Names for Nothingness

by Georgia Blain

  ‘It’s up to you,’ and as he spoke, he tried to hand her the forms again.

  She didn’t take them from him.

  ‘Think about it.’ He opened the door to let her out.

  She caught the bus to the house most afternoons, watching each of the people she went to school with getting off, the seats emptying until she was left alone, there at the last stop.

  The streets were dusty and dry, scraggly paperbarks offered little shade, and the afternoon sun was hot despite it now being autumn. Her school uniform stuck to her skin and her bag was heavy, but she walked quickly, eager to reach the group house.

  She punched the security code into the side door and went straight to the meeting hall to help set up the room. After the weekend away, she had been asked to look after the book sales at the end of each reading, and she carried the cartons out from the storeroom and arranged the titles across a trestle table as people arrived.

  She was becoming familiar with many of the readings, but each time she heard the passages spoken out loud, a new truth unfurled. She would stand perfectly still and listen, letting the words settle within her subconscious, the layers of meaning slowly separating as she opened her heart to them, as she ceased trying to make sense of what she heard.

  If she had a favourite, a piece that meant more to her than the others, it was probably the testimonial written by Kalyani in one of the later editions of Satya Deva’s teachings. It was on the gift of serving.

  When I am asked how it is that I can devote my life to serving another, I can only answer that I have been given the greatest gift of all.

  To serve another’s needs is to subjugate one’s own desires, and this is the true path to happiness.

  Sometimes the readings were accompanied by verbal testimonials; devotees would join the meeting and speak of their own experiences, and Caitlin would listen, the numerous paths that they had each taken towards the one truth spreading out like a web in front of her.

  When Fraser spoke, Caitlin was surprised by his story.

  ‘My parents had untold wealth,’ he said, ‘but they were poor beyond belief. We lived in a huge house and I had everything that money could buy, but nothing that truly mattered. My father was never home and my mother drank. I started smoking dope when I was twelve, and I had my first hit of smack at fifteen. I ran away a year later. I lived on the streets and I sold myself to anyone who would pay. I would have died. I wanted to die. But I didn’t know that this was not life, this was not real. All that I had experienced was simply my own gaping need, an emptiness that I constantly sought to fill, but that was not capable of being filled.

  ‘When I first read the teachings, I felt as though a light had come on, a great, glorious light, and it filled my entire being and illuminated a new path, a path that actually made sense within itself.

  ‘I was reborn.’ He looked out across the hall.

  ‘I was blessed.’

  Later, in the darkness of his room, Caitlin asked him if he ever saw his parents.

  ‘They are not my parents,’ he told her, and he turned away from her as he spoke.

  Back at the flat, Caitlin kept to herself. Liam did not refer to the conversation they had had when she returned from the camp. She did not expect him to. She had not asked him for secrecy, but he had sensed that she wanted to speak to Sharn in her own time, and he respected that, as she had known he would.

  One evening she came in late to find Sharn in a good mood. She had been out drinking after work and she was, as Liam pointed out, pissed.

  ‘Not completely,’ she grinned, running her fingers through his hair, ‘just pleasantly so.’ She opened a bottle of beer and raised it in their direction. ‘Think I’d better keep going,’ and her smile was rueful. ‘Seems to do me good.’

  Liam had been searching through old photographs and they were spread across the floor. Caitlin was surprised to see Sharn pick one up and look at it.

  ‘There we are.’ She stared at the photograph as though she ought to have known the people in it but couldn’t quite place them, and then she let the image drop to the carpet. She sat back on the couch, putting her feet up on Liam’s lap.

  Caitlin picked up the photo and looked at it.

  ‘Why did you go there?’ she asked.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Sassafrass.’

