Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  As she bashed the earth-stained planter, one part of her mind writhed. Another shrugged: why waste time beating herself up about an old man and his affairs? But on meeting Alice, that clear young face, Laura was overwhelmed by what she had done. So it was crucial to ply the girl with food, to heap her with muffins and love.

  Alice sipped guava juice, spoke of university, spoke of films. Light floated in her hair, and homemade muesli with quinoa was set before her by an appreciative waiter. She was writing a screenplay, Alice confided. What she actually longed to divulge was the brilliance of the man she would receive that afternoon. He lectured her in Communications, so the affair was conducted in secret. A woman hovered in the background, and a child from an old marriage, but Alice had seen her new love tremble when she undressed. Laura Fraser sliced open a Florentine egg, and Alice was compelled to speak of decisive choices. For what would have become of Carlo and Rosalba, she mused aloud, if they had married each other as planned?

  It was news to Laura!

  “They were, like, engaged. Then he met this princess. Just like in a book? It was the coup de foudre,” declared Alice, whose lover was French and made the most of it.

  Carlo hadn’t breathed a word, said Laura, somewhat miffed. All she knew was that Rosalba had married a stonemason who brought her to Australia, where he made a killing in wholesale fruit.

  Oh, Carlo’d never said anything, it was Rosalba who’d come out with it, said Alice. “When Mum did the extension on their house? Mum thinks Rosalba’s really amazing. She left school at thirteen but she used to do the books for her husband. He was a creep, Mum says. Rosalba refused to go on wearing mourning for him. Some people still cross the street when they see her.”

  The retriever, who had shown admirable patience, began to lick Laura’s ankle. But she failed to understand and allowed the waiter to carry away her crusts.

  Ravi, 2003

  PAUL HINKEL HAD CRINKLY brown hair and crinkly brown eyes and he wasn’t too tall—so many Australians loomed over Ravi like a tree. On a Sunday in spring, upstairs trains carried Ravi to a station where Paul was waiting. A short drive took them to the Hinkels’ town house. As the car turned in to the driveway, the door opened. Paul’s wife appeared at the top of the steps. She greeted Ravi with her head inclined and her palms joined.

  Over lunch in the courtyard, the Hinkels told Ravi about their honeymoon in Sri Lanka. Lunch was marinated chicken breasts, Thai-style prawns, roast potatoes, an orange salad and a green one. The plates were large and white, the platters heaped. At the first mouthful, Paul said, “Mmm-mmm!” and to Ravi, “Martine’s a brilliant cook.” It was a bright day, but the flats next door threw the courtyard into shadow. Against the only sunny wall rose a flat tree whose arms had been forced along wires; Ravi hadn’t known that crucifixion could extend to the vegetable kingdom. Another peculiarity was the large garden bed with concrete sides raised six inches above the ground on which the table and chairs had been placed. It gave the impression that they were lunching on a grave. The design was loony, said Paul, they had intended to level the bed, break up the concrete and pave over the courtyard. But the baby had come early. This was by way of apology for the table, which shook despite wadded cardboard. Here and there, in the rectangle of gray earth on which it stood, a blade of grass struggled, or a weed.

  A southerly arrived at the same time as whipped cream, and a chocolate and hazelnut cake. Glass doors led from the dark courtyard into a room that was dimmer still. In the galley kitchen at one end, Paul stacked the dishwasher. Martine went around switching on a heater and lamps. Then she sat on the couch with Ravi and turned the pages of a photograph album. The past reconfigured itself as scenery. Ravi saw a temple he knew, a stretch of small shops, the remains of a Dutch wall. A white-haired woman had strayed into a photo taken in the fish market: it was Mrs. Anrado, Ravi realized with a little shock. He hadn’t thought of his mother’s old friend in years. Her guesthouse had flourished for a while, but she had borrowed heavily to establish it. When tourists fled, in the late eighties, the bank was intransigent. Mrs. Anrado lost her house with its bedrooms and hot water, and had to appeal to a brother. He allowed her to live in his kitchen and treated her like a servant—her teeth had fallen out, Ravi saw. He was conscious of comfort and warmth, and the clean smell of Martine’s hair. She spoke softly, an innocent enthusiast, now and then touching her throat. Her oval nails were a pale, pretty pink. Paul moved about the kitchen, wiping surfaces with a sponge.

