On the Edge A Novel (7 page)

The circle was the sun, Ulrike explained, and each person was a sunbeam. ‘We will dance the sun meditation and maybe the sun will come out,’ she smiled.

Fat chance, thought Peter.

Ulrike asked everyone to look at each other while they danced.

The music from the
St Matthew Passion
swelled from a ghetto-blaster in the corner. They started to move in a simple step, looking by turns into each other’s eyes, trying to move harmoniously round the room.

Peter looked at Lolita and she seemed to be serious and kind. Krishna, too, had a serious expression in his eyes. He looked around the room and saw candour, yearning and woundedness. Only Jill looked resolutely at her feet. She was young, excruciated, lost. Her skin was bad and her clothes defiantly ugly, but instead of dismissing her as he would have in the predatory streets of London, Peter found himself longing to reassure her and put her at her ease. They moved around, ceremonious and slow. If only she would look up, he would rain kindness into her eyes.

There were further dances, including a vegetarian allegory in which a hunter, startled by the beauty of his prey, spared its life. Peter continued to note the ideological pressure he was under, but it no longer bothered him as much. He was more intrigued by the strange sense of goodwill that was welling up in him. Why not approach people with trust instead of suspicion? Why not be helpful instead of opportunistic? Why not be heartfelt instead of calculating?

The clouds had thinned, melted and fragmented, and the sun poured down on to the lawn and through the tall windows onto the blond floorboards of the ballroom. What was going on?

‘You see, we’ve brought out the sun!’ Ulrike laughed.

Over the next few days, he kept rediscovering this sense of goodwill, even when the experiences it accompanied seemed to take place on moonless nights of rhetoric and credulity. His concern for the rest of the group gradually rose to a pitch at which his happiness seemed inseparable from the happiness of the others. Everyone developed a sense of each other’s vulnerability by telling their ‘stories’. Instead of having to lower the portcullis of a false self in order to avoid being hurt, they pre-empted the pain by showing that they were all hurt already. There was a great liberation in feeling that the worst had already happened. This mutual concern was how family life should be, but of course never was, and that was its seductiveness.

There was a hint of a primordial scene as everybody told their stories, if not around a campfire, at least around the fat candle that always burnt at the centre of the circle.

Peter had not devoted much time to what Gavin called ‘navel-gazing’, although Gavin himself once admitted to a ‘bout of the blow-your-brains-out’ on an otherwise meticulously rowdy skiing holiday in Klosters. Peter had no very clear idea of what he felt about the big issues, except a general sense that God was bad taste in some forms, boring in others and mad in the rest. Nevertheless, he started to reflect that even if we were just dying animals, burdened with self-consciousness and the certainty of death, telling ourselves stories about the world in order to pass the time and relieve our troubled minds, then they might as well be good stories and they might as well be true. And so he told the group his real reasons for being there and about Sabine and how he’d been happy for the three days they’d spent together, happier than he’d ever been.

Everyone was touched by what he’d said and nobody seemed to worry that he’d not said it before.

‘Oh, it’s so romantic,’ said Oriane, ‘it make me want to cry.’ And cry she did.

‘I want you to think of room ten as your room, Peter,’ said Evan, a buck-toothed and awkward Australian, aching to do good for the world in ways it was hard for him to put his finger on. Room ten had been assigned to Peter before it became known that he was staying in a hotel.

‘It’s actually rather a special room, because it was Eileen and Peter Caddy’s family room,’ Evan went on, unaware that this would not represent an additional temptation to Peter, who found the mythology of Findhorn and the lives of its founders, often recounted with the portentous detail of a biblical parable, one of the most tiresome aspects of his Experience Week.

‘When you were telling your story, I was thinking what a pain in the ass God is,’ guffawed Xana, an American woman who became friends with Peter, despite her initially disconcerting habit of bringing God into every sentence. She helped to persuade someone in the office to look for traces of Sabine, and miraculously, as they all agreed, one of the names that emerged was indeed ‘Peter’s Sabine’, as he could tell from the address in Frankfurt she had unfortunately been leaving at the time he met her. At least he was now fortified with her second name, Wald.

A morning’s work was part of the Experience Week and both Peter and Xana ended up working in the kitchen.

