Walking to the Moon (7 page)

‘Bah,' says the baby, and then, ‘ba ba.'

The woman's face pulls to an expression of delight. She claps her hands. ‘That's right,' she says, pointing at his chest, ‘Bubba.

Bubba.'

‘Bubba,' says the child again, beaming, and claps his hands.

‘Bubba. That's right. You're the bubba. My beautiful, clever Bubba.'

To reach the gate I have to walk past them and, as I approach, the woman looks up for a moment and includes me in her smile.

‘Bubba,' she says again, as I pass.

Anna comes by unexpectedly the next afternoon, while I am napping. She taps lightly at the door and enters without waiting for an answer. ‘Hello Jess, how are you? The doctor tells me you're doing well.'

‘That's nice of him,' I say, raising myself only slightly in the bed. ‘I'm not feeling very well.' It's true. My lower back aches. My head feels spongy, unreceptive.

‘Why do you think that is?' she asks, pulling the chair by my bed around so that she is facing me.

‘I don't know.' I shrug and hunch further down into the bedding. ‘I just feel sick. I think I might be getting some sort of flu again.'

‘It's that time of year.' She nods. ‘A few of my clients are feeling under the weather. Have you sorted out what you're going to do when you leave here?'

‘No, not yet. I—' ‘So, you've got some decisions to make, then.'

‘I just need to be really well before I—' ‘Jess, there are always plenty of viruses around. That's life.

That's what your GP's for.'

‘I just don't think I'm quite well enough.'

‘It's time to go home, Jess.'

She says it quite gently, not taking her eyes from mine.

‘You have a child to look after.'

II

A
long time ago, at a dinner party in a house with harbour views, I found myself sitting next to a man who turned out to be a psychiatrist. It was the first formal dinner party I had been to, the men in suits, the women, even me, in expensive dresses and the table set with three knives, one for fish. The man I had come with, who I would shortly marry, was seated on the other side of the table, at the far end. From time to time he would glance up and smile quickly and reassuringly, but from where I was sitting I could barely even hear his voice above the others. I did not know which wine glass to use. I did not know what to drink. The host, who was tall and tanned and looked as if he played tennis, offered me a selection of whites, and I could feel my mouth open and close two or three times, fishlike, before the man beside me, who was balding with a reddish face, suggested the Chablis. And I said ‘Righto' and reached for a glass, which turned out of course to be the wrong one. The psychiatrist was there because he was married to a paediatric anaesthetist, like half the people at the table I supposed—like me, almost—and although he looked, I thought, puffy and old, I realised after a while that he probably felt as out of place as I did and started to like him a little.

He was a good listener. He asked me about my job, so I told him about the business my friend Emma had set up (where I had met Michael) publishing medical books for the non-medical public, and about working there as a book editor, at least for now. He said that he was a great reader but tried to avoid medical books, and I said so did I and we laughed and talked for a while about novels and then the role of fiction, which he said was to remind people of things they did not know they had forgotten.

Then the conversation turned inevitably back to anaesthesia. It was the host's birthday so there was a speech and doubtless a lot of hospital jokes, and while the cake was being cut the psychiatrist said that occasionally his wife referred a patient on to him; if they had not coped well with the general anaesthetic, for example, or had come back to her later as they sometimes did, complaining of anxiety or sleeplessness.

Everyone had started to stand now, pushing back their chairs, heading to the balcony for champagne and cigarettes. The psychiatrist put his hands on the table as if to push himself up, then sank back again.

‘You know,' he said, ‘you could take any of the people in this room and, if they were suitable subjects, with a very simple procedure you could take them back so they could recall with remarkable clarity events that they had no idea they still remembered.

‘Take Brian over there,' he said, nodding towards the host. ‘If he were a good subject, I could guide him back to his tenth birthday, or his eighth or his fifth.'

I wanted to ask him what made a good subject but, seeing Michael moving towards us, I laughed and said I wasn't sure that I would want to remember any of my birthdays. Then we all walked out on to the balcony, Michael cupped his warm palm around the nape of my neck, and the psychiatrist dipped his head and wandered off, he said, to locate his wife.

I rang three weeks later and after reminding him of our conversation, asked if I could come and see him. He had a medium-sized room in a largish terrace in Potts Point. From his front window, peering between the slats of the wooden venetians, I could make out the grey bulk of the naval frigates in the harbour and the skeletal tip of the old finger wharf. The psychiatrist asked how he could help me and then directed me to a corduroy armchair opposite him. After explaining that we would start with a relaxation exercise, he asked me to close my eyes. It was all very simple and less fraught than I had expected. He was friendly but unobtrusive; his voice, which at the party had seemed almost wheezy, was in this room calm and solid.

At the end, he counted backwards from five, like in the movies. When I opened my eyes all I could see was dust revolving slowly in the slatted afternoon light.

‘How was that?' he asked.

I told him it had been, as he had indicated, remarkably straightforward: like watching a film I had seen before, but so long ago I had forgotten the plot. ‘Enthralling but unsurprising,' I said and started to cry.

