Secret Scribbled Notebooks

by Joanne Horniman

  ‘Tell me about being a Russian prince.’

  He looked away from me for a moment, his eyes narrowed, his attention concentrated inside his head as though picturing a scene, and then turned and looked directly into my eyes. ‘My great-great-grandfather was a member of the aristocracy, and during the Revolution he escaped from Russia in a hay-cart,’ he said, ‘smuggled under the hay by a young peasant girl who later became his wife. They went to England first and later emigrated to Australia.’

  Well. It might be true or it might not be. It was so pat that I suspected not, and realised that I hadn’t been asking for the truth but for a story, to fit my preconceptions of him. I remembered the stories I had made up throughout my life to explain my lack of visible parents, our relationship to Lil, and our life at Samarkand.

  Alex didn’t say any more, and I waited for him to elaborate further, or ask about where I had come from, or my family. When people asked this, I found it difficult to explain; I often evaded the question. If the questioner was someone I liked and trusted, I’d say something like, I don’t know who my parents were. My sister and I are orphans, virtually. We were brought up by a woman who isn’t even related to us. But these words always sounded so forlorn, and said nothing about the way Lil was so familiar to me that I could see exactly the particular parts of her –like the creased, loose skin on her elbows –just by thinking about them. Or how I remembered Lil’s dimpled skin, soft and mottled like an overripe pear. The way she always called out, ‘Is that you, love?’ with a hopeful note in her voice when she heard my footsteps after school. Or how recently this had started to annoy me so much that I wanted to snap at her, Well, who else could it be?

  But Alex said nothing, and I looked at him and thought how beautiful he was. He lay on the grass and put his hands behind his head and his eyes were as bright as a currawong’s (but thankfully not yellow). His teeth showed when he talked, rather charmingly white and sharp. He smiled often. I could see that there was passion in him. People often think of passionate people as being all movement and action and histrionics, but Alex was passionate in a quiet way. He glowed, rather than burned.

  I longed to know more about him but didn’t want to ask too many questions. It had been silly, asking about him being a Russian prince. I hoped to see him again, and again, and that way get to know him.

  Alex lay on the ground looking up at the sky. ‘I love that intense blue,’ he said. ‘My grandfather said that the light is so clear here, so bright, after northern Europe. I’ve never known anything else, but I can imagine different skies, can’t you?’ He looked across at me, and his face was so full of longing, his appeal to me so plaintive, that I knew this, at least, wasn’t a story.

  I looked at his hands. Alex had the fine, slender hands that you see on ancient Asian statues. He was at once young and old. When we stood up I noticed that he was exactly the same height as I was. We could look directly into each other’s eyes.

  ‘People say I’m too serious,’ he said.

  ‘They say I’m too flippant. Is it true,’ I asked him, ‘about you being a Russian prince?’

  ‘No. I’m not even Russian, let alone a prince. But there was an escape over a border. My grandparents –it was all a long time ago.’

  ‘Can I see you again?’ I tried not to appear too eager.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Come to the shop, or my place.’ He touched me on the arm. ‘But where do you live?’

  ‘Somewhere over there,’ I told him, vaguely, waving one arm in a generalised direction.

  ‘Oh, I see. Yonder,’ he said, nodding and smiling at me.

  ‘Yes. Yonder.’

  So we spoke the same language. I wondered if he also looked up dictionaries in his spare time. But I didn’t want to put him off entirely. As we parted, I turned at the last moment to call out, ‘I live in a place called Samarkand.’

  I imagined myself as a bird flying high above the town, seeing us each going our separate ways; I imagined the rusty roof of Samarkand, and the smaller, vine-covered garage where Alex made his home. I thought of all the people in the world converging and separating, meeting and departing, each their own solitary small person.

  The Red Notebook

  Well, I’m not a court lady in tenth-century Japan, but here is a list:

  Things That I Hate About My Sister

  She is maddeningly untidy.

