Questions of Travel

by Michelle De Kretser

“He was afraid of being identified, sir member.” Ravi added, “He was just trying to warn me not to go back to the university.”

  “If he was afraid then, why has he made a formal statement now? Unlike your other friend, this one still lives in Sri Lanka.”

  “He is a very brave gentleman, sir member.”

  The member received this in silence. He turned a page in his file.

  A little later, Feverel suggested that the sketch of the vase might represent a joke in poor taste. A sullen note began to creep into Ravi’s replies. Yes, it was true that when he had no fixed address, he had received no sketches. No, he couldn’t account for the failure of whoever was responsible to track him down. What he really wanted to say was, Sir member, you are making the same mistake I did: you are looking for clues and connections. What happened has no plot, it’s only true. His eyes strayed from Feverel’s—a calm, faint blue behind rimless lenses—to the coat of arms on the wall behind the desk. Ravi told a kangaroo and an emu, How ridiculous you look! Do you have a consistent story?

  “Mr. Mendis, in your original statement, you claimed that you were afraid when the police were interviewing you in connection with the murders. Why was that?”

  “There was a man.”

  Feverel offered theatrical patience. “What kind of man, Mr. Mendis? A police officer?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was his name?”

  “No one said.”

  “It didn’t occur to you to ask?”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they were the police.” Adding silently: You fool, sir member.

  “And what did this officer say or do that made you afraid of him?”

  “He said there were questions it was better not to ask. He told me I was lucky to know that my wife and son were dead.”

  “You chose to interpret these remarks as proof that the police were disinclined to pursue the investigation?”

  It went on and on like that. At one point, Ravi’s gaze slipped sideways, as if pulled. Angie had angled her notepad towards him: Keep going, you’re doing well.

  “Mr. Mendis, you claim that the Sri Lankan authorities were intent on persecuting you. But you were granted the police clearance you needed to obtain your Australian tourist visa. How do you account for that?”

  Then: “Please speak clearly so that the recording equipment can pick you up.”

  “A man helped me.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You will have to do better than that, Mr. Mendis.”

  “A high-up person,” said Ravi, after some thought.

  A wooden bar about six inches high ran across the middle of the member’s desk. Describing the setup at the hearing, Angie had explained that “the modesty bar” prevented either side from seeing what the other was writing. It had obscured Feverel’s hands, but now, as the member raised his glass of water and sipped, Ravi saw that the fingers circling the glass were felted with reddish fur.

  His eyes fled to Feverel’s face—it remained the face of a spectacled saint. It asked, “Why did this official intervene on your behalf?”

  The kangaroo and emu on the coat of arms had given way to a fox and a goose. When they started cavorting, Ravi’s hands jumped to join the jig. Their dance couldn’t be seen by Feverel, who said, “Mr. Mendis…?”

  “There was payment,” said Ravi.

  “Are you claiming that you bribed an official to procure your police clearance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was this person a Sri Lankan national?”

  He didn’t mind the quack, quack, quack, sang Ravi silently. His hands were keeping time.

  “What can you tell the tribunal about this official, Mr. Mendis?”

  “Member, my client—”

  But Ravi needed no help—he knew very well what pleased and excited the fox. “He was frightening,” he said. He tried not to stare at that soft red hand.

  “But a minute ago, you asserted that you bribed this official to help you. Is that correct?”

  “He helped me, sir member. But he had a frightening face.”

  Feverel’s eyes moved behind his glasses. He said, “So this man, like the one at the police interviews, frightened you.”

  On the coat of arms, they were singing, And the legs all dangling down-o! Ravi would have sung along willingly, but the borrowed tie had him by the throat.

  “Was it by any chance the same man?” asked Feverel.

  Angie intervened, saying something sharp; Feverel took his time putting her in her place. But his sarcasm had reached Ravi as a revelation. All the devils were one and the same: like happy moments, the devil contained and was amplified by those that had gone before. He might have long ears or wraparound glasses or a borrowed face, he might choose to transfix with pale eyes—what was certain was that he would come. He was everyone’s last visitor, a tasteless cosmic joke.

  Feverel moved on to his next question. “Mr. Mendis, what do you think would happen to you if you returned to Sri Lanka?”

