Walking to the Moon (18 page)

‘See how you try to check the impulse,' Anna said, quietly, interested but detached. ‘Notice that you try to block the feeling.'

I was shaking my head now, like a metronome, I thought. Tick. Tick. Can't stop. Shaking my head, holding my hand, biting my lip. All the time looking at her, willing her to put an end to it.

‘Try saying it then,' she said after a moment.

‘Saying what?' I became still.

‘Shit.'

‘No.' A whisper.

‘No, then. Say “no”.'

I shook my head. I kept looking at her, silently, brought my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around them.

‘I can't.' I dropped my eyes. A wave of tiredness washed over me.

‘Jess. Come back.' There was a slight, pleasant lilt at the end of her sentence, a request. ‘Jess, bring your eyes back to mine.'

I closed my eyes, lowered my head to my knees. Drifted.

See. A tiny little thought curled in a shell on the sea floor. Now look what you made me do.

Sometimes when my daughter reaches up to kiss me, I think she does not quite look at me, that her eyes dim slightly, barely discernible, as they meet mine, though her smile is the same, bright and quick, as she steps away and takes Michael's hand. I used to watch them as they walked together up the concrete steps that led to the street and then to crèche. Once they had started I could not turn away. I had to watch until all of her was gone, even her ankles and her feet in their small red shoes. But I thought that it was all right. I think that she is all right. I told everyone what a great dad Michael was. I joked that I'd married a SNAG, that he was the one she ran to if she had hurt herself. (Though I was the one, I reminded myself, who picked her up at the end of the day and read her stories and gave her butterfly kisses.) Sometimes I was out when they left in the morning, at the newsagent or on a walk or anywhere away from the house. I took my time getting home and I came around the back way, where there was no chance of glimpsing them unexpectedly as they climbed into the car or pulled away. Some mornings I stayed in bed, feigning sleep until I heard the door close and had to race for the bus, hair wet, toast in a plastic bag.

‘They say at crèche that it's better if you tell the children when you're going,' Michael said one morning, ‘and that you'll be back.

They've done research. It makes it easier.'

‘Who for?' I said, and wished I hadn't.

Michael thought that if he backed it up with research I might listen. And I might. I did. I heard him. ‘I hear you,' I said lightly, the second or third time he told me. ‘I hear you. You are heard. Is that right? Is that what I'm meant to say?'

He was silent and shrugged and turned away, scooped up her school bag. ‘Lil,' he called, ‘time to go. Say goodbye to Mummy.'

It makes me laugh though, the things she comes home with.

‘You're hurting my feelings,' she berates me (bedtime perhaps, or bathtime, or maybe I have refused her an ice-cream). ‘I don't like that.'

Things I would never have dreamed of saying. Still don't. Things I would not even have known how to think. Feelings. ‘What feelings?' I say, teasing. ‘Which of those feelings of yours am I hurting?'

‘All of them,' she says sternly. ‘Especially my angry ones.'

My blister is hurting, a deep ache in the ball of my foot, all the more insistent for the relief over lunch. I have been trying not to think about it, but I realise now that the anticipation and then the dark spreading pain are inescapable. I see them in the flame tones of flowers, in the shapes of shadows on the road. Resistance, pain, momentary relief. A morass of feeling. So that the treading into it feels like a punishment, a personal cruelty inflicted by my brain on my foot (you must walk) and then spreading back up from the foot, which now seems enormous, misshapen, through the rest of my body and back at last to my thoughts (you are cruel; you cannot love). I think about stopping. I think about taking a needle (I have one, I am sure, in the first aid kit) and plunging it into the sole of my foot, opening the tender pool, relieving the pressure. But it is too deep, the pain is too deep, and then there is the raw wound and the risk of infection. I must keep walking. (You cannot love.) I must walk.

All afternoon after the session with Anna I paced. Not outside, I couldn't leave the building, nor sit nor read nor converse. All afternoon I prowled the corridors and stairs and any room that was empty. In the dining room I stalked around the tables, set and waiting for dinner, barely seeing, feeling only the jolt of my heels on the lino. It was bright outside, still daylight, but the windows transmitted as blanks, reflecting only inward, and my feet in their socks were awkward helpless claws.

Late in the afternoon as I came down the main stairs into the entrance lobby I caught sight of her, suddenly and unaccountably, across the corridor, through the open door of the sitting room. She was leaving her room, the one where she saw her private clients, turning to pull the door behind her, her day's work done. She looked small at this distance and out of place, one shoulder hitched to keep her bag from slipping: clumsy, unreal. A couple of seconds and she walked out of the frame, heading I supposed for the back exit, the rear car park, her small green Toyota. I stood immobilised on the bottom step, out of time, and after a while noticed my hands gripping the wooden railing. How could I not have known she was still here?

At the last instant I released the banister, sprinted across the sitting room, past the room she had just left, down the hallway to the back door. Even before I got there I saw through the glass panes that she was gone, the car park empty, but I ran anyway, feet scattering the quartz gravel, down the driveway in great shuddering bounds to the entrance, the concrete pillars and the road, which was empty.

In my room I sat at last cross-legged on the bed. I held the pillow to my chest and rocked back and forth, back and forth. I wanted to cry or to shout. I wanted to shout into her face. I wanted to hurt her. ‘I hate you,' I moaned, ‘I hate you,' but my voice sounded stringy and vague; it could not find the feeling. I started to make sounds, a thick ugly creaking, un-oiled, unhinged. Sounds I had never made before. I sounded like a cow, like a person shitting, like something stuck. I held my pillow against my mouth, pushed my face into it. Rock and moan. In the end, there was nothing but the sound. No more thoughts or ideas or comparisons. Just a droning in my chest and neck and sinuses. In the end, the sound swallowed me, and after a while I felt calmer.

