Questions of Travel (32 page)
ALMOST AT ONCE A
pattern was set. They met at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesday he was at a gym with a climbing wall, Friday meant deadlines. There was a reason Monday was out of the question, but Laura could never remember it. Her usual thing on Thursday had been lunch with Robyn, but that was easily changed.
She would walk to the motel. He drove, so that they weren’t seen to leave or return together. The car park at the rear of the office had no more than a dozen spaces, occupied on the principle of early birds and worms. Most people stuck to public transport: Ramsay was so handy to Central. Paul Hinkel preferred to drive. It was
good discipline,
he said, it got him out of bed and at his desk
bright and early.
That was the way he spoke, camouflaging needs that were urgent or particular to him with banality. One of those needs was Laura Fraser. Gripping handfuls of her, he might gasp, “You’re…
great.
” She thrashed about under his ministrations. He promised nothing on which he could not deliver, he was focused and skilled—one could say professional.
Sometimes, hurrying towards the motel, Laura heard an old whisper:
What are you doing here?
But there was the human wish for an end to loneliness. There was the human need to believe that existence was larger than the plain fact, demonstrated every Sunday, of flesh alone, desiring and laborious on a couch. Sometimes, at the end of an endless avenue, she saw a little dog dance. But the sun intervened and dazzled. It wore Paul Hinkel’s face: ecstatic, overwhelming, gilded with lust.
On learning that Paul was enrolled part time in an MBA, Laura remarked that in her opinion the administration of business could be summed up in a single axiom: “Profit first.” He answered mildly that someone had to
keep track of the numbers.
He was not the kind of man who took offence easily, nor the kind who laughed.
Time ticked through their encounters. They had to
keep an eye on it,
he said. Unraveling, Laura remained bound by schedules, heard the fidget clock.
Afterwards, he showered while she lay in their bed. She should have dressed and left, but then they might have arrived at the office together. It was understood that she could spend longer away from her desk—as if what she did there counted for less, thought Laura resentfully. But it was also true that she could stay at work later. He had a young child and childcare arrangements.
All this—the resentment, the reasoning—flowed in an underground way that bubbled only intermittently to the surface of Laura’s mind. It remained invisible to Paul Hinkel. His shower, her delayed departure belonged to a program he took for granted. Besides, she colluded in it. She wished to impress her nakedness on him, so that what he carried away into the afternoon would be the painterly image of rumpled polycotton and luxuriant female flesh.
But she dragged on her clothes pronto as the door closed, and walked fast.
She was only yards away from the office one Thursday when he loomed before her. He had that fair skin that reddens at once. He nodded behind his wraparounds and strode ahead. By a sun-blighted shrub near the entrance stood a man with smoke coming out of his face. Laura recognized the new web guy, Ravi. Paul paused to say something to him. Twenty minutes earlier Paul Hinkel had left the motel with freshly soaped armpits. Passing him now, Laura caught the delicious tang of his sweat.
A visitor, turning up at Ramsay for a lunchtime meeting, had stolen his parking spot. Paul had been obliged to drive about before he found one three blocks away—with an hour’s limit on it at that. All afternoon he had to go up and down with coins. At one point, he had to leave a meeting called by his line manager and sprint. This trauma leaked from him the following week while he was still resting inside Laura. He couldn’t afford too many repeats, he declared. What he had in mind wasn’t clear, a tightening of managerial features, parking fees, his exertions, all of these. She rubbed herself against his thigh, prey to a terrible premonition that he was about to veto Thursdays or else Tuesdays. But he merely squelched free.
Afford. He had said, Afford. She was facing up to his tightness with money. The first time in the motel, stripping clothing from each other, she had gasped, “Condom.” He had none. They managed, of course, just as they had done the previous time, after the party. As he fitted himself to her, he murmured, “I can hardly get about with condoms.” It crossed Laura’s mind that he might have stopped at the 7-Eleven on his way. But it was no time for talk.
Thereafter she came supplied. She paid for the room, since she always arrived first. Soon the receptionist, a plump teenage Goth, would have the key waiting, wouldn’t even glance at Laura’s signature on the slip. Often she didn’t trouble to break off her mobile phone conversation, merely ran the Visa through the machine while pinning the phone to her shoulder with a metallic ear.
