Touching Earth Lightly Read online

  Touching earth Lightly

  MARGO LANAGAN

  Touching earth Lightly

  The quotation on page 112 is from The People’s Otherworld: Poems by Les. A. Murray, Angus & Robertson, London and Sydney, and is used with permission.

  © Margo Lanagan 1996

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  A Little Ark book

  First published in 1996 by

  Allen & Unwin

  9 Atchison Street

  St Leonards NSW 1590

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Web: http://www.allen-unwin.com.au

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication entry:

  Lanagan, Margo.

  Touching Earth Lightly.

  ISBN 1 86448 823 9

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Cover design by Scooter Design

  Cover photography by Garry Moore

  Designed and typeset by Docupro, Sydney

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Victoria

  now

  ‘I’ve got to get out of that house.’ Janey looked almost small, walking past these angled girders. It was all freezing wind and iron up here, and rinsed blue sky. The water below was opaque, with ferries gliding on it, and a single brave white sail.

  ‘Grim, is it?’ said Chloe, digging in her backsack for a scrunchy.

  ‘Absolutely. Lock-the-door-at-night-type grim.’

  ‘Oh, Janey.’

  ‘I know. It’s kind of my own fault, I guess.’

  Chloe made a face, tying her hair back. ‘It’s still off.’

  Janey sighed. Her own black dreadlocks were pressed aside stiffly in the wind, exposing wandering lines of white scalp. ‘Yeah, the best thing’d be to get out.’ Chloe could see that this time she meant it—was right, was ready. ‘I’ll buy a paper when we get to the other side, and go through the ads while you do your thang. Will you come and help me look?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Janey flung an arm around Chloe’s shoulders and squeezed. ‘Good. I can do it if you come.’

  ‘You can do it anyway. If things are that bad.’

  ‘Okay, how about: I can do it without getting in a panic, if you come. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. What’s funny?’

  ‘You’re so faithful, so loyal, like a little dawg. Your whole family is like … angels or something, I don’t know. Like, Nick—’ She tossed her hair back and laughed again. ‘For example.’

  Chloe checked to see that they were remembering the same thing. ‘Yeah, like Nick, poor guy.’

  ‘I know!’ She sighed. ‘But I guess he must know he’s gorgeous.’ Through the wind Chloe heard the little yearning note, slipped into Janey’s voice like a love-note between harp-strings.

  ‘I guess,’ she said with a sisterly snort. ‘He’s just such an egg, that guy. Specially since Isaac’s been away.’

  ‘It’s all right, I know I haven’t got a chance. Sisters’ friends never do.’ Janey spoke in a flat, loud voice over the traffic noise. She looked down at the double cocked hat of the Opera House. ‘Maybe you’ll meet someone nice, in your new production.’

  ‘I’m not looking, remember?’

  ‘You never know, though. If there’s a princess, for example, there’s got to be at least a prince.’

  ‘Some paunchy tenor with sixteen children.’

  ‘Oh, Cole, don’t sound so disappointed!’

  ‘I’m not—you’re the one who’s hanging out for someone for me. I couldn’t give a stuff, myself.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Cole. Whatever you say.’

  ‘A regal walk, darling,’ said the director. ‘A regal walk is a slow walk. Just think of the weight of textiles you’ll be dragging around.’

  The girl with the golden waterfall of hair clomped back to the wings. She caught Chloe’s eye, mouthed ‘Bastard!’ and turned and did a tight-blue-jeans swagger across the stage. Chloe watched her, trying to remember the feel of a bustle she’d worn in a production two years ago.

  When the director called ‘Next, please!’ she lifted her chin and stalked slowly into the lights. The near-empty theatre opened out on the left; the dusty stage went back and back on the right, encrusted with tackle and gear and lights, and up and up where the backdrops hung. A cool draught across the stage made her long skirt ripple out behind her.

  She heard the man’s murmur on her left, low but distinct: Where have we seen her before? A woman’s voice read out the shows and the highlighted phrase from the reference: always on time.

