by Torey Hayden
This was the cornerstone of his approach with children, who were by default powerless, but he found it equally important to apply this principle to his adult clients. Consequently, he tried to say nothing to Laura or Alan that might make them feel he was pushing them in one direction or another.
When Laura came in for her next session, James decided not to mention that he had read The Wind Dreamer in case it made her feel on show as a writer.
“I’m curious about this imagination of yours,” he said instead. “From what you said the other day, it’s clear you spent a lot of time with Torgon and her world. How did this work out in relation to other children? Kids at school, for example. Did you have many friends when you were that age?”
“All this stuff going on in my head probably makes me sound like I must have been a lonely, friendless kid but it wasn’t really that way,” Laura said. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, but I didn’t want that. I loved my own company. With my kind of imagination, I always had something fun and exciting to do.
“I did have one really good friend and I think this was because she loved pretending as much I did. Her name was Dena. I met her in first grade and we were absolute best friends from that moment.
“We were an odd couple in some ways. While I didn’t live in a conventional family setup, the Meckses were solidly middle class and everyone had solidly middle-class expectations of me. For instance, both my brothers were honours students all the way through school, so my dad expected to see straight A’s on my report card too. It was all so different for Dena. She was the middle child of seven and came from this brawling, beer-drinking cowboy family who were all packed into a dinky house on the alley behind Arnott Street. Every Friday night all her aunties and uncles and cousins would come in from the country and they’d spill out into the yard, playing cowboy music on their guitars and getting drunk. Dena was a dead loss at school. She could never understand math and was always in the lowest reading group, and yet she was perfectly happy. No one in her family ever cared what she got on her report card. Often as not she forged her mother’s name on it and they never even saw it. And they didn’t seem to notice.
“What Dena and I did have in common were our imaginations. When Torgon came, I told Dena about it straightaway. I knew she’d understand. And she did. She thought it was wonderful. Almost immediately we made up our own game based on Torgon. We played it in this enormous cottonwood tree on the alley beside Dena’s house. Shimmying up to great heights, we fought off hostile natives and tigers and bears and all the other fierce things we could think of, even though these things didn’t really seem to exist in Torgon’s world. Horses didn’t exist there either, but even so, in our game I gave Torgon the most beautiful grey horse to ride that was just the colour of her eyes.”
Laura smiled. “None of this was the real Torgon, of course. It was just our play version. Like pretending to be Dale Evans didn’t resemble the real Dale Evans’s life. It’s hard to express that – how the game we were playing was different to the real Torgon and her world, even though both of them were inside my head. But Dena always understood the distinction.”
James nodded. “She sounds like she was a very good friend.”
“Yes, she was. I lost touch with her when I moved away at twelve. I’ve always regretted that.”
The poignancy of other times, other roads not taken intruded. The small silence grew thoughtful as it lengthened.
“I suppose I did want more friends,” Laura said. “In a way. I mean, I don’t recall consciously wanting it, but then maybe it was just because I knew deep down it wouldn’t happen.”
Laura readjusted her position in the chair and sat back quietly for a moment. “I remember this one girl in particular. Her name was Pamela. She was one of those ‘perfect’ kids. You know the kind. They do everything right. Everyone loves them or at least longs to be like them.
“I fantasized quite a bit about being friends with Pamela. She was in the fast group in math like me, so I was sure if I showed her my science projects in the attic, she’d think they were cool. She read a lot, so I dreamed of us making plays together of stories we’d read. And I just knew she’d understand about Torgon, about the real Torgon, who was so much more than a game of make-believe in a cottonwood tree.
“My chance came in the spring of fourth grade. When I was out playing, I found a duck sitting on a clutch of eggs in the underbrush by the lake; so during Show-and-Tell, I told everyone in the classroom about how, if the duck sat on them long enough, the eggs would hatch and we’d have ducklings in 28 days’ time. I must have talked quite eloquently, because afterward the teacher allowed me to stay up in front of the class and answer questions from the other kids. I was Celebrity-for-a-Day because of it.
