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.
then
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.
There’s a terribly ordinary van, not even an ambulance, without even a revolving light, into which Janey is slid. Isaac and Chloe don’t speak, with police beside them, with the panoply of emergency all about them. Isaac’s face is tearless and smooth. He has resumed his normal face, whereas Chloe’s, from inside, feels irrevocably warped. Then he turns and looks to her, and it’s as if he’s holding her upright still. He passes on his strength, by being there, by his calm eyes, his familiarity. Then they’re guided to their separate police cars, and taken to the station.
They all go to the snow. It’s a bad season—they get there early and the snow comes late. All Chloe remembers afterwards is Janey and herself out striding. Janey is wearing sandshoes and her feet have gone numb—they’re striding to keep her blood moving. They’re laughing, expecting to get back to the rented chalet and take Janey’s socks off and find her toes loose in the sock ends, tinkling together like crystals or chunks of charcoal.
There seems to be so much space around them. It really feels like the top of the world, Chloe thinks. Janey says they’re pretty near the top of Australia, but that isn’t what Chloe means. Out in the bush it’s a different kind of space—with all those trees like a different, silent species of people, there’s just as much of a crowd as in the city. Worse—sometimes you can’t even see the sky. But up h
ere the squeaky-blue sky is all around, even below the level of their feet. Rocks and ground with little plants show dark through the melting blue-whiteness, and the sunlit snow burns in their eyes and leaves weird-shaped prints in them like leopard skin.
At the station it is all overbright rooms, not quite clean in the corners, and slouching police. Chloe has to describe in her own words when she last saw Janey, and how she came to find her. With the warmth inside the station she isn’t so shaky, but she still cries. She runs at the eyes. It isn’t a matter of not caring who sees her; she hardly has room in her mind to even acknowledge that other people are there. All she is, apart from the words the law is asking of her, is this weeping.
‘Her own words’ are clumsy, and order themselves strangely, and behind them hovers a vacuum, so that at any minute they might pop like a plane window and suck reality out of the world. The policeman types doggedly, and when it is read back to her and printed out she signs it ‘Chloe Hunter’, as if it were a piece of schoolwork. Hers seems like a long and complicated name—during its writing she wonders, Is this really my name? Whose life have I strayed into here, and how do I get back to my own? I must ring Janey as soon as I do.
Chloe and Janey lie in a summery daze in the park, half in sunlight, half under a curved-leafed gum tree whose shedding purple bark shows green-white new skin beneath. The cover of Chloe’s maths textbook is beginning to warp in the sun, half-fallen out of her school pack. They’re supposed to be in school.
Chloe’s wondering again why sky is blue, knowing that some-whereabouts in her brain she does know, sweeping through her memory trying to hear whichever teacher’s explanation, or maybe Joys—she does tend to know, and to want to tell everyone.
Janey’s fiddle-fiddling with something near her ear, and plucking stalks. Chloe can feel the planet give them up, the reverberations around the roots.
Janey lays something on Chloe’s front, but Chloe doesn’t look at it until later when they’re getting up to go. It’s a curl of eucalypt bark, packed tight with seedheaded grass stalks, ears of grass. ‘Isn’t that neat!’ She carries it home, and is never able to throw it away.
Out in the hall the police officer says to Isaac, ‘Your turn, mate,’ and to Chloe, ‘You’re free to go now, love.’ It’s strange to be unleashed. Chloe just stands there.
‘I’ll go with you if you want to wait,’ Isaac says. Without thanking him or even looking at him she sits down.
She calls Chloe ‘Cole’, short for Colo, which is from a Les Murray poem they found at school when they were supposed to be studying a different one, ‘The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter-Colo Mountains’—Janey insists it’s the only poem that has any decent sex in it.
You long to show someone non-human the diaphragm-shuffle
which may be your species’ only distinctive cry,
the spasm which, in various rhythms, turns our face awry,
contorts speech, shakes the body, and makes our eyelids liquefy.
It makes no difference for Chloe to tell her that Les Murray was describing laughter—‘Not that sort of diaphragm, twit!’
Janey really likes the idea of the liquefied eyelids. She gives Chloe a jar of them for her seventeenth birthday: water and cochineal, with false eyelashes floating through it. And calls her Colo all the time. She tells her it’s because she’s ‘cool, but a bit mixed up’.
They walk home, Isaac large in his coat beside her. Chloe has the distinct feeling of the pavements turning everywhere to slush but for a small, hurriedly semi-solid place beneath each stepping foot.
Only the hall light is on at home. Isaac’s civilised feet go quietly up the stairs. Then Chloe hears her mother suppress a gasp, and come hurrying downstairs, and the whole house lights up and wakes as the thing becomes true again and bludgeons them each, four new people who have to hear it.
She hears Isaac begin to crack, answering Mum and Dad’s stunned questions. She doesn’t know how he can speak at all, through the knowledge that out there the night held—the two of them went—and saw—. Chloe feels skinned, flinching from the cruelty of the air. She sits held in one piece by her mother while the blows of what Isaac is telling fall again, clumps and dumps of bad information that can’t be delivered gently.
