It would be on a day like this that our father would arrive. He’d just come to the top of the stairs and . . .
I couldn’t imagine what we’d say to each other. My imagination failed me. Hetty kicked her legs, bouncing Gregor around with her feet (he was a tall, athletic, rather Germanic bear, and looked as if he enjoyed it). Squinting into the sunlight, I thought about how enjoyable the warmth of the spring sun was, and how beautiful my perfect feet, before immersing myself in the book again. I read: ‘The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.’
When I looked up, I saw a cheerful Hi there! emblazoned on the front of a yellow T-shirt. I put down my book and stood up. ‘Hi there, Alex,’ I said, sardonically. Like me, he often wore clothes that he got for next to nothing at an op-shop. Why else would he wear a T-shirt with that on it?
‘Hi,’ he said, looking suddenly shy.
‘Well, hello!’
‘Greetings!’
‘Salutations, even. How did you find me?’ I never had got round to giving him my address.
‘I hope you don’t mind. I saw the name of this place in a newspaper ad. Samarkand Guest House, it said. There can’t be too many places named Samarkand in this town.’
‘You mean, you really didn’t believe that I teleported to northern Afghanistan each night.’
Hetty, as if fed up with this pointless banter, started to complain. I put her nappy back on and picked her up.
‘Is this Hetty,’ asked Alex, ‘who used to be known as Anastasia?’
‘Yes. Here, why don’t you hold her?’ As I handed her over, Hetty threw up, sending a spurt of curdled milk in a parabola down Alex’s shirt. I fetched a nappy and attempted to wipe it away, but a yoghurt-like blotch remained.
Sophie came back from her shower, thick hair dripping water. ‘Hetty just threw up on Alex,’ I told her, ‘and I can’t get it out.’
‘You’ll have to take off your shirt so it can be washed out,’ Sophie said to him. ‘It’ll dry in a minute in this weather.’
I was dispatched to the laundry to wash out the spot by hand. I bent my head to the task, a teenage Lady Macbeth (‘Out, damned spot!’), aware of Alex out on the verandah with Sophie, without his shirt on.
When I got back they had obviously introduced themselves and were deep in conversation, Sophie lying in the hammock with Hetty latched to her breast and Alex leaning against the railing talking and waving one arm about in the air. He had a smooth, hairless brown chest and neat nipples.
Feeling like a servant, I pegged his shirt onto the line. Alex and Sophie continued to rave on to each other, and when the shirt was dry I took it off the line and surreptitiously sniffed at the place where the sick had been. It still smelt slightly of regurgitated milk and, deliciously, ever so faintly of Alex.
I took him around to my room, where he stood and looked about before choosing a collapsing wicker chair in a corner.
‘I like your sister,’ he said. ‘You’re lucky. I always wanted a brother or a sister. ’
‘Yes, sisters can be good to have. Annoying, too, sometimes.’
‘There’s just one thing, Persephone. Do you mind if I call you Kate?’
‘Oh. Okay. Why?’
‘Because it’s your name,’ he said. ‘Though I like the idea of Persephone –didn’t she live half her life in the underworld and half on earth? When she’s here she brings the spring, doesn’t she?’
I said, ‘I’ll get us something to eat. Have you had lunch?’
I left him to look after Hetty and ran downstairs and constructed several thick roast lamb and tomato sandwiches. ‘What a lot of food,’ he said, when I came back with it.
Being taken by surprise had made me astonishingly hungry, but I tried to eat slowly. Alex chewed thoughtfully, and shook his head politely when I offered him the last sandwich on the plate.
‘So your mother died and you have no brothers and sisters. It must have been lonely for you.’
‘It was. Just me and my father. We used to see a lot of his parents, but he was an only child too, so there were no cousins or anything. I used to love coming up here to see my other grandparents! But then when my mother died, I only did a couple of trips by myself on the plane to see them before they died as well.
‘Until I decided to come back for a while, and revisit the old place.’
