A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  Argent was the word she used to describe it to herself. It was a word with overtones of heraldry and mediaeval heroism, a colour you might find on a shield, or a coat of arms. The sea was a crumpled silver, as if someone had screwed it up and then straightened it out again and laid it in that space where the sea meets the sky. Then, having sighted the sea, she stopped to catch her breath, and turned round and walked back, ‘trailing clouds of glory', she told herself (a line she'd got from a poem). It was an easier walk, being mostly downhill, but this time the sun was hotter and higher. She paused to pick bits of grass to chew on, and flowers she liked the look of - weeds, mostly - so that by the time she reached Em's house she was trailing not only glory but various bits of vegetation as well.

  The house was silent. Emma went to the kitchen and put on the electric jug for tea. When it was made (and this was the first time she'd made tea for Em, who usually got up first) she took a cup to Em's room. Em was lying in bed, with her hands folded neatly across the white cotton sheet. It was the way she slept on her afternoon naps: neat, spare, contained within her body as though it were a box. But now there was something different about her. Em was dead.

  Emma sat the cup down on the bedside table (it shook, and spilled into the saucer) and touched Em gently on the hand. Em's skin was the texture and colour of a dried leaf that Emma had collected on her walk: papery, mottled, delicately veined. When Emma had held the leaf up to the light, the paler patches proved to have almost worn away; the light showed right through them. Emma lifted Em's hand and laid it gently down again. Then she left the room, not knowing what to do.

  She went to the foot of the stairs and paused, her hand on the banister. Then decisively (though she didn't decide; she didn't even think), she went up the stairs two at a time till she reached the top.

  There was no locked room. There was no nursery left exactly as it had been when Em's twin sister died over eighty years before. There was, in fact, very little furniture and a lot of dust and dirt. The skeleton of a bird lay in a fireplace, a few tattered black feathers still intact.

  Emma pushed up a window. It was stiff and difficult to shift and made a noise she wanted at once to stifle, it was so loud in the stillness of the house. Fresh air flowed in, and she stood with the breeze on her face. From her vantage point she could see right over to Flora's house. She saw Flora and Stella come out of the house together, and the chooks come crowding around them. She thought she could hear their voices. In a little while she would go across the paddock and tell Flora that Aunt Em was dead, but for now she would just stand at the window and look out.

  Em is dead and she is a child having her photograph taken with her mother on the verandah. The light falls through a slatted blind onto their faces. She is a young woman about to cook breakfast for her nephew who says, ‘Don't you use my mother's saucepans.’ He is a child planting a forest around the central core of a vast, maternal fig. He is lacing his boots and setting out on a plant-hunting expedition and his body will never be found. His widow sits in resignation and knits in front of the television. His daughter stands at the top of his childhood home and thinks how all time is simultaneous; everything is happening at the same time and forever.

  ‘Whose legs?’ demands Stella. ‘And anyway, they aren't part of anyone, they're just legs.'

  Aunt Em goes inside to make more tea. And Flora seizes Stella by the hand and they waltz along the verandah and inside the house, down the hallway through the shadowy interior to the blinding light at the back door and back again. Emma gets up to watch, seeing the shape their two bodies make togethel; a whirling circle with hands clasped high; they are two indistinct female figures.

  Em is arrested in the act of slicing a long brown pear down the middle by Flora, who takes her laughing and protestingfor a slower whirl, leaving the two halves of the pear and half a pawpaw and the steaming teapot on the kitchen table.

  A rooster crows from Flora's farmhouse over the way and a black and white dog, a border collie awned by the man who comes to do the garden, runs round and round outside on the grass.

  Em's cat has curled up on the seat of a bentwood chair: The pear sits on the table, long and narrow at the top, as curved as a woman below its waist, a pattern of black seeds at its core. The dog is black and white and so are the tiles. The roundness of the twinned dancers is echoed in the pawpaw. Emma is taking all of this in so she can perhaps paint it one day - all the patterns and resonances - when Stella comes to her and, with an expression of slow delight, holds out her armsfor Emma to join in the dance: join in and not just be a watcher: And Emma takes Stella in her arms and is at once astonished by the child's thinness and lightness: Stella is insubstantial andfine and strong and Emma is reminded of Aunt Em when she hugged her at the station.

