Touching Earth Lightly

  Chloe minds the house while the others go off camping. She has an essay to write. Janey stays with her, to get away from her family. She’s quite big by now; she glows, she fills the house with her sharp, hot smell.

  On the Saturday night she brings a boy home, a boy with a voice like a startled Doberman’s. Chloe sits up writing—she writes best on coffee between eleven-thirty and two in the morning—and through the fiddle and mutter of the radio she hears Janey bring him to barking in the lounge room below, over and over.

  Late in the morning Chloe wakes up and goes downstairs. Janey’s smell fills the lower part of the house like trapped smoke. The barking boy is gone (Chloe checks that the video and the CD player are still in place), and Janey lies asleep wrapped in a blanket on one of the couches. Chloe pauses.

  Janey doesn’t look childlike, as most sleeping people do. Her face is serene and adult; without her smile her cheeks aren’t round. Her body is like a child’s, though, not in its shape but in the way it has dropped hot into sleep, unconscious where she fell. Chloe can feel that radiant heat on her face. One of Janey’s arms is flung up, the fingers tangled in her hair, which spreads like wheel-spokes across the couch cushion.

  Chloe goes into the kitchen and starts making coffee and toast. She opens one of the dining-room doors, and feels the inside air being pulled loose by the outside. She finds out-of-season strawberries in the fridge and starts washing them.

  When she turns off the tap, Janey is at the doorway, in hastily-pulled-on clothes that make her look more naked than she did naked. Her face looks round now, puffy with sleep; she sniffs and bats hair-ropes off her face. They look at each other, which is their greeting. It’s as if the remaining part of Chloe’s self has appeared, and she doesn’t have to say hello to that.

  Janey hoists herself onto a stool at the kitchen counter. ‘Finish your essay?’

  Chloe puts coffee in front of her, and the strawberries. ‘Need you ask.’

  ‘Hope we didn’t, you know …’ That was what she really wanted to say.

  Chloe gives her the gleaming look she wants. ‘What have you done with him—buried him in the back yard?’

  ‘He had to go. He works in a bakery. Isn’t that cute? A baker’s boy.’

  Chloe considers a few bun-in-the-oven jokes, but she feels too serene, too Sunday-morning still.

  Janey bites off a strawberry, lays the green bit neatly on the counter and shifts on her seat. ‘This stool and counter weren’t made with pregnant people in mind.’

  ‘They weren’t—Mum was past all that. Want to sit at the table?’ Chloe doesn’t move, and Janey wrinkles her nose and takes another strawberry.

  ‘I won’t give in to it yet. I’m still in denial.’ She grins and bites, the berry a spot of colour in her white face.

  ‘Boy, you’re persistent,’ murmurs Chloe. She feels strange about this baby sometimes, as if it’s hers, and Janey’s just carrying it for her, like a handbag or a book she doesn’t have enough hands for at the moment. She feels hovering and anxious about it; maybe it’s the absence or ignorance of its father that gives her this stake. But it’s also curiosity, and even a kind of envy, although she knows the child is an unwise move for Janey, senses the disaster it might bring.

  She sees how arbitrary the accident was, that took Janey and left her, a matter of timing and slips in someone’s concentration (Janey’s? the juveniles’? God’s?), and the wrong constellation of people and fluids. Circumstances have conspired against Janey’s staying alive, and she can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t conspire against her too, at any time—except that she’s been warned, and now she’ll stay here among these people and not move, in such a crowd of family and friends that the lightning can’t single her out.

  ‘I’m losing you, aren’t I?’ says Theo. Chloe, showered, neatly inserted into bed next to him, feels herself shrink inside. She can say nothing.

  He turns over, a laboured, sighing turn, gathering her up in one arm.

  ‘It’s not entirely up to me,’ she ventures.

  ‘No, well, I suppose your life isn’t entirely in your own—’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean, you can decide, too, how much you’ll put up with. If you can wait, I will have more time once the baby’s born.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’

  ‘Janey’s going to adopt it out.’ It’s something they’ve discussed and weighed and agonised over at length, but here and now it sounds like a reckless, impulsive decision, the decision of children in their ignorance.

  ‘Yeah? Believe that when I see it.’

