Touching Earth Lightly (20 page)

At school, some days, Janey can’t hold on until evening. The news is muttered around the school, and eventually someone, usually Gemma’s friend Sophie, comes up to Chloe and says, ‘You should do something about that friend of yours. She’s gone in the boys’ toilets again.’

‘Why, she’s not hassling anyone, is she?’

‘It’s disgusting. She’s worse than a prostitute; she doesn’t even get paid.’ Sophie darts her head forward like a water bird spearing a fish, then pulls it back to see Chloe’s reaction.

But Chloe’s got a special face for Sophie and people like her. All she has to do is think ‘oyster’ and the face makes itself, mask-like and cool except for her left eyebrow, which slides up. ‘Maybe the boys should do something about themselves, if it’s so disgusting,’ she says very calmly. Or, ‘Never mind, Sophie, you’re not being forced to watch.’ And Sophie goes back to her friends and they all bitch together and throw Chloe dirty looks over their shoulders.

Small-minded people are like oysters, she thinks; they just lie in their shells going over and over their irritations until they’ve smoothed them into little pearls, little ‘wisdoms’. Crack the shell and squirt a little lemon juice on them, anything new, anything not ‘nice’, and they’re all shocked, squirming.

Janey slips into the first period after lunch a little bit late. Girls’ faces ice over; boys’ heads duck. Janey’s lips are very red and her eyes and skin are as bright as dew with sunlight on it. She
sits beside Chloe, and Chloe slides her book over to show Janey where they’re up to.

‘I just don’t understand what she was doing in a place like that. A wrecker’s yard, for heaven’s sake, in the middle of the night!’

‘We went there all the time, Mum.’ Chloe, lying on the couch, adjusts the cool, damp face-washer across her swollen eyes. She sounds as if she has a heavy cold, and feels deaf and stupid from crying. ‘It was kind of a hide-out of ours.’

‘A hide-out? What were you hiding from? Who?’

‘Nothing. Not that kind of a … just a place to go, that was ours.’ She feels Joy looking at her, not understanding. ‘Like a fort, or a cubby. And Janey would bring boys there, for the privacy.’

‘Well,’ Joy still sounds at a loss. ‘It was private, all right.’

‘But not great crowds of boys. And not big boys—just little, runty ones. She would’ve been safe if she’d just gone there with a rat-boy or two.’

‘A rat-boy or two,’ whispers Joy. Chloe feels her mother’s hand on her knee, heavy and firm. ‘I know this sounds like treason, but there are aspects of Janey’s existence that I will not miss.’ She gives a loud, wet sniff.

‘She was worth it,’ counters Chloe, coldly, because that is the only way she can get the words out. ‘I wouldn’t have gone along with it if she hadn’t been worth it.’

‘It’s not the going along with—it’s the going
away
!’ Joy bursts out. ‘I mean, out of hearing, even of
screams,
so that no one would hear and help, no one
could
hear. Don’t you see? Do you see what I’m—’

Chloe lies chilled by that voice skating out of its normal register. She looks out from under the washer. In her jeans and jumper, with her ponytail, Joy looks like a slim girl. Only her hands show her age, one on Chloe’s knee, one cupping her own face—shiny, loose-fleshed, the skin ringed and drawn with lines like a contour map.

And then Joy surprises her at it, with a look of pure anxiety, swimming through tears. ‘I mean, Janey I would
believe
wouldn’t think—I wouldn’t expect her to. But you …’

Chloe presses the washer to her eyes again.

Joy says unsteadily, ‘Do you see how you put yourselves out of—not in danger, so much, but just … out of range of help?’

‘Of
course
I see,’ Chloe groans out. ‘I
see
, okay? I
see
!’ The endless tears boil up again, stinging her eyes; Joy’s hand clamps her knee to the point of pain.

Chloe wakes up in the middle of the night
—
no, something wakes her up, a noise, or a smell suddenly strengthening. In a slab of moonlight Janey’s twisted sheet has been wrestled to the floor. The door hangs wide.

She hears the noise again, still unidentifiable. It’s coming from outside, through the window, not the door. She gets out of bed and goes downstairs as silently as she can, in a strong, high moonlight, like a heatless noon.

There’s no one in the back yard. The back door is open and Chloe, after peering out and seeing nothing, goes into the garden. There’s the noise again, and a whole lot of quieter ones; they come from the cubby-house in the peppercorn tree, where Nick has taken to sleeping, these summer nights. It sounds as if two people are trying to fight very quietly.

Chloe stands looking at the little house, which shakes just visibly, shivers travelling down the tresses of the branch it’s built on. She feels actually sick, trying not to imagine what’s going on inside. She had thought Janey might be able to just like her brothers, without having to jump on them.

