The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  For all its florid emotion it was next to useless.

  My darlings forgive me

  I am sorry I am having trouble writing this. I have loved you all so much.

  Now I cannot feel anything except pain I am so sorry

  Cannot write any more forgive me

  Katherine

  The note is not in the library’s collection. That is because I kept it. In the confusion of the moment my father didn’t notice that I took it. I suppose he later assumed it had been thrown out.

  Anyone can read it and still be none the wiser. It doesn’t explain anything to me, or else its explanation lies only in the absence of her saying anything.

  The meaning I took from it was that my mother loved us, but in the past tense. She had loved us, but previously, not now. Her small, inadequate note recorded the memory of love.

  I could not believe my ears when my father telephoned that morning. ‘Anna, it’s me. I’ve got some terrible news. Can you come over?’ I thought something had happened to Lil. ‘Dad, is it Lil?’ He said, ‘No,’ and straightaway I knew. ‘Oh, please, not Mum. Tell me it’s not Mum.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she’s gone, darling. She’s gone from us.’

  They were taking her away when I got there. She didn’t look dead, she looked asleep. I had this weird feeling she was going to open her eyes.

  Elizabeth and I went with our father to the Glebe Coroner’s Court to hear the coroner’s verdict on our mother’s death. Yes, I am David John Murray, author, husband of the deceased Katherine Anne Elgin Murray, late of 15 Stephen Street, Warawee. Yes, my wife had been drinking heavily the night before her death; yes, she had been depressed for some months. Yes, she was an author, aged forty-six years.

  At this point my father wiped his eyes and the coroner asked if he was all right to continue. My father said, Yes, I’m fine. My father went on to say that his wife had had trouble sleeping, that she had suffered from insomnia for the last couple of years, since returning to Australia after a long exile in Greece. She had at least three current prescriptions for sleeping pills from various doctors in Pymble, St Ives, and neighbouring suburbs.

  Lil cried but I did not. I listened carefully to everything that was said. I saw that my father looked wrecked, as if he had not slept for months. It was news to me that he loved my mother.

  After the coroner returned his verdict that Katherine Anne Elgin Murray had died on or about October 27 from an overdose of sleeping tablets ‘self-administered while in a state of severe mental depression and while considerably affected by alcohol’, my father stood and nodded. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘Am I free to go?’

  It sounds macabre but after my mother was buried I could not stop thinking about her decomposing body. We had a small funeral. My aunt Ros and uncle Pete, my grandmother Elsie. My grandmother didn’t know what was happening. She looked frightened, turning around, twisting her fingers. She’s long dead herself now.

  For months afterwards I kept thinking of my mother down there in the dark. Did she still have her skin?

  I kept thinking foolish thoughts. She was missing out on summer. Her jasmine was in flower.

  Sitting here and reading everything my mother wrote has not made anything clearer. Despite all her words she had the same inability to analyse her emotions as the rest of us. In fact she was more wilfully deceitful than most. She specialised in romance, in emotional obfuscation.

  My mother was so carried away with her private epiphanies about art and life she failed to notice what was under her nose. At her worst she bristles with vanity, drenched in self-pity and artistic self-regard. If I was a psychoanalyst I would say her grandiose persona as an ‘artist’ was the death of her. Only a narcissist could imagine having a soul with the strength of a thousand armies.

  For someone who believed she had dedicated her life to truth she was astonishingly self-deceptive. For all her navel-gazing, my mother couldn’t see how much like her father she was. Ros says she was exactly like him, self-centred, egotistical—I know that when she was writing one of her precious fucking books everyone was supposed to think it was the most important thing in the world. Sometimes when I came home from school she would look straight through me, her thoughts fixed on some character in her head. I once ate an entire freshly baked cake while she worked beside me at the kitchen table. Lil and I twigged early that we could get away with anything when she was writing.

  My mother believed her status as an ‘artist’ gave her the right to everything, including the private details of my life. When she was doing the column, she had no compunction whatsoever about using my experiences, or Lil’s. She wrote about ‘the youth of today’, the boys I went out with, the length of my mini-skirts. She had no idea how she hurt people.

  My mother had a way of blocking out anything she didn’t want to deal with. I was interested to see how she recorded my dislike of our neighbour, Theo. I think these days the term for what he did to me would be called sexual abuse. He used to lock me in his bedroom and pin me to the bed. He was twelve years old, but big and strong, and I was helpless.

  I note my mother’s unfailing romanticism about Greek island life. How could anyone think that living in the sun meant a life without shadows? The laws of life are just as unbeatable on a Greek island as anywhere else.

  Sickness, bad faith, old age. Everything comes to us in the end.

  For a long time I could not forgive my mother. Not only for killing herself but for leaving Lil the most terrible of blueprints. My sister killed herself three years after my mother. Pills, alcohol, the same. I thought any vestige of love left for my mother was gone.

  When someone dies by suicide there is an irresistible impulse to see every event in their life as a missed clue. For years I tried to read Lil’s life backwards from her end, as if everything that went before was changed by that last, defining act.

