That evening, I stood on the verandah in the dark and watched water spilling over from the overflowing gutters; it was almost like standing behind a waterfall. Sophie had only just now managed to get Hetty to sleep –it hadn’t stormed for so long that thunder, lightning and torrential rain must have been a new and startling experience for her. I thought of all the new and startling experiences Hetty had in store for her. Long stretches of life seemed routine and predictable, and then there were the startling bits.
When the storm finished, I went across the road to my fig tree without telling anyone where I was going. I embraced its damp trunk and then hoisted myself up into the dark branches with my notebook between my teeth.
The Red Notebook
Writing in the dark again. It makes me feel free, not being able to see what I’m writing. And, as usual, I am invisible in this tree. My magic cloak.
The truth is today I wanted Alex to kiss me or put his arms around me or something, yet I didn’t want him to, as well. I don’t want to get involved with someone in the middle of my exams and when I’m planning to go away. If anything happens, I want it to last.
I think about Anaïs Nin relishing her life so much, all the pain and joy. She embraced everything. The world was a continual surprise and delight to her. She considered her life’s work to be her life itself, and the recording of it in her journals. Hardly anyone understood her novels, because they were about what goes on inside people’s heads. But why should novels be about the big, important things –war and politics and so forth? Why not about the psychology of people, and the way they see the world?
She lived till she was seventy-four –about the same age as Lil is now. The only picture I have of her is the one on the cover, where she is exquisitely young and beautiful. What sort of old woman was she? I bet she kept living her life to the full, and wearing beautiful clothes and putting on make-up, and having lovers, and thinking and writing and feeling and loving her life. Feeling the sun on her skin.
I long to be as brave as she was. When you think of it, living your life is what you were put on earth to do. And to do it well.
My options are: stay here, sitting in my tree, being invisible when it suits me, or put on that red dress that Hannah gave me and grow into it.
The Yellow Notebook
Finally, after going to the cafe again and again (she ate an incredible number of plates of seafood spaghetti, though not all at once), the girl with the blonde hair (Katerina) saw the beautiful young man again. Alexander.
He was sitting at a table in the corner, and the candlelight made his skin seem golden. His face was all in shadow; she couldn’t tell whether he was looking in her direction or not.
But he did see her, because he stood up, and smiled, and came to her table. They talked for hours, about poetry this time, and more than anything she wanted to be bold enough to ask him to come home with her.
The Wild Typewritten Pages 20
After that, I often found myself, in between exams, at the door of Alex’s garage. I didn’t ever mean to visit. Each time I turned up I thought, So. Here I am again.
We cooked meals together, on the two gas rings of the little camping stove in his room. Pasta or noodles and stirfry. Pancakes, once, which I burnt and then fed to a scavenging magpie in the garden. We ate outside Alex’s back door in the twilight, sitting at a wobbly outdoor table near the water tank. Vivienne, the old woman who owned the house at the front, sometimes waved to us, or brought us biscuits and lemonade.
I learned about Alex’s family. He was the only child of another only child of Polish refugees after the Second World War. His grandparents had had other children, from their first marriages, but everyone in each of their families had died in the war, except for a few distant relatives who were still in Poland. They met on the boat coming out, and Alex’s father –their son –represented their hope for a new life.
Perhaps that was the reason for Alex’s lean intensity. There was so much ancestry distilled in him, such a concentration of history and hope, it seemed too much for one person to bear.
The stories from his childhood enchanted me.
I imagined him when he was young, a solitary little boy playing under the table while the grown-ups talked, aware of the tinkle of teaspoons above his head. ‘My grandparents were happiest when their friends from Poland visited. The food –you can’t imagine the food. And the cakes . . . They often spoke in the language they had grown up with –I think they got carried away and forgot which language they were using. There was a lot of laughter. And sometimes a silence came over the room, and there were sighs, and a few tears. They never spoke about what had happened to them during the war except among themselves. Sometimes they hinted at things. “With nothing we survived,” they said. And their other mantra: “Australia has been good to us.”’
Alex was infused with his grandparents’ melancholy. At those times I just liked him so much, with his whiff of the exotic, his threads of connection to somewhere else.
Once, Alex said something for which I could find no reply. ‘My grandfather told me very little about the war. It was too much, you see. Too much pain in remembering. He did tell me once how they were rounded up into ghettos. Kept from their work, crowded into inadequate buildings, many families together, awful conditions.’
He looked at me.
‘And then lorries came in the night and took them away.’
There was the other side to him, the boy who used to come to Lismore to see his mother’s parents. They fed him on roast lamb and scones, and took him to the municipal pool to swim, and helped him build a billycart to swoop down the street in.
I don’t know whose idea it was to reorganise the shelves at Hope Springs, instituting a new category called Men’s Literature and renaming the shelf previously reserved for women’s books as just Literature. It was one of those ideas that simply happened, born out of our elation and shared silliness.
Men’s Literature turned out to be an enormous section. Whichever way you looked at it, men had certainly had a good go at writing novels over the years.
