Intimate Distance by Katerina Cosgrove

Mother’s hair is wet and her closed face is full of silence. Dusk settles over the narrow streets, deepening the violet shadows and the smell of wet earth. Tonight I’ll leave her alone – with another pang of guilt – and go for a walk to the park with Pan. Zoi hasn’t come back yet from his run, which is strange for him. It’s already past six. I manoeuvre Pan through our narrow hallway. Have you got your jumper? Your ball? Satisfied he’s well prepared, I close and lock the door behind us. My mother upstairs, still staring into the gathering dark.
    Pan wants to walk in the gutter but I hold his hand. He points to houses and cars and exclaims at each one, trying to rhyme the words and sing them aloud. He breaks free from me and claps his hands in an ecstasy of his own making, bounces the ball into the road countless times. Finally we reach the far side of the park and I point to the waterlilies in the pond.
    â€˜Look, Pan. Look at the beautiful flowers.’
    He runs to the water. There’s only one child left, with a toy sailboat, intent on the game. He navigates around the lilies, squinting into the gloom. I sit on the park bench and watch Pan, his little figure almost obscured by the shadows of trees. I sit with my hands in my lap, resting. Allow myself to close my eyes. Just for a second. There are prickles of red and light behind my lids. I exhale, pressing my stomach with one hand. Out, in. I’m slowly relaxing: a balloon letting out air in increments.
    Then I feel something behind me. A presence. An alert, inquisitive regard. I don’t want to open my eyes, to see who’s there. I take another three long breaths, counting them.
    â€˜Pan,’ I call out, panicking.
    He turns around. I swivel, peering at the bushes behind me. Nothing. I continue to watch Pan. He’s fascinated by the boy with the toy sailboat. I feel the presence even stronger, as though I’m being watched from above. Hear a shuffle to my left, don’t want to look. Then next to me on the bench, there Zoi is, sweaty and panting, smiling, but not at me. I can only see his profile. He’s smiling at his son. His?
    â€˜Come,’ he says, almost a whisper. ‘Let’s look at the lilies too.’
    He turns to me, and smiles with that inclination of the head I remember so well. Pan looks up when we approach holding hands but continues to play with the boy. The lilies are large and smooth, upturned cups holding stamens of gilded powder. Beneath them are orange and black carp, coloured like butterflies, their mouths echoing the openness of the blooms. The lilypads could be big enough to stand on comfortably and one of them cradles a pool of water, partly submerged beneath its weight.
    â€˜Listen,’ Zoi says.
    I look upwards, hearing birds, shivering ghosts singing themselves to sleep. The significance of his word is in the air, intangible, eluding me. I need more, need to know why I failed.
    THE TV IS on in the corner of the room at Zoi’s insistence, turned down low. Pan is asleep. We watch scenes of war in Iran: shelling, bombs, crumbling houses so far away from our reality, here in Sydney together. I feel a brief kick in the stomach at the suffering of others, their anguished mouths and eternal pain. But I turn away. Mine is a compound guilt: pity at their situation and the shame of not really caring enough to do anything. Then, inevitably, I think of Pan, wonder if he’s too cold, too hot or crying, and hurry up to the bedroom to check.
    He sleeps on his stomach, head turned away from the thread of light where the blind doesn’t quite reach the window frame. I tuck in the sheet around him. He snores softly and I touch his head, still covered with fine gold down although he’s nearly four. He responds to my touch by whimpering, and I kiss his hand where it peeps out from the sheet, before leaving the door half-open behind me.
    In my mother’s bedroom, nothing