Circle of Nine: Circle of Nine Trilogy 1

by Josephine Pennicott

  The only problem was that the mural was ahead of me. It appeared to be finishing itself.

  Perhaps, I thought, I’m only imagining that it is changing from day to day, varied by a detail here, a shadow or colour there. It seemed to have gradually but steadily faded, and suddenly one morning one of the zebras had clearly moved its position overnight. But of course I knew that was impossible, which made me doubt my own mental balance. I had been convinced that the largest zebra had been to the rear of the herd, but now it was on the far left of the mural, and its eyes seemed to follow me whenever I went into the room.

  The rain continued to drizzle intermittently, and that night there was a strange tapping on the front door. A faint scraping, like something trying to get in.

  I cowered under the bedclothes, my mind filled with all the horror stories that I had heard over the years. Johanna was back. Her corpse was restless, and she had returned to her original home to find a relative, who was little more than a stranger, occupying her space. It never occurred to me to go down and investigate the scratching during the night. I was too afraid. The next morning I walked tentatively into the lounge room, and the largest zebra was back with the herd.

  It wasn’t just the journal. It was the isolation, the half-pitying, half-fearful looks that I received in the street. It was the knowledge that Johanna at her worst was still a more talented artist than I’d ever be.

  It was also the strange noises late at night. The phone that never rang. The soft breathing that I would hear at times over my left shoulder. It was the letters, old family letters, some filled with bitterness after all these years. It was the soft web of fear that hung over me, that echoed in my footsteps, that tasted like stale blood in my mouth. It was the house breathing me in, expelling me out, and never fully accepting me. It was the footsteps that never approached the house, and the doorbell that never rang.

  I was always waiting for Johanna to come home.

  It was the memories.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I never knew my father. I was conceived as a result of a one-night stand when Jade was a student at the old Sydney Tech. That’s why I’m called Emma. He had a copy of the Jane Austen novel on his bedside.

  When Jade found out that she was pregnant with me, she went over to my father’s student digs to tell him, only to find that his supposed flatmates had never heard of him. She claimed they told her that there was no such person as my father, and that the room she had gone to with him after a drunken party had long been vacant. The previous occupant had hanged himself in there.

  Jade loved that story. She loved the romantic idea that she had fucked a ghost. I always suspected that she was lying, and I was really the bastard child of one of her lecturers, a happily married man who didn’t want to have anything to do with a pregnant student, even one as beautiful as my mother had been.

  Sometimes, looking back on my mother’s old photographs, it was difficult to see that smiling fresh-faced girl, who loved to brag that people were always mistaking her for Marianne Faithfull, in the harridan that she had become. When had she stopped worrying about trying to change the world and decided to limit her concerns to her next bikini wax appointment? She often tormented me over the years with incessant whingeing about what she could have done with her life if I hadn’t wrecked her figure, stopped her from completing her degree, and generally drained her of money, energy, looks and youth.

  When her taunts became too much to take I would climb into my wardrobe and sit there with my hands pressed to my face, willing myself not to cry. I would tell myself that she was imbalanced, narcissistic, selfish and cruel. I hoped that she wasn’t my real mother at all, that there had been some dreadful cosmic mix-up. I began to fantasise that she had adopted me. Sometimes, when she was out, I would spend hours looking for the papers in our small flat.

  But when I had to lie there listening to her sobbing herself to sleep at night because she was lonely, afraid of ageing, of dying alone, of having to live without money — then the shame and guilt infected me. My life has cost her her life, I would tell myself. My breath has stolen hers. I didn’t ask to be born! But I’ve ruined her life. Shame, fear, aching. White, itching guilt.

  I often wondered over the years why Jade hadn’t simply had an abortion. Was it some suppressed Catholic guilt from her childhood? Did she harbour a secret desire to be a mother? The truth was a lot more prosaic and wounding. Some airhead catwalk model had been pregnant that year. Having babies had been declared chic. I was born to be her fashion accessory.

