Walking to the Moon (15 page)

‘Michael,' I whispered. He looked up. His eyes were wet.

‘Michael, what's wrong?' I said. ‘What's the matter?' He pulled me towards him then. His lips were cool and salty. I could feel his heart in his chest. The waiter had to rap on the table with his knuckles: ‘Scuse me folks, this is a family restaurant.'

Michael pulled back. ‘Sorry,' he said, looking at me. ‘Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.'

‘It's all right,' I said, though I didn't know if it was. I didn't know what to make of him. I felt a peculiar jumbled excitement.

In the weeks and months that followed I waited to see if it would emerge again—this helpless half-formed Michael—but it never did, and mainly I was relieved. I did not want to think about his eyes, which had peered at me in the cafe, soft and almost frightened. It was this moment that kept coming back to me later, despite myself, the way he had looked at me, and each time I remembered it I felt a piercing tenderness, a wanting to soothe and surround; and nestled alongside it, indistinguishable almost, a bolt of fear.

It was nearly six months before I met his mother. She lived in a 1970s apartment set high above a northern beach and framed by the brilliant blues and reds of jacaranda and flame trees.

‘She's only invited us to show off the view,' said Michael as we made our way into the living room the first time I visited. He said it loud enough for her to hear, teasing. She was standing on the wide tiled balcony from which she had waved as we got out of the car, but turned as we came into the room and walked quickly towards us.

‘Just wait and see,' he said, raising his eyebrows as if this was an old joke, ‘we won't hear from her again until this time next year. Mother, Jessica; Jessica, my mother, Sonia.'

She made a show of ignoring him and kissed me, European style, left, right, left.

‘My rude son has brought home a beautiful woman for me to meet. I have been trying to get him here for months.'

She was taller than me, and smelled of perfume.

‘Michael, what about a gin and tonic for Jessica and I?' She turned to me. ‘Gin and tonic?'

I nodded, unable to match her smile. She turned back swiftly to Michael. ‘Hello darling darling.' She seized his cheeks between her finger tips, pinched them, almost in parody, smiling fiercely, then moved away again as quickly, back out on to the balcony.

‘Darling darling yourself. Ouch.' Michael rubbed his cheeks, pulled a face at me. But he followed her out to where she stood looking towards the ocean, put his arms around her shoulders from behind, leaned his head for a moment on one shoulder. I saw her hands rise briefly to his forearms, locked loosely around her neck, then he spiralled back inside to a heavy wooden cabinet from which he produced glasses, ice in a bucket, gin in a decanter. I sat down on one of the upholstered chairs. After a moment Sonia turned and joined us inside. ‘It's chilly,' she said, standing near the doorway, rubbing her arms. ‘Michael could you fetch me my wrap?'

‘It's there,' he gestured to the chair beside mine, ‘on the chair. Jess? Could you?' And I rose and carried it across the room to her. Our eyes barely met as she took it. ‘What a lovely name. Jessica. Thank-you Michael.' She inclined her head as she took the drink from him. There was hardly any accent—she had gone to school in Switzerland after the war—except when she said his name. Mikhael. Against hers, my pronunciation sounded flat and nasal. I felt large and unkempt. I disliked her intensely.

‘I've been trying to get you here for months,' she continued, speaking to Michael, but smiling slightly at me, raising her glass a little as Michael handed me mine.

This is one of the things we argued about afterwards, that at her apartment and then later when she took us out to dinner (her shout, she insisted) he always gave her drink to her first, before mine. Opened her car door but not mine. (I was relegated to the back.)

‘But you hate all that stuff. You wouldn't let me open your door,' he protested, jaw clenched.

‘That's not what I mean.'

‘If I'd known you were that easy to please. Fine, I'll open doors for you. Is that what you want?'

‘Of course not.'

‘She's my mother for god's sake. She's an older woman. She's of a different generation. What do you expect?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Here we go.'

‘Here we go what? What's that supposed to mean?'

‘Forget it.'

