A Charm of Powerful Trouble (29 page)

Emma agreed with her. She took her mother's hand and said that yes, they would enjoy themselves more; they would do things differently When her mother got better.

But she never did get out of hospital. She died in the middle of one night when Emma wasn't with her.

Their family life hadn't been all dour. Every year after Christmas when their mother took her annual holidays they went down the coast for a whole month to where a friend of hers lived. It was a small beach town, sleepy and dull, with a general store, a newsagent, a fish and chip shop, a boat-hire place, a pub and a picture theatre.

When Emma and Beth were little they all stayed in the house, crammed into the one bedroom with their mother, but when the girls became teenagers they were allowed to sleep in a wooden cabin out the back while their mother kept the room in the house.

On their last holiday, when they were seventeen and nineteen, Beth had abandoned Emma most of the time. One day Emma wandered up and down the lonely beach, searching out shells and pocketing them. The wind whipped the sand into snakes that wriggled along the beach and stung her legs. She came at last to some dunes near the estuary and sat there, her knees drawn up, squinting at the glare of the sea and putting her hands over her ears against the wind. It seemed she was the only person who'd ventured out that day She licked her knee and found it inexplicably salty, as if she had soaked up the very air of the place.

A border collie ran along the top of the dunes, sniffing the ground. It appeared to be searching for something. It kept returning to a certain point, yelping, and then running off again. Emma wondered whether it was lost, and stood up to investigate, following it along the beach and climbing up the dune to where she could hear it barking. She saw then what had been claiming its attention.

Beth looked up at the same moment that Emma caught sight of her. She was lying on the sand behind the dunes with a boy, whom Emma recognised as the boy who worked at the boat-hire place. Beth's skirt was pulled up, and his hand was on the back of her leg just below her buttocks. They both twisted round at being interrupted. ‘Get out, Jess!' he said to the dog. ‘Just get out, will you?'

When Beth saw Emma she didn't acknowlege her at all apart from an involuntary change of expression that was gone a moment later. She shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand and looked away again, and Emma, embarrassed, ran down from the top of the dune to the sea, where she splashed cold water on her face and spilled the shells out of her pockets.

The cabin that Emma and Beth stayed in that summer gave an impression of blackness. The unpainted wood on the outside was black with age, and there were few windows so that inside it was dark even on the sunniest days. Their mother's friend was called Marjorie, and she had decorated the cabin with ancient pictures she'd inherited from her mother. There was one in particular that gave Emma the creeps, a melancholy picture of a woman bending over a baby in a crib, one of those sentimental old-fashioned women with long hair looped up beside her face and a long nose and beseeching eyes.

The cabin was lined only with tar-paper that had come apart in places in long, hairy, tarry strips, and the curtains and bedcover were made of faded patterned fabric. There was just one old double bed in the place, which Emma and Beth shared; Emma often lay awake listening to her sleepless sister sighing and rolling over in the bed.

The boy Emma had seen Beth with that day was called Phillip, and he worked for his father at the boat-hire place. They'd met when Beth and Emma had gone to hire a canoe early on in the holiday when they were still doing a few things together. He was handsome (even Emma could see that) in an indisputable, tall, square-jawed, kind of way. He had a broad chest and muscular arms, and fair, floppy hair that hung over one eye. To Emma he was simply the sum of these things, but Beth obviously saw more. She often went to the boatshed to see him. Emma saw them outside on the jetty, her sister in a short red dress, her legs long and brown, one bare foot stroking the other in delight as she looked up at him and laughed. He took her to the pictures one night, and their mother insisted on meeting him first, and told him not to get Beth home too late. She waited up till Beth got home to make sure.

‘Snuggle up behind me,' Beth told Emma that night as they were trying to get to sleep, ‘and I'll pretend you're Phillip.' Emma was shocked that her sister wanted to imagine that she was in bed with him, and even worse, that she could pretend that her own sister was a boy, and she rolled as far as she could away from Beth onto the extreme edge of the bed. Beth laughed at her, ‘Oh, Emma, can't you see I was joking?' and hugged the spare pillow close to her.

Beth's life became a breathless flurry of anticipation. She encouraged Emma to help in her deliberations on what to wear, allowed her to watch as, pink and damp from a shower, she slipped off her quilted brunch coat and into her clothes, a dab of perfume at the wrist and behind her ears. She did this even if she was going to call in on him at the boatshed.

One of the things she tried on was the transparent blouse she'd worn to the pop concert. Beth put it on without a bra, posing before the mirror with her hands defiantly on her hips, admiring her reflection.

‘You'd never dare wear that in a place like this!' said Emma.

‘Oh, wouldn't I!' said Beth.

But she took it off and slipped it underneath the other clothes in her drawer.

