Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  One was a group of older women talking Europe, vegetables, parboiling and rental cars. ‘He’s the sort of man who has two strong coffees and a cigarette to start the day,’ said one, and I felt a powerful yearning for that sort of man. But when I returned with their coffees, they had moved on to bypasses, cancer, the price of bok choy, and the smell of cigars in the upholstery. ‘You cannot get it out,’ said one. ‘Not ever.’

  I wondered if she was playing the Parent. Should I approach the table and, speaking in a reasonable Adult voice, say: ‘Never? Are you certain? Surely there are home remedies that could assist in these circumstances. Perhaps you should consult the World Wide Web?’

  I also wanted to verify whether the man who started his day with two strong coffees and a cigarette was responsible for the cigar smoke in the upholstery. He struck me as a man who knew how to stride about the world, a man who smoked cigars in his stylish car, a man who would be excellent in bed. I don’t mind the smell of cigars, I would tell them.

  At the other table a young couple sat, dividing up their property. This was one of the ironic uses of the Happiness Café: the venue chosen as a sharp and bitter joke. They each had open notebooks before them, pens in their hands—he kept clicking his; she gripped hers tightly—and across the table came calm politeness, or bristling intensity, back and forth, ducking or colliding, each taking turns at both. The young man thought he deserved a greater share of the property. Because if she hadn’t done this, if she hadn’t taken off, if she hadn’t met . . . this never would have . . . and here, the young woman rose up and rode on her sentences: ‘Do you really think that that is how it works?’

  I sidestepped towards an empty table, wiped it over, straightened chairs. When a marriage breaks up, does the broken-hearted one become the Child? Pleading, desperate, sullen, sobbing, stamping feet, seeking consolation and reward, all the time secretly appalled at this loss of self. While the other is the Parent: contemptuous, self-righteous, terrified by guilt and so stepping up, up, up to this position of authority, laying down the rules, declaring that this is how it works!

  I collected plates and crumpled napkins from the women’s table. ‘It works with lymphoma,’ one of them was saying, ‘to get your own bone marrow? While you’re in remission?’

  Nobody seemed very happy in the Happiness Café today. I felt my usual desperate sense that it was my job to cheer them all up. After all, this was what I promised. I should switch on upbeat music, do a belly dance, get the whole place in hysterics! I should run next door to Hair to the Throne and return with a pretty girlfriend (sporting shiny new hairstyle) for the sad-young-newly-separated-man! Phone the grocery store and arrange for a box of bok choy! Find a cure for cancer!

  The door opened.

  I looked hopefully for a new conversation, but it was a man alone.

  He paused in the shadow of the doorway, shuffled briefly on the welcome mat, took a step forward, and it was a man with red hair and broad shoulders.

  Niall caught my eye and smiled. ‘Hey,’ he said, with a laugh in his voice. ‘So you do own a Happiness Café!’

  At both tables, the conversations paused, and faces turned to watch my response.

  6.

  Niall and I went a block up the road to Billi’s Café where, it turned out, you get a little round chocolate covered in coloured sprinkles—a Freckle—on the saucer with your coffee. It made me happy, the Freckle.

  ‘This,’ I said. ‘It’s all you need for happiness. And I try so hard.’

  Niall studied the Freckle leaning up against his own latte. He lifted it across to my saucer, using his teaspoon. So now I had two.

  ‘You’re not happy?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, no, I’m happy.’

  ‘But you . . .’

  ‘Oh, I get it! No, I just meant I try hard with my café. With the menu and the ambiance and the cushions and all that. Did you notice the cushions?’

  ‘Yes,’ Niall said. ‘I noticed them.’ He raised an eyebrow, teasing.

  Now, although we had spent a weekend together on an island in Bass Strait, and although we had, a few days earlier, attended the introductory course on flight at Wilbur’s place, Niall and I had never sat and faced one another. There had always been others around. Even when we walked from the beach to yoga, Lera, the paediatric ENT surgeon, had walked between us, a midpoint, a bridge.

  Now we chatted at our table on the pavement. I told him the story of the Happiness Café. He asked where I’d grown up. His family had come here from Ireland, he told me, when he was ten. He was in property development, by which he meant he bought cheap flats, fixed them up himself, and ‘flipped’ them. He liked to mountain climb.

