Secret Scribbled Notebooks Read Free Page B

life for something to happen. For someone to come along and change me. Or for a grand event, like in an opera –lots of shrill singing and fancy costumes.
    But now, I want to choose the way I live my life.
    The big question is, How?
    The Blue Notebook
    All right, Blue. Your turn.
    Things are said to come out of the blue. It heralds the unexpected. It is the colour of the sky and Anastasia’s eyes. Of rosemary flowers, and memory.
    You look like a trustworthy colour. I can tell you everything. Can’t I?
    I remember . . .
    I remember nothing.
    The Yellow Notebook
    Yellow is said to be the colour of cowardice, but to me it is the colour of optimism. Sunshine. Sunflowers. Egg yolks (which become chickens, if they are permitted to).
    I have no idea what I will write next. I will just write.
    A girl (tall, with smooth blonde hair caught back with a clip) is walking through a tunnel in the city.
    Concrete floor, old tiles on the walls. Grimy. People on either side of her, rushing to and from the trains. She walks slowly, in a pair of dark shoes with high heels (tippy shoes, she teeters slightly). She wears a charcoal-coloured suit –a jacket and tailored skirt. I can’t see her face, only her back, as she walks purposefully to the trains.
    She’s a girl who works in an office. A serious girl. At least, a girl with a serious job –an interesting job. She carries a soft leather briefcase bulging with papers (but not bulging too much). Some work she’s taking home?
    Where is she going? Who is she?

The Wild Typewritten Pages 3
    I finished school the very week that Anastasia was born. At least, I finished that part of school that had to do with going to class each day. There was still the endless study and the exams and the Formal to go, but still, the end of classes was a milestone too.
    That night, Marjorie and I sat around a campfire in a paddock with the group of people we had hung around with most of the way through high school (Jason, Nat, Zed, Rueben, Camilla, Zara and Ocean –all of these people had been briefly in love with each other at some stage except for Marjorie and me). We passed around bottles of beer and cider and gave each other occasional sentimental hugs. I looked around at all their faces flushed red from the light of the flames and felt a surge of affection, then leaned back and looked at the stars, and felt my life flowing out from this point, spinning further and further away from this time and these people.
    When Oscar Wilde went to Oxford University he said that it was the most flower-like time of his life. It was Sophie who’d told me this, of course; she’d read everything on Oscar Wilde that she could lay her hands on.
    I wonder what kind of flower Oscar Wilde would have been? A lily, probably, one of those large, white funereal lilies with an odour of damp melancholy about it. Oscar Wilde, when he was young (going by the photos in Sophie’s books), was beautiful, with a full, sensuous mouth and dreamy eyes. That must have been when he was at his most flower-like. When he was older his eyes had a droopy, hangdog look to them, and his mouth looked rather dissipated. He had lived his life to the full and probably squandered a lot of it; he died before he was fifty. The scandal of being sent to jail for his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas was the end of him.
    For years I had been waiting for my own flower-like time to begin. I thought that this would probably happen when I finished school and left Lismore and Samarkand for ever. Perhaps then I could throw all caution to the wind (because I was cautious) and become what I was to become.
    Perhaps being an aunt would make me braver and less cautious. I had seen Anastasia’s eyes open; I was the first person she had seen on this earth. Her eyes had been framed by her damp eyelashes, and they were dark with knowledge.
    I had known at once that my niece would leave nothing in her life to chance –Anastasia