by Paul Haines
If you haven't read Paul Haines before, then welcome. Stick with it. He's worth it.
— Keith Stevenson
The Haines I know isn't dark at all but his fiction lies deep below the belt. The word I'm fishing for is raw, followed by others like honest and ugly and stripped bare naked to the bone. Paul writes about the stuff polite folks never mention, described in all its fluid intricacies. The dirt we nice folks wipe off the visor, smeared liberally across the lens. The uncomfortable itch in an embarrassing place. Yeah, you know exactly where that hand of his is going next.
Paul works at deconstructing the Aussie male mystique. Transgressing the precipice, his prose is a map to mateship and aggression. A secret society decoder ring revealing roles imposed by society and hormones. He opens visceral sexual wounds, always with an underlying certainty and strength. There's an element of bullying and coercion to his style. Sharp, smart, and observant, he makes the gross stuff funny. Sympathetic to tragedy, he entices me to enjoy things I don't want to read.
Life has rendered him a fighting man who stands a fighting man's chance. You might not like his work, but you won't forget it.
— Cat Sparks
So who is the real Paul Haines? Read on to discover for yourself ...
***
Doorways for the Dispossessed
For a long time, I used to go to bed early. I relished any chance I had to practise. But not now. Caffeine, sugar, speed: anything to keep me from going back there. Exhaustion is here living with me though it goes by another name, creeping behind my eyes and pulling me down.
Sleep, Richard.
I know I'll have to go back soon and I don't want to. I can hear it whispering. There are too many doors still open ...
I'd met her when travelling through India. Her name was Monika; she was in her late 20s, green-eyed, tall, lean and tanned, her English blurred with Italian and something Eastern European. She was searching for spirituality. I was looking for drugs and sex. In particular, sex with her.
We sat side by side on the walls of the fort in Amritsar, smoking hash and talking, as the sun slowly burnt off the horizon. Her skin was warm upon mine as our arms brushed when she leant closer to pass the joint. The smoke curled off into the twilight, and the first stars peeked tentatively above. I dragged deep. Tonight could be the night.
'Have you travelled far?' Monika asked.
'I've seen a bit. About a third, maybe. Still got two continents to go.'
'You've seen a lot then.'
'Not really, the world is a huge place. I don't have enough money or time to see it all.' I passed the joint back, trying to get some eye contact. 'I'd love to though.'
'Yes.' She stared out over the village below. 'Time and money. It all comes back to that, doesn't it?'
We sat in silence for the next few minutes as the night rushed down to meet the desert.
'Do you remember your dreams, Richard?' she asked.
'Sure. Most of them.'
'I met a man, a sadhu, when I was in Varanasi. He claimed to be able to travel in dreams.'
'Yeah?' Now I did have eye contact. She was looking for something; sarcasm, cynicism, or maybe something simpler—belief. Back then I'd say anything to get a root. 'Tell me more.'
'He began to teach me. The first step is to realise you are dreaming and not wake up. Once you know this, then it's all about control. You must hold your left hand up to your face in your dream. It must be your hand.'
'Your hand? Why your hand?'
'The sadhu said it was because you never look at your hands in dreams. It is a detail you would never remember, never think of. He said you need to be able to master the smallest detail before you can journey. Once you have your left hand, you must bring up your right, and when you have mastered this task, you are ready for the next step.'
'And you can do this can you, Monika?'
She nodded and smiled, her teeth straight and white. 'It took me many months, but I can do it. It's very difficult to stay in a dream once you know it is one.'
'I know what you mean.' All those dreams, all of them; I'm surrounded by gorgeous women and I'm about to come, lots of those; it's the rare double album of my favourite band, cheap and in mint condition and I don't know any of the songs; my life is how it should be, happy, content, my furtive male hungers satisfied; and then I recognise them for what they are—dreams and I wake, never climaxing, never fulfilled. I don't tell Monika any of this though. She's searching for something much deeper than what can be found in my shallow life.
'It's the next step I'm working on now,' she said. 'When you take your hands away from your face there will be a door. And if you can open it, behind it lies your destination. You can step through and you will be there.'
I tried to keep the scorn out of my voice—after all, tonight could be the night. 'Like what? As a ghost? Can other people see you? Are you real?'
Monika shrugged. 'I don't know, Richard. The sadhu did not tell me what I would be like. He said the place would be real; it would be as it is now. He stressed that you must close the door when you leave, that they shouldn't be left open.'
'Why?'
'I don't know. I didn't ask. He just said you must close it. Why are you looking at me like that? Don't you believe me?'
'I didn't say that.'
There were a lot of people travelling the East who believed in all that mystical shit. Looking for the inner 'soul', who they are, what they are, where they fit in the cosmos, one with God, whichever one it was; all that unattainable, born-again shit. I just wanted to fuck her.
I took a battered photo out of my wallet and gave it to Monika. It showed a younger me, lying back on a recliner next to a pool. Behind me, a gum tree towered over ferns banking a small creek.
