Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  And the tall man had said there would be snow. Any time now, outside this window, snow. Snow in December! But that’s the way down south. Things begin to turn as you approach the poles; a giant hand tilting up the hourglass.

  At least that’s what I thought in my lyrical mood. I know that it’s nonsense. It’s just it was unseasonably cold.

  But at that point, happiness and calm were untangling themselves, all the way through my body, like a long, black coat drawn from a suitcase. At the same time, cold shots of excitement touched the back of my neck. It was the first time I’d taken a break from the café in three years. It was the first time I’d flown in an aeroplane since Oscar was born.

  It was not the first time I’d left Oscar with my mother overnight—but this was going to be for three nights, so it was the longest.

  My lips felt dry—the cracking wind—but I was smiling anyway. A bird crossed the frame of the window, trailing night. I remembered the two pointing men we’d passed in the golf buggy, and had the sudden sense that I’d seen them before.

  Or I’d seen that formation, or a piece of it: a man sits by the side of a road, pointing at the sky.

  I realised I was in a dream state. I would call my mum, I decided, and check on Oscar, and then have a bath and sit by the fire in my pyjamas and I’d make myself a cup of tea—there were teabags fanned out on the sideboard alongside a shy electric jug and two upturned teacups; I could see chamomile and spearmint—and I’d eat that cake, one teaspoon at a time. I breathed in the strange happiness, and smiled my cracked, dry lips, and—

  The door rattled.

  A piece of notepaper slid beneath it. Footsteps hurried down the corridor, away.

  I picked up the paper.

  You missed three, it said. Now what?

  3.

  I didn’t know what the note meant.

  You missed three. Now what?

  I felt irked.

  Have you seen the movie Bolt? It’s about a dog that believes it’s a super-dog. The dog has John Travolta’s voice and a quiet pride in its own super-strength and super-bark. The humour comes from the dog running around New York, believing in itself.

  I am irked! says the villain, at one point in the movie, and Oscar turned to me and explained: ‘See that man? His name is Irked.’

  Kids! The world is so confusing, but now and then they think they’ve got a piece of it down: when somebody says, I am—, they are giving their name.

  You think you’ve got life figured out, you lean back on the couch—and then it hits.

  You don’t have superpowers. You haven’t even got basic grammar.

  So, this was me in a guesthouse with cake, towels, snow clouds, and I had figured out that this night was for happiness.

  But no. Underneath the door, a cold truth. You missed three. Now what?

  Who likes to be told that they missed something? Let alone three things. Who likes that accusatory tone?

  I suppose calm, sensible people might raise their eyebrows: ‘I did? I apologise. Can you remind me precisely what I missed?’

  But I am a person who will rise up: a student of Pilates lifting, puppet strings hooked onto my head, the puppetmaster raising my whole body. (You get taller and you get inner-core strength when you do that at Pilates.) But when the voice of authority addresses me in a singsong tone—You missed three!—I rise up, hackles up, claws out: I DID NOT! I DID NOT EVEN MISS ONE! Even when I haven’t got a clue what they’re on about. Maybe I did miss three? Maybe I missed fifteen.

  I threw open the door, but there was nobody there so I slammed it shut.

  In my irritation, I ate the cake. Without a cup of tea, without a bath, without a robe, without calm by the fire, just scoop, scoop, scoop with the silver spoon.

  I saw what I’d done and became angrier. I considered calling the front desk to ask Ellen for another slice, please.

  ‘On account of I accidentally ate this one.’

  But that was no excuse.

  I called my mum instead, and she gave me a detailed recount of how and where she’d read Where is Hairy Maclary? to Oscar that day. Ten or twelve times at least, she said. She recited the story for me—as proof, I suppose. It has pleasing rhythms. It calmed me. Next she set out the complicated rules of each game she and Oscar had played in the garden. This also manifested as a form of meditative hypnosis.

  I can’t remember their other activities. She described them all; the day was crammed with them. Also, he’d had a good dinner, apparently: lamb cutlets, mashed potato, carrots, a slice of wholemeal bread with a little butter. All the food groups.

