ON THE NIGHT of Lawson’s party I set out at about nine-thirty with Hetty asleep in the pram and Tess at my heels.
I hadn’t dressed up for a party; actually, I wasn’t sure if I’d end up even going to it. I planned to wander in that direction and see what happened.
The path under the fig trees was secluded and hushed; as I came out from that friendly darkness and headed towards the town, the lit-up shopping streets with cruising cars seemed another country altogether. I crossed the bridge. Underneath the river gleamed blackly. As I passed the Winsome Hotel, talk and laughter shot out like bursts of gunfire.
Down the street from the pub were the occasional darkened old shops, with houses set between them a little way back from the street. Their fences supported straggling jasmine that scented the night, and I was full of calm happiness, content to be walking my sleeping baby and my dog.
I came to the street whose name Lawson had scrawled for me, a pot-holed lane of timber houses. The only thing the houses had in common was an immense shabbiness; it was the sort of place where a rainbow flag is used in place of a curtain, where there are several empty plots of land with kikuyu grass as tall as your shoulder and nasturtiums running wild. The narrow roadway was lined with ancient cars and derelict kombi vans. Across the way, appearing like a vision through one of the vacant lots, the skating rink blared an aureole of light and tinny music. It was an ugly place, a beautiful place, and one day a poet might well write a suite of lyrical poems to it. The title could be Wotherspoon Street, for that is its name.
Towards the end of the street, music drifted from the back yard of a tall timber house. The space beneath it was filled in with an assortment of old windows and doors, making additional living space. A cluster of garbage bins stood at the entrance, along with lush outgrowths of tropical plants. As I arrived, a car pulled up in front of me. The driver’s door opened and someone deposited a pair of silver, laced, extremely high platform shoes onto the roadway. Bare feet were wriggled into them, and the owner of the shoes tottered down the drive.
I took myself, in my flat, shabby brown shoes (for I can never manage to buy a pair of shoes I really care for), with my sleeping baby and my dog, down the side of the house. In the yard, a few people were dancing in a desultory way, but most were standing about under trees hung with fairy lights, drinking and talking. I saw a boy pause in the middle of a conversation to look at me with interest.
I knew that wolfish look. There are certain men, good-looking, confident and predatory, who specialise in it. The boy detached himself from the group he was with and came over to me. ‘You look lost,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ I told him briskly. ‘I’m just wondering where to find Lawson.’
‘Oh, Lawson,’ he said, with a knowing smile. ‘He could be anywhere.’
‘Then I think I’ll go and find him.’
I went exploring. The party seemed to be taking place not just in one house, but in several. Their common yards had no fences, and all the surrounding houses were also lit up, their gardens festooned with lights. There seemed to be no one there that I knew, and I liked that. Going to a foreign country must be that way. You wonder what the customs will be like, and whom you will meet.
A girl wearing pink cut-off slacks with a broad band of lace at the cuffs stopped and leaned into the pram, her breasts spilling out of a skimpy top. ‘Oh, how sweet.’
Hetty opened her eyes in a drunken, drowsy way and then shut them again, as though against her will. ‘Oh,’ whispered the girl, with a finger to her lips. ‘I’d better not wake her. She is a girl, isn’t she?’ When I nodded, she smiled and said, ‘I thought so.’
‘Do you know where Lawson is?’ I asked.
‘Oh yeah…over in Becky’s room.’ She gestured.
I went in the direction she’d indicated. At the back of the garden, under trees, was a timber shed with a broad front door standing open. It was lit up inside, and I could see Lawson and Becky Sharp reclining on a big bed that filled almost the entire room. The bed faced the door, and they were lying there not talking, each with their legs straight out and their ankles crossed.
I wondered whether I ought to interrupt, but they were in full view of anyone who cared to pass by. But before I even got to the door, Becky Sharp noticed me and raised her hand in a gesture of recognition. She patted the bed beside her and smiled, indicating that I should join them.
I parked Hetty at the foot of the bed. Tess went immediately to Lawson and put her paws up on the bed next to him. ‘Hey, Tess,’ he said, rubbing her ears vigorously. I perched next to Becky Sharp and, after a moment, lay back against the pillows. We all lay with our ankles crossed, staring out at the dark garden. Like people sitting looking at the sea, we seemed to have no essential need to talk to each other. Eventually Becky said, tilting her chin towards the pram, ‘She’s good isn’t she?’
