A Charm of Powerful Trouble (30 page)

Emma wondered why Beth was being so altruistic. Earlier, she'd begged Emma to stay with her.

‘You can go past the boatshed and give Phillip a message for me. Tell him I'll meet him tonight, our usual place - Flat Rock. Usual time.' Beth tossed back her hair and gave Emma a flirtatious glance. ‘Tell him
I'll
be there anyway.'

Flat Rock was a place where people fished, a shelf of rock near the headland where the waves pounded and sent spray leaping into the air. Emma had seen Beth there one afternoon, alone, standing on the edge of the rock with her eyes closed and her arms held out, catching the spray on her face and on the palms of her hands. So that was where she and Phillip met at night. And now her sister wanted her to be a go-between.

Emma hesitated. She was a mass of contradictions, a sketcher of nude bodies at seventeen, but pure still, idealistic, a believer in love, a prude even, who disapproved of
girls like that.

But at the same time my contradictory mother also craved difference and excitement and change.

So Emma, in the long, hot afternoon, went to the boatshed where Phillip worked. She hobbled across the stony road in front of it and crept meekly inside. It was surprisingly cool, like a cave, with shadows reaching into the heights of the roof cavity where oars and parts of boats lay suspended on wooden supports. She could feel her heart beating. She wiped the sweat from her forehead and pretended to look at the fishing lines and lures and children's buckets and spades that were on sale. She walked up to the counter and saw that Phillip was busy with someone at the other side of the shop.

Emma couldn't imagine daring to speak to him. She retreated outside and stood hesitating in the glare of sunlight, then rushed back in again, feeling foolish. The boatshed seemed even darker now. Phillip had gone down the slipway at the back of the shop and was helping a customer with a boat. Emma stood at the counter and saw them through a square of window that was criss-crossed with rusty wire. The blue of the sky and water was dazzling. When Phillip came back in again she saw his shape dark against the door to the slipway He walked up to the counter and said, ‘Hello . . . it's Emma, isn't it?'

He was outlined against the glare of the window, and Emma could see a fuzz of fine hairs on his face, and on his bare shoulders and arms; he was incandescent. He was so near that Emma could smell his sweat, a smell that she was shocked to find not offensive at all, but overwhelmingly attractive.

‘Can I help you?' he asked.

Emma couldn't look into his eyes. She couldn't even see him as a whole person. She saw only a smile, and a chin, and a smooth brown neck. She couldn't speak. Full of shame, she hurried out of the shop.

She went home. She told Beth that she had passed on the message.

That night she lay beside Beth. Both of them pretended to sleep. They lay side by side but separate in the sticky heat of the summer's night, and each thought her own thoughts. My mother's thoughts veered between anxiety about Beth's reaction when she found out that Emma hadn't passed on her message after all, and a reckless defiance that she
didn't care
about what happened anyway. Perhaps Beth would be so angry with Phillip that she'd never speak to him again and wouldn't even discover Emma's deception.

Beth hauled herself off the bed and opened the door of the cabin to let out some of the heat. ‘Maybe it will storm,' she whispered, but Emma pretended she hadn't heard. She hoped faintly that the threat of a storm would prevent Beth going out, but doubted it. Both of them loved storms and wild weather. They thought nothing of going outside in the middle of a storm and getting drenched, despite their mother's warnings about lightning.

Emma lay with her belly still heavy; she felt the pull of the moon and tides. She waited for something to happen. For the storm to break. For blood to flow.

She was aware later of her sister slipping out of bed, dressing quietly and leaving the room like a shadow. She put her hand to the place where Beth had been. It was still warm.

It was a wild night. Thunder and lightning.

Beth did not come home and did not come home.

Emma went to search. It was dark and wild and wet and the few streetlights shimmered through the rain.

At Flat Rock the waves rose and crashed. They ran into the sea in an innocent foamy spill and reared again in fury.

There were no seabirds. No fishermen. Nobody.

My mother listened to the waves. Listened to the wind. The moon and the tides pulled.

