A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  Already I was planning how I could get Catherine to kiss me. She was standing in my room looking around at all my childish things, her hands in her pockets.

  ‘Come for a walk in the forest,’ I said.

  It was a way of getting close to her. And I wanted experience . . . sex . . . all the things my classmates boasted about. I was seventeen years old and eager for everything.

  A forest is so intricate it takes intimacy with it to know how to look at the maze of plants entwined like serpents: twisted, coiled, sinuous, insinuating. A rainforest is artful and curled and wild. It is the wildness I love most of all. It takes time to know it and love it, to see properly what it is.

  There was no path; we meandered where the plants would allow us, and the wait-a-while clutched at us and clasped a toothed tendril across Catherineh bare arm. I disentangled her, and beads of blood sprang to the surface of her skin. I placed my finger on one and put it to my tongue; it tasted salty, of blood and sweat both, not unpleasant.

  ‘You shouldn't do that,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Put other people's blood in your mouth. Or even touch it, these days. What are you, a vampire?’

  I wiped my finger on my shorts.

  ‘How old are you, Laura?’

  ‘Seventeen.’ I put out my hand and touched her on the shoulder. I touched her tattoo, the tiny moon and stars.

  ‘I like girls,’ I said stupidly. I could see at once that she knew what I was getting at.

  ‘Since when? How long have you known?’

  ‘All my life.’ It was the first time I'd said it, even to myself, but I knew it was true, just as I'd known all along that Claudio wasn't Lizzie's father.

  ‘What do you want?’ She asked it kindly.

  ‘I want to kiss you.’ And then I leaned over and licked the place where she had her tattoo, licked her on the bare shoulder.

  ‘You hardly know me.’

  I was stubbornly silent.

  ‘I'm twenty-two. A lot older than you. And I have a girlfriend. Love's not easy Laura, you'll find that out.’

  ‘I don't want love,’ I said. At that time it was true. I wanted experience. Anything.

  She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Not yet. But you will. Sooner or later that's what everyone wants.’

  She kissed me anyway, and I was grateful for that. I loved everything about her: her lips, tongue, the taste of her. I discovered that you can love simply the physical fact of someone, every little secret bit of them. I slid my hands down the back of her jeans and felt her hips swell out below her waist. She had two dimples there, and I put my fingers over them and felt how they fitted exactly, as if she was made for me.

  Afterwards, above everything, I wanted to tell Lizzie what had happened - it was so strange and wonderful and unexpected. I parked the car out the front and floated on the lightest of feet up the overgrown path to her garage. There was honeysuckle sprawled all over one side of the building; it flopped over the door at the side and made a curtain of flowers. We often left the door open even when we were out, and it was open now.

  It happened in the time it takes for a moth to flex its wings: a long, slow moment, a gathering together of potential before flight. I stood with my face full of flowers but they didn't block my vision.

  Lizzie and Al lay naked on the bed, their legs intertwined. And Lizzie looked at him with such a wondering tender expression on her face, a look so full of lightness and love that I stopped breathing. With that look on her face she leaned down and gently kissed the inside of his arm.

  Kissed him on that pale, defenceless part, the part that seldom sees the light, that is like a fish's belly, or a lizard's: soft, private, vulnerable.

  Ugly, graceless Al, Axolotl Al, Al who recoiled from his own reflection in the mirror with flailing arms.

  She kissed him with a look on her face that I'd never seen before. I'd never seen Lizzie look at me that way, with such intensity and adoration and astonishment.

  I stood for a fleeting moment in the doorway with the gold and white of honeysuckle flowers in my face before fleeing, not knowing where I would go. I only knew that I had lost her.

  I found myself on the path to the lighthouse. I stopped briefly to put my forehead against the roughness of a tree trunk, waiting for the blood in my head to stop pounding. It didn't, and I almost ran up the rest of the steep path and sat on a seat looking out at the sea. I felt numb, and dead, and sad. I think that had anyone seen my face it would have looked blank. But I had my face turned to the sea and the sky; the murky, treacherous waves and the darkening clouds reflected what was inside me.

  I had always thought, from the first, that Lizzie was all mine. I thought that I was her. Even after I looked in the mirror at the age of ten and saw that I wasn't I still somehow didn't believe it. But I knew now that she wasn't part of me; we were finally and irrevocably separate.

  When I was a child I was p e n a kaleidoscope that didn't contain the usual brightly-coloured fragments of glass. This one was made entirely of mirrors, and it made patterns from whatever you looked at.

  I was fascinated by it. I aimed it at everything I could find. And having looked minutely at beetles and leaves and pebbles and water, I discovered Lizzie, and I examined her to see what patterns she would make. Her eye became a myriad of eyes, her mouth a carpet of plump pink hills. She was so decorative that I probed almost every part of her that I decently could and exclaimed in wonder. Her hair! Fingernails! Her big toe! I peered through the tube at the intricate mysteries of her curved ear, and I even attempted to look at her nostrils but she pushed me away with an exasperated sound that was the closest she ever got to being angry with me. ‘Oh, Laura, just quit it!’

