Geography Read online

  GEOGRAPHY

  Sophie Cunningham has worked variously as an editor, publisher and journalist since 1989. She is currently the editor of Meanjin and working on a novel This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf’s time as a colonial administrator in Ceylon, and the first years of his marriage to Virginia. Her second novel, Bird, was published in 2008.

  Geography

  Sophie Cunningham

  TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood

  grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Sophie Cunningham 2004

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2004 by The Text Publishing Company

  This edition 2008

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin

  Press

  Designed by Chong

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Cunningham, Sophie, 1963-

  Geography / Sophie Cunningham.

  Melbourne : The Text Publishing Company, 2008.

  ISBN: 9781921351709

  A823.4

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body

  For Virginia

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Acknowledgments

  One

  It is a full moon and I am sitting on the beach watching a green sea turtle covering her eggs. She rotates slowly, her powerful flippers kicking sand out behind her. It will take two hours for her to turn a full 360 degrees. I am in awe of her, the way she shovels so diligently. She is patient. And she is, with her horny old head, her shell a metre across, beautiful. There are other people here too and as well as being excited I am in a kind of terror that all her work will be for nothing, that the guards standing around with torches will take her eggs not to a hatchery but to a market.

  We saw a hatchling from another clutch earlier in the evening, small as a twenty-cent piece, scurrying across the endless desert of sand towards the sea, a pale halo bestowed by the guard’s torch as he urged us to ‘Look, look quick’. The scene is absurd: four guards, five tourists, twenty locals and this tiny creature running frantically for its life. It is hard, but necessary, to feel hopeful that it will survive.

  I turn to the woman next to me, whom I met, as travellers do, at a restaurant earlier this evening.

  ‘Do you think it’ll make it?’

  She nods, smiling broadly. ‘It’ll be fine, Catherine.’ And there is something about this stranger, this girl, that makes me believe her.

  The turtle covers her nest by midnight then heaves herself out of the pit she has dug. She slides down the bank of the nest towards the water but runs out of momentum and must pull herself along the sand for some way. The effort seems enormous and she stops for minutes at a time, too exhausted to move. Finally, she gets close to the waterline and when a wave comes in it picks her up, spins her around and carries her out to sea.

  My new friend, Ruby, and I stay on the beach, in our jumpers on a tropical night, talking. We are surrounded by a ghost forest of palm trees, shadows thrown by the coconut grove behind us. The moon is so bright the ocean looks like grey silk, shot with luminous white. It is one of those nights that is so beautiful that you wonder whether you are dreaming it. It is the kind of night people travel weeks and months and years for.

  When I ask Ruby her age I find out she is younger than I had thought, only twenty-two to my thirty-seven, but she has something of an old soul about her. She is, in fact, the age I was when I first came to India. Neither of us can really explain why we are sitting in Tangalla, which is basically a tourist resort with attractions as diverse as nesting turtles and child sex. Though there is the fact that the civil war means there are not so many other places in Sri Lanka one can go. This beach in the south of the island is one of the ones that is safe enough. On July 24, just over three weeks ago, the Tamil Tigers attacked the air force base and Colombo’s international airport, destroying military aircraft and passenger jets. Twenty-three people were killed.

  ‘So: why Sri Lanka?’ Ruby asks. ‘Why now?’

  I tell her I came to do a meditation retreat, arriving three weeks before the bombing. I hadn’t heard about it for a few days, but once the news got around it had seemed to disrupt things and people had started to leave. I ask her why she is here and she tells me she has been working as a volunteer in Colombo for six months, before she goes to India.

  So we are both on our way to India and both for the second time. Ruby studied Hinduism at university and wants to spend time in the south, the religion’s heartland.

  ‘There is a poem,’ says Ruby. ‘It’s from what you’d call the Hindu version of the Bible. This poem is why I am going back.’ She recites, from memory:

  ‘You are woman, and you are man,

  You are the youth and the maiden,

  And the old man tottering with a staff.

  You are reborn again facing all directions.

  You are the bluefly and red-eyed parrot,

  The cloud pregnant with lightning.

  You are the season and the seas,

  The Beginning less, the Abiding Lord

  From who the spheres are born.’

  She pauses, slightly embarrassed.

  ‘I’m glad you’re a quoter,’ I say. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Why are you going back?’ she asks and I tell her: because it is a place I dream of even though I have not been there for fifteen years. I tell her that I have travelled to many places. That it was in America that I fell in love, but India that changed everything. What I mean, but can’t say to someone I’ve just met, is that in America I had good sex but in India my spirit was touched. For many years I confused the two and I am finally returning to untangle that knot.

  ‘Tell me,’ Ruby says.

  ‘People are bored with stories of obsession. With stories about women in their late thirties who are single, and the reasons why that might be so.’ I could have gone on: people are bored with stories about cities and what cities do to people, families and what they do to each other, the perils of geography and the excuses people use to keep others at a distance. When everything was happening, it all made perfect sense to me, but now, despite the clarity of my memories, I don’t really understand it at all.

