Geography (14 page)

‘Now this is what I call globalisation,' Ruby says.

In the early evening we go down to see the Chinese fishing nets. They look like enormous string clams and it takes four men to open and close them. We pick fish to eat from one of the stalls and it is grilled for us while we stand there.

‘Did you catch that fish here?' I ask.

‘No,' the fishmonger nods his head. ‘There are no big fish left here. From out deeper,' he gestures out behind the nets to the open sea.

As we are returning to our hotel a beggar puts his hand out to us. I shake my head. ‘I have no change.'

He gets angry. ‘You are rich,' he yells. ‘Give me money.' Which is when I see the hole in his face, his caved-in nose. He has leprosy. Ruby takes my hand and we walk quickly, but he keeps pace with us, grabs our arms and tugs at our clothes. Ruby is crying by the time we get to our hotel courtyard.

‘Sometimes I hate this place. I don't know how you stand it,' she looks at my tearless face accusingly. ‘You are too thick skinned.'

‘That's not fair. We didn't have any money, there is nothing we could have done.'

‘That's because we spent it on antiques,' she jerks her laden bag towards me. ‘That is because we are staying in this hotel. No wonder the guy thinks we're full of shit.'

I'm tired of this, of her, of her big emotions. I'm beginning to wonder if we should keep travelling together. If the age difference is a problem. But I do the right thing; I lean forward to comfort her. For the second time in twenty-four hours she moves to avoid me and goes ahead of me to our room.

I give her a few minutes, and when I get to the room she is in the bathroom. She hasn't shut the door, which I take to be a gesture of forgiveness, and I watch her as she scoops the water out of the tiled tub and pours it over her head.

‘You are getting goose bumps,' I say. ‘I can see them from here.'

‘It is nice to be cold after so much heat,' she says. ‘I can't wait for the rain to begin. This build-up—it's making me so tense.' She rubs herself down with soap, seems unselfconscious about me standing there, talking to her as she scoops water between her legs, over her head and back. Suddenly she hesitates, lifts her head and smiles at me, before closing the door.

When she comes out of the bathroom she smells of jasmine oil. ‘Smell this,' she says, tipping her head towards me. ‘It's what the women rub into their scalps. I bought it today.' I lean down and put my face to the top of her head to breathe in the smell of jasmine. I get oil on the tip of my nose.

Geelong was in the 1994 Grand Final. I sat down to watch it with three-month-old Max draped across my chest like a large cat. He snuffled, he was heavy with abandon and as he breathed against me I fell asleep and missed the whole match. This was, as it turned out, no bad thing. Geelong was slaughtered, scoring 8.15 to West Coast's 20.23. I woke up to find Marion asleep in the chair beside me, the television off, and a note from Raff on the coffee table, ‘Fuck this for a joke. Gone for a walk.'

This was a time of open fires and shared meals. I'd cook and Marion would sit in the kitchen, breastfeeding. She said less than usual, seemed too happy for words. ‘I never expected it to be so good,' she said to me one evening. ‘I never knew I could feel so much.'

Raff was more practical. ‘I'm giving up dope,' he said to me. ‘It makes me too anxious. Things are so good that I keep expecting them to go wrong.'

I knew that feeling. That feeling of not trusting happiness to last. It almost made me want to leave this house, where I had been happy for so long.

Raff took some months to forgive Geelong, so in early '95 we found ourselves going to see other teams. Around the time the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma was bombed on April 19, 1995 we went to see the first Essendon–Melbourne game at the MCG. The papers were full of photos of young children killed in the blast; also body parts of some of the other 163 who died. There were photos of Timothy McVeigh, the young man from Kingman, Arizona, in leg irons and handcuffs. The bombing happened two years to the day after the raid on Waco. Statistics. If you like football you've got to like stats.

The match was huge, more than sixty thousand people in the crowd. It was autumn, which in Melbourne usually means perfect weather but on this day it was cold, the sky a steely grey, and it was sheeting rain. Nonetheless when we got to the ground my excitement rose, as it always did, when I saw the green of the oval, the jumpers of the players and all the people within the stands spread out before me.

As charged up as I was about the match, I was having trouble concentrating. I had something to tell Raff—that I was moving to Sydney. It had taken a while, but finally I'd convinced work to transfer me there and it was only now, now that I had to break the news to my friend, that I realised I didn't really know why I was going.

When I spat it out he looked at me blankly from underneath his rain hood for a moment. ‘What about us? What about Max and Marion and me?' Then he turned back to watch the game.

‘Raff,' I touched his arm, but he shrugged me off.

‘It's pathetic,' he said, ‘moving there so you'll be closer to him. And you're going to change teams again, I know it; you'll defect to the Swans.'

‘Closer to who?' I asked. ‘I'm going for the beach. I'm going for the weather.'

‘You know who,' he said and I realised with a shock that this hadn't occurred to me. That I might be harbouring hopes of seeing Michael more, of him moving back to Sydney.

‘You're wrong,' I said, but once Raff put the thought in my mind I became terrified he was right. ‘I couldn't live with you guys forever,' I said. ‘I need to make something…a family. One of my own.' Raff wasn't interested in hearing this. He just shrugged again; perhaps he knew that it was more than that. The three—now four—of us had got too close. I was starting to feel claustrophobic, starting to feel like I couldn't breathe.

I was barracking for Essendon that day; the match was slow, they were losing and we were stuck sitting under an umbrella in the rain. Then, in the second quarter, Michael Long was caught holding the ball. The free kick went against him, provoking a groan of disgust, especially from a bloke sitting three rows in front of us.

‘You black bastard,' he yelled. He was about fifty-five, big, clean cut and well dressed, with hair short enough at the back of his neck to see that it was, in fact, red. ‘You stupid black faggot.'

