About a Girl

by Joanne Horniman

  A teapot named Lavinia … a guitar named Louise … it makes Flynn sound like someone too cute and self-conscious for her own good. But it wasn’t like that. ‘Come on, Louise,’ I heard her say, tapping its body in frustration. ‘Now, we’ll start again. You can do it!’ And it appeared perfectly natural. I’m sure she spoke that way to Louise even when I wasn’t there.

  I don’t think I’ve described Louise, an electric guitar with a white body, sprayed pale blue round the edges. There was something very lacy and feminine about her. She was rarely in her case; being shut away in the dark was not for the likes of her.

  Louise almost always came to my flat with Flynn. And she (Louise, that is) would sit in an easy chair, lolling back voluptuously, like another person in the room. We drew her in that pose one day. ‘Life drawing,’ Flynn called it, and it felt almost voyeuristic, reproducing the curves of that guitar on the page.

  In her bedroom, Flynn always had at least one single flower in a vase. Sometimes she had many, for she had lots of vases, bought in op shops, but only one specimen in each, ever. She didn’t do arrangements. Selecting a vase to suit each flower was a ritual with her. Sometimes the flower was a weed; purple cat’s paw was a favourite – each segment of the ‘pads’ was like a mauve sea anemone, waving tiny feelers, if you looked really close, she said, and I did. Sometimes her vases contained beautiful garden flowers.

  I learned how she got them. One day we were walking down a suburban street when she stopped. ‘Will you look at that colour?’ she asked, cupping in her hand a red flower that nodded over a fence. ‘Oh, I must have this. They won’t miss it – look at them all.’ And with that she plucked it and bore it away.

  Back at her place she selected a tall, narrow blue vase to display it in. ‘Flowers are the only thing I steal,’ she’d told me earnestly on the way home. As though she didn’t want me to think she was a habitual thief.

  ‘Have you ever stolen anything?’ she asked idly, arranging the flower in the vase, tilting it first to one side and then the other. ‘Everyone does, don’t they? When you were little? A lolly? Or something small from a shop?’

  ‘I stole a book once,’ I admitted. ‘From someone I knew didn’t really want it.’

  She looked at me and frowned. ‘Can you make judgements like that? How did you know? That they didn’t really want it?’

  I shrugged. How did she know those people with many flowers didn’t miss the one hanging over the fence? And she didn’t even ask what the book was, which to me would be the most salient point.

  For the record, it was Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman. And I’d stolen it from Michael’s father. After reading it I took it back; I don’t think he’d even noticed it was gone.

  Flynn came to the bookshop, appearing at the counter where I was going through the computer catalogue for a customer. She waited until I took the order and we were alone before saying, ‘I’m looking for a book and was wondering if you could help me?’

  ‘Certainly,’ I said, in my best shop assistant’s voice, wondering what she was up to.

  She leaned over and spoke in a stage whisper. ‘I just felt like seeing you again …’

  I stood behind the counter, embarrassed, but still amazed at the mere fact of Flynn’s existence in my life. We had parted only hours earlier.

  It was a large bookshop, and the other assistants and the manager were otherwise occupied. I walked Flynn along the shelves, pretending to sell to her, and we ended up down the back in the Young Adult section. There Flynn put her hand at the back of my waist, up under my blouse onto bare skin, and kissed me slowly on the mouth, sliding her tongue between my lips.

  And then she departed, as abruptly as she’d arrived.

  We almost always met at my place. Flynn liked it there because we had the whole flat to ourselves. I wondered whether it was because she wanted to keep the nature of our relationship from Caleb and Hannah, whom I still barely knew. Flynn was all contradictions. She was the one who had come to the bookshop and openly flirted, and kissed me so boldly that the manager had seen. The woman said to me discreetly, ‘Anna, I think it’d be a good idea if you kept your love life away from the shop.’

