Touching Earth Lightly

by Margo Lanagan

  It’s frightening how easily those few frames—that lovely crisp sound with the years cleaned off it—reconstitute that lost time, that gone time. It’s all there, in her head, in her skin, attached to hair-triggers ready to blow at any second and eject her from normal life, make her fall against the nearest solid thing, while Janey’s good cheer, her childhood laughing, her oblivious happy faces, and Gus’s revived laughter, gust around like dead leaves on the dirty wind.

  Chloe stands there, the shiny shopping-bag of history in one hand, breathing deeply, seeing no one and nothing, hearing only the absence underneath, behind, above everything.

  When she reads, Janey reads fast and reads everything: textbooks, catalogues, novels and poetry, newspapers from front to back—certain classified ads included. She sits scowling over them on the spare bed while Chloe studies. They are both like people on an eating binge, stuffing in words. They move just enough to keep the blood on course to various limbs, or to reach the packet of toffee Brazil nuts; sometimes Janey gets up and makes tea, or instant soup, or sandwiches. ‘Oh gee, thanks,’ Chloe says. She hasn’t even seen her go out. Janey stands beside her reading her essay draft. She is the one person Chloe doesn’t mind doing that. She says, ‘Look at your writing. It’s so neat, like a machine pumped it out. Look, pages and pages.’ ‘Not enough pages,’ Chloe says gloomily, but Janey’s right, and Chloe likes the look of her own words too. ‘You’ll get there,’ Janey says, perfectly confident, and wanders back to her reading.

  For Janey’s ninth month Chloe’s time is split exactly in four. As long as she keeps moving every few hours, from study to Janey to sleep to school, as long as she keeps the momentum up, she’s all right. If she stops to think about how much is being crammed into her days, or what is happening, or what might happen, she seizes up with anxiety, with the ringing of giant questions in her head, useless questions like, What are we all going to do?

  Coming downstairs late one night for a coffee to finish an essay on, she finds Isaac in the lounge room with books and notes spread out on the coffee table in front of him. Nick is clashing mugs in the kitchen.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, passing Isaac. It’s perhaps weeks since they last spoke.

  ‘How are things with you?’ It would be rude to walk on, but it isn’t so much that that stops her as a feeling that the voice came not only from across the table but also from inside herself somewhere, it’s pitched so differently from the other voices she’s used to hearing. He really wants to know.

  ‘Things are all right,’ she says too quickly.

  He watches her—expectantly, she feels—as if I’m lying and he’s waiting for me to admit it. She tries out ‘Why wouldn’t things be fine?’ in her head, and is shocked by how cocky, how false the words sound. Then she’s angry, because he’s seen her shock from the outside and those glasses of his, which make his eyes look so tiny, also seem to make their vision more acute. ‘How about you?’ she says instead, realising she’s never asked him this before.

  ‘Me? Fine, too.’ He’s performing the same shutting-out manoeuvre as she did, only more gently and pointedly.

  ‘Good,’ she says, and suddenly she laughs, at the bland conversation and the complications it covers, and he smiles back, with an understanding that makes her laugh all the more.

  ‘Nick said to me, the day after, “I just never thought before, it never occurred to me, this is it, this is all, this life is all we get! Why didn’t I ever think!” ’ Pete does a perfect freaked-Nick imitation, and Chloe has to smile.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I had this idea, that I didn’t realise I had, I just assumed that we’d talk about it afterwards, Janey and me, like we talk about—talked—about everything. “Did you see what they did to me? And what about the expression on that cop’s face? Boy, I guess that showed everyone, hey?” All that. It’s so easy to imagine—I’m still expecting it, in a way. I dream it all the time. Good old chats we have,’ she finishes bitterly. ‘Do I sound mad?’ Tears stinging in her eyes.

  ‘No! No. That must be what dreams are for, hey.’

  ‘You mean dreams are the afterlife?’ She thinks about it. ‘So nightmares are hell and my talks with Janey are Paradise, and we get both without even having to die. Which leaves open the question, where is she now?’

  ‘I think, maybe … she isn’t.’

