Secret Scribbled Notebooks (2 page)

She let me in the back door. Her excitement (‘A girl!' she kept saying, as if she couldn't believe it, ‘A girl!', though I'd been telling her for months that was what the baby would be) . . . her excitement finally allowed the whole amazing thing to sink into me, and we jumped up and down on the spot for a little while, though this was something neither of us would normally do.

We made hot chocolate. Marjorie was in her mauve chenille dressing-gown, and her knobbly sleeve kept brushing against my arm as she moved about the kitchen. Despite the jumping up and down I was still in a daze, and Marjorie took hold of me and sat me down in a chair. Marjorie's parents came out in their dressing-gowns. ‘It's a girl,' I told them. ‘We're calling her Anastasia.'

‘Ah, the legendary survivor of the Romanovs,' said Marjorie's father, raising both eyebrows and stirring his chocolate with a slow, even movement. He was a doctor, a general surgeon, tall and thin, with humorous, watchful eyes and hairy wrists.

I sat at the table and savoured the warm, full feeling that welled up inside me. It was a feeling that was absolutely new to me, and I sat and talked to Marjorie and her family and basked in it until Marjorie's mother stood up to make toast.

It was then I remembered that Lil would be wanting help with the breakfasts at Samarkand, so I tore myself away and pedalled like a mad thing through the streets that were already crawling with leisurely cars.

Samarkand was still shrouded in mist, and it rose up like an apparition, enormous, ramshackle and old. It sat on a bend in the river, like a monument to earlier times, and had a view up an uninhabited stretch of water fringed by trees. Standing on top of high timber stumps (the underneath was a barren area regularly swept through by floods), it was two-storeyed, weatherboard, with deep verandahs, and a staircase zig-zagging up the front, punctuated by landings. The galvanised iron roof was almost entirely red with rust.

I dumped my bike at the bottom of the steps and bounded up them, two at a time. SAMARKAND, said a nameplate fixed to the wall near the front door, in mirrored letters on oiled wood. If I peered into the worn, silvered surface, I could make out the tops of trees, and the sky, and bits of my own face –an eye, a scrap of red hair, a freckled forehead.

I used to pause and gaze from the verandah, across the square grassed area directly in front, not quite a park, with a line of palm trees down one side. In front of that was a road, then the river. My secret childhood cubby was down there –an enormous fig tree which looked almost human, but which I also imagined was a rambling, spacious house, full of long corridors and secluded rooms.

But I didn't have the luxury of daydreaming now, with breakfasts to be served. Lil was in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl with one hand and throwing the shells onto a plate, where they landed with a brittle sound. She had bandy legs and hunched shoulders; she seemed to be shrinking inside her skin each day. The sun streamed in through the windows onto the worn green walls. The coloured panels at the top of each window –gold, purple, green –threw jewelled squares of light into the room. It was an ugly room, but this morning it looked beautiful.

I made piles of toast (I love toast, and think one should eat as much of it as possible), took it out to the dining room and went back to fetch the scrambled eggs. At the largest table that morning was a young man with a mournful face and long matted hair and bare feet, and a woman who kept crumbling her toast into bits and pushed away her plate of eggs without appetite. They were not together, but it appeared to me that they matched. At a small table next to them, a shabby businessman bent anxiously over a sheaf of papers, sipping coffee.

‘I'm sorry, we're a bit at sixes and sevens this morning,' said Lil, bustling into the room, ‘but Sophie had her baby in the early hours. Imagine! A girl! Anastasia, her name is. She's beautiful –I'm over the moon, I can tell you!' She beamed at all the guests in turn and twirled around and danced back into the kitchen.

The guests had no idea who Sophie was, but Lil's joy infected them, and they smiled shyly at each other with wary eyes. Their bodies softened and relaxed; they swayed gently like tentacled creatures in a rockpool stirred by a passing current. The thin woman pulled her plate towards her and began to eat, after all. The mournful young man leaned across and asked the businessman whether he minded if he looked at his newspaper.

