Questions of Travel (41 page)

In the warehouse at Ramsay, an acoustic guitar was tackling “Hallelujah,” complicated by the
beep beep
of a forklift in reverse. Ravi realized that he was waiting for Laura Fraser. Recently, they had discussed iPods. Ravi had confessed that he longed to buy one. “Oh, you should,” encouraged Laura. “I love mine.” Then she went quiet. After a while, she said that she missed waiting for a particular song to come on the radio. “It sounds silly, but because I can listen to any song I want, whenever I want it, I miss hopeful anticipation.”

The fire door opened, and Paul Hinkel came out. He raised a hand at Ravi, then lowered it and pointed at his car. The afternoon was ending, and how did Ravi imagine he was going to fill out his time sheet? Still he put off returning to his desk. Laura Fraser might arrive and say something that changed the look of the day.

Laura, 2004

CHARLIE MCKENZIE HAD LOST
his hair and gained a chin. But Laura, looking through a hole in time, saw a faded red quilt. She was eighteen, and
a lovely, sexy man
was attending to her under it. Late one night, Laura had sent an email to Charlie’s gallery—like any traveler who has lost her way, she was trying to get back to a landmark she knew.

So here she was facing up to her old love over tom yum and fish cakes in the big Thai place on King Street. Charlie had driven up to the city for the weekend, and was staying with friends nearby.

There was the usual pandemonium at the long tables in the middle. A kindly waiter had placed Laura and Charlie as far away as possible, by the window. Even so, noise crashed about them. Charlie shrieked that Fee was living in Dapto with their three kids and her new partner. It had prompted his own move to Wollongong; he was teaching part time at the university there. “And you?” he screamed.

She shouted this and that.

She had dressed for the occasion, choosing the grape-green shirt bought to overwhelm Paul Hinkel. Charlie had yelled, on seeing her, that she hadn’t changed a bit. “Nor have you,” said Laura, meaning: Still a liar, still a charmer. She remembered how kind he had been when Hester died. His gallery’s website had revealed his latest paintings. There, too, only the surface had altered.

The main courses came. The volume dipped, and Charlie confided that there was “no give in Fee.” It was a formula Laura recognized. Once, it had applied to her. Decoded, it meant
unwillingness to accept his women.
She smiled at him. He took it as an invitation to touch his knee to hers. The din rose; it was someone’s Happy Birthday. Laura and Charlie went on exchanging the occasional shout, but it was easier to empty a bottle, eat red curry of duck, rub up the past under the table.

She would walk him to his friends’ place, Laura offered, when they left the restaurant. It was a night filched from summer, although the calendar said spring. There were girls in the street barely dressed in violent hues. A big group of them shoved out of a pub, hooting at something they had left behind. Sydney was doing what Sydney did best, putting on a perfect night for getting shit-faced. Charlie steered Laura into a side street, and the scent of jasmine came staggering out of a yard.

“Ever go back to painting?” he asked.

“Painting!”

“You definitely had something there.”

“No, I didn’t. And you saw it, you said I was right to drop out.”

“Really? Can’t remember that.” He added, “Anyway, who’s to say I was right?”

She was stunned. Charlie, for all his sweetness, had always been trenchant about art. He would walk through a show: “Bad, bad, interesting, a copy, a bad copy.”

Across the street was a tall, narrow house. Protected by iron flowers, a man and a woman were dining on the first-floor balcony at a table lit with candles. In the bright room beyond them, the familiar outlines of furniture were blurred and endowed with mystery by the filmy curtain at the window. It was a scene that suggested narrative, progression, symbol. It opened depth and time in the pair at the table. Presently, they would leave the balcony and move from constriction to a brilliant amplitude whose elements remained vague; in a flash, Laura had taken it all in. What she also realized was that Charlie McKenzie was only trying to flatter—with a view to getting his leg over, she supposed. Once, painting had been the one thing about which he had never pretended; he had changed, after all. Laura had gone looking for the past and found a bad copy. She kissed Charlie goodnight at his friends’ gate and put him from her.

By the time the taxi dropped her at home, a nor’easter was up. In Sydney, as nowhere else, Laura was conscious of the course of winds; weather here came with compass and map. A nor’easter was the elsewhere wind: its salty fingers scratched up an old itch. I must go away, she thought, fitting her key into the lock.

