Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

  Tarik laughed loudly and without mirth. A few coins lay on the table. She rattled them, waiting to be told to stop.

  “Sit, sit. I’ll bring coffee.” At the cooker, Hana looked around. “You didn’t have to make a special trip. And in this weather. You are a good friend to us. But my brother should have told you it’s not urgent. Did you speak to him or did he text you?”

  It was plain that Ravi had no idea what she meant.

  “Didn’t my brother call you?” When Ravi shook his head, she sighed. “He said he would call.” And then, “So but why did you come?”

  On the other side of the table, Tarik stopped playing with the coins.

  “I was nearby,” announced Ravi to the air between mother and daughter. “I had to see someone who lives near here. When I was on my way to the station it started raining and I forgot Abebe would be at work.”

  There was silence and the delicious smell of coffee. Ravi said, “Paul. That was the man I had to see. I work with him.”

  Hana came forward with a plastic tray. “It’s good that you came,” she said. “It’s good not to get wet in the rain. And lucky for us. You must have guessed that we needed you.” She placed a cup before Ravi and turned to the child. “Tarik, you can put that book away and get ready for bed now.”

  “But I want to stay here!”

  “I have to talk to Ravi about an important matter.” Hana pressed her lips together and stared at her daughter.

  Tarik scraped her chair backwards. “Can I read my library book there?” She pointed to the sofa bed.

  “All right.”

  The child darted past softly chanting, “Paul, Paul, pudding and pie.” She gave another loud, mirthless laugh and flung herself on the cushions. Ravi saw that she was taller—older—than his image of her. A small lamp beside the sofa leaked light about her head.

  Before Ravi’s eyes, the scene had arranged itself as he had imagined it.

  Sitting at the table with him, Hana explained. Their computer, bought secondhand by Abebe soon after he came to Australia, was almost ten years old, crashed frequently, was maddeningly slow. “Even reading about university courses—my brother helped me, but it was so slow, and these days everything is online this, online that. So we have decided to get a new computer.”

  The complication was this: her friend Jodie could provide Hana with a Mac at a bargain price. “Her boyfriend sells them or makes them or I don’t know what. He can get us a display model.” But what the family was used to was a PC. “Even at my daughter’s school, that’s what they have. So we don’t know which one to buy. I told my brother we should ask you, you would know.”

  Ravi glanced at the dinosaur on its desk in a corner. “If you’re used to a PC…”

  “Jodie says Mac is easy to learn. And some people my brother studies with have Macs. They say they are better.”

  “People like what they’re used to.”

  “But what is the difference?”

  “There are more programs available for PCs. Especially business software and games. Although it’s true that Macs are better for design software.” Ravi recognized that this evenhandedness was not helpful, but it was produced by his brain in a secondary, automatic way.

  “But which one is better overall?”

  Uppermost in Ravi’s mind was, How can we stop talking about computers? He wanted to go back to the moment when Hana had spoken of needing him. But it was like trying to run Windows XP on the antique Dell in the corner, it was beyond his capacity. “Macs have better desktop publishing software,” he said and saw Hana’s face go blank. She started to finger the wire at her neck. Inexplicably, he was driven to say, “But PCs are generally faster.”

  Hana stirred her coffee. She remarked that she liked the way Macs looked.

  Ravi agreed. But was unable to keep from adding, “It’s easier to upgrade a PC.” Scrabbling for simple words, he mentioned operating systems, UI, megahertz and, at one lunatic limit, maximum personal customizability.

  Then he had run out of things to say.

  The silence that followed was like the silence before the first note sounds at a concert, tense and thickened with expectation. A tea towel, the coins on the table: objects in Ravi’s vicinity loomed, receded, loomed. He glanced at Hana and was shocked by what he saw. Her lips looked dry and defenseless. She was leaning forward, very slightly.

  On a rush of pity, he began, “Some people say…”—that strange, scaly look to her lips! It compelled him to lick his own—“…that PCs are more likely to get viruses. But they have a lot of advantages.”

