A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  That evening I found Paris staring at a snake in the grapevine. I stood beside her and watched it. Its eyes were milky, and I thought it might be blind, though it had turned its head to face us.

  I experienced its sinewy strength as if it were my own body, and was contained and held tight by the cool green of taut skin. We stayed there together for a long time, the snake coiled surreptitiously in the grapevine and Paris and I eye to eye with it.

  When Paris finally reached out to touch it, it slid away.

  The next morning, early, just as Paris and Stella were about to leave, both of us thought at the same time to go to the grapevine to look for it. We found a snake skin, silvery and arrowed with scales.

  ‘She's shed her skin!’ Paris whispered.

  I reached out to touch it. The skin was not dry, but soft, and where it was rucked and folded near the head, still as moist as a living thing.

  Trailing Clouds of Glory

  ‘TELL ME about the olden days,’ my mother asked Aunt Em one day, trying to winkle something out of her, but Em waved her question away with a laugh.

  ‘Oh, I never talk about what happened in the past. I'm only interested in what's happening now,’ she said.

  They sat in the sunroom off the kitchen, Em in her favourite floral armchair, Emma in a low-slung cane chair painted bright orange, though the paint was cracked and peeling away. She could see why Em lived in only a part of the house; it was simply too big for her. She confined herself to the kitchen and sunroom, her own bedroom and the verandahs, and these were kept as up-to-date and cheerful as she could manage, with a new radio on a shelf in a corner of the kitchen, and current magazines and newspapers piled untidily in a rack in the sunroom.

  On the whole Em wasn't a great talker; she was content for Emma to simply keep her company. She liked to see Emma doing whatever she pleased, which was mostly dreaming away the afternoons in the garden with her sketchbook. Emma often caught her intelligent, beaky gaze resting on her with approval. But sometimes Em looked as dreamy and as wistful as the child she'd once been.

  Every afternoon Em took a nap to keep her strength up, and Emma got used to having the place to herself. She resisted the urge to see the top floor of the house, to see if there was a room kept for all those years unchanged since Em's twin sister had died. But she crept to the living room that Em never used and wiped the dust from all the framed family photographs, staring at the pictures of her father, trying to see something of herself in them. She gazed wonderingly at the picture of Aunt Em with her mother, at the way the light from that long-ago time fell through the slatted blind onto their faces. Emma felt a tenderness for them, and for Em as she was now, that surprised her.

  But she often surprised herself now with new sensations and feelings. Her life in the house was all sensation and image, rich and heady. Here, she was so different from the Emma who lived with her mother and Beth that she could forget about who she was, and be simply a bundle of nerve endings.

  She grew used to the sound of Em's radio coming from the kitchen in the early mornings, which she blocked out with the tinny sound of her own transistor through the earplugs. There were songs that were played over and over that Emma liked: ‘Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadows? Or was it ‘lover'? Emma couldn't tell.

  Aunt Em knew things. There were words for everything that surrounded her ancient crumbling house. Birds that came to the garden were spangled drongoes or rainbow bee-eaters or fire-tail finches or striated pardalotes. Trees were tamarinds or quandongs or red kamalas. When Emma murmured that they all sounded exotic, Aunt Em's eyes grew bright with amusement. ‘They're not at all exotic,’ she said. ‘They belong here. It's the roses that are exotic.’

  The black phone on the wall rang twice while Emma was staymg there: her mother and Beth, ringing to see how she was. She stood and listened to their distant voices as she stared up the dim reaches of the staircase.

  It was summer, and it rained - sometimes a foggy mist crept down from the hills in the morning, sometimes there was an evening torrent preceded by thunder and lightning. Emma stood on the verandah when it stormed, watching the lightning shoot down to earth, loving it. And there was the humidity, always, that coated your skin with a slick of sweat. She went outside on damp nights, and wandered around the yard, listening to the sound of cicadas and watching for fireflies, whose pulsing trails she followed into the trees. She followed the moon too, watching it move around between the trees; sometimes it caught in the branches, and then broke free and escaped high into the sky. Each night she watched as, little by little, it waxed or waned. On still nights she thought she could hear the sound of the sea, which Em said was just over the hills. It was a gentle swooshing sound like blood moving through veins.

