Touching Earth Lightly

by Margo Lanagan

  Janey twirls in loose clothes, her black hair like spinning strips in an auto car-wash. The two of them are limber like lambs or kittens, moving without aim across the grass, pramless, baby-free.

  They go up to the churchyard. It feels like an old haunt, as if they are coming back after years, lifetimes away. They lie on the sandstone grave-slabs, watching the camphor-laurel leaves against the sky and not speaking.

  ‘It could be all right, you know?’ Janey says eventually.

  Chloe props herself on an elbow. ‘It could be. It won’t ever be exactly the same as it was, will it? As before you got pregnant, I mean.’

  ‘I wonder if they’d let a seventeen-year-old get her tubes tied.’

  ‘Tell ‘em your history.’ They laugh darkly. ‘They’ll be queuing up to do you.’

  ‘Your mum would say not to.’

  Chloe thinks about it. ‘Probably.’

  ‘She’d say, “You never know—your hormones might settle of their own accord.’”

  ‘And you never do know.’

  ‘But babies, as a way of life? And with some man? Some father poking his nose in?’

  ‘Caring, you mean?’ Chloe laughs.

  Janey shudders. ‘Well, I can’t see it. Not for me,’ she adds with great bravura.

  ‘Wait and see,’ says Chloe.

  ‘My, we’re adult today.’

  ‘Well, somebody’s got to be, you talking about having yourself chopped up.’

  ‘Ha. Compared to what a baby does … Let’s get out of here—I’m beginning to feel like a smoke myself. Although, I suppose I can now, now that I’ve only got myself to think about.’

  It becomes not possible to stay all day in the house with the paraphernalia of the Janey-record, in the room that stinks of old dreams and in which Chloe’s own thoughts speak so clearly, that sometimes she checks behind her for the speakers.

  For distraction she goes to the station, and takes trains to unfamiliar places, and walks. She chooses places where other people walk, the quay, the bridge, the beach promenade. She becomes a tourist in her own town.

  One day she takes the train up to the mountains, and walks through a town in drizzle, and leans out over a valley where mist eases itself among the rocks and catches in tree-tops below. She leans there and waits, and for once tears don’t come; instead, the air flows seamlessly around her, full of the smells of soil and leaf rot and green-blue eucalypts; it’s like a wind of protozoa, like massed air-krill nourishing her against her will. Currawong calls shave curls off the silence, tour buses huff and hiss and glide over it. Fragments of conversation in many languages—about meals, about camera angles, about hotels, about the landforms and cloud-forms hulking and moving in front of her—fall about her like leaves, sweetly banal.

  She comes home on the train sleepy with pie-warmth, coffee-warmth, heated-train-warmth, sealed in with fellow tourists and visitors and smacked, crying children with their futures intact and ahead of them, hardly nibbled at the first edge. She walks home in the night and finds the house lit for her, the place ready in the stepped family where she fits. She looks at her room and knows that it can’t stay much longer as it is, that the work is coming to an end, and then she cries, for the emptiness at the end of the work, for her own not knowing what lies there.

  ‘You should stay here,’ says Chloe earnestly.

  ‘You should concentrate on your HSC,’ says Janey severely. ‘One of us should have something to show for this year.’

  Chloe is silent, shocked that she would say that.

  ‘Besides,’ says Janey, haphazardly folding things and stuffing them in her pack, ‘it seems so empty here. It’s all so fresh, you know? I really … I can’t hack it.’

  ‘I can’t bear that you go back to that awful … house, and sleep in that … room, with … no one on your side!’ Chloe starts to cry.

  ‘But you’re all too nice, and you make it so hard!’ Janey crosses the room and hugs her savagely. ‘I need some people around who don’t care. Know what I mean? So I can remember how not to. So I can forget a bit.’

  Chloe looks up at Janey’s wobbling chin. Janey turns away quickly and resumes stuffing.

  ‘I guess …’ says Chloe. ‘But I will “see a lot of you”, won’t I?’ She quotes a teacher who once warned her off Janey’s company.

  ‘Everything there is to see, babe,’ says Janey unsteadily—her standard reply.

