Narcissism for Beginners

by Martine McDonagh

  My release date was a few weeks before your father’s so he had me run a couple of errands before he got out, said he was thinking of setting up a spiritual retreat in the Lake District and it was my job to find a house to rent, etc. But mainly he wanted me to find out where you were. He’d never seen so much as a photograph of you, what with him being behind bars when you were born and your mother taking the opportunity to disappear. Well, not disappear exactly – she was easy enough to find. I’ve gone off the subject. I was in Brazil.

  You must remember how lethal the roads were. Dogs, bikes, carts, buses, people pushing wheelbarrows, all swerving around on the same narrow stretch. It was a long way to Cabrobó and I needed to be out of it. I nodded off in the warm breeze that blew dust in through the open windows and that was it until the driver woke me at the refreshment stop. Some enterprising person had set up a stall in the middle of nowhere selling coconuts and water and home-made pastries. I took a piss behind a tree, bought a coconut and sat under a different tree to drink the juice and smoke a skaggie to see me through the rest of the journey. The other passengers stood around chatting. I was drenched with sweat just in my shirtsleeves; they were wearing jackets. I hadn’t washed for three days. Brazilian people are the friendliest you’ll ever meet, but even they knew to give me a wide berth. Except one scruffy little kid, who appeared out of nowhere to sit next to me. I entertained him by blowing a few smoke rings and gave him a fifty-real note and he legged it at top speed. It’s incredible how fast those kids can run in flip-flops – he probably could have gone at the same speed with a football at his feet too. It felt good giving him money, especially as it wasn’t mine. Come to think of it now, though, it was probably yours! I hope you don’t mind. Five minutes later the boy returned with his mother, or big sister, trying to give it back. I put my hands in my pockets and got back on the bus to get away from them and the driver took that as a signal to scuff his cigarette end into the dust, say goodbye to his mate the coconut seller and get back behind the wheel.

  We arrived in Cabrobó late afternoon. The bus dropped me by a scrubby tree and drove off in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes. I sat on a wall for a smoke, watching the sun go down behind the low flat-roofed buildings and waiting for the cooler darkness to swallow up the shadows of the palm trees at the side of the road. A cart drawn by a pair of black, sharp-horned cattle came up the street towards me, its flatbed loaded with rubble. The driver walked alongside, flicking a switch and shouting. Hard to tell if he was encouraging the cattle to keep going or if he was buying or selling – rubble? – or if he was simply announcing to the whole town that he was on his way home from work. Once they’d passed I set off in search of a bar and a bed for the night. I didn’t want to arrive at the commune in the dark. I sauntered down the road with this image of myself as an enigmatic, smartly dressed stranger arriving in town, more tax inspector than spiritual emissary, a far cry from the emaciated, fluorescent-faced rat of a junkie that I actually was, with my filthy, sweat-streaked shirt hanging down over my baggy-kneed trousers.

  Halfway down the street, a thin, grey-haired man with lines set deep in his face sat dozing under a light pestered by insects, the back of his chair propped against the wall. A brighter light spilled through the open door beside him, and through it a man with a big frizzy afro was hacking at the end of a green coconut on a heavy wooden counter. I went and stood in front of him and he put down his cleaver, cracked a wide white smile, wished me bom dia and reeled off a list of possibilities. Cachaça? Caipirinha? Whisky?

  As if on cue, my room service order arrives: hot chocolate, cold beverage, soggy margherita pizza and potato chips. The guy calls me sir, comes right into the room uninvited and replaces the packs of cookies I ate earlier. I’m glad of an excuse to put Thomas’s letter to one side; he’s walked into a bar so I can kind of tell where it’s going. If you didn’t already guess, Thomas is a recovering alcoholic as well as a drug addict.

  But the food doesn’t have the soporific effect I was hoping for, and I’m kind of intrigued, so I pick the letter up again.

