The Broken Book Read online

  In the night I built him with tongues and teeth; I made him with my own bare hands.

  In the night he told me he was still married, but only technically.‘It was over before the war started,’ he said. He told me that on the plain stone floor of the newspaper building I arose before him as if from the sea. He said, ‘You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life.’

  Then he took my head in his long brown fingers. ‘Katherine Anne Elgin, you are my born wife,’ he said, cradling my dreams, kissing my eyelids.

  I knew that I was. The moon had married us.

  I remember sitting on the bus the next morning going back to my room in the boarding house at Bondi Junction.

  I remember thinking that the world had been cleaved into Before and After. I looked around in amazement at the people sitting dead in their seats. Didn’t they realise there was a whole new land on the other side of the curtain? Didn’t they know that love revealed this other land, allowing you to step outside your own life and see the transparent workings of time and being? I wanted to tell them that life was a gleaming, single moment, translucent, already fleeing, that we were all sitting together in time on a bus, sharing our heartbeats and our breaths. Tell me everything about yourselves! I wanted to cry. Tell me if your life is sad, if your tongue cannot speak its sadness. Tell me your hesitations, your doubts, your yearnings. Tell me how it is that you live.

  When I got back to my room I immediately rushed to my notebook. I have it still, open now before me on the blue table, its spine broken, its pages coming loose. I can see with my own eyes the wretched poem and the spilling words I wrote:

  Knuckle, lip, ankle, flesh:

  If I were a man I’d be him.

  Our kin of bones

  Our seamless skin:

  Body of my body

  Flesh of my flesh.

  Our bony harmony, our common tears:

  A single tongue, unleashed.

  His orgasm—soft and unfrozen—the sweetest, most silent orgasm I have ever known, a gentle sigh; if you breathed too loudly you’d miss it. As though everything has stopped: time, the movement of the earth, everything but the gentle throb in my dark centre. I am lost in the smell of him, the sugared oiliness of his skin, the surprising plump softness of his mouth.

  Thank you, God, for the feel of my bare feet on the cold lino, for the balance of construction, the way my body of nerves and blood is held up. Thank you for the wonder of movement, for the settling of my shoulders, the swing of my arms, the bliss of animated life. Thank you for the breath of in and out, the hidden bloom of lung. Thank you for the sight of sky, of sun, for the sight of his wounded face.

  Who is the deceiver in this picture, who is the deceived? Didn’t I build an image of my husband with my own bare hands? Certainly I wished to believe that he was handing me the head of poetic life. I was a girl who relished the bursting of her skin, who could not resist the idea of a man delivering a new world.

  Sitting here almost fifteen years later in the late afternoon sun I don’t know whether to feel sorry, or embarrassed, for that starving girl of twenty-two. I have since learned, of course, that no man delivers anyone the head of poetic life, let alone life itself. I have since learned that men who see girls as if arising from the sea might later come to view them as fatal sirens, bent on shipwreck.

  Mrs Muse, Mrs Muse, what have you come to, sitting dry in your garden? A permanent stranger in a strange land, a time-wasting, poor excuse for a mother. Get up, Kate, the girls will soon be home; take your remembering fingertips and pick up the paring knife. Domates, patates, psomi, hungry schoolgirls, the disapproving frown of Soula, your plump hawk-eyed neighbour, that superlative housewife far better organised than yourself. Dinner! Here’s a particular truth for you, love: an unfed husband is more solidly of the moment than a thousand fugitive words.

  Sydney, 1941

  Sunday

  Haven’t written anything for a whole month—so much has been happening—where to start? Four Fridays ago I went with Atpay down to Victoria Barracks—it was all so exciting and full of daring and adventure that I almost joined up on the spot. Oh, the intent of it, the sense of mission, the clearness of the boundaries, whole lives bundled up and labelled. When I came back from saying goodbye, life in the flat seemed suddenly purposeless, with no edges or direction, and I decided I would join up. I was gathering up a few things—my birth certificate, bank books—when Ray knocked at the door, asking if I wanted to go for a drink. He was in a really bad way—he looked like he’d been crying.

