Secret Scribbled Notebooks (15 page)

The next time I invited Alex to tea at Marjorie's, he declined.

‘Why? Don't you like Marjorie?'

‘No. That's not it,' he said, and looked uncomfortable. ‘Marjorie is fine –she's lovely.'

Then he said, ‘It's because there's too much. Too much food. Too many urgings to eat. I hate that. It reminds me of my grandparents.'

But I saw Alex and Marjorie together in the park one day. They were sitting cross-legged, face to face, ripping leaves apart as they talked, their fingers working avidly. Marjorie's bicycle lay sprawled beside her on the grass, and she still wore her helmet, crammed on top of the straw hat she always wore when she went out. The day was stinking hot, and her cotton dress was limp; even Marjorie couldn't always look immaculate in this heat. But she was so absorbed in her conversation with Alex that there was a kind of luminosity about her. Neither of them noticed me at all, and I walked on, feeling lost.

Alex came to the cafe one Saturday afternoon, where he sat for hours with a strong black coffee, poring over the newspapers with his forehead creased and his fingers playing around his mouth and chin. People kept coming up to him –the thin boy who sold the socialist newspapers, a bouncy girl in overalls with dark curls and the face of an Italian madonna, an older man with grey hair in Volley sandshoes with the backs cut out of them. Alex greeted them with a delighted smile and gestured for them to sit down. At one stage there were six people at Alex's table, all talking at once, scribbling things on bits of paper and arguing and laughing. Then they drifted off one by one and it was just Alex again.

‘Can I get you something, Alex?' called Hannah, heading past with a tray full of drinks.

‘Oh yes, thanks,' he said, ‘Another coffee?'

‘Do you know him?' I asked her. It was the first time I'd seen him in the Dancing Goanna.

‘Alex? Oh yeah, he comes in all the time. Everyone knows Alex.'

So when I had thought that Alex was mine alone –my secret –it turned out that he belonged to everybody. It deflated me.

When Hannah delivered his coffee (with a complimentary biscuit on the side, I noticed!), she stood talking with him for ages, and I thought she looked particularly lovely that day, all rounded breasts and curvy hips and glossy hair. And Alex drank her in (He did! It was plain for anyone to see), and his eyes were all sparkly and his mouth particularly pleased.

How did Hannah do that? Look (and surely feel) so in possession of her own body? How did she inhabit her clothes so that they enhanced her, whatever they happened to be?

Alex left the cafe just before we closed up, waving to both Hannah and me equally. I went home and took the red dress that Hannah had given me, the dress that I could have had adventures in and which I'd hung on the back of my door like a graceful, supple version of myself, and crumpled it into the bottom of my cupboard.

The Red Notebook

Midnight.

Oh Alex. Where are you? Are you packing supermarket shelves with Omo and instant noodles? Are you sitting at your typewriter are you thinking of your mother are you are you?

The Red Notebook

I am sitting in my fig tree and it's the middle of the day and searingly hot. It is also far from secluded –people from offices downtown drive here to sit in their cars or on the bank of the river to eat their lunches, so there are people all around –but in this tree I have always felt invisible, because it is my own world.

Music: ‘Hey Joe' by Jimi Hendrix, blaring from a car stereo. I will write this quickly and leave.

Dear Red Notebook, I want no one to ever read you.

Because I want to tell you things I would tell no one else.

I always thought that my mother would turn up one day. But now I have to admit to myself that she won't. Well, probably won't, because you can never say never ever, can you?

I keep thinking about how a woman could ever leave her children. I think of her in that red dress, running off for adventures and God knows what. Running away from us, because whatever she wanted to do, we were obviously stopping her from doing it.

I look at Hetty and I love her more than anything in the world. Even though she is so tiny and helpless, she is very strong. I get the feeling that soon nothing will stop her. Her life is all about movement and doing and being!

I don't know how I could ever leave her, and I'm not even her mother.

How
can
I ever leave her?

I'm getting cold feet about going away, and I haven't even told Lil or Sophie yet about my university choices. That I have chosen (chosen!) to go somewhere away from here, away from them. (Whether I get accepted or not is another matter. But I will. Won't I? And if I do, will I have the necessary $$$ to go?)

