Secret Scribbled Notebooks (8 page)

And I can remember the next morning, I gave him a present I'd found. It was a tiny stone, from the garden of the motel. Nothing special really, just one of the little white stones they use in landscaping. But I found one that I thought was prettier than the rest, and I picked it up and gave it to him. He lifted me up and kissed me on the cheek. He told me that he'd always keep it.

That is why I have always believed he'll come back. And that's all I have for you, Blue Notebook. I remember nothing else. You are now officially obsolete.

The Red Notebook

Music: Emmylou Harris, ‘Orphan Girl'

Now I don't feel like writing a thing

The Wild Typewritten Pages 8

I often wondered
where Sophie and I had sprung from, and how we got to be the way we were. Where did my sister get her pale skin and dark hair, I my great height and freckles and wild red mop? A man reeling drunkenly down the street one night saw Sophie and stopped to say, sentimentally, ‘Ah, a beautiful Irish face!'

Our name, after all, is O'Farrell. We could have Irish blood; we might never know. But perhaps that was why Sophie developed an affinity for Oscar Wilde. And she soaked up any tale of deprivation, especially if it had an Irish setting. She had read countless books about people brought up with drunken parents, living in the slums of Ireland, without enough to eat and no shoes on their feet, overcoming the odds and living happy and fulfilled lives. When she was at high school she knew practically everything there was to know about the Irish Potato Famine of 1845-50. She worked it up into a speech that won her first place in public-speaking competitions all over the place until she was beaten at State level by a girl who gave a speech about the bombing of Dresden.

Sophie has such a grave and sincere face when the occasion demands, that she had her audience wringing their hands in sympathy. The Irish potato famine was a story of mass starvation, of families becoming ill from eating blighted potatoes, of incredible loss of life and untold suffering. She'd relate the story of a man named Courtney, who was obliged, in his pitiable state, to
depend on cabbage
for several days to support existence
, till death,
more merciful
than his own rulers, came to his rescue
.

Sophie opened a bag of chocolate drops and reached for a supermarket catalogue that had fallen out of a newspaper onto her bed. Flicking through it, she said, with her mouth full of chocolate, ‘If you had to choose just five items from this catalogue to feed you for an entire week, what would you choose?'

She often played this game with me; I couldn't imagine what premonition of impending starvation or doom had driven her to invent it. But this was a game Sophie took seriously, so I considered my options carefully.

The 5-kilogram bag of potatoes was top of my list. That which kept body and soul together for Irish peasants was good enough for me. I also chose a 3-kilogram bag of oranges (Vitamin C), a large packet of powdered milk (protein and calcium), a bulk pack of lamb chops (iron, protein), and some broccoli.

How much does a human being need in order to survive?

How much in the way of food? How much in the way of love?

Or, more importantly, how much can they do without?

We often lay on Sophie's bed and dreamed up imaginary women who had made do with very little in the way of love. There was a woman who existed on a smile she received every day from a man who served her in the general store where she shopped. And another who kept a letter full of ambiguous tender words in her underwear drawer. It was falling apart at the folds, it had been read and re-read so often. Yet another woman remembered a man she passed in the street who glanced at her in a certain way.

All of these women, naturally, had long skirts and long hair done up in old-fashioned hairstyles. They were women from the past. Modern women wouldn't put up with having so little. Would they?
I want a love that is grand and
passionate and overwhelmin
g, Sophie had told me.

No tattered letters in underwear drawers for her.

I had no idea what kind of love I wanted.

And yet Sophie was dreaming her life away. I found a notebook near her bed with the name
Marcus
scrawled over it in elaborate script. She was always half-asleep in the mornings, dreamily mulling over
Anna Karenina
, filling me in on the latest developments while the toast burned.

‘We're trying to run a
business
here,' said Lil. ‘I just found a pooey nappy sitting on the verandah for people to step in! Can't you at least put them in the covered bucket I gave you, Sophie?'