  As a small child I felt closer to Johanna than my own mother. The resemblance that I had to my aunt was often remarked upon, and I constructed elaborate fantasies in which I was pronounced the child of Johanna, stolen from her by my wicked witch mother, Jade.

  I lived for the monthly visits to Johanna’s harbourside home where she kept her delightful menagerie of pets. Her collection was exotic and included a six-foot-long, dynamically patterned carpet python named Lauren, and an enormous bird-eating spider called Humphrey.

  But for me the highlight of any visit was when Johanna allowed me into the hallowed sanctuary of her art studio. I loved the smell of the turpentine, the oils and the methylated spirits. My mother was always offended that Johanna would refuse to play the perfect host and stop her painting to properly receive visitors. Her normal reaction to Johanna’s frequent lapses of decorum was to retreat into the garden with fashion magazines and talk to whoever happened to be staying with my aunt at the time. Johanna not only kept exotic animals; she had a tendency to collect equally exotic people, too.

  As soon as we returned home from a visit my mother would talk for hours about her sister’s latest house guests. ‘That scruffy man I was talking to, Emma, that was Whiteley. Johanna thinks he’s going to be a great artist. Did you see that beautiful-looking woman in the garden with us? She’s had a nervous breakdown. Imagine looking like that and not being happy! Some politician dumped her. Johanna’s worried she’s going to kill herself! It’s probably more the strain of keeping up with all that plastic surgery! She’d be easily twenty years older than she claims!

  ‘Did you see that very strange-looking man and woman? She had red-dyed hair and he had a walking stick with carvings. They’re both witches, from England. Johanna says they’re really well known, and he’s written heaps of books. Can you imagine! I always knew that Johanna had a screw loose, entertaining those types! It’s a good thing my parents aren’t here to see the way she carries on — she’s got to be dropping acid. It’s true, isn’t it? And she’s ageing herself, so much! She looks ten years older than me, at least!’

  My mother’s envy was obvious and abhorrent to me. She was jealous of Johanna’s interesting life, but at the same time cared nothing for my aunt’s creativity, which was, after all, its core. All my mother ever seemed to care about was her nails or her hair. She would constantly criticise her sister for her lack of grooming.

  ‘She looks like a unkempt little bush pig,’ she would say spitefully. ‘It wouldn’t kill her to slap on a bit of lipstick, for God’s sake! No man is going to look at a drab wallflower. My God, did you see that top she was wearing today? She didn’t even bother to shave under her arms!’

  Looking at the two sisters together, it was hard to believe that they were related. Jade, with her sleek layered bob, its subtle highlights taking her hours to maintain every month, her toned body that she pushed to near collapse in her two-hour workouts every day. Her designer clothes, and her thin, petulant, mean little mouth. I knew she was saving to have collagen injected into that straight Guerlain-pink line, but to me her mouth would always be mean, lips pressed tightly together as if attempting to keep within the critical words that she longed to utter. Misery and frustration were written all over her face.

  Johanna was a total contrast with her paint-splattered clothes and her shaggy hair, which she cut herself. Whenever she saw me her animated face would break into a smile of delight, revealing the gap between her fro
nt teeth. Little freckles of gold were sprinkled across her face, and she wore silver jewellery that she had collected on her travels — India, Spain, Russia, places that I longed to travel to. I loved to explore the enormous pendant that was always dangling from her neck, and the herbal smell that wafted from her skin. Most of all, I loved Johanna’s eyes — brown, but in certain lights almost gold. When she looked at me I would bask in her uncritical acceptance of me. She understood me, and most of all, she understood my shining.

  If people commented on how similar to Johanna I looked, Jade would press her lips together tightly and her eyes would smoke. I used to think it was because she was jealous of her sister, who had finished her degree, and who didn’t have children. Johanna’s life must certainly have appealed to Jade in many ways. She had travelled widely, illustrated books for a living, and lived virtually rent free in a rambling harbourside home. Johanna had boarded with the owner for several years, and now that he was living in the south of France she had the place to herself.

  As I grew older, another thought occurred to me. What if she didn’t want me to resemble my aunt because she could sense the gift that she didn’t share, the shining?

