Geography

by Sophie Cunningham

  We changed trains in Chicago, the day of the Chicago riots in 1968, the ones where the yippies got squirted with firemen’s hoses and put flowers into the ends of the soldiers’ guns. This is something I’ve been told, by history books and my father. My father likes to remember things as events, as newsworthy and I’m left with his exaggerated sense of things in lieu of memory, or facts.

  When I watch the footage of this on the television, years later, it seems strange to me that I was in that place on that day, moving through history without it touching me. My father and everyone else his age seemed trapped in those times, defined by them; this falling away of all that they knew. To me change was a constant, so that when I grew up it seemed to me that I did not know how to stand still.

  We’d gone to America so my father could study journalism at Columbia University. One day soon after we arrived he took me there. People were wearing beads and badges and the men had long hair. That day at the university people were upset because Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated.

  ‘He’s the brother of the man who was assassinated the day you were born,’ my father told me.

  ‘What’s assassinated?’ I asked.

  ‘It means that someone has killed you and you are dead,’ my father said.

  ‘What’s dead?’

  I can’t remember now what answer he gave, but the memory of asking the question came to me vividly when I was in India that first time. Death was everywhere and I spent two weeks with amoebic dysentery. I was twenty-two, but felt like a child. Frightened, and wishing someone else would come and help me sort out this mess, the mess of everything going wrong a long way from home. I realise now that that is how my parents felt when they were in America. That they were too young to deal with this, that everything was going wrong, that they were a long way from home.

  When I was four, I sat at a breakfast bar in New York and was asked what kind of cereal I wanted. I remember looking up at the shelf behind the waitress and seeing little cardboard packets of all different kinds of cereal. ‘What are they?’ I pointed.

  ‘Variety Packs.’

  Choice: I could have cocoa pops or rice bubbles or cornflakes. I was four years old sitting on a barstool in Manhattan and could choose whatever breakfast cereal I wanted. Freedom in breakfast cereal didn’t happen in Melbourne in the 1960s. After the Variety Packs my mother and father took me to Central Park and bought me a Mickey Mouse balloon full of helium. When I let it go it floated in the air, up and up, until it was gone. You didn’t get those in Melbourne either.

  My mother bought me a little wicker table and chair that sat by my new bed. My dolls slept on the table. I can still remember waking up one morning, when things smelt new, to find that my new dolls and furniture had disappeared and my mother was packing our bags. So, for a few years anyway, that was another thing New York had that Melbourne didn’t. My father.

  That was an early lesson. Men I loved disappeared for no reason. They lived in other places, a long way away. There was another lesson in that as well. Don’t ask men why they do these things. These things just happen, and, they tell you, everyone tells you, it doesn’t mean they don’t love you. Things just happen.

  When I arrived in Los Angeles the second time, the time I met Michael, I hired a car and headed for West Hollywood. I had been on a plane for fifteen hours, was jetlagged and disorientated. I had never driven on the wrong side of the road before. I ended up, two hours later, in Inglewood, where riots had taken place a year before. I drove another seven miles to Santa Monica, though that hadn’t been where I was heading either, and ordered coffee and a ranch salad. It seemed that since the Variety Pack days the notion of choice had got a little out of control. I was asked whether I wanted blue cheese dressing, French, Italian or ranch. For my coffee I was offered white liquid that was low in fat or high, as well as sugar or low-calorie sweeteners. ‘Normal fat,’ I wanted to say. ‘Just normal.’ I was tired. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  I collect maps, have I told you that? I have maps for driving tours of Ireland and walking tours of Spain. Other maps show me where there might be a swell of land, a hill, a mountain. Relief maps, they were called in Geography. I have maps that show you where to find family clans in Scotland and the areas particular Aboriginal languages are spoken. I have maps that show me the last bits of the world where you might find a tiger in the wild, that show me where different species of birds migrate to and from and where whales swim as they move up the east coast of Australia.

