A Charm of Powerful Trouble (33 page)

I have forgiven Paris her h r a Zucchini remark; I've told her everything I know about our family, and she has told me about hers. We have shared stories, and if I have made up some of the detail to embellish things a little, well, I'm certain she has done the same.

We stayed in the garden till it was dusk, ‘moth time', as Paris calls it. She says she loves crepuscular light. I think that perhaps she loves the word itself as much. It's the time when, at home, up north, the first bats would be detaching themselves from the trees and flying out in search of food, the black curves of their wings making moving patterns against the setting sun.

It was in that in-between hour, the time when magic is most likely to take place, when confidences beg to be shared, that Paris looked at me cannily and replied to the question I'd asked that afternoon.

‘I've never been in love,' she said. ‘And I don't think I ever will be - not in that hopeless crazy way people long for. People in love imagine that they know the other person. Sometimes they even seem to think that they
are
the other person, or part of them - the other half. But I want to be only myself. Independent.'

Paris has told me that in her family the men are irrelevant. Her grandmother Flora barely knew her father, though he left her the money that allowed her to go and live near Paris, a place she loves. Flora is vague about Stella's paternity And Paris only knows that her father was someone Stella knew briefly in France when she was a teenager. She doesn't seem to care.

‘I think that love's just a myth. An illusion,' she said.

And with that she went inside, out of the crepuscular light and into the harsh glow of the kitchen. She burrowed into the cupboard under the stairs and, like the witch that she has always wanted to be, emerged with a handful of fung from her mushroom farm, which she stewed gently in butter and served to me with a delicate herb omelette and a rocket salad.

And yet despite herself, Paris loves. She loves Tom as if it was she who gave birth to him and not Stella. I have seen her wrap him in a towel after giving him a bath and caress the top of his head with her cheek, her face empty with bliss. I have seen the games she plays with him, chasing him up and down the stairs of their small terrace till they are both in a lather of excitement and need to lie together on the floor to calm down, her hand resting just where his heart is.

The Good Fairies

I
HAD
not admitted it to myself, but 1 had developed my own in-built Catherine-sensor; I had an unconscious habit of scanning any passers-by to see if she was among them. After kissing her in the forest that day, for years I believed that I would find her again. And my patience paid off. One day I saw her, browsing in a bookshop down the road from where Lizzie was conceived. I don't live in that part of Sydney, but I go there often, for nostalgic reasons.

I would have recognised her anywhere. There are people who by their very existence pull you towards them, you have such affinity.

She had her nose in a novel. Her hair was no longer shaved close to her head; it was in a short bob, jet-black, and tucked behind her ears. I could see her only in profile, but I went up to her at once. ‘Catherine.'

She looked up. I could see that she recognised me, but she struggled for a moment with my name. I almost supplied it, before she came out with, ‘Laura! What are you doing here?'

In the coffee shop where we went to talk, she told me she was a librarian at a university library, though not the same university I attend. I imagined her wandering among the stacks of books; libraries immediately became my favourite places. I was giddy with love for her. I talked her senseless; I smiled, looking into her eyes all the time, conscious that I was using Claudio's tactics, keeping her attention on me, not letting up, not letting her go. After the coffee, we continued walking up the road, with me talking, till we came to the park on the corner and she said, ‘Look, Laura, I'm not going to run away from you. Will you please just shut up for a moment?'

We had come to a fig tree, a sad, city fig surrounded by concrete paths and closely mown grass, a tree that dreamed of rainforests. I shut up and leaned against it.

In the past couple of years there had been a lot of girls in my life. I was always searching for someone. But I only ever saw a girl a few times before I lost interest in her. None of them belonged with me. Being with them was too soft, too tentative, too pale. There was no passion between us. Once, after a party, I woke in a strange bed and saw a girl beside me who reminded me alarmingly of Lizzie, and I stole away before she woke and never saw her again.

