Geography (13 page)

‘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.

Seven

Ruby and I sit down to eat a Keralan curry: fish and coconut milk infused with other, subtler, flavours like coriander and lime. We try and figure out what all the ingredients are as we eat, so we can repeat this back home. The taste is so delicate that all travel's frustrations slip away.

‘Enough of food,' Ruby says, after a while. ‘Tell me more about the boyfriend grid.'

‘It has fallen into disuse in recent years.'

‘A system failure?'

‘Exactly. It was another of my organising principles. I'd talk about who I was going out with like I was announcing a series of monarchs. “Hawke was prime minister when the geography teacher was reigning,” or more recently: “That was the time the Catholics took power: Paul Keating on one hand, Michael on the other.” Then I'd genuflect and go down on one knee. Tell me about your boyfriend grid.'

‘I have no such grid,' Ruby says. ‘As you say—it's a flawed system.' She hesitates before she goes on, ‘And if I did have a grid it would be a girlfriend grid.'

I am surprised because I hadn't thought about it. I'd just assumed. ‘I'm sorry,' I say. ‘I didn't know.'

‘Sorry?' she asks, sarcastic. ‘Why sorry? It's not cancer.' She looks at me and suddenly she's furious. She gets up to leave. ‘I'm going for a walk. I know you didn't mean to be hurtful but I hate the way you looked at me just now. As if I haven't had to listen to stories of your heterosexual obsession for weeks now. As if your heterosexuality is normal when it's totally fucking nuts but I don't care because you are my friend and I love you anyway.'

I'm confused because I don't know what she saw in my face that upset her so. I felt flustered, that is all, because it changed things for me. Not how I felt about her but… something shifted. I reach out and take her arm. ‘I didn't mean…'

She shakes me off, bursts into tears and walks into the night. I suddenly feel a lot older than her, which I suppose I am. I remember what it is like to be so distressed and angry but I don't know what to say that will make her feel better. I'm uncertain about words these days; uncertain as to whether they mean anything. I stay at the table and gesture for a waiter. I need a beer.

When I get to our hotel an hour later, Ruby is in bed already, reading. She is red-eyed, but smiles at me when I open the door. I go to speak but she lifts her hand. ‘Don't,' she says. ‘I overreacted.' Suddenly she is Barbara Stanwyck, her voice low and mysterious. ‘Let us never speak of this again.'

We are in the city of Kochi, which is a series of small islands linked by ferries and bridges. It is on one of these islands, Fort Cochin, that we visit St Francis. The church is so old that no one knows when it was built. Tombstones from an early graveyard form the floor of the church. The medieval script and illustrations on the tombs are worn down to shadows, the merest suggestions in stone. Here the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama was buried but also, as I discover when I see her tiny gravestone, the unknown Bunny La Cruz. I become fascinated with Bunny. I try and imagine what she might have looked like dressed in the formal baby clothes of the sixteenth century.

‘If I ever have a daughter,' I say to Ruby, ‘I'd call her Bunny La Cruz.'

‘Bunny La Cruz Monaghan? Sounds good. If I ever have a son I'll call him Vasco. Vasco Miller.'

We walk to Jew Town and down the bluntly named Jew Street. We hover around overpriced but irresistible antique shops, which used to be run by Jewish merchants but now are run by Kashmiri refugees. When we get to the end of the street we visit the 450-year-old synagogue. It is a small wooden building with a floor of disparate Chinese tiles and a ceiling dripping with nineteenth-century Belgian glass chandeliers.