Once they went swimming, driving over an hour to the beach.
‘I wanted to show her the sea,’ Liam said when Sharn questioned why on earth they had driven all that way in the heat.
‘I asked her if she wanted to go and she looked at me in that way she has, with that distant kind of appraisal she gives to every decision, and then she told me that the beach sounded good, that, yes, she would like to see the sea.’ Liam smiled.
‘See the sea,’ Liam repeated, and he and Caitlin laughed at the silliness of the phrase.
‘They sound the same,’ Caitlin said.
‘I know,’ Liam told her.
‘But they’re different.’
And he agreed with her again.
That was when she had asked him why people used words, and he said that they used them to let each other know what they wanted or needed, or to explain what it was that they were feeling or doing.
She asked him why people had to tell each other what they were feeling, why they didn’t just know.
He said that sometimes it was difficult to read feelings, that people often hid them, or didn’t want to show them, and as he spoke he realised the inadequacy of his explanation.
‘But if people don’t want to show them, then they’re not going to use words, are they?’ she asked, and he had to agree with her. ‘And if you don’t want or need anything, then you don’t need words either,’ she said.
‘But everyone wants or needs,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s just the smallest thing, like a sip of water, and sometimes it’s big, impossibly so.’
She didn’t reply.
It wasn’t until they were in the sea that Caitlin brought up the conversation again. She had her arms around his neck and he was swimming her out past his depth, just thinking about how calm she was, how untouched she seemed to be by the sea, even though she had never seen it before, when she whispered in his ear. He didn’t catch what she said at first. Her voice was soft, drowned out by the lap of the waves, and it took him a few seconds before he realised what it was that he had heard.
‘Can you not want anything?’ she asked.
He didn’t know what she meant, and for a moment he thought that he had perhaps just misheard her after all; then she spoke again, softer this time, but clearer.
‘Like me,’ she said. ‘Before I talked.’
‘There must have been something you wanted,’ he said. She just shook her head and grinned. She was a strange child.
Liam told Sharn the story that night, and Sharn did not know what to say.
‘Do you think she’s all right?’ Sharn eventually asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ and she sat back in her chair and looked towards the window.
Later, as they were getting into bed, she told Liam she was glad that Caitlin had him.
‘But she has you too,’ he said.
Sharn could not look at him.
It wasn’t the same, not the same at all, and she moved in close, wanting the warmth of his body to comfort her through the dark of the night.
THERE HAD BEEN LOVE ONCE. Caitlin could remember it.
Down by the river at Sassafrass, she had heard Liam’s footsteps before she saw him. Sitting by the tepid green water, she watched him take Sharn in his arms and then reach out for her too, enfolding both of them in his embrace as he told them that they would leave, together. In the drowsy heat of the afternoon, she thought she had never seen her mother so happy.
‘Why did you have me so young?’ she had once asked Sharn, and Sharn simply said that she had wanted to, brushing aside the question with an embarrassed discomfort that confirmed what Caitlin had always known; motherhood had been forced upon her, and it had horrified her.
But when Sharn met Liam, it was as though she finally allowed herself to breathe, not to open her arms to Caitlin, not entirely that, but to live side by side with her without the wariness that Caitlin remembered in each of her senses.
Alone in her room at night, Caitlin would sometimes hear them fight. It was, invariably, about money. Or at least, that was how the disagreements began, soon spiralling into Liam’s failure to get a job or to follow up a job or to chase a job, moving next to his inability to grasp the realities of life, and finally collapsing into the bottomless pit: his inadequacies per se.
Their heads were only just above water, Sharn would say. He was hopeless. He had no idea. She couldn’t go on carrying them all.
Caitlin could not ask them for money. She had three hundred saved, not through any attempt to save, but because she was a person who had little interest in spending, putting her birthday cheques from Margot into the bank, unsure as to what, exactly, she should do with them.
Margot had money. She was the only one who did, and she bailed them out regularly, but always at Liam’s request. Neither Sharn nor Caitlin had ever asked her for anything, and Caitlin did not want to do so now.
She explained the situation to Fraser, certain that her lack of ability to pay would mean the weekend would not be possible.
‘I’ll see what can be done,’ he promised. ‘Exceptions are made.’
But it was not until the morning of the departure that he rang her, wondering where she was. When she expressed confusion, he assured her that of course it didn’t matter, her three hundred would be fine, he couldn’t believe he had forgotten to tell her.
The note she left for Liam and Sharn was vague: she was going to a friend’s for the long weekend, she would be back Monday night. She knew they would not worry, she had never given them any cause for concern in the past, and she packed a bag and caught a taxi to the meeting place.
Later, Caitlin would realise that those three days were her turning point, the moment when she stopped sitting in the middle and chose a path that she would follow, without deviation, for the rest of her life.
