Touching Earth Lightly (36 page)

She hadn’t intended to go back to the caryard, but looking at the print she thinks there are probably lots of things there—ugly, half-coloured, discarded, rotting things—that would produce the same feeling to look at, collected and placed and lit right, the same—it’s almost excitement, her attention racked up to a certain pitch … She doesn’t know what it is; it’s a feeling that goes down so deep, but vibrates in such a finely tuned way that she can never be quite certain it even happens.

Slumped in front of the Hunters’ TV, Janey, Pete and Chloe watch a documentary about a little Chinese girl, born armless, battling to learn to use prosthetic arms. The arms discarded, the girl sits with an interviewer and shrugs, and her words come up as subtitles: ‘The person without the arms is me.’

‘The person without the arms is me,’ Janey reads aloud, and sits forward all attention.

Pete, who is thirteen, says, Janey, the person with all the
extra
arms is you. Get it right.’

Janey stares at him, then at Chloe, then back at Pete. Chloe hears almost a purr in her voice. ‘Aren’t you gorgeous! What a lovely thing to say!’

Pete watches the TV, blushing.

‘You want to be careful,’ says Janey with a dozy smile. ‘Saying things like that. Someone might kiss you.’

Pete gags mildly and they laugh at each other.

Chloe stands in the entrance hall of Carl’s studio, hunting through her keys so she can deadlock the door. Slides and prints are packed into her backsack; after a day in the darkroom, tiredness sits behind her eyes like a fog. The keys jingle in the silent spaces of hall and warehouse behind her. This is what her life is, without Janey, this lone negotiation with the world, these decisions, about what to do next, day to day, hour to hour, about keeping on with the recording and the photo-making and budgeting for paper and chemicals and slide-processing out of her dole money. They feel like the
first
decisions of her life, the first made under her own steam, straight out of her own unique knowledge, and they surprise her. She always thought she would do something daring and exhilarating, like flying off overseas or running away with a man, as her first independent act; now she finds herself serious like a worker, organised like an executive, teeing up darkroom times, equipping herself, noting down jobs and ideas, all within the same life as she had before, the same family and friends. There is more room among them, there are more possibilities, than she would ever have thought.

She opens the door, deadlocks it, goes out and pulls it closed behind her. ‘Well, hullo,’ someone says from the footpath as she tests the handle.

It’s Isaac. ‘You’re heading home?’ he says as she comes down the steps, stowing the keys in her pocket.

‘Yep. You, too? Our home, I mean.’

He nods and they fall into step.

Chloe relaxes into the odd, rare feeling of knowing her own mind. ‘You look more
in place
here,’ she remarks. ‘In the city, I mean. Down at Gavin’s you looked like you’d wandered off a CD cover or something.’

‘I have to say, it’s not my natural environment, the beach. I like the house, but I don’t know if I could live there.’

‘You might … unbend a bit if you spent more time there.’

Isaac looks taken aback. ‘Reckon I need to unbend, do you?’ That’s Nick’s phrasing.

‘Sometimes you just seem a bit … remote, that’s all. A bit
self-contained.
Or as if your mind was on … I don’t know, maybe higher things.’

‘Which it shouldn’t be?’ says Isaac softly.

‘I’m not saying it’s wrong. It just makes you a bit hard to approach, that’s all.’

They turn into Chloe’s street, which is narrowed by cars parked half on the road, half on the footpath. Isaac walks slightly behind her. ‘Hard to approach,’ she hears him mutter.

‘Oh, your car’s here. Did you come here first?’ She eyes its shiny curves as they turn in at the gate, trying to fit two thoughts together. ‘I just assumed—’ she gets out her keys again ‘—you came from the train station.’

‘Chloe,’ he says. ‘Can we … can we
not
go inside for a minute?’

He’s on the step below her, their eyes level. He lowers his first. ‘Is there a chance I could get to see you some time, without anyone else around?’ He looks up rather helplessly. People move about and talk inside the house, sounding clumsy, mumbling and bumping.

‘You could come up to my room. If you wanted.’

His gaze lifts from her mouth to her eyes, ‘’s, please.’

She lets them in. As they climb the stairs, Nick’s swearing and the clacking of his computer keys greet them.

‘Yo, Zack,’ he cries as they pass. ‘Give us a hand with—’

‘Be with you in a minute,’ says Isaac.

Chloe pushes the door almost closed behind them and puts her pack on the desk. When she turns back, Isaac is right there; they hug in silence, tighter and closer. Chloe feels something like a huge relief, the easing of an enormous tension. She feels like laughing; she holds on and on.

Isaac’s face fills her field of vision. He pushes a wisp of hair aside from her mouth and kisses it. In her hair, she feels his fingers, not entirely steady.

‘Down at the beach,’ he says softly, their noses touching, ‘it was like living with you for a little while. When I got home I really missed you.’

‘I saw you from down on the rocks that time,’ says Chloe.

Isaac laughs through his nose.
‘Longing
for you.’

‘It looked like that. I wasn’t sure.’

‘It was.’

Footsteps halt outside the door. ‘Youse two aren’t having a
push
in there, are you?’ says Nick.

