Chloe wakes up in the middle of the night—no, something wakes her up, a noise, or a smell suddenly strengthening. In a slab of moonlight Janey’s twisted sheet has been wrestled to the floor. The door hangs wide.
She hears the noise again, still unidentifiable. It’s coming from outside, through the window, not the door. She gets out of bed and goes downstairs as silently as she can, in a strong, high moonlight, like a heatless noon.
There’s no one in the back yard. The back door is open and Chloe, after peering out and seeing nothing, goes into the garden. There’s the noise again, and a whole lot of quieter ones; they come from the cubby-house in the peppercorn tree, where Nick has taken to sleeping, these summer nights. It sounds as if two people are trying to fight very quietly.
Chloe stands looking at the little house, which shakes just visibly, shivers travelling down the tresses of the branch it’s built on. She feels actually sick, trying not to imagine what’s going on inside. She had thought Janey might be able to just like her brothers, without having to jump on them.
Chloe is about to backtrack up to her room (where she would have lain, wide awake, full of bitter thoughts and trying not to listen), when Nick’s T-shirted shoulders show at the window, Janey’s hands linked behind his neck. He pulls them apart, and Chloe hears him say, ‘No. No. Absolutely not. Go back to your own bed.’
Janey laughs. ‘What? Not even a kiss?’
‘Not even a kiss. Go on.’
The little play-door opens. ‘Aw?’ says Janey.
‘Go on. Upstairs.’
‘You are so mean.’
‘Go on, before Clo wakes up.’
Chloe is standing in the middle of the yard, sagging with relief. ‘What the bleeding heck, Janey?’ She can be cool now. She can cope.
‘Oh, he’s …’ Janey appears, naked, and starts down the ladder. ‘He won’t do it,’ she says, jumping off the last step.
Chloe looks up at Nick, who leans in the doorway, running his hands through his hair. ‘Of course he won’t,’she says, as much to him as to Janey. Janey starts for the house. ‘What made you think—?’
‘Oh, I didn’t. I just thought if I took him by surprise …’ She turns back at the door. ‘I might have a chance, you know. But he’s too quick. He woke up.’ She stands there in the doorway. Her body is already a young woman’s—it curves, it leads the eye this way and that—while Chloe’s remains straight-up-and-down, a girl’s.
Chloe glances up at Nick again, and sees the tail end of something in his expression as he watches Janey. Chloe thinks, If he hadn’t woken up so fast, if she’d gone a bit further—
He shrugs and grins at Chloe, then both doorways are dark. Chloe follows Janey into the house.
Carl says, ‘I couldn’t see why I should go on living. It seemed as if my whole point had been to care for him.’
‘And what is it now?’
Carl turns from the window. ‘What is what?’
‘Your whole point,’ says Chloe.
‘Oh. I don’t know if I’ve got words for it yet.’ He means there isn’t any point, thinks Chloe in despair. And it’s been a year, for him. He always looks so sad. How can the same face, the same bones and skin, look so radiant one year and so desolate the next? Her own skin feels sore, over the bones that refuse to ease her pain by dissolving out of existence.
He sits on the opposite bed. When he speaks it’s slowly and with some puzzlement. ‘My heart keeps on pumping, you know? Everything functions. Just to appreciate that functioning—every beat, every spark up here.’ He taps his head. ‘It seems the least I can do, somehow, not to take it for granted.’
Chloe listens, waiting for him to utter some lifeline phrase she can grab hold of. All this year she’s been wondering about Carl and Gus, unable to ask him, Well, what’s it like for you now? And now? Gus’s death has evaporated so quickly into something she can’t talk about, but that darkens the air around everyone when Carl visits. And now Janey’s makes this opening, this reopening, for Carl, and there is this impossibly painful, necessary kind of speech, heart to heart, injury to injury, part of the frightening, heightened super-consciousness that is like an illness in her, that is afflicting her.
He’s smiling at her. ‘But you’re not ready for this yet. It’s so early.’ He leans across and lays his hands on hers. ‘It does ease—I should tell you that. It doesn’t ever go away completely, what you’re knowing now, but it kind of grows into you. You carry it around with you without it hurting so badly.’
