Eight

‘These last few days have been a bit of a low point,’ Ruby says. ‘In more ways than one. Today, I am in charge of the itinerary.’

Despite my misgivings about continuing to travel with her we have caught a bus to Thekkady, just out of Periyar National Park. We are both being nice to each other and I’m beginning to enjoy Ruby’s company again. We spent yesterday in pursuit of some of the world’s last living tigers. We saw nothing, of course. Our ‘Wildlife Lake Cruise’ was one of half a dozen boats that set off late each afternoon. The noise of all the engines scared most animals off, though we did see some water birds, a few deer, a hyena-looking thing and some water buffalo, which, for an exhilarating moment, I thought were elephants. Our guides told us endless tales of animals being poached and killed, ‘for the Chinese aphrodisiac’.

We walked at dusk, in the hope of seeing some rare goats. There was a traffic jam in the car park and, as if in mockery of the signs that line the road requesting silence, the drivers leaned flamboyantly on their horns to hurry the traffic along. So, no goats.

‘Today,’ Ruby elaborates, ‘we are going to the spice farm.’ I am dubious, thinking it will be yet another tourist trap, but I have no better suggestions. As soon as we arrive at the farm I’m won over.

‘What does this remind you of?’ our guide, Neehal, asks us. He rubs a seed he has picked off a vine between his thumb and forefinger. We lean towards him and breathe in. I know the smell but can’t place it, it is too subtle.

‘Cardomon,’ Ruby says, and is right.

Neehal bends down and digs up a small root, like a tiny piece of ginger. It is waxy skinned and pink on the outside but when he snaps it open it is chalky and an intense yellow. He takes my hand and turns it over, rubbing the root across the back of it, staining it.

‘Turmeric,’ he says.

We look at peppercorns, pink, black and white. He describes for us the multiplicity of ways in which the peppercorn can be prepared and when we should use each variation. We inspect the bark of a cinnamon tree and the flowers whose stamens become cloves. When we get to the pods of the cocoa plant Ruby gasps with pleasure. ‘Oh my god,’ she says. ‘Chocolate.’ I have such a moment myself when we pass a coffee bush, manicured like a bonsai tree.

After the tour is over Neehal takes us into the small spice shop and gives us a cup of ginger tea. I sit and drink, watching Ruby running her hands over and through the spices. She brings me over bags of colours and smells. Chillies, clove, peppercorns, cinnamon, tea, ground turmeric, and tiny, expensive packets of saffron threads imported from Kashmir. As we leave the shop Ruby says, ‘Neehal asked me out for a drink.’

I feel a twinge. ‘Are you going?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure that traditional Indian men are really on top of lesbianism, so to speak.’

Some hours later, emboldened by Ruby’s talking about things lesbian earlier in the day, I decide to ask her what it’s like. Lots of my friends are lesbians and I’ve never given it a second thought. But with Ruby, I find that I keep thinking about it, about what it is she might do. ‘So are we allowed to speak of it yet?’ I ask. ‘Of the love that dare not speak its name?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruby shortly, with a slightly forced smile. ‘I’ll try not to go off again.’

‘Okay, this is it. This is the question: what do you do with women in bed?’

There is a long silence before Ruby laughs out loud and says, ‘You’re an idiot. That’s your question? That’s what you ask when it clearly is a sensitive’—she draws quote marks in the air—‘subject?’

‘I have told you everything about me,’ I push on. ‘Including my sex life. You can’t get out of the conversation just by being gay. That’s cheating.’

‘What you’ve told me about you is that you had superhuman-pseudo-spiritual-sex and it drove you crazy. I don’t think I can compete.’

‘You know what?’ I say. ‘I’m starting to think that’s the spin I need to put on things to justify the stupidity.’

‘That’s not how you tell it.’

‘You’re attempting to divert me. Details. I want them.’

‘I have no idea why people find this question so fascinating. How’s this: we kiss for hours. We lick and smell each other, we rub our bodies, our skin against each other, we bury our faces in each other’s cunts, and we put fingers inside each other. And if things are going well we get our hands in too.’

