Touching Earth Lightly (29 page)

‘Sure.’ The window-seat box is open. She could toss the envelope in from where she sits, but you don’t toss such things. She gets up and puts it in, then sits down to labelling photographs again.

When Pete’s gone she finishes a label, fixes it to the back of a print and starts another. Then Pete’s envelope burns a hole in her concentration. It’s packed tightly, almost too tight to close; there are more than two or three sheets in there. She has heard the printer going in Nick’s room; on her way to the bathroom she saw Pete hunched over the sheets that were emerging, close-printed both sides.

She doesn’t like this, she realises. She doesn’t like not knowing. She doesn’t like the fact that the envelope’s sealed with packing tape, although she has to admit with shame that a normal seal wouldn’t have withstood her curiosity. And what does he know about Janey that’s such a big secret, that Chloe doesn’t know, that he doesn’t want Chloe to know?
What’s being kept from her? She stares at the envelope lying in the chest, unpleasant possibilities multiplying in her head.

In the middle of Chloe’s HSC trials Janey lumbers from her home to the Hunters’, ‘God free me from the House of
Mould
!’ she cries, bursting in on Chloe and throwing a stuffed backpack on the spare bed. ‘Oh, you’re working. ‘

‘Yeah, for an exam. Tomorrow morning.’

‘Poor chook. I’ll have a bath, then. Have you got any tea-tree oil? I’ve got thrush practically up to the back
teeth
!
’

‘In the cabinet.’

‘Oh, you guys are so
organised—
I love it
!’

After the bath Janey lies on the bed in a borrowed Nick T-shirt and clean underpants. Chloe finishes note-taking and swivels around to face her. They consider each other.

‘Can I stay here a while?’ says Janey.

‘Your dad?’ Janey nods. Chloe regards her for a long moment. ‘You mean until the baby comes.’

‘Yeah. Would that be a big problem?’

‘Nothing we can’t handle.’ Chloe grins briefly.

‘Sorry.’ Janey falls onto her back. ‘It’s not like I’m not feeling like sex. It’s just, all the other things are building up, this great lump, the thrush driving me nuts. I’m in the bath half the day.’

‘I thought you fixed that.’

‘It came back. It always comes back. You know, I get a week clear. And then it’s my veins, or the stretch marks. Itch, itch, itch. So many different itches, that old sex-itch seems like nothing! This was such a
bad
idea.’ She laughs at the ceiling, and sighs, and closes her eyes. ‘It’s so quiet here,’ she says dreamily, ‘and so clean.’

Chloe fetches the bottle of apricot kernel oil from the bathroom. ‘Here.’

Janey opens her eyes. ‘Babe, you are a true babe,’ she says, shifting over and hitching up Nick’s T-shirt to expose her belly. Chloe is used to the cruel red stripes the baby has drawn out of Janey’s white flesh, but still catches her breath sympathetically.

‘You know what I remind myself of?’ Janey says comfortably as Chloe spreads the oil and starts rubbing it in. ‘I keep thinking it’s a “caldera”, but that’s probably the wrong word. That bulge volcanoes get when they’re just about to blow
—
does that have a name? You know, and the earth cracks up all around, like cakes do in the oven at my place. Don’t you think it makes more sense for a baby to pop out your navel than down below? I mean, that’s the whole direction of the thing
—
out.’

Chloe absently runs a finger along one of the stretch marks, and Janey flinches. ‘Hurt when you touch ‘em, itch when you don’t. I tell you, you can’t win.’

‘Only a month more to go.’

Janey groans.

The things Chloe can see, that she doesn’t want to see. She can see how her time with Janey, already receding, is beginning to gather a kind of glow to itself, is beginning to be suffused, like grown-ups’ memories of school life, with a golden late-afternoon glow, poignant and beautiful, but dimming, dimming fast. She can feel it when she looks at photos of Janey—each has become heavily significant, Janey’s ever-youthfulness, Chloe’s youth to which Janey is consigned, peeping out unsuspectingly, with a laugh. Even the bad photos, clumsily framed or blurred or catching some peculiar in-between-expressions expression, ones you would discard if she were alive, threaten to take on this glow, this preciousness. Now Chloe has to work to keep that golden light at bay, to remind herself that Janey’s life was
real,
and changed from week to week as her own life changes now, that it trailed loose ends, that it was as smelly as a ripe cheese, that often it seemed to be lumbering out of control to nowhere.

