Pulse Points

by Jennifer Down

We walked the dense trail that followed the stream. Yoni stopped once in a while to point out old grinding stones to me, herons to Poppy. The three of us stood on an old stone bridge to examine the ducklings in the stream below. I’d expected Poppy to whinge, but she was a good, stoic walker. When at last she fell against Yoni and announced, My legs are tired, we turned back again. She ran on ahead anyway, singing to herself in a fuck-you sort of a way that made me love her and see her as a small person for the first time.

  ‘I like your hair like that,’ Yoni said.

  ‘I didn’t have much choice,’ I said. It had grown back in dark and curly tufts, uneven at first, and my eyebrows coarse. I’d kept wearing woollen hats for a long time, which made me realise I was vain, after all.

  ‘It suits you,’ she said. ‘Even the grey suits you. You look like a middle-aged actress in a French film.’

  ‘Am I fucking the swim instructor? Or am I on a train contemplating suicide because my husband is fucking the swim instructor?’

  ‘God, you’re so difficult,’ Yoni said. It was very easy to make her laugh. We were back at the start of the trail, the place where the world was marked EASY-GOING.

  A few days, Yoni and I drove out to small towns, only thirty or forty minutes from where they lived. High Bradfield, Castleton, Hathersage. They were like something from the bucolic Friday-night English murder mysteries our mother loved. I wished she’d had a chance to see the absurd green of it all, the lambs, the crumbling stone, the wisteria hanging from the awnings of the old pubs. I said dumbly, over and over again, that it was like a postcard. Yoni tilted her head as if looking at an abstract painting and said, I suppose I’ve stopped seeing it like that.

  ‘It’s funny—Yoni sounds more Australian when she’s talking to you,’ Gideon said one evening. We’d just finished dinner.

  ‘I think you sound almost completely English,’ I said to her.

  ‘It wasn’t really conscious. I still don’t sound like I’m from Sheffield.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you’re from the north at all,’ Gideon said.

  ‘I guess I sound more like you,’ Yoni said.

  ‘You’re not really English, though,’ Gideon said. ‘You don’t have that British bashfulness.’

  Yoni rolled her eyes. ‘Everything embarrasses you.’

  Gideon turned to me. ‘Last week we were at the fish-and-chip shop and the woman was wrapping up our stuff and she went to put it into a plastic bag. And Yoni literally took the package from her and said, We don’t need the bag.’ He spread his hands. I realised the punchline had come and gone.

  ‘They’re bad for the environment,’ Yoni said.

  ‘I was mortified,’ Gideon said.

  ‘We had a fight about it outside the shop,’ Yoni said.

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I reached for Gideon’s and Yoni’s plates, all crusts, congealed sauce and picked bones. I carried them to the kitchen. I looked through the window while the sink filled. The last of the day’s sunlight fell across the climbing rose. It refracted from the garden hothouse in prisms of gold. The garden was pretty by accident, not through care. Yoni was hopeless with plants. Weeds sprouted between the pavers, and there were patches of disturbed earth from her failed attempts at various flowers.

  I was almost finished with the dishes when she came to stand beside me. She picked up the tea towel and began to dry the plates in a dreamy way.

  ‘I know you hate it when he talks like that,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not going to defend him to you.’

  ‘I don’t want you to. I am very grateful to you both for having me. I know how much you love him,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘It is okay,’ she said. We were both looking at the hothouse, both blinded by the glare.

  We went into town. It rained. The bus windows were clouded with condensation, and Poppy drew wonky hearts with her fingers. We had coffee with a few of Yoni’s friends. They were pleasant women. They laughed at small things. They pierced juice boxes with straws and passed them to waiting hands, stroked hair from foreheads, unzipped parkas without taking their eyes from each other as they spoke. My favourite was a Glaswegian woman. She worked as a sex-education officer at the university. When her little boy tugged at her shirt and began to chant, Mummy mummy mummy, she closed her hand over his, but did not turn from me. The message passed between them: the kid quietened instantly. It was so potent I almost forgot what I was saying. It was their signal, she explained when he was out of earshot. He knows I’ve heard him, but he also knows he’d better not bloody interrupt me.