We ate at a small restaurant down the road where the waiters knew Sonia by name and ushered us to a table in the window, and where she ordered, unbidden, half a dozen fresh oysters for each of us to begin with. I had never eaten an oyster, not raw, and now there were six lying exposed and glistening on the plate before me. Embryonic. Obscene. I forced myself to put one in my mouth. I doused it in lemon first, and let it rest a moment on my tongue. But I could not swallow. I knew I would gag. I spat it, under Sonia's concerned gaze, into my napkin and pushed my plate across to Michael, who shared the rest with his mother.

I knew I had failed. I knew that Sonia would find me lacking. But what I thought later, after the silent drive home, after we had fought and then fucked, as I lay quietly in bed beside Michael, was that the oysters reminded me somehow of him. That day in the cafe when I had told him to go away. The way he had looked at me. His moist defenceless eyes. I couldn't get the feel of the oyster out of my mouth, nesting wetly on my tongue, waiting to be swallowed
.

It wasn't that our sex was bad. Far from it. That is what I would have told the psychiatrist in Darlinghurst had I gone back later and had we talked about any of this. At first we were mesmerised. Gloating. In sex, Michael lost his primness and became natural, inquisitive. And I—what did I become? I don't know, I didn't think. I stopped thinking.

It is hard to imagine that now, when all I can remember is baulking and weariness and the sheer effort of rising through my own resistance.

But he moved me. The hollow of his neck, the high collar bones. The muttering in his sleep, curled around himself, away from me. For all the running and the leaping into the sea his shoulders were still small and rounded, like a girl's. When he relaxed they curved inwards, like mine. He had the pointed, pigeon chest of severe asthmatics, children who struggled for breath.

In bed, another night, Michael told me about the dark panicked drives to the children's hospital. Him gasping, his mother gripping him tightly by the upper arm, making marks. Just relax, she would tell him fiercely, sit up straight, breathe. Once or twice it was the ambulance, the oxygen mask. Sonia beside him, giving instructions to the ambulance men. She was always right, he said.

Even the ambulance men deferred to her.

It had started after his father died. ‘Heart surgeon. Heart attack,' he told me. Sometimes at night, alone in his bedroom, he could stop it happening. This is what he believed. If he was careful, vigilant, he could sense sometimes the first hint of breathlessness, of contraction, a whisper in the lungs. If he sat up quietly, his back against the wall by the bed and felt his way into his body, through the teeming fuzz in his chest, he could relax his lungs, soften the constriction the doctors had shown him in the pamphlets on asthma. In through the nose, out through his pursed lips. Slowly. Like blowing out a candle. If he could just get it in time, he could settle it. He didn't tell his mother. She would put on that sharp tight face, and then it would be the hospital. He worked out that fear was contagious. His mother's fear was contagious. He learned to travel to the centre of his fear and calm it. He learned to put it to sleep. He told me this story, in a puzzled, faraway voice, as if this child no longer made sense to him. This body traveller. ‘I must have done it for years,' he said, sitting up now, in bed, shaking his head. ‘And then I grew out of it. Just like that.' He snapped his fingers. ‘And things went back to normal.'

When he told me this, a deep private thing that even he did not understand, my love for him, what I called my love for him, this thick red feeling, rose up and tightened my own chest.

I examine these memories now from a procedural forensic distance.

Early summer, Michael's hip bones protruding, pale, above his Speedos, on the sand at Bondi. ‘I don't get this lying down thing,' he complains. He has borrowed my sunglasses, and tilts them back now, and watches as I smear sun block on my arms, legs, shoulders, chest.

‘Can you do my back?' I hand him the bottle.

He is meticulous, lifting the straps of my bathers, and rubbing the skin beneath them. ‘Have you any idea what's in this stuff? It's poison.' Even without lotion, he will darken to gold then deep brown. My face will get hot and pink and my calves will break out in a rash.

‘Look at you,' he says, squatting back on his heels, shaking his head. ‘You should be sitting under a parasol. In the shade. Eating sweetmeats, for god's sake.'

‘Like a big, fat, pale mushroom—'

‘I love your pale skin.' (That is when he said it.) ‘I love your large white breasts. I love all the things about you that you hate.'

