Walking to the Moon (14 page)

Venom. Antivenene. From Latin
venenum
poison, love potion, related to
venus
sexual love.

Anna nodded almost gravely as I came in, then smiled. ‘Sit down,' she said. Her voice seemed increasingly deep, melodious. I glanced at her quickly. Her hair was short, wavy. Tousled. Sweet smelling. ‘How are you Jess?' A slight upwards inflection.

I was not sure how I was. First I said, ‘Fine, I'm fine,' and found myself gazing over her head and to the right to the books on the shelves. Then, still not looking at her, I said quickly, ‘Actually, I'm not exactly fine. I feel a bit, I don't know, agitated. I'd been feeling quite calm, quite good. And now I don't. I keep having dreams. And thoughts. My brain won't stop.'

I glanced at her. ‘Last time after I saw you, I got quite teary.

And exhausted. I was meant to see my aunt Hil the next day, and I couldn't. I was too tired. I had to cancel, and I spent the day in bed.

So, I'm okay now though.' I trailed off, brought my eyes back to her, then away. ‘Though I've got a bit of a headache.'

‘Where does your head hurt?'

‘Oh, just at the back, a bit, it's fine. I'll take a Panadol.'

‘Your neck?'

‘Yes, in the back of my neck.'

‘Why don't we do some work on the back of your neck then?'

Leaning against the far wall was a small foam mattress. Anna picked it up and carried it to the centre of the room. I should help her, I thought, but I felt clumsy, ineffectual. And nervous. What did she want?

‘Lie,' she said, ‘on your back.' She knelt at my head. The room looked different from this angle, the creamy paint unembellished, unwelcoming. I was aware of her sitting behind me. If I tilted my head a little I would be looking at her. I closed my eyes and she put her hands to my shoulders, working the muscles with her fingers, moving towards the base of my skull.

‘Oof. No wonder you have a headache.' We laughed, and I relaxed a little. In my mind's eye I saw her thumbs pushing into my flesh, releasing colours. Lines of brilliant red and green.

‘Jess?' She was asking me something.

‘Mm?'

She wanted to know if I was comfortable. I opened my eyes for a moment and saw her leaning above me, upside down. She was enormous. Her hair had fallen forwards. She eclipsed the ceiling. I closed my eyes, dropped down and down into my body, plumb lines from her fingers. After a while I realised that my legs were hot and heavy, a strange burning sensation. Anna spoke again. She said, ‘Jess, how are you going?'

I was trying to answer her. I was trying to tell her it didn't feel quite right. Something was not quite right. I was trying to tell her that my legs felt strange and lost and empty. I remembered instead a trip to the doctor's with Stuart. I am sitting on the raised bed with my legs outstretched. The doctor has grey hair and a suit that smells of cigarettes. ‘There is no reason why she shouldn't be walking,' he tells Stuart. His voice is quite kind. ‘There is nothing wrong with her that we can see.'

‘Jess?'

I opened my eyes. I looked at the ceiling. ‘How are you going there, sweetheart?' Anna.

‘Okay. My legs feel funny.'

I didn't mind that she called me sweetheart. Her voice was broad and soft and reassuring.

‘Do you want to get up?'

‘No. Yes. No.'

‘Which one?' She laughed.

‘I think I need to stand. My legs feel sort of buzzy. Tickly.'

I wanted suddenly to stamp my feet. I wanted to stamp them hard on the floor. I wanted to say, ‘Anna, I think I need to stamp.

Can I stamp?' But I didn't know how to ask. I said, ‘My feet feel tickly, as if I need to stamp them.'

‘Good,' said Anna. ‘Then stamp.'

At first I felt foolish. I felt like an actor. I felt that I was wearing galoshes. I was not so much stamping as clumping my way around the room. Boomp boomp boomp as my feet hit the floor. But my feet liked it. With each step the tingling feeling came rushing back up my legs. It made me want to laugh. And suddenly, just like that, I was stamping my right foot, really hard, bang bang bang, into the floor, like a buck rabbit. I stopped at three because I knew I still could. And because I wanted to shout; my mouth wanted to shout, and I didn't want it to. I was scared of what would come out.

