My Mother My Mirror Read online

  In the first dance I kept my skimpy clothes on, in the second I stripped seductively down to my knickers or thong, and for the final dance I was naked. Then when the music was over I once again covered my fanny, descended the few steps down from the stage and did a circuit of the tables, encouraging the punters to slip a dollar or so into the lacy garter on my thigh.

  There was usually only one girl on stage at a time; however I learned a lot from watching myself in the wall of mirrors behind me, and when I was off stage I would look and see what the other girls did. Thai had an elaborate but skimpy leopard costume, and did some impressive floor work, writhing around into all sorts of interesting positions; but some of the larger girls who had been there longer were far more subtle and still very popular. The men just seemed to love us, whatever our shape, size or personality. When I first went I asked if I could dance barefoot, which I did for a while, but it soon became obvious that heels made the leg a much sexier shape so I went off and bought a pair of tall white sandals which were surprisingly un-painful. I never threw them away, but they finally fell apart in my wardrobe twenty years later.

  It was easy once I’d been doing it for a while. I had always enjoyed dancing, and it surprised me what power there was in a few wriggles and a pretty smile. I really just had to be myself, and before I knew it they were asking for tabletop dances and buying me champagne. Some of the men were nice to talk to. Because it was near the airport, both pilots and all sorts of interesting travellers would come in to pass a few hours feasting their eyes on our beautiful bodies. I still can’t hear Madonna sing ‘Like a virgin’ without being reminded of my thong with the soft white feather triangle at the front, and the coy way in which I shuffled the lacy shift from my shoulders whilst delicately stroking the inside of my thighs.

  When I got back to the hotel at five o’clock in the morning, I was often touched to find that Sam had cooked me a meal: I particularly remember baked carrots and parsnips and potatoes. He had also spent his time doing press-ups and meditating and reading inspiring passages from his books, ready to regale me with new ideas. We talked about Maharaji, of course, and I asked him what had happened to the role he used to play in the Mission, and how much he missed being with Maharaji.

  They seemed innocent enough questions, and I asked him because I wanted to know him better, and particularly to know about his feelings, but he immediately got defensive and told me that becoming attached to your guru was actually the opposite of enlightenment and it was important to become empowered as an individual. I couldn’t argue with that, but I did admit to being very fond of Maharaji; and again he objected, looking at me sternly and saying I was deluded and it was a trap of the mind.

  He went on and on about it. Even when I told him I agreed, he wouldn’t let it go. He was never, ever at a loss for words. He talked and talked and talked and talked. If there was something he was trying to prove to me, he seemed to think it his duty to talk at me for hours on end until he had ground down any resistance and I had genuinely come round to his way of thinking.

  Sometimes I enjoyed listening to him; a lot of the time I felt uncomfortable, but I hadn’t quite figured out why. He was highly intelligent, and what he said mostly made sense. I wished I could stand up for myself and give as good as I got, but I felt overwhelmed. And when I did stick to my point of view and argue or even shout to get my point across, he would immediately shout back louder and with far more words, so that for the first time I found myself rowing with a partner. I liked the fire and the challenge and the vibrancy of it all, but it also hurt. It amazes me now that I spent twelve years with this man, when it was acrimonious right from the beginning. But I had a lot to learn, and he did teach me a lot, right from the start.

  We also made love in that hotel room, and that felt wonderful. It’s such an immediate, primal and deeply nourishing experience that I must admit I can’t actually remember it at all, but I do remember wanting more – even in those early days, always being a little hungrier than he was. I spent a brief evening agonising over his slightly over-large nose and extra sticky-out ears, but once that was over I was well on the way to falling in love with him, or with the ideal that I projected onto him, or whatever it is that we fall in love with.

  Certainly there was a familiarity about him: a feeling when I saw him in the distance coming towards me, or when I saw him smile, that yes, we were strongly connected, he was a part of me in some way. Where do these feelings come from? Is it to do with soul connection, past lives, destiny? Is it that the way he looked and felt was similar to the way we look and feel in my family? Or did I recognize in him the same emotional wounds that I had? Probably a bit of all these things. One way or another, we were going to be tangled in each others lives for years to come.

  19

  Devon

  Back in California, I had a deep think about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The acupuncture course was intense: if I was going to carry on with it, I would have to take it more slowly. They were trying to cram a three to four year course into two years, and what with having to work to pay for it as well as do all the studying and revising, it was too much. But did I want to continue at all? Was this really my vocation? So far we had only been doing the groundwork, but I had to admit that I wasn’t comfortable with the thought of needles, and there was a way in which the whole practice still seemed very foreign to me.

  What was closest to my heart, occupation-wise? What had healed me the most, and what did I most want to pass on to other people? In the end I had to admit that it was Knowledge, and that still what I would love most in the world was to be an instructor: to be instrumental in offering other people the chance that I had been given to access their own inner love. Whether this ever happened or not, it was what I most believed in, and everything else paled in comparison. So I completed that year at the acupuncture school with no plans to return.

