14

‘I’m not angry with Jason,’ said Haley. ‘I’m sorry for him, I really am.’

‘I hate to say this,’ said Panita, ‘but what I saw in the car had all the classic signs of a sick relationship. I’ve been really worried about you, stuck somewhere with no meetings. I could just imagine Jason throwing your tapes out of the window when you were trying to get some sanity.’

‘He’s been humiliating me in our workshop,’ Haley confessed. ‘And now he’s started up with this woman who lives here. My self-esteem is at about minus ten thousand at the moment.’

‘You need a meeting,’ said Panita, once again relieved by her exclusion from the dangerous world of romantic love. ‘I’ll pick you up at the airport if you like and we can go straight to the Thursday evening Earls Court Women’s Group.’

‘Thanks,’ said Haley, suddenly breaking into sobs.

‘Let it all out, love,’ said Panita.

‘He’s such a bastard,’ sobbed Haley. ‘Why do I still want him to love me?’

‘That’s the disease,’ said Panita.

‘It’s not a disease,’ howled Haley, ‘it’s me, me and Jason. Can’t you understand, it’s the end of three years? Oh God, how can you hate someone and still feel closer to him than anyone else? It’s so horrible.’

Haley abandoned herself to grief.

Panita, shocked by Haley’s rejection of her generic diagnosis, was tipped into a free fall of unconfidence and hostility which made her ache to call her CoCo sponsor. Refraining from quoting her favourite slogan, ‘If you stick together, you’re sick together’, she hastily wrote down Haley’s arrival time, said goodbye and dialled the proleptically healing digits of her sponsor’s number.

After hanging up, Haley went on sitting in the wooden phone booth, glazed over and strangely peaceful. The solvent of her tears seemed to have disengaged her from the confusion of her recent life. In an hour she would be leaving Esalen and leaving Jason too. What was she wailing about? She should be celebrating. What was she doing in California anyhow? She was longing to get back to Clapham. She wanted to build up her business, and get proper offices, and advertise, and marry someone who had a really positive attitude to life. She was finished with her old life, completely finished. She didn’t even like Panita, and she wasn’t going to go to CoCo meetings either.

It was so Aries, she loved it. Just make a new start. No problem. Except that it would be no problem for Jason either. Little bastard.

There was a tap on the window. Christ, it was him.

‘Listen, doll,’ said Jason chirpily. ‘I was wondering if you could lend us a few hundred dollars. I’ll pay you back – I’ve been writing some great new material.’

Haley gave him her contemptuous look.

‘I’m not going to lend it to you,’ she said coolly. ‘I’m going to give it to you.’

‘Great!’ said Jason.

‘On one condition. You never call me, never write to me, and if you see me in the street, you keep on walking.’

She threw down two hundred dollars on the ledge under the phone.

‘I don’t keep walking for less than four hundred,’ said Jason in his John Wayne voice.

‘Oh,’ said Haley, picking up the money, ‘in that case, I’ll keep walking.’

‘No, you’ve convinced me,’ said Jason, lurching forward as Haley started to leave. ‘I’ll walk away.’

‘Too late.’

‘Don’t be such a mean bitch,’ said Jason indignantly.

‘You wanker,’ said Haley, striding towards her car with all the dignity that the word ‘wanker’ left in its wake.

‘You won’t be able to get away from me,’ said Jason. ‘Every time you turn on the radio, I’ll be there.’

‘I think someone’s done that song already,’ said Haley sarcastically.

‘Listen,’ said Jason, switching tactics as they got closer to the car, ‘Angela has been on these conflict-mediation workshops. Maybe we should try to end on a more, sort of … generous note.’

‘You mean four generous notes, don’t you?’ said Haley. ‘I don’t know how you can … I mean … you’re unbelievable.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jason with a grin. ‘That’s what Angela thinks too.’

Haley got in the car and slammed the door.

Jason watched her cerise Fiesta ascend the hill to Route One, unable to forgive himself for not taking the two hundred dollars. He really could have done with that money. He had used Haley’s unrefundable deposits and some of Angela’s cash to get them into the Tantric workshop. Now he was totally broke. He had not mentioned to the office that Haley would not be attending, nor had he warned Angela that she might have to pretend to be Haley if a list of participants was read out. Not a perfect start to a workshop for committed couples.

‘Jason?’

He turned aound and saw Flavia.

‘Was that Haley?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Jason. ‘She left with all my money. I was standing here talking about conflict resolution, and returning to love, and honourable closure, and she just pissed off with all my dosh.’

‘You need a ritual,’ said Flavia.

‘I need a credit card,’ said Jason.

‘Listen,’ said Flavia, ‘I feel we need an honourable closure as well. I want to apologize. I arrived at Esalen with a lot of anger, and I feel I projected it on to you.’

‘People are always doing that,’ said Jason.

‘I had a lot of realizations about my patterns during Martha’s workshop, and I want to say that my behaviour was immature.’

‘Don’t worry,’ grinned Jason, ‘I’m at home with immaturity.’

