Things Happen For A Reason, Do They?

Are you familiar with downward dog? It’s a yoga position and a pretty key one. It’s relatively rare to have a yoga class and not, as some point, find your instructor asking you to get into it. There are various ways, but in case you’ve not been at the yoga, on-and-off, for 28 years, and although I am not a trained instructor, let me get you in position. Lie on your front and get yourself into a press-up, only keep putting your arse in the air, keep at it, until you are basically a triangle with the floor, your bum being the high point (my bum is always the high point, but more of that another time). You can shift around to get the position right for you - we are all different - and if you can get your heels on the floor, have a banana! That’s not part of yoga, just, well, the heels are hard to get on the floor for most people. Now, gently, relax your head. You, my friend, are doing the downward dog.

I’m sure that explanation is inadequate, but I don’t want to hear about it as today, 9 February 2019, marks 14 years since my sister Kate was murdered, so keep it to yourself.

In this exquisite location, this morning, I went to a yoga class and as I dowarded my dog (there is also an upward dog, which is great fun but less central to most yoga practice). As my head hung, relaxed, I inevitably ended up looking at my ankles and my feet and the bottom of my legs. There they were, my pretty reliable ankles, poking out of my yoga bottoms, looking very like my ankles, my feet, totally like my feet. But, suddenly, as I stare at them, they begin to remind me of someone else… my sister. She was a bit more freckly and a bit more pale, and certainly more delicate in the ankle and foot department, and sometimes there was eczema, but neither of us was interested in shaving our legs, and so these ankles, my ankles and the bottom of my legs, remind me of her more than any other ankles and feet and leg bottoms that I ever see. My body, though less delicate and less pretty, than Kate’s, reminds me of her. There is no escape from my sister, however hard I try. And, as I come to this yoga class for the sake of my body and maybe, just maybe, slightly for the sake of my psyche, I resent Kate turning up in my downward dog, appearing to me in my own blinking ankles.

(Dad be-quested me my inordinately large chin, by the way. I don’t see him when I look in the mirror, and Mum’s hardly chinless, but I know that my chin and the shape of my cavernously deep-set eyes are all his own work.)

I suspect that some people think I need to stop thinking so much about Dad and about Kate and I’m sure that opinion is a lovely one for them to hold, and I’m sure it’ll keep them warm at night. And, actually, I agree - it would be great if I could stop thinking about them so much. To be frank, I am exhausted by thinking about them. But as I would not tell a parent to stop thinking of their child, because, well, DUH, I cannot for the life of me imagine how people think I might simply stop the tide of my thoughts, and simply focus on other things. Dad and Kate, unwittingly, force themselves into so much of my thinking that I suspect I am more dead than living myself.

I could skip the yoga or just the dog, but I cannot escape my own ankles and it is agony to have her so close yet utterly not with me.

The 14^th anniversary of Kate’s murder has dawned warm and humid, as days tend to do here in Bali. I have come here to write a book, a book about making Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister, the solo show I made about my reaction to Kate’s murder with Martin M Bartelt, who happens to be in Bali at the moment. Just think of me as the mountain and I have made my way to him, knowing that if there is any chance of me doing this impossible task, it will be with him that I do it.

Dad is so far from me I can’t even begin to imagine what he’d think of me, whether he’d even like me, or respect me, and I know that my weird desire to make work about death and misery and grief is alien to a great many people. Dad was, I feel, a pretty sanguine soul and this might not have been his thing. It’s hard rebelling against a real parent; it’s kind of impossible rebelling against an imaginary one.

Yesterday someone visited us here, a young woman, a friend of a friend. Pretty, smooth-skinned and bright eyed, she asked what I was up to and I talked about writing this book, that it’s kind of a love story, a platonic love story between me and Bartelt, my phenomenal collaborator who has dragged me through eleven of the past 14 years since my sister was murdered. Others have been dragging too, and I’m grateful, but it is Martin who made the show with me and Martin who will let me lounge around in his life while my own ebbs emptily, miserably, pathetically away. (Right on cue, despite my trying to introduce the subject carefully and gently, the young visitor was visibly shaken at the idea of my sister having been murdered). I said, without Kate dying, even if Martin and I had met, we would not have made the show we did and we might not have been so close these days. The visitor said that things happen for a reason. She said that maybe Martin was in, some ways, my sister.

