Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Passing the newsagent’s one day, he puzzled over a headline: Tampa.

  At work, people were talking about it: Afghani refugees were involved, and a Norwegian ship. The government was standing firm. In the courtyard, Mandy said, “I’m not racist but I’m against queue-jumpers. Fair go for everyone.” She settled her uniform, plucking at it under her bust, and explained, in a kindly tone, “That’s the Australian way?”

  When she had gone back inside, Ravi’s gaze met that of the Ethiopian nurse’s aide. Abebe Issayas preferred to work nights; the two men’s shifts didn’t often coincide. But there was a feeling of sympathy between them. Bespectacled and neat, Abebe looked like the accountant he had been in another life. One day, his face would fit him again; he was studying part time to get his Australian qualifications. He said, “When politicians say, ‘We mustn’t be sentimental,’ you know something bad is coming.” His speech was deliberate and faintly inflected with American. A long time ago, he had spent a high school year in St. Paul.

  The new resident, Beryl Doone, trundled her walker into the courtyard. At the sight of the two men, she screamed, “Get away from me, you black shits.” Unlike, say, little Glory Warren, who was prone to fits of rage in which she hit people, Beryl didn’t have dementia—she was merely insane. She filled the doorway, shouting, “Don’t you put your black hands on me! I’m warning you!”

  “Bit of shush, love,” flung Mandy, through fly screen. She had her pets and didn’t care for the independent voice no matter what it cried.

  Beryl stood and trembled. Her complexion, like her blouse, was mauve. In a ruminative, mauve undertone, she repeated, “Black bastards. Black bastards.” This was aimed equally at the trees, which made everything untidy with their leaves. She rolled her wheels back and forth over those she could reach.

  Sandra, who managed activities, appeared at Beryl’s elbow. “Sing-alongs, darling. Everyone’s waiting for you.” And threw over her shoulder, as Beryl wheeled tentatively about, “Sorry, guys.”

  A while later, Beryl could be heard warbling of a track winding back to an old-fashioned shack. Her voice was low, velvety, true. The dining room adjoined the piano room. Setting the melamine-topped tables for afternoon tea, Ravi had damp eyes. The old people’s singing never failed to affect him. Abebe came in, holding Glory’s hand. Glory wished not to sing along, but to sit and fold a napkin that resembled the only doll she had ever owned. Next door they were on to “Waltzing Matilda.” “Under the shade of a coolibah tree,” harmonized Ravi. Mandy, on her way through behind her trolley, pounced. “How come you know that?”

  “I learned it at school.”

  “But it’s an Australian song,” objected Mandy. Then, as her trolley encountered an old woman stalled in the doorway, “Keep moving, love! Whatever you do, don’t stop!”

  When Ravi was waiting for the bus that evening, his phone rang. Angie Segal said, “I guess you’ve heard Labor’s backing Howard on the Tampa. Bastards.” Then she said, “Hang on.”

  He could hear her mobile’s ringtone in the background. He pictured her at her desk, he saw the bones close under the skin in her sharp little face.

  When Angie returned, she said, “I’ve been fielding calls from clients all day. Everyone’s afraid this is going to mean bad news for them.” She told Ravi that he was not to panic. “The pollies are just behaving like the bastards they are. It’s electioneering. It doesn’t have a bearing on your case.” She repeated the injunction about not panicking. Her need to hear it was plain.

  Ravi’s usual shift was an early one, finishing at three, but that day he had started at nine. The bus taking him home snuffled slowly through the traffic, pausing here and there to ingest more victims, and songs looped through Ravi’s mind. When he was a child, the pattern of things had brought neighbors to the Mendises’ house on Saturday evenings. Ravi’s father played his guitar and everyone sang. The night and the songs grew older together. At Banksia Gardens, too, they liked “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Galway Bay,” songs of yearning and flight. How easily music traveled the world! Malini had sung Beatles songs to Hiran and “The Carnival Is Over.” Hearing her warn that the joys of love were fleeing, far beyond and far and wide, Ravi had said that she had the words wrong. But try as he might, he couldn’t supply a plausible alternative. That annoyed Malini, which was understandable. Snug in a rush hour that lasted three, Ravi might have begun counting but hummed noiselessly instead.

