A Charm of Powerful Trouble (15 page)

Guiltily, I began to enjoy staying in my father's house. It wasn't simply the freedom of the night walks. It was the carelessness of the household, the sense that it was all temporary, that what you did there didn't matter as much as it did at home. It was like being on holiday. I began to like all those unpacked boxes, the scrappiness of the kitchen, the starkness of the bare boards and the odd bits of furniture placed just anyhow.

Guiltily, treacherously, I arrived each week at Claudio's house with a sense of release from the sadness that pervaded my mother's life. We had different rituals and habits there. Lizzie and I sat on the front steps with our elbows on our knees and stared out at the street, enjoying the atmosphere of having people around. It was a street of musicians, and we listened to the ragged sounds of the jazz band that practised two doors down.

Alice walked past on the other side of the street on the way to a music lesson, her flute case in her hand, studiously not looking in our direction. She stared down at her bare feet and walked gracefully, as slender as a sardine in flared slacks, her bare belly stuck slightly forward. A little while later she walked past again in the opposite direction.

The band was still playmg, and we tapped our feet to the beat, enjoying the untidy sound, the stopping and starting as they tried to perfect it. An old woman sweeping her path saw us and screwed up her face and put her hands over her ears as if she couldn't stand the noise. Then she grinned and took her hands down and put them on her hips, moving from side to side. ‘Oo, O0, I feel like dancing!' she said. Lizzie smiled at her and leapt down the steps to check the letterbox, leaning quickly over the front fence and looking all the way down the street. No one ever wrote her a letter but h i e thought there might be something interesting there one day. She also held out hope that a fascinating person would suddenly materialise. In a town, with people always about, all things are possible.

I liked to think so too. Mullumbimby swarmed with girls with bare brown arms and midriffs and flirtatious smiles. I would dream for days about the softness of a neck or the shape of a mouth; I imagined seizing some stranger's hand and biting her playfully on her shoulder and running away before she had time to be indignant about it. But of course I told no one of this and I kept apart from the girls at school. There were girls there who would thump you if they didn't like your hairstyle.

Lizzie and I took pleasure in everything. We laughed at nothing, or everything, rolling about on the floor of our bare room. A single word was enough to set us off. We bought packets of chocolate mint biscuits and ate the lot at once, peeling off layers of mint cream and squashing it greedily into our mouths. Fortified by sugar, we began to speculate about the things that still puzzled us.

‘Mum's sister who died . . .' I'd say.

‘Drowned . . .' Lizzie would correct.

The thought of drowning, of submerging for ever, was such a final surrender that I shivered. ‘I wonder why Mum never talks about her at all? I'd talk about
you.'

And we wondered about Lizzie's father. ‘Maybe you should
ask
her. Now you're older . . .' I suggested. But Lizzie jumped up and went to the window.

‘Look at Paris,' she said. ‘Making spells, I bet.'

Paris, in the wild garden, picks absent-mindedly at the scab on her elbow and assembles a collection of ingredients for her magic potion: three leaves from a sandpaper fig, four seeds from a black-bean tree - though she couldn't have named either - and two black and white magpie feathers. She sings to herself and looks around for something else that might be magical and finds a seahorse that Chloe has brought back from the beach and left to dry out under the house. It smells suitably potent.

‘What are you doing?' says Stella, coming down from the laundry with a basket of washing.

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing . . .' sings Paris, skipping out of her way with a private smile on her face. She spins round with a flourish, wriggling her fingers. ‘Making magic!' she says, and disappears up the side of the house.

By the time she comes back, Stella has hung out the washing and departed again. Paris assembles the ingredients for her spell in a pattern on the ground and murmurs an incantation over them:

I want a sistel; a sistel; a sister. . .

If I haven't said much about Claudio and Stella, it is because we were indifferent to them. Not entirely indifferent: I think Lizzie and I wanted both to know and not know what the adults were up to. Do I contradict myself?

