In the ancient kingdom of Bwandulla it was believed that the soul of a person resided in the soles of their feet. The physical body was built upon and supported by the sole. This makes perfect sense and is much more sensible than relegating the soul of a person to an invisible presence which then calls in to question its very existence and often relegates it to something less substantial and less important than the physical body.
The sole in Bwandullan terms carries the body through the world (rather than the body carrying the soul), and the literal and spiritual meaning of the word ‘soul’ are conflated in the Bwandullan belief system. For the Bwandullans were a nomadic people who believed that no part of the earth could be owned, that the world, which was sacred, was leased to us to take care of, and that the soles of the feet were our direct connection with this sacred world.
My interest and love for the Bwandullans can be traced back to my childhood. When I was seven I received a picture book for Christmas entitled Histories and Cultures of the Bwandullan Peoples. I was enchanted by the vast landscapes and vivid colours — the deep reds and yellows of the sands upon which the Bwadullans roamed, the bright blues of the pools and rivers and seas in which they bathed and fished, the rusty reds of the cliffs upon which they stood to survey the world and the lush emerald forests which provided shelter and food. I could almost feel the warmth of that far-away world radiating from the pages of the book in those icy high-ceilinged rooms of my parents’ house.
Above all, I was fascinated by the Bwadullan people themselves and the revealing of their soles. For the artist had taken care to include several illustrations with bared soles to pay homage to the beliefs of the Bwadullans.
In one picture, for instance, a rear view of a man standing on one leg, holding a big stick planted firmly for support in the soil, has his other leg bent at the knee so that the sole of the foot is displayed directly to the viewer. Another has a group of nomads running across what looks like desert sands. The picture is divided horizontally into two, the lower half painted with the bright yellow sand and the top half with an azure sky. The nomads, small in the landscape, were painted in a row across the horizon where the sky meets the sand. Their trailing feet have upturned soles that glistened and even at that young age I was entranced by the idea that these soles, that sparkled like stars, testified to another world.
But perhaps the picture that most linked me to the Bwadullans was the one of a small group of children on their backs, their legs in the air, soles in full view, and their mothers or nurses sitting at their sides, resting a hand on their child’s tummy. One woman, though, is standing with one foot caressing her child’s belly as if imparting the wisdom of her soul. This scene takes place in a little clearing by the river with bulrushes as a backdrop and was so redolent of the way my nanny would gently massage my tummy with the sole of her bare foot, while I gurgled and gushed on the shag carpet, that is was quite feasible, my therapist said, that I found my lost Eden in that Bwadullan picture book. For by the time that book came along, Nancy, my nanny, had been dismissed, as being unsuitable. Even at the age of eight, I disagreed and was distraught at a life without her and barren months followed until the miraculous appearance of the Bwadullans into my life that bleak mid-winter courtesy of that rainbow-coloured picture book.
My therapist also said that my foot fetish most likely had its origins, not in looking at the soles of the Bwadullan people, but from the pleasure I’d got from my nanny massaging my tum with her foot. When she first suggested I had a foot fetish I was incensed.
‘My foot fetish,’ I said in defiance, ‘has led to a very successful career in academia.’
She raised her eyebrows at that above the large green frame of her glasses which magnified those blue eyes of hers and all that blue and green displayed by her face conjured up for me the jungles and watering holes of the Bwadullans and I felt a deep sense of the inter-connectedness of us all, and that Miss Terese, my therapist, was in my life by providence.
Later, I settled down to acknowledge that she did have a point — I did have a fancy for feet. My first love affair was with a ballet dance who was a student at the Royal Ballet School in Covent Garden. I was a callow under-grad at the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury, studying for a degree in Bwandullan Studies ( much to my parents’ disagreement).
Tara was selling fruit from a barrow in Covent Garden Market to help finance her studies. I bought two oranges from her and it took about twenty minutes to complete the transaction because we were finding out about each other. She was intrigued by the obscurity of the subject I was studying (she’d never heard of the Bwadullan people!) and I was tantalised by the prospect of seeing a ballet dancer’s bare feet whose toes could support the entire weight of her body. It reminded me of the soles of Bwadullans carrying their bodies over the face of the earth.