“At recess, Dena and I were playing hopscotch when Pamela strolled over. I remember her standing beside the hopscotch diagram and watching us, her hands stuffed into her coat pockets.
“‘You wanna play?’ Dena asked.
“‘No,’ she said in a bored sort of way. When it was Dena’s turn, Pamela beckoned me over beside her. ‘Come here. I want to ask you something.’
“I readily abandoned Dena.”
“‘Can I come over to your house after school tonight?’ Pamela asked. ‘I’ll ask my mum at lunchtime if I can come, but she’ll probably let me. I want to see the duck. So can I?’
“Of course I said yes. Indeed, I was delirious with joy. I shot out of the school at lunchtime and ran all the way home to tell Ma the news. Pamela, who had never so much as talked to me in the playground, wanted to come to my house to play! I could hardly eat a thing for lunch, because I had so much to get ready. I rushed up to my bedroom to straighten up my things and make my bed. Maybe Pamela would want to see my horse collection or my rocks or my pressed leaves. Maybe Pamela would like to see how I could turn blue water clear, like magic, with my foster brother’s old chemistry set. Maybe Pamela would feel like drawing. Just in case, I clambered up to reach the top shelf where I kept the box containing drawing paper. Then I asked Ma if she would bake some of her special peanut butter cookies that were shaped like cats’ faces.
“Pamela did come. She walked home with me. She came into my house, looked at my room and had a glass of milk and cookies at my table. She wouldn’t eat any of the peanut butter cats, because she said she didn’t like peanut butter cookies; so Ma opened a package of Oreos for her. Then Pamela said, ‘Can I see the duck now?’
“I took her down by the lake. We crawled on hands and knees into the willowy darkness and Pamela muttered about the awful smell of duck poo. The duck, sitting on her nest, hissed at us.
“‘I want to see the eggs,’ Pamela said. I fended off the duck and got one for her. Pamela examined it carefully. ‘Can I have it?’ she asked. I didn’t think to say no or even wonder what she wanted it for, since she didn’t have any way to hatch it. I just gave it to her. Then we crawled out of the underbrush again.
“Pamela put the egg into the pocket of her jacket. ‘Okay,’ she said casually, ‘see you at school tomorrow.’ She turned around and started walking off.
“‘Hey,’ I cried. ‘Wait a minute! Don’t you want to play?’
“She shook her head. ‘No, I got to be home by 4:15. I need to practise my piano. I promised my mother I wouldn’t be late.’
“‘But … but, we haven’t done anything yet,’ I said.
“‘I only came over to see your duck eggs, Laurie. Now I’ve seen them, so I got to go.’
“‘But don’t you want to do something together?’
“‘I said, I need to practise my piano.’
“‘Do you want to come another time? My horse collection usually looks nicer. I polish them with hand lotion and it makes them really shiny. Do you want to come see them after I’ve polished them? I’d let you play with Stormfire. He’s the one that’s white and bucking up on his back legs. He’s my best horse. When Dena and me play, I always save him for myself and she never gets to play with him, b
ut I’d let you.’
“‘No.’
“‘Ma doesn’t always make peanut butter cookies. Lots of times she makes chocolate chip. Do you like them better?’
“Pamela said, ‘Laurie, didn’t you hear me? I only wanted to see your duck eggs. I’ve seen them, so now I want to go.’
“I stared at her blankly.”
“‘Why do you think I’d play with you?” she said ‘You’re crazy. Everybody at school knows you’re crazy.’
“‘That’s not true!’
“‘Yes, sir,’ Pamela replied. ‘You talk to yourself and that means you’re crazy. That’s why nobody wants to play with you.’
“‘I’m not crazy,’ I retorted indignantly. ‘And lots of people want to play with me.’
