Touching Earth Lightly (17 page)

There’s a terribly ordinary van, not even an ambulance, without even a revolving light, into which Janey is slid. Isaac and Chloe don’t speak, with police beside them, with the panoply of emergency all about them. Isaac’s face is tearless and smooth. He has resumed his normal face, whereas
Chloe’s, from inside, feels irrevocably warped. Then he turns and looks to her, and it’s as if he’s holding her upright still. He passes on his strength, by being there, by his calm eyes, his familiarity. Then they’re guided to their separate police cars, and taken to the station.

They all go to the snow. It’s a bad season
—
they get there early and the snow comes late. All Chloe remembers afterwards is Janey and herself out striding. Janey is wearing sandshoes and her feet have gone numb
—
they’re striding to keep her blood moving. They’re laughing, expecting to get back to the rented chalet and take Janey’s socks off and find her toes loose in the sock ends, tinkling together like crystals or chunks of charcoal.

There seems to be so much space around them. It really feels like the top of the world, Chloe thinks. Janey says they’re pretty near the top of Australia, but that isn’t what Chloe means. Out in the bush it’s a different kind of space
—
with all those trees like a different, silent species of people, there’s just as much of a crowd as in the city. Worse
—
sometimes you can’t even see the sky. But up here the squeaky-blue sky is all around, even below the level of their feet. Rocks and ground with little plants show dark through the melting blue-whiteness, and the sunlit snow burns in their eyes and leaves weird-shaped prints in them like leopard skin.

At the station it is all overbright rooms, not quite clean in the corners, and slouching police. Chloe has to describe in her own words when she last saw Janey, and how she came to find her. With the warmth inside the station she isn’t so shaky, but she still cries. She runs at the eyes. It isn’t a matter of not caring who
sees
her; she hardly has room in her mind to even acknowledge that other people are there. All she is, apart from the words the law is asking of her, is this weeping.

‘Her own words’ are clumsy, and order themselves strangely, and behind them hovers a vacuum, so that at any
minute they might pop like a plane window and suck reality out of the world. The policeman types doggedly, and when it is read back to her and printed out she signs it ‘Chloe Hunter’, as if it were a piece of schoolwork. Hers seems like a long and complicated name—during its writing she wonders,
Is this really my name? Whose life have I strayed into here, and how do I get back to my own? I must ring Janey as soon as I do.

Chloe and Janey lie in a summery daze in the park, half in sunlight, half under a curved-leafed gum tree whose shedding purple bark shows green-white new skin beneath. The cover of Chloe’s maths textbook is beginning to warp in the sun, half-fallen out of her school pack. They’re supposed to be in school.

Chloe’s wondering again why sky is blue, knowing that some-whereabouts in her brain she does know, sweeping through her memory trying to hear whichever teacher’s explanation, or maybe Joys
—
she does tend to know, and to want to tell everyone.

Janey’s fiddle-fiddling with something near her ear, and plucking stalks. Chloe can feel the planet give them up, the reverberations around the roots.

Janey lays something on Chloe’s front, but Chloe doesn’t look at it until later when they’re getting up to go. It’s a curl of eucalypt bark, packed tight with seedheaded grass stalks, ears of grass. ‘Isn’t that neat!’ She carries it home, and is never able to throw it away.

Out in the hall the police officer says to Isaac, ‘Your turn, mate,’ and to Chloe, ‘You’re free to go now, love.’ It’s strange to be unleashed. Chloe just stands there.

‘I’ll go with you if you want to wait,’ Isaac says. Without thanking him or even looking at him she sits down.

She calls Chloe ‘Cole’, short for Colo, which is from a Les Murray poem they found at school when they were supposed to be studying a different one, ‘The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter-Colo Mountains’
—
Janey insists it’s the only poem that has any decent sex in it.

You long to show someone non-human the diaphragm-shuffle
which may be your species’ only distinctive cry,
the spasm which, in various rhythms, turns our face awry,
contorts speech, shakes the body, and makes our eyelids liquefy.

It makes no difference for Chloe to tell her that Les Murray was describing laughter
—
‘Not
that
sort of diaphragm, twit!’

Janey really likes the idea of the liquefied eyelids. She gives Chloe a jar of them for her seventeenth birthday: water and cochineal, with false eyelashes floating through it. And calls her Colo all the time. She tells her it’s because she’s ‘cool, but a bit mixed up’.

They walk home, Isaac large in his coat beside her. Chloe has the distinct feeling of the pavements turning everywhere to slush but for a small, hurriedly semi-solid place beneath each stepping foot.

Only the hall light is on at home. Isaac’s civilised feet go quietly up the stairs. Then Chloe hears her mother suppress a gasp, and come hurrying downstairs, and the whole house lights up and wakes as the thing becomes true again and bludgeons them each, four new people who have to hear it.

She hears Isaac begin to crack, answering Mum and Dad’s stunned questions. She doesn’t know how he can speak at all, through the knowledge that out there the night held—the two of them went—and saw—. Chloe feels skinned, flinching from the cruelty of the air. She sits held in one piece by her mother while the blows of what Isaac is telling fall again,
clumps and dumps of bad information that can’t be delivered gently.

Nick’s eyes are wide and stunned; he has one arm around Pete next to him. Isaac’s face is hidden behind his big white knuckly hands—such grown-man’s hands, Chloe thinks in a daze, feeling baby-like and babied, wrapped in this house and family whose pain can’t ease hers by even the smallest degree, in a safety that in the end is a betrayal, because she isn’t armed against a night like this. Police, morgues, injuries—she’s gone along in all innocence, never dreaming these words might be used of Janey, but now that she looks back, of course they were coming—she should have seen them flapping like vultures over Janey all along, from way back in the schoolyard, and in a tall column spiralling up on the thermals of evil grotty heat from Janey’s house. All Janey’s life people had been drawing back from her, baulking, looking askance, doubting, being ‘concerned’, consulting each other—for
this
reason, that they are grown up and know, have seen, that these things can happen, in this world, now, to real people. They’ve seen the vultures, and they didn’t tell her. Or they did, sort of, by all that fuss and worry, but they never actually
made her listen,
made her understand, made her know too.

Here she is in her bed—recognisably it’s her bed, everything about it is real. It’s feelable, seeable in a kind of grainy light like the pre-dawn, only
creepy.
On the wall, as usual, hang the two costumes Janey made herself and Chloe for the Mardi Gras, but in this dream they clothe two sagging, white-haired, white-skinned Janey-corpses. Their heads slump in the feather and pampas-plume headdresses, the eyes open slits, the lips pulling back from their teeth. Where the skirts end, propped on the bookshelves, the Janeys’ hands death-grip the wood.