Walking to the Moon (10 page)

After a while I noticed I was stroking the pillow. Short, even strokes, as if it were a cat. I stopped and smoothed it, briefly, self-consciously, folded my hands again and kept talking. But before long I was stroking it again, the rough-textured cotton, the palm of my hand. I thought about stopping, and didn't. It was relaxing. I glanced up at Anna and she smiled.

‘The pillow likes it,' I said by way of explanation. ‘The pillow finds it quite relaxing.'

‘Lucky pillow,' said Anna.

‘Yes.'

My father had crashed his car.

Some stupid bastard, he said, braking in front of him, except there was a cop driving past and the next thing he couldn't drive for six months.

It wasn't as if he was drunk either, he added. ‘You know me, mate. Couple of glasses of red.'

And now Cassie wasn't speaking to him. There was a pause while I heard him uncork the bottle and pour himself another glass.

Eventually he asked how I was going, and I said fine.

‘Really mate, how's it going? You back on your feet yet?'

I said it was going fine and I was doing a lot of walking, and I'd probably be ready to leave soon.

‘Sorry mate,' he said, ‘I've been a self-engrossed slob, Cassie's right, and I'm going to drive down this weekend and see you. It's bloody ridiculous, you're my child too, she'll just have to make the best of it. She can get her bloody mother down to help with the kids.' And then he remembered he didn't have a car, or a licence, and the conversation pretty much started again.

I didn't mind really. I didn't want anyone to visit. Not my father, not my husband. (‘Poor bastard,' Steff muttered the second time I refused to take his call.) Some days not even Hil.

It was soothing though, listening to my father, familiar; his voice was pleasantly weighted, neither too light nor too heavy, and he required nothing of me. At school, my friends used to think it funny that he and Hil both called me mate, even when I was small. But it was okay by me. I liked having a dad who would talk to me like a friend and tell me things that other dads didn't tell their daughters. Not that I think that any more; I'm just used to it. Part of me feels sorry for Cassie, even though she can barely bring herself to speak to me.

‘She's just jealous, mate,' Stuart would say. ‘Jealous of you, jealous of your mum.' As if it mattered.

I told him not to stress about the car, that I'd be out of there soon anyway, and that maybe we could grab a day, if we planned in advance, and go bushwalking, like old times. He said yes, he'd like that, in his normal voice, the one that he used to have, and I felt that he meant it, though I knew we wouldn't go.

‘What do you do, Jess, when you want something?' asked Anna. ‘Or when you don't. What do you do with wanting?'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Just now, you said you wanted your aunt Hil not to visit as often. Is that right?'

‘Well, sometimes I feel that, yes.'

‘So what would you like her to do?'

‘Well, I'd like her to do whatever she wants…be happy—' pause, ‘and—' ‘But what do you want, Jess?'

‘You mean about her coming here?'

‘Yes. What might you do about that?'

‘Oh. Well, it's not just up to me—' ‘Why not? Couldn't you tell her you don't want her to visit?'

‘Oh, well, it's not that I don't want her to visit at all—' ‘How often would you like her to visit?'

‘Well she already visits less, after we spoke, after I talked to her.'

‘So how often would you like her to come? What would be best for you?'

There was a longer pause.

‘I'd like her not to come for a couple of weeks.'

‘And do you think you could tell her that?'

‘No.'

We sat down, facing each other, Anna and I, on cushions. ‘What I would like you to do,' she said, ‘is to put your hands against mine. Like this.'

We sat cross-legged, palms resting against each other. ‘Now,' she said, ‘I want you to push me away.'

I took my hands back. Put them in my lap.

‘Come on Jess. Just give it a go.'

I put my palms to hers and my arms were full of black treacle.

I pushed for a moment against her and the treacle seemed to run down into my shoulders, my ribs. I stopped.

‘Try again,' she said.

I tried again but I didn't want to. I didn't want to push her away. I was shaking my head: I don't want to.

‘Say the words, Jess. You are shaking your head. Say the words.'

No. I took back my hands and looked at her, not speaking.

‘Okay. Let's try it another way. This time, I want you to pull me towards you. Like this.' And she grasped my fingers in hers and started to pull me. ‘Come here,' she was saying, beseeching, a child.

‘Come he-ere.' I snatched my hands away. ‘Now you try,' said Anna.

I took a slow breath. My arms were crossed in front of me.

‘See how you are hugging yourself,' she said, softly. ‘You are protecting the heart.'

I nodded my head, slowly up and down, looking at her: I am protecting the heart.

After a minute I unwrapped my arms and held my hands again to hers. Our palms were warm against each other, a little moist. I looked at her because I couldn't find anywhere else to look. I tugged her towards me, once, with my hands, and stopped, still holding her fingers in mine. My arms were filled with syrup. I couldn't pull. I couldn't let her go. I could not speak. Please don't make me.

‘Please,' I whispered.

It is quiet here in the space between thoughts. A jumbled clamorous quiet made of rustlings and clicks and the movement of air. In the silence my breath wells and wells and fills my hearing, the steady piston thump of my heart, so close to me, and beyond that other sensations that gradually differentiate into outlines of bird calls and cracking twigs and noises I cannot name. My mind looks for categories, a ceaseless scanning that separates wind and footfall and now cicadas, and keeps stretching further and further, seeking always the coding for threat: footsteps behind me, a rustling in the undergrowth. I must not die. I say it to myself over and over. I must not die.

Sometimes, when I know they will be out, I ring Sydney and listen to the answering machine. ‘You have rung the house of Lily and Jess and Michael,' says my daughter's sweet clear voice. ‘We're not home, but leave a message and we'll get back.'

My daughter, who is small and stern and about whom I will not think.

