‘Gooch,’ said Marion. ‘Against India in 1990. 752 runs at an average of 125.33.’
Raff moved closer to her, began stroking her brow. ‘I love you,’ he said.
At around six a.m. Marion’s contractions began to come apace. The doctor arrived and nurses stopped telling Marion not to push and urged her to bear down. Raff and I cheered her on, yelling, as if we were at the football.
The doctor put her gloves on, ‘He’s coming down,’ and motioned to me to move around beside her. I stood watching as Marion strained, and started straining myself in unconscious sympathy until I almost wet myself.
There was the merest glimpse—a head covered in blood that almost came out then slid back inside Marion’s body. Raff was holding her shoulders; she was gripping him by the elbows.
‘I can’t,’ Marion said. ‘I can’t push again.’ But she could and she did, making a deep guttural moan as she bore down with the most awe-full force. I saw it again, the head almost out, then back in again and Marion, too tired to even complain, had to muster the strength to have one more go.
The doctor pulled me closer. ‘He’s coming, catch him,’ and before I knew it he was sliding out, a blue, blue boy with a red face, into my hands. I struggled to hold on to him, so oily and slippery and me terrified I’d drop him. I lifted him over Marion’s legs and put him on her belly. The sun was starting to rise and shafts of sunlight came into the room; one actually struck the boy, as if it were a nativity tableau. Marion looked down at her son; she touched him gently with a finger.
‘How extraordinary,’ she said.
You can’t be present at the birth of a child and not see the world differently. ‘Now I know,’ I wrote to Michael, ‘how much I want a child. I come home every night knowing that I love more than it is safe to love a child who is not your own. I feel lonely.’
I knew you shouldn’t confess these kind of things to men you wanted to love you. But I imagined I was so far away that Michael would understand. I didn’t think he could possibly sense that I was becoming anxious. For a child, for a lover, for things to come together.
‘Babies are nice,’ Michael replied. ‘Give Marion my best.’ That was all. Then he continued his conversation with me about Sydney. How much he missed it. He wondered as he always did whether he should return. He asked me what I thought he should do.
Between my long letters he sent short emails. Over the years I did the same thing with these emails. I read their brevity as a loaded silence, as a grave and respectful attention to my intensity. I thought they meant something. I assumed that when he read my letters he thought about them and about me. Michael understood, in part, what words could do. He never made promises. But he felt free to send words of longing and encouragement. ‘Write me your life,’ he would say. I would live to write, write what I had lived.
‘When I was an adult, when I first began to travel alone, my mum and dad still lived in Melbourne,’ I wrote once. ‘Perhaps that is why I love airports. Even though my parents were separated they would always come to the airport to greet me, or Finn, when we came home from wherever we had been in the world. They would bring their respective new partners and would wave banners that said “Welcome Home” while wearing silly hats in an attempt to embarrass us. Mum might wear a baseball cap backwards. Her boyfriend would wear a footy beanie. My dad might wear a colourful hat with a propeller on it while his girlfriend wore a hat that would have looked perfect at the races. The family, no matter how disparate, always rallied when it came to airports and homecoming. It brought us together.’
‘Catherine,’ he answered. ‘Family, travel, love. With you they all seem bundled together. Tell me about a man you loved so I can rile myself up with jealousy. Write me a short story.’
So I did. I wrote the story of the first time I confused a continent with a man. The first time I loaded the fragility of love with the weight of a nation.
This love affair is neat in my memory because that is what memory does. It pulls things into shape. There were maps at the beginning, maps in the middle and maps at the end.
I was in love with my geography teacher when I was at high school. In our first class together we looked at maps of the world, maps that compared the countries that had existed before the century’s wars with those that existed now. I rolled the words I saw around in my mouth. ‘Do you like the name Ceylon better,’ I asked when he stood behind my shoulder to see how I was going, ‘or Sri Lanka?’
‘I’m an old romantic,’ he said. ‘Ceylon.’ And then he leant over me and traced the shape of that country, a country that will always be the shape of a teardrop no matter what you call it. ‘Maps are beautiful things,’ he said to me. ‘Even if they are describing the effects of warfare. Aren’t they?’ And I had to agree they were.
My geography teacher visited India every year. As the years went by he brought me presents from his travels: silks, incense, earrings, and, on my eighteenth birthday, a red wool dressing gown embroidered with silk dragons. ‘I think we should celebrate your entry into adulthood,’ he said, with a glint in his eye.
Finally, so I could be with him, I went to India. He was still in Melbourne but I felt closer to him than I ever had before. It was in India that his stories came to life. It was in India I finally understood the kind of man he was. Chaotic, friendly, a storyteller, passionate.
In Kashmir I bought a shawl that I still wear, all these years later, like a security blanket. I lived on a houseboat for ten days and sat on the deck with snow falling around, the Himalayas, reflected in Dal Lake, encircling me. I sat for hours watching the light until I could no longer tell the water from the land and sky. On another boat, far south of Kashmir, I sat out on an open deck all night, watching fishermen’s lamps bobbing at sea, hundreds of little stars.
In Mysore I bought tikka powder for my forehead and I still have the little plastic containers of colour: China red, vivid blues and greens, intense orange. Piles of flowers were placed as offerings at makeshift Hindu temples on every street corner. One day, on one of those same street corners, I stepped over the dead body of a baby girl who was laid out on a rug, a box beside her tiny corpse into which people were invited to throw coins.
