A Charm of Powerful Trouble (25 page)

There was a book that had been published in the United States called
The Dialectic ofsex,
and on the front cover was the warning that
Chapter 6 will change your life!
Several of the women had a copy.

Chapter 6 was about love. It said that people fall in love because of some perceived deficiency in themselves that the other person will supply. It said that people who are happy and involved in their lives didn't fall in love - who ever heard of someone falling in love the week before they went on an overseas trip?

The women related tales to each other of times they'd been in love, men who'd disappointed them, or been out-and-out bastards. At times they rolled about on the floor with laughter, or let tears flow as they relived painful experiences. ‘I always fall in love with bastards,' said one girl, not much older than Emma, and Emma felt woefully under-experienced. She kept her mouth firmly shut, but she was all ears. She was still a hopeless romantic. Deep down she believed in the man who would come into her life and fulfil all her dreams. Remember that she was only a few years older than the Emma who'd taken Marx's
Das
Kapital
to Aunt Em's and never got around to reading it. She was the Emma who lay in the grass and dreamed about love.

There was a meeting in the front room on the night of the Muddy Waters concert. Emma had no intention of walking past all those curious eyes on her way out.

She dressed quickly, pulling on the velvet trousers (they weren't merely trousers, they were breeches!) and then the boots, tucking the breeches into the top of them. The blouse slipped over her shoulders like a mist; she looked anxiously at the transparency of the fabric. She had no make-up, but she bit her lips and shoved her short dark hair behind her ears. From behind her door she seized a dun-brown duffle coat, pulled it on, and prepared to escape the house.

People had already started to arrive for the meeting. She heard footsteps clattering in the hallway below and the continual banging echo of the front door as it opened and shut. She flew down the stairs and strode, big-booted, down the hall to the kitchen, which had been painted blood red with enamel paint; it flashed past her like a dream of carnage as she skipped down the back steps and along the uneven brick path to the darkness of the backyard.

Beyond the dunny she was safe. With her breeches tucked into her boots, her coat flashing like a cape and the moon flying overhead, she felt in her breathless anticipation like a highwayman or an outlaw. In the back laneway skinny cats scattered. She felt hot from all the rushing and went back to sling the duffle coat over the back fence. On the main road lighted buses ambled past, as transparent as fish tanks. She felt self-conscious as she clambered onto a bus and noticed people either look her way and keep staring, or glance away quickly.

As she looked for Claudio among the crowd of people at the theatre she began to laugh. She used to sneak away from her mother and secretly put on blue jeans and attend women's meetings, and now here she was stealing away from those meetings, ashamed of attempting to look dashing, beautiful, glamorous!

But when she saw Claudio her anticipation was squashed at once. He was there with one of his wafting madonnas. ‘Oh there you are, Emma. Nice boots!'

Well, I don't know what Claudio said, but I imagine my mother swallowing her disappointment (did she really think she'd be going out with him alone?) and trailing behind the pair of them into the theatre, feeling absurd after all.

At the end of the concert, when they were milling about at the entrance deciding how they'd get home, someone touched Emma on the elbow and drew her aside.

‘Emma! Emma Montgomery!' It was Blake Yeats Aubergine, her old friend Sappho's brother. Emma had drifted apart from Sappho in their last years of school, and had lost contact with the Aubergines altogether. Now here was Blake Yeats, tall and slender and delicate-looking and impossibly romantic in a cream shirt, a satin waistcoat and soft brown corduroy trousers. They hugged each other spontaneously and when Emma turned around at last to look for Claudio, he was watching them with an enigmatic expression on his face.

‘Look, how about coming for a coffee?' said Blake Yeats Aubergine. ‘Now? I've got a friend's car - I could drive you home afterwards.'

So Emma said goodbye to Claudio and walked off on the arm of Blake Yeats, who had always called himself Bill. It was chilly, so he took her to his car and pulled a long black coat from the back seat and gave it to her to wear. It was the coat of a Russian commissar; it had broad lapels and reached right to the ground and Emma marched along the street in it, hands in pockets. In the coffee shop she shook it off over the back of her chair and leaned towards Bill across the table. The dim lighting made his pupils huge. He said, ‘You know, in that outfit you look like a beautiful young boy That's what I thought you were at first, and when you turned round . . . fancy it being you! Emma!' He reached across the table and touched her hand.

By the time he drove her home the women's meeting was well and truly finished and her house was dark and silent, and Emma, who'd never even been kissed by anyone ever, invited Bill inside. They made their way in through the echoey front door and down the hall and up the stairs to her square room with the peeling white walls and the hairy Greek rug and the curtain made of her mother's ivory damask tablecloth. And Emma pulled back the tablecloth so that light could come into the room, and they went to bed, bathed in moonlight.

