Borrowed Light

by Anna Fienberg

  Maybe if someone else knew, it would seem more real. But there was no one to tell. Maybe the doctor was wrong. I’d read about those ‘hysterical’ pregnancies, where women blew up like pufferfish and bought maternity clothes and everything, and then suddenly their bellies went down, like balloons at the end of a birthday party. I felt a sudden lift of the heart. That’d be right—I could just imagine my mixed-up body doing something crazy like that. Maybe I’d go back to that doctor and ask him to consider this. We could consider it together, while we waved compassionately at the lungfish.

  I felt almost excited by this idea—better than I’d felt for days. I noticed that if I was really firm with it, the nausea seemed to fade now, too. Perhaps the whole thing was in my mind.

  I snapped the light on with new energy. Lying on the bedside table was Grandma’s letter from Venice. I hadn’t even opened it. I shook my head at myself, and smiled indulgently. All this worry over something that was only in my mind.

  I plumped up the pillows, settling back for a good read.

  I loved getting Grandma’s letters. The stamp showed one of those delicate Renaissance men with the long nose and chiselled jaw. The wavy black postal lines ran through the stamp, smudging it slightly. Pity, I’d have liked it perfect.

  ‘Venice is magnifico, as always,’ Grandma Ruth wrote. ‘But I don’t have much time to wander the streets. There’s so much going on at the conference, and so many hotheads! The Moscow gang are still arguing that the neutrino has mass, and the Swiss deny it. Look up Enrico Fermi, Callisto, and we’ll talk about it when I get back. Oh, the Italians—they know their stars, and their coffee! Every time there’s an interval, you can’t resist one of those short blacks—tepid, so’s you can taste it, bitter and sweet at the same time. I sip litres of the stuff, watching the gondolas drift along the canals, then race back for the next lecture. Heaven on earth, Cal!’

  God, it would have been great to be there with Grandma. I could listen to her argue, watch the caffeine and excitement shine in her face. It would be like visiting another planet.

  She was in Italy for two months, to attend La Conferenza di Galileo. Every five years astronomers met in Venice, the city where Galileo worked for most of his life. They discussed the latest discoveries in cosmology, and this year the theme was Dark Matter in the Universe, the name coined by the scientist, Zwicky, back in the 1930s.

  Grandma went to all the conferences, even though she was retired from the university now. She said that just because the skies no longer kept her in menthols, it didn’t mean she’d stop looking up. My grandmother arrived at the peak of her career only a few years ago. She’d been one of the astronomers who discovered thousands of previously unknown galaxies in the cloud-veiled skies of the Milky Way.

  I had already written to Ruth in Venice. My letter was probably waiting for her when she first set foot in her hotel.

  I liked writing out the address, using Galileo’s name—it was as if some of the light anointing the heads of those conference stars might rub off on me, just on contact.

  With my letter I’d included an essay I’d written in English at school. I thought she might appreciate it. We’d been asked to examine the use of the moon as a symbol in literature. I’d spent hours over it, studying the celestial facts, quotes from poetry, my own private feelings. Even though I had learned everything from my science manuals, I still preferred to see the moon as a perfect place, invulnerable and remote (like me). ‘The moon is an island of perfection,’ I wrote, ‘a silver jewel on a black sea. Nothing touches it, but the moon touches everything, here on Earth.’

  I’d been quite proud of this essay, and I’d pinned a photo of myself at the telescope to it, as well.

  I scanned Grandma’s letter. I swallowed in anticipation.

  I had to read all about the coffee and the gondolas and the Dark Matter before I saw any mention of my essay.

  ‘Fiddle!’ wrote Grandma. ‘How can you write all this drivel about the moon, as if you’d never heard anything I said! “So remote, so self-sufficient, floating up there alone on stellar winds …” Well, that’s just romantic nonsense. The moon is not self-sufficient, nothing in our universe is. Haven’t you heard of gravity—the phenomenon of attraction between bodies? Why didn’t you put that in? Don’t tell me you’re becoming all fanciful like your mother! The moon is wired gravitationally to this planet, without which it would sling off into space like a stone from a catapult. Don’t you remember that experiment we did with the bucket and the rope? Can you describe any object in our solar system without reference to its relationships to other bodies? Come on, Callisto!’