‘Keep going,' said Anna, calmly, encouragingly. ‘You're doing really well.'

I wanted to help her. I wanted to do as she had asked. But my throat closed over. All the energy seemed to drain back down into the floor. I shut my eyes and shook my head. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘There's nothing to be sorry about, Jess. That's good work.

Would you like to lie down again?'

On the mattress, I lay on my side and she sat behind me. She put one cool hand to my forehead. ‘Is it all right if I stroke your head?' I nodded, yes, and she stroked my hair back from my forehead. ‘You did really well, sweetheart.' Still stroking.

Later, alone in my room, I put my hand to my forehead, felt the coolness of my fingers, how my face rested into them, nudged gently as I stroked the hair back from my forehead. Sweetheart.

I woke while it was dark, a breeze flapping the blind against the open window, and thought again about the grey-haired doctor talking to Stuart.

‘There's a—' he pauses, ‘—doctor you could see in the city who's good with this sort of thing. Otherwise—I'd give it time. She's had a shock. Time is a surprisingly good healer.' Stuart carries me out. As we leave, the doctor hands me a barley sugar wrapped in coloured cellophane. ‘You be a good girl,' he tells me, ‘and get better for your daddy.'

All the next day and the days after that, I thought about Anna. I wanted to touch her.

I
t was a month or so before I saw where Michael worked. When he was not teaching, he spent half his time on the third floor of the hospital.

‘Come on up,' his voice said the first time I visited, when the receptionist buzzed him from the shiny new lobby, ‘I'll be through in a few minutes.'

Away from the lobby the building stretched in all directions in endless, fluorescent corridors with green linoleum and round institutional clocks. From the lift, I followed the signs to obstetrics and spoke through a sliding glass window to a woman I took to be a nurse, who then opened the door marked staff only and let me in.

‘Michael will be right out,' she said in a friendly voice, and asked me to take a seat on one of the orange benches. I didn't recognise him when he came. He was dressed from head to toe in green, his hair beneath a cap, face hidden by a mask. Even his shoes were covered with soft fabric slippers. When the door beside me opened all I noticed, with an obscure shock of recognition, was the brief wedge of lights and stainless steel beyond, and a momentary impression of a trolley and green-clad human forms moving around it; a cheerfully raised female voice. Then the door closed again, and the man standing next to me pulled down his face mask, and even then it took a moment—the hair still covered—to realise it was Michael. He smiled distractedly and ruffled the back of my hair.

‘I'll just be a few more minutes. It's taking a bit longer than we expected. You okay here for ten minutes?' I nodded yes and smiled back. He turned and the door opened again briefly on to the operating theatre, which was familiar, I realised now, only from the television. Then he was gone. We hadn't kissed, and while this seemed apt, it added to my sense of disjunction. I wondered why it was taking longer than expected in there, whether there had been some medical emergency. I wondered if the brown mark on the front of his gown was blood. It occurred to me that although he had told me he was an anaesthetist and worked three days of every week in surgery, I had come here expecting to find him in an office, behind a computer. And that in his green garb, appearing from that brightly lit room beyond the metal door, he seemed to me irretrievably foreign.

Up ahead the road doubles back on itself in a long sharp hairpin bend. To my left is a shortcut, a steep rocky section of track, dirt and stone winding up between outcrops towards a stand of trees and the road high above. It could save me a kilometre, perhaps more. The cloud has cleared and although it is probably not all that hot, twenty-seven, perhaps twenty-eight degrees, the sun has a sharp edge. I pause at the bottom for a moment, thirsty, looking up. Then I start climbing without stopping for a drink or thought. I can feel the strain almost immediately in my legs, the backs of my calves, my buttocks. My feet are either angled sharply upwards or I am taking giant steps, pulling myself, my weight and the pack's, up between chunks of rock.

