Walking to the Moon (9 page)

Underneath the stick trees the black ground is striped with brilliant green, blades and locks and tresses of green, grasses so fine you could thread them through a needle, and wider-leaved, saw-edged tufts, like pineapple tops
.
Once you get over the black, the green is everywhere, sprouting in foolish, furious clumps from the branches and even the trunks of the charcoaled trees. Occasionally among them the trunk of an angophora bursts bright orange or salmon pink from its blackened casing. Once your eye is in, all you see is colour.

Now that I have made my decision I enter for a while a dreamy hollow of walking, a passage of time in which I am protected from the flickering doubts that have been with me since leaving the nursing home. The path is pink and sandy and has its own momentum, the black and green of the trees alternating beside me.

A landscape abbreviated, comforting even, in its starkness: the sense that the worst has already happened, and I am still here.

It is not, I am aware, real bushwalking. I have a map but no compass. And although the map shows that I must now be a considerable distance from any houses, some kilometres into the national park, I am on a fire trail. There is no chance of getting lost. Nor is there any chance of stumbling across an unexpected waterfall or swimming hole—as I might have, if I had plotted my own course. Once, in the distance, I see what might be a small snake uncurl itself from the side of the road and slip into the bushes as I approach, but it disappears before I reach it, and might have been a lizard.

The road is surprisingly uneven. Despite the evidence of the map, I had imagined a straight, steady incline. Instead, it curves this way and that, though more, it seems, to the left. To the west, or what I imagine to be west; I can no longer tell. Either way, for the most part the land is higher to my left. The road is steep in parts and rippled, with potholes and fissures where the earth, yellower as I get higher, has cracked open or been washed away. After heavy rain it is almost impassable, the guy in the mountain shop said. A slippery torrent, clutching as it passes at sand and clay and small stones.

Now and again I stumble, the impact travelling up my leg to the small of my back. Careful. It is smoother on the other side of the road, but I follow the inside of the curve, clinging mainly to the left. I tell myself that it will even out, and that this way I have to cover less distance. But in truth, I cling to the left because I am afraid of being hit by a bike. Any moment, I keep thinking, a group of riders, three, maybe more, could come sliding around one of these corners. They wouldn't be expecting me, or looking. It is not logical, I know; as my husband would point out, I am better off on the outside of the curve, where I can be seen, and see. But I stick to the inside, where I feel safer. And my husband is not here.

As I walk, placing my feet carefully so as not to twist my ankle on a loose rock or another tree root, I think about the riders. In the end I can no longer tell whether I want them to come or not. In one version they are a cheerful force, raising their hands as they pass, perhaps even stopping briefly to tell me about conditions further up the path and wish me well. In another, they are simply careless—skidding around a corner too fast and striking me or at least showering me with dust. In the third—Stop.

The land to my left is raised, a shallow clay embankment, too familiar already, embedded with repetitive truncated concerns— bikers and snakes and other possibilities. I look to my right. A cluster of angophoras, five of them together. Through the trees, the land falls away a little and I can make out a ridge, or fragments of ridge, that seems to run parallel to the path. It does not look far, though it is hard to get a sense of perspective from here. Beyond the containing green of the angophoras the landscape appears in patches mainly as a khaki monotone with little in the way of gradient or features, the eye lulled or deadened by the sameness. I look at my watch. Eleven. Two hours' walking behind me. Lunch in an hour. In the pocket of my shorts is a fruit and nut bar, which I open without stopping, pushing the plastic wrapper carefully back into my pocket. It is sweet and chewy, not the sort of food I like, but satisfactory for now, the teeth bracing themselves against the stickiness of the sugar.

‘Jess,' says Anna, quiet, persistent, ‘what about your husband?'

I am thinking again about the nursing home. From the window of my room, if you leant out a little you could see, below, the kitchen door and beside it the old wooden bench where I used to sit in the dark with Maud while she smoked her sneaky fags. Sometimes in the daytime Tina and Steff sat there when they had a break. Steff with her head tilted back against the wall, blue-trousered legs straight out in front of her, Tina, on the occasion that now comes to mind, inclining forward over the woollen rug she was crocheting for her baby niece.

She is big, Steff, bigger than Hil or me, set on a solid steel frame. Not fat, or if she is it all seems useful or necessary. She has thick dark hair which she pulls back in a ponytail with those coloured hair bands you buy from the chemist in lots of twelve or six, and which disappear, in my experience, almost immediately you have opened the packet. She would have been the sort of girl I avoided at school, uninterested in showy displays (boys, makeup, fallings in and out), unsmiling except within her coterie. When Steff was in the same room as me I felt that I was back at school and that I was on the outer.

I could not make out what they were saying, on this day, except for the occasional lilt of Tina's clear voice and, once, a deep sharp burst of laughter from Steff. It is odd to think of them as friends and perhaps they are not, away from the home, but they sat together for quite a while and each time I looked out they were still caught up in conversation. Once when one of Tina's balls of wool rolled from her knees on to the gravel, Steff leapt forward, surprisingly graceful, and dusted it off before handing it back. Almost gallant. After a while they both stood up and Tina put away her wool, then they disappeared inside. When they reappeared each was pushing a wheelchair, and after a moment Steff went inside for another, then another, until there they were: four old ladies lined up on the asphalt, their backs to the sun.

After a while Steff disappeared inside again and Tina sat down on the bench. When she saw me coming, she waved and asked if I would mind waiting with the ladies for a while. From the plastic container on the bench beside her she brought out hand-cream, scissors, tissue paper and a nail file. ‘Here you go,' she said. ‘Make yourself useful.'