  ‘I just landed there.’ Sharn took another long swig from the bottle. ‘It could have been anywhere.’ She looked across at Liam with a cheeky smile. ‘But you,’ and she winked at him, ‘you were a believer. What were you trying to unleash? The artist in you? Your “inner eye”?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘We all have unlimited creative potential.’ Sharn stood, her voice taking on a deep, sonorous ring. ‘All of us, except you. Yes, you, Sharn. You have a job to do. Or should I say jobs to do. Endless jobs.’ She shook her head. ‘He was, quite frankly, a fucking dickhead.’ She smiled to herself.

  ‘So you didn’t ever believe?’ Caitlin looked at her. ‘Even at the beginning?’

  ‘Believe in what?’

  ‘Whatever he was on about?’

  ‘You tell me. It’s still not clear to me what exactly it was that he was on about. Other than taking people’s money in return for letting them scream their lungs out, take their clothes off and dance like lunatics.’ She took her tobacco out from her bag and rolled a cigarette, sticking it behind her ear as soon as it was done. ‘I have a feeling I’m going to be distinctly unpleasant tomorrow.’ She stood slowly and looked at herself in the mirror. ‘There’s nothing quite so tragic as a middle-aged hangover.’

  Liam grimaced at Caitlin.

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t see that,’ and Sharn turned to face them both. ‘Just warning you. And letting you know that you’d better take full advantage of my good humour while it’s here.’

  She stood out on the back step, lighting her cigarette, and Caitlin was, for a moment, tempted to go out and tell her then and there that she had found something she believed in, something that made sense to her, that she was, and she searched for the word she would use, ‘happy’.

  The thin stream of smoke floated up into the night air, and she heard Sharn humming to herself, a few bars from a song that was not recognisable.

  ‘Maybe I’ll take a sick day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Lie in bed and sleep all day. Do nothing.’ There was a wistfulness to her tone that sounded quite unlike her, and as she turned to look at them both, Caitlin took one step towards her.

  She stubbed the cigarette out on the railing and let the butt drop down to the garden below.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ Liam called out. ‘I could look after you.’

  His words cut across Caitlin’s attempt to speak. She had got no further than the first sounds of her mother’s name, and she stepped back into the hall.

  ‘Going to sleep?’ Liam asked.

  He was picking the photos up from the floor, bundling them together again.

  ‘Soon,’ she said.

  She watched as he rolled a cigarette and walked out to where Sharn waited for him, and then she went to her room, the book of teachings that Fraser had given her hidden under her pillow.

  ON THE DAY OF HIS DEPARTURE, Fraser told Caitlin that when she saw him again, he would no longer exist.

  ‘My life as it has been will be no more than an illusion.’ He pointed to the room, to her and to himself. ‘This has no substance.’

  He was finally heading north. She did not know when they would meet up again but she, too, had made it clear that she wanted to devote her life to serving Satya Deva. She might have to wait months, or it might only be a matter of days; she did not know, but she would go as soon as she was called. In the meantime, she would do as she was asked here, listening to and learning from the teachers within the community and helping as she was instructed.

  In the early evening light she watched Fraser dress, his white cotton pants and shirt hanging loosely over the slenderness of his frame. His bag was close to
the door. It contained only one change of clothes and a book of teachings. (‘There is no more that I could want,’ he had said to her as she watched him pack only moments after he had had sex with her for what would, in all likelihood, be the last time.)

  His hair had been clipped close to his skull, and he no longer looked like the young man she had met on the bus. But then, she was not the girl to whom he had talked. Looking down at her naked body with a dispassionate eye, she knew that with a certainty that was surprisingly calm.

  ‘You must not hang on to “us”,’ he had said to her as he zipped up the canvas bag, turning to look at her for one brief moment before putting on his clothes.

  She did not reply. The dismay she originally felt at the thought of his departure had gone.

  ‘Attachment is not for us,’ he had once told her. ‘It is simply buying into desire and longing. Now is all that matters,’ and he had rolled off her, his eyes already far away as he searched for his clothes on the floor.

