by Nicky Singer
“That we can change,” says Lalitavajri. “That each one of us can be the most compassionate person we can be.”
This hits me like a thrown stone. Or maybe it’s not Lalitavajri’s words, maybe it’s Zoe’s glance that hits me. I’m not looking at Zoe, but she’s looking at me. She’s giving me one of those totally non-scientific stares, which bangs right into the heart of things.
The heart of me.
“Now,” says Lalitavajri, “do you want to know about the statues?”
According to Paddy’s list, we do. Also on his list are pujas, gongs and drums.
“And what’s that?” asks Paddy.
“Incense,” says Lalitavajri. “We use incense because it smells beautiful and, most importantly, it blows in all directions, like a smile. If you smile at someone they feel happy and then they smile at someone else. Incense passes on like this.”
Paddy smirks, but Lalitavajri smiles and Zoe smiles back. Quite a shy smile for someone so big and so bold and actually – now I look at her – so beautiful. I don’t know if I’m smiling, but I really hope I am.
“How do you think your shrine reflects the Buddhist faith?” reads Paddy.
“Can I ask you first how the Shrine Room strikes you?” Lalitavajri asks.
“Well, it’s kind of big,” says Paddy. “And empty, you know, compared with a church.”
“And peaceful,” I say. I’m still looking at Zoe. “Somewhere you can think.”
And now Zoe feels my look and she lifts her eyes to me, all hesitant and hopeful at the same time.
“I like that,” says Lalitavajri. “Western life is so busy we need a space to be peaceful. Buddhists choose for their shrines whatever’s beautiful and makes them happy.”
My gaze moves, it finds the eucalyptus branches and therefore, Aunt Edie.
“Is that what the flowers are for?” I ask. “Beauty?”
“Yes,” says Lalitavajri. “And they also symbolise impermanence. Nothing lives for ever. All things die.”
Aunt Edie again.
And also Zoe. My friendship with her. Am I going to let that die?
No.
Never.
“What do Buddhists believe happens after you die?” I ask.
Paddy looks confused. This question is not on our sheet.
“We believe in rebirth,” says Lalitavajri. “After you die you go into a state of life between life, which we call bardo, like night is the bardo between two days, or a dream is a bardo between two wakings.”
“A join?” I say. “Do you mean a join?”
“I’m not sure about that,” says Lalitavajri. “But your body falls away and your consciousness remains.”
“And what happens to that consciousness?”
“It remains until it is attracted to a man and a woman having sex,” says Lalitavajri, “then it goes into the soul and enters the baby.”
At the word sex Paddy sniggers.
But Lalitavajri just goes on: “This is why babies arrive with personalities already formed.”
And I’m still thinking about the bardo which (whatever Lalitavajri says) does sound like a Buddhist version of a join, and about the knotted threads of friendship and about how a consciousness might remain when Paddy says, “Do you mean souls hang about, you know, like ghosts, they haunt you?”
“Not haunt, no. Although Buddhism does stretch the Western idea of the rational. Like some Buddhists have claimed to be able to walk through walls.”
“Walk through walls!”
“I don’t disbelieve this,” says Lalitavajri. “Just as you can have déjà vu about someone coming into a room and then they come into a room.”
Or you can have someone look at you and feel that look.
“Ghosts and the supernatural,” Lalitavajri continues, “are much more real for people in the East.”
And for me. And for the flask.
Paddy is scribbling in his notebook.
“Well, is that it?” asks Lalitavajri.
“Yes,” says Zoe. “Thanks. Except – what does your name mean, Lalitavajri?”
“When you’re ordained you are given a new name by the person who ordains you,” says Lalitavajri. “You don’t know your name until this moment. You are named either for things you have achieved or for the potential seen in you. Lalita means she who plays and vajri means diamond thunderbolt. The diamond thunderbolt represents reality, the truth and unstoppable energy.”
“Wow,” says Paddy, looking up from his notes. “So if I was a Buddhist I could get called Supreme Striker, or something?”
