A Charm of Powerful Trouble (14 page)

I imagined the leather woman lying in my mother's workshop.

Moonlight comes through the window and falls onto her. She stirs and shifts about impatiently, casting off the old wrinkled skin as if it is a blanket she has no use for. She pauses, her eyes alert and alive.

With the grace of a sprinter at a starting block she rises in one swift movement from the floor, goes to the door, and opens it. She stands with her head held high as if listening, then leaves quickly without a backward glance. She runs down the road through the trees, and her legs make a cracking sound like a whip that carries far into the night. She passes farmhouses, and dogs bark as she goes by. Her path can be traced by the cries of
Shuddup, you bastards!
that follow her all the way through the countryside, and the lights shooting on and then off again as the commotion dies down. At last she comes to the outskirts of town, and under a streetlight she sits, sinewy, naked, expectant, on the rail of a cattle yard.

Sound came from Claudio and Stella's room down the hallway, and Lizzie sat up sharply. ‘Oh, God, I can't listen to that! Come on!'

She pulled on her clothes. ‘Oh, come on, Laura, we don't have to lie here listening to them fucking all night.'

I dressed and, on feet as poised for flight as the leather woman's, we went down the long wooden steps at the back of the house and were free.

Just down the road was an old house painted white, with white marble statues in the yard: children in classical poses, with white, unseeing eyes. Tendrils of climbing plants caught at their ankles and wound their way up their legs, whispering to them,
caught you, caught you, caught you.

We walked quickly, our eyes avid, peering through leafy front yards to where television sets flickered. We heard the steps of heavy-footed people sounding on timber floors. A dusky cat sat on a fence post but fled as we approached. I felt powerful and vigorous, with the whole town of Mullumbimby at our feet. There was mist, and we revelled in the glory of it, at being out when we should have been in bed. I felt so complete and strong and alive that I flung my arms round Lizzie and kissed her full on the mouth. She pushed me away, laughing, and we danced through the streets, utterly enchanted by the night - simply by the night and the amazement of being alive.

We slowed down to smell a rose that leaned over a fence; it was black in the night but still smelled like a rose. But overlaying that odour I thought I could smell the dark rankness of river mud, and hear the sound of the leather woman coming closer as she strode through the streets, her legs as supple as ribbons, looking for us.

Then I saw a figure halt in the shadow of a tree behind us. It was Paris. The streetlight revealed her face as she moved out of the shadow.

‘What are you doing?'

‘Following you!'

She hadn't bothered to dress, and was wearing pyjamas with teacups all over them. They were too big for her and hung over her wrists. Her feet were bare, and the cuffs of the pyjama pants had splashes of mud on them where she had gone through puddles.

‘You'd better join us,' said Lizzie, authoritative and grownup. She held out her hand, but Paris didn't take it. She walked close behind us, averting her gaze, pretending she was on her own. When we found ourselves unexpectedly back at our own front gate there seemed nothing to do but to go in. We crept up the steps and inside. We had said not another word to Paris and quietly she made her way to her room, as we did.

The house was as silent as a damp old wooden house could be. It made vague, soft, complaining noises. In the kitchen there were secret scunylngs of cockroaches and the flap of moths against the windows. Before I went to sleep I sensed that the leather woman had found her way to the house. She went down the hallway to Claudio and Stella's room and stood looking at them sleeping for a long time.

Claudio and Stella took us all to the beach, often. We were used to going with Claudio and Emma, of course, and we noticed the differences when Stella was there.

Our mother used to avoid the hot part of the day, and she seldom swam. Emma went to the beach to walk and to think and to gaze out to sea, getting ideas for paintings.

Stella liked to go when the sun blazed, so she could sunbake. She would lie on a towel reading a novel and smoking a cigarette, her eyes squinted. She wore nothing but a G-string and became browner and browner. When she walked down to the water to cool off, she was noticeably lean and brown and naked.

‘I
rehse
to look,' Lizzie hissed at me, narrowing her eyes in disgust. We took ourselves off up the beach with Chloe.

Chloe had a mania for collecting things, now. One day she found scores of little fish with boxy shapes that looked utterly surprised to find themselves washed up on the shore, dead, and she took home every one of them. She found shellfish with the insides not yet rotted away, and seahorses, and seaweed like necklaces. All of it stank, and she put it under the house in Mullumbimby, saylng that the smell would go away one day.

