My Candlelight Novel (10 page)

‘Well?' I said. ‘How about asking permission first? Or apologising for
taking
my photo without me knowing?'

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘If I ask permission first it loses its spontaneity. The photo is never as good. Look, come and sit down with me a while.'

I consented to go into the park with him, where we sat on a bench under a spreading tree.

‘Actually, I do often feel guilty about taking pictures of people without asking. But I want them,' he said simply. It struck me that he was as callous as a child. He shrugged, as though it couldn't be helped. ‘Sometimes the picture seems the most important thing.'

I didn't reply, but now I understand him perfectly; I feel the same way about writing.

Delving into my shopping bag, I took out a packet of shredded wheatmeal biscuits and gave us all one. Lawson looked at the biscuit I handed him as if it was a foreign object. Tess gulped hers down at once and sat looking at Lawson with an expression that managed to look both put-upon and melancholy.

His hands were huge and bony. He had a large frame, and was bony all over. The skin on his face had the texture of fine sandpaper, or of having been sprinkled lightly with salt. If I leaned over and licked it, that would be the taste of him.

Lawson broke his biscuit in two and gave one half to Tess, who lapped it into her mouth. After a moment, he fed her the other half.

‘Can I look at them?' I nodded towards his camera. ‘The pictures of me.'

‘It's not digital,' he said, lifting up the large, old-fashioned camera for me to see. ‘It's film. I'll let you know when I've printed them.'

We started walking. There was a row of shops, one with brightly coloured pennants streaming high up in the wind. Then came a row of old timber houses, built on stilts because of the floods. On the other side of the road, next to the railway line, were fig trees with bright green leaves in thick crowns, like a child's drawing of trees.

My day had changed completely. It glowed. Every house we passed looked as though exotic secret lives were being lived inside it. We came to the twin bridges, and we crossed the first one and arrived at the Winsome Hotel.

Lawson gestured down Bridge Street and said, ‘I'm going to head down here.'

‘I'll see you, then.' I prepared to cross the second, my usual bridge.

After only a few steps Lawson ran to catch me up. ‘I forgot – we're having a party on the weekend.' He felt in his coat pockets and found a scrap of paper to scrawl on. I put it in my bag without glancing at it. ‘It'd be nice to see you there.'

‘I don't know whether I'll come. Not much of a party person.'

But he ignored that. ‘Arrive late. We can never seem to get going early.'

He gave Tess a last pat, and she went as if to follow him; I had to tug hard on her rope to make her come with me.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

O
N THE DAY
I attended my first tutorial, dropping Hetty off at child care was the easy part. She was insultingly ready for me to leave her, and looked with smug cheerfulness at all the children who greeted her warmly. She was one of the few really little ones there, and already the older children spoilt her.

In the classroom, we sat in a semi-circle facing the front, in two rows. I took a seat at the back. Outside, the hillside had been cut away, and the view was of a clay bank covered with weeds. It was such an unromantic university, all brick and concrete and square edges, with weeds and rainforest trees instead of ivy.

First of all, there was a certain amount of clarification regarding essay questions and so forth to be gone through. As part of the assessment, we had to construct and answer our own question, and one suggested in the study guide took my eye:
The possibility that writing can be female in style.

Then the tutorial proper started. The tutor talked about what could not be spoken by women in nineteenth-century literature, and the way the text of
Jane Eyre
could be seen as a palimpsest (meaning something rubbed smooth, so that something may be written over the top). In a subversive way, it speaks what cannot be spoken.

‘The female voice is duplicitous,' he said.

‘Women never say what they mean,' quipped a male student, and everyone laughed.

I looked at the portrait of Charlotte Brontë on the cover of my book, so small and plain and poverty-stricken. I've heard she had bad teeth. She was proud and sharp-tongued; I don't think she was
nice
. I like that. She wanted so much, yet so little, really – love and sex and independence, things that many women today would think of as their right. But at least, through the power of her writing, she could allow the women in her books to get what
she
wanted. Though they got it only sometimes, and in roundabout ways. She must have been a realist, for all her gothic overtones.

