Borrowed Light
Page 4
‘And I suppose they go for holidays by the sea and stay in the best hotels, too,’ she adds. ‘Just like you.’ She glances at him quickly, inching away. She is puffed up with daring and anger. She’s panting slightly, frightened she’s gone too far, but she can’t resist spitting out the sharp little splinters of words in her mouth.
What I can’t understand is, why did someone like my father, Mr Organisation and Control, pick something so messy to deal with as art? I could imagine him more happily fiddling with numbers, with tax breaks or bank loans, making calculations with elements that stayed where you put them. Sometimes he brings home a sculpture or a painting he’s bought for the gallery. He tells me about the artist, the village rituals and the practice of magic, about the singing and dancing, the carving of wood. As he speaks his face looks quite different. His eyes are lit with those African valleys, he looks younger.
While I leant against the wall, watching him, I wondered if you could ever truly know your parents. Maybe David May, father of two, was really going to meet a gorgeous black woman in Johannesburg who was a specialist in fellatio and business management. Perhaps he let his thinning hair down over there and danced wildly to the beat of jungle drums. How would I know? I went back to inspect the situation in the kitchen.
Mum was washing up and Jeremy was wearing his helmet. The astronaut theme must have set him off again. I decided to take that book straight back to the library. I picked up the teatowel. As I wiped, I thought about the lifesaver at the pool. I didn’t want to think about the other thing. I’d noticed that the lifesaver had nice eyes—he was attractive, in that eager, athletic sort of style. A bit like Tim. I wondered what he’d thought of me. I’d seen his eyes move rapidly down my body, so he’d probably dismissed me after he’d seen the emptiness of my bikini top. If you really want to know, I hate wearing a costume. I loathe and detest the treacherous way the cloth collapses into little folds when the bikini gets wet. Those swimsuit manufacturers should know that—why, thousands of women could sue them for false advertising. Or maybe it’s just me whose distribution of fatty tissue in the bra area is so disappointing.
Thinking of the lifesaver, I suddenly heard the last part of Jeremy’s question. The part I didn’t answer. ‘Would Mum come to Mars?’ he’d asked. He hadn’t even bothered to ask about Dad.
I WATCHED SOMETHING on TV after Jeremy had gone to sleep, but I can’t remember what it was. Sometimes the television is an excuse to sit like a rotting vegetable and decompose silently while you stare into space. Our family does that often. Sometimes we talk to each other in the breaks. That night I couldn’t concentrate on anything—I didn’t know who was shooting who, or why. I could only hear my own doctor dialogue inside.
I gave in and went to bed. There was an Ancient History exam the next day, and I had to read a chapter about that weird emperor, Caligula. Did you know he made his horse a senator? I got out my books, but I couldn’t concentrate on old Caligula, either. Each time I turned a page, or stretched up, my arm would brush against my breasts. They tingled, as if electrified.
I touched my nipples gingerly. It felt like I’d had a terrible accident, and suffered gravel rash. I felt wounded there. Before, my breasts had been as dead as Jeremy’s playdough. This new sensitivity was a symptom of pregnancy, the doctor had said. My disappointing breasts would swell, grow to new proud heights! That is, if the pregnancy continued.
It was so hard to believe. I couldn’t believe it. My mind kept skipping over the facts, like a stone skipping on water. You think you know your body, every single crushing deficiency. And then, this.
My periods have never been regular, if you really want to know. I remember being so proud when the blood first came. I was a woman now. Eagerly I waited for the next. I had to wait a long time. Everyone else was stocking up on tampons and sanitary napkins and new pairs of knickers. For them the bathroom became a special place—secret, softly pink, filled with flowery packaging and locks on the doors. It seemed all the girls were gliding into another world—they flowed together, damp with their animal nature, fertile and generous as wild moss growing in a cave.
