Walking to the Moon (8 page)

‘It doesn't need anything,' I said quickly, surprising myself at the force of my voice. I knew, even as I spoke, that I'd given something away, unprepared, that she knew more about me than I had intended.

I waited for her to say something, but she was silent. After a couple of moments, still looking down, I said, ‘It would ask for help.'

When I looked up she nodded slowly.

‘But?' she said.

‘But what?'

‘It would say, help me, but what?'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘Help me, but keep away? Is that what it would say?'

I looked down, then up again into her eyes.

‘Yes. That is what it would say.'

When I lie awake in the early hours of the morning, sometimes, if I can let it, if I don't clench against it, everything starts to move. A rolling, swirling motion. I think of the inside of storm clouds, air and water billowing incessantly, changing shape. If I am relaxed enough, close enough to sleep, I let myself go with it and then I too am just movement, a building up and breaking down, drifting and recompiling. In the moments that I am in it, the sensation is exquisite, a delicate rushing, a dismantling. Occasionally I stay with it and am adrift in bliss. Normally, though, what happens is a sort of vertigo or motion sickness. The self starts to reassert itself, a shadow at the edges, a grey wash that works to separate me from other, to define me. And with this comes constriction, contraction. My body tenses, my mind makes shapes. I hold myself still.

‘Try saying it,' she said.

‘Saying what?'

‘Help me. But keep away.'

‘Now?'

‘That's right. Help me, but keep away. Try it out.'

I looked away, towards the door, outside which I could hear the shuffle-drag of someone moving along the corridor behind a walking frame. It must be nearly time. I glanced back across Anna's shoulders to the small round clock she kept on the shelf above her desk. Nearly. I was self-conscious, my body fidgety, ungainly.

‘Can we leave it until next time?'

‘Now would be better,' she said matter-of-factly. ‘Now is when you have the energy.'

‘Out loud? Does it have to be out loud?'

She smiled, nodded.

‘What am I saying again? What do I have to say?'

‘You could try saying, help me.'

‘And I have to look at you?'

‘Yes.'

Quickly, to get it over with, I said it. ‘Help me.' A small fish flip-flopping on the table.

‘Good. Say it again.'

‘Help me.' A bit louder this time. ‘Help me.' I said it a couple more times. But I gave them to her as if they were not my words, as if someone else had left them here and I was merely passing them on; someone I felt a bit ashamed for, and sad.

She nodded. ‘Now try saying keep away.'

‘Keep away.' I said it instantly. I tried to keep it neutral, even, but it filled my throat, my mouth, voice. We both felt it.

‘Well done,' she said. Then, after a pause, ‘I think there is more force in the second one.'

‘Me too.'

For the first time I smiled. I met her look. She was smiling too.

The map shows the start of the trail marked by a small butterfly shape, which I decide must be a gate. Now that I am through the undergrowth, the other side of my hill ends disconcertingly in the backs of houses, fences of wood marking off houses of brick. I find myself in a cul de sac, a keyhole-shaped street of about ten allotments on each side, ending in a round turning circle, which is where I enter, through a track between houses. The bitumen is shiny black and two of the homes are still under construction. I doubt that I'll find it on the map. But when I look it is here, among the dotted lines marking out other unfinished courts and crescents and an avenue or two. They are big houses, double-storey, with balconies and gables and two-car garages. One or two have bikes leaning up outside, or bright plastic scooters. One has a toddler pool sitting on the yellow lawn, but no water.

As I approach this house, walking along the road, I notice a cattle dog lying on its side in the driveway. I glance at it quickly, then look away, not wanting to aggravate it. I cannot remember whether you are meant to lower your eyes or outstare them. He looks relaxed, but it is hard to tell with heelers; they can be territorial, and bored. As I walk away past the house I can feel the spot on the back of my exposed calf where a dog might bite, where that dog might bite. It is so vivid I can almost feel my right leg throbbing. I am completely absorbed in the sensation, though dimly aware that I should shift my attention, move my mind away, when I hear a small sound behind me and the dog bites. It does not bite hard. The skin is not broken and it does not hurt. It is almost a relief, corresponding so exactly to my expectation.

I stop and turn. The dog is standing a few paces away looking at me more in puzzlement than anything else, alert but not aggressive. We meet eyes for a moment, each implicated. ‘Go on now,' I say quietly, and keep walking without thinking or looking back.

At the end of this street is a slightly larger one, along which I travel for a few metres before turning on to another smaller, keyhole street, which leads me back, as abruptly as I emerged, on to a dirt track and into bushland. I walk on for maybe half a kilometre until the houses disappear, and am about to pull out the map again when I see ahead of me a rusted green metal sign and beyond it, further into the trees, a metal gate.

It is odd to find myself missing it now
,
the nursing home, my small room, Tina, Maud. One night a couple of weeks after I came to, I woke to the smell of cigarette smoke. It was a strange smell, no longer appealing, but an alliance even so. I lay for a while, wondering about the smoker, and then I shuffled to my window and quietly opened it. Through the darkness I could make out a darker shape on the bench outside the kitchen, and a small orange point that flared and subsided with each breath. After a while a voice from below said, ‘Sorry love, am I keeping you awake?' And I said, no, I wasn't much of a sleeper anyway.

‘Join the club,' said the voice. ‘Coming down?'

It took me a while to navigate the stairs, feeling foolish, hoping the voice and the dark shape would not disappear. Maud introduced herself, although we had seen each other around the home already. She walked with a wooden stick, which I had heard Viv trying to persuade her to exchange for an aluminium one with a rubber hand grip and four prongs at the bottom for stability.

‘Too late for that,' Maud had said.

