A Charm of Powerful Trouble (22 page)

The next time I saw her, she was on the path to the lighthouse, alone, looking out to the splash and foam around Julian Rocks. I came the next day at the same time and she was there again, but she was so intent on gazing out to sea that she didn't notice me. One, two, three times I saw her there before I was courageous enough to speak to her. I was flattered that she remembered me. She said her friend was out there, diving. She said she didn't want to join her, that she was scared of it, of being submerged in all that water.

I almost told her I had an aunt that drowned, I felt such an affinity with her.

Her name, she told me, was Catherine. ‘So what are you doing today?' she asked, and I shrugged.

‘Nothing. Just hanging about. How much longer are you staying?'

‘A couple more days. We have to be back at work after New Year.'

I ignored the We. Then I said boldly, Why don't you come home with me for the day? I live out there, in the hills. I could borrow my sister's car.'

At my home in the hills, Catherine admired everything: the view, my mother's wild garden, our dark, cavernous house that had always seemed too large and empty after my father went away. There were years of largeness and emptiness behind me that I still hadn't become used to.

Chloe showed Catherine her collections, including all the snake skins that she still saved despite the fact that Paris had moved away. She had wallaby skulls lined along the shelves in her room, and bird skeletons too, hollow-eyed skulls beautiful in their fragility. On her windowsill was her collection of shells, in groups of the same kind, with subtle variations. Seahorses were arrested in elegant curves as though they had died in motion. Along the verandah rail sat all the tiny boxfish that she had brought home from the beach, some of them still with a faint whiff of decay; their skin was stretched like parchment over their boxy frames, their mouths in a pout of disapproving surprise at finding themselves in such an unfamiliar setting.

And along the verandah floor was her collection of cow skulls, some with a line of bullet holes in them. She had stacked them in a pile, diligently. She showed all of this to Catherine with the air of a serious collector; she had about her an aura of self-possession that I envied, as if there were powers in her that were being stored up for a future important enterprise.

She monopolised Catherine, insisting on showing her the microscope she had been given for Christmas. Chloe had already shown me the juice from a potato, which looked like a glistening collection of pearly beads, golden and glowing and magical. A transparent strip from the flesh of an onion had revealed a silvery wall of six-sided cells, stacked together like bricks. One drop of pond water had weed like embroidered pompoms, and slender rods made of a line of square cells glowing like bottle glass against the sun. In pond water I have seen one-celled transparent animals that twist and turn like gymnasts until the heat from the microscope light makes them die.

She showed Catherine the same things, and told her about all of it: that the fine glass-green strands are filamentous algae, that plant cells are rigid with cellulose whereas animal cells are soft and squishy She showed us both something I hadn't seen before, the stomata in a leaf. These are the cells that allow the tree to breathe. All the beauty of life comes down to this, to these things that you cannot see with the naked eye, and which, when you do see them, are more beautiful than you would ever imagine.

When Chloe finally let us go Catherine looked at me and smiled, as if to say that she, also, was pleased to be alone with me at last.

‘She's wonderful. She'll surprise you all one day,' she said, and I felt ashamed of the way Lizzie had been the one for me to the exclusion of everyone else.

‘Your mother. She's sad,' said Catherine, after we had eaten lunch with Emma and gone up to my room.

‘She's lonely Now that she's not with my father she gets together with some of her friends and they drink bottles of wine and laugh into the night but she's not really happy.' I didn't want to explain more. That night he'd spent with her was the only one since they'd parted. Now that Stella had gone away he had other girlfriends, all younger than him, and blonde. All looking rather like Lizzie, in fact, but without the thing I can't describe that made her so beautiful.

Already I was planning how I could get Catherine to kiss me. She was standing in my room looking around at all my childish things, her hands in her pockets.

‘Come for a walk in the forest,' I said.

It was a way of getting close to her. And I wanted experience . . . sex . . . all the things my classmates boasted about. I was seventeen years old and eager for everything.