  She was marking out the coordinates of her grandmothering for me, and they were excellent. They always are. From free-range mother to mindful grandma. Each time she takes care of Oscar, I think I should model my parenting on her. But then I take him back and return to normal life: go to work, collect Oscar from day care, get home, drop my bag and shoes on the floor before we eat fish and chips in front of the TV.

  Oscar was asleep, which was sad, but was also, actually, a relief. I love hearing his tiny ‘hello?’ on the phone, but then I don’t know what to do with it. We have plenty to say in person, but on the phone? Well, all I can think to do is to reach down and hug his voice.

  ‘Have you found out what it’s all about yet?’ Mum wanted to know. ‘Have you shaved your head and signed over your fortune?’

  She was pretty sure it was a cult. She’d been joking to all her friends, ‘Abi’s off to join a cult!’

  But she’d also been saying, quite seriously, to me: ‘I think I should come with you, Abi. They might be going to sell you into slavery or turn you into a drug mule.’

  ‘They’d only do the same to you,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t let them.’

  ‘Well, I won’t let them either,’ I promised, and this seemed to cheer her up.

  In fact, I knew what would happen here.

  There’d be more of the same empty/weird stuff as in the chapters I’d received in the mail, only they’d keep making tantalising promises that something better—the point, the answer, the Truth—was just around the corner! At the end, they’d tell me that this really valuable information would be available once I’d signed up for their two-thousand-dollar seminar and purchased this five-volume DVD.

  But if they wanted to give me a free getaway and a boost of self-help? Well, great. I’d have no problem refusing to commit to anything further: I had my café and my kid. No free time and hardly any money.

  And they couldn’t make me do anything. I also have a law degree.

  So I chatted with Mum on the phone, scraped myself into pyjamas, dragged back the bedclothes and fell asleep.

  4.

  The next morning, I had a birthday room service breakfast in bed. It was excellent: crisp granola sparked with cinnamon and pecans, rich dark coffee with cream; the sky streaked with wind and grey through the softly rattling windows; the bed big and white. I took deep, shining breaths of it all, and let myself be both sad and glad, the way you’re supposed to, and felt my lost birthdays, all the lost birthdays stacking up behind me, all the anger and the anguish, the terror and the hope, all the harshness and the sweetness, the spoon a silver glint against the white.

  Then I went downstairs to learn the truth.

  5.

  It was the tall man; the man who’d collected me from the airstrip and offered snow. He was the teacher.

  Or whatever you call the person in charge at a self-help retreat on an island in Bass Strait.

  As I walked into the conference room of the Hyacinth Guesthouse, he offered me a manila folder.

  ‘Don’t open it just yet,’ he said. ‘Take a seat.’

  The conference room had much the same ambience as the guest rooms. Rugs, an open fire, framed prints of antique balloons on the walls. Narrow windows leaned into a cold, grey view of rocky slope running down to surly sea. Armchairs were scattered about like uncertain guests at a party.
/>   A very slight woman sat in one of these armchairs, ankles crossed, manila folder resting on her lap. She was frowning to herself. She caught my eye, threw me a quick smile, then resumed the frown, deepening it now. Maybe making up for time lost with that smile. (Or had my face reminded her of something troubling? An unreturned library book, say, or soup she’d defrosted weeks before but never eaten.)

  Across the room, their backs to me, two men stood at a table, each holding a large, white plate. One was broad-shouldered with red hair.

  I’ll tell you this for free. I like a man with broad shoulders and red hair.

  The other guy, taller and darker, hovered over a tray of pastries with a pair of silver tongs. He murmured something in the tone of an uncertain joke, and the broad guy laughed, tipping sideways with his laughter. There was a note of golden warmth in his laugh (in my view, anyway), and in the way that he straightened up again so easily, ready for the next laugh.

  I sat down. A few more people arrived, one at a time, some looking around in bemusement, others bright-eyed, or with grim expressions that seemed to say: I’m suspending judgment but I won’t suspend it long.

