Touching Earth Lightly (16 page)

‘Well, hopefully I
won’t
be on my own.’ Chloe kicked her gate open and ran up the steps, opened the door. Joy was reading on the couch. ‘She come back?’ Chloe asked her.

‘No.’

‘Any news? Phone calls?’

Joy shook her head.

‘Okay, I’m going looking. Is Nick in? Good, ’cause Isaac’s here. He’s been opera-ing too.’

Isaac stuck his head in. ‘Hullo, Joy. Actually, I think I might go too.’

Chloe blinked. ‘Oh.’

‘You’d rather I didn’t,’ he said.

‘It’s just—I don’t know what kind of state Janey’ll be in, that’s all. Like, you know,
clothed
, sane …’

‘So you might need help with her, right?’

‘No. Maybe. Probably not.’ Chloe looked at Joy.

‘I, for one, would be delighted if you went, Isaac,’ said Joy. ‘Thank you for taking the trouble.’

Chloe rolled her eyes at both of them and went down the steps. She heard Isaac say ‘See you later’ and the door close. Then the gate.

‘You’re sure you don’t want to stop here and chat with Nick?’

‘No, I’ll come with you.’

‘Oh well, I can check at her parents’ place if I’ve got you.’

‘You can?’ He gave her a puzzled look.

‘Come on.’ She ran into the shadow-clotted darkness, Isaac following.

Janey’s house looked abandoned, the door agape. Then a television shifted some of the darkness in the back room, and Chloe felt a familiar clench of nervousness. She pushed past Nathan’s bike and some piled newspapers, through the smell of man-sweat and damp and ingrained dirt towards the light. Isaac followed close behind her.

Janey’s dad looked up, heaved himself out of his chair and swayed, a black head and torso over work pants that appeared to flap in the TV light. He bellowed, ‘Yeah! You! You’d show your face, would you?’

‘I’ll check her room,’ Chloe muttered to Isaac, and stepped over a two-bar radiator and a pile of laundry to the far door, her mind ready to reel with relief at seeing Janey, the old black-draggle-haired Janey, asleep on her mattress-on-milk-crates, the room the way it used to be, lined with her drawings, her mobiles bobbing overhead.

‘And who the hell are you?’ Janey’s dad roared at Isaac.

‘I’m a friend of Janey’s,’ Isaac said firmly. ‘My name’s Isaac Goldman. You must be Mr Knott. How d’you do.’

But the bed was empty, stripped; the mattress and pillow looked as if they’d been rescued from a rubbish skip. The walls and ceiling were stripped, too, and cloudy with mould. Two large cockroaches sat on the far wall, waving their antennae
nervously. ‘Nope,’ she said, switching all her hopes to the caryard. In the raw light before she flicked it off she saw that Isaac had seen the room, and had never before seen anything like that room. He was all but reeling. Behind him Janey’s dad stood with his mouth hanging open, immobilised by Isaac’s politeness, his hand still stuck out from being shaken.

‘Come chargin’ in ’ere like she owns the place,’ Janey’s mum complained, standing in the kitchen doorway with a pair of tongs in her hand. ‘Bringin’ strange men.’

Halfway back down the front hall Chloe rapped on a closed door. ‘Have you seen Janey, Nath?’ she called out, and strained to hear through the television-yammer.

‘Fuckun’
leave me alone
!’ came Nathan’s faint voice.

‘An’—an’ you can tell ’er from me!’ yelled Janey’s dad, rooted to the floor in the lounge room, waving an arm in the upper shadows. ‘I’ll tan her bloody hide, when I see her. Tell ’er she’s not too old to take me belt to, the trouble she’s caused ’er mother!’

Outside Chloe snorted. ‘What’s he talking about? Her mother hasn’t bothered with her for the last four years.’ She started running.

‘Christ, Chloe,’ said Isaac, catching up, ‘was that Janey’s
home
? How did she—how does she—?’

‘I’m not sure. I’m not sure about the answer to any of those questions.’

They ran down car-lined streets, through fitfully lit back alleys. Dogs came alive all around; Chloe and Isaac could have been traced by the dog-panic that rippled out from them. The Alsatians guarding the spring factory ran along their wire fence, eyes, teeth and saliva flashing, and pressed and bayed in a pack in the corner.

‘This looks like some kind of bombed-out castle,’ panted Isaac as Chloe crawled through into the caryard.

‘It is. A castle of bombs.’ Chloe’s voice was tinny and constricted inside a wreck. ‘Stay with me—it’s easy to get lost.’

Their breath and movements rasped in the close spaces they crawled through, car bodies and cavities between them,
floors that were roofs, wheeled underbodies tilted against the pressing, yellow clouds. Then they could stand, and Chloe started calling Janey’s name as they ran from roof to roof with loud
thunks
and
scrups,
among the stilled rats and engines.

Chloe looked up and stopped running, and stopped calling. Isaac arrived beside her, and took hold of her elbow, and was breathing hard above her right ear. Where they both looked, high above, where the breeze blew, something like white pin-feathers riffled and stopped, riffled again.

‘She hasn’t heard us,’ Chloe said, and her voice cracked unexpectedly, so she said nothing more, but pulled away from Isaac and began to climb—slowly, as loudly as possible, so that Janey would wake up, and turn over, and laugh and say,
You took your time,
or
G’day, Cole,
or
Omigod, Zack! Let me get some clothes on
—whatever.

