A Charm of Powerful Trouble

by Joanne Horniman

  ‘What?’ Beth pulled a dress over her head and wriggled it down over her bottom.

  ‘You know, wonder about our parents? What it was like between them? Mum never says anything about him. There's just that wedding photo, and that doesn't tell you a thing.’

  Beth's eyes sparked with life. Emma had her interest at last.

  ‘I know!’ said Beth. ‘And there's not even a letter that they wrote to each other. Or none that I could find!’

  ‘You've looked?’ Emma imagined her sister rooting around among her mother's things and stared at Beth with frank admiration.

  ‘Of course. Why? Haven't you?’

  ‘All I know about him I learned from Aunt Em. He liked plants.’

  ‘Well, we know that,’ drawled Beth in a bored way.

  ‘There was a fig tree, when he was a child. He grew all these other plants around it, to make a kind of forest.’ But Beth was obviously so uninterested in this that Emma didn't say any more.

  ‘Oh, Aunt Em's place,’ groaned Beth. ‘I was so bored there!’

  I wasn't, Emma thought, but didn't say.

  Beth had finished dressing. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Just because I have to stay in doesn't mean you have to. You could go for a walk.’

  Emma wondered why Beth was being so altruistic. Earlier, she'd begged Emma to stay with her.

  ‘You can go past the boatshed and give Phillip a message for me. Tell him I'll meet him tonight, our usual place - Flat Rock. Usual time.’ Beth tossed back her hair and gave Emma a flirtatious glance. ‘Tell him I'll be there anyway.’

  Flat Rock was a place where people fished, a shelf of rock near the headland where the waves pounded and sent spray leaping into the air. Emma had seen Beth there one afternoon, alone, standing on the edge of the rock with her eyes closed and her arms held out, catching the spray on her face and on the palms of her hands. So that was where she and Phillip met at night. And now her sister wanted her to be a go-between.

  Emma hesitated. She was a mass of contradictions, a sketcher of nude bodies at seventeen, but pure still, idealistic, a believer in love, a prude even, who disapproved of girls like that.

  But at the same time my contradictory mother also craved difference and excitement and change.

  So Emma, in the long, hot afternoon, went to the boatshed where Phillip worked. She hobbled across the stony road in front of it and crept meekly inside. It was surprisingly cool, like a cave, with shadows reaching into the heights of the roof cavity where oars and parts of boats lay suspended on wooden supports. She could feel her heart beating. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and pretended to look at the fishing lines and lures and children's buckets and spades that were on sale. She walked up to the counter and saw that Phillip was busy with someone at the other side of the shop.

  Emma couldn't imagine daring to speak to him. She retreated outside and stood hesitating in the glare of sunlight, then rushed back in again, feeling foolish. The boatshed seemed even darker now. Phillip had gone down the slipway at the back of the shop and was helping a customer with a boat. Emma stood at the counter and saw them through a square of window that was criss-crossed with rusty wire. The blue of the sky and water was dazzling. When Phillip came back in again she saw his shape dark against the door to the slipway He walked up to the counter and said, ‘Hello . . . it's Emma, isn't it?’

  He was outlined against the glare of the window, and Emma could see a fuzz of fine hairs on his face, and on his bare shoulders and arms; he was incandescent. He was so near that Emma could smell his sweat, a smell that she was shocked to find not offensive at all, but overwhelmingly attractive.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  Emma couldn't look into his eyes. She couldn't even see him as a whole person. She saw only a smile, and a chin, and a smooth brown neck. She couldn't speak. Full of shame, she hurried out of the shop.

  She went home. She told Beth that she had passed on the message.

  That night she lay beside Beth. Both of them pretended to sleep. They lay side by side but separate in the sticky heat of the summer's night, and each thought her own thoughts. My mother's thoughts veered between anxiety about Beth's reaction when she found out that Emma hadn't passed on her message after all, and a reckless defiance that she didn't care about what happened anyway. Perhaps Beth would be so angry with Phillip that she'd never speak to him again and wouldn't even discover Emma's deception.

