Walking to the Moon (11 page)

This was a long speech, the longest I had made so far, and in the small silence that followed, I could feel a powerful surge of energy through my body, a rush of adrenaline, and in the background a tiny nub of concern. What was I saying? Who was I?

‘Fantastic,' said Anna. ‘You don't have to be here by the way.

You're free to go.' She said it normally and quite cheerfully.

I stuck my jaw out again. ‘But then I wouldn't get to play silly games like this and tell everyone to bugger off.'

‘You might find that you can tell people to bugger off, even when you're not in here,' said Anna, matter-of-factly. They were all watching me now with interest.

Maud caught my eye and said, ‘Yeah, you can tell me to bugger off any time you want. Won't make any difference, but feel free.'

Anna looked to Maud; ‘Maud, put your jaw out again and tell us what you want us to do.'

Maud stuck her jaw out again, put her hands on her hips, and stood for a moment like king monkey on the top of a hill. She turned her head from side to side, and then said, ‘You can all get fucked.'

I could feel the laughter racing through my body. Embarrassing, except that everyone else was laughing too. Elsie was cackling so much she had to grab at her crotch and then took herself off to the side of the room and a straight-backed chair. Even Maud had gone a surprised pink.

Gradually we all subsided. ‘Let's lie down for the last few minutes,' said Anna, ‘or sit.' She helped Maud lower herself to a chair, and then let Mary hold her arm as she sank to the ground, quiet now, not laughing.

Close your eyes, said Anna, and we lay there together in the room in the newly oriented silence, filled with breath and blood.

After a while Anna's voice said to come back now. Slowly we sat up. Mary saw me looking at her, and nodded her head. ‘What about you dear?' she said. ‘Do you have any children?'

For a moment there was silence. Then I said that yes, I had a daughter.

‘Have you got a photo?' said Elsie, and I nodded and pulled my wallet from my back pocket and took out a photo of Lily at the beach last summer. She had an orange rubber ring around her middle and was smiling up at the camera all blonde and curls.

‘Curls from her dad, colour from L'Oreal,' I said—a family joke—when they stopped oohing and aahing.

‘When's she going to visit?' asked Elsie. ‘When can we see her?' And again I paused. I could feel Anna watching me from across the room.

‘You should bring her,' said Elsie at last. ‘You should bring her here.' The other women agreed and when I glanced up at Anna she was looking at me, not nodding or smiling. Just looking, and I pulled myself up and said time to go. As I left the room she reached across and squeezed my shoulder softly.

At night I dreamed that I was swimming in the ocean with Anna. We were swimming to America and she was covered with a white greasy substance that was supposed to protect and keep her warm. I was freezing, though, I could feel my legs becoming weak and numb. Here, said Anna, just do this, and she whirled her arms and legs about like a dishwasher until the water around us was all warm and thick with grease and we floated along together like plankton.

This road is a corridor. Low scrubby eucalypts lean towards each other as if to create an arch. They are reaching for the sun, I know that, but I like the way they close above me. I like to feel that it is personal. There is a sandy bank running alongside the road. From it sprout low prickly shrubs, sharp grasses, small serrated banksias, blue-green saplings, dead broken sticks. In the middle of the roadway is a tiny lime green shoot, perhaps a centimetre high, a single stalk from which sprout upright pointed needles, like a Christmas tree. All along the stem, still caught between the branching leaves, is the sandy soil through which the seedling has pushed to get here. Sometimes I see the flash of small lizards in the undergrowth. Once, as I walk, I stop thinking. I stop making shapes, and for a long moment I feel air, trees, sunlight, birdcall and insects throb in unison around me, this great containing pulse. I do not feel alone. I feel free. Even when the moment has gone, I can still feel it in my belly and I think to myself: that was peace; I think that was peace. And then it fades.

One day Maud didn't turn up at Anna's class. ‘Would you mind checking her room, Jess,' she asked. ‘It's not like her not to be here.'

