Touching Earth Lightly (26 page)

She feels unable to clear the clouds from her head, unable to see with her own eyes, unable to think without another set of thoughts, mourning thoughts, echoing, moaning away beneath, reverberating unpleasantly.

Theo is stuck on the Russians. His novel is the Russian novel, writ Australian. He pushes aside her English texts (‘Trendy Yanks’; ‘Who gave you this crud?’; ‘Why are you wasting your time on these?’) and leaves Tolstoy on ‘her’ bedside table until she caves in and reads some of it before making the excuse that she hasn’t the time, not this year. He reads aloud to her in the scented bath; he drenches her in close-packed text; he discourses and she sits in his falling-down garden trying to keep her attention from drifting away, smiling as he lays these gifts in her lap. She has never been stuck on anything; his passion intrigues her, rather than the works that spark it. He buys her Russian poetry as a concession to her youth and reluctance to commit herself to the novels. She finds a few poems that she actually quite likes, but strangely never finds the right moment to tell him, to read them to him.

‘You never come round and see me at Theo’s,’ she remarks to Janey.

‘I know.’ Janey looks up from a drawing. ‘Sorry. I can’t. You go all different … and
he
acts like a jerk.
’

‘I go all different?’

‘Yeah. You just turn into this …
love object,’
she says, with such distaste that Chloe laughs.

‘I do not!’

‘You do. You hardly open your gob. The pair of you keep looking all over
—
it’s like duelling eye-beams.’ She jabs the air with her index fingers. ‘Everyone gets embarrassed. And then I yabber on to fill the spaces and Theo just looks at me, like, “When are you going to
leave?
” It sucks.’

Chloe’s helpless with laughter and surprise and the effort of not weeping at the truth of it. Janey looks up and grins. ‘So I’ll just wait ’til you get over it. Like, for ever. Chloe
four
Theo
four eva,’
she adds in a dimwitted voice, writing it on the air.

Chloe dives on her and knocks her to the bed with a hand across her mouth.

‘’s true!’ Janey cries, struggling. ‘Love, love, love
—’

‘Just shut up, you horrible person.’

When they’ve stopped laughing and righted themselves, Janey says, ‘But it’s okay. I mean, you’ve never liked any of my boys, have you?’

‘That’s true. And they all do the same thing, start prodding at us
—
you and me.’

‘They’re just jealous,’ says Janey, hugging Chloe with arms and legs. Chloe laughs with relief at being hugged without the expectation that sex will follow. ‘And I would be, too,’ says Janey. ‘Deep down I’d know I wasn’t any competition for me!’

Chloe thinks of getting a chest specially crafted. If she were the woodcrafting type herself, she’d make it. But asking someone else to means stepping across a line between proper commemoration and sentimentality. Making it herself would be genuine; commissioning it, even from her father, would be false. How does she know this? When did that line get drawn?

Instead she empties out the ‘window-seat’—a wooden chest with a padded top to sit on, under her bedroom window—and begins to store things in there. Janey’s things won’t be tidy; the costumes won’t flatten, the sketchbooks are coming apart and bursting with things glued in and left loose between the pages. Chloe’s record hardly takes up any
room—boxes of slides, envelopes of prints and negatives, folders of notes and memories; everything she contributes is contained, closed, sealed, and can be stacked neatly.

It’s only when Chloe is sitting down to write it all to Eddie that she realises how strange Janey’s life can sound, what weird things she and her family have taken for granted about her, which in anyone else they would find repellent. She’s often tempted to explain and justify Janey’s actions, to make excuses, for Janey and for herself. The easiest thing would be to leave things out, to write only about the good times, to make Janey out as just a high-spirited, fun girl. Or to stop altogether, to abandon the job of pinning her to paper, to wait until Eddie comes asking and just answer him off the top of her head, give him the soft-edged, time-worn version of Janey’s life.

But she can’t do that. By then, she knows, certain essential knowledge will have dissolved out of her memory. While it’s still there, while she can still feel the feelings of the things remembered, she should tell him as much as she can about the girl he came from. She has no choice in the end but to be dedicated about this—bold-like-Janey, not timid-like-Chloe—and put it all down.

