Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  There was a dream in which Priya drew back a curtain, and Ravi saw worms consuming his son’s face.

  The first time he went to Circular Quay, he walked all the way. It took so long that he had eaten all his sandwiches by the time he arrived and was hungry again—it had also started to pour. After that, Ravi always caught an upstairs train to the harbor. In fine weather, he would make his way over a headland to a quiet bay. One of the wharves there offered a good place to sit, in the angle of a building. Hours passed. Skeletons of light twitched in the water. Ravi would smoke a cigarette—he had discovered the Bangladeshi shop where cigarettes were sold singly. Meat was cheap in Australia, and cigarettes were expensive. Like the cold sunlight on his first day in Sydney, it was an other-way-around thing about life here.

  Sometimes a fine morning had turned to rain by the time his train arrived at the harbor. Then he didn’t leave the station but went across to platform 2. That was the marvelous platform. The view, framed by the bridge and the opera house, had been known to Ravi as long as he could remember. Someone had paid for it, scribbled on the back and posted it to his parents. What was amazing was that the original was given away to commuters. Oh, open-handed Australia, lavish as light! Silver trains came and went unnoticed at Ravi’s back.

  Another place he liked on rainy days or when heat struck was the Hungry Jack’s at Central Station. For the price of a small French fries, he could sit on and on at one of the tables on the concourse, and only the eyes of pigeons reproached. Children and suitcases were led to trains leaving for the country. There was always an old lady peering up at the number of the platform with her top lip raised at one corner. There was always a free newspaper to read.

  Next to Hungry Jack’s was a pub with doors to the concourse. Ravi could see the waistcoated barman and the chained lamps that shone all day. It seemed a tremendously luxurious place, with its patterned ceiling and curved, gleaming bar. Unlike Hungry Jack’s, it was patronized exclusively by Australians. What Ravi meant by that was white people. He would have liked to go inside, just once. At the same time, there was something about the men perched in formal jackets over golden drinks that was obscurely sad. Ravi worked out what it was, eventually. Hungry Jack’s drew schoolboys, violent-eyed girls, women with firm-fleshed babies. There might be someone eating chips who was openly or secretly broken. But everyone in the bar, whatever their age, looked old.

  Ravi’s thoughts often strayed to the cemetery above the Pacific. Seen on that first strange Australian day, it had entered his imagination and was lodged there, as plain and bright and talismanic as a scene from the deep past. He considered asking Hazel how he might find it again, but realized, after a while, that he was keeping the cemetery for a special occasion. He had no idea what he meant by that.

  Although his pace was steady and slow, walking tired Ravi. What he had known all his life was sea level. The ache in his shins informed him that he didn’t have the habit of hills. Sydney tricked with deceptive gradients even in streets that started off flat. The lie of the land was still unfamiliar, so the way a street plunged to reveal the river or the suburb cladding a distant valley always took Ravi by surprise. It was called a view but had the force of a reward. And the sunsets—he was no stranger to their conflagrations, but walking uphill into the blaze sent a shiver along his nerves.

  Ravi walked and walked, but he couldn’t outwalk Australia: only the scenery altered. There were days when he felt trapped in red-roofed valleys. A small plane flew through the depths of the river; Ravi looked up and watched it moving far above the roofs. Clouds parted, and a great rib of light reached into a valley like an illustration from a Bible story. Hills are God’s gift to our imagination, said Brother Ignatius. Who can say what lies on the other side of a hill?

  Laura, 2001

  EVERY DAY, THE NEW, the unexpected, the arbitrary arrived in Laura’s in-box, in her in-tray, in person. Accustomed to working alone and without interruption, she was ill prepared for office life. It was like being dropped into a country where she didn’t understand the language: the disorientation, the constant switching of focus, the way the trivial and the momentous presented on the same plane. Cubism must have looked like this in 1911, thought Laura, a lunacy that admitted no hierarchy of interpretation, no fixed point from which meaning might flow.

  A typical day began with an email from Gina Piggott. Gina ran Ramsay’s London branch and liked to copy her messages to the head of Publishing. The latest listed thirty-one errors in the new guide to Brittany. This kind of carelessness is so damaging to our credibility.

  The mistakes, typical of first editions, didn’t amount to much. But Gina wanted editorial on the European guides transferred to London. London office space like London labor like London on-costs like London everything was pricier than in Sydney. Gina knew all this. Everyone did. But Ramsay U.K. was solely a marketing office, and editorial was the core of publishing. Gina longed to speak of my editorial team and she had the mulishness of the successful empire-builder. It was apparent to Laura that Gina would prevail—the rest of them would simply get tired of arguing with her.

  In Sydney, Gina Piggott’s staff were known as the little victims.

  Her emails, always aggrieved or accusatory, arrived overnight. They were never a good way to start the day.

  An email flagged with an urgent red ! proclaimed that someone in Sales couldn’t find his coffee mug.

  An email requested a meeting about freelance editorial rates.

  On the other end of Laura’s phone, Jenny Williams I, who ran Production, said, “Got a moment?”

