Shaman

The marigolds are sticky on his hands, a clammy, synthetic damp he hates.  He buys the largest size, man’s size, but they still feel an affront like the comedy apron his children bought him for Christmas with the headless woman in a bikini that becomes his body when he puts it on.  He picks up the scourer and scrubs the Pyrex casserole dish.  Chilli for supper last night.  Something tonight.  Probably chicken.  Water creeps up his index finger bathing his hand in warmth so that the rubber comes away like a mini wetsuit, he thinks, flexing his fingers and Christ, has it come to this?   He peels them off, throws them in the bin and adds wash-up gloves to the shopping list.  It’s ten-thirty in the morning.  The view from the kitchen window is of a strip of lawn, a cherry tree and the kids’ playhouse which leans depressingly as if down on one knee.  He’s meant to do something about it.  He’s had no end of plans.  But he never goes motor racing at weekends or jumps out of planes during the summer.  He hasn’t invented anything.  Even the garden looks worse than it did when they arrived.  His wife’s in banking.  She doesn’t have room in her schedule for pity. 

This was the plan when they were first married: he’d work his way up to become head of chemistry, she’d finish her PhD.  He’d imagined that by that time she’d want kids or be pregnant already, they both wanted them, and she was pregnant when she handed it in.  A year later she was offered a job in global finance.  “Great maternity leave,” she’d said over breakfast; her salary was triple his, and “it makes sense,” while sitting on the loo, looking up at him as he brushed his teeth.  For their daughter she took four months off.  He didn’t miss teaching to begin with, it had felt like a mediocre bore at the best of times; his future laid out in the eyes and skin of others but it had got him out of the house.  Now he is cook and cleaner, a lone male in the park on a weekday lunchtime, a washerman and taxi driver and he’s getting fat.  He knows he’s doing what millions of women have done before him and he knows he was dismissive of the tedium before he lived it.  He’d had no idea how meaningless his life would become.

The dishes done, he goes to the park and throws a Frisbee in the air.  A woman picks it up.  She smiles as she hands it back.  “Don’t you need two to play?” 

He says, “Thanks.  The kids are at school,” as if that explains everything.  She has long black hair and smooth brown limbs.  He sees himself as she must; a middle-aged man, thinning on top, spreading below, playing with a plastic disc on a weekday morning. He takes up running. 

The next time he sees her she’s on a bench, reading.  He slows to a walk and stops beside her.  He’s got every right to make new friends even if they are ten years younger and beautiful.  She says, “You’re getting faster.” 

"I didn’t know you were watching.”  That’s the kind of thing he would have said when he was younger.  I didn’t know you were watching, assured and horny.  He’s still horny but the words feels flabby like the rest of him.  He sits beside her and stretches his arms above his head.  “So what do you do when you’re not reading,” he tips his head to see.  She holds the book up.  He reads aloud “The Way of the Ancient Warrior.”

She lets the book fall to her lap. “I run retreats."  Now he’ll have to say what he does but she doesn’t ask.  Instead she says, “Would you like to come?”

“I don’t think my wife would like it.”

“I wasn’t inviting your wife.” She shields her eyes from the sun.

That evening, in the kitchen, he says to his wife, “It’s a sports thing.” 

“A what?”  She forks noodles into her mouth while reading the paper.  The television on the corner counter is on. 

"A get together."  His eyes flick over a bombed-out city, a journalist in flak jacket, crouching.

"A party?"  She screws up her napkin.

"No, not a party."  He opens another bottle of wine.  "It's time I had a weekend away."

"From what?"  She throws the carton in the bin.  He yawns.  Clare looks through the file she’s dropped on the table, then at him. "Who’s going?” 

"Friends I’ve been running with.”