I blush. ‘How do you breathe? You know, when you go down on someone and your face is pushed into them?’

‘Using a snorkel helps,’ she says, and I wonder, for just a second, whether she is joking or not. She sees hesitation cross my face and is triumphant. ‘Got you.’

‘I’m easily tricked,’ I say. ‘For several years I couldn’t eat cous cous because Finn told me it was made out of sheep’s nose gristle.’

‘So,’ Ruby is laughing. ‘Do you want me to go on with my sex talk?’

‘Absolutely,’ I say. ‘Challenge my limited imagination.’

But she doesn’t. Instead she takes from her pocket some of the cinnamon bark she has bought and rubs it between her hands and across her face and her neck, as if to wipe off the sheen of sweat that the heat has lain over her. Then she leans across the table and places the cinnamon under my nose.

‘I am the cinnamon peeler’s wife,’ she quotes. ‘Smell me.’

I hadn’t seen him for two years, had only been in Los Angeles for an hour and his house for ten minutes when Michael started to kiss me. I bit his lips, his throat. It was just like I had dreamed it.

‘We better get you walking,’ he said after we’d had sex and I, pleased to be in a bed, started to fall asleep. ‘Or your jetlag will get worse.’ When Michael got up he saw there was blood.

‘Am I imagining it,’ asked Michael as he pulled the sheets off the bed, ‘or does this happen every time?’

‘It does,’ I said. ‘Did I mention that I’m a witch?’

Michael lived in a small cottage in a compound, surrounded by a garden. His house was like a much-loved doll’s house: small and pretty and perfect, but in a rundown kind of way. He looked older now, though his eyes were the same beautiful blue. He had turned fifty and it seemed to me that a certain vulnerability had beset him. Perhaps it was his age. Perhaps it was seeing him being domestic, at home. He was paler too. ‘Even in California,’ he said, ‘it is not dignified to have a tan when you are over fifty. That doesn’t stop some people, but it’s stopped me.’

‘You’re not old,’ I say. ‘Not to me.’

‘I feel it,’ he said.

I was seriously disorientated by jetlag, more than I ever had been before, so I sat around the house, a little like a doll myself. Slept and fucked and read. Michael was busy most days; kept saying he had to work. I took melatonin that made me sleep at night, heavy and long, and left me feeling stoned.

‘Watch how much of that stuff you take,’ Michael smiled on the second evening. ‘It makes people libidinous.’

I thought he was joking but I read later that it was true. Perhaps that was another reason we had so much sex, but whatever the reason it put me in a kind of daze. There was only desire, a kind of madness: no language. That feeling was what I called love—I loved the cottage, I loved Los Angeles, I loved Michael. In that place, I was in love.

I found I couldn’t handle too much sunlight, not even the Los Angeles winter light. It was not hard and blue like you see in the movies but creamy and yellow. The sun sat at a low angle making everything slightly blurred, as if it was always dusk. I kept dropping off to sleep at odd times and on the fourth day Michael came home early in the afternoon to find me curled up on the couch.

‘Hey,’ he said softly, sitting beside me, kissing me on the shoulder. ‘It’s still daylight. You should try and stay awake.’ I sat up and kissed him on the mouth.

‘That’s right,’ he spoke so low it was a moan, ‘wake up so we can go to bed again.’

We began to make love for the third time that day. Michael sat on the bed, his back against the wall and I sat astride him. I loved fucking him this way. I could move as I wanted. His mouth could reach my breasts and his hands could cup my buttocks, lifting me, spreading me wider. It was a way I often came. But this time things were difficult. Already I was thinking that we would be apart soon, that I’d be back, in Sydney, away from him and back in my head, where I’d been stuck for years. We moved together for some time and I could feel he wanted me to come. We both were tired, and sore, so I moved increasingly faster, put my mouth against his neck and moaned, then stiffened. Michael stopped moving, held my face.

‘You faked that, didn’t you?’ he asked. ‘You don’t need to do that.’ He kissed me.

