betwixt and between

[unpublished] a novel of liminality

excerpts #novelbetwixtandbetween

1. I left him.

I left my husband on a Friday, and there was no dappled sunlight to relieve my suffering as I reversed the car down the driveway into our perfect suburban street with its perfect line of Maple trees and rows of gigantic houses, like in one of those typical Hollywood movies where everyone is upper middle class with vast green lawns and barbeques, the sounds of children playing, little Johnny catching a ball in his front yard.

Yes, it really did look like that, my life, from the outside. Not when I left though. There was no warm breeze or birdsong or any of that glittering crap. There was no pathetic fallacy either — no terrible, lashing winds, black clouds, or thunderstorms to see me on my way. There was a fucking palpable lack of anything. The world paled into sheer whiteness and I was a shadow clinging to a hollow body. Like Peter Pan’s shadow. Only a disheveled middle aged version of Peter Pan’s shadow.

Yes, there was a Wendy, and I shouldn’t have gone on that journey to Neverland, now should I?

Three kids at the window peered at me with eyes too wide with having seen too much.

Shit, I was a crap mother, too.

2. How it started

I know this is annoying, because I’ve started with the almost-end and now I’m going back to the beginning to tell how it all came to be. But bear with me and this very over-done narrative trick, the flashback, because I’m telling the honest truth now (I have stopped all my lying). Right now, honestly, I am sitting here having a very tepid cup of coffee, with (okay, here’s a hint), someone new at my side — and we’ve been at it all morning, and I’m a bit tired. So I don’t want to go into everything all at once.

But in answer to the question, “Pris, how did you end up with a lover a nearly a decade your junior, a ripe 25 year old, living in near penury, with friends who are whores and poets and criminals and a gay monkey?” Well, in answer to that, I have to go back to the day when I left my husband. Because that was the beginning. Not all the stuff that came before. Although I will get to that, too.

I am also somewhat of a whore and a poet, by the way. Don’t let appearances deceive you.

But I’m not a criminal.

3. So I left my husband

Not because I didn’t love him, or him me, or because one of us was evil, or we tired of each other, none of that. I left him because, as he told me last week, over coffee, when we passed our kids over, I was “like a wild animal trapped in a dark room looking for light, and any glimmer of light would have done.” Yes. It was like that. I was looking for light, but so was he, and we found it in different ways.

4. When I left him, I drove straight to water.

It was late afternoon and the smog brought an apocalyptic smoulder to the cityscape. The queue of cars before me evaporated into dim cloud as traffic crawled along. I drove north, driving and driving, to the beach of my childhood. Up a hill, somewhere behind the tangled green foliage obscured in the haze, was my once home. I felt it there, like the African statues that once adorned it, with their energy of eerie watchfulness. The parking lot was nearly empty. I put on my sunglasses and walked down to the water, clutching, in my fist, the bag of rough-cut diamonds that I now possessed courtesy of that apparently not-so-useless monkey.

The beach was cast in a yellow glow. There were a few surfers and joggers, and a couple taking pictures of one another, laughing and posing. A fat, elderly woman lowered herself onto a beach chair. The surfers paddled out into caramel water and my attention shifted to a little girl sitting in the sand, like me, close to the surf. She was about three years old, I guess, chubby with dark hair that stuck up in stiff curls. As foam rushed in to her feet she giggled and kicked. My own bottom was damp from the sand. As the tide came in, the water reached up to my knees. I shivered; it was cold. The little girl hadn’t moved. Her mother stood a short distance away, watching her, and whenever the foamy water washed over her daughter’s legs, she took a step closer. The little girl’s laughter became manic as the water reached her waist, knocking her down, splashing into her mouth so that she spit up in between giggles.

The ocean kept coming forward, and I was wet too, skirt sand-caked and sodden. The mother grabbed her daughter, pulling her back into the dry sand. The water spilled over me like cream and pulled me back again into frothy depths, then back over me again. I might have floated away, persuaded by its supreme power and indifference, the constancy of its tug and release. Or I might have gathered my strength and gone to my car, where I had spare clothes in the suitcase in my trunk.

