Standing outside my room, she’d call,‘Kate, are you getting ready for school?’
‘Kate?’
‘KATE!’
‘Yes, Lil?’
‘I know what you’re up to in there! Put down that book! Are you dressed yet?’
‘Almost.’
‘Well, hurry up about it, madam, or we’ll have the police here.’
The police dominated Lil’s threats. I imagined uniformed hordes of them, wielding truncheons, swarming up the zigzag steps of Samarkand and converging on my room where I cowered, half-dressed in singlet and knickers, behind the covers of an open book.
The attraction of reading was that while you were doing it you were somewhere else. I loved feeling with my fingers how much of a book there was left to go –all those pages! –time enough for a satisfactory happy ending to be worked out (because what was the use of a book without a happy ending?). I also liked knowing that the fate of the characters had been already worked out, though I had yet to find out what it was. And people couldn’t reach you when you were reading. It was a private experience, the ultimate intimacy, something between you and the book.
We spent our entire childhood reading. We nicked off from school to do it; we did it with torches in the small hours of the morning; we curled up hidden behind curtains; we climbed trees for the express purpose of spending a few more stolen hours with a book, in direct defiance of the police, who never did manage to discover us. It was glorious.
We knew that people didn’t like it if you read too much, so it was best not to let on what you were up to. Eventually, we discovered characters far more compelling than little trains and boats with faces, although these vehicles will always have a special place in my heart.
We each discovered the book that became our book, the book that spoke to our inner selves, in the very same year. Sophie’s book, which she first read at fifteen, was Anna Karenina. Mine was Great Expectations.
Anna Karenina escaped from a loveless marriage and gave her life to a man who, she finally learned, didn’t love her in return. She ended up walking under a train and killing herself.
In Great Expectations, a jilted woman, Miss Havisham, spent her whole life in bitterness. She adopted a young girl, and taught her not to love, and so this girl, Estelle, couldn’t even love her. And the hero Pip, who fell in love with the girl who couldn’t love, learnt that his great expectations could not be supplied by other people, and made his own way in the world.
These later books were not so clear-cut as the stories about the little trains and boats had been. If they taught us anything, they taught us that nothing in life is unambiguous and simple.
The Blue Notebook
Anaïs Nin’s honesty in her diaries has prompted me to be brave in what I write. All right. Here it is. This is my only memory of my father, and it’s a nice memory. I have to admit that my memory of my father is not a horrible one. If anything, it gives me too much hope. Because he hasn’t come back yet, has he, this man who seemed to love me so much?
I was two. Or three. Certainly no more than three. And we’d gone to a wedding somewhere. I don’t know where. And I only have a feeling that it was a wedding. I mean, I remember a wedding, vaguely.
But what I do remember was this. We were staying at a motel. It was late at night, and I couldn’t sleep. I kept talking and giggling, and whoever else was there tried to shoosh me –they thought I’d wake up Sophie. And then a man –my father –picked me up and put on my swimmers, and took me out to the motel pool. Everyone else was asleep. The place was dead quiet. It must have been about two or three in the morning.
We played for ages in the water. I’d jump in, and he’d catch me. He’d pull me through the water and hold on to me and bounce me up and down. It was wonderful. It really was. I was full of wonder. And all the time there was this sort of quiet laughter between us.
I don’t even remember his face properly. Just this particular way of smiling, and the way he . . . was. He was quiet and sure of himself. He took a lot of notice of me. Not fussing over me, but noticing how I was feeling. It was just the two of us, and the lights sparkling on the water. Everything shimmered.
And I can remember the next morning, I gave him a present I’d found. It was a tiny stone, from the garden of the motel. Nothing special really, just one of the little white stones they use in landscaping. But I found one that I thought was prettier than the rest, and I picked it up and gave it to him. He lifted me up and kissed me on the cheek. He told me that he’d always keep it.
That is why I have always believed he’ll come back. And that’s all I have for you, Blue Notebook. I remember nothing else. You are now officially obsolete.
The Red Notebook
Music: Emmylou Harris, ‘Orphan Girl’
Now I don’t feel like writing a thing
The Wild Typewritten Pages 8
I often wondered where Sophie and I had sprung from, and how we got to be the way we were. Where did my sister get her pale skin and dark hair, I my great height and freckles and wild red mop? A man reeling drunkenly down the street one night saw Sophie and stopped to say, sentimentally, ‘Ah, a beautiful Irish face!’
Our name, after all, is O’Farrell. We could have Irish blood; we might never know. But perhaps that was why Sophie developed an affinity for Oscar Wilde. And she soaked up any tale of deprivation, especially if it had an Irish setting. She had read countless books about people brought up with drunken parents, living in the slums of Ireland, without enough to eat and no shoes on their feet, overcoming the odds and living happy and fulfilled lives. When she was at high school she knew practically everything there was to know about the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-50. She worked it up into a speech that won her first place in public-speaking competitions all over the place until she was beaten at State level by a girl who gave a speech about the bombing of Dresden.
