Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  She stood up. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you. It’s all this uncertainty about who’ll be here this time next week. A weird vibe.”

  “Oh, right.” Robyn Orr was a kind person. She said at once, “Look, I don’t know anything for sure. But my guess is you’re safe. It’s the people who’ve been here ages who’ll go. Their wages have crept up over the years, for a start.”

  Laura went away in shame: for Robyn’s failure to understand, for her own readiness to retreat from treacherous ground. If the dynamic that governed her relations with her colleagues had a name, it would be something like comprehensive fraudulence, she thought.

  It was, indeed, long-standing staff who went. Clifford Ferrier, addressing the assembly, expressed regret—his thick blue eyes bulged with it. But it was a question of ensuring the survival of Ramsay post-9/11. That was decisive. What was human unhappiness when weighed in the life-or-death balance of a brand?

  Cliff went on to announce an indefinite freeze on new hires. Replacement hires would be evaluated case by case and limited to short-term contracts. Finally, “I’m pleased to tell you that the global management team’s agreed to take a ten per cent cut in wages.”

  The silence that greeted this was dense with astonishment. Then someone—it spiraled from the vicinity of Paul Hinkel—began to applaud.

  Every employee who completed a year at Ramsay was presented with a trophy at a general meeting. Humiliation, necessary to any tribal induction, was represented by the awfulness of the prize, sourced from Vinnies or a two-dollar shop. The bestowal of a kitsch little object embarrassed and confirmed, signaling belonging and the renunciation of any higher ideal. A chunky, gilt-rimmed ceramic ashtray had been awarded to Laura. She kept it in a drawer, into which she glanced now and then to puzzle over what she had freely accepted. The hollow for ash, a fleshy pink, was ambiguously molded. It suggested a heart or perhaps a vulva—in any case, a receptacle deemed suitable for the grinding out of fire. But the award ceremony had not been without solace. It had presented Paul Hinkel with a little nodding dog. Seeing him now, glitter-eyed and compliant, Laura thought, Bow-wow.

  Robyn said, over coffee, “Look, I’m not complaining. The wage cut was the right thing to do. But it’s different for Cliff. He doesn’t have a mortgage.”

  Alan Ramsay emailed staff@ramsay.com to assure everyone that the decision had been a difficult one, taken reluctantly. He apologized for the lateness of his support: the eco-resort in Brazil had no Internet access. Jelena and he had intended to go on to Kenya, but it didn’t feel like the right time for elephant polo. Instead, the Ramsays were retreating to their apartment in Paris to reflect and take stock.

  At a meeting of the commissioning editors who had been spared, Quentin Husker said, “Team, I suggest we keep our thinking flexible on this one. Try looking at it this way: isn’t redundancy another name for opportunity? A fresh start. The push-off into the unknown. I’m really pretty excited for those guys.”

  The silence that greeted this was devoid of astonishment.

  Jenny Williams II, taking minutes, thought, Ooh! When Husky talks like that!

  Laura came across Paul Hinkel and another cartographer in the kitchen. With his arms folded across his chest, Paul was speaking of dead wood. It was a metaphor that Quentin, too, had employed—this despite habitually referring to his own corporate longevity as runs on the board.

  The afternoon brought an email from HR. There had been a micro-restructure in Mapping following two redundancies and a resignation. The department required a new senior to implement leadership initiatives at this time of change, and HR was pleased to announce that Paul Hinkel would be stepping up to the role.

  These were grand days for HR, the chief purpose of bureaucratic process being to stave off the tedium of bureaucracy. The department was living through its Renaissance, an era unsurpassed in meetings and confidentiality, grave with strategies and recommendations, incandescent with grief counseling and exit interviews.

  The dead wood had gone; the green bay tree of Ramsay could flourish. A corporate guru, hired to turn the mood of the office around, spoke for an hour and $800 on “Mind Maps: Their Role in Creativity.”

  Tony Highmore was one who fell to the pruning saw. In time, it was learned that he had moved to Melbourne and was working for Lonely Planet. Thereafter he was spoken of sorrowfully and always in the past tense.

