A Charm of Powerful Trouble by Joanne Horniman Page A

future.
    I'd witnessed a bat draw its last breath. I'd seen my sister, in the moonlight, lift up her voice in song. A red butterfly had blossomed from my own body I had ridden as fast as the wind.
    I had drawn blood with my first kiss.

W HEN I think of the secrets of my childhood, I imagine them as the red hibiscus flowers that grew in our garden. They were single, dark red flowers, not the flounced double variety; plain red flowers with an ornate gold stamen.
    My mother ate those flowers. Sometimes she slipped them into a salad for all of us; she said they were packed with the kind of nutrients especially needed by women for menstruation and ‘women's problems'. Once I saw her standing gazing out to where the sea lay like a string on the horizon, slowly devouring one of the red flowers, petal by petal, finally eating the thick, gold stamen, covered with its down of pollen, as dusty as a moth's wing.

    When our parents separated, they told us about it together. But I don't think my father wanted to be there; I imagine he'd have preferred to slide out of our lives.
    Stella had come to live on the north coast with Paris; she'd been waitressing at Byron Bay and had not come to see us.
    Then my mother found out that Claudio had been ‘seeing’ Stella, which was the way she put it to us. We knew what that meant. My mother told him to leave.
    They gathered us together in the living room. Lizzie and I had had an inkling of what it was all about, but Chloe did not. She was lymg, half-naked, on a corduroy beanbag with her thumb in her mouth, and when Claudio said that he was moving into a house in Mullumbimby with Stella and Paris, she sat up and protested.
    â€˜But why?’ she said. ‘Why are you going to live with them?’
    She drew her own conclusions. You love them more than us!’ she said, and started to cry.
    I knelt beside her and took her in my arms; her back was sweaty and covered in lint from the chair. But she pushed me away and got to her feet. She stood in front of Claudio.
    â€˜I'll still be your father, and I'll always love you,’ he told her. His face said that he resented having to have this scene.
    â€˜How can you love them more than us?’ Chloe asked. She hit him with her fist, again and again and again.
    He flinched, and took the blows as if he deserved them.
    â€˜Emma and I will still be friends,’ he said.
    I looked at my mother's face and knew that he lied.
    And then Chloe asked my parents to kiss each other.
    Emma made no move towards Claudio, but kept her eyes cast to the floor. Claudio, not looking at anyone, kissed her quickly on the cheek.

    I wished I still had my red beanie so I could pull it down over my face and lose myself in its comforting smell. I missed my father. I missed his exuberance, the way he would catch me up in an unexpected hug. I forgot his moods and rages and sudden brooding silences.
    Our mother didn't cry in front of us. But did she think we didn't see her weeping at the kitchen sink when she pretended to be washing up, or hunched over with pain as she worked in the garden? She did what women are good at doing: she put on a brave front. But her silence was stifling her. I could see it sitting like a stone in her chest. I heard her in the night vomiting up whatever little she had eaten; she couldn't stomach anything any more. In the morning she was always pale and calm, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea steaming in front of her.
    She threw herself into gardening. She slashed and pulled and planted, coming inside with dirt under her fingernails and lantana in her hair and scratches all over her limbs. In that country, weeds grew rampant and gardening was anything but genteel.
    She began to cultivate herbs. With their soft foliage and shy flowers, they were an antidote to the headlong growth of the rainforest that surrounded the house. She favoured the nightshades, for their names and associations and often poisonous properties: henbane