Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Fair Play was a beauty: satiny black coat, narrow waist, a hunter’s muscled thighs. All day she danced through the pumpkin vine, chasing skinks. She wore her long ears turned inside out when hunting, so that two pink roses adorned her head. In this guise she had the look of a cheetah or a bat. There was always something to investigate or kill, leaf shadows thrown by the overgrown shrubs, doves in the sweet long grass. Sometimes Fair Play’s mind turned to geology: she kept a small collection of stones down the side of the shed. Sometimes Kev, Hazel’s fourth, dropped in with Lefty, his big blond Labrador. Fair Play, who detested all other dogs, loved Lefty. Devotion required her to tug with all her strength at his cheek. There was also standing under Lefty’s belly, reaching out her muzzle and sinking her teeth into his neck. Lefty, a romantic, was tolerant of these coquettish maneuvers and only occasionally sat on her head.

  When they remembered, the boys urged Hazel to open up the back: bifolds, a deck. The view, they said, nodding from the kitchen door at sunsets lolling above the river. But Hazel liked the dim kitchen where her mother had cooked, and the sunroom with its row of windows like a train. When they were first married, Len had put in new kitchen cabinets and an indoor toilet. As the boys grew, a second shower had gone into the laundry, which Hazel still called the washhouse, and that was quite enough of renos for her, thanks.

  There had always been someone living in the sleep-out: Hazel’s uncle Vic, who had never been the same after the Japs, then Len’s dad, later one or another of the boys. It was Damo, Hazel’s youngest, left alone at home with her, who had suggested foreigners. He was different, Damo, he went out into the world and brought back urgent ideas that he handed his mother like thorny bouquets. There were migrants who needed a place while they found their feet, said Damo, there were overseas students being ripped off in unheated rooms.

  After Hazel had been made redundant, the boys said, Mum, you have to charge more than utilities. It was none of their business, replied Hazel, and pushed her gray fringe from her red face. She had her redundancy package. And, lately, her chairs.

  Throughout her grown life, Hazel had renewed old chairs, collecting them from the side of the road and heaving them into the back of her station wagon. She stripped, sanded, cut foam to size, tacked piping into place. Her father had been an upholsterer, and Hazel couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known about grip clamps and webbing. All the chairs in the house were her remodelings. Fair Play had a throne, out of the wind on the back patio, a cozy Victorian affair with maroon velvet cushions and flokati-covered wings.

  Hazel passed on her creations to neighbors who needed seating for a veranda. She gave them to the boys when they had places of their own. They were not always welcome gifts. “What’s wrong with a nice neutral?” asked Sooz, striking to the heart of things, for Hazel salvaged her materials and favored boldness. All the old bedspreads and tablecloths and curtains in the street found their way to her. “And it’s such a wog suburb,” said Sooz. This was provoked by an armchair upholstered in an embossed lime and turquoise fabric that had once covered the Katzoulises’ bed. The back of the chair was a Sacred Heart tapestry: Mrs. D’Agostino specialized in them. “Do you realize Indians bought that place two doors down?” warned Sooz. Sure enough, next thing there were three kitchen chairs flaunting scenes from Bollywood, and Hazel cutting up a vinyl shopping bag for a fourth.

  Then Damo had a barbecue at his house. The new art teacher at the school where he taught English came. Confronted with a pair of Hazel’s chairs, she grew agitated. Her husband owned a shop that sold recycled furniture. One thing led to another. Not only was Hazel doing commissions now, she couldn’t keep up with the demand. Kev had been to Surry Hills to recce the shop. He emailed photos to Robbo. One of them showed a price tag. As Sooz concluded, “There’s always people with more money than sense.”

  The sleep-out held a wardrobe, a microwave, a bar fridge, a TV on a stand. The bed was already made up under a yellow chenille spread. The mustard wall-to-wall had been put in for Col, her eldest, when his father died, said Hazel. “Carpet can be crucial at a time like that.” The sleep-out also contained two of her chairs, one easy, one upright, but she didn’t draw attention to them, of course.

