Geography (8 page)

Perhaps it was to do with loving my new dad, my passion for football. I'd recite the names of the teams to get myself to sleep at night: Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Essendon, North Melbourne, South Melbourne, Hawthorn, Footscray, Fitzroy, Geelong, St Kilda, Melbourne.

In 1982 South Melbourne would move to Sydney and become the Sydney Swans. By 1996 Fitzroy would be gone and Footscray would have another name. But back then I did not know that the shape of the city, the shape of everything was always changing. Back then I thought that people might come and go, but buildings, football clubs, cities: they would always stay the same.

‘Why New York?' I asked Finn when I first found out he was leaving, when I was still pissed off that he was going. ‘Doesn't it seem like a bit of a coincidence?'

‘In what way, coincidence?' he said.

‘You know, the parent split thing.'

‘Yeah, right,' he said. ‘I've been studying for six years so I could revisit the sacred sites of our infant traumas.'

‘I didn't mean that. I know New York has things other than our family trauma going for it. And a Natural History Museum that offered to employ you. It just seems strange to me that we are both so obsessed with the place.'

‘I'm not obsessed,' Finn said. ‘I'm employed. You think too much.'

‘You won't forget me?'

‘I'm sure I will,' he said. ‘But in the meantime, out of familial duty, I'll persist in making regular contact via phone and letter and the facsimile machine.'

‘Fuck you.'

‘No,' he said. ‘Fuck you.'

We batted ‘fuck yous' between us for several minutes until we both had to collapse with laughter at our own hilariousness.

Once he moved to New York, it was I who betrayed him. I shifted my allegiance from Carlton to Geelong, Raff and Marion's team. Changing football teams is not something you should do easily, but I did, and Raff took great pleasure in seducing me away from Carlton.

‘Go Cats,' he would leap, fist in the air. ‘Go Cats.' Then look at me, his partner in crime, and grin. ‘Lick 'em pussies.'

‘You have a commitment problem,' Finn said to me in one fax, ‘and I'm not sure I can call you my sister any more. You know what the great Teddy Whitten said? “Football isn't a matter of life and death. It's more important than that.” Apart from which, barracking for Geelong is like going out with someone who you know is going to disappoint you. You are destined for a life of suffering.'

History would prove Finn right, but not that year. Geelong was the highest-scoring team in the competition, and they kicked 239 points in a single match—the highest score ever. ‘We have God on our side,' I gloated, electronically, to Finn. ‘Otherwise known as Ablett.'

‘Choose your gods carefully,' was Finn's elliptical, faxed, advice.

‘
Quelle embarrassment
,' I groaned one night as we were watching TV. ‘That's our latest ad.' That's
my
latest ad, I nearly said, and despite my coyness I was excited by my new job liaising with the agency that produced the Freedom Travel campaign.

Marion and Raff looked up. The images were grainy, sepia. A gorgeous young guy with a five o'clock shadow and white singlet hitch-hikes down a road. It is hard to place where he is, it could be outback Australia. He turns and looks at the camera. ‘Freedom. You can't put a price on it,' and the shot pans out and spins to reveal Monument Valley in the background. Then the voiceover: ‘Freedom. We bring you the world.'

They both clapped uproariously when the ad was over.

‘There's a whole series of these,' I said. ‘All young spunks who appear to be mooching around somewhere in Australia, and then you realise they are in Japan, India, Indonesia, the States, wherever. And here's the payoff—I'm going to work in LA for a few weeks, helping to organise a mini-conference to develop our global marketing campaign.'

‘I am a marketing goddess,' I faxed Finn. ‘Which means I'll be coming your way soon.'

Finn sent me a fax that had a large diagram at the bottom of it: ‘Dear Cath, you will see I have done a graph using my new software program to assess your current yuppiness and the rate of likely yuppiness increase over the next decade. I have also measured my own studiousness and ethical sensibility. The result of this data suggests the following: I win. PS. Come and visit me in NY when you are done in LA.'

The night before I went away Marion cooked a feast of curries. ‘You won't be getting food like this for a while,' she said, as she served us. Then, when she had sat down. ‘Here's a game. A very LA game. In the movie of your life, who would play you? Raff? You first.'

Raff had played before and had his answer down pat. ‘Robert Mitchum,' he said.

‘You wish,' I said. ‘And you, Marion?'

‘For looks I'd have to say Ali McGraw,' she said. ‘But I don't think her performances have enough subtlety to capture my true essence.'

‘I'd like to think I was a young Jane Fonda,' I say.

‘From the
Klute
era. With a touch of
Barbarella
.'

At the end of the night Raff gave me a present. The lawn in the backyard had been wild and unruly before he mowed it into a circle. The grass around the circumference was still feet high and the boundary of the circle was surrounded with tea light candles that flickered a warm, golden light. After dinner Raff blindfolded me and took my hand.

‘Come here,' he said, leading me outside and untying the blindfold when I got there. ‘You stand inside it and make a wish. That's your going-away present.'

The gesture was romantic; it put me in a romantic mood. I stepped into the circle. I wish, I thought to myself, to meet the man of my dreams.