  Laura, 2001

  SHE WAS WALKING TO work through weirdly hushed streets. No one was revving an engine or screeching away from a light. The newspaper uppermost in the stack in the takeaway place where Laura went in to buy a latte displayed a photograph that already looked iconic. She changed her order to a double espresso. The previous night, she had been getting ready for bed when the phone rang. Danni said, “Switch on the telly.” Laura spent most of the night in front of the set.

  The plane came in, big-bodied and low, at the end of the street, the noise of its engines magnified by the unnatural calm. It was an everyday sight that had been altered forever. People looked up, then away, and tightened their hold on something: a steering wheel, a cup.

  The boy was on the other side of the road and some way ahead of Laura. It was rare to see a kid that age walking alone to school these days. They were packed into people-movers by Yummy Mummies, or flocked, wheeled goslings, about a Boho Daddy’s bike. But the reason Laura noticed the child was something alert in the way he held himself. She thought, He’s not looking forward to school. There returned mornings when she had longed to stay at home, and had discovered that her stomach ached or her throat, and tears had gushed. And Hester, kindly and implacable above an apple and a cut lunch, would inquire most tenderly before concluding, “But if there is no reason…”

  How could six-year-old Laura have found the words for her apprehension of a vast and pitiless trap? How awful school was, when you thought about it, each programmed year opening its jaws upon the other, and fastening about the growing girl. How reasonable of children to weep and wish to flee.

  At the intersection, Laura glanced to her right, which was the way the boy with the red backpack had gone. But he had vanished, presumably into a side street and school.

  Laura, 2001

  DANNI WAS HAVING A few people around for Chrissie drinks. Over the sparkling and dips, wounds inflicted by the federal election were still being probed: “I mean, can you believe it? Who are all these people who gave them a third term?” Laura escaped to the balcony. A girl with dappled hair and the native uniform of sprayed-on denim, halter top and four-inch heels said, “Hi, I’m Alice.”

  They were obliged to stand close to each other—there wasn’t a whole heap of room on the balcony. The green globes of a staked tomato shone in the fading light. A second tub held veined silverbeet. Wild festoons of green that might have been a zucchini had spread from a trough to begin their overwhelming of the galvanized balustrade.

  “I’d love to grow veggies,” confided Alice Merton. “Only Woolies is easier.” Then her perfect golden nose crinkled. “What’s that pong?”

  It was the top note still emanating from the chicken poo recently applied by Laura. Enlightened, Alice exclaimed, “Did you do all this? I thought it was Danni!”

  Alice’s lover squeezed onto the balcony to see what was going on. He was Danni’s editor, a big, pretty man. Afraid of losing Alice Merton, he seized her at once by the wrist. But the girl’s attention was on Laura. “Are you like totally committed to living here?”

  The house at McMahons Point had blistered green shutters. Breaking from window boxes, plumbago intensified its blue against streaky ocher walls. Half the small garden was taken up with a lemon tree and a density of summer vegetables. On the other side of the path, a grape arbor was surmounted by an orange plush dog.

  The man who opened the door had a face known to Laura, not as it appeared now, but when its perfection wasn’t only of the bone. Time hollowed: she was standing uniformed and sl
ouched before painted Carlo Ferri, and Miss Garnault was explaining that the gallery had acquired the portrait ten years earlier, when it had won the Archibald—controversially, of course—for Hugo Drummond.

  These days, dead Drummond’s lover had a third leg that ended in a chrome claw.

  Carlo refused to have the operation that would give him a new hip, according to Alice Merton. Nor would he leave the house where Drummond had lived and died. She would move in herself, said Alice, for her parents were just down the road and she had known Carlo all her life, but—

  But his brown hand slid into Laura’s.

  At the foot of the stairs, he raised his stick. “Up and up.”

  The second flight of stairs was little more than a ladder. She opened the door at the top and went out onto the roof.

  The bridge, the boats, the boisterous light, the whole glam, prancing, knockout show.

  Laura spared it barely a nod. She was taking in oleander, pomegranate, gardenias, everything terra-cotta-potted. Olive, rosemary, mock orange: the Mezzogiorno! Frangipani fallen pinkly upside down. She noted a tap and a retractable hose, a whippy bougainvillea. The logistical riddle was plain, the need for nutrients, mulch, water at one end of a stair, at the other a deficiency of cartilage about a joint. At the thought of the old man making his way up to the roof, Laura could almost hear the grind of bone on bone.

