Home Truth

by HarperCollins Publishers

  Our destination was an archaeological centre 10 miles west of Cortez, Colorado, nestled between the red-rock canyons and majestic Sleeping Ute Mountain. This 40-acre estate has over twenty-five documented prehistoric sites and is adjacent to the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, with the highest density of archaeological sites in the region. My friend had chosen this place because the previous year heavy rains had eroded a gorge through the property to reveal a burial site dated around 900 AD. Further archaeological excavation of the human remains indicated that an apparent family of seven people, including men, women and children, had been cannibalised at this site. This issue of cannibalism was what she had come research.

  While she worked with other archaeologists, I clambered over and through the remains of cliff dwellings tucked into the crevices of the high mesas. I was the only one there. It was as if I was the first person to stumble upon these astonishing places in this empty, rugged, magnificent and inhospitable landscape. The complex people who made these dwellings must have been descendants of those intrepid ice-age hunters who had migrated across Beringia many thousand of years before. They came into the Four Corners in waves of migration between 1500 and 1200 BC and, by 1200 AD, they had they abandoned their cliff dwellings for reasons that no one can pinpoint. Scientists once thought the answer lay in climate. Having examined the varying width of tree rings, they revealed a pernicious dry spell gripping the Southwest during the last quarter of the thirteenth century, around the height of the abandonment. But there had been severe droughts before and it seemed that whole abandonment of the Four Corners was a matter of people moving to where the climate was even worse.

  My friend’s theory favoured the effects of warfare, as indicated by the many sites that showed evidence of brutal death and cannibalism. The increasing complexity of Anasazi society led to a massive ideological struggle, she believed, and the Anasazi were roiled by a religious crisis as divisive as Christianity’s medieval heresies. After four days I was beginning to develop a theory of my own. The completeness and rapidity of the abandonment suggested to me that this ideology emphasised migration. Movement was an essential part of their lifestyle; they never stayed long in one place. The migratory impulse that drew their distant ancestors across Beringia was probably coded into their DNA. It seemed to me that the ‘abandonment’ of all these sites was just an extension of this migratory impulse, and historians were quite wrong to view it as a problem to be solved rather than as a basic human impulse to move.

  On my return to Austin I was increasingly troubled by a powerful pain in the neck, especially located in my left shoulder. I was having twice-weekly massages but they didn’t seem to do any good. My massage therapist had got me into meditation routines which certainly calmed me down but did nothing for my neck and shoulder pain. Eventually she told me she didn’t think that the problem was muscular at all and suggested that she would like to try craniosacral therapy. She explained that our bodies are shaped and conditioned according to how we’re able to deal with any stresses or traumas. If stresses or traumas are overwhelming, they become locked in the body as sites of inertia and craniosacral therapy helps to resolve these trapped forces, which underlie and govern patterns of disease in both body and mind. The therapy involves the practitioner listening to the body’s subtle rhythms through the hands and locating any patterns of inertia or congestion. ‘I think we need to understand what is giving you a pain in the neck,’ she joked.

  The session lasted for ninety minutes and elicited a delicious feeling of calm, yet at the same time my eyes continually leaked salty fluid that trickled down into my mouth. With her hand under my left shoulder my therapist asked me if I could picture what was trapped in there that was causing me such pain. My response was immediate: ‘Disappointment. My life hasn’t turned out the way I wanted it to.’ By way of explanation I told her how hard I had striven to achieve professional success. I had achieved everything I had aspired to—I had a major international reputation in my field; my last book had been a big success and was currently shortlisted for a prize—but this brought me no satisfaction. I didn’t like being a research academic. It was too isolating. I wanted a creative and collaborative life. The more I talked the more copious was the fluid leaking from my eyes.

  Then she moved her hands to my right shoulder. ‘And what is the opposite of disappointment and dissatisfaction?’

  I thought about this for a while and then to my surprise the words came: ‘Spontaneity, wonder, joy.’ I lay there thinking about these words, while the sensation running through my body was like an internal waterfall. Then it was over.

