Walking to the Moon (3 page)

‘Right. Thank-you.' After a while I add, ‘You can always tell the coma patients. They've all got the same scar.' And I touch my throat lightly, at the base, where they put the breathing tube in when I was unconscious.

‘Tracheotomy.' She nods and smiles slightly.

‘Yes, it's our badge of honour. We're always checking out everyone's necks around here. One woman downstairs has had hers for nearly twenty years, and you can still see it.'

‘Does that worry you?'

‘The scar? No. I like it.'

‘You like it. What is it that you like about it?'

‘I don't know. Not what you think. It keeps me company.'

‘What do you think I think?'

‘I don't know. You know. Let's talk about something else.

I'm tired.'

‘What do you want to talk about?'

‘Nothing.'

*

I woke from nothing into nothing. Nameless. I opened my eyes and closed them. Open. Closed. Nothing. But the words stayed in my body. Close. Open. And after a while the flickering darkness rearranged itself into slabs and passages, and I felt that I was in a small stone chamber which was an anteroom to a far greater chamber, and that in that other room was life, or death. I could not tell which. It was quite matter of fact. I had to decide whether to go there. There was nothing mystical or even mysterious about it. It was familiar. Like brushing up against someone you've sat next to all your life, and never noticed.

It was only when I tried to move that I panicked. I felt cables from my throat, my wrist, between my legs. The world slipped and the separation was so vast I had to drag my spreading self into a pinprick of focus to find me again. I traced my outline from the inside. Starting at the right thumb and moving through my body I pushed myself into each digit, each limb, the small of my back, the space between my eyes. Fighting my way back to that fragile, glistening strand. I am the smallest, most delicate of spiders caught in the suck of the wind and below me my web hangs geometric and precise. I woke into blackness. No bedside lamp or radio or voice or shaky cigarette. I woke into blackness. Without.

The next time I came awake, it was day, caramel light, a voice nearby. I'm still not sure whose, a woman's though. I heard the voice and I thought about opening my eyes, and I didn't. All that day, and the next.

On the third day, the specialist from the hospital arrived on his weekly rounds, while I was sleeping, and woke me by sticking a needle in my foot. I think I swore.

‘That's more like it,' he said.

And then someone, Steff it might have been, said, ‘Well, she's taken her time.'

I kept my eyes shut, heart crowding my chest. The doctor tried a few more needles, one in my other foot, a couple in my arms, testing for responses. I lay very still, trying to slow my breathing. Then he said, ‘Just a moment, I'll try something else,' and the next thing I felt his fingers at my eye, smelled the disinfectant soap on him, and then I was looking straight into my own face. Just a moment. The reflected blue rim of the eye, the sloping lid pulled back by his fingers, and then I rolled my pupils back up into the darkness of my head and waited until he stopped. I heard him writing something on paper, packing his things into his bag—notes, needle, mirror—clicking it shut, crossing the room to the door.

‘You can tell her family she's awake,' he said on his way out.

I
am the youngest of the patients here, though Viv calls us residents. In the room next to mine is Irena. Mrs Ivanovich. Irena fell off a horse five years ago, having a riding lesson with her daughter. Now she lies propped in her bed smiling kindly at everyone who passes. ‘Hello Mrs Ivanovich, how are you today?' says Steff in her hearty voice.

‘Not too bad thank-you Stephanie. Not too bad. Yourself?'

Her husband visits on Saturdays and sometimes brings the kids, though less often now that they're getting older. ‘It's too hard for them,' says Tina. Especially the eldest, a girl of around thirteen. Sometimes I see them from my window as they get out of the car. All in their nice clothes, the girl's shoulders hunched forwards, head down, chewing on a strand of long dark hair. Mr Ivanovich leaves his jacket folded in the car and checks himself quickly in the side window, then puts his arm around the girl's shoulders and propels her gently up the path while the boy runs ahead with the flowers.

