Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  So everyone else could join in the joke. Even, grudgingly, Heidi. Because—Laura Fraser!

  Laura’s fingers closed around Cliff’s arm while she cackled, “They’re playing our song!”

  Docile now, Cliff allowed her to lead him onto the dance floor. There he said, quietly reaching under the techno thump, “Jeez, I’m a pretty bloody hopeless case.” And followed with, “I always go and forget that girl’s a lezzo.”

  When Laura protested, he ground out a laugh. And collapsed on her breast.

  Robyn Orr, in a red silk camisole, was watching the dancers. Robyn was flying, she was walking on water. The conference had run like honey, weeks of meticulous planning culminating in two days of potential fuck-ups that didn’t occur. Robyn’s presentations were crisp and forceful, none of the sessions ran over time, some really interesting stuff came out of the workshops, even the caterers got it right, even the vegans were contented. Best of all was the vibe. Robyn had worried that the sales figures would be a downer, especially for the Americans, who had arrived tense with the need to defend. Instead, the statistics served to energize everyone, creating the determination that together, they were gonna turn this thing around. You could feel the buzz.

  Minutes earlier, Robyn had been dancing with Sayyid Jamir from the London office. She lusted after Sayyid a bit. She was pretty sure he lusted after her. “You look wicked,” he murmured into her ear. Not that it would go anywhere, they were both way too smart. So she didn’t dance with him a third time.

  All at once there was Laura: pushing Cliff before her, hissing an appeal. As soon as she took her hands off him, he ambled away.

  “Cliff making an arse of himself? It’s okay, I’ll keep an eye on him,” said Robyn. She was just a little bit pissed, she decided, but her mind was as cold and clear as vodka. She disappeared after Cliff. There was nothing she couldn’t sort today.

  The DJ launched into a mash-up of “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” Laura returned to the terrace. There was no one else there. She strolled to where the shadows lay deepest, tilting her throat so the easterly could fan it. She had forgotten her watch, and was wondering how soon she could go home and how much she was going to have to fork out for a cab.

  A voice said, “That was smart work with Cliff.”

  Laura could smell the beer on him. “All that stuff about decades,” she said. “Do you think people are fascinated by eras and endings because it’s a way of preparing for death?” She had knocked back her share of Stollies with Robyn at the start of the evening and found herself speaking to Paul Hinkel as if he were quite another kind of person.

  “What I think is Cliff’s a dickhead.” His voice was serious and low. “Anyone can see you’re far and away the sexiest woman here.” He put one hand under her breast and began to kiss her.

  When a group of smokers came out onto the terrace, he moved away. With his palms flat on the balustrade, he addressed the quaking black expanse. “Got your phone on you?”

  She had left it in her coat. So she repeated his number after him. Something as frenzied as surf kept crashing through and causing her to fluff it. But in the end she had it by heart.

  “Okay, so here’s what we’ll do. You’re going to get your things and say goodnight to a few people in there. Then you’re going to get a room from reception. When you’ve gone up, call my mobile and tell me where to find you.”

  She did each of these things, one after the other, just as she would have carried out any instruction he issued: calmly drained the hemlock, smashed a skull.

  That Sunday, she was so tender with Carlo. All through lunch, she chatted and gulped wine. Poor old man, she thought, poor old guy. She smiled and smiled.

  The first notes of the aria found her as fluid as a woman in a dream. She realized, with a pang that would have been guilt if happiness had left space for another emotion, that her performance in the red room had grown perfunctory of late. But today she had rubbed her limbs with a scented lotion. With grand, gentle objectives in mind she cupped and arranged herself, she trailed her fingers through her hair. She offered the grace of her glorious flesh to an animated husk, thinking, Poor old man. At his spasm, she smiled.

  Laura, 2003

  ALMOST AT ONCE A pattern was set. They met at lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesday he was at a gym with a climbing wall, Friday meant deadlines. There was a reason Monday was out of the question, but Laura could never remember it. Her usual thing on Thursday had been lunch with Robyn, but that was easily changed.

