Questions of Travel (3 page)
SHE NOTICED AN ANT
scurrying about the bathroom basin. Overcome with tenderness—for where could it go? on what could it subsist?—Laura resolved to pick it up in a tissue and deposit it outdoors. But her need to pee was urgent. Satisfying it, she grew dreamy and remained seated far longer than necessary. She turned on the tap to wash her hands and recalled the ant too late, as it was swept away.
Afterwards Laura thought, Perhaps suffering isn’t a sign that God is absent or indifferent or cruel. Perhaps all the horrible things happen because he just gets distracted.
She was sixteen, a metaphysical age. The Absentminded Almighty: having created him in her image, she felt quite protective of him and worshipped him tenderly until the phase passed.
“HISTORY IS ONLY A
byproduct of geography.” It was Brother Ignatius’s greeting to every new class, the gambit unchanged in thirty-one years. Then very deliberately, with the air of a curator about to reveal a precious artifact, he would manipulate a cord that unrolled a map of the world.
Much creased, nicked here and there, the map brought an unsettling dimension to the room. At once, the gazes of all the boys flew to their island, a dull green jewel fallen from India’s careless ear. It was so small! But no one is insignificant to himself. And in a niche high above the classroom door lay a flat water bottle, its bright red plastic dull with dust, that had been flung up there to avenge a long-forgotten insult; and bedbugs moved in the wooden chairs that the pupils treated at the end of each term, carrying them outside and spraying them with Shelltox. Remembering this, the boys shifted in their seats, certain that the backs of their knees itched. The tips of their fingers grazed words gouged out with dividers and inked into their desks, and they recalled scraping the lids smooth with razor blades, after which they had applied a rag dipped in shoe polish to the wood.
There was the matter of the Indian Ocean. These children were well acquainted with its fidgety expanse. There remained the problem of how to match it to a blue space labeled
Indian Ocean.
Ravi, studying the map, saw that what he knew of existence, the reality he experienced as boundless and full of incident, had been reduced by the mapmaker to a trifle. If the island were to slide into a crack in the ocean and be lost forever, the map would scarcely change. He was visited by the same sensation that came when a wave pulled free from beneath his feet. Things tottered and plunged.
Brother Ignatius was pointing out the conjunction of trade routes, ocean currents and deep-water harbors that had brought the Phoenicians to their island—and, in time, everyone else. It was vanity that led men to overestimate the force of history, he said, for history was a human affair. But, “Geography is destiny. It is old. It is iron.”
Old. Iron.
They were not so much words as emanations from the reverend brother’s core.
When Brother Ignatius smiled—rather, when his thin mauve lips slipped sideways—boys trembled with fear. He could be glimpsed around the town on a high black bicycle, very early in the morning or at dusk, when the uncertain light, the silent glide of the bicycle and the figure in white drapery lent these sightings the quality of apparitions.
Without the benefit of notes, Brother Ignatius spoke of the Zuiderzee, the Nullarbor, the Malay archipelago, evoking places he had never seen in such living detail that now and then, in years to come, a man arriving somewhere for the first time would be made uneasy by a persistent impression of familiarity, until, if he were fortunate, he would recall a lesson half attended to on a morning he could barely retrieve from the rubble of days under which it lay.
When the reverend brother turned to the blackboard, there were boys who flicked each other with rubber bands or stared out of the window. The shadow of a great tree lying on the grass contained pieces of light, coins in a dark hand. But Ravi’s thoughts answered to the irrigation systems of vanished kingdoms, to the complexities that attend the siting of cities, to the almost-freshwater Baltic Sea.
Brother Ignatius was a tea bush: born upcountry, a Tamil tea-plucker’s Eurasian bastard, the lowest of the low. Condemned to toil on the plains, he said, “Hills are God’s gift to our imagination.” And, “Who can say what lies on the other side of a hill?”
Ravi waited until Priya was out. He knew where she hid her atlas. His thumbnail traced journeys across continents. He went for a walk across the world.
When the time came to choose between subjects, he didn’t want to give up geography.
Carmel Mendis, now in the purple stage of mourning, donned an uncrushable lilac dress and set out to address the problem at its source. Her hair was opulently pinned and curled, for Carmel had trained as a hairdresser before her marriage. Ushered into Brother Ignatius’s presence, she remained undaunted. He was imbued with the awful grandeur of the Roman Church. But she had brought children into the world.
“My son is going into the science stream,” she announced.
Brother Ignatius looked at his palms, which were paler than you might expect from the rest of him. “Junior science students are encouraged to study an arts subject if they wish.”
Carmel was obliged to speak of a son’s duty to his mother. For what could a tea bush, abandoned at birth and reared by priests, know of that sacred bond? A Rodi woman had told Carmel’s fortune and assured her that she would not want for anything in old age. Carmel knew this meant that her son would be a surgeon. Her eyes, which were large and still brilliant, remained on Brother Ignatius to remind him of origins and limits.
