My Candlelight Novel (3 page)

I plonked Hetty down on the bed next to Lil, and went out for the breakfast tray, which I made room for on the bedside table.

Lil blew on her tea to cool it. She leaned forward and pursed her mouth to take a sip. I was reminded of the way Hetty ate, leaning forward in her high chair and taking food from the spoon with such a pretty scoop of her lips. Perhaps as people got older they really did revert to babyhood. Lil and Hetty seemed to have such affinity.

Now Lil was handing her a triangle of toast. Hetty, full to the brim with scrambled egg, couldn't possibly be hungry. She took the toast and pressed it between the palms of her hands, squeezing out the butter like water from a sponge. She let the toast fall onto the bed and leaned forward to touch Lil on the face.

‘Sophie darlin', do you have a cloth?' (Do you see how readily endearments sprang from Lil's mouth?)

I lunged forward to wipe butter from my baby's hands with a teatowel, splaying her fingers and cleaning her creased little palms. While I was there I dabbed the butter from Lil's cheek. Lil and I never had proper conversations. We always spoke the comforting language of the everyday, and rarely revealed our more intimate thoughts. Today, Lil was engrossed in fussing about with Hetty.

Still feeling like a parlourmaid, I took the time to put a bit of spit and polish on the framed photographs that stood on the dressing table. There was a picture of Kate and me together when we were very young, not long after we'd come to Samarkand, looking, as Lil would have said, ‘as though nobody owned us'. There was one of Hetty and me when she was a tiny baby. I was very puffy and pale; Hetty was wrinkled and pinkish. If we looked rather blurred and indistinct, it wasn't because of the poorness of the photography, it was because we were both still in the process of becoming. Shortly after that picture was taken we'd both unfolded into being mother and child, and I am pleased to say that these roles became us.

As a reminder of Kate's growing up and away, there was a picture of her with her friend Marjorie at their Year 12 formal, at the end of the previous year. Marjorie, as always, looked like a latter-day Snow White in a perfect little 1950s style frock, while Kate wore an old suit (!) that she'd found in Lil's cupboard. I'd advised her against it at the time, but had to admit now that she looked quite fetching and not at all masculine in it, her long red hair cascading over her shoulders.

The suit had belonged to Alan, Lil's son who had died, and it was his photograph that I did last (he had long hair in this picture, and wore some sort of ethnic shirt), spitting on the hem of my dress again and wiping the glass most tenderly. I had asked Lil once what he'd been like, and she'd said that he'd been a lovely boy, a beautiful, tender young man. ‘But close,' she added. ‘I mean, there was lots he didn't tell me. He often kept his feelings to himself. He was like you in that way.' And it pleased me to be thought to be ‘like someone', even someone I wasn't related to, because it made me feel connected, the way other people were.

Lil finished what she wanted of breakfast, and had eaten very little. Passing Hetty to me, she clambered out of bed and went to her wardrobe to choose a dress. Great black moths spilled from the cupboard and flapped about the room as she rummaged around. They were not clothes moths, but must have loved dark spaces. I sometimes found them inside the fireplaces, where they drifted in clusters like giant flakes of ash.

Lil put on a red dress that morning (the colour of bravery, and love), and made up her face. She painted on a thick layer of powder and red lipstick that bled into the wrinkles radiating out from her mouth. Dressed, and made up, Lil made her way stiffly to the door with a proud expression on her face.

She sailed out into Samarkand, into her day.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

I
AM A READING
girl, with a pale face, and glasses. People who become enthralled by the world of books, as I am, are often thought to have dull lives, but I feel that my own life is made of the stuff of myth. Or anyway, I intend to make it so.

Some say that books are an escape from
real life
. But the beauty of books is that they are crammed with real life. No one is more aware of
real life
, in all its trivia and glory, than a novelist. In novels you will find mention of things like measles, chocolate, ferry crossings (and eating chocolate on ferry crossings), train journeys, adultery (and adultery on train journeys), bacon, junkies, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, gas ovens, lost jewellery, wedding dresses, shower caps, snot, randy bakers, honey, miso soup, spider webs, lost mothers, abandoned children, rainforests, immortality, angels and toe rot.

