If You Go

by Alice Robinson

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

When Esther wakes with a breathing tube down her throat, she has no idea where she is or how she got there. In terrible physical condition, Esther is tended to by Grace, the only other person in the building.
In the half-consciousness of her recovery, Esther is desperate to get back to her young kids and grapples with the events of her life as they come flooding back: a childhood spent between warring parents; the demise of her marriage; the struggles she faced when her children were born.
Suspicious of Grace, Esther takes drastic action to escape. But there are certain facts about the reality of her situation - her place in time, her history and her life - that she will need to uncover first.
If You Go is a moving, captivating and unforgettable novel about hope and grief and family, exploring what we inherit and what we pass down.

Release date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: Affirm Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

PART ONE

I came to as if cracking through ice, gasping, a fish with a hook down its throat. Ice, fish, throat: sounds dragging concepts, a lag, but also a cellular knowing. Lines of sticky sensors circled my head and ran down my chest and across my back, faintly itchy where they adhered like octopus suckers, trailing red and white and blue wires, as if my arteries and veins were external to my body.

I wish I could say the first thought I had was of my children, but what came to mind was Wolfie’s favourite cereal. Sometimes I ate it late at night when the kids were with Jean-Paul. I didn’t always bother to do the shopping when the children were gone – and wouldn’t do it until they were due to come home, to save money. I was probably depressed then, ferociously spooning up the little wheat squares into my mouth by the light of the open fridge, feeling I had set a detonation off under my life and now had to live in its aftershocks as a kind of punishment.

A voice, soft and high and urgent – Grace, though I didn’t know it then. ‘Esther?’

The name was mine. I knew that I was an I. A self. Myself. The taste of wheat and jam and full cream milk were there on my tongue, as tangible as if I had a mouthful I needed to swallow.

The voice said, ‘Try to stay calm. You’re okay. I’m looking after you.’ Clatter of metal on metal. Movement: the soft snare of fabric, synthetic thighs brushing. A brisk walk. Warm hands working over skin, rubbing. My skin. I burned with cold, as if being set alight.

There was only one voice, hushed and urgent, muttering. A bathroom smell: antiseptic, lemon, cool white tiles. Shhh, shhh, the voice went, tsking and clucking in time with the hands, making the same soothing noises I had made in the nursery in the dead of night, rocking newborn Clare while Jean-Paul slept on, wearing earplugs so he could wake in a decent state for work. We thought that was a reasonable arrangement then. It had been my idea – altruistic on the surface, belying the limits of my capacity underneath.

By the time Wolfie was born two years later, Jean-Paul was sleeping in the guest room, and I was going mad. This seems ironic now, given I was in that state to protect Jean-Paul’s job, which as a psychiatrist revolved around caring for other crazy people. What of my experience fell within the normal experience of early motherhood and what was pathological? I didn’t know the answer and couldn’t ask him, terrified of being deemed unequal to the task of mothering Clare and Wolfie by some invisible judge. Jean-Paul seemed to think everything was in order and, as I had made him the arbiter of my reality, I accepted his diagnosis hook, line and sinker.

~

I was electric with pain as Grace tended me in the dark. I smelled something cool and coppery, like a coin laid on the tongue. Her hands on my skin made bursts of blistering lava break over me, the way fingers through darkened water will trigger blooms of phosphorescence. I couldn’t quite tell which was the dream: what was happening in the room or my thoughts and memories. I had seen phosphorescence once, travelling in Thailand with Zoey. We were nineteen and high on magic mushrooms, drinking cheap Thai whisky out of a bucket with eight straws stuck in the ice. After sunset, I stayed on the sand, but she staggered into the water. The cove was almost glassy in its stillness. Behind us, music from the guesthouse bar came beating down the beach and I turned to watch the dancers in silhouette against the jungle rising sharply behind us.

