Read an extract from Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Read an extract from Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024.
DAY ONE
Arrive finally at about three. The place has the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune, but is not welcoming. Signs on fences, or stuck on little posts by driveways: NO ENTRY. NO PARKING. A place of industry, not recreation.
I park in a nondescript spot near a fence, and sit in the quiet car.
~
On the way here I stopped in the town and visited my parents’ graves for the first time in thirty years. It took some time for me to find them in what is called the ‘lawn cemetery’, the newer part fenced off – why? – from the original town graveyard with its crooked rows of tilting white headstones and crosses. That old part is overlooked by enormous black pine trees; ravens and cockatoos scream from their high branches. The lawn cemetery, by contrast, is a dull, flat expanse filled with gently curved rows of low, ugly headstones of identical dimensions. Neater, I suppose (but why should a cemetery be neat?).
There is no lawn, just dusty dead grass.
To find my parents I had to recall the cold, unsheltered feeling I had – physically, I mean – at each of their funerals. There had been the sensation of too much space around me there, at the place where my father, then later my mother, were sent into their adjacent shafts of opened earth. (It seemed callous to me back then, to lower a person into a hole in the ground using ropes and cords instead of arms.) But walking around the cemetery now, remembering that sensation helped me find the spot again. I stood before my mother’s and father’s gravestones, two machine-cut and polished pieces of stone. The colour and design of the stones and the words on them seemed to bear no trace of either of my parents, though I must have decided on, approved of, them.
Someone had pushed some ugly plastic flowers into the small metal grate beside the headstones. Perhaps there are volunteers who go around leaving fake flowers at unvisited graves. Who else would want to mark my parents’ burial place after all this time? The plastic of the flowers had turned grey, every part of them, though they must have once been luridly coloured like those I could see sticking up from the little metal vases at other headstones: ragged synthetic petals in puce and maroon and white with dark green stems, angled here and there with artificial nodules and leaves.
I stood on the grass and looked at the ugly flowers, then at my parents’ names carved into each slab in front of me. And I realised: Your bones are here, beneath my feet. I squatted then, those few feet of earth between their bodies and mine, and I kissed my fingers and pressed them to the crackly grass.
~
Walking back to the car I remembered something else: a phone call, many months after my mother’s death. A man’s voice quietly telling me her headstone was ready. I recall standing by the laundry door with the phone in my hand, my outsides unaltered but everything within me plummeting. Like a sandbank collapsing inside me.
~
Near the end of the drive the sky darkened, turned drizzly. The road coiled up a steep hill, entering a tunnel of thick bush – my car struggled on the wet bitumen – and then on the other side it opened out into these endless, shallow, angular plains, bare as rubbed suede.
Place names I thought I’d forgotten returned to me one by one: Chakola, Royalla, Bredbo, Bunyan. Jerangle, Bobundara, Kelton Plain, Rocky Plain, Dry Plain, like beads on a rosary. Like naming the bones of my own body.
~
A little after I arrive, the sun comes out. I get out and look around me, trying to work out where I should go. There are some skinny pencil pines, a few dripping eucalypts, a lot of silence. Three or four small wooden cabins painted a drab olive; green peaked tin roofs.
I wander the grounds for a time, eventually finding a shed marked office, and knock on the door. A woman appears, introduces herself as Sister Simone. She pronounces it Simone, traces of an accent (French?). Indeterminate age, business-like but soft-looking at the same time. Scrawnyish. Quite yellow teeth. She apologises for not having come out to greet me; she is busy, but a housekeeper will show me around if I wait for a bit. She tells me with a teeth-showing smile – more a grimace – that she’s looked me up on the internet and that my work sounds ‘very impressive’. Her tone seems lightly insulting.
I smile and tell her the internet is very misleading. She pauses, then says coolly that saving God’s creatures most certainly is important work. She’s slightly cross, I think. Not accustomed
to disagreement. We bare our teeth at each other again and she closes the office door.
~
Anita, the housekeeper. Chatty and broad-bummed. Shivering a little in her maroon fleece vest over a turquoise shirt, navy pants. She leads me around the buildings and grounds, and I trot behind her as she rattles on. She could never be a nun – imagine getting up for Vigils at five a.m. In winter! Plus, they can’t watch Netflix: ‘That’s never going to work for me.’
She unfolds her arms now and then to point at something – shop, old orchard, guest cabins; gestures further off to indicate the paddocks, a small dam – then refolds them against the cold and we take off towards a little stone chapel. I open my mouth to say, It’s okay, I don’t need to see inside, but don’t want to be rude. We push through a big wooden door. Anita’s chatter doesn’t stop but turns to a whisper, though there is nobody in the church. She has just learned, she says, that this is not called a chapel – chapels are privately owned. This is a Consecrated Church. When they come in here it’s called the Liturgy of the Hours, she whispers, enunciating these words as if from a foreign language. Which I suppose they are.
Anita points to a corner: ‘This is where you sit.’
Four wooden pews off to the side, away from those in the centre of the church, which are presumably used by the sisters. The guest pews are smaller than theirs, more modern in design and made of a golden pinewood. Each place is marked with a flat, square, brown cushion, and a brown leather-padded kneeler runs the length of the pew. Anita waits for me to show her that I know how to sit. The seat is surprisingly comfortable.
