A Charm of Powerful Trouble (16 page)

She sees him again later that afternoon at the poets' cafe in town. Lizzie doesn't want to go home, or rather, back to the house that Claudio and Stella share, where she's meant to be staying this weekend. So she loiters, finds things to do, places to hang out. The poets' cafe is as good as any.

The goblin man is still wearing his hat; he's sitting with some young women at a table at the front near the microphone. The women have that air of lush insouciance that Lizzie both despises and envies. They wear skimpy tops made of embroidered satin that reveal the shape of their breasts, skirts that flow over their backsides and hips like water, clothes that wouldn't look out of place in a bordello. Or so she thinks. She has heard the word and has only an inkling of what it means.

She watches the performers. Women get up and declaim the words they've strung together so boldly and unashamedly that Lizzie wants to blush with embarrassment for them, they are so pleased with their banality. A man goes to the front with an acoustic guitar and strums it while he recites, and Lizzie thinks hotly,
I can play better than that.
He holds the guitar as if it is of no consequence, and his words make no sense to her.

There is a man in the corner with a face like a toad, and another one looks like a large-eared fox. A girl with a close-shaven head and a ring through her nose swaddles a mauve shawl around herself like the wings of a bat at rest. Lizzie leans forward and takes a long sip of her orange juice, shutting out the sight of them. The whole place is a menagerie.

But then she looks up, only to see the goblin man turn from whispering to one of his women friends to give Lizzie a grin, as if he's known she was there all the time and has deliberately decided to acknowledge her. She stares back, her face unmoving, and he gets up and walks over to her, swaggering, grinning at her. He takes a business card from his top pocket and presents it to her. ‘I think we should get acquainted.'

Lizzie glances at the card.
Tom Roberts, Poet and Healer
says the card boastfully, with an address and phone number. Lizzie stares ahead and pushes the card into the slick of water that her icy glass has left on the table. ‘Come and see me some time,' says the goblin man. He winks and returns to his table at the front.

A girl comes in with a carpet snake draped around her shoulders. Heads turn, but she pretends not to notice. She makes her way languidly to the front of the cafe and to the goblin man's table. She has knowing, slanted eyes, and she fondles the snake absently as she speaks to him. Then she draws up a chair and sits down, and the goblin man reaches round her shoulder and gives her a squeeze. And all this time the snake is draped passively around her. It is unusually sluggish - is it blind, or drugged, or sick? Lizzie watches, horrified that a snake, a wild creature that should be free, is being worn like just another accessory.

Lizzie can't tear her gaze away from the snake girl's bare back, revealed by a halter top. Her dark, frizzy hair comes halfway down it, and the goblin man is tracing a pattern lightly over her skin, again and again and again, the lightest of touches; Lizzie wants to scream with irritation, for she can feel her own skin crawling. The snake girl pays him no attention at all; it is as if nothing is happening to her, but she doesn't move away either. She is as passive as the snake.

Then the goblin man (Tom Roberts, Poet and Healer!) goes to the microphone. He grins and stands there in his ridiculous hat. ‘I am going to recite a love poem,' he says, and he begins, but it is so disgusting that Lizzie's fingers twitch, and, unconsciously gripping the card he has given her, flicking and bending it in annoyance, she scrapes her chair back and leaves without looking back, leaves the whole lot of them, the snake girl, the fox, the toad, and the goblin man, whose words follow her, and seem to trail behind her all the way down the street.

That evening, late, Lizzie cranks up her amp to its loudest. She lets the notes rip through the night. She wants distortion and feedback and out-and-out destruction. She can feel the music bouncing through her chest as she plays, rippling up and down her body; she plays angrily and broods on her knowledge that to be a girl is to be faced irrevocably with your own unimportance. For in truth Lizzie wants to play like Jimi Hendrix; she wants to
be
Jimi Hendrix, but she is only a sweet young girl with a long fair plait and legs that people always stare at. She's a girl, she's white, she comes from Mullumbimby, and she knows she stands not a hope in the world of anyone taking her or her music seriously.

And now Claudio comes roaring and bellowing into the room, and demands that she
turn the bloody thing off,
and Lizzie rips the cord from the amp and, carrylng her guitar as it is, cord dangling uselessly, she heads out into the night.

She left the house on impulse but hows she'll find refuge at Al's place, so she strides confidently along the dark streets. Al is Lizzie's only real friend. She doesn't like girls, not really; they don't share her passion. She and Al have nothing in common either, apart from obsession itself (hers for guitars, Al's for books) and a certainty of their own strangeness and apartness from everyone else.