It was a couple of weeks and dates later before I invited her back into my Halls of Residence. ‘Do you know,’ I said as we lay in our underwear (and Tara still in her socks) on my single bed, ‘that the Bwandullans believe the soul lies in the soles of their feet. Let me see your feet, let me see your soul!’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not the first time.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the feet of ballet dancers are ugly. It’s the last part of me I want you to see. I’m not ready. Until then you can see any other part of me.’
Fair’s fair, there were other unseen parts of Tara I wanted to see and soon we were both naked except for her pink socks, and then, I don’t know what came over me, but I made a play to remove one of them. What I hadn’t counted on was the resistance of Tara and the strength of her ballet dancer legs. She gripped her thighs around my waist and squeezed. I imagine it was something like the constriction of a python and I begged her, ‘Please!’
Only weeks later did she allow me to see her feet. I knelt and held each foot in turn in my hands. Her soles were hard, dry and cracked like a dried-up river bed. I wanted to weep.
Bunions were starting to bulge. Discolouration was seeping into her toenails.
‘I told you. But do you still love me?’ she said.
‘It’s all that pounding on the floorboards,’ I said and thought of the soles of the Bwadullans, buffed to a sheen on the hot sands.
‘I’ve been ballet dancing since I was five,’ she said.
Later, my studies revealed that the Bwadullans carried those whose soles are damaged or deformed, often on people’s backs and sometimes palanquins, constructed out of reeds and wicker. Moreover, shamans would attempt to heal them by applying natural medicine drawn from nature — plants, mud, sea salt and water from the wellspring. This compassion extended to friends and family who would bathe and massage the damaged and deformed soles and is done in return for the sole supporting and carrying them through life and allowing them to travel across the sacred world. A far cry from the way our own damaged and deformed souls are on the one hand, often vilified, and on the other hand, allowed to take positions of power — the lame leading Jack and Jill up a hill.
I’m a damaged soul, at least according to Terese my therapist, and there was me thinking it was me who might be able to help others. I acknowledge, though, that I lacked compassion in those days when I lost my ballet dancer, when I couldn’t overcome my disgust at the state of her feet, by which I mean soul. But that was in the early days of my studies when I only had a theoretical knowledge of the relation between the soles of our feet and our spiritual selves.
A few years later, when I was in my late-twenties, I spent nine months living among the Bwadullan people, as fieldwork for my PhD at Oxford University. It was a quite a palaver to get a permit as the government at the time was quite restrictive about allowing people in and out of their reservation; but my supervisor, the very distinguished Professor Don Montijoy, who had been a diplomat and had contacts in high places, pulled a few strings.
There were, at that time, still over two thousand Bwadullans, a number now sadly reduced to little more than two hundred and they are in danger of extinction. So the government policy of keeping them within the confines of a reservation in order to protect them is clearly not working, or perhaps reveals their true intentions.
When Terese asked me when I’d been most happy in my life, I said it was without doubt the nine months I’d spent living with the Bwadullans. I’m sure there was an almost imperceptible shake of Terese’s head in response and that she looked at me with pity like you might look at a wounded animal before putting it down. But it was true. We may have lacked the physical comforts and luxuries of Western civilisation but what did that matter when you were in such convivial company. I’d never felt such warmth, never felt so welcome, as when I was with the Bwadullans. Their gratitude for life, their joie de vivre, was combined with a deep contemplation which gave birth to a generous philosophy and compassionate spiritual beliefs.
My companion and guide was Jeremiah Mbwanga, who, I believe, was about my age; it was and remains notorious difficult to ascertain the age of a Bwadullan because of their unique way of recording their date of birth. Jeremiah, for instance, was born two days after the first full moon after the migration of the swallow to the north.
He told me this as we lay in our tent looking through the hole in the roof so that we could see the moon.
‘But don’t swallows migrate every year?’I said.
They migrate and return in cycles,’ he said.
‘But how many cycles of migration have there been since you were born?’ I said.
‘Who would be so foolish as to spend their time trying to remember that?’