  Ravi, 2002

  THE SUNDAY EXCURSIONS WITH Damo had fallen away; among other reasons, because Damo was preoccupied with a new man. The old one continued to crash about, called five or six times a day, kept vigil outside Damo’s house, sobbed. He had always known he would lose Damo, had imagined the unfolding of events from every angle, and the foreknowledge had been useless, had failed to ward off or even mitigate the calamity. Damo and Tyler were sorry for him, in a theoretical fashion, but the length of time they had known each other could still be numbered in days. They were unable to muster real interest in anyone else.

  Seated on a stackable orange chair under a Hand Hygiene poster at Banksia Gardens, Abebe Issayas was reading a newspaper. An ad placed by a new budget airline took up the back page. It was offering mystery tours: a forty-dollar, one-day return flight to a mystery destination in Australia. Beryl Doone stood beside Abebe, on guard. Her pills had changed, and her eyes. Now she knew what it was to hate in a cold, marveling way.

  That Saturday, Ravi caught the first train into the city. He was at the airline office before six, but a queue had already formed. Nevertheless, he got a place on a flight to Canberra. He was back in the queue the following week, and every Saturday thereafter for the three months that the promotion lasted. Sometimes he missed out, but the mystery flights carried him far and near. In Melbourne there was a toothed wind and swaying trams, and why was everyone dressed for a funeral? Ravi was still in the center of the city when night came, at five. In their dark clothes, all the people disappeared into it and left their faces floating down lanes.

  Everywhere he went, Ravi met friendliness. Angie Segal, groping for consolation, had said, “I know the uncertainty’s very hard on you. But at least you’re not in a detention center. What’s going on in those places, it’s not much better than torture.” In Adelaide, the southern light, ricocheting off sandstone, knew no mercy; Ravi shielded his eyes with his hand. A day’s drive away, detained behind razor wire, the children of asylum seekers were sewing up their lips. But what Ravi took home was the knowledge of how kind Australians could be.

  There was a long, dreamy flight to and from Perth, when invisible zones stretched and collapsed the day. On the way over, Ravi had a window seat. There was a peculiar moment when, looking out, he realized that he knew the landscape below. Time pocketed, he sat at a wooden desk into which he had carved his initials, Brother Ignatius was describing a treeless expanse. Not sure that he could manage his face, Ravi kept it turned to the glass.

  He worked as much as he could, willingly replacing workers who called in ill. For leisure, there was the Internet. Ravi visited chat rooms, read the diaries of strangers, grazed on images. He Googled the names of old friends, and found a caterer in Orange County, an accountant in Penang. Roshi de Mel’s older sister, the one with the Chinese husband, had written a book about spices. But Roshi herself, like Ravi’s friend Mohan Dabrera, had left no digital trace.

  Ravi scanned sites devoted to the habits of beagles and those that described the customs of whippets. There was an insistence on the sweetness of both breeds—Ravi concluded that Fair Play was unique. He came across a webpage that a young boy in Alice Springs had dedicated to his dog, a beagle called Boogie, run over the previous year. There were photos of Boogie, her birth and death dates, a list of her favorite toys and the tricks she could do. The boy’s family and friends had left tributes. The nature of these messages suggested that they dated from the days and weeks when the loss was still fresh. Its mournful purpose served, the site had been neglected; Ravi noticed that no message had been posted to mark the fi
rst anniversary of the dog’s death. He guessed the arrival of a new pet, a fresh cycle in the boy’s life. He bookmarked the site.

  Over time, he came to build a collection of abandoned websites. If an official site fell into obsolescence, it was remodeled or removed from the commissioning organization’s server. But sites set up for private purposes merely languished when the need they fulfilled had passed. These derelict places drew Ravi. Some, like the Trojan Room coffeepot site, had once been famous. But most of the sites he bookmarked were as obscure as Boogie’s memorial. There were caches and site archives, there were abandoned blogs and personal webpages, there were sites dedicated to family trees that hadn’t been updated in years. Behind the beguiling, hypermodern façade of the web was a landscape littered with ruins. It resisted tourism. Ravi would stumble on its untouted landmarks, their melancholy charms attended by the shock of the accidental and the unforeseen. It was like wandering through a brand-new, labyrinthine mansion in which a door opened to reveal a grave.