Now I am talking to myself, Red, instead of to you. But you are me, aren't you? That is the point of you. Talking to you is like talking to myself.

The Red Notebook

Here I am already, scribbling again. No music. Hetty sleeping.

Tonight: dinner.

It is so hot, but Lil insisted on cooking roast lamb. I couldn't eat it. Tomorrow is my first and most important exam, English. Lamb and roast potatoes is impossible. Such a meal would clog up my brain cells. Fish! I needed fish!

So I ripped open a can of sardines and ate them from the tin, standing at the sink. I crunched into the little bones like a cat, chewing and chewing. The sardines made me feel ill –they were oily and warm and nasty –but I had to eat them anyway as Lil was sitting there with an air of wounded pride, working her way through the meal she had spent so long cooking.

I hate myself sometimes for my cruelty and tactlessness. Anyway, now what's done is done.

Sophie (a vegetarian when she wants to be) pushed a couple of roast potatoes round her plate and then said she wanted to go out.

So now I am here looking after Hetty, and Lil is annoyed with Sophie and me for various reasons (me for eating the sardines and Sophie for going out). And I can only say that Tolstoy was right when he said at the beginning of
Anna Karenina
that each family is unhappy in its own way.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 17

I lay on the bed
with Hetty and watched as Sophie got ready to go out.

She had borrowed a dress from Carmen, made of stretchy material in shades of purple that drifted across the fabric like high clouds. It was a body-hugging dress that you had to wriggle round on your hips till it sat right. The neckline could either modestly conceal the tops of your breasts or, if you pulled it down a bit, reveal them alluringly. Sophie tried it both ways and decided on the concealed look (to be mysterious is more flirtatious). It had a hemline that made it look like a short dress from the back, and a long dress from the front. Sophie surveyed it from all angles in the mirror, screwing up her eyes and getting a sour expression to her mouth.

Then she took it off and put on one of her own limp dishrag dresses.

I often watched Sophie, hoping to know her better, because she rarely confided in me. Since Hetty was born, we had often lain on her bed together reading. I'd noticed how Sophie often unconsciously touched her own body, lying on her back with the book held at arm's length above her, running the fingers of her other hand lightly across the bones of her hips and the mound of her stomach. Or she sat cross-legged on the bed, the book in front of her, her neck bowed, pressing the bones of her upper spine and rubbing her back. She touched her face, too, tracing a finger around the shape of her lips, or smoothing the hair away from her forehead. It was as if, while she was reading, lost in another world, she was also reassuring herself of her own boundaries.

Sophie took off the dishrag and put Carmen's dress on again. ‘I've expressed some milk –it's in the fridge labelled breast milk,' she said, approaching the mirror anxiously without her glasses on, fluffing up her already voluminous hair. ‘How do I look?'

‘Like a tart.' We both loved that word, which was one of Lil's favourites.

‘Good,' said Sophie. She put on her glasses. With Carmen's dress, they gave her the air of a librarian who was waiting for someone to ravish her. ‘I am, after all, a loose woman,' she said with the hint of a question in her voice.

‘A woman with a Past.'

‘Exactly.'

Sophie crammed her feet into a pair of high-heeled sandals and stood poised, as if for flight. She had such an air of heightened expectation that it made me breathless. I had offered to look after Hetty so Sophie could go out, but now I wanted to tie my sister down; take her hand and sit her on the bed and order her, ‘Stay.' I had the feeling that Sophie was a woman who was about to Do Something. It was that dress, her air of distraction, the faint odour of guilty delight that she had somehow acquired as she dressed.

Sophie pecked Hetty on the cheek and was halfway out the door when she turned around with a stricken expression. She took Hetty from my arms and kissed her again, avidly. ‘Look after her for me, Kate?' she said, and went quickly.

Her final words disturbed me, with their hint of a plaintive question. And Hetty seemed aware that her mother had left the house, and wouldn't settle. I was so sick of her bored grizzles that I ended up spending ages walking around the verandah with her in my arms. The noises she made were designed to set teeth on edge, and they succeeded; I tried to soothe her by constant jiggling and soft words of love, but I felt that it was Sophie she wanted.

