Emma wasn't this type. She wore jeans and T-shirts and desert boots sternly and sensibly. She was boylshly handsome; she couldn't have looked like a madonna if she'd tried.
She had never told anyone at university about her family She never talked about her mother's death. It might have been better for her if she had told. This was the start of Emma's not saying things, of keeping everything to herself. She knew that if she started to mourn it would become an unstoppable torrent, so she chose the way of stoicism. And stories.
Tell a story, any story, and people will think they have something of you. ‘Tell us about yourself, Emma,’ said someone one day So she told Claudio and his friends about the Aubergines, the strange and horrible and wonderful family she had known as a child. She was even so bold as to give their real name; she thought, in such a big city, what did it matter? It was Claudio who began calling them ‘the Aubergines', to make them even more absurd, so she called them that too. She had begun to see her early life as something that hadn't really happened to her, and which could be shaped and rearranged into a story to entertain people, to deflect them, even, from the real things that preoccupied her.
‘Tell us about the Aubergines, Emma,’ Claudio would say lazily, lolling in front of the fire, his hand absent-mindedly on the waist, or the breast, of his latest madonna.
And Emma would tell. At first their absurd names were the greatest source of amusement to her listeners, but what had seemed like their strange ways when she was younger seemed tame, now. So she invented things. She had them dressing in Greek robes and dancing in their back yard in the moonlight. She gave their house the black chequered tiles from Aunt Em's, and in her story Mrs Aubergine always wore a long velvet coat (like Flora's) to school open days along with a large red hat (that much was real) and embarrassed her children beyond belief. Emma had read somewhere that the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had kept peacocks in his garden in London, so the Aubergines acquired a pair of peacocks that perched in their frangipani tree and screamed until someone brought them out some bread. In an antique shop near her house she'd seen a collection of small glass spheres containing flowers made of coloured glass (she'd learned the name: millefiore, ‘a thousand flowers') and in her story the Aubergines had these paperweights lying everywhere and thought nothing of picking one up and hurling it at another family member if they annoyed them. Several windows in their house were broken.
She felt a sense of treachery and shame, telling stories about a family who, after all, had been her friends. They had lived a life that defied the convention of Australian suburbs in the 1960s, eating what was then considered strange food, reading so many books. It was the sort of life that Emma felt might have been hers if her father had lived, for wasn't he eccentric, with his bushwalking gear and love of trees and solitary wanderings?
She could have spoken of the moments of epiphany she'd had at Aunt Em's, but that was one story she didn't share with Claudio and the others round the fire. She kept that one for us.
Sometimes Claudio looked at her speculatively. One day, when she was sitting with him on his verandah, he gave her such a look. ‘White socks!’ he said, wonderingly. ‘I don't know anyone else who wears white socks.’
Emma felt young and absurdly foolish. The white socks were a legacy of her mother's taste but she'd been too lazy and thrifty to throw them out.
‘Do you know what?’ said Claudio softly. ‘You need a boyfriend, Emma.’ He often patronised her like this, and she put up with it, because already, though she hadn't admitted it to herself, she loved him too much. When she was with him she felt a sense of rightness, as if they were made of the same stuff. Each time she arrived at his house it was with a breathless feeling of hope that he would be at home.
‘But you need to dress up a bit,’ he went on. ‘Tell you what. Muddy Waters is in town in a couple of weeks - you know who he is?’
Emma shook her head. She was woefully ignorant of things. She'd even stopped listening to pop music on her transistor radio.
‘He's an old blues guy from the States. One of the best. Give me some money and I'll get you a ticket. And dress up for it.’
What Emma came up with was a pair of blue velvet trousers that she found at a second-hand shop. They had narrow legs and hugged her slim hips. She found a pair of long black boots in the same shop. She didn't look for a blouse, because secretly, in her heart, though she hadn't yet admitted it to herself (and Emma was good at not admitting things to herself), she knew the blouse that she would wear.
