Secret Scribbled Notebooks (6 page)

It was worth going to Hope Springs just for the books, and I thought I'd have to break my resolve not to go there any more. I despaired of seeing the bookshop boy ever again.

I finally met him because I liked to travel across town using the laneways. I enjoyed their narrowness, and the way they slid past the backs of the houses so you could peer into the back yards. The back is the part of the house that people don't expect you to see and it is always more individual and interesting.

Entering a laneway on foot (my bicycle out of action with a flat tyre), I saw that the boy I'd met at Hope Springs had just stepped into it at the opposite end. We walked down the lane with each other in full view, our eyes full of boldness, and reached the middle of the lane at the same time.

We halted.

The boy smiled. I smiled. ‘Hello', we said, and stood there smiling at each other.

‘I'm Persephone,' I told him. I was always trying to get people to call me by more glamorous names but they never did, probably because they were used to me being plain old Kate.

‘Alex,' he said, and held out his hand.

He had a soft line of down on his upper lip, and I couldn't stop staring at it. Sophie was always telling me I shouldn't stare at people so much, it disconcerted them. But Alex wasn't at all disconcerted. ‘I was just on my way home,' he said, and gestured to a fence covered with choko vines. ‘Do you want to come in?'

Alex lived in a garage in the back yard of an old house, and it smelt faintly of old car oil. Down one end there were shelves filled with ancient paint tins and mower parts and jars of rusty nails. The other end of the room was Alex's domain. It was inexpressibly bare and neat, with the kind of neatness that sets your teeth on edge like sucking lemons. This may have been because he possessed barely anything at all. Of all the things that are to be possessed in the world, Alex had almost none.

The inventory of Alex's belongings that first day was as follows:

a single bed with a clean, faded cover tucked tightly over it

a bench along one side of the room on which sat

a cup

a plate

a bowl

a bread knife

a fork

a two-burner gas camping stove

a plastic washing-up bowl

a kettle

an onion that had seen better days

and a pile of newspapers.

And also, and most interestingly, on the other side of the room, there was a small table on which sat:

an electric typewriter and

a new ream of copying paper.

‘Could I offer you a cup of something, Persephone?' he said. In the midst of this bare-faced lack of possessions, Alex was the most attentive host possible.

‘Please do,' I said. ‘What do you have?'

‘Well, there's mint tea, or hot water. Or cold if you'd prefer.'

‘Mint tea would be perfect.' I sat on the bed because there was nowhere else to sit.

Alex went out through the door at the end of the garage with the kettle and reappeared with a handful of freshly picked mint leaves and the kettle full of water. He chopped up the leaves, sprinkled them into the cup and, when the water boiled, poured it over them.

‘Sugar?'

He reached up to a shelf and took down a small Vegemite jar.

‘How much? Mint tea is better if it's sweet,' he suggested.

‘Definitely. You decide.'

Using the blade of the knife, Alex transferred rather a lot of sugar to the cup, and stirred. He handed it to me and I took a sip. It tasted refreshingly of the Near (or was it the Far?) East, of shaded courtyards and oases and dancing girls. Alex sat down beside me and, since there was only one cup, I handed it to him so he could have some too. ‘I really prefer coffee,' he said, ‘But I'm trying to wean myself off it.'

Sometimes it is easier to feel intimate with strangers than with people that you know well. The more you know about someone, the more you realise how much about them you don't know. With a stranger it is like the innocent meeting of two souls; you float on a warm swell of good feeling. But you can't sit there and say nothing. Inevitably, the knowing process begins.

‘You type?' I asked, glancing over at the typewriter.

‘Badly. Two fingers.' Alex smiled.

‘So –why do you have a typewriter?'

‘I'm trying to write a novel.' Alex gestured for me to keep possession of the mint tea. He got up and walked over to the typewriter. A sheet of blank paper had been rolled into the carriage, but there was nothing written on it. He leaned over and took out the paper; it curled up at each end.

‘Are you having any success?' I wondered.

‘None whatsoever.'

