Secret Scribbled Notebooks (10 page)

Opening Anaïs Nin's
Journals
, I got in some reading while Sophie was gone, with Anastasia holding onto my finger all the while. When Sophie came in from the shower, wearing one of her limp frocks, I said impulsively, ‘Why don't you go out for a walk? By yourself . . . I'll take Anastasia.'

‘All right,' said Sophie. ‘Thanks.' She tidied her hair in front of the mirror, and blew on her glasses and cleaned them. While she was getting ready I put a couple of nappies into a bag and hung it off the handles of the pram, and took it down the steps. Sophie carried Anastasia in her arms. ‘She's been fed –shouldn't be hungry for ages,' she said, as she settled her into the pram. Then she kissed her on the cheek, and set off in one direction, while I took Anastasia in the other. We turned and gave each other a final wave, and then I was out alone with my niece for the first time ever.

I stopped for a moment to smile at Anastasia. ‘Where will we go, my darling, my dear? We could fly to the moon.'

I was happy and light-headed. Anastasia kicked her legs, and looked at me eagerly. And then she gave me the merest hint of a smile.

I smiled back at her. ‘Why, Hetty!' I said. ‘You've decided to smile.'

I don't know why I said that. It sounded like someone from the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
‘Why, Hetty!'
How ridiculous. But that's what I said, and from that moment on she became known as Hetty.

It was a magical transformation. I had walked up the road with Anastasia in a pram and came back with Hetty. Or rather, I bore her back, triumphantly, the way one bears good tidings. It seemed to be a momentous thing, to have discovered her real name like that, so suddenly and serendipitously, and the pram seemed to be borne on air, as if pulled by angels.

Oscar Wilde knew how important names were in the scheme of things. In his play
The Importance of Being
Earnest
, the man who pretended his name was Earnest when he was in the city (though he was called Jack in the country) found out that his name really was Earnest. He had been left in a handbag (a large, capacious handbag) at Victoria Station when he was a baby, and so his entire identity had been muddled.

A perfectly understandable mix-up, and one which we should be thankful hadn't happened to
us
at least, Sophie had told me. And now Anastasia had become Hetty, without even a handbag being implicated. It must have been her true nature asserting itself.

Sophie was already there when we got back. ‘Guess what?' I told her. ‘I think her name is actually Hetty! And she smiled!'

‘She's way too young to smile!' said Sophie. ‘It must have been wind.'

‘She did smile! I saw it. Oh, I don't care whether you believe me or not. I know what I know. And her name is Hetty, anyway.' I picked Hetty up and danced around the kitchen with her cradled in my arms, moving to invisible joyful music, and smiling into her face.

‘You know, I think Hetty was the name I was looking for all along, when I called her Anastasia,' said Sophie.

‘That poor child won't know whether she's coming or going!' said Lil. But Hetty knew exactly where she was. She wasn't coming
or
going. She was
here.

The Red Notebook

Music: ‘World Where you live', Crowded House

So. I am reading this book by Sartre. Sar-tra. Sarte. (Say it soft and in a Frenchy kind of way. How
does
Alex do that with his mouth?)

Nausea,
by Jean-Paul Sartre:

This book is in the form of a diary, written in 1932. It purports to be written by a man named Antoine Roquentin, an historian who is living in a small French town and researching the life of a man in the eighteenth century.

He says that he lives entirely alone, never speaking to anybody (though this is an exaggeration –he does speak to all sorts of people). He lives a very odd life. It seems that he is alienated from himself. He looks on at life as an observer. He even looks on parts of his own body as if they were merely an object he was seeing. For instance, he feels something cold in his hand and notices that he is holding a doorknob. His thoughts remain misty and nebulous. He seems to think that human life is meaningless and futile. It's a very philosophical book. For instance, a man he knows asks him about adventures, and defines an adventure as an event which is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary. ‘People talk of the magic of adventures,' says the man, and asks him if that expression strikes him as accurate. The man asks if
he
has had adventures.