  Anyway, I thought I’d better go with him. I didn’t tell him about my plans—I just immediately picked up my purse. When we were downstairs in the street we attracted the usual stares—I asked him how he stood it. ‘It’s like the sun in the sky, Kathy,’ he said, ‘the stares are just there.’ At the club the tables were all taken and there were only stools at the bar; he made a wisecrack as I helped him onto a stool. ‘Thank you, Mummy,’ he said but I could tell he was embarrassed. I think Ray has designs on me and I haven’t yet worked out what I am going to say if he tries to get me into bed. This time, though, he only wanted someone to talk to—he’s been trying to get into the entertainment unit but none of the other blokes want to join him, and Beryl is dead against it—she thinks they’re doing all right as they are. ‘And there’s no vacancies for a lone dwarf at the moment,’ he said. We sat there for a long time and I listened while he went on about his fears for the future, how he saw himself at seventy-five, still playing Rumpelstiltskin. He started doing this impression of the evil Rumpelstiltskin dancing around the fire, joyous in the knowledge that the beautiful girl would never guess his name. I couldn’t help smiling, and then he started laying it on thick, cackling and rubbing his hands, gloating with menace. After a while we were drunk and laughing.

  Anyway, going out with Ray for a drink is not the point of this—or perhaps it is!!—perhaps it was fate that made Ray knock on the door and stop me from joining up. For the very next day I met the most wonderful man!! Thank God I didn’t join up—now I know there is always a reason for everything!! I met him—his name is Kenneth Howard—when he came into the Saturday matinee session with his sister and a group of friends. He’d joined up a couple of months previously and he’s been training somewhere in the country; it was his first leave. Anyway, he came in, sauntered in really, half drunk, his uniform unbuttoned, his hat falling off.

  I showed them to their seats but they were laughing and shouting so much everyone was going ‘Sssh!!’ and ‘Knock it off, will ya!’

  The lights were down but I hadn’t shut the door yet when I saw the silhouette of Mrs Benn, the manageress, standing in the entrance. ‘Those young people are making too much racket, Miss Elgin,’ she said when I reached her. ‘Please ask them to be quiet or they will have to leave.’

  ‘Do I have to?’ I said but she closed her lips in an unforgiving line and walked away.

  I made my way back down the darkened room, my torch parting the black at my feet. ‘Excuse me,’ I whispered and Ken was right there, sitting next to the aisle, and straightaway he said, ‘Whatever you want, the answer is yes.’ Everybody clapped and hooted.

  It was hopeless, hopeless—the audience hissing, the film already starting, the entrance door opening again to reveal the stout form of Mrs Benn. ‘Oh, please! I’m going to lose my job!’ I said, beginning to cry.

  And Kenneth Howard took pity on me and quietened them down, with an authority and firmness that I clearly do not possess. ‘You can thank me by having dinner with me, beautiful,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you outside later.’

  Ken is only twenty-four but he looks and seems much older. He’s got a natural authority about him, he’s very self-possessed and confident—actually Beryl met him briefly last week and said she could see why I liked his ‘casual arrogance’. ‘He’s the cocky type, Kath, and I mean that in more ways than one,’ she said. Blood pulsed behind my face.

  ‘I can tell you’re going to fall
for dashing, dismissive types who will give you a hard time.’

  ‘Ken’s not dismissive!’ I said. ‘He’s attentive and loving and … kind!’

  She gave a tight smile. ‘Aren’t they all,’ she said, ‘in the beginning.’

  For the first time I thought that Beryl might be jealous of me because of Ray—I’m still not sure whether they are a couple. What is she doing living with all those dwarves anyway? This is what Kenneth Howard looks like: he has a permanent shadow around his eyes, which are very dark brown (almost black) and deep-set. He looks like what I imagine an Egyptian to look like—his hair is very, very black too—like his eyebrows—but silky like a baby’s. He has burned, olivey skin and he is tall and very broad-shouldered. He has a large hairless chest where I sometimes lie as if shipwrecked, the wash of his blood sounding in my ears.

