We board the boat at Alappuzha, once known as Alleppey. The boat is thatched, with a covered terrace on the roof, a small living room underneath and a bedroom no bigger than a double bed. Our captain is called Hari and we have a cook who calls himself JD. They have nowhere to sleep, or eat.
‘Hari and JD can eat with us,’ I say.
‘They won’t,’ Ruby says. ‘We’re the wrong caste, they won’t want to.’ These are the things I forget about India of course, when I romanticise it in my dreams. ‘This is God of Small Things territory,’ Ruby goes on. ‘Have you read it? It’s all about caste. Caste and love.’
I haven’t read it, but I’ve noticed that everyone we meet tells us what caste they are, along with their names and occupations. And the resentment towards Muslims is overt. As in Sri Lanka, politics are everywhere.
We travelled down tiny waterways at Poovar, in a small wooden boat. We could spread out our arms and touch coconut palms with our fingertips. We floated within inches of an egret perched on a palm trunk that had been twisted by sunlight till it was slung like a hammock over the water.
In contrast, this canal feels like the Keralan equivalent of the Princes Highway—wide and dirty grey-green, with factories and car ads on either side. We are floating through a state where pollution is destroying the waterways and poverty is increasing exponentially. I try to stop worrying about these things and enjoy the fact that manicured rice paddies have come into view and the pace of the boat is smooth and slow. I point out the small villages to Ruby as we pass them, but then we see the villagers washing and bathing in the river and have a shameful sense of invading their privacy.
‘I feel like a Memsahib, perched up here on the roof in my cane chair,’ Ruby announces. ‘And I’m hot. Perhaps that is why I’m finding this so depressing.’
It is hot up here on the roof of this floating palace. Ruby looks to me like a wilting flower. ‘Would you like me to fan you with some kind of frond?’ I ask.
‘Yes, please. And let’s play the game where the historical relic is you rather than the locals. Question one: did you see the first man walk on the moon?’
I did, of course, like almost everyone my age. I was in prep school, five years old. We were all lined up to watch the landing on the TV. I can still remember the eeriness of the flickering images. The crackle and staccato of the sound. The grey surface of the moon. The slow, heavy way that the astronauts moved.
I tell Ruby that at that time, back in ’69, the milk used to be delivered to our house by a man with a horse and cart. ‘I would hear it coming—you know Clydesdales? The horses with enormous feet? Clip-clop, clip-clop,’ I rap my knuckles on the side of the bamboo chair, ‘I would hear them coming down the street. You’d have to shake the bottle to get the cream on the top all through the milk. On winter mornings there would be frosts, on the car windscreen, on the lawn, making it crunchy to walk on.’ The frosts don’t happen so much now. Now it is hotter in summer and milder in winter. It makes Melbourne feel different from the city I was born in.
Ruby smiles when I talk to her of the frost; I smile too. The thought of cold weather is deeply pleasurable.
I tell her that when I was in grade one the system changed from imperial to metric. I had only been doing maths for one year the old way, but that was enough to make it stick and I’ve been confused ever since. It was, I say, an in-between time; but when I think about it, every moment is an in-between time, every moment stands poised between the past and the future.
We stop further along the canal to look at a Catholic church, St Mary’s. It has frescos that are hundreds of years old. They are vivid with colour, unrestrained in the violence and drama with which they portray key biblical moments. I love that about this place, the way the chaos of Hinduism influences Christianity, so that floating down the river you might see a small Ganesa shrine and, a bit further along, a Jesus shrine. Both icons surrounded by incense and laden with necklaces of flower and pieces of fabric.
It is only when we slip out of the river into Lake Vembanad that we see how beautiful this place really is. The lime factories that have lined the river shore and spread a ghostly white over buildings and trees fade into the horizon. There are pretty pink flowers everywhere, though later that evening Hari tells us these flowers are caused by pollution and their leaves are choking the lake.
