A Charm of Powerful Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

wore clothes from another century, but the child looked as real and as childlike as any child today. Emma knew at once that it was Em. She had a beautiful long face and dreamy eyes. She leaned her head against her mother's breast, and their relation to each other was so tender and private and loving that Emma replaced the picture and tiptoed from the room.

    Life with Em in that great old house turned out to be quite unlike Emma's life with her mother and Beth. Home was a very cosy, ordinary, suburban, female nest. Emma's days were filled with the tedium of school and the predictability of watching television at night while her mother knitted, tired after her day in the office. Without a man to feed they often didn't bother with a proper meal, ate macaroni cheese from trays on their laps in front of the television, and afterwards Emma and Beth argued about whose turn it was to wash up. It was secure and safe and dull. Even though she hadn't yet even been able to articulate the desire to herself, it was a life Emma longed to escape from. Here at Em's she was beginning to see she could be someone else. There was time to dream and wander about alone.
    One day she woke early, and went barefoot down the chequered hallway in the wake of Em's cat, a slender half-grown kitten with cloudy dark fur. She watched as it wound its questing way out to the dew-damp grass. The house stood, proud and ramshackle in its small square of fenced garden. Cows grazed outside the fence; inside was a garden full of unidentifiable trees, of roses and lettuces, red geraniums and tomatoes, all grown tumbled together in innocent profusion.
    Emma put Patrick White and Karl Marx back into her suitcase. She took her sketch pad and went to draw the huge clumps of bamboo that grew near the creek. She tried to capture the smell of the silt and rotting vegetation, drawing the strangeness that she felt.
    Flora turned up for the first time since Emma's arrival just as Emma had begun to make a sketch of Em, who was sitting upright and calm, looking out at the garden with her cat on her lap.
    â€˜I hope we're not disturbing you,’ said Flora, ‘but Stella's been pestering me to visit ever since you got here.’
    Stella looked with interest at what Emma was doing and said, ‘I want to draw, too.’ Stella was a slender, eager child, long-limbed and swift; she didn't walk, she darted.
    Emma tore a page from her pad and gave it to her with a couple of pencils. Flora went to make tea, and afterwards, while she and Em sat there drinking it, Emma glanced furtively at Flora and indulged the desire she'd had on that first day to draw her legs. She used a few brisk strokes, practising the curve of the calf again and again. She intended one day to draw all of Flora, who had a heavy mass of blonde hair like a thick curtain that covered her behind when she stood up, and a dreamy, voluptuous face.
    â€˜What are you drawing? Show me!’ demanded Stella, craning her neck to see what Emma had done.
    â€˜Legs,’ said Emma. She smiled to herself.
    â€˜Whose?’ demanded Stella. ‘Whose legs? And, anyway, they aren't part of anyone, they're just legs.’

    Emma went to visit Flora. Em directed her to the house, which was just across the paddock - spitting distance, Em said. As Emma appeared in the yard, a wave of half-grown chickens rushed towards her in a happy, welcoming throng. Everywhere she looked there were chooks. They nested in an open shed near the house, some were locked in pens, and others wandered about the yard and the verandah. There were chook droppings everywhere, and the damp yard stank in the humid, festering morning after rain. The chooks were Flora's livelihood. She sold some for meat, and she sold the eggs.
    Inside the house there were containers of eggs everywhere, and the smell of chicken blood was pervasive. Stella sat at the kitchen table chewing on a raw carrot. She put it down and Emma could see her little teeth marks