A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  Blake Yeats said, ‘Can I come to see you again?’ and she nodded. After the door had closed behind him the dark house gathered itself around her. Mindful of every step she took, she made her way down the dark hallway to where light shone in through the back door. The bright enamel paint on the kitchen walls made each glossy uneven brick stand out in relief. She flung the Henry Lawson notes on top of the scabby yellow refrigerator with scores of their predecessors and some spilled off onto the floor. They reminded her of autumn leaves, the way they fell and accumulated. Some had fallen open so that they had wings. Thinking of autumn leaves and the dusty wings of dead moths, but purposely not of what had happened the night before, Emma made herself another cup of tea and smothered some of the black bread with honey and sat for a long time in the sun on the back step.

  The next day she arrived home and found him sitting in her room. He was at her desk, with a sheaf of her sketches spread out in front of him. ‘I hope you don't mind,’ he said. ‘These were just sitting here. The women downstairs let me in and there seemed nowhere else to wait.

  ‘So you still draw. You're getting good at it, Emma.’ He pulled her to him and kissed her.

  ‘We should stay away from the window,’ she said quickly. ‘There's a man lives right across the way in the next house and he takes too much interest in what I do.’ She tugged the tablecloth down from where it had been looped aside.

  You're so modest, Emma. What could he see?’

  Emma shrugged, and gathered her sketches together into a pile again, putting them neatly one on top of the other.

  ‘That's an interesting face,’ he said, indicating a portrait she'd made of Claudio. ‘He likes himself, doesn't he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pausing and regarding it carefully. ‘My mother would have said, full of himself.'

  ‘Full of himself,’ repeated Bill, and laughed. ‘It's a funny saying, isn't it? As though you could be full of anyone else.’

  Claudio had posed for the portrait that Emma had drawn, and it was typical of him: charming, self-conscious, full of himself. But there was another drawing of him that she wanted to do, one that she would have to draw from memory, for it would be impossible to get anyone, let alone Claudio, to pose for the expression that she wanted to capture, it was so fleeting.

  She'd arrived at his house one day and found him without his shirt. Afterwards, Emma always wondered what was under people's shirts, what they were concealing from others, what the real person was like. It became a metaphor for her.

  Claudio was literally without his shirt, for he was in the backyard hanging his washing on the line and had taken his shirt off, probably in order to wash it. The first thing Emma noticed was his chest, which was so darkly and hairily masculine that it set off a memory of Flora's lover, Frank. At first Claudio was unaware that Emma was there, he was so absorbed in his domestic task, a task he was probably not much used to. He had recently broken up with one of his madonnas and, because he thought himself alone, his face had none of the self-conscious self-regard that was characteristic of him. It was utterly private. Pensive, reflective, with a touch of sadness that was accentuated by the downward curve of his nose and the echoing curve of his jaw, it made Emma feel that there was an inner Claudio that only she had seen.

  She had glimpsed his private face, his tender face, the face he wore when he thought no one was watching. It was just for an instant, but that was enough for Emma to become entirely and utterly and uselessly enamoured of him.

  Emma didn't feel full of herself at all. Much of the time she didn't even feel that she was a solid being, but rather that she was an absence defined by the things that surrounded her, that came up to an Emma-shaped gap in the world and stopped. The footsteps of the children that sounded through the wall formed part of her outline, so too did the voices from the meetings.

  When she had the house to herself she was composed of the shadows that curled around her like smoke. She was an outline of shadows. Even when she basked in the sun on the back step or on the hairy rug in the middle of her room, she was simply something that soaked up the sun. This absence of herself wasn't an unpleasant feeling. When she poured tea, it was the streaming of the aromatic liquid into the cup that defined her; when she bathed, it was the roar of the gas jet and the prickle of the water on her skin.