He wiped his fingers with a handkerchief which he took from a pocket of his trousers, stood up, and went to scrutinise the pictures I had papered all over my walls. They were a record of everything I had ever liked or taken a fancy to. There was a sheep standing at the top of a chute with an uncertain expression on its face, a line of galahs on an outback fence, a child from the Amazon strapped to its mother’s back, and hundreds of others.
‘How long have you been collecting these?’ he asked.
‘Years. Almost my whole life.’
‘Yes . . . I can see that.’ He knelt down on the floor and looked searchingly at examples of my early period –wonky-edged pictures of fluffy kittens and puppies cut from women’s magazines, along with a few well-chosen examples of chocolate cakes and icecream sundaes.
‘I used a stepladder for the later ones.’
‘Uh huh!’
When he lay down on the bed again, it seemed a perfectly natural movement. He was so close I could smell the sweet odour of his skin. He put his hand out to Hetty and she grasped his finger. He wore a bracelet around one wrist, a perfectly plain gold band.
‘So –do your parents run this place?’
‘No. Lil does.’
‘Would that be the old lady I met on my way up the stairs, who told me where you’d be? She seemed to know who I meant when I asked for Persephone.’
‘Yes, that was Lil. We don’t have parents.’
Alex looked up at me.
‘They’re –not here. We just live here with Lil. She’s not related to us or anything.’ It sounded so feeble that I wanted to add, childishly, that Sophie and I were just there for a little while. Just till our father got himself sorted out and came back for us. The story that I’d been telling myself my whole life.
Hetty started to wail. She often started up like that, without any whimpering preamble. Hunger for her was not a gradual thing, but a sudden and urgent necessity. I picked her up, and Alex stood up to go, and the moment when I might have told him things had passed.
The Red Notebook
Music: Crowded House, ‘Weather With You’
Spring has hardly begun, but suddenly it’s like summer. It’s so hot, the sky cloudless, the grass crackling under our feet, bindis spiking our toes. We all sleep fitfully, sheets flung back, our dreams interrupted by mosquitoes. Mozzie nets are brought out, aired on the verandah in the warm, gusty winds, and strung up above beds. We run cool water over our wrists from the tap, douse our heads, and stand in front of the fan. Windows and doors are left wide open, always. Our house is like a tent in the desert. The night is furred and dark.
The Yellow Notebook
The girl with the yellow hair goes again to the cafe, hoping to meet the boy she met there before.
But he isn’t there.
Disappointment is like ashes in her throat.
The Wild Typewritten Pages 16
After that, Alex visited Samarkand often, and it appeared that he was coming round to visit Sophie as much as me. He and Sophie played Monopoly on the verandah while I bent over my books, and their voices floated across to me and made me irritable and anxious that I was missing out on something. Alex turned out to be a Monopoly hog. He bought up whole rows of houses, rented them out for a fortune, accumulated money like a miser. ‘I’m not playing that game with you any longer,’ Sophie declared, scooping up the board and tumbling everything into the box with a flick of her hair.
So they played noughts and crosses in a shaded corner of the verandah instead, and cards (Snap, mostly, their hands shooting out like blades), while Hetty lay naked on a bunny
rug. I listened to Sophie’s shrieks of laughter. She hadn’t laughed like that in a long time. She became pink with pleasure. She ran barefoot to the kitchen for lemon drinks, and spilt them off the tray on the way back.
Sophie cut Alex’s hair, sitting him on a chair on the verandah, a towel round his neck, a bowl of water and a comb on the verandah rail. She snipped carefully at his dark hair, brushing loose strands away from the nape of his neck with her fingers. I prowled past with a book in my hand, feeling like an outsider. Alex’s neck was so smooth, I wanted to reach out and caress it.
One day, after I’d done enough study for the time being, I went down to the park. Sophie and Alex were each sitting on a swing, chatting, drifting idly to and fro with Hetty on Alex’s lap. They looked up at me when I arrived as if they’d forgotten who I was.
