The conference centre was three kilometres outside a well-known tourist town, but the nomenclature ‘conference’ turned out to be misleading. It was in fact an old air-force barracks from World War II, and a gutted and rusting small plane stood propped beside the driveway as he drove through the main gates. Somehow it seemed symbolic; he was here to take flight from his old self. But the conditions were dismayingly primitive, even for a school holiday camp.
Following the signs, he parked outside a cream-coloured demountable hut labelled ‘Registration’. It was empty. Admittedly he was late, and it was dark and he could hear chanting coming from a large weatherboard building with a pitched roof that he deduced must be the main hall. A woman dressed in white jeans and a white shawl stopped and asked him if she could help. She led him into a warm room of Laminex tables and plastic chairs that turned out to be the dining room, and there she introduced him to a man who was to take care of late registrations. Within minutes he was given a plastic wristband and assigned to a dormitory.
Dormitory. That word filled him with unease, and sure enough he had been allocated to the second in a row of wooden huts at the bottom of a steep, grassy slope beside a creek. Inside, the hut had concrete floors and double bunks and not much else, apart from a concrete ablutions wing at one end. At least, he told himself, it was inside and not a tent out in the sharp unseasonal cold that was beginning to blow in from Bass Strait.
He took a leak in the ablutions wing, which had all the charm of a prison block. Then, to his dismay, he found there was only a single top bunk left, and he swung his bag up onto the bare mattress, thinking he would make up his bed later. He had brought with him a sleeping bag, as instructed, and there were pillows and a rough army blanket. By now it was almost dark, and he fumbled in his bag for the small torch he had packed.
Outside, the paths were well lit, and a clear sky of bright stars raised his spirits. He climbed the grassy slope to the main compound, and when he entered the hall she was already there, seated on a low stool that had been draped in white silk. The hall was full, so full there was scarcely room to breathe. By now he felt no excitement, only deep fatigue, and he looked around for a gap of floor space where he could sit until the usual queue formed. After treading on a woman’s foot and bumping the head of small child, he managed to squash himself into a space behind a pillar and felt his jeans stretch uncomfortably as he adjusted his legs into a cross-legged position and loosened the back of his shirt.
Once settled, he began to relax. The interior of the hall had an unexpected charm, with a fibro ceiling that sloped on both sides and a tiny proscenium stage draped in green and gold silk. Already he felt soothed by the chanting, though before long he wished he had sat on one of the chairs at the back. His shoulders began to ache and his calf muscles were stiff and sore. When he felt the familiar tingle in his feet he knew that as soon as the singing stopped he would have to get up and move around. And of course by now he was hungry. On the plane he had been unable to eat, from a feeling of nervous anticipation, not to mention the hectic rush of getting to Mascot, and he had made a mental note to buy sandwiches at one of the airport cafés when he landed. But then, in his haste to get on the road as soon as possible, he had forgotten all about food and so had arrived with an acid pain under his ribs, only to find he was too late for dinner. But still, here he was with her, for two full days, and who knew what revelations and experiences awaited him? What was a pain in the guts?
Craning his neck at intervals to look around the wooden pillar that blocked his view, he gazed at the small, dark-skinned figure in white who was seated in front of the stage, and who had begun now to receive the children first, as was her custom, while some of the adults began to form a queue. For him there was no urgency and he made no move; he would go later. There was all the time in the world, that was the point of being here, and for now he was content simply to sit, hands clasped around his knees, and gaze at her.
