Without looking at me she said, ‘Sometimes I think I'll die from not speaking.’
I crept onto the end of the bed.
‘I hate the way she puts up with everything. And allowing her back here like that, after what she's done. I just wish I could say it all to them, that's all.’
Because we mostly ignored her, Paris kept to her solitary habits. I'd see her scribbling in her notebook, probably writing down observations of us. She was like an anthropologist studying a strange tribe, only the tribe she was studying was us, the Zucchinis.
She kept a collection of moth wings in that notebook. I'd see one fall out when she opened it; see her pick it up and replace it between the pages, wiping the dust from its wings off her fingers.
Paris, ever curious, wonders what the difference is between a moth and a butterfly Looking in the dictionary she finds that among other things, moths have nocturnal and crepuscular habits. She looks up crepwcular and writes the word in her notebook.
Our mother and Paris had grown to like each other. You could tell from the way they did things together, Paris watching Emma carefully.
Emma allowed Paris to be there while she sketched. She drew a picture of a woman in a dress made of a whole snakeskin, the head and open mouth of the snake forming a hood, so that only the woman's face showed.
‘Where are her legs?’ whispered Paris.
‘Perhaps she doesn't have any,’ Emma whispered back.
‘Or they're in the tail of the snake.’
Emma drew the dress so that it ended in a tail.
‘Did she kill the snake to make her dress?’
‘I think maybe she's being eaten by the snake. Consumed by it . . .’
‘Consumed . . .’ said Paris, liking the sound of the word. ‘Why are we whispering?’
‘I don't know,’ Emma whispered back. ‘Maybe we don't want to disturb her. Maybe she is the snake. She might bite us.’ They laughed silently together, covering their mouths in an exaggerated way with their hands.
‘Which is it, though?’ insisted Paris. ‘Is she being . . . consumed . . . by the snake, or is she the snake herself?’
‘I don't know,’ said Emma. ‘Maybe both. All things are possible.’
Paris stroked Emma's hair. ‘A lot of your hairs are silver,’ she said, picking up a strand and examining it. ‘They're beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘I'm going grey. I intend to cultivate my hair to the exact shade of grey I like. I want it to have a soft sheen, like pewter.’
They walked the garden together, Paris with the skin of a small diamond python wrapped around her wrist, Emma with her favourite hemp gardening hat almost obscuring her face. Emma named the plants as if reciting a poem: heartsease and hyssop, borage and bitter root, bittersweet, blackbewy, lemon balm and aloe, chamomile, catnip, geranium and henbane, lavendel; rosemary . . .
They squat down to pinch fragrant leaves between their fingers. The snakeskin Paris wears on her wrist rustles against the rosemary bush. Her eyes, dark with knowledge, are level with Emma's.
‘We're having a baby,’ she says.
She watches until she sees that her words have entered Emma's consciousness. ‘I hope I get a sister.’
Emma stands up, her hand on the small of her back, as if it aches. Paris is too old not to know what effect her words might have. And too young to really know what she is doing.
Emma went to Stella and said, ‘I think you ought to leave.’
Now that she'd been told she couldn't pretend she didn't know. When Stella had arrived on the night of the storm I said that Emma took in her condition. I didn't just mean that Stella was soaking wet and distressed. Emma knew all along she was pregnant, though it didn't show. Some women can scent these things, and my mother is one of them.
Lizzie wore the black velvet hat with the pearl hatpin at the school concert. The hat that we called Aunt Em's hat. We half-believed that it was. We didn't have a long velvet coat like Stella's, so the hat served as a kind of family heirloom for us.
Lizzie was in a rock group with three other girls but she stood apart, a bit to the side, as if she didn't really belong with them. Aunt Em's hat made her look exotic and pale and remote. She played her guitar staring straight ahead. In public she never caressed it, or kissed it, or smelt it as she did when she was on her own. And it was only when she was alone that her face and body manifested her feeling for the music when she played. Now she was almost motionless, except for her fingers, simply a lanky schoolgrl playing a guitar in a desultory way. To anyone else her face would have appeared expressionless. Only I was aware of her secret, suppressed delight.
