Between

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “In my own as yet unperfected state of vice,” smiled Wilmot, “I can only gaze, stupefied, at the imbecility of a spirit who chooses denial as a hobby. In contrast, my own obsession was invariably of indulging extremes. The ultimate experience of excess being orgasm, I chased the physical orgasm only achieved by fucking, the intellectual orgasm only experienced during creative inspiration, and ultimately the emotional orgasm only reached during those first few spangled days of believing oneself into sentimental love. When I found that none of these could reasonably be sustained, I succumbed to irony and the escapism of utter irresponsibility, the bottle and the whore.” He smiled slightly at the memory, gave an absent minded scratch to the tip of his rather snub nose and flicked back the wisps of silvering hair from the margins of his face. “Hedonism is the extreme of the sceptical and ultimately impoverished imagination,” he finished.

  Primo was too tired to smile. “My own escapism certainly sounds flat in comparison.”

  “Indeed it was,” sighed Wilmot, adjusting his shawl. “But I expose my own follies as an example of human stupidity as succinct, if different, to your own. Now of course I have discovered, which I was aware existed but could not discover in life, the orgasm of the spirit. This is the limitless orgasm of unmitigated joy, and is eternally sustainable. You are about to discover it too.”

  “That’s hard to believe at the moment. You’re becoming hypnotic,” murmured Primo. “I can’t stay awake.”

  “The ultimate insult,” sighed Wilmot. “I am reduced to boring my audience into submissive slumber.” Then he reached down and took Primo’s hand in his. It was not an old woman’s hand. It was young and strong and supple and flashed with energy and the rhythm of sacred power. “Sleep again, my young friend. There is only one step more to take.”

  “You called me friend,” sighed Primo, closing his eyes.

  “You are far more than that,” said Wilmot. “I am your guide, and therefore you are my child. I offer you friendship but I also offer you salvation.”

  Primo was asleep again.

  “Whales can fly,” said Norwen. “I have seen them.”

  “So that isn’t the real sun? I know it doesn’t rise and set as it used to, but it looks like sunshine. Absolutely everything is illusion?”

  Norwen smiled and shook his head. “I am not speaking of illusion,” he said. “Life is no more illusionary here than it is on the physical plane of material life. It is true that this brilliance is not the effect of sunshine. The light here is pure energy and energy comes directly from the Source, which we call God. But on Earth, it is also this. The power of the sun is equally the energy of the Source. We speak of the air that we breathe, though here we neither breathe nor swallow air. It is God’s love that surrounds us, and we absorb it, and think we are breathing. But was it ever different?”

  “And so whales can really fly?” Georgia was watching the sea now, gazing out to the heaving purples as if at any moment she might see the immense grey beauty of a humpback break the surface and rise directly into the air, spreading his fins and rolling through the upper spray, breaching from wave to cloud. “I’m still just used to the solidity of things,” she added, “it’s hard not to see this place as less real. Reality – I mean – I know there’s no such thing. And that’s wrong too isn’t it? I should say everything is real. But this is like – a wish fulfilled. A fantasy.”

  “And yet you know that solidity has never been solid,” Norwen reminded her.

  “But when I was alive I couldn’t see perfumes. I couldn’t touch sounds or smell touch. Water didn’t sing.”

  “Are you so sure?” said Norwen.

  “Was it just me then? I was too slow and sluggish and ploddingly physical. Is it all to do with vibration?”

  “Vibration is just another symptom, and not the cause,” said Norwen. He stood beside her on the shifting sands. Every grain here seemed alive, moving amongst themselves, exploring new paths. Where Norwen stood, there was no indentation. Nor did he leave a reflection in the rosy shallows. “There are a million wavelengths, and almost all far exceed the speed of light. Frequencies of sound, vibration, it is all a thundering universe of unending excitement, and all beyond our capacity yet to appreciate. But you will reach it all as your spirit encompasses growth. There are many lives to live even beyond the physical.”

  Georgia took a deep breath, absorbing new truths. “So we start from the beginning, dying over and over to get the experience which develops a tiny soul into a great one. Then we move on into spiritual lives.”