It was a two-hour tutorial, and we had a break mid-way. As people got up to stretch their legs, I heard a girl say softly to her neighbour with awe, ‘Imagine how many people have read this book. Millions…'

Most people went out of the room; I stayed where I was, and struck up a conversation with a girl who'd also stayed behind. Her name was Phoebe. She was even older than me: twenty-eight, she said. She told me she'd been longing to come to university for years, and now that she had, it was everything she'd thought it would be.

She was one of those people who are pure pleasure to look at. She had black hair and red lipstick, and around her neck was a string of large red beads. I liked her friendliness, and her care for her appearance struck me as being extremely considerate. I myself have no thought for those who must view me. My hair is often a mess and I leave my clothes all over the floor of my room so they are perpetually crinkled and quite often not even very clean.

After the break, we divided up into groups, and our task was to look closely at certain parts of
Jane Eyre
. Phoebe and I were with two other girls, and were allotted the scene where Jane is locked in the red-room.

We looked at the symbolism in the description of the room: the bed ‘stood out like a tabernacle in the centre'; it has curtains of red damask; so do the windows. The carpet is red, and the table covered with a crimson cloth. The room is chilled and silent, and seldom entered. Her uncle had died there. Everything in the description speaks of death and blood and anger.

Jane Eyre sees herself reflected in the mirror of a wardrobe; she looks to herself like a phantom. It is in the red-room that Jane fights an internal battle between the light that others cast her in and her sense of herself and feelings of injustice. Her brain is in tumult, and her heart in insurrection.
‘I could not answer the ceaseless inward question –
why
I thus suffered; now, at the distance of – I will not say how many years – I see it clearly.'

Afterwards, we reported on what we'd discussed. To my surprise, the boy who'd made the stupid quip about women never saying what they mean spoke with empathy. He said that the part about Jane being locked in the red-room was something that everyone could identify with.

‘It's one of your greatest fears as a child. Being locked in a room…and in the dark.'

Tears sprang to my eyes. I wiped them away, hoping no one had seen. Then my breasts started to leak milk. I murmured my excuses and went out.

In the privacy of a toilet cubicle I allowed the liquid part of myself full rein. I wept and wept, not fully knowing why I was crying. I stuffed tissues into my bra to catch the milk, and then noticed that there was blood on my underpants. My body seemed intent on betraying me at exactly the time when I needed my intellect. I wondered how I could ever spend years at university if my first tutorial brought me to this.

I went out to the washroom and splashed water on my eyes. Phoebe came in as I was rubbing my face with a paper towel. ‘Are you okay?' she asked.

‘Yes,' I told her. ‘I am now.' I glanced at myself in the mirror; I looked terrible. My eyes were red from crying, my face mottled, my hair a tangled mess. ‘Is the tutorial over?' I asked, and she nodded.

She started to reapply her lipstick, looking into the mirror, but keeping an eye on me as well. ‘Do you want to come for a coffee? That's if you don't have anything else on.'

‘No, I'm through for the day. But I think I should get down to the childcare centre and feed my baby. I'm leaking.' I indicated the damp spots on the front of my dress.

‘Oh!' she said. ‘You have a baby. That must make it difficult sometimes.' She put away her lipstick. ‘But we'll get together another time, yeah?' She smiled at me as I went out.

I sat in a quiet corner of the childcare centre and fed Hetty, thinking how easy it would be if I weren't a student.

I thought about the essay topic:
The possibility that writing can be female in style.

If I were to attempt to answer that it would mean many hours of research, and more thinking than I'd been used to.

I wondered if I was up to it. I contemplated an afternoon in the library taking notes, and was very tempted to pack Hetty up there and then and take her home. The thought brought a smile to my lips, and Hetty dropped my nipple and smiled back at me.

