Secret Scribbled Notebooks (16 page)

I found that there is a point at which you cease to expect someone's arrival; stop listening for a taxi to pull up or for the sound of footsteps on the stairs. I don't think I slept that night, but I must have. I was only aware of the flapping of moths, the hum of mosquitoes, Hetty's breathing, and my own thoughts.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 18

At 5:30 a.m.
Hetty woke, and would not be comforted. Sophie was still not home, and there was no breast milk remaining to feed her. But as I jiggled her on the front verandah in the half-light of morning (bats flying across the sky, back from their evening foraging), hoping not to wake Lil, Sophie returned, coming up the front steps with her shoes in her hands.

She wiggled out of her dress and dropped it on the floor. Sitting down on the bed, she opened her bra and gave Hetty her nipple with a sigh.

And I left them and went to my room and wept.

The English exam went quickly. It seemed that no sooner had we been instructed to turn our papers over than we were being ordered to put down our pens. Three hours passed like ten minutes.

‘
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that
matters,
' Virginia Woolf had urged. ‘
But to submit to the
decrees of the measurers is the most servile of attitudes. To
sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour,
in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand
or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the
most abject treachery
. . .'

I did what Virginia Woolf had advised. I wrote freely. I did not think of headmasters with silver pots in their hands or professors with measuring-rods up their sleeves. I wrote as if I was neither a man nor a woman (it is fatal, Woolf said, to think of your sex): I was woman-manly. I wrote not only of human beings in relation to each other but in relation to the sky and the trees as well. I thought of things in themselves. I quoted the required texts and drew on my additional reading. I wrote with freedom and courage.

I avoided talking to anyone afterwards because I hated post-mortems, and went home and straight to my room. I didn't care what the hypothetical headmasters or professors thought of my work. I had done brilliantly!

And then, of course, I immediately feared that I had done very badly. And I cared very much what the markers of my work thought of it. I went to the kitchen and consoled myself with ten shredded wheatmeal biscuits with butter, and told Lil, when she asked, that the exam had gone okay.

Sophie and Hetty were out, so I filched my copy of
Anaïs Nin
from where it lay on Sophie's floor and went to the park. I lay down on the grass, pulled the book from my bag and gave it a smacking kiss on the cover (the kiss landed on Anaïs Nin's left breast). I found that kissing a book was like hugging a tree. It made me feel better. But because my head was too full, I was unable to read, so I got up to walk through the park.

And there, in the distance, was Sophie. She was lying on the grass, and Hetty was next to her, lying on a bunny rug. Sophie looked as though she was waiting for someone. She was. A man approached, stopping as he got near them. It was Marcus.

Sophie picked up Hetty and got to her feet. Watching from behind a tree, I saw that she was introducing Hetty to Marcus for the first time. He looked dumbfounded and not too pleased. They sat on the ground together and talked. I pressed myself against the bark of the tree and thought I could smell the sap in the trunk. All I heard from Sophie and Marcus was the odd fragment of word.

Marcus got up again. He took a couple of steps and turned round. He went back to Hetty, and wonderingly, he put out one finger and touched her on the cheek. Then he turned and went, without a backwards glance. Sophie bowed her head and looked away.

Hetty lay staring at the sky. She would never remember him at all. She was too young to even watch her father walk away.

The Red Notebook

I found this sitting on my desk today when I got home.

( a note, pasted in)

Dear Persephone/Kate,

I came round to see how your exam went –waited a while in your room for you (hope you don't mind). Maybe I'll see you tomorrow.

Alex

Music: ‘All That Useless Beauty,' Elvis Costello (I can't stop thinking about Sophie and Marcus)

The Wild Typewritten Pages 19

The next day,
Alex drove up in a car. Already, the heat had made a haze over everything, and my skin felt as if it was smouldering.

