Secret Scribbled Notebooks

by Joanne Horniman

  ‘Why did I have to get a name like Kate?’ I said, sounding as sulky as I possibly could. ‘Why couldn’t I have a name like Persephone, or Aphrodite, or Cassandra?’

  Lil still hadn’t started cooking the dinner. She kept puttering round the kitchen with her little old-lady steps, wiping down something here, moving something else there.

  ‘Kate is such a –clunky name. It just sort of falls down –clunk –like a brick. Or a cow-pat. Kate. It doesn’t have any mellifluous syllables. It doesn’t flow.

  ’ Why couldn’t I have been called something like Anaïs? I wondered. If I had a name like Anaïs I couldn’t help but be a writer. It would be in my blood.

  ‘When you were seven you wanted to be called Hepzibah,’ said Lil. ‘Where would you be if I’d gone along with you then? Stuck with it.’ Lil took the jar of nuts from me and put it back into the cupboard.

  I attacked a bowl of grapes, picking them from the stems savagely. I should have made Lil call me Hepzibah. There was a woman named Hepzibah in a book I’d read at the time. Hepzibah Green. She was lovely –warm and motherly and almost a witch as well.

  The phone in the hall rang. Lil was in the middle of chopping a large onion, so I flung myself from the room to answer it. I could feel myself doing the flinging, feeling ridiculous, but unable to stop myself.

  It was for Lil of course; one of her friends. ‘Lil! It’s for you!’ I yelled. Lil waddled out and plopped down in a chair next to the phone, a freshly lit cigarette dangling from her fingers.

  ‘What’s up?’ she said, into the receiver.

  Lil knew thousands of old women who were always coming round and sitting with her in the kitchen, smoking and playing cards and cackling about everything far into the night. The place became thick with smoke and raucous laughter. They seemed never to want to go home, and their voices were so loud that the sound drifted up to my room and stopped me from sleeping. I’d toss and turn with the pillow over my head and finally race down to the kitchen and tell them all to be quiet. I knew that now she would sit on the phone for hours, and dinner wouldn’t get cooked, and I would starve to death.

  I crashed a large pot down on the stove, splashed in some olive oil, and tossed in the onion Lil had partially chopped.

  ‘Oh, Gawd.’ (Lil often called on Gawd. It was her fault that Sophie and I had no sense of blasphemy: we had been brought up without Religion.)

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry. What can I say?’

  Those cooks on television are always going on about how important it is that food is made with luurve. But I think a lot of the food in the world must be made with irritation. Every soothing sentence that Lil crooned to her friend just made me more and more annoyed.

  ‘Look, you cry, love, it’s probably just what you need. Nothing wrong with crying.’

  I tipped the toad into the pot where it sat wetly on top of the onion and oil, and allowed it to slowly seethe in its own juices.

  ‘Oh, you poor, poor love.’

  I found a soggy tomato lurking at the back of the fridge, and lined it up on the bench with a limp bunch of celery (Why does some celery insist on smelling like cat pee?), a couple of flaccid carrots, a disgruntled-looking capsicum and an eggplant that begged to be put out of its misery.

  ‘I know, I know.’

  When I’d chopped the vegetables into an abject heap, I tossed them in, along with a large tin of tomatoes. I added a spurt of tomato paste, a handful of herbs, a splash of soy sauce, and gave it a stir.

  ‘Oh, I know how you’re feeling.’

  I gave a final stir and clanged on the lid, to make sure Lil would hear it.

  ‘Children. They just break your heart.’

  Then I walked heavily down the hallway, past Lil waving her cigarette around and making soothing noises into the phone. On the verandah I was accosted by a guest, a woman in one of those shapeless linen dresses that I really hate. ‘Excuse me,’ said the woman, ‘but there’s a frog in the downstairs toilet bowl.’

  I stood there for a moment as if gobsmacked, so that she’d know that the frog in the toilet bowl was not my responsibility.

