A Charm of Powerful Trouble (12 page)

Unexpectedly, the next marvellous thing came from my own body, the way a spider unwinds the magic of silk.

Our family was swimming in the creek. We never bothered with costumes there, and I sat on a rock above the swimming hole lazily watching everyone splashing in the water. I had a familiar, heavy, almost pleasurable feeling in the bottom of my belly and I sat and luxuriated in it. And then came the warm sticky trickle between my legs. I had been menstruating for over a year now, and I enjoyed the rhythm of it, the small drama of discovering blood on my pants every month. I sat and allowed the blood to seep out onto the rock and onto the top of my thighs, and then I thought I should dive into the water to wash it off.

I stood up. For one instant my thighs were stuck together by congealing blood and I felt the tiny resistance as they pulled apart. Looking down, I saw a red butterfly on my legs made of blood. A symmetrical pair of wings, like an ink blot of folded paper, but coming from inside me: made unexpectedly by my own marvellous body.

‘Lizzie!' I called. ‘Look! A butterfly!' I pointed to my legs.

Lizzie turned to me, wiping water from her face
with
both hands, uncovering her eyes like someone playing peek-a-boo. I saw her expression, shocked for just one heartbeat, and then because I was laughing so much she began to laugh as well. I flapped my legs a few times to show how the butterfly could fly, and then I dived into the water and it vanished.

My life was not all wonderful at this time. There was often tension in the house, between Lizzie and Claudio, and Claudio and Emma. I felt I was stuck in the middle, watching it all.

Artemis killed a snake and left it on the kitchen floor. It was a small red-bellied black snake, and she left it belly uppermost, so that it was like a length of red ribbon that someone had casually dropped on the floor. The belly had a softness that I hadn't associated before with snakes. I could see that it was a creature with insides, that in that long, soft belly were the same vulnerable workings that kept all animals alive.

‘Has that cat actually killed a rat yet?' said Claudio that evening. ‘It seems she has a talent for killing anything but.'

Lizzie looked at the plate of fish that Emma had put in front of her. Lizzie was a strict vegetarian, but she made an exception for fish.

You know, I've been having doubts about fish,' she said, and pushed her plate away.

‘Ye gods and little fishes!' It was Claudio's attempt at humour, but he was too close to being a parody of himself at his worst, when he could explode with sudden anger. Lizzie got to her feet and went out without a word. Emma looked at Claudio, unsmiling. She always said he didn't want to tell when Lizzie was being serious, when something was of utmost importance to her.

When I'd finished eating I followed Lizzie to her room. I wanted to console her. I wanted to be consoled. Lizzie was hunched over her guitar, her ear close to its body, plucking the strings softly in a disconsolate way She seemed to be listening to the guitar, waiting for it to tell her something.

Now that I was at high school I had made a friend apart from Lizzie. Her name was Alice. She lived in town, she played a silver flute, and she had glossy black hair that was cut into the nape of her neck and looked like a little cap.

I invited her out to our place for the day and I didn't know quite what to do with her. I showed her how to make little towns in the earth, with log cabins constructed of sticks, and trees made from the tips of casuarina branches the way Lizzie and I used to, but it seemed too childish a game and we abandoned it.

‘What do you want to
do
?' I asked in desperation, and she shrugged.

We wandered from the house to the garden and back again with such a dogged restlessness that my mother finally told us to go and do
something
. Emma was edgy and impatient. Claudio was away a lot at this time at an editing studio in town, finishing up final work on his documentary.

We flicked through magazines, talking about nothing. I wished that Alice wasn't there; she irritated me suddenly, like an itch in my body that wouldn't go away and that I didn't understand. ‘Let's go down to the creek,' I said.

I think now I simply didn't know how to be with anyone who wasn't Lizzie.

It had been raining, and the creek was muddy and swift-flowing. We waded into the water. It was icy and delicious; I felt the water should have been coloured blue, not brown. Silt had washed down in the recent rains, and lay soft and silken between my toes. I reached down and picked up a handful of it and smeared it on my arm. It smelled faintly of rotting vegetation, a smell that I have always liked.

