Touching Earth Lightly

by Margo Lanagan

  ‘Give yourself time,’ people assure her, as if it’s something she must want to hear. ‘It does heal you.’ Inside, Chloe scoffs. Time’s the great enemy—can’t they see? Time bulldozes a whole heap of other material in on top of your wounds; eventually she might feel healed because, wow, she hasn’t thought of Janey for whole hours (maybe this will stretch out into days, months, years—no, impossible! But then, anything’s possible now, isn’t it?); because she’ll have lived so much life without Janey, there’ll be the illusion that she’s whole again. But she never will be; there will always be this Janey-shaped piece out of her, however small it shrinks.

  She still tortures herself with other ways Janey’s life might have gone. If she’d been a proper friend and used her head, instead of just accepting-Janey-because-she-was-Janey, things would have turned out differently. Janey would still be here, and Chloe not even dreaming of writing letters to Eddie, of presuming to. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’—she could cover pages with those words. Dane used to be punished at school by being made to write a hundred times ‘I will not [whatever he’d done]’. But that always implied there’d be another chance some time, another go at the same choice. With Janey there’s no chance to fix anything, to make anything over. There are no more options, no more forks in the road to stand at, dithering. That was it; it’s all done.

  Oh Janey! To belong in the past! Janey to belong in the past! When she still moves, fierce and clumsy, across the inside of Chloe’s eyelids, when Chloe still actually hears her voice in the day-to-day, for full seconds believes her to be in the next room, or just down in the kitchen chatting with Joy—or making her way here frowsty and cross through the spring morning, her platform shoes crushing the callistemon fluff, her mouth ready to burst forth with some greeting she’s dreamed up. Janey refuses, as yet, to belong in the past. But time will fix all that, consign those memories to their cells, deeper, more secure cells, from which they won’t keep popping out to confuse or dismay Chloe. When they’re all safely away, locked into receding time, Janey will be truly dead and gone; Chloe vows this will never happen, even as she knows it must.

  Janey comes to meet Chloe after school the first day of Year 12. Chloe comes to the fence and swings her legs over; Janey stands on the path as if the fence might zap her, or the school grass brush her with poison.

  They don’t speak until they’re well away.

  ‘Actually, I think it’s going to be a bit different this year,’ Chloe says.

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘No, I mean, it’s so quiet. No gangs—or maybe they just haven’t been set up yet. But Gemma Donato talked to me, like a human being. Everyone’s different—getting serious.’

  ‘Weeded out the bad influences,’ says Janey.

  ‘That’s right.’ Chloe slips an arm around Janey’s waist and catches a whiff of Janey’s fear-sweat smell.

  Janey looks rueful, rubs her nose. ‘You reckon I did the right thing?’

  ‘For sure. What did you do today?’

  Janey shrugs. ‘Wandered ‘round. Nothing much. Got depressed.’ They laugh. ‘It’s a pity you can’t be a loser too.’

  Chloe bumps her off-balance. ‘You’ll find something.’

  Janey looks up, searching the horizon, a frown twitching between her eyebrows. ‘Yeah. I’ll have to, won’t I?’ she says, and sighs deeply.

  She sets up something of a studio in her room, with a sheet of grey marbled paper and some lights of Nick’s. She brings things here, photographs them, returns them to their places, their owners, their libraries. She keeps meticulous records of when Janey made this piece, or read this book, or why these earrings are special (because Janey made them herself for her fifteenth birthday), or this quarter of a bottle of apricot kernel oil (because Chloe used it for foot and baby massages when Janey was pregnant), these pages (because Janey read aloud from them when Chloe lay here—in this bed—with the flu, three winters ago).

  Not everything has to be photographed. Little things Janey made or owned can be boxed in cotton wool, numbered, catalogued, stored. But there are other things, paintings, costumes, mobiles, that resist being put away. Chloe has these things around her; they have gravitated to her from Janey’s room, or her parents and brothers and friends have brought them.

  ‘She gave me this when Gus died, you remember?’ says Carl, bringing a gold box scattered with Christmas-paper angels.

