A Charm of Powerful Trouble (27 page)

Desires and Consequences

T
HERE HAD
been another train journey, another meeting at a station, another visit, but it was a story our mother never told us until I asked much later. It was perhaps the story that the one about Aunt Em was meant to deflect us from.

It was Flora my mother was going to visit. Flora from Aunt Em's. But she didn't live up north any more; she lived close to Sydney, only a couple of hours away by train.

Flora wore blue overalls that day, and gumboots. Her straight blonde hair no longer reached down to her bottom; it swung around her face in a long bob. She didn't kiss Emma hello. ‘I don't believe in kissing,' she said, and Emma was glad. She didn't want to be on kissing terms with Flora. But they were pleased to see each other, anyway Flora picked up Emma's bag as if it weighed nothing, carried it to her ute, threw it into the back, and drove home at high speed without a word. She jumped down from the cab, seized Emma's bag and ducked down an overgrown path to the front door.

Her house was in the country, a small cottage with a high pointed roof and a dormer window poking out above trees in a wild garden. A wisp of smoke trailed from the chimney It was a fairytale cottage. The cottage of a witch from a fairytale.

She pushed the door open with her hip and carried Emma's bag inside and dropped it at the foot of a ladder. ‘I'll give you the loft,' she said. ‘It's Stella's room, but I've persuaded her to let you have it for a few days. She can sleep on the couch.'

My mother was pregnant.

With everyone in her family dead and no close friends, she had turned to Flora.

Stella was now a young teenager who drifted around for a moment after Emma arrived, and then disappeared. Flora made them a cup of tea and they sat at the table drinking it. Neither of them mentioned Emma's problem just yet. But it was the reason she had come and, unspoken, it hung between them.

Flora got up, opened the door of the wood stove, threw a block of wood onto the embers and went out of the room. ‘Just getting a chook for dinner,' she called back over her shoulder,

Emma didn't move. She sat and looked about her. Flora still kept an untidy house. There were cups and jars and half-empty packets all over the table. The living room and the kitchen were part of the one open space, and there were books piled up everywhere on the floor; and the armchairs were draped with clothes. Emma felt desolate. She got up and went out the back door. A little way from the house Flora had a black chook under her arm. She was talking to it tenderly, soothing it, murmuring that it would
be
all
right,
be
all
right.
Then with a swift practised movement she jerked its neck and broke it.

Later, Emma and Flora sat at the kitchen table and pondered Emma's dilemma. Emma didn't really want to think about it, and would have preferred to ignore her condition, but she knew she must decide something.

The carcass of the chook, dead white, sat between them on a blue plate.

‘How far are you along?' asked Flora.

‘I don't know,' said Emma. ‘Not far.' Flora made pregnancy sound like a journey one had embarked on.

‘What are you going to do?'

‘I'm not sure,' said Emma. She thought about the choice. About the idea that one could abandon the journey Pull the emergency cord and hop off.

‘It's something only you can decide,' said Flora. ‘But stay here for a while while you think about it, if you want to. You're more than welcome.'

Stella skulked in the doorway and listened in to everything Emma and Flora said. She regarded Emma speculatively from beneath fringed lashes heavy with her mother's mascara and turned away with a secret smile.

Flora took a wooden chopping board from where it leaned at the back of the sink, selected an onion from a basket, cut it cleanly in two and began to slice. Sploshing olive oil into a pan, she banged it onto the wood stove and, when it started to smoke, threw in the onion and tossed it about in the sputtering oil. Then she took a metal chopper and started to joint the chook, cleaving it with sharp strokes, bangng down on the wooden chopping board.

That was the signal for Emma to leave. She made her way outside. She couldn't stand the smell of frylng onions, and the smell of chook would be even worse, though she knew that once it was cooked she'd be able to eat it. These days, she was always hungry.

Emma imagines the exact moment when her baby came into being. It was the moment in the hothouse when she felt so alive that she laughed with the joy of it, the moment when the carp's golden watery tail swept past with a dismissive wave and she broke up the glassy surface of the water with her fingers. Emma has seen tadpoles hatch, seen each comma-shaped embryo wriggle and kick out of the transparent egg, and it is this she thinks of when she imagines the moment of her baby's conception, of its coming into being.

She's lost to the thought of a baby, even though it's also half in her mind that she could have an abortion. To the Emma who doesn't like to think of things, likes to let bread go mouldy, allows biscuits to soften in opened packets, it would be easier to do nothing, and let nature take its course.

At dinner Flora said, ‘I'm giving up on chooks - have you noticed there aren't nearly so many now? My father died, left me some money, so Stella and I are going to live in Paris for a while.'

Paris.
Flora said it so casually, as if it were merely a trip to the corner shop.

‘I lived there before, when I was younger. And my mother's in England, and she's getting on . . .'

Emma realised how little of Flora she knew. Only then did her accent dawn on Emma. It was as clean as mint. ‘You're English?' she said.

Flora shrugged. ‘I suppose. I've lived out here for a fair while. I don't really think of myself as being anything.'

‘Your father - you were close?'

Flora shook her head. ‘I never really knew him. My mother left him when I was a baby - she's lived with another woman for most of her life.'

It was dark outside and the kitchen window had become a mirror. Emma watched Stella, who had finished eating, put on a classical record and start dancing, ballet-style, between the fat armchairs in the living room.

Emma had always been a little dazzled by Flora. She seemed to live her life exactly as she wanted. Emma remembered Frank, how beautiful and exotic he was, how desirable, and yet Flora hadn't been in love with him.
Stella and I - we're all right,
she'd said. Now he was long gone, and Flora was off to Paris. Her mother had
lived with another
woman
most of her life. She said it as if these choices were easy to make.

Stella stood poised on tiptoes for a long moment and gazed at herself in the window, then dropped her heels to the floor and danced away again. In the glass Emma saw Flora get up from the table and go to Stella. She held out her arms, and Stella at first pulled her body away imperceptibly from her mother (
I'm too oldfor this!
), and then gave in and j oined hands with her. Emma turned to watch them directly and caught an expression of doubt flitting across Stella's face; she saw her laugh reluctantly, enjoying herself against her will, and then finally gve herself over wholeheartedly to the dance.

Emma felt self-conscious. The play of feeling between them was like watching two people in love. It was a thread connecting them, a thread that stretched and pulled and almost broke, that went slack and easy and then taut again. Emma watched the reflections in the window. It was like watching the images in a dream.

When they finished dancing Flora came back to the table, panting slightly from the exertion. Stella was once again dancing on her own, and Emma was mesmerised by her faint shape in the glass.

Flora sat for a while without speaking. Then, also watching the thin figure of her daughter in the glass, she said, ‘Having a child on your own isn't easy'

‘So why did you . . .'

‘I wanted a child. I thought I'd cope. I have.' Flora shrugged. ‘But it's probably not for the faint-hearted.'

Emma looked at the pile of chicken bones on her plate. She wondered what sort of heart she had.

‘Come on,' said Flora briskly, getting up from the table. ‘Washing up, and then bed. I need some time to myself to read. No - don't you do it,' she said, as Emma started gathering the plates together. ‘Stella! Come and help wash up! Now!'

Stella reluctantly left off her dancing and drooped her way expressively to the kitchen with lowered eyes.

Emma went to bed and thought of Stella, too tall at thirteen, sullen and uncommunicative and watchful. In Paris she'd weigh Flora down like a stone.