Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Tracy moistened her lips with peppermint tea and explained to Laura that she was part time at the gallery. Because Destiny was only three, although you’d never know it, everyone from the swimming coach to the piano teacher said she was so advanced for her age. That was when Tracy had known she’d made the right decision about her future, meeting Stew the very same week she moved back to Sydney. You had to believe in karma, n’est-ce pas, darl? Had she mentioned that Stew was a Buddhist? But not in that fundamentalist vegetarian way.

  It was Saturday morning, and the two women were sitting under the frangipani on the roof. Laura was wondering, How could I have gone without this all those years? Just as, in London, Sydney had always come to her as a Sunday in summer, now when Laura thought of London everything seemed to have happened on a winter afternoon. She had been young, undoing her soiled apron after the lunch shift in a pub; the windows were steamy because she had just mopped the floor. Bea came into a dark room carrying flames that streamed sideways, a door opened to admit Theo and the scent of rain. The cold came off a marble pillar, and Laura, wearing a knitted scarf, hurried across a vast courtyard after her breath. A bundle of rags extended a mitten that she filled with cold coins. She saw the red sun.

  She offered almond fingers.

  “No sugar or carbs for me, darl. I’d bloat straight up to a size eight.” Tracy Lacey spoke mechanically because she was thinking she would rather die than endure the cultural wasteland of the North Shore. But she was like that, she required constant intellectual stimulation. It came with being vibrant and thin. Fat people’s thoughts moved sluggishly, it was to do with their high GI intake coating their brains with cholesterol. You only had to look at Laura Fraser, sitting there chewing poison, her eyes empty and content. She was actually going to eat another biscuit—amazing! And the hair! A friend less sensitive than Tracy would have handed over Fabrice’s card and urged—he was so worth it. You could tell straight off he was French. The way he had known, just by looking, that Tracy had arrived at that point on her journey when she needed streaks.

  Through half-closed eyes, Laura was watching the tingle of light on the water. And fearing that she might be slipping, slipping into the Great Australian Smugness produced by the blandishments of climate and scenery, not to mention the world-class varietals you could pick up in any bottle shop these days. With the special fervency of the unbeliever, she prayed, Keep me from It’s great for a while but. She would email Bea that afternoon, vowed Laura, she would arrange to meet up in Hanoi or Split. The thought of travel summoned a Sicilian day when she had taken a long, dull bus trip to a gray town where it was raining. Laura had asked directions, persevered, peering out from the hood of her jacket to struggle with the conditional tense and the Sunday stupor of the streets. Opinion as to whether the famous site could be visited on a weekend wavered. A signpost led uphill, into a suburb of guard dogs and villas. Here more roads branched away, and there were no directions. The local bus, on which Laura had counted, didn’t run on Sunday. The rain stopped, September asserted itself, she grew hot. When she came, at last, to the ruins, the caretaker waved away her money. It was National Monument Day, there was no charge. And yet no one else had come for the silence, the damp Greek stones, the paths devastated by grass. When Laura eventually made her way back to the town, the cafes that hadn’t begun serving lunch when she passed them the first time were now closing. It was raining again. She had to run for the bus. Already she knew that it had been a day that redeemed the boredom and indulgence of tourism. What she had in mind was the hour spent alone with a horizon of poplars and a National Monument. But with time, every aspect of the day had come to seem integral and precious: hunger, the frowning baroque square, the uncertainty attending her ascent through the suburb, the bus filling up with students and immigrants returning to the city now that leisure was done.

  The time! Where were the keys to the Range Rover? Destiny’s class in Free Expressive Movement had less than ten minutes to run. And in just half an hour, there was Italian for Under-Fives over in Leichhardt. “Mind you, it’s all dialect where we have the farmhouse. Stew wouldn’t buy anywhere that wasn’t authentic. But Destiny’s teacher says she’s so gifted, she’ll pick up Tuscan in a flash.” All the while peering and wondering as they descended. For there was not so much as a drawing by Drummond on view. A Whiteley on the landing, Molvigs along the stair, a row of Carl Plate collages to follow. And Tracy driven at last to inquire, for all the doors were shut.