  I could feel my cheeks burning as I read. I slammed the letter face-down on the bed. Shut up! I wanted to shout. Shut up and let me talk! I know all that, what do you think I am, a member of the Flat Earth Society? This is just the way I see it, right, it’s my own world, it’s a fantasy, get it? And I’m not anything like my mother. I winced. I had a sudden picture of Mum sitting round the living room table at her ladies’ meeting, talking to dead spirits.

  I picked up the letter again. I wanted to cut my grandmother off, like scissors to paper. But the letter had its own magnetic field, and my eyes raced down the page. ‘I know, I know,’ I kept chanting as I read.

  The language of the universe had never been like this. I could feel tears burning my lids. Since I was twelve the cosmos had been a world of infinite space, permissive, elastic, consisting of exotic materials, wild chemicals. Suddenly it had boundaries of brick, and they were shutting me out. Or maybe it was just my Grandma. Why did she have to be so damn rigid?

  ‘There is even some evidence, Callisto, that the moon is made from the same stuff as Earth,’ she wrote in her deafening scrawl. ‘When the earth was very young, it was hit by another mighty planet, and the vapour created by the heat of the collision spurted out into space, settling into orbit and condensing as the moon.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I chanted to myself. But Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge, remember?

  ‘Practically speaking, the moon isn’t so remote, so unearthly, so angelically different, my dear. Its face is pocked with craters, like someone suffering from acne. I’m sure you’ve seen them with your telescope.’

  I groaned. I tried to remember the bold A+ that Mrs Graham had marked in red on the last page of my essay. ‘And really, Cally, how can a satellite with no wind, no water and no air be invulnerable? Every trace of history remains like a scar on its landscape.’

  I stopped chanting. I held my breath, as if to hear better. ‘Just think, the footprints left by astronauts will never be worn away! Isn’t that remarkable?’

  Yes it was. I didn’t know that. Or at least, I hadn’t thought that far. I was not good on consequences. I closed my eyes. I saw tracks left by birds in wet sand, tyre marks in dusty roads. I saw myself lying still on Tim’s floor, out of the weather. There was a silence in my head, like the moment after lightning, when you’re waiting for thunder. I pulled up my T shirt and looked at the white lunar landscape of my stomach. No atmosphere meant no protection. Inside, there were footprints.

  I believed it now. My mind stopped skipping and the thought dropped like a stone into my body. I was heavy with gravity, and I lumbered into the bathroom to throw up.

  Part Two

  CALLISTO DOESN’T LIKE me any more. I don’t know what I’ve done. When I go into her room she says, ‘I’m busy, Jeremy.’ Yesterday was so hot, but she wouldn’t take me to the pool.

  ‘It’s the only place we’ll be safe,’ I said. ‘The man on the radio told us we’re having a heat shave.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ she said.

  What I want to know is, how can she be so busy lying on her bed? Maybe she doesn’t like me because I wear a helmet. Sam Underwood at school said I should be locked up. Why? Only bad robbers are locked up. I haven’t hurt anyone. I told Sam that helmets protect you against flying objects, but he wouldn’t listen. No one listens to me.

/>   They’re all too busy.

  I feel sorry for Sam Underwood, really. If he only knew what I know, he’d wear protection gear, too. Before Callisto stopped liking me, she told me something. She said the earth is growing all the time. Every second, thousands of little pieces of iron and stone called meteors fall onto our planet. She said the pieces are no bigger than pinheads. But I think some of them must be ginormous, otherwise, why do they make the earth so much heavier every day?

  Mum says, ‘Stop filling the boy’s head with scary facts, Callisto.’

  Cally says, ‘At least they’re facts, and not spirits from the other side.’ When she says ‘other side’, she makes her voice go all low and shivery, and Mum gets mad.