  She is always telling me what she is going to do. For instance, today she said that she was going to wash Anastasia’s nighties, and then she was going to sweep her room, and then she was going to make cheese on toast for lunch, and then she was going down town to buy some nursing pads because she is sick of leaking all over her clothes (but then again she thought that she might send me to do this!) . . . but she did none of these things, she just lay on the bed and talked about it! I snapped at her –‘Well, don’t talk about it, just do it!’ –and she got offended.

  She snatched my copy of Anaïs Nin from me (literally –her hand shot out and she grabbed it with such a look of avarice on her face I can’t even describe it!) and now she’s reading it, and moaning that her life will never be like that, though if you ask me, Anaïs didn’t always have such a great time (this is evident when you really get into it).

  Sometimes she ignores me when I say something to her (like, I was in the middle of that book and I’d like it back soon).

  I wonder if Anaïs Nin always did tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  Because people must lie, even in their own diaries, mustn’t they?

  The Wild Typewritten Pages 10

  I was glad I hadn’t needed to explain to Alex about Lil and Sophie. It would have been almost impossible, because living with people is somehow inexplicable and subtle, and between us washed a changing tide of emotions that probably had as much to do with the pull of the moon as anything else. After all, aren’t we meant to be almost all water?

  ‘What a perfect little darlin’,’ Lil had said, when Anastasia was born. Lil loved babies and children. She loved dogs, cats, chooks –anything really. Nothing turned her off –the green slime that issued from the noses of small children, the watery eyes and flaky skin of old people (she never counted herself in this category), the slobbery, meaty breath of dogs.

  I knew how delighted Lil had been when Anastasia was born, had seen her dancing alone in the kitchen afterwards. But I also knew that Sophie having a baby so early in life had disappointed Lil. She cried when Sophie told her.

  ‘Oh Gawd,’ she sobbed. ‘You’re doing exactly what I did. Do you think it’s going to be easy bringing up a baby on your own? Do you?’

  This was a reference to Lil’s own son, Alan. Lil had been a single mother, in the days when that was a shameful and unacceptable thing to be. She’d brought up her child on her own, by making the house an aunt had left to her into a boarding house.

  But now Alan was dead. He’d died years before, when he was a grown man, not long after Sophie and I came to Samarkand. We never knew him. There were photos of him in Lil’s room. He was her ‘lovely boy’. Sometimes I saw her holding a picture of Alan in her hands, just gazing at it. Now that we had Anastasia, I knew what it was like to love someone that much.

  Sophie had refused to consider an abortion. ‘I’ll be almost twenty-one when I have it,’ she said. ‘That’s not so young. It’s quite old really, compared with some parts of the world and some periods of history. Stop crying, Lil!’

  Lil never got used to the way things were done these days. When Lil had had her baby, it was the thing to wear loose dresses like tents that attempted to conceal the bump. Sophie wore clothes that flagrantly emphasised her growing belly –stretchy pants and T-shirts. She swam in a bikini. ‘Are you going out like that?’ Lil would cry, as the shape of Sophie’s burgeoning body was revealed for the world to see. ‘People will think it’s disgusting!’

  Lil’s emotions were always close to the surface. She sobbed, cackled with laughter, screamed in pain, at the dro
p of a hat. She could scare me with her melodramatic approach to life. One night when I was small, Lil had toothache; it was the night of a dreadful storm. The power went off, and Samarkand was in darkness. I remembered thunder and lightning, the dancing, menacing shadows thrown by candles, and Lil groaning on the tempest-tossed verandah with a handful of painkillers in one hand and a glass of water in the other. I feared that Lil might die before the night was over.

  When Sophie was a teenager and became friends with Carmen and Rafaella, Lil used to cry out dramatically at regular intervals, ‘Oh, my friends were right! They said I would never be able to handle you two girls when you got older! You are bold, bold girls!’

  Being bold was the worst accusation Lil could fling at us, and I felt quite insulted by this. I was very quiet and studious, and so was Sophie, really. We lived through books. And that worried Lil, too. ‘Oh, my loves,’ she’d plead, ‘get your noses out of those books and go and get some exercise! Play sport. What about basketball? Have you ever heard of basketball? That’s what girls need –not these flippin’ . . . books!’