  Crystal was saying, “Do you remember when there was that fashion for petticoats worn as dresses? That whole inner-becomes-outer thing? I had a blue petticoat with cream lace and a purple one with black lace.”

  “Summer ninety-seven ninety-eight,” said Nadine.

  This was so amazing that not a mouse clicked in the ’zone.

  Eventually: “I would’ve said ninety-six ninety-seven?”

  But Nadine had finished talking for the day.

  “Hang on, I wore my blue petticoat over a black T-shirt that time I went to hear Nick Cave.” Crystal was Googling. Then, “Yeah, you’re right: ninety-seven ninety-eight.”

  “Was that when razor scooters were everywhere?” asked Will.

  “No, that was way later, like maybe two thousand.”

  On Ravi’s screen, Istanbul was the Destination of the Day. A photograph summoned the Hagia Sophia; if he clicked on it, it would transport him to a Grand Bazaar. He remembered that he had once found this effortless travel exhilarating. Bodies are always local, whispered Malini the spoilsport. Ravi was meant to be designing an online promotion for a special offer, but where was the call to action? Buy two city guides, get a third free! The task struck him as devoid of all meaning, a busy waste of effort. Still, it would serve to fill up his time sheet. Time was what mattered here, not history—time could be managed. When Hiran’s photo appeared in answer to Ravi’s summons, he spoke to his son silently: In 2000, someone slit your throat.

  After the hearing, when Ravi had changed back into his own clothes and returned the suit to Angie, he had promised her, knowing it was a lie, that he was taking the afternoon off. In the Ramsay car park, he crossed to his usual spot and stood there with the sole of one foot against the fence. Spring had been tranquilized and put to bed under a gray blanket, but it would have been warm there, by the hibiscus, if only the sun had been out. What he had heard in the e-zone had been no more than idle conversation. All it demonstrated was the ability of Crystal, Will, Nadine—lucky people, said Ravi to himself—to connect then and now. He thought, If I’m allowed to stay, there’ll only be before and after. A hyperlink could replace Sri Lanka with Australia in a flash, but what if you preferred to scroll down a continuous story? Ravi smoked his cigarette to the end. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  Before letting him go, Angie had insisted on taking Ravi to lunch. Her small, tortured hands, busy with butter and bread, reproached the immaculate cloth. At the conclusion of the hearing, Feverel had announced that he was reserving his decision. That was usual, Angie told Ravi, the decision would be handed down in a few weeks. “If it goes against you, there’s always the Federal Court. But the evidence we offered in corroboration was as solid as it gets in this kind of case.” A red claw rose from a platter of seafood and floated before Ravi’s eyes.

  Two hours after entering the room, Feverel had picked up the phone on his desk. “Hearing Officer, cou
ld you please return and close this hearing?” Waiting for her, they had sat, Ravi, Angie, Feverel, in a silence that was enormous. Ravi’s hands lay quietly in his lap. He stole a look at Feverel: the member’s hands, folded under his chin, were only dimly tufted across the knuckles. The fox rearing in Ravi’s mind was a brilliantly ruddy animal who frolicked like a male in his prime. Did he answer to the name of Feverel? The suggestion was far-fetched and the dossier lacked proof; the decision would have to be reserved. The fox had been strong and greedy; beyond that, Ravi knew he couldn’t say. Over and over, Angie had impressed on him the need to boost his credibility with details. But memory might preserve only sensations: pain, humiliation, fear rising like a concrete stair. When Ravi thought back to his time with the fox, he saw a scene as dim and unfocused as a botched snapshot. It contained two figures struggling in ecstasy or fear. That was all. But when all the distractions were stripped away, didn’t life itself come down to that struggle? Details weren’t essential to truth, only to persuasive stories. These days, when he thought of the dripping tap in the fox’s den, Ravi couldn’t be sure if it was a memory or something borrowed by his brain. It was the kind of detail that turned up in telefilms where an informer sweated in a motel and headlights arced over the wall. “They do a sensational white chocolate mousse here,” pleaded Angie Segal, but Ravi said that he had had enough.