  When they finish their dance and come to rest at last in the sunlight on the back step, Flora applauds and exclaims, ‘Stella's a star!’ And Stella smiles and impulsively reaches up and kisses Emmafull on the mouth. Emma pushes Stella away, shocked by how soft and innocent and erotic a kiss can be.

  Butterflies

  THE YEAR I started high school 1 went about with a red woollen beanie pulled down over my ears. I wore it night and day, in school and out, despite the heat of summer. The school wasn't strict about uniform, and a lot of girls wore woollen beanies that year.

  ‘You'll overheat your brain,’ said Claudio. ‘It will make you stupid.’ I stuck out my tongue at him and rolled my eyes in towards my nose.

  I came home from my first day at high school and stood alone in my room. This will go onfor six years. Six, whole, never-ending-years. Six years seemed like the rest of my life. It wasn't that I minded school. It was simply the thought of the never-endingness of day following day, each of them the same. The inevitability and rhythm of it.

  The red beanie was a comfort. I knew it made my face look fatter, but it flattened down my mop of curls. I liked the snugness over my ears, the give of the wool as I hauled it on over my head. It gave off a comforting animal odour, a sheepy but human smell. It wasn't feminine. I could be a woodcutter in that hat, or a fisherman.

  ‘Lucky thirteen,’ Lizzie said on my birthday. But I didn't feel lucky. I felt stolid and stodgy. I wanted wonder and excitement and difference. I wanted to be outrageous and outsize and out of bounds. Magic Happens said stickers I saw on the backs of cars and kombi vans. But when, I wondered, and how.

  Lizzie saw a notice on a board in Mullumbimby:

  FEMALE DESEXED CAT NEEDS HOME

  LIKES TO BE ONLY ANIMAL

  GOOD RATTER

  HER NAME IS ARTEMIS

  Without warning, she arrived home with Artemis in a cardboard box.

  ‘Oh Lizzie,’ sighed Emma. ‘It'll kill birds.’

  ‘She,’ said Lizzie. ‘She's a she. And she's a good ratter.’

  Artemis shot out of the box and around the kitchen like a firecracker, and finally came to rest on top of the refrigerator, which was to become her preferred place, amongst the bottles of rescue remedy and pots of tiger balm.

  Claudio was away camping in a forest, filming people chaining themselves to bulldozers. He arrived home late one afternoon with his crew and a van full of wet tents and a week's worth of washing.

  He exploded when he saw Artemis. ‘A bloody cat!’ Claudio often spoke with exclamation marks.

  Artemis perched on the refrigerator and glowered at him. She had a head for heights. Claudio glared back at her.

  ‘She's a good ratter!’ Lizzie told him.

  ‘Artemis, wasn't she some . . .’ - Claudio wrestled with a bottle of red wine and a corkscrew - ‘bloody . . . goddess of fecundity or something?We'll end up with thousands of cats!’

  ‘She's desexed.’ Lizzie was at her most powerful when she spoke quietly.

  Claudio didn't push the point; the house was full of guests. The van had spilled them out, along with the wet tents and the washing, and a pile of film equipment. Damp people milled about with their hands in their pockets, gazing up
at the impossible height of the ceiling and shrugging the rain off their jackets. Claudio and his crew were full of camaraderie after their week together in the mud and wet. I noticed a grl with a round face and hair bright with orange henna. There was also a thin, tall boy I liked the look of, with a pale, lightly freckled face and very pale red hair.

  Claudio seated his guests around the dining table, pouring wine for everyone. He downed a glass quickly and poured another, then leaned back in his chair.

  ‘The cat's name is Artemis,’ he told the girl with orange hair. ‘Who, if I remember rightly’ (leaning towards her intimately) ‘was the goddess of fecundity There's some ancient statue (circling one hand in the air) - tits all over her chest! But -’ (he suddenly remembered) ‘bloody hell, wasn't she meant to be the virgin huntress? How could she be both?’ Claudio sat up and looked around at no one in particular, outraged. He hated ambiguity He hated a pause in the flow of his words even more. ‘Anyway . . . this Artemis is desexed, so there won't be much fecundity, but I'm told she's a good ratter - that's where the huntress bit comes in, I suppose!’

