A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  When she was older she went out at night without her mother's permission to pop concerts with her friends. She went to the airport and screamed when the Beatles arrived. At one of the concerts she wore a see-through blouse with nothing on underneath - she showed it to Emma the next morning before rolling it into a ball and putting it into her bottom drawer.

  She was beautiful. Beauty gives you advantages and Beth took them all. People will put up with more from you if you are beautiful. Countless boys were interested in her. They'd ring her up and she'd casually tell them off and laugh at their bumbling attempts to go out with her. She cared for none of them.

  But Emma swallowed everything. She swallowed the idea that girls must be polite and kind and considerate to others. She finished up her dinner tidily. When her mother was tired, she never moaned that she was bored but played by herself in the garden with her collection of dolls. She kept a pebble as round and as smooth as a lie in her pocket to suck on when she felt lonely.

  Every morning their mother brushed out Beth's and Emma's hair and plaited it for school. But Beth was never satisfied. She made her mother pull it out and plait it again and again so that it looked just right, though she could never explain what ‘just right’ was. One day, as Emma sat meekly at the table with her school ribbons in her hands waiting for her turn, her mother picked up a sharp pair of dressmaking scissors that lay nearby and hacked off Beth's plait, just like that - and threw it down in frustration on the table.

  Beth's dark plait drops down in front of Emma - she can hear the plop as it hits the table top. Years later Lizzie's blonde one does the same. Our mother looks as though she's seen a ghost.

  Emma woke in the night with the urgent need to pee. She put on her light and made her way as quietly as she could down the ladder from the loft. Yesterday afternoon Flora had showed her the outdoor dunny and said it was better to pee on the grass so they didn't fill it too quickly There was a torch near the back door in case you needed to go outside at night.

  Emma took herself a little way from the house and squatted on the grass. She hadn't given up hope that there might be blood one day, though she hadn't done anything to hasten it. She had vague thoughts of running up and down hills, or of sitting in a hot bath with a bottle of gin. Isn't that what you could do? Or when she got back to Sydney she knew that one of the women who came to the meetings would be able to arrange something for her if she wanted it.

  She closed her eyes and rocked backwards and forwards and she told herselt My nume is Emma Montgomery and I have nofather or mother or sister or anyone who is close to me in the world. There is only me and the night the stars and the damp grass and the yeasty odour between my legs.

  There is the thing inside me, the small wriggling tadpole thing.

  She tried to think of Blake Yeats but she couldn't even call up his face. He had met a man named Hans in Amsterdam and he and Hans were travelling to Venice. That was the last she'd heard of him. His letters were coming less and less often and she knew that one day they would cease altogether as he and Hans rode off into the sunset together. My mother knew what Blake Yeats meant when he whispered harshly in her ear that he wished she was a man.

  Emma thought of Claudio, of his smile and his startling eyebrows and his air of supreme confidence, and of all his wafting madonnas, and he seemed very far away and unattainable. She wiped away a self-pitying tear and took her head from her knees and looked up at the world. The night was predictably lovely, with clear, bright stars.

  After Beth died there were reminders of her everywhere. The routines and patterns of their life gaped with her absence. Emma's mother couldn't bear to go into Beth's room, so it was left as it was, the door shut. Emma crept in there sometimes and lay on her sister's bed. She gazed at the posters on her wall, glanced through her magazines, hung her head over the edge of the bed to stare at the dust balls and withered apple cores beneath it. She flicked through Beth's stack of records and opened and shut the lid of her record player. She examined the clothes in her drawers, shaking them out and looking at them wanderingly, then putting them to her nose briefly before folding and replacing them.

  She longed to escape the dull routine of her mother's suburban house, which was even more chill and claustrophobic after Beth died. All the fighting had left the house and, Emma saw, any of the life and vibrancy it might have had as well. She wished for some of Beth's anger, she longed for her to flounce once more through the door, to yell at her for dabbing some of her precious perfume along one wrist, to hear her say in her careless voice, Emma, you are just so square.

  But Emma was a good girl, a good daughter. She finished her last year at school, won a scholarship and enrolled at university. She'd have liked to be able to rent a room in a student house but that was out of the question. She longed for danger and difference; she stood in the dusky night and hugged her arms around herself and felt the thrill and possibilities of life.

  Without Beth to compete with there was an opening for her to be the bad girl, the beautiful and bold girl, but she wasn't brave enough for that. She couldn't get out of the habit of doing what her mother wanted (a sensible arts degree, not art school) and wore what her mother chose for her (pleated wool skirts, hand-knitted jumpers, a machine-knitted twinset for best). But she practised little subversions. She'd bought a pair of old jeans at an op shop and each day when she arrived at the university in her pleated wool skirt she headed to the toilet to shuck it off and slip into the jeans. They soon became filthy through weeks of not being washed and she liked them that way She let her shirt hang out under her jumper, messed up her hair, and that was all that was needed to effect a transformation.

  Emma didn't want to do things behind her mother's back. But she didn't want to hurt her either, so she pretended to be the daughter her mother wanted. She thought that what her mother didn't know wouldn't hurt her.