  ‘Oh well, then!’ And then, louder ‘Thank you—um, thank you, Chloe, we’ll be in touch. Next, please.’

  When Chloe went to fetch her backsack the girl with the hair said gloomily, ‘You’ve got it for sure.’

  ‘Maybe. You’ve got the hair.’ The girl was plaiting it; she had got to chest-level and still had a way to go.

  ‘But you can do the walk,’ she said.

  ‘If they morphed us together they’d have the perfect princess, hey.’

  The girl looked startled. ‘I guess,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Chloe Hunter, you look delicious tonight! Let tiresome old Aunty Jube give you a hug. Mmm, aren’t you toasty.’

  ‘Hi, Jube. Hi, Maurice. How are you?’ She stepped back to let them in, her hairbrush in one hand.

  ‘We’re well. We’re very well. Hullo, Janey. Hullo, Pete. Are you all coming to the Fiesta with the growed-ups? We’re picking up Carl, too.’

  ‘Nope, Janey and I are going to the Soho—first up, anyway.’

  ‘To see some dreadful teen flick,’ said Jube. ‘Don’t tell me. That big brother of yours, is he still in existence? I never see him these days. He’s not frightened of me, is he?’

  ‘Hallo, Jube! I’m studying,’ Nick called from his room at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Well, keep at it! Are the olds up there too?’

  Dane’s voice came from the front bedroom. ‘Yeah, Joy’s just helping me with my truss before she clips her walking-frame together, you rude tart.’

  ‘Can we plunder some of your Black Douglas while we wait?’ Maurice called up the stairs.

  ‘You may as well,’ Joy called back. ‘We’ll be ages yet, we’re so decrepit.’

  Maurice winked at Chloe and he and Jube went to the kitchen.

  ‘You can come with us if you like, Pete,’ Janey offered.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Chloe, continuing to brush her hair. ‘You might like this one.’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve got homework.’

  ‘So?’ Janey pretended total mystification.

  ‘I mean, I’ve got some hard-core porn I want to download from the Net.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  ‘We’d better get a move on, Janey,’ said Chloe.

  Jube appeared in the kitchen doorway, ice clinking in her drink. ‘Toodle-oo, young things. Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do. Gives you plenty of leeway.’

  ‘See you, Jube. See you, Mum and Dad!’ Chloe called upstairs.

  ‘What is that woman on?’ she said when they got out into the street.

  ‘She’s just happy, like everyone who hangs out with your family,’ said Janey. Her words seemed very deliberate, coming from her freshly carmined lips. Her home-made earrings, intricate, shining double discs, swung dressily.

  ‘Dreadful old pe
ople, with their age jokes.’

  ‘Ee, you’ve got to laff, lass—ootherwise you’d cry!’

  ‘Well, I sometimes wish they would cry, you know? Instead of jollying themselves along all the time.’

  ‘You don’t really.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Wish they’d cry.’

  ‘I mean, face it, accept it. I mean shut up about it.’

  ‘Anyway, maybe they have already.’

  ‘Have what?’

  ‘Cried.’

  ‘Oh … maybe.’

  Stars. Cold. Gil’s rancid smoke. In the car-wreck above, Janey went on—Yeah. Oh God, that’s it. Mm, mm, yes. And the springs ground the rust off each other. And the boy gave a shout as if in pain.

  Gil drew the last juice out of the smoke and flipped it away, a twirl of sparks dying in a curl of rusty duco. ‘How you can hang out with her.’ He crouched on the roof, rubbing the back of his neck.

  Lying across the bonnet, Chloe said, ‘Oh well, you know. It comes and goes.’

  ‘Comes and comes, more like it.’ He laughed at his own joke.

  Chloe squinted up, and moonlight flared into her eyeballs. She could almost feel the pull of the moon’s gravity, the tug on the top of her head, making her taller.

  ‘So she does it for you too, eh?’ Gil repeated.

  ‘Yes. I’m a radical celibate. I gave her my share of libido—I wasn’t using it.’

  ‘Sure you’re not a radical lezzo?’

  Chloe smiled at him. After a moment he returned the smile weakly. He must just feel duty bound to insult her; he didn’t have any actual hatred to back it up.

