Touching Earth Lightly (14 page)

‘Well, I’ll do what I can, love.’

‘Would you? And could you make sure he hasn’t got the photos of Janey’s little boy? They’re under the bedside table; I
think that’s where she keeps them. I’ll come by on my way home, just in case she turns up there.’

On the train home, Chloe made a conscious effort to calm down. This wasn’t the first time she’d lost track of Janey, and every other time she’d turned up smiling on Chloe’s doorstep, or met her up at the shops with a hug, or called her from some peculiar place, Bondi or Wisemans Ferry or, that legendary time, Coffs Harbour. She had powers of recovery that always astounded Chloe.
Just prepare to be astounded again
, Chloe told herself, watching the night suburbs tramp slowly by, by turns ignoring and obsessively examining the memories of this morning’s train trip, with their atmosphere of emergency.
Prepare to have to remind
Janey
about this morning, to point out that she’s got a right to charge Nathan with rape or sexual assault or just assault or whatever terrible thing it was. Prepare to say, ‘Look, I’ll stick with you if you want to go through with it. I’ll hold your hand. It has to be done, now that he’s too big and too dangerous for us to fend off by ourselves.’ Prepare to try and make her see sense
.

Chloe’s own face scowled intently back at her from the cold black train window. She drew a big sigh and looked around. She envied all these newspaper- and magazine-equipped commuters —surely none of them had such a difficult task ahead of them.

Maybe she shouldn’t make Janey go through all that, all those legal hoops, all those words. Hadn’t she said this morning how much she hated all that counselling stuff? Wasn’t that what had sent her off course somewhere between Circular Quay and the Crisis Centre? Maybe she should just move again. Move right away from here. I could go with her, thought Chloe, defer for another year, maybe, while she gets settled, gets together a portfolio that’ll win her a place in a fine art course. We could go to another city, or perhaps to a country town—well, considering Janey’s habits perhaps the anonymity of a city would be best. Melbourne? Adelaide? Perth? Couldn’t get much farther away than Perth—

Chloe rubbed her face with both hands. Who was she fooling? Even Perth was only four or five hours away by plane. Nathan had said he’d always find her, and he was used to getting what he wanted. By themselves they couldn’t neutralise him, and she wasn’t going to spend her whole life running and hiding from him. And neither should Janey let him warp her life like that.

So in the end she didn’t know what to do—not long-term. For now she would just
find
her, and when she was sure she was safe they’d all work out some strategy, the way they always did. Chloe’s parents would be able to work out what choices existed, and lay out the possibilities so that Chloe felt coherent and sensible arguing their merits to Janey, and helping her act on them.

Everything will be all right, she told herself, standing up as the train began to slow for her station.
Everything
, opera and Janey both, will be all right. Everything
will
be all right.

The doors slid open and she stepped out into the night.

‘So Ken gave me a hand—wasn’t he a nasty piece of work, Ken?’

‘A right little thug.’ Ken’s whisky-tanned face set in disapproving lines over his teacup.

‘That poor girl, where can she be?’

‘I don’t know.’ Chloe couldn’t imagine drinking the tea in front of her, but the steam felt nice on her face. She felt dry and worn out from the charged day. ‘Maybe she went back to my place—or her parents’, if she thought Nathan wouldn’t be there. Gee, I hope I haven’t stuffed that up for her—because that’s where he’ll go, eventually, now that he’s left here.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I feel like I just got everything
wrong
this morning—I
could
have gone with her in the end, it didn’t matter that I was late. An extra ten minutes and she would’ve been safe—it would’ve been
worth
being told off—’ She took a tiny scalding sip of tea and looked at Ken and Bette tiredly. ‘Sorry, I’m babbling on.’

‘Maybe the taxi company would know,’ said Bette.

‘That’s a thought,’ said Chloe. Bette motioned her to stay seated, and went to the wall phone. ‘It was a Centurion,’ said Chloe, and Ken reeled off the number by heart.

‘Pity she got her hair cut,’ Ken remarked as Bette talked. ‘They’d remember her for sure, all that hair.’

‘They would. But—’

Bette held up her hand, frowning and listening to the phone. ‘Heading for Newtown? Right, corner of Plaice and Tebbitt. And was she all right when he dropped her off?’ She listened for another few seconds. ‘Thank you—sorry, what was the driver’s number again, just in case?’ She wrote it on the phone pad, then hung up, tore off the page and handed it to Chloe. ‘That’s the driver—he says he remembers her because she was muttering to herself in the back all the way. She seemed very nervous, he says, very upset about something. And that’s where he dropped her, as far as the ten dollars went. Right by the park there.’

Chloe remembered Janey’s hand twitching in hers at the phone booth, Janey’s eyes rolling closed as she leaned her head against the glass. ‘And he just dumped her? But I told him the woman would meet him and pay the rest—’
The rape counsellor
, she added to herself. Talking about Janey to other people, she always found herself leaving out half the story.

‘The police?’ Bette suggested.

‘They won’t do anything until she’s been gone twenty-four hours,’ said Chloe. ‘This happened once before—she was just out partying. But she wasn’t exactly in party mode when I put her in the taxi. Aak, I should’ve gone with her. I
should’ve
! I couldn’t’ve got back to work, mind you, without any money, but—’ She sank her face in her hands.

‘Don’t get yourself into a lather about it, love,’ said Ken. ‘She’s probably just walked back to her mum’s place and gone to bed.’

‘Well, that’s why I’m—that’s one of the things I’m worried about now, with Nathan going—probably there by now.’ Chloe finished her tea and dragged herself to her feet. ‘She
might be at my place. I’ll go and check. Thanks for everything, Bette.’

‘Oh, the photos.’

