The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  This is the first time I have had my own bedroom since I was seventeen years old, living at home with Mum and Dad at Kurrajong Bay. I moved in when Lil moved out, taking everything with her but the bed. The bedroom of my virginal forty-six-year-old self contains my daughter’s cast-off single bed, now draped with a rich, sienna-coloured cloth from Kathmandu, a present from the girls; a bowl of spring flowers from the garden in an old peanut butter jar on this desk by the window; a Byzantine cross I found by a derelict monastery in the hills of the island, and a favourite photograph Claudio once took of our house on the only visit he and Rosanna made to us there in 1956, when we were still happy.

  1956. How long ago. How very far away.

  Lil was here earlier tonight, with her boyfriend Paul, who is clearly in love with her. He wants to get married but Lil wants to ‘live’ first. I wonder if it is my fault that she appears to equate being married with not being able to live. She sees marriage as a form of closure, as an ending rather than a start. ‘I want to get established first,’ she said. ‘I want to be published before I get married.’ Paul was fervently nodding his head. ‘That’s cool,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait.’

  She looked at him. ‘Actually, I don’t know if I believe in marriage. Why should the Church or the State have anything to do with love?’

  Paul appeared stricken. He is a freckled, hairy youth, intense, fond of quoting in impeccable French the more extreme maxims of his hero Baudelaire. Lil told me that he won her heart when he quoted Baudelaire in the context of the legions of cruel girls who had previously betrayed him: ‘Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les betes l’ont mange.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said, ‘make sure you don’t eat what remains of his heart, darling.’

  ‘Oh, Mum! He’s passionate, that’s all.’

  Passion. How exhausting it is to be young.

  When Paul left, Lil and I got into an unpleasant disagreement, which of course led to David and I arguing, which consequently leaves me sitting here at midnight snivelling in my pyjamas writing this. For someone who once liked to think of herself as happy I seem to have spent a lot of my life crying. I am only ever a step away from grief these days.

  I’m trying to muster enthusiasm for Lil’s poetry, I really am, but I also don’t want her to live a life like mine. This all started because she wants to leave university, without finishing her degree, to step blindly into poetry’s thin blue air. I told her she was being foolish, and she accused me of not supporting her decision to become a poet.

  ‘I’m not saying you can’t be a poet, Lil. Of course I’m not! I just think it would be sensible to have another way of earning money just in case.’

  ‘You and Dad didn’t! You gave up everything to write!’

  ‘Dad and I were trained as journalists. We had money before we started out, and jobs we could go back to if we needed to,’ I said.

  ‘But things are different now,’ she said.‘I can go on the dole.’

  David came into the kitchen.‘How’s my favourite girl? Still beautiful?’ She rushed towards him and hugged him theatrically. ‘Why is Mum so against me taking up poetry? You understand why I want to do it, don’t you, Dad?’

  He smiled down at her. I remembered that smile.

  ‘A girl as beautiful as you should be allowed to do anything,’ he said.

  She broke away from him. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. Shit! Doesn’t anybody in this stupid family think straight?’

  David looked angry. ‘I was simply trying to compliment you, Elizabeth. It’s a sign of the times that you take a compliment like that as an insult.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, when you were young women knew how to be women. Fuck, I’ve had enough. See ya.’ And with that she grabbed her bag and stalked out.

  David and I were left in the kitchen, staring at each other.

  ‘What have you got against her becoming a poet exactly? You seem to have an abhorrence to the idea.’

  ‘Of course I don’t. I just think she should make an alternative career for herself first. If she tries to survive on poetry she will be living on air.’

  He cackled. ‘My, my. If your dear lady readers could hear you now. What a hypocrite you are, Katherine.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Shut up.’

  ‘You know what I think? I think you’re jealous. I think you can’t stand the idea that Elizabeth is young and beautiful and talented—all the things that you are not. You can’t even finish your novel. I think you can’t stand the thought of Elizabeth making it where you have failed.’