‘We in the West would,’ I said. ‘We set great store by it.’
He roared with laughter at that, as did everyone else in the tent. There were about sixteen of us, plus a few children who crawled over the adults to find the most comforting place to sleep. (It also caused great hilarity when I told them that we usually slept no more than two adults to a room, sometimes one, though this time tinged with sadness at our insular sleeping arrangements).
‘The number of cycles of migration tells us little,’ Jeremiah said. ‘A boy becomes a man when he is ready, and a girl a woman. And when it is time to die, it is time to die. The number of cycles doesn’t tell us these things.’
‘It might give us a clue,’ I said.
‘Paying attention to someone gives us the best clue to what may happen,’ Jeremiah said, ‘providing there is no judgement.’
This was in October, in the early days of my sojourn. A few weeks later, we travelled to the coast to fish. The government allowed this journey three times a year in deference to the ancient customs of the Bwadullans and under fierce protest from their friends who wanted to restore this long-denied tradition.
Traditionally, of course, my friends would have walked the ten miles to the sea but we were taken there in four-wheel drives and trucks for outside of their reservation the Bwadullans were strongly supervised.
Still, once there, as Jeremiah taught me how to fish, we found a little time to ourselves. Knee-deep in the clear, turquoise waters, spears at the ready, I asked him about privacy in his deeply communal community.
‘There are many places we can go,’ he said. ‘In the bush and forests, in secluded pools, in sand dunes and behind rocks in ravines. But if we are out in the open desert, and a couple want privacy, we form a circle around them, holler and chant and sing to give privacy to their cries. We learnt this from the camel.’
I showed him pictures on my phone of the fish we catch in our northern climes. The sole, in particular, fascinated him, and he pointed out that its shape is the shape of the sole of a foot.
‘A sacred fish,’ he said, ‘ but all fish are sacred, the waters too. For tens of thousands of years our ancestors fished in these seas. We have never taken more than we need. We have never taken a pregnant fish or a thin fish. There was always plenty for the next person and for tomorrow. And yet the people who stopped us from fishing here, depleted the fish through greed. They don’t know what they’re doing.’
Jeremiah guffawed after saying this and then shook his head and smiled.
What I found remarkable about the Bwadullan people is their lack of bitterness towards their conquerors.
My supervisor, Professor Don Mountijoy, who has researched extensively the history of the Bwadullans, concluded that they were such a trusting people and that, having no prior experience of the cruelty and mendacity of their colonisers, they were as helpless as the dodo before the newly-arrived sailors. Still, unlike the dodo, the Bwadullans were foxy enough to survive and tell the tale.
My study was to reveal to what extent their traditional beliefs and customs had survived the two-century onslaught of the settlers and their rounding up and restrictive life in the reservation. My finding was — remarkably well; and this despite the great checks put on their nomadism. For their reservation was an area of about 50 square miles, whereas prior to their colonisation and for tens of thousands of years, they had wandered over thousands of miles, to the seas, to the mountains, to the rivers and deserts. But they had adapted and considered the present set-up temporal as their masters’ greed and treatment of nature and fellow humans was unsustainable, and as such, stupid.
Some it is true had succumbed to imported vices such as alcohol and beef burgers. And just as there are homeless druggies and winos in our shop doorways, so you will find beer-bellied drunks under trees in the Bwadullan reservation.
But though depression at the curtailment of their natural lifestyle and imported disease and vices had played a part in their dwindling numbers, I figured a greater factor was the stealing of many of their children (for moral good) and their women (for unspecified reasons).
But as I’ve said, they remained extraordinarily good-natured, welcomed me into their fold, as if they’d squatted away the idea I might be a bad influence or exploitative, like so many who had gone before me. Instead, when they listened to my tale, they considered I might learn something from them and propagate their cause.
Indeed, the elder ones, remembered with affection, the time Don Montijoy spent with them, some forty years before. They too were young then and they told me with great laughter how, as soon as he’d got there, he’d donned a loincloth which, on his final night there, he’d waved about on the point of a spear, as he as he danced and hollered with the others around a courting couple.
