Geography

by Sophie Cunningham

  ‘It was courageous of you to come and see me after so much time. You’re a very brave woman.’ He was being formal which I took to mean he was moved. And perhaps he was. But now I can see he was trying to work out how to say goodbye.

  Nine

  ‘I want to understand this great love of yours,’ says Ruby, ‘but frankly, even with all the exotic backdrops, I’m stumped.’

  ‘You have friends who have drug problems,’ I say. ‘You know about addiction.’

  ‘Is it the same thing?’ she asks, and I tell her it is.

  ‘If there is any sense to it, it is this,’ I say. ‘I loved him because he was ambivalent for so many years.’

  ‘You know what Krishnamurti says? When you get rid of attachment, there will be love.’ Ruby quotes at me. ‘He means real love. The opposite of what you’re calling love.’

  I sigh, trying not to be irritated when Ruby carries on like this, trying not to be defensive because she is looking at me the way all my friends looked at me. I don’t blame people for not understanding. I don’t understand myself. Ask a heroin user whose addiction has spiralled why that has happened. They can’t explain. Ask a drinker—they don’t know either. As for me, I could say: ‘My fathers left me.’ In fact I do say that sometimes, but to be honest it rings hollow; it sounds like bargain-basement Freud. Or ‘I was molested,’ but that’s therapy talk, too. This I am clear about: it is no one else’s fault. I chose, with a full heart, to give over seven years to the thought of him.

  ‘I can just tell you the facts,’ I say. ‘I can only tell you what happened.’

  We change the subject before things get too fraught. We are eating a meal in Munnar, a tea plantation town. Watery dhal and a curry that is meant to be palak paneer, but the green is wrong and the cheese is off. We have found one piece of chicken in our chicken marsala—the rest is gravy. Despite the promising picture of a bottle of Kingfisher beer on the door, it is an alcohol-free night. When I first travelled in countries where alcohol was hard to come by I simply gave up drinking for the duration of the trip. These days, I don’t find that so easy.

  ‘Places change you, don’t they?’ Ruby says. ‘We didn’t go there together, but whenever you talk about going to Rajasthan fifteen years ago it sounds like it was just two years ago except that it is more crowded and polluted now. But when I saw the men in turbans and their shoes with curly toes I felt like I had walked into Arabian Nights, like you did. I loved it that people painted blue or red or green goats and elephants onto their whitewashed walls. Or if they were Brahmins their entire house was painted blue. There were whole villages of blue houses.’

  ‘It was in Rajasthan that I stood on the roof of my hotel in the fort wall of Jaisalmer,’ I say, ‘watching tanks move slowly across the desert, throwing up dust, as they drove into Pakistan. That same night I watched a bank of sand roll across the desert towards the fort, forcing its way through the lattice stone work that lined our room. After the storm was over the sand lay on the bedspread in lattice patterns, like the most delicate embroidery.’

  ‘You think you can prepare yourself for somewhere if you have seen pictures, or documentaries or whatever, but nothing is the same as being in a place. Letting it get under your skin.’ Ruby pauses. ‘I don’t think this place will get under my skin, though.’

  ‘Nor mine. I actually thought I’d gone mad this afternoon, when the van dropped us at the Indo-Swiss Cattle Farm.’ It was meant to be one of the area’s highlights. We admired the calves, were impressed by the size of the bulls and stood, speechless, in front of a patch of garden called the Fodder Crop Museum, which was a series of tufts of different strains of grass labelled in Hindi and English.

  ‘Why is it,’ Ruby asks, after we’ve sat in subdued silence for a while, ‘that I want to drink more when it’s hot, like now. But I also want to drink more when it’s really cold. There is nothing I like more than a swig of brandy after a day in the snow.’

  ‘I find that I like a drink in more moderate temperatures as well.’

  We sit thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Let’s go back to the room,’ Ruby says to me, ‘I think there is something to drink there. In the mini bar.’ Innocent words, welcome words, but ones I had used with Michael. That time I started a lie with a lie and the echo startles me, all these years later, even though I know Ruby is telling me the truth. Even though she and I aren’t playing games.

