Secret Scribbled Notebooks

by Joanne Horniman

  There was very little talk at our table that night. Far from not wanting to eat meat, Sophie distinguished herself by eating chook and only chook –she wanted no potatoes, peas or pumpkin. She pulled the flesh apart slowly, and ate with her fingers while Hetty stayed clamped to her breast. She looked up from The Journals of Anaïs Nin only to tear another piece from the carcass on the platter in front of her. Lil consumed the parson’s nose with an air of affronted dignity, deliberately not looking at either of us. Lil considered the parson’s nose a delicacy, though it was just pure fat and technically the chook’s bum, but she didn’t appear to be particularly enjoying it that night. It was a mournful meal, and I thought that Virginia Woolf should have added that one could not dine well unless there was good talk as well.

  At least there was always Hetty. After the washing-up was done, I ran to see her, and lay on Sophie’s bed watching her sleep. She was the sort of baby you could watch sleep. Her face had an ever-changing array of expressions and every one of them was adorable. She changed her appearance with regularity as well, as though trying out all her options. At that time it seemed that she was going for the bald look. She must have determined to lose her amazing crop of dark hair, and all her body hair as well. She had done it by stealth, for it seemed to have happened gradually. Without our knowing it, she metamorphosed into a bald baby. We woke up one day and said, ‘Hello, where’s all Hetty’s hair gone?’

  I said impulsively, to Sophie, ‘Why don’t you go out? You never do. I could look after Hetty.’

  Sophie looked up with a puzzled expression. ‘Where would I want to go?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you know –all the places you used to go. Round to Carmen or Rafaella’s. Or to the pub to hear some music. Just for a walk, if you wanted to. If you like I could have her in my room all night, and you could just get a whole night’s sleep for once.’

  ‘What about when she gets hungry?’

  ‘Express some milk.’

  ‘Takes too long.’

  ‘Well, just go out for a little while then. When she wakes up I’ll bring her round for a feed.’

  I watched Sophie get ready. This involved very little, even for her. She cleaned her glasses and stuck them back onto her face, and she brushed her hair and straightened up her dress in front of the mirror. ‘I look dowdy, don’t I?’ she said, sadly.

  ‘You could put a clean dress on.’

  ‘You’re saying this one’s dirty.’

  ‘No! It’s just looking a bit . . . slept-in.’

  Sophie unbuttoned her dress, let it fall to her feet and kicked it away. She picked up another from the floor, sniffed it, and put it on, smoothing out the creases over her hips. ‘Anyway,’ she said steadily, looking at herself in the mirror, ‘What would I want to dress up for ?’

  When she’d gone, I took the sleeping Hetty around to my room. Now that I didn’t have to get up for school I had allowed my night-owl tendencies to take over. These days, I stayed up almost all night studying, and got up late, even napping sometimes in the afternoons. I liked it at night when everyone was asleep, and the light shone out hopefully in my little room at the back of the house like a remote outpost in a jungle.

  That night, while Hetty slept, I sat at my desk where the lamp made a circle of light in the dark room. I felt already stale with all the things I was meant to be studying. I had read every one of the books for English too many times already, so I did a few Maths problems. Then I picked up the book I’d begun reading that night in the kitchen and started on it again.

  Hetty made a lot of noise while she slept. She was like a snorting little animal; once, she opened her eyes and murmured. I leaned over her and listened, thinking that she might say something intelligible, but it was just sounds.

  After midnight I went to the kitchen to make a cup of hot chocolate, and on the way back I passed the TV room, where there was just the flickering light of the television in the darkened room. Lil was there alone, sitting in an armchair, a giant-sized block of chocolate on her lap, her face illuminated by the light from the television. She was watching an old black-and-white movie, and she was in tears. Crying over a movie wasn’t unusual for her, but I couldn’t help feeling that she was crying over something else.

