Secret Scribbled Notebooks (7 page)

Now Sophie walks out onto the verandah with Anastasia in her arms, looks out into the darkness, and goes back into her room again.

Lil comes onto the verandah and shakes a white tablecloth out over the edge of the railing. It floats up and down three times, and it seems so slow that all time is suspended. She catches it in her arms, turns, and goes inside.

Now all the lights in the house are out, except for one, the welcoming light next to the nameplate next to the front door. SAMARKAND, it says, though I can't read it.

The Yellow Notebook

Written in my room with the aid of electric light. What I have learned: If you want to be able to write with facility, handicap yourself first.

Music: ‘Possessed', by Crowded House

The Girl with the Yellow Hair:

She is in the happy position of liking every bit of her life. She likes her work, something that people are not always lucky enough to do.

Each weekday morning, after a breakfast of sourdough toast and cumquat jam and strong coffee, she takes the train into the city, where, in a street lined with green linden trees, she works in an office situated in an old house.

It is a publishing house. At first, when she came here, and found that the
house
part was literally true, she was astonished, because she thought that something as important as a publisher would be in one of those glass and steel tower blocks. But this one is in an actual house, a huge old terrace that goes up and up, rooms everywhere, and inside it are people (mostly women) busy with the business of publishing books.

As yet, she doesn't have an office of her own. It is her job to do all the everyday things –opening mail, clipping reviews, answering the phone –but in between times she is allowed (no –not allowed –
exhorted
) to read the manuscripts, especially the ones that are to be published, so that she can get her eye in for what is good. And the rest of the time she reads the books that have already been published, and sit in rows on shelves, just waiting to be read. This, she thinks, must be heaven.

It is a happy place to work. She closes her eyes sometimes and thinks she can feel all that industry going on around her –all those minds intent on books –all the words floating round the building. Words literally float round the building sometimes too, because once a week all the people who work there gather in one of the larger rooms at lunchtime and sing, in parts, so that their voices blend together most harmoniously . . .

And they lie about on the floor sometimes, these people who work with books, reading or talking to each other. Just lie about among the manuscripts, which sit in piles on tables and shelves, great white stacks of them, with rubber bands about them. In the absence of beds (which is the proper place to read), they just stretch out on the floor and

(O God now Lil wants me for something!)

The Wild Typewritten Pages 7

I had still recorded nothing
in the Blue Notebook, which I had come to think of as my memory notebook. I did remember things of course. How can you go through childhood without a single, solitary memory?

I could, for instance, have written in the Blue Notebook:

In bed with Lil and Sophie at Samarkand. Lil snoring, the
sag of the mattress tilting me towards her heavy warmth.
Sophie on my other side, tossing and muttering in her sleep.
I'm drowsily awake, my head under the covers, breathing in the
sweet musty mingled odours of our skins. Curled into Lil's
back, one hand on her shoulder. Her soft flesh. My other hand,
fingering her nightie. Feeling the threads of cotton and
noticing the difference in texture between skin and fabric.

The verandah door open to an early summer's day. The
sound of someone –something walking across the wooden floor.

A cry. Harsh and raucous. Enough to curdle blood. To
wake the dead.

Lil sits bolt upright, throws back the sheet.

Two crows fly from the room. As black as sin. The wind of
their wings, cutting the air like a sword. Beaks sharp as spears.
Cries like black ice.

‘I'm not dead yet!' Lil calls.

Sophie wakes and murmurs; is asleep again.

Lil lies back down. ‘The hide of them,' she says. ‘As if they
were ready to pluck out my eyes. But I'm not dead yet. Not yet.'

Lil's hair had been the same unchanging colour since we'd known her, and her colour was Jet Black. For years now, it had been our job to help her dye it. We fought about whose turn it was (‘
Bags not mine
!'). It was a dreary ritual: the chair in the bathroom, the towel round her shoulders, the gloves, the goo, the combing through, the waiting, the washing out, the whole chemical stink of it.