  ‘Catherine, meet Anna,’ said Finn. ‘Anna, meet Catherine.’

  I was nervous. Finn was my special piece of family, my most loved person in the world and I wasn’t sure what I thought about him living here, in New York, with a beautiful American–Italian woman. Anna was smart too. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying I’m nervous,’ she said, when we met. ‘It’s just I’ve heard so much about you.’

  New York was a blur of the Calvin Klein ads that papered the boards around building sites in SoHo, or loomed storeys high on the side of buildings mid-town. The city was transforming into one giant billboard. In some ways I was in awe of the sweep of a campaign that bridged years and cities and buildings. Marky Mark had towered over Sunset Boulevard when I first went to Los Angeles, in 1993. On the last day of 1995 it was Kate Moss and heroin chic. The images were black and white, grainy. The city was being swamped by brand names. There were fewer coffee shops that weren’t Starbucks, bookshops that weren’t Barnes & Noble or Borders. I used to travel to escape what I knew; these days I felt I could find nothing else.

  Back then, I had loved this global thing (and even this time I rushed to Baby Gap to buy clothes for Max) but now I saw clearly the erasure of difference; worse, I sensed the closing of escape routes from the sense of claustrophobia that had propelled me away from people and around the world.

  Finn thought I was being romantic. ‘New York has always been like this,’ he said. ‘Changing all the time. It’s what makes it such a fantastic place to live. This is just a phase.’

  ‘Ah, the scientist speaking. Perpetual motion. But you’ve got to admit; you have to walk further now to find the grotty streets with the pawnbrokers’ and the old gunshops with the fading Winchester signs. You’ve got bugger all chance of finding clothes shops that aren’t Gap or French Connection.’

  ‘When have you ever bought a gun?’ Finn laughed. ‘These guys aren’t just going to stay in business so tourists like you can look at their cute run-down shops.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘No, I think you mean, fuck you.’

  ‘Clothes aren’t Finn’s strong point,’ Anna intervened.

  ‘Don’t forget Barney’s.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘As long as there is Barney’s in New York all’s right with the world.’

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll go on a long walk,’ Finn promised. ‘We’ll go to Brooklyn. Plenty of authentic culture there to cheer you up. Speaking of authenticity, whatever happened to Mexico? I thought you and Michael were going to go down to Baja for a few days.’

  ‘Some work came up for him.’

  ‘For an academic? At Christmas time? That’s weird.’

  We spent New Year’s Day walking down and across to Brooklyn. As we walked along the boardwalk looking back on Manhattan, I had a flash. ‘I remember being here,’ I said to Finn, ‘with Mum. When I was four. You were just a fat baby, you probably don’t remember.’

  ‘No, I don’t remember that. But I do remember I had a fabulous figure as a baby.’

  We wandered around the brownstones and several churches. ‘My family used to live around here,’ Anna said. ‘That was our local church.’ She pointed out a tiny stone church with a small white marble angel out the front—so lifelike it seemed as though she might take flight.

  ‘Bondi is more secular,’ I tell her, ‘we have sculptures of mermaids around my suburb. Or we did, before they rusted.’

  ‘Speaking of where you live,’ Finn said, ‘and of religion, are you barracking for the Sydney Swans yet?’

  ‘I think this is where I say fuck you.’r />
  ‘You guys,’ Anna was getting used to it. ‘Though Finn did tell me you changed teams once. Even Americans understand that that is bad behaviour.’

  ‘Do I know you well enough to say, “Fuck you too”?’

  ‘I’d feel honoured,’ Anna smirked. ‘Like part of the family.’

  Finn traipsed behind us while Anna took me to her favourite bookshop, which was full of beautiful art books, and then showed me a vintage clothing store that had been there for twenty years. We’d planned to go for a coffee, but it was so cold we went to a bar and had a whisky instead.

  By the time we walked back over the Brooklyn Bridge it was even colder. Our faces hurt where the breeze hit them. I had never seen the city so clear. Manhattan sparkled.

  ‘Could that be clear ice on the buildings that’s making them catch the light like that?’ I asked. ‘Does it get that cold?’

  ‘It does,’ Finn said, ‘but I’ve never seen the city looking like this.’

