Calligraphy in the sky
It was only then that it occurred to me that I might have been held hostage for quite a few days. This nuance of life in Bourne End might have escaped me, disguised by a madness that had become familiar.
While the shouting continued, ‘Starman’ maintained its monopoly of the turntable, but Audrey came downstairs to find me. If it was Audrey. It seemed not to be wholly Audrey. The girl who had geometrically modified some left-over party cake for my benefit was already somewhat different from the girl I was used to, but the one who came into my room was different again. She was determined and full of purpose. Her purpose was to help me escape. She would help me get to the garage and into the car.
I can’t explain the change in her, except in terms of the song she’d been playing so loudly upstairs. Not the song in itself but the message that rode on those frequencies, the signal below the signal. Ramana Maharshi had exerted himself once again for my benefit. The guru acts with obliquity and tact, and Bhagavan’s miracles in his lifetime were always discreet. They didn’t draw attention to themselves but shaded in with their surroundings. If there was a storm, for instance, and anxious devotees asked when it would stop, Bhagavan didn’t go out and shout down the elements in the style of certain spiritual showmen (such as Sai Baba, a holy man with a streak of ham a mile wide), he would just say, ‘I think it’s clearing up now,’ as anybody might, but those who were waiting to embark on journeys could pick up their luggage with confidence. The magic of the smallest intervention — homœopathy all over again.
The reason for this is actually expressed in the lyric of ‘Starman’: a personage from another dimension would like to meet usbut he thinks he’d blow our minds. A very elegant exposition of the guru’s polite use of a screen, a filter to protect us from rays too strong. When he was communicating with me in one of my dark times at Cambridge, the guru had tenderly ventriloquised Kafka. Now, with Audrey as his instrument, he was vibrating in sympathy with the voice of David Bowie, singing from the inmost marrow of the song, the core, where neither writer nor performer had ever been.
I tried to gather my wits. I asked her how long I’d been stuck inside the house, but all she said was ‘Far too long. It’s time we got you out of here.’
Before I could ask her to be more specific (had it been three days? more?), she had picked me up and carried me to the garage. She didn’t look strong, but she managed. The last time I could remember her trying to pick me up was when she was about five. She had gone through a phase of wanting to lift me because she saw Peter doing it (very put out when she was told she was too young). Now she had her moment of heroic porterage — for a few steps, and then our mode of motion became the conjoined stagger-hobble.
It would have been easier for us to take the wheelchair, but Audrey seemed to know exactly what she was doing. It’s more common for the guru to speak through a person than physically to take over, but perhaps that’s what was happening. It’s true that Audrey was soon breathing heavily and making little grunts of effort, but the presence of the guru is also a great strain on the organism that houses it.
I prayed fervently that Mum and Dad would keep on bawling at Prissie, and that she went on answering back. If the showdown played out too quickly they would see that I was gone and intercept me double quick. I thought that Prissie’s earth-mother persistence, once roused, would see me right. Failing that, I prayed that Mum would wail, ‘I’m at my wits’ end’ and rush upstairs. The stair carpet was worn thin by the scuffing of hysterical feet.
Audrey helped me out of the kitchen by the rear door and round the side of the house. There was a side-door there leading to the garage. Of course there were stops along the way for changes of grip. She had to prop me up against the wall while she opened the back door, and again when we came to the garage. One more time when she opened the door of the car. But the moment we were in was so concentrated that everything seemed to happen in a single breath. To me that’s supporting evidence for this being actual intervention — not to minimise Audrey’s bravery and desire to help. Godhead itself is content to take the line of least resistance. Even Sai Baba didn’t make the lightning do calligraphy in the sky or dance in lazy loops. He worked in the grain of the wood.
In normal life Audrey wasn’t afraid of the garage, but she was certainly afraid of the creatures that lived there. Spiders. Never before had she been so blithely indifferent to the presence of arachnid arthropods. Proof positive, as far as I’m concerned, that she wasn’t at the controls. She was growing up fast, but it’s a slow business overcoming phobias or (more likely) becoming more skilled at hiding them, better at coming up with cover stories.
Audrey slipped me smoothly into the blessed Mini and whispered, ‘Good luck, Godspeed.’ Except it wasn’t going to be quite as simple as that. I had to break it to her that I didn’t have the car keys. They would be on the hall table, where Mum put them in her periodic fits of confiscation.
The car keys were one of our little battlegrounds, cause of many a tussle. I liked to leave them in the ignition of the Mini in the unlocked garage, but she was all against it. I reminded her that she was always saying that one of the reasons we had moved to the Abbotsbrook Estate was that it was safe from thieves — unlike the long-ago married quarters they had lived in when I was a baby, where her wedding-ring had been stolen from the sink where she had been doing the washing-up when she looked in on me for five seconds to make sure I was all right …
Mum said that leaving the keys in the car was asking for trouble, but how was it any riskier than Peter and me sleeping with the door open? Not that I said so, for fear that she would act against that privilege also, in the name of consistency.
So the hall table was where the keys would be, and Audrey must go back for them. She swallowed once or twice at that, but she was still game and guru-guided. For the two short minutes she was away, I tried the worn-out syllables of Om Mane Padme Om one more time, but they did nothing to slow my racing heartbeat. My mantra was like a tyre worn smooth. It had no grip. Really, I would have done just as well with ‘Starman’, or indeed ‘When You Wish upon a Star’.
Contrary to Dad’s precept in his guise as my driving instructor, I hadn’t backed the Mini in. I had been lazy and would have to take the consequences. I was facing the rear wall of the garage. I would have to back my way out. This would be a type of manœuvre that doesn’t feature in any driving test that I know of — the emergency start.
Audrey was frankly panting when she came back from the house. She’d been running. She thrust the keys into my hands. ‘Hurry up,’ she wailed. ‘They saw me. Go! Go now! They’re going mad in there …’ I had the sense that things had returned to normal. The divine whisper had said what it had to say, and we were on our own now. At any moment Audrey’s eyes might slide towards the dark corners of the garage and she would start to hug herself nervously.
That was when we heard the gravel smartly crunching, and Dad closed the garage door. I could see his sports jacket in the mirror of the Mini, the triangle of neat hanky in his breast pocket, before the daylight was cut off. Of course it hadn’t been very bright inside the garage before, but the sudden darkness made Audrey whimper. I started the engine, blessing the general reliability of Maestro Issigoni’s economical masterpiece, and switched on the headlights. Audrey wasn’t comforted by the brightness. It made her cower in a corner of the garage. The divine wind which had filled her sails had well and truly blown itself out. I shouted ‘WATCH YOURSELVES OUTSIDE!’ as loud as I could over the sound of the engine and waited five seconds, as timed by two breakneck Om-Mane-Padme-Oms, so that Mum and Dad at least had time to act on the warning. Then I found reverse and backed out of the garage.