A Short History of Richard Kline (20 page)

‘Rick.'

‘My name's Oliver.'

Well, at least he wasn't called Bhodi or Moon, like some of the hippie kids around the place. ‘Are you sleeping here?'

‘I'm sleeping with my mum.'

So what are you doing in here, Rick thought, in the men's quarters? ‘Perhaps you'd better go back to your own hut,' he said. The best he could offer Oliver was a charmless smile as he strolled off down the aisle between the bunks for a leak in the ablutions wing.

When he returned, the little brat was jumping on his bed and emitting a weird yodelling noise.

‘Hey, get off there!' he snapped.

Oliver stood stock still, mouth open in idiotic astonishment. Rick leaned across the mattress and put his hand on the boy's shoulder with the intention of squiring him out the door, but the instant he touched him the boy keeled over, face forward, onto the bed, and lay there like a zombie.

This was too much. ‘Get up!' he said, sharply, and then regretting his tone, ‘Get up, Oliver. I'm going to have a sleep on that bed.'

Oliver rolled onto his back and looked up at him with a crazed smile. ‘Going to have a sleep,' he droned, as if in a trance, ‘going to have a sleep.'

‘Not you, me.' And he leaned over and hoisted the boy upright, then lifted him under the armpits and set him down roughly in the corridor. Any minute one of the sleepers would wake up and see him molesting this kid. What a perfect day.

To his relief, Oliver made no resistance and began to stroll down the aisle, gazing about him as if he had just that minute wandered in and it was all new.

Rick sank onto the mattress and fell into a heavy, dragging sleep.

When he woke it was almost dark. Damn, he would miss dinner again, for the second night in a row. He threw off the blanket, reached for his jacket and strode to the door, where his boots were lined up with the rest. At the end of the line of shoes, Oliver was standing in shadow, looking intent. At first he couldn't see what the boy was up to and then he recognised the sound; Oliver was pissing over the shoes.

‘Hey!' he shouted. The boy turned to him, staring blankly and waving his little white prick up and down. Then, as if stung by a slap, he ran off up the grassy bank, keening his strange yodelling wail.

Jesus, what next? To his relief Rick found that his own boots had been spared, but since he didn't know any of the others in his hut he wouldn't be able to alert them and they would just have to make the unhappy discovery when they returned. Or should he ask one of the monitors to make an announcement?

When he arrived at the dining room he realised he had misread the time on his watch and he was an hour early. Typical. He couldn't put a foot right. He walked back to where the car was parked and drove three kilometres into the tourist town nearby, where he bought a double-shot coffee, eggs and bacon and some chocolate, including a small bar that he planned to give to Oliver; his conscience continued to prick him over his waspishness with the boy. Oliver was without a doubt the most unlikeable child he'd ever encountered, with flapping arms, sickly pale skin, and a moronic expression, slack-mouthed and mocking, that he found physically repugnant. Nevertheless, he ought to have been able to feel some impulse to kindness. The child was disturbed and he, Rick, had failed a test. Why was it that ever since he arrived at this boot camp, his every word, his every gesture, seemed to strike the wrong note? He was not normally this inept, even when out of his comfort zone. Something was out of sync. And he might not even see the mad kid again – with luck, he wouldn't – though, as it happened, no sooner had he pulled into the drive of the campsite than he saw the boy walking through the door of his hut. Inside, he found him running noisily up and down the ablutions block and shouting into the echoing stalls.

‘Here, Oliver,' he said, testily. ‘I've brought you something,' and he almost thrust the chocolate bar into the pocket of the boy's shorts.

Suddenly he thought of how it would look if anyone came in. Here he was in a lavatory block giving a small boy a lolly. Terrific. In less than twenty-four hours he had been reduced to this.

Oliver just stared at him, that blank moronic stare. ‘What?' he said, but Rick turned and walked away.

Oliver stood motionless in the aisle, his arms limp by his side. ‘
What?
' he shouted, and the cry echoed in the bare spaces of the bunkhouse. ‘
What? What? What?
'

When Rick returned to the dining room it was crowded but they had not yet begun to serve dinner. From over in one corner he saw a raised arm waving to him; it was Rebecca. She was sitting with a group of people and she beckoned him to join them. Later, he could not remember what they talked about; all he could recall was the loneliness that descended on him as they spoke, followed by a strange, numbing paranoia, like the worst kind of stoned feeling. He was miserable, utterly miserable. As the meal dragged on, he could hear his own voice, too loud and too emphatic, some awful desperate braying, and all the time the pain was getting worse. He felt that the others were laughing at him, that he was absurd, an awkward fool, a big lumbering bundle of bone and muscle, of sinew and fat. He and Oliver were somehow kin.

By the end of the meal he was scarcely able to speak.

That evening in the hall he fidgeted with a hostile restlessness that pricked at him as if he were being tormented by invisible flies. He did not get into the queue for her blessing, he left early – before ten – and he walked the track down to the beach, where he sat on the damp sand, his head hunched over his drawn-up knees, and listened to the roar of the incoming waves. There was no moon. He thought of seeking out Rebecca and putting the moves on. She had flirted with him, and it would restore his pride.