  Beth hauled herself off the bed and opened the door of the cabin to let out some of the heat. ‘Maybe it will storm,’ she whispered, but Emma pretended she hadn't heard. She hoped faintly that the threat of a storm would prevent Beth going out, but doubted it. Both of them loved storms and wild weather. They thought nothing of going outside in the middle of a storm and getting drenched, despite their mother's warnings about lightning.

  Emma lay with her belly still heavy; she felt the pull of the moon and tides. She waited for something to happen. For the storm to break. For blood to flow.

  She was aware later of her sister slipping out of bed, dressing quietly and leaving the room like a shadow. She put her hand to the place where Beth had been. It was still warm.

  It was a wild night. Thunder and lightning.

  Beth did not come home and did not come home.

  Emma went to search. It was dark and wild and wet and the few streetlights shimmered through the rain.

  At Flat Rock the waves rose and crashed. They ran into the sea in an innocent foamy spill and reared again in fury.

  There were no seabirds. No fishermen. Nobody.

  My mother listened to the waves. Listened to the wind. The moon and the tides pulled.

  Her sister was everywhere and nowhere. She was there in the wind, in the thump and roar of the waves. In the lashing of the rain against my mother's face.

  Blood trickled between her legs. It felt like the beginning and ending of everything.

  At last she went back to the cabin to see if Beth had come home.

  She hadn't. But the room still smelled of her.

  That night at Flora's, Emma finally gave in to a voluptuous surrender to grief. She stood in the dark and tears streamed down her face and sobs silently wracked her body. She gave herself up to it, became absorbed in it.

  She crouched on the ground, her hands round her knees, and rocked back and forth, reminding herself of who she was, for she felt that at any moment she would lose herself entirely. She repeated to herself over and over:

  My name is Emma Montgomery and I have killed my sister and my mother died ofgrief and I have no one left in the world. . .

  She cried and cried and rocked and rocked and lashed herself with guilt and regret, and you'd imagine that with all the turmoil the tadpole-thing inside her that became my sister Lizzie would have been dislodged, but Lizzie hung on tight.

  And in the morning, when Emma felt that she'd survived a tempest and had been washed clean and pure by rain, she knew that she would have this baby. There was no choice, had never been a choice, because the tadpole-thing that was Lizzie was the only person she had in the entire world.

  Drawn from Memory

  AFTER YEARS of skulking and spying and watching, and learning nothing, you wake one New Year's Day (that New Year's Day), and on impulse and not wanting to stop yourself because you know what you are about to do, you get up and you kiss your sleeping sister on the inside of her wrist. And you dress, observing all the time the opaqueness of her skin, the sureness of her, her solidity, when there have been times you thought her translucent and insubstantial. So you kiss your sleeping sister and she does not stir, and you grasp the keys of her car and steal out through a door curtained by honeysuckle. Your flight is headlong, through a town littered with the debris of last night's revelry. You see a beautiful wasted girl wandering home with one shoe dangling from her fingers and her head leaning against the shoulder of her beloved, and people who haven't even made it home but have passed out on the grass in front of houses - and you leave the town behind
and make for the forest. And your car - your chariot! - flies up the escarpment for once as if drawn by a team of racehorses, and the trees stand massed on either side of the road in silent wonder at your passing.

  And you are so single-minded you hear nothing, not the slam of the car door as you alight, or the crunch of your footsteps across gravel, or the clatter of your shoes on the verandah or the slam of the front door as you whisk through the house, which is empty but for a child intent on staring down the tunnel of a microscope. One sweep through the house and you're away, through the bushes at the back and down a path where lantana - a thicket of it - presses in on either side. It is the hedge that surrounds the Sleeping Beauty - you perhaps need a sword to penetrate it, to clear it away so that you can wake her up at last, but as you approach her castle, you see that she has got to it before you; she is standing outside wearing a pair of shorts and wielding a brush-hook, and all around her is a ruin of lantana. She wipes the sweat from her eyes and looks at you.

