The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

My big, slobbery lips.

  Having to say, ‘Very well, thank you,’ when someone inquires after my health.

  Wearing shoes.

  Going to bed with my hair in onions.

  Winter.

  Night.

  Fat white maggots on the wooden floor of the dunny.

  The blowhole in the rocks next to the ocean shoots out a plume of furious water as if Neptune himself was spitting it out. Whoosh! Up it comes, over and over, a railing, contemptuous, frothing spume of sea, spat right in our faces. I am the only girl in the whole school to run through it: I took one great triumphant leap straight through its angry spout, getting pulverised, soaking wet, stranded. It almost knocked me over with the force of its hate, but I am a girl who went fishing on the rocks with her foolish father, was swept out to sea by a freak wave and came back, alive.

  I am a girl who will gladly fight any boy who calls me names. It was me who kicked Stephen Asmus in the guts for calling me Brains; me who rolled with him in the dirt because he tried to put gluey red sap from a gum tree in my freshly cut hair.

  Throw me the ball!

  Hit me with sticks!

  Come on, I dare you!

  I am the second daughter of Percy and Dorothy Morley and I am living in a seaside town with a blowhole because my father hates the ubiquity of sport. More exactly, he hates the way in which sport in Australia is exalted, ranked high above every other human accomplishment. He believes sport in Australia is regarded as the greatest, most noble of human achievements, greater than any painting, any book, any piece of music you might think of. My father sees the worshipping of the accomplishments of the body as a sign of a culture dead to everything he most believes in, representing a world stripped of intellectual striving, where the only thing that truly matters is the curve of a human wrist in the act of swinging a bat, the line of a hand in the water as the hero gracefully digs his way to the end of the pool.

  Before we moved here my parents lived in a tiny terrace house beneath the mighty shade of the Sydney Cricket Ground. The roar of the sports-loving crowd offended my father’s ears every Saturday during the cricket season; my mother told me that during Donald Bradman’s famous record-breaking run in 1930 he stood on the buckled square of concrete outside the front door, yelling abuse at passing sports enthusiasts.

  ‘You’re a bunch of nongs!’ he shouted. ‘Mindless, the bloody lot of you! Why don’t you go home and read Dickens? You might learn the sweet craft of humanity!’

  My mother wondered whether a good game of cricket mightn’t teach them the same thing, but she never said. My father’s usual preference was for the English poets, Wordsworth and Milton and Marlowe, but perhaps he plumped for Dickens fearing the passing crowd might never have heard of them.

  This practice of hurling abuse at innocent sports lovers ceased abruptly when Len Hatterstone, the local policeman, arrived to break up a scuffle. Someone had jumped the fence to give Dad a deserved walloping.

  ‘Perce, it’s a bit rich, mate, giving everyone a piece of your mind when they’re only minding their own bloody business. Lay off, will ya?’

  My father laid off by moving hundreds of miles away, as far as possible from the Sydney Cricket Ground. It obviously did not occur to him to move to another suburb, or perhaps another street.

  It simply disgusts him, the way Australians lie down before the perfectly sculpted athletic form like Ancient Greeks, like Spartans, seeing God in the hard triangle of muscle in a back or a thigh. He predicts that when the Don finally pops his clogs he will swing his bat endlessly in Australian heaven; he says it’s odds on that Bradman will be the first Australian saint. My father goes on and on about how Australians see something heroic in sport, as if a pure act of the body contains nothing murky or ambiguous, and is unsullied by the dirt of an idea. Sport allows Australians to reduce life to all its banality and glory, he spews, the human body at the peak of its perfection, removed from all other mundane or weighty burdens. Raw life for idiots!

  This is the kind of thing my father says when he is in full rant, for before anything he is a speaker fatally lost to hyperbole. He is a disastrous mixture of oaf and cultural fanatic; Australian colloquialism is his vehicle of speech yet he delivers it with religious fervour, Sturm und Drang, peppered with an odd literary flourish, frequently resulting in a kind of accidental poetry. In short bursts he can be a brilliant, charismatic speaker, words falling emphatically from his mouth as if ready-made with exclamation marks.

