Walking to the Moon (5 page)

At the top of the next rise, the forest drops away to scrub, and looking back I can see the shifting canopy and, above it, the clouds, which have been combed across the sky by some high wind. I squat and breathe. At my feet are small sticky seed pods, open now, and splayed into shapes of children's stars and flowers. The flesh that once contained the seeds is hard and nutty, the very wood peeled back by the force of expulsion.

One night I wake to the sounds of shouting down the corridor. A man's hoarse roar that stops as quickly as it starts. The swimmer. I lie for a long time afterwards in the dark, trying to push away the thoughts. How does a person drown? When I was nine I tried to do it in the bath. I wanted to see how it would feel. I stayed under until my cheeks were aching and there was a black beat at the base of my skull. ‘That's not how you do it,' a girl at school said. ‘You've got to open your mouth and let the water in. You have to breathe it.'

I
rena is going home. Mr Ivanovich has organised wheelchair ramps and an invalid bathroom, and for their bedroom a new king-sized bed. Carers will come for an hour in the morning and two in the evening, to bathe and dress her or prepare her for bed. One evening a week, someone else will come and look after her so that Mr Ivanovich can go out and play cards with his friends, drink a little vodka. On Tuesdays, Irena tells me, the card-players will come to their house. ‘Then I will serve them pelmeni and wear my new high shoes,' she says and snorts with laughter. But when she finishes, she is quiet, staring at the ceiling. For a moment she looks sad or frightened. I squeeze her shoulder lightly, and she turns towards me. ‘Time you go too, Jess. I go home; you go home.' She nods emphatically.

After she has gone, the cleaner goes in. Five years of life. Behind the heater he finds a toy car, a blue pencil, a ring. When he has left, taking the last traces of Irena, I slip into the room and lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling. Above me, barely visible in the light, are the shapes of stars and planets, a slip of moon. I wonder how Irena will feel tonight in a big new bed, staring at an empty ceiling.

The next day, when I wake from my afternoon nap, her room is filled with voices. Viv's, the sandy doctor's, a woman, loud and insistent: ‘This is just temporary, until we can find somewhere more suitable. He shouldn't be here.'

‘He shouldn't be moved too soon,' says the doctor.

‘And as I said over the phone, we'll have our own specialist working with him. He's flying in tomorrow.'

‘Yes, well I don't want it disturbing the other residents,' says Viv.

When I walk past later the door is closed but I can hear the outline of voices. The woman's sharp peaks; a man's smoother curves. They are still there when I get back from my walk, and they keep talking, back and forth, until I fall asleep.

The following morning when I walk past the room on my way downstairs to breakfast, the door is half open. Peering in, I can see a woman's broad back slumped in one of Viv's moulded plastic chairs at the foot of the bed. A clump of brown wavy hair has come adrift from its clip. I try to look past her but from this angle most of the room is hidden and all I can make out is the end of the trolley; a bump that might be feet. When I come back, the door is closed again but, as I pass, it opens and a man steps into the corridor. He stops when he sees me and pulls the door shut behind him. He is tall and fine-boned, shoulders hunched slightly towards his chest, a thin grey face; over-large, wire-rimmed glasses behind which his eyes are pale and damp. He nods, still holding the handle, and I nod back and continue towards my room. As I reach my door he says, ‘That's my son in there.'

I turn. He speaks quietly, not quite looking at me.

‘I wonder…perhaps you might be able to pop in and say hello to him later? I'm taking my wife home for a couple of hours, she's done in. This business is killing her. She slept in here last night, in a sleeping bag, and she needs to freshen up before we go to the airport. We've got a specialist due in from Canada on a midday flight.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Orzasky. Dr Paul Orzasky.'

‘I mean—your son.'

‘Oh. I'm sorry. Hugh. His name's Hugh.'

Back in my room I lie on the bed and think about nothing. Shadows collect in the creases of Hil's vase, and the pigeons come and go without my looking. At eleven-fifteen Tina, I know her footsteps, comes along the corridor. She knocks lightly and when I don't answer, enters and puts something on my table. I keep my eyes shut as she goes into the next room. She is the only one who always knocks. She is in there a few minutes. I hear her voice. And then she leaves. I track her footsteps along the linoleum passage and down the stairs, and when I can no longer hear her, I get up. I take the envelope she has placed on the table and put it, without needing to check who it is from, in my shoulder bag. For later. Then I open the door, pulling it shut behind me.

The door to the next room is ajar. At first I just stand and listen, then I knock lightly, like Tina, and go in. The room looks smaller without Irena, empty. Gone are the pictures and framed photos, the woven rug that Steff hated, the brightly coloured bedspread. Against the whiteness of the sheets the walls look drab now, and the folded sleeping bag in the corner makes the room seem suddenly fleeting, provisional. The only sound is the boy's breath, a loose flapping like an unset sail. My bare feet are pale and wide against the red and grey fleck of the lino, and after a while I know that I don't want to look at him. I turn to leave and just then he begins to speak. Not speech. Not words. A man's low humming, made of half sounds and floating vowels. Scraps of torn paper. I stand there for what seems a long time among them. It is a young man's voice, richly sprung and pleasurable. At times a jumble of sounds, a child's crooned mouthings, and then building in cadence and rhythm, thickening almost to speech, fragments of tune, then falling away again. Once there is a sobbing sound that could as easily be laughter. And later, the same two notes played forwards then back, over and over. Almost music.

‘He's a tenor,' says a voice at the door; the mother is standing there and I notice, before glancing away, that she has tears on her face. ‘He was about to audition for the opera in Melbourne. They even rescheduled him, after the accident, in case he woke up in time for the second round.'

