Walking to the Moon (19 page)

Hil shrugged. ‘What do you want me to say, mate?'

Either way, sitting with my eyes closed in the psychiatrist's room in Potts Point I could recall with an unexpected, almost physical clarity the movement of my body along the narrow green passage and the point at which it altered suddenly and I stopped. In my urgency I had formed no sense of anything beyond the path, of the tall gum trees to my left or the sandstone escarpment rising to my right. Now as I stood I saw two things. I was in a small clearing, or at least a wider section of path. To my right, opening into the rock a little above me, was the mouth of a cave, a dark slab of air. To my left, where there had been trees and shrubs, there was nothing.

In the pulsing silence around me, I could hear only the cicadas and the shuddering of my own breath. I could no longer hear my parents or tell if they were still arguing. I was on the edge of a great cliff. It stretched away in either direction in ribbons of yellow and brown. Far below, further than I could imagine, was green. Had I not stopped when I did I would have gone straight over into nothingness. In the lee of this knowledge, and the great fright that now rumbled through my body, the small strip of sandy soil that separated me from that nothingness seemed to list and tilt in the heat, now wider, now narrower and shrinking. I had the powerful sense that at any moment I would pitch headlong into the abyss, that this time my parents would be unable to save me; and I saw again my mother's dark hair in the water. It was then that my legs buckled beneath me.

For a while I lay there with my cheek pressed hard against the yellow dirt until the rocking subsided and then, without looking back, I crawled on my arms, dragging my heavy blank legs, and pulled myself in this manner up towards the opening of the cave. Inside, the space was wide with a sandy floor and a low roof that sloped down to create a small dim chamber at the rear. I hauled myself as far in as I could, until I had wedged myself safely into the crack. And there I lay and waited for my mother to find me.

When I awoke it was black.

It is not strictly true to say, as people do, that someone wakes from a trance. I did not feel that I was waking, I felt simply that my attention, which had wandered, under the psychiatrist's guidance, into a richly hued daydream, had now returned, leaving me a little startled. As if a wave I had been surfing had dumped me unexpectedly on the beach. I felt oddly bereft, and it was about now that I was briefly consumed by the intense alarming sobs. When I had calmed myself, the psychiatrist said that if I would like to return the following week we could explore the day further. But although I nodded, I felt in truth that I did not want to revisit that emptiness. Besides, I already knew what happened next.

When I awoke, it was morning and someone was saying my name. It was a man; he had a beard and shorts and crouched at the mouth of the cave, calling softly, as if too polite to come in. He had in his hand a walkie talkie, into which he spoke, and which he demonstrated for me as we stepped out of the cave and on to the path. I still have in a folder in my bedroom at home a yellowed newspaper clipping bearing the headline ‘Mountain girl lost'. Now, though, as friends and neighbours in Sydney opened their papers to read about my disappearance, we walked, the ranger and I, together along the path, back the way I had run, and the ranger held my hand calmly and firmly.

Some time afterwards, ahead of me on the track, I saw a small group of people and, as I watched, my mother detached herself and started to walk quickly towards me. I recall that she looked to me immensely distant, a small figure dwarfed by trees and sky and that even when she yelped and called my name and I raced and clung to her, I felt a strange sense of dislocation, of slippage, as if during the night, without my knowing it, something had altered. As I walked beside her, retracing our steps along the track towards the car park where we would shortly be met by my father, I held my mother's hand tightly and did not pull away even though with every wordless step the sense of dread was growing. I could not overcome the feeling that I had left something in the cave. That there was less of me now than there had been when I entered; that while I slept some cog or link had come adrift and was now lost, perhaps forever.

It was late afternoon by the time we left the mountains. There had been doctors and television interviews and police. There had been a trip to the hospital and lunch at a tall hotel with red velvet curtains. There had been my mother and father standing in the hotel foyer, his arms wrapped around her. There had been a curly-haired doll with blue glass eyes, and gradually the feeling had dropped away. As we drove back down towards the city, the wind rushed past us and in through the windows in warm gusts that smelled of eucalypt and earth. Stuart strummed the dashboard with his free hand and sang a song, to make me happy, about a man trying to kiss a girl, and when he had finished I laughed and clapped and then my mother began to sing. Her voice was so low and slow that at first it was not like singing.

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

Stuart joined in. ‘In the pines, in the pines,' they sang, ‘where the sun never shines.'

Stuart glanced across at my mother and they took it in turns to sing the parts. He was the man and she was the woman. Back and forth. And always the man was trying to find out things about the woman.

‘In the pines, in the pines,' sang my mother, ‘where the sun never shines.'

When they finished I could not speak. We were all quiet. It was like being on the edge of something. I sat very still and made my breathing soft and tried to hold it all steady, the wind and the hum of the car and my father and my mother.

When we were close to home, my mother began to cry. She pulled herself into a ball in the front seat and rocked from side to side.

‘Sweetheart?' said Stuart and reached across and touched her shoulder with his spare hand.

She cried so much her face was red and slippery. Stuart pulled over and hurried around the car to open her door from the outside.

‘Steady, steady,' he said, crouching down. She said something into his shoulder, muffled. And he stood and came around to open my door. ‘It's okay, Jess, you come with me.'

He held me by the elbow and walked me quickly across the road to a fish and chip shop where he bought me an orange drink and asked to use the phone. When I was back in my seat, my mother turned around and reached back to stroke my cheek. Her face was not quite right. I had never seen her cry.

‘It's all right, darling, Mummy's not feeling very well.'

