‘Borrowed Light points a fine lens at the macro and micro world of relationships, and there it all teems as if for the first time: love gone wrong, family secrets, imploding and exploding sexualities, the flare of young love set against the waning commitments of the middle-aged… It’s a wonderfully cool celestial appraisal of life from Fienberg’s astronomer heroine, who follows her own Lonely Planet guide to that most mysterious of galaxies, the human heart.’ Anna Maria Dell’oso
borrowed light
anna fienberg
ALLEN & UNWIN
Copyright © Anna Fienberg, 1999
All rights reserved. No part of this publication 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.
First published in 1999 by
Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
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
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Fienberg, Anna.
Borrowed light.
ISBN 1 86448 931 6.
I. Title.
A823.3
Cover and text designed by Elizabeth Farlie
Cover photograph by Graham Baring
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria
Printed in Australia by Australian Print Group
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
About the Author
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Epilogue
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anna Fienberg is the author of many well-loved and award-winning books, including picture books, short stories, junior novels and now fiction for teenagers and adults.
Her writing is remarkable for its’ dazzling inventiveness, insight and humour. She lives in Sydney.
Part One
IT WAS THE discovery that the moon has no wind, no water and no air that changed things for me.
That, and the feeling of being inhabited.
When I was sixteen, these two discoveries lay side by side in my mind, as separate and solid as stones. In time they connected, until, looking back, I could never see one without the other.
I FIRST SAW THE surface of the moon through a telescope in my garden when I was twelve. That same year I learned that stars were all in the process of dying.
I was shocked. My grandmother and I were standing near the azalea bush, our bare feet moist with dew. We were ‘reading the sky’, as she put it. We did that often. In summer it was lovely, the cool grass tickling our toes. Stars sizzled above us. It’s amazing how just one crumb of information can change a person’s view of the world. I thought stars were incredibly glamorous after that. And tragic.
Stars, said Grandma, live only as long as they have fuel. Then they degenerate into white dwarves, or are defeated by gravity and slither into black holes. It’s a ghastly end, but, as I told Grandma, at least stars have a life. Their fiery hearts storm with atoms, creating unimaginable heat, turning hydrogen into helium. They make their own light!
Now take the life of a moon. It just follows a planet around, like a dog on a leash. Same old orbit, same old neighbourhood. Padding along, it catches light rays like bones thrown by stars.
I am a moon. My mother is definitely a moon. My father—he’s a hard one to classify. I’d say he’s a star, but a distant kind, burning away in another galaxy. You’d need something more than a Hubble telescope to see him properly. No, all my hopes are on Jeremy, my little brother. He has the makings of a star, I swear. He’ll make enough light for us all.
You might think, to look at me, that I am a star. If you just gave me a passing glance, that is, out of the corner of your eye. Did you know that children can’t see well out of the comer of their eyes? They don’t develop good peripheral vision until about eight years old. It’s something to watch out for, particularly when your little brother is crossing the road. Little kids don’t see a thing, believe me.
Anyway, if you’re over eight, and therefore glancing at me quickly from the comer of your eye, you’ll see my long wavy dark hair. You may notice I am very slim (from worry, not weight watching). I have a straight nose with elegant nostrils shaped like treble clefs. My music teacher told me that, when she couldn’t think of anything else encouraging to say. People have complimented me on my smile. Tim, my ex-boyfriend, said it was sexy. I work hard at my smile.
People often search for kind things to say when they meet me. I think they sense my eagerness to please. Maybe they can even see my tail wag. My mother says, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. My father is often lost for words, and spends a lot of time on the other side of the planet.
Here in the shadows, lying on my side in bed, I am sixteen again. I watch the line of my body curving out and in like a violin. But if you look properly, you’ll see it’s only my hip bones that stick out like mad. I really look like a starving cow in a drought. When Jeremy falls asleep with me he slings his leg into that hollow of my waist and snuggles up. I love that. I pretend he’s my baby, my little calf. At least I used to. Now I can’t bear to think about it.
It’s late, and I’m tired. My eyes ache. I can’t sleep. My skin is tingling with nerves. Outside, it looks so peaceful. The house lies in fields of silence, the neat lawns and careful gardens threaded together with moonlight.
It won’t last, though. Moonlight changes the world for a while, but it’s like a magician who only does illusions, not transformations. When it moves on, the moon leaves nothing behind. The sun would give you a warm spot.
If you really want to know, I’ve divided the human race into stars and moons ever since I began reading the sky. It’s a tidy and satisfying system, one you can rely on. Before that, I classified people in another way—herbivores and carnivores. (I was a herbivore, of course. Moons usually are.)
Anyway, the thing that I’d like you to consider is, if you’re a moon like me, you won’t make your own light. You’ll borrow it. You’ll go in for a lot of appeasement gestures, like smiling too much and wagging your tail.
And it was being a borrower that got me into all this trouble in the first place.
SOME PEOPLE HAVE photographic memories. They can tell you the colour of their baby blanket, the prize they won in kindergarten. Those people could tell you the date, too, of any personal event, as if it were etched there in the top comer of each memory frame. I can’t. I remember only feelings. And smells.
