Secret Scribbled Notebooks

by Joanne Horniman

I often watched Sophie, hoping to know her better, because she rarely confided in me. Since Hetty was born, we had often lain on her bed together reading. I’d noticed how Sophie often unconsciously touched her own body, lying on her back with the book held at arm’s length above her, running the fingers of her other hand lightly across the bones of her hips and the mound of her stomach. Or she sat cross-legged on the bed, the book in front of her, her neck bowed, pressing the bones of her upper spine and rubbing her back. She touched her face, too, tracing a finger around the shape of her lips, or smoothing the hair away from her forehead. It was as if, while she was reading, lost in another world, she was also reassuring herself of her own boundaries.

  Sophie took off the dishrag and put Carmen’s dress on again. ‘I’ve expressed some milk –it’s in the fridge labelled breast milk,’ she said, approaching the mirror anxiously without her glasses on, fluffing up her already voluminous hair. ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Like a tart.’ We both loved that word, which was one of Lil’s favourites.

  ‘Good,’ said Sophie. She put on her glasses. With Carmen’s dress, they gave her the air of a librarian who was waiting for someone to ravish her. ‘I am, after all, a loose woman,’ she said with the hint of a question in her voice.

  ‘A woman with a Past.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Sophie crammed her feet into a pair of high-heeled sandals and stood poised, as if for flight. She had such an air of heightened expectation that it made me breathless. I had offered to look after Hetty so Sophie could go out, but now I wanted to tie my sister down; take her hand and sit her on the bed and order her, ‘Stay.’ I had the feeling that Sophie was a woman who was about to Do Something. It was that dress, her air of distraction, the faint odour of guilty delight that she had somehow acquired as she dressed.

  Sophie pecked Hetty on the cheek and was halfway out the door when she turned around with a stricken expression. She took Hetty from my arms and kissed her again, avidly. ‘Look after her for me, Kate?’ she said, and went quickly.

  Her final words disturbed me, with their hint of a plaintive question. And Hetty seemed aware that her mother had left the house, and wouldn’t settle. I was so sick of her bored grizzles that I ended up spending ages walking around the verandah with her in my arms. The noises she made were designed to set teeth on edge, and they succeeded; I tried to soothe her by constant jiggling and soft words of love, but I felt that it was Sophie she wanted.

  Oh, Sophie. I wanted her back as well. I kept thinking of the way she had dressed herself earlier, and her critical edginess about her appearance. But why shouldn’t I look after Hetty for an evening? Or even for longer? I didn’t think of Hetty as entirely Sophie’s. Hetty was my responsibility, as well. She had chosen not only Sophie to be her mother, but me to be aunt.

  I took stock of Hetty. She was growing and developing steadily. But it was slow, slow, slow. I was impatient for her to crawl and to run and to walk. I couldn’t wait till she learned to talk. I longed to discuss Virginia Woolf with her, and see whether she liked the plays of Oscar Wilde as much as Sophie did.

  I gave her a bottle of milk, and she slept. But I was incapable of settling down to study. I stood at the window of my room and looked out into the darkness. On the other side of the trees, a laneway ran along the back of the house, and I could hear people strolling through it, talking to each other. ‘Come on!’ demanded a loud male voice. ‘Hurry up!’

  At night the town took on a kind of glamour. Lights glittered along roads and through the trees. Mysterious shadows lurked in the dense vegetation that surrounded most of the houses. There was something exotic in the warmth of the air and the fragrance of leaves and flowers. I knew that on verandahs everywhere there was the glow of cigarettes and the occasional rattle of conversation. If you walked through the streets you’d catch glimpses of people in houses as transparent as fishtanks, sitting at desks under reading lamps, or dancing by themselves in dimly lit rooms.

  Somewhere out there was Sophie, in her tight purple dress.

  While I stood admiring the night, Marjorie rang.

  ‘I thought I’d call you to wish you luck,’ she said.

  ‘Gee, thanks. I’ll need it. What’s that noise?’