The next time Ravi mentioned going on with geography, the reverend brother’s lips shot sideways, and he assured his star pupil that there was not much future in it.
DRIVING HOME FROM A
weekend in the Blue Mountains, Hamish misjudged the speed at which he could take a bend. Speaking of it years later, Laura said, “It should have been terrible, shouldn’t it? It was, for Cameron.”
At the funeral, her brother had the lopsided appearance of a badly pruned tree. Looking at him, Laura knew how much she had been spared of grief. Flint-eyed throughout the service, she was handing around a plate of chicken sandwiches to people in dark clothes when she began to cry. It was a purely selfish emotion. She was crying for the loss of a family romance she knew only from a photograph. It showed the twins, aged five, leaning into their mother.
When everyone had gone away, Cameron appeared in her bedroom.”What are
you
sniveling for? It’s not as if Hamish liked you.” Laura beheld him magnified, a long figure with light about his head. “Back teeth together!” cried Cameron. He reached for her wrist and administered an expert Chinese burn. Then he began to laugh. It came out like vomit, in lumps.
A MRS. ANRADO, KNOWN
to the Mendises from church, was having an extension added to her house. She intended to rent rooms to foreigners, and was urging Carmel Mendis to do the same.
Ravi couldn’t stand the Anrado woman. Pointing out walls that could be knocked through, she was all advice and teeth. The neighbor’s daughter came to play, and Mrs. Anrado asked Ravi, in front of everyone, if the squint-eyed brat was his girlfriend. How Priya crowed! Mrs. Anrado was informing the children’s mother that toast would have to be provided, tourists expected it. And the mulberry would have to go.
For weeks, every conversation led to plumbing and foreign notions of breakfast. Then Carmel Mendis arranged an interview with her bank. Afterwards, whenever Mrs. Anrado was mentioned, Carmel’s face tightened. The idea of strangers traipsing through one’s home!
THE HOUSE IN BELLEVUE
Hill was elevated, split-level, sluiced with light. The terrace dropped to scaly red roofs and a segment of harbor. When Hester left for a flat in Randwick, she mourned the loss of the jacaranda and that different, restless blue. But in low-ceilinged rooms her movements grew expansive. She remembered coming home from dances as a young woman: how spacious life had seemed when she took off her girdle.
Before leaving Bellevue Hill, Hester threw away her sky-blue travel case. Spreading its contents over her bed one last time, she was struck afresh by the fraudulence of souvenirs that suggested pleasure while commemorating flight. The green Venetian bead rolled silently away and came to rest in a corner of the room. There it remained, exquisite and unseen, a solid drop of light-flecked water.
AT SCHOOL THEY HAD
said, Laura is creative. Into that capacious adjective, oddity, uncompromising plainness, a minor talent—in short, much that was inconvenient—could be bundled. Laura had acquiesced, wanting them to be right. Also, she so admired Miss Garnault, the head of Art: the Split Enz badge on her lapel, the bottle-red hair gelled into spikes.
Laura’s misfortune was the ease with which she drew, doublings of the world flowing with incurable accuracy from her hand. It was these nudes and streetscapes and bowls of pears, all flawless and false, that had carried her along to art school. But in that corner of the brain where truth persists, however starved of light, dwelled the knowledge that no one in all the vacant centuries to come would ever stand before work she had brought into the world and know the undoing that came when the wind shivered through a sloping paddock of grass. Or when a fragment of song—
that
song, the one you had bought the cassette for—wafted into the street from a passing car. With the revelation that arrived when the turned page showed the altarpiece at Isenheim, Laura didn’t presume to compare. A sentence was often in her mind:
An eye is not a photocopier.
It kept bobbing to the surface of her thoughts that year: a corpse insufficiently weighted.
In an act of quiet desperation, she had perpetrated a perfect copy of
Organized Line to Yellow,
on which she pasted, here and there, extracts from the more savage evaluations of Sam Atyeo’s painting. She propped her canvas on a table draped in canary-yellow nylon, and laid on this altar an array of factory-fresh yellow offerings: a china rose, a plastic banana, a string of wooden beads, a rubber duck. Filching from Degas, she called it
What a Horrible Thing Is This Yellow.
When it was completed, the feeble wit and flagrant ineptitude of this assemblage overwhelmed Laura. Nevertheless, she entered it for the Hallam Prize. Nevertheless, it was declared a
wittily iconoclastic appraisal of Australian modernism
and included on the shortlist of six.
The annual Hallam Prize, open to all undergraduates at the college, was endowed by a former student who had inherited a largish deposit of opals near Lightning Ridge. It offered the use of a Paris studio for twelve months, an almost-generous stipend and tuition at the Beaux-Arts. Miss Cora Hallam had long since fled her native land for historic stones and up-to-date plumbing in St Germain but remained mindful of those condemned to vacuous ease.
