Names for Nothingness (9 page)

He squeezed her hand gently. ‘You'll have to tell Sharn.'

He was right, and she knew she would have to do it soon.

I
T WOULD BE WRONG TO SAY THAT
Caitlin felt entirely at home within the group house in the weeks that followed the camp, or that she had found the community she had always desired. But it was not, in fact, community that Caitlin had been looking for; she had wanted a way of viewing the world, a perspective that she could understand, and it seemed at last to be within her grasp.

She was happy, and there were times when all she wanted was to share this, but she kept her silence, aware that she was not completely ready. Almost, but not quite.

When she returned to school after the weekend away, the careers counsellor asked her why she had not yet handed in her university application form.

‘Because there's nothing I want to do,' she said.

‘Maybe not now,' he sat back in his chair and looked at her. ‘That's quite understandable. I actually think a couple of years
off is a good thing. But you should apply now, and then you simply defer.'

‘Do you like what you do?' she asked.

He shifted slightly in his seat. ‘It's not bad.'

She blushed. ‘That's not what I meant. Do you really like it? Do you have faith in it? Does it mean anything to you?'

He smiled, but it was an uncomfortable smile. ‘There are days and there are days.' He pushed another copy of the form towards her. ‘Will you just complete it?' he asked. ‘You have always had good marks, you could get into anything. There is time to decide later on.'

‘I've already decided.'

His sigh was audible. ‘Listen,' and he leant a little closer. ‘There's a reality out there.' He waved his hand towards the window. ‘There're bills to pay, obligations, harsh facts. You have the intelligence to make life a little easier for yourself. To find work that will earn you decent money and that won't be totally mind-numbing. When you're young, you think it's all irrelevant, but trust me – it isn't.'

‘It can be.' She uttered the words softly, still uncertain as to the glorious future that was opening up for her, tentative in her reach for a world that suddenly seemed possible, despite the fact that she had hardly ever dared hope for its existence.

He gathered the forms together and stood, too tired to continue with a conversation that was becoming increasingly pointless.

‘It's up to you,' and as he spoke, he tried to hand her the forms again.

She didn't take them from him.

‘Think about it.' He opened the door to let her out.

She caught the bus to the house most afternoons, watching each of the people she went to school with getting off,
the seats emptying until she was left alone, there at the last stop.

The streets were dusty and dry, scraggly paperbarks offered little shade, and the afternoon sun was hot despite it now being autumn. Her school uniform stuck to her skin and her bag was heavy, but she walked quickly, eager to reach the group house.

She punched the security code into the side door and went straight to the meeting hall to help set up the room. After the weekend away, she had been asked to look after the book sales at the end of each reading, and she carried the cartons out from the storeroom and arranged the titles across a trestle table as people arrived.

She was becoming familiar with many of the readings, but each time she heard the passages spoken out loud, a new truth unfurled. She would stand perfectly still and listen, letting the words settle within her subconscious, the layers of meaning slowly separating as she opened her heart to them, as she ceased trying to make sense of what she heard.

If she had a favourite, a piece that meant more to her than the others, it was probably the testimonial written by Kalyani in one of the later editions of Satya Deva's teachings. It was on the gift of serving.

When I am asked how it is that I can devote my life to serving another, I can only answer that I have been given the greatest gift of all.

To serve another's needs is to subjugate one's own desires, and this is the true path to happiness.

Sometimes the readings were accompanied by verbal testimonials; devotees would join the meeting and speak of their own experiences, and Caitlin would listen, the numerous
paths that they had each taken towards the one truth spreading out like a web in front of her.

When Fraser spoke, Caitlin was surprised by his story.

‘My parents had untold wealth,' he said, ‘but they were poor beyond belief. We lived in a huge house and I had everything that money could buy, but nothing that truly mattered. My father was never home and my mother drank. I started smoking dope when I was twelve, and I had my first hit of smack at fifteen. I ran away a year later. I lived on the streets and I sold myself to anyone who would pay. I would have died. I wanted to die. But I didn't know that this was not life, this was not real. All that I had experienced was simply my own gaping need, an emptiness that I constantly sought to fill, but that was not capable of being filled.

‘When I first read the teachings, I felt as though a light had come on, a great, glorious light, and it filled my entire being and illuminated a new path, a path that actually made sense within itself.

‘I was reborn.' He looked out across the hall.

‘I was blessed.'

Later, in the darkness of his room, Caitlin asked him if he ever saw his parents.

‘They are not my parents,' he told her, and he turned away from her as he spoke.

Back at the flat, Caitlin kept to herself. Liam did not refer to the conversation they had had when she returned from the camp. She did not expect him to. She had not asked him for secrecy, but he had sensed that she wanted to speak to Sharn in her own time, and he respected that, as she had known he would.

One evening she came in late to find Sharn in a good mood. She had been out drinking after work and she was, as Liam pointed out, pissed.

‘Not completely,' she grinned, running her fingers through his hair, ‘just pleasantly so.' She opened a bottle of beer and raised it in their direction. ‘Think I'd better keep going,' and her smile was rueful. ‘Seems to do me good.'

Liam had been searching through old photographs and they were spread across the floor. Caitlin was surprised to see Sharn pick one up and look at it.

‘There we are.' She stared at the photograph as though she ought to have known the people in it but couldn't quite place them, and then she let the image drop to the carpet. She sat back on the couch, putting her feet up on Liam's lap.

Caitlin picked up the photo and looked at it.

‘Why did you go there?' she asked.

‘Where?'

‘Sassafrass.'