  But I was tired of us being exclusive and alone. I wanted to be seen with her, even if the nature of our relationship wasn’t obvious to other people. So one Sunday morning I said, ‘Let’s go out today.’

  She looked up. She was propped on her elbows sunning herself near the front windows, dressed only in a singlet and knickers, a cup of coffee on the floor at her side.

  ‘Where?’ she said lazily.

  ‘To the market. I need some fruit and veggies.’

  ‘You can get them at the shops anytime,’ said Flynn. She rolled over and hugged a cushion to her chest.

  ‘But I want to go out with you.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ She finished her coffee and got dressed.

  At the market, we wandered together the way two friends might, only occasionally linking fingers for fleeting moments. Even though I wanted to be seen with her, I was still shy about being romantically linked with a girl, and I thought Flynn must be too. I don’t know why – there were plenty of openly gay people around, men and women. Perhaps because this was my first relationship.

  We filled our bags with vegetables and olives and bread, and playfully tried on dresses and hats we had no intention of buying. I was always overwhelmingly aware of Flynn’s nearness; it was painfully difficult not to touch her. There was that line of smooth skin around her waist where her jeans and T-shirt didn’t quite meet, her soft, bare neck just below her ear when she pushed her hair back. So I stroked the objects on sale instead, running my fingers over embroidered fabric or the smooth glazes of handmade pots, or nosed the fragrant, obscene mouths of orchids. Flynn ran into a few people she knew, and introduced me to them simply as my friend.

  We bought paper plates of food and sat up under the trees to eat, tasting from each other’s choice of lunch, leaning across to put spoonfuls into the other’s mouth. Then, unable to keep our hands off each other, we ran to the car and drove back to my place at speed, giggling and jostling each other in our haste to get to the privacy of my flat, where the shopping was dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

  Chapter Five

  I WENT TO an op shop to find things for my flat, to make it seem more homely. But everything I looked at held the scent of other lives, and I couldn’t imagine making them my own. The one thing I did find I bore away triumphant, because it was perfect for Flynn – a really old plastic bangle, bright red, with waratahs and flannel flowers in relief all the way around it. My world was filtered through awareness of her, even when I was shopping.

  When she arrived at my place I presented it to her, just handing it over unwrapped. ‘I found something for you at Vinnies,’ I said.

  Flynn slid it onto her wrist and I could see that she was delighted, turning it round and peering at the perfection of the moulded flowers. She kissed me quickly in thanks.

  ‘I have something for you, too.’

  She drew from her bag a tiny, almost square paperback book of poems by Christina Rossetti. I thanked her with my heart singing (so Flynn had been thinking of me as well!) and turned to the back blurb at once. GOBLIN MARKET. FAIRYTALE FANTASIES, FABLES OF TEMPTATION AND REDEMPTION.

  But it appeared she had bought it for the front cover – a painting of a girl with red hair, white skin, and the kind of white, swan-like neck you could imagine kissing, or biting.

  ‘That girl,’ she said, ‘has hair exactly the same colour as yours!’

  I glanced at the image and turned automatically to the inside cover. It was from a painting called Reverie by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  I went back to the picture. Long hair flowed over her shoulders, and her face had a look of unconscious voluptuousness, with a hint of bored scepticism. Pe
rhaps she hadn’t liked posing.

  ‘She even looks rather like you, don’t you think?’

  Were my eyes so blue? My mouth so full?

  ‘What you do with it is …’ said Flynn, who had more of an idea of interior decoration than me. And she propped it up, face out, in front of all the Dostoyevskys and other gloomy black books in my improvised board-and-bricks bookshelf.

  I found myself wanting to know more and more about Flynn; it was a feeling of wanting to possess her, or of wanting to possess her life. Sometimes I thought I wanted to be her, and my own life seemed to be lacking in comparison to hers. Hers was so full – she disappeared sometimes to go and see her mother, and she was always either working at the café, or composing music, or getting text messages from friends. She didn’t introduce me to many of them, and only ever as my friend, Anna. Our relationship seemed hidden from everyone. Even if we hadn’t arranged to meet, she turned up at my place most nights, not always bothering to tell me what she had been doing. And I didn't often ask, because her answers were mostly vague. I had to accept her mind was tied up with music, and a complicated network of people that stretched back to her childhood.

