Touching Earth Lightly (22 page)

Chloe has beautiful hands. She has beautiful everything
—
it’s a bit embarrassing, so she compensates by not being too wonderful at anything and by being squirmingly self-conscious. ‘Hiding her
light under a bushel,’ her mother says, and Dane laughs. ‘Yes, so far under the bushel you can’t even tell the
bushel’s
there, let alone the light.’ She prefers to sit and watch Janey’s fingers magic some Janey-thing out of torn paper or rag, or razor blades, or sisal and scrubbed dried bones. She isn’t inspired, herself, to stack tiles into cairns or weave leaves, but when Janey does it it’s worth watching, her unconscious fingers, her silent concentration punctuated with jokes, the moment of completion when Janey takes her hands away and checks with her eyes that the object she imagined is achieved.

Among the rags and bones is always a small space or two for something to be set, something tiny and well-made that gives off intensity: a doll’s hand painted silver; a tiny sugar bear with a smudged eye; a fresh kumquat made sacred by the insertion of cloves and pearl-headed pins.

If she’s at Chloe’s, Janey will cap the glue, sweep up the rubbish with her hands and stow it in the bin and be three steps ahead of Chloe (‘
—
and then we can buy a bag of liquorice at Darrell Lea’s and walk through Hyde Park, hey? Cole?’) while Chloe’s still staring at some minuscule woven hinge or catch and wondering
How did she do that?
Even having watched, Chloe can hardly believe that human adult fingers made them.

For a votive disc Janey starts with a fifty-cent coin or a larger cardboard cutout, and a long strip of paper made from a lined white pad. She writes on the paper, sometimes with her own scrawl in a black needle-tipped pen, sometimes gluing on strips of newspaper type or words photocopied from books. She covers the words with stretches, strips and dashes of colour, mostly rough red crayon or flecks of gold or silver. Then she winds the paper around the coin or cutout until it’s covered, its corners blurred with layers. Then she varnishes and varnishes until it has an aged, yellow look, sometimes sanding it back for a smooth finish, sometimes leaving it a bit rough, stopping now and then to blow the disc clear of dust.

She makes dozens of discs, some pierced for hanging from ears or belts or around necks on leather thongs, some displayed in purpose-built boxes, sometimes labelled with titles or dates. She
gives the discs as gifts, writing their words out again in the card that goes with them, words chosen in Janey’s weird elliptical way, seeming to have nothing and everything to do with the occasion. She wears a disc herself, or has one in her pocket, almost all the time. When Isaac mentions that Jewish people sometimes carry tiny scrolls of scripture in boxes on their foreheads she makes herself a triple head-disc of three poems she likes, and straps it on with black leather; it makes her look warlike and foreign, but when she shows Chloe the three poems, Chloe can sort of see the point of it, having those words so close to the brain, ‘It’s like one of those medicine patches,’ she suggests, ‘or the nicotine patches. It seeps into your body in a continual measured dose.’

‘Yeah.’ Janey adjusts the discs like safety goggles on her forehead. ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

Such things arrive in Janey’s hands like a gift. Chloe understands now what having a ‘gift for’ something means
—
not just the ideas that attack Janey in a constant stream, but a kind of physical knowledge that allows you to bring the ideas out of the materials like a bust out of a block of stone.

It seems to Chloe she has no gifts except her looks, which can only be carted around like a placard, and will spoil. But by watching Janey she might pick something up, some key, some discarded bit of talent like a scrap of wool or a dropped sequin, some clue that she can seize on, to find a way forward for herself.

When Chloe finally leaves her room, the rest of the house, its sameness, its difference, hurt. She chooses a time when no one else is in, but then the house’s stillness is an offence, and the murmurous city outside a worse one. She sits racked on the edge of the couch coming to terms with the front window, how the bars cut the clouds into rectangles, how ivy is beginning to invade the light.

She goes into the kitchen. That’s why she came downstairs, because she was hungry. She stands at the door. On the calendar, ‘Dane—dental appt’ is written in for Saturday morning.
Beyond the white bench-tops the table leads away down the bright room, its chairs placed neatly along each side.

She once overheard Isaac and Nick talking about chairs, about how a chair more than any other piece of furniture suggested an adult human body, drew attention to that body’s absence. For Chloe, every item here refers to absences: the kitchen knife handles imply hands, right down to the finger ridges; the bare benches suggest preparation, ghostly Nicks buttering toast, ghostly Dads chopping salad ingredients; the spokes of the dishwasher imply stacked glasses and plates, meal after meal of them. If you followed the implications far enough, the whole family and all its friends and all its lives would unfold out of them, without any person actually being here, speaking, doing anything.

Isaac’s photo-cards are still pinned to the noticeboard. Chloe leans towards one experimentally. Isaac shows off the artificial landform with a showman-like sweep of the arm, as if he were personally responsible for it; his long clown-face beams. It’s bearable.

