DURING MY RUN this morning I heard footsteps behind me on the gravel, and soon Helen Parry was by my side, keeping pace. Not difficult to do: I’m a slow runner, though I like to remember the technique I was once told, the arms swinging loosely from the shoulders, each hand drawing back as if to take something from a side pocket. Occasionally when I run, I feel it as a form of flight. But not often. And not today with Helen Parry alongside me, when I felt sweatier and breathed more heavily than usual.

She greeted me with a nod, and ran alongside me. She wore a pair of loose old running shorts, and a thick sports bra under a greying Greenpeace t-shirt. The t-shirt neck was stretched, fell to one side so you could see the racerback bra strap. Old black Nikes, white ankle socks also turning grey with age. A navy blue baseball cap, printed with some school crest or other.

We ran together like that, our strides matching, for a short distance. I began to slow my pace as I neared the gate, the point at which I always turn around and run back. Helen exhaled a half-smile and nod in my direction but did not slow down as I did. She kept going, taking the cattle grid in a single long stride – risky; the bars are widely spaced and slippery – and then went through the gate. She turned right, taking the side road in the direction of the Gittenses’ place. I stood catching my breath at the gate, watching her run down the empty road in her ungainly style. A little hunched, shoulders too high, but not breaking her stride. I watched until she went over the small rise and I couldn’t see her anymore.

Afterwards, as I peeled off my t-shirt and socks in my room, my sweat smelled strong to me and I wondered if Helen Parry had noticed it. Probably she had, though she didn’t show any sign of this.

Much later, on my way back from the Middle Hour, I passed her in the yard as she returned. I asked her how her run was, and she said it had been fine. She didn’t look at me as she spoke, finding something in the trees to focus on. She had run down to the Gittens place, and Richard Gittens’s wife had driven past her on the road and invited her to their house for a cold drink or a cup of tea, and she had accepted. I felt something disquieting roll through me when she said this. I don’t know why. She said that Annette was an interesting woman, but ‘quite uptight’. She wiped her arm across her forehead and as she did this the lift of her arm showed the full curve of her breast beneath her t-shirt. After the cup of tea she had run back. I wanted to know if Richard Gittens had been there but something stopped me from asking. Then Helen asked if anyone from town had phoned for her and I said I didn’t think so, and she smoothed a hand over her throat and pulled her t-shirt away from her chest. She said she needed a cool shower and turned towards her cabin.

Later I remembered Virginia Woolf saying of Katherine Mansfield – the only writer of whom Woolf was ever jealous, she said – that when Mansfield came to visit her ‘she stank like a civet cat’.

~

For a brief period in the 1970s, some of the Catholics in our town were swept up in a new craze for organising worship sessions in their own homes, in the hope that ecstatic spiritual events would unfold. My mother changed the subject at any mention of these people – ‘the Charismatics’ – whose claims included speaking in tongues and religious intoxication to the point of fainting, bodily overcome by the Holy Spirit itself.

In their disapproval my parents found themselves strange bedfellows with the local priest, who quietly discouraged Charismatic theatrics and urged his parishioners to stick to mass for more traditional, and more orderly, forms of prayer. Looking back, I think my parents’ disdain had as much to do with what they perceived as American chicanery as their general scepticism about physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit. I understood these meetings to be run by people who thought themselves somehow special or gifted, or who sought out drama (a great crime).

I think now my mother must also have sensed a kind of sexual undertone to descriptions of these gatherings – there was a furtiveness, a breathlessness and urgency in the reports of the wild abandon of self, the rumoured loss of all control. Perhaps she was thinking of one of the teachers at my school and her husband, who were rumoured to spend their weekends ‘wife-swapping’ with the next-door neighbours.

One of the homes at which the Charismatic meetings were held belonged to my friend Kelly and her parents. Although I often attended Sunday mass with this family, I was forbidden from attending these meetings. Nevertheless, in the late afternoon of one autumn weekend, Kelly and I helped her mother set out little cut-glass bowls of peanuts and French onion dip with Jatz crackers for a gathering that evening. Mrs Fuller spoke of ‘signs and wonders’ and ‘Charismatic gifts’, the extraordinary powers that could descend on a person who, after a period of intense prayer, was filled with the Holy Spirit.

All of this was riveting to me.

People began arriving at the Fullers’ door, alone or in couples, one or two carrying a bottle of wine. One woman, who arrived early, was more sophisticated than most women in our town. Her bold jewellery and hair, her declarative way of speaking, manifested the authority bestowed by being from somewhere (almost anywhere) else. Her name was Jackie, and she was from Canberra. She had driven here to lead the meeting with her husband, Rob, a tall, fit-looking man who smiled generously and told everyone several times that he was from Minnesota, which drew exclamations.

