Walking to the Moon (2 page)

How one day last year I lay down and couldn't get up.

I
am in bed this time for four days. My temperature rises and my glands swell, and my body is reconfigured into planes of sensation. Discomfort, Viv calls it, and perhaps she is right; it is not comfortable. But it is peaceful in its way. I lie on my side and my breath comes out in small moans. It is easier than silence. Each breath is made of air and water and warmth, and I send them out like tiny rafts, carrying away the excess.

The nursing home is on the city side of the oval in the highest part of the suburb. It was first opened as a hospice for dying Victorians, the ‘home for the incurables', then, after the foundations gave way, rebuilt in the forties of blond brick with darker bricks around the windows, and curved nautical corners. The place still sits on its original grounds, as Viv likes to say, though really it's just a garden, with a couple of birches and an elm that seems to be sickening and a few spindly azaleas Viv tends without much success.

‘Soil's fucked,' says Steff, whose dad's a market gardener and knows about acid. Most of the garden is taken up by a pine the height of a small office block that clogs the ground with slippery impermeable needles and blocks the sun from about three o'clock.

It is a private nursing home, slightly worn, but well built. I like it. I like its bland colours, its thick plaster, its steadfastness. I like the unassuming brass plaque by the front entrance, announcing its official opening in 1947. I like it because it feels familiar. I feel as if I have been here before.

Viv has been here for a long time. Some doctors (my husband included) mistrust her because she encourages ‘complementary' approaches such as acupuncture. Not that you would think it to meet her. She wears high, bright sandals and dark eye makeup and pulls her eternally russet hair back each day in a perfect French roll. Tina calls her the madam, though not to her face.

Tina also insists that Viv is a medium. Once a month, she says, Viv holds a séance at her house in the next suburb, and sometimes even invites the relatives of people who have died at the nursing home. She doesn't charge, says Tina, who maintains that Viv has told her all this herself. Tina says she has also heard (not from Viv) that the person she is really looking for is her son, who walked out of their home one morning twenty years ago, when he was seventeen, and never came back. Tina drops her voice as she repeats this although the only other people in the room are Steff and me, and I am pretending not to listen. Steff makes a harrumphing sound. But Tina is adamant. Viv has never been able to contact him, she says, and his body has never turned up, so she still hopes he might be alive. Maybe, she adds with a shrug, he just didn't want to come home. Steff says nothing, but her wide face becomes still and set.

Either way, there are movement and meditation classes advertised on the notice board and tai chi in the mornings, along with weekly sessions of art and music therapy, none of which I attend. I am here because Viv is an old school friend of Hil's, and because she knew my mother.

‘Bloody sanitarium,' says Steff.

A week or so after I woke up I took the curved stairway, step by shuffling step, downstairs to the library. There is a lift for wheelchairs in the new wing at the back of the building, but the rest of us are encouraged to walk, when we can. ‘Healthy body, healthy mind,' says Viv. ‘I make no apologies for being old-fashioned.'

‘She makes no apologies for anything,' says Steff.

It is a small room, with a fluorescent strip light and no windows. It may once have been part of the dining room next door. The light shows up the cracks in the upper reaches of the paintwork and the peeled back covers of books. Beneath the room's surface is the weary, comforting smell of old paper. The lower shelves are filled mainly with magazines and games:
Women's Weekly
, Ludo, a chess set with no knights. Above them in rows and stacks are Dick Francis, Colleen McCullough, H. E. Bates, Shere Hite: a muddle of books, linked only by their inscriptions: To Dad, get well soon, love mum and the kids; To my darling Aggie, be brave, 1951. Higher up are what Viv calls the more intellectual books: a bible, a Roget's Thesaurus, a medical dictionary without a cover.

You only have to be unconscious for six hours and they call it a severe brain injury. If you don't wake up in two weeks it's a prolonged coma. And after that they start thinking about moving you out of the hospital into rehab, or somewhere like here. ‘Three weeks you were out,' said Tina, ‘then they brought you here and you woke up, just like that, on Boxing Day.' There is a wooden stool behind the library door with steps that can be folded away underneath. By the time I had dragged it, climbed, balanced and reached above me for the dictionary, my arms were shaking and I was cold again inside. I lowered myself carefully and perched on the stool, shuddering, until my body came back into focus. ‘You're one of the lucky ones,' said Tina. ‘You'll be ready to go home soon. Back to your real life.'

I sleep, I wake, barely touching the sediment before pushing off again lightly with my foot.

‘Overdid it a bit, eh Jess?' Hil is sitting on the chair beside me when I open my eyes, legs stretched out in front of her. I raise my eyebrows a little and shrug. ‘Sleep,' she says. And I do.

The next day, though, my body will not let me be. My skin is hot and taut and cold, and every position is not right. Curled on either side, my hips grind into the mattress and the sheets rub my skin.

On my back, even with the blankets pulled tight around my neck, my belly and chest are adrift, washed by icy spasms. The doctor comes again, and pushes my tongue down with a wooden spatula. ‘Say aah.' My tonsils are up. He says I probably got a chill on my walk. Nothing too serious. But he gives me antibiotics and something for the fever.

