The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Yesterday she had seen it very differently, had floated off to bed in a blaze of light and love. Perhaps she was just suffering from a hangover, the Harvey Wallbangers exacting their revenge. No—she had woken up feeling bright and energetic, newly born, glowing with the group’s good vibes; had stayed the night at Neil and Bunny’s so she would be ready to set off early in the morning; had even cooked the breakfast for them all—waffles swamped in syrup, eggs sunny side up.

  So what had soured the sweetness, fused the light? Why this adolescent change of mood, this growing desolation, when the sun was still shining, the playground in full swing? True, it was no fun to lose one’s party, but it wasn’t tragedy. They would hardly drive off without her, so she could always return to the car, wait for them there.

  She doubled back to Tomorrowland. That was Dean and Chris’s favourite, with all the hairy rides. She would have one last look and if she didn’t find them there, she’d make her way to the car park. She gazed up at the purring monorail, the white cathedral spires of space mountain, the rocket jets whirling up and round. Tomorrowland—and not a bomb in sight. Rockets here meant kiddies’ rides, not weapons of extinction. Walter Elias Disney had wanted people to forget the real world when they walked into his wonderland. But wasn’t that a sham? LA was built of sham—a city of façades with its false stucco porches and pseudo-Grecian pasteboard pillars concealing violence and squalor. More murders in a week in Tinsel Town than Japan had in a year, and Japan had a population of one hundred and eighteen million. Yet this was called the Happiest Place On Earth—just twenty miles from Downtown’s screeching sirens and bloody gunfights. If you dropped your candy wrapper, it would be picked up in an average time of one minute forty seconds, but who picked up the casualties outside these seventy-seven acres—the butchered bodies which Uncle Walt preferred you to ignore?

  Nothing was what it seemed. She had gone on a tour of a Hollywood film studio, seen portable trees which could be ‘planted’ anywhere, portable lampposts plugged in like bedside lamps, the Red Sea parting at the flick of a switch, blazing houses which never actually burnt down, fake floods, fake storms, fake earthquakes. She had left the place in the pouring rain, emerged into a real flood. The weather itself was crazy, changing from storm to sun and back again, the whole Pacific area in flux, beaches swept away, piers snapping in half like chocolate bars, crops ruined, homes dumped in the ocean.

  She trudged on, searching every corner, seeing every child in the world save Dean and Chris, every entwined and happy couple but Neil and Bunny. Perhaps they were glad to lose her, had slipped away on purpose. She was hardly the best of company, surrounded as she was by Disney’s wonders, yet focusing only on her black and bitter thoughts. California was beautiful, a playground and a paradise, and she could only grouch, revile it as an Armageddon. No wonder Neil had left her, replaced her with a fun wife, someone simple and spontaneous who wouldn’t know what Armageddon was and certainly couldn’t spell it if she did.

  Bitch, she accused herself. Okay, so she could spell, but she didn’t have a scrap of Bunny’s kindness. Even Chris had warmed to it, had made a friend of Bunny despite her initial reservations. She herself had hardly spoken to her daughter—not in private, anyway. There wasn’t any private now. Chris had changed camps, joined Neil’s new family—the young and pretty wife and two standard sun-kissed children of the television commercials. Why should they need her in tow—a sourpuss and an ex, unbalancing the numbers, clouding over the sun?

  ‘Stop it!’ she almost shouted at herself. Self-pity was worse than bitchiness and she was so absorbed in it, she was blind to her surroundings, had come to a halt in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, people bumping into her, a woman with a pushchair trying to squeeze by. She forced herself to wander on, keep her attention focused outward. She passed the Circle-Vision Theatre and the Peoplemover, found herself standing in front of a ride they hadn’t sampled yet—Adventure Through Inner Space. Dean had dismissed it, preferred outer space to inner, had been begging for a second dose of Space Mountain.

  ‘Travel through a microscope’, she read. ‘Discover the thrilling world of the atom.’ She joined the queue, intrigued. Something small for once. She would leave the biggest and the brightest and crawl inside what had once been considered the ultimate particle of matter—a truly small world, not a pastel-coloured bogus one full of simpering marionettes.

  Chris had studied Physics up to O level and she had dipped into her daughter’s text-books with a sort of chastened astoundment at what she found. The tiniest speck of dust visible to the naked eye contained more than a thousand million million atoms, and the nucleus of each of them, while taking up ninety-nine point nine five of the mass, occupied only 1,000,000,000,000,000th of the volume.

  Noughts like that almost brought her God back, or suggested a different sort of God, white-coated with a test-tube in His hands. And yet for all the statistics, there was still nothing you could grasp. Atoms had no substance, no appearance—not in the usual sense of the words. David had said that modern physics was seen to be drawing close to Eastern mysticism—elusive, paradoxical, with more questions than answers, and inapprehensible concepts which left you both marvelling and aghast. It was the same with modern mathematics. Easier really to be a Sister Cyril, believe God made the world in seven days, and that heaven was up, hell was down, and science dangerous if it made you doubt your faith.

  The queue was moving faster now. Morna had almost reached the string of little cabs.

