Ways to Come Home

by Kate Mathieson

  I don’t know where I am going.

  The sun sets. It floats on the delta water for the longest time. A murmuration of birds appear in the north and they flutter in changing V and W shapes across the sky.

  Streaks of lilac and indigo appear not long after, and then everything turns the shady haze of dusky smoke. Shapes and shadows begin to merge before all the light is sucked to the other side of the earth and we lie in the peaty, earthy smell of absolute darkness.

  Over the river, fireflies zip across the night sky, giving our camp a yellow and green glow. The moon swallows the sky and perhaps her glow lights everything in her path. Lighting the shadows I don’t want lit; the places tucked away. I am uneasy. Something’s happening, but I can’t reach it. Smoke without shape.

  We pack up after dinner. Small tables, fold-up chairs. Someone has found my jewellery box underneath the crates, still carefully wrapped, from the truck. I wasn’t sure how it even got out here.

  ‘Is this yours?’

  Isn’t it just. I can’t get away from it now.

  While everyone sits around the fire I take the locked box to my tent, put it on the floor and stare at it. I don’t bother to unwrap it because I know what lies beneath.

  For as long as I can remember, I have pretended not to be me. I was told it was wrong to be wild – and found myself apologising for being the woman I was.

  Too sensitive. Too wild. Too weird. Too loud. Too soft. Too dancey. Too untamed. Too strange. Too hopeful. Too hippy. Too strong. Too caring. Too real. Too honest. Too much. TOO MUCH.

  I took the parts of me that threatened and I banished her, muzzled her, caged her, lest people find out that I was not good and happy and nice and neat and clean. I locked her away, but she haunted me, wailing in there, wanting out.

  Why do we grind down parts of ourselves; pretend they don’t exist? Shave them off. Lock them away? For what – so we can fit? But how can we ever fit if we are only half of ourselves?

  And all this time, I hadn’t even realised that I’d moulded myself into a shape that was no longer mine. I had forgotten to ask myself what I wanted. I had chosen the life others had offered and so the seed, my soul, lay ungerminated, hard.

  If only I knew the best way to open the locked box, I would. But I can’t risk going mad. Again.

  LILLITH FORGOT. I can’t say when I first noticed. Just after we met? Maybe months later. I wrote long, newsy emails, essays. I waited on her replies like children wait for Christmas. I fidgeted, checked and rechecked my emails, my phone.

  She resurfaced eight months after we’d met. She was on tour in Cairns, could I pop up? I did, I squeezed meetings together, took a day off work and landed in the hot subtropics just before lunch on a Friday. We ate in an old Mexican eatery on a balcony opposite the brown beer river that runs through Cairns, hoping to spot a crocodile.

  For two days we shared meals of beans and rice, slightly warmed in the oven, smothered in cheese. We walked through the street by the river at night and laughed at the humidity, the crazy things it did to our wavy hair. We stole midnight dips in the pool when we could.

  ‘I’ll email you,’ she waved as she boarded the bus to Brisbane and I took a taxi to the airport.

  She didn’t.

  Still, I found myself compelled to write to her. Even though I was yelling into the silence.

  Her emails, when they came, all started the same.

  Kate! I have been so terrible with my communication. Argh! So busy!

  And each email, never more than three lines long, finished just the same.

  I think about you all the time. I promise to write more.

  But she didn’t.

  Like a climber, she left picks in me, places that tethered us. At any time she could hoist herself back into my life and, just as easily, whenever she wanted she could jump away and repel at such a speed, backwards, away from me. She kept coming in, and then out of my life, like she was hard to catch. And for some reason, that was the way she liked it.

  She rarely made it to Sydney. For my twenty-eighth birthday she offered me a cruise around the harbour in the middle of Vivid Sydney – a winter festival of lights. Each part of the city glittered and flickered. An orange octopus glowed with purple tentacles; the Opera House covered in green scales and a kaleidoscope of rainbows; a gigantic pink rabbit outside the Museum of Contemporary Art.

