A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  When Emma arrived back from Flora's she had no idea how she would proceed. Her stomach was still flat; she'd stopped having morning sickness. Sometimes she could scarcely believe she was having a baby.

  She forgot about it for a while. A coping mechanism, she says. She dwelt in her white room. She sat in the sunlight on the square of carpet and drew. She went back to university and concentrated on finishing her final year.

  She resumed her visits to Claudio's house. Sat alone on his verandah in the sun and looked at the boats on the water. Sat with all the drifting population of the house at night in the old ballroom which was lit by hurricane lanterns now that it was summer. One day, passing her in the kitchen, Claudio said, teasing, ‘You're getting fat, Emma.’

  ‘I'm having a baby,’ she said. He was the first one she'd told. The first person to notice anything.

  ‘Really,’ he said, looking at her with interest. ‘Do I know the father?’

  Emma shook her head. ‘There isn't one.’

  He said, ‘That's very enterprising of you, Emma.’

  He started to pay a lot of attention to her. My mother when she was young was handsome and boyish, not his type, she'd thought. But her condition changed all that. Claudio turned his attention to her. He turned on his charm, which was considerable, using his eyes, his smile, lighting up like a beacon when she entered the room. Once, encountering her in a narrow hallway, he paused and ran a hand over her belly. Emma had noticed how some people had suddenly felt it was all right to touch it, and she felt her personal space encroached upon, but not with Claudio. She welcomed his touch. She couldn't believe her luck. His wafting madonnas couldn't compete with her: Emma was the real thing.

  One night the drifting population sat drinking on the verandah, the lights winking in the bay. The air was hot and fragrant and sexy. Emma sipped a glass of red wine and it warmed and inflamed her. She had accepted it but intended not to drink it, for she knew she shouldn't. But she couldn't help herself once it was in her hands. She glanced across at Claudio and his eyes met hers and held them. Emma looked away. She sipped and sipped at the wine till she had swallowed the whole glass. She got to her feet and went out into the yard where a lemon tree full of both fmit and blossom glowed in the moonlight, and she put her face into the tree and inhaled the sharp odour of the leaves, the cloying scent of blossom. Oh, I love him I love him I love him, she thought. Her head spun with the drink and the stars and the lights on the water. She felt so drunk with alcohol and with life that she thought she'd faint. She put her hands on her belly to steady herself and felt her baby kick.

  Someone touched her on the shoulder. It was Claudio. He led her gently to his room and he put her down on his bed and lay beside her, his head propped on one hand, and stroked her belly. ‘You are clever, Emma,’ he whispered. ‘Making this baby all by yourself. Parthenogenesis. Virgin birth.’ His words were as steady and as comforting as a heartbeat, though they were so oblique that Emma was confused as to what he was talking about.

  My sister Lizzie is a survivor. It can't have been easy being in Emma's body while she went through all that emotion: the grief at remembering her sister's death when she was at Flora's place, and now the excesses of love as her head reeled from alcohol and her heart pounded and she thought I love him I love him I love him. Through all Emma's excesses, Lizzie clung on tight. Not grief, nor drink, nor love, was going to deter her from existing.

  Remember that Emma had seen Claudio without his shirt. The day she'd encountered him in the yard hanging out his washing when he'd felt himself alone, she saw the look on his face: a look of vulnerability He'd turned to her with that naked look still intact, just before he turned on the self-consciously charming smile with which he always greeted the world.

  Emma felt that she was the only one to have seen his soul so naked like that, and he led her to believe it was true. ‘All these women, they think I'm wonderful,’ he whispered to her one night, ‘but you - you know what I'm really like!’

  That was a powerful aphrodisiac.

  Claudio never asked her who the father of her baby was, and never wanted to talk about it. So Emma allowed Lizzie's paternity to remain undiscussed and unacknowledged. She moved out of the women's house and in with Claudio. She was happy She was in love.