The next morning Emma got up early, put on a short red kimono, and crept down the gritty stairs and along the dusty hallway to the back door. In the half light the red enamel paint of the walls had only a dull sheen. She went down the back path to the dunny The duffle coat she'd thrown over the back fence the night before had been caught and suspended by the strong growth of waist-high kikuyu and lay with arms flung out like a person sprawled face-down. She left it there and crept back inside, switched on the kitchen light and shook Rice Bubbles into a bowl, sprinkling on a lot of sugar and placing her nose to the neck of the bottle before she poured on the milk. In her anticipation the night before she hadn't bothered to eat, and now she perched on a chair and wolfed down the cereal, her legs drawn up under her kimono against the cold.

When she got back to her room Blake Yeats Aubergine was still asleep, the bedclothes pulled up around his neck. He had his arm curled around his head, and Emma wanted to trace with one finger the line of the muscle in his upper arm, hook her little finger into the silver bangle he wore pushed right up there. It was in the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail.

Instead she squatted, knees drawn up again, on the chair at her desk and surveyed her room. It all seemed so much smaller with someone else there in her bed. She didn't feel that she could crawl back in with Blake Yeats, or Bill, as he called himself, so she sat watching him sleep, marvelling at the transparency of the pale skin on his freckled face.

Her clothes from the night before lay where she'd dropped them. Emma reached down and picked up Beth's see-through blouse, putting her face to it automatically. But it no longer smelt of her sister; it didn't even smell of herself. It had a used, unfamiliar odour, of cigarette smoke and her own nervous sweat, a smell Emma didn't particularly identify with herself. It was like anyone else's nervous sweat, sharp and sour.

She folded the blouse neatly, leaned towards the dressing-table, slid open the bottom drawer, and put the shirt into it. She would never wear it again.

The sound of the drawer opening and closing must have woken Bill, for when she turned towards the bed again he was looking at her. ‘Emma,' he said. ‘What time is it?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘Early' She wished she wasn't still sitting there in her red kimono, that she'd taken the opportunity of getting dressed while he was still asleep. ‘I think I'll have a shower.' She grabbed some clothes and went to the bathroom which was right next to her room. She thought of him lying listening to the roar of the old-fashioned gas heater and the water falling into the enamel tub; it seemed too intimate a sound to allow him to hear.

He was dressed by the time she got back to her room. ‘Where's the loo?' he asked. She went down with him, and retrieved the duffle coat from on top of the kikuyu while he peed. When he came out they stood for a moment on the path in the thin sunlight together without looking at each other.

‘I can give you Rice Bubbles,' said Emma, leading him into the kitchen nervously ‘I've already had some - or there's some of this bread - it belongs to Lawson - he lives here but he's never home. It's Estonian black bread. It's so dark he says it's like eating chocolate cake with butter . . .'

Bill took the loaf from her and cut a heavy dark slice from the end of the loaf that was as square and dense as a block of wood. ‘This is a quiet house,' he said, ‘Do you get lonely here?'

‘It's only quiet at the moment,' she said, ignoring his question about loneliness. It was too close to the bone. ‘There's a women's group meets here, and sometimes some of them come to work on a magazine they put out. The house is often full of people. Lawson's quiet. He lives in the room up the top at the front - he stays with his girlfriend most of the time, to avoid the women I think. He doesn't seem to have much energy - he eats at Chinese restaurants all the time - he thinks it's the MSG - making him have no energy I mean.'

‘What a funny place for you to have found to live,' said Blake Yeats Aubergine, reaching across and stroking her cheek with one finger. With all your family gone. You're sad, Emma.'

Emma looked at him for a moment and took a breath. ‘The other person who has a room here,' she went on, ‘owns a radical bookshop. He's really old - at least forty. He just keeps the room here to store books and magazines in; he sleeps here about once a week - I don't know where he sleeps the rest of the time - the floor of his shop, I think. And he's far from quiet. When he arrives he sort of bursts through the front door like an express train and chuffs his way up the stairs, all fat and unshaven, calling out at the top of his voice, ‘We got busted again, Emma! Emma! We got busted again!' and rapping on my door on the way past, no matter what time of night it is. The vice squad is always after him for selling what they call obscene literature. One of the magazines he sells is actually called
Obscenity.
He keeps most of them stored in his room here; that's why he keeps it locked. It's full of
Obscenities.'