Kiss the Sky
THE SUMMER when I was seventeen 1 was so full of undifferentiated sensuality that the world was a great glowing golden fruit around me. I didn't long for love and nor did I need it, yet I saw love everywhere without even looking for it.
‘I love you, Mick,’ said a girl who'd been busking outside a cafe with her boyfriend; they'd packed up and were walking away with their instruments. She had a round, childish face and stringy hair and her bare feet were so beautiful I could have taken them into my hands and kissed them. ‘I love you, Mick,’ she said, and her voice was so sweet and innocent and sincere; the words flowed from her mouth spontaneously without passion or inflection. ‘I love you too,’ said Mick simply, and they caught each other's hands. I saw then how easy and undramatic love could be.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ said a guy at a cafe table as a friend of his, a girl, approached.
‘Every time I see you you've got this great grin on your face . . .’ she said.
One night outside the hotel at Brunswick Heads I saw a guy and a girl part: you could see they were only friends at that moment but she said, ‘I'll see you tomorrow then,’ in a way that promised they would soon be much more. I saw the look of delight on his face as he turned away from her to head back into the beer garden. He was so happy he leapt into the air and touched the overhanging branch of a frangipani tree with his hand. Everywhere I looked, there were people delighting in each other.
But I needed no one. I was myself, complete.
At night the summer air breathed onto my face with such promises of bliss that I slept in a deep swoon. I was caressed by the morning sunlight and seduced by the long afternoon shadows, and I lapped it all up in such a daze of sensation that I couldn't tell where the world ended and I began. I was so much in love with simply being alive that I could have kissed the sky.
In the bookshop at Mullumbimby I crouched on the floor, dipping into books. I had a belief that one day I would come across something - in a book, anywhere - that would finally allow the world to make sense, and I was forever alive and alert for it.
The books smelt of age and dust the way only horrible old books can; even the paperbacks were abscessed and flaky like someone with a terrible skin disease. There was an old woman running the shop, and she sat there in a chair behind the counter and a friend sat with her, talkmg. I let their voices wash over me, paying no attention, my nose rebelling so much at the dust that I was almost about to leave.
‘I always wanted what I couldn't have,’ said one woman.
I stopped reading to pay attention, my eyes on the book I was holding, but I was all ears.
‘I always wanted girls,’ she went on. ‘I had four boys.’
‘Girls can be difficult,’ said the other. ‘Girls too close to each other in age can be . . .’ She paused, searching for a word, and it seemed to take her a hundred years to find it. I think I stopped breathing, in case my breath obscured what she would say next. ‘. . . catty,’ she said. I slammed shut the book I was holding, replaced it, and left the shop.
Lizzie was catty with our mother but never with me. I irritated her often, I knew that, by hanging around her so much and forever touching her and adoring her and secretly wishing I could be her. I annoyed her by incessantly trying on her clothes, even though they never fitted properly. I sniffed them with
my eyes shut to try and capture her essence.
Claudio stayed the night once, sleeping in our mother's bed. We only discovered it the next morning when we found him still there. ‘I thought you were meant to be separated!’ Lizzie said to her scornfully when he had gone, and our mother didn't reply.
Stella had gone back to Sydney after Emma asked her to leave. She'd had her baby and Paris hadn't got the sister that she'd wanted, but a brother. His name was Thomas. Tnomas I mouthed silently to myself. I imagined his tiny fingers and scrunched-up face, and I wondered if I would ever meet him. But after we heard the news my mother never mentioned him, or Stella, or Paris, again, and I almost forgot he existed.
Lizzie left school. She said she couldn't stand any more study and found a job in a cafe. Soon after that she moved out of home, found another waitressing job and a place to rent in Byron Bay. It was a converted garage behind someone's house. She made a home for herself there with stuff she'd found at op shops. She draped luscious old curtains at the windows and on the walls she hung elegant scarves and shawls. She'd traded in her electric guitar for an acoustic one, and it stood at the side of the room on a special stand, like an important visitor given pride of place.
