Gravity Is the Thing Read online

  ‘Oscar,’ I said, when I’d paused to find a rhyme for, If those parrots sing a bit raucously (a friend who behaves tortiously? But would he want the gift of such a friend?), ‘you know how you kept saying to Grandma, I see what you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, what do you think it means when a person says, I see what you mean?’

  Oscar widened his eyes at me accusingly. ‘Stop it,’ he commanded.

  He was right. The question was too complex.

  I returned to our traditional songs, then scratched his back, patted his back, told him I loved him so, so, so, so much, engaged in a brief discussion about how much, and about whether Batman would defeat Spiderman in battle, walked out of his room and into my own, unpacked my suitcase and went to bed.

  2.

  In bed, I smiled my wry smile and found myself weeping. I tried to make my tears quiet and amused, a sort of chuckling of tears, but soon the pillowcase was wet and my body was shuddering, the sobs taking on an alarming momentum of their own. I had to bury my head under the quilt.

  I cried for my fifteen-year-old self, standing in the kitchen looking at an envelope inside a rusty frying pan. I cried for my self of two days earlier, standing on an airfield, staring at a tall man and wondering if I was supposed to snow.

  I cried for my happy, hopeful, righteous, wise teenage self, peering through a window at a darkened, empty driveway on the eve of my sixteenth birthday.

  For the self that keeps accepting, and hoping, accepting, and hoping, like quitting cigarettes and then reaching for another, the loop of magic smoke around the coincidence of dates.

  If he disappeared on the eve of my sixteenth birthday, he will reappear on the eve of my thirty-sixth. The men pointing upwards, the cake on a plate, the promise of snow, a note pushed underneath the door.

  Next, I cried for Antony in his flat cap, for his story of coming out at a birthday dinner, for Daniel with his smoky eyes and broken glass, for Niall standing with his back to me at a table of breakfast pastries.

  I kicked out my legs so the sheets got in a state, and cried for the empty space in my bed.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  One, two, three, I thought, the sobs tearing through the numbers, one, two, three, Robert, Finnegan, Guidebook, one, two, three, my brother, my husband, my Guidebook.

  I cried for Oscar and his Batman boat. I see what you mean, I thought, although I didn’t see at all, so I cried harder.

  I had held myself together, laughed at The Guidebook, but all the time, secretly, there it was: the promise of truth, of answers, a reason to keep living with the absence of knowledge, this immense knot of silence and mystery, the loss of Robert, the loss of Finnegan.

  But now even The Guidebook was gone.

  That night, I dreamed that I was climbing a tree, picking leaves as I climbed, placing these into the pockets of my corduroy jacket, climbing, picking, climbing, picking, the leaves small, ordinary leaves, sharp-edged, dark green, tear-shaped, and then I sensed something odd, a spreading all around me, and I was in a forest of trees! Other people were busy climbing the other trees, only they were plucking fruit: mulberries, peaches, plums. None, as far as I could see, was taking leaves.

  3.

  The next morning, I dropped Oscar at Blue Gum Cottage, his day care centre, and drove to the Happiness Café.

  My café is on Blues Point Road in McMahons Point, a block down from the main stretch. The path is wide here and runs up the hill past cafés and restaurants with al fresco dining beneath golden robinia trees, a post office, a bookstore, an artisanal grocer (shiny fruit in tissue paper, chocolate in fancy wraps), eventually darkening to the railway station, the office towers, the crowds more purposeful, the closer, greyer, shadowed streets of North Sydney. In the other direction, the path narrows, bumping down alongside stone houses, brick walls, side streets and gardens, before stopping abruptly at a pocket of green grass, a pocket of bright blue water, the Harbour Bridge and Opera House posing for a photograph, a ferry crossing one way, a speedboat the other, their threads of white foam intersecting.

  I started the Happiness Café after my marriage broke up.

  Despair, eh? One moment it sends you scuttling under the covers; next it makes you open a café.

