Touching Earth Lightly (21 page)

‘I don’t know about that, actually.’ Chloe is wondering, seriously, for the first time, whether there is an ideal man for Janey. If it isn’t the rat-boys, and nice boys like Nick are too scared of her …

‘Don’t you? I do,’ Nick says firmly. ‘I’ve got a life to live.’

Chloe is stung. ‘Oh, and I haven’t?’

Nick looks at her and she is doubly stung. He doesn’t actually say, Well, you said it, but he might as well have.

The trouble is, she keeps waking and waking. Her body only needs so much sleep. Then there’s food, brought to her every mealtime by her family, and images in a rustling crowd through her brain, and a need to move, but often she’s unable to step outside that room; sometimes even opening the door is impossible. So she stays there.

In the middle of the fourth night, or possibly the fifth, cried into a wakeful stupor, she sits at her desk with the envelope of Eddie-photos. She leafs through them, drawing her knees up under her jumper, rocking away the pain, the
pain that’s part of the consolation of seeing Janey so clearly in Eddie’s face, so clearly that Janey might have self-pollinated to produce this Janey-boy with his black-on-white features, his pale blue, dark-lashed eyes.

No one else is awake. Chloe’s eyes are cried dry and her mind hinges itself again, moves to grip and finds thoughts instead of swamp. She picks up a pen, finds a pad, spends some time trying to work out the date, decides it doesn’t matter and writes
Dear Eddie,
in writing that looks nothing like her own, over-careful like a drunk’s, heavily off-balance. She crawls down the page keeping this handwriting in line, and on, getting things down for the only other person who might ever care to know them.

They fall out all disordered, like an old person’s ramblings. There are such a lot; it’ll take
years
to tell, because it took years to live. For every memory she puts down, dozens flit through her head and are lost. And objects go with the memories, that she’ll have to fetch: other photographs, Janey’s sketches and creations, poems, chunks from books, old magazines—Chloe makes a list as she goes, and goes on writing, thinking and writing, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes and writing. She takes her list out into the dark house and tracks a few things down, and comes back with them and with a queue in her head of things to write, and on she writes until she begins to have a great deal written down, enough so that when she waits nothing flows immediately into her mind. At dawn she peels off the clothes she’s worn since she found Janey, down to the last humid grey layers, and showers and goes empty to bed.

The next time she sees Nick, Janey, quite unembarrassed, gives him a big smacking kiss on the cheek.

‘Ow.’ He wipes it off, and laughs back at her. Chloe watches him closely, and listens for flirtatiousness in their laughter. She can’t detect any.

She is deeply relieved. If Nick had taken Janey on, Janey might not have needed Chloe any more; Nick is, sort of, a right-sexed Chloe. Chloe might well have been totally redundant, sitting in her room with her books, hearing Janey laughing (and worse) in Nick’s room. She feels sick just thinking about it.

But Janey might have been happier, she thinks guiltily. If Nick was prepared to care …
She pulls herself up
—
this is her
friend,
not some kind of exotic pet whose care and keeping can be passed from one person to another. Instantly she feels burdened, and sees Janey as exactly that, and panics. Will it ever end? Will she ever have a life of her own to live, like Nick?

All this flashes through her head very quickly. Nick and Janey are still laughing; the smile is still nailed to Chloe’s face.

‘She would just go out and do stuff, you know?’ says Chloe, weeping, to Dane. ‘When I try and think, of the next move—in my life, I mean—I just—nothing’s there. Nothing’s saying, “Hey, do me.” Nothing’s
demanding
to be done, by me. I mean, there’s this BA. I applied, I got into it, I’m all set to do it—but I don’t have the
urge
to do it like Isaac does, or even just wanting to make a living from it like Nick. And Janey … I really wanted her to get into Fine Art—she would’ve taken off like a rocket, you know?’

‘So you think,’ says Dane, ‘that if anyone should have their brains bashed in, it should be colourless, unmotivated you, not Janey.’