In the summer holidays after my final year of school I went to stay with her. Lizzie had a car, an old Toyota station wagon which she'd bought for $700, and she allowed me to drive it sometimes. We loved that car. loved its dear little humble shape, its dusty white paint, and the way it putt-putted steadily up the mountains and never let us down.
In the one-roomed home she'd made in the garage we cooked nourishing vegetarian meals and then, unsatisfied, we went out and bought icecream or take-away pizza and gorged ourselves.
Al had gone away to university Sometimes I found Lizzie in an intemet cafe sending him an email. She hunched her shoulders and stared solemnly into the screen, then shot off her message with the push of a button. She went home and scrawled pages and pages to him with a purple pen, drawing pictures all down the margins and over the envelope.
‘Is Al coming home for Christmas?’ I asked, and she shrugged and looked unhappy I was with her most of the time but she rarely spoke to me; I longed for her to throw herself down beside me on the bed and take my hand and tell me things. Speak to me, Lizie, I wanted to say, tell me what you'refeeling, but she didn't. She didn't really talk, not in the way I wanted. I thought that she had acquired our mother's habit of silence. She was aloof, apart, distant.
For something to do we put henna in her hair. She'd let it grow long again and I was in charge of putting the henna through to make sure it was properly distributed. Massaging her scalp, brushing the long strands of hair from her forehead into the thick, foul-smelling paste, was a kind of intimacy I relished being able to touch her even in this practical way She sat with a plastic bag over her hair for as long as she could stand and then we rinsed it out.
Her hair turned an astonishing luminous red. I saw her walking down the street, head and shoulders above the throng of backpackers who pulsed along the footpath. She was ethereal, she floated, her red hair loose and flowing like a cape. People stared; some even turned their heads to get a better look. But she noticed no one; she walked oblivious, and the crowds parted for her so that behind her there was a human wake.
Christmas came and went, and as usual we shared our time between our mother's house and our father's. Al didn't come home. His mother no longer spent all her time in bed and Lizzie said that she was joining him in Sydney so they could visit relatives. I could see that Lizzie was disappointed, though she never spoke of it to me. Did the thought of Al, the fact of him, their friendship, which I couldn't fathom, make her happy or not?
I worried about her. She no longer played the tunes of Jimi Hendrix, but she'd been seeing him everywhere. The man in the record shop, she said, was the spitting image of him. I thought she was mad. He had frizzy hair and dark skin but that was the only resemblance I could see. She said he'd come into her cafe one day when I wasn't there - not the man in the record shop, someone else who also looked like Jimi Hendrix. He'd ordered a vegetarian focaccia and a latte. And then she'd seen him surfing, on a board, way out on the waves. ‘He was a real good rider,’ she said.
That was when I laughed at her. ‘The ghost,’ I told her, ‘of Jimi Hendrix, maybe that's what you've seen. You've seen the ghost of Jimi Hendrix, surfing at Byron Bay.’
I was in the habit of helping her out in the cafe. The owner was a mean bastard who allowed her to play her guitar to entertain customers when there was a break in the work; she was hoping someone would see her and offer her a proper paid gig somewhere else. So I used to go with her and help wait on tables to give her more time to play Lizzie was writing and playing her own tunes, but she never made up any words to them.
I noticed a woman in the cafe one day just after Christmas. She'd been in there before. I remembered the way her hair was shaved close to her head, emphasising the perfect shape of it, and the tiny moon and stars tattooed on her shoulder. When I took her order I saw that she and the woman she was with were having some sort of silent quarrel. ‘Is there any way out into the hills near here apart from in those buses full of backpackers?’ she asked me.
‘Not unless you have a car.’
I liked the way she grinned back at me, and then later, when I was setting down her food and Lizzie was playlng her guitar, she looked towards Lizzie and said admiringly and intimately, so that I thought she was speaking to me: ‘She's beautiful.’
