Secret Scribbled Notebooks (14 page)

When I got back home, I went straight to Sophie's room, pushing my way through the flimsy curtains that drifted across her doorway to the verandah. Sophie was lying on one elbow, with Hetty beside her. She turned to face me as I came in. She'd been crying.

Sophie hardly ever cried. I thought at first that she must have been reading
Anna Karenina
again. The part where Anna walks under the train and kills herself always devastated Sophie.

She wiped her face and said savagely, ‘Well? What do you want?'

I stood awkwardly, marooned in the middle of the floor. ‘What's the matter?' I asked with dismay. I could see that something more than Anna Karenina was upsetting her.

‘Nothing.'

Hetty turned her head to the sound of her mother's voice.

I dropped to my knees onto the bed and said, ‘It must be something.' Sophie made no reply, and did not look at me.

‘Don't be sad,' I said. ‘Look at Hetty. She's beautiful. How can you be sad when you have her?'

‘It's not the same,' said Sophie. Her voice was muffled.

I knelt there, not understanding.

‘Hetty's not enough for me. I want Marcus, you idiot.'

The Red Notebook

I am sitting on a chair with my legs on the verandah rail. Sophie is swinging Hetty in the hammock. Hetty is stark naked, and Sophie is in an old bikini that barely covers her breasts, and shows her stomach, patterned with silvery stretch marks. The marks remind me of a shoal of small fish, the kind that turn with one accord in a flash of silver.

Sophie kisses Hetty tenderly on each cheek. Then she turns her over and lowers her gently onto her belly, so that they are lying front to front. She strokes Hetty's back, and the two of them close their eyes, basking in the sun like seals.

How vulnerable people are. How tiny and helpless a baby is. Hetty's head is as bald as an egg, and as strong, and tender and fragile too. Her limbs are still so unco-ordinated, her neck a wavery stalk.

I think about what Sophie told me yesterday about Marcus. There is a lot about her relationship with him I don't know. Did she get pregnant on purpose because she knew he would leave soon and she wanted to keep a part of him? Or was she just careless? Did she want sex because that is the closest you can get to someone, and she needs that?

I remember that when we first came here, we craved for Lil to touch us. I remember always holding her hand, and hugging her. I wouldn't let her go. People like us –like me and Sophie –need to be very careful of people. Because we are in danger of doing anything for them, anything for affection.

Now Sophie has gone, and the hammock is hanging empty. It still sways from her being there. It is like having an invisible sister rocking back and forth in front of me.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 15

On this particular day
I had swept the verandahs and hung out my sheets to flap in the breeze. Hetty lay in her basket beside me with her nappy off, with two of my old teddybears, Eugene and Gregor, tucked in with her. I sat with my feet up on the railing and read Virginia Woolf.

It would be on a day like this that our father would arrive. He'd just come to the top of the stairs and . . .

I couldn't imagine what we'd say to each other. My imagination failed me. Hetty kicked her legs, bouncing Gregor around with her feet (he was a tall, athletic, rather Germanic bear, and looked as if he enjoyed it). Squinting into the sunlight, I thought about how enjoyable the warmth of the spring sun was, and how beautiful my perfect feet, before immersing myself in the book again. I read: ‘The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.'

When I looked up, I saw a cheerful
Hi there!
emblazoned on the front of a yellow T-shirt. I put down my book and stood up. ‘Hi there, Alex,' I said, sardonically. Like me, he often wore clothes that he got for next to nothing at an op-shop. Why else would he wear a T-shirt with that on it?

‘Hi,' he said, looking suddenly shy.

‘Well, hello!'

‘Greetings!'

‘Salutations, even. How did you find me?' I never had got round to giving him my address.

‘I hope you don't mind. I saw the name of this place in a newspaper ad.
Samarkand Guest House
, it said. There can't be too many places named Samarkand in this town.'

‘You mean, you really didn't believe that I teleported to northern Afghanistan each night.'

Hetty, as if fed up with this pointless banter, started to complain. I put her nappy back on and picked her up.

‘Is this Hetty,' asked Alex, ‘who used to be known as Anastasia?'

