Although, then she told me I have a Bucket face.
17.
Oscar was sick with a stomach bug for a week and I missed another class.
By the following Tuesday he was well again, and I flew up the stairs to Wilbur’s apartment, fizzy with desire to see everybody, and especially to confirm that Niall existed.
I had exchanged texts with him, setting out descriptions of long, scattered nights and days, vomit on sheets, quilts, carpet, mattress, toys, myself flying through the darkness of Oscar’s bedroom to whisk his blankie out of the way, failing to save blankie, the washing machine and dryer running through the night. I tried to make the texts poetic.
Niall had responded with exclamation marks and sad faces, but eventually we had settled into silence. There was nothing to tell him. I was slowly introducing toast and rice, rehydrating the child, despising myself for running out of Hydralyte; I was reading picture books, watching children’s TV. Sure, there was a jolt of elation when I recognised Judi Dench’s voice as Miss Lilly, the Dacovian teacher in Angelina Ballerina, but otherwise I was violent with boredom, desperate at the sight of closed doors.
Like I said, nothing to report.
But now I was leaping two steps at a time, hands on the flaking iron railings, skidding along the corridor, my hair washed and shiny, bursting with relief at Wilbur’s opening door, the freedom! the adults! the treats! soft light!
Niall was not there.
The others turned from their circle of chairs, welcomed me back, asked after Oscar.
It was a strange class. Wilbur had baked a huge chocolate cake, layered and rich, creamy with frosting. He sliced pieces that fell with quiet thuds onto plates. He offered wine, coffee, tea.
‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we will not look for flight waves.’
Nicole made an aww sound. She likes that part. As do I.
‘Tonight is too significant for windows,’ Wilbur continued sternly. (Nicole apologised. Wilbur accepted this with a nod.) ‘Remember our first night when I said we would cover four units—Meditation, Flight Immersion, Sensory Development and Practical Flight—and then move on to Emotional Flight?’
We all nodded.
‘It is time,’ he said, with beautiful drama. ‘We are ready for Emotional Flight.’
I looked at the door. At the intercom buzzer.
‘But Niall’s not here,’ Frangipani complained, plucking the words from my mind. Nobody, so far, had acknowledged Niall’s absence and this had added to my unease. Does he exist? I was thinking.
‘He can catch up next week,’ Wilbur promised. ‘In some ways, Emotional Flight is a continuation of Sensory Development. To reach the sense of flight we need to move beyond the exteroceptive senses, the proprioceptive senses. Beyond thermoception, magnetoception, equilibrioception, past the interoceptive. To push beyond the Buddhist notion of Ayatana.’
‘Okay, I’m out.’ Nicole reached for her handbag and jacket, as if to go home. She’s funny like that.
‘Have I missed a class?’ Frangipani wondered. ‘I thought I’d come every time.’
Wilbur looked around at us, expression innocent.
‘He’s been on Wikipedia,’ Antony decided. He seemed more himself today, Antony; calmer, quicker. In fact, he had even arrived wearing his flat cap.
Wilbur stretched his arms above his head. ‘Antony’s right,’ he said. ‘I thought there was more to senses than we’ve covered, and there is. It’s a science.’
‘Isn’t everything?’ I said sagely, although I don’t know. Is it?
Wilbur sighed cheerfully. ‘I’ll get back to the course outline,’ he said, picking up a folder. He glanced down. ‘The components of Emotional Flight are these: a sense of pleasure, of the impossible, of defiance, of play, of sideways glances and crooked thinking, a sense of the sky and wonder, a sense beyond the edge of all these senses, a sense of magic, of imagination, of your heart, your soul, your self.’
This was an impressive speech, and Wilbur allowed his voice to swell, punching the final self into the air.
We gave him a round of applause.
‘Thank you,’ he said, pleased, and looked back at his folder.
