The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  ‘A bloody dangerous clown too,’ he says by way of clarification.

  It strikes me that this must be a very terrible thing to be: a clown, a fool, a person not entirely in charge of themselves or their emotions. Stupidity armed with a gun.

  While I continue to eat my toast, my father goes on in this vein: the long and noble history of the Italian left, Garibaldi et al, the valiant struggles of the Italian people. He is still talking when my mother comes into the room; she stops, looks at me and then at my father. Being well trained in Morley domestic politics she makes no comment but simply continues on her uneventful way to the sink.

  My name is Cressida Morley and when I am seventeen I will fail to win the school English prize because I am not as clever as my sister Hebe. ‘Cress, there will always be people cleverer than you and others who are not as smart,’ my mother will say, ‘that’s life.’

  But where is the place I can polish myself, learn to carve myself into marble perfection from the dumb block of stone that I am? Where are my tools? I am seventeen years old and my life is something large and unbroken that must be hewn into a finer, more artful shape. I am the block that holds the waiting story.

  I am Cressida Morley, the teeming stone which must learn to be both stone and tool. I am the unbroken girl who does not wish to make even the smallest of anticipatory mistakes.

  And so it is that I finally come to leave home, to find a flat, to begin my real life. The war is on, the Japs are coming, I am certain that waiting out there is a man with my name written on him.

  Sydney, 1942

  Saturday

  The Japanese have taken Singapore (an entire division of men has been lost—I can’t bear to think of all the bereaved sisters and mothers and brothers and fathers newly left … ). Now Darwin’s been bombed—and suddenly I feel very frightened. At night I lie in bed listening for Jap planes, worrying about Atpay and Ken and everyone else I know who is standing in their skin out there in the open.

  I rang Mum when I heard about Darwin and I could hear Dad ranting in the background. ‘What’s he saying?’ I asked but she covered the mouthpiece at her end. I could hear her muffled voice saying, ‘Arthur! I can’t hear!’ (Actually, she does the same thing when he’s on the phone—both of them talk loudly at the same time.) I heard a scuffle and then my father’s voice boomed out, ‘Listen, Sleepy, don’t believe a word of it. It’s all bloody government propaganda.’

  ‘What,’ I said, ‘you mean Darwin hasn’t been bombed?’

  ‘Of course Darwin’s been bloody bombed! Blimey bloody Charlie, Sleeps, don’t be so literal-minded!’

  I didn’t say anything more because I could tell I was going to get an earful. He went on about government propaganda, the effect of war on the economy, the sheer impossibility of the survival of rational thought. ‘The federal government’s already assumed control of all the state budgets. Wars inevitably provide perfect conditions for capitalist governments.’ I was only half listening: I knew that if I spoke it would only inflame him further. The drama of war suits him—he can froth and steam all he likes because everyone else is doing it too. The innocent people of Kurrajong Bay should be grateful that Arthur Elgin is not the editor. Imagine the editorials if he was in control! He’s much safer where he is—chief sub of all he surveys, umpire of words. It suits him—spotting other people’s mistakes and their incorrect use of the English language—allowing him to gloat about his own superior mind. As he went on and on about war and governments (he was saying something about Neville Chamberlain) I recalled how he used to test Rosalind and me about our general knowledge, just to prove how much cleverer he was than us. ‘Girls!’ he would start, ‘name one British prime minister during the Napoleonic Wars. Rosalind? Katherine? Come on, girls, I can’t believe you don’t know.’ And then we would have to listen while he reeled off not one, but two, three, four names of prime ministers serving during the war which lasted blah blah years. ‘You should at least remember William Pitt the Younger.’ It wasn’t till a couple of years ago that it occurred to me that maybe my bragging father was lacking in confidence. I only worked this out because I lack confidence myself.

  Anyway, there’s Dad going on and on, leaving me no room whatsoever to voice my own terrors and fears. How would I know how to speak them? There’s no space, no sufficient air, everything is already used up. Then the operator asked if I wished to extend the call. ‘No thank you,’ I said quickly, and hung up.