  Now I think she was just unlucky. She was a happy child, a happy young woman, until our mother’s death. I think Lil’s death was an accident: I might have dropped in unexpectedly or her boyfriend Paul might have changed his plans and stayed the night. Like me, like the rest of us, she would have gone on to learn that even unbearable sadness can wax and wane.

  My father never re-married. He had a couple of long-term girlfriends. The last one, Robyn, I grew to like. I told her I understood completely when she decided to leave him.

  My mother’s death had gradually turned us into curiosities. We were early victims of celebrity culture. Before long, everybody wanted to know everything. Articles were written, books. A burgeoning women’s movement claimed my mother as one of its patron saints. My father was reduced to the demon lover, and it was generally supposed that without him my mother’s life would have been happier, her genius fulfilled. I once read an article which suggested that, had she lived, my mother would have been an active campaigner for refugees and women’s rights.

  I’ve got no time for all that crap. Celebrity culture rests on a false premise: that if every action is brought to light, truth will out. I agree with my mother. Everyone is a secret. In the end, no one knows anyone else.

  Words cannot cover or reveal everything. A book will never save your life. I note that as my mother got closer to suicide, words failed her. For someone for whom writing was like breathing, this meant she lacked the means to go on. The mechanism by which she lived was broken.

  It seems to me she finally discovered not everything in life can be written down. There will always be gaps in the narrative, mysteries impossible to record. I see that my mother never once wrote the word ‘envy’. She lacked the courage to write some things down. Her journal often tells a different story to the one she thought she was writing.

  I grew up surrounded by people turning their emotional lives into fiction. Yet my mother went to great lengths to point out the distinction between life and art.

  The library describes her unfinished novel as ‘autobiographical’. This suggests she gave birth to an illegitimate child. If I was the kin
d of reader to read a novel as disguised fact, I would say she did. But nowhere in her journal does she write of such a situation, recording only that something awful happened, about which she does not intend to speak. My instinct tells me she knew regret and sorrow but caused by what it is impossible to say. I am old enough to know everyone holds within them some accumulation of pain, some complex mix of disappointment, longing and grief.

  I’m going to ask Ros. She’ll tell me.

  My late grandfather, Arthur Elgin, was never a communist. He was a lifelong Mason, a fully paid-up conservative. Apparently he loved sport. What my mother did not embellish was his personality: Ros says he was an egomaniac of the highest order, and never stopped talking about himself. Ros, who has just turned eighty-three and is still as sharp as a tack, tells cruel stories about him boring everyone senseless reciting the hundred and one quatrains of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam while dressed in his underpants.

  But if my mother’s fiction does not tell the whole truth then neither does her journal. Many things are missing. Incidents from my childhood, for instance, from Lil’s life and mine, which she never recorded. I remember for Lil’s eighth birthday she went to Athens to get materials so she could make a beautiful blue papier-mache doll. Inside the doll she secreted hundreds of pink sugar-coated chocolates. She hung up the doll from the plum tree in the walled garden. Every child was given a big stick with which to whack the doll. Chocolates rained upon us. It is one of the highlights of my life.

  I remember, too, something my mother once told me about writing. She said it was like seeding a pearl. The writer puts in a tiny piece of truth, smaller than a grain of sand. The grain then irritates its environment into producing an artificial pearl.

  The problem now is the impossibility of ever finding the original autobiographical grain. How could I ever begin to sort through her life and her fiction for truth?

  I am a mathematician, not a writer. I enjoy the solidity of figures, the way everything operates under provable laws. Writing never appealed to me. It’s neurotic, frankly. Living once, then living it over.

  I have always known each breath is singular. Once you have expelled a breath it is gone.

  I waited a long time before I had children. For ages I wasn’t sure I wanted them.

  It was Chris who helped change my mind. Like me, he belongs to a generation which believes it knows more than its elders. We flattered ourselves that knowledge equals power and supposed we could avoid our parents’ worst mistakes. I was thirty-eight when Sam was born; forty when I had Alex.

  I would like to report that I have proved a better mother than my mother was. Before I had my sons, I reckoned I would make a more attentive, caring parent. I believed I could give my sons everything I didn’t get myself. I was therefore surprised when I found myself looking at my oldest son one day, thinking, ‘Why should you have it any easier than I did?’ At that moment, I hated him.

  Last April I went back to the island for the first time in thirty-seven years. I am the only member of my family ever to return.

  A couple of things propelled me. I knew it would probably be our last holiday together. Sam was leaving school; at fifteen, Alex had reached an age where he preferred his friends to us. Then my father died.

  I wanted to go back.

  It was misty as the hydrofoil came into the harbour. No old white boat now. No Sirius taking several hours from Piraeus, stopping off at various islands on the way. Instead a two hour bumpy trip by hydrofoil.

  I had been scanning the horizon for some time. All at once the familiar shape of the island rose up. My breath caught.

  The harbour looked the same. I had not seen it since I was eighteen years old. Then, someone had given my mother flowers. Lil was holding a new hand-sewn handkerchief embroidered by her best friend Cassandra. She was crying.