The exams were only weeks away, then days. Friends from school rang in a panic –they had not, they swore, done nearly enough work. This was obviously an exaggeration, but I told them not to stress. I was laid-back Kate who always pretended I did absolutely no work at all.
Only Marjorie appeared unworried, but her calmness hid a deep panic. She always made cakes when she needed to unwind, and now she began a baking frenzy. She stood in her kitchen with a spotless apron over her dress, sifting soft white flour from a great height into a bowl. She creamed butter and sugar, beat eggs and added them one at a time, spooned batter gently into greased cake tins, and dropped spoonfuls of mixture onto trays, in a ceaseless, tireless rhythm. She made plain sponges, chocolate sponges, butter cakes, butterfly cakes, tea cakes, fruit cakes, ginger cakes, cup cakes, Anzac biscuits, shortbread, melting moments, florentines and scones –many of these on the same day.
‘How about making an orange poppyseed cake, or blueberry muffins?’ I asked her, but she looked blank. If it wasn’t in The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook, 1970 edition, it wasn’t part of her universe.
‘How’s your Russian prince?’ she asked.
‘He’s okay.’ I had still not introduced Marjorie and Alex to each other, or told her that he wasn’t a Russian prince, just a boy with an interest in politics who lived in an old garage and stacked supermarket shelves at night.
‘Bring him round for tea.’
So I did. I felt rather nervous about suddenly placing together two important people in my life, in case some previously unknown chemical reaction might take place. As Alex sat down at the table I watched out for fizzings, foamings or explosions, but there were none. They watched each other shyly, and said very little. But there wasn’t much need for talk anyway, there was too much food to be admired and eaten. Teaspoons tinkled against bone china; Marjorie got up to refill the teapot.
Alex ate sparingly and, despite my best efforts, there was still plenty left over. Marjorie urged us to take the rest with us. I took some home to Sophie, and Alex dropped the rest in to the people at Hope Springs.
The next time I invited Alex to tea at Marjorie’s, he declined.
‘Why? Don’t you like Marjorie?’
‘No. That’s not it,’ he said, and looked uncomfortable. ‘Marjorie is fine –she’s lovely.’
Then he said, ‘It’s because there’s too much. Too much food. Too many urgings to eat. I hate that. It reminds me of my grandparents.’
But I saw Alex and Marjorie together in the park one day. They were sitting cross-legged, face to face, ripping leaves apart as they talked, their fingers working avidly. Marjorie’s bicycle lay sprawled beside her on the grass, and she still wore her helmet, crammed on top of the straw hat she always wore when she went out. The day was stinking hot, and her cotton dress was limp; even Marjorie couldn’t always look immaculate in this heat. But she was so absorbed in her conversation with Alex that there was a kind of luminosity about her. Neither of them noticed me at all, and I walked on, feeling lost.
Alex came to the cafe one Saturday afternoon, where he sat for hours with a strong black coffee, poring over the newspapers with his forehead creased and his fingers playing around his mouth and chin. People kept coming up to him –the thin boy who sold the socialist newspapers, a bouncy girl in overalls with dark curls and the face of an Italian madonna, an older man with grey hair in Volley sandshoes with the backs cut out of them. Alex greeted them with a delighted smile and gestured for them to sit down. At one stage there were six people at Alex’s table, all talking at once, scribbling things on bits of paper and arguing and laughing. Then they drifted off one by one and it was just Alex again.
‘Can I get you something, Alex?’ called Hannah, heading past with a tray full of drinks.
‘Oh yes, thanks,’ he said, ‘Another coffee?’
‘Do you know him?’ I asked her. It was the first time I’d seen him in the Dancing Goanna.
‘Alex? Oh yeah, he comes in all the time. Everyone knows Alex.’
So when I had thought that Alex was mine alone –my secret –it turned out that he belonged to everybody. It deflated me.
When Hannah delivered his coffee (with a complimentary biscuit on the side, I noticed!), she stood talking with him for ages, and I thought she looked particularly lovely that day, all rounded breasts and curvy hips and glossy hair. And Alex drank her in (He did! It was plain for anyone to see), and his eyes were all sparkly and his mouth particularly pleased.
