My Candlelight Novel (17 page)

And then I came to my senses. I thought that although Jack Savage was very attractive and desirable, I did not want to do that with him. I would rather be home with my baby.

Naturally, part of me wanted to, part of me wanted the comfort of a warm body and, yes, the pleasure of sex. But I didn't really want
him
, not the way I'd wanted Marcus, who, it seemed, would now be my benchmark.

I put down my beer on the ironing board. ‘I have to go,' I said.

He looked annoyed, but was far too cool to protest. I picked up my book and my bag and prepared to leave. But I wasn't to get off that lightly. ‘You
are
a bitch, aren't you?' he said, as we walked out the door together.

Oscar Wilde appeared beside me, long black coat, gladioli, astrakhan collar and all. It was he who had said, ‘To the world I seem, by intention on my part, to be a dilettante and a dandy merely – it is not wise to show one's heart to the world.'

I didn't grace Jack Savage with a reply.

We left together, Oscar and me, in the direction of Samarkand, and Jack Savage in the direction, probably, of the university bar.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE

M
Y MEMORIES OF
my grandfather's place had been real, because our mother took us there, not long before we lost her. We went by train, and he picked us up in an old Land Rover, which twisted and turned its way along dirt roads to his house. I had dreamed of the place ever since leaving it, and it was just as I'd remembered. He was the way I'd remembered him too, and not much older. He still lived in Paradise. I played hide-and-seek with him in the garden. The cherry tomatoes were still there, and still ripe, though it was the next generation of black hens that laid eggs for us.

It was there that I first noticed my mother stumbling, holding out her arms to steady herself. She often stayed in bed and let our grandfather look after us. Now it was Kate who rode around on his shoulders. I held his hand.

I know now that our mother was ill.

Late one night, I heard them talking urgently. He was pleading with her to stay. But she took us away a second time, leaving the dog, Jess, with him, as though she knew that very soon she wouldn't be able to look after her.

When I was fifteen, I started looking for his house. I became convinced that he lived in the hills somewhere around Lismore. I watched out for him in the street, and indeed, there were many old hippies who
could
have been him. One day I trailed one of them around the health-food shop until I decided it couldn't possibly be my grandfather; there was just something about him that was wrong. I thought that if I ever did come across him I would know him at once.

I've always been a romantic like that. At fourteen, I'd read
Jane Eyre
; I remembered how Jane had run away from Rochester and then stumbled around starving until she was taken in by kind people who turned out to be her cousins. And then she found out she was an heiress. Her luck could also be mine!

And so I took to hitching out of town, hoping that I'd see a place I'd recognise. In my imagination, I could see myself going up a driveway, and there he'd be.

At that stage, I was a sullen girl; I exuded a dark aura. I wore layers of complicated and ancient clothing found in op shops. I never washed my hair, and was fat and pimpled. Carmen and Raffaella had schooled me in the minutiae of making myself difficult. I seldom spoke to Lil. I growled at Kate, and froze her out. I did almost nothing but read, and was proof positive against all those proselytising teachers and librarians who imagine that reading is a Good Influence. As far as I was concerned, reading was a down and dirty activity. I read
Lolita
with relish.
‘Light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul…Lo-lee-ta!'
The poetry of the sentences made me swoon. But
Jane Eyre
was even filthier. All that imagery, all that she left unsaid. You didn't need a lot of imagination to know what she was
really
writing about.

When I hitched out of town, every car that pulled up was a potential adventure, a possible prelude to my finding my true identity. Many of the people who picked me up were women, worried about me hitching alone. But they asked too many questions about where I was going – I didn't know the answers, so I began to favour lifts with men. My plan was to ride until I found a likely-looking place, and then get out and explore for a bit on foot, hitching another ride further up the valley when I'd drawn another blank.

Over two months of Saturdays, I went up and down most of the steep valleys surrounding Lismore. I walked up driveways that looked as though they might be the right place, only to be disappointed, time and again. I encountered dogs both fierce and friendly, and people the same. And with each disappointment I lost hope until expectation had drained right out of me.

