A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  Despite her love of the freedom at Claudio's place in town, the only place she really thinks of as home is the one in the hills with her mother. There, Lizzie takes out the small plastic parcel the goblin man has given her. She sets off with it across the hot midday garden and crosses paths with Emma, who has a paintbrush in her hand, on her own quest to her studio to work. Emma spies the parcel in Lizzie's hand; Lizzie tries to conceal it, putting it behind her quickly, making it all the more obvious.

  ‘What have you got there?’ Emma's query is light and idly curious.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You're so secretive.’

  ‘Oh, and you're not!’

  The exchange takes place in passing; it is over in seconds, but in a few moments the tone has changed so swiftly it leaves Lizzie reeling. She can see by the look of her mother's disappearing back how she's hurt her.

  She goes to the seat that looks east over the escarpment. Unwrapping the package quickly she hesitates only a moment. The mushrooms are misshapen and in a puddle of watery grey ooze; their moisture has diluted the honey so that it is unrecognisable. She places one and then the other on her tongue and swallows quickly They are like earthy wet oysters.

  Lizzie sits for a long time looking at the view and decides nothing is going to happen. Her stomach is faintly queasy and she wonders if she should stick her fingers down her throat and try to bring it all up.

  She closes her eyes and feels the world spin. When she was a child she would make herself dizzy spinning round and round like a top and then sit on the ground and open her eyes, to find with delight that she had been able to alter reality.

  She feels no such delight now. She sits down on the ground with a bump, hoping the earth will steady her. She thinks at once of her mother, and what they've just said and not said to each other.

  I think 1'11 diefrom not speaking.

  Red hibiscus flowers nod to her and she goes over to them, willing them to speak. She plucks one and laps at the red petals with her tongue. Red for danger, red for rage, red for sex.

  The petals are veined like flesh but as fine as skin. They give way beneath her teeth; she savours the texture and gulps them down, and then begins on the yellow stamens, which are thicker and harder to swallow. The red of the petals is the colour of secrets. She swallows the secrets and they disappear but they haven't gone away They are inside her.

  Evil Gifts

  THERE WERE a lot of snakes in our lives at this time. At our mother's house enormous carpet pythons wound themselves around the rafters of the verandahs. When Lizzie saw one, she'd capture Artemis and shut her in her room. She'd known someone who'd had a kitten taken by a carpet snake once; Artemis was bigger than that, but Lizzie was taking no chances.

  Snakes curled up in dark corners of Emma's studio; they stretched along the noggins of the unlined walls, still and milky eyed, and shed their skins. Her studio was a perfect place for snakes, dim and cool and surrounded by sheltering trees. Only Emma disturbed the stillness, scratching softly at her easel. She and the snakes tolerated each other; I think she quite liked them.

  We found snake skins everywhere: wafting from the rafters like pennants or drifting like leaves on the verandah floors. I loved the pattern of three diamonds across the back, the delicacy of the scales, like fine bubble-wrap. The dry skins rustled when you touched them, but sometimes we found one moist and recently vacated. Chloe collected them; she planned to give them all to Paris. She still tried to please her always.

  I don't mean the snakes to be symbolic of anything; you can take them any way you like. I mention them because they were there. They were part of the texture of our lives. A fact. A snake can simply be a snake.

  Lizzie was good at swallowing things. She swallowed the goblin man's evil gifts and went back for more. I don't know what she did there. Maybe she just cleaned off the dribble of tannin under his teapot spout, or watered the wilting herbs in the garden planted by that Jamila person, or learned to appreciate his badly written poetry at last.

  When we were at Claudio's she disappeared for long afternoons at a time. I prowled the streets sometimes looking for her, and one afternoon I spotted her in an outdoor cafe. The goblin man was with her. I watched as he said something to her and slid his finger along the top of her upturned wrist. Without another word he got up and left, as smoothly as a snake. I followed him, not daring to catch up, wondering what I would say to him if I did. Then, as he reached his front gate he turned his head and looked at me, as still as something about to pounce. I took the next few metres in great strides, urgently, and he waited, seeing that I had something to say to him. ‘Leave my sister alone,’ I blurted out. I was Claudio's daughter as I said it, my brows running together fiercely, my eyes flashing fire.

