A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  The girl looks at him with narrowed eyes. ‘Well, it’d be bloody cold sleeping in the open, I’ll tell you that,’ the girl says.

  ‘There’s the main house.’

  ‘With a dozen people in it, some of them kids.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but the gompa is not a possible place, you should know that.’

  ‘The retreat’s over, isn’t it? And look! We took our boots off.’

  Ignoring an agonised bray of laughter from the boy, he pulls the gold curtains back. ‘The gompa’s a consecrated place,’ he says.

  ‘Okay. Sorry. I’m not into religion myself. Neither is Adrian, are you? But we didn’t mean to offend anyone.’

  ‘You haven’t offended me.’

  ‘Lucky you didn’t catch us last night! Jesus, you gave me a fright. My heart’s still banging.’

  That reminds him. ‘I won’t be ringing the wake-up gong today,’ he says, ‘but I’m doing a guru puja. A few people have said they’re coming.’

  ‘Okay. Sure.’ She shoulders the sleeping-bag. ‘Well, let’s dispose of the evidence. Come on, love.’ She flings an arm round the boy’s shoulders. ‘Cup of tea time, hey.’

  Three men come, prostrate three times and sit. They join in when Tenzin chants. The sun rises into the window and still they sit on. After a breakfast of porridge on the lawns, tents are packed, cars rattle down the sunlit hill to the highway. Tenzin stays in the gompa. He has cleaned out the ashes, stacked the cushions and is sweeping over the reflection of the window on the glossy wood when the door creaks. He swings round, expecting the lama, but the valley girl and Adrian are on the doorstep, and she is holding a shaggy bunch of yellow flowers and bronze-green fronds which she hands to him. He stares.

  ‘Oh, you’re still here,’ she says. ‘We picked these for the gompa. Got a vase?’

  He gets an empty jar from his back room and puts it into the boy’s hands. ‘Wait,’ he says, ‘I’ll get some water.’ He fills the jar from the heavy white jug by the altar, and she crams the stems in.

  ‘Ragwort and bracken. Aren’t they noxious weeds?’ giggles the boy.

  ‘Yep. It’s what there is here in the valley.’ She leans sideways to brush wisps of grass and leaf out of her brown hair. ‘Where’ll I put them?’

  ‘On the floor in front of the throne would be best,’ he says.

  ‘There. They look good, eh? Match the gold silk.’

  ‘They look very good.’

  ‘I love flowers. Live ones.’ She fingers the dried chrysanthemums round the candlesticks. ‘Do you live in that little room?’

  ‘No, in a shack, usually. Down by the lake.’

  ‘Oh, I know! The one those people with the twins had. They’re going after lunch.’

  So he will have his shack back today. In a few hours he will pack his kitbag and go home, put his books and pictures back in their places and himself with them, and it had slipped his mind until now.

  ‘Good,’ he says aloud. ‘I can pack my things. Move out of here.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, mystified.

  ‘No, thanks all the same, there’s no need. We’re going today too.’

  Tenzin gapes. The boy jerks his body in his blind, gulping laugh: ‘Last night was our first and last night, father. How sad.’

  ‘Call me Tenzin.’

  ‘I like Hans better,’ the girl says.

  ‘It’s no longer my name.’

  ‘I don’t get you. You’re not Tibetan. All this dressing up and mumbo jumbo – it’s all very well for the lama, he was born to it. But for you it’s just an act.’

  ‘Julie!’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind. Do you?’

  ‘I don’t mind. But it’s not an act.’

  ‘That’s what it looks like to me.’

  ‘That’s the problem, of course. How to tell the form from the substance. If it’s worth trying to do.’

  ‘All these golden Buddhas. Radiating nectar, isn’t that it? I don’t know. I reckon I’ll stick to nature. This’s beautiful, I suppose. The window, look – it’s lovely.’

  ‘Yes, I love the window.’

  Her finger traces the lead lines of the lotus petals. ‘There aren’t any waterlilies in the lake.’ He shakes his head. ‘Where did they get the idea for this one?’

  ‘They put it there because there aren’t any in the lake. Idiot,’ giggles the boy.