  No, there were no Drummonds in the house, said Laura. A Giacometti lithograph hung in the downstairs toilet off the laundry, but without Carlo, she didn’t feel she could take Tracy through. Every Saturday, Carlo Ferri’s cousin Rosalba carried him off to her house in Haberfield. He would return the next morning, bearing damp parcels from the fish markets at Pyrmont and the cousin’s own ravioli.

  Not long after moving in, Laura had encountered this Rosalba in the hallway. She was Europeanly groomed, her hair a bronze stiffness, her feet defying the dread humidity in closed and shining shoes. They were broad across the toe yet stylishly heeled and indefinably expensive—and how they clashed with the pastel summer suit! Laura deduced: Peasant thrift offsetting the price tag with serviceable black. This spurt of snobbery was born of the antagonism, inaudible to an onlooker, deafening to the protagonists, that rustled at once between the women.

  Faced with this large new person, Rosalba said merely, “So you are here.” Her voice was husky, with the downward inflection that Italians so often carried over to English. It made everything she said sound ironic.

  Ravi, 2002

  HE COULDN’T GET OVER the things people threw away in Australia. Bedsteads, TVs, tennis balls, mattresses, couches, T-shirts, computers, toys: in Sri Lanka, there were many who would take these pavements for a showroom. Sneakers swung from the power lines. Coins glinted at Ravi’s feet. He always took the tennis balls home to Fair Play—ripping open a furry green sphere in a private place brought gratifying memories of entrails. Ravi pocketed the money, of course.

  The profligacy of the streets explained why it was a long time before the grassy strip outside Hazel’s house caught Ravi’s eye. At the foot of a majestic municipal fig, the vestiges of children’s games were frequently to be seen—at least, that was how Ravi interpreted these exhibits. There might be a scattering of paper stars, colored with crayon and clumsily scissored. Or gumnuts or plastic figurines or a configuration of white pebbles. Once a small gray rubber elephant lay half buried on its side.

  At first, Ravi merely registered the changing display. Later it began to preoccupy him. What did it mean? Who were the children behind it? The Mishra girls were too old, the Katzoulis children too young. Hazel’s house stood near the middle of the street. Children lived further along, in both directions, but Ravi had never seen them playing near her gate. It was true, however, that a troop led by a girl with bold black eyes went shouting and running by from time to time.

  Ravi began to watch out for this brigade. He saw it charge past, chanting, te-le-phone, te-le-phone. The black-eyed girl was called Layla. She was a tyrant. Ravi heard her command, “Give me your Fighting Energy card or I’ll bash you.” She threw stones at a cat in a tree. He was returning from work one afternoon when he saw her astride a wall. Her face, screwed tight, showed concentration and mirth. As Ravi drew level, she farted. Admiring and fearful, her subjects snickered on the porch.

  A mirror with a plastic loop at the top, the kind designed to dangle in a birdcage, had been driven into the tree with a pin. It flashed in the sun, three feet above the ground, at child height. On the grass below it lay the knave of hearts. This assemblage disturbed Ravi in a way he couldn’t name. On warm evenings, people would sit out on their verandas and conversations netted the street. Ravi, standing with a cigarette at the gate, was offered coffee. Lit by calm candles, the children gathered on a carport deck and sang, “Red, Red Wine” in their birdlike voices. The mystery continued to nag.

  He answered his la
ndline one evening and said, “Priya!” But it was Varunika, who never rang him, laughing in Africa at his mistake. The line was clear, but as sometimes happens, they kept cutting across each other’s remarks. Each would apologize, wait politely for the other to speak, and they would end up saying something at the same time.

  Into one of their silences, Varunika came out with, “Aiyya, do you think I would like Sydney?”

  So that was why she had called.

