I examined Anastasia’s sleeping face and furled hands. Gently, I unrolled the fingers of one hand, but they curled up again immediately. I thought of how I was waiting for my own flower-like time to begin. You couldn’t force a flower. When I was a child I used to pick camellia buds and strip the tightly wadded petals away, one by one, but I never ended up with an opened flower.
Sophie’s best friends, Carmen and Rafaella, came to pay homage to the baby. They were lush, seductive-looking girls, with full lips, ruffled blouses that displayed their shoulders, trousers that displayed their belly-buttons, and large hoop earrings dangling from their ears. They were bold girls, with dope-smoking hippie mothers, whom Lil had been convinced would lead Sophie astray.
Now they came up the steps like a visiting troupe of gypsy dancers, their high heels clattering along the verandah to Sophie’s room, and greeted Anastasia with shrieks of adoration. They’d brought gifts: four pairs of red booties that one of their grandmothers had knitted, and a crocheted hat in rainbow colours. They dangled the booties from their fingers and exclaimed at the impossibly small size, then fitted them onto Anastasia’s feet. They pulled the hat onto her head and adjusted it until they felt that it looked just right. Anastasia sucked on her fingers and bore all this with stolid patience.
They wanted to help Sophie bathe her, and when she was undressed they rudely exclaimed over her fatness and hairiness. Even I had admitted to myself that Anastasia was fat (and amazingly hairy), but I wouldn’t have said so out loud.
Sophie had given in to her insatiable craving for meat pies when she was pregnant, but there were all kinds of things she wouldn’t ingest because she said they ‘crossed the placenta’: aspirin, and alcohol, and cigarette smoke. Did meat pies cross the placenta? Perhaps this was the explanation for Anastasia’s fatness.
Her head was covered with black, straight hair –carelessly stylish. It could well be the best hairstyle she’d ever have in her life. And she had hair all over her shoulders and in a line down her back to her buttocks as well. Sophie said defensively that it was perfectly normal for a baby to have a lot of body hair and that it would fall out soon, but I thought Anastasia might be setting out to be the hairiest woman in history. Because I believed Anastasia knew what she was doing. Already, she knew. She had a strong will, and she cared not one jot what Carmen and Rafaella thought of her.
Carmen and Rafaella had been Sophie’s friends since early high school. I watched and vowed that my own friendships would not be like that. Sophie would regularly arrive home in tears and lock herself in her room, sobbing that she was never speaking to Carmen (or Rafaella) ever again. That night there would be a phone call and they were best friends again, until the next unkindness or betrayal. ‘Don’t worry about them, love,’ Lil would say to her each time, but Sophie did worry. She desperately needed to belong to them.
They were fiercely competitive. Someone would always be on the outer edges of the friendship. Sophie’s love for them both (because it was a kind of love, I can see that now) went through extremes of emotion. They all knew the exact thing to say to cut the other to the heart.
But even though Rafaella and Carmen were so important to Sophie, she was always resolutely herself. They didn’t much care for reading, and Sophie did. When she was away from them, Sophie’s real friends were the characters she met in books.
She didn’t obsess about clothes the way her friends did either. Sophie was absolutely unadorned. She wore her long black hair loose, or pulled back in a severe ponytail. Her clothes were so dowdy that people thought it was deliberate, a style that she was affecting, but the truth was that Sophie simply didn’t care.
But apart from her emphatically unattractive clothing, there was something about her –her face, the way she looked at you, her smile, her way of quoting obscure bits of literature everyone thought she’d made up herself –that made people notice her. They looked, and kept looking, because Sophie was carelessly beautiful. She was splendid and overwhelming, like something in nature that could never be replicated –a mountain, or a river, or a thunderstorm.
Sophie lay on the bed and watched her friends play with her baby, smiling in a detached and almost condescending way. Motherhood had made her more dreamy and languid than ever. All she had done since Anastasia was born was lie on the bed and read and breast-feed.