I could see through to the kitchen where Lil was dancing to music from the radio. She moved easily and gracefully, her arms above her head and her feet making intricate patterns on the floor like a Greek dancer. Lil often danced alone this way. She sashayed into the dining room and threw her tea-towel and apron onto the back of a chair. ‘I'm done in,' she said. ‘Let's leave the dishes in the sink for once; I'm going to get some sleep.'

I hoed into my breakfast, my head full of the baby. This
girl
, whom Sophie had named
Anastasia
. Neither of these words seemed to do her justice. I remembered her private little face as she lay sleeping against Sophie's breast. She seemed to me to be not so much a child as a flower bud, or a newly-emerged butterfly, damp, enfolded, and full of promise.

The Red Notebook

Music: Rickie Lee Jones, ‘Chuck E's in love'

Found at Hope Springs:

A Room Of One's Own
, by Virginia Woolf, $3

The Journals of Anaïs Nin, Volume Five
, $4

also, a boy (beautiful), brown and slender, whose name I don't yet know

So far, Red, you are the only notebook I have written in. Yellow and Blue lie languishing, waiting for me to feel the urge to use them. But what shall I write in them? I feel your impatience. You want more from me than random scribble, but will you get it? (Wonder all you like –only time will tell.)

I want, I want, I want . . . At this point I'm just a mass of seething wants, but what I want I'm not really sure of. (Like going to the fridge and opening it, ‘letting all the cold air out' as Lil complains, and not knowing what it is you want to eat. You stand with the door open hoping that something will inspire you.) I'm standing with the door open at the fridge of life, and I want.

Sometimes I think I'd be happy if I could just make sense of all the fragments of my life.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 2

The day Anastasia was born
I went out and bought three notebooks with shiny covers and fragrant paper to scribble down my secret thoughts. Three was probably excessive, but I couldn't choose which one I liked best: the red, the blue or the yellow. I love stationery, and can never resist a fragrant piece of paper or a pen with a nice grip that writes in a pleasing way upon the page.

Then I went off to find a book for Sophie. Down an alleyway off one of the shopping streets is a place with the tantalising name of Hope Springs. It's a second-hand bookshop run for charity, and the proceeds go to projects in East Timor and refugee support. I went there sometimes because it had an air of possibility, and I love all places where books are gathered en masse. At Hope Springs the books were like flotsam and jetsam that had been washed up by the tides. All sorts of unexpected little treasures were possible. I imagined that the books would be encrusted with barnacles and salt, spilling sea water when you opened them, but I only ever saw an occasional silverfish and a lot of dark spotting on the pages, like the marks on old people's hands. But against the evidence of all those sad, unwanted books, I went there the afternoon after Anastasia was born because I felt a trickle of hope (hardly a spring) that there might be something there that Sophie would like.

The shop is staffed by volunteers, a changing cast of people who give the general impression of advancing age and wispy beards and unironed clothing. But on this particular day there was a boy there, not much older than me, with a slim, slightly stooped body, olive skin, and a graceful, rather hooked nose. He stood beside me and gave a hint of a smile as he placed a book on the shelves. His fingers were long and brown and slender, and so were his eyes. Every part of him was brown and slender. Someone, somewhere, had constructed him perfectly.

There is nothing like browsing in a bookshop for covertly observing someone. I felt that the boy was observing me too, but we were both also eavesdropping on the conversation between two other customers. They were middle-aged people with shapeless bodies clad in jeans and big shirts, and were lamenting the lack of standards in written English these days: the mis-use (or even non-use) of apostrophes, the bad grammar that cropped up even in Published Books, and the dirty-mindedness and lack of plot in these same Published Books. Finally they walked out of the shop, and the boy and I looked over at each other at the same time.

‘I hope you know where to place an apostrophe,' he said, softly.

‘I most certainly do. A badly placed apostrophe is something that really turns my stomach.'

‘And I hope you always observe the correct English usage.'

‘I wouldn't dream of corrupting our fine language. And as for Plot –if I ever write a book, I will make sure it has a good, soundly constructed Plot.'