  “Indeed,” he agreed. “There will always be more glory to discover.”

  “It’s funny and a bit sad,” said Georgia, “knowing all this now, but also knowing I’ll get born again and slink back into the same old terrors. I’ll be an ignorant coward all over again and forget all this beauty. I wish I could write the truth inside my head, so I’ll never forget.”

  “That is precisely what experience does,” Norwen said. “Each life writes more truths inside your head. What else would be the point of living?”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  He was glad to have the house back to himself. Romano wandered the passages, naked, not bothering to put on lights, enjoying the gentle sway of the shadows. He strolled the grounds, seeing the fat new growth of the budding olives, the points of fruit in their nests of clustered leaf, burgeoning figs like tiny finger tips of green. Free to think his own unfettered thoughts, he breathed in the soaring, gaudy sunshine, skin soaking heat, eyes screwed against the vast spread of Tuscan countryside.

  He lay alone on the wide white bed, stretched sleepless and lost in memories. No whispers to disturb his dreams, no pattering, eager subterfuge to nudge at doubt. His life his own, his own solitary shadows, the echo of his own footsteps, and nothing to interrupt the developing appreciation of his own serenity.

  During a convalescence as nurtured by light as any hospital, Romano planned a future which would take him back into responsibility and the busyness of the world. It would include a daughter he could adopt almost as his own, should she wish it. It would include his own family and the inheritance of the vineyards. Most of all it would include new ideas, new ambitions, and hope.

  Again Primo slept.

  This time, however, he did not sleep alone. He was not himself, lost back in the desperate lifetime of a soul utterly unaware of its inherent destiny, struggling with the challenges of bitterness, anger and ignorance. He was the Primo he had become, aware of sleeping in the Welcome-Hospital of the dead while peacefully absorbing the memories of what he had once been.

  The sour malnourished boy, who had used fantasies of violence to smother the weaknesses of self-pity and self-doubt, was now a used out shadow. Primo remembered the myriad mistakes but remembered also the learning and the shaping and the growing, and knew that there was no such thing as a mistake.

  He slept with Wilmot’s perfume as a quilt and the harpy’s crooning presence as a shelter above his head. He experienced the loneliness of the boy he had once been, but he was never alone.

  There were many long, hot roads with the dust rising and the sudden swoop of the condor. Sometimes he slept in barns, sometimes in the back of a broken down car, sometimes out in the desert with a rock at his back and the tumbleweed in his hair. Out in the nothingness of the world’s great abandoned places, there were always the stars. They swept the black skies in swathes of milky sheen, too many millions to claim an individual poignancy, too much beauty to see as simple science.

  And the sleeping Primo listened with patience as the boy he had been wrapped himself in angry travesties, determined to acknowledge the monster within, since that was what they said he was, and own all the pride of his own unique character, to be whatever he had to be, to relish the ugliness within and survive.

  “Do not judge,” Wilmot’s voice reminded him, slipping between the creases of his dreams. “Simply remember, without either judging or exonerating. Blame is the prerogative only of those who choose
to be victims. And pardon is not yours to give.”

  Wilmot’s voice interrupted many slow meanderings of time. Primo found himself in a bar, slumped over the one beer he could afford, and noticed Wilmot sitting three stools along. Sometimes Wilmot was the barman, sometimes the girl picking up customers. But these were not time games. It was simply that while Primo retraced his life, Wilmot was holding his hand.

  “I thought of having a tea party,” said Georgia. “I even thought of giving a formal dinner. Does that sound silly? I mean, apart from you there’s two grandmothers and two grandfathers I could entertain over here, a couple of uncles and a great aunt, and there must be lots more ancestors I don’t even know. I could even invite my guide. I adore my guide. I suppose everyone does. I’d like you to meet him.”

