by Gregory Day
They watched for twenty minutes or so, by which time six Japanese tourists had wandered up Merna Street from the carpark above Horseshoe Cove to have a look. Rather than enjoying the attention, the wet-haired model seemed to Carla and Liz to clam up a bit once there was a crowd watching her. In sympathy they decided to move on.
Instead of walking down to the Two Pointers lookout as they had intended, they realised now that time was getting on and so they just continued along Merna Street, to do a loop back down to where their cars were parked in front of the cafe. As they went, they stopped to peer through the windows of the cluster of meteorological buildings. There were signs on the old blue doors for the benefit of tourists, denoting what each was originally used for. Liz remarked to Carla that it was nothing short of amazing that the buildings were all still locked up when only the main cottage was in use for meteorology. She was impressed that they were still well maintained but joked to Carla that the scientists would hardly be needing a ‘Balloon Filling and Hydrogen Storage’ building in the digital era. Both of them agreed that it was only a matter of time before at least some of the beautiful old structures were rationalised and put to better use.
They stopped for a peek into the frontyard of the big Khouri house on the ocean side of the road as they went by, the gate in the high rusted steel wall being open. They passed opinion on the wall itself as well as on the shiny glass cube of the house. There were three flowering gums between the gate and the house and the reflections of the colour and foliage in the light-filled sheets of glass created an effect whereby you didn’t know where the house or the trees began or ended. They seemed interchangeable. Liz thought it was effective but ‘a bit slick’ and Carla thought it was ‘totally gorgeous’, but when a young man of about twenty came out of the front door and hopped into a brand new oyster-grey VW, they moved on.
‘If I had the money,’ Liz said as they began to descend from the cliff back down towards the Dick Lake Sanctuary, ‘I’d build a grand old weatherboard. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have the big wide verandahs, and those flywire walls that retract. Like in Queensland. I’ve always loved the idea of a Queenslander. Of being outside but protected at the same time.’
‘You’re so trad, Lizzie. That’s what the Khouri place is all about. Natural light. But it’s now, you know, and funky, with all those large glass sheets. Apparently the ocean side’s in the same stone as the Meteorological Station. From the water it just fits in, looks like an extension of the cliff.’
Liz screwed up her face, trying to find the words to describe her displeasure. ‘Yeah, I kind of like the glass but not for a house. It’s kind of cold. And what about the rusted wall. It’s all . . . I dunno, too smooth or something. Kind of cheap.’
Carla snorted through her nose. ‘Cheap! That’s very expensive “cheap”, Lizzie. Do you know how much that would have cost!’
Liz rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘It’s all Craig talked about for ages after they missed the sale. The land alone was worth two million.’
‘That’s what I heard. The house’d have to be worth that again. More, probably.’
Back at their cars Carla hugged Liz and told her: ‘I’m so happy for you about the yoga, Lizzie. You deserve it.’
‘Thanks, hun.’
Carla got into her car and pressed the window down. ‘What are you doing on the weekend?’ she asked.
Liz squinted in the light, thinking. Eventually she remembered. ‘Oh, we’re going to this big auction on Saturday, out the back of Minapre. Why don’t you come? Bring the kids.’
‘Sounds nice.’
‘Yeah, yeah, it will be. Batty’ll be there but I’m sure that won’t faze you. It’s meant to be a beautiful property. Come around to us, if you like, for brekky about nine and we’ll go from there.’
‘Excellent.’
‘OK. Great. See you.’
‘Arrivederci, darl.’
As Carla drove off, Liz got into her car and for a moment felt an overwhelming need to check all the seats and carpet for spiders. That was strange. She put it down to the fact she’d had two coffees rather than one. She should’ve known better. She felt a bit speedy now, a little wound-up. It was unpleasant.
She flicked on the radio and found presenter Alex Harte talking to an ex-Catholic priest about what he was calling ‘The New Spirituality’, which apparently included yoga. Liz was amazed at her timing, and immediately felt better. Rather than drive home directly she headed off on the Ocean Road towards Boat Creek so she could listen.
