If you go, p.1
If You Go, page 1
Praise for If You Go
‘If You Go reminds me of Annie Ernaux, although it’s fiction. It shows how much women carry without acknowledgement.’
ALICE BISHOP
‘An eerie and evocative rendering of the complexities of motherhood set against the backdrop of a collapsed world. This visceral novel packs a punch.’
JESSIE COLE
‘If You Go is an absorbing and terrifying novel about a woman altered by time and her enduring love for her children. Robinson’s depictions of Esther’s grief and artistic life are painful, fascinating and beautiful in equal measure.’
LAURA ELVERY
‘If You Go has the sense of something deeply personal and otherworldly. It felt like an intensely personal conversation with me, as a reader, but also with the whole world in all its chaos.’
KATE MILDENHALL
‘A tightly woven, emotionally charged, brutally honest fable. If You Go is a gripping climate thriller and a deeply feminist portrait of motherhood and its complex ferocities. An utterly compelling vision of the future: intricate, clever and fearless.’
JENNIFER MILLS
‘Alice Robinson charts not only the difficult dark places between mothers and children, but those between mothers and themselves. If You Go moved me with the pain of lost intimacies, disintegrating relationships and unrecognised ambitions: the pain of existing but not thriving, of being but not living, of wanting but not being able to keep faith. In a prose style of beautiful attentiveness, and with a narrative premise that rips your heart out, Robinson knits social realities with futuristic horrors in this blindingly truthful and unsettling novel.’
EDWINA PRESTON
‘My favourite kind of book: an exquisitely written page-turner. Unsettling, absorbing, beguiling. Read it.’
ANGELA SAVAGE
‘As an exploration of love over time, If You Go is unique and perfect, a work of rare moral beauty and, ultimately, of hope. Alice Robinson is the Helen Garner of the future.’
JESSICA STANLEY
Alice Robinson is the author of two previous novels: Anchor Point, longlisted for the Stella Prize and the Indie Book Awards, and The Glad Shout, shortlisted for an Aurealis Award and the Colin Roderick Literary Award and winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. In 2012, Alice earned a PhD by research in Creative Writing at Victoria University, for which she was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Peak Award. Alice lives in Melbourne with her kids and works at Federation University and RMIT.
First published by Affirm Press in 2024
Bunurong/Boon Wurrung Country
28 Thistlethwaite Street
South Melbourne, VIC 3205
affirmpress.com.au
Affirm Press is located on the unceded land of the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. Affirm Press pays respect to their Elders past and present.
Text copyright © Alice Robinson, 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 9781923022836 (paperback)
Cover design by Sandy Cull © Affirm Press
Cover image by Lucia Postik via Stocksy
Author image by Gang of Babes Photography
Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by J&M Typesetting
Proudly printed and bound in Australia by Opus Printing Group
Poem on page x from GOLDENROD, Poems by Maggie Smith. Copyright © 2021 by Maggie Smith. Reprinted with the permission of One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
This project is supported by the following organisations:
For my parents and my children.
For Martin.
And for Kath, met not a moment too soon.
After the Divorce, I Think of Something
My Daughter Said About Mars
Once you go, you can never come back.
If you returned to Earth,
the gravity would turn your bones
to noodles, I mean your skeleton
would sort of melt. So if you go,
you have to stay gone.
Maggie Smith, Goldenrod
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.
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.
