A Charm of Powerful Trouble (13 page)

When our parents separated, they told us about it together. But I don't think my father wanted to be there; I imagine he'd have preferred to slide out of our lives.

Stella had come to live on the north coast with Paris; she'd been waitressing at Byron Bay and had not come to see us.

Then my mother found out that Claudio had been ‘seeing' Stella, which was the way she put it to us. We knew what that meant. My mother told him to leave.

They gathered us together in the living room. Lizzie and I had had an inkling of what it was all about, but Chloe did not. She was lymg, half-naked, on a corduroy beanbag with her thumb in her mouth, and when Claudio said that he was moving into a house in Mullumbimby with Stella and Paris, she sat up and protested.

‘But why?' she said. ‘Why are you going to live with
them?'

She drew her own conclusions. You love them more than us!' she said, and started to cry.

I knelt beside her and took her in my arms; her back was sweaty and covered in lint from the chair. But she pushed me away and got to her feet. She stood in front of Claudio.

‘I'll still be your father, and I'll always love you,' he told her. His face said that he resented having to have this scene.

‘How
can you love them more than us?' Chloe asked. She hit him with her fist, again and again and again.

He flinched, and took the blows as if he deserved them.

‘Emma and I will still be friends,' he said.

I looked at my mother's face and knew that he lied.

And then Chloe asked my parents to kiss each other.

Emma made no move towards Claudio, but kept her eyes cast to the floor. Claudio, not looking at anyone, kissed her quickly on the cheek.

I wished I still had my red beanie so I could pull it down over my face and lose myself in its comforting smell. I missed my father. I missed his exuberance, the way he would catch me up in an unexpected hug. I forgot his moods and rages and sudden brooding silences.

Our mother didn't cry in front of us. But did she think we didn't see her weeping at the kitchen sink when she pretended to be washing up, or hunched over with pain as she worked in the garden? She did what women are good at doing: she put on a brave front. But her silence was stifling her. I could see it sitting like a stone in her chest. I heard her in the night vomiting up whatever little she had eaten; she couldn't stomach anything any more. In the morning she was always pale and calm, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea steaming in front of her.

She threw herself into gardening. She slashed and pulled and planted, coming inside with dirt under her fingernails and lantana in her hair and scratches all over her limbs. In that country, weeds grew rampant and gardening was anything but genteel.

She began to cultivate herbs. With their soft foliage and shy flowers, they were an antidote to the headlong growth of the rainforest that surrounded the house. She favoured the nightshades, for their names and associations and often poisonous properties: henbane and belladonna and the fabulous datura, whose huge trumpets (not shy, these flowers) are borne upon a tree. Angels' trumpets, they are called, and they can give hallucinations, and kill.

Henbane she loved because the name made her laugh - she said why anyone would want to poison hens was beyond her, as hens are the most domestic and benign of birds (though perhaps it reminded her, savagely, of Stella, surrounded by all that poultry during her childhood). In the Middle Ages henbane was employed in witchcraft to cause insanity and convulsions, and to give visions - it deranged the senses of whoever took it.

And there's belladonna (
bell-a-don-nu
- say it with a lilt), meaning beautiful lady, for drops of it in the eyes cause the pupils to dilate, simulating sexual arousal, and enhancing their beauty.

And there was heartsease, and love vine and love-lies-bleeding, forget-me-nots and rosemary, bitter herb, and rue. Plants for weakness of the heart, to expel pain and torments, or to aid the memory (though I would have thought that if you were in such torment, the best thing to do would be simply to forget), and motherwort, ‘to help women in sore travail': all of these she grew, but they didn't seem to help, for she grew sadder and sadder.

She went to her tumbledown studio and worked at her paintings, but nothing she did allowed her to forget.

Her friends rallied round. One of them, Edith, brought her some clay, thinking that making a sculpture from such earthy material might help. Edith made vessels on a wheel, distorting their regular shapes afterwards by pushing at them or tapping them with a paddle. She sometimes pressed her thumbs into the soft clay in secret and subtle places so that if you looked carefully you could see the mark of a human making.

Emma found that one pug of clay wasn't enough. She bought more and created a sculpture. It was life-sized, of a woman lying on her side, one leg drawn up like a sprinter's. She was slipping out of an old, wrinkled skin with a smile of triumph on her face. I asked what the sculpture meant, and my mother replied that she'd come to realise that you grow older around an unchanged core, that the young self is still there, always.

