Secret Scribbled Notebooks (20 page)

‘The man was Alan, Lil's son. This is his suit I'm wearing.'

‘How did he die?'

‘A road accident. He was overseas. He was a journalist –always travelling. Always adventuring. That's what Lil says about him, anyway. And I really loved him, that night. I don't remember anything else about him –he was just here for a little while, must have come back for a friend's wedding, and he and Lil took us to it. But I loved him. It was special, that time we spent with each other, you know?'

I had spent my whole life fruitlessly waiting for my father to come back. And now it came to me again that I could get on the bus with Alex and go. If I was going anyway, why shouldn't I leave sooner, rather than wait for university to start? And besides, even if I didn't get in, I knew I didn't want to stay here. I could get a job in Sydney.

I didn't say anything to Alex, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. Why shouldn't I do what I wanted to do? And I did want to go with Alex, didn't I?

I looked across at him, where he sat in contemplation, looking at the lights of the town. He glanced at me and smiled.

I said to him, ‘All my life I told myself that the man I remembered that night was my father. I told myself that he would come back for me. But I think I must have known all along that it wasn't him. ' Alex took my hand and held it unemphatically, letting it rest in his.

‘My real father wasn't like that. I do remember him –a bit. He neglected us. He used to leave me and Sophie for ages –days on end, it seemed –in a flat with very little to eat. She used to look after me as best she could, and feed me on bits of bread . . . She and I have never talked about this.'

Alex squeezed my hand, and let it go. We leaned forward, putting our elbows on our knees, and watched the light creep over the town.

It was a long time ago that Sophie and I had stood together, barefoot, at the top of the stairs of Samarkand. Even now I could feel every grain of the weathered boards against my soles. My sister and I were not hand in hand; we stood together stoically like little soldiers, arms by our sides, watching our father make his way down the steps. I can see us as though I'm watching myself all that time ago.

We wear faded summer dresses, too small. Mine has gold sunflowers. Sophie is in blue. She has put a red ribbon in her hair.

Our father is going away and I know that he isn't coming back. No one has told me this. No one, apart from him, must know this. Perhaps, at this point, he doesn't even know it himself. I don't cry, because crying would do no good. I can only watch.

He turns around on the lower landing and looks up at us. ‘See you, kids,' he says, putting one hand in the air in farewell, his face skinny and sly, his eyes avoiding ours. They are as dry as a parched landscape. ‘See you in a coupla days.'

His eyes are the kind of blue that has almost all colour leached from it. Every part of him seeps guilt. He's off up the road, his back eloquent with it.

I know that my father isn't coming back, and I know why. Even at that age (perhaps especially at that age, when children can read people the way dogs read people), I know that he's a weak man. He bears us no ill will, but looking after the two of us is something that is simply beyond him.

That night, Sophie started to talk in her sleep. I couldn't make out what she was saying, but the sound of her voice in the darkness frightened me. I ran to Lil's room, and she woke Sophie, and bundled us into her own bed. We lay in the summer dark, listening to her sing.

Ten little ducks went out one day,
Over the hills and far away.
Mother duck said, quack quack quack quack,
But only nine little ducks came back.

Finally, we all slept. It was the first of many nights we would spend in Lil's bed.

I remembered how Sartre had written that it was quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. That it takes energy, generosity, blindness. He said that there was a moment, right at the start, where you had to jump across an abyss. If you thought about it, you didn't do it.

I had already jumped. I had jumped without thinking the first time Lil had taken us into her bed; I had jumped when I lay near Sophie as a child and listened to her speaking unintelligibly in her sleep. I'd been loving people for years without even realising it. Without thinking, I had leapt across the abyss many times: when I saw Hetty staring at me only moments after she was born, and with Alex . . .

I took up his hand again and stared at his fingers, remembering how Sophie had undressed the new-born Hetty and looked at every single part of her, silently counting her fingers and toes. So Alex's mother might once have examined him.

