What Was Left, page 11
‘Flight attendants, prepare for landing.’ The plane is descending through grey cloud cover and rain into Zurich, into Europe. The continent of her father. Flying is unbearable because it is when she can’t escape Lola. Trapped for nine hours in a seat, all the books and movies in the world can’t keep her daughter from squirming into her thoughts. Rachel stands up and paces the aisles when she can, but turbulence has meant that the fasten seatbelt sign has been illuminated for most of the trip. Delhi to Zurich. Even Rachel can’t believe that she’s going through with it.
Her seat back is upright, the headphones and rubbish have been collected by a flight attendant, and her carry-on luggage is beneath the seat in front of her, cramping her legs. The tray-table is up, the businessman in the seat beside her is still absorbed in Newsweek, and in the small purse stuffed into the seat pocket in front of her are all of the important things: passport; plane tickets; and the phone number of Eli’s friend, still written on the napkin from the hospital cafeteria. His name is Ben. There is also a print-out of a confirmation of her booking for two nights at a youth hostel in central Zurich. Rachel dreads the thought of sharing rooms of bunk beds with hordes of happy backpackers, but this is Switzerland, after all. A hostel is all she can afford.
Between memories of Lola—her screams, the smell of her scalp, the way her feet curve inwards, with narrow soles—Rachel has worried that this is all a waste. What is the likelihood, after all, of finding Gunther now? The hands she remembers could be buried beneath the earth, the flesh long rotted away. Can a father be conjured up, forced to suddenly appear? It could be a colossal waste of time, money, everything. Yet somehow the sight of the city opening up beneath the clouds makes her smile. The mountains ridged with snow, the city built into the banks of a lake, the church spires—there is no avoiding the beauty of the place. Like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Here is a place where you could still believe in princesses with hair that falls like a rope.
The plane circles above the city before landing with a roar and a bump. They taxi to the main building, a shining steel and glass construction that Rachel knows Peter would love. He has made her notice buildings, the way that they can play with air and light or repel it—keep it at a distance. She feels a wave of longing for him, for what he opened her eyes to—a buried desire that, momentarily, almost resurfaces. ‘Flughafen Zurich’, the letters read. The pilot comes on again speaking that language of her father—all of the f’s and u’s and n’s. Warum warum. She has no idea what he has said until he repeats himself in English. They are here. The weather is cold. Wait until the seatbelt sign turns off before you stand.
She looks out of the distorted glass at this different place. Time zones have added and subtracted inside her head and are now just a jumble of numbers, leaving her with no idea what time it is. In Sydney, Peter might be asleep, or just getting up to go to work. Lola is eating, sleeping, or being pushed through the streets in her pram. In Delhi, Jen is possibly having dinner, or going to bed listening to the drone of the neighbours’ televisions. Around her now the passengers are standing, grabbing their bags and their coats, and avoiding one another’s eyes.
At the baggage carousel Rachel is quick to spot her backpack among all of the hard, plastic suitcases. She buys a woollen coat from a boutique in the main section of the airport. It is bright red with black buttons, and when she tries it on the weight is substantial on her narrow frame. Her fingers slip into the satin-lined pockets. There is even a hood, which frames her dark hair in the mirror beside the change rooms. Little red riding hood. She is going to visit the wolf. Rachel puts it on her credit card, refusing to consider the currency exchange. She asks the woman at the register to please cut the tags from her coat. As an afterthought, she asks where to find a pay phone.
‘First,’ the woman explains in perfect English, pulling a pair of orange-handled scissors from her drawer, ‘you need to buy a card that you put money on. At the magazine shop—here,’ she points across the hallway. ‘Five francs is probably enough.’
Rachel nods. ‘Thank you.’ The woman steps behind the desk and holds the coat out to Rachel, who slips her arms into it.
‘Well chosen,’ the woman says, and Rachel walks back into the soaring terminal.
Ben picks up on the third ring.
‘Who is this?’ he says immediately, a sharp edge to his words.