  She would walk to the motel. He drove, so that they weren’t seen to leave or return together. The car park at the rear of the office had no more than a dozen spaces, occupied on the principle of early birds and worms. Most people stuck to public transport: Ramsay was so handy to Central. Paul Hinkel preferred to drive. It was good discipline, he said, it got him out of bed and at his desk bright and early. That was the way he spoke, camouflaging needs that were urgent or particular to him with banality. One of those needs was Laura Fraser. Gripping handfuls of her, he might gasp, “You’re…great.” She thrashed about under his ministrations. He promised nothing on which he could not deliver, he was focused and skilled—one could say professional.

  Sometimes, hurrying towards the motel, Laura heard an old whisper: What are you doing here? But there was the human wish for an end to loneliness. There was the human need to believe that existence was larger than the plain fact, demonstrated every Sunday, of flesh alone, desiring and laborious on a couch. Sometimes, at the end of an endless avenue, she saw a little dog dance. But the sun intervened and dazzled. It wore Paul Hinkel’s face: ecstatic, overwhelming, gilded with lust.

  On learning that Paul was enrolled part time in an MBA, Laura remarked that in her opinion the administration of business could be summed up in a single axiom: “Profit first.” He answered mildly that someone had to keep track of the numbers. He was not the kind of man who took offence easily, nor the kind who laughed.

  Time ticked through their encounters. They had to keep an eye on it, he said. Unraveling, Laura remained bound by schedules, heard the fidget clock.

  Afterwards, he showered while she lay in their bed. She should have dressed and left, but then they might have arrived at the office together. It was understood that she could spend longer away from her desk—as if what she did there counted for less, thought Laura resentfully. But it was also true that she could stay at work later. He had a young child and childcare arrangements.

  All this—the resentment, the reasoning—flowed in an underground way that bubbled only intermittently to the surface of Laura’s mind. It remained invisible to Paul Hinkel. His shower, her delayed departure belonged to a program he took for granted. Besides, she colluded in it. She wished to impress her nakedness on him, so that what he carried away into the afternoon would be the painterly image of rumpled polycotton and luxuriant female flesh.

  But she dragged on her clothes pronto as the door closed, and walked fast.

  She was only yards away from the office one Thursday when he loomed before her. He had that fair skin that reddens at once. He nodded behind his wraparounds and strode ahead. By a sun-blighted shrub near the entrance stood a man with smoke coming out of his face. Laura recognized the new web guy, Ravi. Paul paused to say something to him. Twenty minutes earlier Paul Hinkel had left the motel with freshly soaped armpits. Passing him now, Laura caught the delicious tang of his sweat.

  A visitor, turning up at Ramsay for a lunchtime meeting, had stolen his parking spot. Paul had been obliged to drive about before he found one three blocks away—with an hour’s limit on it at that. All afternoon he had to go up and down with coins. At one point, he had to leave a meeting called by his line manager and sprint. This trauma leaked from him the following week while he was still resting inside Laura. He couldn’t afford too many repeats, he declared. What he had in mind wasn’t clear, a tightening of managerial features, parking fees, his exertions, all of these. She rubbed herself against his
thigh, prey to a terrible premonition that he was about to veto Thursdays or else Tuesdays. But he merely squelched free.

  Afford. He had said, Afford. She was facing up to his tightness with money. The first time in the motel, stripping clothing from each other, she had gasped, “Condom.” He had none. They managed, of course, just as they had done the previous time, after the party. As he fitted himself to her, he murmured, “I can hardly get about with condoms.” It crossed Laura’s mind that he might have stopped at the 7-Eleven on his way. But it was no time for talk.

  Thereafter she came supplied. She paid for the room, since she always arrived first. Soon the receptionist, a plump teenage Goth, would have the key waiting, wouldn’t even glance at Laura’s signature on the slip. Often she didn’t trouble to break off her mobile phone conversation, merely ran the Visa through the machine while pinning the phone to her shoulder with a metallic ear.

  In case he should find his parking space nabbed, Paul now allotted no more than an hour to Laura. There was a constriction in her throat as the minutes fled. He plunged about her, and she thought, Tick-tock. Her picture of his life was an Excel spreadsheet. She tried to imagine joy, fatherhood, craving, hope as so many challenges in time management. She might have confided at least a version of this, but they were running out of time.

