The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  She looked at me in all her cold and beautiful fury. ‘I’m going to be a poet whether you like it or not.’

  Anna came in then, Anna of the sad eyes, my stern maiden. Anna has already surely detected the whiff of life’s decay, although she is barely older than her sister.

  ‘I thought you’d be proud of her, Katherine,’ she said,‘wanting to build another wall in the house of art.’

  I raised my eyebrows. Like her father, Anna has always been quick of tongue, a girl who, unlike myself, never suffers from esprit d’escalier. ‘The house is too cold,’ I said, ‘it has no running water.’ I thought this was rather good.

  Then David came in: the whole family, one, two, three, four. A rare occasion, the lot of us, in the same room, with no screaming.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said, and Elizabeth rushed up to him with her golden hair and her beauty and her optimism and shone upon him like a personal sun. Their heads were together and Anna and I looked at each other.

  I remembered Anna at seven or eight, in the rain on a beach in Greece, turning to me and saying, ‘I don’t care if I die, Mummy, because then I can go to heaven and sit on a cloud.’

  I crossed the room and put my arm around her.

  ‘Sweetheart, do you still want to sit on a cloud?’

  She looked at me, confused.‘What are you going on about?’

  I for one would like to feel the air’s tender ministrations.

  My children are grown. All my rooms are empty.

  Tuesday

  Another fight with David—this time over a silly letter. The Herald insists on passing on these things—sometimes there is a great swag of them, from women who say they feel exactly like me, that my column somehow crystallises all the inchoate emotions inside them. They feel like they know me, they write, as if I am an old friend, moreover a wise old friend who can tell the secret at their centre. ‘You are my oracle!’ writes a Mrs Judith Watts of Kogarah, to which David snorted, ‘Blimey, Sydney’s very own Sibyl.’ In her four page letter Mrs Watts told me everything—how many children she has, how she fell out of love with her husband, how sometimes she doesn’t even know if she loves her sons.‘Do you ever feel like that, Katherine?’ she wrote impudently, for it obviously did not occur to her that as a complete stranger she had no right to ask.

  ‘Well, what do you expect?’ David said when I got angry. ‘You can’t write about your private life every week in a column and then complain when people make assumptions.’

  ‘Christ, David, you should know more than anyone the difference between real life and writing about life! My private life is private, the column is something I write for public consumption. It’s not my actual, lived life.’

  He looked at me with an expression I can only describe as distaste. ‘Oh yes? And what is your real life, darling? What exactly is Katherine Elgin’s World? I think you’re so full of bullshit you wouldn’t know. You mixed up reality and fantasy a long time ago.’

  And so it went, growing nastier and more bitter. In the book of David I am some sort of sad old fantasist, growing cold in the ashes of my life. I should have stayed living in my fantasy world on a rocky island in the Saronic Sea because clearly I cannot live like everybody else in a real world stripped of illusions. I have lost my looks, my sense of humour, my joie de vivre, my charm to men. I drink too much and I should take more exercise. My act of sophisticated poise may fool the rest of the world but it will never fool him. ‘I know all about you, my love,’ he said, his mouth pulled down in a sneer.

  I thought: no one knows me. I am a secret made of secrets, a locked door. I am a woman who makes her living offering up her life for public consumption, yet knows she gives nothing away. I am the most secretive woman I know.

  Meanwhile, a young publicist arrived in the middle of the fight to take David to lunch to discuss his nearly finished book. I rushed to the bathroom to hide myself, the well-known columnist, wife of the husband, pressing a towel against her ugly, swollen eyes.

  Meanwhile, every day is the same: fight after fight after fight.

  Meanwhile, each week the cursed column grows more insurmountable than a book, 1000 blooded words which might as well be 1000 chapters. Such scattered, paltry words, so hard to conjure, so ultimately meaningless. How did I ever think there was a chance I might one day write a great book?

  Perhaps David is right and I have confused art and life. I know that for a time my writing was where I lived my truest life—now the question is whether I exist at all if I can no longer write fiction. I seem to be slowly fading—the technical term is blocked but the feeling of no longer being able to write is one of having no outlines, of being blurred. I can’t write because I can’t bring something into focus. I don’t know what that something is.