Now we shook hands, hers fleshy and very soft.

‘You look better than you did,' she said, and I nodded and asked her how long she had been there and she said ‘too bloody long' and laughed her big wheezy laugh, and for the first time since arriving, just for a moment, I felt happy. After that we would meet downstairs every now and again; the midnight club, Maud called it, although normally it was later, three or four, and often we did not talk.

When we saw each other in the daytime, she would nod or wink, but that was generally all, although one day she walked across the dining room and hugged me, just like that, with her big bread-maker's arms, and I felt enveloped and shocked and replete.

I stop at the gate and pull out the map again. The trail I intend to follow zig-zags through whorls of crimson contours and across the hospital green of the national park. At the top edge of the map, a few kilometres to the north (in acid yellow) is domesticity: black train line, red highway, cream teas. Here where I am about to go is wilderness. Each existing side by side, almost merging at times, but each unknown, unknowable to the other.

When I look up a bike rider is approaching down the path. He has his head down low and is making a good speed, the back of the bike sliding once as he swerves to avoid something on the road. In his glossy synthetics and plastic pointed helmet, he looks for a moment constructed, electronic, like a remote-control toy. He pulls to a stop in front of me, heat dancing around him, face shiny with sweat. So full of movement, even at a standstill, that he feels to be closer to me than he is, and I step back.

‘Sorry,' he says; he is breathing deeply and evenly, not puffed, simply absorbed, all of him, in the process of motion.

I stand back while he dismounts and hurdles the gate before reaching back to lift the bike across. ‘You walking?' he asks, and when I nod, he says, ‘Take you a while. It's uphill.'

I nod again. There is an opening in the fence a few metres away and I walk around, rather than try to mount the fence, graceless with my pack.

As he rides off, he calls behind him: ‘Not much of a trail. Nothing to see.' But I am not here to see. And so I raise my hand and keep walking. Almost immediately, the town, or the idea of town, drops away.

E
verything is burnt. Up here the trees are black twigs, pushed into the ground by a child, brittle scarecrow arms raised to the sky. Abrupt, irrevocable. A shape passes above me and looking up I see a small hawk, quite low, gliding and looking. There are not many places to hide. The soil must be rich now, dusted still with pale ash, nutrients from the bodies of trees and small animals that lived in the hollows.

The fires were a year ago. I remember vaguely hearing about them in the news, fires in the national park. But there are always fires, one year or another. And the park held no meaning for me then, or the trail that I am now walking. Perhaps these weren't the fires they were talking about. Perhaps those ones were higher up, closer to homes. Perhaps this fire was not even noted or reported on.

The road disappears behind me as I round the first bend, and continues ahead in a shallow, steady incline. As I walk, my hip bones rub through my skin against the strap of the pack. I am losing my plumpness. And for all the years of hoping for this lessening, I now feel less than, unsatisfactory. After about ten minutes I stop and take off my pack, sit down on the edge of the road. For a moment all I can hear is myself, my breath, already pushing a little at my chest, and my heart.

‘Jess, wake up.' It is a whisper, just a whisper, and I cannot tell who is speaking.

I wonder now about the specialist from town. It annoys me, the way he talked about my coma. ‘Your coma,' he said. My coma: as if I were responsible for it, as if it belonged to me, rather than the other way around. As if, too, there were a clear line between what was me and what was it: my coma; as if we were separate.

‘Tell me about your coma,' said the specialist's colleague (he was fiftyish and handsome, with a complacent, boyish face and dry patches at the corners of his mouth where he had forgotten to moisturise); and then, when I continued to stare at him, unresponsive, he tried a different approach. ‘Let me recast the question,' he said. ‘How, when you woke up, did you know that you were awake?' He looked pleased with himself.

‘I was awake because I wasn't asleep,' I said evenly, before Hil arrived and made them leave.

We both knew it was not an answer; I could see him writing on his clipboard as he walked to the door, but what was I supposed to say? A coma has an inside and an outside, and whichever side you find yourself on, even fleetingly, you cannot grasp the other? I was awake because I was on the outside of the coma and I couldn't get back. Even if I'd wanted to. Even though I'd wanted to.

I could hardly tell him that. He would have been delighted.

Besides which, it was only partly true. A better question might have been, what did my coma feel like, or how did I feel about my coma. And even then I could not have told him. It changes all the time. But when I think about my coma now, what comes to me, or what rises in me, or around me, is a feeling that I cannot name, which might be grief or might be joy, or fullness, or emptiness. I can taste it now, pooled in the back of my throat. An exquisite tender ache. Everything else is the casing. Muscle, rock, shell. Everything else is just layers.

That is how I feel about my coma.

Ten-twenty-five and already everything feels wrong: the blackened trees; my legs, pasty where they protrude from the shorts, hairs half-grown and spiky, calves already pink despite the sun block. Thin-skinned, Michael said, a blusher. As a child, an adolescent, the mottled tide rising up my neck, chin, cheeks, prickling my scalp. Even the tiniest of slights. Even a thought. And everyone then able to see for themselves. In winter I prefer high-necked jumpers. And even in summer, even in this heat, I like to be covered. I hide my chest and the base of my throat. My heart settles gradually, and with it my breathing. I open my water bottle and swallow.

You can turn back: I say the words so I can hear them in my head. I can turn back. I can catch a cab back to the station. And from there a train. In two hours I can be home. (But where is home?) I can ring Hil. She will meet me at Central. I can take it from there, make a plan; we can talk it through, think it over, I can sleep on it. Whatever. I squat a little way from the path and watch the piss spurt, feel the strain in my thighs, the new grass sharp against my buttocks. Black trees and thin blue sky. I pull the pack on and continue.