The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  Very nervous about meeting them—but you know how within seconds of meeting someone you know whether everything is going to be okay or not—well, within seconds I knew everything was going to be fine. His mother, Betty, has a kind face—she’s surprisingly plump and pretty looking—rosy cheeks and dark hair all fluffed out around her head—not what I expected at all. She seemed too young to be Ken’s mum, and kind of the wrong shape and look altogether—I was expecting an older version of Ken and his sister Gloria. (They both look like their dad.) Anyway, Ken’s mum was practically flirting with Ken, her own son, laughing at his jokes and being all coy and girly. I couldn’t believe it! She acts like she thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread, but it obviously gets on Gloria’s goat—as it would on mine if I was his sister. (I’VE BEEN BOMBED!! I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT!!!)

  Anyway—God, I have to write all of this down so I remember everything EXACTLY. Well, Ken’s dad was a surprise too—sort of weak and wishy-washy, stoop-shouldered—the opposite to his son in every way, who is all big-chested confidence and self-possession. His dad, Ernest, kind of sat there and disappeared into the background, hardly contributing anything to the conversation, just smoking cigarette after cigarette and drinking endless bottles of beer. He looks like Ken and Gloria though, which seems to be about the only thing they have in common—except he is a washed-out version of them, insipid, like a photographic negative of a gloriously coloured photo.

  Well, for dinner we had a roasted rabbit with all the trimmings, and beer for all of us, which left me feeling quite tipsy. Talked mostly about Ken’s work in the munitions factories and his plans for after the war (he wants to go to Europe to study). ‘All my life I’ve wanted to see Paris,’ said Mrs Howard. And Mr Howard made the only funny remark of the night: ‘The question is, does bloody Paris want to see you?’ I laughed but Mrs Howard looked offended and I lowered my eyes—Ken kicked me under the table. After that Mr Howard didn’t say another thing all night!

  After dinner we sat around the piano, which Gloria played, and Ken and I and Mrs Howard sang. Ken’s got quite a good voice, and I love singing, even though I’m not very good. I love the way it makes you feel like you have just run up a good hill, all that air and energy and rush. I sang my tuneless heart out and even Gloria smiled at me. When she started playing ‘Abide With Me’ all the others packed it in, but I love hymns too, so we did ‘Rock of Ages’ and lots of others till Gloria said she’d had enough. It made me quite like her—that, and the fact that I could imagine how she felt having a mother who so clearly preferred her brother to her.

  Anyway, the kitchen for a cup of tea before bed, listening to the radio for the latest war news (the boy from the flat next door, who Gloria and Ken grew up with, has just been killed in Singapore), and then bed. Gloria and I went to the bathroom to wash our faces and change into our nightgowns, then I gave Ken a chaste kiss goodnight and he whispered, ‘See you later, beautiful.’

  No late-night confessions from Gloria just a curt ‘Goodnight, Kathy’, lights out, and before long some breathing that suggested she was asleep. (Although on those occasions when I’ve feigned being asleep, for one reason or another I can never work out how to breathe properly, having never had the chance to monitor my own breath when I am asleep!) How long was I supposed to wait? Minutes? Hours? I lay in bed trying to work out if it was safe to creep down to Ken’s room, but when Gloria started snoring (politely, femininely) I took my chance.

  Now—here comes the BOMB!! What happened was that I crept out of bed as quietly as I could and opened the door—which creaked like a door in a horror movie. Bloody hell, I thought, poised on the threshold, waiting for Mrs Howard to rush up the corridor. When no one came I left the door ajar and made my way along the walls in the dark, praying that I would feel the doorway soon. Ken was right though—the floorboards didn’t creak.