  Inside a glassed ferry we travelled in style, enjoying a three-course meal with matching wines. Over a glass of wine (her only one; she still detested drinking too much), she looked at me. ‘Do you want to go to Egypt?’

  She offered to smuggle me along with the rest of her tour group. ‘Just pay for the flights,’ she waved her hand like a wand. ‘It will be brilliant!’

  I booked leave at work, researched bazaars and pyramids and camels. My excitement grew. I scrolled through flights, finding the best times to go, the cheapest, the shortest journey, the longest. Could I stop over in Dubai?

  I emailed, ‘What are you going to pack? Is it hot? Can we go camel riding?’

  She didn’t respond. She’s busy. I told myself. She’s probably on a plane. I said this like it was a perfect reason to be silent.

  The dates for Egypt came and went. I heard nothing. Like a magician, she had disappeared.

  I didn’t get angry; instead, I got really quiet. There is something disturbing about waiting for people when you know they’d rather be elsewhere.

  IN THE morning, everyone gets up before seven. It’s too hot to stay in the tents. They eat bits of toast grilled on the fire, then dress for the day. There are no showers so they flick water from the delta under their armpits, or spray powdery deodorant onto their clothes.

  I stay in the tent. I say I’m sick, but I’m not.

  I can’t remember what it feels like to be happy – whole and happy. I can’t.

  I listen to them leave, looking for leopards and lions. And I hear them return, some hours later, disappointed. No animals.

  A group gathers outside my tent.

  Are you okay? Do you want some Nurofen?

  I pretend to be asleep but I’m not sure my eyes close once. When they leave I lie there, wide awake, staring at the ceiling of the tent. Then the box.

  Tent. Box.

  Tent.

  Box.

  The rest of the world seems to fall behind a haze of grey clouds. Rain. The sky opens up and refuses to stop. I hear them frantically packing away lunch chairs and tables. Taking the rest of their food to someone’s small tent where they continue to eat and laugh.

  The wind sounds like a ghost woman haunting the earth, furiously ripping up trees, wailing and crazy and unpredictable. Torrential rain guts the camp. There are rivers instead of paths. Clouds congeal into one solid mass, as though the sun will never be let through again. It rains all afternoon. I picture it rushing quickly towards the delta, filling up, breaking the banks. I pray it lifts up our tent pins and carries us somewhere else.

  If I lay floating on the water, arms open to the grand sky above, where would it take me? Would I be swirled around like a leaf, tossed in the lashing wind and rain? Or would the undertow, that which can’t be seen from above, would those currents tug at me, pull me under? If I was in that river now, where would I end up?

  The thought-web begins at once. Stickiness of gossamer, spreading out in each direction, canvassing corners of my mind long since shut. Reopening doors. Prising open locks.

  It’s unravelling itself.

  The rains stop as quickly as they came. Just in time for a blood-red sunset. I smell dinner but don’t come out for it. They make punch (if you can call it that), with wine that they fizzed by shaking hard before opening, lemonade and some of their leftover Zanzibar vodka with pineapple juice.

  Ant stumbles into the tent still early in the night, and falls promptly asleep. She snores slightly and alcohol escapes her lips, filling the tent quickly with its scent.

  I wait until I hear everyone else go into their tents, the steady brea
th of sleep, before I quietly unzip the tent and slip outside. At the edge of the delta, I lie on the sand in the blackness without knowing why. The cool water slinks up into my hair, finds my feet, nibbles at my toes like rats.

  JUST FOUR months ago I was lying in a similar position. On my back. In a place that didn’t belong to me either. That bed had metal straps by the side, in case they decided to restrain me. Luckily, they didn’t.

  I didn’t put up a fight when they admitted me. I knew I belonged there. I felt like I needed to sleep for a thousand years.

  Lillith had arrived just twenty-four hours earlier, in the middle of a bitter cold-snap. We met for dinner. Noodles in Chinatown. She started with apologies about not being in contact. It had been a year. I kept eating floating bits of broccoli, one piece after another, but tasted nothing.

