A Surreal Night with Merry B.

Dear old friend Merry B. has recently drifted back into my life and I reminded her the other day of a very VERY surreal night she once inflicted on me.  She didn't recall it and asked me to jog her memory, so I've rummaged deep and pulled out that file, and this is an exact account of what I recall happening that night, written to remind her but also posted here because it was so strange and bizarre it's most relate-able:

Sydney, Australia. 1979. I'm on holiday from university when late one night I'm suddenly plunged into a rather frightening episode at Manly Ferry Pier.  Because it was all Merry B.'s fault - she dropped me off in the middle of nowhere to find my own way home in a city I barely knew - I ring her when I finally do get back to Rod's place in Woollahra, after two in the morning, to berate her for putting me in harm's way.

"Ooooh!" said Merry when I tell her what's happened,  "You have dark beings in your aura!"

Normally, I find surreal non sequiturs wonderful but it was very late and I was very cross. "What are you talking about?" I snap at her.

"Dark beings!  Bad things only happen when you have dark beings trapped in your aura!"

A new form of 'blame the victim'? "Still not with you. Again, what are you talking about?"

"Can't explain. But let me make it up to you.  Let me take you to have your aura cleaned."

It's weird, it's wonderful, Merry's forgiven and I'm sooo there!

So late the following afternoon she swings by Woollahra to pick me up on a street corner and, while we're driving through inner-city Sydney, she rummages in her handbag and hands me a small wad of white tissue. "Don't worry." she says "I didn't touch it."

Thinking it's maybe a handmade chocolate intended by way of apology, I open the wad ... but inside there's only a purple bougainvillea flower. "What am I meant to do with this?" I ask, disappointed.

"Touch it!"

I poke it with my finger.  "Now what?"

"That's enough!"

We end up, around sunset, parked on a small road off Norton Street in Leichhardt, Sydney's "Little Italy", and wander over to an old, rundown church.

Inside, it's a huge empty space with only thin reedy light coming through broken stained glass windows. And there are about forty folk milling around a big coffee urn; the men all gaunt and haunted bearded "folkie" types and the women all chunky and butch with overalls, crew-cuts and the obligatory Doc Martens. No one appears to know each other so there's very little chat and everyone carries a single flower.

I find it kinda creepy and sacrilegious and am thinking "Don't vampires and devil-worshippers meet in de-sanctified churches?" No one looks like a vampire or a devil-worshipper so I grab a cuppa and wander around the semi-dark hall trying to read the posters and programs on the cork boards: No vampires! No devil-worshippers! Instead it's all meetings for "Things, Anonymous" and yoga gatherings, aerobics gathering, and gatherings of various different cliques of Anarchist Collectives, but the very best would have to be the advertisement for "Leichhardt Lesbian Lawyers Laundomat Collective", which appeared to be for a place where inner-city lesbians dispense free legal advice while you have your washing done.  Love?

Eventually someone thinks to turn on the lights, and, like it's a signal, everyone puts down their coffee mugs, takes one of the uncomfortable old wooden fold-up chairs from against the wall and goes up to the space behind the rail where the altar would once have been.  Merry grabs a chair so I join her but I'm still thinking vampires and devil-worshippers, and am so pleased when I see they're placing their chairs diagonally away from the once-was-altar-space and towards a long trestle table where everyone is placing their flower.

We place our two matching bougainvilleas in among the other flowers and sit down to wait. No one's talking and it's all kinda grim and uncomfortable, so I prod Merry in the waist and hiss "What are you doing to me, Merry!"

"Ssssshhhh! Esme will be here soon!"

Esme?  So we're waiting for someone called Esme! Mental picture?  Long flowing robes, scarves, a great claimer of Romany ancestry?  I'm thinking she'll be wearing khol around her eyes, a great deal of purple and black and maybe even have an ankh somewhere about her person!

But no!  Eventually, Esme bustles in, all brisk efficiency and rushed for time.  She's in her 50s, quite formidably chunky, with a butch and unfortunate man-ish gray haircut, and she's wearing sensible shoes and a white nurse's uniform that looks exactly like a real one, right down to the watch she has pinned onto her enormous bosom.  For my money, she looks exactly like the matron of a large and busy inner-city hospital ... which, as it turns out, she is!

