The Healing Party

by Micheline Lee

  The driver asked Dad what he should do.

  ‘She is not well,’ Dad said. ‘Let her out and then keep going to the address I gave you.’

  Mum stepped out of the taxi, followed by Patsy. ‘Come on,’ Maria said on the other side of me. When I wouldn’t budge, she climbed over me and got out. Mum bent down into the car, her mouth tight and eyes wild. ‘Come out now!’

  ‘No!’ I yelled, trying to pull away. ‘I want to go with Dad to the party!’ Digging her long fingernails into my arm, she hauled me out. The taxi driver shut the door behind me.

  Mum lifted me up over the gutter and onto the footpath. As soon as she let go, I ran a few steps and then squatted down with my hands over my head. The heat closed in around me.

  She marched over, with Patsy and Maria close behind. ‘Stand up and come with me now. What is wrong with you! Don’t be stupid!’ she hissed.

  Patsy and Maria called out too. ‘Come on, Natasha, what are you doing?’

  A crowd gathered around us. I heard people saying of Mum, look how beautiful she is. An old woman crouched down and started to shout in my face in a dialect I couldn’t understand. A beggar approached Mum, and then another, hassling her until a man in the crowd shooed them away.

  Finally, Mum bent down and dragged me up by the ear. I stood up and followed, my head throbbing with shame and pain. For years afterwards I would see Mum as the one who spoilt everything for Dad. I would replay the incident, remember her claw-like fingernails digging into my arm, grabbing my ear, and burn with resentment. As a child, I felt special when Dad confided in me that Mum was the cross he had to carry, that she was well-meaning but rough and insensitive and we had to forgive her because of her lack of education.

  He sometimes forgot whom he was talking to. ‘A man always thinks of another woman while he makes love to his wife,’ he said to me in his studio. In those days I often sat quietly watching while he cut, tore, arranged and pieced together his photos. ‘He may be a good man and love his wife, but that’s the way it is,’ he went on. ‘Man is imperfect.’

  Even when I was old enough to know better and the only time he could get me alone was when he drove me in his car, even then with his words pouring like poison into my ear, I still listened, transfixed, frightened to disappoint him.

  But one day when I was about sixteen, I said, ‘What would Mum think of what you are saying? Maybe I should ask her?’

  ‘I thought you were more mature. I thought there were things that we could share. My fault. I am too idealistic,’ he said. He stopped confiding in me then.

  *

  During family prayers the night of the restaurant lunch, the phone rang. ‘It’s Jason,’ Maria called out. I carried the phone into my bedroom, closed the door and leant against it.

  ‘Hi.’ I pressed the phone against my ear.

  ‘Gidday,’ he said. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing at home on a Saturday night?’ His voice sounded upbeat and velvety, the way it was when he’d had a drink.

  He asked me how Mum was, how the lunch went. I tried to be engaging, but we were both awkward, skirting around each other. I concentrated on the textures in his voice, the sound of the clanking fan in the corridor where he sat, and tried to bridge the distance.

  ‘What’s the new housemate like?’ I asked.

  Jason’s other housemate, Penny, was in teacher training. She was nice, vague, not his type. But all Jason had told me so far about the girl who had moved in the week before was that she was a Fine Arts student.

  ‘Good,’ he said, and hesitated. ‘She cleared half the garage to do her painting in.’

  I wondered why he didn’t offer any more information about her. ‘What kind of painting does she do?’ I said.

  ‘Largeish scenes.’

  ‘Well, what are they like?’

  ‘They’re interesting,’ he said.

  It seemed as though it was her he found interesting. She had to be attractive – I could tell from the way he talked about her, never saying her name or describing her.

  ‘Are you going to tell me her name?’

  ‘Clarissa. She and Penny have gone out to the Dolphin tonight.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go with them?’ I said, and didn’t like the sound of my voice.

  ‘I wanted to ring you.’

  ‘You could have done both.’

  ‘Didn’t want to.’ He sounded vague, confused.

  My heart was beating fast. ‘The party you went to last night. Was that with Clarissa?’

