A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

Then I saw a figure halt in the shadow of a tree behind us. It was Paris. The streetlight revealed her face as she moved out of the shadow.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Following you!’

  She hadn't bothered to dress, and was wearing pyjamas with teacups all over them. They were too big for her and hung over her wrists. Her feet were bare, and the cuffs of the pyjama pants had splashes of mud on them where she had gone through puddles.

  ‘You'd better join us,’ said Lizzie, authoritative and grownup. She held out her hand, but Paris didn't take it. She walked close behind us, averting her gaze, pretending she was on her own. When we found ourselves unexpectedly back at our own front gate there seemed nothing to do but to go in. We crept up the steps and inside. We had said not another word to Paris and quietly she made her way to her room, as we did.

  The house was as silent as a damp old wooden house could be. It made vague, soft, complaining noises. In the kitchen there were secret scunylngs of cockroaches and the flap of moths against the windows. Before I went to sleep I sensed that the leather woman had found her way to the house. She went down the hallway to Claudio and Stella's room and stood looking at them sleeping for a long time.

  Claudio and Stella took us all to the beach, often. We were used to going with Claudio and Emma, of course, and we noticed the differences when Stella was there.

  Our mother used to avoid the hot part of the day, and she seldom swam. Emma went to the beach to walk and to think and to gaze out to sea, getting ideas for paintings.

  Stella liked to go when the sun blazed, so she could sunbake. She would lie on a towel reading a novel and smoking a cigarette, her eyes squinted. She wore nothing but a G-string and became browner and browner. When she walked down to the water to cool off, she was noticeably lean and brown and naked.

  ‘I rehse to look,’ Lizzie hissed at me, narrowing her eyes in disgust. We took ourselves off up the beach with Chloe.

  Chloe had a mania for collecting things, now. One day she found scores of little fish with boxy shapes that looked utterly surprised to find themselves washed up on the shore, dead, and she took home every one of them. She found shellfish with the insides not yet rotted away, and seahorses, and seaweed like necklaces. All of it stank, and she put it under the house in Mullumbimby, saylng that the smell would go away one day.

  There had been a bushfire a couple of kilometres up the coast, and we arrived on one scorchingly hot day to find ash in the water, and burnt leaves all along the tideline. Along with the leaves were cicadas, burnt black, and hundreds of Christmas beetles, still shiny. Chloe and I walked together, she with her head bent low, searching for any sign of life.

  She stopped. ‘I can hear a fizzing noise. Listen.’

  Crouching down, she said, ‘This beetle is moving. It's hissing.’

  Stranded all along the beach we found, when we looked closely, dozens of live Christmas beetles. Somehow they had survived the fire, been blown out to sea on the debris, and floated back in again on the tide. One was still clinging to the gumleaf it had coasted in to shore on, like a miniature board-rider.

  Chloe made me and Lizzie and Paris help her pick them up. Each of us loaded them onto the palm of one hand, and all the way up the soft underside of our arms to the elbow; once they were there they started to creep about. ‘Stop tickling!’ Chloe commanded them, giggling. We carried them carefully up to the dunes where there were trees to deposit them on. Some beetles put out their legs to take hold of a twig, but some were unable to grasp a foothold and fell to the ground. A few of them took off from our outstretched arms before we even got to the dunes. We stopped and gazed up at them as they soared above us.

  Lizzie and I went out in the night again and again. We were the waltzers down damp footpaths, the midnight ramblers who prowled the streets witnessing everything. We heard voices raised in argument, or soft words of love from front verandahs. There were occasional fellow revellers of the night - people who dined in their gardens with the soft light of candles; we heard their intimate laughter and talk and the clink of glasses and cutlery. There were lone people who squatted on their front steps smoking a cigarette or hugging their knees to their chest - people like us, who knew the attraction of darkness.

  ‘Didya hear about the midnight rambler,’ Lizzie sang. Her voice was wistful and shy in the dark, a bit off-key, a bit unsure of itself. I wished she'd sing louder, and longer. Our ramblings were mostly accompanied by the muffled dialogue of television programs. There was the occasional plinking of a guitar, and then Lizzie paused to listen, her face still with longing.

