A Charm of Powerful Trouble (9 page)

She grew used to the sound of Em's radio coming from the kitchen in the early mornings, which she blocked out with the tinny sound of her own transistor through the earplugs. There were songs that were played over and over that Emma liked:
‘Have you seen your mother, baby, standing in the shadows?
Or was it
‘lover'
? Emma couldn't tell.

Aunt Em knew things. There were words for everything that surrounded her ancient crumbling house. Birds that came to the garden were
spangled drongoes
or
rainbow bee-eaters
or
fire-tail finches
or
striated pardalotes
. Trees were
tamarinds
or
quandongs
or
red kamalas
. When Emma murmured that they all sounded exotic, Aunt Em's eyes grew bright with amusement. ‘They're not at all exotic,' she said. ‘They belong here. It's the roses that are exotic.'

The black phone on the wall rang twice while Emma was staymg there: her mother and Beth, ringing to see how she was. She stood and listened to their distant voices as she stared up the dim reaches of the staircase.

It was summer, and it rained - sometimes a foggy mist crept down from the hills in the morning, sometimes there was an evening torrent preceded by thunder and lightning. Emma stood on the verandah when it stormed, watching the lightning shoot down to earth, loving it. And there was the humidity, always, that coated your skin with a slick of sweat. She went outside on damp nights, and wandered around the yard, listening to the sound of cicadas and watching for fireflies, whose pulsing trails she followed into the trees. She followed the moon too, watching it move around between the trees; sometimes it caught in the branches, and then broke free and escaped high into the sky. Each night she watched as, little by little, it waxed or waned. On still nights she thought she could hear the sound of the sea, which Em said was just over the hills. It was a gentle swooshing sound like blood moving through veins.

One night late, Emma stood in the garden and watched as Em poured her evening drink of Hospital brandy (the brand with medicinal overtones), standing at the kitchen table. She sipped it slowly and with enjoyment. Emma saw the scene as a picture: the kitchen window was the frame, the darkness was a border that set off the tableau inside the house. In the daytime, the house was dark, and the light outside contrasted starkly, but at night it was the opposite, and that was why she went out there, to drink it all in and marvel at the difference.
Woman In Kitchen, Night, 1960s
would be the title of the picture, had Emma ever painted it.

Her nights were never sweeter. She lay on her bed with the sheet kicked off, wrapped in the soft darkness, veiled by a mosquito net, aware of the relief of night air flowing over her skin, and of Aunt Em asleep in her own bed, lyng as straight as a board. The house towered above her, mysterious and hidden, but the small part that she and Em inhabited sang with their small daily pleasures.

One afternoon she came upon Flora and Stella bathing in the creek. She called out to them and sat down on the bank to watch. They had lathered themselves with soap, their hair as well, and were splashing and laughing and tickling each other. Flora suddenly caught Stella up in her arms, and stood there cradling her, waist-deep in water, gazing into her eyes. Then just as suddenly she kissed her on the forehead and released her back into the water; Stella submerged and came up gasping like a fish, water streaming over her face, her hair slicked back. Emma remembered the picture of Em with her mother, taken all those years ago, and she thought,
nothing lasts
. She was full of loss and longing; she wallowed in it, stretching out on the bank and staring up through the branches of a tree, watching the pinpoints of light through the leaves.

Emma loved this place, but it had a tendency to make her melancholy. She'd taken to going for walks in the early evening, and she saw symbols everywhere of the vulnerability of life. The sight of a calf alone on a distant hillside, tottering on unsteady legs with no mother in sight, crows circling overhead, had made her sad for days.

‘Come into the water, Emma,' Flora called. ‘It's lovely. Take off your clothes and come in.'

But Emma shook her head.

She lay in the grass and dreamed about love, for Emma was a great believer in Love. It was Beth who pinned pictures of the Beatles on her bedroom wall and declared on many mornings that she'd had ‘another lovely dream about Paul last night', but it was Emma who yearningly remembered the lyrics of their song ‘Love Me Do', despite her averred interest in
Voss
and
Das Kapital
.

