Touching Earth Lightly (28 page)

‘It’s just safer, with the two of us. And I feel better if I go—about her, about the baby.’ She is aware of trying to make her voice soothing, resents the effort it requires.
Just accept it,
she thinks to him.
Just take it on, why don’t you?

He shifts position at the door. ‘Well, yes, this pregnancy’s very convenient, isn’t it? Just when it looked like she might lose you.’

Chloe sighs. ‘What are you saying, Theo?’

‘I’m saying it’s a ploy.’

‘You’re saying she
engineered
a split condom?’

‘I’m saying there may be reasons why she decided to go through and have the baby, and your being away from here all the time might be one of them.’

Chloe shakes her head and smiles. ‘Janey’s not that
…
not that calculating.’

‘Isn’t she?’

Chloe turns away from the mirror, scooping up her backsack from the bed. ‘Look, if you want to bitch about Janey, find someone else to bitch to, okay? I just hate the sound of it coming from you, coming from someone who’s always on about how much they care about me.’

‘How much
he
cares.’ Theo stops her with an arm across the doorway, and delivers a slow, sexy kiss. Chloe feels like hitting him. ‘You don’t have to be non-sexist with me. I’m a man.’

‘Hmm.’ She gives in and smiles
—
it’s quicker. ‘Well, take it like one, then.’ She ducks under his arm and leaves the house.

‘All the old videos with Janey in,’ says Chloe to Dane.

Dane nods slowly. ‘For Eddie, you mean.’

‘I thought … By the time he’s old enough, there’ll be no sound, they’ll be all faded. I thought I’d take them to that place in town Carl uses, that puts videos onto CD, so it’ll be digital.’

‘Good idea. Right-o, I’ll give Carl a ring and he can bring around a VCR when he comes on Sunday.’

‘Thanks.’ Today she is raw; something has again stripped protective layers of habit from her eyes and mind. Everyday speech feels false in her mouth; she
sees
past it to the great cords that hold her to her father, to her whole family, the blood instinct they have for each other, their very for-ness for each other—and the goodness of this, of Dane’s and the others’ unspoken gladness that she’s alive, keeps her nearly on the point of tears.

Chloe minds the house while the others go off camping. She has an essay to write. Janey stays with her, to get away from her family. She’s quite big by now; she glows, she fills the house with her sharp, hot smell.

On the Saturday night she brings a boy home, a boy with a voice like a startled Doberman’s. Chloe sits up writing
—
she writes best on coffee between eleven-thirty and two in the morning
—
and through the fiddle and mutter of the radio she hears Janey bring him to barking in the lounge room below, over and over.

Late in the morning Chloe wakes up and goes downstairs. Janey’s smell fills the lower part of the house like trapped smoke. The barking boy is gone (Chloe checks that the video and the CD player are still in place), and Janey lies asleep wrapped in a blanket on one of the couches. Chloe pauses.

Janey doesn’t look childlike, as most sleeping people do. Her face is serene and adult; without her smile her cheeks aren’t round. Her body is like a child’s, though, not in its shape but in the way it has dropped hot into sleep, unconscious where she fell. Chloe can feel that radiant heat on her face. One of Janey’s arms is flung up, the fingers tangled in her hair, which spreads like wheel-spokes across the couch cushion.

Chloe goes into the kitchen and starts making coffee and toast. She opens one of the dining-room doors, and feels the inside air being pulled loose by the outside. She finds out-of-season strawberries in the fridge and starts washing them.

When she turns off the tap, Janey is at the doorway, in hastily-pulled-on clothes that make her look more naked than she did naked. Her face looks round now, puffy with sleep; she sniffs and bats hair-ropes off her face. They look at each other, which is their greeting. It’s as if the remaining part of Chloe’s self has appeared, and she doesn’t have to say hello to that.

Janey hoists herself onto a stool at the kitchen counter. ‘Finish your essay?’

Chloe puts coffee in front of her, and the strawberries. ‘Need you ask.’

‘Hope we didn’t, you know …’ That was what she really wanted to say.

Chloe gives her the gleaming look she wants. ‘What have you done with him
—
buried him in the back yard?’

