Touching Earth Lightly (23 page)

‘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.