A SPARKLING, MOVING, UTTERLY CHARMING NEW NOVEL FROM THE INCOMPARABLE SARAH-KATE LYNCH
Annie Jordan never wanted to go to India: there were too many poor people and the wrong sorts of smells. But when she ends up there anyway, to her great surprise it’s not the beggars who cling to her, it’s the lessons in life – courtesy of Heavenly Hirani and her beachside laughing yoga.
Heavenly
Hirani’s
School
of
Laughing
Yoga
SARAH-KATE LYNCH
For Barry Robison and Mark Robins, who got me to Mumbai, then let me have all the fun while they did all the work.
Spec-TAC-u-LAR!
Be truthful, gentle and fearless
M. K. Gandhi
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Thanks
About the Author
Also by Sarah-Kate Lynch
Copyright
Chapter One
Annie knew that her mother’s marbles were loose, but had never suspected that one day they would all fly out of the bag at the same time, bouncing into far-flung corners, never to be gathered together again.
That awful morning Eleanor Martyn had presented herself down at the local corner shop in her dressing gown, asking if she could please have a chocolate milkshake, which they had not sold for fifty years. On being told this, Eleanor removed the dressing gown and, naked but for the fuzzy pink bear-claw slippers Annie had given her for Christmas as a joke, wandered along the aisles searching for a suitable alternative.
A neighbour recognised her and called Annie at home, but when she got to the store her mother seemed not to know who Annie was and, worse, seemed not to like the cut of her jib.
A shop assistant had draped the dressing gown back around Eleanor’s shoulders, but the shock of seeing her graceful, elegant mother sitting on a plastic chair beside the bread stand with her sagging breasts exposed was one from which Annie doubted she would ever recover. They’d been close, always, but she hadn’t seen her mother naked for decades even though she’d lived with Annie and her husband, Hugh, for almost ten years. In fact, now Daisy and Ben had gone off to university in other cities, it was mostly just Annie and her mother at home.
They’d played cards only the day before, and her mother had been fine, Annie was sure of it. Tired, perhaps, and she’d cheated — which was a new development — but fine. Oh, she had forgotten to do her hair, her lips were dry, and she was missing an earring, but there had more often than not been something missing in recent times. Or not matching. Her mother had gone out the month before wearing two different shoes. She’d mislaid three of her four handbags. She’d lost interest in doing jigsaw puzzles.
Annie had thought so little of it yesterday! And now, here Eleanor was; naked and angry — the anger more upsetting than anything — refusing to get dressed, kicking off the bear claws and grabbing at cans of baked beans, which she didn’t even like. They didn’t like her either, slipping out of her grasp and rolling along the lino, one of them hitting her foot before Annie could intervene, splitting her thin skin like a tomato.
That broke Annie’s heart. How could such delicate skin ever hope to hold together every wonderful thing that made up her mother? How had it never occurred to her before that Eleanor needed more protection than an organ, so tired after eighty-three years of expert containment, could offer?
The Eleanor she knew seemed to escape into the ether through that brutal slice.
IN THE DAYS TO FOLLOW, her gentle loving mother was replaced by a frightened old woman who fought tooth and nail with Annie, with Hugh, with the doctors and even with the police who found her wandering around the neighbourhood in the early hours of the morning a week after the corner-shop incident.
‘You have to accept the new reality,’ the specialist they had been referred to told Annie, patting her hand.
Annie nodded politely, but inside she was howling at the absurdity of the very concept. New reality? Who came up with these things? She wanted to box his ears. What meaningless twaddle.
But by the end of the following month, the twaddle was no longer meaningless. Annie’s life had changed forever, her reality was new, and her mother was living at a twenty-four-hour care facility twenty minutes’ drive from her house.
‘But she might get better,’ Annie argued with the specialist when he recommended the move. ‘It’s been so quick. I can’t believe that this is it.’
‘In almost one hundred per cent of cases, it does not get better,’ he said, adding, perhaps to ease the blow although he didn’t seem that sort of a person, ‘but in the unlikely event of an improvement, we can revisit Eleanor’s domestic situation.’
‘Has that ever happened? That someone’s gone home?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
Twice in the week before the move Eleanor had slapped Annie in the face, once scratching her from her eye all the way down her cheek. Her mother had never struck anyone as long as she lived, so far as Annie knew. Yet without her in the house Annie panicked. It was bad enough that her children had left home; now she was abandoned by her own darling mother. She spent much of the next month either in tears or baking Eleanor’s favourite lemon cake, Daisy’s chocolate brownie, and Ben’s beloved Anzac biscuits. She loved the way the house smelled, but chucked everything in the bin as soon as it came out of the oven without even tasting it.
Her home — which she had so loved when it was busy with comings and goings — fell silent; three rooms now empty were haunted by memories of chat and clatter and sleepovers and drama and sympathy and love, always love.