Flavia smiled back. She opened her arms to indicate that the moment had come for a hug. Jason, who had nothing better to do, hugged her. He could feel that she was standing on tiptoe so that her chin could clear his shoulder; it was quite sweet really.

They disengaged, and Flavia let loose a loud sigh, still holding on to Jason’s forearms with her long fingers.

‘Oh, that felt good,’ she said. ‘My personal rock bottom was living with this English guy in LA and I was projecting all that stuff on you. I can’t believe I did that, it’s so primitive.’

She seemed as elated at the end of the week as she had been angry at the beginning.

‘Listen, I don’t know how appropriate this is,’ she blurted out, ‘but if Haley left with all your money, I could lend you some until you get it back.’

‘It’s totally appropriate,’ said Jason.

‘I could give you my address in LA and you could send me the money next week.’

‘Definitely.’

‘This feels good,’ said Flavia.

‘It’s beautiful, beautiful,’ said Jason, giving her another hug.

*   *   *

Kenneth prodded and squeezed his crushed feet. Over the last two days, Brooke had cajoled him along several hiking trails, his wheezing progress only inspiring her to more ambitious combinations of hill and stream and wood. These country walks, or Vision Quests as Brooke preferred to call more or less anything that took place outside a department store or a restaurant, were a medical hazard from which he scarcely expected to recover. Radiated by the carcinogenic sun, they had scrambled over blond hillsides, exhuming muscles from the graveyard of Kenneth’s thighs and shocking them brutally into life. He could remember seeing, through his sweat-blurred vision, the purple splashes of wine-coloured rocks in the soft and intricate gloom of a redwood grove. He had swayed giddily as wild mineral water frothed under a fallen tree. Brooke ballerinaed across with outstretched arms and girlish cries; he lumbered behind like Frankenstein’s monster, while she extolled the beauties of the scene.

If only he had finished his book, he could have turned down these bucolic humiliations. As it was, he could refuse nothing to Brooke. He had always exhausted his imagination wondering what to wear for the television interviews accompanying the publication of his finished book. Now he tiptoed apprehensively to the other end of the process and wondered what to put in the book itself. At first a hideous sense of blankness and panic washed over him, but as another ravine edged into view, he started to compose spontaneous fragments of Streamist philosophy.

‘You see, you’re being inspired by Nature,’ said Brooke, when he took out his notebook.

‘You better believe it,’ he muttered.

‘Oh, God,’ said Brooke, ‘it’s so beautiful here, I think I’m going to buy a ranch.’

*   *   *

‘You should be teaching the Tantric workshop,’ said Yves, leafing through the Esalen catalogue.

‘We should be teaching it together,’ said Adam.

‘Everyone could sit in silence and just watch us,’ said Yves.

‘Don’t get me excited, I’m trying to pack.’

‘But Ad-um,’ said Yves, imitating the annoying Frenchwoman Adam had been telling him about. ‘Did Rumi and Shams have Tantric sex?’

He caught hold of Adam and pulled him backwards onto the bed.

‘Scholars are divided on this point,’ said Adam, in his silly don’s voice, ‘but I think that the best approach is the experiential one adopted by Fraser and Lamartine in their seminal work, “Having It Off”.’

He rolled over to Yves’s side and they stared adoringly into each other’s eyes.

*   *   *

Karen spotted Martha tossing her crutches into the back of her liberated Range Rover, and felt compelled to tell her that unique was not a unique enough word to express her appreciation and gratitude for the inner journey Martha and Carlos had taken them on during the course of the week. Clad in a pink tracksuit of the softest fabric and with one hand pressed to her heart, she walked over to Martha and congratulated her.

‘Well, you know, I thought it was real dynamic,’ said Martha, her fists racing about aimlessly in the air. ‘The energy was really moving around the room,’ she boasted. ‘And when Stan shared with the group about his impotence – that was one of the high points, for me personally.’

‘It was really an important moment for me also,’ said Karen. ‘I was sort of embarrassed at first, and then I broke through to another level.’

‘You should be proud of him.’

‘He should be proud of himself.’

‘I’m sure he is, dear,’ said Martha, closing the back door and hoisting herself into the passenger seat.

Carlos came striding up the hill, his suitcase swinging lightly by his side. ‘The patent has been processed,’ he declared. ‘The Auricular Acupunture Massage Muffler is now official.’

‘Oh, I … that is so … we were…’ Karen didn’t know where to begin. ‘When you get the Nobel Prize don’t forget that we were praying for you,’ she finally said.

‘I’ll be sure to mention that,’ said Carlos suavely.

*   *   *

Peter wondered if it could all be true. Not just the miracle – how easily that word now slipped from his lips – of meeting Crystal, but the paradoxes – how indispensable that word had become – which emerged from his brief experience of meditating and listening to the question-and-answer sessions in the evening. Meditation appeared to be a mad game of hide-and-seek in which the seeker stubbornly overlooked the hidden and the hidden longed to be found, while an audience of giggling lamas shouted, ‘Look behind you!’ ‘Look within you!’ ‘Look beyond you!’ ‘Look around you!’ like children at a Christmas pantomime. If you took any of these propositions seriously, there was always someone ready to bash language, and say that teachings were just a ‘finger pointing at the moon’.

