Read by Will Goodhand
Terry had walked down a mountain for three hours, crossed a raging river in a boat with a cow, and hitched a ride to Rishikesh in a lorry driven by a very chatty man who believed in reincarnation and eye-contact, neither of which made for good road sense.
Now he wanted cake.
As far as Terry was concerned, the cake shop in Rishikesh was second only to the bookshop in Rishikesh in heading up his (very short) list of things in Rishikesh that didn’t make him want to punch himself. The fact that he came to Rishikesh once a week on his days off was a tribute solely to the high quality of the cake and the books available at those two establishments, and was in no way a reflection on the rest of Rishikesh. As far as he was concerned, the rest of Rishikesh could go fuck itself.
Today was a day for plum cake, he decided. He had a particular seat in the cake shop where he could sit with a new book and look out over the Ganges, and see almost no people, unless they actively threw themselves in the water, which they only did occasionally.
Of course, he did see Indians. That went without saying. But Indians were OK. He was in India. You signed up for that. You went to a strip-bar to see strippers – you went to India to see Indians. Preferably in saris, with coloured bits on their faces. Or children – laughing happy children with stick-thin legs holding out their hands, children like the ones back in the village who wore sweetly mismatched clothes and giggled at everything you said. He loved that. It was impossible to teach them, not with learning objectives and formative assessment and proper accountability like back home. But the classes were such fun! He’d start trying to do some kind of grammar, and by the end it would just be a free-for-all with a half-deflated football.
Terry opened his new PG Wodehouse, readied a mouthful of plum cake, and sat back.
“Oh my God!” said a voice.
Terry narrowed his eyes at the page.
“It’s the same!”
The cake was fast turning to ashes in his mouth.
“It’s karma!”
His eyes closed all the way in pain. He was willing to bet it wasn’t.
“Don’t you think? It is, isn’t it! Exactly! He has exactly the same hair as Tim!”
His eyes snapped open. He looked up. They were looking at him.
The first one, who was pointing excitedly, had a cloth patchwork bag over her shoulder. The second wore a gypsy skirt. The third, a man, had a thin braid of hair with beads on snaking down the back of his neck.
Hippies.
Terry shuddered. A chill settled around his heart. He stared resolutely at the page. Bertie Wooster was having a cocktail and worrying about something.
A chair scraped. The words in front of his eyes blurred with panic as he felt the approach of footsteps.
“Hi!”
He looked up apprehensively. A beaming face smiled down at him.
“Sorry to disturb, you, but you’ve got the exact same hair as our friend Tim!”
Terry arched an eyebrow. He meant it to be dismissive, but it failed. She perched on a chair.
“So, where you from?”
“Kent,” said Terry.
“Where’s that, then?”
He looked at her, incredulously. “Kent?”
“Yes, where’s Kent?”
“Next to Surrey.”
“And?”
He blew air out through his nose in a sort of quasi-laugh and looked back at his book. In the process he couldn’t help noticing her breasts. Not just the shape of them, either. She was wearing some kind of garment made by children or lepers, with string to hold it together instead of sensible buttons and zips, and in the process, between spangly material and a plunging neckline, he saw actual shadowy nipple.
Something stirred deep within him.
“Sorry, my friend, I’ll leave you to your book.”
He looked up again and smiled, and made an embarrassed face, and tried to ignore the way she’d said “my friend” as if the whole of humanity was her friend, and concentrated instead on that glimpse of nipple.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said, closing the Wodehouse decisively. “I’m just a bit, you know…” he paused, and made a modest face. “I’m a bit… I’ve been up in the hills for a while.”
He met her eyes. She cocked her head.
He looked soulful.
*
They talked for a bit. He told her about teaching, the village, how he’d learned some Hindi. She seemed pretty impressed. She’d been travelling around, you know. She loved India.
In her defence, not only was she nicely cynical and self-deprecating at times, but she was also increasingly attractive. She had a squidgy face, but as you spoke, it moved in nice ways, and her waist was narrow behind all the gypsy crap.
After they had chatted a bit, they joined the friends she had been with at first. They all talked together about Tim, and his similar hair. That lasted a little while. Then there was stuff about where they’d been, your normal traveller top trumps. My Tiger Sanctuary beats your Rat Temple for danger, but the Rat Temple trumps most other things for being just plain nasty. This segued quickly into food and illnesses. The winner was bead hair man for eating fermented yak cheese in a Buddhist temple that then gave him the shits for seventeen days.
Liar, thought Terry.
Anyway, he felt he had the moral victory. He was the only one who was doing something useful. He was pretty sure Angela, the girl, was aware of this. So when she suggested he join them at an open mic night later, he blundered right ahead.
“Sure,” he said. “I’d love to.”
*
She told him to just turn up, and she’d see him in there. It was in a hall belonging to some kind of foundation. He spent the day wandering round town wondering if he should really go. He even stood looking vacantly into the window of the didgeridoo shop, hoping that his raging hatred of the man inside and his Thai Fisherman’s trousers would quench his raging horn.
