Touching Earth Lightly (11 page)

After a moment’s indecision he left the doorway. She kicked the door closed, hard, and put her head down and wept.

‘There.’ Magda stood back and looked Chloe up and down. ‘Have a look at yourself.’

Chloe turned to the mirror. Her shoulders and chest had been transformed into a cleavage, a décolletage, offered brimming in the ice-blue cone of the bodice. The skirt puffed out and back in again, fairy-flossed with tulle, icicle spangles dripping through its masses.

‘Gorgeous enough, do you think?’ said Magda.

‘Pretty gorgeous,’ said Chloe. She examined her reflection again. Her own, everyday head stuck up at the top, and her feet in grey woollen socks showed at the bottom. ‘It needs the slippers and coronet, and an icily made-up face. Really. To be properly gorgeous.’

‘Time enough for that next week. I love rehearsals, don’t you? Everyone slowly going off their brains. James will be tearing out what’s left of his hair … I’m really
not happy
with the way this zip’s sitting at the back.’ Magda zeroed in on it, scowling.

Chloe stood still. It was funny how, when you tried to be absolutely motionless, your body still swayed just slightly, and you noticed how much your breathing moved you. You thought you could be as stiff as a doll, any time you wanted, but really you were animal—constantly, automatically in motion. Even if she fainted, her heart would go on with its
work, and her lungs with theirs. Even at her stillest she was beating, running, streaming with her own life. There was nothing she could do about it.

Isaac’s parents bought him a car. He stepped into the Hunters’ dining room jingling his keys and saying with affected nonchalance, ‘So who wants to go for a
burn
?’

‘Ho, there’ll be no stopping you now,’ said Dane. All of them went outside to walk around and around the thing, touching its highly polished blue-black panels reverently, Dane asking obscure questions Isaac had to consult the manual to answer.

‘Come on, then,’ said Isaac. ‘Let’s drive somewhere it’s a real
chore
to get to on public transport.’

‘The beach,’ suggested Pete. ‘Bondi or Manly.’

Isaac looked up at the low grey clouds, but Nick and Chloe said, ‘Yeah, let’s go and have fish and chips at the beach.’

‘Uh-uh, Chloe,’ said Isaac as she opened the back passenger door. ‘I need you in the front.’

‘What?’ She frowned.

Nick burst out laughing. ‘Gee, Zack, you’re so weak! He wants everyone to think—’ he explained to Chloe ‘—you know, the car, the bird—what a guy! Should Pete and I stay here, you reckon?’ he asked Isaac with heavy irony.

‘You can come, but only on sufferance, so behave,’ said Isaac, grinning. ‘And keep your feet off the fittings.’

Chloe got in the front. ‘Bit short of leg-room back here,’ moaned Nick.

‘See you in a little while,’ Isaac said to Joy and Dane. ‘We’ll just
zip
out there and back.’

‘Just don’t let our lot distract you into a power pole,’ said Joy. She fluttered her fingers at Chloe, who had just discovered the electric window button. Joy bent down and croaked, ‘Fluff up your hair a bit, darl! And where’s ya smile?’ Chloe pulled a dork-face, and Isaac drew away from the kerb.

They glided across town, across the bridge, through the suburbs to the beach. Feeble sunlight broke through the clouds as they parked; ‘I knew that was going to happen,’ said Pete.

They bought fish and chips and sat on the grass under the Norfolk pines, eating and looking out over the water to the container ships moored to the horizon.

‘This is so cool—no grown-ups,’ said Pete, through a mouthful of hot fish.

‘It’s different, isn’t it?’ said Chloe. ‘You can go anywhere, wherever you want—no plans, no packing, no having to tell anyone. And it’s so quick! You can just go, on a whim.’

‘Not to mention being able to pull the birds. Eh, mate?’ Nick thwacked Isaac on the arm.

‘Don’t be gross,’ said Isaac, reaching for the chips. He looked up and down the beachfront. ‘Look at the way they’ve crammed in these apartment blocks along the water, will you?”

‘Uh-oh. I hear shop-talk approaching,’ said Chloe.

‘Like lemmings,’ said Isaac.

‘Like what?’ said Pete.

‘We’re like lemmings that have just crawled out of the sea, Australians. Some have crawled a little way in, but most of us are just hanging on by our fingernails—’

‘Claws,’ said Chloe.

‘—to the edge of the land, hanging over the sea, hoping a boat will come along and take us Home again.’

‘That is a very cute image, Isaac,’ said Chloe.

‘It wasn’t meant to be cute—it was supposed to be perspicacious and bitter. Surf, sun, sand—pah!’

‘You’re wrong, you know,’ said Nick. ‘All that cultural cringe stuff’s gone by the board these days.’

‘Has not,’ said Isaac.

‘Has so.’

‘Certainly hadn’t when those apartments were built.’

‘Besides,’ said Chloe, ‘what’s there to look at, in there, inland? Bush, cattle, desert—’

‘If there’s nothing else there’s the sky. Skyscapes.’

‘Naah,’ said Nick. ‘Blue, blue, blue—boring bloody blue.’