She's not anything like scary but everyone watches in awed and jaw-dropped silence as she sits herself down at the trestle table, shuts her eyes and puts her hands out to pray Buddhist-style, maybe to center herself but more likely to catch her breath because ... well, she's a big woman and she's been rushing!

When she finally opens her eyes she asks everyone to hold hands as she prays aloud; something politically correct and addressed to some vague multi-denominational god.   And there's some little homily I don't get about polar bears in cages or something.  But then she starts on the flowers ...

One by one she picks them up, holds them cupped in her hands and sprouts whatever comes to her: very general references to things in peoples' lives followed up by what sounds to me like "placebo advice". One size fits all.

But then she picks up a bougainvillea.  I poke Merry in the waist again.  "It's us!" I whisper excitedly.

"Ssshhhh!"

"I have no patience with this person." Esme says scornfully, uncupping her hands and throwing the flower down on the table.  "Your problems are all of your own causing! Stop blaming other people and start looking inwards.  You KNOW and you know that you know ..."

"That's me."  I whisper.

"No." says Merry very sadly and nodding.  "That's ME!"

And that's the point where Merry became very glum and remained glum for the rest of the night.

Esme eventually comes to the other bougainvillea, picks it up, cups it in her hand then shrieks loudly and throws it away from herself, far and fast.  "This person is being haunted. This person has dark beings trapped in her aura.  It's imperative that whoever owns this flower stays back afterwards to see me!"

"Now THAT'S you!" says Merry!

So that's what Merry was talking about; hauntings!; dark beings in my aura! Cool, huh! I'm hopelessly rapt and loving every moment, thinking about how many zillions of dollars I'll no doubt be asked to pay to rid me of these "dark beings" and laughing to myself because I'm so hopelessly poor no one can bleed me for anything!

After the flowers have all been read, it's time for another prayer, another homily, and the advice "Be the love you all want to find in the world.", then everyone picks up their chairs, returns them to the wall, and goes over to the coffee urn to mill around and still not talk to each other.

Not us, however.  Merry and I get to stay behind and I'm thrilled about it, waiting for the sting and trying to anticipate how exactly she'll set up the con.

Esme comes over to the pair of us, standing side-by-side, glances briefly at Merry then looks at me hard. "You're the one!" she says and signals for the nurse-looking-minion who'd been there all along, not participating, to bring up a regular-looking massage chair and a blue plastic bucket of water. Minion does and places them right where the altar once would have been and I'm not so comfortable with that.

Nonetheless, I sit in the chair and Esme runs her hands about a foot away from my body.  "Two dark beings." she says "Both female. One has been with you for about four years.  The other for nine days."

Suddenly I'm creeped out.  Nine days earlier, a friend had overdosed on Sylvia Plath and stuck her head in a gas oven: Elaine Smythe.

"This new one isn't very nice." says Esme. "In life, she was what you'd call an emotional parasite and you were right to distance yourself from her.  

I'm squirming in the chair and remembering the poetry Elaine used to write me and how I used to have to pretend I didn't know it was cobbled together from bits of the more obscure Elton John songs, and how I found her increasingly very strange and her poetry rather increasingly more creepily passionate and so, well, yes, I'd recently stopped having much to do with her.

"She used to write you poetry." says Esme and suddenly I'm trembling.

Esme wafts around some more: "She's telling me she didn't mean to die. She was just being dramatic and attention-seeking. And she says that you know her well and that her name is Eileen Smith."

"Elaine Smythe!" I correct her.

"No. Eileen Smith. She only used the other name so she'd sound posh!"

More wafting. More trembling. "She's attached herself to you because she realised after she died that you two used to know each other as children.  You used to swim in her pool on the hill overlooking Port Morseby."

Seriously, I'm now shaking with hair standing up in places I didn't even know I had hair, remembering that metal above-ground salt-water swimming pool perilously close to the ridge overlooking Port Moresby Harbour, and of a young girl my age in a green and white swimsuit called Leeny.  A creepy little snot-eater from memory and I didn't like her but it was insanely hot, even in the hills, and she was the only person in the neighbourhood with a pool.