Oh, Sophie.
I wanted her back as well. I kept thinking of the way she had dressed herself earlier, and her critical edginess about her appearance. But why shouldn't I look after Hetty for an evening? Or even for longer? I didn't think of Hetty as entirely Sophie's. Hetty was my responsibility, as well. She had chosen not only Sophie to be her mother, but me to be aunt.

I took stock of Hetty. She was growing and developing steadily. But it was slow, slow, slow. I was impatient for her to crawl and to run and to walk. I couldn't wait till she learned to talk. I longed to discuss Virginia Woolf with her, and see whether she liked the plays of Oscar Wilde as much as Sophie did.

I gave her a bottle of milk, and she slept. But I was incapable of settling down to study. I stood at the window of my room and looked out into the darkness. On the other side of the trees, a laneway ran along the back of the house, and I could hear people strolling through it, talking to each other. ‘Come on!' demanded a loud male voice. ‘Hurry up!'

At night the town took on a kind of glamour. Lights glittered along roads and through the trees. Mysterious shadows lurked in the dense vegetation that surrounded most of the houses. There was something exotic in the warmth of the air and the fragrance of leaves and flowers. I knew that on verandahs everywhere there was the glow of cigarettes and the occasional rattle of conversation. If you walked through the streets you'd catch glimpses of people in houses as transparent as fishtanks, sitting at desks under reading lamps, or dancing by themselves in dimly lit rooms.

Somewhere out there was Sophie, in her tight purple dress.

While I stood admiring the night, Marjorie rang.

‘I thought I'd call you to wish you luck,' she said.

‘Gee, thanks. I'll need it. What's that noise?'

‘I'm whipping some egg whites with sugar till stiff peaks form. For lemon meringue pie. Can I come over? I'm so nervous I think I'll go mad.'

‘Of course.'

‘I'll have to wait for the pie to cook.'

An hour and a half later, from a deck chair on the front verandah, I heard the sound of a 1965 Holden as it growled its way up the street. Marjorie pulled up on the grassy square in front of Samarkand in her mother's car, and waltzed up the steps with a warm lemon meringue pie in her hands.

We cut ourselves large slices of pie, and I filled two glasses with wine from Lil's cask, and we sat on the sofa outside my room, speaking softly so as not to wake Hetty. ‘Well, this is it,' said Marjorie. ‘The thing I've been working for my whole life.'

‘These exams? You can't have been.'

‘Slight exaggeration.' Marjorie took a sip from the wine and sat her uneaten pie on the floor.

I could see her anxiety in the hunch of her shoulders, and the way she stared out at the night without seeing it. A flying fox flapped away through the trees, its strong wingbeat cutting the air. Hetty squawked and then was silent.

Marjorie looked down at her feet, clad in little black shoes like ballet slippers. ‘I can't see beyond them,' she said.

‘I can,' I told her. ‘Beyond these exams is . . . life! The rest of our lives!'

‘But we have to get through them first.'

I wanted to tell her,
Stop fretting. You'll do fine in the
exams! Before you know it you'll be operating on people's
spleens!

But I didn't. I looked out into the night.

‘You didn't tell me Alex was a medical student!' said Marjorie.

A picture came into my mind of the two of them, sitting on the grass the other day, talking.

‘He told me he was taking a year off while he thought about what he wanted to do. That was really interesting to me –we talked for ages. You might have told me
that
about him!'

He might have told me that about himself.

Marjorie stood up. She had hardly touched her drink, or her pie. ‘Anyway I'd better go and get some sleep. And so had you.'

She looked such a small creature as she walked down the darkened front steps; she heaved the door of the car open and it clunked shut behind her. I watched the red eyes of the taillights as the car groaned its way up the road and disappeared, and then went to check on Hetty, who was still sleeping soundly.

I took a sip of the water I kept beside my bed, climbed under the mosquito net and switched off the light. It was well after midnight, and Sophie still wasn't home.