  He’s lived all his life in the same block of flats in Rose Bay (his mum and dad and sister still live there), where his parents own a grocery shop. His dad wants him to take it over, but Ken says he doesn’t want to end up like his father. ‘Working his guts out seven days a week for a pittance. No chance to dream.’ Ken wants to be a painter—he’s shown me some of his stuff, some pencil drawings and charcoals, and I think he is very, very good. He showed me some portraits (which I preferred, but didn’t tell him), but what he likes best is drawing machines and various technological stuff—he believes the world is going to get more and more taken over by machinery and artificial intelligence, robots!! He’s had a couple of meetings with some government art committee trying to get taken on as an official war artist but the negotiations are still going on. (‘Artists and governments don’t speak a common language,’ he said. ‘The bloody war will be over by the time they make up their minds.’) In the meantime he is doing ordinary army training—with the camouflage unit.

  What else? What else? Well, his friends are mostly other painters (he was going to the Julian Ashton School before he joined up) but he knows some writers, too, even poets! I met them all with him just last night, this big group of people at a pub in the Rocks—some of them are at the University of Sydney—girls, really clever girls who can speak as wittily as the men. They were talking about politics and books and whether art played a moral part in the overall scheme of things; one conversation seemed to be about the question of whether one could be moved by bad art.

  ‘This is Kathy, the flower of my heart,’ Ken said when he introduced me into this conversation—several of the men smiled but only one of the girls. She was the little red-haired one who swears like a trooper—Val is her name—and she sort of looked after me when Ken disappeared into the crowd. Oh, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t think of one single clever thing to say! They were so brilliant and funny and confident—I was listening very carefully to how they spoke, hoping to pick up some clues. One thing I noticed was that they kept saying ‘in the sense of’ when they were talking. It sounded wonderful.

  When I was coming back from the toilet I stepped outside—to gather my wits and my courage really, before going back in. I was sitting on the step leading to the footpath when this man came out, all open shirt and kerchief at the throat, supercilious, haughty. I had spotted him before and immediately steered a course away from him. He sat down beside me!!

  ‘The company too dull for you, my dear?’ he said, in this arch voice as he sat down.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said at once, immediately knowing I was going to gush, ‘oh, no, everyone is really wonderful! I’ve never met so many interesting people—all together in one room! I just thought I’d get some air, you know how smoky it is in there, how crowded. My name’s Kathy Elgin, how do you do?’ I stuck out my hand.

  He peered at my hand for a moment and then disdainfully gave it a small, wet shake. He did not offer his own name. ‘Miss Kathy Elgin,’ he said, ‘do tell me all about yourself. I am quite sure you will.’

  My tongue was glued up: I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I laughed in this really pathetic way, ha, ha, pretending that one of us had made the most wonderful joke. I sat there with this rigor mortis grin, a stupid girl devoid of brilliant words.

  Then Val came up, with two beers and she handed one to me. ‘Is he poisoning you?’ she said. ‘Bitter John, be a good boy would you and bugger off.’

  He gave an elaborate sigh. ‘I’ll leave you to get on with the sapphic seduction,’ he said, rising gracefully.

  My blood lurched: I had never met a lesbian!

  ‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ she said, giving me a pat on the knee, ‘you’re not my type.’

  I laughed at that too, ha ha, my face aching with effort. Why was she sitting so close to me?

  ‘Bitter John is called Bitter John for obvious reasons,’ she said. ‘He cannot stand to see hope personified. Now tell me, where did you meet young Ken?’

  I told her everything, about Ken and me and wanting to write and my father and my best friend Atpay who had just joined up and my sister Ros. I went on and on and she listened kindly, filling me in on her own background as we went (Methodist Ladies’ College, Melbourne; daughter of two doctors; started off doing med but realised she was only doing it for her parents; now doing arts at Sydney). Val speaks out of the side of her mouth, like Mae West or someone, delivering lines as if they were scripted. We talked a lot about books we were reading—she said I should read someone called Nelson Algren—and then we spoke about the business of being an artist, how one might best learn to write. She didn’t patronise me or speak down to me once—she did me the honour of taking my intentions seriously.