  I woke up in a windowless room behind the bar with a plastic strip curtain for a door. My bag, and the money and drugs inside it, were on the floor beside me, untouched. Needless to say I had no memory of the night before. A small, dark-skinned lad, maybe ten years old, woke me. His green eyes and ball of reddish frizzy hair suggested a genetic link to the proprietor, who was nowhere to be seen. The boy waved at me to follow him into the bar, sat me down, brought me coffee and a plate of couscous in the shape of a disembodied breast and cheesy butter to spread over it. I knocked the coffee back in one gulp and tuned into the sound of voices and general kitchen noises off somewhere in a back room. As it’s common practice for a Brazilian family to welcome a stranger to their table, I assumed I’d overstayed my welcome, probably done something shameful the night before, which was nothing out of the ordinary. I picked at the couscous, slipped a large apologetic tip under the plate and headed off down the street to find a taxi.

  The taxi office was shut. It was early, not even six-thirty, so I sat under the tree for a smoke while I waited for it to open. A few minutes later, the boy from the bar turned up, leading a cart and two oxen. ‘Taxi?’ he said. I showed him my list of instructions and pointed at the name of the place I wanted to go, hoping he could read. ‘Trinta,’ he said. I gave him a fifty and gestured at him to keep the change. He climbed up on to the cart and beckoned to me to follow. In one corner was a rolled-up hammock, which the boy pulled out and patted, then pointed at me and put his two hands together at one side of his face to suggest sleep. He jumped down, the cart jerked forward and yet again I saw nothing of the journey.

  When I came to, the cart had stopped. At first I thought the glimmers of light against dark above me were stars in a black sky, then my eyes adjusted and the stars morphed into specks of sunlight through a mass of foliage. The cart was parked on a narrow track under a canopy of trees, its wheels stopped by large rocks. The boy and his oxen were nowhere to be seen.

  I followed the track to the edge of a river. I knew the commune was close to the São Francisco so I deduced we were at or near our destination. I saw the oxen first, stood cooling their ankles in the shallows. The boy was sitting watching them, his back resting against the trunk of a palm tree, a newspaper spread on the ground beside him as a makeshift blanket, over which were scattered the remains of a picnic. The boy looked up and waved me over and I propped myself against the tree next to his. He held out a spoon and a plastic box and babbled something at me in Portuguese.

  The box contained a mix of rice and black beans and a few chunks of sausage. Feijoada. As the first spoonful approached my mouth, one of the oxen lifted its tail and dumped a string of turds as big as footballs into the water. I screwed up my nose and the boy fell sideways laughing, clutching his belly and rocking. Although the food was delicious, my appetite was knackered and when he wasn’t looking I tossed a couple of spoonfuls into the trees behind me.

  When he calmed down, the boy looked at me, weighing me up, then patted the tree-trunk behind him and said: árvore. So I did the same and said tree and we went on like that for a while: leaf, stone, water, oxen, sky, shit, shoe, shorts, and trousers, until the boy got tired or bored and lay down on his newspaper sheet and fell asleep. I sat and had a smoke and read through my instructions properly for the first time. Your dad had written one of his inspirational quotes at the end of his notes. You know the kind of thing: A Master can show you the path that leads to the doorway of understanding, but only a True Master will hand you the key to pass through it. I was always impressed by his ability to come up with such twaddle without the aid of chemical stimulants. This is my all-time favourite: History imprisons the mind. Science imprisons the soul. Sensual pleasures imprison the aura. Only fools allow themselves to become trapped. Unlearn it all to become Free.

  Something tells me he thought that one up in prison.

  When the boy woke up he jumped to his feet, ra
n into the river and splashed around shrieking. I called over and pointed to the shit to remind him but he just laughed and mimicked my accent. After a few minutes he shook his hair like a dog and set about urging the oxen to their feet. We processed at ox-speed back to the cart. Water droplets glistened in the frizz of the boy’s hair like dew on a cobweb. I shudder now to think of the litter we left behind, newspaper, plastic containers, water bottles, but that was normal there, remember?