  He is a secret Englishman. That is, he was born in Stoke-on-Trent, an only child, moving to Australia with his shopkeeping parents at the age of six. Forever after my father has been one of life’s exiles, forever yearning for a better place. He keeps his Englishness hidden though, as is only wise, for like the Irish, Australians do not like the whiff of supposed superiority and are quick to take offence at any slight. Yet all his life my father has exalted anything English: we eat cream teas and learn Shakespeare and when he converted to communism he had the most difficult time trying to reconcile a classless society with the monarchy. ‘I suppose it must go but, by jings, there’s beauty in it.’

  The four of us then—Hebe, Mum, Dad and me—unbroken still, all piled in together in our tiny wooden house by the sea. If we walk out the back door, through the tough buffalo grass growing in the back garden, past the clothes line (one end of wire tacked to the back wall of the house, the other held by nails hammered into the mulberry tree; an old broomstick with a v-shape cut into its top holding up the wire in the centre), we reach the sand dunes and then the boundless sea.

  There is no back fence, we walk up and over the sand dunes straight onto the beach. When we go to the beach for the day Hebe and I carry the woven beach bag between us, swinging it, but not so high that we disturb the contents of our picnic. Dad strides up ahead carrying the family beach umbrella, dressed only in swimming trunks—spindly legs on skinny body, broad shoulders, very tanned. Mum rushes up to catch him, takes his hand; she is plumper than him, dressed in a patterned sundress over her swimming costume. It is always a red-letter day for us if Mum joins us for a swim. Hebe and I are plunged into happiness by the fact that our mother is coming with us into the sea.

  The beach is untrodden sand, white, silky, the sea a glinting, splashing spew of colour. Greens, blues, silver, the hat of the sky. No wind, no one else about, a school of dolphins rising and diving.

  We walk far up the beach, right up past the point, near two fishermen. ‘Fish running?’ asks Mum, bending over to look in the bucket. The bucket is full of silver twisting bream, the effortful pulse of gills, glassy eyes not yet clouded.

  We pick a site miles from anyone. Once, memorably, Dad danced around the beach umbrella, pretending to do a Red Indian war dance as he pierced the pointed end of the umbrella into the ground. ‘Humma, humma, humma, humma,’ he chanted in mock Red Indian. ‘Come on, girls, join in!’

  And we stamped around in a circle with him. ‘Humma, humma, humma, humma,’ said Mum, joining in, the four of us in an impromptu family war dance around a twisting umbrella. Round and round we went, laughing, the mad Morleys: brown, tossed, worshipping the sun, the beach, the glory of the untarnished moment.

  Dad loves scaring us and we love to be scared. Sometimes he sneaks into our room at night with a candle held under this chin, pushing out his lower jaw and exposing his bottom teeth. ‘I am the Vampire of the Blowhole,’ he whispers and we scream.

  ‘I’ve come to drink your blood,’ he cries, rushing towards us.

  We long for him to drink it.

  Sometimes Dad pretends to sew his upper lip with an imaginary needle. He threads the invisible needle, miming the whole thing—tongue in one corner of his mouth, eye squeezed up in concentration, invisible needle held up between his fingers while he tries to thread the cotton—then he mimes putting the needle up through his upper lip. When the lip is supposedly caught by the knot at the bottom of the thread he pulls the needle up and his lip comes with it—one half of his upper
lip, a curl, a funny sneer, a lip being dragged up by a thread.

  We laugh until our stomachs hurt.

  Our dad is a nong! A prize idiot!

  Our dad is the funniest man in the world!

  Once the four of us went up the Hawkesbury, to Dangar Island, to stay with Uncle Terry, and all four of us got bitten by bull ants on the same day. There was a sand toilet—a hole in the ground and a plank to sit on—and a beach house shackled together with fibro, slabs of corrugated iron which leaked when it rained, windows without glass. Dad was out the back on our first day, out near the pile of wood kept for winter fires, looking for the giant frilled-necked lizard called Shorty who lived beneath the wood pile. A bull ant bit him on the toe—you would think it was a shark from the racket he made. Then Hebe got bitten later that morning when she poked a long stick down a nest and an army of bull ants attacked her: all up her legs, and one bit her near her wee hole. Mum got bitten when she was hanging out the washing and an ant crawled into her shoe; as for myself, I was quietly reading David Copperfield under a tree after lunch when I got bitten on the bum.