  A room clad in trellis and leaves wasn’t locked. A cupboard beneath the sink revealed practicalities, like secateurs. And a window the view, of course. Here, with the harbor rolling over at his feet, Hugo Drummond had produced the tortured monochromes of his late period, burning layers of color onto canvas with a blowtorch.

  She tramped back down. The old house shuddered along its spine.

  In the kitchen, Carlo Ferri waited behind an interrogative espresso.

  “I think the murrayas could do with a tip-prune,” said Laura. “And a dose of Seasol all round couldn’t hurt.”

  His eye was appreciative. “Nice big girl. Run up and down stairs with dung.”

  Each contemplated this vision.

  Friends said, “It’s the wrong side of the harbor! You can’t possibly!”

  But Laura could.

  Laura, 2002

  ROBYN WAS SAYING, “…CALLED Mao? It used to be a shoe-repair place?”

  Laura shook her head.

  “Oh yeah, I know where that is,” Crystal Bowles said. “They’ve got that funky Cultural Revolution decor. What’s the food like?”

  From her desk in the e-zone, Crystal had spied Robyn Orr heading for the kitchen and had followed. Robyn was cool. And a manager. There had been a time when Crystal’s sister, Jade, had worked with Robyn. So when Crystal applied for the editorial traineeship in web publishing, Robyn had been really helpful.

  “Who’d even think about calling a restaurant Hitler? Or Stalin? So how come Mao gets to be funky?” Robyn applied herself viciously to a coffee plunger. “Because the millions he murdered were only slopes, that’s why.”

  Crystal explained patiently, “The name’s just a joke. Like the Mickey Mao T-shirt I got when Jade and I went to Hong Kong.” Because it never hurt to remind Robyn of the Jade connection. “It’s an ironic thing.”

  “That’s such crap, Crystal. How come the Holocaust isn’t”—Robyn’s fingers inserted scare quotes—“ironic? Because, a, bad stuff that happens to white people isn’t funny, and b, after blackfellas, Chinese are who Australians hate most.”

  “But there’s Chinese people working at Mao. I’ve seen them through the window.” Crystal thought, Aborigines! They’re soooo touchy about ethnicity. She felt quite compassionate as she pointed out, “Nowadays Mao is like a brand name?” Whereupon, having deposited her soggy Celestial Harmony teabag in the sink, directly beneath the sign that said DON’T BE EVIL. PUT YOUR GUNK IN THE BIN!!!, she sashayed away.

  Slumped against the counter, Robyn said, “I had such a crap weekend, you wouldn’t believe. Ferdy and I came yea close to calling it a day.” Her teaspoon was beating against the rim of her mug. “The whole band thing’s never going to happen. Not in any financial way. Meanwhile, Ferdy’s happy spending his life stacking shelves at Woolies. I mean, I love the guy, but he just, I don’t know, it’s like he’s got no drive.”

  Ferdinand Hello played bass in a band that refused to give interviews and performed wearing cartoon masks. His name was self-awarded. In Cambodia, a long time ago, he had had a different one, but all the people who remembered it were dead.

  “I’m good at marketing, I could help him with his résumé,” said Robyn. Then, “Shit! I was supposed to be in a meeting five minutes ago.”

  She went away thinking, I shouldn’t have lost it with Crystal. Even if she’s full of crap. Like the global management meeting to which Robyn was making her way. She’d seen the agenda. Post-9/11, Americans weren’t traveling. The profits from the U.S. office were down. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure out where that scenario was going.

  But moral indignation was so not managerial, Robyn knew.

  Laura took the ferry to the city, then a bus to the office. The train was fast, cheap, efficient. But who wouldn’t choose the ferry?

  In the evening, she would realize that she couldn’t wait to get home. So the train would rush her across the bridge. She just about ran upstairs.

  When she left Erskineville, Laura had donated the little she owned in the way of furniture and so on to Alice Merton’s student household. Robyn had driven her and a couple of suitcases over the bridge in her Charade. In McMahons Point, Laura’s room was the back one on the first floor; she stored her clothes there. It had a door to the bathroom, and a rubber tree in a glazed Chinese pot. And an embroidered white cover on a nun-like bed.