Her mother refused to allow Beth to go out with Phillip two nights in a row, but Beth went anyway, stealing out of the cabin after the main house was in darkness. After that she sneaked out night after night, and Emma got into the habit of lying awake waiting for her, pretending she was asleep while Beth slipped out of her clothes and into her nightie. Emma, with her nose attuned to her sister's smell, noticed that she smelt different when she came home, that she smelt of herself, but not herself, of something earthy and fishy and undefinable.

One day Beth had been forbidden to go out at all by their mother, who'd caught her coming in late the night before. She must have suspected something and had lain in wait.

And where do you think you've been, young lady?

Can you explain to me
exactly
what you've been doing?

So you're thinking of becoming
that
sort of girl, are you?

Their mother's voice continued, cold and quiet and relentless, and Beth murmured indistinct replies. Emma lay in bed and heard it all through the thin walls of the cabin. When Beth finally came inside, she undressed in the dark and lay on the extreme edge of their shared bed and sniffled softly to herself.

In the morning Emma collected her sketchbook and prepared to go out for the day on her own, as she was used to doing, but Beth, her face still smeared with make-up, looked up in despair and said, ‘Oh stay! Keep me company!'

So Emma did.

She watched as Beth cleaned off her face and smoked a cigarette. Emma reached for her crayons and doodled while Beth went out to the bathroom and had a long shower. She came back with her face pink and her skin moist with steam.

When she slipped off her brunch coat and began to dry herself thoroughly, Emma, admiring the curve of her back as she bent over to towel between her toes, said impulsively, ‘Let me draw you like that!'

‘What? With nothing on?'

‘Why not?'

‘All right, but I won't pose.' Beth picked up a bottle of red nail varnish from the bedside table and shook it. She plopped down onto the bed and, with her knees drawn up in front of her, started to paint her nails.

Emma pursed her mouth as she drew, concentrating, intent on seeing properly: the curve of her sister's back, her absorbed expression as she dabbed gloss on her nails, the mole beside her mouth, the downy hair on her upper lip, her dark eyebrows furred like the antennae of a moth, her hair as smooth as a sheet of satin, the scar on her upper arm from chickenpox and one the size of a five-cent piece on her knee where she'd fallen over when she was five, her pearly fingernails. All the things that made her Beth and no one else.

Emma thought of how she'd seen Beth lying with Phillip in the sand dunes with his hand over her bum. A frisson of disapproval passed through her. Cheap. The word that came unbidden to her mind wasn't hers. It came from years of inculcated social disapproval. She feared for her sister, too. If you
gave in
, which meant giving in to your own desires as much as to anyone else's, you risked
getting caught
. And everyone knew what that meant.

‘Do you love him?' she blurted out.

Beth looked startled and then secretive. ‘Oh, love . . .' she said, smiling to herself in a superior way that made Emma sorry that she'd asked such a question. They caught each other's eye and Emma was the first to look away Beth leaned over and placed the bottle of varnish on the table.

Emma felt hot, and heavy. She looked out of the window of the cabin. Masses of dark clouds were building in the sky. And Emma felt her own body susceptible to its own kind of weather. Like the pull of a tide, her belly had the heavy, dragging, almost pleasurable pain that meant she would soon be menstruating.

She and Beth always bled together. Emma enjoyed the quiet drama of it, the seeking out of sanitary pads and tampons, the secretive urgency of it all. It was Beth who had shown her how to use tampons, had told her that you could if you were still a virgin, and scorned the tampons that had applicators attached, telling Emma that it was all right to stick your finger
up there
.

Emma concentrated on finishing her picture; her charcoal scratched over the paper. What did either she or Beth know about love anyway? With their father dead, they had never seen a relationship between a man and a woman at close quarters. ‘Do you ever . . .' said Emma.

‘What?' Beth pulled a dress over her head and wriggled it down over her bottom.

‘You know, wonder about our parents? What it was like between them? Mum never says anything about him. There's just that wedding photo, and that doesn't tell you a thing.'

Beth's eyes sparked with life. Emma had her interest at last.

‘I know!' said Beth. ‘And there's not even a
letter
that they wrote to each other. Or none that I could find!'

‘You've looked?' Emma imagined her sister rooting around among her mother's things and stared at Beth with frank admiration.

‘Of course. Why? Haven't you?'

‘All I know about him I learned from Aunt Em. He liked plants.'

‘Well, we know that,' drawled Beth in a bored way.

‘There was a fig tree, when he was a child. He grew all these other plants around it, to make a kind of forest.' But Beth was obviously so uninterested in this that Emma didn't say any more.

‘Oh, Aunt Em's place,' groaned Beth. ‘I was so
bored
there!'

I wasn't,
Emma thought, but didn't say.

Beth had finished dressing. ‘Hey,' she said. ‘Just because I have to stay in doesn't mean you have to. You could go for a walk.'