Touching Earth Lightly by Margo Lanagan

Author:Margo Lanagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 1996-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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