  But there were such glories, such redemptions! There was a weekend that dragged on forever, followed by an interminable Monday. On Tuesday she was at the motel early, but his knock came almost at once. He dropped to his knees and hooked her knickers aside. This unscheduled haste so astonished him that he was moved, in time, to a redundant confession: “I couldn’t wait.”

  A dreamy benevolence continued to emanate from Laura. It extended to Ramsay, which had brought her Paul Hinkel. Office life, yoking unlikely temperaments and unequal talents, taught, or at least exacted, tolerance. When Quentin Husker spoke of strategizing our focus on delivering unique content and was so struck with his poetry that he repeated it, Laura felt only a mild desire to vomit. Then HR produced an eighteen-page document that every employee was required to keep up to date titled My Aims & Development. If its authors had noticed the acronym, they had judged it unimportant. It provoked only amusement in Laura; once it might have brought despair.

  Even having to work late to make up her hours was soothing. Here and there, fluorescence showed as bright as the onset of migraine, but the calm of the office at evening was largely undisturbed. Laura signed off on a costing with her favorite kind of pen, a four-color Bic. It was an object that had come into the world in her lifetime. She always kept a spare in her desk. It aroused a strong, primitive emotion in her: not quite a lucky pen thing, but not far off it either. The Bic wasn’t standard issue from stationery and was touched with magic, one having appeared on Laura’s desk on her second day at Ramsay. She had asked around, but no one claimed it. Office life abounded in these small mysteries. Post-its went missing. Staplers appeared. The flash new photocopier always jammed, while the ancient one reliably produced single-sided A4 copies (b&w only) in batches not exceeding thirty. Urgent emails failed to arrive, spam turned up twice. Documents vanished from hard drives. Screens brightened, then dimmed. The workplace was organic. It had its own vital signs. It was shifty, endowed with speed and cunning. It breathed.

  The curtains in the motel, always shut, were printed with waratahs. That October Laura raided florists, swooped on markets, surrounded herself with sculpted red blooms. Would Paul Hinkel understand the coded declaration on her desk? Everything charmed and delighted her. Her laugh rolled from meeting rooms, was heard on the stairs. An advance copy of a guidebook arrived from the printer, and Helmut Becker propped it beside Laura’s computer wedged open with a piece of fruit. She returned from the motel and discovered the assemblage with its handwritten caption: Last Mango in Paris. She sought out Helmut and hugged him. She laughed and laughed.

  Ravi, 2003

  A LONG TIME AGO, someone relieved by Banksia Gardens of the burden of a parent had expressed thankfulness with flowers in a shallow china bowl. They had remained in the entrance hall, the petals stiffening and darkening, finally assuming the appearance of wood. One day, Glory Warren slid white pebbles, stolen on an outing, between the rigid stems. This aroused the competitiveness that beats savagely in aged breasts. Pine cones came to augment the arrangement, a tartan ribbon was fastened anonymously around the bowl. The result, the first thing a visitor saw, was judged really creative and certainly good enough for the indigent old.

  At Ramsay, artfully disarranged blooms, renewed twice a week, greeted in reception. Ravi was able to ignore them—lounging in a brushed-metal bucket rather than jammed into a vase, the flowers didn’t disturb him. He had been a designer in the e-zone for a month, and still his thoughts skittered between his old workplace and the new. Thus tourists, trying to decipher strangeness, compare home and here. Here, everyone sat before big, bright screens. Everyone was connected. Souvenirs proclaimed a casual familiarity with the planet: a mouse mat from the Guggenheim, a Javanese shadow puppet, an Eiffel Tower snow dome. Postcards were Blu-Tacked to monitors, screensavers showed fiords or a noodle seller’s stall. Keep moving, love! remembered Ravi. Whatever you do, don’t stop!

