Read Online My Candlelight Novel by Joanne Horniman - Free Book Online

to meet up with boys on the riverbank, after sex I always ended up reaching into my bag for my copy of Anna Karenina . I used to carry it with me to help me deal with boring moments in my life.
    With Marcus Innocenti, the thought of Anna Karenina didn’t even enter my mind.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    T HE DAY AFTER Hetty was conceived, Marcus and I found a set of old inks in an op shop. They were in small squat bottles, and were coloured crimson, vermilion, aquamarine, Prussian blue, chrome yellow, and dark, evil black.
    The reds were as transparent as blood – all the colours but the black were transparent; we speculated that the other colours might have been from differently blooded people. We sat in my room and drew on large sheets of paper (all abstract stuff, just lines and squiggles, trying out the colours and dropping the ink from the stoppers, smearing them across the paper). And he told me about his family. His mother worked in a bank and his father sold appliances in a store. They lived in a squat brick house somewhere in Sydney’s west and he had a little sister who played hockey and roller-skated. It all seemed so exotic – I longed to live his life, to go home to a mass-produced modern kitchen, up a path surrounded by unevenly mown lawn, to a family watching television and eating food they’d warmed in a microwave. There were people like that in Lismore, but their lives were unknown to me.
    The name Innocenti was real, he said, only the Italian heritage was so long ago that no one remembered a thing about it. It had all been lost. He lived in the garage out the back of his parents’ house, worked odd jobs when he wasn’t doing gigs. They despaired of him, and I felt sad for him when he told me that, because I’d been allowed to glimpse an aspect of his life that wasn’t all hope and glory and dazzling, beautiful noise.
    That morning, drawing with the old inks, the late morning sunlight slanting through the doors, I thought that perhaps I had imagined I was now pregnant. The baby seemed a figment of my fevered imagination (and I was fevered – I was so filled with love for Marcus Innocenti that I was constantly giddy, and I hadn’t slept properly for several nights in a row).
    Marcus told me that he’d thought I must have invented the colourful past I’d related to him on that first night, but now, having seen Samarkand, he conceded that I might have been telling the truth. I smiled, and put three vermilion dots next to a Prussian blue square.
    â€˜Why paint your room red ?’ he asked, gesturing at the bright walls.
    I shrugged. ‘Why not?’ I could only tell him so much about myself, after all. How could I tell him that the colour red represented my mother to me, and living in a red-room was a way of keeping her always with me when at that time I hadn’t even reasoned that out for myself?
    When we’d done enough fooling about with the inks, we lay next to each other on my bed and fooled around with each other. We compared the colour of our skins. The inside of my arm was the colour of a gardenia, he decided. I said his was polished wood. Both of us had hair of similar length, which made it easy to lay a hank of one across another. Though both were black, his hair was glossier than mine. And mine smelt filthy, he told me tenderly. It smelt of me, of my skin and sweat, as if I never used shampoo (and I didn’t).
    After Kate came in to offer to make us some lunch (but really to get a good look at Marcus) and I’d sent her away with an order for cheese on toast, Marcus said, teasingly, ‘Do you really remember the day your sister was conceived? And your own birth?’
    I nodded. ‘I remember my own conception too,’ I boasted.
    He grinned and pinned me down, kissing me so hard that I could taste blood from where his teeth (they were very sharp) grazed the inside of my mouth.
    He was so beautiful. That was the thing about him, his