  ‘She’ll do you, after,’ she said kindly.

  He glanced behind him at the wreck, which was rocking itself and the car underneath as Janey finished. ‘Dunno if I wanna,’ he sulked.

  Janey called, ‘What do you reckon about his friend, Cole?’

  Chloe lay back. ‘Wouldn’t take much convincing, I’d say.’ Gil stood up. He’d do it, just to get away from Chloe and her big words.

  Janey said to the other boy, ‘Off you go, then.’

  ‘Hey, give us a second. Gimme me jacket.’

  ‘In a minute. I’m using it.’

  ‘Give us it. You’ll get … stuff on it.’

  ‘I’ll be careful, don’t worry. Hi. What was your name—Bill?’

  ‘Gil. Go on, mate. You’ve had your turn.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ There was a lot of movement, a twang of metal. The boy came down to Chloe’s roof, buttoning himself. He glanced at Chloe and forced a laugh. ‘She’s done me over. Good and proper.’ He crouched, recovering. His biceps were goosepimpled. ‘You’re the good-looking one. Pity you’re frigid.’

  Chloe picked at a sliver of painted rust—thick, old paint from the days when they really crafted cars.

  ‘What happened? You get raped or something?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘To make you frigid.’

  ‘Um, I got bored …’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘… was what it was.’

  ‘Right.’ He scrabbled his cigarettes and lighter from his tight T-shirt sleeve and went about smoking. ‘Want one?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You don’t do nothin’, do ya.’ Now he hadn’t anything else to do but needle. ‘What do ya do?’

  ‘I look out for her.’

  ‘Yeah, and what does she do for you? Shit, don’t tell me—I can imagine.’

  ‘Oh, you can?’ Chloe rolled her eyes at the moon. ‘How worldly of you.’

  ‘She’d root anything, that one; wouldn’t matter what sex you were.’ He looked at Chloe for confirmation.

  She sat up, brushed rust flakes off her coat sleeve. This winter she was wearing a coat, enormous and grey like a storeman’s dustcoat, over blouses that hung past her hands, skirts that trailed and ragged and floated like her own pale hair, layers of translucent cloth, anchored by Blundstone boots.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry your little head about her and me.’

  Chloe wished she did smoke sometimes, for the time it filled, the gestures it let you make. It was very good for looking contemptuous. You pursed your lips and tipped back your head and the smoke went thin and straight into the air. It was a way of being taller than another person, like big hair or platform shoes.

  ‘Chicks like you and her, guys don’t really go for.’

  ‘No?’

  He shook his head decisively. ‘Not properly. You can’t go for a chick who’d turn straight around and root your mate.’

  ‘What do you mean, go for? Marry?’

  ‘Stick around. Go with. Like, steady.’

  ‘Ah.’ Chloe’s laughter bounced back off roofs and door panels, disappeared into shadowy nests of engine, boot and bursting seat. The boy watched her, his eyes narrowing. ‘I mean, you’re such prizes, guys like you, to go steady with,’ she said eventually, still laughing.

  The springs in Janey and Gil’s wreck began to work towards a crisis. The boy hawked up some tar and spat it off the roof. ‘What a slut.’

  ‘You’re just angry because she calls the shots,’ Chloe said equably. ‘You’d go for her, no worries. She wouldn’t want you to stick around, though—that’s why you don’t like her.’

  The boy stood up and ground the cigarette butt into the rust with his running shoe. ‘Don’t have to stay around here listening to this shit. The both of you are just bent. The both of you.’

  He stepped down off the car. Chloe watched him clamber and stumble. He sat six or seven cars away, his back to her.

  ‘Oh, fa … ar out!’ Gil was saying. ‘Man!’

  There was irregular movement in the wreck. Janey easing herself out onto the boot was like some kind of mysterious extrusion from the car corpses. The leather jacket was all she wore except for a great gawky pair of black sandals with tree-trunk heels. She came down to Chloe’s level, sliding on her bottom from wreck to wreck.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’ she panted. ‘Mr Johnny-come-early? Oh, there.’