  ‘It’s like a city of ice crystals,’ Anna says. ‘The snow cave out of The Faerie Queene.’

  The next morning I woke to blizzard warnings on the television. I was in the kitchen making a coffee when Finn wandered in, half asleep. ‘You’d better get going early,’ he said. ‘If you don’t get on a plane this morning you’ll be snowed in for days and miss LA and all your connecting flights to Australia.’ I threw my stuff in my bag. ‘I love you,’ I said to Finn as I hugged him goodbye.

  The snow began to fall as my cab pulled up; by the time I got to the airport there was pandemonium, people everywhere jostling in queues trying to get onto earlier flights. I managed to get one and joined the line at the gate lounge. But as I looked out through the window, out on the snow swirling so thick everything was turning to white, I knew I had missed my chance. Just before we were due to board, the airport called everything to a halt. Neither I nor anyone else was getting any plane anywhere.

  ‘It is not possible to board flight QF 001, flight JAP 900 and flight BA7,’ the announcement went. ‘It is not possible to return to Manhattan because of the dangerous weather conditions. Please be advised that all airport hotels are full. Due to the nature of the emergency and the numbers of people involved, there will be no food vouchers.’

  It was three p.m. and already an eerie dark had fallen. Backpackers started putting tents up in the waiting areas, preparing to sleep it out.

  ‘It’ll be okay tomorrow,’ said the woman in front of a queue I was standing in for some reason I can no longer recall.

  I knew she was wrong, this was going to last for days. The thought of spending a week on an airport floor made me feel like a caged animal, the thought of being away from Michael for any longer seemed even worse.

  ‘What will I do?’ I called him in a panic.

  ‘There is nothing you can do,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t see you tonight,’ I said. ‘I may not get the chance to see you again.’ Trying not to cry.

  ‘There’s no need to be melodramatic,’ he sounded remote. ‘Things will sort themselves out.’

  After I had hung up, I went outside into the snow waving a handful of cash at the stranded cabs. The lead driver beckoned me over with a jerk of the head. He didn’t much like the idea of being snowed in away from home either, he told me as we gingerly pulled out of the taxi rank—his wife was due to give birth to their first child any day now. And that was all I learned about Robert, apart from his name. Navigating the worsening snowstorm took all his concentration. The windscreen wipers moved slowly, dumping the snowflakes from one side of the windscreen to the other, opening a slowly blinking eyelid through which the road could intermittently and indistinctly be seen. The traffic stretched for miles.

  I thought of footage I’d seen of whiteouts in Europe where people had been trapped in their cars for days and frozen to death. I was furious that I’d put myself in such a dangerous situation because of my desperation to get back to Los Angeles—and furiously embarrassed that I’d rung Michael from the airport because I wasn’t going to make it back to him. As I sat and fumed, the traffic thinned. My fellow commuters were either home with a stiff drink by now, or they had thrown in the towel and abandoned their cars by the road.

  It was five hours before I got back to Manhattan. It was empty, as if a bomb had dropped leaving all the buildings intact. The taxi slid down Third Avenue, literally the only car on the road. With nothing to grip, it was gliding in wild arcs, first to the left, then to the right down the middle of the road. Close to Grand Central Station, Robert gave up.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, I’m going to have to leave you here,’ he said and I found myself standing on the corner of 3rd and 46th, surrounded by suitcases in a bank of snow with flakes falling around me. I started to cry but it was too cold for immobility. I quickly gathered myself together and dragged my bags to a phone box to ring Finn, who told me the trains were still running. He met me at the station in SoHo and helped me drag my bags through the snow to his apartment. I started to cry all over again when we got there and Anna hugged me and put a scotch in my hand.

  ‘I’m sorry you are missing out on LA,’ Finn said. ‘But it’s fun you are staying. Nothing awful about having to spend a few more days with us.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I said, ‘it’s Michael. I only had a couple more days with him and now I mightn’t have that.’

  ‘Change your flight back home. Get to Sydney a few days late. It’ll be okay.’

  ‘I think I’m just getting spooked,’ I said. ‘It used to be there was fire when we saw each other. Now it’s snow. It’s not a good sign. And, to offer a more solid fact, he sounded totally unmoved on the phone when I rang him from the airport.’