‘I’m Gawain, I’ll be focalizing the soups today,’ said the friendly man who greeted them in the kitchen. ‘And this is Bettina, who’ll be focalizing the salads.’

‘Hi,’ said Bettina.

There was an attunement and everyone shared what was ‘going on’ for them that morning. The sharing went around in what Peter was coming to think of as the usual way, until it reached Lisa, a young Argentinian woman who was part of the established kitchen team. Lisa’s English was immediately exhausted by the enormity of her mood.

‘I feel,’ she began, and then broke into gesture, wriggling her palms towards each other on different planes, like tadpoles hurrying towards a doomed rendezvous. ‘I have to be careful, because I may not really be here…’

You what? thought Peter.

‘When I was a healer in Brazil,’ continued Lisa, ‘I couldn’t work at night, because I would leave my body and go off on the astral plane. Sometimes it was very hard to come back and I think maybe last night,’ her right hand shot up into the air, ‘I spoke to my angel, and I have to share one thing: my angel tell me no work this morning.’

This was what Gavin would have called ‘skiving off work without a chit from Matron’. You didn’t need a chit from Matron here, just a chat with an angel.

Gawain, whose name sounded so like Gavin’s but whose tone was so different, asked the Angel of Findhorn to help them work as a team, to open their hearts and to clear their minds. He invited everyone to be conscious of the noises in the kitchen and of the spirit helpers, as if this enjambement of whirring blenders and fluttering wings were the most natural thing in the world.

The strange thing was that they
did
work as a team, the atmosphere was wonderfully collaborative and charming, people glided round the kitchen, anticipating their fellow workers’ needs, sliding saucepans and knives to each other, handle first, with a silent smile, moving out of the way without stopping work, preparing food for hundreds without apparent effort, and enjoying themselves as well. What had happened? Again, there seemed to be something precious hidden among the rustling tissue of ritual and rhetoric. Gawain’s prayers had been answered, and even if prayers were just the setting up of a fervent expectation, they had worked.

Elated over lunch, Peter and Xana discussed what had happened while eating the food they had helped to prepare, which tasted to them supremely good. Perhaps the attunements were not just an amiable waste of time. Peter had always assumed it was best to bully his way through his feelings. When he set off for the bank feeling sad, or hung-over, or bored, or desperate, or in some other way unfit for work, he found that these moods usually evaporated as they hit the hot plate of action. There was of course a price to pay, a vague general depression, the lost habit of reflection, sudden bursts of frustration that seemed inexplicable because the trail that led to them had been obscured by a thousand urgencies, and by the trick of calling unhappiness ‘a lousy day’, and by the agreement of everyone around him that nothing surpassed the thrill of selling expensive loans and securing cheap ones, in order to enter a nirvana of ownership and hobbies.

At that evening’s group attunement, Peter shared that he liked the group much better than he’d expected.

‘Are we supposed to be flattered?’ asked Xana, breaking the rule of respectful silence.

Stung by this mild mockery, Peter felt that sense of intense betrayal that sends children running from rooms. This raw sensitivity had of course to be ‘processed’, and led to further opportunities for bonding and trust. Xana and Peter climbed on to the roof and Peter, who had always been the one who said ‘Oh, I missed it’ when someone pointed out a shooting star, saw four that evening.

‘You know they’re no bigger than a swimming pool,’ said Xana, ‘burning up as they hit our atmosphere.’

That night Peter, who never remembered his dreams, dreamt vividly. Gawain and Gavin were engaged in an elaborate medieval jousting match. From behind the stockade where he stood among the rude serfs, Peter could see Sabine seated next to the King. Peter was crushed when he found that the jousting match was a computer game he was playing at work, and that with this shift in perspective Sabine was reduced to a few dots of light on a liquid-crystal screen. Caught playing games instead of investing, Peter was furiously berated by his boss, but he couldn’t concentrate on his chastisement because he was too preoccupied with the pair of dirty pigeon’s wings which grew out of his boss’s shoulder blades. In the next scene he was swimming with Sabine among the stars, in mildly electrified water that made them both unbearably excited. Their swimming pool suddenly tilted out of orbit, hurtled through space, and flared on the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.

