‘Is that Princess Di?’ Ruby asks, and I realise that it is, that there are dozens of paintings of her on the houses lining the main road of the village we are passing through. Her blonde fringe hangs low, she looks out from underneath it with bright blue eyes. Some portraits are well executed, some more like cartoons. The whole village is a shrine to her.
We are driving to another shrine, the Sthanumalay-aswami Temple. From the outside this temple looks like any other. Square and tiered with row upon row of brightly coloured gods reaching up towards the heavens. Ruby and I take our shoes off and walk gingerly through the mud, past the doors, which are two storeys high and are each made from a single piece of wood.
It is like stepping through the wardrobe door into Narnia, another world. Priests are everywhere, three white stripes painted across their forehead. They wear white dhotis around their waists, their chests are bare, their bodies shiny with coconut oil. There is hardly any natural light here, just the flickering dark yellow light of ghee lamps. The air is thick with oil, with the smells of ghee and of coconut.
There is a monotonal chant in a woman’s voice humming over loudspeakers. It is the first woman’s voice I have heard in any Hindu temple. To my right is a giant Nandi, the Bull that Siva rides, and Hanuman—a man with a monkey head—some three metres high. The stone on these statues is black, rubbed with oil by worshippers who have been coming for twelve hundred years. To my left is a boulder more than eighteen hundred years old with epigraphs written on it in ancient Pali.
One of the priests takes us in hand. He points to each of the stripes on his forehead. ‘Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver,’ he says. ‘Siva the Destroyer.’ He takes us to a large open chamber with stone columns, floor to ceiling. The columns are organic in shape, more like groups of three or four narrow pipes clustered together. He walks towards one set of pipes, beckoning us to follow. He cups the side of my head and forces my ear to it, then does the same to Ruby. He raps his knuckles on the pipe. The sound is pure.
‘A perfect G,’ says Ruby.
He raps a different pipe.
‘That was a B-flat.’
‘Stone,’ the priest says. ‘All stone.’
He takes us next to a tiny Ganesa chamber that is too small to enter. All we can do is dip our heads low, look in. There are yellow and orange markings painted on him, he is covered in flowers. I bow to him, one of India’s favourite gods, the Remover of Obstacles. This Ganesa, like all Ganesas, has only one tusk and he holds his second tusk before him as a stylus.
Our priest takes us to another chamber, but instead of coming in with us, gestures for us to go in alone. It is like stepping into a black hole, it seems entirely lightless in this room. After a few moments, after my eyes adjust, I can make out rows of Kalis, multi-armed, at head height.
‘Kali is the consort of Siva,’ Ruby says. ‘Kali is time.’ Then she quotes, ‘In the power of Time all colours dissolve into darkness. All shapes return to shapelessness in the all-pervading darkness of the eternal light.’
In front of me is a stone column with a bowl carved into it, but no lingam.
‘Is that a Yoni?’ I ask.
‘Yes,’ Ruby says. ‘In theory Hindus believe that there is only divinity when opposites co-exist. Male and female. But most of the time you just see the lingam. This is a special place.’
It is hard to describe what it feels like: the energy here is dark and wild, not just in this chamber but throughout the whole temple. When we step out the priest taps our foreheads, then taps the door of the chamber. ‘Woman,’ he says. ‘Very important.’
We go further into the centre of the temple. The ceilings are so low we cannot stand up straight. The air feels heavy in here, as if we are underground. The light is a dim flickering the colour of old gold. The chanting is loud, a combination of the woman’s voice over the speakers and the murmurings of the people queueing to go into the central chamber. Eyes full of smoke, ears full of sound. Shirtless men prostrate themselves at the chamber entrance, placing first their forehead, then each cheek onto the cool of the stone floor. They do it over and over.
We bend down to look in and I see many doors, each leading to smaller and darker rooms. It is like looking into a diminishing corridor, perspective seems distorted. I do not know what is in the final room, though this place vibrates with the dangerous power of Siva, and I wonder if it is him in there. There is the merest suggestion of light, one flickering ghee lamp.
It is hard to breathe. My heart is racing, and from the way Ruby is standing, with her hand over her left breast, I can tell hers is as well. There is only one way I can describe what I am feeling: we are looking at time. It tumbles back in this space, not just hundreds, but thousands of years. Backwards through those turbulent centuries when Mohammed, then Christ, then Buddha were born, to the time of the gods and goddesses that came before them.