  Wearing a pair of old blue jeans was the least of the things Emma kept from her mother. She had also told her that she was staying back at night to use the library when she was really attending women's liberation meetings at an old house near the university, the house she later moved into.

  My mother understands disguise and metamorphosis better than most people. The skins you can slip out of to reveal the person you really are. You can slip into a disguise, too. Put something on.

  Or you can change from within, become an amorphous mush and form into something other. It was no accident that she created the sculpture of the leather woman. She was as slippery as a snake, my mother.

  When her mother died, it was the real thing.

  It wasn't like her father, or Aunt Em, who had appeared to be merely swallowed by the universe, sucked up into a mysterious and grand state of non-being. Her mother's death was the way death was meant to be: painful and drawn-out, a gradual sickening and wasting with time for tears and regrets.

  Emma sat with her, wishing she knew what to say Her mother craved sweet, cold things; Emma bought her tubs of icecream from the hospital shop and spooned it tenderly into her mouth. ‘I miss Beth,’ her mother said.

  At another time she said, ‘I was always so angry at your father for leaving us like that. Always tramping off into the wilderness . . . going off on that . . . wild-goose chase for new plants when he had a wife and daughters dependent on him. I did my best to look after us all. I'm only sorry now that we didn't have more fun.’

  Every time her mother spoke like that Emma couldn't find a reply It wasn't that she wanted to remain silent. It was that she was already in the habit of not saying what she felt. For she didn't even know what it was she did feel. She patted her mother's hand. She thought, I'm too youngfor this. I don't know how to help people die. Her mother said softly, looking at her pleadingly, daring Emma to contradict her: ‘When I get out of here I don't want to waste another precious moment inside the house. We'll take picnic teas to the park, to the beach.’

  Emma agreed with her. She took her mother's hand and said that yes, they would enjoy thems
elves more; they would do things differently When her mother got better.

  But she never did get out of hospital. She died in the middle of one night when Emma wasn't with her.

  Their family life hadn't been all dour. Every year after Christmas when their mother took her annual holidays they went down the coast for a whole month to where a friend of hers lived. It was a small beach town, sleepy and dull, with a general store, a newsagent, a fish and chip shop, a boat-hire place, a pub and a picture theatre.

  When Emma and Beth were little they all stayed in the house, crammed into the one bedroom with their mother, but when the girls became teenagers they were allowed to sleep in a wooden cabin out the back while their mother kept the room in the house.

  On their last holiday, when they were seventeen and nineteen, Beth had abandoned Emma most of the time. One day Emma wandered up and down the lonely beach, searching out shells and pocketing them. The wind whipped the sand into snakes that wriggled along the beach and stung her legs. She came at last to some dunes near the estuary and sat there, her knees drawn up, squinting at the glare of the sea and putting her hands over her ears against the wind. It seemed she was the only person who'd ventured out that day She licked her knee and found it inexplicably salty, as if she had soaked up the very air of the place.

  A border collie ran along the top of the dunes, sniffing the ground. It appeared to be searching for something. It kept returning to a certain point, yelping, and then running off again. Emma wondered whether it was lost, and stood up to investigate, following it along the beach and climbing up the dune to where she could hear it barking. She saw then what had been claiming its attention.

  Beth looked up at the same moment that Emma caught sight of her. She was lying on the sand behind the dunes with a boy, whom Emma recognised as the boy who worked at the boat-hire place. Beth's skirt was pulled up, and his hand was on the back of her leg just below her buttocks. They both twisted round at being interrupted. ‘Get out, Jess!’ he said to the dog. ‘Just get out, will you?’

  When Beth saw Emma she didn't acknowlege her at all apart from an involuntary change of expression that was gone a moment later. She shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand and looked away again, and Emma, embarrassed, ran down from the top of the dune to the sea, where she splashed cold water on her face and spilled the shells out of her pockets.

  The cabin that Emma and Beth stayed in that summer gave an impression of blackness. The unpainted wood on the outside was black with age, and there were few windows so that inside it was dark even on the sunniest days. Their mother's friend was called Marjorie, and she had decorated the cabin with ancient pictures she'd inherited from her mother. There was one in particular that gave Emma the creeps, a melancholy picture of a woman bending over a baby in a crib, one of those sentimental old-fashioned women with long hair looped up beside her face and a long nose and beseeching eyes.

  The cabin was lined only with tar-paper that had come apart in places in long, hairy, tarry strips, and the curtains and bedcover were made of faded patterned fabric. There was just one old double bed in the place, which Emma and Beth shared; Emma often lay awake listening to her sleepless sister sighing and rolling over in the bed.

  The boy Emma had seen Beth with that day was called Phillip, and he worked for his father at the boat-hire place. They'd met when Beth and Emma had gone to hire a canoe early on in the holiday when they were still doing a few things together. He was handsome (even Emma could see that) in an indisputable, tall, square-jawed, kind of way. He had a broad chest and muscular arms, and fair, floppy hair that hung over one eye. To Emma he was simply the sum of these things, but Beth obviously saw more. She often went to the boatshed to see him. Emma saw them outside on the jetty, her sister in a short red dress, her legs long and brown, one bare foot stroking the other in delight as she looked up at him and laughed. He took her to the pictures one night, and their mother insisted on meeting him first, and told him not to get Beth home too late. She waited up till Beth got home to make sure.