“Well, maybe not something so…” Lalitavajri pauses, “… specific.”
“You could be called Paddy though,” says Zoe and laughs. But she’s not laughing at him, she’s just laughing because everything suddenly feels relaxed, easy.
“Sorry?” says Lalitavajri.
“They call me Paddy,” says Paddy. “Because…” He looks at Zoe. “Why do people call me Paddy?”
And Zoe laughs some more and Paddy grins in his Happy-to-Be-the-Centre-of-Attention way, and I feel a strange warmth wash through me, which takes in, without judgment, Zoe and Paddy and Aunt Edie and the supernatural and ghosts and souls.
“Well, I need to prepare now,” says Lalitavajri. “I have to lead a meditation in a minute. Although, you’d be welcome to stay if you’d like. A meditation would give you a very good idea of Buddhist practice.”
Paddy’s face suggests that the last thing in the world he’d like to do is stay for a Buddhist meditation.
“No,” he says. “Thanks. I think my mum will be back for us any minute now.”
“Well, another time,” says Lalitavajri. “I’m here every Tuesday if you want to change your mind.”
And I think, yes... I’m going to come back here.
And I’m going to bring the flask.
“Well?” asks Mrs Paddy. “How was it?”
“Buddhism,” says Paddy, “is mental.”
“Mental?” repeats Mrs Paddy.
Paddy consults his notes. “Buddhists,” he reads, “claim to be able to walk through walls. ‘I don’t disbelieve this.’ That’s what she said, Onion Bhaji: ‘I don’t disbelieve this.’”
Mrs Paddy laughs. “Bit like Christians then.”
“What?” says Paddy.
“Well,” says Mrs Paddy, “Christians believe that, three days after being crucified, a man rose to life again.”
“That’s different,” says Paddy.
“Is it?” says Mrs Paddy.
“Course,” replies Paddy. “Christianity’s true.”
“Oh,” says Mrs Paddy. “Says who?”
“Father Neville!” says Paddy, like he’s just played the Ace of Spades.
Mrs Paddy keeps quiet.
“Anyway, it not just the walls stuff,” continues Paddy. “There’s plenty of other weird stuff in Buddhism.”
“Such as?”
“Such as after you die, your soul hangs about until, until…”
“Until?”
“Until a man and a woman have sex,” adds Zoe helpfully.
Paddy sniggers and Zoe beams, as if the joke is all hers.
“And then,” Paddy adds, “your soul goes into the baby which means…”
“Everyone gets a pre-owned soul,” concludes Zoe.
Then they both laugh and things seem to be going back to the way they were with the conversation about films.
“Isn’t that horrible?” says Paddy. “I mean, having someone else’s soul inside you? How creepy is that?”
“But if it was in you,” I say, maybe just because I’m beginning to wish I was back in the Shrine Room where all things seemed possible, “it wouldn’t be someone else’s, it’d be yours.”
“It would still be pre-owned,” says Zoe.
Pre-owned is clearly going to take over from ancient as Zoe’s new favourite word.
“Pre-owned,” considers Mrs Paddy.
“You know, like in an X-box game or a DVD th
at used to belong to someone else.”
“Oh,” says Mrs Paddy, “you mean second-hand.”
“Pre-owned,” repeats Zoe. “Disgusting. Yuck, yuck, yuck.”
“Hang on,” says Mrs Paddy. “We’re all a bit second-h— pre-owned, if you think about it.”
“What?” says Paddy.
“What?” says Zoe.
“Well, genetics,” says Mrs Paddy. “Like you have your dad’s eye colour, Maxim, and my face shape and your grandad’s laugh, and you don’t think of that as disgusting, do you?”
Paddy looks like, all of a sudden, he’s not quite so sure about this.
“So why would it seem so strange,” Mrs Paddy adds, “to share a soul with someone?”
I look at Mrs Paddy trying to work out whether she believes what she’s saying or is just doing what Si calls Playing Devil’s Advocate, which is saying stuff you don’t believe just for the sake of A Discussion. I decide she’s being truthful.