  ‘I’m whipping some egg whites with sugar till stiff peaks form. For lemon meringue pie. Can I come over? I’m so nervous I think I’ll go mad.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll have to wait for the pie to cook.’

  An hour and a half later, from a deck chair on the front verandah, I heard the sound of a 1965 Holden as it growled its way up the street. Marjorie pulled up on the grassy square in front of Samarkand in her mother’s car, and waltzed up the steps with a warm lemon meringue pie in her hands.

  We cut ourselves large slices of pie, and I filled two glasses with wine from Lil’s cask, and we sat on the sofa outside my room, speaking softly so as not to wake Hetty. ‘Well, this is it,’ said Marjorie. ‘The thing I’ve been working for my whole life.’

  ‘These exams? You can’t have been.’

  ‘Slight exaggeration.’ Marjorie took a sip from the wine and sat her uneaten pie on the floor.

  I could see her anxiety in the hunch of her shoulders, and the way she stared out at the night without seeing it. A flying fox flapped away through the trees, its strong wingbeat cutting the air. Hetty squawked and then was silent.

  Marjorie looked down at her feet, clad in little black shoes like ballet slippers. ‘I can’t see beyond them,’ she said.

  ‘I can,’ I told her. ‘Beyond these exams is . . . life! The rest of our lives!’

  ‘But we have to get through them first.’

  I wanted to tell her, Stop fretting. You’ll do fine in the exams! Before you know it you’ll be operating on people’s spleens!

  But I didn’t. I looked out into the night.

  ‘You didn’t tell me Alex was a medical student!’ said Marjorie.

  A picture came into my mind of the two of them, sitting on the grass the other day, talking.

  ‘He told me he was taking a year off while he thought about what he wanted to do. That was really interesting to me –we talked for ages. You might have told me that about him!’

  He might have told me that about himself.

  Marjorie stood up. She had hardly touched her drink, or her pie. ‘Anyway I’d better go and get some sleep. And so had you.’

  She looked such a small creature as she walked down the darkened front steps; she heaved the door of the car open and it clunked shut behind her. I watched the red eyes of the taillights as the car groaned its way up the road and disappeared, and then went to check on Hetty, who was still sleeping soundly.

  I took a sip of the water I kept beside my bed, climbed under the mosquito net and switched off the light. It was well after midnight, and Sophie still wasn’t home.

  I found that there is a point at which you cease to expect someone’s arrival; stop listening for a taxi to pull up or for the sound of footsteps on the stairs. I don’t think I slept that night, but I must have. I was only aware of the flapping of moths, the hum of mosquitoes, Hetty’s breathing, and my own thoughts.

  The Wild Typewritten Pages 18

  At 5:30 a.m. Hetty woke, and would not be comforted. Sophie was still not home, and there was no breast milk remaining to feed her. But as I jiggled her on the front verandah in the half-light of morning (bats flying across the sky, back from their evening foraging), hoping not to wake Lil, Sophie returned, coming up the front steps with her shoes in her hands.

  She wiggled out of her dress and dropped it on the floor. Sitting down on the bed, she opened her bra and gave Hetty her nipple with a sigh.

  And I left them and went to my room and wept.

  The English exam went quickly. It seemed that no sooner had we been instructed to turn our papers over than we were being ordered to put down our pens. Three hours passed like ten minutes.

  ‘So long as you write what you wish to wri
te, that is all that matters,’ Virginia Woolf had urged. ‘But to submit to the decrees of the measurers is the most servile of attitudes. Tosacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery . . .’

  I did what Virginia Woolf had advised. I wrote freely. I did not think of headmasters with silver pots in their hands or professors with measuring-rods up their sleeves. I wrote as if I was neither a man nor a woman (it is fatal, Woolf said, to think of your sex): I was woman-manly. I wrote not only of human beings in relation to each other but in relation to the sky and the trees as well. I thought of things in themselves. I quoted the required texts and drew on my additional reading. I wrote with freedom and courage.

  I avoided talking to anyone afterwards because I hated post-mortems, and went home and straight to my room. I didn’t care what the hypothetical headmasters or professors thought of my work. I had done brilliantly!

