Read Online My Hundred Lovers by Susan Johnson - Free Book Online Page B

words. Towards the end I sat with her and held her hand even though she had lost her lips and forgotten who she was. Her words were random, mysterious, floating. ‘The clothes are burning,’ she might say, or ‘Beautiful brown’ or ‘She’s a good cup.’
    Once, in a rare moment of lucidity, she said, ‘If I gave you a thousand pounds, would you take me home?’
    Nana Elsie and her radiance appeared to dwell between this world and the next, in the slippage between them, where life meets death and where time is rendered eternal.

FORTY-ONE

Words in her fingers

    IN PARIS THE YOUNG WOMAN began to formulate a plan. She wanted to hold words in her fingers as well as in her mouth, to move words this way and that.
    Steph knew the manager of an English-language bookshop, who knew someone who knew someone else, and so it was that the young woman found herself working part-time in Shakespeare and Co, the famous bookstore on rue de la Bûcherie owned by the eccentric American, George Whitman. George sometimes came down from his room above the shop dressed in his pyjamas, his hair wild, to shout winningly at customers. ‘Look sharp, Deborah,’ he once shouted. She was shocked to find he knew her name.
    At Shakespeare and Co she met the owner of a small English press, who needed a proofreader. And so she began proofreading and copyediting, reading the pages of manuscripts, working carefully with her fingers and eyes on tiny black marks against white. It was pernickety, detailed work, requiring concentrated and discerning effort. She imagined it to resemble the art of lace-making, stitching everything perfectly together as if with a very fine needle.
    Sometimes she found the work a chore, her brain anxious and trying too hard, and then she stumbled and made the mistakes that she feared. Soon she recognised that if she allowed her eyes and fingers to act instinctively, the work became fluid and easy.
    She fell in love with the laws of form, the satisfactions of order, with the illusory human notion that everything could be perfected. Sometimes the fingers who loved her thought they knew everything. She was still an unfortunate romantic girl who wanted everything explained.
    In wielding her needle, she came across a word she believed described herself. It was a French word, métèque , meaning foreigner or stranger and, more pejoratively, wog. It came from the ancient Greek word metic , which referred to those in the Hellenic cities who were stateless.
    The definition of métèque she liked best of all was ‘suspicious wanderer’. She took to signing the letters she wrote to Ro back in Sydney with her new favoured initials, SW, for Suspicious Wanderer.

FORTY-TWO

Heavenly sleep

    LISTEN TO THIS: IN A global survey of some twelve thousand five hundred souls, almost sixty percent admitted they preferred a good night’s sleep to a night of magnificent sex.
    In nine out of ten western countries, men and women confessed that sex was all very well, but sleep was essential. Only horny Canadians preferred sex to sleep.
    I lost my ability to sleep after the birth of my son. I became an incurable insomniac, listening for each newborn breath. I was his guard, and for a while I thought I had to breathe for him. By the time I discovered that I did not, it was too late, and I was tipped forever from sleep’s rosy arms into wakeful vigilance.
    For many years my bed, like my body, was my son’s playground and his kingdom. I surrendered to him, willingly and grudgingly, because by then I knew that ambivalence lived beside me and in me, inhabiting everything, even that unbreakable watchfulness between mother and son. By then I was no longer a romantic.
    When my son was a growing boy, long and stretched and fatless, his legs like gnawed chicken bones as mine had once been, I loved to watch him sleeping.
    He tucked himself into sleep as if into the most comfortable of beds. He locked