Secret Scribbled Notebooks (12 page)

The Yellow Notebook

Some nights, when she gets home from work, she can't bear to cook, and she needs something more than solitude. So she takes a book and goes out to a cafe she knows, and where they know her. She orders her usual, a plate of spaghetti with mussels, a green salad, and a glass of red wine, and eats slowly, watching the people walk by in the street, and the lights of passing cars. She knows better than to eat and read at the same time. She did that when she was young, but it means you can't enjoy either experience to the full. So it is only when she is replete that she pushes her plate aside and begins to read.

The cafe is full of people and their talk washes over her. She is unselfconscious, eating out on her own, and doesn't notice that people look at her, and wonder about who she might be, so lovely and all alone.

She becomes aware of someone standing near her table –she looks up, and sees a man, tall and slender, with a slim brown face and watchful, friendly eyes. ‘May I sit with you?' he asks. She assents with an inclination of her head.

‘I've noticed you here before,' he says, as he sits down. There is nothing sleazy or pushy about him. ‘My name's Alexander,' he says. ‘What's yours?'

‘Katerina,' she says, closing her book and glancing at him across the table.

‘I'm sorry I interrupted. But I could see you reading one of my favourite books -' ‘Sartre?' she says.

He nods. ‘Yes, Sartre . . .'

The Wild Typewritten Pages 13

When Lil and Sophie
arrived home that afternoon, I was still lying on the floor of the verandah, reading.

‘Move that body of yours please, madam. My old legs can't step over you!' Lil was accompanied by fistfuls of plastic bags which the taxi driver deposited at the top of the stairs, and which I helped her haul in to dump on the kitchen table. Sophie snatched
The Journals of Anaïs
Nin
from my hand and disappeared with Hetty to her room.

‘Been into my make-up again?' said Lil comfortably, putting on the kettle for a cup of tea.

I poked around in the contents of the bags, looking for something interesting to eat. I found a packet of biscuits and opened it. ‘I've
told
you we shouldn't use plastic bags!' I said, with my mouth full, as Lil emptied the bags and they mounted in a flimsy pile on the table. ‘You should get those calico ones they sell. These will all end up in some landfill or dumped into the sea, and turtles will eat them thinking they're jellyfish! Did you know they found a whale with about a tonne of this stuff in its gut?'

‘Some days,' said Lil, ‘there are more important things to think about than remembering to buy a whole lot of calico bags. We've just spent most of the afternoon down at the Social, sorting out Sophie's payments.' She shovelled four cartons of eggs into the fridge, along with two bulk packs of bacon and several pounds of butter, like someone stoking the boiler on an old steam train.

‘It's called Centrelink now,' I told her, arranging fruit in a bowl with a great deal of finesse. I put the yellow lemons with some golden pears, and put green apples into a bowl with a red capsicum on top.

‘Very nice, I'm sure,' commented Lil sourly, stopping for a moment and surveying the fruit with one hand on her hip, before turning round to stack loaves of bread onto a corner of the bench.

Sophie drifted in and casually plucked an apple from the bowl, biting into it dreamily.

‘Well,' said Lil, ‘now you know,' obviously referring to something which I had not been party to. ‘That will be your life for the next twenty years or so, unless you stir your stumps and support yourself and that baby with your own hands, the way I did. You won't get much joy from them, nor money either. Waiting and explaining, that will about be the size of it. Handing them bits of paper till they're coming out your ears.'

‘Just leave me!' said Sophie. ‘I'm too tired to think about it now. Or talk. Or have you going on at me.'

‘How can she hand them bits of paper till they're coming out her ears?' I said, but they ignored me.

‘I
will
do something,' said Sophie. ‘Just, not yet. She's only a couple of months old. Even working women have at least a couple of months off when they have a baby!'

‘Just so long as you're thinking about it,' said Lil, nodding. ‘You can't simply let your life . . . drift.' She gestured with her hands as though a boat was teetering on the seas.

‘Oh, so running a
really classy
guest house is doing something with your life!' retorted Sophie.

‘It kept me and my boy,' said Lil, quietly, with her back to us, making the tea. ‘It kept you.'