  When Ravi asked if she didn’t like where she was, she replied that it was fine. But recently she had been thinking about other possibilities. Dreaming, was what she said. “In the end, I’ll probably stay here. I’m used to it.” Her tone was casual, but Ravi sensed unhappiness. When Priya called him at New Year, she had suddenly asked, “Do you think nunggi is one of those?” Ravi knew what was meant but feigned mystification. He was punishing Priya for voicing an idea that had crossed his own mind. Priya had evoked a recent photograph of their sister. “Did you see how short she’s cut her hair?”

  When Varunika rang, Ravi was sitting in front of his laptop. Listening to her voice, he found the email with the photo and opened the attachment that brought up her face. She was smooth-skinned and delicate-featured, her mother’s pretty child—but it was true that the haircut was brutal. Ravi told her what he had heard at Banksia Gardens, that nurses were in short supply in Australia.

  A few days later, his mobile rang. It was Angie Segal. She had spoken to Ravi’s case officer—“a bit of a dick but not actually a bastard”—because his application for asylum had now been before Immigration for fourteen months. “He was pretty evasive but in the end he hinted that some applications might have gone astray last year. Gone astray!” Angie said, “No, not lost, I promise. Just moldering at the bottom of an in-tray while someone’s brain went AWOL.” She also said, “I tried to make him promise he’d fast-track your case. But there’s a limit to how far these guys can be pushed.”

  Her voice had faded. Ravi heard a tearing sound and pictured Angie ripping open a packet of sweets. He asked, “Has the other Ravi Mendis heard?” This met with silence, so Ravi specified, “The man in Port Hedland?”

  Angie said, rather indistinctly, “Their appeal was rejected.”

  “But his wife’s a Tamil,” implored Ravi.

  Before ringing off, Varunika had said rather coolly that she would look into Australia; Ravi was left feeling that he had failed her in some way. Why hadn’t he said that his life would be transformed if she joined him? He was unable to stop thinking about her in Sydney. He was unable to stop thinking about his namesake, seeing him circling the world, now and then arriving somewhere where he and his Tamil wife were always unwanted. Ravi wished he had asked Angie how old the man was, what kind of work he did, how long he had been married.

  Into his dreams that night came a long-ago scene of a girl stumbling along in front of soldiers. When he woke, what was in his mind was not an image but, as sometimes happens, a sentence: There’s no limit to how far people like that can be pushed.

  Laura, 2002

  NINETEEN JOBS WENT AT Ramsay’s Sydney office. The announcement followed a fortnight of speculation and closed doors. The HR people were always going into or coming out of meetings with their faces arranged to convey importance and concern.

  Laura thought, This is it. She rotated her shoulders: Unemployed at last!

  At first, there had been the satisfaction of acquiring a trade. She learned how a book was put together and how to decipher a sales report. There was budgeting and blurb-writing, and what to look for when checking artwork. She was shown how to calculate a researcher’s fee and how to plan a first edition. There was the satisfaction of staying late to lend a hand with proofs so that a colleague might meet a deadline, although it was not required or even expected of her. There were the delights of a specialist vocabulary. Ozalids—fabulous word!

  There was the wonderful moment when an advance copy arrived: an object in the world, satisfyingly material, labor rendered tangible and solid. People would smile as it passed from hand to hand.

  These pleasures, of solidarity in work, of making and learning, had carried Laura through meetings, through the seminar on Mission and Vision, through the annual cricket match, through mandatory enthusiasm, through more meetings, through the slump of Wednesday afternoons, through her first year.

  Once mastered, however, skills returned as routine. There was a special monotony to the production of guides. Out of date before they were published, always in need of renewal, they were the perfect commodity. When Laura had been at Ramsay for a month, the bestselling guide to France had gone to the printer. Now, consulting her schedule of titles, she saw that it was time to start commissioning the next edition. The horror this aroused in her seemed disproportionate. In an effort to shake it off, she mentioned it to an editor called Tony Highmore, with whom she happened to fall in on her way to Central Station that evening. “Oh yes,” he said, and adjusted his pack so that it sat squarely against his spine. “They come around. When people ask how long I’ve been here, I don’t say ten years. I say three editions of India.”

