Touching Earth Lightly (31 page)

Now all that seems too silly to think about. After each rearing pain the crouched midwife wipes Janey, somewhere out of sight at the back of the birthing chair. And there are the parts Chloe feared, reflecting up from a mirror
—
strange, grey-purple, half-screened by sproinging black hairs, but not disgusting. In this part of the world nothing is disgusting, nothing like that, nothing bodily. Chloe is freed of such disgust; she will never be able to think like that again.

Eddie arrives purple and white after four hours of the very worst. He spills out of Janey before Chloe’s astonished eyes, and is instantly commandeered, his face working around a tube sucking fluid from his mouth, his wet shuddering body in the midwifes rubber-gloved hands. Janey struggles in the chair and yelps, ‘Fuck off. Leave him alone!’ and Chloe almost cheers her, almost
sees
the connection rear up from the baby and strike into her. Janey grabs him, and wraps herself around him, sweaty T-shirt and wet-ringleting hair and all, while her bottom half, all splayed legs and wound and purple cord, hangs and bleeds like some other body quite separate from Janey’s, its work done. ‘Get the fuck out of here, all of you!’ she commands, in a low, venomous voice. ‘Not you
—
she spares Chloe’s arm a claw. Just get these buggers in masks out of my
fanny,
will you?’ And Joy laughs! and Chloe, overpowered by the baby’s pinking face, by his lips,
tiny
lips, opening upon a real if tiny mouth, by his eyelids coming unstuck and by expressions crossing his face as fast as water, as fast as air, can’t stop crying, tears she can see over, tears of terror and relief that well up inside her and pour automatically down her face.

Chloe hardly knew what to think when the date for the hearing was set, but as the time comes closer she feels more and more that she has a duty to go, to hear what there is to be heard in such a place, at such a time.

She wants to go on her own—maybe she can hold herself together to listen calmly if she’s just a single anonymous figure in the public gallery—but Dane and Joy won’t hear of it, and Isaac thinks he ought to come too, at least for the start of
the hearing, and now Nick and Pete say they will, so she’s condemned to sob in the middle of her family instead.

So it’s come to this, the courtroom buried in a windowless slab of a building. Chloe sits dazed and dismayed and watches the play of the lawyers, the defendants, the witnesses. The court procedure is long-winded, to the point where Chloe wonders if it is some kind of endurance test, for witnesses and relatives alike.
This will take
days, she realises,
when it should be so simple—they did it and should die, slowly and painfully.
Everyone has their time to speak—except Janey, her time being over, gone, finished, her ration run out.

The procedure seems to ignore somehow the enormity of what’s being talked about. It’s a search, persistent, thoroughgoing, methodical, for a thin single line of fact to walk among the scrappy rememberings of the five defendants. Chloe realises, with an almost audible
ping!
of insight and disappointment, that it doesn’t want what she wants. It wants to
remain
utterly impersonal; it doesn’t want to know that this was Janey who was lost; it doesn’t want to be swayed by Chloe’s tears, Chloe’s loss, Chloe’s friendship. It wants to separate out the different strands of criminal behaviour on that night, pin them to the correct culprit, and match them with punishments deemed appropriate by law in previous, similar cases. It’s so limited, so insufficient, for all its length and complication! It’s a cruelty and an insult to the people who knew Janey. The truth is so much bigger than the facts; the reality has so many more permutations than the law. Chloe is glad, now, that there’s a decent-sized pack of them here, proclaiming Janey’s value, not just one weeping teenager. It’s
their
presence here that holds the meaning for Chloe, that is the point; the trial in front of her is so far off the mark she hardly knows why everyone’s bothering.

When she looks at the defendants, sitting down the front with the prison officers and lawyers, looking bored, she can feel her mind straining to believe they did what they did. They are all so small, so hunched, so inconsequential-looking—how could they have overpowered Janey? At first she doesn’t
even feel anger towards them, just this brain-bending puzzlement. Then, as their stories start to contradict each other and collapse under questioning, and it becomes clear that they’ve said anything they thought might save their skins, Chloe’s contempt deepens to a point where it tries to lock her throat closed, where she must consciously stiffen her limbs to stop them shaking. She wanted these people in some way to be worthy of Janey, but it’s clearer with every word of evidence that they have no idea what they did, what manner of person they removed.

As the events are related, the monotonous words bloom in Chloe’s mind almost too quickly and vividly, like time-lapse photographed flowers. She can hear, as no one else can, Janey’s failing attempts at cockiness, at brashness; she can hear her pretending everything is normal, fun. And then Janey founders; the puzzlement in the defendants’ testimony shows Chloe how badly. Janey raves and weeps and begs, and doesn’t notice how their puzzlement curdles into anger. Janey can’t stop talking, trying to tell them, about Nathan, about how terrible her life is. They can’t stop shouting back at her, advancing on her, threatening and then carrying out their threats. None of this ‘shuts her up’; she seems to ‘go crazy’; she keeps getting up and ‘coming back for more’; she won’t stop talking; she won’t stop crying. Everybody is deeply drunk; no one is having any fun any more. Finally the girl and the biggest boy—not very big, Chloe notes—climb down and find that cam shaft, the one there on the table, lobed like a sculpture, dense now with significance, like some kind of ceremonial object. They find it, they climb up the cars with it, and it only takes one stroke from behind to silence Janey at last. Then they all—this is astonishing more than anything else that has gone before—they crawl into various cars, and sleep.

