So silent.
Who would dare to put footprints there? I felt that I, for one, wouldn’t be able to take even one step. I’d fall face forward into the snow and lie there, spreadeagled, my very breath muffled by that weighty silence.
I thought about my notebooks, especially the red one, which I’d had no trouble beginning at all. That was because it wasn’t real writing –just random thoughts, and quotations, and notes about books I was reading. I never really expected anyone to ever read it, despite my reference to posterity at the beginning.
I stared at Alex’s blank page. This was a different matter. A page where he hoped he might write something significant. A whole novel. Neither of us spoke. We sat silently and pondered the enormous task of filling page after page with print, when it was so difficult to make even the first mark.
Marjorie lived on a broad, quiet street lined with shady fig trees, in a house framed by a large garden with a perfectly manicured lawn, and tasteful shrubs and flowers. The house had been built in the 1930s and her parents had renovated it to retain its period character. A deep front verandah led to a double living room with sliding-glass doors dividing it down the middle.
I always ran up the front steps and called, ‘Coo-ee!’ at the open front door to let Marjorie know I was there, then bounded down the hallway to where Marjorie sat in the panelled dining room with her books spread about over the table. Her parents were always at work during the week, and Marjorie liked to study in the dining room rather than her bedroom, as the house seemed less lonely that way. She was an only child. Her mother was an accountant, an almost unbelievably beautiful woman with long auburn hair. She drove a restored 1965 Holden (pale green, very shiny), and had a trick of being able to remove her bra without taking off her top. She did this every day, in the living room, when she arrived home from work, so Marjorie said.
I slipped into a chair opposite Marjorie. Her notebooks were filled with indecipherable squiggles and symbols –she studied a hideously high level of maths and physics. Marjorie wanted to be a doctor, like her father. ‘Tea?’ she asked, removing her glasses and looking at me gratefully. I had probably arrived just in the nick of time to prevent her brain exploding. We went to the kitchen, where Marjorie put on the kettle and set out bone china cups and plates.
Marjorie had slipped through the fabric of time and was really from another era –the 1940s, say, or the 1950s. She hadn’t been born at all. For one thing, her parents would have been far too busy to give birth to her. I imagined that she had skipped into her parents’ kitchen one day at the age of five or six, carrying a little suitcase and humming a tune, and had been there ever since.
She was the loveliest-looking girl I had ever seen, small and slim, with black hair cut short and curled around her face, alabaster skin, and clear, intensely blue eyes. The sort of girl you just wanted to look and look at, she was so pretty. She wore crisp cotton pastel frocks with sprigs of flowers, and sandals.
When she wasn’t studying maths and physics, Marjorie baked cakes. She did it with scientific precision, weighing the ingredients on a scale and sifting the flour from a good height so it would be beautifully aerated. She wore an apron when she baked and, in their cream and green renovated 1930s kitchen, she could have been someone in an old-fashioned advertisement.
That day, she had baked a sponge and filled it with jam and cream. She poured the tea from a silver teapot and I sliced the cake. Marjorie ate delicately, with a cake fork. Lil always said that I fell upon my food like a starving man, and that day was no exception. I picked up my slice and took enormous greedy mouthfuls. There were not many moments of the day when I was not starving hungry.
Marjorie and I had been friends since primary school. Both of us, in different ways, were unlike the other girls at school, so it suited us to stick together. For me, Marjorie was a safe friend; with her there were none of the passions and uncertainties that characterised Sophie’s relations with Carmen and Rafaella.
I enjoyed the calmness of being with her. I enjoyed her quiet and ordered household in contrast to my own, which was so often intruded on by strangers.
‘Have you been studying?’ Marjorie asked.
‘Not much,’ I said, feeling slightly guilty.
‘Well, what else have you been up to? The exams aren’t that far off, you know.’
Furtively, remembering my recent encounter with Alex, I shrugged.
‘You needn’t look as if I’m interrogating you.’