I don’t want to leave but the priest tugs our arms. ‘Sivalingham,’ he says gesturing back to the chamber we have been looking at, before taking us back to the light of day, to a corridor of columns. As he walks past one he taps it and when Ruby and I go to look at it we see carved into the stone a man sucking his own penis, the shaft standing the full length of his body. The priest walks slowly past the columns, tapping them to draw our attention to a series of such carvings: a woman copulating with a dog, another with a snake, men and women bent over each other in stylised poses.
We are back at the entrance and the priest nods that it is over. We give him money and then we are outside again, feeling slightly shell-shocked. More shocked again when we see a pilgrim standing in front of us, face painted, stripes on his chest, hair in dreadlocks, a spear piercing his tongue and two pieces of metal through his eyebrows. He holds his begging bowl before him but doesn’t register our presence, or the coins we place in the bowl. His devotion, his trance, are absolute.
We sit in the car going back to Kanniyakumari in silence. It is some minutes before Ruby says, finally. ‘Hinduism is right. Sex and spirituality…they are, well they should be, the same thing.’
‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘we take just the one thing, sex, and put it in the place of spirit. I did that. That’s why the whole Michael thing was so pathetic: it was just a case of bad wiring. If I’d started taking the anti-depressants earlier it never would have gone on so long.’
‘Looking for spirit in a relationship doesn’t mean you need drugs,’ Ruby says. ‘I like that you looked for such things in sex, even if it was with the wrong person. Drugs like that are never an answer.’
‘You don’t know that. If you figure out where the light at the end of the tunnel is you can use them to get you there. Through the darkness.’
Her disapproval about such things, about the lifeline I found for myself, hurts me. But it’s her ignorance that’s making me angry. I turn and look out the window at India, waiting for the surge of fury to subside. I stare out there for too long—it just builds, until eventually I turn round to glare at her, tears running down my face. ‘How dare you judge me? You’re just like everyone else, disapproving of the fact that I’m obsessive then disapproving of the way I tried to pull myself out of it. Everyone’s a fucking expert. But you know something Ruby? Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do. Those drugs don’t make you well—Jesus, they don’t even make you feel better—but they turn off the static. The noise, the interference, the shit in your head that keeps you from understanding that you are destroying yourself.’
‘You’re smart,’ Ruby says, looking at me anxiously because she knows I’m upset but she wants to stand her ground. ‘You would have figured things out.’
‘If we are going to be friends I need you to understand this. I’m smart but I could not figure things out. Could not. The worse things got, the more I called them destiny. By the end it was nothing to do with Michael. It was me. I wanted to believe that I could change how things ended by loving him hard enough. By loving him long enough. I wanted to finally keep a man, not have one leave like my fathers did, like they all do. To have some control over what a man does to me or perhaps what I mean is to want what a man does to me because in my experience they do it anyway.’ The words start to catch in my throat, I’m starting to sob, I’m starting to repeat myself. ‘I wanted to believe that love could change things.’
Ruby is touching me nervously, lightly, with the tips of her fingers. Her hand flits across my face, my arm. She is not sure if I will let her be near me and I am not sure either.
‘It can change things,’ she says. ‘It does change things. Nothing you tell me, no argument we have, can change the fact I think you are,’ she flounders for the right word, is insistent when she uses it. ‘Lovely.’
‘I was impossible,’ I touch her hair, try to calm us both down. ‘You have no idea how tedious and unremarkable madness can be.’
Travelling is like a night of heavy rain. It can clear away the heat and dust of the day, of all that has gone before. It can teach you how to be light, to let go. I wanted to drive, I was going to keep moving until I understood how I might do things differently.
I flew to Seattle and spent two nights on a houseboat. It rained, like everyone told me it would. I slept, sat watching the grey sky and grey water, and drank coffee. Then I hired a car and drove down to Portland. Along the way I stopped at one of many roadhouses with pro-gun posters and Vote One: Ollie North, though it was years since Ollie had stood for office.
‘You travellin’ alone?’ the pump attendant asked. ‘Kinda dangerous for a woman to be on her own around here.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Well excuse me for saying so ma’am, but you don’t look fine.’
Great, I thought. Total strangers telling me I’m a wreck.
I stayed a night in Portland then drove through Salem and turned towards the coast. The roads were narrow and windy and small and I didn’t know anything about where I was. It was pretty.
