by Helen Brown
Now my daughter’s head glistened under the halogen lights. I was reminded of the Ancient Egyptian statue of Nefertiti. She looked so . . . vulnerable.
‘Are you doing it for a fundraiser?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.
‘No. I’m going back to the monastery.’
The sentence hit me like a landslide. Lydia and I had grown closer through my illness and building the garden together. Even though I’d been nervous about the intensity of her spiritual aspirations, I understood them on some levels. But this announcement summoned all my old fears of losing her and, worse, Lydia losing herself.
Philip showed no emotion. Jonah blinked up at her from his lap. Katharine became suddenly engrossed in an outdated magazine.
My daughter was bald, devout and heading to a monastery for the third time. It could only mean one thing.
‘You’ve decided to become a nun?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ she answered. ‘I just want to see how it feels for a while.’
I asked what she meant by ‘a while’. A few weeks? Months? A lifetime?
She said she wasn’t sure. Again. How I loathed those words.
‘Can’t you wait till you’ve finished your degree?’ I asked.
‘I can do that any time,’ she replied offhandedly.
I’d thought her rebellion phase was over. If there was anyone behind this I knew who it had to be. That monk. Why couldn’t she be honest with me?
Trying to assemble my emotions, I wondered what she was thinking. Caring for disabled people and vegetarianism were fine and admirable. Shaving her head and becoming a Buddhist nun was a step beyond the realms of normality. Was she aiming to become a Generation-Y saint?
I’d been researching saints. They tend to come from middle-class families. Buddha himself, Saint Francis of Assisi and his sidekick St Clare were raised in comfortable homes. They’d all rejected the abundance their parents had provided.
St Clare’s parents were devastated when she refused to marry. Their anguish is recorded on a fresco in the church dedicated to St Clare in Assisi. While the facial expressions aren’t particularly informative (apart from one nun glowering at St Clare’s mother), the title says it all – ‘Clare clinging to the altar to prevent her family bringing her back home.’
It would be the same for us if we tried to drag Lydia away from her altar of choice.
Gazing at our bald daughter, I tried to dredge positives out of the anxiety. Number one consolation was that the Sri Lankan civil war was over. The likelihood of her being in mortal danger had reduced. Bizarre as it seemed, at the age of just twenty-five Lydia was already a seasoned traveller who knew how to avoid trouble. Going by the phone calls I’d overheard, she had reasonable mastery of Sinhalese. Her teacher and the nuns would be meeting her at the airport and taking her straight to the monastery, which she knew well.
And if this strong-minded young woman really wanted to shut herself away from the world for the rest of her life on some remote island, I couldn’t stop her.
Weariness washed over me. Truth to tell, I’d run out of fight. There was no point railing against the more outrageous aspects of our daughter – nor, for that matter, our cat. All I could do was live my life – and allow them the freedom to do the same.
Besides, Lydia had helped celebrate and soothe me through all the changes I’d been through recently. It was time I stepped back and accepted she was a woman in her own right.
‘Well . . .’ I said, sensing the others were waiting for me to explode in one of my old-time tirades. ‘If you want to be a nun, and it’s the right thing for you, I won’t say I’m over the moon but I’ll fully support you.’
And, to my surprise, for the first time I actually meant it.
Needled
A cat’s scratch can be a badge of honour
Watching Lydia pack over the following week, I became increasingly curious. Not in the old way, when I’d been threatened by every aspect of Sri Lanka. I longed for a better understanding of the world she wanted to be part of and began to wonder what it would be like to visit the monastery. Physical hardship, possibly even danger, might be involved.
Closer to home, I had more prosaic challenges to contend with. While Lydia prepared for her departure, I was gearing up for the final phase of breast reconstruction: the nipple tattoo.
Philip claimed that, as the fake nipple’s chief inspector, he was perfectly happy with it, but it looked albino alongside its partner. Having got this far, I figured the job might as well be finished.