‘Are you actually, officially, moving in with Theo?’ says Joy one afternoon as Chloe’s about to leave with another backsack of clothes. ‘Or are you just kind of doing it behind your own back, bit by bit?’

‘What do you mean?’ Chloe realises with a start that she’s doing the latter. Joy’s perceptiveness annoys her. ‘What, you want me to
marry
him, do you? Make some kind of public pronouncement?’

‘God, no. I’m just curious about where you are. At what point, I mean, with him. Of involvement. If you are planning a life together,’ she finishes, smiling at her own pomposity. ‘And if you are shifting yourself, to let you know that it’s always revocable—like,
I’m not going to immediately make over your room into a sewing-room or anything’

‘Oh. Good. I wasn’t worried you would, actually.’
I hadn’t thought that far, actually. I hadn’t thought you had any part in this, in fact.
She feels silly, caught out, childish, when she’d felt so sophisticated, spending nights at Theo’s, dropping in at home for books, clothes, bits and pieces, ringing home, ringing Theo, ringing Janey all the time to let them all know where she was, where she was heading next.

Her mother sits at the far end of the dining table, framed in the rainy windows like some science-fiction queen in council. ‘Well, men may come and men may go—’

‘Oh Mum, this isn’t the seventies,’ snaps Chloe.

Joy gives a single nod of assent. ‘But there’ll always be your place here, whenever.’

‘Oh
Mum.’ Was that a goodbye? Was that a release?
Chloe sweeps out before the conversation can continue, while her irritation can still carry her, sophisticated, bereft, away.

Someone calls her name on the street, a girl she doesn’t recognise—oh, it’s Gemma, from school, who’s had a radical change of image, ratted hair and pierced everything.

‘Chloe, how you going! You look great, as usual.’

The smile aches from disuse on Chloe’s face. ‘I’m okay. What are you doing with yourself these days?’ she adds quickly.

‘Oh, man, life is great! I’m at uni—I swapped from arts/law to just straight arts. I got so
bored with,
law I couldn’t stand it. I’m doing all these great subjects, like anthropology and politics, I’m really into it. Anthrop is, like,
the
most fascinating subject. Sophie Shiller’s in my anthrop tute—you wouldn’t
believe
how that girl has changed. I’m living in this totally mad share house with about fifty zillion people, all insane, all arts students. I’m just having
the
—best—time. What about you?’

‘Oh, I deferred, you know,’ Chloe says slowly; she feels slightly retarded in contrast to Gemma’s fizzing. ‘I’ve just been—’ A huge sigh catches her throat. ‘Having a year off,
just … living, you know?’ She looks down at Gemma’s eager face, thinking she can’t possibly even begin to tell her, in any way that Gemma will want to hear.

‘What, working?’

Chloe shakes her head. ‘On the dole. I was … doing some work for the opera, that’s all, a bit.’

‘Oh yeah, I remember. That’s a cool job, but I guess it doesn’t pay, like, a million bucks. Are you still living with your folks?’ Chloe nods. ‘Yeah, well you would, with groovy folks like yours.’

‘Groovy?’ Chloe gives a startled laugh.

‘Yeah, like not always on your back about something. And what about that wild mate of yours, Jane Knott? How’s she? Do you see her? I mean, it’s funny how you can lose touch when you leave school, but you two were pretty close, weren’t you?’

Chloe smiles weakly at Gemma, tries to remember the question. ‘Yeah, we were, I guess.’

‘Oops, you have a fight, did you?’

‘No, we just, like you say, lost touch …’ It isn’t quite a lie, is it? There are far too many people milling past the shops, far too many vehicles choking the road, choking all the people with their fumes.

‘Right. I bet she’d be doing something fantastic, though, hey? I mean, she was hopeless at school, but she had so much energy, and, gee, isn’t everything
different
once you get out of that place? Isn’t everything
furit
Moving out of home, living with your friends, doing all these interesting courses, you know, like,
all
electives—it’s great! I’m having a ball. You remember Sophie’s friend Sheree? She’s had a baby!
And
got married to the guy. A baby girl, Madison. Can you believe it?’

Chloe feels old and worn. ‘Yeah. Why not?’

Gemma looks at her. ‘Don’t tell me—you’ve got one too! No?’