Touching Earth Lightly (30 page)

‘I’ll show you.’ He has the disc out of the sleeve and in the player on the counter. ‘It’s come up well; I think you’ll be pleased.’

Chloe’s Hawaiian-theme twelfth birthday party is on the screen, the back yard a mess of balloons and streamers. Pete lairs in past the camera. Chloe’s friends dance (she did have more friends then, she realises with a shock), their parents’ conversation murmurs off to one side; she hears Gus’s high-pitched laugh for the first time in more than a year. As she’s recovering from that, Janey idles into the picture wearing pink swimmers, a pink-and-orange-flower-splashed sarong and a crepe-paper lei, and carrying a glass of fruit punch. She sees the camera, raises her glass pretend-drunkenly and staggers out of frame, then pops back in with a bright wave.

‘Having a good time, Janey?’ Dane’s voice says loudly behind the camera.

‘Lovely crisp sound,’ says the shop-man, startling Chloe.

‘Absho-
lutely
!’ hoots Janey.

‘There was a bit of a buzz of distortion there. We can clean that sort of thing off now.’

‘Uh-huh?’ says Chloe dazedly.

He ejects the disc and slides it into a slick snap-lock bag with the others. ‘Two copies—if you have any problems, come straight back.’

She pays and walks out of the shop. Then her body forgets how to breathe. A row of square sandstone pillars supports the skyscraper above her, and she slows, and leans against one.

Janey lives, on screen, with her smooth and slightly wispy dark hair, her wide smile, her hooting giggle. Chloe remembers that party, remembers agonising over the guest list, closely supervising Dane as he compiled the party tapes from old vinyl LPs, splitting strawberries for the rims of the glasses while Joy assembled the satays. She remembers how it ended—late at night, Chloe dancing with Dane, Janey with Pete, Mum with Isaac, Carl with Gus, out on the lawn with the Hawaiian music twanging and swooning all around them.

It’s frightening how easily those few frames—that
lovely crisp sound
with the years cleaned off it—reconstitute that lost time, that gone time. It’s all
there,
in her head, in her skin, attached to hair-triggers ready to blow at any second and eject her from normal life, make her fall against the nearest solid thing, while Janey’s good cheer, her childhood laughing, her oblivious happy faces, and Gus’s revived laughter, gust around like dead leaves on the dirty wind.

Chloe stands there, the shiny shopping-bag of history in one hand, breathing deeply, seeing no one and nothing, hearing only the absence underneath, behind, above everything.

When she reads, Janey reads fast and reads everything: textbooks, catalogues, novels and poetry, newspapers from front to back—certain classified ads included. She sits scowling over them on the spare bed while Chloe studies. They are both like people on an
eating binge, stuffing in words. They move just enough to keep the blood on course to various limbs, or to reach the packet of toffee Brazil nuts; sometimes Janey gets up and makes tea, or instant soup, or sandwiches. ‘Oh gee, thanks,’ Chloe says. She hasn’t even seen her go out. Janey stands beside her reading her essay draft. She is the one person Chloe doesn’t mind doing that. She says, ‘Look at your writing. It’s so neat, like a machine pumped it out. Look, pages and pages.’ ‘Not enough pages,’ Chloe says gloomily, but Janey’s right, and Chloe likes the look of her own words too. ‘You’ll get there,’ Janey says, perfectly confident, and wanders back to her reading.

For Janey’s ninth month Chloe’s time is split exactly in four. As long as she keeps moving every few hours, from study to Janey to sleep to school, as long as she keeps the momentum up, she’s all right. If she stops to think about how much is being crammed into her days, or what is happening, or what might happen, she seizes up with anxiety, with the ringing of giant questions in her head, useless questions like,
What are we all going to do?

Coming downstairs late one night for a coffee to finish an essay on, she finds Isaac in the lounge room with books and notes spread out on the coffee table in front of him. Nick is clashing mugs in the kitchen.

‘Hi,’ she says, passing Isaac. It’s perhaps weeks since they last spoke.

‘How are things with you?’ It would be rude to walk on, but it isn’t so much that that stops her as a feeling that the voice came not only from across the table but also from inside herself somewhere, it’s pitched so differently from the other voices she’s used to hearing. He really wants to know.

‘Things are all right,’ she says too quickly.

He watches her—expectantly, she feels
—as if I’m lying and he’s waiting for me to admit it.
She tries out ‘Why wouldn’t things be fine?’ in her head, and is shocked by how cocky, how false the words sound. Then she’s angry, because he’s seen her shock from the outside and those glasses of his, which make his eyes look so tiny, also seem to make their vision more acute. ‘How about you?’ she says instead, realising she’s never asked him this before.

‘Me? Fine, too.’ He’s performing the same shutting-out manoeuvre as she did, only more gently and pointedly.

‘Good,’ she says, and suddenly she laughs, at the bland conversation and the complications it covers, and he smiles back, with an understanding that makes her laugh all the more.

