A Charm of Powerful Trouble (26 page)

Blake Yeats Aubergine looked down at the table and laughed. The story Emma was telling him was absolutely true. She didn't have to make up a bit of it. But she was aware at the same time of p i n g it to him as an offering, as conversation, as entertainment, because she had no idea what to say to Blake Yeats Aubergine the morning after going to bed with him.

After he'd eaten the slice of Lawson's black bread and washed it down with a cup of tea, he got up and said, ‘I'd better be going.' Emma trailed after him up to her room where he put on the black coat he'd given her to wear the night before. Then he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her on top of the head. Downstairs, in the meeting room, he paused and looked at one of the posters on the wall - a picture of a pregnant man in a sweater with his hand ruefully on his tummy - before stooping to collect several neatly folded notes that someone had pushed through the letter slot in the front door. He handed them to Emma. ‘The Henry Lawson notes,' she said. ‘Someone pushes a pile of these through the door almost every day.' She picked one up and read it out loud for Blake Yeats's benefit:
‘Henry Ldwson was born in Grenfell
NSW
on 17th June, 1867. Henry Ldwson
died in Abbotsford on 2nd Septembev, 1922.
They always say exactly the same thing. I have no idea who does it.'

Blake Yeats said, ‘Can I come to see you again?' and she nodded. After the door had closed behind him the dark house gathered itself around her. Mindful of every step she took, she made her way down the dark hallway to where light shone in through the back door. The bright enamel paint on the kitchen walls made each glossy uneven brick stand out in relief. She flung the Henry Lawson notes on top of the scabby yellow refrigerator with scores of their predecessors and some spilled off onto the floor. They reminded her of autumn leaves, the way they fell and accumulated. Some had fallen open so that they had wings. Thinking of autumn leaves and the dusty wings of dead moths, but purposely not of what had happened the night before, Emma made herself another cup of tea and smothered some of the black bread with honey and sat for a long time in the sun on the back step.

The next day she arrived home and found him sitting in her room. He was at her desk, with a sheaf of her sketches spread out in front of him. ‘I hope you don't mind,' he said. ‘These were just sitting here. The women downstairs let me in and there seemed nowhere else to wait.

‘So you still draw. You're getting good at it, Emma.' He pulled her to him and kissed her.

‘We should stay away from the window,' she said quickly. ‘There's a man lives right across the way in the next house and he takes too much interest in what I do.' She tugged the tablecloth down from where it had been looped aside.

You're so modest, Emma. What could he see?'

Emma shrugged, and gathered her sketches together into a pile again, putting them neatly one on top of the other.

‘That's an interesting face,' he said, indicating a portrait she'd made of Claudio. ‘He likes himself, doesn't he?'

‘Yes,' she said, pausing and regarding it carefully. ‘My mother would have said,
full of himself.'

‘Full of himself,' repeated Bill, and laughed. ‘It's a funny saying, isn't it? As though you could be full of anyone else.'

Claudio had posed for the portrait that Emma had drawn, and it was typical of him: charming, self-conscious,
full of himself.
But there was another drawing of him that she wanted to do, one that she would have to draw from memory, for it would be impossible to get anyone, let alone Claudio, to pose for the expression that she wanted to capture, it was so fleeting.

She'd arrived at his house one day and found him without his shirt. Afterwards, Emma always wondered what was under people's shirts, what they were concealing from others, what the real person was like. It became a metaphor for her.

Claudio was literally without his shirt, for he was in the backyard hanging his washing on the line and had taken his shirt off, probably in order to wash it. The first thing Emma noticed was his chest, which was so darkly and hairily masculine that it set off a memory of Flora's lover, Frank. At first Claudio was unaware that Emma was there, he was so absorbed in his domestic task, a task he was probably not much used to. He had recently broken up with one of his madonnas and, because he thought himself alone, his face had none of the self-conscious self-regard that was characteristic of him. It was utterly private. Pensive, reflective, with a touch of sadness that was accentuated by the downward curve of his nose and the echoing curve of his jaw, it made Emma feel that there was an inner Claudio that only she had seen.

She had glimpsed his private face, his tender face, the face he wore when he thought no one was watching. It was just for an instant, but that was enough for Emma to become entirely and utterly and uselessly enamoured of him.

Emma didn't feel full of herself at all. Much of the time she didn't even feel that she was a solid being, but rather that she was an absence defined by the things that surrounded her, that came up to an Emma-shaped gap in the world and stopped. The footsteps of the children that sounded through the wall formed part of her outline, so too did the voices from the meetings.

