A Short History of Richard Kline (19 page)

In the morning we woke to an abrasive loudspeaker. Sitting on the edge of his bunk and pulling on his socks, Luke stared at me with a solemn gaze. ‘You can feel it,' he said. I thought he meant the vibration of the massive engine beneath us, which had kept me awake for much of the night. ‘No,' he said, ‘the ocean. You can feel it under you. It's awesome.'

At the Devonport terminal we hired a car and bundled our packs into the boot. Then we set off for the coast, heading southeast along the highway, past the Great Western Tiers and pastures white with frost. When we turned off into the Fingal Valley we met with a cold so intense that the bare limbs of the deciduous trees were still coated in ice crystals and the valley shone like a landscape in a folk tale. We drove on, through the old mining towns with their wide streets and abandoned collieries, until at last we arrived at the top of a steep mountain pass, the edge of which fell away into canyons of dry eucalypt forest. As we made our descent, down and around the many narrow bends, we began at last to catch a glimpse of the glittering sea below, the long arc of a bay that curved towards the horizon.

At the small seaside town of Scamander I pulled in at a dusty secondhand bookshop that had a food counter with scallop pies, which we ate for our breakfast. Then we set off for the fishing town of St Helens, where we bought camp food at a supermarket and hired boogie boards and wetsuits from a surf shop. By mid-afternoon we had arrived at an area known as The Gardens, and here we took the turn-off to a narrow unsealed road that led to the Bay of Fires.

Because it was winter the campsite was empty, and we parked the car in a clearing fringed by she-oaks. I was impatient to see those magical waters of the bay again and wanted Luke to get oriented before it grew dark, so we set off down a steep track to the shore, where first we had to climb up and over a rocky promontory before we could descend to the long, white sands of the bay.

The water was still at low tide, and all along the sand lay beached puffer fish with ugly bulbous heads, squashed angry-looking faces and bloated bodies covered in grey spikes. Luke was fascinated by their sinister ugliness and began to count them, until I directed his attention to Sloop Rock, a formation of rocks just off the coast, where a single steeple of rock reared up from a cluster of smooth boulders around its base, the whole appearing to float on the water.

Luke stared out to sea. ‘The rocks here are different,' he said, and I knew what he meant. In the softness of their contours they had a pneumatic quality, as if inflated with air; beneath the warmth of their pink lichen they seemed to breathe.

At the far end of the bay we encountered a group of middle-aged walkers accompanied by young guides with bulging back-packs, and I guessed they were trekking towards the expensive eco-resort that lay some kilometres north. With their bodies knee-deep in grass and their heads silhouetted against the sky, they looked like pilgrims, even if it were only the local pinot and oysters that lured them on.

I showed Luke where I had camped as a boy – behind the grasslands, near the mouth of a creek that ran out into a small lagoon – but it was too cold to camp there in winter as it lacked shelter from the wind. I told him of how, one morning, Gareth and I had woken to find a brown snake basking in a languorous coil beside our tent, and of the day a gang of bikies roared in to drink at the other end of the beach. My father had stiffened to red alert while my mother snapped at us to stay close, but Gareth had disappeared to climb a path that ran along the rear of the promontory. When he returned he boasted to me that the bikies had offered him a beer.

Luke was keen to help with the set-up of the campsite. We pegged the tent beside a cluster of drooping she-oaks, and I warned him that if the wind came up at night they would make an eerie sound and he was not to be spooked. After we unrolled our sleeping bags I unpacked the primus stove, but Luke wanted to light a fire. Then he insisted on cooking the sausages and hamburgers, which he handled with the deft practicality of his mother, squatting on thin haunches and shaking the pan with one hand, while with the other he brushed the sparks away from his eyes. We ate beside the fire and I explained how the Bay of Fires was a favourite campsite for the northeastern tribe of the Tasmanian Aborigines, how in winter they came to live off the shellfish. When the English navigator Tobias Furneaux sailed along the coast he observed their long line of campfires glowing in the dusk and gave the bay its name.

Then the darkness began to enclose us, and the cold, but we stoked the fire and warmed ourselves by its coals.

In the morning it was freezing but Luke was determined to enter the water so we put on our wetsuits and took up our boards. When Luke emerged from the surf he was trembling from the chill. After we had changed, he was still shivering, so I suggested we cheat and drive to a local restaurant for lunch where it would be warm.

