About a Girl Page 5

  But she did. She said, ‘And you know – I don’t really care. I thought I would, but I don’t. I think the caring’s gone right out of me.’ She laughed. But it was a laugh without any humour. She spoke to me the way I had heard her talking to her friends – with candour, and a kind of tough, womanly resignation.

  ‘Does Molly know?’

  ‘Not yet. It barely shows. She’ll have to know soon. But he can tell her. I mean, it’s his business, not mine.’

  I finished putting crockery away in the cupboard.

  She said, ‘How do you feel about it?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I told her truthfully. ‘But I suppose I don’t really care, either.’ I couldn’t help imagining, though, what this new sibling, this new half sibling, would be like. This new brother or sister.

  The time flew, and by the end of the week they seemed to have always been there.

  My mother and I cooked together each night, talking, it sometimes seemed, like old friends. And yet I didn’t tell my mother about Flynn. I couldn’t talk to her about what had been happening to me. She said, one evening, stopping what she’d been doing and looking at me with an odd smile, ‘You know, Annie, sometimes I never really know what you’re thinking.’

  I looked back at her. I could have laughed it off, and said that there was absolutely nothing going on in my head, that everything about me was perfectly straightforward. But that would have been a lie, and both she and I would know it. I looked into her eyes honestly, but I said nothing.

  And it occurred to me that my mother was not telling me everything either, that she was putting on a brave face (as she always had, especially since Molly had been born). And perhaps this was what people did, mothers and daughters, and friends, and probably even lovers as well.

  Chapter Ten

  ALL I COULD think about was Flynn. When the bookshop closed at Saturday lunchtime, I felt drawn towards the stairs to her flat, but knew I could not walk up them. Apart from anything else, I had a certain amount of pride. I wondered how much, and felt faint at the thought of putting it to the test.

  On the way home I avoided walking past the café where she worked, in case she was there and I caught sight of her. Seeing her again was something that I longed for, and dreaded. Because what if she had decided against me?

  And then, after all my longing and trepidation, as though she’d been conjured up simply by my desire to see her, Flynn arrived at my flat that evening. She stood at the door as though she’d never been away, her face bright, not even awkward or ashamed that she’d gone away and left me hanging. Without her eyes leaving my face, she put out her hand, and her fingers touched my lips.

  She looked surprised to find my mother there, but recovered with aplomb. I could not breathe, and stood awkwardly, introducing Flynn to my family.

  ‘Flynn,’ said my mother. ‘That’s an unusual name.’

  ‘It’s Rose, really.’

  ‘Oh, that’s pretty …’

  ‘Believe me, I’m more of a Flynn.’ She smiled ruefully, but she did not elaborate or explain.

  She smiled across at me, and it was a smile full of promises and secrets. She had gone away to think about us, and now she must have gathered her thoughts. Her face told me she wanted to be with me; it was impossible that she had decided otherwise. I looked away, because I wanted to take her face in my hands. I wanted to lie down at her feet, though by rights I should have struck her across the face and demanded an explanation of her behaviour.

  Instead I offered a glass of wine, but she declined and asked for water. She appeared thinner, and browner, her face more grave; she was lovely, as poised as a tiger. It seemed impossible that this creature had come back for me.

  We sat down. Nursing the glass from which she had not drunk, Flynn leaned forward in her chair and asked my mother how she’d enjoyed her holiday. She chatted to Molly about the cat, and it seemed no time at all before she said that she must go.

  ‘Call round and see me,’ she said shyly, as she left. She waved her hand awkwardly from hip level, the hand that I must not, for now, touch.

  I followed her out to the car. With my mother safely inside, in the cover of darkness I put out my hand and touched her face. When my hand reached her mouth, she took my fingers softly between her teeth and bit them. I pinched her on the back of the neck, playfully. Then, wanting to punish her, I pinched harder, and she slapped me away. We glared at each other. How much I hated and loved her at that moment!

  ‘That was a nice girl,’ said my mother.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, not able to look her in the eye.

  I wondered if she could see how I burned.

  They left very early next morning, just as the sun was coming up. Molly was an early riser anyway, and my mother wanted to get a large part of the distance covered before they stopped at a motel for the night.

  I wiped a tear as the car pulled away. And then thought with relief and guilt that nothing prevented me from going to Flynn at once. I wanted so much to see her, but to run to her place straight after saying goodbye to my family would be like saying that I had wanted them gone. And my pride stood in the way as well. She’d left me hanging on in agony for what had seemed like an aeon, and I didn’t want to be at her beck and call.

  I went back inside, and the place was empty and lonely. I washed up the few breakfast dishes. There was no bedding to deal with as they’d taken it away with them.

  I fought a battle between anger and longing. My flat felt as barren as a wasteland. Someone might have died there.

  I stared out through the windows, and sat all day watching the shadows move across the room. Finally, when I could bear it no longer, I got up and showered, automatically dressing in something I could wear to work the next morning.

  And I walked down the hill to the town, in the twilight, in the red light of a summer evening, in the crow-cawing evening, with the setting sun pinking the clouds, to the purple staircase, the shadowy purple staircase to her flat.

