A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  We flicked through magazines, talking about nothing. I wished that Alice wasn't there; she irritated me suddenly, like an itch in my body that wouldn't go away and that I didn't understand. ‘Let's go down to the creek,’ I said.

  I think now I simply didn't know how to be with anyone who wasn't Lizzie.

  It had been raining, and the creek was muddy and swift-flowing. We waded into the water. It was icy and delicious; I felt the water should have been coloured blue, not brown. Silt had washed down in the recent rains, and lay soft and silken between my toes. I reached down and picked up a handful of it and smeared it on my arm. It smelled faintly of rotting vegetation, a smell that I have always liked.

  We took off our clothes down to our knickers and submerged ourselves in the water and then stood up again, water streaming from our hair. I tried not to look at Alice because I knew she might not like me to stare; her new breasts were even tinier than mine. I reached down and took some mud from the bottom of the creek and smeared it quickly over my breasts, to cover them. Then without thinking I took another handful, and tossed it at Alice. Alice tossed a handful back at me.

  Soon we were covered in mud. I stood savouring the warmth of the sun, and the sensation of the mud firming into a second skin. Without washing it off, I climbed up onto the grassy bank. Alice followed me, and we lay back, our faces turned up to the sun.

  When I was so dazed by sun that I was almost asleep, I rolled sideways, and accidentally bumped into Alice. She returned the bump. We giggled, and made it into a game, rolling and bumping against each other. My eyes were dazzled by pinpricks of sunlight through my lashes.

  I did a particularly vigorous roll, and felt myself come to rest partly on top of Alice. I stopped. I could feel the softness of her breast against my skin.

  When I opened my eyes I saw her looking back at me.

  Without thinking I put my mouth against her mouth. It wasn't a kiss, not what I'd seen Claudio and Emma do, not what I'd seen on television. With my eyes shut I licked Alice on the lips, and felt Alice's tongue touch mine. My mouth on hers was like a butterfly alighting on the edge of a puddle to drink, the lightest of touches. Sip, sip, sip.

  My tongue went further. The inside of Alice's mouth was soft. For a moment my whole world was the warmth of the sun and the soft inside of Alice's mouth.

  And then that itch I had felt with Alice earlier returned and I took Alice's bottom lip gently between my teeth. I don't know why, but very quickly and cleanly and suddenly, I bit into it. Alice cried out and pulled away, and I tasted the salt of blood.

  Alice stumbled to the creek and plunged in. She rubbed at the mud on her body, trylng to clean it all off. At last she emerged and stood with water streaming over her, her finger held gingerly to the sore spot on her mouth.

  I saw the look of loathing on Alice's face. She said to me, slowly and emphatically, ‘I am never speaking to you again. You're dirty. You're horrible. I'm going to ring my mother to come and get me.’

  We didn't speak to each other again.

  I stood in the driveway with her while she waited for her mother to pick her up, but she wouldn't even look at me. After the car had gone, I pulled on my comforting red beanie which smelt so strongly of myself and dragged out an old bicycle that Lizzie and I took turns on sometimes, and went for a ride. I rode and rode till I was breathless and my legs hurt, right to the top of the hill near our place. And then I turned round to go back.

  It was a windy day, and as I headed down the hill I could hear the wind and feel it pushing behind me. I pedalled faster and faster, hanging on tight as I jolted through potholes and then pedalling even faster afterwards. And the wind was with me and the trees beside the road were tossing about and I became aware that I couldn't hear the wind any longer at all: I was going as fast as the wind and there was absolutely no sound, just the trees tossing and my front wheel going so fast it was blurred and my hands gnpping the handlebars tight.

  And then my red beanie blew off! And the wind whipped it away All in a split second. And I didn't care, I didn't care at all.

  I hadn't told Alice I was sorry, because I wasn't. I didn't feel horrible, or dirty from what I had done. I felt wonderful.

  I was thirteen. My life, which I'd feared would be ordinary, had proved to be full of wonders, and I expected that more would come to me in the future.

