Touching Earth Lightly

  It’s only when Chloe is sitting down to write it all to Eddie that she realises how strange Janey’s life can sound, what weird things she and her family have taken for granted about her, which in anyone else they would find repellent. She’s often tempted to explain and justify Janey’s actions, to make excuses, for Janey and for herself. The easiest thing would be to leave things out, to write only about the good times, to make Janey out as just a high-spirited, fun girl. Or to stop altogether, to abandon the job of pinning her to paper, to wait until Eddie comes asking and just answer him off the top of her head, give him the soft-edged, time-worn version of Janey’s life.

  But she can’t do that. By then, she knows, certain essential knowledge will have dissolved out of her memory. While it’s still there, while she can still feel the feelings of the things remembered, she should tell him as much as she can about the girl he came from. She has no choice in the end but to be dedicated about this—bold-like-Janey, not timid-like-Chloe—and put it all down.

  ‘Are you actually, officially, moving in with Theo?’ says Joy one afternoon as Chloe’s about to leave with another backsack of clothes. ‘Or are you just kind of doing it behind your own back, bit by bit?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Chloe realises with a start that she’s doing the latter. Joy’s perceptiveness annoys her. ‘What, you want me to marry him, do you? Make some kind of public pronouncement?’

  ‘God, no. I’m just curious about where you are. At what point, I mean, with him. Of involvement. If you are planning a life together,’ she finishes, smiling at her own pomposity. ‘And if you are shifting yourself, to let you know that it’s always revocable—like, I’m not going to immediately make over your room into a sewing-room or anything’

  ‘Oh. Good. I wasn’t worried you would, actually.’ I hadn’t thought that far, actually. I hadn’t thought you had any part in this, in fact. She feels silly, caught out, childish, when she’d felt so sophisticated, spending nights at Theo’s, dropping in at home for books, clothes, bits and pieces, ringing home, ringing Theo, ringing Janey all the time to let them all know where she was, where she was heading next.

  Her mother sits at the far end of the dining table, framed in the rainy windows like some science-fiction queen in council. ‘Well, men may come and men may go—’

  ‘Oh Mum, this isn’t the seventies,’ snaps Chloe.

  Joy gives a single nod of assent. ‘But there’ll always be your place here, whenever.’

  ‘Oh Mum.’ Was that a goodbye? Was that a release? Chloe sweeps out before the conversation can continue, while her irritation can still carry her, sophisticated, bereft, away.

  Someone calls her name on the street, a girl she doesn’t recognise—oh, it’s Gemma, from school, who’s had a radical change of image, ratted hair and pierced everything.

  ‘Chloe, how you going! You look great, as usual.’

  The smile aches from disuse on Chloe’s face. ‘I’m okay. What are you doing with yourself these days?’ she adds quickly.

  ‘Oh, man, life is great! I’m at uni—I swapped from arts/law to just straight arts. I got so bored with, law I couldn’t stand it. I’m doing all these great subjects, like anthropology and politics, I’m really into it. Anthrop is, like, the most fascinating subject. Sophie Shiller’s in my anthrop tute—you wouldn’t believe how that girl has changed. I’m living in this totally mad share house with about fifty zillion people, all insane, all arts students. I’m just having the—best—time. What about you?’

  ‘Oh, I deferred, you know,’ Chloe says slowly; she feels slightly retarded in contrast to Gemma’s fizzing. ‘I’ve just been—’ A huge sigh catches her throat. ‘Having a year off, just … living, you know?’ She looks down at Gemma’s eager face, thinking she can’t possibly even begin to tell her, in any way that Gemma will want to hear.

  ‘What, working?’

  Chloe shakes her head. ‘On the dole. I was … doing some work for the opera, that’s all, a bit.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember. That’s a cool job, but I guess it doesn’t pay, like, a million bucks. Are you still living with your folks?’ Chloe nods. ‘Yeah, well you would, with groovy folks like yours.’

  ‘Groovy?’ Chloe gives a startled laugh.