There had been a bushfire a couple of kilometres up the coast, and we arrived on one scorchingly hot day to find ash in the water, and burnt leaves all along the tideline. Along with the leaves were cicadas, burnt black, and hundreds of Christmas beetles, still shiny. Chloe and I walked together, she with her head bent low, searching for any sign of life.

She stopped. ‘I can hear a fizzing noise. Listen.'

Crouching down, she said, ‘This beetle is moving. It's hissing.'

Stranded all along the beach we found, when we looked closely, dozens of live Christmas beetles. Somehow they had survived the fire, been blown out to sea on the debris, and floated back in again on the tide. One was still clinging to the gumleaf it had coasted in to shore on, like a miniature board-rider.

Chloe made me and Lizzie and Paris help her pick them up. Each of us loaded them onto the palm of one hand, and all the way up the soft underside of our arms to the elbow; once they were there they started to creep about. ‘Stop tickling!' Chloe commanded them, giggling. We carried them carefully up to the dunes where there were trees to deposit them on. Some beetles put out their legs to take hold of a twig, but some were unable to grasp a foothold and fell to the ground. A few of them took off from our outstretched arms before we even got to the dunes. We stopped and gazed up at them as they soared above us.

Lizzie and I went out in the night again and again. We were the waltzers down damp footpaths, the midnight ramblers who prowled the streets witnessing everything. We heard voices raised in argument, or soft words of love from front verandahs. There were occasional fellow revellers of the night - people who dined in their gardens with the soft light of candles; we heard their intimate laughter and talk and the clink of glasses and cutlery. There were lone people who squatted on their front steps smoking a cigarette or hugging their knees to their chest - people like us, who knew the attraction of darkness.

‘
Didya hear about the midnight rambler
,' Lizzie sang. Her voice was wistful and shy in the dark, a bit off-key, a bit unsure of itself. I wished she'd sing louder, and longer. Our ramblings were mostly accompanied by the muffled dialogue of television programs. There was the occasional plinking of a guitar, and then Lizzie paused to listen, her face still with longing.

Sometimes we abandoned the streets of wooden houses for the mystery of the park near the river where rainforest trees breathed out an odour of glossy green, and canna lilies, which had been red in the daylight, stood with black spears massed like a waiting army.

Paris always followed. ‘
I'm a nuisance, I'm a nuisance,
‘ she sang under her breath. We allowed her to catch us up. Lizzie stood, hands on hips. ‘You may as well walk with us!'

I knew the leather woman followed us too. She knew every useful shadow; she practised the art of pausing and blending with her surroundings at exactly the right moment. I never really thought of us as being out alone.

Once, when we passed a cottage almost entirely concealed by trees, Lizzie said, ‘There's Al's place.' She ducked up the front path and pushed her way among foliage at the side of the house to where light shone out from a window. Paris and I followed, and the three of us stood at the lighted window and peered in.

Al was the person Lizzie spent most of her time with at school. He wasn't her boyfriend, she said. He was in his room, perched on his bed reading, surrounded by the hundreds of books he collected for next to nothing from op shops. He looked up, bemused at the faces peering unexpectedly through his window so late. We were standing on the raised brick edge of a garden bed, so we teetered a bit, except for Lizzie, who was tall enough to stand on the ground.

Al smiled and came to the window. He was pale and thin and freckled. ‘What are you all doing?' he whispered.

‘Oh, just walking, you know,' said Lizzie, and grinned back at him. ‘Bye!'

We kept going. There was no need to talk. There was just the shared pleasure of being out of our beds when we were meant to be asleep, and of the wonder and mystery of the dark. It was a guilty pleasure but we were unrepentant.

The leather woman came into the house when we were finally all in bed. She came unsurely at first, and then boldly, as if she owned the place. She listened outside the bedroom of Claudio and Stella, and she watched over Chloe, who slept soundly with her plump arms flung out behind her head and never stirred when the rest of us went out. She even watched over Lizzie and me for a time, pleased that we were safely back at last.

If I woke in the night I always knew that she had been there. There was a sense of departure in our room, a disturbance in the molecules of the air, a faint whiff of clay.