‘Nick said to me, the day after, “I just never thought before, it never occurred to me, this is it, this is all, this life is all we get! Why didn’t I ever
think
!” ’ Pete does a perfect freaked-Nick imitation, and Chloe has to smile.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I had this idea, that I didn’t realise I had, I just
assumed
that we’d talk about it afterwards, Janey and me, like we talk about—
talked
—about everything. “Did you see what they did to me? And what about the expression on that cop’s face? Boy, I guess that showed everyone, hey?” All that. It’s so easy to imagine—I’m still expecting it, in a way. I dream it all the time. Good old chats we have,’ she finishes bitterly. ‘Do I sound mad?’ Tears stinging in her eyes.

‘No! No. That must be what dreams are for, hey.’

‘You mean dreams are the afterlife?’ She thinks about it. ‘So nightmares are hell and my talks with Janey are Paradise, and we get both without even having to die. Which leaves open the question, where is she now?’

‘I think, maybe … she isn’t.’

‘Very delicately put.’ Chloe’s snort of laughter turns wet and Pete passes her the tissue box. ‘Ah, God, tears again. Mop, mop, blow, blow.’

‘Just think, though, if there was this talking-it-over time afterwards—like, we all sit around with our lives and, I don’t know,
score
them—will she wait sixty years for you to die? And then, if she does—well, how would you compare, you know, her eighteen years and your—what?—seventy-eight?’

‘I can just see the look she’d give me as I hobbled through the gates. Like, “Jesus, Cole, you went and turned into an
old
!’ Or she might have expected it; she might have been watching all along …’

‘Or do the years in between kind of disappear,’ suggests Pete, ‘and we all have perfect understanding of each other, whatever age we are, whatever we’ve done?’

‘But that would take away the whole
point
—I mean, when I talk my life over with Janey I want to talk like we talk
here,
you know—hearing things wrong, getting the giggles, trying out ideas before they’re properly thought out, hearing her reactions, interrupting …’

‘You might not even remember that kind of conversation when you’re seventy-eight,’ Pete suggests.

Chloe’s shocked. ‘You think?’

‘Well, I don’t know. Do I? Do you know?’

There’s a pause.

‘It just sounds awful, you know,’ says Chloe. ‘You see someone and—blinngg!—perfect understanding. It sounds so
quick.
I mean, how’s that going to fill eternity? … I mean, I can imagine having an endless conversation with Janey—I can see the point of that, but

‘But blinging you can’t come at?’

‘Well, bling and
then what
? Or is it an endless wonderful bling, or a sort of frozen moment? Or is there no bling and we all just float around communing with God? He’s never sounded like much fun. It’s a—it could be a problem, this afterlife business,’ she finishes with a laugh. It’s pointless—she’s stuck here, not knowing anything.

Pete says, after another thoughtful pause, ‘People reckon they can feel dead people’s … presences.’

‘We-ell. Feel the
absence,
maybe. And then, know the person so well, and know so exactly the sort of thing they’d say, or the sort of opinion they’d hold in that situation, that they convince themselves the person’s there. Which is fair enough, I guess—you console yourself any way you can. Some people fool themselves that poor old dead so-and-so’s keeping an eye on them. I mean, can you imagine Janey just serenely
watching!
Wouldn’t she butt in, wouldn’t she blab on, out on the sidelines there?’ Pete’s laughing. ‘You wouldn’t be able to shut her up. So if she’s some kind of serene spirit,
GOOD FOR YOU
,’ Chloe calls to the ceiling. ‘But I liked the old Janey, the earthly one. She was the one I hung around with, she’s the one I really miss.’

Eddie is born in the night
—
or early morning: 2.16 a.m. Chloe sees Janey change before her very eyes. First, she goes inward, thoughtful, emerging now and then to make a joke. By the time they go to the hospital the jokes have stopped; Joy drives, and in the back seat Chloe, the lid firmly on her own anxieties, sits with Janey trying to read the labour from her face as squares of street light flow over it. At the worst, Janey climbs Chloe’s arm with a frightened yowl, terrifying her with her weight and distress, the unstoppable pains, the fear of them getting so much worse.

At the hospital, which is all white wall panels and silver hardware, noise seems to attack Janey from the inside and burst out of her. There is a sequence to it: terrified swearing, a kind of bull’s bellow, and then a falling back, weakly whimpering, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry.’

‘You can.’ Joy pulls Janey’s sodden dreadlocks back and twists them into a temporary knot. ‘You’re doing it.’

Chloe watches her mother and follows her lead
—
soothes and murmurs, holds on. She isn’t able to smile, to say after each contraction, ‘Good. You’re doing a great job, Janey, because she doesn’t know; she thinks possibly Janey’s bellowing herself to death, but obviously not if Joys so calm. In a pause between contractions she looks down at her own reddened hands, at her arms scored by Janey’s fingernails and the ridges of veins winding across the finger tendons. Her hands look strong, and worked, and they are nothing to the muscles working in Janey, the system forcing the contents of that great stretched belly out through … out through …

Chloe had mentally shrunk from the idea of seeing, of having to focus on Janey’s nether end. Looking up from the birth books Janey had said with relish, ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous, waters breaking, fluids and shit
—
like, shit, the real thing.’ And Chloe had gargled with embarrassment.