The boy gets up first, taking the stairs in twos, then pauses for a moment outside her door, slowing his breath before going in. ‘Hello Mama.' I hear them from my room. ‘Hello my love. Give me a kiss. Careful where you sit.' He can't sit though; only for those moments before the others arrive. Then he's moving around the room, picking up trays, pressing buttons, pulling the curtain around her bed back and forth along its rail, until his dad snaps at him and Irena remonstrates softly. ‘It's all right Sergei, let him go.' The boy spends the rest of the time in the garden. He has a special place at the bottom of the pine tree. He pulls his knees up and wraps his arms around them and waits.

Tina says it's best if the kids don't come, even the boy. ‘It just upsets her. Puts her out for a couple of days.'

Normally the door to her room is open when I pass. ‘Hello Irena.'

‘Hello darlink.' She speaks softly as if her voice is full of air. ‘You are walking good now, Jess. Good gel.' The huge dark eyes of a calf. When she is excited she wobbles her head from side to side on her pillow. That is all she can move. When her husband leaves at the end of his visit, she asks him to draw the curtains around her bed and they stay pulled shut for the rest of the day. Sunday too. If anyone tries to talk to her she closes her eyes, squeezes them shut until they go away.

Many of the people here are stroke patients. Strokes. ‘Stroke in room four', or ‘room thirteen stroke', or sometimes it's just a number. ‘Bedpan in eight', ‘visitor for two'. At the other end of the corridor there's an overdose, and downstairs a couple of car accidents. Prangs, Steff calls them. A few doors down from Irena there's a drowning, or near enough. A middle-aged man who once ran a sporting goods store. He left his Randwick home one afternoon, told his wife he was going to buy cigarettes and washed up a couple of hours later at Bondi. ‘Tried to top himself, I bet,' says Tina. ‘Insurance.' You never see his wife, or his kids. Just his mother, who comes on Wednesdays. She is very distinguished, grey hair pulled up in a loose, elegant bun, and trouser suits made of fine wool or linen. She sits by his bed until hours are over, stroking his face with the backs of her fingers. Sometimes she takes a pair of folding scissors from her handbag and cuts his hair.

Once after she had gone I thought I heard him call out, a thick bellowing. When I looked in, though, he was lying on his back, quite still, just his hands on his chest moving vaguely. Like kelp.

I call him the swimmer.

One evening, as I pass Irena's door on my way to bed, she calls to me. ‘Here darlink, here Jess.'

‘Over here, close now,' she urges as I stand in the doorway, clicking her tongue until I reach her bedside. ‘Good gel. Now, you are small. You lie next me.'

‘Um. I don't think I'll fit Irena. Would you like me to get Tina?' My voice trails off. ‘Or someone?' She rolls her eyes at my confusion, and rocks her head. ‘Quick. Quick. You fit. Only take moment.'

Eventually I sit beside her and begin to lower myself on to my side, facing her.

‘No. No. Not look at me, silly gel. Look up. Up.'

There is a galaxy on the ceiling. Stars, planets, fluorescent constellations, a crescent moon. Close like this she smells of biscuits or rice. Warm grain. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

‘See Jess,' she says. ‘My husbant is make me a sky.'

On Mondays and Fridays, Hil catches the train from Central, then walks the twenty-five minutes from the station to the nursing home. ‘Hey Jess.' She has never learned to drive and doesn't intend to. ‘What's wrong with legs?'

What was wrong with the industrial revolution, I complain, and she shrugs. ‘I use what I need, Jess, no point needing more.' She won't use a computer either, although she always carries a mobile phone. Four nights a week, she rings me from the Dump, the youth centre she runs for the church out of the old hall around the corner from her place. She has been doing it ever since I remember.