'If you want to see where I live, then check this out. There's something to the right of me, just out of the photo. When you get there, tell me what it is.'
Monika laughed. 'Look how young you were. You must be only, what, eighteen then? You are funny. Now I must go to bed and practise.'
At first, I thought she meant with me, but she put the photo in her pocket, kissed me gently on the cheek and walked back to the hostel. I lit up another joint. Tonight would not be the night, but at least she would have something to remember me by, even if it was ten years out of date.
#
We travelled together for the next few weeks, making our way down to Bombay. She would ask me how my dreams were going, and I would tell her I was still trying to bring my left hand up. The craziest thing was that it was true. I could picture my hand in the dream, yet I would get too excited when I understood what was happening and wake up. My nails, bitten and uneven, my lifelines, even the silver Celtic ring I wore. And Monika? She was still trying to form a door. It could have been great between us, but the lust of the beast was too strong in my blood. For all my efforts, I still hadn't managed to get any more intimate than a kiss goodnight; she was infectious and unattainable, and eventually frustrating. I needed more than friendship.
Monika and I parted ways when I headed off to Goa with a young blonde German girl who had found what I was looking for. In the weeks that followed, I lost myself in ecstasy-fuelled nights and bhang-lassi days, loving all and being loved. This part of the world catered for all of my worldly desires, and I soon forgot about Monika and hands and doors. I lived for the me in the now. There was no time for dreams; I was living them.
#
My eyes are full of sand. Grain after grain scrapes raw against flesh as my eyelid closes, briefly, only briefly. I am not ready. Sleep calls me. What happened to you, Monika? Did you forget to close them, too? Dragging me down ...
#
London reality had stripped me back to my bones and leeched the sun from my face. Grinding away at low-paid bar work or dull, well-paid bookkeeping tasks kept me going, and for all the urgency that surrounded me, I felt myself worn-down and slowly bludgeoned into a corporate slavery. I'd arrived broke from India, and seemed to be bare
ly keeping my head above water.
I shared a room with too many people, I owned nothing in a city that boasts of wealth, and it was always cold and wet and dark and crowded. Most people I knew were scrounging to earn enough for their next trip away, somewhere magical and ancient, primitive and spiritual, and I think I was finally beginning to realise what they were looking for. I'd been there, I'd almost had it, and with a Western indignity I had abused it and myself, losing sight of what was within reach. Karma, finally, for me was real and believable, a tangible essence reaching out and making me pay for my highs.
At my lowest ebb, and a year and a half after I had last seen her, I received an email from Monika. Her message was short:
Hi Richard, Long time no hear. The gum tree has been cut down, there's only a stump now. It's a gazebo, and it overlooks a small pond that is fed by the creek. It's real and you can do it. Open your mind. Believe. Thinking of you, Monika xx
I read it three times. Dad had cut the tree down a few years ago because its leaves choked the garden and filled the pool. He had built the gazebo and dug out the pond before he'd even planted the tree. My first instinct was that she had called my parents. She hadn't. She'd been there, had seen my parents, she described them to me, she'd heard them talking, and they had never seen or spoken to her. It was real.
Monika sent me another message with an attachment. It was a recent picture of her standing in front of an apartment block, stone and ivy, shuttered windows. 'Start with what you can see. Come and visit.' It read. There was no address.
I believed. I wish to God I never had.
#
Sleep now. You owe me.
I can hear it—the one who calls itself Zaehner, I don't know what it is—whispering, clawing at the inside of my head, persuasive, insistent, insidious. It wants to be me. I can't find all the doors I've left open and I'm scared to go back in. I might not come out as me, but then, that is the deal ...
#
I took every opportunity to practise in those days. I stuck to bar work in the evenings, it afforded the best REM moments, late morning, late afternoon, eyes bulging under closed lids, a little booze, a touch of hash, and I became a regular entrant into the world of dreams. It took me a month before I could bring my left hand back into my dreams, another two before my right materialised. It wasn't easy, sleep was often interrupted, a factor, from sharing a flat with seven others, that gradually became intolerable. I worked fewer hours and went out less. While those around me partied and drank and fucked and travelled to Amsterdam and Morocco and Spain and Greece, I slept and dreamt.
By the time the weak English summer tiptoed back, I had managed to form a door. A simple white door, wooden, with a copper latch, standing solitary in a field of grass. I opened it and stepped through into Monika's world.
It was as her photograph showed. A two-storey, stone-block apartment building, not built in this century, with vines creeping over and across the walls. A narrow cobblestone path led between similar buildings, down to what appeared to be a market. Old women called 'Hola' to each other from balconies and I realised she didn't live in Italy at all. On a nearby wall, a matador danced with a bull—a poster declaring to all the bullfight this weekend in Sevilla. People passed me by, oblivious. I could smell the heat in the air, hear fragmented Spanish conversations as people walked past, I could almost taste their cologne and yet I couldn't touch them. My hand passed through them as they lived their lives, oblivious to me. I was here, I was real, and yet I wasn't.
