A Charm of Powerful Trouble
A Charm of Powerful Trouble
A Charm of
Powerful Trouble
JOANNE HORNIMAN
First published in 2002
Copyright © Joanne Horniman 2002
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Horniman, Joanne.
A charm of powerful trouble.
ISBN 1 86508 837 4.
1. Mothers and daughters - New South Wales - Fiction.
2. Sisters - New South Wales - Fiction. I. Title.
A823.3
Designed by Jo Hunt
Set in 11 on 15 pt Berkeley Book by Midland Typesetters
Printed by McPherson's Printing Group
10Â Â 9Â Â 8Â Â 7Â Â 6Â Â 5Â Â 4Â Â 3Â Â 2Â Â 1
For my family and friends
Acknowledgements
I'd like to warmly thank the following people: Margaret Connolly, Erica Wagner and Sarah Brenan for their support and enthusiasm; Faye Bolton and Pip Davenport for showing me microscopes; Scot Gardner for generously giving me butterflies; my sister Joyce for introducing me to Christina Rossetti at such an early age; Jacqui Kent for sending a title my way (which is, of course, by William Shakespeare). And Tony Chinnery, as always, for everything.
Contents
C
HILDREN KNOW
when there are secrets.
The house where I grew up reeked of them. Secrets had been layered into the mud-brick walls that my mother and father had built, and secrets fluttered with the tiny bats that lived under the eaves and found their way inside each evening to dance under the cavernous ceiling. Secrets shone from the ferocious red of the hibiscus flowers in the garden, and they rotted with the leaves that lay on the rainforest floor.
In that place, my sister and I lived a charmed life.
For a long time I didn't distinguish between myself and Lizzie. We were Lizzie-Laura or Laura-Lizzie, part of a single consciousness. Our lives were full of exhilaration and endless play We ate when we were hungry, slept when we were tired, and woke the next morning to more sunlight or to rain, to a garden full of light and shadow and the cries of birds. We made tunnels through the undergrowth to find bowerbird nests, and built towns from sticks and palm fronds. Our parents drove us to the beach, and the car swooped down the mountain through tunnels of green. We came home with our skin salty and the cracks in our fannies filled with sand.
And all through our childhood, Lizzie sang. She sang as she squatted on the ground arranging sticks into houses and streets; she sang as she built sandcastles and decorated them with shells and stones and seaweed, and she sang as she walked with a bent back through the lantana on one of our expeditions. It was a soft, melodious song, a kind of hum, and she made it up as she went along. I identified myself with Lizzie so much that I imagined I also sang. It wasn't until years later, when she stopped singing, that I realised I couldn't.
We went to school, but that was a nuisance and an interruption. I made no real friends. Lizzie, just two years older, was enough for me. I don't think I even bothered looking in a mirror till I was ten, and it was then that I realised I wasn't Lizzie, who was tall and blonde and beautiful. Laura, I saw, was brown and stocky and covered with scratches. Of course I'd seen my dark, tangled curls when my mother cut my hair, but I hadn't really believed in them. We had a little sister called Chloe, six years younger than I; we loved her to bits, but she was never one of us, part of Lizzie-Laura.
Our parents were Claudio and Emma: we had been brought up to call them by their first names. We lived on a wild property in the hills behind Mullumbimby. Emma painted pictures and Claudio made documentary films. Claudio was expansive and gregarious; he wanted more and more of life all the time. His laughter seemed to fill the house even when he wasn't there. And he often wasn't there. He was away making films, or sometimes, I now see, simply adventuring. It was our mother who kept us together. Our home was her nest, her retreat, her sanctuary; her studio was an old shed hidden by trees, secretive, like her nature.
My mother loved my father too much. She loved us all too much. It was her weak point, her tender vulnerability. Her strength was in her secrets. Lizzie and I lusted after them; we longed to get inside her head, but lovingly, steadfastly, she kept herself intact from us. We could only wonder.
When I was twelve, we'd lie on the bed together, our legs intertwined, and talk all afternoon. We'd pass food into each other's mouths like a mother bird with her young. That didn't seem revolting to us, but natural, part of our intimacy. For a while it seemed that there was nothing we couldn't say to each other.
On one of those afternoons Lizzie told me that she knew Claudio wasn't her real father. No one had told her, but when she voiced it I saw that I had known all along. It wasn't simply that she looked like a cuckoo child, tall and blonde and pale. It was evident that Claudio didn't really like her. He preferred me and Chloe, dark-haired, dark-eyed copies of himself. There was something in the way he looked at her, detached, without love. He was outwardly magnanimous, but it was beyond his capacity to love a child who wasn't his own.
Lizzie and I would lie in the grass and speculate about what had happened to her real father.
âKilled . . .' we'd say testing out the idea.
âGone to America . . .'
âDied young of a dreadful disease . . .'
Our mother had had other people disappear from her life. There was her father, lost in the bush when our mother was only two, his body never found. And her sister Beth had drowned in the ocean at the age of nineteen. It seemed to us that the world had simply swallowed them up. Perhaps it had swallowed Lizzie's father as well.
Our mother never spoke much about her sister; we gleaned only fragments. For the rest we had to imagine her. We'd lie, staring at the clouds, dreaming of our Aunt Beth, who never really got to be our aunt as she died before we were born. In our minds, she was beautiful and clever and funny She liked pop music and adored the Beatles, especially Paul. But our strongest image of her was in death.
âDrowned . . .' we'd murmur, imagning her floating tidily on an aqua sea, her long hair spread out on the water, hands clasped over her breasts, flowers unaccountably drifting beside her on the swell of the waves.
At twelve I had developed an antenna for the darker side of life, and an interest in it. I assumed there were many layers to people.
That summer Stella and Paris came to visit, driving all the way up from Sydney, and we trooped out of the house to welcome them. Stella was someone our mother knew from her childhood, but this was the first time we'd met her.
She was younger than my mother, tougher, thinner, with a sort of wiry resilience in her body and a childish, unblemished face framed by blonde curls. She was someone who clearly wasn't impressed by children. When she was introduced to us she said âHi', then lit a cigarette and gave us a dismissive glance.
Her daughter Paris was ten. She acknowledged us with her eyes but remained silent. Spiky black hair accentuated her pointed, severe little face. I felt that we would stand there forever beside Stella's battered old yellow Corona with Claudio eating Stella up with his eyes. Chloe, who was uncomplicated and plump and calm, stood dreamily humming a tune. Emma hugged Paris, who scowled ungratefully up at her. And Lizzie and I hovered at the edge of the group, Lizzie drawing circles in the dust with her foot.
Three black cockatoos came swooping in with metallic, rolling cries. We lifted our eyes to the sky as they circled above us and watched as they came to rest in a tree next to the house and began to rip away the bark with their beaks, looking for grubs. My mother walked over and flapped her arms at them. âShoo!' she called, âShoo!' Her movement broke our inertia, and we made our way into the house.