They camped, thirty of them in five tents, huddled into the side of the mountain, the cool air sweet and pure, the mists tinged with blue from the eucalypts that stretched straight and ghostly white into the sky. Several of the others were familiar to her from the meetings, but they exchanged no words of greeting, no nods of recognition. They were forbidden all forms of communication with each other, expected only to obey the instructions of the three devotees who had been appointed as their leaders. But their abstinence extended beyond denial of words. They were there to purify mind, body and soul. Only water was to pass their lips, and this was to come from the bottom of the waterfall that cascaded down the cliff face next to their campsite.
Caitlin had to fetch this water, sliding down slippery shale in bare feet, working her way back up again with a bucket at a time. The calls of the whip birds lashed through the stillness, and each of the rocks that she dislodged rocketed like a bullet through the quiet. She set herself a task: to complete each trip without disturbing the silence, to float without existence down the slope, drifting like the mist that rose from the floor of the valley, weightless and without impact upon the world. When she reached the bottom and the water ran like ice over the heat of her skin, she felt the shock of awareness of her bodily existence once again, and she closed her eyes, wanting only to become the water, to cease to exist in the stillness that surrounded her. This was all that mattered to her. The simple task of fetching the water had become the only reason for her life, and this simplicity was perfection.
Back at camp, they meditated. Alone, under the sparse shade of a slender sapling, Caitlin tried to let go of all awareness, the sharp tang of the eucalypts, the dancing light on the boulders, the high call of the currawongs, the slow crawl of an ant across her ankle – and then she tried not even to try, simply to let it all drift, like the smoke from their campfire, curling up into the sky.
Do not close your eyes. Do not block your ears. Do not shut down your senses.
She was to open herself completely, to lie flat beneath the teeming tumultuous nature of all existence, completely surrendering herself to the power of the earth.
Because it is only then that we cease to exist. It is only in a lack of all awareness that we reach awareness.
And in each brief moment of total absence there was liberation, followed by the crashing realisation that she had once again been aware of reaching that state only to lose it in that very instant of realisation. It was a pattern that she told herself to accept, for only in accepting it would she liberate herself from its hold.
In the evenings they fed and washed the devotees who acted as their instructors. Fraser was one of them but he was no longer Fraser to her, even when it was her turn to sponge him down, even when he told her to bathe his feet, and she knelt beside him, aware only of the duty she had been asked to perform, his nakedness close to her but not in the way it had once been, in an entirely new way, a way that felt far more right to her than the previous closeness they had shared.
When their tasks were complete, they listened to readings in the darkness. Her head light from lack of food, Caitlin felt the words float away from her, becoming more substantial in their weightlessness, so that the teachings became as Fraser had once described them to her, the very breath of life.
On the second evening as they all rose to walk back to their tents, she felt the touch of Fraser’s hand on her arm, and she followed him as instructed.
She had been selected, he told her, she and four others, to sit at the feet of their spiritual master.
She did not say a word.
He was being flown into the clearing above their camp tomorrow morning, Fraser said. She was expected to bathe beforehand and to wear a white robe, which she would be given.
When he finished speaking, he motioned for her to leave, and she walked back to her tent in the darkness, the light from the stars obscured by the canopy of leaves, and she felt, for a moment, overwhelmed by the gift that was being presented to her. It was more than she had expected, more than she had even begun to allow herself to hope for, and she breathed in deeply, wanting the weight of her anticipation to lift from her shoulders.
‘Do you see him often?’ she had once asked Fraser, and he told her that it was a rare honour.
‘Unless, of course, you live on our land, and then he is a daily presence.’
The next day she woke before dawn, the darkness of the night still impenetrable as they stumbled down to the waterfall to bathe and change. The thinness of her robes did little to protect her from the cool of the morning, and she shivered as she made her way back to the camp where she and the four others waited for Fraser to rise.
They watched as he ate his breakfast, scraping the edge of the bowl with the tip of his finger, licking the last remnants of food out. When he finally finished, he beckoned for one of them to clear up.
They would be climbing the mountain they could see on their left. They all looked in the direction he pointed. He would lead them.
Caitlin put on his shoes, tying the laces for him. When she had finished, he stood, beckoning for them to follow. They walked single file, the path narrow and rocky, and the heat rising as they continued their ascent. They arrived as the helicopter was landing, the blades chopping through the sharpness of the sky, whipping up a wind that seemed to have enough strength to lift them all in its force.
Kalyani stepped out, laying a length of white cloth behind him, unfolding the material and weighing it down with stones, until it reached the shade of an ancient spotted gum, where they waited. He returned to the helicopter, not treading on the cloth, and reached up to help a man, who they could only assume to be Satya Deva, step down to the ground.
As he approached, Caitlin saw that he was short and his frame was slight beneath the white shift that he wore. He seemed to float, rather than walk, across the paleness of the path that had been laid out before him, his bare feet treading so lightly that not even a twig snapped under his weight.
