Gravity Is the Thing

by Jaclyn Moriarty

  Each is also split into subcategories: Beauty branches off into How to Look Youthful and How to Be Slim (beauty and age/plumpness being mutually exclusive, of course).

  You could embrace How to Be Slim. That could be your life force. Enter a jungle of exercise regimes, gym memberships, boot camps, personal trainers, this-one-bizarre-tricks, fasts, fads, shortcuts, Fitbits, calorie counters, stomach staples, nutritionists, therapists, mirrors and bathroom scales, and never leave.

  You might find yourself growing smaller, your face disappearing, your shoulders dwindling, your ribs emerging.

  ‘You’re so little I had trouble finding you,’ someone says, and you glow. For this is the essence of How to Be Slim, this delight in being elusive, not quite there.

  18.

  Niall’s place was a Federation cottage, battered floorboards lined with nails, unhinged doors leaning up against walls. I praised the mouldings and light fittings, and as I talked I saw that all the detritus, the paint tins and toolboxes, had been pushed against the walls in an effort to tidy.

  He gave me a tour, then reached for his house keys and jacket, and we stepped back out again. I supposed he had changed his mind about making dinner. First we had a drink in a bar with aquamarine lighting, next we had dinner at a Mexican place.

  ‘Can I say something?’ Niall asked.

  ‘Certainly.’

  He smiled. ‘When I first saw you—at the weekend retreat—I felt like I’d seen you before.’

  ‘Me too!’

  In fact, when I saw him, I thought: That’s the kind of man I like.

  I didn’t tell Niall that. Nor did I enter into a chain of enquiry about where we might have met before. That was how my marriage began and look how it turned out. Instead, taking a divergent path, I suggested it was misfiring neurons: we saw each other, blinked, saw each other again and our brains were confused into thinking: I’ve seen you before!

  ‘Like with déjà vu,’ Niall said agreeably.

  I drank sangria and the music was loud enough to talk beneath, so I became reckless. ‘Do you know anything about Tantric sex?’ I asked.

  Not much, he replied, so I told him about it. We laughed, but it turned out that talking about Tantric sex is excellent foreplay, especially when you have both been shy and cautious up to this point. By the time we got back to his place we were like those movie couples, tearing off clothes, hands all over the place, breathing heavily, tripping over paint tins and bumping into walls.

  It was extremely exciting, and not remotely Tantric.

  The next morning, I woke up and studied the shape of his back and shoulders in the bed.

  ‘Do you exist?’ I asked.

  He turned over and studied me through sleepy eyes.

  19.

  The next Tuesday we had a Flight Immersion class.

  Antony arrived late, pulled a bottle of Slivovitz out of his backpack, and announced that tonight he needed a real drink and he needed us to drink it with him.

  We were all amenable to the idea. We sat on cushions on the floor, drank Slivovitz, split into teams and brainstormed superheroes who could fly. Superman, the Human Torch, Hawkman, Green Lantern, Storm, Iron Man: those are the ones I can remember now.

  At Antony’s suggestion, we divided the superheroes up into those who fly using biological skills and those who require wings or a suit.

  Next, the teams had to brainstorm songs about flight. The teams were: The Kookaburras (Niall, Nicole, me) and The Velociraptors (Antony, Frangipani, Pete), and the Velociraptors smashed us. Not surprising: way cooler name.

  Wilbur was effusive in his praise and suggested we lie on the floor while he played us a scratchy recording of Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ as a reward.

  ‘How are things going with that guy you started dating?’ Nicole asked Frangipani while the song played. ‘What was his name again?’

  ‘Abel,’ Pete Aldridge grunted.

  Frangipani sighed. ‘It didn’t work out. The sex was terrible. So quick! I barely had time to lie back, let alone start thinking of England.’

  Everyone guffawed, Pete Aldridge most loudly, but Frangipani was tranquil. ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Let’s listen to the song.’

  Since our night together, Niall and I had spoken on the phone each day, conversing in a shy, hesitant way about things like a blown fuse in my café and a delivery of mismatched kitchen tiles to Niall’s place. Tonight, we behaved as we ordinarily would, but the air between us was charged with zigs and zags. I kept expecting somebody to notice and say, ‘Hold up! I think I see a flight wave!’

