A Charm of Powerful Trouble Read online

  Only now can I imagine Stella that night. Stella lies in the guestroom, a space enclosed at the end of the verandah. She breathes in all the smells of the night and smiles as she thinks of Claudio's smile, and the intensity and absurdity of his eyebrows. She sleeps naked, and throws off the sheet, and for a moment her body feels the relief of the cool night air.

  From the first, it seemed to me I had known about sex. Where we lived, there were always animals mating and producing offspring, and our mother was matter-of-fact about it. When we were still quite young - when I was about six or seven - she told us about men and women making love.

  ‘It sounds horrible!’ said Lizzie. ‘I'm never going to do that.’

  ‘It's not horrible,’ said Emma. ‘It's nice.’ It was a hot day, one of those summer days when the very air oozed moisture. She smoothed the hair from Lizzie's forehead where it hung in damp strands. ‘It's lovely to be that close to someone you love. When you're grown-up you'll see how nice it is.’

  In those days Lizzie and I shared a bed and slept tumbled together like puppies. That night it was too hot for even so much as a sheet, and Lizzie pushed me away when I tried to curl up close to her.

  ‘Lizzie,’ I whispered in the dark, my thumb in my mouth for comfort. ‘Does it have to be with a man?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Does it have to be with a man?’

  ‘Does it have to be with anybody, that's what I'd like to know!’ she said crossly, and turned her back to me.

  I can remember waking the next morning and a close-up of Lizzie filling my entire vision: her cheek, with damp hair lying across it, her nose in profile, one fist held against her face in sleep.

  When I thought Chloe and Paris would be asleep, I crept into their room. Because Paris was there I hadn't gone in to talk to Chloe before she went to sleep, as I always did, and I missed her. I knelt beside my sister and listened to her breathing. I shut my eyes and leaned in close to her, taking in her warm, bed-fuddled little-sister smell. Her fat hand lay palm upwards on the sheet and I bent my head to kiss it. I adored my little sister: if she wasn't one of us, part of Lizzie-Laura, she was something far more exotic and lovable.

  I became aware that Paris was awake. I stayed for a long time, to spite her, and she didn't breathe, or move, at all.

  The next morning their room was deserted; they were already out exploring together. On Paris's bed was an exercise book that she hadn't bothered to shut. By sitting on the edge of the bed I could read what she'd written without even touching it.

  Yesterday we came to stay with people called the Zucchinis. Laura Zucchini doesn't like me and Lizzie Zucchini doesn't even know I exist. Chloe Zucchini is just a baby but I will be able to make her do what I want.

  Mr Zucchini makes eyes at Mum. He looks at her m if he wants to eat her up. He thinks the whole world loves him and that he is the best. Mrs Zucchini is nice and she watches Mr Zucchini all the time as if she thinks he's wonder-l too. I hate their toilet, it is a hole in the ground and I always think I'llfall in. There are bats and mice everywhere and their house is like a haunted castle.

  Outside, a feral cat had killed a feather-tail glider and eaten it all but for the tail and tiny skull. I found the remains as I made my way down the overgrown track, dense with weeds, that led to my mother's painting studio. It was an old timber shed that leaned into the lantana.

  I stood at the window and saw Stella reclining on an old sofa, naked, while Emma sketched her. Emma worked quickly, looking up every few moments to study Stella intently.

  ‘Come in, please!’ she called, when she saw me. ‘I won't have any peepers.’

  I crept inside and craned over her shoulder to see what she had drawn.

  ‘Be patient. I'm nearly finished, and then I'll show you.’

  I couldn't help looking at Stella's breasts: they were small and pointed, not at all like my mother's, which were plump and soft. It was my first intimation that women could be so different.

  My mother had always told me that everyone sees things in their own way - that is why drawings of the same thing are so different. I waited for my mother to finish so I could get an idea of how she saw Stella.

  ‘Now you can look!’ she said.

  Her sketch had been done very quickly with soft black crayon. It looked like a good drawing, but she had merely gone through the motions. It was simply a picture of a naked woman; it told nothing.

