A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  A girl comes in with a carpet snake draped around her shoulders. Heads turn, but she pretends not to notice. She makes her way languidly to the front of the cafe and to the goblin man's table. She has knowing, slanted eyes, and she fondles the snake absently as she speaks to him. Then she draws up a chair and sits down, and the goblin man reaches round her shoulder and gives her a squeeze. And all this time the snake is draped passively around her. It is unusually sluggish - is it blind, or drugged, or sick? Lizzie watches, horrified that a snake, a wild creature that should be free, is being worn like just another accessory.

  Lizzie can't tear her gaze away from the snake girl's bare back, revealed by a halter top. Her dark, frizzy hair comes halfway down it, and the goblin man is tracing a pattern lightly over her skin, again and again and again, the lightest of touches; Lizzie wants to scream with irritation, for she can feel her own skin crawling. The snake girl pays him no attention at all; it is as if nothing is happening to her, but she doesn't move away either. She is as passive as the snake.

  Then the goblin man (Tom Roberts, Poet and Healer!) goes to the microphone. He grins and stands there in his ridiculous hat. ‘I am going to recite a love poem,’ he says, and he begins, but it is so disgusting that Lizzie's fingers twitch, and, unconsciously gripping the card he has given her, flicking and bending it in annoyance, she scrapes her chair back and leaves without looking back, leaves the whole lot of them, the snake girl, the fox, the toad, and the goblin man, whose words follow her, and seem to trail behind her all the way down the street.

  That evening, late, Lizzie cranks up her amp to its loudest. She lets the notes rip through the night. She wants distortion and feedback and out-and-out destruction. She can feel the music bouncing through her chest as she plays, rippling up and down her body; she plays angrily and broods on her knowledge that to be a girl is to be faced irrevocably with your own unimportance. For in truth Lizzie wants to play like Jimi Hendrix; she wants to be Jimi Hendrix, but she is only a sweet young girl with a long fair plait and legs that people always stare at. She's a girl, she's white, she comes from Mullumbimby, and she knows she stands not a hope in the world of anyone taking her or her music seriously.

  And now Claudio comes roaring and bellowing into the room, and demands that she turn the bloody thing off, and Lizzie rips the cord from the amp and, carrylng her guitar as it is, cord dangling uselessly, she heads out into the night.

  She left the house on impulse but hows she'll find refuge at Al's place, so she strides confidently along the dark streets. Al is Lizzie's only real friend. She doesn't like girls, not really; they don't share her passion. She and Al have nothing in common either, apart from obsession itself (hers for guitars, Al's for books) and a certainty of their own strangeness and apartness from everyone else.

  Al looks up as she appears at his window and does his startled movement, elbows flylng everywhere and shoulders twitching. But he manages to get to his feet and, without saying a word, Lizzie hands the guitar through to him and clambers in after it.

  ‘Can I stay the night? It's a demand, not a question. Lizzie looks around her. ‘Don't you have a spare bed?’

  Since she's been to his house innumerable times, she should know that he doesn't, but Lizzie's not good at noticing such things. They stay up a while longer, Al reading a thick volume of the collected plays of William Shakespeare and Lizzie plinking quietly at her guitar. Al haunts places that sell old books and has collected enough reading matter for a lifetime. He buys books on anything as long as they're cheap: the rules of tennis, which he doesn't play, and fairy tales, and Euclidian geometry. Lizzie thinks he buys them for the titles, sometimes, or the smell, for he certainly doesn't read them all. She suspects that he simply likes the word Euclidian, that it holds some magical promise for him; she feels that way about particular combinations of notes, though she's never actually put them into a tune.

  When he's absorbed in a book his usually ugly face takes on a kind of beauty, and Lizzie, at those times, loves him more than anyone in the world. He's a genius, she thinks, admiringly, as she strums her guitar softly Without an amp, her electric guitar sounds like an insect lost in the bottom of a box and searching for a way out. She thinks of the glory of the music she made earlier, when the notes of her guitar tore through the night and stung Claudio into a rage.

