Touching Earth Lightly (15 page)

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—

A crash of applause woke her, and she had to disguise a start as a princess-like shifting of position. Then the hero Emeric and his love Irma did their little to-and-fro, she pleading, he rabbiting on about his ‘noble purpose’, and Irma launched into her aria. In rehearsal the soprano had been conserving her voice and the song had seemed rather feeble; now, with the audience-animal crouched in the shadows, all attention, it rose like a tricky steel spiral staircase, and every note struck somewhere in Chloe’s frame, building some congestion of feeling towards the unbearable. Chloe tried to think of it as a purely technical exercise, a matter of the singer’s muscles and cords vibrating, of membranes fluttering and tiny bones knocking in her own ears. But the notes kept striking and speaking through all that, Irma’s pain finding the thinnest and most saddened fibres of Chloe—and there seemed to be so many of them all of a sudden. The air in the auditorium throbbed with Irma’s love, all cast aside, and the world, the universe, seemed frail and sad and full of pain.

Chloe, trying to stare out into the darkness in regal oblivion, saw a little white triangle of handkerchief being raised to someone’s eye, and her cage bars began to blur alarmingly. It would look
really
good if the spotlights picked up a tear trickling down the Ice Princess’s cheek—and there was no way she could dab them away. She wasn’t supposed to even blink. If only she’d
stop
, poor Irma, if only she didn’t
care so much
about losing him—didn’t she know she’d get him in the end? Any second now, someone in row 36H near the pillar would spot that the princess had a normal, human heart, an eighteen-year-old, suburban, milk-and-meat-and-fruit-and-veg-fed, beating, caring heart … Irma reached the high point of the aria, flinging her voice up pure and accurate as William Tell’s arrow, and Chloe’s scalp crept under the hair augmentations in amazement and distress. She thought there’d never been such a cruel art as this singing that dragged out your heart and hammered it to your sleeve where
anyone
could see—

Then the music and the voice released her, and she stared out into the applauding darkness. Irma became gradually clearer, collapsed below Emeric on the lower rim of Chloe’s vision, as the tears drained back into her head and the curtain, finally, swung across, closing off the second act.

‘I think we might have a hit on our hands,’ said one of the guards beside the frog cage. Chloe’s head sank back and she let out a puff of air.

She sat in the Green Room at interval and listened to some of the peasant-maid extras chatting. She felt drained; she thought about calling home, but she wanted to stay here, among untroubled people in outlandish costumes with flat, patently-not-Hungarian accents and worries about kids and cars and mortgages, as far from Emeric’s and Irma’s pain as a person could get. And Janey’s. She’d had a gutful of Janey. She was just
tired
, of being
dragged
, up and down, round and round, all over town. She was sick of the anxiety, she was sick of being on the run after Janey; she just wanted to sit still, to feel nothing. She wanted to be a tight-bodiced Ice Princess who cared about nothing and no one.

But as the curtains parted at the start of the third act, the dark tiered wall of seats made something fall like a domino against other dominoes in her brain. Of course! Janey hadn’t wanted to be with people, hadn’t wanted to talk. She would have gone to ground somewhere private, where no one would find her
except
Chloe …

Of
course
. Only the sudden, orchestrated shout of the chorus kept Chloe from scrambling up and running off then and there. Only this wafer-thin thing called professionalism kept her cool stare motionless mid-audience. Her muscles began to itch; she could
see
Janey curled up asleep, the tufty blonde hair twitching in the wind, the swollen pink eyes, the dark puddle of her clothing, her fists loosening. Would she have moved, these thirty-six hours? Would she have eaten? Chloe would go, the
minute
she was out of this corset and into her own clothes. She would
run
, the very
second
.

