Touching Earth Lightly (35 page)

‘The hard bit is getting out of this town without having a major panic attack,’ mutters Chloe, starting the engine.

‘You’ll be fine. Just take it as slowly as you want,’ says Isaac. ‘Don’t let anyone behind you bother you.’

‘Yeah, leave the finger-signs to me,’ says Nick with relish.

Once she’s crept out of town back onto the highway, she drives on silently, with great concentration, super-aware of the overtaking traffic. She drives them the rest of the way. As they jounce carefully down the bush track to the house, her heart and her head lighten with the realisation of what she’s done—taken her turn, been of some use, not just a guest, a
little sister or a convalescent along for the ride. She switches off the engine, her hands trembling with adrenalin.

Isaac is already out of the car, greeting his mother’s friend, Gavin. Nick reaches from the back and shakes her shoulder roughly. ‘You done good,’ he says.

On their second day at Gavin’s house, Chloe walks alone down to the beach. There is very little her eyes need screen out—no bag ladies or drunks, no rust-bucket cars or derelict, boarded-up buildings. The sand is washed clean. Hard, dried-black seaweed and other sea-litter are caught in the lowest dune grass. Here is that live air again, like the air in the mountains, only salty; out there is a whole other world of whales and water-breathers, submarine forests and mountain ranges, tides instead of winds, phosphorescent fish instead of stars. This, what she can see, is just the grey lid of it, rippling under the grey sky.

If she stays on the beach long enough she thinks of nothing. The wind and water rinse out her head. And she
feels
nothing. She can re-enter her life clean. She can start again. This is why people go to the seaside on holidays—to clear away all the grime and disillusion and sadness and frustration, to be salt-clean and cold, able to face their jobs again without boredom or their partners or families without annoyance.

Chloe crosses to the rocks, a beautiful mosaic scattered with limpets, anemones, cungevois as soft and dark as blood-blisters. Tinier and tinier creatures and plants show themselves, the closer she looks. She crouches and rests her eyes on the colours, muted without sunlight—mauves and pinks, milky-coffee browns, pale yellows, whites warm and cool. She can’t tell where the water’s surface is, except at the edges where light scrawls a complex rim around slow-moving snails and honeycomb rocks. Every few waves a large one crashes into the rock-edge, flinging up spray that falls back like firework sparks, pattering.

This is her last look at the beach. Up in the house—an intelligent shoebox of a house in which everyone tends to look beautifully arranged—Gavin is scanning parts of the architect’s plans for Nick and Isaac to take with them.

Chloe doesn’t want to leave. For two nights she’s slept in an elegant black-walled cell overlooking the sea, with nothing in it but a bed, a bookcase and a knobbly grey woollen rug—no clutter, no memories. It has been as if a silence fell, inside her head. If the relief had continued, if she could have shut out the clamour of Janey’s things, of the jobs Janey has left her, just a short while longer, maybe something else would have stirred and begun to move out into the vacated space, something inside her that has been waiting all curled up and contained—but growing a little impatient.

Last night she lay awake imagining Janey on a sleeping mat on the floor next to her. It was so easy, she gave herself a shock when she turned over and there was nothing but moonlight and rug. She sat on the end of the bed, from where she could see the night-time sea, wave after wave foaming over the rocks like buckets of sudsy water cast across a pavement. Day and night it went on, whether or not there was moon to watch it by, whether or not she was there to watch it, or Janey. Was that reassuring, or terrifying? She decided to plump for reassuring, because there was nothing she could do about terror, and she crawled back into bed and let the sea sounds reassure her to sleep.

Towards morning she dreamed walking across the park and into the churchyard. She found Janey lying on a slab, smoking a cigarette. Janey turned and smiled satirically, crushed the cigarette out against the stone.

‘So … you finished
grieving
?’ Janey scornfully blew a plume of smoke into the air. Chloe followed it with her
eyes
and woke up in the sky, in a sense of pausing, Janey’s question in her head. Janey’s voice had been so clearly Janey’s; her face had been her own, too, not distorted or dead or Janey-disguised-as-anyone.

Chloe tests herself, thinking about the impossibility of turning around and seeing Janey picking her way on solid white feet across the rocks, wincing, about never seeing her on another beach again, about never sitting beside her waiting for a thought to arrive that’s worth repeating. It still hurts; it still makes her shake herself and take a deep breath to ease the weight from her heart. But once that’s done the weight
is
eased, a little, and still, before her, there is the pool, full of fans and shells, bone-stones, snail-tracks, lost white claws, tiny dun fish; and still, beyond that, the waves peak and crash, and the moon-dragged rug of the ocean is beyond that again—she is tiny herself before it all, a humble fleck of sea-debris. High above and behind her there is still Gavin’s house, with its maybe-beautiful, functional, plain planes. She turns to look at it.

Isaac is at the living-room window. She’s about to wave, but something in the fixed way he leans and looks down prevents her, and makes her stand up instead. She
sees
the flash of her mother’s eyebrows and hears her voice: Didn’t I
tell
you?

