Walking to the Moon (20 page)

By the time I saw my mother again I was fourteen. There was another long letter first, hand-written in blue biro, in which she talked about her ‘journey' and ‘healing' and about her and Hil growing up on a farm an hour's drive from the nearest town, and their father who drank and their mother who drowned—this was the only part of the letter that I found interesting, the silent father and the dead mother and the two little girls, the one who became my mother and the other who was and always will be Hil.

I asked Hil about it later, in a roundabout sort of way to try and trick her into talking, but she just stood up from the couch where we had been drinking cocoa and brushed her palms brusquely on her jeans and said it was all old history now and that was how it should be, and that was that and it was time she got down to the Dump. I was cross with myself for not thinking it through or remembering that the best way to find out about Hil was to get her talking about someone else.

Three afternoons a week at three o'clock she still walks up the small steep street behind the cottage to the redbrick hall she talked council into turning into a youth club, and stays there until closing time at ten. When I was a kid and still living with Stuart, she used to pick me up from school and we would walk there together hand in hand, and there I would wait until Stuart came and got me. At first I did not want to go. I was scared of the kids, although I did not say so to Hil. For the first few weeks, she tells me, I would not come out from the little glass-fronted office where she paid accounts and organised fundraising and spoke to parole officers and sometimes angry parents. But there was a trampoline and pretty soon there were friends, and besides, there was no choice. These kids were disadvantaged and it was up to Hil to look after them. I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I was disadvantaged and no one made any fuss about me, least of all Hil.

In her letter, my mother wrote that she had been very unhappy when I was a child, but that this was not my fault and that there had not been a day since that she had not thought of me; that she was coming to Australia next month for a couple of weeks and that she very much hoped I would see her. She did not say she was sorry; not that a letter would have been the place for it.

We met, for reasons I can no longer remember, outside the North Sydney swimming pool where, as it turned out, she had just swum. Her wavy brown hair, longer now, was still wet and there were reddish indents around her eyes where her goggles had been. We were the only two standing there, so it was not hard to find her. She apologised immediately for her dishevelled state and wondered aloud whether she might have been trying to disguise herself, to give herself the advantage of recognising me first. I said it was fine and that I was not sure I would have known her anyway. She looked smaller than I remembered and thinner, and somehow less, although her arms were brown and sinewy. Beside her I felt pale and soft. She spoke with an American accent, which I had not expected. She said she had borrowed a car from a friend and could give me a lift back to Bondi afterwards if I wanted. I told her I was planning on having a swim myself, nodding at my shoulder bag. She laughed a little too fast and made a joke about blood and water that I did not catch, and her hand flitted for a moment towards my forearm, as if to touch, then dropped away. Beyond the pool was the harbour with its bridge and ferries and its hundreds of small white handkerchiefs. My mother looked from me to the water and back, and perhaps there was a flicker then, something deep between us. Her eyes were green. I asked if she was going to see my dad and she said no.

I don't remember much more. We went and sat on a bench from where we could look at the view, and while she watched it I watched her, and tried to make sense of her strange new face, which was creased and beautiful and after a while gave me a headache. As we sat, she lit herself a cigarette, for which she also apologised. She asked after Hil and nodded repeatedly as I told her that she had bought herself a cottage around the corner from Stuart and me, and about the Dump. And my mother kept nodding, like a sharp bright bird, and said of course, she remembered. I didn't know why she had asked, as I was sure that she must know all this. She said, ‘Do you think she is happy?' I shrugged and said I supposed so.

‘I miss her,' said my mother. ‘She thinks I have done the wrong thing.' As she sat, she leaned forwards from her hips as if into a strong wind. She said, ‘You must be very angry with me,' and I shrugged again and said I didn't really feel like talking. She nodded. I felt bad for her, but I still didn't want to say anything. After a while she said that she had made a mess of things. Then she said that she was doing a degree in psychology and that Ted, who I supposed must be her husband, was building her a studio in the garden where she could work and that I had a half brother whose name I promptly forgot. Soon after I asked if she could drive me home as I wasn't feeling well.

When we got to Bondi, she parked a little way from the house and got out of the car when I did. I was scared for a moment that she would try to hug me, but instead she held out her hand and we shook. She had warm hands and long useful fingers with short bitten nails. The next day, she rang to see if I wanted to come to Manly with her on the ferry. I said no, that I had homework, and she left me a phone number and asked me to call. Hil said that it might be good for me to spend some time with her. ‘She's your mother, mate.' I said I hadn't noticed, and anyway I hadn't seen Hil rushing off to visit her.

‘She smokes now, you know,' I said.

‘She knows where I am,' said Hil.

I went to bed. I didn't call and when the phone rang I didn't answer it. She wrote when she got back to America, giving me her details and telling me to write or ring any time. She underlined the last two words. I thought about it once or twice but that was all. I found her alarming. As if somebody had taken away the mother I once had, and replaced her with a counterfeit.

Once or twice a week at the nursing home I used to help Viv out with paperwork in the office. I had started updating her filing system, though not officially; she wouldn't have liked that.

‘Just bringing you into the new millennium,' I told her.

Viv had been there for thirty-five years, and she still had the details of every resident who had passed through the place filed alphabetically in concertina files above the desk.

‘Who's this?' I said one day as I was idling in the office.

‘Marjorie Walker. Who's Marjorie Walker?'

‘Oh, Marjorie.' Viv paused for a moment, tilted her head. ‘She was here in the early eighties, I think. Eighty-two. Eighty-three she died. I think it was March. She had a big funeral up in Willoughby, I think it was. She came from money. Her husband was in copper. Or zinc. Something metally.'

‘But she's been dead nearly twenty years.'

‘Yes.'

