Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  At twenty-eight, Tyler Dean was history.

  But in the modern workplace, flexibility was a watchword. Solidarity with refugees was cool. Taking Ravi on, equipping him with marketable skills: it would be a first at Ramsay. A strategic staircase was taking shape. It was smarts plus heart. It ticked boxes. Tyler was updating his CV, cascading his vision through the ranks.

  He said, “Let me think about it.”

  Damo kissed him.

  The Wayback Machine preserved webpages over time, offering a record of the digital past. A few days after his conversation with Damo, Tyler used it to reach the archived site of a university in Sri Lanka. Just as he’d expected: frames, static content, low interactivity. Where was the call to action? To think there had been a time when the whole web was like this! Tyler took note of the clashing typefaces, the untidy navigation, the amount of white space on the pages. He thought, Dead links!

  It was hilarious, really. At the same time…it was sort of great. It was just a few years old and it was pioneering. These guys had been cowboys, making up the web as they went along. Gotta love that, thought Tyler Dean.

  In his gap year, Tyler had traveled to Zimbabwe. In the company of a cousin, he visited his family’s old farm. There was an avenue, a mile long, of flame trees and jacarandas. Tyler had always believed that he had forgotten everything about the first three years of his life. Then he saw the trees.

  When they set off again after lunch, the cousin stopped in a town to pick up some fertilizer. A dusty eucalypt was all elbows on the far side of the street. On the farm, the trees were in flower. Tyler’s life stretched before him like the view from his cousin’s veranda in the morning. It was only the way back that was barred, electric with wrongdoing, patrolled by dogs with angry faces. His cousin drove with a handgun in her glove box. If he had been alone in the car, Tyler might have cried.

  He got out and wandered along the street, looking for something to photograph. He came to a recreation center, identified by a sign above the door, and went in. The hall housed a concrete stage and a table-tennis table. Tyler, navigating around the Sri Lankan website, found himself remembering that hall. He saw the breeze-block walls and the dust on the table. The net sagged, and so did the light. It revealed the figure who had come to greet him: Dean Tyler, a double, a visitant, a there-but-for-the-grace. On Tyler’s screen an open stairway climbed into a colorwashed building, and that shade of yellow, too, was something he had seen. Tyler was arrogant or kind or blundering enough to imagine that he knew what Ravi had been up against, designing that site. He went into his email and began composing a message to HR.

  Crystal Bowles glided into Tyler’s office. When he took out his earbuds, she said, “Guess what I just found out about Ravi?”

  “Hi, Crystal.”

  “He’s never been in a detention center!”

  “Yeah, cool.”

  “You said he was a refugee. He says he’s a refugee. So how come he wasn’t locked up?”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “Didn’t you see that email HR sent round before he started? About appropriate conduct with a refugee?” Conscious of virtue, Crystal said, “I’ve been approaching Ravi sensitively and respecting his right not to talk about what he’s been through.”

  “Boat people get locked up.” Tyler had Damo’s explanation by heart. “Plane people like Ravi come in on a visa, so they live in the community while their applications are being processed. It’s part of the government’s strategy to distinguish between the two groups. To boost their line that boat people can be treated like shit.”

  During the weeks of the restructure, Tyler had scarcely slept. In management meetings, the phrases that rang around the table were re-engineering and scaling back. Tyler saw cells in a spreadsheet vanish with a mouse-click: the process was painless, efficient, clean. Then Clifford Ferrier had to say, “What this means is people are going to lose their jobs.” The other faces in the room instructed Tyler in what he felt: a pure, consuming hatred for Cliff.

  Tyler slashed jobs, suffered, learned whose skin he would always put first. He called together those who were going from IT. “You’re a great bunch of people. You’ve been responsible for the most creative, inspirational, even provocative work to come out of Ramsay.” When he began to cry, some of his victims wept with him. They had been spared war, starvation, plague, but knowledge of those ancestral catastrophes was coded into their DNA; what was novel and terrible was mundane disaster. Each felt personally to blame. They should have gained new, indispensable skills or at least moved on sooner—after all, wasn’t it their love of travel that had brought them to Ramsay? Dave Horden, the webmaster, spoke up on behalf of everyone: “Dude, thanks for sharing our pain.”