When I was sixteen I moved into her house in Bondi while I did my HSC. Every morning at six-thirty she would wake me and we would pull on shorts or tracksuit pants and T-shirts and set off along the path cut into the sandstone cliffs between Bondi and Bronte. There the city lost its grip. The land pushed through and the suburbs stretching inland were just a thin skin waiting to be peeled back. At that hour everything had purpose. Dogs on leads dragging their owners. Fishermen pushing bits of squid on to hooks. Couples pacing each other through the apricot light. Hil and I would walk without talking, pushing hard against the inclines, almost running the down-slopes. Hil striding ahead on the thick muscles of her thighs. Me, grumbling at first, hacking away the tightness of the night's cigarettes, feeling the sweat begin to prickle my armpits, the slight nausea. And then release; the body loosening, gliding slip-easy into its own rhythm and the breeze at my face and light leaping from the sea. My warm breath and the day.

*

When I was younger, I used to love taking friends to visit her. Her walls were covered with things to look at: posters in foreign languages, wall hangings from Timor, a copper calendar from Nepal. My room, the room where I used to sleep, looked on to the pathway that runs along the side of the house. The wooden fence separating her place from the one next door was long gone beneath layers of bougainvillea and honeysuckle and in the morning, if you stuck your head out, all you could smell was green. The weatherboard in my room was unplastered, painted a pale, pale yellow that I had picked out when I moved in. We did it in an afternoon, and the eggshell blue trim around the windows, and when we were done Hil opened a bottle of sparkling apple juice and we sat on the paint-dotted sheets on the floor and raised our glasses and she said, ‘Well Jess, here's to the present.'

At the youth centre she hands out condoms to kids as young as twelve. The church that owns the hall has forbidden it, but Hil lists them as ‘miscellaneous' in her monthly accounts and everybody pretends she means biscuits. Later, after the Dump closes at ten or eleven, she sets off on foot, feeling her way across vacant blocks, crawling into barricaded squats. In her satchel she carries a phone, food, clean fits. Sometimes she brings news of empty beds in nearby hostels or shelters. Sometimes she holds their bird bodies against her strong one until the ambulance comes. Most often she just chats, passes on messages from absent parents or parole officers, gives details of court appearances, the use of her phone. In the mornings she finds offerings outside the front door of her leaning weatherboard: notes under stones, flowers from other people's gardens.

When she was at school, a teacher told Hil that what she lacked in good looks she made up for in personality. Hil laughs. She says being plain has its advantages. I like the way she looks. Just a face. Hazel eyes, cleft chin, freckles. Hil. When she is old she will be handsome. I am not the only one to see it. Men propose but she always turns them down. She has never had a boyfriend—or a girlfriend as far as I know.

‘I'm not a virgin, Jess, if that's what you're worried about,' she told me once. ‘I'm just not interested.'

‘But what about…I mean you must get…Don't you ever…?'

‘Wank? No. Tried it once but I fell asleep. I'm just not, Jess. That's all there is to it. Better talk about your sex life if we want some excitement.'

But that was a long time ago. I was living then with my friend Emma in a skinny blue terrace in Darlinghurst. She had black hair and red lips and we went to university and waitressed or sold books or clothes, or whatever people wanted us to sell, or cleaned houses (other people's), and then went dancing. We danced a lot and drank a lot and there were men with dirty fingernails at the breakfast table, and once they had gone there was Emma and me curled up in her queen-sized bed with tea and toast with honey, comparing notes or consoling one another.

Sometimes when it all got too much I would pack my bag and take the bus to Bondi, to Hil's and stay there for a night or two where it was peaceful and the sun through the window settled in ragged patches on my single bed. The key was by the back door and she never asked questions. One day I just moved back in.

She is thinner than she looks, Hil, undressed. In the shower the skin of her belly stretches very pale between her wide-set, protruding hip bones. The water runs in ropes between her small round breasts, the pink nipples, across the smoothness of her stomach and into her fine, reddish-brown pubic hair. Her body is a puzzle; the ruddy, freckled face and workman's arms against the smooth, milky torso.