‘I just landed there.' Sharn took another long swig from the bottle. ‘It could have been anywhere.' She looked across at Liam with a cheeky smile. ‘But you,' and she winked at him, ‘you were a believer. What were you trying to unleash? The artist in you? Your “inner eye”?'

‘Something like that.'

‘We all have unlimited creative potential.' Sharn stood, her voice taking on a deep, sonorous ring. ‘All of us, except you. Yes, you, Sharn. You have a job to do. Or should I say jobs to do. Endless jobs.' She shook her head. ‘He was, quite frankly, a fucking dickhead.' She smiled to herself.

‘So you didn't ever believe?' Caitlin looked at her. ‘Even at the beginning?'

‘Believe in what?'

‘Whatever he was on about?'

‘You tell me. It's still not clear to me what exactly it was that he was on about. Other than taking people's money in return for letting them scream their lungs out, take their clothes off
and dance like lunatics.' She took her tobacco out from her bag and rolled a cigarette, sticking it behind her ear as soon as it was done. ‘I have a feeling I'm going to be distinctly unpleasant tomorrow.' She stood slowly and looked at herself in the mirror. ‘There's nothing quite so tragic as a middle-aged hangover.'

Liam grimaced at Caitlin.

‘Don't think I didn't see that,' and Sharn turned to face them both. ‘Just warning you. And letting you know that you'd better take full advantage of my good humour while it's here.'

She stood out on the back step, lighting her cigarette, and Caitlin was, for a moment, tempted to go out and tell her then and there that she had found something she believed in, something that made sense to her, that she was, and she searched for the word she would use, ‘happy'.

The thin stream of smoke floated up into the night air, and she heard Sharn humming to herself, a few bars from a song that was not recognisable.

‘Maybe I'll take a sick day tomorrow,' she said. ‘Lie in bed and sleep all day. Do nothing.' There was a wistfulness to her tone that sounded quite unlike her, and as she turned to look at them both, Caitlin took one step towards her.

She stubbed the cigarette out on the railing and let the butt drop down to the garden below.

‘Why don't you?' Liam called out. ‘I could look after you.'

His words cut across Caitlin's attempt to speak. She had got no further than the first sounds of her mother's name, and she stepped back into the hall.

‘Going to sleep?' Liam asked.

He was picking the photos up from the floor, bundling them together again.

‘Soon,' she said.

She watched as he rolled a cigarette and walked out to where Sharn waited for him, and then she went to her room, the book of teachings that Fraser had given her hidden under her pillow.

O
N THE DAY OF HIS DEPARTURE
, Fraser told Caitlin that when she saw him again, he would no longer exist.

‘My life as it has been will be no more than an illusion.' He pointed to the room, to her and to himself. ‘This has no substance.'

He was finally heading north. She did not know when they would meet up again but she, too, had made it clear that she wanted to devote her life to serving Satya Deva. She might have to wait months, or it might only be a matter of days; she did not know, but she would go as soon as she was called. In the meantime, she would do as she was asked here, listening to and learning from the teachers within the community and helping as she was instructed.

In the early evening light she watched Fraser dress, his white cotton pants and shirt hanging loosely over the slenderness of his frame. His bag was close to the door. It
contained only one change of clothes and a book of teachings. (‘There is no more that I could want,' he had said to her as she watched him pack only moments after he had had sex with her for what would, in all likelihood, be the last time.)

His hair had been clipped close to his skull, and he no longer looked like the young man she had met on the bus. But then, she was not the girl to whom he had talked. Looking down at her naked body with a dispassionate eye, she knew that with a certainty that was surprisingly calm.

‘You must not hang on to “us”,' he had said to her as he zipped up the canvas bag, turning to look at her for one brief moment before putting on his clothes.

She did not reply. The dismay she originally felt at the thought of his departure had gone.

‘Attachment is not for us,' he had once told her. ‘It is simply buying into desire and longing. Now is all that matters,' and he had rolled off her, his eyes already far away as he searched for his clothes on the floor.

‘Sex is simply a basic need,' he had said on another occasion when Jacinta walked in on them, and he had pulled her down onto the mattress with them, Caitlin moving back to watch them fucking with a calm that she would not have expected. He was, when it came down to it, completely right; sex was no more than a need.

‘There is only room for one love,' he had said on another afternoon, and she had dressed herself to return to the readings while he watched her with a lazy smile, his hand absent-mindedly stroking the length of her thigh.

He had always been clear about their relationship but there had never really been any need. She may have been younger than him and he may have been the first person to have sex with her, but she had known the way things were.

And now he was leaving and she would be here alone,
coming to this house without ever seeing him, coming simply and purely for herself.

He turned to say goodbye, and when their eyes met, she knew that he was already gone.

‘You have found us or we have found you,' he said as he lifted his bag and swung it onto his shoulder, and she sat up, raising her hand in farewell.

‘You have chosen the right path,' and he bent down to kiss her on the cheek, his lips smooth and cool against her skin.

‘Goodbye,' she said, and she watched him walk lightly down the darkness of the corridor, without once turning back to look, unaware of her eyes following the retreating whiteness of his figure as he made his way to the front door.

It was cold. She had wrapped the sheet around herself to watch him leave, and she searched for her school uniform among the clothes he had left behind, but then changed her mind, reaching for his discarded shirt and jeans instead. She could no longer put off talking to Sharn. She didn't want to pretend anymore. She was finally herself, and the dishonesty of even dressing like the person she had once been was now a complete anathema, and so she shut the door behind her, leaving her uniform on the floor, and headed out to wait for the next bus home.