  Against my will, tears sprang up in my eyes. ‘You know what I think, David?’ I said. ‘I think I don’t want Lil to be a poet because I don’t want her to need another life. I want her waking life to be enough.’

  So here I sit in my stained pyjamas, fat and crying, alone in my middle-aged single bedroom writing an abridged version of my pathetic little life.

  I can’t see where the story is going. What is the end of the story?

  Cressida, what is the end?

  The Broken Book

  DECLARATION OF WAR

  My name is Cressida Morley and it is my melancholy duty to inform you that I am at war. As a consequence of the persistence of the Living Mistake’s attempts to illegally enter my body I have declared war on him and, as a result, my best friend Pamela Crockett is also at war.

  I wish to declare that I am sixteen years old, sound of body and mind, and that I will do everything in my power to defend the rights of my body and soul from further attacks.

  Signed,

  Cressida Anne Morley

  16 Bongaree Street

  The Blowhole

  New South Wales

  Australia

  It is late afternoon and Ampay and I are standing around a young ghost gum in the paddock next to the house filled with drunken Aboriginals. ‘Aren’t we a bit old for this?’ Amp will say, taking another contemplative drag of her cigarette as I finish carving my initials into the skin of the tree. We have carved a heart and the initials of our names so that now we are fixed upon the earth, part of the elements.

  ‘Just think,’ I will say, ‘this tree will be here long after we have gone. Our names will be part of the tree as it grows into the sky.’

  ‘And no one will be able to read it except the koalas,’ Amp will reply.

  ‘But we’ll know they’re there,’ I say, ‘no matter where we are in the world, or if one of us dies.’

  Amp took another long suck of her cigarette. ‘Well, I don’t know about you but I’m planning on coming back and climbing the tree when I’m eighty.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe there’s a war on.’ I say. ‘Germany seems a long way off.’

  And we will lift up our heads looking for evidence in the peace of the sky. There is only the bluest lid, a few cockatoos, the empty sound of afternoon heat and crows.

  Does anybody know if Germany actually exists?

  ‘Give us a drag, Ampay,’ I will say before we head off to join the Aboriginals to get drunk. Amp’s mother’s eyes are large and blue as the heavens and when she is very drunk a filmy wave of white washes across them as if she was blinded by glaucoma. She is a milky blind drunk then, with extraordinary otherworldly eyes, like a visiting alien. I love to watch those beautiful eyes slowly filming over.

  Of course you know that the best form of warfare is guerrilla warfare: it’s defeated the French, the English, various Americans; it’s slaughtered many a well-trained traditional army. Sneak attacks. Constant movement. The disconcerting element of surprise! Sneak up on Mr Hunter’s Hillman and let the air out of his tyres; throw a brick through the window where he sleeps drunkenly in his chair after returning from the pub. (Comrade! Always make sure you know the whereabouts of young Cecil before you hurl.) Can you possibly sneak into the pub and put upright tacks on his favourite chair? Can you spit into his beer before he takes an unknowing first sip?

  Soldier, be constantly vigilant: never venture onto the beach alone, always walk down st
reets in daylight. Surround yourself with boyfriends, girlfriends, your hateful sister Hebe, your secret army. Remember: forewarned is forearmed.

  My father Percy Morley, editor of the Blowhole Gazette, informs me that Mrs Hunter, she of the Norma Shearer dancing eyes, is out of sorts after some hooligan threw yet another brick through her window. Presumably her dancing eyes are too tired to dance any more and instead are soaking their feet.

  ‘Bloody hoons,’ my father says. ‘They need a good kick up the bum.’

  ‘Poor Theresa,’ my mother comments, ‘do they have any idea who’s doing it? Three times seems more than coincidence.’

  But I am saved from the giveaway of my guilty face by the appearance of my big sister Hebe. ‘Guess what?’ she announces and something in her boastful stance alerts me to danger.

  Everyone looks at her, standing in the doorway with a haughty look on her face. My sister, the genius.