  He laughed, his face full of astonishment and mockery. ‘And who might your sister be?’

  ‘Lizzie.’

  ‘Lizzie is your sister?’

  I nodded, insulted by the disbelief on his face.

  ‘Look, Lizzie is her own person,’ he said. ‘She does what she wants to do. If you don't know that, then you don't know the first thing about your sister.’ His words were slow and soft. I don't remember him doing anything as ordinary as turning and going into the house. The next moment he simply wasn't there.

  Claudio loved Stella. His eyes flashed with adoration for her; it was embarrassing. He'd pick her up and hold her above him as if she were a child, laughing and looking up at her, his eyes alive.

  Stella was nonchalant about all this adoration; she took it as her due. She stayed out late as she felt like it, and never bothered to ring to say where she was on those nights. He looked after us all, including Paris, on his own, but his face became anxious and then enraged as the evening progressed. There were arguments, which we heard from the shelter of our room.

  Paris crept around, keeping to herself. I often saw her inquisitive face before she disappeared through a doorway. At that time Stella wore the long black velvet coat that set off her blonde hair and creamy skin. It must have been winter, for she wore it often. ‘My mother's coat,’ she'd said carelessly, the first time she put it on, and Claudio cast an admiring glance at her. ‘She bought it in Paris. The first time she went there, before she had me. I used to dress up in it when I was a kid.’ How Lizzie and I admired and envied that coat, gilded as it was by being part of our mother's Great Aunt Em story It was a part of our folklore, part of the only story our mother had consented to tell us.

  Claudio adored Stella whatever she wore. I'd catch him looking at her and have to turn away.

  Our mother couldn't always conceal her pain from us. There's a part of my story that causes me pain to tell.

  There was a gathering at which my mother's friend Mishka was to play the trumpet in a jazz band. (Mishka had just turned fifty: she said to my mother, ‘Now I'm blowing my own trumpet at last.') Imagine a darkened hall; tables with candles, people everywhere; my mother to one side of the room watching the band warm up; and then,Claudio and Stella aniving at the door. I saw the expression on my mother's face. She looked away.

  Claudio registered Emma's presence too. There was surprise - no pain - then it was gone. Claudio was a great concealer. He met up with people, talked and laughed. My father was always the life of the party.

  Stella was wearing her mother's coat. She stood there in it, ice-cool, her skin like cream, smiling to herself, staring at the floor. Our mother pushed her way from the room, out a side door, so she wouldn't have to go past them.

  Lizzie lay stretched out on her bed and I crept up to her and laid my head on her belly At fourteen I was still young enough to do that and get away with it. I knew that the shorts I wore and my sturdy brown legs and short cropped curls made me look a child still. It allowed me to do lots of things that more dignified people would think beneath them, but it was also my greatest source of sorrow, that Lizzie and I didn't look more alike.

  ‘Don't go to see that man again,’ I begged, aware of how pathetic I wa
s. I couldn't stop myself. ‘He looks like an evil fairy.’ I sat up and slid my hand under her blouse and felt the smooth skin of her waist. My fingers touched the cool ring embedded in her skin; I slipped the tip of my index finger into the ring for an instant. She pushed me away ‘Oh, Laura, get off me.’

  ‘But why do you visit him?’ I put my hand on her thigh and she slapped it away.

  ‘Stop touching my leg!’

  She began to dress with care, pulling a flimsy purple top from a hanger. She unearthed a slim-fitting long magenta skirt from a pile on the floor and shook it out. Her hair she unbraided and brushed so that it stood out in crinkles over her shoulders like a gold cape. I lay on the bed and watched. She coated her lips with mulberry lipstick and then ate most of it off again while she daubed rose geranium oil on her wrists.