  How we laughed, the jokes we made, which we told again and again, year after year. The Bull Ant Family: firm friends to ants the world over!

  I will be madly in love with my father for a long, long time, forever trying to capture his kind opinion or even his momentary attention, but I will hate him too, for the great stain he spreads over my life, for the abrasive, harassing sound of his endless booming voice which follows me from room to sea.

  He is always talking, talking at me, talking over me, and never, never listening. I am so used to going unheard that surely words would be stillborn in my mouth. I am so used to being told what I am supposed to think and feel that I am no longer certain who I am. My father is always telling me what to do, always issuing instructions or laying down the law, or else talking endlessly on and on about himself. He is a bully with a bully’s sentimental streak; a crude thick streak of self-indulgent bullshit runs straight down his middle. His eyes invariably fill with tears when he speaks of his dead, saintly mother (pure Dickens), or when he tells of finding his dear old father dead on the floor, the sad egg he was cooking for his tea still on the stove, cracked and waterless in the burned pot.

  But my father never cried when my adored cat Mordechai was bitten by a snake and died. Nor did he comfort me, being too busy heading off to some meeting about the world-wide Depression, all fired up with fresh ideas about communism. He doesn’t care that my mother loves my sister Hebe more than me, for he doesn’t seem to notice me at all. His nickname for me is Dopes, after Dopey in Snow White. ‘Here she comes, old Dopes, old Dreamy Drawers,’ he usually says when I come in the door.

  My father didn’t notice the day I came home from school crying because Peggy Gordon accused me yet again of being stuck up. ‘You love yourself, Cressida Morley! Cressida Morley loves herself! Cressida Morley loves herself!’ He only noticed when Miss Petersen came to see him the time I wagged school for a whole week because Peggy Gordon always sat behind me, laughing. He asked my mother to get the strap and took me into the bathroom. ‘Please, Daddy, not the strap! I promise I’ll be good!’ My arm has instinctively begun to rise up to cover my face whenever I pass him.

  My father will only begin to pay attention when I bring scandal down upon the family head, ruining everything.

  When I am older, at the beginning of the war, before I wreak my personal destruction, all my friends will laugh at him, he is so strange: the worker’s friend spouting Wordsworth! The worker’s friend able to remember every single verse of Tennyson’s In Memoriam! Everyone will think he is a loveable, funny old goat.

  I know he is not. I know my father to be the whetted knife, sheathed.

  Hey, Peggy Gordon: I love myself!

  I am delivered, walking fast along the sand. Look, my handsome brown feet, square at the toe, leaving hardly any prints as I walk. I am Cressida Morley and I love myself, I am Cressida Morley walking close to the shoreline, where the sand is hard as a road.

  I am lifting off, into eternity. Soaring!

  I am ten years old, unbuckled from the house of my father, the bully. I am free of the house of my mother, the clever sulker. I cannot hear his voice, or hers; the only thing I hear is the suck and crash of the ocean, that endless dance of sea and moon.

  My body is waking up. I am alive, stretched and rustling to the very tips of my fingers.

  I am a girlish triumph.

  Sometimes in my father’s house at night I creep out when I am supposed to be in bed. This is because my hair is tied up in onions, five perfectly spaced rags around which my hair is curled, causing the onions to bob like corks whenever I move my head. Without onions my hair is long and straight and the fashion is for curly hair like Peggy Gordon’s. Onions are all right when I am sitting or standing but sleeping on them is like sleeping on a pillow filled with walnuts. Every night my head does a dance upon the pillow in its quest for lumpless space.

