The Broken Book

My father Percy Morley is the editor of the Blowhole Examiner. He has a staff of four, supposedly journalists, but they also double as secretaries, copytakers and advertising reps, taking down the stock sale results and writing up the radio guide and doing up advertisements as well. Mrs Hunter is the only real journalist—she was once a copy girl on the Argus in Melbourne but she gave it all up to marry Mr Hunter. But Mr Hunter is a disappointment, being the town’s Dirty Old Man, with hands faster than Hopalong Cassidy drawing a loaded Colt. All women have to give up their jobs when they get married, but my sister Hebe and I believe Mrs Hunter gave up the wrong thing. That’s the thing about mistakes, you only know it’s a mistake once you’ve made it. Hebe and I reckon you should be able to tell beforehand whether something is going to be a mistake or not, then you could decide to do it anyway, in the full knowledge of your forthcoming mistake. This could be known as an anticipatory mistake.

Mr Hunter is not an anticipatory mistake. He’s a full-blown error of judgement, the feeling in the middle of the night when you know you’ve done something seismic which can’t be undone. Mr Hunter has given Mrs Hunter a big fat baby called Cecil, whom she adores, but now Cecil is almost three and cannot walk or talk and Mr Hunter has lost his job so Mrs Hunter has come back to work. Mr Hunter is supposed to look after Cecil but once Cecil was found crawling along the main road because Mr Hunter was at the pub and had forgotten all about him.

Mrs Hunter is what is known as a looker, or at least she used to be. She is supposed to look like Norma Shearer, all flaring face and dancing eyes, but lately her eyes look like they are sitting down, being too tired to waltz around the room. She is always sweet to Hebe and me when we come into the office, maybe because the time spent away from her Living Mistake revives her spirits, making the world momentarily kinder.

The other ‘journalists’ are Mr Duncan Road, aged twenty-two (known as Dusty for obvious reasons; eager, competitive), Mr Bill Bishop (veteran of the Great War, been writing his memoirs ever since; once told me that the men in the trenches sometimes shook a dead frozen hand in passing if one happened to be sticking out of the mud) and Miss Doreen Evans (genteel working lady who finds Mr Hunter alarming, and who may or may not admire the questing zeal of Mr Dusty Road).

The Blowhole Examiner has been in the Griffith family since 1863, being established by Mr John Griffith’s grandfather Joseph. Mr Joseph Griffith was a Scot from Dumfries who sailed to Australia thinking it might be something like India, with darkies and elephants and tigers. Disappointed by its olive green dullness and patronised by Sydney’s English aristocracy, he travelled further down the coast, finding the largely unclaimed green and gentle hills around the Blowhole more to his taste. The favoured son of wealthy shipowners, Joseph had his father cable out some money (although legend has it that he sent out gold bars secured in a safe in some captain’s quarters). Within six months Joseph Griffith secured premises, invested in good presses sent out from England, selected staff and printed his first copy of the Blowhole Examiner.

My father Percy Morley wasn’t a communist when he became editor of the Blowhole Examiner but he has had many run-ins with Mr John Griffith since becoming one. Indeed, he has been sacked and reinstated once, over an editorial he wrote during the Depression analysing the failures of capitalism and urging workers everywhere to seize the moment and revolt. Because paper was scarce and expensive in the Depression (just like it will be in the war), my father was accused of wasting valuable resources to proselytise.

The only reason he is still in the job today is that they couldn’t get anyone to do it. Dusty is too inexperienced, and Bill Bishop too old, and they would never give the job to a woman. They advertised Dad’s job the week he was sacked but not one person applied. Poor old John Griffith tried to do it himself but he couldn’t get any of the copy to fit the page layouts (nobody in the office is any good at layouts except Dad) and the paper was late and lost a lot of money. Anyway, Dad had so much support from the local townspeople (there was even a rally for him in the town hall) that Mr Griffith eventually gave in and reinstated him.

‘I suppose you are entitled to your views, Percy,’ he said. ‘Never let it be said that I am a proprietor who interfered with the freedom of the press.’

‘Well said, sir,’ said my father. ‘I always thought you were a bonzer bloke. You will go down in history as a man of thoughtful and independent views.’

Mr Griffith was pleased to be seen this way, being otherwise inoffensive and ineffectual. The Griffith family is the richest in town, rivalled only by the landed Hewitt-Piggots, who own half the countryside around the place. They are graziers, whose sons are educated in England and whose daughters go to London with their mother for the season.