I ran out and up to Sophie's room where Hetty lay in her crib. ‘Everyone's so
edgy
,' I whispered to her. ‘Can I come and play with you?'

I took Hetty onto the bed with me and kissed her on the cheek, where my lips left a red smudge. I wiped it away with some spit on a corner of a sheet, then rescued Anaïs from under Sophie's pillow and resumed reading where I'd left off. Anaïs's mother is very old. Every time she visits her she feels it might be for the last time. She says that she was always preparing herself for the separation, and would have liked to be able to sense when she should be there.

It was true, I thought, the people we love might be gone at any time. And yet Anaïs Nin's relationship with her mother was rather edgy. Isn't that always the way? We love people, and yet . . .

‘Lil wants you to help with the dinner,' said Sophie, coming into the room. ‘She's that done in, she says, and implies it's all my fault.'

I relinquished the book again (
my
book –I'd found it in the bookshop, and I was sure I needed it far more than Sophie did). To compensate, I snatched up the copy of
A Room of One's Own
that I'd bought for Sophie all that time ago –I'm sure Sophie had never even looked at it –and took myself to the kitchen.

A chicken, as pale as lard, sat trussed on a plate in the middle of the table. ‘Sophie won't eat that,' I said. ‘You'll have to open some nutmeat.'

‘It's white meat,' said Lil. ‘That's as good as a vegetable, in my books.'

‘Chooks still have red blood,' I told her. ‘They have mothers. Isn't that a definition of an animal?'

I peeled the potatoes that Lil thrust at me, and topped and tailed the beans.
If I do brilliantly in these exams,
I thought,
it will be a miracle. And I'm up against all these
people who go to private schools, whose parents are lawyers and
everything, and those parents are
even now
cooking them
something really nutritious and good for their brains
-
something like deep-sea fish with a sunflower sprout salad,
washed down with a shot of wheat-grass juice.

While the dinner was cooking, I brought all my stuff down to the kitchen to study. It made an impressive array on the kitchen table –sheets of businesslike diagrams, lined cards scrawled with notes in different-coloured ink, notebooks crammed with summaries, and textbooks decorated with highlighted underlinings. It made me look like a serious student.

Working in the kitchen reminded me of when I was little, and did my homework there, with Lil pottering about taking the lid off one pot and popping a lid on another.

This kitchen was the only one that I had ever known. When we had arrived at Samarkand I was only as tall as the table. I used to creep around under it. It was a different world down there, my own world. Lil had a cat in those days, a striped, slender creature with a bung eye. There had been two bowls in the corner of the room for it, one for meat and one for milk.

The floor covering had been renewed since then. I remember the red-and- black pattern of the old lino. It was black and sticky where it had worn through, as rough as a kitten's tongue. From under the table you could see only legs, and things that had found their way there: stray peas, and dead moths, and a trail of ants to the cat bowls. ‘What are you up to down there?' Lil would ask. ‘Come up here to me.' She'd held out her arms.

I'd spent most of my time in the kitchen with Lil, who handed me a never-ending stream of food. I ate it all gratefully: bread with Vegemite, Saos with tomatoes and cheese, slices of apple cake. ‘You've got hollow legs!'

The rest of the house had been wonderful and mysterious. There were rooms and rooms: rooms that I wasn't allowed into, that belonged to the guests (‘Hello. Who do
you
belong to?' I didn't belong to anyone. If anything, I belonged to the house), and narrow rooms that could be hidden in, among brooms and buckets and shelves full of sheets, still smelling of the sun. There were verandahs, two levels of them, scattered with collapsing chairs and sofas, open to the sky, or shaded by a tangle of trees with red spikes of sunlight shafting through them. Leaves blew onto the verandah and sat in drifts on the floor.

Now, here I was, only months from possibly leaving the place altogether, and I didn't even know exactly how I felt about it, only that the thought sometimes made me miserable, and sometimes exhilarated, and sometimes extremely scared. I felt guilty, too, because I'd put in my choices for university, and hadn't told Lil or Sophie what they were. They assumed I would go to university in Lismore, but I had applied for a university in Sydney as my first choice. I didn't know when I'd get up enough courage to tell them this.