  ‘This flight course,’ Niall said eventually. ‘What do you think?’

  He stirred sugar into his coffee and tapped the spoon on the side of the cup. His hand was big around the spoon. His forearms were freckled and the pale orange hairs on them listed sideways in the breeze.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s a sad story about Wilbur’s parents, and I see why he wants to run the course, but why are we going along with it? The guy’s a stranger! It’s nice of us, isn’t it?’

  Niall leaned forward, folding his arms on the table. It rocked. Startled, he sat back and studied the ground. Then he shifted the table slightly and now it was steady.

  ‘It is,’ he agreed, smiling. When he smiled, his eyes disappeared almost completely, leaving just cracks of bright blue amid deep patterns of lines. This was unexpected: when not smiling, Niall’s face was long, steady, solemn, almost sombre.

  ‘Do you think you’ll keep going?’ he asked me.

  ‘So long as he keeps giving us sushi.’

  Niall nodded. ‘And cake.’

  We both smiled.

  ‘Plus I want to see what happens,’ I said.

  ‘You want to see what happens,’ Niall echoed, considering this carefully. He looked up at the leaves of the tree standing beside us. A golden robinia, shining lime green. The blue sky bright above it.

  A car pulled up beside us, and we both watched a woman climb out, open the boot, pull out a stroller, and set it up. Next she opened the back door of the car, reached in and emerged with a baby.

  ‘Is that why you went to the first class?’ Niall asked, turning back to me. ‘To see what would happen?’

  The woman was now clipping the baby into the pram. She handed over a stuffed toy caterpillar. The baby accepted the toy in silence. A business transaction.

  ‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘I went because it was on a Tuesday night.’

  Niall’s eyes disappeared into another grin. ‘On a Tuesday night?’ His intonation made me think of an Irish accent now, but only the shadows, the traces of it.

  I told him about my reading plans, The Celestine Prophecy, the letter from Wilbur, the message from my father, the confluence of Tuesdays.

  He smiled faintly as I talked, and drank his coffee, looking to the side, the crinkles around his eyes deepening now and then. He seemed to find the story funny, so I drew it out, but eventually I finished.

  ‘How about you?’ I said. ‘Why did you go?’

  He tipped back the last of his coffee, put the cup down, glanced at me then turned sideways. He was facing the tree. ‘Why did I go?’ he repeated. ‘Because I hoped you might be there.’

  7.

  Oscar seemed wild that night: wild curls, wild eyes, laughing loudly at my jokes about the dinosaur.

  They weren’t jokes so much as a performance. We were eating dinner on the couch, watching ABC for Kids, and I picked up the latest toy dinosaur that my mother’s husband, Xuang, had mailed to us. Xuang was obsessed with dinosaurs as a child, he says, and he wanted to encourage the same in Oscar, phoning him now and then to ask after his favourite. ‘T-Rex!’ Oscar always says, and I can hear Xuang’s voice urging a less obvious choice: ‘Diplodocus? Brachiosaurus?’ ‘No,’ Oscar says patiently. ‘T-Rex.’

  Anyhow, tonight I picked up Xuang�
�s latest gift (a triceratops) and had it rise up behind the cushions and express surprise to find us there. ‘I’m just walking around on my mountains here, and oh! What’s this? Who are you?’ The dinosaur kept lumbering around the couch and discovering us. It was a riot. Hilarious. Oscar’s wild eyes, wild laugh. We both fell about laughing. Some peas slid from Oscar’s plate to the floor. ‘What are those?’ the dinosaur shouted. ‘Falling green boulders!’ Oscar couldn’t breathe, he was laughing so hard. The dinosaur leaned over, trying to get a closer look at the falling green boulders. He toppled to the floorboards. He survived but with various wounds.

  We bandaged him up with torn strips of paper towel and he was fine.

  ‘What a day,’ Oscar said, as I put him to bed.

  8.

  The following Tuesday night, I returned to Wilbur’s place, and he held a class in Flight Meditation.

  Before we started, however, we lined up side by side at Wilbur’s windows and stared into the evening blue. We were looking for flight waves.

  ‘We’ll start each class with this exercise,’ Wilbur explained, striding up and down behind us, and instructing us to keep our eyes on the glass. ‘Don’t expect to see anything tonight, of course. It will take weeks, months even, before the flight waves appear. We just need to get into the habit of looking.’

