I was not his friend, Daniel wanted to protest, but the bus lurched to a halt at a huge roundabout where many streams of cars flowed. It was as if someone had decided to tie a knot in a highway. Horns were sounding, brakes screeched and the noise was such that conversation was impossible.
His two companions were gone by the time Daniel emerged from the bus. There were at least thirty taxis lined up along the kerb and people from the Roissybus and other buses were streaming to join the line at one end and climbing into taxis at the other.
On impulse, Daniel turned on his heel and set off in long, loping strides, determined to find a quiet café and check the map, then walk to the hotel. He was soon deep in a maze of streets hemmed on either side by buildings with ornate facades and a multitude of statues. He was struck by their beauty, but also oppressed by the weight of time they represented. No building in Australia was more than two hundred years old, but some of the buildings around him now looked as if they might have been there for many hundreds of years, especially the ones with crumbling, black-streaked stonework.
He had a sudden sharply painful longing for the simplicity of the flat red landscape outside the bedroom window of his parents’ home. That particular view of what some would call nothing, framed by limp, flowered curtains.
He crossed the street because there was a car parked on the footpath and realised he was panting like a dog, he who had ridden a hundred boundaries in the outback without raising a sweat. It was something to do with the way the heat was pressed between the stone buildings maybe, compressed so that it was almost solid. In the outback, the heat was light, stretched thin.
There was no café in sight, so finally he stopped in the shade of a building and took out the map. He had not bothered with maps in the outback. The country offered its own landmarks and signs to one who had grown up with Murri jackaroos and trackers.
Cities smothered the land, he reckoned, stopping it communicating with the people who lived on it, though maybe it was more that cities reflected people’s desire not to hear the land. Once when the family had come up to the city to plead with the bank to give them more time, his father had said sadly that cities were as confused as the people who lived in them, and that you needed maps for dealing with the people as much as for finding your way around the streets.
A metal sign fixed to the side of a building said Rue Cloche. Daniel took out his map and plotted a course to the street where he would find his hotel, and as he set off again, he looked at his watch and saw that no time had passed since the plane had landed. The watch had stopped, but there was no point in winding it again until he learned the correct local time.
The hotel turned out to be no more than a doorway leading to carpeted stairs, with the name written above a glass door in fancy writing. The bottom floor was a restaurant and, as he climbed the stairs, Daniel smelled coffee. It reminded him of his father so strongly that for a moment he actually seemed to see his father’s hands on the rail instead of his own. Bigger, always bigger, soft-furred with golden hair that caught the sunlight, the huge scarred knuckles and the missing index finger.
Some people coming down the stairs eyed him disapprovingly as they passed him, and Daniel realised they thought he was drunk. He felt as lightheaded as he had the time he got sunstroke as a kid. He still remembered how everything had sagged and tilted when he moved, the heaviness of the shadows and the silky feeling of sickness. An older woman in a fitted green dress and smooth bun examined him with shrewd eyes as he approached the reception desk.
Once he had proffered his passport and filled out the papers, the receptionist pressed the lift button for him and explained breakfast was to be eaten in the restaurant below, he had only to show his key to the waitress.
The room when he reached it was tiny. He bumped his elbows on both walls going to the toilet and was forced to shower with the door