I was as dry as an old stick. I stood outside the circle. Six weeks apart, eight weeks, the blood came. I’d watch the moon, waxing and waning every twenty-eight days. My moon. Why couldn’t I keep up with it? Some women sang to the moon during their cycle. They’d join hands on a hill, the full moon blessing their faces. My mother once belonged to a group like that. The moon seemed to pull their bodies toward it, just as it pulled at the tides. I longed to let go and dissolve into that ocean, drawn this way and that by the sky. I took books out of the library, to research this phenomenon. Perhaps just a little crumb of information could change my whole view of it all. But the books only pushed me further away. I was always standing outside the circle.
‘For most women, the menstrual cycle is every twenty-eight days,’ the book About Women said. So what was I, a hyena? I just wanted to be normal for God’s sake, and keep time with the rhythm of the universe. Was that so much to ask? The world kept dancing away from me.
I closed the history book and picked up my diary. I kept my recent menstrual dates in this small blue book. I riffled through the pages. The black numbers glared at me, all askew and irregular, like the wrong ingredients in a spell. My last period, the book said, was seven weeks ago.
I remembered my last period. Jeremy had come rushing into the bathroom without knocking, and seen the blood running down my leg. His eyes widened and he’d flung his arms around me. ‘Where’s your cut? Was it a flying meteor?’ When I told him that I had my ‘woman’s time’, he nodded wisely, relieved. ‘You should wear a nappy then, like Mum,’ he advised. ‘I don’t need one any more,’ he added proudly, ‘not even at night time. I’ve got excellent control.’
Good old Jeremy. Once I tried to talk to Mum about my abnormalities, and she just said I should eat more ying (or was it yang?) food. I wanted her to see my faint moustache, and the excessive hairiness of my arms. But she didn’t look properly. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘I’m sure your cycle will settle down soon. You can be too obsessive about appearances. Feed your soul, Cally, instead—your beauty will shine through.’
Well, I know I’m obsessive, I know that. I wish I did think more about abstract art, or all those poor people starving in India and the war in Afghanistan. And I do, sometimes. I worry about them as well, all right? But I can’t help returning to my estrogen deficiency. Mum stands there with her hands on her hips, shaking her head at me. It’s all very well for her. She has beautiful ripe breasts that move under her shirt like luscious fruit. I feel like I belong to another species when I look at her. It’s hard to believe I’m her daughter. There’s a silence between our two bodies in space. Sometimes I want to lay my head in the hollow between her breasts. I want to burrow in.
WHAT THE HELL was I going to do? Maybe I could lie here on my bed for nine months and my family could pass food in under the door. Mashed avocado through a straw. I could lie here in eternal procrastination. That word sounds rude, antisocial, like something you do alone under the covers. I suppose it is.
Have you ever considered how much the ingredient of Time has to do with decision-making? If you put in two tablespoons of Time, instead of one, perhaps the flavour of the decision would be different. Imagine if you only put a quarter of a teaspoon in, the way Tim does.
My Grandma was telling me, just before she went away, about the idea that time freezes at the event horizon. We’re talking black holes here. It’s almost impossible to imagine, isn’t it? But frozen time—it must be paradise for the procrastinator. A black hole, some say, is a collapsed star with an escape velocity faster than light. The curvature of spacetime becomes infinite inside the hole, and if you fell in, you’d never get out. You’d stretch into something as skinny as an elastic band. Well, spacetime inside this hole loses its timelike qualities, and what you get is spacetime foam—can you believe it?—where time has no real direction.
Anyway, what I couldn’t understand, lying on my bed and looking at the dates in my diary is this: how did I get into this trouble when I decided long ago that my body was a desert in which nothing would grow? Sparse periods like grudging oases, breasts that wouldn’t keep a beetle alive. And now this. It was a terrible shock. I couldn’t get past the shock waves.
It was very hard to think through this whole thing alone. There was just dark matter in my head, and tides of panic that blurred the facts. It was like being on drugs that wouldn’t wear off.
I hadn’t told Tim yet. I felt so far away from him. My situation seemed to have nothing to do with him. This bubbling nausea, these feverish nipples, the image of a little fish swimming in warm waters. The fear. It was all so personal. I’d plunged into a strange interior world, and Tim was an extraterrestrial.
