The stars below me twinkle like jewels draped on a purple carpet. The moon clears a path, illuminating Atlantic Avenue through the blue-black ocean. Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.
Can we wish on the same bright star as Rahla? The second star on the right, the one that goes straight on till morning. It’s a great big star; I’m sure she can also see it wherever she may be. If I wish on it, and she wishes on it, then surely our dream will come true?
I’ve been wishing on that bright star since God was a boy, just wishing and dancing. So many lives have been offered to me but I’ve kept on, holding out steadfast for this one. If I stand really still, with my hand on my little belly, I can just about count the flaps of the buttercup-coloured wings of the butterfly that lives inside my tummy.
It’s not that I mind being here. This is the heavenly pit stop. We come here between lives to refuel, to take stock and reflect on our most recently passed lives and meditate on the ones to come.
Some people just keep gravitating towards one another and finding one another life after life after life (like me and the boys), but the only thing that’s really for keeps is the soul. Each time we’re born we have so many new things to learn, so many lessons to complete, it’s only natural we’re inclined to keep the same people around us.
Often there’s unfinished business with specific people and it’s not always a pretty affair, but if you don’t work through the issues, you have to carry them around with you from one lifetime to the next. It weighs you down, making the soul heavier and heavier, like poor Count Dracula’s. ‘Try not to die before you’ve finished all your business this time round’: that’s the best advice I ever got.
Perhaps the best you can hope to do is to devote yourself to people with whom you have good contracts and try to avoid the ones with whom you’ve got bad business. The way to judge who’s who in your karmic creations is to ask yourself, ‘Does this person bring out the me in me that I love?’
If you pay attention and listen to the fast or faltering beat of your heart, it’s generally a very clear yes or no. Not a lot of grey in that area. The memories of other people who’ve crossed your path are imprinted in your soul – not written down, of course; more like fine, scarcely visible fingerprint drawings.
Here we carry our souls around with us all the time. Mine is in a silk mermaid’s pouch, attached to my wrist with a daisy chain.
The last thing you do before you go to sojourn inside your mommy’s tummy is to pop your soul into your mouth like a giant vitamin pill. After you’ve swallowed it, it remains inside you throughout your lifetime. So you’d better make pretty darn sure you’ve got a good soul, ’cos it’s the only thing you have forever and ever. If it’s a little off-colour, you need to try hard to clean it up, otherwise it gets smelly and festers inside like the alien living inside Sigourney Weaver in Alien. Of course, if you’ve got a good soul, it’s just like swallowing a bunch of rose petals.
The more lives you live, the lighter your soul becomes. That’s why mine is suspended by a mere daisy chain. Maybe this time I’m not making the easiest choices; maybe I’m picking up some weird genes and I’m going to end up stark raving mad, but who gives a hoot? I’m going to have a grand old time and I’m going to be a magical conduit of love.
We don’t go into lives ignorantly. We don’t happen upon people and just pop out of their unsuspecting tummies. Sometimes it takes years and years of God’s planning and our deliberating. Our options are explained to us and we make informed decisions. There’s nothing haphazard about the relationships we have in this world. We can’t predict the precise details of our lives, but we do have an idea of the risks we’re taking and the dreams we may have.
I’ve grown bored of listening to all the warnings about the dangers of bipolar disorder. They say 90 per cent of people who suffer from the sickness have a close relative who suffers from some mood disorder or other and having one bipolar parent gives a child a 10 to 30 per cent chance of becoming bipolar herself. And they don’t stop trying to frighten me with stories about bipolar mothers.
Fine, I’m choosing really special godparents in case I need extra love and attention if Rahla goes off the rails. I’ve got grown-ups ready to make extra school lunches and give lifts to and from extramural activities. People to explain to me why my mother is hiding under her dressing table for no apparent reason. And lest I forget, one in every five people with bipolar disorder will commit suicide, and of course the rate of alcoholism and drug abuse is three times higher than it is with other people. Nevertheless, all my bags are packed and I’m ready to go, just like the melodic refrain from a seventies song. I keep telling all the busy-body angels, even God, that I know exactly what I’m doing, and I’m going to have the life of my life! With or without the genetic disorder that has lived quite happily in the bodies and souls of my new family for generation upon crazy generation.
If you catch a crying germ as a little girl, you can’t stop crying and you have to hope and pray that you don’t cry all the water and even the blood out of your body, leaving you a dehydrated old desert wasteland with not a mirage in sight. The doctor sometimes punctures you with needles to stop the crying, otherwise he gives you a ‘special penicillin treatment’ for the aching heart. If, on the other hand, you get ‘wings’, you just keep on wanting to fly and fly, higher and higher. Close to the sun you soar, and you just hope that your wings don’t melt, and your feet don’t stumble while walking on the moon. But sometimes the doctor can also give you ‘special penicillin stuff’ to help you land back on earth.
