‘Five years,’ I said, blushing, putting my head in my hands. ‘Shoot me, someone.’
‘In AA we have a saying along the lines of “to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result is madness”.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Believe me. That’s why I’m doing the long drive.’
‘I’m going to play you Joni Mitchell,’ he replied. ‘A track for a girl who is heading off on a long drive through California while she’s stuck on someone.’
Oh will you take me as I am / Strung out on another man / California I’m coming home.
As I prepared for my long drive I thought of some of the others I’d done. Of the car trips that had imprinted themselves on me. I remembered that when my mum got with my dad, we spent our Christmases along the wild coast between Apollo Bay and Portland. I could remember the first time I went there, when Finn and I were still little.
I realise now that I was with Mum and Dad on their first real holiday together and my memory of that time is infused with the love that was growing between them. Not every child is lucky enough to see her parents fall in love. I saw them fall out of love as well, and when I was a teenager things ended for them. Now I’m an adult I have trouble remembering the details of that sad time, but I can remember these, the good times, as if they were yesterday.
We had no tents; we slept under the sky, or packed like sardines into the back of the Holden station wagon if it rained. My dad dived for abalone and we would grill it on the fire. I always thought it was tough and refused to eat it. Nowadays it is considered a rare delicacy.
In this part of my memory it is always summer and there are endless days of playing in the sand, of swimming and the smell of campfires and mosquito coils. There were bad things, too, but not very bad, more the kind of things that make something more exciting to remember. There was the time my dad swallowed a bull-ant that was in his beer and he got bitten inside his throat and it swelled up. There was the possibility of snakes—every fallen branch a possible culprit to be inspected from afar. The excitement when one of these sticks uncoiled in a powerful wave across the path and my dad had to kill it with an axe.
I learnt to snorkel in a rock pool and I learnt to dogpaddle. Even today whenever I duck dive, then come to the surface blowing water out of the snorkel in a spout, I have a rush of memory for Dad and the rock pool he taught me to swim in.
I was highly attuned to the love between my parents and hyper-vigilant for signs that it might not work out. I would roll into a ball and face the wall whenever I heard raised whispers, my parents’ failed attempt to hide the fact they were fighting. I would close my eyes and think of things that were like dreams, except I was awake. As a child I called them almost-dreams. I would almost-dream of beaches and playing in the sand. Of planes and a train that travelled for days. Of a city that was all stone and bricks and rows upon rows of brownstones. Sometimes these imaginings would roll seamlessly into real dreams, other times they would not stop the rage of the adults in the next room from leaking under the door to find me in my bed.
Over time my imaginings of other places turned into something else. Instead of travel and movement it was thoughts of boys and the new feelings in my body that took me out of myself, away from the world, into sleep. I would dream that a boy and I were forced together by circumstance. Perhaps we would be kidnapped and locked in a barn together and, after a few weeks of forced proximity, he would come to see my true beauty and ravish me. Perhaps we would be thrown into the back of a truck together, hands tied, and find a way to make love despite being bound. I can remember my first orgasm. The intensity of it. The purity of the pleasure.
As I got older, as I involved other people in my sexual explorations, as I became more consciously sexual, the pleasure lessened. I had to chase harder to find the feelings. What began as an opening to pleasure became a way of closing down. Sex became like the dreams of travel, something so sweet, so powerful, that I forgot the point of them. Both took me out of myself until it seemed there was no getting back.
Eleven
‘Is that Princess Di?’ Ruby asks, and I realise that it is, that there are dozens of paintings of her on the houses lining the main road of the village we are passing through. Her blonde fringe hangs low, she looks out from underneath it with bright blue eyes. Some portraits are well executed, some more like cartoons. The whole village is a shrine to her.
We are driving to another shrine, the Sthanumalay-aswami Temple. From the outside this temple looks like any other. Square and tiered with row upon row of brightly coloured gods reaching up towards the heavens. Ruby and I take our shoes off and walk gingerly through the mud, past the doors, which are two storeys high and are each made from a single piece of wood.