  Luckily Ken’s door didn’t creak either as I opened it and he was waiting for me in the dark. He had my nightdress up over my bottom and his hands on the curve of my naked buttocks within moments. I straddled him, my hair brushing his face, the smooth cups of his palms resting gently on each curved globe of flesh. ‘A perfect fit,’ he said, breathing into my mouth. He slid into me and just at that EXACT MOMENT there was this god-almighty crash and the wall above the bed fell down and this shell came through the wall and skidded right across the floor, right through the wall of his parents’ bedroom, right through another two internal walls before coming to rest – unexploded!!!—on the communal stairs. A Japanese shell!! IN ROSE BAY, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA!!! We didn’t know what was happening—for one wild frantic moment I thought my father had come to smash down the door—Ken and I were covered in broken bricks and dust but we were in one piece, not a scratch, standing there in our nightclothes, speechless. I can’t remember getting up from the bed, walking to the door—I remember everyone standing in the corridor, me suddenly crying, wondering if I had been smote by God, Ken telling me to shut up, me crying harder because he had never ever spoken cruelly to me before, his mother coming up and clinging on to him, shrieking hysterically, his father limping because his foot had somehow been crushed by falling debris. Gloria was there too and then all the air-raid wardens from the area, trying to work out how to move the shell so it wouldn’t explode. And Ken shouting at me, ‘It’s not a bloody bomb, for God’s sake! Everybody calm down, bombs fall through roofs, they don’t come through walls!’

  But I was terrified another one was coming and I didn’t know where to go—did the flats have an air-raid shelter? Where was it? It was after midnight but everyone in the block of flats was up, gibbering, crying, wringing their hands. Then we were all herded off to a shelter somewhere, but I had recovered my wits enough by then to watch the air-raid wardens carrying the unexploded shell out, down the stairs, cradling it tenderly. I wanted to go somewhere, hide in the earth, cover myself with the safest dirt. We were all being told to keep calm, to follow instructions, not to panic. ‘A bomb!’ people kept repeating and air-raid wardens kept saying, ‘There is no bomb! Keep calm!’ and the children were crying, along with their mothers, every one of us wishing to live, wishing to evade extinction. By then I was angry with Ken—how was I to know it wasn’t a bomb? How am I supposed to know the difference between a bomb and a shell? He was being the Big Leader, explaining to everyone in the shelter that it was probably a shell from the Japanese subs that have been around; we would have to wait to learn whether there was any serious damage. Then of course everyone was convinced that when the sun came up we would find Sydney in ruins, the Bridge gone, the Town Hall smashed. How many submarines were there? How many shells? We passed the hours scaring ourselves out of our wits, but then morning came, and as the hours passed, good news—no one killed, perhaps half-a-dozen shells at the most, only one exploded.

  I’ve only just got back here now, the newspaper confirming all this under my arm, Ken gone off in a huff after I refused to kiss him goodbye.

  And of course Mr and Mrs Howard could not have cared whether their favoured son was entertaining twenty prostitutes in his bed! They wouldn’t have known which door I came out from in all the chaos, and frankly I don’t think they would have cared if I was dead or alive. Mr Howard’s gone off to hospital to have his foot dealt with, and right at this moment I don’t care whether I see Ken Howard ever again. I just remembered something else he said: ‘Stop being a drama queen, Kathy! Hose it down for God’s sake, you’re hysterical!’ All my life people have been telling me to hose it down—you’re too dramatic! Too stuck-up! Too pretty, too sensitive! Well, now I know what people mean—I’m too much myself. Ken wants me to be someone else, someone I’m not.

  I’ve been bombed, Ken Howard. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  Wednesday

  Mum is putting the weights on Ros and me to come home. ‘I can’t sleep at night for worry,’ she said but then Dad got on the phone. ‘The bloody Japs couldn’t hit a target if you paid them, Kath. You’re as safe as houses�
��your mother doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’ Ros has just been here for dinner and both of us want to stay in Sydney—she’s seeing some fellow who’s on the same course as her, but the main reason she wants to stay is university. She tried explaining to me St Thomas Aquinas and his arguments for the existence of God, but it struck my head like complicated maths and I soon tuned out. She’s always been good at maths, Ros—as well as everything else—and now she has this new sophisticated glow about her, as if she could tell the world a few things. She says she is never going to get married.

  She already knows all about Ken but when I told her about the bomb and being in his bed, the first thing she said was: ‘I hope you’re using reliable contraception, Kath. You do know about diaphragms, don’t you? I can give you my doctor’s name if you like.’

  She has tried to press this once before, when I told her about losing my virginity. There is nothing starry-eyed about my sister—I want to talk about love and roses and all she wants to talk about is sperms meeting eggs.

  Speaking of which … I think that is Ken at the door.