For the dyeing process, Lil wore a nylon slip, and the straps cut into her rounded, mottled shoulders. The features on her face were blurring with age, growing less defined day by day, so that sometimes I feared that she was becoming less and less Lil, and more and more just an Old Person. She had a peculiar smell of old sweat mixed with talcum powder.

She had worn her hair the same way for years, done up in a french roll. I could see when I dyed it that the real colour was pure white, and wished Lil would let just one streak of that proper colour grow out; it would make a spectacular black-and-white effect. Sophie hankered to cut Lil's hair in a short, spiky style, but Lil wouldn't have it.

Lil complained that we spent far too much time reading, but she had set a bad example. When we were little she was always sneaking off to where no one could find her and reading books and eating chocolates. She treated the guests like children that she needed to take a break from for her own sanity. I used to find her in her favourite sofa on the back verandah, a book and a ciggie in her hands and lollies in her pockets. ‘Is that you, lovey?' she'd call: I knew it wasn't me she was hiding from. Lil would pull me onto the sofa for a cuddle, stroking the curls away from my face. I'm ashamed to say that I now avoided a cuddle from Lil –her puckered red lips, the folds of her skin, made me shudder.

It was Lil who taught us to read, so it was her fault that we were so addicted to it. But I thought that I must have been born able to read, the learning was so effortless. Lil would take us on either side of her and we'd sit there, eagerly looking at the book as she read to us.

‘I can read!' Sophie announced out of the blue one day, standing in the kitchen with a half-eaten apple in her hand.

‘Sez who?' said Lil.

‘Sez me!' (hands on hips and chin stuck out defiantly).

‘Go on . . . who taught you?'

‘I taught myself!'

‘Well, read something to me.'

‘Lan-choo Tea!' (pointing at the packet).

‘Very good. And what does this say?'

‘Kellogg's Cornflakes!'

‘Can you read books?'

‘I can especially read books!'

Sophie's second day of school: I go to our shared room in the middle of the morning and see a movement behind the curtain. A face appears. ‘It's me!'

‘I ran away,' Sophie tells me. ‘School's boring!'

We sit behind the curtain together. The curtain is red and voluminous and hides us pretty well. Or so we think. Anyway, the girl who's meant to be looking after me while Lil gets on with the work never worries about what I'm doing. Sophie and I have a stash of picture books with us, and paper and textas for drawing with, and Sophie's school lunch. It's a complete and perfect world there behind the curtain.

We peel apart the sandwiches and lick the butter and Vegemite off first, poring stickily over the pictures in the books. We eat the cream biscuits from Sophie's playlunch. Later, I sneak to the kitchen and fetch a fistful of crackers, and we suck the salt away and nibble the crimped edges. Sophie reads to me in a whisper.

But then the school rings Lil, and we are discovered.

Sophie did end up going to school almost every day, so I got Lil's lap to myself. I always listened closely when Lil read to me, and pulled her up when she got a word wrong. Lil thought I just knew the book by heart, but I knew how to read long before I let on to Lil that I could. I'd read along under my breath, but I was caught out one day when Lil stopped reading and I continued on, my lips moving almost soundlessly, my eyes following the text. ‘Why, you little monkey!' said Lil. ‘You can read for yourself, can't you?'

But that didn't stop Lil reading to me, as I'd feared she would. The books she read were old ones she'd had around for years and years; I now see that they must have belonged to Lil's son, Alan. They were about trains and boats with faces and feelings who learned valuable life lessons. A train called Tootle had to learn to
stay on the rails no matter what.
A boat named Scuffy sailed off down the river till he reached the sea, only to be snatched up at the last moment by his owner and returned to sailing in the bathtub. Another train tried and tried until he reached the top of a steep hill. ‘I think I can. I think I can,' he said. And of course, he could.

I enjoyed the pictures of Tootle when he was off the rails the best. He romped through fields of flowers with blossoms floating in the bowls of soup in his dining car and flowers draped rakishly across his engine. I thought it looked like far more fun off the tracks. And I felt sorry for the little boat who found the sea far too wide for him, because I felt sure that the ocean would be far more exciting than a mere bathtub.

