Touching Earth Lightly (33 page)

‘I do. I do love him,’ Janey says, matter-of-factly. ‘Which is why, you know? Get him away from me, ‘cause I can’t do him any good, and you can’t do it for me, and I don’t want my family ever to see him, or be able to recognise him on the street. And because this … this rips me up, just sitting watching him sleep, you know? When everything’s good, even, I can’t stand it. It’s too much. I could never relax. I’m scared shitless. I mean, look at him!
—’
She waves at him lying like a wrapped doll in Chloe’s arms, a frown whispering on and off his face. ‘He can’t do … anything! He can’t … even
…
just
roll out of the way.
It’s just
—
he needs a family, a nice couple who can make things nice for him, you know? I just want it to be met,’ she finishes in a whisper.

‘You want him to have illusions,’ says Chloe.

‘I want him to have a golden childhood,’ says Janey, leaning to his level and examining his sleeping face. ‘And, God, you know, an end to this
—’
The leaning and looking have brought milk out onto her already blotched T-shirt. She reaches for a folded nappy and presses it to her breast. ‘I can’t think straight, and there’s always mess, and half the time I don’t know what time of day or
night it is. I tell you, I thought I was a bit mixed up before, but now I don’t know anything,
anything,
for sure.’

Terry and Maxine visit, and can’t be faulted, they’re so kind and joyful and considerate of Janey’s feelings. Chloe wonders if she’s imagining a slight protective
clench
in her family and Janey, even in Isaac when he’s introduced to Eddie’s adoptive parents; certainly she herself feels it, feels for Janey, inwardly wails for Janey in apprehension of her sacrifice. Such a confusion of caring and fear exists inside her these days she can barely think straight at home; at school the tasks are portioned out and the goals clear, but the minute she steps out of the school gate her brain begins to scramble, her organised frame of mind to fracture and float to pieces.

Chloe sees Nathan up at the shops. It’s one of those early spring days when it first becomes possible to imagine summer. The air has lightened; she’s not too hot in her coat but she wouldn’t be cold without it.

Nathan sees her at the same instant, and backs around the street corner ahead of her. She feels the change in herself as clearly as if she were one of those Transformer toys Pete used to be stuck on; suddenly instead of a person she’s a heat-seeking missile, after a particular kind of heat.

She goes to the corner. A little way along the sunlit wall, Nathan hulks, smoking. All his power is drawn up into his shoulders pretending she’s not there; he looks top-heavy, off balance. Chloe teems with dammed-up accusations, with the urge to pick up stones, half-bricks, and throw them at his head. This she must not do—but she must not walk away, either. She’s fated to say or do
something.

He glances at her; she recognises his furtive dislike. He knows, too, that fate or God or whatever is driving her forward, just one step. He tries to fold in on himself further, to fold his bulk utterly away into nothing.

Into the pocket of silence by the wall, Chloe says, ‘I was sorry to hear about your sister,’ very clearly, very calmly.

From looking sideways at her he wrenches his head away, like an acknowledgment, like a … Chloe doesn’t know what he means by it.

‘But she was better off dying,’ she says, ‘than coming back to you.’

She’s never seen someone actually
blanch
before. One moment his face is just pallid; the next it is startlingly colourless, the lips gone. Janey had her father’s eyes, wide, blue and sometimes frightening. Nathan has inherited their mother’s, enfolded in flesh, dark and indeterminate. These eyes check over both Chloe’s shoulders, then return uneasily to her face.

‘I know what you did to her. I’ve
always
known—’ she hears her voice rushing and takes a breath ‘—exactly what you, and your dad, were doing to Janey’ Nathan throws away his cigarette and stands up straighter, the back of his head against the wall, his eyes looking away down the street. ‘Why didn’t I tell someone? Why didn’t I get you both put away?’ The heat-seeking missile begins to turn around and guide itself back to its source. Chloe watches, aghast.
I’m no better than either of you. I’m no better than your mother, standing aside and pretending nothing’s happening.
Nathan’s looking at her as if she’s holding a syringe of poison against his jugular.
With friends, and relatives, like us, Janey really didn’t need enemies, did she, Nath?
He looks at the gutter near his feet. She feels a sudden urge to slap that whitened cheek, to see her hand-print on it. She steps back. ‘Well, I guess she’s gone somewhere where you won’t find her. Where none of us will. I guess that’s something—none of us can do her any more damage.’

