We used to love going through Lil’s wardrobe on dull afternoons, and Lil had never minded. I knew every dress by heart –the glittery blackish-silver sheath that Lil wore to the funerals of her friends, the one with the red roses and gathered skirt, the white jersey with the cowl neck, the plain shift with Pop Art patterns on it, the red dress with batwing sleeves . . . Lil had owned these dresses for hundreds of years and it was almost a library of every dress style that had ever existed.
At the very end of the row was the Man’s Suit. Sophie and I used to speculate about the suit. (Had it belonged to a lover of Lil, or to our father? Or had a guest simply forgotten it, and Lil kept it in case they returned?) We’d learned, when Lil overheard us discussing it, that it had belonged to her son Alan. Lil told us that she couldn’t bear to throw it out after he died. And then her face had closed up. She hadn’t wanted to talk about it.
Lil had so much stuff that if she did die (when she died . . .), there’d be no shortage of mementoes to remember her by. Whereas, of our own mother we had nothing: not a photograph, or a bracelet, or even one single worn-down lipstick.
When I was seven, I had walked home from school for the first time on my own.
This was an important milestone, for Lil had expressly forbidden me to do it. Sophie was meant to walk me to and from school each day.
Sophie hated having to do this –it stopped her running off immediately with her friends and doing whatever important things she was doing in those days. On this particular day, she said, ‘Kate. I have to go to Jane’s house right now - I don’t have time to take you home first. You can walk by yourself, can’t you? But don’t tell Lil. Tell her I saw you to the door first.’
I set off. The lollipop man helped us all cross the road near the school, and I had no other busy crossing to contend with after that. I ignored the boys on the corner who always teased me, and said pooh! to the black dog that lived behind a high timber fence, and it lunged towards me, barking, making the fence shudder with its weight. I took an apple from my bag to feed the goat with the hard demonic eyes that lived tethered on the empty block three houses from Samarkand. I was as good as home at that point, and as the goat took the fruit from my hand I savoured the feeling of having achieved something that I had been absolutely forbidden to do.
That walk had been a cinch, really, and I felt invincible. I was purple with importance by the time I reached Samarkand. I paused at the bottom of the steps that seemed to weave their way forever up the front, took a deep breath and toiled up them, knocking my school case against each step as I ascended.
The house was silent. There seemed to be no one there. This was unusual, because Lil was always there when we got home. It was usual for several of the guests to be milling about on the verandah or in the lounge room as well.
The kitchen was empty, so I went looking for Lil in all the usual places. She wasn’t in the television room, and she wasn’t hiding with a book on the overstuffed sofa on the verandah. The next most likely place for her to be was in her room, and that was dead silent. I crept to the doorway.
Lil’s room was in darkness; the curtains drawn. I went up to the bed: Lil lay so still that I knew she was dead. Whatever had made her Lil had departed. The room had a feeling of absence in it. I pulled a chair over next to the bed and sat with her, not touching her, just gazing at her face in the faint light that came through the window. Lil kept a tin of lemon sweets on her bedside table. I reached over and removed one from its bed of powdered sugar, and sucked slowly on it, allowing it to dissolve on my tongue.
What would happen to us now that Lil was gone? Who would look after us? I missed Lil already. A hole had opened up inside me, but no tears came.
If one did creep in a ticklish track down my cheek, I just licked it away. Having finished the lemon sweet, I reached for the tin and sat with it opened on my lap, with my head bowed. I took another sweet and crunched savagely into it.
When I looked up, Lil’s eyes had opened, and she was looking at me, though no other part of her had moved. It was like being observed by a statue.
‘Did you ask if you could have those, madam?’
I dropped the tin at once, and sweets rattled onto the floor.
I had tasted grief. It would always taste of sugary lemon. It would feel like the shard of a hard sweet against my tongue; a film of sugar across my teeth.