Although Lil loved to read as much as she loved to smoke and drink red wine and play cards with her friends, she treated it as a guilty pleasure that had to be stolen from the imperatives of the day. Sophie and I learned to snatch our reading time as well, and Lil was always onto us for reading when we ought to have been doing something else.

Standing outside my room, she'd call,‘Kate, are you getting ready for school?'

‘Kate?'

‘KATE!'

‘Yes, Lil?'

‘I know what you're up to in there! Put down that book! Are you dressed yet?'

‘Almost.'

‘Well, hurry up about it, madam, or we'll have the police here.'

The police dominated Lil's threats. I imagined uniformed hordes of them, wielding truncheons, swarming up the zigzag steps of Samarkand and converging on my room where I cowered, half-dressed in singlet and knickers, behind the covers of an open book.

The attraction of reading was that while you were doing it you were somewhere else. I loved feeling with my fingers how much of a book there was left to go –all those pages! –time enough for a satisfactory happy ending to be worked out (because what was the use of a book without a happy ending?). I also liked knowing that the fate of the characters had been already worked out, though I had yet to find out what it was. And people couldn't reach you when you were reading. It was a private experience, the ultimate intimacy, something between you and the book.

We spent our entire childhood reading. We nicked off from school to do it; we did it with torches in the small hours of the morning; we curled up hidden behind curtains; we climbed trees for the express purpose of spending a few more stolen hours with a book, in direct defiance of the police, who never did manage to discover us. It was glorious.

We knew that people didn't like it if you read too much, so it was best not to let on what you were up to. Eventually, we discovered characters far more compelling than little trains and boats with faces, although these vehicles will always have a special place in my heart.

We each discovered the book that became
our
book, the book that spoke to our inner selves, in the very same year. Sophie's book, which she first read at fifteen, was
Anna
Karenina
. Mine was
Great Expectations
.

Anna Karenina escaped from a loveless marriage and gave her life to a man who, she finally learned, didn't love her in return. She ended up walking under a train and killing herself.

In
Great Expectations
, a jilted woman, Miss Havisham, spent her whole life in bitterness. She adopted a young girl, and taught her not to love, and so this girl, Estelle, couldn't even love her. And the hero Pip, who fell in love with the girl who couldn't love, learnt that his great expectations could not be supplied by other people, and made his own way in the world.

These later books were not so clear-cut as the stories about the little trains and boats had been. If they taught us anything, they taught us that nothing in life is unambiguous and simple.

The Blue Notebook

Anaïs Nin's honesty in her diaries has prompted me to be brave in what I write. All right. Here it is. This is my only memory of my father, and it's a nice memory. I have to admit that my memory of my father is not a horrible one. If anything, it gives me too much hope. Because he hasn't come back yet, has he, this man who seemed to love me so much?

I was two. Or three. Certainly no more than three. And we'd gone to a wedding somewhere. I don't know where. And I only have a feeling that it was a wedding. I mean, I remember a wedding, vaguely.

But what I do remember was this. We were staying at a motel. It was late at night, and I couldn't sleep. I kept talking and giggling, and whoever else was there tried to shoosh me –they thought I'd wake up Sophie. And then a man –my father –picked me up and put on my swimmers, and took me out to the motel pool. Everyone else was asleep. The place was dead quiet. It must have been about two or three in the morning.

We played for ages in the water. I'd jump in, and he'd catch me. He'd pull me through the water and hold on to me and bounce me up and down. It was wonderful. It really was. I was full of wonder. And all the time there was this sort of quiet laughter between us.

I don't even remember his face properly. Just this particular way of smiling, and the way he . . .
was.
He was quiet and sure of himself. He took a lot of notice of me. Not fussing over me, but noticing how I was feeling. It was just the two of us, and the lights sparkling on the water. Everything shimmered.