  Another reason I feel sorry for Sam Underwood is that everyone calls him Sam Underwear. He pretends he doesn’t care. When I say ‘Underwear’ to myself, it makes me laugh too. But I only do it under my breath. There was a man on telly last night, and his name was Bob Bottom. Even Cally laughed at that. We laughed together for about five hundred hours right there on the black sofa. I kept making myself think of ‘bottom’ and ‘underwear’ so I could keep going.

  But then Cally hopped up and went back to her bed.

  I asked Mum why my sister is always lying on her bed now.

  ‘She’s got the teenage blues, Jeremy,’ said Mum. ‘It makes her cranky. Don’t take any notice of her.’

  Is it catching, this teenage disease? Will she turn blue?

  My lips went blue at Manly pool once, when I stayed in the water too long. Cally said my lips gave her the creeps, and she made me put my jumper on. She said only dead people went blue. I hope Cally isn’t dying, with her teenage blues.

  If Cally dies, I’ll never have anyone to play with. I might as well go out into Belmore Park, the one with no trees, and wait for a meteorite to get me. I wouldn’t even wear my helmet.

  Sam Underwood is always asking if he can come over to my house. ‘Do you live in a tent?’ he asked me last week. ‘Do you live in a zoo?’

  Mum never lets me have anyone over to play. She says we’d make too much noise. She’s always got sad ladies in the living room. Cally says we may as well go and live in a funeral parlour. When you’re dead, you get a funeral. I know that much.

  Dad says, ‘Why don’t you go and play rugby? I’ll take you on Saturday mornings.’ A boy in our class, I saw him, got his whole top row of teeth knocked out. You have to wear a mouthguard to rugby, as if you’re in a war. I said, ‘No thanks, Dad.’

  Dad would miss a lot of Saturday mornings, anyway. He goes away all the time, mostly to South Africa. He does Business there. Mum is always putting newspaper clippings about South Africa up on the fridge. She says it’s terrible what goes on there. Dad takes them down when she isn’t looking. He says those things don’t happen any more, not since Mr Mandela, and doesn’t she live in the modern world? I don’t like her pictures. There are children with no arms and men with angry faces. There are women crying over small boxes with dead children in them. I lose my appetite, looking at the fridge. I prefer things in packets, from the pantry.

  I wonder when you’re dead, if you can still think. Grandma says you can’t, that it’s like being asleep. That must be nice, in a way. Mum says it’s not true, and that silly old Grandma doesn’t believe in the spirit. I don’t like her calling Grandma ‘silly’. Mum says when we die our bodies change, but our spirit is still there.

  ‘What does it look like?’ I asked her.

  ‘You can’t see it,’ she said, ‘it’s so light and free, it wafts around like a breath of wind.’

  I want to ask her about gravity, but she gets this look in her eyes and I know she’s gone away somewhere. No one ever asks me to come with them.

  My sister lay on her bed for about twelve hundred hours yesterday. When I went to bed I had a bad dream. Batman lost his space suit, and fell off the moon. He was choking, there was no air. Cally didn’t come when I called, so I went into her room. She was lying on her back. There was a bucket on the floor with some sick in it. She was so still, I was scared. Batman couldn’t breathe. Nor could I. There was a pocket mirror on her bedside table—she uses it to look at her pimples up close. I put it next to her mouth, to see if she was dead. The mirror clouded up every two seconds. She was okay.

  Mum came in then to see if Cally was all right. She felt Cally’s forehead.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she whispered to me.

  I told her. She smiled, and patted my head. ‘I used to do that when you were a baby,’ she said. ‘When you slept for more than an hour at a time, it made me nervous—it was so unusual!’

  I made her tell me the story a second time. When I was in bed, I said I’d only go to sleep if she told it a third time. I liked thinking of her coming in to see my breath making little clouds on her mirror.

  THERE’S NEVER ANYTHING much to do in the afternoons now, so I thought I’d make a bunker. There’s a good spot under the house. No one goes there because there’s just a lot of old dirt and a nest of cockroaches. They all run away when they see me. I found a shovel in the garage, which is excellent for this sort of digging. It’s quite a big shovel, because it’s for grown-ups, but if I put both my feet on it and stab it into the earth, I can get a good scoop.