I took the Anaïs Nin (my Anaïs Nin) from Sophie’s room, and lay on my back on the verandah floor, just near the front door, where I could read by the low rays of the sun that came slanting through the trees. I looked up at the pattern of the galvanised iron, and the old timber rafters, and imagined the house spinning about me –the rafters, the tin roof and the draughty timber walls, the gappy floorboards, and the doors and windows that let in all the light and sound from the world outside. The house was at once substantial and insubstantial; I thought that if it could spin fast enough, then it would all come apart and circle and circle me, and then just as easily settle into place again, every nail and board and bit of tin. I might be leaving soon, but I knew that for as long as I lived I would dream of Samarkand; in my sleep I would enter its walls and tread its worn floors, and wake filled with peace and foreboding. Samarkand was as much a part of me as my skin.
The Yellow Notebook
Some nights, when she gets home from work, she can’t bear to cook, and she needs something more than solitude. So she takes a book and goes out to a cafe she knows, and where they know her. She orders her usual, a plate of spaghetti with mussels, a green salad, and a glass of red wine, and eats slowly, watching the people walk by in the street, and the lights of passing cars. She knows better than to eat and read at the same time. She did that when she was young, but it means you can’t enjoy either experience to the full. So it is only when she is replete that she pushes her plate aside and begins to read.
The cafe is full of people and their talk washes over her. She is unselfconscious, eating out on her own, and doesn’t notice that people look at her, and wonder about who she might be, so lovely and all alone.
She becomes aware of someone standing near her table –she looks up, and sees a man, tall and slender, with a slim brown face and watchful, friendly eyes. ‘May I sit with you?’ he asks. She assents with an inclination of her head.
‘I’ve noticed you here before,’ he says, as he sits down. There is nothing sleazy or pushy about him. ‘My name’s Alexander,’ he says. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Katerina,’ she says, closing her book and glancing at him across the table.
‘I’m sorry I interrupted. But I could see you reading one of my favourite books -’ ‘Sartre?’ she says.
He nods. ‘Yes, Sartre . . .’
The Wild Typewritten Pages 13
When Lil and Sophie arrived home that afternoon, I was still lying on the floor of the verandah, reading.
‘Move that body of yours please, madam. My old legs can’t step over you!’ Lil was accompanied by fistfuls of plastic bags which the taxi driver deposited at the top of the stairs, and which I helped her haul in to dump on the kitchen table. Sophie snatched The Journals of Anaïs Nin from my hand and disappeared with Hetty to her room.
‘Been into my make-up again?’ said Lil comfortably, putting on the kettle for a cup of tea.
I poked around in the contents of the bags, looking for something interesting to eat. I found a packet of biscuits and opened it. ‘I’ve told you we shouldn’t use plastic bags!’ I said, with my mouth full, as Lil emptied the bags and they mounted in a flimsy pile on the table. ‘You should get those calico ones they sell. These will all end up in some landfill or dumped into the sea, and turtles will eat them thinking they’re jellyfish! Did you know they found a whale with about a tonne of this stuff in its gut?’
‘Some days,’ said Lil, ‘there are more important things to think about than remembering to buy a whole lot of calico bags. We’ve just spent most of the afternoon down at the Social, sorting out Sophie’s payments.�
� She shovelled four cartons of eggs into the fridge, along with two bulk packs of bacon and several pounds of butter, like someone stoking the boiler on an old steam train.
‘It’s called Centrelink now,’ I told her, arranging fruit in a bowl with a great deal of finesse. I put the yellow lemons with some golden pears, and put green apples into a bowl with a red capsicum on top.
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ commented Lil sourly, stopping for a moment and surveying the fruit with one hand on her hip, before turning round to stack loaves of bread onto a corner of the bench.
Sophie drifted in and casually plucked an apple from the bowl, biting into it dreamily.
‘Well,’ said Lil, ‘now you know,’ obviously referring to something which I had not been party to. ‘That will be your life for the next twenty years or so, unless you stir your stumps and support yourself and that baby with your own hands, the way I did. You won’t get much joy from them, nor money either. Waiting and explaining, that will about be the size of it. Handing them bits of paper till they’re coming out your ears.’
‘Just leave me!’ said Sophie. ‘I’m too tired to think about it now. Or talk. Or have you going on at me.’
‘How can she hand them bits of paper till they’re coming out her ears?’ I said, but they ignored me.