  Wouldn’t it be great if someone invented a machine where you could turn your parents off at will like that? I don’t mean kill them or anything, but maybe a machine that allowed you to alter the frequency or the wavelength of the communication, perhaps something which let you fiddle with the dial until the quality of transmission improved. Something you could turn off when you wanted.

  I always think one day the air between us will be perfectly clear. I always imagine on this day I will have a full, calm heart; the air will be free of debris, pure as an infant’s first breath. On this day I will be able to speak everything that is in my heart and my father will have the grace to hear.

  Thursday

  Ken is back. He’s got permission from the Department of Information to depict activities in munition and aircraft factories, which means he’ll be spending a lot of time in Sydney.‘Depicting activities’ means he’ll be going into the factories, doing drawings and paintings of what goes on—he’s not an official war artist yet, but he’s getting there. Oh, I’m sure he can only go on to bigger and better things—he’s so very talented.

  Friday

  Well, we are certainly going on to bigger and better things!! Last night I lost my virginity!!! It didn’t hurt at all and there was hardly any blood. Ken bought three French letters and we used them all. Oh, the world turned slippery and soft, we were a dreaming huddle on the bed—now and then I raised my head for air and then I dove deep again, into the long sweet suck of him, the wet red slip of his inner lip, the tender open swell of his mouth. I know now what my body is for—I have used it all, every fibre and pore of it, every muscle. We drank champagne in bed and he pretended to launch me, like a ship. Thwack went the bottle, a playful knock against my scalp. ‘God bless all who sail in her,’ Ken said and we laughed.

  I am launched.

  I have sailed—I am away.

  Sunday

  Just when you think life can’t get any better, it suddenly gets worse. Last night Ken and I met up with his friends at this pub in King Street—I recognised most of the faces from the last time (I couldn’t see Val) but the first person who came up to me was Bitter John. God he’s horrible that man, really nasty, and I will never talk to him again as long as I live.

  Ken disappeared and Bitter John sidled up to me straightaway. As soon as he opened his mouth he started to make fun of me. ‘Here she is! The flower of Ken’s bosom!’

  I was feeling really confident before we went in, someone with a life of her own. I had a new pair of shoes which I thought looked flattering; I was wearing a very smart suit.

  ‘Bitter John,’ I said, ‘haven’t you joined up yet?’

  He smiled vaguely. ‘My dear, the army would not have me on a platter.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He looked at me with disdain.‘Don’t you find your ingénue pose a tad tedious?’

  ‘My what?’ I tried to keep smiling.

  ‘Your adoption of the guise of wonder. Your girlish air of joy at the wonder of being alive.’

  I kept smiling. ‘But I am glad to be alive.’

  He blew a ring of smoke into the air. ‘And so full of charm and innocence.’

  Anger surged in my blood. ‘At least I believe in something,’ I said with the sweetest smile I could find. My heart was pumping so furiously I thought Bitter John might see the movement of cloth at my chest.

  ‘Oh, yes?’ he said. ‘And what do you believe in?’

  He wanted me to explain everything I believed in! He wanted me to explain myself to him. I was furious, sp
eechless; I was beside myself with rage.

  He smiled down at me. ‘Do you want to know what your guise of girlish innocence really means? It says, “Oh, don’t hurt me, I am a good girl, I am so very nice!” It says, “Oh, I am defenceless, without weapons, please treat me kindly!” Meanwhile, your true black heart beats on, continuing to be as vicious as it likes. You’re a fake, darling, a beautiful fake.’

  Tears leaped to my eyes. ‘Uh, oh,’ said Bitter John, ‘not the waterworks. Not the weapon of choice of every manipulative young woman.’

  I rushed past him, into the street. Ken didn’t know I had gone till later. When he found out, he left straightaway to look for me and eventually made his way back here to the flat. I wouldn’t tell him what was wrong—he only knew it had something to do with Bitter John. ‘He’s a bastard, Kath,’ he said, stroking my hair. ‘I wouldn’t waste a single emotion on him, beautiful.’

