The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  ‘Why? Because I’m Aboriginal?’

  I blushed. ‘Ah ha!’ she said. ‘I knew it!’

  ‘No! It’s not only that—but it is interesting, you being Aboriginal! It meant I had something to learn.’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘Athykay, you’re an idiot.’ I grinned at her. ‘But a nice idiot.’

  It will be great having Atpay around for a while.

  Letter

  (UNDATED, PROBABLY PERIOD 1953–54, LONDON; WRITTEN BY ELGIN’S ELDEST DAUGHTER ANNA B. 1947)

  To Mummy hello

  To Mummy I love you thank you for the present and well be coming back on 21st July and I miss you Mummy Did you have a happy holiday because I hope you did soon I lle be going to Kent and I lle like it there but I lle still miss you there to but of course I wont miss you a lot

  Love Anna

  The Broken Book

  My name is Cressida Morley and when I am sixteen years old Mr Hunter, otherwise known as Mrs Hunter’s Living Mistake, will try to rape me on Booby’s Beach on a sunny morning in December. I am supposed to be meeting my best friend Ampay Rockettcay but she is late: in fact she is nowhere to be seen. ‘Boongs are notoriously unreliable when it comes to time,’ Mr Hunter will say after we have been sitting together on my beach towel for ten minutes staring out to sea. I will be distinctly uncomfortable with the Living Mistake sitting so close to me, so close that I can feel the heat of his thigh. He will smell of beer, even though it is only nine o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Please don’t call them boongs, Mr Hunter,’ I will say politely, ‘they are Aboriginals. Actually, they are just people.’

  ‘Dirty people in need of a good scrub,’ he will say, ‘and a good douse of kero for the head lice.’

  ‘I got lice last year at school,’ I will say.

  ‘Probably because the lice found you beautiful,’ the Living Mistake will tell me.

  I will look up the beach, desperate now, for Amp, for the saving sight of any human face. My sixteen-year-old heart will beat in my chest and the air in my lungs will appear to be coming too fast so that I am conscious the force of my breath is causing my breasts to rise and swell like a tide.

  I will notice that the Living Mistake’s eyes are on my breasts, that their rise and fall is hypnotic to his eyes. I will see his hand lift to land on my upper leg, where it stays only because I am unsure whether I have the right to push it off. I have been trained to be a nice girl, not to be rude, and I am embarrassed because I don’t know what to do next. Surely someone will come along, surely someone will come to see the waves or the sun, even though it is only nine o’clock in the morning?

  But The Living Mistake’s big red hand is travelling up my skirt where it comes to rest near my outer thigh, on the fraying elastic of my underpants. I am on the rag. I have a thick washer pinned to either side of my pants with a large safety pin: a girl’s nappy. What if his hands find out? What if blood leaks out all over him, a shaming flood? I quickly bring my legs together, straight out in front of me, so that the Living Mistake is forced to retrieve his hand.

  ‘Cress, darling, you are a very beautiful young woman,’ he says. ‘I have fallen in love with you.’

  I turn my head away from him, looking back up the beach, my mouth dry. Am I allowed to get up? To go home? To run away? Oh, Ampay, where are you now, why can’t you save me?

  While my head is turned the Living Mistake throws me back onto the sand, where he lands on top of me, his thick tongue lapping at my mouth. I can feel his penis, ugh, against my leg, hot and hard like a rock in the sun. I am struggling to sit up but there is nothing but the smell of beer and the press of my bones into the sand, the universe of him blocking out the passage of air. I am trying to wipe my mouth, the snail’s trail of his saliva is all over my face, I think the washer between my legs is preventing him from getting his freed cock inside. I can see it! Springing up, waving, an ugly mean thing without eyes. He will climb off me to get the thing out and I am out and free, standing up, pulling at my dress and my face.

  ‘We shall have to try again when Miss Curse has gone away,’ the Living Mistake will say, sitting up and beginning to brush off the sand.

  He knows I’ve got the curse! The Living Mistake knows I am on the rag! I will blush hard, my head will feel hot and swollen, so that only embarrassment will force me from the beach. I will snatch up my towel and my new beach bag that Hebe gave me for my birthday and tears of shame will spill out of my eyes.