The psychiatrist said I was a good subject for hypnosis and that perhaps I might want to come back and talk to him again. I said I would think about it, but in the end I didn't. It was just the shock, I told myself later, of having found a whole day curled inside me, gleaming and wet like a child.

III

I
set out across the oval, today filled with school children, past the scoreboard, through the gap in the wire fence and up the incline towards the pine trees.

‘I'm going to go for a bushwalk,' I told Anna, that last time I saw her, before I left the nursing home for good. ‘Just part of the way up the mountain. It'll only take a couple of days.'

‘Jess, did you hear what I said?'

‘Yes.'

It is hard walking with the pack on my back. Inside is a two-man tent—‘two-person; can't be sexist,' said the guy at the camping shop, hoping to be funny—a small cooker, one change of clothes, enough food for two days I hope; a map, a torch. Even not quite full, it digs into my hips and drags at my shoulders. I stop at the ridge, readjust my shoulder straps, swig from my water bottle. When I reach the path at the top, I pause again and look down to my left towards the grove of trees where I usually walk.

I think about taking off my pack and hurrying down to—to do what? Touch them. Say goodbye. Instead I pull out the map from my pouch and take the narrower path veering to the right that leads up into the mountains. I plan as I walk, matching my thoughts with the rhythm of my boots. Straight on for a couple of kilometres, then hook on to the road for a bit, and then back into the bush and the main track up the mountain. The air is cool and astringent, twisting through the tops of the eucalypts. Try for maybe twenty kilometres today, maybe a little less. Make sure I've got plenty of time to set up the tent, light a fire, cook some soup before dark. My stomach tightens a little at the thought of the dark, so I think about the torch I bought yesterday and the new set of batteries, and of the women's self-defence course I never finished and Hil trying to teach me karate on Bondi Beach, and of the concrete and iron balustrade above the middle of the beach where my husband and I used to watch dolphins riding the waves with the surfers.

I trip on a tree root and stagger, the backpack tipping me abruptly off balance. I grab a low branch for support, then pull myself up and start to take the pack off, my heart jittery with adrenaline, my fingers shaking on the clip. For the first time in months I feel a rush of craving for a cigarette. I am only a kilometre or so from the nursing home, but it feels further. Irrevocable. I breathe deeply and try to feel inside for that calm, cocooned self, the self I have grown to trust. An anxious wind skitters through the canopy, bending the branches back upon themselves, sending a twig scraping through the foliage to my feet.

Viv has given me two apples from her garden at home. I pull one from the side pocket of the pack, and crouch on a low lichen-splattered rock to eat it. ‘I hope you know what you're doing,' she said. Not smiling. ‘I don't want to see you back here.' The flesh is tart and sweet. I put the core in my bag, thinking of Hil, feeling better. The map shows a campsite about six hours' walk away, I estimate, taking it slowly up the mountain track. That might do.

‘Have you thought,' said Anna, ‘about what you will do when you leave here?'

‘Not really. I might stay with my aunt, Hil.'

‘What about your husband?'

‘I don't know.'

The map is in the front pocket of the backpack, along with a small packet of tissues I bought at the chemist and some barley sugars for energy. The bloke at the camping shop gave me the map. ‘You won't need it,' he said, when I asked. ‘Just follow the path.' But I said no, I liked to know where I was going.

‘Fair enough,' he said. ‘Cheers. On the house.'

I wanted to buy a drink flask too, but I didn't want him to think I expected that for free. And it seemed a good time to leave, our encounter rounded with a gift and cheers. I'd get bottled water from the milk bar. Cheaper.

‘You travelling alone?' he asked as I shrugged the pack over my shoulders.

‘No.'

When I think of my husband I think of a block, a square, four straight lines, and all my life streaming towards it and then stopping. Even now, even from this distance, if I try to bring it close, to look at it, my mind veers away, becomes vague, unfocused, and I find nothing. I feel nothing.

‘Tell me how that is in your body,' said Anna.

‘How what is?'

‘Nothing.'

‘What?'

‘Tell me how it is to feel nothing.'

‘That's the whole point,' I said, irritated. ‘I don't feel anything. I feel nothing. It's like a black box.'

‘Can you describe the box?' she said.

Silence.

‘How big is it?'

‘I don't know.' I held my hands up in front of my chest, where the box resides, made a square from my thumbs and forefingers.

‘What is it made from? How does it feel?'

‘Rock. Stone. Not shiny. I don't know. Something heavy. It feels heavy.'

We are in drought. Radio bulletins about stock losses, half-empty reservoirs, water restrictions. You don't notice it up here, where the bush holds its blues and greens in taut, tarpaulin spearheads and sun-resistant spikes. But in the suburbs you can sense the strain in the wheaten lawns, the early morning hosing; even the birch leaves in Viv's garden curling brown at the edges.

‘This black box,' said Anna, ‘this heavy black box in your chest; if it could speak, if it could tell me something or ask me something, what would it say?'

I looked away, down at the floor. Anna said nothing. We were sitting cross-legged on cushions, facing each other, about two metres apart in the private counselling room downstairs. The carpet was beige with darker grey smudges. I glanced back at her, then down again.

‘Can you tell me what might it say?' she asked again, in a quiet voice. ‘What does it need?'