‘No, I came,’ I lied. But, caught out, I felt a small stab of triumphant intimacy; he could tell the difference between fake me and real me.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, grumpy now. He rolled me over and kissed me on the collarbone before withdrawing from me.

In the evenings we would walk around Venice and Michael would tell me its history. He was a good teacher, he made things sound interesting. ‘At one stage Venice was a separate city to Los Angeles,’ he said. ‘The idea was to improve upon the Italian Venice. Imagine, the arrogance. It was to be a fairytale city of canals floating between the sea and the desert, but by 1930 the canals were full of silt. The gondoliers were being sent back home to Italy. The Americans are nuts sometimes.’

‘Perhaps they’d call it vision.’

‘No doubt. It was created by a class-A nut called Abbot Kinney in 1905. His “vision” included the mass planting of eucalypts and Anglo-Saxon racial purity through eugenics; just so you know. Now to more recent history: that’s the phone box where Keanu Reeves is making a phone call when the first bus blows up in Speed,’ he said, pointing to a phone box on Main Street and Sunset Avenue.

‘There,’ he swung around, pointed, ‘is where he got his takeaway coffee before he went to the phone box.’

I was inspired, and finally, for the first time in days, left the house on my own. I borrowed Michael’s car and cruised LA like I was in my own private computer game. I got onto the Hollywood Freeway at Echo Park, which meant that I had to move left, across six lanes of traffic, and take the same exit as Keanu takes when he discovers they haven’t finished building the road yet. The rush of driving there, having to do it fast, was a real buzz.

‘It’s silly, I know,’ I said to Michael over dinner. ‘But there’s something about driving down roads which I’ve seen on films. Like all those streets of San Francisco.’

‘Watch it. You’re getting the LA bug. You think you know things because you’ve seen them on film. This city is full of people who live life at one remove.’

‘Speaking of which, this restaurant is good, but it is one remove from Mexico. I’m still keen to drive down to Baja, you know. Do you think you’ll have the time? To go there like we planned?’

Michael glanced up from his plate. ‘I wouldn’t say we had a plan. It was just an idea—but an idea I’m working on. It depends how much I get done in the next few days. I have a book for you to read in the meantime.’ He passed over a big hardback, richly illustrated: A History of Mexican Archaeology: The Vanished Civilisations of Middle America.

Christmas Day. No other day of the year reminded me so strongly of the tensions that drive people apart; of the roads and houses and countries we need to put between ourselves. Now Finn lived in New York, now my whole family was scattered to the four winds, Christmas didn’t make sense to me any more. Even if we had all lived in Melbourne I wondered if we’d have managed to defeat the sadness that sprawled out across the suburbs as people tried to gather together the fragments of their families. The pressure to get it right, to get the idea of family right, was intense; no wonder most people buckled under it.

The previous Christmas Eve I had flown in to Hong Kong to meet my dad, who had flown in from Bangkok. The plan was to spend Christmas Day shopping, a present to ourselves for a hard year’s work. I’d flown in late at night and the buildings had giant Santas and stars and trees etched out by the lights of the skyscrapers. The cityscape reminded me of Blade Runner, a vision of the world that was bleak but compelling. That night I had lain in bed, sweating in the humidity, dreaming vivid dreams of disintegration; of a self that broke down into bands of colour and light, speeding through time and space then reconfiguring in some city of the future. Michael was like that to me, some exciting but ravaged future place, a place where I could become something new.

This Christmas morning Michael and I woke fucking, we must have started in our sleep. I rubbed my face all over him, like a cat, breathed in the smell of him. ‘You smell right,’ I said.

‘So do you.’

‘Was that my present?’ I asked, after we had had sex.

‘No,’ said Michael. ‘It was mine. Pack your bags for the day, that’s my surprise.’

As we were walking out the door, Tony rang. It was Christmas night back home. I let the machine run and listened to Tony wish me the best. He sounded drunk.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Michael.

‘No one,’ I said. ‘Just my housemate.’

We drove west for two hours before we noticed the smoke. Michael wound down the window to let some air into the car and when we opened the window we could smell it.