Mrs Fuller’s friends were another middle-aged couple and their sixteen-year-old daughter, inscrutable with harsh make-up and silence, and three droopy-looking young men who were generally seen hanging around the church doing small tasks for the priest: handing out hymn booklets, mowing the lawns. When I grew up it seemed clear to me that the church, and gentle Father Fitzroy in particular, must have offered the only place where a meek young gay man might feel protected, even welcomed. There was also the town’s Little Theatre, where all kinds of artistic cavorting was supposed to go on, but these boys were far too shy for that.

After a time, the front door was closed, Kelly’s mother lit candles all around the living room, and the overhead lights were turned off. Glasses and coffee cups were set down as Rob pressed play on a little cassette player. Jackie and Rob produced two tambourines, swaying along with a jangly pop hymn, eyes closed, crying out one melodious line over and over: Come, Holy Spirit. On television I had seen Hari Krishnas dancing and singing in the streets – in cities, nowhere near our town – and those images of blissed-out, shaven-headed believers came back to me as Mrs Fuller now raised her arms, her eyes tightly closed, and soon everyone was swaying and singing along in their hesitant, small-town voices in the candlelit dark.

When the hymn was finished, ending with a long shimmer of tambourines, Jackie began instructing us in a strong, clear voice, eyes still closed, hands high in the air. We were to do three things, she said. First, we were to pray with expectant faith. This meant to fully believe that our prayer would bring definite results; that God would listen and answer this prayer without question. Second, we must keep singing ‘Come, Holy Spirit’. We must not stop, for this was calling forth the Charisms. And third, if we happened to hear unfamiliar words in our heads, this was the Gift of Tongues, a holy language coming directly from God, and we must speak the words aloud.

The singing began again, and I opened my eyes a fraction to look around at the faces of Mrs Fuller, Mr Fuller and their friends – smiling, singing, swaying along. Come, Holy Spirit. Mr Fuller’s expression was of mild forbearance. Once Rob and Jackie took up the hymn again in their full, carrying voices, Mr Fuller opened his eyes and silently darted about the room between the swaying worshippers, collecting up coffee cups and ashtrays, then slipping out to the kitchen. The visiting teenage daughter swayed stiffly but did not sing, while her parents obediently shifted their weight from one foot to the other and back, valiantly repeating the words in their thin voices. But it was the young men who were truly affected. In the darkness, with this chaste encouragement, they began to unfurl. Their bodies moved gracefully, a natural limberness descending into their hips and their chests. Their hands reached high in the air, delicate underwater fronds, and they sang softly, full of yearning.

Then a quiet gasp was heard and I saw that Mrs Fuller had begun to tremble, breathing heavily. Jackie moved to her and nodded, smiling widely, then closed her eyes again, singing on and on. Everyone else stepped back a little from Mrs Fuller and then we all stopped singing because she had thrown back her head and opened her mouth to emit a long string of strange noises, a made-up African-sounding language, her ‘accent’ changing every few phrases. Mrs Fuller’s eyes were tightly shut as she swayed and called, in the grip of something animal, some urgent force. In the candlelight her throat glowed with a fine perspiration and her voice took on an anguished tone.

Jackie began calling out over Mrs Fuller’s voice, translating her speech into holy praise and pleas. And now Mrs Fuller was beginning to cry and wail in her new language (I noticed she began to repeat some of the first ‘words’), and opened her eyes briefly before letting herself fall into Rob’s waiting arms. With surprising smoothness he steered her body to the sofa, draping her across it. It was an agile operation that made me think they had done this before. Mrs Fuller lay in an ecstatic swoon, arms above her head, chest heaving, as the others sang on triumphantly. Mr Fuller had come out of the kitchen and stood watching all of this from the doorway.

Afterwards, when everyone had gone home and Kelly and I lay in her room in the dark, I wondered. I found it impossible to believe Mrs Fuller had been filled with the Holy Spirit, but still I felt a kind of reverence for what had gone on. The young men and their yearning, the thrusting of the self into some new vulnerability, the willingness to be opened up – all of this seemed beautiful to me.

At home the next day I told my mother we had eaten tuna mornay for dinner and watched This is Your Life on television. I believe she knew I wasn’t telling the truth, but she asked no more about it.

~

I dream: Helen Parry dancing, her head on fire. The flame is long and thick, covering her whole head from the neck up. She shrieks and tosses her head in circles, the flame swirling out like hair. The shriek isn’t pain or fear but exhilaration. A sound of power, just on the edge of terror. Sweat pours off her along with the flame. There is something potent and ceremonial in her dance, in the fire and the sweat. It is a kind of holy rite.