As dusk descends the twilight blurs everything so I feel like I’m in Kashmir again, unable to distinguish between water and sky. Ruby sits, mesmerised. Wailing floats across the water. ‘Is that sound coming from the mosques?’ I ask the gnarled and grumpy Hari.
Hari looks offended. ‘Not Muslims. Hindus chanting. Perhaps some Christians singing their hymns. Not Muslims.’
Ruby and I smile at each other when he says this and I wonder whether we are smiling at the same thing: our craving to find the perfect moment; the absurdity of expecting it.
Two weeks after Michael left Australia in the summer of ’94, I woke to the news that LA had been hit by earthquake just hours after he’d got off the plane. The front page of the paper had a photo of freeways collapsed on each other like a pack of cards. And the news that most of the major roads downtown were closed. Dozens were presumed dead and thousands injured, thousands homeless.
‘Are you okay?’ I faxed Michael immediately, forgetting my promise to Marion, and to myself, that I wouldn’t contact him again. He faxed me straight back.
‘Have you ever touched concrete that undulates like fabric, stood on floors that rolled like surf beneath you? But that isn’t the worst of it. It is the aftershocks that hit every few minutes or so which are the most distressing. There have been hundreds of them since the main quake and it is only twelve hours in. They leave you chasing your coffee as it slides around the table, afraid to stand, convinced you’re crazy, convinced the building is going to crumble around you. Nothing is solid.’
I was a long way away again, Michael felt safe. He kept faxing, he was romantic, he was sweet to me. I forgot the rumours about other girls in Sydney, and forgot about wandering St Kilda in the middle of the night. Remembered only that when I was with him I bled, the moon was full, fires broke out and now it seemed the earth moved underfoot: all these things I read as signs.
One day Marion found a fax Michael had sent me and she confronted me. ‘Are you two back in touch?’
‘I was worried because of the quake.’
‘Just don’t wake up one morning to find five years have gone by and you’re still hooked. He’s not real, Catherine. You don’t know him. Nothing is more alluring than a man you make up in your head.’
‘Of course he’s real.’
‘No he’s not. He’s drama and chaos. He’s Los Angeles. He’s good sex.’ Marion stared at me in exasperation. ‘You don’t get it, do you? With real boyfriends you do things. You hang out after you have sex. You talk about stuff. All you’ve done with this guy is fuck, get a postcard or sit by the phone in a range of exotic locations. It is not a relationship.’
‘You pathologise everything,’ I was upset. ‘This is what all that therapy has done to you. This is what this decade has done to us. No one would ever love anyone if they went around being sensible about things. What I feel for Michael, what he feels for me, it’s…It’s romantic. This is what romance is.’
‘Catherine,’ Marion hesitated. She seemed nervous. ‘Speaking of pathology, do you think this has anything to do with…’ I knew what she was getting at. ‘It can skew people’s antennae pretty badly. And Michael…I think he’s got a nose for damage.’
‘Jesus, Marion, everyone’s got their seedy stories. It’s so fucking nineties the way everyone excavates some minor event and turns themselves into victims. What happened to me wasn’t abuse with a capital A, it’s not a big deal.’
‘I don’t have a story like that,’ Marion looked upset. ‘I think the whole word should be in capitals: A. B. U. S. E. It’s a huge fucking deal to have your best friend’s father grope you every time you babysit. It’s not about sex; it’s about having to keep secrets, and feeling like you have to play up to it, and no one noticing because everyone thinks it’s normal these days for teenage girls to be sexually precocious. It’s awful. Really awful.’
The few friends I had told over the years had said the same thing. To me it was a fog. I couldn’t see how it was connected to the person I was now, and I certainly couldn’t see how it was connected to Michael.
‘Look, Laura’s dad never actually fucked me. He just felt me up a few times. Lots of older people tried it on me. In some ways it was kind of sexy, it made me feel powerful.’
