Counting Stars

  “These the bones of our people. We keep watch on them. This holy place.”

  He stood up and held his hands toward the earth of Jonadab.

  “The bones of our people. Somewhere here our father, somewhere here our mother.” The girl on the stones sniggered, giggled. He held the bone in his palm. “Mebbe this a bit of mother, a bit of father. Mebbe from an older time. Mebbe from time way way back, boy.” He went to the fire, raised the bone over his head. He grunted several times, stamped his feet, muttered and wailed. His voice intensified. He howled and howled. Then was silent, sat by his sister. She stuck her tongue out.

  “Now you shove off back, boy,” he said.

  She nodded, formed the words with her lips: Shove off back.

  He dropped the bone. The dog crawled to it, started to lick.

  The boy and the girl leaned on each other. They faced away from me. He lit another cigarette stub and they smoked together.

  I sketched them. I stared toward the city, saw the huge construction cranes turning so slowly across the rooftops, saw the glint of traffic in the sunlight as it moved across the bridge, saw the world moment by moment being created on what was gone.

  “I knew somebody who died,” I said.

  They were lost in themselves. I imagined following them, entering their silence, moving through it step by step. Another little journey, another Jonadab.

  “I knew somebody that’s in the ground,” I said.

  The girl turned.

  “Where that?” said the boy.

  I pointed back up the hill. “There. Up there.”

  “Ha. Up there.”

  I moved to them. I sat on a stone at their side.

  “There’s ground up there filled with people, too,” I said.

  The boy nodded.

  “Places everywhere built on bones.”

  The girl held the cigarette to me. I smoked it and my head began to reel and I smoked again.

  I stood above the fire and stamped my feet and grunted. I muttered and wailed and the girl giggled. I put my hand flat to my mouth and hooted. The dog growled. The boy came to my side and stamped and hooted too. Then the girl at last. She circled the fire and held her face up to the sky. We circled the fire together and squealed and screamed.

  When it was over we sat on the stones again. The girl was at my side. I wrote in my book, I went to Jonadab today. I closed my eyes and moved into the silence. After a long time, she whispered. “Yes. This is Jonadab.” And then another long time, and she whispered, “We bring the ponies for the grass.”

  She leaned on me.

  “We sleep out in fine weather,” she whispered. “Our home is not far away.”

  Her body rose and rested on her breath.

  “Your people are good,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Write your people.”

  I wrote their names: my father, my mother, my sisters, my brother.

  “Write the one that’s gone.”

  I wrote her name, Barbara.

  “Write us.”

  “Who are you?”

  “John and Jane.”

  I wrote their names.

  “Who are your people?” I asked.

  “Our father died and then our mother died. We live with another, who is bad.”

  The boy was silent, until he knelt before us with his knife. He took our thumbs and cut into their soft flesh and squeezed out the blood. He cut his own thumb. We pressed our wounds against each other’s wounds.

  “Now we brothers and sisters,” he said. “We joined in blood.”

  We meditated on this.

  “One day much blood will run from our knives,” said the girl. “We will go off on the horses.”

  I asked no questions. We sat there. The field by the river was quiet and still. The men in the shipyards called to each other. Sparks cascaded into the water.

  “One day I thought I was going to die,” she said.

  She turned. We looked together toward Jonadab Lane, and saw the dark figure waiting there below the broken buildings.

  “It’s nothing,” she whispered. “Don’t look. Don’t ask.”

  After a time she kissed my cheek.

  I thought of Miss Lynch and of my duty to move forward.

  I thought of my sister in the ground at Heworth. I thought of the stone with her name on it, the space beneath waiting for other names. I thought of passing her, of climbing home again through familiar streets, passing familiar faces, and there came a great ache of desire to stay in Jonadab this day, and then to disappear, to ride into the unknown places with these gentle children and their beasts.

  The Subtle Body

  I FELL IN LOVE WITH THERESA as I came back from kissing the cross.

  It was Good Friday afternoon. St. Patrick’s church was packed. Babies squealed. Old women whimpered in grief. The place reeked of incense and sweat and beery breath. The priests’ voices droned in prayer and wobbled in song. They went on and on about death and hell and gloom. The day darkened and darkened and darkened. A hailstorm roared in from the North Sea.

  I squirmed on my hard seat. Never again. Never again.

  I was with Mick Flannery. He’d gone off to train to be a priest when he was eleven. Two months ago they’d sent him back, and he was quickly making up for lost time. It was Mick who spotted Theresa. We were shuffling to the altar. The choir was groaning through “O Sacred Heart.”

  “Corduroy suit. Black hair,” he hissed. “Lovely.”

  She was on her way back, black mantilla draped across her head.

  “An angel,” he moaned. “Who is she?”

  A mystery. I dipped my head as Father O’Mahoney held out the cross. I kissed the great black nail that pierced Christ’s feet.

  Going back, I saw her a few rows beyond our own. Her eyes were piously downcast.

  The priests said that Christ had begun his voyage through death, that like all of us he would rise again, that like all of us he would return in more glorious form.

  I kept turning.

  She raised her dark eyes to me, and my heart was hers.