We took off our clothes down to our knickers and submerged ourselves in the water and then stood up again, water streaming from our hair. I tried not to look at Alice because I knew she might not like me to stare; her new breasts were even tinier than mine. I reached down and took some mud from the bottom of the creek and smeared it quickly over my breasts, to cover them. Then without thinking I took another handful, and tossed it at Alice. Alice tossed a handful back at me.

Soon we were covered in mud. I stood savouring the warmth of the sun, and the sensation of the mud firming into a second skin. Without washing it off, I climbed up onto the grassy bank. Alice followed me, and we lay back, our faces turned up to the sun.

When I was so dazed by sun that I was almost asleep, I rolled sideways, and accidentally bumped into Alice. She returned the bump. We giggled, and made it into a game, rolling and bumping against each other. My eyes were dazzled by pinpricks of sunlight through my lashes.

I did a particularly vigorous roll, and felt myself come to rest partly on top of Alice. I stopped. I could feel the softness of her breast against my skin.

When I opened my eyes I saw her looking back at me.

Without thinking I put my mouth against her mouth. It wasn't a kiss, not what I'd seen Claudio and Emma do, not what I'd seen on television. With my eyes shut I licked Alice on the lips, and felt Alice's tongue touch mine. My mouth on hers was like a butterfly alighting on the edge of a puddle to drink, the lightest of touches.
Sip, sip, sip.

My tongue went further. The inside of Alice's mouth was soft. For a moment my whole world was the warmth of the sun and the soft inside of Alice's mouth.

And then that itch I had felt with Alice earlier returned and I took Alice's bottom lip gently between my teeth. I don't know why, but very quickly and cleanly and suddenly, I bit into it. Alice cried out and pulled away, and I tasted the salt of blood.

Alice stumbled to the creek and plunged in. She rubbed at the mud on her body, trylng to clean it all off. At last she emerged and stood with water streaming over her, her finger held gingerly to the sore spot on her mouth.

I saw the look of loathing on Alice's face. She said to me, slowly and emphatically, ‘I am never speaking to you again. You're dirty. You're horrible. I'm going to ring my mother to come and get me.'

We didn't speak to each other again.

I stood in the driveway with her while she waited for her mother to pick her up, but she wouldn't even look at me. After the car had gone, I pulled on my comforting red beanie which smelt so strongly of myself and dragged out an old bicycle that Lizzie and I took turns on sometimes, and went for a ride. I rode and rode till I was breathless and my legs hurt, right to the top of the hill near our place. And then I turned round to go back.

It was a windy day, and as I headed down the hill I could hear the wind and feel it pushing behind me. I pedalled faster and faster, hanging on tight as I jolted through potholes and then pedalling even faster afterwards. And the wind was with me and the trees beside the road were tossing about and I became aware that I couldn't hear the wind any longer at all: I was going as fast as the wind and there was absolutely no sound, just the trees tossing and my front wheel going so fast it was blurred and my hands gnpping the handlebars tight.

And then my red beanie blew off! And the wind whipped it away All in a split second. And I didn't care, I didn't care at all.

I hadn't told Alice I was sorry, because I wasn't. I didn't feel horrible, or dirty from what I had done. I felt wonderful.

I was thirteen. My life, which I'd feared would be ordinary, had proved to be full of wonders, and I expected that more would come to me in the future.

I'd witnessed a bat draw its last breath. I'd seen my sister, in the moonlight, lift up her voice in song. A red butterfly had blossomed from my own body I had ridden as fast as the wind.

I had drawn blood with my first kiss.

The Leather Woman

W
HEN
I think of the secrets of my childhood, I imagine them as the red hibiscus flowers that grew in our garden. They were single, dark red flowers, not the flounced double variety; plain red flowers with an ornate gold stamen.

My mother ate those flowers. Sometimes she slipped them into a salad for all of us; she said they were packed with the kind of nutrients especially needed by women for menstruation and ‘women's problems'. Once I saw her standing gazing out to where the sea lay like a string on the horizon, slowly devouring one of the red flowers, petal by petal, finally eating the thick, gold stamen, covered with its down of pollen, as dusty as a moth's wing.