He walks around the cross-legged Buddha, past his fleshy knee and lets himself into his belly through a small, discreet door. Inside, he immediately feels the Buddha's mood—cold, frightened. He climbs the stairs to open the windows high up in the Buddha's back. He removes the metal rods that fasten the shutters and opens the windows; little wings where the Buddha's shoulder blades should be, letting air flow in around his hollow body.
He hears the sound of smashing pottery, wind whipping around each corner of the hall and he realises he should secure the large exterior door and lock himself in.
Outside the Buddha's protective womb, his eyes strain against the gritty wind. There is something looming in the distance, something grey he can't focus on. The sky is moving. Now distant trees begin to disappear. They are swallowed by the grey, which grows and fills the sky until he realises—a wave.
The tsunami moves forward so smoothly it looks like it's on wheels. He leans his weight against the heavy hall door as he tries to close it but his hands freeze with fright into hooks as he claws at the door's bolt. He can't lock it. He runs back and shuts himself inside the Buddha.
‘Why did I come today?’ he asks in a voice that fills the Buddha's belly.
He knows he wouldn't want to die in his home. It is a place to eat noodles alone every night, not a place to die. But where to go? He feels anchored to the temple—like the Buddha. Now he touches the Buddha in the same spot he touches him every other day, on the hollow of his right knee, then curls into a ball in the very centre of the cavernous belly, rocking against the wave's roar.
‘Hold your breath,’ he urges the Buddha.
The roar is so loud it is almost silent. A scar splits near the corners of his mouth as he screams a scream that is not heard. Water pours in through the gaping windows high in the Buddha's back. The caretaker struggles to his feet, his legs heavy, trapped in his wet seaweed-like robes. He touches the Buddha's knee again, seeks his guidance, and lets the Buddha know he is still alive. Surely escape through the door is impossible—if he opens it, the wave will rush in. Water rises up his legs with every passing second. He climbs the ladder to the windows despite the powerful jets that now crash down on him, make his hands slip and fill his mouth with mud. A rock strikes his brow bone and water gushes red over his eyes. He reaches the Buddha's shoulders and shelters to the side of the windows. His chest heaves, fills with air and dirt and dust, which he coughs out a second later. The caretaker watches the water rise—engulfing the Buddha's knees.
How to get out the window? His legs will have to go first—push one out against the rapids and then the other. He tests the water's force with his hand but it is smacked back and he almost loses his balance. He presses his back against the wall and with all his might he jams an elbow into the flow and manages to hold it there for the count of five.
He changes his mind about going through the window legs first, he has a better plan. He must act fast—the rising water is licking his toes. He works his body into the jet stream and his back is pummelled as if by a stampeding horse. He wedges his buttocks in the window's frame. Now the water has the strength of ten horses but with his legs in position, he launches himself: a man reborn. His legs splay like a frog's mid-leap.
The force of the water pins him to the Buddha's shoulder. He can see the surface of this new ocean but can barely move. His face and hands are pressed flat against the cold golden robes. An invisible force sucks at his legs, trying to pull him back through the window, taking the socks right off his feet. It won't release him. It means to drown him. Is this where I die, Buddha?
His chest is ready to explode. The skin on his hands looks fish-blue in the water, like a corpse's hands. He lets the last bubbles of breath escape. Let me live! Let me live!
He feels himself slipping away—up, up, up towards the heavens. When he bobs to the surface, sweet relief fills his lungs as water spews out of him as if he is a fallen vase. He opens his eyes. All he can see is sky but he is free. Exhausted, he floats on his back until he bumps into something smooth and large and wet. It is an island of gold, a gold so bright it blinds him. He reaches out a hand and hauls himself out of the water and onto the Buddha's shoulders, his legs shaking and shivering with fatigue. He can't stand. His head feels like a boulder but he manages to lift it just enough to see.