It is harder than it looks, each step requiring concentration, attention, the clenching of muscle, my forward momentum offset by the weight of the pack. My hands scrabble for holds. I can feel new sweat prickling on to my back, trapped by the pack, senseless wasted moisture. No chance of evaporation in there, just a dull build-up of heat. Cheap pack. Almost immediately, it seems, my breathing is ragged, mouth dry, blood thumping in my ears. Keep looking down. Watch my feet. My breath tastes like dry grey dust. Great gobs of it tearing into my lungs, the breathing and the earth the same now, unbearable. When I look up along the jagged line of the incline, it looks like a cliff face. Impossible.

I raise a hand to wipe my face and instead scrape my arm against a pointed outcrop, prickles of pain in a line from my elbow towards my wrist. Flash of hot feeling, anger, a sharp spike, and I take the next step too fast, wilfully careless, feel my foot wedge between rocks, my body swivel (see, you are about to be hurt), the pack catch against something—vegetable, mineral. An acid rush of adrenaline, a pain in my ankle as I teeter for a moment before grabbing on to a small spiky bush—which holds.

My body-mind stills instantly, ceasing to struggle, letting it all settle before assessing the damage.

Consequences: this is a consequence of that—of the moment when my anger twisted back on itself. I am lucky; the pain is not bad. My foot is still wedged, and I move carefully, kneeling on the other leg, using both hands to help raise my calf, ease the shoe from where it is stuck between rocks. I am calmer now, my body slow in the aftermath of the fright, respectful again. I sit, the straps of the backpack still on my shoulders, the weight resting on a ledge.

Now that it is over and I am safe, all I can feel around me is emptiness. I am in a vacant hollow of day. Unhurt, but despite myself. The sun beats and flares with my slowing pulse but I feel it darkly, cold now against my skin. My legs feel distant and unreal. I pull my drink bottle out, swallow without thirst or taste—the body's needs not yet reasserted—placating some grim watcher. See, I am drinking water. I am taking care.

It is only as I start to move that I feel the heat come back, the buzzing in my thighs. It is shock, I think; I must have had a bit of a shock; the coldness. I say it to myself again as I begin, carefully, evenly, to climb. Just a bit of a shock.

I reach the top quite quickly after that and sit, legs dangling against the warm rocks, the mind's clatter quieter for now. In the settling ripples of my near-accident my husband floats back into view, some distance off, in his running shorts.

Every day at the same time Michael runs, the same run every time, around the ocean path to Bronte and back—with a monitor strapped to his chest measuring distance, pulse rate, spent kilo-joules. Before we had Lily, I used to sit and watch him from my table at the cafe as he finished. Checking his time, stretching his slender, finely muscled legs, and then leaping from the boardwalk to the beach, running into the ocean, fifty metres in, fifty metres out, shaking his head, water flying from his dark curls.

‘Have you always been this obsessive?' I asked one day, early on, when he arrived back. He bent forward as if for a kiss, then rubbed his morning stubble across my chin instead.

‘Oh piss off,' I said, pushing him away.

‘But I love you.' He puckered his lips and leaned towards me, crossing his eyes.

‘Yuk. Michael. Go away.'

He stopped and sat down next to me. Looked at me intently.

‘Really?'

‘Really? No.'

‘I will. If that's what you want.'

‘It's not.' I wrinkled my nose and looked down at the menu.

‘Have the pikelets. The pikelets are good.'

‘But maybe it is,' he said.

I looked up again. ‘It's not.' I reached my hand out to touch his cheek, but he jerked his head back, staring at me.

‘Michael?'

‘Maybe it is, and that's why you said it.'

‘Maybe I was joking, Michael.'

‘Maybe this is all getting a bit much,' he said, half rising, ‘all going a bit fast.'

He knocked the table with his knee, spilling hot coffee over my leg. ‘Sorry, sorry,' he grabbed at a pile of serviettes and thrust them towards me, swiping at the stain. Then he sat back suddenly in his seat, dropped his head into his hands. After a few moments I reached out and tentatively touched the dark wavy hair. Without looking up he grabbed one of my fingers and held it tightly against his skull.