In the bottom of the old chest of drawers in her white room were some things she'd saved from her old home, things she never looked at. The damask tablecloth had come from there. Emma eased the drawer open and slipped her fingers to the very bottom of the drawer and pulled out a bundle of cloth. It was a blouse that had belonged to Beth, and Emma had kept it because she liked it, and because it still smelled of her sister. She took it into the bathroom where there was a scabbed, dull mirror, and without glancing into it she pulled off her maroon T-shirt, and her bra, and slipped on the blouse.
It was utterly transparent. She could see her nipples through the fabric. But they were pretty nipples. She had pretty little breasts. You could see them clearly on either side of the embroidery down the front.
Emma was a modest person. She hadn't wanted the man in the room opposite to be able to see her getting dressed. She hadn't even wanted him to see her sitting at her desk in her private struggle with her essays. But this was different. This was dressing up. She thought that Claudio might like it.
The meetings that were held in Emma's house often made her head spin. People sat around on the bare floor of the shopfront room on cushions or on ancient brown sofas. They ate chocolate and smoked cigarettes and the discussions got very heated. Emma never said much; she was too unsure of what she thought and too intimidated by the people with strong views. The talk was sometimes about politics, about new ways of organising society, about socialism and the Vietnam war. And then there was talk about the politics of housework, and about whether women should wear makeup and shave their legs and under their arms. Emma was safe on the make-up front (she didn't), but she always kept her arms firmly to her sides and her legs resolutely covered by jeans (she did shave).
There was a book that had been published in the United States called The Dialectic ofsex, and on the front cover was the warning that Chapter 6 will change your life! Several of the women had a copy.
Chapter 6 was about love. It said that people fall in love because of some perceived deficiency in themselves that the other person will supply. It said that people who are happy and involved in their lives didn't fall in love - who ever heard of someone falling in love the week before they went on an overseas trip?
The women related tales to each other of times they'd been in love, men who'd disappointed them, or been out-and-out bastards. At times they rolled about on the floor with laughter, or let tears flow as they relived painful experiences. ‘I always fall in love with bastards,’ said one girl, not much older than Emma, and Emma felt woefully under-experienced. She kept her mouth firmly shut, but she was all ears. She was still a hopeless romantic. Deep down she believed in the man who would come into her life and fulfil all her dreams. Remember that she was only a few years older than the Emma who'd taken Marx's Das Kapital to Aunt Em's and never got around to reading it. She was the Emma who lay in the grass and dreamed about love.
There was a meeting in the front room on the night of the Muddy Waters concert. Emma had no intention of walking past all those curious eyes on her way out.
She dressed quickly, pulling on the velvet trousers (they weren't merely trousers, they were breeches!) and then the boots, tucking the breeches into the top of them. The blouse slipped over her shoulders like a mist; she looked anxiously at the transparency of the fabric. She had no make-up, but she bit her lips and shoved her short dark hair behind her ears. From behind her door she seized a dun-brown duffle coat, pulled it on,
and prepared to escape the house.
People had already started to arrive for the meeting. She heard footsteps clattering in the hallway below and the continual banging echo of the front door as it opened and shut. She flew down the stairs and strode, big-booted, down the hall to the kitchen, which had been painted blood red with enamel paint; it flashed past her like a dream of carnage as she skipped down the back steps and along the uneven brick path to the darkness of the backyard.
Beyond the dunny she was safe. With her breeches tucked into her boots, her coat flashing like a cape and the moon flying overhead, she felt in her breathless anticipation like a highwayman or an outlaw. In the back laneway skinny cats scattered. She felt hot from all the rushing and went back to sling the duffle coat over the back fence. On the main road lighted buses ambled past, as transparent as fish tanks. She felt self-conscious as she clambered onto a bus and noticed people either look her way and keep staring, or glance away quickly.
As she looked for Claudio among the crowd of people at the theatre she began to laugh. She used to sneak away from her mother and secretly put on blue jeans and attend women's meetings, and now here she was stealing away from those meetings, ashamed of attempting to look dashing, beautiful, glamorous!
