Walking to the Moon (24 page)

I look up and see at first nothing, trees. Then dust rising around the bend up the hill ahead of me, a glint of silver. It is travelling quite slowly, taking up the road, dirty white behind the roo bar. I pull myself to standing. It is going the wrong way, down the mountain, but I want it to see me; I want to be seen. I want to ask how far it is to the end. I step out a little into the road, and raise my hand. The car slows, then stops. There is just the driver, a man. He winds down the window and puts his head out. A straight blokey face, a little weight around the chin and neck. Brown hair, cut short. Mid-forties. Familiar somehow. He says, ‘Hello again.' I suppose I must stare.

‘We passed you on the way out,' he says. ‘I had my wife and the kids in the car. You spoke to my wife.'

The family. He is the father. I am confused. Why is he here? ‘Can you tell me how far it is,' I ask, ‘to the end?'

‘Couple of kilometres. All uphill. Hop in, I'll give you a lift.

Too hot to be walking.'

‘Where are your children?' Uneasy.

‘All up at the picnic ground,' he says, gesturing back the way he's come. ‘Jane, my wife, told me to come and make sure you were all right. Too hot out here.'

He is not that much older than me, but he seems a generation away. A father. He has come to get me. I pick up my pack and he hops out, comes around, opens the back door and puts it on the seat.

‘Must've been getting heavy. Bill,' he says, and puts out a hand, a solid paddle, which I shake.

‘I'm Jessica.'

Bill opens the passenger door for me to climb in. He closes his door, and his window slides up at the touch of a button. The air is cool and conditioned. There is a wider patch of road about one hundred metres down the incline, where he reverses and turns the car, and then we are all uphill, pulling and crunching over small rocks and twigs, potholes, ridges. ‘You're like a knight,' I say. ‘From a book.'

‘That's what they say.'

At the picnic area the mother, Jane, is crouching at the base of a stone wall with the two children. The stones are flat, laid out in slices, and in the cracks are tiny lizards, skinks, which dart in and out of the shadows, gleaming like copper. A toddler and an older girl squat back on their heels like their mother. Jack and Amy. They have twigs in their hands, and now and then they poke carefully into the cracks, hoping to provoke some creature into breaking its cover. Or perhaps just to impale them. ‘Gentle. Be gentle,' their mother keeps saying, although she doesn't tell them to stop. Perhaps she is weighing the risk of injury to the skinks against the benefit of diversion for her children. But crouched beneath her straw hat she seems contented, engaged, and I think, this is what children do, this is what millennia of children have done.

She smiles as I approach, introduces herself, although I already know her name. I say, ‘Thank you for saving me.'

She ducks her head. ‘Too hot, too windy. Bill and I used to bushwalk before—' she gestures to the children. She doesn't ask about my imaginary friend. ‘I didn't like thinking of you alone, and we were coming back this way anyway.' A shrug. ‘There's a stream over there.'

I have already taken off my shoes and socks and now I hobble across the dusty car park in the direction she has pointed.

‘Hang on,' she calls, ‘we'll come.'

The water is shallow, just over the tops of my feet, and so cold that when I touch it with the soles of my feet it feels electric. ‘God that's good,' I say.

‘You bet,' says Jane, sitting on a rock a little further along the bank, pulling off her own shoes.

‘Od ood,' says Jack, regarding me gravely. Amy sits down next to me, proprietorial, and bursts into a peal of exaggerated laughter. ‘He can't even talk properly yet,' she tells me. ‘But you can say my name, can't you? What's my name Jack? What's my name?' Jack looks at her for a while, expressionless, then says ‘mee-mee', before heading suddenly at a run for the water.

‘No you don't,' says Jane, catching him by one arm at the stream's edge. ‘Let me take those shoes off.'

‘He said my name Mum, did you hear him say my name?'