Once, when I was little, we went on a holiday to a farm. I sat down in the chicken yard, to talk to the hens. I got chicken manure all over my skirt. The stink was enough to make you pass out. When I ran into the kitchen crying, everyone laughed. ‘Ugh, you smell fowl!’ they crowed, radiant with their own wit.
I remember nothing about the pony rides, or the cow called Daze I was supposed to have milked so happily. Since then, whenever I smell garden fertiliser, I blush like a madwoman.
It’s a defect in my character, this ‘feeling’ memory. You can’t really tell feelings—imagine someone recounting a long anecdote, without place, setting or time! Just, ‘I felt this, I felt that, but I don’t know when …’ It’s like being lost in a landscape with no signposts.
I have a mountain of other defects as well, which you will discover if you continue with this. For instance, I read constantly, even at the dinner table. My mother says it’s rude. Not a good example for Jeremy. (
It’s also unhygienic, as pages get stuck together with sauce spots.) But I like to expand my general knowledge. I pick up a lot of interesting facts through reading—it’s a side effect, like the rampant fungal growth that occurs with antibiotics. Did you know, for instance, that a bulldozer is as heavy as 700 seven-year-old children? Such facts provide a kind of social glue; you can bring them out whenever there’s a gap in conversation.
But astronomical facts are the best. They are in a class of their own. They enlarge the perimeter of your life, sweeping you away, past the dinner table, above the arguments and the silences and the washing up. They signpost the way to other worlds you might want to live in.
In another twenty years, if I’m still alive, I’ll want to remember this sixteenth year properly, the way other people remember. Not just the feelings and smells. So I’m writing this while it’s still clear. I’ll put in my own signposts, and the feelings can just drape over them like swamp weed.
Do you remember the bad things in your life, more than the good? I tend to remember disasters. I must have a special section in my brain that says, Line Up Here, Disasters Only. This annoys my mother, who says I had a perfectly decent childhood. And maybe she’s right, because compared to the catastrophe that happened when I was sixteen, the sum of all the painful events of my childhood would be as microscopic as those first single-celled bacteria climbing up the lip of volcanoes.
THAT YEAR, WHEN I was sixteen, I had to make a decision. You ought to know I’m terrible at decisions. I’m the biggest procrastinator I’ve ever met. I lie around for ages imagining both sides (I actually lie on my bed a lot, it’s another defect of mine) and keep feeling sorry for the side that loses. It’s like a ghost standing at the end of my bed.
My ex-boyfriend, Tim, is always saying, ‘I decided to do it, on the spur of the moment!’ When he says that, you can see he feels heroic—he throws his head back and laughs, and his teeth (carnivorous) glint in the sunlight. You can see he is a daring, impulsive guy—a real risk-taker. Well, he is a star, after all. A real one. That’s why I was attracted to him.
But do you know, I don’t really believe in spur-of-the-moment decisions. Not now. I think so many things lead you to make that decision. The swish of your mother’s dress as she walked past your cot, the tang of your father’s soap, the dreams you had when you were three. There are things you can’t remember, jostling like wrestlers in a crowd, trying to push to the front of your mind. I can feel them sometimes, it makes me hold my head, I feel a pressure that tingles in my scalp, like tears pricking my eyelids. The wrestlers sometimes make me cry, but I can’t see their shape or expression, they just press on me when I’m doing nothing—pulling the sheets up on my bed, watching television.
Life is one big question mark, if you ask me.
THIS DISASTER, AT sixteen, is without comparison. It is the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Worse than the time I drank too much green ginger wine and passed out on the kitchen floor at Simon Throng’s party. I woke up to find that my hair was full of potato crisps and everyone else had gone home. I hate green ginger wine, anyway. I’d only had one glass, then two, because everyone else was doing it. The girls had looked so cool, summer legs crossed, fingers laced around those elegant, long-stemmed glasses.
This disaster was worse, too, than the time I came home from a party with my dress inside out. I’d gone parking with Tim at the Botanical Gardens. By day the Gardens are soft and inviting. At night there are sharp things in the grass that poke into your back and stinging things that make you think of deadly funnelweb spiders. You’re supposed to be carried away with your lover’s caresses, but it’s not easy when you think every breath might be your last, due to the funnelweb. Somehow, Tim removed my dress and I helped, of course, because I am always obliging and consider others first. (You do that to excess if you’re a borrower.) Being naked in a public place, surrounded by spiky objects doesn’t excite me, if you really want to know. As soon as it was polite, I slid my dress back on. I rode home, safe now, wrapped from neck to knee in natural cotton. I wasn’t aware that my labels were flapping—and everyone could see I was size ten, made in Thailand, and needed a warm machine wash only.
THESE PAINFUL EVENTS were temporary. After a while they lay buried, like sharp metal objects you step on in the sand. I wince sometimes, just as I’m falling asleep, and remember them.
But the disaster I’m about to confess to you, is definitely the worst. It had the shock value of a giant meteor crashing to earth. Have you heard about the meteor that fell in Winslow, Arizona? It made a crater two kilometres wide. Well, when I heard the result of my test, my mouth fell open just like that.
