Touching Earth Lightly (32 page)

Chloe reaches across and lays a hand on Joy’s arm. ‘Will you stop, please? It’s done, isn’t it? And we’re not—I mean, we can beat ourselves around the head with it, but in the end we’re not the ones on trial. We’re not the ones who did it.’

‘Well, you see, I don’t know—I’m not so sure!’

‘Joy,’ warns Dane.

‘Okay, I won’t go on. I just feel as if
everyone
is guilty, of this. Catching and trying those stupid kids is just our easiest way out. They’re just … I don’t know, our agents, somehow.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ murmurs Dane. ‘As if we
wanted
them to do that.’

Four nights later, Chloe stares out her window at the leafless trees netting the city-brightened clouds. She has just finished
writing it all out for Eddie, all the hearing, all she knows now about Janey’s last night. She hasn’t spared him any of the details, or herself. She has been exhaustive, and is exhausted. And tomorrow there will be more newspaper articles to clip, and in maybe a year, maybe longer, there will be the actual trial, for which this hearing was just the introduction. In the meantime nothing can be absolutely closed off or filed away, except Janey’s life. The people who closed it off, who turned it into this collection of artefacts and records and memories, they still live, still have rights to be debated and excuses to make, still walk on the earth. Yet Janey has nothing, is nothing, any more.

The stunned stillness in her mind allows a thought through:
I used to
procure
kids like that for Janey, all the time. I chose the ones with really low opinions of themselves, boys who were so used to being stepped on or cast aside they’d hardly notice we were doing it too, discarding them when we’d finished with them. Janey never learned how to be safe on her own; she didn’t know to avoid a pack like that, with a leader like that—or maybe she did, but whatever happened with Nathan threw her judgement.

Chloe leafs back through the writing-crinkled pages: ‘… going on and on about her brother … Detective Sergeant Ken Somebody … their faces, when they saw the photographs … the beautiful sunshiny mornings lost inside sealed courtrooms …’

She files the pages away with others, then puts her head in her hands and holds it together against the vastness and darkness resounding around her. She thought she knew what to expect; she thought she had everything under control. She knew nothing, had nothing, and now she is frightened. A wallowing uncertainty about everything, everything she used to be sure of, dampens and curtails her every impulse, qualifies her every thought. Now that it’s proven, in a court of law, that people—local people, almost
neighbourhood
people—are capable of such things, who can she trust? Humans can be inhuman—but then, doesn’t that make the ‘inhumanity’
human too? She knows so little; the questions she has are so immense, so interwoven, and come so thick and fast. She puts her head on the desk and lets her tears silence the questions—temporarily at least. At least until tomorrow.

Janey in hospital is sleepy, amiable, exposed-looking on the high bed among the white sheets, without any make-up on.

‘Did I do that?’ She gapes when Chloe shows her her bruised and scratched arms. ‘Sheesh! Wow! Sorry!’ She laughs and runs her fingers over the marks.

‘It’s nothing to what happened to you, pushing that little watermelon out.’ Chloe indicates the sleeping baby with her elbow.

‘I know. They say the third day’ll be the worst, when the stitches start tightening, and it hurts to feed him, and the baby blues set in.’

‘“On the third day …”’ Chloe intones. ‘Sounds like an old midwives’ tale to me.’

‘Oh, man.’ Janey holds Chloe’s hands loosely and looks across at the baby. ‘His “parents” came in this morning.’

‘Yeah?’ Chloe waits to see what tone she’s supposed to take.

‘They want to call him Edward,’ says Janey gloomily.

Chloe snorts. ‘Edward’s okay! Ed. Eddie. Teddy-boy. It could’ve been one of those other ones you were scared of—Brett or Craig or … what was that mad one? Tarquin
—
it could’ve been Tarquin.’

‘They offered to put my name in the middle.’

‘What—Edward Jane?’

Janey pushes her. ‘Edward Knott, dillbrain. Edward Knott Hayworth.’

‘It would be true enough.’

‘I thought about it. Then I thought Edward Hayworth, plain, is a better name. Don’t you reckon?’

‘It’s okay, I guess. He’s just The Baby in my mind.’

‘I know. It’s weird, hey? Nailing ’em with a name. You feel as if you haven’t got the right.’

Chloe watches her watching the baby, tries to read what she’s feeling about him. ‘So how was it, seeing Terry and Maxine? Did you feel all defensive? Did you feel like protecting your
young?”

