Today we go to the monastery, an annual pilgrimage my mother made with us when we were small and it was a ruin, and one I make now with my friends. One of my sons is coming, the other wants to stay home. There are high winds today, doors banging and leaves flying, it will be cooler, the drive is an hour up and up the winding road, a sheer and terrifying drop to one side, the other steep rising mountains. I will go slowly. I will irritate the cars behind me. There will be cyclists sweating their way in pretend Tour de France, there will be madmen on motorbikes. We will park and walk the last kilometre of sandy track, the monastery will appear through the trees as it has for hundreds of years.
Except it was closed due to the high winds and fire risk, a ban on visitors who won’t be as careful as the nuns and caretakers, who might have a swift cigarette in the carpark and set off a blaze. We hadn’t gone straight there, instead detouring to Collobriers far beneath it where in the past we’ve retreated for lunch following a visit. The narrow road twists to the valley where a wide river sunk between high walls is dry but verdant. There are café’s on bridges and the one we stopped at in the Place de Marie, a view of French flags strung across shaded square. As we walked in circles looking for the post office, a cashpoint, money needed, we passed a man at another little café, a single table outside, two chairs, he was in one of them, an ankle on a knee. He was on the phone and something in the slant of him reminded me of hot days in Australia, dropping down from our jungle house into the local town for supplies, two junkies on a day out that was really only an hour or two before retreating to our lair. Those days of obsession when all we thought about was getting it right, the next taste, did we have everything, could we hole up for the days needed. I remember how we’d search for houses out of the way where we could be left alone, like the monastery, remote and difficult to reach. I remember a landlady in a wide Queenslander realising what we were up to in her basement flat and throwing us out, how we got more wizened and scurrilous and secretive as the months and years went by. It consumed us, the totality of it, the way it filled our world; there was nothing but needles and the drugs we put in them. We built altars. We felt like aliens. We did not encourage visitors either. Now I pass me by in a hot market square, that small world encased in foot up, ankle on knee, on the phone, a coffee and cigarette before getting back to the business of a singular point. A tenderness we guarded like the gardens of the monastery. A devotion that would end.
I'm struck over and over again by your use of run-ons, often in series that would make small paragraphs, how they help create a sense of interiority even when describing the exterior world, they're almost hallucinatory.
Ah, secrecy ...