  My mother has made portraits of Lizzie plucking at the strings of her guitar and everything is there: her beauty and her anxiety captured on the surface of the paper. Those pictures made me fear for Lizzie sometimes. I wanted to capture her beauty, not to keep it for myself, but to contain it and protect her. Perhaps drawing is a kind of capturing.

  And now here was this sketch of Stella,which looked like her, but told nothing of what she might be like. My mother can evade even when she draws.

  ‘I like the way you do legs,’ said Stella, standing shamelessly naked in front of the easel. ‘I remember you, when I was a kid, drawing legs - my mother's legs; remember?’

  Emma shot her a smile. ‘I learned how to do legs from the illustrations in a storybook when I was a child. I can't remember who the artist was, but she - I'm sure it was a she! - drew the legs with just a couple of swift lines. I liked the curve of the calf, the way it suggested firmness and muscle. Legs are my favourite things to draw. They're so interesting! Because you can never tell from the rest of a person what the legs will be like - have you noticed? Some very slim people have quite big legs. And fat women, especially, can have surprisingly dainty ankles. The legs I hate are ones that are somehow shapeless, with seemingly no muscle in them at all.’

  ‘Fancy hating someone because of their legs.’ Claudio stood leaning against the doorjamb. I was embarrassed. It didn't seem right that my father should be able to inspect Stella's nakedness so closely.

  Emma glanced at him dismissively ‘I didn't say I hated the people,’ she said lightly, ‘just the legs.’ She began to pack up her materials. Stella pulled on her clothes, lingeringly.

  Emma and Stella left the drawing hut, left Claudio standing in the doorway with an expression on his face that was between a grin and a leer. I could see that my father liked women; I thought that perhaps it was the essential thing about him. More than that, he needed women to like and admire him. But I could see that although women liked him, it was not all the time, or when he was in certain moods.

  I followed my mother along the path through the lantana. I felt the scratch of the stems against my arm, and smelt the sharp odour of the bruised leaves.

  That night my mother and Stella talked for hours in the kitchen. I heard them mention Stella's mother Flora, whom Emma had known for years. She lived just outside Paris still, said Stella.

  I'd lived my whole life - an eternity it seemed - in the one place, and it seemed astonishing that someone could have so much mobility. To live near Paris!

  The murmur of their voices continued long after I was in bed. They talked with long silences and whisperings and bursts of unseemly laughter, but there was something that told me they weren't really friends.

  M

  WHEN WE were young we always begged our mother to tell us stories. Real stories, we wanted, of her life.

  She only ever told us one. It was a story we loved, and she told it again and again, with variations. Details that were forgotten at one time were remembered at a later telling, so that eventually I built up a patchwork of images and associations which I put together in my imagmation into some sort of whole.

  It was the story of a magical visit she made when she was sixteen to visit her Great-Aunt Emmeline. That visit was a turning point in her life. It was when she learned to love heat and humidity and tangled, fecund vegetation. The light she portrayed in that story was special: the world was brighter and more marvellous and more . . . everything, the way it is sometimes when you look at the colours in the sky at dusk and think I am in another world. The story m
y mother told was about another world.

  Her great-aunt lived in a huge old house in the country, eight hundred kilometres north of my mother's childhood home in the suburbs of Sydney We grew up only an hour or so from where it stood. But my mother never went back to look at it, and never took us to see it. It might not bear being scrutinised, she said, more than twenty years later in the light of day. She meant that she wanted to think of it in that special light, the light of memory.

  Great-Aunt Emmeline - Aunt Em - was Emma's father's aunt; she had brought him up after his mother died. He died when my mother, Emma, was two and her sister Beth was four; Emma remembered nothing of him.

  Their mother didn't visit Aunt Em after her husband's death, and nor did Aunt Em come to visit them, though they wrote occasional letters and there were presents at Christmas and on birthdays. The years just slipped by Then when Beth was sixteen her mother felt she was old enough to go alone on the train for a visit, and two years later, when she was sixteen, it was Emma's turn.