I stopped at Coos Bay, a fishing and tourist town with a plaque on the wall of the local restaurant commemorating a visit by John Kennedy. I slept in a cabin with a high double bed and a thick doona. It was cold even though it was the beginning of summer. A television was suspended from the ceiling above the bed and I watched ‘Seinfeld’ repeats. If I lowered my eyes I could see through the window and look out to sea. Moored boats rose gently with the ebb and flow of the tide.
I stopped again in Oregon and picked from the beach stones and shells polished by the sea. I slipped my thumb over their surface and they were so smooth it was like rubbing nothing at all. I carried one of the stones, a white quartz, for the rest of the journey. It’s the stone I gave to you, Ruby.
By the time I hit northern California I was driving through fields of sunflowers. I lived on McDonald’s. I didn’t stop to eat; I used the drive-thrus and kept going, my foot hard on the accelerator, the countryside flickering past me. I played music at full blast.
In Monterey I visited the aquarium at Cannery Row and watched fish swoop and dive overhead like birds. I had always thought I’d come here with Michael, I had imagined driving this great American road with him. Instead my companion was a book, By Grand Central Station I Lay Down and Wept. During the days I drove, in the evening I read about a woman who became lovers with a married man in this part of California, a man who abandoned her after she had borne his four children. I lean affirmation across the café table, and surrender my fifty years away with an easy smile. When I reached Carmel and walked slowly through the Mission cloisters, I prayed to be saved from her fate.
I drove on to Big Sur, so I could visit Esalon. I could only get into the spa baths at one a.m. so I went to bed in my wooden cabin at nine o’clock then got up at twelve-thirty to drive the six miles to the baths. The night was quiet, bright. I was vague with sleep as I sat behind the wheel swinging with the curves, loose, as if I was on a motorbike. It was only when I was nearly there that I realised all the signs faced the other way and I was driving on the wrong side of the road. The thought filled me with pleasure, I embraced it, imagined a car bearing down on me, the impact as we collided. The slope into the sea was steep, I would roll ten, maybe twenty times. My seat belt would dig into me, it would cut me before it broke, releasing my body to be thrown through the windscreen onto the rocks. Gashed. Broken. There would be blood, my neck might break. It took an effort of will to stop these thoughts, to move to the other side of the road.
I walked through the paths of the beautifully manicured gardens, towards the lights on the cliffs where I knew the baths would be. At the cliffs I walked down a corridor until I came out in a kind of cave that was open to the Pacific Ocean. I got into the hot bath, heavy with minerals, and lay there. After half an hour or so I moved to the group spa, out in the open, on the edge of the cliff. The moon was low and bright, casting its cold light wide across the ocean. I lay there till nearly four o’clock, and watched the moon as it climbed the sky to sit directly over my head. Moon, moon, rise in the sky to be a reminder of comfort and the hour when I was brave.
The next day I drove on to Los Angeles but I kept having to stop by the road to watch sea otters playing in sea-forests of giant kelp. I was driven relentlessly down the coast of this country by desire, by longing. Finding instead of romance bigger things, better things. My head felt clear, my view larger. I escaped, for a moment, the endless self-absorption of a broken heart, the exhaustion of narcissism. I imagined that my aimless days of searching for love in the wrong places were drawing to a close. But it was more like this: in these days I understood for the first time that I could do things differently. It was more like the beginning of the end.
I arrived back in Sydney late at night and woke up, jetlagged, at six the next morning. When I walked down to the beach it was still dark except for the fishermen’s lights scattered at intervals along the beach. I waded into the water, hoping the winter cold would wake me up. I was not paying attention but after a minute or two I looked at the shore and realised that it was moving away from me faster than it should have been. I was half asleep, it was dark, and I was caught in a rip. It shocked me, how quickly it happened, and for a moment I felt a surge of panic.
I knew what I had to do, Tony had lectured me endlessly on the subject. ‘If you are ever caught in a rip, don’t swim against the current—you will just exhaust yourself. Swim to the side of it, at a 45-degree angle. The rip won’t be wide, they never are. And never overestimate your strength. Conserve it.’ I was tempted, for a minute or so, to float out gently, to go with it, but Tony’s words came to me and I began to swim at an angle to the shore.
When I got home I knocked on his bedroom door, not sure if he’d be there, but he was.
‘You’ve woken me up. Go away.’