  I felt wonderfully light and airy when I left, for all that my face was tearstained and my collar wet. That night I had a very different kind of dream.

  I killed a woman. I denied having killed her as I didn’t remember doing it and my friends colluded with me to give me an alibi. Then I realised I had actually done it and gave myself up to the police. I thought: ‘This is a sign; I have been wondering how to change my life and now if I am going to be in prison I’ll be able to get right into meditation and self-awareness.’

  I believe that I had killed the part of me that had been bitterly holding onto the past and to a view of myself conditioned by that past. Recalling the words that had sprung to mind during the session, I decided that spontaneity should be my new watchword. I opened my laptop and got onto the internet where I booked myself a ticket to the new Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. Then I flew to New York.

  I was singing along as I came out of the theatre and skipped down Broadway toward Times Square, where I ran into one of my dearest friends, a documentary filmmaker from London, who was also in New York to go to the theatre. Adam was insistent he must take me to lunch next day with the novelist Caryl Phillips, who lived in an apartment that overlooked Central Park. Caz, as Adam called him, had just written a play on the same subject as my latest book and he wanted to meet me. For my part I practically swooned at the idea of meeting Caryl Phillips, whose work I had long admired. I’d seen him at a distance at the Adelaide Festival; he was one of the most handsome men I’d ever clapped eyes on. Clearly Adam thought so too.

  It is a curious thing how different the world can be if one allows experiences to come and doesn’t try to engineer every future moment. The unplanned lunch was uproarious fun; it was also life-changing.

  Both Caz and I were full of praise for Adam’s latest project, a film about Herman Melville and whaling. ‘To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,’ Adam quoted from Moby Dick, sparking a discussion about another great book of the wayward imagination, Wuthering Heights. At this point I launched into my theory that Emily Bronte’s mighty theme is slavery and that her brooding antihero, Heathcliff, is a slave boy sent to Mr Earnshaw from the West Indies, possibly his own son or grandson. I was so caught up with the telling that I hadn’t noticed Caz looking fixedly at me.

  ‘This is extraordinary,’ he murmured when I finished. ‘I am just about to start a novel around much the same idea: just what was Mr Earnshaw doing at the Liverpool docks the day he found Heathcliff?’

  By late afternoon, we agreed that if the money could be raised, we three would make a film about Wuthering Heights.

  Adam had once visited me in Lower Snug, and he could not believe that I had put myself into permanent exile. ‘That glorious place is your sanctuary, Cassandra, it is part of you,’ he insisted. ‘You must go back and reclaim the place as yours.’ I took his advice. From New York I negotiated to fulfil the rest of my fellowship at Texas in the following year and I flew back to Tasmania.

  The marital home at Lower Snug had been sold to my cousin Dennis, but I kept the cottage my mother had designed on the block behind. This cottage was to be my Tasmanian abode for those times when I felt the pull to return. It needed work, small jobs requiring a certain amount of physical heft and experience with tools. The sort of thing a husband might do. It was no easy matter to find someone t
o do such jobs. Luckily my cousin Dennis was a builder; he took pity on me and arranged for one of his apprentices, a charming lad who had abandoned his arts degree in favour of a trade, to drop by my place for a day a week. When the apprentice went back to college, Dennis sent another helper.

  I was quite taken aback when this fellow came to my door; he was not at all what I expected. Mr K was an unreconstructed hippie, wearing a sweater of hand-spun wool, with curly grey hair falling to his shoulders, heavy silver rings on his elegant fingers and an embroidered leather band on his wrist. ‘What’s your story?’ I asked him over mid-morning coffee. ‘Aren’t you a bit long in the tooth to be a builder’s labourer?’

  He laughed good-naturedly and told me that he did lots of different things, including building work one day a week. It gave his life balance. ‘So, what gives balance to your life?’ he asked, casting a glance at the table littered with laptop, printer, books, research papers.