  Sometimes we abandoned the streets of wooden houses for the mystery of the park near the river where rainforest trees breathed out an odour of glossy green, and canna lilies, which had been red in the daylight, stood with black spears massed like a waiting army.

  Paris always followed. ‘I'm a nuisance, I'm a nuisance,‘ she sang under her breath. We allowed her to catch us up. Lizzie stood, hands on hips. ‘You may as well walk with us!’

  I knew the leather woman followed us too. She knew every useful shadow; she practised the art of pausing and blending with her surroundings at exactly the right moment. I never really thought of us as being out alone.

  Once, when we passed a cottage almost entirely concealed by trees, Lizzie said, ‘There's Al's place.’ She ducked up the front path and pushed her way among foliage at the side of the house to where light shone out from a window. Paris and I followed, and the three of us stood at the lighted window and peered in.

  Al was the person Lizzie spent most of her time with at school. He wasn't her boyfriend, she said. He was in his room, perched on his bed reading, surrounded by the hundreds of books he collected for next to nothing from op shops. He looked up, bemused at the faces peering unexpectedly through his window so late. We were standing on the raised brick edge of a garden bed, so we teetered a bit, except for Lizzie, who was tall enough to stand on the ground.

  Al smiled and came to the window. He was pale and thin and freckled. ‘What are you all doing?’ he whispered.

  ‘Oh, just walking, you know,’ said Lizzie, and grinned back at him. ‘Bye!’

  We kept going. There was no need to talk. There was just the shared pleasure of being out of our beds when we were meant to be asleep, and of the wonder and mystery of the dark. It was a guilty pleasure but we were unrepentant.

  The leather woman came into the house when we were finally all in bed. She came unsurely at first, and then boldly, as if she owned the place. She listened outside the bedroom of Claudio and Stella, and she watched over Chloe, who slept soundly with her plump arms flung out behind her head and never stirred when the rest of us went out. She even watched over Lizzie and me for a time, pleased that we were safely back at last.

  If I woke in the night I always knew that she had been there. There was a sense of departure in our room, a disturbance in the molecules of the air, a faint whiff of clay.

  Guiltily, I began to enjoy staying in my father's house. It wasn't simply the freedom of the night walks. It was the carelessness of the household, the sense that it was all temporary, that what you did there didn't matter as much as it did at home. It was like being on holiday. I began to like all those unpacked boxes, the scrappiness of the kitchen, the starkness of the bare boards and the odd bits of furniture placed just anyhow.

  Guiltily, treacherously, I arrived each week at Claudio's house with a sense of release from the sadness that pervaded my mother's life. We had different rituals and habits there. Lizzie and I sat on the front steps with our elbows on our knees and stared out at the street, enjoying the atmosphere of having people around. It was a street of musicians, and we listened to the ragged sounds of the jazz band that practised two doors down.

  Alice walked past on the other side of the street on the way to a music lesson, her flute case in her hand, studiously not looking in our direction. She stared down at her bare feet and walked gracefully, as slender as a sardine in flared sla
cks, her bare belly stuck slightly forward. A little while later she walked past again in the opposite direction.

  The band was still playmg, and we tapped our feet to the beat, enjoying the untidy sound, the stopping and starting as they tried to perfect it. An old woman sweeping her path saw us and screwed up her face and put her hands over her ears as if she couldn't stand the noise. Then she grinned and took her hands down and put them on her hips, moving from side to side. ‘Oo, O0, I feel like dancing!’ she said. Lizzie smiled at her and leapt down the steps to check the letterbox, leaning quickly over the front fence and looking all the way down the street. No one ever wrote her a letter but h i e thought there might be something interesting there one day. She also held out hope that a fascinating person would suddenly materialise. In a town, with people always about, all things are possible.

  I liked to think so too. Mullumbimby swarmed with girls with bare brown arms and midriffs and flirtatious smiles. I would dream for days about the softness of a neck or the shape of a mouth; I imagined seizing some stranger's hand and biting her playfully on her shoulder and running away before she had time to be indignant about it. But of course I told no one of this and I kept apart from the girls at school. There were girls there who would thump you if they didn't like your hairstyle.