  You ask her to tell you what you have longed to know for years.

  In doing so, you are both her inquisitor and her saviour.

  You'd better come inside,’ she said, as if she had known all along that this moment would come. She told me the story over one long afternoon while she tidied her studio.

  I don't remember what question I asked first, but Lizzie's birth and the real story of Beth's drowning were twined together like a vine that is corded round its neighbour, growing twisted together so that they become one thick rope. It seemed to me that the two stories were threaded together in inextricable and subtle ways.

  My mother said, ‘I never told anybody that I sent Beth out there to Flat Rock. I allowed my mother to think I knew nothing about it. I didn't want to do her harm, but I did. I killed her.’

  It seemed that a great weight had been lifted from her.

  She said, ‘Sometimes I thought I'd die from not speaking.’

  For years my mother had been content for the lantana to press in upon her studio. But that morning she had taken to it with a brush-hook, and by the time I found her, had cleared along all one side of the building so that the place had a shorn, naked appearance. She had pulled all the branches into a huge pile, and because nothing will grow under lantana, the ground was dry and bare, littered with the debris of dead leaves and broken twigs.

  We went inside, and the story spilled out of her. She cleaned her studio as she spoke, putting away pastels, crayons and brushes, looking at the sketches she kept in folders, reorganising them, throwing some out. She stacked the paintings up against one wall and swept dust from previously hidden corners of the room. As she talked the light advanced and retreated and by the time she had finished, the room was almost dark. She plopped herself down on the stool at her high workbench and said, ‘. . . it all seems such a long time ago. And when I try to explain to myself how I felt and how I feel there is a gaping hole in my understanding. My mind shies away from it.’

  Because I couldn't bear to look at her, I switched on the light and started sifting through some of the drawings she had placed in a folder. Over the years she had sketched us all again and again, most of the time without us knowing, for she preferred to work from memory She told me that is the way to capture only the essentials, the things that are important.

  There was a sketch of Lizzie - I knew it was Lizzie, even though it was only a drawing of her back. I could tell that she was playing the guitar, though her body concealed the instrument.

  I recognised myself in another drawing. It was just my head and shoulders and hands, though my features were indistinct. My hands were cupped, as if I was holding something, except my mother hadn't drawn what it was - it could have been nearly anything. I was looking out of the picture, sideways, at the viewer.

  And there was Lizzie and me sleeping, when we were children, our feet twined together and my hand reaching out to grasp her hair.

  My mother said, ‘Beth and I weren't like you and Lizzie. Peas in a pod. Sometimes I thought I'd have to prise you apart. But Beth - I don't think I ever even touched her. I wouldn't have dared.

  ‘We just didn't touch each other in our family. None of us. I always knew my mother loved me, but there were never any physical expressions of affection. The closest I got to her was when she was in the kitchen making a pie. She'd roll out the dough, and I was allowed to have the scraps to make something with. She showed me how to pinch round the edges of the pie to make a decorative border. That became my job.

  ‘I never really knew either of them properly. People you live with can be both a mystery and so familiar that they seem a part of you. Maybe that's why you feel you can never see them properly. But Beth had a scent that was specially her. I liked it. Playing blind man's bluff when we were kids was always so pointless. I always knew when it was her.

  ‘If you live with someone,’ she went on, ‘you can't help a kind of intimacy. There's a presence, a companionship. My sister and I always bled at the same time, in perfect synchronicity.’

  I said, ‘What did she look like? Are there photos?’

  ‘Somewhere.’ My mother's face was sad. ‘I put them all away when my mother died.’

  She seized a black pastel and reached for a clean pad. ‘I'll draw her for you.’