  ‘Sex is simply a basic need,’ he had said on another occasion when Jacinta walked in on them, and he had pulled her down onto the mattress with them, Caitlin moving back to watch them fucking with a calm that she would not have expected. He was, when it came down to it, completely right; sex was no more than a need.

  ‘There is only room for one love,’ he had said on another afternoon, and she had dressed herself to return to the readings while he watched her with a lazy smile, his hand absent-mindedly stroking the length of her thigh.

  He had always been clear about their relationship but there had never really been any need. She may have been younger than him and he may have been the first person to have sex with her, but she had known the way things were.

  And now he was leaving and she would be here alone, coming to this house without ever seeing him, coming simply and purely for herself.

  He turned to say goodbye, and when their eyes met, she knew that he was already gone.

  ‘You have found us or we have found you,’ he said as he lifted his bag and swung it onto his shoulder, and she sat up, raising her hand in farewell.

  ‘You have chosen the right path,’ and he bent down to kiss her on the cheek, his lips smooth and cool against her skin.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, and she watched him walk lightly down the darkness of the corridor, without once turning back to look, unaware of her eyes following the retreating whiteness of his figure as he made his way to the front door.

  It was cold. She had wrapped the sheet around herself to watch him leave, and she searched for her school uniform among the clothes he had left behind, but then changed her mind, reaching for his discarded shirt and jeans instead. She could no longer put off talking to Sharn. She didn’t want to pretend anymore. She was finally herself, and the dishonesty of even dressing like the person she had once been was now a complete anathema, and so she shut the door behind her, leaving her uniform on the floor, and headed out to wait for the next bus home.

  As a child, Caitlin had rarely resisted doing as she was told, but when she made her mind up, there was nothing anyone could do to change it.

  When she was ten years old, she told her teacher that she did not want to do PE anymore. The teacher refused to believe her.

  At the start of the next class, they all stood out on the oval.

  ‘Caitlin, you can be one of the captains; Joseph, another.’ Miss Heide had clearly forgotten their earlier conversation, and she waited for Caitlin to walk to the centre of the field and select her softball team.

  Caitlin took her bag and sat under the Moreton Bay fig. Everyone watched her. No one said a word.

  ‘Caitlin,’ Miss Heide repeated.

  Caitlin’s voice was calm. She did not want to take part. She would just sit and read. She hoped it wasn’t a problem.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Standing above her in a tracksuit, whistle clenched between her fingers, Miss Heide demanded an explanation. ‘Are you ill? Do you have a medical certificate?’

  Caitlin shook her head in response to both questions.

  ‘Then you will do as I tell you.’

  Caitlin did not move.

  ‘Right.’ Miss Heide blew her whistle loudly in Caitlin’s ear. ‘Up,’ and she pointed to the oval. ‘Ten laps.’

  Caitlin shook her head once again.

  Miss Heide’s fingers pinched into her flesh as she hauled her onto her feet and told her to go straight to the principal. ‘Tell him I sent you.’

  Standing opposite Mr Smythe, Caitlin tried to explain. She did not like PE, she did not like the way in which certain people were always humiliated. She did not believe they should pick teams, with the same few always left to last, alone and unwanted on the oval. She did not like the races they were made to run, the way in which they had to compete with each other, and she didn’t understand why they couldn’t just do physical things without having to bring in winning and losing all the time.

  ‘Who is the teacher?’ Mr Smythe asked, and Caitlin dutifully told him that her name was Miss Heide.

  ‘Precisely,’ and he looked across his desk at her. ‘You are the pupil and she is the teacher. So you do as she says, and not the other way around.’

  But the matter did not end there. The next week Sharn was called in to discuss Caitlin’s behaviour.

  ‘If it were any other pupil, I would have no hesitation in suspending her,’ the principal said. ‘Quite simply, this cannot continue.’

  Catching the bus home, Sharn asked Caitlin why she couldn’t just do the classes as she was instructed. Sharn understood (and supported) her objections, but now she had made them, surely she could see that there was little she could do to alter the way the classes were run.