  Long after we had gone to bed I lay there in the dark, thinking. I know that some part of what Bitter John said is right—the part about not being able to let the blackest parts of myself show. It’s true that I cannot tell people when I am angry about something; it’s true that I rail against unfairness and bad behaviour and meanness only in the privacy of my heart.

  But how can I begin to learn to taste angry words on my tongue? The only way I know of transmitting anger and pain is through the vehicle of words—but written words. I cannot speak them—I am going to have to write a letter to the world. Bugger you, Bitter John.

  You are not right about my whole identity being fake. I am alive. I am here. I am grateful to be breathing, alive upon the earth at ten o’clock in the morning on Sunday, February 22, 1942. I am here. I am.

  Letter to the world (Poem for Bitter John)

  Here is the dark

  syllable of rage,

  the fearless muck

  of my heart.

  Here is the putrid

  waste, the blood,

  the slime:

  every worst wish.

  Here is the good girl skin

  the clean hair

  the virgin eye

  the whitest fingernail

  Keep them:

  the dark, the light

  the blessed and the cursed,

  humanity’s sad address, freshly posted.

  London, 1953

  Tuesday

  David came home last night with this: colleague on Fleet Street laughing hugely at the very idea of a ‘cosmopolitan Australian’. ‘An oxymoron if ever there was one, eh, cobber?’

  Last week he happened to be visiting someone at the Times when one of the subeditors asked if anyone could help translate some Latin. When David was the only one in the entire newsroom who could do it, the rescued sub was open-mouthed. ‘How astonishing! I had no idea they even had Latin in the colonies!’ (It was indignatio ubi saeva ulterius cor lacerare nequit—where fierce indignation can tear his heart no longer—which I thought was wonderfully apt. The words form part of Swift’s epitaph, which no one knew except David.)

  How dare they patronise him—one of the finest writers they will ever chance their mediocre eyes upon. This is all so tedious and predictable—the British notion of an Australian, I mean—but fascinating too. Find the English very, very interesting.

  Later

  Stiff little party for the children, some confusion on my part whether an invitation to ‘bring the children for tea’ meant afternoon tea (as in a cream tea) or dinner for them and drinks for the adults—what??? Turned up yesterday at a posh house near the school with a bunch of flowers and a bottle of good French wine, just in case. The hostess met me at the door and said, ‘What an extraordinary girl. Turning up with a bottle secreted in your coat!’ All the other beautifully coifed young mothers laughed kindly. (‘Tea’ means dinner for the children only, usually cooked by Nanny and eaten in the nursery; a cup of tea for waiting mothers is rare; apparently mothers usually drop the children off and disappear.)

  Am interested in why it never occurs to the English that perhaps their way of doing things is the odd way to a non-English person, that other people in the world may have other ways and means. Find it all fascinating—this race superiority, this dumb arrogance of the blood; they are truly appalling to Americans—always going on about them having no sense of humour, no sense of irony.

  ‘One finds the American sensibility so different to our own,’ said the same mother at the nursery tea where I made the faux pas of bringing the wine. She was speaking (condescending?) to the new American mother at the school who looked interesting to me—perky, slightly unconventional in a way I could not quite put my finger on.

  ‘Yes, we have a more sophisticated sense of irony,’ the American girl responded, smiling, and I immediately sat up and paid attention. She was wearing those new khaki Capri pants with sandals. Her hair was short and unschooled (everybody else, including me, sported a French chignon—mine held together with a hideous old doughnut ring the girls had been playing with—I found it by chance under the bed, covered with dust). ‘I mean our sense of irony is more playful than yours,’ the American girl continued. I was quite speechless with admiration: I looked over with fascinated horror at her effect on the gleaming English mother.

  The hostess, Charlotte, was raising her overplucked eyebrows. ‘Really?’ she said, which meant, You couldn’t be more wrong. ‘And how did you reach that conclusion?’

  The American girl, Rosanna, continued to smile.

  ‘People so misuse the word “irony”,’ she said. ‘You know, “Ironically killed on her wedding day”.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘when they mean “coincidentally” or “tragically” or “bizarrely”. Or even, “luckily”.’