I found a wonderful copy of Great Expectations, with an old embossed cover and thick paper that was spotted with brown marks. Peggy to Betty, April 22, 1898, was the inscription inside. Because of its antiquity, it had a premium price on it –a whole $10. I had a perfectly good copy of my own, so I didn’t need it, but before I shelved it under D in Men’s Literature, I scribbled a note and put it inside the cover:
Dear Reader,
I think this book is wonderful. If you haven’t read it yet, please buy this copy. You must admit it’s lovely-looking, and very old and all that, but most importantly, it has some beautiful writing in it.
Hope you enjoy it!
Another Reader
A man was leaning against the shelves nearby, reading a book called Women in Love. More Men’s Literature. He had a day’s growth of orange stubble on his face, and wore a navy singlet. The shop was very hot; the only ventilation was from a large gap at the front where a roller door was raised during the day. It was too hot to be reading literature of any sort. Anyway, what would a man know about women and love? Quite a lot, evidently. They seemed always to be writing about it.
‘What do you know about love?’ I asked Alex, after the man had left without buying the book and having replaced it in the wrong section entirely. I retrieved it and took it back to where it belonged, among the men.
‘Not a lot, really,’ said Alex, echoing my flippant tone. ‘You?’
‘Only what I’ve read in books.’
‘Oh Kate. That’s sad. That’s really sad.’ His remark was halfway between seriousness and banter.
We sat on the sill of the roller-door gap, trying to pick up any whisper of breeze that might make its way down the alleyway. No one else came in. It was too hot to be hanging round in stuffy bookshops.
A parrot screeched from the yard of the petshop that backed onto the laneway.
‘I hate that,’ said Alex
. ‘Birds in cages. I keep wanting to liberate it.’
‘You must have a love story,’ I said to him. ‘You’re so old and you’ve been to university and everything.’
‘I’m not that old.’
‘As old as Sophie. She has a love story.’
‘Marcus?’
‘She told you?’
‘Of course.’
‘If you tell me your love story, I’ll tell you mine,’ I said.
Alex looked at me with surmise. ‘All right.’
He pushed his hair out of his eyes and stretched out his legs. Alex was so angular when he sat; his elbows and knees were like a geometry lesson.
‘You know how I told you that when I was nine, my mother died? I had no brothers or sisters –it was just me and my father. He worked an awful lot; he’s an industrial chemist. And in most of the school holidays he had no time off. Anyway, when I was ten I decided I didn’t want to go and spend the days with my grandparents –his parents –during the holidays as I had the year before. They were overprotective and clingy. They fed me too much.
‘My father said I could stay home as long as I went to the holiday care centre that was running in our suburb. So I went to that every day –it wasn’t far to walk. It was held at the local oval, and we mostly played sports and games, which I didn’t much like. In wet weather we played board games under the grandstand. There was this beautiful girl running it. Her name was Maria. I think she was a uni student on a holiday job. She seemed pretty inexperienced with kids, and got flustered easily, but she was nice.
‘I was in love with her. People think kids of that age don’t fall in love, but they do. I adored her. I’d get up every day with anticipation. I was longing to see her again. I loved the way she smiled at me, and her laugh, and the sexy dresses she wore –you could see her cleavage when she leaned over. I wasn’t the only boy who looked.
‘I used to follow her around, help her carry stuff. I think she was finding the job quite difficult. There were a lot of kids, and it was frantic and noisy.
‘One day I got there extra early, and I was the first one there when she arrived. I ran across the oval towards her, calling out hello. I ran up to her and took her hand. And there was this –this split second where she recoiled from me. I felt a kind of distaste and fear coming from her. It was just an instant, just a feeling.
‘I stayed at home for the few remaining days of the holidays. I pretended to my father that I’d gone out, but I came back to the house and spent my days watching TV and reading comics.’
Alex looked across at me.
‘I learned then that you can be too needy. You can overwhelm people.
‘There’ve been other girls, of course, at high school and university. But when you asked me about love, it was Maria I thought of. Funny, isn’t it?’
The parrot screeched again. ‘Now it’s your turn,’ he said.
‘Another day,’ I said, hopping down from the sill and going inside to where the work of shelving the rest of the Men’s Literature awaited me.
One day we lay on my bed, one at each end, while I went over my notes for the next exam. My hand sneaked out often to Anaïs Nin, or Virginia Woolf: I stole snatches of their writing to entertain myself.
Alex reclined with the newspaper –a Sydney broadsheet. It flapped like a giant bird as he turned the pages. Alex was also bird-like –an intelligent crane, perhaps, his head on one side, thoughtful, absorbed. He looked as though he ought to be sitting in a cafe. (In fact, he often did sit in a cafe: the Dancing Goanna. When I turned up to work on Saturdays I could have sworn that some of the molecules of his breath still drifted through the rooms.)
I ran down to the kitchen and constructed towers of biscuits and cheese, bringing the plate back to my room and placing it in the middle of the bed where we could both reach it. I crammed each morsel of food into my mouth with frank hunger, demolishing most of the plateful by myself before Alex could so much as reach a languid hand out from behind his newspaper.