Soon we are all sitting there, dangling, as if we have known each other longer than fifteen minutes. Long enough not to need to talk much. ‘Can you do plaits, Jess?' says Amy. ‘Can you plait my hair?' And without waiting for an answer she wriggles over to sit cross-legged in front of me. I look down at the top of her head, the ragged parting, the white skin beneath, and I have the strange brief sense that a hand has been pushed through my solar plexus up into the cavity of my chest and is clenching now where the heart must be, my heart, so that an ache spreads outwards towards my throat and my stomach and I realise with surprise, Oh, that is grief. This is grief.

Jane says, ‘Where do you live, Jess?'

‘Sydney. Bondi. But I've been away.'

(Where do I live? Where will I live? What am I doing?)

Then I say to myself, one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, and I take a segment of the girl's fine hair and divide it into three.

Jane is beautiful. Narrow-bodied with reddish brown hair in a bob that swings along the line of her jawbone, and tiny white creases leading away from her eyes. I think, that is how I would like to be in ten years. She has a quick, poised concentration, and her arms and legs beneath her sarong are brown and finely muscled. She is crouched now on the edge of the water with the little boy, and while she talks to me she lifts handfuls of tiny river rocks, opens her palm in front of his face like a shell or a flower and lets him knock them, ping ping, back into the water. It has been hard for her, it occurs to me, to learn to be still, to wait and be patient. But she has learned. Her calves support the backs of her thighs as she squats with the boy in the late sun, restful and alert.

I look around for Bill. He is not at the car or the picnic table. ‘He's gone for a walk,' says Jane. ‘There's a walk near here he likes to do. We used to do it together, now we take turns.'

‘I want to go with Daddy,' says Amy suddenly, sitting upright, pulling her head away from me, plaits forgotten. She looks at her mother with an expression passionate and accusing. ‘You said I could go with him.'

‘But you came with us instead, to the water.'

‘I didn't know he was going. I wanted to go with him.' She is wailing now, half risen.

‘You can go with him next time, Amy.'

‘No. Now. I'm going to catch him.' She leaps back on to the bank and starts at a run towards the car park.

‘Amy.' Jane's voice is sharp. ‘Look where you're going. You can't follow Daddy.'

She too has risen and swings Jack towards me by his upper arms, following Amy, like a markswoman, with her eyes. ‘Just a moment.'

She too sets off running. ‘Amy. Stop there!'

She catches up with her on the other side of the car park at the top of the steps leading down to the walking track. I see them standing beneath a tree, a vivid tableau, the girl stamping her foot, trying to break free of the mother who has her by the wrist. When they get back, Amy doesn't speak, she takes herself to a spot further along the creek and sits with her back to us looking in the direction her father has gone. Jane looks at me and rolls her eyes. ‘I'm the witch.'

It is getting towards the end of the day. Bill comes back from his walk. Away from the car he looks younger, freer. His hair is wet as though he has swum or dipped it into a pool. Amy jumps up and runs towards him, calling, and wraps her arms extravagantly around his waist. I see now that he is attractive, pretending to stagger backwards under the impact of her embrace, lifting her, sack-like, to his shoulders (‘Daddy, Daddy,' she chants), grinning at Jane, who raises her eyebrows and smiles back at him quizzically. I wonder if they still have sex. The toddler, Jack, drops backwards on his bottom and starts to cry.

‘Tired,' says Jane, bending to lift him.

They are staying a few kilometres away with Jane's sister. Can they drop me somewhere? Where am I staying? I don't know. There is a motel nearby, I know, and I murmur something about a phone, if they could just drop me at a phone, I can walk from there, or get a taxi. But I am thinking, it must be near to here. I am nearly at the place where we came that day. My foot feels possible again, shrunk to a manageable discomfort.

‘You just calling the motel?' says Bill, reaching into his pocket.

‘Here, use the mobile.'

But I say, no, it may be a longer call. And after a moment, because it is true, I say, ‘I'm going to call my husband.'

Jane looks at me with her clear grey eyes and nods. Bill, perhaps at some instruction, jogs on ahead to the car, Amy still slung squealing around his neck. Jane walks beside me, holding Jack, whose head is drooping now on to her shoulder.

‘When we lost our first son,' she says, ‘I thought I would never have another child. I thought I could not bear it, to love like that again. But I did, you see.'

