Geography (21 page)

‘Hi, you've called Michael O'Maera. I'll be in Sydney until mid-July, but leave a message, I'll be checking in.'

‘
Fuck
,' I screamed, startling people around me. ‘You are un-
fucking
-believable.' I slammed down the phone, banged my head against the side of the booth. I was standing at LAX, breaking the promises I had made to Marion and Tony not to call Michael when I got here. But they had had nothing to worry about: we'd passed in the air. He had booked a ticket to fly to Sydney the day I left.
The past is another country,
I was thinking,
they do things differently there
—that was the line that kept coming into my head. HSC English Lit.;
The Go-between
. But what the hell that was trying to tell me I didn't know, or why all I could think about was a line from a book I had studied more than fifteen years before.
Reader, I married him
, was another one of my favourite lines and that wasn't making much sense either. I'm one of the best-read people I know but it was clear from the fact that I was standing in an airport concussing myself in a phone booth that it had done me no good. No fucking good at all.

Sitting on the plane on my way to Chicago I watched
Groundhog Day
for the fifth time. Watched Bill Murray try and figure out how to get things exactly right with the appalling Andie McDowell. Leaving ice-cream on the window ledge, which flavour did she like, should he speak French, should he quote poetry, should they have a snowball fight and how hard should he throw the snowball, how many days and months of days and years of days would he try and figure out how to get things right before he stopped trying and got on with the endless day that was his life.

I couldn't watch the film any more. I pulled out a book Tony had given me (‘Some light reading for your big fat hippy streak'). It was called
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
and it looked like up-market self help. I had read all those.
Women Who Love Too Much
.
Men Who Can't Love
. All that stuff which promised women if they just fixed themselves up everything would be different. But in the book Tony gave me I read a poem that made sense of things.

I walk down the street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. / I fall in. / I am lost…I am hopeless / It isn't my fault. / It takes me forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. / I pretend I don't see it. / I fall in again. / I can't
believe I'm in the same place. / But it isn't my fault. / It still takes me a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I see it is there. / I still fall in…it's a habit/ My eyes are open / I know where I am / It is my fault. / I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I walk around it.

I walk down another street.

When I got to Chicago I sent Tony an email: ‘Hello my friend,' I wrote. ‘I've begun reading the book you gave me. I think, I hope, I am at stage #3.'

I dragged myself around Chicago where there was an international travel conference. I spent my days in an exhibition centre that was like one long shopping mall. There was no light, no air, just a tomb a mile long with four thousand travel agents. As well as the stalls there was a series of morning focus groups where different travel agents ‘shared' their global strategies. Buying entire islands seemed a particularly popular ‘strategy'.

‘More control,' the head of Global Adventures beamed. ‘More flexibility to meet our clients' needs.'

Freedom organised some seminars of its own for an hour at the end of each day where the company discussed ‘strategies for the new millennium'. There was a lot of talk of branding and the suggestion that the company move into travel guides to compete with the
Lonely Planet-
style guides. The manager of our Los Angeles office had ideas for a line of travel products: backpacks, little clothes lines, inflatable pillows, foil blankets for those who find themselves stuck in the Himalayas somewhere without shelter. Then there was a long angry session about ethics, and the company's responsibility towards the groups they subcontracted out to.

‘It is not our problem that the trekking companies we deal with don't pay their porters properly,' said Justin, who ran the London office. ‘We've all heard stories about people who have given the porters down coats or good boots, only to see them for sale in the markets after they finish the trek. They choose to live this way.'

‘That's bullshit,' I said. ‘Poverty is never a “lifestyle” decision, but that's what you make it sound like.'

Tom, from the Dublin office, joined in. ‘If we are to continue any pretence that we are an alternative company, we have to take the ethics of the people we subcontract to seriously.'

Trish, the owner of Freedom Travel, began to look animated. ‘You're right, Tom. We are an ethical company. Frankly it is one of our assets, something we should be advertising.'

I knew my days in advertising were almost over. I was selling choice and I didn't believe it existed. The global melding imagery in my early ads, the questionable humour of my later ones, those days were over. Smallness and difference were back in, precisely because they were endangered. Being ethical was part of our branding and the idea of making sexy what we should all have been doing without hesitation made me feel sick.

‘Fuck the new millennium,' I said to Tom over a beer in his hotel room later that night. ‘Fuck Freedom Travel.'

‘What kind of hard-hitting Aussie businesswoman are you, in your cups after only two beers? I thought you sheilas were big drinkers.'

I smiled at him. ‘I'm a hopeless drinker. Always have been. While we're on the subject, what kind of Irishman are you, drinking lemonade?'

‘I'm a drunk,' he smiled. ‘So I don't.'

I hadn't really given him a second glance before he'd got into the debate this afternoon, but now I was taking more notice—the brown eyes, the curly hair, the wicked accent.

‘Why is it,' I went on, ‘that the more I have fetishised choice—sold it, packaged it, lived it—the less I've actually had?'