  PART TWO

  Chapter One

  BUT BEFORE FLYNN, before nearly everything, there is Michael. There is Michael, there is Finnegans Wake, there is my mother and Molly, my father and Josh. There is Morgan. There is a girl in a diaphanous dress.

  But to begin at this particular moment: I am experiencing something close to bliss. I am sixteen, and browsing in a second-hand bookshop in our suburb.

  The shop’s in Canberra’s inner north, part of a villagey shopping centre with a park in front and at the rear. Down the laneway that leads between the two parks, the narrow shop stretches halfway up the lane, its windows offering views of the maze-like arrangement of shelves inside. It’s the most higgledy-piggledy shop I’ve ever seen. Everything is in categories, but books are only roughly alphabetical, only barely shelved. Little piles of books lie in abandon everywhere, and finding one you want is like a lucky dip.

  LITERATURE is right at the back. I lean against the glass, warmed by the early afternoon autumn light. I am filled with bliss because I’ve discovered a fat, barely thumbed book called Finnegans Wake.

  riverrun is the way it starts – I always like to see how a book begins and ends – and the incomplete last sentence of the book appears to form the beginning of the first. That is, if this book could be said to have sentences by the usual definition, or indeed be about anything. But the language makes sense in a rhythmic, nonsensical way, and this matter of making sense and yet not at the same time has me hooked. You could have fun with a book like this. I have the feeling that this book might contain everything in the world. So I lean my head and shoulder against the warm glass of the shop window and read.

  riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay …

  Michael comes up to the window and waves at me, but I am barely conscious of him, only of a darknes
s on the other side of the glass.

  And then he appears next to me, though I am still so taken by the book that I’m only aware of the toggles of his coat at eye level, and the faint odour of mothballs. He is wearing his father’s black duffle coat from thirty years ago, and a button that says, DON’T PANIC.

  ‘Have you found something?’ he whispers.

  I check in my purse. ‘D’you have five dollars?’ And he rummages in his trousers.

  We take the book up to the front, where a tall man with glasses and a myopic gaze sits like a bear in a cave behind a huge desk covered with books and papers. The book is eleven dollars, but he charges only ten, and I give the remaining dollar to Michael when we get outside. We go to the park behind the shopping centre and throw ourselves on the ground. I open the book.

  riverrun …

  Chapter Two

  IF THERE WAS a time before Michael, I’ve forgotten it. No, that isn’t exactly true, but it seems my life proper only started once I met him.

  We were eleven, and at an educational weekend for gifted children, though not in the same group most of the time. We happened to sit near each other at lunch out under the trees, neither of us used to feeling at ease with others. I liked his pale face and floppy fair hair, his big glasses, and the neatly practical way he consumed his lunch. He was one of those fearsomely bright children who made me feel blessedly average.

  Was it then, or a bit later (surely it was later) that he said to me, ‘Anyway, everyone’s different in their own little way.’

  The words had a kind of confidence, and were said brightly and lightly, but they held hurt and uncertainty, and a hidden story of not belonging. Hearing them, I almost wanted to cry, because they held out a kind of hope to me. I had always been different, without really knowing why. I only knew that I would never fit in.

  We became friends. It turned out that though we went to different schools, we lived only streets apart. This meant we were almost neighbours, though as I pointed out to Michael, ‘streets apart’ also meant to be far removed from something.

  I loved going down the deserted suburban streets with their avenues of trees to his house, because I knew when I got there there’d be companionship, and interesting conversations. I’d go round the back, knock on his window, and clamber in. It was easier than going to the front door, because I didn’t have to encounter his parents, who took far too much interest in me. They were the kind of people who needed to know everything, and Michael and I most emphatically didn’t want to tell them, though we didn’t get up to anything much.

  In many ways he and I didn’t speak the same language. I had to translate his scientific way of looking at the world into my metaphorical one. He knew things that I could never even begin to understand. And yet it was as though we were two sides to the same coin, different, yet welded together.

  On the day of Finnegans Wake we stretched out on the grass in the park in perfect ease. It was thin, wiry grass like a threadbare carpet, and the earth showed through. Fallen leaves lay everywhere, brown, crunchy ones from the year before, and newer drifts of wine-red ones. The ground was cool; it was not quite winter, but everything spoke of it – the pale, thin sunlight, and the sulphur-crested cockatoos that screeched at the top of the tall pine trees, and the icy fragrance of trodden leaves that made your nostrils thrill and contract.

  ‘Show me this book then,’ said Michael, taking it from my fingers and opening it at random. He read aloud: ‘To sum, borus pew notus pew eurus pew zipher. Ace deuce, tricks, quarts, quims. Mumtiplay of course and carry to their whole number. While on the other hand, traduced by their comedy nominator to the loaferst terms for their aloquent parts, sexes, suppers, oglers, novels and dice.’

  He laughed, and his chest shook with mirth. ‘I like it! I think I’ll take this problem to my mathematics lecturer.’