  ‘I just live here,’ I said, pleased with the way I’d maintained my dignity, ‘I’m not the maid!’ and kept going to my room, which is on the top floor at the back, where the wrap-around verandah comes to a full stop. It was a small room looking out into thick trees, a quiet, gloomy space as secretive as the place where I had seen the fox. I liked it that way, as I am nocturnal myself, with pale skin and large light-seeking eyes.

  On the verandah outside my room was an old sofa covered by a bedspread to stop its innards from leaking everywhere. It was the place where I sat, especially at night, and looked out into the trees and palms that pressed against the back of the house, and listened to the fruit bats squabbling over blossom and berries.

  I grabbed Anaïs Nin’s Journals and took it out to the sofa. There was just enough light to see by (if Lil had come past she’d have squarked, ‘Oh, lovey, you’ll roon your eyes!’), and I lay for a long while and looked into Anaïs Nin’s face. Anaïs Nin looked back at me. I couldn’t believe that she was dead, because when you read her book it sounded as though she’d just written it.

  I opened it at the beginning, and read the start again. Winter, 1947. Acapulco, Mexico. Anaïs Nin is lying in a hammock with her diary open on her knees, and she has no desire to write. Her senses overwhelm her –the sun, the leaves, the shade, the warmth. She is experiencing perfection.

  I turned again to the face on the cover. She was quite old - forty-four –when this particular journal was started. Lying in the hammock in Mexico, feeling no need to portray or preserve what she is experiencing, Anaïs Nin feels in full possession of her own body. Everything is pleasure.

  I couldn’t help wondering if Lil was off the phone yet, and if the dinner was ready. I was hungry, and couldn’t wait any longer. On my window sill sat five pears, Josephines (the best variety: the nicest name, compared to William or Bartlett or Bosc, and the best shape, like a plump drop of water). They glimmered in the twilight. I liked to keep fruit in my room in case of sudden hunger. They were a happiness of pears, sitting there in a row.

  I chose two and took them around the verandah to Sophie’s room. It was at the front, overlooking the park and the river, open to the light and the air and the sky. Sophie was lying in bed on her side with Anastasia latched on and sucking. It was the perfect position for reading, and Oscar Wilde lay open on the bed beside her; her eyes were fixed on it.

  I handed her a pear and she took it without looking up from her book. Biting into my Josephine, I found that it was perfect: juicy, sweet and spicy at the same time. Sophie also made greedy inroads into hers, and a splash of juice fell onto Anastasia’s face. She wiped it away and continued reading. She finished her pear, core and all, and dropped the stalk onto the open page of The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde.

  I started to tell her about the fox, about the look on its face that I’d seen before it fled. But Sophie had fallen asleep, quite suddenly, as she often did these days, her glasses crooked on her face. Anastasia was asleep too, her mouth lolling open, her hands folded into fists.

  The Red Notebook

  From the Oxford Dictionary:

  exo –from the Greek, meaning outside

  exotic –meaning 1: (of plants, words, fashions): introduced from abroad. 2: striking and attractive through being colourful or unusual

  exotic things that come to mind: mangoes (not yet in season but Sophie and I are already dreaming of them); the boy in the bookshop (whom I may never see again)

  The Journals of Anaïs Nin

  Summer 1953, New York

  Anaïs dreams of the evening and what it will bring at twilight; it is the hour she loves best, and it also saddens her. She ceases the day’s efforts, she bathes, and dresses for some event. She loves this time best, the ‘in-between hours’, the only moment when she exists alone.

  The Pillow Book of Sei Shonogon

  The Pillow
Book is written by a woman who was a lady-in-waiting at the Court of the Japanese Empress in tenth-century Japan. She writes down all the things that attract, displease her etc. in daily life. She seems to have been quite promiscuous –her lovers discreetly steal away from her in the early hours of the morning. She’s always writing lists. For example, Poetic Subjects (Arrowroot???), and Things That Cannot be Compared (summer and winter, night and day, and she also puts in this category) ‘When one has stopped loving somebody, one feels that he has become someone else, even though he is still the same person’. Also Hateful Things (‘One is about to be told an interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.’ I’d hate that too!). But the bit I like best is under When a Woman Lives Alone. She says that when a woman lives alone her house should be extremely dilapidated, the mud wall should be falling to pieces, and if there is a pond it should be overgrown with water-plants. She hates a woman’s house when it is clear that she has scurried about with a knowing look on her face, arranging everything just as it should be . . . (She would love Samarkand, where nothing is arranged as it should be!)