‘You found them?’

‘They were right where you said. Fetch ’em out for me, Ken—behind the toaster. You take ’em with you, love—if she comes back tonight I’ll be straight in and tell her.’

At Chloe’s place her mum looked around from the TV news and shook her head.

‘Sheesh.’ Chloe threw her backsack and herself down on the couch opposite her.

‘Had a fun day, huh?’ said Joy. ‘You and me both.’

‘I didn’t think so many terrible things could
happen
in the one day.’ Chloe lay with her eyes closed, enjoying the cushioned couch—she felt as if this was the first time she hadn’t been physically uncomfortable all day. Her father was making dinner—she could hear something hissing in the wok, and Nick and Pete’s voices in the background. She could smell—what? Garlic frying, and the marinated meat. And it was warm in here, in the yellow lamplight, with the fire going and the newsreader calmly recounting disasters in faraway countries—Janey would
have
to want to come here, surely, rather than go to Bette’s or her parents’?

Her eyes opened as she remembered Janey absenting herself from her that morning—not just gliding away in the taxi but turning her face away, not responding, having to be practically pushed into the car. Earlier, even, in the train when Chloe had suggested going to see Joy—that’s when it had begun, that’s where Chloe had lost touch with her, or trust, or whatever the link was. That was where she’d started feeling annoyed at Janey’s refusals to see ways out, or ways to lessen the pain, where she’d started forcing the issue,
bustling
around her.

Her mother’s hand on her arm broke her free of these thoughts. ‘She always turns up,’ Joy said. ‘But you can’t make her turn up just by worrying about her.’

Chloe stared at the ceiling and nodded. She would turn up. Janey always turned up. Janey had looked after herself through many nasty situations—like her childhood, Chloe thought bitterly—and if Chloe had sat up all night worrying every time, she’d have missed out on a lot of sleep in the last six years.

That night she took off her boots and lay down in her clothes under the quilt, in case she had to leap up to telephone or door. Then she slept; if she were to be any use when Janey
did
turn up, sleep was the best thing for her.

A terrible stab of fear woke her. She sat up, shaking sleep out of her brain. It was a fresh morning, all soft sunlight and bird-noise and family padding about the house getting ready for the day.

Chloe tried to wash the feeling of alarm off her in the shower, but as she went downstairs she felt shimmery with too much adrenalin, and time kept gently stretching so that she could notice more details, then snapping tight unexpectedly so that she lost a swathe of seconds and had to reorient herself.

So she was suddenly in the kitchen, pouring her panic out to her father; then there were great vistas of seconds in which nothing happened except the steam curling up from the coffee in front of her; then she was babbling again, and Joy’s hands were tamping her down. ‘Okay, calm down now. We all know the drill, right?’ Then she was sitting at the table, rubbing her eyebrows as if the fear had gathered there and must be pushed out, while Joy, with a patience that Chloe found incredible, rang Janey’s mum, and Bette, and a counsellor across town to whom Janey had once actually, briefly listened.

‘Hospitals?’ said Chloe desperately, standing up.

Joy put her arms around her. ‘Not hospitals. We’ll be like the police, we’ll wait twenty-four hours. If she’s
at
a hospital she’ll be being looked after as well as possible. You go looking, the places
you
know; if you find her, call me at work. Be methodical; don’t panic; don’t make yourself late for tonight.
If I don’t hear from you by the time I get home, I’ll call the police.’

Chloe held onto her, marvelling at her clearheadedness.

‘Remember, little honey—’ Joy held up Chloe’s head and peered into her eyes ‘—this is
Janey
we’re talking about.’

‘But it’s not her adventuring time of the month! And yesterday—she was so upset—and I let her down!’ The tears wouldn’t hold off any longer.

‘Clo, you did what you could. You did what I would have done, what you
should
have done. Do you hear me?’

Chloe nodded, weeping.

‘When she walks in the door, strangle the dear girl for me, will you?’ She held Chloe hard, then kissed her, pinched her cheek painfully and left for work.

Chloe was methodical. She went to the main street and in two long loops checked inside every likely shop and a lot of unlikely ones. Well, why
not
the button shop, for materials for a new project? Well, why
not
the second-hand furniture warehouse, for proper bookshelves, or a table, or a chair? She visited Bette’s twice. She paced out the park and the churchyard. The thought, ‘Maybe Janey’s left town’ slipped into her head, but after a desperate surge of cheer she acknowledged that it couldn’t be true. Janey didn’t have those kinds of resources, and besides, she’d never leave without calling or leaving a note—

—unless Chloe had let her down
so badly
she figured she didn’t care any more. ‘But I do, I do!’ she moaned among the crumbling stones.
I was just in a rush. She doesn’t understand about work
— She left the churchyard and her own discomfort. She walked to the train station at last, casting her mind about town, trying to pick up some
tremor
of Janey somewhere, some extrasensory vibration.

From the station she rang the Rape Crisis Centre. She took a deep breath and rang Janey’s family. ‘No. Fuck off!’ said Nathan, and slammed down the phone. Chloe understood why a person might trash a phone booth, out of sheer uncontainable rage.

Shaking, she bought herself a book to read on the train, to stop her mind’s anxious circling.
Have I done all I can do?
she kept pausing and asking herself, checking over the possibilities; for the zillionth wishful time she imagined Janey arriving, tear-smirched but essentially undamaged, at Bette’s, at Chloe’s, slouching into her parents’ place, wandering confused through the streets after a night curled up on a park bench, putting together the pieces that would point her to safety. This spectral Janey walking Chloe’s mind was always the old Janey, dread-locked and gothic, black-garbed, white-skinned; neither she nor Janey had yet grown into the shorn blonde version.