by Philip Salom
Elizabeth enjoys telling this story this way. Opening the body to see what’s inside is how she thinks of it, the process.
‘You don’t have any?’ she asks. ‘Children?’
He pauses for longer than expected. As if he has never been asked before.
‘No,’ he says.
Just to be safe, Elizabeth leaves the small kitchen light on overnight. In case he wants to, well, have a drink of water. Though there is water in the downstairs bathroom. Anyway, just to be sure. And so her house isn’t left in complete darkness. It is very dark at night.
She lies alone listening for any unexpected sounds.
It occurs to Elizabeth that she has missed talking like this, forgotten its pleasures. In this spirit of exchange, she will have to tell Trevor about her years with Ian, the man she took to complement her coffee and cigarettes and then her life. He thought he was a husband, she thought she was a wife. A tradie and a bookworm. Beginning from when she was at uni, when she became pregnant. Knocked up by a carpenter, as if she were a sideboard.
Her bedroom door is shut and Gordon is inside with her, something she hadn’t anticipated, given she usually sleeps with the door open and the cheerful dog moves freely here or there in the house. It was OK with the girl from Guangzhou. At first Gordon scratches at the door, wanting to go downstairs to visit Trevor. She makes him sit on her bed and as she strokes him she listens to the sound this makes, impossible to describe, of her hand caressing his coat. A sound she loves, leaning in against him to hear it.
The shower downstairs is running. He is under the water, naked, somewhat overweight. She could creep down and do a reverse Psycho. Slash, slash. Does he have a towel? Ah, well, that’s his problem, unless he comes back up.
What an odd evening. So far she likes him, feels trust has been growing immediately he began moving his things in. Strangers often stayed in the house when she was a girl, her mother’s lovers, friends. Orange men, women, after all that dynamic meditation during the afternoon. The sannyasin. Veils and all clothes orange until they shifted into maroon for whatever reason. Rending the veil, to meet what exactly …? She never quite knew how to take them, or trust them.
Their guru sat in Poona surrounded by US and Australian worshippers. When the family lived in Fremantle her young mother went looking for enlightenment with the Orange People, the sannyasin of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Many of them lived in a commune, or, if they worked, spent as much time there as possible. They were renouncing their worldly passions. Elizabeth was 14. She watched the light passing through her mother’s diaphanous orange clothing, over and around her mother’s body, her mother’s tall, endlessly moving silhouette, often naked inside the see-through cloth. Her mother was slim. Her mother was having sex.
Everyone was having sex. Sometimes with people they knew.
The sannyasin all dressed in orange. They were famous for it, and laughed at.
As a teenager Elizabeth and her mother lived in Fremantle close to, not amid, the Rajneeshee commune. Fourteen years old, trainee gymnast, schoolkid. The routines she performed every day in her gymnastic endurance were beyond the merely personal – they were universal and heartless. Fremantle had been undergoing its own rigour. The council painted the old harbour town in gauche pastels and divided loyalties in preparation for the America’s Cup, and smooth-talking Alan Bond had been celebrated and reviled and, as far any anyone knew, still owed shitloads of money to local businesses. Bond’s dictum, one sannyasin said, belonged at the rock bottom of simple: never pay a debt until, and unless, they take you to court and are likely to beat you. In other words, the sannyasin said (and he was a lawyer) the man is a complete shit and should be in jail. It came to be.
Elizabeth’s favourite male sannyasin was called Mali whose new name, meaning “gardener”, belied his reality as an architect in civilian life. He laughed, as he often laughed, resting a hand on her shoulder and telling her about the movement. On Sunday the group was involved in the various and quite different meditations the Bhagwan had developed for his followers. Most seemed to prefer the dynamic meditation, or it seemed so to her, perhaps because of the lurid imagery this group action left.
