Touching Earth Lightly (24 page)

‘Don’t ask,’ says Janey quickly. They’re on the train into town, and she looks out at the sunlit terrace roofs rushing past.

‘Why, what’s—?’

‘You don’t wanna know, let me tell you.’

She gives Chloe a look, but Chloe won’t be shielded like this. ‘So Nathan
—’

‘Nathan isn’t the problem. I’m bigger than Nathan. It’s Dad who’s built like a
…
like a …’ Janey jerks her head back dismissively and turns back to the scenery. The Newtown tunnel momentarily swallows them.

‘Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?’ says Chloe, with an awkward laugh.

‘I don’t know. Are we?’ Janey flashes her eyebrows coldly.

Chloe realises she is hugging herself, pressing her fingers to her lips, then to her forehead, as her mother does when she’s worried and thinking hard. The doors hiss open at Newtown station; people stump in; the seats wheeze. Finally she says fearfully, ‘Does he hurt you?’ The question hangs there, soft, foolish. Of course he—

‘Not if I do what I’m told.’ The flicker of expression in Janey’s eyes is instantly shuttered over.

‘How often does he
—
does it happen?’

Janey looks at her. Chloe feels the force, as if Janey’s spread hand covered her face, pushing her away. She has never felt so useless, so frivolous, so out of her depth. The very most she can do is not take offence.

She sits back and makes herself stare at the back of someone’s head, as the train picks up speed gliding out of the station.

She dreams a visit to the morgue. She’s amazed they can work in this dim bluish light, the sort of light she imagines is inside the fridge when the door’s shut. The morgue attendants have something like a computerised meat-slicer, like the ones used in delis to cut ham whisper-thin. They have already done most of Janey’s head. Chloe recognises the chin. The dreadlocks lie all about.

The attendant pulls back the slicer. A slice of head lies on her gloved hand like a very fine, very intricate doily. ‘You see,
we’ve got the cortex at the back here.’ She indicates a focal point of tightly packed, glowing threads.

‘She’s so unusual,’ the other attendant breathes.

Janey is wearing the clothes she used to wear to school—jeans and a windcheater. Chloe has time to wonder whether the clothing will snag on the slicer, before she wakes.

Chloe is amazed and horrified at how life goes on, and how everyone seems to think that this going-on is a good thing. Each day moves past like one pulse among many, too strong to be paused or disrupted, the flow of lives too insistent to stop or turn aside. It’s an outrage, that Janey has ceased and they’re all dragged on headlong, claimed by the future, that Janey’s future has given up on her like some feeble teacher sending her to the principal’s office, who simply can’t cope with her, or won’t. It’s an outrage that Janey’s dying hasn’t brought the whole thing to a halt as it has brought Chloe, frozen in realisation, as death and loss become real, exploding from the poems and pop songs in which she thought they belonged. The days—grey, ordinary, lifeless days—continue to chug past, accumulating between Chloe and Janey, forcing them farther and farther apart.

‘Give yourself time,’ people assure her, as if it’s something she must want to hear. ‘It does heal you.’ Inside, Chloe scoffs. Time’s the great enemy—can’t they see? Time bulldozes a whole heap of other material in on top of your wounds; eventually she might
feel
healed because, wow, she hasn’t thought of Janey for whole
hours
(maybe this will stretch out into days, months, years—no, impossible! But then, anything’s possible now, isn’t it?); because she’ll have lived so much life without Janey, there’ll be the illusion that she’s whole again. But she never will be; there will always be this Janey-shaped piece out of her, however small it shrinks.

She still tortures herself with other ways Janey’s life might have gone. If she’d been a proper friend and used her head, instead of just accepting-Janey-because-she-was-Janey, things
would have turned out differently. Janey would still be here, and Chloe not even dreaming of writing letters to Eddie, of
presuming
to. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’—she could cover pages with those words. Dane used to be punished at school by being made to write a hundred times ‘I will not [whatever he’d done]’. But that always implied there’d be another chance some time, another go at the same choice. With Janey there’s no chance to fix anything, to make anything over. There are no more options, no more forks in the road to stand at, dithering. That was it; it’s all done.

Oh Janey! To belong in the past!
Janey
to belong in the past! When she still moves, fierce and clumsy, across the inside of Chloe’s eyelids, when Chloe still actually hears her voice in the day-to-day, for full seconds believes her to be in the next room, or just down in the kitchen chatting with Joy—or making her way here frowsty and cross through the spring morning, her platform shoes crushing the callistemon fluff, her mouth ready to burst forth with some greeting she’s dreamed up. Janey refuses, as yet, to belong in the past. But time will fix all that, consign those memories to their cells, deeper, more secure cells, from which they won’t keep popping out to confuse or dismay Chloe. When they’re all safely away, locked into receding time, Janey will be truly dead and gone; Chloe vows this will never happen, even as she knows it must.

