Questions of Travel (38 page)
IT WAS ONE OF
those days when the shade made Ravi shiver. He took his cigarette across the car park to the patch of sun beside the fence. Further along, where winter had stripped them of obscuring greenery, white symbols showed on the palings: <<+#>>.
A woman was making her way between the cars. Laura Fraser often put Ravi in mind of upholstery: an armchair advanced across the concrete, bearing a mug.
She announced that it was a beautiful day. Then she asked if Ravi had done anything interesting on the weekend. Presently, she indicated a blue Mazda. “I think that’s Paul’s car. There’s a kiddie seat inside. You know Paul Hinkel, don’t you? Everyone knows Paul.”
In cold weather, Ravi’s lips were always dry. He licked them as she continued, “You’d have to be a dickhead to bring a car in here, wouldn’t you say? With Central so close. He must be a dickhead.” She grinned broadly, while her brown eyes glared. How small they were and how savage! Ravi watched their depths turn to rust. “I must say I pity his poor wife,” she went on. “Who’d want to be Mrs. Hinkel?”
All the time, Ravi had the unnerving impression that Laura Fraser, while looking at him intently, was not talking to him at all but to an invisible figure at his shoulder. He placed his back to the fence and was moved to say, “Mrs. Hinkel is a very nice lady. Very kind.”
She drank her coffee after that.
More or less daily, she began turning up in the car park with her mug. The hand that held it wore a big red worthless ring. Ravi grew used to her. One morning he drew her attention to the white hieroglyph. “Oh, it’s been there ages,” she replied. It was the name of a band. “You say it like this.” Her tongue clicked twice. “Ben Thwaites—do you know him? That really tall editor? He’s their drummer, and there’s three other people in it, including the guy Robyn Orr used to go out with.”
But why didn’t the band have a proper name?
“It’s their philosophy. They’re against commercialism, that sort of thing.” She looked into Ravi’s face and laughed. “They’re better than you might think. Funny. In a good way. I could burn you a CD.”
Laura Fraser’s hair was heavy around her face. Sometimes her hand closed around a clump of it. Now that Ravi had seen her amused, he realized that he had thought of her as unhappy. The burden of her hair suggested it. Sometimes, like sorrow, it was heaped on her head. He got into the habit of looking for her, as he looked for the hibiscus, when he went out for a smoke. But he never forgot that she had frightened him, that first day.
Varunika called to say that she had decided to go home when her contract expired the following year. “I keep thinking about our house.” It would be easy for her to get work at the local hospital. She added, “Of course,
akka
won’t give me any peace as long as I don’t have a husband. Did I tell you they sent a photo of Lal’s cousin? So ugly he must have broken their camera.”
Ravi asked if she wanted to get married.
“What do you think?”
Priya, apprised of Varunika’s plan, hastened to inform Ravi that she didn’t believe a word of it. “She’s changed her mind before. Wait and see, she’ll renew her contract at the last minute.” Then she began to grumble about the tenants in Carmel’s house. Priya believed that they brought about problems in order to hold back the rent. This conviction enabled her to convert their grievances into swindles. Their latest ruse was bandicoots in the roof. Ravi heard the relish in his sister’s voice: the tenants, their slovenliness and cunning, were Priya’s live teledrama. The plot gratified, being both ingenious and reassuring. Each fresh development confirmed what Priya already knew. Now a grandmother had taken up residence behind a partition on the back veranda, and the
biling
tree had promptly died. That sorcery was involved was plain.
If Varunika returned, the blue house would come, by imperceptible degrees, to be looked on as hers. Ravi opened the sleep-out door and stood there surveying Hazel’s yard. It was one of those golden winter afternoons slashed by a southerly; the canna lilies were in rags. The sunshine, having lured with a thousand brilliant promises, delivered the unwary to the wind. Whatever knocked on the door at home, the weather at least didn’t smile and knife. Recently, on just such a day, Ravi had realized that Hiran was somewhere outside in the wind with no one to take care of him. It was not a dream or a delusion but a matter-of-fact acknowledgment. More than anything in the world, he wanted to hold his child.