‘He had to go. He works in a bakery. Isn’t that cute? A baker’s boy.’

Chloe considers a few bun-in-the-oven jokes, but she feels too serene, too Sunday-morning still.

Janey bites off a strawberry, lays the green bit neatly on the counter and shifts on her seat. ‘This stool and counter weren’t made with pregnant people in mind.’

‘They weren’t
—
Mum was past all that. Want to sit at the table?’ Chloe doesn’t move, and Janey wrinkles her nose and takes another strawberry.

‘I won’t give in to it yet. I’m still in denial.’ She grins and bites, the berry a spot of colour in her white face.

‘Boy, you’re persistent,’ murmurs Chloe. She feels strange about this baby sometimes, as if it’s hers, and Janey’s just carrying it for her, like a handbag or a book she doesn’t have enough hands for at the moment. She feels hovering and anxious about it; maybe it’s the absence or ignorance of its father that gives her this stake. But it’s also curiosity, and even a kind of envy, although she knows the child is an unwise move for Janey, senses the disaster it might bring.

She sees how arbitrary the accident was, that took Janey and left her, a matter of timing and slips in someone’s concentration (Janey’s? the juveniles’? God’s?), and the wrong constellation of people and fluids. Circumstances have conspired against Janey’s staying alive, and she can’t see any reason why they shouldn’t conspire against her too, at any time—except that she’s been warned, and now she’ll stay here among these people and not move, in such a crowd of family and friends that the lightning can’t single her out.

‘I’m losing you, aren’t I?’ says Theo. Chloe, showered, neatly inserted into bed next to him, feels herself shrink inside. She can say nothing.

He turns over, a laboured, sighing turn, gathering her up in one arm.

‘It’s not entirely up to me,’ she ventures.

‘No, well, I suppose your life
isn’t
entirely in your own
—
’

‘I didn’t mean that. I mean,
you
can decide, too, how much you’ll put up with. If you can wait, I will have more time once the baby’s born.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘Janey’s going to adopt it out.’ It’s something they’ve discussed and weighed and agonised over at length, but here and now it sounds like a reckless, impulsive decision, the decision of children in their ignorance.

‘Yeah? Believe that when I see it.’

‘Well …’ It throws her, the bitterness in his voice. ‘Well, I guess it’s up to you whether you stick around long enough to see it.’ She tries to sound gentle, reasonable, but somehow she keeps choosing the wrong words.

‘Me
“stick around”! Listen, I’ve
been
sticking around! It’s you who’s been flitting off every time the phone rings.’

‘Yes, and I’m saying this is going to be a fact of life until November. If you can’t hack it, we should split up. If you can wait, there’s a good chance
—
’ She makes a special effort to soften her voice. ‘—that things will get better.’

He looks at her, half-risen over him. The darkness is nearly complete
—
she sees him as much by his warmth and breathing as by his shadow against the pillow. ‘You’re just not giving an inch, are you?’ he says.

‘I am!’ she says wildly. ‘I’m giving a whole
lot
of inches!’ and she starts to cry out a tremendous rage, a heart-splitting, brain-stopping rage at her own confusion, exhaustion, ignorance, her inability to keep tabs on this slippery thing, this
relationship,
to hold it to her will.

Behind her he lies silent, until her weeping eases a little. ‘Yes. Just not to me,’ he says, and turns away.

His snide tone dries up her tears at the source. She lies staring, amazed to find herself here, lying beside this rounded back. Clearly, she is supposed to grovel. Plead. Promise. She gets out of the bed, a hysterical laugh of astonishment in her throat.

She discovers she has left all her belongings in neat clumps around the house, as if she were only ever a guest. She goes out into the night like a bag lady, carrying everything she owns, and slowly, stopping often to rearrange her load, struggles home.

Pete stands at her door. ‘I’ve got something to go in the chest.’

It’s in an unmarked envelope, sealed conspicuously with brown packing tape. She takes it and looks at it front and back and then at him.

‘It’s for Eddie,’ he says pointedly. ‘Will you put it with the other things?’