  Afterwards we walked across town, Poppy asleep in her stroller, to the winter garden. I’d expected a nineteenth-century hothouse, but it was a modern building, its ceiling made of elegant timber arches.

  There was a group of schoolchildren, all in yellow hi-vis vests, clustered together eating lunch under the eye of their teacher. Their voices echoed in the space. I told Yoni about Gillian’s hand signal.

  ‘She’s clever, isn’t she,’ Yoni said.

  ‘It’s another language just for them,’ I said. The rain had started again, hard. I could see it smearing the ceiling of the glasshouse over the great palm leaves. ‘When they were all asking me if I had children—’

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Yoni looked destroyed. ‘You were very gracious.’

  ‘No—I didn’t care. But it would have made everyone uncomfortable if I’d said, Oh, I can’t have them now but it’s all right.’

  ‘You could have them,’ she said uncertainly. ‘You have options.’

  ‘If I’d said I don’t want them, then.’

  ‘I think illness frightens people,’ she said.

  ‘I am forty-two years old,’ I said.

  In the adjoining Millennium Gallery there was a John Ruskin exhibition. I’d never heard of him, but the plaques told me he was a Victorian writer who’d created a museum especially for the workers, to bring them culture. It was open in the evenings and on Sundays to allow the workers time to view the collection. Ruskin stipulated that the objects—the etchings, sculptures, poems, mosaics, paintings—be few and carefully selected so as to not overwhelm or bore the workers. Poppy was still asleep. Yoni and I were a long time moving around the room. We whispered to each other in a kind of truce. We stood before a display of minerals and I told her what I remembered about them.

  ‘What about lapis lazuli?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s supposed to have powerful healing energy. Enhances memory and learning abilities. Balances the energies of the throat chakra, blah, blah.’

  I looked at our ref lection in the glass case. Her arms were crossed, her brow tight. ‘What if it’s bullshit?’

  ‘Well, it probably is,’ I said. We looked at each other. We began to laugh.

  By Sunday, my last day, the children had come down with head colds. Yoni and Gideon were terrified they’d pass it on to me, even though I kept telling them I was all better, I’d been better for months, and how could I have travelled for thirty hours on a plane if I was worried about germs. Yoni was also bitter about the weather. The sky was dark and heaving.

  ‘We were supposed to go out to the Peaks,’ she said, sounding crushed.

  ‘We can still go,’ I said.

  ‘Look at the sky.’

  ‘The worst that’ll happen is we’ll get wet,’ I said. ‘It’s not really cold.’

  ‘How about if I look after the girls and you two just go,’ Gideon said.

  Yoni looked doubtfully at Mila’s dripping nose. She glanced at me.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

  We stopped for Irish coffee on the way.

  ‘We should have done this the other way around,’ Yoni said. ‘We’ll need something to warm up afterwards.’

  ‘We can get another one,’ I said. We were sitting in the window of an old pub. Its panes were brown and distorted with age, framed with lace curtains. Yoni propped her chin in her palm, smiled. She lo
oked very tired. There were pennies stuffed into the hollows of the roof beams. When I pointed them out she went, Oh, yeah in a toneless voice. Walking back to the car we passed a bakery.

  ‘Look,’ I said, squinting in, ‘the Ruskin loaf. He’s everywhere.’

  ‘Mm, there’s a bakery around the corner from home does one the same. It’s Gid’s favourite. He loves Ruskin.’

  ‘I bet he does,’ I said nastily without knowing what I meant by it.

  ‘You can’t not trust him because he went to university,’ Yoni said.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Because he teaches at a university, then.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I said. ‘You or I could have gone to university. We have HECS.’

  ‘It’s called something else now,’ she said. She unlocked the car. ‘Anyway, you were looking after Mum. You couldn’t even consider it.’