But tattoos involve needles. Plus there’s no man in a gown to knock you out during the process.
While I was mulling this over, Jonah insisted on a fishing rod session. Watching him spiral through the air, I wished I could be more like a cat. Even a neurotic one like Jonah didn’t waste time fretting over needles.
When he finally collapsed on the rug, his glossy sides heaving in the sun, Katharine gathered him up.
‘Oh, Jonah!’ she said, burying her nose in his fur. ‘You’re such a good de-stresser!’
Maternal alarm bells jangled.
‘What’s worrying you?’ I asked.
‘My IB presentation on immigration,’ she replied, running a finger down Jonah’s nose. Our cat adored nose rubs.
Katharine was demonstrating a passion for refugees. On weekends she taught English to children from the Sudan. I’d already noticed an accusatory glint in her eye. Just as Lydia implied we didn’t do enough for the disabled, Katharine was disappointed by our lack of commitment to refugees. I’d been made uncomfortably aware that Shirley’s proportions were generous enough to accommodate several Sudanese families.
I was concerned about our younger daughter. Her face had grown pale and thin with shadowy semicircles under her eyes. The plaster on her elbow seemed to get bigger every day, covering either a fungal infection or a rash. Either way it was a manifestation of stress. I asked what time she’d finished her homework the night before. She said 11.30, but I knew it would’ve been much later. She promised to get to bed earlier tonight.
Jonah’s paws were dry, she said, unfolding him on top of his scratching post. He flashed me a look of self pity as I lifted his front paw. The pad was cracked like an old riverbed. While I couldn’t improve Katharine’s opinion of my commitment to refugees, I could do something about Jonah’s paws. He watched intrigued as I lifted his leathery pads one after the other and massaged them with hand cream. Then he promptly licked it off.
When Lydia came downstairs, she offered to drop Katharine at school and take me on to the tattoo parlour. We accepted without hesitation.
The tattoo parlour was a dishevelled old worker’s cottage with a discreet sign on the fence. Lydia waited for me while I disappeared down a brick path lined with plants.
A blonde woman opened the door. With no moles, marks or wrinkles, her face was technically perfect. It was almost as if someone had pencilled her features in on a blank canvas. Devoid of the myriad faults that make a face real, she resembled a daytime soap star.
She asked me to take my top off and lie down on her massage table.
‘It doesn’t hurt, it just buzzes,’ she assured me, placing a blue plastic sheet over my exposed breast.
I tried not to look at her tattoo needle. It resembled a dentist’s drill in a brown plastic jacket.
‘It’s just colouring in,’ she reassured me. ‘You might feel a tweak if the nerve endings have started joining up. I use anaesthetic cream for that.’
Anaesthetic cream? I’d have the sleep of Morpheus any day. To my relief the procedure was painless. It just sent assault waves of vibration through my body as she drilled away. Every few minutes she paused to dab her artwork with little white squares of gauze.
‘It shouldn’t bleed,’ she said. ‘The trick is not to dig the needle in too deep, otherwise you get deep tissue bleeding and the tattoo goes blurry after a few years like my dad’s did. But they didn’t know that back in the war days.’
T
oo much information. I asked if she had any tats.
‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘Except for my face.’
‘Your face?’
‘Yes, eyeliner and eyebrows. I had a natural colour done for my lips. Lips can be tricky. If you choose a strong colour it goes out of date.’
Forty minutes later I stood in front of a mirror to admire her work. The coloured in nipple looked darker than its partner. She said it would fade. I’d have to keep it dry and covered in ointment for four days. I could expect a visit from my old friends swelling and discomfort.
‘You’ll be able to sunbathe topless soon,’ she chirped.
While wearing the bikini bottoms Greg had mentioned, no doubt. Were these people insane?
I asked what she’d recommend in the way of facial tattoo. She said I had lovely eyes, so she’d do the eyeliner first. Imagining myself the Cleopatra of the old people’s home, I squinted in the mirror. The bright red veins in my eyeballs hardly needed highlighting.