How did Hannah do that? Look (and surely feel) so in possession of her own body? How did she inhabit her clothes so that they enhanced her, whatever they happened to be?
Alex left the cafe just before we closed up, waving to both Hannah and me equally. I went home and took the red dress that Hannah had given me, the dress that I could have had adventures in and which I’d hung on the back of my door like a graceful, supple version of myself, and crumpled it into the bottom of my cupboard.
The Red Notebook
Midnight.
Oh Alex. Where are you? Are you packing supermarket shelves with Omo and instant noodles? Are you sitting at your typewriter are you thinking of your mother are you are you?
The Red Notebook
I am sitting in my fig tree and it’s the middle of the day and searingly hot. It is also far from secluded –people from offices downtown drive here to sit in their cars or on the bank of the river to eat their lunches, so there are people all around –but in this tree I have always felt invisible, because it is my own world.
Music: ‘Hey Joe’ by Jimi Hendrix, blaring from a car stereo. I will write this quickly and leave.
Dear Red Notebook, I want no one to ever read you.
Because I want to tell you things I would tell no one else.
I always thought that my mother would turn up one day. But now I have to admit to myself that she won’t. Well, probably won’t, because you can never say never ever, can you?
I keep thinking about how a woman could ever leave her children. I think of her in that red dress, running off for adventures and God knows what. Running away from us, because whatever she wanted to do, we were obviously stopping her from doing it.
I look at Hetty and I love her more than anything in the world. Even though she is so tiny and helpless, she is very strong. I get the feeling that soon nothing will stop her. Her life is all about movement and doing and being!
I don’t know how I could ever leave her, and I’m not even her mother.
How can I ever leave her?
I’m getting cold feet about going away, and I haven’t even told Lil or Sophie yet about my university choices. That I have chosen (chosen!) to go somewhere away from here, away from them. (Whether I get accepted or not is another matter. But I will. Won’t I? And if I do, will I have the necessary $$$ to go?)
Now I am talking to myself, Red, instead of to you. But you are me, aren’t you? That is the point of you. Talking to you is like talking to myself.
The Red Notebook
Here I am already, scribbling again. No music. Hetty sleeping.
Tonight: dinner.
It is so hot, but Lil insisted on cooking roast lamb. I could
n’t eat it. Tomorrow is my first and most important exam, English. Lamb and roast potatoes is impossible. Such a meal would clog up my brain cells. Fish! I needed fish!
So I ripped open a can of sardines and ate them from the tin, standing at the sink. I crunched into the little bones like a cat, chewing and chewing. The sardines made me feel ill –they were oily and warm and nasty –but I had to eat them anyway as Lil was sitting there with an air of wounded pride, working her way through the meal she had spent so long cooking.
I hate myself sometimes for my cruelty and tactlessness. Anyway, now what’s done is done.
Sophie (a vegetarian when she wants to be) pushed a couple of roast potatoes round her plate and then said she wanted to go out.
So now I am here looking after Hetty, and Lil is annoyed with Sophie and me for various reasons (me for eating the sardines and Sophie for going out). And I can only say that Tolstoy was right when he said at the beginning of Anna Karenina that each family is unhappy in its own way.
The Wild Typewritten Pages 17
I lay on the bed with Hetty and watched as Sophie got ready to go out.
She had borrowed a dress from Carmen, made of stretchy material in shades of purple that drifted across the fabric like high clouds. It was a body-hugging dress that you had to wriggle round on your hips till it sat right. The neckline could either modestly conceal the tops of your breasts or, if you pulled it down a bit, reveal them alluringly. Sophie tried it both ways and decided on the concealed look (to be mysterious is more flirtatious). It had a hemline that made it look like a short dress from the back, and a long dress from the front. Sophie surveyed it from all angles in the mirror, screwing up her eyes and getting a sour expression to her mouth.
Then she took it off and put on one of her own limp dishrag dresses.
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 11