When she had the house to herself she was composed of the shadows that curled around her like smoke. She was an outline of shadows. Even when she basked in the sun on the back step or on the hairy rug in the middle of her room, she was simply something that soaked up the sun. This absence of herself wasn't an unpleasant feeling. When she poured tea, it was the streaming of the aromatic liquid into the cup that defined her; when she bathed, it was the roar of the gas jet and the prickle of the water on her skin.

And now here was Bill, whom she couldn't quite believe in. It was hard for her to get used to this new way of being with someone she'd known since childhood. When she lay beside him it was like possessing a part of her childhood that had been most exotic and unattainable to her, and yet he was entirely new to her, too. She was never sure what to call him. It seemed a new name would be necessary for such a new way of seeing him. One thing she'd learned: being close to someone, kissing them, seeing how they loved, made them seem a different person entirely. Even his face was different close up. He seemed to be entirely unrelated to the Aubergine family she'd known when she was younger. He was something uniquely hers.

She liked sleeping with him, the comfort of it, body to body, naked flesh to naked flesh. What most people would call the actual sex part of it was a blur and an embarrassment sometimes, and she didn't like to think of it, it was so unthinkable and new. But skin is sex, breath is sex, and so is whispering. She traced the long curve of his back as he lay sleeping beside her on his stomach; she put out one finger to touch the sandy hairs that sprang from the sideburns on his face. She lay awake and listened to his slow breath in the dark.

In the Botanic Gardens they wandered down serpentine paths. Emma loved tangled, moist vegetation, and here there were dank paths surrounded by the swampy green of rush, fungus, moss, leaf frond, petal, shoot and tendril. The stink of it curled into her nostrils. Her spirit plunged into the rank, seething lushness and she swooned and forgot Blake Yeats Aubergine altogether, she was so drenched by it.

They came across a glass pyramid, entered its muggy atmosphere and stood on an elevated walkway gazing out. Their pale faces looked back at them in the glass, and Emma felt herself germinate, sprout, shoot. She felt juicy and alive.

She laughed aloud in her joy, and bent down to a pool of water where a golden carp waved its frond of tail. Her face was there too, and she reached out and dabbled the water into ripples which shimmered for a while before arranging itself into her features again.

When she stood up Blake Yeats took her into his arms and put his mouth near her ear, and his voice was sibilant, like the swoosh of the sea. ‘I want to tell you a secret,' he whispered.

She waited a moment without curiosity or anticipation.

‘I wish you were a man,' he said.

Within a month he was gone.

She received a postcard when he arrived in London and then a few weeks later another from Amsterdam telling her that he'd decided to stay in Europe indefinitely Emma stood near the front door in the darkened meeting room with the postcard in her hand. As she stood, uncertain of what she would do next, a pile of folded notes cascaded through the letter slot, slid across the worn lino and came to a halt. Emma seized one and opened it.
Henry Lawson was born
. . .
Henry
Lawson died . . .

Emma tugged open the front door, stepped outside, and saw an old man making his way down the street. She caught him up, standing in front of him and blocking his way He wore a white shirt with a grimy collar; instead of a top button there was a safety pin. ‘Why do you keep putting those notes through our door?' she demanded.

He blinked behind his round glasses. Emma repeated the question.

‘Henry Lawson,' he said, waving his arm towards the posters stuck to the window of the shop in front of the hessian curtain. ‘He believed in the same things that you young people do.'

Emma thought that he was absolutely mad. And she decided that she had to forget about Blake Yeats Aubergine once and for all.

She went inside and made a cup of tea. She cleaned the kitchen and put on a load of washing in the old twin-tub washing machine. She swept the darkened staircase and the grimy passageway downstairs, and she went out and bought a bag of oranges and arranged them in a bowl on the kitchen table.

In the weeks that followed her moods changed almost daily Emma felt that she was waiting for something, but she wasn't sure quite what. There were days when she was so full of lightness and warmth that she felt she might take off and fly, and days on end when she felt heavy and dragged down by gravity and boredom. There were unexpected, blessed days when she strode through the streets flashing with energy and feeling like a young prince. Those days were the best, and at night, when she closed her eyes and slept at last, she dreamed that from the windows of her small white room she could see, not the city, but a glorious countryside of mountains and rivers and great wide plains.