Rachel nearly puts down the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘My name is Rachel. I’m a friend of Eli’s, we met in India. He told me, well, that I should talk to you.’
‘Ah, yes. Eli wrote me about this. You’re from Australia. Looking for your father.’
‘Living in Australia, from the US.’
‘Yeah yeah. Where are you now?’
‘Zurich airport.’
There is a pause, the opening of a door, street sounds and children’s voices shouting. A schoolyard.
‘I can’t escort you around. I am not a tour guide.’
‘I don’t need one. I have a place to stay. I just wanted to call you after I landed. I wanted to make sure you can help me.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Zurich Youth Hostel. On Mutschellenstrasse.’
‘Yeah, okay. Not there. Can you meet me out tomorrow?’
‘Just say where and when.’
‘At noon, Zurich Zoo, in front of the lions. Do you have a phone?’
‘No.’
‘Then I guess I’ll just have to trust that I will see you there.’
Rachel is about to ask why the zoo but realises Ben has hung up and the line is beeping at her. She replaces the phone. How strange. She shakes her head and goes to figure out the train map, which tickets to buy, and which train to take, tonight and tomorrow. There is a maze of tunnels to the airport station. When she finally arrives, twenty minutes later, at the station closest to the hostel, it is well and truly night. There are signs and the streets are well lit, and other travellers carrying backpacks walk in the same direction.
The air is cold, but Rachel slips her hands into the pockets of her bright red coat. They feel so small in there. Slippery. Like fish in a silken black sea.
Chapter 12
A month after leaving Yosemite, Rachel dropped Peter off at the security checkpoint, LAX international terminal, an hour before his flight back to Sydney. She watched him walk through the metal gate, turning to grin and wave before disappearing into the gaping tunnel. She sat down on the floor, back pressed into the wall, wishing she could follow.
Back in the car park, in the Corolla, everything she touched reminded her of him. There were his toe prints on the inside of the front windscreen on the passenger side, and crushed cans of Dr Pepper he’d guzzled on the drive back from Mexico, so that he could help keep her awake while she drove through the night, through border patrol and along a highway flanked by desert. He said that when he was younger Dr Pepper had been sold in Australia for a brief time, just long enough for him to get a taste for it, but then it disappeared from the shops. He was saving a six-pack to take back with him.
Rachel and Peter had been together for a month, but Rachel felt as if it were years. Each day they lived in each other’s skin, as intimate as two people can be.
After dropping off the van in San Francisco, Peter and Rachel had spent a few days there, eating and sleeping in places that neither of them could really afford. They camped at state parks with rolls of quarters for showers and laundry. Peter bought condoms from a 7-Eleven on their second night together—Rachel was glad he didn’t have any in his shaving kit—and after a few awkward attempts they had sex. It was a camping ground in San Onofre, and while it was everything she had hoped for, afterwards she couldn’t fall asleep. Peter snored beside her, so she unzipped the tent and walked down the narrow grassy path to the beach. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, took in the black of the ocean, the dim fuzzy stars overhead, the flashing red of distant boats, and the bright lights of the nuclear power plant.
Peter said earlier that a popular surf break was just beside the power plant, and surfers swore the water there was warmer. He surprised her with how much he knew about the country she had been born and raised in. He always knew how to make her laugh. She wasn’t the one calling the shots anymore; she wasn’t in control. She hadn’t even told him about Gunther yet. Usually, it was what she told men right before she slept with them, or immediately afterwards. Something was different about Peter. It was like he was guiding her, and as much as she didn’t like the idea of it, the feeling was irresistible. It reminded her of being a small girl, riding on Gunther’s shoulders with her legs dangling down his chest, his hands wrapped around her narrow ankles. To be so high and yet feel so safe—it was intoxicating.
