by Philip Salom
Again, some writer shits on a person who is working on their behalf. Sounds like a man.
And she has not addressed the suggestions.
Almost immediately she remembers the pithy response from T S Eliot when the definition was put to him that most editors are failed writers. Eliot’s reply: Perhaps, but so are most writers. Brilliant. It helped her when she tried to write, long ago, and realised that, though she was good, she wasn’t good enough. She is a better finder than maker – she discerns where the text is strongest and where it must concentrate. The raw text is unwell and she is its doctor.
So. Someone must have talked up Shia to the last person they should have – herself. All the more reason, therefore, to discuss the manuscript’s faults. Not have this un-nuanced bloody email exchange with its crossover raves and crossings out and endlessly vexatious paragraphs.
A new email arrives on her screen.
Without any comment Shia agrees to the big shifts in her time line.
Towards the end of the day Elizabeth risks reinforcing her observations about the characters. Shia, she types, I assume you read my thoughts regarding the three sect leaders at the centre of Collectors. Ring me. A spunky lot and I’m impressed you’ve made them so. Verbally, that is … (I know psychological characterisation isn’t your main concern …) but it seems to me these women (interesting that they are women, rare in sects) are like the Bronte sisters. Smart, headstrong and diversely talented, brilliant, but isolated. By choice in this case, cut off from the world in order to totalise their control over the group. They are dangerous. But why so samey? There’s too much going on for them to be sounding so much the same. It’s not psychological, it’s the texture, the liveliness. We must discuss them.
Shia emails back in five minutes. Elizabeth’s kettle hasn’t had time to boil.
Just three versions, she replies, of the same sort of characterisation, is that what you’re saying? I never thought of that. I could make it more so, on purpose, couldn’t I? Make it creepier? Or vary them more?
Elizabeth again: Vary them. At the moment, whenever they speak, these three women, they’re not sisters after all, whenever they speak (to each other or to others) they sound like … each other. Keep that incestuous kind of pact they have, which is terrific. I mean, parallel to them manipulating the children and younger adults, they have this sexually complex tangle of their own. Are they playing out their own sexual tensions on the followers?
Shia’s next email arrives before she can finish.
So, I’ve missed a few tricks?
It sits there, alone and – incredibly – brief. Elizabeth stares at it, almost laughs. Somehow she has shut her up. She responds:
Motives: not always upfront or even ‘evil’. My mother was indifferent and irresponsible and drove me crazy. She ended up wanting more power in the ‘cult’ – she was Narcissistic, blind, yes, controlling. She believed in her name of Boundless Lustre! She expected love and therefore obedience. Even so, it wasn’t aggression, it was entitlement. She was up herself. You could keep in the back of your mind: these followers were not stupid or damaged, they were Narcissists.
When Shia asks for more of this mother-daughter detail, Elizabeth realises she is shedding any thoughts of writing it herself. Not such a good feeling.
Still. There is something Shia should use, not the melodramatic and psychological frights of gurus but the insidious spread of solipsism among their followers. Their attentions too often devoid of empathy. Empathy, such a contemporary issue even if a few years ago it was rarely discussed. Talking about her personal fallout from the Orange Blight, as Elizabeth once called it, comes back to catharsis. She needs it, so she tells it:
For six weeks of her school holidays Elizabeth travelled down to live in the ashram, to be briefly one of the Orange kids in Beedelup, playing near the lake under the karri trees, watching the adults meditate and talk earnestly and even have sex in the open, casually, for all the children to view if they wanted to, and what nearly pubescent child isn’t curious? Except when she saw her own mother naked on all fours with a man slapping up behind her.
A few days later, her mother was squatting on a man and crying out as she tried to come. Elizabeth did not want to see this. She was angry and spent as much time avoiding her mother as going to her. Hardly a happy state, it was scary. Even if the other adults were warm and happy, who were they really? Was she a communal child or an abandoned one? Some other children felt the same way.