  The Yellow Notebook

  The girl with the yellow hair, who wears the charcoal suit and high heels to work in the day, relaxes at night in her kimono and bare feet, lying on an old sofa. After drinking the mint tea, she makes herself a mushroom omelette for dinner. She eats a mango afterwards, licking away the sticky juice that runs over her wrists and down her arm. She loves this time of the day, when she can relax, and be alone.

  Now she reads (the luxury of it!) till the small hours of the morning. Books fill the shelves that line the walls of her room; she has so many they spill over into piles on the floor and over the coffee table; they are stacked up beside the sofa, so she has only to reach out her hand and it touches a book.

  The books are many and various. There are new books, with clean, shiny covers and crisp pages, and there are old books, rare books, with beautiful dustjackets and intriguing inscriptions inside. Their pages are beautiful in a different way from the clean, sweet-smelling white pages of the new books –these old books have thick, cream-coloured paper, browned on the edges, some as crisp as a perfectly fried egg. They all smell different –of rich, old spices, or deep green forests, earthy and damp. They evoke long-forgotten rooms and other lives.

  She reads and reads, occasionally picking up a piece of Turkish delight and savouring the intense flavour, which is like a thousand red rose petals crushed into one sweet, sticky little cube.

  Suddenly restless, she goes to the window. There, in the garden, is the glint of the eyes that she sees each night. She fetches a bowl and some milk, and goes outside and sets it down just beyond the window. She retreats, and waits.

  Cautiously, an animal approaches. It is a fox. It laps at the milk, poised for flight at any moment. She doesn’t move; she just watches it.

  The Wild Typewritten Pages 6

  I went again to Hope Springs, hoping to see the boy I’d met there; the boy whose name I didn’t know. Actually, he wasn’t a boy, not like the boys I was friends with at school (Jason with his saxophone, Zed who was crazy about cooking Italian food). He was a man, though a young one, and he had an interesting air of having lived in the world –the huge, ocean-sized world that existed beyond Lismore. Perhaps that’s why I was so drawn to him.

  I’d never had a boyfriend –never wanted one –though Jason used to come round to play the saxophone for me, and he kissed me once when he was dropping me off after a party, but I ignored it, pretending afterwards that it hadn’t happened. His mouth had felt strange against mine, too soft, and it made me think of jelly-like sea-creatures.

  If the boy wasn’t there this time, I thought, that would be it. I would never darken the bookshop door again.

  And he wasn’t there. Instead there was a man (not young at all, and very whiskery) shelving a box of books that someone had left at the doorway of the shop like an abandoned baby. The shop was a kind of home for books, and they would stay there until someone came to take them away and love them. Some of them would probably stay there forever, they were so tattered and unattractive, but Hope Springs had a policy of turning nothing away. Every single time I went to the shop, I found a book I liked the look of, and I bought it. Even though I mightn’t read them just yet, I liked to have them stored up against possible periods of booklessness in my life.

  It was worth going to Hope Springs just for the books, and I thought I’d have to break my resolve not to go there any more. I despaired of seeing the bookshop boy ever again.

  I finally met him because I liked to travel across town using the laneways. I enjoyed their narrowness, and the way they slid past the backs of the houses so you could peer into the back yards. The back is the part of the house that people don’t expect you to see and it is always more individual and interesting.

  Entering a laneway on foot (my bicycle out of action with a flat tyre), I saw that the boy I’d met at Hope Springs had just stepped into it at the opposite end. We walked down the lane with each other in full view, our eyes full of boldness, and reached the middle of the lane at the same time.

  We halted.

  The boy smiled. I smiled. ‘Hello’, we said, and stood there smiling at each other.