Rachel walked in the hard, wet place where the ocean had just been, and thought of reasons not to fall in love. There were many, but as soon as she thought of them they seemed to disappear, like the tide. Could she be herself with him? Could she remember what it was that she wanted? A cold breeze blew in from somewhere across the Pacific and Rachel shivered, turned and followed her footsteps back up the beach. Back to the tent, where Peter still slept.
In the morning they drove south to another surf spot outside of San Diego: Black’s Beach. They were going to drive to the Mexican border later that day and the lines of cars waiting to cross could take hours, so they went to the beach early. Rachel lay on the sand with a book and Peter took out his surfboard. She was hoping to even out her tan. After an hour or so, Rachel looked up from her book to discover that she was surrounded by male sunbathers. Nude male sunbathers. A handful were playing volleyball—leaping and flopping with patches of dry sand stuck to skin she wasn’t used to seeing. Tan, pale, leathery, wrinkled, hairy and waxed. Rachel struggled not to gape, to draw her eyes back to her book. There weren’t many other women around. And she was the only one wearing bathers. The next time she looked up there was a jangle of gold chains and an ‘Excuse me dear,’ as a tall, naked man squatted beside her.
She attempted to make eye contact. ‘Yes?’
He held out a bottle of sunscreen, as if for her inspection. ‘Can I ask you to do my back? It’s the only place I can’t reach.’
He winked. Rachel forgot to breathe. She sat up, placing her book spine up in the sand. He sat bare-arsed on Peter’s towel while she rubbed the cream into his hairy back.
‘You ask a man at this beach and he thinks you want to fuck him,’ the guy said.
‘This is a gay beach? I didn’t realise.’
‘Tourists normally don’t.’
‘How did you know?’
‘I could tell,’ the man said, as Rachel passes back the bottle.
‘Thanks sugar,’ he said, standing just as Peter emerged from the water, looking more than a little overdressed in his wetsuit.
The hairy man followed her eyes. ‘Cute. Is he yours?’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said, more forcefully than she planned to.
He waved and walked off as Peter approached them.
‘What the fuck?’ Peter said, dripping saltwater and dropping his board in the sand.
‘Don’t ask. But you might want to wash your towel,’ Rachel said, smiling as she turned to lie on her stomach. She picked up her book again.
Once over the border they passed through Tijuana without stopping and went straight for the little fishing towns, the whitewashed buildings, children playing in the dirt, and cars blasting mariachi. They ate fish tacos with habanero salsa and washed them down with Tecate. They drove and drove down the Baja coast, where the roads were fringed by desert cacti and sand, and feral cattle seeking any shade they could find. They passed abandoned car skeletons, stripped of every useful part. They drove in the heat of the day, grateful for the cold blast of the Corolla’s air conditioning in forty-degree heat, through landscapes so abandoned that even the music on the radio turned to static.
Faced with silence, they turned to the past. Rachel told him about Gunther, Judy and Esmeralda. Peter talked about his father, who preferred the dark familiarity of the pub to helping his son with his maths homework, or coming to watch him play cricket on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
‘He was so negative,’ Peter said, shaking his head at the desolate landscape. ‘There was no point trying anything you hadn’t already proven yourself at, because you were never going to be good enough.’
Rachel wondered if that was where Peter got his optimism from, his sense of humour. If it was purposefully chosen. The first evening, they pulled off towards the coast and ended up on a dirt road. Rachel was worried they would be stuck, easy prey for banditos. She had read the warnings at the border—don’t drive at night. Don’t stop for unmarked cars. But the road bounced them down to a secluded beach, ringed by cliffs, empty. They set up their tent, built a fire in the sand, and heated cans of black beans on the coals, scooping them up with tortillas, blowing on the steam. The pale green flesh of an avocado sliced with a knife, the seed tossed into the sea. Bottles of Negro Modelo as the sun dropped out of sight. In the tent later, sweat tingled as it dried on her skin. Rachel memorised the way the tent let in patches of sky, and the way Peter had tasted on her lip—like salt and beer and the crunch of sand. They fell asleep without talking, just the sound of waves slapping the beach.
