MY MEMORIES OF my grandfather’s place had been real, because our mother took us there, not long before we lost her. We went by train, and he picked us up in an old Land Rover, which twisted and turned its way along dirt roads to his house. I had dreamed of the place ever since leaving it, and it was just as I’d remembered. He was the way I’d remembered him too, and not much older. He still lived in Paradise. I played hide-and-seek with him in the garden. The cherry tomatoes were still there, and still ripe, though it was the next generation of black hens that laid eggs for us.
It was there that I first noticed my mother stumbling, holding out her arms to steady herself. She often stayed in bed and let our grandfather look after us. Now it was Kate who rode around on his shoulders. I held his hand.
I know now that our mother was ill.
Late one night, I heard them talking urgently. He was pleading with her to stay. But she took us away a second time, leaving the dog, Jess, with him, as though she knew that very soon she wouldn’t be able to look after her.
When I was fifteen, I started looking for his house. I became convinced that he lived in the hills somewhere around Lismore. I watched out for him in the street, and indeed, there were many old hippies who could have been him. One day I trailed one of them around the health-food shop until I decided it couldn’t possibly be my grandfather; there was just something about him that was wrong. I thought that if I ever did come across him I would know him at once.
I’ve always been a romantic like that. At fourteen, I’d read Jane Eyre; I remembered how Jane had run away from Rochester and then stumbled around starving until she was taken in by kind people who turned out to be her cousins. And then she found out she was an heiress. Her luck could also be mine!
And so I took to hitching out of town, hoping that I’d see a place I’d recognise. In my imagination, I could see myself going up a driveway, and there he’d be.
At that stage, I was a sullen girl; I exuded a dark aura. I wore layers of complicated and ancient clothing found in op shops. I never washed my hair, and was fat and pimpled. Carmen and Raffaella had schooled me in the minutiae of making myself difficult. I seldom spoke to Lil. I growled at Kate, and froze her out. I did almost nothing but read, and was proof positive against all those proselytising teachers and librarians who imagine that reading is a Good Influence. As far as I was concerned, reading was a down and dirty activity. I read Lolita with relish. ‘Light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul…Lo-lee-ta!’ The poetry of the sentences made me swoon. But Jane Eyre was even filthier. All that imagery, all that she left unsaid. You didn’t need a lot of imagination to know what she was really writing about.
When I hitched out of town, every car that pulled up was a potential adventure, a possible prelude to my finding my true identity. Many of the people who picked me up were women, worried about me hitching alone. But they asked too many questions about where I was going – I didn’t know the answers, so I began to favour lifts with men. My plan was to ride until I found a likely-looking place, and then get out and explore for a bit on foot, hitching another ride further up the valley when I’d drawn another blank.
Over two months of Saturdays, I went up and down most of the steep valleys surrounding Lismore. I walked up driveways that looked as though they might be the right place, only to be disappointed, time and again. I encountered dogs both fierce and friendly, and people the same. And with each disappointment I lost hope until expectation had drained right out of me.
It was on one of those Saturdays that I had my first experience of sex. I blame Jane Eyre. I wanted to find out what Charlotte Brontë so studiously avoided mentioning except indirectly through wild weather and tempestuous emotions.
It was with a boy a couple of years older than myself. I’ve forgotten his name. He had his P-plates, and drove very fast. Down a rocky side road he pulled over, and we did it, right there on the front seat, without too much of a preamble. I felt nothing really, except stickiness and discomfort; in truth, I’d have welcomed a bit of bad weather to liven things up.
I gave up searching for my grandfather. It was entirely possible that he hadn’t lived around Lismore at all. Long-lost relatives and fortuitous legacies didn’t happen in real life, I decided.
And I was getting sick of suffering the leers and innuendoes of some of the men who picked me up. I was afraid of getting into a situation I couldn’t control. I wasn’t such a bad girl after all.
But after that, I started going round with boys. I’d meet them down near the riverbank. I got very little pleasure from these encounters; it was then that I started reading Anna Karenina afterwards. Leo Tolstoy 4 eva, I should have tattooed on my shoulder.
So why did I do it? Was it because for at least the duration of sex I felt wanted and beautiful, even if later I almost always felt the exact opposite? I can see now that reading Anna Karenina was a way of telling myself that I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t one of those girls. See! I read. I read Proper Literature!
Boys used to hang round outside the house waiting for me, and Lil finally realised what I was doing, and she came to my room one night. She told me that I was loved and wanted. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go damaging yourself.’ She said it fiercely, and hugged me close; I could feel her emotion. It flowed between us. There were our two hearts, beating against each other, and her chin, poking uncomfortably into my shoulder. I love you too, I thought. I remembered, regretfully, my mother. I didn’t want to lose her. For me, she was still the one. Could I love Lil at the same time?
Lil looked me full in the face and said, ‘You don’t need to run around with those boys. You’re worth more than that.’
And I stopped. Just like that. I kept reading Anna Karenina, though. It was then that I asked Lil if I could paint my room, which up till then had been a dull, flaking green like most of the walls in the house.
I chose red, bright red, and Lil and Kate helped me coat the walls of my bedroom with the glossy, sticky enamel paint. From then on my room became like a warm, enclosing womb, where I read and dreamed and wrote the beginnings of at least a dozen novels about impossibly beautiful girls living in exotic countries and which rang so false that I abandoned each one almost as soon as I’d started it.
I didn’t go with another boy until I met Marcus. Tell me the story of your life, he’d said. It hadn’t been until then that I realised I had a story to tell.
Lil had a story, too. Everyone does. But it’s only in novels we can know fully another human being. Real life is different. People are lucky if they’re even fully known by themselves.
Lil had been an unmarried mother, as I became. I like the term ‘unmarried mother’. Sole parent has too much of the smell of social workers. Her son had been called Alan (such a nice, unfashionable, boyish name!) and I only met him once. He was away overseas a lot. He was a ‘freelance journalist’, which has a great air of freedom and gung-ho about it, though I suppose the reality of it is more likely uncertainty and bouts of penury.
When he died Lil seemed inconsolable. For years her grief so coloured the atmosphere of Samarkand that it’s a wonder people kept coming. But since so many of the guests carried their own hidden burdens, they possibly failed to notice it. It was such a colourless house with its brown lino, faded green walls, weathered unpainted wood on the verandahs. Even the coloured glass in the windows was dirty and dull. Only Kate gave any life to the place, and I could see how Lil brightened at her presence. I was a different matter: often sullen, difficult, as dun-coloured as the house.
But Samarkand, as gloomy as it was, had been a saving grace for Lil. It allowed her to be independent, and bring up her son, and later on, support us. It had been left to her by an aunt, or a great-aunt, or a friend of an aunt…Anyway, an aunt had come into it somewhere, and thank goodness for her.
‘You’re worth more than that,’ Lil had told me, and that was a new beginning for the we of Lil and me. We became more straightforward with each other (slightly), and I was less secretive (somewhat). But it’s probably impossible for people to change their basic natures. Lil would have said of us, ‘We rub along okay.’