Al looks up as she appears at his window and does his startled movement, elbows flylng everywhere and shoulders twitching. But he manages to get to his feet and, without saying a word, Lizzie hands the guitar through to him and clambers in after it.

‘Can I stay the night? It's a demand, not a question. Lizzie looks around her. ‘Don't you have a spare bed?'

Since she's been to his house innumerable times, she should know that he doesn't, but Lizzie's not good at noticing such things. They stay up a while longer, Al reading a thick volume of the collected plays of William Shakespeare and Lizzie plinking quietly at her guitar. Al haunts places that sell old books and has collected enough reading matter for a lifetime. He buys books on anything as long as they're cheap: the rules of tennis, which he doesn't play, and fairy tales, and Euclidian geometry. Lizzie thinks he buys them for the titles, sometimes, or the smell, for he certainly doesn't read them all. She suspects that he simply likes the word
Euclidian,
that it holds some magical promise for him; she feels that way about particular combinations of notes, though she's never actually put them into a tune.

When he's absorbed in a book his usually ugly face takes on a kind of beauty, and Lizzie, at those times, loves him more than anyone in the world.
He's
a
genius,
she thinks, admiringly, as she strums her guitar softly Without an amp, her electric guitar sounds like an insect lost in the bottom of a box and searching for a way out. She thinks of the glory of the music she made earlier, when the notes of her guitar tore through the night and stung Claudio into a rage.

Eventually they get into Al's bed, Lizzie's head at the top, Al's at the bottom. Lizzie slides in next to Al's pale, thin body His feet are endearingly like a pair of scaled fish next to her face, and she lies awake for a long time, staring at the shape of her guitar, which seems naked and vulnerable propped there without its protective case. She thinks of the snake girl and the goblin man, and how her skin would erupt with irritation, if anyone were to touch her like that.

‘Lizzie stayed the night,' Al tells his mother the next morning. ‘But you don't need to worry, nothing happened.'

Al's mother spends her days in bed. Mostly she sleeps. She has slept and slept since they ran away from his father two years ago. Al is pleased they left, because the violence that was once part of their lives has also gone. But he worries about her and her inability to do anything any more.

He looks after her tenderly. He brings her cups of tea, and food, though he often finds the tea still in the cup and cold, the food congealed. He takes the ATM card from her purse and shops for them and pays the rent. Some of his own student allowance goes towards this too. He buys her little gifts: plastic frogs, which he has decided she collects. It's nice to have a mother with an interest. He buys her cakes of nice-smelling soap, and she smiles and puts them under her pillow. On good days she gets up and showers and he finds her in the living room reading a magazine.

In whimsical moments Al says that he is really an axolotl. That's what Al is short for, he says, it's the first and last letters of his real name. Lizzie saw him catch sight of himself in the bathroom mirror. He hissed at his reflection with narrowed eyes and made clawing motions with his hands. Now he and Lizzie sit together on the back step eating toast and honey in the morning sunshine, Al with his long body stretched out. ‘Warming myself up on my rock,' he says, ‘so I can get going for the day'

Al sees himself as lizard-like and unattractive. He has a long, pale body, a freckled face, and strong, sandy hairs sprouting from his legs. But Lizzie sees the beauty in him. There is a sensuality in Al of a kind that Lizzie recognises, for she's noticed it in herself, a sensuality that has nothing to do with another person, or love, or sex, just with the pleasure of responding to the world.

But lately, certain things have disturbed her, such as the goblin man stroking the girl's bare back at the poetry cafe. And she remembers that first night she and Laura went out to walk in the dark, how Laura took hold of her and unexpectedly kissed her. Her sister's mouth, soft and childish and innocent, was so unexpected and lovely that she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand at the memory.

‘So,' says Al, sitting up and stretching. ‘What happened last night?'

Lizzie shakes her head. ‘I don't know. Some stupid fight with Claudio.'

Al squeezes his eyes shut and lifts his pale face to the sun with a smile so that it is like a flower unfolding. ‘I don't mind you coming over,' he says, ‘but if you do it too often, I'll need another bed.'

Lizzie has something hidden. Something under her shirt. A secret wound. A piercing. Her bellybutton now has a slim gold ring inserted in it, and it gently weeps and festers. This pleases Lizzie, for she has always felt a hurt somewhere about herself and now it has been made manifest.

She has found that pain can be exquisite, a secret knowledge that sustains you. Lizzie has grown fond of her wound. She examines it briefly in the washroom at school and applies more ointment and goes off to console herself with her guitar.