When Carmen and Rafaella left, the sound of their footsteps and laughter retreating down the stairs, Anastasia started to complain. Sophie opened her dressing-gown, put the baby to her breast, and began to read again. She had been interrupted by the arrival of her friends.
Sophie was reading Anna Karenina for the umpteenth time. Her face was absorbed behind the twenty-five-year-old copy of the book she’d picked up at a fete. Nicola Pagett, from the magnificent BBC dramatization, stared off the cover to the left, her lips slightly parted, her blue eyes forever a study of hope and anguish. This tale of a respectable married woman in Tsarist Russia who gave up everything for love had a seemingly endless fascination for Sophie.
She put down the book for a moment and moved Anastasia to the other breast, where she sucked intently with her eyes closed before dropping off like an engorged tick and lolling back in Sophie’s arms in a milk-induced stupor. Gently, I took her and put her down on the bed. Sophie read on without missing a beat. At last I could observe my niece up close. She was so fat that her cheeks looked wider than the top of her head. I loved her to distraction but was very afraid that she might be the ugliest baby I’d ever seen.
Perhaps she was making a statement, and her disregard for appearance was intentional. Why should babies be pretty? Why should women be beautiful? Though if she did intend being outstandingly ugly, it would be quite an achievement for her to succeed at it. She would be going against her genetic inheritance, because Sophie was certainly beautiful, and Anastasia’s father, a guitarist called Marcus who had passed through town with his band nine months before, was more gorgeous-looking than any boy should be. Carmen and Rafaella had said it was a mistake to go out with a boy who was prettier than you were (women were always coming up to him in cafes and telling him he had beautiful eyes), but Sophie wouldn’t be told. Now she had Anastasia, and Marcus didn’t even know of the baby’s existence. Sophie claimed that she was happy to bring Anastasia up by herself, but I wondered about that. I suspected that Sophie had not dismissed Marcus from her mind as she claimed she had. It was possible to spend years filled with hope for something that your more rational self would see as a lost cause. Because hadn’t I been secretly waiting for years for our father to return?
A hundred years ago someone like Sophie would have been described as a woman with a past. Having ‘a past’ hinted at something unspeakably shocking that nevertheless everyone must have known of and whispered about behind the tinkle of teacups. Anna Karenina became a woman with a past when she left her husband to live with the man she loved, and she was shunned by polite society. But I agreed with Oscar Wilde: having a past made you immediately more interesting.
When Sophie met Marcus she was working in a coffee shop, and he called her over one day to order another coffee. He wasn’t one of the regular customers; she learned that he was the lead singer in a band that was touring the area.
‘What do you do?’ he’d asked her, after he’d put in his order for a soya-milk latte and the soup of the day.
‘Do?’ she said.
‘For a job.’
‘I work here,’ she said.
‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But what do you do really?’
Then Sophie saw what he was getting at. All of the other people who worked in that cafe saw themselves as being really students or painters or actors, and they were just waiting on tables to pay the bills.
Sophie, in her unremarkable dress, down-at-heel shoes and black cardigan that looked as though it had belonged to a middle-aged shop assistant, adjusted her glasses with their thick black frames, and said again, ‘I work here.’
He asked her out as he was
leaving. It had to be late, after his gig, and there was nowhere much to go by that time except his motel room, and they ended up there.
Sophie was almost twenty and had had heaps of boyfriends. Marcus was different. She loved him. She told me this. She only knew him for a bit over a week, but in that time they spent every available moment together. She brought him back to Samarkand, and they sat in the kichen one morning and oozed satisfaction. They were a beautiful couple, both with long dark hair; he with olive skin and she with skin like cream. I saw them once in the street together, Marcus catching hold of her arm and Sophie laughing.
But soon he was gone, on to the next place. He didn’t offer to stay in touch.
Can you love someone you’ve only known a week, I asked her. She said yes. Yes, you could.
‘You don’t have any control over love. It just is. You can love someone for the way that they laugh, or the shape of their face, or simply the smell of them.’