A bunch of yellow roses from Philip was waiting beside the front door when Lydia and I got home. Sweetheart. I opened the card and read: ‘I hope your feeling better.’ The florist needed a stint at apostrophe school.
To celebrate my coffee-coloured nipple, Lydia and I went to a new cafe down on Chapel Street. With its concrete floor and primitive benches posing as seats, it resembled a nuclear shelter. The clientele was studiously hip. Men wore grey T-shirts. Improbable patches of hair on their chins and cheeks suggested a mange epidemic. Women were bent over laptops or pecking birdlike at their phones. Almost everyone bore that compulsory badge of twenty-first century youth, at least one tattoo.
A ringlet of steam rose from the machine. Rich, nutty aroma hovered over the tables. The coffee-maker shook his dreadlocks and beamed me a telepathic message – ‘Uncool.’ Responding in kind, I sent one back – ‘I could have rinsed your nappies, son.’
‘Great tats,’ I said, admiring the impressive coil of red and blue rats twisting up his arm. ‘That must’ve hurt.’
‘Not as much as the one I had here,’ he said, tapping a spot just above his right breast.
I felt an urge to tell him we were brother and sister in ink.
‘Why did you have it done?’ I asked instead.
‘To prove I could master pain,’ he replied.
‘Oh,’ I said, staring down into my coffee.
I could’ve told him pain takes many forms. The most excruciating manifestation isn’t from a tattoo needle, or probably even knives and guns. It isn’t the wave of panic you experience when a doctor uses the c-word, or the jab of surgical wounds. Real anguish happens when things go wrong for your kids.
But he’d written me off as old and boring. He was looking through me to his next customer.
Back home, watching the usual run of funeral insurance advertisements on afternoon television, I caught a snippet of an American sitcom – one of those modern ones where it’s hip to be gay.
Lydia brought in a mug of tea and glanced at the screen.
‘You want rebellion!???’ roared the television teenager whose parents were furious about his new pornographic tattoo. ‘I’ll show ya rebellion. I’ll run away and be a monk in Thailand!’
As canned laughter filled the room, Lydia and I exchanged glances – and a hint of a smile.
Blessed
I’m not religious but . . .
Suitcases were Jonah’s enemies. To him they were as bad as the big black cats down the street. A suitcase or a backpack meant someone was leaving.
B.P. (Before Prozac) the sight of them had sent him into a frenzy. With tail booffed, he’d sprint up and down the hallway, his meows changing key into pitiful ‘Ne-ooooo!’s.
Anyone who tried to catch him to calm him down would be left in the dust as he shot upstairs and down again. Up down, up down. Don’t go, don’t go . . .
If a bag was left open and partially packed, he’d leap into it, dig in and refuse to budge. Zipped-up luggage ready to go beside the front door was even more vulnerable. Jonah would seize the first opportunity to back up against it, ensuring the owner would take more of our cat away with them than they’d intended.
Managing Jonah’s suitcase phobia had been a challenge. I didn’t want to do anything to tip him back into his bad old ways.
We stored all forms of luggage out of sight these days, in the attic or bulging on top of each other in one of the cupboards of my study. Whenever one of us needed to pack to go away, another family member would divert Jonah’s attention with ribbon, fishing rod or flattery. The traveller would then stealthily remove the suitcase from its hiding place, slide into their bedroom with it and shut the door.
We tried to hide it from him, but Jonah always knew, even A.P. (After Prozac). So it was as Lydia prepared to leave for Sri Lanka again. Shut behind her bedroom door, she folded her modest garments along with gifts for the monks and nuns. We’d had a brief scuffle over a blanket of ugly grey and crimson squares I’d knitted. Originally, it had been made to order for The Homeless through Katharine’s school. Then it turned out The Homeless didn’t want it, so I’d started taking it to yoga. I was briefly affronted when Lydia asked if she could take it to Sri Lanka – until I decided it was a compliment. She wanted to take something of me with her.