It is like stepping through the wardrobe door into Narnia, another world. Priests are everywhere, three white stripes painted across their forehead. They wear white dhotis around their waists, their chests are bare, their bodies shiny with coconut oil. There is hardly any natural light here, just the flickering dark yellow light of ghee lamps. The air is thick with oil, with the smells of ghee and of coconut.
There is a monotonal chant in a woman’s voice humming over loudspeakers. It is the first woman’s voice I have heard in any Hindu temple. To my right is a giant Nandi, the Bull that Siva rides, and Hanuman—a man with a monkey head—some three metres high. The stone on these statues is black, rubbed with oil by worshippers who have been coming for twelve hundred years. To my left is a boulder more than eighteen hundred years old with epigraphs written on it in ancient Pali.
One of the priests takes us in hand. He points to each of the stripes on his forehead. ‘Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver,’ he says. ‘Siva the Destroyer.’ He takes us to a large open chamber with stone columns, floor to ceiling. The columns are organic in shape, more like groups of three or four narrow pipes clustered together. He walks towards one set of pipes, beckoning us to follow. He cups the side of my head and forces my ear to it, then does the same to Ruby. He raps his knuckles on the pipe. The sound is pure.
‘A perfect G,’ says Ruby.
He raps a different pipe.
‘That was a B-flat.’
‘Stone,’ the priest says. ‘All stone.’
He takes us next to a tiny Ganesa chamber that is too small to enter. All we can do is dip our heads low, look in. There are yellow and orange markings painted on him, he is covered in flowers. I bow to him, one of India’s favourite gods, the Remover of Obstacles. This Ganesa, like all Ganesas, has only one tusk and he holds his second tusk before him as a stylus.
Our priest takes us to another chamber, but instead of coming in with us, gestures for us to go in alone. It is like stepping into a black hole, it seems entirely lightless in this room. After a few moments, after my eyes adjust, I can make out rows of Kalis, multi-armed, at head height.
‘Kali is the consort of Siva,’ Ruby says. ‘Kali is time.’ Then she quotes, ‘In the power of Time all colours dissolve into darkness. All shapes return to shapelessness in the all-pervading darkness of the eternal light.’
In front of me is a stone column with a bowl carved into it, but no lingam.
‘Is that a Yoni?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Ruby says. ‘In theory Hindus believe that there is only divinity when opposites co-exist. Male and female. But most of the time you just see the lingam. This is a special place.’
It is hard to describe what it feels like: the energy here is dark and wild, not just in this chamber but throughout the whole temple. When we step out the priest taps our foreheads, then taps the door of the chamber. ‘Woman,’ he says. ‘Very important.’
We go further into the centre of the temple. The ceilings are so low we cannot stand up straight. The air feels heavy in here, as if we are underground. The light is a dim flickering the colour of old gold. The chanting is loud, a combination of the woman’s voice over the speakers and the murmurings of the people queueing to go into the central chamber. Eyes full o
f smoke, ears full of sound. Shirtless men prostrate themselves at the chamber entrance, placing first their forehead, then each cheek onto the cool of the stone floor. They do it over and over.
We bend down to look in and I see many doors, each leading to smaller and darker rooms. It is like looking into a diminishing corridor, perspective seems distorted. I do not know what is in the final room, though this place vibrates with the dangerous power of Siva, and I wonder if it is him in there. There is the merest suggestion of light, one flickering ghee lamp.
It is hard to breathe. My heart is racing, and from the way Ruby is standing, with her hand over her left breast, I can tell hers is as well. There is only one way I can describe what I am feeling: we are looking at time. It tumbles back in this space, not just hundreds, but thousands of years. Backwards through those turbulent centuries when Mohammed, then Christ, then Buddha were born, to the time of the gods and goddesses that came before them.