‘We ask that you call to mind,’ he read aloud, ‘the stories you have heard of extraordinary feats, of people crossing impossible boundaries—Bolt flies a hundred metres in under ten seconds, Bruce Lee snatches grains of rice from the air using chopsticks, a man . . . there’s a note here in my father’s handwriting that says, find out this guy’s name—I haven’t done that, sorry. Anyway, apparently he caught a cannonball with his bare hands. I think that’s probably a crock of—’ Wilbur reached for his coffee, and sipped from it.
He continued reading: ‘Mysteries remain unsolved: the merest skeleton of facts, a structure in which to place selective truths. Consider mind-reading, psychic powers, time travel, black holes, evolution, travel through space. The Guidebook has encouraged off-kilter thinking, laying the groundwork, but to question an absolute truth—a truth that has physics, logic, history, biology behind it—you need a highly developed sense of defiance.’
‘This absolute truth being that people cannot fly?’ Pete Aldridge checked.
There was a pause as Wilbur flipped through the folder, then he looked at Pete Aldridge and nodded. ‘Right. Where was I?’
We glanced at each other. Occasionally Wilbur had consulted notes before, but now he was reading them verbatim, head down. I was missing his eye contact. He has dark eyes, circled in gold.
‘Can you step into the silence of the sky?’ he read. ‘This is the heart of defiance. Can you dismantle all you thought you knew? You also need . . .’ he turned the page ‘. . . a belief in the sky: the essential wrongness of the ground.’
He closed the folder. ‘The moment you doubt that you can fly,’ he said, ‘you cease forever to be able to do it.’
There was a long silence.
‘So if we’re in the sky,’ Nicole clarified, ‘and we think, Holy shit, how is this even possible! I can’t be doing this!—we come crashing to the ground?’
‘Oh, I’m just quoting Peter Pan.’ Wilbur sighed. ‘I have no idea if J.M. Barrie knew how flight works. That bit, I improvised.’
He tapped his fingernails on the folder, opened it again. ‘What is it that stops us flying?’ he read.
‘Gravity,’ Antony said promptly.
‘Gravity, right,’ Wilbur agreed. ‘Not just Isaac Newton’s gravity, but being too grave, too serious. Being weighed down by science, trapped by solemnity. Fear of authority—’
‘Fear of falling,’ Nicole pointed out.
‘Right. It’s also about finding your centre. On the island, two men sat facing one another on opposite sides of the road, and pointed to the sky.’
‘They were there because of you?’ I gaped at him. Like a fish.
‘I have no memory of any such men,’ Frangipani said. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Good, I would say,’ Pete Aldridge reasoned.
‘I paid them a lot of money to sit there,’ Wilbur said. ‘So I think it’s bad that you’ve forgotten. But I’ll be okay.’
‘They seemed familiar to me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got it! A defamation case I once read—a man sat by the side of the road and pointed to a banner!’
The others seemed happy for me.
Wilbur returned to his notes. ‘The Guidebook pointed to the absurdity of self-help manuals, of philosophy, authority, of any universal rule. Flight defies a universal rule. To fly, you must de-ice your wings, for they are heavy with the weight of frozen thought.’
Wilbur’s eyes strayed to his phone.
‘It sounds like we still have a lot to cover,’ Nicole mused.
‘Well, no.’ Wilbur flicked his eyes back. ‘We’ll do one topic. It fuses all of . . . what I just said.’
Frangipani crunched on a chocolate curl. ‘What topic?’ she asked, jaunty.
‘Letting go.’
I noticed a curious sound. A little burr.
‘If you let go of authority, science, fear, preconceptions, gravity—things that weigh on you, things you cling to—the sense of flight will finally kick in.’
‘We’ll see the flight waves?’ Nicole looked longingly at the dark windows.
‘Right. It’s a very specific form of letting go. Letting go and holding on at the same time, I guess—finding the impossible balance. There are suggested activities.’ Here, Wilbur’s phone dinged and he surged for it, studied it, and replaced it on the table. I tried to read the message but the screen was dark.