He called Angie Segal. There was no point waiting to hear from the Refugee Review Tribunal, he told her, he had made up his mind to go back. Angie said that it was a matter of hanging on. And later, “So why not wait for them to reject your application? At least you’re earning dollars as long as you’re here.”
It was Hana, in a way, who had prompted Ravi’s call to Angie Segal. Hana, with her transformative schemes, with her list of native plants, instructed by counterexample. Ravi had accompanied her on a history walk that started at a railway station. The guide declared, “Every Australian should know the work of Henry Lawson.” Lawson had written a poem at the station while waiting for a train. The trains ran once every three hours in his day, and the poem was a long one. The guide kept everyone there on the platform while he read it aloud. The thump-thump of a regular pulse could be discerned; now and then, a rhyme, slotting into place, was a bolt locking up an idea. But most of the poem was rendered unintelligible by arrivals, departures, the broadcast roll call of destinations. Hana grimaced at Ravi. But she found a pen in her bag and wrote
Henri Lawson
on her palm. There had been plenty like her among the workers at Banksia Gardens, newcomers with their faces set to the future. It was a type, a necessary one. But from the start, Ravi had suspected that he might have more in common with the old people. In his life, too, everything vital had already happened. He felt too tired to start again. Self-invention was poetry written to an energetic beat with rhyme’s confidence in endings; in that sense, it resembled love. Ravi thought it likely that when Abebe, Hana and Tarik lived in a house, he would still be only a visitor, hovering. Look at Desmond Patternot: he had spent two-thirds of his life here and still lived in another country. Ravi could see himself ending up like that, his knowledge of Australia as formal as a string of recited stations. He wanted to go back to Sri Lanka, he told Angie Segal. She made a note on the pad in front of her:
This guy’s all over the place.
She had said as much to Freda Hobson just days earlier. Freda still called, not as often as when Ravi first came to Sydney, but staying in touch; it was one of the things at which she excelled. Why, on hearing Freda’s voice, did Angie think of a panther in pursuit of a rabbit? It must have been brought on by the pinch of guilt: she had forgotten her friend’s birthday. Work was the usual twenty-five-hours-a-day shambles, Angie was behind with…But Freda cut these apologies short. The two women had a long, confiding conversation, in which each agreed with everything the other said. Angie and her husband were considering IVF. Martin, too, wanted children, said Freda, but she was in no rush. She had been in Dhaka for some time now, working for the Sustainable Cities Trust. There was so much to be done! Freda was in charge of Waste Concern, which was going super-brilliantly. “We had such an inspiring event about dry lavatories—I must send you the photos.” When the talk swung around to Ravi, Freda asked if he was still unable to deal with what had happened. She also said that she knew exactly what Angie was going through with him—hadn’t she been there herself? “It’s vital to keep in mind that he’s a damaged person.” For ages after Freda rang off, Angie found herself thinking about that word “still.”
Ravi caught the first ferry that was leaving Circular Quay—he didn’t care where he went. He had bought a gelato before boarding; the afternoon, too, was soft, yellow, clean. It said: The hemisphere and you are tipping into light. Once again, Sydney was gift-wrapped and tied with sparkly ribbon, and Ravi was a child hoping his name was on the tag.
In a calm bay, lawns sloped to the water. A boy was guiding a kayak among bobbing white yachts. Ravi realized that he had just been granted a vision of paradise: it was the Saturday afternoon of a boy in a boat on Sydney Harbor. Hana could study the city’s past, list its plants, memorize its poems. But it was to Tarik that Sydney would belong. The child’s imagination would transform things that were of no significance into touchstones: the swamp of a summer day, the jingle that advertised a theme park, a derelict roller-skating rink seen from a bus. The city would be inseparable from her private myths. For Tarik, marvel and history would amount to the same thing.