  Lil’s eyes made a slight movement in my direction when I appeared at the doorway, but she kept her face firmly in the direction of the television. It was as if she couldn’t look at me, and I hurried away, back to the solace of my room and Hetty. I knew that I’d upset her with my thoughtless threat of leaving, but I didn’t know how to apologise –didn’t know if I wanted to apologise –at that moment.

  Hetty breathed as peacefully as a drowsing cat, her mouth a fat cupid’s bow. Her eyes fluttered open, then she was asleep again. I watched her; she was so new and unworn, her feet so soft and untrod upon the ground.

  I tried to forget about Lil, and read with one hand on Hetty’s cradle. Virginia Woolf urged young women to drink wine and have a room of their own. ‘So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.’

  I thought of Alex, who said he couldn’t even make a start. He couldn’t make his words matter to himself, even for a little while.

  I scribbled in my Red Notebook, writing about my guilt when I’d seen Lil in tears. I wrote out some quotations from Virginia Woolf. Then I went onto the verandah and sat on the sofa and looked out into the trees. The smell of their dank vegetation was in the night air. There were secretive rustlings along the branches which Sophie and I always said were possums, while Lil always swore they were rats. Sophie always retorted that she had absolutely no romantic imagination; Lil always said that we had too much.

  Some people walked along the back lane; a child said plaintively, ‘Mu-um . . .’ A dog howled somewhere. I heard Sophie come home; she didn’t come round to my room to check on Hetty so I assumed she had gone to bed. I imagined that Lil had, as well. The house was silent, and I sat there for a long while.

  Hetty began to cry, so I changed her nappy and lifted her from her cradle with soft words of love to soothe her, then wrapped her in a blanket and took her around the verandah to Sophie’s room. I switched on Sophie’s reading light and shook her awake, helped Hetty find a breast, and watched her feed. She was such a greedy baby! She drank until she was full, gave a drunken smile, and closed her eyes. I lifted her up and took her back to my room and put her to bed.

  I dreamed I was in the middle of an exam, and Virginia Woolf was urging me to write! To write whatever I wanted to. But somewhere there was a baby crying, and I apologised to Virginia Woolf and went to comfort it.

  I was woken by Hetty screaming. It was eight in the morning, and she was wet and starving hungry again.

  The Red Notebook

  Spring. Flowers bursting out everywhere.

  A List:

  Lil –an enormous red, overblown rose, petals dropping onto the table.

  Sophie –a very new rose, hardly unfolded, but with lots of potential to go the way that Lil has.

  Hetty –something very small and neat and perfect –a chamomile flower.

  Marjorie –a pansy, all velvety and beautiful. me –????

  The Wild Typewritten Pages 14

  It was spring. I had that to be thankful for, even if the exams were looming ever closer. I had no time to visit Alex, and spent as long with my books as I could stand, glad on Saturdays when I could go to work at the cafe and escape it all.

  I worked with a girl called Hannah, with breasts that peeped over the top of her blouse. I tried not to look, but often found myself stealing glimpses of them. Hannah and I worked very companionably, and never got in each other’s way. As the morning wore on towards lunchtime and the cafe became even busier, it became a kind of dance behind the crowded counter, with our hips and arms always miraculously gliding past each other. By the time the cafe emptied out again, I was moist with sweat.

  Hannah brought me a freshly squeeze
d juice, all frothy on the top, which I sipped in the back yard with the scent of jasmine from the side fence making me almost faint with delight. I wondered why on earth I wanted to go to university when it was so enjoyable simply working in a cafe.

  Hannah was a little older than me, and had left school in Year 10. She seemed such a blithe, uncomplicated girl. If she was a flower she would be a gardenia, full and white and sweet-scented.

  (Because of Oscar Wilde, I sometimes wondered what kind of flower certain people would be. I had seen a photo of Virginia Woolf taken a hundred years ago when she was my age, and she was simply beautiful, a violet, with a graceful bowed neck and a delicate face. If Alex was a flower, what would he be? Something that dwelt in the shaded, damp, secretive part of the garden. Something darkly purplish.)