  Hana folded and refolded the tea towel into a small square. It wasn’t as if she had never imagined a version of this scene, but what amuses as a doodle alarms as a blueprint. She unfolded the cloth and smoothed it with the heel of her hand. Made of Irish linen, the tea towel was ugly and indestructible—it must have been a present. It was printed with mushrooms grouped about an openmouthed fish. The fish led Hana to an evening in Paris. It involved her husband—was that an encouragement or a warning? She thrust the tea towel at Ravi, saying, “You know, this reminds me of the time…” Pierre and Hana had taken his mother, a widow, to a restaurant, where she had scanned the menu and pointed triumphantly: it should be le not la sarde, she declared. The mistake proved that she had been brought to an inferior establishment; Pierre’s mother didn’t say so but assumed the pained, virtuous look of a martyr. Her son remarked, in his peaceable way, that he believed the name of the fish was one of those rare nouns that could be either masculine or feminine. At that, the widow grew frenzied and tore off her glasses to display tears. To think that she had produced a son who made elementary errors in his own language! What was worse, she had only herself to blame, for she had knowingly married a man whose mother was a Pole.

  Ravi plucked the only thing he understood from this rigmarole: a woman couldn’t be too careful in her choice of husband. The tea towel crumpled under his hand. It was too late, he could no longer say what he had come to tell Hana. There was something wrong with his heart—no monitor was required to prove it.

  A voice came out of the puddle of light behind Hana. “Miss Moran at school’s got two dogs called Mac and PC. PC is stinky but Mac is soooo cute.”

  Ravi saw Hana smile. At once, the agitation between them subsided; an invisible hand, passing over the table, had made everything smooth. She offered more coffee, and he accepted. They drank it, talking of this and that. Like someone in a fog who has discovered, just in time, that the next step forward would take him over a cliff, Ravi was shamefaced and relieved.

  On the train home, he replayed everything that had happened, over and over. Each time, he was mortified afresh by how close he had come to making a fool of himself—in the presence of the child, too! By the time his footsteps in the drive set Fair Play barking, he had persuaded himself that he had never meant to go through with his declaration. Unbolting the side gate, he spoke to a dead woman: Did you really think I would leave you?

  Laura, 2004

  THEY HAD ABANDONED THE Koreans in favor of the classy new Japanese. Robyn Orr was saying, “…so we have another drink, and he asks me if I’d like to go back to his place. And then he goes, ‘There’s just one thing you should know. I’m not gay or anything. But I really like wearing women’s underpants.’ So I ask why. And he goes, ‘My arse looks gorgeous in a G-string!’”

  The women spluttered over their sashimi, wiped tears. “God!” they cried. And sometimes, “Guys!”

  Then it was suddenly over and each was as somber as if Robyn hadn’t told her latest Internet dating story.

  After a while, Laura asked diffidently if Robyn ever found herself thinking about Ferdy.

  Robyn snapped, “You know that wasn’t going anywhere.”

  And going somewhere was the thing.

  Gloomily, they feasted on slivers of raw flesh. Until Robyn said, “Listen: keep this quiet for now. The general meeting tomorrow? Cliff’s going to announce he’s taking early retirement.
”

  “Wow! Really?” Laura put down her chopsticks. “When?”

  “Early next year. It’s going to take a little while to find a new CEO.”

  Robyn was looking attentively at her friend. Laura Fraser was stacking on the kilos. And she had that caved-in look around the diaphragm that screamed out for Pilates. But she dragged her chin up to say, “Robyn! Are you going to…?”

  Robyn had got wasabi up her nose. She waved a deprecating hand.

  “You’ve got to,” said faithful Laura Fraser. “You’d be brilliant. Who else could they even consider?”

  “Quentin.”

  “They couldn’t.” Then, less certainly, “They wouldn’t, surely.”

  “Or they could go external.”

  But Robyn knew that Alan Ramsay would be in favor of promoting someone from the ranks. It looked like sentimentality but was essentially shrewd: internal promotions fostered loyalty to Ramsay and were crucial to motivation. On the other hand, external hires generated loyalty to whoever did the hiring. Cliff Ferrier had hired Robyn. And not because of any fucked-up white guilt either. Robyn Orr scored the top marketing job at Ramsay because she was a marketing genius—Cliff had made a point of telling her so. She’d always felt grateful to Cliff.