Now, all that was left was Hugh, of course, and Bertie, Annie’s dog, a wily terrier of mixed origin, a faded redhead who doted on her and she him. Bertie had loved Eleanor, too, and would often be found sleeping on her feet as she sat in her favourite chair in the sunny corner of the sitting room, but he seemed unmoved by her disappearance. He simply found another spot on the small rug in front of the fireplace in which to snooze in the sun when nothing more interesting was happening, his stump of a tail still wagging maniacally whenever Annie so much as looked at him.
She envied him his adaptability. It didn’t seem at all callous coming from a woolly little beast who still cuddled the same sock he’d found balled up under the sofa when he was a puppy.
And then, just weeks after she lost her mother to a depressing room in a dementia ward, Bertie disappeared, too.
Annie had given him his usual breakfast of tuna and rice (ridiculous, she knew, but she could swear he smiled when she got the can of fish out of the pantry) and let him outside into the backyard as she did every morning. By lunchtime he had not come back. By dinnertime she had scoured the neighbourhood
, rung the vet, the pound, the local radio station and anyone else she could think of, to no avail.
When Hugh got home from work they set off again, separately, calling Bertie’s name and knocking on the doors of his favourite neighbours, checking the local park, the school a few blocks away, the now-awful corner shop, the petrol station … but of their wily terrier there was not a single trace.
The loss of a dog should not derail a person quite so momentously, Annie knew that, but that did not stop it happening.
She could deal with the children moving away and not needing her, not even keeping in touch, she could deal with her mother moving and not even knowing who she was when she went to visit. She might cry a lot, and be developing an addiction to eating creamed butter and sugar from the bowl, but she could deal with it. She could even deal with a husband who worked long hours, often travelled, and seemed detached, at best, when he was home.
But she could not deal with Bertie’s nose not being at the edge of the bed every morning waiting for her to wake up and let him out of the house. She could not deal with him not skittering beneath her feet in the kitchen. She could not bear to see his leash hanging with the children’s old raincoats and scarves from the pegs by the back door. She could not stomach the thought of walking down the street without him barking at the birds, or peeing on Mrs Wheeler’s letterbox or straining to get even a glimpse of the cat that had once lived across the road but moved three years ago.
Every day for two weeks she called the radio station to advertise Bertie’s loss until one day the receptionist kindly suggested she stop. Still, Annie printed up posters and taped them to lampposts, even offering a $500 reward. But the phone number tabs at the bottom of each poster remained intact.
Annie did not remain intact. Her reality was new but she was having trouble accepting it. She still made the bed, tidied the garden and emptied the dishwasher, but she started deliberately mixing the forks with the spoons and knives in the drawer. She stopped reading the foodie supplement in the newspaper. She gave up going to her weekly girls’ Pilates class, and cancelled her appointment with the bitchy hairdresser who charged a fortune for highlights but had the best gossip. When her favourite lipstick got worn to a nub, she started using an old one that she’d earlier discarded because she didn’t really like the colour. She took to wearing the same clothes two days in a row. And during her daily visits to her mother she just sat quietly next to her, staring out the window, watching Dr Phil or Oprah or The Biggest Loser, with the sound down, no longer patiently explaining who she was, no more trying to recapture the bond she had shared with this kind, remarkable woman for all her life.
She tried not to take it personally when Eleanor seemed frightened of her or, worse, uninterested, preferring the company of the woman in the next room, who had a baby grandson.
‘It’s not you, it’s the disease,’ a sweet-faced enrolled nurse told Annie, reading her expression one afternoon.
‘But it is me,’ Annie wanted to say. How much more personal could it get?
When Eleanor died after just three months in the home, Annie was stunned. She’d barely had the chance to accept her mother’s mind had been swept away to some foreign place when her small, familiar, sweet-scented body had been carried there, too, courtesy of pneumonia.
‘It’s too soon,’ she wept when she got the call. She had not even been there, holding her mother’s hand. She’d been at home, watching mindless infomercials on late-night television, wishing that Daisy would call as she had promised. Hugh was away so she’d had peanut butter with raspberry jam on toast for dinner, cheated on the crossword, wept briefly for Bertie, cleaned her teeth, hopped into bed and flicked on the telly.
So routine! If she’d known that day would be Eleanor’s last, she would have stayed with her. She should have stayed with her anyway. She’d died alone, her hand clutching the sheet, not the warm flesh of someone who loved her.
They said pneumonia was common, that a lot of the residents got it. They were old and weak, their immune systems were giving up the ghost.
And now her mother was one. And Annie had not been there to ease her exit.
‘You could think of it as a happy release,’ said the same nurse when she got to the hospital, the shell of her mother impersonating the real thing, lying tiny and empty against the stark white bed linen. ‘Some of them live for years and years, you know, and it’s very difficult for the family — but your mother was ready to go.’
