Touching Earth Lightly (19 page)

‘What d’you mean?’ Chloe laughs, disappointed. ‘It’s just roses. She’ll love it.’ But Janey won’t take the box back, and she’s chuckling. Chloe looks again, closer. ‘Well, not roses. But it’s floral.’

‘Yeah. Isn’t it? Oh, good. There’s no way Mrs Tench’ll work it out, if you can’t.’

Chloe scowls at the egg, insulted. Those flower centres
—
that’s where the strangeness lies. They’re kind of … they have soft hairs all around, black or gingery or yellow … and they aren’t round, but eye-shaped, irregular … it’s all so tiny. She puts the egg in a patch of sunlight and scowls at it some more. Janey is laughing and staggering about in front of her.

‘“Any old magazines lying around!” See, I have to give you clues! What sorts of magazines are lying around my place?’

Chloe tries not to go around to Janey’s place too often. ‘Not gardening magazines.’

‘No! Nothing of Mum’s, nothing of mine, so … ?’ She waves her hand in a circle and nods expectantly at Chloe.

‘Your dad’s then? Car magazines? Nathan’s? Motorbikes?’

‘No! No! Try again!’

The penny drops. ‘Porno mags!’ All of a sudden she can see the six little vagina-mouths, surrounded by petals of thigh and breast and bottom, shaded delicate-apricot-to-orange-tan, or white-through-rose-to-blush-red. Her own skin goes all hot. ‘Man, that is so gross!’

‘Isn’t it?’ squeaks Janey, jumping about.

‘But what if she works it out?’

‘She won’t. No way will she.’

‘You reckon?’

‘No, it’s so good. She won’t look past the roses. I mean, it’s so …’

Chloe holds it at arms length and laughs out loud. ‘It’s so pretty, isn’t it!’

‘Yeah! I mean, we can really do this woman. We can get top marks and still do her, if we’re careful. If we just make everything so well, you know? So that it looks like exactly what she wants, but isn’t. What d’you reckon?’

‘
I reckon excellent.’

Grief is like weather—rainstorms and windstorms, lulls, long dry spells broken by floods, and underneath some slower passage from one season to another. It’s as insensible as weather, as irresistible, as exhausting.

It’s an unshare-able thing, but people keep offering to share it, offering themselves to be cried on, or their arms to hold her—or, finding her upright and dry-eyed, their company, which is sometimes conversational but more often silent, basic relief from solitude. Words, which she thought were so important, which she and Janey tossed and played with for days and nights at a time—words, she finds, are the least of it. People give time, people give presence, and say so much by these gifts that Chloe can’t see it for its size. Her family’s thoughts for her, its attention, shape the air all around her; these are the only shapes that exist, besides the physical, warm, wool-clad, cried-on shapes of the bodies she had almost forgotten as bodies, bodies she had somehow, at some point, fallen out of the habit of touching. She used to know Janey’s body better than any of these—she leaned against it, knew exactly how hard to knock it to send it staggering, wrestled with it, tickled it. As for her own, she still leaks tears and sways and sometimes can’t bring herself to stand up; sleep wrinkles her and tangles her hair, and crying bags her
eyes
and wears the bloom off her nose. Her period
comes early, making the bleeding literal, adding its ache to all the others.

‘Don’t tell me, Mum
—
I can tell by your face you’re “concerned”.’

‘I am. Worried. I mean, is this behaviour okay by you?’

Chloe sits on Joy’s little tapestried footstool in front of the fire, drinking hot chocolate. She’s just fourteen and thinks she’s cool as cool. She brushes Joy’s question away, breezily, she thinks. She feels breezy. She feels cool. She can handle anything.

‘It’s not like I can do anything about it. It happens. She’s like that, sort of
on heat
for a couple of days
—
at least, last time it was only a couple of days. I don’t know what I’ll do if she stays like this.’

‘Isn’t it a bit gross for you, sitting around waiting, hearing it going on?’

‘A bit. But it doesn’t take long, and she’s always in an excellent mood afterwards, instead of all manic and twitchy.’

Joy frowns at the fire. ‘You do realise that most people don’t do sex like that?’

Chloe can’t believe she’s said that. She just looks at her, and when Joy sees Chloe’s face she laughs. ‘Well, I have to say it; it has to be
seen
to be said
—
I’m your mum! I don’t know what you know, what you think about these things. And if she goes off the rails I don’t want her to pull you off too.’