  The doorbell commanded. “That’ll be Mum,” said Paul. When he came back, he was carrying a miniature replica of himself: “This is Anouk.” Martine was already reaching for the child. The woman who had entered with Paul said, “Hi, I’m Leonie.” and “Oh, no need to get up” and “Can’t stay long, I’m due at the gym.” She wore tracksuit pants, and a tight-fitting vest that showed her fibrous brown arms.

  Martine returned the baby to Paul and passed into the kitchen. Standing at a bench, she began setting out white cups. Leonie’s hair was as parched and yellow as grass in midsummer. She asked, “Has Paul told you he’s got ancestors on his father’s side who were in Ceylon?” and “Which detention center were you in?” Her voice, too, was dry and blond. Ravi thought of the cornflakes tipped into bowls at Banksia Gardens while Glory Warren cried, “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” Something had changed in the room: the difference encompassed Leonie and the silky-haired child and the music of teaspoons, but had angles Ravi couldn’t measure.

  Leonie was saying that for two years she had visited a Tamil asylum-seeker at Villawood. “Nasedan? No, Nadesan, that’s it. Lovely guy. Everyone called him Neddy. Have you ever met him?” She also said, “I’m a librarian. When Paul was a little boy, he used to tell everyone that his mum was a lesbian.” Her smile was sparkling and wide. It was difficult to believe that she had a son who was older than Ravi. Another thing Leonie mentioned was that before the divorce, she had owned an antique dresser carved from Ceylon ebony. Paul went to a shelf, and then to a different room, stepping over the gate at the foot of the stairs: he was looking for the photo that would prove it.

  An electric jug began to rattle in the kitchen, letting off steam. The baby clambered off the couch and staggered about, then sat down all at once and opened her eyes wide at her cleverness. Ravi gathered her onto his lap. She had been premature, explained Leonie, and wasn’t really slow for her age at all. Ravi would have liked to have gone on sitting there forever, the baby smiling and touching his face, while Leonie said, “Sri Lankans are so gentle,” and the past, sectioned into 4x6 rectangles and protected with plastic, could be safely shut up in a book.

  Fear was rising like water in Martine Hinkel as she tilted the jug over the pot. Teaspoons had provoked it. Long ago, people she loved had taught her that black skin harbors germs. No one, learning what Martine’s life had been like, would have held her responsible for it. But the past was a trinket she kept locked, lied about, wore always around her neck. One of the things that lay twisted inside was love; she would never betray it to the light. The rest, Martine wanted to believe, had withered to dust. In Asia, in Africa, dark children had enchanted her. But that was before she had a child of her own. Just now, she had been arranging teacups on a tray when time had flashed forward. It was the following morning, or the one after that, and Anouk opened wide, as Mummy requested, to receive a morsel of soft egg. Into that trusting mouth went the teaspoon that Ravi had touched. Reason said, Dishwasher, Sterilization, and, loudest of all, You are vile, you are mad. But Martine shivered in a shadow she couldn’t outrun. The baby was patting Ravi’s cheek, but that was of no importance—what menaced was the conjunction of mouth and spoon. Did the bibbed child in Martine’s vision come from the future or the past? Her hand flew to her throat, checking that something was in place.

  Leonie said, “How’s that tea coming along, love? I’ve got five minutes.”

  Martine’s fingers found what she needed at the back of a drawer. Coming forward with the tray, she looked f
or a way around Paul. The lines of a toaster, the heft of a jug: things like that mattered to her husband. They had sat on floor cushions until they could afford the couch he had chosen. There had been chopsticks or tinny two-dollar-shop knives until the desired canteen came up at a Peter’s of Kensington sale. Distributing cups, positioning the sugar bowl, Martine knew that Paul had spotted the anomaly. On a leather ottoman at Ravi’s feet, she murmured, “This is a souvenir from Alice Springs, I thought you might like to keep it after you’ve stirred your tea, a dingo’s an Australian icon?” The baby said, Mmm-mmm-mmm, leaning out from Ravi’s lap. He exchanged her for a spoon.

