WITH MY LIFE at university tantalisingly close, I got into an irritable state of hating the whole world. In that mood, I took Hetty and Tess for a walk downtown, and we must have been a miserable sight. Hetty grizzled and gnawed at one hand, dribbling a trail of spit down her front. Tess trotted behind, tail down, at the end of a filthy bit of rope I was using as a lead.
I tramped along the street, preoccupied with my foul mood. As I passed the café where I used to work before Hetty was born, someone ran up behind me and touched me on the elbow.
‘Sophie.’
And there was Becky Sharp, her little lobeless ears miraculously unchanged. In slim black slacks and white shirt, with a blue beret on her head. She slid her hands casually into her pockets.
I said her name aloud, hesitantly, as though I’d almost forgotten she existed, though in truth I think I’d called her to mind almost every day. She gestured towards the outdoor tables. ‘Hey! Come and sit a while – do you have time?’
She was with a boy she introduced simply as Lawson, and whether that was his first or last name I couldn’t tell. He was very tall, and dressed in a thick grey army coat. When he stood up to shake my hand he towered over me. Becky Sharp left us alone while she darted inside to order me a coffee, and he and I sat there silently, neither of us knowing quite what to say, though really I can only speak for myself. Perhaps he didn’t want to talk.
But I liked him. He had the face of an ugly, faithful hound, with sincere eyes that turned down at the outer corners, and an immensely long nose that dominated a long face. Tess perked up at the sight of him; he smoothed back her ears firmly in a way she didn’t mind at all, and when I let go of her rope she went to sit with her head in his lap.
Becky Sharp returned, and Lawson said he had to be going. He shook my hand again, patted Tess one last time, and departed. I had to call Tess back, as she had started to follow him, trailing her dirty rope over the footpath.
Becky Sharp and I looked at each other. It was difficult to know what to say to her, as I didn’t want to say anything ordinary. She looked so extraordinary sitting there in the thin afternoon sunlight, her lovely pink mouth pursed in thought.
In the end, I said something absolutely commonplace:
‘I took the books back.’
‘I know.’
Taking a deep breath (I was so happy to see her I had forgotten to breathe), I added, ‘I’m starting at uni after the break.’
‘I’ll probably see you about the place, then.’
I looked down into my coffee and took a sip.
Then, ‘Have you ever cooked with Parisian essence?’ I asked her. Only the Goddess, in all her wisdom, would know why I said something as pointless as that. I had noticed it the night before in our cupboard, and Lil had told me that its function was simply to make food brown.
‘Um…no,’ she said. ‘What exactly is it?’
I started to prattle. I do that when I don’t know what to say and I want people to like me.
‘It’s just kind of brown. That’s what it is. Brown stuff, to make food brown. It sounds exotic though, doesn’t it? Essence of Paris. Who wouldn’t want it in their food?’
Becky Sharp pushed her empty cup away to make room for an elbow, which she placed on the table, resting her chin in her hand. Her hair, which I think I said before was black, wasn’t entirely black at all. Like my sister Kate’s, it had green strands in it, and red.
‘And some food really needs to be brown, doesn’t it?’ she said, with a smile. ‘I’ll look out for this Parisian essence.’
Hetty, still strapped into her pram, was starting to fuss. I picked her up and opened the buttons on my dress to feed her. Becky Sharp watched, frankly and openly, but it didn’t worry me. What I hate is when people look at anything else but my breast.
She got up and went into the café and came back with blueberry muffins, which we ate silently while Hetty fed. It was nice not having to talk, and I felt most comfortable with Becky. She seemed to understand without being told how much I loved and needed food.
She took Hetty while I went off to the loo, and dandled her on her knee. When I came back she indicated that she was happy to keep her. And I can’t remember what else we said to each other. I think we just sat there for a long while, looking at each other and smiling.
Eventually I said I had to go. And I got up and went, collecting up my baby and my dog, adjusting the pram, feeling slightly self-conscious at my disreputable-looking entourage.