  Lizzie and I took pleasure in everything. We laughed at nothing, or everything, rolling about on the floor of our bare room. A single word was enough to set us off. We bought packets of chocolate mint biscuits and ate the lot at once, peeling off layers of mint cream and squashing it greedily into our mouths. Fortified by sugar, we began to speculate about the things that still puzzled us.

  ‘Mum's sister who died . . .’ I'd say.

  ‘Drowned . . .’ Lizzie would correct.

  The thought of drowning, of submerging for ever, was such a final surrender that I shivered. ‘I wonder why Mum never talks about her at all? I'd talk about you.'

  And we wondered about Lizzie's father. ‘Maybe you should ask her. Now you're older . . .’ I suggested. But Lizzie jumped up and went to the window.

  ‘Look at Paris,’ she said. ‘Making spells, I bet.’

  Paris, in the wild garden, picks absent-mindedly at the scab on her elbow and assembles a collection of ingredients for her magic potion: three leaves from a sandpaper fig, four seeds from a black-bean tree - though she couldn't have named either - and two black and white magpie feathers. She sings to herself and looks around for something else that might be magical and finds a seahorse that Chloe has brought back from the beach and left to dry out under the house. It smells suitably potent.

  ‘What are you doing?’ says Stella, coming down from the laundry with a basket of washing.

  ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .’ sings Paris, skipping out of her way with a private smile on her face. She spins round with a flourish, wriggling her fingers. ‘Making magic!’ she says, and disappears up the side of the house.

  By the time she comes back, Stella has hung out the washing and departed again. Paris assembles the ingredients for her spell in a pattern on the ground and murmurs an incantation over them:

  I want a sistel; a sistel; a sister. . .

  If I haven't said much about Claudio and Stella, it is because we were indifferent to them. Not entirely indifferent: I think Lizzie and I wanted both to know and not know what the adults were up to. Do I contradict myself?

  But we were too immersed in our immediate world to be bothered with them. We were grand and callous and selfish and self-absorbed as children are, caught up with the immediacy of the smell of roses and the taste of chocolate, the trivial, engrossing, delicious details that made up our lives.

  And yet I was aware of how our mother was filled with grief and jealousy.

  It eats her up. Her love for Claudio is a great Rasputin of a love, dark and bearded and vile. It comes to her in the dead of night with rank, lustful breath and mad eyes and she stumbles out to the garden and mbs dirt and leaves into her face and hair. Her love won't die. She has tried to forget him. She has shot her love for him in the back ten times, but still it staggers to its feet. She has buried it alive, but still a great hoary hand breaks through the soil and comes to seize her by the throat.

  After a while Emma's sculpture, the leather woman, dried out completely Her body became dusty and lifeless. To look as good as her old leather-hard self, she would have to be glazed and fired. But then she would be a glazed woman, Emma said, a glass woman. Not plastic, as soft clay is, but brittle. Besides, we didn't have a kiln large enough to fire her in.

  One day I helped my mother drag the leather woman outside on her plastic sheet. She lay underneath the trees, and over time, rain fell on her and blunted the detail of her features. Leaves fell on her and began to conceal her nakedness. She was on the way to going back into the earth.

  And only then did I stop seeing the woman who stood in the shadows across the street when she thought everyone was asleep, watching the house, her eyes dark hollows of grief.

  Goblin Market

  LIZZW MAKES her way through the Saturday market in the park, treading as carefully and fastidiously as a cat. She does not yet know she is beautiful, but she sees people look at her, and keep looking, especially men. They must register her size, she thinks: she towers above most people. Lizzie is tall and long-legged and undainty, and she feels painfully the scrutiny of others. She wears her hair in a thick gold plait; it draws too much attention to her if she wears it loose.

  It seems to her that this is a market full of people who look like animals: English animals from the picture books of her childhood. That man there selling jewellery, with the small eyes and pinched mouth, is a rat; and the man making coffee, who has black and grey hair brushed back in a wave from his forehead, is a badger.

