Geography (7 page)

Then: ‘Now.'

We moved together for a while before he said, ‘I can't. I'm too sad that you are leaving.' So we kissed and talked. For a while we slept. When I moved away from him, he pulled me back towards him, put his hand on my cheek. ‘I could love you,' he said. ‘Perhaps I already do.' And the words filled me up.

We drove to the airport, stopping in a bar on the way for a beer and something to eat. ‘Try this beer,' he said. ‘It's called Bohemia, it's Mexican.' And I did, loving the colour and taste of it. I can still remember how it tasted all these years later.

At the airport Michael had tears in his eyes. ‘Being with you reminds me of home.'

I never really got to know Michael. But I came to know distance intimately and to understand what it did to desire; I came to understand that desire was as much a place as any country I had visited. It had its own geography. At first I thought it was just me but over the years I learnt that Michael was lost in this place as well. With him I visited the dreamscapes that had nourished me since I was a child. Distance, desire, ambivalence, city, they were all one. And always there was the fact that he was eight thousand miles away, the fact that it was impossible, the fact that distance stretched our desire so taut I thought I might die of longing.

Four

When I wake on the morning we are to leave for India, Ruby is lying in the next bed, bald. Her hair, when she had it, was long, curly and red. It reached halfway down her back.

She laughs when she sees my face. ‘I suddenly realised,' she says, ‘that my hair was a vanity. I shaved it all off.'

‘Are you sure that's not just the hash talking?'

‘No, I'm not,' she says. ‘But it's too late to worry about that now.'

She looks amazing, shorn like that; large green eyes and milky white skin. I had not noticed how delicate her face was before. I get out of bed and lean down to run my hand over the sandpaper stubble.

‘Don't let your head burn,' I say. ‘I suppose you're a sun block baby?'

Ruby nods. ‘Slip, slop, slap.'

Ruby takes a Valium as soon as we get to the airport, and the levity of this morning is gone. ‘I was bad enough about flying before half the airport was blown up. Now…' She shakes her head in distress. ‘I'm sure that's why I got so stoned last night. So I could get some sleep.' She looks drawn, her pupils are dilated. Her movements are jerky. ‘Doesn't it scare you?'

‘It makes me horny, I'm afraid.'

‘That's insane,' she is trying to make a joke but just sounds abrupt. ‘You're nuts.'

We stand in a long queue for the security check and she shuffles nervously, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. ‘I'm going to flip. You'll never talk to me again.'

‘I will,' I say. Then I pass her a piece of white quartz I found years ago on a beach in Oregon. ‘Take this stone. It's my travelling talisman, it will keep you safe.'

As we file onto the plane she grips my hand. Her anxiety is infectious, especially when it becomes clear that there is, actually, a problem. Someone has checked their bags then not got on the flight, so all the bags have to be taken out of the hold then put back in again. The plane sits on the tarmac for an hour and a half and the airconditioning isn't on. The heat and stench become unbearable.

‘I told you. I told you things would go wrong.' This isn't the Ruby I know. All twisted and turned in on herself. ‘I'm scared. It will crash. I know it. I feel it in my bones. This bag thing is a bad sign.'

‘Instinct can be wrong,' I say. ‘Your bones are wrong.' And I, of all people, know that to be true.

When the plane finally takes off she hyperventilates then starts scratching at her face. I grab her hands and hold them, to stop her hurting herself. ‘I can't do this,' she says, ‘I can't.' Then tries to get up, as if she could get off the plane.

I pull her down. ‘Breathe,' I say.

‘Fuck,' she bangs her head into the seat in front of her. ‘I hate this.'

‘Look at me. Look into my eyes.' I hold her arms tightly, look at her. ‘I will not let anything happen to you. I will look after you. I promise you everything will be okay.'

‘Talk to me,' Ruby says gripping on to me hard enough to make bruises.

‘Okay,' I say, ‘the weather: did you know that 75 billion tonnes of rain clouds cross the South Indian coastline around this time each year?'

‘I didn't know that, no,' Ruby says.

‘Only a third of it falls as rain,' I go on, ‘and the rain that falls and makes it back to the ocean is swept along by currents from one continent to another. It turns into clouds over the desert in the USA a year or so after it has fallen as rain. The very same water.'

‘Cool,' Ruby nods, but she's faking her interest. She doesn't relax until I point out the window, thirty minutes later, and say, ‘There it is.'