  Tyler consoled himself with the thought that he had hung on to a couple of really great people. Also Crystal. She had finished her training shortly before the restructure, she cost less than anyone else in the e-zone, she was smart, it had made sense to keep her. Nadine Flanagan, who had replaced Dave, preferred email to talking, so Tyler had become the screen on which Crystal projected her effects. These days he thought of her as a punishment. She was saying, “So Ravi’s definitely a refugee? Even though he wasn’t locked up?”

  “Would it’ve been better if he’d been locked up?”

  “I’m just saying,” said Crystal Bowles.

  Laura, 2003

  THE KOREANS WERE PLAYING Carla Bruni again. Robyn said, “I’m seriously going to bring them a new CD next time.” She shook out her napkin and inspected Laura. “You’re looking indecently good. Love that shirt.”

  It was a delectable grape-green with concave buttons of opalescent shell. Laura was buying a lot of clothes, spending Saturdays checking out the little designer places in Surry Hills, the gear in Oxford Street. She had lost weight. Her hair was different, too. It was a matter of camouflage, concluded Robyn, noting the uniform darkness of Laura’s head. There wasn’t a female on the North Shore under the age of eighty with gray hair, and like any good tourist, Laura Fraser was blending in.

  Robyn said, “Looks like this lunchtime exercise plan’s suiting you. Where do you walk? Should I come with you, maybe?”

  There was friendship’s ever-present invitation to confide. And beyond that, Laura’s wish to proclaim the miracle, to shout the holy syllables of Paul Hinkel’s name.

  Fortunately, seafood hotpots intervened. “Maybe when I get back from Vietnam,” went on Robyn. “You know what it’s like when you’ve got holidays coming up. I’ve got back-to-back meetings between now and then.”

  “How long are you going for?”

  “A week.” Robyn repeated, “You know what it’s like.”

  Laura did: you dreamed of working at Ramsay because you loved travel.You had one of those passports with the extra pages, your gap year had turned into three. Asked where you would like to go next, you answered, Away. It was the reason they hired you. Thereafter, what you knew of travel was your daily commute.

  “How’s it all going with Ferdy?” asked Laura. Because Robyn, once unfailingly upbeat, had seemed dispirited of late.

  “Yeah, good.” Robyn’s chopsticks grasped a cube of white flesh. Lifting it required an effort, like the discretion she was tired of practicing. She longed to tell someone what had happened after the conference party, but Laura was rising from the table. She fled from the restaurant, her face a consternation. Robyn twisted to look out of the window, but there was only the lunch-hour street.

  A waitress was asking if everything was okay.

  Laura, returning, apologized. She sat, rather heavily, and said, “This kid, I’ve seen him before. Wandering about on his own but he’s not that old. It’s weird.”

  “School holidays,” said Robyn. “Lots of short people with time on their hands. You sure he was alone?”

  Laura could only resume her hotpot. Eventually remembering, “Were you saying something before?”

  She’d forgotten, said Robyn, it couldn’t have been important
.

  Laura volunteered to email the senior cartographers about a few editorial issues. She did so, then sent a PS to Paul for him alone.

  When they next met, he told her that he didn’t trust in-house email. “The techies monitor it.”

  “Really?”

  “It happens everywhere. In case some creep’s downloading kiddie porn on a company computer.” There had been a guy he’d worked with in the public service. The cops were called in.

  She hadn’t known that Paul was ex–public service. What she knew of him was as intimate and as superficial as skin. Of facts, there were these: Paul Hinkel surfed whenever he could and was into photography. He loved Thai food but disliked fish. A long time ago, he had worn a surplice and sung in a cathedral. His daughter was called Anouk. His father’s people had come to Sydney from Rotterdam. He suffered from hay fever, each sneeze an explosion. When Laura learned that he had spent almost two years in London, their histories drew together. He had worked as a barman in Shepherd’s Bush; there had been a time when she had passed that pub almost every day. Entwined, they recalled Cool Britannia. (Oh, Britpop days of our youth! Truly, was there anyone in big spectacles more major than Jarvis Cocker circa 1995?) They were pretty sure they’d gone to the same Elastica concert at the Hammersmith Palais; he ta-tummed a riff from “Stutter.” They might have traveled on the same train, stood within feet of each other. London became their repository of might-have-been. “If I’d seen you then,” he would say and cover her mouth with his. The sentence remained unfinished, the consequence at once all-encompassing and vague.