Alex Harte’s radio persona was that of the devil’s advocate so he was challenging his guest at every point. But already the ex-priest was talking about ‘contemporary manifestations, such as meditation and yoga’ as being the beginnings of a new religion:
‘. . . but surely, Andrew, something like a religion must have a specific idea of a God. Isn’t that what a religion is all about?’
‘Yes, but who’s to say that our traditional view of God as an old man with a white beard isn’t being replaced by something a little more mature, in keeping with all the information we have these days? People are looking for something else.’
‘Yes, I understand that, but are they looking for God or just for some self-satisfaction? If so, it sounds like a Clayton’s religion to me. Aren’t those people faux-religious?’
‘Alex, that’s the problem, you see. People feel all this pressure in the modern world to be authentic. As if you’re not a farmer unless you drive oxen. But, of course, our world has changed and . . .’
Liz cruised down the western side of the Boat Creek slope. At the bottom she swung the 4WD up into the Old Breheny Road and headed inland to do the loop back around to Mangowak rather than a u-turn on the main road. That way it would take a fraction longer to get home, and she could just crawl along as she listened rather than worry about other cars going this way and that on the Ocean Road. She felt her tyres grip the gravel as she headed past the nestled beach shacks of Breheny Creek.
‘Isn’t something like yoga just a physical thing, Andrew?’
‘You mean, like going to the gym?’
‘Well, yes. I mean, I know people who say that walking is like a spiritual act these days. I mean, really, walking is what we do, isn’t it, not how we pray?’
‘Yes but while we’re walking, or practising yoga, or playing darts for that matter, Alex, we are all the time in consciousness. Now, for some people walking brings them an awareness of that fact. And for others, yoga does. And the guy at the pub may find that awareness in the concentration he requires to be a darts champion.’
‘So, anything goes?’
‘Well, no, it’s not quite that simple but, really, why demarcate what is and isn’t a spiritual practice? All I’m saying is that there are no rules to the life of the spirit and it will find what it needs where it finds it. In yoga, for instance, or Christian prayer. It’s simple.’
Liz agreed. Keep it simple. But then again she admired Alex Harte and his stubbornness. His mind was as sharp as a whip and the other guy was a bit new-agey. She looked out at the well grassed paddocks to her left as she drove and the clusters of fallen flowers in the shadows under the ironbark stands on the roadside. Did she believe in God, she wondered.
As she passed through the bend just over the old wooden bridge of the Mangowak Creek she happened to glimpse the west face of the convent high up in the hills to her left. The white stone of St Catherine’s shone out amidst the deep green of the trees. She thought how in the whole time she’d lived in Mangowak she’d never entered the building. Not to attend a wedding, or a funeral, or even just for a visit. She’d driven past and admired the lovely Spanish style architecture and the gardens that the nuns looked after. But she’d never been in it.
What does it matter if it’s a Catholic convent? she thought now. The guy on the radio was right. Take it where you find it.
With that new ten per cent of herself that the yoga had awoken, Liz turned left now rather than
right when the Old Breheny Road rounded onto the valley and met the Dray Road. As the conversation on the radio ended and the station broke for news, Liz was driving up into the hills towards the convent rather than back towards home to work.
TWENTY-ONE
LIZ’S PILGRIMAG
Pulling into the parking bay of St Catherine’s in the 4WD, Liz initially felt conspicuous in the strange environment. The car was so big, for a start, no-one could possibly miss her arrival.
Slowly she got out and stood by the cooling bonnet, looking up at the blond stone building, the entrance of which was adorned with a brief but ornate flourish of scroll, acanthus and angels. The plain walls extended away to her right and high above the garden, only punctuated by the natural pink striae of the stone itself, and also by a line of windows ten metres apart in both the first and second storeys. There was no sign of human life, no swish of habits or bobbing of wimples, and all around the bush stood silent, like a witness focused on exactly that spot.
Liz walked across the rose-gold gravel and stepped up the three hemispheric entrance steps into the vestibule. The space was honey-timbered but bare, with not even the usual diocese posters or cardboard donation boxes one would expect. All there was, next to an ordinary sash window on the wall to her left, was a portrait of a chubby looking young nun, and below that a stone ledge covered with small orange and yellow stapled booklets. On closer inspection she discovered the booklets were brief hagiographies of St Therèse of Lisieux, who Liz assumed must have been the nun in the picture. Casually she flicked through a couple of booklets before replacing them. Their faded covers suggested they’d been sitting untouched in the northern light of that bench for a long time.