  ‘Well? Spit it out!’ My father is looking grumpy (as usual) for no other member of the human race is in the room except us. No smiles for the public, Dad? No Hail Fellow Well Met? What happened to your good-tempered self—leave it at work?

  ‘Cressida has been playing tennis!’ Hebe cries.

  Everybody turns to look at me. I am sitting at the table doing my homework (The Fall of the Roman Empire) and I look up from my papers into my father’s hot eye.

  ‘So what?’ I will say. I will feel my chin involuntarily rising as if in preparation for a mighty punch. The Fall of the Empire of Cressida.

  To my surprise my father slowly walks towards me, carefully pulls out a chair and quietly sits down. ‘Cressida, I am disappointed in you,’ he begins. ‘As a member of this family you know very well that every one of us has a duty to refuse to take part in organised games. It is our family’s way of subverting the ruling sporting culture of Australia, our family’s means of illustrating what is and what is not important. Do you understand?’

  I nod cursorily at him in the hope that this might encourage him to wind up his little speech and go away.

  ‘I know our family protest is unusual, even eccentric, but if our actions encourage just one person to stop and think about the implications of living in a sports-mad society we will have done a bloody good job.’

  Do I have to listen to this bullshit? Do I have to remain in my chair while my father goes on and on? Do I have to listen to him expounding on the joys of physical expression in natural surroundings, running on beaches, frolicking in open seas; do I have to wait while he tells me again that I will be free to do whatever I like once I leave home?

  ‘And while you live under this roof, Cressida, you will abide by the rules.’

  For the first time it occurs to me that my father is mad. It dawns on me that his quaint, endearing little eccentricities might be evidence of some inner flaw of wiring and scaffolding. What holds him up? What scanty grid of nerves animates the strange and furious web of bizarre thoughts which form his personality?

  I am thinking these things while I am looking at his head and consequently I do not answer the question he has asked me. I can only suppose he has asked me a question because the flow of his words has stopped.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What is your answer? Do you promise to refrain from playing tennis?’

  I am still looking at his head, trying to imagine the interior network of fibres and nerves. ‘No, I do not promise,’ I reply.

  ‘In that case you will have to leave this house,’ he says.

  The fact that I start to laugh does not help. ‘Cast into the street over a game of tennis!’ My voice is high, slightly hysterical because I cannot stop laughing. I look at my mother, who is looking frightened, at Hebe, who looks upset.

  ‘Happy now?’ I say to Hebe between laughs. ‘Is this what you wanted?’

  ‘Oh, Percy, don’t be stupid,’ my mother is saying, ‘you don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘On the contrary, Dorothy, I know perfectly well what I’m saying. A family has to work as a unit, as a team, every member has to play by the rules.’

  I am still laughing. ‘Play by the rules!’ I sputter and he ominously stands up.

  ‘Go to your room! Now!’ my father shouts, the network of nerves somewhere in his head radiating heat.

  I go, but I am still laughing and even when I close the door I find that I cannot stop. Dad, don’t you know there’s a war on? Don’t you know German planes are spreading across the unaware sky like a successful disease?

  Thinking of the German sky causes me to stop laughing. I am sitting in my room, breathing heavily, imagining the dark freight of bombs.

  My name is Cressida Morley and when I am sixteen my mother will talk my father out of throwing me out of the house. I am not sure how she does it exactly but I suspect it has something to do with me finishing my Leaving Certificate. I know she could not have appealed to my father’s common sense (he has none) or his fear of public opinion (ditto), but she might have successfully appealed to his sense of narcissistic pride in the possibility of his second daughter’s glossy future. For hasn’t he always believed we are better than everyone else? Hasn’t he prided himself on the flexibility of his own intellect, the breadth of his knowledge, feeling nothing but scorn for the poverty of thought that surrounds him? Am I not, first and foremost, the promising second daughter of Percy Morley? (Certainly never destined to be as brilliant as my father, nor indeed as clever as my older sister, but nonetheless I remain his second daughter.)

