The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Despite the early hour, several of the restaurants were already getting crowded, couples with their children, friends meeting friends. Morna walked on, searching for somewhere empty or secluded. It was as if she were infectious and had been shut up on her own, ordered to shun all normal human intercourse. She had to walk in zigzags to dodge the puddles, avoid the broken paving stones. The whole area was shabby and run-down, in sharpest possible contrast to the manicured lawns (and matching residents) of Neil and Bunny’s suburb. Although it was nearer to the sea, there was still no sign of it—nor sound. Honking trucks instead of crashing surf.

  She stopped at a small self-service café which looked bleaker than the rest, almost institutional with its plain linoleum floor and functional wooden chairs. Three elderly women were sitting on their own at separate tables, one in bedroom slippers, one in a rain-soaked panama, muttering to herself as she spooned in her creamed wheat. A man with a woolly hat pulled down towards his wispy silver beard was gnawing a turkey drumstick. Was this a place for old folks only, Morna wondered, or just so inexpensive it attracted the down and out? Today she felt in sympathy with vagrants and outsiders. She slipped inside, watched the four pairs of eyes turn her way, follow her as she walked up to the counter. Lunch dishes were laid out as well as eggs and bacon, pizzas and fruit pies alongside cereals and muffins. It seemed strangely early to be chewing turkey drumsticks. She could feel the four pairs of eyes still boring into her back. She was the cabaret—an over-dressed but timid stranger who looked as if she had strayed from her package tour or Holiday Inn to come and join the outcasts—yet still with nothing on her tray. She grabbed two rolls and a packet of Alphabetti Ricicles, sugar-coated rice puffs in the shape of little letters. They were Dean’s favourite cereal, though more for playing with than eating. He always spelt out his name with them, and then her own, added an X as a kiss. She was tempted to spell some words herself—David (with an X), England, home, escape. She looked up, saw the eight rheumy eyes still watching her every move, tried to distract herself by reading the amounts of iron and thiamin contained in an average serving of rice puffs.

  It was strange to see the old and poor in California. Bunny’s charmed circle contained only the wealthy young, and those older people she had seen so far in streets and shops had all looked spruce and glossy as if they had been recycled, reconditioned, sprayed with a fresh coat of paint. These were the first old folk she had come across who had let nature take its course, allowed themselves to rust and warp. The gnarled old woman in her unseasonal straw hat was still mumbling to herself, wagging a finger at some imaginary companion. Her own mother would be horrified. She believed in constant vigilance to prevent mind or body cracking.

  She had phoned Bea twice since she arrived, tried to compress California into a brief three-minute call, spent two minutes of it discussing Joy’s arthritis. At least her mother seemed resigned about the trip now. She had opposed it violently at first, preferred to keep Neil safely dead and buried, feared that both granddaughter and daughter might be hurt by his sudden resurrection—correct in her own case, not in Chris’s, though. Neil and Chris were pals. He was employing her not only as caddy at his golf-club, but also as human car-wash and nanny to Dean. She was thriving in all rôles.

  Morna crunched up a letter C, then a B, E, A, for her mother. Bea would be at Mass now, swallowing the host instead of iron-rich Ricicles. Morna put her spoon down, started on the rolls. Sundays still felt aimless without the Mass, just lazy straggling days which had once been vowed to God and were now sacred to the lawn mower or the Ford Capri or The Sunday Times. Here, in the States, she was deprived of those as well, had nothing but an empty stretch of time to fill. She almost envied the church-goers—the Evangelicals born again each Sunday, the Pentecostals hosannaing the day with tambourine and Gift of Tongues. Religion was a craze in California. Even Bunny had her own brand—belonged to a group who found God within—a highly elastic God who stretched to include money, food, possessions, sex.

