Touching Earth Lightly
Chloe hung up and wrote the address on an old cash register docket from her wallet. ‘They sound good. Sensible and kind and sympathetic.’ She pushed the docket into Janey’s hand, and a ten-dollar note. ‘That’s all I’ve got. If it costs more, she says they’ll pay it at the other end. There’ll be someone out on the footpath there, waiting for you, a woman called Janine.’
Janey pushed the papers into her pocket and stood as if she were standing all alone, not knowing what to do with herself, not even trying to decide. She looked vaguely out across the harbour.
‘Come on, I’ll get you a taxi.’ Chloe led her to the taxi rank, opened the car door for her. Janey stood nervelessly and stared in.
Chloe pulled the docket out of Janey’s pocket and gave it to the driver. ‘Can you take her to this address please? Someone will meet you with the fare.’
Janey returned her hug lifelessly, wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Take care, eh?’ said Chloe. ‘What’s more, let someone take care of you.’
Janey gave the slightest nod and slid into the taxi. She didn’t look out as she was driven away.
Chloe turned and ran, out along the quay and all along the endless walkway to the Opera House. Tourists had gathered in obstructive crowds, photographing each other, the city, the bridge and the Opera House in the morning sunshine. Chloe checked her watch every few metres and moaned to herself.
She ran straight down to Wardrobe. Magda looked at her own watch severely, then grinned. ‘It’s a good thing James’s car broke down on the freeway, isn’t it?’
Chloe’s shoulders sagged. ‘Isn’t it what.’
It was a horror rehearsal. Everything went wrong that could go wrong; every piece of equipment played up that could play up. One of the footmen stepped on the Ice Princess’s train and ripped the waist of her dress during her regal walk, and the glittering frog-shaped cage that was supposed to glide down and close like claws around her juddered and hesitated and finally stopped entirely. Such elaborate things had been done to Chloe’s head and hair that she wouldn’t have dared put a telephone handpiece in among it all, so she sat trapped for most of the day, worrying, wondering where and how Janey was, calming herself down and then feeling agitation bubble up again. The rehearsal didn’t help; she thought if James stopped the production one more time to nag at the principal singers or shout at the soldiers, she would throw her own tantrum, tear off the coronet and the hairpieces whose pins were boring holes in her skull and scream at him, ‘For God’s sake, just let the song finish!’ But of course she was being paid not to do exactly that. She must sit still and stare straight ahead into the empty theatre, and ignore the anger and frustration all around her.
Finally at about five-thirty she could shed costume and hairpieces and get to the phone. She was still in make-up, and she could see in the glass wall of the booth that in combination with her ordinary clothes and messed-up hair it made her look unhinged.
‘Oh, we were hoping you’d call back,’ said the woman at the Crisis Centre. ‘Your friend never arrived. Janine went out to wait about ten minutes after you rang and waited about three-quarters of an hour. We’ve kept an eye out through the window for her, but she hasn’t turned up. She must have changed her mind.’
Chloe put down the phone with a surge of irritation. She hadn’t got through to Janey, after all; what she’d thought was resignation was in fact resistance, closing Chloe’s sensible actions out, closing out the Rape Centre’s helpful women. Oh, God.
She stuck the phone card in again and called home. ‘It’s me. Has Janey shown up there?’ she asked Pete.
‘Nope,’ he said blankly.
‘Oh, bum! But it’s been hours,’ she added, thinking aloud.
‘Why, what’s up?’
‘I saw her this morning. She was really upset. I lined her up to see some counsellors but she didn’t get there; I thought she might’ve come there and waited to talk to Mum—oh, bum!’
‘Well, don’t worry. If she turns up, we can look after her.’
‘Yeah, I’m just worried she won’t.’
‘She might be at her new place.’
But she wasn’t. ‘No, love, I just checked,’ said Bette. ‘There’s only a young chap in there, says he’s her brother.’
‘Nathan. He shouldn’t be there. Janey doesn’t want him there. That’s why she hasn’t come home—she’s frightened of him. This is why she’s gone missing, because he beat her up this morning.’ She must sound as weird as she looked, spouting this melodramatic stuff. She couldn’t quite believe it was real after a day away in James’s futuristic-historic opera world. ‘Bette, can you get him out of there?’