  ‘Wait, so this isn’t part of the meditation?’ Frangipani frowned.

  ‘No.’

  His ‘no’ was emphatic, but in fact I did find it meditative, to stand at a window and stare. Through the glass I could see roofs, chimneys, pipes, wires. A bird swooped. I turned to Niall, who was beside me, and smiled. He smiled back. I stepped forward and looked down at the road. A parked car, a garbage bin lying on its side.

  ‘Not too close,’ Wilbur said. ‘You’re not looking down at things, you’re only looking out at the air.’

  I looked up again. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Never apologise,’ Wilbur told me kindly. This seemed like bad advice. Sometimes an apology is just the thing.

  Antony tapped on the glass. ‘Flight waves? Can you hear me?’

  Pete Aldridge winced and massaged his own shoulder. It must have been playing up again. He was paying almost no attention to the windows.

  ‘Is it like looking at those pictures?’ Antony enquired. ‘The Magic Eye pictures with the hidden 3D images?’

  Interested by this idea, everyone turned to Wilbur.

  Wilbur considered. ‘It might be,’ he hedged.

  ‘Well, that’s it for me then,’ Niall said. ‘I’ve never been able to see those images. I’ve stood and stared at one for half an hour or more, and it was always nothing but the pattern.’ He sketched squiggles in the air.

  ‘I’ve never looked at one properly,’ Nicole announced. ‘Every time I try, the word priorities comes into my head. Priorities!’ She pronounced the word in a fluting, Scottish accent. ‘So I stop, because is life long enough for us to stare at patterns? No, it’s not. Not that I’m judging you, Niall. The fact that you tried for half an hour shows commitment.’

  Niall laughed.

  ‘Got one in my living room,’ Pete Aldridge put in, bending his elbow and forcing it upwards with the other hand. That’s a good stretch. It made me want to do it, only that would have seemed like I was imitating Pete Aldridge. He was still speaking. ‘Dolphins hidden in mine. I see them instantly now.’

  ‘You have to look through the pattern,’ Frangipani told everyone. ‘Blur your eyes and relax, let the image come to you.’ She turned to Wilbur. ‘The same way you see auras. I expect that’s how we’d see flight waves too. Make our eyes passive, rather than active.’

  ‘Yes.’ Wilbur was warming to the idea. ‘Yes, that’s exactly how you do it.’

  We all looked back at the windows. I sensed the others working to relax and let images come to them. The blue outside was darkening.

  ‘Right,’ said Wilbur. ‘That’s probably enough.’

  He gestured towards a stack of purple yoga mats by the front door. ‘Everybody take one and find a place on the floor.’

  There was a moment’s pause while we measured the living room floor with our eyes. Then Antony and Niall began pushing furniture back against the walls. Frangipani and I handed out the yoga mats.

  ‘Perfect,’ Wilbur said cheerfully, assisting Antony with the coffee table. The muscles in Wilbur’s forearms were pronounced. ‘Thank you. Yes, I wondered about space but Antony and Niall are problem-solvers. And wait.’ He headed down the hall and I saw him pivot on his heel as he turned into a doorway.

  When he returned this time, you couldn’t see his face for the cushions in his arms. He peered around them. The cushions were the big, puffy sort, embroidered with silvers and golds, tasselled edges. These, he flung about the floor.

  We were instructed to lie flat on our backs on the yoga mats and cushions. There was jostling for place, and my feet ended up dangerously close to Pete Aldridge’s head. He didn’t seem to mind. He groaned as he lay down on the mat, grasping his shoulder, but once flat he exhaled noisily and said, ‘Just the thing.’

  Wilbur wove between us, turned on some low, mystical music, sat down on the floor, and requested that we close our eyes and breathe.

  9.

  Incidentally, for his thirteenth birthday, my brother Robert received a Magic Eye picture. He Blu-tacked it to his bedroom wall. It rippled like water, shades of green woven with yellow in vertical shimmers. Late one night, not long after he had disappeared, I went into his room and stared at this picture. I had never bothered with it before, but now I stared until a woman appeared, riding a bicycle. She was not the person I was looking for, of course, but I was pleased enough to see her.

  10.