  Sex. Morna pushed her plate away. Wasn’t that the secret of Bunny’s glow, America’s new God? The bookshops were full of prayer books—How To Achieve Ecstasy, Prude to Lewd in Six Short Weeks, The Book of Total Love. Therapeutic sex sessions were as common here as coffee mornings, vibrators prescribed for headaches instead of aspirin. If she were E-stream in England, then she was gravely sick in California. She drained her coffee, walked towards the door, aware of disturbing the silence, aware still of the stares. The hoot and fret of the traffic outside was almost a relief. She had better find the ocean. When Bunny next phoned, she would expect to hear accounts of long walks on the beach, drives around the coast …

  She consulted her map, turned left into a quieter street, left again. Strange how garish billboards and cheap and ugly shopfronts could suddenly give place to elegant homes and gardens with fancy pilasters, scalloped palms; then back again to car parks, petrol stations. It made her feel disorientated, as if she were a character on television, with a director shouting ‘Cut!’ every few lines.

  She almost shouted ‘Cut!’ herself when she stood at last staring at the Pacific. She had imagined it magnificently rolling, magically blue. Instead it spread before her in a flat expanse of grey, the beach a dirty brown, speckled with yellow metal litter-bins and crisscrossed with tyre marks. The sea itself looked passive and inert, as if it had fought and lost a battle and was now slumped nursing its wounds, no vigour in its slow and sullen waves.

  She walked down to the beach. A cloud of sea birds flapped heavily away, their cries sounding desolate, forlorn. A girl was sitting on the sand, eyes closed, palms outstretched, communing with God and Nature. Morna envied her serenity, her faith, yearned suddenly to kneel down where she was, feel that strength she had drawn on as a child, that certainty of being heard, watched over. Yet there was no sense of God’s presence here at all. God didn’t live in California.

  Two joggers overtook her, pounding across the sand—high priests of another indigenous religion, their vestments track suits and training shoes, their temples gym and stadium. She had already seen their acolytes exercising on the strip of green which fringed the boulevard, women older than her mother encased in tights and leotards, doing side-bends or leg-swings in the open. At school, they had worked through the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyala. Was it so different, really—the same passion, dedication, the same self-absorption, for something that turned out to be a chimera in the end? The latest statistics comparing a group of jogger-gymnasts with a sedentary control group revealed no difference at all in mortality statistics, and almost none in general health.

  Morna began to run herself. The sky had clouded over again, and the first few drops of rain were spattering on her face. Suddenly it was pouring, the rain cascading down so fast she could barely see her way as she stumbled across the beach, tripping on empty cola cans tangled up with seaweed. Sunny California.

  She panted back to the boulevard where people were clustered under awnings, sheltering in doorways. It was more flood than rain, water streaming down the sidewalks, overflowing the gutters. She had neither mac nor umbrella. Her shoes were squelching, her hair dripping in lank tails on her shoulders. It was at least a mile back to her motel. A bus pulled up, discharged three passengers. Almost without thinking, she stepped on to the platform.

  ‘Do you pass Ocean View Motel?’ she asked the swarthy driver.

  ‘No, Ma’am. We’re going in the opposite direction. Downtown LA.’ She could hardly understand his foreign accent, especially as he was chewing gum, spoke only out of one side of his mouth. ‘You’d better get off at the next stop.’

  She stayed on. She hadn’t seen Downtown yet. A morning’s sightseeing would be better than another cops-and-robbers in her gloomy motel room. Anyway, how could she get off when rain was lashing on to the freeway, drenching anything and everything in its way? It was as if God had read her thoughts on His absence and was proving He was there, sending flood and fury to make His point. Why did she
always think in terms of God when He hurt as much as Neil did? To Chris, He was someone remote and out of date, some kindly but irrelevant old codger who had made a botch-up of creation and then retired.

  Traffic and buildings thickened. So did the rain. She could hardly see at all now. She asked the man beside her how far it was to Downtown and perhaps he could advise her … He muttered something sotto voce, appeared not to understand. Another twenty minutes passed. The streets were getting wider, the outlines of the skyscrapers outside the blurred and streaming windows taller and closer-packed. She lurched towards the automatic doors. She had better get off soon, before she was carried on to Covina or San Benandino, or still further east to Oklahoma or New York.

