A Charm of Powerful Trouble (2 page)

At night our house was filled with light and was like a beacon in the dark. I liked it best then, with the dank odour of the forest invading it. In the day, you could see the thin line of the ocean in the distance and I always fancied I could catch a whiff of the sea on the evening air.

That night I stood in the doorway where I could see both inside and outside the house. If I turned my head one way I could see the darkness and imagine everything that was in it. By turning my head the other way, I could see inside the house. It was as high as a church, with a six-metre tree trunk reaching to the ceiling. Tiny bats flew in the high loft windows and out again. These bats were as small as mice; they reminded me of mice, the way they colonised the house. I stood in the doorway and watched the people inside. They thought I was simply dreaming there, my head full of fuzzy twelve-year-old's fantasies.

I watched Claudio and Emma as they lounged on a sofa talking to Stella. They were drinking wine and there was a lot of laughter, but it seemed uneasy to me.

Lizzie sat in a corner and played her electric guitar without the amp. She played the same riff over and over, frowning and biting her bottom lip when she played a wrong note. Lizzie had got the guitar a couple of years before, and now it was her constant companion. She was mad about the guitar - it was her passion; she'd stopped singing when she found the music she could make with it.

Chloe and Paris sat at the dining table, which was still littered with the remains of dinner. They painted a wallaby skull green and orange with model paints, and planned to put candles in the eye sockets when it was finished. Paris rarely smiled, and when she did it was as if something painful was being drawn out of her. Already I knew I didn't like her.

But it was the adults I was interested in. They were saylng things that would be worth listening to.

‘So,' said Claudio to Emma. ‘Tell us about the Aubergnes.' He said it lazily, leaning back in the chair, smiling, watching her, but keeping his eye on Stella, too.

Emma shook her head and laughed. It was a regretful, wise laugh, a laugh that remembered things. ‘The Aubergnes,' she said. ‘I'd almost forgotten about the Aubergines.'

‘What aubergines?' said Stella.

I saw a familiar flicker in my mother's eyes and I crept over and sat on the floor at my father's feet, watching her.

‘Oh God, the Aubergines! They were just a story I used to tell. A true story About this amazing family I knew when I was young . . .' Emma spoke into the air, looking into the past, seeing herself all those years ago.

‘Their name wasn't really Aubergine; they had another name, an Italian name that sounded a bit like aubergne . . . it was Claudio who started calling them the Aubergines.'

‘And when we were students, whenever we got bored,' drawled Claudio, ‘which was quite often, sitting around in dark, damp old houses with no money - Emma would amuse us by telling us about the Aubergines.'

‘You've never told us about these Aubergines,' I said.

‘But they were nothing. They weren't important. Just a thing from my childhood. Just a story to amuse people.'

‘What were they like?'

‘Oh, they were wonderful and awful at the same time.' Emma stared into the shadows of the ceiling. ‘They had a wonderful big old house. And it was full of books, and they were always reading them. I could never get enough books. We had hardly any The Aubergines argued about the books with each other, about what they thought of them, and got quite angry, and thumped tables. Once, Mrs Aubergine burnt a book, right at the dining table, with one of the Aubergine children sobbing and trylng to stop her. She said the book was puerile. I had to go home and look the word up in the dictionary.'

‘What else did they do?'

‘The parents used to argue a lot, in front of everyone. And once, one of the children said to them scornfully, "Why don't you just get a divorce?" That shocked me. I didn't know of anyone who'd been divorced, and here was a child telling his parents to get one.

‘And oh - I've forgotten the rest - they don't seem nearly so interesting now' Emma shook her head and gazed at the floor.

‘The children had strange names,' said Claudio. ‘Sappho and - what were the others?'

‘Sappho and William Carlos Williams and Blake Yeats. Those were the three children. Sappho was my friend from school; that's how I knew the family.'

I kept quizzing her.

‘William something Williams? That was afirst name?'

‘Yes. After an American poet that Mrs Aubergne admired. His name was William Carlos Williams Aubergine . . .'

