Ordinary Miracles (7 page)

And then of course there’s Katie.

Charlie says Katie can stay here any time – that there’s
plenty of room. I keep telling her this on the phone. I also
went to visit her in Galway last week. I said I felt like a break,
but actually I wanted to check out her new flat.

When Katie first went to Galway, Bruce and I found digs
f
or
her with a nice family in Salthill. The lady of the house was very bonny and beaming and the place seemed like a home from home. So, naturally, I was rather worried to
discover that, after just one month, Katie had decided that a home from home was not what she needed.

‘Mum, I’m not a child any more,’ she kept saying as I snooped round the small flat she’s sharing with a girl called Sarah.

‘Are you eating properly?’ The cliches leapt off my lips.
‘And what about that nice warm coat I bought you? It really
is quite cold these mornings.’

‘Mum, I’m not a child any more.’

‘Here, I brought you a few things,’ I said, handing her a
huge bag of sensible food. ‘That muesli’s home-mixed and it’s full of fibre. Fibre is very important.’

‘Oh, Mum, please don’t bring up bowels again. It’s so
obvious.’ She grimaced long-sufferingly, as only an eighteen-
year-old can.

‘I don’t think bowels are that obvious, Katie. Young people
frequently forget all about them.’

‘No. No. Don’t be so dense, Mum. It’s so obvious you’re avoiding the subject.’

‘What subject?’

‘You and Dad.’

She was, of course, right. We talked about my ‘displace
ment activity’, as she called it, over some of my currant cake and tea. As far as I could gather, though Katie is
obviously upset about her parents’ separation, the budding psychology student part of her also regards it as a rather
interesting case study – though of course this could be just
a defence.

She informed me that if I had been getting more ‘positive reinforcement’ in my marriage – that is if Bruce had ‘rewarded me’ more often for my wifely attentions – then
his affair would not have had the same impact.

Pigeons, it seems, can be trained to detect flaws in produ
cts on assembly lines through the judicious application of positive reinforcement, which in their case is usually grain.

She related all this with such scholarly enthusiasm that I
hadn’t the heart to point out that I found the pigeon analogy
in our conversation far from flattering. First year psychology
is bound to change her world-view somewhat. I’m grateful
I was spared Freud. He pops up next term so I’m probably
due a lecture on penises sometime soon.

Yes – all in all – Katie has been very understanding. But th
at may be because she herself has dropped more than one
bombshell in the recent past. The latest was delivered last
week. I was going on and on about hoping she wasn’t too
upset and that I’d always be there for her and that sort of thing when she told me she thought she might be a lesbian.
Frankly it’s something I wished she could have kept to herself
until she was sure, but then I have been telling her for years th
at she can ‘tell me anything’. She’s really taken me at my word and so far ‘anything’ has included a herpes scare, a
crush on a priest, a short-lived wish to become a social worker nun, and now this.

I’m beginning to wonder whether there isn’t something to
be said for good old repression and secrecy after all.

As to the latest announcement – I don’t have anything
against lesbians
per se.
In some ways it makes a lot of sense
and in an ideal world nobody would give a fig who was loving whom. But the world is not ideal and Katie is quite sensitive.

She’s also beautiful. I know I’m her mother and therefore
biased, but it’s true. Katie’s hair is wispy and golden white,
like an angel’s, and she has these big clear kind blue eyes. For
y
ears all she wanted to do with her life was live in a croft in Scotland with a seal – she’d read
Seal Morning
by Rowena
Farre. At one point she used to spend entire weekends in a tent
in our garden poring over books about subsistence farming
and edible berries, with poodle Sammy acting as surrogate
sea mammal.

She had her own little vegetable patch in the garden and
assured us, with twelve-year-old conviction, that she could
happily live off the carrots and potatoes which she boiled
up – with me watching from the kitchen window – on her
small Primus stove. However the sandwiches and hamburgers
which I left on the window-sill were always eaten, a fact Bruce
and I thought it wisest not to comment upon.

So much has changed. So much has been happening lately
that I’ve been tempted to exchange my periodic tizzies for a
prolonged and full-blown panic.

‘What form would this panic take?’ asked Charlie. ‘I mean,
is it going to be an underground thing – like obsessively
ordering kitchen accessories from cable TV – or something
more dramatic?’

‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled sadly.

‘Well, you’ll have to work that one out first and I tell you
something Jasmine, the options are vast.’

‘I suppose they are.’ I looked at him anxiously.