  In the warehouse at Ramsay, an acoustic guitar was tackling “Hallelujah,” complicated by the beep beep of a forklift in reverse. Ravi realized that he was waiting for Laura Fraser. Recently, they had discussed iPods. Ravi had confessed that he longed to buy one. “Oh, you should,” encouraged Laura. “I love mine.” Then she went quiet. After a while, she said that she missed waiting for a particular song to come on the radio. “It sounds silly, but because I can listen to any song I want, whenever I want it, I miss hopeful anticipation.”

  The fire door opened, and Paul Hinkel came out. He raised a hand at Ravi, then lowered it and pointed at his car. The afternoon was ending, and how did Ravi imagine he was going to fill out his time sheet? Still he put off returning to his desk. Laura Fraser might arrive and say something that changed the look of the day.

  Laura, 2004

  CHARLIE MCKENZIE HAD LOST his hair and gained a chin. But Laura, looking through a hole in time, saw a faded red quilt. She was eighteen, and a lovely, sexy man was attending to her under it. Late one night, Laura had sent an email to Charlie’s gallery—like any traveler who has lost her way, she was trying to get back to a landmark she knew.

  So here she was facing up to her old love over tom yum and fish cakes in the big Thai place on King Street. Charlie had driven up to the city for the weekend, and was staying with friends nearby.

  There was the usual pandemonium at the long tables in the middle. A kindly waiter had placed Laura and Charlie as far away as possible, by the window. Even so, noise crashed about them. Charlie shrieked that Fee was living in Dapto with their three kids and her new partner. It had prompted his own move to Wollongong; he was teaching part time at the university there. “And you?” he screamed.

  She shouted this and that.

  She had dressed for the occasion, choosing the grape-green shirt bought to overwhelm Paul Hinkel. Charlie had yelled, on seeing her, that she hadn’t changed a bit. “Nor have you,” said Laura, meaning: Still a liar, still a charmer. She remembered how kind he had been when Hester died. His gallery’s website had revealed his latest paintings. There, too, only the surface had altered.

  The main courses came. The volume dipped, and Charlie confided that there was “no give in Fee.” It was a formula Laura recognized. Once, it had applied to her. Decoded, it meant unwillingness to accept his women. She smiled at him. He took it as an invitation to touch his knee to hers. The din rose; it was someone’s Happy Birthday. Laura and Charlie went on exchanging the occasional shout, but it was easier to empty a bottle, eat red curry of duck, rub up the past under the table.

  She would walk him to his friends’ place, Laura offered, when they left the restaurant. It was a night filched from summer, although the calendar said spring. There were girls in the street barely dressed in violent hues. A big group of them shoved out of a pub, hooting at something they had left behind. Sydney was doing what Sydney did best, putting on a perfect night for getting shit-faced. Charlie steered Laura into a side street, and the scent of jasmine came staggering out of a yard.

  “Ever go back to painting?” he asked.

  “Painting!”

  “You definitely had something there.”

  “No, I didn’t. And you saw it, you said I was right to drop out.”

  “Really? Can’t remember that.” He added, “Anyway, who’s to say I was right?”

  She was stunned. Charlie, for all his sweetness, had always been trenchant about art. He would walk through a show: “Bad, bad, interesting, a copy, a bad copy.”

  Across the street was a tall, narrow house. Protected by iron flowers, a man and a woman were dining on the first-floor balcony at a table lit with candles. In the bright room beyond them, the familiar outlines of furniture were blurred and endowed with mystery by the filmy curtain at the window. It was a scene that suggested narrative, progression, symbol. It opened depth and time in the pair at the table. Presently, they would leave the balcony and move from constriction to a brilliant amplitude whose elements remained vague; in a flash, Laura had taken it all in. What she also realized was that Charlie McKenzie was only trying to flatter—with a view to getting his leg over, she supposed. Once, painting had been the one thing about which he had never pretended; he had changed, after all. Laura had gone looking for the past and found a bad copy. She kissed Charlie goodnight at his friends’ gate and put him from her.

  By the time the taxi dropped her at home, a nor’easter was up. In Sydney, as nowhere else, Laura was conscious of the course of winds; weather here came with compass and map. A nor’easter was the elsewhere wind: its salty fingers scratched up an old itch. I must go away, she thought, fitting her key into the lock.