‘And if it’s clear at night, star and planetscapes. You remember, up at Coltrane Creek. All of you were pretty impressed, then.’ He kicked Nick’s shoulder.

‘Oh yeah, stars,’ said Nick dismissively. ‘Too many of the buggers for my liking. ‘Drather not see ’em.’

‘Yeah. Intimations of mortality, bog off,’ said Chloe.

Isaac looked at her. She whipped a hand over her mouth in mock guilt, but his eyes didn’t let her off the hook. She did remember lying under the stars on the bank of the creek, amazed, frightened even, at how small and singular her own mind was, in this scale of things.

‘I read about a guy in New York,’ Pete said, chewing, ‘an astronomer, went to give talks in schools about the stars. The kids thought he was lying—they’d never seen any stars. ‘Cause of all the city lights, you know? It’s so bad in New York you can’t see
any
.’

‘Wow! Wouldn’t that be a job, convincing people that stars existed,’ said Chloe. ‘Showing them for the first time—I guess you’d give them a telescope, or take them out into the country.’

‘Watching their tiny minds blow,’ agreed Nick.

‘I’d like that job,’ said Pete. ‘I’d like to be the teacher on that bus trip.’ He laughed at the thought, looking out over the winking sea, a wad of potato chip in one cheek.

Janey stood in the doorway, most of her hair cut off, and the centimetre that was left bleached white as stars. Chloe screamed ‘Aah! Mum! Look!’ and Janey came in laughing, bent double, her hands over her face. Her short fingernails were freshly polished black and she wore voluminous clean black from high neck to sandshoe’d toe.

‘Oh, you are
brave
! You look amazing, truly!’ Chloe hugged herself, in terror at seeing Janey’s face so undisguised,
at the thought of her going about with nothing to hide behind, so unprotected.

‘It’s so
light
, and so
cold
—’

‘Look, when you blush like that, you can see your whole
head
blushing!’

‘I know.’ Janey’s hands flew about her head, tweaking the white tufts. Then she pulled an envelope out of her pocket and gave it to Chloe.

‘My God! Is that you, Janey?’ Chloe’s mum came down the stairs. ‘Hyuk, hyuk—that was some lawnmower.’

‘God, Mum, that is
such
an old joke. Ignore her, Janey. What
is
this—’ Chloe peered into the envelope.

‘It’s one of my dreddies. I’m giving them to all my fans,’ said Janey.

‘Ooh, don’t you smell of
hairdresser’s
,’ said Joy, passing her.

Chloe drew out a metre-long black dreadlock, bound at the snipped top with a band of red and yellow silk thread and at the tail with blue and yellow. The tail band was hung with one of Janey’s votive discs and a tiny wooden giraffe. The hair itself was warm and flat from being pressed against Janey’s buttock.

Chloe laughed. ‘Oh, look, I’ll treasure it forever. I’ll nail it up at my window where it can rattle.’

‘Seriously, do I look like a dyke?’ said Janey, when Joy had gone into the kitchen.

‘No—yes.’ They laughed. ‘No, not really. Not you.’

‘And so what if you did?’ called Joy.

‘Yeah!’ said Chloe. ‘You might meet someone nice!’

‘I don’t want someone
nice
.’

‘You know what I mean. “Nice” doesn’t mean
nice
. Where are you going?’ Janey had started up the stairs.

‘I need a mirror. I’ve only just had it done, and you can’t properly look, in the shop. You can’t see how it looks in
real life
.’

Chloe followed her up and watched her scrutinise her head from all angles, run her fingers through the fur. ‘It’s so weird,’ Janey whispered.

‘It’s
very
different,’ agreed Chloe.

‘I used to have to toss my head, just, you know, to
see
. Now there’s nothing to toss! Just this little nude …
nut
.’ She patted the air where the hair used to be. ‘I
end
so much sooner than I used to—like,
clunk
!’ She held her new head in her hands.

‘Come and have a look what I’ve done,’ Janey had said, and hurried Chloe past the shabby terrace houses of her street.

‘Okay. Are you ready?’ she said now, with her hand on the doorknob of her room.

‘Don’t,’ said Chloe. ‘I’m scared we’ll find something worse than last time.’

Janey went in and switched on the bedside lamp. Chloe followed and stood in the centre of the room.

There was still the faint whiff of some kind of lemony cleaning agent, but no visible sign of the previous destruction remained.

Janey had put up her mobiles. Hung on invisible fishing-line, mirror-chip-crusted boxes opened to reveal tiny gold-painted baby dolls, the sort you get in Christmas crackers, their arms and legs out in a kind of startle reaction or freefall. Hundreds of other babies in their original flesh-pink shifted and wandered in the air overhead, strung in thread harnesses, some with wings attached, some with rose-thorn shark fins, some carrying tiny knives or medals on ribbons or wearing tutus or leather loincloths sealed behind with dewdrops of glue. Above the bed was Blu-tacked a large watercolour Chloe remembered Janey doing at school, of horses’ severed heads being tumbled by foaming breakers of blood. The bed itself was covered in crimson crushed velvet with pillows covered with the same fabric. One of them was embroidered with a large old-gold fleur-de-lys. Janey sat among the pillows, hugging her knees and smiling. ‘You like it?’