  In the wake of Varunika’s phone call, Ravi gave way to a fantasy in which she came to live in Sydney. Dreamily, he plotted expeditions with her: to the harbor, to shopping centers, to visit Hazel. Varunika drew up a chair, and they ate a meal she had cooked. A monologue ran incessantly under Ravi’s thoughts, advising his sister on the weather, on bargains and bus routes, on the idiosyncrasies of their co-workers at Banksia Gardens. An ingrained association showed him women as sources of food and receptacles of instruction. He would have denied the pattern, but it had survived his marriage, its relationship with reality at once ambiguous and firm.

  On real estate sites, he visited first flats and then—why not?—houses Varunika and he might rent together. Details of properties that had been let or sold sometimes hung about on a real estate site for months. Ravi bookmarked these ghost listings. His childish daydream of entering the houses of strangers was realized. He walked unseen through home gyms, eat-in kitchens, lower-level laundries. Sometimes a child ran ahead of him, always out of sight. A voice floated back, announcing that the dog had drowned in the pool. It asked, Why are all the children in the photos so fat? Ravi followed the voice to an entertaining backyard and a full-brick family. There was also a duel residence—perfect for the in-laws. The TVs in the photos were bigger than desks. But that was a false comparison: there were no desks. All the concrete paths led to Hills hoists. All the vanities gleamed. Frightening photos, taken at purplish dusk, showed new, empty houses whose windows shone yellow—for whom?

  A kitchen in Enfield belonged to Retiree moving out: a lace tablecloth drooped over one patterned with fruit. Set around it were three wooden chairs. The fourth stood with its back to a wall, its place at the table taken by a chair with a tubular frame and padded arms. An African violet bloomed in purple plastic by the window; beyond it, shrubs pressed green faces to the glass. A strip light struck glints from teacups suspended like carcasses from hooks.

  Carmel Mendis’s letters to her son were vigorous and combative, detailing the foolishness of Priya’s notions on how to rear children. But occasionally they mentioned breathlessness or a blocked sink. Squabbles had sparked between mother and daughter as long as Ravi could remember, but now he feared a conflagration. What would become of his mother if the one child left should grow estranged? Who would summon the doctor, who would deal with the drain? Residents newly arrived at Banksia Gardens sulked or cried until, exhausted, they grew resigned. Their pets had been put down—a brother would mention it in passing on the phone. The old women were offered safety, a choice of crumble or tart, sometimes kindness, and there wasn’t one who wouldn’t have left if she could.

  The tubular chair in Enfield, its seat raised with extra cushions, lingered in Ravi’s dreams. Banksia Gardens had instructed him: the hollow steel frame made the chair light to maneuver, but what mattered was that it had arms. All the upright chairs at Banksia Gardens were provided with them. Arms were what you needed when your knees let you down. They got you to your feet when the garden had run wild and what you were left with could be contained in a pot.

  In February, Ravi had called his mother for her birthday. The receiver passed in turn to Priya, to her husband, Lal. Everyone asked the same questions about the weather and the time, and rejoiced at the cease-fire with the Tigers. It wasn’t that Ravi wanted the war to go on. But he couldn’t shake off a sense of things slipping from his grasp. The blue house was not an earthly edifice but the space where his life had taken shape; abandoned by her children, his mother drifted through rooms as formless and echoing as the past. She stumbled, smashed her hip, died alone in a version of Banksia Gardens. The last face she saw was Mandy’s. Forsaking email, Ravi wrote a letter, a sign of gravity. It urged conciliation and prudence, and mystified Carmel. She accused Priya of complaining to Ravi behind her back. For the first time in months, the two women had a row.

  Laura, 2002

  SHE WONDERED WHERE CARLO washed. Certainly not in the bathroom on the first floor, where the only damp towels or stray hairs belonged to her.

  The flush sounded in the downstairs lavatory. Perhaps he made do with the basin there. Or the kitchen sink. Or the laundry trough.

  He was unfailingly spruce: cheeks smooth, nails trim. Clothes mattered. For going out, there was a pale straw hat, and a blue shirt playing a cadenza against his tan. His shoes gleamed and fastened with laces. Even at home, and with the air-conditioner purring, there were thin socks and leather mules.