A shadow fell across the water, and a cliff slid silently between the ferry and the shore. The boy, the bay, the lawns, the red roofs climbing the hillside vanished. The cruise ship was a large thing seen too close: the victim’s view of the predator. The specks caught in its long grin were human faces. From the deck of the ferry Ravi saw, somewhere else on the planet, the other Ravi Mendis and his wife circulating between ports.
When the liner had passed, Ravi’s clothes were damp with spray. He looked down, tugging at his windcheater, and saw that his waist had developed a soft little roll of flesh. It came of passion fruit gelato, and delicious white bread that never went stale, it came of boats and trains instead of walking.
You’re lucky,
he remembered. There were times when Ravi could almost believe it. He believed, then, that he wanted to stay.
A WEEK WENT BY,
ten days, eleven. Another Tuesday, a second Thursday. Now Laura was persuaded that she had blundered on the roof. Paul Hinkel had said
I can’t live without you,
but she had been guided by a smell—a thing of no substance. Like any ghost, it might have been a trick of the mind. Ancestral Frasers pointed out that reading should always be confined to the Bible and ledgers: look what came of a diet of fiction. Why not follow the dictates of a ouija board or ask advice of ectoplasm? Laura should have followed their ancestral example: grabbed what she could get, erected a fence, backed up ownership with a gun.
She emailed Paul. Subject:
Editorial error.
Message:
As discussed, this problem is urgent. Please schedule a meeting asap.
He didn’t respond, so she texted him. Again, there was no reply.
More time passed. She crossed to his section of the office. He glanced up, saw her, reddened, fixed his gaze on his screen. She noted coldly, His face is a brick.
They met, by chance, in the kitchen. The designer to whom he was talking smiled at Laura. Paul Hinkel looked, entranced, into his Bushells.
They met, not by chance, in the copying room. A mirage showed her the pale sheen of the skin that stretched between the bones in the small of his back. Without a word, he lowered the lid of the machine and configured its settings. She wanted to say his name, but recognition no longer ran between them. The copier released its flash at his touch. He had already closed his eyes.
Away from Ramsay, she couldn’t wait to return. The office was their shared orbit. He would come into view, they might even collide. But at her desk the hours grated. The pettiness of her work overwhelmed her. A cost projection for
Romania,
a meeting about more effective blurbs, what to do about the researcher who had missed his deadline and wasn’t answering emails. Rows of tiny Lauras stretched away down the corridors of her mind, all of them trapped under fluorescent lighting in urgent, meaningless labor. If the production of all travel guides ceased on the instant, forever, not a particle of the world’s glory would dim. Laura had always known it. But the unremitting busyness of office work obscured its triviality. When Baghdad was burning, what had yanked Laura from sleep was the fear that
Berlin
would be late to the printer.
She botched things: muddled dates and schedules, contrived to lose files from her hard drive. Failure hung around her like a virus that lingers. She attracted bad luck, gave off bad vibes. Even her hairdresser, an old ally, turned adversarial. When he had blow-dried, there were right angles in her hair. The long mirror near the door of the salon gave back a meaty rectangle with pretty hands.
Simple conversations ran onto reefs. An editor called Rhonda Burdett came to tell Laura that she would be resigning; her architect partner had accepted a two-year contract in Dubai. “The tax rate is unbelievable.” Rhonda held her head like a flower, important with insider knowledge. “Of course there’s the cost of living.”
Laura offered congratulations—on the tax rate, perhaps. And asked, “But what’ll it be like, living there?”
“There’s so much prejudice about the emirates,” Rhonda’s voice dismissed. “It’s just ignorance. We’ll be able to drink at home.”
What no one at Ramsay knew was that in one of youth’s unreasoning caprices, Rhonda Burdett had married a Fijian. Fortunately, it hadn’t taken long to come to her senses, and she had disposed of the encumbrance with minimal inconvenience to herself. Thereafter she was very alert to racial feeling and often discerned its lurking presence.
“Women can wear whatever they like in Dubai. Within reason, obviously.”
