A Charm of Powerful Trouble Read online

  A Charm of Powerful Trouble

  A Charm of

  Powerful Trouble

  JOANNE HORNIMAN

  First published in 2002

  Copyright © Joanne Horniman 2002

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Autralian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Horniman, Joanne.

  A charm of powerful trouble.

  ISBN 1 86508 837 4.

  1. Mothers and daughters - New South Wales - Fiction.

  2. Sisters - New South Wales - Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Designed by Jo Hunt

  Set in 11 on 15 pt Berkeley Book by Midland Typesetters

  Printed by McPherson's Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my family and friends

  Acknowledgements

  I'd like to warmly thank the following people: Margaret Connolly, Erica Wagner and Sarah Brenan for their support and enthusiasm; Faye Bolton and Pip Davenport for showing me microscopes; Scot Gardner for generously giving me butterflies; my sister Joyce for introducing me to Christina Rossetti at such an early age; Jacqui Kent for sending a title my way (which is, of course, by William Shakespeare). And Tony Chinnery, as always, for everything.

  Contents

  The Aubergines

  M

  Queen of Swords

  Trailing Clouds of Glory

  Butterflies

  The Leather Woman

  Goblin Market

  Evil Gifts

  Kiss the Sky

  The Secret History

  Desires and Consequences

  Drawn from Memory

  Paris

  The Good Fairies

  The Aubergines

  CHILDREN KNOW when there are secrets.

  The house where I grew up reeked of them. Secrets had been layered into the mud-brick walls that my mother and father had built, and secrets fluttered with the tiny bats that lived under the eaves and found their way inside each evening to dance under the cavernous ceiling. Secrets shone from the ferocious red of the hibiscus flowers in the garden, and they rotted with the leaves that lay on the rainforest floor.

  In that place, my sister and I lived a charmed life.

  For a long time I didn't distinguish between myself and Lizzie. We were Lizzie-Laura or Laura-Lizzie, part of a single consciousness. Our lives were full of exhilaration and endless play We ate when we were hungry, slept when we were tired, and woke the next morning to more sunlight or to rain, to a garden full of light and shadow and the cries of birds. We made tunnels through the undergrowth to find bowerbird nests, and built towns from sticks and palm fronds. Our parents drove us to the beach, and the car swooped down the mountain through tunnels of green. We came home with our skin salty and the cracks in our fannies filled with sand.

  And all through our childhood, Lizzie sang. She sang as she squatted on the ground arranging sticks into houses and streets; she sang as she built sandcastles and decorated them with shells and stones and seaweed, and she sang as she walked with a bent back through the lantana on one of our expeditions. It was a soft, melodious song, a kind of hum, and she made it up as she went along. I identified myself with Lizzie so much that I imagined I also sang. It wasn't until years later, when she stopped singing, that I realised I couldn't.

  We went to school, but that was a nuisance and an interruption. I made no real friends. Lizzie, just two years older, was enough for me. I don't think I even bothered looking in a mirror till I was ten, and it was then that I realised I wasn't Lizzie, who was tall and blonde and beautiful. Laura, I saw, was brown and stocky and covered with scratches. Of course I'd seen my dark, tangled curls when my mother cut my hair, but I hadn't really believed in them. We had a little sister called Chloe, six years younger than I; we loved her to bits, but she was never one of us, part of Lizzie-Laura.

  Our parents were Claudio and Emma: we had been brought up to call them by their first names. We lived on a wild property in the hills behind Mullumbimby. Emma painted pictures and Claudio made documentary films. Claudio was expansive and gregarious; he wanted more and more of life all the time. His laughter seemed to fill the house even when he wasn't there. And he often wasn't there. He was away making films, or sometimes, I now see, simply adventuring. It was our mother who kept us together. Our home was her nest, her retreat, her sanctuary; her studio was an old shed hidden by trees, secretive, like her nature.

  My mother loved my father too much. She loved us all too much. It was her weak point, her tender vulnerability. Her strength was in her secrets. Lizzie and I lusted after them; we longed to get inside her head, but lovingly, steadfastly, she kept herself intact from us. We could only wonder.

  When I was twelve, we'd lie on the bed together, our legs intertwined, and talk all afternoon. We'd pass food into each other's mouths like a mother bird with her young. That didn't seem revolting to us, but natural, part of our intimacy. For a while it seemed that there was nothing we couldn't say to each other.

  On one of those afternoons Lizzie told me that she knew Claudio wasn't her real father. No one had told her, but when she voiced it I saw that I had known all along. It wasn't simply that she looked like a cuckoo child, tall and blonde and pale. It was evident that Claudio didn't really like her. He preferred me and Chloe, dark-haired, dark-eyed copies of himself. There was something in the way he looked at her, detached, without love. He was outwardly magnanimous, but it was beyond his capacity to love a child who wasn't his own.

  Lizzie and I would lie in the grass and speculate about what had happened to her real father.

  ‘Killed . . .’ we'd say testing out the idea.

  ‘Gone to America . . .’

