Questions of Travel Read online

  As soon as Laura showed signs of getting ready to go home, Theo would beg. “Why are you going? It’s still early. Stay.” She, poor fool, would have to run for the last Tube. The next day she would slop soup, suppress yawns as she scribbled down orders. But Theo had declared, “You’re necessary.” It was quite true. As long as she stayed, he went on drinking. Laura saw and didn’t see this.

  There are paintings of flowers or fruit whose sheer lusciousness suggests the invisible, lengthening worm. Theo was like that: at that stage of ripeness where his attractive surface held an intimation of decay. So it was possible to speak to him of fear. It was possible to speak of the queasy sensation, running under the drift of Laura’s days, that her life was dribbling away unused. “I suppose I’m talking about a career.” Because the only professional progress she had made since the course in word-processing had been to exchange the pub in Clerkenwell for a restaurant in Islington, which had smaller servings and larger tips.

  It was true that she was prized as a house sitter these days. She picked and chose among clients who lived within a restricted circumference and who would be away for at least a month. Even so, Fitzrovia, Balham, Primrose Hill. Even so, Shepherd’s Bush, Camden Town, Holland Park. It seemed to Laura that she was always packing up. And recently she had minded a flat for a physicist summoned to a bedside in Johannesburg and worried about an elderly cat. A day or so after moving on to Highgate, Laura missed a favorite shirt. The physicist said, “Yes, I wondered when you would call.”

  “Oh, you’ve found my shirt,” said Laura, pleased.

  “Shirt?” said the physicist. “Shirt? It’s my bin-liner that’s at issue. There was a black plastic liner in the kitchen bin when I entrusted you with my belongings.” She spoke distinctly, enunciating with rageful care. “When I came back, the bin was empty. What I want to know is, when do you intend to make good your theft?”

  Laura told Theo that she had had it up to here—the edge of one palm slicing at the throat—with other people’s houses. She was tired of the box at the post office, tired of tending leafless gardens that flowered for other eyes, tired of public phones. “I want people to call me.” She wanted a telephone number. She wanted a teapot. “I’m fed up with other people’s teapots,” she wailed.

  She pulled a face as she spoke, deprecating her need. But there was nothing comic about the fierceness with which she coveted the teapot in the window of a shop in Camden that sold North African wares. It was a small metal pot with a hinged lid, shapely and inexpensive, enameled in cheerful red. “But I can’t lug a teapot around London. I need a place of my own. I need proper work.”

  Bea Morley’s firm had upgraded her laptop. Bea passed on the old one—ancient, it dated from three years back—to her friend. Every few weeks, Laura would use it to compose an application for a job that seemed congenial and that might be assumed, if she remained optimistic, to be not incompatible with an Australian degree in English literature. To letters expressing her desire to assist a publisher or work in a bookshop or even, fueled by the insomniac elixir of lunacy and despair, to help an ex-SAS officer compose his memoirs (Must be under thirty-five and willing to live in. Send full-body photo), she received no reply.

  She attended an information evening about a career in librarianship and a workshop on proofreading. These experiences discouraged her from working in a library or reading proofs.

  Who should alight in London but Tracy Lacey, now in possession of a hedge fund–managing husband, a Grad Dip in Museum Studies and an assistant directorship at a university gallery in Melbourne. Je regrette, darl, Tracy couldn’t stay long, in her deconstructed hair and PVC and linen shift, being en route to guest curate an Australian show at the Guggenheim.

  “But I couldn’t resist a stopover in London—not with you here, darl.” And there was Paree to patronize as well. Her flight to Roissy left that evening, she informed Laura. “I don’t know why I bother, I’m so over Europe these days. The work they show here—darl, it wouldn’t get past the door at home. I always say Melbourne’s the new New York. But you know what I’m like when it comes to Paree! Gary says I’m such a softie. As if he wasn’t the one crying buckets at the airport! His men’s dream group has really opened up his feminine side.”

