About a Girl Read online

  Also by Joanne Horniman

  My Candlelight Novel

  Secret Scribbled Notebooks

  Mahalia

  Little Wing

  A Charm of Powerful Trouble

  First published in 2010

  Copyright © Joanne Horniman 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (cal) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest nsw 2065

  Australia

  Phone (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email [email protected]

  Web www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Horniman, Joanne

  About a girl

  ISBN 978 1 74237 144 3 ( pbk.)

  a 823.3

  Cover and text design by Bruno Herfst

  Cover illustration by Amanda Soutar

  Set in 11.2 pt Dante mt by Ruth Grüner

  eBook production by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Tanka

  for my muse, Tom

  I search the kiln shed, the orchard,

  and in the ferns …

  then you appear in the kitchen

  when I least expect you

  Prologue

  TTHIS MORNING I woke and remembered her, and went to the window to look out into the leafless garden, leaning my forehead against the cold winter glass.

  Flynn.

  I whispered her name.

  Flynn – one single, flighty syllable, the teeth flicking the bottom lip and the tongue expelling a breath of warm air. The window clouded with a small patch of mist. And then it faded away.

  Flynn: she was graceful and intense, beautiful, serious. I remember when we lay together for the first time and I closed my eyes and felt the crackle of her dark hair between my fingers. She was all warmth and sparking light. When I was with her, my skin sighed that the centre of the world was precisely here. Nowhere else.

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  SHE DREW HER fingers across the strings of her guitar, and the sound jangled into the room.

  And I saw that it was her, the girl I’d seen running down the street only fifteen minutes earlier with a white guitar clutched to her chest and a boy trailing after her, as though in her slipstream.

  She gazed out into the audience as though expecting someone special, and her expression was so trustful and tender that my heart went out to her. Then, turning her face to her guitar, she played another chord, lifted her throat, and began to sing. And her lovely, soft shoulders in a little strapless cotton dress, and her bare legs, and the way she smiled with humble delight at the applause … And her voice was round and full and confident, and her guitar ramped right up so that it was loud, the way I like music to be. I stood motionless and listened. The other people in the room fell away. It was as if she was singing for me alone, and no one else in the world existed.

  When she’d played four songs straight she paused. She had kicked off her black rubber thongs and was sitting on a chair in the spotlight barefoot, bare-shouldered, dark-haired, with her white guitar cradled in her arms like a lover. She drummed her feet lightly on the floor, staring into space as though considering what to play next.

  ‘They say soft is the new loud,’ she said quickly and almost indistinctly into the microphone. She seemed shy, except for when she was actually playing.

  The songs in the rest of her set were quieter, a beautiful contrast to what had gone before. I listened and watched, mesmerised.

  When she had finished she said, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to me. I’m called Every Little Thing.’

  And then she unplugged her guitar from the amp and walked straight off the stage into the audience. She took a swig of beer from a glass someone handed her, and grabbed the hand of a boy – perhaps the one I’d seen following her down the street. Without looking back, she took off with him, the white guitar once again held close, and my own unplugged heart trailing behind her down the stairs.

  Chapter Two

  ONE SATURDAY SOON after that I went to a café for lunch, one I hadn’t been to before. The place was all hard surfaces – polished concrete floors, brightly painted brick walls, timber-and-chrome chairs and tables. There were paintings on the walls, an exhibition by local artists. I looked around at the other customers. There were all sorts – young people who might have been students, and barefoot hippies and middle-aged people. One or two of them were regulars at the bookshop where I worked. They recognised me, and smiled.

  And then my lunch arrived.

  ‘Sorry to take so long,’ said the waitress. ‘We’ve been run off our feet.’ A smooth arm reached in front of me to deliver the plate. I looked up and saw that it was the girl from the gig, the girl called Every Little Thing.

  I was surprised; I had imagined that she was like the visiting band she’d been opening for, an exotic, glamorous creature from Elsewhere, here for one night and then moving on. I’d not imagined that she was an ordinary girl like myself living in this very town, with a job at a café.

  She had a way of holding her mouth as though in anticipation of saying something, a kind of breathless thoughtfulness. And it was a rueful mouth, the most rueful mouth I have ever seen.

  I watched as she moved back behind the counter. There is a whole genre of waitress songs: about falling in love with them, the way they move across the floor, their grace, their beauty – and who am I to add to it? I can only say that my day had burst into a rosy, piquant sweetness, like popping pomegranate seeds on the tongue.

  When she returned with my coffee I ventured to say, ‘Didn’t I see you performing last week? Are you’ – and I must have blushed as I said it – ‘… are you Every Little Thing?’

  She said, with pleasure, ‘Oh – were you there? Yes, that was me.’

  ‘I really enjoyed your songs.’