A forest is so intricate it takes intimacy with it to know how to look at the maze of plants entwined like serpents: twisted, coiled, sinuous, insinuating. A rainforest is artful and curled and wild. It is the wildness I love most of all. It takes time to know it and love it, to see properly what it is.

There was no path; we meandered where the plants would allow us, and the wait-a-while clutched at us and clasped a toothed tendril across Catherineh bare arm. I disentangled her, and beads of blood sprang to the surface of her skin. I placed my finger on one and put it to my tongue; it tasted salty, of blood and sweat both, not unpleasant.

‘You shouldn't do that,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Put other people's blood in your mouth. Or even touch it, these days. What are you, a vampire?'

I wiped my finger on my shorts.

‘How old are you, Laura?'

‘Seventeen.' I put out my hand and touched her on the shoulder. I touched her tattoo, the tiny moon and stars.

‘I like girls,' I said stupidly. I could see at once that she knew what I was getting at.

‘Since when? How long have you known?'

‘All my life.' It was the first time I'd said it, even to myself, but I knew it was true, just as I'd known all along that Claudio wasn't Lizzie's father.

‘What do you want?' She asked it kindly.

‘I want to kiss you.' And then I leaned over and licked the place where she had her tattoo, licked her on the bare shoulder.

‘You hardly know me.'

I was stubbornly silent.

‘I'm twenty-two. A lot older than you. And I have a girlfriend. Love's not easy Laura, you'll find that out.'

‘I don't want love,' I said. At that time it was true. I wanted experience. Anything.

She laughed. ‘Maybe not. Not yet. But you will. Sooner or later that's what everyone wants.'

She kissed me anyway, and I was grateful for that. I loved everything about her: her lips, tongue, the taste of her. I discovered that you can love simply the physical fact of someone, every little secret bit of them. I slid my hands down the back of her jeans and felt her hips swell out below her waist. She had two dimples there, and I put my fingers over them and felt how they fitted exactly, as if she was made for me.

Afterwards, above everything, I wanted to tell Lizzie what had happened - it was so strange and wonderful and unexpected. I parked the car out the front and floated on the lightest of feet up the overgrown path to her garage. There was honeysuckle sprawled all over one side of the building; it flopped over the door at the side and made a curtain of flowers. We often left the door open even when we were out, and it was open now.

It happened in the time it takes for a moth to flex its wings: a long, slow moment, a gathering together of potential before flight. I stood with my face full of flowers but they didn't block my vision.

Lizzie and Al lay naked on the bed, their legs intertwined. And Lizzie looked at him with such a wondering tender expression on her face, a look so full of lightness and love that I stopped breathing. With that look on her face she leaned down and gently kissed the inside of his arm.

Kissed him on that pale, defenceless part, the part that seldom sees the light, that is like a fish's belly, or a lizard's: soft, private, vulnerable.

Ugly, graceless Al, Axolotl Al, Al who recoiled from his own reflection in the mirror with flailing arms.

She kissed him with a look on her face that I'd never seen before. I'd never seen Lizzie look at me that way, with such intensity and adoration and astonishment.

I stood for a fleeting moment in the doorway with the gold and white of honeysuckle flowers in my face before fleeing, not knowing where I would go. I only knew that I had lost her.

I found myself on the path to the lighthouse. I stopped briefly to put my forehead against the roughness of a tree trunk, waiting for the blood in my head to stop pounding. It didn't, and I almost ran up the rest of the steep path and sat on a seat looking out at the sea. I felt numb, and dead, and sad. I think that had anyone seen my face it would have looked blank. But I had my face turned to the sea and the sky; the murky, treacherous waves and the darkening clouds reflected what was inside me.

I had always thought, from the first, that Lizzie was all mine. I thought that I was her. Even after I looked in the mirror at the age of ten and saw that I wasn't I still somehow didn't believe it. But I knew now that she wasn't part of me; we were finally and irrevocably separate.