  The thing that terrified Emma about going to visit Aunt Em was the idea that once she got there she'd be trapped somehow, and never be able to leave. But a thrill of anticipation went through her as well: that and the terror seemed to belong deliciously together. Until now, she felt, she'd been half asleep, waiting for her life to begin. Here, perhaps, was the great thing she'd been longing for, though what the great thing might consist of she could scarcely imagine.

  Beth had set herself up as the expert on Aunt Em, who preferred to be called just Em. Emma always thought of the name as a single letter: M. Beth told Emma that their great-aunt always had a drink of Hospital brandy, standing at the kitchen table, before she went to bed at night. ‘Don't let her give you any!’ Beth warned.

  She said that Aunt Em had been a twin, but that her twin sister had died of scarlet fever when she was still a baby The nursery door was locked afterwards, and everything kept exactly as it was when the child died. The nursery was upstairs, on the upper floor of the house. Aunt Em lived in the downstairs part only, now, and never went up there.

  She said that Aunt Em had a white whisker on her chin, and that it prickled when she kissed you.

  And finally she told Emma, in that dramatic voice that bore the unmistakable authority of the older sister, that when Aunt Em died, Emma would have to go and live forever in the vast old house in the country: ‘So that there will always be an Aunt Em living there.’

  It was a long, rocking, rolling journey north. The train slid through the suburbs of Sydney, gliding surreptitiously along the tracks. It was night, and Emma saw her face reflected in the glass, wan and anxious-looking. She pressed her lips together and looked away. She could smell the cracked varnish of the window frame as she leaned her head against it. The green leather seats were impregnated with the smell of soot. People entering the compartment wrestled with the handle of a door that slid about with the movement of the train. Finally, the lights went off and, surrounded by the smells of strangers, Emma snuggled down under the blanket her mother had pressed upon her for the trip, and slept.

  In the morning there were cow paddocks, and kangaroos fleeing through stands of eucalypts. Then the vegetation became denser. The train followed a creek fringed by trees struggling under the weight of vines. The line was cut into the hillsides, and they seemed to be pushing against the forest at each turn. Emma thought she would be swallowed by all that lush, green dampness.

  And then she was at Aunt Em's station, a tiny faded weatherboard building surrounded by tree ferns and palms, a station so small it was hardly a station at all, to Emma's city-bred eyes. An old woman waited on the platform, watching alertly. She and Emma recognised each other at once, and would have even if they hadn't been the only people there.

  Aunt Em was tall and upright, with a beaky nose and a face that was full of anticipation. She was narrow, with no hips or breasts, so that her cotton dress was like a pillowcase for her body, with a belt around the middle. Aunt Em put her arms around Emma briefly and Emma felt how thin she was, but strong. The whisker Beth had told her about pricked Emma on the cheek but she hardly felt it, so overwhelmed was she by her surprising and sudden arrival after the long hours of rattling along a track. ‘It's so lovely to see you, dear,’ said Aunt Em. She blinked quickly, before turning away.

  She had been brought to the station by a neighbour, a young woman named Flora, who had the longest hair Emma had ever seen, and the shortest miniskirt, and the nicest legs. Emma, who loved sketching, felt that she could draw Flora's legs then and there. But then she was bustled out to Flora's little Austin, where she met Flora's eight-year-old daughter Stella, who sucked her thumb and looked with frank curiosity when Emma crawled into the back seat beside her.

  Emma took in everything, staring intently from the window of the car: the winding road with camphor laurel trees pressing in from both sides, the paddocks full of scotch thistles and lantana and cattle, the outcrops of bananas on the hills. There was a sense of things growing headlong in the heat and the wet. And she was watching for the house, to see if it was as Beth had said.

  It was. She recognised it from Beth's description even before they turned in the drive. It was set back in a paddock with hills behind it and a creek winding down one side: large, two-storeyed, with rusty iron lace on the upstairs verandah and peeling paint on the timber walls.