‘I don't know how these Modern Novels get published,' he said, shaking his head, still in the same deadpan voice.

‘It's a scandal and a disgrace.'

At that same moment I found a book by a writer called Virginia Woolf. It was called
A Room of One's Own
, and though it looked very dull from the outside, with a stained hard cover with no dustjacket or picture on it, I opened it and liked the way the words were put together. It was about women and fiction and looked just the thing for Sophie. I also found (I'd been looking in the ‘Women's Literature' shelves –how ridiculous, bookshops never have a section called ‘Men's Literature') a book whose cover photograph attracted me at once. On it, a woman reclined on a bed with her hands behind her head and stared frankly at the camera, her pale face framed by a mass of dark hair.
This is who I am
, she seemed to be saying. She wore a lacy-looking blouse patterned with dark leaves, and had an exquisite china-doll face, with thin eyebrows and a cupid's-bow mouth.
The
Journals of Anaïs Nin
, the book was called.

I took the two books to the table that was used as a counter, and the boy came over to serve me. He smiled when he saw what I was buying, but he didn't comment and, despite our earlier banter, I felt suddenly tongue-tied. I paid for the books and left without asking his name or anything, but once I was out on the street I regretted it. I wanted to go back at once, because I couldn't wait to see him again, but I was too shy to turn round.

I gave
A Room of One's Own
to Sophie that afternoon, but could see that it would be a while till she would be strong enough for such a book. All her desire for something
interesting
to read had disappeared; she declared that her fanny was so sore she doubted it would ever recover (the other women in the room looked at each other and tittered), but that she was still blissfully ecstatic. She added almost balefully that the feeling would probably wear off when the hormones that had kicked in just after the birth wore away. She exchanged glances with the other new mothers around her, as if they were in an exclusive club together.

She slipped the book into a drawer, not even glancing at it, and devoured the chocolate I had brought without offering me any.

I went to see Sophie in hospital every day. On one visit she wept bitter tears, and complained that she leaked from almost every orifice; she waddled to the toilet with enormous pads stuffed down her pants; she held nappies to her breasts to staunch the flow of milk that welled from them at inconvenient times. Otherwise, she seemed very happy. She read snatches of Oscar Wilde and snorted with laughter. She undressed Anastasia and inspected her for any flaws or imperfections and found none. I wondered if she also searched for any resemblance to the man who was the father, but if she did she said nothing. Mostly, Sophie just lay beside her baby and gazed at her. ‘She's just perfect,' she said.

Naked, Anastasia was all secret folds of skin, and surprising hairiness. Her mouth was fleshy and dimpled, with all the twirls and convolutions of a flower, her fingers a group of blind, plump grubs. I learned that a baby is not simply a larger person in miniature, but a creature with an almost entirely different terrain. Everything was in the right place but shaped so differently that I was awed to think that she would one day resemble a real, flawed person. Anastasia had the disposition of a baby bird, and either rested in a state of flaccid, helpless dreaminess, or reared up urgently, demanding food.

Because I was at the hospital so often, I was there when the nurses taught Sophie to bathe her, and learned how to test the temperature of the water, unwrap her from the layered confusion of her clothing, and wipe her small protesting face with a warm cloth. I learned how to immerse her in tepid water, where she hung suspended peacefully on my arm like a creature returned to its natural surroundings. I learned how to dry every last tender fold of her skin, and wondered if she minded her lack of privacy, but she bore it all with grace. I thought how amazing it was that Anastasia came to be alive at all. All of life seems so chancey, but each birth must be the biggest miracle of all.

The Red Notebook

Music: none. written in absolute silence

The Journals of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5, 1947-1955

On the cover, Anaïs Nin is a fragile, yet strong-looking woman. She looks fearlessly into the camera. She looks at
me.

She was a writer, and she lived in wonderful places like Paris and New York, and wherever she went she attracted people like writers, artists, composers and film-makers. Which I have never known (and may never know), but some of the things she says make me feel that I know her.

It says she lived between 1903 and 1977. I'm reading her book and I love it and I can't believe she died before I was even born!