‘Holy fuck!’ Zoey screamed, half laughing to cover her terror, and I turned so fast to see what had happened that a ribbon of whisky flew out of the bucket onto my skirt. Zoey stood wearing a look of fear and wonder I’ve only seen one other time: on Jean-Paul’s face, as our babies were being born.

‘The sky’s fallen into the water, Esther.’ Her voice was reverential. It did look that way. We swam in the phosphorescence every night for as long as we stayed on that island, and I knew then that the world was just a strange repetition of shapes and meanings, the macro and micro repeating and repeating. Patterns of milk ducts in breasts and veins in lungs with the roots of trees. Tree rings with human fingerprints. Constellations of stars with bioluminescence.

Grace’s touch brought my body further into focus, her hands cartographic. Black space lit up under the pressure of contact: elbow, forearm, hands. Mine. But the pain of it. My muscles contracted, writhing. The sound in the room: an animal dying.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Grace said. ‘I’ve got to rub you down hard like this to get things going.’ At my lips: cloying tape, sticky and strong. I jerked my hands to remove it and found they were tied down. A prick in my arm and the pain submerged back into itself, darkness retreating from torchlight. Screams became moans. Then I lay quiet.

With eyes rolled back in my skull, I saw something. A newborn baby caked in cheese-like vernix, blue lipped, squalling. The tiny purple-pink hands, nails like pearly flecks of shell, fingers curled with the effort of crying. The baby’s eyes clenched shut, mouth open, the wail so forceful no sound came. Latex-fingered midwife; a towel, white and blood-streaked. She rubbed the infant harshly to make it draw breath. Soon its skin was pinking, vernix wiped clean. A blanket drew the flayed arms in. Swaddled, the baby was lifted, passed. Those were my arms. Looking down at the child, that was my wedding ring glinting there on the left hand as it touched the infant’s cheek.

I tried to say, ‘Where is he?’ A word, that critical word, was missing. My voice had rusted over, machinery long out of use. Snake’s skeleton hung down my throat, sharp-boned and choking. Even so, the name was clotting there, unsayable. I heard it in my skull, resounding like a bell.

Wolfie. Wolfie. Wolfie!

Grace was talking as she worked. I heard her say, ‘Shh, you’re safe now, Esther.’ I vaguely registered the note of anxiety in her voice, discordant with the words. But I was too exhausted to indicate that I was listening. The effort it was taking just to order my thoughts was like nothing I’d experienced before.

I lay bogged in mud for a time, until fingers encircled my wrist. The woman clucked anxiously, murmuring to herself.

‘Your blood pressure’s still too low.’ Her voice grew faint as she retreated across the space, then louder again: ‘Now, where are those bloody blankets?’

I wanted to say ‘Don’t go,’ but the words were only a longing. I was trapped in honey, in amber, voiceless but preserved.

Soon she was back. ‘I’m going to take this tape off your eyelids slowly, so that you can see.’

I felt it then, a graze across both lids and the lids themselves heavy, gummed as if with hardened wax. The sweet, high voice, close to my ear. ‘Now, try to open your eyes, Esther. Don’t fight me. I need you to be nice and calm before I can try to take the breathing tube out.’ Low murmuring: words I couldn’t make out. ‘I’ll turn down the lamp for you, there. Open your eyes slowly. Take your time about it.’

Dim light, a hot blade. I blinked, blinked, blinked, and felt like retching. Later, I will think that describing a room as swimming into focus had always seemed a bit of a stretch to me, but that’s what it was like. Flat on my back, blinking at the ceiling, the face peering down at me. I felt I was looking up from the bottom of a lake.

‘Oh dear, your heart rate,’ the woman said quietly, her voice coming small and pinched as if she was trying to keep her thoughts from spilling out. ‘Try to stay calm!’ She squeezed my hand where it lay flat, bound against the rails. Her face was just a spectrum of tones, like a watercolour painting. She said, ‘You’re in shock. I know you’ll have a lot of questions. I can help you. But I can’t take that tube out of your throat until you’re stable.’

