Walking to the Moon (25 page)

The sun is dropping outside as I leave, and a small cold wind is leaking into the street from the direction of the highway. Overhead the cloud is clumping together. Looking beyond me along the rail track, I see that it has settled already into a low flat ceiling that darkens and gathers intensity with distance. At the far edge it is purple. It has happened without my noticing, and only now, with the warmth and light beginning to drain, do I let myself know that I must make a decision. I bend and pull my map from the side of my pack. I think I know where the path is, and once there I think I know how to get to the place. I don't know how I know, or where I get the unfamiliar sense of certainty. I have been here only once before. But I know where I am going. I will need a lift to the start of the walking tracks, which these days begin, the map shows me, from a large car park. And then perhaps half an hour to walk to the place. It needn't take long. I could be there and back before dark. If I wanted. I could be there tonight.

Further along the street is the station where there will be a phone and probably a taxi rank. The cab could drop me at the car park at the start of the walk. I know that the weather is against me, and the light. I know I could stay in the pub, or a hostel, or a hotel. I have MasterCard. I have Visa. In my pack I have a litre of water, a packet of Continental chicken soup, half a loaf of bread and a banana; I could stay the night in the bush. If I find it, if I found the place, I could stay the night. I wouldn't even need the tent. It wouldn't matter. Even if I didn't find it, it would be all right.

There is a payphone next to the empty taxi rank outside the station and I shrug off the pack, reach into the side pocket and pull out my change: one twenty, one fifty cent piece. Hil doesn't answer so I leave a message on her mobile. I tell her where I am and not to worry. When I finish, a cab is sitting in the rank. A train draws in below in the cutting, and I hurry now to reach the taxi before someone else takes it. The driver has the door open, his feet on the road, smoking a cigarette. He stubs it out when he sees me coming, grinds it, swings his body heavily back inside.

‘You'll be after the resort?' he says, unsmiling, looking me up and down through the window. My dirty shorts. My backpack. He has a thick neck with reddish brown folds, and a head of grey stubble. It takes me a moment to realise he is joking, that this is his idea of a joke. I say, no I want to go to where the walks start. He shrugs; says hop in then.

‘Which walk?' After we have been driving a few minutes.

‘The one from the car park, the path along the top.'

‘Which car park?'

I realise that he isn't going to help me, that I have to do this alone.

‘Just take me to the closest one.' If it is not this car park, he can take me to the next. Or the next. I say nothing. He shrugs. Turns the radio on. Tiny splatters of rain start to fall on the windscreen. And a minute later we are there, entering down a one-way road that leads to a bitumen parking area, empty now of cars. The fare is $4.50 and I give him five, knowing that he will not give me change without me asking, and knowing that I will not ask. Except that when it comes to it I find myself sitting in the back waiting, with my hand held out, until he passes fifty cents back to me without turning. I am afflicted almost immediately by doubt. This petty power play. And him not rich, probably poor. I try to give it back, as if I had never intended him to return it, muttering, ‘No, no, it's okay.'

But he ignores me, setting his back against me, and after a moment I clamber out and pull the pack behind me. Threads of thin bad feeling. He starts to draw away the instant the door is closed and I find myself suddenly thumping on the car's boot, once, twice, with the palm of my hand. He stops. I walk around the back of the car to his window. He looks at me, impassive. I hold his gaze.

I hear my voice, very clear and earnest, as if this is information that he too has been seeking. ‘I came here with my mother when I was a child.'

I say it twice. Nodding my head and looking at him. And after a moment he too dips his head, once, twice. And draws away, this time more slowly.

When he has gone, when I can no longer see his car, I squat and pull my rain jacket from my pack. It is spitting only lightly and the weather may yet move off, I tell myself, although I can feel the chill rising from the valley below. It is about half a kilometre back to where the walks start, and there is a large sign with a map showing the various tracks laid out in dots and dashes, blue and red and brown. The map shows a set of stairs you can follow, doubling back and forth upon itself, clinging to the cliff face, right to the bottom of the escarpment. From there, other walks follow the base of the cliff, or strike west into the valley a kilometre below. Down there is wilderness.

There is another track, about half way down, that looks to have been gouged into the cliff face, impossibly high and narrow, a ledge made for birds, not people. There are shorter walks too, up the top. One to a waterfall, another that travels for a while beneath the overhanging sandstone lip of the escarpment. That sounds right. But the more I look at the map, the less certain I become. The less sure even that I am at the right place. I feel in my body the tight coil of anxiety. Who will tell me? Who will show me the way? I stop looking. I decide to follow my nose.

Up here the steps are wide and broad, packed with earth, held with railway sleepers. I take them one at a time, giant steps. None of it is familiar. Except the earth, slightly moist now and exuding a tired, end of day, dog smell. A small path opens off to the right. I stop, undecided. It is the right direction, I am sure, but narrow and overgrown. I take a few paces along, then a few more and end up following it a couple of hundred metres before the way is blocked by an upturned tree trunk. But even before the tree I know it is not right. I push my way back between clumps of damp grass and continue down the steps until the next pathway. I turn on to it before I even give myself time to think, and enter suddenly into a cool vast knowledge. I do not think it. It is just there.

For so much of my life I have not known where I was going— not let myself know where I was going—and here now, in this moment, my certainty is unavoidable. The doubt is a decoy. The map, the checking for signs; all of it is decorative, a distraction. The taxi driver, too, the drama over the change. Even the walk up the mountain. I know where I am going. I have known since I left the nursing home. Since before then; since waking up from the coma. Even, the thought striking itself like a black flame, the coma. Now shrunk. Irrelevant. I no longer look at the vegetation around me or check for reference points. I do not care any more where I am going. I just know that I am going there. I am powered by a great silence in the back of my skull. I know where I am going. And suddenly, as quickly as it came, the feeling is gone. Not a feeling: a knowledge, a place, an opening in my mind through which I have seen, for a moment, clearly.

