A Charm of Powerful Trouble (23 page)

When I was a child I was p e n a kaleidoscope that didn't contain the usual brightly-coloured fragments of glass. This one was made entirely of mirrors, and it made patterns from whatever you looked at.

I was fascinated by it. I aimed it at everything I could find. And having looked minutely at beetles and leaves and pebbles and water, I discovered Lizzie, and I examined her to see what patterns she would make. Her eye became a myriad of eyes, her mouth a carpet of plump pink hills. She was so decorative that I probed almost every part of her that I decently could and exclaimed in wonder. Her hair! Fingernails! Her big toe! I peered through the tube at the intricate mysteries of her curved ear, and I even attempted to look at her nostrils but she pushed me away with an exasperated sound that was the closest she ever got to being angry with me. ‘Oh, Laura, just
quit
it!'

When I could stay away no longer, I returned in the dark. Lizzie was alone by then, and I waited for her to speak, to confide in me, but she didn't tell me a thing. We made dinner together and talked, but nothing was said.

That night was New Year's Eve, and everywhere I went I watched for Catherine. The streets were filled with people, music, noise, candle-lit lanterns. Lizzie and I didn't usually drink, but we bought cans of rum and Coke and drank them sitting on the white-painted fence that fronted the beach.

I wondered when Lizzie would tell me about Al, or if she would ever tell me about him. I wondered where he was now, and why he hadn't stayed. But I didn't say anything, and she didn't even notice I wasn't talking. We sat on the fence, and I felt apart from her.

The beach was filled with people walking along the sand, or curled up together waiting for the fireworks to begin. I kept scanning the crowd for Catherine, looking for her beautiful shorn head. Once or twice I thought I saw her - someone who could be her - but it never was.

We sat down on the dry sand, just above the tide line. In front of us stretched the endless sea and sky, and the moon reflected a path on the water like a shimmering yellow road. We didn't speak.

All I could hear was the waves. At midnight, when the first fireworks burst overhead and filled the sky with sparks, Lizzie stood up and walked into the sea.

She made her way out into the waves, never looking back, as if the moon was calling her. Her dress was drenched; she submerged in a wave and came out again, water running through her hair. The sea moved up and down as though breathing. For a moment she stood with the water rocking about her and the moon floating above.

She raised her arms in a gesture of release and lightness, and I thought that she might ascend into the sky and float away

The Secret History

I
T IS
the early 1970s. My mother, Emma (to set the scene, so you can picture her), is leaning out the window of a room she is renting in an old shopfront terrace near the university She loves this room, though it is small, and the paint is peeling away in broad flakes and the floor has boards that are unpolished and therefore ingrained with dirt and impossible to clean. Not that Emma tries very hard to clean them. Cleaning isn't, and will never be, her strong point.

She loves her small square room with the peeling white paint and the
Free Angela Davis
poster that the previous occupant has left stuck on the wall and which she hasn't bothered to take down. Emma is very much in the mood to simply let things be. She allows biscuits to go soft in their packets but she eats them anyway; she's been known to eat mouldy bread without noticing. In those days she had her mind on higher things.

So, she's leaning out the window with her mind on higher things: namely, how wonderful every moment of life is, how much to be savoured and treasured. To see the distant city skyline she has to lean right out and peer down the brick-walled canyon between the back of her house and the house next door. She loves the sight of the growing outcrop of skyscrapers with a dozen metal cranes nodding on top of them.

If she looks down to the ground and not out to the city she can see her own back path of crumbling uneven bricks leading to the outdoor dunny, and the timber fence that separates her path from the path of the house next door. Beyond the dunny the yard is covered with waist-high grass and a choko vine covers the back fence. Emma leans and leans from her window, sighing with satisfaction, breathing the world in with each breath and sucking up the view with her eyes as if she can't get enough of it.

By the age of twenty my mother had lost everyone close to her. Her father when she was two. Great Aunt Em when she was sixteen. A year later her sister Beth. And then, just two years afterwards - from shock, Emma thought - her mother succumbed to cancer.

Perhaps that was why our mother loved us all so much, why she was always so fearful for our safety. ‘Oh, be carejd!' was the cry that followed us everywhere. It was her mantra, her magic spell to ward off the danger and certain death she was sure was always following us.

Emma agreed with the solicitor to sell the family home and put the money in trust for her (it was added to the money from Great Aunt Em's place: a tidy sum), and then found a room to rent in a place near the university.
I am an orphan
, she told herself melodramatically.
An orphan and an heiress
. Making such an image for herself helped her to be strong. It explains her apparent heartlessness. She grieved for her mother; of course she grieved. But she was a girl alone in a big city, an orphan (and an heiress!) and she was determined to make the most of it.

For her first two years at university she had commuted on the train in her pleated wool skirt and hand-knitted jumper, clutching her briefcase. On her mother's advice, she had not enrolled in art school, but was studying for a sensible BA: literature and history and politics.

The first thing she did after her mother died was throw out the pleated wool skirts. She almost threw out the hand-knitted jumpers as well, but prudently kept them at the last moment when she remembered the cold of winter. She bought two more pairs of jeans and two maroon T-shirts, and that was what she wore for the rest of her time at university.

Two other people lived in her new house; they were both men, but they were rarely home, so Emma mostly had the place to herself. The men were socialists; the woman who'd had Emma's room before her had organised women's liberation meetings to be held there, and the meetings continued to be held in the house after she left. The shopfront room and a room immediately behind it were given over to radical activity. Sometimes the place hummed with people, but mostly it was cool and dark and quiet, and Emma moved quietly from her bedroom to the red-painted kitchen downstairs like a ghost.

Her room was uncurtained. In the afternoons the sun flooded in and filled her white room with uninhibited light. As well as the Angela Davis poster, the previous occupant had also left behind a hairy old Greek rug, and Emma sat on this in the afternoons in underpants and singlet and made sketches of people she'd noticed during the day. She sat in a compact way, her knees drawn close to her face, her drawing paper on the floor beside her, or sometimes balanced on her knees.

She collected paper to draw on, of different weights and textures. She even tore the sides off cardboard boxes she found at the supermarket because she liked the thickness and colour and the ridged surface, which changed the nature of the things she drew. Surface was everything, she thought. She liked the way images could be built up on the page, layer upon layer.

So she sat in her room, and the sun warmed her naked legs, and her nostrils were full of the sharp smell of paper and the sweet, cloymg scent of her own skin. She must have been a singular figure, sitting curled in the centre of a grimy wool rug in a small white box of a room in an old house near the centre of the city She was all alone in the world, but she tried not to think about that: this room was her home, her refuge, her enclosing womb.

Her life was simple. She went to classes. She visited friends. She came home and cooked scrappy meals from a stash of food she kept in a cupboard that smelt of stale bread and sour cheese. To her unassuming mind she was living a life of unrestricted freedom.

There was a child in the house next door, a little girl who played in the passageway at the back. From her window Emma could see her sitting cross-legged with a black kitten on her lap, talking to it.
‘No, I said no!'
she scolded the kitten, obviously echoing what someone had said to her.
‘You say yes, but I say no!'

Emma had no view of the house on the other side which shared the wall where the staircase ran. There were children in that house too, and she heard them running up and down the stairs all day, with the lightness of step and of heart that is natural only to children. It lifted her spirits to hear their joyful footsteps, just as it saddened her to watch the child on the other side who played alone with her yes-saying kitten.