  A slice of life from our lives at that time:

  Sophie and I cook dinner in the kitchen and Lil looks after Anastasia. The trouble about cooking with Sophie is that all the cooking is left to me while Sophie reads. Sophie’s nose is, literally, in a book. Her bum is on a chair, her feet on the rung of the chair next to her, one hand is holding the book, the other rubs the nape of her neck. Her mind is elsewhere.

  I place three zucchini on a chopping board on the table next to her, and hand Sophie a knife, which she looks at as if contemplating an entirely original invention that she hasn’t before encountered. She begins to chop the zucchini, slowly and laboriously. She slices them lengthways, which is also the way I do it. No one has taught us to slice them this way, we just do. Lil does them in rounds.

  We do a lot of things the same way. We will wander up and down a clothes line, pegging things erratically, a shirt here, a sock there, so that the line is dotted with random garments, with lots of gaps in between them. Lil lines up everything neatly in a row.

  For the rest of our lives, Sophie and I will share the same way of doing things. Our childhood is a country whose dimensions and geography are known only by us, and it is this which binds us together. We speak a different language there. No one, apart from us, will quite understand exactly how it was. Most families must be this way, an entity to themselves.

  I think of our particular childhood as an island, with high, inaccessible cliffs. Waves pound at the foot of the cliffs, sending up a mist of spray. Seabirds, obscured by mist, hover round the cliffs and call in shrill, beseeching voices.

  There is no place to land safely. No sandy beaches with a welcome creek running down to it, no palm trees bending in the balmy wind –just cliffs and the crash and roar of waves. The island itself is high and forbidding, containing impenetrable jungle and alligator-infested swamps.

  So I understand why Sophie has spent a large part of her life escaping: migrating to other shores, learning the language of others. For a long time she had become a denizen of Carmenandrafaellaland, and I was not allowed to enter. The three of them would gather in Sophie’s bedroom, and I would hover outside, listening to their voices making a most welcome and diverting chatter, longing to be asked to join them, until a bare foot casually pushed the door shut on me.

  When I arrived home after seeing Alex in the park, I went straight to Sophie’s room. Sophie had barely been out of the house since Anastasia was born. She and the baby virtually lived in the bed, which was a nest of tangled bedclothes, books, magazines, chocolate wrappers and fruit peel.

  I noted with annoyance that Sophie was in the act of reading my copy of Anaïs Nin. Anastasia lay next to her, quietly kicking her legs and sucking on her fist. Sophie looked up at me. ‘This woman is brilliant,’ she said, ‘Listen to this.’ She read out a rather convoluted passage.

  ‘I hadn’t got that far yet,’ I said grumpily, hoping she would take the hint; but Sophie is always deaf to hints.

  She picked herself up from the bed and said casually, ‘Can you watch the baby while I have a shower?’ She often still called Anastasia ‘the baby’ as if she didn’t yet have a name of her own.

  I took Sophie’s place on the bed while she pulled her chenille dressing-gown around her, found a towel, and went out. ‘Hello, my darling,’ I said to Anastasia. ‘When are you going to start talking to me?’ I liked calling her ‘my darling’. It had a formal and old-fashioned ring to it, befitting an aunt. Anastasia moved her lips together in a sucking motion and kicked a little more vigorously. Although she was a long way off talking (she tended to just cry, hiccup, sneeze or burp, and hadn’t even given a first smile yet), I always hoped that she might break into conversation at any moment.

  I blew a raspberry on her bare tummy and gave her a finger to hold. I had a wonderful feeling of heightened expectation, which I knew had something to do with the spring day, and a lot to do with having spent almost the entire afternoon with Alex. I am a naturally secretive person, so I hadn’t said a word about him to Sophie or Lil. I wanted to keep him to myself; I felt that telling someone would spoil the feeling that I couldn’t even explain to myself. But at the same time, I desperately wanted to tell someone. I leaned close to Anastasia and whispered, ‘I know a boy named Alex!’