  ‘Oh, not the hat! Oh God, I don’t think I can take it!’ Chloe is on the verge of handing the box back.

  ‘Don’t look at it now. It does work, though, a little way down the track.’

  ‘It was terrible, I remember. Everyone laughing and crying at the same time.’ Chloe is blinking tears.

  ‘I know. But wasn’t it exactly right, her timing? Just when we were getting all solemn and restrained and black, she had this thing ready, which hit just the right note, it was so Gus, it was so much what we wanted for him.’

  Chloe nods, and falls into a sob. ‘What am I going to do? There won’t ever be another one of her.’

  ‘There won’t, my lovely girl.’ She leans against him feeling far from lovely—ugly, grief-distorted, graceless. One of Carl’s tears falls on her cheek. She looks up at him. ‘How did you get through this?’ she says, reaching for the tissues.

  ‘I didn’t. You don’t. I’m not through. Probably won’t ever be. It’s just a very—’ he laughs softly, ‘—a very dark, plain area of the tapestry. Without it the rest of the pattern wouldn’t be quite so bright.’

  When Carl has left, Chloe opens the hatbox. Inside is a decrepit old top hat. Janey has fixed a narrow ramp to it, curving right around it from brim to crown, and glued on a piece of aged-looking paper, on which she has carefully inked the words ‘Je Monte’ in curly, old-fashioned writing. Chloe remembers her saying ‘Djer montay,’ reading the words Joy wrote down for her.

  Chloe turns the little handle under the brim, and the pipe-cleaner figure in its silver-wire wheelchair, its face a cutout photograph of Gus, rolls smilingly, smoothly up the ramp to the heaven on the crown. There, a little golden harp, some golden cardboard wings, a halo on a wire halo-stand and four golden books—The Cat in History, The Wonder Book of Pasta, Poussin and How to Fix Your Mini Cooper—nestle in a cottonwool cloud, awaiting him.

  Little snorts of laughter and crying escape Chloe as each object sets off sprays of memories, in particular of The Last Picnic, and Gus being wheeled along the paths in the Botanic Gardens, the wheelchair winking in the sunlight, burning little holes in Chloe’s vision, and Gus shrunk to almost nothing, his smile ghastly and luminous at the same time, his eyes enormous.

  ‘What’s he staring at?’ Janey had muttered to Chloe. ‘What can he see?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Chloe had said. ‘Here. Have some more cake and don’t say anything.’

  She falls in love with Theo as much for his novel as for anything else. The paraphernalia of it attracts her—the reference books, the piles of notes, the set-aside times. That he has set himself such a task impresses her. She wants to know all about it, she wants to help if she can. She wants to inspire him.

  And for a while she does. At the beginning she can’t do anything wrong; he approves of everything about her. ‘I think that’s very kind,’ he says when she explains about going out with Janey, as her guard dog. ‘There aren’t many people who’d do that for their friend.’

  And Chloe thinks, Well, those are nice words in my ears, but a bit beside the point. It feels false, if pleasant, to take some credit, to seem saintly and generous, as if Janey has pleaded pathetically, and she has consented. When in fact it isn’t something she thinks about any more than a magnet things about snapping onto the fridge—it’s not a matter of discussion or agreement that keeps them together, but an unquestioning force.

  People come to dinner, Isaac and a couple from Joy’s work whom Chloe has met before but doesn’t know well. It’s kind of a test run, Chloe feels, a half-throttle occasion to ease them back into proper socialisin
g.

  She can’t eat much or say much. The whole thing seems too much of a betrayal of Janey, too much a pretence of normality. Between courses she excuses herself and goes into the lounge room, sits on the arm of the couch and flicks listlessly through the TV channels. She goes upstairs for want of something better to do, lies on her bed until she thinks she might be missed.

  When she comes down again, slowly because the dining room is full of laughter now and she doesn’t want to spoil things for them, to cast a pall over them again, Isaac is seated on the couch, studying CD sleeve notes.

  ‘So they’ve found who did it, they reckon,’ Chloe says bluntly, pausing at the end of the couch. She has to say something about it, acknowledge that they were in this together, clear the way for normality to flow back in between them.

