by Fiona Capp
Ned answers Morrow’s questions while casually picking up his clothes and cramming them into his bag. ‘I really should leave,’ he says eventually. ‘And I’m sorry—’
Morrow seems in no hurry. ‘Where will you stay?’
‘The beach. It won’t be the first time.’
‘For God’s sake, man, just stay here. What’s your name?’
The words are out before Ned can stop himself. ‘And I know who you are, of course,’ he adds. ‘Everyone does.’
Morrow takes this as his due. He sweeps the torch around the shed again. ‘Looks like you’ve got what you need. Blankets, a bunk. It’s a warm night.’ He stops and listens to the symphony under the jetty. ‘Not a bad place to sleep.’
Ned has the feeling Morrow hasn’t finished with him yet, that there are more questions about the Wainwrights and the house he would like to ask. Or perhaps he wants to know more about him, what he’s up to.
The politician goes to leave, then turns back. ‘I’d like a word in the morning. Come up for breakfast at eight.’ It is not a request but an order.
Ned is tempted to salute. He forces a blithe smile. ‘Be happy to.’
He watches Morrow disappear into the darkness. There’s no getting out of this one. If Ned vanishes into the night, it might confirm any suspicions Morrow harbours. When he wrote the letter, he did his best to imply that knowledge of the deal between Morrow and Stone came from inside the politician’s office – but that doesn’t mean Morrow will believe it. His thoughts might lead him back to the meeting he had here with Stone. He might begin to wonder just how long Ned has been in the shed. Perhaps he noticed the toothbrush on the basin, how much at home Ned seemed.
He has no choice now, he will have to play along. Although he is a novice at this game of exerting influence, of twisting the truth and exploiting weaknesses, he is beginning to see how easily you can get caught up in it, how it can start to feel like the only way to conduct yourself.
Halfway up the cliff, Morrow stops and looks down. The night is so dark, the pale cube of the boatshed seems to float, unmoored, on the black soup of the bay. His gaze roves over the other boatsheds nearby. They all look empty, but how would you know? He wouldn’t have known his own was occupied if he hadn’t spotted a figure disappearing inside it. Yet another violation. Was there nowhere he could escape? He’d been working on the assumption that blackmail is the financial equivalent of homicide, a crime usually committed by a person known to the victim. Which was why he’d braced himself, however irrationally, to come face to face with Howard, and why it had almost been a relief to be confronted with this feckless Ned who’s been booted out of home by his wife.
Or so he claims. Morrow sits down on the nearest bench. If this Ned is who he says, if his arrival is just a coincidence, he won’t feel the need to bolt. If he does a runner, however, Morrow will have his answer. In the meantime, he can wait. He is in no hurry. The blustery northerly has dropped away, leaving the air moist and soft. Like a gentle whisper. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Not all enemies, though. You couldn’t do it with Wainwright. But this Ned is not in his league, no question of that. If, by some chance, he’s behind it, catching him out shouldn’t be difficult. It will just be a matter of watching and waiting, of holding him close.
12.
It is not what you would call a pretty drive. The highway lined with car yards, furniture showrooms, gaudy fast food joints and endless suburbs that reach into the foothills of the mountains – although calling them mountains is pushing it. A range of tall hills is more accurate. Angela stares out the passenger-side window. As the road begins to climb, pin-pricks of vapour appear on the glass. The car moves through patches of low cloud and everything blurs. Gradually, the spaces between the houses get larger and greener and soon there are more trees and birds, more paddocks, more cows.
Angela has seen it all before and knows what she is in for. When she thinks of the first time, it is not the sitting for nine hours a day but the walking that comes to mind: the walk from her cabin up to the meditation hall on top of the hill at four-thirty in the morning as the wake-up gong gently disturbed the frosty air; the walk down to the dining hall at the bottom of the hill afterwards – breakfast never tasted so good. And the circuit walk, three or four laps of the garden in the breaks between the sessions of sitting. She will miss that walking. The satisfaction of putting one foot in front of the other and being conscious of her connection with the ground beneath her feet. The routine will be the same, but she will be a different person in a different body.
Why do it again? everyone has been asking her. You can sit at home and meditate any time you like. They think she wants to retreat into her mind in order to escape her body, that meditation only happens in your head. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only those who have done this form of meditation understand and they are more concerned than anyone. Because they know what it will be like. If the first time she was running a marathon sitting still, this time will be like trying to shift a boulder with her little finger, or opening a book in Sanskrit and willing herself to comprehend every word.
In the months after the first retreat, she went eagerly to her meditation cushion each morning before sunrise. It was the most peaceful time of her day. Nothing was spoilt yet. Matthew was still asleep; only the birds were up. Every morning she was setting out on a journey. She was learning a new way of being, a new way of waking up to herself and the world.
Meditation, the teacher had said, was like conducting ‘mental surgery’. The students were excising the roots of their suffering. The metaphor only failed if you expected to leave the retreat radically transformed. This ‘mental surgery’ was something you had to practise every day for the rest of your life. It was not a one-off event. And you could not will it to happen. It happened of its own accord if you kept up the daily practice. Freud used the same analogy. The analyst was the surgeon coolly dressing the wound. And if the patient broke off analysis before the treatment was complete, the wound would remain open. It was something that Angela, in her own practice, had observed to be true.