  When I finished school I worked in a café for a couple of years, then a bicycle repair shop. I went to TAFE and studied drafting. I did that for a while. Then I worked at a holistic healing practice. That was where the crystals came in. I only ever took bookings, but my boss liked me to know what I was talking about. I got another certificate and worked at a respite-care facility for intellectually disabled adults out in Warrnambool. I was living with a bloke there. When we split up I moved back to the city and never looked for another job in care. Our mother used to say, You only ever stick with anything long enough to get good at it. If she was right, I didn’t really see the problem with it.

  ‘I’ve got nothing against Gideon,’ I said.

  Yoni turned the key in the ignition. ‘You’re like a reverse snob.’ We didn’t speak the whole way to the Peaks trail, or while we walked. It was not far, nor very steep. I kept turning to look at the view. We were higher up than I’d thought. The wind was powerful. I zipped my jacket over my lips.

  ‘That’s a concrete factory,’ Yoni said, pointing to a greyish, hulking building in the distance. ‘Sort of spoils the view.’ It was so windy we were standing with our legs spread, knees bent, bracing ourselves. The green rolled on forever. Blurry horizon: it was already raining on the distant hills. I leaped up in the air and landed a foot from where I’d jumped.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Yoni said.

  ‘The wind is so strong that it actually pushes you backwards. Do it.’

  She hesitated, then jumped. Her hair whipped across her face, loose from its plait. She hitched her leggings up around her crotch. ‘These are too big,’ she said, ‘and when they start to slide down I can feel the wind around my vag.’ She laughed and I did, too. My nose and eyes were streaming.

  I walked out across the cliff, half-rock, half-grass, to where the ground fell away. I stood a few feet back from the edge. I looked down at the concrete factory, at the cartography of the dry stone walls and unpaved roads.

  ‘Don’t go any further,’ Yoni called. ‘You’re scaring me.’

  I turned to walk back to her, to the safety of the plateau’s centre. I held out my arms and leaned into the wind. It buffeted my whole body, puffed up my windbreaker. I felt as if I were floating. ‘Do it,’ I said. She had that same uncertain expression on her face.

  ‘Yoni,’ I said. ‘Put your arms out.’

  She came to stand beside me in the crucifixion pose.

  ‘It’s like flying,’ she said. She was breathless. I could hear voices coming up the trail, carried on the turbulent air, but for a moment it was just the two of us in the whole world.

  ETERNAL FATHER

  At the end of my shift I put on a fresh pot of coffee and have a cup with JJ. We always do when we work together. He’s my favourite of the cooks. Today he tells me a story about his granddaughter. Last week it was her third birthday. He phoned her in the morning. She was confused, he says. She kept saying, ‘But Poppy, where did my two go?’ He chuckles when he says it and I can tell he really loves her.

  It’s one of those mornings when the day doesn’t ever really break. More snow coming. It’s almost eight-thirty, but the sky is low and leaden. It makes the world feel small. The roads haven’t been salted yet.

  At home the red light on my answering machine is winking. I am the only person I know who still has one. But cell reception is patchy around here, and the tiny tapes remind me of when I was small. Mom and I would record a new greeting message every year.

  It’s Deenie on the machine. There’s a show in Elizabethton tonight. It’ll be fun, she says, promise. The two of us could use a little circuit-breaker right now. I’ll come pick you up so you don’t have to drive. My place is out of her way. She must really want a friend.

  I met Deenie working at a titty bar in Johnson City. I hadn’t been there long when she got into money trouble with the owner. Then she found out how old I was. It took her about three days to find us both another job at an all-night café in Elizabethton. They were only looking for one waitress but she convinced them to take us as a package deal. We still work there.

  Deenie looks the way you want a waitress to look. She’s five foot nothing, tiny, but round in the places that matter. All her features are exaggerated—huge hazel eyes, full lips, big teeth, mass of dark hair that she puts up in a bun when she’s at work. Her little boy died of crib death. It happened right before I met her, but it was a long time before she told me. Sometimes in the night she wakes up and his face is pressed up against hers. She says it’s the most terrifying feeling in the world. She’s paralysed when it happens. She got his name tattooed in curly letters under one tit. One of the cooks, Lenny, is crazy about her, but she always says, I don’t shit where I eat. I think she’s smart.