  And now here was Bill, whom she couldn't quite believe in. It was hard for her to get used to this new way of being with someone she'd known since childhood. When she lay beside him it was like possessing a part of her childhood that had been most exotic and unattainable to her, and yet he was entirely new to her, too. She was never sure what to call him. It seemed a new name would be necessary for such a new way of seeing him. One thing she'd learned: being close to someone, kissing them, seeing how they loved, made them seem a different person entirely. Even his face was different close up. He seemed to be entirely unrelated to the Aubergine family she'd known when she was younger. He was something uniquely hers.

  She liked sleeping with him, the comfort of it, body to body, naked flesh to naked flesh. What most people would call the actual sex part of it was a blur and an embarrassment sometimes, and she didn't like to think of it, it was so unthinkable and new. But skin is sex, breath is sex, and so is whispering. She traced the long curve of his back as he lay sleeping beside her on his stomach; she put out one finger to touch the sandy hairs that sprang from the sideburns on his face. She lay awake and listened to his slow breath in the dark.

  In the Botanic Gardens they wandered down serpentine paths. Emma loved tangled, moist vegetation, and here there were dank paths surrounded by the swampy green of rush, fungus, moss, leaf frond, petal, shoot and tendril. The stink of it curled into her nostrils. Her spirit plunged into the rank, seething lushness and she swooned and forgot Blake Yeats Aubergine altogether, she was so drenched by it.

  They came across a glass pyramid, entered its muggy atmosphere and stood on an elevated walkway gazing out. Their pale faces looked back at them in the glass, and Emma felt herself germinate, sprout, shoot. She felt juicy and alive.

  She laughed aloud in her joy, and bent down to a pool of water where a golden carp waved its frond of tail. Her face was there too, and she reached out and dabbled the water into ripples which shimmered for a while before arranging itself into her features again.

  When she stood up Blake Yeats took her into his arms and put his mouth near her ear, and his voice was sibilant, like the swoosh of the sea. ‘I want to tell you a secret,’ he whispered.

  She waited a moment without curiosity or anticipation.

  ‘I wish you were a man,’ he said.

  Within a month he was gone.

  She received a postcard when he arrived in London and then a few weeks later another from Amsterdam telling her that he'd decided to stay in Europe indefinitely Emma stood near the front door in the darkened meeting room with the postcard in her hand. As she stood, uncertain of what she would do next, a pile of folded notes cascaded through the letter slot, slid across the worn lino and came to a halt. Emma seized one and opened it. Henry Lawson was born . . . Henry Lawson died . . .

  Emma tugged open the front door, stepped outside, and saw an old man making his way down the street. She caught him up, standing in front of him and blocking his way He wore a white shirt with a grimy collar; instead of a top button there was a safety pin. ‘Why do you keep putting those notes through our door?’ she demanded.

  He blinked behind his round glasses. Emma repeated the question.

  ‘Henry Lawson,’ he said, waving his arm towards the posters stuck to the window of the shop in front of the hessian curtain. ‘He believed in the same things that you young people do.’

  Emma thought that he was absolutely mad. And she decided that she had to forget about Blake Yeats Aubergine once and for all.

  She went inside and made a cup of tea. She cleaned the kitchen and put on a load of washing in the old twin-tub washing machine. She swept the darkened staircase and the grimy p
assageway downstairs, and she went out and bought a bag of oranges and arranged them in a bowl on the kitchen table.

  In the weeks that followed her moods changed almost daily Emma felt that she was waiting for something, but she wasn't sure quite what. There were days when she was so full of lightness and warmth that she felt she might take off and fly, and days on end when she felt heavy and dragged down by gravity and boredom. There were unexpected, blessed days when she strode through the streets flashing with energy and feeling like a young prince. Those days were the best, and at night, when she closed her eyes and slept at last, she dreamed that from the windows of her small white room she could see, not the city, but a glorious countryside of mountains and rivers and great wide plains.

  Desires and Consequences

  THERE HAD been another train journey, another meeting at a station, another visit, but it was a story our mother never told us until I asked much later. It was perhaps the story that the one about Aunt Em was meant to deflect us from.

  It was Flora my mother was going to visit. Flora from Aunt Em's. But she didn't live up north any more; she lived close to Sydney, only a couple of hours away by train.