  ‘Yeah, like not always on your back about something. And what about that wild mate of yours, Jane Knott? How’s she? Do you see her? I mean, it’s funny how you can lose touch when you leave school, but you two were pretty close, weren’t you?’

  Chloe smiles weakly at Gemma, tries to remember the question. ‘Yeah, we were, I guess.’

  ‘Oops, you have a fight, did you?’

  ‘No, we just, like you say, lost touch …’ It isn’t quite a lie, is it? There are far too many people milling past the shops, far too many vehicles choking the road, choking all the people with their fumes.

  ‘Right. I bet she’d be doing something fantastic, though, hey? I mean, she was hopeless at school, but she had so much energy, and, gee, isn’t everything different once you get out of that place? Isn’t everything furit Moving out of home, living with your friends, doing all these interesting courses, you know, like, all electives—it’s great! I’m having a ball. You remember Sophie’s friend Sheree? She’s had a baby! And got married to the guy. A baby girl, Madison. Can you believe it?’

  Chloe feels old and worn. ‘Yeah. Why not?’

  Gemma looks at her. ‘Don’t tell me—you’ve got one too! No?’

  ‘No, but, you know, these things happen.’

  ‘I know; that’s why I tell ‘em, if it’s not on, it’s not on!’

  Chloe fakes a complicitous laugh, feeling slightly sick. This is so far … so different from … so all wrong …

  ‘Don’t tell me, you’re unlucky in love,’ says Gemma, sympathy at the ready.

  ‘No, that’s all right, things are … fine in that area,’ Chloe quotes Janey.

  ‘Good, good!’

  Finally Chloe is zingless enough for Gemma to find an excuse to go away. Watching her bounce away through the people, Chloe feels the way she did the year she and Janey grew tall, suddenly, ahead of all their classmates—oversized, gawky, not knowing what to do with all the new matter that was themselves, and the odd new status that came with it, with having everyone look up to them, just physically.

  But then, what does she know? Maybe Gemma was chattering to cover up some terrible thing, some tragedy she was getting over.

  Chloe walks to the nearest shop window and stares in sightlessly. Sheree. So Sheree’s had a baby. All she can remember is Sheree narrowing her eyes against her cigarette smoke, somewhere up here in the shops, belligerent in school uniform. Now Sheree has a daughter Madison, and a husband, has made up a family, just like that, out of nothing. Chloe stands wounded among the people, marvelling, horrified at what time can do.

  When Janey tells Chloe, Chloe just says ‘Oh.’ They’re in the back garden at Theo’s place. The summer air is close and still around them like a pressurised chamber.

  ‘I know,’ says Janey. ‘I guess, you know, statistically. The number I use, ‘I’d have to get a dud some time.’

  ‘Oh sheesh.’ Chloe really doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘I know.’ Janey’s knees are together, her hands folded around them like some kind of complicated lock.

  ‘What would you do if you were?’

  Janey’s face blanks out in thought, and she rocks gradually farther back until she’s staring up into the jacaranda. ‘God,’ she says. ‘I don’t— I hadn’t—’ She splutters into a laugh. ‘I mean, it’s ridiculous! Hard to imagine. I couldn’t, you know?’

  ‘What? Have it, or keep it?’

  But Janey shudders away from thinking about it. ‘I don’t know. Yeah. I’ve never—’

  ‘When will you know?’

  ‘Two weeks. I’ve got the kit, and it says, the day your period’s due.’

  ‘Don’t think about it until then, then.’ Theo, washing up in the kitchen, gives Chloe a sweet, inapp
ropriate smile through the window. ‘You never know, you might be lucky.’

  Janey nods, brooding. ‘I don’t know, I’ve just got a feeling …’

  She holds Chloe’s gaze. Chloe looks back a long moment and then suddenly shivers. ‘Don’t think about it. It’s too big; it’s too serious. You’re probably not, anyway.’