  Afterward, we waited in the dusk beneath St. Patrick’s statue until she came. She was with a girl I knew, Mary or Maria, who lived out Heworth way. We followed them toward Felling Square, then on to Watermill Lane, where heavy trees grew from the verges and yellow streetlights shone down through the spring leaves.

  “What can we do?” said Mick.

  I started to run.

  Maria held Theresa tight.

  “What you after?” she asked.

  “Saw you in church,” I said to Theresa. I gagged and gaped. “Never seen anybody so beautiful.”

  “She’s Theresa,” said Maria. “My cousin. She’s from Winlaton.”

  “Come out with me,” I said.

  Mick struck a match behind me.

  “She’s come to be with me,” said Maria.

  “All of us,” I said. “You and all. Mick and all.”

  They huddled together and whispered and giggled; then Theresa came in close. Her corduroy on the back of my hand, her scent, the sweetness of her breath.

  “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Same time. Here.”

  And they were gone, heels clacking through the shadows of the trees.

  The back of my hand was tingling. My spirit was soaring.

  “Thanks be,” Mick said.

  “Amen. Amen.”

  Dad was still alive then. He told me I was a member of the most privileged generation the world had ever seen. There’d be nothing I couldn’t do. Nothing must hold me back. We used to stand together in the garden and he talked about the war, how it had stifled his own generation. He said a time of great liberation had arrived. He understood the doubts that I was prey to: the problems of my faith, the complexity of my young body, the yearnings and confusions of my liberated mind. He said there were temptations and possibilities he had no experience of.

  Mam used to cry when I questioned the faith. But he used to whispe
r, “Find your own way. Go as far as you need.”

  He’d hold me close.

  “Just don’t leave us behind. You’ll need us waiting here with our love.”

  Then he’d ask about books, and we’d start to smile. He knew that the library had begun to overcome the church. The library was a prefabricated place on a green beside the square. I took out armfuls of Hemingway and Lawrence and now-forgotten names from the Recommended New Novels section. I pored in excited confusion through The Waste Land and The Cantos. I learned Dylan Thomas and Stevie Smith by heart. I plundered the shelves of the paranormal. I devoured surveys of the occult, read tantalizing accounts of spontaneous combustion, the aura, teleportation, poltergeists and human vanishings. I took home books on yoga and propped them on the bedroom floor as I attempted the Plow or the Lotus or teetered upside down on my head. I squatted between the beds, meditated, and attempted to reach some higher plane.

  I kept reading about the body’s subtlety: there was the thing of bones and the thing of spirit; in between was an astral body with elements of both these forms. This body could be inhabited by adepts, who traveled in the astral plane above the material world. I wanted to do this. I wanted to learn the necessary mantras, to submit to arcane disciplines. But the references were coy and confusing, gushing descriptions, no instruction.

  Then I discovered T. Lobsang Rampa, my exotic counterpart, my guide. He was a Tibetan monk forced into exile by the barbaric Chinese. His map of Lhasa in The Third Eye was an exalted version of Felling. I imagined walking past the Potala Palace as I walked past Felling Square, loitering in Norbu Linga as I loitered in Felling Park, gazing down toward the Kyi Chu River as I gazed toward the Tyne.

  Lobsang taught me that there were no secrets. Imagination was the only key. With thumping heart I read his words, so thrilling, so intimate:

  As you lie alone upon your bed, keep calm. Imagine that you are gently disengaging from your body. Imagine that you are forming a body the exact counterpart of your physical body, and that it is floating above the physical, weightlessly. You will experience a slight swaying, a minute rise and fall. There is nothing to be afraid of. As you keep calm you will find that gradually your now-freed spirit will drift until you float a few feet off. Then you can look down at yourself, at your physical body. You will see that your physical and your astral bodies are connected by a shining silver cord which pulsates with life. Nothing can hurt you so long as your thoughts are pure.

  Dad was with me in the living room as I read this. He smiled at the three eyes and the snowy mountains on the cover. He told me as he so often did about Burma, the wet heat and stench of the jungle, the awful fear of the Japanese.

  “I saw the Himalayas once,” he said. “Went with a mate on leave. Traveled north for days. Came one night to a station in the middle of nowhere. We sat on the platform, waiting. Lots of Indians beside us with blankets pulled over their heads. Over the line there was a fire burning and they were playing flutes and a girl was dancing. I kept thinking of your mother, of Felling, getting home again. Kept nodding off, dreaming of being here, certain I was here, then jerking awake again. The sun came up and straightaway it was blazing hot and glaring and the fields were shimmering and the line was shining bright. There they were, the Himalayas, out past everything. Icy white and still and beautiful. They just drew your eyes to them and held them. Then the train came and chaos started and we were heading back again.”

  He smoked and coughed and smiled again.

  “Always said I’d go back there. Tibet, maybe. Nepal . . . Maybe you will, though.”

  I went on reading.

  If you imagine it strongly enough you can do it.

  “Aye. You know there’s more than this. Maybe you will.”