  I will rush up the beach where I will run into Amp and immediately burst into wails.

  ‘The Living Mistake knows I’ve got the curse!’ I will cry and this is the one fact I will cling to, the saving shape of my ruin, the one idea my sixteen-year-old mind will safely hold. ‘Mr Hunter knows I’ve got the curse,’ I will say again and again before I begin to sob, before Amp cradles me in the dark sling of her arms.

  The Island, Greece, 1961

  All day I have been sitting in our little walled garden, remembering. I have been doing a certain amount of counting, so to speak, some adding up. On the creaky blue table in front of me are my notebook and pen, a scattering of lemon blossoms, an old journal with a broken spine. Above my head the Greek sky, lemon trees, bitter oleander, two plum trees. Sounds reach me: the knock of donkeys’ hooves, the voices of the boys leading them up and down the lanes, Soula’s nervous chickens, the cries of children from the school on the hill. It is not yet hot enough to force me indoors—within weeks the sun will batter us senseless, but for the moment the air is sparklingly fresh and everything appears newly rinsed. The lemon trees smell wonderful and every now and then I stand up from the table and bend towards them. I am trying to fix my eye upon the particular: upon the white centre of the lemon blossom, upon the tiny, trembling puffs of pollen, upon the unfurling of the most tender new leaf. I am trying to remember my way into the past, into the particular, into a new book to be exact—at the same time I am trying not to flail in panic. Are we to go on like this forever, each successive book bringing diminishing advances and ever smaller returns? Am I to spend the rest of my days worrying about whether we can afford new coats for winter because our old ones are worn out? I am so ground down by fears about money, about the future, about how much my unwritten book will bring us. Surely we cannot go on being poor forever. Can we?

  As I sit here I am forcibly reminding myself that my belly is full and that our poverty is relative. We are warm, sheltered, we have blankets for our beds, sunlight. We have more than enough to survive on a spring day like today without worrying about new coats for winter. Would I swap this day for a staff flat, a regular wage, our old safe life back in London? I remember myself standing for forty-five minutes in the blistering cold one spring morning on an ugly street in Highgate, waiting for a bus that never came, when suddenly snow began to fall. The man standing next to me turned up his face and announced in an impeccable public school voice, ‘God, how I loathe this wretched country.’ I laughed, uproariously and inappropriately, and he asked me out for a drink (I declined). I don’t think such a man would ask me out today.

  I sit now in my worn artistic shabbiness, my hair badly in need of a cut, trying to count my blessings. It is a perfect day for remembering, a shimmering day just like those from my childhood by the sea. A letter from my mother tells me my father is doing far better than expected and is even starting to speak again. I cannot imagine my father without words.

  I have not seen my father since that morning ten years ago when our ship sailed for London from Circular Quay: I can still see him standing next to my frantic mother, refusing to wave. I have been trying to imagine him old and faded, but I find I cannot. It is hard to picture the powerful figures from our childhood as vulnerable, no matter how old we get. In my heart I will always be fifteen with my father.

  Above my head, up on the roof, my husband is working in his studio, writing his novel which he hopes will bring us salvation. We are a house of memory here, every door opens on the past, every corn
er cherishes a lost moment. For months now I have been helping David to remember—after the girls are in bed we sit together on the roof, drinking ouzo, while I talk about Australian food we used to eat when I was growing up or long-forgotten expressions. (I remember the things my father used to say, such as calling children ‘nippers’ or women he thought unattractive ‘old boilers’ or young men ‘two-bob lairs’. Dad used to say ‘give it a burl’ when he meant give something a try and ‘blimey bloody Charlie’ when he was cross, which was most of the time.) I remember the clothes we wore, the songs we sang, and all this remembering is going into David’s new book. His novel is packed with lost remembered life, humming and sure as a pulse—it’s about his youth and Australia and our early life together, about the sad, lingering effects of war—if it works he’s planning on turning it into a trilogy.

