Secret Scribbled Notebooks (18 page)

The Wild Typewritten Pages 21

It was the day
I found him at his typewriter, writing a letter to his father, that he told me he'd decided to go away. Afterwards, I couldn't remember his exact words, but they were something like: ‘I can't live in Vivienne's garage for the rest of my life.'

He got up from the typewriter and made two cups of strong coffee. He held a cup in each hand, and while he talked he moved his hands about, so that liquid splashed over the tops onto the floor. ‘I've thought about what I want to do. I know now I'm never going to write that novel. I've applied to go back into Medicine next year. Before –when I dropped out –I felt that I'd just rushed into university after school. You know, you do your final exams, and then you get your marks, and you do a uni course –without ever thinking about who you are or where your life is taking you. I think some people spend their whole lives like that –just doing what is expected of them. Being busy all the time. No time to think, or reflect. No time to hang about doing nothing much.' He finished, looked down with surprise at the cups he held in his hands. He gave me one.

I couldn't take it in. Even though Alex's living situation looked temporary and makeshift in the extreme, this all seemed very sudden. He looked at me with a mixture of embarrassment and pleading. ‘You'll be going away soon yourself, won't you?'

‘Maybe.' I was feeling less and less sure about this. It depended on how I did in the exams, and whether I got into the course I wanted, and money, and getting up the courage to tell Lil –too many variables to be sure. I took a sip of coffee, and it was strong and bitter.

‘But you're not going straight away?'

‘No, not straight away.'

‘After my exams finish?'

‘Sometime soon after that.'

‘Don't look like that,' he pleaded. ‘We'll always know each other. We're friends, aren't we? It's not the last you'll see of me, you know that.'

And before I left he handed me a book he had sitting on his table:
Good Blonde & Others
, by Jack Kerouac.

Soon after this, I saw him with Hannah in the street, Hannah eating an enormous icecream, which she handed to him for a lick. As he took it, Hannah bumped into him accidentally-on-purpose with her hip, and he smilingly took a bite of the icecream and then bumped her back, and I crossed to the other side of the street before they could see me. I envied Hannah, with her rounded, womanly body, and her easy way with people.

My solution to any problem: Get lost in a book. I went back to Anaïs Nin, and read her account of her mother's death.

I wrote in the Red Notebook:

She said that the pain was deeper than at her father's death. ‘I didn't love her well enough.'

She couldn't concede her love for her mother because it would have meant accepting beliefs and attitudes that were a threat to her existence. Her mother wanted her to be someone other than the woman she was. She wanted Anaïs to be the submissive child she once was. So she had to fight her mother's influence. But as soon as her mother died, her rebellion collapsed.

How hard it must be to break away from one's parents.

If one had them.

The Red Notebook

Good Blonde & Others
, by Jack Kerouac: given to me by Alex on a day I don't even want to think about; was once $5 at Hope Springs

I have smelt it to see if has absorbed any of Alex's scent (which is, exactly ??? I can't describe it). Anyway, I don't think it has; it just smells of book.

I have put it away till later. It will always remind me that Alex is going. Soon will be gone.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 22

I stood in a boutique
with a strapless piece of magenta taffeta somehow clinging to my torso, while down below a foam of ruffles danced about my ankles. I scowled at myself in the mirror.

I looked vile. My feet (my elegant feet, my radiant feet) poked out the bottom of the dress, and they were the only lovely thing about me. I thought it was very unfair that feet must be encased in shoes on all but the least formal occasions, for they would have been my saving grace.

I was looking for something to wear to the school formal and I could find nothing. I went to shop after shop with increasing despair. In a vintage clothing place I found a pink checked thing with a shirred and beaded bodice that made me look like a birthday cake. In every single dress I tried on I looked like someone other than myself, but exactly who that was I couldn't work out. Actually, at that time, I was at odds with everything.