  “Anything you need, give us a hoy.” She had already shown Ravi the dunny, down near the fence, its louvers obscured by passion fruit vine, and the laundry off the patio where he could shower and wash his clothes. As soon as he was alone, Ravi remembered that he didn’t have a towel. But he had made up his mind not to ask for anything again.

  The first thing he did was unhook a picture from the wall and slide it face down under the bed.

  Angie Segal said that it would take Immigration a year, and very likely longer, to rule on Ravi’s application for asylum. The waves of refugees coming in from Afghanistan meant the system was more than usually slow. Meanwhile, Ravi was on a bridging visa—or would be, once three months and his tourist visa expired. Because he had entered Australia legally, his new visa would allow him to work. But when Angie spoke of organizations that helped people in his position find employment and what she called support, Ravi’s stomach clenched. He didn’t want to be put in touch with people like him.

  Angie asked fiercely, “Are you okay for money?” and “What’s Hazel charging you?” She pressed a mini Mars Bar on Ravi along with a mobile phone. There was a year’s credit on it, she said, because she had to be able to contact him. Fresh from Freda, Ravi feared finding himself in a new labyrinth of obligations. Angie Segal and Freda Hobson had shared a flat in London for two years. “Isn’t she completely amazing?” Angie said.

  Gathered around yum cha in Campsie for Col’s birthday, the boys analyzed and assessed.

  Russ, Hazel’s third, said, “Any of youse see that thing about queue-jumpers on Channel 7?” Then, “Yeah, I know Howard’s a slimy turd. I’m just saying, if this Lankan bloke’s a refugee, why isn’t he locked up?”

  Kev said, “Those Reeboks he’s got didn’t come cheap.”

  Damo said, “His face.”

  Laura, 2000–2001

  RAMSAY PUBLICATIONS WAS ADVERTISING for a commissioning editor for its European guidebooks. Why not? thought Laura. She had to do something for a living.

  The great thing about putting together a CV for a guidebook publisher was that there was no need to obscure the gaps. On the contrary, the missing years were converted into an asset: travel, experience!

  At her interview, she told the story of It’s Australian. But good. Somewhat to her consternation, she was hired.

  Aspects of it were magical: the regular infusions of money into her bank account, the rostered days off, the prospect of paid leave. But there was getting to a laminated desk on time and remaining there for hours, there was overcooled or stuffy space where only Windows opened, there were key performance indicators and the corporate we.

  At general meetings, new employees were introduced to the rest of the staff. Invited to tell us your reasons for choosing Ramsay, Laura mustered a love of travel that drew decorous applause. Then the other new hire, a cartographer called Paul Hinkel, flung his arms wide. “You guys!” he cried. “You’re the reason I want to work here. You’re such a great team!”

  Cheers. Fists punched air. Laura waited for someone to shout, “Let’s all have a Coke!”

  The world of work. She heard doors sliding shut.

  Ramsay’s head office occupied a former knitwear factory in Chippendale. Laura caught a bus or walked to work through fume-rich air. She had moved to affordable Erskineville, where she shared a warehouse apartment that belonged to a journalist called Danni Holt. Warehouse living suggested capaciousness, but so many flats had been squished into the building that Danni’s rooms were poky, her ceilings oppressed. Five years earlier, when she bought it, the apartment had possessed the virtue of being new. Now the collapsing baseboard, the creeping stains testified to the effects of climate and greed.

  Condensation, on its way to becoming mold, had settled betwe
en the heavy panes of the door to the balcony. There was a view of a car park, more apartments, antennas like Chinese script. Quite often, the sky was replaced by a low-flying plane on its way to the airport. Danni said, “You get used to the noise.” Laura hoped not—it would mean she had died.

  In her sunless flat in Kentish Town, she had harbored a fantasy of greenness and growth. Now she had tomato seedlings in mind, and a trough planted with spring onions. Meanwhile, the balcony boasted a bloomless gardenia in a pot.

  There were nights when she left the apartment and went out walking. The west was gentrifying: there were For Sale signs in every street. Laura paused before a shuttered house In Need Of Complete Renovation. One photo showed a backyard deep in weeds, another a mirrored mantel above a bed. Poverty slept on a bare mattress draped with an orange, satin-bordered blanket. BYO Imagination! invited the sign. Laura conjured wintry midnight journeys to a tacked-on lavatory, she pictured the kitchen where the airbrush hadn’t dared.

