Names for Nothingness (15 page)

And she turned to the door, wanting only to be home.

I
N THE GARDEN THERE ARE FRANGIPANNIS
, heady sweet in the sticky heat, great hibiscus that yawn, red, pink and golden under the heavy clouds, and bougainvillea that sprawls lurid around the verandah. The traveller palms catch the slight breeze that comes before the afternoon rain, the great leaves rustling like stiff sheets of card, and Caitlin, who is now Nirav, sits, still, on the lawn beneath them, each limb tired and aching.

She is blessed, they tell her now that it is obvious, this weight that she is carrying. She is blessed, and she repeats their words to herself until she believes them.

In the evenings, she sweats, lying curled up on her side, unable to sleep. Kalyani sponges down her forehead with cool water, and kisses each eyelid. Santosh asks after her health, his voice a hushed whisper as he passes her, so soft that he might not have spoken. He, too, questions her with each glance.

Or perhaps she just imagines that their concern is more than simple care for another. Perhaps she is still too tied to a world that has passed.

Here, she does as all the others do. There is no question of doing otherwise. The fear she felt when it first became obvious has to be gone. Fear is anxiety about the future that comes from being trapped in the past. There is no place for it here. This is what she tells herself, over and over again. She does not eat when the others do not eat. She meditates when they meditate. She follows instructions, walking down to the river for water for washing, gathering petals for garlands, lying prostrate in obedience, and each time she feels the discomfort in her body, she does not question the correctness of her course. She cannot. Her role is only to obey, to experience the sublime beauty of obedience in every given moment.

She is blessed, they tell her, because this is the most extraordinarily exacting task of all. To immerse herself in now when the future kicks against her skin, the imprint of a heel clear against her flesh; this is the task that she has been given, this is her path to enlightenment, and she must hold it and bless it in the palms of her hands.

A butterfly dips into an open blossom, sapphire blue wings flitting open and shut, the colour brilliant against the cream of the petals. An ant crawls across her foot, tickling her bare skin, and overhead a bird calls, sharp, piercing the stillness.

And here under the palms, she is as she is. Aware only of the changing heat, the slow build-up that will finally burst open. Fat, hot drops of rain that become a torrential shower, the great bruised sky emptying, the earth finally cooling beneath her feet as she sits, still and heavy, in the perfection of the present.

W
HEN
L
IAM SUGGESTED
that Sharn's response to Caitlin's decision could partly be due to the bitterness she still felt about Sassafrass, she denied it. It was the night of Caitlin's visit, a week after she had left home, and he had come back from work to find Sharn still sitting on the couch with her book.

‘Caitlin came.'

He listened without a word.

‘When I was talking about regrets, I wasn't talking about having her,' and Sharn stared at him. ‘I was talking about not finishing school, about staying so long in that place.'

And although he did not respond, his disbelief was evident.

‘It's true,' she said.

He just shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe if you started by letting Sassafrass go, you could move on to letting her go.' He uttered the words softly, but she heard them nonetheless.

‘They don't have anything to do with each other,' and she turned and left him, alone in the room.

When Lou made the same suggestion some months later, her response was not so certain.

‘They're just so full of shit,' she said, ‘all of them,' and she knew how sweeping her statement was, but she didn't care. ‘I mean, look at Simeon. He fucked me, and anyone else who was stupid enough to let him. Four days after I had Caitlin, I had to get straight back to work. I had to clean out the chicken coop if I wanted eggs for dinner. All he wanted was money, sex and cheap labour. I couldn't give him the first one, but he certainly got the other two out of me.' She attempted to smile, but she feared her expression was more like a grimace than anything else.

She had been trying, as everyone had advised her, to just let it go, so much so that when Lou first told her that Christina knew of someone who had followed Satya Deva, she didn't seize the telephone immediately to find out how she could meet her. She asked Lou if she could get her number, and when Lou forgot, she rang Christina herself.

Her name was Freya, Christina said. Christina knew her younger sister, and she gave Sharn Freya's contact details.