  Flora wore blue overalls that day, and gumboots. Her straight blonde hair no longer reached down to her bottom; it swung around her face in a long bob. She didn't kiss Emma hello. ‘I don't believe in kissing,’ she said, and Emma was glad. She didn't want to be on kissing terms with Flora. But they were pleased to see each other, anyway Flora picked up Emma's bag as if it weighed nothing, carried it to her ute, threw it into the back, and drove home at high speed without a word. She jumped down from the cab, seized Emma's bag and ducked down an overgrown path to the front door.

  Her house was in the country, a small cottage with a high pointed roof and a dormer window poking out above trees in a wild garden. A wisp of smoke trailed from the chimney It was a fairytale cottage. The cottage of a witch from a fairytale.

  She pushed the door open with her hip and carried Emma's bag inside and dropped it at the foot of a ladder. ‘I'll give you the loft,’ she said. ‘It's Stella's room, but I've persuaded her to let you have it for a few days. She can sleep on the couch.’

  My mother was pregnant.

  With everyone in her family dead and no close friends, she had turned to Flora.

  Stella was now a young teenager who drifted around for a moment after Emma arrived, and then disappeared. Flora made them a cup of tea and they sat at the table drinking it. Neither of them mentioned Emma's problem just yet. But it was the reason she had come and, unspoken, it hung between them.

  Flora got up, opened the door of the wood stove, threw a block of wood onto the embers and went out of the room. ‘Just getting a chook for dinner,’ she called back over her shoulder,

  Emma didn't move. She sat and looked about her. Flora still kept an untidy house. There were cups and jars and half-empty packets all over the table. The living room and the kitchen were part of the one open space, and there were books piled up everywhere on the floor; and the armchairs were draped with clothes. Emma felt desolate. She got up and went out the back door. A little way from the house Flora had a black chook under her arm. She was talking to it tenderly, soothing it, murmuring that it would be all right, be all right. Then with a swift practised movement she jerked its neck and broke it.

  Later, Emma and Flora sat at the kitchen table and pondered Emma's dilemma. Emma didn't really want to think about it, and would have preferred to ignore her condition, but she knew she must decide something.

  The carcass of the chook, dead white, sat between them on a blue plate.

  ‘How far are you along?’ asked Flora.

  ‘I don't know,’ said Emma. ‘Not far.’ Flora made pregnancy sound like a journey one had embarked on.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I'm not sure,’ said Emma. She thought about the choice. About the idea that one could abandon the journey Pull the emergency cord and hop off.

  ‘It's something only you can decide,’ said Flora. ‘But stay here for a while while you think about it, if you want to. You're more than welcome.’

  Stella skulked in the doorway and listened in to everything Emma and Flora said. She regarded Emma speculatively from beneath fringed lashes heavy with her mother's mascara and turned away with a secret smile.

  Flora took a wooden chopping board from where it leaned at the back of the sink, selected an onion from a basket, cut it cleanly in two and began to slice. Sploshing olive oil into a pan, she banged it onto the wood stove and, when it started to smoke, threw in the onion and tossed it about in the sputtering oil. Then she took a metal chopper and started to joint the chook, cleaving it with sharp strokes, bangng down on the wooden chopping board.

  That was the signal for Emma to leave. She made her way outside. She couldn't stand the smell of frylng onions, and the smell of chook would be even worse, though she knew that once it was cooked she'd be able to eat it. These days, she was always hungry.

  Emma imagines the exact moment when her baby came into being. It was the moment in the hothouse when she felt so alive that she laughed with the joy of it, the moment when the carp's golden watery tail swept past with a dismissive wave and she broke up the glassy surface of the water with her fingers. Emma has seen tadpoles hatch, seen each comma-shaped embryo wriggle and kick out of the transparent egg, and it is this she thinks of when she imagines the moment of her baby's conception, of its coming into being.

  She's lost to the thought of a baby, even though it's also half in her mind that she could have an abortion. To the Emma who doesn't like to think of things, likes to let bread go mouldy, allows biscuits to soften in opened packets, it would be easier to do nothing, and let nature take its course.