Later – how much later he couldn't say – he lay on his mattress in the hut and stared up at the blank ceiling. It was all a mistake, he shouldn't have come, the place was indescribably tacky and he had made a serious error of judgement. In the morning he would get up, pack the car and leave early. He would use his mobile to rebook his flight, and with luck he'd be home by mid-afternoon. He would lose face with Zoe but it would be a small price to pay.

He woke at eight and did not bother with breakfast. For a moment he contemplated not having a shower, so keen was he to make his escape. By the time he had dried off and dressed, the dormitory hut was empty and he was able to pack up his things without having to face any awkward questions. No-one would notice he was gone; everyone there was completely self-absorbed, absorbed in their own salvation, their own ‘experience', and the other bodies around them were not much more than props or dummies, a human blur.

As he lifted his bag into the boot of the car, he stopped for the first time and thought about what he was doing. He was behaving like a child. He had forgotten about one thing:
her
. It would be churlish of him to go without making any farewell. Some instinct, a throb in his pulse, told him he would regret it. He would be leaving without closure. It was messy, it was adolescent and it was beneath him.

Slipping the car keys into his back pocket, he headed for the hall. Just as he rounded the corner of the dining-room block, suddenly there she was, walking towards him with a small crowd in a procession behind her, the hem of her white sari trailing in the dust. Surely she should be in the hall by now? He must have looked puzzled because a man next to him explained that she had made an unscheduled walk to the beach, and as a result the program was running late. So he stood there, goggle-eyed, waiting for her to pass, but as she approached the wooden steps leading to the hall she stopped, looked straight at him and said one word, in English. ‘Going?' But her eyes were more eloquent:
I have put you through all this
, they said,
and now you are going to run away like a scared child.

What happened immediately afterwards was hazy; he staggered up the wooden steps of the hall in a daze, slumped into a chair against the side wall and wept.

In the long wait in the queue he was shaking, and when finally he found his way to her chair, she looked into his eyes with the most compassionate smile she had ever given him, laid her hands on his head and gave him a prolonged blessing. As if she knew. But of course she knew. On a low table beside her there was a brass bowl filled with rose petals, and, taking a handful of petals, she began to stuff them into his ears, to the delighted laughter of those looking on.

Drunk with bliss, he staggered back to his seat.

That night, when he rested his forehead against hers, he had, for the first time since he was a boy, prayed.
Take this absurd pain away from me, take it all. I don't want it. I'm laying it down here, at your feet. I'm giving it to you. Take my life's burden.

He had booked himself onto the last plane out on the Monday evening, and when he arrived at the airport he was hungry. All the food stalls were closed, except one, and even there they had only a single packet of sandwiches. By now he was exhausted and he slumped into a seat in the departure lounge and unravelled the wrapping from the soggy white-bread sandwich in his lap. Inside was a slice of plastic yellow cheese, two slices of pale, watery tomato and a single leaf of limp lettuce. Great. It was the theme of his benighted excursion. Still, he was empty, and he took a half-hearted bite and began to chew. What followed was perhaps the most remarkable part of the weekend. The sandwich was delicious; the sandwich was the best sandwich he had ever eaten. With each mouthful it grew more subtle and more satisfying so that he began to chew more slowly, the better to savour it, to linger over its sweetness. Now he was not so tired. Now, suddenly, he was very focused, he was like a scientist in his lab, wholly absorbed in an experiment.

When he boarded the plane and the steward brought him his plastic tray with its two airline biscuits, brittle circles of flour dust in cellophane packets, he couldn't wait to open one of the packets and bite into the dun-coloured orb. Yes,
delicious
, and the other one equally so! And he saw what she was doing, how she had played with him all weekend, how she had taken pity on his arrogance, his discontent, and was teaching him now to take pleasure in the simplest things. To be grateful.

It was gratitude that he lacked, that he had always lacked. Since childhood it had been his curse to see the flaw in everything. This he had prided himself on; this, he had told himself, was discrimination. No-one could fool him.

And with this thought a rush of tears welled behind his eyes and he laid his head against the window to conceal his overflowing heart.

What did he learn from this? He learned that he was not in control, and that any expectations he had were foolish in their naïve presumption. Sometimes they would be met, sometimes not; sometimes they would be met but when he least expected it and not in the form he had anticipated. His imagination was a tantalising distraction; pleasurable in itself, often, but nothing ever came of it. Nothing was ever as he imagined it. To re-imagine the past or daydream the future was beside the point. Only the present mattered.

But this was not an insight that stayed with him. He was unable to hold this wisdom, this freedom in his heart, for long. For the first month after the retreat he lived and breathed and worked in a serene state, and the memory of that single word, the sound of her voice, its gentle ironic inflection of mock surprise – ‘Going?' – was enough to make him smile to himself in the middle of a meeting. But it was not enough.
Nothing
would ever be enough for him. And later, when he looked back, he could see that this short-lived phase of serenity was nothing other than a return to his original smugness. Which is why it was inevitable that he should fall out of it, without warning.

Now began some terrible mood. A sense of futility seeped into his viscera like a thin drip of poison. So, he thought, so, it's going to wear off, just like every other infatuation. Every morning, in his meditation, he could feel a sharp instrument twisting in his bowels, some double-edged sword of disillusionment and longing. The pain was unbearable.