I REMEMBER WHEN I told Jeremy about the earth, for the first time. How we are always moving on our own axis, on our long journey around the sun. ‘Nothing ever stays still,’ I’d said with excitement. ‘Things are always changing. The universe is expanding and galaxies of stars are flying away with it!’
I’d brought out this piece of news, delivered by Grandma, like a valuable treasure. For me, this evidence of change, of ours being a rebellious, restless world, was a sign of hope. Just because you were born into a certain family, a certain pattern, it didn’t mean you had to stay there. Why, families of stars were changing all the time, breaking up, swelling into powerful red giants, cooling into white dwarfs, transforming into neutron stars that could spin more than a thousand times per second. It was the way of the universe!
But Jeremy’s lip had trembled. ‘I don’t want everything to change,’ he’d protested. ‘I want us always to be here, together, with those sad ladies in the living room, and our trips to Manly pool, and my Batman videos and icecreams when I’m good.’
At the time, I hadn’t seen why he’d been so upset.
Especially the bit about the sad ladies. But now I understood. Just then those sad ladies on Wednesday seemed comforting rather than irritating. I wanted to wallow in the luxury of yesterday—I longed to be bored again, and feel superior. Like when my mother was watching some old soapie on TV and I nagged to see ‘Quantum’, or Dad gave us a lecture on mess. It seemed like a suburban paradise, looking back. Life unfolded at a strolling pace, wearing sensible shoes of a Hush-puppy brown. The main event at night was selection of the garbage taker-outer. Just a few weeks ago, nothing in the family landscape stood so much taller than anything else. The garbage, the TV programs, homework, what’s for dinner?—all those things were so reassuringly familiar, like rosary beads you could rub together between your fingers for comfort.
I thought about Dad’s trips away, and how we’d relax at home then and watch television with our dinners on our laps. I thought about Grandma’s astronomy lectures in our garden, with the grass curling round our toes. There were talks with Mum in the kitchen, as we washed up and argued about the afterlife and my homework. We knew what came next.
Maybe when you look back from the cliff of disaster, everything appears cosier than it really was.
Now there was a subtext to everything. A dark running undertow that dragged me along. What will I do? What will I do? it whispered on and on. It pulled me, obsessed me, took the colour out of everything. Every time I thought of something else, laughed, ran, lay on my bed, it pulled me under—think about me, worry about me, solve me, don’t forget about me!
I wanted my old life back. Me, Callisto—tail-wagging, over-eager, estrogen-deficient old me.
I wanted it back, the time before my breasts changed and the blood stopped, and I became inhabited.
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK my mother, Caroline, came in to say goodnight. That’s a lovely name, isn’t it? Caroline. I’ve always thought it sounded very feminine. You couldn’t mistake it for a boy’s name, the way you could with mine. Anyway, there she was, drifting in across the carpet. She squinted at the light, as if it hurt. Lines sprang up around her eyes like pulled threads. Under her arm was a thick book. I glanced at the title. Meditation—Discover the Real You. She’d probably been lying in the dark as usual with her eyes closed, intoning a new mantra.
‘Can’t sleep?’ Mum asked. She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘I’ve got a letter here from your grandmother.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘From Venice, of course.’
She had her old cardigan on, and as she bent over, I smelled the familiar odour of avocado and pears. Ever since I could remember, my mother had made her own moisturiser with ‘only natural ingredients’. My father said she smelled like a vegetable garden. ‘More appealing than a chemical factory,’ she’d snorted.
When my mother bent over to kiss me, I felt a sudden urge to put my arms around her. I’d breathe in great wafts of peace and avocado, I’d lie down in silence and meditate amongst the grass and vegetables.
But I lay there, inert. I only moved my hand to cover up the dates in my notebook. A hug wouldn’t mean anything, anyway, because a hug is only worthwhile if you share the same knowledge. And my mother didn’t know something very important about me. A hug now would be a surface thing, like a white lie. My mother would be embracing the old skin, before the secret.