  But there was a lot else going on. Already, having a relationship with Sam was becoming a full-time occupation. I found it fascinating, but difficult and demanding. There was always some new misunderstanding to struggle with and try to resolve. Also I was unwell, and dreaded going to an American doctor because of the expense. I had a pain in the lower right corner of my abdomen. By this time we were living in Sam’s blue van and camping here and there. We travelled north to a lakeside site where I brewed Chinese herbs on the Calor Gas and Sam hovered healing hands over my belly; but despite all this I got steadily worse.

  I thought it might be my appendix. I longed for the British National Health Service. Then in the end it got so bad that we went to the hospital, where after a quick examination I was told it was an ovary infection and given a course of penicillin. I guess having a regular sex life after so long had taken my body by surprise. Now of course I wished we had asked for help earlier, especially because the nagging adhesion of scar tissue continued to bother me for the next five years. All in all I was getting a bit fed-up with America, so what with Sam’s intense nostalgia for Devon and my health worries, we decided to start throwing some things out and selling others in preparation for returning home.

  At first we stayed with my family in London and looked for somewhere to live close to where I was as a child, but everything seemed impractical and too expensive, so after a few weeks we went down to Plymouth to meet Sam’s parents, and then to visit some of his old friends in the area. In the end we found a winter-let cottage attached to a large house a few miles from the sea. That winter was exceptionally snowy, and we went for walks amongst the huge drifts, then came back and snuggled up in bed together. We made up pet names for each other: I called him Snufkin, because his hat and his pipe and his travelling stories reminded me of the character in the Moomintroll books, and he called me Bubbins; then I called him Bubbins too and later it was shortened to Bubs.

  When spring came we enjoyed the primroses and daffodils and the unfurling ferns. I cooked for us both, and we wrote – I’m not sure what - and of course he still talked to me a l
ot. I admired the fact that he was always striving to find the truth, but sometimes I felt like a whole auditorium rather than just little me, receiving these great philosophies about the meaning of life and the blindness of the majority of people. He talked a lot about being positive, about how the Americans had got it right in this way: a positive attitude was the answer to everything. If I spoke fearfully about something he told me I was giving it the wrong sort of energy and making the thing that I dreaded much more likely to happen.

  I became cautious about what I said, but more because I didn’t want to annoy him than from believing in what he told me. Though I could see his point, sometimes it felt necessary and healthy to talk about my worries, and certainly being afraid to be fearful just tied me up in knots. And I did notice that sometimes he said a lot of very negative things himself without noticing, and then at another time in another mood almost anything I said was condemned for being negative.

  But I loved him: his smile, his body, his appetite for life, his struggles – especially his struggle with his own sense of worth, his own power, which I recognized as very similar to my own. Sometimes it took the form of intense criticism of other people, but even this I could revel in sometimes, provided it didn’t get turned towards me. Certainly the way he saw my mother as controlling and thinking herself better than everyone else was enormously comforting to me. I needed an ally in this: I still felt overpowered by her, reduced to feeling like a nobody in her presence, confused as to who I was separate from her. So someone who could point out her faults and tell me that I was different, in fact better than her, was very valuable.

  Sam delighted in showing me Devon: all the spots that were familiar to him as a child. We visited little stone bridges over Dartmoor rivers, rocky tors, different beaches and villages. He told me about his grandfather who was a fisherman in Tamerton Creek, and about how his father used to be in the marines and was distant and strict with him, and how his mother suffocated him with her attentions and then one day threatened to chop off his willy and give it to the rag-and-bone man, after finding him and the girl next door innocently looking at each others’ bodies. I was deeply moved by the pain he had suffered, and told him stories about my own struggles.

  We loved going to the zoo and marvelling at all the different creatures, and we did a lot of other touristy things during our first few years together. We travelled on the steam train to Kingswear, then took the ferry across to Dartmouth and looked round the shops; we had a drink in the hotel on Burgh Island where Agatha Christie wrote some of her books, took a walk round the lake at Slapton Leigh nature reserve, went to see the model village in Torquay, the Aquarium in Plymouth and the Marble Centre in Bovey Tracy. We explored Kitley Caves, the Shire Horse Centre, Buckfast Abbey, Start Point lighthouse...

  By late spring the next year we had moved in with Sam’s friend Terry, who was renting a large farmhouse a mile up the lane from Bantham beach; then a few months later Terry moved out and we had the place to ourselves. It was scruffy, with uneven floors and bits of plaster coming off the walls in places, but it was also a dear old house with plenty of space, and I loved finding ways to make it work for us and be beautiful at the same time. We did some plastering and decorating, but mainly we just made the most of what was there. With a combination of second-hand furniture, bricks and planks we had all the shelves, work surfaces and sitting places that we needed; then I hung colourful fabric on the walls and over the sofa and armchairs, put up pictures, and as a final touch made stencils of birds and clouds to flit around the top of the landing.

  There was a large walled garden, not so sheltered when the winter wind from the sea whipped round it, but glorious on a summer morning when the mist drifted inland, bringing with it a faint whiff of ozone. We grew a lot of vegetables and some flowers, then we bought a summerhouse where we nurtured seedlings and tomatoes, and a fragrant creeping Hoya with waxy white blooms. This was a lovely place to sit and write or meditate, overlooking the garden.