  When I used to leave Jade in the garden, encased behind her sunglasses, spitting venom and flicking through Vogue, to join Aunt Johanna in the studio, I was leaving the part of me I didn’t want to ever become. I loved that studio; it was my portal to a transformed world, where Johanna and I were creators and magic lay in the everyday objects that surrounded us. This magic had a name: it was called art, and with every fibre of my being I longed to be as powerful and magical as Johanna.

  I think I sensed even back then that we were similar. My aunt and I were born into this world, but we were not truly of it. I never asked her, but I’m sure she knew about my special gift. I know she shared this same gift, indeed I believed her shining was stronger than mine, because I witnessed how she would guard her mind as soon as I was in her company. And sometimes in her studio, when she was engrossed in her painting, I saw the blue–gold light around her and objects would fly to her outstretched hand when she needed them. But we never sat and talked of these things, for instinctively I knew it was forbidden. I sensed that if I whispered the name of the shining it would disappear.

  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have the power that I later came to term the shining. Stephen King’s The Shining was my favourite book when I was young. I’ve no idea how many times I read it back in my early teens, alone in the flat while Jade was out with different men. The boy in that book, Danny, had a similar gift, so I named mine after his. I related to him, except for the fact that he had a friend, Tony. I often felt alone, except, of course, for Johanna.

  From when I was a little girl I could see vivid colours around people. Great, beautiful balls of light surrounding people who seemed unaware of their existence. It wasn’t until some time during my primary school years that I learned that not everybody saw these colours. Years later, through my studies, I came to understand that what I was seeing was an aura. I read that theosophists had studied these colours, believing there to be five auras: the health aura, the vital aura, the karmic aura, the character aura, and the aura of spiritual nature.

  Except it wasn’t only colours. There were times when I could see into the bodies of people. I would see clearly through their skin to the inner organs, like an X-ray machine. Most disturbing of all, however, was the fact that I could read minds. Like all the gifts that came with the shining it wasn’t something I received all the time; often it would come when I least expected it. Obviously I didn’t want other people’s thoughts creeping into my mind. I felt like an invader, a traitor to my acquaintances; I could never tell them that I was reading their private impressions. I would attempt to block them out, and sometimes I would succeed, but soon enough I would hear those inner murmurings again, whispers inside my brain that didn’t belong to me.

  So I guess the shining was just my childish term for being psychic.

  My mother Jade did not possess the same ability. Her thoughts were chaotic, shallow, unrestrained. It was so painful to read her mind — a stark reminder that the shining was not only a blessing but a curse as well. Her unfulfilled longings and dreams, her envy of Johanna and her resentment of me — they were terrible to feel and filled my being with pain. But in the studio Johanna showed me how I could release the pain. Art was the key to transformation. It was holy. The seeds of the woman I was to become were being sown then.

  ‘Look, Emma!’ she would cry as her hands deftly sketched a Faery face in soft pastels, ‘Here’s a friend for you. His name is Tessi and he’s the protector of spiders!’

  I sat, awed, witnessing the birth of Tessi’s form from the blank page. And so my destiny was set, in those glory days, those endless, orange, summer days. Years later, as a struggling student at the Royal Academy of Visual Art, I attempted to keep true to the awe and respect I had felt for the Muses’ gifts. Despite the cynicism and negativity of the jaded lecturers, my memory of the awe remained undiminished.

  Later everything changed. Johanna’s drawings gradually became darker. Light faces of fairytale innocence were replaced by dark shadows and malevolent beings. The transition had not harmed her career. The children that read her books loved the murky beings that sprang from my aunt’s new style. The only casualty was Johanna herself.

  The carefree, eccentric spirit I had cherished was no more. In her place was a stranger who looked like my aunt. She had the same almond-shaped brown eyes, heavily lined with kohl, eyes that in a certain light still turned to gold. She talked like Johanna, quickly, softly, with her hands waving worlds into the air. Her face would often be streaked with paint, the freckles on her unpowdered skin making her appear younger, despite the wrinkles that were already cracking over her face. Jade’s major fear in life was wrinkles. I know that she often worried about how she could get the money together to organise a full facelift.

