Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Her brothers, paid to apply the rack and the screw, Hamish in finance, Cameron in commercial law, rented a flat in Rushcutters Bay. Donald Fraser, the medical director of a hospital, often dined out. So Laura and Hester watched TV with plates on their laps. There were evenings when they sat on and on, homework and washing-up neglected. By the time the sound of a car could be heard in the drive, it was a point of honor not to move. It was not that Donald criticized Dallas or fish fingers. But he stood there, jingling his keys, before retreating to his room.

  Wielding his electric toothbrush in the en suite, Donald Fraser was reliving the moment when he had looked in on his daughter and his aunt. One was a glazed wooden goat, the other…he rinsed and spat, traversed by pity for the female morsel he had engendered. His daughter’s eyes were coins of a lowly bronze denomination. Crossing a room, she caused him to fear that she would collide with the furniture. He couldn’t conceive of the absence of beauty in a woman as anything other than a misfortune and had no doubt that he was responsible for Laura’s affliction. Long before her birth, mirrors had presented him with lips as coarsely suggestive as a double entendre. He pressed a hand towel to them. Yet they excited women. For context is all. It was a mouth that would constitute an invitation on an attractive girl; on his poor child, it was an obscenity from which her father flinched.

  She was the repository of all that was massive and defective in Donald’s lineage. He had escaped the worst of it. Even so, as he peered over the towel, he fell far short of his own ideal. Beautiful young women—stunners—were therefore necessary to him. His wife had been one. Her radiant fairness had passed to the boys, adulterated by the Fraser motif of thickly turned limb. But it was the girl who had suffered the full force of the paternal theme. The runt had copped the brunt. At her birth, Donald had thought of a piglet he had dissected as a boy. Loving his sons, he showed them no quarter. Laura, whom he didn’t like to touch, raked in money, extravagant presents, indulgence in all things except the failure in which she had played no part.

  Donald put the thought of his daughter from him by recalling the image of a succulent oncologist who was driven to adjust her goldilocks if ever they met in the lift. But her smile contained a pink expanse of gum. So he had pretended not to understand when she “accidentally” called his extension. Emboldened before the bathroom mirror by this proof of standards, he dared to let the towel fall.

  In the rumpus room, they were eating Tim Tams straight from the packet. An ad break interrupted a Ewing machination—something involving a secret and a lie. It must have been the reason Hester chose that moment to confide that she hadn’t always been the last after a run of boys. A sister had contracted diphtheria in India at the age of three. Pinafored Hester, lingering outside a window, heard her mother say that the child’s throat seemed to be lined with gray velvet. “That was the infected membrane,” said Hester to Laura. “Dr. Norris had ridden through a cyclone to reach us but he was too late. Ruth choked and died.”

  Yuk! thought Laura. The unfairness of being saddled with an old bag as companion had recently begun to oppress. Thankfully, the Ewings had returned to cavort and divert. Hester went on holding half a Tim Tam. Eventually, she placed it on her saucer and drew a hanky from her sleeve. Laura thought, If you cry, I’ll have to kill you. She waited, sliding her eyes sideways and holding a cushion like a shield. The whole hanky thing was disgusting, too—what was wrong with a Kleenex?

  Hester was in the grip of a senseless thought: Death runs in our family. For a long time, the space occupied by Ruth had remained visible; the child Hester had to step off a path or choose a different chair. A Ruth-shaped form, something like a mist but less definite, still moved now and then along a passage or across a window. Back teeth together! said Hester to Hester. It was the only salve known to her childhood: offered when a funny bone collided with a cupboard, when a sister died. Over the years that followed, the command lost its power; it survived in the present as a joke. It wasn’t that Hester regretted the shift, exactly. But the saying belonged to a world that was imperfect and solid: how had it grown as light as mockery? She wiped her ringless fingers—carefully, one by one.

  Ravi, 1970s

  ON THAT DAY IN 1779 when Captain Cook died in Kealakekua Bay, an Italian apothecary arrived in Galle on a ship registered in Rotterdam to the Dutch East India Company. One of these men was already famous and the other would die in obscurity, but each had his part in a great global enterprise that ran on greed, curiosity and the human reluctance to stay still.

  Ravi’s pedigree reached back through two hundred years to the Italian adventurer; on his mother’s side, which didn’t count. Of his father’s ancestors, however, he knew almost nothing. No tales circulated of them, for they lacked exoticism and hence the glamour from which legends are made.

  Mindful of his wife’s European heritage, Suresh Mendis had once brought home a sideboard inset with speckled mirrors and a portrait of Edward VII. It was solidly constructed from teak, but two of its clawed feet had been sawn off and one of its drawers was stuck. Suresh told his wife that he had acquired it from a colleague who was emigrating and had let it go for next to nothing. Suspicion fluttered in Carmel, but this was in the first year of their marriage, and they hadn’t yet learned to look on each other’s wishes as flaws.

  Propped on bricks, the sideboard was placed on the back veranda to await repair. There it stayed and became, in fact, a useful receptacle for the odds and ends that every household accumulates: a pot of glue, string, receipts, a saucepan without a handle, a cracked dish that might yet serve for the dog’s rice. “Look in the sideboard,” the Mendises would advise each other when they had searched everywhere else for an elusive object.

  It was here that Ravi came to stand when his father went into hospital with pains in his stomach and failed to return. The sideboard, ever further advanced in decrepitude, one of its mirrors shattered by a cricket ball, a second monsoon-warped drawer now as unyielding as the first, had nevertheless endured. Ravi was just tall enough to lay his head on the battered board, beside a blurred whitish ring left by a glass. Marmite, believing this stance to signal a new game, trotted up and remained beside him, gently wagging her tail.

  Laura, 1980s

  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.

  Ravi, 1980s

  “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 w
ith 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.

  Laura, 1980s

  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.

  Ravi, 1980s

  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!

  Laura, 1980s

  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.

  Laura, 1980s

  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 th
is 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.