‘Well you probably didn't grow up with your dad telling you to pull your tummy in,' I said, careful not to show my surprise. ‘Maybe I could hire you. You could come everywhere with me. Like a motivational tape. Maybe you could be my affirmation.'

‘Maybe I could be your husband.'

I remember him saying that. And that brief, startled moment when our eyes met, before I laughed and looked away. And now I don't even know if I said anything. I must have answered. I must have said yes, for we were married not long after. What I remember is the ocean. The first swim of the season. How the coldness exploded around me as I dived deeper and deeper, feeling the waves burst into foam above me.

I reach the campsite well before dark. An uneven clearing a little distance from the track, with a dozen or so tents rising like hummocks beneath the trees. A dirt road leads into the site from the other side, and a group of four wheel drives is parked around the largest stand of gums. A couple of men, dads, are down there tending a fire, and kids, five or six of them, are zig-zagging around them. Already I can smell sausages. I stop before I reach the campers, feeling exposed, uncomfortable at the thought of being among them. Having to talk to strangers, find the rhythm of easy chat, maintain eye contact. There is a sign telling campers to take their litter with them, to light fires only in the barbecues provided, to camp in the numbered sites. I don't want to camp in a numbered site. But nor do I want to camp alone in the bush. On the side of the path near where I am standing is a smaller clearing, half screened from the main site by bushes. I walk over and take off my pack and stand, experimentally, in the place where my tent might go if I pitched it here. If I were to pitch it here. Subjunctive. Provisional.

For a moment I feel light-headed. Not dizzy but disconnected, as if the force in my body has risen like steam towards my head, prickling my scalp, sending thoughts or scraps of thoughts out on their own into the cooling air.

I think suddenly of Steff, standing with her back against my door before I left, her large smooth arms folded in front of her. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.' She has pulled her voice in, so as not to be heard by anyone passing.

Squat. I say the word, a neutral command, without heat. I lower myself without desire or grace on to my haunches, unconvinced, going through the motions. Ground yourself, says Anna, placid, precise. Squat down, allow yourself to feel your relationship to the earth. Small twigs, mottled and smooth, lie in among fallen gum leaves and thready native grasses. I reach first for those that are closest, gather them in a small pile between my knees. I test one by bending it; it snaps dryly between my fingers. Then, feet still planted in the same position, I reach further out, sweeping from right to left, left to right, feeling the stretch in my thighs and calves, until I have collected a dozen or so twigs within arm's length. Before I stand I place the palms of both hands flat on the ground before me, allow my arms to take some of my weight, then straighten slowly.

I unroll my tent where I am. Place it carefully with the entrance facing in the direction of the other tents—I want to be able to see them—then angle it away a little for privacy. Pull the back of the tent in against the bushes, then out a fraction. It is easy to put up, even alone, and surprisingly satisfying. It is a long time since I have camped. The man in the shop showed me how to assemble the flexible poles and then feed them through the tabs along the sides and top of the tent and into the slots at the bottom. The tension forces the poles upwards and the tent rises. A small green pod in the bush. I push the pegs part way in with my heels and then bang them in further with a lump of wood, leaving a small pile to one side. A moment of concern with the fly-sheet; I put the entrance at the wrong end, facing the bushes. Stuffed it. Shh. Look, it's easy. Just turn it around. See? Eight more pegs. A couple won't go in all the way. I move one, and make do with the other. ‘Well done,' says Anna. I put my pack inside, and my sleeping bag; sit for a moment in the filtered light, then climb out and move off into the trees in search of kindling.

When I get back, someone is standing next to my tent. A man. At first I think he is trying to steal it, and I put down my sticks and wait in the bushes, heart pounding, too afraid to move. Then I see the car, the emblem on the side, and I realise that he is a ranger.

‘Hey.' My voice sounds small and irresolute.

He looks up, straightens. ‘Sorry. You're not allowed to camp here. Campsite's over there.'

He is not unkind. Tall. Younger than I had thought. He waits until I reach him.

‘Campsite's over there,' he repeats, gesturing with his head.

‘I know,' I say, following his look. Flashes of bright nylon through the trees. ‘There's other people there.'