  ‘Very delicately put.’ Chloe’s snort of laughter turns wet and Pete passes her the tissue box. ‘Ah, God, tears again. Mop, mop, blow, blow.’

  ‘Just think, though, if there was this talking-it-over time afterwards—like, we all sit around with our lives and, I don’t know, score them—will she wait sixty years for you to die? And then, if she does—well, how would you compare, you know, her eighteen years and your—what?—seventy-eight?’

  ‘I can just see the look she’d give me as I hobbled through the gates. Like, “Jesus, Cole, you went and turned into an old!’ Or she might have expected it; she might have been watching all along …’

  ‘Or do the years in between kind of disappear,’ suggests Pete, ‘and we all have perfect understanding of each other, whatever age we are, whatever we’ve done?’

  ‘But that would take away the whole point—I mean, when I talk my life over with Janey I want to talk like we talk here, you know—hearing things wrong, getting the giggles, trying out ideas before they’re properly thought out, hearing her reactions, interrupting …’

  ‘You might not even remember that kind of conversation when you’re seventy-eight,’ Pete suggests.

  Chloe’s shocked. ‘You think?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Do I? Do you know?’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘It just sounds awful, you know,’ says Chloe. ‘You see someone and—blinngg!—perfect understanding. It sounds so quick. I mean, how’s that going to fill eternity? … I mean, I can imagine having an endless conversation with Janey—I can see the point of that, but

  ‘But blinging you can’t come at?’

  ‘Well, bling and then what? Or is it an endless wonderful bling, or a sort of frozen moment? Or is there no bling and we all just float around communing with God? He’s never sounded like much fun. It’s a—it could be a problem, this afterlife business,’ she finishes with a laugh. It’s pointless—she’s stuck here, not knowing anything.

  Pete says, after another thoughtful pause, ‘People reckon they can feel dead people’s … presences.’

  ‘We-ell. Feel the absence, maybe. And then, know the person so well, and know so exactly the sort of thing they’d say, or the sort of opinion they’d hold in that situation, that they convince themselves the person’s there. Which is fair enough, I guess—you console yourself any way you can. Some people fool themselves that poor old dead so-and-so’s keeping an eye on them. I mean, can you imagine Janey just serenely watching! Wouldn’t she butt in, wouldn’t she blab on, out on the sidelines there?’ Pete’s laughing. ‘You wouldn’t be able to shut her up. So if she’s some kind of serene spirit, GOOD FOR YOU,’ Chloe calls to the ceiling. ‘But I liked the old Janey, the earthly one. She was the one I hung around with, she’s the one I really miss.’

  Eddie is born in the night—or early morning: 2.16 a.m. Chloe sees Janey change before her very eyes. First, she goes inward, thoughtful, emerging now and then to make a joke. By the time they go to the hospital the jokes have stopped; Joy drives, and in the back seat Chloe, the lid firmly on her own anxieties, sits with Janey trying to read the labour from her face as squares of street light flow over it. At the worst, Janey climbs Chloe’s arm with a frightened yowl, terrifying her with her weight and distress, the unstoppable pains, the fear of them getting so much worse.

  At the hospital, which is all white wall panels and silver hardware, noise seems to attack Janey from the inside and burst out of her. There is a sequence to it: terrified swearing, a kind of bull’s bellow, and then a falling back, weakly whimpering, ‘I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You can.’ Joy pulls Janey’s so
dden dreadlocks back and twists them into a temporary knot. ‘You’re doing it.’

  Chloe watches her mother and follows her lead—soothes and murmurs, holds on. She isn’t able to smile, to say after each contraction, ‘Good. You’re doing a great job, Janey, because she doesn’t know; she thinks possibly Janey’s bellowing herself to death, but obviously not if Joys so calm. In a pause between contractions she looks down at her own reddened hands, at her arms scored by Janey’s fingernails and the ridges of veins winding across the finger tendons. Her hands look strong, and worked, and they are nothing to the muscles working in Janey, the system forcing the contents of that great stretched belly out through … out through …

  Chloe had mentally shrunk from the idea of seeing, of having to focus on Janey’s nether end. Looking up from the birth books Janey had said with relish, ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous, waters breaking, fluids and shit—like, shit, the real thing.’ And Chloe had gargled with embarrassment.