  But when shadows emerged in my aunt’s work they wafted from the canvases and crept softly across her face. When her hands touched me they were cold, and when her eyes looked upon me they were without warmth. Most puzzling of all, the colours I used to love to watch dancing around her, that exquisite blue-gold shade, had now dulled, and when the shining opened in my mind, Johanna’s thoughts were closed. I was only a child and I lacked the vocabulary to ask Johanna what was wrong.

  My mother naturally noticed nothing. Our monthly visits continued, although often we sat in the garden together, with Johanna avoiding the studio.

  ‘She’s blocked,’ Jade would say knowingly, her eyes flashing in malicious triumph. I remained silent, appalled at the depth of my mother’s envy of her sister. Inside me I protested that she wasn’t blocked, couldn’t possibly be blocked. And so she wasn’t. Johanna was just simply no longer there.

  *

  The abscess of pus inside Jade that she had been carrying finally burst. It was to be the last Sunday we ever visited Johanna. There was another visitor there that day, but I cannot recollect his face. I can only say that he was a nondescript male and he was the unfortunate witness of a vicious family quarrel.

  It had begun as so many of their quarrels began, with money. My mother, with her twisted resentment of Johanna’s childlessness, felt that Johanna should contribute money to my cultural education. Johanna naturally had no inclination to support my mother’s fantasies about sharing costs. Familiar phrases that I had heard many times over the years were repeated, this time with a new intensity.

  ‘It’s all right for you, you selfish bitch! I’ve got a child to support while you’re just sitting on a fortune here and you won’t lift a finger to help!’

  ‘Don’t use that child as an excuse to me! You want it for yourself, you useless fucking slut! Go and get a fucking job like the rest of the world!’

  ‘Well, look who’s talking! What are you doing here? Running around naked with a bunch of weirdos pretending that you’re all witches? Taking drugs and drawing thos
e pathetic pictures that you pass off as art? At least I’m trying to do the right thing! I’m trying to bring up Emma, contributing something to the world. Not hiding from it!’

  I stared from one sister to the other. My mother, blonde and pretty in a chocolate-box type of way, with her bony, half-starved body. My movie star mother. I felt nauseated by her blatant rejection of me. The stranger, whose face I can’t remember, had a long dark beard, and the same pendant necklace as Johanna. He stood up and offered me his hand.

  ‘Why don’t we go and say hello to Humphrey?’ he suggested. My mother agreed it was an excellent idea and, scarlet-cheeked, I was led away. Humphrey was examined that day through a blur of tears and an awkward lump in my throat, but my faceless friend didn’t seem to mind. When we eventually returned to the sisters, their body language said it all.

  ‘There you are!’ cried my mother suddenly, throwing down the fashion magazine she had been studying sulkily. ‘Say goodbye to your aunt. We’re leaving.’

  The air was thick with words left unsaid. Jade’s blue eyes were filled with malice. Her lips were pressed so tightly together they had almost vanished.

  Johanna was sitting, head down, doodling into the dust like a sad child. I noticed the dirt under her fingernails. The elaborate snake ring that she always wore on her left hand.

  ‘Goodbye, Auntie.’ The words had to struggle to get past the lump in my throat.

  Johanna looked at me with those dead eyes.

  ‘Goodbye, Emma.’

  They were the last words she spoke to me.

  At first I missed those monthly visits terribly. I fretted for Humphrey and Lauren. I held endless conversations with Johanna in my head where we discussed art and the shining. All my fantasies ended with her stealing me from my insubstantial, pretty mother so we could live happily ever after in her studio.

  Gradually, however, those visits became just another memory, like my vague recollections of Grandpa and Grandma before they went to retire in England. I continued to follow my aunt’s career through her children’s books and the odd snippet about her in the papers. But I remained loyal to my mother’s unspoken desire and never mentioned Johanna or the visits again. I did secretly send her Christmas and birthday cards, but there was no reply and these eventually petered out.