Touching Earth Lightly

by Margo Lanagan

  When Chloe finally leaves her room, the rest of the house, its sameness, its difference, hurt. She chooses a time when no one else is in, but then the house’s stillness is an offence, and the murmurous city outside a worse one. She sits racked on the edge of the couch coming to terms with the front window, how the bars cut the clouds into rectangles, how ivy is beginning to invade the light.

  She goes into the kitchen. That’s why she came downstairs, because she was hungry. She stands at the door. On the calendar, ‘Dane—dental appt’ is written in for Saturday morning. Beyond the white bench-tops the table leads away down the bright room, its chairs placed neatly along each side.

  She once overheard Isaac and Nick talking about chairs, about how a chair more than any other piece of furniture suggested an adult human body, drew attention to that body’s absence. For Chloe, every item here refers to absences: the kitchen knife handles imply hands, right down to the finger ridges; the bare benches suggest preparation, ghostly Nicks buttering toast, ghostly Dads chopping salad ingredients; the spokes of the dishwasher imply stacked glasses and plates, meal after meal of them. If you followed the implications far enough, the whole family and all its friends and all its lives would unfold out of them, without any person actually being here, speaking, doing anything.

  Isaac’s photo-cards are still pinned to the noticeboard. Chloe leans towards one experimentally. Isaac shows off the artificial landform with a showman-like sweep of the arm, as if he were personally responsible for it; his long clown-face beams. It’s bearable.

  Chloe creeps to the fridge and opens it. Outlandish things sit on all the shelves: egg cartons like ported spaceships, a silver box of cream cheese (why silver, for cheese?), a row of magic pots in the door-rack—mustards, capers, pesto sauce, Tabasco. Trapped flavours—none of it makes sense.

  She’s eating only enough to keep actual pain at bay these days, and still her bony body feels heavy, and hard to move around. In the end she closes the door and takes an apple from the bowl. She can’t quite come at eating it straight; she fetches a knife and a board and cuts it into quarters, cores and peels it.

  When she’s eaten it she feels very full, and exhausted. She goes upstairs to her room, to its sick-room fustiness, its banked-up warmth, its darkened window. She lies down and lets sleep claim her again.

  She asks Dane, ‘Is it child sexual abuse if the child doesn’t really mind the sex?’ They are shelling peas—the pods crack, the peas zip out and patter into the colander. Crack, zip, patter. Crack, zip, patter.

  He says yes, straight away, then gives her one of those looks that says, Confess all, now.

  ‘Not me,’ she says, ‘but someone my age.’

  ‘You can only mean one person.’ He gives a big sigh and goes back to shelling. After a pause he says squeamishly, ‘Is it someone who’s … got something over her? Like, a teacher taking advantage of her?’

  ‘It’s her father, and Nathan—but he’s under age too, so I guess that doesn’t count,’ Chloe says flatly.

  ‘Holy Manoly, Clo!’ He stares at her, a pea-pod in his hand.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you know? For sure?’

  ‘Well, she’s told me. I haven’t actually gone round and got a—a statutory declaration from them! But they started making it really, you know, obvious that they wanted … I mean, not just leaving those centrefolds lying around, and perving on her in the shower and hinting … ’ God, that stuff gives me the heebs, Janey said.

  ‘Jesus.’ Dane cracks the pod and rolls a pea between his forefinger and thumb. ‘How does she feel about it?’

  ‘Anyway, she says if she meets them halfway sometimes, they might not hassle her so badly the rest of the time. She might get a say in things.’

  ‘How does she figure that? How can she possibly think—’ He goes back very efficiently to the peas, then breaks out, ‘I mean, her father’s old enough to know what he’s— Oh Christ, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’ He shakes his head and goes on shelling. ‘Then again, Janey’s a funny girl. She’s got a pretty good imagination. This might be something she’s dreamed up to—I don’t know—to make her life seem more dramatic or something, not what’s actually happened, hey?’

  ‘It could be,’ Chloe says. But she can tell the difference between Janey ‘dreaming something up’ and confiding that she’s actually done it. Thinking of Janey relating the details, Chloe feels the hairs rising on the back of her neck. Janey’s done it. It wasn’t so bad, Janey said, staring doubtfully into her memory.