  She reached over. I thought she was going to hold my hand, and half lifted it off the table where it hovered and wobbled, but she grabbed the soy sauce instead. Tipped it across her noodles, drowned them.

  Outside the night had begun to storm. I had to tighten my scarf several times around my neck because the rain came lashing at us, almost sideways. She said it was too wet for me to walk to the station. Come up to her room for tea.

  We rode the lift in silence. She poured me peppermint; lemon ginger for her. She was only staying for two nights but already the room smelt of her – tiger balm and lavender mist.

  I told her the doctors thought I’d had a stroke. Just recently. And now everywhere I looked I saw flashes. My left fingers still hadn’t regained full feeling.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  That was it. Oh.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

  Even though I wasn’t sure at all.

  For a few minutes we sat, blowing cool breath on our boiling mugs. Tea and silence made her talk too. Made her want to fill the gaps.

  ‘I was pregnant before,’ she said into her cup. ‘Before you.’

  I looked at her. ‘Oh?’

  ‘It was an accident. Abortion.’ She uttered the word into her tea cup. ‘That’s what happens,’ she told me, ‘when you know you’re pregnant.’

  I froze. Heard the words she didn’t say. Heard them as though she were shouting in my face.

  I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed my bag. Stumbled out into the night.

  Everything I am, all the thoughts and moments in my life shouldn’t exist.

  The small brown freckle below my right eye.

  Learning how to tie shoelaces.

  Licking cream off a beater.

  My first kiss.

  Can you make something, into nothing?

  She told me this. In passing.

  I realised with sharp awareness, like a slap, that I did not belong. I had never belonged to anyone. I shouldn’t be here. In this world.

  I am an accident.

  I felt myself disappearing. On the way home in the taxi, I grabbed hold of a pair of tweezers from my bag and stabbed it into the fleshy part of my palm. The ends marked me like a bite, made my skin glow red, like a snake had struck me.

  Blood was on my phone. On my clothes.

  Blood smeared the kitchen counter like a child’s finger painting. It smelt of copper and iron. I could taste it.

  Blood dripping from my elbow. There was a puddle on the kitchen floor. Would bleach clean it?

  My wrist pumped furiously.

  I pressed it to my chest. A crimson crescent spread quickly through my white shirt, painting a blood moon, leeching into my favourite cotton top.

  I was put in the mental ward. My tongue was soft and fuzzy. I hadn’t eaten. I was still in my jeans. I remember leaking across the floor, spilling parts of me on their white linoleum, a tea towel wrapped around my arm.

  There was a blur of white, monotonous voices and someone tugging at my wrist as they sewed me back together.

  My lips were numb. I wanted someone to cradle me, but if they came too close I yelled.

  A man down the hall kept running and shouting. He wasn’t wearing shoes. Someone kept following him, tersely saying, ‘Dave. Dave. Get back to bed. Put on some shoes.’

  A woman was wailing and wouldn’t stop.

  Doors hushed opened and closed for faceless people to slip in and out with white tops and silent shoes. I laid down and let sleep take me elsewhere.

  There was the light and darkness that maps day and night, but I couldn’t tell the two apart. I slept most of the time. I didn’t eat. Eating meant I had to sit up, and that felt like it could take all the energy in the world.

  I remembered bits of me, the girl I used to be, like I was falling from the clouds in fragments.

  My stitches were due to come out. I wished they were the dissolvable ones but they weren’t. They were great black ties that sprouted like cats’ whiskers. They needed to be clipped and threaded out the way they went in.

  It didn’t bother me. My wrist – red, raised and marked – was shown to a trainee nurse. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-three.

  She said nothing but I saw judgement etched on her face. She labelled me silently.

  I’m one of THEM. Not right in the head.

  I tried to lighten the mood. ‘What do you think I can tell people? I got caught in a fork fight? I have a pet puma in my yard?’

  She wouldn’t look at me. Finally, she said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  I turned my face away from her and her giant-sized tweezers and watched the blank white hospital wall instead.

