Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  ‘It’s Edwardian,’ says Ruth, misreading my thoughts. ‘This style of house was built during the reign of Edward the Seventh. Make yourself comfortable. Would you prefer tea or coffee?’

  ‘I’m a tea man, thank you,’ I say. ‘My parents were both Brits, remember?’

  I have no idea why I say that – nerves, I guess. My tea habit comes from Thomas, not from you, or my dad, who only drank herbals, and I feel bad for Ruth when she slaps her hands on her skirt as if to say she should have known that. She’s gone again before I get the chance to apologise.

  The room is in the back of the house and has a clear view over the red and brown rooftops of the houses on the street behind. Beyond them is a large grey pond and beyond that an area of green, which I guess is the Heath. We don’t have large public parks in RB, and if we did Donald Trump would probably have bought them and remodelled them into golf courses for rich old men to drive around on in their buggies.

  The thin layer of dust on the window frames and shelves in Ruth Williams’s house is the same dust that settles on everything in the rooms of the old people at Sunrise: tiny particles of dead skin, shed by the old and dying, whose eyesight is too weak to see it and even if their vision is okay their muscles and bones are too tired to care about sweeping it away. Sometimes their brain has forgotten what dust is and what you’re supposed to do about it. But don’t get me wrong; there is nothing weak or forgetful about Ruth Williams.

  Two chairs are arranged at an angle to the window, positioned to look out over the view. It’s obvious which chair is Ruth’s favourite: the one with the reading lamp set right behind it and the slanting seat cushion with the ends of a newspaper poking out from under it. I guess this is where she likes to sit and talk, and when there’s nobody to talk to it’s where she likes to sit and read, or sit and watch the seasons change. A low, round wooden table is set between the two chairs and I knock my knees against it as I sit down because I’m not about to start rearranging the furniture.

  While Ruth sings to herself in the kitchen, I mess with my phone, send myself the recording of Mrs C because I forgot to back it up, check the weather in RB (sixty-eight and grey), and write another message to Thomas, which I send this time, so he knows I found his letters. One thing. Those challenges I faced head-on were of my own making, not anybody else’s. Shaun has to stop defending Ed’s actions before he can grow some, and I had to stop defending meth-head Sonny’s actions. Right?

  Ruth has arranged cookies in the shape of a flower. A low tower of round, pale wheat cookies in the centre form the flower’s eye, and six or seven chocolate oblongs with BOURBON etched into their tops are the petals. Later, before I kill the last petal, I take a photo to remind me to buy a pack on the way back to my hotel. This is one kind of bourbon I’m allowed.

  I double check that Ruth’s okay with me recording her story and she warns me that her speech can get a little slurred when she’s tired and makes me promise that if it gets so I can’t understand what she’s saying, I’ll stop her and continue tomorrow. Like Mrs C said about there being so many different ways to die, there are so many different ways of being old. As many different ways as there are people, I guess. Not that Ruth’s so old, just a little stooped from her condition. There’s an old guy at Sunrise, Mr Somethingowitz, who is bent over at the waist. He used to set the type for a newspaper. He calls it his occupational posture. ‘I’ve been looking at the floor since 1968,’ he says. I tried it one day, doing everything bent over at ninety degrees, and man, it kills. Once you’ve tied your shoelaces, everything else is hard. Thomas refused to participate because he said you couldn’t have two people in a house like that; nothing would get done. So I guess the moral of that tale is that, when life bends you over, you need an unbent helper, right?

  As Ruth settles into her chair, I feel myself getting antsy again. I have so few memories of the time I was with you. But, as Ruth rests her hands on her knees and closes her eyes, prepares to speak, I remember the anticipation of being told a story and naïvely associate it with you.

  ‘Is it recording?’ she says.

  Her voice is soft and clear, like I imagine a dolphin’s would be if it could speak.

  ‘I’ll start at the very beginning, as they say in The Sound of Music. The first time I met your mother. It wasn’t long after they diagnosed my Parkinson’s disease. I have only ever had mild symptoms, but we didn’t know then how it would progress and someone at work suggested meditation might help. I wasn’t into any of those New Age therapies, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to learn to relax properly, particularly with a job as stressful as running a school.