  Ravi, 2003

  HE HAD NEVER MET anyone like Crystal Bowles. He had never seen anything like the streaky brown and gold of her hair. She wore it in pigtails or piled carelessly on her head. When they were both facing their screens, Ravi could study it or the solid column of her neck. He never saw her without thinking of his favorite supermarket dessert: caramel, cream and chocolate packed into plastic and individually served. She wore tiny skirts over jeans. On a cold morning, she arrived in a leopard-skin coat. It seemed the height of luxury to Ravi, who had no idea that the leopard had been made in China. Under this glamorous garment, a much-washed green T-shirt asked Do I Look Like a People Person? Ravi had heard Crystal say that she shopped for clothes at Vinnies. He couldn’t understand why a girl like that would rummage through the cast-off garments of strangers. She often called in sick. Ravi felt sure that the germs trapped in the seams of her clothes were exacting their toll.

  He was sent on a short training course in web design held in the city. Images faded or flared as a cursor moved over them: the first online tutorial was in creating rollovers. When they broke for coffee, a boy standing near Ravi remarked, “Should be called a glideover. It’s not like anything actually rolls.” Ravi thought of the older model of mouse with a hard rubber ball embedded in its base. He could remember the shape of it in his hand, and blowing on the ball to free it of dust. The boy wrinkled his nose. “Oh, right. Interesting.” Ravi felt old.

  Work was lessons, parables, mysteries. Nadine Flanagan, the webmaster, sent Ravi an email called feedback. hi ravi, it would be great to hear your own ideas in meetings. we’re proactive players in the e-zone! Ravi looked up “proactive” in his online dictionary. In the weekly think-tank sessions, he listened with interest to everything his colleagues said. If asked what he thought, he would agree with either Nadine or Will Abrahams, the unit’s design guru. That had seemed natural, courteous, safe. Everyone had more experience and was senior to him. Ravi rarely left his desk, never made or received personal calls, completed his set tasks in the allotted time. He looked across at Crystal. She was asking her phone, “So did Adam get kissed in the end?” There was a pleasant, rasping quality to her voice. She was wearing long gray socks, bronze stiletto sandals, a short blue dress. Light caught the clear plastic combs in her hair.

  He took a cigarette from the pack in his drawer and made his way across the office. Someone or other was always coming or going at Ramsay, to and from the stationery cupboard or a meeting room, out to the car park, where they could smoke. People on the move often carried a phone, grabbing the opportunity to make a call. Down the stairs they went and up, in and out of the photocopying room or the kitchen. Sometimes his workplace looked to Ravi like one of those hand-held labyrinths contained in plastic in which a tiny silver ball can be set rolling. That was an idea of his own, but he could see that it wouldn’t do.

  A terrace of narrow houses backed onto the car park. They sheltered small businesses: a barber, a Chinese herbalist, an artists’ co-op. At the bottom of the barber’s yard, a crooked hibiscus rose above the fence. On the Ramsay side, the lower branches had been lopped off to ensure safe passage for the trucks making deliveries to the warehouse. Long strands of a creeper, too, hung over the palings. Against its green vigor, the hibiscus looked arthritic. But one morning each gray twig flaunted a swirl of red silk. Now the maimed glory of the hibiscus spoke to Ravi of a different thing. Eventually, he realized that it was twinned with the old sideboard in the blue house. Whenever he came out to have a cigarette, the first thing he looked for was the tree.

  Every time he told Hana about something that had surprised him at Ramsay, she would say, “Oh, Australians!” She told Ravi that when her brother first came to Sydney, he had worked as an assistant to a house painter. There was far more work than the two men could handle. “The first thing Australians do when they buy a house is change it. Why don’t they just buy a house they like?”

  She would like to rent a house, said Hana, so that her daughter would have a garden to play in. But the exams that would authorize Abebe to practice accountancy were more than a year away. Until then, Hana hoped that the rent on their flat wouldn’t rise. It gave on to the parking area at the front of the orange-brick block. The main room contained a sofa bed where Abebe slept, a TV, a computer, a table at which the family worked and ate. At one end of the room was a small kitchen; at the other, the door to the bedroom that Tarik and Hana shared. Ravi thought of the child riding her scooter up and down the concrete side passage. The rubbish bins were kept there. “That’s another thing about Australians,” remarked Hana. “They think everyone in Africa lives in a mud hut.”

  This conversation was taking place, not without difficulty, in the middle of a carnival crowd. A street had been pedestrianized and lined with stalls for a Spring Festival. There was a Cook Islands Cultural Association, an Islamic Women’s Aid Agency, a police recruiting booth. Rice-paper rolls tempted, along with Turkish pancakes, Malaysian noodles, Lebanese pastries, Indian sweets.

