A Charm of Powerful Trouble (20 page)

On the second day of rain, after we'd finished dinner, Stella and Emma and I sat listening to the calls of frogs from the puddles that had been created around the house. It was an awkward silence; no one spoke. The rhythm of the frog calls beat inside my head. Lizzie had eaten quickly and sparingly and gone to her room.

It had stopped raining, and Chloe and Paris had gone outside. Emma suddenly got to her feet and went to find them. ‘Chloe! Paris!'

I followed. They looked up at the dazzling eye of Emma's torch. ‘Come and look for frogs with me!'

We followed the call of the frogs, a regular
unk, unk, unk
, our footsteps making the torches bounce. We stopped when the sound was right in front of us. Emma leaned over a puddle and spotlighted a small frog floating on the surface of the water. Paris caught it in a jar, and we took it back to the house to look at it properly It was a woebegone little frog, small and warty, and with one suckered foot against the wall of the jar. We could see its soft, pale underbelly.

‘An ornate burrowing frog,' said Emma, who knew about these things.

‘No it's not,' said Paris, ‘It's a yukky little toad. The kind a witch might have.'

‘No, it's a frog,' said Emma. ‘The only toad in Australia is introduced - the cane toad. But this isn't one of them - it's an adult frog, even though it's so small. This one is
Limnodynastes ornatus.
The ornate burrowing frog.
Limnodynastes
means "lord of the marshes". Don't you think he looks like a little lord?'

‘
I'd
hate to kiss him,' said Chloe, wrinkling up her nose, ‘even if he really was a handsome prince.'

‘I'd
kiss him,' said Paris. ‘And I'd cut him up too. I'd love to cut up a frog.'

‘I don't think we'll kiss this one, or cut it up,' said Emma. ‘When we've had a bit more of a look we'll put him back in the puddle.'

‘You should be wary of kissing frogs,' drawled Stella, her face turned towards them in the darkness, from where she'd been leaning over the edge of the verandah with a cigarette. The tip glowed as she inhaled. You never know what kind of prince it might turn into.'

Lizzie's shape appeared in the shadowy doorway for a moment, but when I looked properly she was gone. I think I saw my mother smile. I may have even heard her laugh, a soft chuckle. Stella glanced quickly in her direction and then back out at the night.

Lizzie was careful to avoid Stella; it was easy, for it was a big house, sprawling, made for people to be able to go off on their own. It was the only reason our mother and Stella had been able to live there together for the past week.

Lizzie had worn the velvet hat ever since she'd bought it. I found her late one night, lying on her bed like a corpse, her hands folded on her chest, the hat still on her head.

Without looking at me she said, ‘Sometimes I think I'll die from not speaking.'

I crept onto the end of the bed.

‘I hate the way she puts up with everything. And allowing
her
back here like that, after what she's done. I just wish I could say it all to them, that's all.'

Because we mostly ignored her, Paris kept to her solitary habits. I'd see her scribbling in her notebook, probably writing down observations of us. She was like an anthropologist studying a strange tribe, only the tribe she was studying was us,
the Zucchinis.

She kept a collection of moth wings in that notebook. I'd see one fall out when she opened it; see her pick it up and replace it between the pages, wiping the dust from its wings off her fingers.

Paris, ever curious, wonders what the difference is between a moth and a butterfly Looking in the dictionary she finds that among other things, moths have
nocturnal and crepuscular
habits.
She looks up
crepwcular
and writes the word in her notebook.

Our mother and Paris had grown to like each other. You could tell from the way they did things together, Paris watching Emma carefully.

Emma allowed Paris to be there while she sketched. She drew a picture of a woman in a dress made of a whole snakeskin, the head and open mouth of the snake forming a hood, so that only the woman's face showed.

‘Where are her legs?' whispered Paris.

‘Perhaps she doesn't have any,' Emma whispered back.

‘Or they're in the tail of the snake.'

Emma drew the dress so that it ended in a tail.

‘Did she kill the snake to make her dress?'

‘I think maybe she's being eaten by the snake. Consumed by it . . .'

‘Consumed . . .' said Paris, liking the sound of the word. ‘Why are we whispering?'

‘I don't know,' Emma whispered back. ‘Maybe we don't want to disturb her. Maybe she is the snake. She might bite us.' They laughed silently together, covering their mouths in an exaggerated way with their hands.

‘Which is it, though?' insisted Paris. ‘Is she being . . .
consumed
. . . by the snake, or is she the snake herself?'

‘I don't know,' said Emma. ‘Maybe both. All things are possible.'

Paris stroked Emma's hair. ‘A lot of your hairs are silver,' she said, picking up a strand and examining it. ‘They're beautiful.'

‘Yes,' said Emma. ‘I'm going grey. I intend to cultivate my hair to the exact shade of grey I like. I want it to have a soft sheen, like pewter.'

They walked the garden together, Paris with the skin of a small diamond python wrapped around her wrist, Emma with her favourite hemp gardening hat almost obscuring her face. Emma named the plants as if reciting a poem:
heartsease
and hyssop, borage and bitter root, bittersweet, blackbewy,
lemon balm and aloe, chamomile, catnip, geranium and henbane,
lavendel; rosemary
. . .

They squat down to pinch fragrant leaves between their fingers. The snakeskin Paris wears on her wrist rustles against the rosemary bush. Her eyes, dark with knowledge, are level with Emma's.

‘We're having a baby,' she says.

She watches until she sees that her words have entered Emma's consciousness. ‘I hope I get a sister.'

Emma stands up, her hand on the small of her back, as if it aches. Paris is too old not to know what effect her words might have. And too young to really know what she is doing.

Emma went to Stella and said, ‘I think you ought to leave.'

Now that she'd been told she couldn't pretend she didn't know. When Stella had arrived on the night of the storm I said that
Emma took in her condition.
I didn't just mean that Stella was soaking wet and distressed. Emma knew all along she was pregnant, though it didn't show. Some women can scent these things, and my mother is one of them.

Lizzie wore the black velvet hat with the pearl hatpin at the school concert. The hat that we called
Aunt
Em's
hat.
We half-believed that it was. We didn't have a long velvet coat like Stella's, so the hat served
as
a kind of family heirloom for us.

Lizzie was in a rock group with three other girls but she stood apart, a bit to the side, as if she didn't really belong with them. Aunt Em's hat made her look exotic and pale and remote. She played her guitar staring straight ahead. In public she never caressed it, or kissed it, or smelt it as she did when she was on her own. And it was only when she was alone that her face and body manifested her feeling for the music when she played. Now she was almost motionless, except for her fingers, simply a lanky schoolgrl playing a guitar in a desultory way. To anyone else her face would have appeared expressionless. Only I was aware of her secret, suppressed delight.