They told me too that after he’d left, Marsha Gwamurull, gave birth to his child, and that this baby girl had been taken by the authorities who blamed it on a wild dog. The Bwadullans had sent letters to the Don and even tied a message to one of the migrating swallows, but sadly he hadn’t replied. Sadly, too, Marsha had died three swallow migrations ago. Could I tell him?
I told them that nowadays they could contact him directly through social media but they preferred a less blunt, more natural route, through a friend.
‘It’s up to him if he returns,’ one of the elders told me. ‘Applying pressure leads to distortion and nature has its way.’
They were remarkably magnanimous like this and without rancour.
Just to think that that my stooped and wrinkled-walnut professor, with his few remaining strands of wispy silver hair and his hands blotched with heat spots, had gone native.
I told him in a pub shortly after I got back.
‘But I didn’t receive any letters,’ he said. Then, after some consideration, he said, ‘The bloody government! They’d have confiscated them.’
I was surprised he hadn’t remained in contact or visited again, for he gained worldwide renown for his work gleaned from his time with them and he had encouraged and aided my visit.
‘It was difficult in the aftermath,’ he said, ‘and for years afterwards. Their government didn’t like my work. Neither did our own government, Only recently have channels of negotiation been opened up again.’
‘To think you could have married and become one of them,’ I said. ‘That you have a son somewhere.’
He looked wistfully over my shoulder out the leaded window.
‘I have a wife and three daughters,’ he said.
‘Are you going to look for him? Are you going to tell them?’
He looked from the window and stared at his beer, which was half empty, or perhaps full, as the case may be. Then he picked up a beer mat and twirled it around in his hands.
‘I’m not sure what good would come of it,’ he finally said. ‘For my daughters to know they have a half-brother. It might unsettle them.’
‘They might be curious,’ I said, ‘They might want to meet him?’
‘It would mean unearthing my past life,’ he said. ‘You won’t tell, will you? My wife doesn’t know anything about this.’ He appealed to me with a pitiful glance and I looked down.
‘But they know you spent time among the Bwadullans, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but they don’t know all of it. And neither do my peers and students. I have my reputation to consider. This generation might consider my taking advantage of a native to be an abuse of my position.’
‘But you found her attractive, it’s only natural. And she liked you, too.’
His stare was so piercing I felt pinioned to my faux leather chair.
‘But don’t you want to meet your son?’ I said,
His glance darted everywhere but me, until it settled on his beer for some considerable time. Then he picked his glass up and downed the beer in one.
‘Another pint?’ he said.
It was the beginning of my disillusionment with the professor and marked a sea change in our relationship. In my mind he’d put his own reputation and sense of self above the interests of the Bwadullian people. He made no attempt to re-visit them, took no pride in, or responsibility for, his mixed race son, but rather seemed ashamed, wanted to bury away his hidden history.
It struck me that his son might even be dead, killed by the government, and yet Montijoy showed no curiosity or passion in finding out.
I hid from him my dawning revulsion of his sickly cowardice, his using of the Bwadullans to support his career and prestige, and his refusal to take responsibility for his past behaviour. But I needed him on side to make sure I got my research degree and then to give me a leg up on the ladder of my own career — so I couldn’t afford to risk provoking his animosity towards me; he was a bit prickly to say the least. In any case, I wouldn’t’ve been such a rat as to snitch on him. He’d been very supportive of me. He once told me, quite unprofessionally, that I was like a son to him.
I told all this to Terese over several sessions — she coaxed it out of me — on my own couch, in my own flat. Terese specialised in therapy for the elderly and infirm and visited them in their homes, though I assured her I didn’t consider myself elderly. Even then, a septuagenerian, I secretly wanted to take her shoes off, look into the soles of her feet, and massage them. But she always sat rather primly, as dignified as she could, in the shabby, soft, sinking armchair.
‘And were you like his son?’ Terese said.
‘No! Or maybe a son that rebelled. Unlike him I didn’t use the Bwadullans merely for my own benefit.’
‘But you have benefited from them, haven’t you?’