  The driver shouted after her as she clambered down, his heavy foreign accent distorted further by the engine noise. LA was full of foreigners. Over half the population were minority groups—not only Mexican, but Chinese, Arabs, Koreans, Guatemalans. She was a foreigner herself, felt both lost and dwarfed as the bus revved away and she stood in the lacerating rain, gazing round at discount houses, liquor stores, sleazy cinemas. This couldn’t be the centre. A woman in a long grey coat and gym shoes, with a pair of pink silk bloomers tied around the head against the rain, was wheeling an empty pram. A younger woman, soaked and shivering, slumped against a shop-front shouting at her child. No good asking them. One looked cracked, the other yelling in a language she had never heard before.

  She decided to brave the rain, dodging from shop to shop until she found one selling umbrellas. Many of the stores were open, despite it being Sunday. She bought a large black brolly and a fold-up mac which unbuttoned from a handkerchief-sized package to a full five foot of creased black plastic, complete with hood. She tried it on, grinned at herself in the mirror. She looked a cross between a gangster and a nun. She also got directions, though she was soon lost again, confused by both the traffic and the blinding rain. There was no one else to ask. Not only was it Sunday, but the weather had driven everyone inside. Some of the branches had broken off the trees and were lying on the pavement in a wreckage of leaves and twigs. She picked up a leaf, a strange one with saw-tooth edge and blotchy markings. Even the trees were unknown species here. She longed suddenly for London’s familiar plane trees or Bea’s close-clipped beech hedge, as tidy as her life.

  She dawdled on, stopped outside a candy shop. Although it was more than a month away from St Valentine’s Day, the window was ablaze with hearts. It wasn’t just Bunny—this whole city dealt in hearts. Erasers, keyrings, ice lollies—all came heart-shaped, like these mammoth chocolate boxes arranged on heart-shaped scarlet cushions. ‘Say ‘‘I love you’’ in candy!’ shrieked the poster. ‘I love you’ was printed on mugs, tee shirts, cards, in the shop next door. The only thing you couldn’t buy was the love itself.

  She walked into the card shop—valentines for teachers, daughters, neighbours, parents, friends. They didn’t count. A valentine meant true love from a sweetheart. She wished she could buy one, send it to David—a flimsy paper heart riding out his riptides, defying wind and wave until it was swept up on his island on the morning of St Valentine’s.

  Oddly enough, he had mentioned the feast—one of the myriad subjects they had tossed between them on that very special Saturday. Any other man would have landed up in her bed, at least by the second evening, whereas she and David had watched the twilight fall walking in the cool of Ashdown Forest, discussing the third-century Bishop of Rome whose feast day was on the fourteenth of February, but who was not, David claimed, anything to do with love or cards or sweethearts. Those derived from a pagan feast, he had told her, a Roman day of expiation when priests lashed people with strips of goat- or dogskin called purifiers, to cleanse them of their sins. She smiled to herself, remembering his words. Only David could metamorphose hearts and flowers to sin and scourge. Perhaps she should buy him a hair shirt printed with a heart and ‘I love you’ underneath.

  She had loved him on that Saturday as they strolled together, still shy and over-formal, between the chaperone trees, watching the shadows hem them in. And then he had left. She had driven him herself, all the way to London. He hadn’t asked her in. It was late by then and perhaps he feared to disturb his cousin, or had to get up early to catch his train back home. The next morning, when she woke alone in Weybridge, she thought of that train bearing him away from her; and three days later, the colleague’s car clinching their separation, their divorce. Once David reached his island, there were five hundred miles between them—over five thousand now.