  Eventually they get into Al's bed, Lizzie's head at the top, Al's at the bottom. Lizzie slides in next to Al's pale, thin body His feet are endearingly like a pair of scaled fish next to her face, and she lies awake for a long time, staring at the shape of her guitar, which seems naked and vulnerable propped there without its protective case. She thinks of the snake girl and the goblin man, and how her skin would erupt with irritation, if anyone were to touch her like that.

  ‘Lizzie stayed the night,’ Al tells his mother the next morning. ‘But you don't need to worry, nothing happened.’

  Al's mother spends her days in bed. Mostly she sleeps. She has slept and slept since they ran away from his father two years ago. Al is pleased they left, because the violence that was once part of their lives has also gone. But he worries about her and her inability to do anything any more.

  He looks after her tenderly. He brings her cups of tea, and food, though he often finds the tea still in the cup and cold, the food congealed. He takes the ATM card from her purse and shops for them and pays the rent. Some of his own student allowance goes towards this too. He buys her little gifts: plastic frogs, which he has decided she collects. It's nice to have a mother with an interest. He buys her cakes of nice-smelling soap, and she smiles and puts them under her pillow. On good days she gets up and showers and he finds her in the living room reading a magazine.

  In whimsical moments Al says that he is really an axolotl. That's what Al is short for, he says, it's the first and last letters of his real name. Lizzie saw him catch sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. He hissed at his reflection with narrowed eyes and made clawing motions with his hands. Now he and Lizzie sit together on the back step eating toast and honey in the morning sunshine, Al with his long body stretched out. ‘Warming myself up on my rock,’ he says, ‘so I can get going for the day’

  Al sees himself as lizard-like and unattractive. He has a long, pale body, a freckled face, and strong, sandy hairs sprouting from his legs. But Lizzie sees the beauty in him. There is a sensuality in Al of a kind that Lizzie recognises, for she's noticed it in herself, a sensuality that has nothing to do with another person, or love, or sex, just with the pleasure of responding to the world.

  But lately, certain things have disturbed her, such as the goblin man stroking the girl's bare back at the poetry cafe. And she remembers that first night she and Laura went out to walk in the dark, how Laura took hold of her and unexpectedly kissed her. Her sister's mouth, soft and childish and innocent, was so unexpected and lovely that she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand at the memory.

  ‘So,’ says Al, sitting up and stretching. ‘What happened last night?’

  Lizzie shakes her head. ‘I don't know. Some stupid fight with Claudio.’

  Al squeezes his eyes shut and lifts his pale face to the sun with a smile so that it is like a flower unfolding. ‘I don't mind you coming over,’ he says, ‘but if you do it too often, I'll need another bed.’

  Lizzie has something hidden. Something under her shirt. A secret wound. A piercing. Her bellybutton now has a slim gold ring inserted in it, and it gently weeps and festers. This pleases Lizzie, for she has always felt a hurt somewhere about herself and now it has been made manifest.

  She has found that pain can be exquisite, a secret knowledge that sustains you. Lizzie has grown fond of her wound. She examines it briefly in the washroom at school and applies more ointment and goes off to console herself with her guitar.

  At a loose end, she discovers the goblin man's card in the bottom of her bag. It is as creased and crinkled as his face. Tom Roberts, Poet and Healer, it says.

  The house is a small timber
cottage in the tail end of one of the shopping streets. Lizzie pauses and takes in the peeling paintwork and the tattered Indian flag that serves as a curtain in the front window before striding up the front path between yellowing palm trees. A frangipani has dropped fragrant pink flowers onto the ground and she feels their fleshiness beneath the thin soles of her sandals. The door is open and Lizzie knocks. She feels no nervousness as she hears footsteps responding; she feels not even curiosity, just a strange kind of anger and a power she's never felt before.

  When he comes to the door, she refuses to register the speculative look on his face; she simply stands without speaking and lets him say, ‘Well . . .’ and then, ‘Come in . . .’

  She follows him down a hallway with small darkened rooms on either side. At the rear of the house is a long enclosed verandah with a kitchen at one end. He motions her to a battered couch, but she ignores the offer and glances dismissively towards a large painting that hangs on the end wall, so thick with paint that it almost looks like a relief sculpture.

