About a Girl

by Joanne Horniman

  When my mother came in, offering words and soup, I shrugged my shoulders and said I was fine, in a cool little voice designed to shut her out.

  No one ate dinner that night.

  I burrowed into my new book, remembering the bliss of its discovery only hours before. Perhaps it had been sent my way for a reason. It might have something to tell me.

  Opening it at random, I read:

  O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to hear all about Anna Livia.

  And it was comforting and anaesthetising to lose myself in that book, the day of Finnegans Wake, the day my father left us.

  Chapter Four

  OVER THE NEXT few months, my feelings about what had happened changed. At first I thought that the rift in our family had occurred precisely because we were so smug and comfortable – a kind of comeuppance. And then I realised we had never been comfortable at all. It had all been a façade. I blamed each of us in turn; but oddly, for a long time I didn’t think to blame my father.

  At first I took it all upon myself. It was all my fault. My secret self had caused cracks to appear in the fabric of our lives. I was the cuckoo in the nest, pretending all the time to be one of the family, when all along I was an oddity. For years I’d distanced myself from them, sneaked away at midnight to spend the night at Michael’s place, tucked top-to-tail in his bed.

  Then I blamed Molly. Nothing had been the same since she was born, a late baby, beautiful and yet damaged. Molly wasn’t so difficult in herself. She didn’t scream or run away or make scenes as many children with learning problems apparently did. She was just vague and vacant and slow; not all there. There were obviously many things she would never be able to do. Even so, in my opinion my mother worried about her too much. There were countless times I hated my little sister. She gets all the attention! I screamed at my mother when Molly was only a toddler. Nobody ever thinks about me!

  If that makes me seem cruel and selfish, I was. But just because Molly had ‘special needs’ didn’t mean that I had none.

  And then there was Josh. All he thought about was his band, and his girlfriend – whichever one was current. He didn’t seem to keep them long. Very often he didn’t even bother going to the music course that he was meant to be doing. Our parents were so easy on him – they just let him loaf, while I, who was meant to be the clever one, bore the weight of their huge expectations. I felt the pressure to do well at school, go to uni and be academically brilliant, and presumably get some impressive job.

  So I stewed away in the weeks after my father left. Finally (and perhaps most) I blamed my mother. She’d only ever had time for Molly these last five years, so no wonder Dad had found love in the arms of another woman. I heard my mother going on to her friends about it – they all rallied round her in supportive rage and righteous indignation. The New Woman (and sometimes they called her the Bimbo) was only twenty-seven, one of his students. Almost twenty years younger than him!

  I overheard my mother say that he had told her he needed to find himself, and concentrate on his painting. ‘As though we were holding him back!’ she sobbed. ‘Blaming us! Putting it all back onto us!’ She didn’t even seem to care that I might be standing on the other side of the door hearing everything, all that outpouring of anger and grief she’d concealed from me, pretending to cope, as though I was still a child.

  ‘And look at the way I supported him while he was an art student! The shitty jobs I did. All those years down the drain – for nothing!’

  I crept away, crushed and hurt. I wondered if my mother meant that she’d also wasted her life on us.

  All my father’s things disappeared from the house. He’d used the garage as a painting studio, and that emptied out too. One day I came home and it was all gone, the completed canvases that had been stacked against the wall, and the ones in progress, the paints and brushes and boards used as a palette, the paint-stained rags, all the paraphernalia of him. All that remained was the smell of paint and cleaning fluid, and dollops of colour all over the floor.

  Michael and I had made the part of Canberra where we lived our own. We were as territorial as magpies or cats, and roamed with abandon, walking down the middle of streets beneath canopies of red leaves, crunching acorns beneath our feet. Once, falling behind to do up a shoelace, I saw what a solitary figure Michael was – a tall boy in a dark coat, who turned around in surprise when he realised I was no longer beside him. I ran to catch up, but it had been interesting to observe him on his own, the long dark streak of him beneath the sheltering branches. In the streets filled with boxy houses there was seldom anyone about, so it felt as though we were the last people in the world.

  After my father left, I hurled myself into the book I’d bought on the day of his leaving. I began to read it aloud with a newfound angry energy. I opened it at random and read it to Michael. He’d been the one who had got it first.

  He got that it was like a piece of music, that it helped if you read it aloud, or sang it. That you didn’t need to start at the beginning, you just found a word or phrase you liked and dived in, and were carried along like a river.

  ‘It’s Dr Seuss for grownups,’ he explained to me.

  Together we wrote in it, and drew pictures in the margins, and carried it through the streets chanting it and singing it. We wandered through grassy wastelands at the back of houses, along stormwater drains, and reclined on unwanted couches dumped beside bus stops or in parks.

  Each of us had found a character we could pretend to be.

  I was Anna Livia Plurabelle:

  O

  tell me all about

  Anna Livia! I want to hear all

  about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia? Yes, of course, we all know Anna Livia. Tell me all. Tell me now. You’ll die when you hear.