  Near the first stalls, Abebe had led Tarik away. When Ravi next saw the child, by a stage where four West Africans were setting up their drums, she was nibbling a pink cloud. Then the crowd bellied and she vanished again. Ravi never questioned or teased Tarik, remembering how, as a child, he had resented the intrusiveness of adults. But now he bought a box of honeyed sweets that he pressed on Hana. That was his strategy, to arrive with chocolates or little cakes, a gift that didn’t single out Tarik but had been chosen with her in mind.

  Hana stopped to examine a display of shoes. She picked up a blue ballet slipper with a beige and blue bow and turned it over to look at the sole. She turned it over again and slipped it onto her hand. She held the shoe up, then put it down and turned away looking bored. They were almost at the end of the street, and Ravi calculated that he had seen no more than a dozen white faces. One of them belonged to the local MP, who was handing out unwanted flyers, baring his teeth. The banner over his head proclaimed that Richard Madison Supports Diversity. Hana said, “He looks like he’s hoping someone will give him a medal for it.” She paused before a dispiriting array of cheap homewares and cosmetics offered by Ethiopian Community Aid. Hana exchanged a few words with the women behind the table and came away with a scented candle. Tucking it into her bag, she told Ravi, “At home, I’d never speak to people like that.”

  Children were everywhere: sturdy babies in strollers, boys and girls wheedling treats from a parent or weaving independently through the crowd. Tarik appeared, leading Abebe. “Mum, see what I got?” The child’s face had been painted with pink and orange petals. She blew a soap bubble at her mother through a plastic loop. “Very clever,” said Hana, not as if she meant it. Tarik began dancing up and down on the spot, making an irritating noise with her lips pressed tight. Abebe placed his hand on her shoulder and said, “Shall we meet back at the car in half an hour?” He looked from Ravi to Hana. His expression was interrogative but not only that; it looked to Ravi as if Abebe had reached a conclusion. On their outings, he often found a reason to go off with Tarik, leaving Ravi and Hana together. Ravi had read this as a tactic for sparing mother and daughter from each other. Now he wasn’t sure.

  Hana drew the candle from her bag and held it out to Tarik. “Yuk!” said Tarik. “Yuk and double yuk to you,” replied Hana. “A million billion trillion yuks to you!” “Go a
nd put your head in a bag!” Hana and her child had the same long cheeks and sharp nose. They were dressed alike, too, in windcheaters and jeans. Ravi was thinking that Hana always wore that type of thing, when he understood what he found disturbing about Crystal Bowles: her clothes didn’t go together. They formed a sentence whose parts were individually alluring but made up a grammar that bewildered. In meetings, the way Crystal had written up a destination was often admired. She whipped up airy marvels from a stodge of facts: “Be Amazed by History!” It was really creative. Studying one of her articles after he had returned to his desk, Ravi realized that it accorded equal weight to a civil war and an anecdote about an emperor’s horse. He found it unsettling in the same way as stilettos worn with socks.

  Hana had mentioned that as a child she had spent long months in bed. “There was something wrong with my heart.” From time to time, it still beat irregularly. There were days when she wore a monitor; Ravi had seen the wire taped down near her collarbone. Hana’s fingers often went to that spot. The gesture was an invalid’s, plaintive and fussy. Once, as Ravi looked on, that beautiful, bony hand found its way to Tarik’s arm. A faraway look came over Hana’s face as she pinched up the flesh under her fingers. The child sat wide-eyed, faintly smirking, still.

  On weekends, Sydney waited. A magical bus route wound east, attended by the shimmer of bays. Ravi saw an image from a book: sandstone shaped into arches and towers and piled on a hill. Set against clouds, the convent? school? hallucination? was charged with prophecy and haunting. Then the bus had left it behind and found its way to the sea. Sometimes it seemed to Ravi that the city and all its inhabitants sought only that untrammeled blue terminus—the Australian mind slid towards it on shining rails. Even in Oxford Street, where the traffic dragged itself forward in agony, or moaned and tended its wounds, the fumes were edged with brine. Encouraged, the cars crept on, hoping for a glimpse of waves before expiring. Ocean delirium was pervasive. Parched inland suburbs boasted Beach roads, Bay streets, Seaview crescents. Ravi remembered his first Australian day, the boats dying of thirst in the streets.