  Also, now, as we lay on Wilbur’s floor, eyes closed, the room’s laughter fading, Sinatra singing, Niall brushed his hand against mine, and I thought I might cry from the intensity.

  Next, we played with a remote-control aeroplane. Wilbur unpacked this from a box, peeling away tape, studying instructions and inserting batteries. I imagined him going into Kmart to buy this, and I wondered if the woman in turquoise had accompanied him. Had Wilbur described us to his turquoise friend, and had he done so disparagingly (They think they can fly! Idiots!) or affectionately (For my sake, they pretend to think they can fly)?

  Niall was the best in the class at flying the remote-control plane. I watched the toy soar and turn and I felt it soar and turn in my heart. (Later, I texted Niall to congratulate him on his technique and then we exchanged messages along the same theme. I hadn’t meant the double entendre in my first text, but I played along as if I had. Sexting, it’s called.)

  Pete Aldridge kept crashing the plane into walls and making, ‘Ker-pow!’ sound effects. Frangipani, concentrating fiercely, rotated the plane in a tiny circle at knee height.

  Finally, Wilbur had us face his computer while he flicked through multiple images of people parasailing and parachuting, using jetpacks or rocket boots, hang-gliding or flying in kite suits. From this, we skipped to YouTube videos of parkour, followed by a series of short extracts from movies and TV shows about flight. The criteria seemed pretty loose: Santa Claus swooped by in his sleigh, Harry Potter and his buddies zoomed about on brooms, E.T. rode in a bicycle basket, and George Clooney stood at an airport studying the departure board.

  Martial arts movies, especially the Wuxia genre, featured heavily, and the scenes from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon convinced us all that we could fly. I suppose the Slivovitz helped.

  I ended up taking Oscar home in a cab.

  20.

  Niall started coming over to our place for dinner and staying over—no more than once or twice a week, as we did not want Oscar to get muddled and think Niall was a father figure. Or, you know, get attached.

  The dinner part was tricky, as I usually make a cheese omelette for myself and kid food for Oscar, but now I had to make grown-up food for Niall and pretend this was usual. Exhausting. On Niall’s first visit, I set him up on the couch with a glass of wine while I put Oscar to bed.

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I asked, and he pointed to his phone and said, ‘I’ll make some calls.’ We heard the murmur of his voice while I bathed Oscar, and while I sang, chatted, scratched his back and so on. It was important not to cut Oscar’s bedtime ritual short. I interrupted ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ to mention that our friend Niall would be having a sleepover.

  ‘Why?’ Oscar asked. ‘Why doesn’t he go to his own home?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s a long drive.’

  Oscar accepted this, not being a fan of long drives himself.

  Back downstairs, Niall was asleep on the couch, so I cleaned up the kitchen, brushed my teeth, then I kissed Niall on the cheek and he opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Shall we go to bed?’

  So that became the pattern. Once or twice, Oscar came into my room in the night when Niall was there, but I just shifted to the middle of the bed and Oscar curled up beside me. It was important that Oscar have the same space he usually had; and Niall, as a guest, and a big man, must have sufficient territory. So I turned onto my side, made myself a dart, a led
ge between them.

  21.

  I read about kundalini, an energy that is coiled, trapped within us—like a hyperlink, I suppose. You must keep your chakras clear, ready for it. If you are not ready when kundalini arrives, you get a stiff neck and headache, and you hear curious sounds such as a flute playing in the mornings. However, if you are ready, the kundalini offers high-voltage power, infinite potential, enabling you to experience heightened awareness and increased capabilities.

  It seemed to me that this must be the way you learn to fly.

  I raised the issue at the following flight class, suggesting Wilbur add a session on this topic. Wilbur seemed pleased and curious, but he firmly and politely explained that the course outline was already set. We were working on sound (identifying instruments, discussing sonic booms) and touch (blindfolded, we ran our hands over velvet, corduroy, sandpaper, walked through silk curtains and sat with our bare feet in tubs of warm water).