  ‘I’m Persephone,’ I told him. I was always trying to get people to call me by more glamorous names but they never did, probably because they were used to me being plain old Kate.

  ‘Alex,’ he said, and held out his hand.

  He had a soft line of down on his upper lip, and I couldn’t stop staring at it. Sophie was always telling me I shouldn’t stare at people so much, it disconcerted them. But Alex wasn’t at all disconcerted. ‘I was just on my way home,’ he said, and gestured to a fence covered with choko vines. ‘Do you want to come in?’

  Alex lived in a garage in the back yard of an old house, and it smelt faintly of old car oil. Down one end there were shelves filled with ancient paint tins and mower parts and jars of rusty nails. The other end of the room was Alex’s domain. It was inexpressibly bare and neat, with the kind of neatness that sets your teeth on edge like sucking lemons. This may have been because he possessed barely anything at all. Of all the things that are to be possessed in the world, Alex had almost none.

  The inventory of Alex’s belongings that first day was as follows:

  a single bed with a clean, faded cover tucked tightly over it

  a bench along one side of the room on which sat

  a cup

  a plate

  a bowl

  a bread knife

  a fork

  a two-burner gas camping stove

  a plastic washing-up bowl

  a kettle

  an onion that had seen better days

  and a pile of newspapers.

  And also, and most interestingly, on the other side of the room, there was a small table on which sat:

  an electric typewriter and

  a new ream of copying paper.

  ‘Could I offer you a cup of something, Persephone?’ he said. In the midst of this bare-faced lack of possessions, Alex was the most attentive host possible.

  ‘Please do,’ I said. ‘What do you have?’

  ‘Well, there’s mint tea, or hot water. Or cold if you’d prefer.’

  ‘Mint tea would be perfect.’ I sat on the bed because there was nowhere else to sit.

  Alex went out through the door at the end of the garage with the kettle and reappeared with a handful of freshly picked mint leaves and the kettle full of water. He chopped up the leaves, sprinkled them into the cup and, when the water boiled, poured it over them.

  ‘Sugar?’

  He reached up to a shelf and took down a small Vegemite jar.

  ‘How much? Mint tea is better if it’s sweet,’ he suggested.

  ‘Definitely. You decide.’

  Using the blade of the knife, Alex transferred rather a lot of sugar to the cup, and stirred. He handed it to me and I took a sip. It tasted refreshingly of th
e Near (or was it the Far?) East, of shaded courtyards and oases and dancing girls. Alex sat down beside me and, since there was only one cup, I handed it to him so he could have some too. ‘I really prefer coffee,’ he said, ‘But I’m trying to wean myself off it.’

  Sometimes it is easier to feel intimate with strangers than with people that you know well. The more you know about someone, the more you realise how much about them you don’t know. With a stranger it is like the innocent meeting of two souls; you float on a warm swell of good feeling. But you can’t sit there and say nothing. Inevitably, the knowing process begins.

  ‘You type?’ I asked, glancing over at the typewriter.

  ‘Badly. Two fingers.’ Alex smiled.

  ‘So –why do you have a typewriter?’

  ‘I’m trying to write a novel.’ Alex gestured for me to keep possession of the mint tea. He got up and walked over to the typewriter. A sheet of blank paper had been rolled into the carriage, but there was nothing written on it. He leaned over and took out the paper; it curled up at each end.

  ‘Are you having any success?’ I wondered.

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  The words hung gloomily in the bare room like a small dark cloud.

  ‘I have writer’s block.’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly? Or even approximately?’

  I waited for his reply. Sophie had told me that you shouldn’t always let words rush in to fill empty conversational spaces.

  At last Alex said, ‘It means I can’t write. I can’t even make a start. Something stops me from putting words down. I sit at the typewriter and nothing comes. It’s like being paralysed.’

  Alex stared at the blank sheet in his hand. He turned it over and looked at the other side of the paper as if contemplating an object he’d never before encountered, or in case words had magically appeared there in his absence.

  Pages are such daunting things. Unwritten on, they are so pure, so white, so unsullied, like freshly fallen snow.