‘Turn off here?’ Mai says.
Impossibly straight eucalypts, shaggy with bark, tower on either side of the road. The rain is so light it dances like snowflakes.
Angela studies the intersection. ‘Yes. Sorry.’ She smiles apologetically. She has hardly said a word for the hour-long drive and Mai must be wondering what she’s in for. In an hour or so, there won’t be any more talking, not once the Noble Silence begins. She had thought, the first time she came here, that the silence would be a welcome break from the hard listening she does in her job. As the days passed she realised how misguided she’d been. The silence amplified her old habits of mind, brought into sharp relief the ruts she was stuck in. It was another form of analysis, except that the dialogue was internal. She was putting herself on the couch.
The road winds for a short distance through the dripping bush until they see a sign on their left. Mai parks the car and they sit for a moment, exchanging nervous smiles.
Angela pats Mai’s knee. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘Of course we will.’
The first meditation session takes place that evening after a bowl of chunky vegetable soup and toast in the dining room. With the ripples of the gong still melting into the air, Mai pushes Angela up the path that winds through the landscaped compound dotted with cabins. At the top of the hill they reach the meditation hall, a large whitewashed building with curved, stuccoed walls and high windows. Behind it, the clear night sky is cloudy with stars.
Mai and Angela have permission to talk to each other when absolutely necessary, when it concerns Angela’s body or the chair. Technically, they are not even supposed to catch each other’s eye – or anyone else’s. Everyone walks with heads slightly bowed or gaze averted. It feels strange, almost rude. Mai hadn’t realised there would be all these rules.
On the porch outside the hall, she kneels to remove Angela’s
shoes and then takes off her own. Angela wheels herself inside and finds the spot at the back of the hall where their names have been placed and where they will sit for the next ten days. Once she is sure Angela is comfortable, Mai settles herself on her cushion, arranges the blanket over her shoulders and looks around. The women are on one side of the hall, the men on the other; everyone making last-minute adjustments to their positions in preparation for what lies ahead.
Mai’s eyes come to rest on a low dais at the front of the hall with a door behind it. When everyone has stopped shifting and fidgeting, the door opens. A lean woman in loose linen pants and a tunic, her long ashen hair pulled back in a ponytail, walks with great deliberation across the low stage to the cushions arranged at the centre. She sits and bows until her forehead rests on the floor. Mai shoots a furtive glance at Angela, wondering what she is supposed to do.
In the silence that follows, the teacher looks out over their heads, a faint smile on her face. The hall is full to its high rafters with hushed expectation. Much as she wants it to start, Mai doesn’t want this moment to end. There is kind of perfection in it. A perfection that she knows cannot last. She’s afraid of what comes next and where it will lead her and whether she will have whatever it takes to get through it. Nine hours a day of meditation and twenty-four hours a day on duty, attending to Angela. She can dance all day and night and do it all again the next, but this will be an endurance test unlike any other. Keeping mind and body perfectly still is in another league. She has a friend who busks as a living sculpture in the pedestrian mall in town. Sometimes she’s the Statue of Liberty, sometimes a baleful angel. Mai doesn’t know how her friend does it for hours on end. At least there’s no audience here waiting to pounce on the slightest twitch. Just the teacher and the retreat manager who does the teacher’s bidding: a self-effacing young Iraqi woman with eyes that have seen too much. Mai wonders if she has found the refuge she was looking for.
Before dinner, Mai spent time studying the noticeboard in the foyer of the dining room. Hardly a dining room, more like a school canteen with linoleum floors, basic tables and chairs, and a long bench where the crockery and pots of food are placed. There were notices about working bees and photographs showing how the place had been transformed in recent years. Not that long ago, the cabins sat on bare, muddy hillsides. No gardens, no paths. Photographs show the hall being built, a skeletal frame slowly acquiring walls, windows, an outer coating of stucco. Busy figures carrying beams, pushing wheelbarrows, hammering and painting. All volunteers, ‘old students’, as they’re called, performing a labour of love. Mai contemplates how the place functions. New students pay only what they can. They might pay nothing at all. They might pay by returning to volunteer in the kitchen. Even the teachers and the manager give their time freely. The assumption being that those who take will, in turn, give. Could the real world ever work this way?
The teacher starts to speak. To Mai’s disappointment, her voice is all too human, slightly quavery and self-conscious. Not the confident, soothing tones she had hoped would put to rest the confused chatter in her head.
Next to her, Angela listens but doesn’t listen. She knows what she has to do. Feel the faint sensation of her breath entering and leaving her nostrils. Not my breath, the breath. They will do this for the first three days – concentrate on the passage of the breath in and out of the body, focusing on the area below the nostrils and above the upper lip. She is conscious, as she never was before, of being able to breathe of her own free will, unlike some of her quad friends who depend on a machine to ventilate their lungs. This time around, she will savour each breath she takes.