‘Don’t worry, Mum, okay? I’m not interested in all that, and if I ever am I sure won’t be doing it like Janey. It’s okay!’ Chloe goes on, seeing Joy’s face full of doubts. ‘I know the difference between Janey’s life and mine! We’ve always been really different. That’s what keeps us friends, because we’re interesting to each other.’

Nick has been sitting side-on to them, talking with Isaac and Dane. He turns to Joy and Chloe. ‘You talking about Janey? A bit too bloody interesting, if you ask me.’

‘Well, just because you couldn’t cope with her life doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.’

‘Anything wrong with it? Show me something
right
!’

He laughs when Chloe stays silent, but it’s just that she doesn’t know where to begin.

When he turns away again, Joy says, ‘I’m wondering
—
is this better or worse than nicking stuff at Marketown?’

‘It’s not illegal, is it?’ says Chloe.

‘Well, there
is
an age of consent.’

‘But they’d
both
be under it, Janey and
—
whoever.’

‘Whoever. Do you know how chilling that sounds, to a parent’s ear? She
is
using condoms?’

‘When I nag her, she is.’ Chloe grins at a memory of Janey grumpily snatching the silver packet out of her hand. Joy cocks an eyebrow at her. ‘Well, look, she’s fine when she’s with me. She’s sensible
—
no, she’s not sensible, but she does what I tell her. You can ground me if you want, but if I’m not with her I can’t keep control of the situations she gets into. If I’m there, I can keep us both safe.’

‘I wouldn’t ground you,’ says Joy seriously. ‘I would get you to promise, though, that when she’s in this mood you’ll be extremely careful to stay in control, and not take any risks.’

‘I will. I have. I do. You’re not asking me to do anything I don’t already do.’

‘Well, good,’ says Joy, with deep uncertainty.

With the arrival of every familiar person, the impact falls anew, like a short, awful video being rewound and played again and, cruelly, again—each time, the vacuum forms itself beside her, behind her and, when she sits in her room recovering, in front of her on the spare bed. It’s a Janey-sized nonexistence in the air, in her life.

Besides the grief is the other thing, the fear that seizes her, the scenes that play themselves out in her head at night, over and over. She thinks she will never go out at night again, or alone again, because the world is truly, physically dangerous, and bodies are frail and soft, on fragile armatures of bone, infinitely vulnerable. Her own body seems to be a magnet for
pain—it seems to have been drawing this one event towards her all her life. This one, and who can tell what others?

This is what she’s known without admitting it, all along. This was why, all those times, she bestirred herself to go with Janey when she would rather have slobbed in front of the TV. Even as an abstract possibility, danger had had the power to rouse her to deflect it, unthinkingly, automatically. As a gross reality, as a violence against her friend and herself, it smacks her into intolerable wakefulness. It throws open around her a vast, dark world in which anything can happen, any awful thing.

Janey puts Chloe’s hair in cornrows. It’s the first time she’s ever done them. She’s like that; she just knows. Afterwards people will come up to Chloe on the street and ask who did them, how much it cost.

It costs an afternoon eating Milkos and listening to CDs in Chloe’s room, while Janey draws lines on her head like furrows in a field with a cold steel comb and works tiny plaits down each one, and on out the length of her hair, finishing each plait with a green glass bead.

Chloe watches Janey’s hands in the wardrobe mirror in a kind of trance. They’re real girl’s hands
—
they remind Chloe of hands in a medieval painting of a madonna or a noblewoman, tapered white fingers, with dimples for knuckles. Janey’s bitten nails are flecked with chips of old black lacquer. When Chloe closes her eyes the fingers feel like mice nesting in her hair.

‘You’re half done, about. You can get an idea.’

Chloe opens her eyes. ‘Oh, weird.’ Half her hair is drying out, and fluffing off across one shoulder. The other half has shrivelled into its rows as if burnt into lumps. Her head looks like a phrenologist’s dummy, her scalp shining in lines. She shakes it and the beads rattle. ‘I feel like a bobbly lampshade. Or one of those covers they put over milk jugs, the ones with the beads.’ She tries to see herself side on, to imagine the whole effect. The plaits are so straight, so even
—
and wet-dark. Not like her hair at all.

‘It’s going to be great,’ says Janey. This is in the days when they drink diet drinks from cans, and Janey has a slurp and then cracks her knuckles before getting back to the job. ‘Shows your face better. Makes you look less like a blonde.’

‘More like an alien.’

‘More like you, not just a girl with gorgeous hair.’ She wets down the other half ruthlessly with the water-spray bottle, and Chloe shivers as the cold water slides down her neck. Above her, humming, Janey works on.