A Charm of Powerful Trouble (17 page)

At a loose end, she discovers the goblin man's card in the bottom of her bag. It is as creased and crinkled as his face.
Tom Roberts, Poet and Healer,
it says.

The house is a small timber cottage in the tail end of one of the shopping streets. Lizzie pauses and takes in the peeling paintwork and the tattered Indian flag that serves
as
a curtain in the front window before striding up the front path between yellowing palm trees. A frangipani has dropped fragrant pink flowers onto the ground and she feels their fleshiness beneath the thin soles of her sandals. The door is open and Lizzie knocks. She feels no nervousness as she hears footsteps responding; she feels not even curiosity, just a strange kind of anger and a power she's never felt before.

When he comes to the door, she refuses to register the speculative look on his face; she simply stands without speaking and lets him say, ‘Well . . .' and then, ‘Come in . . .'

She follows him down a hallway with small darkened rooms on either side. At the rear of the house is a long enclosed verandah with a kitchen at one end. He motions her to a battered couch, but she ignores the offer and glances dismissively towards a large painting that hangs on the end wall, so thick with paint that it almost looks like a relief sculpture.

‘That's an awful waste of paint,' she says tartly.

He grins at her. ‘Tea?'

They sit outside in a garden that is a tangle of greenery. Lizzie sips her tea and glances at him and finds herself looking into his eyes and responding to his wrinkled smile. She begm to feel afraid of her own impulses, and wonders what has brought her there.

Poet and
Healer
his card says. Perhaps she wants healing, and thinks that in some obscure way he could help.

Lizzie makes her way to Tom Roberts's house again and again. She is repelled and fascinated by him, by the way he appears to both mock and yearn for her. She grows familiar with his squat metal teapot stained with a stripe of tannin below the spout and resists the urge to clean it off. She sits on the floor in the square of morning sunlight that comes through the back door, gazing out at the garden. He has other young women visit him, she knows. Sometimes she catches the heady scent of ylang ylang oil, and fancies that bare brown feet and a jangling anklet have just whisked out the door. She learns that someone named Jamila has planted the herb garden among a radiating circle of bricks in the back yard. But it is dry and lifeless and no one waters it any longer, and she suspects that Jamila is long gone. She finds the teapot scrubbed clean one day and wonders who has cleaned it.

Sometimes other people are there, drinking coffee, smoking dope, listening to music. Tom Roberts entertains them all, he dances around playing host, his laughter bouncing round the thin timber walls. He does magic tricks, pulling coins from behind people's ears. Lizzie sees him watching her from across the room, seeming to consider her possibilities. Lizzie can bear his gaze, for she feels she's in control. She stares back, unsmiling. She doesn't want him, she doesn't even like him particularly.

Lizzie prefers it when she finds him there alone. She doesn't know what she wants from him. And what does he want from her? His look of secret triumph each time he finds her at the door troubles her. She vows each time not to come back. But she always does. She despises his scrawny chest with greying hairs and the way he gets around without a shirt. Despite his being thin, there is a bulge of flabby skin over the waistband of his jeans.

He reads his poems to her sometimes, watching her face, observing her reaction closely She thinks his poems paltry, but stops herself from saying so. Kindness is a habit with her.

There is an ambiguous struggle going on between them. Who has the upper hand? Neither of them knows. He often looks at her with something like a leer. She affects not to notice. She emanates scorn.

‘You're getting pretty, Lizzie,' he tells her one day He playfully squeezes her waist in passing, putting his hand under her shirt. His fingers pass across the metal ring and stop there. This is the first time he has ever touched her. ‘What's this, Lizzie?
A
pierced bellybutton? I didn't think you were the type.'

Lizzie removes his hand and adjusts her shirt. ‘What type?' she says coolly. ‘Is there a type?'

Later, when she collects her bag, the wordless signal that she is leaving, he brings out a jar and opens the lid. It is filled with dark liquid and squashy, shapeless objects.
‘A
present,' he says. ‘Try one.'

She laughs. Her scorn is genuine. ‘My parents ate those back in the seventies.'