  But there were clues. Her room was full of trinkets. I wondered who had given them to her, and in what circumstances. One day in her room I picked up an old coffee tin and shook it.

  ‘I’ve had that for years,’ she said. ‘I imagine I’ll be taking it to every place I live until I die.’

  ‘May I see what’s inside?’

  ‘If you like.’ She smiled. ‘You won’t find the contents particularly spectacular. But that tin represents my childhood to me.’

  I prised open the lid with a teaspoon. Inside I found:

  A single pearl earring.

  ‘That used to belong to my grandmother. She lost the other one, but loved them so much she kept this one in her jewel box. She used to let me look through it whenever I visited. I inherited this along with an extremely beautiful necklace my mother’s looking after for me until I’m old enough and beautiful enough to do it justice.’

  An extremely tiny teapot from a child’s tea set, minus the lid.

  ‘The only thing that’s left from a tea set I got for Christmas when I was four. I don’t know where the rest of it went – must have lost it.’

  A yellow feather.

  ‘My budgerigar. I let him go because I thought birds shouldn’t live in cages, but he kept coming back. He died three years ago.’

  A small blue button in the shape of a rabbit.

  ‘Is this a kiss?’ I said, holding it up.

  Her brow furrowed. ‘A kiss?’

  ‘You know – Peter Pan. Wendy asks him if he’d like a kiss, and he doesn’t know what one is, so he holds out his hand. So as not to embarrass him, she gives him a thimble. And then when she asks him for a kiss he gives her an acorn button.’ But I could see that Flynn didn’t know the book. ‘Just one of the books from my childhood,’ I explained.

  ‘Well, that’s just from a dress I had when I was a toddler. Apparently I loved the buttons, so my mother saved them – that’s the only one to survive.’

  At the bottom of the tin lay a small piece of plastic. I shook it out onto my hand.

  A guitar pick.

  I looked at her for another explanation, and Flynn raised an eyebrow. ‘A guitar pick,’ she said casually, as though it was an entirely incidental matter that it was there.

  She bundled the things back into the tin and pressed the lid shut. ‘There. I told you the contents wouldn’t be much. I need to go out for a few things. Just bread and milk and stuff. Want to come?’

  Normally I would have relished the opportunity to wander in and out of shops with Flynn. I spent as much time as I could with her. So why did I say lazily that day, ‘I think I’ll just stay here and listen to that new CD’?

  It was the first time I’d been alone in her room for any length of time. At first I lay on the bed listening to music and looking around as though with Flynn’s eyes, because places are different when their owners are absent. And then I sat up, and realised with a fluttering heart that if I liked I could look through her things. The thought immediately horrified me – it was so untrustworthy and secretive, but I realised that it wasn’t just an option for me, but a compulsion. I might never get the chance again.

  I turned the music off and listened at the door. Caleb and Hannah were out, as usual, and the flat was silent.

  Beset with urgency, I flipped through Flynn’s notebooks. I knew she didn’t keep a diary, just a book with ideas and words for songs. I hoped, of course, to find references to myself, and I did. I found the words to the song Flynn had written about the first time we’d been alone together on her roof.

  I wondered if she’d made up songs for other people she’d gone around with – she hadn’t talked about her former relationships. There were plenty of songs that could be construed as love songs (a mainstay for musicians), but there were no names mentioned – the songs could have been about entirely imaginary people and situations.

  Leaving the notebooks as I’d found them, I next opened Flynn’s drawers, hot with shame and curiosity. At first I found nothing unexpected – the usual underwear, cakes of fancy soap, boxes of tampons.