‘How much did you have to start with, I wonder? We're all stuck with our own psyche, not to mention our national psyche. Most choice is marketing, always has been. Take Ireland. Five hundred years as a run-down joke; now we're sexy. None of it makes much difference though a few of us get richer from it. The coffee's got better, the Guinness has got worse. UK publishers make a shit-load out of a few Irish writers, but an Irish language writer is lucky to get published anywhere at all. Even if you do have a lot of choice, choice for its own sake is pretty meaningless. It's depressing.' He paused. ‘What'll you do when the conference is over?'

‘Drive,' I said. ‘I've got a ticket to Seattle to worship at the shrine of Kurt Cobain—don't laugh—and from there I want to drive to LA. I want to do my own personal road trip, and heal a broken heart with wide open spaces.'

‘What's happened to your heart?' he asked and I told him, in as few words as possible.

‘How long did you say this has been going on?' he asked.

‘Five years,' I said, blushing, putting my head in my hands. ‘Shoot me, someone.'

‘In AA we have a saying along the lines of “to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result is madness”.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘Believe me. That's why I'm doing the long drive.'

‘I'm going to play you Joni Mitchell,' he replied. ‘A track for a girl who is heading off on a long drive through California while she's stuck on someone.'

Oh will you take me as I am / Strung out on another man / California I'm coming home.

As I prepared for my long drive I thought of some of the others I'd done. Of the car trips that had imprinted themselves on me. I remembered that when my mum got with my dad, we spent our Christmases along the wild coast between Apollo Bay and Portland. I could remember the first time I went there, when Finn and I were still little.

I realise now that I was with Mum and Dad on their first real holiday together and my memory of that time is infused with the love that was growing between them. Not every child is lucky enough to see her parents fall in love. I saw them fall out of love as well, and when I was a teenager things ended for them. Now I'm an adult I have trouble remembering the details of that sad time, but I can remember these, the good times, as if they were yesterday.

We had no tents; we slept under the sky, or packed like sardines into the back of the Holden station wagon if it rained. My dad dived for abalone and we would grill it on the fire. I always thought it was tough and refused to eat it. Nowadays it is considered a rare delicacy.

In this part of my memory it is always summer and there are endless days of playing in the sand, of swimming and the smell of campfires and mosquito coils. There were bad things, too, but not very bad, more the kind of things that make something more exciting to remember. There was the time my dad swallowed a bull-ant that was in his beer and he got bitten inside his throat and it swelled up. There was the possibility of snakes—every fallen branch a possible culprit to be inspected from afar. The excitement when one of these sticks uncoiled in a powerful wave across the path and my dad had to kill it with an axe.

I learnt to snorkel in a rock pool and I learnt to dogpaddle. Even today whenever I duck dive, then come to the surface blowing water out of the snorkel in a spout, I have a rush of memory for Dad and the rock pool he taught me to swim in.

I was highly attuned to the love between my parents and hyper-vigilant for signs that it might not work out. I would roll into a ball and face the wall whenever I heard raised whispers, my parents' failed attempt to hide the fact they were fighting. I would close my eyes and think of things that were like dreams, except I was awake. As a child I called them almost-dreams. I would almost-dream of beaches and playing in the sand. Of planes and a train that travelled for days. Of a city that was all stone and bricks and rows upon rows of brownstones. Sometimes these imaginings would roll seamlessly into real dreams, other times they would not stop the rage of the adults in the next room from leaking under the door to find me in my bed.

Over time my imaginings of other places turned into something else. Instead of travel and movement it was thoughts of boys and the new feelings in my body that took me out of myself, away from the world, into sleep. I would dream that a boy and I were forced together by circumstance. Perhaps we would be kidnapped and locked in a barn together and, after a few weeks of forced proximity, he would come to see my true beauty and ravish me. Perhaps we would be thrown into the back of a truck together, hands tied, and find a way to make love despite being bound. I can remember my first orgasm. The intensity of it. The purity of the pleasure.

As I got older, as I involved other people in my sexual explorations, as I became more consciously sexual, the pleasure lessened. I had to chase harder to find the feelings. What began as an opening to pleasure became a way of closing down. Sex became like the dreams of travel, something so sweet, so powerful, that I forgot the point of them. Both took me out of myself until it seemed there was no getting back.

Eleven

‘Is that Princess Di?' Ruby asks, and I realise that it is, that there are dozens of paintings of her on the houses lining the main road of the village we are passing through. Her blonde fringe hangs low, she looks out from underneath it with bright blue eyes. Some portraits are well executed, some more like cartoons. The whole village is a shrine to her.

We are driving to another shrine, the Sthanumalay-aswami Temple. From the outside this temple looks like any other. Square and tiered with row upon row of brightly coloured gods reaching up towards the heavens. Ruby and I take our shoes off and walk gingerly through the mud, past the doors, which are two storeys high and are each made from a single piece of wood.