A Charm of Powerful Trouble (19 page)

Lizzie lay stretched out on her bed and I crept up to her and laid my head on her belly At fourteen I was still young enough to do that and get away with it. I knew that the shorts I wore and my sturdy brown legs and short cropped curls made me look a child still. It allowed me to do lots of things that more dignified people would think beneath them, but it was also my greatest source of sorrow, that Lizzie and I didn't look more alike.

‘Don't go to see that man again,' I begged, aware of how pathetic I was. I couldn't stop myself. ‘He looks like an evil fairy.' I sat up and slid my hand under her blouse and felt the smooth skin of her waist. My fingers touched the cool ring embedded in her skin; I slipped the tip of my index finger into the ring for an instant. She pushed me away ‘Oh, Laura, get
off
me.'

‘But why do you visit him?' I put my hand on her thigh and she slapped it away.

‘Stop touching my leg!'

She began to dress with care, pulling a flimsy purple top from a hanger. She unearthed a slim-fitting long magenta skirt from a pile on the floor and shook it out. Her hair she unbraided and brushed so that it stood out in crinkles over her shoulders like a gold cape. I lay on the bed and watched. She coated her lips with mulberry lipstick and then ate most of it off again while she daubed rose geranium oil on her wrists.

I lay on her bed as she left.
A
sickly sweet trail of scent was all that was left of her. I rolled over and put my nose into her pillow and her bed still smelt of the real Lizzie.

She goes to the goblin man's house, her hair unbraided, dressed like an offering. She walks straight through the front door, a door that is rarely closed, and up the dark stem of hallway to where the house opens out into a cluttered back verandah. The goblin man is not alone.

Stella is there. She is sprawled on the sofa, her head reclining against a cushion. The goblin man is beside her, curled up with his ear against her belly.

He looks up at Lizzie, his one visible eye glittering like a raven's. Lizzie turns without a word and goes out.

‘What happened?' I asked her when she returned.

‘Nothing. Nothing happened.'

I looked at her, not believing. Yet she had been gone only a short time.

‘Tmly,' she said. ‘Nothing happened. Then, or ever. He never touched me.'

She laughed with relief. She lay on the bed and hugged her knees to her chest.

All that time spent hanging round the goblin man and nothing had happened. Something was going on but nothing had happened.

It wasn't long before she began to ask herself if he was even real.

She asked me to come with her to the hairdresser's where she sat stiffly in front of the mirror, her hair in a single plait that fell behind like a rope. The hairdresser was young, with white hair clipped close to his head and a thin face. He tied a rubber band around the top of the plait and severed it cleanly just above the band. With a war whoop he dropped it into Lizzie's lap. ‘Scalped!' he said.

The buzz of conversation in the salon stopped for a moment as everyone turned to look. It was odd, like the world stopping, and then starting up again as if nothing had happened. The place was more like a party than a hairdresser's; it was full of people talking about the kind of music Lizzie and I never listened to.

Lizzie bowed her head and refused to look in the mirror as he got to work on what remained of her hair. When it was finished she raised her eyes; he held a mirror behind her so she could see it from all sides, and I could tell that she liked what she saw.

‘Very, very nice,' said the hairdresser with admiration. ‘You're a new woman!'

I stared at her shyly. The cut was short and feathery, shaped into the nape of her long, pale neck. She stood up. And again, everyone left off what they were doing or saying for a moment to observe her with long glances of envy.

She put the plait into her bag, went to the counter and paid; I got up to go with her, and it was like attending a queen. We went out into an ordinary Mullumbimby afternoon. I skipped a hop and a step to keep up as she made her way down the street; I saw her catch sight of her reflection in a shop window and admire herself secretly.

We passed an old woman in a purple hat, a hat that you felt you could eat, for it had a bloom on it like a ripe plum, and Lizzie smiled to herself. We walked on, and were halfway down the street before I said, ‘You liked that hat.'

You liked
her
in that hat,' I amended.

She smiled down at me, sideways, a small complicit smile that let me know I was exactly right. She said, ‘I enjoy it when old ladies dress up. When I am old, I'll wear the most beautiful clothing I can find.'

We passed the op shop and with one accord stopped and went back to it. Lizzie loved the clothes that other women had discarded. She slipped into them eagerly, loving how they transformed her, loving how she transformed them and gave them new life.

‘I need a hat,' she said.

We found the perfect hat for Lizzie first off. It was as old as old, made of black velvet with a low crown and no brim, and had an ancient stiff hatpin with a single pearl embedded in the side. It smelt of dust and lavender perfume.

‘It's the sort of hat Aunt Em might have worn,' I said.

‘Exactly,' she said, her voice round and fat and satisfied, and took the hat straight to the counter. She wore it out of the shop.

When we got home Lizzie didn't remove her hat at once, and I don't think our mother noticed that she'd cut her hair. Then Lizzie reached into her bag and threw the severed plait onto the table.

Stella and Paris arrived in the middle of a storm. Emma had been standing on the verandah enjoying the crash of thunder and the beat of the rain, as she always did - she liked the
tempestuousness
of it - when Stella's old yellow Corona toiled up the drive. Torrents of water poured from the sky and rendered the car almost invisible. Emma watched as Stella climbed out, the door almost wrenched away from her by the wind, and climbed the front steps of the house without bothering to run or hunch her shoulders as people do in the rain, simply allowing herself to get drenched. Her hair was plastered down over her head and her mouth was open.

Emma met her at the front door, took in her condition, and ushered her inside without a word. She left her dripping in the kitchen and took some raingear outside to help Paris out of the car and into the house.

When she was a child, Flora had said that Stella was a star. She was also a drama queen. ‘I've left him!' she said, the moment Emma got back. ‘God, what a bastard! I wonder that you stuck to him all those years!'

Paris watched with a cynical expression. Lizzie went off to her room. But of course I stayed on to see what happened. Emma calmly found dry clothes, offered food, and made them up a bed each.

Emma could have asked why or how but she didn't want to know the details. Anyway, who can say what goes on between people where love is concerned?

Only Paris had seen the end of Claudio and Stella's affair. Alone in the house with them, as she often was when we weren't there, she had heard the angry and then resigned words in the bedroom. She heard them go out.

She followed down the windy winter street. Neither glanced back to see the small figure in teacup-printed pyjamas as she padded barefoot down the ill-lit pavement behind them. Stella huddled into her black coat and Claudio shivered in a cotton shirt.

And Paris sees them enter the darkened silent park, empty of people or lights. She stands at a distance and watches as Stella spreads her coat on the ground under the shelter of some trees, and she and Claudio, on the coat, fuck for the last time.