There was a hint of a primordial scene as everybody told their stories, if not around a campfire, at least around the fat candle that always burnt at the centre of the circle.
Peter had not devoted much time to what Gavin called ‘navel-gazing’, although Gavin himself once admitted to a ‘bout of the blow-your-brains-out’ on an otherwise meticulously rowdy skiing holiday in Klosters. Peter had no very clear idea of what he felt about the big issues, except a general sense that God was bad taste in some forms, boring in others and mad in the rest. Nevertheless, he started to reflect that even if we were just dying animals, burdened with self-consciousness and the certainty of death, telling ourselves stories about the world in order to pass the time and relieve our troubled minds, then they might as well be good stories and they might as well be true. And so he told the group his real reasons for being there and about Sabine and how he’d been happy for the three days they’d spent together, happier than he’d ever been.
Everyone was touched by what he’d said and nobody seemed to worry that he’d not said it before.
‘Oh, it’s so romantic,’ said Oriane, ‘it make me want to cry.’ And cry she did.
‘I want you to think of room ten as your room, Peter,’ said Evan, a buck-toothed and awkward Australian, aching to do good for the world in ways it was hard for him to put his finger on. Room ten had been assigned to Peter before it became known that he was staying in a hotel.
‘It’s actually rather a special room, because it was Eileen and Peter Caddy’s family room,’ Evan went on, unaware that this would not represent an additional temptation to Peter, who found the mythology of Findhorn and the lives of its founders, often recounted with the portentous detail of a biblical parable, one of the most tiresome aspects of his Experience Week.
‘When you were telling your story, I was thinking what a pain in the ass God is,’ guffawed Xana, an American woman who became friends with Peter, despite her initially disconcerting habit of bringing God into every sentence. She helped to persuade someone in the office to look for traces of Sabine, and miraculously, as they all agreed, one of the names that emerged was indeed ‘Peter’s Sabine’, as he could tell from the address in Frankfurt she had unfortunately been leaving at the time he met her. At least he was now fortified with her second name, Wald.
A morning’s work was part of the Experience Week and both Peter and Xana ended up working in the kitchen.
‘I’m Gawain, I’ll be focalizing the soups today,’ said the friendly man who greeted them in the kitchen. ‘And this is Bettina, who’ll be focalizing the salads.’
‘Hi,’ said Bettina.
There was an attunement and everyone shared what was ‘going on’ for them that morning. The sharing went around in what Peter was coming to think of as the usual way, until it reached Lisa, a young Argentinian woman who was part of the established kitchen team. Lisa’s English was immediately exhausted by the enormity of her mood.
‘I feel,’ she began, and then broke into gesture, wriggling her palms towards each other on different planes, like tadpoles hurrying towards a doomed rendezvous. ‘I have to be careful, because I may not really be here…’
You what? thought Peter.
‘When I was a healer in Brazil,’ continued Lisa, ‘I couldn’t work at night, because I would leave my body and go off on the astral plane. Sometimes it was very hard to come back and I think maybe last night,’ her right hand shot up into the air, ‘I spoke to my angel, and I have to share one thing: my angel tell me no work this morning.’
This was what Gavin would have called ‘skiving off work without a chit from Matron’. You didn’t need a chit from Matron here, just a chat with an angel.
Gawain, whose name sounded so like Gavin’s but whose tone was so different, asked the Angel of Findhorn to help them work as a team, to open their hearts and to clear their minds. He invited everyone to be conscious of the noises in the kitchen and of the spirit helpers, as if this enjambement of whirring blenders and fluttering wings were the most natural thing in the world.
The strange thing was that they did work as a team, the atmosphere was wonderfully collaborative and charming, people glided round the kitchen, anticipating their fellow workers’ needs, sliding saucepans and knives to each other, handle first, with a silent smile, moving out of the way without stopping work, preparing food for hundreds without apparent effort, and enjoying themselves as well. What had happened? Again, there seemed to be something precious hidden among the rustling tissue of ritual and rhetoric. Gawain’s prayers had been answered, and even if prayers were just the setting up of a fervent expectation, they had worked.
Elated over lunch, Peter and Xana discussed what had happened while eating the food they had helped to prepare, which tasted to them supremely good. Perhaps the attunements were not just an amiable waste of time. Peter had always assumed it was best to bully his way through his feelings. When he set off for the bank feeling sad, or hung-over, or bored, or desperate, or in some other way unfit for work, he found that these moods usually evaporated as they hit the hot plate of action. There was of course a price to pay, a vague general depression, the lost habit of reflection, sudden bursts of frustration that seemed inexplicable because the trail that led to them had been obscured by a thousand urgencies, and by the trick of calling unhappiness ‘a lousy day’, and by the agreement of everyone around him that nothing surpassed the thrill of selling expensive loans and securing cheap ones, in order to enter a nirvana of ownership and hobbies.
At that evening’s group attunement, Peter shared that he liked the group much better than he’d expected.
‘Are we supposed to be flattered?’ asked Xana, breaking the rule of respectful silence.
Stung by this mild mockery, Peter felt that sense of intense betrayal that sends children running from rooms. This raw sensitivity had of course to be ‘processed’, and led to further opportunities for bonding and trust. Xana and Peter climbed on to the roof and Peter, who had always been the one who said ‘Oh, I missed it’ when someone pointed out a shooting star, saw four that evening.
‘You know they’re no bigger than a swimming pool,’ said Xana, ‘burning up as they hit our atmosphere.’
That night Peter, who never remembered his dreams, dreamt vividly. Gawain and Gavin were engaged in an elaborate medieval jousting match. From behind the stockade where he stood among the rude serfs, Peter could see Sabine seated next to the King. Peter was crushed when he found that the jousting match was a computer game he was playing at work, and that with this shift in perspective Sabine was reduced to a few dots of light on a liquid-crystal screen. Caught playing games instead of investing, Peter was furiously berated by his boss, but he couldn’t concentrate on his chastisement because he was too preoccupied with the pair of dirty pigeon’s wings which grew out of his boss’s shoulder blades. In the next scene he was swimming with Sabine among the stars, in mildly electrified water that made them both unbearably excited. Their swimming pool suddenly tilted out of orbit, hurtled through space, and flared on the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
‘Awesome,’ said Terry, a black American woman who had given up her job in order to do past-life regression work, dream work and body work. ‘You were definitely on the astral plane.’
‘Was I?’ said Peter, looking up from his porridge.
‘Definitely.’
‘Maybe I can skive off work,’ said Peter.
‘What?’ said Terry.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘The King’s your higher Self,’ shouted Terry, as he set off to the kitchen.
He didn’t skive off work, although he soon wished he had. Gawain, who had focalized the kitchen so beautifully the day before, had been replaced by a tall bearded American called Warren. Perhaps Gawain had lost his jousting match, thought Peter, who found himself shuttling increasingly fluently between waking and dreaming.