The fact of my solid presence here, alone, was proof that I existed apart from my family, from my life as I’d known it. I could start fresh.

I went to my car and got dry clothes. I went into the public showers and showered and changed. I bought myself some food from a café down the road, and went back to my car to eat it.

I sat there all evening, watching the ocean dance on the shore, the dull water as it gained a yellow hue, as the sky lightened and the air cleared and the sun set. Then, I stashed the diamonds in a diaper bag in the trunk and went to spend the night at Biggie’s. I would figure out what to do with the diamonds, we would have a lot of sex, and I would become a fantastic mother again. So long as no one found out about that monkey.

5. It began the first time I drove straight to water, which is what I do when I panic.

When I was still a good wife, with a nice, stable life, I fell from grace quite suddenly, on a bleak, bleak day of playgroups with my children, and mothers and boobs dribbling milk and noisy kids and tiny containers with tiny triangle sandwiches.

Children shrieked and cheered, one wielding a stick, another two chasing a ball, one more singing a song to herself. The eldest children were at school, including my daughters Chloe, six, and Ivy, four. Two-year old Sam and I joined four other toddlers and their mothers at Kristina’s parents’ house with its huge backyard, cubby-house, and sandpit.

Kristina, the youngest of us all at just twenty-five, was doing a degree in primary education. She was (and still is) nubile and fresh-faced with her perfect, small features and her slightly (but not too) plump figure. She was always infuriatingly excited about her classes, and that day was no exception. We began the morning with her news — latest assignments, books she’d read, etc. etc..

Deb provided a nice counterpoint to Kristina’s niceness with her bitching about what happened yesterday when she ran into a woman she used to work with. She was, as always, tired with an edge of incurable resentment. She wore her mousy hair in an untidy ponytail, her face a sheen of perspiration, never make-up. She had two boys who tore her house apart and kicked and punched each other most of the time, and when she joined us of late with just the one boy, she seemed almost unable to cope with her reduced duty of care. Mostly, she said little, but when she did, there was no small talk — rather, a pithy observation, a sullen complaint, maybe even a startling confession, as when she admitted to using a belt to hit her elder son. She was once in the corporate world, before kids, pretty high up with her own team. I’m not sure why she isn’t back yet, except that currently she had her own underlings to flog.

There was chaos in the backyard, and it was putting me on edge. “Joe hit me!” was followed by some high-pitched screeching. Alison, mother of the victim, paused mid-sentence to push a blond lock behind her ear as she stood to survey the scene.

“No blood. Anyway, Pris, you were about to say something.”

All eyes turned to me, as if this was sure to be a big announcement. Actually, I was going to get someone to pass the onion dip. Instead I said,

“I fucking hate my life.”

Silence.

My breathing came fast. They stared.

“I just don’t know who I’ve become. In life. I don’t think it’s someone who makes triangle sandwiches though.”

Kristina lowered her eyes and bit her lip. She made the very best mini triangle sandwiches.

There was hardly a murmur; hands had stopped fidgeting, cups of tea lay abandoned, and for a few more second s— which I just barely registered against the loud thumping of my heart — the backyard play collectively paused. After an eternity, children’s voices rose again to fill the silence.

Sam climbed into my lap and asked for water. His wispy blond hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and he smelled sweet, like breast milk. I breathed in his scent and kissed his hot cheek before he ran off. I felt crazy deep love for this kid, but also a numbing, crushing boredom that bordered on suffocation and made me want to freebase Skittles.

Olivia stretched, arms over her head. I was distracted by her hairy armpits. I knew that at home she was a control freak who orchestrated manners like a maestro. Her girls handled cutlery with musical precision, never an elbow on the table, nor a word spoken out of turn. They were punished when they argued. The peace in her house was preternatural. Yet even before I discovered the strictures of her domestic routine, the tidy clip of her slight German accent gave me the impression of self-control. So the mass of armpit hair took me aback every time. She hid her hairy legs under long, loose skirts. She was always barefoot.