‘I think my life would be meaningless without them. Especially since, since…’
‘Since when?’ Terese was often impatient like this, butting in. I often caught her glancing at her watch, a clock-watcher if ever there was one. The sessions were only 45 minutes, but as she said, she was on a tight schedule; she had other clients to see.
I didn’t want her there, but it was one of the conditions of me being able to live there.
When these sessions first started, I felt ashamed of my little grubby flat with its threadbare carpet and spots of mould in the corner of the kitchen ceiling.
‘I didn’t always live like this,’ I told her. ‘Once I lived in a big house.’
‘And why did you leave your nice, big house?’ she said.
That was the very first session and as she said it she glanced at her watch and realised she’d overrun. I was relieved that I didn’t have to answer, but Terese had a way of leading me back to the same questions and now, several weeks later, beguiled, I was back here again.
‘Since, my wife left me,” I said, ‘And my daughters no longer see me.’
‘So the Bwadullans filled a void in your life.’
‘You could say that.’
‘Do you want to tell me why you think your wife left you?’
‘Hounded out. We both were. The smashed windows, the words scrawled on the door, the unpleasant parcels posted through the letterbox freaked her out.’
‘And that’s when you left too, went missing.’
‘Yes, my tramp days, they were. I was like a Bwadullan then, a nomad. I got as far as Dover and would’ve crossed the Channel, continents, if I hadn’t been apprehended.’
‘But you wandered alone and you told me they were a very communal people. So in that sense you weren’t like the Bwadullans at all.’
‘That’s why I was trying to get back to them. To live with them again. It was the happiest time of my life. Did you know, I had unbridled glimpses into their soles?’
‘And that gave a meaning to your life?’
’To see into another’s soul, yes.’
‘And that’s why, later, when you were a professor, you offered foot massages to your students.’
‘I learnt it from the Bwadullans. They taught me there are reflex points on the feet linked to every part of the body, that massaging these points can treat illness and relieve tension.’
‘But there are also pleasure points,’ Terese said, ‘on the sole of the foot.’
She was suspiciously knowledgeable about this for a therapist. She was an attractive woman and I couldn’t help but glance at her stockinged feet. Despite the state of my carpet, she always removed her shoes at the door. I couldn’t help but think of the Bwadullans barefoot on the earth and I wondered if, come summer, Terese, too, would be stockingless, barefoot on my carpet, if I would actually get to see into her soul.
‘They were stressed, though, my students. They told me, and I only had to remember what it was like when I was a student. Exams, homesickness, the fear of failing, I wanted to soothe them. The Bwadullans are well aware of the connection between the body and mind, that stress seeps into our bodies from our minds, especially when we’re young.’
‘Did you feel stress when you were young?’ Terese asked.
‘When I was a student, you mean?’
‘Before that, when you were a child.’
I was sitting on my faded sofa when she said this; I’d furnished this place from charity shops. I tried hard not to look at her feet. I looked down like I often had when I was reprimanded at home as a child, for jumping up and down on the sofa, for instance. It was an expensive sofa and I was barred from even sitting on it after that. I think I was four. Nancy let me, though, when no one was around.
I must have been thinking about these things, Nancy and the sofa and being told off, for quite some time, because Terese interrupted my memories by asking another question.
‘Did you receive much kindness in your childhood?’ she said.
There was a long silence after that question. I lay on my own couch and felt the pain it inflicted.
‘From Nancy,’ I said, ‘my nanny.’
‘And your parents?’
‘They spoke of her in such hateful terms after they sacked her, I daren’t tell them what she meant to me. After that, I was unceremoniously packed off to boarding school.’
I felt as if something was pressing on my chest; my throat felt constricted. I sat up. I felt a little dizzy, nauseous.’
‘Are you alright?’ Terese asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think they didn’t want me, did they?’
Then another thunderbolt-thought struck.
‘There’s a postscript to Nancy’s story,’ I said. ’At my graduation ceremony, I blurted out to my dad, “I wonder what became of Nancy?” I’ve no idea why I said it other than I’d split up with my girl-friend who said I was weird, and all those beautiful undergrads were going their separate ways, while I was returning to my parents.
And my dad whispered, almost conspiratorially, “Became a sex-worker,” and then he guffawed.’