Her sister was everywhere and nowhere. She was there in the wind, in the thump and roar of the waves. In the lashing of the rain against my mother's face.

Blood trickled between her legs. It felt like the beginning and ending of everything.

At last she went back to the cabin to see if Beth had come home.

She hadn't. But the room still smelled of her.

That night at Flora's, Emma finally gave in to a voluptuous surrender to grief. She stood in the dark and tears streamed down her face and sobs silently wracked her body. She gave herself up to it, became absorbed in it.

She crouched on the ground, her hands round her knees, and rocked back and forth, reminding herself of who she was, for she felt that at any moment she would lose herself entirely. She repeated to herself over and over:

My name is Emma Montgomery and I have killed my sister and my mother died ofgrief and I have no one left in the world. . .

She cried and cried and rocked and rocked and lashed herself with guilt and regret, and you'd imagine that with all the turmoil the tadpole-thing inside her that became my sister Lizzie would have been dislodged, but Lizzie hung on tight.

And in the morning, when Emma felt that she'd survived a tempest and had been washed clean and pure by rain, she knew that she would have this baby. There was no choice, had never been a choice, because the tadpole-thing that was Lizzie was the only person she had in the entire world.

Drawn from Memory

A
FTER YEARS
of skulking and spying and watching, and learning nothing, you wake one New Year's Day
(that
New Year's Day), and on impulse and not wanting to stop yourself because you know what you are about to do, you get up and you kiss your sleeping sister on the inside of her wrist. And you dress, observing all the time the opaqueness of her skin, the sureness of her, her solidity, when there have been times you thought her translucent and insubstantial. So you kiss your sleeping sister and she does not stir, and you grasp the keys of her car and steal out through a door curtained by honeysuckle. Your flight is headlong, through a town littered with the debris of last night's revelry. You see a beautiful wasted girl wandering home with one shoe dangling from her fingers and her head leaning against the shoulder of her beloved, and people who haven't even made it home but have passed out on the grass in front of houses - and you leave the town behind and make for the forest. And your car - your chariot! - flies up the escarpment for once as if drawn by a team of racehorses, and the trees stand massed on either side of the road in silent wonder at your passing.

And you are so single-minded you hear nothing, not the slam of the car door as you alight, or the crunch of your footsteps across gravel, or the clatter of your shoes on the verandah or the slam of the front door as you whisk through the house, which is empty but for a child intent on staring down the tunnel of a microscope. One sweep through the house and you're away, through the bushes at the back and down a path where lantana - a thicket of it - presses in on either side. It is the hedge that surrounds the Sleeping Beauty - you perhaps need a sword to penetrate it, to clear it away so that you can wake her up at last, but as you approach her castle, you see that she has got to it before you; she is standing outside wearing a pair of shorts and wielding a brush-hook, and all around her is a ruin of lantana. She wipes the sweat from her eyes and looks at you.

You ask her to tell you what you have longed to know for years.

In doing so, you are both her inquisitor and her saviour.

You'd better come inside,' she said, as if she had known all along that this moment would come. She told me the story over one long afternoon while she tidied her studio.

I don't remember what question I asked first, but Lizzie's birth and the real story of Beth's drowning were twined together like a vine that is corded round its neighbour, growing twisted together so that they become one thick rope. It seemed to me that the two stories were threaded together in inextricable and subtle ways.

My mother said, ‘I never told anybody that I sent Beth out there to Flat Rock. I allowed my mother to think I knew nothing about it. I didn't want to do her harm, but I did. I killed her.'

It seemed that a great weight had been lifted from her.

She said, ‘Sometimes I thought I'd die from not speaking.'

For years my mother had been content for the lantana to press in upon her studio. But that morning she had taken to it with a brush-hook, and by the time I found her, had cleared along all one side of the building so that the place had a shorn, naked appearance. She had pulled all the branches into a huge pile, and because nothing will grow under lantana, the ground was dry and bare, littered with the debris of dead leaves and broken twigs.