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For the first time, I present Being Sleek without some kind of support network. It’s the final seminar in my series and I’m on my own. Alister’s gone, and Fabienne has a previous commitment. Something about it feels significant. Making it. Arriving. But they’re words from a success manual. This is...something else.
The audience is small – the last enrolments from the Twitter troll attack – making it an intimate experience. Mind-mapping is now part of the program, and I leave the front of the room and join in. With art materials again at my fingertips, I drop into a creative trance.
When I stand back to see what I’ve done, the first thing I think of is the collage. Davina got me to make it not long before I descended to the beach at Bantry’s Bluff. But the mind-map in front of me is more cryptic. Instead of using images cut from magazines, I’ve created them myself. The most striking feature is the slash of white between solid areas of black, twisting down the page and cutting it almost in two. It’s nearly identical to the one I painted with Fabienne. On either side of it, primitive scribbles – like cave art – collide and overlap like my blind drawings, representing the collection from Nigel’s floor. A bowl and a spoon, seven stars, a four-legged creature and a lump-like shape that must be the donkey and the rock. Haphazard letters are scrawled in red and, with a start, I see a grouping that spells lay zard. The lizard might elude me, but it’s firmly planted in my mind. The whole combination has a disturbing quality – and an embarrassing sense of exposure – but I’ve got nothing to lose by sharing it with the group.
“Those things you’ve drawn,” one guy says, “it’s hard to tell what they are.”
“A bunch of things that have been turning up in my life,” I explain. “Each one in an unexpected – and significant – way.”
“Something to do with your future direction?” a woman asks.
“The past and the future are linked,” the first guy says. “Who you are now is a direct result of your past experience. You might cut your ties, but their influence hangs around. Like a noose.”
Everyone laughs, but I think of Andrew.
“No seals,” another woman says. “I thought you’d draw seals, but there’s only that horse.” She means the donkey. “And that lizard.”
What? “Where’s the lizard?”
She leaves her seat and points to the slash of white. “This looks like a lizard from where I’m sitting.”
Others agree.
I prop it up on the whiteboard and stand further back. The way it twists, the slash could be a snake, but blobs of paint look like legs.
“You’ve used colours for everything else,” another guy says. “All that red for the letters. But the lizard shape is white against black. Like a candle flame.”
A flame in the dark. If the lizard is the candle lighting my dream...is that a cryptic meaning for ‘whisper’? Not everything that whispers, breathes.
When they start discussing the red graffiti, I’m too disturbed and move them on to sharing their own mind-maps. But mine inspires comments throughout the day. Then we’re wrapping up and discussing what we’ve learned from seals.
“The shamans up where I come from,” says a guy called René in a Canadian accent, “used to take advice from orcas.” He’s got everyone’s attention. “A shaman would go down to the shore and wait for an orca to come close, so he could channel its wisdom and take it back to the tribe. Is that how you got the activities for this workshop...by channelling seals?”
My first response is to laugh, but the faces around me are taking him seriously. To give myself thinking time, I bat the question back. “Why do you think Being Sleek is more than a marketing gimmick?”
“It’s a great gimmick, don’t get me wrong. It’s why I’m here. When I heard about the seal connection I remembered those damn orcas and thought I’d fly over, see what the fuss was about. But it’s more than a gimmick. It’s something else, this workshop.”
Others are nodding.
“I’ll be truthful, René. I don’t know where the activities came from. Every time I run the seminar, the activities...create themselves.”
“But you’ve been talking to seals, right?”
“Not that I know of.”
Bloody hell. Is there any chance I was doing the shaman thing? Evading discovery and talking to seals? Talking about what?
“How did they do it, the shamans?” I’m keeping the question lighter than I feel. “Did they swim with the orcas? Did they go into some kind of...altered state?” For days at a time?
He shrugs. “No-one knows how they did it. It stayed with them – their secret. But the messages from the orcas brought harmony to the tribe, so I’ve heard.”
The seminar is over. People thank me on their way out. René hangs back, and although I’m grateful for his contribution – it lent extra depth to people’s perception of their experience – I’m hoping he doesn’t want to carry on. But he’s in a hurry.
He shakes my hand and leans in to murmur, “You’re a whisperer and you don’t know it.” Then he’s gone.
I want to dismiss it all, but it gets me hovering over Google. Not ‘shaman’ or ‘orca’ – they’re someone else’s reality. In the end I type in ‘seal whisperer’ and laugh at what comes up. It’s the scuba-diving blog from Hawaii, the one that described frolicking with the monk seal in the Bluff Cave. The scuba-divers think of themselves as seal whisperers. It’s a wonderful image, swimming with the seals and learning their secrets. I envy their freedom. But I can’t see how it solves my memory problem.
***
Gaston leaves me a voice message: “Miguel is here.” After the days of silence its implications bring a sudden chill.
Then Genevieve rings. We haven’t spoken since I left her with Gaston and she brings me up to date.
“I can’t believe how happy I am. You’d think I’d be angry or sad or bitter or something, but those old feelings vanished as soon as Tony looked at me and I saw that he still loves me. His body’s a train wreck, but in spite of the disease and what it means, I’m...happy. Explain that. It’s a cliché, but love is enough. You helped bring us together, Selkie. Sorry I haven’t called till now.”