  In the dark I feel my way along walls and doorways till I can safely crouch behind the chair in the living room and watch my parents around the radio in the kitchen. My father is quiet for once, listening with the full force of his ears. What ears he has, live creatures on his head, big as my hand! My own ears are friendly at my temples, coyly composed. I fear, though, that I have inherited like a family curse my father’s large and sensual mouth: to me his lips look ugly, squalid, as if they don’t quite fit his face. My own lips are slobbery suckers, the bane of my life, the subject of teasing by Peggy Gordon, who has recently taken to calling me Lubra Lips.

  I do not yet know that these very same lips will prove to be my face’s most sublime invitation.

  Hey, Peggy Gordon: I am going to grow up to be beautiful.

  Hey, Peggy Gordon: I am going to grow up to command the eyes of every fucking man on the planet.

  Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

  Sydney, 1969

  From my desk by the bedroom window I can see the length of the garden, with its English gardenias and roses and rhododendrons, its lilies and camphor laurels. In the early spring I planted a jasmine vine directly beneath the window because I wanted to be reminded of being ten years old and lying in a froth of flowers. The jasmine vine which kept up the back verandah of our house when I was a girl was wreathed with the breaths of flowers. I used to lie flat on my back, my head completely inside the vines, taking in the private exhalations of blossoms. I wish to lie among their scent again.

  But, look, the push of reality. Look beyond the tame English roses, the trimmed hedge, and raise your tired eyes to the sky beyond the fence. Witness there the unruly clutch of native trees, the eucalyptus and ghost gums and waratahs and the frilled-necked lizards, look upon that straggly beauty which slipped the fence and broke the painting. Of course the first English painters who tried to claim those trees could not literally see what was in front of their eyes, reproducing instead a painting already in their heads, some extract from an interior England. The beauty of the Australian bush does not easily compose itself for the brush or the camera: the tallest of those ghost gums beyond the fence stands like a fist pushed through the hard dirt of the earth, fully clenched.

  I myself have lost entirely the memory of clench. My hand on the desk worrying its end of string is slack of muscle. I have lost the ability to raise my fists in my own defence. David has somehow worn me down, or I have worn myself down—whoever is guilty, here I am, at the end of myself in this curiously silent place among the trees and the birds, the wind moving the tops of the trees about like the sway of an airy sea. Beached, Katerina, surprised to find yourself on the manicured sands of the northern suburbs of Sydney, known to all Sydneysiders as the North Shore, as if it were the furthest stretch of some vast, encompassing beach. When I was a girl this area could only be reached by ferry until they built the Sydney Harbour Bridge; back then it was a curious mix of market gardens and small holdings, of occasional suburbs peopled by toffs who lived in g
rand houses and sent their sons to faux English public schools. The really big money was always in the eastern suburbs but some of it came here too, to build mock English houses and mock English gardens. England was the mother country.

  I think my girls are dreaming of America. Lil is saving up to go to San Francisco; she is, I suppose, what is known as a ‘hippy’ and comes home clothed in fringed garments and woven headbands, her blond hair hanging loose all the way down to her bottom. ‘Anaïs Nin is unbelievable, Mum. You’ve got to read her!’ she says, bursting through the door, dragging in another new friend from university. Lil is dangerously beautiful, dangerously optimistic, full of innocence, unpeeled like a fruit. Greece has fallen away from her, as if that part of her life might never have been. She might be any other Australian girl, blithe and suntanned; she rarely speaks Greek now, and I am always shocked if I chance to hear her speaking Greek with Anna. Life has not yet pressed its weight upon her and when we are standing together in the same room I try not to breathe too heavily, lest I infect her. I carry the germ of melancholy, filled with the knowledge of life’s sober mathematics, its cruel invisible subtractions. I am the diminished sum of my parts, an entire lived experience, and she is right to be leery of me.

  ‘Mum, what’s wrong with you? You’re so cynical!’ she said yesterday. She has decided she is going to be a poet and is putting together her first collection of poems (too many of them, I fear, are antiwar poems which will date); she wanted to talk to me about possible publishers. I felt tired just thinking about the long stack of words ahead of her, the money that will never come, the rewards she will never reap. A poem to the world is a pea to a starving man: too small, too inconsequential. Did I say this aloud?

  ‘It’s just that it’s a very, very hard life, Lil. I want you to have an easier life than mine.’