This is like having dead cells scrubbed off a burn; Chloe
sees
all the good that time has been doing her, as it’s clawed away and made raw again. Janey’s last minutes were so much worse than she’d imagined, because her imaginings
were
imaginings, were all provisional, could easily be wrong. Janey
might have had a wonderful last night, and only hit her head falling; these people might be quite blameless! But the moments they tell of were the real moments, of which there is only one possible version—these boys raped and beat Janey, this girl ridiculed her, together they brought about her end. This is the whole truth of it; they are arguing merely over who did what, and in what order. The deed remains the same. Determined not to sob aloud, Chloe sits blinded by tears, her teeth clamped, vibrating in pain.

There is a morning break, and then another for lunch. Outside, the spring wind blows litter, grit and danger, unpredictable gusts of it. People inch and sidle from the courthouse door; Chloe is led. She stands shrinking and numb in sunshine misplaced from another day, swayed by the wind on the precipitous steps.

Some person’s hand is under her elbow, their arm around her, some bright, precious person of her family squinting in the sunlight. Nick, it is—how he’s grown, that he would help her like this, that he would put aside their years of squabbling, for her in her helplessness.

At the bottom of the steps he hands her to Dane, as if this is some kind of progressive dance. Everything has an aura around it; the paving stones float in the light like great squared loves; Isaac’s coat-edge fizzes with it; his glasses as he talks to Joy catch it and shoot it into Chloe’s eyes—dazzling, hesitant lines.

No one addresses her. They murmur among themselves. Nick and Isaac have to go now, just up the road to the university. After their subdued goodbyes, at the last moment Isaac turns to Chloe and puts his arms around her, and a big ugly sob catches in her throat and begins to choke her. As he gives her back to Dane, she glimpses her tears in long dashes down Isaac’s coat, strokes of silver beads.

‘I thought—what I saw—what Isaac and I found—was terrible, but it was nothing! Everything had been done by then, done a whole night before! They were the terrible things, not her body—that was nothing. Seeing her lying there was nothing.’

They can’t sit close enough to the fire. They can’t ever be warm enough. The hearing is adjourned for the day, and evening has greyed everything out. They huddle, Dane and Chloe with Joy across from them, clasping tea mugs, their
eyes
on the orange flames, seemingly the only live thing in the world.

‘It’s all terrible,’ says Dane through his teeth. His arm around her, he rubs the same spot on her shoulder, irregularly, to the rhythm of his distress, until it begins to feel raw. ‘How terrible, it doesn’t matter, the degrees. It’s all bloody terrible, everything about it.’

Joy sighs, uncrosses her legs, puts her mug down. ‘I keep thinking about that little girl who got kidnapped a few years ago. Six years old, she rides her bicycle down to the shop and someone takes her on the way. Remember that? And everyone went crook at her mother, but the mother said, “Well, you’ve got to let go of them sometime; you’ve got to give them some responsibility.” I mean, we are talking about an
eighteen-year
-old here, technically an adult. And still, I feel …’ She covers her mouth with her palm.

‘Hindsight,’ says Dane. ‘And besides, you weren’t Janey’s mother.’

‘Oh, I know that. I’m just wondering—you know, I drive myself crazy—where was the gap, where was the moment, where we should have said … I don’t know,
more,
or done … whatever it took, you know? To avert it.’

‘There wasn’t one,’ says Dane firmly. ‘D’you hear me, Joy? There was no gap. We did whatever we thought was best, at whatever time—you too, Clo. I’ve watched you two helping Janey cope with life for years. I won’t
let
you go guilt-tripping over this! There was only so much we could do, and we did it.’

I could have gone to the Rape Centre. I could have taken her to work with me. I could have kept her in my sights.
Chloe knows; Chloe is tired of knowing; her guilt is worn down to a nub of tired knowledge.

Joy smiles at Dane. ‘I don’t know that you can stop us, actually.’

‘Any more than we could stop Janey going exactly where she chose to go. I rest my case.’

‘I love you for trying.’ She rests her head briefly on his shoulder. ‘The fact remains, though: we failed her.’

‘We did,’ says Chloe.

‘We failed you, too,’ says Joy, giving her a clear-eyed look. ‘We just went along, you know? Obviously, it’s not enough just to hope things will turn out right, to be wishful, to think, “Well, Chloe’s a sensible person, she’ll find her way.” You have to be active. You have to … take steps.’

‘You have to hedge your kids about with fears about the worst things that could possibly happen to them?’ says Dane. ‘I’m telling you, this was just bad
luck
as much as anything, Joy.’

‘Yes, but there are ways, of … of staying the hand of luck; there are ways of—’