A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  Then, like a miracle, after her head had disappeared from sight, after the moment when I might still have saved her was lost, I saw her reappear. When we were children she would do that. Hide and then return.

  She came out, water streaming from her hair and over her breasts. She walked up to me and without a word we sat down. I could feel the warmth of her next to me. She sat, her feet planted firmly on the sand, her arms propped up on her knees, and both of us looked out to sea at the moon making a shining path on the water. It was like a golden path that you could walk out on, and it would lead somewhere. But Lizzie had come back.

  Then she started to sing, as I had not heard her sing since that night when I was thirteen and I heard her outside in the moonlight raising her voice in song. It had been one of my miracles. I thought I had dreamed it then, and I thought I was dreaming now. She sat beside me, staring out to sea, singing without words in a voice that seemed to come so naturally from inside her that she didn't even need to try. She finished singing, and then she laughed and stood up, and I saw her before me, her body dark against the sky. She seemed immense, her legs wide apart like a colossus straddling the entrance of an ancient harbour. She put out her hand and pulled me to my feet, and we stood together with her breath against my forehead, and now my mind was full of what had happened with Catherine in the forest. I thought of how once I had been in love with the world - the earth, the sky - everything. But the sky was no longer enough for me. I wanted a person to delight myself in, like everyone else. Like Lizzie and Al.

  We went back to Lizzie's garage; she had a hot shower and put on the kimono that our mother had given her for Christmas. It was old, of white satin with red and gold peonies all over it.

  Lizzie took one of my hands in hers and examined each of my fingers in turn, caressing them with her own, before she said, ‘Al arrived home unexpectedly yesterday and came to see me.’

  ‘I know,’ I told her. ‘I saw you.’

  She nodded. ‘I told him I wanted to spend New Year with you. I didn't know what to think of it all, really I couldn't tell you at first. I needed to think about it, absorb it into myself.’

  I said, ‘Tonight when you went out into the sea I thought at first that you would be pulled up into the sky by the moon. And then you disappeared. I thought you had drowned, and I did nothing to stop you. I could have allowed you to die.’

  ‘Oh, Laura,’ she said. ‘You're always so fanciful. Pulled up into the sky by the moon! And anyway, I didn't drown.’ Lizzie pointed out that I didn't need to save her. She says that in some hidden part of myself I must have known that. I must have known that she was on some private, solitary task, and that once she'd accomplished it she would return.

  And what had she been doing, walking out into the waves like that? (I decided to ask; I thought nothing could ever be gained from not asking. There had been enough not usking in our family to last for several whole lifetimes.)

  ‘Maybe it was an impulse,’ she said. ‘A New Year thing. And the moon was so lovely I think maybe it did pull me out into the water.

  ‘But it was mainly because of Al. I was so happy. Laura, you have no idea. He is one of the loveliest people I have ever met. I've been secretly miserable for years - wondering who my father really is, fighting with Claudio, watching Mum's grief. And now I realise that none of that matters. I decided that enough is enough. I think I wanted to wash myself clean of my misery.’

  I made hot chocolate and we lay together on Lizzie's bed. Lizzie said, ‘Do you remember the story of Aunt Em?’

  Of course I did, and she knew it. The ‘Do you remember’ question was simply a ritual, an opening for us to relate the story to each other, the story our mother had told us again and again as if it was enough, and told us everything about her we needed to know.

  Family stories are like folk tales, told for comfort and out of a sense of shared history, told to bond teller and listener together, and that night Lizzie and I took it in turns to be both. We told the story as it came to us, out of sequence, embellishing our favourite parts with details we either remembered or invented, so we couldn't tell which was which. Was it a red kimono Flora wore in bed that day Emma sketched her? Or white like Lizzie's? Did she possess a kimono at all? It didn't matter, we gave her one. Was Aunt Em's favourite chair on the verandah made of canvas or of cane? For us, it has solidified into cane, and she had painted it orange. Did they go to the beach with Flora just once, or twice, or many times? Once will suffice, for story's sake.

  Once upon a time I thought that the story of Aunt Em was like the story of the Aubergines, it concealed more than it told. But now that I know the way of stories I am aware that secrets are difficult to keep. Stories tell things obliquely.

  Now I can see that the story of Aunt Em told it all, and it was prescient that our mother would eventually tell us everything.

  It told us that when she was young, our mother was obsessed by the idea of love and yet ignorant of it. She was so overwhelmed and attracted by the proximity of a man who belonged to someone else that she was unable to speak to him.

  It is a story about death. A sister who died, long ago. And there is always the knowledge of that sister; her things are thought to be kept upstairs in a locked room that no one ever enters. Better to live downstairs, pretend the things hidden up above don't exist.

  And in the end, there is no locked room after all. The window is opened so the air can flow through.

  I said, ‘Lizzie, I kissed someone yesterday For the first time. A real, proper kiss.’

  She hugged me. ‘That's nice, Laura. That's really nice. Are you going to tell me her name?’

  ‘How did you know it was a she?’

  ‘I don't know. I've always known. It's the way you are, isn't it?’

  ‘Her name is Catherine. I don't know if I'll ever see her again. She's here on holidays. She already has a girlfriend.’

  I hugged my knees to my chest. I was so full of that kiss, at that moment I didn't care.

  I will make a grand tour of my family, to tell them about Catherine.

  Chloe is fourteen now. She says she will be a scientist, and she has her own way of looking at things. As well as her microscope, she has something which, instead of looking into the structure of things, enlarges them so you can see their surfaces closely Through this, the leg of a cockroach is a lethal-looking forest of spikes, and the wing of a butterfly is a tapestry that a patient embroiderer with a talent for subtle colour has painstakingly picked out with small, even stitches. She does experiments; she has things growing in the fish pond to mop up excessive nutrients; she has notebooks full of observations and ideas for things that need examining. I like the way she has grown up so suddenly and surprisingly, so that she is herself a kind of fait accompli.