  Dad won’t miss his shovel because he never does any gardening any more. He says it makes his nails black, and anyway, Mum is the expert on plants. She’s always trying different ones for her aches and pains. She grinds them up with a little hammer thing. Sometimes she puts onion juice in my ear. I hate that. It itches like mad and then burns. And I still can’t hear much, anyway.

  Maybe Sam could come and help me dig. Under the house, no one would hear us. They wouldn’t even know we were there. That way, Sam would have protection too. Even though he says he doesn’t need it. But hey, like Batman says, protection is my racket!

  If a meteorite hits this house, we’d be goners. And no one can really tell when they’re going to fall. They could just fall out of the sky at any moment. They could come like bad dreams, when you’re asleep. If that happened, then it wouldn’t matter any more that Cally is always lying on her bed, or that I can’t have friends over, or that there are little children lying in boxes over there in South Africa. We’d all be dead. Only our spirits might make little breaths of wind on a mirror.

  So I’m making a bunker for us all. And Sam can help.

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT, I told Tim. He said nothing for ages. We were at Miranda Blair’s house, out in the garden. The music was loud, even out there, because she had speakers dotted like garden gnomes in amongst the potplants.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I said again more loudly, in case he hadn’t heard. I looked nervously around, to make sure no one was listening. ‘But don’t tell anybody,’ I added.

  We were sitting on those canvas director chairs. I took a slug of green ginger wine. Something sour rose up in my throat.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Tim. He took my hands and wobbled the ring from Franklins back and forth on my finger. He coughed.

  ‘Cally,’ he said, and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t worry, Cal, I’ll look after you.’

  It was almost worth it, all of it, to hear him say that. All the sickness and the anxiety and the newspaper and everything. His face was shining with concern. There were little crinkles of worry at the comers of his blue eyes. He made me think of the doctor. I know it’s not cool for a woman entering the new millennium, but I’d have given everything to be looked after. I started to imagine us in a little flat, with carpet (not timber floors), and our own dining-room table. We’d have people over for dinner, and a stock of green ginger wine. It would be just the two of us. Tim would go out to work, and he’d come home to delicious smells of roast. I couldn’t quite get to the baby bit, but I just needed more time to imagine it.

  I started to feel breathless, as if I’d just run a mile. Our little flat was becoming so clear in my mind. I could see the guests around the new dining table—there was Miranda Blair in
her black lipstick, and there was her tribe. They were all laughing at something I didn’t hear. They kept drinking our wine and breaking our glasses, and the house was filled with people, surfers and lifesavers and others I didn’t know. The floor was littered with surfing magazines. There were no issues of New Scientist anywhere. No one had heard of black holes or inertia. When I went into our bedroom there was still the noise and the music. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere that was mine. The doona was too white. I put my hands over my ears, but it didn’t do any good. I wanted my father’s earplugs. God, I even wanted my father. I wanted to go home.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Tim asked. ‘You probably shouldn’t be drinking that.’ He took my glass away from me and put it on the wooden table, out of reach. I’d done that kind of thing with Jeremy when he was four.

  If I lived with Tim, I couldn’t keep wearing this bad disguise. Eventually I’d have to take it off. Then he’d see me in the nude, with all my bones and my tail wagging and my estrogen deficiency. And then we’d both die. It would be like one of Jeremy’s meteorites hitting the earth. The end of life as we know it.

  But I didn’t have to worry, as it turned out. It wasn’t that kind of ‘taking care’ that he had in mind.

  ‘Listen, Cally,’ he said. ‘I know this guy in the Cross, he’s a friend of my brother’s. He’s an expert with herbs and plants that cure you of all kinds of things. He’s at the cutting edge of this stuff. I’ll talk to him and see if he can give you something to make your period come on. He helped one of my brother’s girlfriends once.’

  I looked up at him. ‘Really?’ I said. I thought of my mother with her onion juice.

  He nodded. ‘We could go, say, Tuesday night? Monday night I’ve got swimming training.’

  I beamed at him, showing that I understood.