She gets back into the crowd somehow—she doesn’t remember walking away. She’s forgotten where she was going, even in which direction. She’s lost her grasp of who she ever was besides a cell of sick-heartedness being swept along the street.

The last Saturday, Janey can barely speak. She and Chloe go walking with Eddie along narrow, root-warped paths bloodied with bottlebrush fur before the day gets too hot. When they get
back they go up to the bedroom and cry on and off, holding Eddie and looking at him for the hour and a half before Terry and Maxine arrive. Chloe doesn’t think anything could be harder than placing that baby in his new parents’ arms, even if Maxine is crying, too, and hugging Janey, and reminding her about the photographs and the progress reports. Or anything bleaker
—
she feels it herself—than all that free time, all that tidiness, that absence of squalls and screams, that absence of almost-imperceptible breath, of bunny-rug-wrapped limbs, of tiny heart
—
Chloe’s dreamed of that heart, in a transparent chest like a Catholic Christ’s, and lit from within. She sits with Janey, she walks with Janey. That night, she sleeps in her old room with Janey and they bear the wakeful emptinesses of the night together, and bear the morning, the cleared room, the immensely long Sunday.

Carl is teaching her to develop black-and-white prints in the darkroom at his studio. Checking over the first contact sheet with a magnifying glass, he says, ‘I like these. I think this is a good project.’

Chloe is taken aback, as if he’s accused her of profiting from Janey’s death. ‘I never thought of it as a project. More like a whole pile of …’

‘Chores?’

‘Just … necessities. Things that have to be done, and no one else is going to do them.’

Janey up at the park, spinning. ‘Oh God, this is so
good
! Give me back my
life
!
’

Chloe feels momentary alarm, thinking she must have sent the baby flying, or left him somewhere; then she remembers Terry and Maxine driving away, and feels a rush of relief ‘And your body
—
look at you!’

Janey twirls in loose clothes, her black hair like spinning strips in an auto car-wash. The two of them are limber like lambs or kittens, moving without aim across the grass, pramless, baby-free.

They go up to the churchyard. It feels like an old haunt, as if they are coming back after years, lifetimes away. They lie on the sandstone grave-slabs, watching the camphor-laurel leaves against the sky and not speaking.

‘It could be all right, you know?’ Janey says eventually.

Chloe props herself on an elbow. ‘It could be. It won’t ever be exactly the same as it was, will it? As before you got pregnant, I mean.’

‘I wonder if they’d let a seventeen-year-old get her tubes tied.’

‘Tell ‘em your history.’ They laugh darkly. ‘They’ll be queuing up to do you.’

‘Your mum would say not to.’

Chloe thinks about it. ‘Probably.’

‘She’d say, “You never know
—
your hormones might settle of their own accord.’”

‘And you never do know.’

‘But babies, as a way of life? And with some
man?
Some father poking his nose in?’

‘Caring, you mean?’ Chloe laughs.

Janey shudders. ‘Well, I can’t see it. Not for me,’ she adds with great bravura.

‘Wait and see,’ says Chloe.

‘My, we’re adult today.’

‘Well, somebody’s got to be, you talking about having yourself chopped up.’

‘Ha. Compared to what a baby does … Let’s get out of here
—
I’m beginning to feel like a smoke myself. Although, I suppose I can now, now that I’ve only got myself to think about.’

It becomes not possible to stay all day in the house with the paraphernalia of the Janey-record, in the room that stinks of old dreams and in which Chloe’s own thoughts speak so clearly, that sometimes she checks behind her for the speakers.

For distraction she goes to the station, and takes trains to unfamiliar places, and walks. She chooses places where other
people walk, the quay, the bridge, the beach promenade. She becomes a tourist in her own town.

One day she takes the train up to the mountains, and walks through a town in drizzle, and leans out over a valley where mist eases itself among the rocks and catches in tree-tops below. She leans there and waits, and for once tears don’t come; instead, the air flows seamlessly around her, full of the smells of soil and leaf rot and green-blue eucalypts; it’s like a wind of protozoa, like massed air-krill nourishing her against her will. Currawong calls shave curls off the silence, tour buses huff and hiss and glide over it. Fragments of conversation in many languages—about meals, about camera angles, about hotels, about the landforms and cloud-forms hulking and moving in front of her—fall about her like leaves, sweetly banal.