But we were too immersed in our immediate world to be bothered with them. We were grand and callous and selfish and self-absorbed as children are, caught up with the immediacy of the smell of roses and the taste of chocolate, the trivial, engrossing, delicious details that made up our lives.

And yet I was aware of how our mother was filled with grief and jealousy.

It eats her up. Her love for Claudio is a great Rasputin of a love, dark and bearded and vile. It comes to her in the dead of night with rank, lustful breath and mad eyes and she stumbles out to the garden and mbs dirt and leaves into her face and hair. Her love won't die. She has tried to forget him. She has shot her love for him in the back ten times, but still it staggers to its feet. She has buried it alive, but still a great hoary hand breaks through the soil and comes to seize her by the throat.

After a while Emma's sculpture, the leather woman, dried out completely Her body became dusty and lifeless. To look as good as her old leather-hard self, she would have to be glazed and fired. But then she would be a glazed woman, Emma said, a glass woman. Not plastic, as soft clay is, but brittle. Besides, we didn't have a kiln large enough to fire her in.

One day I helped my mother drag the leather woman outside on her plastic sheet. She lay underneath the trees, and over time, rain fell on her and blunted the detail of her features. Leaves fell on her and began to conceal her nakedness. She was on the way to going back into the earth.

And only then did I stop seeing the woman who stood in the shadows across the street when she thought everyone was asleep, watching the house, her eyes dark hollows of grief.

Goblin Market

L
IZZW MAKES
her way through the Saturday market in the park, treading as carefully and fastidiously as a cat. She does not yet know she is beautiful, but she sees people look at her, and keep looking, especially men. They must register her size, she thinks: she towers above most people. Lizzie is tall and long-legged and undainty, and she feels painfully the scrutiny of others. She wears her hair in a thick gold plait; it draws too much attention to her if she wears it loose.

It seems to her that this is a market full of people who look like animals: English animals from the picture books of her childhood. That man there selling jewellery, with the small eyes and pinched mouth, is a rat; and the man making coffee, who has black and grey hair brushed back in a wave from his forehead, is a badger.

And she can't help noticing that there are a number of dainty mice, almost an infestation of them - the woman selling fairy wings and dresses, for example, and the one at the plant stall wearing overalls, and the girl walking by clutching her boyfriend's hand as if she's afraid he'll escape from her. They are small women, with small, pointed, pretty faces.

The market is achingly full of luscious food. Lizzie has a large person's appetite, and food attracts her. Watermelons and mangoes, strawberries, rockmelons and pineapples, all call to her in high, fruit-like voices, saying, ‘Eat me, Lizzie, eat me!'

She buys a large fruit salad served in half a scooped-out pineapple with a mound of whipped cream on top, and finds a quiet corner of the market to stop and eat it in. Food is to be savoured and appreciated, she feels, and shouldn't be eaten walking about, or when one's attention is focused on something else.

She finds herself near a stall where a man in a top-hat made of satin patches is selling coloured balls for juggling. He stands out the front and juggles as if he doesn't care whether people buy or not, and despite herself, Lizzie finds herself watching him as she eats; her eye is drawn to him again and again. He has an attractively ugly face. He looks like a hound, with his loose, baggy jowls; his whole face is baggy and wrinkled.

One of the balls seems to slip out of his hands accidentally, though Lizzie doesn't see how it could have, and it lands at Lizzie's feet. With a grin, he skips over to her and says, ‘Sorry about that,' picking it up with a deft swoop, but he doesn't seem sorry at all. ‘Give me a bite of your fmit salad, love.' Lizzie looks at him haughtily and decides he is a goblin. He is easily as old as Claudio, and smaller than she is. The crown of his hat is ridiculously high, it is a joke top-hat, and it is as baggy and pouched as his face is.

‘Oh well, don't, then,' he says, shrugging in an exaggerated fashion, going back to his stall.

Lizzie can't help stealing another look at his remarkable face. It is a landscape of changing expression and appears never to be still: the folds are constantly shifting and refiguring. There seems to be more skin on his face than there needs to be, and it doesn't know where to go.