  Meanwhile, I am remembering that many of our fights begin with David’s question, ‘Well, what did you expect?’

  What did you expect, Katerina? Just exactly what did you expect?

  Sydney, 1941

  Friday the Thirteenth—my first journal

  Actually it’s Saturday now—I was preparing to write last night but, realising the date, didn’t want to start. However, this book was opened and begun on that day, a day full of fears, superstitions—some sort of echo of my existence, I suppose. Fate, in a way.

  I am seventeen years old (almost eighteen) and I fear mediocrity more than anything. Even my own father thinks I’m stupid. He calls me Sleepy because he thinks I’m like the sleepiest, stupidest dwarf, the goofy daydreamer—‘Old Sleepy wouldn’t know if her bum was on fire!’ Mum and Ros always laugh, which only encourages him. He knows I’m good at English, but of course no one is allowed to be as good as he is at anything. And Rosalind is the brains in the family.

  My whole life I have always been second best, the runner-up, never first—not as clever as Ros, not a hope of being as brilliant as Dad. To top it off, in my last year of school Elaine Murphy won the school English prize and I came second, even though I tried my absolute hardest. When she stood up to accept her award I felt really sick, as though it was some sort of premonition about being an also-ran for the rest of my life—never good enough, never the best, always mediocre. Only Mrs Ford believed in me and even she ended up becoming an English teacher instead of a writer. (She gave me her copy of Madame Bovary which she’s had since she was sixteen.)

  Last year Mrs Hope (!!!) got us all to do some calligraphy. We had to choose a line of poetry or an aphorism. I chose this:

  It might be easier

  To fail with land in sight,

  Than gain my blue peninsula

  To perish of delight.

  –Emily Dickinson

  ‘Kath, dear,’ Miss Hope said, ‘you are sixteen years old with everything in front of you. Why not aim for the blue peninsula?’

  But what if I fail? What if I can’t do it?

  The blue peninsula of the world is so large, so unattainable, and I am so inconsequential. I am only a girl in boring old Australia, an unimportant country far from everywhere, and I don’t know anything, not really. I don’t understand how telephones work, let alone the difference between capitalism and communism. How does Dad remember all those things? How can I be more like that, able to present an argument or analyse something, instead of being diverted by the beauty of the oceanic sky out the window or the locked sadness in a passing boy’s face? Everything I know is useless, useless—not very important. I need to read more, learn everything, PAY ATTENTION.

  Instead I remember all the wrong things, everyone who was ever cruel to me, anyone who ever hurt me—the ugly man on the beach; fighting hard against that bitch Betty Gordon who made going to school every day such an ordeal, such a bloody misery—I remember all that perfectly. It’s possible, isn’t it, that everyone’s life is made up of a string of feelings—that a feeling might be more real than a fact?

  I must train myself to notice everyone; to take notes, make character sketches of people I know and people I don’t—I MUST BEAR WITNESS.
Already I have a sense of time slipping away, running through my fingers, and if I don’t start now it will be TOO LATE!!

  POEM

  One day

  I will wake the ocean.

  One day

  I will rouse the sky.

  One day

  I will reach the blue peninsula—

  In planting my flag,

  I will learn the true art of delight.

  Oh, everything I do is so second-hand, so unoriginal. How can I train myself in perfection? Please let me do something perfectly.

  PLEASE LET ME LEARN TO WAKE THE OCEAN!

  Sunday

  Now that the war is on everything seems shaken up, everything seems changed, even possible. It’s like there’s a giant crack in the wall and everyone is rushing through it. Everyone is secretly excited, no, thrilled, by the disruption to ordinary life but too guilty to say so, just like when the sandbank collapsed at the beach that time and all those people started drowning. Everyone on the beach was rushing around screaming, mad, crying, but charged with life, really intoxicated by being shown what truly mattered. This is what I think—I reckon people need drama in order to feel they are alive—everyone needs the brush of death every now and then to make us remember what it is to really live.