  The idea is happiness immersion. We have mood-enhancing light and colours, chairs that make you say, ‘Aaah,’ as you relax into the cushions, quirky cutlery and napkin holders to elicit chuckles, newspaper clippings of feel-good stories, puzzles that are pleasantly easy to solve, audio loops of happy sounds like kookaburras laughing and brooks babbling, and indoor plants recommended by NASA for drawing toxins from the air. The walls are decorated with framed prints of misty cities or mountains piercing clouds, and framed lines of uplifting poetry rendered in calligraphic swirls.

  The menu is a masterpiece of happiness-inducing foods.

  But it’s tricky.

  For instance, not all foods that trigger serotonin are particularly tasty.

  Also, it turns out that the effect a colour scheme has on your mood depends on factors such as childhood and cultural background.

  If you have lower back issues, you don’t say, ‘Aaah,’ as you sink into the chairs, you frown: ‘Where’s the lumbar support?’

  Images of Paris in the mist might only remind you that you went there in the summer of 2002 (say), slipped on a cobblestone, broke your arm, and then discovered that your partner, who had promised to organise travel insurance, never did.

  Swirly poetry makes some people physically ill.

  And so on.

  Another thing. The café is next door to a beauty salon that does hair, skin and facial treatments. I remembered this now, as I approached. (I forget sometimes.) My heart sank a little. It had been propped up by anticipation—seeing Oliver, my chef, and Shreya, my waitress, my regular customers, setting the weekend aside—but now it readjusted.

  I worry about the effect the salon might have on my customers’ happiness, you see. A woman leaves the café, brimful of joy, notices Hair to the Throne next door, its signs offering Anti-Ageing Microdermabrasion and Hair Removal Laser Treatments.

  Her footfall, which had been animated, slows. ‘I am getting old,’ she sighs.

  Or: ‘I am kind of hairy.’

  Or: ‘Hair to the Throne. Stupid name.’

  Her joy spills and evaporates.

  Anyway, there it was. The salon.

  Inside, Jennie waved at me with both hands. She’s friendly and warm, Jennie. I like her. I just want her business to fail.

  I pushed open her door, calling, ‘Hey!’

  ‘Hey yourself!’ she said. ‘How was your weekend away?’

  That’s how well Jennie and I know each other. She was aware that I’d just been away for the weekend.

  ‘Great!’ I replied.

  So not that well, I guess. I mean, I didn’t say, ‘My weekend shattered the illusions that have held me together for years. This was predictable. And yet it did so with an unexpected twist that has left me both fragile and bereft—although, in all honesty, that could also be because I was smitten by two different men simultaneously, neither of whom I will ever see again.’

  I just said: ‘Great.’

  We did chitchat not worth recording, while Jennie used some kind of pump to spray her client’s hair, and the client sat quietly, like an obedient child. Then I stepped back out of the salon and turned towards my café.

  Happiness, I thought. It’s a complicated thing.

  I’ve thought that many times before, of course. But now the thought sprouted tendrils. It rose up inside me like Jack’s beanstalk. It twisted up my chest, down each arm and pierced the fingernails!

  The beanstalk thickened, grew to the circumference of a tree, and there I was, inside my dream, climbing up the branches, reaching for leaves while others plucked at plums and peaches.

  I saw what the dream meant.

  I saw what I must do.

  4.
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  Later that night, I set to work doing what I knew I must.

  By now, it was so obvious to me I felt embarrassed by my subconscious for dreaming with such transparency.

  Here it is.

  As you know, self-help is a vast and thriving industry. It spans books, movements, religions, communes, therapies, diet, psychics, philosophies, life-changing novels and exercise regimes. From the earliest civilisations, people have been trying to sort out how to live, the point of it all, the key to happiness, and how to interact in a way that makes everybody like us.

  Yet I had only ever read The Guidebook.

  Seriously. Although I’d often skimmed, ignored or mocked its pages, The Guidebook had been my only reference point. I’d never read another self-help book, never enrolled in an aura-healing class, never even been to see a motivational speaker!