What did she say? Sharn wanted to ask, but she forced herself not to. She wanted to be calm, to be measured in her response.

‘Pretty interesting,' Christina said, ‘what she told me, that is.'

And Sharn gave up any pretence of detachment. ‘What?' she demanded, ‘what did she tell you?'

‘They just sounded freaky. Total obedience to the lord and master.'

Sharn arranged to meet Freya two evenings later. Her flat was above a panel-beating shop in a suburb close to the beach.

‘Sorry about that,' she said when she opened the door, and
she pointed to a stick of burning incense in the hallway. ‘Hate the shit, but it's the only thing that gets rid of the spray-painting fumes,' and she pointed below to the garage.

The odour was cloying in its sweetness, overpowering, but Sharn told her that it was fine, barely noticeable in fact.

Freya just laughed. ‘Obviously something wrong with your sense of smell, then.'

Her boy was getting ready for bed, prevaricating about brushing his teeth. When he eventually came out of the bathroom, he asked Sharn if she could read to him.

‘He always does that,' Freya said, ‘to anyone who comes over,' and Sharn was relieved as Freya led him into the bedroom and told him that she would read the stories tonight.

‘You know he's the son of God?' Freya said when she came back out. She pointed to a cask of wine and Sharn nodded.

‘You do?' Freya laughed again, husky and fierce.

For a moment Sharn wondered whether she was a little mad, and she attempted to explain that she had been saying yes to the wine, and not in fact confirming that she knew Freya's son was some divine being.

Freya just grinned. ‘I was fucked by the great Satya Deva. Most of us were. And that's what happened.' She pointed to the bedroom. ‘Not that I'm not glad to have him,' and she sat down opposite Sharn, stretching her legs out on the coffee table, ‘but man, oh man, when I think about what a gullible fool I was …'

She had been twenty. ‘I'd just broken up with the love of my life, and I was devastated.' She lit a cigarette and pushed the pack over towards Sharn. And I met some devotee in the supermarket, who somehow sucked me in.' It was what they did, she said, used the young, good-looking ones either to recruit or to serve.

‘I'm sure your daughter – what's her name?'

‘Caitlin.'

‘Yeah, Caitlin, was brought in by one of them. Some handsome young bloke who made her feel that he alone understood her.' She drank the last of the wine in her glass and poured herself another, pushing the cask across the table towards Sharn.

Sharn shook her head. She couldn't help noticing how rapidly Freya seemed to be consuming her alcohol, and she wondered how drunk she was.

The ash from Freya's cigarette crumbled onto the carpet and she rubbed it in with her foot, smiling as she did so. ‘And then there's the faceless, grey ones. The middle-aged, the ugly.' She sneered. ‘They do the work. Run the shonky sales operations, the rip-off spiritual awakening camps, cook and clean, all the boring drudgery – that's theirs. Equality is not an outstanding feature of Satya Deva's dominion.'

She had lived in one of the city houses for about eight months before she was asked to join the inner circle on some land they owned up north.

‘It was what everyone wanted,' and Freya rubbed at a clump of mascara that had dried on her lashes, a dark circle forming around her eye. ‘The calling from the master. He had some guy who would come down and check out the new recruits and pick the best looking ones. No one told us where the land was, no one knew unless they went there; it was just painted as this nirvana, one step down from heaven, and off you went.'

She smiled to herself, shaking her head as she did so. ‘Everyone had to wear white in the presence of the lord. It was all part of his nothing-is-everything, servitude-is-freedom rant and rave.'

It was getting darker now and the tip of her cigarette
glowed as she drew back deeply. She leant across and switched on a small lamp next to the television, bathing the room in a dirty yellow light.

‘It was mad. The whole lot of it. And I wonder at myself, at my own stupidity.' Her voice cracked a little. ‘I was a fucking lunatic.'

She had turned slightly to the side and Sharn shifted uncomfortably in her own seat. She was about to tell her that it was okay, she didn't have to say any more if she didn't want to, when Freya spoke again. Her thin face was pale, and the smudge of mascara gave her a ghoulish look in the dim light.