  That was before the ride home after last year’s conference party.

  Paddo was on Robyn’s way: it had made sense to share a cab with Cliff. In the backseat, leftover aroma of pizza and Friday-night vomit. Robyn fell asleep almost at once.

  Minutes later, she woke and saw that Cliff had moved up beside her. “Was I snoring?” mumbled Robyn. She leaned her head against him. He settled himself more comfortably, his arm slipping around her shoulders. Robyn closed her eyes.

  When a hand brushed her breast, Robyn’s sleepy thoughts were of Sayyid Jamir from the London office. Fingers kneaded her flesh, and she sighed.

  “When my red, red Robyn comes bob-bob-bobbin’,” wheezed Cliff.

  Robyn’s eyes flashed open. She pulled away. Cliff’s hand followed. Robyn shoved hard, palms against his chest. “Stop it. Just fucking stop it.”

  At first, there was only the sound of their breathing. Then Cliff’s hand lunged. But he did no more than run the tip of a finger down her cheek. Robyn’s shoulders slumped. Keen to forgive, she turned her smile towards Cliff. A hand clamped itself to her jaw. “You think you’ve got it made, don’t you?” inquired Cliff pleasantly. He squeezed harder. “Little girl. Little bitch.” He released her and turned away.

  The following day, something that had lasted a minute had acquired the skewed force of hallucination. Robyn’s eyes, like the blinds in her bedroom, were closed. Cliff’s face was a clown-white balloon under her lids. Her jaw was tender where his fingers had clutched. That was nothing, however, compared to the pulsing in her skull, the milk thistle capsules downed before the party having proved inadequate against vodka. Ferdy came in with a pot of ginger tea, kissed Robyn, straightened the doona, went away.

  Robyn knew she had leaned against Cliff in the taxi; he had misunderstood, that was all. A mild eroticism had always vibrated between them. Quite often, aware of Cliff’s approval, Robyn had arranged her parts for his inspection: pelvis forward, shoulders back. She could not, with fairness, claim never to have signaled something that might have been encouragement. And in the end nothing had happened. Thus Robyn reasoned, lying in a bath with scented candles set on the rim. Her need to minimize what had happened was strong.

  Robyn Orr was neither a fool nor a coward. Refusing to acknowledge trespass was a way of denying Cliff power, as a mother might ignore a child who thrusts himself into her talk. It enabled Robyn to face Monday ready to be flip: Scrub up okay on Saturday? But Cliff hailed her first, between the entrance and the stairs. “My share of the cab.” The note fluttered as he passed; Robyn grabbed reflexively, missed, looked foolish. But she had yet to feel the force of Cliff’s hostility. He conveyed it, simply and devastatingly, by ignoring her. When meetings obliged it, he kept conversation brief and stared at the side of her head.

  Robyn’s parents, the black one and the pink one, had a mantra in common: You’re in charge of your life. Robyn Orr reminded herself, Never look back. There was no going forward if the past was a rock around your neck. So Robyn had moved on: taken up yoga, devised a brilliant campaign for the new Chinese city guides, laid a last ultimatum before Ferdy. It was just that from time to time, the sense that Cliff Ferrier had got away with something was a sore rubbed raw. His face, whiter and larger than life, hovered in Robyn’s dreams. The eyes overflowed their sockets. They were the eyes of a glutton.

  On the way back to the office, “So what’s Cliff going to do with himself?” asked Laura.

  “Cash in the stock options. Grow bananas on his place behind Byron. Surf. Stay stoned 24/7. Whatever.”

  Ever since the global management meeting, Robyn had been running the numbers. Alan would pick Quentin, Cliff wouldn’t pick Robyn, either or both might pick someone new. Quentin 1, Robyn 0 and dark horses waiting. Robyn didn’t look back, but a pattern of old wrongs flapped at her heel.

  Crossing the road, Laura said, “You have to go for it. Promise?”

  “Totally,” said Robyn Orr.