  When I could stay away no longer, I returned in the dark. Lizzie was alone by then, and I waited for her to speak, to confide in me, but she didn't tell me a thing. We made dinner together and talked, but nothing was said.

  That night was New Year's Eve, and everywhere I went I watched for Catherine. The streets were filled with people, music, noise, candle-lit lanterns. Lizzie and I didn't usually drink, but we bought cans of rum and Coke and drank them sitting on the white-painted fence that fronted the beach.

  I wondered when Lizzie would tell me about Al, or if she would ever tell me about him. I wondered where he was now, and why he hadn't stayed. But I didn't say anything, and she didn't even notice I wasn't talking. We sat on the fence, and I felt apart from her.

  The beach was filled with people walking along the sand, or curled up together waiting for the fireworks to begin. I kept scanning the crowd for Catherine, looking for her beautiful shorn head. Once or twice I thought I saw her - someone who could be her - but it never was.

  We sat down on the dry sand, just above the tide line. In front of us stretched the endless sea and sky, and the moon reflected a path on the water like a shimmering yellow road. We didn't speak.

  All I could hear was the waves. At midnight, when the first fireworks burst overhead and filled the sky with sparks, Lizzie stood up and walked into the sea.

  She made her way out into the waves, never looking back, as if the moon was calling her. Her dress was drenched; she submerged in a wave and came out again, water running through her hair. The sea moved up and down as though breathing. For a moment she stood with the water rocking about her and the moon floating above.

  She raised her arms in a gesture of release and lightness, and I thought that she might ascend into the sky and float away

  The Secret History

  IT IS the early 1970s. My mother, Emma (to set the scene, so you can picture her), is leaning out the window of a room she is renting in an old shopfront terrace near the university She loves this room, though it is small, and the paint is peeling away in broad flakes and the floor has boards that are unpolished and therefore ingrained with dirt and impossible to clean. Not that Emma tries very hard to clean them. Cleaning isn't, and will never be, her strong point.

  She loves her small square
room with the peeling white paint and the Free Angela Davis poster that the previous occupant has left stuck on the wall and which she hasn't bothered to take down. Emma is very much in the mood to simply let things be. She allows biscuits to go soft in their packets but she eats them anyway; she's been known to eat mouldy bread without noticing. In those days she had her mind on higher things.

  So, she's leaning out the window with her mind on higher things: namely, how wonderful every moment of life is, how much to be savoured and treasured. To see the distant city skyline she has to lean right out and peer down the brick-walled canyon between the back of her house and the house next door. She loves the sight of the growing outcrop of skyscrapers with a dozen metal cranes nodding on top of them.

  If she looks down to the ground and not out to the city she can see her own back path of crumbling uneven bricks leading to the outdoor dunny, and the timber fence that separates her path from the path of the house next door. Beyond the dunny the yard is covered with waist-high grass and a choko vine covers the back fence. Emma leans and leans from her window, sighing with satisfaction, breathing the world in with each breath and sucking up the view with her eyes as if she can't get enough of it.

  By the age of twenty my mother had lost everyone close to her. Her father when she was two. Great Aunt Em when she was sixteen. A year later her sister Beth. And then, just two years afterwards - from shock, Emma thought - her mother succumbed to cancer.

  Perhaps that was why our mother loved us all so much, why she was always so fearful for our safety. ‘Oh, be carejd!’ was the cry that followed us everywhere. It was her mantra, her magic spell to ward off the danger and certain death she was sure was always following us.

  Emma agreed with the solicitor to sell the family home and put the money in trust for her (it was added to the money from Great Aunt Em's place: a tidy sum), and then found a room to rent in a place near the university. I am an orphan, she told herself melodramatically. An orphan and an heiress. Making such an image for herself helped her to be strong. It explains her apparent heartlessness. She grieved for her mother; of course she grieved. But she was a girl alone in a big city, an orphan (and an heiress!) and she was determined to make the most of it.

  For her first two years at university she had commuted on the train in her pleated wool skirt and hand-knitted jumper, clutching her briefcase. On her mother's advice, she had not enrolled in art school, but was studying for a sensible BA: literature and history and politics.

  The first thing she did after her mother died was throw out the pleated wool skirts. She almost threw out the hand-knitted jumpers as well, but prudently kept them at the last moment when she remembered the cold of winter. She bought two more pairs of jeans and two maroon T-shirts, and that was what she wore for the rest of her time at university.

  Two other people lived in her new house; they were both men, but they were rarely home, so Emma mostly had the place to herself. The men were socialists; the woman who'd had Emma's room before her had organised women's liberation meetings to be held there, and the meetings continued to be held in the house after she left. The shopfront room and a room immediately behind it were given over to radical activity. Sometimes the place hummed with people, but mostly it was cool and dark and quiet, and Emma moved quietly from her bedroom to the red-painted kitchen downstairs like a ghost.

  Her room was uncurtained. In the afternoons the sun flooded in and filled her white room with uninhibited light. As well as the Angela Davis poster, the previous occupant had also left behind a hairy old Greek rug, and Emma sat on this in the afternoons in underpants and singlet and made sketches of people she'd noticed during the day. She sat in a compact way, her knees drawn close to her face, her drawing paper on the floor beside her, or sometimes balanced on her knees.