  One night late, Emma stood in the garden and watched as Em poured her evening drink of Hospital brandy (the brand with medicinal overtones), standing at the kitchen table. She sipped it slowly and with enjoyment. Emma saw the scene as a picture: the kitchen window was the frame, the darkness was a border that set off the tableau inside the house. In the daytime, the house was dark, and the light outside contrasted starkly, but at night it was the opposite, and that was why she went out there, to drink it all in and marvel at the difference. Woman In Kitchen, Night, 1960s would be the title of the picture, had Emma ever painted it.

  Her nights were never sweeter. She lay on her bed with the sheet kicked off, wrapped in the soft darkness, veiled by a mosquito net, aware of the relief of night air flowing over her skin, and of Aunt Em asleep in her own bed, lyng as straight as a board. The house towered above her, mysterious and hidden, but the small part that she and Em inhabited sang with their small daily pleasures.

  One afternoon she came upon Flora and Stella bathing in the creek. She called out to them and sat down on the bank to watch. They had lathered themselves with soap, their hair as well, and were splashing and laughing and tickling each other. Flora suddenly caught Stella up in her arms, and stood there cradling her, waist-deep in water, gazing into her eyes. Then just as suddenly she kissed her on the forehead and released her back into the water; Stella submerged and came up gasping like a fish, water streaming over her face, her hair slicked back. Emma remembered the picture of Em with her mother, taken all those years ago, and she thought, nothing lasts. She was full of loss and longing; she wallowed in it, stretching out on the bank and staring up through the branches of a tree, watching the pinpoints of light through the leaves.

  Emma loved this place, but it had a tendency to make her melancholy. She'd taken to going for walks in the early evening, and she saw symbols everywhere of the vulnerability of life. The sight of a calf alone on a distant hillside, tottering on unsteady legs with no mother in sight, crows circling overhead, had made her sad for days.

  ‘Come into the water, Emma,’ Flora called. ‘It's lovely. Take off your clothes and come in.’

  But Emma shook her head.

  She lay in the grass and dreamed about love, for Emma was a great believer in Love. It was Beth who pinned pictures of the Beatles on her bedroom wall and declared on many mornings that she'd had ‘another lovely dream about Paul last night', but it was Emma who yearningly remembered the lyrics of their song ‘Love Me Do', despite her averred interest in Voss and Das Kapital.

  The grass was long and full of seeds that fell down her back, and ants wandered along various parts of her body, causing her to itch. She brushed them all away and continued to lie with her nose close to the ground, drinking in the earthy, herbal smell.

  She thought of Frank, his glistening back as he dug in Flora's garden, the corded muscles of his arms, his ready, noisy laugh. She had asked Flora, had pressed her, about whether she loved Frank, whether she'd marry him, but Flora waved the idea away She'd said, lazily, ‘Stella and I are all right.’

  But Stella loved Frank. She hung onto his arm and pestered him until he noticed her; she giggled helplessly when he tickled her. She sought his attention by dressing up; one da
y she appeared in her mother's long black velvet coat. It swept the floor and enveloped her like a shroud, but she had her mother's sense of style and she wore a beret on her head and nothing at all underneath, and she looked pleased when Frank wolf-whistled her.

  Flora took them all to the beach, just a short drive away, late one afternoon. She said she only ever went late, when the sun was going down, her skin was so fair. ‘First to see the sea!’ called Stella, as they crested a hill and saw the ocean stretched out in the near distance.

  Emma strolled along the shore, and the white moon hung low in the sky Still in her melancholy mood, she saw death everywhere: a long thin seahorse, as stiff as a twig; a fish with its eyes pecked out by gulls. Everywhere was the smell of rot overlaid with the clean smell of salt. Aunt Em, so old and upright, walked a little way along the shore, and then stood still, and gazed at the sea. She searched the tide line for treasures and looped her skirt up into a nest to hold the things she wanted to keep. Her old legs were as mottled and as pleated as tree bark. Flora wore a white bikini, and her skin was white; she was lush and full and ripe. She caught wave after wave, with the white full moon behind her on the horizon. And then she dragged Stella into the sea from where she'd been dabbling on the edge. Emma saw their two blonde heads bobbing close together far out among the waves.

