Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Laura Googled names. Sometimes an image turned up. A girl she had known at school, now a dispute resolution counselor, had disguised herself as her mother. The apple cheeks of a once longed-for boy had assumed the lackluster mask of middle age. Steve Kirkpatrick had vanished, leaving not even a death notice. There was a review of Charlie McKenzie’s latest show: the gallery was middling, Laura noted cattily, and the praise distinctly faint.

  She remembered that only four or five years earlier, “the information superhighway” had been a fashionable term. Information encouraged thoughts of newsrooms and statisticians, of gravity and weight. But Laura’s experience of the Internet was of invisibility, exoticism, discontinuity: a lightness. She moved from site to site in an exhilarating patternless dance. One step led to another, performance and choreography the same. It was true that she usually set out soberly—tonight she had begun with an analysis of neocon strategy offered by the New York Times. So how come forty-three minutes later she was reading a blog about street fashion? Along the way, there had been a review of a Mexican film, an Oberlin sophomore’s blog about her yoga class, an advertisement for weight loss, an interview with Louise Bourgeois, a site where one click fed starving children while another conserved 11.4 acres of rainforest, a vituperative forum about global warming and a Japanese designer’s take on the uses of bamboo. Information abounded, but what triumphed was partial and individual. Glimpsed lives were addictive: Laura cruised the confessions of strangers, their aversions and apartments, the recipes they recommended, their responses to the news.

  She Googled colleagues. There was a photo of Robyn Orr accepting an award on behalf of the budget travel agency where she had once worked. Quentin Husker had left no digital footprint, but Marion, his wife, dispensed interior design in Woollahra. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of books are considered sophisticated, but the same effect can be achieved with wallpaper. Marion’s personal style was influenced by India, where she loved to holiday with her family. What others called the Raj had provided her breakthrough concept: “The Greater Shopping.” Global fusion was timeless and now! Laura saw paisley throws, rosewood consoles, an antique Buddha coupled with a pith helmet on a brass tray.

  The only living Paul Hinkel she could find taught economics at a college in Baltimore. But an online genealogy unearthed a dead one in The Hague. That’d be right, thought Laura, for whom tulips had a regimental air. First up to the dyke with his loud, heroic thoughts, the fool.

  The lyrics of songs were an education. Ancient riddles dissolved. So it was not, after all, She keeps a mohair champion in a pretty cabinet. Not Cheap wine and a teenage goat, not I’m a pool hall ace with every breath you take. But oh, how Laura yearned for Bryan Ferry to go on singing, Analogue. Analogue. She had thought it wonderfully modern, a love song to technology.

  Google was ravenous: Laura fed it hour after hour. Her laptop kept up the noisy breathing of a drugged child.

  There came an afternoon when, at the end of yet another day of cant and emails, Laura was fed up. It was not quite four. But she left work and walked all the way up to Circular Quay, looking into windows, scraping off the office like something stuck to her shoe. She went into a shop and bought a single, expensive chocolate. She bought red gerberas from a stall. Wind sliced her cheekbones on the deck of the ferry, but inside was stagnant with office workers. As her destination loomed, Laura saw that a group of Asian men were setting up lines and rods on the wharf. One settled himself beside a tartan thermos, another snapped open a plastic box. The passengers in their severe city clothes began to disembark. No one looked at the fishermen, and they appeared not to notice the stream of commuters. Laura had the impression of living through something remembered or imagined: a scene in a film, tense with meaning and possibility, or an incident in a dream. A straggler from the fishing party came hurrying down to the water, wearing tracksuit pants and sneakers, swinging an old TAA bag—the crowd parted before him as for a messenger. He was younger than the other fishermen; Laura tried to smile at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eye. A large yellow car, unnaturally luminous in the gathering dusk, was parked at the bottom of the street, a battered old Kingswood with one dull pink door. Around here, if you had the misfortune to have to park in the street, you made up for it with a RAV4 or a Subaru. Where had the fishermen come from? Laura wondered, and drawing closer, read their license plate: Peril. It made her smile all the way up the hill.