‘Yes. Here, why don't you hold her?' As I handed her over, Hetty threw up, sending a spurt of curdled milk in a parabola down Alex's shirt. I fetched a nappy and attempted to wipe it away, but a yoghurt-like blotch remained.

Sophie came back from her shower, thick hair dripping water. ‘Hetty just threw up on Alex,' I told her, ‘and I can't get it out.'

‘You'll have to take off your shirt so it can be washed out,' Sophie said to him. ‘It'll dry in a minute in this weather.'

I was dispatched to the laundry to wash out the spot by hand. I bent my head to the task, a teenage Lady Macbeth (‘Out, damned spot!'), aware of Alex out on the verandah with Sophie, without his shirt on.

When I got back they had obviously introduced themselves and were deep in conversation, Sophie lying in the hammock with Hetty latched to her breast and Alex leaning against the railing talking and waving one arm about in the air. He had a smooth, hairless brown chest and neat nipples.

Feeling like a servant, I pegged his shirt onto the line. Alex and Sophie continued to rave on to each other, and when the shirt was dry I took it off the line and surreptitiously sniffed at the place where the sick had been. It still smelt slightly of regurgitated milk and, deliciously, ever so faintly of Alex.

I took him around to my room, where he stood and looked about before choosing a collapsing wicker chair in a corner.

‘I like your sister,' he said. ‘You're lucky. I always wanted a brother or a sister. '

‘Yes, sisters can be good to have. Annoying, too, sometimes.'

‘There's just one thing, Persephone. Do you mind if I call you Kate?'

‘Oh. Okay. Why?'

‘Because it's your name,' he said. ‘Though I like the idea of Persephone –didn't she live half her life in the underworld and half on earth? When she's here she brings the spring, doesn't she?'

I said, ‘I'll get us something to eat. Have you had lunch?'

I left him to look after Hetty and ran downstairs and constructed several thick roast lamb and tomato sandwiches. ‘What a lot of food,' he said, when I came back with it.

Being taken by surprise had made me astonishingly hungry, but I tried to eat slowly. Alex chewed thoughtfully, and shook his head politely when I offered him the last sandwich on the plate.

‘So your mother died and you have no brothers and sisters. It must have been lonely for you.'

‘It was. Just me and my father. We used to see a lot of his parents, but he was an only child too, so there were no cousins or anything. I used to love coming up here to see my other grandparents! But then when my mother died, I only did a couple of trips by myself on the plane to see them before they died as well.

‘Until I decided to come back for a while, and revisit the old place.'

He wiped his fingers with a handkerchief which he took from a pocket of his trousers, stood up, and went to scrutinise the pictures I had papered all over my walls. They were a record of everything I had ever liked or taken a fancy to. There was a sheep standing at the top of a chute with an uncertain expression on its face, a line of galahs on an outback fence, a child from the Amazon strapped to its mother's back, and hundreds of others.

‘How long have you been collecting these?' he asked.

‘Years. Almost my whole life.'

‘Yes . . . I can see that.' He knelt down on the floor and looked searchingly at examples of my early period –wonky-edged pictures of fluffy kittens and puppies cut from women's magazines, along with a few well-chosen examples of chocolate cakes and icecream sundaes.

‘I used a stepladder for the later ones.'

‘Uh huh!'

When he lay down on the bed again, it seemed a perfectly natural movement. He was so close I could smell the sweet odour of his skin. He put his hand out to Hetty and she grasped his finger. He wore a bracelet around one wrist, a perfectly plain gold band.

‘So –do your parents run this place?'

‘No. Lil does.'

‘Would that be the old lady I met on my way up the stairs, who told me where you'd be? She seemed to know who I meant when I asked for Persephone.'

‘Yes, that was Lil. We don't have parents.'

Alex looked up at me.

‘They're –not here. We just live here with Lil. She's not related to us or anything.' It sounded so feeble that I wanted to add, childishly, that Sophie and I were just there for a little while. Just till our father got himself sorted out and came back for us. The story that I'd been telling myself my whole life.

Hetty started to wail. She often started up like that, without any whimpering preamble. Hunger for her was not a gradual thing, but a sudden and urgent necessity. I picked her up, and Alex stood up to go, and the moment when I might have told him things had passed.