‘I mean, in your case a fairly common scenario would be
heavy alcoholic intake followed by deep, drunken existen
tial angst and late night dash in taxi back to unfaithful
husband.’

I pulled a face. ‘Yuck.’

‘Or fast, desperate involvement with some extra-ordinarily
unsuitable man. That’s quite popular too.’

‘Yuck again.’

‘Or you could be more enigmatic. You could, for example,
r
un down the road in your nightie screaming the 1989
Norwegian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest.’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘And why on earth would I want
to do that?’

‘Exactly,’ said Charlie, giving me a broad smile.

Susan says my confidence has taken a knock and I need to get out and about to boost my self-esteem. She thinks
coming along with her to a yoga and meditation class is just
the job, and so now here I am in my tracksuit bottoms and
sweatshirt.

This is my second visit and I’m just about getting the gist
of things.

I know, for example, that in Room 5B of St. Benedict’s
High School for Girls we are supposed to be heightening
our awareness of our life-force and life-purpose. I also know
that we are being bathed in the glow of collective oneness and
a feeling of harmony and balance with all things, and that
swallowing sounds really noisy in a silent room.

‘Are you comfortable?’ asks Arnie, our teacher. This is just
politeness – rather like the woman on BBC radio’s
Listen with
Mother
who used to say ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then
I’ll begin.’

We’re all lying flat on the floor on foam mats and the air
is thick with the smell of apple tarts from domestic science
class. Susan beside me is furtively sucking a Fisherman’s
Friend because she has a slight cold.

‘We’ll go straight to the meditation tonight,’ says Arnie, who is not American but has a slightly American accent.
You can tell just by the way he sits, with his back straight
and knees comfortably but athletically crossed, that he’s no
couch potato.

Arnie then puts on one of his CDs. Strange sub-aquatic
sounds emerge from the player – whale s
ongs and the bubblings of some synthesiser and then pan pipes and little drumming sounds that grow louder and then
burst into a hypnotic, rhythmical beat.

‘Listen to the music,’ Arnie says softly. ‘Don’t try to relax.
Trying is not relaxing. Just let go.’

Funnily enough that’s much the sort of thing Bruce used to
say to me during our initial love-makings. ‘Just relax,’ he’d say. ‘Just let go.’ ‘Where will I go to and if I get there will I
get back?’ I used to wonder. I did occasionally manage this
intrepid journey. The small sweet explosions left me feeling
rather adrift and forlorn as Bruce, having been available for
hugs and comment for the obligatory five minutes afterwards,
then fell into a deep untroubled sleep. We got better with
practice though. In fact for a while in our marriage, sex was
even fun.

But I’m not supposed to be thinking of sex. Our thoughts, says Arnie, are like birds flying through a clear blue sky.
Though we may see them passing we are not to follow them.
‘Leave your mind and the rest will follow,’ he murmurs. And
I try to – I really do – but instead I get all these images.
They’re jerky at first – like an old newsreel – and then more real than life. First there’s Charlie’s cat coughing up
a hairball, head hanging limply then seized with a husky spasm; then come the clumps of mascara that gather under
Katie’s eyes after she’s been crying, followed by – goodness – t
hat fat German man in yellow shorts reading
Catch 22
on
the ferry to Poros. And then a fish – a huge yellow fish with
blue stripes that smiles.

There are twenty people in the room – twenty-one if you
count the studiously serene Arnie. The room is quite small
and after a while grows rather hot and stuffy. When, after
our session, someone comments on this Arnie says it might
be something to do with our collective energies. But he also
adds that the ventilation in the room isn’t good and that
he’d asked Mrs Wakefield – the school principal – if the
air-conditioning might be left on after 7.30 p.m. He looks
slightly less serene as he says this.

The subject of air-conditioning is reassuringly prosaic, for
the other comments the session inspires are very strange
indeed. Mildred, who runs a small tea shop in Rathgar,
reports that the cells of her body felt as if they were dissolving
into radiant light, and a man in a purple sweater says energy
exploded out of him when the Richard Clayderman tape was
on, and had ricocheted around the room. Warm loving energy
it had been – ‘Did any of you feel it?’ he asked. I’m trying
to turn a giggle into a cough when Susan says yes, she had
felt the energy. ‘Thank you, Eric,’ she says, giving him a
calm but beaming smile. Then piles of other people start
reporting tinglings and glows and I begin to wonder if the
warm drowsiness I’m feeling is the afterglow of Eric’s warm
loving energy or lack of oxygen. Not wanting to be left out I mumble something about the yellow fish with the smile.