Touching Earth Lightly (18 page)

Oh God, oh God, she’s condemned to sleep under these things, to wake up to them every morning. How will she stand it? How can she ever have a normal life again?

When Chloe sees Janey in the next dream, a battle cry rips out of her, but she’s obstructed by boiler-suited legs, by police cars, by ambulance officers. She can see Janey staring at the sky, the waxen face, the hair straggling off, raw patches on the scalp; she knows the spark is still there, if she can only get through them, if she can pound the white chest to kick-start the heart, and blow into Janey’s mouth with all her strength. But their arms reach and cross across her face; all these do-gooding, fate-accepting adults smilingly, consolingly, physically hold her back. She screams out, desperate, ‘Over here! Look this way! They won’t let me through!’

She wakes with the screaming. Some kind of black animal scrambles towards her across her room, dimly lit from the hall. She throws up her arms and slams back against the wall with a last scream.

‘It’s me.’ It’s Joy. She switches the bed lamp on and they stare at each other, panting.

Janey comes with them on a camping trip, early on. It’s the first time she’s been out of town since spending a day at her grandma’s in the mountains four years before.

Chloe takes her camera
—
it’s so new she feels she ought to, even though she doesn’t really know what she’s supposed to do with it. Janey uses it most of the time. She takes a series of photos of her own feet, bare, in the bush. Joy and Dane won’t let her go barefoot or in thongs on bushwalks, so every rest-stop Janey walks off a little way, takes off the hiking boots she’s borrowed from Nick, gets her photo and puts the boots back on.

‘Is she all right, that girl?’ Nick says to Chloe. None of them knows Janey very well yet. Even Chloe isn’t quite sure why she’s becoming Janey’s friend.

When the photos come back, Joy clears the kitchen noticeboard and pins up the twenty foot-photos, in four neat rows of five, like a real exhibition. When Chloe and Janey charge in from school
that afternoon Chloe stops short, seeing them, and Janey crashes into her, then stares with her, her hands bunched at her mouth.

The feet look like white fins or flowers or fans of coral, wet with seawater in one photo, striped from boot socks the next. Sea-foam blurs past them, sand crusts them, sword-grass stripes them with shadows. Indigo rock; dewy green ferns; a mat of fine leaves, dove-grey and rose, curved almost into circles
—
the colours and the textures, colours and textures Chloe didn’t see, all come alive around those neatly side-by-side city girl’s feet.

‘Oh, don’t they look great all together!’ says Chloe inadequately. But when she turns around, Janey’s eyes are filling with tears. ‘Jesus, Janey! What
—’

‘That was such a great holiday,’ Janey quavers. Then she wipes the tears on her arm and goes to the board for a closer look. After a while she says, in a stronger voice, ‘They all came out really good, didn’t they?’

Chloe stares at her. She doesn’t have a clue what makes her tick, and it’s exciting, not knowing
—
she isn’t scared of her, just curious, just wildly curious. It’s as if whole lobes of Chloe’s brain, whole cell-scapes in her eyes, are being stirred awake.

Chloe dreams standing outside the caryard, cold in the starlight, watching car corpses, two and three at a time, swing from a magnet—rise, swing and drop, shaking the ground. She knows Janey’s in there somewhere but she’s not allowed in while the work’s going on. She knows Janey’s deep in one of those piles, white, naked, stained, cold, all on her own. She’s not allowed in. Her helplessness is so strong she can feel it rotting her insides.

She dreams meeting Janey up at the shops, on an ordinary day, sunny, with colours. Janey looks dreadful—like Edward Scissorhands, her hair grown out dark and scraggly, her face bruised and scarred. Chloe’s mildly irritated that Janey’s put them through all this fuss, and she tells her so.

‘Yeah,’ Janey admits. ‘I’m hopeless, I know.’

‘How are you, then?’

‘Oh, okay. Healing up okay.’ She indicates the back of her head. Chloe knows she’s lying.