  ‘I like stories,’ Ruby says. ‘It’s one of the fun things about travelling—hearing people’s stories.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I will tell you a love story of sorts. I’ll tell you a story about the one who drove me crazy. But remember, the main character in this story, she isn’t me. Not any more.’

  ‘So who are you now?’ she smiles at me.

  ‘I am being reborn again,’ I return the smile. ‘Facing all directions.’

  Just getting on a plane made me want sex. From the moment I sat down and pulled the belt tight there was a heat that grew until all I was aware
of was a pulsing, the movement of blood, like my cunt was beating, like it was the very heart of me.

  So I was primed by flying before I ever arrived in Los Angeles. Primed by travel, by movement. But even before I left the ground I’d been primed by Michael’s suggestive fax: ‘Sorry to hear you have a hotel and won’t need a bed. Any friend of Marion’s…Looking forward to meeting you, call me when you hit town.’

  I didn’t call him, not straight away. He was a stranger, my housemate’s former colleague, and his fax had made me nervous. Its tone seemed to assume something between us, a done deal; or perhaps it was me who assumed, it is hard to tell from this distance. Crazy as it sounds, I knew from the first few words he wrote to me that we would sleep together.

  Los Angeles hasn’t the graciousness of age, nor the dignity of a long history. But for all the warnings of pollution, I found a city where I could smell desert air and see a broad, blue open sky that reminded me of Sydney, a town I loved; and for all the talk of crassness, in Los Angeles you could feel possibilities, the weightlessness of things that are new. I wanted to live here. On the weekends I’d take my hire car—a 1965 Buick Skylark Convertible that was a dream in itself—and drive around like LA was my very own movie set.

  A couple of weeks after I arrived I called my brother, Finn. He was still a long plane ride away; over on the east coast, over in New York where he worked. But at least we were on the same continent now.

  ‘How’s LA?’ he asked.

  ‘Good. Busy. I’ve eaten out so much I suspect I am about to turn into a burrito.’

  ‘You have been a burrito for some time.’

  ‘Ignoring that. Did you know I stopped over in Bangkok and saw Dad? We went to see Groundhog Day, and then afterwards he said he’d already seen it with you. It’s very Buddhist, isn’t it? The perfect mix of profound and silly.’

  ‘So we all watched the same film, both of us with Dad. That’s very family-like.’ I could almost hear him smiling down the phone.

  ‘Everyone told me LA would be awful, but I love it. The architecture is wild and the hotel where I’m staying in West Hollywood is fantastic. All the guys who work here look like Tom Waits and wear shoestring ties. Janis Joplin died here.’

  ‘To be in a hotel that’s famous because of a dead person is very cool in the States, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘Hey, listen to this.’ I’d circled a paragraph in that day’s LA Times: ‘No man should be condemned in this case because of the fear of a riot. My client is on trial. But you are also on trial. Your courage is on trial.’

  ‘Deep.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I laughed. ‘You’re a big dork.’

  I arranged to meet Michael at a cafe on Melrose. When I walked into the place—all chrome counters and strange macrobiotic salads piled high behind glass—he stood and bowed slightly. I was struck by the particularity of that gesture, the old-fashionedness of it. The other particular thing I noticed was his eyes, an intense blue and all the more compelling for the contrast with his tanned skin. What I said to Marion when I wrote to her next was that his eyes were like Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia, and she laughed at me of course. But I couldn’t stop looking at them, looking into them.

  ‘How does an academic get a tan?’ I asked him.

  He grinned. ‘This is California,’ he said. ‘Tans are compulsory.’

  He was twenty years older than me and he looked it, but the fact that his face was lined, that he was lanky to the point of skinny boniness, and that he retained all the confidence of a good-looking man without the looks themselves, just made me more interested. As lunch went on, I could feel my laugh becoming bigger, my movements more exaggerated, my lips fuller. His life, I thought, is written on his face. And there was something more—this man had slept with a lot of women; I could see that written into his face as well. I remember thinking I wanted to know what that was like, to have had sex with a lot of people. I have read about men like you. I have seen men like you in movies.

  We talked. There was an intensity to him, a combination of argumentativeness and attentiveness. He kept touching me on the arm, and once, for a second, on the cheek, with his forefinger as he made his point. I thought he was gorgeous. When I told people about him later I would draw out the vowels of that word: he was gooor-geous. I agreed to have dinner with him the next night, kicking myself all the while that I had left it so late in my trip to contact him.

  All the next day, I ran this fantasy that he would knock on my hotel room door and that I’d greet him by saying, ‘Let’s forget dinner. Let’s fuck.’ All day that was all I thought about. Fucking him.