‘On the way here today I drank mint tea with a Russian prince,’ I blurted out.
‘Of course! What else is there to do, on a Monday morning?’
‘But really,’ I said. The sweet taste of his exotic tea still seemed to be in my mouth.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Alex.’
I hesitated. ‘I told him my name was Persephone.’
‘After all, that is your name.’
‘He’s a writer.’
‘Really? What’s he written?’
‘Nothing. He told me he’s writing a novel, but he has writer’s block.’
‘Very painful.’
I stared at Marjorie across the table; we started to giggle. I felt an instant pang of disloyalty, to be laughing about Alex with Marjorie so soon after meeting him, and the mint tea, and everything. I had meant to keep him as my secret. Now, here I was, blabbing it at the first opportunity.
But Alex did look like a Russian prince. Perhaps he was one. Anything was possible.
The Red Notebook
I am sitting in the dark in my fig tree and my bottom is icy cold. I am discovering that you can write without seeing what you are writing and that is somehow very liberating, though it’s bound to be indecipherable.
Behind me is the river. The water glimmers in the moonlight, and it looks better than it does in the daylight, when it is oily-looking and sometimes muddy and you can see the scrappy weeds along the banks. My nostrils are cold, and I can smell where the weeds along the roadside have been mown today by the Council tractor.
When I was a child I considered this tree my second home. Actually, it was my real home, because it was all mine, and it was where I felt most myself. Only Marjorie was ever invited in. Sophie used to sit on the ground at the bottom and call up to me. I have never told anyone this, but I used to pretend that I lived here with my mother and father. When I got home from school my mother was waiting with a glass of milk and biscuits just like old-fashioned Moms in American movies and my father was in a chair smoking a pipe.
This tree is vast, like a cathedral or an ocean liner. When I was little I had parts of it all mapped out into kitchen and bedrooms and living room, all connected by the passageways of broad branches.
But I intended to write about the here and now, not the past. I am staring out through the leaves at Samarkand. My tree is in darkness, but lights shine out from Samarkand as from a city on a distant shore. It is another country there.
There is a burst of loud music from Sophie’s room. She is playing her current favourite song, ‘Because the Night’, by Patti Smith, very loudly. It’s a song that breaks my heart because of the way the music makes a pattern of such longing, one note against another. I know that Sophie longs for Marcus, though she would not tell anyone, and this is the reason she plays the song.
The music has stopped suddenly but I can still hear it in my head. Anastasia begins to cry, so mournfully I want to go to her. Anastasia loves the song too, and hates the silence. Perhaps the song reminds her of her father, though she has never met him. But there is a little bit of him in her, so she must know him in some way –the parts of her that are like him call to him.
Two guests are sitting on the steps smoking –I can see the twin eyes of their cigarettes gleaming in the dark. And from the lower verandah a harmonica starts up, a heartfelt, melancholy tune. The harmonica player is a man from somewhere in the north of England, and he has been staying this past week. He’s an oldish man, and I believe that he’s either
severely missing his homeland or pining for a long-lost lady love. (He actually used this term ‘lady love’ when he saw two of the other guests canoodling. ‘Oh, to have a lady love,’ he said, longingly.)
The tune he’s playing is ‘Dirty Old Town’, and it’s a tune full of longing. A lot of the people who come here are longing for something and looking for something (I know I have used too many ‘longings’ –Ms M, my English teacher, would probably tell me to use another word). Sometimes I think the house might fill with so much other people’s longing that it will float away like a hot-air balloon.
Now Sophie walks out onto the verandah with Anastasia in her arms, looks out into the darkness, and goes back into her room again.
Lil comes onto the verandah and shakes a white tablecloth out over the edge of the railing. It floats up and down three times, and it seems so slow that all time is suspended. She catches it in her arms, turns, and goes inside.
Now all the lights in the house are out, except for one, the welcoming light next to the nameplate next to the front door. SAMARKAND, it says, though I can’t read it.