‘When she’s asleep,’ I replied. ‘Sometimes she has so much energy I can’t stand it. You have no idea. It’s getting worse as she gets older.’
It was all so easy and companionable, as though I’d known them for years. I looked around Becky’s room. It was painted yellow with blue trims, clean-looking and pleasing. There was no decoration on the walls at all. But everywhere, on a desk, on a small dressing table and on whatever floor space there was, were untidy piles of CDs. On a shelf next to the bed, with the CDs, were a few books.
Then someone arrived, wanting Lawson for something. Tess trotted out after him, and that left Becky and me sitting there together, staring out at the garden. The lights and music through the trees were enchanting, and I felt I could spend the whole evening there, just sitting and looking.
‘I’m glad you came,’ she said. She took hold of my hand and held it lightly, turning it over and looking at it in a detached way. As I’d noticed the first time I met her, her hands were slim and pale, with long fingers. She was like a carving of something stripped down to its essence. I glanced across at her smooth cheek, but she didn’t look into my face, just kept examining my hand as if it was a thing of mild interest, a leaf, say, or a stone.
I was happy, sitting there, with my hand in hers. Nothing else mattered. I felt that I was somehow at the centre of the world.
‘I thought you said you didn’t read,’ I said to her, indicating the books.
‘Yeah, well…’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s impossible to have no books, isn’t it? But they’re only poetry. So slender they hardly count.’
I moved over and sat on the edge of the bed so that I could better look at her books. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso. William Carlos Williams. Denise Levertov. On her desk was the little case she’d carried that first day.
‘May I?’ I asked, reaching for it. It contained a silver flute, disassembled.
Just then, someone came to fetch her; the musicians were about to start. Becky Sharp took the case from me and snapped the latches shut. Reaching up to a peg, she took down a beret, placed it at a rakish angle on her head, waved at me, and departed.
In fact, as I knew from experience, musicians ‘about to start’ take a very long time to get going. Wheeling the pram with Hetty still asleep, I wandered out into the garden and sat on the grass, watching them setting up in a space under a large tree. Becky Sharp moved about, setting up mics and amps, testing levels, kicking leads out of the way, and pushing hair away from her face in the inimitable way of musicians, as though she had all the time in the world.
At the edge of my vision I saw Maggie Tulliver. I turned my head to look at her, and our eyes met for a moment and then I looked away. Neither of us made any attempt to approach the other. I wished she wasn’t there; it spoiled the evening for me somewhat, but I was determined to ignore her.
Hetty woke up, and I sat with her on my knee. She became mesmerised by the lights and movement. Various people came up and introduced themselves, taking Hetty by the fingers and cooing at her. She was perfectly happy to be cooed at, and greeted each arrival regally. The wolfish boy I had met earlier came over to introduce himself, bowing low in front of me in a parody of courtliness.
‘Jack Savage,’ he said, holding out a hand.
‘Sophie O’Flahertie,’ I replied. O’Flahertie was one of Oscar Wilde’s middle names, and I used it sometimes because I felt more related to him than to Michael O’Farrell, the man my mother had hooked up with, whose name I’d been given.
I couldn’t take my eyes from Becky Sharp. She had opened her music case and slotted her flute together. With apparently random notes floating diffidently into the air, the band started to play.
The music gave me great pleasure, but it was watching the musicians together that I liked best. Each of them managed to be in their own world with the music at the same time as being acutely aware of what the others were doing. They communicated with quick smiles and raised eyebrows, entered into playful volleys of sound, and became lost in trancelike reveries. The music, which had begun so uncertainly, gathered strength.
Jack Savage squatted down next to me and asked me to dance, but I declined. For some reason, I didn’t much like him, and I was content simply watching the music. He went away, and a bit later I saw him dancing with Maggie Tulliver. But I kept my eyes on Becky Sharp, saw how her mouth pursed just so against the side of her flute, how she stood so relaxed and upright, as though suspended from some invisible point above her.
I was thinking that I ought to go home at the end of the first set when Lawson turned up, trailed by Tess. ‘Come and get something to eat,’ he said. He led me up the stairs into the kitchen where people thronged round a long table set with food. He found me a plate, and even selected some choice things for me to eat. He didn’t take a plate for himself.