  I didn’t have a decent map of Los Angeles, though. The streets, hills and canyons of Los Angeles were familiar to me, had formed the streetscapes of most of the films I had seen. I felt as if I would know my way around. But Los Angeles, as it turns out, was the place where I needed a map most of all. It was a place I got lost.

  There is a moment, driving in from JFK airport, when you cross the Triborough Bridge and suddenly see Manhattan spread out before you, just like in the opening credits of a film. When I arrived in Manhattan the second time, just after my affair with Michael had begun, I felt a sudden rush of feeling when we got to that bridge, like I was crossing over into the centre of all that was important.

  The bus dropped me at Grand Central and I caught the train down to SoHo, where Finn lived. He took me to eat Indian on Sixth Street, but I was so tired I almost fell asleep in the lamb korma.

  ‘I’ll become interesting and worthy of siblinghood tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Actually, I’m used to you being boring,’ said Finn. ‘But is there a particular reason behind how thoroughly boring you’re being tonight? Is it your lack of excitement at not having seen me for over a year?’

  ‘There are two reasons: reason one is that I am so comfortable around you that you bring out my inner bore. Reason two is that I spent all last night having sex with a guy called Michael and…’

  Finn flung his hand into the air, like a traffic policeman. ‘I’m your brother. No details please. But is this a “I’m in LA so I’m going to have an international quickie” thing, or will you see him again?’

  ‘We might meet up in Phoenix and go to the Grand Canyon together.’

  ‘Is he based permanently in LA?’ Finn asked.

  ‘I think,’ I said. ‘He teaches at UCLA.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said. ‘You could be like those Chinese guys I just read about in Maximum City.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I asked. Knowing the way Finn’s mind worked, I hoped this was going to be good. ‘Maximum City?’

  ‘A history of New York. The author talks about Chinese men who came to New York around the turn of the century to earn a living, but they weren’t allowed to bring any family out. So they’d marry a woman in China, stay three months, hopefully impregnate her in that time, then head to New York. They’d return to China three years later to meet their children, and, after that, maybe never see them again. The wives were called living widows.

  ‘So some guy lives in Manhattan, running a laundry, living alone in a single room, and in Manhattan he’s no one. But he knows he’s someone back home in China where he has a family and maybe owns some land, so he doesn’t care so much what the New Yorkers think.’

  ‘Are you saying if I kept up with Michael I could have my very own chance to be a living widow?’

  ‘No, you strike me as the man,’ said Finn. ‘Working in the laundry, hanging out in gambling halls. A secretly rich and powerful guy who has a whole world—well, a whole family—in his head.’

  ‘Ahh, thank you, Grasshopper,’ I bowed low. ‘You are a very wise man and I must remember to discuss my love life with you more often. Perhaps you’ll now allow me to go home and meditate in silence on what you say?’

  Once we were back at Finn’s apartment I ran a bath, put foam into the steaming water and stepped into it. I started reading a current edition of Vanity Fair but had also moved the television into the bathroom so I could watch ‘Melrose Place’. I learnt that Alison was going to win Billy over Amanda, a
nd that Michael and Kimberly were having an affair that was being conducted, for the most part, in an elevator. Knowing these things a full six months before those episodes were in Australia felt like the height of sophistication. This is what I thought as I lay in the bath: My name is Catherine Monaghan. I am in a bathtub, in New York, New York, The United States of America, The World, The Universe.

  The next morning Finn took me to Dean and Deluca’s for breakfast, and I made another discovery. Strawberry muffins.

  Finn looked more noticeably Australian than he did back home. He was tall, like me. Determinedly antifashion, he was wearing a flannelette shirt, Blundstone boots and the beginning of a beard. ‘This place is a bit of a wank,’ he said. ‘But I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘Yes, well struggle through that excellent short black for my sake.’ I stuck out my tongue, then decided that since I was twenty-seven and in a restaurant in New York I should try and act more grown up.