But I knew now that I would do the sensible thing. I wouldn't go away with him that morning (not that he'd asked me, or even knew what I'd been thinking). I would stay where I belonged, for the moment, with my family.

I asked Alex, ‘What are you going to do when you get back to Sydney?'

‘Go and see my father. Persuade him that it might be a good idea if we went for a trip to Poland together, to look up the distant relatives over there. My grandparents kept in contact with them, though they never went back to see them.

‘Take up my degree again. Write to you. See what happens. Does that sound like enough?'

‘That's enough.'

The sun came up, the way it always had, I presumed, though I had never seen it before. Alex and I sat like spectators at a theatre while the light of the world was slowly turned on, illuminating everything. The shapes of trees appeared, and houses, nebulous at first, and then the summer sunlight poured colour through everything, and paled the streetlights to insignificance.

Alex stretched, and looked at his watch. ‘Are you hungry?' he asked. ‘We could do the unthinkable and go to a fast-food place. And then I have a bus to catch.'

At the garage that he'd made his home, we found my jacket, which I must have thrown down when I fetched him to drive Marjorie home. That seemed such a long time ago. While I put it on, Alex picked up the typewriter, which was all closed up in its carry-case, and put it into my arms, like a baby. ‘I know computers are more the thing these days, but some people still use these, and you are very low-tech.'

‘What would I want it for?' I asked.

‘You might want to write. You've got the secret scribbled notebooks for it. Haven't you read that book I gave you by Jack Kerouac? The piece called “Rules of Modern Prose” advises, “Secret scribbled notebooks and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy.” This could be for the wild typewritten pages. Here –take the paper as well.'

I found myself with a ream of A4 under my arm.

We gave his room a backwards glance from the doorway. Alex carried the suitcase that said ‘Winter Stuff ', in which I presumed he'd packed the few possessions he wanted to keep, and I took the typewriter. It amazed me that a person could travel so light.

We ate raisin toast and coffee in a room filled with the glare of laminex and vinyl tiles and the clatter of trays. I walked him to the bus depot, and everything seemed ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. A boy with a shaved head sat on a chair outside eating chips. A police car cruised past. A sparrow alighted on the pavement and the boy threw it some crumbs.

We hugged, but I didn't wait for the bus to come. I couldn't bear to stay and watch it pull away through the empty streets, with his smooth hand at the window long after his face was no longer visible.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 25

That first morning
, Lil gave us breakfast in bed: strawberry jam on toast, and hot chocolate. I lay there and stretched with the luxury of it. ‘Do you know what?' I told Lil happily. ‘I love this bed!'

‘Do you, darlin'? That's nice.'

‘I love this room!' I said, looking around and wriggling my feet. It was the first time I'd ever felt at home anywhere. That sense of peace and belonging and absolute rightness.

‘I love this house!'

And later that day, Lil lifted me up and showed me the name of the house, a magical name made of mirrored letters.
Sam-ar-kand
, she said, pointing to the syllables, syllables that dripped off your tongue with a natural poetry.

I felt secure in her arms. I could see my face in that word, but only bits of it at a time. My eyes, my hair, my teeth. I
was
the word. I was Samarkand.

Samarkand
.

I got close to the word and whispered it, and my breath fogged up the glass. Samarkand
was
my breath. It was the first word I ever read.

And that day, when I got home from saying goodbye to Alex, I stood looking at the word SAMARKAND, and suddenly all of my life made sense. I had no need of three notebooks to record my life, I needed only one, because my past, my present and my future were all one continuous stream.

‘You're very late home, madam,' said Lil, coming to the door with a tablecloth in her hand.

‘I'm sorry, ' I said.

‘And what's that you've got there?'

‘A typewriter. Alex's typewriter. He bequeathed it to me.'

‘Bequeathed it, indeed.' Lil snorted.

‘I love you, Lil,' I said, without knowing that I was going to say it. I said it sincerely and helplessly, standing there in Alan's suit with the typewriter in one hand and a ream of copy paper in the other.