  He roared with laughter, and the girl with orange hair, whose name was Amanda, smiled uncertainly.

  ‘Actually,’ said Lizzie, who stood with Artemis in her arms and regarded Claudio disdainfully, ‘Artemis's virginity wasn't about her sexual purity, but a reference to her being complete in herself, inviolate.’ Lizzie had been studymg up on Artemis; she'd known Claudio would make a thing of it.

  All the young men in the crew looked at her with admiration and lust. In the golden light from the lamps, with her hair shimmering over her shoulders, she had the kind of beauty and great height that made her scorn magnificent and imperious. But Lizzie didn't notice them. She picked up Artemis and stalked off to have a shower.

  My mother looked at the pile of washing that had been dumped on the verandah and then out at the rain. The crew stuck close by Claudio in the living room; you could see that, having endured the hardships of a protest camp for a whole week, they felt bonded together for life. Emma left them to it. She went into the kitchen and made food.

  ‘And what do you do? asked Amanda, as Emma sat finally, exhausted, over a plate of pasta. ‘Are you a filmmaker too?’

  I watched. My mother hated this question: the assumption that because Claudio made films, she must too, except that she was so hopeless at it that no one had ever heard of her.

  ‘No,’ said Emma. ‘No, I don't.’

  ‘What do you do?’ said Amanda. She ate delicately and fastidiously.

  ‘Oh, this and that,’ said Emma, vaguely, sipping her wine and staring out at the rain.

  The boy with the pale hair and skin looked shyly at me and smiled. He had been eating his meal with frank and grateful hunger. I thought that although he had looked at Lizzie with admiration as the others had, there had not been so much lust there.

  Claudio plunged the corkscrew into another bottle of wine. ‘It's now or nevel;‘ he sang, ‘Your soul or mine.’

  Lizzie arrived at last from her long shower, and stood in the doorway with Artemis in her arms. Her hair was wet, plastered down unflatteringly over her head.

  ‘Well, she's my cat,’ she announced, ‘and don't any of you dare, ever, to say a word against her!’

  Artemis was a wild and wiry little animal, and took as much of a dislike to Claudio as he had to her. If he came near her when she was eating she growled at him threateningly and hunched over her food.

  One night a tiny bent-wing bat found its way into the kitchen and flopped onto the floor. Artemis, opportunistic, caught it.

  I heard my mother's cries and ran in. Artemis let go of the bat at once and escaped through the window over the sink, her hind legs flicking away into the night like a shadow spirit's.

  I held the bat in the palm of my hand. The fur was the colour and texture of a velvet dress my mother had worn at one time to parties. There was a suggestion of gold amongst the brown. I looked into the bat's face. It was as intricate as an ear, and ancient, and wild. The tiny chest contained a still-beating heart, but it grew fainter, and, as I watched, it became still.

  I have seen the last breath of a bat. It was a thought both horrible and wonderful, and it made me slightly breathless myself.

  In the morning I helped Chloe bury the bat in the garden. ‘Pipistrello,’ I said lingeringly, saying the Italian word that Claudio had taught me. ‘Pipistrello,’ echoed Chloe, as she sprinkled earth over the small corpse. Soil fell into its eyes and nostrils, and I turned away, unable to watch.

  Lizzie refused to have anything to do with the burial; she said why shouldn't Artemis have killed the bat if it had flopped down into her clutches like that? She said haughtily that the bat must have had a death wish, and implied that Artemis was the unwitting and innocent agent. And she cradled Artemis protectively in her arms and strode off to her room.

  Chloe and I made a shrine of rocks and flowers for the bat, and that seemed to be that.

  I came upon Artemis later, sitting on a fence post with a knowing look on her face. She allowed me to go right up to her and stare intently into her eyes. Do cats eat bats? I asked her silently. Do bats eat cats? It seemed that with all the looking into Artemis's eyes, for a moment I became a cat.