  ‘That's an awful waste of paint,’ she says tartly.

  He grins at her. ‘Tea?’

  They sit outside in a garden that is a tangle of greenery. Lizzie sips her tea and glances at him and finds herself looking into his eyes and responding to his wrinkled smile. She begm to feel afraid of her own impulses, and wonders what has brought her there.

  Poet and Healer his card says. Perhaps she wants healing, and thinks that in some obscure way he could help.

  Lizzie makes her way to Tom Roberts's house again and again. She is repelled and fascinated by him, by the way he appears to both mock and yearn for her. She grows familiar with his squat metal teapot stained with a stripe of tannin below the spout and resists the urge to clean it off. She sits on the floor in the square of morning sunlight that comes through the back door, gazing out at the garden. He has other young women visit him, she knows. Sometimes she catches the heady scent of ylang ylang oil, and fancies that bare brown feet and a jangling anklet have just whisked out the door. She learns that someone named Jamila has planted the herb garden among a radiating circle of bricks in the back yard. But it is dry and lifeless and no one waters it any longer, and she suspects that Jamila is long gone. She finds the teapot scrubbed clean one day and wonders who has cleaned it.

  Sometimes other people are there, drinking coffee, smoking dope, listening to music. Tom Roberts entertains them all, he dances around playing host, his laughter bouncing round the thin timber walls. He does magic tricks, pulling coins from behind people's ears. Lizzie sees him watching her from across the room, seeming to consider her possibilities. Lizzie can bear his gaze, for she feels she's in control. She stares back, unsmiling. She doesn't want him, she doesn't even like him particularly.

  Lizzie prefers it when she finds him there alone. She doesn't know what she wants from him. And what does he want from her? His look of secret triumph each time he finds her at the door troubles her. She vows each time not to come back. But she always does. She despises his scrawny chest with greying hairs and the way he gets around without a shirt. Despite his being thin, there is a bulge of flabby skin over the waistband of his jeans.

  He reads his poems to her sometimes, watching her face, observing her reaction closely She thinks his poems paltry, but stops herself from saying so. Kindness is a habit with her.

  There is an ambiguous struggle going on between them. Who has the upper hand? Neither of them knows. He often looks at her with something like a leer. She affects not to notice. She emanates scorn.

  ‘You're getting pretty, Lizzie,’ he tells her one day He playfully squeezes her waist in passing, putting his hand under her shirt. His fingers pass across the metal ring and stop there. This is the first time he has ever touched her. ‘What's this, Lizzie? A pierced bellybutton? I didn't think you were the type.’

  Lizzie removes his hand and adjusts her shirt. ‘What type?’ she says coolly. ‘Is there a type?’

  Later, when she collects her bag, the wordless signal that she is leaving, he brings out a jar and opens the lid. It is filled with dark liquid and squashy, shapeless objects. ‘A present,’ he says. ‘Try one.’

  She laughs. Her scorn is genuine. ‘My parents ate those back in the seventies.’

  ‘I'll give you some for later. A gift.’ He extracts two tiny mushrooms and puts them in a plastic sandwich bag. ‘Preserved in honey What could be purer?’

  He hands it to her with a flourish.

  She bestows a luminous, insincere smile on him. He smiles back at her, blissfully, too eagerly, closing his eyes and savouring the moment with a sweet, sad expression on his face. It's like smiling at babies, she thinks. You don't even have to mean it and the fools always smile back.

  Still, she remembers the way Tom Roberts's hands have touched her, discovering her hurt, her secret wound. She remembers the feel of his roughened fingers on the soft flesh of her waist and, days later, when she sees Claudio's fingers slide inside the opening at the side of the loose overalls Stella is wearing, she walks away in disgust.

  She goes to see Al. She's been neglecting him, and now she needs him.

  ‘Can I show you something?’ she asks, and without waiting for his reply she lifts her shirt to reveal the gold ring in its bed of weeping flesh.

