It was a long time ago, when we came to Samarkand. A whole lifetime away for me, but in the scheme of things, not such a very long time, because I am still only seventeen. If I am lucky enough to become an old woman, like Lil, it will seem just a tiny part of my life. A tiny but important part.
Today, I thought again about the time when I had only just arrived, and in my ignorance, I smashed the plate, the day I thought I had smashed the whole world, and curled up into a ball with my hands over my ears.
I waited for the blow, for I heard Lil get to her feet.
It didn’t come. I opened my eyes. Lil was standing in front of me with her arms held out, warding me off.
‘Don’t move!’ she said. ‘You might cut yourself.’ And she went and got a dustpan and brush, and cleaned it all up. Not another word was said about it.
Today I said to her, ‘Lil –do you remember the day I smashed the plate?’
Lil laughed. ‘I most certainly do! And I remember later in the day, I was drinking a cup of tea, and I went to put it down on the table and missed. It smashed on the floor. And you looked at me with the brightest of eyes. Do you remember what you said to me?’
‘No,’ I said, not remembering any of this at all.
‘You looked at me and said, “Now we’re even!”’
Today is January 6, the day of the Epiphany, the celebration of the showing of Christ to the Magi (whatever that was). Of course, no one here knows what that is, so I am still ignorant. We are not Religious and never will be. I got it from the dictionary.
An epiphany is also a revelation of the basic nature of something; a perception of some essential truth, from the Greek, epiphaneia - literally, appearance, manifestation, from epiphanes –coming to light, appearing.
Now that the results are out, and it is almost certain that I will go away to university, I am getting all nostalgic. I don’t want to leave this place! I don’t want to leave Lil, or Sophie, or Hetty. I keep walking around and thinking of all the things I will miss. The view –that view from the verandah of my fig tree and the river. How can I move away from that? And the frogs in the toilet bowl. Even the Guests! I will miss it all. (No, not the Guests.) I keep going up to Lil and giving her a cuddle, and putting my head on her shoulder, and she tells me I am a big sook. I heard her on the phone to a friend the the other day saying, ‘She’s getting that sooky I don’t know what to do with her.’
I have just now received the mail. I now get mail! A letter is such a wonderful thing –the smell of the paper, and all those words, written with someone’s live hand! I am glad we are low-tech here, because an email wouldn’t be quite the same.
I got a letter from Alex, written on the plane to Poland and posted when he got there. He and his father are excited and a bit apprehensive about meeting their relatives at last. He says it will be amazing to meet people who knew his grandparents from those days, the days they rarely spoke of, because the memories were too painful for them.
And he says that he hopes to see me in Sydney this year. Maybe we will be going to the same university.
Maybe. Maybe. My marks were good, but I have to see what places I’m offered.
And I got a postcard from Marjorie in Florence. (Italy! The lucky thing.) Lots of tiny writing. I quote her: ‘This place is full of paintings, which my parents, of course, adore (and I thought this was meant to be my reward for doing so well in the exams) . . . the paintings are are all right, I suppose, as you can see from the pic on the front of this, but Kate –the cakes. The cakes ! They are exquisite. Magnificent. Unforgettable. I really wanted to send you a postcard of a cake, but there were none. Maybe I’ll smuggle some actual cake back for you . . .’
The picture is of a Madonna and child, all gilt and rich colour. The child, held by his mother (yes, his - he has a tiny penis) looks out of the picture. He looks, where? To the future? He holds out one arm, reaching out to that future, exactly the way Hetty does. Reaching. Always reaching out.
And the Madonna –she looks at the child. All her attention is concentrated on him. That is her life. To look to the child.
Sophie is looking to her child, but to their future as well. When she does go to university, probably next year, because it is too late to apply for this year, she will be a formidable student. She has already researched the life of Anaïs Nin, and she tells me that she didn’t always tell the truth in her diaries. She was not quite the fiercely independent woman she presented herself to be. She had a husband –two husbands! At the same time! –one of whom was incredibly rich, who paid for everything . . .
She has also read somewhere that when Virginia Woolf got married she decided to have books, not babies. If that is so, it seems to me to be a terrible choice. Because why can’t you have both? I have to say this, unequivocally. I want both.
Sophie tells me that in the end she chose Hetty, whom she loves above all else. She chose Hetty above grieving for Marcus. The day I saw her in the park with Marcus, the day after she spent the night with him, he didn’t want to have anything to do with his baby. And that was when she started on the road back to being herself. To being more than herself, because having a baby has changed her. She says that there is only so much disarray you’ll put up with for love. She says that she is no Anna Karenina, and has no intention of doing the modern-day equivalent of walking under a train.
Now that she can sit up, we are reading to Hetty again. When she was a foetus she understood everything –Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce . . . but now that she is a baby she has forgotten it all, and has to start learning everything from scratch. Her current favourite is The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which is the best kind of book, having both lots of food and a happy ending. She looks so intently at the pictures, and seems to particularly love the look of the sausages and the cupcakes –and of course, the beautiful butterfly at the end!
When I first brought Alex’s typewriter home, I didn’t think I would ever write anything with it. I made space for it on my desk, and took it from its case. It was such a compact, innocent creature, like a little hen. I thought that it should get up and start pecking about and exploring its new home, or even racing in blind panic around the room, but it sat there quite calmly.