Upstairs, outside her door, thirty-six, I hesitated then knocked. I knocked again when she didn't answer. Probably on the loo. In the shower. On the phone. Dead. Say the word, then it won't happen.

Her blinds were still down and at first I couldn't make out anything except the shape of the bed to one side, and the large overstuffed armchair she had brought from home. ‘Maud?' She was probably still downstairs at breakfast. The room smelled of the lilac talcum powder she always used and the chemical underlay of medicines. She was not in her bed. She was on the floor. My foot connected quite solidly with some part of her and I staggered, regained my balance, and stood for a moment looking down at the shape that was Maud. I did not want to look at her face. The blanket was half off the bed, as if she had accidentally pulled it with her as she tried to crawl to the door. She must have been crawling. One leg was still bent up, one arm extended forward, like road kill. I didn't even check her breathing or her pulse. I dragged the blanket across to where she lay and pulled it up over her body, tucked it around her chin, felt her skin suddenly cold, stiff, her hair still soft, with the hairpin still tucking back some stray wisp.

For some reason I shut the door behind me, then ran down the corridor, silently down the stairs, past the room where Anna and the others must now have begun, towards Viv's office. My body not my own, an autonomous module that moved beside me, covering ground without pain or thought. It spoke to Viv for me, told her what I had found. Confronted like this with the actuality of death, all of her resistance to it disappeared. She nodded once, as if to confirm what I had told her, rang the buzzer on her desk, spoke on the intercom to one of the nurses. ‘Room thirty-six please. Straight away.' Took off her mauve-rimmed glasses and exchanged them for another pair. Shrugged off her cardigan, hung it on the arm of her chair and told me to lie down on her sofa until she got back. Her actions were smooth and efficient and strangely graceful. As if this was the moment, these were the moments, for which she had rehearsed all her life.

I did as she instructed and lay on the couch, staring through the window into the half-empty branches of the sickly elm and the silvery grey sky they held. It had rained a little overnight and the tops of the branches were stained in dark irregular blotches. I wondered if Maud had heard the sound of it falling, if she had taken comfort in that. I wondered what it was like for her now, all alone and cold.

Whenever anyone died, Viv would hold a little ceremony. Under the elm if it was not raining, otherwise in the rec room, where we gathered for Maud. Viv called it dying, and I liked her for this. Not ‘passing away' or ‘leaving us', or just ‘passing', as Steff used to say. It always surprised me with Steff, this delicacy when it came to dying. Even her voice softened, or at least thinned out—‘so and so passed last night'. Almost timid.

But Viv knew what to do. She was in her element. She honoured the dead with precision and the living with details, which is the most, I think, you can offer to either.

‘Maud Kathleen Bernadette Flanagan died last night, in room thirty-six, where she had stayed,' already the tense adjusted for Maud's new circumstances, ‘for eleven months. She was seventy-three. Her birth certificate tells me she was born in Dublin
.
The doctor believes she died somewhere between three and five a.m., of a heart attack. Maud had already had two small strokes, as you may recall. She leaves behind her a daughter and three sons. Also grandchildren, some of whom you will have met.

‘Well then, thank-you for coming. There is a collection bowl on the table. Any donations will go towards flowers for her family. I'll advise you shortly when and where the funeral will be held.'

Afterwards a few of the others might get together in somebody's room with a bottle of sherry and share anecdotes or gossip. I don't know; I never went. But I always turned up for Viv's ceremonies, and I think she understood that I found them comforting. Sometimes she looked straight at me, not one of her usual skating glances. Sometimes she looked straight at me, and I at her, and I felt in this way that we were connected.