The Red Notebook

Music: Crowded House, ‘Weather With You'

Spring has hardly begun, but suddenly it's like summer. It's so hot, the sky cloudless, the grass crackling under our feet, bindis spiking our toes. We all sleep fitfully, sheets flung back, our dreams interrupted by mosquitoes. Mozzie nets are brought out, aired on the verandah in the warm, gusty winds, and strung up above beds. We run cool water over our wrists from the tap, douse our heads, and stand in front of the fan. Windows and doors are left wide open, always. Our house is like a tent in the desert. The night is furred and dark.

The Yellow Notebook

The girl with the yellow hair goes again to the cafe, hoping to meet the boy she met there before.

But he isn't there.

Disappointment is like ashes in her throat.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 16

After that, Alex visited
Samarkand often, and it appeared that he was coming round to visit Sophie as much as me. He and Sophie played Monopoly on the verandah while I bent over my books, and their voices floated across to me and made me irritable and anxious that I was missing out on something. Alex turned out to be a Monopoly hog. He bought up whole rows of houses, rented them out for a fortune, accumulated money like a miser. ‘I'm not playing that game with you any longer,' Sophie declared, scooping up the board and tumbling everything into the box with a flick of her hair.

So they played noughts and crosses in a shaded corner of the verandah instead, and cards (Snap, mostly, their hands shooting out like blades), while Hetty lay naked on a bunny rug. I listened to Sophie's shrieks of laughter. She hadn't laughed like that in a long time. She became pink with pleasure. She ran barefoot to the kitchen for lemon drinks, and spilt them off the tray on the way back.

Sophie cut Alex's hair, sitting him on a chair on the verandah, a towel round his neck, a bowl of water and a comb on the verandah rail. She snipped carefully at his dark hair, brushing loose strands away from the nape of his neck with her fingers. I prowled past with a book in my hand, feeling like an outsider. Alex's neck was so smooth, I wanted to reach out and caress it.

One day, after I'd done enough study for the time being, I went down to the park. Sophie and Alex were each sitting on a swing, chatting, drifting idly to and fro with Hetty on Alex's lap. They looked up at me when I arrived as if they'd forgotten who I was.

The exams were only weeks away, then days. Friends from school rang in a panic –they had not, they swore, done nearly enough work. This was obviously an exaggeration, but I told them not to stress. I was laid-back Kate who always pretended I did absolutely no work at all.

Only Marjorie appeared unworried, but her calmness hid a deep panic. She always made cakes when she needed to unwind, and now she began a baking frenzy. She stood in her kitchen with a spotless apron over her dress, sifting soft white flour from a great height into a bowl. She creamed butter and sugar, beat eggs and added them one at a time, spooned batter gently into greased cake tins, and dropped spoonfuls of mixture onto trays, in a ceaseless, tireless rhythm. She made plain sponges, chocolate sponges, butter cakes, butterfly cakes, tea cakes, fruit cakes, ginger cakes, cup cakes, Anzac biscuits, shortbread, melting moments, florentines and scones –many of these on the same day.

‘How about making an orange poppyseed cake, or blueberry muffins?' I asked her, but she looked blank. If it wasn't in
The Australian Women's Weekly Cookbook
, 1970 edition, it wasn't part of her universe.

‘How's your Russian prince?' she asked.

‘He's okay.' I had still not introduced Marjorie and Alex to each other, or told her that he wasn't a Russian prince, just a boy with an interest in politics who lived in an old garage and stacked supermarket shelves at night.

‘Bring him round for tea.'

So I did. I felt rather nervous about suddenly placing together two important people in my life, in case some previously unknown chemical reaction might take place. As Alex sat down at the table I watched out for fizzings, foamings or explosions, but there were none. They watched each other shyly, and said very little. But there wasn't much need for talk anyway, there was too much food to be admired and eaten. Teaspoons tinkled against bone china; Marjorie got up to refill the teapot.

Alex ate sparingly and, despite my best efforts, there was still plenty left over. Marjorie urged us to take the rest with us. I took some home to Sophie, and Alex dropped the rest in to the people at Hope Springs.