Then I went off to find a book for Sophie. Down an alleyway off one of the shopping streets is a place with the tantalising name of Hope Springs. It’s a second-hand bookshop run for charity, and the proceeds go to projects in East Timor and refugee support. I went there sometimes because it had an air of possibility, and I love all places where books are gathered en masse. At Hope Springs the books were like flotsam and jetsam that had been washed up by the tides. All sorts of unexpected little treasures were possible. I imagined that the books would be encrusted with barnacles and salt, spilling sea water when you opened them, but I only ever saw an occasional silverfish and a lot of dark spotting on the pages, like the marks on old people’s hands. But against the evidence of all those sad, unwanted books, I went there the afternoon after Anastasia was born because I felt a trickle of hope (hardly a spring) that there might be something there that Sophie would like.
The shop is staffed by volunteers, a changing cast of people who give the general impression of advancing age and wispy beards and unironed clothing. But on this particular day there was a boy there, not much older than me, with a slim, slightly stooped body, olive skin, and a graceful, rather hooked nose. He stood beside me and gave a hint of a smile as he placed a book on the shelves. His fingers were long and brown and slender, and so were his eyes. Every part of him was brown and slender. Someone, somewhere, had constructed him perfectly.
There is nothing like browsing in a bookshop for covertly observing someone. I felt that the boy was observing me too, but we were both also eavesdropping on the conversation between two other customers. They were middle-aged people with shapeless bodies clad in jeans and big shirts, and were lamenting the lack of standards in written English these days: the mis-use (or even non-use) of apostrophes, the bad grammar that cropped up even in Published Books, and the dirty-mindedness and lack of plot in these same Published Books. Finally they walked out of the shop, and the boy and I looked over at each other at the same time.
‘I hope you know where to place an apostrophe,’ he said, softly.
‘I most certainly do. A badly placed apostrophe is something that really turns my stomach.’
‘And I hope you always observe the correct English usage.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of corrupting our fine language. And as for Plot –if I ever write a book, I will make sure it has a good, soundly constructed Plot.’
‘I don’t know how these Modern Novels get published,’ he said, shaking his head, still in the same deadpan voice.
‘It’s a scandal and a disgrace.’
At that same moment I found a book by a writer called Virginia Woolf. It was called A Room of One’s Own, and though it looked very dull from the outside, with a stained hard cover with no dustjacket or picture on it, I opened it and liked the way the words were put together. It was about women and fiction and looked just the thing for Sophie. I also found (I’d been looking in the ‘Women’s Literature’ shelves –how ridiculous, bookshops never have a section called ‘Men’s Literature’) a book whose cover photograph attracted me at once. On it, a woman reclined on a bed with her hands behind her head and stared frankly at the camera, her pale face framed by a mass of dark hair. This is who I am, she seemed to be saying. She wore a lacy-looking blouse patterned with dark leaves, and had an exquisite china-doll face, with thin eyebrows and a cupid’s-bow mouth. The Journals of Anaïs Nin, the book was called.
I took the two books to the table that was used as a counter, and the boy came over to serve me. He smiled when he saw what I was buying, but he didn’t comment and, despite our earlier banter, I felt suddenly tongue-tied. I paid for the books and left without asking his name or anything, but once I was out on the street I regretted it. I wanted to go back at once, because I couldn’t wait to see him again, but I was too shy to turn round.
I gave A Room of One’s Own to Sophie that afternoon, but could see that it would be a while till she would be strong enough for such a book. All her desire for something interesting to read had disappeared; she declared that her fanny was so sore she doubted it would ever recover (the other women in the room looked at each other and tittered), but that she was still blissfully ecstatic. She added almost balefully that the feeling would probably wear off when the hormones that had kicked in just after the birth wore away. She exchanged glances with the other new mothers around her, as if they were in an exclusive club together.
She slipped the book into a drawer, not even glancing at it, and devoured the chocolate I had brought without offering me any.
I went to see Sophie in hospital every day. On one visit she wept bitter tears, and complained that she leaked from almost every orifice; she waddled to the toilet with enormous pads stuffed down her pants; she held nappies to her breasts to staunch the flow of milk that welled from them at inconvenient times. Otherwise, she seemed very happy. She read snatches of Oscar Wilde and snorted with laughter. She undressed Anastasia and inspected her for any flaws or imperfections and found none. I wondered if she also searched for any resemblance to the man who was the father, but if she did she said nothing. Mostly, Sophie just lay beside her baby and gazed at her. ‘She’s just perfect,’ she said.
Naked, Anastasia was all secret folds of skin, and surprising hairiness. Her mouth was fleshy and dimpled, with all the twirls and convolutions of a flower, her fingers a group of blind, plump grubs. I learned that a baby is not simply a larger person in miniature, but a creature with an almost entirely different terrain. Everything was in the right place but shaped so differently that I was awed to think that she would one day resemble a real, flawed person. Anastasia had the disposition of a baby bird, and either rested in a state of flaccid, helpless dreaminess, or reared up urgently, demanding food.