At the home I required of myself only one task each week. Every Wednesday now for more than a month, a letter has arrived from my daughter. She writes them on the weekend, at home with Michael, and on Monday, during a coffee break I suppose, Michael drops them at the post office in town. Normally she draws me a picture, which she folds over to make a card. Great reckless conglomerates of colour, depicting I'm not sure what, driving the empty space from the page; inside, in her jaunty jostling script, she writes
Dear mummy
, embellished often with stars or hearts and sometimes fish, and then Michael takes over and variously transcribes:
I love
you/ hope you are feeling better/ happy/ I am missing you/ I went to
Carly/ Nathan/ Bim's house to play/ daddy bought me an ice-cream/
lolly/ I have built a castle in my room. I want to leave it up for you to see
but daddy won't let me/ I am missing you/ missing you/ missing

It is a strategy of Michael's. Mean-hearted, I know, for me to see things this way, yet each week, I am certain, he has her decorate the envelope to be sure it will not end up in the drawer with the rest. And in each letter he inserts too a note from himself—determinedly chatty, giving details of callers (fewer) and outings (Manly with Hil) and general housekeeping (dripping tap on porch)—as if everything is all right, as if nothing has changed. Each lovingly adorned envelope a Trojan horse.

‘It is true,' said Anna, ‘that he is trying to keep you connected to your life with him and Lily.'

‘But what can I do? He's using Lily to trap me.'

‘Perhaps,' said Anna, ‘you could use him to tell Lily a story.'

Each Wednesday at around four, ignoring the tightness in my chest, I made my way down to the front sitting room and settled myself in the blue armchair that looked out on to the side garden and, resting my paper on a book, I wrote my reply. I wrote her a story. I wrote about the little starfish whose mother had gone away on a journey.

In these stories, which evolved naturally, without thought, and which now number five, the mummy starfish must try to get back a black pearl that has been stolen from her by a frightening monster who lives in a giant clamshell on the bottom of the sea. The monster is called the Nuthing, and the mummy starfish is afraid of it. To get back her pearl she cannot walk straight up to the clamshell, or it will open up in a rush and the Nuthing will swallow her whole. Instead, the mummy starfish, whose name is Nancy, must work out sneaky ways to creep up on the monster and retrieve what is rightfully hers. Along the way Nancy starfish has adventures and meets various friendly and not so friendly creatures of the sea. Each week she asks the little starfish, whose name is Lily, to think of a spell or tricky scheme to help her open the clam and distract the monster while Nancy starfish gets the pearl.
Nancy should
get a gun
, wrote my daughter,
and shoot the Nuthing/ She should use a
bow and arrow/ She should leave a bowl of food to make the Nuthing
come out of its shell
. So far though, while Nancy has found many useful things (a hamburger, a bent key, a large wooden nulla nulla with which to beat away her enemy), she has not been able to find what she has lost.

In the days after I sealed and posted my story I tried not to think about it again. I tried not to think about it again until Wednesday, when the mail arrived, and after I had read her letter (two, three times—I took it on my walk) I got a glass of water, went to the sitting room and settled myself in the blue chair. It was surprising how quickly the time passed. I never wanted to begin, but in the end, every time, it was a relief.

T
he first time I saw the man who would become my husband was through the glass door that led into the foyer at work. I was late, my tooth was aching and I was trying to open the door without putting down the box of books I was carrying. He was standing with his back to me, a slim figure looking at the magazines on the mantelpiece, and our eyes met briefly and precisely in the large mirror that hangs there, before he turned and walked across to open the door. I thanked him and said that Emma, who was now my boss, must have popped out for a minute.

‘She's getting coffee,' he said. ‘I'm early.'

He was still holding a book on childhood asthma, one we had published the previous year. He was dark—hair, eyes, suit—and quietly spoken. His movements were small and efficient (he closed the book quietly without glancing at it again and placed it on the low table). All this I noticed through the pain in my jaw as he carried the box of books into my room, where I had directed him. I couldn't stop looking at him. Later I realised that he rarely wore suits and must have been nervous, although it did not show. What I noticed was a sense of restraint that might or might not turn out to be shyness.