The Albatross by Nina Wan

Author:Nina Wan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2023-03-26T22:39:08+00:00

12

Peter opened his atlas – the same edition that everyone at school had for geography – and found the map of the United States on page 123. He pointed to a spot on the east coast. New York.

On the page it didn’t look any more remarkable than the other towns around it: just a slightly bigger dot, and a slightly bigger font. All of the east coast was coloured in the same lovely green which, according to the legend, indicated a low-lying shoreline stretching all the way from Maine to Miami. It seemed to me that Peter could have pointed to anywhere on that part of the map and convinced me it was New York.

As for the west coast, that was a different matter. The west was a crumpling vastness of topographical changes, full of deep furrows and towering summits. There was a madness about that side of the country, where mountains seemed to rise straight out of the sea and rush to gain ever more altitude as they tumbled unrelentingly towards the brown heart of the Rockies.

Looking at a map of America – of the way the different colours fought for attention, and the names of towns and cities jostled for space – it somehow made more sense that the people there should disagree with each other so often, why everyone got so worked up about the OJ Simpson trial, the Rodney King incident. Which seemed to me a perfectly good reason why Peter should not go there, even as he said, ‘When you come to visit me, we will take a road trip, from here to here.’

He was running his finger from New York to Chicago, where he had always wanted to watch a baseball game at Wrigley Field – ever since he was six, when he saw an aerial poster of it hanging on the wall of his dad’s house. It was the colours that struck him: the redness of the infield, the green turf mowed to a lattice pattern. Also the thought of people eating American hotdogs.

We were at the dining table in his house, a vase of banksias at one end and us at the other. The table was an old wounded thing, full of marks made by the bottoms of burning pots. Donna preferred furniture that told a story about how they’d been used. Almost all the furniture here had lived a former life in someone else’s house, with someone else’s family. What Donna liked to call history was really just damage, Peter believed. Some people rescued injured animals. His mother did the same with things made out of wood.

There were 800 miles between New York and Chicago, said Peter, already leaving the metric system behind. There was a chocolate town along the way called Hershey; we could stop over there if we found it interesting, or further along in Pittsburgh. Either way he would take me on a detour to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Had I ever seen a picture of it?

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