‘I felt … okay,’ says Janey with some surprise. ‘You know, they were so happy and excited, and they wanted to know everything about the labour and stuff. It was like they were friends
—
or family, even. I suppose they are, eh? My son’s parents … No, it was fine. They seem so—ready, you know? And there are two of them, and they want him so badly, and I feel so
not
ready, it makes sense. I don’t regret my decision,’ she declares formally, and laughs at herself. ‘In fact, I feel like I’ve done some people some
good
!
’

‘Whoa!’

They fall silent as the baby moves. Through his transparent crib Chloe sees his eyes open halfway. He takes a few loud sucks of the fists in front of his face and relaxes back into sleep.

Chloe’s mouth has fallen open. Janey looks at her and flashes her eyebrows.
‘Weird,
hey?’ she whispers. Chloe closes her mouth and nods.

‘I don’t know how you can even think of Eddie, to tell you the honest truth,’ says Nick, pouring coffee. ‘Janey as just her own person I can hack, but if I think of that kid, of her as someone’s mother—’ The column of coffee wavers, and Chloe looks up at his face. ‘Well, you see.’ He sniffs, laughs at himself.

Chloe smiles. ‘I thought I was never going to see you cry,’ she says with relief.

‘I’m not crying, I’m not crying! Water’s coming out my eyes, that’s all.’ He gives another exaggerated sniff, blinks to retrieve the tears. ‘Yeah, well. Everybody’s been bloody leaking at the eyes in this house. Someone’s had to hold together, hey.’

‘It’s the opposite for me. I think about Janey and I go all helpless; I think about Eddie and I can hold together. There are things I can do—
have
to do, to give him some idea of who she was, you know? I can
move
; I have to.’

Nick spoons sugar, stirs, and shakes his head. ‘Well, I thought you’d lost it, to start with. Felt like, you know—’ He snaps his fingers twice in front of her face. ‘“She’s really gone—none of this running about’s gonna bring her back!” But you’re not as bent as I thought—’ He picks up his mug and makes to leave the kitchen.

‘Oh. Well, thanks,
bro.
’

He smiles back over his shoulder—what Chloe thinks of as a
proper
smile, disconcertingly affectionate and warm.

In this dream Janey’s whole family attends the hearing, spectacularly grief-stricken. Outside the courthouse Chloe goes for Janey’s mother—she’s the only one small enough to tackle. Immediately Mrs Knott turns pathetic, loose-mouthed, feebly whingeing. Chloe smacks and smacks her face but it seems to have no effect; she just keeps
doddering
there, alive and useless. Chloe grabs her by the arms and shakes her, screaming all those things she’s been thinking in the courtroom opposite them, watching them in their black with their hypocritical mouths turned down and their handkerchiefs dabbing. ‘Why didn’t you open your eyes and see what was going on in front of you, you silly sagging old non-person of a cow? Why weren’t you some
help
! Mothers are supposed to
help
!’ Mrs Knott’s head lolls back and forth, a long high-pitched complaint squealing out of it. Chloe’s getting nowhere, but she goes on shaking and shouting; it feels so good to have one of the true culprits in her hands, and to be dealing out punishment personally.

Janey comes back to the Hunters’ after the baby. She and Eddie sleep in Chloe’s room. Every day is different for the whole two weeks. There’s a great sense of disorder, of wonder, of just-contained emergency, of everyone ignoring an oncoming crisis. All is cloths and creams and powders, fluids leaking, mounds of laundry.

Certain images from that time will never leave Chloe: Eddie flushing red and screaming in the cradle and Janey in a stark panic above him; Chloe walking Eddie for a full two hours between night feeds while Janey sleeps, her own eyelids drooping, his silky head doddering on her shoulder; Pete holding up a miniature sock, a private, marvelling expression on his face; Dane setting up the video camera next to the cradle so that they can all watch Eddie sleep on the TV downstairs; Nick and Isaac cringing quiet as they bluster in from outside and everyone turns with shushes and alarmed frowns. There are shadows around everyone’s eyes.

The two of them catch each other gazing at Eddie in moments of peace, and remind each other ‘Don’t get too attached’, as if they could control it, as if he didn’t cast a spell by his very smallness, by the very shortness of his history, by his every twitch and crease, by his lightness as a body, his weight as a person, by the unfeelable softness of his skin.