Walking to the Moon (13 page)

As I talked, Michael watched me with his dark eyes and nodded slowly.

I asked him then if anaesthetics could be dangerous, and he gestured towards the knife with which I was buttering my roll, and said anything could be dangerous if it wasn't used properly; they were powerful drugs. There was a bit of an art, he added, to knowing just how much of the drug to give. That was what made a good anaesthetist. There were guidelines of course, but every patient was different. Also, it depended how deep you wanted them to go
.
Sometimes, he said, if someone was terribly wounded, he might put them in a coma, an anaesthetic coma, to give the body a chance to heal. Sometimes the only way to save someone from death was to take them part of the way there.

Up here, the trees rise from a bed of rock, moulded basalt that follows the earth's contours, creating lips and ledges where the soil has washed away beneath it. Even in the charred rock there is nourishment; lichens in pale greens and deep rust reds colonise the surface and in every gap and hollow, earth has formed from which grasses and other small plants reach out. Sometimes I come across small groups of trees or shrubs where there seems to be no life. But even here if I look close I find tiny green shoots, right at the base, beginning to push through.

I was fascinated by his hands, the long square-tipped fingers, which he moved as he talked, and the smooth splayed nails. Mine, which I bit, I kept folded beneath my palms on the table, two vague fists.

I wondered if he kept his like this for his patients. It seemed oddly flawed, I said at last, to need that amount of guesswork. Not like science. Not like grammar. More like sleep, I thought, which might come or might not. ‘Sometimes,' I said, ‘I fantasise about snakes and squirrels and other animals that hibernate. I sometimes wish I could do that.' And then I felt foolish because he did not answer and kept staring beyond me, as if I had not spoken.

Sometimes it seemed to me that the times I felt the most myself were at work, when I was editing: the fluid, formal arrangements of commas, full stops and semicolons, the precise unarguable shifts in meaning; sentences and paragraphs rearranged, ideas corralled, collated; excised.

‘That's how I felt when I split up from my wife,' he said suddenly. ‘I stopped sleeping. I'd sleep maybe two or three hours a night. It was weird. I wasn't tired. In the morning I'd get up and go to work, and I was fine. I seemed fine. And as soon as I got home I'd just go to bed. I'd lie there for hours and hours and hours. I'd get tranquilisers from work, but I couldn't sleep. I would have given anything to sleep.'

The subtle, unarguable adjustment of rhythm and flow.

At the end of the meal we ordered takeaway coffees and then walked back to the office where, instead of parting, we sat, as if it were already habit, on the concrete steps. I wanted to ask about his wife, and when she had left. ‘Do you think people can know anything,' I asked, ‘when they're unconscious? Emma's mum, when Em was doing exams, she used to sit by her bed until she'd gone to sleep and then she'd read to her from her swot notes. Em's convinced it was what got her through.'

‘No
,
' he said, shrugging. ‘I don't think so. Anaesthesia's not sleep. People sometimes say they heard stuff, but mostly it's dreams.' Occasionally, though, he said, someone would start to wake before you wanted them to. The other day, he said, a bloke had tried to sit up while they were still stitching him and they'd had to give him more propofol to settle him down. ‘Although we might not mention that in the book,' he said. And we both smiled.

What about the man, though, I asked: would he remember?

Michael said no; the drugs made you forget.

The backpack is pressing into my shoulders, sending lines of sensation up both sides of my neck each time I step. It is heavy, heavier than I had imagined at the shop. It takes more energy than I had expected just to walk. I stop and adjust the hip strap, tightening it properly so that it rests now on my hip bones, which I can feel taking the weight, releasing the pressure on my back. I think of the brown leather satchel Hil bought me as a present when I started school.

The silver buckles that she adjusted over my chest. My pencil case, my drink bottle, my lunch in a paper bag, sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. How I would wait out the front after school for her to come and get me, and how each day I would imagine that instead of Hil standing by the gate, it would be my mother waiting there in the old Holden. I tried not to think it, but I always did. And each time I thought it, I felt guilty.

‘But the body,' I want to say to Michael. ‘What about the body? Does the body remember?'

‘F
or an editor,' said Michael, ‘you have terrible handwriting.'

It is true. Everything in my writing is designed to conceal, to make sure that the person next to me cannot see into my mind. I write so fast I miss some letters and distort others so completely that reading it back five or ten minutes later whole words are unrecognisable, even to me.

‘I think I might have to get you a proper pen,' said Michael the first time we worked together in my office, looking over the notes for his book. And he did: a long silver one on a velvet bed. He brought it to our next meeting. I was not sure what to make of it, of the fact of him giving it to me. I was not sure whether to take it as a gift, signifying something, or just as the sort of thing he did, the sort of thing he would do for his friends, a wholesome, practical thing. But was I a friend?

Sometimes when I write I feel that I am skating, that the pen is skating across the page and that I am on thin ice. And then I pull myself up, slow down, start again. It is safer to work with other people's words, to order and reveal the thoughts of others.

‘If you put this bit up here,' I said to Michael, ‘then you don't need that sentence in between. You don't need to tell us those two thoughts are connected, because you've already connected them. Do you see?'

As I am walking I pick up a small yellow stone and put it in my mouth. I do not intend to. It is a soft pinky yellow, quartz-like and smooth, a pebble really, with rounded edges. Everything is so clean up here. I put it to the tip of my tongue and lick, and then, because there is no one here and because it is cool and somehow pleasing, I put it in my mouth. It feels odd on my tongue, surprising at first and colder than me, tasting slightly of dust, though it soon becomes warm and I find that I can tuck it to the side of my mouth, alongside the jaw, and that the soft clack clack against my teeth is companionable. After a while I see another pebble and another, and soon I am walking along with a mouth full of stones, five or six tucked behind my teeth or beneath my tongue. I can move them around together or separately, creating small migratory groupings and helping my body to produce saliva. It feels as if my back teeth have fallen out and are rolling around inside my head.

