Life is a Parallel Universe Page 5
About this time, Beatrice’s father contacted her after many years. She felt that she had been summoned from the wilderness. She set off one Friday evening, catching a bus and walking the short distance to the small shack that looked even more squalid and decrepit.
Mr Snellgrove was a shrunken and emaciated skeleton covered by a dry layer of skin.
Beatrice didn’t need to be told that he was suffering from something severe: something terminal.
‘It’s pancreatic cancer’ he explained, throwing the words out into the air without preamble. Then he continued ‘I haven’t much time left and there are things I gotta tell you’
Sitting down, Beatrice felt her mind flee. She had no idea what she would hear. Her father, however, launched into his story ‘that woman you think was your mother, is not your mother’.
Beatrice merely shook her head. Dumbfounded and suddenly unpegged.
‘She was just a live-in child minder. For you. I provided her and her kid a place to say and she cleaned up a bit and was meant to look after you’ he continued. ‘She just took off one day though and I never saw her again.’ He sat, quiet for a moment, mulling over the past in his mind’s eye.
‘But where is my real mother?’ Beatrice managed to spit out. The word ‘mother’ feeling foreign to her tongue.
‘Well….she wasn’t right in the head after you was born…..she just kind of disappeared inside herself…..and she had to be put somewhere else to live. A home.’
He recounted this tale, which left Beatrice both stunned and drained of all energy. He could not look her in the eye. His eyes would slowly look up, but then slide away to the side. Unseeing.
‘Can I see her?’
‘She died five years ago. …..sorry……I know I should have been a better dad to you……but I just couldn’t……I felt like me whole life…had just collapsed….or blown apart. You just reminded me of her….. and all that I had lost’
Beatrice wanted to yell ‘what about what I have lost!’ But there were no winners and losers here.
Chapter 8.
Finding out about her mother made Beatrice see life in a new way, she realised that there were many angles and perspectives and that so much information about us remains hidden and unknown.
She wondered if part of the reason that she had bullied and shoved aside for most of her life, was something inbuilt. Within her. Something that she carried from her mother and that had been passed to her daughter. In the DNA. Something missing or different: outside her control. Making her an alien.
Luckily, her daughter was receiving therapy now and she was improving day by day.
These thoughts journeyed into other thoughts and Beatrice reflected on how she had been avoiding a man who was a member of the local folk music group that she had recently joined. She called him ‘Creepy Man’ in the privacy of her mind. This man would stand too close to Beatrice and suddenly she would find that she had travelled halfway across the room whenever he spoke to her. Then, another time, he had insisted that Beatrice make a donation to a cause that he was supporting. It had felt like an onslaught, an invasion of her personal sovereignty. She had to admit that she avoided him and rebuffed his overtures of friendship. One day, as she was engaged in conversation with another member of the group named Yandi, she noticed Creepy Man hovering about, as though he wanted to join in and didn’t know how. She saw a look of anguish pass across his face, as he seemed to concede defeat and walk away. Beatrice thought about how she had turned her body away from him: to block him.
What if this man is someone just like me: awkward, floundering and innately lacking social nous? The thought percolated and echoed through her head. Perhaps I am just as guilty as Lisa and her gang? A question posed which could not be adequately answered.
Beatrice thought about all those years when she felt alone and cast off from the world, how she thirsted for some connection; for someone to listen and understand her innermost true feelings and thoughts. This, she thought, is what everyone wants and what everyone needs. And, yet, human relationships seem to be so charged with misunderstanding.
She also thought about how the past rears up like a sea monster and strangles the present and then drags you backwards like an anchor.
Lives and people are not equal. No one starts from the same place. It is beguiling, Beatrice thought, to believe that ‘everything happens for a reason’ or that all wrongs will one day be sorted out by some magical hand of Karma or other divine being whose eye follows all. But, in reality, it seems that humanity is alone, living on the outside of a giant blue ball, winging through the cosmos, and so it is us alone, who must work toward fairness and tolerance. And these, can only come from true understanding.
And then, as if travelling from a very great distance, she heard the voice of David, from long ago speaking in that soft and insistent way of his: ‘Sometimes it feels like our lives are a purple tragedy, but perhaps, all you are is a brain in a vat.’
Well, thought Beatrice, if we are being deceived by a malicious demon about the nature of reality, how can we ever know that we are? All we can know is the cave of this world. And, all we can do is use our thinking mind to make a glitch in The Matrix.
But on those days when everything seemed to be out of her control, and she is not feeling brave, Beatrice simply thinks to herself, at least I am here and in the dance of life.