Since coming home to Sydney, Laura had holidayed in Cuba, Tasmania, northern Italy. Avoiding London—London was Theo—she had met up with Bea in Havana, with Gaby and her children in Venice. These trips, with their satisfactions and disappointments, had been interludes. They were books read and abandoned in hotels, absorbing while they lasted but left behind without regret. Sometimes their contents leaked: a treed slope near Hobart, strewn by a storm with branches and bark, kept sliding into Laura’s dreams. But real life was Sydney: an area that covered a few streets of shops and restaurants, a house at McMahons Point, an office in Chippendale, a kinetic blue core. Now Laura felt as if her days were fenced with iron lace. The world waited like a lighted, veiled room: a vague, bright amplitude.
What am I doing here?
she wondered.

There were photographs of Venice, taken by Theo’s sister, on Laura’s laptop. Each was a tiny, luminous Canaletto: waterways, palaces, tinted skies. Hester had owned a bead like that solid green water—what had become of it? It seemed to Laura that her faith in
away,
too, had been lost. She had mislaid it at Ramsay. There, everything was known about travel. In the same way, a butcher can be said to know everything about a lamb. Guidebooks lured with the Taj by moonlight, with Machu Picchu at dawn. But the moment that mattered on each journey resisted explanation. It couldn’t be looked up under Spoil Yourself because it addressed only the individual heart. It was only an empty Kleenex box, only a dangling wire hanger, only a battered hillside in a cold spring.

Away
took on the aspect of a solution. It promised enlargement: glowing, ill defined, a movement away from Paul Hinkel. Laura dreaded and desired it. At work, she went on plotting chance encounters: placing herself in his path, engaged in vivacious chat with a colleague seated conveniently close. Perfect was if she was laughing as his red lips passed. But just before that came the electric moment: she wasn’t looking at him, but he couldn’t avoid seeing her. A current ran between that moment and all those Tuesdays and Thursdays when, entering the waratah room, he had found her naked. Now, as then, Laura moistened. At her desk afterwards, she was sated and hollow. Nothing had changed. She would begin, almost at once, to plan the next time when she would show Paul Hinkel that she was completely indifferent to him. The clear part of her brain saw this pattern and was sickened by and helpless against it.
A clean break
was called for—it was cleaner. Venice glowed on her screen: space opened in Laura, and movement. She made up her mind that at Christmas, when Ramsay shut down for a week, she would go away.

At home, she was the subject of a quarrel. She learned this, holding her breath, at the top of the stair. Carlo’s hip had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer kneel before his vegetables. Would Laura take them over, he had asked. She refused, citing work. “Work,” repeated Carlo. He had that peering look he wore when trying to find something he needed. But he turned away to fuss over his sauce. And because Laura apologized again, “
Ho capito.
No worries.” The air between them was drunk on garlic. She almost confessed: Carlo, what I want to do is smash everything and pull the world out by its roots. He had known lust, therefore despair; he would understand. But he had his nose to a board on which he was chopping herbs with maddening deliberation. “Here, let me,” said Laura. She was terribly kind to him all that afternoon.

Opening a noiseless door the following Saturday, she heard voices below. They scraped and ripped but reached Laura, who was tiptoeing forward, too muffled to decipher. In any case, when talking to Rosalba, Carlo used dialect. But Rosalba, coming out of the kitchen, inquired in her pure Italian with its terminal droop:
“E quella grassa di sopra?”
Carlo limped after her, his voice harsh. Their gruesome feet carried the argument along the passage and out of the house.
The fat one upstairs
shrank against a newel. The Whiteley loomed: one of his bulging female landscapes, all rusty buttock and rock. Laura could have vanished into it. She knew what the row was about; it was an old one, inactive for stretches but never extinct. Rosalba wanted Carlo to move to Haberfield. Her house was level and practical. It had big, clean, silent rooms. A long time ago, a crepe myrtle had towered in the garden, dropping untidy pink blossoms. It had been chopped down, and the lawn tiled. “She sweep everything, always,” Carlo confided. That, however, was not his objection. “My life here.” What he meant was with Hugo Drummond. Rosalba’s tussle was with a dead man. The dead are fearsome opponents, but Drummond couldn’t cross the street to avoid her. Laura guessed that she had been brought in when it had seemed that Rosalba was winning. The fat one was a counterargument, proof that Carlo wasn’t risking his neck trying to get up onto the roof, help in the ever-feared emergency, someone in the house at night.