‘You’re pregnant,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m afraid the test was positive.’
He’s afraid, what about me?
Everything became very quiet after he said that, like when you dive under water. Without sound, I saw things so clearly. The doctor’s hand rested on the desk. It was pale, with fine black hairs sprouting below each knuckle. There was something pubic about the hairs, so I looked away. Next to the hand was a small fish tank. I peered closer. Inside was a long pinkish thing that looked like it was still evolving.
‘A lungfish,’ said the doctor kindly, giving us both a bit of time. ‘Of the order Dipnoi. It has lungs as well as gills.’
‘I know, and in certain species it builds a mucus-lined mud covering to withstand extended droughts.’
The doctor looked annoyed. He was used to bringing out his information like a present. I was supposed to go ‘Oh!’ Normally I would have. I’d have smiled a lot, too, and fallen about with amazement. (Because I’m a borrower, remember. We try to fulfil people’s expectations at any moment.)
Only that day I didn’t feel like it. I just didn’t feel like it.
I think his hand was extended to comfort me. I was too numb. The silence thing had come back. In the moments after an explosion there is no other sound. The doctor’s mouth was opening and closing, and without the words he looked quite funny, like the telly when the mute button is on. Funny and vulnerable. I didn’t want to worry about him on top of everything else, so I switched back to looking at the lungfish, of the order Dipnoi.
But I couldn’t help thinking of all our fishy ancestors, crawling up from the sea, millions of years ago. Slithery slidey blotches, wriggling with pride—‘Look I’ve got lungs and you’ve only got gills, ner ner!’ I remembered that a human fetus makes gills in the early weeks, only to destroy them later on.
I wondered if I had a little fish inside me.
I could feel tears welling up, warm as those primordial swamps. Suddenly the lungfish pressed against the glass. My tears spilled their banks. I wanted to let the poor thing out. The water would gush over the table, drowning the files and the neat penholder with the doctor’s name inscribed in gold, and the pink plastic pelvis of a female perched in the comer. But I couldn’t rescue it. Nobody could. The creature seemed frozen in time, eternally procrastinating—animal, mineral or vegetable?—while all its brothers and sisters had made up their minds a millennium ago, embracing a muddy bank, or sliding down under a wave.
‘Whatever decision you make,’ the doctor said, picking up his gold pen, ‘I’d be glad to help.’
I wanted to blurt it out then, and howl. His face was all crumpled with concern. Soft, like rumpled sheets. I could have laid my head in his lap.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and stood up. I waved to the lungfish. I couldn’t manage anything more.
WHEN I CAME home from the doctor’s, nobody seemed to notice anything different. I didn’t really expect them to. Everyone in our family has eye trouble. The world goes blurry at a distance of two centimetres outside their own skins. I forgive Jeremy, of course. He is only five. And anyway, the day I got home, he was worrying about much larger things.
He was wearing his bike helmet again, inside the house. ‘Oh Jem,’ I said, ‘it won’t do you any good, even if a meteor does land on our house. That one
in Siberia turned into a fireball and killed fifteen hundred reindeer when it fell. Where’s Mum?’
I’ve thought for a long time now that maybe I should stop teaching Jeremy to read the sky. For me it’s exciting, it’s a way out of here. There are infinite possibilities. But Jeremy just seems to worry about things falling on him.
Jeremy shrugged and the helmet shifted sideways. It was too big for him anyway. ‘Mum?’ He wrinkled his forehead. ‘She’s in the living room, talking to those dead people.’
We both sighed. I sat down heavily on a kitchen chair, and pulled Jeremy onto my lap. The helmet hit my chin. From the living room we heard a voice. ‘Oh beloved spirits, come in peace, we are ready for you.’ We held our breath in the kitchen. Jeremy snorted. I could feel his shoulders shaking. The silence was thick in that room. We’d seen it. It hung suspended, like layers of cigarette smoke.
We heard a low murmuring. There was a moaning and wailing, the sounds reeling together through the silence, and then like a solid shape spinning up from a potter’s wheel, a clear cry came. It made goosebumps stand out on my skin. Jeremy pulled his helmet down.
Someone was crying. It was a hopeless kind of crying, as if it came from the bottom of a well. I could hear Mum doing her comforting routine. It was Wednesday, I realised, and I couldn’t have picked a more depressing day to make my discovery.
Wednesday was seance day. Every Wednesday, for as long as I can remember, I’ve come home to a darkened living room, moist with sad ladies. Curtains are drawn, the air is trapped and still, the dining table pushed into the middle of the room. Sitting around it are eight or nine women, usually my mother’s age or older. They all have one finger on a glass that is moving jerkily around a ouija board, telling stories of misfortune. My mother says they are trying to contact the spirit of a loved one, who was too rapidly snatched from this world. When I come in from school, she glances up at me with irritation and purses her mouth into Ssh! position. It makes her mouth look like a dried plum. ‘There’s fruit in the bowl,’ she whispers. ‘Can’t talk now.’
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