  ‘Lizzie!’ says Al, coming over to peer at the wound through his glasses. ‘Why on earth did you do that?’

  She becomes enthralled by food. She sits in a cafe alone, imbibing iced chocolate and carrot cake with cream cheese icing. She sucks up the sweet dark liquid, licks cream from her lips, and lets her fork fall through the soft cake. Scooping it up, she allows the cake to remain in her mouth for long moments before swallowing. Her experience is intense and private.

  Food becomes her religion. She bows her head before slicing a mango with a knife, one cheek at a time. The act is at once a submission and a sacrifice. She eats watermelon and spits the seeds slowly into the ferns, leaning over the verandah in a silent communion with the ground.

  She ambushes food; she becomes a mistress of tactics. She walks casually past the fruit bowl, reaching out at the last moment to seize a banana. She takes grapes by surprise, standing under the vine lost in thought, then reaching suddenly upwards to tear away a bunch before it can anticipate the attack. She retreats to the shrubbery to eat each grape carefully, squeezing the flesh into her puckered mouth and discarding the skins for the ants.

  Her body becomes lush and full, reminiscent of the fruit and cream she feeds it with. Her breasts grow round and ripe and heavy. Her haunches are smooth and curved, plump and delicious-looking. She stands naked before the mirror and turns around to appraise them, running her fingers appreciatively over the line of her waist and hips before slipping a slinky frock over the top. Her stomach is no longer concave. It swells delicately below her bellybutton. The wound has healed and she wears clothes that expose the small gold ring and the soft mound of her belly. She surveys herself in the mirror and likes what she sees.

  It has come into her consciousness that you can be someone other than your dull self. You can become whoever you want to be simply by pretending. You can play-act, and it is for real. Slither out of your old skin and take on another. She studies other girls, other women. At a party, one of those flirty, flighty parties that Claudio drags them to, she sees a girl who isn't pretty but can make people believe she is. She wears a skimpy black top and a black velvet stole round her shoulders. Lizzie watches as the girl weaves between the crowd of people, watches as the girl looks lingeringly over her shoulder at no one in particular and slowly lowers the stole to reveal one plump, creamy shoulder.

  Lizzie, as beautiful as the day, bites her bottom lip and holds her breath. She watches and learns. She has always bought clothes but has simply worn them. Now she sees that you can do more with them than that. You can become someone other.

  For a time she becomes bolder and more expansive, especially when she isn't at home with her mother. In the house in Mullumbimb
y she flings the windows open to the night with a broad sweep of her arms, embracing the darkness. She spends long steamy sessions in the shower and then walks about the house with only a towel wrapped around her, leaning from the windows in the living room to brush out her damp hair, shaking it and letting the breeze whip it until it crackles dry She is forever hangng out of windows, as if houses are too small to contain her. She pulls the long blonde hairs from her hairbrush and, wrapped only in a too-small towel, leans outside on tiptoes and scatters the strands to the four winds.

  She has grown plump and beautiful but she still wears her hair in a chaste plait. She returns to Tom Roberts's house again and again, never knowing what it is she wants. She hasn't eaten the mushrooms he's given her. He never touches her again.

  She wants to do something with all this ripeness. ‘Kiss me,’ she says to Al one day, and he complies, pressing his mouth childishly to hers. It is a strange, sexless, unerotic kiss, but it leaves them both shaken, for it has shifted the ground between them and it will take a long time for them to regard each other as they had before.

  ‘We shouldn't have done that,’ says Al, returning to his book, his neck suffused with red. ‘You shouldn't do that to me, Lizzie.’

  She is heartless. She leaves him and goes straight to St Vinnies, where she tries on clothes out on the open floor of the shop, ignoring the way people stare at her. She pulls on dowdy floral rayon dresses that grow instantly glamorous when they connect with her body Frivolous net petticoats gain in stature and acquire a gravitas they've only dreamed of. Everything looks wonderful on her. Ancient unwanted clothes made from lace and satin she adds to the pile that grows on the floor. She scoops the lot up in her arms and strides to the counter and buys them all for a song.