  ‘Sulking,’ said Chloe. ‘He’s only here for his jacket.’

  ‘Gil? Oh, Gi-il? You got a smoke?’

  ‘Give us the jacket,’ said Chloe. ‘I’ll take it to the Spurned Lover.’

  ‘Rats, I’d just got it warm.’

  Janey’s shoulders and breasts emerged into the moonlight. She handed the jacket to Chloe, and warm breast and shoulder air puffed out of it—Janey air, that smelled like hot metal. Climbing back into the dark stack, she was just a soft white writhing, kinked and cleft here and there.

  Chloe leaped fairy-like from roof to roof in her Blundstones and tossed the boy his jacket. ‘Here you go, Johnny.’

  ‘Thanks for nothin’, bitch.’ He shrugged it on and scrambled towards the street.

  Chloe snorted and turned back. Janey and Gil sat naked on the boot of the top car. They smoked and swung their crossed legs, a matching pair. ‘Coming up?’ Janey called out.

  ‘Nothing for me down here.’ Chloe began to climb. ‘It’s like a huge adventure playground, this place, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, with no other kids on it,’ said Janey, ‘so you never have to wait for your favourite—what’s this one?’ she asked Gil, slapping the car they sat on.

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t know nothin’ about cars.’

  ‘It’s a Wolseley’, said Chloe. ‘It’s written on it.’

  ‘On your favourite Wolseley.’

  Chloe hoisted herself onto the boot-end and past them. The moonlight fell through the car window onto Janey’s tight black-widow clothes, on her bag, split open on the floor, spilling foil-wrapped condoms like treasure. There was a breeze here, heavy with jet-fuel and the smell of the sea. ‘So you can think straight now?’ She settled into the dent in the roof.

  ‘Sort of straight.’ Janey’s white arm was around Gil’s shoulders. They looked like Hansel and Gretel, if Gretel had been the big sister. Their cigarette-coals jerked and settled like red insects in front of them.
‘I could go a George’s mud-cake. What about you?’

  ‘If it came with a megaccino, maybe.’

  ‘I could go a drink,’ said Gil. ‘You got anything?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Janey. ‘We go crazy. At least, I do; Cole just goes to sleep. We don’t drink and we don’t swear. We’re clean-living girls, aren’t we, Cole?’ Janey flung away her smoke and crawled across the boot to fish her clothes out. She grunted and dragged and snapped them all on. When she stood, she still looked naked, but black now and glossy, with a belt around her like a wrestling champion’s, broad and heavily decorated. She tossed her hair back and yodelled out across the wrecker’s yard, long and expertly on three notes, a multitude of echoes splitting and descanting back from this arena of cars, from the farther stacks, and faintly from the motorway pylons.

  ‘Signing off,’ said Chloe. But Gil sat on, spooked, until the last echo died and the rats started moving again.

  ‘Well, g’day,’ said Chloe’s dad when she came in. She caught him glancing at her ragged hair and rust-smudged coat, but he said nothing. He was freshly showered, his silver-streaked dark beard was trimmed and he was eating a virtuous breakfast of muesli and acidophilus yoghurt.

  ‘Ay.’ She went to the cupboard for a cereal bowl.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Dane continued to watch as she poured muesli and milk, fetched honey. ‘Not pregnant, or diseased?’

  She didn’t answer, wiped her face clear of expression.

  ‘Show us your arms,’ he went on.

  She bared them to the elbows, held them out to his scrutiny, an eyebrow raised. ‘You’ll want to check my hymen next.’ She pulled the sleeves down again, and sat two stools from him at the kitchen counter.

  ‘Hmm. Not sure what I’d check for, the hymen of a bornagain virgin. And don’t tell me—I’m eating.’

  They both ate, Chloe in a daze of exhaustion, Dane with efficiency.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ It was almost convincing as an idle question.

  ‘We went to the movies. Then, just around. You don’t want to know—you’re eating.’

  Dane nodded. ‘Fair enough, I get the picture. You going to catch up on some sleep today, then?’