  I had to walk the rest of the way. The boy – we’d exchanged names but I’d already forgotten his – pointed me in the right direction and I burdened him with a further fifty reals and for some reason my gold watch, probably a pathetic attempt on my part to make memorable for him a day that I would most likely forget myself. Although, even more strangely, I haven’t, mainly because of the watch, which had belonged to my grandfather and was worth a fortune.

  The sun was burning the top of my head, and after just a few minutes’ walking my feet were hot and heavy and my shoes were tight as if they’d shrunk. I had sobered up enough to consider that I might have paid a hundred reals and one priceless gold watch for the privilege of being taken into the wilderness and dumped, but not really enough to care. I was without food or water, had nothing to sustain me but a bottle of cachaça I’d found in my bag without having any idea how it got there. The river was still visible through the trees, but the road was definitely moving away from it. I took a swig from the bottle and had decided to look for a place to sit and finish it off – if I was facing a slow death by sunburn, I might as well be cooked in something nice – when I spotted something glinting at the side of the road up ahead. It turned out to be a large wooden M (for Mehdi, I discovered later), mounted on a wooden plinth and decorated with random scraps of silver foil and thin streamers of faded fabric, bleached pale by the sun. It marked the beginning of a track through the trees, the branches of which were decorated in similar fashion, with streamers and wooden windchimes that clunked together in the breeze of my passing. Ah, good, I thought, hippies. Where there were hippies, there were drugs. I crossed the log bridge and was at the wall and listening to life on the other side – a child shouting, a dog barking, someone whistling, I don’t know, you probably remember better than me how it sounded. I sat down on the track with my back against the wall and polished off the cachaça while rehearsing my ‘bringer of good tidings’ act to be performed on the other side. I chucked the empty bottle into the undergrowth, and followed the wall to the next bridge and the open gates of the commune, where I was greeted by the sign WELCOME TO QUILOMBO NOVO written in English, Portuguese, Dutch and German.

  Most of what happens next I already know, because it’s part of Thomas’s first rehab story that I’ve heard sooooooo many times, so I’ll abbreviate. T shows up at the commune and they think he’s a bum, he’s such a stinking, drunken, drug-stung mess. The doctor there, Ken, takes him in and cleans him up, which isn’t a simple case of showering him off and washing his clothes, it takes three whole months. Ken gets him off the junk and booze and on to methadone and vegetable-farming. What I don’t already know is that, when the resurrected Thomas finally emerges from that first house of reformation and gets round to remembering why he’s gone there in the first place, he hits a major stumbling block. The part of the story I’ve never heard before is that it turned out the Universe lied to my dad about the leader of the commune being dead. Good old Guru Mehdi was in extremely good health.

  The law of inevitability says that if you write down one word after another you will eventually find yourself forming the sentences you’ve been trying to avoid. I’ve reached the point of no return, and I must keep going because you have a right to know who I was, who I still am. We can never leave ourselves behind; we can only know ourselves better. I’m beginning to sound like your father. Sonny, I’m not like you, the drugs didn’t turn me into an arse; I got into drugs because I was an arse. Saw myself as the big man upending the system, when all I did ultimately was land my family in jeopardy. In those first few months at Quilombo Novo I might have come off the junk – thanks to Ken – but I was still the same person in terms of motivation. Under the skin, I wasn’t so terribly different from those zombies you’re so fond of.

  On the subject of the undead, Mehdi still being alive was a huge problem. While he was still there your father couldn’t take over and if I didn’t contact your father soon I’d be stuck out there in the Sertão, miles from civilisation, stranded, sober and broke. I had no interest in staying clean; I needed your father to come and rescue me so I could get off the methadone and back on to the real stuff. So I exerted my recently unaddled brain to come up with the best possible solution to my dilemma.

  Quilombo Novo under Guru Mehdi was a happy and healthy place. The commune seemed to run itself, with Mehdi as its benign leader. Children and adults from the surrounding villages came and went as they pleased to make use of the school and Ken’s clinic, and Ken treated villagers out in their homes if they were too sick to visit the commune. The word ‘leader’ doesn’t best describe his relationship with the rest of the community. Mehdi had the best house because he had bought the land and settled there first, but the vision was a shared one and he helped build every other house there. He wasn’t old, in his fifties or early sixties, nor was he even sick. He was fit and well and everybody loved him. He swam in the river every morning at dawn and this was his private time. Otherwise he was never alone.