The time had come to change rooms. He was going to share a room with Crystal for the weekend. It was strange, they hadn’t made love yet and that evening they would be starting the Tantric workshop together.

Peter came to an abrupt halt. Here was something really unbelievable. A few yards away from him stood Jerome, the appalling man he had met in LA, stretching out his arms and arching his back after taking some suitcases out of the boot of a car. Jerome looked round at him and nodded vaguely.

‘Hello, Jerome,’ said Peter icily.

‘Hi,’ said Jerome. ‘Do I know you?’

‘You seem to have a lot of trouble working out who you know,’ said Peter. ‘The last time we met you thought you knew Sabine but she, or he, turned to be Shalene.’

‘Peter!’ said Jerome. ‘Peter, my friend. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.’ Jerome stood back and looked at Peter discerningly. ‘You’ve been going through some changes.’

‘Not as many as Shalene, I’m pleased to say,’ said Peter. ‘Has she had the full operation yet?’

‘I know I don’t know Shalene,’ said Jerome.

‘She was the little charmer you introduced me to in 222.’

‘Oh, Shalene, sure I know her,’ Jerome corrected himself. ‘I guess maybe you’re mad at me about that evening, huh? That’s what we call crazy wisdom, Peter, kinda shocks you into a realization. That’s me, the Jester, the Trickster. When the crazy wisdom gets going, even I don’t know how crazy it’s going to get.’ Jerome pranced around in front of Peter, shifting convulsively from leg to leg. ‘You know, Sabine is going to be very happy to see you again.’

‘You’re still claiming to know her?’ said Peter wearily.

‘Claiming? We’re here for a Tantric workshop.’

‘You’re not serious?’

‘Couldn’t be more serious,’ said Jerome seriously.

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Peter.

‘We just arrived. Sabine had to go to the bathroom. She’ll be back.’

‘So likely.’

‘Here she is right now!’ Jerome exclaimed, spreading his hands copiously in the direction of the sea.

Walking across the lozenge of lawn that separated the office from Jools’s car, a hippie harlequin in baggy trousers of emerald and beetroot velvet, Sabine billowed into view.

Peter was startled into a moment of detachment. He saw the walk of a model who has been told to look preoccupied, the vigorously insipid expression of a woman who is doomed to be stared at, and the devouring sexual confidence, as easy as a panther’s stride. As she came closer, though, he was engulfed by his old longing, and its vast entourage of panic and frustration and unreality.

‘Hey, Peter!’ said Sabine in her husky German voice, throwing her long arms around him and kissing him on the mouth.

Peter stood there as if a bucket of water had just been emptied over his head.

‘It’s great to see you guys get together,’ said Jerome, placing an avuncular hand on each of their shoulders.

‘You realize that I tried to get hold of you in LA and this man stopped us from meeting?’ asked Peter.

‘Yeah,’ said Sabine, laughing. ‘He’s so naughty, huh?’ She looked at Jerome with mock reproach, at the same time draping an arm around his neck and biting his ear. ‘You shouldn’t have dumped Peter at that stupid club.’

‘I knew why you wanted to see Sabine,’ said Jerome, ‘but she’s my Tantric consort.’

‘She could have told me that herself.’

‘What we had in Germany was very sweet,’ Sabine explained, ‘but then the universe gave me Jerome.’

‘Clever old universe,’ said Peter, suddenly sounding to himself like Gavin.

‘He’s a crazy and stupid man,’ said Sabine, playfully slapping Jerome and then biting his ear again. ‘But the energy between us is something incredible,’ she gasped.

‘It certainly is,’ said Peter. ‘He’s lucky to have any ears left.’

‘She can have my ears,’ said Jerome, crucifying himself against the side of his car. ‘She can have all of me.’

‘Yummy, yummy,’ growled Sabine.

I want to throw up, thought Peter.

‘So did you just quit a workshop, or are you going into one?’ asked Sabine.

‘Both. I’m doing the same one as you.’

‘Hey, cool,’ said Sabine, moving over to Peter’s side. ‘Maybe I go with him instead,’ she taunted Jerome.

‘And maybe I’ll go with him too,’ Jerome threatened.

‘Sorry, I’m already booked,’ said Peter. ‘I’m sure you could get Shalene biked up for the weekend. Listen, I’ve got to move rooms. We’re bound to see each other very soon.’

‘Hasta luego,’ said Jerome.

‘Ciao, Peter,’ said Sabine, kissing him on the mouth again.

What an appalling woman, thought Peter, wishing he could fuck her one more time. How could he have turned her into an emblem of depth and mystery? He wandered towards his new room in a state of turmoil which centred, if anywhere, on the facile consolation of thinking that if he hadn’t pursued Sabine he never would have met Crystal. If he started thinking like that, he might as well get a set of beads and start circle dancing.