  ‘I don’t have any balance; that’s my problem. I lost my vegetable garden when I lost my husband.’

  He cocked his head at me and lifted his eyebrows. ‘You get to lose a husband?’

  ‘He just walked out one day.’

  ‘Left you for a younger woman?’ That rankled.

  ‘No. He left because I kept going away.’

  ‘Why be so bitter? Seems like it was your choice.’ He broke into a dazzling smile and added, ‘You are the one responsible for the loss of your vegetable garden, no one else.’

  As the morning wore on he seemed to think I should work alongside him, to hold the ladder, or help to lift this piece of timber, or hand him that tool. We chatted away amiably about the possibility that he could build me raised vegetable beds in the small plot in front of my cottage. Then I began to quiz him on the other parts of his life. He looked thoughtfully at me. ‘I suppose you are asking me what I am passionate about.’ My heart gave a little lurch. Passionate? Here in Southern Tasmania? Growing crocus for their stamens for saffron was a passion, it transpired.

  That Saturday I was wandering through the famous Salamanca Market in Hobart and I experienced a small explosion in my chest as I caught sight of Mr K walking toward me. It turned out that another thing he was passionate about was a market stall, selling beautiful things imported from Kashmir, where he had lived for a time. I bought a gorgeous embroidered bedspread and organised for him to come down to Lower Snug the following week to start building the raised vegetable beds. Driving home I found myself singing Cole Porter and asking whether this was the real turtle soup. Desire. This was very unexpected and disconcerting. For a quarter of a century or more I had felt nothing like it. It was also very dangerous. There can be no desire without pain. That night Mr K appeared in my dream.

  He doesn’t look like my handyman, more like a movie star with golden hair and a bronzed, chiselled face. He is in bed at my mother’s house. When I climb into bed he wants me to kiss him, but my mouth is full of pencil shavings that stick to my lips. He is appalled and makes me try again. I do badly. I tell him that it has been fifteen years since I kissed a man. He says crossly, ‘You had plenty of opportunity to kiss other men, why didn’t you try?’ Then we are at the beach with three other women who tease him about how his hair is now golden blond. He says that he can be anything or anyone he likes; he is as free as a bird. When I say that I too am free, he replies, ‘No you are not; what about the $30,000 you borrowed?’ I tell him I am paying it off and soon will be free, but he just sprints into the ocean. I call out as he swims away from me, ‘Will I still be able to work?’

  Over the next three weeks Mr K came several times to help me build the vegetable bed and I began to germinate heritage tomato seeds in jiffy pots on my windowsill. He and I worked alongside each other; he did the heavy work while I wheeled the many barrows of soil and held the timber steady. He gave me advice on buying a lawn mower and brush-cutter and went with me to the local hardware emporium where they took us for a married couple, just like Darby and Joan. Once or twice he stayed for dinner and afterward we watched a video. For my birthday he gave me a book about Kashmir with a card that read: ‘Life is a mystery to be lived not a problem to be solved.’ I longed to kiss him but it never seemed appropriate.

  Just when the vegetable beds were nearly finished and my tomato plants shooting out of their jiffy pots, I got an urgent e-mail from Adam in London. It arrived on a glorious Spring day, when a palpable sense of quickening in the garden made me really excited at the prospect of planting. Adam’s e-mail told me to jump on a plane to London in the next couple of days because he had secured funding for a pilot of the film on Wuthering Heights and Caz could only come to England at that time. Of course I agreed to go.

  After leaving an apologetic message for Mr K on his mobile, asking him to take my seedlings rather than let them die, I flew to London, a city I dislike, where I have always been miserable. Yet the day I spent there was delightful. As I walked along the Thames the sun was shining on Westminster and I saw for the first time how ravishingly beautiful it was.