  But Laura preferred Drummond’s daybed in his studio on the roof. She kept an electric jug beside the sink, along with a bowl, two mugs, a corkscrew, equipment for coffee. Forks etc. She was welcome to cook downstairs: “You not be shy.” Carlo Ferri had said. But Laura preferred to tuck in to takeaway laksa or sushi or beer-battered fish on high: at a small slatted table beneath the frangipani when the weather was fine, by the window in the studio when it wasn’t.

  Oh, Sydney, with your giant moon!

  And prawns.

  There was a quilt for cool nights. And Theo’s red rug on the paint-splattered floor.

  Ferries passed, lit up like cakes. The bridge went on holding the two halves of the city apart. On Saturday evening, everywhere was oysters and mozzies on sandstone terraces. Screams of gaudy terror noosed the minarets at Luna Park.

  Laura rose in opal dawns to hose, and maneuver shade cloth. On weekends, she deadheaded and pruned, topped up potting mix, measured fish emulsion into a watering can, hefted bales of pea straw, swept.

  She photographed the plants from different angles, uploaded the images, carried her laptop along with seven gardenias and their shining leaves to Carlo.

  On the ground floor, walls had been knocked through. Here Carlo cooked, watched TV, smoked. He greeted Laura with tiny cups on the brown and red oilcloth. An archway separated the kitchen from the living area. Under the bay window, a sofa served as his bed. There were actually records, and a player with an arm you moved out. A song as thick and syrupy as the coffee mingled with the smell of garlic, liniment and Camels. A lamp raised by a naked black female always shone, for at all times the shutters were closed.

  The courtyard at the back was for the compost bin and a fruiting fig. There was a bench that got the morning sun and a bed of herbs. Here, as among the vegetables that flourished at the front, Carlo refused help and was to be observed kneeling on a mat before a perennial basil as if to pray.

  Once a day, on his own two legs, he made the grim journey up and down the first flight of stairs. “The old guy, he not finish yet.” No matter what the weather was doing, morning found him creeping up and down green gullies and streets that followed the unreasonable contours of the bay.

  “You think I marvelous for my age?” W
hen Laura assented, he pounced. “I marvelous at all age. Always!”

  Tracy Lacey was so happy for her friend. Although personally she’d always thought a harbor view was just that little bit obvious. For her bohemian soul, there was nowhere but a heritage terrace in Paddo. It was the simple things that mattered, as Tracy had always said. And that was where she and Gary had been fundamentally unsuited, that way he always judged and grasped. Still, water under the bed now, darl, Tracy was totally Zen that he’d repartnered with Bruce, no hard feelings—they just fell away when you had a good divorce lawyer. But the Melbourne scene was so up itself—people there carried on like it was Manhattan or something. Dream on! The vibe here was totally different, so laid-back, and Sydneysiders were really open to innovation. “You know I’m in charge of new media, darl?”

  Laura congratulated. Then spoiled the effect by asking dreamily how long new media stayed new. “When does it become old media?”

  Honestly, anyone less loyal would have just ignored Laura Fraser’s email. But there was something of a buzz around Hugo Drummond. At the gallery, they had been all ears when Tracy happened to mention where her friend was living. Torquil from Modern Australian had invited Tracy to lunch and told her that Carlo Ferri ignored all his letters. Drummond’s dealer got the same cold shoulder; there had been one falling-out too many in the eighties, when no one was buying Drummond and he blamed everyone else for it. Torquil had known him: “a terrifying old bastard.” Then he had died, and Carlo seemed to be under the impression that the art world was to blame for that, too. Torquil would love a retrospective to coincide with Drummond’s centenary, but who could say what Carlo Ferri had done with the late work? He was Neapolitan and excitable. Torquil, staring into his third pinot grigio, saw canvases slashed in unfathomable Latin frenzies, tossed out with empty flagons, carved up to fire pizza ovens. Long ago, when Drummond was still accepting commissions, a society hostess whose portrait he was painting had invited the pair to dinner in Double Bay. Carlo took offence at something her husband said about Italian opera. He refused the oysters and said he had to have spaghetti. When it came, he ate it with his fingers. The guests included a bishop, and a Dane who was very possibly titled. “Drummond told that story for years.”