They kicked and jumped and leapt up and down like hyper kangaroos who’d lost all forward direction. And, because they were dressed in such thin clothing without underwear, she could see the men bumping and flopping in jumpy bulges under the clothing, and the women’s tits – it looked as if it hurt – bumping and jolting. The men, their bouncing cocks and sometimes their erections; some small, some big; until it became embarrassing. She was embarrassed. But they kept at it. Earnestly. They screamed for catharsis.
From her point of view, after years of exacting practices and routines, keeping the body compact and highly focussed, they looked like apes set loose in a lounge room. They were not gymnasts. Nor were all of them were as good-humoured as Mali, she had come to realise, and some took themselves so seriously, she had heard from her mother, they told the newer men, and the women especially, how they, not the newbies, were advanced souls. Yes, they had been around and around many times. Oh then, she thought, they are advanced. Egotists. What happened to renunciation?
She and Mali were sitting side by side on the old bench beside the main hall the meditations were performed in. They could hear shouting and singing coming from the sannyasin group inside.
‘Your mother is quite a woman,’ Mali had said. He, as darkskinned now as his name, from all the outdoor work in WA’s relentless sunlight. Skin cancer was in God’s hands, it seemed. And gardening was what God needed, now, the weekend work of hoeing and planting vegetables for the endless supply of vegetarian food, steaming platters of which, in Elizabeth’s view, the sannyasin ate their way through like furious orange caterpillars. Peculiar when she thought about them with her friends, yet normal when she simply sat there, as she often did, among them.
His beard remained untrimmed, which Elizabeth liked; the wispy everywhereatonce of his facial hair looked sexier and cooler than that of the local folk-singers and more recently the daggy bush-band members who performed at public functions in Freo. Shovel beards. How these contrasts made any kind of sense was beyond her. Fremantle had become a mixed bag of lifestyles since the re-painting and tidying up for the America’s Cup. She did not consciously regard the similar beards of the homeless men she occasionally saw in the parks.
‘There’s no pressure on you to join the Rajneeshees,’ Mali had said, ‘but if you do we’ll find a name for you.’
Like her mother – Amitabha, she thinks.
Having a Sanskrit name would absolutely improve her peer love at school. She could guess the extra passion it would put into their bullying: a form of dynamic meditation her mother would not imagine. But then, her mother was oblivious to most things not immediately concerning herself. Having a mother wafting around Fremantle in Orange garb and picking you up from school, the rare times she did that, was confronting enough. Though Orange People were increasingly common in Fremantle, they were a sex cult, a guru sex cult, everyone said at school. Cool and uncool at the same time.
Her mother was bully enough. Her mother wanted more power in the movement, not for power itself, but to impress her wonderfulness upon everyone. Her mother expected love and, possibly, in a desiring reflection from the big man, her share of worship.
Except her mother had also decided to renounce the worldly nonsense of washing and deodorising. She stank. Social mixing with the plebs, whether in the school car park or the shops, was therefore a standoff for more reasons than her religious differences. A few of Elizabeth’s friends had already left school and taken up exotic names (so cool as long as you’re not at school) and, unless they made a law against it, attracted a succession of lanky undressed Orange men. They were under-age even if they were quasi-children of a quasi-god who had a wavy beard, mesmerising eyes and a sense of humour. Also, in years to come, ninety Rolls-Royces.
Mali enjoyed dynamic meditation as much as the rest of them and
she felt shy sitting with him, talking, except she liked him the way she liked her father: working at something direct, honest, hands-on, a physical job. And, after all, not unlike architecture. She never thought of him as a bullshitter.
Why hadn’t he become a Christian? asked Elizabeth. Even her mum had given that a go. The real RC, she was. Loved the rituals. Had to keep her clothes on.
Mali smiled at this girl. He moved closer to her, their thighs touching.
‘I was never interested in Christianity,’ he explained, ‘but it works for many. Which means there is something deep about Jesus. What he was,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t the meek and humble moral man of God. Intelligent people didn’t wear that, not any more, not for themselves, though the general idea of a moral life was there in Christ by example – for people who never read philosophers!’
He laughed.