  Last night, sitting in the moonlight up on the roof drinking and talking and remembering, I knew again we had done the right thing in coming here, and—despite everything—David felt as close as my own skin. ‘Darling, you’re a witch,’ he said at one point. ‘How is it that you can remember everything?’ He asked if I minded him using the name Cressida Morley for his main female character and I said he was welcome to it. ‘It’s a beautiful name. Euphonious,’ he said. When he is happy David is the best of men—when his work is going well he is pleased with everything and consequently pleased with me. Increasingly I find myself doing all I can to provide the conditions in which his happiness might flourish.

  These days I rarely tell him bad news or speak of sadness. I have never told him, for example, that for a long time the only thing my remarkable memory seemed to recall was pain. I used to think that painful memories were more deeply seared into our cells than happy ones. But as I’ve grown older I’ve come to believe there is no such thing as a ‘fixed’ memory, painful or happy—that is, an actual event recalled exactly as it happened—but only the act of remembering.

  Here we are now, remembering, on this shimmering Greek day—David up there remembering his version of our story, and me down in the garden counting mine. ‘As two spent swimmers, that do cling together/And choke their art …’ But must we both drown because we share the same story? Surely there was some point when our stories diverged, when each of us struck off in a secret, unknown direction? In the house of marriage, whole rooms are closed off, windows grow darkened, there is a small place where husband and wife must always sit separate and alone. David is sitting there now, and as a writer as well as a wife I must respect his right to sit in that place and make of our story what he can. Will I cry foul, claiming privacy for all my spent tears?

  Both of us made the story.

  Each of us must make of it what we can.

  I’ve read enough of his book to know that I appear in the guise of an earthly mermaid, dining on the bones of breathless men. David said to me, on our first night together, ‘You arose as if from the sea.’ If he remembers me as if arising from the sea, what do I remember? What are the things I must count?

  In fixing my eye upon the particular I will begin by recalling my strange and fatal first interview with David. (‘By our first strange and fatal interview/By all desires which thereof did ensue/By our long starving hopes …’) The date was May 14, 1946—I was twenty-two and demobbed for six months, working at the Herald for four—we met in the foyer of the Fairfax building in the city. I knew who he was, his fame preceded him, and I recognised him immediately. He was on his way into the building with the editor Vince Atherton and I was on my way out to cover one of the Lady Mayoress’s sticky garden parties for Women’s News.

  When we looked at each other it was a bodily shock: erotic, charged. I felt my lips twist up in that way they used to when I was young and embarrassed, so that people thought I was smirking.

  ‘David, I don’t think you’ve met our new star? Katherine, this is our paper’s oldest star, David Murray.’

  ‘Katherine Elgin,’ I said. ‘It’s an honour to meet you.’

  Our skins touched; our palms. Everything we needed to know was in our skin.

  ‘You make me sound like I’m about to burn out, Vince,’ he said, turning to me and smiling, ‘an old, burned-out star and a shiny new one. Is there enough room in the sky for both of us?’

  Standing there, holding his hand for too long, everything in me opened, everything previously locked up. He seemed to me full of something I wanted, the possessor of some idea of life that was bitter and hard won. He was instinctively graceful, even standing motionless his body had natural elegance, an air of sensuality. He was not beautiful, not handsome; his face was jagged, heavily lined, the bluish skin of his eyelids already collapsing over his intelligent eyes. He was fully present in a way I had never before witnessed in anyone, every part of him was alive and searching; he was all discernment, all appraisal, all perceptive open eye. Some suffering in him was known to me, his inner life was recognisable in the alert lucidity of his face.

  What exactly did I know of him? What did his skin tell me that his words could not—that he would cast me as his muse, that he would marry me, marry me?

  ‘We must have a drink,’ he said as Vince Atherton led him away. ‘Soon.’

  ‘Five-thirty at the Australia Hotel,’ I said as I turned towards the door.

  ‘Tonight,’ he said, over his shoulder, and I nodded.

  David told me later that Vince Atherton had warned him I would burn his fingers. ‘And that’s not counting what she’ll do to your heart, mate.’

  Back then I planned on burning up, on leaving nothing but the whitest ash.

  I was so young.