“‘Just Dena. And you know what her dad does? He works at the water treatment plant. He stands in people’s poo all day.’ She pinched her nose. ‘That’s why she plays with you, because she’s too stinky to play with anybody else.’
“‘She is not stinky,’ I said. ‘Besides, she’s not my only friend. I have lots of friends. Friends you don’t even know about. Friends who wouldn’t even like you.’
“‘Yeah, sure, Laurie, I bet. Like who, for instance?’ she asked.
“‘You don’t know them.’
“‘Yeah, because probably you just made them up.’
“‘No, sir, real friends.’
“‘Crazy people think everything’s real. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re crazy,’ Pamela said and gave me a haughty little smile. Then she turned, let herself out through our gate and walked on down the street.”
Laura paused. She leaned back into the softness of the sofa and sat for several moments in deep silence.
“The thing was, I wasn’t lying,” she said. “This is what people always kept accusing me of. That what I experienced wasn’t real, and therefore it had to be lies. Black and white to them. Real or unreal. Truth or lies. But it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t making it up. It wasn’t false. There was another world there. Like ours, but different. I could see it, but, for whatever reason, they couldn’t. I don’t know why. But that didn’t make it unreal.”
There was a long, reflective pause.
“I remember learning about bees when I was in fifth grade,” she said softly, “about how bees can see beyond the visible colour spectrum. Humans look at a white Sweet William flower, they see it as plain white. To us that’s true. But if a bee looks at the same flower, it sees intricately patterned petals. That’s because bees can see on the infrared spectrum beyond what human eyes can. The pattern is there for them, but it’s invisible to our eyes. And when I read that, I remember thinking, ‘That’s just like it is with the Forest.’ Simply because we can’t see the pattern on the flower, that doesn’t mean the bee is lying. Because I can see the Forest and other people can’t, that doesn’t mean I’m lying.”
Laura stopped speaking and looked at James. Again the silence, spinning out around them like thread.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to share this whole thing about Torgon with you in a way that shows the vibrancy of it all; how something can be real and unreal at the same time and so beautiful. Because if you can’t get a sense of that, then it does quickly reduce what I’m saying to nothing substantial …”
Her breath caught and James sensed a sudden upsurge in emotion. He didn’t speak. He let her rest in her feelings without pressure.
Finally, Laura leaned forward and lifted her handbag off the floor. “I did a lot of writing when I was younger. Recording Torgon’s world. That’s how I learned to write, trying to capture all that. So I was thinking … perhaps if I gave you some of the stories …” She lifted a small sheaf of typewritten pages from her bag. “I thought maybe this would give her world more immediacy for you than my third-person account of what was going on … it would make it easier to understand what I was saying …”
James reached his hand out. “Yes, that’s a good idea. I’d like that.”
“They aren’t all that well-written. I was a teenager when I did most of them.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine.”
“They’re just stories. Events that happened in Torgon’s world. I’d see it and then I’d write about it as a way of understanding it better. That’s what I always used writing for. To make sense of things.”
Chapter Eleven
It wasn’t until that evening when James was home that he had time to look at the material Laura had given him. It was old. James recognized the uneven pressure of a manual typewriter in forming the words, and that the edges of the pages themselves were yellowing and gently foxed, as if turned many times.
Pouring a glass of wine, adding another log onto the fire against an unexpectedly stormy autumn evening, James sat down and began to read.
There was a knock at the door, but without waiting for an answer the acolyte pushed it open.
“It’s dark in here,” she said with sudden surprise. This was Loki. She was only eight and had just been sent to the compound to start her life as an acolyte. She hadn’t mastered the rules yet.
“Usually one waits outside the benna’s quarters until given the command to enter,” Torgon said and then added, “and when an acolyte does enter, the first act is obeisance.”
Loki flapped her hands in frustration. “Oh, I am sorry. I always do it wrong. What do you wish I should do now? Go out and come in again?”
“No, just remember it for next time.”