  I know that people who have actually lost someone dear to them feel different—violently angry for a start—but for everyone who hasn’t, like me, the war is sort of an unexpected holiday from ordinary life. It’s as though all the old rules have gone and there are no restrictions any more. I know one thing for sure and that is that Mum and Dad would never have let me come up to live in Sydney if it hadn’t been for the war.

  We all know people are dying now. I am even starting to know some personally—Ruth Parker’s brother John was killed last month and what happened to the family was incredible, so spooky and so very, very sad. When Ruth told me the story of how they heard he was dead, my whole body prickled with goose bumps.

  All the Parkers played tennis—no one in our house played (Dad thinks organised games are for mugs and the only sport Ros and I ever played was school hockey). Anyway, Mrs Parker and John were particularly close—he was her only child until Ruth was born when John was nearly ten. Well, one Sunday last month Mrs Parker was sitting on that wrecked old cane chaise lounge in the back garden—half asleep, with a copy of the Kurrajong Examiner over her face, as it happened—when John walked around the back of the house in his tennis whites. BUT HE WAS FIGHTING WITH THE SECOND AIF IN CRETE!!! HE WASN’T EVEN IN THE COUNTRY!!

  Mrs Parker sat up. ‘John? Darling? Are you all right? What are you doing home?’ Ruth said her mum was suddenly flooded with peace, she didn’t even think to rush up to him, she just watched him and felt really calm and somehow happy. ‘Mum, I’m fine, I’m really fine. I want you to promise you won’t worry about me. Always remember that I love you very much.’ He smiled at her, a really deep, loving smile, and then he turned and was gone.

  Ruth said her mum walked straight back into the house, unruffled as you please, and said to Ruth and her dad, who were sitting in the kitchen, ‘I’m afraid I have some awful news. Our dear John has gone from us.’ And then she sat down at the table and sobbed.

  And do you know what? SHE WAS RIGHT! They got the telegram about three weeks later: Sergeant John Parker, 27, of the 2/1st Battalion, killed in action, Crete.

  John used to write the most wonderful letters.

  Ruthie, when we manage to get into the villages, we often find cats tied to doorknobs by bits of string. Do you know why? When everyone is starving, they eat the cats, so cats are not allowed to go wandering. The question is: should one let them off, in the hope that they will make a dash for freedom? Are the ones tied to doorknobs destined for their owner’s table? Or would they die faster if I let them go?

  At night I often lie in bed and think of John. I try to imagine how it was that he got home to his mother. What force of will allowed him to pass through air and time, through death itself, to bring comfort? Imagine the act of selflessness—at the moment of your own death, at your own perishing, that glad rush to the living, towards love.

  I try and read everything I can about the war, and I ask every boy I know to tell me everything, but I still cannot feel it, how it must be, the noise, the smell. Funnily enough, hearing that story about John is the closest I have come to feeling the reality of it even though it sounds like a dream.

  I remember reading somewhere that in the Great War, on particular kinds of days when the weather was a certain way, you could hear the fighting in France from England.

  I feel as though my ears are constantly straining for a sound that is too far off to hear. When we were kids Ros used to unexpectedly put her hand over my eyes, to annoy me—she knew it drove me crazy. I used to flail around, maddened, furious—it’s completely shocking being made unexpectedly blind—it’s much more unpleasant, more frightening, than you would expect.

  I feel like that now—as if I can’t hear anything or see anything, as if someone has got his hands in front of my eyes. I want to do something practical—train to be a nurse, ship out with the men, act. I WANT TO DO SOME GOOD IN THE WORLD, MAKE A DIFFERENCE. Oh, life is so wonderful, so interesting and strange—I want to feel every inch of it, live my life to the absolute fullest, see everything, go everywhere, LIVE.

  I wonder what’s going to happen to me. I wonder how old you have to be before you stop wondering what will happen to you?