I smiled. Martin smiled. I said tedious little nothings to her. I had no desire to put her right, but if it had been today and I’d told her about the yoga, I most certainly would have pointed to his ankles: have you seen those babies? Absolutely no relation at all. The man is not my sister.

And as for things happening for a reason, well, people think in this vein to shield themselves from the ghastly reality that things do not happen for a reason, they just happen. I do get it, and I get it if this is you, if you are a things-happen-for-a-reasoner - I think it must be pretty nice to think in that vein. That way, even if the meaning is hidden from you, at least everything does have a meaning, rather than the meaninglessness one must endure without such a belief structure. I know it’s tough to live without this platitude because that is how I live and boy do I envy you if you think like that.

I think this everything-happens-for-a-reason vein needs to be cut open and bled dry. Please do use it for yourself, but don’t try to make me feel better by trying to make yourself feel better. And you can join the people who tell me not to feel so bad about Kate because she and I might have fallen out by now. Really. Just stop it, but more importantly, please don’t do it to other people either. Maybe you can ask the parent if they think they might have fallen out with their seven-year-old if the leukaemia hadn’t taken them at five, but leave it at that - they have an imagination, they can use that piece of ‘comfort’ if they want to. It’s not a comfort, the idea that my beloved sister and best friend, might have grown so sick and tired of me, her loving sister, that she no longer wanted to talk to me. I can’t think why that’s of no comfort, but it’s not.

Now that I think of it, no one ever tells me not to feel sad about my dad because we “might have fallen out by now”, which is odd. Why should I not have fallen out with my father when so many seem so sure I’d’ve had a right up and downer with Kate and would not, from some point in the last 14 years, now be speaking?

As this young woman was leaving our company she and I embraced - I’m an actor, it’s perfectly normal. She then embraced Martin, but for her the embrace was unsatisfactory and she said so. She wanted it heart to heart, and of course, Martin giggled and obliged. He then showed Things-Happen-For-A-Reason out, having a brief farewell chat at the door.

Afterwards Martin tells me how this conversation in German had gone. Turns out that Martin had only worked out part-way through our time with Things-Happen-For-A-Reason that she was a woman who had booked some treatment with his boyfriend (who is a healer) and then simply not turned up. So, at the door, being Martin, he raised this with her. Ah, she had said, yes it was her. She said she was sorry, she had been working and had forgotten the time. Martin replied that these things happen but that they had refused another client whose last chance to come was then because she was going home to Australia, so not only did she not get her healing treatment but they also lost a client. Things-Happen-For-A-Reason replied that perhaps it was good: things happen for a reason.

Martin:

“That’s a threadbare excuse (remember, this was in German). No, sorry I think that’s bullshit. The only things are we lost money and another client lost a treatment because you did not respect your appointment.”

He’s great, Martin. Clever and funny and hard as nails. I’m writing a blinking book about him and my love for him, for crying out loud. I’ve come all the way to Bali (I realise that doesn’t sound like a burden to those of you enduring February, of all benighted months ,in the northern hemisphere, but it’s costing me money and losing me work and I cannot imagine anyone will publish the book, and I’ll have made yet another thing to add to the other things, and my very self, which nobody wants….). My point is, he is da bomb.

And yet I suspect I’d get rid of Martin in a heartbeat if I could have Kate back. Not kill him, I don’t mean that, I mean I’d trade him in, or I would allow myself to never have met him, just to have her back. Or rather, never to have lost her. Truly now, I don’t know who I might have been if she’d not died, what I would have been doing. It’s a gamble you see, as it is with the idea of Dad - if he had not died, I mean, I simply cannot imagine that life or who I would be.

And so all I can do is go on in this life, having no choice in the matter, I keep Martin because he's wonderful, and allow my father and my sister to slip 24 hours further away from me, leaving me to stare from my cavernous eye sockets between my legs at my nearly-Kate’s ankle’s and wish… wish for I know not what.