At Binalong Bay we ate out on the deck under gas burners and looked down to a wedding that was being celebrated on the beach below. The members of the bridal party were in bare feet, the men in black trousers and white shirts, the bridesmaids in tight pink dresses that barely reached the top of their thighs. We watched as the elderly male celebrant took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers so that his white, bony shins looked like the legs of a rare species of seabird.

At the culmination of the ceremony the groom lifted his bride and carried her to the edge of the water, where he whirled her around and around in the shallows. Up on the deck we, the diners, clapped and cheered.

Luke seemed bemused by this. ‘Why did everyone cheer?' he asked. ‘We don't know them.'

‘To wish them well.' It was a lame way of saying what I really meant. We cheer because we are in the presence of a great fertility rite. Uplifted by the promise that life will go on, for a moment we love one another and are irrational in our hope.

In the late afternoon we returned to the campsite to build a fire and make supper from bread and packet soup. There was no wind and no cloud, one of those night skies where you don't so much see as feel the curve of the earth fall away under you, with the stars spun out in a swathe. Luke yawned and I suggested we put out the fire and climb into our tent early.

When I was sure he was asleep I unzipped the flap of the tent and went outside. There was a boulder nearby with a smooth, rounded surface and I sat cross-legged on the sand and leaned my back into it. For a while I meditated, absorbing the muted roar of the ocean, until I became aware that my body had dissolved into the rock, and the rock into the sand. I felt the edges of whoever and whatever I was expand out into the darkness. The night sky entered into me, and when I looked down to where my body had been sitting, upright on the sand, there were no organs, no viscera, only the white stars blinking in space.

the riddle

And so he continued to meditate, in an interregnum of calm, until the inevitable happened. He began to feel smug. He had discovered the secret; he was one of the elect. He had knowledge at his fingertips. He had read the books, he had it all figured. He couldn't wait for the next time she came out of her seclusion so that he could advance to a higher level.

And then he received an email to say that, for the first time, she would be running a long weekend retreat in a small seaside hamlet an hour outside Melbourne. No talks, no teaching, only some chanting in the evenings and silent meditation throughout the day. For three days he would live the life of a monk and go deeper into the mystery.

He flew down to Melbourne late on the Friday afternoon. On the plane they offered him food but he was too nervous to eat. Instead, he stared out at a sea of grey-white cloud that floated beneath him. For a while he closed his eyes, hoping for sleep, but, unable even to doze, he opened them. When he looked out the window, he saw that a huge cloud had risen up in a curling arc, like a frozen wave about to break. In the distance the sunset was a rim of crimson fire along a black horizon; the wing of the plane looked uncannily still, as if they were not moving at all but were suspended in space. Every now and then a gap would open in the cloud and the yellow lights of houses would blink up at him from the dry, brown earth below.

At the airport he hired a car and drove to a small town on the Mornington Peninsula. All the way down he felt an intense excitement; this was going to be it, the time of revelation when he broke through into another dimension, when he ceased to be an apprentice, when finally he got ‘it'.

The conference centre was three kilometres outside a well-known tourist town, but the nomenclature ‘conference' turned out to be misleading. It was in fact an old air-force barracks from World War II, and a gutted and rusting small plane stood propped beside the driveway as he drove through the main gates. Somehow it seemed symbolic; he was here to take flight from his old self. But the conditions were dismayingly primitive, even for a school holiday camp.

Following the signs, he parked outside a cream-coloured demountable hut labelled ‘Registration'. It was empty. Admittedly he was late, and it was dark and he could hear chanting coming from a large weatherboard building with a pitched roof that he deduced must be the main hall. A woman dressed in white jeans and a white shawl stopped and asked him if she could help. She led him into a warm room of Laminex tables and plastic chairs that turned out to be the dining room, and there she introduced him to a man who was to take care of late registrations. Within minutes he was given a plastic wristband and assigned to a dormitory.

Dormitory. That word filled him with unease, and sure enough he had been allocated to the second in a row of wooden huts at the bottom of a steep, grassy slope beside a creek. Inside, the hut had concrete floors and double bunks and not much else, apart from a concrete ablutions wing at one end. At least, he told himself, it was inside and not a tent out in the sharp unseasonal cold that was beginning to blow in from Bass Strait.

He took a leak in the ablutions wing, which had all the charm of a prison block. Then, to his dismay, he found there was only a single top bunk left, and he swung his bag up onto the bare mattress, thinking he would make up his bed later. He had brought with him a sleeping bag, as instructed, and there were pillows and a rough army blanket. By now it was almost dark, and he fumbled in his bag for the small torch he had packed.

