I WAKE AT five fifteen and stay in bed until six, while the room warms up. It is much colder this morning, drizzling outside. I feel surprisingly light compared to the past few days, as if I have regained a great deal of energy. As if finally emerging from a deeply necessary period of sedation.
The mid-morning service is the same, ish. But at a certain point, one of the nuns – I like the look of her, tall and narrow with a big rosy nose and steely grey hair visible at the edges of her veil – steps across the church and asks me to move to the other side of the crucifix. I stand there with Cynthia from Melbourne and then the others – Diane and Lavinia, plus another two men and a woman I’ve not seen before – and the nuns gather into a large, closed circle. (No sign of Richard Gittens today. If it is even him. I wonder whether, if I told him my name, any recognition at all would cross his face?)
I suddenly realise, too late to return to my seat, that I’m about to take part in communion. When the old nun says, ‘The body of Christ,’ and puts the wafer into my hand I have forgotten what to say, but it swims up from distant childhood: ‘Amen.’ The wafer is chalky white, the size of a twenty-cent piece, with an indented cross pressed into it. When I put it in my mouth it dissolves immediately. Utterly tasteless, like paper. It seems thinner or finer than the ones from childhood, which I recall as hard, slightly wheaty-tasting discs sticking to the roof of your mouth. I feel silly taking it now, of course. I can’t recall the last time I took communion. My mother’s funeral? I’m not sure I would even have done it then; I’d abandoned all this long before that.
Afterwards comes the sign of peace. The nuns move towards us with their hands outstretched – and something catches in me. I allow myself to be greeted in turn by three or four of them; a very young woman with a clear, open face, wearing a synthetic black puffy vest over her habit (I feel sure she is the novice Bonaventure was talking about), and a few of the others. I find it hard to stop tears pricking my eyes, which alarms me. It is to do with being greeted warmly by a stranger, offered peace for no reason, without question. They have kind faces; warmth radiates from them. I hold their soft, dry hands.
After this it’s back to our seats for more praying and singing, more biblical mumbo jumbo. I drift off and think about my feet being cold, and my legs. Listen to the woman behind me – Lavinia? – singing very badly off-key.
Nothing now till Vespers at five. It’s still drizzling, and grows even colder as I walk back to my cabin. I crank up the heating.
~
When I was about six or seven my mother used to visit a blind woman called Denise, who lived in a caravan with a series of annexes on a property outside town. She had a small feeble child, frighteningly pale-skinned, and a huge bearded husband. When my mother arrived with me in tow, the husband gruffly and immediately left the caravan to go across the yard into one of his sheds, or climbed into his truck and drove away. The yard was filled with old cars and rusted machinery, and steel drums, inert, on the dirt.
I don’t know how my mother befriended Denise, who had thick black hair cut in a blunt style and spoke out into the room in a dry, even voice. I felt it was wrong for me to be there in her home, watching the sickly baby crawling about. I didn’t like looking at Denise, and I never spoke, but she and my mother would talk easily together for what felt like hours. Sometimes Denise would get up and make a cup of tea, or peel some carrots for her family’s dinner, speaking upwards into the air before her, her eyelids flickering softly. I didn’t like the sense that I was spying on Denise, but that was how I felt.
There seemed something sinister about the little caravan parked in the dirt with the rocks and rusted things strewn about it, and it was sad to me that Denise could not see the bleakness of her home. At the same time, I knew she was alert to my mute presence, and I think now my child self feared that in her blindness she discerned things about me that I, and even my mother, did not know.
Denise never repaid my mother’s visits. There was, in her home, an air of captivity. When her husband returned to the caravan, we would leave.
Once I heard someone – a neighbour – tell my mother it was good of her to visit Denise. It had never occurred to me that my mother was there to look after Denise, to ‘mind’ her, as people said about children. I just thought they were friends.
When I was older, a boyfriend of mine said with a kind of a sneer, ‘What was your mother, some kind of missionary?’
No, I said. She was just kind.
It’s possible, of course, that I am wrong about this. It’s possible Denise and her husband didn’t welcome my mother’s arrival at all; perhaps they endured her visits with me – the mute, anxious child – out of politeness or some other pragmatic necessity. But still, it has surprised me, over the years, to discover how many people find the idea of habitual kindness to be somehow suspect: a mask or a lie. My mother did have an uncommon sort of simplicity, a light oddity, about her. But I still believe the answer I gave my boyfriend was the truth.
~
Just now I went down alone to the empty church and sat for a time.
Back in my room, it’s odd to find myself longing for Vespers. I suppose it might be like this in prison. You look forward to the routines because they show that time has passed. And now the tranquillised feeling has lifted I’m too alert, reading for a while but not falling asleep. I keep checking my emails, longing for distraction, but still can’t bring myself to answer any.
~
I go to Vespers expecting more of the same, and by now am at ease sitting at the front of the guest pews. I’m surprised to see several of the nuns already in situ, ten minutes before start time, and then the organist starts playing quite loudly and comparatively jauntily. It’s as if everybody has been suddenly energised by some unseen force. Busy things take place: scurrying about with gold staffs and a crucifix on a stick; lighting of incense and lots of candles, putting them in position in their holders, taking them out and fitting them back in. Then suddenly, in place of the usual soundless and modest entry in pairs and threes, there is a procession: one nun leading with the crucifix on the pole, followed by two more, their tall white candles held before them, then the young novice carrying incense, strong clouds of it billowing, and then the rest of the women entering two by two. It is stark and mighty and beautiful to see them all lined up, with the incense rising, the candles and the music. Each pair comes to the centre, bows in unison, and then each woman bows to her partner, separates and moves to her pew – a mirror image of the other day’s departure.
The singing is unearthly this evening.
At one point the two soloists who have been singing each day – Sister Bonaventure, who has a strong, clear voice, and the young novice – move to the back of the church to stand in front of the organ and sing a two-part harmony. The novice walks like a bashful teenage boy. I have watched her each time in church; she stands with her feet apart, firmly planted, shoulders a bit hunched, hands in her puffy vest pockets or, if she’s not wearing it, tucked into the front of her tunic. Her voice – delicate, reaching, yearning – is the opposite of her physical bearing. The two of them muck it up here and there; I can tell from the way they smile at each other as they sing. But the sound soars.
Sister Simone is there, sprinkling holy water over us guests at the start, and again at the end. We are directed to gather in the centre of the church and give praise to a Madonna-and-child image – the nuns sing in Latin, and we outsiders awkwardly nod along. Then we line up in pairs for the final sprinkling. I am next to the old nun in the electric wheelchair. She smiles at me with what feels like her whole self, and I can only think of it as … love.
Afterwards I walk back to the cabin and lie on the floor again for a long time.
~
Bedrock was the word my doctor had used.
Driving across the surface of the high stony plains on my way here, I found the landscape’s desolation beautiful. My car had been seized now and then by the wind, and I had to grip the steering wheel to correct its movement along the empty road. The sweeping, broad structure of this land gently shifts from one plane into another, each sloping yet almost flat, like a shoulder blade. Although these plains bristle with a fine skin of pale grasses, they are almost as bare as bedrock, and I wonder if this is why I never came back, until now.
~
I’ve started packing. I’ll load the car first thing in the morning, then take a quick walk to try to loosen my spine before the long drive home. With a few stops I should be back by around five. Maybe grab dinner at the sushi place.