  This is what happened. Start again: this is what I did. One morning I waited for him down at the river with a cloth and a bottle of chloroform stolen from Ken’s clinic. I hid behind a tree and watched him take off his pyjamas, fold them and place them on a small boulder – he always swam naked. As soon as he had both feet in the water I pounced on him from behind. He was tall and wiry but there were hidden depths to my strength that only a junkie in need of a fix can muster and I managed to keep walking him out into the river as we struggled. The chloroform didn’t work quickly like in films, he didn’t fall into an instant swoon, but, once he was out, I pushed him face-first into the water as if I were baptising him and held him under until the bubbles stopped rising to the surface. Then I dragged him further out and let him go.

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  Ruth of the Living #2

  I haven’t slept. Ruth says we can postpone if I want to go back to my hotel or else I can rest at her house. For once I don’t want to be alone so I say I’ll be okay, that I need to beat the jet-lag and that it was probably the elkburger that kept me awake.

  Then we’re outside, trudging up to the top of the Heath and I try to relax my shoulders and breathe. It’s warmer today, or else I’m acclimatising. I should be genetically programmed for this climate, right?

  I guess you’re wondering how good of a writer I can be if I don’t describe what’s going on around me. What can I say? I’m in shock. There are dogs, trees, people. Leave me alone.

  I drift ahead of Ruth without meaning to. I guess I’m not ready for her to pick up her story. I stop and wait for her to catch up then find myself ahead again. I wait at the top of the hill and when she joins me she needs to rest so we sit on a bench overlooking a view of downtown and I tell Ruth I haven’t seen any of it close up yet. She says it’s prettier from up here anyway and tells me the weird names of some of the weird-shaped buildings: the Gherkin, the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater, the Shard. I say they should call them all the Penis and be done with it: Penis 1, Penis 2, Penis 3, Penis 4. Seriously. Which makes her laugh, and me kind of proud for making her laugh.

  Ruth breathes easier on the downhill so she’s keen to start recording again. I shuffle along beside her, thinking of Thomas up to his middle in the São Francisco.

  ‘I came home late from work one evening to find a message from Suki on my answering machine. I hadn�
�t been back to Brighton since the episode with Bim. She wanted me to call her urgently. She sounded so excited that I immediately assumed Ishvana had enlightened her at last. Naturally I called her right back, but whatever it was couldn’t be told over the phone and she begged me to visit as soon as possible.

  ‘Now I say I’d pushed Agelaste Bim to the back of my mind, but not so successfully that his name didn’t ring warning bells as soon as it came up. Not that she mentioned him on the phone, but when I arrived in Brighton a couple of days later it was Agelaste Bim this and Agelaste Bim that, which was troublesome enough, but on top of that she seemed to be thinking about leaving LifeForce, and that’s when I started to worry.

  ‘Suki confided that they had become quite close, albeit according to the strict restrictions imposed by LifeForce. As for the cause of her excitement, he hadn’t even been initiated yet, but that hadn’t stopped him taking her aside one evening and claiming to have achieved enlightenment. And she fell for it.

  ‘Apparently, a few weeks before, he’d tried to persuade her to set up a new group with him or to come and give a talk, something along those lines, but she’d refused because LifeForce initiates weren’t allowed to give discourse anywhere outside the LifeForce centres. So evidently he’d gone away and raised his game, but unfortunately that wasn’t how she saw it. It was impossible that Ishvana had extended his grace to a non-initiate – or indeed anyone, of course – but, Suki being Suki, she couldn’t help but be intrigued. She made a deal with him that if he kept his “enlightenment” secret from other LifeForcers she would break the rules and meet him at the house in Hove where he lodged with that Marsha Ray woman, so he could show her whatever proof he had to offer.’