Emma's sculpture, because it was so large, took a long time to dry out, and she called it her leather woman, because at a certain stage of drylng clay gets a sheen on it, like leather.

The leather woman lived on a length of plastic laid out on the floor of her workshop. We got used to stepping around her. She looked so real that I began to imagine that she could come alive. There was so much possibility in those arched feet, poised as if to leap into the world, such elasticity and power in those muscled legs.

Mullumbimby is a small town overlooked by a single triangular mountain nearby and wild rainforested ranges further west. It is dead flat, with a grid of streets lined by wooden houses. At the back of the houses is a network of narrow lanes, with timber fences collapsing under the extravagance of the vines sprawling over them. It is a prodigal town, blessed by an abundance of vegetation, a place where flowers and fruit grow lavish in neglected back yards, and lie squandered and overripe and spent at the end of summer.

Claudio wanted us children to come and stay with him in the house they'd rented there. Lizzie didn't want to go, saying to me under her breath, ‘He's not even my father.' But she agreed finally for my sake, and our mother's.

In the old house near the river I wandered through the afternoon-darkened rooms when everyone else was out. I enjoyed the temporary feel of the place. The telephone sat on the floor in an empty room; boxes of stuff sat randomly about. The unpolished timber floors echoed when you walked on them. The house had no need of blinds, for trees surrounded it, trees covered in morning-glory vines with their purple flowers. Looking through those windows was like peering at a stage set draped with tattered green curtains, through which crept the small brown river at the end of the back yard. You could smell the silt from the river, and it reminded me of Alice, and mud, and the taste of blood.

Paris hadn't changed much. She still had that same sharp and considering look. She glanced up from her homework at the kitchen table on that first afternoon and said, ‘Hello,' in a way that told me that she didn't much care whether I liked her or not.

I was pleased to see that Stella wasn't much of a cook. We had vegetarian sausages and vegetables that first night, and the sausages were smooth and pale, like creatures that had never seen the sun, the vegetables lumpy or mushy, under- or over-cooked. Claudio hadn't helped cook, of course; he rarely did. He sat in the bare room with the telephone and ‘did business' until dinnertime.

Paris speared a sausage with her fork and held it up in front of her face to examine it. ‘Pooh!' she said, and started to nibble it from one end, still holding it on her fork.

‘Pooh!' said Chloe, laughing, holding up her sausage in imitation.

‘Are you still playing the guitar?' Stella asked Lizzie.

‘Of course.'

‘It's her passion,' I started to explain, but Lizzie gave me such a look that I shut up at once.
‘Be mine tonight!'
sang Claudio. He had opened a bottle of wine and was steadily working his way through it without Stella's help. He'd given us all a little, just a taste in the bottom of a glass. Lizzie ignored hers, while Paris tipped her own few drops down her throat immediately and then sent her hand out stealthily across the table towards Lizzie's glass. I sipped carefully; the wine tasted of rich, red moths that had drowned in a vat of grapes, and then been strained through a cloth that had lain on a dusty road for some time.

Paris closed her eyes and reached her tongue to the bottom of Lizzie's glass and lapped at it. ‘Mmmm.
A
nice little drop!' she said.

Claudio helped Lizzie and me with the washing-up afterwards. Lizzie was silent. She refused to look at him. ‘Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie,' he said, ruefully, trying to jolly her along, putting on one of his broad smiles that showed his front teeth almost fiercely. (My father's face was always prepared for people, he was always aware of the effect he was having on others. I have seldom seen him with his face bare, not readied to receive someone's gaze. Sometimes I think that all that self-conscious readiness must have worn him out.)

‘Oh, Claudio, Claudio, Claudio!' said Lizzie, her hand over her heart, not smiling, still not looking at him. She flicked the tea towel at him and left the room.

I found her later, staring out the window of our empty, threadbare room, a room like a blank slate that no one cared to scribble on. She had thrown the window open and stood with her arms braced on the timber frame. Outside was black.

We lay in the dark and couldn't sleep; I heard Lizzie tossing and turning. Our mattresses were on the floor, and although it wasn't cold, Stella had come in with extra bedding. ‘There's a mist that comes in from the river sometimes,' she said.

I lay in my strange bed and stretched luxuriously I didn't mind the strangeness of it; there was the feeling of possibilities. My body felt strong; I felt power coil right through it like a spring, waiting to be released. I wasn't tired at all: I wanted to
do
something.