  Since coming home to Sydney, Laura had holidayed in Cuba, Tasmania, northern Italy. Avoiding London—London was Theo—she had met up with Bea in Havana, with Gaby and her children in Venice. These trips, with their satisfactions and disappointments, had been interludes. They were books read and abandoned in hotels, absorbing while they lasted but left behind without regret. Sometimes their contents leaked: a treed slope near Hobart, strewn by a storm with branches and bark, kept sliding into Laura’s dreams. But real life was Sydney: an area that covered a few streets of shops and restaurants, a house at McMahons Point, an office in Chippendale, a kinetic blue core. Now Laura felt as if her days were fenced with iron lace. The world waited like a lighted, veiled room: a vague, bright amplitude. What am I doing here? she wondered.

  There were photographs of Venice, taken by Theo’s sister, on Laura’s laptop. Each was a tiny, luminous Canaletto: waterways, palaces, tinted skies. Hester had owned a bead like that solid green water—what had become of it? It seemed to Laura that her faith in away, too, had been lost. She had mislaid it at Ramsay. There, everything was known about travel. In the same way, a butcher can be said to know everything about a lamb. Guidebooks lured with the Taj by moonlight, with Machu Picchu at dawn. But the moment that mattered on each journey resisted explanation. It couldn’t be looked up under Spoil Yourself because it addressed only the individual heart. It was only an empty Kleenex box, only a dangling wire hanger, only a battered hillside in a cold spring.

  Away took on the aspect of a solution. It promised enlargement: glowing, ill defined, a movement away from Paul Hinkel. Laura dreaded and desired it. At work, she went on plotting chance encounters: placing herself in his path, engaged in vivacious chat with a colleague seated conveniently close. Perfect was if she was laughing as his red lips passed. But just before that came the electric moment: she wasn’t looking at him, but he couldn’t avoid seeing her. A current ran between that moment and all those Tuesdays and
Thursdays when, entering the waratah room, he had found her naked. Now, as then, Laura moistened. At her desk afterwards, she was sated and hollow. Nothing had changed. She would begin, almost at once, to plan the next time when she would show Paul Hinkel that she was completely indifferent to him. The clear part of her brain saw this pattern and was sickened by and helpless against it. A clean break was called for—it was cleaner. Venice glowed on her screen: space opened in Laura, and movement. She made up her mind that at Christmas, when Ramsay shut down for a week, she would go away.

  At home, she was the subject of a quarrel. She learned this, holding her breath, at the top of the stair. Carlo’s hip had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer kneel before his vegetables. Would Laura take them over, he had asked. She refused, citing work. “Work,” repeated Carlo. He had that peering look he wore when trying to find something he needed. But he turned away to fuss over his sauce. And because Laura apologized again, “Ho capito. No worries.” The air between them was drunk on garlic. She almost confessed: Carlo, what I want to do is smash everything and pull the world out by its roots. He had known lust, therefore despair; he would understand. But he had his nose to a board on which he was chopping herbs with maddening deliberation. “Here, let me,” said Laura. She was terribly kind to him all that afternoon.

  Opening a noiseless door the following Saturday, she heard voices below. They scraped and ripped but reached Laura, who was tiptoeing forward, too muffled to decipher. In any case, when talking to Rosalba, Carlo used dialect. But Rosalba, coming out of the kitchen, inquired in her pure Italian with its terminal droop: “E quella grassa di sopra?” Carlo limped after her, his voice harsh. Their gruesome feet carried the argument along the passage and out of the house. The fat one upstairs shrank against a newel. The Whiteley loomed: one of his bulging female landscapes, all rusty buttock and rock. Laura could have vanished into it. She knew what the row was about; it was an old one, inactive for stretches but never extinct. Rosalba wanted Carlo to move to Haberfield. Her house was level and practical. It had big, clean, silent rooms. A long time ago, a crepe myrtle had towered in the garden, dropping untidy pink blossoms. It had been chopped down, and the lawn tiled. “She sweep everything, always,” Carlo confided. That, however, was not his objection. “My life here.” What he meant was with Hugo Drummond. Rosalba’s tussle was with a dead man. The dead are fearsome opponents, but Drummond couldn’t cross the street to avoid her. Laura guessed that she had been brought in when it had seemed that Rosalba was winning. The fat one was a counterargument, proof that Carlo wasn’t risking his neck trying to get up onto the roof, help in the ever-feared emergency, someone in the house at night.