2 Chapter Two (The Destination is the Answer to the Questions Our Feet Ask)

Another question had started to grow BIG inside my head as we went along: Where are we going to?

We were answering it with our feet: No-where. No where. We were just going. That was what it felt like, because my mum hadn't said anything about a 'where'. Yet. And she wasn't ever going to say it, until we got there, wherever. I knew. Neither was she going to say anything about the why of our leaving. She felt it was not any of my business, because I was just a child and what did I know. Well, I knew that my poor legs were invested in this business now and they were killing me! So, since I had shares in this suffering, she couldn't tell me that it was not any of my business to know, some of the business was mine now, and she was supposed to let me know what was going on and where we were going to. And if we were ever going to stop.

But all we kept doing was just the going. No talking. No laughing. No stopping, for anything. No looking or thinking.

Just. Going.

Lord! I had never trekked this long before in my small life. I began to feel as if I was in the bible and I was one of them Israelites in the old testament bit they had read to us in Sunday School, the Israelites trekking all over this wide, endless wilderness place and begating descendants everywhere and there. . .

"Walk up!" I heard my mum snap. My feet were s-l-o-w-i-n-g down, becoming rocks that my tired heart had to draaaaaag along to keep up with my mum's fast walking. She was walking like many exclamation marks rushing forward into battle. She was walking as if she was going somewhere to kill somebody. There was a lot of anger in her walk, the way she was walking it, you could see it; it wasn't in the how she was swinging her arms or marching her legs or holding her head straight, it was just how the anger carried her whole body like a hot blade cutting through the air in front of her.

But what was she angry about?

The question crawled into a corner with the rest of its family huddled there in the dark, unanswered, unasked. Untouched.

Wait. What if?

I had heard of people that just woke up one morning and just started walking away, far away. Far into madness. Because somebody somewhere had sent a curse to them while they slept, and it had been delivered to them in a dream, wrapped in wild images from hell. So they had woken up and just started walking; walking away from themselves, into forever.

I had seen this type of person before on the expressway while travelling somewhere with my mum or her mum or my aunt or somebody. This person walking on the side of the road, usually naked, or half-, talking to the air, saying something very important, laughing at a joke that appears in front of him or her sometimes, not knowing that cars are speeding past and life is going on around him or her. Just walking. Away. To a far place that can never be reached.

Was that what had happened to my mum? Was that what was happening? The beginning of a madness?

If that was what, was it part of the curse delivered to her that she should take me along with her?! I doubted that it was. I mean, how can a madness custom-made for her be any of my business? Why did I have to suffer with her like this! The package of madness that she must have received in her dream must have had only her name on it; so why did I have to share in it! It was her personal madness, wasn't it. She should be the only one doing all this stupid walking to nowhere. Alone. Because, see, if whoever had done the curse had intended for me to partake in this madness, my own share would have been sent to me and would have appeared in my dream, but no, I had been dreaming a soft, light blue dream that had no hint of any evil, so I shouldn't have a portion in this. See?

I began to think: I could just slip away behind her and escape, and maybe she wouldn't notice, so that. . .

"Walk up!"

No chance of it.

I gathered my feet and caught up with her.

She hadn't even looked back. She must have felt my little presence fading away behind her. Then maybe she wasn't really mad after all. But I really wished she could be, so that she wouldn't know that I was her son anymore (I'd heard that mad people didn't know anything, or anybody), and I could escape, go back home and go back to being only my dad's son in that nice big house.

My dad. The house. My bed. I missed everything. What had happened? How did everything just become nothing all of a sudden? What was happening? Or is that how life is? One minute, you're something, the next minute, you could be anything, not what you were a minute ago. And nothing had any meaning.

We stopped.

It was a bus stop. And there was an ocean of mad people in front of us pouring back and forth.

Yes, the city was on its feet already, running mad here and there, early in the morning. And this was where the second leg of our going was going to start. So we hadn't really stopped.

Do we ever?