  Should I let him in?

  The Broken Book

  Here I am, the girl of teeming stone, leaving school, accepting second prize. Life’s runner-up! But will I cry and gnash my teeth? Will I show anyone I care? No, I will smile and wish the winner the best of luck, all the while plotting my mutinous revenge. I will pack my little kerchief of worldly goods, tie it to a jaunty stick, and set off for the city with a wave. Goodbye, Blowhole. Goodbye, Dad. Good riddance.

  For a while I will work in a spectacle shop and curiously I will come to believe my 20/20 vision eyes are losing their powers. I will need to blink a lot while watching lesser eyes reading diminishing letters, for it is as if a film of unknown origin has descended upon my previously glistening young orbs. Every lunch hour I will try on various spectacles while wondering if I have spent my life trying to get to this blurred new point. Was I meant to grow up and lose my sight in a spectacle shop?

  I will take my own flat in a seedy area of the city peopled by artists and poets. I hope that I am a poet too, a carrier of coiled words, a vessel for dreams. Is a poem as real as a pair of glasses? Is a poem as real as a gun?

  The war is on! Bombs, guns, planes—no poems, no poems. Instead, lectures from my father Percy Morley via the medium of the telephone, a trip with my mother Dorothy Morley to the best dressmaker in the Blowhole to kit me out for adult life. Four dresses for summer, three skirts for winter, two blouses; a coat, fully lined. Mum will come to look for flats with me, all the while tut-tutting at the lowly forms of life visible around us. ‘That girl has no self-respect,’ she will say, sotto voce, as a young woman passes us in the street, hatless, gloveless, stockingless, her hair swinging uncurled and free, a cigarette dangling from her unpainted lips. My mother has heard that the Witch of the Cross, Rosyln Norton, lives nearby. ‘I don’t understand why you are attracted to ruffians, Cressida,’ she will say. ‘These people have the Devil on their shoulders. Why don’t you move somewhere nice?’

  Where is the planet Nice, Mum? Where is this place where everyone is well behaved, their emotions neatly tucked in like a freshly ironed shirt in a clean pair of trousers? Where is this place where all the pain and rage and bile of the world do not exist, where no one kills another human being because of his religion or his race? I would like to live there, happy on a cloud, my dimming eyes adjusting to the light.

  In the meantime I will decide to leave the spectacle shop because while walking to work I have seen a job advertised at a cinema. A lot of theatres have closed because of the war, but a few picture houses struggle on. What is it about my beautiful eyes and wilful blindness? Why is it that as I take my place in the world I find myself blinking?

  But one afternoon a brilliant light will unexpectedly fall. The light will come in the shape of a man, a tall, wide-shouldered man. The man will have a name and the hands of an artist, but he will be revealed as a true artist of the body. He will take my clay and shape it, he will knead me and break me, the first man to enter my body. He will write his name upon my skin; I will hand myself over as if on a plate and fail to notice the crumbs of other women around his mouth. The first man to join himself to me. My body proves itself to be a fast learner, taking to that ancient rhythm without lessons. I learn the art of suck and sigh, the wonder of the penis, the soft knowledge of testicle, lip, tongue. I am being mapped, traced upon the earth, my first man is showing me that I have joined that long line of girls becoming women, of women growing old, eventually becoming of the earth, humanity’s mulch. I am joining hands with all historical women, with the future: I am taking my place.

  Look at me, a member at last. A man has chosen me, the invisible girl, life’s runner-up. A wide-shouldered man is telling me I am beautiful, that he is in love with me, that there are safe days of the month. A man who is cleverer than me, more everything than me, has finally chosen me first.

  I will exist in this new world of bodily swoon for six months, eight months, ten. I will keep blinking but my eyes are always peeled, my ears are always open. I will learn again that there are women much, much cleverer than me, grown-up women who are friends of the man who has named me. In their company I will blush and stammer, lower my diminished eyes, completely forget what to say. I am practising my first adult form, trying on my shape in the world.