On Laura’s Walkman, Bowie sang of modern love. She crossed a park on wings and never saw the two-tone flare of the magpie who decided, at the last moment, that she wasn’t worth swooping. Nor did she offer her customary salute to the man who sucked sherry from a paper bag, for her thoughts, as cinematically black and white as the birds overhead, were of Belmondo and cobblestones, and herself advancing down a leafless avenue in a slanted hat. Paris was surely her reward for irregular verbs committed to memory, for the existentialist struggle of persisting to the last page of
La nausée.
Luckily she glanced down just in time to sidestep the small corpse lying on yellow wattle blossom and wet black leaves.
In a corner cafe, her friend Tracy Lacey was waiting at a metal-bordered table that was genuine fifties laminex. Tracy, too, was a finalist for the Hallam, with a video that involved a housewife in a robe of steel wool taking a hatchet to Superman. It was uncomfortable viewing, for this
radical deconstruction of androcentric hegemony
was quite as horrible as Laura’s jaundiced gaffe.
So here were the girls, meeting to celebrate their good fortune with ciggies and cappuccinos.
The announcement of the winner was still a fortnight away, but Laura knew that the Hallam would go to a final-year student called Steve Kirkpatrick for
Mr. Truong in a Red Chair.
She accepted this as right and just, yet being human hoped. Hope beat its wings under her breastbone. It went so far as to insinuate that men with trench coats and ageless bone structure would speak to her of post-structuralism on terraces hedged with potted shrubs, while a waiter wrapped in a long white apron plied her with
fines.
To suppress these ravings, she asked whether Tracy ever looked up when walking down a street and imagined rooms that hadn’t yet been built. “Apartments with people cooking and watching TV where now there’s just air.”
Much of what Laura Fraser said was best ignored. Yet how Tracy loved her friend, for Laura was a darl and tried so hard and looked so…
unusual
was the kind way to think of it. And Tracy was all heart. And joyful choirs were making merry in those crimson chambers. Surely even Laura might hear their caroling?
But Laura had the lid off the powder-blue Bessemer bowl and was intent on sugar—with a figure like hers! So Tracy had to lean forward and hiss, “Guess what, guess what!”
Dull Laura Fraser hadn’t a clue.
“You have to
swear
you won’t tell anyone. Ant’ll kill me if word gets around.”
Ant was Tracy’s latest, this guy in Admin who looked exactly like Mel Gibson. But a bit shorter.
Laura swore the required oath.
“Guess who’s won the Hallam!”
For a soaring moment, Laura imagined…
“
Mais oui!”
cried Tracy. “
Moi, moi!
They gave Ant the judges’ report to photocopy.”
Boulevards and Belmondo were fast fading to black. It was hard to breathe, the air was so choked with debris from the collapse of flying buttresses. A lightning protest in Laura’s brain declared, I could have had Paris until the announcement if. Fourteen days of sophisticated depravity in garrets overlooking the Seine trembled and were reduced to dust. For the last time, Laura lit another Gauloise and said, “Is it not the case that your refusal to place the metaphysics of presence under erasure is always already an aporia?”
Ashamed of such selfishness, she offered congratulations without delay.
“Thanks, darl,” said Tracy. “You’ll have to visit me. In Paree.” She wore her hair combed back and up, and tied at the nape with a floppy pink chiffon bow. Under her black quiff, her face was a white pumpkin. But the profile sliced.
“In any city with decent licensing laws, we’d be calling for Bolly. But while we wait for civilization to arrive, let’s go crazy and have another round of cappuccinos—
n’est-ce pas, Mademoiselle Lacey?
”
How Laura’s tongue clattered and clacked, like that wooden noise-maker she had rattled as a child.
“God, you make me laugh, darl! Mine’s a skinny.” And when Laura returned with it, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the
Herald
did an interview. The Hallam’s never gone to someone in first year.” Tracy fingered the ironic pink rag at her neck and observed, “I’m a break with tradition.”
Laura, reminded of another who would have hoped, and with far greater cause, murmured, “Steve.”
“I still can’t believe they shortlisted him.” Tracy’s profile stood out as clearly as if stamped on the silver light of Paree. “I mean, he’s technically quite good”—for she was magnanimous in victory—“but where’s the concept in that painting?”
The words
truth
and
beauty
occurred to Laura, but after six months at art school she knew better than to utter them. The aroma of ham and tomato jaffles, however, proved irresistible.
As she chewed, the image of the dead mouse over which she had stepped returned to her. The eyeless head had resembled a mask. It was astonishing how a true thing might be taken for an imitation of itself.