  Where spooky blue TV light had once indicated a fellow insomniac, her sleepless neighbors now sat before bright screens. Laura mentioned this evolution to Robyn Orr, with whom she had become friendly at work. “Late-night searches for twentieth-century exes.”

  Robyn headed up Marketing. “They’ll be downloading porn,” she said.

  Ravi, 2001

  FREDA HAD SAID, “ONCE you’ve got a bank account, send me the details and I’ll transfer more.” But instead of opening an account, Ravi had merely converted her rupees to dollars. He hid the cash in his wardrobe and resented each withdrawal. The sum that Freda had calculated would cover four weeks lasted twenty-one.

  The phone Angie Segal had given him rang. She said, “I’ve got an email for you from Freda. Actually, I’ve got three. I’ve been in BrisVegas visiting the rellies. Should I print out your messages and post them? Or have you got an email address I can forward them to?”

  “No.” Ravi added, “Thank you.”

  “Fair enough,” said Angie, after a while.

  He lived on cheap, delicious food, baked beans, pot noodles, sugary tea, spaghetti onto which he poured tomato sauce, toast made from plastic packs of bread that didn’t dry out or grow mold. For feast days, a hamburger or chicken nuggets or pasta with tinned tuna. The smell of the fish brought Fair Play. Her eyes were as large and lustrous as those of cartoon aliens. Ravi poured the juice into her dish.

  Hazel gave him pumpkin scones and a jar of her marmalade. It was a street where vegetables and gossip and plants were exchanged. Hazel passed on a foil dish of curried beans. “Dr. Mishra, God love her. I didn’t like to mention the ulcer.”

  Whenever Hazel grilled sausages and chops on the barbecue, there were extra. She said, “You’re doing me a kindness,” and “I’m used to a crowd.” The thin sausages tasted of soap. Ravi loved them, as he loved all Australian food.

  In flower-sprinkled grass, Fair Play was liberating a moth from the wheel of existence. Plumbago draped the fence; the blue of the flowers turned unearthly at dusk. In the middle of the yard rose what Ravi had taken for the skeleton of a giant shade umbrella. Hazel showed him how to peg his washing to its ribs. It was called a Hills hoist: “A great Australian invention.” For a long time, Ravi went on thinking of it as something broken.

  The dunny door was made of clear glass. That was Damo’s idea, said Hazel, he had taken down the old door saying, Why waste the sunset? She offered to rig up a curtain for Ravi. “But you’ll be quite on your own down there.”

  From his perch, Ravi looked out at prosperous clouds. When he rose, the wet gash of the river came into view. Leaving the dunny one evening, he forgot to switch off the light. Anyone else would have thought that the lighted lavatory had the look of a phone box. When Ravi remembered and turned, he saw a glass-lidded coffin from a tale.

  Damo had made it his business to ask a question or two of Angie Segal. Then he had Googled sri lanka politics. When he had finished reading, what he needed to do at once was to give Ravi something. He drove to his mother’s. To Ravi he said casually, “Got this fleece that’s too small. Could come in handy when the weather turns.”

  He told Hazel that Ravi had refused counseling. “Angie told him she could put him in touch with people from his own community but he doesn’t want that either.” He fetched two stubbies, which Hazel and he drank peering through the sunroom windows at the sleep-out. Hazel said nothing of a discovery she had made. The lock on the sleep-out door didn’t always catch. When Ravi was out one windy morning, the door had begun to bang. Hazel, giving in to temptation, had seen at once what was missing. The small mystery gnawed. Had Ravi sold the print? But it was more or less worthless. Thrown it away? Kev had bought it long ago in his creative phase. Hazel wanted to tell Damo that the picture was gone but it would mean revealing that she had snooped. Her youngest had strong, formidable beliefs. He seldom left her house without having first forced an act of submission from Fair Play—this or that small frustration of the dog’s will. It wasn’t cruelty and passed as discipline. Now and then, his mother spared a thought for the teenagers Damo taught.