Then one day I started writing my Wild Typewritten Pages, and I did not see at first how the pieces of my life would fit together. At first, it was like scribbling in the dark, the way I used to scribble at night in the fig tree. It was like going into a dark room with a torch, illuminating everything. There were some things in the room that I expected, and knew were there, and other things appeared out of the darkness and surprised me.
Anaïs Nin said that to write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground, and that is what it was like. I felt like an adventurer, an explorer, descending into my own life and bringing it back into the light.
So now, Red Notebook, it’s just you and me again. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to break the habit of you. You will be the first of many notebooks, each one starting where the last one ended. Anaïs Nin (I don’t care what Sophie says about her –I love her writing) said that the present was sacred to her, to be lived, to be passionately absorbed, and to be preserved faithfully in the diary. She also said (will I ever stop finding things she wrote that relate to my own life?) that we cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, society . . . if we accepted a part of this responsibility we would discover our strength.
So here, Red Notebook, is today’s offering. This, for what it’s worth, is my present:
Music: Crowded House: ‘You’re not the girl you think you are’
This morning:
I stand naked in front of the mirror and it’s as though I’m seeing myself for the first time. I don’t care if it’s cliched that girls are always looking into mirrors and knowing themselves; I do it anyway. I look like a girl from a nineteenth-century painting, the type of girl who is always gazing wanly at her reflection in pools: pale and slender, with long limbs and hair spreading ove
r her shoulders.
But this is the twenty-first century and it is not for me to loiter palely in the forests like some anaemic nineteenth-century beauty. I have a job to do. I slip into the red dress that Hannah has given me, cram my feet into high-heeled sandals and head to work, like thousands of girls all over the country.
Hands in the washing-up water, calling out orders for coffees, slapping roasted vegetables onto rounds of bread, popping plates onto tables with a smile, I pause for a moment to reflect that the Buddhists or whoever it was were right. Live in the moment, didn’t they say? I’m too busy to be certain.
The customers are highly amusing. There is a boy with an adorable beard who simultaneously reads Rimbaud and listens to Aretha Franklin through his Walkman; he barely looks up as I slide a succession of short blacks within his grasp.
To people who enquire chattily what I do, I reply airily, ‘Oh, I’m making a comparative study of Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf,’ and they either respond enthusiastically or look completely blank.
A handsome boy is reading an old edition of Great Expectations; I ask him if it’s any good and he says, ‘Oh yes, it’s great. I wouldn’t normally read a book like this, but I got it at Hope Springs bookshop, in the Men’s Literature section. Someone left a note inside recommending it, so I thought I’d give it a try.’
I chat with him for a long time, and both of us smile a lot, and I sway my hips as I depart.
‘Flirt!’ Hannah hisses.
After work, I scoot through the streets as though I have winged heels. Whisking across roads in front of cars, striding along footpaths, flowing between window-shoppers, and pausing to hover at a fruitstand where I select a perfect nectarine, I move effortlessly through the world as if it is my element.
Voices wash over me:
‘But you’d need a bra with that.’
‘What’s wrong with a bra?’
Two girls meet on the footpath and hug slowly, body to body.
Someone says: ‘Lismore is killing me.’
I sleep every second night with Hetty in my room. I love her more than I have ever loved anyone (Sophie, Lil, Alan, Alex. All right –and Marjorie). I fell for Hetty the moment she was born, without even thinking about it. Who was it taught me to love? I think it must have been Lil –she was a sort of Miss Havisham in reverse.
I told Sophie how I remembered being left alone at home when we lived with our father, and the way she looked after me. And the stories she told me –I suddenly remembered Sophie telling me stories! About princesses trapped in castles and handsome princes and frogs and boys that turned into ravens, and sisters helping sisters. ‘Where did the stories come from?’ I asked her. ‘How did you know them?’
‘From her,’ Sophie replied. ‘I got them from her.’
I looked at her, dumbly.
‘Our mother.’
It was only then that we were able to talk about her, our eyes unable to meet at first because we share the shame of not having been wanted.
We may never know why she left us. We have to accept what we have, Sophie says, and forgive her, because who knows what caused her to leave us? ‘Get on with our lives,’ said Sophie, one of the few times I have seen her cry. ‘That’s what we have to do. That’s what we have always done.’
So that is what we are doing, and it’s not too bad, this business of getting on with your life. There are all sorts of possibilities for all of us. But for now, I sit after midnight on my bed writing this. Hetty is asleep in her cot beside me. I can hear her breathing and snuffling and turning over. Everyone else in the house is asleep; if you stood outside, my light would be the only one shining out. And as soon as I’ve finished writing this, I will switch off the light, and snuggle down into the warm dark of my bed, and sleep.
JOANNE HORNIMAN has been a kitchen-hand, waitress, editor, teacher, and part of a screen-printing collective whose posters are in the print collection of the National Gallery in Canberra. She now writes full-time in a shed overlooking Hanging Rock Creek near Lismore in northern New South Wales. Her novels include Mahalia and A Charm of Powerful Trouble.
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