Behind me stood my door, and people passed through it as if it didn't exist. Never once did it occur to me I was dreaming. This was real for me, why would I think to wake up? Monika. She would be here, too. I looked for her door, a door of this world, a door on the apartment, and knocked. I knocked again, this time louder. Either nobody was home or they couldn't hear me. I suspected the latter. I tried to open the door, but my fingers slid around the handle, refusing to find purchase.
I stepped back and looked up at the building, trying in vain to peer into the windows. As I was about to give up, a window near the top opened and Monika looked out. The photograph had been recent, she looked the same. Beautiful, restless.
'Monika!' I called waving my hands up at her. 'I'm here. I've made it!'
She looked past me, through me, down the cobbled street.
'Hola,' she waved, and a woman from a balcony across the street called back. The rest was lost on me as they conversed in Spanish. Monika didn't know I was there, she couldn't hear me or see me. I was a passive observer here, unable to affect those around me. I watched her as she spoke and when she closed the window and didn't come out I wandered down to the markets and immersed myself in smells and colours, food, textiles, people and eventually found myself being drawn back to my door. It started as a niggling feeling and quickly became too insistent an urge to ignore. My feet moved quickly over the cobblestones, almost floating, and the door came rushing up to meet me. I stepped through, closed it behind me, and woke up. I had been asleep for no more than an hour and I had spent half a day in Spain.
I wrote to Monika, describing what I had seen. She told me of the places she had been and the people she had met, most of the destinations from an image she had focused on before sleeping. I didn't tell the people I shared the house with what had happened; they had begun to think of me as reclusive and eccentric. 'Weirdo' was a term I heard used on more than one occasion when they thought I wasn't there.
I travelled more often; safe places to begin with, the Spanish Steps, the Vatican, Berlin, and the pyramids. I went to shows at the Edinburgh festival and even followed my flatmates on their regular excursions. Sometimes I felt that I was not alone, that there were people with me, doing the same thing, but I could have been projecting what I was missing: food, drink, and sex, the purely physical pleasures. My sexual appetite had not been diminished, of course, God forbid the day. My job as a barman kept me in bed with numerous women, most of them young Aussie and Kiwi backpackers out for a good time. I wanted more though. I was lonely travelling by myself.
I decided to move back home. There was nothing in London keeping me and I was definitely not taking advantage of living there. Back home things would be cheaper; I could go on the dole and do some bar work while I figured out what to do next. I didn't travel for the first few months back in Melbourne, content instead to find some sort of routine, some normality.
I thought about writing down some of my experiences and began going through the email correspondence I had saved. One of the first I read got me thinking about travelling again. It was an early one from Monika. In it she talked of 'the people she had met'.
How? I had never been able to communicate with anybody. I had to ask her.
She sent me a photo of the Taj Mahal. The message said:
Hi Richard, I thought you would never ask. Sometimes you don't see what is in front of you. Sometimes you just don't listen. I know we've both been here before, but a familiar place is good for a first time. You never know, maybe this time we'll get a proper sunrise. Meet me here. Your time 7pm. Love, Monika xx
I arrived half an hour before dawn. People were already pouring in, cameras ready, sketchpads raised. Indians took rupees from tourists and herded them into lines for the perfect photograph. Last time I had been here the smog and cloud had hidden the sun until it was well overhead, denying me the pink-and-rose marbled marvel vista that greeted the dawn for the deceased and beloved Mumtaz Mahal.
I wandered around looking for Monika but she found me.
Something whispered in my ear. It sounded much like the voices of the dead that are rumoured to be echoing in the dome of the Taj's tomb: faint and echoey. It whispered again and this time I could understand it. It was my name.
'Monika?'
'I'm right here.' The hairs on my neck tingled. 'Can you feel that?'
'Yes.'
'That's me. It's my hand.'
'Can you see me? I can't see you.'
'Be patient, Richard.
It will come. You were always in too much of a hurry.'
Something light brushed against my lips. She closed my eyelids. I could feel her breath on my face. It smelt fresh and minty. My scalp tickled.
'What are you doing?'
'Helping you. Don't open your eyes yet.'
'Why?'
'You ask too many questions. Because.'
We waited for what must have been only a minute, and a pin-prick of intense light shot through my head.
'What the fuck was that?' I tried to open my eyes.
'Not yet,' she said. 'That's just me. I'm giving you something, from me to you. I'm helping you open the eyes inside your mind.'
The tickling moved inside my head, and the blood behind my eyes danced, thick and alive. I gradually felt her body firm next to mine, and my hand reached out, groping her arm, until her fingers entwined with my own.
'Now,' Monika said.
I opened my eyes as the sunrise crept across the marbled surface of the Taj Mahal, infusing the stone with glowing pinks and reds. I stood next to Monika, hand in hand, and saw what I had been denied.