  ‘Yeah, she came along to Mick’s party.’ He paused. ‘I’m just going to turn the fan up. It’s fuckin’ hot in here. Hold on.’

  I put the phone down on the floor, shook my hands and feet and rotated my neck. Thuds came from the phone and then his voice. I picked it up.

  ‘Are you there?’ he said.

  ‘So, what else is happening?’ I asked.

  His voice relaxed. ‘Yesterday a couple of jokers were playing with a snake down at the rocks. Drunk as skunks, they were. They found it in the mangroves at the mouth of Rapid Creek. King brown snake, deadly one, big one. Anyway, these guys are that off their heads they thought the thing wouldn’t hurt them. They pick it up and pass it backwards and forwards to each other, pissing themselves laughing, until both get bitten. Still, they’ll have a story to tell next time.’

  It was sweet, the way he stored up stories to tell me. But I wasn’t interested. I closed my eyes and imagined him on the other side, lying shirtless on the floor with his feet up on the louvred window, his long, slim muscularity, and the fuzz of dark hair on his chest funnelling down his stomach. He would be wiping sweat off his brow, looking restrained and a bit helpless.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘My family drives me insane.’

  ‘They are insane,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be glib,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand, do you! How do you know that they’re not right and that we’re the ones who are missing the point? How do you know miracles don’t happen?’

  ‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ he said, trying. ‘I’d like to believe it. That’s the problem I have if I ever go to church. I’m in an agonised state for days. Like when you dragged me to church at Easter. All those people – they look so sure of themselves, the priest saying all that stuff about Jesus coming back to life from the cross. Do people actually believe it – actually believe? That’s what I can’t get.’

  ‘My family always say faith is a decision, not an emotion,’ I said.

  ‘I guess they’ve got a point. To be so sure, you’ve got to be lying to yourself, or blocking everything else out and just deciding to believe.’

  ‘It’s not faith, is it, if you have all the proof? I think I understand why they say it’s a decision,’ I said. We were silent again.

  Jason sighed. ‘This is torture,’ he said. ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘you should let me come down. I asked my boss if I could have time off to see you and he said yes. Then he said, “You’ll be carting your balls down there in a wheelbarrow, won’t you?”’

  ‘Do you hear that?’ I put the phone out into the corridor so he could hear them singing. Walking and leaping and praising God.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said.

  ‘In my bedroom.’

  ‘Why don’t I come down? Christen that childhood bed of yours.’

  I didn’t feel in the least bit sexy. I looked at my room. It was like a cell or sanatorium at night. I had not decorated or softened it at all, and had been sleeping with the light on. It made me feel dirty thinking about sex in this room. Their singing rose in the background. He had no idea. He’d been drinking.

  ‘If you need a fuck, why don’t you just have it with the new housemate?’ I said.

  ‘What the hell?’ His voice cracked.

  ‘You’re attracted to her, aren’t you?’<
br />
  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I can tell by the way you avoid talking about her that something is going on.’ I didn’t care if none of it was true. I leapt. ‘You just want to come here because you can’t fight the temptation of her in your house!’

  ‘I can’t believe this! I am not your father.’

  My mind reeled. ‘Don’t bring him into it! It’s best if we break up, at least while I’m down here.’

  I could hear him getting to his feet, dragging the landline up from the floor. ‘What’s this about?’ His voice was strangled.

  ‘It’s probably just me,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel I can take another thing.’

  He breathed hard. ‘I want to support you through this.’

  ‘I know you do. I’m just not very good at being supported. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not good enough for you, am I? Never have been.’ he said angrily. Then he started to cry.

  ‘Sorry, but I’m not going to start consoling you. It’s me, I really just can’t take another thing. I love you, goodbye.’ I put down the phone, covered my face with both hands, fell to the floor and sobbed.

  If I did not join them, they would wonder what was going on. Wiping my eyes, I walked out of the room and down the corridor, and took my place on the couch at family prayers.