  I'd witnessed a bat draw its last breath. I'd seen my sister, in the moonlight, lift up her voice in song. A red butterfly had blossomed from my own body I had ridden as fast as the wind.

  I had drawn blood with my first kiss.

  The Leather Woman

  WHEN I think of the secrets of my childhood, I imagine them as the red hibiscus flowers that grew in our garden. They were single, dark red flowers, not the flounced double variety; plain red flowers with an ornate gold stamen.

  My mother ate those flowers. Sometimes she slipped them into a salad for all of us; she said they were packed with the kind of nutrients especially needed by women for menstruation and ‘women's problems'. Once I saw her standing gazing out to where the sea lay like a string on the horizon, slowly devouring one of the red flowers, petal by petal, finally eating the thick, gold stamen, covered with its down of pollen, as dusty as a moth's wing.

  When our parents separated, they told us about it together. But I don't think my father wanted to be there; I imagine he'd have preferred to slide out of our lives.

  Stella had come to live on the north coast with Paris; she'd been waitressing at Byron Bay and had not come to see us.

  Then my mother found out that Claudio had been ‘seeing’ Stella, which was the way she put it to us. We knew what that meant. My mother told him to leave.

  They gathered us together in the living room. Lizzie and I had had an inkling of what it was all about, but Chloe did not. She was lymg, half-naked, on a corduroy beanbag with her thumb in her mouth, and when Claudio said that he was moving into a house in Mullumbimby with Stella and Paris, she sat up and protested.

  ‘But why?’ she said. ‘Why are you going to live with them?’

  She drew her own conclusions. You love them more than us!’ she said, and started to cry.

  I knelt beside her and took her in my arms; her back was sweaty and covered in lint from the chair. But she pushed me away and got to her feet. She stood in front of Claudio.

  ‘I'll still be your father, and I'll always love you,’ he told her. His face said that he resented having to have this scene.

  ‘How can you love them more than us?’ Chloe asked. She hit him with her fist, again and again and again.

  He flinched, and took the blows as if he deserved them.

  ‘Emma and I will still be friends,’ he said.

  I looked at my mother's face and knew that he lied.

  And then Chloe asked my parents to kiss each other.

  Emma made no move towards Claudio, but kept her eyes cast to the floor. Claudio, not looking at anyone, kissed her quickly on the cheek.

  I wished I still had my red beanie so I could pull it down over my face and lose myself in its comforting smell. I missed my father. I missed his exuberance, the way he would catch me up in an unexpected hug. I forgot his moods and rages and sudden brooding silences.

  Our mother didn't cry in front of us. But did she think we didn't see her weeping at the kitchen sink when she pretended to be washing up, or hunched over with pain as she worked in the garden? She did what women are good at doing: she put on a brave front. But her silence was stifling her. I could see it sitting like a stone in her chest. I heard her in the night vomiting up whatever little she had eaten; she couldn't stomach anything any more. In the morning she was always pale and calm, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea steaming in front of her.

  She threw herself into gardening. She slashed and pulled and planted, coming inside with dirt under her fingernails and lantana in her hair and scratches all over her limbs. In that country, weeds grew rampant and gardening was anything but genteel.
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br />   She began to cultivate herbs. With their soft foliage and shy flowers, they were an antidote to the headlong growth of the rainforest that surrounded the house. She favoured the nightshades, for their names and associations and often poisonous properties: henbane and belladonna and the fabulous datura, whose huge trumpets (not shy, these flowers) are borne upon a tree. Angels’ trumpets, they are called, and they can give hallucinations, and kill.

  Henbane she loved because the name made her laugh - she said why anyone would want to poison hens was beyond her, as hens are the most domestic and benign of birds (though perhaps it reminded her, savagely, of Stella, surrounded by all that poultry during her childhood). In the Middle Ages henbane was employed in witchcraft to cause insanity and convulsions, and to give visions - it deranged the senses of whoever took it.