I went home the long way, walking over the three bridges that cross Lismore’s rivers (for Lismore is a place built on multiple converging rivers – no wonder it’s such a place for floods). I thought about Becky Sharp almost all the way. Picking a flower that leaned out over a front fence (what was it? – let’s say it was a gladiolus) I carried it as far as the bridge near the Winsome Hotel, where I leaned over and threw it into the river. I’m in the habit of throwing things into the river; it seems to me a gesture both practical and symbolic. A river brings, and it also takes away.
I know that at some stage I should give an account of myself: how I, an apparently not-too-badly educated girl, not too stupid (perhaps not too clever either), came to be blessed, as I see it, by a child at the age of twenty-one.
I remember this:
It was the middle of a morning in hot December; shafts of light shot from the surface of the river. Amazing to think that something as miraculous as Hetty could have her beginning with Marcus hugging a tree and exclaiming how good it felt.
I found my own tree to hug, and Marcus came over and embraced me against the slender, half-grown gum. Things went on from there. Slipping my knickers from underneath my skirt, I took Marcus by the shoulders and moved him so that I was on the outside and he was the one pressed up against the tree. We were hidden down near the riverbank, among weeds and tall flowering grasses. My knickers (red silky ones, my favourites) were scrunched up in one fist.
There was a woman picnicking with her two children over in the park, and I kept my eye on her at first to make sure she hadn’t seen us, and then I got lost in the moment. Sex is essentially ridiculous when you think about it, but while you’re actually doing it, it’s not ridiculous at all, but lovely and essential. The thing I like is the way you reach a point where nothing else matters. There is that moment when time is suspended. Everything stops, and falls away.
We looked into each other’s eyes the whole time. That was one thing I loved about Marcus, that he always kept his eyes open. Afterwards, I saw the woman in the park ushering her children away with an angry backwards glance. I also noticed with surprise that my knickers were still balled up into my fist.
And then I had to hurry to get to work on time, a wad of tissues stuck into my pants to collect the drips. I waited on tables all afternoon in a dreamy haze. I kept thinking of the Judith Wright poem, ‘Woman to Man’. The third that lay in our embrace is the line that ran through my head. But there had been four of us: me, Marcus, the gum tree and Hetty. Hetty was as yet only there in her potentiality, but that’s the point of the poem, isn’t it?
In an idle moment, standing next to the sink and scoffing a piece of brioche that I pulled apart with sticky fingers, I thought about those animated diagrams of conception, with sperm wriggling their way towards the ovum. I wasn’t sure how long that swim took, but sperm were small, so it must take some little time at least. In my mind, the baby was already the imperious little madam that Hetty in fact became. My womb was waiting for her. And although I knew in reality that it must be quite small (it had to be; it fitted in there somewhere between my fanny and my waist), in my imagination I saw that part of me as a place as large and as infinite as an entire universe, with its own constellations and weather. It was dark there, and beautifully patterned with stars.
That night Marcus stayed with me in my red-room at Samarkand. And though I knew that he would be gone in a few days, I didn’t care because I had him with me here, now. I couldn’t stop looking at him and marvelling. It was as if he was my baby, he was so exquisite, so perfect, so astonishing. I had this idea that there was a type of love that you didn’t want to miss out on in your life, and I knew it was that type of love I was experiencing now. It was absolute, abandoned, and beyond sense or logic.
Marcus slept, and still my eyeless labourer toiled through the night, striving herself into being. Are we there yet? I asked her silently.
Not yet, not yet.
It was then that I felt fully the strength of my baby’s will.
Then, when I was almost dead with exhaustion (I didn’t want to miss the actual moment of my baby’s arrival so I kept myself awake) I heard a bat fly into the room. It was one of those tiny bats that frequented the house, and was no bigger than a tiny mouse.
The sound of its wings stopped, and I switched on the reading light at the same instant that it alighted on the shade that hung in the middle of the room. As I watched, the bat took off, out through the doors leading to the verandah. The moment between its alighting and swooping away again was a long, breathless pause. It was like the swinging arc made by a trapeze artist in a circus, the releasing and grasping, another moment when time stood still.
And I know that it was at that moment, that split second as the bat pushed away from the lightshade, that a single spermatozoon, the winner of the race, reached its destination and Hetty came into being.
I had met Marcus only three days before. He was just another customer in the café where I worked, and he started a conversation by asking me what I did.
‘What do you mean, what do I do?’
‘For a living.’
‘I work here.’