Five

‘Do you know,' Ruby says, ‘that Bill Gates thinks the South Indians are the second smartest people in the world?'

‘Who's first?' I ask.

‘The Chinese.' She laughs. ‘He is a man with his eye on the global market.' We are driving down to Poovar Island and India flickers by through the car windows. I cannot understand why it took me so long to return.

Kerala is a Communist state, and hammer-and-sickles are painted on the sides of people's houses. The locals wear white to fend off the heat. The coconut palms are so thick that the light is filtered to a greeny-gold. There are Christian churches scattered at regular intervals through the trees as well as temples and the occasional mosque.

Everyone warned me that India would be more crowded, more polluted and more of a hassle since I was here last. But at this moment it seems utterly perfect. We catch a low wooden boat through the waterways to our hotel. There are fireflies darting about, and the glow of lamps from the villages scattered among the trees. It is hard to believe there is solid land in under there. In the twilight it seems that the trees are floating, that the water extends forever.

After we unpack and have dinner, we go for a walk along the beach. It is a narrow strip of sand, with the sea on one side and a lagoon on the other and there are brightly painted fishing boats beached for the night above the water line. The sea is full of phosphorescence and the surf is wild, making a continual play of fireworks, a constant sprinkling of stars.

‘They are living creatures, you know, that are glowing like that. They light up when they're disturbed. Look.' Ruby runs down the beach a few metres, landing as heavily as she can on each foot, shooting stars into the air.

‘You have diamonds on the soles of your shoes.'

‘I love that album. You see, just because there is an age difference doesn't mean we can't like the same music.'

‘On that subject, don't feel obliged to hang out with me while we're here,' I say. ‘Full moon is coming. Keralan beaches are famous for their raves. I don't want to cramp your style.'

‘You won't,' Ruby says. ‘I might just disappear at any time. But I'm trying to be a good girl. I haven't been so into the drug thing since I had a bad reaction to the anti-malarials I was on. I had like five anxiety attacks a day and couldn't stop crying. It was foul. And let's not mention the very recent head-shaving-on-hash incident.' She runs her hand over her scalp. ‘Anyway, I like being with you.'

With her clothes on and no hair, Ruby looks like a boy. But now that she is in her bathers I cannot miss her curves. Her curves—and mine, I suppose—are the reason we are sunbaking on a secluded section of sand out of sight of the fishermen. We don't want to offend them with our uncoveredness.

‘I don't usually travel like this,' Ruby says, her voice muffled because she is lying on her stomach with her head cocked into the crook of her elbow. ‘Normally I spend time with the locals. Work with them, if it's possible.'

‘I've come to accept that I'm fooling myself if I think I can be anything other than a tourist,' I say. ‘That's one of the things I like about America. I can work with people, live there. I don't feel like such a voyeur. Here, it's more complicated.'

‘You're being defeatist,' Ruby says. ‘You sound like my mother. It's not as hard to engage as you make out.'

‘Well you sound like a naïve rebellious daughter.' I'm sharp with her. Her certainty about the world, about what's right and wrong with it, suddenly irritates me. ‘But I'm glad you think you've got it all sorted.'

I've upset her, which I suppose is what I wanted. She gets up and walks down to the water without looking at me. She spends some time there, pottering in the shallows because the rip is so strong.

I get up too and move under the palms to get some shade. Ruby joins me there.

‘You know,' she says, ‘this heat is bringing back a memory, the first really scary thing I can remember: Ash Wednesday. Not so much the fires as the build-up. The dust storm. Did you live in Melbourne then?'

‘I was in Bali,' I tell her. ‘I was with my brother Finn and the day we were leaving to fly home was February 14, 1983. I remember the guy serving us in the bar saying, “Your country is on fire.” We didn't believe him, but the next morning, when we were coming in to land at Melbourne airport, the air was thick with smoke.'

‘I was only five,' Ruby says. ‘I can remember my dad calling from work and saying we had to close all the windows because a lot of dust was blowing towards us. He asked to speak to Mum and I was suddenly scared, spooked by the urgency in his voice. I remember that more vividly than the storm itself. Later Dad told us about friends of his that stood in their driveway at Mount Macedon with wet towels over their heads while their home burnt down around them, waiting for the flames to claim them as well. And a woman who put all her possessions in a boat in a dam, only to have the fire pass over the house and burn the boat, destroying everything that was precious to her.'

‘I only heard the details when we got to the airport. The dust storm was over by then but my parents told us it dumped a thousand tonnes of sand on the city in a single hour. They told us what it was like when the smoke rolled over the city, and the stories they'd read in the papers or heard from friends. All the firemen who got burnt in their trucks as they were trying to escape from the fire front.

‘Then, whenever I turned on the radio over the next few days there was the voice of the journalist who reported on the burning of his own house. His broadcast was replayed again and again, you know the way they do—
I'm watching my house burn down. I'm sitting out on the road in front of my own house where I've lived for thirteen or fourteen years and it's going down in front of me. And the flames are in the roof and…Oh, God damn it. It's just beyond belief…my own house. And everything around it is black. There are fires burning all around me. All around me
.'

‘You remember what he said?' Ruby asks, ‘word for word?'

‘It's a grid thing.'