Touching Earth Lightly Read Online Free PDF

head on Chloe’s shoulder, crunched lightly like steel wool. ‘I hate myself,’ she said feebly.
    ‘No, you don’t. Why would you? None of this is your fault.’
    ‘It all is.’
    ‘Yeah, like what?’ Chloe stood back, gripping and shaking her.
    ‘Being stupid, getting pregnant. You know, if I hadn’t, if I’d—I dunno—got the morning-after pill, that one time, I could stand … things wouldn’t
get
to me like they do.’ She wiped her nose on the wrist of her jumper, blinked aside at the floor.
    ‘Who knows?’ said Chloe. ‘I can’t say it’s not true, can I? But who knows? Who knows it isn’t keeping you as settled as you are now, having him in the world? Just knowing he’s alive.’
    Janey tipped her head back, searched the ceiling through tears as if a rope-ladder might swing down to save her. ‘Just knowing he’s alive sends me
crrrazy
! That sweet little …’ She began to crumble. ‘Off away there!’
    ‘Yes! And he came from
you
, the sweetest part of
you
, that mothering bit you talk about. Just … the one that buys him Duplo, and Wibbly Pig books. That kid bit of you, from before. From when it was okay with you.’
    ‘Oh, it was never okay!’
    ‘It was too. You can’t tell me. I was there.’
    ‘But
now
! I can’t handle it!’
    ‘You can. You do, and you’ll go on doing.’
    ‘Yeah? Will I? How?’
    ‘One—way—or—another,’ Chloe insisted.
    Janey gave a pained laugh and broke away to collapse at the table. Chloe made the coffee and put it down beside Janey’s snaggly head. ‘You want to come into town? Just for the heck of it? Just to get away from the happy children playing?’
    The snaggles nodded.

    Under the Queen Victoria Building, in a shop-lit warm fug of people and food smells, Janey walked upright, glaring straight ahead; Chloe went beside, not quite as tall as Janey, and attuned to every glance their way, every muttered remark as they passed.
God, who’d wanna look like that? Check out the hair. Aw, yuk
.
    Some boys up ahead were bellowing—no, it was just one of them, enjoying his new deep voice. He fell silent midbellow, and Chloe saw him, and thought he looked familiar.
Yes, he must be
, she thought, catching his stricken glance at Janey. She felt the crucial moment pass when he decided not to shout something; she saw him suck the words back into his mouth. He huddled with his friends, who were not familiar to Chloe, and glanced out from among them, chin up to cover his fear—fear of Janey, of whatever she’d done to him. Jumped on top of him, probably, made him come too quickly. Chloe couldn’t work it out, how these little street rats could have such buckets of pride, still, that they were threatened by Janey’s jolly fucking, by having to do it her way. She was so amiable, so harmless, really. It was funny to know that and to see this guy shrinking into his group, terrified she might nail him again with his mates watching—his mates, who were shouting ‘Hey, Morticia!’, and falling about at their own wit.
    Janey didn’t seem to even notice them. ‘Let’s go up the art gallery,’ she said. ‘I don’t really feel like shops. Is it school holidays or something? There seem to be a pile of kids around.’
    ‘No, these are just your regular delinquents, cluttering up the pavement when they should be in school,’ said Chloe, with the conscious self-righteousness of the new Year 12 graduate.

    Janey in the gallery coffee shop, surrounded by rinsed perms, handbags and a few dapper suits, stirred a cappuccino and stared out at the docks. ‘Everything looks like artworks when you’ve been around the gallery, doesn’t it?’
    Chloe glanced over her shoulder at the grey-variant slabs of water, warship, warehouse and dockside machinery.
    ‘That’s what I like,’ Janey went on. ‘It wakes up your eyes. It’d wake up your
hands
, too, if you could only
touch
a few things.’
    ‘You are so selfish, Jane,’ said Chloe severely. ‘How will the