  From her roof, the wharf was invisible. But when Laura woke that night, she thought she could see the spangle of the fishermen’s lights. There was the smell of food, she thought, a wafting of spices. She was sure she could hear the men, their talk as alien and appealing as birdsong. Far away, but clearly, Theo was laughing. The harbor was an alchemist: a radio blared, a baby cried, and Theo’s wild hoot erupted. In spring, when the ascending whistle of koels rang through Sydney, Laura could have sworn he was laughing at her. The light in his star fell across arms pimpled with goose bumps. The past had come strolling over her grave.

  Close at hand, the darkness shrilled and frightened. Laura located her phone. Its face shone, it was a live thing in her hand. The number had been withheld. There would be only the familiar, faintly echoing silence if she answered. She switched off the phone. Once, startled from sleep, she had shouted, “Cameron, what do you want to say?” Her caller broke the connection.

  Laura made herself a mug of lemongrass and ginger tea. Despite the florist’s wire, her gerberas were heavy-headed—she had known they would droop. But after work she often craved flowers, or a yellow pear in a twist of violet paper, something pretty to salvage from the day. She wondered again how her brother had got hold of her phone number. When giving it to their father, she had asked him not to pass it on. But Donald Fraser was of the generation that relies on address books. His was easily found beside the cordless phone in the hall. Cameron was devious by nature and training. Laura pictured him pocketing the book, turning to L behind a locked lavatory door. She had seen her brother only twice since returning to Sydney—he was a stranger, in fact, as opaque to her as the young fisherman hurrying down to the wharf.

  When she tilted her mug, a scene from the afternoon rose from the dregs. She was walking away from Ramsay, and there were three apprentices, two young men and a girl in buff overalls, on the far side of the street. A child walked with them—or so it had seemed. But now Laura wasn’t sure; he had walked a few steps behind. She had seen him before, she recognized the red pack and the shock of black hair. A voice accused silently: You should have gone over and spoken to him. The presence of the girl had misdirected. It had caused Laura to believe, somewhere deep in the brain where such links persist, that the child was with the trio. Actually, she had barely noticed any of them—they were heading in a direction she was intent on leaving. The frustrations of the day, the memory of Quentin Husker prefacing yet another idiocy with “Let’s just run this up the flagpole,” had crowded the scene from her mind. Now it came to her as a bungled occasion, attended by urgency and regret.

  Ravi, 2003

  ON THE DAY OF his mother’s funeral, Ravi called Banksia Gardens and said he was ill. He took an upstairs train and then another to Bondi Junction, where he caught a bus. It was a roundabout route, but he was in no hurry. There was a moment when the second train, burrowing up from the city, shot out into light: something that had been constricted fanned open. Ravi noticed this, noticed spaciousness presented like a blue volume—an idiotic gesture.

  Along the cliff path, the light was an anesthetic. Ravi walked south past sea baths and secluded coves. Beach towels had been hung out to dry over balconies. An old Chinese man walking the other way was shaking his wrists.

  A tree bristled with gray cones and white birds; Ravi could name them and the tree. Hana knew things like that, and pointed them out to Tarik. Ravi, eavesdropping in the passenger seat as Abebe drove, learned hoon, nature strip, servo. “How do you know these things?” he had asked one day. Hana looked surprised. There were library books, she
listened to people talking at work, there were nature documentaries. She kept a list of Australian plants and made Tarik look up their pictures on the computer. But it was Tarik who informed her mother that it was not a swimsuit but a cossie. “Or you can also say swimmers.” Hana was delighted: she wanted an Australian child. In Addis Ababa she had worked as a secretary in a firm that imported medical equipment. That was how she met her husband. A shell had killed him as he tended the dying on the fourth day of the last war with Eritrea. The family had applied for residency in Australia, where Abebe was already living. The papers had come through, the date had been decided, there was no need for the Frenchman to go to the front. But he had the foreigner’s hazy vision of Africa. “To give his life for those people!” Hana’s tone was the barbed wire on which an old quarrel was stuck. As for herself, she couldn’t wait to get out. When she was fifteen, Marxists had hanged her father. Once, and never again, she referred to my mother. Abebe, turning the steering wheel, had nothing to say.