‘You’ll have to go back by yourself if you want to keep doing this silly being-a-gymnast thing,’ her mother had said. ‘My training under the Bhagwan is too important. The Bhagwan is coming here and I must be prepared.’
‘Why did you even have me if you can’t be bothered being my mother?’
‘But I didn’t have you, you were an accident, darling, just a flash in the pan, as it were! I was never any good at taking pills.’
‘You mean sticking to a routine.’
Her 12-year-old bullshit meter had much to work on with her mother.
‘Routines are for losers, darling.’
And she stared at her disappointing daughter.
One of the several dogs on the property ran across in front of them, wet and sandy from swimming in the lake. A second dog, mottled and mongrel, skidded around the corner of the building and chased after it.
‘No, dear, it’s work on ourselves that matters. And that’s what I’m doing. When you get older you will realise how important this really is.’
‘And what do you think I’m doing? Every day.’
‘Just the body, sweetie, just the body. You are learning a discipline, of course, I admit that. That’s good, but it’s also a terrible limitation. I need my mind to be free.’
Her mind meant that much to her. Years before the Bhagwan she had enjoyed sitting topless and tanned in the full sunlight, with Elizabeth suckling from her breasts. She was aware of nature, of the sun, of a special, unearthly love in Elizabeth’s eyes. It had to be more than thirst. Even sexual, of course, in the occasional orgasm she felt rising like Kundalini in her spine, come of her own flesh and blood sucking her nipples. Such a circular event is life. And from people watching? No, she was not as ordinary as that, she was spiritual.
More irony, then. To rephrase old Wordsworth: The Child is mother of the Woman?
Sometimes the Bhagwan said he didn’t believe in God. It was all up for grabs. Or had they got that wrong? He had left the planet to his vicious sidekick Ma Sheela, the devil who had earlier groomed then doomed the ashram in Pemberton. Ma Sheela, who then tried to kill the Bhagwan’s physician with poison in Oregon before she upped her ambition by trying to poison an entire township with salmonella, and nearly succeeded, just to prevent them voting for their preferred councillors in local elections.
By then, Elizabeth had a degree in English Literature, her own daughter was born and her mother had disappeared.
Even now the old mother prides herself on her sagacity. But to have been called a loser – so categorically – hurt Elizabeth in a way her mother never understood, never gave a minute to understand. This attitude of hers is quieter now, it hardly speaks its presence, or if so it is merely to patronise Elizabeth, which is ironic, even futile, considering the wreckage the old woman lives inside, the house crammed with objects and rubbish, the decaying carpet underneath.
But to have been called it … And here is Elizabeth attending to the old judge. She knows how this drag on her time will only increase; as age and increasingly poor health, possibly dementia, bruise the Amitabha in dull phrases and wound the poor old fruit of her body.
As several days pass without a reply, Elizabeth remembers the story of Max Perkins, legendary editor at Scribner’s, telling Thomas Wolfe he needed a line or two, or maybe a paragraph, to create a stronger transition between two scenes of Look Homeward, Angel – the original manuscript of which was so big it was delivered in a truck.
Two weeks passed in silence and Wolfe suddenly con
tacted him, announcing the delivery by taxi of the required transition, another 20,000 words!
Elizabeth does not want that.
She has in the past spent days text-editing a poor work of trivial writing or a highly competent work of no real interest. Just not sexy. Never a bad sentence, never a great one either.
Elizabeth used to hold editing workshops for the Writers’ Centre and once, on the big blank whiteboard, she accidentally wrote Story is a cumpulsion. She couldn’t stop laughing. There it was, a slip of the pen – the foreplay-arousal-orgasm model of the short story.
She told them even dreams aren’t stories yet we tell them every night. Perhaps they had heard of that bloke who cut dreams into their fragments and then asked a workshop to reassemble them, edit them, back into “the story”. So hard it was too hard. And no two the same. Stories are always going somewhere, and the fact is, we aren’t. Like the dreams, we are fragmented, changing, returning, repeating.
