Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  Bibi recovered her seriousness. ‘You know, I used to have all sorts of hang-ups about being, well …’ She gestured vaguely at the black silk dress and at shoes which, Judith noticed with sudden, fervid interest, had the tail feathers of some wonderful bird shooting up the back of the calf. They were of a type she had seen once only in an Italian glossy. Bibi was saying, ‘But right here in KL I did a special course in mind control, and I know now that nobody needs feel guilty. About anything.’ Her hands moved in downward sweeps, as if she were a conductor muting an orchestra.

  ‘There is no such thing as one person taking advantage of another against their will. People ask to be taken advantage of. They believe they are badly done by.’ She took Judith’s hand and pressed it between kitten palms. ‘Do you know, you can be happy living on a handful of rice a day? I do it myself at home. I sleep on a mat on the floor of a tiny room.’

  Judith wished she had a tape recorder. She kept her face straight as she replied, ‘Yes, only the very rich these days can live really simple, human lives. In Australia when people have made their pile in the cities they buy a little place in the country where they get back to nature, breathe lovely clean air, eat wholesome biogenetic vegetables.

  ‘Touché, touché,’ Bibi squealed. They reassessed each other.

  ‘What you’re suggesting,’ Judith said, ‘is that victims of the social system should be blamed for being at the bottom of the heap. They’re there because they’re lazy or stupid, or both. You’re inventing scapegoats to soothe your own conscience about having so much wealth.’ It sounded tough.

  Bibi’s response was unexpected: she trilled with laughter. ‘You Westerners! Such materialists! Happiness is having a paid job, for you. Even your own prophet, Jesus, said … look, here’s Kanan. He’ll explain.’

  Judith had pictured Kanan as an Indian version of her own history lecturer, who had been a plump little man with spectacles, fussy manners and a passion for harpsichord music. When she turned to look at her guide for Thaipusam she did a double-take. He was standing in profile, chatting to Jamie. His eyes were like those of a figure on an Egyptian frieze, she thought, and knew before he came towards her that he would be wearing scent. And he was. An almost palpable cloud of the smell of violets moved with him. This is a 1920s Hollywood version of the East, she thought. Mystical princesses, and men who tart themselves up like whores.

  He said, ‘How do you do?’ nicely enough and inclined slightly for Bibi to kiss his cheek.

  ‘You’re as gorgeous as ever, Kanan,’ Bibi said and he shrugged, a man acknowledging a fact.

  Then dinner was announced.

  ‘Faridah has forgotten to do the placement, chaps. It’s liberty hall,’ Jamie called out.

  Judith had a mind to seat herself beside Kanan, but Bibi carried him off to one of the smaller tables at the end of the terrace, and Judith found herself seated with the Tunku Faridah, whom everyone seemed to call ‘Fred’, and eight others, including the royal in base metals. There was a toast to the King (of Malaysia) followed by a toast to the Queen (of Great Britain and Australia). Then Jamie proposed ‘the Sultan’ and all his children and nieces and nephews smiled as one.

  ‘The food will be appalling,’ Fred said without apology. ‘I had to give most of the kitchen staff the day off.’ But there were three bare-foot waiters serving at table.

  ‘What’s this?’ Fred asked, looking at her soup bowl as if she had never seen one before.

  ‘Soup, Tunku Yang Mulia.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ Fred nodded round to her guests in a way which indicated that soup confirmed her worst fears. Later she said, ‘I think this is meant to be chicken. Billy, does Kanan eat chicken? One never knows with him.’ She addressed the table at large. ‘He’s so polite. I saw him eat a big beef-steak at the German Ambassador’s Residence one night. I ticked him off afterwards, I can tell you. Do you know what he said? “In my heart, it was vegetable.”’

  The conversation swung to anecdotes about tense moments during house-parties in England when bacon had been served for breakfast. The Arabs had made lots of improvements in Britain, but really, the place was finished except for shopping, they told one another.

  Somewhere in all of this there was a story, Judith realized, on the complacency of people whose countries were rich in resources. She could work in Billy’s remark, just now, ‘Korea? Can’t stand doing business in Korea. All their food is on sticks. I make ’em come down here to do business.’ She asked two of the princes if she could interview them about their companies on Monday morning. They replied languidly, ‘Why not?’