We went to his room, where Hetty crawled about on the floor and ate pieces of quiche that I popped into her mouth whenever she came close. When she’d had enough, she took the food from her mouth and gave it to Tess.
Lawson’s room was at the front of the house, and was sparsely furnished, with a bay window. The bed was unmade; it was single, a monk-like bed, with a thin grey blanket and a flat pillow. I saw his camera sitting on a table, but no evidence of his work.
‘So where are these photos you took of me?’ I asked. Reaching down under the bed, he drew out a large folder and showed me the photos he’d taken of me on the stone lion. They were of my face. Just my face. In one I wore an expression of brooding intensity, my eyes cast downwards. I must have been reading Oscar Wilde’s letter to his mother. Another picture had me gazing into the distance (thinking perhaps of the beauty of the laundromat and Dr Dirt of Dunoon?).
Lawson had other photographs, all of faces. He must have taken them in the street without people knowing, because each of their expressions said something they would not have wanted others to see. People always put on a special face for a camera, just as they do when looking into a mirror.
One man’s face said, ‘You cannot help me.’
Another’s said, ‘I am alone.’
‘What does my face say?’ I asked Lawson.
He looked at the picture of me reading Oscar Wilde’s letter. ‘I wish I was somewhere else,’ he said. And then the one of me staring across the road: ‘I belong here.’
He handed them back to me.
Looking at Lawson’s own face, I noticed again the grainy quality of his skin, as though someone had rubbed at it with sandpaper. I wanted to reach out and touch it. Impulsively, I leaned over and put out my tongue. It connected with his cheek for a moment. He tasted, as I’d suspected he would, of salt, as though he’d been standing in sea-spray, or wept so much that his skin was impregnated with tears.
One of his eyes flickered, but that was the only reaction he made. Putting away the photographs he said, ‘Do you want to walk up to the park?’ Hetty had fallen asleep suddenly on the floor, her bottom in the air, and I picked her up and carried her to the pram without her waking. On our way out of the drive I saw Maggie Tulliver again. She was talking to someone, and affected not to notice me.
We walked away from the voices and music, across the road to the park. There was a brick entranceway with iron gates, but you didn’t need to use it, as there was no fence. Immense fig trees, their roots making a maze in the bare earth, stood at intervals where a fence might have been. The park curved around a bend in the river; and through the trees I saw that it was diagonally opposite Samarkand, not far as the crow flies. But there were no crows flying that night. All the birds were silent. Within the park, several more spreading fig trees enclosed little areas of darkness and secrecy. Broad sweeps of lawn were lit by moonlight.
We sat in the open, on the grass, and the air was so mild it was like being bathed in the sea on a summer day. We talked, this salty man and I, in a desultory, aimless, pleasing way. I lay down, stretching out my legs and staring at the sky. At some stage I must have fallen asleep, though I don’t remember it. I ended up sleeping the entire night in the park.
It was laziness that led to my sleeping the night in the park; the laziness of not wanting to make my way home with my baby and my dog; the laziness of not wanting to move, of not wanting the balmy night to end; the laziness of enjoying talking softly to Lawson, speaking of nothing, my favourite kind of conversation. It was the laziness of simply being me, an abandoned, reading girl.
When I woke in the morning, Lawson had gone, and Becky Sharp was asleep next to me. Someone had placed a rug over each of us, and we had pillows under our heads. Hetty was beside me, curled up with her hand inside the front of my dress. Tess was nowhere to be seen.
I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so Becky Sharp appeared blurred and indistinct. I scrambled in my bag and found them. Pushing them up onto my nose, I leaned in close to her.
Her breath smelt like lilies. It was sweet and damp and exotic. She had the lightest down on her upper lip. Up close, I was able to examine the perfection of her ears. Having barely any lobes seemed the only way for ears to be. The ears of other people would from now on appear elephantine. As I watched, her eyes opened, and she lay there for a moment as though unseeing. I saw her gathering herself together; it was an almost imperceptible drawing together of her consciousness, this gathering, until her face became one I fully recognised as hers.
She looked at me.
‘Sophie,’ she said.
She said it in a wondering way. She said it in recognition, as though she’d both expected to find me there and feared that she wouldn’t. I felt, in some way, that it was the first time my name had ever been spoken, it sounded so new and fresh and untried on her lips. Sophie. So soft and sibilant, it was hardly my name at all, but a new language I had yet to discover the vocabulary of.