After the curtain calls she rushed down to Wardrobe, shrugged off the dress and tore the hairpieces from her head. She dressed and cold-creamed the heavy make-up off her face. She ducked and wove through ambling, gossiping cast members in the corridors, and burst out the stage door onto the cobbles, where already the principals’ fans were gathering. ‘Excuse me, can I just get through, please?’ she called politely, and heard the stiffness in her voice from the desire to swear at them and
push
them out of the way.

Then she heard her name called, saw Isaac moving around the back of the crowd to meet her. He must know something, have been sent to tell her—she angled through the last few people between them, waiting for the news to drop from his lips. It must be good news; he was smiling.

‘Sorry, are you in a rush to meet someone?’ he said, checking all around him.

‘I hope so. I’m going to look for Janey.’ She paused so that he could cut in with his news, but he only fell into swift step beside her across the cobbles, so she went on, ‘I just thought of somewhere I haven’t looked. You didn’t happen to bring your car, did you?’

‘Sorry. I didn’t feel like coping with the parking.’

Now that he couldn’t further her search, there was just their hurrying between them. ‘So, were you just passing by, Isaac, or—’

He ran a few steps to catch up with her as she overtook some dawdling opera patrons admiring the lights on the harbour. ‘Um, Chloe, are you aiming to catch a particular train?’

‘No, but I haven’t seen Janey since yesterday, and she was in really bad shape, and I think I know now where she might be. I just wish I could, you know,
teleport
myself there—all this one-foot-in-front-of-the-other business is …’ She growled and bared her teeth.

‘Why don’t we get a taxi?’ Isaac said gently.

‘I haven’t got the money.’

‘I have. Let’s get one from the quay, seeing’s we’re halfway there already.’

‘All right. Thanks.’

They hurried past more idling people, and under the railway to the quayside taxi rank. Isaac turned to her in the taxi as he shut the door. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Oh, home.’ Chloe wrestled with the seatbelt.

‘Newtown,’ he told the driver, then sat back. ‘Why didn’t you just ring and see if she was there?’

This didn’t seem to make sense. ‘Hmm?’

Isaac looked patient. ‘If you thought Janey would turn up at your place—’

‘Oh, no. Where I’m thinking about is walking distance from home, that’s all, and you can stop in and see Nick.’

‘Ah.’ Isaac looked out the window.

‘Sorry, were you going to go home now—to
your
home, I mean? I thought, when you said, “
Let’s
take a cab—’”

He shook his head. ‘I hadn’t decided what I was going to do—I was still sort of in twenty-second-century Hungary.’

Chloe frowned at him, mystified. ‘Oh, you mean you were in the
audience
?’

‘Why, did you think I was just loitering around the Opera House?’

‘Why not? It’s—architecturally it’s interesting, hey?’

‘I do have other interests besides architecture, in case you hadn’t noticed.’ He gave her what seemed to be a very pointed look, and she wondered whether he was commenting on her own narrowness.

‘So, um, Rachel didn’t come with you?’

‘Rachel? No.’ He peered out the windscreen through the front-seat headrest. ‘We’re not, actually, together any more.’

‘You broke up? That was quick.’

‘It was, it was very efficient,’ he said wryly, still looking ahead. He ran his thumb along the side of his jaw facing her, and she realised she was staring at him.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know about that.’

‘It’s okay.’

Chloe gripped the edge of the seat as the driver pulled up sharply at the lights. Why did taxi drivers always drive in this mad way, piling on the Gs—so they’d
seem
more hurried even though they actually took you the long way home?

‘Is she ill?’ said Isaac.

‘Janey?’

‘You said she was in bad shape.’

‘Less stable than usual. She usually has a low around now, but she was …’ How did you tell someone like Isaac the specifics of Janey’s life without sounding melodramatic? ‘She was upset. I haven’t seen her that upset for a while. She gets down, but not so that you really worry.’ Isaac had an unnerving habit of watching you and visibly digesting what you said. Chloe was used to people just coming straight back with something—a joke, or a nod to show they’d heard. ‘What?’ she said impatiently.

