Walking to the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

from dirt bikes. I pass a blackened ring containing scorched tin cans and shards of brown glass and a little further on a rusted car exhaust protruding from the undergrowth.
    The path drops and divides, one half disappearing to the right into an overgrown track, the other dipping towards a group of white-skinned gums. The grove, I call it, though it is not. It may once have been a forest. The trees hold themselves like dancers and I walk among them powered by the deep combustion of breath. I do not think. Trees, birds, air, soil, self, light, in no particular order. The air cooling now, gathering scent and colour and sound, the looping cries of the currawongs. Cool in. Warm out. An exchange. And all around, the slow turbulence of the leaves.
    At the top of the next rise, the forest drops away to scrub, and looking back I can see the shifting canopy and, above it, the clouds, which have been combed across the sky by some high wind. I squat and breathe. At my feet are small sticky seed pods, open now, and splayed into shapes of children’s stars and flowers. The flesh that once contained the seeds is hard and nutty, the very wood peeled back by the force of expulsion.
    One night I wake to the sounds of shouting down the corridor. A man’s hoarse roar that stops as quickly as it starts. The swimmer. I lie for a long time afterwards in the dark, trying to push away the thoughts. How does a person drown? When I was nine I tried to do it in the bath. I wanted to see how it would feel. I stayed under until my cheeks were aching and there was a black beat at the base of my skull. ‘That’s not how you do it,’ a girl at school said. ‘You’ve got to open your mouth and let the water in. You have to breathe it.’

I rena is going home. Mr Ivanovich has organised wheelchair ramps and an invalid bathroom, and for their bedroom a new king-sized bed. Carers will come for an hour in the morning and two in the evening, to bathe and dress her or prepare her for bed. One evening a week, someone else will come and look after her so that Mr Ivanovich can go out and play cards with his friends, drink a little vodka. On Tuesdays, Irena tells me, the card-players will come to their house. ‘Then I will serve them pelmeni and wear my new high shoes,’ she says and snorts with laughter. But when she finishes, she is quiet, staring at the ceiling. For a moment she looks sad or frightened. I squeeze her shoulder lightly, and she turns towards me. ‘Time you go too, Jess. I go home; you go home.’ She nods emphatically.
    After she has gone, the cleaner goes in. Five years of life. Behind the heater he finds a toy car, a blue pencil, a ring. When he has left, taking the last traces of Irena, I slip into the room and lie on her bed and stare at the ceiling. Above me, barely visible in the light, are the shapes of stars and planets, a slip of moon. I wonder how Irena will feel tonight in a big new bed, staring at an empty ceiling.
    The next day, when I wake from my afternoon nap, her room is filled with voices. Viv’s, the sandy doctor’s, a woman, loud and insistent: ‘This is just temporary, until we can find somewhere more suitable. He shouldn’t be here.’
    â€˜He shouldn’t be moved too soon,’ says the doctor.
    â€˜And as I said over the phone, we’ll have our own specialist working with him. He’s flying in tomorrow.’
    â€˜Yes, well I don’t want it disturbing the other residents,’ says Viv.
    When I walk past later the door is closed but I can hear the outline of voices. The woman’s sharp peaks; a man’s smoother curves. They are still there when I get back from my walk, and they keep talking, back and forth, until I fall asleep.
    The following morning when I walk past the room on my way downstairs to breakfast, the door is half open. Peering in, I can see a woman’s broad back slumped in one of Viv’s moulded plastic chairs at