Read Online Walking to the Moon by Kate Cole-Adams - Free Book Online

asked as I shrugged the pack over my shoulders.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Tell me how that is in your body,’ said Anna.
    â€˜How what is?’
    â€˜Nothing.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Tell me how it is to feel nothing.’
    â€˜That’s the whole point,’ I said, irritated. ‘I don’t feel anything. I feel nothing. It’s like a black box.’
    â€˜Can you describe the box?’ she said.
    Silence.
    â€˜How big is it?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜What is it made from? How does it feel?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Can you tell me what might it say?’ she asked again, in a quiet voice. ‘What does it need?’
    â€˜It doesn’t need anything,’ I said quickly, surprising myself at the force of my voice. I knew, even as I spoke, that I’d given something away, unprepared, that she knew more about me than I had intended.
    I waited for her to say something, but she was silent. After a couple of moments, still looking down, I said, ‘It would ask for help.’
    When I looked up she nodded slowly.
    â€˜But?’ she said.
    â€˜But what?’
    â€˜It would say, help me, but what?’
    â€˜I don’t know what you mean.’
    â€˜Help me, but keep away? Is that what it would say?’
    I looked down, then up again into her eyes.
    â€˜Yes. That is what it would say.’
    When I lie awake in the early hours of the morning, sometimes, if I can let it, if I don’t clench against it, everything starts to move. A rolling, swirling motion. I think of the inside of storm clouds, air and water billowing incessantly, changing shape. If I am relaxed enough, close enough to sleep, I let myself go with it and then I too am just movement, a building up and breaking down, drifting and recompiling. In the moments that I am in it, the sensation is exquisite, a delicate rushing, a dismantling. Occasionally I stay with it and am adrift in bliss. Normally, though, what happens is a sort of vertigo or motion sickness. The self starts to reassert itself, a shadow at the edges, a grey wash that works to separate me from other, to define me. And with this comes constriction, contraction. My body tenses, my mind makes shapes. I hold myself still.
    â€˜Try saying it,’ she said.
    â€˜Saying what?’
    â€˜Help me. But keep away.’
    â€˜Now?’
    â€˜That’s right. Help me, but keep away. Try it out.’
    I looked away, towards the door, outside which I could hear the shuffle-drag of someone moving along the corridor behind a walking frame. It must be nearly time. I glanced back across Anna’s shoulders to the small round