The first time we went out together, we passed an accident as we came out of Bondi. There was a car on its roof. Michael drove past and then slowed. He said, ‘Shit; there's no ambulance.' He pulled over and told me to wait in the car. After he left I turned on the radio. When he came back about twenty minutes later he had blood on his hands and his face and shirt. He asked if I would mind driving us to his flat, and I saw that his hands were shaking.

‘That,' he said in tight voice, ‘is what I hate most about being a doctor. That is why I chose to be an anaesthetist.'

I drove him home, uncertain what to say or how to comfort, and after he had showered and changed we ended up walking up the street and getting pizza. I asked if he had always wanted to be a doctor. He said he didn't know, he supposed so, his father had been, but he had died quite young.

Later, over margherita and red wine, he told me that the man in the car had died while they were waiting for the ambulance. I didn't know what to say. Eventually I said, ‘At least you were there with him.' Michael shrugged and started to say something then stopped. After a while he said he still remembered the first time he had put someone to sleep, a middle-aged woman having a lump removed from her breast. She was wheeled in awake. He had not met her before, he was only a trainee, under supervision. But he was the one who anaesthetised her. He attached the monitors to measure blood pressure, pulse, the amount of oxygen in the blood, and found that it was easy to chat to her lightly, soothingly. She was nervous of course, pale and awkward, lying on her back in the ugly hospital gown, trying to smile when she was spoken to, nodding at his questions. She had put on lipstick. He felt sorry for her, and suddenly, to his surprise, terribly protective. He asked about her children. Her son was eighteen and thinking about doing medicine. He kept talking while he took her right arm, rubbed a numbing agent in the soft crook, then the local anaesthetic. ‘Just a small prick coming up, that's it, perfect. It's a bit of an odd feeling isn't it?' and then connecting her to the drip. ‘And what about your daughter?'

She started to answer, got out maybe half a dozen words, and then smiled and breathed in as if she had just remembered something, and that was all. He looked down at her and thought, ‘I did that', and tucked her arm up against her body where it would stay warm.

‘It's kind of silly really,' he told me, shrugging. ‘It's not as if she'd be feeling the cold.'

And then he added: ‘I was talking to a forensic pathologist once. He was doing some work at the hospital. Funny guy. Really funny guy. He told me you can always tell if it's a domestic, you know, if it was someone who loved them. They put a blanket over the body or a pillow under their head.'

And then he said, ‘I like you. I like you a lot.'

It was a few weeks after that that I paid my visit to the psychiatrist in Potts Point. I didn't tell Michael I had gone. I had not yet moved into his tiny flat, and besides, there was not much to tell, although afterwards I tried to write about it. ‘On my fifth birthday we went on a picnic in teh mountains,' I typed on my laptop on the back steps at Hil's. I stopped, pulled myself up, took myself back, changed ‘teh' to ‘the'. Reread: ‘On my fifth birthday we went on a picnic in the mountains.' On my fifth birthday we went on a picnic
.
I went blank. I wondered if he would love me. ‘Do your first draft in a rush,' I had told him that first time we sat down together to work. ‘Don't worry too much about spelling, punctuation, just get down the shape that's in your mind. You can fill in the gaps later.' But what, I thought, if you wrote so fast your fingers got ahead of your mind, what if you didn't know what was coming?

It was wrong, I knew, to think this way. I didn't even tell Emma. (What if something took you unawares?) On my fifth birthday we went on a picnic in the mountains. Full stop. And now what? Always the urge to go back, to adjust, to alter. To change teh to the. To interrogate. It didn't matter, I told myself, it didn't matter; just write. But it did matter. It was a blemish. And always this sense that if I didn't get it right now, if I didn't make amends straight away, that somehow I would never be able to undo it; that some pathway would have been created that I would be unable to change, to which I would return time and again, reinforcing and deepening it. That I would be trapped forever in my own error. Teh. Something misplaced.

Dear mummy,
writes Lily
, Nancy starfish should feed the Nuthing a
poison fish.

The first time I saw Michael naked I thought of potters' clay, fine-grained and whitish, and I had the sense that if I were to press my thumb against his flesh he might not rise back, but might stay like that always, moulded. It was an impression only, fleeting, at odds with the taut, tanned arms and runner's legs, but when I think of him it is what I see. It is there too around the corners of his mouth and eyes, where the expression seems always to hover just beyond his features, felt rather than seen. As if someone forgot to apply the final layer and now he is vulnerable to the elements, to leaching and evaporation. So that when he looks at you, when he looked at me, the exchange was glancing, momentary, and the contact seemed to take place in the space between us, neither forming nor dissipating. So that even now, even when he is not here, he seems to fill the air with his unspoken, inexact requirements. And I am never free of him.

There is a blister on the sole of my left foot, a pinkish bubble far beneath the surface. I noticed it this morning when I put on my boots, and now it provides a steady bass beat as I walk. In my first aid kit I have Panadol, antiseptic cream, band-aids, a sealed wound dressing, two plastic syringes of distilled water and two bandages which you could use to stem the flow of blood, or if you were bitten by a snake. These days they tell you not to use tourniquets. If you are bitten you wrap the bandage with a firm, even pressure along the wounded limb (bad luck if it's your neck, I think), not too tight or you cut off the blood supply. If the blood cannot get to the tissue, the tissue starts to die. People have lost limbs. You use a firm, even pressure to slow the movement of the toxins through your body. You keep the limb as still as possible and get to a hospital. If you can, you give the doctors a clear description of the snake, its shape and size and colouring, so that they can find the antidote.