‘I want us to go to Land’s End at the tip of India,’ Ruby says. ‘I think you’ll like it there.’ ‘I want us to go to Land’s End at the tip of India,’ Ruby says. ‘I think you’ll like it there.’
‘I’m sure I will,’ I say, ‘but it’s ten hours in a bus in the opposite direction from where we planned to go next.’
‘It’s a sacred place,’ she says, firmly. ‘You are here to rediscover your spirituality, and I’ve organised us a lift.’
We’re driven there by a middle-aged Indian couple Ruby met when she was watching the cricket on TV at our hotel in Munnar.
‘We are here in the tea plantations for our second honeymoon,’ Gita told Ruby. ‘Now our children have all left home.’ Gita and her husband, Rajeev, both grew up in Uganda but they met in Bombay after they’d been forced out by Amin during the seventies. Now they live in London.
‘Our marriage was arranged,’ Gita tells us on the drive. ‘So it was not like falling madly in love. Actually I loved someone else.’ Rajeev drives on stoically. ‘My first boyfriend, he was better looking than Rajeev. But not as rich and not from such a good family.’
I start to laugh, then stop myself, for fear of offending them. I needn’t worry. They have told this story many times before.
‘I had a very sexy girlfriend myself,’ Rajeev says. ‘More sexy than Gita, but also, not as rich.’ Gita starts to laugh, then Rajeev joins in. They crack each other up.
‘Actually,’ Gita recovers herself. ‘Our love was slow to come, but now it is good. Sometimes we are quite bored, but mainly, we love each other very much.’
Rajeev turns around and winks at Ruby who is in the back seat. ‘When it is too boring,’ he says, ‘I can always watch the cricket.’
‘This is a very nice hotel,’ Gita says when they drop us off. ‘Rajeev, why aren’t we staying at this hotel?’
It is a very nice hotel. I am taken aback. ‘I booked it,’ Ruby says. ‘Special for us. Let’s dump our stuff. It is not far off sunset and I want to give you a present.’
I don’t understand the connection between these two things, but we walk down through the fishing village, and the shell shops for tourists and pilgrims. Ruby leads me through the tangle of touts to a patch of ocean that has rocks banked up all around, creating an artificial lagoon. The water is full of women in saris and men in dhotis. They squeal and flick water at each other before reluctantly going under.
‘Come,’ Ruby says. ‘Follow me.’
She walks to the water line and then keeps on going, full-length skirt, long-sleeved shirt and all. She turns to make sure I’m behind her.
I join her at about waist height and then we hold our noses and go under together, trying to ignore the colour of the water. It is putrid and brown.
After we have done that she hugs me then puts a hand on my shoulder, and holds me at arm’s length. She says to me, formally, ‘This is where the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea meet. Gandhi’s ashes were spread here, where we are standing. That is why it is a sacred place. That is why you must wash yourself here. It is something like the Christian notion of washing away your sins—it leaves you open for life’s blessings. Like you said when we first met, this is an important time for you: you are being reborn in all directions.’ She kisses me ceremoniously on the forehead.
It is a nutty, lovely thing to do. I smile at her, kiss her back.
‘As an added bonus, this is one of the few places in the world where you can see the sunset and the moonrise at the very same moment—every April. Since it’s September we will have to make do with watching the sun set tonight, and being able to see the sunrise tomorrow, while standing at practically the same point.’
‘I love this kind of cosmic symbolic stuff, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I know,’ Ruby says, looking proud of herself. ‘Do you think I’d have gone to all this trouble if I didn’t?’
Later that night I am woken by a thunderstorm that doesn’t quite come. The sky is rumbling and there are bolts of lightning, but no rain. It is like the song from Lagaan says, Let loose not the sword of lightning, but the arrows of raindrops! I sit up and shake myself, hoping that if I can properly wake, perhaps I might properly rest. I look across at Ruby. Her face is angled towards a shaft of moonlight that has broken through a gap in the clouds. I sit, wakeful, and watch her sleep.