He turned another page and read aloud: ‘Students lift heavy objects, hold them in air for count of thirty, then drop. Students don heavy coats, walk around room in them for unreasonable time, then remove. Students hold hands and fall backwards onto mattress.’
That strange sound again, but Wilbur was smiling. ‘It goes on like that,’ he said. ‘Fun. See, you can leap higher after you’ve been pressed down deep.’
The sound was Antony crying. We all realised at once. He’d been resting his elbow on his knee, his face muffled by his fist, but now the cries broke free. He tried to shield his face with his arms.
‘Can’t . . . keep . . .’ There were yelps between the words. ‘It’s . . . fun . . . but there’s . . . no . . . such . . . thing . . . as . . .’
No such thing as—
We waited.
‘Fun,’ he sobbed.
No such thing as fun. We looked at one another grimly as Antony tore his cap from his head and tried to hide behind it. You can’t hide behind a flat cap.
Yoop came to my mind: a word to describe the sounds made in convulsive sobbing. There shouldn’t be a word for that. Don’t intrude on anguish with your frantic classification.
Some leaned forward, hands out, others sat back, worried or distraught.
Abruptly, Wilbur leaped up and crouched beside Antony. He took him, like a child, into his arms. Antony’s face was now buried in Wilbur’s chest.
We waited. The sobbing quietened.
Eventually, Antony straightened, wiped his face with the back of his own hand, and Wilbur sat back on his haunches.
‘Sorry.’ Antony glanced quickly around at us.
Everybody reassured him that he had nothing to be sorry for.
‘It’s just all the talk about letting go,’ he explained. He aimed for smiling and frank. ‘Friends have been saying that exact thing to me for months—that I have to let go, that he’s holding me down.’
‘Who?’ whispered Nicole.
‘My partner. Rick. He has a problem with addiction.’ Antony was using a matter-of-fact voice now. ‘Crystal meth mostly—’ (Frangipani gasped) ‘—and he’s . . . been disappearing, days at a time, left his job, or lost it, stealing from family and friends.’
‘From you?’ Pete Aldridge asked.
‘From me. And yes, of course I have to let go, but it’s Rick, and letting go of him is not . . .’ He laughed, almost raucously. ‘Well, it’s not a game.’
‘Of course it’s not,’ Wilbur said at once. ‘I’m sorry, Antony.’
‘We all carry an invisible burden,’ Frangipani said.
‘For some people,’ said Nicole, ‘it’s the size of an elephant.’
Here come the elephants, I thought.
18.
Later that night, I sent a text to Niall: You missed a big class at Flight School!
Then I decided that was callous, reducing Antony’s breakdown to an exclamation point. I remembered that these little machines facilitated talking, in addition to texting, so I telephoned.
There was no answer. I left a message.
By the following night, there had been no reply from Niall. I worried about him, alone in his house, hammering things, messing with wires. He could have electrocuted himself; a chunk of plaster could have worked loose and knocked him out.
You okay there? I texted.
As I looked at the text I’d just sent, this appeared: Read 10.35 pm.
If he was lying on the floor, half strangled by a power cord, it seemed he was still capable of reading.
19.
Oscar said, ‘Do you want to know the thought I just thinked?’
‘What did you just think?’
‘It was eighteen o’clock and I was fast in bed, and you were in bed too, we were both fast in bed, and a fairy came and woke me up with a magical bell and took me to fairyland.’
‘What was fairyland like?’ I wondered.
‘Oh.’ He was dismissive. ‘A lot of fairies.’ Waving a vague hand.
20.
After three days, Niall replied: All good. See you soon.
I started a text in reply, and stopped. I scrolled for his name, to call him, and stopped. All the voices clamoured in my head: the young men shrugging their shoulders, He’s just not that into you, reminding me that he’d never been keen, that I’d asked him out the first time, that he’d never bought me flowers or told me I was a goddess; Socrates telling me to treat him like a slave.
Another week went by. Wilbur cancelled Tuesday’s class.
21.
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too. Jean-Paul Sartre said that.
