A Charm of Powerful Trouble (3 page)

From the first, it seemed to me I had known about sex. Where we lived, there were always animals mating and producing offspring, and our mother was matter-of-fact about it. When we were still quite young - when I was about six or seven - she told us about men and women making love.

‘It sounds horrible!' said Lizzie. ‘I'm never going to do that.'

‘It's not horrible,' said Emma. ‘It's nice.' It was a hot day, one of those summer days when the very air oozed moisture. She smoothed the hair from Lizzie's forehead where it hung in damp strands. ‘It's lovely to be that close to someone you love. When you're grown-up you'll see how nice it is.'

In those days Lizzie and I shared a bed and slept tumbled together like puppies. That night it was too hot for even so much as a sheet, and Lizzie pushed me away when I tried to curl up close to her.

‘Lizzie,' I whispered in the dark, my thumb in my mouth for comfort. ‘Does it have to be with a man?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Does it have to be with a man?'

‘Does it have to be with
anybody,
that's what
I'd
like to know!' she said crossly, and turned her back to me.

I can remember waking the next morning and a close-up of Lizzie filling my entire vision: her cheek, with damp hair lying across it, her nose in profile, one fist held against her face in sleep.

When I thought Chloe and Paris would be asleep, I crept into their room. Because Paris was there I hadn't gone in to talk to Chloe before she went to sleep, as I always did, and I missed her. I knelt beside my sister and listened to her breathing. I shut my eyes and leaned in close to her, taking in her warm, bed-fuddled little-sister smell. Her fat hand lay palm upwards on the sheet and I bent my head to kiss it. I adored my little sister: if she wasn't one of
us,
part of Lizzie-Laura, she was something far more exotic and lovable.

I became aware that Paris was awake. I stayed for a long time, to spite her, and she didn't breathe, or move, at all.

The next morning their room was deserted; they were already out exploring together. On Paris's bed was an exercise book that she hadn't bothered to shut. By sitting on the edge of the bed I could read what she'd written without even touching it.

Yesterday we came to stay with people called the Zucchinis. Laura
Zucchini doesn't like me and Lizzie Zucchini doesn't even know
I
exist. Chloe Zucchini is just a baby but
I
will be able to make
her do what
I
want.

Mr Zucchini makes eyes at Mum. He looks at her m
if
he wants
to eat her up. He thinks the whole world loves him and that he is
the best. Mrs Zucchini is nice and she watches Mr Zucchini all the
time
as if
she thinks he's wonder-l too.
I
hate their toilet, it is a
hole in the ground and
I
always think I'llfall in. There are bats
and mice everywhere and their house is like
a
haunted castle.

Outside, a feral cat had killed a feather-tail glider and eaten it all but for the tail and tiny skull. I found the remains as I made my way down the overgrown track, dense with weeds, that led to my mother's painting studio. It was an old timber shed that leaned into the lantana.

I stood at the window and saw Stella reclining on an old sofa, naked, while Emma sketched her. Emma worked quickly, looking up every few moments to study Stella intently.

‘Come in, please!' she called, when she saw me. ‘I won't have any peepers.'

I crept inside and craned over her shoulder to see what she had drawn.

‘Be patient. I'm nearly finished, and then I'll show you.'

I couldn't help looking at Stella's breasts: they were small and pointed, not at all like my mother's, which were plump and soft. It was my first intimation that women could be so different.

My mother had always told me that everyone sees things in their own way - that is why drawings of the same thing are so different. I waited for my mother to finish so I could get an idea of how she saw Stella.

‘Now you can look!' she said.

Her sketch had been done very quickly with soft black crayon. It looked like a good drawing, but she had merely gone through the motions. It was simply a picture of a naked woman; it told nothing.

My mother has made portraits of Lizzie plucking at the strings of her guitar and everything is there: her beauty and her anxiety captured on the surface of the paper. Those pictures made me fear for Lizzie sometimes. I wanted to capture her beauty, not to keep it for myself, but to contain it and protect her. Perhaps drawing is a kind of capturing.

And now here was this sketch of Stella,which looked like her, but told nothing of what she might be like. My mother can evade even when she draws.

‘I like the way you do legs,' said Stella, standing shamelessly naked in front of the easel. ‘I remember you, when I was a kid, drawing legs - my mother's legs; remember?'

Emma shot her a smile. ‘I learned how to do legs from the illustrations in a storybook when I was a child. I can't remember who the artist was, but she - I'm sure it was a she! - drew the legs with just a couple of swift lines. I liked the curve of the calf, the way it suggested firmness and muscle. Legs are my favourite things to draw. They're so interesting! Because you can never tell from the rest of a person what the legs will be like - have you noticed? Some very slim people have quite big legs. And fat women, especially, can have surprisingly dainty ankles. The legs I hate are ones that are somehow shapeless, with seemingly no muscle in them at all.'

‘Fancy hating someone because of their legs.' Claudio stood leaning against the doorjamb. I was embarrassed. It didn't seem right that my father should be able to inspect Stella's nakedness so closely.

Emma glanced at him dismissively ‘I didn't say I hated the people,' she said lightly, ‘just the legs.' She began to pack up her materials. Stella pulled on her clothes, lingeringly.

Emma and Stella left the drawing hut, left Claudio standing in the doorway with an expression on his face that was between a grin and a leer. I could see that my father liked women; I thought that perhaps it was the essential thing about him. More than that, he needed women to like and admire him. But I could see that although women liked him, it was not all the time, or when he was in certain moods.

I followed my mother along the path through the lantana. I felt the scratch of the stems against my arm, and smelt the sharp odour of the bruised leaves.

That night my mother and Stella talked for hours in the kitchen. I heard them mention Stella's mother Flora, whom Emma had known for years. She lived just outside Paris still, said Stella.

I'd lived my whole life - an eternity it seemed - in the one place, and it seemed astonishing that someone could have so much mobility. To live near Paris!

The murmur of their voices continued long after I was in bed. They talked with long silences and whisperings and bursts of unseemly laughter, but there was something that told me they weren't really friends.

M

W
HEN WE
were young we always begged our mother to tell us stories. Real stories, we wanted, of her life.

She only ever told us one. It was a story we loved, and she told it again and again, with variations. Details that were forgotten at one time were remembered at a later telling, so that eventually I built up a patchwork of images and associations which I put together in my imagmation into some sort of whole.

It was the story of a magical visit she made when she was sixteen to visit her Great-Aunt Emmeline. That visit was a turning point in her life. It was when she learned to love heat and humidity and tangled, fecund vegetation. The light she portrayed in that story was special: the world was brighter and more marvellous and more . . . everything, the way it is sometimes when you look at the colours in the sky at dusk and think I am in another world. The story my mother told was about another world.

Her great-aunt lived in a huge old house in the country, eight hundred kilometres north of my mother's childhood home in the suburbs of Sydney We grew up only an hour or so from where it stood. But my mother never went back to look at it, and never took us to see it. It might not bear being scrutinised, she said, more than twenty years later in the light of day. She meant that she wanted to think of it in that special light, the light of memory.