He gets off at Woking by mistake.  His taxi gets lost.  He arrives late, sweating, at a stone farmhouse hugged by woodland.  Thirty people swathed in multi-coloured blankets mill about the garden smoking roll ups.  He’s brought a blanket but it isn’t from Peru.  It’s from John Lewis.  Cream.  He sneaked it into his bag along with the towels from the guest room while Clare was in the shower.  Asha said to bring three.  He sees her coming towards him.  He’s about to say hi but she doesn’t look like the woman he’s been sitting on a bench with.  She’s a wolf, her black hair hanging.  She doesn’t see him.  She walks right past him.  They follow her to a clearing in the wood. There’s a fire, roaring, piled with stones and a tarpaulin dome like a half-buried egg.  Everyone is stripping.  Soon a mass of naked shivering bodies are gathered about the heat, hands out to the warmth.  This isn’t what he’d imagined.  A few juices, a massage, an invigorating walk and greens for supper; he’d reckoned he could wing it.  But he’s the one left with clothes on so he peels off his jumper, then trousers, socks and t-shirt; the underpants seem ridiculous so he steps out of them too.  He folds them neatly at the foot of a fir tree then joins the line snaking toward the entrance.  It’s dark inside as on hands and knees he makes his arse in the air navigation to the next seated, silent flesh.  Rocks, red with heat, are shovelled in.  He hears Asha call, “Enough.”  The door shuts and they are pitched into black. Heat creeps up his legs, circling his head, closing his throat.  He feels sick, instantly.  Drumbeats crowd the air, chants take up a steady beat through his senses.  There’s sweat-slicked skin everywhere.  If he’d wanted a sauna he’d have gone to Clare’s health club.  It would have been cleaner and nobody would have been crying.  Water flung on the rocks sends crashing waves of scorching wet burn into the air around him.  He tries to lie down but there’s no room, the dome curves into his back, a stump of branch sticks into his shoulder blade.  The women on either side of him moan as if in labour.  By the time the door is flung open it’s dark outside.  He crawls no longer caring for the view of the person following.  He files into the farmhouse.  Tea, dishevelled hair and ruddy faces surround him. They cluster and gather and talk about their feelings.  They talk about her.  He leans against a dresser stacked with books.  They don’t know her like he does; a woman on a bench, normal with him on a sunny weekday afternoon, tossing her black hair.  He should go.  But his clothes are damp and stuck with pine needles, he forgot to take the taxi number, he hasn’t spoken to her yet and the weekend isn’t over. 

In a low lit, large square room of no furniture with pillows on the floor and an altar in the middle at which Asha kneels, Joe takes his place in the circle. He crosses his legs like the others.  Asha’s robe hangs open at her chest. His John Lewis blanket across his knees, he watches her pour black liquid into a shot glass.

When his turn comes he says, "What is it?"

She meets his eyes briefly.  "Ayahuasca."

"Is it clean?"  It looks like oil.

"It’s for cleaning." 

"Bottoms up."  He doesn’t want to seem unmanly. It’s bitter.  He reaches for the water. 

She puts her hand over his.  “It’s better not to have it.”  She puts a bucket beside his crossed legs. 

Most people were lying down as if softly punched.  He’ll go through this charade and that will be it.  He’s made a mistake.  No one need know.  He's had drugs before and mostly they made him tired.  He can leave when no one’s watching.  If it weren’t for the memory of her gaping top he’d leave now.  Then he feels himself sink.  He tries to sit up but his limbs have disconnected from his brain.  He can’t speak.  He’s travelling down at great speed as if he’s swum over a chasm and been grabbed by a rip tide.  It’s clear, instantly, that he’s going to die.  There’s no escape.  It’s happening too fast.  This is his death.  He jolts upright, catches hold of the bucket and is sick, violently then struggles to his knees, the better for the world to pour from his gagging mouth.  He’s strangled with fear.  He wants to cry and finds that he is, curled foetal like, his brow resting on hard floor, his body heaving.  There’s a devil in his back and it’s clawing its way out from beneath his skin.  There are demons with gargoyle faces, their tales whipping like razors about his head.  He’s possessed, monstrous, no longer able to tell where he ends and the visions begin.  Over and over he retches as if this is his final act.  There’s no floor beneath, no roof above, the walls are gone and he tumbles in mythological rage through eons of life in and out of his head.  There’s screaming, everywhere.  He can’t make it stop.  He opens his eyes.  The retching calms, stillness takes hold, but the world he once knew is vanished.  In its place, a blur of multi coloured strands flow relentlessly from objects he once recognised.  The air, filled with howling, travels thickly through his senses.  He sees Asha, wavering in transcendental light, hold more liquid to his lips. 

The sun shines through the windows.  He’s alone.  Detritus from the night before is scattered about the room, proving it was true; discarded blankets, pillows in a heap, the altar candles burnt low.  Thankfully the buckets are gone.  He gets to his feet, rolling like a child about to walk.  His gut aches.  In the garden, clutches of bodies stir as Asha moves amongst them.  He sits alone on the grass.  He can’t stop shaking.

"Joe."  She touches his arm.  There’s a solid quietness to her.  She’s undisturbed by gaps. 

He means to be angry but instead he says, "Thank you."  She hugs him, her body against his.

He walks slowly from the station in the late afternoon light, entranced by the sensations within.  He’s aware of his cells, his blood, his veins. Clare draws up outside the house as he turns the last corner.  When he reaches her he sees the children, messy and asleep, in the back.  It’s odd; at once familiar and alien, as if a piece of him has left them all behind.  As they unload together, she says, “How was your weekend?” 

He replies, “Fine.” 

On Monday morning he goes to the park but Asha isn’t there.  She isn’t there on Tuesday either, nor for the rest of the week or the one after that.  On the third week he sees her on their bench.  He doesn't bother with the run. His elbows on his knees, he looks out across the grass.  "You scared the shit out of me."