  When I woke, two ladies in flowery tops were staring at me over clipboards.

  Have you done this before?

  You didn’t cut vertically, did you know that? You didn’t actually want to die?

  It wasn’t the skin, the muscles that I wanted to cut out, it was a deeper place of secrets and shadows. I stared at the wall and said nothing.

  They took their clipboards and conferred in whispers outside my door. The tall one popped her head back in. We’ll organise your paperwork and discharge you. You can go.

  They called a cab from the front desk. The driver looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  ‘You don’t seem like the type I normally pick up from here.’

  I stared at him. ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘Not you.’

  I looked down at my wrist and it was pink and furrowed like a worm had been burrowing beneath my skin. It wasn’t long after that I left for Africa.

  But that woman I had been in the bed, tied with restraints, kept gnawing at me from the inside out.

  THE NEXT morning rises stubbornly like a moody child. Water laps at the sand. We pack and push our canoes out into the delta water, sliding easily onto the glassy surface. Early morning light shapes the top of the palm trees with an angry red; they look like they’re on fire.

  When we get the chance to stray into the water, I dive in. The bottom is cold, thick with waterweed. Slimy shoots pull at my ankles. Pressing hard on the lake bed in the shallows, or landing with a thud, lures the thick ooze of muddy earth to spread quickly between my toes.

  Brown spotted frogs throat-thump and golden silk orb-weaver spiders spin. Tall reeds engulf my head. A dragonfly flitters an inch above the water forest.

  Other campers are nervous about hippos, pythons and crocs, and do the egg beater with their legs, churning the underworld and staying close to shore.

  I swim out as far as I can before the current becomes too strong, and duck behind a clump of reeds; buds of lilies. I watch the others through the narrow gaps, their movements and sound cut into slits. I see only fragments; and that is enough.

  I hadn’t slept; all night I thought about my wrists. Lillith. The box. The knife.

  Why does the past stick into the present like a log waiting to trip us?

  I consider ducking right under again, kicking my way to the bottom. I have the urgent need to immerse my entire self, nubs of nose and ends of toes, to stay down there for as long as breath will allow. I sli
de quietly under the surface, breaking it with a small ripple, finding the cool skin membrane underneath.

  When Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse, she became enchanted by water. Perhaps Woolf was so in love with it, she just couldn’t bear to leave it, and so when she crouched down in the Ouse river on a March eve, she decided it was less painful to breath it into her lungs, than it was to be back on land. She filled her coat pockets with stones and let the soft arms of the water open, taking her into a shadowy underworld embrace. Her body stayed there, kept by the water world, for another three weeks.

  I lean back, floating, and let the cool water slide its fingers through my hairline. Underneath, my ears fill with water and I hear nothing but the wash of rushes. They could have been eight feet deep or eighty. A haven that keeps safe all the lives I have ever had; all the lives I ever will.

  Out here, the past lies murky below the water, the future spreads out above in the sky, and I am like a chalk mark disappearing into both.

  Only two months ago, in my Australian night sky, Venus was strung hard. Her pearl white glow, an incandescent fire, and Jupiter, large and kind, drew towards her, each night getting closer until they hung perfectly above the crescent moon. From earth we couldn’t tell that one was infinitely larger than the other; that one was a planet of gas, the other a planet of sulfurous heat. Rather, from our place, they looked the same; as if they’d been there all along, perfectly aligned.

  Even when we feel as far apart as Venus and Jupiter, perhaps, our parts don’t need to be entirely separate – they can just be together for a while; in whatever way togetherness might work out.

  I glide past a spider in a web. Painted golden orb legs. Spinning, spinning, forever spinning.

  The smell of deep earth and cool streams. I stretch my hands wide and let my fingertips trawl and trace against the reeds. They bow slightly as we touch.

  I have always visited the water when time on the ground found me irritated, agitated, out of place, despairing. Oceans mostly – the salt spray seems to cleanse away time. It undoes memories and lets them seep out of my skin, like dye into water.