But two minutes later she was asleep at my breast. I considered my options. I thought of what our lives would be like if I
didn't
get a university degree. Things still weren't too bad while Hetty was a baby, but I depended on Lil to an alarming degree – she still provided a roof over our heads, for instance, and while we were at Samarkand we were never going to actually
starve.
But children cost, and I didn't want to support Hetty all her life on a waitress's wage, or worse, on the pension.

And very quietly, and with very little guilt, I carried the sleeping Hetty to the cot they'd allotted her, tucked her into it, and made my way back up the hill to the library.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

O
N THE NIGHT
of Lawson's party I set out at about nine-thirty with Hetty asleep in the pram and Tess at my heels.

I hadn't dressed up for a party; actually, I wasn't sure if I'd end up even going to it. I planned to wander in that direction and see what happened.

The path under the fig trees was secluded and hushed; as I came out from that friendly darkness and headed towards the town, the lit-up shopping streets with cruising cars seemed another country altogether. I crossed the bridge. Underneath the river gleamed blackly. As I passed the Winsome Hotel, talk and laughter shot out like bursts of gunfire.

Down the street from the pub were the occasional darkened old shops, with houses set between them a little way back from the street. Their fences supported straggling jasmine that scented the night, and I was full of calm happiness, content to be walking my sleeping baby and my dog.

I came to the street whose name Lawson had scrawled for me, a pot-holed lane of timber houses. The only thing the houses had in common was an immense shabbiness; it was the sort of place where a rainbow flag is used in place of a curtain, where there are several empty plots of land with kikuyu grass as tall as your shoulder and nasturtiums running wild. The narrow roadway was lined with ancient cars and derelict kombi vans. Across the way, appearing like a vision through one of the vacant lots, the skating rink blared an aureole of light and tinny music. It was an ugly place, a beautiful place, and one day a poet might well write a suite of lyrical poems to it. The title could be
Wotherspoon Street
, for that is its name.

Towards the end of the street, music drifted from the back yard of a tall timber house. The space beneath it was filled in with an assortment of old windows and doors, making additional living space. A cluster of garbage bins stood at the entrance, along with lush outgrowths of tropical plants. As I arrived, a car pulled up in front of me. The driver's door opened and someone deposited a pair of silver, laced, extremely high platform shoes onto the roadway. Bare feet were wriggled into them, and the owner of the shoes tottered down the drive.

I took myself, in my flat, shabby brown shoes (for I can never manage to buy a pair of shoes I really care for), with my sleeping baby and my dog, down the side of the house. In the yard, a few people were dancing in a desultory way, but most were standing about under trees hung with fairy lights, drinking and talking. I saw a boy pause in the middle of a conversation to look at me with interest.

I knew that wolfish look. There are certain men, good-looking, confident and predatory, who specialise in it. The boy detached himself from the group he was with and came over to me. ‘You look lost,' he said.

‘I'm not,' I told him briskly. ‘I'm just wondering where to find Lawson.'

‘Oh, Lawson,' he said, with a knowing smile. ‘He could be anywhere.'

‘Then I think I'll go and find him.'

I went exploring. The party seemed to be taking place not just in one house, but in several. Their common yards had no fences, and all the surrounding houses were also lit up, their gardens festooned with lights. There seemed to be no one there that I knew, and I liked that. Going to a foreign country must be that way. You wonder what the customs will be like, and whom you will meet.

A girl wearing pink cut-off slacks with a broad band of lace at the cuffs stopped and leaned into the pram, her breasts spilling out of a skimpy top. ‘Oh, how sweet.'

Hetty opened her eyes in a drunken, drowsy way and then shut them again, as though against her will. ‘Oh,' whispered the girl, with a finger to her lips. ‘I'd better not wake her. She
is
a girl, isn't she?' When I nodded, she smiled and said, ‘I thought so.'

‘Do you know where Lawson is?' I asked.

‘Oh yeah…over in Becky's room.' She gestured.