A scrap of brown and grey hair has fallen again from her clip and lies across the shoulder of her dress. I think, briefly, that she is one of those people who will always look messy. There is silence from the bed now, except for the corrugated breath, and from the corridor the sound of voices. The father's, low and deliberate, and another, quicker, lighter.

‘We have found this amazing man,' the mother says to me now, words falling over themselves, ‘we are putting our faith in this amazing, good man, this doctor. He is going to help our son.'

‘He is going to do his best, Laura,' says the husband, behind us. And seeing me, ‘Oh hello. Thanks for looking in.'

I am trying to leave but the doctor comes in, and there are introductions. ‘Jess,' I say. ‘I'm in the room next door. I just came in for a minute to see—' He looks young for an imported specialist, perhaps in his forties, dressed in jeans and a striped blue-and-white T-shirt.

‘A bloody clown, if you ask me,' Steff tells Tina later, as they pull the sheets from my bed and fling them into the laundry trolley.

‘I asked Jess if she would keep Hugh company,' the father tells Laura, who squeezes my shoulder.

‘Glad you could come,' says Paul Orzasky, pumping my hand.

‘Excuse my outfit. I just got off a plane.'

‘That's all right,' I say, edging towards the door.

‘He has a beautiful face, doesn't he?' says Laura, looking towards the bed. I nod.

‘Anyway,' I say, ‘I should get going.'

‘No, please. Stay for a bit,' she says, snatching quickly at my sleeve and then dropping it. She looks at her hand for a moment as if surprised, then lowers her voice a little. ‘My daughter's on her way. I'll be all right then. Would you mind?'

‘Laura?' Her husband looks across from the bed where he is standing with Dr Orzasky.

‘It's okay,' I say.

Even so, when we cross to the bed I try at first not to look; to focus on the outline, not the face. When I do, I see that she is right. Her son is beautiful. He has his father's fine bones and his mother's wavy brown hair. His face is pale with bright spots of colour on each cheek, the nose dented from some old fall. There are no tubes, no scars, no feeding lines running into either nostril; he looks as if he is sleeping.

‘I feed him,' says Laura. ‘Myself.'

‘I thought he wasn't conscious,' I say.

‘Hugh.' She speaks to the boy. ‘This is Jess. She's in the next-door room. She was in a coma like you. And now she's nearly ready to go home.' She turns to me. ‘That's right, isn't it? That's what the nurse said.' She continues without waiting for an answer. ‘His breathing's fine and he knows how to swallow,' she says. ‘He lets me feed him. That's how I know he's going to be all right.'

‘It's a good sign,' says Dr Orzasky, from where he stands at the foot of the bed, jotting pencilled notes into what looks like a school exercise book.

‘We had to fight them, to get the feeding tube taken out,' says Laura. ‘That's one of the reasons we got out of the last place. At least here they say we can give it a go. Not without a battle, I might add.'

‘They're worried he'll choke,' the father explains quietly.

‘Yes, and he hasn't.' She reaches out and runs her forefinger lightly across the sleeping man's concave cheek. ‘As if I'm not able to feed my own child. What would they know?' She addresses the question to the son, and her husband on the other side of the bed gives a tiny shrug and says nothing.

Dr Orzasky has been watching from the base of the bed, and he moves up now to where Laura is standing. ‘Laura, would you mind?' For a moment she looks confused, then she steps away quickly to allow him in.

The doctor looks down at the young man in the bed for what seems a long time. Then, reaching behind him for one of the plastic chairs, he sits and leans forwards to take Hugh's wrist. Then nothing. Just the boy's windy breath, and the doctor's. The father, Martin, is rubbing a finger rhythmically up and down the side of his nose, and Laura frowns at him from across the bed. He stops for a moment, then looks away from her and starts again. No one speaks, and after a while everyone's attention returns to Paul Orzasky. It takes me a while to realise that they are breathing now in unison, the doctor matching his patient. Long in. Long out. And then, on the exhalation, he begins to speak, softly, rhythmically, up against the boy's ear.

‘Hugh,' says the doctor, ‘I'm Paul – Orzasky – I've come a – long way to – see you. – I'm going – to try and – help get you – back on your – feet. – If that's what – you'd like. – I'm going to – examine you – now – as gently – as I can. – A couple of – these tests might – sting a little – but I won't – do anything – without letting – you know first. – Okay?'

I see Laura glance quickly at her husband. Paul Orzasky reaches and opens the case on the table near the bed head, and pulls out a slim black torch, talking all the while in his light voice with its long, sloping vowels. ‘O-kay now.' He puts all the weight on the O-sound, kicking off with the K. ‘I'm just going – to shine – this light – in your eyes – Hugh – just to check – what's going – on with them.'

He pulls back the eyelids, one by one. ‘Okay, well there's – something happening – there, Hugh – glad to have – you with us.

‘Does he move around much, Laura, Martin?'

‘Not much,' says Martin.

‘And talk? Does he say anything, make sounds, anything?'

‘Sometimes,' says Laura, ‘though he stops if he knows you're in the room.'

‘He stops? Well that's a good sign. That's surely a good sign.

What sort of sounds?'

‘Oh, well, just sounds. Nothing really. Just…sounds.' She stops, uncertain, and for the first time since we have entered the room speaks to her husband. ‘Martin?'

‘A kind of singing,' says Martin. ‘But without words.'

‘Singing without words. Sounds nice. I'd like to hear that.

Now I'm – just going to – tap your arms – and legs – Hugh – to test your – reflexes. – It may feel – a little – strange.'

Dr Orzasky pulls a small hammer-like instrument from his bag.

‘He should never have moved to Melbourne,' says Laura suddenly. ‘I knew something like this would happen. I knew it. I had a bad feeling.'

‘Darling, you often have bad feelings, and quite often they don't amount to anything,' says Martin, quietly.