  She collected paper to draw on, of different weights and textures. She even tore the sides off cardboard boxes she found at the supermarket because she liked the thickness and colour and the ridged surface, which changed the nature of the things she drew. Surface was everything, she thought. She liked the way images could be built up on the page, layer upon layer.

  So she sat in her room, and the sun warmed her naked legs, and her nostrils were full of the sharp smell of paper and the sweet, cloymg scent of her own skin. She must have been a singular figure, sitting curled in the centre of a grimy wool rug in a small white box of a room in an old house near the centre of the city She was all alone in the world, but she tried not to think about that: this room was her home, her refuge, her enclosing womb.

  Her life was simple. She went to classes. She visited friends. She came home and cooked scrappy meals from a stash of food she kept in a cupboard that smelt of stale bread and sour cheese. To her unassuming mind she was living a life of unrestricted freedom.

  There was a child in the house next door, a little girl who played in the passageway at the back. From her window Emma could see her sitting cross-legged with a black kitten on her lap, talking to it. ‘No, I said no!’ she scolded the kitten, obviously echoing what someone had said to her. ‘You say yes, but I say no!'

  Emma had no view of the house on the other side which shared the wall where the staircase ran. There were children in that house too, and she heard them running up and down the stairs all day, with the lightness of step and of heart that is natural only to children. It lifted her spirits to hear their joyful footsteps, just as it saddened her to watch the child on the other side who played alone with her yes-saying kitten.

  One day, when she was sitting at the window at her desk, she glanced up and saw a man in the room opposite. She saw that he was young, and had olive skin and a five o'clock shadow. He was naked from the waist up and had a towel slung over his shoulder. They held each other's eyes for a moment before Emma looked away.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, coming to the window and leaning his hands on the sill. ‘How are you going?’ He had dark eyes; his face was expressive and handsome. Emma's eyes were drawn to the mass of black hairs on his chest.

  ‘I'm all right,’ she said, carefully and politely.

  The man looked at her appraisingly ‘Looks like we're neighbours. I've just moved in.’

  Emma smiled coolly and attempted to ignore him, pretending to work, though that was now impossible.

  You a student?’ he called out.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Writing an essay,’ she said stiffly ‘On anarchism,’ she added, not wanting to sound too unfriendly.

  ‘Bomb-throwing,’ said the man.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Emma. She attended to her book and did not look up again, and he went away, whistling.

  Emma rooted around in her things and found a damask tablecloth, something of her mother's that she'd kept, and attached it above her window with long drawing pins. She couldn't have an uncurtained window with a man living opposite, especially not a man who seemed inclined to lean on the sill talking if he saw you there at your desk. She pulled back the curtain when she thought he wouldn't be there, and the rest of the time the light of her white room was filtered through the intricately woven ivory-coloured cloth.

  Some of the people Emma knew lived in a house at the end of the point, right on the water. It was an old mansion on the verge of being pulled down, and was surrounded by the rubble of houses that had already been demolished. It had an unrestricted view of the bay a place teeming with the life of industry: factories on the facing foreshore and tugboats and ships loaded with containers on the water. She would sit on the verandah that wrapped round the house, admiring the mechanical nature of it all; she ran her fingers round the edges of the loose tiles on the floor of the verandah and mourned that their beauty would soon be crushed and bulldozed with the rest of the rubble.

  At night the water was festooned with lights, and that was lovely too. Emma couldn't decide which was the nicest place to sit: outside, with the delicious chill of wind off the water and the splendour of the lights, or inside, where everyone s
at around a great fire that roared every night in the fireplace in the centre of the living room. The house had been built for people with grand aspirations; the living room was more like a ballroom, but now it was filled with the scrappy furniture that was all that students could muster in the way of home furnishings.

  Emma visited at first because she knew a few people in the house vaguely; it was the kind of place where no one asked why you were there. You could just go and hang out and no one asked questions. Emma liked the place, and then she started visiting more often because Claudio lived there.

  He was a few years older than Emma and he was from Melbourne; both these things made him immediately more exotic. After an initial degree in anthropology he'd come to Sydney to attend the Film and Television School, where he was studying directing. He told her that he was escaping from his claustrophobic Italian family and made her laugh with disbelief at tales of their excesses of love and anger. She loved his striking Italian looks and his ready laugh; he laughed with her and sometimes at her and she found that kind of undivided attention intoxicating, even though he just as readily gave his attention to other people. Living alone in her white room, Emma needed a little of his warmth. She needed the warmth of that great house and the magic that seemed to envelop it.

  Claudio had girlfriends. It seemed he had lots of them, because Emma met different ones all the time. But they were all the same type, virtually interchangeable. The grls Claudio favoured were slender and feminine and had beautiful madonna-like faces, and long fair hair. They wafted (or so it seemed to Emma) into Claudio's bedroom and out again, in and out of the kitchen or bathroom, on delicate bare feet, their long dresses sweeping the ground. If they smiled, which was rarely, it was a smile of such tender gravity that it would break your heart.