  As the hydrofoil came into the port everything rushed back. The houses, the hills, the colours, the smells, the same sounds. ‘Are you okay?’ Chris asked. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m fine.’

  On the quay of the port my feet recalled the feel of the cobblestones. I put my head down and walked.

  I told no one I was coming. I still occasionally correspond with Lil’s friend Cassandra. At fifty, Cassandra is a grandmother several times over but I have not heard from her in some years.

  I did not look up. I did not expect to be recognised. Nonetheless I felt exposed. I followed Chris and was aware of the excitement of the boys, who had mysteriously dropped their air of inner-city teenage surliness to exclaim over the donkeys, as my sister and I had once done.

  My heart was racing despite myself. The smell of petrol and kerosene and oil and salt and fish and donkey shit and rotten vegetables brought everything back.

  We found ourselves in some anonymous room. Our bags on a mock marbled floor. The shutters opened onto a sports ground I did not remember. Boys were playing on a football pitch I had never seen.

  Behind the field were the rocky hills of my youth. I saw olive trees, cactus, donkeys, the weak spring sun. Chris said, ‘We don’t have to stay you know, Anna. We can leave on the next boat.’ I shook my head. My eldest son came up and offered his hand.

  It was too early in April for warmth. Sometimes we needed sweaters. In the days that followed I passed unnoticed, indistinguishable from every other tourist. It was still quiet, out of season. I saw the effects of international tourism, how much cleaner and slicker everything looked. I noticed the plethora of shops selling tiny wicker donkeys, evil eyes, komboloe.

  On warmer days Chris took the boys to the coves where I swam as a child. While they were gone I walked endlessly. I walked up to the school where I once stood at the wire fence shouting down messages to my father working in his studio in our house below.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw our house. Quickly my eye veered away. I turned and began to walk, fast. I continued up the hill. I passed the church where Lil was baptised, the houses where I knew all the children who once lived inside. Every house was freshly painted, probably owned by rich Athenians for use as weekenders. Derelict houses had been renovated; walled gardens where pigs and goats and chickens had been kept were laid out with expensive tiles and pot plants. Every time anyone passed I put my head down.

  One afternoon I came by accident upon our house. I had momentarily stopped to rest. Turning my head I looked up a lane and saw the edge of it.

  I stood very still. It seemed unbelievable the house had survived us.

  I walked towards it. The well outside was no longer in use. All the windows were new. Everything was closed, every window and shutter and door. I quickly glanced over to the house next-door which used to be Soula’s. Whoever lived there was not in.

  I circled the house. Round the walled garden where I saw the tops of lemon trees. Past the plum tree planted by my mother. I went around the back of the house and down the other side. The window to the kitchen was open, protected by a new metal grill. I squatted down and peered in. The cool of it hit me in the face: its deep cave smell, its dark quiet. I could see straight through to the walled garden at the other side.

  I stood up. I moved quickly back down the alley where I had come. I was trying not to run.

  Every day the house kept drawing me back. I could not stop myself from walking towards it. I sat on my heels in the alley and made out our old bedroom, Lil’s and mine. I noted the window where we had once yelled out obscenities to Theo. From where I had thrown water bombs at my sister.

  As I got braver I took to sitting on the stone steps of what used to be Soula’s house. Not once did I see Soula. I did not see anyone in our house either. It appeared closed up for winter.

  I wondered who owned it now. When we left we handed over responsibility for its sale to Thanasis, the mayor. I believe he sold it for a pittance to someone from Athens.

  I wondered what had happened to Soula. To Theo. Perhaps they were dead like the rest.

  When I was with Chris and the boys I began to point things out to them.


  I took them to the cove where we used to swim. The steps leading down to the sea had rusted away. My mother used to hoist herself up from the sea using those steps.

  One morning Chris took the boys on a climb to the mountains. I bought a copy of the Guardian International and sat down at one of the indistinguishable new cafés. I was wearing my sunglasses for the first time, trying to drink a terrible cup of coffee made with Nescafé and UHT milk.

  I happened to glance up. Coming straight towards me was Kyria Soula. Soula grown old, but still recognisably Soula. She moved slowly, still a far way up the lane. Straightaway I knew that squat and solid shape to be hers. I sat very still. As I watched my hands began to sweat. How old was she? Seventy-five? Seventy-six? I know she was younger than my mother. Age had descended on her like it never would upon my mother.

  She came closer and closer. That same large, square bottom that had descended so many times down the ladder from our upper rooms. That same fleshy face.

  I barely breathed as she drew closer, as she passed within inches of my face. I felt the curved ridge of the chair against my back. I came eye-to-eye with that living memory: I needed only to reach out a hand to stop her.

  I could not move. She passed by, not glancing in my direction. As she passed I noticed one of her eyes had filmed over. She had a wall eye, some kind of blindness.

  But her face, her hands, her great solid bottom were the same. She was walking the same earth, the same streets as she had always done. She had lived here, rooted to the spot, turning into a mother, a grandmother, no doubt into a great-grandmother. Eventually she would turn into earth. Into the dirt of the cemetery on the hill.