  The wines had been good, though warm, and champagne was served with the fruit salad. Judith was so engaged by Billy’s story of how he had swapped a (small) rubber estate (plus workers), for an uncle’s polo pony with which he had fallen in love, that she did not realize that the women were leaving the terrace.

  As she hurried after them she heard Jamie begin what promised to be a ribald song. She was smirking as she caught up with Sancha, who said with alarm, ‘I was afraid you were going to stay in there.’

  Fred’s bedroom suite, up a flight of stairs, had a pink marble bathroom and lamps with pink frilled shades. On one wall was a huge gilt-framed mirror, carved with lounging cupids. Above the flounced, satin-covered bed there was a painting of a Middle Eastern scene, with camels.

  They repaired their makeup and one of the Tunkus ripped off then restuck her eyelashes. Judith noticed that she and Sancha looked as plain as grass-stalks in this bunch of sensual blooms. They sat about for a bit, waiting for their turn in the Cecil B. de Mille bathroom. Two ladies massaged each other’s shoulders and one said to Judith, ‘You’re going to Thaipusam?’ and shuddered delicately.

  ‘The holy Koran forbids that we attend infidel festivals,’ she added.

  Then Fred announced, ‘Come on, then. We’ve all done wee-wee,’ and they marched off. Coffee and the men were waiting for them in a downstairs drawing-room. Jamie sang a song which he said was ‘Sawf Airfricane’ and one of his cousins sang ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ in a Punjabi accent, snapping his fingers and rolling his head.

  Sancha whispered to Judith, ‘Can you do “Waltzing Matilda”? They’ll ask us to, in a moment.’

  Judith moved off to a settee where Bibi was talking animatedly to Kanan, who nodded now and then. The cloud of violets had lost some of its pungency, Judith noticed, as she allowed Bibi to pull her down beside them.

  ‘I was trying to explain inner consciousness to Judith, but she’s a real politician. She switched the conversation to scapegoats,’ Bibi said. ‘Now, scapegoats. How do people become scapegoats?’ She looked brightly at Judith and Kanan. ‘I’ll tell you. They have desires, and for those desires they make a bargain. And sometimes the bargain does not pay off. Look at your own prophet, Jesus. I don’t mean to be anti-Christian. I respect all religions, but look at the prophet Jesus. He made a bargain to be called Son of God. And what happened to him? He was eaten by lions!’

  Judith felt her eyeballs bulge. ‘Actually, he was crucified,’ she said.

  Kanan nodded at this correction.

  Bibi conceded the point. ‘O.K. But if he had had no desire to be a leader nothing bad would have happened to him. It’s always our own fault.’ She looked triumphantly from one to the other, smiling brilliantly.

  Judith said, ‘Is it the fault of the Chinese minority in Vietnam that the Hanoi government has embarked on genocide against them? There are tens of thousands of corpses in the South China Sea. What does that justify? Being kind to fish? And here in Malaysia …’

  Bibi had covered her ears and murmured, ‘Cancel, cancel, cancel. No negative thoughts or negative suggestions will have any influence on me’, and having said this patted Judith’s hand. Her expression was pitying. ‘Kanan, you explain.’

  ‘I don’t need an explanation,’ Judith said. ‘This Indo-Chinese refugee problem is an international crisis. When modern people like you, Bibi, resort to wit’s end
reasoning, to fatalism, we all must know that the situation is hopeless. The next step, usually, is war.’

  She turned unwillingly to Kanan, who had made no attempt to gain her attention. For the first time he looked Judith full in the face. She had the sensation of a sudden decrease in her metabolic rate, as if an internal barrier had abruptly been lowered.

  ‘The Tunku does not suggest that suffering should be ignored,’ he said. ‘Her point, I think, is that ethics must arise from a pure inner source, dissociated from ambition, desire from esteem, fear, and so forth. If not, our actions are vulnerable to the passing fashions of society and only sometimes, when fashion and ethics coincide, will they be good. But to achieve an inner purity it is necessary to look into the unconscious mind, and deeper. That is difficult. It happens only in dreams, in fantasies, or, as in Tunku’s case, in modern Yogic meditation.’