  Sam started working, teaching computer skills on a government-run course fourteen miles away on the edge of Plymouth. It seemed to do him good to have a regular routine, although he complained a lot as well. Finally he was conforming to an ordinary working-man’s life, and it didn’t sit very comfortably with his image of himself as a truth-seeking pioneer, a rebel who would never adopt the mundane values of British society. I stayed at home for a year and wrote a short novel, then I also went to work, as a secretary: first in a heavy transport company round the corner from where Sam worked, and later at Fairford Electronics in Kingsbridge, just four miles away, where I stayed for over three years. It was a friendly local company and I enjoyed my time there.

  Now we were both working we could afford some new things, so we bought a luxurious pocket-sprung mattress with matching quilted bed-base complete with spacious, smoothly gliding drawers: a huge improvement on our mattress on the floor. We also got nice new bedding, and some good quality saucepans; then we replaced the Renault we had got from an auction when we first arrived in London with a SAAB, and generally enjoyed ourselves improving our lifestyle. Because we still didn’t have very much and were getting to know each others’ tastes and whims, for a series of Christmases and birthdays we successfully bought lovely presents for each other that both gave pleasure and added to our household possessions: a blue glass vase, a decorative fruit bowl, an illustrated book of British woodlands, a picture for the wall, candlesticks, ornaments, clothes...

  From time to time we went to see Maharaji, and it was awful. I have particularly bad memories of the NEC in Birmingham, and another large hall in Brighton. Sam had a lot of confused feelings around Maharaji: guilt, a sense of rejection, anger, love, bitterness. Sometimes he would admit to his hurt, but mostly he projected his difficulties in my direction and managed to make me thoroughly miserable.

  I wanted to do what I usually did and try to get as close to the front as I could, with or without the help of Sandra or any of my other allies. Sam had two weapons he used to try to prevent me: one was to make me feel guilty and say I should stay with him, that he was my partner and much more important than my guru and far too many premie relationships had been ruined by misplaced loyalty... The other was a long spiel about the spiritual mistake of thinking that God was on the outside, when the whole teaching was about an inner experience.

  Buoyed up by being in the company of a lot of people whom I’d known and loved over the years, and by determination borne of the fact that this was really important to me, I was a little bolder than usual and argued vehemently with what he said, which only made him worse, until we were having horrible shouting matches in front of my friends and acquaintances, which was the very last place in which I wanted to be seen like that. Sometimes I compromised, and usually regretted it, or sometimes I defied him and found a seat close to the front. One way or another, it was a very trying ordeal.

  However, back at home things were relatively peaceful and we had lots in common. We both still meditated, and we did a lot of writing: stories, essays and poems, most of which had some sort of spiritual message. Sam had brought his IBM computer and printer over from America, which was no mean feat considering the size of them. He taught me how to use the word-processing program, and I taught myself to touch-type with the help of a book I bought from ‘Smiths’. Then we began to go once a week to the Kingsbridge Writers’ Circle, where we shared what we had written with a group of other aspiring writers. Sam wrote an epic poem about a fighter pilot in the last few minutes before his death, that was so detailed and real it made us think he must have been one in his last life. I typed it up for him, and then typed up all the poems he had written in his youth. I was writing fairy-stories, trying to convey what I had realized about the magical nature of life using witches and fairies, goblins and princesses.

  We decided to look for a kitten. I had always had a cat around when I was growing up, and to me a home wasn’t complete without one. Someone told us about a farm where the cat population was
getting out of control and they were bound to have spare kittens, so we went along to look. It was upsetting: there were so many cats, and all they ate were crusts of stale bread thrown out by the farmer’s wife plus milk they licked up from the floor of the milking parlour, and of course the rats and mice that they were employed to destroy. However, as promised there were kittens to spare, so we chose one with handsome tiger stripes and took him home.

  Understandably, Snooks was quite sickly to begin with: he must have licked up all sorts of rubbish along with the milk, and his mother didn’t look in great shape either. We fed him scrambled eggs and warm, clean milk to settle his stomach, and let him sleep in a hollow on our bed, and after a while he grew stronger and settled in nicely.

  Our lives began to follow the seasons. In spring we would dig and plant seeds, in summer and autumn we would tend the plants and reap the harvest. I grew some flowers: pansies, snapdragons, sweet williams, sunflowers... but most of my energy went in to vegetables. I loved rummaging in the soil for potatoes: finding a great wealth of them underneath each leafy mound, then being surprised by yet another and another smooth oval shape as I scrabbled deeper into the earth. The carrots were my favourite: such a gorgeously sweet, earthy smell and so satisfying to pull up; and the parsnips sometimes had tails a foot long. Then there were great glossy quilted leaves of swiss chard, bamboo pyramids of runner beans, and leeks and peas. All of this would be taken into the little back kitchen, washed and scrubbed and cooked on the Rayburn or else on the electric stove.