In case he should find his parking space nabbed, Paul now allotted no more than an hour to Laura. There was a constriction in her throat as the minutes fled. He plunged about her, and she thought, Tick-tock. Her picture of his life was an Excel spreadsheet. She tried to imagine joy, fatherhood, craving, hope as so many challenges in time management. She might have confided at least a version of this, but they were running out of time.
But there were such glories, such redemptions! There was a weekend that dragged on forever, followed by an interminable Monday. On Tuesday she was at the motel early, but his knock came almost at once. He dropped to his knees and hooked her knickers aside. This unscheduled haste so astonished him that he was moved, in time, to a redundant confession: “I couldn’t wait.”
A dreamy benevolence continued to emanate from Laura. It extended to Ramsay, which had brought her Paul Hinkel. Office life, yoking unlikely temperaments and unequal talents, taught, or at least exacted, tolerance. When Quentin Husker spoke of
strategizing our focus on delivering unique content
and was so struck with his poetry that he repeated it, Laura felt only a mild desire to vomit. Then HR produced an eighteen-page document that every employee was required to keep up to date titled
My Aims & Development.
If its authors had noticed the acronym, they had judged it unimportant. It provoked only amusement in Laura; once it might have brought despair.
Even having to work late to make up her hours was soothing. Here and there, fluorescence showed as bright as the onset of migraine, but the calm of the office at evening was largely undisturbed. Laura signed off on a costing with her favorite kind of pen, a four-color Bic. It was an object that had come into the world in her lifetime. She always kept a spare in her desk. It aroused a strong, primitive emotion in her: not quite a
lucky pen
thing, but not far off it either. The Bic wasn’t standard issue from stationery and was touched with magic, one having appeared on Laura’s desk on her second day at Ramsay. She had asked around, but no one claimed it. Office life abounded in these small mysteries. Post-its went missing. Staplers appeared. The flash new photocopier always jammed, while the ancient one reliably produced single-sided A4 copies (b&w only) in batches not exceeding thirty. Urgent emails failed to arrive, spam turned up twice. Documents vanished from hard drives. Screens brightened, then dimmed. The workplace was organic. It had its own vital signs. It was shifty, endowed with speed and cunning. It breathed.
The curtains in the motel, always shut, were printed with waratahs. That October Laura raided florists, swooped on markets, surrounded herself with sculpted red blooms. Would Paul Hinkel understand the coded declaration on her desk? Everything charmed and delighted her. Her laugh rolled from meeting rooms, was heard on the stairs. An advance copy of a guidebook arrived from the printer, and Helmut Becker propped it beside Laura’s computer wedged open with a piece of fruit. She returned from the motel and discovered the assemblage with its handwritten caption:
Last Mango in Paris.
She sought out Helmut and hugged him. She laughed and laughed.
A LONG TIME AGO,
someone relieved by Banksia Gardens of the burden of a parent had expressed thankfulness with flowers in a shallow china bowl. They had remained in the entrance hall, the petals stiffening and darkening, finally assuming the appearance of wood. One day, Glory Warren slid white pebbles, stolen on an outing, between the rigid stems. This aroused the competitiveness that beats savagely in aged breasts. Pine cones came to augment the arrangement, a tartan ribbon was fastened anonymously around the bowl. The result, the first thing a visitor saw, was judged
really creative
and certainly good enough for the indigent old.
At Ramsay, artfully disarranged blooms, renewed twice a week, greeted in reception. Ravi was able to ignore them—lounging in a brushed-metal bucket rather than jammed into a vase, the flowers didn’t disturb him. He had been a designer in the e-zone for a month, and still his thoughts skittered between his old workplace and the new. Thus tourists, trying to decipher strangeness, compare home and here. Here, everyone sat before big, bright screens. Everyone was connected. Souvenirs proclaimed a casual familiarity with the planet: a mouse mat from the Guggenheim, a Javanese shadow puppet, an Eiffel Tower snow dome. Postcards were Blu-Tacked to monitors, screensavers showed fiords or a noodle seller’s stall.
Keep moving, love!
remembered Ravi.
Whatever you do, don’t stop!
Mortgages and tertiary education debts were spoken of in Ravi’s hearing, but what he noticed was the magic of money. Disposable income was as silent as snow and as transformative. It softened monotony, blurring its workaday bones with MP3 players, camera phones, negative ionizers, takeaway coffees in environmentally responsible mugs.