The grass was long and full of seeds that fell down her back, and ants wandered along various parts of her body, causing her to itch. She brushed them all away and continued to lie with her nose close to the ground, drinking in the earthy, herbal smell.

She thought of Frank, his glistening back as he dug in Flora's garden, the corded muscles of his arms, his ready, noisy laugh. She had asked Flora, had pressed her, about whether she loved Frank, whether she'd marry him, but Flora waved the idea away She'd said, lazily, ‘Stella and I are all right.'

But Stella loved Frank. She hung onto his arm and pestered him until he noticed her; she giggled helplessly when he tickled her. She sought his attention by dressing up; one day she appeared in her mother's long black velvet coat. It swept the floor and enveloped her like a shroud, but she had her mother's sense of style and she wore a beret on her head and nothing at all underneath, and she looked pleased when Frank wolf-whistled her.

Flora took them all to the beach, just a short drive away, late one afternoon. She said she only ever went late, when the sun was going down, her skin was so fair. ‘First to see the sea!' called Stella, as they crested a hill and saw the ocean stretched out in the near distance.

Emma strolled along the shore, and the white moon hung low in the sky Still in her melancholy mood, she saw death everywhere: a long thin seahorse, as stiff as a twig; a fish with its eyes pecked out by gulls. Everywhere was the smell of rot overlaid with the clean smell of salt. Aunt Em, so old and upright, walked a little way along the shore, and then stood still, and gazed at the sea. She searched the tide line for treasures and looped her skirt up into a nest to hold the things she wanted to keep. Her old legs were as mottled and as pleated as tree bark. Flora wore a white bikini, and her skin was white; she was lush and full and ripe. She caught wave after wave, with the white full moon behind her on the horizon. And then she dragged Stella into the sea from where she'd been dabbling on the edge. Emma saw their two blonde heads bobbing close together far out among the waves.

‘Do you think there was someone in her life she was to marry? You know, who got killed in the war or something?' Emma asked later, as Flora lay stretched beside her on a towel. She was sure there had been a young man in Em's life, a great, tragic, lost love.

‘Who? You mean Em? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe there wasn't. Do you think there ought to have been someone?'

Emma didn't reply to that. Instead, she said, ‘What did Em do, then?'

‘Do?' said Flora.

‘For a job. When she was young. With her life.'

‘I don't know,' said Flora. ‘There wasn't much for a lot of women
to
do in those days, was there? Look after other people's children, or do domestic work, or factory work if they were poor. If they were rich, maybe try to write or paint, if they took themselves seriously enough. But her family had money, didn't they? That house . . . and they were lawyers, weren't they? Her father and her brother, at least. There was family money. Maybe she didn't have to do anything.'

‘She looked after my father,' said Emma. ‘She brought him up when his mother died.'

‘There you go, then.'

‘But apart from looking after him, what did she do - you know - to fill in her days?'

Flora rolled over onto her stomach and regarded Emma with amusement. ‘She lived,' she said.

Emma had almost forgotten that there was an upstairs to go to. The dark staircase reminded her sometimes, but she came to almost regard it as a decoration, something that had no real purpose.

As she wandered from the house one afternoon she discovered something that was like another room, it was so self-contained and private. In the middle of the paddock at the back of the house was a large circular clump of trees like a small forest. Emma pushed her way inside, first broaching a wall of pungent lantana that scratched at her arms and face, reminding her of the bramble hedge that surrounded the castle of the Sleeping Beauty. The lantana gave way to trees with tall trunks that made a canopy overhead excluding the sunlight; under them were vines and ferns and countless small plants. At the centre of this room of trees was the beauty - a great tree with a buttressed trunk and branches reaching out to the sky.

Emma returned later with her sketchbook and drew this tree, which she saw as a great muscled human torso, sinewy and strong. She looked up at it, and sketched, and looked up, and sketched, and put down her book to wrap her arms part way around its trunk and breathe in the smell of it. She thought and didn't think of Frank's naked back, the movement of his muscles as he worked in the garden. Those were dangerous thoughts and she both refused and welcomed them, and she put all her suppressed feelings into her drawings of the tree. They became almost human portraits.