  Ravi spent fine days out walking. It exhausted him and passed the time. In his pack was bread spread with peanut butter and a soft-drink bottle filled with water. The cushioned sneakers of Ravi-Mendis-from-Phoenix carried him along the river in both directions, across suburbs, to shopping centers. What he liked best were parks and streets of houses. The mouth-watering smells of food he couldn’t afford mocked him in the malls.

  Long afterwards, when Ravi thought back to those endless summer days, what he remembered was loneliness. No one spoke to him. No one knew where he was. He missed Malini. She refused to be coaxed out, claiming that the light hurt her eyes. Ravi blundered into a tiny park that had been arranged as a giant’s sitting room: the vast couch had an antimacassar of colored tiles, and a flight of concrete steps for a seat. He thought how Hiran would love it. A banyan tree appeared at once—Ravi saw the great black square of its head. It blotted out a mirrored fireplace in which a kiosk took the place of a grate.

  A plane roared so low overhead that it must have been navigating by a street directory. There was a row of birthday-cake houses, green, pink, yellow, with marzipan trims. Fences and railway arches were sprayed with the symbols Ravi had seen on his first day: <<+#>>. And the flowers—he hadn’t known a city could contain so many flowers. There were mandalas of fallen blossom studded here and there with a squashed cockroach; he stared at them as if they held messages. His mind grew white-hot—it was the mind of an animal in a searchlight.

  Angie Segal had held up a hand, folding down fingers as she cited the recognized motives for persecution: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, political opinion. “In your case it’d be the last one. Political persecution.”

  He had never been politically active, said Ravi.

  “But your wife was. And whoever killed her made sure you feared for your life.”

  No one expects you to do anything. In the fierce summer streets the light was incontinent, and Malini’s voice was a scythe. Ravi would have to stop walking and rest on a wall or a bench. Sometimes he sat on and on—who was he waiting for? He looked up and saw Freda in her baggy T-shirt with rings on every finger. She was coming to save him. They would drive down empty streets to an air-conditioned room. “Can I help you?” asked Freda. She had disguised herself as a square, exhausted woman pushing a stroller hung with shopping. She said, “My husband doesn’t like people sitting on our wall.”

  Walking is a porous activity: the outside seeps in. By the end of that summer, Australia had entered Ravi. Now it would keep him company no matter where in the world he went.

  All the houses in Hazel’s street were built of dull red brick. A lane ran behind the yards on one side. Ravi had explored it, and seen extensions and a swimming pool and ramparts of hydrangeas. There were expressions of individual style—the Katzoulises had replaced their timber veranda posts with handsome fluted columns and paved
their drive with big orange tiles—but the core of all the houses was the same. Over a barbecued T-bone, Hazel filled Ravi in on the neighbors. Dr. Mishra was a dentist and her husband was an engineer. Mr. Katzoulis worked at the airport. The D’Agostinos ran a deli, and their daughter, who lived three doors up, was a teacher. A Russian at the far end of the street drove a bus. Ravi saw people leave for work dressed in uniforms at the same time as their neighbors were setting out in shorts or suits. At home, where the humble lived in small, flimsy houses, the wealthy in large, solid ones, such miscegenation was inconceivable. Hazel mended chairs, which made her a kind of carpenter in Ravi’s eyes. But her house had ceilings more beautiful than he could have imagined, fit for a palace with their plaster fruit and birds.

  Malini went on refusing to show herself but sent Hiran to appear in a dream. The child was only a tot. He clapped his hands or sat up on his mat and smiled. Ravi cut him a slice of birthday-cake house. They took bites from it in turn. Hiran spoke up, telling his father that it was vital not to look in the mirror over the mantel. The queen of spades lived there. She could reach out and pull you in.

  At night the flowers returned as scent. Woken by his bladder, Ravi would step outside and be met by a great whorl of perfumed air, gardenia, frangipani, the jasmine that starred the length of the lane.

  The shower recess in the laundry had a screen of ridged amber glass. One morning Ravi was certain that someone had entered the laundry as he showered, and was waiting. Thereafter, even though it was drafty, he left the sliding door open when he had a shower.