  I grabbed it back. ‘Get your own copy.’

  ‘It is! Half, anyway.’

  ‘Four tenths.’

  ‘Aha! You can do maths! When you want to. But seriously, do you think everything in life should be traduced to the lowest comedy nominator? Discuss.’

  He was only sixteen, but he was in his first year of university. I was in Year Twelve, and it was the first-term break. Less than two months into his course of study, Michael had gained a new confidence, perhaps because for the first time in his life he wasn’t the smartest person in the class. And with this confidence he had suddenly become beautiful, though I could see that he wasn’t aware of it yet.

  ‘But what does it all mean?’ I asked him, as he took the book from me again and started to read it.

  After a while he pronounced, ‘I don’t think it’s meant to mean anything. It’s pure music. I think it’s meant to make you laugh.’

  It was cold on the ground, so we stood up and brushed the leaves from our clothing. I took up my new book and kissed it. Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce. I knew I had found a new, beloved friend, one that promised many hours of happy reading.

  But that day, the one I later thought of as the day of Finnegans Wake, also became the day when everything in my life changed.

  Chapter Three

  IF SOMEONE WHO knew us had been asked to describe my family, they might have said, ‘comfortable’. Because isn’t that the way people describe families who have enough money, seemingly enough of everything (though what that everything might be I could not say) not to worry?

  We lived in a lovely house in a pleasant old suburb. It was a house full of paintings and flowers and piano music (my father taught painting at a college, and my mother piano, part-time). There was comfortable clutter; it was a house where books lay in piles next to chairs, or on coffee tables, and shells and seed-pods were arrayed along windowsills. The kitchen seemed always to have a few bowls in the sink, and a cake cooling on the bench, and bowls of fruit made prettier by the addition of a couple of pomegranates from the garden, or a dragon fruit from the greengrocer.

  But ever since I was very young I’d seen myself as a kind of interloper, a stranger who had come from somewhere and inveigled her way into the family. One day, they would have to find out what I was really like.

  That was why meeting Michael had been such a blessing. He was also different in his own little way. Increasingly, home became a sort of stopping-over place for me. My real life was lived inside my own head, or with Michael, while we roamed around the city and suburbs looking at things, or talking, or simply being together.

  On the day that I came home with Finnegans Wake, I had the house to myself. I went to the kitchen and took a stash of home-made biscuits from the tin, and went to my room, where I dipped into the strange, intoxicating world of the new book. I heard my family come home; first my mother with Molly (Mum put her head round my door to check on me – she never knocked!), and then I heard my brother, Josh, pull up on his motorbike, and soon after loud music burst from his room. I rapped on the wall for him to be quiet and he rapped back, but did not turn down the sound. Just before the time we usually had dinner, I heard my mother and father conferring in the hallway.

  And then they called me from my room.

  Everyone sat on sofas in the living room, and the air was full of tension. Josh sat staring into space, as though waiting for an unwelcome appointment, and Molly, who was only five, sat on Mum’s lap, her face vacant.

  ‘We’ve called you together …’ said my father, clearing his throat and staring into the air, sounding frighteningly like someone convening a meeting. And then he seemed to forget what he was going to say, and looked at the floor.

  ‘We need to tell you something,’ my mother said quickly and nervously, looking at Josh and me. She hugged Molly closer to her. My parents sat on opposite sides of the room. ‘And we need to tell you together.’ Mum stared across at Dad, willing him to look at her. He took up the cue to speak, but still would not
face her.

  He said, as though he’d rehearsed it, ‘We … I mean, I … am moving out of the house … we’re separating.’

  ‘Tell them why,’ said my mother, in a challenging voice. Molly couldn’t really have understood, but must have picked up on the tension. She gave a puzzled cry, and Mum took hold of her head gently, and kissed her.

  Our father still would not look any of us in the face.

  ‘I … that is …’ Then he threw the words at us as though he couldn’t get them out quickly enough. ‘I’ve met someone – I’m going to live with her … her name is—’

  He stopped. I wanted him to go on, but perhaps he thought the name of this person he was leaving us for wasn’t important.

  He sat there with his palms out loose and beseeching on his thighs. My father was a tall man, as muscular and lean as a drover, still handsome. I adored him.

  ‘Is that all, then?’ said Josh dismissively. He got up and went to his room, his head high, the set of his shoulders like that of someone bearing up to pain. His door banged, and he put on his music again, turned up loud.

  In a swift, impulsive movement, my father moved across the floor and knelt in front of Molly, cupping her face in her hands. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I can’t live here with you anymore. But I love you. It’s not because of you.’

  ‘Can’t live here!’ snorted Mum derisively. ‘And she doesn’t understand.’

  My father’s face was filled with such pain. He was, in effect, also kneeling in front of my mother, but he was looking only at Molly. I got to my feet and headed for the door.

  ‘Anna?’ he pleaded.

  I turned round. ‘You’ve said all you need to, and I don’t want to talk about it.’

  I went to my room and cried.

  I heard my father’s car leaving, and Molly wailing in her bedroom, my mother comforting her.