Life is a Parallel Universe (8 page)

Beatrice merely
shook her head. Dumbfounded and suddenly unpegged.

‘She was just a
live-in child minder. For you. I provided her and her kid a place
to say and she cleaned up a bit and was meant to look after you’ he
continued. ‘She just took off one day though and I never saw her
again.’ He sat, quiet for a moment, mulling over the past in his
mind’s eye.

‘But where is
my real mother?’ Beatrice managed to spit out. The word ‘mother’
feeling foreign to her tongue.

‘Well….she
wasn’t right in the head after you was born…..she just kind of
disappeared inside herself…..and she had to be put somewhere else
to live. A home.’

He recounted
this tale, which left Beatrice both stunned and drained of all
energy. He could not look her in the eye. His eyes would slowly
look up, but then slide away to the side. Unseeing.

‘Can I see
her?’

‘She died five
years ago. …..sorry……I know I should have been a better dad to
you……but I just couldn’t……I felt like me whole life…had just
collapsed….or blown apart. You just reminded me of her….. and all
that I had lost’

Beatrice wanted
to yell ‘what about what I have lost!’ But there were no winners
and losers here.

Finding out
about her mother made Beatrice see life in a new way, she realised
that there were many angles and perspectives and that so much
information about us remains hidden and unknown.

She wondered if
part of the reason that she had bullied and shoved aside for most
of her life, was something inbuilt. Within her. Something that she
carried from her mother and that had been passed to her daughter.
In the DNA. Something missing or different: outside her control.
Making her an alien.

Luckily, her
daughter was receiving therapy now and she was improving day by
day.

These thoughts
journeyed into other thoughts and Beatrice reflected on how she had
been avoiding a man who was a member of the local folk music group
that she had recently joined. She called him ‘Creepy Man’ in the
privacy of her mind. This man would stand too close to Beatrice and
suddenly she would find that she had travelled halfway across the
room whenever he spoke to her. Then, another time, he had insisted
that Beatrice make a donation to a cause that he was supporting. It
had felt like an onslaught, an invasion of her personal
sovereignty. She had to admit that she avoided him and rebuffed his
overtures of friendship. One day, as she was engaged in
conversation with another member of the group named Yandi, she
noticed Creepy Man hovering about, as though he wanted to join in
and didn’t know how. She saw a look of anguish pass across his
face, as he seemed to concede defeat and walk away. Beatrice
thought about how she had turned her body away from him: to block
him.

What if this
man is someone just like me: awkward, floundering and innately
lacking social nous? The thought percolated and echoed through her
head. Perhaps I am just as guilty as Lisa and her gang? A question
posed which could not be adequately answered.

Beatrice
thought about all those years when she felt alone and cast off from
the world, how she thirsted for some connection; for someone to
listen and understand her innermost true feelings and thoughts.
This, she thought, is what everyone wants and what everyone needs.
And, yet, human relationships seem to be so charged with
misunderstanding.

She also
thought about how the past rears up like a sea monster and
strangles the present and then drags you backwards like an
anchor.

Lives and
people are not equal. No one starts from the same place. It is
beguiling, Beatrice thought, to believe that ‘everything happens
for a reason’ or that all wrongs will one day be sorted out by some
magical hand of Karma or other divine being whose eye follows all.
But, in reality, it seems that humanity is alone, living on the
outside of a giant blue ball, winging through the cosmos, and so it
is us alone, who must work toward fairness and tolerance. And
these, can only come from true understanding.

And then, as if
travelling from a very great distance, she heard the voice of
David, from long ago speaking in that soft and insistent way of
his: ‘Sometimes it feels like our lives are a purple tragedy, but
perhaps, all you are is a brain in a vat.’

Well, thought
Beatrice, if we are being deceived by a malicious demon about the
nature of reality, how can we ever know that we are? All we can
know is the cave of this world. And, all we can do is use our
thinking mind to make a glitch in The Matrix.

But on those
days when everything seemed to be out of her control, and she is
not feeling brave, Beatrice simply thinks to herself, at least I am
here and in the dance of life.