  ‘Well …’ It throws her, the bitterness in his voice. ‘Well, I guess it’s up to you whether you stick around long enough to see it.’ She tries to sound gentle, reasonable, but somehow she keeps choosing the wrong words.

  ‘Me “stick around”! Listen, I’ve been sticking around! It’s you who’s been flitting off every time the phone rings.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m saying this is going to be a fact of life until November. If you can’t hack it, we should split up. If you can wait, there’s a good chance—’ She makes a special effort to soften her voice. ‘—that things will get better.’

  He looks at her, half-risen over him. The darkness is nearly complete—she sees him as much by his warmth and breathing as by his shadow against the pillow. ‘You’re just not giving an inch, are you?’ he says.

  ‘I am!’ she says wildly. ‘I’m giving a whole lot of inches!’ and she starts to cry out a tremendous rage, a heart-splitting, brain-stopping rage at her own confusion, exhaustion, ignorance, her inability to keep tabs on this slippery thing, this relationship, to hold it to her will.

  Behind her he lies silent, until her weeping eases a little. ‘Yes. Just not to me,’ he says, and turns away.

  His snide tone dries up her tears at the source. She lies staring, amazed to find herself here, lying beside this rounded back. Clearly, she is supposed to grovel. Plead. Promise. She gets out of the bed, a hysterical laugh of astonishment in her throat.

  She discovers she has left all her belongings in neat clumps around the house, as if she were only ever a guest. She goes out into the night like a bag lady, carrying everything she owns, and slowly, stopping often to rearrange her load, struggles home.

  Pete stands at her door. ‘I’ve got something to go in the chest.’

  It’s in an unmarked envelope, sealed conspicuously with brown packing tape. She takes it and looks at it front and back and then at him.

  ‘It’s for Eddie,’ he says pointedly. ‘Will you put it with the other things?’

  ‘Sure.’ The window-seat box is open. She could toss the envelope in from where she sits, but you don’t toss such things. She gets up and puts it in, then sits down to labelling photographs again.

  When Pete’s gone she finishes a label, fixes it to the back of a print and starts another. Then Pete’s envelope burns a hole in her concentration. It’s packed tightly, almost too tight to close; there are more than two or three sheets in there. She has heard the printer going in Nick’s room; on her way to the bathroom she saw Pete hunched over the sheets that were emerging, close-printed both sides.

  She doesn’t like this, she realises. She doesn’t like not knowing. She doesn’t like the fact that the envelope’s sealed with packing tape, although she has to admit with shame that a normal seal wouldn’t have withstood her curiosity. And what does he know about Janey that’s such a big secret, that Chloe doesn’t know, that he doesn’t want Chloe to know? What’s being kept from her? She stares at the envelope lying in the chest, unpleasant possibilities multiplying in her head.

  In the middle of Chloe’s HSC trials Janey lumbers from her home to the Hunters’, ‘God free me from the House of Mould!’ she cries, bursting in on Chloe and throwing a stuffed backpack on the spare bed. ‘Oh, you’re working. ‘

  ‘Yeah, for an exam. Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Poor chook. I’ll have a bath, then. Have you got any tea-tree oil? I’ve
got thrush practically up to the back teeth!’

  ‘In the cabinet.’

  ‘Oh, you guys are so organised—I love it!’

  After the bath Janey lies on the bed in a borrowed Nick T-shirt and clean underpants. Chloe finishes note-taking and swivels around to face her. They consider each other.

  ‘Can I stay here a while?’ says Janey.

  ‘Your dad?’ Janey nods. Chloe regards her for a long moment. ‘You mean until the baby comes.’

  ‘Yeah. Would that be a big problem?’

  ‘Nothing we can’t handle.’ Chloe grins briefly.

  ‘Sorry.’ Janey falls onto her back. ‘It’s not like I’m not feeling like sex. It’s just, all the other things are building up, this great lump, the thrush driving me nuts. I’m in the bath half the day.’

  ‘I thought you fixed that.’

  ‘It came back. It always comes back. You know, I get a week clear. And then it’s my veins, or the stretch marks. Itch, itch, itch. So many different itches, that old sex-itch seems like nothing! This was such a bad idea.’ She laughs at the ceiling, and sighs, and closes her eyes. ‘It’s so quiet here,’ she says dreamily, ‘and so clean.’

  Chloe fetches the bottle of apricot kernel oil from the bathroom. ‘Here.’