‘Awesome,’ said Terry, a black American woman who had given up her job in order to do past-life regression work, dream work and body work. ‘You were definitely on the astral plane.’

‘Was I?’ said Peter, looking up from his porridge.

‘Definitely.’

‘Maybe I can skive off work,’ said Peter.

‘What?’ said Terry.

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘The King’s your higher Self,’ shouted Terry, as he set off to the kitchen.

He didn’t skive off work, although he soon wished he had. Gawain, who had focalized the kitchen so beautifully the day before, had been replaced by a tall bearded American called Warren. Perhaps Gawain had lost his jousting match, thought Peter, who found himself shuttling increasingly fluently between waking and dreaming.

‘Have you been the butt of a lot of small-people jokes?’ Warren asked Xana as she came into the kitchen.

‘What?’ said Xana, amazed.

‘That’s just me,’ said Warren. ‘I like to push people’s buttons. I’ve got to be myself, right?’

Despite this warning, Peter, lulled into needless candour by the touching group attunements, mentioned his real reasons for being in Findhorn.

For the rest of the morning, Warren shouted, ‘Is this the one?’ whenever a woman passed the kitchen window. He danced with special glee when the ancient overweight postmistress came to deliver the mail.

‘Hey, Peter, this is definitely the woman of your dreams. It was her dress sense that got to you, right?’

Whenever he was near Peter he sang the old Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song ‘If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with’.

Under Warren’s guidance the food gradually declined.

‘This is my grandmother’s secret receipt,’ he said, emptying a bottle of vinegar into a saucepan full of cabbage leaves. ‘She smuggled it out of the Ukraine in the lining of her overcoat.’

‘We want to go to the sanctuary to meditate,’ said Xana at noon, when there was a theoretical right to do this.

‘Tough shit,’ said Warren.

‘We’re going anyway,’ said Xana, undoing her apron.

‘Great,’ said Warren. ‘That’s called stating your needs.’

‘You know, Warren,’ said Xana with clipped patience, ‘when you asked me about the small-people jokes, I happened to be with my god.’

‘Did you get back to him?’ said Warren, suddenly leaning closer.

‘No, I wasn’t able to do that,’ said Xana. ‘I think we’ve all come to Findhorn to develop our personal concept of the Divine. It so happens I
have
been the butt of lots of small-people jokes, and I’m all right with it, but you didn’t know that. You just planted a bomb and walked away.’

‘I could see you were all right with that issue,’ said Warren, as if he’d been in control of the situation all along. ‘I make people confront their issues, it’s kind of a twisted gift I have,’ he said. ‘Think about it: what’s your god worth if he can’t survive a small-people joke?’

‘That’s what I’m going to the sanctuary to find out,’ said Xana, hanging up her apron.

Peter started to follow her.

‘Have
you
got an issue with me?’ asked Warren, fixing Peter in the eye.

‘Not really,’ said Peter, for whom the word ‘issue’ had, until recently, always been preceded by the word ‘bond’. ‘I mean, it was a lot more fun working yesterday,’ he recovered feebly.

‘I don’t give a shit,’ said Warren, striding back to the cauldron of sour soup he was preparing for the community. ‘I say that,’ he shouted over his shoulder, ‘but really I care profoundly.’

Outside Xana and Peter burst out laughing.

‘I wasn’t with my god when he asked about small-people jokes,’ Xana confessed.

‘Weren’t you?’ said Peter, slightly shocked.

‘I just thought I’d throw
him
for a change.’

‘Rather naughty of you,’ said Peter admiringly.

Instead of going to the sanctuary, they went for a walk and talked about how horrible Warren was.

Apart from anything else, Warren had managed to destroy the alternative way of working which Peter had glimpsed the day before. A more familiar pattern had taken over; everyone retreated into their private thoughts and watched the clock, workers intimidated by an unpleasant authority. When Peter stopped chopping beetroot for a moment to stretch his back, Warren, who spent most of his time bouncing around the kitchen making flippant remarks, instantly caught him out.

‘Got a backache, huh? Try working through the pain,’ he suggested. ‘You see, I’m not just good-looking, I’m psychic.’