Then Gavin comes up beside Isaac, handing him a mug of coffee; whatever it was disappears from Isaac’s stance and they become two men conversing, a long way away. Chloe steps off the rocks onto the hard-packed, sloping sand, as if that were all she had intended by standing. She must have seen wrong; she may have just made an idiot of herself, gazing up at him like Romeo at Juliet. Look at him now—just a quick glance. This is Isaac, Nick’s friend. It’s not possible, what she thought she saw—she’s known him so long, he’s seen her so many times at her worst, she’s been outright rude to him, not even greeted him sometimes,
swarmed
past him, joked at his expense endlessly, the way all her family does. And Rachel … girls like Rachel are available to him, while Chloe’s been stomping around scowling in Blundstones and fairy dresses and dirt for
years
… well, it’s
not
possible, is it?

She makes a neat set of boot-prints along the bubble-line of the retreated sea, to the far rocks. She stands, invisible to anyone, and stares for a while at the horizon. The wind whistles in her sleepers; the sea falls forward and slides back.

‘And I see things, is another thing,’ says Janey, blowing smoke up into the camphor laurels in the graveyard.

‘Huh?’ says Chloe lazily. There are times when she doesn’t actually listen very carefully to everything Janey says.

‘When I’m having sex. When I’m not thinking.’

‘What do you mean, “see”? And “things”
—
what things?’

‘Like, pictures
—
like, almost like psychedelic things, sometimes. Odd pictures. Things I haven’t thought about for years, and then sometimes things I never
would
think about, in my normal life. Do you get that?’ She peers at Chloe. Chloe shakes her head.

‘It’s just
…
I don’t know how to explain it. These pictures pop into my head, that’s all. But that makes it sound ordinary, when in fact they’re really …’

‘Visions,’ Chloe supplies, closing her eyes against the busy wiggling of the leaves.

‘They
are
visions! Little ones, not your full-on, you know, wow-man,
Joan of Arcs
or anything, just …’

‘You make it sound like a brand name, like Doc Martens
—
Joan of Arcs. What would a Joan of Arc be? Some kind of rainwear?’

‘Some kind of tool, some
…
implement. I know, one of those little plastic swords you stick through the onion in a cocktail, or the pineapple chunk or whatever.’

‘No, that’s too trivial.’ They have this sort of conversation a lot. ‘I’d say a special sword-shaped skewer that you use to cook kebabs over a barbecue. You have a whole row of them, you know, with little sword handles. Joan of Arcs. So you give someone a set of Joan of Arcs for a wedding present. Fits in with her burning at the stake, get it?’

‘Oh, stake
/steak,
right?’

Chloe picks up a fragment of sandstone and throws it at her. ‘So tell me one of these visions.’

‘Ooh. Well. That picture I did in Art, of the horses’ heads being washed up
—
that was one.’

‘Yeah? In the middle of sex? Not exactly a turn-on, I would’ve thought.’

‘No, well, they don’t have anything to
do
with the sex. They’re just happening there, when it’s going on. I had this weird one a couple of weeks ago
—
a guy strapping his kids into the car, in those little safety seats they have, you know? With the little kind of head-guards? Only the babies are just, kind of, meat. They’re just these, like, meat trays or … meat
sculptures.
They hold together, and he acts like they’re his kids, but they’re not even kid-shaped. Gross, huh?’ she says, catching Chloe’s bemused expression.

‘Pretty strange,’ Chloe says.

‘They’re like dreams
—
if I make a note of them I can remember. Otherwise they just go. They just blow away afterwards.’

‘And you
want
to remember stuff like that?’

‘Well, look at the horses: A-plus. I can
use
this stuff. I can use it!’

Sometimes Janey isn’t entirely serious with Chloe.

Back home in the city, Chloe has tidied her room. It’s odd to walk in and find it so spare-looking; it gives her a not-quite-painful feeling, as if she’s cut her fingernails too short.

There is nothing on the walls now except Janey’s horse-heads painting, and opposite it on the noticeboard the last Cibachrome Chloe made over at Carl’s. The metal twist, which is more like a kelp stalk torn from its rock than a flower, lies beside a circle of metal patterned with rust like lace, and a line of beer-bottle shards collected from the car-yard. They look like archaeological finds lined up like that, in pin-sharp focus against the backing paper, which is a light, marbled purple. The light from Chloe’s window was strong that day, and the amber light through the glass bits flares off across the paper like flames.

It only makes a kind of sense, as a record of Janey. It’s a record of her death, Chloe supposes, because the objects come from that place, but it’s like looking not at it but past
it, just catching it with her peripheral vision. Then again, the things seem to speak the feelings Janey’s death make; Eddie might get a clearer idea of what a loss she was, looking at this picture, than from all the other things in the Janey-chest.
No,
she thinks, going through them in her mind,
they all combine, they all say some little different thing about what she was, what she meant
—that’s why Chloe’s collected them so obsessively, tracked down every possible item. All the fragments play off each other, and somewhere between them, among them, is where the fully-faceted Janey exists.