Not to mention love. Novels are full of life's impurities, and love must be the most impure thing of all.

But now, with Hetty growing older, I couldn't read as much as I'd have liked. It's very easy to spend almost all day reading with a small baby at your breast, but now she needed to be talked to, and played with, and be read aloud to something other than the Great Works of literature. She had progressed from the plays of Oscar Wilde to board books full of pictures of ducklings and butterflies.

I made a habit of carrying her around the house and naming things for her. ‘This is a wooden spoon, Hetty,' I would tell her, holding it aloft as I helped Lil make a cake. That day, I had occasion to point out the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the kitchen sink. I hid behind the sheets on the line and popped my head out at her, which made her laugh immoderately.

I took her across the road to the river, and showed her Kate's fig tree, a special, almost sacred place, since it was where Kate had dreamed her childhood away. Magpies, empty chip packets, and the greyhound racing track across the river completed Hetty's education that day, and afterwards we were both so worn out we went to our room for a nap.

That afternoon, while I was on my way to the kitchen, the phone in the hall rang. I lifted the receiver and heard the familiar chimes of the HomeLink signal.

‘Lil?' Kate's voice was so small it was almost inaudible.

‘No. It's me. How are you?'

There was a long, shuddering intake of breath. ‘I'm lonely.' She drew the word out so that it was a wail of self-pity.
Loooooooonely
.

(O Kate!)

There was a sniffle on the other end.

‘Where are you?'

‘In a phone box on King Street.'

I put Hetty down onto the floor, where she crept over to the corner of the dim hallway and found something that interested her, I couldn't see what.

Leaning up against the wall, I pulled down a strip of photos from where I'd wedged them behind the pegboard over the phone table. Kate had recently had them taken in a photo booth. She had cut her long hair very short; she'd done it herself to save money and it was a bit ragged, but it suited her. I studied the progression the photos took, from the first caught-unawares shot, to carefully wary-looking, to increasingly confident to extravagantly posed.

‘Stop crying, you eejit. Now. Describe for me exactly what you can see right at this moment.'

‘O
God
, Sophie!'

‘What? So you can see God, can you?'

‘Noo-ooo! Okay…I see an ugly little tan-and-white terrier tied up to a post.'

‘Why is it ugly?'

‘Eyes too close together. Horrible gingery colour. Um…I can see a boy with a ring through his eyebrow. He looks really happy about something. Now the woman who must own the dog has just untied it…she's wearing a coat like a hessian sack, and her hair is all sticking up at the back of her head as though she's slept on it but I think she might have paid a lot of money to get it looking as terrible as that. Is that enough? I think I'm okay now…'

But she wasn't.

‘O Sophie…It's just that I don't know anyone. No one I can really talk to. And I was so sure when I came down here I'd make heaps of friends and all sorts of exciting things would happen. And with Alex still away in Europe…I really thought he'd be coming back, you know? Marjorie's in Brisbane…there's no you and Hetty and Lil…

‘And Sophie…there's just something about the long shadows on a winter afternoon, and the light in my room, so tobacco-brown and gloomy, and…

‘How's Hetty?' she finished up in a feeble voice.

‘She's fine. Currently about to put a dead cockroach she just found on the floor into her mouth.'

Lil appeared in the doorway that led from the kitchen into the hallway. ‘Is that my Katie?' she said. She picked Hetty up, took the cockroach from her with distaste, and threw it away. Handing Hetty over to me, she took the receiver.

I left her to talk, and went to Kate's room. It was exactly as she had left it earlier in the year.

Soon after she'd started university Kate had written:

Dear Sophie,

At last, my life is like a book!