The Hewitt-Piggot land goes right down to the sea, to the cliffs and bays and sandy scalloped edges of the Pacific, to the place where we live all our days. Our edge of the country falls away down the hill from the steel town further up the road: if you stand on the very top of the cliff you can see the blue of the Pacific with its cuff of frilly waves, the green swaying hills, once thickly forested with Red Cedar. The sand is white in the Blowhole, there is the East Beach and the Main Beach and Booby’s Beach and of course the angry spume of the blowhole. The Aboriginals around here call it the place where the sea speaks, although I think the sea speaks everywhere. The sea speaks and is prone to moods, sometimes it shouts, hurling its thunder into my ears, filling every part of me with its rage. It hurls me about then, throwing me down, so hard my shoulder scrapes the sand. When I emerge sand is coating my scalp—it is in my hair, my eyelashes, my crack—and the skin on my shoulder is scraped and bleeding as if I have skinned it on cement.

Look! The line of the sea’s horizon is curly where the water leaps and falls. A frill of lace lies about the surface of the sand after a wave breaks. A girl leaps up from a wave, tossing her head back, sending a whip of silver water like mercury flashing through the air. ‘Over!’ scream the girls, jumping high into the air. ‘Under!’ scream the boys, going under into currents and salty blindness, the dishevelment of sand. Dig your toes into the sand and let the sea pull you, drag you with its great net across the sea floor. Sink your shoulders beneath the green glistening water so that your eyes are level with the surface of the curly sea and you are part of the whole, a creature of salt, a silver flash of girl upon the sea.

This is what the sea is capable of: it can grab me like a fist and drag me down, shaking my life out. It grabbed me once while I was fishing on the rocks; the hand of the sea rose up and claimed me. I was standing and then I was under, froth and gasp and sand, the wash and blur of green airless existence. From somewhere my father saved me, fist against fist, knuckle and bone. My father heaved me up, gashed and bleeding on the rocks, and all the while the hand of the sea pounded against our backs, our legs, still trying. This is what the sea is capable of: it provides me with a sandy rug, a safe place to rest my feet and in a split second it whips the rug out. The rug is gone, the floor, the sand: I am drowning in the winning fist of the sea. Where is land, safety, the sandy bucket which once held me up? Tricked you!

Sometimes the sea speaks quietly, turning its back, and then I have to woo it to me. I try to coax the lap of its salty tongue, in my ears, my mouth, my nose; I dive down, filling myself up, willing it to open wide its arms. Deep down inside it, I find the sea alive and pulsing, always moving, always speaking, a rolling carpet of tongues, talking, talking. Listen! Hear the slap of sea words, a liquid vocabulary, speaking low, murmuring fluently.

My name is Cressida Morley and when I am fifteen and talking to boys I will have a lot of difficulty paying attention to whatever it is they are saying.

All the time their lips are moving I will be wondering about that curled stalk in their pants and what it is doing at that very moment. I have only recently held one in my palm and I was immediately struck by the strangeness of it, the way it felt in my hand, unfurling, surprisingly weighty. And then it suddenly changed, and was seemingly constructed of bone.

I like the way Gavin Hunt presses the length of it up against me, so large and long it reaches my bellybutton. A quivering bow. A slender branch. A telegraph pole built for me! I like the way it presses up against my secret lips, the fragrant warmth it creates in the privacy of my pants.

My best friend is Pamela Crockett, whose mother is half Aboriginal. Pam lives out at the Aboriginal housing estate with her seven brothers and sisters. Pam’s dad was a blow-in from Sydney, a sailor or a forester, anyway, some Irish fellow who got her mum pregnant and then shot through. There are a lot of half-Irish, half-Aboriginal people on the estate. Pam reckons the Irish are very similar to the Aboriginals and that’s why they get on—they both love myths and stories, music and drinking. All Pam’s brothers and sisters have different fathers, except for the first three, Clarrie and Arthur and George, whose dad was Mr Ryan, who was Irish too but died young of drink. Pam’s mum drinks too, till her blue eyes turn marbled and opaque, otherworldly like a woman of visions.

Pam is very pretty, with large round blue eyes like her mum, heavily lashed, and malt-coloured skin. She gets a lot of stick from the other kids (especially Stephen Asmus who calls her Chockie Bickie or Vegemite Features or the Boong). Mum doesn’t like me going out to see her at home, believing all Aboriginals are drunks and/or have loose morals (actually I have seen a lot of drunk people out there but I would never tell her, and Pam’s sister Jenny is only fourteen and she’s pregnant).

Anyway, Pam and I spend hours talking about penises, both of us crammed into the dark of the cupboard at the back of the classroom, hidden by a curtain. The room is never locked and we go there every lunchtime, hidden, alone. She calls me Ressidacay and I call her Ampay or just plain Amp (we speak igpay atinlay—Pig Latin—and it’s the first part of our names in igpay atinlay).

Amp likes them too, penises I mean, their ever-changing properties, their scientific mastery over matter. ‘Roger’s is very fat,’ she tells me, ‘ittlelay utbay ickthay.’

Amp is going with Roger Price, the school captain. This has given her a certain cachet among the other kids, and even Stephen Asmus has to watch his mouth around Roger. It seems to me that if you are pretty, people are more likely to forgive you for being Aboriginal—Amp says it is a well-known fact that the light-skinned, prettier kids from the settlement are the first to be picked for fostering.