‘I will do something,’ said Sophie. ‘Just, not yet. She’s only a couple of months old. Even working women have at least a couple of months off when they have a baby!’
‘Just so long as you’re thinking about it,’ said Lil, nodding. ‘You can’t simply let your life . . . drift.’ She gestured with her hands as though a boat was teetering on the seas.
‘Oh, so running a really classy guest house is doing something with your life!’ retorted Sophie.
‘It kept me and my boy,’ said Lil, quietly, with her back to us, making the tea. ‘It kept you.’
I ran out and up to Sophie’s room where Hetty lay in her crib. ‘Everyone’s so edgy,’ I whispered to her. ‘Can I come and play with you?’
I took Hetty onto the bed with me and kissed her on the cheek, where my lips left a red smudge. I wiped it away with some spit on a corner of a sheet, then rescued Anaïs from under Sophie’s pillow and resumed reading where I’d left off. Anaïs’s mother is very old. Every time she visits her she feels it might be for the last time. She says that she was always preparing herself for the separation, and would have liked to be able to sense when she should be there.
It was true, I thought, the people we love might be gone at any time. And yet Anaïs Nin’s relationship with her mother was rather edgy. Isn’t that always the way? We love people, and yet . . .
‘Lil wants you to help with the dinner,’ said Sophie, coming into the room. ‘She’s that done in, she says, and implies it’s all my fault.’
I relinquished the book again (my book –I’d found it in the bookshop, and I was sure I needed it far more than Sophie did). To compensate, I snatched up the copy of A Room of One’s Own that I’d bought for Sophie all that time ago –I’m sure Sophie had never even looked at it –and took myself to the kitchen.
A chicken, as pale as lard, sat trussed on a plate in the middle of the table. ‘Sophie won’t eat that,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to open some nutmeat.’
‘It’s white meat,’ said Lil. ‘That’s as good as a vegetable, in my books.’
‘Chooks still have red blood,’ I told her. ‘They have mothers. Isn’t that a definition of an animal?’
I peeled the potatoes that Lil thrust at me, and topped and tailed the beans. If I do brilliantly in these exams, I thought, it will be a miracle. And I’m up against all these people who go to private schools, whose parents are lawyers and everything, and those parents are even now cooking them something really nutritious and good for their brains - something like deep-sea fish with a sunflower sprout salad, washed down with a shot of wheat-grass juice.
While the dinner was cooking, I brought all my stuff down to the kitchen to study. It made an impressive array on the kitchen table –sheets of businesslike diagrams, lined cards scrawled with notes in different-coloured ink, notebooks crammed with summaries, and textbooks decorated with highlighted underlinings. It made me look like a serious student.
Working in the kitchen reminded me of when I was little, and did my homework there, with Lil pottering about taking the lid off one pot and popping a lid on another.
This kitchen was the only one that I had ever known. When we had arrived at Samarkand I was only as tall as the table. I used to creep around under it. It was a different world down there, my own world. Lil had a cat in those days, a striped, slender creature with a bung eye. There had been two bowls in the corner of the room for it, one for meat and one for milk.
The floor covering had been renewed since then. I remember the red-and- black pattern of the old lino. It was black and sticky where it had worn through, as rough as a kitten’s tongue. From under the table you could see only legs, and things that had found their way there: stray peas, and dead moths, and a trail of ants to the cat bowls. ‘What are you up to down there?’ Lil would ask. ‘Come up here to me.’ She’d held out her arms.
I’d spent most of my time in the kitchen with Lil, who handed me a never-ending stream of food. I ate it all gratefully: bread with Vegemite, Saos with tomatoes and cheese, slices of apple cake. ‘You’ve got hollow legs!’
The rest of the house had been wonderful and mysterious. There were rooms and rooms: rooms that I wasn’t allowed into, that belonged to the guests (‘Hello. Who do you belong to?’ I didn’t belong to anyone. If anything, I belonged to the house), and narrow rooms that could be hidden in, among brooms and buckets and shelves full of sheets, still smelling of the sun. There were verandahs, two levels of them, scattered with collapsing chairs and sofas, open to the sky, or shaded by a tangle of trees with red spikes of sunlight shafting through them. Leaves blew onto the verandah and sat in drifts on the floor.