‘You always have been one for spreading yourself,' Lil grumbled, taking the chook from the oven and heaving it onto the table with a bump. Fat splashed all over my carefully arranged notes. I wiped it off with a tea towel.

‘If you will put your things everywhere . . .'

I don't know why I snapped at her the way I did. I said, ‘Well, I'll be leaving soon, and then I won't annoy you!'

Lil turned the potatoes and put the chook back into the oven without a word, and I slowly packed away my books. I took my things to my room, where I immediately burst into tears.

The truth was, I felt less sure about heading off to live in a city than I made out to myself. Cities were unfamiliar to me. We went to the Gold Coast sometimes, but that wasn't a real city, just an endless strip of high-rise buildings running between the mountains and the sea. We went to Brisbane –only a couple of hours away on the bus –to shop occasionally, but I had only been to Sydney once, as far as I could remember.

Lil couldn't get away from Samarkand often, that was the problem, so we'd had very few holidays. The one time we went to Sydney, when I was ten, Lil called a ‘busman's holiday', because she had swapped places with a friend of hers who ran a bed and breakfast in Sydney.

The place in Sydney was a much posher establishment than Samarkand was, and the people expected a higher level of service. It was a big old house close to the city (called, rather grandly, ‘the Mansions'), with a pretty back garden and polished floors, and nicer rooms, with good bedspreads and flowers and ensuite bathrooms. The breakfasts couldn't be just slapped down on tables any old how, and there was a need to be charming to the guests. When Lil got back home to Samarkand she said it was a blessed relief. She never changed places with her friend again.

But the trip to Sydney had a magical charm for me. I loved the idea of all that life throbbing away out there, not far from where we slept. And that life could be stepped out into at any time. Not far from the Mansions there were busy shopping streets. I found shops filled with books, and I loitered in them reading for as long as I decently could. I bought books with whatever money Lil gave to me. That was when I'd bought my copy of
Great Expectations
. It was so pleasingly packed with words, and it looked so grown-up –I kept it for a couple of years as a kind of talisman before I finally got around to reading it. It had promised much, and it didn't disappoint me. It was so full of images of darkness and light, and I saw something of myself in Pip, the boy who wanted to escape his humble origins. It was a book that grew with me, so that each time I read it there was something more, something I'd been blind to at an earlier reading. It was a book I felt I could live with my whole life.

I also discovered Turkish delight. It winked at me from the window of a shop, and I bought two pieces (it was terrifyingly more expensive than chocolate), and took it home to share with Sophie.

It tasted like a rosebud exploding on my tongue, and was as sweet and sticky as soft toffee. I lay on the bed and almost passed out in a sensation of rose-flavoured pink, and when I recovered I sat up and declared, ‘I'm going to come and live in this city when I grow up and eat
nothing
but Turkish delight!'

‘Would you leave me, Katie?' asked Lil, liltingly, shooing me off the bed so I didn't muck up the clean cover.

‘I would,' I told her, callously. ‘Yes, I would.'

I don't know why Lil insisted that we eat together at the table every night, because Sophie usually sat there with a book, and tonight, because I felt sad and confused after my kind-of altercation with Lil, I did too. I started on the book by Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One's Own
, which began by describing two dinners that Woolf went to in the early 1920s, first at a men's college at a university, and then at a women's college. The men were given infinitely better food, and they had wine as well. Virginia Woolf came to the conclusion that ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well . . . A good dinner is of great importance to good talk.'

There was very little talk at our table that night. Far from not wanting to eat meat, Sophie distinguished herself by eating chook and only chook –she wanted no potatoes, peas or pumpkin. She pulled the flesh apart slowly, and ate with her fingers while Hetty stayed clamped to her breast. She looked up from
The Journals of Anaïs Nin
only to tear another piece from the carcass on the platter in front of her. Lil consumed the parson's nose with an air of affronted dignity, deliberately not looking at either of us. Lil considered the parson's nose a delicacy, though it was just pure fat and technically the chook's bum, but she didn't appear to be particularly enjoying it that night. It was a mournful meal, and I thought that Virginia Woolf should have added that one could not dine well unless there was good talk as well.