  He slides the booklet into the plastic case. ‘Your dad said. A whole gang of them.’

  Chloe nods. The abbreviated version of the evening flashes through her mind—a pitiless blackness and spilled cubelets of glass.

  ‘It would take a gang, to knock down Janey.’ His is not a dutiful remark, as was hers. He looks up, and it’s as if Janey, her white feet and head at either end of Isaac’s coat, lies there in the air between them. Beyond her, Isaac is smiling—a curious thing, a new thing, that kind of smile, on Isaac’s face. Chloe feels childish, incompetent to deal with the twin twists of death and life in the air. She is shamed almost to tears. Yes, but what do we do now? is the bewildered thought that forms in her head.

  Pete comes with her to buy milk. Neither of them speaks, either on the way there or coming back, but Chloe’s glad of him, another pair of eyes besides her own, another set of thoughts—and to be half of a pair instead of a lone figure walking the streets at dusk.

  Janey’s mum is in the kitchen making tea, and she looks up at Janey as if Janey’s a complete, and very unwelcome, stranger. Janey once told Chloe that her mother reminded her of an unborn piglet that had been preserved in a jar, and really, she was right—that kind of aimless, vulnerable floating, and the little pink eyes with the pale lashes. She gives Chloe the shivers, and she gives her the same look as she gives Janey, and doesn’t speak to either of them. She doesn’t offer them any of the food she’s cooking, either—she cooks for herself and the men. ‘They stopped feeding me when I started going out in the evenings,’ Janey maintains. ‘Reckoned I was getting too fat. Actually, I think they got embarrassed when I started bringing my breasts to the table—I mean, covered up and everything, but, you know, there.’

  Chloe is aware of Nathan being in his bedroom. She can sense Janey’s dad, too, somewhere out the back. Her role is simply to keep them there, at bay, while Janey grabs some clothes to change into at Chloe’s place.

  This house has got worse since she was here last, months ago; the thick air seems too silent, and predatory. And was it always this dark? She feels as if she’s ventured into the territory of another species, almost, the atmosphere is so different from that of her own home.

  Chloe dreams leaving the crematorium after a ceremony. They hand her the urn of ashes, and she carries them to the car. Sitting between Pete and Nick she checks under the lid, a little pottery lid with a knob, like a sugar bowl. ‘Oh, look, she’s not ashes at all!’ She shows Pete and Nick the little foetus curled up in the jar, suspended in some kind of clear jelly. ‘Oh, cool!’ says Pete, and they all feel more cheerful. It seems they only have to find the right laboratory, the right host womb, and Janey can be grown back again. Chloe replaces the lid and cradles the urn happily. The taxi glides through sunlit suburbs she doesn’t recognise.

  Theo relieves her of her virginity almost too gently. Afterwards Chloe lies beside him as he sleeps, wondering why this thing is made out to be so momentous, this peculiar form of intimacy. It seems about as intimate as watching someone use the toilet, about as pleasurable as someone sticking a wet finger in your ear.

  It’s not that Chloe doesn’t get sexual feelings; they just seem to be sited differently from the sensations of this kind of sex, farther forward, and more on the outside. Maybe with practice the two experiences join up; maybe it can be as fabulous as Janey describes it. There must be more to it than Chloe’s just had.

  She looks at Theo’s fine Jesus-face on the other pillow. She doesn’t regret that it was with him, but she had just thought there would be more to it, the sex. This was so quick, and … strange, and … and now he’s just asleep …

  When she tells Janey the news, Janey wants to know everything. Gradually, reluctantly, Chloe tells her, wondering how she’ll ever face Theo again.

  ‘He sounds hopeless!’ cries Janey. ‘He sounds soggy, and boring—’

  ‘He was very affectionate, and very careful not to hurt me,’ asserts Chloe.

  ‘Careful not to excite you, by the sound of things. And so serious, like, “This is my great gift to you.” Like you couldn’t get better from any passing brickie’s labourer.’