‘I got so sick. I barely ate. There were weeks when we were told that we could live off air alone.' This time her smile was weaker, the bravado momentarily gone. ‘It's a wonder he survived,' and she nodded in the direction of her son's room.

From down below, Sharn could hear the sound of a car engine revving. The roar built, silencing them, until the tyres eventually skidded on the road, the squeal loud as it disappeared up the street.

‘The owner's son,' Freya explained, and she rolled her eyes. ‘Complete petrolhead.' She looked at Sharn as though she had lost track of what it was they were discussing, as though it had all slipped through her fingers, spilling into a pool on the floor.

‘I think Caitlin is still in the city,' Sharn said. ‘But I don't know. I've been ringing the house over and over again and no one will tell me.'

Freya just smiled. She continued talking as though Sharn had never spoken.

‘Sometimes we would meditate for days. Or walk through the cane fields naked for hours on end. We had to do whatever he told us, and there was no rhyme or reason behind any of it. Abstinence. Denial of all personal desires and needs.
The path to freedom. That's what we were told, and I swallowed it. Every bit of it. The more you obeyed, the greater you were. That was the deal,' and she stubbed out her cigarette, the end sizzling in a small pool of wine she had spilt in the ashtray.

‘What made you finally leave?'

Sharn pulled back as Freya undid the top buttons of her shirt, her mouth drawn tight in a sharp, angry line. As she opened it, she revealed a wound that started at her collarbone and spread down to her small breasts, the flesh pink and puckered, angry in its failed attempt to heal.

‘I burnt myself,' she said. ‘By accident,' she added, seeing the momentary look of alarm that had crossed Sharn's face.

Sharn winced.

‘I was no longer attractive. I was no longer required. I mean, look at me.'

‘Did you want to leave?'

Freya did not do up her shirt. She just sat there, the wound on display as she looked Sharn directly in the eyes. ‘No, I didn't. I was horrified. They told me I was no longer a valid spiritual member of the community – whatever that means – and I fell apart.

‘I was driven back to one of the city houses and given a job. But I felt so deeply ashamed of the fact that I had somehow failed, I could no longer function. I lost the plot. Or maybe I actually regained it, I don't know. Nothing made sense anymore. The words they used, the readings, the lessons, it all seemed to be completely scrambled, incomprehensible. I began to ask questions, all the time, and I wasn't trying to be difficult, I just didn't understand anymore.' Her face was hard as she spoke and under the yellow of the lamplight she looked almost maniacal.

‘But that's not how they saw it. They thought I was making
trouble. They thought I was bitter,' and she spat out the word.

‘Eventually I was asked to leave. For good.'

Sharn wanted to speak. She wanted to tell her that her shirt was still undone, that she could do it up now; she wanted to lean over and extract the material from the tight grip of her fingers and close it, gently, over the angry sadness of that scar. Please, she wanted to say, you can let it go now, but she said nothing.

‘And when I came back into the world – I suppose that's how you'd describe it – well, I just didn't cope. I didn't know how to anymore. I was so used to being instructed, to only acting as I was told, that I had simply forgotten how to think,' and Freya tapped the side of her head angrily, the tip of her finger hard and sharp against her short reddish hair. ‘It took me a long time,' she waved one thin, pale hand around the room, ‘to get even this far.' She smiled, a broad, ugly smile. ‘And this sure isn't anything to write home about.'

They looked at each other in silence, until Freya eventually spoke, her voice harsh again, husky, brisk, just as it had been when Sharn first arrived.

‘Want another?' She pointed to the cask, and Sharn told her that she didn't.

She sat back again, her shirt gaping open even further. ‘What's she like?' she asked.

‘Who?'

‘Your daughter, Caitlin.'

The suddenness of the question threw her, and she responded without thinking, the words slipping out before she had even had a chance to remove herself from Freya's story and come back into the reality of her own daughter. She sat opposite a woman she had only just met, and told her that she didn't know, she had no idea, ‘a stranger', she said; they were the words she used to describe Caitlin: she is a stranger.