Tony was waiting for me at Sydney airport, which surprised me but made me happy. We had exchanged the occasional email while I was away, and it seemed to me from the emails, from the fact he was here, that he wanted to forget our fight so we could go back to being friends. I launched into the details of my trip but I hadn’t judged things between us right. He cut across me. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘It’s the blizzard I want to hear about, not Michael. I get the picture. Full moon and fire gone. Waning moon and snow instead. You are such a hippy. But in this case, go with the signs. I think they’re right. He’s a jerk; I don’t know what you see in him. He’s not even good looking, like me.’
‘His nose isn’t as big though,’ I said, pushing my luck even further in an attempt to get us back to how things had been. To my immense relief, he laughed.
‘Take me to the beach,’ I drew him into a hug. ‘I want to swim. I have been pining for Bondi.’
When we got to the water and I dived into the waves, I finally felt I had come home. It was cold and refreshing and to be so close to the sea, to spend the day in and beside it, felt like a blessing. In the afternoon we went together on one of my favourite walks on the North Shore, around from the Taronga Zoo to Clifton Gardens, where the bush was so thick that, if it wasn’t for the sight of the occasional ferry heading past on its way to Manly, you would think you were in the middle of the country. To add to the adventure spiders’ webs, in the middle of which sat big fat spiders, were strung from one side of the path to the other—sometimes a dozen in only a hundred metres.
Tony had packed a picnic for us and after walking for an hour or so we sat on the lawn that led down to the beach at Clifton Gardens and ate crusty bread with avocado.
‘Do you think I should listen to him when he says he loves me, or when he says it’s over?’ I couldn’t help myself.
‘You really must be losing it if you think it is okay to talk to me about this shit. After what happened between us.’
I went to speak, but then didn’t, because he was right. This thing—and it was more than Michael, I knew that—was bigger than me and it left me with no judgment.
‘I’m going to let you off the hook this time,’ Tony went on, ‘because I drove all my friends crazy when I was breaking up with Julia.’ He put his hand over mine. ‘I don’t approve, and I need you to shut up. But I understand.’
Michael didn’t answer my emails, calls or letters in the weeks after I returned. Tony made it clear he was still interested in sleeping with me, in more than that, but I was too confused to take him up on it. Instead, we lived like an old married couple. We cooked and shopped together, went to the movies, and cuddled on the couch in front of bad TV.
One night we went to see Portrait of a Lady. I had loved the book and felt trepidation about both the film and another couple of hours in front of John Malkovich. I groaned when I realised one of the ads I had helped design was going to run in the trailers. A group of happy-go-lucky young people, barefoot, casually dressed, sit down to a pile of oysters on a boat that could be in Haloong Bay, or Lakes Entrance or the Blue Grotto. The vibe is comic, they are gorging themselves on food and drink. As they collapse, one by one, on comes the voiceover: At Freedom, the world is your oyster.
The audience guffawed and there were a couple of boos. A bad joke, I thought, but it’s got their attention. I leant over to Tony. ‘If they don’t like that, wait till they see the next one—“We leave no stone unturned.” ’
He laughed. ‘I do think you may be getting bored.’
‘I know. The tragedy is it’s the most successful ad campaign we’ve done. The less I try, the better things seem to go.’
It was clear that Marion and Tony had been discussing me behind my back. ‘How can you turn down Tony, who is there, for Michael who isn’t?’ she said to me on the phone one night. ‘That’s totally aside from whether Michael behaves himself when he is actually in the same place as you.’
‘It depresses me to admit this,’ I replied, ‘but I sometimes think that it is because he is far away that I love him.’ I paused. ‘I try, but I never get that intense about people who are close to me. Friends who support me. People like you.’
‘You’ll lose Tony,’ she said, ‘if you haven’t already. Will that worry you?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘I’m in this constant state of grief, and I call it Michael. But perhaps if Tony gives up on me I will call the grief Tony. Who knows.’
‘I’d call it Dad if I were you. Have you thought of seeing a shrink?’
I admitted that was a good idea but I never followed up on the name she gave me, or the one Tony gave me a couple of weeks later.
‘You’re sick,’ Tony said after he came home to find me watching some crap show for the fourth night that week. ‘Too much of your emotional life is vicarious or mediated by technology. Computers. Video. Pretend stuff. Let me put this as bluntly as I can: George Clooney is not your boyfriend. You do not work in an emergency ward in a Chicago hospital. A girl like you should be aiming for a real boyfriend.’