When Ravi looked back at Banksia Gardens, he saw lives marked by before and after. Youth, health or the simplicity of belonging were landscapes that had been lost. Much had been patched up but nothing could be mended. On inspection, the crack always showed. His new workplace, on the other hand, was forward-oriented: the Mission Statement required it. Ramsay was firm flesh, blonde streaks, the smiles that only fluoride and first-world dentistry can achieve. Diversity, diligently practiced, was an HR crusade, but everyone looked alike to Ravi. On the train, in the streets, there were so many different kinds of faces—it was one of the wonders of Sydney. But at Ramsay, China, Ireland, Hungary, Lebanon had brought forth identically clear eyes and gleaming hair. Ravi saw energy and confidence and post-industrial track lighting. There was nowhere to hide. People spoke kindly, and he had difficulty following them. What did
Give it a burl
mean? The girl who sat across from him swiveled her chair to ask, “Are you a Tamil?” and “So when exactly did you leave the detention center?” Her hair and her eyes were bright brown shot with gold. Ravi willed himself not to stare. Even her name was beautiful: Crystal Bowles.
Tyler had protested, “A Sri Lankan site in the nineties? No way would he have the skills.”
“A trainee,” said Damo. “He’d save you money.”
That was cunning. It was Sunday night, the first time they’d seen each other that weekend because Tyler had been working on budgets. He hesitated: the kind of small, fatal mistake to which Tyler was prone.
“His case has gone to review,” Damo improvised: “A job at Ramsay could work in his favor, swing the decision.”
Tyler rallied. “There’s travel experience. That’s crucial at Ramsay. A designer has to know where the user’s coming from.”
“Ravi’s traveled around Sri Lanka.”
“He’s local. It’s different for foreigners.”
“Exactly. He’d provide a fresh point of view.”
Tyler changed direction, another error. “There’s a freeze on new hires.”
“Only permanent ones.” The relationship was still in that phase when Damo and Tyler actually listened to each other’s complaints about work. “You could offer him a contract,” said Damo. He also pointed out that from one postal delivery to the next, Ravi could find himself with twenty-eight days’ notice to leave the country. “Which is the likely scenario. So it’s not like he’s going to be on your payroll for too long.”
Later he said, “A refugee, Tyler. You could change his life.” And, “It would be a visionary thing to do.”
It was
visionary
that affected Tyler, loosed the tinsel-twirl of possibility in his mind.
Back in the day, newly recruited to head up IT at Ramsay, Tyler had worn cargo pants and held grown managers spellbound. He had bounced a little on his exercise ball, incandescent with can-do. He sprinkled words like magic dust: electronic editions, fully searchable knowledge bases, Intranets, interactivity. Drifting through the minds of his listeners, these terms left little impression but glittered with efficiency and profit. They sparkled with the promise that all who heeded them would be carried along into the digital age. Even the newcomer’s name suggested a spell: Tyler Dean, an incantation that worked backwards and forwards. It sounded American: youthful, state-of-the-art,
now.
No one wanted to be left behind in the old century, as has-been as analogue. Success was a god with a single profile, and it wasn’t directed at the past.
Back in the day was before dot-coms mutated into dot-bombs, it was before 9/11. It was before the global sales dive, before a ruinous Ramsay e-venture into smart cards for travelers. Tyler still had his soul patch and his place on the management team, but the glamour had gone. Thoughts strayed when he addressed meetings. IT was back where it had once been, a service division to the rest of the company. Tyler would have liked to
move on.
He had been four years at Ramsay and should have left after three. He had heard vaguely, as he had heard of Machiavelli, that a career had once been considered a matter of long-term development. Tyler conceived of his as a series of short-term stays. He saw himself flowing freely from one organization to another, changing tactics and style as required—only losers got stuck. But the headhunters who didn’t answer his emails knew that the market was oversupplied with start-up whiz-kids who’d left it too late to cash in their stock options.
At twenty-eight, Tyler Dean was
history.
But in the modern workplace, flexibility was a watchword. Solidarity with refugees was cool. Taking Ravi on, equipping him with marketable skills: it would be a first at Ramsay. A strategic staircase was taking shape. It was smarts plus heart. It ticked boxes. Tyler was updating his CV, cascading his vision through the ranks.
He said, “Let me think about it.”
Damo kissed him.