Once again he was struck by how her photographs failed to capture the aura of her presence. By now he had seen dozens of these photos, and each one could have been of someone else. The ineffable sheen of her skin, the subtlety of her expression and the light in her eyes were beyond the camera’s capacity to capture and store. At times it seemed as if they were barely accessible even to the human eye, as if some emanation from her hovered at the edge of the cornea and could only be glimpsed peripherally, and then for a nanosecond. When someone asked her a question, often she would laugh with childlike good humour, revealing an appealing gap in her white teeth. When she set about explaining a point in Hindi she would use her delicate, dark hands fluidly, occasionally forming a small fist and gesturing with an emphatic elegance that was neither masculine nor feminine but that embodied an authority, a knowingness, unlike any he had experienced. When people wept at her feet, as they so often did, she stroked their cheeks, brushing aside strands of their hair and giving them a look of the utmost compassion. And yet through all this, in every mood – laughing, frowning, consoling, chanting ecstatically with her eyes closed and her arms extended – she was sublimely impersonal. He had tried once to explain this to Zoe, who had responded with the obvious: ‘If she’s as loving as you say, how can she be impersonal?’ To which he could only reply, lamely, ‘You have to be there.’ Why don’t you come, he had asked, and see for yourself? But she’d shaken her head, and got up to brush her hair.
As the crowd murmured around him in the stuffy hall, he closed his eyes to meditate. And immediately thought of food. Damn, how careless of him not to see to his bodily needs. He was used to Zoe doing that. It was Zoe who packed sandwiches for a long trip, or kept dried fruit and nuts in the glove box of the car. Seeking distraction from his hunger pains, he opened his eyes and saw one of the marshals browsing at the bookstall at the rear of the hall. It was Rebecca. Yes, Rebecca. He got up and walked over to her side.
‘Hi, Rick,’ she said, with obvious pleasure at seeing him. Feeling foolish in the extreme, he asked her if she knew where he could get some food. ‘No,’ she said, with an expression of quaint seriousness that was rather attractive. ‘Why don’t you go over to the kitchen and see if they have something there?’
‘The kitchen?’
‘Where you registered. Behind there.’
Outside, he searched for his shoes, which had been scattered some distance from where he left them and were now squashed beneath several other pairs. How could this be, since he was one of the last to arrive? The longer he searched, the more irritable he became.
By the time he located the kitchen, a big commercial set-up of deep stainless-steel sinks, black gas burners and giant cooking pots, it was empty. Sacks of flour and lentils were stacked up against the wall and there wasn’t a loaf of bread in sight. All he could find was an urn of hot water and various teabags left over from dinner, so he poured himself a mug and loaded it up with sugar. Then he drank the rest of the milk left in the only carton on the bench that wasn’t empty. He had come to his first meditation retreat in the hope of deep insights and had begun the evening by prowling around with a growling stomach like a disgruntled bear.
When at last he joined the queue for her blessing, it was after eleven and the crowd was beginning to thin. The diehards would stay until the last moment, and he would be one of them. As he approached what by now he thought of as the final straight, the few metres in the queue between himself and her feet, he began to feel the subtle vibration that emanated from her and that entered him as if through the pores of his skin, no matter how great his discomfort, no matter his mood. But when she drew him to her, brow to brow, and he felt nothing. A pleasant blankness, a certain lightness of being, but nothing more.
Afterwards, on the walk back to the hut, he asked himself if his expectations had been unrealistic. And he laughed silently. The concept of ‘realism’, as commonly applied, in no way belonged here. And anyway, what had he expected? Nirvana in a decrepit air-force barracks? Still, it was only the beginning of the retreat; he w
as confident she had more in store for him than this, and he must wait patiently for it to come, and not think of himself as a special case to whom anything – anything at all – was due.
That night was one of the most uncomfortable of his life. The man beneath him snored loudly in fitful bursts. The door to the ablutions block at the end of the hut was weighted in such a way that whenever anyone got up in the night for a leak it banged loudly in a sudden thud that jolted him awake. As if that were not enough, around two in the morning the temperature dropped suddenly and he shivered under his single blanket. He disliked the constraint of sleeping bags and it hadn’t seemed cold enough to bother unpacking his when finally he had climbed up onto his bunk.
As a consequence of all this, he slept in, only to find when he climbed down from his bunk that the hot water in the showers had run out. He set out for the dining room but a cold wind had blown in off the water, and halfway across the paddock he had to turn back for a jacket. By the time he made it to the dining room there was only cold semolina porridge sitting congealed at the bottom of a big steel pot, and insipid white sliced bread, which he lathered thickly with peanut butter – something he hadn’t eaten since he was a child. Anything to fill him up.
