Geography (24 page)

‘And you may laugh, Catherine,' Ruby goes on, school-marmish. If she wore spectacles she'd be looking at me over the top of them. ‘But I think you have lived in the thrall of Siva, with your fixation on catastrophe, sex and disasters. I'd recommend a stint of Brahma worship—even Vishnu is too in-the-head for you, with all that emphasis on dreams.'

I smile at her, but, as happens so often with Ruby at the moment, I don't know what to say. It is hot, she is sweating and I run a hand over her head, where there is now enough hair to show a hint of curl.

We get back in the hire car and drive to the main village, about ten kilometres further along. When we arrive we find a strange and sandy place. People come here to worship Vishnu but the Ramalingeshwara Temple is closed when we get there, leaving us with only the famous colonnades to walk through. Their length—205 metres—is impressive but the columns themselves are concrete copies of what was once there. It is only when we walk past the ruins of the original columns, looking like so many fallen giants, that we understand what this place must once have been.

We walk through the heat to the water, past the shops that sell objects made of shells, strings of shells, macramé and shells.

‘What will you do when you get back to Melbourne?' I ask.

‘I'm still interested in aid organisations,' she says. ‘I'd like to make a career of it but I'm not sure if that means going back to uni to do development studies or applying for every job going. Probably both. You?'

‘Well, I think I'm back in Melbourne for good now. I figured I couldn't base a whole life on good weather patterns and surf. I've gone back to writing, do a bit of consulting for extra cash. So I guess I'll just keep going along the same—new—track.' you are back among your old—emphasis on old—friends?'

‘You will keep in touch, won't you?' Ruby asks, anxious. ‘I know we've been fighting. I know it has been a bit difficult. You won't suddenly decide I'm too young once

I put my arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. ‘We won't lose touch,' I say. ‘You are my new and most favourite friend.'

We walk past the sadhus; wild dreadlocked men with orange cloths round their waists. One of them looks at us lustfully, pointedly. Then we see a naked sadhu, covered from head to foot in white ash, supposedly from funeral pyres, Ruby tells me.

This place is lighter than Land's End and Kanniya-kumari. The atmosphere is less commercial, more fun. We sit and watch the women in their colourful saris, the businessmen who strip down to their underpants before wading in, the priests picnicking on the ghats that lead down to the water. Cows wander, down there by the sea, sniffing gently at people's food. Everyone is hanging out, killing time until the temple reopens at five p.m. and they can go and get their blessing.

‘Have you read
All's Well that Ends Well
?' Ruby asks me as we sit on the ghats and watch the sun go down. I am bemused.

‘No,' I say.

‘There is this quote from it,' she says. ‘
I am undone:
there is no living, none, / If Bertram be away. 'Twere all one / That I should love a bright particular star / And think to wed it, he is so above me: / In his bright radiance and collateral light / Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. / The ambition in my love thus plagues itself.

‘That's you,' she goes on. ‘It was the ambition in your love that plagued you.'

I look at her, surprised. ‘That's it exactly,' I say. ‘When I was at my lowest I felt undone.'

Tony was home for a Sunday of domestic duties. I missed him now that he was hardly here and it was good to see him, despite the fact that on this particular day he was so scratchy and irritable.

‘It's the full moon,' I laughed. ‘My period's due. Perhaps we're cycling.'

‘Well, how come you're in such a good mood?'

‘I'm through the monthly suicidal days. The happy hormones have started.' And it was true. I was full of joy, light-headed with it. As madly up as I had been down.

That night I woke up nauseous, back aching, and tried to walk to the bathroom. Dizziness hit me halfway so I dropped to my knees and crawled. By the time I got to the bathroom I was sweating and all I wanted to do was lie on the cold, smooth tiles, feel the cool of them against my cheek. I lay like that for two hours, half conscious, until Tony found me at six a.m.

‘Jesus,' he said, helping me up. A few minutes later he was sitting by me in bed, wiping my brow with a washer. ‘Go to the doctor, all right? Today.'

‘Lots of women have bad periods.'

‘This is beyond bad. That's the problem with you women, you're natural masochists. You lose all sense of what is reasonable pain.'

I went to my GP. She booked me in for an ultrasound and the next thing I knew I was in stirrups while a woman in a twin set and pearls inserted a large camera-tipped phallus into me. This was not how I'd imagined being here, in this place that pregnant women come to see their unborn babies for the first time, in this place where the receptionist asked, ‘How many months?' before she realised I was ill, not with child. Fairly quickly the ultrasound found a growth the size of a grapefruit. Then a second one.

My stomach bloats. My bladder feels full, I piss all the time. I am nauseous, I am in pain, I am mad—a hormonal punching bag, out of control. The object in my stomach grows larger by the week. I cannot roll on my stomach because it hurts. I am giving birth to a deformity, a growth, a shadow: a shadow child to my shadow lover.

The doctor said that after the operation I might be infertile. For years I have been dreaming my little girl. She is not born yet, but I know her. She is a wild child with curls and a sticky-out tummy. She is full of bad behaviour. She is waiting for me, waiting for me to be ready to let her be born. I am scared that if I do not have a child of my own, I will never grow up, that I will die gazing at myself in the water's reflection.

