A Charm of Powerful Trouble (24 page)

One day, when she was sitting at the window at her desk, she glanced up and saw a man in the room opposite. She saw that he was young, and had olive skin and a five o'clock shadow. He was naked from the waist up and had a towel slung over his shoulder. They held each other's eyes for a moment before Emma looked away.

‘Hey!' he said, coming to the window and leaning his hands on the sill. ‘How are you going?' He had dark eyes; his face was expressive and handsome. Emma's eyes were drawn to the mass of black hairs on his chest.

‘I'm all right,' she said, carefully and politely.

The man looked at her appraisingly ‘Looks like we're neighbours. I've just moved in.'

Emma smiled coolly and attempted to ignore him, pretending to work, though that was now impossible.

You a student?' he called out.

‘Yes.'

‘What you doing?'

‘Writing an essay,' she said stiffly ‘On anarchism,' she added, not wanting to sound too unfriendly.

‘Bomb-throwing,' said the man.

‘Sort of,' said Emma. She attended to her book and did not look up again, and he went away, whistling.

Emma rooted around in her things and found a damask tablecloth, something of her mother's that she'd kept, and attached it above her window with long drawing pins. She couldn't have an uncurtained window with a man living opposite, especially not a man who seemed inclined to lean on the sill talking if he saw you there at your desk. She pulled back the curtain when she thought he wouldn't be there, and the rest of the time the light of her white room was filtered through the intricately woven ivory-coloured cloth.

Some of the people Emma knew lived in a house at the end of the point, right on the water. It was an old mansion on the verge of being pulled down, and was surrounded by the rubble of houses that had already been demolished. It had an unrestricted view of the bay a place teeming with the life of industry: factories on the facing foreshore and tugboats and ships loaded with containers on the water. She would sit on the verandah that wrapped round the house, admiring the mechanical nature of it all; she ran her fingers round the edges of the loose tiles on the floor of the verandah and mourned that their beauty would soon be crushed and bulldozed with the rest of the rubble.

At night the water was festooned with lights, and that was lovely too. Emma couldn't decide which was the nicest place to sit: outside, with the delicious chill of wind off the water and the splendour of the lights, or inside, where everyone sat around a great fire that roared every night in the fireplace in the centre of the living room. The house had been built for people with grand aspirations; the living room was more like a ballroom, but now it was filled with the scrappy furniture that was all that students could muster in the way of home furnishings.

Emma visited at first because she knew a few people in the house vaguely; it was the kind of place where no one asked why you were there. You could just go and hang out and no one asked questions. Emma liked the place, and then she started visiting more often because Claudio lived there.

He was a few years older than Emma and he was from Melbourne; both these things made him immediately more exotic. After an initial degree in anthropology he'd come to Sydney to attend the Film and Television School, where he was studying directing. He told her that he was escaping from his claustrophobic Italian family and made her laugh with disbelief at tales of their excesses of love and anger. She loved his striking Italian looks and his ready laugh; he laughed with her and sometimes at her and she found that kind of undivided attention intoxicating, even though he just as readily gave his attention to other people. Living alone in her white room, Emma needed a little of his warmth. She needed the warmth of that great house and the magic that seemed to envelop it.

Claudio had girlfriends. It seemed he had lots of them, because Emma met different ones all the time. But they were all the same type, virtually interchangeable. The grls Claudio favoured were slender and feminine and had beautiful madonna-like faces, and long fair hair. They wafted (or so it seemed to Emma) into Claudio's bedroom and out again, in and out of the kitchen or bathroom, on delicate bare feet, their long dresses sweeping the ground. If they smiled, which was rarely, it was a smile of such tender gravity that it would break your heart.

Emma wasn't this type. She wore jeans and T-shirts and desert boots sternly and sensibly. She was boylshly handsome; she couldn't have looked like a madonna if she'd tried.

She had never told anyone at university about her family She never talked about her mother's death. It might have been better for her if she had told. This was the start of Emma's not saying things, of keeping everything to herself. She knew that if she started to mourn it would become an unstoppable torrent, so she chose the way of stoicism. And stories.

Tell a story, any story, and people will think they have something of you. ‘Tell us about yourself, Emma,' said someone one day So she told Claudio and his friends about the Aubergines, the strange and horrible and wonderful family she had known as a child. She was even so bold as to give their real name; she thought, in such a big city, what did it matter? It was Claudio who began calling them ‘the Aubergines', to make them even more absurd, so she called them that too. She had begun to see her early life as something that hadn't really happened to her, and which could be shaped and rearranged into a story to entertain people, to deflect them, even, from the real things that preoccupied her.

