A Charm of Powerful Trouble (31 page)

We went inside, and the story spilled out of her. She cleaned her studio as she spoke, putting away pastels, crayons and brushes, looking at the sketches she kept in folders, reorganising them, throwing some out. She stacked the paintings up against one wall and swept dust from previously hidden corners of the room. As she talked the light advanced and retreated and by the time she had finished, the room was almost dark. She plopped herself down on the stool at her high workbench and said, ‘. . . it all seems such a long time ago. And when I try to explain to myself how I felt and how I feel there is a gaping hole in my understanding. My mind shies away from it.'

Because I couldn't bear to look at her, I switched on the light and started sifting through some of the drawings she had placed in a folder. Over the years she had sketched us all again and again, most of the time without us knowing, for she preferred to work from memory She told me that is the way to capture only the essentials, the things that are important.

There was a sketch of Lizzie - I knew it was Lizzie, even though it was only a drawing of her back. I could tell that she was playing the guitar, though her body concealed the instrument.

I recognised myself in another drawing. It was just my head and shoulders and hands, though my features were indistinct. My hands were cupped, as if I was holding something, except my mother hadn't drawn what it was - it could have been nearly anything. I was looking out of the picture, sideways, at the viewer.

And there was Lizzie and me sleeping, when we were children, our feet twined together and my hand reaching out to grasp her hair.

My mother said, ‘Beth and I weren't like you and Lizzie. Peas in a pod. Sometimes I thought I'd have to
prise
you apart. But Beth - I don't think I ever even touched her. I wouldn't have dared.

‘We just didn't touch each other in our family. None of us. I always knew my mother loved me, but there were never any physical expressions of affection. The closest I got to her was when she was in the kitchen making a pie. She'd roll out the dough, and I was allowed to have the scraps to make something with. She showed me how to pinch round the edges of the pie to make a decorative border. That became my job.

‘I never really knew either of them properly. People you live with can be both a mystery and so familiar that they seem a part of you. Maybe that's why you feel you can never see them properly. But Beth had a scent that was specially her. I liked it. Playing blind man's bluff when we were kids was always so pointless. I always knew when it was her.

‘If you live with someone,' she went on, ‘you can't help a kind of intimacy. There's a presence, a companionship. My sister and I always bled at the same time, in perfect synchronicity.'

I said, ‘What did she look like? Are there photos?'

‘Somewhere.' My mother's face was sad. ‘I put them all away when my mother died.'

She seized a black pastel and reached for a clean pad. ‘I'll draw her for you.'

Swiftly, decisively, pausing every now and then to remember, my mother set to work. I refrained from trylng to steal a look; there was no sound except for the scratch of pastel over paper. The sound was an irritant, for I felt that it was my own skin being stroked, and I rubbed my arms and squeezed the skin over my elbows.

Always, it seemed, I had been waiting for my mother to finish a drawing so that I could see what she had done. Now she tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me.

I saw a naked girl, her back a lovely long fluid line, her legs drawn up, her face intent on the task of painting her toenails. How beautiful she was, how full of eager anticipation, how unconcerned that someone was watching her and remembering.

Chloe came grumbling to the door of the studio where we sat under a single spotlight. She said that we'd been talking
all
afternoon. I grabbed her from behind and covered her neck in kisses, and she only pretended to squirm away from me. She took my hand imperiously ‘Come and look through my microscope,' she said. ‘We can do
blood,
if you like!'

She had shown me plenty of other things, but blood was special.

‘My
own
blood?' I said. I wanted to see that more than anything.

‘If you like.' She added, warningly, ‘You'll have to prick your finger.'

She handed me a needle. But every time the needle approached my finger I pulled away I couldn't bring myself to do it. It wasn't because I feared the pain, for that would be nothing. There was something that wouldn't allow me to knowingly mutilate myself.

Rolling her eyes to the ceiling in exasperation, Chloe took the needle from me. She swung her arm round and round and round to make the blood rush into her hand, then she made me squeeze her wrist while she plunged the needle into her finger with one deft movement.