  It’s distressing how unpredictable the process is. Suddenly one conversation, not unlike many others before it, will call up clot after clot of memories that have to be cried out of her, like hairballs to be coughed up, like kidney stones to be passed, before she can go on. Some days she manages to split herself into grieving and non-grieving streams, and flow along with the non-grieving almost normally; others, the grieving bulges up painfully underneath, the fresh realisation that Janey is not coming back erupts and makes mess all through the normal, and she has to retire again, and hear people making excuses for her, through doors, on telephones.

  At first she was frightened that her whole life would be like this. Now, after barely two weeks, she begins to see that there will come a time when she’ll have control, when it will be possible for her to set aside time for the eruptions, or to hold them down until she has privacy, or to smother them entirely. The physical pain has seeped out of her limbs; the intensity of her senses is only an occasional affliction; her voice steadies, and her handwriting becomes her own again, or almost—something of its machine-like regularity has been lost. The intervals between collapses are lengthening, and a pattern is emerging in the way she copes with them; the strongest and most strengthening thing about them is that she knows they do not last forever. The grief is like a de-addictive drug; it weans her off itself; its demands grow less instead of greater; it stands aside and allows other demands—for food, or physical activity, or sleep—to take precedence. Chloe hates it for that, for its acquiescence in the face of life. And when the tears threaten she welcomes them, and feels a kind of manic clinging to the freshness of the grief; she replays things and dwells on them to bring the tears back, to reassure herself that she still can remember, still has the power to make the past present, even as that power begins to fade.

  ‘It’s not so much not wanting to look after a baby,’ says Janey out of the dark, ‘although I know I’d be hopeless at that; I’m just not that kind of … I just don’t think I could. Anyway, it’s more, when I think of Mum having anything to do with it, when I think of Nathan even in the same room—or my dad, him either. I just …’ Chloe can hear the sheets rustle as Janey squirms in the spare bed. ‘Something says no, you know? I’m not going to … bring it into … my kind of life. That has to stop with me. I mean, Nathan can go on and do what he wants, have kids—poor things. But I’m not going to. I’m going to stop the tradition, you know? You hear, you know, how “abused” people abuse their kids and I …’ Her voice drops almost to nothing. ‘I just wonder, is that something you could control? Like, is there any way I could be sure ‘I wouldn’t? Also,’ she adds after a long pause, ‘if I took it away to get away from my folks, I’d be taking it away from your folks, too, and I’d be taking me away from your folks. And you.’ She gets up on one elbow and looks across at Chloe. ‘I’d be scared to even visit, ‘cause of running into Nathan or something, and I just know, especially when you start uni, you won’t have time to come and visit me. You won’t forget me, but I won’t be able to fit in your life like I do now.’

  She lies back down and lets out a big sigh. ‘So the answer seems to be,’ she goes on doggedly, ‘that I just send it away, put it with safer and better parents than me, and parents who aren’t too weird about it, who’ll, like, let me have a look at it every now and again, who won’t pretend, you know, that it’s theirs, who’ll tell it, and let it visit me when it’s older.’

  ‘I don’t know if you can specify that, to the adoption people. Agencies, they have, don’t they? Terrible idea.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Janey shudders in agreement. ‘“Child number thirty thousand, you have been assigned to Couple forty-six QH seven. Please proceed to the pick-up area.” Well, I’ll find out, hey? Because that would be something I could stand to do.’

  All during Janey’s pregnancy, Chloe is exhausted. She naps in the library during free periods, head down on the desk, waking up at the bell with red impressions of her watch or her fingers or her notes across one cheek. Her eyelids are like badly propped-up blinds, always ready to snap shut.

  She’s falling somewhere with Janey, falling too fast towards a very hard surface. The only difference between them is that Janey doesn’t know they’re falling, and can’t be told. Janey is as happy as a pig in hors d’oeuvres. Janey is using sex the way some people use food or drugs, to console herself and to celebrate, for basic sustenance and for entertainment.

  It’s all right for Janey—she can sleep all day. But Chloe can only be watchdog for so many hours. The exams that are supposed to make or break her future hang at the end of the year like the Gates of Doom, and she’s sliding down a scree-covered mountainside towards them. Some nights she brings a book along with her, and reads a few paragraphs while Janey’s busy. It’s ludicrous; she’s frantic, constantly low-level frantic, just about the exams. Study time is like treasure, some of which she has to dole out reluctantly for sleep. Resentment shadows her whenever she goes with Janey, but someone has to go along, someone has to keep her out of trouble.