  ‘Eilmer of Malmesbury,’ Wilbur said, low and gentle, into the quiet of our breathing, ‘was an eleventh-century English monk.’

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Keep your eyes closed,’ Wilbur murmured. ‘Breathe in. Breathe out. Don’t try to listen to the words that I’m saying. Simply breathe them in.’

  I breathed deeply. My arms and legs felt heavy on the mat. Niall was two mats over. I could hear him breathing.

  ‘Eilmer of Malmesbury jumped from an abbey watchtower,’ Wilbur said, ‘one hundred and fifty feet high. He was wearing wax wings. He broke both his legs. Afterwards he said he failed because he wasn’t wearing a tail.’

  Nicole snorted.

  ‘Shhh,’ Wilbur said. ‘Breathe in. Breathe out.’

  ‘Which?’ Pete Aldridge complained. ‘In or out?’

  ‘Both,’ Frangipani clarified. ‘Or I assume so. Wilbur?’

  ‘The father of King Lear,’ Wilbur continued, ignoring the question, ‘King Bladud, died leaping from a tower. According to legend, he was attempting to fly: wings he had constructed himself were attached to his arms. He was smashed to pieces.’

  There were puzzled, distressed murmurs from around the room.

  ‘Shhh,’ Wilbur said again. ‘In 1519, a Portuguese man named João Torto attempted a flight from a cathedral wearing calico-covered wings and an eagle-shaped helmet.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Nicole asked.

  ‘Hush,’ Wilbur said. ‘Breathe. He died.’

  Antony laughed aloud.

  ‘Paolo Guidotti crashed through a roof wearing wings of whalebone and feathers,’ Wilbur added, ‘and broke his thigh.’

  Niall spoke up. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘that these stories are quite the thing.’

  Giggles rose and fell. Wilbur raised his voice but sustained his lulling tone. ‘Otto Lilienthal first attempted to fly a glider in 1891. In 1896, his glider stalled and crashed. He broke his back and died.’

  The stories continued. People jumped, leaped, fell and broke their limbs. People crashed balloons into the sea and drowned. People flew and fell, flew and fell. All the time Wilbur spoke in the same singsong voice.

  Eventually, he couldn’t be heard over our laughter. ‘It’s in the script,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m readin
g from the script.’ And now our laughter grew and ascended until we were rolling around in it, sitting up, falling sideways, hurting with it, weeping. Wilbur shrugged, set down his notes, and we laughed even harder.

  After that we ate lemon and ginger cheesecake and drank sherry.

  ‘We were getting to a point,’ Wilbur said eventually. ‘The point was that all these people thought they had to use wings of calico, or whalebone, machines, cloth, motors and gas, and that is why they crashed.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable point,’ Niall conceded, ‘but it’s not really meditation.’

  11.

  That night, I collected Oscar from my father’s place and drove home while Oscar chatted, from the back seat, about Grandpa and Lynette, and how Lynette couldn’t find any socks for him, and you cannot play at Firecracker Soft Play Centre if you don’t have socks. You need socks. And Lynette said, ‘This is a disaster!’ but then she found them.

  ‘They were in the exact same place I put them last week!’ I said. ‘The front pocket of your backpack! I told Lynette they were there!’

  But he only repeated the story of how Lynette could not find them, until she could. ‘So very lucky,’ he added to himself in Lynette’s voice, shaking his head at the car window.

  Lynette had bought Oscar a baby doll from a vending machine in the play centre, and this now lay across Oscar’s lap, alongside one of his toy swords. The gift of the doll pleased me because I like the idea of Oscar having a doll: it is consistent with my principles of parenting, many of which I keep forgetting to apply. But was it an implied criticism of the three plastic swords in his backpack?

  ‘Did Lynette get you the baby doll before or after she looked in your backpack for your socks?’ I asked Oscar.

  ‘She couldn’t find my socks at all!’ Oscar declared. ‘But then she find-ed them! So very lucky.’

  Which was no answer.

  In any case, you can’t call up your father’s wife and say, ‘Was your gift of the baby doll a commentary on my parenting? Because, just so you know, he already has plenty of non-gender-specific toys. He has a pink fairy wand at home! I bought it for him in the two-dollar store the moment he asked for it. The swords in his backpack are not representative.’