  I tell Deenie’s voicemail I’ll come to the show. I eat a spoonful of peanut butter and half an apple. Then I put on my long johns and boots and drive to Carver’s Gap. The parking lot is empty. I stuff my thermos, crampons and headlamp in my pack and cross the road to the trailhead.

  I never started hiking until I lived here. There are a ton of trails out this way, and a lot of people come to see the rhododendron garden in the spring. This time of year their leaves are iced over, and sometimes I can walk for hours and not see another soul. It’s funny how there are certain things you learn about yourself pretty late. Like, I’d never thought of myself as being a person who enjoys the outdoors, but it turns out I am.

  I like all weather. The light out here in winter is one of the cleanest, most peaceful things I know. In the spruce forest by the trailhead it’s bluish, spiked with gold when it’s sunny. The world is silent when I’m walking through that balsam. Out on the balds it’s quiet, too, but windier, and it’s me, too, my body, making noise; the silvery sliding of my waterproofed limbs, my boots on the snow, my steady breath. The snow and ice make for hard work. By the time I reach Engine Gap, my calves are on fire. One time JJ drew me a diagram of lactic acid and how it works. I don’t know how he knows about that stuff, but I always think of it when I’m hiking.

  This part of the Appalachian trail switchbacks across the Tennessee–North Carolina state line. I like it for that, though maybe not everyone would care. When I was a kid I thought I’d never leave Louisiana. Then we did leave, after Katrina, but it was just the same in Florida. My mom had this way of making every place feel suffocating. In my eighth-grade geography classroom I used to stare at the map tacked to the wall. Our state flower was the orange blossom, our animal the Florida panther. Gainesville was marked with a blue star. It seemed impossibly distant from any borders. It turned out to be not so far. It was a sleep on a bus. That summer I was fifteen.

  Here are some reasons why I like hiking: it encourages you to look for signs and signals, and also to make your own. There are obvious ones like blazes and cairns and tape, but if you want to pay attention it’s easy to see where things have changed in small ways—a bit of your own jumper lint caught on a branch, animal tracks in dirt, and so on. Sometimes other hikers leave you messages, too. A branch over something that looks like a trail, but is actual
ly a dry creek bed—they’re telling you not to go that way. And I never sign them, but I like to read the guest books that some shelters have, and see other people’s drawings and notes.

  It teaches you to be prepared. I don’t think you need hiking sticks or those ridiculous water bladders or packs the rich tourists carry, but I always take extra snacks and flares and my headlamp. I have a ref lective blanket that folds down real small, a knife, things like that. Nothing bad has ever happened to me, but you have to take at least a little care. You’d be surprised how dumb people can be.

  Today there’s a cold disturbance in the air. The mountains are disappearing in cloud cover. The kind of weather that looks ugly in a city. I walk as far as the barn at Yellow Mountain Gap and drink my coffee sitting at the picnic table. The air freezes the coffee droplets at the lip of my thermos, the sweat on the back of my neck, the damp hair at my temples. I try to pee, but my body won’t work in the cold. I watch the billowing sky, squatted, with my ass to the snow. Mist rolling in over Roaring Creek. Time to turn back.

  Last time I saw Carson he showed me a catalogue. He’d circled a watch, one of those fancy outdoor ones with a compass and a GPS. It could tell you how high up you were. It was chunky and black. He said, How would you like something like that for Christmas? I had to find a gentle way to tell him it was too much for him to buy, too much for me to accept. Too heavy a thing for us.

  By the time I make it back to the car, it’s near dark. At home I strip off all my layers and take a Xanax. I run the bath as hot as I can stand. The shampoo’s frozen. I lie in the tub with the bottle between my thighs. Knuckly red chilblains are blooming across my fingers. I should have warmed up gradually. My problem is that I’ve never had much patience for discomfort.

  Deenie comes by after seven. I open the door to her jiggling up and down to keep warm. She’s wearing a puffy jacket and tight jeans and boots with a little heel. She has butterfly clips in her hair. She fixes her eyeliner in front of the speckled hall mirror while I check all the lights and slide a hot water bottle under my quilt for later.