‘Where did you get that?' Sophie called from the verandah. She wore a piece of cloth tied round her head (to keep the hair off her face), and baby cereal was smeared down the front of her singlet –no bra. She'd lost a lot of the weight she'd put on when she was pregnant, and her cheeks were hollow. Her shoulderblades stood out. I hadn't ever noticed before that her elbows were dimpled. Sophie was all beautiful bones and curves.

‘I borrowed the car from Gavin, at the shop.' Alex grinned, and his face was full of happiness and light. ‘It even has a baby capsule. I thought we could go to the beach.'

In the car, Sophie sat in the front and put her head out of the window like a dog, her hair streaming behind her. The wind was warm and made my mouth dry. I held one of Hetty's fingers as we sat in the back together; Hetty sucked the fist of her other hand furiously, as if sucking was what she'd been put on earth to do. I watched the back of Alex's head. There were lines of hair running down the back of his neck in whorls like a weather map.
Today will be
hot and windy and full of surprises, with possible evening
thunderstorms.

We sat under the trees above the dunes and looked at the sea. A stream of brown water flowed across the rippled sand from a little creek, cutting the beach in two. A flock of gulls stood beside it, as if waiting along a platform for a train. Not far from them, a cormorant sitting in the branch of a casuarina let fall a spurt of shit, which flew gracefully to the ground like a ribbon unfolding.

Sophie sat in an offhand way, her gaze on the horizon. She said, sulkily, ‘Rimbaud –you know, the poet –said that a seagull's shit is as worthy of poetry as a flower.' She hit the flats of both hands against the ground in an impatient, edgy rhythm. ‘And why
should
poets write about beautiful things? There's so much shit in the world.'

‘But that particular shit really was beautiful, the way it moved,' said Alex. ‘Rimbaud must have meant ordinary, boring old bird poo, the kind those seagulls over there must be doing all the time, even though we can't see it from here. But look at the moon,' he said, gesturing towards the white disc of it. ‘That looks worthy of poetry. The flower kind. The world isn't all shit and ugliness.'

‘I bet it stinks,' said Sophie. ‘The stinking moon!'

She looked at the sun. ‘The coruscating sun!'

‘But coruscating is good. It means sending out flashes of light.'

‘Not if it's a boiling hot day and making everyone as cranky as hell.'

Alex pulled Sophie to her feet. ‘Come down for a swim, then. Kate will look after Hetty, won't you?'

‘I love the way the beach stinks,' said Sophie. ‘It's all death and decay. Even sand is the ground-up skeletons of dead things.' She pulled her top over her head and stepped out of her shorts, pulling down the bum of the stretchy old swimmers that she always wore in the river. They were brown with river mud and faded from the sun. Alex took off his shirt. He was golden.

‘The excruciating sea!' he said, as they walked off.

‘Yes! It's full of plastic shit. Supermarket bags. Did you know that they find whales dead with acres of that stuff inside them? How foul is that? Humans. You have to love them. They write poetry about flowers and foul up their own planet.'

Alex dodged a dog turd next to the path, sending up a cloud of flies. ‘An exultation of flies!' he said.

I watched as they made their way to the top of the dunes, tossing words at each other. Alex went down, and held out his hand for Sophie to jump down beside him. ‘Cowabunga!' she yelled.

They raced down to the waves, and Sophie ran straight in, her arms waving in the air like a caricature of someone running into the surf. They dived through the waves together, and came up with their faces and hair streaming water.

They arrived back smelling of salt, and plopped down next to us. Hetty was lying very happily on a rug, looking at the dappled light beneath the trees, her eyes following the patterns. She'd inherited the same pale skin that Sophie and I had, and would always have to watch herself in the sun, too.

‘Swim?' Alex asked me, but I shook my head.

‘Come down for a walk, anyway,' he said.

Cramming on my hat, I took off along the path without waiting for him. At the tideline, I walked with my head down, examining the things that had washed up on the beach. Alex caught me up.

‘So,' he said, ‘you don't swim?'

‘I burn. I get dumped a lot.'