‘I'll give you some for later.
A
gift.' He extracts two tiny mushrooms and puts them in a plastic sandwich bag. ‘Preserved in honey What could be purer?'

He hands it to her with a flourish.

She bestows a luminous, insincere smile on him. He smiles back at her, blissfully, too eagerly, closing his eyes and savouring the moment with a sweet, sad expression on his face. It's like smiling at babies, she thinks. You don't even have to mean it and the fools always smile back.

Still, she remembers the way Tom Roberts's hands have touched her, discovering her hurt, her secret wound. She remembers the feel of his roughened fingers on the soft flesh of her waist and, days later, when she sees Claudio's fingers slide inside the opening at the side of the loose overalls Stella is wearing, she walks away in disgust.

She goes to see Al. She's been neglecting him, and now she needs him.

‘Can I show you something?' she asks, and without waiting for his reply she lifts her shirt to reveal the gold ring in its bed of weeping flesh.

‘Lizzie!' says Al, coming over to peer at the wound through his glasses. ‘Why on earth did you do that?'

She becomes enthralled by food. She sits in a cafe alone, imbibing iced chocolate and carrot cake with cream cheese icing. She sucks up the sweet dark liquid, licks cream from her lips, and lets her fork fall through the soft cake. Scooping it up, she allows the cake to remain in her mouth for long moments before swallowing. Her experience is intense and private.

Food becomes her religion. She bows her head before slicing a mango with a knife, one cheek at a time. The act is at once a submission and a sacrifice. She eats watermelon and spits the seeds slowly into the ferns, leaning over the verandah in a silent communion with the ground.

She ambushes food; she becomes a mistress of tactics. She walks casually past the fruit bowl, reaching out at the last moment to seize a banana. She takes grapes by surprise, standing under the vine lost in thought, then reaching suddenly upwards to tear away a bunch before it can anticipate the attack. She retreats to the shrubbery to eat each grape carefully, squeezing the flesh into her puckered mouth and discarding the skins for the ants.

Her body becomes lush and full, reminiscent of the fruit and cream she feeds it with. Her breasts grow round and ripe and heavy. Her haunches are smooth and curved, plump and delicious-looking. She stands naked before the mirror and turns around to appraise them, running her fingers appreciatively over the line of her waist and hips before slipping a slinky frock over the top. Her stomach is no longer concave. It swells delicately below her bellybutton. The wound has healed and she wears clothes that expose the small gold ring and the soft mound of her belly. She surveys herself in the mirror and likes what she sees.

It has come into her consciousness that you can be someone other than your dull self. You can become whoever you want to be simply by pretending. You can play-act, and it is for real. Slither out of your old skin and take on another. She studies other girls, other women. At a party, one of those flirty, flighty parties that Claudio drags them to, she sees a girl who isn't pretty but can make people believe she is. She wears a skimpy black top and a black velvet stole round her shoulders. Lizzie watches as the girl weaves between the crowd of people, watches as the girl looks lingeringly over her shoulder at no one in particular and slowly lowers the stole to reveal one plump, creamy shoulder.

Lizzie, as beautiful as the day, bites her bottom lip and holds her breath. She watches and learns. She has always bought clothes but has simply
worn
them. Now she sees that you can do more with them than that. You can become someone other.

For a time she becomes bolder and more expansive, especially when she isn't at home with her mother. In the house in Mullumbimby she flings the windows open to the night with a broad sweep of her arms, embracing the darkness. She spends long steamy sessions in the shower and then walks about the house with only a towel wrapped around her, leaning from the windows in the living room to brush out her damp hair, shaking it and letting the breeze whip it until it crackles dry She is forever hangng out of windows, as if houses are too small to contain her. She pulls the long blonde hairs from her hairbrush and, wrapped only in a too-small towel, leans outside on tiptoes and scatters the strands to the four winds.

She has grown plump and beautiful but she still wears her hair in a chaste plait. She returns to Tom Roberts's house again and again, never knowing what it is she wants. She hasn't eaten the mushrooms he's given her. He never touches her again.