"Do you want to come again?"  She replies.

That evening, the children in bed, his wife forking Chinese noodles, he says, "I'd like to go every month, if that's all right?"

Clare says, "What is it?  Some sort of gym club?"

He replies, "Sort of." 

It’s Christmas.  Six months have passed.  Clare takes ten days off work.  They book a babysitter and go out to dinner.  He orders the Carbonara.  It sits before him like an assault.  Clare picks at her risotto. "Aren’t you going to eat?" 

He twirls his fork without commitment.  "I’m not hungry.”  They’ve drunk two thirds of a bottle of pinot.  They'll need another if they’re going to make it to pudding.

She says, “What’s going on, Joe?” 

“You said I needed to lose weight.”

“I’m not talking about your paunch.”

“Well the kids approve at least.”

“I approve, I just don’t get it.  You’ve never been into sport and you haven’t told me a thing about it.  It’s a running club, right?”  She hasn’t noticed that he doesn’t take his gym clothes anymore.  His trainers have sat for months un-muddied in the hall. 

He struggles with a piece of bacon, caught in his back teeth.  Last weekend Asha said how great he was looking.  She said hello to him before anyone else.  “It’s not a running club.”

Clare’s expression creases to a pinched, familiar point and her fork, speared with French beans, lands on her plate.  “Then what is it?"

He empties the bottle into her glass and waggles it at a waiter.  Her question wafts across him like steam.

“It’s a fucking cult.” They’re home.  She spits toothpaste into the basin.  He puts on his pyjamas.  The pent-up discontent that has seeped amongst the floorboards of their expensive house, gathers at his feet, creeps up the counterpane, lies upon their bed. 

He says, “It’s not a cult.”  He hasn’t told her how Asha looks at him. He hasn’t told her about Asha at all.

Clare says.  “Some weird hippy freak zone.  At your age.  Are there girls?  Half-dressed nymphs?  It’s embarrassing.”  She climbs in beside him.  “I didn’t go back to work so that you could become a fucking middle-aged drug addict.” 

He turns out the light.  He’s used to these attacks when love like a pyroclastic cloud heads downhill, killing everything.  Into the darkness he says, “It’s not about that.” 

“Of course it is.”  She switches it back on.  “Some hydroponic, hallucinogenic hippie shit.  What do they do?  Serve it to you naked?”  Her arms are folded across her narrow chest.  She doesn’t sound jealous.  She sounds angry.  “Is it legal?” 

“It’s from the Amazon.” 

“Oh Jesus.”

“I still do the washing up and the fucking school run.” 

“I don’t want you going there anymore.” 

Over the coming torrent, visible in the cumulous build up in his wife’s small eyes, her perfect hair, he says “I think you should meet her.”

“Meet who, Joe?”

“The Shaman,” replies Joe. 

He takes the children to the park.   They shiver in overcoats.  He pours hot chocolate from a thermos.  They’re tired.  He must go back.  The noise of them running upstairs obliterates other sounds.  He walks into the kitchen, ready for tears and recriminations, for the end of his marriage and the beginning of something else but not for the sight of Asha and Clare, their feet up on chairs, glasses of wine in their hands, laughing. 

Clare says, “All right if Asha stays for dinner?”  They use the good plates, no takeaway, Clare puts on an apron and whips up a bolognaise as if she does it every night.  She doesn’t say it’s his bolognaise from the supply in the freezer.  When Asha calls it heavenly, Clare smiles and says, “it’s nothing.”  The children stare at Asha’s long black hair, a wolf made human at their kitchen table, this lupine hunger about her that Joe has come to think of as his own, and disappear to their rooms as soon as the meal is over.  Asha and Clare polish off two bottles of wine between them.  They’re moving on to tequila when Joe wishes them goodnight.  He checks the spare room before cleaning his teeth.  He can hear them laughing through the floorboards.  Maybe it’s a good thing.

Asha stays the night, and the next night, a week later she turns up with a bag.  When Clare gets home Joe raises his eyebrows behind Asha’s back and motions with his head, a move that’s meant to say quick chat?

“There’s no need for a pantomime, Joe,” Clare drops her coat on a chair.  “Asha’s staying till she’s got her place sorted.”  He didn’t know her place wasn’t sorted, he didn’t know she had a place.  He’s only ever seen her in the park with a book and almost naked round a fire, he’s only ever thought of her as Beautiful and Shaman and His; never as a human with human needs, a mortgage somewhere, a front door, a closet with her clothes in it except they aren’t, they’re spilling out of a sports bag on the spare room bed where Joe has taken them and Asha has rifled through them and followed him down to the kitchen pulling a sweater over her head.  In the hour between Asha arriving and his wife coming home he’s tried to find the magic they share around the fire, the magic that was theirs when Asha was his secret, when his wife had been dismissive and he had kept it quiet, but this Asha holds her intimacy from him like a toy he cannot have.  This Asha picks up Vanity Fair while he scrubs potatoes and reads out bits to him that he couldn’t care less about but which his wife would find hilarious. 

