Walking to the Moon (21 page)

O
ne night after dinner Michael said, ‘Someone's trying to sue me.'

Lily was asleep in bed, and we were sitting side by side on the back step of his flat, our flat, listening to the sea rasp against the sand at the other end of the street. I was smoking a cigarette, and we were drinking red wine from tumblers. I was wearing a cardigan over my dress because the weather had started to turn, but the evening was still mild and scented with salt. It was Friday and Lily had just finished her orientation week for her new school, where she would go the next year (where she has gone, I remind myself; where she now
goes
). I was pleased. The teachers were friendly, I'd told Michael, and Lily had decided she would stay there until she was seven or ten. He had laughed, briefly, and we had been sitting in what I took to be an uncomplicated silence. I was relieved—far more than I told Michael, or even myself—that she had taken to it so well, that I had not had to work my way through tears and promises and unnavigable guilt.

I was, if not peaceful, at least satisfied. Michael was working hard and seemed mainly cheerful. We argued less over sex and he no longer talked about wanting a second child. Sometimes I took pills to sleep. In my mind we were treading water. The water felt okay. It didn't feel too bad.

‘A woman,' he said.

‘A woman is suing you?'

‘Threatening to sue. We gave her a general. She says the anaesthetic was inadequate.'

‘Meaning what?' I picked up the dictionary lying next to me on the step and started to flick through it, reluctant to give up the evening.

‘She's saying she remembers the operation.'

‘She's saying she remembers. What was it, a caesarean? What does she remember? Could she hear you?'

Inadequate, I read: not adequate; insufficient. Not capable or competent; lacking.

‘She's wasting her time. She wasn't conscious. There was no problem with the anaesthetic. She's got some psychiatrist saying she remembered the surgery under hypnosis.'

‘Was the baby okay?'

‘The baby was fine. Don't worry about it. It won't come to anything.'

‘Inadmissible,' I read aloud. ‘Not admissible or allowable. So she's not saying she was conscious. She's saying she remembered things later, but only after she was hypnotised. And what does Roger say? Can't he sort it out?'

‘He doesn't need to sort it out. It won't come to anything.

Don't worry about it.'

‘What does it mean if you're being sued? Is it you, or us, or the hospital? Who's she suing?'

‘No one. I just thought I'd tell you. It won't happen.'

But a few days later it was in the papers. Michael brought it in and dropped it on the kitchen table.

‘Here we go,' he said.

It was a small story on page four.
Woman sues over birth ‘nightmare
'. I read the first few paragraphs. Her name was Andrea. She was thirty-one. She was suing St Mary's hospital, surgeon Roger Ellis and anaesthetist Michael Small. She claimed to have suffered depression and ill health after the birth of her first child. Under hypnosis she had told her psychiatrist she remembered a conversation in the delivery theatre. She said she remembered one of the doctors calling her a whale, saying they would need a forklift to move her. She was suing for compensation for psychological distress, claiming professional misconduct.

‘That's not possible, surely, that she could remember things like that?'

‘Who knows, there can be some recall. But the hypnosis stuff will never stand up in court.'

‘So did anyone say anything? Who called her a whale?'

‘No one that I'm aware of.'

‘So she's making it up?'

‘Imagining it, more like.' He folded the paper. ‘I'm late.'

Michael didn't bring it up again. Once or twice I asked, and he said again that it wouldn't go to court, that the woman had no case. I asked him again about hypnosis. Using the woman as an example, did that mean then that, theoretically at least, it would be possible for someone, for that woman, to have taken in information while she was unconscious? To have in her memory things she didn't even know she knew but that could still affect how she behaved or felt? Was that what it meant?

No, said Michael, because the things she said had happened hadn't happened.

But technically, I persisted, would it be possible, technically, for someone to remember in that way?

Michael said no.

All afternoon as I walk thoughts clamber up my throat and get stuck there, making pressure.

A week or so later there was a knock at the door. Lily was playing in the lounge room with a friend from crèche. Michael was at work. I had a headache. I had had it for about three hours. I knew who she was. I had never seen her before but I knew who she was. I stood in the doorway, and said, ‘Yes?' I wondered where her baby was. She said, ‘You're married to that Dr Small aren't you?'

‘Who are you?' I could feel my heart starting to pound. I blocked the doorway with my body.

‘I'm not going to hassle you,' she said. ‘They're going to pay me out, the hospital. They're going to pay me to keep my mouth shut.

And after this I will. I just came to tell you what they said while I was having my baby, your husband and all them other nice men.'

When Michael got home that evening, Lily was excited because I'd let her have crap for dinner. She showed him the plastic toy.

‘Great, honey,' he said, and then to me, ‘Couldn't you at least have got pizza?'

‘Andrea Roberts came around.'

‘Honey, Daddy's got to talk to Mummy for a moment,' he said at last. ‘Go and get into that bath and I'll come in a minute and wash your hair. What did she say?'

‘You tell me. Why didn't you tell me?'

‘Because I didn't think it was necessary.'

Christ, she's like a whale. Women this fat shouldn't have kids. That was what one of them said.

Women this fat shouldn't have sex. That was what the other one said. Then there was laughter, and then a third voice cut in, a quieter male voice.

‘Well, if she doesn't pull herself together she's going to end up losing her husband.'

That's what she told me. Afterwards she shuffled back up the drive without looking back, and I watched her get into her car, a small brown Corona or something similar, with a child seat in the back.

Michael was as pale as I've ever seen him. Eventually he said, ‘I didn't mean it like that.'

Had he laughed, I asked him, had he laughed with the others?