  Even more beguiling were the West Yorkshire Dales, carpeted in soft autumn hues, with low clouds hovering around the brooding crags and silvery threads of water cascading down the rock faces. The two weeks spent filming stayed remarkably free from rain but were bitterly cold. For extremely long hours Caz and I stood mutely watching Adam, his producer Martin, and the film crew take the same shot over and over.

  Evenings at the local pub were spent in script development, where boisterous four-way conversation, well lubricated with Jameson’s whiskey, more than made up for the day’s discomfort. This kind of collaborative work, where I could risk unorthodox ideas and wrong-headed opinions, was hugely liberating after so many years of running entirely on my own fragile ego. Other film projects were hatched and a new career began to take shape in front of me. Adam proposed that when we finished in Yorkshire I should go with him to Turkey to work up a script for a film about the whirling dervishes of the Sufi sect created by the poet Rumi.

  Driving back to London in a state of near exhaustion, we stopped at a trendy gastro-pub where I was finally able to get a wireless connection for my laptop. In my e-mail, among the accumulated detritus of unsolicited offers of employment and sex enhancement, was a message from a source I could not identify with the subject line ‘Journeys from Tasmania’. It turned out to be an e-mail from Mr K to tell me I did not need to apologise for rushing off to England, because one always must seize the opportunities of the moment. ‘Your tomatoes are being lovingly tended in my hothouse,’ he wrote. ‘They will be here for you when it’s time to come home and I’ll have a glass of wine waiting.’ I knew it would soon be time, but not quite yet. First I needed to experience the whirling dervishes.

  Returning from Turkey I had an eight-hour stopover in London. My shoulder was again giving me trouble, so I made an appointment with a craniosacral therapist a short taxi ride away from Heathrow. The therapist was a very austere woman of my age who touched me so lightly I would not have thought I was being touched except for the electrifying sensation. She placed her hands under my left shoulder for a really long time, and I felt a strange sense of weightlessness, punctuated by waves of intense pain. Toward the end a delicious sensuous calm began. When I came around, as it were, she told me she felt there was a strong connection between my heart and my shoulder. She felt my heart was injured; ‘pierced’ was the word she used. She wanted me to tell her what words I would use for my heart. The words I chose were ‘damaged, guarded, fragile’. As I was leaving I added that despite my damaged heart I was prepared to take the risk of embracing new possibilities.

  ‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘I want to copy something for you to take to read.’

  I read the page she had copied for me several times on my flight back to Australia, marvelling that this austere stranger had so accurately sensed my state of mind. She had given me a poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer which read, in part:

  It doesn’t interest me what you do for a livi
ng.

  I want to know what you ache for

  and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

  It doesn’t interest me how old you are.

  I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool

  for love

  for your dream

  for the adventure of being alive.

  This poem spoke directly to me. I was on my way home, I understood, because I was now able to face the danger of a journey alone through this dark, bitter, luminous, awesome world; to find joy in the knowledge that life is a mystery; to be open to desire and the pain which is its twin.

  The soul finds its own home.

  Homes Sweet Homes Peter Goldsworthy

  1. Minlaton

  The last time I spent a night in my birthplace—Minlaton, South Australia, pop. 500, multiple Tidy Town winner and Barley Capital of the World—I was nineteen, camped out with a group of friends, exploring the nearby Curramulka caves. After a day and a night spent crawling about in the dusty lungs of the earth, I was stricken by asthma and rushed to the Minlaton Hospital, where I spent another night recovering.

  It made for a good story later—that I was allergic to my birthplace: allergic to my roots—but I should have expected it. My first home sweet home was a fibro shack on the edge of Minlaton, facing Mr Tonkin’s barley fields. There are a lot of world capitals on the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia—the Tommy Ruff Capital of the World on one coast, the Blue Swimmer Crab Capital of the World on the other—but my first memory of the Barley Capital of the World is of wheezing home at age three after a ride on Mr Tonkin’s harvester.

  The local doctor, Paddy Reilly, sat on the edge of my bed that evening and murmured reassuringly: ‘Don’t worry, son—no one ever died of asthma.’