There’s no altar. Instead, a simple wooden lectern in front of a huge carved wooden crucifix on the whitewashed wall.
As we leave, Anita pauses to show me a large angular flower arrangement set on the floor to one side, beneath the crucifix. It was made by one of the oblates, she says. I murmur some generic sound. Yes, says Anita, sighing with admiration. This particular oblate really thinks outside the box.
I don’t tell her I have no idea what an oblate is.
~
Next on my tour Anita stops at a double-doored fridge-freezer on a verandah. She yanks open the fridge door to show me the shelves containing eggs, milk, a few apples. Slams that door shut, opens the freezer to reveal individually packaged meat pies and four-slice packets of wholemeal bread. This food is for those who don’t want to take lunch from the dining room, she explains.
I will not see the sisters except in church, she warns, as if I will be disappointed. The nuns live in another long low building, fenced off by a hedge behind the church, a hidden part closed to guests.
At last to my cabin, which Anita calls by a saint’s name I immediately forget. The cabins nearby seem to be unoccupied, but who knows? I don’t ask if there are any other guests.
The place feels pretty empty.
Anita unlocks my door and stamps about opening curtains, showing me the remote control for the reverse-cycle air conditioner. (‘It gets very hot here in summer, you’d be surprised, but look, it’s on “heater” – see the little sunshine symbol?’) She picks up a laminated booklet from the small desk – ‘Everything you need to know is in here’ – and slaps it down again. Waves a hand at the kitchenette with its canisters and cupboards, and then in the opposite direction to the unseen bathroom, then smiles at me and sighs with a bright finality, as if now the formalities are over we can settle down to a proper chat. I thank her briskly, stepping towards the door. She finally seems to accept that I am not looking for conversation, and leaves.
~
Alone at last, having flipped through the booklet and ferried my few things from the car, I lie on the floor in a patch of wan afternoon sunlight. The heating works well; the room is soon warm. The light from the window illuminates a small wooden crucifix positioned on the wall above the desk. The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.
My phone vibrates, its buzz making me jolt. Alex has landed at Heathrow; his new colleagues are to collect him. I reply, then lie back on the floor again. Neither of us has said it yet, but we both know I won’t be following. We both know he’ll be relieved.
I realise that it would be possible here, once Anita had given you your key and trudged off in her sheepskin boots, to spend the entire visit without seeing or hearing another soul. It is accepted, the laminated booklet says, that guests might want total solitude, and they are free to decline joining others for eating or worship. Noise is discouraged. Nobody would have to know, until the end of one’s stay, that a person might choose to end their life here on this clean carpet in a warm, silent room. At this moment I cannot think of a greater act of kindness than to offer such privacy to a stranger.
But my own escape is a different, less definitive kind than that.
From somewhere beyond my window comes the faint burbling of chickens.
~
At five o’clock I decide to try to wake myself up by joining the nuns at Vespers. I walk the track to the little church in the falling light, in the silence. My footsteps on the gravel make the only sound. I sit in the cold church and wait. I was wrong about other visitors: two women bustle to the front row of the guest pews and settle in. They seem quite at home. Then, from a door on the other side of the church, the nuns enter in ones and twos. Long brown habits, white collars. Some of them tuck their hands into the apron fronts of their gowns. One very old woman arrives in an electric wheelchair, jerking slightly to cross the lip of the entrance way. Another uses a walking frame. There are eight altogether, at least half of them quite elderly. Sister Simone is there. She doesn’t look in the direction of our seats; none of them does.
Their pews have panelled wooden fronts, so they are visible only from the waist up. They begin to sing a series of prayers I find it impossible to locate in either of the two photocopied booklets on my seat, one with a musical score and another with the words of the psalms. The nuns have very high, thin voices, some quite lovely. It’s a kind of chanting, the same seven or eight notes released, over and over. There is another congregant a few pews behind me. A man’s quiet, low voice, a throat clearing softly now and then. The singing is mesmerising, until I find the right page in the right booklet and discover that the lyrics are all about denouncing evil this and God’s enemies that. The subtlety of the lilting chant belies the blunt instrument of the words themselves.
Watching the women, I’m convinced that the words they’re singing are meaningless; that instead, this ritual is all about the body and the unconscious mind. Every so often, at some signal I can’t discern, they bow very deeply in their little wooden pews, so they disappear for a minute. Then they pop up again. I keep thinking of yoga: it has the same rhythmic quiet, the same slow, feminine submission.
At the end, I sit for a moment after the nuns and then the women in front of me (and the unseen man) have filed out. By the time I leave the church, it is completely empty. I walk back to my cabin in the dusk.
It’s shockingly peaceful.
I eat two bowls of peanuts and drink three glasses of wine for dinner.
My back is very painful now, worsened by the six hours of driving and the hard wooden pew, despite its cushion. I lie on the carpet, arms outstretched. When I wake I see Jesus on his cross, looking down at me.
Extracted from Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood.
Stone Yard Devotional
by Charlotte Wood
A deeply moving novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be 'good'.
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