The moon was full in Udaipur and I sat on the hotel rooftop by the lake smoking dope under the cold light, while the dogs howled and wedding parties danced through the streets. I rode camels into the Thar Desert where the moon was new, so fragile it lit nothing, and I lay and watched Scorpio circle over me, stars inscribing the curl of its tail as it spun slowly over me through the night.
There was a lot of illness and strange things happened to my mind. I went through periods of intense fear. I lived on Masala Dosai and Sprite. I lost a lot of weight. I didn’t go out for days at a time.
Beggars chased me, thrusting mangled limbs in my face. In Jaisalmer someone spiked my lassi with a hallucinogen and I was mad for days, friends turning into skeletons around me, the floor rising up to swallow me, the walls wrapping around me. But before these visions set in there was a moment when Jaisalmer, known as the golden city, actually turned gold and glowed at me; and I received its full beauty as well as that of the desert around me.
When I got back from India I went around to the geography teacher’s house. He was surprised when he saw me. ‘You’re half the size you were when you left,’ he said and I told him it had been hard being there, and that I wanted to go back.
‘Show me where you went,’ he asked, so I opened up his atlas and laid it out on the table. ‘I landed here, in Madras,’ I pointed at the spot on the map. ‘Then I went here,’ I trailed my finger across to Mysore, then Bangalore and Goa. ‘Then I caught the steamer,’ arcing my finger through the Arabian Sea to Bombay. My fingers traced the map, his fingers traced my arm and before I’d got to Rajasthan, we finally went to bed, as I’d always known we would.
Then there was a day, a year later, when he packed his guides and his maps and kissed me goodbye. He disappeared into India, for what he called his ‘
big adventure’. The cards and letters came often at first, and then were more intermittent. Now I only hear from him when he comes to me in dreams—like you do, Michael. He is always smiling, and his map is always open in his hands.
‘I like your story,’ Michael answered. ‘At the risk of being hoist on my own petard, you should be writing more. About love, about sex.’
‘Petard?’ I emailed back. ‘What’s that?’
Now I am older I wonder if that was the point after all, if that was the gift Michael gave me: permission.
Seven
Ruby and I sit down to eat a Keralan curry: fish and coconut milk infused with other, subtler, flavours like coriander and lime. We try and figure out what all the ingredients are as we eat, so we can repeat this back home. The taste is so delicate that all travel’s frustrations slip away.
‘Enough of food,’ Ruby says, after a while. ‘Tell me more about the boyfriend grid.’
‘It has fallen into disuse in recent years.’
‘A system failure?’
‘Exactly. It was another of my organising principles. I’d talk about who I was going out with like I was announcing a series of monarchs. “Hawke was prime minister when the geography teacher was reigning,” or more recently: “That was the time the Catholics took power: Paul Keating on one hand, Michael on the other.” Then I’d genuflect and go down on one knee. Tell me about your boyfriend grid.’
‘I have no such grid,’ Ruby says. ‘As you say—it’s a flawed system.’ She hesitates before she goes on, ‘And if I did have a grid it would be a girlfriend grid.’
I am surprised because I hadn’t thought about it. I’d just assumed. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Sorry?’ she asks, sarcastic. ‘Why sorry? It’s not cancer.’ She looks at me and suddenly she’s furious. She gets up to leave. ‘I’m going for a walk. I know you didn’t mean to be hurtful but I hate the way you looked at me just now. As if I haven’t had to listen to stories of your heterosexual obsession for weeks now. As if your heterosexuality is normal when it’s totally fucking nuts but I don’t care because you are my friend and I love you anyway.’
I’m confused because I don’t know what she saw in my face that upset her so. I felt flustered, that is all, because it changed things for me. Not how I felt about her but… something shifted. I reach out and take her arm. ‘I didn’t mean…’
She shakes me off, bursts into tears and walks into the night. I suddenly feel a lot older than her, which I suppose I am. I remember what it is like to be so distressed and angry but I don’t know what to say that will make her feel better. I’m uncertain about words these days; uncertain as to whether they mean anything. I stay at the table and gesture for a waiter. I need a beer.
When I get to our hotel an hour later, Ruby is in bed already, reading. She is red-eyed, but smiles at me when I open the door. I go to speak but she lifts her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I overreacted.’ Suddenly she is Barbara Stanwyck, her voice low and mysterious. ‘Let us never speak of this again.’
We are in the city of Kochi, which is a series of small islands linked by ferries and bridges. It is on one of these islands, Fort Cochin, that we visit St Francis. The church is so old that no one knows when it was built. Tombstones from an early graveyard form the floor of the church. The medieval script and illustrations on the tombs are worn down to shadows, the merest suggestions in stone. Here the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama was buried but also, as I discover when I see her tiny gravestone, the unknown Bunny La Cruz. I become fascinated with Bunny. I try and imagine what she might have looked like dressed in the formal baby clothes of the sixteenth century.
‘If I ever have a daughter,’ I say to Ruby, ‘I’d call her Bunny La Cruz.’
‘Bunny La Cruz Monaghan? Sounds good. If I ever have a son I’ll call him Vasco. Vasco Miller.’
We walk to Jew Town and down the bluntly named Jew Street. We hover around overpriced but irresistible antique shops, which used to be run by Jewish merchants but now are run by Kashmiri refugees. When we get to the end of the street we visit the 450-year-old synagogue. It is a small wooden building with a floor of disparate Chinese tiles and a ceiling dripping with nineteenth-century Belgian glass chandeliers.
‘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 Alfr
ed 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.
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