Mum straightened up, and walked briskly over to the window to pull the curtains.
‘No, leave them,’ I called out.
‘But the moonlight will keep you awake. You’ve got a history test tomorrow, and you need your sleep.’
That old history test. I’d had a far more significant test today. Didn’t Mum ever see anything? She always read the contents of jars at the supermarket so carefully. But that was food. When it came to her family, she was quite content to just recognise the label.
She paused at the window, her hand raised uncertainly for the curtain cord. Her hair was silver with moonlight, and she was standing so intently it was as if she were awaiting a celestial blessing. Her eyes seemed fixed on something very far away. Or perhaps she was still listening to her mantra. She could have been an object in a still life, leaving the shell of her body here for appearance’s sake, while her soul flew gratefully away.
She shook herself momentarily, as if awakening from a dream. Her hand dropped from the curtain cord as if she’d forgotten why it was there. She focused back on me, and smiled. ‘Don’t read too long then, Cally,’ she said. It was like a nursery rhyme, that phrase, repeated over and over through my childhood. When you said the same thing often, I suppose your mouth could move on automatic, while your brain was busy thinking something else for yourself. Mothers probably perfect that technique over the years.
But as I watched her walk to the door, glancing back and blowing a kiss, I wanted to shout, ‘Look! Look at me properly! Don’t you see how pale my face is? How red my eyes are? Don’t you want to know why I’m so quiet?’ I thought of Jeremy, and how incessant were his daily cries of ‘Look at me, look at me jump! Look at me dive! See, I can do a handstand!’
‘Well, sleep well, Cally, sweet dreams,’ she murmured as she stood at the door.
I looked at the dark square of carpet between us. I was standing on the bank of a river, and my mother was on the other side. The river flowed between us, familiar, chilly, always there. My mother hovered, studying the moon shadows on the water. I tried to catch her eye, but she turned just then and went through the door. As I watched her go, I saw the river slow and ice over, just a long dead gap between us.
When Mum had gone, I thought about getting up and making hot milk. But I didn’t want to joggle the anxiety, set off the alarm. Moonlight drenched the bed, blanching my toes. I wriggled them. I wished I could vanish
like a dust particle into nothingness. At a certain altitude I would dissolve, just like that, as easily as sugar in black tea.
ONE THING YOU ought to know, if you are going to understand my family, is that Grandma is passionate about cosmology. It was her profession. Mum said it was her life. Grandma Ruth thrived on the unknown, and delighted in scientific confusion. It gave her breathing space, she said, to risk and theorise. Science gave her the tools to imagine the world. Confusion gave her the chance to prove everyone else wrong.
Grandma was a hot-shot astrophysicist at the university. Professor Ruth Cook. I always listened to Grandma Ruth. I hung on her words, like Jeremy does with his glue ear. I learnt the tiniest details about her life. Sometimes I pretended I was her. As I listened to Grandma there were blazing moments of discovery, when I understood something for the first time. It was like falling in love.
It was Grandma who told me that space is not empty. At least ninety percent of the universe consists of dark matter, and no one is sure what this matter is made of. ‘Maybe WIMPS,’ said Grandma. ‘That’s Weakly Interacting Massive Particles!’ She said these particles tended to roam about, not sticking to atoms and molecules like the more familiar stuff of the universe. I added WIMPS to my vocabulary, and found it extremely useful in describing certain people I knew.
And it was Grandma who introduced me to the language of the universe.
THE TRUTH—As Grandma tells it—was that she was born with ‘eyes for the skies’. She was labelled from the beginning, as clearly as if she’d shot from the sky, stellar wind in her hair, plasma swirling from her feet. When she was a small baby, just a few months old, the only way to quieten her was to take her out to the garden and place her on her back in the grass. There she would lie, motionless, silent, watching the theatre of the stars.
When she began to talk, she could say ‘moon’ before she said ‘Mummy’, and was more interested in experiments with gravity than in hide and seek. She never did sleep very much. Later, when she could justify her behaviour, she said that sleeping was dumb, because you missed out on the sky’s best performance.