  Having on sight declared Laura gorgeous, Tracy was examining her old friend with a connoisseur’s eye. So she might have appraised a painting, acquired as a kindness, that she had seen at once was second-rate but which she didn’t quite like to let pass. The type of thing she might hang in a dark corner in case it came good over time.

  What could Laura Fraser, tucking into reckless tortellini in cream, deploy against the triple assault of Gary, the Guggenheim and the new New York? It would have been nobler to refuse the contest. But she was human and imperfect. Tentatively, she offered Theo. In such a spirit Abraham might have led forth his son, each step a betrayal.

  But Tracy Lacey was as magnanimous as her maker. She interrupted only to address a Do you mind? to the man at the adjoining table who was showing signs of lighting up.

  Buoyed by victory and a Caesar salad (no egg no anchovy no dressing, merci), “He sounds gorgeous, darl,” she conceded. “Do you have a piccie?” While thinking, One of those plutonic things—no thanks! Mind you, it was just like Laura Fraser to end up a fag-hag.

  A few weeks later, a card arrived from the old New York. Steve Kirkpatrick—did Laura remember him from art school?—had hanged himself in his studio. Tracy felt terrible. But it was Steve’s own fault that no one wanted to show him. If only he had progressed his aesthetic. Laura would find it hard to believe, but he had never read Kristeva: Tracy knew it for a fact.

  Ravi, 1990s

  THE NEIGHBOR’S DAUGHTER CAME to Carmel’s door to announce a phone call for Ravi. She peered at him through her glasses and touched her hair. A long time ago, when they were children, a lady had referred to Anoma as Ravi’s girlfriend. Now he had a son and a frightening wife, but Anoma knew that Ravi was conscious of their older, deeper bond. Standing at the door, he had looked first surprised, then happy—that meant recognition. So what did it matter that Anoma’s younger sister had married first?

  How ridiculous, thought Ravi, as he dashed up the lane, that he had always pictured the summons to Silicon Valley as a letter: modern news arrived by phone. He had time to wonder how the Swedish boy had known the right number to call. Was there some kind of tracking software, known only to Californians, that had enabled it? In any case, a magical event requires an element of mystery. He seized the receiver and heard a familiar voice. It was his old professor, known to all his students as Frog-Face. He informed Ravi, without preamble, that an assistant lectureship in maths was coming up. Ravi stood there, breathing hard. He would be well advised to apply, Frog-Face said.

  The young family moved to a rooming house above a bicycle-repair shop just outside Colombo, conveniently close to the university where Ravi would be working. The street door gave on to a stair that led up to the lobby of the rooming house; the cheaper rooms, such as Ravi and Malini could afford, opened off this communal space. There was a gathering of rattan-bottomed chairs there, and a huge old black-and-white TV in a wood-veneer case. The vertical hold tended to slip, but of an evening all the tenants gathered in front of it anyway. They would smoke and gossip and watch teledramas. If the Mendises shut their door against the noise, the room quickly grew stifling. But life in the rooming house was companionable, and Malini was content: she had escaped her mother-in-law at last.

  There was a morning when Ravi woke very early. He saw his wife and child asleep, and thought, Who are these people? He grappled with feelings of suffocation and fear.

  Ravi, 1990s

  HIRAN PRESSED HIS FACE into Ravi’s shoulder and rubbed. The child had returned from a visit to his mother’s family with something that had once belonged to her, a toy that was already old when she was young. He couldn’t wait to show Ravi this treasure: a small viewfinder fashioned in Germany from yellow plastic to resembl
e a TV.

  A few days before this, a Tamil Tiger had driven a truck filled with explosives into the Central Bank. Ravi was called to the phone at work. On the other end of the line, Malini was frantic: her father had mentioned that he would be in Colombo that day. She had been trying to ring her mother but there was no answer. Confused reports told of hundreds of casualties; Malini was sure that her father lay among the dead.