  Later Joy finds Chloe alone in her room, sobbing hard. ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Hey. Hey, hey.’ She sits down and puts her hands on her back. ‘What is it?’ she says when she can be heard. ‘What am I consoling you for, lamb-girl?’ Chloe can hear her looking around the room, seeing all Janey’s things gone.

  ‘Everything! Just … all of it!’

  ‘The whole lot, hey? The two weeks that changed the world.’

  ‘They did,’ sobs Chloe helplessly. ‘They did.’

  Downstairs, what Joy calls ‘the usual crowd’ talks and laughs. She can hear Carl’s murmuring, Maurice’s deep chortles and Jube’s sudden hoots of laughter. Chloe remembers how subdued they were, the first Sunday after Janey died; now they’ve all recovered, clearly, judging by the amount of noise they’re making. She’s helping by keeping out of the way, by not reminding them with her scrawny frame, her silence. She’s slept most of the day; weekends are the hardest to bear, when everyone else in the world has a social life—or are weekdays, when everyone’s got a job to go to? She can’t decide … well, weekends are just bad in a different way. It’s late in the evening and she isn’t tired any more; she was up most of last night prowling, labelling and sorting, writing. She’s caught halfway between sleeping and waking, sitting on the end of her bed unable to move, unable to see much point in moving.

  She hears a chorus of goodnights from below and someone comes upstairs and along the hall. She assumes it’s Nick, and when he knocks she says ‘Yep’. But it’s Isaac, ready to leave in his black coat and tartan scarf.

  She stares at him as if he’s slipped through time or from another planet to stand there. Her room suddenly seems disgusting, piled up with clutter, and unclean—it isn’t meant to be seen by other people at the moment. She isn’t meant to be seen.

  Too late. Isaac comes in and squats near her chair. Chloe tenses, afraid she smells of bed, of sleep. He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose, closing his suddenly enlarged dark eyes. He seems like a neat paper sculpture scalpelled moments before, all clean edges. He’s so present, his bumpy face, his black-coated shoulders. It’s just like when he came back from overseas. All this time he’s been going on, continuing. How surprising.

  His unglassed eyes look up at her. ‘How’s it going?’

  She nods. She needn’t say anything, like an invalid whose condition is always the same.

  He begins to speak, slowly and with long pauses. He seems to realise that the words will have to swim about a bit before they settle into meaning.

  ‘I’m going to the coast next week. Nick’s coming too—there’s a house I want to show him. It’s kind of a work thing, leaving Monday, coming back Wednesday. The owner’s a friend of my mother’s. He said to bring whoever I wanted.’

  She sits very still, examining his face—not the eyes, which are too full of sight and understanding, but the stubble beginning to shade the chin, and the scrim of black steel-wool hair, and the big white bony hands dangling the glasses, which are like another pair of eyes, assessing the state of the carpet.

  Her eyes begin to haze over and she realises she isn’t breathing. When they clear she nods, and meets his eyes. ‘Sounds nice.’ Her voice is husky with lack of use. ‘By the sea, did you say it was?’

  ‘On a cliff overlooking a little beach. There’s no one else around. You’ll like it.’

  I probably will, she thinks. This is possible, now. ‘Okay,’ she says. I can always say no, later on, if it seems like too much, too hard. I mean, facing strangers … She nods tentatively.

  Isaac watches her close
ly, as if he has another, more vital question to ask and is fighting himself whether to ask it. She waits for it, almost leans a little towards him expecting it.

  She hasn’t realised how cold she is. He puts his hand against one side of her face, and kisses the other side. Then he seems to vaporise, to be gone without going, to disappear into his own warm hand-print and face-print, into the small sound the kiss made. And Chloe sits surprised, wide awake, not quite knowing what to do, how to feel.

  The caryard seems very … quiet. Out of breath from crawling through the wrecks, Chloe stands up and looks around, her hands on her camera case. The sunlight is still winter-weak, but the air is warm and sheltered.

  Janey’s stack rises ahead of her like a post-nuclear-holocaust altar, black and rusty, seamed with cheap colours. A small twist of crushed metal opens like a flower at her feet; it’s small enough to pick up and put in her pocket. She goes slowly across the roofs, each step carefully planted. She keeps moving, so that she’s climbing before she can stop and lose courage. She climbs right to the top without stopping.