  When David came into the bar I had already been there for half an hour and downed three shandies.‘Murray! Murray, over here!’ half-a-dozen people shouted as he came in and he was immediately surrounded. The famous war correspondent himself! The poet of war, of suffering. He cast a look at me, of raised eyebrows and helplessness, insisting he was only staying for a quick beer. ‘I have more important business to attend to,’ he said, nodding in my direction. ‘I’m not wasting time with you lot.’ I lowered my twenty-two-year-old marine eyes and blushed.

  Several men turned and the hooting and whistling began. ‘Not our Kathy,’ the Count said, ‘she’s mine!’ The Count was called the Count because of his presumed likeness to Count Dracula—with his slick black Brylcreemed hair, styled straight back from his forehead, and his adoption of a silk lined black coat, he was creepily handsome; no female copy girl or cadet journalist was safe from his vampire hands.

  ‘She’s already said no to me,’ said the Count,‘she can’t possibly say yes to you!’

  Actually I had never said no—I tried never to be alone with him and therefore never had the chance—he kept up a running commentary on me whenever I happened to venture into the newsroom from the sanctity of Women’s News. ‘Boys, this is what I would like to do with Miss Elgin. I’d dress her in satin and place her fully dressed in the bath so that her dress was very, very wet.’ He knew I would laugh and pretend to be a nice jolly girl who could take a joke, he knew I would refuse to run crying from the room like Anne Jones, telling tales to Miss Mattingley.

  (Miss Patience Mattingley, Women’s News editor, spinster, large men’s hands, smoked, incongruously wore fine lace gloves. Rarely smiled, kind to girls, fiancé killed at the Somme—there were lots of women like this when I was growing up, women without men—strangely sexless. Heard years later that she had been having a long-standing affair with the married editor Vince Atherton—which just goes to show how impossible it is for the young to believe the old have sex. She was like an old, shaggy animal—large yellowing teeth, faded hair. Skin yellow from cigarettes. Hoarse voice; kind. Did not believe she possessed sex parts.)

  Evelyn Simpson, assistant political correspondent (Canberra) had succumbed and gone out with the Count. It is true that he was vaguely glamorous in a matinee-idol kind of way—very well turned out, shoes highly polished, suits well cut, cuffs clean. Police reporter, wh
ich meant that he sat in the little lino-floored room just off the newsroom with the police radio blaring out at all times. Evelyn Simpson said he took her to the Chevron (expensive champagne, oysters, steak) then on to a nightclub in Kings Cross, where he knew everyone and was very charming. He was forty-five at least, three wives down; he made me feel naked when he looked at me.

  He was looking at me then, but out of the corner of one eye I saw David walking towards me, striding really, coming straight at me, pulling me up from my chair hard by the wrist. ‘Ouch,’ I said and he swung me around and sat me on his lap. I smelled him—cigarettes, alcohol, with something compelling and fragrant underneath—can someone’s whole life be decided by such an animal instinct? He smelled familiar, good; faintly sweet, like a loved child.

  ‘That’d be right,’ the Count said with a sneer, ‘trust Murray to get all the best ones.’

  And David Murray did get the best ones. He got the choicest, most succulent part of me, my youth, my freshest hopes. When we embraced on the bed at a cheap hotel in Kings Cross that same night, he got the best part of my tender skin, my mermaid’s eyes, my stubborn unbroken belief in love. He got my unsimple heart, my long starving hopes: he opened the cave of my chest and I believed all the yearning and pain inside flew up and away. We rolled together and our eyes swam with common tears; when he shuddered inside me I felt the pulse of him in my deepest self, as if he had reached some private core. I lay on the sheets and he traced every part of me, the jutting bone of my hip, the flare of my ribs. He found the scar on my leg from the day my father and I had been swept out to sea only to be smashed upon the rocks of land and safety. He found the secret part of me, the tender carving down my centre, a lingering smudged brown line that was the only bodily evidence left of my most terrible dream. His whole self seemed transparent to me so that I found I could tell him everything, believing that his chest and arms and skin were ready for burdens. I thought my sad waiting was over, that he had come to tell me some central truth for which I had been waiting.