  22.

  Also at Flight School, we did a Meditation during which Wilbur played recordings of birdsong. When the recording moved on to kookaburras laughing, we all rolled around laughing. Wilbur tried to incorporate this into the meditation: the contagion of laughter, the buoyancy of laughter—he referred to the scene in Mary Poppins in which laughter rose them to the ceiling—how laughter and flight are closely connected; how laughter is sideways, it’s upside down, defiance, it’s a lightening, a universal language. Like flight, it is a peculiar thing we can do with our bodies that serves no obvious purpose—although flight, he noted, reconsidering, would actually serve plenty of purposes, but anyway, moving on . . . We laughed right over him.

  Another time at Flight School, we talked about flight in everyday discourse; hidden flight in dance, in drugs, in dreams; flights of the imagination, taking flight. ‘The flight/fight response,’ I suggested. Wilbur was delighted with me.

  We analysed the nature of flight in our dreams. In Antony’s dream life, he has to crawl along the floor to fly.

  ‘That makes no sense,’ grumbled Pete Aldridge, in a mood.

  But Antony got down on the floor and demonstrated: a commando crawl, using his elbows. ‘If I dig my elbows in hard enough,’ he said, ‘eventually I start to lift off.’

  Pete Aldridge said, ‘Nonsense,’ and we all scolded him for disrespecting others’ dreams.

  The same evening, Wilbur produced a toy that projected the solar system onto the ceiling, and we tipped back our heads while he moved the laser pointer around, describing planets and stars.

  He switched the projector off. ‘Close your eyes and dream about fireflies,’ he said.

  23.

  One evening, we did a Flight Immersion class in which we learned aircraft marshalling signals: all clear, insert chocks, pull chocks, start engines, cut engines, turn left.

  Very few of these would be useful when we flew ourselves, Wilbur noted. For example, we did not have chocks. (These are wedged behind the wheels to stop the plane moving.)

  ‘We don’t have engines either,’ I pointed out.

  ‘And yet we are learning the signals.’ Pete Aldridge rolled his eyes. He was especially cranky that night, and made no effort to hide it.

  ‘It’s in the course outline,’ Wilbur said, rubbing his forehead absently. ‘I think this is part of . . .’

  ‘It’s Flight Immersion, Pete,’ Nicole said. ‘We’re immersing ourselves in things to do with flight.’

  ‘Right,’ Wilbur agreed. ‘Exactly.’

  Sometimes people did not show up, and we missed them. Pete Aldridge missed a week because he was getting shoulder surgery, but he gave us all a month’s advance notice of this. Others would fail to appear without explanation. When we lined up at the windows, staring out into the black—it was deep winter now, always dark when we arrived, but Wilbur said you could still see flight waves; could possibly even see them better at night (‘I think,’ he added under his breath. ‘Who knows, to be honest?’)—we would talk about our week, our work, our children, and wonder where the missing classmate was.

  Flight classes were always tinged with suspense, particularly when somebody was absent. They were built on such a gossamer web, on a pattern of fine glass, and could snap or crack at any moment. It only needed one person to say, ‘Shall we wrap up now?’ or to turn to Wilbur and say, ‘Buddy,’ or, ‘Mate, do you think we’ve played long enough?’ and everything would dwindle or shatter.

  So when Antony was absent for three weeks in a row, the tone of the class was noisy, mildly panicked.

  I don’t know. I might have imagined that.

  24.

  One of the mothers at Oscar’s day care told me that she practises witchcraft.

  We were having a play date at the Phillip Street park, and Oscar had chosen to bring everyone along. By ‘everyone’ he meant several small objects, including: one piece of Lego; a broken book light; and a tiny plastic motorbike, which, on arrival at the park, he handed back to me. ‘I only need things that do things,’ he said.

  I pointed to the Lego brick. ‘What does that do?’

  ‘Shoots electrical rays.’

  ‘Okay, have fun!’

  He hardly glanced at me he was so keen to start playing, running to join Amber, arms full of objects that did things. But then, as I watched, he slowed to an uncertain jog.

