I put the trays for the dirty dishes on the table by the door. Then the plastic bucket for the cutlery. First the women’s side, then the men’s. It’s good there are two sides to serve. Twice the work. The first days as a server I kept doing kindnesses for everyone. I’d run off and get a clean knife for someone who had dropped hers. I’d fetch a heavy blanket for a meditator who was shivering. It was a sort of show. Very Beth. I wanted to make myself known, to say, Here’s Beth, serving you! Big grin on my face. Here’s Beth, helping you to meditate! That makes me laugh now. That isn’t service. Service is doing only what is required, facelessly, no more, nothing personal. Let the woman eating go to the tray and get herself a clean knife. Let the meditator go to the back of the room and get herself the blankets she needs. Personal is poison. Personal distracts. Invites relationships. I wish I could serve more and more and more, in the dead of night, always in the dead of night, in complete silence, unheard, unseen, unpraised, unloved. Serving. I don’t want to be loved. I mustn’t be loved. I don’t want to fail to love the person who loves me. I don’t want anything.
May all beings visible and invisible be free from all attachment.
May all beings be liberated, liberated, liberated.
I want to be one of the invisible beings.
Mi Nu is becoming invisible. One day we will see right through her. She won’t be there.
I put out breadknives and crackers. I measured the oats for the men’s porridge and the women’s porridge. I love to smell the oats on my fingers. I put prunes and lemon slices in a pan to warm. If only there’d been more to do, I would have gone on for hours. I wasn’t tired. It was like setting up for a concert when you’ve arrived too early. Take it slowly. The drums the amps the mikes the leads the wah wah. I loved setting up with Zoë. We bumped into each other and giggled. Sex was so childish with Zoë. I was so childish.
Now I remembered the serving spoons for the cereals, for the stewed fruit. I made up bowls of oranges and apples. The apples were a deep waxy green. I took them one by one from the box in the cold room, rinsed them and dried them at the sink. I even polished them with a clean tea-towel. They looked good. And the oranges glowed beside them. The orange of the oranges made the green of the apples greener. How healthy fruit is. After concerts we ate crap. We rushed to whatever crap place would fill us with junk and booze. What do you expect? But now I was bleeding like a pig. I was uncomfortable with sodden wads of TP between my legs. I must go to the main loos and get some tampons. You’re an unclean woman, Betsy M. They should segregate you.
Jonathan was the only guy I ever knew who didn’t mind blood on his dick. Nothing fazed him. Nothing changed him. Not blood, not passion. There was nothing doing with Carl on menstrual days. If only the Red Army had invaded France that week. No sex, but he’d go all concerned and caring. ‘How are you feeling, Beth? Will you be able to sing, Beth?’ Carl liked a girl to be weak, he loved me fragile. A fragile Beth with puppies and baby rabbits to look after. Jesus. I went to the loo which still smelt smoky. If only I had another pack. If only you could chain smoke for eternity. Chain smoke, chain drink, chain fuck. Why not? If it has to be dukkha, go the whole hog.
I went back to the kitchen and looked for the recipe book. Time was passing. A month away will pass in a blink, Jonathan said. He actually smiled. I found it on the small fridge, then made a cup of chai instead. I rinsed a pot, filled it from the kitchen boiler, stirred in ginger, cloves, cinnamon. I’d never have dreamed of drinking this brew before I came to the Dasgupta. No fennel seeds, though. Someone must have put them away in the wrong place. We were in a pub in Edinburgh and one of the bands invited me on stage. Someone had recognized me. We did a pepped-up cover of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’. The crowd was stomping. I was weeping as I sang. I was laughing. My voice was booming. I cupped the mike, ‘“Oh-o-oh-o-oh. When the working day is done, girls just wanna have fun.”’ It wasn’t true. I wanted Jonathan. ‘Just looking in your eyes now …’ he scribbled on his beer mat. He was ecstatic. People couldn’t believe I was with such an old guy. The next night, back in London, he was in bed before eleven for an early start.
‘I have other fish to fry,’ I told him.
Vikram’s Vipassana Cookbook. Food for Meditation. Cool Cooking for Cool Karma. The servers always made jokes about the folder with the recipes. We imagined a cover illustration with Vikram sitting cross-legged in the bratt pan.
I turned to day nine. Tofu and broccoli stir-fry, steamed kale, mashed potatoes, a mixed salad, soya mayonnaise, two dressings. I went into the cold room to see if anything had been prepared yet. The spuds. There were two plastic boxes with peeled potatoes in cold water. Nothing else. I went to the fresh-supplies shelves, found a box of broccoli and dragged it out to the counter.
It’s incredible how tightly they pack broccoli, how good it looks in the box. There’s a layer with heads down and stalks up and a layer with heads up and stalks down. Looking in the box, you see the heads in rows and between each foursome of heads a fat stalk poking up from the layer beneath. It all fits so neatly it looks like a jigsaw. You can’t lift one out without pulling them all up. They’re locked there. To move them you have to break one, at least one.
I wondered how they did that, whether they had a broccoli-packing machine, or just people pushing them into place. The heads were a fine dark dull green and the stalks were pale and rubbery. It was an unbroken pattern that you needed to break to cook them. It seemed a shame.
I waited a moment before pulling one out. How could they fit together so well, even though, being living things, they must all be different? At least slightly. Not made to fit together. Not like factory things. I felt weirdly mesmerized looking at the dark broccoli heads and pale broccoli stalks. My breathing went softer and I was suddenly aware of it. I had the feeling I was seeing something that wasn’t the broccoli really, even though, as Dasgupta would say, when you are looking at broccoli, you are looking at broccoli, nothing else. I shook my head.
‘Break up the broccoli into small twigs,’ the recipe book said.
Why did it bother me that I’d have to break one and take it out of the pattern, if the whole purpose of pulling them out of the cold room was to chuck them in the pot? I didn’t know if I was blessing them, or adoring them or studying them. Or if they were just in my head. Why bother tugging feelings this way and that to fit this word or the other? Who cares what I was doing? Mum used to give us tons of broccoli because it was great against cancer, and as soon as he’d turned fifty that was exactly what Dad got.
I grabbed a stalk and yanked.
‘Elisabeth? Elisabeth, what on earth are you doing?’
I had found a pair of scissors to snip the branches into a big metal colander with the tap turned on over it. The running water must have masked her footsteps.
‘I couldn’t sleep, Mrs Harper.’
What was she doing here?
I went on working as she drifted nearer. She was wearing a baggy green nightdress. She always gives that strange impression of moving on wheels. You couldn’t see her legs. I snipped the broccoli into the bowl under the fluorescent light in the big empty kitchen. We understood at once there was a tension between us. It was the same tension I used to get with Mum. Love and impatience. Maybe I couldn’t speak to Mrs Harper because of her motherliness. It wouldn’t be like that with Mi Nu, I thought. Or with GH. I would definitely be able speak to GH, if I decided to go that way. He is as fucked up as I am.
I felt angry with Mrs Harper that I couldn’t talk to her. I wanted to yell. I went on with what I was doing. The broccoli offered the tiniest resistance, then the scissors snipped. The little branches tumbled into the colander where the running water frothed over them, shifting the pale stalks and dark heads this way and that. I said: ‘I love touching vegetables and washing them. It calms me down.’