Lil stopped, on her way back into the house. ‘And I love you too, Katie. Oh, come here, you, and give us a hug. I don't know . . . you come in at all hours –and what's that all over your nails? Paint! And now a typewriter. What am I going to do with you? And what would you do with a typewriter?'

Lil had left a big smudge of vermilion lipstick all over my cheek. I could smell it. I wiped it away with the back of my hand, and said, doubtfully, ‘I could write something with it?'

But she had already gone inside to make the breakfasts. ‘I could write something!' I yelled out, with more certainty, to her departing back.

The Red Notebook

From Jack Kerouac's ‘Rules of Modern Prose': ‘Be in love with yr life.'

It was a long time ago, when we came to Samarkand. A whole lifetime away for me, but in the scheme of things, not such a very long time, because I am still only seventeen. If I am lucky enough to become an old woman, like Lil, it will seem just a tiny part of my life. A tiny but important part.

Today, I thought again about the time when I had only just arrived, and in my ignorance, I smashed the plate, the day I thought I had smashed the whole world, and curled up into a ball with my hands over my ears.

I waited for the blow, for I heard Lil get to her feet.

It didn't come. I opened my eyes. Lil was standing in front of me with her arms held out, warding me off.

‘Don't move!' she said. ‘You might cut yourself.' And she went and got a dustpan and brush, and cleaned it all up. Not another word was said about it.

Today I said to her, ‘Lil –do you remember the day I smashed the plate?'

Lil laughed. ‘I most certainly do! And I remember later in the day, I was drinking a cup of tea, and I went to put it down on the table and missed. It smashed on the floor. And
you
looked at me with the brightest of eyes. Do you remember what you said to me?'

‘No,' I said, not remembering any of this at all.

‘You looked at me and said, “Now we're even!”'

Today is January 6, the day of the Epiphany, the celebration of the showing of Christ to the Magi (whatever that was). Of course, no one here knows what that is, so I am still ignorant. We are not Religious and never will be. I got it from the dictionary.

An epiphany is also a revelation of the basic nature of something; a perception of some essential truth, from the Greek,
epiphaneia
- literally, appearance, manifestation, from
epiphanes –
coming to light, appearing.

Now that the results are out, and it is almost certain that I will go away to university, I am getting all nostalgic. I don't want to leave this place! I don't want to leave Lil, or Sophie, or Hetty. I keep walking around and thinking of all the things I will miss. The view –that view from the verandah of my fig tree and the river. How can I move away from that? And the frogs in the toilet bowl. Even the Guests! I will miss it all. (No, not the Guests.) I keep going up to Lil and giving her a cuddle, and putting my head on her shoulder, and she tells me I am a big sook. I heard her on the phone to a friend the the other day saying, ‘She's getting that sooky I don't know what to do with her.'

I have just now received the mail. I now get mail! A letter is such a wonderful thing –the smell of the paper, and all those words, written with someone's live hand! I am glad we are low-tech here, because an email wouldn't be quite the same.

I got a letter from Alex, written on the plane to Poland and posted when he got there. He and his father are excited and a bit apprehensive about meeting their relatives at last. He says it will be amazing to meet people who knew his grandparents from
those days
, the days they rarely spoke of, because the memories were too painful for them.

And he says that he hopes to see me in Sydney this year. Maybe we will be going to the same university.

Maybe. Maybe. My marks were good, but I have to see what places I'm offered.

And I got a postcard from Marjorie in Florence. (Italy! The lucky thing.) Lots of tiny writing. I quote her: ‘This place is full of paintings, which my parents, of course, adore (and I thought this was meant to be
my
reward for doing so well in the exams) . . . the paintings are are all right, I suppose, as you can see from the pic on the front of this, but Kate –the cakes.
The cakes !
They are exquisite. Magnificent. Unforgettable. I really wanted to send you a postcard of a cake, but there were none. Maybe I'll smuggle some actual cake back for you . . .'