  And then the days will come when the day does not come, the day of blood, of hot red rush. I will wait for the blood, I will wait and wait. I will sit at my table, a calendar before me, and count and recount the days. I will try to see through time, the walls of my body; I will try to see the workings of God. But my body is dumb, my body does not flow, as if clogged. Now I am both dumb and blind, not privy to the secret interior life inside my own skin. I will suddenly become conscious of this secret alternative physical reality, this other unseen physical self I cannot reach to speak sense. I will sit in the dark and plead with my body to release its flow and save me. But my body won’t answer; it gives back the sensation of dumbness, of something dark and unknown, beyond which I cannot reach. I can’t believe my own body is betraying me, making its own secret plans. I am the teeming head here, I am the captain! Do not destroy me, not now just as I am about to step out and take my place, not when my whole life is before me.

  I will cry in the arms of the visionary man, who will coo into my beautiful ear and rock me. He will take me out to drink champagne to cheer me up and tell me not to worry too much. ‘You don’t know you’re pregnant for sure,’ he will say but I know, O, I know. I am a body occupied, claimed land, my breasts are responding to some genetic message from my body’s new captain, some cunning mutineer.

  I will forget to do my job properly so that the cinema manager, Mrs Close, will ask me if something is on my mind. ‘You’ve been very distracted, Miss Morley. Everything all right at home?’ I am frequently late for work, or late back from lunch because I have been sitting in the park going over and over dates in my head. I can’t concentrate on anything but the drama going on underneath my own skin. The days keep coming, more and more of them, taking me further and further away from a miracle.

  Then the fateful day will come when I finally find the courage to go to the doctor, a doctor I have never seen before, whose offices I pass every day. He will ask me to take off the skirt my mother recently had made for me when fitting me out for adult life. I will lie upon the high cotton-covered bench where the doctor will put on a pair of rubber gloves and stick his fingers into me while palpitating my uterus. ‘You are at least sixteen weeks pregnant, young lady,’ he will announce. ‘I take it you are not married?’

  I am not married, sir, I am not married. I have not even begun my grown-up life. I am a teeming girl who has just left school, a girl who has long supposed herself to be above anticipatory mistakes. I am that girl who intended to do everything, to write poems, to be a witness to Life. I am that girl who wished to rouse the sky.

  But right now I find mys
elf crying on the examining bench, crying tears that are coming so fast they are rolling down the side of my face and into my ears. Get away from me, Doctor, let me get up, let me get out of this room into the air. Let me run somewhere safe, somewhere far from this news, let me run so fast it won’t catch me. Let me reach the telephone, where I will ring the man of visions, who will tell me he is sorry but he cannot speak right now. Let me sob, let my heart crack, let me bleed, O please let me bleed.

  I will turn up unannounced at the door of the man of visions. He is about to go into the army and is staying with friends, in a flat in the suburb next to mine. He will take a long time to answer the door and when he does he appears to be doing up the collar of his shirt. It is late, I know, too late for a young woman to turn up at his door carrying a secret. ‘Hush, darling, it’ll be all right,’ he will say kindly, taking me at once in his visionary arms. But who is that coming out of the room behind him? Why, it is Lorna of course, you remember Lorna, I think you met at the King’s Arms? Of course, Lorna, the clever girl of words, his old chum! She will say, ‘I was just saying goodbye before he is lost to us—I was just off myself!’ Cheerio!

  And when she has gone, I will make a scene and the man of visions will assure me I am jumping to conclusions. ‘She’s just a friend!’ he will say and I will leave the house trying to believe him. I am trying to believe you, Man of Visions, I am trying to believe that Lorna is your friend.

  But all the while I am walking home (will walking make something come loose?) I am thinking: that girl Lorna had the tag of her blouse sticking up from the neck of her cardigan. That was definitely a girl with her blouse on inside out.

  I will turn up at the door of my foe, my sister Hebe, too late at night for a young woman to turn up with a secret. ‘Oh, God, you poor thing,’ she will say but not before she tells me I should have been more careful. Not before she tells me I should have listened to her advice and protected my ovaries and my heart. ‘What a goose,’ she will croon as I cry. ‘Poor little Cress.’ She will make me a cup of tea and toast just the way I like it, thickly spread while the toast is still hot. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to eat it like that,’ she will say, ‘it’d give me indigestion.’ So Hebe waits till her toast is stone cold and then spreads a thin film of butter. ‘Now,’ she will say, ‘what are we going to do with you?’