Jalan Jalan (25 page)

‘Doesn't work.'

‘Does.'

‘Doesn't. It means you get back in about twenty minutes.'

‘Does it? OK. Give you that. So faster and faster until you get back in a second, then faster and faster and at some point the time difference becomes a negative.'

‘Doesn't work.' Confidence has not found a comfortable seat in my argument.

‘And,' she adjusts in her seat as she realises a new revelation, ‘the plane has passed over all the time zones with people going to bed and getting up and working at different times in each one, ahead of us and behind us, yet we arrive back before we left. Work that out. It just strengthens the belief that time as a human concept does not exist. It is not linear.'

‘Have I got a week of this mental torture during this holiday?'

‘All sorts of torture.'

‘Good.' I kiss her neck. She kisses my cheek. We kiss lips. The woman next to me tuts.

‘Time, my dear boy, not as a concept but as a dimension or an object, is always there, like the sky and the mountains and the sea.' Laura is holding the back of my neck and whispering against my ear. ‘All laid out across an endless plain where it isn't known as time. You just have to travel a bit to see it all, and know where to be to soak it all up. All those moments of now that have ever been and will ever be. They're all there.'

The next few moments aren't successive, they all become one. Time is certainly not counted while kissing and holding and two-people-asone happens. When skin melds into skin and thoughts soak into the other's. It has no length, it has no count, the convention ceases to exist while people become more than people and slip out of the universe, closer to space than to ground, nearer to infinity and timelessness than clocks and numbers. How can time travel be an impossibility when linear time doesn't exist, and all that does exist is me and her and emotion? Love at forty thousand feet: as good and mind-blowing as sex at zero feet.

GOING WITH IT

‘I
was
used as a medium once.' Joanne sips from her beer and nods. She is a teacher at another school in Medan, at Toba to relax for the weekend with her husband John. Julie knows her so we've joined tables in this gently lit and wall-less restaurant. Crickets are rubbing their wings in the undergrowth. The large full moon throws a line of shimmering white across the lake's surface beyond their noise. The hills the darkest of blue under the mass of stars that decorate the sky.

‘Here's a good story,' says John, small and scrawny and henpecked beside the tall and hippy and overbearing Joanne.

A good story. Right. Can't wait. My head pulses behind one eye, the result of grass and beer in the sun followed by a late-afternoon nap. I hope the coolness of the evening that envelops this little place by the lake will help to ease it.

‘Go on, tell it.' Julie's eyes are nearly out of her head and her hands are strangling the neck of her beer bottle.

Jussy is leaning back in his seat, staring out into the darkness. Marty is leaning in, his head close to Julie's. Kim is still smoking grass and looking around the restaurant with bemused red eyes.

‘Well, I went to a spiritualist meeting in Brisbane to keep a friend company and watched this woman with wild hair prance around this stage trying to find people to use her crap on. It really was a load of crap and she was a fraud, but my mate soaked it up. But this woman sitting on my other side'—she points to a spot to her left—‘kept looking at me in the darkness, and every time I looked at her she didn't even look away.'

‘Did she live on Lesby Avenue?' Kim sniggers and rubs his eyes.

‘At the end,' Joanne carries on, ‘the lights come on and this woman leans over and tells me I have the gift. I just laugh and say, “Well, if it's the same as hers, I'm giving it back.” She then says that I really have the gift. That the woman on stage was a fraud. But with me, with
me
, she could feel the energy coming off me.'

John is smiling beside her, pride gushing from him. ‘So she hands me and my mate a card and tells us to call her. She'd like me to help at a séance.'

‘No way,' Julie's beer bottle is having its neck well and truly wrung.

‘Yep. Anyway my mate is really up for seeing my powers and I'm sort of curious in a cynical way, but sort of intrigued too, so we go.'

She pauses to sip her water while Hubby nods his head. ‘There's only four other people there, all wanting to talk to their dead better halves, at which point I nearly go, but this bloody woman grabs me and asks me to please stay because I really do have a gift. So I sit and the next thing she's talked me into being the host for a ghost.'

‘No way,' whispers Julie. She's caught.

I want to leave. My head is worse and my patience is wearing thin. The last thing I want is another
dukun
moment.

—So leave.

I laugh; short and sharp and loud. The others look at me.

‘Just got Kim's Lesby joke.' I wave my beer at him. ‘Very good, Kim.'

Kim raises his bottle at me.

I look at my knees

—Don't tell me you've made an appearance because this woman says she's a medium?

—Just thought it was time to annoy you, was all. Get you back for sleeping with little Miss Prozzy. And see how New You is getting on.

—New Me is fine. Having fun without you and the Ice-Cream Boy. It's been a while. I'd forgotten you.

—Right. As if.

—Anyway, I'm listening to her story.

—But you think stuff like that is bollocks.

—True. I also think you chattering away in my head is bollocks too, so right now, she is the less bollocky of my options. So shush, I missed some of her story.

‘So I'm sat in this chair and she's summoned the spirits and suddenly someone's in me. I've gone cold and can't feel my limbs and some bastard is trying to make my mouth move from within.'

‘Fuuuck.' Kim is all blinking red eyes and open mouth.

‘I hated it, so I took control and shouted, “No. Get out.”'

‘And?' Julie sucks the last dregs of life from her bottle.

‘And whoever it was left and I ran from that place and never tried it again since.'

‘Bullshit.' Jussy has swivelled around to join the table.