  Finn rolled his eyes. ‘Think laterally: maybe this is a good sign. Perhaps this huge dump of snow represents the depth of your passion for each other. Perhaps it is about smothering the mundane and the day to day with a soft, delicate—yet potentially dangerous—passion.’

  ‘Deep,’ I paused. ‘Now let’s discuss another urgent matter. As we were driving here for five fucking hours I was pondering an ethical issue. Have you ever been at a dinner party where you and your friends have discussed whether or not you would eat each other if you were starving to death?’

  ‘Often,’ said Finn.

  ‘Never,’ said Anna, simultaneously.

  ‘Well I started to ponder this very question earlier tonight when I thought me and Robert were going to be trapped in the snow.’

  ‘So, could you have eaten him?’

  ‘That’s the point. I don’t think I could’ve,’ I said. ‘He was a nice guy. And very skinny.’

  ‘Wimp,’ Finn said. ‘He would’ve eaten you in a flash. You’ve gotta toughen up; this is New York.’

  After another scotch I went to bed and slept heavily for a few hours. I woke to find Finn and Anna hanging out the window gazing at the snow that had built up through the night. All the cars were covered and the doorways snowed in. The snow glowed under the street lamps, intensifying what little light there was so it was like a strange twilight, even though sunrise was more than an hour away. More remarkable than the glow was the silence that had enveloped this largest, this noisiest of cities. The snow on the roads had stopped the traffic and muffled all other sounds as well. There was only the occasional echo of voices as the sun rose and people fought their way out into the snow to dig out their cars or bikes and the kids who lived in Finn’s apartment block all raced outside to make snowmen.

  That morning Manhattan took on a carnival atmosphere. People got out toboggans and snowboards. They went skiing down Fifth Avenue. There was no logic to which shops opened and which didn’t. The Swedish lipstick shop opposite Finn’s flat was open, but you couldn’t get groceries or papers. I went with the flow, and bought several lipsticks—black, dark brown, bright red. When the snowfall had eased enough, we walked around the streets, arms linked.

  ‘When snowflakes bond together they can be as strong as concrete,’ Finn told us. ‘No t
wo are the same.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, but as we walked along I found myself picking up a handful of snow to examine it, as if I had a chance of seeing an individual flake.

  ‘So admit it,’ Finn said. ‘You do think I say interesting things.’ And, as I began to mould the snow into a snowball to throw at him, I confessed that once in a while I did.

  We walked home, through the gentle flurry of snow that was still falling, and I put out my tongue, feeling the prick of cold as the flakes landed. ‘If snowflakes are so strong,’ I said to Finn, ‘how come I can melt them away with my tongue? How come I can disappear them with the heat of my palm?’

  ‘Ah,’ Finn said, ‘the way to kill a snowflake is to isolate it. Separate it from the pack and pick it off,’ before pausing to build up to the bad punchline I could see from a mile off. ‘Or perhaps it is just that you have a very strong tongue.’

  We hung around the house with the heating up high, reading and ignoring each other. We watched the weather channel. The blizzard had been dubbed The Blizzard of ’96 and every snowflake was being reported on a minute-by-minute basis.

  ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘You would think it was World War Two.’

  ‘This is what you get when there are dozens of cable channels, with one dedicated to weather. This is a content opportunity like they haven’t had in years,’ said Finn.

  Regular bulletins would report the death count. ‘I’m not sure,’ said Finn, ‘that guys in their fifties having heart attacks while trying to clear snow drifts can count as death by blizzard. I’d have thought it should be classified as death by unfitness.’

  ‘And I notice,’ continued Anna, ‘that there’s no talk of the homeless people that must have died under snow or been knifed in overcrowded shelters.’

  ‘Already finishing each other’s sentences,’ I say. ‘That’s a good sign.’

  Two nights after the blizzard we watched ‘Letterman’, which, for the first time in its history had almost no studio audience. People watching the show on television saw a window of opportunity and snowboarded through the streets at ten at night, figuring this was their chance to get into the audience. Most of the show was taken up with shots of people running into studio seats and whooping.