  And she can't help noticing that there are a number of dainty mice, almost an infestation of them - the woman selling fairy wings and dresses, for example, and the one at the plant stall wearing overalls, and the girl walking by clutching her boyfriend's hand as if she's afraid he'll escape from her. They are small women, with small, pointed, pretty faces.

  The market is achingly full of luscious food. Lizzie has a large person's appetite, and food attracts her. Watermelons and mangoes, strawberries, rockmelons and pineapples, all call to her in high, fruit-like voices, saying, ‘Eat me, Lizzie, eat me!’

  She buys a large fruit salad served in half a scooped-out pineapple with a mound of whipped cream on top, and finds a quiet corner of the market to stop and eat it in. Food is to be savoured and appreciated, she feels, and shouldn't be eaten walking about, or when one's attention is focused on something else.

  She finds herself near a stall where a man in a top-hat made of satin patches is selling coloured balls for juggling. He stands out the front and juggles as if he doesn't care whether people buy or not, and despite herself, Lizzie finds herself watching him as she eats; her eye is drawn to him again and again. He has an attractively ugly face. He looks like a hound, with his loose, baggy jowls; his whole face is baggy and wrinkled.

  One of the balls seems to slip out of his hands accidentally, though Lizzie doesn't see how it could have, and it lands at Lizzie's feet. With a grin, he skips over to her and says, ‘Sorry about that,’ picking it up with a deft swoop, but he doesn't seem sorry at all. ‘Give me a bite of your fmit salad, love.’ Lizzie looks at him haughtily and decides he is a goblin. He is easily as old as Claudio, and smaller than she is. The crown of his hat is ridiculously high, it is a joke top-hat, and it is as baggy and pouched as his face is.

  ‘Oh well, don't, then,’ he says, shrugging in an exaggerated fashion, going back to his stall.

  Lizzie can't help stealing another look at his remarkable face. It is a landscape of changing expression and appears never to be still: the folds are constantly shifting and refiguring. There seems to be more skin on his face than there needs to be, and it doesn't know where to go.

  She sees him again later that afternoon at the poets’ cafe
in town. Lizzie doesn't want to go home, or rather, back to the house that Claudio and Stella share, where she's meant to be staying this weekend. So she loiters, finds things to do, places to hang out. The poets’ cafe is as good as any.

  The goblin man is still wearing his hat; he's sitting with some young women at a table at the front near the microphone. The women have that air of lush insouciance that Lizzie both despises and envies. They wear skimpy tops made of embroidered satin that reveal the shape of their breasts, skirts that flow over their backsides and hips like water, clothes that wouldn't look out of place in a bordello. Or so she thinks. She has heard the word and has only an inkling of what it means.

  She watches the performers. Women get up and declaim the words they've strung together so boldly and unashamedly that Lizzie wants to blush with embarrassment for them, they are so pleased with their banality. A man goes to the front with an acoustic guitar and strums it while he recites, and Lizzie thinks hotly, I can play better than that. He holds the guitar as if it is of no consequence, and his words make no sense to her.

  There is a man in the corner with a face like a toad, and another one looks like a large-eared fox. A girl with a close-shaven head and a ring through her nose swaddles a mauve shawl around herself like the wings of a bat at rest. Lizzie leans forward and takes a long sip of her orange juice, shutting out the sight of them. The whole place is a menagerie.

  But then she looks up, only to see the goblin man turn from whispering to one of his women friends to give Lizzie a grin, as if he's known she was there all the time and has deliberately decided to acknowledge her. She stares back, her face unmoving, and he gets up and walks over to her, swaggering, grinning at her. He takes a business card from his top pocket and presents it to her. ‘I think we should get acquainted.’

  Lizzie glances at the card. Tom Roberts, Poet and Healer says the card boastfully, with an address and phone number. Lizzie stares ahead and pushes the card into the slick of water that her icy glass has left on the table. ‘Come and see me some time,’ says the goblin man. He winks and returns to his table at the front.