All day he squirmed in a cocoon of hunger. He was unable to meditate, he was unable to sit still. The morning program went on forever, the queue afterwards was interminable, he delayed too long in joining it and soon it was two in the afternoon and his belly shouted at him with hunger. He knew he would again be too late, he would miss lunch, he would get to the bare, fluorescent dining room with its white plastic chairs and there would be nothing left to eat, it would all be gone. When finally he arrived at her feet, his blessing seemed perfunctory, as if she were barely interested in him, as if they were both going through the motions.
But it didn’t matter because all he could think about was lunch. He couldn’t get to the dining room fast enough, and to his relief saw that they were bringing out big new trays of food for a second sitting. Thank God for that! But it looked better than it tasted – a bland, overcooked vegetable burger in a mushy bun, accompanied by a few lettuce leaves, undressed. He swallowed it down awkwardly so that he almost gagged, conscious of a craving for coffee, real coffee, not the instant stuff that sat spilled in sticky granules on the benches, and not that disgusting coffee substitute made of roasted grass and God knows what other foul vegan brew. He was a long way from home, and not just in kilometres. He was out of his comfort zone.
By the time he had finished eating, it was almost three in the afternoon. The evening program began at six-thirty and he could go for a walk along the beach now, as some of the others were doing, but an icy wind was blowing in off the strait. He decided instead on a nap.
Back in the hut there were several prone bodies with the same idea but as he approached his bunk he had an idea. Reaching up to the bunk, he hoisted the mattress and bedding down over his head and carried them to a space at the end of the hut where there was a bare alcove of concrete floor. Perfect. He would sleep there. Before long he had gathered his things together and set them up alongside the mattress. It would be hard, and it would be cold, but he would not have to climb up onto that narrow bunk and he would be much further from the snorer and the thudding cubicle door.
Already he felt better.
He began to do a quick check of his things, and by this time a small boy had approached and was staring at his manoeuvres. There was something odd about the boy, a plump child with fair, curly hair and vacant green eyes.
‘What are you doing?’ the boy asked. ‘Why is that thing there?’ His speech was unclear, as if he couldn’t be bothered to articulate the ends of words, and it occurred to Rick that the boy was in some way simple. Was that the correct term for it now? Or would it be more accurate to describe him as ‘complex’? In either case, he wanted him to go away; he was not in the mood for children, he was tired, he wanted quiet, he wanted a nap. But the boy hovered. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Rick.’
‘My name’s Oliver.’
Well, at least he wasn’t called Bhodi or Moon, like some of the hippie kids around the place. ‘Are you sleeping here?’
‘I’m sleeping with my mum.’
So what are you doing in here, Rick thought, in the men’s quarters? ‘Perhaps you’d better go back to your own hut,’ he said. The best he could offer Oliver was a charmless smile as he strolled off down the aisle between the bunks for a leak in the ablutions wing.
When he returned, the little brat was jumping on his bed and emitting a weird yodelling noise.
‘Hey, get off there!’ he snapped.
Oliver stood stock still, mouth open in idiotic astonishment. Rick leaned across the mattress and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder with the intention of squiring him out the door, but the instant he touched him the boy keeled over, face forward, onto the bed, and lay there like a zombie.
This was too much. ‘Get up!’ he said, sharply, and then regretting his tone, ‘Get up, Oliver. I’m going to have a sleep on that bed.’
Oliver rolled onto his back and looked up at him with a crazed smile. ‘Going to have a sleep,’ he droned, as if in a trance, ‘going to have a sleep.’
‘Not you, me.’ And he leaned over and hoisted the boy upright, then lifted him under the armpits and set him down roughly in the corridor. Any minute one of the sleepers would wake up and see him molesting this kid. What a perfect day.
To his relief, Oliver made no resistance and began to stroll down the aisle, gazing about him as if he had just that minute wandered in and it was all new.
Rick sank onto the mattress and fell into a heavy, dragging sleep.