Now he must have admitted about the vegetables. No doubt Rosalba had remarked on a weed or pointed out that the lettuces required thinning.

Laura brought her laptop to lunch that Sunday. Carlo beamed at glossy gardenias, fattened on Organic Life. Such flowers they would bear, Laura assured. He gazed lovingly at oleander, and at the early red flush on the pomegranate. But then he grew anxious: the effect of water restrictions on root systems balled in thirsty terra-cotta could only bring ruin. Oh, please don’t worry, said Laura, she was using that special water-retaining mix, and hand-hosing the regulation three times a week until water brimmed in the pots. She clicked and clicked, summoning creepers before and after the discipline of secateurs, showing soil protected with pea straw. Next thing, he was fretting over a photo in which he had mistaken the speckle of light on a leaf for a fungus. Laura soothed and promised. She laid it on like the pea straw, she moved her hands like snakes. All the photos had been taken the previous year. He was an old man with cataracts, he couldn’t tell what he had already been shown. She placed flowers and shining leaves, stolen from other people’s gardens, in his vases. She fitted a padlock to the door that led to the roof and worked the tiny key onto her ring.

She told Quentin Husker that she would be away at Christmas. “And a few days either side as well. I’ll work out the dates once I’ve decided where I’m going.”

Quentin scrawled his name obediently on a blank leave form. “Fill out the details when you know them.” Throughout their meeting, he had turned on Laura the vacant look of a beach house in winter. If he had been asked to picture himself, however, his mind would have called up a public statue surmounted by a pigeon—something like that anyway, lofty and imperiled. Quentin had set himself the task of carrying off a bold, original move, worthy of a CEO, a move that spoke to the
essence of Ramsay.
He remembered that it was Robyn Orr who had first used that phrase; straight away, a tingling in Quentin’s groin had acknowledged a masterstroke. The same reverence tinged with fear thrilled in that spot whenever Jenny Williams II, unlacing her corset, revealed a new tattoo or a fresh piercing.

When Laura had gone away, Quentin wrote the Ramsay tag on his whiteboard:
Every traveler is unique.
After contemplating it a while, he circled
traveler.
Then he made a list:
explorer, vagabond, nomad, adventurer.
There was a metallic tang in his mouth; it was often there these days. What would become of Quentin Husker if he didn’t make CEO? He could stay on under Robyn, at least for the short term; but losing out would mean everyone, and especially Jenny Williams II, looking at him and thinking, Loser. Moving on was the only real option. But where, where? Whichever way the cards fell, Robyn would be okay: marketing was a content-free career. Any time Robyn Orr tired of Ramsay, she could plug herself into toothpaste or transponders or time-shares and hit play. Editorial was different, it was rooted in the specific. Editorial staff who quit Ramsay either went back to university to reinvent themselves, or drifted around talking about their novel or screenplay before the mortgage drove them to inquire about freelance work. Guidebook experience was too specialized to translate into general publishing; Quentin had no idea how to commission a biography or acquire the local rights to a Swedish bestseller. On the mind map of his future all was wilderness, save for a distant southern peak labeled “Lonely Planet.”

The following week brought an email from HR. All managers had been rebadged as leaders.
A manager manages, but a leader inspires. A leader has a vision.
The proposal had originated with Paul Hinkel. The sentences were his. HR applauded
Paul’s commitment to keeping Ramsay at the cutting edge of corporate philosophy.
From the window where she spied, Laura watched the day’s hero—or its leader—setting off at noon with his gym bag. Incy-wincy Hinkel climbing rock by rock.

There was a federal election. Australians were offered a choice between two bullies. “Enjoy your democratic process,” said the polling official as he handed Laura her papers. In a cardboard booth, she wrote across each one, “I choose not to vote for any candidate.”