‘Yeah—bugger off,’ says Isaac with the same conscious rudeness. Chloe pushes her face into his scarf.

‘Jesus bloody Christ, you sure pick your bloody times.’ Nick goes off grumbling.

‘Like, this’s
always
happening,’ mutters Chloe.

‘Yeah.
As if
.’ Isaac takes off his coat and scarf, sits on the end of Chloe’s bed and pulls her close. Waiting for Nick’s interruption to fade, she runs her hand experimentally over the nap of his hair. His head warmth streams out between her fingers in beams, like light. ‘Well, longing looks aren’t exactly the strongest cues around.’

‘I did kiss you, once.’

‘Yes, but I thought you were just feeling sorry for me. I didn’t think it was a romantic kiss, I just thought you were being kind.’

Isaac sits back, grips her hands. ‘Who do you think you are?’ he mutters fiercely. ‘Some kind
of ordinary
person, to be
kind
to, to feel
sorry
for?’

‘Well, yes!’ She gives a puzzled laugh.

He pulls her to her knees and stares into her face with such intensity that she draws back a little. ‘How—I mean, I have seen, of
all
people, how strong you are. And loyal, and loving? I was
there,
remember—’

‘Yeah, I was so strong you had to hold me up. I remember.’

He takes his glasses off, pushes her coat off her shoulders. ‘Take your coat off. Relax. Make yourself at home.
Unbend
,’ he adds as she hauls at her coat. ‘Don’t be so
remote,
and
self-contained.’

‘Well, you always have been,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to take it back, or apologise.’

‘I know I have.’ He puts his hands on her shoulders. ‘I’ve also always been either a bit or a lot in love with you.’

Chloe blinks. ‘Always? I mean, I thought maybe recently, but … ?’ He nods. Tension is dissipating out of him, too, falling off him in chunks and sheets. She can almost see its flashes, hear it splitting away. ‘You’ve disguised it pretty well,’ she says.

He rolls his eyes. ‘You’re officially the last to know.’

Chloe takes his great jaw in her hands, to feel what it’s like to be allowed to. Her eyes rove all over the landscape of his face. ‘Have I been cruel to you?’ she says softly.

‘Not ever knowingly, I don’t think.’

‘But I have hurt you?’ He looks at her without answering, with a touch of his old expressionlessness. ‘Well, I’m sorry, then.’

‘That’s okay,’ he says quickly, lightly. They both smile. They both laugh.

Chloe sits in the crematorium garden and tries to feel something. A needling wind sneaks over the wall, ruffles the jonquils and makes their leaves squeak together. They have a scent, but it’s not sweet; it’s right at the threshold of not being pleasant at all. Chloe sniffs and sniffs compulsively, trying to print it on her memory.

Credit-card-sized plaques line the walls, but Chloe doesn’t read any; the one she’d be looking for isn’t there. Those plaqued ones were the moneyed ones, the cherished ones, the ones from nice families that knew they were families. Chloe engraves one in her imagination, with Janey’s name and dates and, perhaps,
‘Je monte’,
or ‘She was so
unusual.

She ought to feel something. Dug into the soil from which the jonquils spring is the body she hasn’t seen since the night at the caryard, when it lay so still, speaking by the marks on it, describing bruise by bruise, smudge by stain, the violences done on it. Now the same matter, but with its words erased, is here, in actual fact, present all around her—or maybe dug
only into a single bed, and how is she to know which one?, and it would be ridiculous to try and find out.

She should have brought someone, maybe Joy. ‘Well, of
course
you don’t feel anything,’ Joy might have said. ‘Does any of this bear
any
resemblance to the Janey you know?’

And Chloe would answer, ‘If I come again, I’ll bring a cigarette, and smoke it here.
That
would make it more Janey-like.’

And Joy would grimace and say, ‘A bit tasteless, maybe.’
Of course
it’d be tasteless. Chloe smiles.

But sitting alone here, she doesn’t feel any urge to speak aloud, to whatever is left of Janey here, whatever hasn’t blown away in the smoke. What’s left that isn’t jonquils, it seems to Chloe, is scattered through Chloe’s life, and Chloe’s family’s, as comprehensively as a Kleenex through a load of washing. It’s just there, in their bones and brains and speech patterns, built into their senses of humour and each of their separate histories.

She’ll write a last letter to Eddie.
When you’ve read and looked at all this,
she’ll write,
come and see me, wherever I am and with whom, and I’ll make however much time you need, and we’ll talk.
Even if he can’t see the traces in her, he’ll have questions of his own, which will prompt memories she hasn’t thought to record, just as important as the ones she has.

She takes some photographs, black and white, of massed jonquil blooms, a hunched crowd of them fluttering with morning light; of two flowers in the shade with the sunlit plaques marching away behind them; of leaf-spikes and flowers rippling into focus and out again.

She stands up, focuses on her own feet, the scuffed Blundstones, the short new grass, the brick edging of the lawn, the tumbled, ash-flecked earth of the flower bed. She focuses, but she doesn’t release the shutter. Instead she clicks the case closed, shoves her cold hands into her pockets, and walks out on her own into the open.