  ‘Died young of a dreadful disease . . .’

  Our mother had had other people disappear from her life. There was her father, lost in the bush when our mother was only two, his body never found. And her sister Beth had drowned in the ocean at the age of nineteen. It seemed to us that the world had simply swallowed them up. Perhaps it had swallowed Lizzie's father as well.

  Our mother never spoke much about her sister; we gleaned only fragments. For the rest we had to imagine her. We'd lie, staring at the clouds, dreaming of our Aunt Beth, who never really got to be our aunt as she died before we were born. In our minds, she was beautiful and clever and funny She liked pop music and adored the Beatles, especially Paul. But our strongest image of her was in death.

  ‘Drowned . . .’ we'd murmur, imagning her floating tidily on an aqua sea, her long hair spread out on the water, hands clasped over her breasts, flowers unaccountably drifting beside her on the swell of the waves.

  At twelve I had developed an antenna for the darker side of life, and an interest in it. I assumed there were many layers to people.

  That summer Stella and Paris came to visit, driving all the wa
y up from Sydney, and we trooped out of the house to welcome them. Stella was someone our mother knew from her childhood, but this was the first time we'd met her.

  She was younger than my mother, tougher, thinner, with a sort of wiry resilience in her body and a childish, unblemished face framed by blonde curls. She was someone who clearly wasn't impressed by children. When she was introduced to us she said ‘Hi', then lit a cigarette and gave us a dismissive glance.

  Her daughter Paris was ten. She acknowledged us with her eyes but remained silent. Spiky black hair accentuated her pointed, severe little face. I felt that we would stand there forever beside Stella's battered old yellow Corona with Claudio eating Stella up with his eyes. Chloe, who was uncomplicated and plump and calm, stood dreamily humming a tune. Emma hugged Paris, who scowled ungratefully up at her. And Lizzie and I hovered at the edge of the group, Lizzie drawing circles in the dust with her foot.

  Three black cockatoos came swooping in with metallic, rolling cries. We lifted our eyes to the sky as they circled above us and watched as they came to rest in a tree next to the house and began to rip away the bark with their beaks, looking for grubs. My mother walked over and flapped her arms at them. ‘Shoo!’ she called, ‘Shoo!’ Her movement broke our inertia, and we made our way into the house.

  At night our house was filled with light and was like a beacon in the dark. I liked it best then, with the dank odour of the forest invading it. In the day, you could see the thin line of the ocean in the distance and I always fancied I could catch a whiff of the sea on the evening air.

  That night I stood in the doorway where I could see both inside and outside the house. If I turned my head one way I could see the darkness and imagine everything that was in it. By turning my head the other way, I could see inside the house. It was as high as a church, with a six-metre tree trunk reaching to the ceiling. Tiny bats flew in the high loft windows and out again. These bats were as small as mice; they reminded me of mice, the way they colonised the house. I stood in the doorway and watched the people inside. They thought I was simply dreaming there, my head full of fuzzy twelve-year-old's fantasies.

  I watched Claudio and Emma as they lounged on a sofa talking to Stella. They were drinking wine and there was a lot of laughter, but it seemed uneasy to me.

  Lizzie sat in a corner and played her electric guitar without the amp. She played the same riff over and over, frowning and biting her bottom lip when she played a wrong note. Lizzie had got the guitar a couple of years before, and now it was her constant companion. She was mad about the guitar - it was her passion; she'd stopped singing when she found the music she could make with it.

  Chloe and Paris sat at the dining table, which was still littered with the remains of dinner. They painted a wallaby skull green and orange with model paints, and planned to put candles in the eye sockets when it was finished. Paris rarely smiled, and when she did it was as if something painful was being drawn out of her. Already I knew I didn't like her.

  But it was the adults I was interested in. They were saylng things that would be worth listening to.

  ‘So,’ said Claudio to Emma. ‘Tell us about the Aubergnes.’ He said it lazily, leaning back in the chair, smiling, watching her, but keeping his eye on Stella, too.

  Emma shook her head and laughed. It was a regretful, wise laugh, a laugh that remembered things. ‘The Aubergnes,’ she said. ‘I'd almost forgotten about the Aubergines.’

  ‘What aubergines?’ said Stella.

  I saw a familiar flicker in my mother's eyes and I crept over and sat on the floor at my father's feet, watching her.

  ‘Oh God, the Aubergines! They were just a story I used to tell. A true story About this amazing family I knew when I was young . . .’ Emma spoke into the air, looking into the past, seeing herself all those years ago.

  ‘Their name wasn't really Aubergine; they had another name, an Italian name that sounded a bit like aubergne . . . it was Claudio who started calling them the Aubergines.’

  ‘And when we were students, whenever we got bored,’ drawled Claudio, ‘which was quite often, sitting around in dark, damp old houses with no money - Emma would amuse us by telling us about the Aubergines.’

  ‘You've never told us about these Aubergines,’ I said.