I heard what she said, but the words did not penetrate; they slid off like oil on water. Another name was surfacing inside me, painful as a contraction and more urgent than anything the voice in the room might articulate. Clare. I heard myself choking on the sound of the name, the gurgle and spit of my vocal cords against the breathing tube.

‘Shh,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t try to talk just yet. You hear what I’m saying?’

The body was just a hunk of something, a creature strapped down, a weight. I was somewhere inside, clawing to get out. My limbs trembled, all the hinges and sockets and joints of my body alive with the friction of shifting tectonic plates. Fingers cuffed my ankles, gripping my legs to stop them shivering off the bed. The balls of my eyes rolled. My head turned side to side on its neck as if looking for an exit.

‘You’re clammy,’ Grace said, trying for matter-of-fact. An alarm sounded, sharp and urgent, or maybe it was something inside me. ‘Can you hear me, Esther?’ The cacophony of the room, all those screeching electronic noises, the urgent human voice, blurred together to form a single high-pitched flatlining note.

‘Your blood pressure’s going berserk.’ The woman seemed to be swaying as she spoke, her voice rising and receding as if it were a wave breaking and drawing back. ‘All right, but listen: you’re going to be okay. Okay? I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.’ She sounded on the verge of tears. I had the urge to reach out and offer her comfort but at that moment all the blood in my body roiled up towards my head, like a pot of pasta boiling over.

The woman screamed, as if to prevent me from stepping into oncoming traffic. ‘No, Esther! Stay with me here. Please.’

But I was already falling backwards into a deepening shaft. Far above, the real world, a disc of light, receded to a prick.

~

At a party when I was a very small child, a toddler – it was before my mother moved away – something happened. It probably seemed like nothing to the adults present, but the memory lay in my body like a dormant gene. Epigeneticists reckon we carry the markers of our ancestors’ viruses in our DNA like ghosts. This was like that, only the ghost was made of my own distant experience.

My mother sat in the kitchen drinking wine with the other feminists while we children played out of sight in the lounge of someone’s rambling shared house. Lots of jars of lentils in the kitchen and old bikes leaning against the wall in the hall. The dim bathroom smelled of wet dog from the damp towels lying over the edge of the bath.

The bigger kids had the idea to pile up all the pillows from the beds and couches so we could jump down onto them from the coffee table. But after my turn, as I lay panting on my back on the soft pile, an older boy dropped a beanbag over me as a joke. I think it was a joke. I was only two or three, but the swift, suffocating blackness, the heat, the impossible, slippery mass over my face, formed a bedrock of memory. I kicked and fought, but the beanbag was too big and unwieldy for me to shift. It wasn’t until another child took pity on me, yanking it off from above, that I was able to draw in great shuddering, hysterical breaths. I started to cry.

I ran straight into the kitchen and tried to explain what had happened, burrowing against Vivienne’s side. Tried to tell her that I had nearly died. I was too young to articulate the severity of the experience so my mother would get it, but old enough to feel the full measure of her failure to grasp what I was saying.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said distractedly, giving me a squeeze. ‘Here, you can sit with me for a minute and have a little cracker, darling.’ She pulled the plate of soft pungent supermarket Camembert towards her, lifted me onto her lap and kept talking over the top of my head to her friends as if I were only a winter coat she had laid over her knees for lack of somewhere better to put it.

I was confused. I nibbled the cracker my mother had given me. It appeared that my mother’s friends were fighting, with their voices raised through the heat and smoke. But there was something jovial in the way they also leaned towards one another, nodding and guffawing as each took a turn to speak.

The choreography of the occasion was opaque to me, but it must have made sense to the group gathered around the table, for no one seemed alarmed by the display. In fact, though I couldn’t understand what was happening, I could feel the thrum of excitement and possibility around the table like a current. The voices were loud, but the faces were glowing.