‘I don’t understand why you play this down, Catherine—you play every-bloody-thing else up. There’s nothing powerful about how you behave with men now. When it comes to Michael, you’re like a junkie,’ she took a breath. ‘This is not romance,’ she said carefully. ‘It is madness.’
She put a glass of red wine in front of me. She, five months pregnant, was on the mineral water. ‘If I wasn’t pregnant this friendship would be driving me to drink,’ she said. ‘Let’s watch TV—“Seinfeld”’s about to start. Otherwise I’ll kill you and agitate the baby.’
I leaned across the couch and took Marion’s hand. ‘Why do you put up with me?’ I asked her.
‘Like you said,’ she smiled at me. ‘Love isn’t sensible.’
Through the perfect autumn and into early winter Marion, Raff and I planned the coming of the child. I offered to move out but they both said they wanted me to stay. Or, to put it as Marion did, ‘subvert the heterosexual family norm.’ They asked me to come to the birth and I took the responsibility seriously, reading my Sheila Kitzinger conscientiously. I even attended the hospital pre-natal clinic with Marion. We talked about pain control, and names, and whether it was bad to dress boys in blue and girls in pink. Raff built shelves and fossicked through secondhand shops looking for a cot and other things the baby might need. Marion and I cleared out the small study and painted it, blue and yellow like the sky and the sun. I made curtains out of an Indian print with wood-blocked elephants and then painted some elephants, and the occasional goat, down low, near the floor. I did this because they reminded me of Rajasthan and Arabian Nights and such thoughts had always made me happy.
‘But will they make Embryo happy?’ asked Raff, unconvinced. Embryo was now large enough to make Marion’s stomach round and smooth with a popped-out belly button.
‘Well, they won’t make it unhappy,’ Marion reasoned. ‘And perhaps they will make it wise.’
All this should have made me less interested in Michael, but it seemed to have the opposite effect. I felt a stirring of want for the things that Marion and Raff were going to have and it did not occur to me to look closer to home to find those things.
‘We’ve just got email set up at work,’ I told Marion one evening. ‘It’s great.’
‘We’ve had it for a few months already,’ she said. ‘I get much more work done but it’s addictive. I think I’ll miss it when I take time off after Embryo is born.’
I soon found out what she meant. Email changed how I felt about the world. It brought me closer to my family—my father in Paris; my dad in Bangkok; my brother in New York; my mother in Adelaide. Sometimes I felt as if I personally was being globalised: stretched thin, across the world. Sometimes I felt as if I could never find all of me in the one place at the one time. So more and more the place I found myself was at my computer, imagining Michael sitting in front of his screen on the other side of the world.
When Michael and I had used faxes, the contact was irregular, once every couple of weeks or so. But soon, with email, we were up to every couple of days. Out there in cyberspace there were no gestures to read. We didn’t have to see the certain turn of the body, the angling that suggests ambivalence. We emailed each other with no idea what the other was doing at the time: drinking, working, grabbing a quiet moment away from a lover, it was irrelevant. Most importantly all these words between us, the frequency and intimacy of them, made me forget how fraught things had been when he was in Sydney and Melbourne just a few months ago.
He would lose interest periodically of course. Faxes, emails, letters were unanswered, phone calls unreturned, the waiting was so intense, so exquisite that it consumed me. I pined across, masturbated to, the distance between us. Thought of that wonderful sprawling city in the soft winter light and the sea that edged it. Thought of planes cutting through the sky to be at that airport, with him, fucking in half an hour as if one year, or two, had never passed.
‘What I imagine is this,’ I’d write. ‘I am lying on a towel on Venice beach, hot from baking in the sun. The sun on my skin fills me with heat. I am wet, I am swelling, thinking about you…’
Time wasn’t as solid in this space. I would sit down for a moment and find hours had passed. I found I could write things, say things, which I lacked the courage to say or do in the flesh. Things I was embarrassed to read once I had written them.