  ‘Please,’ says Chloe, offended. ‘I’m sure it’ll get better.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe you’ll both loosen up a bit.’ She looks shrewdly at Chloe, then laughs. ‘I just think you deserve a good time, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t a bad time, and I’m grateful for that—’

  ‘Grateful?’ Janey squeaks.

  ‘Well, I’m glad he didn’t want to do anything weird, you know, like spank me or anything.’

  ‘Sounds like he could do with a pretty good spanking himself,’ mutters Janey.

  Chloe waves the conversation away.

  She feels like a blight on everyone’s lives, as if she’s just a cipher for her dead friend, as if she’s death itself, out walking by day but returning, always returning at night to fill up the house with the black stuff of her dreams and grievings. She carries some infection; the family’s faces change when she enters, from whatever expression to something bland, watchful, analytical—they don’t so much greet her as read her, registering her state, so that they can react or be tactful as she might require. She hates that, hates it and needs it.

  She feels unable to clear the clouds from her head, unable to see with her own eyes, unable to think without another set of thoughts, mourning thoughts, echoing, moaning away beneath, reverberating unpleasantly.

  Theo is stuck on the Russians. His novel is the Russian novel, writ Australian. He pushes aside her English texts (‘Trendy Yanks’; ‘Who gave you this crud?’; ‘Why are you wasting your time on these?’) and leaves Tolstoy on ‘her’ bedside table until she caves in and reads some of it before making the excuse that she hasn’t the time, not this year. He reads aloud to her in the scented bath; he drenches her in close-packed text; he discourses and she sits in his falling-down garden trying to keep her attention from drifting away, smiling as he lays these gifts in her lap. She has never been stuck on anything; his passion intrigues her, rather than the works that spark it. He buys her Russian poetry as a concession to her youth and reluctance to commit herself to the novels. She finds a few poems that she actually quite likes, but strangely never finds the right moment to tell him, to read them to him.

  ‘You never come round and see me at Theo’s,’ she remarks to Janey.

  ‘I know.’ Janey looks up from a drawing. ‘Sorry. I can’t. You go all different … and he acts like a jerk.’

  ‘I go all different?’

  ‘Yeah. You just turn into this … love object,’ she says, with such distaste that Chloe laughs.

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘You do. You hardly open your gob. The pair of you keep looking all over—it’s like duelling eye-beams.’ She jabs the air with her index fingers. ‘Everyone gets embarrassed. And then I yabber on to fill the spaces and Theo just looks at me, like, “When are you going to leave?” It sucks.’

  Chloe’s helpless with laughter and surprise and the effort of not weeping at the truth of it. Janey looks up and grins. ‘So I’ll just wait ’til you get over it. Like, for ever. Chloe four Theo four eva,’ she adds in a dimwitted
voice, writing it on the air.

  Chloe dives on her and knocks her to the bed with a hand across her mouth.

  ‘’s true!’ Janey cries, struggling. ‘Love, love, love—’

  ‘Just shut up, you horrible person.’

  When they’ve stopped laughing and righted themselves, Janey says, ‘But it’s okay. I mean, you’ve never liked any of my boys, have you?’

  ‘That’s true. And they all do the same thing, start prodding at us—you and me.’

  ‘They’re just jealous,’ says Janey, hugging Chloe with arms and legs. Chloe laughs with relief at being hugged without the expectation that sex will follow. ‘And I would be, too,’ says Janey. ‘Deep down I’d know I wasn’t any competition for me!’

  Chloe thinks of getting a chest specially crafted. If she were the woodcrafting type herself, she’d make it. But asking someone else to means stepping across a line between proper commemoration and sentimentality. Making it herself would be genuine; commissioning it, even from her father, would be false. How does she know this? When did that line get drawn?

  Instead she empties out the ‘window-seat’—a wooden chest with a padded top to sit on, under her bedroom window—and begins to store things in there. Janey’s things won’t be tidy; the costumes won’t flatten, the sketchbooks are coming apart and bursting with things glued in and left loose between the pages. Chloe’s record hardly takes up any room—boxes of slides, envelopes of prints and negatives, folders of notes and memories; everything she contributes is contained, closed, sealed, and can be stacked neatly.