  But because Dane, seems upset about the whole thing (well, Chloe is, too, or she wouldn’t have brought it up), and so relieved to think it’s just one of Janey’s stories, Chloe goes along with him. She even feels a little bit of misplaced relief herself—before wondering why she should, before realising how upset she must have been, and that she isn’t as cool as she thought. She falls silent, in the uncomfortable knowledge that her silence protects Dane and herself protects not Janey, but Nathan and Janey’s father. She doesn’t ask, as she intended, whether there is someone official she ought to inform, if anything should go wrong.

  But, Janey’s confident nothing will go wrong. She seems to think she’s solved all her problems by making this happen on her own terms. How can Chloe tell whether she has or not? She doesn’t have the right, she feels, to do more than stand to one side, her knees wobbling with indecision, her face scrunched up with doubt. She can’t see how it can be good, in any way—nothing involving that jerk of a brother of Janey’s, that father whose eyes never look straight at you, can be okay. While Janey goes blithely on, Chloe follows a step behind, laden with foreboding. That seems to be their way.

  ‘I went around and had a talk with Janey’s mum today,’ says Joy.

  ‘She talked?’ Chloe nearly chokes on her coffee. She puts the mug down on the dining table.

  ‘Hmm. I asked her about a funeral. She said they’re not having one. I think it’s because they don’t know how to organise one, what you do.’

  ‘They don’t want to spend the money,’ suggests Chloe. ‘They don’t think she’s worth the bother.’

  ‘Well, they may not have the money. And I don’t think they are in any way religious. Anyway, they went up to Teak & Son, who did what they call a—a “burn and scatter”.’ Joy touches her forehead. ‘She kept saying this—“burn and scatter”—like some kind of spell …’

  ‘What do you mean, did?’ Chloe feels a hardening inside her chest. ‘What do you mean?’

  Joy comes from the kitchen and sits opposite, confronting Chloe’s filling eyes with her clear ones. ‘I mean, they’ve cremated her, and scattered her ashes. They have a place for it, Mrs Knott says, a garden, for if you don’t want an actual plot, or a chamber in the wall.’

  ‘Did they go? Why didn’t they tell us? I should’ve gone! What do they—?’

  ‘Nobody went.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Chloe puts her head down on the table. ‘That’s so awful! I hate them! I hate those useless, vicious—rapist, bloody—I mean, what kind of a family—!’ She sits up and digs in a pocket for a tissue. ‘Not even a plaque somewhere?’ Joy shakes her head. Chloe breathes, ‘God, that sucks so badly. We should have a big, public funeral, TV cameras, flowers, you know? An—an oration.’ She stares through the kitchen wall, trying to hear the oration, seeing the right kind of upright, white-frocked reverend person mouthing, and Janey in the casket bleached by the white satin, the lace pillow, her scalp and belly stitched up neatly after the autopsy, her eyelids closed. ‘It’s like she never was. They should be ashamed.’

  ‘Well, maybe they are. I couldn’t tell—the men kind of melted into the shadows, you know the way they do,’ says Joy. ‘And Mrs Knott was just … blank. Well, she didn’t know what to do with Janey when she was alive, so why should she be any clearer on it now?’

  Chloe picks up her coffee with shaking hands, the damp tissues in a ball on the table. Behind Joy the garden is spiky with spring bulbs, battalions of long
green blades forcing up through the lawn.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Joy, her eyes on Chloe unseeing. ‘Such sad, botched people. I don’t know.’

  Janey, bored, flings back her hair. ‘Like, when is something going to happen?’

  Chloe has been steadily working through their Year 11 homework. ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit less happening, actually.’

  Janey goes on as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘Like, when are we going to get our big break?’

  ‘What, it’s guaranteed we’re going to get one?’ Finally Chloe looks up.

  ‘Course it is. People of our talent and looks—my talent, your looks,’ she adds with a wicked glance at Chloe.

  ‘Well, thanks. That’s why it’s our big break, right? Together we make up one gifted, gorgeous person.’

  Chloe knows the courts, the ‘justice system’, will never come up with the kind of justice she wants. They won’t go back and undo the crime. She doesn’t even want them to bother. What they should do is come to her and say, Tell us the truth about her. What was she like? What have we lost here?’ We’ being—Chloe doesn’t know—the community, the nation, the species, the world? How can we best commemorate her? She wants them to at least ask, to offer a school, an art gallery, a research centre to be named after Janey, even a park, even a monument in a park, even a little plaque somewhere.

