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.

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.