“Well, it might not even be the soul of someone in your family,” says Paddy. “I mean, you might get the soul of an ant.”
Paddy having the soul of an ant could explain a lot of things.
“I didn’t know Buddhism did the animal thing,” says Mrs Paddy. “Are you sure about that?”
“Or what if it was the ants who were having sex?” says Zoe (and I’m hoping sex isn’t going to become her new word). “I mean, that would be even worse. You’d end up inside the ant.”
“On the other hand,” says Paddy, “you’d probably be so much cleverer than all the other ants, you’d be Ant Emperor and then you could marshal the forces of ants worldwide and take over the universe.”
“Who says souls are clever?” says Mrs Paddy.
“What?” says Paddy.
“What?” says Zoe.
“Well, souls can be many things,” says Mrs Paddy, “but I’m not sure clever is one of them.”
I’m beginning to change my mind about Mrs Paddy. Other than Si (who’s a life form that would probably baffle even Pug), most adults I know talk about Nothing in Particular. They can talk about Nothing in Particular for hours on end: homework, washing-up, road tax, the education system, lawnmowers, lost keys, the supermarket run and here is Mrs Paddy, who I’ve always thought of as simply a larger version of Paddy, actually being interesting. Thoughtful, even. I’m not sure I should be calling her Mrs Paddy any more. I think I should be calling her Sarah, because even if it turns out that she has a pre-owned soul, I think she definitely has a brain all of her own.
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“Well, you hear of ‘old souls’, don’t you?” says Sarah. “Sometimes people look into the eyes of babies and say, ‘Well, here’s an old soul’, as though that baby has some sort of wisdom they couldn’t possibly have unless they’d been round once or twice before. But ‘clever’ souls – I don’t know.”
“What’s the difference between being clever and being wise?” asks Paddy.
“Quite a lot,” says Sarah.
When we get back to the house, it’s Gran who opens the door. Si has obviously returned to the hospital. Gran invites Sarah in for tea and that leaves me with Zoe – but also with Paddy. I wish Paddy would just Go Away, I wish he’d disappear in a Puff of Smoke. It’s so difficult to think around someone who treats the whole universe as a joke. And I need to do some thinking and I need to check in with Zoe, to see how we are.
I also need to be with the flask.
But Zoe’s already bounding up the stairs to my bedroom and Paddy’s following her, and I’m following both of them.
Why am I always following people?
It’s Zoe, of course, who’s first into the room.
“Wow,” she says. “Will you look at that!”
We look.
As I managed to get up and leave the house this morning without opening the curtains, there is nothing in my room but darkness.
Nothing, that is, but the flask.
The flask is sitting on my computer table, swirling clouds and clouds of fluorescent green.
And Zoe is looking straight at it.
Zoe can see the flask – she can see inside it!
“Jeez,” says Paddy. “That’s amazing!”
And Paddy – Paddy can see inside it too.
Paddy!
I feel something thrill up my spine. I am not alone. I am not alone! They can see it. I am not going mad. I am not the only person in the universe who can see beyond science, beyond Si, just… beyond. And, all at once, I love Zoe! I even love Paddy.
“What on earth is it?” Paddy is advancing into the room, making for the green swirl of the flask.
Zoe moves too, she’s almost dancing towards the glow. But I remain where I am, stuck in the doorway, because suddenly I think there’s something wrong, something unholy about the flask and its colour. It’s not making me feel good, not like the fizz-heart blue. It’s coming to me slowly, oh so slowly across the room. I’m fighting to think exactly what it is that’s wrong and then I get it: up until now the flask has only held natural colours, the iridescence of pearls, the blue of the sky, the grey of storm clouds, the purple of bruises, the black of night. This green is alien, lurid, electric.
Paddy arrives at the computer table. He stretches out his hand.
“Wait,” I cry.
But he’s already lifting the flask, holding it in his hands.
“Oh, you’re joking,” he exclaims.
At desk level are the four flashing, fluorescent green lights of my broadband internet connection. In his hands is a colourless flask.