  ‘It’s not scary, is it?’ she asked the man in charge. That was Dean’s word.

  ‘No,’ he drawled. ‘You could take your great-grandmother on this one.’

  The cabs were made for two, joined one behind the other like a train. She stepped in on her own, the only single, gripped the push-bar as they began to move away.

  They clanked up an incline and into the gaping mouth of a huge black microscope which plunged them into darkness. The cab was gathering speed, hurtling along its roller-coaster rail, a deep distorted voice booming from the soundtrack. Morna could hear only a disorientating roar, with no coherent words. Surely something had fouled up—the electronics shorted, the mechanics about to fail? She clung to the bar in fear. In some of the other frightening rides, she had cowered damp-palmed and quaking, realising that if she fainted, panicked, no one could get her out until the ride stopped. But there, at least, she had had the others with her—someone to grab her if she lost consciousness or … Here she was alone. The people in the cabs in front and behind had simply vanished, been swallowed up in the darkness and the roar. She was truly lost now, had entered some dark underworld. The soundtrack was still jarring on, but she could hear mainly echo and vibration, a rude backfire of sound. She forced herself to concentrate, caught a few discordant phrases. ‘Single crystal’, ‘a snowflake’s perfect symmetry … something, something …’

  She shut her eyes a moment as the cab made a sudden lurching dive, opened them to dazzling white. She was staring into the shining blinding faces of a hundred snowflakes, growing slowly larger as she herself shrank in scale.

  The disembodied voice was coming clearer now. ‘Still we continue to shrink,’ it said, and the snowflakes expanded even further until they were towering all around her in a glittering wall of ice. Despite her own dwindling size, her sight appeared to have sharpened so that she was aware of details never glimpsed before; gazed astounded at every multi-faceted crystal of each gigantic flake.

  ‘And now,’ boomed the voice, ‘we go right inside the snowflake, enter one of its water molecules.’

  Morna clung to the side of the cab, surprised to find it solid. She had lost her own solidity, lost her shape and outline as they zoomed into a world of orbiting spheres, hazy whirling patterns. She heard the voice explaining, caught the words ‘nucleus’, ‘electrons’; lost them again as she seemed to spin and circle with the ever-changing spirals. Words were losing their shape as well; were too trivial, too earth-bound, to have any relevance to
this dizzying dance of the spheres.

  ‘Smaller still,’ the voice continued. ‘As we enter the oxygen atom within the molecule, pierce its wall, go right inside of it.’

  Morna gasped as she was rocketed into an entire new solar system, a huge red sun blazing in the centre with countless tiny stars shooting and sparking round it, confusing the mind as they dazzled the eyes. This soaring cosmos was in fact so minuscule that it would have made a pinhead look like St Peter’s dome, yet it had dwarfed her into nothing, dazed and overawed her. In the flotation tank, she had seen the world as infinitesimally small. Now she saw that every one of its trillion trillion atoms was ineffably vast, and yet the two were indistinguishable. Small and large had somehow merged, defying definitions—infinity not in a grain of sand, but in the millionth part of a millionth of a grain; mocking fractions with its complex teeming nothingness. This was the Order in the world, this whirling turbulent confusion; this was omnipotence, one single atom in a single molecule. She shaded her eyes against the seething ferment of the red-balled sun. She had found the time which she had lost in the tank, except it wasn’t time, but distance, force. And now there was only distance, the vast unfathomable distance to that red sun of the nucleus from the smallest electron-star, a journey across endless space and void.

  She heard the voice again, faint and puny now as if it were already light years distant. ‘We dare not enter the nucleus,’ it warned, ‘as there can be no return from there.’

  She ignored the warning, slumped back in her seat, let her hands relax. She had to be comfortable for so long and strange a journey.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Mix 8oz suet with an equal quantity of breadcrumbs moistened with milk. Stir in 6oz of raisins and as many nuts as you can spare and … and …’

  And what? Bea peered closer, took her glasses off, polished them on the corner of her apron, then put them back again. The recipe seemed blurred still. She would have to make an appointment with the optician, get some stronger lenses. She stirred in chopped cashews and hazelnuts, a dash more milk. So many things blurred as you got older—even God. His photo frame was empty still, had remained so since the operation. She had been doing exercises to make her bladder stronger, but her faith was still weak and saggy. She went to Mass as always, said her prayers, but there was an increasing frightening sense of no one there. She hadn’t breathed a word to any of her friends. How could she? They were God’s friends first, would all be horrified. She was horrified herself—kept trying to suppress the doubts. If God really wasn’t there, then all those years and years of chatting to Him, serving Him, building her life round His, had simply been a delusion. Worse than that—there would be no afterlife, which meant no chance of being reunited with her husband. She had always lived in hope of that, old age not feared or dreaded because it would bring her nearer to him, was only a passing stage in any case. They would rise again with young and shining bodies, Edward’s shattered bits made whole, she a girl again, blushing as he took her arm, led her round the tranquil paths of heaven. No fighter planes. No war.