A cauldron of dark green sea has spilled and changed everything. The hall has been washed away. The water is calm now, a glass lid over his town. In front of him is an endless lake dotted with protruding treetops which look like battered arrowheads. Behind him the mountains emerge to tower above all else. He leans against the cabbage rolls, forces himself to stand on the Buddha's slippery shoulder and surveys the area where Kamakura should be. What a sight they must look: a giant head floating above a sunken kingdom, a tiny man whispering in his ear.
He will have to swim to the mountains behind the temple grounds, but first he must rest. He lies back. Bright sunshine seems out of place after the storm but here it is, almost burning his face. Burn it right off, he thinks. The dirt-filled sky and wall of water feels like a dream now. Maybe this Buddha is merely a statue in the emperor's pond, and he one of a hundred caretakers in the palace.
‘Did it happen?’
No reply.
‘Were you scared? I was. I thought I would die, I thought maybe I wanted that, but then maybe I didn't.’
There is no reply. Not that he expects one, of course. Many times he has spoken to the Buddha and only a tiny part of him, a fingernail even, has ever expected a response. If the Buddha were ever going to talk, surely he'd talk now. Maybe the Buddha has never been listening.
The caretaker wakes with a shiver. His robe, still damp, leaves a slug's trail behind him as he gets up.
‘I'll be back later.’
He slides off the shoulder and swims, throwing his arms over a plank that fortune puts in his path, and begins kicking himself towards the mountains. Sea hawks have returned to the cleared sky and swoop without effort to the water then soar again, finding beneath its surface nothing more than the debris of a drowned town.
He kicks and kicks until he tires and rests—he lies motionless, a limp doll, across his plank. He can see the light dimming by the minute. Eventually, the outline of the mountain against the sky disappears and he is in blackness. Still, he keeps kicking, holding the memory of the mountain in his mind until he glimpses a light in the distance. A fire? Fire means people.
He kicks slowly. He knows he should head for the fire, head for them, but his face begins to twitch. He was getting used to being in an empty world—no-one to stare at his scars, to point at his shame. He orders his legs to keep moving, forces his arms to stay stretched out straight and not steer back into the darkness.
Finally he hits a tree branch jutting out over the water. He grapples to reach the tree's trunk; his hands find the smooth cold bark while the branches scratch at his face and chest. He ducks, paddles under one branch only to come up against another, then another, and still more. The trees seem close together, their branches holding hands. Soon the treetops climb higher and he finds himself wading through a waterlogged forest until the earth rises to greet his feet.
He has lost sight of the fire. He climbs a nearby tree and sees the fire to his left, climbs down and wades to the bank. Dry ground.
He approaches a makeshift campsite, careful to stay at the clearing's edge, to hover in the darkness. He does not want his shame to alarm the people he sees gathered, some asleep, in the fire's glow. Cold and wet, he tentatively walks into the light. Some in the group leap up in shock.
A young girl stirs in her blanket and sits up, rubbing disbelief from her eyes. ‘Hello, uncle. Don't be afraid.’
His eyes well with tears of relief when he hears her welcome, when she accords him a respect he has never enjoyed before.
‘Who's there?’ asks one of the men.
‘Nobody,’ the caretaker calls back. ‘I mean, just me. I have swum here, from the temple. From the big B
uddha.’
He walks slowly towards them.
‘Come, come join us. Come dry yourself by the fire.’
The caretaker kneels and joins the other men.
‘What happened to your face?’ asks the girl.
‘Yes, your face,’ says another man.
They can see his face in the fire's light but at least they don't mock him.
‘Did that happen to you in the storm?’ asks the man.
‘Oh, you poor man,’ says the girl, looking at his face with interest.
They can't tell the old scars from the new cuts, the years of pain from the freshly dried blood. But they will be able to in the morning, he's sure, in the harsh light of day.
‘Come here, let me clean your face,’ says a woman.
‘No, no, really, it's fine.’
‘Don't be silly, you can't sit around with—’
‘Don't come any closer,’ he pleads and jumps to his feet.
‘I'm sorry,’ says the woman, trying not to show her alarm, ‘Here. You can wash it yourself.’