  ‘Oh, you!’ She grabs at him and roughly rumples his hair. He dodges, squealing.

  ‘Are we awful? Don’t you think we’re awful? Look, he’s smiling. We’re his chance to practise forbearance. Bless you my children,’ the boy prates with a papal gesture.

  ‘If you call be what you are a blessing.’

  ‘Be what you are? I don’t call that a blessing, it’s a curse. Oedipus! Be what you are!’

  ‘I think the best –’

  ‘Heard of the mummy’s curse? That’s nothing, folks. Meet the daddy of all curses!’

  ‘I think the best way to see it,’ Tenzin says, ‘is as being neither a curse nor a blessing.’

  ‘Oh well, if the father says it’s neither, of course. But what if it’s both? What then?’

  ‘Not being a father –’ Tenzin says.

  ‘Hear that? He’s not my father.’

  ‘Come on, love. I want a swim in the lake.’

  ‘In a minute. Not being your father…?’

  ‘Not being a father, I was going to say, please don’t call me that.’

  ‘You said you had two kids?’ Julie says quickly.

  ‘I mean “father” is for priests. Monks aren’t called “father”.’

  The boy is gulping in front of them, struggling to speak. His face wrenches. At last he hurls one warding arm over the bristles of his head and stumbles out into the paddock.

  ‘He’s got this problem, you know?’ the girl says. ‘About his father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s always on like that about Oedipus? He’s on tranquillisers. I got him to go and talk to the lama and all he did was show us photos of his father. I reckon I’ve helped him a bit. Believe it or not.’

  ‘I do. Why not?’

  ‘I know you think I’m a slut.’

  ‘The longer I live the closer I come to the knowledge,’ he says, ‘that everyone’s everything.’

  ‘What’s the good of that, though, when everything’s nothing?’

  ‘Not nothing. Empty.’

  ‘Same difference, I reckon. What’s this for?’ She fingers the faceted bead, making it flash in the sun. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Pretty though, isn’t it? Like a big drop of water. Well. See you round, hey. Tenzin Hans.’

  The boy is face-up in the long grass beyond the stupa, a tiny skull edged with brown. She goes and lies down with an arm across him. Tenzin, replacing the candle-stumps above the door, watches her pull the boy up and lead him through the far gate on to the lake path.

  They thought I was offering my room for tonight, he thinks, and feels the rumbles and quivers inside him that had overcome him at his mistake with the young monk. In his heart he is suddenly roaring, rolling on the floor in the grip of pummelling laughter. He is still smiling irresistibly when he starts his walking meditation, pacing with careful slowness clockwise round and round the inside walls of the gompa, treading his wheel. The vision comes into his mind of the young lama cantering joyfully round the paddock in the twilight as the new moon rose and a flute sang. He walks on until his attention has alighted on everything – the flickering Buddhas, the empty paddock through the lotus window, the hollow grate – and so can draw itself in, oblivious. He knows that the task of the mind is to come to the realisation that everything is empty of inherent existence: not that it is nothing, but that it is empty. Nor can the mind come there picking its way through negation, through denial. No, it must take in emptiness whole. And he knows the mind has as much chance of taking in emptiness whole as a drop of water has, say, of taking in the lake…
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  ‘First,’ he says aloud, ‘let the mind be like a drop of water.’

  Already with the thought of the lake his mind – the mind is restless – is flying off to the empty shack waiting for him above the mirrored silent trees. Firmly he brings it back inside, walking on.

  MAY

  I LOVE THESE little squat pyramid-bottles of Windsor & Newton inks, their jewel-glow against the light – I have six now. I bring home shells, cuttle bones, seaweed pods, a crab-case, to draw in black or brown ink, water-washed (blotted with a yellow sea sponge). One day I’ll dare to mix colours and draw the rocks, the lighthouse, the sea. But for now, this mussel; this fringed claw.