Perhaps Hil is right. Perhaps we went home after that, my mother and father and I, and I slept. And perhaps the days after that continued uneventfully. But that is not how it feels. To me the two memories, the pool and the cave, remain encased forever in the same smooth skin, and they always end the same way.

Before we got to our house, Stuart drove to Hil's. She was waiting at the gate, expecting us. She opened my door and when I climbed out she gave me a bear hug. Then she held me as I leaned in the car window to kiss my mother goodnight. I slept in her bed. The next day I started school, and when I got home my mother had gone.

V

T
he guy at the outdoor shop tried to talk me out of coming this way.

‘Take your time,' he told me. ‘There's some wicked country out there, some of the best tracks in the world.'

He was thickset, not tall, with short cropped hair that glinted under the store's fluorescent lights and a tattoo encircling his upper arm, Maori-style.

I said I knew and that perhaps I would try one of them next time. He said there might not be a next time, and although he was smiling, he did not seem happy and his voice sounded almost sharp. On my way out, however, he called after me and told me to keep a look out for the hanging swamp. I said I would, and he made a thumbs-up sign. Now, remembering the conversation, I wonder what I am meant to be looking for. I do not know what a hanging swamp is, or where to find it. I decide I must have missed it, and for a moment wonder whether I should turn back, retrace my steps, looking properly this time. Or maybe I have not yet reached it. Or perhaps in this heat the swamp has dried out and died.

My mother left a letter. It didn't say much but I learned it by heart and Hil, who had moved in with us by then, was forced to read it to me last thing at night for weeks until she got fed up and hid it in the linen closet, where I found it many years later.

The letter said my mother would not write again for a while and that I should not wait for letters, but that she would think of me every day. She did not leave an address. As I got older I became convinced that Hil must know her whereabouts, must even be in contact with her, but no matter how much I probed and cajoled, she would only change the subject or deny it, and after a while, realising that if I pushed too hard she would simply walk away, I stopped asking. All I knew from my mother's letter was that she had gone to live in America, and that there were some things that grown-ups could not easily explain to children, but that one day she was sure we would sit down together and talk about everything.

I knew also, although it wasn't in the letter and I don't remember how I found out, that my mother had gone to live with a man, an American she had met at school where she had been studying sociology. In the playground during recess I would mesmerise myself with precise detailed fantasies, from which the American was excluded, in which my mother was there one day waiting when I walked out of school to take me home.

In class, when the teacher told us to draw a picture of our family, I drew my mother in the kitchen floating above the table. While Stuart and Hil and I sat below, poised over dishes of strange, brightly coloured food, she bobbed along beneath the ceiling, her legs trailing behind her like pond weed.

When people asked, I told them she had drowned. I could describe in great detail the lake in the mountains where she died. How my father and I had pulled her out. And after a while I decided to believe it.

Up ahead the road rises and curves, parched and yellow, made of dirt. In my mind the hanging swamp floats above me, anchored over the sandy track like a pontoon of flat-bottomed clouds, moisture saturating the brilliant green mosses, sunlight catching the droplets as they drip and plash from level to level like tiny glinting waterfalls. If I listen I can almost hear them.

It takes me a while to realise my phone is ringing again. At first I can't quite decipher the sound, then I reach behind me with one arm and twist my elbow to reach it. There is a woman's voice, husky and almost familiar. She doesn't introduce herself.

‘Jessica?'

‘Yes.' My voice in my ears is plaintive and over-loud.

‘I just wanted you to have our address, in case you want to come and visit.' The speaker, who I know that I know, but cannot yet place, doesn't pause. ‘You could come any time. There's a spare room—or there's even a flat, downstairs.'

‘I'm sorry—'

‘I don't mean to be pushy. People are always telling me I'm pushy and I don't mean to be. I just thought you might like…It's very beautiful up here. There's a small boat. You could use it whenever you wanted. It used to be Hugh's but he won't be using it for a while.'

The boy's mother. Hugh's mother. Laura.

‘He might not be using it at all. You probably think I'm mad—' ‘I don't think you're mad. I just—I don't think you're mad. I'm not sure what my plans are—how's he going?' I add quickly before she can speak again.

‘Well of course the doctors are calling it miraculous, at least his GP in town did—Dr Orzasky seemed to think it was all in a day's work, but he has to say that really, doesn't he? Americans. Don't you find Americans very brash? Yes, I thought he was a bit brash, but he helped things along I suppose. No more than you did though, in my opinion.'

‘Oh, well I didn't do anything—' I want to tell her that he is not American, he is Canadian, but Laura tumbles on.

‘Of course you did. You did! Or at least you helped me. And now it looks as if he's going to be all right. Well nearly all right.' She slows at last. ‘Of course we don't know if he'll sing again.' I hear her breathe in slowly. ‘He says he doesn't want to sing.' There is a pause. ‘Anyway,' she resumes, ‘we got home last night, and I thought of you.'

‘Laura, did you ring before?'

‘Yes, I might have done. I heard you'd left, and I wanted to contact you before, you know…well, anyway.'

‘Laura?'

But she has gone.

In the newly gathering silence I pull the pack into a small patch of shade and sit in the dirt on the side of the road, still holding the phone. The conversation with Laura has depleted the charge. Only two notches left. I should turn it off, preserve the power. I finger the button on top of the phone, but in the end I don't press it. I put the phone back into the backpack, and pull myself up to start walking. I leave the phone on just in case. I leave it on in case Anna rings.