  I lay on her bed as she left. A sickly sweet trail of scent was all that was left of her. I rolled over and put my nose into her pillow and her bed still smelt of the real Lizzie.

  She goes to the goblin man's house, her hair unbraided, dressed like an offering. She walks straight through the front door, a door that is rarely closed, and up the dark stem of hallway to where the house opens out into a cluttered back verandah. The goblin man is not alone.

  Stella is there. She is sprawled on the sofa, her head reclining against a cushion. The goblin man is beside her, curled up with his ear against her belly.

  He looks up at Lizzie, his one visible eye glittering like a raven's. Lizzie turns without a word and goes out.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked her when she returned.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing happened.’

  I looked at her, not believing. Yet she had been gone only a short time.

  ‘Tmly,’ she said. ‘Nothing happened. Then, or ever. He never touched me.’

  She laughed with relief. She lay on the bed and hugged her knees to her chest.

  All that time spent hanging round the goblin man and nothing had happened. Something was going on but nothing had happened.

  It wasn't long before she began to ask herself if he was even real.

  She asked me to come with her to the hairdresser's where she sat stiffly in front of the mirror, her hair in a single plait that fell behind like a rope. The hairdresser was young, with white hair clipped close to his head and a thin face. He tied a rubber band around the top of the plait and severed it cleanly just above the band. With a war whoop he dropped it into Lizzie's lap. ‘Scalped!’ he said.

  The buzz of conversation in the salon stopped for a moment as everyone turned to look. It was odd, like the world stopping, and then starting up again as if nothing had happened. The place was more like a party than a hairdresser's; it was full of people talking about the kind of music Lizzie and I never listened to.

  Lizzie bowed her head and refused to look in the mirror as he got to work on what remained of her hair. When it was finished she raised her eyes; he held a mirror behind her so she could see it from all sides, and I could tell that she liked what she saw.

  ‘Very, very nice,’ said the hairdresser with admiration. ‘You're a new woman!’

  I stared at her shyly. The cut was short and feathery, shaped into the nape of her long, pale neck. She stood up. And again, everyone left off what they were doing or saying for a moment to observe her with long glances of envy.

  She put the plait into her bag, went to the counter and paid; I got up to go with her, and it was like attending a queen. We went out into an ordinary Mullumbimby afternoon. I skipped a hop and a step to keep up as she made her way down the street; I saw her catch sight of her reflection in a shop window and admire herself secretly.

  We passed an old woman in a purple hat, a hat that you felt you could eat, for it had a bloom on it like a ripe plum, and Lizzie smiled to herself. We walked on, and were halfway down the street before I said, ‘You liked that hat.’

  You liked her in that hat,’ I amended.

  She smiled down at me, sideways, a small complicit smile that let me know I was exactly right. She said, ‘I enjoy it when old ladies dress up. When I am old, I'll wear the most beautiful clothing I can find.’

  We passed the op shop and with one accord stopped and went back to it. Lizzie loved the clothes that other women had discarded. She slipped into them eagerly, loving how they transformed her, loving how she transformed them and gave them new life.

  ‘I need a hat,’ she said.

  We found the perfect hat for Lizzie first off. It was as old as old, made of black velvet with a low crown and no brim, and had an ancient stiff hatpin with a single pearl embedded in the side. It smelt of dust and lavender perfume.

  ‘It's the sort of hat Aunt Em might have worn,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, her voice round and fat and satisfied, and took the hat straight to the counter. She wore it out of the shop.

  When we got home Lizzie didn't remove her hat at once, and I don't think our mother noticed that she'd cut her hair. Then Lizzie reached into her bag and threw the severed plait onto the table.

  Stella and Paris arrived in the middle of a storm. Emma had been standing on the verandah enjoying the crash of thunder and the beat of the rain, as she always did - she liked the tempestuousness of it - when Stella's old yellow Corona toiled up the drive. Torrents of water poured from the sky and rendered the car almost invisible. Emma watched as Stella climbed out, the door almost wrenched away from her by the wind, and climbed the front steps of the house without bothering to run or hunch her shoulders as people do in the rain, simply allowing herself to get drenched. Her hair was plastered down over her head and her mouth was open.