Chloe is about to backtrack up to her room (where she would have lain, wide awake, full of bitter thoughts and trying not to listen), when Nick’s T-shirted shoulders show at the window, Janey’s hands linked behind his neck. He pulls them apart, and Chloe hears him say, ‘No. No. Absolutely not. Go back to your own bed.’

Janey laughs. ‘What? Not even a kiss?’

‘Not even a kiss. Go on.’

The little play-door opens. ‘Aw?’ says Janey.

‘Go on. Upstairs.’

‘You are so mean.’

‘Go on, before Clo wakes up.’

Chloe is standing in the middle of the yard, sagging with relief. ‘What the bleeding heck, Janey?’ She can be cool now. She can cope.

‘Oh, he’s …’ Janey appears, naked, and starts down the ladder. ‘He won’t do it,’ she says, jumping off the last step.

Chloe looks up at Nick, who leans in the doorway, running his hands through his hair. ‘Of course he won’t,’she says, as much to him as to Janey. Janey starts for the house. ‘What made you think
—
?’

‘Oh, I didn’t. I just thought if I took him by surprise …’ She turns back at the door. ‘I might have a chance, you know. But he’s too quick. He woke up.’ She stands there in the doorway. Her body is already a young woman’s
—
it curves, it leads the eye this way and that
—
while Chloe’s remains straight-up-and-down, a girl’s.

Chloe glances up at Nick again, and sees the tail end of something in his expression as he watches Janey. Chloe thinks,
If he hadn’t woken up so fast, if she’d gone a bit further—

He shrugs and grins at Chloe, then both doorways are dark. Chloe follows Janey into the house.

Carl says, ‘I couldn’t see why I should go on living. It seemed as if my whole point had been to care for him.’

‘And what is it now?’

Carl turns from the window. ‘What is what?’

‘Your whole point,’ says Chloe.

‘Oh. I don’t know if I’ve got words for it yet.’
He means there isn’t any point,
thinks Chloe in despair.
And it’s been a year, for him. He always looks so sad. How can the same face, the same bones and skin, look so radiant one year and so desolate the
next?
Her own skin feels sore, over the bones that refuse to ease her pain by dissolving out of existence.

He sits on the opposite bed. When he speaks it’s slowly and with some puzzlement. ‘My heart keeps on pumping, you know? Everything functions. Just to appreciate that functioning—every beat, every spark up here.’ He taps his head. ‘It seems the least I can do, somehow, not to take it for granted.’

Chloe listens, waiting for him to utter some lifeline phrase she can grab hold of. All this year she’s been wondering about Carl and Gus, unable to ask him,
Well, what’s it like for you now? And now?
Gus’s death has evaporated so quickly into something she can’t talk about, but that darkens the air around everyone when Carl visits. And now Janey’s makes this opening, this reopening, for Carl, and there is this impossibly painful, necessary kind of speech, heart to heart, injury to injury, part of the frightening, heightened super-consciousness that is like an illness in her, that is
afflicting
her.

He’s smiling at her. ‘But you’re not ready for this yet. It’s so early.’ He leans across and lays his hands on hers. ‘It does ease—I should tell you that. It doesn’t ever go away completely, what you’re knowing now, but it kind of grows into you. You carry it around with you without it hurting so badly.’

Chloe nods, not believing him, not seeing how it could possibly happen. ‘I just don’t understand—’ she says in a cold, cramped voice. She looks up and he makes a listening movement with his eyebrows.
Why I get to go on,
she meant to say, but it comes out as ‘Anything. Any of it, any more.’

‘I know. It changes the whole universe,’ he says. ‘It just destroys it in one hit and says, “Okay, go off and make a new one.” And we think, “But how—me?—without Gus, without Janey? Who will I come home and
tell
about it? Why should I
bother
?”’ He squeezes her hands tighter. ‘But you do—or you will do, when you’re ready.’

When Chloe gets home from school the next day, Nick is sitting studying at the dining room table. He checks behind her immediately

‘You’re safe. She’s at home doing some laundry.’

He looks relieved. ‘She’s dangerous, that girl.’

Behind him through the window Chloe can see the cubby-house door propped open, the curtains blowing out the open window. Nick glances out, too. ‘Couldn’t get the smell of her out of that room all night, and she was only in there about ten seconds. Enough to ruin my night’s sleep, I can tell you.’

‘I thought she might try it on you some time.’
Well, feared she might. Now that the fear’s been put to rest it’s possible to joke about it.
‘You’d be so convenient, eh? And she needs a nice, steady, tolerant man like you.’

He shrinks down into his notes. ‘God, she’d take over. I don’t think there’s enough of me. Truly,’ he adds, meeting Chloe’s eyes.