Janey’s dying has thrown a cloak of tragedy over her life, giving everything she ever said or did a significant ring, an edge of portent, a kind of unwitting courage it didn’t have at the time. Chloe hates that, doesn’t want Janey to be noble and dead. She wants her to be live and rude and drawing
disapproving glances on the street. She keeps falling into pits of Janey-absence, now that she has time, now that she’s never interrupted, never dragged out of her cave to knock Janey’s demons on the head (so lightly, so easily—why didn’t she do it properly, that last time?). She sees that it’s possible, as it didn’t seem possible three weeks ago, that these absences will become less frequent, that people she doesn’t even know yet will meet her and come close and partly fill them. Still, she can’t imagine life without this weight on her heart, subduing her laughter, urging caution in all things. There is a dark wound in her where Janey was cut off, and it never quite closes, it sours everything, slows everything, bleeds mystery and sadness. However far ahead she looks, she can’t see a time when it will seal up completely and be gone.

‘Is it okay with you guys if Janey stays here until the baby comes?‘

Joy and Dane look at each other across the dining-table. ‘I thought you wanted to be free of distractions during the trials,’ says Joy.

‘Yeah, yeah. But she’s being … harassed at home.‘

They check with each other again, then look at her without speaking.

‘Look,’ she says, going to the cupboard for a glass, ‘I can hack it, if you can. Can you?’

‘Well …’ says Dane. ‘We usually do.’ Chloe hears only the doubt in his voice

Joy adds, ‘Are you asking because you want us to say no? Because we will if you want us to.’

Chloe turns from the tap. ‘It’s just, a whole month, and probably more—I thought I ought to check, that’s all.’ Her parents stare, and their astonishment makes her hear the loud, impatient tone in her voice. She gulps water.

‘It’s not just any old month, though,’ says Joy cautiously.

‘That’s why I’m checking, because I won’t be able to take the full load, of keeping her company. Someone else’ll have to sort of step in … every now and again, you see?’

There’s a long, awkward pause.
They may not say yes,
Chloe realises, surprised.

Dane stops rasping his fingers in his beard. ‘I just think … with the exams, with a baby in the house—’

‘I didn’t
say
after the baby
—
’

‘No, but that’s what it’ll turn into.’

Chloe acknowledges it with a grimace.

‘What I think …’ Dane goes on evenly. ‘There are actual, formal, refuges … staffed by people who are trained to take on people like Janey.’

There are no other people like Janey.

Dane catches Chloe’s mutinous look. ‘People in Janey’s type of situation. We’re talking a very serious time in your life, and a very serious time in Janey’s. We’re not talking “full load” here, we’re talking …’ He chops out a large piece of the air with his hands, trying to capture the word.

‘Overload,’ says Joy, squinting out at Chloe from under her hand, that shades her eyes from the downlight. ‘Overload good and proper. You can’t cram with a baby in the house, Clo.’

‘Then I’ll cram in the library. Or I’ll work hard enough now that I won’t
have
to cram.’ She slumps over the kitchen counter. ‘Don’t you see,’ she says flatly, hopelessly, ‘I can’t go upstairs and tell Janey to go to a
refuge.’

‘You may have to, Chloe love,’ says Joy.

Chloe raises her head. A tear squeezes out of one eye and she pushes it away with hair and sleeve. ‘Would you put your feet down?’ she asks them, feeling curious more than anything.

Their eyes slide off her to the door, and Chloe knows who has silently arrived there. She puts her forehead on the counter.

‘I’ll be good,’ says Janey, almost in a whisper. ‘I’ll be quiet. I know Cole’s exams are important.’

Chloe looks up. Janey’s face is white and delicate among the black-straggling flames of hair, her arms wound round each other down over her belly, as if to hide it. Pity and anger, love and loyalty swell and strive inside Chloe, ravel and tighten. She can’t do what any of them want her to do.

Suddenly out of the knot escapes a single clear thought. ‘I just don’t see,’ she says to her mother, ‘how we can say yes, we’ll be there for the birth but no, not before, and not after either.’

‘I didn’t
—’
starts Janey. ‘I wouldn’t expect
—
’

Chloe stops her with a wave, her eyes on Joy. The air almost creaks with her parents’ doubt.

Joy looks at Dane. ‘Let’s sleep on this one. Okay?’

He nods.

‘Okay?’ Joy checks with Chloe and Janey.

They nod dumbly. Chloe yearns to be asleep, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, thinking nothing. ‘Come on, Janey. We’ll sleep on it, too.’ She leads the way upstairs.

It’s just a matter of handing the numbered videos over, Chloe thinks, and paying money, and coming back later to collect the discs.

But when she picks them up, the bright-eyed man behind the counter says, ‘We cleaned up the sound on the first couple; it was already starting to break up.’

‘Yes, I guess it would’ve—’