MY HAIR IS done, my clothes are neat, and when my heart slows down a bit I’ll put on eyeliner and ride to the audition for the insurance commercial. If I get it, that’s three months’ rent, maybe more. But my heart won’t slow down, it keeps speeding up, until it’s beating so hard I have to throw myself on the bed before I faint.
This has happened before, and lying flat always helps, but not this time. The thought of fainting while lying down fills me with a new level of dread. My body sinks lower and lower into the bed until it seems to fall right through, down through the floor and the apartment below, into the foundations and dirt, to a cold, cold place. Here in its silent grave my body stops fighting. I relax into the peace of nothingness, relieved, dead. God, it feels good to be dead.
I stay like that for a long time, until air begins to creep back into my nostrils and out of my mouth and I gradually rematerialise on my bed. Still here. I kick off my shoes and crawl under the covers, arms stiff at my sides. Tears spill down my cheeks, though I’m not crying – they do that now of their own volition, like incontinence. Face incontinence. I have no idea how much time passes: all I know is I’m now very late for the audition, and the thought sends me into another state of panic so intense I have to put my knees up and my wrists over my eyes and order myself to breathe, breathe, breathe. The suffocating feeling eventually subsides enough for me to roll over and pick up my phone.
My agent’s assistant, Robin, answers. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, ‘I’ll let them know.’
Robin took me for a cup of tea when an episode like this, but milder, happened in her office. Her mother died too, she told me, when Robin was in her late forties. She told me age makes no difference, but that twenty-eight was young to lose your mother. ‘It doesn’t go away, but it does get better,’ she said. She also said she’d found a sort of new mother figure in the warmth and wisdom of other women around her. The last thing she said had stuck in my mind: having a mother is like being a balloon tied to the earth. Once she is gone, the string is cut, leaving you to roam untethered forever. ‘Which isn’t always bad,’ she said, patting my arm. ‘You’ll see.’
I hang up and fall into a heavy sleep. When I wake, it feels past lunchtime, judging by the sun on the palm tree outside. Two birds are chatting on a wire. Of course it’s a beautiful day. Australia never has any empathy for your mood.
When will things feel normal again? How to proceed when I don’t even have the ability to perform basic tasks like getting out my front door? I need to call Mum to ask her advice on how to get over the death of herself. She would know what to say. ‘Eat something. Go for a jog. Come on, Jaynie.’
The image of her drawing murky broth through a straw in a desperate bid to cling to a few more minutes of life wills me into the kitchen. What she’d have done for one more day. One more hour.
Kate has left two crusts of a loaf in a plastic bag and there’s an open jar of peanut butter on the bench. She dreams of Mum. For me, her absence is as cold as concrete, even in my sleep. I smear peanut butter on the crusts when they shimmy out of the toaster and sit looking at them. The window is open but the world outside is silent. Everyone’s at work, going about their day, smiling, chatting, eating stuff. All I want to do is stop. Forever. Disappear. I know how I’d do it. But the thought of standing is too much, let alone finding my keys. Too lazy even to suicide.
On the table is a scrap of paper with the words Reiki John written on it, and a number, which I must have absent-mindedly transcribed when someone said, yet again, with concern, ‘I know this guy. He can help.’ Who can help with something like this? It’s normal. People die. It happens every day.
What right have I to be helped anyway? I don’t deserve help. I’m a grown woman with a whole life ahead to look forward to. What about Dad? What about people whose parents die when they’re little? What about the stolen generations? What about kids in Africa?
Besides, I’ve already tried two people for help – a trainee counsellor who checked his manual and told me that this kind of grief takes six to twelve months to recover from, and Mum’s reiki lady, Magdalena. Mum was a pragmatist and didn’t go for hippie stuff, but a friend had recommended Magdalena to her when she fell ill, and she told me the reiki sessions made her feel so calm and well. The Christmas before she died, Mum gave me a voucher to see Magdalena – ‘It’s your kind of thing, Jaynie!’ – and a week after she died I remembered the voucher and went to see Magdalena, thinking it might uncover some secret to Mum I didn’t know. The idea of her private world fascinated me: she had never really shown us any of her vulnerability, cancer or otherwise. Had she told Magdalena if she was scared of dying?
Magdalena was just as I imagined: long wavy hair, long dress, beads. She took my rigid body in her arms; she loved my mother dearly, she said. And after lying on the table and having her warm hands hovering near me, I did feel slightly calmer. But that calm disappeared when Magdalena insisted that Mum had come in while I had my eyes shut, and had given me a kiss on the forehead. I wanted to shatter every crystal in her zen den. Even if I believed in anything like that, Mum had left the most tangible stillness I had ever known. Even if she could, she wouldn’t have hung around to give kisses on foreheads. She was gone; nothing, no one, had ever been so gone.
But reiki is all the rage right now, and in my circle of friends it’s the go-to solution for all life’s woes.
On this day, it doesn’t matter anymore whether I see Reiki John or not, nothing could make me feel worse, so I decide to call him. Besides, if one more person tells me to see him, I actually will kill myself.
The receptionist says he’s had a cancellation and I can come at three. The feeling of having an appointment makes me feel something that is neither good nor bad. Just something.