“Well,” she said. “You sound fed up.” She leaned towards me, elbows on the table. She took a deep breath in, as if she were about to launch into an analysis.

Kristina put an arm around me and gave me a squeeze. Of us all, she was the most naturally maternal. She was also a single mother who lived with her parents. In order to continue staying there, reaping their full-time babysitting help, she pretended that her child support was insufficient to cover rent. I kinda loved her, and kinda resented her freedom, and just then I was worried I’d hurt her feelings about the triangle sandwiches. She was so irresistible with her kindness. If anyone could kiss my boo boos and make them better, it would be her. But that’s weird.

“Oh, Pris, you need a day to yourself!” said Alison.

Now, Alison assumed she knew me best, and often she didn’t know crap, but in that moment she was spot on. People sometimes confused us. We shared a certain surface similarity. We were both slender, blonde, attractive in a conventional sort of way, and dressed casually (no frills, nothing flowery or loose). We chatted about clothes and hair, and, lately, interior decoration. I suppose it’s only natural that she should think these things really mattered to me, since they formed the basis of our conversations. They didn’t matter to me that much, but that was all we had in common, and it took my mind off other things.

“Alison’s right. Can you all keep Sam until I pick up my girls from school?” I asked the assembled group. “I need to not be someone’s mother right now.”

*********************

I really did drive to the beach in a state of mild panic, because my possibly assured tone was a foil for the absolute wellspring of self-pity and desperation that had come out of nowhere. Who was this woman I had become anyway? I started somewhere else in life, somewhere fun, a bit daring — but nevermind, I will get to that.

I knew exactly where to go. The beach of my youth. I parked along a busy road where the cafés were packed together, with ocean views. I went into the first café that caught my eye; it was filled with books. My heart fluttered in anticipation. I took a book from my bag, but I could not concentrate on it and found myself staring at the people around me instead. The crowd was young — in their twenties, mostly — and childless. They were dressed colourfully, loose tops and skirts, dishevelled hair, frizzy from the humidity of ocean air. I ran my hands through my own hair, messed it up a little. I thought I still looked young for my age, but perhaps it was just vanity, or desperation. I imagined that I was one of them now, those young, beautiful people. I wished I weren’t wearing jeans and a boring white t-shirt.

My gaze paused at a stunning black-haired girl, hair falling past her shoulders in braids beneath a brightly coloured, woven head wrap. She was maybe in her early twenties. Probably on holiday. Maybe she had never had a job, or any responsibility. She was fair-skinned, I could tell, but her skinny arms were sun-browned and her face was red and shiny like a ripe plum, skin pulled taut. She was beautiful and free, a mythic creature. A raven. With her was a small, darkly tanned man, his brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. He gesticulated, paused for breath, and his wild eyes roved impatiently, impassioned. This girl hung on his every word. Her fingers drew invisible circles on the table and nudged his every once in a while. She sat too close to his face and had trouble looking at him directly. She wanted him, I thought, but had not yet had him.

As I finished my last, cool drop of coffee, the man’s short, muscular arm reached around behind the girl to rest on the back of her chair. He laughed; it was a peculiar chortle. I thought him fey and simian and wondered at her attraction.

He left the café, and the girl looked around. I realized I’d been staring, and she’d noticed. She came over to my table and asked me what I was reading.

“A book about the goddess Inanna. I’ve had it for years, and only just decided to read it.”

She’d heard of Inanna, she told me, and introduced herself. Her name was Saffi. She was from Germany, travelling, for adventure.