Raff turned to me. ‘Did you hear that?' he said. ‘Did you hear the FUCKING racist in front of us?' Raising his voice to make sure the people in front could hear. The man who had been doing the taunting turned around. ‘You talking to me? If you're calling me a racist I'll punch you in the fucking head.'

Raff pitched his voice lower, angry, making sure the guy had to strain to hear him. ‘But you are mate, you're racist scum.'

The next thing I knew this man had leapt over three rows of chairs and, before I even had time to think about what he might be about to do, he'd done it—slammed his fist into Raff's face and sent him sprawling back in his seat. Then I was on my feet waving my own fist in the guy's face. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to hit him as hard as he'd just hit Raff, but the woman he was with grabbed his arm and dragged him away.

Raff sat down and fiddled with his mangled glasses. People were slapping him on the shoulder to see if he was all right but he wouldn't look up. He wouldn't look me in the eye. A few minutes later I peered at him and saw that there was blood running down his face from where his glasses had cut into him on the bridge of his nose. He was trembling and there were tears running down his face. I didn't know whether that was because his nose was hurting or from sheer distress.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, putting my arms around him. ‘That you are hurt. I am sorry people behave like that.' We leant together so our faces were touching.

Sydney is a place that gets under your skin. The way it smells, the way its moist heavy air pushes against your skin. One of my very first memories is being taken there as a tiny child and staying up late, sitting on a hill watching the lights of the racecourse, the movement of the people and the horses caught under them, going round and round. I know now I was at Harold Park in Glebe where they run the trots, but then, as a child it felt like somewhere very exotic and exciting. Warm air, and lights and movement. It was the same when I went to live there; this body-response to the place. I loved the rocky coast and harbour. Loved the weather. I was a pot plant that had finally been given enough light.

I moved in with Tony. He was a journalist with the
Sydney Morning Herald
and many years ago, when he had been one of my journalism lecturers, we'd had an affair that was truncated by one of my extended trips overseas. He had quite a strong Italian accent that he was embarrassed by; he was ambivalent about his homeland but it informed everything he did, the friends he made, the politics he wrote about. He would tell me sometimes that the rocks and colours around Bondi reminded him of Sicily.

He was recently divorced from a woman that none of us had ever liked, though we all tried to be polite about her. He needed someone to share his apartment on the tip of Ben Buckler in North Bondi. The wall of the building merged with the cliffs that plunged down into the ocean below. The wind was always wild there—at the point there was a boulder that had been dumped onto the rocks and the little metal plaque on it read: ‘This rock weighing 235 tons was washed from the sea during a storm on 15th July, 1912.' Apparently two rusty mermaids used to sit perched on this rock, but they were gone by my time.

Everything I owned that was metal—my stereo, my car, my fax machine, my computer—was soon rusted by the salty air. The paint peeled and all the furniture was covered in a coating of sticky salt. Everything was permanently damp.

‘That's the price you pay for living in one of the most beautiful places in the world,' Tony said. It didn't seem such a high price. I loved it there.

Tony was weathered, like the cliffs he lived on. He had curly silver hair and dark olive skin. He would swim each morning at Bondi beach and each evening at Bronte pool. Perhaps that is why he looked so fit. He'd been a champion sprinter as a schoolboy in Italy. ‘For this reason,' he told me with no modesty at all, ‘my thighs are very strong.' And it was true, they were like tree trunks. In contrast, his hands were tiny, they flitted around as he talked. He was less proud of these. ‘Kind of poofy, huh? Or do you think they are artistic?'

To celebrate my first week in Sydney we went to have a drink at a place near where we both worked. It was a revolving cocktail bar on top of the Australia Building, once the tallest building in the city. The décor hadn't been changed since the seventies, a fact that was starting to make it fashionable again but had not, at this time, completed the process. We sat, cocktails in hand, and slowly inched our way around the sweep of the city and harbour.

‘I shouldn't complain,' I said. ‘My office is right in the middle of the Rocks. I get off at the station at Circular Quay, I walk past the MCA and through the Argyle Cut. That has to be one of my favourite bits of city in the world, the way the ferns grow in tufts from the cracks of those hand-made bricks.'

‘They are more than 160 years old, those bricks, you know,' Tony told me.

‘So it's all good. Except they hate me in my new office. One of the other workers thought she was up for my job, but instead she's working for me and giving me a hard time. My office isn't set up. I don't have furniture. The computer guy still hasn't got around to setting up my email.'

‘Aahhh, that is why you're so jumpy,' said Tony. ‘Email withdrawal syndrome.' He was joking, but he was right. I felt anxious without email. I had become used to the notifier flashing in front of me dozens of times a day, holding the promise of Michael.

Three days later I got to sit down at a desk, with a computer, and log on. An email from Michael greeted me. ‘You've arrived! I'd welcome you home properly if only I still lived there. Enjoy and take care—M.'

The next day he emailed me again to give me the names of people I should make a point of meeting. He put me in touch with his family—his parents, his sister—and several other friends. He trusted me with people he loved, and they made me feel welcome. I liked them. Over the next few months there was a flow of invitations to birthdays, the movies, dinners. ‘It is as if,' I wrote to Michael, ‘I have become the sister-in-law, or the daughter-in-law, without having the husband. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or bad thing.'

‘Trust me,' he answered. ‘You're getting the best part of the bargain.'

What I didn't say to him was that his family's kindness entangled him and me further. Nor did I say that Raff had been right. It seemed that in moving to Sydney I had moved closer to Michael, just as I had come to know my geography teacher by going to India. Sydney was where he had lived, and grown up. Everybody knew him. He no longer seemed so far away.