On the far side of the vestibule was an open entrance to a carpeted hallway. Directly in front of her, however, beside the portrait of St Thérèse of Lisieux, was a heavy wooden door with a reliquary which quite obviously was the entrance to the church. With no-one about, Liz quietly pulled the door open. She entered, stepping forward slowly across a dark mosaic floor. The air was heavy with incense. She stopped when she reached the back of the centre aisle. It seemed she had it all to herself. She sat down on a pew and took in the hush.
The interior of the church was unexpectedly garish. It reminded Liz of a wedding cake. Leaning back slowly with a slight smile on her lips she gazed at the rococo plasterwork on the high ceiling directly over her head. Up behind the altar the same marzipan and nougat coloured ornaments and filigrees rose around a painted panel upon which a stone Christ was crucified on a timber cross. Incongruously the background panel itself was daubed with a bush scene of gumtrees, kookaburras, kangaroos, possums, cockatoos and galahs. The bush scene was rough work, and set within the Italianate plasterwork of the walls and ceiling she couldn’t help but be amused by it. Even despite the soaring height of the ceiling, the solemnity of the dark empty pews and the funereal scent of frankincense, she was somehow set at ease by the garishness of the plasterwork, and the tackiness of the panel. She looked up at the soft natural light entering the church high up through the clerestory. It reached across the space in clichéd shafts. She closed her eyes. She began to listen to her own breath in the silence.
Before long she found herself in a deep meditation. From the easy listening to her breath she ran her mind over the entirety of her body, beginning with her toes. As each toe slipped from her focus she would concentrate harder and breathe more rhythmically until it would allow itself to be dwelt upon and released with a tingling sensation. Up along her body she came, over the arches of her feet, up along her ankles and calves, as if in a slow thaw, the stiffness and clenching unstiffening and unclenching until eventually she reached her chest and shoulders, and sat in a leaden stillness. She was deeply relaxed. She focused on each feature of her face then, roving along her cheekbones and jawline and into the spaces between, letting the flesh sag naturally, her lower lip hanging down. She rounded behind to the nape of her neck, which soon was also tingling, the icy tension relaxed.
After half an hour her whole body was unwound. She didn’t want to open her eyes just yet. This was too nice. She focused back on her eyelids and let them go free for a second time. Then she was back at her nostrils again, at the source of her breath, which now seemed to be passing through her body uninterrupted by the rhythm of her thoughts. She let her mind travel, unhitching the body-roving meditation. She sat there with a thousand unbidden images, for she wouldn’t have known how long. Eventually she slowly opened her eyes and let out a deep sigh.
From that day on, Liz began to include in the resumption of her walks a longer route that took her through the damp, swordgrassy bush at the back of the riverflat, along the Evan’s Tip fire track, and up to the high facing ridge of ironstone and casuarina where St Catherine’s was. Turning her phone off she’d meditate in the church and afterwards sit blissfully on a wooden seat in the convent garden, to rest and suck from her water bottle, surrounded by lemon-scented gums, hydrangeas and bougainvillea, lagunarias, azaleas, lavender, Chinese lanterns, cork oaks, vivid convolvulus and pungent wafts of wisteria.
The wooden seat was on a lush sloping lawn under the gum-nuts of a flowering gum. From there, Liz would watch the nuns come and go across the lawn with their dark grey wheelie-bins full of mulch or cuttings and weeds, or with their garden implements in their gloved hands. They all wore ankle-length pale green habits with a shorter marine-blue tunic over the top, but on their heads and feet they seemed to allow themselves anything they liked. Some wore elasticised working boots for the garden and others wore sandals, some wore modern looking runners and skate shoes and others even went about in bare feet. On their heads they wore anything from old terry-towelling beach hats to baseball caps or wide-brimmed straw hats. Some would smile in Liz’s direction as they passed by, as if to say welcome and hello, while others seemed either too shy to acknowledge her sitting there, or completely oblivious to her presence. Liz was glad of this. Like the tacky decor of the church, it was a relief. Not being brought up a Catholic she felt just a hint of ineligibility in the surrounds. She wouldn’t have known what to say if the nuns had been more forthcoming.