But when she saw Claudio her anticipation was squashed at once. He was there with one of his wafting madonnas. ‘Oh there you are, Emma. Nice boots!’
Well, I don't know what Claudio said, but I imagine my mother swallowing her disappointment (did she really think she'd be going out with him alone?) and trailing behind the pair of them into the theatre, feeling absurd after all.
At the end of the concert, when they were milling about at the entrance deciding how they'd get home, someone touched Emma on the elbow and drew her aside.
‘Emma! Emma Montgomery!’ It was Blake Yeats Aubergine, her old friend Sappho's brother. Emma had drifted apart from Sappho in their last years of school, and had lost contact with the Aubergines altogether. Now here was Blake Yeats, tall and slender and delicate-looking and impossibly romantic in a cream shirt, a satin waistcoat and soft brown corduroy trousers. They hugged each other spontaneously and when Emma turned around at last to look for Claudio, he was watching them with an enigmatic expression on his face.
‘Look, how about coming for a coffee?’ said Blake Yeats Aubergine. ‘Now? I've got a friend's car - I could drive you home afterwards.’
So Emma said goodbye to Claudio and walked off on the arm of Blake Yeats, who had always called himself Bill. It was chilly, so he took her to his car and pulled a long black coat from the back seat and gave it to her to wear. It was the coat of a Russian commissar; it had broad lapels and reached right to the ground and Emma marched along the street in it, hands in pockets. In the coffee shop she shook it off over the back of her chair and leaned towards Bill across the table. The dim lighting made his pupils huge. He said, ‘You know, in that outfit you look like a beautiful young boy That's what I thought you were at first, and when you turned round . . . fancy it being you! Emma!’ He reached across the table and touched her hand.
By the time he drove her home the women's meeting was well and truly finished and her house was dark and silent, and Emma, who'd never even been kissed by anyone ever, invited Bill inside. They made their way in through the echoey front door and down the hall and up the stairs to her square room with the peeling white walls and the hairy Greek rug and the curtain made of her mother's ivory damask tablecloth. And Emma pulled back the tablecloth so that light could come into the room, and they went to bed, bathed in moonlight.
The next morning Emma got up early, put on a short red kimono, and crept down the gritty stairs and along the dusty hallway to the back door. In the half light the red enamel paint of the walls had only a dull sheen. She went down the back path to the dunny The duffle coat she'd thrown over the back fence the night before had been caught and suspended by the strong growth of waist-high kikuyu and lay with arms flung out like a person sprawled face-down. She left it there and crept back inside, switched on the kitchen light and shook Rice Bubbles into a bowl, sprinkling on a lot of sugar and placing her nose to the neck of the bottle before she poured on the milk. In her anticipation the night before she hadn't bothered to eat, and now she perched on a chair and wolfed down the cereal, her legs drawn up under her kimono against the cold.
When she got back to her room Blake Yeats Aubergine was still asleep, the bedclothes pulled up around his neck. He had his arm curled around his head, and Emma wanted to trace with one finger the line of the muscle in his upper arm, hook her little finger into the silver bangle he wore pushed right up there. It was in the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail.
Instead she squatted, knees drawn up again, on the chair at her desk and surveyed her room. It all seemed so much smaller with someone else there in her bed. She didn't feel that she could crawl back in with Blake Yeats, or Bill, as he called himself, so she sat watching him sleep, marvelling at the transparency of the pale skin on his freckled face.
Her clothes from the night before lay where she'd dropped them. Emma reached down and picked up Beth's see-through blouse, putting her face to it automatically. But it no longer smelt of her sister; it didn't even smell of herself. It had a used, unfamiliar odour, of cigarette smoke and her own nervous sweat, a smell Emma didn't particularly identify with herself. It was like anyone else's nervous sweat, sharp and sour.
