Helen Brown - After Cleo

After a while, unnerved by the spooky symphony, I sprang off the bed and reached for my iPhone. A clearly pixelated image of Jonah draped like a beret over Philip’s head flashed to life once I pressed a button. I was relieved it still worked. For a moment I’d imagined I’d slipped into another century.

By the light of my head torch, I dug my earplugs out of my toilet bag, thanking whoever was CEO of the heavens right now that I’d remembered to bring the orange plugs of sanity. Next, I counted out my nut bars. Two for each night. I hoped they’d get me through. If not, I’d just have to regard the monastery as a fat farm.

Sifting through my carefully thought out luggage, I felt ridiculous. Almost everything I’d brought for ‘protection’ was proving useless. I draped the pesticide-soaked net over the window in case Lydia was being optimistic about mosquitoes. As for the silk liner, mozzie bands, Marcel Marceau gloves, knee-length white socks and hat net – I needn’t have bothered. The blocking and unblocking pills languished inside their packets. I was almost hoping I’d meet a tic so the tic remover hadn’t been a waste of cabin space.

Still, I thought, easing cautiously back on the bed in case it was more fragile than it looked, the trip wasn’t over. There was plenty of time for things to go wrong. Even through the earplugs, I could hear the screeching jungle – but was too tired to care.

I’d hardly fallen asleep when I was woken by the sound of a woodpecker drilling a tree. After a while, I realised it wasn’t a woodpecker at all, but a drum roll – the monks’ morning wake-up call. Soon after, their eerie chanting began. Using harmonies even Schoenberg couldn’t have dreamt up, their mahogany voices drifted across the jungle canopy. The sound was from another world – music a shoal of fish might make if they could sing.

Pink light filtered through the curtains. Over more than three decades, motherhood had taken me to all sorts of places – from pinnacles of joy in maternity wards to utter desolation at a graveside. Through all those years I’d never imagined it would bring me to a remote monastery in Sri Lanka.

I was relieved that the monks hadn’t issued an invitation to attend the pre-dawn chanting. Maybe it was a male-only thing. Monastery life didn’t seem to encourage mingling of the sexes. The monks were housed across the hill well away from the nuns’ accommodation.

Getting back to sleep was impossible. I lumbered out of bed and wondered what Trinny and Susannah would recommend under these circumstances. White trousers and a mostly white long-sleeved top seemed logical – and of course I was happy to take on the role of student, whatever that might mean. Pale clothes deflected heat and kept insects at bay. Pulling on the knee length white socks, I toyed with the idea of the Marcel Marceau gloves – and put them back in my suitcase.

Lydia escorted me downstairs to the dining room, which was a simple space with two small tables covered in plastic tablecloths, a sink and a microwave. A wall of windows overlooked a mass of plant life glistening happily in the sun. I recognised a banana tree and some coconut palms, but they were squashed together, bigger and greener than anything I was used to, as if they were on growth hormones. Most of the trees and plants were unfamiliar. Not for the first time, I felt overwhelmed by ignorance.

The table was laid out with flat bread, dhal, delicately flavoured rice balls and bananas. There was also a tub of garishly labelled margarine and a jar of Vegemite. Apart from these two imports, almost all the ingredients were fresh from the monastery surrounds. The breakfast was wholesome and filling. When I commented it felt health-enhancing Lydia explained it was based on Ayurvedic principles of food being medicine.

Approaching the day ahead with an open mind, I wondered if Lydia’s teacher might hold some classes I could sit in on. It turned out he’d had to stay in Kandy on business overnight and sent his apologies. Lydia offered to show me around, and suggested we could maybe go into town with the nuns later on. Oh, she added, and a fortune-teller was coming up from the village mid morning.

After we’d washed our dishes and put them away, Lydia showed me the meditation hall further up the hill. She’d spent many hours alone there, sometimes more than twelve hours a day, doing sitting and walking meditation. The room, largely unadorned, was steamy and still.

Trying to understand what she’d been doing there, I asked her to give me a short, guided meditation. Perched on a blue cushion on the floor, I closed my eyes and listened to her voice. Sounding strong and authoritative, she urged me to concentrate on my breathing; I tried but a river of sweat trickled down my back and I started to feel dizzy.

Like an unco-operative school child, I interrupted to ask if she’d mind if I stretched out on the floor. She nodded graciously. Even horizontal I was still uncomfortable. My right leg twitched and my throat was dry. Maybe it was jet lag, but I was relieved when the session finished.

Lydia showed me her teacher’s house, a pleasant cottage with a view over the valley. We then wandered past the monks’ quarters, where maroon garments were draped over a clothesline. Nine monks currently lived there, she said. Most of them were teenage boys ranging in age from twelve to nineteen. We strolled past the classroom – an open-sided hall with benches and a whiteboard – where she taught the young monks English and Neuroscience. Neuroscience?

Some monks were more interested in Neuroscience than others, she confessed, but the links to meditation and its effects on the brain were particularly relevant. Apparently, happiness can be measured by heightened activity in the orbital frontal cortex. Scientists had discovered that the man with the happiest brain in the world happened to be a Buddhist monk.

Before there was time to ask more, we needed to hurry back to the dining room to meet the fortune-teller. Neuroscience to fortune-telling seemed an easy leap in this unworldly place.

I’d expected a village fortune-teller to have white hair and no teeth. But she was a good-looking woman in her thirties with prominent hooded eyes and long dark hair tumbling over her shoulders. She looked like the sort of woman I might’ve made friends with at a playgroup not so long ago. Unfortunately, she spoke no English.

The senior nun, who’d had her fortune told with surprising accuracy on a previous occasion, agreed to translate while Lydia took notes. The psychic didn’t ask to look at my palm. She gazed disinterestedly out the window instead.

‘You make a lot of money but you waste it,’ she said.

I couldn’t argue with her there.

‘Your family lives near you. Brothers, sisters – some over the back fence, some next door.’

Well, even the best fortune-tellers miss the mark sometimes.

‘In your house there is the ghost of an old man,’ she continued. ‘He is followed up and down the stairs by a cat. Do you have a cat?’

I nodded.

‘The cat and the old man’s ghost – I think it is your father. They are good friends.’

Lydia and I exchanged glances. Perhaps Jonah had been trying to tell us something when he’d sprayed Dad’s old piano. Dad had always liked cats.

‘You’ve had a very hard time with your health lately,’ the fortune-teller went on. ‘But things are okay now. You’ll get another health problem when you’re sixty but don’t worry. It won’t be serious. You’ll live till . . .’

She took the pencil from Lydia’s hand and wrote ‘82’ on the paper.

I was happy with that.

‘You had a terrible time when everything was very bad,’ she added, her eyes suddenly veiled with a memory of pain. ‘You wanted to end your life, but you became strong instead. You lost all fear and started a new life.’