“Even God,” Viola said. Perhaps that’s where it had all started to go wrong.
Of course, no one would know by observing them that they were mother and son. Sunny called her “Viola” and she didn’t really call him anything. He treated her exactly the same as he treated everyone else in the class, with a detached kind of concern. (“Do you have arthritis in your knees?” No, she didn’t, thank you very much.)
Surprise?” she said when she eventually tracked him down.
“It is,” he said. They had hugged warily, as if one of them might have a knife.
Only Bertie and Sunny knew where she was. She hadn’t bothered to tell the staff at Poplar Hill that she was on a different continent from her ailing father. She was at the other end of a phone if they needed to contact her.
She had stepped out of her life. If she’d known how easy it was she would have done it long ago. She had sent an email to her agent and asked her to tell people that she was having an operation (she was, she was having her mind removed) and to make her apologies all round. She didn’t want people to think she had absconded, disappeared, like Agatha Christie. The last thing she wanted was people looking for her. No, that wasn’t true—the last thing she wanted was people finding her.
The incredibly expensive hotel where Viola was staying had been converted from an old estate and sat at the top of a gorge from where there were lovely views along the river a long way below. There were security guards and personal butlers and nothing was any trouble at all. She had a villa—the largest, the most expensive—all to herself. It was far too big, it could have accommodated several families, but she liked the solitude. When she got up in the morning she could make coffee in the high-end espresso machine in the “living area” (surely everywhere was a living area?) and drink it while she watched the mist rising from the valley below and listened to the birds calling to each other across the forest. Then someone would bring her something delicious for breakfast and she would go to the spa and be massaged or walk down the ancient stone steps to the “sacred river.” She wasn’t sure why it was sacred. Sunny said all rivers are sacred. Everything was sacred, apparently.
“Even dog shit?”
“Yes, even dog shit.”
She was compiling a list of things that might not be sacred. Hiroshima, jihadist massacres, kittens in microwaves. Those are acts, Sunny said, not things. But weren’t acts committed by people and weren’t people sacred? Or was it just trees and rivers?
In the afternoons she slept (an alarming amount) and then woke up and had the hotel car drive her to Ubud, where she joined Sunny’s class. He didn’t even save her a place on the mat-crowded floor, so that if she arrived late there was no room for her and she had to sit in the little office and read the books they had in a small “library” (i.e., a shelf). All the books had some kind of spiritual slant, needless to say. There was a handwritten sign attached to the shelf that said, “Please, dear friend, leave these books in the condition that you found them,” which was ridiculous as no book could ever be left in the condition that you found it in because it was changed every time it was read by someone.
The class, if there was space for her, lasted for two hours (it was designed with punishment in mind) and afterwards the driver would take her back to the hotel and she would watch the family of monkeys that came out from the forest every evening to play on the old estate walls around her villa. She would eat dinner too, of course. The “eat” part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.
Once or twice she had been to Sunny’s early-morning meditation class, which was less crowded but even more difficult.
“Don’t think, Viola,” Sunny said.
How could anyone not think?
“Don’t not think either.”
“I think, therefore I am,” Viola said, clinging doggedly on to an outmoded Cartesian universe. If she stopped thinking, she might cease to exist.
“Just let go,” Sunny said.
Let go? Of what? She had nothing to hold on to to begin with.
And then! The flowing river, the calling birds, the mechanical insects, the chattering monkeys all finally did their job and her mind stopped working and it was the most unbelievable relief.
In the car, on the way to Sunny’s class, her phone surprised her by ringing. It was the nursing home.
The end was nigh. She had been waiting for her father to die so her life could begin, but as we could all have told her it doesn’t work like that. She knew that anyway. Really.