Reiki John works from a room in a little place built into the stone bridge that goes over the railway tracks to the Ripponlea railway station. The station is at the end of my street, and I must have passed his place a thousand times but I’ve never noticed it. It’s like a troll’s home, a cobbled brick wall with tiny windows in it, utterly out of place and yet perfectly belonging. Inside are four practitioners – an osteopath, a masseuse, a counsellor, and John, a ‘reiki and spiritual healing practitioner’, according to his signage. I sit for ten minutes in the waiting room, staring at an ad for water purifiers, trying to ignore the fact that an actor who graduated from my drama school the year before me (and got a big part in a hit TV series) is sitting opposite, trying also to ignore that she has noticed me.
‘Jayne?’ The portly receptionist directs me to the end of the hallway, into a warm, darkened room. Reiki John is seated on a comfortable-looking chair next to a small desk. His hands are clasped and he smiles at me, gesturing for me to sit down. He seems ageless – he could be my age, with his waxy skin and fair curls, but his eyes and body have an unwavering quality that makes him seem older. The quietness in his body unsettles me, and I would fidget and chew at the inside of my mouth were I not in such a rock-bottom state.
I slump in the chair like an old curmudgeon, beyond caring.
‘So, Jayne, tell me what’s been happening in your life.’
I have nothing to lose, so I tell him. Everything. About Mum, about us trying to go on like nothing has happened, about the guilt, the exhaustion, the desire for oblivion. Trying to mother my brothers and sister, their repulsion. How bullshit reiki is. Magdalena’s bullshit. How bullshit everything is. About how my heart seems to have died but I don’t have the guts to tell Jack, or the decency to let him go. My selfishness, weakness, how so many people in the world have it so bad. How I’ve fantasised about moving into a convent, or prison even, somewhere I could hide away and not exist anymore. Death, Paris, the Lecoq school —
‘Paris?’ he interrupts.
Weeks ago, on a whim, I’d asked the director of the French theatre for a contact at the embassy, and emailed them to ask about scholarships. I heard nothing back. Paris felt further away than death itself.
‘You are going to Paris,’ he says, before I tell him any of this.
‘Yeah right. I have no money, and I don’t know how I’d —’
‘You’re going,’ he repeats, face still as ever. ‘When you said the word “Paris”, your guides came rushing up around your head saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” You are going to Paris. I have no doubt about it.’
Reiki John is on crack.
‘Now, I’ll just get you to take off your shoes and socks and lie up here.’
The room smells like a faraway land. He puts a warm rug over me. The distant sound of harps is interrupted by the rushing of a train.
‘Close your eyes and try to relax,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
Just go with it, I tell myself.
When he returns he stands with his hands hovering above my head for a very, very long time. More trains go by. The string music changes to pipes, then flutes, then piano. Someone else comes quietly into the room, perhaps Reiki John’s assistant. They stand together near my head and then they move down towards my right shoulder. Both have their hands hovering over my arm; hers are smaller than his, but just as warm. I feel like opening my eyes to see what the assistant looks like but my lids are too heavy. The two of them stand for a while by my legs, then move down to my feet, staying there for a long time, his hands over my left foot, hers over my right. Hers tremble a bit and feel light and youthful; I have the sense that she’s giggly. They swap sides. It’s odd, her presence in the room keeps changing. I can almost feel her giggling now. I imagine she has long blond hair. They keep moving around and arrive back at my shoulder. Then the strangest thing happens. I feel the girl lean in, right over me, and for some unknown reason I know it’s Mum. She puts her hand on my chest and says three things. I love you. I’m proud of you. You’re doing good.
And then everything is quiet.
Reiki John leaves the room. I don’t want to open my eyes. I lie for a long time waiting to see if the Mum-girl will come back. Come back!
The door opens and Reiki John taps me on the shoulder. His eyes are wide as I open my own.
‘Stay there a moment,’ he says.
Face incontinence washes my cheeks.
‘I know!’ he says. ‘Honestly, I think she did come to you at Magdalena’s, but you weren’t ready. This time she took a form you wouldn’t be scared of, perhaps someone a bit like you. And when she was able to get close she passed on her message.’
The fact that Reiki John had felt it without me mentioning it makes me deeply curious. But more than anything, I feel relieved. Those were the exact three sentences I needed to hear. I hadn’t known how much I’d needed to hear them.
I walk back up Maryville Street feeling that a great weight has lifted from my shoulders. Kate looks at me strangely as I recount the story – I am desperate that she see John herself and receive her own message. But she isn’t interested. She has her dreams. I want Dad to go too, but he just laughs. ‘So glad that happened for you, Jaynie.’
A week later I rush back to Reiki John, excited at the thought of seeing Mum again. She doesn’t come, but afterwards he tells me she’s given him a message. ‘She told me to tell you she’s fine, and not to worry. And that she’s working with the light.’
This makes me happy, though I’m sure he made it up.
Nothing happens the next time I see him either, and I realise I don’t need to go again. I am done. Things feel better. I am on the other side. Of course I know it was just my deepest psyche coming up to rescue me. Whatever it is, I don’t care. I don’t feel the urge to die anymore. I feel like eating things.
A few weeks later, I receive an email from the French embassy in Canberra saying that I’m being considered for a two-year government grant to attend the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School. This includes payment of the school fees, a monthly allowance, and accommodation at the Centre des Récollets, an ancient monastery close to the school that has been recently restored as a residence for international artists and scientists. Will I please fill in the attached form.
I’m sure I’m dreaming.
But four months later, I’m on a plane to Paris.