  ‘Nor do I believe in signs, but when I spotted an advertisement in the Ham & High, our local paper, for an alternative health fair up at the library, I thought I should go and take a look. This was in 1988, I’m not sure of the month. Most of the stalls were selling useless paraphernalia, crystals and incense holders and suchlike, and your mother was the only stallholder not selling anything. There she was, sitting behind a bare wooden decorator’s trestle covered by a white sheet with LifeForce Meditation printed on it in big blue letters. She had her nose in a book, was deep in concentration, obviously hadn’t had too many interruptions. When she sensed me hovering, she looked up and smiled.

  ‘Your mother was a remarkably pretty girl.’ Ruth Williams opens her eyes and squints at me. ‘It’s no surprise you’re so handsome. Although you have your father’s eyes; hers were the clearest blue. Her hair was coal black, like yours, tied up in a long glossy ponytail. Her skin was clear but for the sprinkling of freckles on the bridge of her nose and she was the smartest-dressed person in the whole room. A badge pinned to her blouse said her name was Suki, which hinted, I assumed wrongly, at an oriental heritage.

  ‘I explained why I wanted to learn to meditate and she offered to teach me, right there and then. A couple of cushions were set out on the floor behind her and she invited me around to her side of the stall. I wasn’t the type to worry about who might see me, so I sat down and shut my eyes as instructed – my movements were still brisk in those days – and she sat opposite me. She talked me through a simple deep-breathing exercise and in those few minutes I experienced such peace as I’ve never achieved since. It was as if every muscle in my body had been put into neutral and every worry transformed to insignificant litter floating around on the breeze. Five minutes and I was hooked, regardless of whether it could help my condition. Suki gave me her business card and invited me to join one of her meditation groups. She seemed so mature and pragmatic that it didn’t occur to me she might be involved with a cult; she didn’t seem the type.

  ‘Of course I found it much more difficult to meditate alone. So the following week I went to a meeting. The address was a private house in Camden, so not far from here.

  ‘The meeting started with a short meditation, followed by an inspirational talk, or “discourse”, as it was called. I don’t remember the subject; it would have been trust, openness, our inner child, something like that. After that, more meditation, followed by tea and biscuits and a general chat.

  ‘Over the weeks I learned a little bit about the group, a real mix of people: professionals, artists, students, unemployed people looking for a meaningful pastime or some supernatural luck. Fifteen or twenty of us in all, of which around half of us were beginners like me, or “uninitiated”, to give us our correct label. The others were a mix of first and second initiates, people who’d climbed to a higher rung on the spiritual ladder, although hadn’t yet reached the top. Suki was a second initiate and told me that first initiates meditated on a personalised mantra and second initiates meditated on light and sound. I said she did seem to have a certain glow about her, which made her laugh. I learned that by practising meditation I was aspiring to the highest possible spiritual state: enlightenment. There were apparently some within the LifeForce organisation who had reached that hallowed state. They were known as “adepts”, and they didn’t mix with anyone less evolved than a seco
nd initiate.’

  And there I was, hoping you’d turn out to be the normal parent.

  ‘There was a lot of talk about us being on a spiritual path and the importance of staying on it. Initiation was the big mystery for us beginners, the carrot that kept us going back every week. I admit I found it all a bit competitive and tedious. I was too old to care about enlightenment. My only ambition at that point was to perfect my meditation practice and stay in good health as long as possible.

  ‘A faint alarm bell rang when Suki told me I needed to be seen to be making progress. You need to progress from breath meditation to truly benefit, she said, and insisted on giving me a basic mantra to repeat over and over during meditation, a string of seven sounds that would have a healing effect on my aura and help prepare me for initiation. It was gobbledygook really but I didn’t want to get her into trouble by not conforming, so I promised to try.

  ‘When she announced she was moving to Brighton – she’d been accepted by Sussex University for a research post in philosophy – it came as a surprise to think of her having a life outside LifeForce, though it was no surprise that she was clever.’

