Touching Earth Lightly

by Margo Lanagan

  Isaac is at the living-room window. She’s about to wave, but something in the fixed way he leans and looks down prevents her, and makes her stand up instead. She sees the flash of her mother’s eyebrows and hears her voice: Didn’t I tell you?

  Then Gavin comes up beside Isaac, handing him a mug of coffee; whatever it was disappears from Isaac’s stance and they become two men conversing, a long way away. Chloe steps off the rocks onto the hard-packed, sloping sand, as if that were all she had intended by standing. She must have seen wrong; she may have just made an idiot of herself, gazing up at him like Romeo at Juliet. Look at him now—just a quick glance. This is Isaac, Nick’s friend. It’s not possible, what she thought she saw—she’s known him so long, he’s seen her so many times at her worst, she’s been outright rude to him, not even greeted him sometimes, swarmed past him, joked at his expense endlessly, the way all her family does. And Rachel … girls like Rachel are available to him, while Chloe’s been stomping around scowling in Blundstones and fairy dresses and dirt for years … well, it’s not possible, is it?

  She makes a neat set of boot-prints along the bubble-line of the retreated sea, to the far rocks. She stands, invisible to anyone, and stares for a while at the horizon. The wind whistles in her sleepers; the sea falls forward and slides back.

  ‘And I see things, is another thing,’ says Janey, blowing smoke up into the camphor laurels in the graveyard.

  ‘Huh?’ says Chloe lazily. There are times when she doesn’t actually listen very carefully to everything Janey says.

  ‘When I’m having sex. When I’m not thinking.’

  ‘What do you mean, “see”? And “things”—what things?’

  ‘Like, pictures—like, almost like psychedelic things, sometimes. Odd pictures. Things I haven’t thought about for years, and then sometimes things I never would think about, in my normal life. Do you get that?’ She peers at Chloe. Chloe shakes her head.

  ‘It’s just… I don’t know how to explain it. These pictures pop into my head, that’s all. But that makes it sound ordinary, when in fact they’re really …’

  ‘Visions,’ Chloe supplies, closing her eyes against the busy wiggling of the leaves.

  ‘They are visions! Little ones, not your full-on, you know, wow-man, Joan of Arcs or anything, just …’

  ‘You make it sound like a brand name, like Doc Martens—Joan of Arcs. What would a Joan of Arc be? Some kind of rainwear?’

  ‘Some kind of tool, some … implement. I know, one of those little plastic swords you stick through the onion in a cocktail, or the pineapple chunk or whatever.’

  ‘No, that’s too trivial.’ They have this sort of conversation a lot. ‘I’d say a special sword-shaped skewer that you use to cook kebabs over a barbecue. You have a whole row of them, you know, with little sword handles. Joan of Arcs. So you give someone a set of Joan of Arcs for a wedding present. Fits in with her burning at the stake, get it?’

  ‘Oh, stake/steak, right?’

  Chloe picks up a fragment of sandstone and throws it at her. ‘So tell me one of these visions.’

  ‘Ooh. Well. That picture I did in Art, of the horses’ heads being washed up—that was one.’

  ‘Yeah? In the middle of sex? Not exactly a turn-on, I would’ve thought.’

  ‘No, well, they don’t have anything to do with the sex. They’re just happening there, when it’s going on. I had this weird one a couple of weeks ago—a guy strapping his kids into the car, in those little safety seats they have, you know? With the little kind of head-guards? Only the babies are just, kind of, meat. They’re just these, like, meat trays or … meat sculptures. They hold together, and he acts like they’re his kids, but they’re not even kid-shaped. Gross, huh?’ she says, catching Chloe’s bemused expression.

  ‘Pretty strange,’ Chloe says.

  ‘They’re like dreams—if I make a note of them I can remember. Otherwise they just go. They just blow away afterwards.’

  ‘And you want to remember stuff like that?’

  ‘Well, look at the horses: A-plus. I can use this stuff. I can use it!’

  Sometimes Janey isn’t entirely serious with Chloe.

  Back home in the city, Chloe has tidied her room. It’s odd to walk in and find it so spare-looking; it gives her a not-quite-painful feeling, as if she’s cut her fingernails too short.

  There is nothing on the walls now except Janey’s horse-heads painting, and opposite it on the noticeboard the last Cibachrome Chloe made over at Carl’s. The metal twist, which is more like a kelp stalk torn from its rock than a flower, lies beside a circle of metal patterned with rust like lace, and a line of beer-bottle shards collected from the car-yard. They look like archaeological finds lined up like that, in pin-sharp focus against the backing paper, which is a light, marbled purple. The light from Chloe’s window was strong that day, and the amber light through the glass bits flares off across the paper like flames.

  It only makes a kind of sense, as a record of Janey. It’s a record of her death, Chloe supposes, because the objects come from that place, but it’s like looking not at it but past it, just catching it with her peripheral vision. Then again, the things seem to speak the feelings Janey’s death make; Eddie might get a clearer idea of what a loss she was, looking at this picture, than from all the other things in the Janey-chest. No, she thinks, going through them in her mind, they all combine, they all say some little different thing about what she was, what she meant—that’s why Chloe’s collected them so obsessively, tracked down every possible item. All the fragments play off each other, and somewhere between them, among them, is where the fully-faceted Janey exists.

  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 mo
re 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.