Sophie has such a grave and sincere face when the occasion demands, that she had her audience wringing their hands in sympathy. The Irish potato famine was a story of mass starvation, of families becoming ill from eating blighted potatoes, of incredible loss of life and untold suffering. She’d relate the story of a man named Courtney, who was obliged, in his pitiable state, to depend on cabbage for several days to support existence, till death, more merciful than his own rulers, came to his rescue.
Sophie opened a bag of chocolate drops and reached for a supermarket catalogue that had fallen out of a newspaper onto her bed. Flicking through it, she said, with her mouth full of chocolate, ‘If you had to choose just five items from this catalogue to feed you for an entire week, what would you choose?’
She often played this game with me; I couldn’t imagine what premonition of impending starvation or doom had driven her to invent it. But this was a game Sophie took seriously, so I considered my options carefully.
The 5-kilogram bag of potatoes was top of my list. That which kept body and soul together for Irish peasants was good enough for me. I also chose a 3-kilogram bag of oranges (Vitamin C), a large packet of powdered milk (protein and calcium), a bulk pack of lamb chops (iron, protein), and some broccoli.
How much does a human being need in order to survive?
How much in the way of food? How much in the way of love?
Or, more importantly, how much can they do without?
We often lay on Sophie’s bed and dreamed up imaginary women who had made do with very little in the way of love. There was a woman who existed on a smile she received every day from a man who served her in the general store where she shopped. And another who kept a letter full of ambiguous tender words in her underwear drawer. It was falling apart at the folds, it had been read and re-read so often. Yet another woman remembered a man she passed in the street who glanced at her in a certain way.
All of these women, naturally, had long skirts and long hair done up in old-fashioned hairstyles. They were women from the past. Modern women wouldn’t put up with having so little. Would they? I want a love t
hat is grand and passionate and overwhelming, Sophie had told me.
No tattered letters in underwear drawers for her.
I had no idea what kind of love I wanted.
And yet Sophie was dreaming her life away. I found a notebook near her bed with the name Marcus scrawled over it in elaborate script. She was always half-asleep in the mornings, dreamily mulling over Anna Karenina, filling me in on the latest developments while the toast burned.
‘We’re trying to run a business here,’ said Lil. ‘I just found a pooey nappy sitting on the verandah for people to step in! Can’t you at least put them in the covered bucket I gave you, Sophie?’
‘But breast-fed babies have such sweet, innocuous poo!’ said Sophie.
‘Not if the baby isn’t yours,’ retorted Lil.
I took it upon myself to wash out the nappies every morning, because Sophie somehow never got round to it. I swooshed the yellow shit out of them with the tap and threw them into the machine with a capful of antiseptic bleach, and became very familiar with the inside of the laundry room, propping a book up against the window while I waited for the rinse cycle to finish.
Anastasia was my reward. Out on the verandah she kicked in her bassinette, exercising her legs in preparation for the time when she would stand up and walk. I tickled her toes on the way past to hang the nappies on the line; Anastasia gave me a look that was not yet a smile, but was working up to it. Every morning I made a bee-line for Sophie’s room to see how Anastasia had changed overnight. I didn’t want to miss one stage she went through.
I didn’t know if Sophie would ever go back to her waitressing job. She had never been one for planning her life. When she left school, everyone thought that she should do something with herself besides waitressing in a cafe. They assumed that she would go on to university and study literature, she had such a love of it. But Sophie declared she’d had enough of all that during Year 12. A scholar has to read everything, regardless of whether they like it or not. Sophie wanted to read only what she loved; she said she couldn’t stomach writing essays any longer. ‘Well, someone has to support the novel,’ she’d say crossly, if anyone even so much as hinted that she lay about reading too much. One of the teachers at school always asked after her in an anxious and sorrowful way. I wanted to tell her to have faith ! Because what I thought Sophie would do was this: she would read and read for years, lying about on her bed and caring for her baby. And then, having absorbed all the Great Literature of the world, she would write a book of her own and it would be wonderful and amaze people.
But now I wasn’t so sure. Whatever energy Sophie had seemed to be seeping out of her, day by day.
Sophie would talk to me about imaginary women in love; she would talk to me about books, and quote from them extensively; she would ask me what I would buy to feed myself from the supermarket catalogue, but she wouldn’t talk to me about her life. How did she feel about Marcus? Did she feel afraid of bringing up a baby on her own?
Sophie had never confided in me. But ever since she was a child, Sophie had sometimes talked to herself, at night, while she slept. I was glad when I no longer had to share a room with her. Her voice was clear, but I could never make out what she was saying. It was like listening to someone speak in a foreign language. Uncanny, in the immensity of the dark, to listen to her speak and not be able to understand a word.
The Red Notebook
From the dictionary:
chartreuse (shartrerz), a liqueur; pale apple-green colour (another dictionary says clear, light green with a yellowish tinge) –made by Carthusian monks
absinth, a strong, bitter, green-coloured aromatic liqueur, made with wormwood, anise and other herbs, with a pronounced licorice flavour
I can’t remember if Anaïs Nin drank these things, but I imagine she would have –is it because the word anise reminds me of Anaïs?
The Yellow Notebook
And every night, when the girl gets home from work, she leaves a bowl of milk out for the fox, and watches for it. It comes slipping through the trees like a shadow, approaching the milk and lapping avidly, its tongue darting in and out, watching her face all the while.