  Now all that seems too silly to think about. After each rearing pain the crouched midwife wipes Janey, somewhere out of sight at the back of the birthing chair. And there are the parts Chloe feared, reflecting up from a mirror—strange, grey-purple, half-screened by sproinging black hairs, but not disgusting. In this part of the world nothing is disgusting, nothing like that, nothing bodily. Chloe is freed of such disgust; she will never be able to think like that again.

  Eddie arrives purple and white after four hours of the very worst. He spills out of Janey before Chloe’s astonished eyes, and is instantly commandeered, his face working around a tube sucking fluid from his mouth, his wet shuddering body in the midwifes rubber-gloved hands. Janey struggles in the chair and yelps, ‘Fuck off. Leave him alone!’ and Chloe almost cheers her, almost sees the connection rear up from the baby and strike into her. Janey grabs him, and wraps herself around him, sweaty T-shirt and wet-ringleting hair and all, while her bottom half, all splayed legs and wound and purple cord, hangs and bleeds like some other body quite separate from Janey’s, its work done. ‘Get the fuck out of here, all of you!’ she commands, in a low, venomous voice. ‘Not you—she spares Chloe’s arm a claw. Just get these buggers in masks out of my fanny, will you?’ And Joy laughs! and Chloe, overpowered by the baby’s pinking face, by his lips, tiny lips, opening upon a real if tiny mouth, by his eyelids coming unstuck and by expressions crossing his face as fast as water, as fast as air, can’t stop crying, tears she can see over, tears of terror and relief that well up inside her and pour automatically down her face.

  Chloe hardly knew what to think when the date for the hearing was set, but as the time comes closer she feels more and more that she has a duty to go, to hear what there is to be heard in such a place, at such a time.

  She wants to go on her own—maybe she can hold herself together to listen calmly if she’s just a single anonymous figure in the public gallery—but Dane and Joy won’t hear of it, and Isaac thinks he ought to come too, at least for the start of the hearing, and now Nick and Pete say they will, so she’s condemned to sob in the middle of her family instead.

  So it’s come to this, the courtroom buried in a windowless slab of a building. Chloe sits dazed and dismayed and watches the play of the lawyers, the defendants, the witnesses. The court procedure is long-winded, to the point where Chloe wonders if it is some kind of endurance test, for witnesses and relatives alike. This will take days, she realises, when it should be so simple—they did it and should die, slowly and painfully. Everyone has their time to speak—except Janey, her time being over, gone, finished, her ration run out.

  The procedure seems to ignore somehow the enormity of what’s being talked about. It’s a search, persistent, thoroughgoing, methodical, for a thin single line of fact to walk among the scrappy rememberings of the five defendants. Chloe realises, with an almost audible ping! of insight and disappointment, that it doesn’t want what she wants. It wants to remain utterly impersonal; it doesn’t want to know that this was Janey who was lost; it doesn’t want to be swayed by Chloe’s tears, Chloe’s loss, Chloe’s friendship. It wants to separate out the different strands of criminal behaviour on that night, pin them to the correct culprit, and match them with punishments deemed appropriate by law in previous, similar cases. It’s so limited, so insufficient, for all its length and complication! It’s a cruelty and an insult to the people who knew Janey. The truth is so much bigger than the facts; the reality has so many more permutations than the law. Chloe is glad, now, that there’s a decent-sized pack of them here, proclaiming Janey’s value, not just one weeping teenager. It’s their presence here that holds the meaning for Chloe, that is the point; the trial in front of her is so far off the mark she hardly knows why everyone’s bothering.