  ‘But they were nothing. They weren't important. Just a thing from my childhood. Just a story to amuse people.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Oh, they were wonderful and awful at the same time.’ Emma stared into the shadows of the ceiling. ‘They had a wonderful big old house. And it was full of books, and they were always reading them. I could never get enough books. We had hardly any The Aubergines argued about the books with each other, about what they thought of them, and got quite angry, and thumped tables. Once, Mrs Aubergine burnt a book, right at the dining table, with one of the Aubergine children sobbing and trylng to stop her. She said the book was puerile. I had to go home and look the word up in the dictionary.’

  ‘What else did they do?’

  ‘The parents used to argue a lot, in front of everyone. And once, one of the children said to them scornfully, "Why don't you just get a divorce?" That shocked me. I didn't know of anyone who'd been divorced, and here was a child telling his parents to get one.

  ‘And oh - I've forgotten the rest - they don't seem nearly so interesting now’ Emma shook her head and gazed at the floor.

  ‘The children had strange names,’ said Claudio. ‘Sappho and - what were the others?’

  ‘Sappho and William Carlos Williams and Blake Yeats. Those were the three children. Sappho was my friend from school; that's how I knew the family.’

  I kept quizzing her.

  ‘William something Williams? That was afirst name?’

  ‘Yes. After an American poet that Mrs Aubergne admired. His name was William Carlos Williams Aubergine . . .’

  ‘Except that Aubergine was really an Italian name . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And . . . what was the other one's name again?’

  ‘Blake Yeats.’ She said it quickly, looking away from me. ‘The Aubergines,’ said Stella. ‘Then you could be the Zucchinis. Zambelli - Zucchini.’ She looked at Claudio, whose name it was, and he gave her one of those smiles of his, intense and fleeting and flirtatious, with one eyebrow raised. His eyebrows were astonishing and absurd, but that look could make the person receiving it feel that she was the only one in the world.

  My mother laughed uncomfortably. ‘The Zucchinis . . . I suppose we could be.’

  I settled back against Claudio's knee and he stroked my hair, smoothing down my curls with his square hand. I leaned into him; I knew I was his favourite, I looked so like him. I had his prominent chin and long nose and dark eyes. In the mirror I would practise making my eyes wild with enthusiasm like his when he talked about something that interested him.

  I thought about the Aubergines, the story my mother had told, which wasn't much of a story, it was more an evasion of a story. It was all very well talking about these strange Aubergine people, but what was my mother really like in those days? I felt that the story of the Aubergines concealed more than it told.

  Lizzie came up, her guitar slung round her neck. ‘Mum . . . what's this?’ She played a few chords. Lizzie was always asking people if they could recognise the tune she was playing.

  ‘Oh, heavens,’ said Emma. ‘Play it again . . . "All Along the Watchtower"? No . . . is it "Hey Joe"?’

  ‘No,’ said Lizzie. Her face had a stricken expression. ‘It was "Purple Haze".’

  ‘Of course. I knew it was something by Jimi Hendrix.’

  Lizzie never asked Claudio to identify the tunes she played.

  Paris and Chloe put purple candles in the eye sockets of the wallaby skull, lit them, and camed the skull slowly across the room so the candles wouldn't blow out. Emma chanted, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed.’

  ‘And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’ said Paris, looking up
at Emma sharply, not smiling at all.

  I lay in the dark. I always aimed to stay awake long after everyone else had gone to sleep. If I didn't stay wakeful, and watch over the house, I felt that everything would fall apart.

  I thought of the dark outside, the night, everything black, without sun to show the colours. I heard cries, shrill or muffled, of creatures hunting or being hunted. The house lay still, while the cruel world went relentlessly about its business.

  I heard mice in the kitchen. I fancied I could hear their claws slipping on the polished wood of the floor. A bat came in and fluttered around my bedroom before flying out again. I heard faint snufflings and snortings as people prepared for sleep.

  And the bat goes into each of the rooms in the house in turn and circles three times above the heads of the people in their beds, before flymg out again, the sound of its wings a whispered incantation.

  I close my eyes. I can see my mother, Emma, who is also awake. She feels the presence of Stella and Paris in the house like an extra weight, as if she carries the whole household inside her body. Unable to sleep, she gets out of bed and stands at the window. She sees Claudio, a dark shape covered by a sheet, roll over in his sleep. She slips into bed beside him and lays her cheek against his back.

  I have seen my mother run her hands down my father's back as he stood on the verandah after a shower. She laid her cheek against him then, and I can see now how she loved his compact, muscular body.

  My sister Lizzie is also awake. In the dark, unaware of the soft noises of restless people moving about the house, Lizzie reaches under the bed for her guitar. The smooth wood of the neck and the cool metal frets reassure her. She longs to play the guitar so brilliantly that it makes people dizzy. She longs to play as well as Jimi Hendrix, but she knows the absurdity of that; she is just a girl with long blonde hair who lives outside a little town in Australia.

  But she imagines the notes she could pull from that guitar if only she could find it in herself to call them up. Lizzie kisses her guitar all the way along its neck.