  Of course, it is impossible to live without coming into contact with self-help. Essentially, life is the river in which we all tread water, sometimes flailing, sometimes swimming a steady freestyle, maybe a leisurely breaststroke (and so on). Now and then a flotation device bobs by—a boat, a buoy, a candy-pink inflated castle—and people grab it and climb aboard. At last, they can have a rest.

  They float along the river for a while (or forever), riding on the device. (Some are hoisted up when they are born and later jump off, to the distress or chagrin of the family and friends left aboard.)

  Sometimes, the same style of flotation device is suddenly everywhere, crowded with excited people, and they call out to you, ‘Here! Come try this! It’s brilliant! My sister told me about it! If only I’d found it sooner!’

  They’re in the zeitgeist; they are the zeitgeist. You catch the lingo, you read the articles, your friends go off to the courses and describe them to you, embarrassed by their conversion, or they babble, not embarrassed at all.

  So, I knew some of the basics. I had sampled various religions over the years, trying to get a navigation system to God, or whoever was in charge, so that I could put in a request for the return of my brother. I knew about living in the moment and the value of yoga. Movies had taught me how therapy works: the therapist tells you to set boundaries, and that nothing is truly your fault.

  Also, I knew that there was something called chi which you—well, you wanted it. It belonged to another culture, but it was good.

  But I had never climbed aboard anything! I was living my life, missing my brother, searching for my brother, I was studying law, I was falling in love, I was losing my husband, I was being a parent, and whenever I saw, say, a giant inflatable swan floating by, I waved it on! No, no, I said, I’m okay, I’ve got my Guidebook.

  There was so much I didn’t know, because all I’d ever known was The Guidebook.

  Yet here I was running a Happiness Café!

  To be clear, and to get out of the river and back to my dream metaphor: I had been plucking leaves from the pages of The Guidebook, and had never tried the fruits of other trees.

  So I’d sped to Stanton Library after work and taken out a number of self-help books. These were now stacked on my kitchen bench.

  I took the top one from the pile and started reading.

  The Celestine Prophecy, it was called. I’d heard of it and knew it was connected with coincidence, and with messages delivered by strangers.

  The book turned out to be the story of a man who travels around Peru eating soup, sleeping here and sleeping there. (People were amazingly hospitable.) He learns that we can direct our energy at plants and they’ll grow really well, but then we eat the plants. So, in the end, they lose. But we win, in that, following our consumption of the plants, we grow happy and healthy. Chew food very slowly, the man also learns—I suspect the author was suffering from indigestion at that point—and be nice to other people and open to conversation because anybody might have a message for you. You don’t need to think hard, or weigh up factors; you just keep an eye out for coincidence and messages. Easy. In the end, we will stop working because we’ll make money by selling our messages, and next we will vibrate madly and disappear.

  5.

  The morning after I finished The Celestine Prophecy, I felt very wise and floaty.

  I wondered if Oscar had a message for me. He had just woken me by jumping onto my bed and shouting, ‘GET UP!’ so that might have been his message. But I checked for another.

  ‘Oscar, do you have a message for me?’

  ‘Yes!’ he said at once.

  This made my chest flutter.

  ‘What’s your message?’ I asked him carefully.

  But he scrambled off my bed and ran from the room. His footsteps pattered down the stairs.

  Oh well, I thought.

  I lay in bed, stretching my arms above my head, and looking forward to the time when nobody would need to work and we’d all vibrate invisibly. Although, how would I keep an eye on Oscar when he was invisible?

  And he’s so cute! It would be a shame not to see him anymore.

  Oscar was singing downstairs. Footsteps on the stairs again. Now he was back in my room, something cupped in his hands. ‘Hold out your hands,’ he instructed, and he filled my palms with Honey Nut Cheerios. Many fell onto the pillow. ‘Here is your message,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Surprising!’