  And there's belladonna (bell-a-don-nu - say it with a lilt), meaning beautiful lady, for drops of it in the eyes cause the pupils to dilate, simulating sexual arousal, and enhancing their beauty.

  And there was heartsease, and love vine and love-lies-bleeding, forget-me-nots and rosemary, bitter herb, and rue. Plants for weakness of the heart, to expel pain and torments, or to aid the memory (though I would have thought that if you were in such torment, the best thing to do would be simply to forget), and motherwort, ‘to help women in sore travail': all of these she grew, but they didn't seem to help, for she grew sadder and sadder.

  She went to her tumbledown studio and worked at her paintings, but nothing she did allowed her to forget.

  Her friends rallied round. One of them, Edith, brought her some clay, thinking that making a sculpture from such earthy material might help. Edith made vessels on a wheel, distorting their regular shapes afterwards by pushing at them or tapping them with a paddle. She sometimes pressed her thumbs into the soft clay in secret and subtle places so that if you looked carefully you could see the mark of a human making.

  Emma found that one pug of clay wasn't enough. She bought more and created a sculpture. It was life-sized, of a woman lying on her side, one leg drawn up like a sprinter's. She was slipping out of an old, wrinkled skin with a smile of triumph on her face. I asked what the sculpture meant, and my mother replied that she'd come to realise that you grow older around an unchanged core, that the young self is still there, always.

  Emma's sculpture, because it was so large, took a long time to dry out, and she called it her leather woman, because at a certain stage of drylng clay gets a sheen on it, like leather.

  The leather woman lived on a length of plastic laid out on the floor of her workshop. We got used to stepping around her. She looked so real that I began to imagine that she could come alive. There was so much possibility in those arched feet, poised as if to leap into the world, such elasticity and power in those muscled legs.

  Mullumbimby is a small town overlooked by a single triangular mountain nearby and wild rainforested ranges further west. It is dead flat, with a grid of streets lined by wooden houses. At the back of the houses is a network of narrow lanes, with timber fences collapsing under the extravagance of the vines sprawling over them. It is a prodigal town, blessed by an abundance of vegetation, a place where flowers and fruit grow lavish in neglected back yards, and lie squandered and overripe and spent at the end of summer.

  Claudio wanted us children to come and stay with him in the house they'd rented there. Lizzie didn't want to go, saying to me under her breath, ‘He's not even my father.’ But she agreed finally for my sake, and our mother's.

  In the old house near the river I wandered through the afternoon-darkened rooms when everyone else was out. I enjoyed the temporary feel of the place. The telephone sat on the floor in an empty room; boxes of stuff sat randomly about. The unpolished timber floors echoed when you walked on them. The house had no need of blinds, for trees surrounded it, trees covered in morning-glory vines with their purple flowers. Looking through those windows was like peering at a stage set draped with tattered green curtains, through which crept the small brown river at the end of the back yard. You could smell the silt from the river, and it reminded me of Alice, and mud, and the taste of blood.

  Paris hadn't changed much. She still had that same sharp and considering look. She glanced up from her homework at the kitchen table on that first afternoon and said, ‘Hello,’ in a way that told me that she didn't much care whether I liked her or not.

  I was pleased to see that Stella wasn't much of a cook. We had vegetarian sausages and vegetables that first night, and the sausages were smooth and pale, like creatures that had never seen the sun, the vegetables lumpy or mushy, under- or over-cooked. Claudio hadn't helped cook, of course; he rarely did. He sat in the bare room with the telephone and ‘did business’ until dinnertime.

  Paris speared a sausage with her fork and held it up in front of her face to examine it. ‘Pooh!’ she said, and started to nibble it from one end, still holding it on her fork.

  ‘Pooh!’ said Chloe, laughing, holding up her sausage in imitation.