‘I’m used to relationships being in my head. And, given the hours I’m working, it’s useful I think like that.’
‘It’s true,’ said Tony. ‘Relationships ’90s style. Very cost-efficient. In the short term at least.’
‘Do you think it’s a government plot?’ I laughed. ‘To bring up a generation so hooked on the fantasy of perfection and endless possibility that we never have the kind of family life that may cut down on productivity? Perhaps it was something they put in the water along with fluoride. And I have to tell you, I have fantastic teeth. No fillings.’
‘We didn’t have fluoride where I grew up,’ Tony smiled toothily at me, ‘yet I also have fantastic teeth. I think this may be another of your dubious theories.’
I’d go down to the beach early every morning and launch myself, swimming further and further each day. For the first couple of weeks I could only make it one way across Bondi, could only get as far as the point where the floor of the ocean moved towards me. Soon after that rocks began, then the seaweed and fish darting in amongst them. Then, one very calm day, I got to the point where I could stand on the rocks beside the wall of the Icebergs pool. Soon I was turning at Icebergs and heading back north again.
Some days I felt so strong I could imagine I was swimming across the oceans of the world: the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea. Some days the waves were so high I couldn’t see over them. I’d become disorientated and find I was swimming out to sea. While it was more dangerous swimming when the surf was up, it was more exciting as well. The water swelled underneath me and if the waves were particularly high they would drop me quickly back to sea level and there would be a flash of fear, followed by delight.
The repetition of strokes and the endless ripples on the sand below me would lull me as if I were meditating. I was no longer attached to the land, or the city. I was carried by the water, as well as moving through it like the fish I passed, the seaweed trails that traced the movement of currents.
If I didn’t swim I’d walk, as the sun was rising, around the cliffs to Bronte past the Icebergs pool where men had been swimming, literally, among iceblocks every winter since 1929. Walking this path, day after day, I began to relish its particular curves and quirks. The sea was sometimes calm and green, other times rough and grey. Some wild mornings I’d be caught out as the rain came down in sheets and I’d remember people talking about Black Sunday, February 6, 1938, a day when the weather turned and the surf became so huge that three hundred people had to be rescued and five people drowned.
Even if there was no rain I often came home wet from the foam and spray where the waves curled up the cliff back onto the path, heavy as a shower. At the point, the wind always hit with a force so great I could feel the full weight of the weather slapping my face and skin; I could literally lean out against it.
One day, when I was catching the train home in the evening, I saw an accident. There were some renovations being done at Central Station and metal dividers were placed at awkward angles everywhere, funnelling the peak hour push-and-shove in closer together than usual. As I was going up the escalators I looked down to the platform over the surging mass of people to see that an old man had caught his leg in the divider and fallen. He was lying at such a sharp angle I could only assume the leg was broken, but people were walking around him and someone even walked over him. He was a tough old bastard though; as I watched he reached out and grabbed a woman by the ankle. She stopped and looked at him.
‘You,’ he commanded. ‘Help me. I’ve broken my leg.’
I told Tony about it that night. ‘It was living proof of those surveys. The greater the numbers of people around the less likely people are to help each other. Everyone hopes someone else will sort out the problem. No one takes responsibility.’
‘Cities,’ Tony looked sad, ‘can be horrible places. Much as I love Sydney, I miss Melbourne. It’s smaller, things like that don’t happen as much. Did the woman help him?’
‘She did. She cleared the crowd away from him, called over some guards. But I don’t think she would have stopped if he hadn’t reached out for her.’
That night Tony and I drank wine and ate together. He flirted with me and did his best to dispel my bad feelings about Sydney. Yet still I went to bed wondering why it was I had moved from Melbourne, where people would look out for me. I pined for Marion and Raff, phoning them almost daily. We talked about Max, and tried to hold on to the inconsequential chat that bound us together.
The pull between the physicality of Sydney and the love of my friends confused me, just as Melbourne confused me. I didn’t know what to think of it. It was flat, it housed the people I loved, it made me claustrophobic. Other places…other places were where my family was from. Other places were where I found lovers. But there was something else as well. Like Michael, I needed distance to love people.