It was on one of those Saturdays that I had my first experience of sex. I blame
Jane Eyre
. I wanted to find out what Charlotte Brontë so studiously avoided mentioning except indirectly through wild weather and tempestuous emotions.

It was with a boy a couple of years older than myself. I've forgotten his name. He had his P-plates, and drove very fast. Down a rocky side road he pulled over, and we did it, right there on the front seat, without too much of a preamble. I felt nothing really, except stickiness and discomfort; in truth, I'd have welcomed a bit of bad weather to liven things up.

I gave up searching for my grandfather. It was entirely possible that he hadn't lived around Lismore at all. Long-lost relatives and fortuitous legacies didn't happen in real life, I decided.

And I was getting sick of suffering the leers and innuendoes of some of the men who picked me up. I was afraid of getting into a situation I couldn't control. I wasn't such a bad girl after all.

But after that, I started going round with boys. I'd meet them down near the riverbank. I got very little pleasure from these encounters; it was then that I started reading
Anna Karenina
afterwards.
Leo Tolstoy 4 eva
, I should have tattooed on my shoulder.

So why did I do it? Was it because for at least the duration of sex I felt wanted and beautiful, even if later I almost always felt the exact opposite? I can see now that reading
Anna Karenina
was a way of telling myself that I wasn't
like
that. I wasn't one of
those
girls. See! I read. I read Proper Literature!

Boys used to hang round outside the house waiting for me, and Lil finally realised what I was doing, and she came to my room one night. She told me that I was loved and wanted. ‘I love you,' she said. ‘I don't want you to go damaging yourself.' She said it fiercely, and hugged me close; I could feel her emotion. It flowed between us. There were our two hearts, beating against each other, and her chin, poking uncomfortably into my shoulder.
I love you too
, I thought. I remembered, regretfully, my mother. I didn't want to lose her. For me, she was still the one. Could I love Lil at the same time?

Lil looked me full in the face and said, ‘You don't need to run around with those boys. You're worth more than that.'

And I stopped. Just like that. I kept reading
Anna Karenina
, though. It was then that I asked Lil if I could paint my room, which up till then had been a dull, flaking green like most of the walls in the house.

I chose red, bright red, and Lil and Kate helped me coat the walls of my bedroom with the glossy, sticky enamel paint. From then on my room became like a warm, enclosing womb, where I read and dreamed and wrote the beginnings of at least a dozen novels about impossibly beautiful girls living in exotic countries and which rang so false that I abandoned each one almost as soon as I'd started it.

I didn't go with another boy until I met Marcus.
Tell me the story of your life,
he'd said. It hadn't been until then that I realised I had a story to tell.

Lil had a story, too. Everyone does. But it's only in novels we can know fully another human being. Real life is different. People are lucky if they're even fully known by themselves.

Lil had been an unmarried mother, as I became. I like the term ‘unmarried mother'.
Sole parent
has too much of the smell of social workers. Her son had been called Alan (such a nice, unfashionable, boyish name!) and I only met him once. He was away overseas a lot. He was a ‘freelance journalist', which has a great air of freedom and gung-ho about it, though I suppose the reality of it is more likely uncertainty and bouts of penury.

When he died Lil seemed inconsolable. For years her grief so coloured the atmosphere of Samarkand that it's a wonder people kept coming. But since so many of the guests carried their own hidden burdens, they possibly failed to notice it. It was such a colourless house with its brown lino, faded green walls, weathered unpainted wood on the verandahs. Even the coloured glass in the windows was dirty and dull. Only Kate gave any life to the place, and I could see how Lil brightened at her presence. I was a different matter: often sullen, difficult, as dun-coloured as the house.

But Samarkand, as gloomy as it was, had been a saving grace for Lil. It allowed her to be independent, and bring up her son, and later on, support us. It had been left to her by an aunt, or a great-aunt, or a friend of an aunt…Anyway, an aunt had come into it somewhere, and thank goodness for her.

‘You're worth more than that,' Lil had told me, and that was a new beginning for the
we
of Lil and me. We became more straightforward with each other (slightly), and I was less secretive (somewhat). But it's probably impossible for people to change their basic natures. Lil would have said of us, ‘We rub along okay.'