It was only when I was recounting this to Terese that I wondered how he knew and then that it might have been a joke. But the bile I tasted then at his cruel laughter, came up again now in my throat.
‘And how did that make you feel?’ Terese said.
‘I think it was then that I made up my mind to do an MA in Bwadullan Studies at Oxford, to get away and in defiance.’
And then Terese said, ‘Except it wasn’t Bwadullan studies, according to the records, it was Swahili.’
That stopped me in my tracks. Of course, yes, I studied Swahili first.
‘I’d forgot about that,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do Bwaduallan Studies until my PhD.’
’No,’ Terese said. ‘Your research degree was based on travel writing and tourism in Tanzania. Bwadulla came later, much later.’
‘You seem to know more about me than me,’ I said.
‘I have access to your records,’ Terese said.
‘I’m confused,’ I said. ‘How could I have become a Professor of Bwadullan Studies if my qualifications were in Swahili?’
‘You didn’t,’ Terese said. ‘You became a Professor of Swahili.’
‘I did?’
Terese nodded her head, regarded me, lying supine and pained, through those green-framed specs of hers.
‘But I learnt the art of foot massage from the Bwadullans. I kept alive their spiritual knowledge and not just in a highfalutin, academic, theoretical way; no, I put into practise what I’d learnt. Like the Sally Army going about among the down and outs, I went among my students and helped heal their soles.’
‘Except you didn’t help them or heal their souls. You abused them.’
I sat up sharpish and put my feet on the carpet, faced her.
‘No, they liked it. It was consensual.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They went along with it.’
‘You can be very persuasive sometime, Christopher. Your fabricated stories can sound very convincing, it’s easy to be fooled, especially if you’re naive. And it went much further than foot massage.’
‘But why didn’t they complain at the time if it upset them so much?’
‘Maybe they were afraid or felt guilty or thought no one would believe them. Several said they told you to stop and you wouldn’t.’
‘Years later they said it, and then a few out of scores of them.’
‘There were eight historical allegations which the judge upheld. And then another six came forward later.’
‘Cowardly to wait so long before coming forward.’
‘I’d say it was brave,’ Terese said and looked my way with such a penetrating stare that I looked down at my slippered feet.
‘You damaged them. It affected them.’
‘But we were all on the same side, defending the rights of the Bwaduallans, propagating their practises in the living modern world.’
Terese leaned back in her chair and there was an uncomfortable silence. I felt a strong urge to bolt out of the room. I rubbed the back of my neck vigorously. Then Terese crossed her legs and leaned forward.
‘But your students knew nothing of the Bwadullans,’ she said. ‘They didn’t exist then.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘But I went to visit them.’
‘No, you spent time in Tanzania.’
‘But what about the childhood books I remember so vividly.’
‘Have you got them?’
‘No. Who saves books from childhood?’
‘Some people do. Especially if the books meant a lot to them.’
‘But I can still see them in my mind.’
‘Exactly, Christopher. They exist in your mind. Only in your mind.’
‘And therefore they exist.’
‘But not in the physical world. You touched those girls in the physical world, that’s real. But all the rest — the Bwadullans — it’s a confabulation.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It’s important, Christopher, not to keep running away from the truth. But to confront it. Your wife and daughters…’
‘Abandoned! They abandoned me.’
‘They wanted you to acknowledge what you’ve done.’
‘Preposterous! How could I have concocted such a world?’
‘I suggest you did it when you were homeless, on the way to Dover. You’d lost your mind when they found you. You didn’t even know who you were.’
‘But Professor Montijoy was real.’
‘No. Your supervisor was Professor Richard Goodingwood. And that was in Swahili studies. The University have the records and there is no record of a Professor Montijoy.’
I rested my head in the palm of my hand and shook my head.
Terese peered over at me and after a while said, ‘I think it’s interesting that you and Professor Montijoy shared certain similarities. What do you think?’
I rubbed my eyes and refused to answer.
‘For instance you both had a wife and three daughters and you both had things you wanted hidden from them.’
‘I never snitched on Montijoy,’ I said.