We never touched, but I could feel how the depression Alex made on my bed made me tilt slightly towards its centre. I looked at him as he ate. He stopped reading while he was chewing and gazed thoughtfully out of the window. Late afternoon sunlight streamed in, revealing the flaking paint on the walls. Then Alex looked over at me and smiled. He simply smiled, and then returned to his newspaper. I went back to my books.
And always, between reading, we talked. I told him about growing up in this house with Lil and Sophie. If I told him nothing about my parents, and my life before Samarkand, it was because I didn’t remember. It was as if I was reborn here, in this house.
I felt that I had at last found someone I could be myself with. I didn’t feel that I was a girl when I was with Alex, or that he was a boy. I felt that neither of us belonged anywhere except with each other. He was on my side.
Despite this, there was one thing that I concealed from Alex. I didn’t tell him of the night I played with my father in the swimming pool of the motel, or my hope that my father would come back one day and claim me.
The Yellow Notebook:
She sees him at the cafe, often. He smiles at her from behind his newspaper, and then takes his coffee and strolls over to where she is sitting. The scrape of his chair makes the floorboards shudder as he sits down. His hand brushes her sleeve as he reaches across the table for the sugar. He is so beautiful, and he has become so familiar to her that sometimes she thinks she has stopped breathing. They talk, of trivial things sometimes, and sometimes of books. But all the while, underneath the talk, there is another current running. It is as though they know each other’s essence.
One night she says, casually, ‘Come back to my place.’ He accepts, and they pull on their coats and scarves, and walk together through the frosty streets, never touching.
In her room, he wanders around and looks at everything while she puts a match to the kindling in her fireplace and pours some absinth into two glasses. But as they sit down on the sofa, a movement in the garden catches her eye. She sees something glitter.
It is her fox. She goes to the door and opens it, and the fox pauses, wary, but does not run away. She had forgotten to fill its bowl with milk, so she fetches some. The fox waits for her to pour it out. Then she retreats, and watches. It waits till it considers she is at an acceptable distance, and then comes forward to drink.
The boy is crouching beside her. ‘You’re taming it,’ he says softly.
This is the first time she’s thought of it this way. ‘Yes, she answers, I suppose I am.’
‘And he is taming you. Soon you will be unique in all the world to each other. Then you will need each other.’
‘We’ve read the same books,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We have.’
The Red Notebook
Today I heard the sound of a typewriter as I approached Alex’s garage. The garden was quiet, and the sound continued, little rushes at a time. Electric typewriters don’t clatter, they make a swift whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sound, almost as though someone is throwing darts at a dartboard.
I wondered whether I should interrupt. I couldn’t imagine what writing a novel would be like. Once you got a flow going, would it hurt to be halted mid-stream? Perhaps the Muse (whoever she was) was perched even now on the edge of his typewriter (I imagine muses to be weightless, so she wouldn’t tip it over). Perhaps all nine Muses were gathered there together in a superhuman show of support.
The typing stopped.
I peeked in the door, and Alex must have sensed that someone was there, because at the same time he looked sideways, and we caught each other’s eyes. (Caught how? tangled up in a net? Or with a hook? Or caught like hands reaching out to each other? No, a hook, something vicious.)
He smiled. I took his smile as permission to enter. Screwed-up pieces of paper littered the table next to him.
As usual, he made coffee, and we had it black and sweet, with stale walnut bread. I glanced covertly at the typewriter (I ha
ve always wanted to glance covertly, and it is harder than you imagine, to glance secretly at something in a room where there is very little else to look at).
‘I’m not writing my novel,’ said Alex, noticing my not-so-secret glance. ‘I’m writing a letter to my father.’
The Wild Typewritten Pages 21
It was the day I found him at his typewriter, writing a letter to his father, that he told me he’d decided to go away. Afterwards, I couldn’t remember his exact words, but they were something like: ‘I can’t live in Vivienne’s garage for the rest of my life.’
He got up from the typewriter and made two cups of strong coffee. He held a cup in each hand, and while he talked he moved his hands about, so that liquid splashed over the tops onto the floor. ‘I’ve thought about what I want to do. I know now I’m never going to write that novel. I’ve applied to go back into Medicine next year. Before –when I dropped out –I felt that I’d just rushed into university after school. You know, you do your final exams, and then you get your marks, and you do a uni course –without ever thinking about who you are or where your life is taking you. I think some people spend their whole lives like that –just doing what is expected of them. Being busy all the time. No time to think, or reflect. No time to hang about doing nothing much.’ He finished, looked down with surprise at the cups he held in his hands. He gave me one.
I couldn’t take it in. Even though Alex’s living situation looked temporary and makeshift in the extreme, this all seemed very sudden. He looked at me with a mixture of embarrassment and pleading. ‘You’ll be going away soon yourself, won’t you?’
‘Maybe.’ I was feeling less and less sure about this. It depended on how I did in the exams, and whether I got into the course I wanted, and money, and getting up the courage to tell Lil –too many variables to be sure. I took a sip of coffee, and it was strong and bitter.
‘But you’re not going straight away?’
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 13