  In Ravi’s first week at Banksia Gardens, “What brings you here all the way from Sri Lanka?” Mandy had asked. “Politics?” After a moment, Ravi assented. Politics would cover it. It covered most things. At work, he never spoke of the past. Or rather, he talked about curried seer fish, monsoons, the blue house by the sea. Most of his fellow workers were immigrants. Reminiscing of home, everyone stuck to food, plants, childhood, the weather. Ravi assumed that somewhere else, if only on the treadmill of the mind, the reasons that had brought them to Australia were rehearsed. Or perhaps that was how memory triumphed, in the end, over regimes: by according politics less significance than a flower.

  There were more cockatoos ahead, strident in a park. One, further off, was shifting about on a shrub. Fixing on the acid-yellow fan of its crest, Ravi willed the bird to fly. Before I count to ten. At twenty he looked over his shoulder. The cockatoo lifted a leg and scratched its head. On the balcony of Freda Hobson’s flat, too, Ravi had searched for signs: that his dead were at peace, or at least within earshot. If the crow calls thrice. If the leaf falls. The Pacific slopped over rocks—it was beautiful and careless. But the city of the dead was in sight at last. All morning Ravi had feared that the cemetery would be ordinary. Then it was before him, and it was not.

  Under the blind gaze of an angel, Ravi took out an aerogram. It had arrived the previous day. For the last time, he messed up opening the flimsy blue sheet, leaving the lower section to flap over the middle of the letter. His mother had written of a downpour, a grandchild’s fever, the present that Varunika had brought her. Three days later, her heart had stopped. Ravi read the letter again. Again there was nothing, between Darling Son and Your loving Mummy, but rain, medicinal tea, a watch set with stones. When he could have closed his eyes and recited each sentence, he looked at his wrist. She was under the earth now. The sea coughed and coughed, but what Ravi heard were the first slow steps of rain through a mulberry. It was answered by the slap of rubber slippers passing in and out of rooms: his mother was sheeting the mirrors against lightning. Until now, all that had belonged to a time that was distant but ongoing, still susceptible to surprise and flux.

  The Irish girl found him sitting beside a tomb with his knees drawn up in a sliver of shade. Keira had thought that she had the marble books and jittery sea-light to herself, but the first thing she offered the man was her smile. It was one of her grandmother’s precepts: Christ comes as a stranger. The old woman was the reason she was visiting the cemetery, Keira told Ravi. “Her brother’s buried here. He left Ireland when he was seventeen and they never saw each other again. Isn’t that sad, now?”

  The cone of pink paper she was carrying was full of red flowers. J’aime Paris announced her T-shirt in dancing script. Ravi couldn’t always follow what she said. At first, not realizing that she was speaking English, he heard only the dappled noise of a breaker or a bird. In the shadow of a cotton brim, her face, too, had its mysteries. A sentence detached itself: “Isn’t it special here?” The graves, pointing to the drop, proposed no limit to loneliness or risk.

  When she set off again, Ravi went with her—it seemed expected. Keira said, “We’re looking for the name Sims.” Soon enough, it was there. From the glazed photograph on his headstone the dead man peered out boldly. Ravi saw eyes that were an argument for placing corpses under granite and concreting around the base. The girl shook crisp brown roses from the jar under the photo and filled it with water from her bottle. Her sunglasses slipped when her hands were full; she pushed them up with a knuckle. While she arranged the flowers she had brought, Ravi looked away. Keira went on talking. Sims had a Protestant wife—she was somewhere nearby, packed into an urn. Ravi learned that the rift caused by the marriage had seen out two generations.

  When Keira stepped back from the grave, she did something Ravi had never seen before: holding up a phone, she took a photo.

  He had read about camera phones on the Net. “Duty-free,” explained Keira. Ravi asked, “Will you take my picture?”

  A pattern slotted into place for the girl; she almost heard it click. Between Dublin and Sydney, she had stopped only in hot places. In each of them, black-haired men had requested a photo. She regarded Ravi, in her viewfinder, with disappointment; also with the first faint prickle of something else.

