About a Girl

by Joanne Horniman

  But I made no move to leave, leaning against the kitchen bench. Timothy had jumped onto the table and was licking honey from the slice of abandoned bread. Flynn stroked him along the length of his back and he raised his hindquarters with pleasure.

  ‘All right, I’ll let you go,’ she said, sternly. ‘But only if you promise to come and see me again soon.’ She put her hand on my arm.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, my heart pounding.

  She released me – that’s what it felt like when she took her hand away – and I turned and went out, not wanting to go, feeling the pull of her. The cord between us stretched as I went down the purple, eucalyptus-smelling stairs in the twilight, and with every step I wanted to stop, and go back.

  But I came at last to the foot of the stairs, into the darkening street, and walked quickly away.

  Chapter Four

  I HAD LIVED for only a month in a little flat high on a hill. It was part of a duplex, two low, detached buildings built in the 1950s or ’60s, old, but not old enough to be quaint or charming.

  The buildings backed onto the street and sat in a concreted yard edged with a low brick wall. A previous tenant had left a collection of succulents in rusty olive-oil cans, and they spilled over in profusion, grey-green and knobbed and somewhat lizard-like. Several blue-tongue lizards lived out there, and they blended in so well with the foliage that we sometimes surprised each other. A couple of straggly pawpaw trees leaned away from the building towards the light. There was something Mediterranean about it all: the warmth and sparseness perhaps, or maybe it was those olive-oil cans. I often sat on the wall and sunned myself like a cat, and looked out over the town. It was a toy town from there. You could hear voices floating up, the growl of trucks, and sometimes the low bass beat of music from passing cars.

  I spent most of my time in the narrow front living room. It had a line of little push-out windows that faced the view. I especially liked it at night; with the lights from the town arrayed below, it was like living above the stars. There had been curtains there when I arrived – dusty, horrible things – and I’d taken them down.

  The kitchen ran up the side of the flat, a narrow galley open to the living area. The rest of the place reminded me of a train; it was strung out, with three bedrooms along a strip of hallway. The whole back of the flat was quite depressing. I slept in the first of the bedrooms and pretended that the rest of it wasn’t there, though it yawned gloomily behind me. I could have got someone in to share, but at that time I needed to live on my own.

  A young musician and his family lived in the other flat. I heard the children’s voices sometimes as they played handball against the side of their house. The father, long-haired and skinny, was a sole parent, and I had the impression that the children stayed with their mother most of the time. When he was alone he played on his guitar, sounding very forlorn.

  But it was a private place, at the end of a steep street, from where a track led through a weedy tangle of trees to a grassy, rubbish-strewn lookout. I had come to this town on impulse from the south, and the flat I’d found to live in suited my spirit. It was solitary and starkly beautiful despite its scruffiness, or perhaps because of it. The sky was pure, and carried intimations of infinity. In my little front room, I might have been floating.

  I had found work in a bookshop – that was why I’d moved north.

  Each morning, as I walked down through the leafy streets, some so narrow and crooked it was a wonder cars could even negotiate them, I had moments of pure pleasure. Vine-covered fences, pretty timber cottages, fat dozing cats, yappy dogs, the occasional crawling car or wandering pedestrian – I found myself smiling at it all.

  At the bottom of the hill, where timber houses gave way to brick walls and urban grunge, I scuttled across four lanes of traffic. I had a key to the bookshop and was often the first to arrive, letting myself in through a back door from an untidy laneway. At the moment when the lights flickered on, I could feel the books coming to attention after dozing the night away.

  It was a big store, filled with merchandise – and that’s all most of the books were, for they contained none of the magic of what I regarded as real books. Sometimes I felt I might have been selling bathroom tiles or washing machines. There was a time when I was romantic about all books, but working in a bookshop it didn’t take long for me to see that they were not all created equal. Some were like tricked-up tarts, and others reminded me of packets of soap powder, great square blocks stacked in formation, waiting smugly to be reached for and shoved into shopping baskets. The shop was like a city with different suburbs: a prominent area for glossy cookery books, an exclusive area for literary titles, the high-rise stacks of the soap-powder books in the centre, and the children’s and teenagers’ books shoved down the back in a sort of shanty town. I loved most the almost ecclesiastical purity of the Penguin Classics, a small ascetic gathering waiting on some out-of-the-way shelf. Most of them were large and solid like men in long black coats and top hats, rather imposing and self-important, while others were lean and made me think of funeral directors.

  It was a large bookshop, with a number of women working there, and though I liked them all, they were quite a bit older than me, in their thirties and forties. They had made me feel most welcome, but they had families and busy lives, and I didn’t want or expect to see them after hours. Like me, they loved books, and would often steal a few solitary moments in the stockroom poring over the latest releases.

  I loved the picture books best. I ran my fingers over their glossy pages and imagined I could feel through the illustrations to the real things they represented. At lunchtime I sometimes went out to the park, but more often I stayed in the back of the shop with a salad sandwich, trying not to drop beetroot onto the book I was reading.

  So that was my life at that time: my flat, and work, and solitary salad sandwiches.

  And then, as I have said, I met Flynn.

