A Charm of Powerful Trouble (21 page)

Kiss the Sky

T
HE SUMMER
when I was seventeen 1 was so full of undifferentiated sensuality that the world was a great glowing golden fruit around me. I didn't long for love and nor did I need it, yet I saw love everywhere without even looking for it.

‘I love you, Mick,' said a girl who'd been busking outside a cafe with her boyfriend; they'd packed up and were walking away with their instruments. She had a round, childish face and stringy hair and her bare feet were so beautiful I could have taken them into my hands and kissed them. ‘I love you, Mick,' she said, and her voice was so sweet and innocent and sincere; the words flowed from her mouth spontaneously without passion or inflection. ‘I love you too,' said Mick simply, and they caught each other's hands. I saw then how easy and undramatic love could be.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?' said a guy at a cafe table as a friend of his, a girl, approached.

‘Every time I see you you've got this great grin on your face . . .' she said.

One night outside the hotel at Brunswick Heads I saw a guy and a girl part: you could see they were only friends at that moment but she said, ‘I'll see you tomorrow then,' in a way that promised they would soon be much more. I saw the look of delight on his face as he turned away from her to head back into the beer garden. He was so happy he leapt into the air and touched the overhanging branch of a frangipani tree with his hand. Everywhere I looked, there were people delighting in each other.

But I needed no one. I was myself, complete.

At night the summer air breathed onto my face with such promises of bliss that I slept in a deep swoon. I was caressed by the morning sunlight and seduced by the long afternoon shadows, and I lapped it all up in such a daze of sensation that I couldn't tell where the world ended and I began. I was so much in love with simply being alive that I could have kissed the sky.

In the bookshop at Mullumbimby I crouched on the floor, dipping into books. I had a belief that one day I would come across something - in a book, anywhere - that would finally allow the world to make sense, and I was forever alive and alert for it.

The books smelt of age and dust the way only horrible old books can; even the paperbacks were abscessed and flaky like someone with a terrible skin disease. There was an old woman running the shop, and she sat there in a chair behind the counter and a friend sat with her, talkmg. I let their voices wash over me, paying no attention, my nose rebelling so much at the dust that I was almost about to leave.

‘I always wanted what I couldn't have,' said one woman.

I stopped reading to pay attention, my eyes on the book I was holding, but I was all ears.

‘I always wanted girls,' she went on. ‘I had four boys.'

‘Girls can be difficult,' said the other. ‘Girls too close to each other in age can be . . .' She paused, searching for a word, and it seemed to take her a hundred years to find it. I think I stopped breathing, in case my breath obscured what she would say next. ‘. . . catty,' she said. I slammed shut the book I was holding, replaced it, and left the shop.

Lizzie was catty with our mother but never with me. I irritated her often, I knew that, by hanging around her so much and forever touching her and adoring her and secretly wishing I could be her. I annoyed her by incessantly trying on her clothes, even though they never fitted properly. I sniffed them with my eyes shut to try and capture her essence.

Claudio stayed the night once, sleeping in our mother's bed. We only discovered it the next morning when we found him still there. ‘I thought you were meant to be separated!' Lizzie said to her scornfully when he had gone, and our mother didn't reply.

Stella had gone back to Sydney after Emma asked her to leave. She'd had her baby and Paris hadn't got the sister that she'd wanted, but a brother. His name was Thomas.
Tnomas
I mouthed silently to myself. I imagined his tiny fingers and scrunched-up face, and I wondered if I would ever meet him. But after we heard the news my mother never mentioned him, or Stella, or Paris, again, and I almost forgot he existed.

Lizzie left school. She said she couldn't stand any more study and found a job in a cafe. Soon after that she moved out of home, found another waitressing job and a place to rent in Byron Bay. It was a converted garage behind someone's house. She made a home for herself there with stuff she'd found at op shops. She draped luscious old curtains at the windows and on the walls she hung elegant scarves and shawls. She'd traded in her electric guitar for an acoustic one, and it stood at the side of the room on a special stand, like an important visitor given pride of place.

