Questions of Travel
Page 43
It was not quite nine o’clock, but the beach was crowded. Tourists and locals were sunbathing, breakfasting on hotel terraces, breaststroking in the calm bay. The perfect, cloudless morning had summoned vendors of batik and greeting cards and a depressing lace tablecloth. Laura no thank you-ed, no thank you-ed. She came to a cluster of fishing shacks thatched with coconut. A wave of children poured from them and into the sea—only the boys, noted Laura; the girls stood in the shallows with their skirts bunched.
There were more boys further along, playing beach cricket with a tennis ball. While Laura was still some way off, one of them lunged for a catch, missed, went running after the ball. A fielder at the far edge of the group, hands on hips, had a shock of black hair. In four seconds, Laura thought, First: It’s that boy. Next: But taller. Then: Well, he would have grown over the years. Finally: But it can’t be the same boy! He had turned to watch the fate of the ball. Then, as Laura looked on, he strolled away. She realized that he had nothing to do with the game, after all—he was only a bystander. A horn startled, and, glancing around, Laura saw a blue Mercedes pull off the road and park. The driver got out. Behind his wraparound sunglasses, he appeared to be scanning the beach. But it was a sign nailed to a tree that caught Laura’s eye: an arrow pointed along a sandy path on the far side of the road to Network Cafe. When she looked back along the beach, a quartet of English teenagers was approaching, and the boy was splashing into the bay.
Robyn had emailed from her parents’ place in Townsville:…told us that gina’ll be taking over from cliff. quentin and i didn’t even know gina was going for ceo. she’s got experience running an office and we don’t—that’s the party line anyway. i’ve already talked to the headhunters and we’ve lined up a meeting in january. i’m also thinking i should maybe talk to alan about taking over from gina in london. a few years there could be pretty cool…
Turning a dull red stone on his finger, Nimal Corea was studying the back of Laura Fraser’s head. She had agreed, readily, to have a cup of tea with him when she had checked her email. “No breakfast for madam?” She had already breakfasted, she said. But then she smiled. “I can have a second breakfast, can’t I? I’m on holiday!” Nimal suggested an omelette made with green chlli, and she agreed to that, too. She said, “Call me Laura—please.” A vista opened as if activated by remote control, and Nimal strolled hand in hand with Laura over the Harbor Bridge in a deep mauve dusk.
A cry drifted from the beach: “Run! Run!” Absorbed in Robyn’s news, Laura didn’t hear it. In any case, she wouldn’t have understood. Nimal, who did, assumed that the shouts sprang from the game of cricket. Laura closed Robyn’s message, and her inbox reappeared. It now contained a second email. There was no subject line and, when she opened it, no message. But the sender was Paul Hinkel. Was it a truce, carte blanche, a summary of what she had meant to him? Laura could read his blank letter any way she chose. As she pondered its intent, there came a great shuddering sigh, as if the whole planet were sorrowing. It was about 9:20 on the twenty-sixth of December, and a tsunami had just struck. On the veranda that served as a kitchen, an omelette stiffened in its pan, the cook’s attention claimed by a blue car surfing a black wave. Nimal had only to glance that way to witness the marvel but he was slow to emerge from the vision in which he lay entwined with Laura Fraser on a buttery leather couch. The power cut out, but not before Nimal had seen every detail of their harborside mansion. It was white and storied with a view of water from every room.
Credits
The lines by Elizabeth Bishop quoted as an epigraph are an excerpt from “Questions of Travel” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
The lines quoted on page 8 are from “Away Is Hard to Go” by Kathleen Raine from The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. Copyright © 1956 Kathleen Raine. Used by kind permission of Kathleen Raine’s estate.
The lines quoted on page 97 are from “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever” by Les Murray from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2006 Les Murray. Used by kind permission of Les Murray.
The phrase quoted on page 177 in my translation is excerpted from “Death Fugue” from Paul Celan, Mohn und Gedächtnis © 1952, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, München, in der Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH. Used by permission of Verlagsgruppe Random House.
The lines quoted on page 215 are from “The Tourist and the Town.” Copyright © 1993, 1955 Adrienne Rich, from Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the Literature Fund of the Australia Council.
Thank you to Devika and Michael Anthonisz, Penelope Asselineau, Sophie Cunningham, Robert Dessaix, Robert Dixon, Clara Finlay, Goolbai Gunasekera, Philip Hoare, Ayalew Hundessa, Gail Jones, Sharmalie Joseph, Chris Mander, Michael Meyler, Sue Mitra, Peter Morris, Christa Munns, Virginia Murdoch, Jane Nethercote, Maria Psihogios-Billington, Varunika Ruwanpura, Sanjaya Senaweera, Glenda Sluga, Lachlan Strahan, Maithree Wickramasinghe, Charlotte Wood, and Jayne Yaffe Kemp.
Thank you to Victor Melder and the Victor Melder Library in Melbourne. Thank you to Maureen Seneviratne, in whose Dark Nights of the Moon I read of a children’s game about bombs. Thank you to Michael Taussig for Walter Benjamin’s Grave, where I learned about the flower vase cut.
A special thank-you to Sarah Lutyens, Clare Drysdale, Ali Lavau, Jane Palfreyman and Pat Strachan. Also to Vita Giordano, Kerry Murphy, Joseph Pearson, Nicholas Poynder, Sally Webster and particularly Walter Perera.
Last and first, I thank Chris Andrews.
About the Author
Michelle de Kretser is a Sri Lankan who has lived in Australia for several years. De Kretser’s previous book, The Lost Dog, was long-listed for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and received Australia’s “Book of the Year” Award, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Gold Medal from the Australian Literary Society. She is also the author of the novels The Rose Grower and The Hamilton Case, and she is currently an associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney.
Also by Michelle de Kretser
The Lost Dog
The Hamilton Case
The Rose Grower
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Michelle de Kretser
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover photograph by Johannes Kroemer / Getty Images
Copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Originally published in Australia by Allen & Unwin, October 2012
First ebook edition, May 2013
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ISBN 978-0-316-21924-2