Because I was at the hospital so often, I was there when the nurses taught Sophie to bathe her, and learned how to test the temperature of the water, unwrap her from the layered confusion of her clothing, and wipe her small protesting face with a warm cloth. I learned how to immerse her in tepid water, where she hung suspended peacefully on my arm like a creature returned to its natural surroundings. I learned how to dry every last tender fold of her skin, and wondered if she minded her lack of privacy, but she bore it all with grace. I thought how amazing it was that Anastasia came to be alive at all. All of life seems so chancey, but each birth must be the biggest miracle of all.
The Red Notebook
Music: none. written in absolute silence
The Journals of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5, 1947-1955
On the cover, Anaïs Nin is a fragile, yet strong-looking woman. She looks fearlessly into the camera. She looks at me.
She was a writer, and she lived in wonderful places like Paris and New York, and wherever she went she attracted people like writers, artists, composers and film-makers. Which I have never known (and may never know), but some of the things she says make me feel that I know her.
It says she lived between 1903 and 1977. I’m reading her book and I love it and I can’t believe she died before I was even born!
In winter, 1948, she wrote that we receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity . . . she writes of the fallibilities, the errors, the weaknesses of parents . . . and more besides. I only half understand this . . . I will keep reading.
I wonder if I read enough about the lives of other women whether I would find out how to live my own. Whether I’d feel surer about what I wanted to do with myself. Everything that has happened to me up to now has been by chance. I feel that I have been waiting my whole life for something to happen. For someone to come along and change me. Or for a grand event, like in an opera –lots of shrill singing and fancy costumes.
But now, I want to choose the way I live my life.
The big question is, How?
The Blue Notebook
All right, Blue. Your turn.
Things are said to come out of the blue. It heralds the unexpected. It is the colour of the sky and Anastasia’s eyes. Of ro
semary flowers, and memory.
You look like a trustworthy colour. I can tell you everything. Can’t I?
I remember . . .
I remember nothing.
The Yellow Notebook
Yellow is said to be the colour of cowardice, but to me it is the colour of optimism. Sunshine. Sunflowers. Egg yolks (which become chickens, if they are permitted to).
I have no idea what I will write next. I will just write.
A girl (tall, with smooth blonde hair caught back with a clip) is walking through a tunnel in the city.
Concrete floor, old tiles on the walls. Grimy. People on either side of her, rushing to and from the trains. She walks slowly, in a pair of dark shoes with high heels (tippy shoes, she teeters slightly). She wears a charcoal-coloured suit –a jacket and tailored skirt. I can’t see her face, only her back, as she walks purposefully to the trains.
She’s a girl who works in an office. A serious girl. At least, a girl with a serious job –an interesting job. She carries a soft leather briefcase bulging with papers (but not bulging too much). Some work she’s taking home?
Where is she going? Who is she?
The Wild Typewritten Pages 3
I finished school the very week that Anastasia was born. At least, I finished that part of school that had to do with going to class each day. There was still the endless study and the exams and the Formal to go, but still, the end of classes was a milestone too.
That night, Marjorie and I sat around a campfire in a paddock with the group of people we had hung around with most of the way through high school (Jason, Nat, Zed, Rueben, Camilla, Zara and Ocean –all of these people had been briefly in love with each other at some stage except for Marjorie and me). We passed around bottles of beer and cider and gave each other occasional sentimental hugs. I looked around at all their faces flushed red from the light of the flames and felt a surge of affection, then leaned back and looked at the stars, and felt my life flowing out from this point, spinning further and further away from this time and these people.
When Oscar Wilde went to Oxford University he said that it was the most flower-like time of his life. It was Sophie who’d told me this, of course; she’d read everything on Oscar Wilde that she could lay her hands on.
I wonder what kind of flower Oscar Wilde would have been? A lily, probably, one of those large, white funereal lilies with an odour of damp melancholy about it. Oscar Wilde, when he was young (going by the photos in Sophie’s books), was beautiful, with a full, sensuous mouth and dreamy eyes. That must have been when he was at his most flower-like. When he was older his eyes had a droopy, hangdog look to them, and his mouth looked rather dissipated. He had lived his life to the full and probably squandered a lot of it; he died before he was fifty. The scandal of being sent to jail for his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas was the end of him.
For years I had been waiting for my own flower-like time to begin. I thought that this would probably happen when I finished school and left Lismore and Samarkand for ever. Perhaps then I could throw all caution to the wind (because I was cautious) and become what I was to become.
Perhaps being an aunt would make me braver and less cautious. I had seen Anastasia’s eyes open; I was the first person she had seen on this earth. Her eyes had been framed by her damp eyelashes, and they were dark with knowledge.
I had known at once that my niece would leave nothing in her life to chance –Anastasia had decided to be born at this time and place and had chosen Sophie to be her mother. Everything that she did in her life would be intentional. I had known from the start that it would be a wondrous thing to watch a child grow from being a small baby. My own growing, and Sophie’s, was shrouded in mystery and forgetting. There were thoughts I didn’t allow myself to think, and things that my sister and I never talked about. Our parents had left us when we were very young –almost too young for memory.