Janey comes to meet Chloe after school the first day of Year 12. Chloe comes to the fence and swings her legs over; Janey stands on the path as if the fence might zap her, or the school grass brush her with poison.

They don’t speak until they’re well away.

‘Actually, I think it’s going to be a bit different this year,
’
Chloe says.

‘Well, yeah.’

‘No, I mean, it’s so quiet. No gangs
—
or maybe they just haven’t been set up yet. But
Gemma Donato
talked to me, like a human being. Everyone’s different
—
getting serious.’

‘Weeded out the bad influences,’ says Janey.

‘That’s right.’ Chloe slips an arm around Janey’s waist and catches a whiff of Janey’s fear-sweat smell.

Janey looks rueful, rubs her nose. ‘You reckon I did the right thing?’

‘For sure. What did you do today?’

Janey shrugs. ‘Wandered ‘round. Nothing much. Got depressed.’ They laugh. ‘It’s a pity you can’t be a loser too.’

Chloe bumps her off-balance. ‘You’ll find something.’

Janey looks up, searching the horizon, a frown twitching between her eyebrows. ‘Yeah. I’ll have to, won’t I?’ she says, and sighs deeply.

She sets up something of a studio in her room, with a sheet of grey marbled paper and some lights of Nick’s. She brings things here, photographs them, returns them to their places, their owners, their libraries. She keeps meticulous records of when Janey made this piece, or read this book, or why these earrings are special (because Janey made them herself for her fifteenth birthday), or this quarter of a bottle of apricot kernel oil (because Chloe used it for foot and baby massages when Janey was pregnant), these pages (because Janey read aloud from them when Chloe lay here—in this bed—with the flu, three winters ago).

Not everything has to be photographed. Little things Janey made or owned can be boxed in cotton wool, numbered, catalogued, stored. But there are other things, paintings, costumes, mobiles, that resist being put away. Chloe has these things around her; they have gravitated to her from Janey’s room, or her parents and brothers and friends have brought them.

‘She gave me this when Gus died, you remember?’ says Carl, bringing a gold box scattered with Christmas-paper angels.

‘Oh, not the hat! Oh God, I don’t think I can take it!’ Chloe is on the verge of handing the box back.

‘Don’t look at it now. It does work, though, a little way down the track.’

‘It was terrible, I remember. Everyone laughing and crying at the same time.’ Chloe is blinking tears.

‘I know. But wasn’t it exactly right, her timing? Just when we were getting all solemn and restrained and black, she had this thing ready, which hit just the right note, it was so
Gus,
it was so much what we wanted for him.’

Chloe nods, and falls into a sob. ‘What am I going to do? There won’t ever be another one of her.’

‘There won’t, my lovely girl.’ She leans against him feeling far from lovely—ugly, grief-distorted, graceless. One of Carl’s tears falls on her cheek. She looks up at him. ‘How did you get through this?’ she says, reaching for the tissues.

‘I didn’t. You don’t. I’m not through. Probably won’t ever be. It’s just a very—’ he laughs softly, ‘—a very dark, plain area of the tapestry. Without it the rest of the pattern wouldn’t be quite so bright.’

When Carl has left, Chloe opens the hatbox. Inside is a decrepit old top hat. Janey has fixed a narrow ramp to it, curving right around it from brim to crown, and glued on a piece of aged-looking paper, on which she has carefully inked the words ‘
Je Monte
’ in curly, old-fashioned writing. Chloe remembers her saying ‘Djer montay,’ reading the words Joy wrote down for her.

Chloe turns the little handle under the brim, and the pipe-cleaner figure in its silver-wire wheelchair, its face a cutout photograph of Gus, rolls smilingly, smoothly up the ramp to the heaven on the crown. There, a little golden harp, some golden cardboard wings, a halo on a wire halo-stand and four golden books—
The Cat in History, The Wonder Book of Pasta, Poussin
and
How to Fix Your Mini Cooper
—nestle in a cottonwool cloud, awaiting him.

Little snorts of laughter and crying escape Chloe as each object sets off sprays of memories, in particular of The Last
Picnic, and Gus being wheeled along the paths in the Botanic Gardens, the wheelchair winking in the sunlight, burning little holes in Chloe’s vision, and Gus shrunk to almost nothing, his smile ghastly and luminous at the same time, his eyes enormous.

‘What’s he staring at?’ Janey had muttered to Chloe. ‘What can he
see
?’