Alex had booked to go on the bus the morning after the Formal. He hadn't planned it that way, but it had happened, and he didn't want to change it. He said what difference did it make? Alex was all for slipping away without any fuss being made; he didn't even want me to come and see him off. ‘My family has always been bad at goodbyes,' he said. ‘We hate saying them. My grandparents never got to say goodbye to any of the people they lost in the war. So we never make a big deal about departures. You'd think it'd be the opposite, but it's not.'

The idea of Alex just going without some sort of farewell made me cry inside. I missed him already, and couldn't bear to go and visit him.

‘Do you know what?' I told Sophie, when I arrived home from my fruitless shopping expedition, ‘I wish I could just wear a suit, like the boys.'

‘No girl would wear a suit to a formal,' said Sophie. She sounded so dismissive, so sure she was right.

‘I would! Why not? Men always know exactly what to wear for a formal occasion, whereas women . . .'

‘Yes, that would be just like you, Kate, to wear a suit.'

‘Would it?'

‘That was meant as a criticism.'

‘But why not?'

‘Indeed. If you want to make a spectacle of yourself. But I have any number of dresses here that would do. You wouldn't look exactly glamorous, but at least it would look as if you'd tried.'

Hetty had been feeding voraciously at Sophie's breast, but now she smiled at me with a milky, gummy mouth, and her generosity made me warm to the world and forgive Sophie at once.

Sophie had turned out to be a champion breast-feeder. ‘You know, I think. I've found something that I'm really good at,' she had told me. ‘After I've weaned Hetty I could be a wet-nurse. I bet there are any number of professional women out there who want to return to work but still want breast-milk for their babies.' While she fed Hetty she leafed through a university admissions book. It was too late to put in an enrolment for next year, but she was thinking of the year after.

‘I could do an Arts degree here in Lismore,' she said. ‘And then, if I wanted a job, I could do a Dip. Ed. and be an English teacher.' She frowned. ‘Not exactly inspiring, is it? But better than spending my entire life as a waitress. What I really want to be is a Buddhist monk. I saw in the paper the other day about an eighty-something woman who had become one. I could shave my head and wear yellow robes.'

‘There's that suit in Lil's cupboard,' I said, not able to abandon the idea of it.

‘Oh, Kate, please . . . Here, hold Hetty. If I went to uni here we'd be doing much the same classes, probably, except that you'd be a year ahead. You could hand your textbooks on to me.'

‘But I'm not going to uni here. Not if I can help it.'

‘Oh?'

‘I applied for a course in Sydney.'

‘Does Lil know this?'

‘No, I haven't told her.'

‘That will cost a fortune, living down there.'

‘I've been saving. And I'll get a job. I can do anything –I'd clean toilets if I had to. I've had enough practice. Here, take Hetty, I'm going to look at that suit.'

I went to Lil's room and found the suit, tucked at the very end of the rail. I had never looked at it properly, but now I drew it from its sheath of black plastic and sniffed it. It smelt very strongly of mothballs, but at the same time it seemed familiar and comforting.

It had belonged to Alan, Lil's dead son, and I regarded it with something like awe. It would be almost blasphemous to wear it, wouldn't it? Lil just about worshipped Alan. I remembered a time when Lil had cried so much I thought she'd never stop. That must have been when Alan died. I'd stood at the doorway of Lil's bedroom, watching her, fearing to go near her. I thought that Lil would drown in tears and take me with her.

I stood with my hands at my sides, and watched, feeling helpless. I knew that Lil was lost to me. I turned and ran to the kitchen, where I sat under the table with the cat. Sophie had tried to haul me out by one arm, but I wouldn't be hauled. I sat with my head curled over my knees, rolled up like a slater.

There were more footsteps. Lil's face appeared, upside down. ‘Come on, madam,' she said. ‘There's no need to go hiding under there. You're too old for that now.'

She'd held out her arms. ‘Come out and give us a cuddle,' she said.

She came in as I stood holding up the suit.

‘What are you up to?'

‘I look horrible in frocks. I wondered if I could wear this to the formal.'

‘I have never heard of anything so . . .' Lil sighed. Exasperated, that's what she was. She often said that I exasperated her.