‘It’s seven o’clock already. You always get up around now, and besides, you haven’t seen me for weeks. I need to thank you for the fact that you just saved my life, not fifteen minutes ago. I almost drowned.’
‘My pleasure,’ he said, as he rolled out of bed, looking bemused.
‘So?’ Tony asked, after I had told him about my road trip, ‘Now you are both in town at the same time do you plan to see him?’
‘I can’t promise I won’t. I’ve broken too many promises over the years. It seems safer not to make them.’
Tony nodded and sighed. ‘I might have saved you this morning, Cath, in a virtual fashion. But I can’t keep doing it. You’re going to have to learn to save yourself. You do know that?’
‘I know it,’ I said. ‘I just don’t seem to be very good at it.’
Michael called. ‘I came for a sabbatical. Can we have dinner? Please?’ he asked. ‘I need to talk to you.’ So I betrayed myself, and my friends, and time, by letting all I had learnt slip away from me yet again. By walking down the same old street and leaping in that hole.
‘Why did you fly out of Los Angeles the day I arrived?’
‘Did I? I never knew when you planned on being in town.’
‘I emailed,’ I said. ‘I left messages on your answering machine.’
‘I never got the messages.’
‘Right.’
‘Believe what you want. Why would I lie about a thing like that?’
We met that evening at the Icebergs. Michael went to hug me but I pushed him away. While we sat and had a beer he stroked my arm, touched my face. If you’d been watching us from a distance you’d have thought we were happily reunited lovers. Once we’d finished a drink, before we’d ordered our second, he said this to me: ‘I’m seeing someone else. I wanted to tell you in person. It isn’t because she means more to me than you; it is because she’s closer. It’s the distance. It was impossible for us to keep going.’ He talked to me slowly, with catch-up pauses, as if we were speaking on an international phone line.
‘It was not impossible,’ I said, after too long. ‘It was only impossible because you made it so.’
All the while Michael kept telling me I looked beautiful. Kept touching me on the back of my hand, my cheek. Put his arm around me as we walked down the street to a restaurant. I didn’t stop him, and I was frightened by my own passivity. After we ate—me all smiles and conversation—he walked me home and kissed me goodnight on the mouth in a way that suggested that nothing was over at all, not if I wanted to keep pushing, not if I was prepared to accept his terms. But instead I said goodnight and went up to the flat, alone.
When I got in the door I began to weep. I got into the bath still sobbing. My toes and fingers went white and wrinkly and I rocked back and forth in the water, moaning loudly. I didn’t sound human. I was trying to melt away into the water, down the plughole, to disappear.
Through the haze, I became afraid of what I might do to myself. Tony was out. I was running out of people who could be bothered with this thing. Finally, I rang Marion in Melbourne, but I couldn’t speak properly, made no sense.
‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, kept asking, but I just held onto the phone, not speaking.
‘I am nothing,’ I managed to say. ‘I am falling in on myself.’
Tony came home. He knocked on the bathroom door but I was unable to answer, just kept on crying. He came in and stood by the bathtub, stared at me rocking.
‘Get out, baby.’
‘I thought you were staying out tonight,’ I sobbed.
‘I was. Marion rang me. She was worried about what you might do to yourself. This has to stop. Catherine, how do we make you stop?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I sobbed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Stop apologising.’ He leant over me and pulled me up by the armpits as if I was a child. ‘Put this towel around you.’ He tucked me into bed and then made me a cup of tea. ‘There is lots of sugar in this,’ he said. Then, ‘Can I snuggle in with you?’
I hesitated. ‘For old time’s sake,’ he said after a few moments of silence.
‘Yes, please.’ He pulled off his trousers, crawled in and put his arms around me.
‘He is finally treating me like a girlfriend now it’s over,’ I told him. ‘It makes no sense.’
‘It makes sense,’ Tony said. ‘Sex and emotional connection together overwhelm him. He can only do one at a time. But frankly I don’t care if it makes sense or not. I just want him to stop contacting you. Or you to get the strength to stop seeing him. You have to learn to care enough about yourself. And your friends.’
Tony held me for a while.
‘I’ve broken my own rule,’ I said finally.
‘What rule is that?’
‘The five-year rule. If you are obsessing about a situation after five years it’s crossed the line.’
‘A five-month rule would be better,’ said Tony.
Still I kept seeing him, convincing myself that not sleeping with him counted as looking after myself. If my friends expressed concern, I simply lied to them about what I was up to.