Had he laughed when they said she was too fat to have sex?

He said no he hadn't laughed, he didn't think it was funny.

But nor did he think it was worth destroying a career over. Two careers. Three.

‘She can't breast feed,' I told him, my voice veering upwards. ‘She can't make herself hold her baby. She can't even look at him. Her mum's looking after him.'

‘You can't say that, Jess; you can't assume that those things are related.'

‘I bloody well can,' I told him. ‘How come the hospital's settling out of court?'

‘Those things would probably have happened anyway for that woman. It happens all the time. Mothers get post-natal depression, you of all people know that. I understand how hard it seems, but it doesn't make sense to get so upset about it.'

‘It bloody does,' I said, near tears. ‘It does!'

He sighed, and in response my voice rose further, shrill now, almost comic. ‘So does that mean you'll leave me now? Will you leave me because I'm fat?'

That startled him. ‘Jess. No. What are you saying? Of course not. And you're not. What is this?'

His arms and legs, I noticed as he spoke, seemed only loosely attached to the rest of him and, with his head shaking from side to side, he reminded me of a marionette. I wondered for the first time if he was good at his job. I had always assumed he was; now I didn't know. Not because of what the woman, Andrea, had said, but because I saw now that all the bits of him didn't seem to fit together, as if he had to think about them all the time, keep them in check or decide what to do with them. It must take a lot of effort, I realised, not being angry with me.

And at that moment I wanted to tell him the truth. I wanted to tell him what this was, but I couldn't. So instead I told him what I had forgotten to tell him that day when Lily was small. I told him I was leaving him.

Cause and effect. It was almost funny after all this time to see that I could make a difference. Michael looked like a ten-year-old. He actually looked as if he had been hit, as if I had hit him, although when he spoke it was with his normal talking voice. ‘I had an affair,' he said quickly. ‘I had an affair with one of the nurses; it's a cliché, it's over, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please Jess.'

And then strangely, because even I could see it was not what he meant to do, he gave me a small shy smile. It was the smile that shocked me. It was the smile of someone without a backup plan.

And instead of rage or desire or any of the other things a wife might have felt at that point, what I felt was nothing. Not an empty nothing, not an absence or a stillness or a space between thoughts, but a nothing like a slammed door. Like an axe. I wanted to feel those other feelings; I knew they were probably there. But I could not. And so I said nothing. I left it to him and he said all the things I had wanted him to say: about needing me and never leaving me; about us moving to another place, a proper house; about his childhood and about his father and about his mother, and even (though I stopped listening then) about mine. He said everything and none of it mattered. I was looking at his face and its expression, which I could not name.

When I looked away from him, Lily was standing in the doorway, thoughtful in her towel. And then I couldn't talk any more because my head ached too much, a greenish throbbing that fitted like a skullcap and now seemed to stretch down my neck and shoulders into my kidneys, my buttocks, the backs of my knees. ‘I feel like shit,' I told him. ‘I'm going to lie down.'

‘Can I bring you something?' The doctor again.

I didn't answer. I felt really quite ill. Lying on top of the bedcovers, curled in a ball, I could hear the low square mounds of Michael's words from the bathroom, and after a while Lily's high singing. They sounded a long way away. I woke briefly some time later and Michael's voice was beside me. ‘Jess, are you awake?' He sounded small and worried. I tried to sit up but I could not move. There was a dark buzzing sound in my head, and through the buzzing Michael kept saying, ‘Jess, wake up.' I tried to answer him but I could not hear my voice and am not sure if I spoke.

T
he last time I saw my mother was shortly before I met Michael. She wrote and suggested, as she had once or twice before, that she pay for me to come to America to stay with her and meet her family. I don't know why I decided to accept this time. I told myself it would be good to see the States. I even hoped she might send me a round the world ticket, but in the end there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over dates and connections and it turned out she was using her husband's frequent flyer points. He was an academic and travelled a lot to deliver papers. They had been saving points for some years, she told me during the brief flurry of phone calls that followed my letter back, hoping I would decide to come.

On the phone she talked fast and a little breathlessly, confirming schedules and itineraries, saying again how pleased she was, checking even on my dietary needs—meat? (yes) dairy? (yes)—and I was reminded again of a bright quick bird, one whose metabolism required that it only ever alight briefly before moving on.

She met me at the airport with her husband. He stood back while we greeted each other. ‘Oh my,' said my mother, like an American, standing in front of me with her hands spread open-palmed in a gesture of plenitude. ‘Oh my.' Her hair was cut shorter than the last time I had seen her at the North Sydney pool, more like I remembered it from my childhood. Her face was still thin, with small bundles of wrinkles starting to gather on her cheeks and in the dimples beneath the corners of her mouth. She was still pretty and in a way I liked this face more than the previous time I had seen her. Her hair was flecked now with grey and for the first time I could see that she looked like Hil.

We shook hands. I remembered her wiry fingers with the small knotted knuckles. And then we hugged awkwardly. She gestured behind her and Ted, I remembered his name, stepped forward a little apologetically, a tall soft-skinned, peaceful-faced man, who picked up my cases and walked ahead like a chauffeur, parting the crowd quietly before us.

They lived in a suburb around forty-five minutes' drive away, and as we drove we chatted about my flight, which had been delayed, and then the weather, which was unseasonably dry, and then the eldest son Hamish's cello lessons and the possibility that he might have a girlfriend about whom he was saying nothing. This information, added my mother, had come from the younger son, Kit, and might not be reliable. I sat in the back and as Ted drove I saw my mother reach her hand across and place it on his and saw him glance quickly at her and smile.