  Instead, the police call. They’ve ‘apprehended five juveniles’—four ‘males’ and one ‘female’. The youngest ‘male’ is the weakest, and he’s dobbed the others in, and there’s a kind of shopping list of charges that have been laid. In three weeks’ time there will be a preliminary hearing.

  It’s bewildering, all this activity of people who never knew Janey. They appear to be meddling with thick, clumsy fingers, with big, blunt tools, in an area of Chloe’s life where the slightest touch makes everything teeter and crumble. They appear to have no idea what they are dealing with. Even Joy, explaining the system to Nick, seems to be one of them, in league with these file-shufflers and warders, satisfied to leave the matter in their hands.

  Whereas Chloe knows that the only justice would be in howling revenge, in herself riding down the juveniles and laying about her with a great, gleaming battle-axe. As long as those rat-kids are protected from the force of her fury, the right price hasn’t been exacted. It seems to be no progress at all to swap old-fashioned retribution for this cool, rational apprehension, detention, laying of charges. It just strips Chloe of basic rights, takes from her hands the only power she wants to wield, the power to make good the damage, the power to do.

  On the beach at Terrigal, all Chloe’s family are doing their own thing—-Joy and Dane slobbing on towels with newspapers, Nick and Pete bodysurfing, Chloe resting after a surf. Janey is down on the damper, harder sand, drawing a long, wobbly line with a stick. Chloe can almost see thoughts falling away from Janey, her self disappearing down the stick into the line. She watches for as long as she can hold herself back, then gets up to go and have a snoop.

  ‘There, who’s that?’ Janey says, and sniffs at the profile on the sand.

  ‘Pete.’

  ‘It’s in his eyes, isn’t it? You’ve all got this chin and nose, but he’s got those little worried eyes, bless him.’

  She starts drawing again. ‘So who’d this be? I won’t do the hair and make it too easy for you.’

  ‘Nick. It’s the eyebrows.’

  ‘Like swallows’ wings,’ Janey sings lightly. She really is a bit stuck on Nick, Chloe thinks. Or does she just pretend to be, for her own amusement? ‘Yours are the same, but lighter, so they’re not so noticeable. Here’s you.’

  The line is thick and bobbled with sand, but the profile is still hers—she remembers it from the cornrow days. ‘You see?’ says Janey. ‘You’ve got Dane’s eyes and then your mum’s nose and chin like the others. Now Dane’s nose … see? Got that curve to it, like a real handle.’

  ‘You remember that guy at the Show, who cuts people’s silhouettes out of paper?’ She is trying to distract herself from the eerie feeling Janey’s drawing gives her.

  ‘Yeah, I could make a fortune,’ says Janey, drawing on. ‘Here, whose bloody … mountain range is this?’

  ‘Isaac. Even without the glasses. Put the glasses on; he looks naked without them.’

  ‘He is. Have you noticed? It’s like that story where the guy says, “Put your glasses back on; I don’t want anyone else to see how beautiful you are.” Doe eyes. Yum.’

  ‘Yeah? I haven’t seen …’ Chloe frowns, trying to remember. She thinks there might be something wrong with her—if she doesn’t notice half of what Janey notices, does that make her half-witted?

  ‘Because you don’t look. Because you don’t want to see, don’t want to find anyone attractive, after the beauteous Theo. Gaak. Here’s your mum.’

  ‘Gee, you must spend a lot of time looking at us. I never would have spotted that, about us all having Mum’s nose and chin, but it is, isn’t it? Exactly the same.’

  ‘You don’t have to notice—you’re one of you. You can take it all for granted.’

  ‘You’re one of us too, except in name.’ Chloe puts an arm around her. Janey is warm underneath an outer, sea-cold layer.

  ‘Except in name and something else, I don’t know, that’ll never cross over. Not something I mind, just …’

  ‘Draw you.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t.’ She starts a caricature of herself, with goggling eyes and hair in electrocuted spikes.

  ‘Oh, you.’ Chloe bumps her with a hip and Janey staggers, laughing, into the foaming shallows.

  ‘I can’t. I don’t spend time staring at myself, like some people.’

