The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  Quotations

  (FROM ELGIN’S JOURNAL, GREECE, 1961)

  From Emerson’s journals, 1864: ‘Shakespeare’s fault that the world appears so empty. He has educated you with his painted world, and this real one seems a huckster’s shop.’

  Montaigne, Essays:‘Women when they marry buy a cat in the bag.’

  Sydney, 1969

  Vanishings—light, colour, movement, growth—all gone. It takes all morning to rise from my dreamless bed, to dress myself and make a cup of tea. Sleeping pills don’t bring sleep but stupor, a drugged and blind grope that lasts all day. David seems far away, a vague presence on the edge of my consciousness, and I no longer have the energy to fight him. The only thing I have the ability to long for any more, to actively desire in fact, is that moment of release into drunkenness. I want that all right, I need that—release, oblivion—I want loosed from me all pain, all anxiety, all cares. Without that liquid departure I remember I am trapped, and I see that David remembers he is trapped too—for I could never leave him and I know he will never leave me. Neither of us has the energy necessary for it.

  The girls come and go—all bud and constant motion—and I know that I must love them but the feeling is a long way off, as if it belonged to somebody else. Everything requires so much energy, even love, and every action takes such energy that mostly I don’t attempt anything at all. Sometimes whole days pass and I realise when David knocks on my door, asking about dinner, that I have been sitting here at my desk by the window for hours, staring into nothing. Yet I am obsessed by time, by the carrying away of life in each tick of the clock—I feel an exaggerated sense of the fleetingness of things but I cannot seem to perfectly express the anguish I feel about this in words.

  The deadness of lost moments, the lostness of places and meals and people past—the inevitable death of things causes me such pain that I can hardly bear to look any more at a blooming rose, a child, a photograph, the bursting faces of the girls. The turning of the seasons are unbearable to me, I smell death even in the freshest morning. Summer is ending.

  Yesterday I tried to write this journal for the first time in weeks but it seemed too difficult, the act of putting words on the page seemed imprecise, even meaningless. As for The Broken Book, I haven’t touched it for at least six months, longer; when I last looked, the mock melodrama idea underpinning the whole thing struck me as silly. The deliberately heightened language seemed a mistake but I no longer have the energy to fix it. The column alone takes a full three days to write—I couldn’t face it this week and begged off, blaming a stomach bug. I am having to concentrate hard even to write this, like a child who is beginning to imagine the scope of language. I can only attempt these few words at all this morning because for some reason hidden from myself I can tell that I am alive today. As I find myself alive I find myself writing, since writing is a bodily habit, perpetual as breath. One day soon I may forget to breathe.

  The house is a mess (Anna came in last night, took one look and repeated our old joke, ‘Call yourself a mother?’ I attempted a smile). I cannot even begin to think about housework, and going on an errand to the shops takes forever—I may as well be planning a six month trip, it takes me so long to get ready and leave the house. Time itself has begun to seem strange, rushing or else queerly formless, so that I can spend a whole morning sitting at the kitchen table, staring out the back window into the seamless sky, believing only ten minutes have passed. While I am sitting there my mind seems curiously empty—I notice there are birds in the air, the dry wave of silver eucalyptus leaves, that the sky is still in its place. I suppose I notice the particular heat and dry-leaf look of Australia—and something else, something empty, forlorn. This country will always seem uninhabited to me in the same way that Greece always seemed peopled. Coming back, so poor and so broken, will always have the stink of defeat. Everything is behind me now, the things I have seen I can see no more.

  Reading Wordsworth, when I can concentrate long enough on the words. ‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’ But can the meanest flower offer solace to these thoughts too deep for tears?

  I used to believe there was a pattern to life, or at least you could see in retrospect where a particular life had twisted itself into the wrong shape, buckled by rogue bad luck. I used to think my moment came when a handsome young man who smelled like Sunlight Soap burst like a firework inside me, turning me incandescent. Now I don’t think there is any pattern, any shape whatsoever. All is randomness, chance.