The Wayback Machine preserved webpages over time, offering a record of the digital past. A few days after his conversation with Damo, Tyler used it to reach the archived site of a university in Sri Lanka. Just as he’d expected: frames, static content, low interactivity. Where was the call to action? To think there had been a time when the whole web was like this! Tyler took note of the clashing typefaces, the untidy navigation, the amount of white space on the pages. He thought, Dead links!
It was hilarious, really. At the same time…it was sort of great. It was just a few years old and it was pioneering. These guys had been cowboys, making up the web as they went along. Gotta love that, thought Tyler Dean.
In his gap year, Tyler had traveled to Zimbabwe. In the company of a cousin, he visited his family’s old farm. There was an avenue, a mile long, of flame trees and jacarandas. Tyler had always believed that he had forgotten everything about the first three years of his life. Then he saw the trees.
When they set off again after lunch, the cousin stopped in a town to pick up some fertilizer. A dusty eucalypt was all elbows on the far side of the street. On the farm, the trees were in flower. Tyler’s life stretched before him like the view from his cousin’s veranda in the morning. It was only the way back that was barred, electric with wrongdoing, patrolled by dogs with angry faces. His cousin drove with a handgun in her glove box. If he had been alone in the car, Tyler might have cried.
He got out and wandered along the street, looking for something to photograph. He came to a recreation center, identified by a sign above the door, and went in. The hall housed a concrete stage and a table-tennis table. Tyler, navigating around the Sri Lankan website, found himself remembering that hall. He saw the breeze-block walls and the dust on the table. The net sagged, and so did the light. It revealed the figure who had come to greet him: Dean Tyler, a double, a visitant, a there-but-for-the-grace. On Tyler’s screen an open stairway climbed into a colorwashed building, and that shade of yellow, too, was something he had seen. Tyler was arrogant or kind or blundering enough to imagine that he knew what Ravi had been up against, designing that site. He went into his email and began composing a message to HR.
Crystal Bowles glided into Tyler’s office. When he took out his earbuds, she said, “Guess what I just found out about Ravi?”
“Hi, Crystal.”
“He’s never been in a detention center!”
“Yeah, cool.”
“You said he was a refugee.
He
says he’s a refugee. So how come he wasn’t locked up?”
“Have you asked him?”
“Didn’t you see that email HR sent round before he started? About appropriate conduct with a refugee?” Conscious of virtue, Crystal said, “I’ve been approaching Ravi sensitively and respecting his right not to talk about what he’s been through.”
“Boat people get locked up.” Tyler had Damo’s explanation by heart. “Plane people like Ravi come in on a visa, so they live in the community while their applications are being processed. It’s part of the government’s strategy to distinguish between the two groups. To boost their line that boat people can be treated like shit.”
During the weeks of the restructure, Tyler had scarcely slept. In management meetings, the phrases that rang around the table were
re-engineering
and
scaling back.
Tyler saw cells in a spreadsheet vanish with a mouse-click: the process was painless, efficient, clean. Then Clifford Ferrier had to say, “What this means is people are going to lose their jobs.” The other faces in the room instructed Tyler in what he felt: a pure, consuming hatred for Cliff.
Tyler slashed jobs, suffered, learned whose skin he would always put first. He called together those who were going from IT. “You’re a great bunch of people. You’ve been responsible for the most creative, inspirational, even provocative work to come out of Ramsay.” When he began to cry, some of his victims wept with him. They had been spared war, starvation, plague, but knowledge of those ancestral catastrophes was coded into their DNA; what was novel and terrible was mundane disaster. Each felt personally to blame. They should have gained new, indispensable skills or at least
moved on
sooner—after all, wasn’t it their
love of travel
that had brought them to Ramsay? Dave Horden, the webmaster, spoke up on behalf of everyone: “Dude, thanks for sharing our pain.”
Tyler consoled himself with the thought that he had hung on to a couple of
really great people.
Also Crystal. She had finished her training shortly before the restructure, she cost less than anyone else in the e-zone, she was smart, it had made sense to keep her. Nadine Flanagan, who had replaced Dave, preferred email to talking, so Tyler had become the screen on which Crystal projected her effects. These days he thought of her as a punishment. She was saying, “So Ravi’s definitely a refugee? Even though he wasn’t locked up?”
“Would it’ve been better if he’d been locked up?”
“I’m just saying,” said Crystal Bowles.