I told Michael what I would like to do to him. I told him what I would like him to do to me. I would describe how it felt to have him slide into me after weeks—no years—apart, shocked by how easy it was, how ready I was for him. I told him I loved his cock, how big it was. I was graphic. I described the sensation as he sat on my couch, grasping my arse, moving me down onto him. The way my cunt resisted him at first and the pressure we used to push at each other until that moment when my body stopped fighting him. The release inherent in that precise moment of giving in. I would describe him licking and biting me, holding my arse and spreading it wide as I moved upon him, so he could go deeper. I told him that I wanted him in me as deep as he could go without hurting me. No, deeper, I didn’t care if it hurt. I wanted it to hurt.
It was enough to make us both come as we were reading, as we were writing. If I were at work I would run to the toilet to masturbate. I couldn’t, not once I got there and the reality of the office-grey toilet walls, the fake smell of pine from the room deodoriser and the neat line of toilet rolls impressed themselves upon me, but the need was urgent.
Words amazed me. The fact that they wrought such an effect. Could make people cry, and laugh, make their body swell and harden, or soften and open. I would describe how it felt to suck his cock. As I typed I could taste him in my mouth, my lips would part. I began to miss meetings at work because I was typing so hard, so furiously. I would jump when anyone came into my office.
Sometimes Michael complained that my emails were too intense. ‘Perhaps if you gave me more detail, built things more slowly,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t come so quickly.’ Occasionally he asked me to stop. ‘I am sitting here, my cock hot and hard in my hand, and you are several thousand miles away. This is driving me crazy.’
I would masturbate and describe that to Michael. The feel of my fingers, or of the vibrator, too large really, having to be worked into my body. I would describe to him the fantasies I would have while I did that to myself. ‘I imagine,’ I wrote, ‘that you are fucking me up the arse. It is hard for you to get your cock in, we are worried it is too big, but we manage if you use a lot of lubricant, if I lie very still, not moving, and you push slowly. You have me pinned.’
‘I am not sure if that is what I want to do to you,’ he answered. ‘If we do it like that I will not be able to see your grey eyes and that is what I first noticed about you. There is a game I would like to play. You lie on your side and read a book to me, out loud. I will stroke you for a while, then put one finger, or two, in your cunt to see where it is your attention lies, with me and my cock that is hard against you, or with the book. Let’s say it’s Tolstoy: Anna Karenina. That’s a long book. You must keep reading all the while, while I stroke you, while I fuck you with my fingers. You must keep reading as I penetrate you. You get the idea, I’m sure. I want to see how long you can keep reading for, I want to wait for that moment when all you want to do is fuck, nothing else. I want that moment to take a long time to arrive, to take no time at all. Clearly, it seems, I don’t know what I want. But you know what I want. You always do. You are always right.’
‘I want a look,’ said Raff. ‘I’ve always thought you were a girl with literary talents.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I can’t re-read this stuff without blushing. I’m sure the computer guy from work has read some of it and you should see the way he looks at me. I can guarantee it will send you crazy with desire. You’ll stare at my breasts more than you do already. Marion will get cranky.’ But then Marion, despite her reservations about Michael, started nagging as well. I showed them an extract of one of my more pornographic attempts. We sat together, shoulder to shoulder in front of their computer screen, reading. Marion kept laughing out loud, but Raff went silent.
‘I didn’t think it was possible,’ Raff announced, ‘but you have finally made me blush. You’re wasted in the travel industry, you could make millions writing smut like this.’ He turned back to Marion. ‘Have we got time for a quickie before dinner? We both know how randy those hormones are making you.’
Marion laughed. ‘It’s a miracle, my darling,’ she answered. ‘You’ve been out-perverted in your own home.’