‘Oh, come on, you,' she said. ‘Try it on then. If you must. Then you'll see.' She sounded so ominous I wanted to say, ‘See what?'

I peeled off my clothes while Lil unearthed a white shirt from the cupboard. I dressed. First the shirt, yellowed a bit with age, then the trousers, light and scratchy on my legs, and the jacket, shrugged on over my shoulders. I looked into the mirror.

I was transformed. I was tall and elegant in that suit, and I looked wonderful. As I approached the full-length mirror my face wore a look of breathless disbelief and appreciation.

‘It will never do,' said Lil briskly.

I turned to her questioningly.

‘It looks simply dreadful. Dressed like a man!'

‘I love it! I love how I look.' I was amazed that Lil couldn't see how stunning I looked.

‘People will say I don't know how to look after you properly. It's bad enough that Sophie . . .'

‘I'm going to wear it!'

‘Not while you're under my roof!'

‘Well, before too long I won't
be
under your roof!'

I rushed on heedlessly. ‘I'm going to university in Sydney next year, and then I'll be gone and you won't need to worry about what people think of me!'

Lil said nothing for a long time. Then she reached up and removed some imaginary fluff from the front of the suit.

When I had first come to Samarkand, when I was still small enough to fit easily under the table, a terrible thing had happened.

Lil and I had eaten sandwiches, sitting on the verandah sofa together. Lil had put a sandwich on a plate for each of us, and when I finished mine (I don't think I'd ever eaten a sandwich off a plate in my life) I tossed my plate onto the floor.

It made a shattering noise that radiated out until the entire world was exploding with the smash of crockery. I closed my eyes and curled up and put my hands over my ears. I had smashed the world and was waiting for the punishment.

Lil's sadness was harder to bear than her anger would have been. She presented no more objections to my wearing Alan's suit, and aired it on the verandah, then pressed it neatly. On the night of the formal I found that a clean white shirt and a bow tie had been laid out on my bed.

I dressed.My radiant feet were covered by socks and flat black shoes. They would be my secret beauty, and glow down there unappreciated the whole night long.

Lil sat me down to brush my hair. This was something she had always done when I was little, a before-school ritual, to make sure I looked decent. Now she ran the brush through my long hair, and strands came away on the suit, glittering red. Lil plucked them from the fabric and went to the window, and allowed each hair to fly away from her fingers. While she brushed, she talked about Alan, how he had loved words and adventure so much that he went and became a journalist, and was away overseas a lot of the time. Which was what he'd been doing when he was killed, in a bus accident on a narrow road somewhere in Asia.

I felt like a child again, having Lil tugging at my hair with the brush, and I liked being the focus of her attention for a while. I leaned back and closed my eyes and wondered if Lil ever wished that she had Alan still, instead of me and Sophie. It was strange, the way she'd acquired two girls, and then, not long afterwards, lost her only son, as if some force in the world was intent on evening things up.

As if she had read my thoughts, Lil said, ‘Ah well, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.'

She put down the brush and got me to stand up, turning me round and reaching up to fix the collar of my shirt.

‘You'll do,' she said softly.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 23

‘Marjorie's here!'
announced Sophie, coming round the verandah with Hetty in her arms.

For Marjorie, there had been no what-to-wear problem. She already had a rather fetching little dress that I was sure she had packed into her suitcase in a moment of prescience when she'd slipped through time from the 1950s all those years ago. Now she came running up the steps in her shoes like ballet slippers, her short gathered skirt with hot pink and black checks bouncing around her. Her hair was dark as coal, her skin as white as snow, her lips as red as blood; she looked very lively and rather flushed.

I kissed Hetty a hasty goodbye, and then paused in front of Lil. She was the one who moved first. She reached one hand up to my face, and patted it. ‘Have a nice evening,' she said.

Marjorie's mother was chauffeuring us in her old Holden. In the back of the car I chewed my nails and peered from the window. ‘They might think we're gay,' I worried.