I don’t want to leave but the priest tugs our arms. ‘Sivalingham,’ he says gesturing back to the chamber we have been looking at, before taking us back to the light of day, to a corridor of columns. As he walks past one he taps it and when Ruby and I go to look at it we see carved into the stone a man sucking his own penis, the shaft standing the full length of his body. The priest walks slowly past the columns, tapping them to draw our attention to a series of such carvings: a woman copulating with a dog, another with a snake, men and women bent over each other in stylised poses.
We are back at the entrance and the priest nods that it is over. We give him money and then we are outside again, feeling slightly shell-shocked. More shocked again when we see a pilgrim standing in front of us, face painted, stripes on his chest, hair in dreadlocks, a spear piercing his tongue and two pieces of metal through his eyebrows. He holds his begging bowl before him but doesn’t register our presence, or the coins we place in the bowl. His devotion, his trance, are absolute.
We sit in the car going back to Kanniyakumari in silence. It is some minutes before Ruby says, finally. ‘Hinduism is right. Sex and spirituality…they are, well they should be, the same thing.’
‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘we take just the one thing, sex, and put it in the place of spirit. I did that. That’s why the whole Michael thing was so pathetic: it was just a case of bad wiring. If I’d started taking the anti-depressants earlier it never would have gone on so long.’
‘Looking for spirit in a relationship doesn’t mean you need drugs,’ Ruby says. ‘I like that you looked for such things in sex, even if it was with the wrong person. Drugs like that are never an answer.’
‘You don’t know that. If you figure out where the light at the end of the tunnel is you can use them to get you there. Through the darkness.’
Her disapproval about such things, about the lifeline I found for myself, hurts me. But it’s her ignorance that’s making me angry. I turn and look out the window at India, waiting for the surge of fury to subside. I stare out there for too long—it just builds, until eventually I turn round to glare at her, tears running down my face. ‘How dare you judge me? You’re just like everyone else, disapproving of the fact that I’m obsessive then disapproving of the way I tried to pull myself out of it. Everyone’s a fucking expert. But you know something Ruby? Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do. Those drugs don’t make you well—Jesus, they don’t even make you feel better—but they turn off the static. The noise, the interference, the shit in your head that keeps you from understanding that you are destroying yourself.’
‘You’re smart,’ Ruby says, looking at me anxiously because she knows I’m upset but she wants to stand her ground. ‘You would have figured things out.’
‘If we are going to be friends I need you to understand this. I’m smart but I could not figure things out. Could not. The worse things got, the more I called them destiny. By the end it was nothing to do with Michael. It was me. I wanted to believe that I could change how things ended by loving him hard enough. By loving him long enough. I wanted to finally keep a man, not have one leave like my fathers did, like they all do. To have some control over what a man does to me or perhaps what I mean is to want what a man does to me because in my experience they do it anyway.’ The words start to catch in my throat, I’m starting to sob, I’m starting to repeat myself. ‘I wanted to believe that love could change things.’
Ruby is touching me nervously, lightly, with the tips of her fingers. Her hand flits across my face, my arm. She is not sure if I will let her be near me and I am not sure either.
‘It can change things,’ she says. ‘It does change things. Nothing you tell me, no argument we have, can change the fact I think you are,’ she flounders for the right word, is insistent when she uses it. ‘Lovely.’
‘I was impossible,’ I touch her hair, try to calm us both down. ‘You have no idea how tedious and unremarkable madness can be.’
Travelling is like a night of heavy rain. It can clear away the heat and dust of the day, of all that has gone before. It can teach you how to be light, to let go. I wanted to drive, I was going to keep moving until I understood how I might do things differently.
I flew to Seattle and spent two nights on a houseboat. It rained, like everyone told me it would. I slept, sat watching the grey sky and grey water, and drank coffee. Then I hired a car and drove down to Portland. Along the way I stopped at one of many roadhouses with pro-gun posters and Vote One: Ollie North, though it was years since Ollie had stood for office.
‘You travellin’ alone?’ the pump attendant asked. ‘Kinda dangerous for a woman to be on her own around here.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Well excuse me for saying so ma’am, but you don’t look fine.’