  ‘Art is about discipline,’ I remember she said. ‘How good you will be sometimes depends on how firmly you bend to your task.’

  She was fascinating but after a while I knew I wasn’t listening properly, that my inner ear was straining to hear the sound of Ken Howard’s voice. I wanted to hear his voice making people laugh, to see him standing in the very centre of a pool of attention, knowing that I was his girl. I wanted everyone in the room, every girl who was cleverer than me, or more beautiful than me, every girl who was in every other way my superior, I wanted all these girls with brilliant minds to know that Kenneth Howard had personally chosen me, Katherine Anne Elgin.

  Oh, he is gorgeous! He has the softest skin imaginable, and when he is lying next to me he nestles in so close it is as if he was suckling. I don’t know how a big, grown man can seem so boneless, so velvety and plush—it is like holding a bunch of feathery blossoms in my arms. When we lie together I am in ecstasy—he smells sweet and good, like Sunlight Soap and innocence—I could dive into him as if leaping into a cloud.

  And I’ll tell you something strange—the film that Ken and his sister and friends came to see was How Green Was My Valley (Ken said he was indulging his little sister and that he didn’t want to see it particularly). It’s got that scene where all the old men of the village are screaming at the poor defenceless unmarried mother that she will be ‘cast out into the outer darkness till she has learned her lesson’. She cradles her baby, like a stranded Tess, huddled pitifully. But what is the lesson she is supposed to learn? Not to love with her body? Or not to get pregnant? What about the Bible’s ‘With my body I thee worship’, or is that just about bodies that are married? MY BODY DOESN’T KNOW IT’S NOT MARRIED! MY BODY WANTS TO WORSHIP KEN HOWARD’S BODY! Ken Howard has single-handedly made me forget all about that awful, awful man at the beach and his ugly face and his ugly evil hands and his ugly stinking foul breath—Ken Howard has saved me. His penis is LOVELY—long and slender, gracefully shaped like a kind of bow (I must write to Atpay that I have found the most beautiful penis in the world)—he has come SO close to putting it inside me. I’ve only known him a month—and I only ever see him in short snatches when he comes into town to talk to the bigwigs about being made an official war artist—but I already feel as if I have known him forever.

  Anyway, we always stop before it’s too late—he’s going to buy a packet of French letters. I dare not ask him whether he has
done it before because I don’t want to know if he has. I cannot bear to think of him with anyone else; I cannot bear the thought of that lovely penis rising elsewhere in homage. Surely it can only fly up because of me? Surely it is not possible that he could feel the same things for anyone else? Everything between us feels so precious, so fresh, so unique, I cannot imagine feeling in a million years the same way about someone else. It must be the same for him.

  I am a trembling, waiting thing, a creature of longing, of yearning. I am gathered up into one still, waiting point—a poised moment—a caught breath.

  Friday

  Beryl and the dwarves have been giving me gyp over Ken.‘Here she is, the soldier’s fair maiden,’ said Beryl this morning when I ran into her on the landing after walking Ken downstairs.

  ‘He’s finished his leave,’ I said with as much dignity as I could, since I was clad only in my dressing gown, my feet bare. She was dressed up as Snow White again and the dwarves all started coming out as I opened my door.

  ‘Kathy, au naturel!’ said Ray, his hand over his heart, his beautiful eyes turned heavenward.

  ‘I think the word is dishabille,’ said Beryl, smirking.

  ‘Your Ken’s a bit of a ladies’ man, love. He’s obviously got his ball in your pocket,’ said Bernie, the rudest dwarf.

  ‘Be a gentleman please, Bernard, if that is possible,’ said Ray, giving Bernie a dirty look.

  ‘What’s his secret war mission, Kath? Screwing for Australia?’

  Ray walked swiftly over to Bernie and gave him a sharp clout to the ear. ‘Mind your mouth,’ he said.

  Bernie immediately put up his fists but in the same instant Beryl crossed the corridor and wrenched them apart. Bernie was trying to kick Ray in the shins, shouting, ‘Fuck off, Beryl! Let me’ave’im!’