‘It is not. Joanne has a gift. She senses things, don't you, Joanne.' Little hubby is rubbing wife's back.

‘I can. All sorts of things. Evil or good in houses, stress in people, possessed people. I sometimes have psychic visions.' She is nodding to herself.

—Ask her about me,
says Laura, standing behind me, hands on my shoulder.

—Don't be ridiculous.

‘I can even sense there's something here, tonight, around this table.'

Joanne's eyes are closed and she tilts her head from side to side. ‘Someone.'

—Oooh.

—Shut it.

‘Oh, Joanne, no, fuck off. No.' Julie leans back in her chair and rubs her hair while she looks around the restaurant.

During the silence that follows I almost expect someone to scream. Hopefully not me. I'm willing Joanne not to look at me.

—Look at Ice-Cream Boy.

—No, don't.

—Do.

—Don't.

Before Joanne opens her eyes I'm aware of someone else standing behind me, not Laura, she seems to have suddenly cleared off. I look around. Instead of her and her green eyes and black hair and sarcasm and love, there is a man of about thirty, with tattooed arms, a shaved head, and a long pink ponytail sprouting from his shiny pate.

‘Sorry, but couldn't help overhearing your conversation and just wondered if you'd mind me joining. I love these sort of stories. Got some beliefs of my own about other dimensions.' His voice is British and surprisingly well-spoken.

‘Bet you have,' says Kim. ‘Do share, man.'

I sneak a look at Joanne to make sure she isn't studying me, isn't getting ready to denounce me as haunted person, but she's just looking down and stroking the back of her hand.

There's a scrape of wood across stone as Pink Ponytail pulls up a chair and Julie moves round so he can squeeze in.

‘That's a really cool story. I'm Derek, by the way.' His hand is offered and all shake it.

‘What's your story then, man?' Kim's eyes are ready to drop from their sore-looking sockets.

‘Well, I been travelling a while now.' He reaches behind his head and strokes his tail. ‘Ten years. Seen nearly all of Asia, Africa, South America. I've done every continent's drugs and shit.'

My head is thumping harder.

‘And I've had some weird trips, and on some of those trips I've really been places.'

Jussy yawns then apologises.

‘You alright, Jussy?' Marty asks.

‘Yeah, man. Just chilled and a bit bored of the drug stuff. Sorry, Derek, but heard this before. Let me guess, you've seen places that really exist, met people that really exist in these places and you could only go there after some heavy hallucinogen. Yeah?'

An unusually vocal moment for Jussy.

‘Yes. That's it. But it was real and I've been there a few times.'

Kim is giggling and bangs his head on the table.

‘Fuuuck. Take me there.'

For a moment we all look at Kim. He looks back at us through slow-moving eyes.

‘What?'

‘Think you need to slow down on the grass, Kimbo.' I say.

‘Who the fuck are you to tell me that? Don't fucking tell me what to do.' The sudden aggression tenses everyone around the table for a second and I have no reply.

Julie tells him to chill.

‘I am fucking chilled. You lot fucking chill. Fuck.' He shakes his head, swigs his beer and laughs. ‘Everyone suddenly wants to mother me, fuck. Get on with your story.'

‘OK man.' Derek swallows then coughs. ‘So, yeah, I took some LSD or something and I literally flew out from my body and where I was, right out over the town, and I could see everything clearly below me, houses and trees and cars, and then out over the sea, then I landed really gently on this green grassy island and met some really nice people. It was, I know it sounds weird, just a really warm friendly place. Then I just took off and floated back to me, opened my eyes and knew I'd really been somewhere. Somewhere real, but not on this Earth.'

‘I've heard of those places too,' says Joanne. ‘I believe in them. Lots of drug users believe they have really gone somewhere out of our time and dimension.'

‘Really?' I ask. Why have I asked that? Don't even consider it to be true, you idiot. But what if it is? It isn't.

—What if it is?

—It isn't.

—Time: fields and fields of moments. Or maybe islands and islands of moments, where you can hop from one and onto another.

I whack my forehead with my hand and the smacking sound makes me jump more than the pain.

‘Jesus, Newbie.' This is Marty. I nearly forgot he was there. In fact I nearly forgot everyone was there. ‘What're you doing?'

‘Mosquito. On my head. Squashed it.' I pretend to rub something off my hand.

‘I sense something in you.'

Oh shit, no.

Joanne is up and standing behind me before I can move my chair back and leave. I can smell patchouli on her.

‘Stress. You are stressed and troubled.'

‘Er, no. Just a headache. That's all.'

‘I can help.'

‘No really.'

‘I won't touch you. Wait. I promise I can make you feel better.'

‘Yeah. Go on. Exorcise Newbie.' Kim bangs his bottle on the table.

‘Really. I practise healing.'

Healing and a medium. What a girl.

‘It will help. Just relax your shoulders and keep your head still.'

—Go on. Open your mind, numbnuts.

Laura laughs and it rolls around my head like a dropped cymbal in a hall.

I let Joanne do her thing. Her open palms are just a couple of inches from each of my temples. The smell of patchouli is stronger. She slowly moves her hands in little circles.

‘Close your eyes.'

I do. I can't not. I don't want to protest too much. The table is silent and everyone is watching. The silence only breaks when Kim mutters something under his breath every few seconds.

‘Relax. Just feel the warmth. Can you feel the warmth?'

I can feel the warmth. Her hands are giving off warmth. And it's soaking into my head. Little warm spots.

Nice.

Tension is going from all over my body. It's actually nice.