Tracy Lacey, gazing on through drifting veils of Camel, was savoring the satisfaction of a woman who has denied herself food. That was the great thing about Laura, the comparison was always in your favor. Tracy was quite overcome with tenderness for her friend. Her complexion was after all rather gorgeous, peaches and cheese.
Here Tracy looked closer, because something in Laura’s face, bent over buttery crusts, suggested despondency. At first she couldn’t imagine why, on this gold and blue day with such news bestowed upon her, Laura Fraser should be glum. For herself, electric eels were slithering along her veins.
When enlightenment arrived, “Oh darl!” she exclaimed and ground out her ciggie. “I’m really going to miss you too, you know.” A damp, greenish seed clung to Laura’s chin, where tomato had spurted when she sliced open her jaffle. But Tracy scarcely noticed it, being sincerely moved.
In her share house in Newtown, when she should have been working on a project or researching an essay, Laura was to be found reading fiction. She read dreamily, compulsively, pausing only to pop in a square of Cadbury’s or knock the hair from her eyes with her wrist. Novels, dutifully taken apart at school for Themes, had reasserted their wholeness, like time-lapse films of decay reversed. Now she read them as if they were guidebooks, looking for directions on which way to turn.
But she was so alone at humid midnight, trying to pummel her pillow into coolness! While still at school, Laura had realized that she could enjoy rather more success than far prettier girls by making it clear to their bumbling, flesh-fed brothers that she was willing to sleep with them. When she tumbled to that little ploy, There’s
that
taken care of, Laura thought. Many a pleasant hour followed. But it turned out to be no more than a kind of competence, not so different from the facility with which she drew. In both cases, a degree of victory only heightened awareness of all that remained out of reach.
The numbers on her old clock radio clicked over again, and there Laura Fraser lay, thoughts scraping like the lemon-scented gum outside her window: a modern girl in the grip of antique cravings. The next novel waited beside her bed. Passing a bookshop that afternoon, she had spotted one of those brilliant little manuals called something like
The Children’s Barthes.
Paree flared, quivered, threatened: it was a marble-topped table feathered with gray. But a merciful rush of dun-colored patriotism came to Laura’s aid. By the time it receded, she was leaving the shop with a secondhand copy of
For Love Alone.
Laura picked this up now and opened it with the tips of her fingers. She approached Sydney gingerly in fiction. Was it really up to literature, even the Australian kind? She always feared that it might be like watching someone she cared for, but whose ability she doubted, thrust on stage by an ambitious and deluded parent. What if the performance came over as provincial and amateurish, or blustering and self-important? Sydney was
always already:
rakish, stinking, damp, radiant, too much with her. She turned a few pages. Multihued ballpoint warned from the margins:
Irony. Opinion of Australia.
Downstairs, the phone began to shrill. It stood in the hallway, just outside Cassie and Phil’s door, but they were at band practice and wouldn’t be home before two. Tim’s room lay between Laura’s and the head of the stairs, but Tim held himself aloof from domestic activity; he was an artist, he had explained. So Laura heaved herself out of bed. She took the stairs at a gallop—as the young do, upright and unafraid.
There was silence at the other end of the line. Then the click as the caller broke the connection.
It wasn’t the first time it had happened.
Laura switched on the jug for a hot chocky. But then—she checked in the sink and behind the couch—there were no mugs to be found. Tim lived on Vegemite toast and milky tea, and one by one every mug in the house would vanish into his room until someone banged on his door and demanded. Laura got dressed and went out into the night instead.
Above her, stars were conducting their long migrations. Hefty eucalypts filled tiny yards: broccoli jammed into bud vases. The trees must have been planted in the optimistic sixties, when minds expanded and it had seemed that everything else must follow. When Laura tried to peer past one, a veranda showed its wrought-iron teeth. She ambled on, trailing her fingers against a sandstone wall, crumbling grains that had known the weight of an ocean. Oh, sea-invaded Sydney! The Pacific never tired of rubbing up the city, a lively blue hand slipping in to grope. It made you want to shout or sing—or swig the stars. But what came out of Laura Fraser’s mouth was a giant burp. She was passing an open window at the time. The two on the other side muffled their merriment in a pillow, and enjoyed each other more fiercely thereafter.
She had been walking for a while when a lone car slowed and flashed its lights. Recalled from her trance, Laura remembered that she was female and veered closer to a fence as if its hard brown arms might save her. Over the accelerator’s screech he called, “You’re too fucken ugly, love!” The harbor smell was reaching south to tickle scentless roses.
Laura had been choosing back streets, but instinct now led her towards thoroughfares and lights. Soon she was approaching the place where Glebe Point Road ran into Broadway. It was a junction Laura associated with vivid occurrence. Once there had been a motorcyclist face down in the road and a shriek of sirens. And quite recently, a gust of wind had presented her with a sheet of paper on which someone had copied out the lyrics to “Message in a Bottle” with the chords written in above.