  When I was young and invincible like Anna and Elizabeth and everything was still before me, I loved knowing I could inspire fire and water. I loved making love without a French letter, that milky tattoo of desire running down my leg whenever I stood up. If I didn’t catch it with a handkerchief it gently slid all the way down to the arch of my foot.

  Flaubert’s letter about the death of his great friend Alfred Le Poittevin—how surprisingly soon after death the waters of the body seek release. Life flowing out of the ears, the anus; the sheets wet.

  My watery life of desire, my life of toil—the past, vanishings. The glorious hour, spent.

  I am too tired to invent myself any more.

  My heart has gone from the festival.

  Sydney, 1941

  I finally got the chance to have a long chat with Beryl. She had sent all the dwarves off, every one of them, to do a variety of chores: some to get groceries, some to get beer, Ray had to go all the way to Kogarah to see the woman who is doing their new costumes.

  ‘I have to get them out of my hair at least once a week,’ she said, pouring me a shandy, ‘preferably twice.’ (I still cannot drink a glass of beer without the sweet relief of lemonade—the smell of beer always reminds me of that man on the beach.) Beryl drank her beer as if it was water, then poured herself another. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, or a girdle, and she sort of flowed out of herself, in a pretty silk nightgown, her dyed blond hair loosely caught up in a net. She was sprawled on the sofa, with a shaft of afternoon sun on her cheek: if I was a painter I would have liked to have painted her.

  ‘Now, tell me all about yourself,’ she said. ‘Are you going to marry the first boy who comes along?’

  I felt myself sitting too primly in my chair: I kicked my shoes off and curled up my stockinged legs beneath me. She offered a cigarette and I took one.

  ‘Oh, no. I want to see the world,’ I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I planned to become a writer, the best writer I could be.

  ‘And then you’ll settle down. After you have walked up a mountain and sailed down the Nile.’

  She made it sound stupid and I blushed. I don’t like to be misunderstood: I have this dreadful need to explain myself, so that no one gets the story wrong. I suppose you might say I have an obsessive need for control, which is maybe one reason why I am planning on being a writer.

  Suddenly my impulse was to tell her everything, to explain exactly who I was. I wanted to sound intelligent, and noble, a girl full of passion and high intentions.

  ‘No, I want to live the fullest life possible,’ I said. ‘I never want to settle down.’

  She smiled at me (she has dimples on either side of her mouth when she smiles; she is pretty in the manner of a young girl). ‘How sweet,’ she said, ashing her cigarette, ‘but life won’t be easy. The world does not enjoy people who don’t play by the rules.’

  I wondered if she was speaking about herself. I was dying to know how she became who she is.

  ‘By thirty you will have changed your mind,’ she said. ‘Most people choose a life of certainty, of financial security. By forty the eggs are well and truly sorted from the bacon.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want financial security,’ I said. ‘I don’t want safety. I want to have experiences and joys and—oh, everything! I want to die knowing that I have reached the very limits of myself, that there is nothing left undone.’ I sat forward in my chair, desperate to reach her, desperate to talk soul t
o soul.

  ‘Aren’t you a little firecracker,’ she said but it wasn’t unkind. I smiled at her and she smiled back: I felt she understood what I meant.

  ‘I hope the world gives you everything you wish for,’ she said. ‘Who knows? It might.’

  ‘Has it given you everything you wished for?’ I asked, supposing that I had won the right to know.

  ‘Very few people get everything they want,’ she replied. She did not look unhappy. ‘Personally, I reckon you can get one thing, or maybe two, but never the lot. Love, maybe. Money, yes. Doing something you love, no. I’ve only met one couple in my life who had everything—they owned a circus in Adelaide, happy as two pigs in mud, rich too, and just as in love with each other as the day they met.’

  ‘So, it can happen,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and then the wife, Doris was her name, got this horrible disease, something in her nerves. First she got dizzy spells and then her legs started to go. Herb, that was the husband, spent a fortune on quacks trying to find a cure. When you’re older you’ll understand that there is no cure.’

  ‘I don’t understand. No cure for what?’