‘No – I mean really…’
‘I work here. Do you want pepper with that?’ I brandished a tall grinder.
‘You don’t look like a waitress – you must do something else as well.’ He was flirting with me, and I was pretending indifference.
‘Really? What do I look like?’
‘I dunno…an actress?’
It was at that moment I should have hit him with a line from Shakespeare or Edward Albee (or better still, the pepper grinder), but I never had the knack of saying something witty at the right time; it only ever came to me afterwards. I found myself agreeing to come to the pub that night where he had a gig. He said his name was Marcus Innocenti (Sure, I thought), and his band was called The Innocents.
I’d forgotten how viscerally live rock music hits you. How loud it is. The way the sheer volume of it pounds into your chest, taking you by force, storming right in and using your body as a sounding board.
I loved it; I could have sat there all night. I watched Marcus Innocenti and felt, rather than heard, the music that he made. I conceded that perhaps ‘Innocenti’ might be his real name after all because he looked Italian. That face, that nose, that dark hair, and the glance he shot me between songs that almost killed me. He looked anything but innocent, and that was the kind of boy I liked.
I hadn’t dressed up, and still wore the outfit I’d worn at work, an old cotton dress and down-at-heel flats, ugly shoes that I hated; I called them my licorice shoes because of their unappetising dull black surface. Looking up from my horrible shoes, I made the fatal mistake of comparing myself with a slim, blonde girl in jeans and a skimpy top who seemed somehow connected with the band. She sipped at her beer with such a healthy unawareness of anyone else that I became painfully conscious that I can seldom lose myself like that in a crowd.
The music stopped and I got up and moved for the exit. I heard a voice say, over the microphone, ‘I think we’ll take a break,’ and before I got to the door, Marcus Innocenti caught me up. And he looked at me with such an entreating expression that I couldn’t help but go back with him. He led me to a seat in a corner and fetched us some drinks. As we sipped beer together I saw various girls I’d been at school with toss their hair and throw me hincty glances.
After the gig there was absolutely nowhere in Lismore for us to go, so we walked the darkened streets. It was early December, and some houses had Christmas lights out already. What did we talk about? I can’t remember, and besides, who needed to talk? If I wanted conversation I’d read Leo Tolstoy. It was enough simply to be walking beside Marcus Innocenti, aware of every cell in his body.
We ended up at his motel. I hadn’t been in many motel rooms in my life, and this one struck me as very depressing, with ugly furniture and expanses of brown curtain and carpet and bedspread. So far we hadn’t touched each other, not on the walk, and not now. I sat on the end of the bed and drank a can of Passiona from the mini-bar. Marcus Innocenti made himself a cup of green tea. He sat beside me on the bed to drink it. I kicked off my shoes, and they lay there on the brown carpet looking very lost and ugly and alone.
He said, ‘Tell me the story of your life.’
No one had ever said this to me before. It would never have crossed the minds of the boys I’d been with up till now.
Tell me the story of your life.
I looked at him, and it seemed as though he meant it. He smiled.
Marcus Innocenti wasn’t your brooding, moody type. He was no Edward Rochester or Mr Darcy, and thank goodness for that. He smiled and laughed a lot, even though I couldn’t remember afterwards exactly what he’d smiled and laughed about.
I took him at his word. I told him the story of my life. I told him everything, things I’d never told another soul. It took all night. It took till the dawn, lying all that time next to him on the bed, still not touching. When I’d finished he took my face between his hands and said, ‘Do you know what? You’re the funniest girl I’ve ever met in my life.’
We undressed each other and Marcus Innocenti examined every inch of my body. Under his scrutiny there wasn’t one part of myself that I felt the need to cover up or feel ashamed of. He said, pinching the flesh tenderly between his fingers, ‘You’ve got a fat back,’ and it didn’t seem that he was criticising, merely observing. He found the scar on my knee from when I’d fallen from a swing when I was four, and chided me gently for not telling him the entire story of my life after all.
Back in the days when I used to meet up with boys on the riverbank, after sex I always ended up reaching into my bag for my copy of Anna Karenina. I used to carry it with me to help me deal with boring moments in my life.
With Marcus Innocenti, the thought of Anna Karenina didn’t even enter my mind.