The narrator lies, and tells the man that he has had a few adventures but says to himself that he doesn't even know what the word means any more.

What must it be like, to live in a world where words lose their meaning?

From the dictionary:

adventure
,
n
. ( the various meanings include:)

- an undertaking of uncertain outcome; a hazardous enterprise (by this definition life itself is an adventure; so is sitting for the Year 12 exams!)

- an exciting experience

- (obsolete) peril, danger

- to take the chance of, dare

- to venture

It comes from Middle English
aventure,
from Old French, from Latin
adventura
, meaning ‘future'; (a thing) about to happen.

The Yellow Notebook

And very late at night, when she has read enough, she sips absinth in the yellow glow of her reading lamp. The liquid is like a jewel. She sits the glass next to the remaining cube of Turkish delight, and sees the light reflected through them both. The colours remind her of the coloured glass in the old windows of the house she lived in when she was a child.

Outside, the city sleeps. And the fox is out there somewhere, too, somewhere in the wild patch of land that runs from her back garden along to the railway line, and which reminds her of the country, it is so quiet and earthy and secretive.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 11

On one of those misty mornings
, when the sunlight falls through fog –still –at nine in the morning, I went to Alex's garage. I knocked, and put my head round the garage door. Alex was lying on top of the bedclothes, spreadeagled naked, asleep.

I rushed outside and stood with the back of my head pressed against the wall, seeing mist fall through the air, seeing beads of water on a spider's web, seeing the blue day stretch up above me, and the grass, plump with green and dew-wet. I could only think of Alex. It wasn't so much seeing him with no clothes on –it was the nakedness of his face as he lay in the abandon of sleep.

I had woken him. I could hear him inside, moving around. Soon he came to the door.

‘Hello,' he said. ‘I was working late last night and I slept in.'

I looked past him towards the table with the typewriter, wondering whether he meant by
working
that he'd been writing his novel. I expected untidy piles of paper, ashtrays full of cigarettes and half-empty cups of mint tea. But the typewriter looked as if it had not been touched. It sat mutely on the table with the almost unsullied ream of copy paper beside it.

‘I have a job,' he explained. ‘A paying one. I pack shelves at one of the supermarkets at night. That's how I pay for food.' He turned to the bench. ‘Coffee?' he asked. ‘I've decided not to fight my addiction.' He looked wonderfully dishevelled, with stubble on his chin.

He filled the electric kettle, and while it boiled he tipped rather a lot of fresh coffee into a jug, which he then filled with boiling water and allowed to steep with a saucer covering the top of it. Since the first time I'd been there, Alex had acquired a large ceramic jug with a crack near the lip, and another cup.

He started slicing a loaf of heavy wholemeal bread. I sat on his bed, delightfully aware that he had been so recently inhabiting it.

‘What is it you want to write about?' I asked.

He looked nervously towards the typewriter, as if it might overhear him, or read his thoughts, or reproach him for lack of activity.

‘I don't think I can talk about it,' he said.

‘Oh, okay. But why?'

Alex had a coy way of looking at you, and a sly smile that began in his eyes and gradually reached his mouth.

‘Because,' he said, and thought a bit more. ‘Because I suspect that “works in progress” may sound a bit crazy.'

‘Have you been able to write anything?'

‘I have. But I threw it away. Sometimes I can only write a few sentences. Sometimes I think that I'll be able to get going with it if I can even get a decent first sentence down on the page.'

‘Write the second sentence, then,' I blurted out, and wished I didn't always say the first thing that came into my head.

‘Another thing that stops me from writing is that I think that it's probably pointless writing a novel, anyway. I mean, do novels really change the world? So I hover between thinking it's important to write and thinking that the whole thing is a great waste of time.'

Do novels have to change the world?
I have to admit that I like novels that appear to be entirely useless, in a world-changing way. I like a novel with lots of people, and conversations, and surprising ways of thinking about things. A novel that you can place against the light and look through, like a piece of pretty glass.