But there's a spark in someone that you recognise, that answers yours.

I leaned across to Catherine and grasped her hair at the back. I pulled her slowly towards me and breathed her in. I was full of the scent of her. I tasted the nape of her neck, grazed it with my teeth; I foraged on the whorls of hair below her hairline.

I bit.

She wrenched my hand away and immobilised it, grasping both my hands in front of us, holding me at bay. I pressed forward and she offered only token resistance. Now her lips were fair game, and I explored the shape of them with my teeth until her tongue intervened, and it was a tongue you could wrestle with, spar with, a tongue you could please, but not too easily.

‘Gentle!' she whispered.

Her face in my hands.

My own breath loud in my ears. We pulled back at the same time.

An old man sat on a seat with his elbows on his knees, smoking a cigarette, a bored expression on his face. He'd seen it all before. A tide of pigeons milled nearby on the grass.

Catherine said, ‘I live three blocks from here.'

I remembered that day we met in the cafe and Catherine said, of Lizzie,
She's beautiful,
and then, when I said Lizzie was my sister, she said, ‘I can see the resemblance.'

I think that anyone who knows us can tell we are sisters, despite our apparent differences. But now I know we
are
separate people. And I've grown to like my compact, firm little body, my frizz of dark hair, my small nose that curves downwards and that I like to think somehow complements my pointed chin and delicate face. When I look into the mirror I know that I am not Lizzie, but I, too, am beautiful.

And I often think of the night that Lizzie walked into the sea.

I thought at first that she would come to no harm, she was filled with such lightness and buoyancy. I thought that somehow the moon would keep her afloat. But then she waded out until the water had swallowed her, and part of me remembered my mother's sister who had drowned. I stood up, my heart pounding, but I was still unable to act. Fireworks exploded overhead and lanterns bobbed along the beach. I thought she was gone. Drowned. I felt numb, but still I watched.

Then, like a miracle, after her head had disappeared from sight, after the moment when I might still have saved her was lost, I saw her reappear. When we were children she would do that. Hide and then return.

She came out, water streaming from her hair and over her breasts. She walked up to me and without a word we sat down. I could feel the warmth of her next to me. She sat, her feet planted firmly on the sand, her arms propped up on her knees, and both of us looked out to sea at the moon making a shining path on the water. It was like a golden path that you could walk out on, and it would lead somewhere. But Lizzie had come back.

Then she started to sing, as I had not heard her sing since that night when I was thirteen and I heard her outside in the moonlight
raising her voice in song
. It had been one of my miracles. I thought I had dreamed it then, and I thought I was dreaming now. She sat beside me, staring out to sea, singing without words in a voice that seemed to come so naturally from inside her that she didn't even need to try. She finished singing, and then she laughed and stood up, and I saw her before me, her body dark against the sky. She seemed immense, her legs wide apart like a colossus straddling the entrance of an ancient harbour. She put out her hand and pulled me to my feet, and we stood together with her breath against my forehead, and now my mind was full of what had happened with Catherine in the forest. I thought of how once I had been in love with the world - the earth, the sky - everything. But the sky was no longer enough for me. I wanted a person to delight myself in, like everyone else. Like Lizzie and Al.

We went back to Lizzie's garage; she had a hot shower and put on the kimono that our mother had given her for Christmas. It was old, of white satin with red and gold peonies all over it.

Lizzie took one of my hands in hers and examined each of my fingers in turn, caressing them with her own, before she said, ‘Al arrived home unexpectedly yesterday and came to see me.'

‘I know,' I told her. ‘I saw you.'

She nodded. ‘I told him I wanted to spend New Year with you. I didn't know what to think of it all, really I couldn't tell you at first. I needed to think about it, absorb it into myself.'

I said, ‘Tonight when you went out into the sea I thought at first that you would be pulled up into the sky by the moon. And then you disappeared. I thought you had drowned, and I did nothing to stop you. I could have allowed you to die.'