  At each new arrival, the tall man handed over another manila folder. ‘Don’t open it yet,’ he said. ‘Take a seat.’ Again and again, the same phrases. I wondered why he didn’t vary them.

  But then he did. ‘Not to open yet,’ he said. ‘Please, for now, sit down.’

  Hm, I thought. Maybe stick to the original. The brief expression of distress on his face suggested he was thinking the same thing.

  Eventually, his stack of folders was gone.

  The room was all rustle and movement now. There were maybe twenty-five or thirty people, a mix of men and women, a scattering of races and accents. I heard American, something that might be Eastern European, and a New Zealand accent in there, but otherwise mostly Australian.

  Some were at the table helping themselves to the pastries and coffee, chatting about pastries and coffee—and about weather, islands, breakfast, flights; a few at the windows, hands pressed to the glass; some sitting in the chairs, silent, or talking low-voiced. (‘I like your shoes,’ I heard a man say to a woman. ‘Oh!’ said the woman, and she swung her feet from side to side, admiring the shoes herself. I admired them too. Such a glossy purple.)

  Nobody mentioned the strangeness of us being here.

  I stayed quiet. It was my birthday. That exempted me from small talk.

  Now came an unexpected twist in the day.

  That’s overstatement; it wasn’t a twist. Only, the next thing took the mood around a curve. The tall guy strode to a sideboard, messed with an iPod, and music filled the room. ‘Read My Mind’ by the Killers.

  I love that song! It gives me this excited feeling like it has a secret message just for me. It’s more the song’s tone than its lyrics; I can’t really figure those out.

  Anyhow, the music starts and the tall guy stands there, expressionless.

  Around me the chatter stops, the purple-glossy-shoe woman does a cute tapping thing with her purple-glossy shoes, a guy with a goatee drums a quick flourish on his armrest.

  And I have this surge of what my brother Robert and I used to call the Breakfast Club vibe. The feeling that something swift and strong is going to happen or unfold; that here, among these people, are stripes of energy, smouldering and poised, ready to snap into being.

  Somewhere behind me, a guy sings along with a line of the song in a good, strong, unaffected voice. Another guy’s voice, also strong, shoots back the next line, and people smile or chuckle softly at this, so then I know I’m right about the Breakfast Club vibe.

  I felt happy-birthday good. People are going to tell secrets here, I thought. People are going to surprise themselves and one another. We will clash and cry and challenge one another; we may even change our appearances for the better—take down our hair or muss it up! remove our spectacles! tear off our shirtsleeves and use one as a bandana?—and certainly some of us will sleep together.

  I hoped I’d be one of the ones doing the sleeping together and, in particular, I hoped I’d sleep with the redheaded guy.

  Or that one over there with the flat cap and hipster beard. His smile was friendly.

  I hadn’t properly checked out all the men in the room, so there might have been further possibilities. I would certainly have been happy to sleep with either of the two men who’d sung along just then, although I couldn’t quite see their faces.

  The song ended.

  Entertain me, I thought suddenly, looking at the tall man. Out of the blue, I felt supercool. I looked right up at him, with a challenge on my face. Entertain me.

  The tall man waited. He let the silence carry on. He glanced back at me, like he was all set to meet my challenge.

  Nice, I thought, in reference to his glance.

  Then he spoke in a low, soft, reasonable voice.

  ‘You might remember,’ he said, ‘twenty years ago, when you first received a letter in the mail?’

  6.

  He meant the letter enclosing the first chapter of The Guidebook.

  We all knew what he meant. At least, I assume we did. There was a wonderful rush of goosebumps across the room.

  ‘Open your manila folders,’ the tall man said next, same tone of voice.

  Raised eyebrows, opening folders. Inside was a copy of that first letter.

  ‘Touché,’ someone murmured.

  ‘Um,’ a voice responded, ‘in what way?’

  The tall man blinked at this exchange, then recovered. ‘Kindly read over the letter,’ he instructed, and we obeyed. People sighed, giggled or swore as they read.