  Once Finn had left for work I made a plan to take myself from one end of the island to the other. I caught the train down to the World Trade Center and climbed it. I floated in the sky of the city and gazed at it spread below. Then I walked down to Battery Park and looked at the Statue of Liberty. From there I walked, slowly, to Union Square, where I had a coffee.

  Walk one block in Manhattan, even half a block, and everything changes and I liked that, that you couldn’t predict what was around the corner. My nerves were on edge, alive. Michael had done that to me, New York was doing it to me. I felt as if I had pins and needles all over my body no matter what I was doing: walking, looking in shops, looking at art. Every brush against my skin, the movement of fabric over my flesh, made me flinch.

  At Union Square I moved down to the subway and as the train sped through its tunnels I wondered what part of the city was above me—was I passing under the Chrysler Building? Would the weight of it crush me? I stared out the train windows into the darkness and imagined I could see the homeless, the mad, the devastated who lived underground in the network of tunnels and crannies that had been left when the subway was dug at the end of the last century.

  I emerged on West 125th, and walked past the Apollo Theatre, the hair braiding shops and the street markets until I found Sylvia’s where I ate southern fried chicken, greens and mash. Everyone had told me not to walk through Harlem, that it would be dangerous, but no one hassled me. I walked until I found the Addicts Rehabilitation Choir a few blocks away. The choir was singing gospel and within minutes I was on my feet, clapping and dancing.

  ‘God lives here, yes he does,’ the preacher shimmied through the crowd. ‘He moves through us all.’

  ‘Yes,’ I sang with everyone. ‘Yes he surely does.’

  ‘Where you from?’ the preacher came up to me, ‘where do you call home?’

  ‘The world,’ I sang into the mike, full of joy all of a sudden. ‘The world is my home.’

  I had planned to go out dancing on my first night in Manhattan, but I’d exhausted myself. Finn took me to the Odeon for an early dinner.

  ‘More expensive groove for you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t need groove,’ I retorted. ‘I almost found God today. In Harlem.’

  Finn burst out laughing. ‘I have consulted with the lord,’ he said shortly, when he had recovered himself. ‘And the lord says stick to sex.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I smiled beatifically.

  After dinner Finn and I sat, gripped, watching the drama unfold at Waco. We watched the troops built up around the fort in Texas. Listened to the commentators who described a people becoming more and more entrenched in their position, a cult that would rather die than surrender, victims of a megalomaniac who had no care for their lives.

  ‘How could they do it,’ I asked. ‘Hand over all responsibility to Koresh?’

  ‘They all think they’ll be resurrected, so death doesn’t scare them,’ said Finn. ‘I didn’t understand how many crazy cults there were in this country till I got here. Everyone’s desperate to give their lives over to someone.’

  Before I went to bed that night I wrote a long letter home to Marion.

  ‘Confession time,’ I wrote. ‘I told you that I thought Michael had eyes like Peter O’Toole, but what I didn’t tell you is that we did more than flirt. I’m going to use big words here: I think he is the one. Does that sound ridiculous? But something has shifted in me—it’s as though there’s been some kind of chemical reaction and all the fluids in my body are somehow re-tuned to flow towards him. And now I’m in New York, in such a daze that I feel like I’ve had a lobotomy. Simone de Beauvoir wrote about this in The Second Sex—after she started sleeping with Sartre she became so obsessed that even getting on the tram became an erotic experience for her. I know how she felt, like everything around you is penetrating you—forgive the pun—the music, the art, the funk of the subway. Everything turns into sex.’

  Marion teased me about the letter for a long time after that. ‘You didn’t waste any time slotting yourself and Michael into some great romantic tradition. Chemical reaction? Re-tuned body fluids? De Beauvoir and Sartre? He’s old and a bit smart, and you’re young and smart. There the resemblance ends.’

  I spent the next day at MOMA. I got home that afternoon and put on the TV just as the tanks moved towards the compound and it erupted in flames. You could hear the screams, see people on fire as they leapt out of windows trying to escape the flames. There was the odd gunshot as some contrived to cut short their suffering. Eighty-six people died. It was not clear to me why the government thought killing these people was a way of saving them. In their own way they were as crazy as Koresh.