In the summer holidays after my final year of school I went to stay with her. Lizzie had a car, an old Toyota station wagon which she'd bought for $700, and she allowed me to drive it sometimes. We loved that car. loved its dear little humble shape, its dusty white paint, and the way it putt-putted steadily up the mountains and never let us down.

In the one-roomed home she'd made in the garage we cooked nourishing vegetarian meals and then, unsatisfied, we went out and bought icecream or take-away pizza and gorged ourselves.

Al had gone away to university Sometimes I found Lizzie in an intemet cafe sending him an email. She hunched her shoulders and stared solemnly into the screen, then shot off her message with the push of a button. She went home and scrawled pages and pages to him with a purple pen, drawing pictures all down the margins and over the envelope.

‘Is Al coming home for Christmas?' I asked, and she shrugged and looked unhappy I was with her most of the time but she rarely spoke to me; I longed for her to throw herself down beside me on the bed and take my hand and tell me things.
Speak to me, Lizie,
I wanted to say,
tell me
what you'refeeling,
but she didn't. She didn't really talk, not in the way I wanted. I thought that she had acquired our mother's habit of silence. She was aloof, apart, distant.

For something to do we put henna in her hair. She'd let it grow long again and I was in charge of putting the henna through to make sure it was properly distributed. Massaging her scalp, brushing the long strands of hair from her forehead into the thick, foul-smelling paste, was a kind of intimacy I relished being able to touch her even in this practical way She sat with a plastic bag over her hair for as long as she could stand and then we rinsed it out.

Her hair turned an astonishing luminous red. I saw her walking down the street, head and shoulders above the throng of backpackers who pulsed along the footpath. She was ethereal, she floated, her red hair loose and flowing like a cape. People stared; some even turned their heads to get a better look. But she noticed no one; she walked oblivious, and the crowds parted for her so that behind her there was a human wake.

Christmas came and went, and as usual we shared our time between our mother's house and our father's. Al didn't come home. His mother no longer spent all her time in bed and Lizzie said that she was joining him in Sydney so they could visit relatives. I could see that Lizzie was disappointed, though she never spoke of it to me. Did the thought of Al, the fact of him, their friendship, which I couldn't fathom, make her happy or not?

I worried about her. She no longer played the tunes of Jimi Hendrix, but she'd been seeing him everywhere. The man in the record shop, she said, was the spitting image of him. I thought she was mad. He had frizzy hair and dark skin but that was the only resemblance I could see. She said he'd come into her cafe one day when I wasn't there - not the man in the record shop, someone else who also looked like Jimi Hendrix. He'd ordered a vegetarian focaccia and a latte. And then she'd seen him surfing, on a board, way out on the waves. ‘He was a real good rider,' she said.

That was when I laughed at her. ‘The ghost,' I told her, ‘of Jimi Hendrix, maybe that's what you've seen. You've seen the ghost of Jimi Hendrix, surfing at Byron Bay.'

I was in the habit of helping her out in the cafe. The owner was a mean bastard who allowed her to play her guitar to entertain customers when there was a break in the work; she was hoping someone would see her and offer her a proper paid gig somewhere else. So I used to go with her and help wait on tables to give her more time to play Lizzie was writing and playing her own tunes, but she never made up any words to them.

I noticed a woman in the cafe one day just after Christmas. She'd been in there before. I remembered the way her hair was shaved close to her head, emphasising the perfect shape of it, and the tiny moon and stars tattooed on her shoulder. When I took her order I saw that she and the woman she was with were having some sort of silent quarrel. ‘Is there any way out into the hills near here apart from in those buses full of backpackers?' she asked me.

‘Not unless you have a car.'

I liked the way she grinned back at me, and then later, when I was setting down her food and Lizzie was playlng her guitar, she looked towards Lizzie and said admiringly and intimately, so that I thought she was speaking to me: ‘She's beautiful.'

‘She's my sister,' I said. When she turned to me I waited for her to say ‘Your sister?' surprised, as people always were. But she looked at me carefully, glancing frankly into my eyes. I was grateful for the way she smiled and said, ‘Yes, I can see the resemblance.'