I'm sitting at my table on a Friday night and my teeth are aching with excitement. I've lit a candle in honour of writing to you, and when I've finished I will blow it out. (If Lil is reading this she should be assured that I'm also writing with the aid of electric light and am not ruining my eyes: the candle is there to gaze at and to steady my focus on you, my dear reader.)

Outside lies King Street, Newtown. I cannot sleep for lights flashing through the window (nor do I want to). Living here is like fronting a different kind of river than the one that flows past Samarkand: tonight this river is in flood, with people and traffic going past. There are short, sharp bursts of voices and vehicles above the steady background hum.

Earlier, I went out and joined the throng; most people were with groups of friends, but there were many solitary people like myself. I bought a takeaway kebab and came back here and sat on the windowsill to eat it, looking down into the street.

But already I know the bed, my piles of books, the one cupboard I have for clothes, all too well. The problem is that nothing here will move position unless I move it. I miss coming into my room and knowing that you've been there, by a dent in the quilt not made by me, a black hair left on the pillow, mandarin peel scattered over the desk, or the fact that one of my books has disappeared, perhaps forever.

Whenever I come back to my room here I want to shout, ‘Hello-o-o? Is there anyone home?' I would have to answer myself, whispering a small, meek ‘Yes'.

I don't know what university will be like yet, as I've only had one week of lectures. I know no one, of course, and most of the other students seem to know each other from high school, and they mostly live at home, so they disappear at the end of the day.

On our reading list is
Ulysses
. I've bought a secondhand copy that is at least four hundred years old, a big old doorstopper of a book, disintegrating and well-thumbed. The cover is black, with only the words
Ulysses
and
James Joyce
in large white letters on it.

And the cover has been stuck back on with masking tape, and inside there are already notes from previous students. I've dipped into it, and some of it is wonderful. The bit I like best so far is the one that begins,
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls
.

It describes him going out and buying a kidney for breakfast, cooking and burning it, and throwing the burnt bit to the cat. He takes his frowzy wife Molly a cup of tea, and goes and sits on the toilet reading the paper. (By the way, do you know that Irish cats say
Mrkrgnao
?)

Some of the book is almost unreadable, and some totally unreadable. At one of those parts a previous student has written in the margin:
Why did I do this course?
I well may feel the same by the end, but for now, Sophie, it is sublime! And actually, the unreadable bits somehow make it even better, because life is mysterious and never completely knowable, don't you think?

My teeth seem to be back to normal now, so I think I'll try to get some sleep. So I'll blow out the candle and say goodnight.

My best and most fervent love to Hetty and Lil, Your sister Kate

I picked up one of Kate's books (
Nausea
, by Jean-Paul Sartre) and took it to the bed and lay down with Hetty. Kate had written with such excitement about her new life, and now she was lonely. I had not written back to her. I am too lazy. Besides, she knows I seldom confide in her, but she is such an innocent, and insists on pouring out her heart anyway.

Opening the book, I found a long strand of her hair that she had left between the pages.

A relic.

Kate was in the habit of absently taking one of her own hairs and marking her place with it. This hair was like a filament of copper wire, but finer. It caught the light and flashed out the colours red, gold, mauve, and even green (yes!). My sister has extraordinary hair.

I remember how I once unexpectedly found one of my own hairs caught between the pages of a book, the shock of recognising it as mine. It was long, coarse and black, the dull black of wood stoves or pieces of ash.

Now, finding Kate's hair was like finding a part of myself. My sister Kate: who as a child had a tiny, pale, porcelain solemn face and thin red hair lying flat to her scalp. Who now lived in a room above a greengrocer in the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown. She shared a kitchen and bath, and the other residents left squid hanging out of bowls in the refrigerator. Even the forlorn appearance of the little legs dangling over the side of the bowl was enough to make Kate melancholy.

She lived uneventfully, going to university and then home again. She longed to meet someone she felt an affinity with… There was Alex of course, a boy from Sydney whom she'd met here in Lismore last year, but he had gone to Europe and had not yet come back. He wrote to her, which left her with feelings of lingering hope…