Free A Charm of Powerful Trouble by Joanne Horniman Page A

into another bottle of wine. ‘ It's now or nevel; ‘ he sang, ‘ Your soul or mine .’
    Lizzie arrived at last from her long shower, and stood in the doorway with Artemis in her arms. Her hair was wet, plastered down unflatteringly over her head.
    â€˜Well, she's my cat,’ she announced, ‘and don't any of you dare, ever, to say a word against her!’

    Artemis was a wild and wiry little animal, and took as much of a dislike to Claudio as he had to her. If he came near her when she was eating she growled at him threateningly and hunched over her food.
    One night a tiny bent-wing bat found its way into the kitchen and flopped onto the floor. Artemis, opportunistic, caught it.
    I heard my mother's cries and ran in. Artemis let go of the bat at once and escaped through the window over the sink, her hind legs flicking away into the night like a shadow spirit's.
    I held the bat in the palm of my hand. The fur was the colour and texture of a velvet dress my mother had worn at one time to parties. There was a suggestion of gold amongst the brown. I looked into the bat's face. It was as intricate as an ear, and ancient, and wild. The tiny chest contained a still-beating heart, but it grew fainter, and, as I watched, it became still.
    I have seen the last breath of a bat. It was a thought both horrible and wonderful, and it made me slightly breathless myself.
    In the morning I helped Chloe bury the bat in the garden. ‘Pipistrello,’ I said lingeringly, saying the Italian word that Claudio had taught me. ‘Pipistrello,’ echoed Chloe, as she sprinkled earth over the small corpse. Soil fell into its eyes and nostrils, and I turned away, unable to watch.
    Lizzie refused to have anything to do with the burial; she said why shouldn't Artemis have killed the bat if it had flopped down into her clutches like that? She said haughtily that the bat must have had a death wish, and implied that Artemis was the unwitting and innocent agent. And she cradled Artemis protectively in her arms and strode off to her room.
    Chloe and I made a shrine of rocks and flowers for the bat, and that seemed to be that.
    I came upon Artemis later, sitting on a fence post with a knowing look on her face. She allowed me to go right up to her and stare intently into her eyes. Do cats eat bats? I asked her silently. Do bats eat cats? It seemed that with all the looking into Artemis's eyes, for a moment I became a cat.

    That night I woke to the sound of singing, and it was so persistent that I got out of bed and went outside.
    It was Lizzie, standing alone in the night (I would like to remember moonlight, but there wasn't much of it that night, if I am to be truthful), and she was singing, something she hadn't done for ages. I felt certain she was making it up as she went along; it was a wonderful song, full of unexpected twists and turns and consisting not of words but merely of sounds. Lizzie stood outside in the dark, lijting up her voice in song, which is the way I see it now, though at the time I was only aware of my sister standing tall in the night, singng as the spirit moved her. She didn't notice me watching from the shadows, and I didn't reveal myself, aware that here was the kind of marvellous thing I had been looking for in my life. I didn't want to spoil it.

    Unexpectedly, the next marvellous thing came from my own body, the way a spider unwinds the magic of silk.
    Our family was swimming in the creek. We never bothered with costumes there, and I sat on a rock above the swimming hole lazily watching everyone splashing in the water. I had a familiar, heavy, almost pleasurable feeling in the bottom of my belly and I sat and luxuriated in it. And then came the warm sticky trickle between my legs. I had been menstruating for over a year now, and I enjoyed the rhythm of it, the small drama of discovering blood on my pants every month. I sat and allowed the blood to seep out onto the rock and onto the top of my