Secret Scribbled Notebooks (3 page)

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 rosemary 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 enormous. 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.

I examined Anastasia's sleeping face and furled hands. Gently, I unrolled the fingers of one hand, but they curled up again immediately. I thought of how I was waiting for my own flower-like time to begin. You couldn't force a flower. When I was a child I used to pick camellia buds and strip the tightly wadded petals away, one by one, but I never ended up with an opened flower.

Sophie's best friends, Carmen and Rafaella, came to pay homage to the baby. They were lush, seductive-looking girls, with full lips, ruffled blouses that displayed their shoulders, trousers that displayed their belly-buttons, and large hoop earrings dangling from their ears. They were
bold girls
, with dope-smoking hippie mothers, whom Lil had been convinced would lead Sophie astray.

Now they came up the steps like a visiting troupe of gypsy dancers, their high heels clattering along the verandah to Sophie's room, and greeted Anastasia with shrieks of adoration. They'd brought gifts: four pairs of red booties that one of their grandmothers had knitted, and a crocheted hat in rainbow colours. They dangled the booties from their fingers and exclaimed at the impossibly small size, then fitted them onto Anastasia's feet. They pulled the hat onto her head and adjusted it until they felt that it looked just right. Anastasia sucked on her fingers and bore all this with stolid patience.

They wanted to help Sophie bathe her, and when she was undressed they rudely exclaimed over her fatness and hairiness. Even I had admitted to myself that Anastasia was fat (and amazingly hairy), but I wouldn't have said so out loud.

Sophie had given in to her insatiable craving for meat pies when she was pregnant, but there were all kinds of things she wouldn't ingest because she said they ‘crossed the placenta': aspirin, and alcohol, and cigarette smoke. Did meat pies cross the placenta? Perhaps this was the explanation for Anastasia's fatness.

Her head was covered with black, straight hair –carelessly stylish. It could well be the best hairstyle she'd ever have in her life. And she had hair all over her shoulders and in a line down her back to her buttocks as well. Sophie said defensively that it was perfectly normal for a baby to have a lot of body hair and that it would fall out soon, but I thought Anastasia might be setting out to be the hairiest woman in history. Because I believed Anastasia knew what she was doing. Already, she knew. She had a strong will, and she cared not one jot what Carmen and Rafaella thought of her.

Carmen and Rafaella had been Sophie's friends since early high school. I watched and vowed that my own friendships would not be like that. Sophie would regularly arrive home in tears and lock herself in her room, sobbing that she was
never speaking to Carmen (or Rafaella) ever again.
That night there would be a phone call and they were best friends again, until the next unkindness or betrayal. ‘Don't worry about them, love,' Lil would say to her each time, but Sophie did worry. She desperately needed to belong to them.

They were fiercely competitive. Someone would always be on the outer edges of the friendship. Sophie's love for them both (because it was a kind of love, I can see that now) went through extremes of emotion. They all knew the exact thing to say to cut the other to the heart.