Our mother had taken off first. I imagined her becoming airborne like a bird, soaring upwards in a tattered red dress that streamed out behind her like feathers. Afterwards, our father drifted, like a lost boat rather than something of the air, towing the two of us behind him. He washed up at Samarkand. And then left again, without us.
He left us there with Lil, who has looked after us ever since. Sophie told me once that she felt like a forgotten parcel waiting for someone to turn up and claim her. But although I could barely remember my father, I always expected him –he would return one day and our real lives would begin from there. Because I felt sure that our father must have had a good reason for going.
The only thing he left behind apart from us and our shabby collection of clothes was a small box with our birth certificates in it, so he must have known he wasn’t returning for a while. And there, with all the authority that printed words on paper confer, is the evidence of our existence, which establishes us as legitimate people for the rest of our lives. Kate O’Farrell and Sophie O’Farrell. No second names, as if our parents hadn’t the energy for it. On the certificates are the names of our father and mother. Michael O’Farrell: occupation, labourer. Margaret Thomas, no occupation listed. They weren’t married.
Lil had never attempted to find them. Presumably because if people didn’t want to be found, it was no use going after them. After all, our father must have known very well where he’d left us.
I often wondered about our mother –this Margaret Thomas, whom I don’t remember at all. It is such a stern, forbidding, humourless name, and doesn’t match the description Sophie gave me of her. She’d said that our mother’s hair was as black as night. She said that she was wanton and wild and gypsy-like, though I don’t know how Sophie was able to see all this at the age of five or six.
My mother was never real to me at all; I didn’t even quite believe in her existence. But I did have a single memory of my father. It was a memory that led me to believe he would come back. For years I scrutinised every man who turned up at Samarkand wanting a bed, thinking that it might be our father come back to claim us.
The Red Notebook
‘I like men who have a future And women who have a past.’
Oscar Wilde
Sophie is bringing Anastasia home today! We have made all the preparations for their return. In the storeroom Lil found an old cane bassinette that she says is a family heirloom (and we aren’t even a proper family!). She painted it lavender (how predictable!). She also painted a chest of drawers lavender, for Anastasia’s clothes. L is Lil’s favourite colour –ages ago she bought a huge tin of lavender paint for little jobs around the place, and it never seems to run out. (How I wish it would run out!)
To compensate for all that Lavender (I want my niece to have colours other than lavender to look at –it might become burned onto her retina and scar her for life!), I have hung a constellation of brightly coloured stars above the bassinette, which bob about in the breeze. And Marjorie brought a crystal which we hung in the doorway to the verandah –we hope it will reflect the river and the sky into the room.
Everything is tidy for once. All Sophie’s clothes are put away in the cupboards, nice and clean. This won’t last long. Soon she will have them out all over the floor again, clean mixed with dirty, and when she wants to put something on she’ll sniff it to determine whether it’s clean or not. This isn’t the way women are supposed to behave, I know, but Sophie and I have never really learned the proper way for women to behave. We are like savages. Or so Lil tells us, when she’s annoyed with us.
But here’s the taxi!
The Wild Typewritten Pages 4
When Sophie came home from hospital at last, I was astonished to see her appear in the kitchen the very next morning, ‘You look like the wreck of the Hesperus!’ said Lil.
But to me, Sophie didn’t look like a wreck at all; she looked rather grand, like a boat in full sail rather than a wrecked one. Her faded pink chenille dressing-gown was tied round her waist with a green scarf; her hips swelled out beneath the thick fabric; her breasts were enorm
ous. Crinkled black hair stretched behind her like a cape.
She leaned against the doorjamb. ‘I got practically no sleep,’ she whispered in a voice that sounded as if she had spent the last four hundred years singing jazz in a smoke-filled nightclub. ‘Anastasia wanted to feed all night.’
I left her sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her and ran up the stairs. Very quietly, I entered Sophie’s room, and though I moved carefully so as not to wake Anastasia, I was hoping that she was awake, or would wake soon.
Even asleep, she was a miracle and a joy to behold. As I bent over the cradle Anastasia must have sensed my presence, because she pursed her lips and grimaced, and then was still again.
Sophie had painted her room vermilion. She said her walls were as red as a womb. Her bed was a voluptuous muddle of sheets and doona, and she had already messed up the room that Lil and I had tidied before she came home. Books and magazines lay all over the floor. The wardrobe contained no clothes, because she’d gone through them finding out which ones still fitted and left them lying all over the floor.
I lay down on Sophie’s bed, which smelt of perfume and milk and baby, plopping down onto the pillows and hoping that it would wake Anastasia. I luxuriated in the sensation of being an aunt, noticing how the flimsy white curtains at the French doors billowed in the breeze, thinking I’d like to be a painter and capture the billowing.
A shadow appeared on the curtains. It was Lil.
‘Kate, do you intend going to school today, or in the near future, or ever?’
Lil was always convinced that I was hell-bent on avoiding school. I reminded her that it was the September holidays, and after that I was off on swot vac until the exams started.
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 2