‘But had he done something to harm people, had he harmed the Bwadullans, had they wanted reparation, who would you have sided with then?’
‘Oh, do we have to take sides?’
‘You said yourself you became disillusioned with Montijoy.’
‘But I never snitched on him.’
‘But unlike him you have been found out. Your own wife and daughters know what you did. Have you thought of the impact on them?’
‘But it all got distorted. I can’t believe I’m being persecuted after all the work I did defending the Bwadullans.’
‘But didn’t you hear what they had to say, your wife and daughters?’
‘I didn’t want to. It was unpleasant. I couldn’t believe they’d turn on me like that.’
‘But why do you think they did?’
‘Because they believed in lies.’
‘But have you thought they might be right and you might be wrong?’ Terese said. But our time was up and after she’d left, I sat and blushed. I was very fond of my young students, how I wanted to help them.
At an earlier session, Terese had said to me, ‘We all create our own realities.’
‘In which case it’s not reality,’ I said.
‘But those realities we create often overlap and correspond with other people’s realities,’ Terese said. ‘And that verifies, to an extent, our reality.’
‘Like some giant Venn diagram,’ I said ‘of human minds.’
‘In a way, yes.’ Terese sounded surprised at my interpretation.
‘It must be a nightmare to look at and work out,’ I said. ‘Complex and impenetrable.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
I thought of that now — billions of circles laid on one another, all of them surely overlapping at some point and some circles no doubt bigger than others. But it was her parting shot —‘they might be right and you might be wrong’— that blushed me with pain and shame and anger. Had most my life been a sham?
The next time Terese came round we sat at the table drinking instant coffee, her feet safely out of view under the table.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to sit somewhere more comfortable?’ she said.
‘No, if it’s alright with you, I think we should try something more upright?’
Terese nodded. She was bright and breezy that day, as if she realised she’d probed some dark places last time and needed to step back, lighten the mood.
‘Do you want to talk about Nancy,’ she said, ‘your nanny?’
Truth is, Terese was the first person I’d mentioned Nancy to for years. I’d skimmed over her with my wife, never mentioned her to the children, or friends or colleagues for that matter. And yet she was like a treasure buried away inside of me, a treasure that soothed me, to cling to. Then I remembered I had often told my lovely young students about her when we were in flagrante delicto, so to speak, and I don’t know why but, young Vanessa, a black student came to mind, she in the easy chair in my study one early evening, I, kneeling, her feet in my hands, looking up at her, and in a flash I see her dilated pupils might not have been a come on but a look of frozen alarm.
‘Are you alright?’ Terese said. ‘You look very red and hot.’
‘Yes, I want to talk about Nancy,’ I said. ‘Nancy was full of life and freedom and affection, a beacon torn from me. I was bereft after that.’
‘Even so,’ Terese said, ‘it’s possible her behaviour might have been inappropriate on occasions, your parents might have been right. An eight-year-old is too young to know what’s appropriate.’
‘But I don’t think she abused me. Even now, I think about her.’
‘Sometimes,’ Terese said, ‘when we’re in an environment lacking in warmth and affection we cling to love where we can get it, like clinging to a leaky raft.’
‘It’s better than nothing. People aren’t perfect,’ I said.
‘But those students of yours, they may have been vulnerable, clinging to a leaky raft, and so ripe for abuse.’
‘But it wasn’t abuse. I had relationships with one or two. And I certainly wouldn’t describe Penny as vulnerable. We went together to restaurants, theatres, cinemas — sometimes at her prompting. Unbelievable that she should accuse me decades later.’
‘But this was all done clandestinely?’ Terese took a sip of coffee.
‘Yes, the rules didn’t allow it. I’d have been fired.’
‘But when she was no longer a student, once she’d graduated to pursue her own career, then you were both free to be together.’
‘Except I was married, two young children and a third on the way. I really wasn’t in a position…’
‘And your wife didn’t know?’
‘Not until the allegations were made years later. And then she said, “now everything makes sense.” I can’t believe they all waited so long after the event.’