She couldn’t look at me as she told me this. But then, turning to face me with tears in her eyes, she said, ‘If you ever have a chance for love, you should take it.’
The Yellow Notebook
The girl in the charcoal suit gets onto a train; as it swerves through station after station, she leans against a wall of the carriage, absorbed in a book. Her journey isn’t long. Soon she is at her stop, and she gets out and makes her way up the station steps. Everyone rushes, but she takes her time.
She’s in an inner suburb, full of exotic shops. She buys two pieces of Turkish delight for dessert, and passes coffee shops where people lean across tables in earnest conversation. She pauses at a fruit shop where she lingeringly selects mangoes and lychees (they remind her of home, which is a long way away), then heads down a street of tall terrace houses with lace balconies. She lets herself in a front door, painted glossy black.
The house has been made into flats, and hers is at the back –an enormous room with a high ceiling and long windows opening onto a wild garden. She puts down her briefcase and changes into a pale blue kimono with birds and butterflies all over it. She uncoils her hair, shaking it free and separating the strands with her fingers.
It is twilight. She opens the window into the garden and looks out into the trees. Then she makes herself a cup of mint tea, and sits on the floor at the window, sipping it. She sees a movement at the end of the garden. The glint of eyes in the near-darkness. There is an animal out there; it comes and waits between the trees, watching. It knows she is there.
The Red Notebook
Lil and Sophie, today:
- I have a tick in my head! says Sophie, indignantly. Lil says, –Well, come here and I’ll pull it out.
- Last time you pulled one, you squeezed it, and all the poison went in!!!! I had a lump for weeks!!! Get your glasses.
- But I can see it quite well!
- No!
- Don’t pull away –I nearly had it then!
Me, wanly: –I’ll do it. (They ignore me.)
- Ow! You’re pulling my hair!
- Do you want it out or not?
- Jesus, I hate this place.
- How did you manage to get a tick anyway? You’re always lying on the bed.
- They fall from the trees. They blow in from outside. This place is tick-ridden.
- Got it! There it is. Look at the size of it –tiny. All that fuss, madam, for a little tick. You’d think you’d never gone through childbirth!!
(the exclamation mark was made for us!)
Found at Hope Springs: The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogon, for $3
but no boy, of any description, just a man with a motheaten beard and wearing an old Fair Isle jumper
Music: Sinead O’Connor, ‘Factory Girl’ and Joni Mitchell, ‘The Magdeline Laundries’, from The Chieftains album, Tears of Stone
drudgery, n. The long, unremitting, unrewarding work done by teenage girls in cheap bed-and-breakfast lodgings, particularly those that trade under the name of Samarkand.
drudge, n. The name given to the girls who do such work.
The Blue Notebook
still nothing
The Wild Typewritten Pages 5
The work at Samarkand was pure drudgery, because we did nearly everything ‘by hand’. Sophie said it was a wonder our hands were still so young and lovely-looking, after everything they had been through. They ought to look like a hundred-year-old’s hands. They ought to look like Lil’s hands.
There was no dishwasher, though there was a washing machine and a vacuum cleaner. But I would have loved to see a machine (apart from a girl) that could make beds. Or serve breakfasts. There was a toaster to make the toast, but someone still had to pop the bread into the toaster, and it was usually me.
On Saturdays I worked for money in a cafe, to save up for university –I was planning to work there full-time after my exams were over. The cafe was called the Dancing Goanna, and it was across the river on the wild side of town, where students and hippies hung out. The tables and chairs were old laminex and vinyl ones, and none of them matched. There was a courtyard with a long, messy garden behind it, full of long grass, nasturtiums trailing orange and yellow flowers, and bok choy gone to seed. The place looked like the country. There was a lot of rusty galvanised iron everywhere and unpainted timber walls, but people didn’t care because the coffee was good and strong and the atmosphere was so genuinely daggy it was fashionable.