  Mortgages and tertiary education debts were spoken of in Ravi’s hearing, but what he noticed was the magic of money. Disposable income was as silent as snow and as transformative. It softened monotony, blurring its workaday bones with MP3 players, camera phones, negative ionizers, takeaway coffees in environmentally responsible mugs.

  When Ravi looked back at Banksia Gardens, he saw lives marked by before and after. Youth, health or the simplicity of belonging were landscapes that had been lost. Much had been patched up but nothing could be mended. On inspection, the crack always showed. His new workplace, on the other hand, was forward-oriented: the Mission Statement required it. Ramsay was firm flesh, blonde streaks, the smiles that only fluoride and first-world dentistry can achieve. Diversity, diligently practiced, was an HR crusade, but everyone looked alike to Ravi. On the train, in the streets, there were so many different kinds of faces—it was one of the wonders of Sydney. But at Ramsay, China, Ireland, Hungary, Lebanon had brought forth identically clear eyes and gleaming hair. Ravi saw energy and confidence and post-industrial track lighting. There was nowhere to hide. People spoke kindly, and he had difficulty following them. What did Give it a burl mean? The girl who sat across from him swiveled her chair to ask, “Are you a Tamil?” and “So when exactly did you leave the detention center?” Her hair and her eyes were bright brown shot with gold. Ravi willed himself not to stare. Even her name was beautiful: Crystal Bowles.

  Tyler had protested, “A Sri Lankan site in the nineties? No way would he have the skills.”

  “A trainee,” said Damo. “He’d save you money.”

  That was cunning. It was Sunday night, the first time they’d seen each other that weekend because Tyler had been working on budgets. He hesitated: the kind of small, fatal mistake to which Tyler was prone.

  “His case has gone to review,” Damo improvised: “A job at Ramsay could work in his favor, swing the decision.”

  Tyler rallied. “There’s travel experience. That’s crucial at Ramsay. A designer has to know where the user’s coming from.”

  “Ravi’s traveled around Sri Lanka.”

  “He’s local. It’s different for foreigners.”

  “Exactly. He’d provide a fresh point of view.”

  Tyler changed direction, another error. “There’s a freeze on new hires.”

  “Only permanent ones.” The relationship was still in that phase when Damo and Tyler actually listened to each other’s complaints about work. “You could offer him a contract,” said Damo. He also pointed out that from one postal delivery to the next, Ravi could find himself with twenty-eight days’ notice to leave the country. “Which is the likely scenario. So it’s not like he’s going to be on your payroll for too long.”

  Later he said, “A refugee,
Tyler. You could change his life.” And, “It would be a visionary thing to do.”

  It was visionary that affected Tyler, loosed the tinsel-twirl of possibility in his mind.

  Back in the day, newly recruited to head up IT at Ramsay, Tyler had worn cargo pants and held grown managers spellbound. He had bounced a little on his exercise ball, incandescent with can-do. He sprinkled words like magic dust: electronic editions, fully searchable knowledge bases, Intranets, interactivity. Drifting through the minds of his listeners, these terms left little impression but glittered with efficiency and profit. They sparkled with the promise that all who heeded them would be carried along into the digital age. Even the newcomer’s name suggested a spell: Tyler Dean, an incantation that worked backwards and forwards. It sounded American: youthful, state-of-the-art, now. No one wanted to be left behind in the old century, as has-been as analogue. Success was a god with a single profile, and it wasn’t directed at the past.

  Back in the day was before dot-coms mutated into dot-bombs, it was before 9/11. It was before the global sales dive, before a ruinous Ramsay e-venture into smart cards for travelers. Tyler still had his soul patch and his place on the management team, but the glamour had gone. Thoughts strayed when he addressed meetings. IT was back where it had once been, a service division to the rest of the company. Tyler would have liked to move on. He had been four years at Ramsay and should have left after three. He had heard vaguely, as he had heard of Machiavelli, that a career had once been considered a matter of long-term development. Tyler conceived of his as a series of short-term stays. He saw himself flowing freely from one organization to another, changing tactics and style as required—only losers got stuck. But the headhunters who didn’t answer his emails knew that the market was oversupplied with start-up whiz-kids who’d left it too late to cash in their stock options.