“It’s just a stupid old bottle,” he says.
“Give it here,” says Zoe.
He gives it to her, all interest gone. She places it down in front of the broadband connection again, watches the clouds gather and swirl, the green computer lights refracted through the uneven contours of the glass. Then she picks the flask up, puts it down again, just to check.
“Oh,” she says, equally disappointed. “Just for a moment I thought we might all have walked through a wall, actually found something special, a genie in a bottle. Wouldn’t that have been something?”
“Me,” I say. I’ve begun to unlock, I’m going across that room faster than light. “Give it to me!”
“Steady on,” says Paddy, sensing my urgency. “It’s not going anywhere.”
But it is going somewhere. In fact it’s already gone. I know even before I lay my hands on the bottle, the flask is empty. The butterfly breath has gone.
I snatch the flask from Zoe’s hands, stare down its glass throat, just like I did when I couldn’t believe the cork was missing.
“There’s nothing in there,” says Paddy, as though I’m a total imbecile. “It was just the lights. The lights of the computer.”
“But what if it had been for real?” says Zoe. “Imagine that. Our very own genie. We could have asked for whatever we wanted.”
“Correction,” says Paddy, “I could have asked for whatever I wanted. I was the one that touched it first, you know, as in me – master, you – slave.”
“Not me slave,” says Zoe. “Genie – slave.”
“No,” I roar. “Not a slave. Not now, not ever. The biggest, freest, most extraordinary being in the universe.”
“What?” says Paddy.
“What?” says Zoe.
“In this bottle, in this flask. Big as a storm wind, tiny as a baby’s breath. It was here!”
Zoe and Paddy exchange glances.
They think I’ve lost it.
Paddy puts his head to one side. “Jess,” he says solemnly, “did you bang your head when you stepped through one of those Buddhist walls?”
And Zoe laughs.
She laughs.
“Tell you what,” adds Paddy, “why don’t we shed some light on this sad little scene?” He opens the curtains.
And there it is, there on the window sill, like some curled, pearly cat.
“Look,” I shriek, spilt over with happin
ess. “Look!”
They look.
“Oh,” says Paddy. “I see.”
He sees!
He leans forward, putting his hand straight through the pearly cat, and knocks on the windowpane.
“Sam,” he yells. “Look, it’s Sam!”
Zoe joins him at the window. The pearly cat has reformed, close to the glass, but away from Paddy’s huge, clumsy hands. Zoe will see it, surely Zoe will see it?
She looks straight at the pulsing light, straight through it, out over the rooftops, down the street and towards the rising mound of the park.
“And Alice,” she says. “That’s Alice with him, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” says Paddy. “Come on – what are we waiting for?”
Paddy isn’t waiting for much, he’s straight off down the stairs and Zoe would be with him, with hardly a backwards glance, only I grab her elbow.
“Wait!” I cry.
“Huh?”
“Don’t go,” I say.
“Why?”
I mean to say, There’s so much I need to share with you. And, Please, because it’s scary having to deal with this all by myself.
What I actually say is, “Don’t go. Don’t go with him.”
“With Paddy?”
“Yes. No. I mean it, please.” And I give her one of those looks that, between friends, don’t usually need words. The one that says simply: Be there for me.
“You’re not making sense,” says Zoe.
“Wait,” I say again, unwilling to let go of her arm in case she just runs straight out of my life, but needing to get something from the bureau. I scrabble behind the arched door flanked by the two wooden pillars. “Look.”
She looks. I’m showing her the braided bracelet of pink and purple she made for me in year 5.
“So?” she says.
“Best friends,” I say. “That’s what you said. When I wanted to wind Em in, when I wanted to make a bracelet for all three of us. ‘Don’t you understand about best friends?’ That’s what you said.”
“I was nine,” says Zoe, incredulous. “Ten, tops. What are you talking about?”
“Zoe!” yells Paddy from the front door.
“Look, either come or don’t,” says Zoe. “I don’t care one way or the other. But don’t go all heavy on me. Since when were we joined at the hip?”