  It wasn’t until the evening that news of her parents came. Her father had woken with pains in his legs and decided to stay in bed. Later, he had gone out on the veranda and applied himself to the analysis of a bottle of arrack. Then it was his wife’s turn to lie in bed, ignoring the phone, with the sheet pulled over her head. Learning that her father was safe, Malini began to cry. She had been so sure he had died—slowly, under twisted concrete—that she had to see him. She set out the next day, accompanied by Hiran.

  Examining the viewfinder, Ravi marveled at the mobility of things. By what elaborate journeys had the little souvenir waltzed over continents and oceans and ended up in his hand? Hiran showed his father how to place his eye to the peephole at the back of the toy and work a lever to produce a succession of three-dimensional images: a plumy fountain in a rose garden, swimmers at a lido, a mountain with its feet in a roofscape of blue slate. But it was the scenes featuring the interior of a bathhouse that held the child enthralled. There were dark green palms and a pale green pool surrounded by columns and mirrors. Archways repeated themselves endlessly. The watery, indoor light lent these pictures a remarkable quality: they appeared at once outdated and not-yet-seen. They were dreams and premonitions, scenes penetrated by the past and the future, irredeemably spooky.

  Hiran loved the viewfinder to the point of preferring it to the TV in the lobby, but he avoided it after dark. It had to be placed in the suitcase that contained the family’s spare clothes, and the case padlocked, before he would lie down to sleep.

  Sometimes he woke crying. There had been a devil with long ears.

  Malini learned that her best friend at school, shopping in the Fort when the truck exploded, had lost her sight in the blast.

  At the time of these events, Malini was working for an international aid organization dedicated to improving the status of women. The NGO ran village clinics, microfinance schemes, adult literacy classes, that kind of thing. Malini volunteered her services at first, but after a while was paid for a few hours of work each week. She was quick, clever, brimming with push. Her responsibilities and salary expanded. Ravi informed his mother of these developments with pride. But occasionally he recalled the first time he had taken Malini to Mr. and Mrs. Basnayake’s house. Ravi had been examining their computer when his wife rose, crossed to the vase of orchids below the photograph of their dead son and set about rearranging the flowers. The old people stared as if watching the first flames reach the roof. Malini smiled: “That’s better.” Neither justification nor apology, it merely stated a fact. At moments of marital wear and tear, Ravi imagined her going about her rounds, the openmouthed villagers contemplating their improved lives.

  Ravi, 1990s

  HE HAD BECOME FRIENDS with another assistant lecturer in his department. Nimal Corea’s father owned a printing business, and Nimal was familiar with phototypesetting. Investigating website markup, he had realized its resemblance to the typesetting code. Now Ravi and he were working together on building the university’s website. It was a matter of fierce principle that this should be accomplished without assistance from the specialists in Computer Science.

  The Maths department had only one computer with a dial-up connection to the Internet; the two young men tended it like an altar. During the day, the phone line was always busy, so they took to working on the website at night. When the power failed, as it often did, they stretched out on the concrete floor, and didn’t wake until the lights came on again.

  A new word entered Ravi’s vocabulary: “yahoo.”

  Half mad from lack of sleep, he was in a state of exaltation known to pioneers and priests. He fanned himself with a newspaper—the fragrance of drains arrived, compounded by the cannabis with which Nimal was always well supplied. Mosquitoes were holding a banquet on Ravi’s ankles, but hyperlinks were irresistible: as all-at-once as a conjurer’s bouquet. Screens opened and vanished before him, dissolving and multiplying like dreams.

  It was called surfing the Net. Ravi tried to describe it to Malini, the way one electronic landscape gave way to another, the thrilling suspension between surface and depth. It was magical: a string of typed words made wishes appear on the screen. Place had come undone, said Ravi. He spoke of flight and speed.

  Five or six years later, when dial-up and Mosaic were dim monuments of digital prehistory, he would recall how slow it had really been. He was waiting to cross a road in Bondi, and the woman jogging on the spot next to him kept hitting the pedestrian button. Her request had been electronically registered the first time, and the lights weren’t going to change faster whatever she did, but the heel of her hand continued to punch. Ravi remembered waiting for the upload all those years ago, jiggling his mouse, circling it on its mat, humanly reluctant to relinquish control to mere technology.