  ‘Are you still playing the guitar?’ Stella asked Lizzie.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It's her passion,’ I started to explain, but Lizzie gave me such a look that I shut up at once. ‘Be mine tonight!’ sang Claudio. He had opened a bottle of wine and was steadily working his way through it without Stella's help. He'd given us all a little, just a taste in the bottom of a glass. Lizzie ignored hers, while Paris tipped her own few drops down her throat immediately and then sent her hand out stealthily across the table towards Lizzie's glass. I sipped carefully; the wine tasted of rich, red moths that had drowned in a vat of grapes, and then been strained through a cloth that had lain on a dusty road for some time.

  Paris closed her eyes and reached her tongue to the bottom of Lizzie's glass and lapped at it. ‘Mmmm. A nice little drop!’ she said.

  Claudio helped Lizzie and me with the washing-up afterwards. Lizzie was silent. She refused to look at him. ‘Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie,’ he said, ruefully, trying to jolly her along, putting on one of his broad smiles that showed his front teeth almost fiercely. (My father's face was always prepared for people, he was always aware of the effect he was having on others. I have seldom seen him with his face bare, not readied to receive someone's gaze. Sometimes I think that all that self-conscious readiness must have worn him out.)

  ‘Oh, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio!’ said Lizzie, her hand over her heart, not smiling, still not looking at him. She flicked the tea towel at him and left the room.

  I found her later, staring out the window of our empty, threadbare room, a room like a blank slate that no one cared to scribble on. She had thrown the window open and stood with her arms braced on the timber frame. Outside was black.

  We lay in the dark and couldn't sleep; I heard Lizzie tossing and turning. Our mattresses were on the floor, and although it wasn't cold, Stella had come in with extra bedding. ‘There's a mist that comes in from the river sometimes,’ she said.

  I lay in my strange bed and stretched luxuriously I didn't mind the strangeness of it; there was the feeling of possibilities. My body felt strong; I felt power coil right through it like a spring, waiting to be released. I wasn't tired at all: I wanted to do something.

  I imagined the leather woman lying in my mother's workshop.

  Moonlight comes through the window and falls onto her. She stirs and shifts about impatiently, casting off the old wrinkled skin as if it is a blanket she has no use for. She pauses, her eyes alert and alive.

  With the grace of a sprinter at a starting block she rises in one swift movement from the floor, goes to the door, and opens it. She stands with her head held high as if listening, then leaves quickly without a backward glance. She runs down the road through the trees, and her legs make a cracking sound like a whip that carries far into the night. She passes farmhouses, and dogs bark as she goes by. Her path can be traced by the cries of Shuddup, you bastards! that follow her all the way through the countryside, and the lights shooting on and then
off again as the commotion dies down. At last she comes to the outskirts of town, and under a streetlight she sits, sinewy, naked, expectant, on the rail of a cattle yard.

  Sound came from Claudio and Stella's room down the hallway, and Lizzie sat up sharply. ‘Oh, God, I can't listen to that! Come on!’

  She pulled on her clothes. ‘Oh, come on, Laura, we don't have to lie here listening to them fucking all night.’

  I dressed and, on feet as poised for flight as the leather woman's, we went down the long wooden steps at the back of the house and were free.

  Just down the road was an old house painted white, with white marble statues in the yard: children in classical poses, with white, unseeing eyes. Tendrils of climbing plants caught at their ankles and wound their way up their legs, whispering to them, caught you, caught you, caught you.

  We walked quickly, our eyes avid, peering through leafy front yards to where television sets flickered. We heard the steps of heavy-footed people sounding on timber floors. A dusky cat sat on a fence post but fled as we approached. I felt powerful and vigorous, with the whole town of Mullumbimby at our feet. There was mist, and we revelled in the glory of it, at being out when we should have been in bed. I felt so complete and strong and alive that I flung my arms round Lizzie and kissed her full on the mouth. She pushed me away, laughing, and we danced through the streets, utterly enchanted by the night - simply by the night and the amazement of being alive.

  We slowed down to smell a rose that leaned over a fence; it was black in the night but still smelled like a rose. But overlaying that odour I thought I could smell the dark rankness of river mud, and hear the sound of the leather woman coming closer as she strode through the streets, her legs as supple as ribbons, looking for us.