Desperate to be let in to Lydia’s room, Jonah went on fast-forward, a Pink Panther on speed. Hurtling around the upstairs family space, he leapt from one window ledge to another, across the sofa backs then down on the floor. He threw himself at her door and stretched a paw up to pat the handle.
When Lydia emerged, a vision in white crowned with a maroon beanie, Jonah lunged at her and begged to be picked up.
‘It’s all right, boy,’ she laughed, holding him like a restless baby. ‘I won’t be far away. I’ll beam you golden light every day.’
Jonah stopped writhing and blinked up at her. Lydia and Jonah seemed to float away on a shared wavelength for a moment or two. Maybe they would be able to communicate in some other dimension while she was absent. Who knows what filtered through her brain during all those hours of meditation? Maybe the same trippy stuff wafted through Jonah’s mind when he dozed on the alpaca rug.
Whenever I’d tried to discuss her religious views with Lydia she still closed me down. The most I could get out of her was that the purpose of Buddhism was to achieve Enlightenment.
If I asked if that’s what she was aiming for – to become Enlightened – she’d clam up. That was when I’d fight an urge to take her by the shoulders, shake her and tell her to stop dreaming. But I’d read enough quasi-spiritual books to know the answer to that one. She’d say it was I who was half awake and locked in the dream.
After Lydia kissed Jonah goodbye, I helped her hoist her backpack on her shoulders. The rosemary hedge brushed our clothes with its oily perfume as we headed down the path. Watching her beanie glide gracefully ahead of me, I wanted to explain I had an inkling of understanding of why she was doing this, even though I wasn’t religious.
She heaved her backpack into the car’s boot.
The car coughed to life. Leonard Cohen bellowed ‘Hallelujah!’ at full volume over the speaker system. I hushed his mouth.
If she’d wanted to hear, I’d have said: I’m not religious but . . .
I always light a candle in old churches in memory of friends who are suffering or loved ones who’ve moved on.
Lydia studied her hands. She was already in another world. It’s always easier being the leaver than the leav-ee.
The motorway unravelled under our wheels. She wasn’t going to change her mind. Not now.
I’m not religious but . . .
Certain places on Earth have incredible atmosphere. In the tomb of St Francis in Assisi I wept tears from a cave somewhere deep inside of me. Maybe some locations are portals. Or imbued with goodness because of the person they’re associated with. Perhaps the bricks and stones become consecrated simply because they remind human beings of the potential for goodness within themselves.
We entered the concrete oesophagus of the airport car park. Finding a place to park was surprisingly easy. But it always is with Lydia on board.
I stood back while Lydia checked herself in at the counter. Passport, customs form. She was an old hand.
I’m not religious but . . .
Even though Sam was killed in 1983, I never lost him. The older I get the more I understand people are never lost. They’re always with us.
Likewise, if you go ahead and became a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka, I won’t be losing you. Not really.
We stood at the shiny goodbye doors. She kissed my cheek.
‘Why don’t you come and stay at the monastery?’ she asked.
Go to a Third World joint run by a monk who’d caused me so many sleepless nights? And let’s not forget the primitive toilet arrangements, leeches and the rat.
The psychologist had told me to put my health first. I had no intention of disobeying orders.
Surely Lydia knew I only went to places that had fluffy towels.
She had to be joking.
‘You know I’m not religious but . . .’ I said, kissing her back. ‘I’ll think about it.’
Serendipity
If you want to know what to do, ask a cat
The first I ever heard of Sri Lanka was at primary school. The teacher unravelled the wrinkled map that hung over the blackboard and pointed to an island shaped like a teardrop off the coast of India. It was coloured reassuringly pink like most of the world (the important parts, anyhow). Like our own country, it belonged to that eternal force, the British Empire.
‘Ceylon’s famous for tea and these,’ said the teacher, holding up her engagement ring for us all to see. The sparkly blue stone in it was a sapphire, she said.