  And Michael was Michael Arklow:

  … a local heremite, Michael Arklow was his riverend name, (with many a sigh I aspersed his lavabibs!) and one venersderg in junojuly, oso sweet and so cool and so limber she looked, Nance the Nixie, Nanon L’Escaut, in the silence of the sycomores, all listening, the kindling curves you can’t stop feeling, he plunged both of his newly anointed hands, the core of his cushlas, in her singimari saffron strumens of hair, parting them and soothing her and mingling it, that was deepdark and ample like the red bog at sundown.

  So much to heart did we commit the words that we would casually recite them in idle moments.

  ‘O tell me all about Anna Livia! I want to know – all – about – Anna Livia!’ Michael would chant.

  ‘… Michael Arklow was his riverend name …’ I would respond.

  We were strange and unknowable to anyone but each other.

  Our suburb ran along the base of Mt Ainslie, a dry, scrubby area of bush with a lookout and a marker light at the top, one of the city’s landmarks. You could enter the bush there from anywhere at the back of the houses that bordered the park area, not just on the designated walking trails. There were secret paths through the scrub, known only to certain locals. It was wonderful to have this wild, desolate area at our doorstep, and Michael and I went there often, tramping across the grey, discarded limbs of gum trees, crunching through dead leaves, or sitting watching the magpies, the only spots of intense contrast, patrol the patches of faded ground. Sometimes what I thought to be the trunk of a fallen tree would turn out to be a grey kangaroo, reclining, and we’d turn away so as not to disturb it.

  Once, we took off our clothes and sat in the thin sunlight on one of the lesser-known paths, to feel what it was like to be entirely naked out in the open, under the immense, all-seeing blue sky. I watched the light play across Michael’s freckled shoulders like gauze. We heard someone coming, but were so mesmerised by sitting that we didn’t bother to move. Soon, two elderly women walkers came past and said good afternoon cheerfully, as though it was unexceptional to find a pair of
naked teenagers on the path.

  We took to walking up Mt Ainslie at night, lit only by a hazy moon. There we could sit and watch the constellations of lights marking the roads, the moving patterns of cars, and the softer, intimate glow of houses. There were huge floodlit areas marking the Australian War Memorial and Parliament House and Anzac Parade, all precisely and frighteningly lined up so there was an unimpeded view between them.

  Michael talked to me about Walter Burley Griffin, the American architect who had designed Canberra; I switched off a little, as I felt that I’d heard it all in school. But Michael was interested in the mathematics of it. He told me about the use of the vesica piscia in the design, which was an ancient geometric concept, a pointed, oval-shaped space created by intersecting circles, a fishlike symbol of the intersection of the material and spiritual worlds (though for some reason, while he told me this, I remembered a nature program I’d seen on cormorants in China, which had been trained to fish; I kept thinking of the lines put round their throats to keep them from swallowing the fish they’d caught).

  There was a theory, Michael said, that the planning of Canberra had some esoteric secret buried in it. ‘There are secrets everywhere,’ I retorted. I could have been referring to Parliament House, sitting off in the distance, where our politicians often conceal the truth from us.

  I could also have meant the comfortable suburban homes – ours – that lay at the foot of the hill.

  Chapter Five

  MY FATHER COLLECTED Molly and me from home one Saturday morning and took us to his new place for the first time. Josh would not come with us. He had moved into the garage soon after our father left; it was his way of announcing that he was taking more independence for himself. He was nineteen and, as well as his studies, he had a job in a coffee shop in the city. He said he was saving to go into a share house.

  As the car pulled up outside my father’s rented house I tried to summon a feeling of reluctance. But the truth was, I longed to see where he lived and spend time with him. I missed him as bitterly as my mother did, but without feeling her anger.

  The house was one of those small, narrow, brick and fibro places, without much of a garden, and with old rolled-up newspapers rotting on the tussocky grass. But I’d heard my father complain it was expensive for all that, now he was supporting two households.

  The woman he’d left us for was called Morgan, a name that I knew meant ‘morning’. The only Morgan I’d ever known was a girl at my school who was dark-haired and bossy, and somehow that was the sort of person I had expected. So when I met this Morgan, my expectations were overthrown.

  ‘Anna … hello,’ she said, moving forward with an uncertain expression on her face. She shook my hand; she looked as nervous as I was, but her touch was firm. As her hand slid from mine it was like something ineffable slipping from my grasp.

  Later, I was to learn that the habitual expression on her face was one of innate surprise. And she was so lovely to look at that it quietly took my breath away. She had clear skin, wore no make-up, and was casually dressed in old jeans and a striped top that looked just right. Her bare feet had beautiful toenails painted all different colours. Her long blonde hair looked as though she’d cut it herself: the fringe was all crooked. I could tell that I wasn’t what Morgan had expected either. Both of us were a little shy with the other.

  Of course my father would have given Morgan the run-down on Molly, to account for her special needs, but what had he told her about me? Would he have said, my difficult daughter … my clever daughter? I couldn’t imagine, and it made me realise how little I really knew my father.

  ‘Can I get you something to drink?’ Morgan asked. ‘Molly, I’ve heard that you like chocolate milk?’

  Molly clapped her hands, as she did when she was happy, and allowed Morgan to lead her into the kitchen.