I started with Mrs McClintock. The skin that stretched over her bones was like baking paper, translucent, decorated with brownish circles and deep blue, almost black, veins. Her nails were long and thick, horn-like. ‘Here, Eileen, can I give you a bit of a manicure?' The thumbnail was the thickest, ridged and yellowish over the small shrunken digit; the tiny delicate bones beneath encased in skin, articulated by stringy bands of tendon or ligament that I could feel around each joint.

‘Careful dear, careful. Don't take my fingers off with those scissors.'

‘I won't Eileen, I promise. I didn't mean to frighten you.'

‘Not so much frightened, dear, as watchful.'

Even so her hand flinched each time the scissors bit into the nail, and I had to hold her fingers quite firmly between mine—‘nearly there'—to get it done. She had no children, although a nephew came every few weeks and wheeled her along the footpath, sometimes around the block. ‘I don't know why he does it,' she once said tartly. ‘It jolts me terribly, rushing along at that pace.' Although whenever I watched he always seemed to be moving carefully and not fast, stopping every few paces to lean forwards to hear what she was saying. He must have come from work, in his lunch hour, as he always wore a suit. Lawyer maybe, except there were not too many lawyers around here, or not the suit-wearing type. Perhaps he was an accountant, or a manager, a person who managed things. He was tall and big-limbed with wide shoulders and neat brown hair. He would be a safe person, I thought, careful, considerate. The way he lowered his head towards her. I wondered if he had a wife and kids.

After an hour or so Steff came out again to wheel them into the dining room for lunch. I was just finishing off and I glanced at her and she looked straight past me, as she always did, and I looked away. I wondered if anyone else noticed, Tina or Viv or any of the other staff. I mentioned it once to Tina, that Steff didn't like me, but Tina shrugged and said not to worry about Steff, she was just like that.

When I think of my husband, it is in segments. The cropped beard, the full lips, the long thin fingers. In my mind, each is separate. And with each image comes a grey band of feeling. A pressure, distaste. I try to pull him together, force him together, and the grey feeling tightens and darkens, and I stop. My husband is a thick, dark feeling in my stomach. Aubergine. Bruised.

‘He seems like a nice chap,' said Hil the first time I brought him home to the little wooden house where I was living with her again.

I laughed and said, ‘Yes; yes he is a nice chap.' Chap: a very Hil word.

That night we walked down to the beach, the three of us, and ate mussels in sweet tomato sauce in one of the open air cafes that Hil usually mocked. Michael and I drank red, and Hil, as always, apple juice. Afterwards we all walked down on to the broad white beach and then along the sea path that followed the cliff to Bronte. At the top of the stone steps the path spreads out into an uneven rocky overhang that flows towards the ocean and then stops. We walked to the edge, all of us, and lowered ourselves on to our bellies on the still-warm rocks; looking straight down into the listing blue darkness and the rims of white foam far below, until after a minute I felt dizzy and turned, half crawling, back towards the path. Michael helped me up, supporting my elbow, and I felt awkward and pleased but did not catch his eye, nor Hil's when she joined us.

Other people were still passing along the path behind us, and Hil said she might call it a night. I said I might stay, and she nodded and raised her arm in a Hil salute and said, ‘Cheers then,' and strode away without looking back. After she had gone we sat down again. Michael folded his sweater and put it on the rock and patted it, and we sat next to each other while I told him how Hil had moved in with Stuart and me when I was five and stayed there until she bought the cottage around the corner, and how, later, when Stuart met his second wife, I had moved back in with Hil, and always seemed to return there. She was away most evenings anyway, I told him, at the Dump. Then I asked about his work and why he had chosen to be an anaesthetist and if he liked it, and after a moment he asked if I always talked this much and I said only when I was nervous and he said I didn't need to be, and then we sat for a long time in silence.

Bondi, which seems to me now unreal, like a smooth, sealed bubble on whose glistening surface everything is reflected back distorted. That was my life.

‘W
ould you like to take a cushion?' said Anna, gesturing at the small pile in the corner of the room.

‘Why?'

In answer, she walked across and picked up a smallish soft green pillow, then another in the same quiet tone of pink and held them both up by their corners.

‘Which one?' she asked.

I shrugged and she said, ‘Catch,' and threw me the pink one, which I grabbed and dropped, embarrassed, wishing already I had asked for green, which was less imbued with possible meaning. Anna crossed the room back to her chair, still carrying the green cushion, which she hugged up against her chest as she sat back cross-legged; arms, too, crossed in front of the pillow.

‘What's it for?' I asked after a few seconds, leaning and picking mine up from the floor next to my seat.

‘This,' she said, and hugged her pillow closer to her, as if it was something warm and precious. I knew what she was trying to do. I sat the cushion on my lap, and rested my folded hands on top of it.

Anna laughed. ‘Try it,' she said. ‘You might like it.'

‘No thanks.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because it's silly.'

‘Ah.' After a while she said, ‘How's your week been, Jess?'

I told her it had been fine, not much happening, and then, because she just kept sitting there, head tilted very slightly to one side, I said that my father had rung last night and that we might be going bushwalking together one weekend after I got back.

‘Where will you go?'

‘I don't know. Maybe up around Newcastle where he lives. It might not happen.'

‘Would you like to go bushwalking with your father?'

I shrugged. ‘I don't know. I used to like it. We haven't been for a long time.'

Then I said that maybe I liked the idea more than the reality, and besides, what with Hil being up here so often, I probably had enough family to keep me going for now, more than enough, and then I stopped.