‘Well, I’ll do what I can, love.’
‘Would you? And could you make sure he hasn’t got the photos of Janey’s little boy? They’re under the bedside table; I think that’s where she keeps them. I’ll come by on my way home, just in case she turns up there.’
On the train home, Chloe made a conscious effort to calm down. This wasn’t the first time she’d lost track of Janey, and every other time she’d turned up smiling on Chloe’s doorstep, or met her up at the shops with a hug, or called her from some peculiar place, Bondi or Wisemans Ferry or, that legendary time, Coffs Harbour. She had powers of recovery that always astounded Chloe. Just prepare to be astounded again, Chloe told herself, watching the night suburbs tramp slowly by, by turns ignoring and obsessively examining the memories of this morning’s train trip, with their atmosphere of emergency. Prepare to have to remind Janey about this morning, to point out that she’s got a right to charge Nathan with rape or sexual assault or just assault or whatever terrible thing it was. Prepare to say, ‘Look, I’ll stick with you if you want to go through with it. I’ll hold your hand. It has to be done, now that he’s too big and too dangerous for us to fend off by ourselves.’ Prepare to try and make her see sense.
Chloe’s own face scowled intently back at her from the cold black train window. She drew a big sigh and looked around. She envied all these newspaper- and magazine-equipped commuters —surely none of them had such a difficult task ahead of them.
Maybe she shouldn’t make Janey go through all that, all those legal hoops, all those words. Hadn’t she said this morning how much she hated all that counselling stuff? Wasn’t that what had sent her off course somewhere between Circular Quay and the Crisis Centre? Maybe she should just move again. Move right away from here. I could go with her, thought Chloe, defer for another year, maybe, while she gets settled, gets together a portfolio that’ll win her a place in a fine art course. We could go to another city, or perhaps to a country town—well, considering Janey’s habits perhaps the anonymity of a city would be best. Melbourne? Adelaide? Perth? Couldn’t get much farther away than Perth—
Chloe rubbed her face with both hands. Who was she fooling? Even Perth was only four or five hours away by plane. Nathan had said he’d always find her, and he was used to getting what he wanted. By themselves they couldn’t neutralise him, and she wasn’t going to spend her whole life running and hiding from him. And neither should Janey let him warp her life like that.
So in the end she didn’t know what to do—not long-term. For now she would just find her, and when she was sure she was safe they’d all work out some strategy, the way they always did. Chloe’s parents would be able to work out what choices existed, and lay out the possibilities so that Chloe felt coherent and sensible arguing their merits to Janey, and helping her act on them.
Everything will be all right, she told herself, standing up as the train began to slow for her station. Everything, opera and Janey both, will be all right. Everything will be all right.
The doors slid open and she stepped out into the night.
‘So Ken gave me a hand—wasn’t he a nasty piece of work, Ken?’
‘A right little thug.’ Ken’s whisky-tanned face set in disapproving lines over his teacup.
‘That poor girl, where can she be?’
‘I don’t know.’ Chloe couldn’
t imagine drinking the tea in front of her, but the steam felt nice on her face. She felt dry and worn out from the charged day. ‘Maybe she went back to my place—or her parents’, if she thought Nathan wouldn’t be there. Gee, I hope I haven’t stuffed that up for her—because that’s where he’ll go, eventually, now that he’s left here.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I feel like I just got everything wrong this morning—I could have gone with her in the end, it didn’t matter that I was late. An extra ten minutes and she would’ve been safe—it would’ve been worth being told off—’ She took a tiny scalding sip of tea and looked at Ken and Bette tiredly. ‘Sorry, I’m babbling on.’
‘Maybe the taxi company would know,’ said Bette.
‘That’s a thought,’ said Chloe. Bette motioned her to stay seated, and went to the wall phone. ‘It was a Centurion,’ said Chloe, and Ken reeled off the number by heart.
‘Pity she got her hair cut,’ Ken remarked as Bette talked. ‘They’d remember her for sure, all that hair.’