  ‘I've got some money,’ she told him one day ‘From my inheritance. Do you know what I'd really like to do? Go up north and buy some land. You could make films and I . . .’ she searched in her mind for what she really wanted to do, which at this stage was to live for ever and ever in a haze of love with Claudio and have more babies, ‘. . . I could paint.’

  My mother Emma, when she was a girl, dreamed of love, and she got it. She got the days and nights of bliss and the heady, fragrance-filled summers, and two more daughters.

  Emma dreamed of love, and she got it. And, finally, she got the moments of sick despair when she went out into the garden at night and rubbed leaves and earth into her face and hair. She stood in the dark street and watched, night after night, the house where we stayed with Claudio and Stella after she was left alone.

  But that was later, much later, and she was innocent of all that at the beginning. She wasn't to know that love is a charm of powerful trouble. At that moment, her life was the fragrance of lemon blossom at night and the gleam of lights on the water and Claudio sleeping behind her, his hand on the belly that held her survivor, Lizzie.

  Paris

  YESTERDAY I met Paris for lunch, in our favourite cafe in Newtown. It's become like this for us. We have afavourite and a usual. Some things have become habitual for us. It is like having another sister.

  We've been meeting every week now for about a year; our mothers no longer speak to each other, but I see no reason why we shouldn't. I lived in the city for over a year before I contacted her finally.

  I don't know why I sought her out. From a longing, perhaps, for a sense of connection with someone in this city that I still feel is alien to me, or a reconciliation with my past. I had started to dream that I was in our house on the hill with the sounds of the forest outside and the ocean in the distance. And Paris had been there. She knows what it is like.

  The first time we met, I approached her warily. I remembered that I hadn't liked her. But she was seventeen by then. I recognised her as soon as I saw her. Her hair was sooty and short and furred like a kitten's, her body as lean as a boy's in narrow black trousers and black top. She sat waiting calmly and unselfconsciously, and her pale, clear skin seemed to enclose her core of cool self-sufficiency so beautifully that men and women alike were attracted to her. Many stared frankly as they went past or turned to look back but she ignored them all.

  I stopped in front of her table and she looked up.

  ‘Laura Laura Zucchini!‘ she said, and laughed behind her hand, ostentatiously. For a fleeting, dismayed moment I remembered the way she had watched us all, and imagined her amusing people by telling them stories about this weird family, called the Zucchinis. I almost walked out, but I took a breath and sat down.

  I have found that she is no longer prickly and spiky. She often talks about laughing her head off at things. She talks to me with serious, unselfconscious absorption in what she is saying, thinking things through as she speaks. I wonder sometimes how that watchful child has become this warm, wise young woman.

  On that first day we talked for a while and then she said, ‘Come home with me and meet our little brother, Tom. He's almost five now. Imagine.’

  Her house wasn't far. We left the traffic and the self-conscious cool of King Street and she ducked down a lane-way where some of the small terraces were still unrenovated. Naturally, the paint would be peeling on a house that Stella and Paris lived in. Inside it was full of the clutter of a life lived hectically and casually.

  Stella was at home, but about to go out. She was unsurprised to see me; there were none of the exclamations of Oh it's been such a long time or Haven't you grown up? that most adults would indulge in. She simply said, ‘O
h hello, Laura,’ as if she'd seen me only yesterday, absently putting on an earring and poking her feet into a pair of stilettos. She hadn't changed a bit. She still had the same childish and unblemished face that no amount of difficult living would ever scar. She was out the door before I could say anything more than hello. ‘Not sure when I'll be back!‘ she called out and the door slammed.

  Tom came running down the stairs. ‘Paris, can we have pizza for dinner?’

  Paris caught him up and smothered him in the kind of kisses I used to give Chloe. ‘No, I think I'll eat you instead!’ she told him before swinging him to the floor again.

  He looked at me, his thumb in his mouth. ‘Are you my sister?’ he asked. ‘Paris said that one of my other sisters was coming to visit us.’

  Yes,’ I told him. ‘I'm your sister. My name's Laura.’

  His eyes were unwavering. ‘I havefowsands andfowsands of sisters,’ he said.

