Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove Page B

lips very slowly and resolutely.
    â€˜Father gave me too much schooling for them. My head was always in the books. These men didn’t want anyone who could turn out to be smarter than them.’
    She opens her eyes, shockingly yellow, and turns her head to me. Her voice changes, ridiculing the accents of village matrons.
    â€˜All that book learning and where did it get her?’
    She laughs a small dry laugh.
    â€˜At least I wasn’t out tilling the fields for a man’s brats, putting food on the table for them.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜The only one who wanted me was a widower. He had too many children and I was far too young. Only fourteen and didn’t know how to cook or clean like the other girls. And as you know I had a baby of my own to look after.’
    This she says under her breath, with sadness.
    We drowse together, my leg beneath hers, afraid to move it for fear of waking her. My pins and needles are shooting stars, the electricity of my dreams. Lying on my side, the weight of my belly resting on a pillow, my mouth near her ear: I let myself breathe openly, long and deep, close my eyes, see the greenness of light from behind closed lids, open them again.
    Alcmene snores gently. The birds outside argue. They fight about the position of nests. I close my eyes again, surrender to the greeny blackness. At the bottom of a still pool, an earthy pool in a forest glade. Lying on my side in the mud, sloshing my toes, squirming my fingers. Nostrils thick with soil. My child kicking out arms and legs inside me. A screen of leaves obscuring the sky. The sound of female voices as if from very far away: speaking a language of rises and falls, of drawn-out vowels. They carry me with them on these waves of sound, freeing my body, splitting consciousness. Am I here or aren’t I? Grunting out my baby, looking up at the pattern of the oak-leaves, giving birth with no effort at all. A sense of loss for only a moment – then release. A newborn child gurgling at the bottom of the still pool, hardly disturbing its tranquility.
    Zeus and Chthonia, looking down. The Earth Goddess smiling. The Sky God with half-closed eyes, indifferent in his appraisal. My mother told me the story when I was very young, I didn’t understand. Zeus married the Earth Goddess and wove the whole world as a mantle for her. He spread it over an oak, the world tree. There’s beauty and ugliness here, good and bad in this story, haste and grace. He swiftly made her pregnant, as is the old way. She gave birth to the first being, the spherical god. He was only held together by the love principle, by the spirit of Eros. When Eros prevails, the world also is one, but when Neikos the god of discord arrives; the world crumbles, falls apart.
    16
    SYDNEY, SPRING, 2017
    I SIT ON the front verandah, my mother in bed behind me in the dark room. I can’t tell anymore whether she’s asleep or awake. She can’t move at all now, not even a hand. Her mouth hangs permanently open. She looks dead. I wish she were dead – for both our sakes. Then I feel guilty again for allowing the thought.
    From my vantage point I can survey the length of Darlinghurst Road, watch homeless men carousing in the park opposite and women in black drinking lattes across the road, without being seen myself. My bare feet are up on the balustrade; I look across at my mother, crinkling my eyes against the glare of the afternoon. Her eyes are open, and she seems to be looking away, out through the French doors and over the span of rooftops and trees and the greyness of the hospital. She used to tell the story of her youth in a melodic, singsong voice, entering into legend, suspending disbelief. I can appreciate the story, the history; those two strands that will not mingle. I keep them deliberately well apart, while she blurred the edges, freeing herself from truth.
    I’ve just washed her – the homecare nurse didn’t come today.