  From the front door you could see right through the house, down the long shadowy hallway to the back, where there was a concrete path and a rusty water tank illuminated by sunlight. Halfway up the hall was a staircase leading to the upper floor. It was all as Beth had described.

  Emma closed her eyes. She wanted the experience of being here to be hers, not a second-hand version of Beth's. The trouble with being the younger sister was that you were never the first to do anything.

  Emma opened her eyes and saw Aunt Em looking at her, as quizzical as a finch. ‘Are you all right, dear?’

  ‘Oh, Aunt Em . . .’ she said. The newness of it all was almost too much for her.

  ‘Just call me Em,’ said her aunt, kindly.

  Flora came inside with Emma's bag. ‘There you go!’ she said, setting it down in the hallway.

  ‘Thank you so much, my dear.’ Em managed to look both grateful and taken aback. Emma was to grow used to her look of perpetual surprise; all those years of being alive hadn't lessened one scrap her astonishment at the world.

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Flora. She put her hands out in a broad gesture of uselessness and shrugged. ‘Well, I'll leave you to it.’ She clattered out through the front door, trailed after by Stella, who'd only just finished trailing inside, and who gave Emma a lively backward glance as she departed.

  The house smelt of lamb fat, and wood smoke, and lavender perfume. The bedroom Emma was to stay in was sparse and clean. It had double doors leading onto a verandah with ancient, splintered boards. There were fresh flowers on a chest of drawers, and a new bedspread. Aunt Em had taken trouble with it. But it was strange, and empty.

  Emma had brought her drawing things with her, and Patrick White's Voss, which she had imagined reading on long lonely nights in the old house in the country. She'd thrown in a copy of Das Kdpital for good measure. Emma was an ambitious reader. She unpacked them, along with her small black transistor radio with its earplug. She hoped the radio would have reception. She thought of Aunt Em's place as the end of the earth.

  Her meagre things made no dent in the strangeness. Her clothes were swallowed by capacious drawers that had been lined with fresh newspaper, and her copies of Voss and Das Kapital merely looked as if someone had abandoned them on the night table. Emma went to the verandah door and laid her cheek against the timber doorjamb, listening for the tick of a heartbeat. She felt that such an old house must have a pulse. She rummaged in her bag and found an apple left over from the trip, and she lay on the bed and devoured it, a last link with home.

  Out in the hallway, she followed the sunlight till she was outside, and was startled by
two pigeons taking off from on top of the water tank next to the door. The sound of their wings was like the squeak of someone running across dry sand. Yin-yin, yin-yin, sang the cicadas; their song throbbed inside her head. Emma sighed with satisfaction. Beth had said nothing about all this. The place was hers now.

  Em was in the lutchen makrng tea. It was a gloriously dim, damp-feeling room at the back of the house. Emma peered from the narrow window There were clumps of lilies growing outside in dark, damp soil. It was so shaded beside the house that no grass grew there. A thrill of attraction and fear had begun in Emma's heart for this place. It was both strange and familiar; it had been waiting for her all along.

  Emma pictured herself within this kitchen, within this house, within this damp, luxuriant landscape, and recounted to herself the journey which had taken her further and further from her old life. This was a house of shadows, of dark and light: dark inside, with squares of light where the doors and windows were. The floor of the kitchen and hallway were dark and light too, a chequerboard of tiles. It was a place that she felt she had dreamed about and forgotten.

  At a table with a lino top she sat and drank Em's strong, sour tea. Em said, ‘Well, my dear. How is your mother? And Beth?’ She blinked as she said it, surprising herself again.

  ‘They're well,’ said Emma, stirring more sugar into her tea. ‘They send their love.’ This was true, but sounded as if she'd just made it up, from politeness. Her mother had sent presents, too: a flannelette nightie and a set of face washers, but Emma was shy of presenting them to Aunt Em and had left them in her bag.

  ‘I'm so pleased you could come,’ said Em. She smiled and squinted; she seemed to have trouble with her eyes, for they watered at the slightest thing. ‘It's lovely to see Sam's children again. You were such a tiny thing when he brought you here.’