Outside, the paths were well lit, and a clear sky of bright stars raised his spirits. He climbed the grassy slope to the main compound, and when he entered the hall
she
was already there, seated on a low stool that had been draped in white silk. The hall was full, so full there was scarcely room to breathe. By now he felt no excitement, only deep fatigue, and he looked around for a gap of floor space where he could sit until the usual queue formed. After treading on a woman's foot and bumping the head of small child, he managed to squash himself into a space behind a pillar and felt his jeans stretch uncomfortably as he adjusted his legs into a cross-legged position and loosened the back of his shirt.

Once settled, he began to relax. The interior of the hall had an unexpected charm, with a fibro ceiling that sloped on both sides and a tiny proscenium stage draped in green and gold silk. Already he felt soothed by the chanting, though before long he wished he had sat on one of the chairs at the back. His shoulders began to ache and his calf muscles were stiff and sore. When he felt the familiar tingle in his feet he knew that as soon as the singing stopped he would have to get up and move around. And of course by now he was hungry. On the plane he had been unable to eat, from a feeling of nervous anticipation, not to mention the hectic rush of getting to Mascot, and he had made a mental note to buy sandwiches at one of the airport cafés when he landed. But then, in his haste to get on the road as soon as possible, he had forgotten all about food and so had arrived with an acid pain under his ribs, only to find he was too late for dinner. But still, here he was with her, for two full days, and who knew what revelations and experiences awaited him? What was a pain in the guts?

Craning his neck at intervals to look around the wooden pillar that blocked his view, he gazed at the small, dark-skinned figure in white who was seated in front of the stage, and who had begun now to receive the children first, as was her custom, while some of the adults began to form a queue. For him there was no urgency and he made no move; he would go later. There was all the time in the world, that was the point of being here, and for now he was content simply to sit, hands clasped around his knees, and gaze at her.

Once again he was struck by how her photographs failed to capture the aura of her presence. By now he had seen dozens of these photos, and each one could have been of someone else. The ineffable sheen of her skin, the subtlety of her expression and the light in her eyes were beyond the camera's capacity to capture and store. At times it seemed as if they were barely accessible even to the human eye, as if some emanation from her hovered at the edge of the cornea and could only be glimpsed peripherally, and then for a nanosecond. When someone asked her a question, often she would laugh with childlike good humour, revealing an appealing gap in her white teeth. When she set about explaining a point in Hindi she would use her delicate, dark hands fluidly, occasionally forming a small fist and gesturing with an emphatic elegance that was neither masculine nor feminine but that embodied an authority, a knowingness, unlike any he had experienced. When people wept at her feet, as they so often did, she stroked their cheeks, brushing aside strands of their hair and giving them a look of the utmost compassion. And yet through all this, in every mood – laughing, frowning, consoling, chanting ecstatically with her eyes closed and her arms extended – she was sublimely impersonal. He had tried once to explain this to Zoe, who had responded with the obvious: ‘If she's as loving as you say, how can she be impersonal?' To which he could only reply, lamely, ‘You have to be there.' Why don't you come, he had asked, and see for yourself? But she'd shaken her head, and got up to brush her hair.

As the crowd murmured around him in the stuffy hall, he closed his eyes to meditate. And immediately thought of food. Damn, how careless of him not to see to his bodily needs. He was used to Zoe doing that. It was Zoe who packed sandwiches for a long trip, or kept dried fruit and nuts in the glove box of the car. Seeking distraction from his hunger pains, he opened his eyes and saw one of the marshals browsing at the bookstall at the rear of the hall. It was Rebecca. Yes, Rebecca. He got up and walked over to her side.

‘Hi, Rick,' she said, with obvious pleasure at seeing him. Feeling foolish in the extreme, he asked her if she knew where he could get some food. ‘No,' she said, with an expression of quaint seriousness that was rather attractive. ‘Why don't you go over to the kitchen and see if they have something there?'

‘The kitchen?'

‘Where you registered. Behind there.'

Outside, he searched for his shoes, which had been scattered some distance from where he left them and were now squashed beneath several other pairs. How could this be, since he was one of the last to arrive? The longer he searched, the more irritable he became.

By the time he located the kitchen, a big commercial set-up of deep stainless-steel sinks, black gas burners and giant cooking pots, it was empty. Sacks of flour and lentils were stacked up against the wall and there wasn't a loaf of bread in sight. All he could find was an urn of hot water and various teabags left over from dinner, so he poured himself a mug and loaded it up with sugar. Then he drank the rest of the milk left in the only carton on the bench that wasn't empty. He had come to his first meditation retreat in the hope of deep insights and had begun the evening by prowling around with a growling stomach like a disgruntled bear.