  Janey opens her eyes. ‘Babe, you are a true babe,’ she says, shifting over and hitching up Nick’s T-shirt to expose her belly. Chloe is used to the cruel red stripes the baby has drawn out of Janey’s white flesh, but still catches her breath sympathetically.

  ‘You know what I remind myself of?’ Janey says comfortably as Chloe spreads the oil and starts rubbing it in. ‘I keep thinking it’s a “caldera”, but that’s probably the wrong word. That bulge volcanoes get when they’re just about to blow—does that have a name? You know, and the earth cracks up all around, like cakes do in the oven at my place. Don’t you think it makes more sense for a baby to pop out your navel than down below? I mean, that’s the whole direction of the thing—out.’

  Chloe absently runs a finger along one of the stretch marks, and Janey flinches. ‘Hurt when you touch ‘em, itch when you don’t. I tell you, you can’t win.’

  ‘Only a month more to go.’

  Janey groans.

  The things Chloe can see, that she doesn’t want to see. She can see how her time with Janey, already receding, is beginning to gather a kind of glow to itself, is beginning to be suffused, like grown-ups’ memories of school life, with a golden late-afternoon glow, poignant and beautiful, but dimming, dimming fast. She can feel it when she looks at photos of Janey—each has become heavily significant, Janey’s ever-youthfulness, Chloe’s youth to which Janey is consigned, peeping out unsuspectingly, with a laugh. Even the bad photos, clumsily framed or blurred or catching some peculiar in-between-expressions expression, ones you would discard if she were alive, threaten to take on this glow, this preciousness. Now Chloe has to work to keep that golden light at bay, to remind herself that Janey’s life was real, and changed from week to week as her own life changes now, that it trailed loose ends, that it was as smelly as a ripe cheese, that often it seemed to be lumbering out of control to nowhere.

  Janey’s dying has thrown a cloak of tragedy over her life, giving everything she ever said or did a significant ring, an edge of portent, a kind of unwitting courage it didn’t have at the time. Chloe hates that, doesn’t want Janey to be noble and dead. She wants her to be live and rude and drawing disapproving glances on the street. She keeps falling into pits of Janey-absence, now that she has time, now that she’s never interrupted, never dragged out of her cave to knock Janey’s demons on the head (so lightly, so easily—why didn’t she do it properly, that last time?). She sees that it’s possible, as it didn’t seem possible three weeks ago, that these absences will become less frequent, that people she doesn’t even know yet will meet her and come close and partly fill them. Still, she can’t imagine life without this weight on her heart, subduing her laughter, urging caution in all things. There is a dark wound in her where Janey was cut off, and it never quite closes, it sours everything, slows everything, bleeds mystery and sadness. However far ahead she looks, she can’t see a time when it will seal up completely and be gone.

  ‘Is it okay with you guys if Janey stays here until the baby comes?‘

  Joy and Dane look at each other across the dining-table. ‘I thought you wanted to be free of distractions during the trials,’ says Joy.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. But she’s being … harassed at home.‘

  They check with each other again, then look at her without speaking.

  ‘Look,’ she says, going to the cupboard for a glass, ‘I can hack it, if you can. Can you?’

  ‘Well …’ says Dane. ‘We usually do.’ Chloe hears only the doubt in his voice

  Joy adds, ‘Are you asking because you want us to say no? Because we will if you want us to.’

  Chloe turns from the tap. ‘It’s just, a whole month, and probably more—I thought I ought to check, that’s all.’ Her parents stare, and their astonishment makes her hear the loud, impatient tone in her voice. She gulps water.

  ‘It’s not just any old month, though,’ says Joy cautiously.

  ‘That’s why I’m checking, because I won’t be able to take the full load, of keeping her company. Someone else’ll have to sort of step in … every now and again, you see?’

  There’s a long, awkward pause. They may not say yes, Chloe realises, surprised.

  Dane stops rasping his fingers in his beard. ‘I just think … with the exams, with a baby in the house—’

  ‘I didn’t say after the baby—’

  ‘No, but that’s what it’ll turn into.’

  Chloe acknowledges it with a grimace.

  ‘What I think …’ Dane goes on evenly. ‘There are actual, formal, refuges … staffed by people who are trained to take on people like Janey.’

  There are no other people like Janey.