India. The mountainous ruck of the Ghats splits the bottom of the continent in two. There are more coconut palms than I had ever imagined possible, with the spires of churches spotted among them.

Ruby sighs with relief. ‘It's almost over.'

‘We're arriving,' I say. ‘It is just beginning.'

In 1992, just after the first Rodney King verdict came down, I started to work for a travel agency. There was only one newspaper worth working for in Melbourne and after a few years there I applied for work as a media and marketing consultant for a company called Freedom Travel. I could think of nothing better than going to work every day and being surrounded by maps, photos and talk of other places. I'd been employed to work on the ‘big picture', whatever that meant, but for the first few months I just wrote copy for brochures. It was a job that allowed me to travel, constantly, inside my head.

The Pamirs form the mountainous hub of central Asia
, I might write.
They are a rugged and remote wilderness region of jagged ridges, alpine lakes and distant snow-capped peaks that stretch and fold towards the Hindu Kush and Karakoram.
Enjoy a trek in these impressive mountains, spend time in the fabled Silk Road oasis cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara. Rediscover the child that loved
Arabian Nights.

Not long after I started working there I had to fill in on the front desk for a day. A woman came in just as we were about to close. ‘Hi,' she sat down in front of me. ‘I want to go to Paris,' she said. ‘On the cheap.' She peered at me. ‘I want to go with my new boyfriend, Raff, he works around the corner in Readings bookstore, do you know him?' I shook my head. ‘Are you the girl I talked to last time, when I was going to Africa?' I shook my head again. ‘Because that was a fucking disaster, I can tell you,' before throwing her head back and hooting with laughter.

The woman's name was Marion. She was curvy in a va-va-voom way, with long black hair. The glamorous effect of this was undercut by her permanently perplexed expression—she was short sighted. Two hours later we were still talking. Friday afternoon drinks among the rest of the staff had started at some point and we sat there drinking as Marion regaled me with tales of a safari gone wrong, fading colonial towns and the increasingly heated rows with her now ex-boyfriend. Things had come to a head when a lion chased them and both headed for the same tree.

‘He got there first,' said Marion, ‘and was climbing up as quickly as he could. It was just a little tree. The kind you see in cartoons, the kind that bends over to the ground and places you gently into the jaws of whatever it was you were escaping from. And George—let's call him George of the jungle—could tell the tree wouldn't carry both of us, so he started flailing at me, kicking out with these massive Timberland hikers and swearing at me in a freaked-out girly voice. He came very close to kicking my glasses off.' She looked at me, deadpan. ‘Anyway that's when I had an inkling that things weren't going to work out.'

Three months later Marion and I had moved in together with Raff. Marion's and my conversations together never really stopped, and once I started to become friends with Raff, he and I talked endlessly as well. They became my very best friends.

Our large terrace house overlooked acres of grey and red inner-suburban roofs and was permanently surrounded by a guard detail of stray cats. We had a bluestone lane to one side of the house, and an outside bathroom with an old door that didn't close. During Melbourne's winter we showered with the weather whipping around us. The backyard was overlooked by a huge old fig tree that filled with fruit we didn't eat and let fall onto the ground to rot.

When I was living with Marion and Raff, I started to feel I could make my little bit of the town, Fitzroy, belong to me. Slowly, I came to know the way the shadows fell down the streets on the nights when there was a bright moon, the colours of the stones and bricks, the places that offered comfort, friendship and good coffee; those where there was none to be had.

But while I loved Fitzroy, I struggled with Melbourne. It was a place with meaning hammered into the streets and the bluestones and the weatherboards: there was so much meaning I could find none. Trying to explain this to Marion, I would point through the car window when we drove places: there is the riverbank where I first kissed a boy; that is where I saw my first concert; there is the old movie theatre where I first went to a 24-hour movie marathon; over there is the street I first lived in with my mother and my dad, the same street that a large dog tore down with the blood-matted body of our rabbit in its teeth; on the corner of Punt and Bridge Roads I broke my first boyfriend's heart and he leapt out of the car while it was moving; there is the bland suburban brick veneer house where I lost my virginity; there is the street where I saw my dad walking across the road with a woman who wasn't my mother.

On the weekends Marion, Raff and I would go to the football, wandering through the autumn leaves and mud to the MCG. My family were keen Carlton supporters and from the age of five, soon after we returned from America, I would traipse off to watch Carlton play at Princes Park with Dad. He would put Finn, who was only three years old, in a baby car seat and tie it high to the wire fence at the back of the outer so Finn could get a good view.