When at last he joined the queue for her blessing, it was after eleven and the crowd was beginning to thin. The diehards would stay until the last moment, and he would be one of them. As he approached what by now he thought of as the final straight, the few metres in the queue between himself and her feet, he began to feel the subtle vibration that emanated from her and that entered him as if through the pores of his skin, no matter how great his discomfort, no matter his mood. But when she drew him to her, brow to brow, and he felt nothing. A pleasant blankness, a certain lightness of being, but nothing more.

Afterwards, on the walk back to the hut, he asked himself if his expectations had been unrealistic. And he laughed silently. The concept of ‘realism', as commonly applied, in no way belonged here. And anyway, what
had
he expected? Nirvana in a decrepit air-force barracks? Still, it was only the beginning of the retreat; he was confident she had more in store for him than this, and he must wait patiently for it to come, and not think of himself as a special case to whom anything – anything at all – was due.

That night was one of the most uncomfortable of his life. The man beneath him snored loudly in fitful bursts. The door to the ablutions block at the end of the hut was weighted in such a way that whenever anyone got up in the night for a leak it banged loudly in a sudden thud that jolted him awake. As if that were not enough, around two in the morning the temperature dropped suddenly and he shivered under his single blanket. He disliked the constraint of sleeping bags and it hadn't seemed cold enough to bother unpacking his when finally he had climbed up onto his bunk.

As a consequence of all this, he slept in, only to find when he climbed down from his bunk that the hot water in the showers had run out. He set out for the dining room but a cold wind had blown in off the water, and halfway across the paddock he had to turn back for a jacket. By the time he made it to the dining room there was only cold semolina porridge sitting congealed at the bottom of a big steel pot, and insipid white sliced bread, which he lathered thickly with peanut butter – something he hadn't eaten since he was a child. Anything to fill him up.

All day he squirmed in a cocoon of hunger. He was unable to meditate, he was unable to sit still. The morning program went on forever, the queue afterwards was interminable, he delayed too long in joining it and soon it was two in the afternoon and his belly shouted at him with hunger. He knew he would again be too late, he would miss lunch, he would get to the bare, fluorescent dining room with its white plastic chairs and there would be nothing left to eat, it would all be gone. When finally he arrived at her feet, his blessing seemed perfunctory, as if she were barely interested in him, as if they were both going through the motions.

But it didn't matter because all he could think about was lunch. He couldn't get to the dining room fast enough, and to his relief saw that they were bringing out big new trays of food for a second sitting. Thank God for that! But it looked better than it tasted – a bland, overcooked vegetable burger in a mushy bun, accompanied by a few lettuce leaves, undressed. He swallowed it down awkwardly so that he almost gagged, conscious of a craving for coffee, real coffee, not the instant stuff that sat spilled in sticky granules on the benches, and not that disgusting coffee substitute made of roasted grass and God knows what other foul vegan brew. He was a long way from home, and not just in kilometres. He was out of his comfort zone.

By the time he had finished eating, it was almost three in the afternoon. The evening program began at six-thirty and he could go for a walk along the beach now, as some of the others were doing, but an icy wind was blowing in off the strait. He decided instead on a nap.

Back in the hut there were several prone bodies with the same idea but as he approached his bunk he had an idea. Reaching up to the bunk, he hoisted the mattress and bedding down over his head and carried them to a space at the end of the hut where there was a bare alcove of concrete floor. Perfect. He would sleep there. Before long he had gathered his things together and set them up alongside the mattress. It would be hard, and it would be cold, but he would not have to climb up onto that narrow bunk and he would be much further from the snorer and the thudding cubicle door.

Already he felt better.

He began to do a quick check of his things, and by this time a small boy had approached and was staring at his manoeuvres. There was something odd about the boy, a plump child with fair, curly hair and vacant green eyes.

‘What are you doing?' the boy asked. ‘Why is that thing there?' His speech was unclear, as if he couldn't be bothered to articulate the ends of words, and it occurred to Rick that the boy was in some way simple. Was that the correct term for it now? Or would it be more accurate to describe him as ‘complex'? In either case, he wanted him to go away; he was not in the mood for children, he was tired, he wanted quiet, he wanted a nap. But the boy hovered. ‘What's your name?' he asked.