He didn’t answer. ‘Where do you think she’ll be, then?’

‘In a caryard we hide out in sometimes.’
When the moon’s full and Janey can’t think straight
. It sounded like something kids would do, playing hidey in the wrecks, practising smoking. Not the sort of kid Isaac had probably been. Chloe imagined him, much as he was now only smaller, sadly whacking a totem-tennis ball in the middle of a vast empty lawn. A maid in a ruffled apron approached from a distance with iced lemon squash on a tray … ‘So, did you cry?’ she asked.

‘Pardon?’

‘At the opera. Did you cry?’

‘Oh, buckets. Didn’t you hear me?’

‘Really? Did you?’

Isaac grinned. ‘You sound so surprised. No, I didn’t cry. I didn’t actually shed a tear,’ he qualified.

‘But they were there, ready?’ Chloe was delighted to hear it. ‘Whenabouts?’

‘Oh, when his girlfriend was at him to stay. Round about then—before she gave up and threw herself on the floor. And after the battle, when that little tenor was singing about all his dead friends.’

‘Yes, that’s pretty bad, too.’ She laughed with what she thought was fellow-feeling, and then felt silly. He was giving her that
look
again; she felt as if she were completely beside the point.

‘It didn’t look like you up there,’ he said, into her silence.

She shrugged, looked at her lap, found he was still waiting. ‘What can I say? It
was
.’

‘I had to keep—I had to remind myself it was you.’

She couldn’t read his eyes; reflections of the cold street-scape outside her window flowed across his glasses. He looked rather like a mechanical person inclining its head at her. She was sure she was supposed to be forming an answer; she had a vague feeling that in different circumstances her answer might even matter. She looked out the window—oh
God
, had they only gone
this
far? She sat back and folded her hands in her lap. Isaac’s and Rachel’s break-up scene began to play in her mind. She saw Isaac duck a piece of precious china. Smash! it went, against a designer-painted wall. Isaac straightened up and looked at Rachel, bewildered by such a display of
emotions
. Or maybe they reached their decision by mutual agreement, over the telephone, even—Chloe could see that, too; that would have been ‘very efficient’.

She sighed. Isaac looked at her. ‘So,’ she said, not wanting to have to explain the sigh. ‘Do you go to the opera often?’

‘Not very. I used to go with my uncle, pretty regularly, but then he moved away … I’ve been a few times, since …’ Abruptly he fell to examining the palms of his hands.

‘One day I’ll go myself, I reckon. You know, take a hanky, and pay, and sit there in the dark and listen to the music right through, all fresh, instead of just being relieved everyone got through it without falling on their faces.’
Stop
chattering,
Chloe
.

Isaac was nodding. ‘You should. It’s the silliest,
and
the grandest kind of entertain—it’s not even entertainment, really. It’s more a kind of—I find it, anyway—a kind of mass therapy.’

‘
Therapy
?’ Chloe bit her lips closed and stared at him. ‘Therapy for what?’ she asked more quietly.

‘Well, you know, it’s meant to—to affect you, isn’t it? It works on your emotions, it’s supposed to move you.’ He lifted some air from one knee to the other with his hands.

Chloe smiled. ‘You make it look like a kind of … a bulldozing operation or something.’

Isaac cocked his head. ‘Yeah, well, I guess it does take a bit of heavy machinery sometimes.’ He laughed a little, looking out his window. ‘For some of us, anyway.’

Did he mean himself? Could he mean her—was it some kind of hint? Did she need therapy? Chloe smiled non-committally and looked out the window, chewing her lip. Oh well, they were nearly home, anyway. Impatience began to attack her again. ‘I’ll come in with you,’ she said as the taxi turned into her street. ‘Janey might have turned up there, you never know.’

They stopped, and she got out as he paid. The taxi sped off up the quiet street. She started to thank him, but he interrupted. ‘Listen, this caryard—should you be going there on your own, in the middle of the night like this?’