Chloe nods, not believing him, not seeing how it could possibly happen. ‘I just don’t understand—’ she says in a cold, cramped voice. She looks up and he makes a listening movement with his eyebrows. Why I get to go on, she meant to say, but it comes out as ‘Anything. Any of it, any more.’
‘I know. It changes the whole universe,’ he says. ‘It just destroys it in one hit and says, “Okay, go off and make a new one.” And we think, “But how—me?—without Gus, without Janey? Who will I come home and tell about it? Why should I bother?”’ He squeezes her hands tighter. ‘But you do—or you will do, when you’re ready.’
When Chloe gets home from school the next day, Nick is sitting studying at the dining room table. He checks behind her immediately
‘You’re safe. She’s at home doing some laundry.’
He looks relieved. ‘She’s dangerous, that girl.’
Behind him through the window Chloe can see the cubby-house door propped open, the curtains blowing out the open window. Nick glances out, too. ‘Couldn’t get the smell of her out of that room all night, and she was only in there about ten seconds. Enough to ruin my night’s sleep, I can tell you.’
‘I thought she might try it on you some time.’ Well, feared she might. Now that the fear’s been put to rest it’s possible to joke about it. ‘You’d be so convenient, eh? And she needs a nice, steady, tolerant man like you.’
He shrinks down into his notes. ‘God, she’d take over. I don’t think there’s enough of me. Truly,’ he adds, meeting Chloe’s eyes.
‘I don’t know about that, actually.’ Chloe is wondering, seriously, for the first time, whether there is an ideal man for Janey. If it isn’t the rat-boys, and nice boys like Nick are too scared of her …
‘Don’t you? I do,’ Nick says firmly. ‘I’ve got a life to live.’
Chloe is stung. ‘Oh, and I haven’t?’
Nick looks at her and she is doubly stung. He doesn’t actually say, Well, you said it, but he might as well have.
The trouble is, she keeps waking and waking. Her body only needs so much sleep. Then there’s food, brought to her every mealtime by her family, and images in a rustling crowd through her brain, and a need to move, but often she’s unable to step outside that room; sometimes even opening the door is impossible. So she stays there.
In the middle of the fourth night, or possibly the fifth, cried into a wakeful stupor, she sits at her desk with the envelope of Eddie-photos. She leafs through them, drawing her knees up under her jumper, rocking away the pain, the pain that’s part of the consolation of seeing Janey so clearly in Eddie’s face, so clearly that Janey might have self-pollinated to produce this Janey-boy with his black-on-white features, his pale blue, dark-lashed eyes.
No one else is awake. Chloe’s eyes are cried dry and her mind hinges itself again, moves to grip and finds thoughts instead of swamp. She picks up a pen, finds a pad, spends some time trying to work out the date, decides it doesn’t matter and writes Dear Eddie, in writing that looks nothing like her own, over-careful like a drunk’s, heavily off-balance. She crawls down the page keeping this handwriting in line, and on, getting things down for the only other person who might ever care to know them.
They fall out all disordered, like an old person’s ramblings. There are such a lot; it’ll take years to tell, because it took years to live. For every memory she puts down, dozens flit through her head and are lost. And objects go with the memories, that she’ll have to fetch: other
photographs, Janey’s sketches and creations, poems, chunks from books, old magazines—Chloe makes a list as she goes, and goes on writing, thinking and writing, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes and writing. She takes her list out into the dark house and tracks a few things down, and comes back with them and with a queue in her head of things to write, and on she writes until she begins to have a great deal written down, enough so that when she waits nothing flows immediately into her mind. At dawn she peels off the clothes she’s worn since she found Janey, down to the last humid grey layers, and showers and goes empty to bed.
The next time she sees Nick, Janey, quite unembarrassed, gives him a big smacking kiss on the cheek.
‘Ow.’ He wipes it off, and laughs back at her. Chloe watches him closely, and listens for flirtatiousness in their laughter. She can’t detect any.
She is deeply relieved. If Nick had taken Janey on, Janey might not have needed Chloe any more; Nick is, sort of, a right-sexed Chloe. Chloe might well have been totally redundant, sitting in her room with her books, hearing Janey laughing (and worse) in Nick’s room. She feels sick just thinking about it.