There is no avoiding it. He'll have to wash away the mud and blood for them to see what hides underneath. Then they will shun him. The woman hands him a clean dry rag. He takes it and dips it into a nearby pot and wipes at his face until the cloth is brown with mud and dried blood.
‘That's much better,’ says the woman.
Is she mad? Does she not see the scars crisscrossing his face? The ploughman's harrow tracks?
‘Sleep for a while, you must be exhausted,’ says a man to the caretaker. ‘I won't sleep tonight, you take my blanket.’
‘How kind. Thank you.’
In the morning the caretaker wakes up to find everyone packing up the campsite.
‘Good morning, friend,’ says one man.
‘Good morning.’ The caretaker keeps a hand up to his face while watching the goings-on, the campers packing the few items they have managed to save.
The young girl joins the caretaker, sits on his blanket, stares into his face like she might a pond.
‘Look, the water has gone down some,’ she points towards the Buddha. Now his full back is exposed and he shines like a beacon in the early morning sun.
‘I must go to him. I need to empty him out and clean him when the water returns home to the sea,’ says the caretaker.
‘You do what you have to do. We are going to walk on. I'm sure we'll all meet up again. Good luck to you, my friend.’
The caretaker walks down the mountain and wades out into the water. ‘Friend’ he repeats to himself. The water level is much lower and the journey back to the Buddha much shorter. Still, the whole of his body aches and he wonders whether his legs are up to the effort. He spies a small roof wedged in the branch of a nearby tree and swims to it, recognising it as soon as he reaches it—the roof that sheltered the large incense pot at the temple.
Pulling it free he turns it upside down, uses the tangle of branches to help him climb aboard, and sets himself adrift.
He floats towards the Buddha as the water slowly subsides. Soon he is close enough to slip off his makeshift raft and paddle his way to the Buddha. The caretaker scrambles over the Buddha's thigh and lies in his lap, his head in the crease of the giant knee.
The tide continues its retreat and Kamakura slowly reappears. When he checks to see if it is safe to climb down, he sees the remains of the hall all around them. Cracked pots, seaweed stretched out over upside-down prayer stools, and many items relocated from other places by the mighty wave. He jumps down, walking among the debris until he comes to a broken mirror, a mess of large jagged triangles on the ground. He crouches to pick them all up and catches his reflection. To his surprise his scars are gone—every line has been filled in with soft skin, every red stripe has been cooled to nothing. Tentative fingers doubt his eyes and trace his face where the scars should be. But his hands feel only smooth skin, a skin that knows no pain.
‘Look, look at me!’ he cries, and spins to face the Buddha looming large and bright in the afternoon sun. His golden mask has been ripped in strips from eye to chin, from ear to ear, from crown to neck. It's as if a giant rake has been dragged across his face, leaving dark-green bronze marks.
‘Thank you, Lord Buddha.’
Thank you.
In the days that follow the caretaker wanders to the beach to fish and eat. He cleans the mud and debris from the belly of the Buddha and with it all the years of his loneliness. People come to visit them and he explains how he hid inside the Buddha's belly and was saved. The caretaker finds that now the Buddha is out in the open, he borrows the heat of the sun. When he rests a palm on the Buddha from within, the warmth flows through him as if the statue is made of flesh and blood.
After some time, the people he met in the forest that night return home to Kamakura and together they talk about rebuilding the Buddha's hall. The caretaker suggests they leave him out in the open, ‘Let him look out to sea, ask him to watch for storms.’ The people also talk of fixing the Buddha's scratched face. He shakes his head at this too, and reminds them that one day the damaged gold leaf will be stripped away by the sun and wind and rain, to reveal what lies beneath.
I remember it began on a Saturday morning because I was hung-over after our Friday piss-up at the beach. I was sitting at a bus stop with Mul and Seano, and Mul was whinging about everything, getting himself all worked up like usual.
‘Fuck it's hot, my arse is burning on this seat.’
Seano and I agreed. We were miserable and bored because there was no surf.