  ‘Do you think there was someone in her life she was to marry? You know, who got killed in the war or something?’ Emma asked later, as Flora lay stretched beside her on a towel. She was sure there had been a young man in Em's life, a great, tragic, lost love.

  ‘Who? You mean Em? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe there wasn't. Do you think there ought to have been someone?’

  Emma didn't reply to that. Instead, she said, ‘What did Em do, then?’

  ‘Do?’ said Flora.

  ‘For a job. When she was young. With her life.’

  ‘I don't know,’ said Flora. ‘There wasn't much for a lot of women to do in those days, was there? Look after other people's children, or do domestic work, or factory work if they were poor. If they were rich, maybe try to write or paint, if they took themselves seriously enough. But her family had money, didn't they? That house . . . and they were lawyers, weren't they? Her father and her brother, at least. There was family money. Maybe she didn't have to do anything.’

  ‘She looked after my father,’ said Emma. ‘She brought him up when his mother died.’

  ‘There you go, then.’

  ‘But apart from looking after him, what did she do - you know - to fill in her days?’

  Flora rolled over onto her stomach and regarded Emma with amusement. ‘She lived,’ she said.

  Emma had almost forgotten that there was an upstairs to go to. The dark staircase reminded her sometimes, but she came to almost regard it as a decoration, something that had no real purpose.

  As she wandered from the house one afternoon she discovered something that was like another room, it was so self-contained and private. In the middle of the paddock at the back of the house was a large circular clump of trees like a small forest. Emma pushed her way inside, first broaching a wall of pungent lantana that scratched at her arms and face, reminding her of the bramble hedge that surrounded the castle of the Sleeping Beauty. The lantana gave way to trees with tall trunks that made a canopy overhead excluding the sunlight; under them were vines and ferns and countless small plants. At the centre of this room of trees was the beauty - a great tree with a buttressed trunk and branches reaching out to the sky.

  Emma returned later with her sketchbook and drew this tree, which she saw as a great muscled human torso, sinewy and strong. She looked up at it, and sketched, and looked up, and sketched, and put down her book to wrap her arms part way around its trunk and breathe in the smell of it. She thought and didn't think of Frank's naked back, the movement of his muscles as he worked in the garden. Those were dangerous thoughts and she both refused and welcomed them, and she put all her suppressed feelings into her drawings of the tree. They became almost human portraits.

  With the rough drawings spread out beside her on the verandah, Emma tried to make a final picture. Her crayon rasped softy and swiftly across the paper. In the garden a spangled drongo glittered. Em sat back in her chair, a hairbrush in her lap.

  ‘I see you've found your father's forest,’ she said. There was absolutely no weight in her voice at all, no inflexion to help Emma discern her feelings about what she said.

  Emma didn't look up; the crayon flashed a confident line down the curve of the trunk.‘Tell me about it,’ she said. Emma knew then that she was right, that the clump of trees she'd found was a kind of room where she could discover things.

  ‘It wasn't always a forest. It was just that fig tree at first,’ said Aunt Em, her voice airy and detached, as if this was ancient history. ‘The one you're drawing. That was all that was there. It was all that they left when they cleared the land. Sam and I used to walk up there and sit in the shade. But when he was - oh, only about nine or ten - he saw that there were seedlings coming up beneath it.’

  Now Aunt Em's face was puckered with the pleasure of remembering, her eyes narrowed. ‘And he said to me, "Auntie, these little plants must be from seeds the birds have dropped after they've eaten fruit from the trees in the hills." And he said we should make a fence round the fig so the cattle couldn't eat the seedlings.