  I looked over shoulders, confirming that the other letters were essentially the same as mine. Then I read it:

  Dear Abigail,

  Congratulations.

  Of all the people, in all the world, you have been chosen to receive this.

  Enclosed is Chapter 1 of The Guidebook. One day, this book will change the world. In the meantime, it will change your life.

  We invite you, please, to read this chapter.

  No. More than read it. Eat it. Devour it. Freeze it into ice cubes and place these in a glass of lemonade. (Drink the lemonade.) Dive into it! Swim through it. Love it. Embrace it! Wear it as a coat!

  As you may notice, Chapter 1 is very short. Some might even say peculiarly short. This happens throughout The Guidebook. Some chapters are just a line or two!

  But where is the rule that says a chapter must be ten to twelve pages?

  Nowhere.

  Would you like to continue receiving chapters from The Guidebook? Do you dare to embrace this opportunity? Do you wish your life to soar to heights beyond your wildest dreams?

  If so, please write to us at PO Box 2828, Katoomba, NSW with the single word: YES.

  Yours with alacrity,

  Rufus and Isabelle

  PS It would be best if you kept this to yourself.

  I looked up from the letter.

  ‘Are you Rufus?’ demanded a woman, pointing at the tall man at the front. A plastic frangipani flower was woven into this woman’s ponytail; I tried not to judge her for this.

  The tall man held up his palms. ‘My name is Wilbur,’ he said.

  There was an interested silence.

  ‘Not Rufus,’ he clarified, somewhat unnecessarily.

  ‘So you’re not the Rufus who sent us the chapters?’ the frangipani woman asked, in a penetrating, cross-examiner’s voice.

  Good grief, I thought.

  ‘I hope he’s not that Rufus,’ I murmured, and people around me laughed. This warmed my heart.

  However, not everyone laughed. Some, including frangipani-flower-woman, turned to me with reproachful expressions, as if I might have hurt Wilbur’s feelings.

  But honestly, the tall man appeared to be no older than me. If he was Rufus, he had started sending us The Guidebook when he was around fifteen. The idea that a teen had been ‘guiding’ me was pretty unsettling.
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br />   ‘What I want to know,’ said a man with a wry and sonorous voice, ‘is why I ever agreed to keep receiving these chapters.’

  There was more laughter at this. I joined in. I tried to see the speaker, and he caught my eye—he had small, round spectacles, large mouth, high cheekbones—and he smiled at me. Oh, I’ll sleep with you too, I decided generously.

  ‘Of all the people in all the world!’ a voice proclaimed, two seats along from me, and again, everybody laughed.

  That speaker had a bland, pale-pink look. I’m not going to sleep with you, I apologised.

  The tall man—Wilbur—nodded towards wry-and-sonorous. ‘This is precisely the question,’ he said. ‘Close your eyes. Are everybody’s eyes closed? Good. Now, think back to the day when you first received this letter.’

  My eyes snapped open.

  Wilbur caught this and gave me a stern look. Quickly, I closed them.

  ‘Consider this.’ His voice dropped lower and took on a sway, like a voice on a meditation tape. Immediately, I grew sleepy. ‘Consider this. This letter was sent out to one hundred and twenty young people. Only forty-three responded with a yes. Over the years, that forty-three has slipped down to thirty-one. Of those thirty-one, only twenty-six agreed to come to this retreat. You are those twenty-six.’

  That was good drama.

  ‘Now ask yourselves,’ Wilbur continued, ‘why did you say yes? Why did you never cancel the subscription? Why are you the twenty-six?’

  ‘Well, I think—’ began a woman’s voice, but Wilbur said, ‘Shhh. Close your eyes and think back.’

  7.

  At our place, the mail was always in an old frying pan on the countertop. I don’t know why.

  It also contained a faded tennis ball, random elastic bands, and a little plastic Snoopy who got tossed about and clanged against the pan whenever you leafed through the mail. He seemed resigned to this.

  On this particular day, I’d just walked up the driveway after school when Mum came tearing out of the house. She was shouting, ‘Robert! We forgot you’ve got that appointment!’