  Now things looked rather different. Old bodies getting older, rotting away in the cold and lonely earth. No—mustn’t think like that. It was probably just a stage, a sticky patch, perhaps a trial sent by God Himself. Father Clarke had preached once about the dark night of the soul when God kept His distance and everything seemed flat and pointless. It wasn’t just a night, though. Over half a year now since she had first felt that emptiness. It had been worse at the retreat house, way back in July, surrounded by all those kindly pious people who were still in touch with God, walked arm in arm with Him, shared meals and news with Him, and she a fraud amongst them. She had taken to her bed—not just with post-operative depression as she had let Reverend Mother think. A few stitches in a womb or bladder wall were nothing compared with a whole lifetime cut away. Her new friend, Madge, had had a total hysterectomy, ovaries as well. She and Madge had met at the retreat, first got friendly swapping operations, then gone on to swap addresses, found they lived quite close. Now she saw Madge every week. They had discussed most things except the most important one. Madge’s life was set in God as firmly as a gemstone in a brooch, so how could she confess that her own brooch had lost its pearl, was only an empty metal clasp? They had been back to the retreat house at least a dozen times for days of prayer or weekend scripture courses. She felt more and more uneasy being greeted as a friend there, valued as a regular, had tried to find excuses not to go. Madge had also roped her in to parish work—running church bazaars, organising missions, visiting Catholic children in hospitals and orphanages. She would have to put a stop to it. It was hypocritical playing the pious committed Catholic and crusader, when she wasn’t even sure if … The trouble was it would leave a gap, a hole she couldn’t fill. She had to admit she’d been enjoying the activities, the sense of being busy, even needed. Life without God was like a cake without fruit—dry and savourless. She had her daughter, of course, and granddaughter, but they were busy with their own lives. Dreadful to be a burden. That was the advantage with a God. You could never be a burden to Him, however old you grew.

  She stoned some dates and chopped them, sprinkled them with flour, added them to the bowl. She had been worrying over Morna. She hadn’t been herself for weeks, seemed restless and unsettled, didn’t always answer when you spoke. And now she was away on that crazy Californian trip, which was undignified as well as dangerous, and very bad for Chris. She would have to keep an eye on Chris, with her mother so distracted—though she saw less and less of the child. She was always out with Martin, or busy with her books, and if she were going to start commuting to America to see a father who couldn’t be bothered to do the travelling himself, then they would be parted still more often. That was the trouble—people didn’t need her now, and if God also kept His distance, then …

  Damn! She had added too much milk and the mixture had gone soggy. She crumbled in more breadcrumbs to soak up all the liquid, lined a tin with greaseproof, scribbled ‘greaseproof’ on the shopping list. The roll was almost empty. She had used it up last week making twenty quiches for Madge’s charity bazaar. Father Clarke had bought a couple himself, complimented her on the lightness of her shortcrust. He was the one she should confide in. ‘Go to your priest,’ people always said when you had some spiritual problem. Father Clarke was a friend and guest as well, though. How could you admit that you thought you’d lost your Faith to a man who praised your pastry? Anyway, he would never take it in. She had been a pillar of his parish for as long as she remembered, couldn’t pull that pillar down, watch his face collapse—especially now, when he’d only just recovered from a cancer scare. The cyst had proved benign, in fact, but he still looked pale and drawn, as if the week of uncertainty had aged him several years. He was older than she was anyway, perhaps already thinking about leaving to join his Maker. How could she suggest that there might not be a Maker? It would be cruel as well as tactless. He had always comforted her. ‘He that believeth in Me, although he die, shall live …’ She had often imagined the three of them—Edward, herself and her favourite priest—lazing in deck chairs on the lawns of heaven with someone else to weed the beds, make the tea and cakes. But what if she didn’t believeth?

  She had chatted with him that morning after Mass, but not about faith or afterlives—only about the value of including recipes in the parish magazine and whether the tea urn in the church hall had sprung a leak or not. He had been leaning on a stick, his frail white wisps of hair no longer covering the patch of shiny scalp which looked pink and flushed like a well-scrubbed baby’s bottom. ‘God bless you,’ he had said, and she had almost cried wishing that He would—or even curse her. Anything to prove He was still there. Doubts felt worse on Sundays. There were more people in the church, more false smiles to hand out with the pamphlets on Church Aid and Foreign Missions; all the congregation flocking out asking how she was, having no idea that everything had fallen—not just her womb, but her whole world.

>   She gave one last stir to the mixture, then transferred it to the tin, put it in the oven, removed her apron. Now what? It would take at least an hour to cook and she couldn’t sit there in the gloom fretting over God, worrying about Morna. She fetched Morna’s letter, Chris’s cards, sat down in the drawing-room, re-read them for the twentieth time. Chris was all right, Morna not, though her daughter had pretended. All those ‘fines’ rang hollow—she knew that from her own case. Ironic, really, that she was experiencing her daughter’s doubts, only at the age of nearly seventy instead of seventeen. Twenty years ago she hadn’t understood, had been angry, even, censorious, labelled doubt as sin. Now she realised it was more a sort of illness, something which just happened, had to be endured—the pain, the fears about the future, the sleepless nights. She glanced at her watch. A quarter to eleven. She ought to be asleep now, not making cakes—but no point tossing and turning when sleep was so unkind, kept away.