Chloe creeps to the fridge and opens it. Outlandish things sit on all the shelves: egg cartons like ported spaceships, a silver box of cream cheese (why silver, for
cheese
?), a row of magic pots in the door-rack—mustards, capers, pesto sauce, Tabasco. Trapped flavours—none of it makes sense.

She’s eating only enough to keep actual pain at bay these days, and still her bony body feels heavy, and hard to move around. In the end she closes the door and takes an apple from the bowl. She can’t quite come at eating it straight; she fetches a knife and a board and cuts it into quarters, cores and peels it.

When she’s eaten it she feels very full, and exhausted. She goes upstairs to her room, to its sick-room fustiness, its banked-up warmth, its darkened window. She lies down and lets sleep claim her again.

She asks Dane, ‘Is it child sexual abuse if the child doesn’t really
mind
the sex?’ They are shelling peas
—
the pods crack, the peas zip out and patter into the colander. Crack, zip, patter. Crack, zip, patter.

He says yes, straight away, then gives her one of those looks that says,
Confess all, now.

‘Not me,’ she says, ‘but someone my age.’

‘You can only mean one person.’ He gives a big sigh and goes back to shelling. After a pause he says squeamishly, ‘Is it someone who’s … got something over her? Like, a
teacher
taking advantage of her?’

‘It’s her father, and Nathan
—
but he’s under age too, so I guess that doesn’t count,’ Chloe says flatly.

‘Holy Manoly, Clo!’ He stares at her, a pea-pod in his hand.

‘I know.’

‘Do
you know? For sure?’

‘Well, she’s told me. I haven’t actually gone round and got a
—
a
statutory declaration
from them! But they started making it really, you know, obvious that they wanted … I mean, not just leaving those centrefolds lying around, and perving on her in the shower and hinting
… ’ God, that stuff gives me the heebs,
Janey said.

‘Jesus.’ Dane cracks the pod and rolls a pea between his forefinger and thumb. ‘How does she feel about it?’

‘Anyway, she says if she meets them halfway sometimes, they might not hassle her so badly the rest of the time. She might get a say in things.’

‘How does she figure that? How can she possibly think
—
’ He goes back very efficiently to the peas, then breaks out, ‘I mean,
her father’s
old enough to know what he’s
—
Oh Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’ He shakes his head and goes on shelling. ‘Then again, Janey’s a funny girl. She’s got a pretty good imagination. This might be something she’s dreamed up to
—
I don’t know
—
to make her life seem more dramatic or something, not what’s actually happened, hey?’

‘It could be,’ Chloe says. But she can tell the difference between Janey ‘dreaming something up’ and confiding that she’s actually done it. Thinking of Janey relating the details, Chloe feels the hairs rising on the back of her neck. Janey’s done it.
It wasn’t so bad,
Janey said, staring doubtfully into her memory.

But because Dane, seems upset about the whole thing (well, Chloe is, too, or she wouldn’t have brought it up), and so relieved to think it’s just one of Janey’s stories, Chloe goes along with him. She even feels a little bit of misplaced relief herself
—
before wondering why she should, before realising
how
upset she must have been, and that she isn’t as cool as she thought. She falls silent, in the uncomfortable knowledge that her silence protects Dane and herself protects not Janey, but Nathan and Janey’s father. She doesn’t ask, as she intended, whether there is someone official she ought to inform, if anything should go wrong.

But, Janey’s confident nothing
will
go wrong. She seems to think she’s solved all her problems by making this happen on her own terms. How can
Chloe
tell whether she has or not? She doesn’t have the right, she feels, to do more than stand to one side, her knees wobbling with indecision, her face scrunched up with doubt. She can’t see how it can be good, in any way
—
nothing involving that jerk of a brother of Janey’s, that father whose eyes never look straight at you, can be okay. While Janey goes blithely on, Chloe follows a step behind, laden with foreboding. That seems to be their way.

‘I went around and had a talk with Janey’s mum today,’ says Joy.

‘She talked?’ Chloe nearly chokes on her coffee. She puts the mug down on the dining table.

‘Hmm. I asked her about a funeral. She said they’re not having one. I think it’s because they don’t know how to organise one, what you do.’

‘They don’t want to spend the money,’ suggests Chloe. ‘They don’t think she’s worth the bother.’

‘Well, they may not have the money. And I don’t think they are in any way religious. Anyway, they went up to Teak & Son, who did what they call a—a “burn and scatter”.’ Joy touches her forehead. ‘She kept saying this—“burn and scatter”—like some kind of spell …’

‘What do you mean,
did?’
Chloe feels a hardening inside her chest. ‘What do you mean?’

Joy comes from the kitchen and sits opposite, confronting Chloe’s filling eyes with her clear ones. ‘I mean, they’ve cremated her, and scattered her ashes. They have a place for it, Mrs Knott says, a garden, for if you don’t want an actual plot, or a chamber in the wall.’

‘Did they go? Why didn’t they tell us? I should’ve gone! What do they—?’

‘Nobody went.’