  Hannah and I closed up the shop and mopped out the kitchen, and then this gardenia of a girl asked me if I wanted to come round to her place.

  She lived just a block away from the cafe in a share house, a lopsided timber place with rattly front steps and a back yard which contained nothing but a clothesline and a frangipani tree with creamy flowers. Hannah made jasmine tea, which we sipped on the back steps. She had a black cat named Blanche that wove between our legs as we talked. One of her flatmates, a girl named Clive, had the thinnest legs I had ever seen, and was doing a load of washing in an old machine that sat under the house. She pegged the clothes out on the rusty Hill’s Hoist, and I was utterly happy at that moment, sitting on the back step watching the bright clothes go up onto the line with the blue sky above.

  I liked Hannah because she was calm and unassuming. I liked her speed and efficiency with a mop, her encompassing smile, and the little mole at the side of her face, so darkly beautiful on her white skin. She was a different style of girl from Marjorie, who could be nervy and preoccupied. With Hannah, I could be a different person. With Hannah, I was Kate the weary waitress, rather than Kate the ambitious student. Life was not more complicated than the next vegetarian focaccia and soya-milk latte.

  And yet I found out that Hannah was not content with her life. ‘I swore when I left school that I would never work as a waitress and I would never work weekends, and here I am doing both,’ she said, tipping her remaining tea out over the edge of the steps.

  ‘What would you like to do?’

  ‘Design dresses. I’d like to do a TAFE fashion course or something. Move to Sydney –the best course is down there. Come on, I’ll show you what I do.’

  We went to her room. Hannah had more clothes than anyone could possibly know what to do with. They hung from the picture rail, overlapping each other, all around the room, and on a makeshift rack in the corner. They were mostly old clothes from op shops, many of which she’d remodelled, sometimes pulling them apart completely and re-using the fabric. She’d made an old chenille dressing-gown into a mini-skirt, and a kimono into several blouses.

  ‘Try something on,’ she urged, ‘and if you like it, I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘I’m not really . . . a clothes sort of person,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh, come on. My clothes would look so good on you. You’ve got a great body. Now, let me see . . .’ She went through the rack and pulled one out. She threw it at me, and I caught it. ‘Try that.’

  It was a red dress made of some sort of stretchy fabric, with long sleeves and a low, scooped neck. Shyly, I changed into it, turning round to look at myself in the mirror. I liked what I saw. It came to just above my knees and hugged my body.

  ‘It fits so well I must have made it for you,’ said Hannah. ‘You’ve got to keep it.’

  ‘Oh, no . . .’ I looked at myself in the mirror with alarm. ‘I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘Look that sexy?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘You could have adventures in that dress,’ said Hannah, chuckling.

  ‘Adventures?’

  ‘Yep. Definitely.’

  ‘What sort of adventures, exactly? Or even approximately.’

  ‘Any kind you like. Wear it home today. Oh go on, Kate. It’s no big deal. The fabric cost me next to nothing.’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’

  I kept the red dress on, and put my old clothes into a plastic bag. On the table beside the bed I noticed a framed photograph of a young man. ‘Your boyfriend?’ I asked.

  Hannah laid the picture face down on the table. ‘Used to be,’ she said, and turned her face away. ‘I can’t get rid of it. I still love him.’

  I wondered how I could have ever imagined Hannah to be uncomplicated. How I could have read as many books as I had and still imagined that there was one single completely blithe person upon this earth. There were people everywhere who had an appearance of absolute normality, but who carried a weight of hurt and sorrow inside them. You could never assume anything about people.

  In Hannah’s red dress, I found myself not walking directly home afterwards, but making my way to Alex’s place. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I just went, but at the same time, I knew where I was going.