I discovered some little bugs, brightly coloured like jewels, stranded on the sand. Some were on their backs, with kicking legs and bright red bellies. I picked them up, and they started to move around on my hand, and up my arm. They were iridescent, some coloured orange and green, others red and blue. I wondered how they had come here, out of their element, to end up stranded like that.

‘What little survivors,' said Alex. We walked up the beach against the wind, and he picked them up too, until our arms were swarming with beetles. I stood in the glare of the sun, with the sound and sight of the sea all around me, the wind in my ears. This was all there was to my life at the moment. The beach enveloped me.

My hat blew off, and I let it. A beetle had reached my shoulder; it flew up onto my hair, and still I was just sea and sand and wind, bright blue and glaring white, and the battering of air at my ears.

‘Take them up to the dunes!' called Alex. He had retrieved my hat, and held it between his teeth.

We struggled through the soft sand to where tough, grey beach grass crept over the dunes, and put the beetles one by one onto bits of grey vegetation. Alex popped the hat onto my head, and he left his hand there, resting on top of my hat, looking at me. He bent forward as if he was about to kiss me.

‘Don't!' I said, and turned away. ‘I hardly know you,' and started walking away up the beach.

Alex ran to catch up. ‘Why do you say that?'

‘Because I don't. I never knew, for instance, that you were a medical student.'

He laughed, ‘Oh Kate.'

‘Don't laugh at me. You'd think by this stage I should know the least things about you. I don't. And you don't know me.'

‘I know that I like you more than anyone in a long time. I don't need to know
about
you. I know
you
. And anyway, I've seen your diaries.'

This stopped me.

‘When?'

‘Yesterday, when I waited in your room.'

‘And did you read them?'

‘A bit. I read a bit of them. I felt guilty, looking, but you'd have to have a will of iron not to read someone's notebooks. Wouldn't
you
look, if an opportunity came your way?'

I looked past him, at all that blue. ‘I can't even remember what was in them,' I said. ‘I never intended anyone to read them. They were just for me.'

That evening, I stood on the verandah in the dark and watched water spilling over from the overflowing gutters; it was almost like standing behind a waterfall. Sophie had only just now managed to get Hetty to sleep –it hadn't stormed for so long that thunder, lightning and torrential rain must have been a new and startling experience for her. I thought of all the new and startling experiences Hetty had in store for her. Long stretches of life seemed routine and predictable, and then there were the startling bits.

When the storm finished, I went across the road to my fig tree without telling anyone where I was going. I embraced its damp trunk and then hoisted myself up into the dark branches with my notebook between my teeth.

The Red Notebook

Writing in the dark again. It makes me feel free, not being able to see what I'm writing. And, as usual, I am invisible in this tree. My magic cloak.

The truth is today I wanted Alex to kiss me or put his arms around me or something, yet I didn't want him to, as well. I don't want to get involved with someone in the middle of my exams and when I'm planning to go away. If anything happens, I want it to last.

I think about Anaïs Nin relishing her life so much, all the pain and joy. She embraced everything. The world was a continual surprise and delight to her. She considered her life's work to be her life itself, and the recording of it in her journals. Hardly anyone understood her novels, because they were about what goes on inside people's heads. But why should novels be about the big, important things –war and politics and so forth? Why not about the psychology of people, and the way they see the world?

She lived till she was seventy-four –about the same age as Lil is now. The only picture I have of her is the one on the cover, where she is exquisitely young and beautiful. What sort of old woman was she? I bet she kept living her life to the full, and wearing beautiful clothes and putting on make-up, and having lovers, and thinking and writing and feeling and loving her life. Feeling the sun on her skin.

I long to be as brave as she was. When you think of it, living your life
is
what you were put on earth to do. And to do it well.

My options are: stay here, sitting in my tree, being invisible when it suits me, or put on that red dress that Hannah gave me and grow into it.

The Yellow Notebook

Finally, after going to the cafe again and again (she ate an incredible number of plates of seafood spaghetti, though not all at once), the girl with the blonde hair (Katerina) saw the beautiful young man again. Alexander.