A Charm of Powerful Trouble (32 page)

One night the drifting population sat drinking on the verandah, the lights winking in the bay. The air was hot and fragrant and sexy. Emma sipped a glass of red wine and it warmed and inflamed her. She had accepted it but intended not to drink it, for she knew she shouldn't. But she couldn't help herself once it was in her hands. She glanced across at Claudio and his eyes met hers and held them. Emma looked away. She sipped and sipped at the wine till she had swallowed the whole glass. She got to her feet and went out into the yard where a lemon tree full of both fmit and blossom glowed in the moonlight, and she put her face into the tree and inhaled the sharp odour of the leaves, the cloying scent of blossom.
Oh, I love him I love him I love him,
she thought. Her head spun with the drink and the stars and the lights on the water. She felt so drunk with alcohol and with life that she thought she'd faint. She put her hands on her belly to steady herself and felt her baby kick.

Someone touched her on the shoulder. It was Claudio. He led her gently to his room and he put her down on his bed and lay beside her, his head propped on one hand, and stroked her belly. ‘You
are
clever, Emma,' he whispered. ‘Making this baby all by yourself. Parthenogenesis. Virgin birth.' His words were as steady and as comforting as a heartbeat, though they were so oblique that Emma was confused as to what he was talking about.

My sister Lizzie is a survivor. It can't have been easy being in Emma's body while she went through all that emotion: the grief at remembering her sister's death when she was at Flora's place, and now the excesses of love as her head reeled from alcohol and her heart pounded and she thought
I love
him
I
love
him
I
love
him.
Through all Emma's excesses, Lizzie clung on tight. Not grief, nor drink, nor love, was going to deter her from existing.

Remember that Emma had seen Claudio without his shirt. The day she'd encountered him in the yard hanging out his washing when he'd felt himself alone, she saw the look on his face: a look of vulnerability He'd turned to her with that naked look still intact, just before he turned on the self-consciously charming smile with which he always greeted the world.

Emma felt that she was the only one to have seen his soul so naked like that, and he led her to believe it was true. ‘All these women, they think I'm wonderful,' he whispered to her one night, ‘but you - you know what I'm really like!'

That was a powerful aphrodisiac.

Claudio never asked her who the father of her baby was, and never wanted to talk about it. So Emma allowed Lizzie's paternity to remain undiscussed and unacknowledged. She moved out of the women's house and in with Claudio. She was happy She was in love.

‘I've got some money,' she told him one day ‘From my inheritance. Do you know what I'd really like to do? Go up north and buy some land. You could make films and I . . .' she searched in her mind for what she really wanted to do, which at this stage was to live for ever and ever in a haze of love with Claudio and have more babies, ‘. . . I could paint.'

My mother Emma, when she was a girl, dreamed of love, and she got it. She got the days and nights of bliss and the heady, fragrance-filled summers, and two more daughters.

Emma dreamed of love, and she got it. And, finally, she got the moments of sick despair when she went out into the garden at night and rubbed leaves and earth into her face and hair. She stood in the dark street and watched, night after night, the house where we stayed with Claudio and Stella after she was left alone.

But that was later, much later, and she was innocent of all that at the beginning. She wasn't to know that love is a charm of powerful trouble. At that moment, her life was the fragrance of lemon blossom at night and the gleam of lights on the water and Claudio sleeping behind her, his hand on the belly that held her survivor, Lizzie.

Paris

Y
ESTERDAY
I met Paris for lunch, in our favourite cafe in Newtown. It's become like this for us. We have afavourite and a usual. Some things have become habitual for us. It is like having another sister.

We've been meeting every week now for about a year; our mothers no longer speak to each other, but I see no reason why we shouldn't. I lived in the city for over a year before I contacted her finally.

I don't know why I sought her out. From a longing, perhaps, for a sense of connection with someone in this city that I still feel is alien to me, or a reconciliation with my past. I had started to dream that I was in our house on the hill with the sounds of the forest outside and the ocean in the distance. And Paris had been there. She knows what it is like.

The first time we met, I approached her warily. I remembered that I hadn't liked her. But she was seventeen by then. I recognised her as soon as I saw her. Her hair was sooty and short and furred like a kitten's, her body as lean as a boy's in narrow black trousers and black top. She sat waiting calmly and unselfconsciously, and her pale, clear skin seemed to enclose her core of cool self-sufficiency so beautifully that men and women alike were attracted to her. Many stared frankly as they went past or turned to look back but she ignored them all.