But still, so very very sad!  No one deserves to die like that. So stupidly and so pointlessly! What a stupid, stupid woman that little snot-eater grew up to be!

"She won't leave you." says Esme. "I've asked and asked but she says she now realises you two were meant to be together and won't go.  I'll have to catch her."

Esme, looking grim and angry, starts scooping cupped hands and sweeping away around my body and normally I'd have found it hilarious but truly, truly, truly, I'm not laughing.

Eventually - "Aahhhhh!" - she grabs some nothing in the air, cups it in both hands and puts it into the blue plastic bucket, and inexplicably I suddenly feel so much lighter. I hadn't even realised I was feeling leaden.

"Now for the other one." says Esme and this time I'm a believer from the get-go.

She wafts around again. "Nice." she says.  "This one is a nice spirit and was traveling so lightly with you, she never gave you problems. Ah, she tells me you called her Aunty although you weren't related."

I know exactly who she means.  It's Aunty Claire, a dear sweet old lady, 98 when she died, with eyes the exact colour of her sapphire brooch - and she was so thrilled when I told her so because "that's exactly what my father said when he gave it to me." - who had the best stories ever about balls and beaus and beautiful gowns and, as a child, I used to listen in rapt silence for hours and hours, curled up on the sofa next to her, clutching a pillow to my stomach.Yes, this beautiful lady was one of my early life's very few infinitely-precious adults.

But when she'd died four years earlier, she'd left me (along with a particularly ugly apartment building called "Moana" in Randwick overlooking Coogie Beach that was disputed by her family in court so I never received) some shonky metal brooch with plastic stones that looked like something you'd get in a toy store. I hadn't seen her in years and remember looking at the brooch and thinking "She must have really lost it at the end."

"She says she's with you because you didn't get what she intended you to have.  She wanted you to have the brooch to remind you of her eyes so you'd know that she'd always be looking over you."

"Aunty Claire!" I say to Esme, nodding.

"That's what you called her. And she says you know the person who switched the brooches - another person you called Aunty but wasn't - but Aunty Claire says to let it go. It isn't important now that you've been told the meaning of the gift she intended for you, which was always really the message and not the object."

Esme didn't have to scoop hard to rid me of my beautiful Claire. Seems once I knew the truth she was ready to go.

So that's it.  I know, I know, it's all "Flakes R Us!" but that's the story of how I stopped being haunted. And, yup, it was all most peculiar that entire night!  And after Aunty Claire left me, while I'm still in the massage chair, Esme took both my hands and told me I was a lovely soul with a dazzling aura - mmm, you can never get enough of that kind of talk, can you! - and that I really had to learn to protect myself and so she teaches me how.

"Do this at least once a month." she says. "And instantly whenever you suddenly feel leaden." and I take it all in ... and I must confess I was so impressed I still follow Esme's advice ... maybe not once a month or even once a year but whenever I remember to.

After that, well, once they saw my session was over, all the milling folk surged across the hall all obviously hoping for a private word with Esme, and she was instantly swallowed up by the crowd and so Merry and I snuck off, but not before nurse-looking-minion grabbed us and asked us to pay 30 cents each for the cups of tea we'd had.

30 cents for a cup of tea!  Now THERE'S a sting for you!

Yes, it was all most most peculiar. And, yes, the night had left me rather shaken up and I wanted us to go someplace with tea and cheesecake so we could talk it all through, but Merry was glum and depressed and definitely wanted to be alone, so she dropped me off on Oxford Street in Bondi Junction, again leaving me to find my own way back to Woollahra ... but this time I found my way easily and nothing bad whatsoever happened to me.

In the decades since then, I've thought about Esme now and then, and particularly so when around cynics who scoff at psychics ... or around folk who don't believe there's an afterlife ... and there have even been occasions when I've been in the company of a group of working psychics and asked if they've ever known a woman called Esme who worked from an old church in Leichardt in downtown Sydney and there's always at least one person who gasps and says "Oh my god, you knew Esme!  Wasn't she spectacular!"

And I always have to reply with perfect honesty "Yes. Yes, Esme was indeed spectacular!"


So, darling Merry, you old duffer, do you remember it all now?