  She took a huge drag of her cigarette. ‘For life,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing for it but to take your little basket—the one with everything in it—the good, the bad and the in-between. You have to take the basket that you’re given. There’s no more and no less.’

  I didn’t want to believe her. Sitting there with my huge hope I didn’t wish to believe that life will not grant me everything. I am ambitious for life in a way she will never know: my waiting basket is hungry for the lot.

  ‘Don’t look so smug,’ Beryl said. ‘Life’ll wipe that smile off your face before long.’

  She sat up and put her hand over mine. ‘You know, I fell in love with dancing when I was a little girl looking at pictures of Irene and Vernon Castle. I used to think, “One day I’m going to do that.” And I grew up and learned the foxtrot and the tango and the charleston—I became New South Wales’s champion lady dancer. When Fred and Ginger came along I thought, “I could do that.” Actually, I secretly thought, “I could do better!”’

  She had a dancer’s body: lithe but strong, as though used to the rigors of the barre. How interesting, I thought, Beryl doing the tango with some chap in a suit, her dress frothier than a wave.

  ‘And you know what? Life showed me that I was never going to be chosen. I was good but I was never going to be great. There was this unbreachable gap between who I thought I was going to be and who I actually was.’ Still she refused to look sad.

  ‘It’s in that gap that you grow up,’ she said, ‘in that gap you find maturity, a place to square yourself with the world.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to live in that gap,’ I said, my feelings rushing out of me. ‘I want to be free. Always.’

  ‘Do you, little one,’ she said, ‘good for you.’ She saluted me with her glass. ‘Here’s to freedom.’

  I saw that she didn’t understand. ‘Have you read Moby Dick?’ She shook her head and I sat even further forward in my chair, ‘“Better is it to perish in howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety.”’

  She looked puzzled. ‘I’m going to be a writer,’ I announced, conscious that the expression on my face was one of pride.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ she said, offering up the beer bottle. ‘I’m not much of a reader myself.’

  I felt a kind of lurch: I am mad for books, just mad for them, and I saw that for some people a book might be just another object, like a shoe, a loaf of bread, a cup. The universe of a book might not be visible to them, for a book’s universe of words does not exist without the participation of eyes.

  ‘Oh, I’ll lend you some wonderful books,’ I said, jumping up, ready to dash to my room. ‘I’ll make you a reader!’

  She stood up and sat on the edge of my chair. ‘That’s very kind of you, Kathy, but perhaps some other time—the boys will be back any minute. Would you like to stay for dinner?’

  I said I would, even though Atpay was coming later (she’s joining the Australian Women’s Army Service next week). Following her into the kitchen I suddenly felt embarrassed, as if I had revealed too much of myself—as if what I had revealed was too ambitious and not very nice. I felt a sharp shame, for in Australia no one likes anyone with tickets on themselves.

  ‘Beryl, I don’t think I’m a genius or anything,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t have tickets on myself.’

  She put the empty beer bottle down by the sink. ‘I know you don’t, love. It’s good to love something as much as you do. Don’t apologise for it.’

  But I still felt sort of dirty, as if I had shown unbecoming greediness or pride. In Australia there is no greater sin than being a show-off, in thinking you are better than anyone else. I remembered Betty Gordon at school teasing me for loving myself, as if loving yourself was morally wrong.

  ‘I don’t love myself or anything,’ I went on.

  Beryl shut the door of the fridge and crossed the room to give me a quick hug. ‘Kathy, you’d be better off loving yourself a bit more,’ she said.

  I wonder what she meant.

  It turns out that Beryl grew up in Rose Bay and went to that fancy Catholic girls school on the hill overlooking Sydney Harbour. She’s just turned thirty-five and her dad was a bank manager who lost everything in the Depression. Apparently her mum was a bit of a society queen—always trying to marry Beryl off to various suitable beaus. She even had a coming-out party and was presented to the Governor at a ball at Government House. I tried to move the conversation in the direction of men in general, the dwarves, and whether her mother knows—I’m still fascinated by that part—but the only thing she said in passing was that she had only ever had one boyfriend in her life whom she adored but who was also capable of charming the pants off her mother. ‘And she didn’t want me to marry him,’ she said.

