A Charm of Powerful Trouble (8 page)

When the sound of the car has died away Emma feels that she can inhabit her house entirely as she wants to. She pours herself through the rooms, becoming thought, feeling, sensation only The square of sun coming through the kitchen window becomes dappled and disappears. The shadows lengthen. She goes to the cavernous main room, shadowy and cool, and puts her arms round the tree trunk that reaches up to the beams of the roof. It is clay-cold and white and comforting against her cheek. She remembers the grey and green of the sea the day before, the lightning that struck out in bright sparks against the sky, and thinks calmly about going to her studio and attempting to paint it all. But then she decides to simply let it all be, and keep the colours in her mind.

Chloe's singing comes to her, childish and tuneless, and draws her to where Chloe sits on the floor with her dolls, combing their hair and singing and talking to them. Emma wraps her arms around her youngest daughter and smells the farmyard odour of her unwashed hair, the sweetness of her plump limbs. She feels she could drown there, but she releases Chloe after a second or two and returns to the cavern of her house, feels the cool timber floor underfoot, shiny from the tread of all their feet.

When the others return, it disorients her to be so suddenly confronted with the lap and pulse of people around her.

‘Couldn't find that size light bulb I wanted,' roared Claudio. ‘Bloody useless electrical shop.' He pushed groceries away into the kitchen cupboards, bouncing the doors open, letting them flap like useless wings.

‘I got you a present,' I said. I thrust the cactus with the bright pink flower at my mother, unable to wait for her birthday. I'd get her something else, something better, closer to the time.

‘What a gloriously coloured flower.' My mother turned and encountered Stella, whose arms were full of dried flowers, large and dun-coloured and as crisp as brown paper.

‘For you,' said Stella abruptly ‘For having us,' and thrust the bunch into Emma's hands. Emma automatically put her nose into the arrangement, but there was no fragrance of flower. It was a brown smell, uninviting.

‘I think we'll go tomorrow,' said Stella, putting her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. ‘We've imposed on you long enough.'

Emma stood holding the gifts she'd been given: the prickly flower and the dead ones, and was about to protest,
not imposed, no,
but weariness overtook her. ‘Of course,' she murmured, ‘of course.'

That evening, their last evening with us, Chloe presented Paris with the gaudy wallaby skull. ‘You can take it home,' she said. Paris took it without a word, dismissively, and Chloe looked so crushed by her ingratitude that I swooped on her and kissed her.

I watched Paris on that last night, taking in everything, imprinting it on her mind. I saw her take note of the uneasiness at the dinner table, where conversation between Stella and Emma was awkward and even Claudio's attempt to crank up laughter fell flat. She saw me looking at her. ‘Stare, stare,' she said quietly and carelessly Another child would have stuck out her tongue, but Paris knew already the power of understatement.

I imagined Paris regaling her friends with tales of this
awhl
or
strange
or
weird
or
pathetic
family she'd stayed with. She didn't need the wallaby skull to take away as a memento. As surely as primitive people take locks of hair, or fingernails, and work bad magic with them, Paris was taking something of our family away with her.

And this is what I had seen that day:

I stood looking at the cactus with the pink flower and then glanced again towards the coffee shop.

Claudio finished whatever it was he was saymg, and Stella looked into his eyes. She'd stopped giggling and rubbing her arms and was absolutely still. Claudio said something else. He didn't laugh as he said it. Stella lowered her eyes and replied. Her hand reached across the table and took his. She took my father's hand, the hand I knew so well with its square fingers and short, tough nails.

My father closed his eyes. He looked happy
Thank
you,
I saw his lips say
Thank
you.

With his other hand my father reached out and touched Stella's cheek with the back of his fingers.

I bought the cactus with the pink trumpet flower and went looking for Lizzie. I found her a few doors away in the op shop. She was trying on an assortment of dresses out in the open shop, not bothering to take off the clothes she was wearing first.

I told her I had seen Stella and Claudio having coffee, but I didn't tell her what else I had seen.

‘You should have seen her,' I said. ‘She was laughing like a hyeena.' I could feel my mouth pull into a grimace and my teeth bare like a hyena's itself as I said the word.

After dinner I sat in Lizzie's room with her. ‘Anyway' she said with satisfaction. ‘They're going tomorrow.'

She plucked a string of her guitar and listened as the sound resonated and then died away.

‘And nothing happened,' she said.

I wondered if the sound of the guitar was still there, though we couldn't hear it. You can only hear music when it's played but it's still an event. It's still real. I imagined the sound wave passing out into the universe. Perhaps someone was still hearing it somewhere.

That evening I found Paris staring at a snake in the grapevine. I stood beside her and watched it. Its eyes were milky, and I thought it might be blind, though it had turned its head to face us.

I experienced its sinewy strength as if it were my own body, and was contained and held tight by the cool green of taut skin. We stayed there together for a long time, the snake coiled surreptitiously in the grapevine and Paris and I eye to eye with it.

When Paris finally reached out to touch it, it slid away.

The next morning, early, just as Paris and Stella were about to leave, both of us thought at the same time to go to the grapevine to look for it. We found a snake skin, silvery and arrowed with scales.

‘She's shed her skin!' Paris whispered.

I reached out to touch it. The skin was not dry, but soft, and where it was rucked and folded near the head, still as moist as a living thing.

Trailing Clouds of Glory

‘T
ELL ME
about the olden days,' my mother asked Aunt Em one day, trying to winkle something out of her, but Em waved her question away with a laugh.

‘Oh, I never talk about what happened in the past. I'm only interested in what's happening now,' she said.

They sat in the sunroom off the kitchen, Em in her favourite floral armchair, Emma in a low-slung cane chair painted bright orange, though the paint was cracked and peeling away. She could see why Em lived in only a part of the house; it was simply too big for her. She confined herself to the kitchen and sunroom, her own bedroom and the verandahs, and these were kept as up-to-date and cheerful as she could manage, with a new radio on a shelf in a corner of the kitchen, and current magazines and newspapers piled untidily in a rack in the sunroom.

On the whole Em wasn't a great talker; she was content for Emma to simply keep her company. She liked to see Emma doing whatever she pleased, which was mostly dreaming away the afternoons in the garden with her sketchbook. Emma often caught her intelligent, beaky gaze resting on her with approval. But sometimes Em looked as dreamy and as wistful as the child she'd once been.

Every afternoon Em took a nap to keep her strength up, and Emma got used to having the place to herself. She resisted the urge to see the top floor of the house, to see if there was a room kept for all those years unchanged since Em's twin sister had died. But she crept to the living room that Em never used and wiped the dust from all the framed family photographs, staring at the pictures of her father, trying to see something of herself in them. She gazed wonderingly at the picture of Aunt Em with her mother, at the way the light from that long-ago time fell through the slatted blind onto their faces. Emma felt a tenderness for them, and for Em as she was now, that surprised her.

But she often surprised herself now with new sensations and feelings. Her life in the house was all sensation and image, rich and heady. Here, she was so different from the Emma who lived with her mother and Beth that she could forget about who she was, and be simply a bundle of nerve endings.