  Emma met her at the front door, took in her condition, and ushered her inside without a word. She left her dripping in the kitchen and took some raingear outside to help Paris out of the car and into the house.

  When she was a child, Flora had said that Stella was a star. She was also a drama queen. ‘I've left him!’ she said, the moment Emma got back. ‘God, what a bastard! I wonder that you stuck to him all those years!’

  Paris watched with a cynical expression. Lizzie went off to her room. But of course I stayed on to see what happened. Emma calmly found dry clothes, offered food, and made them up a bed each.

  Emma could have asked why or how but she didn't want to know the details. Anyway, who can say what goes on between people where love is concerned?

  Only Paris had seen the end of Claudio and Stella's affair. Alone in the house with them, as she often was when we weren't there, she had heard the angry and then resigned words in the bedroom. She heard them go out.

  She followed down the windy winter street. Neither glanced back to see the small figure in teacup-printed pyjamas as she padded barefoot down the ill-lit pavement behind them. Stella huddled into her black coat and Claudio shivered in a cotton shirt.

  And Paris sees them enter the darkened silent park, empty of people or lights. She stands at a distance and watches as Stella spreads her coat on the ground under the shelter of some trees, and she and Claudio, on the coat, fuck for the last time.

  On the second day of rain, after we'd finished dinner, Stella and Emma and I sat listening to the calls of frogs from the puddles that had been created around the house. It was an awkward silence; no one spoke. The rhythm of the frog calls beat inside my head. Lizzie had eaten quickly and sparingly and gone to her room.

  It had stopped raining, and Chloe and Paris had gone outside. Emma suddenly got to her feet and went to find them. ‘Chloe! Paris!’

  I followed. They looked up at the dazzling eye of Emma's torch. ‘Come and look for frogs with me!’

  We followed the call of the frogs, a regular unk, unk, unk, our footsteps making the torches bounce. We stopped when the sound was right in front of us. Emma leaned over a puddle and spotlighted a small frog floating on the surface of the water. Paris caught it in a jar, and we took it back to the house to look at it properly It was a woebegone little frog, small and warty, and with one suckered foot against the wa
ll of the jar. We could see its soft, pale underbelly.

  ‘An ornate burrowing frog,’ said Emma, who knew about these things.

  ‘No it's not,’ said Paris, ‘It's a yukky little toad. The kind a witch might have.’

  ‘No, it's a frog,’ said Emma. ‘The only toad in Australia is introduced - the cane toad. But this isn't one of them - it's an adult frog, even though it's so small. This one is Limnodynastes ornatus. The ornate burrowing frog. Limnodynastes means "lord of the marshes". Don't you think he looks like a little lord?’

  ‘I'd hate to kiss him,’ said Chloe, wrinkling up her nose, ‘even if he really was a handsome prince.’

  ‘I'd kiss him,’ said Paris. ‘And I'd cut him up too. I'd love to cut up a frog.’

  ‘I don't think we'll kiss this one, or cut it up,’ said Emma. ‘When we've had a bit more of a look we'll put him back in the puddle.’

  ‘You should be wary of kissing frogs,’ drawled Stella, her face turned towards them in the darkness, from where she'd been leaning over the edge of the verandah with a cigarette. The tip glowed as she inhaled. You never know what kind of prince it might turn into.’

  Lizzie's shape appeared in the shadowy doorway for a moment, but when I looked properly she was gone. I think I saw my mother smile. I may have even heard her laugh, a soft chuckle. Stella glanced quickly in her direction and then back out at the night.

  Lizzie was careful to avoid Stella; it was easy, for it was a big house, sprawling, made for people to be able to go off on their own. It was the only reason our mother and Stella had been able to live there together for the past week.

  Lizzie had worn the velvet hat ever since she'd bought it. I found her late one night, lying on her bed like a corpse, her hands folded on her chest, the hat still on her head.