Great, I thought. Total strangers telling me I’m a wreck.
I stayed a night in Portland then drove through Salem and turned towards the coast. The roads were narrow and windy and small and I didn’t know anything about where I was. It was pretty.
I stopped at Coos Bay, a fishing and tourist town with a plaque on the wall of the local restaurant commemorating a visit by John Kennedy. I slept in a cabin with a high double bed and a thick doona. It was cold even though it was the beginning of summer. A television was suspended from the ceiling above the bed and I watched ‘Seinfeld’ repeats. If I lowered my eyes I could see through the window and look out to sea. Moored boats rose gently with the ebb and flow of the tide.
I stopped again in Oregon and picked from the beach stones and shells polished by the sea. I slipped my thumb over their surface and they were so smooth it was like rubbing nothing at all. I carried one of the stones, a white quartz, for the rest of the journey. It’s the stone I gave to you, Ruby.
By the time I hit northern California I was driving through fields of sunflowers. I lived on McDonald’s. I didn’t stop to eat; I used the drive-thrus and kept going, my foot hard on the accelerator, the countryside flickering past me. I played music at full blast.
In Monterey I visited the aquarium at Cannery Row and watched fish swoop and dive overhead like birds. I had always thought I’d come here with Michael, I had imagined driving this great American road with him. Instead my companion was a book, By Grand Central Station I Lay Down and Wept. During the days I drove, in the evening I read about a woman who became lovers with a married man in this part of California, a man who abandoned her after she had borne his four children. I lean affirmation across the café table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile. When I reached Carmel and walked slowly through the Mission cloisters, I prayed to be saved from her fate.
I drove on to Big Sur, so I could visit Esalon. I could only get into the spa baths at one a.m. so I went to bed in my wooden cabin at nine o’clock then got up at twelve-thirty to drive the six miles to the baths. The night was quiet, bright. I was vague with sleep as I sat behind the wheel swinging with the curves, loose, as if I was on a motorbike. It was only when I was nearly there that I realised all the signs faced t
he other way and I was driving on the wrong side of the road. The thought filled me with pleasure, I embraced it, imagined a car bearing down on me, the impact as we collided. The slope into the sea was steep, I would roll ten, maybe twenty times. My seat belt would dig into me, it would cut me before it broke, releasing my body to be thrown through the windscreen onto the rocks. Gashed. Broken. There would be blood, my neck might break. It took an effort of will to stop these thoughts, to move to the other side of the road.
I walked through the paths of the beautifully manicured gardens, towards the lights on the cliffs where I knew the baths would be. At the cliffs I walked down a corridor until I came out in a kind of cave that was open to the Pacific Ocean. I got into the hot bath, heavy with minerals, and lay there. After half an hour or so I moved to the group spa, out in the open, on the edge of the cliff. The moon was low and bright, casting its cold light wide across the ocean. I lay there till nearly four o’clock, and watched the moon as it climbed the sky to sit directly over my head. Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.
The next day I drove on to Los Angeles but I kept having to stop by the road to watch sea otters playing in sea-forests of giant kelp. I was driven relentlessly down the coast of this country by desire, by longing. Finding instead of romance bigger things, better things. My head felt clear, my view larger. I escaped, for a moment, the endless self-absorption of a broken heart, the exhaustion of narcissism. I imagined that my aimless days of searching for love in the wrong places were drawing to a close. But it was more like this: in these days I understood for the first time that I could do things differently. It was more like the beginning of the end.
I arrived back in Sydney late at night and woke up, jetlagged, at six the next morning. When I walked down to the beach it was still dark except for the fishermen’s lights scattered at intervals along the beach. I waded into the water, hoping the winter cold would wake me up. I was not paying attention but after a minute or two I looked at the shore and realised that it was moving away from me faster than it should have been. I was half asleep, it was dark, and I was caught in a rip. It shocked me, how quickly it happened, and for a moment I felt a surge of panic.
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