‘But breast-fed babies have such sweet, innocuous poo!' said Sophie.

‘Not if the baby isn't yours,' retorted Lil.

I took it upon myself to wash out the nappies every morning, because Sophie somehow never got round to it. I swooshed the yellow shit out of them with the tap and threw them into the machine with a capful of antiseptic bleach, and became very familiar with the inside of the laundry room, propping a book up against the window while I waited for the rinse cycle to finish.

Anastasia was my reward. Out on the verandah she kicked in her bassinette, exercising her legs in preparation for the time when she would stand up and walk. I tickled her toes on the way past to hang the nappies on the line; Anastasia gave me a look that was not yet a smile, but was working up to it. Every morning I made a bee-line for Sophie's room to see how Anastasia had changed overnight. I didn't want to miss one stage she went through.

I didn't know if Sophie would ever go back to her waitressing job. She had never been one for planning her life. When she left school, everyone thought that she should
do
something with herself besides waitressing in a cafe. They assumed that she would go on to university and study literature, she had such a love of it. But Sophie declared she'd had enough of all that during Year 12. A scholar has to read everything, regardless of whether they like it or not. Sophie wanted to read only what she loved; she said she couldn't stomach writing essays any longer. ‘Well, someone has to support the novel,' she'd say crossly, if anyone even so much as hinted that she lay about reading too much. One of the teachers at school always asked after her in an anxious and sorrowful way. I wanted to tell her to have
faith
! Because what I thought Sophie would do was this: she would read and read for years, lying about on her bed and caring for her baby. And then, having absorbed all the Great Literature of the world, she would write a book of her own and it would be wonderful and amaze people.

But now I wasn't so sure. Whatever energy Sophie had seemed to be seeping out of her, day by day.

Sophie would talk to me about imaginary women in love; she would talk to me about books, and quote from them extensively; she would ask me what I would buy to feed myself from the supermarket catalogue, but she wouldn't talk to me about her life. How did she feel about Marcus? Did she feel afraid of bringing up a baby on her own?

Sophie had never confided in me. But ever since she was a child, Sophie had sometimes talked to herself, at night, while she slept. I was glad when I no longer had to share a room with her. Her voice was clear, but I could never make out what she was saying. It was like listening to someone speak in a foreign language. Uncanny, in the immensity of the dark, to listen to her speak and not be able to understand a word.

The Red Notebook

From the dictionary:

chartreuse
(shartrerz), a liqueur; pale apple-green colour (another dictionary says clear, light green with a yellowish tinge) –made by
Carthusian
monks

absinth
, a strong, bitter, green-coloured aromatic liqueur, made with wormwood, anise and other herbs, with a pronounced licorice flavour

I can't remember if Anaïs Nin drank these things, but I imagine she would have –is it because the word anise reminds me of Anaïs?

The Yellow Notebook

And every night, when the girl gets home from work, she leaves a bowl of milk out for the fox, and watches for it. It comes slipping through the trees like a shadow, approaching the milk and lapping avidly, its tongue darting in and out, watching her face all the while.

The fox is a little bit of wildness in the intense, tightly packed life of the city; it exists in the wild strip of garden that runs in a thread of green from yard to yard and along to the waste area beside the railway line. She thinks of it as
her
fox, as though she owns it, but she knows there are some things that you can never own.

The Wild Typewritten Pages 9

Alex had told me
he'd be at the bookshop the following Friday, and suggested I meet him there. He finished his shift at lunchtime, and while I waited for him, I browsed the shelves and wondered what it was that he wanted to write a novel about. It seemed to me a very ambitious thing to do. So many books had already been written; writing down words with any plan in mind seemed to be asking too much of any ordinary person. This old bookshop, for instance, in a very dull country town, was stuffed with any number of Great Books by the greatest minds of the last couple of hundred years.