  Ravi, 2004

  THE MIRROR IN THE lift showed Ravi a man in a gray suit and a woman in a blue one. Angie Segal tilted her head. “You look good—I knew that suit’d fit.” It belonged to her husband. She smiled at reflected Ravi. He would have liked to smile back, but his face was stuck.

  Two men, one a skeleton, the other turbaned, were waiting when the lift arrived. Angie spoke briefly to the thin one, afterwards informing Ravi, “Feverel’s the member today. Adrian Feverel. He’s new—jury’s still out, but signs are he’s not one of the total bastards.” She offered Ravi a packet of chocolate-coated sultanas. At a pedestrian crossing on the way to the hearing, she had burst out with, “Members rake in the loot. They get a flash car and to feel like they’re really hot shit. You can bet most of them fall over their arses to toe the line.”

  From the window in reception, the view was rowdy with blue and green. At Ravi’s shoulder, Angie said, “Hyde Park.” They examined its trees in silence, and the harbor’s unambiguous stare. For the first time, that quick, trilling impression Ravi associated with Angie was absent—she was a phone that was out of credit. She said, “Feverel’s ex-DFAT. That’s Foreign Affairs and Trade.”

  If that cloud reaches the sun before I count to five. Ravi counted slowly to ten. The cloud had stalled. Spring continued to swagger through every leaf—a plain sign that the tribunal would reject him. Angie Segal was still talking, still untypically spelling everything out. So she, too, expected the worst, Ravi could tell.

  The member said, “Mr. Mendis, no one doubts that your wife and son were murdered. But why do you claim that the state was responsible?”

  Ravi had rehearsed this with Angie. “No one was arrested or even detained for the murders, sir member. The police took no credible action. Also, there has been no follow-up to the complaint I lodged with the Human Rights Commission.”

  The room in which the hearing was taking place had no window and no shadows. Swearing Ravi in, the attendant’s bronze lips had quivered, and she looked no higher than his chin. She checked that the recording equipment was working and left the room. That made sense to Ravi: why sit there listening to what no one wanted to hear?

  In the cramped space, the member’s desk imposed. Glancing sideways, Ravi could see Angie’s blue sleeve moving as she took notes. But he tried to keep his gaze, as she had advised, on Feverel. He saw silver hair cropped close to the skull and a face that had bones behind it. It was saying, “…does not, in itself, constitute proof.”

  Time passed. At Angie’s urging, Ravi had written to Aloysius de Mel and begged. To his amazement, the old tortoise had obliged. A certified copy of his formal statement lay among Feverel’s many papers. It repeated what Aloysius had once reported to Carmel: that the police had orders to drop Malini a
nd Hiran’s case.

  Feverel’s pleasant voice asked, “Why wasn’t this statement submitted to Immigration with your original application, Mr. Mendis?”

  Ravi explained.

  “But after your application for asylum was rejected, your friend in Vancouver changed his mind and agreed to put his allegation in writing.”

  Angie Segal was allowed to be present but was discouraged from speaking. Ravi felt rather than saw her stir. If only he could pass her something to gnaw, a thumb or a sweet. He said, “Mr. de Mel’s sister in Sri Lanka died last year, sir member. He has no need to go back. So he is not afraid to make a statement now.”

  “His statement is hearsay, Mr. Mendis. It relies on an allegation by an unnamed third party.”

  This only added depth to a pattern that was engraving itself on the morning. There was nothing in the dossier to prove that asylum should be granted: a formal order to track down and kill Ravi might have satisfied, or a signed confession that Malini and Hiran had died at official hands. Conversely, what the dossier did contain proved nothing; it might even have been concocted. Absence and presence alike cast a dubious light on Ravi’s case.

  Angie had been in touch with Freda Hobson, who had added to her original statement at numbing length—the new one went on for pages. But Feverel had passed on to a beautiful, imposing document with a wax seal; from the corner of his eye, Ravi saw Angie turn to the copy in her file. Like Aloysius de Mel, Frog-Face—valiant Frog-Face!—had responded to Ravi’s plea.

  Feverel said, “This person.” He was peering at the name at the bottom of Frog-Face’s declaration—a venerable, musical, polysyllabic name that easily defeated Feverel. “Why was this person’s first letter typed and left unsigned?”