But Janey might have been happier, she thinks guiltily. If Nick was prepared to care … She pulls herself up—this is her friend, not some kind of exotic pet whose care and keeping can be passed from one person to another. Instantly she feels burdened, and sees Janey as exactly that, and panics. Will it ever end? Will she ever have a life of her own to live, like Nick?
All this flashes through her head very quickly. Nick and Janey are still laughing; the smile is still nailed to Chloe’s face.
‘She would just go out and do stuff, you know?’ says Chloe, weeping, to Dane. ‘When I try and think, of the next move—in my life, I mean—I just—nothing’s there. Nothing’s saying, “Hey, do me.” Nothing’s demanding to be done, by me. I mean, there’s this BA. I applied, I got into it, I’m all set to do it—but I don’t have the urge to do it like Isaac does, or even just wanting to make a living from it like Nick. And Janey … I really wanted her to get into Fine Art—she would’ve taken off like a rocket, you know?’
‘So you think,’ says Dane, ‘that if anyone should have their brains bashed in, it should be colourless, unmotivated you, not Janey.’
Chloe lays her face among her interlocked fingers. ‘I guess I do mean that.’
‘You think that she should be alive now, and you should be dead. If there was any justice in the world.’
Chloe, hiding, nods, sniffs; a long silence.
‘News for you, honey-girl,’ Dane whispers. ‘There is no justice.’ He kisses her hair. ‘You’re stuck here with us.’ A sobbing laugh tears itself from Chloe. ‘Colourless, boring, directionless, Chloe is stuck in this world. Marvellous Janey, who had all the talent, all the sex appeal, all the initiative—’ his whisper is almost inaudible under Chloe’s moans ‘—she’s gone on to that other one, if there is one.’
Eventually Chloe chokes out, ‘I miss her—hurts, it actually hurts! Like, my body! All over.’
Dane gathers her up. ‘It won’t hurt forever—not so badly.’
‘Oh, but it hurts now!’
‘And it should, and it should,’ he soothes. ‘Don’t sound so outraged—of course it hurts! She was a big girl, in every way. She took up a lot of room. For a while you just have to stop, and … and register what you’ve lost.’
‘Feels like everything—’
‘I know. But it isn’t, not quite. Really. Believe me. Other things will come along. You’ll be glad to be alive again, some time, if you can hold out through this.’
Chloe says nothing, but nods and sobs on.
It’s spring. It’s raining. They’ve been inside all day. Now they’re running across the park at night, just to be running, just because they can, there’s room. The rain drops sting, but between them the air is soft and springy, and it smells green. Everything feels alive; even the swings look alive, like newborn giraffes bracing themselves upright.
There’s a fantastic slippery-slide, following the slope of the park down, curving right, then left. Janey and Chloe both see it at the same second. ‘It’s gotta be done,’ says Janey, her face blistered all over with water drops. She takes off her clothes, shoves them at Chloe, and gallops away to the slide. She’s fifteen, but as unembarrassed as a child would be. Chloe staggers after her, a sleeve trailing out of the clothes bundle and tripping her up. ‘Watch out, it’ll be slippery with this rain,’ she says, but Janey’s off already.
It is slippery. She’s immediately out of control. She slews right, slews left, too fast even to scream. She shoots out of the end, hangs there like an airborne Henry Moore sculpture, and lands hard in a puddle in the bark-chip soft fall.
The breath is knocked out of her. ‘How. Oh. Ow.’ When she manages to gulp some air, she disappears in a fit of silent laughter. Chloe crouches beside her, Janey’s clothes still warm in her arms, more like skin than cloth. Their hair is seriously wet, swinging in coils.
‘Aak! People coming!’ Janey hauls on the trailing sleeve and starts dressing. As she stands up, a big patch of bark-chip and dirt falls from her hip and Chloe can see she’s scraped herself; blood is trickling.
‘Ow,’ Chloe says, and puts her hand on it for a second. It’s gritty, and the flesh underneath is cold and wet and roughened.
‘Yeah, I whacked myself—landing.’ Janey hauls her underpants and leggings on, and Chloe runs back and fetches a dropped boot, hunts down a sock, while Janey sits on the end of the slide, groaning with laughter.