  At saner intervals, Laura could see that the only future his tenderness implied was retrospective. Yet on ferries, at the checkout, in her aerie above the flexing harbor, geography dissolved—Laura was rushing upstairs to the room she shared with Paul Hinkel in Ladbroke Grove. They went traveling together. In a bar in Berlin, they toasted each other in a mirror. They picked through jackets in a flea market in Bucharest. In a mall in Pasadena, they agreed that the nineties were pastel-hued, smelled of Obsession and tasted of Starbucks. In the shadow of a domed palace in Jaipur, they bought a mirror-worked coverlet for their bed.

  Thus Laura substituted fantasy for history—in fact, it wasn’t just the past she remodeled but time itself. The scenarios she constructed belonged equally to once-upon-a-time and still-to-come, to one day and back then. The unwritten, endless letters she addressed to Paul Hinkel were more knowing. They revived what had taken place in the waratah-curtained room, and proposed inventive variations. Grammar, syntax, vocabulary remained steadfastly erotic, although straying on occasion into the more banal endearments. Beyond that, her sentences refused to progress.

  If obliged to alter their arrangements, they would text each other. They shared a fondness for electronic gadgetry—he bought an iPod two days after she acquired hers. She inquired into his playlists so that she might download the same songs. He declared that the White Stripes were even more amazing than Coldplay. His iPod nuzzled her breasts, and “Seven Nation Army” cascaded through her while he showered. He surprised her, too, with a taste for lush romanticism. At night, she would listen over and over to “The Ship Song,” to “Ruby’s Arms.” Her phone went everywhere with her, was switched on the instant the credits came up or the chairs scraped back, even though his texts were rare and of the meeting delayed 30 mins sort. He was the kind who reduced morality to caution, thought Laura. It was one of the sour, forensic insights that streaked across her mind, self-protective and useless. How perfectly texting was suited to adulterers, instant, private, as readily mastered as erased. This reflection was provoked by the sight of Quentin, who famously had once required a techie to point out the on button on his computer, in adroit manipulation of a Lilliputian keypad. Yet to associate anything that emanated from Quentin Husker with that communion in the waratah room was a form of sacrilege.

  At work, a group email from Paul Hinkel contained an emoticon. Laura remembered that she had despised them—why? What a snob she was! Those little winks and smiles were charming. They enlivened her own messages now.

  He mentioned that he had given Ravi Mendis, a really nice guy, a lift one evening. Laura was conscious of shame—although she felt enormous goodwill towards Ravi, she had never actually spoken to him. Now she made a point of saying, “How’s it going?” and beaming at him if their paths chanced to cross.

  There was rugby talk around the water cooler. Why was Laura Fraser hanging about? Because the state team was called the Waratahs. Not that anyone had mentioned the Tahs. But the word shone unspoken in the air.

  There came the thought: What will be left of this when it’s over? She knew every inch of him but not his handwriting. She had no letters, no photographs, no gifts, not even any emails. There would be a handful of text messages, as anodyne as business, and a few schmaltzy tunes on her playlist. There would be the Visa statements that recorded her squandering on flowers and a motel. This was modern love: traceless, chilling. But when it’s over was as empty of meaning as a faulty proposition in logic.

  His phone rang as she was bending over him. He pulled away, located it, was stumbling, already flaccid, into the bathroom. He emerged and told her that he had to leave. His child, Anouk, was asthmatic and was having difficulty breathing. So Laura knew that, too. She knew that his thumbs were double-jointed and his parents divorced. It was like her late-night trawling of the Internet: she learned a great many things that had no bearing on each other and were of unequal worth.