  Chapter Five

  SHE HAD MADE me promise to come and see her again soon. Her words repeated in my head. I kept seeing her face as she said it; she’d looked deep into my eyes as though she really meant it – hadn’t she?

  But I made myself wait five days (I counted them off, one by one) before I went there again, breathlessly, arriving late Saturday afternoon, fearing that I wore the look of a supplicant on my face.

  But it wasn’t Flynn who answered the door; a boy did, one of those boys with short, carefully tousled hair and a carefree face. Was it the same boy who’d gone off with Flynn the night I’d seen her at the gig?

  ‘Hey, Flynn!’ he called, turning his head so that the cords of his neck stood out.

  She came in with a towel round her head, and said my name with obvious pleasure. She took me to her room, and I felt foolish for all my worry and anticipation, all my heart-in-mouthed-ness and tingling skin feelings, because after all weren’t we just two girls, being friends?

  The bed was unmade, and the cat Timothy lay there among the tangled sheets; he looked expectantly up at me, so it felt perfectly natural to sit down and caress him. He received my attention with the same humble, grateful expression on his face that I remembered, flexing his feet, and plucking at the bedclothes with his claws. The sheets were soft and none too clean, and the green bedcover had been hand-printed with tiny skulls.

  Flynn stood at the window towelling her damp hair.

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked, gesturing with my head towards the door. I feared he might be her boyfriend, but I had to know.

  ‘Who? … oh, just Caleb. One of my flatmates. There’s Caleb and Hannah and me – but they’re never home. I often wish they were, it gets a bit boring on my own. I mean, if you’ve got a share place, it’s nice to share, isn’t it? What about you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you share with people?’

  ‘No. I live on my own.’r />
  She threw the towel onto the back of a chair and sat down on the bed. I felt the mattress sink a little, and smelled the scent of shampoo coming off her wet hair. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said, with curiosity, as though she really wanted to know.

  ‘Well – you asked me to call in again …’ I replied, a little defensively.

  ‘No, silly! In this town.’ She took my hand and squeezed it. Her hand was warm, her face moist and pink from the shower. ‘You didn’t go to school here, did you – or I’d have remembered you.’

  I shrugged. ‘You have to leave home sometime. And if you’re going to leave … well, I suppose it’s good to get right away.’

  ‘And where is home?’

  ‘Canberra.’ I stopped to wonder if it did still feel like home, and couldn’t decide.

  ‘I know you have a little sister. Molly, the lucky one who got Molly McGuire’s name.’ She paused, as though prompting me.

  ‘And I also have a brother, Josh, who’s twenty-two – he’s in a band – still lives at home. With Mum, I mean. Though he lives out in the garage now. My parents are separated.’

  She dropped my hand, as though taking it had been a mere whim (but my own hand still burned with pleasure). ‘A brother!’ she said, her face suddenly closing. ‘And a musician! What sort of music does he play?’

  ‘Indie rock – sort of psychedelic pop – it’s beautifully melodic, and you need to listen to the words.’ It occurred to me that Josh and Flynn might be very interested in each other if they met. She might well want a boy just like Josh for a boyfriend.

  I wanted her to take my hand again. But she reached for her guitar, which lay next to the bed, and began to strum. She tilted her head and listened to it as though I wasn’t there.

  I stood up and went to the window, and looked out to the rooftop where we had sat together and talked only five days before. It had been so easy then, but was so awkward now. The teapot, Lavinia, sat there on the selfsame wall. I remembered bringing her (it! – it was just a teapot!) inside that day, the clink of the lid as I set it down on the table. It pained me to think of Flynn sitting out on the roof since, perhaps with someone else; to think that afternoon with Flynn on the roof might not be special, but just an everyday occurrence to her.

  I had thought she’d forgotten I was there, but she started improvising to my name as she strummed, singing: ‘Anna …Goanna … Anna … Spanner … Anna … Lavinia …’

  ‘Did you think Molly got the good name?’ she asked, not looking at me, but at her own hands as she fingered the strings.

  ‘I used to,’ I said, surprised. She must have been able to read right into me, for it was true that for a long time I didn’t much like my name. ‘But then,’ I said, wondering at how easily I could talk to her now, ‘I found a book with a character called Anna Livia, and I saw what a musical name I had.’

  ‘Anna Livia,’ she repeated, her fingers moving rapidly across the frets so the strings squeaked the way dry sand does when you run across it.

  ‘It’s in a very odd book called Finnegans Wake. And she’s identified with the River Liffey that runs through the book – and through the city of Dublin – so that she’s like life itself.’ I paused. There was so much of my life that book reminded me of – Michael, my father and mother, and a time that had been at once strange and painful and wonderful.

  Flynn was looking at me so intently that I must have blushed. She had a most direct stare, and her dark eyes slanted up at the corners. And so did her mouth, when she smiled.

  ‘Anna Livia, Anna Life, Anna Spanner, Anna Goanna …’ she sang again. ‘Don’t keep standing there at the window. Come and sit down.’ She patted the bed beside her.