  Unable to sleep the previous night, Ravi had switched on his laptop. He searched his emails for the first message Varunika had sent and chose one of her photos of their mother. After some fiddling, it reappeared as his screensaver. Then he set four candles around the computer and began his vigil. The rosary clicks of his mouse ensured that Carmel went on looking out at him, the machine, too, prevented from slipping into sleep.

  In the morning, confronted with a mirror, Ravi saw an effigy. Thinking, This is what grief looks like, he had wanted a photo of it. One of the things he couldn’t forgive Freda Hobson was her doctor. If you have spent a season in hell, you should have something to show for it. Ravi’s souvenirs were the memory of a syringe, a recollection of pills. This time he wanted a keepsake. But he had returned the Memory Maker before leaving for Australia. He stared straight at the Irish girl’s phone. An image Keira had known all her life came into her mind: a sorrowing face imprinted on a veil.

  Her cousin’s flat was a few streets inland. As they walked, Ravi learned that Keira was on her way to Cairns. A friend was waiting there, and a job serving beer to backpackers. “What do you think, Ravi? Will I like Queensland? The pay’s rubbish, but I can’t wait to see the reef.”

  In the hallway, released from hat and sunglasses, her face was ordinary and more satisfying. Around her throat was a band woven from tiny red and blue beads. Among the tombs, she had written down Ravi’s email address and suggested tea. What she produced, however, were slices of lemon in a pitcher of cool water. Her eyes were the faraway blue of hills.

  The cousin’s living room was as dim as a grotto. From a sideboard shaped like a coffin, the dead man smirked in the gloom. Long ago, lumpy forms had sunk to their graves here and grown encrusted with cushions. Weedy leaves trailed from a shelf, and there were clumps of round and branching coral. Ravi saw more photographs: a white dog and a black cat. Keira confirmed that the animals, too, were dead. Her cousin worked in the city and wouldn’t be home for hours. Every morning, she renewed her instruction about shutters: light ruined the upholstery. Keira wet her finger in the moisture on the pitcher and dabbed at her temples. She remarked that the view, in any case, lay to the east.

  A door at the end of a passage opened on to a backpack propped against a filing cabinet. “If you squeeze yourself in there, next to the desk, and stand on tiptoe, you’ll see a piece of ocean”—but Ravi was looking at her. Under her T-shirt, her body was white as a candle. The room, like the sofa, was gray and comfortless but wholly adequate to their needs.

  He returned by the route he had come, along the cliff path. Dogs and the people they walked were everywhere, and joggers in tight, expensive gear. Workers, released for the evening, were hurryi
ng to the beach. Children screamed in the luscious bays. Ravi passed families around picnics and a group doing tai chi. He marveled at the ease with which Sydney shrugged off drudgery, slinging a towel over its shoulder, heading for the waves.

  A woman scolded her phone in a foreign language, and Ravi thought of the Irish girl. When her fingers found the embossing on his back, they had paused. Ravi could have said, A fox passed that way—it’s nothing. But he remained silent, watching the wide eyes fill with tears. At the last minute, he had substituted a .net for a .com in the address he gave her. “Greensleeves” started up like a dirge in the distance, and behind the greedy thought of a choc-top came an aerogram from the previous year. Halfway through, his mother had written, There was an old song I used to sing, “I would give all for a moment or two, Under the bridges of Paris with you.” Do you remember that? Ravi had ignored this when he replied. Now he saw that the reference made no sense but answered a need—it was like his decision to abandon the photo he had requested. His image would travel with the Irish girl until she deleted it. As with any graveside ceremony, what the photo would mark wouldn’t be a connection but a defeat. In the end, that was what everything recorded. Papering over absence, his mother’s letters had proclaimed it. He would Google the song as soon as he got home, but what it had come to tell him had always been clear. His mother had missed him to the end of her days. Each punctual aerogram had played the same tune.

  He was almost at Bondi before he noticed that the long day was weakening. There were more people on the path than on the beach below. Ravi remained where he was, grasping a protective rail. If I see the first star. If the last surfer leaves the water. Then Malini was at his shoulder. He couldn’t see her, but she was pointing out what he had missed. Along the horizon, a ribbon of darkness had broadened. Night was rising over the earth.