  Six weeks in residence – though not literally, since I won’t be using the ‘old maid’s’ flat provided – at the Geelong College. I have the English Resource room to work in with a long window and shelves of old class sets, some of them textbooks I studied at high school in the fifties! A musty room, timeless, cold – a smell of radiator bars and apple cores. Many beautiful things here: a pair of woven wooden doors, mossy ferns and pines in courtyards, very old fine papered books in the library, pale stone lining the sand stone of the cloisters like icicles, small-paned windows deep in ivy leaves, the voices of pigeons in the silence…The Virginia creeper is turning papery yellow and glossy red: translucent leaves press against the window panes, dark veined, cobwebbed. Ivy and pigeons: they creep into the smallest space and are hard to dislodge; they’ve crept into a story while I’ve been working on it, huddled over the radiator munching apples – a story about a boy of six whose father has just left home. He lives with his mother. One day a visitor, a man, an enemy, decides to teach him a lesson about what life is like.

  Just on thirty years ago I saw that boy fall. Impossible to forget his whooping sobs, his tears; and his mother’s face (which he didn’t see). The agony of others, nearly experienced…Has he forgotten it, I wonder – has he suppressed the knowledge of it? I won’t do it from the point of view of the au pair girl. She won’t even be there. The maimed man who was that boy – he has to tell the story.

  Always a scene has arranged itself: representative; enduring. This confirms me in my instinctive notion: (it will not bear arguing about; it is irrational) the sensation that we are sealed vessels afloat on what it is convenient to call reality; and at some moments, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is, these scenes – for why do they survive undamaged year after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent?

  Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being

  At times when I was recovering from some illness, measles, mumps, chickenpox, and had slept most of the day away, I was allowed to get up at night and sit up with my parents, in my dressing-gown with a blanket round me in front of the hissing gas-fire until ten o’clock, even eleven. Details of the set were out of place, I noticed. The radio programs were not our ones. Once they had a Shakespeare play on, Othello, I think, in which someone called someone else a ‘hore’. I asked what a hore was, and my father muttered an irritable evasion, and glared at me and my mother. ‘Sssh,’ she said. ‘You can ask me tomorrow.’ I had read Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and knew that Shakespeare was approved. But hore wasn’t in our dictionary when I looked…Admitted to this sector of time that had never existed for me, the time of their intimacy beyond the stripe of light under the lounge-room door, I felt that I was the provisional one, the one lacking in substance: like a member of an audience suddenly brought on stage. I was politely unconvinced by these puppets playing my parents. Could this be all there was? Secretiveness was in the yellow air. Those nights: bubbles of memory, sealed in.

  Deep red, the soft sun in the mist, sunk over Swan Bay. Harvest suns, harvest moons.

  Rereading, not systematically, Sylvia Plath. Poems. Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel.

  And while she was trying to free herself from the traumas of her past by discharging them into the forms of her art [in The Bell Jar], she and her husband ‘devised exercises of meditation and invocation,’ as he tells us, to help her ‘break down the tyranny, the fixed focus and the public persona which descriptive or discursive poems take as a norm’ and to help her ‘accept the invitation of her inner world.’

  George Stade: ‘Afterword’ in A Closer Look at Ariel

  That is the problem. The task. Sink in under the surface of the self, the mirror’s skin, weighted down enough and not too much. The Lorelei-woman, she went deep.

  An ear of wheat, of corn. (And the silk hair.) A hand of bananas. A tooth (in Greek, not a clove – ena donti skordo) of garlic. The teeth of garlic under the papery shells on these bulbs are broad, brown-skinned, glossy, the size and shape of the best chestnuts. Yellowwaxy under the skin. (Plant some?)

  In the wet grass I found a small white mushroom in the perfect shape of a phallus and picked it, and could eat it if I dared. The earth at its base is like soft hair.

  This week the Victoria Market had boxes of new season’s olives for preserving, all of them that soft, full purple, with one black hole, and that dusky bloom on them, like plums, or black grapes – so that you bite expecting sweet juice to flow in your mouth, not oil.

  I know why I wanted to write the story about this boy now, after all these years: being here among children has awakened the memory. This school, too, is like the one I used to take him to.

  Last night was full moon. Two slabs of white marble stretched under the two bare windows. The wash of the sea was so quiet that I could hear the engines of passing ships. Some time in the middle of the night a rattle made me sit up and turn the lamp on. One of the mirrors was quivering aloud on the wooden wall, and as I watched the other mirror began and the sound reverberated in the space between that wall and the wall of the next room, then in the spaces of the rooms themselves, until the whole house was chugging, all the time it took the boat to edge through the Rip.

