Geography Read Online Free Page B

through the taxi windows, at the Los Angeles suburbs sprawling out and away.
    I know, because I was told, that we caught the train from San Francisco to Boston. I don’t know how we got to San Francisco, though when I drove down Highway 101 almost thirty years later, along the coast and through Big Sur, I thought I could remember the landscape from this time, from when I was little. But memory does that. Makes you think things have happened that maybe never did.
    The train we caught was red and we were on it for three days and two nights. We slept on little foldout beds attached to the wall and it felt like magic to me, like living in a doll’s house. I remember that I spent most of the time reading books of my favourite fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty , Cinderella , Snow White .
    We changed trains in Chicago, the day of the Chicago riots in 1968, the ones where the yippies got squirted with firemen’s hoses and put flowers into the ends of the soldiers’ guns. This is something I’ve been told, by history books and my father. My father likes to remember things as events, as newsworthy and I’m left with his exaggerated sense of things in lieu of memory, or facts.
    When I watch the footage of this on the television, years later, it seems strange to me that I was in that place on that day, moving through history without it touching me. My father and everyone else his age seemed trapped in those times, defined by them; this falling away of all that they knew. To me change was a constant, so that when I grew up it seemed to me that I did not know how to stand still.
    We’d gone to America so my father could study journalism at Columbia University. One day soon after we arrived he took me there. People were wearing beads and badges and the men had long hair. That day at the university people were upset because Robert Kennedy had just been assassinated.
    â€˜He’s the brother of the man who was assassinated the day you were born,’ my father told me.
    â€˜What’s assassinated?’ I asked.
    â€˜It means that someone has killed you and you are dead,’ my father said.
    â€˜What’s dead?’
    I can’t remember now what answer he gave, but the memory of asking the question came to me vividly when I was in India that first time. Death was everywhere and I spent two weeks with amoebic dysentery. I was twenty-two, but felt like a child. Frightened, and wishing someone else would come and help me sort out this mess, the mess of everything going wrong a long way from home. I realise now that that is how my parents felt when they were in America. That they were too young to deal with this, that everything was going wrong, that they were a long way from home.
    When I was four, I sat at a breakfast bar in New York and was asked what kind of cereal I wanted. I remember looking up at the shelf behind the waitress and seeing little cardboard packets of all different kinds of cereal. ‘What are they?’ I pointed.
    â€˜Variety Packs.’
    Choice: I could have cocoa pops or rice bubbles or cornflakes. I was four years old sitting on a barstool in Manhattan and could choose whatever breakfast cereal I wanted. Freedom in breakfast cereal didn’t happen in Melbourne in the 1960s. After the Variety Packs my mother and father took me to Central Park and bought me a Mickey Mouse balloon full of helium. When I let it go it floated in the air, up and up, until it was gone. You didn’t get those in Melbourne either.
    My mother bought me a little wicker table and chair that sat by my new bed. My dolls slept on the table. I can still remember waking up one morning, when things smelt new, to find that my new dolls and furniture had disappeared and my mother was packing our bags. So, for a few years anyway, that was another thing New York had that Melbourne didn’t. My father.
    That was an early lesson. Men I loved disappeared for no reason. They lived in other places, a long