  The Broken Book

  My father Percy Morley is the editor of the Blowhole Examiner. He has a staff of four, supposedly journalists, but they also double as secretaries, copytakers and advertising reps, taking down the stock sale results and writing up the radio guide and doing up advertisements as well. Mrs Hunter is the only real journalist—she was once a copy girl on the Argus in Melbourne but she gave it all up to marry Mr Hunter. But Mr Hunter is a disappointment, being the town’s Dirty Old Man, with hands faster than Hopalong Cassidy drawing a loaded Colt. All women have to give up their jobs when they get married, but my sister Hebe and I believe Mrs Hunter gave up the wrong thing. That’s the thing about mistakes, you only know it’s a mistake once you’ve made it. Hebe and I reckon you should be able to tell beforehand whether something is going to be a mistake or not, then you could decide to do it anyway, in the full knowledge of your forthcoming mistake. This could be known as an anticipatory mistake.

  Mr Hunter is not an anticipatory mistake. He’s a full-blown error of judgement, the feeling in the middle of the night when you know you’ve done something seismic which can’t be undone. Mr Hunter has given Mrs Hunter a big fat baby called Cecil, whom she adores, but now Cecil is almost three and cannot walk or talk and Mr Hunter has lost his job so Mrs Hunter has come back to work. Mr Hunter is supposed to look after Cecil but once Cecil was found crawling along the main road because Mr Hunter was at the pub and had forgotten all about him.

  Mrs Hunter is what is known as a looker, or at least she used to be. She is supposed to look like Norma Shearer, all flaring face and dancing eyes, but lately her eyes look like they are sitting down, being too tired to waltz around the room. She is always sweet to Hebe and me when we come into the office, maybe because the time spent away from her Living Mistake revives her spirits, making the world momentarily kinder.

  The other ‘journalists’ are Mr Duncan Road, aged twenty-two (known as Dusty for obvious reasons; eager, competitive), Mr Bill Bishop (veteran of the Great War, been writing his memoirs ever since; once told me that the men in the trenches sometimes shook a dead frozen hand in passing if one happened to be sticking out of the mud) and Miss Doreen Evans (genteel working lady who finds Mr Hunter alarming, and who may or may not admire the questing zeal of Mr Dusty Road).

  The Blowhole Examiner has been in the Griffith family since 1863, being established by Mr John Griffith’s grandfather Joseph. Mr Joseph Griffith was a Scot from Dumfries who sailed to Australia thinking it might be something like India, with darkies and elepha
nts and tigers. Disappointed by its olive green dullness and patronised by Sydney’s English aristocracy, he travelled further down the coast, finding the largely unclaimed green and gentle hills around the Blowhole more to his taste. The favoured son of wealthy shipowners, Joseph had his father cable out some money (although legend has it that he sent out gold bars secured in a safe in some captain’s quarters). Within six months Joseph Griffith secured premises, invested in good presses sent out from England, selected staff and printed his first copy of the Blowhole Examiner.

  My father Percy Morley wasn’t a communist when he became editor of the Blowhole Examiner but he has had many run-ins with Mr John Griffith since becoming one. Indeed, he has been sacked and reinstated once, over an editorial he wrote during the Depression analysing the failures of capitalism and urging workers everywhere to seize the moment and revolt. Because paper was scarce and expensive in the Depression (just like it will be in the war), my father was accused of wasting valuable resources to proselytise.

  The only reason he is still in the job today is that they couldn’t get anyone to do it. Dusty is too inexperienced, and Bill Bishop too old, and they would never give the job to a woman. They advertised Dad’s job the week he was sacked but not one person applied. Poor old John Griffith tried to do it himself but he couldn’t get any of the copy to fit the page layouts (nobody in the office is any good at layouts except Dad) and the paper was late and lost a lot of money. Anyway, Dad had so much support from the local townspeople (there was even a rally for him in the town hall) that Mr Griffith eventually gave in and reinstated him.

  ‘I suppose you are entitled to your views, Percy,’ he said. ‘Never let it be said that I am a proprietor who interfered with the freedom of the press.’

  ‘Well said, sir,’ said my father. ‘I always thought you were a bonzer bloke. You will go down in history as a man of thoughtful and independent views.’