There was sex, there was the weather. Michael would write of the sky with clouds or without. Of clouds, full of rain or empty of it. There had been a hot north wind in Melbourne, in Los Angeles a hot wind had come in from the desert. Storms and dying cyclones would come down from Far North Queensland to Sydney, giving the city the feel of the tropics. In Los Angeles the storms came from the west across the American plains, exhausted of rain by the time they got there, more wind than anything else. There was so much drama in the air and sea: wild winds, killer surf, storms and heat. We would always have the weather between us, the weather to talk about. Cold currents would move south from Alaska, freezing the seas at Big Sur while the seas around Bondi were heating up, as if it were on the equator, and Melbourne sweltered in forty degree heat for days and weeks on end. The warmth would bring in sharks and bluebottles along the beaches of New South Wales. Whales would swim north earlier than usual; in California they would move south late. Summer hailstorms would pelt me, while fog hung heavy over the ocean at Venice making it impossible to surf in the morning.
He might write: ‘It has been hot for weeks on end. There is no relief in sight.’ Or this: ‘It has been raining and in this weather this city loses all its charms.’ These things felt important. Expressed, perhaps, his state of mind (‘it is cloudy’), or his feelings for me (‘it is hot’). That he was missing me (‘I envy you those tropical summer storms, the build-up then the relief. The thunder and lightning. It gets so wild there. Here, here it is always the same’).
I told Michael how it had been raining constantly in Melbourne, and then again in Sydney whenever I went there for work. ‘I thought Sydney was drier,’ I complained, ‘so how come it rains whenever I am there?’
‘People always think it rains more in Melbourne but it’s not true,’ he said. ‘Sydney’s annual rainfall is 47 inches a year—twice Melbourne’s.’
‘My mother has a theory,’ I say, ‘that the weather follows me. I think perhaps it does.’
One cold winter night, Raff knocked on my door and woke me up. Told me it was time. I got up to find Marion pacing. ‘It hurts,’ she said, outraged.
She staggered out to the car and lay in the back seat, curling over a large cushion I’d put there for her days earlier. Raff got into the front seat and together we drove the five or so blocks to the Royal Women’s Hospital. We put Marion in a wheelchair and went up to the twelfth floor.
She was in so much pain all she wanted was a hot shower. She couldn’t bear having either of us near her. ‘Just piss off and leave me alone,’ she hissed, so Raff and I sat in the hallway, on the floor outside the bathroom, helpless, listening to Marion’s groans. Sometime, around three a.m. they took Marion into the delivery room and gave her a shot of pethidine. For a while things became very quiet and still. I sat by the window, staring out over the streets of Carlton, the suburb where I’d gone to university and hung out, the place where I worked. This night as Max was being born, the moon was bright enough to bathe the street in light. Mist hung in the air and everything shone white.
After Marion had slept for an hour or so she began to enter the contractions again. I sat by her, putting a washer on her burning forehead, bringing water to her in a glass with a straw, spraying her with Evian water. She was very self-contained. A lover of cats, she was like a cat herself, drawn deep into herself. I’d look into her eyes when the contraction was building, panting in short breaths, reminding her by example how to breathe over the pain. To breathe with someone, to look at them with such a steady gaze was a revelation. It revealed to me the quiet depth, the steadiness of friendship.
Raff, who was sitting at the end of the bed with a book of sports trivia, threw out a continuous string of quiz questions. ‘In what year did Bradman make 974 test runs at an average of 139.14?’
‘Easy,’ Marion gasped when her contraction finished. ‘1930.’
‘And the scores were?’
‘Shut up, Raff,’ I wanted to kill him; I couldn’t believe he was going on like this. But Marion, Marion loved him for it.
‘Eight,’ she said. ‘Then 131, 254, 1, 334, 14, 232.’ Before doubling up and raising her hand in a firm stop sign when Raff started to ask another question. He sat quietly through the next contraction while I gave her a sip of water and changed the washer on her forehead. When he could see that the pain had receded he started again. ‘Who made the most runs in a three-test series?’
‘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.