Joy sighs, uncrosses her legs, puts her mug down. ‘I keep thinking about that little girl who got kidnapped a few years ago. Six years old, she rides her bicycle down to the shop and someone takes her on the way. Remember that? And everyone went crook at her mother, but the mother said, “Well, you’ve got to let go of them sometime; you’ve got to give them some responsibility.” I mean, we are talking about an eighteen-year-old here, technically an adult. And still, I feel …’ She covers her mouth with her palm.
‘Hindsight,’ says Dane. ‘And besides, you weren’t Janey’s mother.’
‘Oh, I know that. I’m just wondering—you know, I drive myself crazy—where was the gap, where was the moment, where we should have said … I don’t know, more, or done … whatever it took, you know? To avert it.’
‘There wasn’t one,’ says Dane firmly. ‘D’you hear me, Joy? There was no gap. We did whatever we thought was best, at whatever time—you too, Clo. I’ve watched you two helping Janey cope with life for years. I won’t let you go guilt-tripping over this! There was only so much we could do, and we did it.’
I could have gone to the Rape Centre. I could have taken her to work with me. I could have kept her in my sights. Chloe knows; Chloe is tired of knowing; her guilt is worn down to a nub of tired knowledge.
Joy smiles at Dane. ‘I don’t know that you can stop us, actually.’
‘Any more than we could stop Janey going exactly where she chose to go. I rest my case.’
‘I love you for trying.’ She rests her head briefly on his shoulder. ‘The fact remains, though: we failed her.’
‘We did,’ says Chloe.
‘We failed you, too,’ says Joy, giving her a clear-eyed look. ‘We just went along, you know? Obviously, it’s not enough just to hope things will turn out right, to be wishful, to think, “Well, Chloe’s a sensible person, she’ll find her way.” You have to be active. You have to … take steps.’
‘You have to hedge your kids about with fears about the worst things that could possibly happen to them?’ says Dane. ‘I’m telling you, this was just bad luck as much as anything, Joy.’
‘Yes, but there are ways, of … of staying the hand of luck; there are ways of—’
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 o
f 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.
‘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 gu
ess 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!’