  In the half-dark, lit only by candle flame and the glowing portrait of Jesus, permeated by the smell of melting wax and fragrant oil, my family gathered in prayer. It was a touching sight. ‘Let the mighty love of God flow out through me,’ they sang with full hearts. Mum twinkled a smile at me as I sat down. She closed her eyes again, still smiling, her hands gently raised and upturned to God. On bended knee, eyes squeezed shut, mouths open wide in song, Dad and Maria lifted their arms high and contorted their faces in worship. Anita, her eyes open and watchful, sang chin up, loud and clear. As usual, Patsy’s voice soared above the others, effortless, her closed eyes fluttering as though in a trance.

  Bitch, I said to myself. You stupid bitch. What is wrong with you, bitch? I had not intended to break up with Jason. I looked up at the face of Jesus hanging on the wall, lit up, as I now knew, by diodes behind a translucent screen. The likeness was drawn from the markings of the Turin Shroud that had covered his face for the three days and nights before he was raised from the dead. I shuddered. This was the face of a dead man.

  Maria had been right. Years ago, when my sisters secretly turned on the light behind the picture of Jesus and declared it a miracle, I did fall to my knees and gasp. I could still remember the sense I had that the light was pulsating, alive, searching for me. I had no reason not to believe. They were wrong, though, to think that it showed I had faith. Miracles, catastrophes, ghosts, poltergeists, resurrections! I had no faith in order. Anything and everything could happen. I believed in utter chaos.

  I HAD BEEN IN MY PARENTS’ HOME FOR SEVEN WEEKS. The days were full of purpose, but the nights were long and gnawed away at all three of us. Taken in the right dose before bed, the morphine capsules helped to control Mum’s pain, but what was there for the fear that at the foot of their bed grew ten feet tall?

  Perhaps it was me projecting my own fear. They said they trusted in God. I knew what I heard, though. Each night their sighing, shuffling, bed-creaking and muttered prayer leached through the bedroom wall.

  I had bought a lamp for the bedside table and left it switched on. I also had a torch under my pillow in case the lamp failed, or the hair-thin filament fizzled out. It felt as though I had not had a good night’s sleep in weeks. When I lay awake, I read the books on coping with cancer and dying that I kept hidden under the bed. I did not contact Jason. I tried not to think of him.

  I opened again the sombre grey cover of On Death and Dying. ‘How sick are you?’ the author asked a cancer patient in one of the interviews. ‘I am full of metastases,’ the patient replied.

  I had to put the book down.

  Sleep, when it came, was confused by the light of the lamp. Its white energy seared my brain. I felt as if I were under twenty-four-hour observation. I had experienced this before, sleeping out in the Darwin bush under the intensity of a full moon.

  The next morning, as usual I rose when it was still dark. The clock said 6.05 a.m. I had taken to walking around the oval before helping Mum up if I woke early enough. How delicious it was to step outside into the blackness. The dark before dawn held no fear for me. It was like velvet over my eyes.

  Breathe! Mum had always told us if we were sick. Breathe and pray. She would demonstrate, inhaling through the nostrils until her chest expanded and she could take no more in. Then she would open her mouth and expel her breath with a loud animal hiss. Walking on the road to the oval, I breathed as Mum did. Icy air filled my nostrils and purified my lungs. Ready to burst, I exhaled, sending out warm, moist clouds before my face.

  When I reached the middle of the broad oval, I stopped. It was still too dark to identify houses, trees or fences. With only the ground and sky as my reference, this spot could have been anywhere in the world between heaven and earth. There was a stirring and glowing in the purple-black shroud above. I waited for the first rays.

  Some mornings I saw the beauty, but it slid off me, unfelt. This morning though, the rays of light pierced me. This morning, I worshipped. What else was the sunrise but a brimming over of hope? I felt the all-ness, the miracle of creation, and my own nothingness.

  ‘My mother’s body is full of metastases,’ I told the sky.

  *

  I had stayed out too long. In the powdery light, the wire fence surrounding the oval, and beyond that the box-shaped houses with their bins and cars, started to form. I rushed back to meet Mum’s 7 a.m. rise. The light was already on in Dad’s studio.

  A pungent smell filled the bedroom. It was always present now, around Mum, from the gas that she burped out every few minutes to relieve the build-up in her stomach. After a night’s confinement however, it was especially intense. Mum was upbeat when she saw me. Her hair was back, and her face on the pillow looked flat and exposed. Trying to raise her head, she lifted her eyebrows and smiled.