A week turns into months.  The spare room isn’t called that anymore, it’s called Asha’s room, even the children have come to accept it.  Clare takes a rare moment with him, she seeks him out on a Sunday while he crouches in the garden trying to fix the lawnmower.  She stands over the noise of the machine.  He looks up at her.  He wipes his hands on his jeans.  She says, “I was thinking we could go out for dinner.”

“All five of us?”  He’s already planned white fish and salsa wraps.

“Actually I was thinking me and you.”  The way she holds his eyes feels like the first time she’s seen him in ages. 

Asha whips the children into a frenzy with the proposal of homemade pizza, Clare and Joe go up to change, she showers first, he picks out his favourite shirt.  They walk arm in arm to the restaurant they used to go to in the old days when she was angry and he was tired, when they’d argue over carbonara and too much wine.  She hasn’t looked pissed off in months and he hasn’t felt tired; he’s been positively buzzing.  His life as meaning at last, a Shaman has come to stay, picked them, picked him, these last weeks with Asha have been transformative.  He’s laughed at the petty jealousy he’d felt when she’d moved in, the fear of her leaving him, preferring his wife; she’s a Shaman, she’s above that, he’s embarrassed he asked.  They have hours and hours together while his wife’s at work, he’s started meditating in tune with her, one ear on the sound of her bedroom door opening.  The kids have asked how long she’s going to stay.

He notices Clare isn’t drinking as much this evening, he’s noticed she wants to stay present.  She’s even stopped taking the piss out of the beads that Asha gave him.  Maybe tonight they’ll have sex.  

“So Asha and I have been talking,” she says, putting her wine glass down.  “She’s asked me to go with her to Italy.”

The Italy retreat has been a long time in the planning.  Only people who are ready have been invited to come.  “That’s great,” he says, and thinks but you’ve never even come to one ceremony.

As if reading his mind she says, “I know I’ve never come to one of your ceremonies, but Ash thinks it will be good for us, I mean, me.”

She still calls them your ceremonies as if they’re playthings to keep his mind at bay but it’s impossible to be near Asha without being drawn in and at last he can see it in the clear happiness of his wife’s eyes.  Asha had cautioned him not to push, she’d said many times leave her be, Joe, Clare will come round in her own time and she’s been right.  She’s always right.  “And us,” says Joe.  “It’ll be really good for us.  Will we send the kids to grandma?”

“Actually, she thinks it would be better if you stayed at home.”

Later that evening Asha temporarily mutes Love Island and says, “someone’s got to look after the altar, Joe.”

He decides this increase in responsibility is a fair price to pay for missing out on ten days in Tuscany sweating beneath an Italian sun.  He waves them off with a sense of purpose and checks on the candles newly lit on the expansive shrine in her room.  Asha’s taught him how to care for this centre of her power; a soft brush between the artefacts, a charcoal lit each morning, a resin smouldering smoke amongst white heat.  She’s schooled him in meditation prayers of purity.  She’s given him a blanket from Peru.  She’s told him it would be best if he slept in there too, while they’re away.

Asha and his wife return three weeks later, they took a few days extra shopping in Florence and a detour to Rome.  They are sun-kissed and happy, they don’t spend much time explaining.  “Clare and I needed to spend more time together,” says Asha, already shutting the door on the room that used to be his.  He makes it okay in his mind, he believes it will only be temporary.  The way she looks at him sometimes, it’s a wonder they haven’t all three ended up in that bed.  “You’re becoming a man,” says Asha that weekend, passing him her bag to carry, the retreats at the farm a showcase for how far he’s come.  Now he is the first to strip off, a solid mountain in the sweat lodge, a beast of a warrior as the ayahuasca renders newcomers foetal.  His bedroom at home, that was her bedroom, has become his temple.  He sleeps before her altar and tries not to listen to the sounds coming through the wall.

When summer comes again the children say they want to stay with grandma.  His eldest says that things have got too weird.  “It was always meant to be, Joe,” says Asha, stroking Clare’s arm.  They lie together on the sofa, legs entwined. Clare says, “we don’t want you to go.”  He’s asked Asha three times if she wants to clean the altar, she hasn’t been in there in for months, she hasn’t held a retreat since Clare expressed an interest in city breaks to Bruges.  Since then they’ve been to Dublin, Berlin and Vienna.  They’re going to Oslo next.  He leaves them to their chatter and goes into the kitchen.  The sink is full of suds and last night’s supper, the view a strip of lawn, a cherry tree and the playhouse which leans depressingly down on one knee. The marigolds are sticky on his hands.