Suddenly Vivienne shouted, making me jump. I glanced up at her face to gauge the ferocity of her anger, but puzzlingly, the other women just laughed amiably. The room was full of cigarette smoke and the musk of perfume gone ripe with body heat. I saw Vivienne clear as anything in that moment. She had kept her hair long to her shoulders, thick and blonde and wavy, so it framed her face like a mane. The blaze of hair was perhaps intended to distract from what I had once overheard her call her beak, the strong nose inherited from her father, and passed down to me. Standing at close to six feet, my mother towered over other women and many men. With her bright blue eyes and her cheekbones, the way she carried herself, Vivienne was a woman who turned heads. I knew this about my mother – that she could be seen – before I knew much of anything else about her. Trailing invisibly along in her wake, I was free to observe her presence, its impact.

Laughter was still rising in the room. Why did they all feel the need to speak so loudly? Was there something wrong with their hearing? I watched the ash from another mother’s cigarette drop like pesticide from a crop-duster into her wine glass as she waved the smoke round to make her point.

In my mother’s lap, I leaned back, falling against the blue satin of her shirt. My mother seemed to remember that I was there then, and without speaking to me, hooked me under the arms to lift me down

~

Every home I ever shared with my mother looked the same, even when we moved from small flats to bigger. The dimensions and characteristics of the individual places hadn’t mattered to Vivienne; she inhabited every home tentatively and with a sense of impermanence, as if preparing to move on in the night. When we arrived in a new place, my mother always erected a table in the kitchen and installed herself at it among the books and papers she was working on, close enough to monitor the stovetop coffee that was perpetually percolating. Our furniture was never arranged but was mostly left where it had been placed by the men who carried it in from the truck, so that our couches and chairs huddled together as far from the walls as they could get. Vivienne never hung any pictures or seemed to worry about windows being bare. She didn’t own house plants or colourful rugs or any of the friendly little items I noticed in the homes I visited. It doesn’t take an experienced therapist like Jean-Paul to draw a connection between an early childhood spent living this way and my attempts to make a home at the mountain house when he and I settled down together.

If Vivienne was ambivalent about the physical world around her, when I first moved in with Charles, I was confused by my father’s devoted attention to aesthetics, the way he fussed at the curtains to get them to hang correctly after drawing them in the morning, how he plumped the pillows on the couch then stood back to appraise their shape. In my first weeks and months on the farm, I watched shyly from doorways as my stepmother Orlanda bustled about, less concerned with the way things looked than with whether they functioned. She was always squatting down on her meaty thighs to check the frame on a door that had swollen with the temperature and no longer closed properly. She was always going out to the shed to find another tube of Selleys No More Gaps.

I can hear my mother now, the way she sounded coming down the phone from London, calling the farm too late at night for a child of eight. Vivienne could extend her maternal duties to ringing occasionally to check on me at my father’s, but not to observing the time differences between our hemispheres.

‘Try not to sound so apologetic, Esther,’ she had chastised by way of a greeting when I ran to pick up the phone in the hall of the farmhouse.

My mother had only been gone a year, and I still missed her urgently. But life went on. I went out to feed the chooks with Orlanda each morning, naming the flock and laughing at their funny individual characters. They seemed to me a group of kindly old women, standing round in the yard gossiping until they caught sight of us and came running. Sometimes the smooth, speckled eggs were still warm when we collected them from the nesting boxes, and I held them carefully, the heat in the shells something precious for the fact that I could already feel it fading in my fingers.

I played on the swing Orlanda strung up on the blue gum behind the house, so tall that the rope had to be several metres long to reach over the lowest branches. Given the length of the rope, the swing went flying out far over the precipice of the hill, and I felt I might keep on flying beyond the boundaries of the farm to the horizon.

On weekends when I was free from walking down to the dirt road at the end of our drive to wait for the school bus, Charles allowed me to join him in the studio, where a little black potbelly stove kept the room warm in winter and the floor was covered in papers and spackles of dry paint. My father let me use the offcuts from the darkroom to make my own pictures. While he worked on his images, I spent hours kneeling on newspaper to construct collages with scissors and glue. ABC news radio rumbled in the background, keeping us both company so we needn’t feel pressure to talk.