  ‘Today! All the family together at the faith rally! Thank you, Jesus.’

  It had been planned for weeks that we would all go to a rally at Dallas Brooks Hall. I had not been to one since my schooldays. The honeymoon days or cloud nine was how Mum and Dad referred to those early Charismatic years. It didn’t matter that we had school or work the next day, how far it was or how long into the night the rejoicing extended; we whirled from one prayer meeting to another, several times a week. On weekdays there were the local prayer groups, on weekends the larger faith rallies, and a couple of times a year the rock concert–sized, international Charismatic conferences that went all week.

  ‘You will go to the rally, won’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Is Anita going?’

  Mum nodded. ‘Oh yes, of course. She always goes.’

  No, she didn’t. But there was no point saying that to Mum. Anita had not been baptised in the holy spirit like the rest of us. She had not joined in the endless round of prayer meetings. She didn’t speak in tongues or get slain in the spirit. Somehow Anita had avoided the whole Charismatic thing from the beginning without causing any of the conflict that arose when I resisted going to the meetings in my final years of school. It wasn’t just the age gap between us and the fact that she had moved out of home before we became Charismatic. She got away with it because she never objected. She came to the occasional meeting when my parents asked and when it didn’t clash with her work. She voiced no criticism, sang when they sang, knelt when they knelt and prayed when they prayed.

  Except once. A few weeks after my parents were born again, they arranged a meeting with a Charismatic family counsellor. We sat in a circle of plastic chairs in a side room at the Christian Revival Centre. After two songs and some speaking in tongues, the balding counsellor held Dad by the shoulders.

  ‘Declare in front
of God, in front of your beloved family, why we are here today.’

  Dad stood up. ‘Jesus, I have given you my life. You are the alpha and the omega. Now I give to you what is most precious to Irene and me. I give you my children’s lives!’

  The counsellor stood in front of my sisters and me. ‘Do you, girls, accept Jesus into your lives?’

  After some time, it was Anita who spoke up. It was not tongues or praise that came from her mouth, but some plain words. ‘Why should I, when Dad always tried to kiss my girlfriends?’

  It was so surprising that it was almost as if it had never happened.

  *

  Dad, hands gripping ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, led us in prayers and songs as he drove us to the rally. Mum’s eyes, reflected in her visor mirror, were on us girls at the back, smiling to see us together.

  Dallas Brooks Hall stood in inner-city Melbourne, a forty-minute drive away. We breezed through our modern suburbs, joined the no-man’s land of the freeway and emerged into more intricate, older streets with industrial shopfronts, terrace houses and small corner pubs. I did not realise I had stopped singing until Anita elbowed me. ‘Sing!’ she said. I complied, shrinking from her strong perfume and angular linen suit.

  People and cars collected in front of the hall. A colonnade of columns surrounded the rectangular concrete building, giving it the look of a modern-day temple – a very austere temple, I now thought, though I had remembered it as grand.

  The worshippers alighting from the cars were in suits, formal dresses, pearls and shawls. They hadn’t dressed like this when I last came to one of these eight years ago. Maria and Patsy had advised me to dress up as well, ‘to show the world we are “winners for Christ”’. I wore a woollen skirt and vest of Mum’s that she had urged on me.

  As soon as we reached the drop-off area, we sprang into action, hauling the wheelchair out, lifting Mum into it, conscious of the long line of waiting cars. Dad drove away to find a park. Anita forged a path through the throng for Mum pushed by Maria. At the entrance, a broad, tiled staircase, two flights high, confronted us. None of us had thought about wheelchair access. We spread out in different directions, searching for another entrance, but all had to return to the foot of the stairs. Mum’s face was stretched tight and self-consciously bright. She asked Maria to push her over to the side, where she would be less in the public view. We saw a man, bowed over his crutches, scrabbling over to the entrance. At the foot of the stairs, he dropped his crutches and was hoisted onto the back of another man. Up the stairs he went, his small, twisted body dangling from his companion’s neck. Cries of ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Alleluia’ came from the crowd following their progress.