  And then, of course, I immediately feared that I had done very badly. And I cared very much what the markers of my work thought of it. I went to the kitchen and consoled myself with ten shredded wheatmeal biscuits with butter, and told Lil, when she asked, that the exam had gone okay.

  Sophie and Hetty were out, so I filched my copy of Anaïs Nin from where it lay on Sophie’s floor and went to the park. I lay down on the grass, pulled the book from my bag and gave it a smacking kiss on the cover (the kiss landed on Anaïs Nin’s left breast). I found that kissing a book was like hugging a tree. It made me feel better. But because my head was too full, I was unable to read, so I got up to walk through the park.

  And there, in the distance, was Sophie. She was lying on the grass, and Hetty was next to her, lying on a bunny rug. Sophie looked as though she was waiting for someone. She was. A man approached, stopping as he got near them. It was Marcus.

  Sophie picked up Hetty and got to her feet. Watching from behind a tree, I saw that she was introducing Hetty to Marcus for the first time. He looked dumbfounded and not too pleased. They sat on the ground together and talked. I pressed myself against the bark of the tree and thought I could smell the sap in the trunk. All I heard from Sophie and Marcus was the odd fragment of word.

  Marcus got up again. He took a couple of steps and turned round. He went back to Hetty, and wonderingly, he put out one finger and touched her on the cheek. Then he turned and went, without a backwards glance. Sophie bowed her head and looked away.

  Hetty lay staring at the sky. She would never remember him at all. She was too young to even watch her father walk away.

  The Red Notebook

  I found this sitting on my desk today when I got home.

  ( a note, pasted in)

  Dear Persephone/Kate,

  I came round to see how your exam went –waited a while in your room for you (hope you don’t mind). Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.

  Alex

  Music: ‘All That Useless Beauty,’ Elvis Costello (I can’t stop thinking about Sophie and Marcus)

  The Wild Typewritten Pages 19

  The next day, Alex drove up in a car. Already, the heat had made a haze over everything, and my skin felt as if it was smouldering.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Sophie called from the verandah. She wore a piece of cloth tied round her head (to keep the hair off her face), and baby cereal was smeared down the front of her singlet –no bra. She’d lost a lot of the weight she’d put on when she was pregnant, and her cheeks were hollow. Her shoulderblades stood out. I hadn’t ever noticed before that her elbows were dimpled. Sophie was all beautiful bones and curves.

  ‘I borrowed the car from Gavin, at the shop.’ Alex grinned, and his face was full of happiness and light. ‘It even has a baby capsule. I thought we could go to the beach.’

  In the car, Sophie sat in the front and put her head out of the window like a dog, her hair streaming behind her. The wind was warm and made my mouth dry. I held one of Hetty’s fingers as we sat in the back together; Hetty sucked the fist of her other hand furiously, as if sucking was what she’d been put on earth to do. I watched the back of Alex’s head. There were lines of hair running down the back of his neck in whorls like a weather map. Today will be hot and windy and full of surprises, with possible evening thunderstorms.

  We sat under the trees above the dunes and looked at the sea. A stream of brown water flowed across the rippled sand from a little creek, cutting the beach in two. A flock of gulls stood beside it, as if waiting along a platform for a train. Not far from them, a cormorant sitting in the branch of a casuarina let fall a spurt of shit, which flew gracefully to the ground like a ribbon unfolding.

  Sophie sat in an offhand way, her gaze on the horizon. She said, sulkily, ‘Rimbaud –you know, the poet –said that a seagull’s shit is as worthy of poetry as a flower.’ She hit the flats of both hands against the ground in an impatient, edgy rhythm. ‘And why should poets write about beautiful things? There’s so much shit in the world.’

  ‘But that particular shit really was beautiful, the way it moved,’ said Alex. ‘Rimbaud must have meant ordinary, boring old bird poo, the kind those seagulls over there must be doing all the time, even though we can’t see it from here. But look at the moon,’ he said, gesturing towards the white disc of it. ‘That looks worthy of poetry. The flower kind. The world isn’t all shit and ugliness.’