  When she looks at the defendants, sitting down the front with the prison officers and lawyers, looking bored, she can feel her mind straining to believe they did what they did. They are all so small, so hunched, so inconsequential-looking—how could they have overpowered Janey? At first she doesn’t even feel anger towards them, just this brain-bending puzzlement. Then, as their stories start to contradict each other and collapse under questioning, and it becomes clear that they’ve said anything they thought might save their skins, Chloe’s contempt deepens to a point where it tries to lock her throat closed, where she must consciously stiffen her limbs to stop them shaking. She wanted these people in some way to be worthy of Janey, but it’s clearer with every word of evidence that they have no idea what they did, what manner of person they removed.

  As the events are related, the monotonous words bloom in Chloe’s mind almost too quickly and vividly, like time-lapse photographed flowers. She can hear, as no one else can, Janey’s failing attempts at cockiness, at brashness; she can hear her pretending everything is normal, fun. And then Janey founders; the puzzlement in the defendants’ testimony shows Chloe how badly. Janey raves and weeps and begs, and doesn’t notice how their puzzlement curdles into anger. Janey can’t stop talking, trying to tell them, about Nathan, about how terrible her life is. They can’t stop shouting back at her, advancing on her, threatening and then carrying out their threats. None of this ‘shuts her up’; she seems to ‘go crazy’; she keeps getting up and ‘coming back for more’; she won’t stop talking; she won’t stop crying. Everybody is deeply drunk; no one is having any fun any more. Finally the girl and the biggest boy—not very big, Chloe notes—climb down and find that cam shaft, the one there on the table, lobed like a sculpture, dense now with significance, like some kind of ceremonial object. They find it, they climb up the cars with it, and it only takes one stroke from behind to silence Janey at last. Then they all—this is astonishing more than anything else that has gone before—they crawl into various cars, and sleep.

  This is like having dead cells scrubbed off a burn; Chloe sees all the good that time has been doing her, as it’s clawed away and made raw again. Janey’s last minutes were so much worse than she’d imagined, because her imaginings were imaginings, were all provisional, could easily be wrong. Janey might have had a wonderful last night, and only hit her head falling; these people might be quite blameless! But the moments they tell of were the real moments, of which there is only one possible version—these boys raped and beat Janey, this girl ridiculed her, together they brought about her end. This is the whole truth of it; they are arguing merely over who did what, and in what order. The deed remains the same. Determined not to sob aloud, Chloe sits blinded by tears, her teeth clamped, vibrating in pain.

  There is a morning break, and then another for lunch. Outside, the spring wind blows litter, grit and danger, unpredictable gusts of it. People inch and sidle from the courthouse door; Chloe is led. She stands shrinking and numb in sunshine misplaced from another day, swayed by the wind on the precipitous steps.

  Some person’s hand is under her elbow, their arm around her, some bright, precious person of her family squinting in the sunlight. Nick, it is—how he’s grown, that he would help her like this, that he would put aside t
heir years of squabbling, for her in her helplessness.

  At the bottom of the steps he hands her to Dane, as if this is some kind of progressive dance. Everything has an aura around it; the paving stones float in the light like great squared loves; Isaac’s coat-edge fizzes with it; his glasses as he talks to Joy catch it and shoot it into Chloe’s eyes—dazzling, hesitant lines.

  No one addresses her. They murmur among themselves. Nick and Isaac have to go now, just up the road to the university. After their subdued goodbyes, at the last moment Isaac turns to Chloe and puts his arms around her, and a big ugly sob catches in her throat and begins to choke her. As he gives her back to Dane, she glimpses her tears in long dashes down Isaac’s coat, strokes of silver beads.

  ‘I thought—what I saw—what Isaac and I found—was terrible, but it was nothing! Everything had been done by then, done a whole night before! They were the terrible things, not her body—that was nothing. Seeing her lying there was nothing.’

  They can’t sit close enough to the fire. They can’t ever be warm enough. The hearing is adjourned for the day, and evening has greyed everything out. They huddle, Dane and Chloe with Joy across from them, clasping tea mugs, their eyes on the orange flames, seemingly the only live thing in the world.

  ‘It’s all terrible,’ says Dane through his teeth. His arm around her, he rubs the same spot on her shoulder, irregularly, to the rhythm of his distress, until it begins to feel raw. ‘How terrible, it doesn’t matter, the degrees. It’s all bloody terrible, everything about it.’