  In her office, Jenny silently held up an advance copy of a guidebook. Silently, she turned it around so that Laura could read the spine: Swizerland. Ramsay printed offshore, usually in Singapore or Hong Kong; it was cheaper than printing locally, and more efficient for shipping books to warehouses around the world. Recently, however, Jenny had been using a firm in Indonesia, where printing was cheaper still.

  “The usual illiterate in Design. And no one at the plant who reads English,” said Jenny. “Twenty thousand copies,” she said.

  There was a meeting to discuss proposed changes to map keys. It was confined to commissioning editors and senior cartographers. But a memo from Paul Hinkel, suggesting an alternative set of symbols for hotels, restaurants and places of interest, was circulated. It was well written, closely argued. People were impressed.

  Afterwards, Laura saw Paul in discussion with his line manager, arms folded across his chest. As she passed, his eyes ran over but didn’t acknowledge her: she might have been a blank space on a map. His small, red mouth went on pulsing—Laura could see why he would appeal to a certain kind of woman. He looked capable and generic, like a man in a training video demonstrating CPR.

  An email requested a meeting about price points.

  An email reminded that the brief for the Ireland update was due the next day.

  A letter offered the exclusive opportunity to publish the writer’s tales about his travels around Europe in a campervan. Family and friends have found my stories hilarious!

  In the kitchen, Laura stood chatting with Helmut Becker from Design. “I am an artist,” declared Helmut as Laura’s herbal teabag brewed. “Art is elusive. It is inspiration. They cannot just say, do this, Helmut, do that, we need six covers, schnell, schnell, like bastard Nazis in a movie. There is a creative ambience—you know? When things are flowing, I could start work at dawn, I could stay at my desk all night,” announced Helmut magnificently. He had never been seen in the office after half-past six or before ten. Laura liked him a lot.

  An email from Rights proposed a seminar on intellectual property law.

  An email from Nadine Flanagan, the webmaster, requested copy for an e-feature on Russian churches.

  An email from Sari Gardiner, one of the researchers on the Greek Islands update, complained that her deadline wasn’t realistic. It was Sari’s first assignment. She had yet to realize that guidebook deadlines were never rea
listic. Information dated quicker than it could be gathered—that was the built-in use-by date that made publishers of guidebooks rich. How it went with new researchers was already sadly plain to Laura. They clamored to be hired, brimful of energy and enthusiasm, thinking Free travel! Cool! A few days into a gruesome schedule of fact-gathering, it began to dawn on them that this was nothing like a gap year. And that interacting with other cultures, always cited in their letters of application as motivating their desire to write guidebooks, would be confined to wheedling information from expatriates and bureaucrats, who lied reflexively—the first group to aggrandize their experience, the second to cover their tracks.

  An email from HR outlined changes to Ramsay’s corporate membership deal at the local gym.

  An email requested a meeting about blurbs.

  Laura had lunch with Robyn Orr at their usual Korean restaurant. Over a soundscape of Carla Bruni, Robyn said, “So I’m in Cliff’s office, running through this deal I’ve negotiated with the airport bookshops, and suddenly he goes, ‘What do you make of this?’ It’s this letter—typed, can you believe it, pages and pages—from this guy in India who used to distribute us. London’s dropped him and he’s writing to complain, saying he was the first to distribute us in India, he’s served us faithfully since like the Dark Ages, yadda yadda. So I remind Cliff that this guy was always months late paying us, Gina was totally pissed off about it at our last conference. I mean, we all know what Gina’s like, but this guy’s the limit, I’d’ve dropped him too, in her place. Anyway, after a bit Cliff goes, ‘We could choose to be kind.’ And then he just vagues out, clicks his pen, you know the way he does when he’s miles away?”

  Laura looked sympathetic. But Cliff Ferrier’s Hawaiian shirts and Mambo Ts, so unsuited to a CEO, had already recommended him to her.

  On the other hand, she was not Robyn: twenty-eight, narrow rectangular glasses with red frames, going places.

  A tiny woman bore down on them with a large dish of kimchi pancakes.

  “Those sixties guys!” said Robyn Orr.

  A voice message from her dentist’s receptionist reminded Laura that she had an appointment the next day.

  Twenty-three emails replying to the email about gym membership had been copied to her.

  An email from Clive Mason, a long-standing Ramsay researcher, complained that the money he’d been offered to update the Vienna guide wasn’t realistic. He provided a detailed breakdown of costs, exchange rates and so on. The new researchers complained about time, the veterans about money. It had been explained to Laura that after five years a researcher either went feral and disappeared in a series of savage and minatory emails, or became an old hand. Old hands combined the unshakeable certainty that they were being ripped off by Ramsay with a pathological inability to contemplate alternative employment.

  An email from reception announced a garage sale the following Saturday.

  An email requested a meeting about performance reviews.

  Laura endured her weekly meeting with Quentin Husker, the head of Publishing. Quentin’s soul was corporate. But his flesh was weak. It had succumbed to chicken parmigiana in the pub at lunchtime. Now it wished to succumb to Jenny Williams II, the publishing assistant, in her flat in Darlinghurst. She had already briefed him by email, and the rendezvous was scheduled for the end of the working day.