But I was only biding my time, waiting to be returned to my mother. Which just goes to show that it doesn’t matter what one’s mother is like, or what other lives are on offer; what a child is used to is what they will pine for if they have to do without. Yes, I lived in the new family arrangement with Charles and Orlanda compliantly enough, but I had the sense that my real life lay elsewhere, cold and dormant, waiting for me to revive it when my mother returned.

Standing in the hall of the farmhouse as Vivienne berated me down the line, I was aware of an absence where my father’s voice and Orlanda’s should have been, gaily filling the living room with music and laughter as they did every evening. Their silence told me they were listening in to my side of the conversation.

‘Always use your big, loud voice to announce yourself,’ Vivienne was shouting into the receiver on her end, though her voice came thin and tinny, which only made her seem more remote. ‘You are allowed to take up space on this planet, Esther darling. The world is as much yours as anyone else’s, and you deserve to have it sit up and listen when you have something to say.’

‘Sorry,’ I whispered automatically. Listening to my mother, the dimensions of the farmhouse warped as if in a fairground mirror, the hallway suddenly so much longer and darker than I knew it to be.

Vivienne talked on, telling me about living in London and about the book she was writing. She maintained that she had moved away for work, but I knew there was a partner of some kind, a lover – the word made me feel like I needed to be sick into my mouth, as I’d been once in the car, turning onto the freeway when Charles said it wasn’t safe to pull over and I should hold it. But lover was the term my father had used when I overheard him talking to Orlanda about Vivienne after she left.

Now I could hear someone moving around in the dark space behind Vivienne’s voice. I imagined this person as a godly figure: all-powerful, even gilded. They were responsible for securing my mother where I had failed. This did not seem an unusual turn of events to me. I accepted that I was mortal, and not a very interesting or worthy example in my mother’s eyes; it was no wonder someone else had come along and drawn her attention. I thought that perhaps if I had been special – brilliant or beautiful, as Vivienne herself was – the outcome for us might have been different. Sometimes I daydreamed about that possibility: that I would be discovered by a talent agent in a suburban shopping centre and set on a path to stardom that would lure my mother back. I’d read about enough child stars being unearthed that way in Orlanda’s women’s magazines to know it was possible. In the meantime, and in comparison with Vivienne, I saw and accepted my flaws, relating to my mother’s departure from Australia with a resigned understanding that is awful to reflect on from the vantage of adulthood. If anyone needed to shoulder the responsibility for what had happened, it was my mother. But by the time I comprehended this with any clarity, she was already famous for the book she had written about women’s entitlement to freedom from marriage and motherhood, and there was no arguing with her.

I listened to Vivienne, twisting the coiled phone cord around my fingers anxiously, trying to bind myself together, to prevent the parts of my body flying off in the acute centrifugal force emanating from inside me. My mother threw out questions whose true answers I couldn’t fit into my mouth. I imagined what the conversation must sound like to Charles and Orlanda in the other room: long stretches of silence interspersed by my tiny voice saying yes and no and good … good … good.

Eventually, Charles came to take the phone gently from me. With his warm, soft palm on my shoulder, he spoke to Vivienne with an authority he didn’t ordinarily command.

‘It’s ten here, Vivi. Esther has to go to bed – she has school tomorrow.’

Whatever my mother said in response Charles allowed to flow into his ear without comment. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said with finality. ‘We have to go now.’

When the phone was back in its cradle, I sagged for a moment against my father, breathing in his scent of sweat and wool and eucalyptus, allowing him to reach down and scoop me into his arms although I was strictly too big and too heavy to be carried.

‘You’re very tired,’ he said gently into my neck, leaning back against my weight and shuffling me up the hall to my bedroom with my feet knocking against the backs of his thig. . .