The Yellow Notebook
Written in my room with the aid of electric light. What I have learned: If you want to be able to write with facility, handicap yourself first.
Music: ‘Possessed’, by Crowded House
The Girl with the Yellow Hair:
She is in the happy position of liking every bit of her life. She likes her work, something that people are not always lucky enough to do.
Each weekday morning, after a breakfast of sourdough toast and cumquat jam and strong coffee, she takes the train into the city, where, in a street lined with green linden trees, she works in an office situated in an old house.
It is a publishing house. At first, when she came here, and found that the house part was literally true, she was astonished, because she thought that something as important as a publisher would be in one of those glass and steel tower blocks. But this one is in an actual house, a huge old terrace that goes up and up, rooms everywhere, and inside it are people (mostly women) busy with the business of publishing books.
As yet, she doesn’t have an office of her own. It is her job to do all the everyday things –opening mail, clipping reviews, answering the phone –but in between times she is allowed (no –not allowed –exhorted) to read the manuscripts, especially the ones that are to be published, so that she can get her eye in for what is good. And the rest of the time she reads the books that have already been published, and sit in rows on shelves, just waiting to be read. This, she thinks, must be heaven.
It is a happy place to work. She closes her eyes sometimes and thinks she can feel all that industry going on around her –all those minds intent on books –all the words floating round the building. Words literally float round the building sometimes too, because once a week all the people who work there gather in one of the larger rooms at lunchtime and sing, in parts, so that their voices blend together most harmoniously . . .
And they lie about on the floor sometimes, these people who work with books, reading or talking to each other. Just lie about among the manuscripts, which sit in piles on tables and shelves, great white stacks of them, with rubber bands about them. In the absence of beds (which is the proper place to read), they just stretch out on the floor and
(O God now Lil wants me for something!)
The Wild Typewritten Pages 7
I had still recorded nothing in the Blue Notebook, which I had come to think of as my memory notebook. I did remember things of course. How can you go through childhood without a single, solitary memory?
I could, for instance, have written in the Blue Notebook:
In bed with Lil and Sophie at Samarkand. Lil snoring, the sag of the mattress tilting me towards her heavy warmth. Sophie on my other side, tossing and muttering in her sleep. I’m drowsily awake, my head under the covers, breathing in the sweet musty mingled odours of our skins. Curled into Lil’s back, one hand on her shoulder. Her soft flesh. My other hand, fingering her nightie. Feeling the threads of cotton and noticing the difference in texture between skin and fabric.
The verandah door open to an early summer’s day. The sound of someone –something walking across the wooden floor.
A cry. Harsh and raucous. Enough to curdle blood. To wake the dead.
Lil sits bolt upright, throws back the sheet.
Two crows fly from the room. As black as sin. The wind of their wings, cutting the air like a sword. Beaks sharp as spears. Cries like black ice.
‘I’m not dead yet!’ Lil calls.
Sophie wakes and murmurs; is asleep again.
Lil lies back down. ‘The hide of them,’ she says. ‘As if they were ready to pluck out my eyes. But I’m not dead yet. Not yet.’
Lil’s hair had been the same unchanging colour since we’d known her, and her colour was Jet Black. For years now, it had been our job to help her dye it. We fought about whose turn it was (‘Bags not mine!’). It was a dreary ritual: the chair in the bathroom, the towel round her shoulders, the gloves, the goo, the combing through, the waiting, the washing out, the whole chemical stink of it.
For the dyeing process, Lil wore a nylon slip, and the straps cut into her rounded, mottled shoulders. The features on her face were blurring with age, growing less defined day by day, so that sometimes I feared that she was becoming less and less Lil, and more and more just an Old Person. She had a peculiar smell of old sweat mixed with talcum powder.
She had worn her hair the same way for years, done up in a french roll. I could see when I dyed it that the real colour was pure white, and wished Lil would let just one streak of that proper colour grow out; it would make a spectacular black-and-white effect. Sophie hankered to cut Lil’s hair in a short, spiky style, but Lil wouldn’t have it.