I stopped in front of her table and she looked up.

‘
Laura Laura Zucchini!
‘ she said, and laughed behind her hand, ostentatiously. For a fleeting, dismayed moment I remembered the way she had watched us all, and imagined her amusing people by telling them stories about this weird family, called the Zucchinis. I almost walked out, but I took a breath and sat down.

I have found that she is no longer prickly and spiky. She often talks about
laughing her head off
at things. She talks to me with serious, unselfconscious absorption in what she is saying, thinking things through as she speaks. I wonder sometimes how that watchful child has become this warm, wise young woman.

On that first day we talked for a while and then she said, ‘Come home with me and meet our little brother, Tom. He's almost five now. Imagine.'

Her house wasn't far. We left the traffic and the self-conscious cool of King Street and she ducked down a lane-way where some of the small terraces were still unrenovated. Naturally, the paint would be peeling on a house that Stella and Paris lived in. Inside it was full of the clutter of a life lived hectically and casually.

Stella was at home, but about to go out. She was unsurprised to see me; there were none of the exclamations of
Oh it's been such a long time or Haven't you grown up?
that most adults would indulge in. She simply said, ‘Oh hello, Laura,' as if she'd seen me only yesterday, absently putting on an earring and poking her feet into a pair of stilettos. She hadn't changed a bit. She still had the same childish and unblemished face that no amount of difficult living would ever scar. She was out the door before I could say anything more than hello. ‘
Not sure when I'll be back!
‘ she called out and the door slammed.

Tom came running down the stairs. ‘Paris, can we have pizza for dinner?'

Paris caught him up and smothered him in the kind of kisses I used to give Chloe. ‘No, I think I'll eat you instead!' she told him before swinging him to the floor again.

He looked at me, his thumb in his mouth. ‘Are you my sister?' he asked. ‘Paris said that one of my other sisters was coming to visit us.'

Yes,' I told him. ‘I'm your sister. My name's Laura.'

His eyes were unwavering. ‘I havefowsands andfowsands of sisters,' he said.

‘No you don't, you dope,' said Paris. ‘You have four. Just four.' She counted them off on his fingers. ‘There's me, and Laura, and Chloe, and Lizzie. You haven't met Chloe and Lizzie yet.'

Tom continued to look at me with a friendly but uncertain expression on his face. I looked back. It was strange, seeing him like that. I had known, of course, that Stella had had her baby, a boy, but I'd never imagined the child as a real person, as looking like anyone, or having a real existence in the world. Now here was this perfectly ordinary little boy, a little unsure of himself with me. He looked a lot like Claudio, and because of that, he looked a lot like me. It was almost like seeing myself when I was young, only as a boy.

Then he did a surprising thing. Without a word, and with his thumb in his mouth, he stepped towards me and hugged me quickly, laying his head briefly against my hip. He patted me with his free hand, and I can still feel how small and trusting and loving it was.

Yesterday when I saw her, Paris asked, ‘What was I like when I was a kid?' and I answered, ‘Horrible!' without needing to think about it at all. She laughed her head off for a little while and then she said, ‘You're different, Laura. I mean, different from the last time I saw you.'

I looked at her, wondering if I should tell her.

I longed to tell her,
I'm
in
love,
but I wanted to save it up. I wanted Lizzie to be the first to hear, from my own lips.

Instead I said, ‘Do you believe in love?'

Paris narrowed her eyes, considering. She didn't reply, but after a moment she got to her feet. She said, ‘I have to get home to Tom. Mum's going out soon. Come with me and I'll cook you dinner.'

At the back of their tiny terrace, Paris has made a garden. She has surrounded the original square of concrete in the middle with greenery. There is a slender bay tree in a pot in one corner, and elsewhere a tangle of ferns and climbing plants is kept separate from an orderly collection of herbs: great masses of mossy parsley, and delicate thyme and a profusion of rocket partly going to seed. Herbs are weeds, she says, it takes no effort to grow them. But after she'd fed Tom an early meal and settled him down with some textas and paper, she spent ages out there watering and weeding and picking, putting what she collected into a shallow cane basket. I sat on the edge of a raised garden bed and watched. She is small, with narrow shoulders, and was dressed plainly in a black pinafore with purple stockings and the square black school shoes she still likes to wear. From behind she looked like a wise old woman.