Book of Ma'Chi - 10 - Shari's dusk

Shari was surprised to find her mother lying on her bed as she get out of the bathroom, wrapping a second towel around her hair and flipping it down her back.

"Oh hi, I didn't expect to see you so early," Shari said suprised.

"I'm exhausted”, Ekantika sighed, “it's been a hard day and I've got my migraine spots. So I'm just lying quietly with my eyes shut.” Ekantika paused and sighed again, “what have you been up to?"

"I finally got online this afternoon.” Shari began in a frustrated tone. “There's a WiFi network here, but I couldn't get the key to work. I got Alex to help me. My Dell couldn't find a signal. I don’t have WiFi in our room, but I do in the sitting room. You know the one with the bar.”

Shari turned, suddenly aware that her mother wasn’t responding.

“Are you listening to me?" Shari asked angrily.

Ekantika sat up slowly and swivelled her legs over the side of the bed.

“Why are you so upset darling?"

"I spent the whole morning looking for my book. I couldn’t find it! I slipped in the mud in the yard. My brand new top got dirty. It’s only the first day. When I finally got on Facebook I found out Tim has got a new girlfriend! That bastard! I just knew it! And it turns out everybody else knew it first! And now you are completely ignoring me! I should never have come with you!”

Ekantika stood up with a concerned look on her face.

"Well darling, um… how, er, where do you feel that anger?"

"Mother! Don't do your psychobabble on me," Shari warned.

"Well, darling, this psychobabble, as you call it, happens to pay for your school and for you to go to Cambridge next year!"

"Mother! Not Cambridge again", Shari retorted bored and annoyed at having to have that old discussion all over again.

"That's not the issue here! I, just, don't, want, to, be, here!"

"Darling, I think it's important to consider your future..."

"Mother! Just get out of my head! Go to bed! And while you're at it give me my book back!"

"What is it about that book? You're not listening to me!"

"That book happens to be very important to me! You know it's the last thing I had from dad – it's my book."

"Well I don't have your book!"

Ekantika turned her back angrily on her daughter, started tidying her clothes and putting them forcefully into her suitcase and getting undressed, ready to go to bed.

Shari banged the bathroom door and turned on the hairdryer. When she finished her mother was in bed, turned away from her, towards the wall, apparently asleep.

Shari’s heart was still beating with the emotion of yet another frustrating conversation with her mother. She couldn't get to sleep with the sound of her heartbeat in her head. In the end she found herself looking at the trees out of the window in the darkness and drifting off into the Garden of Ma’Chi in order to calm down.

Of course the rhythm she had obtained by putting the water from the waterfall into the bowl was completely different. Now she got an urgent series of multiple drumbeats, one overlapping the other, some syncopated and vibrant, some just starting and stopping unexpectedly. The rhythm was full of urgent energy, and quite compelling to listen to.

Shari emptied out the water again and the rhythm stopped. She moved off North, putting the bowl back into her carpetbag, towards the Mysterious Garden. She soon found herself wading through some kind of swampy ground.

Thin mist hung just above her head as she was startled by a yellow snake that crossed her path. She leapt backwards and nearly got stuck in the suction of the swampy ground. Taking another route around some of the big clumps of tough grass, she saw the snake again and froze transfixed by what looked like a much bigger snake.

As she stared at it, she realised that it wasn't a snake at all. Where the swampy grass met the rock, the rock was covered in a yellow deposit that looked just like snake.

She followed the trail of the deposit, which she could now see had once been a stream. The deposits got heavier and heavier and the little stream became a gully as big as her leg, when she found herself looking into the mouth of a cave. Peering in, she could see more yellow deposits and even some yellow crystals in clumps around what looked like holes in the ground.

Suddenly she was aware of the smell, the cave stank of bad eggs. "Sulphur”, she thought to herself, "these must be some kind of vents, which spray water into the cave, leaving the walls and ceiling covered in sulphur deposits. A brimstone cave." The smell was becoming overpowering and she left, not having found any water at all that she could put into one of the bottles.

Shari had just reached the edge the Mysterious Garden where it met the lake and the Botanists Garden, when she heard a hissing sound of steam escaping. She put down the bag and went back as fast as she could, given the thick undergrowth of the Mysterious Garden, to find the entrance to the cave full of steam.

Now the stream outside the cave was gushing and gurgling with water. Taking care not to burn her fingers, she managed to fill a bottle.

Back where she had left the bag, she unpacked the bowl and chose a spot, by what looked like a clump of wild rhododendrons. She sat down with the bowl between her legs, confident that she was about to produce the fourth rhythm.

The hot water made no difference to the ceramic bowl with its five symbols engraved inside. The new rhythm started as soon it made contact with the water. A much more sophisticated rhythm emerged with beats and counter beats intertwining and linking up with yet other surging rhythms. For a while, she sat mesmerised, nodding her head to the beat.

From where she was sitting she could just see the edge of the lake at the centre of the garden. “This should be easy”, she thought and emptying out the still warm water, she set off towards the edge of the lake.

At first she was surprised and then a bit frustrated, when the water she had scooped up in her hand and sloshed into the bowl on the side of the lake, did not produce any rhythm.

“That’s odd”, she thought, “the four other rhythms have been produced by collecting different types of water from the four main gardens and tipping them into the bowl. When I do that with the lake water nothing happens…”

She emptied the lake water out of the bowl and set off around the lake. About halfway round she sat on a green boulder to think some more. Looking out across the lake she could see the island with its white gravel and its hexagonal roof building.

“I wonder if there’s any water in the middle that is different to the water of the lake?” she pondered, “but there’s no way to get out there”.

Standing up, she accidentally kicked the boulder she had been sitting on, to produce a hollow sound. On closer inspection the boulder turned out to be a coracle. By sliding her fingers under one edge, she was able to get a grip on one side, enough to lift the coracle off the ground. It was surprisingly light. With one effort she flipped it up the right way. Now she could easily slide it into the water.

Carefully putting the bowl on the crosspiece on one side of the coracle, Shari balanced herself on the other crosspiece and using the paddle that she had found underneath the boat, she pushed herself off, towards the middle of the lake.

About three quarters of the way across, she turned quickly to see where a screeching was coming from. Doing so she upset the delicate balance of the coracle and it started to wobble violently. The bowl splashed into the water, and floated gently away. It took a minute or so for her to regain her balance, and as she sat down again, looking for the bowl, she could hear a new rhythm.

This rhythm was the gentlest yet. Its quietness and slowness had an appeal all of its own.

“But … what the hell is going on? I tried lake water in the bowl and it didn’t work? Why does it work now?”

She sat quietly in the coracle, staring – almost in a trance – at the bowl, floating, a couple of feet away in the lake. Listening to the quiet, softly insistent rhythm, she tried to make sense of what had happened.

The effect of the rhythm was quite soporific, and her drowsiness soon turned to sleep…

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This is the tenth chapter from the Book of Ma'Chi