The words hung gloomily in the bare room like a small dark cloud.

‘I have writer's block.'

‘What does that mean, exactly? Or even approximately?'

I waited for his reply. Sophie had told me that you shouldn't always let words rush in to fill empty conversational spaces.

At last Alex said, ‘It means I can't write. I can't even make a start. Something stops me from putting words down. I sit at the typewriter and nothing comes. It's like being paralysed.'

Alex stared at the blank sheet in his hand. He turned it over and looked at the other side of the paper as if contemplating an object he'd never before encountered, or in case words had magically appeared there in his absence.

Pages are such daunting things. Unwritten on, they are so pure, so white, so unsullied, like freshly fallen snow.

So silent.

Who would dare to put footprints there? I felt that I, for one, wouldn't be able to take even one step. I'd fall face forward into the snow and lie there, spreadeagled, my very breath muffled by that weighty silence.

I thought about my notebooks, especially the red one, which I'd had no trouble beginning at all. That was because it wasn't real writing –just random thoughts, and quotations, and notes about books I was reading. I never really expected anyone to ever read it, despite my reference to posterity at the beginning.

I stared at Alex's blank page. This was a different matter. A page where he hoped he might write something significant. A whole novel. Neither of us spoke. We sat silently and pondered the enormous task of filling page after page with print, when it was so difficult to make even the first mark.

Marjorie lived on a broad, quiet street lined with shady fig trees, in a house framed by a large garden with a perfectly manicured lawn, and tasteful shrubs and flowers. The house had been built in the 1930s and her parents had renovated it to retain its period character. A deep front verandah led to a double living room with sliding-glass doors dividing it down the middle.

I always ran up the front steps and called, ‘Coo-ee!' at the open front door to let Marjorie know I was there, then bounded down the hallway to where Marjorie sat in the panelled dining room with her books spread about over the table. Her parents were always at work during the week, and Marjorie liked to study in the dining room rather than her bedroom, as the house seemed less lonely that way. She was an only child. Her mother was an accountant, an almost unbelievably beautiful woman with long auburn hair. She drove a restored 1965 Holden (pale green, very shiny), and had a trick of being able to remove her bra without taking off her top. She did this every day, in the living room, when she arrived home from work, so Marjorie said.

I slipped into a chair opposite Marjorie. Her notebooks were filled with indecipherable squiggles and symbols –she studied a hideously high level of maths and physics. Marjorie wanted to be a doctor, like her father. ‘Tea?' she asked, removing her glasses and looking at me gratefully. I had probably arrived just in the nick of time to prevent her brain exploding. We went to the kitchen, where Marjorie put on the kettle and set out bone china cups and plates.

Marjorie had slipped through the fabric of time and was really from another era –the 1940s, say, or the 1950s. She hadn't been born at all. For one thing, her parents would have been far too busy to give birth to her. I imagined that she had skipped into her parents' kitchen one day at the age of five or six, carrying a little suitcase and humming a tune, and had been there ever since.

She was the loveliest-looking girl I had ever seen, small and slim, with black hair cut short and curled around her face, alabaster skin, and clear, intensely blue eyes. The sort of girl you just wanted to look and look at, she was so pretty. She wore crisp cotton pastel frocks with sprigs of flowers, and sandals.

When she wasn't studying maths and physics, Marjorie baked cakes. She did it with scientific precision, weighing the ingredients on a scale and sifting the flour from a good height so it would be beautifully aerated. She wore an apron when she baked and, in their cream and green renovated 1930s kitchen, she could have been someone in an old-fashioned advertisement.

That day, she had baked a sponge and filled it with jam and cream. She poured the tea from a silver teapot and I sliced the cake. Marjorie ate delicately, with a cake fork. Lil always said that I fell upon my food like a starving man, and that day was no exception. I picked up my slice and took enormous greedy mouthfuls. There were not many moments of the day when I was not starving hungry.

Marjorie and I had been friends since primary school. Both of us, in different ways, were unlike the other girls at school, so it suited us to stick together. For me, Marjorie was a
safe
friend; with her there were none of the passions and uncertainties that characterised Sophie's relations with Carmen and Rafaella.