‘So why have you got her filed in here next to Mrs Wong from room thirty-three?'

‘W. Walker. Wong. No, that can't be right. We've had a Weston. Joyce. And a couple of Wilsons. At least two, there was Reg and his wife. Come here. Give it to me.'

‘Viv,' I said after a minute. She was still flicking her way through the file, lips pursed, trying to find the missing Wilsons. ‘Why have you got all the living people mixed in with the dead ones?'

‘Why not? There's no point changing it all around, it will disrupt my system. I know where everyone is.'

‘But couldn't you at least have one new file, with just the people who are here now? I could do it for you if you want. And then when they die, or leave, you could file them with the others.'

‘No,' she said briskly, climbing up on the piano stool to put the W file back on its shelf. ‘It's fine as it is.'

‘Don't you get sick of clambering up and down every time you want a file?'

‘Not that I'd noticed.'

But about a week later she stopped me in the corridor on my way back from breakfast. ‘All right,' she said. ‘You can come in and do a new file for me. And you can tidy up the rest, make sure they're in order. But that's all. I don't want anything messed up or thrown out. Don't go reading anything you shouldn't. All right?'

I started with the A's. Abbot, Allen. Anderson, Rose—take her out and put her in the file of the living, for now at least. The manila folders were mainly taken up with medical records: diagnoses, prognoses, medications, test results. As well as information on each resident's discharge or death. Then there were other bits and pieces that Viv had seen fit to conserve. Christmas cards from relatives thanking Viv and her staff for the work they were doing. Receipts from the man who came to fix the washing machine. Pamphlets from pharmaceutical companies. Cards written in wavering script from long-dead residents.

The names thinned out at the end of the alphabet. A surge of W's. Weston (Joyce), Williams (three of them), Wirth, Wirihana, the two Wilsons, a Watson, two Wongs. Even, I noted, a White. X Y and Z shared a file. Xanthopoulous. Xuerab. Somehow a P had found its way in here with the X's. Parker. Xanthe Parker, her first name, so much more exotic than her second, taking precedence in one of Viv's distracted moments. Xanthe Parker had been dead eight years. I wondered if Viv would know where to find her now. Probably. Eight or nine Y's, a couple of Z's. I flicked along the name markers dividing each file, and stopped at Young. It was habit more than intent that stopped my thumb, a matter of placement; this is where I fit. There were two Youngs. And even though some part of me must have anticipated it, it was with a little startle that I found my name on the second. Jessica Young. I wondered if Viv would call this reading something that I shouldn't.

The file was thick with papers. I glanced quickly at the card in front—name, date of birth, admission date, and then more cards bearing details of my condition and circumstances. Diagnoses, medications, test results (inconclusive). There was an envelope, addressed to Vivienne Elder; something familiar about it. Checking the date on the postmark—two weeks after my illness began—and realising of course that the writing was Hil's. Her chunky long-hand marching across the page, inside as well, two sheets. She doesn't type, won't use a word processor. ‘Dear Viv, I know it's been a long time, but I could do with your help again, if you can manage. My niece—' I stopped reading and folded the letter back into its envelope, following the creases, and buried it back in the file. Moving swiftly, without thought, to the next entry, the other Young. Glancing at the name. Isn't that strange, I thought—that odd lag the mind engineers under pressure—she has the same name as my mother. What a coincidence. And then I realised it was not a coincidence, that of course it was my mother, my mother's file. I didn't know how I knew, no one had told me she was ever here, it just settled on me with a clear certainty. And I realised also—but as if I had always known it, the brain still working backwards—that this was why the place had always seemed familiar. First, in fact, the recognition of the familiarity, and then the other understanding slotting quickly, efficiently into place. Effect and cause. The mind separating now into layers or planes, each operating independently but in unison, each producing or retrieving its own insights or images; the mind's contents unstacked and laid out before me. I had come here when I was little. I remembered the bronze plaque next to the front door. The slack face against the pillow. (‘Dear Viv, I could do with your help again.')

‘Give your mum a kiss, mate.' Hil.

‘That's not my proper mummy.' I am not yet three.

And as quickly as it had opened, the mind closing, reassembling, stacking up. Tightness at the base of my skull; that's the shock. My hand, I noticed, was shaking. In an envelope stuck to the inside front cover of the file was her card, written in spidery black handwriting that even now I recognised as Viv's. She had been admitted in November, a little over two years before she left for America. Age, 33; the same as me. Underneath, in Viv's truncated notes, I could make out the words ‘valium' and ‘depression'. I closed the folder.

‘Well of course they were there. I thought you would have known.' Viv was in on her way to a meeting. ‘You didn't have to read them.'

‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘Well, as I say, I thought you knew. And besides, it wasn't up to me.'

Hil was no better. ‘We didn't think you'd remember,' she said at last. ‘You only came the once.'

‘You're not sick, you know, not really,' said Viv one day soon after, as I sat at the roll-top desk, putting stamps on envelopes. Overdue accounts. ‘Not any more. You're a bit weak still, that's all. You should get back to Sydney. To your friends. Family.' It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was slanting through the window on to the couch, where George the cat was asleep, stretched out on the padded floral arm.

‘I'm still doing quite a bit of work with Anna,' I said. ‘It's odd that Rose's family hasn't paid.'

‘You shouldn't really be seeing those accounts,' said Viv, sounding annoyed, as if she had not asked me to sort through them.

‘They're private. You're not meant to know who's paid and who hasn't, all the other residents. Anyway, you can still see Anna Greene; nothing to stop you from seeing her. She's got her own practice.'

‘Yes, I know.'

I licked the last stamp and stuck it down smoothly with my thumb.

‘I wonder,' says Anna, ‘if we might do an exercise. Would you like to do an exercise? It's very simple, and quite energising.'