I'd seen a new side to Mul the night before. He'd gone off with some blonde from the nearby girls’ school. They went to a hut out of our view, while the rest of us blokes smoked a joint, and the group of girls huddled together drunk and giggling. Although I was pretty stoned I remember the blonde shouting out. There were some muffled noises and Mul was obviously trying things on with her. They returned soon after. She looked pissed off and her friends noticed. They followed her into the dark and left without another word. We passed the joint to Mul, and when it ran out, we split and went home.
Mul wouldn't give me a straight answer the next morning when I asked what happened, so I left it. I knew that he could do some crazy stuff, hurting himself for hoots and glory, but after our piss-up I no longer knew where his limit was, or if he had one.
At the bus stop he started on complaining, as he always does, about how I was still hanging out with Joe, not so subtle with his change of topic. ‘He's such a rich fucken loser. I don't get ya, Oscar.’
I told him something like, ‘I don't talk to him much, and it's just that he doesn't have any mates cause you guys ignore him.’ Mul responded by broadening his shoulders, flexing his chest like a pigeon, and then he started laughing at me. Then Seano joined in.
Anyway, the rant about Joe gave Mul an idea. While we waited in the sun he told me to ask Joe to drive us down south to catch a big southerly swell. I texted him, and Joe was stoked to be included, even though he knew we were using him for his car.
Early Sunday morning Mul, Seano and I left my place while it was still dark and met at Joe's. His place was a huge dark shadow, four-storeys high. He was already packing the car. He couldn't hide his smile. He was so pleased to be coming with us.
This was my first real surf trip out of Sydney. We were travelling pretty far south to Aussie Pipe. The swell always came in cold even in summer, from Antarctica, and broke straight onto a shallow rock reef. With Mul and Seano there I knew I really had to prove myself, otherwise I'd never live it down.
Joe had something to prove too, that he was cool enough to hang out with us. He had a determined look in his eyes as he tore along the highway twenty ks over the limit with the four of us in his hatchback and our bodyboards in the boot. It clashed with his clean white fingernails and hunched shoulders.
We slowed down just the once to pick up drive-thru from Maccas. I paid for my own food, but Mul and Seano reckoned they had no money. They were angry with Joe
for being rich.
The first confrontation between Mul and Joe happened when we were leaving the Maccas carpark. Some cabbies were sitting on their car bonnets chatting. They must have been heading into the city to start their shift. Mul said something stupid like, ‘Do you think there are heaps of Aussies cruising around as cabbies in China?’ Joe laughed, and shook his head as he looked at Mul in the rear-view mirror. Mul fired up, and Seano, like the sheep that he is, with a sarcastic smirk on him you sometimes wish you could slap off, chimed in and said, ‘Nah, he's fucken right, Joe. It's like we're a minority or somethin’.’ Joe didn't say anything back, but Mul and Seano muttered to themselves and nodded.
During the awkward silence that followed we all stared out our windows. The highway shrunk to two lanes, and our anger petered out with it.
The closer we got, the more concerned we were about getting out of the car than about surfing, because the four of us made it smell like a sewer. It was a relief when we reached a dirt road because it felt like we were actually getting somewhere. We bumped over the rocks and potholes, and bush surrounded us. The shock absorbers were stunned by the change and pretty much useless.
After a while we pulled to the left and stopped behind a rusty old fence between trees and scrub. Someone had said Aussie Pipe was past an Aboriginal mission. A car door rested against a rotten piece of wood which was holding up the fence. Red spray paint said, keep out on the white panelling of the old door.
All I could see as I looked past the gate was a big grassy area, cleared of trees. It was like a campsite. Adults were sitting together around a small fire I could only distinguish by a trail of smoke, withering as it rose higher. Some girls sat further away at the edge of the bush, and a few boys were walking around with a dog trailing along behind. I didn't know we were coming here. We were intruding into a private space, a home. Then Mul said to me, ‘Time to man up, mate.’
The Life You Choose and That Chose You Page 10