  Finn got home as I was watching a blow-by-blow news report of what had happened. ‘That Michael guy sent a fax for you to my work number,’ he handed me the fax, before turning to the TV. ‘He likes to keep things enigmatic, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t mind enigmatic.’

  ‘I can’t believe the government went in like that,’ Finn wasn’t listening. ‘It’s insane.’

  But I was no longer watching the TV.

  ‘Catch a plane to Phoenix,’ said the fax. ‘I have five days. I’ll meet you at the Desert Sands Hotel, May 4, 4 p.m. We can tour around from there. M.’

  Three

  ‘Fact: this is where the Australian cricketers drink,’ Ruby tells me, as we sit in the bar of the Galle Face Green Hotel, drinking a midday beer. The tropics do that to you.

  ‘Counter fact: Bombay has the largest film industry in the world. Bigger than Hollywood.’

  ‘It’s Mumbai, not Bombay. Bombay is part of India’s colonial past. Mumbai is the future. You can be a know-it-all, but sometimes I know more.’ Ruby thrusts her fist into the air as if she has just taken a wicket. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know you think it’s funny, but it does seem like only yesterday that I was there, and it was called Bombay. And you’re not helping,’ I say, half accusing, half teasing. ‘On the second day we met you asked me if I was alive when Gough Whitlam was sacked.’

  Ruby laughs out loud and I realise I like watching her, even when she is provoking me: the way she throws her head back to laugh, her pale freckled face, her broad mouth.

  ‘I just want to know,’ Ruby continues to stir me, ‘whether historical moments you’ve lived through have felt big when they happened. Like being alive when Marilyn Monroe died. Or Kennedy was assassinated. Or even seeing Kashmir before it was destroyed?’

  I say that the shimmering light and water of Kashmir seemed timeless and that it never occurred to me that things could change. Kashmir felt outside of history, floated out of time, like things do when you are in love. It is only when the affair is over that you realise months or years have gone by, and, sometimes, what was beautiful has been laid waste. I tell her that she should know how these things feel, what with her months in Colombo. She refused to go home when the government urged all Australians to leave the country; now she has developed a habit of starting whenever she hears a loud noise. She’s cut sh
ort her time here for that reason.

  ‘I wasn’t born when Marilyn died,’ I say. ‘But I was born the very day Kennedy was killed. November 22, 1963. My mum tells me that she couldn’t sleep because the radios in the hospital were never turned off.’

  ‘Did you have to spend every birthday watching footage of Jackie picking the top of JFK’s head off the back seat of the limo?’ Ruby asks.

  She is right, I did. And I wonder whether that is why media events are one of my organising principles. I wonder if that is why I became a journalist. There are the big moments; those things that happen that make everyone draw breath, make them realise that at any moment anything and everything could change—cyclones, wars, a man walking on the moon, bushfires, sudden deaths and earthquakes. The things that happen in the world that mean for a few moments a lot of people are talking about the same thing and for a few moments there is the illusion of community. Then there are the smaller events that act like punctuation points: songs, films and television shows.

  We discuss whether this really is community. I used to think it was but now am not so certain. Ruby thinks it is, a sharing of experience as people talk about what they have seen and heard. I wonder whether it is just a kind of perving.

  ‘When did you ever actually do something as a result of seeing something on TV?’ I ask her, and she stumps me by saying, ‘Now. That’s why I’m in Sri Lanka. I saw a documentary about the civil war and decided to go and help out for a while.’ As she talks I realise I’m touchy on this subject because the more I’ve watched, the less I’ve done.

  ‘You sound like one of those old “TV is evil” fogies,’ says Ruby.

  ‘I’m becoming one,’ I admit. ‘I recently worked out how many hours I’d spent in front of the box. Assuming two hours a day every day from the age of five—which is probably an underestimate—the answer is 23,496 hours. That’s almost three years of my life in front of the television. Four if you allow for sleeping at night.’