  Beside me, Amber’s mother also watched. I suppose she was watching Amber, rather than Oscar, but I always find it hard to comprehend that anyone would watch another child but mine.

  ‘We can only stay until twelve, I’m afraid,’ she told me. ‘I have a meeting.’

  Rather than respecting her privacy, I asked, ‘What sort of meeting?’

  ‘A meeting of my coven.’

  Surprising! She had always struck me as harried, this woman, and I thought a witch ought to be more serene. Also, she was blonde, and Amber wore pink sparkle clips, not spiders or newts. (Also: hee hee hee, she said when she laughed, not cackle, cackle, cackle.)

  I expressed interest in witchcraft, which seemed to please Amber’s mother, and the next time I saw her, at day care, she gave me a book of spells. It almost made me cry, this generosity.

  She said I could borrow it for up to seven days, so I stopped wanting to cry. The book took on an urgency—I only had a week in which to perform these spells!—so I read it that night. Magick, said the introduction, helps us to appreciate the power of coincidence. (Coincidence again! What a coincidence!)

  I scoured the book for spells that help you find people who are lost, but there were only spells for love, money, healing and to give you confidence.

  With three strands of blue cord, you can knot the wind, raise the wind and call the wind. I wondered if I should bring this to Wilbur’s attention.

  25.

  When I read the spells for love, I thought proudly: I don’t need these. I have Niall.

  But then I paused.

  Did I have Niall?

  One thing I’ve noticed is that romantic relationships are like life.

  You start life as a miraculous little thing: a baby! And you get cuter and cuter: a darling! Strangers smile as you are wheeled by in your stroller. This continues through toddler and preschool years, everybody finding you fascinating, bringing you treats and toys.

  Then you grow longer and bonier, fewer people smile at the sight of you, many regard you as one of an interchangeable swarm, some purse their lips in pre-emptive disapproval or scold you for being your own peculiar self.

  The taller you get, the better you learn to form sentences and walk without error, the more resounding the indifference with which you are observed, many failing even to register your presence in the room.

  The same is true with relationships. A person meets you and is enchanted, finding you miraculous, and then, over several dates, falls in love with you, finding you cuter and cuter: a darling! Over time, however, he/she begins to accept your presence, even to purse lips in pre-emptive disapproval, to scold you for being your own peculiar self. Sometime
s he/she fails to register your presence in a room.

  With Finnegan, of course, we mostly gazed at one another in wonder. Right up until the day he slouched in the hall, taking off his boots and scowling about his affair.

  With Niall, however, I found myself waiting for things to begin. We were sleeping together, chatting or texting, but in no way was he gazing, or murmuring that I was exquisite.

  Instead, we grinned, looked away, reached for each other uncertainly.

  Perhaps, I thought, this is just as it should be? If he never finds me miraculous, he will never take the next step to indifference, we will simply carry on with happy chatting.

  I took care not to gaze at him adoringly myself. When he realigned my sliding wardrobe door, which had got unhooked from its track a year before, or helped Oscar onto his chair at dinner, or enthused about the fact that Oscar’s day care had introduced Mandarin lessons—when he did these things, it was difficult to avoid.

  26.

  On the fourth week, Antony was back. He was very quiet. Everyone was excited to see him, and keen to know where he’d been, but he said, ‘Oh, well, things, you know,’ and pressed his forehead to the window, gazing out at the stars, the chimneys, the moonlight.

  That night, Wilbur told a story about a famous pilot named Harry Hawker. One day, Harry and his navigator took off in their Sopwith aeroplane to fly the Atlantic.

  They disappeared.

  Back in London, there was sadness at the loss of Harry Hawker. The Daily Mail offered to provide for Hawker’s daughter. King George V sent a message of condolence to Hawker’s wife.

  Days later, a Danish freighter signalled to the shore: Saved Hands. Sopwith Aeroplane.

  Is it Hawker? was signalled in reply.

  Yes.

  It turned out Harry Hawker’s engine had overheated; he and the navigator had ditched, landed in the ocean, and been picked up by the passing Danish freighter.