In a region deeper than such insecurities, however, she sensed a perfection in the convent garden, with the limestone rising high towards the black eaves across the lawn in front of her. She would rest her eyes, inhale, exhale, simply be happy. She would allow every thing that seemed complex in her life to gently simplify. The tensions of her family life, the town, the people she knew, even the actual physical spaces of her house, seemed at times a long way away. And then it would all zoom back into the foreground of her thoughts and she would find herself with a re-energised perspective on the life that she and Craig had created. She would see clearly the gift they were giving to their children, amongst all the usual diffculties and indecision of a marriage, by their love and hard work, and particularly by their decision to bring them out of the city to the coast. Libby and Reef were having a rare childhood, something special when you considered the million less fortunate ways that people lived. The challenge now, of course, was to let the abundance flower further, so that when they came of age and wanted to start their own families they could afford, if they chose, to soar as high and far as they liked, or to simply buy a place in the town which they called home.
Everything seemed possible as Liz sat there, and she had no doubt that the trick was to allow things to be, to let good fortune come to you. She needed to trust more, and let things develop. She saw, in a string of tangential but epiphanic scenes from her life, how much she liked to control events and how destructive her fear could be. Amidst the light horticultural chatter of the nuns and the perfume of the wisteria in the convent garden she felt the logic of allowing seeds to grow. To nurture, to water, but not to implore or to expect or to demand.
Unwittingly Liz had created for herself a little pilgrimage by this visit to St Catherine’s once a week, and so precious to her was the nature of her solitude in that church and garde
n that she told none of her friends about it. Already she had invited Carla to yoga on numerous occasions but this was different. She kept the convent walk for herself.
She realised now that it was all due, of course, to the ants. If she’d never been bitten so severely by that bunch of dynamos her life would never have taken this wonderful turn. She would never have become a regular at Vrindarvan, let alone the convent garden. She would also never have experienced the terror of being expropriated from the very land she lived on. Privately Liz thanked the ants. It was as if they were spirit messengers from the intrinsic culture of the land itself, come to stop her in her tracks and deepen her understanding. If she hadn’t been a walker, if she hadn’t gone out day after day with her dumbbells, such a conversion might have never taken place, but now that it had she saw profoundly that Mangowak was a gift she could give to her children but never entirely to herself.
As she walked back through the bush from her visits to the convent she would peer through the screen of trees on either side of the Evan’s Tip track and feel something latent all about her. Something from the core of things. The forest was still and inscrutable, with garnet sap frozen on the husks of the ironbarks, a pair of bush doves blank-eyed in the leaf litter, the air full of echoes about to sound, astringent and mysterious. She had been deluded, she realised, to ever think it was otherwise, to ever view the bush as open, or merely as ‘the great outdoors’. Perhaps for someone who had grown up amongst it it could be that, but she would never know it as she knew the footpaths and playing fields of the suburbs. The ironic thing was that with this new acceptance, she could walk quite confidently amongst it, knowing that for her children its resonance would have no end.
Libby thought her mother was hopeless, a cot-case, that she was floundering about in a region close to nutsville. She had friends at school whose mothers were into yoga but none, absolutely none, who combined it with time-consuming visits to an old Catholic convent! It was spooky and stupid and the nuns were weird, Libby thought. She’d seen them walking in little clusters down the Dray Road on their Tuesday trek into town, in their shapeless garb, and she rolled her eyes with the rest of her friends. She’d spoken to two of them once and had to admit they were quite sweet, but what she remembered most was the tour they’d been given in her last year at primary school. It was conducted by an old nun with a little morsel of banana on her chin, presumably stuck there from her breakfast. Of course no-one, not even Mr Bannister the teacher, had had the courage to alert the nun to the fact and as soon as the tour was over and they were back in the minibus, they all, Mr Bannister included, cracked up. From that day on the mere mention of Sister Banana was enough to double every one over. Occasionally in class, if Mr Bannister was in a good mood, he would refer to Sister Banana in the middle of a lesson and everyone would share the joke. It was funny after all, and there weren’t many jokes a teacher and students could share. It was good for camaraderie.