‘Darling,’ Tony said, ‘ I have something to tell you.’
It was a hot day and we were lying on the sand, drying off from a swim. Tony was scratching his thigh with his left hand, the pressure making his right hand twitch, like when a dog scratches itself. He was like a dog when he came out of the water too, when he shook his curls dry.
‘I think I should call you Fido,’ I said, not listening to what he was saying.
‘I had sex last night,’ he announced with a smug look. I felt as if I had been slapped. I must have looked like it, too.
‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he reached out and touched my face. ‘I didn’t think you would care. After all, I’m not Phantom Man, he of the large penis and super brain.’
I burst into tears. ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘I always hoped that when we were ready, one way or another, we might get together again.’
Tony kissed me on the forehead. ‘When are you going to be ready for that? I’ll be an old man.’
‘You are being cruel,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to rub salt into the wound.’
‘I want to,’ said Tony. He was angry now. ‘I want you to see how bad it is. What you are doing to yourself.’ My being upset, my revealing, too late, that I cared, had pissed him off completely. ‘Did you think I was going to keep finding you attractive the way you’ve been moping around, watching crap television and being miserable?’
‘I thought you liked crap television.’ I was hurt.
‘I was pretending,’ he said.
‘Fuck you. I’ve got the message.’
‘No you haven’t, that is what I’m trying to tell you. You haven’t got the message at all.’ He got up, shook himself free of sand, of me, and walked towards the ramp, away from the beach.
Tony was hardly home after that. Was it the loss of Tony or was it the months without any contact from Michael? Whatever the reason I was like a cat on a hot tin roof. I read magazines because I couldn’t concentrate long enough to read books. Everything seemed magnified, tick tick tick every second of the clock, the phone too loud, the phone didn’t ring enough. I would check the email once, five times, ten times a day. I would check the mailbox; I would check my messagebank at home and at work. I carried a mobile phone. Just in case. If I missed a call it could ruin everything. I might miss out on sex, I might miss out on love and marriage and a family. I was surfing adrenalin, underneath the waters were deep. Give way and I would sink into them. So I stayed up, skimming. Coffee, alcohol, dope, food. Stuff. I had to get stuff into me.
Friends asked me why I was like this and I sympathised. I didn’t understand either. Yes, Michael was smart, and charming, he was enticingly erratic, alluring, out of reach. But basically this thing, it didn’t make sense. I can only come back to this: the sex was extraordinary.
There was this too. Things in my body, in my brain didn’t feel right. It was not just other people who thought I was mad, I was starting to feel mad myself. I was starting to understand that other people didn’t feel anxious all the time. I knew that the rationality of scientific explanation would never do justice to my, or anyone’s, experience of longing, but I began to give up my insistence that what was happening was particular to me. To call what happened chemical was less poetic than calling it love, but it was starting to feel closer to the truth. I’d always called my attraction to Michael chemical, talked about it as if he was a part of my body—so perhaps I might expel him, like a toxin, out of my system.
‘Hi, you’ve called Michael O’Maera. I’ll be in Sydney until mid-July, but leave a message, I’ll be checking in.’
‘Fuck,’ I screamed, startling people around me. ‘You are un-fucking-believable.’ I slammed down the phone, banged my head against the side of the booth. I was standing at LAX, breaking the promises I had made to Marion and Tony not to call Michael when I got here. But they had had nothing to worry about: we’d passed in the air. He had booked a ticket to fly to Sydney the day I left. The past is another country, I was thinking, they do things differently there—that was the line that kept coming into my head. HSC English Lit.; The Go-between. But what the hell that was trying to tell me I didn’t know, or why all I could think about was a line from a book I had studied more than fifteen years before. Reader, I married him, was another one of my favourite lines and that wasn’t making much sense either. I’m one of the best-read people I know but it was clear from the fact that I was standing in an airport concussing myself in a phone booth that it had done me no good. No fucking good at all.