  ‘Bravo, Kanan,’ Bibi cried.

  He gazed at Judith, who wanted to say, ‘What superlative garbage! India is recognized as the most irresponsible society in the world, and now I know why.’ Pure inner source! Cosmic consciousness would be next. It was a great excuse for staring at your navel, while people starved. She supposed he believed in rebirth, too, so that death in the here-and-now did not matter. Judith noticed that at the outer corners of his eyes there were hair-thin lines and she realized he was not in his early twenties, as she had first imagined, but nearer middle age. His physical beauty was distracting, making it difficult to concentrate on his elaborate philosophy. I’m still exhausted, she thought.

  He was saying. ‘If people have absorbed violence they resist looking into their unconscious minds, for they know intuitively that the violence is stored there and that they will have to re-experience it. So she’, he turned, to Bibi, ‘tries to prevent its storage by saying “Cancel, cancel”. She does not mean to ignore the boat people. She means their plight pollutes us all.’ He smiled with charmingly exaggerated warmth. ‘Hindus worry a lot about pollution.’ It was impossible to tell if he were embarrassed about this, or proud.

  Judith was able to pretend to listen as Bibi chattered feverishly about her new techniques, aware that Kanan was watching her. As he had gone on speaking she had allowed cynicism to unhook from her mind, had even ceased grasping for the meaning of his words, and had felt herself carried along by a river of communication flowing from him at a different level. He had seemed to ask ‘Who are you?’ and his unspoken question had plucked out of her a memory, just a few weeks old, but forgotten until now – Gail shouting ‘You were a wasted fuck!’ and the man’s backward glance, appalled, as if he’d glimpsed the damned.

  She’s been at an abortion rally in Canberra, outside the House. The Festival of Light had bussed-in their supporters. Judith and a Sister from Queanbeyan were holding a banner reading, ‘Catholic Women for Abortion’, and were talking and laughing with their group. A man carrying a clumsy sign saying ‘The Festival of Light Supports Life’ walked up to them and said, ‘Good afternoon, Ladies’. He was badly dressed and had decayed teeth. ‘Piss off,’ they’d said. The man had replied, ‘I’m glad your mothers didn’t abort you, so that you can be here today.’ Judith had muttered at him ‘It’s a pity yours didn’t get rid of you’ and her companion had yelled ‘Yes! You were a wasted fuck.’ They’d laughed wildly. Judith had joined in but had felt so shaky that she had left before the speeches were over. By the next morning she had completly forgotten about it. Until now. Judith glanced at Kanan, furtively.

  Bibi was saying, ‘I’m never bothered by mosquitoes these days. I simply go down to my Alpha brain-wave level, visualize the mosquito, ask the mosquito to leave, and it flies away.’

  Kanan was nodding.

  ‘You can communicate with trees, too,’ Bibi added. ‘My mangoes! Since I’ve been communicating with my mango tree … You two must come round and eat some.’

  It was off-putting, the way Bibi had confidently linked them together: you-two. Judith said quickly, ‘Doesn’t the tree raise objections?’ and realized that she was being purposefully crass, that most of her behaviour that evening had been a kind of version of the loud, slow, pidgin English which Australians abroad used. They were all more unnerving than she had cared to admit.

  ‘We should leave,’ Kanan said. ‘You look tired and you will have only a few hours of sleep before we go to the caves.’ He lifted his hands from his knees in a gesture of helplessness. ‘Unfortunately my car is being repaired. Perhaps Sancha?’

  Sancha was singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, with Jamie joining in the choruses. She was rosy from exertion, and other things. ‘Billabong! Jumbuck!’ Jamie was saying. ‘Extrawdinrary!’

  He called out ‘Don’t get caught up in the kavadis’ as he waved the three of them off.

  The air outside was warmer, and tender on their skins. Judith began to vibrate with laughter when the front door closed as if, released from etiquette, her spirit had been liberated, and was soaring.

  ‘What a madhouse! Bibi thought Jesus was eaten by lions! Oh, Sancha!’