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO

S
O THERE WERE
Lil and I, rubbing along okay in the kitchen one Saturday night. It was about a week since Maggie Tulliver's gig. She had made herself wondrous scarce in that time, and Lil wondered did she still live there at all, though she was somehow always on hand to do the breakfasts.

Lil was making one of her famous stews, with lamb, potatoes, carrots and barley, and sloshing a bit of red wine into it, while she drank the rest of the bottle. It was a kind of Irish stew, I suppose, a homage to the Irish in us, though Lil's surname was Ventura, surely an Italian name if ever there was one. In any case they were two cultures devoted to drink.

Hetty was very tired and grizzly; she had a runny nose and ground her teeth angrily in between chomping on some lamb's liver that I'd cooked for her. I could tell she wouldn't stay awake long enough for the stew.

Someone knocked at the front door and Lil went out. I was expecting it would be someone wanting to book in for the night, but I heard a voice from the hall: ‘Is Sophie here?'

Lil arrived back with Becky Sharp, and I was very pleased and surprised. I pulled her out a chair, got her a glass of wine, and she sat there with one elbow on the table, looking around her. I became overly conscious of the Dickensian nature of our kitchen: the crepuscular light, the cracked paint, the filthy old table, and Lil cooking away with cigarette in one hand and wine glass in the other. Hetty gnawed on the unsavoury-looking piece of meat, her nose running snot down to her upper lip; I wore a shabby dress stained with mashed pumpkin, with that morning's porridge dried out on the bodice. You could have mistaken the place for a very low-class orphans' home.

‘I'm sorry. I seem to have caught you at dinnertime,' she said. I could tell that she had been very well brought up (though not perhaps well brought up enough not to call round at dinnertime, but who is to know these days when people might take it upon themselves to begin eating?).

‘Not at all,' I said. ‘People come and go here all the time. Anyway, dinner will be ages.' Hetty finished chewing on her mouthful of liver, and spat it out, grey and desiccated, onto the tray of the high chair.

Becky Sharp said, ‘I came to see if you'd like to come out for something to eat. But…'

I looked at Lil. ‘Go ahead,' she said, stirring the pot like a modern incarnation of one of Macbeth's witches (cigarette in mouth to leave her hand free). ‘This will keep, and if you get Hetty to sleep first, I'll listen out for her.'

Becky Sharp stayed in the kitchen with Lil while I put Hetty to sleep. It took ages, lying with her on my bed. I was impatient to be away. Once she was asleep, I put her into her cot, found a slightly cleaner dress on the floor, and ran a brush through my hair. In the mirror, lit only by the dim light from my bedlamp, I looked rather scary, all big hair and large, expectant eyes framed by glasses. And also very eager and impatient. I threw a thin shawl around my shoulders and slipped quietly from the room, leaving the nightlight on in case Hetty should wake.

Becky Sharp followed as I ran down the stairs barefoot; I hadn't bothered with shoes – it was a warm night, and I like the feel of the ground beneath my feet. At the same time, I felt that I was flying. Becky and I wrenched our respective doors open at the same time, and grinned at each other over the top of her car.

This was only the third time I'd been in it, and it had lost none of its appeal. So original, so old, but with a CD player which she had installed. You have to have music while you're driving. For a while we just drove around, and ended up at the lookout on Girard's Hill. ‘What do you feel like eating?' Becky asked. Lismore lay below, lights strung along the main roads, the city centre shining feebly, and house lights dotted between trees. Night and distance made the place look larger, with more possibilities.

‘I'm not very hungry.'

‘Me either.'

So we decided on takeaway falafel rolls. We parked downtown near the shop, and sat looking for a while at the people wandering about. Up close, Lismore is not the most exciting place to be on a Saturday night (or, indeed, many would argue, at any other time). There was a choice of several pubs, with or without live music, a nightclub (actually also in a pub), various takeaway food places, a couple of restaurants…but people were out and about, anyway. ‘Look at them,' said Becky. ‘All of them looking for
the heart of Saturday night
.'