  And then in a bottom drawer filled mostly with socks, I found something firm and hard wrapped up in a T-shirt.

  It was a picture of a boy in a glass frame; he was a very beautiful boy, with short dark hair and brown eyes. And the shirt it was wrapped in was a boy’s shirt – too large for Flynn, and not too clean. I sniffed it. It had a stale, boy smell.

  My heart felt as though it was beating its way out of my body. Quickly, I wrapped up the picture and slid the drawer shut.

  By the time Flynn came back I was sitting on the floor with the music playing again, but I scarcely heard it, because guilt and shame and curiosity almost overwhelmed me.

  Surely there must be some way Flynn could tell what I had been doing. I waited fearfully to be denounced. And I thought I really had been found out, because she approached me with such gravity, her eyes on my face. She knelt in front of me. I thought she was about to accuse me, but she said, with a look of shy tenderness, ‘I found something for you at the op shop.’

  Her long, slender fingers held something tiny wrapped in blue cellophane. As she handed it to me, her eyes playfully told me to open it.

  The blue paper crackled open and I found a button, a small, perfect, old mother-of-pearl button.

  A kiss.

  It gleamed with secrecy. It was as smooth as innocence. And its perfection was marred by the smallest crack at the edge.

  Chapter Six

  I TOOK THE button home and put it away in a box with my earrings. Flynn had given me a token of her feelings for me at exactly the same time that I had betrayed her trust.

  I know this now: I will never again pry into the past of someone I love. I will accept their feelings at face value.

  But then: I couldn’t help wondering jealously who was the boy in the photograph.

  When you’re in love, other people fall away. Her flatmates, Caleb and Hannah, were fleeting presences – clouds of steam from the bathroom or kettles bubbling dry in the kitchen. The front door slammed and they were gone again, the last CD they’d put on playing itself out in the living room.

  Flynn and I took to sauntering round town together, whenever we were free from work (work: that wretched thing that keeps two girls apart), as carefree as kingfishers, our happiness in each other flashing out in shades of blue and gold.

  One day we passed two girls walking with hands held, and Flynn shot me a look of delight and caught hold of my hand and kissed my fingers. The moment was as brief as a bird alighting on a limb but my happiness lasted hours.

  Everything she did charmed me. No one else was like Flynn
– could be like Flynn. Each day she would go outside and look up at the sky, determining what the weather would hold so as to choose the right clothes to wear. (As though weather forecasters did not exist, and girls must be like wise women who read the sky for Signs.) I loved to see her selecting items from her wardrobe – she would wear these green trousers with that apricot cotton top, and it was the perfect, the only thing to wear on that day.

  Her favourite place for writing songs was out on her roof, the teapot Lavinia propped beside her. Hugging Louise to her chest, a pencil by her side, she would strum and scribble, pausing every so often to pour more tea into her cup till eventually every drop was drained from the pot. It was then that I’d quietly go inside and make another, her cat and I keeping each other company.

  Early one Saturday afternoon, Flynn came to my door and said urgently, ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A surprise.’

  ‘Should I wear a party frock? Or …’

  ‘Bring a towel … Do you still have those swimmers I lent you? – And we might need another blanket. I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a sleeping bag?’

  She spoke with that frowning faraway look on her face, and she wouldn’t say where we were going.

  When we got out to the car I saw that the back was filled with stuff. There was a sleeping bag, and pillows, and a box with a pan handle sticking out.

  Flynn drove us to the coast, and along a sandy track through the scrub, parking behind some dunes; I heard the sound of the sea and the warbling of nectar-feeding birds that flapped clumsily along the branches of the trees. We got out and walked through a stand of banksias and casuarinas. At the top of the dunes we could see the sweep of a long stretch of beach; the only other people were a few lone fishermen standing with rods at the edge of the sea.

  Flynn ran to the water and waded in up to her thighs. She was wearing khaki shorts, and the bottoms got wet. I walked down to join her, my dress tucked into my knickers.