Geography Read Online Free Page A

narcissism. She says there is nothing wrong with being younger and making young-people mistakes.
    â€˜We all stuff up,’ she says.
    I hesitate. I’m not sure I know her well enough to ask her what her mistakes might be. Me, I’m talking about my past because I am shedding it. She is watching me slough off my old skin.
    We order more drinks. The humidity makes us drink quickly and the gin and tonic is working its effect. Ruby asks me how I imposed order on things.
    â€˜Perhaps it’s a journalist thing,’ I say. ‘I have a series of grids. When I travel I read the papers, watch TV and get caught up in any local media event. Afterwards I organise the event—in my head anyway—according to the decade it happened in, and the place, and, more bizarrely, the man I was seeing at the time. It is like playing with building blocks. Building things, creating meaning, to soothe oneself.’
    Ruby raises an eyebrow. ‘Have you heard of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?’
    â€˜Like this,’ I recite my litany in a sing-song voice. ‘I was born in the sixties, and that is when I first went to America and that is when my parents separated. I was at high school in the seventies, I got a new dad, and there was Cyclone Tracy. I studied journalism in the eighties. I fell in love with my geography teacher, our family ended all over again, there was the Ash Wednesday bushfires and I went to India. I worked for a travel agency in the nineties and I met Michael. And Max was born. There were bushfires and earthquakes and blizzards. I came to Sri Lanka in the new century—a girl like me loves it when there is an actual new century—and the airport was blown up.
    â€˜You see how neat everything is?’
    â€˜A new dad?’ asks Ruby. ‘How many do you have?’
    â€˜Two. I call my first father Father, and my second father Dad.’
    â€˜So it’s like this,’ Ruby says. ‘We are sitting in a hotel in Sri Lanka in August, 2001, and it’s your turn to buy the drinks.’
    We go back to our room to find that it has heated up like an oven. ‘No fan,’ Ruby grimaces. ‘And these windows, they don’t open. There is only this grille at the top.’
    We lie on our beds, tossing and turning; it’s partly the drink but mainly the heat. Our beds are only six inches apart and I can hear Ruby’s every move, her efforts to rearrange her limbs as she seeks out the cooler parts of the sheet. Her low moans of frustration and irritation. I periodically fall into a half sleep and sweaty dreams full of dread. Telling Ruby my story is making my time with Michael come back to me with the kind of intensity I haven’t felt for years. I am restless with rushes of loathing, not desire. I cannot believe I let this happen, that I lost those years. I won’t tell Ruby everything, I can’t, but even in the partial telling I find I remember more.
    At around three a.m. I say, ‘Do you ever feel that you’ve been beaten by something that other people think is quite trivial? And then you hate yourself twice over: for being defeated, and for the cause being so…nothing…compared to what most people deal with in their lives?’
    â€˜It’s not a competition,’ she says; then, after we have lain silent for a few moments, ‘Let’s go outside and walk around the fort walls. It will be beautiful at this time of night.’ I pull on my clothes. She takes me down the street to the 340-year-old battlement walls that look across palm trees and rocks and ocean, all grey silver white in the moonlight. She takes me outside, where it’s cool.

    The first time I was in Los Angeles my mother and father tried to make me walk out of the airport into the carpark, but the noise—people, planes, taxis and buses—upset me and I had to be carried, like a baby. It is hard for me to remember details. I can remember that I stared