Of course, the boys still pretend they think I’m making a crazy choice, but I tell them that an animated soul in a dull life is a dangerous thing. It’s a wild card, always saying inappropriate things at inappropriate times. A lively soul can become so bored that it starts doing re-ee-ee-ally nutty things. I just don’t imagine that a life in Atlanta, with or without the boys, can contain or accommodate nuttiness, so I’ll be off to the tip of Africa.
They keep on reminding me about this crazy artist we once knew in France. At the time we were prostitutes, leading a frightful existence. One day the artist came and tried to pay me for services rendered by offering me his ear. He just took a shaving knife and lopped the ear off his head. The boys freaked out, but I rather liked the artist and the funny, warped way he had of seeing life. Simple scenes that you or I might take for granted he painted in magical, swirling colours. He seemed to see the world through the eyes of his sickness, and it made mundane things exciting and wondrous. After his death he became quite famous.
One day, he’d be the busiest, happiest man in the world, frenetically painting away as if he knew his time was running out. Next day he’d be an inert lump of misery unable to make himself a cup of tea. We never knew what was wrong with him, but we did try to look after him.
Nowadays people are cleverer than they were then. It’s not like past centuries, less humane and caring, when people with bipolar disorder generally died of exhaustion and starvation during bouts of mania or else got locked away in unsympathetic institutions to sit out the depression all alone. That won’t happen to me. I’m going to live in a lovely home looking onto a lemon tree in the little garden.
But que sera, sera, whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see … as Doris Day once sang. I’ll take the downs with the ups and long live the in-betweens. It’s going to be just dandy, and if those ragamuffins could come along, it would be even better. I’ll begin my life sheltered from the storms in a green bay of the Cape under a flat-topped mountain with a floating cloud that comes and goes.
It’s drawing nearer now. Each day it seems more certain. The doubts that plagued me two months ago have been gobbled up and swallowed by my exuberant enthusiasm. I see Rahla’s face more vividly than those around me up here. I can hear my father’s thoughts, travelling faster than the speed of light through his active mind. I look at them both and wonder: What will I inherit from whom?
Will I inherit his eyes and her laugh? Or maybe my grandmother’s laugh? Please, please God, at the risk of sounding picky, could I dance like her and not like him? I’d really appreciate just a bit of his brain; he’s got such a dashing brain. I’ll be able to cut through all the foolishness of life. Then there are the aunts, uncles and grandparents. Won’t it be a thrill if I inherit my maternal grandmother’s poise and my paternal grandmother’s figure?
Now I sit up at night eating hot chocolate sauce on rye bread and weighing up all the options. I study the various genetic providers, and naturally I’m inclined to mix in only the more appealing ingredients. My mother’s lousy vision I’ve left out of the equation. As for the madness, well, kindness transcends that. I’ve been alive for an awful number of lifetimes and I can tell you that if the kindness is strong enough, it counters the Crazies most days. The Crazies are fierce animals, but kindness helps you to understand the wild beasts.
Today I looked at my boys while we were playing in the crystal rainbow forest and I could hardly see them. They were just a silhouette of rainbows, almost a smudge. I didn’t tell them, but I had a feeling my time here is growing shorter and shorter. I won’t be playing in the rainbow forest for much longer. Even if the boys are coming with me, I’ll start losing their images as we all metamorphose into human children.
Dear me, they’re probably not expecting the boys in Cape Town, whereas in Atlanta they’ve been praying for them. Whatever happens, somewhere along the way we’ll meet again – don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.
Preparing to leave is rather like packing a satchel for the first day of school – so much anticipation and excitement. If I forget anything, my fruit juice or my pencil sharpener, why, it seems like I’ll just die. That first day of school, those six hours, seem to present themselves to a child’s delirious brain as the final six hours of life. The opportunity to come home and pack again will never again present itself. This is my only God-given opportunity to get it right.
That’s how I feel now, galloping about, disrupting the tranquillity and peace of the place. Trying to capture ideas and faces, trying to catch important details and memories in a butterfly net so that I can pop them in my pouch and they’ll be available as déjà vu experiences throughout my long, funny life. Not that I’ve got such a lot of space in my little Anya Hindmarch evening bag.
It’s going to be soon. I can feel it in the fragrance of the moon, which is somehow earthier. It’s as if the moon is carrying with it the smells of earth that are quite different from the smells up here. I can smell jasmine, which is the smell of fertility, so definitely it’s going to be soon.
Falling and falling, I’m drawn to this new life with a sense of delightful abandon, like sunflowers are drawn to the sun and swallows are drawn to the warm South. After years of adult analysing, it seems we happen upon a path and the most sensible thing to do is just to meander along it. Enjoy the smell of the flowers and take special note of the cloud formations. Wherever the destination is, it’s like love preordained by higher beings who must be wiser than even we consider ourselves.
In a funny way, in leaving things to chance, or fate, as it were, the freedom of that free fall gives a girl a sense of security. I’ve done whatever I can; now, more than anything else in the world, I want to be Tallulah Xenopoulos, beloved daughter of Jason and Rahla. It seems like just about everyone on earth is madly excited with longing for me – all I have to do is turn up.