After work, on a Saturday soon after Sophie had come home from hospital, I didn’t feel like heading straight back to Samarkand, so I wandered the streets for a while. I longed so much for a life somewhere else. I thought of all the people who must live in rooms filled with light and books in famous cities. The stone buildings would be shrouded with mist, and the lights on the water mesmerising and magical. In a place like that, you could stay up all night and watch the oyster-coloured dawn creep slowly over ancient buildings, and breakfast with people as beautiful and mysterious as you were. People like the ones Anaïs Nin wrote about in her journal.
That day, the sky was a flat blue, and enormous. The streets were so still and the colours so washed-out that my body felt hollow. In the empty main street, a few people went in and out of the pub and the video store, or hung about aimlessly in front of the milk bars. I walked past the alleyway that led to Hope Springs. The shop was closed and shuttered, and I thought of all those books dwelling there in the dark, sleeping their time away till the shop was opened up again. I thought about the boy I’d met there. He had such an aura of exoticism about him, of having known other places and even other times.
That afternoon my life seemed particularly dull. I spied a beautiful woman driving somewhere fast in a sleek car, and a feeling of such quiet desperation came over me that I wanted to cry.
Walking back past Samarkand, I noticed how the bright afternoon light revealed it as unbearably shabby, all its blemishes laid bare for the world to see. I tried to go past with an impartial eye, as though I didn’t live there, and came at last to a small bridge that crossed the river a little way along the street, just before it became the country.
Here, a Landcare group had planted rainforest trees to blend in with the original vegetation that had been left accidentally uncleared. As I crossed the bridge I glimpsed a fox –white muzzle and orange fur, lean and mangey –as it darted back into the trees to avoid a passing car. Its hunted expression imprinted itself on my mind.
I walked a little way into the trees, where the earth showed bare under the damp fallen leaves. Somewhere here lived a fox, with a den, and perhaps a mate and cubs. A fox is an alien animal, unwanted and despised, and its fear of people is well-founded. Once I’d seen the ancient remains of a fox –a few scraps of fur and crushed bones –lying on the surface of a road. Foxes reminded me of a childhood book, The Little Prince, which I still read sometimes when I was feeling nostalgic for those days. When the little prince meets the fox, the fox says that if the little prince tamed him, it would be as if the sun came to shine on his life. The sound of his
footsteps would be different from all the others. ‘If you tame me, then we shall need each other.’
I sat down under the trees near the river, and shivered in the cool, damp shade, thinking about the fox, and about taming and needing. I felt like being gloomy and moody and miserable.
Late in the afternoon I made my way back to Samarkand. It had been grand once; now it was just a shabby old house. It was full of shadows and damp, dark corners; the boards creaked at night like an arthritic old lady, and every winter morning the condensation under the verandah roofs dripped onto the floor, making everything wet. Sometimes I thought I would never escape from it, and was doomed to live there for ever and ever, like a trapped princess in a fairy tale.
When I got back, Lil was in the kitchen puffing on a cigarette and thinking about putting on the dinner. Breakfast was the only meal we served to the guests. They had to make their own arrangements for dinner. Many of them ate take-aways or went to the pub, though there was a kitchenette for their use tucked away on a side verandah. Dinner for us was meant to be a family occasion, without the intrusion of business, though often guests came knocking on the kitchen door, wanting something.
‘Hello, darlin’,’ said Lil. ‘Have a good day?’
I didn’t bother to reply.
Lil took a plate of mince out of the fridge and stubbed out her cigarette. She squirted red wine from a cask into a glass, took a sip, and put it down on the table. Lil did everything that was bad for you, and her breathing was often laboured.
‘You know Sophie won’t eat that !’ I told her. The meat squatted there like a minced toad, seeping blood. Sophie had been a vegetarian, of sorts, for a long time.
‘She won’t even notice a little bit of meat in the sauce.
She could do with some building up,’ said Lil dismissively.
I was starving. I reached into the cupboard for the jar of almonds that Lil kept to put on top of fruit cakes, tipped out a handful and crammed them into my mouth.
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 3