  He was late and I lay on the couch channel surfing until I stumbled over a sitcom about a stand-up comedian. He was doing a routine on men and commitment. ‘When a man is driving down that freeway of love, the woman he’s involved with is like an exit, but he doesn’t want to get off there…’ There was something about ending up on the kerb with smoke pouring out of the engine, but I missed that because Michael walked in. He opened the door without knocking, like he was staying here in the hotel. Like he was staying here with me.

  ‘What’s this show?’ I turned to him—drew breath, like I always would when I saw him.

  ‘You don’t know “Seinfeld”? It’s lotsa laughs,’ he said. ‘Me, I’m a Kramer fan.’

  ‘Kramer? I haven’t got to him.’ Michael was moving back out the door already, beckoning me with his hand. I followed him out through the lobby.

  The streets were full of sirens, everything felt edgy. ‘After the police were let off last year, whole suburbs went up in flames,’ Michael said. ‘According to tonight’s news, and I quote, there are 3000 LAPD officers, 1350 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies, 1500 California Highway Patrol officers, 700 members of the National Guard and assorted others placed at strategic points around the city.’ He put an arm around my shoulders and drew me to him briefly. ‘We should be safe.’

  ‘We’re in the final scene of The Blues Brothers, aren’t we?’ I said. But like everyone I’d seen the video of Rodney King being worked over by police officers and even thousands of miles away in Melbourne I’d found it distressing. I hoped that this time around, the police would be convicted.

  After we’d eaten, we cruised down Sunset Boulevard past a bookshop called Duck Soup, past bars, past a billboard of Marky Mark muscled, hung and metres tall in his Calvins. Then we drove up through the Hollywood Hills along Mulholland Drive.

  ‘Let me take you somewhere special,’ Michael said.

  And even though I had driven there myself just a few nights earlier, even though I knew it was a cliché, even though I had seen men drive women to this place so they could make out in more movies than I could count, when Michael stopped at a point where I could see Los Angeles spread out below me, a blanket of lights twinkling like stars, it felt like he had given me a gift. Like it had all been laid out there, especially for me.

  I got out of the car and gazed across this cityscape that felt as familiar to me as Melbourne, and more beautiful than I had ever imagined it would be. Michael came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘Get back in the car.’

  We drove further, then stopped again. I clambered up onto a fence so I was sitting up high and could see the valley spreading out northwards. There was nothing—no hills, curves, coastline—to soften the grid of it, the huge expanse of the San Fernando Valley. It was a city too heavy for the desert it was built on. It was ugly, it was beautiful. I looked into those blue eyes of his and he seemed like this to me as well: ugly and beautiful at the same time.

  I was here, with the lights of Los Angeles spread below me. I was here with Michael, holding his hand out to me, to help me step down. I went to take his hand but he leaned forward, held my waist and lifted me into the air. When my feet hit the ground we held onto each other for a moment too long. We looked into each other’s eyes. Just like in the movies.

  We came down from the hill
s and drove to some bars in west LA, along Wilshire Boulevard. I was surprised by how closed down the place was—Melbourne would have been livelier at this time of night.

  ‘Everyone’s been frightened by the trial,’ Michael said, ‘but this isn’t a great night city at the best of times. People stay home, watch videos—preferably videos starring themselves—then get up early to go to the gym.’ He had a dry way of speaking. The way someone speaks if they know a lot and have been a lot of places. He talked to me like I was that kind of person as well, though I was so much younger.

  We traded stories about work. He had moved to Los Angeles to study but even though he’d finished his PhD a few years ago he’d stayed on. He’d even scored a green card. I explained my slightly erratic career path from journalist to marketing consultant for a travel agency. ‘It merges my favourite things: words and travel,’ I told him truthfully, but he looked dubious.

  ‘Academics don’t understand marketing,’ he said. ‘Although the way things are going in universities, we’re having to learn.’

  Michael told me he had written his PhD on the history of the epistolary form with particular reference to Choderlos Laclos. ‘You mean letters?’ I asked. ‘That’s very old-school. I thought it was all about theory these days. Who was Laclos anyway?’

  ‘He wrote Dangerous Liaisons. You know the film?’

  ‘Yeah, Malkovich was a total prick. What is it with these films and young girls? Why are men obsessed with virgins?’

  ‘You have to ask?’ Michael smiled. ‘When they look like Uma Thurman? You’re like her, you know. Tall. Blonde, grey eyes, young. What man wouldn’t find you attractive?’

  ‘Give it a rest.’

  ‘It’s a compliment,’ he persisted. ‘Women your age think everything is sexist. Everything is about politics, about being politically correct. But that’s not what the story is about. It’s about desire. It’s about love.’

  ‘It’s about power, not love.’

  ‘If you can explain the difference to me, I’d be pleased to hear it. People destroy each other. That is what they do. One day you’ll understand.’ He stopped himself.