  Dane catches Chloe’s mutinous look. ‘People in Janey’s type of situation. We’re talking a very serious time in your life, and a very serious time in Janey’s. We’re not talking “full load” here, we’re talking …’ He chops out a large piece of the air with his hands, trying to capture the word.

  ‘Overload,’ says Joy, squinting out at Chloe from under her hand, that shades her eyes from the downlight. ‘Overload good and proper. You can’t cram with a baby in the house, Clo.’

  ‘Then I’ll cram in the library. Or I’ll work hard enough now that I won’t have to cram.’ She slumps over the kitchen counter. ‘Don’t you see,’ she says flatly, hopelessly, ‘I can’t go upstairs and tell Janey to go to a refuge.’

  ‘You may have to, Chloe love,’ says Joy.

  Chloe raises her head. A tear squeezes out of one eye and she pushes it away with hair and sleeve. ‘Would you put your feet down?’ she asks them, feeling curious more than anything.

  Their eyes slide off her to the door, and Chloe knows who has silently arrived there. She puts her forehead on the counter.

  ‘I’ll be good,’ says Janey, almost in a whisper. ‘I’ll be quiet. I know Cole’s exams are important.’

  Chloe looks up. Janey’s face is white and delicate among the black-straggling flames of hair, her arms wound round each other down over her belly, as if to hide it. Pity and anger, love and loyalty swell and strive inside Chloe, ravel and tighten. She can’t do what any of them want her to do.

  Suddenly out of the knot escapes a single clear thought. ‘I just don’t see,’ she says to her mother, ‘how we can say yes, we’ll be there for the birth but no, not before, and not after either.’

  ‘I didn’t—’ starts Janey. ‘I wouldn’t expect—’

  Chloe stops her with a wave, her eyes on Joy. The air almost creaks with her parents’ doubt.

  Joy looks at Dane. ‘Let’s sleep on this one. Okay?’

  He nods.

  ‘Okay?’ Joy checks with Chloe and Janey.

  They nod dumbly. Chloe yearns to be asleep
, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, thinking nothing. ‘Come on, Janey. We’ll sleep on it, too.’ She leads the way upstairs.

  It’s just a matter of handing the numbered videos over, Chloe thinks, and paying money, and coming back later to collect the discs.

  But when she picks them up, the bright-eyed man behind the counter says, ‘We cleaned up the sound on the first couple; it was already starting to break up.’

  ‘Yes, I guess it would’ve—’

  ‘I’ll show you.’ He has the disc out of the sleeve and in the player on the counter. ‘It’s come up well; I think you’ll be pleased.’

  Chloe’s Hawaiian-theme twelfth birthday party is on the screen, the back yard a mess of balloons and streamers. Pete lairs in past the camera. Chloe’s friends dance (she did have more friends then, she realises with a shock), their parents’ conversation murmurs off to one side; she hears Gus’s high-pitched laugh for the first time in more than a year. As she’s recovering from that, Janey idles into the picture wearing pink swimmers, a pink-and-orange-flower-splashed sarong and a crepe-paper lei, and carrying a glass of fruit punch. She sees the camera, raises her glass pretend-drunkenly and staggers out of frame, then pops back in with a bright wave.

  ‘Having a good time, Janey?’ Dane’s voice says loudly behind the camera.

  ‘Lovely crisp sound,’ says the shop-man, startling Chloe.

  ‘Absho-lutely!’ hoots Janey.

  ‘There was a bit of a buzz of distortion there. We can clean that sort of thing off now.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ says Chloe dazedly.

  He ejects the disc and slides it into a slick snap-lock bag with the others. ‘Two copies—if you have any problems, come straight back.’

  She pays and walks out of the shop. Then her body forgets how to breathe. A row of square sandstone pillars supports the skyscraper above her, and she slows, and leans against one.

  Janey lives, on screen, with her smooth and slightly wispy dark hair, her wide smile, her hooting giggle. Chloe remembers that party, remembers agonising over the guest list, closely supervising Dane as he compiled the party tapes from old vinyl LPs, splitting strawberries for the rims of the glasses while Joy assembled the satays. She remembers how it ended—late at night, Chloe dancing with Dane, Janey with Pete, Mum with Isaac, Carl with Gus, out on the lawn with the Hawaiian music twanging and swooning all around them.