  She left the shop without her card, seeing not concrete buildings but St Abban’s lowering cliffs, hearing the boom of waves on rocks instead of the plash of rain on pavements. She buttoned up her hood again, made herself walk on. The shop next door was boarded up and derelict, stuck with posters. ‘Sensory Deprivation’, read one, ‘For Creative Calm, Therapeutic Relaxation’. She moved closer. That would appeal to David and his saint—joy in deprivation. She read the small print underneath. The poster was advertising a Flotation Tank Studio, whatever that might mean, offering a special deal—two hours for the price of one. Two hours of what? She read on. It appeared you floated in a tank of tepid water in the dark and silence, totally alone, and by shutting off all outside stimuli, achieved a Higher State. David, definitely. The address of the place was given, but she had no idea where it was. North, south, east, west, meant nothing any more. She trailed away. It would probably be closed on Sunday, or too expensive anyway, or full of pseuds and freaks. LA was high on crazy therapies. The local paper had offered Integrated Ortho-Bionomy, Aura-Harmonisation, Psychophysical Integration and Mentastics, and even an Atheist Dating Service. Yet, with so much help, people still seemed lost. Her old Catholic God had answered several of those needs at once—made His children loved, accepted, purposeful, given them hope, unwavering beliefs, a moral code, a reason for existing, made them part of a family which, if not happy, was at least secure. Religion was the Valium of the people, damping down their agonies, hushing the non sequiturs.

  Morna yanked back her umbrella from the snatches of the wind. The rain was still as fierce. She would have to shelter somewhere. She crossed the road, turned a corner and suddenly, there was the name of the street she had seen on the poster, and two blocks along, a second larger notice above an open door: ‘Our tanks can bring you peace, perception, mind-power. Please walk in.’

  The room was dimly lit. Strange watery music seemed to writhe and ripple through it, never reaching any cadence but flowing on eternally, harmonised by the drumming of the rain. A slowly rotating mobile of headless aluminium birds was suspended from the ceiling, casting nervous shadows on the walls.

  Morna dithered at the door. A man was sitting at the desk but his eyes were closed, palms spread upwards on the blotter. Was he meditating? Stoned? A fat red candle was guttering in a saucer, a stick of incense burning in a vase, emitting a sickly cloying scent.

  Morna cleared her throat. The man remained motionless apart from his eyelids, which slowly opened, revealing weak blue eyes which seemed to look past her, through her.

  ‘I … er … wondered if …’ she started.

  ‘Sit down.’ He was wearing an embroidered cheesecloth robe above grubby denims, open sandals with rough hemp soles. ‘I’m. Krishna.’

  ‘H … How d’you do.’ Morna stepped a little nearer. Krishna must be his equivalent of Anne. He could hardly be Indian with those pale eyes and freckled arms, that Middle-Western accent.

  ‘Have you floated before?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, no. I didn’t actually want …’

  ‘You’re in luck. First-timers get a real good deal. Your first hour absolutely free and your second …’

  ‘I was really only enquiring for a friend …’ Her voice petered out. She couldn’t tell him the friend was in another country, living on a primitive island, almost completely out of touch, that she might never set eyes on him again.

  ‘Great! You want our twin-tank deal, then. Bring
your buddy and you can share a room. We do a special offer for …’

  ‘Well, no. He’s … er …’ Morna backed away. She had come in really to shelter from the rain, just to look around. She had expected crowds of people—staff and customers—not one hard-sell pseudo-Indian. She was at his mercy now. It was miles back to the exit. She had walked down winding steps into a basement, wandered a labyrinth of dark and narrow corridors, following the signs, until the crack of light from this room had beckoned her in.

  ‘Look, if you could just give me a brochure or a price list or …’

  ‘Relax. You don’t need a brochure. I’ll explain the whole thing myself. We like to give you what we call an initiation before you enter the tank. Just sit down.’ He gestured to the small cane chair drawn up in front of the desk. ‘Sit,’ he said again, as if he were commanding a recalcitrant dog.

  Morna sat, seemed to have no more will-power to make excuses or a getaway. The music and the incense were spiralling around her, somehow sapping her strength. Krishna had changed his voice, made it both slower and softer so that he was talking in a near-hypnotic drone. She felt lulled by it, yet was really hardly listening, just sinking back and down, hearing certain words weave and tangle with the music—‘brain-wave cycles, creative hemisphere, mind expansion, psychic reverie’.

  ‘It’s like returning to your mother’s womb,’ he murmured. ‘A safe space, peaceful, sheltered.’

  Morna opened her eyes, hardly realised she had closed them in the first place. A return to the womb was definitely attractive—a Catholic womb like Bea’s, not spotless like the Blessed Virgin’s, but at least serene, secure. Why not go along with it, forget her fears for once?