  ‘No you don't, you dope,’ said Paris. ‘You have four. Just four.’ She counted them off on his fingers. ‘There's me, and Laura, and Chloe, and Lizzie. You haven't met Chloe and Lizzie yet.’

  Tom continued to look at me with a friendly but uncertain expression on his face. I looked back. It was strange, seeing him like that. I had known, of course, that Stella had had her baby, a boy, but I'd never imagined the child as a real person, as looking like anyone, or having a real existence in the world. Now here was this perfectly ordinary little boy, a little unsure of himself with me. He looked a lot like Claudio, and because of that, he looked a lot like me. It was almost like seeing myself when I was young, only as a boy.

  Then he did a surprising thing. Without a word, and with his thumb in his mouth, he stepped towards me and hugged me quickly, laying his head briefly against my hip. He patted me with his free hand, and I can still feel how small and trusting and loving it was.

  Yesterday when I saw her, Paris asked, ‘What was I like when I was a kid?’ and I answered, ‘Horrible!’ without needing to think about it at all. She laughed her head off for a little while and then she said, ‘You're different, Laura. I mean, different from the last time I saw you.’

  I looked at her, wondering if I should tell her.

  I longed to tell her, I'm in love, but I wanted to save it up. I wanted Lizzie to be the first to hear, from my own lips.

  Instead I said, ‘Do you believe in love?’

  Paris narrowed her eyes, considering. She didn't reply, but after a moment she got to her feet. She said, ‘I have to get home to Tom. Mum's going out soon. Come with me and I'll cook you dinner.’

  At the back of their tiny terrace, Paris has made a garden. She has surrounded the original square of concrete in the middle with greenery. There is a slender bay tree in a pot in one corner, and elsewhere a tangle of ferns and climbing plants is kept separate from an orderly collection of herbs: great masses of mossy parsley, and delicate thyme and a profusion of rocket partly going to seed. Herbs are weeds, she says, it takes no effort to grow them. But after she'd fed Tom an early meal and settled him down with some textas and paper, she spent ages out there watering and weeding and picking, putting what she collected into a shallow cane basket. I sat on the edge of a raised garden bed and watched. She is small, with narrow shoulders, and was dressed plainly in a black pinafore with purple stockings and the square black school shoes she still likes to wear. From behind she looked like a wise old woman.

  I have forgiven Paris her h r a Zucchini remark; I've told her everything I know about our family, and she has told me about hers. We have shared stories, and if I have made up some of the detail to embellish things a little, well, I'm certain she has done the same.

  We stayed in the garden till it was dusk, ‘moth time', as Paris calls it. She says she loves crepuscular light. I think that perhaps she loves the word itself as much. It's the time when, at home, up north, the first bats would be detaching themselves from the trees and flying out in search of food, the black curves of their wings making moving patterns against the setting sun.

  It was in that in-between hour, the time when magic is most likely to take place, when confidences beg to be shared, that Paris looked at me cannily and replied to the question I'd asked that afternoon.

  ‘I've never been in love,’ she said. ‘And I don't think I ever will be - not in that hopeless crazy way people long for. People in love imagine that they know the other person. Sometimes they even seem to think that they are the other person, or part of them - the other half. But I want to be only myself. Independent.’

  Paris has told me that in her family the men are irrelevant. Her grandmother Flora barely knew her father, though he left her the money that allowed her to go and live near Paris, a place she loves. Flora is vague about Stella's paternity And Paris only knows that her father was someone Stella knew briefly in France when she was a teenager. She doesn't seem to care.

  ‘I think that love's just a myth. An illusion,’ she said.

  And with that she went inside, out of the crepuscular light and into the harsh glow of the kitchen. She burrowed into the cupboard under the stairs and, like the witch that she has always wanted to be, emerged with a handful of fung from her mushroom farm, which she stewed gently in butter and served to me with a delicate herb omelette and a rocket salad.