She folded the blouse neatly, leaned towards the dressing-table, slid open the bottom drawer, and put the shirt into it. She would never wear it again.
The sound of the drawer opening and closing must have woken Bill, for when she turned towards the bed again he was looking at her. ‘Emma,’ he said. ‘What time is it?’
‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘Early’ She wished she wasn't still sitting there in her red kimono, that she'd taken the opportunity of getting dressed while he was still asleep. ‘I think I'll have a shower.’ She grabbed some clothes and went to the bathroom which was right next to her room. She thought of him lying listening to the roar of the old-fashioned gas heater and the water falling into the enamel tub; it seemed too intimate a sound to allow him to hear.
He was dressed by the time she got back to her room. ‘Where's the loo?’ he asked. She went down with him, and retrieved the duffle coat from on top of the kikuyu while he peed. When he came out they stood for a moment on the path in the thin sunlight together without looking at each other.
‘I can give you Rice Bubbles,’ said Emma, leading him into the kitchen nervously ‘I've already had some - or there's some of this bread - it belongs to Lawson - he lives here but he's never home. It's Estonian black bread. It's so dark he says it's like eating chocolate cake with butter . . .’
Bill took the loaf from her and cut a heavy dark slice from the end of the loaf that was as square and dense as a block of wood. ‘This is a quiet house,’ he said, ‘Do you get lonely here?’
‘It's only quiet at the moment,’ she said, ignoring his question about loneliness. It was too close to the bone. ‘There's a women's group meets here, and sometimes some of them come to work on a magazine they put out. The house is often full of people. Lawson's quiet. He lives in the room up the top at the front - he stays with his girlfriend most of the time, to avoid the women I think. He doesn't seem to have much energy - he eats at Chinese restaurants all the time - he thinks it's the MSG - making him have no energy I mean.’
‘What a funny place for you to have found to live,’ said Blake Yeats Aubergine, reaching across and stroking her cheek with one finger. With all your family gone. You're sad, Emma.’
Emma looked at him for a moment and took a breath. ‘The other person who has a room here,’ she went on, ‘owns a radical bookshop. He's really old - at least forty. He just keeps the room here to store books and magazines in; he sleeps here about once a week - I don't know where he sleeps the rest of the time - the floor of his shop, I think. And he's far from quiet. When he arrives he sort of bursts through
the front door like an express train and chuffs his way up the stairs, all fat and unshaven, calling out at the top of his voice, ‘We got busted again, Emma! Emma! We got busted again!’ and rapping on my door on the way past, no matter what time of night it is. The vice squad is always after him for selling what they call obscene literature. One of the magazines he sells is actually called Obscenity. He keeps most of them stored in his room here; that's why he keeps it locked. It's full of Obscenities.'
Blake Yeats Aubergine looked down at the table and laughed. The story Emma was telling him was absolutely true. She didn't have to make up a bit of it. But she was aware at the same time of p i n g it to him as an offering, as conversation, as entertainment, because she had no idea what to say to Blake Yeats Aubergine the morning after going to bed with him.
After he'd eaten the slice of Lawson's black bread and washed it down with a cup of tea, he got up and said, ‘I'd better be going.’ Emma trailed after him up to her room where he put on the black coat he'd given her to wear the night before. Then he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on top of the head. Downstairs, in the meeting room, he paused and looked at one of the posters on the wall - a picture of a pregnant man in a sweater with his hand ruefully on his tummy - before stooping to collect several neatly folded notes that someone had pushed through the letter slot in the front door. He handed them to Emma. ‘The Henry Lawson notes,’ she said. ‘Someone pushes a pile of these through the door almost every day.’ She picked one up and read it out loud for Blake Yeats's benefit: ‘Henry Ldwson was born in Grenfell NSW on 17th June, 1867. Henry Ldwson died in Abbotsford on 2nd Septembev, 1922. They always say exactly the same thing. I have no idea who does it.’
A Charm of Powerful Trouble Page 13