I believed I was keeping it together. My life might sometimes look like it was unravelling but I was managing, I thought, to hold on to most of the threads. One night I drove us to dinner in Darlinghurst and turned the wrong way down a one-way street, then almost crashed the car when I parked it.
‘Good park,’ Michael laughed. ‘You seem a bit wired tonight.’ Then, when we were sitting in the restaurant, ‘You look incredible.’
I was wearing a tight shirt that showed lots of cleavage. I had hoped that might make me feel powerful, but it didn’t, it filled me with contempt. For both of us. I look back on things and I realise that I spent years not wanting to admit how shallow men can be. That people can declare true love, that churches can be formed, that fathers can leave their flesh and blood, for nothing more than this—a good pair of tits.
‘Are you trying to make things hard for me?’ Michael asked, ‘By dressing like that?’
I look at him and imagine smashing my glass of wine in his face, cutting him up, blinding him, making him bleed. I imagine slashing myself. I look at my arms and imagine the glass going in.
‘I miss you,’ Michael is saying. ‘I always miss you, that’s what I can’t bear about this.’
I am trapped in a bad play, the lines not convincing even to me, who wants desperately to be convinced. I drop Michael off where he is staying and he gets out of the car. He hesitates, stands by the car, drums his fingers on the roof, then leans back in and kisses me all over my face, on the mouth. I think he will leave it at that but he doesn’t, begins to bite my lips hard, my neck.
He drops to his knees on the pavement beside the car. He put his head in my lap. He is shaking.
‘You have to let go of me,’ he says.
‘You say, on your knees, kneeling before me.’
He doesn’t answer, but puts his hands on my breasts, buries his face into my lap, breathes me in.
‘I love your smell,’ he says, as he has said many times over the years. ‘We are right for each other.’
I get out of the car and push him against it, keep kissing him while he puts one hand under my shirt, undoes my jeans with the other. He turns us around so now I’m against the car, he puts two fingers in my cunt, one in my arse, my hand reaches back for his cock. He bites me so hard he draws blood. We strain and push against each other, like we are wrestling.
He pulls back, ‘It is important to me that you understand,’ he says, ‘why we can’t see each other any more.’ I don’t understand, refuse to even now and we end up clawing at each other, half-hitting, half-embracing.
I want you to kill me, I think. I want to die.
As if he hears me, Michael reaches out and puts both hands around my throat so tight it hurts. He shakes me slowly. He shakes me with force.
‘We. Must. Stop. This.’ He lets go of my throat, pushes me hard away from him. ‘We are driving each other crazy.’
He walks off, breathing sharply, retching air. I’m left alone in the driveway, and even though there is no one to see me now I slide down the side of the car to the ground. That is the role I have chosen. I am the victim. I will always be hurt and left. I don’t know any other way. I pull myself onto all fours and bang my forehead over and over onto the asphalt until finally, to my relief, I gash myself. I sit quietly there on the concrete and bleed tears down my face.
I look back at this and I can see it is not that exciting. A long night in the bath and waterlogged skin. Bored friends. A fantasy of drowning, of crashing my car, ripping my own flesh open with metal, slicing up Michael’s flesh with glass. I’d like to make it seem like there was more drama. But the point of my story is how quietly you can lose years. How gently they can slip away from you. You can spend so much time waiting for something to happen, and then…well, it simply doesn’t.
When I was reading all those classics at university, about heroines like Jane Eyre and Anna Karenina, I’d rail against the times that reduced women to such dependence, though for all my travelling, my working, my friendships, I too had spent years hanging around waiting for someone, some man, to fix everything up. From the outside it didn’t look like that, not that you’d know it from the story I’m telling. From the outside I had a good job, I was a success, I looked sexy. I was smart and funny. Etcetera. All the positive things we tell ourselves and each other to make it all seem okay. I call myself a feminist. But this is my secret, many women’s secret: there is a darkness in me that isn’t about how kinky I can get in bed, or the rage I often feel. In fact ‘darkness’ is the wrong word. ‘Beige’ is more the word to describe the passivity that eats away at me, away at us, but seems like nothing at all.
The books I read were full of warnings it took me too long to heed. I read them for romance but now I see they were written to save women like me from ourselves. Don’t wait, that is what I say to people now. Never wait. I am a born-again on this subject. What do the Nike ads say? Just Do It. I offer up my childlessness as my scar.