‘They would. But—’
Bette held up her hand, frowning and listening to the phone. ‘Heading for Newtown? Right, corner of Plaice and Tebbitt. And was she all right when he dropped her off?’ She listened for another few seconds. ‘Thank you—sorry, what was the driver’s number again, just in case?’ She wrote it on the phone pad, then hung up, tore off the page and handed it to Chloe. ‘That’s the driver—he says he remembers her because she was muttering to herself in the back all the way. She seemed very nervous, he says, very upset about something. And that’s where he dropped her, as far as the ten dollars went. Right by the park there.’
Chloe remembered Janey’s hand twitching in hers at the phone booth, Janey’s eyes rolling closed as she leaned her head against the glass. ‘And he just dumped her? But I told him the woman would meet him and pay the rest—’ The rape counsellor, she added to herself. Talking about Janey to other people, she always found herself leaving out half the story.
‘The police?’ Bette suggested.
‘They won’t do anything until she’s been gone twenty-four hours,’ said Chloe. ‘This happened once before—she was just out partying. But she wasn’t exactly in party mode when I put her in the taxi. Aak, I should’ve gone with her. I should’ve! I couldn’t’ve got back to work, mind you, without any money, but—’ She sank her face in her hands.
‘Don’t get yourself into a lather about it, love,’ said Ken. ‘She’s probably just walked back to her mum’s place and gone to bed.’
‘Well, that’s why I’m—that’s one of the things I’m worried about now, with Nathan going—probably there by now.’ Chloe finished her tea and dragged herself to her feet. ‘She might be at my place. I’ll go and check. Thanks for everything, Bette.’
‘Oh, the photos.’
‘You found them?’
‘They were right where you said. Fetch ’em out for me, Ken—behind the toaster. You take ’em with you, love—if she comes back tonight I’ll be straight in and tell her.’
At Chloe’s place her mum looked around from the TV news and shook her head.
‘Sheesh.’ Chloe threw her backsack and herself down on the couch opposite her.
‘Had a fun day, huh?’ said Joy. ‘You and me both.’
‘I didn’t think so many terrible things could happen in the one day.’ Chloe lay with her eyes closed, enjoying the cushioned couch—she felt as if this was the first time she hadn’t been physically uncomfortable all day. Her father was making dinner—she could hear something hissing in the wok, and Nick and Pete’s voices in the background. She could smell—what? Garlic frying, and the marinated meat. And it was warm in here, in the yellow lamplight, with the fire going and the newsreader calmly recounting disasters in faraway countries—Janey would have to want to come here, surely, rather than go to Bette’s or her parents’?
Her eyes opened as she remembered Janey absenting herself from her that morning—not just gliding away in the taxi but turning her face away, not responding, having to be practically pushed into the car. Earlier, even, in the train when Chloe had suggested going to see Joy—that’s when it had begun, that’s where Chloe had lost touch with her, or trust, or whatever the link was. That was where she’d started feeling annoyed at Janey’s refusals to see ways out, or ways to lessen the pain, where she’d started forcing the issue, bustling around her.
Her mother’s hand on her arm broke her free of these thoughts. ‘She always turns up,’ Joy said. ‘But you can’t make her turn up just by worrying about her.’
Chloe stared at the ceiling and nodded. She would turn up. Janey always turned up. Janey had looked after herself through many nasty situations—like her childhood, Chloe thought bitterly—and if Chloe had sat up all night worrying every time, she’d have missed out on a lot of sleep in the last six years.
That night she took off her boots and lay down in her clothes under the quilt, in case she had to leap up to telephone or door. Then she slept; if she were to be any use when Janey did turn up, sleep was the best thing for her.
A terrible stab of fear woke her. She sat up, shaking sleep out of her brain. It was a fresh morning, all soft sunlight and bird-noise and family padding about the house getting ready for the day.
Chloe tried to wash the feeling of alarm off her in the shower, but as she went downstairs she felt shimmery with too much adrenalin, and time kept gently stretching so that she could notice more details, then snapping tight unexpectedly so that she lost a swathe of seconds and had to reorient herself.