  Resentment is nothing; exam-related stress is nothing. What Chloe has to struggle to keep at bay is a sense of tragedy, breeding in her bones as if her marrow is making it along with the blood. She thinks of the baby and she cannot see how things can possibly work out. You should not be here, she groans to it, to herself, almost every day. You should not have come into existence. This was a bad move. And yet it does not give up; Janey grows and flourishes and is happier than Chloe has ever seen her, which seems, to Chloe, something to worry about and guard against—terrible, dangerous.

  Theo has tried sulking, and the first few times Chloe was flattered enough to fall for it and spend extra time with him. Now she is tired of the manipulation. ‘I thought I was the child and you were the grown-up!’ she yells at him, and goes, just goes, and he can lump it. The first time she does this, when she comes back he’s filled his bedroom with roses, scattered the bed with petals, and he makes love to her right there and then. She laughs, surprised, and gives in, but with the feeling that she oughtn’t to, that she’s falling for an old, old trick.

  ‘It’s not normally like this. I don’t know what else to do,’ she says the next night, at the wardrobe changing to go out and meet Janey. It is nearly midnight.

  ‘Well, it’s pretty clear where your first loyalty lies,’ he says in a deeply accusing tone. Just woken, he looks old and crabby, a humourless adult.

  She pulls on an overshirt, meets his eyes in the mirror. ‘This is wrong of me, to support my friend?’

  ‘It’s wrong of her, to expect it. You give up an enormous amount of time.’

  ‘But time is what I’ve got! Company is what I am!’ Chloe laughs helplessly.

  ‘I thought we were going to spend more time together—I thought that was our agreement. Now she needs you all the time—or so she says. Why doesn’t she just take responsibility for her own life, look after herself?’

  ‘It’s just safer, with the two of us. And I feel better if I go—about her, about the baby.’ She is aware of trying to make her voice soothing, resents the effort it requires. Just accept it, she thinks to him. Just take it on, why don’t you?

  He shifts position at the door. ‘Well, yes, this pregnancy’s very convenient, isn’t it? Just when it looked like she might lose you.’

  Chloe sighs. ‘What are you saying, Theo?’

  ‘I’m saying it’s a ploy.’

  ‘You’re saying she engineered a split condom?’

  ‘I’m saying there may be reasons why she decided to go through and have the baby, and your being away from here all the time might be one of them.’

  Chloe shakes her
head and smiles. ‘Janey’s not that … not that calculating.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’

  Chloe turns away from the mirror, scooping up her backsack from the bed. ‘Look, if you want to bitch about Janey, find someone else to bitch to, okay? I just hate the sound of it coming from you, coming from someone who’s always on about how much they care about me.’

  ‘How much he cares.’ Theo stops her with an arm across the doorway, and delivers a slow, sexy kiss. Chloe feels like hitting him. ‘You don’t have to be non-sexist with me. I’m a man.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She gives in and smiles—it’s quicker. ‘Well, take it like one, then.’ She ducks under his arm and leaves the house.

  ‘All the old videos with Janey in,’ says Chloe to Dane.

  Dane nods slowly. ‘For Eddie, you mean.’

  ‘I thought … By the time he’s old enough, there’ll be no sound, they’ll be all faded. I thought I’d take them to that place in town Carl uses, that puts videos onto CD, so it’ll be digital.’

  ‘Good idea. Right-o, I’ll give Carl a ring and he can bring around a VCR when he comes on Sunday.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Today she is raw; something has again stripped protective layers of habit from her eyes and mind. Everyday speech feels false in her mouth; she sees past it to the great cords that hold her to her father, to her whole family, the blood instinct they have for each other, their very for-ness for each other—and the goodness of this, of Dane’s and the others’ unspoken gladness that she’s alive, keeps her nearly on the point of tears.