  The upshot was just a little bit woggy. But what was moving was the endeavor. Once, it hadn’t been necessary. Photographs provided evidence on the mantelpiece, the cabinets. A child collared for first communion, a man wearing only cotton trousers and the golden pollen of youth: they had been effortlessly ravishing.

  His orange-blossom cologne was over-sprinkled. Passing down the hall shortly after he had gone out, Laura was in a patisserie in Agrigento and they were carrying in a silver tray of cakes.

  These things marked Carlo’s zone: fragrance, excess.

  He invited her to lunch one Sunday. They ate late, well after two, spaghetti with mussels, a firm fish baked with tomato, zucchini and peppers, a salad of bitter pink leaves. Laura noticed that her glass was cloudy. She noticed that a speck had dried on his spoon. The kitchen was a little grubby, there was a dark line where the draining board met the bench, the tea towel slung over Carlo’s shoulder was stained. None of this really merited attention, but a Fraser had no truck with dirt.

  Carlo’s vanity precluded spectacles. He would poke about the kitchen, trying to locate a grater or a sponge. Events unfolded slowly in his vicinity. That stretching of time, too, was characteristic.

  There was the bright room on the roof and the shadowy one below. Things happened differently in each, each had its own weather and codes, its specific etiology. Linking the two was the picture-hung stair.

  After they had eaten, Carlo lay on the sofa, head propped on a cushion, and smoked. Laura stretched Gladwrap over leftovers and scrubbed pans.

  Then came coffee, and cassatine from Haberfield in a white cardboard box. Carlo offered liqueurs from the sticky bottles on the varnished sideboard. That was where he kept his shirts, he said. Laura accepted a Camel. “Ave Maria,” cried Mario Lanza, and the needle jumped. A very long time ago, the walls had been painted wine red. Somewhat less long ago, in an age when the sun had been permitted to sprawl about the room, they had faded to an uneven rose. There were darker rectangles where pictures had once crowded, there were peacock feathers in a green-glazed jar. The lamp raised by the naked female stood on a table covered with lace. All trace of Hugo Drummond had vanished with the paintings: absorbed into an oleographed Infant, into damask upholstery draped with protective polycotton, into four upright chairs lined up like victims in a row. Carlo’s cigarette glowed in a Cinzano ashtray. Laura remembered rooms glimpsed off alleyways in Naples. She searched the shadows around her, half expecting a framed dollar bill on the wall.

  The flowers were fresh but suitably
vulgar. Their scent fanned from three cut-glass vases, big velvet-stamened lilies from a greengrocer’s bucket, all pinkly suggestive and past their prime.

  On top of the TV, a plaster statuette stood on a runner. Carlo followed Laura’s gaze. “You know this one?” She learned that in 1958, Pius XII had chosen Clare of Assisi as the patron saint of TV because she had seen heavenly visions projected on the wall of her convent cell. Her statue on the set was said to guarantee good reception. “My mother, she no have telly. She buy Santa Chiara for keep on table. Every day pray God to send her TV.”

  It became a Sunday ritual. They would eat the meal he had prepared, there were sauces made from his tomatoes and herbs, there was always something that tasted of the sea. They ate greedily: he pushed his tongue into shells, she wiped her plate with bread. The wine, made by a friend from Carlo’s grapes, was pale, slightly frizzante and came in an unmarked liter bottle. They nibbled on small, heavy cakes, Carlo lay on the sofa in one of his beautiful shirts and smoked. They sipped coffee. There was sugar, in lumps, in a tin. The afternoon, darkening, was thick with tobacco, with garlic and swooning flowers.

  They painted out towards the edge of the canvas, filling in the past for each other.

  He had been born in a village in the foothills of Vesuvius. When he was still very young, there was an accident—Carlo was vague about it, and much else—and his father died. His mother went to live with relatives in Naples, among the tenements of the Spanish Quarters, taking the three children with her. She gave birth to a female infant, who obligingly died.

  The oldest son was killed at fifteen during the quattro giornate that liberated the city from the Germans.

  Some years later, Carlo was unloading artichokes in a market at daybreak when a party of revelers swept into the square. They were led by a woman with hair like a flame. She was a principessa from Palermo. At her strawberry-pink villa on Ischia, Carlo was appreciated by her husband as well.