The horn won. He arrived at the hall just before eight. It had various hanging plants festooning the front, and some tinkly bits of tat hung from them. There was a hand-drawn poster advertising the evening’s “Jam session” in curly letters sprinkled with Oms. He stood outside for a bit, watching people go in. There was quite a varied audience, he supposed. Old hippies, young hippies, hippy spawn, all sorts. There were even some Indian hippies. Eventually, he screwed up his courage and went in.
He sat down, scanning the assorted crossed-legged folk scattered across the floor for his new friend and her nipple. He couldn’t see her. Around him, people were gathered in loose groups, chatting. He sat, trying to look serious, listening. He could hear some girls to his left talk excitedly about some songs they had written and were going to perform. Peppered into the conversation all round was much mention of the following words: energy, enlightenment, shakra, yoga, guru, India, amazing, and wow.
He tried to think of Jeeves.
Then, the compere stepped out. He had dreadlocks, and his name was Paradox. He announced that they would begin by laughing for ten minutes.
Terry chuckled a bit. It always annoyed him when comedians were too cocky, but he felt he ought to get into the spirit of the thing. Beside him, the girls were reverently stony-faced.
Paradox retreated, not having even attempted any jokes, and leaving behind on the stage a spindly woman with the smile of a psychopath. Terry began to worry.
"Laughter is the best therapy!" said the woman. "It frees the soul! It lets the spirit fly!"
Terry felt a plunging sensation in his gut that he had last experienced when falling out of a tree aged eight, shortly before breaking his arm.
She didn't do anything funny: she just told them to place one hand on their belly and one on their heart, breathe from the diaphragm, and release the soul’s music (apparently a forced bark of laughter). The horrible thing was, everyone obeyed. It was like the Nazi party had all taken acid and dressed up as fuckwits.
"Everyone in a circle!" barked the commandant.
Terry found himself moving into place. He didn’t know how to stop it. He was just deciding that he would have to make a run for it, elbowing past the laughing goons on his way out, when he saw Angela.
She caught his eye, and a wide smile spread across her face. Maybe even a blush.
His heart started pounding. Then, as the circle wobbled into shape, she was making her way towards him, and by the time the commandant had taken her place in the middle, they were next to each other.
She winked at him.
That was the cruellest touch. That was what held him there. Nothing else could have during the horror that followed.
“OK, people,” said the commandant, "I want you to open your hearts, release the child within, and hop round the room, giving me a great, belly laugh of ‘Ha ha ha, He he he’ as you do so ."
And everyone did it. Including, to his eternal shame, Terry. Admittedly, his heart was not really open as he did so. If anything, it was sobbing bitterly in rage and misery and beating its tiny ventricles against the cage of his ribs in a desperate attempt to escape this cruel world. Terry imitated Jeeves, though, and kept the upper lip stiff. As far as Angela and everyone else was concerned, he was nourishing his soul with mirth.
It went on from there. After the bit where they had to shake everyone else's hand and laugh, while meeting their mad mad eyes, he was broken. He sat without protest through several odes to mother Ganges. He mumbled listlessly along to a chanted chorus of "India, oh India". He didn't even scream obscenities at the top of his voice when listening to someone's song about how they found the "meaning of meaninglessness" while on acid in Goa. Then, just as Damian was starting his "movement in celebration of life" - which at this stage involved standing on one leg with his eyes closed – Angela leant over to him and said,
“Shall we leave?”
Her eyes were bright and inviting. His heart soared suddenly into life. He shook his head, brushing off the detritus of desperation, and surfaced back into hope and the raging horn.
She led him out by the hand. Outside, she giggled. They kissed without speaking. Her lips were cool and wet.
“Wasn’t that amazing?” she said.
He wasn’t going to disagree.
“Come with me,” she said. “I’ve been inspired.”
She took him down narrow streets to her hotel. They kissed in the lobby. His penis was hard. She pressed it against her. They went to her room. They kissed. She pulled her tasselled thing off. He unzipped his flies and stepped out of his trousers. She straddled him and put him inside her. Wow, he thought. Amazing. Hadn’t felt like that in a while.
He looked at her, sitting above him. She moved over him.
A creeping unease stirred inside him.
Her eyes were closed. She breathed in deeply. He could see her diaphragm move above him. With mounting horror, he saw one hand move to her heart and one to her belly. All the pent-up sexual desperation of the evening dissipated in an increasingly flaccid instant as she began to bark out heartily,
“Ha, Ha, Ha! He, He, He!”
*
The next time he was in Rishikesh for cake, he bought some pornography. It was just easier all round.
---
Fucking Hippies by Samuel Wright was read by Will Goodhand at the Liars’ League East & West event on Tuesday August 9th, 2011 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London.
Samuel Wright is mostly cleaning up poo at the moment, and instead of banging on about his writing, would like to announce to the world the awesomeness of his brand new son, Joel, who has already learned the black power salute.
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