Intimate Distance (12 page)

All I hear in this hot breathy silence is the clink of ice in my glass as I drop cubes in one by one. Large ice cubes slightly rounded at the edges, in a tall glass of water. I stand by the window and drink, watching nothing in particular. I'm hungry, but it's a deep hollow need, not easily satisfied. I'd like to gorge on double cream and chocolate and jagged bits of toffee, substitutes for love, but I know how I'll feel afterwards.

I sit at the table I now adore, appreciate with the nostalgic tinge of perspective. This scrubbed pine table, scene of so many silences, so much sullenness in my teenage years. The time I came home high, and my mother had no idea. I sat at one end of the table and pushed a solitary pea around my plate. The night I pushed her hard against the wall, heard her bones crack with the impact. So many misdirected passions. The table has gouges and marks on its surface, testaments to my small frustrations when I sat, listening to the radio, watching my mother's back at sink or stove, doing homework. Its scrolled legs like an arthritic woman's. It seemed so imposing when I was a child, the table I'd hide under and listen to the secret stories my mother would tell other adults, Greek neighbours sipping thimbles of coffee, her few friends.

Now I realise how small the table is, far too low for someone of my height; only little malnourished people like her can tuck their legs comfortably beneath it. Pan, until recently, would only sit at his high chair. Not any longer, now he likes big chairs, peeping out from the edge of the tabletop. I look at his chair now, abandoned in a corner of the kitchen, too beautiful to stow away. I painted it eggshell-white with the shape of a duck cut out on the back. That was the first word he ever said in English. Duck.

I go upstairs, watch my mother narrowly from the bedroom door. Her blankets are bunched at her feet in a thick wad and the full nappy under her nightgown makes her look bloated. Mouth open, head flung back, she looks more like a corpse than ever. The room smells bad, of closeness and old skin. Her eyes are closed, and I pray she's sound asleep. I listen; a rattly sound of breathing, the slight rise and fall of her chest. Her throat looks so vulnerable in the rising light. If I'm going to do it, I should do it before Pan wakes up. There's no nurse coming today. I can call the undertaker afterward, just say she died in her sleep, that I found her like this. Will there be an autopsy? Will they see the puncture mark under her toenails? My hands are shaking, my wrists and knees turned to water. I open her mouth wider with two of my fingers; syringe the liquid sedative down her throat. She splutters, gags, subsides. I wait, my heart beating in my ears. She's somehow stiller now. I can hardly hear her breath. I lay out the morphine and Nembutal on her bedside table, already mixed together with urea and sodium. I unwrap the plastic from the other syringe, make too much noise.

As I snap off the ampoules and click the needle on, she stirs. I stand frozen by her side, watching her face. Her eyelids flutter, straining against the light, and she finally opens her eyes. I turn my back; start working faster. The needle is ready, chilly and solid in my hand. Over my shoulder, I glimpse her lips, pursed now, as if she's making the effort to speak. Come on, I tell myself, she hasn't spoken for years. Come on, stop imagining things. Do it. I kneel beside her, breathing heavily, and kiss her slowly on the forehead. I trace the sign of the cross with my right hand on her chest, near her heart, three times. I don't know why – but I remember her doing it to me as a child before putting me to bed. The needle's shaking so much now I don't know if I can find the strength to jab it in. I push the loose blankets up to her knees, expose her weak, white feet, the bony shins. I imagine heaving forward, pushing down on the needle until there's nothing left. Her eyes are wide open now, and I reach forward with my other hand to close them, but she resists.

‘Damn you!' I yell at her. ‘Damn you for making me do this.'

I look around, fearful I've woken Pan. Take a deep breath. I try to position my hand so it will be easy to stick the needle in. It's now shaking so hard it has a mind of its own. Oh God. I can't. I put the needle on the table, try to breathe deeply. I can hear the wet sound my breath makes as it goes in and out. I'm going to vomit. My mother settles into herself, sighs. Did I hear it, or just imagine it? I sit on the edge of the bed looking at the needle, filled to the brim. Then at my mother, now so peaceful, sedated. I can't do it.

I stretch out next to her on the bed, facedown. She's warm, damp. My mother. Mum. Oh, Mummy. I sob, heaving against her, rubbing my face and tears and snot all over her nightgown. She's inert, wooden. My hands clutch her legs as though without her I might float, or fall, away.

‘Where's my daddy?'

I jerk up, quickly hide the needle under the packet.

‘Why are you up so early, love?'

‘Where's Daddy?'

‘He's gone back to his home, but he'll be back very soon. Remember? He promised.'

His face has contorted.

‘Oh, Mummy,' he wails. ‘I'm so sad. Make me feel better.'

I hug him. His tiny, hard body clings to mine. His tears – sudden, huge drops like rain – wet my shoulder and hair, and he's crying for my mother, for Zoi, for me. I seem to be falling further, losing myself again, but I continue to hold him, murmuring in his ear. Within a moment or two, he's fine again. I lead him away from his grandmother for a glass of water, and he replenishes himself after all the tears.

I'VE PLANTED A
jacaranda in the backyard, still a sapling; its spindly branches draw ever-changing patterns on our skin as it grows. Pan is a mottled frog with his stained T-shirt and grimy shorts. It's after dinner, and he eats a lemonade iceblock so passionately his face is furrowed with the effort.

‘Just this once,' I say to him. ‘Only because it's such a special day.'

He nods, understanding the boundaries. Licks syrup from his elbow, and says confidingly, ‘You know, Mummy, I don't miss Daddy as much as I thought.'