  Chloe tosses her hair in a ‘vain’ way and wades into the water, sarong and wraparound blouse and all, trying to look like a supermodel, or a sea goddess, maybe. Janey follows, climbing through the waves like a drowning crow, her wet, dark clothes dragging, her purple shirt clinging to the swimsuit lines and nipples, her hair blowing stiff out the side of her head.

  It’s a week since it happened. This seems a short time to sift through inner-city crowds and narrow the possibilities down to just five people. Then again, that night—it’s a lifetime ago, a world away, a quite different world, almost a fantasy world, a Narnia that Chloe can never get back to. Even when she’s plotted all the possible ways around it, the thing ends up done, the killing. It sits in history like a rock in a stream, and the water won’t flow backwards and dislodge it.

  Chloe passes Nick’s room, glancing in. Isaac has just arrived and is in there shaking his coat off. He’s had a haircut, a close one, the hair hardly more than a shadow on his scalp. There’s no disguising how the bones of his head fit together.

  Nick has just swivelled around from the computer but the two of them haven’t spoken yet. Both glance out at Chloe, guarded.

  She’s lost for the right greeting. You’ve done a Janey, she almost says of the haircut.

  She passes on without saying anything, hears the silence in the room behind her—are they making some face at each other? It was just a bit unexpected, that’s all, seeing him for the first time since the night—and all composed again, and with the hair. It’s something that will take a while to go away from between them.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ says Janey quickly. They’re on the train into town, and she looks out at the sunlit terrace roofs rushing past.

  ‘Why, what’s—?’

  ‘You don’t wanna know, let me tell you.’

  She gives Chloe a look, but Chloe won’t be shielded like this. ‘So Nathan—’

  ‘Nathan isn’t the problem. I’m bigger than Nathan. It’s Dad who’s built like a … like a …’ Janey jerks her head back dismissively and turns back to the scenery. The Newtown tunnel momentarily swallows them.

  ‘Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?’ says Chloe, with an awkward laugh.

  ‘I don’t know. Are we?’ Janey flashes her eyebrows coldly.

  Chloe realises she is
hugging herself, pressing her fingers to her lips, then to her forehead, as her mother does when she’s worried and thinking hard. The doors hiss open at Newtown station; people stump in; the seats wheeze. Finally she says fearfully, ‘Does he hurt you?’ The question hangs there, soft, foolish. Of course he—

  ‘Not if I do what I’m told.’ The flicker of expression in Janey’s eyes is instantly shuttered over.

  ‘How often does he—does it happen?’

  Janey looks at her. Chloe feels the force, as if Janey’s spread hand covered her face, pushing her away. She has never felt so useless, so frivolous, so out of her depth. The very most she can do is not take offence.

  She sits back and makes herself stare at the back of someone’s head, as the train picks up speed gliding out of the station.

  She dreams a visit to the morgue. She’s amazed they can work in this dim bluish light, the sort of light she imagines is inside the fridge when the door’s shut. The morgue attendants have something like a computerised meat-slicer, like the ones used in delis to cut ham whisper-thin. They have already done most of Janey’s head. Chloe recognises the chin. The dreadlocks lie all about.

  The attendant pulls back the slicer. A slice of head lies on her gloved hand like a very fine, very intricate doily. ‘You see, we’ve got the cortex at the back here.’ She indicates a focal point of tightly packed, glowing threads.

  ‘She’s so unusual,’ the other attendant breathes.

  Janey is wearing the clothes she used to wear to school—jeans and a windcheater. Chloe has time to wonder whether the clothing will snag on the slicer, before she wakes.

  Chloe is amazed and horrified at how life goes on, and how everyone seems to think that this going-on is a good thing. Each day moves past like one pulse among many, too strong to be paused or disrupted, the flow of lives too insistent to stop or turn aside. It’s an outrage, that Janey has ceased and they’re all dragged on headlong, claimed by the future, that Janey’s future has given up on her like some feeble teacher sending her to the principal’s office, who simply can’t cope with her, or won’t. It’s an outrage that Janey’s dying hasn’t brought the whole thing to a halt as it has brought Chloe, frozen in realisation, as death and loss become real, exploding from the poems and pop songs in which she thought they belonged. The days—grey, ordinary, lifeless days—continue to chug past, accumulating between Chloe and Janey, forcing them farther and farther apart.