The blood welled into a tiny bead. She squeezed the drop onto a glass slide, and with another slide spread the blood thinly over the surface.

Blood - the stuff I licked from Catherine's shoulder, that trickles from between our legs each month, the thing that relates me to my sisters and is something all human beings share, is made mostly of red blood cells, concave discs that look to me like red satin pillows with an indentation in the middle where someone has laid her head.

My mother and I were the watchful ones, the ones who looked, and never said a thing. There were some things we simply didn't want to see. Or if we did see, we didn't want to admit it even to ourselves.

Lizzie and I had always imagined Beth floating like a beautiful Ophelia on a flower-strewn sea. We imagined it peaceful, like the image of Great Aunt Em dead in her sleep, hands folded neatly on her chest. But of course for Beth it hadn't been like that.

Now I needed to know something I had always wondered about. That night, having looked at the wonder of blood under a microscope for the first time, I filled my heart with courage, and went to where my mother was often to be found in the evening, standing and looking out in the direction of the sea. I could see that she'd been crying, but this time she didn't try to conceal it. Perhaps that's what she had always been doing, standing alone out here all those years.

I took both her hands in mine so that she couldn't help but face me.

I asked, ‘Was Beth ever found?'

I saw that flicker in my mother's eyes. She glanced towards the sea. Then she looked straight at me.

‘Yes, there was a body.'

I imagined the rest.

I cried then, too, for Beth, because she was suddenly real to me, not just someone I'd heard a story about. I thought how tangled my feelings were for Lizzie, how confused and jealous I had been when I saw her with Al. I let her walk out into the sea in the dark, just like that. She could have drowned. How easy it is to allow someone to submerge. You take your eye off them, you use words carelessly, and you risk losing them for ever.

When I came to Sydney to start university, my mother came with me, and she took me to all the places she'd told me about. The house where Lizzie was conceived is now an antique shop. She didn't want to go inside. We looked in the window and saw our dark shadows against the glass. I caught hold of her arm. We walked on, and my mother paused again in the street, remembering.

‘There used to be a betting shop here. A cattle dog would lie in wait with a soft-drink can and get people to throw it for him to fetch.'

We had coffee in a shopping complex that my mother said was on the site of an old timber yard. ‘This place was like a country town, once. Now look at it.'

We finished our coffee and continued on up to the point. Where Claudio's old mansion was is now a collection of townhouses. ‘Everything is different,' she said. Except for the water, which still glinted in the sunlight.

When Emma arrived back from Flora's she had no idea how she would proceed. Her stomach was still flat; she'd stopped having morning sickness. Sometimes she could scarcely believe she was having a baby.

She forgot about it for a while. A coping mechanism, she says. She dwelt in her white room. She sat in the sunlight on the square of carpet and drew. She went back to university and concentrated on finishing her final year.

She resumed her visits to Claudio's house. Sat alone on his verandah in the sun and looked at the boats on the water. Sat with all the drifting population of the house at night in the old ballroom which was lit by hurricane lanterns now that it was summer. One day, passing her in the kitchen, Claudio said, teasing, ‘You're getting fat, Emma.'

‘I'm having a baby,' she said. He was the first one she'd told. The first person to notice anything.

‘Really,' he said, looking at her with interest. ‘Do I know the father?'

Emma shook her head. ‘There isn't one.'

He said, ‘That's very enterprising of you, Emma.'

He started to pay a lot of attention to her. My mother when she was young was handsome and boyish, not his type, she'd thought. But her condition changed all that. Claudio turned his attention to her. He turned on his charm, which was considerable, using his eyes, his smile, lighting up like a beacon when she entered the room. Once, encountering her in a narrow hallway, he paused and ran a hand over her belly. Emma had noticed how some people had suddenly felt it was all right to touch it, and she felt her personal space encroached upon, but not with Claudio. She welcomed his touch. She couldn't believe her luck. His wafting madonnas couldn't compete with her: Emma was the real thing.