‘Tell us about the Aubergines, Emma,' Claudio would say lazily, lolling in front of the fire, his hand absent-mindedly on the waist, or the breast, of his latest madonna.

And Emma would tell. At first their absurd names were the greatest source of amusement to her listeners, but what had seemed like their strange ways when she was younger seemed tame, now. So she invented things. She had them dressing in Greek robes and dancing in their back yard in the moonlight. She gave their house the black chequered tiles from Aunt Em's, and in her story Mrs Aubergine always wore a long velvet coat (like Flora's) to school open days along with a large red hat (that much was real) and embarrassed her children beyond belief. Emma had read somewhere that the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had kept peacocks in his garden in London, so the Aubergines acquired a pair of peacocks that perched in their frangipani tree and screamed until someone brought them out some bread. In an antique shop near her house she'd seen a collection of small glass spheres containing flowers made of coloured glass (she'd learned the name:
millefiore,
‘a thousand flowers') and in her story the Aubergines had these paperweights lying everywhere and thought nothing of picking one up and hurling it at another family member if they annoyed them. Several windows in their house were broken.

She felt a sense of treachery and shame, telling stories about a family who, after all, had been her friends. They had lived a life that defied the convention of Australian suburbs in the 1960s, eating what was then considered strange food, reading so many books. It was the sort of life that Emma felt might have been hers if her father had lived, for wasn't he eccentric, with his bushwalking gear and love of trees and solitary wanderings?

She could have spoken of the moments of epiphany she'd had at Aunt Em's, but that was one story she didn't share with Claudio and the others round the fire. She kept that one for us.

Sometimes Claudio looked at her speculatively. One day, when she was sitting with him on his verandah, he gave her such a look. ‘White socks!' he said, wonderingly. ‘I don't know anyone else who wears white socks.'

Emma felt young and absurdly foolish. The white socks were a legacy of her mother's taste but she'd been too lazy and thrifty to throw them out.

‘Do you know what?' said Claudio softly. ‘You need a boyfriend, Emma.' He often patronised her like this, and she put up with it, because already, though she hadn't admitted it to herself, she loved him too much. When she was with him she felt a sense of rightness, as if they were made of the same stuff. Each time she arrived at his house it was with a breathless feeling of hope that he would be at home.

‘But you need to dress up a bit,' he went on. ‘Tell you what. Muddy Waters is in town in a couple of weeks - you know who he is?'

Emma shook her head. She was woefully ignorant of things. She'd even stopped listening to pop music on her transistor radio.

‘He's an old blues guy from the States. One of the best. Give me some money and I'll get you a ticket. And dress up for it.'

What Emma came up with was a pair of blue velvet trousers that she found at a second-hand shop. They had narrow legs and hugged her slim hips. She found a pair of long black boots in the same shop. She didn't look for a blouse, because secretly, in her heart, though she hadn't yet admitted it to herself (and Emma was good at not admitting things to herself), she knew the blouse that she would wear.

In the bottom of the old chest of drawers in her white room were some things she'd saved from her old home, things she never looked at. The damask tablecloth had come from there. Emma eased the drawer open and slipped her fingers to the very bottom of the drawer and pulled out a bundle of cloth. It was a blouse that had belonged to Beth, and Emma had kept it because she liked it, and because it still smelled of her sister. She took it into the bathroom where there was a scabbed, dull mirror, and without glancing into it she pulled off her maroon T-shirt, and her bra, and slipped on the blouse.

It was utterly transparent. She could see her nipples through the fabric. But they were pretty nipples. She had pretty little breasts. You could see them clearly on either side of the embroidery down the front.

Emma was a modest person. She hadn't wanted the man in the room opposite to be able to see her getting dressed. She hadn't even wanted him to see her sitting at her desk in her private struggle with her essays. But this was different. This was dressing up. She thought that Claudio might like it.

The meetings that were held in Emma's house often made her head spin. People sat around on the bare floor of the shopfront room on cushions or on ancient brown sofas. They ate chocolate and smoked cigarettes and the discussions got very heated. Emma never said much; she was too unsure of what she thought and too intimidated by the people with strong views. The talk was sometimes about politics, about new ways of organising society, about socialism and the Vietnam war. And then there was talk about the politics of housework, and about whether women should wear makeup and shave their legs and under their arms. Emma was safe on the make-up front (she didn't), but she always kept her arms firmly to her sides and her legs resolutely covered by jeans (she did shave).