She is keeping an eye on Mai and is impressed by her air of calm. Many of the younger students seem to find it hard to stay still, but Mai sits with as much grace as she moves. Composure, though, can be deceptive; you can put it on like armour – not to protect yourself from the outside but to hold the chaos in. But you can only do it for so long. The repressed always returns. It’s just a matter of how and when.
Light rain has been falling since they arrived, drawing a curtain between the retreat and the outside world. Low, misty clouds hover just above their umbrellas as they crunch across the drizzle-smeared path from the hall to their cabins to the dining room and then back to the hall.
At first, Angela’s mind wouldn’t settle. It roiled with thoughts of work, the operation and mostly of Matthew, whom Mai had found asleep in the front garden of the flat the morning before they left. She would have dashed straight past him had it not been for his bright orange sock sticking out from under a bushy camellia. She did a double-take. There was a man in a trench coat, lying on his stomach, his head on a pillow of leaves. He had that crash-landed look of someone in deep sleep, Mai told Angela – except that he was so still she was worried he might be dead. When she examined him more closely she could just make out a faint rise and fall in his shoulders and back.
Mai wondered if he lived in one of the flats, if he’d lost his keys. From the reek of him, he’d been on the booze. She tentatively poked his leg. The man twitched and grunted. Mai poked him again, this time harder. He flapped an arm in her direction and drawled, ‘Go way.’
‘Excuse me.’ Her tone was so feebly polite she almost laughed. ‘You can’t stay here.’
The man rolled over to face her. On his forehead there was a dried gash, as if he’d had a fall or been struck by something. His eyes opened, one less than the other because of the bruising above it.
Mai told him she would call an ambulance. The man protested and crawled out from under the bush. He was not as old as she’d thought, somewhere in his thirties probably. He was wearing a tie.
‘Do you live here?’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘I want to see Angela.’
‘Are you a patient?’
He laughed bitterly. ‘Can you arrange it?’
Only then did it dawn on Mai whom she might be talking to. She told him she would be back in a moment and rushed inside. After raising the lounge-room blinds, she asked Angela to look out the window.
Matthew was picking leaves from his jumper and brushing down his coat. When he looked up, Angela saw the gash on his forehead. He raised one eyebrow, the way he used to when they shared a joke. Dark stubble shadowed his cheeks. His stomach hung like a sack of sand from his once-powerful frame.
It had been over two years since they’d spoken. The few times he’d turned up unannounced wanting to see her, she had refused. There was nothing to discuss. She wanted him out of her life. After her accident, Ned had urged her to press charges. But Angela couldn’t say for sure what had happened. And she didn’t have the will or the strength. She didn’t believe he had meant to hurt her. She supposes now it made her feel noble – she had been wronged, yet she spared him.
Angela steeled herself and went out to him. ‘You have to go.’
His eyes swept over her and her chair with fresh horror. ‘Oh God, how you must hate me.’
He would draw her into the whirlpool of his self-loathing if she let him. ‘I don’t hate you, Matt.’
To truly hate him she would’ve had to love him. Whatever that meant. Romantic love was a pathology. The truth was she should never have married him. Apart from those early years before his injury and the odd, brief truce afterwards, their marriage had been a muster of ugly, escalating skirmishes, a battlefield with no hope of honour or victory for either of them. And now his punishment was the sight of her, the knowledge of what he had done.
He took a step towards her. ‘Please Ange, please.’
Mai was about to move between them when Angela motioned for her to stay put. He looked like he’d been sleeping rough. If she turned him away now, God knows what he might do to himself. Her first patient for the day was due to arrive any moment. She would have to do a deal. She told him that if he left straight away and stayed sober for the next two weeks, she would see him again, just once, that was all she could promise. She would try to persuade him to get the help he need
ed. They would talk like mature adults, and then they would say their goodbyes.
Angela waits for Mai to finish arranging the blanket over her shoulders. She nods and smiles to indicate everything is fine. She closes her eyes, shutting out the hall and everyone in it. There is no point trying to force the swirling particles of thought to settle. If she watches and waits, gravity will do its work, the sediment will sink.
Now that almost a week has passed, they have reached the stage in the meditation that she has been longing for, yet dreading. The hunt for sensations, the systematic body scan. She remembers the enormous effort and concentration it took. Often, the sensations were subtle, barely perceptible until she tuned into them. A faint tingling, itchiness, crawling or numbness. Then there were the ‘gross sensations’, the strong pains that threatened to drown out everything else with their jarring static. But there were also rewards, of a sort: an intermittent fizzing, like light rain falling through her body, wave after delicious wave. The important thing was not to crave the pleasurable sensations and not to react with aversion to the painful ones. She should simply note them and move on.
Every new pain, the teacher said, had something useful to teach her. By sitting with her pain and not reacting, she was learning how to deal with other forms of pain in life – emotional and psychological. Pain that most people tended to obsessively rehash or push away. This was why she had come here in the first place. Because the philosophy connected so beautifully with psychoanalysis. The meditation would take students back to the root of things. It focused on bodily sensations because this was where all cravings and aversions, all yearning and suffering, began.