‘The climate has changed,’ Terese said. ‘Perhaps they feel safer, emboldened in a newer, more supportive environment,’
‘But it was all so long ago. Couldn’t we just let sleeping dogs lie?’
‘But the women obviously don’t want to. Why do you think that is?’
I rubbed the back of my neck. ‘Money?’ I said.
‘How about they’ve been carrying this with them like a lead weight? How about they even feel guilty about what you did to them? How about they might be angry? How about what seems insignificant to you is an enormous burden on them?’
‘But it wasn’t insignificant to me! I loved those girls. They gave a meaning to my life.’
‘But if you loved them why don’t you give them what they ask?’
‘That was then when they were young and innocent. And now they’ve become vipers, leeches!’
‘You should look at yourself, Christopher,’ Terese said. ‘You were much older than them and in a position of power. You took from them, obviously, and now they want an acknowledgement, an apology.’
‘It’s me who’s lost everything. My reputation, my family, my house.’
‘You’re not the victim here, Christopher. You need to consider the harm you have done to others.’
‘What about the harm done to me?’ I blurted out, almost in tears.
I had noticed that over the weeks and months these sessions went on, Terese seemed to be developing a more strident tone, as if her patience was wearing thin. Terese really was my last ally. And yet she was casting doubts on Nancy. She was trying to strip the Bwadullans away from me. What would I be left with if I followed Teresa’s rocky trail?
From time to time now shafts had started to pierce my flesh. That look in Vanessa’s eyes, Penny’s anger when I dropped her, my wife and daughters siding with those women. Everything that I had lost.
At our next sessions, and we remained migrated to the kitchen table, I said to Terese, ‘Do you not think that the Bwadullans were such a marvellous concoction, that it’s be a shame if they weren’t true.’
Terese took her time to answer that, pursed her lips, glanced up. ‘Well, they certainly sound a wonderful people,’ she said.
‘And I invented them according to you, so I must be a wonderful person.’
‘Most people wouldn’t see you that way,’ Terese said. ‘But yes, it indicates some light inside of you. It might indicate what you wish to be, or even as you see yourself.’
‘Many great people have been persecuted by the mob in history.’
‘I wouldn’t say these women are a mob.’
‘But they were supported by a mob,’ I said,
‘We need to stick with the facts, Christopher. In my years as a late life therapist it is the clients who have been pliable enough, who have been able to see clearly and feel their true feelings that have been able to re-build something for themselves.’
Shafts, shafts were piercing me but I wouldn’t give in without a fight. But Terese went on, ‘Have you thought you could still do a good deed before you die?’
I was hoping there wasn’t such a hurry, that I had another ten or more years left, but she was putting such a positive spin on this, that at our next sessions, after her words had fermented somewhat in my stomach, I said, ‘Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?’
‘That’s up to them,’ Terese said. ‘Your part is to help them by confirming their view of what happened.’
‘Nancy, me, my parents, none of us were perfect,’ I said. ‘But how would I go about repairing the damage?’
‘To acknowledge what you did, to apologise,’ Terese said.
After Terese left, I slapped my face hard. I banged my head against the table and then, a week later, I was ready for Terese to help me and we made a start on the letters. I painstakingly wrote to every one of the women I’d wronged, including my wife and daughters. I blushed as I wrote. I’d never blushed so much in my life. It was as if there was a little pair of fists inside my throat punching from the inside.
And when Terese took them all to pass them on, when Terese looked so radiant, when Terese said she would be filing her report, I felt strangely unburdened, despite knowing that in a way I could never right the wrong.
And I don’t know if I shall get a response from any of them; I like to think my wife and daughters might at least. But that’s up to them and in the meantime Nancy and Jeremiah and that wonderful ancient kingdom of Bwadullah still pop up from time to time to offer me some respite.
~0~
Richard Moore is a writer of fiction and poetry with work published in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Jerry Jazz Musician, inScribe Journal and Passager Journal.
“The narrator’s fascinating biography – he is the epitome of the unreliable narrator – is turned upside down with the story’s reality itself as his therapist forces him to confront his darker unexamined truth. The author navigates this complex terrain with admirable skill” says Judge Brett Alan Sanders of Richard’s submission.
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