There had never been much warmth between these two. Laura wasn’t sorry to see Rhonda go. But she reflected, with a twinge, that in a recent meeting she was one of those who had advised against promoting her.
“What those people have done with the desert is incredible. They’ve covered it with really modern buildings.”
Before this vision, they were silent.
Laura felt obliged to say, “Your performance review. I hope that didn’t influence your decision. I mean, I’m sure next time…”
Rhonda said, “I’m not in the habit of taking work decisions personally, actually,” so that Laura knew her guess had found its mark. “This move’s been on the cards for ages. Matt’s been negotiating the offer.”
“We’ll miss you, of course.”
Rhonda inclined her shining topknot in acknowledgment and continued her progress from desk to desk. Later, in the cafe where she was lunching with two or three sympathizers, she confided that Laura had accused her of a lack of professionalism—it was what Rhonda had come to believe. By the time lattes were brought, she was ready to lower her voice and speak of Laura Fraser’s
unbelievable attitude towards Arabs.
A version of this was smuggled back to Laura. She accepted the caricature with barely a protest. It was the cost of living. The numbers on the bathroom scale flashed up between her toes, and she cried silently, I am in need of complete renovation! She unhooked a waistband grown so tight it might have been cut from steel.
From the high window at which she spied, she saw Paul leave the office carrying a sports bag. It was Wednesday, therefore the gym with the climbing wall. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he remained at his desk, working through lunch. At least he hadn’t replaced her; or only with AutoCad and renewed ambition.
One evening, perched above the harbor, she called his landline. Everywhere the bilious sky that precedes a storm. A woman’s faint voice answered: “Hello?” Under Drummond’s contemptuous stare, Paul had confided that his wife had tried to make Ravi Mendis a present of a teaspoon. It had glinted at him from the rubbish bin after Ravi went away.
There was no sense to it:
a phrase he repeated, as if astonished to find this clot of enigma at the heart of his marriage. The teaspoon had propelled him, months later, past convenience stores and into the river of Saturday-night cars flowing over the bridge—at any rate, it was the only domestic scene he offered Laura. “Hello?” murmured the voice, fainter still.
Laura’s own silent caller remained faithful. The next time he woke her, she climbed the stair to the roof. It was icy and moonless up there. Swaddled in polar fleece, slovenly in Uggs, she lit the candle in Theo’s star. It glowed on the wine she had opened with dinner: Lacryma Christi. But Christ’s red tears hadn’t killed Theo. The backward gaze traveled beyond the bottle, beyond the vomit in the windpipe and reached a pearly Polish forest. The past had found its way out of the birches and come looking for Theo Newman. Only the dead are perfect, and everyone had left too early.
Laura switched on her laptop and Googled
nightingale.
Within minutes, a bird was singing from a Breton wood. Oh, thought Laura, oh. She had imagined that this music, like its associate, romantic love, would be bound to disillusion. In fact, like everything overwhelming, the song could be anticipated but not prepared for. The bird sang on, and Laura acknowledged that she lived in an age of miracles. Critics of the Internet pointed out that it trivialized, catered to weakness, misinformed. But it was also a nightingale singing in winter above Sydney Harbor.
All through the drab season, she was granted intervals of grace. At work, it had become a habit to take her midmorning coffee in the car park. If Ravi Mendis was there, she squeezed between cars to join him. At first her motive had been to peer into the Hinkel ménage. But after a while Laura came to value these interludes for their own sake. The ugly concrete yard held sun, wind, Paul Hinkel’s Mazda. Ravi was easy company: a stocky, silent, handsome man.
One morning, the vine along the back fence was hung with brilliant orange. The flowers were trumpets, the buds blunt and tapering at the base. “Like small orange clubs,” remarked Laura. Ravi inspected the creeper. Then he plucked a bud and stubbed it into the middle of his forehead. It burst with the most satisfying
plop.
Ravi said, “It was a game when I was small.” Laura had to try it. It didn’t always work, but you couldn’t help feeling pleased when it did.