I’ll tell you about silence; breathing, sneering silence; the lethargy of the telephone, the way it watches you, heavy-lidded.
It follows you around the house, just behind you, a reprimand, reproof. You do this, and this, and nobody knows what you are doing, the silence accumulating around each thing. It pours in like concrete, getting heavier.
You sit in your living room and, through the window, there’s the girl from next door in a white dress. Her silence is barefoot, she’s carrying a bag of rubbish to the garbage bin.
There’s silence when an email you’ve sent is unanswered, and scorn in the silence, or dismay or offence.
There’s silence from the oven, the cake slowly burning; silence from the alarm clock you forgot to set.
A minute’s silence, immense, then day-to-day comes jostling back in.
Silence before the key turns, or the door knocker sounds; silence in the hallway after the boots are removed.
Silence when you can’t think of anything to say, panicked silences.
The silence of an early morning, and the hope in it, before sounds step in, tentative.
Come here, he said. Come be with me in the silence. But that was only a dream I once had, in which Robert held out his hand. Water splashed, stroking the silence, wind running its hand over the silence.
Silence from the baby’s room at last, the beauty of that, stretching across the house.
It was beautiful, in splinters, Robert’s silence. It meant, No news is good news; if there was something wrong, I’d have heard.
There is something smug about silence, or sad and pale and wistful, something lazy about it. Implacable, like death. But silence is the possibility of noise. Death is ear-splitting, it’s shattering with absence; over time, it’s quieter.
22.
Headlights flared through the window, flaring in my chest, and I understood why Emily Dickinson’s poetry is so terse. It hurts too much to carry on. You keep coming up against the sharp, you need a break, a fence.
Niall’s silence, like Robert’s, grew from reprimand to something more like punishment, a scourging.
23.
Eventually, he called and said he was sorry for not being in touch. He’d been confused, he said, figuring things out, and didn’t want to speak until everything was clear. The upshot was that he was moving to Brisbane.
His brother, Patrick, had invited him. They would go into partnership. In fact, when Patrick had visited a few months before, his purpose had been mostly persuasion.
We had a long conversation then, about the property market in Brisbane. Next we discussed his relationship with his brother, and their complementary skill sets.
Until I felt something crack in my throat—afterwards I realised that might have been my throat chakra, my Vishuddha, splitting open to let these words loose
—and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to miss you.’
Niall was quiet. Breathing. Eventually he said, ‘You will?’
‘Of course I will!’
‘It’s just, I never really thought you were into it,’ he said. ‘When I came over, you spent a long time putting Oscar to bed. And you only ever spent that one night at my place.’
‘But Oscar . . .’
‘I know. Oscar has to come first. I was fine with you having Oscar. It’s just, I felt like I wasn’t a priority. And even when you were with me, I never really thought you were there . . . if that makes sense. And you haven’t exactly been chasing me.’
At this, I became former-lawyer strident: ‘I was never there? But that’s exactly what I thought about you! I thought you didn’t exist! I thought you didn’t want to be chased! I mean you never said that I was . . . pretty.’
Niall breathed laughter down the phone. ‘But you are pretty. I was nuts about you. I didn’t think you’d want to hear that. I thought that would . . . scare you away.’
My heart was tumbling high speed, ribbons of hot and cold crisscrossing my face.
‘But, Niall,’ I said—and it was strange to use his name; I never used it ‘—I was crazy about you. I mean, when you smile . . .’
‘We should have talked, I guess,’ he said. Then he reached into the pause to say, ‘I’m flying out Sunday.’
‘What if I chased you through the airport?’ I said. ‘And caught up with you just before you handed over your boarding pass?’
He laughed. We both did. But I was actually serious. Imagining the sprint.
I made a decision. ‘Please change your mind,’ I said.
He made a sound, something desperate or pleading in it, a small laugh, or cry.
‘Abigail,’ he said, ‘thirteen years is a long time.’
Thirteen years? I thought. What’s he on about?
Gravity Is the Thing Page 31