  ‘So that's what we got his father to do - Sam wanted the fence put some way out from the fig to allow the trees room to spread. He pestered and pestered me to get him books about plants.’ Em laughed with pride. ‘He was such a clever boy He learned how to identify them by looking at the leaves and so on. And he went into the hills where the scrub hadn't been cleared and brought back seeds himself, from trees he found there, and he raised them up and planted them along with all the seedlings left by the birds.’

  ‘And all these years later they're all still here,’ said Emma.

  ‘Yes,’ said Em. ‘And he knew they would be. He said to me, "Auntie, when we're all long dead these trees will still be alive. That fig has already lived for a hundred years or more." Oh, he loved trees. And he didn't want to be a lawyer like his father and grandfather. He said he'd die if he sat in an office all day He liked going out to where it was wild. He dreamed of finding a new species, a plant that no one had discovered. He said there were still plants out there that hadn't yet been identified.’

  Emma glanced quickly at Em's face and then back down to the drawing of her father's fig. Em didn't look sad; her face was calm, clear, remembering. Her hairbrush was forgotten on her lap, her hair awry and only partially unpinned.

  Emma put her sketchpad aside and stood up. With one hand on her great-aunt's shoulder, she leaned forward and took up the hairbrush from her lap. She removed the last few pins from Em's hair and began gently to brush it out. She noticed the pale skin of her scalp, the delicate whorls of her ears, the fine strands of white hair, and she was breathless with awe that you could be this close to someone.

  Ever so slightly, Em leaned against Emma's body ‘He was such a funny little boy,’ said Em. ‘When I arrived to look after him when his mother died, he said in the kitchen on the first morning, when I was about to cook breakfast, "Don't you use my mother's saucepans!"’ She laughed at the memory.

  Emma moved in front of Em and knelt down. Aunt Em's skin was so lined and wrinkled that her face seemed decorated with a beautiful deliberate pattern. She put her hand at the side of Em's face, smoothing the hair over her ears, so that all she could see of Em now was her face. Em's eyes looked steadily back at her and Emma held the gaze, wanting to remember, wanting to capture this particular view of Em so that she'd never forget. Then quickly Emma stood up, kissed Em on the forehead, said ‘All done!’ and put the hairbrush back into her lap.

  Em took up the hairpins and put her hair up again. She needed no mirror; it was something she'd practised for most of her eighty-three years.

  When Emma, alone in her room that night, drew a portrait of her great
-aunt from memory, the whole page was filled with a face, not the whole face, but the part around the eyes. And her drawing wasn't symmetrical, but slanted and partial, and when she'd finished, it wasn't a picture of an old woman at all but of a child.

  At the beginning Emma had counted down the days till she could leave, but now she found she didn't want to go home. She loved it here with Em. And miraculously she became ill, just a day before she was to go. She came down with a fever, felt dizzy, sweated, then felt as cold as ice. Perhaps it was all that wandering around on humid nights, coming in with her hair beaded with raindrops, that did it.

  She floated on a wave of illness. Aunt Em called the doctor, who said she should rest, and have plenty of liquids. Flora came, and changed the tangled, damp sheets for cool crisp ones. She changed Emma's nightie for her too, when she was too weak to even lift it over her head. Stella brought grapes, carrylng them into the room reverentially in a cut-glass bowl.

  At last, in the middle of one morning, Emma woke from sleep and felt well, and strong. She got out of bed and found that she could walk. But once she was up she found she wasn't strong, she was weak. She went out onto the verandah. Em was in the garden, a pair of clippers in her hand. Emma watched as she drew a red rose towards her and, with her eyes closed, breathed in the scent. Emma saw how surprised and pleased she was at being alive.

  Emma got up at dawn the following morning and put on a long red dress.

  In a red dress and in her bare feet my mother, aged sixteen, walked across the paddocks till she was within sight of the sea.

  The sun was not quite up. The grass was moist, and it wet her feet and the bottom of her dress. She walked, avoiding cowpats, ducking under barbed wire fences, looking at the marvel of dewdrops on spider webs until, breathless, over an hour later, she came upon the argent ribbon of the sea stretched out on the horizon.