Sitting on the plane on my way to Chicago I watched Groundhog Day for the fifth time. Watched Bill Murray try and figure out how to get things exactly right with the appalling Andie McDowell. Leaving ice-cream on the window ledge, which flavour did she like, should he speak French, should he quote poetry, should they have a snowball fight and how hard should he throw the snowball, how many days and months of days and years of days would he try and figure out how to get things right before he stopped trying and got on with the endless day that was his life.
I couldn’t watch the film any more. I pulled out a book Tony had given me (‘Some light reading for your big fat hippy streak’). It was called The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and it looked like up-market self help. I had read all those. Women Who Love Too Much. Men Who Can’t Love. All that stuff which promised women if they just fixed themselves up everything would be different. But in the book Tony gave me I read a poem that made sense of things.
I walk down the street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. / I fall in. / I am lost…I am hopeless / It isn’t my fault. / It takes me forever to find a way out.
I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. / I pretend I don’t see it. / I fall in again. / I can’t believe I’m in the same place. / But it isn’t my fault. / It still takes me a long time to get out.
I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I see it is there. / I still fall in…it’s a habit/ My eyes are open / I know where I am / It is my fault. / I get out immediately.
I walk down the same street. / There is a deep hole in the sidewalk / I walk around it.
I walk down another street.
When I got to Chicago I sent Tony an email: ‘Hello my friend,’ I wrote. ‘I’ve begun reading the book you gave me. I think, I hope, I am at stage #3.’
I dragged myself around Chicago where there was an international travel conference. I spent my days in an exhibition centre that was like one long shopping mall. There was no light, no air, just a tomb a mile long with four thousand travel agents. As well as the stalls there was a series of morning focus groups where different travel agents ‘shared’ their global strategies. Buying entire islands seemed a particularly popular ‘strategy’.
‘More control,’ the head of Global Adventures beamed. ‘More flexibility to meet our clients’ needs.’
Freedom organised some seminars of its own for an hour at the end of each day where the company discussed ‘strategies for the new millennium’. There was a lot of talk of branding and the suggestion that the company move into travel guides to compete with the Lonely Planet-style guides. The manager of our Los Angeles office had ideas for a line of travel products: backpacks, little clothes lines, inflatable pillows, foil blankets for those who find themselves stuck in the Himalayas somewhere without shelter. Then there was a long angry session about ethics, and the company’s responsibility towards the groups they subcontracted out to.
‘It is not our problem that the trekking companies we deal with don’t pay their porters properly,’ said Justin, who ran the London office. ‘We’ve all heard stories about people who have given the porters down coats or good boots, only to see them for sale in the markets after they finish the trek. They choose to live this way.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ I said. ‘Poverty is never a “lifestyle” decision, but that’s what you make it sound like.’
Tom, from the Dublin office, joined in. ‘If we are to continue any pretence that we are an alternative company, we have to take the ethics of the people we subcontract to seriously.’
Trish, the owner of Freedom Travel, began to look animated. ‘You’re right, Tom. We are an ethical company. Frankly it is one of our assets, something we should be advertising.’
I knew my days in advertising were almost over. I was selling choice and I didn’t believe it existed. The global melding imagery in my early ads, the questionable humour of my later ones, those days were over. Smallness and difference were back in, precisely because they were endangered. Being ethical was part of our branding and the idea of making sexy what we should all have been doing without hesitation made me feel sick.
‘Fuck the new millennium,’ I said to Tom over a beer in his hotel room later that night. ‘Fuck Freedom Travel.’
‘What kind of hard-hitting Aussie businesswoman are you, in your cups after only two beers? I thought you sheilas were big drinkers.’
I smiled at him. ‘I’m a hopeless drinker. Always have been. While we’re on the subject, what kind of Irishman are you, drinking lemonade?’
‘I’m a drunk,’ he smiled. ‘So I don’t.’
I hadn’t really given him a second glance before he’d got into the debate this afternoon, but now I was taking more notice—the brown eyes, the curly hair, the wicked accent.
‘Why is it,’ I went on, ‘that the more I have fetishised choice—sold it, packaged it, lived it—the less I’ve actually had?’