  ‘I’m sloshed,’ Sancha said, victoriously.

  The moon was flying high overhead. They danced a bit as they approached the car. Even Kanan was giggling, a high rippling noise. ‘You’ve stepped off a star,’ Judith said. For a moment the three of them clung together in the tinselly light; Judith, leaning against Kanan, felt a brotherly warmth from his shoulder. She realized that she was nearing the limits of exhaustion and that recklessness was overtaking her.

  As the car went lurching off through the moonlit garden film clips were speeding through her head, but too fast for her to see them.

  14

  To Kanan’s look of inquiry Judith said, ‘I feel jittery. I had dozens of jumbled dreams.’

  He nodded. ‘You are a sensitive person with many problems. The knights of self-knowledge are battling with the dragons of fear in your mind. Isn’t it?’

  Judith grinned. ‘Do you read palms, as well as minds?’ She had managed to keep the irritation out of her voice, and too well, apparently.

  Kanan replied, ‘I can.’ He was confessing to another of his virtues.

  She wanted to laugh. He was so astoundingly beautiful and gentle. So unlike a man, she thought. There was no room in her imagination for someone who looked and behaved as he did, and it occurred to her suddenly that for ten years, more than ten years, Richard had defined for her what a man was and did, that she judged all of them by how closely they resembled or departed from him, the norm. Perhaps everyone turned a mate into a prototype?

  He had not slept at all, Kanan was saying, but had spent an hour or so talking to Sancha, and then had meditated for two hours. That was as refreshing as sleep.

  ‘Sometimes I see the future when I meditate.’ His great black eyes moved at leisure over Judith’s head and shoulders, making her say pertly, ‘You’d be a red-hot journalist.’

  They were standing in the living-room of the Hamilton house, waiting for someone whom Kanan described as ‘my relation’ to arrive with a car. The windows were all shut – against oily men, whom, Sancha had explained, were the local cat-burglars who worked naked and covered with oil which made them impossible to capture. The house was airless and to Judith seemed hot, even at this pre-dawn hour. Their footsteps made loud, metallic sounds on the polished stone floors and when Kanan moved out of the pool of yellow light from a table lamp he merged with the dark, so that she had the sensation of communing with a poltergeist.

  The car, a rackety vehicle of venerable years, arrived. They stepped out into a night no longer suffused with thin white light but black and heavy. The moon was as small as a tennis ball now and its valleys and craters were blue. Kanan and his relation sat in the front and burbled in Tamil to each other sounding, Judith thought, as if their mouths were filled with marbles.

  Every now and again the relation, the middle-aged man with spectacles whom Judith had expected Kanan to be, turned right round to face her. He had long yellow teeth which escaped the covering of his top l
ip, like a slipped petticoat. In English he made remarks like, ‘I’m telling you, Madam, it is a wonderful sight to see the amazing things these people can be doing with the spears’, and ‘All this wisdom is coming from India and even Western people are following it now’.

  Somehow they had no head-on collisions with the other vehicles careering towards them.

  Judith took notes to calm her nerves. The Lord Subramaniam had six heads and twelve arms (‘Some gods have ten thousand arms – he’s modest with only twelve’, Kanan said); he was forever youthful; his elder brother was the elephant god; white oxen drew his silver chariot with his image in it from the temple in High Street out to the caves once a year for this festival, the Lord’s day of victory; more than a thousand devotees – nearly all Tamils, but some Chinese and Sikhs as well – would carry the kavadi; Subramaniam had thirty-seven names; his mother was Parvati, his father was Siva; in the luni-solar calendar it was now the tenth month, Thai; and the lunar station was Pusam, governed by the planet Brishaspati.

  They argued in Tamil about the planet’s name in English, and agreed on Jupiter.

  ‘In southern India now the moon is at its most beautiful,’ the relation told Judith, just missing a truck. Traffic was getting heavier.

  ‘And this festival – originally celebrating the winter equinox – is banned in India,’ Kanan added quietly.

  It was the first indication Judith had had that something was amiss, but Kanan only shrugged when she asked why it was banned, as if things Indian were so unknown and unimaginable to her that they were beyond her questioning.