Viv pops in on her daily tour. ‘Just poking my nose in. Really darling, you'll never get well if you keep gallivanting off into the hills. Whatever were you thinking?'

*

Every day at about eleven a flock of pigeons enters the sky outside my window. I never notice them arrive, I just look and they are there, an eddy of birds circling my hill. I never see them go, either, or think about them, until it is mid-morning again and they are back.

‘A
nna Greene is dropping in to see you this morning,' says Tina. She releases the blind too quickly, so that the string spins around the top and she has to take off her shoes and climb on the end of my bed to unwind it.

‘Who's Anna Greene?'

‘You'll like her. She's meant to be very good.'

I don't like her: she is perfect. Pale hair cropped around her face in soft tufts; cotton drawstring pants in a neutral, unbleached colour. Biscuit or taupe or whatever they call it where she does her shopping. Hil would call it beige. A loose, white, short-sleeved shirt. Deep blue beads around her neck. She pulls up a chair uninvited and sits at the foot of my bed, one leg tucked beneath her.

Mid-forties. Fifty. I can't tell. With her flat Italian sandals and her quiet textured voice.

‘Your aunt, Hil, asked me to come and see you. She thought it might be helpful.'

‘Are you another doctor?'

‘I'm a therapist. But I also work with the body.'

‘Hil didn't tell me she'd spoken to you.' As soon as I say it I wish I hadn't. I don't want this Anna Greene to know.

She has very blue, very pale eyes, and whenever I glance at her she is looking straight at me.

‘It must be strange being here with most of the others so much older.'

‘I don't mind. I'm not really up to talking much.'

‘The matron, Viv, says you came here from the hospital.'

‘That's right.'

‘Do you remember much about the hospital?'

‘No.'

‘You were very sick.'

I turn my head towards the window, through which the pigeons, fewer than usual, are spiralling beneath low, buckled clouds. ‘I don't remember.'

‘How are you feeling? How have you been going recently?'

It is hard not to look at her. She has pulled one knee up to her chest and wrapped the other around it so that she is almost curled in the chair. She is like a big, blonde cat, loose-limbed and satisfied.

‘Okay. Pretty tired still.'

She nods and says nothing. I look back out through the window towards the birds, but they are gone. Just like that. And after a while the fact of her sitting there, watching me, is too much.

‘These birds come every day at the same time,' I say at last, still looking out the window. ‘And then they go.'

‘What sort of birds?'

‘Pigeons.'

‘Someone probably owns them,' she says. ‘They probably let them out for exercise.'

I hadn't thought of that. And now I am upset. She has taken away the mystery; she has put my birds in a context, so that they are not even my birds any more. They are someone else's. They come from somewhere and go back there, to cages. They haven't even chosen the spot in which they fly. I stare at the ceiling. For a moment I think I am going to cry.

‘That's just a guess,' she says, trying to keep her voice neutral.

She has realised her mistake. ‘I don't know where the birds come from. Do you suppose they could be wild?'

‘No.'

She is silent again, everything off to a bad start. Her predicament gives me a sudden little jab of satisfaction.

Illness pares you away: manners, appetite, ego, past.

Shell, membrane, albumen. Until all that remains is the smooth gold yolk.

‘Is it all right if I sit here?' says Anna Greene.

I glance back towards her, shrug. ‘Suit yourself.'

‘Yes, I will.' She pauses. ‘But what do you want?'

‘I just want to get out of here.'

She nods, and waits, and when I don't speak, she says, ‘I could help you if you'd like.'

I shrug again, but I don't look away.

‘The only thing is, if that's what you want, you will have to let me know.' After a while, when I don't speak, she says. ‘Or perhaps you don't know what it is that you want.'

‘Yes,' I say at last. ‘I don't know.'

‘So maybe we'll talk a little more now.'

‘Are you a psychiatrist?'

‘My background is in psychology, but these days I work also with the body—sometimes with exercises, sometimes with touch. I run an exercise class,' she says. ‘Downstairs in the rec room, every Tuesday at eleven. It's nothing strenuous. More a way of getting back into your body. Helping you find your body again. You might like to come and try it out. People find it very beneficial.'

‘I might do that,' I say, and nod, careful. Might. Might not.

‘What about you?' she says. ‘Can you tell me a bit about what you are doing here?'

‘There's not much to tell. I just got sick one day.'

‘Sick how?'

‘Headache. I had a headache, and I was feeling nauseous and dizzy.'

‘What happened then?'

‘Then I lay down.'

‘Do you remember anything about the coma?'

‘No. I was unconscious.'

‘Some people do have memories. At least images. Impressions.

I know one woman who thought she was climbing the tree that had been in her back yard when she was a child. She was unconscious for two weeks. She could describe every twig, the bark on every branch.'

‘What happened when she got to the top?'

‘She wasn't trying to get to the top. She climbed as far as the tree house where she used to hide when she'd had enough. And she stayed there until she felt ready to come down.'

‘Well I don't remember a thing. It was an infection; a bacterial infection. Ask the doctors. Ask Hil. I'm sure you already have.'

Memory. Anti-memory. I remember waking. That is all. I woke into the dark, and I thought I was dead.

‘The doctors think you might have had a form of meningitis, but they're not sure.'