I thank her. I don't tell her that is not what happened to me.

*

At the last instant, just before we come off the dirt road, I lean forwards and ask Bill to stop the car. ‘I can walk from here.'

‘You sure? We're nearly there.' He slows and pulls to the side of the road, swivels towards me.

‘Yep. Thanks.'

I nod at Jane, who has turned too and is looking at me, eyes slightly narrowed in inquiry. ‘I need the exercise,' I say, and we all laugh, tension broken, and I open the door and climb out.

Jack has started to cry again. Jane reaches behind, fishes with an arm around his seat. Bill comes across and opens the boot, pulls out my pack and leans it against the side of the car for me. He says, ‘Good luck,' and puts out his hand, which I shake again. He doesn't quite meet my eye, and I think: he is afraid of women who need saving; that is why he married Jane. I say, ‘No, I'm fine,' and Jane opens the door, climbs out. I think at first she too is going to shake my hand. She stands in front of me for a moment, then steps quickly into a hug. I feel her shoulder blade and stroke her T-shirt, once, twice, over the bone, before she steps back. Jack is hiccoughing now with distress or frustration, and she turns, ducks smoothly back into her seat to pass a litre bottle of water out to me through the window. In the back, Amy reaches across the crying child and winds down the window a couple of inches.

‘Bye-bye Jess, goodbye.' As if suddenly, again, we are family. I blow her a kiss as the car draws away. Stand for a moment on the side of the road, feeling—what?—uncertain, un-something.

I am on the highway before I know it. A truck sputters past, a blurred line of sound and scattered twigs. I step back. I can't have been walking more than ten minutes. Fifteen, tops. Ridiculous. For a moment I think about heading back the way I have come, charging back towards the line of gums, but there's no point really. I am here, on the road, not in the wilds. I am on the main highway and metres away I now notice, on the other side of the road, is a line of shops, a bakery, the corner pub. I am in a town.

W
hen the road is clear I cross, the bitumen flat and unyielding, a small line of pain in my hip. If that cafe is open, I will have a coffee. Sit down, read a magazine, think about what to do next. The sign in the glass door says welcome, a cuckoo clock in one window. But as I am about to enter, the door opens from inside and a couple, man and wife, come out. The man reaches back to turn the sign to closed and locks the door from outside. The woman catches my eye, shrugs. She might be about to say something but she sees someone beyond me, smiles across me, waves. They set off in a group, the cafe couple, the waved-to woman, a large boy of sixteen or so, shoulders huge in his padded jacket, walking together up the highway, leaving me feeling small, unkind. The woman from the cafe has a knitted woollen beret, plum-coloured, that looks like a tea cosy. I am flooded suddenly with distaste. The thought of living like this, of choosing that hat, of displaying that clock. The boy with his great round bulk bringing up the rear of the group. The gap between us stretching and chilling and the whoosh of cars passing me from behind, heading home from the city.

I turn and start to walk away from them, back down the mountain. There must be somewhere else. About fifty metres on there is a road to the left, which leads, I realise, to the shopping centre and the station. I pass a real estate agent, a bookshop; glance in the window of a bric-a-brac store with small knitted animals in the window. I am almost past it before I realise there are tables and chairs in there, and people sitting. Inside, it is gloomy, the lights not yet on, and I have to pick my way over to the counter to make out the menu on the blackboard above it. I order a latte from a man with a long sad moustache, and the remaining slice of cake. Carrot or banana with thick damp icing which I will remove.

There is only one group in the café, and turning back into the room I see now that they are Aboriginal, or most of them are Aboriginal. They have pulled two or three small tables together and are sitting in a cluster laughing quite loudly at something one of them has said. There are a couple of white people to one end—two boys, dreadlocked and nose-ringed, one with his hair tied above his head in a spray—and another, a woman, in the middle of the group, sitting with her back to me. I know her. I know her broad back, and her long dark hair (loose now) and her voice, which is throaty with laughter. I am about to look away when she turns and stares straight at me. Steff. Her eyes rest on me for a moment, almost absently, then she turns with a fluid motion back towards the group.