  Her father nodded. It was his home she was sitting in, on a back patio of sorts, with a jungle of tropical plants enclosing their horizons. A gentle steam rose from the foliage as it might have on the physical Earth. Here it was purely the miasma of moisture and pearlised beauty. She sat in a round backed cane chair which dutifully creaked as she moved, fulfilling its logical expectations. The chair reminded her of sleepy afternoons in Italy. For the moment, she brushed that memory aside.

  “But you changed your mind?” her father suggested politely into the pause.

  “Yes,” Georgia said. “Eating and drinking and parties. The old habits seem so boring. I’m beginning to feel restless with physical symbols.” She looked around her, smiling at the familiarity. “Not the houses, though. Cosy and bright. I mean, I’d hate to live in a field, wouldn’t you? This feeling at home business still seems essential.”

  “They say you eventually just feel at home within yourself,” said Maurice. “On the next plane up when the physical expectations drop away and we’re more our inner selves, home becomes a state of mind.” He paused, grinned, and seemed unconvinced of what he was saying. “I’m not there yet but it makes sense. In theory. For now – well, I’m happy in a house.”

  “I’m certainly not there yet,” said Georgia. “I suppose thinking about dinner parties is a proof of how far behind I am. But it’s habit, isn’t it? That’s the way I was always used to doing things.”

  “Cake and biscuits are good anytime,” smiled her father, “but maybe not a whole dinner. That sounds so heavy.”

  Georgia watched the convoluted curls of a mulberry warratah petal unwind, breathe, and spread. Finally she said, “Mum likes my cakes too. I turn up a chocolate cream sponge for her almost every time I go.”

  “Has she asked about me?” said Maurice at once.

  Georgia nodded. “Several times. She’s feeling guilty of course, but shrugs it off. Besides, she has a boyfriend now. He’s alright. But she’s nothing like you. Honestly, Daddykins, I’m not at all sure what you ever saw in each other.”

  Her father momentarily glowered. “I always hated it when you called me that.”

  She knew, and giggled. “Sorry.”

  Maurice shrugged. “I’ll meet up with her sometime soon I suppose,” he said. “I know it’s one of those things holding me back, but it’s not the only one. Maybe not even the most important. When I’m ready – when she’s ready -”

  “I’m not entirely sure I like her but probably that’s more my fault than theirs anyway. And she’s funny, with personality.”

  “She was always funny, with personality,” said Maurice.

  “And pretty.”

  “She was always pretty too,” he said. There was a steamy filled pause. Both watched the steady drip of moisture from leaf to flower bud. “So, about that chocolate cake,” said Maurice.

  The harpy was crooning, a sweet raptor coo as softly adoring as any dove. “And you are freedom,” Primo whispered back to her. “After living my own life’s entrapment, it is your freedom which I have admired so richly. And your danger, which even here remains ruthless without malignancy. You epitomise everything I have misunderstood in life.”

  She looked down on him from her perch. She blinked, a response of affectionate disinterest. His deeper unravellings were of no interest to her, since her own freedom she took for granted and considered that he should too.

  “Whatever corruption empowered or weakened me in the lives before that,” Primo continued speaking to the eagle, “is beyond my memory for now. But it doesn’t matter. I know previous lives were the basis for the last, and turned me into a brat of stubborn jealousies and sullen resentments. Small wonder I lived in scrubland on the edge of the desert, since I gasped endlessly for a sustenance I had no talent for securing.”

  The shadow of the two vast wings, spread to protect and shade her mate within the nest, now curtained the hospital bed in soft fringed feather. The harpy continued to croon. “Yes, my beloved,” Primo sent his whispered thoughts. “You are the most perilous of creatures, and the most loving. For so long I thought myself monstrously dangerous, but I forgot entirely how to love. No, not forgot. I feared. I was terrified of loving. Especially myself.”

  He turned, looking towards the far wall. The astonishing brilliance of the sun filled windows which he had once seen there, had faded to a twilit lullaby. He smiled. He had lived in the Summerlands long enough to read most of the symbols. He was not yet meant to rise. He was not yet ready. Even though awake, he had not finished dreaming.