  All the way home, Laura had wondered, How do people put up with it?

  So she anticipated the email summoning her to the meeting that would inform her of her fate with something approaching relief. But it wasn’t unalloyed. She was getting on for thirty-eight. Fear wriggled in and out of her ribs. Meera Bryden had said, “We’ll always want you back.” But Meera had left the Wayfarer, following the birth of a baby with cerebral palsy, and no longer answered emails. Laura didn’t know the man who had replaced her. There were other travel magazines, of course. But: the train to the airport, the safety announcements, the keycard that controlled the lights, the invoices that were ignored. And the hunched craftsman in the narrow alley. And there are myriad Mumbais, clashing and intertwined.

  Lack of a tolerable alternative: that was why people put up with it. As to how: by paying attention, Laura saw that ambition was useful. Ditto intrigue, adultery, gossip, myth.

  Overcome by the need to say something true, she went into Robyn Orr’s office. There was a whiteboard on Robyn’s wall. Every manager had one, to encourage creativity. Robyn’s said: Brad Pitt called AGAIN. Laura recognized Ferdy’s hand.

  An award-winning poster urged Do Your Country a Favor—Leave! Laura sat down under it and said, ‘Ramsay’s in the business of manufacturing guidebooks, right? Things that can be sold. The success or failure of what goes on here can be expressed as sums.”

  “Sure,” said Robyn. “Listen, I’m leading this think-tank with the marketers tomorrow. I was going to kick off by asking, What is the core of Ramsay? But then I thought ‘essence’ would be better than ‘core.’ It’s cooler, isn’t it?”

  Distracted by what she had come to say, Laura replied, “It sounds like aftershave. ‘Essence of Ramsay. For Today’s Traveler.’”

  “Ha ha,” said Robyn. Her clever face had shut down.

  Laura saw the wisdom of stopping right there. But she had been thinking about all this for a while. It was clear in her mind and bore her along on its flood. “Have you noticed, the only word you never hear around this place is ‘tourism’? Because tourism’s about dollars, no argument. But ‘travel’ lets you pretend. Travel has an aura. It allows us to believe that publishing guidebooks is, you know, a good thing. We can tell ourselves that what we do contributes to global harmony, international understanding, you know the stuff I mean. It’s understood without being spelled out.”

  She paused for breath. Robyn blinked.

  Ramsay was a successful community, went on Laura, and what successful communities had in common was a self-flattering mythology that encouraged loyalty and dedication. “That’s why a downturn in sales gets everyone jittery. Not just because jobs will go. It’s more insidious. Suddenly the profit aspect’s upfront. For a little while, there’s no pretence.”

  Robyn was thinking, Editors!

  Laura said rather desperately, “What I
’m getting at is, there’s this warm fuzzy feeling people have about travel that inspires them to put in extra hours, meet deadlines, take pride in their work, all that self-motivated stuff. It makes them easier to manage. Ramsay reaps the benefit.”

  “People like working here because it’s a good place to work,” said Robyn. “We have flexi-time and paid parental leave, we pay above-award wages, that kind of thing.”

  “Okay. Sure. But isn’t the dedication also down to people feeling they’re working for a larger cause? That travel is, you know, a good thing?”

  “Well, it is, isn’t it?”

  Laura thought, It’s another thing that most people in the world can’t afford. And yet none of this was exactly what she had wanted to say. A picture appeared in her mind: outside a bar in Manhattan, snow was falling like tattered lace. Then she was walking down a street in Singapore where washing hung in grubby tenement windows; a white dress swayed on a hanger, sheer across the midriff, lacy above and below. Try as she might, Laura was unable to connect those scenes with her daily work—perhaps that was all she meant. But something true hadn’t turned out, after all, to be the same thing as the truth.