My Candlelight Novel Read Free Page B

found them inside the fireplaces, where they drifted in clusters like giant flakes of ash.
    Lil put on a red dress that morning (the colour of bravery, and love), and made up her face. She painted on a thick layer of powder and red lipstick that bled into the wrinkles radiating out from her mouth. Dressed, and made up, Lil made her way stiffly to the door with a proud expression on her face.
    She sailed out into Samarkand, into her day.

C HAPTER T HREE
    I AM A READING girl, with a pale face, and glasses. People who become enthralled by the world of books, as I am, are often thought to have dull lives, but I feel that my own life is made of the stuff of myth. Or anyway, I intend to make it so.
    Some say that books are an escape from real life . But the beauty of books is that they are crammed with real life. No one is more aware of real life , in all its trivia and glory, than a novelist. In novels you will find mention of things like measles, chocolate, ferry crossings (and eating chocolate on ferry crossings), train journeys, adultery (and adultery on train journeys), bacon, junkies, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, gas ovens, lost jewellery, wedding dresses, shower caps, snot, randy bakers, honey, miso soup, spider webs, lost mothers, abandoned children, rainforests, immortality, angels and toe rot.
    Not to mention love. Novels are full of life’s impurities, and love must be the most impure thing of all.
    But now, with Hetty growing older, I couldn’t read as much as I’d have liked. It’s very easy to spend almost all day reading with a small baby at your breast, but now she needed to be talked to, and played with, and be read aloud to something other than the Great Works of literature. She had progressed from the plays of Oscar Wilde to board books full of pictures of ducklings and butterflies.
    I made a habit of carrying her around the house and naming things for her. ‘This is a wooden spoon, Hetty,’ I would tell her, holding it aloft as I helped Lil make a cake. That day, I had occasion to point out the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the kitchen sink. I hid behind the sheets on the line and popped my head out at her, which made her laugh immoderately.
    I took her across the road to the river, and showed her Kate’s fig tree, a special, almost sacred place, since it was where Kate had dreamed her childhood away. Magpies, empty chip packets, and the greyhound racing track across the river completed Hetty’s education that day, and afterwards we were both so worn out we went to our room for a nap.
    That afternoon, while I was on my way to the kitchen, the phone in the hall rang. I lifted the receiver and heard the familiar chimes of the HomeLink signal.
    â€˜Lil?’ Kate’s voice was so small it was almost inaudible.
    â€˜No. It’s me. How are you?’
    There was a long, shuddering intake of breath. ‘I’m lonely.’ She drew the word out so that it was a wail of self-pity. Loooooooonely .
    (O Kate!)
    There was a sniffle on the other end.
    â€˜Where are you?’
    â€˜In a phone box on King Street.’
    I put Hetty down onto the floor, where she crept over to the corner of the dim hallway and found something that interested her, I couldn’t see what.
    Leaning up against the wall, I pulled down a strip of photos from where I’d wedged them behind the pegboard over the phone table. Kate had recently had them taken in a photo booth. She had cut her long hair very short; she’d done it herself to save money and it was a bit ragged, but it suited her. I studied the progression the photos took, from the first caught-unawares shot, to carefully wary-looking, to increasingly confident to extravagantly posed.
    â€˜Stop crying, you eejit. Now. Describe for me exactly what you can see right at this moment.’
    â€˜O God , Sophie!’
    â€˜What? So you can see God, can you?’
    â€˜Noo-ooo! Okay…I see an ugly little tan-and-white