There was nothing she could say, Rachel realised, to express the sum of her happiness.
The next two days they continued down to Cabo San Lucas. They should have stayed on their deserted beach, but curiosity won out. What else was there to be discovered? Nothing so perfect, it turned out. More empty road, some poor fishing towns, a few shacks that were dwarfed by satellite dishes, the occasional motorhome with a family from California or Arizona—sunburnt and weighed down with enough extra flesh to make the giant vehicles seem normal. Boojum trees that they would both exclaim over—a tall spindly thing with a plume.
They drove into Cabo hot, thirsty, red-eyed and weary. There were familiar hotel chains lining the beach, trinket shops, and Americans with bum bags and plastic sun visors—everything that they hadn’t wished for. It was the end of the peninsula; they had hoped for something beautiful, and they were met with hordes off the cruise ships, swilling margaritas in test tubes, shouting things like, ‘Hey, Chris, put on this sombrero and I’ll take your picture with the monkey.’
The monkey was wearing a sombrero as well. It was missing patches of fur across its back, and the monkey handler was missing something vital in his eyes.
They shared a towering plate of nachos and a pitcher of margaritas in a hotel bar beside the beach, blinking at all of the neon, all of the tequila, all of the flyers for dance clubs and pimp’n’ho nights and time-shares.
They stayed in the Sheraton for a night—Peter put in on his card—and Rachel had to admit that she enjoyed the cool, white sheets, the hot shower that washed sand out of the places it had settled, and the cable television that assured them nothing had happened in the world while they were away from it.
‘Where to?’ Peter said in the morning, going back for his fourth plate from the breakfast buffet. Rachel had eaten as much: pancakes, papaya, toast, huevos rancheros and hash browns. They were getting their money’s worth. She eyed off the Bloody Mary bar but knew she would need to be sober to drive.
‘This town is pretty tacky. We passed much nicer places on our way down,’ she said, draining her freshly squeezed orange juice.
‘Let’s get outta here then, hey? I wouldn’t mind camping on the beach somewhere. Having a surf.’
So they headed back in the direction they came from, back north, away from the people that reminded them where they had come from. They spent a week in a surf camp where they hired a board for Rachel and Peter taught her, slowly, to watch the rhythm of the waves, and to find her feet and stand in the white water. It was the paddle out that exhausted her—she didn’t have the arms for it—so instead she sat under the shade of a palm tree, read and sifted sand through her fingers. Or she walked down the beach and took photographs of the local fishermen as they brought in their catch. It was a smell that took some getting used to—fish guts; seawater; stale beer; the smell of bodies that worked in the sun.
The camp had little huts—palapas—with ceiling fans. They were cooler than the tent and only ten dollars more a day. Rachel and Peter spent the hottest part of the afternoon in bed, whispering and dozing, waking up to have sex for the second or third time. At night they sat with the camp owners in beach chairs around a pool that needed a good dose of chlorine, drinking and listening to surfers outdo each other with their gnarly tales. Rachel was quiet, but she liked to observe Peter among the others. She liked his calm assurance, the way he stood up for whichever guy they decided to pick on for whatever flash of weakness the guy had shown, and the one or two words he had for the bully, giving everyone a reason to laugh at the bully instead.
One morning they woke up beneath the whine of the fan and realised that they had to be back in LA in three days, for Peter’s flight. They threw their things together and left the camp, exchanging email addresses with the camp owners and long-time residents. Rachel would miss the fishermen more—the way they worked with such efficiency, gutting their catch on the beach as the sun dropped, their brown hands a blur against silver scales, and their sharp, rusted knives.
They slept by the side of the road when they got tired of driving, hardly caring anymore about banditos. Peter talked about the design of houses, why things like light and breezes and location were so important. Rachel listened and nodded and smiled. He talked about Sydney, about the different beaches that fringed the city, about the food, and the proximity of the green spaces that fooled you into thinking it wasn’t a city after all. He had never lived anywhere else.