  She sits in the sun, in the balmy breeze off the invisible sea. In the direction of the sea arcs the motorway, with traffic beetling along it, only the shiny beetle-backs visible above the barriers. All around her at a distance, traffic makes the noise that’s always here, ignored, like tinnitus. And the dead traffic spreads around her black and uneven, a city in itself, blocking out all of the outer city but the motorway and two church spires.

  It’s all different. This is why she has come in daylight, so that it will be different, so that there’ll be no shadows, no mysteries, no dark feelings, so that the memories will be bleached out or at least overlaid with light. Parts of the stack are white with fingerprinting dust. She has the sense of everything being gone, professionals having swept the site, tweezers and snap-lock bags at the ready; whatever was there is now neutralised; it’s no longer the scene of a crime but a place of legend, where only those who know feel its power.

  At last she allows herself to look down at the boot where Janey lay. The blood is still visible, baked flat into the metal, open to sun and wind. You wouldn’t mistake it for anything else but blood. Chloe’s hands automatically undo the camera case. This is something she didn’t want to do, but she knows she must. This dry weather won’t last forever; the mark will disappear, washed and worn deep into the field of cars. Someone besides the police has to record that it was here, before it goes. For Eddie? Chloe isn’t so sure any more.

  ‘You okay back there?’ Nick turns around to check.

  ‘Yep, fine,’ says Chloe.

  ‘Thought you’d gone to sleep.’

  ‘I would’ve, if I’d been listening to you two talk.’ She’s quite proud of herself for managing a joke. ‘But I wouldn’t want to waste the view.’

  There is almost too much view. They are driving right down the edge of the land, through bush, through little lemming-villages, around cliffs. The sky and sea are huge and blue and clean, and everything speaks of morning—the damp road edges, the dewy roadside weeds, the shop owners putting out signs, children running to school.

  After a petrol stop they swap around seats, Nick driving, Chloe in the front passenger seat. After a few miles, Chloe says, ‘Well, this seating arrangement sure killed the conversation.’

  ‘Thank God,’ says Isaac, from behind. ‘Nick banging on about uni. Thought I was getting away from the place.’

  ‘You’re just squitting yourself I’ll go off the road,’ cackles Nick.

  ‘That’s it. Too scared to utter a word.’

  ‘I can hear your fingernails in the upholstery.’

  They stop halfway for a snack and a walk on a beach in the cold, on the coaldust-streaked sand. Chloe stands at the water’s edge facing the wind off the sea. It’s as if she’s been pulled loose from something, and the tendrils that had grown to it are now waving free, searching the air, curling around nothing.

  When they get back to the car Isaac climbs into the passenger seat and Nick opens the door to the back. Chloe stops in her tracks.

  Isaac’s window glides down and he holds out the car keys. ‘You are joking,’ says Chloe.

  Nick takes a pair of magnetic L-plates out and slaps them on the bonnet and boot. ‘It’s your turn.’

  ‘Oh, no-oo-oo! I just wanna sit!’

  ‘You’ve done enough sitting.’ Nick gets in and shuts the back door.

  ‘It’s okay,’ says Isaac. ‘I’ll be here to grab the wheel if you look like wrecking my precious vehicle.’

  Moaning with embarrassment Chloe drags herself around to the driver’s side.

  ‘It’s all automatic,’ coaxes Isaac as she fastens her belt. ‘You just put it in Drive and go.’ She gives him a withering look.

  ‘Yeah, the hard bit is remembering you are actually driving,’ says Nick.

  ‘The hard bit is getting out of this town without having a major panic attack,’ mutters Chloe, starting the engine.

  ‘You’ll be fine. Just take it as slowly as you want,’ says Isaac. ‘Don’t let anyone behind you bother you.’

  ‘Yeah, leave the finger-signs to me,’ says Nick with relish.

  Once she’s crept out of town back onto the highway, she drives on silently, with great concentration, super-aware of the overtaking traffic. She drives them the rest of the way. As they jounce carefully down the bush track to the house, her heart and her head lighten with the realisation of what she’s done—taken her turn, been of some use, not just a guest, a little sister or a convalescent along for the ride. She switches off the engine, her hands trembling with adrenalin.