  “But I knew enough when I got here to search for the mountains and the forests,” he said, as if answering some unspoken question from the bird. “Everything I never saw when I was alive. Waterfalls and streams. A pool in my own home. The beauty and the freedom. Nature and the birds. I muttered on about wanting nothingness, but I had the sense to find the richness of everything. Everything I’d missed in life. Including love. That was you.”

  The harpy swept one wing tip across Primo’s face, a cool fan of downy softness, as if wiping away his tears. “For a very little while, I thought it was Daisy,” he mumbled, slightly ashamed. “I still think of her. But I certainly never loved her the way I love you and she certainly never loved me. We were tied up somehow. I thought I’d killed her when we were alive, but that was only a silly misunderstanding. Thank God.”

  Was it better to have only dreamed of slaughter? Had he held back from action only out of cowardice? Was there value in torture, when it was only of oneself?

  “Even in death I kept my pride,” he said, though now only to himself. “Arriving to discover the treachery of survival after death, I was at least determined to hang onto what I considered my character and my insufferable individuality. I expected hordes of Heavenly choirs to descend, one almighty pulpit and an endless sermon to convert me into holy angel pap and a sanctimonious copy of every other kidnapped soul. Some monstrous pride kept me determined to continue being the vile thing I thought I was.”

  “So,” interrupted Wilmot’s voice, “do you now consider it a weakness, or a strength, that you failed to fully realise your fantasies of rape and murder while alive?”

  Primo grinned into the emptiness. “So you’ve come back. I don’t see you. I thought you’d gone and left me.”

  “You thought I had taken up knitting bed socks?” Wilmot reappeared directly onto the side of the bed. He was still snugly grannyfied.

  “You look as though you might need them.”

  “Is that a subtle criticism of my protective role?” Wilmot crossed knobbly knees. Another ladder rushed upwards into the higher regions of wrinkled nylon. “Perhaps, with a passing apology for re-entrance into your befuddled mind, I might alter the costume. I am fully wearied of this one myself.”

  “I’m bloody sure you pop in and out of my befuddled brain as and when you want to,” said Primo, “and certainly without warning or apologies. In fact, that’s probably why I’m befuddled.”

  “You are befuddled,” said Wilmot sternly, temporarily vanishing though his voice took up visibility in his place, now floating on neat little bluebird-borne cloudlets, “simply because you lack commitment to any particular self-belief. Having giv
en up your remarkably unimaginative ramblings of self-loathing and revenge both against a society you despised and the even more despicable character which you believed you owned, you have been left floundering above water, gasping for anything that will obligingly drop into your open mouth.”

  “Such as you?”

  Wilmot’s voice nodded cheerfully. “Indeed. I am the sardine to your beached whale.”

  “If you reappear looking like a sardine,” Primo warned, “I shall feed you to my harpy.”

  The harpy, catching the words without understanding the inference, and having forgotten entirely about food long ago anyway, blinked twice and went back to sleep. Wilmot said, “We were discussing self-image, dear boy. Have you chosen one yet?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” Primo pointed out.

  “Ah yes,” said a vaguely transposed outline, “but I have never pretended to be perfect. And I am undoubtedly multi-faceted. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Primo gazed up helplessly as a shape, overbearingly dark, hovered. “Well, at least hurry up,” he muttered. “I’ve never known you to be tentative before.”

  “It is your mental confusion that makes my solid transformation a touch more difficult at present,” complained the looming darkness. “However, this should not interrupt my lecture. I have very little to say before I send you back to sleep again.”

  “I’m ready to get up,” said Primo, edging onto his elbows.

  A very long knuckled finger wriggled from the hovering shadow and pushed him firmly back down. “Certainly not,” said Wilmot. “We were discussing commitment. To self-image. Having relentlessly pursued a life-long switch from aggressive ego indulgence into aggressive self-denial and self-conscious inferiority complex which of course is just another form of conceit, you are now puzzled as to what exactly you are supposed to be. My disguises are purposeful. And playful perhaps? I do sincerely hope so. But yours, my dear friend, are simply the miserable gropings of a lost soul.”