When she goes outside to empty a rubbish bag into her wheelie her mood is broken. She notices the neighbour watching her through the broken fence and laughing. Just standing there, side-on, in a check shirt and long black trousers. The perverse thing is, creeps don’t fail at being creeps. Perhaps she should say something. He has remained quiet for weeks, just the way he looks, then silence.
She walks back inside, but when she looks out again he is standing halfway in from the fence. He is standing in her garden. Worse, he seems to know she is watching him. Taunting her, like a small-town bully, and smirking.
Then he turns away and is gone.
That night she dreams of him. Darkness as always in the backyard near the man’s fence. Something stirs in the shrubs on her side and she jumps away from it, fearing a snake or a dog waiting to attack and her being too close. The noise increases into a terrible scratching, and crunching somewhere in the blackness struggling up in front of her the neighbour, both eyes blackened, one long cut on his forehead, the blood which ran from his nose dried over his mouth and his cheeks where he has wiped it with his wrist.
Elizabeth does have a contradiction: her strong brown eyes are weak. Myopia. She is having trouble reading the much photocopied song sheets for the choir she has only attended twice, as if straining to see the notes tightens her voice, and the notes are fading in front of her. The choir. Another more or less abandoned venture.
Eye trouble is affecting her screen work, too, the endless work of her real work.
The day of her appointment to see the optometrist again.
The thing is, she tells him, since she saw him last she has kept wondering whether she should risk having laser surgery just to … relieve her of glasses? Her annoyingly persistent mother is suggesting it, so she’s come in to establish for herself, once and for all, at the very least to shut her up. ‘And now (what does she call him?) a friend … has stuck his nose in as well, says I should go ahead.’
‘Ah. Everyone’s an expert.’
‘He showed me his DVD of them … doing it.’
‘Did he really?’
‘It made me feel queasy. Slicing each eye off like a soft-boiled egg. Anyway, in fact, this friend (the word sounds all wrong) had it done and it didn’t go as planned.’
The optometrist is a cheery man with a lot of easy charm. He is wearing glasses.
‘As far as I’m concerned, Elizabeth, your short-sightedness isn’t a problem that requires an operation, because you’re happy enough with corrective glasses. But they will need to get thicker and heavier as you get older. If laser surgery works, and it usually does, not always, you can dispense with the drag of wearing glasses’ – he shrugs – ‘and then why not? I can’t be bothered having it myself.’
His hair wavers when he laughs.
When Trevor gets home carrying two bags of groceries she follows him into the kitchen. Before he has begun putting things away she tells him about The Creep’s intrusion.
‘I think he’s trying to intimidate me,’ she says. ‘Just because he isn’t doing anything doesn’t mean he won’t. Even if he doesn’t, he’s getting into my head. Which is exactly what he wants, has been all along. Just when I thought he’d gone to ground. What did you actually say to him that day?’
‘What? That time through the fence?’
‘I know you did, you said something to shut him up, I just couldn’t hear it. You said he went away happy. As if. …’
‘It’s in the eyes, Elizabeth. The stare,’ he laughs, exaggerating his voice. ‘Nothing really.’
He waits, but she isn’t happy.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Of course I do’.
‘I told him I can be a real cunt when I want to be.’
‘Huh. Didn’t work for long, did it. Can you be?’
‘What does matter is that I told him. And that I have friends who are bigger problems than me, and they are ex-cops. I take it he knew what that meant.’
‘I think he needs to be told again,’ she says. ‘I don’t want him taunting me like that. He might be capable of anything. I’m starting to feel uneasy.’