‘There’s a fire,’ I said.

‘We seem to attract these things,’ Michael said, peering out the windscreen at the sky.

‘Do you know what you’re supposed to do if you get caught in one?’ I said. ‘You curl up in the bottom of the car, cover yourself with wet towels or rugs and let the fire move over you—that’s the safest thing. The worst thing to do is get out of the car and try and run away. Fire can move quicker than you.’ I looked at him. ‘If enough heat was generated the bush would simply explode like a bomb around you.’

‘You’re very focused,’ he smiled wryly, ‘when it comes to drama. But I don’t think it will come to that.’

We stopped and looked around and could see a glow in the distance. ‘That’s Joshua Tree,’ he sounded irritated. ‘Where I was planning on going for our picnic. Now I don’t know what to do.’

‘Let’s keep driving,’ I say. ‘Take me to Palm Springs. We could stay overnight. We don’t have to be back till tomorrow.’

‘Stay overnight? I hadn’t planned on that.’

‘Is it a problem?’

‘No,’ he hesitated. ‘No. I just hadn’t planned on it. Look, I think it will be difficult. To find somewhere to stay.’

We spent that night back in Venice. We talked about Mexico, again, but it was dawning on me that we were going nowhere. Michael seemed to have trouble organising himself to do anything at all. He could tell I was becoming annoyed and became solicitous, offering me chocolate biscuits, joints and cups of tea. He lit candles around the room before we went to bed. Despite, or perhaps to distract myself from, my frustration with him, I sucked his cock. It was silky to me. What it did to him, I liked that too. After he came he stroked my head, drew me into his arms. ‘You give the best head,’ he said. ‘I love the way you suck me.’ I was irritated all over again. This is not a skill I want to be remembered for. Perhaps Michael could tell he’d said the wrong thing, because he started to play a game we’d played together before, a game in which we tried to remember all the states of America.

‘Georgia,’ he drawled, in mock Southern accent, ‘Alabama, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota,’ seeing the map of America before him, ‘Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts.’ He drew breath, ‘Thems is only some of the places I’ve travelled trying to find myself a better head job. I’ve been to Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Maine, Vermont, Hawaii, Nebraska, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida…’ And before he could say Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska or the other two states I can never remember the names of, he’d gone hard and I’d gone down on him again.

The next morning we lay in bed late, kissing.

‘Why did Roberta leave you?’ I asked.

‘Where did that come from?’ He was holding me close, but his body had gone rigid.

‘You told me she met someone else. But why? Why was she looking?’

‘What do you mean why? Why does anyone? She was bored of me, I suppose.’

‘No, there’s something else,’ I said. ‘Something has happened to you.’

Michael was holding me, stroking my hair. ‘Well, actually, there was more to it than that. She kept miscarrying. She would get pregnant and then four weeks or so later she would lose it. Four times it happened. By the last time she was hating me.’

‘That is sad,’ I said.

‘She was right to blame me,’ said Michael, ‘as it turned out. She got pregnant to what’s-his-face within weeks. Happy families.’

He lay on his back, looking blankly at the ceiling. ‘You needn’t think about her, or worry about that time. It is you,’ he paused, awkward. ‘It’s you I love.’

A day later we were on the way to the airport. Once I knew Mexico wasn’t going to happen I decided to go to New York and spend New Year’s Eve with Finn.

‘My birthday is on the cusp between Sagittarius and Scorpio,’ I say. ‘Which star sign should I read?’

Michael took the paper from me and read aloud from it when we next pulled up at the lights: ‘Sagittarius, November 22—December 21, for the week December 27 to January 2, 1996. Next week things will have moved on. Something will be over. That’s us.’ He chucked the paper over his shoulder onto the back seat. I just sat and stared out the car window, like I had when I was here as a child. Ever since he’d said he loved me he’d been behaving more erratically than ever.

By the time we got to the airport he was tender again. Leant across and held my face.

‘Don’t look so sad,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in a few days. You’re not saying goodbye forever.’

‘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.