When he woke it was almost dark. Damn, he would miss dinner again, for the second night in a row. He threw off the blanket, reached for his jacket and strode to the door, where his boots were lined up with the rest. At the end of the line of shoes, Oliver was standing in shadow, looking intent. At first he couldn’t see what the boy was up to and then he recognised the sound; Oliver was pissing over the shoes.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. The boy turned to him, staring blankly and waving his little white prick up and down. Then, as if stung by a slap, he ran off up the grassy bank, keening his strange yodelling wail.
Jesus, what next? To his relief Rick found that his own boots had been spared, but since he didn’t know any of the others in his hut he wouldn’t be able to alert them and they would just have to make the unhappy discovery when they returned. Or should he ask one of the monitors to make an announcement?
When he arrived at the dining room he realised he had misread the time on his watch and he was an hour early. Typical. He couldn’t put a foot right. He walked back to where the car was parked and drove three kilometres into the tourist town nearby, where he bought a double-shot coffee, eggs and bacon and some chocolate, including a small bar that he planned to give to Oliver; his conscience continued to prick him over his waspishness with the boy. Oliver was without a doubt the most unlikeable child he’d ever encountered, with flapping arms, sickly pale skin, and a moronic expression, slack-mouthed and mocking, that he found physically repugnant. Nevertheless, he ought to have been able to feel some impulse to kindness. The child was disturbed and he, Rick, had failed a test. Why was it that ever since he arrived at this boot camp, his every word, his every gesture, seemed to strike the wrong note? He was not normally this inept, even when out of his comfort zone. Something was out of sync. And he might not even see the mad kid again – with luck, he wouldn’t – though, as it happened, no sooner had he pulled into the drive of the campsite than he saw the boy walking through the door of his hut. Inside, he found him running noisily up and down the ablutions block and shouting into the echoing stalls.
‘Here, Oliver,’ he said, testily. ‘I’ve brought you something,’ and he almost thrust the chocolate bar into the pocket of the boy’s shorts.
Suddenly he thought of how it would look if anyone came in. Here h
e was in a lavatory block giving a small boy a lolly. Terrific. In less than twenty-four hours he had been reduced to this.
Oliver just stared at him, that blank moronic stare. ‘What?’ he said, but Rick turned and walked away.
Oliver stood motionless in the aisle, his arms limp by his side. ‘What?’ he shouted, and the cry echoed in the bare spaces of the bunkhouse. ‘What? What? What?’
When Rick returned to the dining room it was crowded but they had not yet begun to serve dinner. From over in one corner he saw a raised arm waving to him; it was Rebecca. She was sitting with a group of people and she beckoned him to join them. Later, he could not remember what they talked about; all he could recall was the loneliness that descended on him as they spoke, followed by a strange, numbing paranoia, like the worst kind of stoned feeling. He was miserable, utterly miserable. As the meal dragged on, he could hear his own voice, too loud and too emphatic, some awful desperate braying, and all the time the pain was getting worse. He felt that the others were laughing at him, that he was absurd, an awkward fool, a big lumbering bundle of bone and muscle, of sinew and fat. He and Oliver were somehow kin.
By the end of the meal he was scarcely able to speak.
That evening in the hall he fidgeted with a hostile restlessness that pricked at him as if he were being tormented by invisible flies. He did not get into the queue for her blessing, he left early – before ten – and he walked the track down to the beach, where he sat on the damp sand, his head hunched over his drawn-up knees, and listened to the roar of the incoming waves. There was no moon. He thought of seeking out Rebecca and putting the moves on. She had flirted with him, and it would restore his pride.
Later – how much later he couldn’t say – he lay on his mattress in the hut and stared up at the blank ceiling. It was all a mistake, he shouldn’t have come, the place was indescribably tacky and he had made a serious error of judgement. In the morning he would get up, pack the car and leave early. He would use his mobile to rebook his flight, and with luck he’d be home by mid-afternoon. He would lose face with Zoe but it would be a small price to pay.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 16