  I guess I get my brains from you, then, right?

  ‘Brighton was famous for its hedonism, and for all her maturity and pragmatism I found myself worrying about how she would fare amongst other less ethereal beings. When I expressed this to her she emphasised that she wasn’t leaving LifeForce, that she’d chosen Brighton because there was a fledgling group of initiates there who needed her guidance. When I told her she’d be missed, she said I should channel my emotional energy into my meditation, that I should get initiated, so I could also go to meetings in Brighton and even spend time with her outside meetings. I didn’t want to be left behind, so I increased my meditation from twenty minutes to an hour each morning and evening.’

  Suddenly Ruth opens her eyes. ‘I hope I’m not being too long-winded.’ I wave at her to keep talking; this is the first time anyone has told me anything about you EVER and I want to know every detail. She nods and closes her eyes again.

  ‘Apparently my reluctance to socialise with other non-initiates was also a hindrance, and the more gregarious members of the group overtook me on the path time and again, but like the proverbial tortoise I persevered and, a few months after Suki moved away, I was invited to attend a “special meeting”.’

  She makes those cute little finger-waggling movements for the inverted commas.

  ‘Four of us were taken into a darkened room and instructed not to leave under any circumstances. The ceremony consisted of us being tapped on the forehead by an unseen adept. It could have been anyone and was over in seconds. I barely noticed it, but one of the others experienced a hallucination of gold and silver flying doughnuts while the other two declared internal firework displays of municipal proportions. I kept quiet, but I wrote and told Suki my news and within days she wrote back, inviting me to Brighton.

  ‘Things changed after initiation. The adepts came into the picture more, as did the big boss, Ishvana, our guru, whose “grace” –’ waggling fingers ‘– had to be switched on for initiations and enlightenment to take place. He was the great puppet-master behind the organisation, and the recipient, no doubt, of all the donations. As initiates we were expected to donate ten per cent of our income to the organisation. Perhaps to justify the expense, initiates made ridiculous claims about their meditation: enhanced insight into the thoughts and behaviour of uninitiated people, heightened aura-detection, taste and smell, superhuman powers of concentration. It was Thatcher’s Britain, after all; people expected value for money. I fluctuated between feeling inadequate and irritated by their nonsense, but kept quiet in case Ishvana decided to uninitiate me, if such a thing were possible.

  ‘Suki completed her research and that summer I went down to Brighton for a week to have a little holiday and take her out for a celebratory dinner. I was allowed to stay with her and Andrew, another second initiate, in their little rented house in Kemp Town. I loved waking every morning to the sound of gulls calling to each other across the rooftops. You don’t get that in London.

  ‘One evening, I was helping Suki prepare the room for a meeting when she told me she had invited someone new along, a student from the university, and wanted my opinion of him. The way she tried to stop herself smiling as she talked about him gave me the impression she thought he had some special spiritual quality, and I couldn’t help but feel a little sad. LifeForcers had a tendency, because of the celibacy rule, to dress up any sexual attraction as mutual recognition on a deep spiritual level. I felt sorry for Suki that she had learned to sublimate her natural feelings in order to justify them and I was sad because I had hoped that she would fall in love with Andrew, who was such a kind, gentle person and clearly smitten with her. She had achieved so much intellectually at such a young age that I often worried about whether her emotional development wasn’t a little retarded, if that doesn’t come across as too much of an insult.’

  Ha ha. So maybe I got the emotional retard gene from you as well as from my dad.

  ‘I was quite friendly with some of the regular Brighton gang. They were a funny bunch. Alison, who was the unhealthiest-looking nurse I’d ever met, had spent her adult life trying to give things up – smoking, food, drink, poor hygiene – and was delighted to have found an arena in which to flagellate herself legitimately; Alan, a lovely silver-haired man in his fifties, hyperactive, obviously gay and terrified of it and using LifeForce as a kind of reinforced closet – Ishvana condemned homosexuality as unnatural – and Amber, a dance student, who I think was there hoping to meet a boyfriend who wouldn’t hurt her. I don’t know if she ever found one.’