Alex strained the coffee into cups and handed me one. The coffee was dark and strong and bitter, even with the addition of a large amount of sugar. He handed me an ungainly slice of bread, piled high with plum jam, and I ate it.

Alex did not sit on the bed beside me. He had pushed the typewriter over to the edge of the table and sat there with the coffee and a pile of bread and jam in front of him, eating it neatly and without undue haste.

‘How's the Sartre going?' he asked. He had to crook his little finger to sip the coffee, his cup was so dainty.

‘I'm getting through it. I've got to the part where he starts noticing the existence of things. How they exist so blatantly, somehow. He thinks that nothing matters –it disorients him, rather. In fact, it makes him nauseous.' I looked down at the enormous mug Alex had given me and wondered how on earth I'd be able to finish it. It was a veritable swimming pool of coffee, a lake of coffee.

‘If you ask me,' I said, ‘I think he was probably a little crazy. If you look at things so closely, you're bound to feel disoriented. Like words. If you say a word over and over it starts to lose all meaning.
Persephone
, for example.
Persephone
,
Persephone,
what is that? Just a collection of sounds. And
umbrella.
What kind of word is that?'

I looked into the coffee cup and felt a little queasy, as if I might topple into it and drown.

Alex said, ‘Don't drink it all if you don't want it. I know what it's like to be overwhelmed by food. My grandparents used to pile up my plate. The table was groaning. I always wished they had a dog that lived under the table that I could slip things to.' He got up and relieved me of my cup. ‘Do you want to come for a walk? I like to get the newspaper.'

The town was the same one I'd known my whole life, but there was something about it that day –it was being with Alex –that made it all polished and glowing for me. It was just the usual grid of streets, this one with fig trees all the way along it, this one with a line of bare, hot, front yards without a shrub in sight, with the bright primary colours of children's toys abandoned on paths –I loved it all that day. I felt that the world had opened its arms and clasped me to its bosom.

Alex and I didn't need to say much at all. If I'd been with Sophie we might have played the game where we decided which house we would live in. Sophie always chose something flashy and expensive, but I liked more modest and retiring houses, ones that people wouldn't notice. A small house, suitable for just one family, without any strangers staying overnight in the spare bedrooms. A house where we might have all lived, the four of us, had our parents still been around.

Now, forgetting that Alex and I were not playing the game, I stopped in front of a particular house I liked and said, ‘That one! That's where I'd live.' It was a timber cottage, almost entirely overwhelmed by trees, with a wonky verandah and a frog pond in the front garden.

Rather than being surprised by my sudden act of choice, Alex simply smiled and scrutinised the house. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I like that one, too. It would be like living in a forest, and when you got bored you could always go out the front and talk to the frogs.'

We bought the newspaper and wandered back, and when we got to the street in front of the lane where he lived, he nodded towards the house next door. ‘What do you think that house would be like to live in?' he asked.

It was an old timber house, very nicely kept, with a verandah at the front wrapping round the side. It was all closed up and quiet, and the front door was painted pale blue. There were pink roses growing along the front fence. A frangipani tree in front of the verandah had sprouted its spring leaves, but had not yet flowered.

‘I don't know,' I answered. ‘I think it would be a quiet life there. A very ordered life.'

Alex had put his arm through mine, very naturally, and he kept hold of it while we made our way round the corner to the laneway. ‘My mother used to live there,' he said. ‘When she was a girl.'

All I could think was that he was holding my arm.

‘I used to visit that house when I was a child. But they're all gone now –my grandparents are dead, and someone else owns it.'

‘And your mother?'

‘She died when I was nine.'

I was glad that he didn't let go of me, but he said nothing more, and when we reached the door of his garage, I asked, ‘Do you feel at home here?'

‘I feel at home everywhere,' he said, going inside and throwing the paper down next to all the others on his table. The walls of his garage swallowed these words gratefully.