The stack of cars was not as usual. Chloe passed a crusted splatter of vomit, an empty whisky bottle, bent beer cans, cigarette butts by the score. All up the stack tiny cubes of broken glass, white, brown and green, some gummed together by bottle labels, slipped and scraped under her feet and hands, glittered at her eyes. A swollen tampon, not Janey’s brand, hung from a rear-vision mirror like a little lamp, trembling as she passed. Chloe climbed with a weight inside her, a wrecking ball that she must not let swing, a brimming iron cauldron she must not let spill. She held her lower lip hard between her teeth, and the top lip glued down to it, as she worked her way.
Maybe, maybe. Maybe we’ll be lucky. If we’re lucky, just this time, I’ll never, I’ll always
—

The cold breeze swirled down into her hair, buffeted one side of her face. She climbed onto the bonnet of the Wolseley. The windscreen was frosted, with seeing-holes cleared from it. Through them she saw Janey lying on her back across the boot, naked, white. Without pausing Chloe climbed onto the roof, looked over … and ceased to move, ceased to be able, except for her clear, good, young, relentless eyes, which continued to operate without her permission.

Janey seemed to float above the rusted metal, outlined by her own shadow. Then Chloe realised the shadow was a cape of blood, flown down around her from the back of her head and off over the edge of the boot. Janey’s arms had stiffened as if she were lifting her tide-marked hands in distaste from the blood. Her body was marked up and down with bruises old and new; her mouth and eyes were open in an expression of glazed surprise.

Isaac arrived, and seemed to have to hold onto Chloe, to prop her upright.
I was perfectly all right before he came,
she thought crossly, and tried to say, but her voice was not at her disposal. There didn’t seem to be much difference between her body and Janey’s except that hers was bound together and kept warm with clothing. And she was inside hers, whereas Janey was gone from her body, and didn’t have to know or feel. Janey was off somewhere else, sleeping, unaware, was walking dry-mouthed and dreamy along some street, or knocking on Chloe’s own door and sighing at having missed her, or crying on some stranger’s shoulder, some kind, helpful, warm-hearted person Chloe didn’t know about yet.

‘Come away,’ Isaac said thinly. ‘Don’t look.’

If he had shown the least wince of distaste Chloe would have pushed him off the stack. She wouldn’t have cared if it had killed him. Instead, his eyes—she found them eventually, at the end of the tunnels of his glasses—were wide and stunned, as hers felt. His aloofness had simply gone, his polite exterior cracked off him like exfoliated rock-shell, shattered aside.

‘That blood’s dry,’ Chloe whispered. ‘This didn’t happen tonight. She’s lain here … all this time!’ She felt some dangerous movement inside her and couldn’t speak any more for shaking.

They were sitting on the roof, Chloe’s hands inside Isaac’s like the weight of a cannon-ball on their knees. ‘We have to go, get the police, so they can find out who did it,’ he was urging. His words seemed peculiar, irrelevant. As if this had anything to do with other people! Who cared who did it or
why? It was
done
; that was what mattered—and, done, it couldn’t be undone, and they were trapped here in this unbearable, unavoidable stretch of time, after the doing of it.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’m not leaving her again.’

‘She isn’t here, though,’ Isaac said gently.

‘I don’t care. This is what I’ve got—I’ll stay here. Someone’s got to treat her right.’

‘Chloe, I can’t leave you here. This is too—you’ll go mad, in this place, with Janey like this. I’m
afraid
for you.’

Chloe cast her eyes along the motionless body to the staring face. ‘I’ll put my coat over her, and close her eyes,’ she said, as firmly as she could.

‘You’ll need your coat—it’s freezing. I’ll put mine.’

‘Yes, yours is nicer.’ The beautiful teal lining shimmered down against Janey’s skin. It would be warm from Isaac, and so smooth—just what such poor, punished skin needed. ‘It won’t stain—everything’s dry,’ Chloe murmured.

‘Shall I close her eyes?’

Chloe felt herself sitting rock-like in the one spot. It might be safer to stay like that. When Isaac looked at her for an answer she nodded.

He crouched beside Janey’s head, hiding her from Chloe. He used one hand, then two. ‘Won’t they go down?’ said Chloe.

‘Yes, it’s all right. She’s quite cold,’ he added in a distant voice.

Chloe lifted her gaze to the stars. She felt she hadn’t raised her head for years. She felt the chemicals of shock seeping around her, blanketing and comforting her, because this could not be true.

Covered, eyes closed, Janey looked only like an accident victim; Chloe found herself staring at the coat over her chest, actually seeing it rise and fall, as if Isaac had performed some life-restoring rite.

He sat back beside her and put his long arm around her. She felt like a small, upset child or a very frail old person.
She steeled herself against the warmth of him, and the shelter, because those things would soon be gone.

‘You can’t leave her, even like this?’ Isaac said.

‘Do you remember the way we came?’

‘Don’t worry about that. Will you be all right?’

‘I have to be. I’ve got a—got an
obligation
—’ The danger leaned at her again.

‘All right. Stay here—right here or very close by—so I can find you again. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Chloe nodded, looking him in the eye to convince him.

She listened to him climb down, watched him move away, a shadow leaping. Once, before he entered the nest of cars, he turned back and his glasses gleamed, two tiny Os. Then Chloe was alone with her thoughts under the cold, light-stained clouds, with her burning eyes and her clenched limbs and the black wrecks all around her, with her friend, without her friend, without her friend in the world.

Isaac’s group and Chloe’s go separately across the wrecks, a long, difficult way but Janey on her gurney can’t be taken the quicker. Chloe feels she ought to show them the proper way to travel this terrain, which is to leap, joyfully or in panic, coat flying, from roof to roof, never losing momentum, but they’re all so heavy with their caution and their belts and boots and holsters. Maybe the leaping, the flying, was actually not possible, like a bumble-bee’s flight, and now they’re being told, Janey and she, of their own weight and the laws that bind it. Life from now on will be this struggle up and across and down, planting each foot where the preceding people placed theirs, bending and balancing and climbing, admitting the existence of gravity.