Life is a Parallel Universe (7 page)

The following
day Pope John Paul II apologises for 2000 years of wrong doing and
violence.

Vince Borelli
was the groom’s name and he was almost forty at the time; with a
kind of dyed pompadour and very white teeth. He was handsome in a
slick and obvious way, but also loaded. Supposedly, his father had
made lots of money from a record back in the seventies called ‘Al
fine’ – meaning ‘to the end’. This record is still played at many
an Italian wedding: even now. And the manna is still falling from
heaven.

The newly wed
Borelli’s buy a Victorian Italianate house of great significance
and beauty on The Hill and promptly set about gutting the interior;
installing black marble floors, stainless steel, vast quantities of
glass, and a giant spa bath. To do this, money has travelled under
various tables. And perhaps featured on birthday cakes.

As the years
travel by, Lisa has two children: a boy and a girl named Johnny and
Angela. These children, who are mostly cared for by their Nonna,
become ordinary, work- a -day people with the usual beige morals.
They regard their mother with benign tolerance.

Lisa, never
knew that her own maternal grandmother, Lilith, was a Russian Jew
who had fled Europe with her parents in 1922 during the last wave
of pogroms. As the wheel of time turned, this became just another
story, covered in the sands of life; like the two convicts in the
family tree.

As you may have
guessed, Sue Brown and Scott Smith ‘tie the knot’ in a white
wedding at the local Presbyterian Church. The couple, who saved
their wages for years, buy a three bedroom house straight away and
move out to Wallsend.

After a
suitable time, our merry couple produce three children named:
Peter, Dianna (after Princess Dianna) and Carolyn (after Princess
Caroline). Peter, named after his paternal grandfather, plays
soccer and gets excited only about cars. Dianna and Carolyn are
twins and compete for class stars, for the best handwriting, and
who can skip the most jumps on the skipping rope at lunchtime.

Sue works part
time in the school office, serves on canteen duty and fulfils her
Saturday night obligations. Eyes to the wall. All goes along
swimmingly, until a minor tsunami arrives in the children’s high
school years.

The university
never did get to claim Beatrice. She continued with her singing and
guitar playing and attained some success around the pubs and clubs
of Australia. But her relationship with David splinters when she
turned twenty. David wanted to get married, but Beatrice, suddenly
felt desperate to escape the cage of her past life and to know if
she existed as a person apart from David. And, so, she left the
limits of our land, to live in London for a year. She stayed for
five.

Being further
away from the scenes of her misery, humiliation and loneliness,
allowed Beatrice to forget them somewhat. But the sadness and
emptiness she carried were always part of her.

David became a
teacher. He didn’t sing anymore, because times had changed and
younger people with new voices carrying the spirit of the times had
moved into his old haunts. He had to move on: every dog has its
day.

Later, David
married another teacher that he met at the high school where he
worked. An easy and happy marriage. They have one daughter.

David is one of
those good teachers who inspire and awaken small fires of curiosity
and confidence within their students. He is a rarity.

Sometimes,
David thinks about Beatrice: late at night, alone, when he sits in
his office with a finger of good scotch swirling a slow whirlpool
in his glass. He sighs, a long drawn out exhalation and shakes his
head as if the clear it of thought. Outside a night bird cries its
mournful dirge and the moon looks down like an old eye watching the
stricken world.

Let us return
now to Sue Smith, formerly Brown, that plain, reliable and sober
woman of the suburbs. Well, she also met a teacher at the school
where she worked and she too fell in love. And she knew, just knew
that with Sally Stavros she had found the real thing.

Strangely,
Sue’s kids took their father moving out and another ‘mother’ moving
in quite well, because, in many ways, their father was a foreigner
to them. A laconic man of few words who favoured the company of his
shed over his family. A shed, you see, has no eyes, which look with
expectation or hope or disappointment. He felt safe there as in a
womb.

The coming of
Sally into the teenagers’ lives animated their mother; she became
real to them for the first time: happy in her truth.

In 2012,
Beatrice was thirty seven years old and she had a child of her own,
a precious daughter whom she named Charisma. This name, which can
mean ‘possessing charm that can inspire devotion in others’, was a
name which would hopefully operate, as a charm of another kind.
Beatrice did not believe in magic, but still….

Then, in 2013,
Beatrice tentatively joined Facebook and skulked and prowled about
in cyberspace. For some odd reason, perhaps because they had
featured so much in the shaping of her life, Beatrice felt
compelled to cyber-stalk her old nemesis Lisa and her various old
cronies like Sue. Strangely, Sue and Lisa were not Facebook
friends.