So she was suddenly in the kitchen, pouring her panic out to her father; then there were great vistas of seconds in which nothing happened except the steam curling up from the coffee in front of her; then she was babbling again, and Joy’s hands were tamping her down. ‘Okay, calm down now. We all know the drill, right?’ Then she was sitting at the table, rubbing her eyebrows as if the fear had gathered there and must be pushed out, while Joy, with a patience that Chloe found incredible, rang Janey’s mum, and Bette, and a counsellor across town to whom Janey had once actually, briefly listened.
‘Hospitals?’ said Chloe desperately, standing up.
Joy put her arms around her. ‘Not hospitals. We’ll be like the police, we’ll wait twenty-four hours. If she’s at a hospital she’ll be being looked after as well as possible. You go looking, the places you know; if you find her, call me at work. Be methodical; don’t panic; don’t make yourself late for tonight. If I don’t hear from you by the time I get home, I’ll call the police.’
Chloe held onto her, marvelling at her clearheadedness.
‘Remember, little honey—’ Joy held up Chloe’s head and peered into her eyes ‘—this is Janey we’re talking about.’
‘But it’s not her adventuring time of the month! And yesterday—she was so upset—and I let her down!’ The tears wouldn’t hold off any longer.
‘Clo, you did what you could. You did what I would have done, what you should have done. Do you hear me?’
Chloe nodded, weeping.
‘When she walks in the door, strangle the dear girl for me, will you?’ She held Chloe hard, then kissed her, pinched her cheek painfully and left for work.
Chloe was methodical. She went to the main street and in two long loops checked inside every likely shop and a lot of unlikely ones. Well, why not the button shop, for materials for a new project? Well, why not the second-hand furniture warehouse, for proper bookshelves, or a table, or a chair? She visited Bette’s twice. She paced out the park and the churchyard. The thought, ‘Maybe Janey’s left town’ slipped into her head, but after a desperate surge of cheer she acknowledged that it couldn’t be true. Janey didn’t have those kinds of resources, and besides, she’d never leave without calling or leaving a note—
—unless Chloe had let her down so badly she figured she didn’t care any more. ‘But I do, I do!’ she moaned among the crumbling stones. I was just in a rush. She doesn’t understand about work— She left the churchyard and her
own discomfort. She walked to the train station at last, casting her mind about town, trying to pick up some tremor of Janey somewhere, some extrasensory vibration.
From the station she rang the Rape Crisis Centre. She took a deep breath and rang Janey’s family. ‘No. Fuck off!’ said Nathan, and slammed down the phone. Chloe understood why a person might trash a phone booth, out of sheer uncontainable rage.
Shaking, she bought herself a book to read on the train, to stop her mind’s anxious circling. Have I done all I can do? she kept pausing and asking herself, checking over the possibilities; for the zillionth wishful time she imagined Janey arriving, tear-smirched but essentially undamaged, at Bette’s, at Chloe’s, slouching into her parents’ place, wandering confused through the streets after a night curled up on a park bench, putting together the pieces that would point her to safety. This spectral Janey walking Chloe’s mind was always the old Janey, dread-locked and gothic, black-garbed, white-skinned; neither she nor Janey had yet grown into the shorn blonde version.
And so it was that Chloe found herself, the hairpiece pins tweaking her scalp on one side, raised once more above Boscovicz’s lovers, but in front of twenty-eight hundred people this time, protected only by a series of curved, glittering bars. She had made her regal entrance, and her brain had stopped anxiously checking over what ought to be happening next, because now the production had picked itself up and begun to flow in a way no one could have imagined during rehearsal. Instead of James’s pernickety interruptions, a vast quiet attention buoyed the singers along, and bursts of applause, and laughter at Boscovicz’s textual jokes and some of James’s visual ones. Oh, it’s not going to be a horrible disaster after all, thought Chloe with surprise, and her relief played back over the last day and a half and convinced her that everything would be all right with Janey, too. Even now Janey was probably sitting at the kitchen table at home, laughing ruefully at the agonies she’d caused Chloe; even now she could be tucked up in her own bed at Bette’s, sated with milky tea and conversation—Bette would make sure she ate something, at least. As Mum said, worrying about her wouldn’t bring her one millimetre closer. You just had to wait for Janey—