Despite the new author, Elizabeth is taking medical time out for her mother. She has made an appointment with an orthopaedic specialist to discuss her mother’s erratic mobility. Now her mother keeps insisting she has no social contact who isn’t a bloody doctor of some sort. The specialist determines that her hips are a worry and so are her knees and, though it isn’t his area, certainly not helping is the deterioration of muscle tissue in both her legs. She tells him she used to play tennis and for years performed strenuous physical meditations so what’s this nonsense about her fitness? When did she last do daily exercise, he asks her, and she tells him she has always done a lot of walking and even the occasional bit of dancing and, when he asks when that was, she becomes grumpy and tells him he’d better take her word for it.
‘Maybe it was the tennis. An old injury?’
On the way to do some food shopping Elizabeth says, ‘Well, that wasn’t a lot of help.’ Her mother says the man was not only misguided, he was over-assertive. No, says Elizabeth, she meant her mother being so bloody-minded, wasting the opportunity by turning it into an expensive denial session. ‘What was all that about tennis? Remember, Mum,’ she says, ‘how you pooh-poohed my gymnastics as a boring, routine body thing, nothing as free and fine as your mind? Look at how that turned out. Your body, I mean.’
She’d never have said that to her daughter about gymnastics.
Well, she had.
No, she hadn’t.
At the shopping centre her mother decides she is coming in, using her stick this time, not that terrible walking thing. They argue. She insists. Inside it is busy, shoppers with trolleys and baskets and staff re-shelving for the evening. In the third aisle Mrs Sermon slips over and stumbles onto a trolley full of toilet paper. ‘Oh fuck!’ she growls, down on her side with one hand grasping the trolley. Elizabeth grabs the trolley just before it tips and spills the packages all over her mother.
The staff member is a small Indian man who leans over to help her up.
‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ she wails. She pokes at him with her walking stick which she has managed to keep a grip on.
‘And don’t you touch me either.’
This directed to Elizabeth who is helping regardless. Her mother wobbles and flounders like a wobbegong shark cast up, mottled and unmanageable, on dry land. Until a tall, tanned person presumably not an Indian stops to help.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I suppose I could get up but I’ll need a little help.’
She is all smiles as he reaches down.
Between Elizabeth and the man they lift her up, and she thumps her stick down onto the floor and leans on it as if shoving it down a hole. Now the smiles are no more. It hurts and there is no way to pretend it doesn’t. The walker, when reversed, provides a seat to rest on, so in future they must always use it. She tells her mother to wait there, not move, she is going to fetch the walker from the car and her
mother will just have to put up with it.
How it falls to the dutiful daughters. Not exclusively but usually.
On the weekends Trevor drives to the boathouse. Whenever he begins rowing, his childhood returns. As a kid he sometimes spent his school holidays on a farm that was, luckily, on his mother’s side of the family. His father? Away, as always, on his field trips. After he had been shown how to manage the oars and keep the old rowing boat upright and moving more or less straight ahead, Trevor was free to untie the boat, get in, push off and row upriver, against the slow current. This meant he could row with the current on the way home, just in case he was too tired.
His rowing now is filled with its own peace, and rhythm, and the sound of the hull passing through water, along with the past memory of his father, in a good mood, rowing upriver to fish. Therefore Trevor, rowing on the gleaming water with two oars and two states of mind, is double-dipping. The pun makes him smile even if his father does not.
The slow-moving water. The peace. The banks curve back and around like any river left to its natural development. Above him the magpies carol and sometimes cry, small cranes lift above the water and lodge, shakily, in the higher branches. Ducks smooth past, these neck-and-beak birds defining the word “glide”, besides the twitchy zigzagging waterhens, black-feathered and red-beaked, and the dabchicks and other species he isn’t sure of and – because it has been a long warm spring and summer – the endless bush flies. On warmer days he knows flies will be clustering on his back.
Even when rowing against the flow his right leg remains untroubled by the exercise. Both legs bracing against the double stroke, and the even lean forward and pullback on the oars, means his body remains in symmetrical activity. Keep the legs straight and knees flexing back and through, back and through. The boat skimming ahead.
Not even rain discourages him, falling around him, pockmarking the water, soaking him as he leans and releases.