  I will see Chloe, and I will see my father, who still lives by himself despite all the women who drift through his life. I have seen him with a pensive expression on his face, looking wistful and vulnerable and alone. ‘Without his shirt', the way my mother has described. And can't help liking him, because, after all, he is my father.

  My mother, Emma, says that sometimes she felt like a sleepwalker in her own life; there were times when she was so consumed by grief and guilt that her life was lived through a veil of sadness. She had moments of enlightenment and long years of forgetfulness. She said that sometimes her past didn't bear thinking about. Sometimes, she says, in order to keep a secret you even have to keep it from yourself.

  But now there is someone she's been seeing for a while, a man who teaches computing at the school where she works part-time, teaching children to draw. I have not met him but he is kind and nice and ordinary, she says. She told me she was reluctant to go to bed with him at first, feeling ashamed of her humble, aging body and the silver marks that bearing the three of us have made on her belly But he also is old and not perfect. When he was young he tattooed the words LOVE and HATE with a school pen and blue ink over the knuckles of each hand. They have remained, a remin
der of a youth spent living on the streets. When they first undressed each other he ran one calloused finger over her skin that she says is turning to crepe and said, ‘See, we are real.’

  When I am with Catherine I wonder sometimes if we are real. We could be just characters in a story. A story with lives as intertwined as the vines in the rainforest where we first kissed. Where the wait-a-while catches your skin and beads it with blood to be licked away by a lover. Perhaps we are characters in a never-ending story dreamed by Paris, who spins out our fate each night as she unwinds our story from her mind. A story with characters like those in a fairytale, where all the women, young and old, are aspects of the same person.

  But I choose to believe we are real.

  How could we not be? Every one of my senses tells me we are. The scent of her skin. Her breath on my cheek. The taste of her mouth. Her eyes up close to mine, like looking into a mirror.

  The dimples in the small of her back, like two thumbprints pressed by a potter into soft clay to show marks of a human making.

  Lizzie has removed the ring from her bellybutton, and all that remains is a tiny scar. She says we are all scarred, one way or another, and that she no longer has anything to hide, nothing under her shirt. I think she is mistaken. She knows the story of her conception now and has let it lie, but I think that one day she will look up this Blake Yeats Aubergine, and I can't help worrying about how that will affect her. But I know now that Lizzie is a survivor, and it was never up to me to save or redeem her.

  But for now I will make a grand tour of my family and first of all I will go to see Lizzie, because she is the one I want to tell about Catherine most of all. She lives in Brisbane now, with Al. They have a baby, and live in a peeling timber cottage perched on a hillside with a mango tree shading the back verandah. Bella, she says, is her little moon-child, plump and round and happy. She makes the most of her. They are babiesfor such a short time.

  My mother said that, when she saw the photos of Aunt Em with her mother and then came across Flora and Stella playmg in the creek, she'd thought, nothing lasts. Now she thinks it does. All that mother-love gets taken up by the ether; it stays around; it accumulates.

  When Bella was born I hurried up there to see her, and Lizzie and I stood leaning over the crib watching the expressions play across her face as she slept. We were like good fairies, wanting to bestow gifts upon her.

  ‘I'm going to tell her all the family stories - every last little thing,’ said Lizzie. ‘All the bad and the good.’

  ‘Don't tell her too much all at once,’ I said. ‘There's a proper time to tell things, don't you think? And sometimes people need their secrets.’

  Lizzie looked at me speculatively, then returned to contemplating the perfection of her child.

  ‘She will have so many stories they will be oozing out of her,’ said Lizzie. ‘She will bore her friends with them, but they will be secretly jealous. They will say, How come your family has so many stories?

  ‘And she will say, How come yourfamily doesn't?'

  When Bella is asleep, Lizzie washes out the nappies and runs barefoot down the back steps, making the treads shudder, out to the back yard where she pegs the washing unevenly on the line and stands with her hands on her hips looking at the moon floating in the blue daytime sky. Al comes home from his job tutoring at the university and she leaves Bella with him, and goes off to singing lessons, her feet flying over the footpath, sandals flapping.

  I can see Al now through Lizzie's eyes: that he is tender, and thoughtful, and loyal. She says he was never Axolotl Al to her, that he was always beautiful, that she must always have loved him. I can see the beauty of his pale skin and freckles and the dreamy way he lies on the floor with his books, Bella tucked tenderly into the crook of his arm.

  When I go to see her, Lizzie and Al and I will take Bella in her pram for a walk, very late, through the dark streets, the tarred roads still breathing out daytime heat. There will be roses leaning out over the footpath, and Lizzie will pull them to herself and drink in their scent. She will tell me how she remembers our night walks through Mullumbimby, our exhilaration, and all the sadness we bore. She will say that she is happier now. Life, she will tell me, is meant to be like this.

  JOANNE HORNIMAN was born in Murwillumbah, northern New South Wales, in 1951 and grew up in a huge old general store which her parents owned. Her brother and sister were teenagers by the time she was five. ‘Our family told lots of stories, many of them about their life before I was born, and I often felt left out. I think I became a writer to show them that I had stories that they didn't know.’ She has worked as a teacher of adult literacy, and has written several books for children and teenagers.

  Joanne and her partner live in a place they built themselves near Lismore. Their property is a haven for wildlife, as they have a creek, lots of shelter and natural food, and no dogs or cats. ‘Tiny bats live in the walls of the house, goannas wander about, and in the evening you might see platypus in the creek, a rufous night-heron fishing, or flying foxes dipping into the water. It's no wonder that the place I live in often gets into my writing.’