I enjoyed the calmness of being with her. I enjoyed her quiet and ordered household in contrast to my own, which was so often intruded on by strangers.

‘Have you been studying?' Marjorie asked.

‘Not much,' I said, feeling slightly guilty.

‘Well, what else have you been up to? The exams aren't that far off, you know.'

Furtively, remembering my recent encounter with Alex, I shrugged.

‘You needn't look as if I'm interrogating you.'

‘On the way here today I drank mint tea with a Russian prince,' I blurted out.

‘Of course! What else is there to do, on a Monday morning?'

‘But really,' I said. The sweet taste of his exotic tea still seemed to be in my mouth.

‘What's his name?'

‘Alex.'

I hesitated. ‘I told him my name was Persephone.'

‘After all, that
is
your name.'

‘He's a writer.'

‘Really? What's he written?'

‘Nothing. He told me he's writing a novel, but he has writer's block.'

‘Very painful.'

I stared at Marjorie across the table; we started to giggle. I felt an instant pang of disloyalty, to be laughing about Alex with Marjorie so soon after meeting him, and the mint tea, and everything. I had meant to keep him as my secret. Now, here I was, blabbing it at the first opportunity.

But Alex did look like a Russian prince. Perhaps he was one. Anything was possible.

The Red Notebook

I am sitting in the dark in my fig tree and my bottom is icy cold. I am discovering that you can write without seeing what you are writing and that is somehow very liberating, though it's bound to be indecipherable.

Behind me is the river. The water glimmers in the moonlight, and it looks better than it does in the daylight, when it is oily-looking and sometimes muddy and you can see the scrappy weeds along the banks. My nostrils are cold, and I can smell where the weeds along the roadside have been mown today by the Council tractor.

When I was a child I considered this tree my second home. Actually, it was my real home, because it was all mine, and it was where I felt most myself. Only Marjorie was ever invited in. Sophie used to sit on the ground at the bottom and call up to me. I have never told anyone this, but I used to pretend that I lived here with my mother and father. When I got home from school my mother was waiting with a glass of milk and biscuits just like old-fashioned Moms in American movies and my father was in a chair smoking a pipe.

This tree is vast, like a cathedral or an ocean liner. When I was little I had parts of it all mapped out into kitchen and bedrooms and living room, all connected by the passageways of broad branches.

But I intended to write about the here and now, not the past. I am staring out through the leaves at Samarkand. My tree is in darkness, but lights shine out from Samarkand as from a city on a distant shore. It is another country there.

There is a burst of loud music from Sophie's room. She is playing her current favourite song, ‘Because the Night', by Patti Smith, very loudly. It's a song that breaks my heart because of the way the music makes a pattern of such longing, one note against another. I know that Sophie longs for Marcus, though she would not tell anyone, and this is the reason she plays the song.

The music has stopped suddenly but I can still hear it in my head. Anastasia begins to cry, so mournfully I want to go to her. Anastasia loves the song too, and hates the silence. Perhaps the song reminds her of her father, though she has never met him. But there is a little bit of him in her, so she must know him in some way –the parts of her that are like him call to him.

Two guests are sitting on the steps smoking –I can see the twin eyes of their cigarettes gleaming in the dark. And from the lower verandah a harmonica starts up, a heartfelt, melancholy tune. The harmonica player is a man from somewhere in the north of England, and he has been staying this past week. He's an oldish man, and I believe that he's either severely missing his homeland or pining for a long-lost lady love. (He actually used this term ‘lady love' when he saw two of the other guests canoodling. ‘Oh, to have a lady love,' he said, longingly.)

The tune he's playing is ‘Dirty Old Town', and it's a tune full of longing. A lot of the people who come here are longing for something and looking for something (I know I have used too many ‘longings' –Ms M, my English teacher, would probably tell me to use another word). Sometimes I think the house might fill with so much other people's longing that it will float away like a hot-air balloon.