“I guessed you two were...catching up.” It’s all I’m going to say about love. “That’s much more important than calling me. And I’ve been busy. So what’s this party about? I hear Miguel’s arrived.”
“And half Tony’s old crew. They’ve descended on some rooms over a bar here in Chinon. Getting their land legs and warming themselves up for the party.”
Gaston mentioned the party before Genevieve walked in on him, so it’s not a celebration of their reunion.
“What’s the occasion?” I ask. “Is it Gaston’s birthday?”
“No. He’s come out of hiding, and his wife and friends are here. It’s just a celebration of...living.”
After blogging forever about the opposite. I let it go and ask how I can help.
“We need music. The woman you’re staying with, she might know someone. I saw her talking to some musicians...at the guinguette.”
The night Genevieve was following me, and I was spinning around the dance floor with Alister, then running from his kiss. He hasn’t been in touch since he left to chase a phantom called Deshi.
Genevieve gives me the details. They’re hiring a bus and taking the partygoers to the beach at St Malo. It’s on the coast beyond Rennes, a spectacular walled town with pirate history. Probably the perfect location for Miguel and his crew.
“Tony wants to smell the sea,” she says.
I promise to ask Fabienne. Perhaps she knows a band that would be prepared to travel – and subject their instruments to the salt air.
She’s in her studio, wrapping the Seven Sisters for their next journey across the sky – to Honolulu. I can’t gaze at them any more. They’re already hidden under layers of bubble wrap.
“I put them inside this box,” she’s saying, “then I put this box inside a bigger box. It makes the room to...dance.”
She winks at me and I feel a surge of affection for her and her sculpture. How amazing it is that we’ve met. She senses it too, because we give each other a spontaneous hug, then brush away a tear or two.
She says she’ll speak to her musician friend about playing at Gaston’s party.
***
Keith and I Skype one last time before I leave Tours for St Malo. While we try to talk, Daisy sits up on her usual chair and barks at the screen.
“She’s trying to tell you where we went today,” Keith says. “All the way to North Steyne. I waited by the rail while Daisy raced across the sand to the cliff. And before you ask, I could hear her barks fading at speed.”
“Why did you go back there?”
“Daisy was insistent. She’s been jumpy for days, running away from my chair and coming back. I knew she wanted to get something. From the cliff.”
“What?”
“She’ll show you.”
Daisy has disappeared from view, but I can hear her happy growls as she returns. She comes right up to the screen to show me what she found. Dangling from her jaw is a lizard. Large and brown with a broad blunt face. A blue-tongue lizard. An icon of Sydney’s fauna, just like the ones I brought home as a child to torment Stella.
“It’s alive,” Keith is saying. “Daisy carried it gently in her mouth all the way across the sand and put it in my lap.” He laughs. “I nearly passed out when I put my hand on it.”
I’m trying not to do the same.
“A young guy came back with her. He was walking on the rock shelf and saw Daisy sticking her head through a long vertical crack in the cliff and coming out with the lizard. He was fascinated to know where she was going with it.”
The long vertical crack where we put the Hawaiian rock. Daisy must have seen the lizard hiding inside the opening. But that was weeks ago. Why did she want to get it now?
“It’s now living in our garden, with Daisy keeping an eye on it.”
I’m feeling queasy. Daisy is reading my clues. She knew where to put the rock. She knew where to find the lizard. I thought meeting Keith was significant, but maybe it’s been Daisy all along. Has the lizard been whispering to her? How can I find out what the hell it said?
“Does Daisy talk to you?” I ask Keith, feeling sure he won’t find the question bizarre.
“Not in words.”
“But you know what she’s thinking?”
“A lot of the time. We share thoughts with each other. Telepathically.”
So Daisy’s a telepath. She’s been reading my thoughts about the lizard. Davina says I’m a telepath. We should be able to ‘talk’.
“Could I try?” I ask.
“Sure. Be my guest.”
Keith doesn’t pry into my reasons, and he obviously trusts that I’m not after the password to his bank account. As he moves his chair back, Daisy’s shiny black face fills the screen, the lizard in her jaws like an offering. She stands very still and looks straight at me. I do the same, pushing all thoughts from my mind. If I’m sceptical, it’s not going to happen.
Nothing does happen.
I gaze into Daisy’s eyes for what seems like an age before I notice how rigid I am. Rigid with expectation. I start to curse that I’m not fit to be a telepath’s armpit, when a thought cracks me in two. Without words to shape it, I know it and I don’t know it all at the same time. It’s something about the dark, something about the light, something about dying, loving, listening, turning, something about...being. Sleek.
The name of my seminar. It’s as if the words have been translated through several languages, like Chinese whispers, and finally been translated back with a whole new meaning. I’m blinking fast, but Daisy’s eyes have closed. Her mind is quiet.
That’s when I see that the lizard has opened its eyes. It’s looking at me with a reptilian stare that’s holding mine without blinking. The thought didn’t come from Daisy. Did it come from the lizard?
After Keith signs off without asking what happened, I’m exhausted. Did the telepathy really happen? And if the lizard’s message is the final clue from the lipstick words, does it mean there’s more for me to discover? From Being Sleek?
My seminar has accompanied me across the world. It’s anchored me while it’s taught me about letting go. It’s connected me on a creative level with Fabienne, and it’s been the means for me to turn the tables on Andrew. Is there something else?