  I couldn’t do it. Too much disturbance. Not enough purity. Not enough imagination. Night after night I tried. Often I felt the minute rise and fall. I was on the point of breaking free. I imagined looking down upon Felling, lights arranged in rows along the streets, dark patches of parks and gardens, the river’s gleam, all of Tyneside glittering in the night. I imagined traveling to Tibet itself, to the snowy peaks, the eagles, the palaces, the fluttering prayer flags. I imagined the shining cord stretching back to the bony body on the bed. But each night I lay surrounded only by the known and the familiar: the small house, the darkness, Dad’s snoring, one of my sisters murmuring in her sleep.

  And on Good Friday Theresa disturbed my imaginings: her dark hair and eyes, her sweetness and her breath, and my anticipation of tomorrow.

  Mick and I stood beneath the trees. We breathed smoke through the mist toward the lights.

  “Tell me about the Fathers,” I said.

  “Why’s it always that you want to know?”

  “Were there things you can’t talk about?”

  “Things?”

  “Secrets. Things they taught you. Things they showed you.”

  “We did Latin all the time. They told us about Africa and malaria. They went on and on about Hell. They showed us how to lie in bed in an attitude of prayer. We had to contemplate our end and rise above the flesh.”

  “And did you?”

  “All we talked about was girls. All we imagined was girls.”

  He had the wildness in his eyes that had come back from the Fathers with him.

  “They asked about our dreams. They searched our lockers, read our letters. They were evil, man.”

  The girls didn’t come. We scanned the houses, looked for the Sacred Heart medallions in the doorlights that showed where Catholics were. We cursed and blasphemed. Then there was a door ajar, a crack of light inside the frame, music playing. We stepped through the gate.

  Mick gripped my arm.

  “You have the pretty one,” he said. “I saw the way she looked at you. I’ll have the other. Right?”

  I peered through the doorlight, past the medallion’s silhouette. From inside came the singing of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

  “Must be them,” he said. He rapped on the door.

  Hurrying feet and laughter, then Maria, peering out.

  “What you doing?” she asked.

  “You said you’d come.”

  “How d’you know we wouldn’t?”

  “We waited.”

  “And we’re not worth waiting for?”

  “Let’s come in.”

  Theresa came, stood in the hall.

  “They want to come in,” laughed Maria.

  She sniggered, then let us through. I saw Christ exposing his heart for us. I smelt Theresa, felt her hand brush against mine.

  “Nobody in?” said Mick.

  Maria laughed.

  “They’re at the vigil.”

  We drank sherry that tasted like altar wine. The girls sat on a sofa and Mick and I on deep chairs. Smokey finished and the Temptations slapped down onto the turntable. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. Plaster angels flew across the walls. We tapped our cigarettes relentlessly on the rims of ashtrays. Theresa talked about Winlaton, in the hills beyond Felling. So rough, lads fighting in the streets all the time. She’d dreamt for weeks of coming here.

  “But I can’t stay long,” she said, and she gazed into my eyes.

  Mick left me and sat on the sofa with his arm around Maria. Theresa smiled and turned the light off and came to me and we kissed.

  “I hoped you’d come,” she whispered.

  We kissed again.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said.

  I imagined floating through the room, seeing the two of us tangled below me on the armchair.

  “Keep calm,” whispered Theresa.

  I ran my hands across her.

  “Not too far,” she whispered.

  We lay sighing.

  “I’m glad you were in the church,” she whispered. “You believe in it?”

  “It?”

  “God. Sin. Angels. Hell and Heaven. Soul and body. All that. The Cross. That He came back from death and ascended into Heave
n.”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.

  “You like my body?” she whispered.

  I sighed and my heart raced.

  “Yes. I believe in astral bodies, as well,” I said.

  “Astral bodies?”

  “They’re like souls. You float out of yourself and travel in the astral plane. It’s true. All it takes is imagination.”

  She sniggered.

  “Imagine it,” I said. “Close your eyes. Imagine that we’re rising together from the chair, that we can look down at ourselves. Imagine it. It can happen. It can really happen.”

  “I’m floating,” she murmured.

  For a moment it seemed true. We felt Lobsang’s swaying, we began to rise from the chair. We held each other tight and kissed. Then Maria called.

  “Hey. You two.” She giggled. “Come back to the real world. Time to go.”

  We went into the night, all four of us. Theresa pressed against me as we walked.

  I told her about Lobsang, Tibet, the Himalayas, the astral plane.

  Our breath glowed and thickened beneath the lights. Our lips were tender. We hid in the shadows as families moved past us from the vigil. Soon Maria said they’d have to go. Theresa drew me into a heavy overhanging hedge and we kissed again.

  I walked with Mick through the mist to Felling Square. I could still smell her, feel her skin, hear her breath in my ear. Mick trembled and skipped in excitement.

  “Wow,” he kept saying. “Wow. How far’d you go?” he said.

  I smiled.

  “Far enough.”

  “Aye. Far enough.”

  We smoked a cigarette beside the fountain, then went our separate ways into the gloom.

  “You weren’t at the vigil,” said Mam as I entered the house.

  I turned my eyes down.

  “Your faith’s your most precious thing,” she said.

  “I know that.”