Lil complained that we spent far too much time reading, but she had set a bad example. When we were little she was always sneaking off to where no one could find her and reading books and eating chocolates. She treated the guests like children that she needed to take a break from for her own sanity. I used to find her in her favourite sofa on the back verandah, a book and a ciggie in her hands and lollies in her pockets. ‘Is that you, lovey?’ she’d call: I knew it wasn’t me she was hiding from. Lil would pull me onto the sofa for a cuddle, stroking the curls away from my face. I’m ashamed to say that I now avoided a cuddle from Lil –her puckered red lips, the folds of her skin, made me shudder.
It was Lil who taught us to read, so it was her fault that we were so addicted to it. But I thought that I must have been born able to read, the learning was so effortless. Lil would take us on either side of her and we’d sit there, eagerly looking at the book as she read to us.
‘I can read!’ Sophie announced out of the blue one day, standing in the kitchen with a half-eaten apple in her hand.
‘Sez who?’ said Lil.
‘Sez me!’ (hands on hips and chin stuck out defiantly).
‘Go on . . . who taught you?’
‘I taught myself!’
‘Well, read something to me.’
‘Lan-choo Tea!’ (pointing at the packet).
‘Very good. And what does this say?’
‘Kellogg’s Cornflakes!’
‘Can you read books?’
‘I can especially read books!’
Sophie’s second day of school: I go to our shared room in the middle of the morning and see a movement behind the curtain. A face appears. ‘It’s me!’
‘I ran away,’ Sophie tells me. ‘School’s boring!’
We sit behind the curtain together. The curtain is red and voluminous and hides us pretty well. Or so we think. Anyway, the girl who’s meant to be looking after me while Lil gets on with the work never worries about what I’m doing. Sophie and I have a stash of picture books with us, and paper and textas for drawing with, and Sophie’s school lunch. It’s a complete and perfect world there behind the curtain.
We peel apart the sandwiches and lic
k the butter and Vegemite off first, poring stickily over the pictures in the books. We eat the cream biscuits from Sophie’s playlunch. Later, I sneak to the kitchen and fetch a fistful of crackers, and we suck the salt away and nibble the crimped edges. Sophie reads to me in a whisper.
But then the school rings Lil, and we are discovered.
Sophie did end up going to school almost every day, so I got Lil’s lap to myself. I always listened closely when Lil read to me, and pulled her up when she got a word wrong. Lil thought I just knew the book by heart, but I knew how to read long before I let on to Lil that I could. I’d read along under my breath, but I was caught out one day when Lil stopped reading and I continued on, my lips moving almost soundlessly, my eyes following the text. ‘Why, you little monkey!’ said Lil. ‘You can read for yourself, can’t you?’
But that didn’t stop Lil reading to me, as I’d feared she would. The books she read were old ones she’d had around for years and years; I now see that they must have belonged to Lil’s son, Alan. They were about trains and boats with faces and feelings who learned valuable life lessons. A train called Tootle had to learn to stay on the rails no matter what. A boat named Scuffy sailed off down the river till he reached the sea, only to be snatched up at the last moment by his owner and returned to sailing in the bathtub. Another train tried and tried until he reached the top of a steep hill. ‘I think I can. I think I can,’ he said. And of course, he could.
I enjoyed the pictures of Tootle when he was off the rails the best. He romped through fields of flowers with blossoms floating in the bowls of soup in his dining car and flowers draped rakishly across his engine. I thought it looked like far more fun off the tracks. And I felt sorry for the little boat who found the sea far too wide for him, because I felt sure that the ocean would be far more exciting than a mere bathtub.
Although Lil loved to read as much as she loved to smoke and drink red wine and play cards with her friends, she treated it as a guilty pleasure that had to be stolen from the imperatives of the day. Sophie and I learned to snatch our reading time as well, and Lil was always onto us for reading when we ought to have been doing something else.
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 5