  A night like that is wasted sleeping. My bed, my body, my house were all one resonance.

  Waking in this room

  to the lighthouse on the point

  hooting through sun haze,

  the sound of water moving,

  is like waking on board ship.

  Among Pigeons

  OUR HOUSE WAS near the river, deep in the city, one of a row of narrow brick houses half-hidden under shaggy creepers. Green and red leaves and yellowish ones like singed wax paper hung and fell, shone through its barred windows, flickered in spider webs. A long glass room tacked on at the back opened into a courtyard. We slept upstairs and woke to pigeons, clusters of them on the bricks and branches, wheezy bubbles bursting in their throats. When I fed them they came fanning up to my shoulder and pecked in my palm, one eye watching, ready to edge their plump warmth away. Some would let me stroke a crown, a mother-of-pearl neck. I remember their eyes: luminously red.

  It was in the autumn of my seventh year that my father left this house to live by himself in a house in the Dandenongs, and the first I knew of it was when my mother took me to the park on the way home from school. Over my shoulder while she was pushing me on the swing she said that my father had gone away to another house to live and that I was to be a good boy for her from now on. In the watery green air the words hung shuttling, loud, soft, loud. Then we walked home over the sodden grass hand in hand. His things were all gone when we got home. They were at his new house, she said, but he was coming to see us this and every Saturday afternoon.

  Auntie Jan (who was our friend, not a real aunt) was in by the fire with my sisters, and in the courtyard a man not my father sat slumped over a beer and some pizza. This was Uncle David, my mother said, and he had brought Auntie Jan’s things over for her, now that she was going to live in our spare room and mind us when my mother went out.

  ‘Who’s Uncle David?’

  ‘He’s a friend of Jan’s. He’s an actor.’

  ‘On TV!’

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Hey, the pigeons know you’re here, Luke.’

  They were crowding round
. As I went out with the bag of bread I saw one suddenly whir up and snatch out of the man’s hand the red crust he was holding to his mouth. At the same moment a splodge squirted from its fantail onto the pizza tray. The man jumped, clenching his ginger brows until they joined with a ridge like his moustache, and this astonishment wrung a wild laugh out of me. But he had grabbed the bird, pushed it down flat to the table: staring at me, he lifted one arm and clawed his hand above the trapped grey head. At my shriek my mother ran out. ‘Luke!’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Rub its nose in it,’ he growled. ‘Its beak. Teach it a lesson.’

  ‘No! Mum!’

  ‘Fair go.’ She touched his shoulder. ‘No teasing my boy. Come in by the fire?’ Grinning, he lifted his hand; the pigeon fluttered off. I scattered the bread by the sandpit, my back to the warm glass room, my shoulders and shoes heavy with pigeons.

  ‘Who was that man?’ She was putting me to bed. The girls were asleep already.

  ‘I told you, love. Auntie Jan’s friend. He’ll probably help her mind you sometimes.’

  I hung round her neck. ‘But I don’t like him.’

  ‘You will once you get to know him. He’s just not used to relating to kids, that’s all. He’s had a hard life.’

  ‘It thought he was feeding it. The pigeon.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But he hurt it!’

  ‘Let go, now you’re hurting me. He was teasing you.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t tease.’

  ‘Everyone’s different. Just give him a go, love. Please?’

  ‘I want Dad to mind us,’ I whined. No answer. ‘Why can’t Dad?’

  My father came down on Saturdays to take us to the pictures or the park and on to McDonalds, though he would always refuse to come inside or round the back. I waited on the front porch every Saturday afternoon for his car to stop and the door to creak open. The sun was on the front of the house by then; leaves of ivy like flames crawled up knotted branches all over the walls and across windows as dark and clear as ponds. My mother kept an eye out from inside, ready to send my sisters running out when he arrived. They were only three. Auntie Jan remarked to my mother that they didn’t really miss him. I was six, though, nearly seven. I missed him.