  ‘Snuggle up behind me,’ Beth told Emma that night as they were trying to get to sleep, ‘and I'll pretend you're Phillip.’ Emma was shocked that her sister wanted to imagine that she was in bed with him, and even worse, that she could pretend that her own sister was a boy, and she rolled as far as she could away from Beth onto the extreme edge of the bed. Beth laughed at her, ‘Oh, Emma, can't you see I was joking?’ and hugged the spare pillow close to her.

  Beth's life became a breathless flurry of anticipation. She encouraged Emma to help in her deliberations on what to wear, allowed her to watch as, pink and damp from a shower, she slipped off her quilted brunch coat and into her clothes, a dab of perfume at the wrist and behind her ears. She did this even if she was going to call in on him at the boatshed.

  One of the things she tried on was the transparent blouse she'd worn to the pop concert. Beth put it on without a bra, posing before the mirror with her hands defiantly on her hips, admiring her reflection.

  ‘You'd never dare wear that in a place like this!’ said Emma.

  ‘Oh, wouldn't I!’ said Beth.

  But she took it off and slipped it underneath the other clothes in her drawer.

  Her mother refused to allow Beth to go out with Phillip two nights in a row, but Beth went anyway, stealing out of the cabin after the main house was in darkness. After that she sneaked out night after night, and Emma got into the habit of lying awake waiting for her, pretending she was asleep while Beth slipped out of her clothes and into her nightie. Emma, with her nose attuned to her sister's smell, noticed that she smelt different when she came home, that she smelt of herself, but not herself, of something earthy and fishy and undefinable.

  One day Beth had been forbidden to go out at all by their mother, who'd caught her coming in late the night before. She must have suspected something and had lain in wait.

  And where do you think you've been, young lady?

  Can you explain to me exactly what you've been doing?

  So you're thinking of becoming that sort of girl, are you?

  Their mother's voice continued, cold and quiet and relentless, and Beth murmured indistinct replies. Emma lay in bed and heard it all through the thin walls of the cabin. When Beth finally came inside, she undressed in the dark and lay on the extreme edge of their shared bed and sniffled softly to herself.

  In the morning Emma collected her sketchbook and prepared to go out for the day on her own, as she was used to doing, but Beth, her face still smeared with make-up, looked up in despair and said, ‘Oh stay! Keep me company!’

  So Emma did.

  She watched as Beth cleaned off her face and smoked a cigarette. Emma reached for her crayons and doodled while Beth went out to the bathroom and had a long shower. She came back with her face pink and her skin moist with steam.

  When she slipped off her brunch coat and began to dry herself thoroughly, Emma, admiring the curve of her back as she bent over to towel between her toes, said impulsively, ‘Let me draw you like that!’

  ‘What? With nothing on?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘All right, but I won't pose.’ Beth picked up a bottle of red nail varnish from the bedside table and shook it. She plopped down onto the bed and, with her knees drawn up in front of her, started to paint her nails.

  Emma pursed her mouth as she drew, concentrating, intent on seeing properly: the curve of her sister's back, her absorbed expression as she dabbed gloss on her nails, the mole beside her mouth, the downy hair on her upper lip, her dark eyebrows furred like the antennae of a moth, her hair as smooth as a sheet of satin, the scar on her upper arm from chickenpox and one the size of a five-cent piece on her knee where she'd fallen over when she was five, her pearly fingernails. All the things that made her Beth and no one else.

  Emma thought of how she'd seen Beth lying with Phillip in the sand dunes with his hand over her bum. A frisson of disapproval passed through her. Cheap. The word that came unbidden to h
er mind wasn't hers. It came from years of inculcated social disapproval. She feared for her sister, too. If you gave in, which meant giving in to your own desires as much as to anyone else's, you risked getting caught. And everyone knew what that meant.

  ‘Do you love him?’ she blurted out.

  Beth looked startled and then secretive. ‘Oh, love . . .’ she said, smiling to herself in a superior way that made Emma sorry that she'd asked such a question. They caught each other's eye and Emma was the first to look away Beth leaned over and placed the bottle of varnish on the table.

  Emma felt hot, and heavy. She looked out of the window of the cabin. Masses of dark clouds were building in the sky. And Emma felt her own body susceptible to its own kind of weather. Like the pull of a tide, her belly had the heavy, dragging, almost pleasurable pain that meant she would soon be menstruating.

  She and Beth always bled together. Emma enjoyed the quiet drama of it, the seeking out of sanitary pads and tampons, the secretive urgency of it all. It was Beth who had shown her how to use tampons, had told her that you could if you were still a virgin, and scorned the tampons that had applicators attached, telling Emma that it was all right to stick your finger up there.

  Emma concentrated on finishing her picture; her charcoal scratched over the paper. What did either she or Beth know about love anyway? With their father dead, they had never seen a relationship between a man and a woman at close quarters. ‘Do you ever . . .’ said Emma.