‘How much did you have to start with, I wonder? We’re all stuck with our own psyche, not to mention our national psyche. Most choice is marketing, always has been. Take Ireland. Five hundred years as a run-down joke; now we’re sexy. None of it makes much difference though a few of us get richer from it. The coffee’s got better, the Guinness has got worse. UK publishers make a shit-load out of a few Irish writers, but an Irish language writer is lucky to get published anywhere at all. Even if you do have a lot of choice, choice for its own sake is pretty meaningless. It’s depressing.’ He paused. ‘What’ll you do when the conference is over?’
‘Drive,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a ticket to Seattle to worship at the shrine of Kurt Cobain—don’t laugh—and from there I want to drive to LA. I want to do my own personal road trip, and heal a broken heart with wide open spaces.’
‘What’s happened to your heart?’ he asked and I told him, in as few words as possible.
‘How long did you say this has been going on?’ he asked.
‘Five years,’ I said, blushing, putting my head in my hands. ‘Shoot me, someone.’
‘In AA we have a saying along the lines of “to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result is madness”.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Believe me. That’s why I’m doing the long drive.’
‘I’m going to play you Joni Mitchell,’ he replied. ‘A track for a girl who is heading off on a long drive through California while she’s stuck on someone.’
Oh will you take me as I am / Strung out on another man / California I’m coming home.
As I prepared for my long drive I thought of some of the others I’d done. Of the car trips that had imprinted themselves on me. I remembered that when my mum got with my dad, we spent our Christmases along the wild coast between Apollo Bay and Portland. I could remember the first time I went there, when Finn and I were still little.
I realise now that I was with Mum and Dad on their first real holiday together and my memory of that time is infused with the love that was growing between them. Not every child is lucky enough to see her parents fall in love. I saw them fall out of love as well, and when I was a teenager things ended for them. Now I’m an adult I have trouble remembering the details of that sad time, but I can remember these, the good times, as if they were yesterday.
We had no tents; we slept under the sky, or packed like sardines into the back of the Holden station wagon if it rained. My dad dived for abalone and we would grill it on the fire. I always thought it was tough and refused to eat it. Nowadays it is considered a rare delicacy.
In this part of my memory it is always summer and there are endless days of playing in the sand, of swimming and the smell of campfires and mosquito coils. There were bad things, too, but not very bad, more the kind of things that make something more exciting to remember. There was the time my dad swallowed a bull-ant that was in his beer and he got bitten inside his throat and it swelled up. There was the possibility of snakes—every fallen branch a possible culprit to be inspected from afar. The excitement when one of these sticks uncoiled in a powerful wave across the path and my dad had to kill it with an axe.
I learnt to snorkel in a rock pool and I learnt to dogpaddle. Even today whenever I duck dive, then come to the surface blowing water out of the snorkel in a spout, I have a rush of memory for Dad and the rock pool he taught me to swim in.
I was highly attuned to the love between my parents and hyper-vigilant for signs that it might not work out. I would roll into a ball and face the wall whenever I heard raised whispers, my parents’ failed attempt to hide the fact they were fighting. I would close my eyes and think of things that were like dreams, except I was awake. As a child I called them almost-dreams. I would almost-dream of beaches and playing in the sand. Of planes and a train that travelled for days. Of a city that was all stone and bricks and rows upon rows of brownstones. Sometimes these imaginings would roll seamlessly into real dreams, other times they would not stop the rage of the adults in the next room from leaking under the door to find me in my bed.
Over time my imaginings of other places turned into something else. Instead of travel and movement it was thoughts of boys and the new feelings in my body that took me out of myself, away from the world, into sleep. I would dream that a boy and I were forced together by circumstance. Perhaps we would be kidnapped and locked in a barn together and, after a few weeks of forced proximity, he would come to see my true beauty and ravish me. Perhaps we would be thrown into the back of a truck together, hands tied, and find a way to make love despite being bound. I can remember my first orgasm. The intensity of it. The purity of the pleasure.
As I got older, as I involved other people in my sexual explorations, as I became more consciously sexual, the pleasure lessened. I had to chase harder to find the feelings. What began as an opening to pleasure became a way of closing down. Sex became like the dreams of travel, something so sweet, so powerful, that I forgot the point of them. Both took me out of myself until it seemed there was no getting back.