  Beryl hardly ever sees her parents—they think she fell in with the wrong crowd when she took up professional dancing—I wonder what they think of her now!!

  I was drunk by the time Atpay got here. The dwarves came home and we drank more and more beer, and then Ray opened a bottle of chianti. They were telling funny stories of their days around the traps. (On one trip to Singapore before the war Ray got attacked by monkeys. ‘Just imagine,’ Ray said, ‘back home everybody would be saying, “Oh, poor Ray’s been killed!” And then they’d say, “Yeah, but did you hear how? He was eaten by monkeys!”’) They were a funny lot, and I drank and smoked till wine and nicotine roared through my blood like power—the windows were open and the world rushed in, the world of possibility, of hope, of the immense pleasures of the unforeseen. The streets below were full of soldiers, the sound of a band playing somewhere far off, the press of existence.

  At some point Ray leaned across the table and kissed Beryl full on the lips; I saw her trace with one finger the lines of his beautiful mouth. Happiness rushed in on the silky air, on the fresh smells from the harbour. I felt a surge of rapture.

  ‘Oh, this is bliss,’ I said, turning up my face to the open window and closing my eyes.

  ‘Kathy, you have a talent for happiness,’ Beryl said, ‘you’re blessed.’

  I don’t think Atpay was pleased that I was blessed, although she usually likes a beer far better than me.

  ‘Darling Atpay! My oldest, bestest friend in the world!’ I rushed up and covered her with kisses when I finally opened the door of Beryl’s flat and found Atpay knocking fruitlessly at my front door.

  ‘I’ve been knocking for twenty bloody minutes,’ she said. ‘I thought you said Flat 2.’

  The dwarves spilled out behind me. ‘Come and meet my friends!’ I said, pulling her by the hand towards them. ‘Everyone, this is darling Atpay, my darlingest friend in the whole world!’

  She snatched her hand back crossly.

  ‘But I love you, dearest Atpay,’ I said, stepping on her shoes by mistake.

  ‘You’d l
ove Adolf Hitler if he was here,’ she replied. ‘Have you had anything to eat?’

  ‘A cherry,’ I said, leaning against the wall, ‘a cherry with a fringe on top.’

  ‘Where are your keys?’ she asked, taking off her coat and glaring at me. ‘Don’t move until I come back.’

  I leaned against the swaying wall, dazed with life, filled with love for Atpay, for the dwarves, for Beryl, for the universe. Then I saw that Atpay was back and that she was opening the door; I saw Beryl saying something to Atpay and Atpay looking annoyed. I waved to the dwarves as I fell in the door.

  ‘Sit down while I get you something to eat,’ Atpay said but it was too late: my stomach was coming up, rushing fast, hurling its contents even as I ran.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I heard her say as I reached the washbasin, my stomach’s contents splashing up the newish wallpaper.

  ‘I’ll never make an alcoholic!’ I yelled to her before I was sick again.

  ‘Shut up and be sick,’ she replied.

  Dear Atpay shared the bed with me while I got up to be sick several times that night, fetching water and endless Bex powders for me. In the morning she made me a piece of dry toast and went out to buy oranges which she squeezed for juice.

  While I was drinking she gave me a lecture on the badness of the dwarves, on the evil of Snow White. ‘If you ask me, that Beryl’s a piece,’ Atpay said. ‘Why do you find those sorts more interesting than anyone else?’

  ‘But they are!’ I said. ‘You should hear their life stories!’

  ‘Oh, Athykay, everyone’s life story is interesting!’

  While I know this to be true, it doesn’t mean that I wish to spend my time with just anyone.

  ‘Of course I know that everyone has a story,’ I said, ‘but I prefer interesting people. I always want to find out everything about them.’

  She snorted with contempt. ‘Do I qualify as an “interesting person”?’ I nodded vigorously.