  ‘It’s just school,’ Sharn said, irritated because she had had to miss an entire afternoon’s work, and with Liam once again failing to pick up any editing jobs, they simply could not afford to lose the pay. ‘You have to do things you don’t want to do. It’s part of growing up.’

  Caitlin stared out the window.

  ‘So, you’ll do as you’re told?’ Sharn asked.

  Caitlin refused to answer, and Sharn knew that they had hit an impasse, that this was one of those situations where nothing would make her daughter budge. Her sigh was loud, audible to the passengers in front, and she pushed the stop button with an agitation that was evident to Caitlin, who glanced, slightly nervously, in her direction. This wasn’t their stop. But she followed her mother anyway, crossing over to the other side of the road, where Sharn immediately hailed another bus, one that was heading back in the direction from which they had only just come.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Caitlin asked.

  ‘Going back.’

  And she marched straight into the principal’s office without even knocking.

  ‘We have to come to a solution,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing you or I or anyone can do to change Caitlin’s mind, so it seems to me we have two choices. We either let her sit out of class or you expel her, and quite frankly neither of us would want the latter.’

  Mr Smythe put down his pen.

  PE was compulsory, he explained, and therefore letting Caitlin out of class without a medical certificate would present a problem.

  ‘Well then, I’ll get one,’ Sharn said, and she was about to leave, satisfied that the matter had been resolved, when Caitlin stopped her.

  This was not what she wanted, and her voice was hushed but determined. She was making a point, she said. And if they tried to get a doctor to give her a certificate, she would say that she was not sick and that she did not want one.

  The exasperation on Sharn’s face was unmistakable.

  ‘Okay,’ and she turned back to Mr Smythe. ‘Why not let Caitlin do some other form of physical activity, something on her own, for christsakes? I mean, she could be there with the others, but she could do yoga, anything.’

  Mr Smythe was about to argue, to raise another objection, but Sharn stopped him. ‘There’s no point,’ she said, and she turne
d to Caitlin. ‘I know her.’ They both looked across at Caitlin who stood, silent, by the door.

  Caitlin knew then that the battle was won.

  They worked out an arrangement, but she did not listen, no longer interested in the discussion now that she was certain she would not have to participate in an activity she found to be repugnant.

  ‘You know something?’ Sharn said as they headed home. ‘You are fucking unbelievable,’ and Caitlin just looked at her mother, uncertain as to whether her expression was one of frustration or admiration.

  Wearing Fraser’s clothes, Caitlin stood at the entrance to the kitchen. Liam was cooking dinner and Sharn was out on the back step drinking a beer.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked, and she said that she had been at the house, saying goodbye to Fraser.

  If he was surprised at the directness of her response, he did not show it.

  ‘Hungry?’

  She shook her head and pointed towards the back door; she wanted a few moments to talk to Sharn first.

  It was cool outside, and she could hear the neighbours trying to get their child to bed. Sharn looked up briefly at Caitlin standing behind her.

  ‘Whose are these?’ she asked, pointing at Caitlin’s clothes.

  ‘A friend’s.’

  ‘You went there after school?’

  ‘I haven’t been to school.’ As Caitlin spoke, Sharn turned, putting her beer down as she did so.

  ‘Oh, for godsakes, Caitlin, why on earth are you stuffing it up now?’ Her eyes were almost black in the evening light, but Caitlin could see the anger and impatience in them, and she found herself taking one step backwards.

  ‘I’m not going to go anymore.’ She spoke softly but with certainty as she explained that she had made her decision and that nothing anyone could say would change her mind. ‘I know that it’s right for me,’ and she wished that she could see even a shadow of understanding in Sharn’s face, but there was none.

  ‘So what do you intend to do? Get a job?’ Her words were sharp and sarcastic. ‘You clearly have it all worked out.’