The fox is a little bit of wildness in the intense, tightly packed life of the city; it exists in the wild strip of garden that runs in a thread of green from yard to yard and along to the waste area beside the railway line. She thinks of it as her fox, as though she owns it, but she knows there are some things that you can never own.
The Wild Typewritten Pages 9
Alex had told me he’d be at the bookshop the following Friday, and suggested I meet him there. He finished his shift at lunchtime, and while I waited for him, I browsed the shelves and wondered what it was that he wanted to write a novel about. It seemed to me a very ambitious thing to do. So many books had already been written; writing down words with any plan in mind seemed to be asking too much of any ordinary person. This old bookshop, for instance, in a very dull country town, was stuffed with any number of Great Books by the greatest minds of the last couple of hundred years.
I found myself pulling one of these books from the shelf: Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. The front cover had a faint undulation, as if it had been left out in the rain, or wept upon copiously (It bore a strange picture by Salvador Dali: a landscape with a hole in it and a partially melted clock reading about four minutes to six.) I opened it and breathed in the scent –it was a typical Old Book. And the words inside –surely these were words I’d want to read sooner or later. I took it to the table that served as a counter and found some money. ‘Ah, Sartre,’ said Alex, and nodded in a knowing way. He said the name differently to the way I would have (didn’t Sartre rhyme with Frank Sinatra?). He said it with a soft French sound, all but ignoring the last syllable.
I sat on a chair and started reading, and soon the next person on the roster turned up, and we were able to leave. ‘The students from the Conservatorium are playing jazz in the park today,’ said Alex. ‘We could go and listen.’
On the way to the park we approached a street corner where a boy stood selling socialist newspapers. FREE THE REFUGEES said the front page. The boy was far too thin, with a haunted look to him, and he stood with a paper held up in each hand, displaying the headlines. He looked, I thought, as though he’d been impaled there, like Christ on the cross, or an eagle spread out on a barbed-wire fence. People ignored him as they passed by.
‘Hey!’ said Alex, greeting him with a smile.
‘Hey,’ he replied. When he smiled, it only exaggerated his leanness.
They exchanged a few friendly words, and Alex took a coin from his pocket and bought a paper.
‘I feel ashamed,’ Alex said, as we approached the park, ‘to live in this country. The way we treat people who come here for refuge. Children should not be locked up. No innocent people should be locked up. I hate what the government is doing in our name.’ His words mingled incongruously with the notes of jazz music floating out to us.
It was early spring, and we sat on the grass in front of the band and bathed in the gentle sun. Leaning back on my arms, I lifted my face to the sky and wriggled my toes, feeling lucky to be alive and free. Alex had expressed serious sentiments, and ones that I agreed with, but my joy in the day, and in being with Alex, could not be suppressed. I am ashamed to say that quite often my feelings are not worthy; when my mind should be on deeper things, I am often quite shallow.
For instance, I am not normally vain, but I must say that I have incredibly beautiful feet. The rest of me is unremarkable, but everything about my feet is simply lovely: their shape –slender and graceful and high-arched; the skin –smooth and unblemished by the freckles that intrude on almost every other area of my body; and my toes are long and perfectly shaped, with nails like charmingly pink little sea-shells.
That day I took off my sandals and displayed my feet for the world to see. I hoped that Alex would see them and admire them, because they were the one thing about me that had achieved a satisfactory level of be
auty.
A girl with rings on her toes and in her belly-button took the microphone and sang, Summertime, and the living is easy . . .
And I felt that it was. There was nowhere I’d rather have been at that moment than next to Alex in a park on a spring day. With the sun, and the sweet rhythms of the music winding themselves through my body, and lying on the grass with people all around me, and my beautiful feet, and Alex, I felt that I might unfold into an enormous scented blossom. I stretched out my feet again and hoped to catch Alex’s eye, but he was absorbed in the girl who was singing. She had a mane of tawny hair, a quizzical expression on her face, and a voice like dark honey.
Then a boy who’d been lying nearby on the grass got to his knees and packed some things into his bag, preparing to leave. Before he stood up, he looked over and said to me, ‘Excuse me, but has anyone ever told you that you have really beautiful feet?’
‘You look like a Russian prince,’ I told Alex, after the band had packed up and we were wandering through the park together.
He wore a black beret that day, and a threadbare silk scarf round his neck, all grey and blue squares. He was graceful and feline and beautiful, with angular cheekbones, and a thoughtful downward curve to his mouth. He took a slim brown cigarette from a packet and lit it.
‘That’s because I am one,’ he said, blowing the smoke away from me. He had a considering, bright-eyed way of looking at me, and a warm and secret smile.
We lay in the shade of a fig tree. I picked up a selection of the small leathery fruits that had fallen to the ground and said, ‘Which one do you like best?’
Without hesitation, Alex plucked one from my palm. ‘This one,’ he said.
‘I like that one, too.’ I really did. From a collection of almost identical objects I could always choose the most desirable one. I put it in his top pocket and scattered the rest onto the ground.
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 6