  At dinner Flora said, ‘I'm giving up on chooks - have you noticed there aren't nearly so many now? My father died, left me some money, so Stella and I are going to live in Paris for a while.’

  Paris. Flora said it so casually, as if it were merely a trip to the corner shop.

  ‘I lived there before, when I was younger. And my mother's in England, and she's getting on . . .’

  Emma realised how little of Flora she knew. Only then did her accent dawn on Emma. It was as clean as mint. ‘You're English?’ she said.

  Flora shrugged. ‘I suppose. I've lived out here for a fair while. I don't really think of myself as being anything.’

  ‘Your father - you were close?’

  Flora shook her head. ‘I never really knew him. My mother left him when I was a baby - she's lived with another woman for most of her life.’

  It was dark outside and the kitchen window had become a mirror. Emma watched Stella, who had finished eating, put on a classical record and start dancing, ballet-style, between the fat armchairs in the living room.

  Emma had always been a little dazzled by Flora. She seemed to live her life exactly as she wanted. Emma remembered Frank, how beautiful and exotic he was, how desirable, and yet Flora hadn't been in love with him. Stella and I - we're all right, she'd said. Now he was long gone, and Flora was off to Paris. Her mother had lived with another woman most of her life. She said it as if these choices were easy to make.

  Stella stood poised on tiptoes for a long moment and gazed at herself in the window, then dropped her heels to the floor and danced away again. In the glass Emma saw Flora get up from the table and go to Stella. She held out her arms, and Stella at first pulled her body away imperceptibly from her mother (I'm too oldfor this!), and then gave in and j oined hands with her. Emma turned to watch them directly and caught an expression of doubt flitting across Stella's face; she saw her laugh reluctantly, enjoying herself against her will, and then finally gve herself over wholeheartedly to the dance.

  Emma felt self-conscious. The play of feeling between them was like watching two people in love. It was a thread connecting them, a thread that stretched and pulled and almost broke, that went slack and easy and then taut again. Emma watched the reflections
in the window. It was like watching the images in a dream.

  When they finished dancing Flora came back to the table, panting slightly from the exertion. Stella was once again dancing on her own, and Emma was mesmerised by her faint shape in the glass.

  Flora sat for a while without speaking. Then, also watching the thin figure of her daughter in the glass, she said, ‘Having a child on your own isn't easy’

  ‘So why did you . . .’

  ‘I wanted a child. I thought I'd cope. I have.’ Flora shrugged. ‘But it's probably not for the faint-hearted.’

  Emma looked at the pile of chicken bones on her plate. She wondered what sort of heart she had.

  ‘Come on,’ said Flora briskly, getting up from the table. ‘Washing up, and then bed. I need some time to myself to read. No - don't you do it,’ she said, as Emma started gathering the plates together. ‘Stella! Come and help wash up! Now!’

  Stella reluctantly left off her dancing and drooped her way expressively to the kitchen with lowered eyes.

  Emma went to bed and thought of Stella, too tall at thirteen, sullen and uncommunicative and watchful. In Paris she'd weigh Flora down like a stone.

  If there are sisters, then one must be bad and the other good. One ugly the other beautiful. One fair, the other dark. One fallen, the other redeemed. There is always an ‘other’ when there are sisters. Stories tell it that way My mother said that when she was a girl she took these stories literally. It wasn't until she was older - much older - that she saw that these dichotomies were really aspects of the same person.

  Beth was always the difficult one. She spat out food she didn't like, simply refused to swallow it, so there it was - broccoli or mashed turnip - in a big splot at the side of her plate. She talked too loudly, talked with her mouth full, and picked fights with Emma, so that there seemed to be a perpetual festering quarrel between them. She ran away from school so often that the teachers knew at once where to go to look for her. When she was young it was the park at the end of her street; when she was older a certain coffee shop near the school. She didn't head to these places so regularly and predictably because she was stupid. It was simply that she didn't care; getting caught was part of the game. And she was clever, so clever that none of this affected her school results.