  I sat, feeling self-conscious. Flynn put down her guitar. ‘I have to go to see my mother later on. She lives out of town. Brothers and sisters?’ she said, as if anticipating my inevitable question, though I wasn’t about to ask any such thing. ‘I have none. I’m an only, lonely, child.’ She lay on the bed and hugged her knees, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘And is there just your mother?’

  ‘No. I have a father. But I’m a mummy’s girl.’ She smiled at me. ‘You know, we’ll have to do something together one day.’

  Warmth flooded through me.

  ‘What sort of things do you like doing?’ I asked her.

  ‘Apart from singing and writing songs, not a lot. I enjoy camping in the bush. I used to be a Girl Guide, but it was too sissy for me. We could go to the beach!’ she added, as though having a brainwave. ‘I have a car.’

  ‘So do I, but I don’t use it much.’

  ‘Mine’s a bomb,’ we said, at the same time.

  I smiled, pleased and dismayed. It was too much for me, being with Flynn. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll do something, then.’

  ‘It’s a date!’ she said. ‘I’ll call round for you one weekend. I’m often working Saturday mornings.’

  ‘I always do.’

  ‘One Sunday, then. You’d better give me your address.’ She fetched a book with flowers and butterflies all over it, and opened the page to A. I scrawled my address and, as an afterthought, the number of the mobile phone I rarely switched on or even carried with me, because there were so few people who rang.

  She hugged me briefly at the front door, and our cheeks collided softly. As I made my way down the purple stairs, my head was full of the way our skins had touched. When I came out onto the street, the sun was shining. I had forgotten it was daylight, a bright summer day.

  That night I was too restless to stay in my flat. I prowled about, making a cup of coffee and tipping it out, sitting for five minutes with a book before putting it down. I needed to go out and walk to get rid of my energy, so I showered and changed into a dress, the red-spotted one I’d worn that day on the roof with her.

  At the door I stopped to look into a small mirror that hung beside the door, a leftover from a previous tenant. I appeared surprised and expectant.

  Then I let myself out into the night, startling a thin grey cat, which ran down the path, pausing to look over its shoulder at me. ‘Here, puss, puss, puss.’

  But it fled.

  I went over the top of the hill, through the weedy grasses, into the glorious warm darkness. There were cars parked at the lookout, and people sitting on the low barricades at the edge of the car park, smoking. I looked at the lights of the town, and relished for a moment the exquisite feeling of possibility that lay before me. Flynn was somewhere down there, and one day soon anything might happen.

  I remembered Michael, the two of us sitting on the top of Mt Ainslie observing the lights of Canberra. And it was a tender feeling of sweet regret. Then I thought of Flynn’s rueful mouth, and treacherously I forgot Michael and thought of her again.

  I felt that I could walk all night, up the narrow streets and, just as inevitably, down again. Lismore was a very up-and-down place, as well as being rivery, and remembering those rivers, I instinctively headed towards them.

  I went along broad main roads along which cars streamed; and made detours into cul de sacs, which made me feel like a loiterer when there was nothing to do but turn round and go out again. Through leafy gardens I saw houses lit up and open to the night, doors and windows flung wide for the heat. I heard music, and television, and voices calling out in ordinary conversation; I encountered dogs, and cats, but very few people.

  Finally I came to the shopping streets, and passed the bookshop where I worked, saw the window display I’d made last week illuminated, the books lurking behind it in the dim shop.

  And then there was the door that led up to Flynn’s flat; the steps that I wanted to climb but mustn’t, not yet. Because it seemed that hers must be the next move. I passed the entrance to the lane behind the shops and paused. If I went down there, just to look up and see if there was a light on in Fly
nn’s window …

  I resisted the temptation.

  And continued on, down to the river at last, where I walked beside the murky water on a lonely dark footpath.

  It was a large town to walk around if you had a mind to, and I did. I could have walked all night, taking it all in, and all the time my body thrummed, Flynn, Flynn, Flynn.

  I walked past churches and cathedrals, pubs and clubs, across sporting fields, and even along the defunct railway line, where grass grew between the tracks. Finally, I found myself climbing through the hilly streets towards my flat, and came suddenly to my own gate with a shock of recognition. The light I’d left on was glowing; I saw that lights left on in an empty place don’t fool anyone, for it still looked deserted. Now I was incredulous that this was where I had made a home.

  I found a key in my pocket, and it fitted the lock. I felt like a stranger entering my own flat. I fell into my own, unmade bed, which smelled familiar; it must smell of me. And I went to sleep at once.

  Chapter Six

  I DREAMED I was desperately knocking at a door, willing it to open. When the sound persisted, I swam up into daylight and found that the knocking was real. Someone was rapping at the door of my flat.

  Wearing my red, spotted, and extremely crumpled slept-in dress, I walked out gingerly and opened the door. Flynn was sitting on the steps, patting the grey cat I’d seen the night before. ‘Is this your cat?’ she said.

  ‘I think it's a stray,’ I said weakly. Flynn had said that we must do something together one Sunday. She hadn’t said anything about the very next day. I peered at the sky. It must be past noon.

  She came in, along with the cat. ‘Did you sleep in that dress?’