Edward Aubyn - On the Edge

The next time the bell sounded, it was the end of the session and time for lunch. Peter unlocked his legs and staggered out of the meditation room. He waited for Crystal in the hall, and passed the time by reading various quotations pinned to the notice-board.

Follow your breath right out of your nose

Follow it out as far as it goes.

You can’t think straight

And you don’t know who to call

It’s never too late to do nothing at all.

— Allen Ginsberg

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

— Franz Kafka

Within that birthless wide open space, phenomena appear like rainbows, utterly transparent …

* * *

As Peter began to read this third quotation, the woman he had last seen buried under a pile of cushions in Martha’s workshop swayed towards him, as if to challenge the claims of transparency with her soft bulk.

‘Hi, how are you doing?’ she said.

‘Fine.’

‘You left our workshop, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s too bad. Martha and Carlos have completely changed my life. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my mind.’

‘Oh good.’

‘But maybe you’ve found what you need. I hope so.’ She smiled and swished her way through the door.

A great weight has been lifted off her, thought Peter, remembering Carlos, Martha and Paul sitting stoutly on the cushions from which her stifled screams of protest could be heard. I wanna live. Let me outta here. And now she’s grateful. Why had he wasted his indignation on this useful therapy? How could he know what benefits it might not hold for someone whose life was already worse than being sat on in public?

He looked into the meditation room and saw Crystal stretching out. She sat on a cushion, her back arched forward and her head touching the floor.

‘That’s not necessary,’ smiled Surya.

‘Ah, Guruji,’ said Crystal, entering into the joke and bowing reverently.

Peter glanced back at the notice-board, and wondered vaguely whether you could get rainbow gridlock, with the phenomenal world arching iridescently in one direction or another. The rainbow marquetry of a place like Manhattan might represent a substantial insubstantiality. He decided not to carry on reading but to wait for Crystal outside. After retrieving his shoes, he went out onto the lawn and stood with his hands in his pockets looking at the flowers, and thinking he must look like lovers are supposed to.

When Crystal came out, they walked together to the lodge. Peter wanted to keep the silence they were meant to observe, but he was desperate to ask if she would join him that weekend. As they crossed the bridge over the waterfall, he pondered various hopeless ways of formulating the question.

‘Yes,’ said Crystal, as they started the ascent beyond the bridge.

‘What?’ said Peter.

‘You wanted to know whether I’d spend the weekend with you. The answer is yes.’

‘How did you know I was going to ask that?’

‘I don’t know how ,’ said Crystal. ‘I just knew it was troubling you.’

‘I don’t know why I asked you how you knew,’ said Peter, after a pause. ‘I suppose,’ he went on, unused to talking after two days of relative silence, ‘I suppose it sounded like the next question, if you know what I mean. It’s not that it might not be interesting to look into, but I asked it then because it was the obvious thing to say.

‘It’s like earlier,’ he went on, ‘when I was waiting for you, I leant over and sniffed a flower, and it smelt of nothing, and I thought of the word “odourless”, and then I thought of the phrase “odourless, colourless liquid”. It was completely meaningless, except that the phrase was lying there like invisible ink, waiting for the heat of an experience to tell me what to think. I can’t bear it, it’s completely unfree, during that moment my mind was just a chain of words.’ Peter was surprised by the thoughts that were tumbling out of him. He felt himself becoming more real as he spoke.

‘Even when I was beating myself up about being distracted during meditation, I thought “I’m living in the past” — another chain of words — but I wasn’t living in the past, I was thinking about the past. Thinking about the past was my present experience. What stopped me from having it was that chain of words, that misguided self-reproach. Do you see what I mean? I’m rather new to all this, I’ve probably got it all wrong.’

She smiled at him and he knew that she understood. Her silence invited him to be silent. Did he need words at all? And when he did, why arrange them in a chain? They were not his enemies. He understood, and smiled back.

At lunch, Crystal and Peter found themselves next to a man from their group. With aquiline nostrils and an emphatic vertical crease between his eyebrows, he sat on the redwood bench, both hands planted on his thighs, looking at his salad bowl with the implacable concentration of a duelling samurai. He breathed heavily through his nose, a pearl diver about to plunge, and then with a sudden burst of speed impaled a lettuce leaf on his fork, thrust it in his mouth, replaced the fork, planted his hands back on his thighs and resumed his wakeful snoring. Chomping the leaf with reptilian equanimity, his half-closed eyes remained focused on the same spot. A minute later he repeated his raid on the salad bowl, bringing a piece of celery back to his ruthless mouth.

Peter looked on, lost between amazement and laughter. Glancing at Crystal to see if she was leaning in either of these directions, he saw a complex but relaxed expression on her face. She seemed to sympathize with his desire to laugh, without losing sympathy for the person who had caused it. She held his gaze and he felt himself slipping into the atmosphere she was inhabiting, where the mind’s dragging plumage could slowly spread to reveal the full glamour of its design.

‘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.