She said that she came to this café each Thursday morning after her yoga class, which was around the corner, and that after, she went back to her share house for meditation. I liked her immediately. I’m not the type of person who likes people in general, not just anyone. I’m just not very social in that way. It took me at least a year to develop affection for the women in my mother’s group — excluding Kristina, whom I also liked immediately. Saffi reminded me a bit of Kristina: they were both open, optimistic, warm. Just now, as Saffi leaned toward me, so beautiful and confiding and trusting, I was torn between confessing who I was really, and pushing away the black braid that persistently drifted towards her left eye.

She was already twenty-five, she said, as if she’d wasted too much time in life already, and she had to see the world before she turned thirty.

So do I, I told her.

I did not tell her that I was already thirty-five. I did not tell her that I was a mother, in the suburbs, about as boring as they come.

She came here from Thailand and Bali. She rambled on about the powder-white beaches, lemongrass and lime fish, temples half-submerged in jungles, meditations and libations. The men, their parties, drinking, sex. Her English was nearly perfect, her native German only betrayed by the odd vowel, by the precise rhythm of her speech.

I asked why she spoke English so well, and she said that she started studying it in high school, then for two years in college, then, later, she had an English boyfriend. I ask why she’d come to California, and she said, “because it is the farthest I can go.”

She blinked quickly and looked past me towards the ocean.

“It’s exciting, to come so far from home.”

She planned to stay here for a while. She told me of her share house, the other housemates, their group meditations, their shared searching for something that is only to be revealed by Hindu gods, during chanting rites, within deepest meditation. She recounted her latest group meditation, when she felt herself disappear into something greater. This was why she stayed — she was evolving, spiritually, she was sure. I wanted to dismiss it as a load of bull, until the man reappeared. “Let’s go,” he said, and touched her shoulder with a fingertip.

He was not much taller than me, perhaps five foot eight. He wore a loose, sleeveless white top. His arms were sinuous and shiny, his small, taut muscles bulging with veins. Lascivious. Eyes brown like toffee under thickset eyelashes, sweet and inviting. He smiled at me in a manner I found almost flirtatious, then commented on how blond I was, how Saffi was like my shadow with her exotic darkness. He was too clever with words. His eyes took in the whole of me, and I looked away, feeling exposed.

He asked me my name, and repeated it slowly, “Prissssss,” like a snake.

“Come back to our house later,” he told me. “We are meditating at six o’clock.”

He wrote the address on my hand with a pen he took from Saffi’s bag.

I shivered at the pressure of the red pen tip in my palm. He pressed his thumb against my wrist to write. His name was Seraf.

I felt awkward in my own skin. White skies hid the glare of sun, and it was a cool day, but I perspired at my collarbone, at the nape of my neck. My plain t-shirt chafed against me.

When Seraf left, Saffi praised his skills, and told me I must come tonight, since he was going overseas the next day for a few months. For training. At a centre with a guru in India.

“Who is he, to you?” I watched him glide down the sidewalk.

“He is like…a guru.”

“And he’s going to guru school in India?” I choked on laughter.

Saffi was nonplussed. Her eyebrows knit together, mouth a frown. One hand crossed at her chest, hand under her armpit, self-protective.

“He’s receiving the highest training at an ashram in the mountains. He’s very, very talented,” she said, breathless. Such an open face. Her mouth upturned, a smile of praise. “You will see.”

[more to come, I’m drip-feeding it to you].

About the author

NO, this novel has no agent representing it and it has not been placed nor read by anyone but you, on here, but I am overwhelmingly busy with my three kids and three jobs, and the general thankless task of ‘surviving,’ so if my writing makes you feel all gooey inside, or an intimation of intrigue, or you experience a strange combination of laughter and tears, and you’d like to represent or publish me, please do get in touch. I’ve written three whole novels for practice, have had an agent submit others in my insipid, lame 30s, before I really grew up, so I’m no virgin to the gig. I am, however, a writer through and through, so expect more. And more. Because we writers like to punish ourselves with a constant creative drive that rarely reaps rewards but occasionally makes someone go, “oh my god, that’s my life!” (especially the bit about gay monkeys). admin@miraclerising.org