I cannot sleep. Instead of counting sheep, I chant the names of the football clubs, the twelve that were around when I was growing up: Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Essendon, North Melbourne, South Melbourne, Hawthorn, Footscray, Fitzroy, Geelong, St Kilda, Melbourne. If I'm not asleep by then I move on to the new list: Port Adelaide, the Crows, West Coast Eagles, Bulldogs, Fremantle Dockers, Sydney Swans, Brisbane Lions, Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Essendon, Kangaroos, Hawthorn, Geelong, St Kilda, Melbourne. This second list is harder. The names have less to do with places; I don't know where these teams are from. Melbourne is slipping away from me. In this, and other things. The summers have been hot since I left; the city is in drought. It is true, I think, the rain does follow me. This thought jolts me awake and I brood on the weather, how I no longer live where it is hot, how where I am is always cold.

A month later I was lying in surgery while an anaesthetist placed a drip in my arm. ‘Think of a nice place,' he said. ‘Of somewhere that makes you happy.' I panicked. Where would that nice place be, what nice place?

Then I was waking and calling out to my mother who had flown from Adelaide to be with me, who was sitting beside me, holding my hand and telling me she loved me. I began calling for Michael, even though we had not been in contact for a year, even though I could barely remember what he looked like any more. Calling out his name, over and over.

The morphine made me drowsy and floaty. I left the television on and dozed on and off against a background of footage of emergency workers digging bodies from the mudslide at Thredbo. Resorts and apartments had slipped forward and crumpled, piling house upon house and leaving a gash across the landscape. Drugged as I was, it truly seemed a miracle to me when Stuart Diver was pulled out of the earth some 68 hours later, his tortured face blinking at the light.

When I couldn't focus on the screen I would lie for hours listening to Joni Mitchell's
Blue
, her songs of travel and love and blood.
I could drink a case of you, darling / And I would still be on my feet.

I was not on my feet. After days of not getting better the doctor decided I was anaemic because of the blood I had lost in surgery. I had painfully, slowly, given litres of my own blood in the weeks before the operation. Now they slowly dripped it back into me.

The day I got home I stood in the mirror and looked at myself. The scar red, raw and not yet joined, the shaving rash, the uneven mix of stubble and pubic hair, and the blisters caused by an allergic reaction to the surgical tape. There were bruises on my belly, on my pubis. All that had been lush now devastated. It was impossible to imagine the regrowth. It was impossible to imagine that anyone would love me in my ugliness.

Tony made sure I had meals cooked for me when I got out of hospital, but he always went back to his girlfriend's to sleep. It was a lonely time. I'd been out of hospital three weeks when Michael called. ‘I'm in town for ten days or so. I didn't know whether you would want me to call. Are you up to visitors? I heard you've been sick.'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘Come over.'

I was nervous and when I answered the door I could see he was too. He looked old. Not sexy old, but old old. That made sense, I realised, he was well into his fifties now, but this was the first time he had struck me that way. Even his eyes had lost their intensity and seemed a paler blue. The lines on his face were drooping into folds. It looked like his confidence had evaporated, leaving him deflated. He looked like a man who had given up. I suppose I looked pretty much like a woman who had given up as well.

‘You look great in pyjamas,' he kissed me, handing over some flowers. ‘I don't think I've ever seen you in nightwear before. There was never the need.' He smiled at me. ‘Have you lost weight?'

We talked, and were polite to each other, and after an hour I asked him to leave because I was tired. A few days later he came by again. He cooked me a meal while I lay on the couch watching the coverage of Princess Diana's death. I could not turn off the TV and the stories of shattered bodies dripped into me, like the stories of the dead at Thredbo, like the blood I had needed. I was like Gollum, feeding off the misery of others, shrinking, twisting into deformity. Trevor Rees-Jones, Diana's bodyguard, had a smashed up face and had bitten off part of his tongue. I kept thinking about that. The fact that he bit off his own tongue.

‘Since when did you become a royalist?' Michael asked, coming in to sit beside me on the couch.

‘I'm not one,' I said. ‘But no one expects a princess to have such a grisly end.
Sleeping Beauty
was my favourite fairytale when I was a kid. She was meant to be woken from a long slumber when a prince kissed her. She was meant to get married and live happily ever after.'

‘She'd already divorced Charles, been bulimic and had lovers while she was still with Charles, who was on with Camilla Parker-Bowles. You call that a fairy tale?' Then he stopped himself launching into a lecture and tried to soften. He put his arm around me and hugged me. ‘Actually, I'm upset, too,' he said, ‘and I don't know why, either.'

As I sat watching the television that night, cuddled up to Michael, I realised it was true. I had believed in fairy tales. Yet here I was, watching the flowers pile up outside Kensington Palace with a man who couldn't love me on the couch beside me.

That night I dreamt that it was my chest that had been cut open, not my abdomen, my heart was ripped and bleeding, just as Diana's had been. I woke with a start, pain pulling my chest tight, unable to breathe.