  Alex wasn’t there, but that didn’t matter. He might have been absent, but the place was full of him. It was full of him in its sparse, neat, orderly way. His bed with the blanket tucked tightly over it. His two cups and a teaspoon with a Chinese man on the handle that he’d found one day in the street. His washing-up bowl turned upside down with a sponge beside it.

  The typewriter sat silently on the table. Next to it was the pile of newspapers that he seemed to collect and never throw out. FREE THE REFUGEES said the newspaper on the top of the pile, the one he’d bought from the boy in the street that day. I wished in a vague way that I could share his intense interest in news and politics, but in my heart I was happy in the world of books written by people a long time ago.

  I sat down in the middle of the floor. The place was still, and silent. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t actually waiting for Alex; I was simply being in the place where he’d been. I’d have been mortified if he’d arrived and found me there, dressed in the red dress that you could have adventures in.

  There was a new object in Alex’s space, a small battered suitcase with a yellow plaid design, sitting on the end of the bench. I stood up, and feeling like an intruder for the first time, went across and clicked the rusty locks open. They sprang back with a force that surprised me. The suitcase was empty.

  Inside the lid was a sticker saying that it had been made by the Globite company. The name PJ O’TOOLE was written in block letters under that, now faded and worn. On the front, just under the handle, the same hand had written the words WINTER STUFF.

  When I got back home, I went straight to Sophie’s room, pushing my way through the flimsy curtains that drifted across her doorway to the verandah. Sophie was lying on one elbow, with Hetty beside her. She turned to face me as I came in. She’d been crying.

  Sophie hardly ever cried. I thought at first that she must have been reading Anna Karenina again. The part where Anna walks under the train and kills herself always devastated Sophie.

  She wiped her face and said savagely, ‘Well? What do you want?’

  I stood awkwardly, marooned in the middle of the floor. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked with dismay. I could see that something more than Anna Karenina was upsetting her.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Hetty turned her head to the sound of her mother’s voice.

  I dropped to my knees onto the bed and said, ‘It must be something.’ Sophie made no reply, and did not look at me.

  ‘Don’t be sad,’ I said. ‘Look at Hetty. She’s beautiful. How can you be sad when you have her?’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ said Sophie. Her voice was muffled.

  I knelt there, not understanding.

  ‘Hetty’s not enough for me. I want Marcus, you idiot.’

  The Red Notebook

  I am sitting on a chair with my legs on the verandah rail. Sophie is swinging Hetty in the hammock. Hetty is stark naked, and Sophie is in an old bikini that barely covers h
er breasts, and shows her stomach, patterned with silvery stretch marks. The marks remind me of a shoal of small fish, the kind that turn with one accord in a flash of silver.

  Sophie kisses Hetty tenderly on each cheek. Then she turns her over and lowers her gently onto her belly, so that they are lying front to front. She strokes Hetty’s back, and the two of them close their eyes, basking in the sun like seals.

  How vulnerable people are. How tiny and helpless a baby is. Hetty’s head is as bald as an egg, and as strong, and tender and fragile too. Her limbs are still so unco-ordinated, her neck a wavery stalk.

  I think about what Sophie told me yesterday about Marcus. There is a lot about her relationship with him I don’t know. Did she get pregnant on purpose because she knew he would leave soon and she wanted to keep a part of him? Or was she just careless? Did she want sex because that is the closest you can get to someone, and she needs that?

  I remember that when we first came here, we craved for Lil to touch us. I remember always holding her hand, and hugging her. I wouldn’t let her go. People like us –like me and Sophie –need to be very careful of people. Because we are in danger of doing anything for them, anything for affection.

  Now Sophie has gone, and the hammock is hanging empty. It still sways from her being there. It is like having an invisible sister rocking back and forth in front of me.

  The Wild Typewritten Pages 15

  On this particular day I had swept the verandahs and hung out my sheets to flap in the breeze. Hetty lay in her basket beside me with her nappy off, with two of my old teddybears, Eugene and Gregor, tucked in with her. I sat with my feet up on the railing and read Virginia Woolf.