  Laura finished running through her titles. She had confessed that one of them was over budget and two others were running late. The silence went on, for Quentin was still admiring Jenny, in her boots and nipple ring, illuminated by black candles. A tomato fleck lingered on his shirt, which he always wore open at the neck to signify openness. Arabella, his sister, had once been married to Alan Ramsay. In office lore, the wedding coincided with the hiring of Quentin, the birth of the Ramsay heir with his first promotion, the divorce with his second. At the pub on a Friday evening, deep into sauvignon blanc and the train-wreck of another week, Jenny Williams I liked to return to the topic. “I swear to God Arabella had it written into the settlement. Facework every two years and Quentin stays.”

  At last Laura ventured to ask for guidance, speaking of deadlines and escalating costs. Recalled from his erotic duties, “Your call,” said Quentin. The management handbooks that guided him all advised delegation. And cunning. “To be honest, I’m not feeling the best.”

  Laura offered an ambiguous noise.

  “Yeah, thanks.” Quentin glanced ostentatiously at his watch. It was not quite three. “You’re right, I might just have to call it a day. We have so much to learn from the wisdom of our bodies.” His eyes, a damp brown, were guileless and alarming.

  The latest draft of the revised Ramsay style manual (one hundred and eighty-three pages) waited on Laura’s desk. Her comments were required by the end of the week.

  A second email from reception apologized: Duh!! I meant to flag my garage sale email as Spam! Sorry!!!

  There was a meeting to discuss font sizes. Dropping down a point would make it possible to include more information without affecting the length of a book, and therefore its portability and price. Against these advantages, there was the matter of legibility. Someone under thirty looked at the sample page and asked incredulously, “Is it really too small to read?” Laura stared at the blurry print.

  A Post-it stuck to her screen reminded her that she owed petty cash $9.15.

  A letter from a woman in Aberdeen threatened legal action because her B&B was described in the Scotland guide as “pleasingly ramshackle.”

  Laura studied the first of three costings on which she had to sign off by the end of the day.

  Occupational Health & Safety emailed about a fire drill.

  Eleven emails, all copied to Laura, went on arguing the new gym-membership deal back and forth.

  An email came in from Alan Ramsay, founder and sole director of Ramsay Publishing, to his staff worldwide. More than twelve months had passed since Alan had handed over the day-to-day running of the business to Cliff Ferrier, his former general manager. Now, as Alan wandered the globe with his new young wife, a Croatian underwear model, noblesse obliged him to gladden tinier lives. Their brains dulled by conditioned air, their eyes reddened by screens, his employees would learn that the skiing at Aspen had exceeded all expectations or that the truffle restaurant in Haute Provence totally deserved its third Michelin star. Hi all, We’re in Milan and Qantas has managed to lose our luggage again. Jelena had to go shopping all yesterday and was so exhausted, we had to cancel our private viewing of The Last Supper. But New York was great. Bill Clinton is terrifically friendly. He sat next to Jelena and—But Laura had deleted the message.

  Ravi, 2001

  PRIYA HAD POSTED HIM a photo of her daughter, quite unconsciously selecting an image that displayed her plump, pretty arms to greater advantage than the baby. Now she was pregnant again. Whenever Ravi checked his email in an Internet cafe, there would be a message from Priya. Her emails rambled at length, full of carelessly spelled complaints and news about friends Ravi barely knew. So many people had left that Priya had correspondents across the globe. A girl she had gone to school with lived in Perth, her husband’s niece was studying in Canberra, Carmel’s cousin had been in Sydney for years. Priya provided addresses; Ravi should visit these people, she urged.

  Varunika, too, was emailing him. Not regularly, like Priya, but surprising him from time to time. She had been home on a visit but was back in Tanzania. Her first email was only a subject line—Thought you might like these—with two photos of their mother attached. When there was a message from her, Ravi’s thoughts would drift to it all day, although Varunika’s emails were brief and usually unremarkable. But once: I’m filled with hope in this place, she wrote.

  Nimal, too, kept in touch. He no longer worked for RealLanka; the company had folded. Hugely successful at first, it had fallen to a creeping malaise. Clients began to complain that the experiences for which they had paid handsomely and in hard currency lacked authenticity. Those who chose to
stay with urban families were affronted when their hosts addressed them in English or invited them to watch reruns of American soaps. A Norwegian wrote that the household into which he had been thrust was grossly materialistic. He had been assured that these people were Buddhists, yet five curries had waited on the table, including beef. A New Zealander demanded a refund: her hosts’ eleven-year-old daughter had confided that when she grew up, she wanted to be just like Britney Spears.

  RealLanka broadened its strategy. It billeted its clients with villagers who spoke nothing but a pure and incomprehensible vernacular. Tourists labored in paddy fields, ate malodorous rice and fiery sambols with their fingers, slept on beaten earth in mud huts where mosquitoes sang. In towns, they were received by slum dwellers, queued to squat in communal and stinking lavatories, went down with dengue fever. An Italian ethnographer was so enamored of these trials that she returned with a group of graduate students. One sliced his foot open on a rusty blade, contracted septicemia, died. Seizing the day, RealLanka organized a traditional funeral ceremony to which tickets were sold at U.S. $30 a head.