Lisa’s profile
could easily be summed up as ‘look at me!’ But, then, she also
displayed her complexity of character with various hate based posts
about asylum seekers ‘breaking the rules by coming here illegally’.
And, interestingly, she appeared to have a preoccupation with the
psychic domain, which she loftily called ‘a higher dimension of
existence’.

A plethora of
photos featuring Lisa swanning about various resorts, restaurants
and luxury, pools wearing assorted slutty bikinis and slinky
dresses; surrounded by vapid types eager to breathe her air
appeared to be the main subject matter of her Timeline. Some of
these photos were designed to exhibit her skeletal frame and
surgically enhanced cleavage; others showed her pouting and
flirtatious. But, it was the bountiful comments by her bosom
buddies and associates which really put Beatrice in danger of
losing her dinner.

‘Oh! You are so
beautiful!!!!’ and

‘OMG I luv luv
luv your hair & u r so beautiful!’

And on and on
in this vein. But, anyone reading such shallow tripe knew that
these gushing essayists were really high on schadenfreuder;
thinking, ‘look at that fake, aging bitch.’ You just knew.

But Beatrice
could not help wondering if Lisa had a rich inner life, in the same
way that she did. And if so, what were her deeper thoughts in
moments of introspection and reflection?

Beatrice was
befuddled when she perused the profile of Sue Brown (she had
reclaimed her maiden name) and another woman. The plain pair with
cropped hair were hugging and smiling surrounded by rainbow flags.
Like a smack to the head it hit Beatrice that Sue, was in a
relationship with another woman!

Some of
Beatrice’s former tormentors had obviously experienced the hard
hand of life. One was battling cancer and another was boated and
almost bald with some atrocious malady. Nola wrote multiple posts
about being unable to find a job or pay her rent. Beatrice felt
sad.

One day, when
Beatrice was obsessing and hovering over Lisa’s Facebook page, her
boyfriend, Marco, walked into the kitchen where Beatrice sat
hunched over her laptop. He caught sight of a dazzling photo of
Lisa and her husband Vince. ‘Holy hell! That’s my second cousin
Vincenzo’ he cried. ‘I haven’t seen him for years!’

How strange
life is. But, Beatrice was thinking: this town is too small.

And though
Beatrice searched for Terry: it seemed she was not there.

Did Sue, part
of a minority that has fought hard for equality and against being
elbowed to the margins have empathy for poor sidelined and
mistreated Beatrice when she came online? She did not. When
Beatrice joined her former school group, she received no friend
requests; it was as though an iron curtain separated her from
others. Even after all these years.

Clans and
tribes of disembodied voices existing in the land of virtual
reality.

David was
someone that Beatrice often thought about. He had been such a
generous, intelligent and very kind man, who had given her so much
in so many ways. She had felt sick-at-heart when she left him, but
she had also felt so many confused, contradictory emotions:
incarcerated by her past. A past made up of memories that science
tells are so very unreliable.

How much of our
past is actually manufactured and untrustworthy?

Life is so
confusing thought Beatrice, like a maze we must muddle through,
whilst at the same time attempting to decipher code.

But a simple
rule guided Beatrice in her dealings with others: the golden rule.
The idea that one should treat others as one would like others to
treat oneself. This concept goes way back in antiquity and can be
found in many traditions of thought. However, certain happenings
and revelations in that year made Beatrice think about how people
act and how they are treated from a very different angle.

When Charisma,
Beatrice’s daughter was a plump baby of eighteen months, her
development appeared to suddenly stall. Then, she slowly lost her
rudimentary language and then an abrupt acceleration into
hyperactivity took place. Febrile fear possessed Beatrice; she knew
that something was very wrong with her daughter. It was obvious
that the child’s mind and body were in chaos, but Beatrice too was
disoriented herself and frozen with fear, wondering what to do.

About this
time, Beatrice’s father contacted her after many years. She felt
that she had been summoned from the wilderness. She set off one
Friday evening, catching a bus and walking the short distance to
the small shack that looked even more squalid and decrepit.

Mr Snellgrove
was a shrunken and emaciated skeleton covered by a dry layer of
skin.

Beatrice didn’t
need to be told that he was suffering from something severe:
something terminal.

‘It’s
pancreatic cancer’ he explained, throwing the words out into the
air without preamble. Then he continued ‘I haven’t much time left
and there are things I gotta tell you’

Sitting down,
Beatrice felt her mind flee. She had no idea what she would hear.
Her father, however, launched into his story ‘that woman you think
was your mother, is not your mother’.