Annie wanted to re-arrange the features on her sweet, annoying face. Her mother had not been released: she had been catapulted. And she wasn’t one of ‘them’, she was someone else, someone special, someone very deeply loved. As for being ready to go, Eleanor hadn’t known where she was, or when, so any choices being made were certainly not being made by her.
The Eleanor that Annie knew would never just have let go, not of her anyway. She wasn’t a cheap kite in a brisk northerly — she was her mother’s only daughter. A love like that was snatched, wrenched, stolen away — it was not let go. Such a loving, long, uncomplicated story theirs, finished so abruptly; the last neat, healing chapters never to be written.
In the days surrounding the funeral, she felt Bertie’s absence like a physical wound. Her arms ached to hold him; she longed to bury her face in his wiry coat, to laugh at his unrequited love affair with the microwave oven. She kept the beloved sock from his puppydom in her handbag, reaching in to squeeze it when no one was around.
The one bright spot was the children coming home. Ben looked unfamiliar and solemn, wearing a suit she’d never seen before and a tight, closed look on his face that she recognised as grown-up grief. Did he have to look so much older every time she saw him? Did nothing stand still? Did reality have to shift every which way?
Daisy at least remained relatively unchanged, sobbing dramatically all through the service and clinging to Annie later that night, inconsolable that her recent plans to come and visit her grandmother had derailed every time.
‘She wouldn’t have known you anyway, sweetie,’ Annie reassured her. ‘She wouldn’t have known either way. It wasn’t her.’
It wasn’t until she and Hugh had dropped the kids off at the airport for their separate flights back to their different lives, Daisy still red-eyed and emotional, Ben stiff and silent, that Annie realised neither of them had asked where Bertie was. She had been crying, at the time, but with that thought her tears dried and knotted in her chest, her throat, behind her eyes, refusing to be shed.
IN THE DAYS AFTERWARDS she moved automatically, in a fog she felt would never lift. She wondered if she would fall into madness or alcoholism like her mother’s sister, Vera, who had died of cirrhosis of the liver when Annie was in her twenties, and who had broken her mother’s heart for years before with her lies and false promises and endless sob stories.
But Annie didn’t much care for drinking these days. She no longer had any vices to fall back on. The kids had teased her about it for years: Mrs Goody Two-Shoes.
If only they knew! Before she grew up and had them, she’d done her time on the wild side. Her first boyfriend had been a musician, into smoking dope and having sex in back alleys and scummy back rooms — not that he’d been very good at it. She’d even dropped acid with him once, although she hadn’t cared for the hallucinations. She would rather stay up all night drinking wine with her girlfriends in those days, careening down to the shore in the early dawn to watch the sun come up. She’d been Queen of the Margarita Makers for a while in her early twenties. Tequila was briefly her thing. Not that the kids knew any of this, or would believe her if she told them.
The kids.
She’d thought, somehow, that everything would one day go back to being the way it had been before they went away, with them in and out, busy as bees, but always coming home. But Daisy and Ben now both thought of other places as ‘home’. They didn’t want to move back, or even check in; they were too busy leading their rich young lives.
And Annie didn??
?t begrudge them that — not at all. She was pleased that she and Hugh had grown two such independent, successful, content young people.
Or she had been.
Now ‘pleased’ seemed a stretch — everything did. She couldn’t quite reach anything, feel anything.
And when Daisy had rung a week after the funeral, not to find out how Annie was coping but to ask if she could have Eleanor’s cameo brooch, Annie had fought the urge to hang up. She hadn’t been angry, she’d just wanted Daisy to shut up and go away.
This made her feel so sick with guilt that she couldn’t eat for two days.
‘I think you’re depressed,’ her friend Rhona said when she dropped in one afternoon and caught Annie curled up on the sofa, staring into space, a magazine still in its plastic wrapper beside her, her coffee cold on the side table.
‘I’m not,’ said Annie. ‘Depressed? No, honestly. I’m just … Well, a lot has happened. All of it awful. So I’m not depressed. I’m just … nothing, really. I’m fine.’
‘What does Hugh say?’
‘About what?’
‘About this,’ Rhona said, waving her hand at the couch. ‘About you.’
‘There’s nothing to say,’ said Annie. And even if there had been, Hugh wouldn’t say it. Hugh wasn’t like that, she thought, with a bitterness that surprised her. He was a good husband, a great father, a solid man, a solid person, but he wasn’t the type to ask if she was all right, or even notice that she might not be. He never had been.
Then again, she had never not been all right.
‘But he must be worried about you,’ Rhona said. ‘I know I am. It feels like you’re disappearing. What can I do?’ She looked at her watch. Rhona had four children, three of them still at school, and her husband had decided the previous year that he liked his dental hygienist more than any of them.