I feel an upsurge in my heart close to pain, gather his skinny limbs in my arms.

‘You're a brave boy, Pan. Braver than Mummy. Braver than all of us.'

He shows me a painting he did at preschool today. He points, weary, when I question him, as if explaining something obvious.

‘See? There's the sky and clouds. You and Daddy and me are lying down on the grass. And the flowers are waiting for rain.'

I look closely at the picture. The three stick figures are replete, covered over with green and brown scrawls. The pink flower blobs have smiling faces, every one.

‘Where's Grandma?'

‘She's up in the sky. See? Her face is peeking out from behind one of the clouds.'

I lean back with him on my lap, resting all my weight on my wrists. My mother and her pain, her imminent death, is a dark voice from the past, nothing more. The telling of stories and movement of hands, emerging from stipples of light and shade. Pan yawns, his stomach full of ice and chemicals now. I carry him inside, inhaling his cocktail of soil and sweat and sugar; wanting to remember it, keep it in my nerves forever. He's grown heavier – I haven't had to hold him so much with Zoi around in the past few weeks. We plunge into the darkness of the hallway. I undress him and bathe him in the old tub with lavender soap and toys for company. After being splashed many times I finally put him to bed, read him a book, then another as he asks for it, and another. I tuck him in, tenderly telling him a story of my own, a simple, weightless tale about a mummy and daddy who love each other very much but can't live in the same place. Not for now, anyway. I'm not sure how much he understands. He seems content, though, happy to know that Zoi will come back soon and we'll all go to the zoo together, and on the harbour in a big boat.

I hold him in my arms then stretch out beside him, my face close to his on the pillow. The room darkens. I keep my hand on his back; he likes the weight of it as he drifts off. I sing a half-breathed phrase in Greek.
And from your pot-plant, so that you remember me, I'll steal the slyest, and the smallest rose
. He's taking longer than usual to fall asleep, his fingers working at my hair, my neck, my wrists, tickling me. I'm now singing the entire song for the third time, fighting off an intense sensation of panic. I want to get out of the room, compose myself before I go in to my mother. I coach him in a whisper, straining to keep the irritation out of my voice.

‘Time to sleep, love. Mummy's right here. Relax now, think of beautiful things.'

‘Like what?'

‘Flowers, trees, the ocean. Cats, baby birds, grandma's hands.'

‘I'll think of you and my Daddy,' he murmurs, and my heart contracts again.

In the next instant his eyes are fluttering, his mouth trembles a little with an unexpressed word, and he's silent. I lie with him for a few moments longer, breathing in rhythm with him, watching how sleep overtakes his face. His features smooth over; become ageless, amorphous. He could be Zoi sleeping, head upflung, flat on his back, or Dimitri, dreaming peacefully. I kiss him one last time and close the door, not leaving it ajar as I normally do.

My mother's eyes are open. This time she looks dead beyond doubt, and I wonder if the sedative has worn off. I curl up near her on the bed and watch the sun suck itself out of the sky through the French doors. She smells of age, urine and soap, unfamiliar. Not the mother I knew. I place one of her limp hands on my chest, feel my heart beat through her inert fingers. The sun pales and shudders. Gone. I can't hear the traffic on Darlinghurst Road any longer. Or see the tree at the window. Outside is my mother's village, Zoi's, anyone's. Great folded mountains like sleeping ghosts.

On my mother's headboard is the snapshot of my father taken at the temple of Poseidon. He faces the sun through oval glasses, apples of artificial rose painted on his cheeks. Prospective husband. Stranger. Man in a cheap dark suit, with a squint in his eye. I still can't believe he was my father. And that I still care for him so much. Nearby is a photo of Dimitri, peeling off in the heat. He looks uncharacteristically solemn. There is Zoi in Efes, laughing into the camera, teasing me. And now Zoi is gone again, when I allowed myself for a moment to hope he would stay. He told me once that even if we never saw each other again his love would hover about me like a benediction. This was in Efes, when his conception of our future had been extravagant, baroque. I'd been touched, transformed by his admission, tricked by my desire for the tragic love that lasts a lifetime. Impossible. Love like that doesn't exist.

There's a framed photo on the bedside table, my latest of Pan. His head fills the whole space; eyebrows cocked like Dimitri's, that crooked mouth wide in a toothy smile. The photograph has managed to capture the translucency of his skin, the softness of his chin and cheeks and the goldfire of his hair, as he stands posed in the sun under the jacaranda. A haze of purple seems to envelop his head like a petalled nimbus.

The photographs in their tarnished frames are mute behind glass. They tell no stories. My mother has survived them, with her silenced voice and the stillness of her hands. Resilient still, with only one photograph of herself. Perhaps it's still tacked to the wall in the village house, edges curled up and splitting, colours fading into the dampness of air. She stirs slightly and opens her eyes, looks at me. Really, she's looking at me, seeing everything. Behind her the wall is blurred, no faces visible, only a flat vivid sheet of blue.

Katerina Cosgrove was born in Sydney in 1973. She completed a BA Comm (First Class Honours) in 1996, a Doctorate in Creative Arts (Australian Postgraduate Award) in 2003 and tutored at UTS. Her first novel
The Glass Heart
was published by HarperCollins in 2000, and also published in Greece. Katerina was a judge for the NSW Premier's Awards in 2007. Her latest novel,
Bone Ash Sky
, has been completed with the assistance of a grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, and a six-week residency in Ireland. It was shortlisted for the Australian Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2011.