IV

O
n my fifth birthday we went on a picnic in the mountains, my mother and my father and I. My mother cut sandwiches, vegemite and lettuce, corned beef and chutney, and filled the thermos with hot tea. We put cherry cake, tin cups, condensed milk and apples into the basket. Stuart drove. Once we were out of the city and on to the main road running west to the mountains, we began to sing. This old man, he played one. The owl and the pussycat went to sea. Knick knack paddywack. ‘Fare thee well for I must leave thee,' sang Stuart in his light, sweet voice, and my mother joined in, ‘Do not let this parting grieve thee; just remember that the best of friends must part, must part.'

When we got to the mountains, to the place my parents called the mountains, Stuart pulled off the bitumen on to a narrow dirt road and we drove into the bush; saplings so close they hit the windscreen and scraped the sides of the car. My mum and dad used to come here before I was born. I sat in the middle of the back seat and peered between my parents through the windscreen. The path dipped and the car bumped over the rough corrugations, making my teeth clack, then veered up and out and suddenly we were looking at water.

‘Here we are,' said Stuart, opening his door and getting out to stretch. ‘Our own swimming hole.' It looked like a lake to me.

The pool was below us, and we had to climb down a narrow path through low scratchy bush to reach it. Behind it were high rocks and more scrubby plants. In front of us was a small tawny beach. On a checked rug, my mother unwrapped our sandwiches from waxed paper coloured in pink and blue and green. She called it rainbow paper, and as she took each piece off, I flattened it on the stone beside me into a rectangle or a square.

After we had eaten and taken time to digest, I wriggled into my rubber swimming ring. Stuart and I walked to the other end of the pool and a small rocky outcrop while my mother pulled on her togs behind a tree and then sank into the water, except her head
.
‘Be careful,' she called. ‘Check it, Stuart, for rocks.' Stuart lowered himself into the water, sinking under, then bursting up, spraying water from his hair. ‘It's fine, it's fine. She can jump,' he called. ‘Swim to me.' The water was the colour of the sand and the cliffs. I could see his face, eyes squinted towards me, his upheld arms, and below that, nothing. I jumped and the water rushed its coolness around me, then I bobbed up, held by my ring, and made see-saw strokes to Stuart. We made our way towards the shore, me hanging on to my dad's kicking legs and laughing, and when we got to the shallows I let go and he stood up and I pulled my ring over my head and crouched low in the water with my lips level to it and imagined that I was a crocodile and that I could swallow the lake and everything in it.

When I stood up I could not see my mother. She was not on the beach, and when I looked back across the water she was not there either. Stuart had not noticed. I asked, or was about to ask, ‘Where is she?' when I saw something floating a little way off, not far from the shore. It was big, like a branch, but I knew straight away that it was not a branch. I could see part of her back, with its floral swimsuit, and her long dark hair floating on the top of the water. I was waist deep, and in the icy elongated moment that followed I could neither move nor hear nor speak.

None of it, as I told the psychiatrist that afternoon in Potts Point, was really new to me. As I sat in his corduroy armchair, the day in the mountains repeated the pattern it had always followed. What was surprising was the immediacy, and to realise, if only fleetingly, that despite the familiar plot the day was not quite as I had remembered it after all. It was as if, I now sensed, it had been divided into two—severed, even—and although both parts were known to me, in my mind they were unrelated, two separate histories running side by side, the first, I now realised, taking precedence. I think this must have been where the upset came from, the choking sobs in his darkened front room, feeling the stories suddenly pushed together. And at that point I did think that I would come back and see him again. By the time I was home, though, away from his kindly containing gaze, the two histories seemed to have drifted apart, and I could no longer quite recall why I had been crying.

The second history starts where the first ends. I remember that moment as silent—the moment of my mother's hair—though some slow sound must have seeped out, for Stuart turned as if to look at me, and at the same time my mother raised her head and waved. Stuart waved back and took two or three of his long strides to the shore and I, forgetting I had taken off my rubber ring, started to swim to my mother.

It is strange even at five how clearly things present themselves. There was the panic of course, and the rushing sense of displacement (my hands, which had nothing to hold), but my main recollection is one of embarrassment (my foolishly flailing legs) and then the descent.

Stuart carried me to shore. ‘She's all right,' he kept saying as my mother reached us, ‘she's all right'. But my mother was not listening.

‘What were you thinking, what were you thinking?' she muttered to Stuart, or to me, over and over, as she snatched me from him.

In the psychiatrist's corduroy armchair, I could feel her face very close to mine. Over her shoulder I could see Stuart's mouth opening and closing behind her, everything wrong, because of me.

And I felt myself engulfed, suddenly, in rage. I shouted shrilly at my mother to let me go. When she did not I pushed her hard, as hard as my arms would allow, and fell suddenly away.

The next image in this memory chain is of my mother and father fighting. I do not recall the content of the argument, but I have a clear sense of their placement, against a backdrop of pale peeling tree trunks, and me, a little distance away now, drawing with a stick in the dirt. They were not shouting. My mother was speaking fast and low, looking not at my father but at the ground beside him, and my father at one point, quite casually it seemed, reached out and struck the tree trunk nearest to him with his fist. I do not recall any sense of urgency, nor do I remember deciding to run. Nearby, however, was a set of wide dirt steps leading down, and then a narrower set, and then a dirt path to the right with a ruckus of low sharp shrubs on either side, along which I now charged.

Hil says it was not this way at all. She says that the two events—the moment of my mother's hair and the moment on the mountain track—were separated not by minutes but months. That during that hot summer my parents had driven to the mountains several times, and that she, Hil, had even swum with us one day in the same pool, which was at least five kilometres lower down the mountain. ‘But Hil,' I insisted, ‘it happened on my birthday!'