  That night I woke to the sound of singing, and it was so persistent that I got out of bed and went outside.

  It was Lizzie, standing alone in the night (I would like to remember moonlight, but there wasn't much of it that night, if I am to be truthful), and she was singing, something she hadn't done for ages. I felt certain she was making it up as she went along; it was a wonderful song, full of unexpected twists and turns and consisting not of words but merely of sounds. Lizzie stood outside in the dark, lijting up her voice in song, which is the way I see it now, though at the time I was only aware of my sister standing tall in the night, singng as the spirit moved her. She didn't notice me watching from the shadows, and I didn't reveal myself, aware that here was the kind of marvellous thing I had been looking for in my life. I didn't want to spoil it.

  Unexpectedly, the next marvellous thing came from my own body, the way a spider unwinds the magic of silk.

  Our family was swimming in the creek. We never bothered with costumes there, and I sat on a rock above the swimming hole lazily watching everyone splashing in the water. I had a familiar, heavy, almost pleasurable feeling in the bottom of my belly and I sat and luxuriated in it. And then came the warm sticky trickle between my legs. I had been menstruating for over a year now, and I enjoyed the rhythm of it, the small drama of discovering blood on my pants every month. I sat and allowed the blood to seep out onto the rock and onto the top of my thighs, and then I thought I should dive into the water to wash it off.

  I stood up. For one instant my thighs were stuck together by congealing blood and I felt the tiny resistance as they pulled apart. Looking down, I saw a red butterfly on my legs made of blood. A symmetrical pair of wings, like an ink blot of folded paper, but coming from inside me: made unexpectedly by my own marvellous body.

  ‘Lizzie!’ I called. ‘Look! A butterfly!’ I pointed to my legs.

  Lizzie turned to me, wiping water from her face with both hands, uncovering her eyes like someone playing peek-a-boo. I saw her expression, shocked for just one heartbeat, and then because I was laughing so much she began to laugh as well. I flapped my legs a few times to show how the butterfly could fly, and then I dived into the water and it vanished.

  My life was not all wonderful at this time. There was often tension in the house, between Lizzie and Claudio, and Claudio and Emma. I felt I was stuck in the middle, watching it all.

  Artemis killed a snake and left it on the kitchen floor. It was a small red-bellied black snake, and she left it belly uppermost, so that it was like a length of red ribbon that someone had casually dropped on the floor. The belly had a softness that I hadn't associated before with snakes. I could see that it was a creature with insides, that in that long, soft belly were the same vu
lnerable workings that kept all animals alive.

  ‘Has that cat actually killed a rat yet?’ said Claudio that evening. ‘It seems she has a talent for killing anything but.’

  Lizzie looked at the plate of fish that Emma had put in front of her. Lizzie was a strict vegetarian, but she made an exception for fish.

  You know, I've been having doubts about fish,’ she said, and pushed her plate away.

  ‘Ye gods and little fishes!’ It was Claudio's attempt at humour, but he was too close to being a parody of himself at his worst, when he could explode with sudden anger. Lizzie got to her feet and went out without a word. Emma looked at Claudio, unsmiling. She always said he didn't want to tell when Lizzie was being serious, when something was of utmost importance to her.

  When I'd finished eating I followed Lizzie to her room. I wanted to console her. I wanted to be consoled. Lizzie was hunched over her guitar, her ear close to its body, plucking the strings softly in a disconsolate way She seemed to be listening to the guitar, waiting for it to tell her something.

  Now that I was at high school I had made a friend apart from Lizzie. Her name was Alice. She lived in town, she played a silver flute, and she had glossy black hair that was cut into the nape of her neck and looked like a little cap.

  I invited her out to our place for the day and I didn't know quite what to do with her. I showed her how to make little towns in the earth, with log cabins constructed of sticks, and trees made from the tips of casuarina branches the way Lizzie and I used to, but it seemed too childish a game and we abandoned it.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ I asked in desperation, and she shrugged.

  We wandered from the house to the garden and back again with such a dogged restlessness that my mother finally told us to go and do something. Emma was edgy and impatient. Claudio was away a lot at this time at an editing studio in town, finishing up final work on his documentary.