‘Except that Aubergine was really an Italian name . . .'

‘Yes.'

‘And . . . what was the other one's name again?'

‘Blake Yeats.' She said it quickly, looking away from me. ‘The Aubergines,' said Stella. ‘Then you could be the Zucchinis. Zambelli - Zucchini.' She looked at Claudio, whose name it was, and he gave her one of those smiles of his, intense and fleeting and flirtatious, with one eyebrow raised. His eyebrows were astonishing and absurd, but that look could make the person receiving it feel that she was the only one in the world.

My mother laughed uncomfortably. ‘The Zucchinis . . . I suppose we could be.'

I settled back against Claudio's knee and he stroked my hair, smoothing down my curls with his square hand. I leaned into him; I knew I was his favourite, I looked so like him. I had his prominent chin and long nose and dark eyes. In the mirror I would practise making my eyes wild with enthusiasm like his when he talked about something that interested him.

I thought about the Aubergines, the story my mother had told, which wasn't much of a story, it was more an evasion of a story. It was all very well talking about these strange Aubergine people, but what was my mother really like in those days? I felt that the story of the Aubergines concealed more than it told.

Lizzie came up, her guitar slung round her neck. ‘Mum . . . what's this?' She played a few chords. Lizzie was always asking people if they could recognise the tune she was playing.

‘Oh, heavens,' said Emma. ‘Play it again . . . "All Along the Watchtower"? No . . . is it "Hey Joe"?'

‘No,' said Lizzie. Her face had a stricken expression. ‘It was "Purple Haze".'

‘Of course. I knew it was something by Jimi Hendrix.'

Lizzie never asked Claudio to identify the tunes she played.

Paris and Chloe put purple candles in the eye sockets of the wallaby skull, lit them, and camed the skull slowly across the room so the candles wouldn't blow out. Emma chanted, ‘Here comes a candle to light you to bed.'

‘And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!' said Paris, looking up at Emma sharply, not smiling at all.

I lay in the dark. I always aimed to stay awake long after everyone else had gone to sleep. If I didn't stay wakeful, and watch over the house, I felt that everything would fall apart.

I thought of the dark outside, the night, everything black, without sun to show the colours. I heard cries, shrill or muffled, of creatures hunting or being hunted. The house lay still, while the cruel world went relentlessly about its business.

I heard mice in the kitchen. I fancied I could hear their claws slipping on the polished wood of the floor. A bat came in and fluttered around my bedroom before flying out again. I heard faint snufflings and snortings as people prepared for sleep.

And the bat goes into each of the rooms in the house in turn and circles three times above the heads of the people in their beds, before flymg out again, the sound of its wings a whispered incantation.

I close my eyes. I can see my mother, Emma, who is also awake. She feels the presence of Stella and Paris in the house like an extra weight, as if she carries the whole household inside her body. Unable to sleep, she gets out of bed and stands at the window. She sees Claudio, a dark shape covered by a sheet, roll over in his sleep. She slips into bed beside him and lays her cheek against his back.

I have seen my mother run her hands down my father's back as he stood on the verandah after a shower. She laid her cheek against him then, and I can see now how she loved his compact, muscular body.

My sister Lizzie is also awake. In the dark, unaware of the soft noises of restless people moving about the house, Lizzie reaches under the bed for her guitar. The smooth wood of the neck and the cool metal frets reassure her. She longs to play the guitar so brilliantly that it makes people dizzy. She longs to play as well as Jimi Hendrix, but she knows the absurdity of that; she is just a girl with long blonde hair who lives outside a little town in Australia.

But she imagines the notes she could pull from that guitar if only she could find it in herself to call them up. Lizzie kisses her guitar all the way along its neck.

Only now can I imagine Stella that night. Stella lies in the guestroom, a space enclosed at the end of the verandah. She breathes in all the smells of the night and smiles as she thinks of Claudio's smile, and the intensity and absurdity of his eyebrows. She sleeps naked, and throws off the sheet, and for a moment her body feels the relief of the cool night air.