  And she smiled and said, ‘Thank you. Oh, thank you!’ smiling and smiling, embarrassed maybe. Then she dipped her head modestly and moved off, and one of the customers called out to her, ‘Hey, Flynn! When do you get off work?’

  She went over to chat to him.

  I finished my lunch and left, but I longed, I so longed, to see her again.

  Chapter Three

  ONLY DAYS LATER, we ran into each other in the street as I was leaving work.

  She was carrying several string bags full of vegetables; I saw her first, and wondered if she’d recognise me. She did, pausing to get a better grip on one of her bags.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said. A bunch of celery dropped out onto the footpath.

  ‘Hi.’ I picked it up.

  ‘Shopping,’ she said, and grimaced at the bags cutting into her fingers.

  I was still holding the celery. ‘One day they’ll cross
this with something shorter – like a potato – so it’ll fit into shopping bags.’

  ‘I hate the way celery always falls out! Hey – I live just up the street. If you can carry it home for me I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  We started walking. I was amazed to be actually there with her, she was so astonishingly lovely, with her long dark hair and smooth skin. And that mouth. She wore denim jeans, with a red-spotted blouse. My dress was made from almost identical fabric. I like to break that stupid rule that redheads shouldn’t wear red.

  ‘We kind of match,’ she said, nodding towards my dress, and almost running into a man on a mobile phone. She skipped aside to avoid the collision. Only a few seconds later, she stopped at a doorway sandwiched between an optometrist and a travel agent. ‘My flat’s just up here.’

  The stairwell was dark, and smelled of eucalyptus. The stairs and walls were painted purple; I kept my eyes on the treads the whole way up, and on the back of her heels. She wore the black rubber thongs I’d first seen her in at the gig – later I was to know that she almost always wore black rubber thongs. On her they took on a kind of elegance.

  At the top there was a landing, and a door, which she opened with a silver key. Everything about her was magic.

  And we still hadn’t introduced ourselves.

  The door opened into a small living room full of old sofas, with a sound system and piles of CDS. We went through and she dumped the bags onto a table in the kitchen, a room that had been painted green, long ago. It was a dim room, full of shadows, and bowls of fruit. The kitchen table held, among other things, a honey jar with a used knife beside it and a slice of half-eaten wholemeal bread-and-honey on a board, as though someone had gone out in a hurry, or simply become tired of eating it.

  The window looked across to the back room of the building next door, where a group of oldish women were taking part in some sort of tai chi class. ‘The white dove spreads her wings,’ she said, glancing across at them. ‘Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Tea, please.’

  She didn’t bother putting away the vegetables. While the kettle boiled, she leaned against the sink and said, with a look of mixed earnestness and hilarity, ‘Don’t you love making new friends? Please don’t tell me your name just yet. One of these days I’ll know all about you, and I want to savour the moment of not knowing.’

  I saw that her rueful mouth could also look delighted and mischievous. I wanted to reach out and trace the contours of her lips. I was filled with intense happiness and delight because for some reason I found her utterly attractive, and feelings like that don’t happen often for me.

  I didn’t tell her that I already knew her name. I, also, wanted to savour the moment of not officially knowing. I said, ‘Then what shall we talk about? I know that you sing. May I tell you I work in a bookshop?’

  ‘That one down the road? I hardly ever go in there, so that must be why I haven’t seen you before.’

  Her teapot was called Lavinia. She told me that much, at least. Lavinia was made of white porcelain, decorated lavishly with leaves and flowers, a tall, slim, elegant pot like a maiden aunt from the late nineteenth century, a woman who wore a lacy blouse buttoned right up to the neck and had a topknot on her head. She laughed when I told her this and said, yes, that was exactly what Lavinia was like; she must have been thinking of that when she named her.

  She put the teapot on a tray with mugs and a sugar bowl. ‘Let’s drink this outside,’ she said, and led me out of the kitchen. There didn’t seem to be anyone else home. The flat was large and rambling, and ran along the back of the building. She opened a door and went in. It was a light-filled room, disordered and feminine. I saw a music stand holding the white guitar, clothes strewn everywhere and several single flowers in vases. She handed me the tray, kicked off her thongs, hoisted herself up onto the windowsill and swung through, reaching back for the tray once she was outside.

  I joined her. We were on the roof at the back of the building, overlooking the very laneway from which I entered the bookshop each morning. The tin on the roof was hot, and rather dirty, so she went inside and came out with towels for us to sit on.

  ‘I don’t normally bother,’ she said, as she handed me one, ‘but that looks like a work dress. A pity to mess it up.’

  We sat and sipped tea. I noticed the geometry of the backs of the buildings, all squares and triangles of various sizes and shapes. Graffiti on a wall across the lane said SHADOW; it was written with grey paint in slanting capitals with shadowing behind the letters. Like everything that day, it seemed beautiful to me.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. ‘This is my special place,’ she said. ‘I love sitting perched up here above the street – and no one ever thinks to look up, so it’s quite secret. It’s not pretty, but ugliness can be kind of nice too, don’t you think?’ She sat up and looked at me earnestly, as though she valued my opinion.