  ‘Obviously its use in the Socratic sense has been lost entirely,’ Rosanna added and the hostess Charlotte exchanged an ominous glance with another mother.

  ‘Ironically,’ I said and Rosanna looked at me and laughed.

  We are friends after this—the American academic and the mad Australian mother who goes around with bottles of wine secreted about her person. In fact we fell straight into that particular shorthand intimacy which comes when two people meet and recognise they will be friends for life.

  Rosanna is from New York and has been in Lionel Trilling’s course in the Romantic poets at Columbia. She briefly wanted to be a poet herself but quickly decided she was not good enough; she was not heartbroken by this discovery, which only confirms to me that she made the correct decision. Her husband, Claudio, is a photographer, an Italian-American, quite famous, who is older than her and who established his name with an extraordinary series of photographs of the first prisoners released from camps in Germany. Rosanna came to England for postgraduate work in Middle English, having recently moved to London from Cambridge. They have a precocious son—the same age as Anna—called, rather alarmingly, Cody. (God, I sound like an Englishwoman!) All this came out on the way home (David and I still no car; Rosanna, big American-looking thing—Chevrolet?)

  ‘You may call me Dr Weiss,’ she said to the girls in the car. She was a terrible driver, made worse by the fact that she was trying to roll a cigarette at the same time.

  ‘Where’s your stethoscope?’ Anna asked her, having recently learned the word.

  ‘Here, give it to me,’ I said, grabbing the cigarette papers from Rosanna’s fingers and the pouch of tobacco from her lap. I rolled the cigarette (badly), lit it with the lighter on the dashboard and handed it to her.

  ‘What’s a steth … stet …’ asked Lil.

  ‘Stethoscope,’ said Anna. ‘You can’t say it. You’re a baby!’

  ‘I am not a baby!’ wailed Lil.‘Mummy, Anna called me a baby!’

  ‘Baby! Baby! You are a baby! Elizabeth is a baby! Poo-ey baby! Poo-head baby!’

  At that moment a dog ran in front of the car, Rosanna swerved to miss it, and Lil hit Anna across the head. Anna began to howl and then Cody began to howl and then Rosanna stopped the car and put her head in her hands
, at which point the cigarette caught a strand of her fringe. The car was filled with crying and the stench of singed hair.

  ‘Ironically, the mothers could not remember what it was they were talking about,’ Rosanna said.

  Tuesday

  In a blue funk last night because David came home very late, reeking of cigarettes and drink, having spent long hours with friends at El Vino.

  Can it really be true that none of his women colleagues are admitted to the inner bar there?

  What happens at this inner bar? Does it contain heady air we are not supposed to breathe?

  O, to be lungful of smoke and soot, of all the world’s best pollution.

  Wednesday

  Foolishly, recklessly, full of hope, took notebook with me to the park today. Thought I might be able to sit down on a bench and dash off a few ideas. Notes? Thoughts? Words for possible later use? Beware of poetry and springtime, beware of trying to record the glory of dappled things.

  Wrote:

  Broken.

  Feast.

  Bee.

  But here is Anna. Here is Anna, rushing up and knocking my arm, so that my pen skids across the page.

  ‘What, Mummy? What are you writing? Write down Cynthia’s party. Are you writing it?’

  She has been invited to Cynthia’s party on Monday—can think of nothing else.

  Poem: Cynthia’s Party.

  I am the bloody Pied Piper to my children, who are instructed by their instincts to follow me everywhere. They follow me to the bedroom, to the bathroom—yesterday even to the toilet, where I sat, captured like an Indian, my journal shamefully open on my knees. ‘She’s in the loo!’ Lil cried triumphantly, pushing open the door—my best thoughts scattered, my skirts hoisted. Rounded up, corralled, cornered like an Indian by the cowgirls of instinct.

  For too long I have been a thief in my own life, stealing out of bed before dawn, notebook in hand, slipping into a moment’s cold freedom. In the chilly dawn I sit in silence, the children sleeping, the day not yet cracked, every pore open. If I sit very still I can hear the clock of the universe, the motion of eternity. In the blue time, the eye time, I claim a single fat tick of time for myself.