‘She's my sister,’ I said. When she turned to me I waited for her to say ‘Your sister?’ surprised, as people always were. But she looked at me carefully, glancing frankly into my eyes. I was grateful for the way she smiled and said, ‘Yes, I can see the resemblance.’
The next time I saw her, she was on the path to the lighthouse, alone, looking out to the splash and foam around Julian Rocks. I came the next day at the same time and she was there again, but she was so intent on gazing out to sea that she didn't notice me. One, two, three times I saw her there before I was courageous enough to speak to her. I was flattered that she remembered me. She said her friend was out there, diving. She said she didn't want to join her, that she was scared of it, of being submerged in all that water.
I almost told her I had an aunt that drowned, I felt such an affinity with her.
Her name, she told me, was Catherine. ‘So what are you doing today?’ she asked, and I shrugged.
‘Nothing. Just hanging about. How much longer are you staying?’
‘A couple more days. We have to be back at work after New Year.’
I ignored the We. Then I said boldly, Why don't you come home with me for the day? I live out there, in the hills. I could borrow my sister's car.’
At my home in the hills, Catherine admired everything: the view, my mother's wild garden, our dark, cavernous house that had always seemed too large and empty after my father went away. There were years of largeness and emptiness behind me that I still hadn't become used to.
Chloe showed Catherine her collections, including all the snake skins that she still saved despite the fact that Paris had moved away. She had wallaby skulls lined along the shelves in her room, and bird skeletons too, hollow-eyed skulls beautiful in their fragility. On her windowsill was her collection of shells, in groups of the same kind, with subtle variations. Seahorses were arrested in elegant curves as though they had died in motion. Along the verandah rail sat all the tiny boxfish that she had brought home from the beach, some of them still with a faint whiff of decay; their skin was stretched like parchment over their boxy frames, their mouths in a pout of disapproving surprise at finding themselves in such an unfamiliar setting.
And along the verandah floor was her collection of cow skulls, some with a line of bullet holes in them. She had stacked them in a pile, diligently. She showed all of this to Catherine with the air of a serious collector; she had about her an aura of self-possession that I envied, as if there were powers in her that were being sto
red up for a future important enterprise.
She monopolised Catherine, insisting on showing her the microscope she had been given for Christmas. Chloe had already shown me the juice from a potato, which looked like a glistening collection of pearly beads, golden and glowing and magical. A transparent strip from the flesh of an onion had revealed a silvery wall of six-sided cells, stacked together like bricks. One drop of pond water had weed like embroidered pompoms, and slender rods made of a line of square cells glowing like bottle glass against the sun. In pond water I have seen one-celled transparent animals that twist and turn like gymnasts until the heat from the microscope light makes them die.
She showed Catherine the same things, and told her about all of it: that the fine glass-green strands are filamentous algae, that plant cells are rigid with cellulose whereas animal cells are soft and squishy She showed us both something I hadn't seen before, the stomata in a leaf. These are the cells that allow the tree to breathe. All the beauty of life comes down to this, to these things that you cannot see with the naked eye, and which, when you do see them, are more beautiful than you would ever imagine.
When Chloe finally let us go Catherine looked at me and smiled, as if to say that she, also, was pleased to be alone with me at last.
‘She's wonderful. She'll surprise you all one day,’ she said, and I felt ashamed of the way Lizzie had been the one for me to the exclusion of everyone else.
‘Your mother. She's sad,’ said Catherine, after we had eaten lunch with Emma and gone up to my room.
‘She's lonely Now that she's not with my father she gets together with some of her friends and they drink bottles of wine and laugh into the night but she's not really happy.’ I didn't want to explain more. That night he'd spent with her was the only one since they'd parted. Now that Stella had gone away he had other girlfriends, all younger than him, and blonde. All looking rather like Lizzie, in fact, but without the thing I can't describe that made her so beautiful.
A Charm of Powerful Trouble Page 11