I am standing in front of a deep rocky overhang. A cave. It is where I came before she went away. It is raining. Now that I am here, there seems nothing extraordinary about the place, or even the fact of my arrival. It is close to dark, and I could not honestly say that it looks the same as it did back then, that I would recognise it in a photo, or even identify the ways in which it has changed; though the trees must surely be higher. The escarpment is not apparent in the rain and the mist; I just know that it is there. And this knowledge may not even be knowing, it may simply be a decision. It doesn't matter. I am here.

VI

I
step in under cover, shrug off first my backpack, then my rain jacket. Then I sit under the rock overhang, watching the rain as it slides off down the valley away from me. I think, ‘I am sheltering from the rain.' It is big in here. Not quite a cave but a deep wedge, high enough, even this far in, for a person to stand. For people to stand.

I think again of Steff, standing with her back against my door the day before I left. Her low tight voice.

‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.'

I didn't say anything, my stomach tightened. I sat on my bed and waited. I knew that whatever she was going to say would not surprise me. The room shrank around her and she shook it slowly with her head.

‘It's fucking disgusting. That's what I think. There's people spend their whole lives trying to find their kids, you know that? Kids who spend their whole lives trying to find mothers, fathers, aunties, anyone. You wouldn't have a clue, would you?'

She took a step away from the door, into the room. Practically hissed the next bit. ‘Think you'll go walkabout do you? Try and find yourself?'

I raised my hand to my mouth. There was a sound caught in the back of my throat. Steff thrust one hand forward, like a policeman, as if to stop me speaking. I cleared my throat, but I had nothing to say.

‘Well let me tell you sister,' she said at last, ‘you're just buying time, and you're buying it with pain. Other people's pain.' She paused and said at last the thing she had wanted to say. ‘Your little girl's pain.'

The cave is cool and quiet, protected from the weather. Outside the sky is a dense grey sheet. Steff, with her broad face and dark eyes. Her white skin. White, but not like me. That is what she was telling me: she would never be like me. She crossed the room, passing my bed on the way to the window, knocking a pile of folded clothes to the floor. She didn't stop. Reached the window and opened it wide, as if to let in clean air.

‘Got what you wanted, didn't you? They all feel sorry for you.' She spoke conversationally, turning back into the room. She raised her voice now that she had said what she needed to. ‘Bet you've been wanting people to feel sorry for you your whole life, haven't you?' She looked straight at me, held my gaze. ‘Yeah, you have.' She shook her head. ‘Unbelievable.'

*

There is a darkened patch on the rock ceiling. At first I think it might be damp, a seeping crack, but looking down I see a smudge of charcoal and below it burnt sticks. If I started now I could be at the station in an hour or so. Or I could head back to the main road and find myself a hotel for the night. In the gloom, I squat and pick up a blackened twig, clear a space on the rock floor, draw a heart, a feathered arrow. Love heart. Stupid. I rub it out. On the wall behind me I find scratched initials, a charcoal cock and balls. Primitive rock art. The rock floor is coated with a dry, sandy residue that might one day become soil. There is a broad flat area next to the fireplace. I open my pack and unroll my sleeping mat. Pull out my stove, lamp, matches. No one will pass now; not before morning.

After I have spread the sleeping bag on the thin blue mat, I find a flat rock where I place the stove and half fill the saucepan with water from the rock face outside. I fish out a couple of small pieces of vegetation, leaving a brown sediment in the bottom. I get the packet of soup from the backpack and reach for the matches to light the stove, but in the end I don't.

It is that indeterminate time between dusk and nightfall, when nothing can be done. When it feels that nothing can be done but wait. I pull another jumper from the pack and carry my sleeping bag to the mouth of the cave. Cave. I say it again. Try to make it solid. I am sitting at the mouth of the cave. I am looking out. I pull my knees up to my chest and the rain falls steadily, settling in for the night.

The ants too are seeking shelter. A wavering column. They clamber singly and in pairs up the wet moss outside the cave, in under the rocky overhang, antennae still flattened against their heads. Outside, the water washes down the rock face, parting around the mossy outcrops as if they were eyebrows. They are larger than the ants at the nursing home, these ones. Reddish brown rather than black, but they work with the same purpose, moving impossibly fast for their size, most of them clasping above them one, sometimes two, spherical milky eggs. They thin out as night approaches and disappear, as ants do, almost magically. The file fading, then gone. This is the first rain I remember, heavy rain, since I woke up.

Sitting here now on the edge of a cave in the rain, I am reminded suddenly of that first exercise with Anna, jiggling up and down in the room with the three old women. The feeling of my legs afterwards, heavy and boneless. That is how it feels now. The memory locates itself in my body, so that even as I look down and see my legs clearly outlined before me, I experience them only as a distant formless buzzing. And I see again my mother's dark hair floating in a ring on the water.

I sit for a long time in the gathering dark. At first the feeling is so strong, so convincing, that I believe I cannot walk. I think I will have to wait until someone passes by tomorrow and ask them to call me an ambulance. Then I think that I will be dead before then, that I will not be able to endure being like this: the crawling, swarming pain in my legs and pelvis, the feeling of darkness and badness that wraps itself all around me, my throat and face. The certainty that this is not survivable. I think that I am bad. A bad seed. I think that it is my fault. Eventually I start to notice the thoughts and that I am thinking them, and that behind the thoughts is the feeling, just sitting there, as familiar as day, not doing anything in particular.