Roger Price shaves and already looks like a man; Amp says his pubic hair is thick as sheep’s wool.

‘He likes it when I kiss his chest,’ Amp says, which we both consider daring. To touch a live penis, as both of us recently have, is so wildly implausible, so dangerous, so against every law, that it is barely within the realm of imagination. Girls simply do not do such things; as far as we know, besides Amp’s sister Jenny, we are the only girls in the school to have seen one. It is boys who own the kingdom of sex, who are free to roam its furthest boundaries. Girls are barred from its glorious gates and any girl who dares to venture inside will come to a Bad End, like Jenny Crockett. Jenny is going to a single mother’s home in the country, but only because the welfare are making her.

So far for us, though, there is no anticipatory mistake in sight and Amp and I suffer our sins gladly: we know the might of watching a previously powerless finger reduce nascent men to blood and water. We feel the exhilarating charge of our hands, our lips, our tongues; we understand ourselves to be sources of influence. We love, too, the heat of our own skins, the heavy, swollen feel of our secret lips, the sweet trance of kissing on and on.

While Amp is talking in the half-black of the cupboard, her foot is sliding slowly towards me; we are facing each other, backs to either side of the cupboard wall, our knees drawn up hard. I can feel Amp’s foot creeping, inching, falling, along the floor, coming towards me. Can’t Amp keep her knees up? Is the floor slippery? Does she even know? Does she realise her foot in its gym shoe is creeping towards the dark of my legs, towards my bottom, my secret lips, that her shoe is headed directly for my most private centre?

Heartbeat like a bat; I cannot move; Amp’s shoe makes a squeaking sound on the wood. Flooded with blood, desire, refusal, panic: both want the meeting and do not.

But we are her favourite students, her girls full of promise, her angelhearts of paint and words.

‘Come on, out. You know you’re not supposed to be in here. Quick, before someone else finds you. Shoo!’

And we are out the door, into the light; the cupboard, the foot, the slide gone.

We do not speak of it but at night I think about that slow creep towards my centre and I know this: I am christened sex, I am a miracle of light and desire, the world is a tender, soft place of boys and girls, and I am home.

I have taken to this flushed, blood-filled thriving place as if I was born to it, which I am, I am.

Not long after, I am getting ready for school, folding up a clean handkerchief to put in my pocket, when my father comes into the kitchen. I have written a love letter to Gavin Hunt and I suddenly see it there on the bench, folded up, next to my lunch, plain for everyone to see.

But he does. He picks it up while I am still standing there folding my handkerchief.

There is a loud silence while he reads my words. A swollen, ringing silence in which I hear the ticking of the clock, the sound of the sea, or the hosing sound of my own blood.

I know every word in the note because I have re-written it seventeen times. I used special black ink, my finest arts, the throb, throb, throb of my blood.

DON’T SHOW THIS TO ANYONE!

Dear Gavin,

I’m sorry about saying that I didn’t care if you went out with Shirley Mainwaring. I do care, but sometimes I say the opposite of what I really feel. I don’t know why I do it and now you’ll probably cut me because of it. I love you, Gavin Hunt. I love the way you’ve got pointy eye teeth and amazing brown eyes and I especially love the way that P thing in your pants springs to attention as if I was its captain. Please don’t go out with Shirley Mainwaring, pretty please with sugar on top? Don’t go out with Shirley Mainwaring, marry me! (Joke) Can you speak igpay atinlay (Pig Latin)—or is it only girls? Ampay (Pam) and I speak it all the time—I’ll teach you if you like. (It’s words with the first letter taken off and put at the end—with ‘ay’ added on. Some words don’t change, they just have ‘ay’ tacked on, like ‘anday’ for ‘and’ and ‘ayay’ for ‘a’.)

Iay ovelay ouyay (easyay isntay itay?).

Ovelay, Ressidacay

XXXXXXXX OOOOOOOOO

EMEMBERAY—ONTDAY HOWSAY HISTAY OTAY ANYONEAY!

For a long time now my father has not touched me, not in caresses, not in hugs, not with his hands. When I grew breasts and hair and my beautiful face I became sulphurous to him, something destructive and dangerous. It was as though I had sprouted fangs and a tail; he flinched when I touched him, as if burned. His temper has grown even worse around me; he cannot seem to bear looking into my eyes.

I walk fast, I have to walk right past him, and when I do I instinctively raise my arm in self-protection.

‘Dorothy!’ he shouts to my mother as I pass. ‘Dorothy! Bring me the strap!’

I am going to get strapped! I am going to be belted with his long black leather belt. I am fifteen years old, brim full of sex and beauty, and I am going down at the hands of my father.

I am in my room, waiting for him to open the door, my fifteen-year-old heart thrashing in its bony cave.