  Ruth looked up and caught my eye. ‘But I’m drifting off the point; you want to know about your parents.

  ‘By then I knew a little about Suki’s upbringing. Her parents, your grandparents, were strict Anglican Christians, very High Church, who had sent her to a single-sex Anglican school and expected her to marry within the church community. Her dedication to Ishvana and his teachings earned her the strong disapproval of her parents and their religious friends, who all but ostracised her. For all its restraints and control, LifeForce was Suki’s spiritual rebellion. But I couldn’t help wishing she’d do something truly rebellious, truly worthy of rejection, like being arrested for drunk-driving or lashing out at someone who annoyed her instead of smiling with compassion. But religion was part of her make-up and she couldn’t be someone she wasn’t. In the end it didn’t seem to matter too much, because she always seemed so happy with her lot.

  ‘I’ll cut to the chase. The person she’d invited along that evening was your father, and I’ll be frank with you, I didn’t like him from the start. Of course in LifeForce you weren’t allowed to say anything about anyone or anything that might be construed to be a negative criticism.’

  ‘It’s like that in SoCal too,’ I tell her. Personally I find all that positivity exhausting, and so does Thomas, which is why we’re allowed to be as negative as we want at home. As long as it causes nobody harm. ‘Why didn’t you like him?’

  ‘He was faking it to get in with Suki. I understood the attraction, though; those narcissistic types are always charming. He was as striking to look at as she was and charismatic with it. They even looked alike. Not so much a physical resemblance, but they shared an ethereal quality that might lead you to assume they were brother and sister, even though he was fair to her dark. Please excuse the LifeForce cliché but I had this overwhelming sense of him being her shadow.’

  She opens her eyes. ‘Have you seen that Austin Powers film where Dr Evil says “you complete me” to his Mini-Me? Yes? Well that’s how it was with them: he completed her, but in a negative sense, if you don’t mind my saying that.’

  I tell her she has great taste in movies and that I appreciate her honesty. I don’t want her to hold anything back no matter how anxious it makes me feel.

  ‘You could generally spot a newcomer at their first me
eting by their posture. Usually they cowered and slumped, intimidated by the presence of us so-called spiritually advanced beings. Not so Agelaste Bim; he sat there erect as a flagpole from day one. He had no interest in me so I was free to observe him at my leisure, and I watched him closely in the hope of finding some positive encouragement to give Suki when she asked for my opinion.

  ‘Do you mind if we stop for a while? I could do with a break.’

  Ruth suggests I take a walk over the Heath while she rests, so I show her my list of SOTD locations and ask how close they are. On the map they seem really close, but I have no sense of scale here. In Redondo, if a place looks really close on a map, it probably takes three hours to walk to it.

  ‘Oh, yes, most of these are in this area. This one’s in Highgate, over the other side of the Heath. Probably a bit too far for you to go now.’ She’s tapping her fingernail on the address for the apartment building where Shaun’s girlfriend, Liz, lives. I can’t stand the sound of it and pull the paper away. She doesn’t seem to notice. ‘What’s the title of that film again?’

  I set off over the Heath to Hampstead, following Ruth’s directions, sucking up the post-rainshower smells, which are so rare in RB. My sponsor told me once that drug addiction can be caused by a sense of loss at the deepest cellular level and I wonder, since I was born over here but grew up in warm dry places, if my deep sense of loss is rain-related. Could be, right?

  Hampstead’s kind of a swanky neighbourhood. Swanky and shabby all at the same time, like you’d expect the heart of Trustafaria to look, and I wonder if that’s why Ruth sent me to check it out, to be among my own people. There’s no bling here, people hide their wealth by dressing shabby, but they live behind high walls and cameras and it’s clear they have plenty of the most valuable commodity of all, according to Thomas: time. Time to shuffle along the street at the pace dictated by their expensive little doggies. The main street runs uphill and I walk up looking for a deli, in search of a sandwich without mayo; I settle for the market and an Indian pastry.