  And yet despite herself, Paris loves. She loves Tom as if it was she who gave birth to him and not Stella. I have seen her wrap him in a towel after giving him a bath and caress the top of his head with her cheek, her face empty with bliss. I have seen the games she plays with him, chasing him up and down the stairs of their small terrace till they are both in a lather of excitement and need to lie together on the floor to calm down, her hand resting just where his heart is.

  The Good Fairies

  I HAD not admitted it to myself, but 1 had developed my own in-built Catherine-sensor; I had an unconscious habit of scanning any passers-by to see if she was among them. After kissing her in the forest that day, for years I believed that I would find her again. And my patience paid off. One day I saw her, browsing in a bookshop down the road from where Lizzie was conceived. I don't live in that part of Sydney, but I go there often, for nostalgic reasons.

  I would have recognised her anywhere. There are people who by their very existence pull you towards them, you have such affinity.

  She had her nose in a novel. Her hair was no longer shaved close to her head; it was in a short bob, jet-black, and tucked behind her ears. I could see her only in profile, but I went up to her at once. ‘Catherine.’

  She looked up. I could see that she recognised me, but she struggled for a moment with my name. I almost supplied it, before she came out with, ‘Laura! What are you doing here?’

  In the coffee shop where we went to talk, she told me she was a librarian at a university library, though not the same university I attend. I imagined her wandering among the stacks of books; libraries immediately became my favourite places. I was giddy with love for her. I talked her senseless; I smiled, looking into her eyes all the time, conscious that I was using Claudio's tactics, keeping her attention on me, not letting up, not letting her go. After the coffee, we continued walking up the road, with me talking, till we came to the park on the corner and she said, ‘Look, Laura, I'm not going to run away from you. Will you please just shut up for a moment?’

  We had come to a fig tree, a sad, city fig surrounded by concrete paths and closely mown grass, a tree that dreamed of rainforests. I shut up and leaned against it.

  In the past couple of years there had been a lot of girls in my life. I was always searching for someone. But I only ever saw a girl a few times before I lost interest in her. None of them belonged with me. Being with them was too soft, too tentative, too pale. There was no passion between us. Once, after a party, I woke in a strange bed and saw a girl beside me who reminded me alarmingly of Lizzie, and I stole away before she woke and never saw her again.

  But there's a spark in someone that you recognise, that answers yours.

/>   I leaned across to Catherine and grasped her hair at the back. I pulled her slowly towards me and breathed her in. I was full of the scent of her. I tasted the nape of her neck, grazed it with my teeth; I foraged on the whorls of hair below her hairline.

  I bit.

  She wrenched my hand away and immobilised it, grasping both my hands in front of us, holding me at bay. I pressed forward and she offered only token resistance. Now her lips were fair game, and I explored the shape of them with my teeth until her tongue intervened, and it was a tongue you could wrestle with, spar with, a tongue you could please, but not too easily.

  ‘Gentle!’ she whispered.

  Her face in my hands.

  My own breath loud in my ears. We pulled back at the same time.

  An old man sat on a seat with his elbows on his knees, smoking a cigarette, a bored expression on his face. He'd seen it all before. A tide of pigeons milled nearby on the grass.

  Catherine said, ‘I live three blocks from here.’

  I remembered that day we met in the cafe and Catherine said, of Lizzie, She's beautiful, and then, when I said Lizzie was my sister, she said, ‘I can see the resemblance.’

  I think that anyone who knows us can tell we are sisters, despite our apparent differences. But now I know we are separate people. And I've grown to like my compact, firm little body, my frizz of dark hair, my small nose that curves downwards and that I like to think somehow complements my pointed chin and delicate face. When I look into the mirror I know that I am not Lizzie, but I, too, am beautiful.

  And I often think of the night that Lizzie walked into the sea.

  I thought at first that she would come to no harm, she was filled with such lightness and buoyancy. I thought that somehow the moon would keep her afloat. But then she waded out until the water had swallowed her, and part of me remembered my mother's sister who had drowned. I stood up, my heart pounding, but I was still unable to act. Fireworks exploded overhead and lanterns bobbed along the beach. I thought she was gone. Drowned. I felt numb, but still I watched.