Now, here I was, only months from possibly leaving the place altogether, and I didn’t even know exactly how I felt about it, only that the thought sometimes made me miserable, and sometimes exhilarated, and sometimes extremely scared. I felt guilty, too, because I’d put in my choices for university, and hadn’t told Lil or Sophie what they were. They assumed I would go to university in Lismore, but I had applied for a university in Sydney as my first choice. I didn’t know when I’d get up enough courage to tell them this.
‘You always have been one for spreading yourself,’ Lil grumbled, taking the chook from the oven and heaving it onto the table with a bump. Fat splashed all over my carefully arranged notes. I wiped it off with a tea towel.
‘If you will put your things everywhere . . .’
I don’t know why I snapped at her the way I did. I said, ‘Well, I’ll be leaving soon, and then I won’t annoy you!’
Lil turned the potatoes and put the chook back into the oven without a word, and I slowly packed away my books. I took my things to my room, where I immediately burst into tears.
The truth was, I felt less sure about heading off to live in a city than I made out to myself. Cities were unfamiliar to me. We went to the Gold Coast sometimes, but that wasn’t a real city, just an endless strip of high-rise buildings running between the mountains and the sea. We went to Brisbane –only a couple of hours away on the bus –to shop occasionally, but I had only been to Sydney once, as far as I could remember.
Lil couldn’t get away from Samarkand often, that was the problem, so we’d had very few holidays. The one time we went to Sydney, when I was ten, Lil called a ‘busman’s holiday’, because she had swapped places with a friend of hers who ran a bed and breakfast in Sydney.
The place in Sydney was a much posher establishment than Samarkand was, and the people expected a higher level of service. It was a big old house close to the city (called, rather grandly, ‘the Mansions’), with a pretty back garden and polished floors, and nicer rooms, with good bedspreads and flowers and ensuite bathrooms.
The breakfasts couldn’t be just slapped down on tables any old how, and there was a need to be charming to the guests. When Lil got back home to Samarkand she said it was a blessed relief. She never changed places with her friend again.
But the trip to Sydney had a magical charm for me. I loved the idea of all that life throbbing away out there, not far from where we slept. And that life could be stepped out into at any time. Not far from the Mansions there were busy shopping streets. I found shops filled with books, and I loitered in them reading for as long as I decently could. I bought books with whatever money Lil gave to me. That was when I’d bought my copy of Great Expectations. It was so pleasingly packed with words, and it looked so grown-up –I kept it for a couple of years as a kind of talisman before I finally got around to reading it. It had promised much, and it didn’t disappoint me. It was so full of images of darkness and light, and I saw something of myself in Pip, the boy who wanted to escape his humble origins. It was a book that grew with me, so that each time I read it there was something more, something I’d been blind to at an earlier reading. It was a book I felt I could live with my whole life.
I also discovered Turkish delight. It winked at me from the window of a shop, and I bought two pieces (it was terrifyingly more expensive than chocolate), and took it home to share with Sophie.
It tasted like a rosebud exploding on my tongue, and was as sweet and sticky as soft toffee. I lay on the bed and almost passed out in a sensation of rose-flavoured pink, and when I recovered I sat up and declared, ‘I’m going to come and live in this city when I grow up and eat nothing but Turkish delight!’
‘Would you leave me, Katie?’ asked Lil, liltingly, shooing me off the bed so I didn’t muck up the clean cover.
‘I would,’ I told her, callously. ‘Yes, I would.’
I don’t know why Lil insisted that we eat together at the table every night, because Sophie usually sat there with a book, and tonight, because I felt sad and confused after my kind-of altercation with Lil, I did too. I started on the book by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, which began by describing two dinners that Woolf went to in the early 1920s, first at a men’s college at a university, and then at a women’s college. The men were given infinitely better food, and they had wine as well. Virginia Woolf came to the conclusion that ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well . . . A good dinner is of great importance to good talk.’
Secret Scribbled Notebooks Page 9