  Swiftly, decisively, pausing every now and then to remember, my mother set to work. I refrained from trylng to steal a look; there was no sound except for the scratch of pastel over paper. The sound was an irritant, for I felt that it was my own skin being stroked, and I rubbed my arms and squeezed the skin over my elbows.

  Always, it seemed, I had been waiting for my mother to finish a drawing so that I could see what she had done. Now she tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me.

  I saw a naked girl, her back a lovely long fluid line, her legs drawn up, her face intent on the task of painting her toenails. How beautiful she was, how full of eager anticipation, how unconcerned that someone was watching her and remembering.

  Chloe came grumbling to the door of the studio where we sat under a single spotlight. She said that we'd been talking all afternoon. I grabbed her from behind and covered her neck in kisses, and she only pretended to squirm away from me. She took my hand imperiously ‘Come and look through my microscope,’ she said. ‘We can do blood, if you like!’

  She had shown me plenty of other things, but blood was special.

  ‘My own blood?’ I said. I wanted to see that more than anything.

  ‘If you like.’ She added, warningly, ‘You'll have to prick your finger.’

  She handed me a needle. But every time the needle approached my finger I pulled away I couldn't bring myself to do it. It wasn't because I feared the pain, for that would be nothing. There was something that wouldn't allow me to knowingly mutilate myself.

  Rolling her eyes to the ceiling in exasperation, Chloe took the needle from me. She swung her arm round and round and round to make the blood rush into her hand, then she made me squeeze her wrist while she plunged the needle into her finger with one deft movement.

  The blood welled into a tiny bead. She squeezed the drop onto a glass slide, and with another slide spread the blood thinly over the surface.

  Blood - the stuff I licked from Catherine's shoulder, that trickles from between our legs each month, the thing that relates me to my sisters and is something all human beings share, is made mostly of red blood cells, concave discs that look to me like red satin pillows with an indentation in the middle where someone has laid her head.

  My mother and I were the watchful ones, the ones who looked, and never said a thing. There were some things we simply didn't want to see. Or if we did see, we didn't want to admit it even to ourselves.

  Lizzie and I had always imagined Beth floating like a beautiful Ophelia on a flower-strewn sea. We imagined it peaceful, like the image of Great Aunt Em dead in her sleep, hands folded neatly on her chest. But of course for Beth it hadn't been like that.

  Now I needed to know something I had alwa
ys wondered about. That night, having looked at the wonder of blood under a microscope for the first time, I filled my heart with courage, and went to where my mother was often to be found in the evening, standing and looking out in the direction of the sea. I could see that she'd been crying, but this time she didn't try to conceal it. Perhaps that's what she had always been doing, standing alone out here all those years.

  I took both her hands in mine so that she couldn't help but face me.

  I asked, ‘Was Beth ever found?’

  I saw that flicker in my mother's eyes. She glanced towards the sea. Then she looked straight at me.

  ‘Yes, there was a body.’

  I imagined the rest.

  I cried then, too, for Beth, because she was suddenly real to me, not just someone I'd heard a story about. I thought how tangled my feelings were for Lizzie, how confused and jealous I had been when I saw her with Al. I let her walk out into the sea in the dark, just like that. She could have drowned. How easy it is to allow someone to submerge. You take your eye off them, you use words carelessly, and you risk losing them for ever.

  When I came to Sydney to start university, my mother came with me, and she took me to all the places she'd told me about. The house where Lizzie was conceived is now an antique shop. She didn't want to go inside. We looked in the window and saw our dark shadows against the glass. I caught hold of her arm. We walked on, and my mother paused again in the street, remembering.

  ‘There used to be a betting shop here. A cattle dog would lie in wait with a soft-drink can and get people to throw it for him to fetch.’

  We had coffee in a shopping complex that my mother said was on the site of an old timber yard. ‘This place was like a country town, once. Now look at it.’

  We finished our coffee and continued on up to the point. Where Claudio's old mansion was is now a collection of townhouses. ‘Everything is different,’ she said. Except for the water, which still glinted in the sunlight.