  Then Morgan made me a cup of coffee, and asked me about my final year at school, and commiserated at how everyone made such a fuss about it.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world if you don’t get the marks you want,’ she said. ‘I ended up taking time off for a while, went back and did a course I hated, and now I’m studying something I really love.’ She glanced at my father as she said this, but there was nothing flirtatious or ambiguous in it.

  My father showed me round the house. There was a spare room if Molly or I wanted to stay over, and a bedroom for my father and Morgan with just a double mattress on the floor, and cushions everywhere, and beautiful pieces of cloth hanging on the walls. There was a room for Morgan to work in; it contained a desk and books and all sorts of strange and lovely things she’d collected – masks from all over the world, various body parts of porcelain dolls, Japanese fabric, and handmade paper. I could have lingered there for hours. My father had the garage as his studio, but it didn’t look nearly as lived-in yet as the old one had. There wasn’t much furniture – my father had only taken his personal possessions.

  Morgan chatted to me while she showed Molly how to make animals with coloured pipe cleaners and painted her toenails the same colours as her own. My father joined in our conversation from time to time, looking pleased and happy that we were there. He went out to shop for food, leaving us alone with Morgan. Molly scarcely noticed he was gone, and when he came back, loaded up with stuff that we never ate at home – prepared pasta and sauces, baked beans, and chocolate biscuits – I glanced at him shyly. This was my father – my new father, my old father – and I had to get to know him again.

  Driving home with him, Morgan having seen us off at the door, I felt surprised and rather shocked. I had been prepared to hate the new woman in my father’s life. What I hadn’t expected was to fall in love with her.

  There followed a period of conflicting loyalties. My mother would ask about my visits, and I feigned indifference, or even scorn, but they were the glittering centre of interest in my life.

  ‘What did you have for dinner? my mother would ask.

  ‘Tinned spaghetti on toast.’

  ‘Oh. Doesn’t she cook?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame …’

  My mother’s sarcasm rankled. She was an excellent cook. My father and Morgan ate takeaways, or stuff from tins, or bacon and eggs. Lots of things on toast.

  I vowed to do the same. Why spend time cooking? Stuff on toast was fine.

  The first time Morgan touched me I almost swooned. The word swooned came to me as I closed my eyes and felt the world falling away. I went home and looked the word up; the computer’s dictionary described it as to be overwhelmed by happiness, excitement, adoration, or infatuation, to experience a sudden and usually brief loss of consciousness.

  And all Morgan had done was to touch my hand. We were standing at the kitchen sink. ‘Anna, look at that,’ she said, indicating a tree in the backyard filled with blossom, its branches dancing in the wind.

  Her hand was soft and warm; she left it there, in no hurry to take it away. I could tell she was used to touching people. I was to find that she did it often, casually and apparently unconsciously.

  The first time Josh went to visit Dad in the new place, I went out to the garage when he got back.

  ‘What did you think of Morgan?’ I asked, standing at the door. Josh never invited me to enter, and I didn’t have enough confidence to barge in.

  Josh looked up. ‘Oh … she’s all right,’ he said indifferently. I turned away with a smile. So Josh was smitten, too – smitten: past participle of smite, to hit somebody or something hard; to affect somebody strongly or disastrously (archaic or literary) (often passive); to fill somebody with love or longing (humorous or archaic or literary) (often passive).

  The house was only a few streets away. I took to calling round when my father wasn’t home, hoping to find Morgan there. One day she opened the door with a pair of scissors in her hand.


  ‘Oh, Anna, you’ve arrived at just the right time. I’m cutting my hair, and it’s so hard to do the back.’ She made me feel more than welcome, and despite my protests that I was no good with scissors, we went to the back yard and Morgan instructed me on what to do. I lifted the hair from the back of her neck, closed my eyes and breathed in the scent of her.

  ‘Don’t be timid,’ she said. ‘Just hack away. Nothing’s irrevocable.’

  ‘You haven’t seen how much damage I can do,’ I said.

  ‘I trust you,’ she said, making me blush. I blush easily; it’s one of the things I hate about myself.

  I cut and cut at Morgan’s hair, darting around the front every so often to see how it looked, and every time I did I encountered her smile. She surveyed the result in the hand mirror, and then went to the bathroom and snipped a bit more off herself, and then she was done.

  ‘Could you do mine?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know if I’d dare. Your mother might kill me.’

  ‘She might kill you anyway.’ And we laughed.

  ‘Oh, very well,’ she said, in a mock grumbling tone. ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I’d like it really short. And sort of scrappy, like someone’s chewed it off.’

  ‘Are you sure? It’s such a beautiful colour, it seems a shame.’

  ‘It’ll still be a beautiful colour – there just won’t be so much of it.’ I was sick of having it long. ‘Anyway, nothing’s irrevocable.’

  ‘At least where hair’s concerned.’

  I wanted to sit there all day with Morgan combing and clipping, her hands brushing against my skin. In the end, she didn’t cut it extremely short, but made a shapely bob, layered at the back and cut up into the nape of my neck. Too soon it was finished, and I had to make my way home.

  ‘I didn’t know you were going to the hairdresser,’ said my mother.

  ‘D’you like it?’

  ‘Suits you. Should have done it like that ages ago.’