  Sometimes Laura tried to account for it, this need, this infatuation, this…but she resisted the word “love.” “Lust” wasn’t right either, although lust was inseparable from it. It was folly and it was clarity. One tiny part of her mind never lost sight of her original verdict on Paul Hinkel. But it was without importance.

  At night, with the red star presiding over her vigils, Laura was inclined to ascribe Paul Hinkel to Theo Newman. Theo had offered a risk, she had refused it, he had died. So now it was necessary to persist: to accept adventure, to follow to the end of a path haunted by a corpse and the child he had proposed. The dead are called ghosts, but what name could she assign to the never-were? By day, however, what happened in the waratah room was sufficient unto itself, unghosted. It was something to look forward to, it excited—as work didn’t—with hazards and thrills. And why look further than the animation of a biological clock? But that was simplistic. What Laura finally settled for was merely simple: Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi. It was no reason, the only one.

  On a Saturday morning in Blues Point Road, she came face to face with Alice Merton. Alice was attended by a large golden beast. She was walking her parents’ retriever while they were on holiday—as it happened, she was on her way to visit Carlo and Laura, she explained. But Carlo wasn’t there, Laura told her, Rosalba had carried him off as usual. She invited Alice to brunch in a cafe, instead. The retriever, who loved indiscriminately, laid his head against Laura’s knees and pressed.

  The sight of Alice was especially welcome that morning. Of late, Laura had tended to neglect her duties on the roof. Working late meant coming home too tired to think about gardening. On Saturday, she shopped for clothes, she dawdled and dreamed. There was often a film or a meal with Robyn and Ferdy. On Sunday, Laura rose late. Soon it would be time to go down to Carlo. Meanwhile, she made half-hearted passes with secateurs or hose.

  Carlo took his time over eating. Laura would grow impatient. She was down there for one reason only, and tortellini boscaiola didn’t come into it. She stuffed plates any old how into the dishwasher’s orthodontic maw. In the rose-red room, she gulped coffee, positioned the needle with brutal precision. But on the couch, Carlo was still taking his time. Laura made an effort, stroking and arranging herself with extravagant, baroque gestures. If she closed her eyes, she could almost believe that the gaze she nourished was Paul Hinkel’s. But the scent of the rotting lilies intruded. The aria ended and another began. Even the tenor strained, even the gli
de of the needle was effortful.

  One day Carlo said, “Non posso.”

  Laura was willing to help—it was her declaration of independence from Paul Hinkel. But he was at hand while she caressed Carlo, their invisible third. She felt his disgust and his excitement. When she gathered her clothes and left, it was Paul’s face, its blurring at the moment of climax, that followed her.

  The rain that drenched the city at night in winter, the summer downpours: of late, these had abated. Elsewhere, the continent might wither, its ancient skin split. But this was Sydney! It oozed damp, it was made of water! How could the dams be down by a third? Drought, a disease that had once remained politely out of sight, was spreading to the face and neck. Carlo said, “You no forget mulch?” Pea straw lay thick among his vegetables. There was another bale of it in the shed at the back, delivered by the friend who made his wine. “You take upstairs.” There was no need, called Laura, rushing for the ferry, she had already mulched everything up there.

  That was true. But she had put down the straw in autumn and failed to renew it in spring. On the Saturday that brought Alice Merton, Laura had spotted a lifeless gardenia on the roof. She waited until the sound of Rosalba’s car faded, then uprooted the crisp brown shrub, emptied the planter of compacted potting mix, attacked the terra-cotta with a hammer. She broke up the soil and scattered it about. Snipped into sections, her floral victim vanished into the compost. A plastic bag concealed the pieces of clay. Minutes before spotting Alice, Laura had dropped it into a municipal bin.

  While envisaging these actions, while carrying them out, she had known that Carlo would forgive her at once if she confessed. Like anything that mattered, gardening was inseparable from losses. And a single gardenia! A dozen remained. But Laura knew she could never tell Carlo. The shame that burned if she allowed it oxygen had little to do with shriveled leaves. It was fueled by the clinical determination, untainted by tenderness, that had come to govern her in the rose-red room. These days she undressed for Carlo as if lashing him. To admit to the lesser dereliction was, in some obscure yet unmistakable way, to own to the other.