  ‘I bet it stinks,’ said Sophie. ‘The stinking moon!’

  She looked at the sun. ‘The coruscating sun!’

  ‘But coruscating is good. It means sending out flashes of light.’

  ‘Not if it’s a boiling hot day and making everyone as cranky as hell.’

  Alex pulled Sophie to her feet. ‘Come down for a swim, then. Kate will look after Hetty, won’t you?’

  ‘I love the way the beach stinks,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s all death and decay. Even sand is the ground-up skeletons of dead things.’ She pulled her top over her head and stepped out of her shorts, pulling down the bum of the stretchy old swimmers that she always wore in the river. They were brown with river mud and faded from the sun. Alex took off his shirt. He was golden.

  ‘The excruciating sea!’ he said, as they walked off.

  ‘Yes! It’s full of plastic shit. Supermarket bags. Did you know that they find whales dead with acres of that stuff inside them? How foul is that? Humans. You have to love them. They write poetry about flowers and foul up their own planet.’

  Alex dodged a dog turd next to the path, sending up a cloud of flies. ‘An exultation of flies!’ he said.

  I watched as they made their way to the top of the dunes, tossing words at each other. Alex went down, and held out his hand for Sophie to jump down beside him. ‘Cowabunga!’ she yelled.

  They raced down to the waves, and Sophie ran straight in, her arms waving in the air like a caricature of someone running into the surf. They dived through the waves together, and came up with their faces and hair streaming water.

  They arrived back smelling of salt, and plopped down next to us. Hetty was lying very happily on a rug, looking at the dappled light beneath the trees, her eyes following the patterns. She’d inherited the same pale skin that Sophie and I had, and would always have to watch herself in the sun, too.

  ‘Swim?’ Alex asked me, but I shook my head.

  ‘Come down for a walk, anyway,’ he said.

  Cramming on my hat, I took off along the path without waiting for him. At the tideline, I walked with my head down, examining the things that had washed up on the beach. Alex caught me up.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you don’t swim?’

  ‘I burn. I get dumped a lot.’

  I discovered some little bugs, brightly coloured like jewels, stranded on the sand. Some were on their backs, with kicking legs and bright red bellies. I picked them up, and they started to move around on my hand, and up my arm. They were iridescent, some coloured orange and green, others red and blue. I
wondered how they had come here, out of their element, to end up stranded like that.

  ‘What little survivors,’ said Alex. We walked up the beach against the wind, and he picked them up too, until our arms were swarming with beetles. I stood in the glare of the sun, with the sound and sight of the sea all around me, the wind in my ears. This was all there was to my life at the moment. The beach enveloped me.

  My hat blew off, and I let it. A beetle had reached my shoulder; it flew up onto my hair, and still I was just sea and sand and wind, bright blue and glaring white, and the battering of air at my ears.

  ‘Take them up to the dunes!’ called Alex. He had retrieved my hat, and held it between his teeth.

  We struggled through the soft sand to where tough, grey beach grass crept over the dunes, and put the beetles one by one onto bits of grey vegetation. Alex popped the hat onto my head, and he left his hand there, resting on top of my hat, looking at me. He bent forward as if he was about to kiss me.

  ‘Don’t!’ I said, and turned away. ‘I hardly know you,’ and started walking away up the beach.

  Alex ran to catch up. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because I don’t. I never knew, for instance, that you were a medical student.’

  He laughed, ‘Oh Kate.’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me. You’d think by this stage I should know the least things about you. I don’t. And you don’t know me.’

  ‘I know that I like you more than anyone in a long time. I don’t need to know about you. I know you. And anyway, I’ve seen your diaries.’

  This stopped me.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Yesterday, when I waited in your room.’

  ‘And did you read them?’

  ‘A bit. I read a bit of them. I felt guilty, looking, but you’d have to have a will of iron not to read someone’s notebooks. Wouldn’t you look, if an opportunity came your way?’

  I looked past him, at all that blue. ‘I can’t even remember what was in them,’ I said. ‘I never intended anyone to read them. They were just for me.’