  That’s my guess, anyway, for when I sit down for breakfast the next morning the subject of my leaving home is never mentioned. In fact, nothing is mentioned. My father does not address one word to me during the entire meal: my father is not speaking to me.

  Hooray!

  And so it goes: my father does not speak to me for six whole months. If he needs to address a question to me he does so through the conduit of my mother or my sister. He never quite looks at me either, which is strange because I always thought he could see right through me anyway. Perhaps I really am a girl of glass, a see-through vessel, something so flimsy and insubstantial that I have become erased. Where are my edges, where is my tongue?

  I know I must exist, though, because Ampay speaks to me, even saving me a seat on the bus. I know I must exist because Gavin Hunt continues to press his quivering bow against me, even though we broke up four months ago. This does not stop him from trying to put his hands down my pants when I go over to his house to see his sister Jeanette: we are in his bedroom looking for cigarettes when suddenly he closes the door. I let him pass his fingers over the hidden steel wire, let him part the sliver of lips nestling in the steel wool. Afterwards he will tell everyone that I let him finger me, even though he dropped me and is going out with Shirley Mainwaring.

  Throughout it all, throughout the days, my father will keep refusing to look me in the eye or to address one single comment to my person.

  What exactly is my crime? Independent existence? Am I the cruel branch about to take up the saw and let the trunk’s sap weep?

  I know myself to be an invisible girl about to blow far, far away. A branch, a leaf, a moment passing. A shiver of air. Away!

  Now the brainbox is leaving school, as dux of course: Hebe Morley, the first Morley to go to university. As the new year dawns, off she goes, wreathed in glory, off to study arts among the dreaming spires. But this is the University of Sydney, Australia; Oxford writ small, replica Oxford, the colony’s little echo. There she goes nonetheless, walking the quad, passing over the lawns and gardens planted with oaks and elms once carried as acorns and seeds in the bellies of wooden ships from that greener, wetter place. There goes Hebe, the family’s star, the firstborn with the nimbus around her curly head. The intellectual, the first Morley to tread the academy’s marbled floor. My sister the killer, the one who fed me to the prowling lions without once looking back.

  We will all go up to Sydney to see her settled in her university hall
residence, to see her take her place among the gods. My father will wear a formal hat and tie; my mother her only string of pearls. My father will appear strangely discomfited, ill at ease, even more blustery and jocular than usual. I guess this is because he is intimidated by the idea of all those hard thoughts being thought, by clever men and women tidying up loose arguments all around him. Will some brainbox look upon him and be able to tell that he is only a wanting head filled with idle facts, random thoughts? Will someone guess that Percy Morley’s head contains a pile of disjointed facts: the line of ascension of British kings and queens; the causes of the Russian Revolution; the name of the small New South Wales town on the most easterly point of Australia? A fact is safe, a solitary true thing; extrapolation and reasoning are dangerously murky. Percy Morley, careful now!

  Goodbye, Hebe. Goodbye my loved and hated elder sister who I have long believed to be better loved than myself. Goodbye to you and your winning ways, to the stories my mother tells about you being their ray of joy, a parcel of sunshine delivered to their undeserving door. How you make Mum laugh, how you cause Dad’s chest to swell. What a silent sad sack of a child I am, compared to you.

  Goodbye Hebe, holder of my secrets, fellow giggler, kind girl who pretended to bump into Mrs Hunter’s Living Mistake in the newspaper office while carrying a hot mug of tea. I will love you forever, Hebe Mary Morley, sister and friend, first and most terrible foe.

  My father will begin to talk to me by mistake one morning when the news comes over the radio that Italy has entered the war. ‘Mussolini’s a clown,’ my father will say, and since no one else is in the room, this remark must be meant for me.

  ‘I don’t know much about him,’ I will reply, careful not to look directly at my father. I will concentrate on buttering my toast.