No. Well, until he knew any better he had thought myth and religion were about truth and meaning, and how the world was made, that stuff. Now he thought they were speaking about power. The paradox was: Christ, with all his personal charisma, must have been like the Bhagwan, except greater, lived and then died powerless against the Romans. The only power the Church had fed its followers was Resurrection, eternal-life bullshit. Suffer now and then you’ll be fine. That was just giving in, didn’t she think? A sign of defeat and so a sign of weakness. Most people should learn how to live with each other, to suffer and to think about how they live before their lives waste away. Never just throw it in.
‘They waste away?’ This made Elizabeth jump. ‘Why?’
‘They have a problem with sex,’ he said to her. ‘The Bhagwan speaks always of love. From the heart. It’s the Sufi way.’
But he was staring at her mother.
Her mother, the embarrassing one. She had been dancing topless and now she sat in the garden area with her orange merely draped in her lap.
‘And towards the heart,’ he had said, looking into Elizabeth’s eyes. ‘Amitabha. She attracts desire.’
‘She has a great body. Is that a Sufi thing?’
Mali thought this girl was too young to be so cynical.
‘It’s embarrassing to have you kind of rub this in my face,’ she added. ‘It doesn’t look like love, it looks like no-rules sex. It’s not normal.’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘ We are the normal people, we have learnt that so-called normal people are not, at all, they are insane in certain ways. Or robots. They can’t see. They want to be told what to do, or they want power, to push people around.’
‘And she doesn’t? She pushes me around. She pushes everyone around. There’s a lot of coercion going on here. And a lot of being told what to do, Mali, just that it’s not by force. You think you’re not conforming? To the Bhagwan …’
‘You’re very articulate, Elizabeth.’
‘I’m at high school, Mali. I’m trying to work out my values.’
But Mali was besotted. And there was no avoiding her mother, she was everywhere. He said Amitabha was supposed to mean Boundless Lustre. Elizabeth laughed. Boundless Lust, more like. Her mother seemed to be with a different man every time Elizabeth managed to find her. She could not resist the swirling cloth and beads and the energies of the Orange flock: more to the point, the men couldn’t resist her. Her mother had no limits. She slept around and meditated on a level of forgetfulness far above normal life.
According to her mother, the Bhagwan stated that they have to work through the blockages in their sexual energies, that women are faced with both catharsis and generous supplies of male antidote. Hence the fucking. No holding back, never. Her mother admitted she loved fucking, it made her a better person, closer to God; closer to you, too, my darling. Her daughter shrank.
‘What if the men want sex with me,’ she’d asked. ‘I’m only 14.’
‘Don’t be silly, that’s not …’
‘Some of them have been a bit touchy-feely. Hugging and kissing. I’m not stupid, Mum, and I’m not making it up.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly, they like you because you’re my daughter.’
Even a 14-year-old had to gasp at this. Especially a 14-year-old.
Her mother wouldn’t hear of any problem. No. (She was deaf as well as blind.) They were renouncing orthodoxies, ordinary stupid same-same people, boring everyday life, for bouts of group dancing, elevated bliss-creep (from jumping exhaustion, drugs, the pleasures of the chosen), taiko-drum-sized-cooking-pot meals and the eternal class of superior beings.
Except, for young Elizabeth, sitting or wandering amongst them, they all blurred in together. All the sannyasin looked the same. Every one of them. They were not special. She was the nadir of an irony. They knew about Elizabeth’s rare neurological condition of prosopagnosia, and yet it surprised them, these humble and not so humble seekers after God, to realise this condition rendered her so face-blind she couldn’t distinguish one sannyasin from another. They were rendered equal. Prosopagnosia had reduced them to the same level of advancement. Their souls were all the same.
If God and the Bhagwan and her father had sat side by side in the same orange robes, she could not tell them apart. Instead, she had to memorise them by other means. When they were all long-haired and bearded (men) and all long-haired and blossoming (women) they were astonishing similar, impossible for her to tell apart. Her mother’s voice had always been the main identifier and then, one new difference, her hair was close-cropped, sometimes shorn.