Chloe lays her face among her interlocked fingers. ‘I guess I do mean that.’

‘You think that she should be alive now, and you should be dead. If there was any justice in the world.’

Chloe, hiding, nods, sniffs; a long silence.

‘News for you, honey-girl,’ Dane whispers. ‘There
is
no justice.’ He kisses her hair. ‘You’re stuck here with us.’ A sobbing laugh tears itself from Chloe. ‘Colourless, boring, directionless, Chloe is stuck in this world. Marvellous Janey, who had all the talent, all the sex appeal, all the initiative—’
his whisper is almost inaudible under Chloe’s moans ‘—she’s gone on to that other one, if there is one.’

Eventually Chloe chokes out, ‘I miss her—hurts, it actually
hurts!
Like, my
body
! All over.’

Dane gathers her up. ‘It won’t hurt forever—not so badly.’

‘Oh, but it hurts
now
!’

‘And it should, and it should,’ he soothes. ‘Don’t sound so outraged—of course it hurts! She was a big girl, in every way. She took up a lot of room. For a while you just have to stop, and … and
register
what you’ve lost.’

‘Feels like
everything
—’

‘I know. But it isn’t, not quite. Really. Believe me. Other things will come along. You’ll be glad to be alive again, some time, if you can hold out through this.’

Chloe says nothing, but nods and sobs on.

It’s spring. It’s raining. They’ve been inside all day. Now they’re running across the park at night, just to be running, just because they can, there’s room. The rain drops sting, but between them the air is soft and springy, and it smells green. Everything feels alive; even the swings look alive, like newborn giraffes bracing themselves upright.

There’s a fantastic slippery-slide, following the slope of the park down, curving right, then left. Janey and Chloe both see it at the same second. ‘It’s gotta be done,’ says Janey, her face blistered all over with water drops. She takes off her clothes, shoves them at Chloe, and gallops away to the slide. She’s fifteen, but as unembarrassed as a child would be. Chloe staggers after her, a sleeve trailing out of the clothes bundle and tripping her up. ‘Watch out, it’ll be slippery with this rain,’ she says, but Janey’s off already.

It is slippery. She’s immediately out of control. She slews right, slews left, too fast even to scream. She shoots out of the end, hangs there like an airborne Henry Moore sculpture, and lands hard in a puddle in the bark-chip soft fall.

The breath is knocked out of her. ‘How. Oh. Ow.’ When she manages to gulp some air, she disappears in a fit of silent laughter. Chloe crouches beside her, Janey’s clothes still warm in her arms, more like skin than cloth. Their hair is seriously wet, swinging in coils.

‘Aak! People coming!’ Janey hauls on the trailing sleeve and starts dressing. As she stands up, a big patch of bark-chip and dirt falls from her hip and Chloe can see she’s scraped herself; blood is trickling.

‘Ow,’ Chloe says, and puts her hand on it for a second. It’s gritty, and the flesh underneath is cold and wet and roughened.

‘Yeah, I whacked myself
—
landing.’ Janey hauls her underpants and leggings on, and Chloe runs back and fetches a dropped boot, hunts down a sock, while Janey sits on the end of the slide, groaning with laughter.

Chloe helps her limp to the shopping centre; in the rain it looks like a long row of lit-up ships moored to the edges of the street. Both girls have bad giggles, and are staggering like drunks. Chloe pants out, ‘I’ve just one question for you, Janey. Why? I mean, does something take hold of you? Tell you?’

‘Not exactly. Not like … God, or anything. Just suddenly, there’s only one course of action. Only one way to go, and that’s forward.’ She spears the air with her grimy hand.

Where there was once a whole other planet, with its cycles and seasons, its oceans and continents, societies and species and fascinations, with its magnetic field—Janey’s orbit and Chloe’s pulling each other out of whack (or into it)—there is now only deep space. The other stars and planets are pinprick distant, quite out of reach, mere decorations, festoons, on a fabric of darkness.