  Opening Anaïs Nin’s Journals, I got in some reading while Sophie was gone, with Anastasia holding onto my finger all the while. When Sophie came in from the shower, wearing one of her limp frocks, I said impulsively, ‘Why don’t you go out for a walk? By yourself . . . I’ll take Anastasia.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sophie. ‘Thanks.’ She tidied her hair in front of the mirror, and blew on her glasses and cleaned them. While she was getting ready I put a couple of nappies into a bag and hung it off the handles of the pram, and took it down the steps. Sophie carried Anastasia in her arms. ‘She’s been fed –shouldn’t be hungry for ages,’ she said, as she settled her into the pram. Then she kissed her on the cheek, and set off in one direction, while I took Anastasia in the other. We turned and gave each other a final wave, and then I was out alone with my niece for the first time ever.

  I stopped for a moment to smile at Anastasia. ‘Where will we go, my darling, my dear? We could fly to the moon.’

  I was happy and light-headed. Anastasia kicked her legs, and looked at me eagerly. And then she gave me the merest hint of a smile.

  I smiled back at her. ‘Why, Hetty!’ I said. ‘You’ve decided to smile.’

  I don’t know why I said that. It sounded like someone from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. ‘Why, Hetty!’ How ridiculous. But that’s what I said, and from that moment on she became known as Hetty.

  It was a magical transformation. I had walked up the road with Anastasia in a pram and came back with Hetty. Or rather, I bore her back, triumphantly, the way one bears good tidings. It seemed to be a momentous thing, to have discovered her real name like that, so suddenly and serendipitously, and the pram seemed to be borne on air, as if pulled by angels.

  Oscar Wilde knew how important names were in the scheme of things. In his play The Importance of Being Earnest, the man who pretended his name was Earnest when he was in the city (though he was called Jack in the country) found out that his name really was Earnest. He had been left in a handbag (a large, capacious handbag) at Victoria Station when he was a baby, and so his entire identity had been muddled.

  A perfectly understandable mix-up, and one which we should be thankful hadn’t happened to us at least, Sophie had told me. And now Anastasia had become Hetty, without even a handbag being implicated. It must have been her true nature asserting itself.

  Sophie was already there when we got back. ‘Guess what?’ I told her. ‘I think her name is actually Hetty! And she smiled!’

  ‘She’s way too young to smile!’ said Sophie. ‘It must have been wind.’

  ‘She did smile! I saw it. Oh, I don’t care whether you believ
e me or not. I know what I know. And her name is Hetty, anyway.’ I picked Hetty up and danced around the kitchen with her cradled in my arms, moving to invisible joyful music, and smiling into her face.

  ‘You know, I think Hetty was the name I was looking for all along, when I called her Anastasia,’ said Sophie.

  ‘That poor child won’t know whether she’s coming or going!’ said Lil. But Hetty knew exactly where she was. She wasn’t coming or going. She was here.

  The Red Notebook

  Music: ‘World Where you live’, Crowded House

  So. I am reading this book by Sartre. Sar-tra. Sarte. (Say it soft and in a Frenchy kind of way. How does Alex do that with his mouth?)

  Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre:

  This book is in the form of a diary, written in 1932. It purports to be written by a man named Antoine Roquentin, an historian who is living in a small French town and researching the life of a man in the eighteenth century.

  He says that he lives entirely alone, never speaking to anybody (though this is an exaggeration –he does speak to all sorts of people). He lives a very odd life. It seems that he is alienated from himself. He looks on at life as an observer. He even looks on parts of his own body as if they were merely an object he was seeing. For instance, he feels something cold in his hand and notices that he is holding a doorknob. His thoughts remain misty and nebulous. He seems to think that human life is meaningless and futile. It’s a very philosophical book. For instance, a man he knows asks him about adventures, and defines an adventure as an event which is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary. ‘People talk of the magic of adventures,’ says the man, and asks him if that expression strikes him as accurate. The man asks if he has had adventures.

  The narrator lies, and tells the man that he has had a few adventures but says to himself that he doesn’t even know what the word means any more.