‘Welcome.’ The depth of his voice was surprising, and his smile embraced them all. ‘We have new followers.’ He laughed, and Caitlin felt as though she, too, could laugh in delight, wrapped in the beauty of the day and the perfection of each moment.
He held out his arms and they each stood, in turn, to receive his touch, light but charged with an electricity that bolted through Caitlin’s body with a strength that left her soul singing with joy.
They sat again, waiting for him to continue to speak, but he remained silent, eyes closed and head turned upwards towards the arc of clear sky. In the stillness that followed, Caitlin felt the weight of her own expectations evaporate. There was no need for words, there never had been and there never would be. Overhead, the blue-green leaves rustled silvery in the sunlight, and the branches creaked in the breeze. The white cloth that had been laid out lifted and fell, rippling like a sail across the rocks and twigs. A ladybird landed on her foot and Caitlin felt its presence as though it was at one with her as she was at one with it.
This was where she wanted to be and the peace that enveloped her was such that she was not even aware of its existence. It simply was. As she closed her eyes, she knew that there was no turning back. Each moment was each moment but it would be from this moment that each would follow, and so she remained, sitting silent, until the day began to slide towards afternoon, until they were told that it was time to return to camp and prepare for their departure.
On her return, Caitlin fainted.
‘I haven’t eaten,’ she explained to Liam, and she was glad that it was he who was at home and not Sharn.
He helped her to her bed and told her he would fetch her some food.
He had made soup, and she sat up by his side, swallowing small mouthfuls with a difficulty that surprised her. He did not interrupt her eating to ask where she had been or why she had had no food. He was not like that. He simply waited for her to finish and to speak. How could she explain? She wanted to tell him but she simply did not know how.
‘Are you all right?’ he eventually asked, and she nodded, hoping he could see, right there in her face, how happy she was.
‘The school rang,’ he told her, ‘on the night you left.’
She looked at him.
‘They’re worried.’
She waited, aware of how difficult he was finding this.
‘You haven’t been going. And you haven’t handed in this.’ He held up the form on which she was meant to select the courses she wanted to do. It had not been completed.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she told him, and she was surprised at her own directness.
Again, he didn’t ask her why, he just waited for her to continue.
‘I want to leave,’ she said, and she looked across at him as she told him she had found something, something that finally made sense to her.
He asked her what it was and she tried to explain, about the readings, the weekend, and the morning with Satya Deva, aware of the inadequacy of her words as she searched for them.
He let her finish and then he told her he was happy for her.
He was, she could see it in his eyes, but she could also see the parent in him, and he had to speak, to counsel her against any hasty decisions.
‘You only have this year to go,’ he said. ‘You could just finish and then you can do what you want.’
She listened, knowing that her mind was made up but feeling that she should give him the respect of at least appearing to pay attention to what he had to say. But when he asked her to think a little further about her decision, she could not lie to him by making a commitment she had no intention of keeping.
‘I know that it’s what I want to do,’ she said.
He squeezed her hand gently. ‘You’ll have to tell Sharn.’
He was right, and she knew she would have to do it soon.
IT WOULD BE WRONG TO SAY THAT Caitlin felt entirely at home within the group house in the weeks that followed the camp, or that she had found the community she had always desired. But it was not, in fact, community that Caitlin had been looking for; she had wanted a way of viewing the world, a perspective that she cou
ld understand, and it seemed at last to be within her grasp.
She was happy, and there were times when all she wanted was to share this, but she kept her silence, aware that she was not completely ready. Almost, but not quite.
When she returned to school after the weekend away, the careers counsellor asked her why she had not yet handed in her university application form.
‘Because there’s nothing I want to do,’ she said.
‘Maybe not now,’ he sat back in his chair and looked at her. ‘That’s quite understandable. I actually think a couple of years off is a good thing. But you should apply now, and then you simply defer.’
‘Do you like what you do?’ she asked.
He shifted slightly in his seat. ‘It’s not bad.’
She blushed. ‘That’s not what I meant. Do you really like it? Do you have faith in it? Does it mean anything to you?’
He smiled, but it was an uncomfortable smile. ‘There are days and there are days.’ He pushed another copy of the form towards her. ‘Will you just complete it?’ he asked. ‘You have always had good marks, you could get into anything. There is time to decide later on.’
‘I’ve already decided.’
His sigh was audible. ‘Listen,’ and he leant a little closer. ‘There’s a reality out there.’ He waved his hand towards the window. ‘There’re bills to pay, obligations, harsh facts. You have the intelligence to make life a little easier for yourself. To find work that will earn you decent money and that won’t be totally mind-numbing. When you’re young, you think it’s all irrelevant, but trust me – it isn’t.’
‘It can be.’ She uttered the words softly, still uncertain as to the glorious future that was opening up for her, tentative in her reach for a world that suddenly seemed possible, despite the fact that she had hardly ever dared hope for its existence.
He gathered the forms together and stood, too tired to continue with a conversation that was becoming increasingly pointless.
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