Loki glanced around inquiringly. “It is very dark in here, holy benna. Did you not notice? My mother says one shouldn’t work in darkness for it offends the eyes.”
“Aye, your mother’s right,” Torgon said and threw back the coverlet to rise.
Loki’s eyes went wide, “Holy benna! You have no trousers and no boots!”
“I returned during the heavy snow. My trousers became wet, so I’ve removed them to let them dry more easily.”
“I didn’t know you would have legs like everybody else,” Loki said, astonished. “Or feet. For feet are very ugly, don’t you think?”
Torgon laughed. “I am all over just as any other woman, Loki, ugly feet and all.”
The girl blushed. “Oh, I did not mean offence to your feet!”
“My feet are not offended. Nor am I, not by your words nor by my feet. Before Dwr chose me as his benna, I was a worker’s daughter and had much need of my feet for standing on, when toiling in the fields.”
“You were a worker’s daughter? Truly?”
“Aye. So this is why one must always tend one’s tasks with pride, for Dwr takes as much pleasure in good work as in good breeding.”
Loki nodded.
“Anyway,” Torgon said, “it is in my mind you must have come here on a task, Loki, for I did not bid you come.”
“I was sent to say the evening meal is ready.”
“Ah, well. Say to the Seer that I shall take no food tonight.”
“Why? Is something wrong with you?”
Torgon grinned. “You are very new among us, aren’t you”?
The girl ducked her head. “I’m sorry. Am I not supposed to ask you questions?”
“Well, perhaps not quite so many.”
Within moments of Loki’s departure, the Seer entered. “You are unwell? What overtakes you?”
“No real illness, Just a minor grumbling, but my stomach wants a rest from eating.”
The Seer came over and leaned down very close to Torgon to scrutinize her face. She looked back at him, studying his watery old man’s eyes, as it would be unseemly not to meet them. Clasping her head firmly between his hands, he probed her jawline with his fingers. “We shall burn the cleansing oils tonight,” he said. “I can feel evil building in your bones.”
’I’m all right, truly,” she managed to say, as he kept his grip on her face.
“Then you’ll come into the dining room as usual. The soup is thin so will sit easily enough in your stomach.”
> Torgon said, “I have no hunger and fear feeling worse, if I should eat. Send an acolyte with a bowl of soup here to my cell and if I am well enough, I shall eat it.”
“You will eat it,” he declared.
“If I feel well enough.”
“You will eat it. You have gone too thin since you’ve come here and I fear you’re full of worms. So it is of no matter if you bring the soup back up. Better if you do, in fact, for then I shall have the chance to see which worm infests you.”
It was Loki who came. She unlatched the door and then backed into the room, carefully carrying the wooden bowl, trying not to let the thin broth spill.
“You have forgotten yet again to knock,” Torgon said gently.
“Oh!” the girl cried in despair. “I beg your pardon.” Her shoulders sagged. “It’s just there are so many rules here and I am not yet used to them. Shall I go back out and knock?”
“No,”’ Torgon said. “But, yet again, please try harder to remember. You’ll get a nasty cuff about the ears if a holy woman catches you not waiting for permission.”
“Why do you not cuff me?”
Torgon managed a smile. “Perhaps I shall when I am feeling better.”
The girl smiled back. “I think not. I think you care not for cuffing, for I’ve never seen you do it.”
Nausea swept over Torgon again, and she took a deep breath to quell it.
“You look most unwell, holy benna,” Loki said and set the bowl of soup down on the small table near the window. “I had the retching illness once,” she added cheerfully. “I brought up my stomach twelve times in just one night. And then each of my brothers took it. I have four brothers.”
“You have a large family. Your parents are much blessed.”
“My father is a mighty warrior of the benita band and pleased to have so many sons.”
“He’ll be pleased to have you too, for it is the nature of fathers to love their daughters well. And your mother will be grateful for your help in caring for so many men.”