‘Give us a look.’

Janey turns and Chloe pulls aside the dreadlocks to reveal a gaping black cavity that goes right through Janey’s head. ‘It hardly hurts at all now,’ Janey insists, and Chloe can see daylight out her mouth.

‘Oh, Janey. You should see someone about this.’

‘It’s okay, really,’ she says.

‘But your brain! Here, bend over and hold it in and I’ll take you up the hospital.’

Janey walks bent beside Chloe. Chloe’s worried—will they get there in time? And what about infection? The air’s full of dust and fumes, and the crowd is thickening.

Janey gets the giggles; her bent body convulses and she scuttles along in a horrible way, as a joke.

‘Don’t turn your head, Janey,’ Chloe instructs, which is exactly the wrong thing to say. Still bent double, Janey looks aside at her, really malevolent now, and goggles her eyes and flaps her tongue like a Maori warrior. Her brain, the size and colour of a beef kidney but wetter, falls out and splats on the pavement. Her eyes turn white and she scuttles on over the rubbery brain, still laughing, still making dreadful faces.

Some time after daylight, Isaac and her mother are murmuring downstairs. Chloe’s eyes are so swollen she can barely open them. Her entire body aches almost audibly, like a low, ongoing moan. This puzzles her, until she remembers all in one hit. She looks from top to bottom of the memories, her own and Janey’s body merged within them; she too carries crushed bone in the back of her head; bruises band her upper arms, sprinkle the rest of her. In her deepest deep inside is the rape-bruise, a wound torn within a wound, flowering blood and fear, Nathan’s worst work—and maybe others’ too,
after him, which would be … terrifying … unbearable … And the pain, too … After that, you would be grateful for unconsciousness, anyone would be, anyone would go into it gladly, just to end such pain.

Chloe lies there aching, hurting, crying a long time, hearing through it Isaac leave the house, the telephone ringing, the clatter of dishes, traffic swishing by outside. There is nothing to get up for—she cannot work, or eat, or speak. Her life is deserted, blown to the four winds, and she can’t see how to go on, how to physically rise and enter a day.

In Year 9 they choose a Craft elective because they like the teacher, Mr Frobisher, but at the last minute he gets glandular fever and a woman called Mrs Tench is rung in. She’s a real disappointment, really tame. She likes dried flowers and shell-covered picture frames.

‘Bloody hell,’ says Chloe to Janey on the way home
—
this is in the years when they still swear
—
‘a whole term of that raffia-head. Découpage, for God’s sake. Cupids. Roses. Girls in bonnets.’

Janey just walks slower and slower, and then her head comes up. Her smile is devilish; it looks a bit weird on her face, which is like a sweet little doll’s.

‘We’ll do her,’ she says. ‘We’ll do her right over. What’s more, she won’t even know she’s being done.’

‘How? How? You’ve got an idea!’

‘I’ve got an idea. This’s so cool. I’ve got to get home.’ She’s already hurrying ahead.

‘How’s that? I thought you were going to come to my place.’

‘I won’t have time. I’ll show you tomorrow!’ She’s running. Chloe has never seen her running home before.

They’ve each been given a little wooden egg, which they are supposed to start covering with decorations snipped from magazines
—
or they can just buy transfers from a craft shop (that’s how feeble Mrs Tench’s ideas are). They’ve already primed it with varnish
—
that’s how they spent a riveting forty minutes while she
showed them pictures of rose-splattered jewel boxes and screens covered with Victorian-era children and pretty ladies. Chloe sits at her desk at home really annoyed at Mr Frobisher for getting sick and depriving them of his ideas for mad collages and moving sculptures.

Next morning Janey meets her at her gate, with the same smile on her face. ‘Show me, then,’ Chloe says, and she fishes a margarine-box out of her pack. Inside it, the egg is in a little nest of cotton wool, its upper surface covered with strange pink leaves and buds.