I found myself pulling one of these books from the shelf:
Nausea
, by Jean-Paul Sartre. The front cover had a faint undulation, as if it had been left out in the rain, or wept upon copiously (It bore a strange picture by Salvador Dali: a landscape with a hole in it and a partially melted clock reading about four minutes to six.) I opened it and breathed in the scent –it was a typical Old Book. And the words inside –surely these were words I'd want to read sooner or later. I took it to the table that served as a counter and found some money. ‘Ah, Sartre,' said Alex, and nodded in a knowing way. He said the name differently to the way I would have (didn't Sartre rhyme with Frank Sinatra?). He said it with a soft French sound, all but ignoring the last syllable.

I sat on a chair and started reading, and soon the next person on the roster turned up, and we were able to leave. ‘The students from the Conservatorium are playing jazz in the park today,' said Alex. ‘We could go and listen.'

On the way to the park we approached a street corner where a boy stood selling socialist newspapers. FREE THE REFUGEES said the front page. The boy was far too thin, with a haunted look to him, and he stood with a paper held up in each hand, displaying the headlines. He looked, I thought, as though he'd been impaled there, like Christ on the cross, or an eagle spread out on a barbed-wire fence. People ignored him as they passed by.

‘Hey!' said Alex, greeting him with a smile.

‘Hey,' he replied. When he smiled, it only exaggerated his leanness.

They exchanged a few friendly words, and Alex took a coin from his pocket and bought a paper.

‘I feel ashamed,' Alex said, as we approached the park, ‘to live in this country. The way we treat people who come here for refuge. Children should not be locked up. No innocent people should be locked up. I hate what the government is doing in our name.' His words mingled incongruously with the notes of jazz music floating out to us.

It was early spring, and we sat on the grass in front of the band and bathed in the gentle sun. Leaning back on my arms, I lifted my face to the sky and wriggled my toes, feeling lucky to be alive and free. Alex had expressed serious sentiments, and ones that I agreed with, but my joy in the day, and in being with Alex, could not be suppressed. I am ashamed to say that quite often my feelings are not worthy; when my mind should be on deeper things, I am often quite shallow.

For instance, I am not normally vain, but I must say that I have incredibly beautiful feet. The rest of me is unremarkable, but everything about my feet is simply lovely: their shape –slender and graceful and high-arched; the skin –smooth and unblemished by the freckles that intrude on almost every other area of my body; and my toes are long and perfectly shaped, with nails like charmingly pink little sea-shells.

That day I took off my sandals and displayed my feet for the world to see. I hoped that Alex would see them and admire them, because they were the one thing about me that had achieved a satisfactory level of beauty.

A girl with rings on her toes and in her belly-button took the microphone and sang,
Summertime, and the living is
easy . . .

And I felt that it was. There was nowhere I'd rather have been at that moment than next to Alex in a park on a spring day. With the sun, and the sweet rhythms of the music winding themselves through my body, and lying on the grass with people all around me, and my beautiful feet, and Alex, I felt that I might unfold into an enormous scented blossom
.
I stretched out my feet again and hoped to catch Alex's eye, but he was absorbed in the girl who was singing. She had a mane of tawny hair, a quizzical expression on her face, and a voice like dark honey.

Then a boy who'd been lying nearby on the grass got to his knees and packed some things into his bag, preparing to leave. Before he stood up, he looked over and said to me, ‘Excuse me, but has anyone ever told you that you have really beautiful feet?'

‘You look like a Russian prince,' I told Alex, after the band had packed up and we were wandering through the park together.

He wore a black beret that day, and a threadbare silk scarf round his neck, all grey and blue squares. He was graceful and feline and beautiful, with angular cheekbones, and a thoughtful downward curve to his mouth. He took a slim brown cigarette from a packet and lit it.

‘That's because I am one,' he said, blowing the smoke away from me. He had a considering, bright-eyed way of looking at me, and a warm and secret smile.

We lay in the shade of a fig tree. I picked up a selection of the small leathery fruits that had fallen to the ground and said, ‘Which one do you like best?'

Without hesitation, Alex plucked one from my palm. ‘This one,' he said.