  Isaac is already out of the car, greeting his mother’s friend, Gavin. Nick reaches from the back and shakes her shoulder roughly. ‘You done good,’ he says.

  On their second day at Gavin’s house, Chloe walks alone down to the beach. There is very little her eyes need screen out—no bag ladies or drunks, no rust-bucket cars or derelict, boarded-up buildings. The sand is washed clean. Hard, dried-black seaweed and other sea-litter are caught in the lowest dune grass. Here is that live air again, like the air in the mountains, only salty; out there is a whole other world of whales and water-breathers, submarine forests and mountain ranges, tides instead of winds, phosphorescent fish instead of stars. This, what she can see, is just the grey lid of it, rippling under the grey sky.

  If she stays on the beach long enough she thinks of nothing. The wind and water rinse out her head. And she feels nothing. She can re-enter her life clean. She can start again. This is why people go to the seaside on holidays—to clear away all the grime and disillusion and sadness and frustration, to be salt-clean and cold, able to face their jobs again without boredom or their partners or families without annoyance.

  Chloe crosses to the rocks, a beautiful mosaic scattered with limpets, anemones, cungevois as soft and dark as blood-blisters. Tinier and tinier creatures and plants show themselves, the closer she looks. She crouches and rests her eyes on the colours, muted without sunlight—mauves and pinks, milky-coffee browns, pale yellows, whites warm and cool. She can’t tell where the water’s surface is, except at the edges where light scrawls a complex rim around slow-moving snails and honeycomb rocks. Every few waves a large one crashes into the rock-edge, flinging up spray that falls back like firework sparks, pattering.

  This is her last look at the beach. Up in the house—an intelligent shoebox of a house in which everyone tends to look beautifully arranged—Gavin is scanning parts of the architect’s plans for Nick and Isaac to take with them.

  Chloe doesn’t want to leave. For two nights she’s slept in an elegant black-walled cell overlooking the sea, with nothing in it but a bed, a bookcase and a knobbly grey woollen rug—no clutter, no memories. It has been as if a silence fell, inside her head. If the relief had continued, if she could have shut out the clamour of Janey’s things, of the jobs Janey has left her, just a short while longer, maybe something else would have stirred and begun to move out into the vacated s
pace, something inside her that has been waiting all curled up and contained—but growing a little impatient.

  Last night she lay awake imagining Janey on a sleeping mat on the floor next to her. It was so easy, she gave herself a shock when she turned over and there was nothing but moonlight and rug. She sat on the end of the bed, from where she could see the night-time sea, wave after wave foaming over the rocks like buckets of sudsy water cast across a pavement. Day and night it went on, whether or not there was moon to watch it by, whether or not she was there to watch it, or Janey. Was that reassuring, or terrifying? She decided to plump for reassuring, because there was nothing she could do about terror, and she crawled back into bed and let the sea sounds reassure her to sleep.

  Towards morning she dreamed walking across the park and into the churchyard. She found Janey lying on a slab, smoking a cigarette. Janey turned and smiled satirically, crushed the cigarette out against the stone.

  ‘So … you finished grieving?’ Janey scornfully blew a plume of smoke into the air. Chloe followed it with her eyes and woke up in the sky, in a sense of pausing, Janey’s question in her head. Janey’s voice had been so clearly Janey’s; her face had been her own, too, not distorted or dead or Janey-disguised-as-anyone.

  Chloe tests herself, thinking about the impossibility of turning around and seeing Janey picking her way on solid white feet across the rocks, wincing, about never seeing her on another beach again, about never sitting beside her waiting for a thought to arrive that’s worth repeating. It still hurts; it still makes her shake herself and take a deep breath to ease the weight from her heart. But once that’s done the weight is eased, a little, and still, before her, there is the pool, full of fans and shells, bone-stones, snail-tracks, lost white claws, tiny dun fish; and still, beyond that, the waves peak and crash, and the moon-dragged rug of the ocean is beyond that again—she is tiny herself before it all, a humble fleck of sea-debris. High above and behind her there is still Gavin’s house, with its maybe-beautiful, functional, plain planes. She turns to look at it.