Elizabeth told Mali she had a private joke about this blank-face thing. He asked what and she told him: ‘God has prosopagnosia too,’ she said, ‘all His children are equal, they are the same.’ No one was any better than another.
‘You are a chip off the old block,’ he said, somewhat startled. Given he meant her mother, this sounded decidedly inept to Elizabeth.
She told him she at least knew what irony was. And how it was brought on by having a mother.
She noticed he stopped laughing.
So it was her father, the tradesman the cult looked down upon, who had taken care of her. His work may have been in joinery but he was not a joiner. In fact, he said the Orange lot were not into selfrenunciation either, just self-indulgence. These educated people, mostly professionals, treated anyone who wasn’t a Rajneeshee with disdain. He was a mere tradesman, his kind of work/life a discipline the sannyasin were not inclined to value and would fail to achieve. Every morning he rose early and went to work regardless of weather or personal vision or thoughts of any fucking guru.
He would say to Elizabeth, if a room full of intelligent people insisted the Bhagwan’s games were rigorous enough to grant them union with God, why wouldn’t they work hard, as Christ the fisherman, the carpenter, had; and focus, being patient and to sufficiently without ego, in order to become enlightened through work of that kind?
The care he took involved picking Elizabeth up from her gymnastics lessons, and taking her to performances and weekend camps, while she trained and trained. Until she literally grew out of it. No tall gymnasts.
Her mother hardly noticed, though enough to say How nice, dear sometimes, and How bourgeois at others.
Then too soon after uni Elizabeth announced she was pregnant. Her little girl was having a baby! There was no offer from her mother to help. This pregnancy, her mother had said, is something Elizabeth shouldn’t have let happen. As if her own example ever helped.
As before, her mother’s quest came first, and Elizabeth’s anger followed.
After the Orange People split up or flew to America her mother packed off to Victoria because she hadn’t time for babies, even her own grandbaby. Far away geographically and even further personally, her mother said she was between lives.
So yes, Elizabeth does know about sects.
An ambulance siren seems to lean towards the street then veer off, and while Elizabeth lies straight and stationary in her bed an injured person similarly prone is tilted left and right by G forces inside the lit vehicle. Life is seeking some direction but i
s indecisive.
The siren diminishes and thins out entirely. Her street, another street, any street where trees do, and houses don’t, move in the wind and rain but become less with any person lost.
She realises she has been drifting. Back to WA where her memories seem only to have one season: summer. Summer outside and inside the warm house inside her dreams. Perth’s usual weather, or maybe it is something about her. Nothing sentimental, or idealistic, nothing like that, something generic. Except for her mother.
The house is silent.
One new customer presumes to tell him – the bookseller as passive audience of one – that a super-ministry run by Dutton is a great idea. That the Government needs to stop things (the man almost says everything). Trevor is just hoping the miserable sod will buy a book. The man chats away as if programmed to stand in shops and pronounce on such matters, as no doubt he does (and does with no doubt). Trevor says Dutton the ex-Queensland copper reminds him of the primary-school kid working up a huge effort in a dull voice just to make a simple-minded statement.
Only days earlier a young man dressed like a share-house floor came into the shop and asked him to sell copies of Social Alternatives. Trevor said sorry, no. He explained that he chose whatever political works or posters were displayed and wasn’t going to read through every Social Alternatives they brought in.
‘Why not?’ objected the young man. ‘Are you a fucking Tory?’
‘The word “no”,’ said Trevor, ‘is not a political persuasion.’
Two more emails arrive with a ping from returntime@gmail .com, an address that disclaims identity even as the email itself is cryptically personal. The writer seems over-familiar with Trevor and even keener to know about the shop. It occurs to Trevor this might be from one of Jonesy’s confused customers. The messages are intrusive, they ask about turnover. An offer for the shop? Or is there a very strange 12-year-old who hasn’t yet leant about online porn?