  ‘No, no,’ he chided, disappointed in me. ‘You say this: Thank you for my message. You say: I love my message.’

  He ran back down to the kitchen to get me another message.

  This went on for a while, trails of Cheerios up and down the stairs. Then I had to give him a message, and it had to be something from the fridge.

  Eventually, I drove him to day care.

  I kept glancing at the trees we passed, trying to tap into their energy, so I wouldn’t steal Oscar’s. I worried about just how much of Oscar’s energy I had taken in the last four years, before I had read The Celestine Prophecy and knew I was supposed to get it from the universe.

  I felt the energy from the trees! Seriously! It kind of tipped into my head through my right ear and tunnelled its way through my body. It was very good. It was so good I wondered how I’d missed it before. I felt the energy clogging up around my shoulder, so I used my imagination to scoop it up and pour it into the essence of my being.

  After that, I just had to break off a piece when I needed it. For example, I took a piece to help me find a parking spot, and to remember the security code at Blue Gum Cottage, and to push the gate open—it gets jammed. It was good to let the universe deal with that jam.

  I signed Oscar in, read a notice about proposed Mandarin lessons for the children, felt grateful to the universe for offering my child lessons in Mandarin, and said goodbye. Oscar considered whether to weep at my departure or to get straight on with playing. I could see it in his face, the weighing up of factors. But then his friend Lachlan ran by, calling, ‘Oscar! We need you!’ so that was decisive. I left him busy trying to catch Lachlan to find out what was needed.

  Arriving at the Happiness Café, I asked Oliver, my chef, if he had a message for me, and he said, ‘Yes, the Schweppes guy called to say he was running a couple of hours late, but no sweat, we still have plenty of soft drinks in the fridge.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I mean a message. Like, a message?’

  ‘Hm.’ Oliver squinted.

  ‘Like an insight?’

  A sharp intake of breath through Oliver’s teeth, his eyes bright. ‘For sure I do!’ he said. He clicked his tongue quickly, thinking, thinking.

  Eventually he admitted that he was not completely sure what his insight was, but it might be something to do with the colour of my dress, which wasn’t the ideal shade for my complexion, and he’d need to consider overnight. Was that okay?

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I’m an easygoing boss.

  Our waitress, Shreya, had been listening to our exchange, and now she raised her eyes to the ceiling and exhaled. I knew better than to ask her for a message.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘You�
��ll give me a message without even realising you’re doing it.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I have zero interest in happiness,’ she had told me when I originally interviewed her for the position, which I found so funny I hired her.

  I spent much of the day eavesdropping on customers’ conversations, in case they contained messages.

  A man sat in the corner, at table seven, making call after call about insurance policies. As far as I could deduce, he’d recently separated from his wife and wanted her name removed from his policies. An open manila folder lay before him and, as he talked, he fanned out paper after paper until the table was covered.

  At table four, two girls in their twenties were drinking green tea. ‘Oh, his photos!’ one enthused. ‘His photos!’

  The other said: ‘No, it’s just his equipment. He’s not that good.’

  I would have liked to see the photographs myself, to decide. Also, I can’t hear the word equipment without thinking of my first boyfriend, Samuel.

  Meanwhile, at table twelve, a woman sat alone, a map open on the table before her, hand covering her mouth.

  Shreya approached insurance guy at table seven, a plate of banana bread in her hand. She paused and studied the scattered papers: ‘Let’s clear a bit of real estate here,’ she said.

  6.

  I arrived home weary from my floaty search for messages.

  There was a letter in my mailbox. The envelope was white. A pair of leaping dolphins on the stamp. Addressed in blue handwriting. No return address.

  Probably another letter from a real estate agent offering to value my house and pointing out that there are motivated buyers in this neighbourhood. These always make me uneasy, imagining small crowds of motivated people loitering outside my front door, ready to pounce. They’ll be so mad, I always think, when they find out I can’t sell. (I don’t own this house. I’m renting.)