  I smiled at her in agreement, and turned my face to the sun.

  Occasionally, someone walked through the street below; you could hear their footsteps. And then there was the sound of a van backing, and departing, and everything was still. I thought of the incongruity of the grimy bricks and old galvanised-iron roof, against the soft human-ness of us – or of her, at least. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She noticed, and smiled. Really, I think both of us felt shy, but it was a happy feeling of anticipation for me.

  Then she got up and went through the window, returning a couple of minutes later with the remains of a banana cake, which we shared. A cat had followed her out. It was her cat; his name was Timothy, and he was old and arthritic. He had brown striped fur, with curious dark pools of colour on his feet, as though he’d stepped into brown ink. He looked right up into my eyes with an expression that begged acceptance; he had such a humble, cautious, affectionate way with him that I fell in love with him immediately. I stroked his long, appreciative back, all the way to the tip of his striped tail, and thought how frustrating it was that we can take such liberties with animals, but not with people. I wanted to stroke her head – this girl I secretly knew was called Flynn. I wanted to follow her long, black, glossy hair halfway down her back, and then go back to the crown of her head and start again. Would she curl up in my lap?

  ‘Anyway, my name’s Anna,’ I said at last.

  ‘And I’m Rose,’ she answered.

  I think I looked up with surprise.

  ‘But people call me Flynn. Maybe I’ll tell you why one day.’ And with that, she got up and went back through the window, and returned with some crayons and art paper.

  ‘Do you draw?’ she asked, handing some paper across to me.

  I do, though I can’t draw people. So I set to work on a likeness of Timothy, who had jumped up onto a low wall overlooking the street, next to where we’d put the teapot. We both scratched away at our paper, and it was a relief, in a way, not needing to talk for a while. All the time I could feel my heart beating in my chest, painfully aware of Flynn’s proximity. I kept sneaking looks at her. She had a tiny scar on her chin, and her little toe was twisted, as though it had once been broken. She had pointy elbows, and a perfect widow’s peak.

  I was also aware that she kept looking at me – we caught each other’s eye every so often and I looked away quickly. But she seemed to be drawing me, so she had an excuse. She appraised me carefully and then returned to her paper; it was a kind of objective scrutiny that made me feel self-conscious and flattered.

  ‘Your hair is such an extraordinary colour!’ she said. ‘And your face …’

  I know that I have a face that people often look at twice. I’ve been told that I look very grave and truthful, but that is only an accident of feature. My father once told me my face can appear either very beautiful or quite ugly depending on the angle I’m viewed from, and that many actresses have that quality.

  I told Flynn
what my father had said, and she only stared at me more intently, so that I was sorry I’d told her.

  ‘My face is also a curse,’ I added, lightly. ‘There must be something about me. Old ladies are always asking me to reach for things in supermarkets, and people are constantly stopping me to ask for directions, or the time. If I look that trustworthy, maybe I’d make a good politician, or newsreader.’ She laughed when I said that, and I felt a bit easier about her looking at me.

  ‘May I touch your hair?’ she asked a bit later. And she was so sweetly serious as she asked permission that I did not assent nor deny. So she reached forward, and ran her hand down my hair, from the crown to where it curves in a bob to my chin. I wondered if she also felt the delicious tension between us, like a string pulled taut, the sparks coming from our skin when we leaned close, the simple heat.

  To dispel my awkwardness I started to prattle. ‘Apparently I inherited my colouring from my father’s grandmother. Her name was Molly McGuire, and she had white skin that never burned or freckled, and this red hair. Only the women in the family inherit it – my father is dark. My sister, Molly, is exactly like me.’

  ‘You have a sister! She got Molly McGuire’s name as well! Is she older?’

  ‘She’s younger. Only eight.’

  I stopped talking then, because I didn’t want to get onto telling about Molly.

  We went back to our sketching. I’d made a very rough drawing of her cat, and wasn’t very happy with it, so I drew the teapot, Lavinia, as well, making them look like a pair of identical animals staring down into the street. I showed what I’d done to Flynn, and she smiled. Then she revealed the portrait she’d done of me. I looked rather odd and quite beautiful, not at all like myself, which was fitting, as that was the way I’d felt ever since running into her that afternoon. Because being with Flynn did make me feel odd and beautiful.

  It was getting dark, and there were a few drops of rain, so we moved inside. I plonked Lavinia onto the kitchen table and the lid rattled. In the building next door the windows were shut and darkened; the white doves had spread their wings and departed. ‘I must go,’ I said, sounding like someone entirely other than myself. I don’t think I was myself. I was out of my mind with longing.