I’ve got to admit: the volcano stunt was impressive. Was that power of suggestion? Some subtle form of hypnosis?
Whenever I think I’ve got to the bottom of Mercy’s weirdness, I find it was just another sub-surface layer.
She makes the most preposterous assertions with complete composure, as if they are unremarkable facts that everyone should know. Faced with such eloquent confidence, coupled with a charming, almost naïve candour, I feel a strong temptation to go with the flow.
Then, when I step back into my own quiet, solitary little life, I think: ‘Half a mo. Why did that seem like it made sense?’
I’ve always believed myself to be a rational person, yet I feel my resistance fading.
Being English, or to use local parlance, a Pom, doesn’t help.
I mean, we Poms are used to nutters. You can’t go on public transport in the UK without a nutter sitting down next to you, sooner or later. The Pommie way of dealing with deluded people is to listen politely to their confused babble, offer an innocuous remark about the weather, then make our excuses:
‘Well, it’s been an interesting chat. Ah, I think this is my stop. Bye now …’
It’s the same with people who are trying to scam you, con you, lie to you. It would be very un-English to tell them to fuck off. The Pommie way is to pretend to go along with the charade:
‘Oh, so you’re a Nigerian heiress? How lovely! Yes, of course you can transfer the funds into my bank account.’
I resolve to toughen up. Pull on my straight-talking Aussie trousers. I mean pants.
And that goes about as well as might be expected.
‘How have the migraines been?’
‘Moderately shit.’
We’re out at my place, a week after the volcano incident, sitting rugged up on the veranda, watching the sun go down and drinking mulled wine.
I’ve had a frustrating day, trying to organise the renovation of the former servants’ wing, the right-hand side of the U, across the courtyard opposite the laundry, dairy and estate manager’s office.
It was a jerry-built, half-arsed structure to begin with, and a century of weather, termites and neglect had made it unsalvageable, so we got permission to rebuild from the groundwork up, turn the six cramped little rooms into three comfortable guest bedrooms with ensuites.
However, it’s still just a shell, and has been that way since Em died.
The in-laws warned about the difficulty of getting trades out here in the bush, but I don’t think I quite believed them. Now I know the truth of it. With the abundance of straightforward, lucrative new-builds around Melbourne, Geelong and Ballarat, nobody who’s any good wants to spend an hour each way, driving to a complicated job in the middle of bloody nowhere.
Best-practice customer relations in the Aussie building trade: don’t answer calls; don’t respond to emails; as a last resort, don’t turn up.
I wish I could run my consultancy like that.
I’ve been let down again today, and the resentment sits across my shoulders like a barbell. I can sense a migraine aura waiting at the edge of my field of vision.
‘Got one lurking now, I think.’
‘Oh, sorry to hear that. Poor you …’
She reaches out, caresses my cheek, my forehead with her cool hand. Kneads the back of my neck. I have to admit, I like it a lot, the way she does that. The tension recedes.
Then, a little later:
‘What do you think your manifestations – your auras – are about, Benjamin?’
‘About? They’re not about anything. Are they?’
‘Oh, absolutely they are!’
Hello, here we go again.
‘When we suffer trauma, in a place where the separation between the planes of existence is thin and porous, sometimes fissures are created. Cracks in reality that let things through from the other side – other sides.’
On the pretext of refilling our glasses, I remove myself from her embrace, sit up straight.
‘You sound very confident about all this. Sounds like bollocks to me, if I’m honest.’
‘That’s fair enough. But I do know what I’m talking about. My job – my vocation – is to help those cracks to heal.’
‘So you’re saying the auras are the cracks? And you’re some kind of psychic plasterer?’
‘Ha! I like that, but no, not quite. The auras are glimpses, intimations of other planes of existence, including those you might think of as the “spirit world”, and the beings that dwell there.’
‘You mean they’re ghosts? The auras are dead people trying to communicate with me? Em?’
‘No. This really isn’t about you, Benjamin. You just happen to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right disposition and to have suffered the right degree of psychic trauma.’
Psychic trauma. Planes of existence. Beings dwelling in the spirit world. Bless you, Mercy, but you’re clearly out of your tree.
‘Terrible things have happened in this place, Benjamin.’
She makes a sweeping gesture, encompassing the darkening farm, possibly the whole shadowy landscape.
‘Dark things you wouldn’t believe. But also good things, wonderful things, and you and Em were part of that. You and she were helping to heal this place – then she was taken, too soon.’
By now I’m thoroughly weirded out. I’m not giving in without a tussle, though.
‘You see, Mercy, the problem I have with this “cracks in the universe” stuff is that it’s just too anthropocentric. It has all the myopic, parochial, egotistical absurdity of a Doctor Who plot premise.’
‘Doctor Who? That funny, frenetic show with the animated trash cans, the creepy statues and the flying police box? How do you mean?’
‘Come on! Think about this.’
She adopts that patient, listening face, like I’m the nutter on the bus, but I press on.
‘In a world full of suffering, where millions of cattle for example are slaughtered every day to be turned into burgers, or lions eat live antelope, like actually disembowel the living creature and leave it running around while they snack on its innards, or sharks worry at a whale calf over a thousand miles of sea, so that it’s weeks in the dying and its mother is helpless to save it – in all this anguish, all this terror …’
I pause to draw breath.
‘… you’re telling me that the petty troubles of a human, a tribe of humans, a city of humans, are so damn special, shattering the laws of physics, the separation between universes?’
‘What on Earth makes you think that it’s all about humans, Benjamin?’
‘Eh?’
‘Trauma is trauma, whether it’s the loss of your dearly-loved wife, or a thousand-year-old Southern Beech being felled in the Tasmanian wilderness, feeling the chainsaw gnawing at its trunk, then crashing to the ground, an entire ecosystem shattered. The people who shaped this land over the past sixty thousand years understood that clearly.
‘But you – as an individualistic, modern human in the twenty-first century – are attuned more keenly to the trauma you can understand, the patterns of resonance and dissonance it sets up.
‘And I’m here for you, if you’ll accept me. If you can conquer your scepticism sufficiently to trust me. I’m here to help you heal yourself and this place, to realise the dream that you and Em had, to the extent that I can. Do you see?’
‘Hmm.’
Next week in Blind Spot:
Chapter 12: Arse-Kicking Boots
Mercy decides it’s time for some tough love.
Acknowledgement of Country: This story is set on the lands of the Djargurd Wurrung, while the author lives on Wadawurrung country. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned herein are the product of the author’s imagination. The locations are based on real places.
“Cracks in reality that let things through from the other side”—- That’s an interesting way to view it.
I am enjoying this series, Steve. 😊
And I am wondering what inspired you to write about it.😇