  Eager to experience these modern marvels, Malini visited Ravi at work one evening. Nimal was there, perched in a spiral of smoke. A childhood accident had left him with a withered arm; he was chubby, bulge-eyed, gifted. Watching his friend build the site, the almost wasteful elegance of his ingenuity, Ravi felt the scrape of envy. His own mind was an iron: it smoothed. It could improve on what Nimal, who worked fast and with a degree of disdain for the immaculate, had produced. But Ravi was aware of belatedness: of his painstaking ability grafted onto another man’s casual flair.

  Early on, Nimal had linked into the wealth of pornography on the Net: its unfree flow. His good hand trembled on the mouse, but he had no credit card and no prospect of obtaining one. However, he had discovered Jennifer Ringley, an American student who had set up a webcam in her room to document her life. JenniCam refreshed every three minutes. There were dull hours of Jennifer holding forth about herself, but Nimal had once watched her masturbating. She had promised to strip for the camera, an event both men anticipated keenly. What if it coincided with their teaching duties or a blackout? Jennifer had said that she wanted to give everyone a really open, honest view into her life. It was appalling and riveting: Jennifer Ringley was a new kind of person. Every tyrant in history had dreamed of spying on hidden lives—but that dream required subjects who wanted to hide. It shriveled before a pudgy eighteen-year-old, exposed on camera to the world, who didn’t care in the least.

  Now Ravi saw Nimal’s huge eyes, reddened by ganja and fatigue, linger on Malini’s breasts. To distract her, Ravi spoke hurriedly. “You’re you and anyone you can imagine. There is the same as here.” He felt the insufficiency of words as he guided Malini through portals and loitered with her in chat rooms, trying to demonstrate this disembodied travel. Webcams showed them a fish tank in San Francisco; in a basement in Cambridge, coffee dripped into a pot. The world had shrunk, said Ravi, and at the same time it was tentacular and unconstrained. From New York to Negombo, life would be digital and linked. What mattered weren’t computers but the possibilities they unleashed. He declared, “The Internet will free people from this.” The sweep of his hand took in damp-stained walls, the large brutality of politics, the petty humiliations of making do.

  He said, “Soon everyone will be a tourist.”

  Malini was typing words into a search engine: human rights sri lanka.

  In bed that night she spoke of a forensic scientist who had identified the remains found in a mass grave in a wildlife park. She said, “Bodies are always local.”

  But their embraces were Venetian: fluidly magnificent. Melting inside her, Ravi was assailed by images: of streaming and connection, of data and bodies. There was HTML, there was DNA. Things flowed together on his mind’s screen.

  The NGO was involved in a rope-making enterprise i
n a village in the south. Malini returned from it with the story of an eight-year-old raped nightly by her father while her mother was working in Geneva as a nanny.

  “Everyone knows what’s going on.”

  “Why don’t they report it?”

  “The father’s a constable. His brother’s a sergeant. For all I know, he’s in on it as well. We’ll have to do something.”

  “But what? It’s terrible, but what can we do?”

  “I meant the NGO.” She said, “No one expects you to do anything.”

  At the onset of a storm, Carmel Mendis would go from room to room in her house hanging towels over mirrors to keep them from attracting lightning. It was the kind of thing that Malini couldn’t stand. She had nothing but scorn for her mother-in-law’s superstitions and pieties: the palm-leaf cross, the plastic crucifix on which Christ hung glowing and green.

  But Malini harbored fetishes of her own. Ravi learned this when a bracelet of hers disappeared. It was a childish thing made of bright and dark blue plastic beads—Malini rarely wore it, but left it here and there, and now it was lost. She was panic-stricken at first, then inconsolable. Ravi, not understanding, said he would buy her a replacement. But the bracelet was charged with magic and luck.

  I’ll never get to the end of her, Ravi thought, and was filled with joy. This led to further confusion, for although he remained grave, Malini sensed his happiness and believed him indifferent to her grief.