Nick’s eyes are wide and stunned; he has one arm around Pete next to him. Isaac’s face is hidden behind his big white knuckly hands—such grown-man’s hands, Chloe thinks in a daze, feeling baby-like and babied, wrapped in this house and family whose pain can’t ease hers by even the smallest degree, in a safety that in the end is a betrayal, because she isn’t armed against a night like this. Police, morgues, injuries—she’s gone along in all innocence, never dreaming these words might be used of Janey, but now that she looks back, of course they were coming—she should have seen them flapping like vultures over Janey all along, from way back in the schoolyard, and in a tall column spiralling up on the thermals of evil grotty heat from Janey’s house. All Janey’s life people had been drawing back from her, baulking, looking askance, doubting, being ‘concerned’, consulting each other—for this reason, that they are grown up and know, have seen, that these things can happen, in this world, now, to real people. They’ve seen the vultures, and they didn’t tell her. Or they did, sort of, by all that fuss and worry, but they never actually made her listen, made her understand, made her know too.
Here she is in her bed—recognisably it’s her bed, everything about it is real. It’s feelable, seeable in a kind of grainy light like the pre-dawn, only creepy. On the wall, as usual, hang the two costumes Janey made herself and Chloe for the Mardi Gras, but in this dream they clothe two sagging, white-haired, white-skinned Janey-corpses. Their heads slump in the feather and pampas-plume headdresses, the eyes open slits, the lips pulling back from their teeth. Where the skirts end, propped on the bookshelves, the Janeys’ hands death-grip the wood.
Oh God, oh God, she’s condemned to sleep under these things, to wake up to them every morning. How will she stand it? How can she ever have a normal life again?
When Chloe sees Janey in the next dream, a battle cry rips out of her, but she’s obstructed by boiler-suited legs, by police cars, by ambulance officers. She can see Janey staring at the sky, the waxen face, the hair straggling off, raw patches on the scalp; she knows the spark is still there, if she can only get through them, if she can pound the white chest to kick-start the heart, and blow into Janey’s mouth with all her strength. But their arms reach and cross across her face; all these do-gooding, fate-accepting adults smilingly, consolingly, physically hold her back. She screams out, desperate, ‘Over here! Look this way! They won’t let me through!’
She wakes with the screaming. Some kind of black animal scrambles towards her across her room, dimly lit from the hall. She throws up her arms and slams back against the wall with a last scream.
‘It’s me.’ It’s Joy. She switches the bed lamp on and they stare at each other, panting.
Janey comes with them on a camping trip, early on. It’s the first time she’s been out of town since spending a day at her grandma’s in the mountains four years before.
Chloe takes her camera—it’s so new she feels she ought to, even though she doesn’t really know what she’s supposed to do with it. Janey uses it most of the time. She takes a series of photos of her own feet, bare, in the bush. Joy and Dane won’t let her go barefoot or in thongs on bushwalks, so every rest-stop Janey walks off a little way, takes off the hiking boots she’s borrowed from Nick, gets her photo and puts the boots back on.
‘Is she all right, that girl?’ Nick says to Chloe. None of them knows Janey very well yet. Even Chloe isn’t quite sure why she’s becoming Janey’s friend.
When the photos come back, Joy clears the kitchen noticeboard and pins up the twenty foot-photos, in four neat rows of five, like a real exhibition. When Chloe and Janey charge in from school that afternoon Chloe stops short, seeing them, and Janey crashes into her, then stares with her, her hands bunched at her
mouth.
The feet look like white fins or flowers or fans of coral, wet with seawater in one photo, striped from boot socks the next. Sea-foam blurs past them, sand crusts them, sword-grass stripes them with shadows. Indigo rock; dewy green ferns; a mat of fine leaves, dove-grey and rose, curved almost into circles—the colours and the textures, colours and textures Chloe didn’t see, all come alive around those neatly side-by-side city girl’s feet.
‘Oh, don’t they look great all together!’ says Chloe inadequately. But when she turns around, Janey’s eyes are filling with tears. ‘Jesus, Janey! What—’
‘That was such a great holiday,’ Janey quavers. Then she wipes the tears on her arm and goes to the board for a closer look. After a while she says, in a stronger voice, ‘They all came out really good, didn’t they?’
Chloe stares at her. She doesn’t have a clue what makes her tick, and it’s exciting, not knowing—she isn’t scared of her, just curious, just wildly curious. It’s as if whole lobes of Chloe’s brain, whole cell-scapes in her eyes, are being stirred awake.
Chloe dreams standing outside the caryard, cold in the starlight, watching car corpses, two and three at a time, swing from a magnet—rise, swing and drop, shaking the ground. She knows Janey’s in there somewhere but she’s not allowed in while the work’s going on. She knows Janey’s deep in one of those piles, white, naked, stained, cold, all on her own. She’s not allowed in. Her helplessness is so strong she can feel it rotting her insides.
She dreams meeting Janey up at the shops, on an ordinary day, sunny, with colours. Janey looks dreadful—like Edward Scissorhands, her hair grown out dark and scraggly, her face bruised and scarred. Chloe’s mildly irritated that Janey’s put them through all this fuss, and she tells her so.
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