‘Notice,' says Anna, ‘how you touch your lips with your fingers. Notice how you soothe yourself.'

After a while I realise that I am whimpering. Small, curled sounds that are dislodged and shaken out of me with each step. At first I do not notice them, or name them anyway. At first it is just a feeling coiled in the back of my throat, not yet sound; another beat that falls in with the rhythm of my feet on the dirt road, softening and filling out my footsteps. For a moment when I hear the sound that I am making—when I realise that it is me making the sound—I stop. I tighten my throat and the sound stops. I wonder if anyone has heard. I walk more slowly. The crunch-shuffle of my boots on the road. The big empty air. And then I think, bugger it. And I soften my throat again, and pick up speed, and after a while it is back, a small animal following me, or leading.

It is odd at first, foolish. Babyish. But after a while I realise that it is a skill, an act of balance. The whimpering must neither be shouted over nor drawn in, contracted. In either case it loses its power to nourish, to alleviate. The whimpering must be left to its own devices, but held, my throat the cradle.

‘I love,' says my husband suddenly, ‘your large white breasts and your pale skin. I love all the things about you that you hate.'

At midday I stop for lunch. Hungry. I have been singing. Out here there is no audience, and if there is, they are welcome. I sing the song I remember my mother singing with my father. A question and an answer.

‘True love, true love, don't you lie to me. Tell me where did you sleep in the night?'

‘In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines. And I shivered the whole night through
.'

Most of the words I have forgotten, and I hum idly in between, improvising links and bridges, coming back over and over again to the same refrain. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines. I am in the back of the car and my mother and father are in the front, singing together. I am sitting in the middle and from here I can see both of them, my mother on the left, the side of her face, her dark glasses, and my dad in the driving seat. He is sitting up straight, his big thin hands on the wheel, and his chin is tilted up, his wispy beard almost red in the last of the day's sunshine. He has a light tenor that brushes along beside my mother's deeper, stronger voice, and he looks so happy. I can see the happiness dancing around his skin.

I find a log in the shade, check it for ants and sit. I must be half way. At least half way. I still have two full bottles of water, and a half which I open now and swig, throat open. In my bag I have two muesli bars, a third of a bag of dried apricots, four tea-bags, one apple, two bananas, a block of chocolate, two packets of soup, bread, honey, marmalade and a vegemite sandwich. Not a lot, but enough.

The sandwich, from the kitchen at the nursing home, is sweaty and limp now, the butter soaked into the bread. I hold it with both hands and eat slowly, the flavours and texture heightened by exertion. The bread, sourdough that Tina bought especially from the bakery, is chewy and yielding, the vegemite perfectly salty. I have a sudden powerful sense of wellbeing, the good fortune of my limbs and lungs which have brought me here, and through which blood and nutrients are coursing.

I
n the rec room, we bounced and shook. Maud, Elsie, Mary, Anna and I. Shaking and shuffling on the spot, laughing more easily now. ‘Now yawn,' said Anna. ‘Deeper. Deeper. That's right, right down to the diaphragm. Good, Jess. Now stretch. Remind the body we're still alive.'

‘Tell that to my legs,' said Maud, glancing towards her stick, which she had left leaning against the wall. We were becoming familiar with each other, almost comfortable. Maud had been here for nearly a year, I now knew, since her second stroke, and although she was among the younger of the other residents she was wheezing slightly already. She had a soft broad back and plump shoulders, and wore floral print dresses without stockings. Sometimes she pulled her hem up and rubbed at her varicose veins.

‘Four kids,' she announced, by way of explanation, ‘and none of them gone off the rails, at least not yet,' as if this too were attributable to the dark knots behind her knees.

‘It must have been very full-on,' said Anna, ‘having so many children.' Sometimes she did this, I noticed, talked as if to a slightly younger audience she was trying to impress. Full-on. I wondered suddenly if she was doing it for my benefit. Maud looked for a moment as if she hadn't heard but then she nodded, with a slight smile, and said, ‘That would be putting it mildly.'

Elsie—pale blue stretchy pant suit, hair to match—turned to Anna. ‘Do you have children, dear?'

‘Me,' said Anna, considering, ‘no. No. Now today we're going to be monkeys.'

Anna stood at the front of the room and jutted her jaw out. She looked, it was true, like a monkey, the lower jaw pushed so far out that we could see her bottom teeth coming forward. She looked ridiculous. She retrieved her face for a moment and smiled. ‘Easy,' she said, sticking her jaw out again. ‘Now you try.' Her voice had a weird slightly stretched sound. I didn't like it. I slumped my shoulders. Anna ignored me.

One by one the others stuck out their bottom jaws, and eventually so did I.

‘Right out,' said Anna.

Mary in her nylon shirt looked like a tiny lizard, all pink and purple frills. Maud looked like a grader. I started to laugh.

‘You should look in the mirror,' she said.

‘There are some things that are good to say with your jaw out like this,' continued Anna. ‘This is what monkeys do when they are angry, this is what they do when they want to warn another monkey off, when they want to defend their territory and before they attack. That's why it feels so good to do.

‘Go away!' she said suddenly. She looked like Popeye but her voice was gruff and for a moment she seemed almost frightening.

‘Go away,' I said back to her, jaw jutting, surprising myself.

‘Go away. Bugger off.'

It felt good. Silly, but good. ‘Bugger off all of you,' I said now to everyone in the room. ‘Leave me alone.'

‘That's good,' said Anna and they all beamed back at me.

‘Go to hell,' I said in my monkey voice. ‘I'm really sick of this.'

‘What are you sick of?' asked Anna, jaw still thrust out.

‘I'm sick of doing this stupid exercise and I'm sick of people looking at me as though there's something wrong with me. So you can all get stuffed.'