Chloe helps her limp to the shopping centre; in the rain it looks like a long row of lit-up ships moored to the edges of the street. Both girls have bad giggles, and are staggering like drunks. Chloe pants out, ‘I’ve just one question for you, Janey. Why? I mean, does something take hold of you? Tell you?’
‘Not exactly. Not like … God, or anything. Just suddenly, there’s only one course of action. Only one way to go, and that’s forward.’ She spears the air with her grimy hand.
Where there was once a whole other planet, with its cycles and seasons, its oceans and continents, societies and species and fascinations, with its magnetic field—Janey’s orbit and Chloe’s pulling each other out of whack (or into it)—there is now only deep space. The other stars and planets are pinprick distant, quite out of reach, mere decorations, festoons, on a fabric of darkness.
Chloe has beautiful hands. She has beautiful everything—it’s a bit embarrassing, so she compensates by not being too wonderful at anything and by being squirmingly self-conscious. ‘Hiding her light under a bushel,’ her mother says, and Dane laughs. ‘Yes, so far under the bushel you can’t even tell the bushel’s there, let alone the light.’ She prefers to sit and watch Janey’s fingers magic some Janey-thing out of torn paper or rag, or razor blades, or sisal and scrubbed dried bones. She isn’t inspired, herself, to stack tiles into cairns or weave leaves, but when Janey does it it’s worth watching, her unconscious fingers, her silent concentration punctuated with jokes, the moment of completion when Janey takes her hands away and checks with her eyes that the object she imagined is achieved.
Among the rags and bones is always a small space or two for something to be set, something tiny and well-made that gives off intensity: a doll’s hand painted silver; a tiny sugar bear with a smudged eye; a fresh kumquat made sacred by the insertion of cloves and pearl-headed pins.
If she’s at Chloe’s, Janey will cap the glue, sweep up the rubbish with her hands and stow it in the bin and be three steps ahead of Chloe (‘—and then we can buy a bag of liquorice at Darrell Lea’s and walk through Hyde Park, hey? Cole?’) while Chloe’s still staring at some minuscule woven hinge or catch and wondering How did she do that? Even having watched, Chloe can hardly believe that human adult fingers made them.
For a votive disc Janey starts with a fifty-cent coin or a larger cardboard cutout, and a long strip of paper made from a lined white pad. She writes on the paper, sometimes with her own scrawl in a black ne
edle-tipped pen, sometimes gluing on strips of newspaper type or words photocopied from books. She covers the words with stretches, strips and dashes of colour, mostly rough red crayon or flecks of gold or silver. Then she winds the paper around the coin or cutout until it’s covered, its corners blurred with layers. Then she varnishes and varnishes until it has an aged, yellow look, sometimes sanding it back for a smooth finish, sometimes leaving it a bit rough, stopping now and then to blow the disc clear of dust.
She makes dozens of discs, some pierced for hanging from ears or belts or around necks on leather thongs, some displayed in purpose-built boxes, sometimes labelled with titles or dates. She gives the discs as gifts, writing their words out again in the card that goes with them, words chosen in Janey’s weird elliptical way, seeming to have nothing and everything to do with the occasion. She wears a disc herself, or has one in her pocket, almost all the time. When Isaac mentions that Jewish people sometimes carry tiny scrolls of scripture in boxes on their foreheads she makes herself a triple head-disc of three poems she likes, and straps it on with black leather; it makes her look warlike and foreign, but when she shows Chloe the three poems, Chloe can sort of see the point of it, having those words so close to the brain, ‘It’s like one of those medicine patches,’ she suggests, ‘or the nicotine patches. It seeps into your body in a continual measured dose.’
‘Yeah.’ Janey adjusts the discs like safety goggles on her forehead. ‘Yeah, you’re right.’
Such things arrive in Janey’s hands like a gift. Chloe understands now what having a ‘gift for’ something means—not just the ideas that attack Janey in a constant stream, but a kind of physical knowledge that allows you to bring the ideas out of the materials like a bust out of a block of stone.
It seems to Chloe she has no gifts except her looks, which can only be carted around like a placard, and will spoil. But by watching Janey she might pick something up, some key, some discarded bit of talent like a scrap of wool or a dropped sequin, some clue that she can seize on, to find a way forward for herself.
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