Borrowed Light

by Anna Fienberg

  ‘We could go out to dinner afterwards, Gal. I know this nice little place in Kellet Street. We could go there, just the two of us, after the cure.’

  I told him that sounded lovely.

  I went and rescued my glass from the wooden table, and someone filled it up for me. I took a swig. It was sickly sweet—marsala. I could see it lying in my stomach, a red band of liquid on top of the green ginger. It would be like that oil and water experiment I did with Jeremy. The two substances never mixed, no matter how much he shook the test tube. I felt the two wines staring at each other in a hostile manner in my intestine. One of them tried to climb back up my throat.

  We didn’t stay at the party much longer, because Tim wanted us to go back to his place. I didn’t like to say no. My head was spinning as we walked into his room. I told Tim about my head and he spread Saturday’s newspaper out on the floor in case I was sick. We lay down and I don’t remember much until the last part. I turned over and threw up all over the Leunig cartoon on the back page. We both sat up in horror. I must have drunk quite a bit of marsala because the vomit was a stunning colour, quite scarlet and swirly. It lay in bands across the headings on the newspaper, like the Great Red Spot around Jupiter. We watched the red spread and stain the paper, seeping onto the polished timber floors, and out into the universe.

  Tim jumped up and ran to fetch a rag. I just sat there, leaning against the bed. I felt almost satisfied, watching my Great Red Spot. I don’t know why.

  Tuesday, 27 January

  Callisto started high school today. Nearly twelve years old. She’s growing up so fast. Poor Cally, she was nervous this morning. She talks non-stop when she’s anxious. ‘My uniform is too long, Mum,’ she wailed. ‘Everyone will think I’m a nerd. First impressions are really important.’ And she embarked on a long diatribe, following me into the bathroom.

  ‘Take the case of ducks and imprinting,’ she said to me in the mirror. A duckling stumbles out of his egg and thinks the first animal he sees is his mother. He’ll go on all his life expecting some green tree frog to teach him to dive. It’s tragic, and now all those Meadow High kids will form the impression that I’m a dork, no matter what I wear tomorrow.’

  To cheer her up, I told her she’s so good at arguing, she should become a lawyer. She said she couldn’t convince me to take up a lousy hem, so how could she persuade a jury? She folded her arms then in a gloomy fashion and went into her cone of silence. I wished I had taken up the hem last night. I meant to, but Naomi rang up in a dreadful state. Lost her job!

  I wish, too, that she wouldn’t worry so much about appearances. She’s always puzzling over what other people think of her. It makes her so vulnerable. I want to grab the people she likes and put a spell on them so they all rush to be her friend. Find a love potion.

  I used to be just like her. My mother laughed at me about it. She thought it was idiotic to worry about other people’s opinions. I never let her know how much time I spent in front of the mirror.

  At forty the state of your face is the least of your worries.

  In the car, on the way to school, Cally fiddled with the catch on her bag. Open close, open close, snap, snap, snap. She was holding her breath while she fiddled, and letting it out in great gusty sighs. Snap, sigh. So irritating. But I was sick with anxiety for her. I know what it’s like. All those new faces, kids making mysterious instant decisions about you. ‘I’ve got a purple bag and so have you, let’s be twins.’

  Cally never had the right bag when she was little. Now I think she has, because she’s done the research. She takes it very seriously, this watching of other kids. Notes what they’re wearing, and the words they use. She does a far better job of camouflage than I ever did.

  I never had many friends at high school. Kids didn’t come to our house much, because my mother was always working. She had to—how different would my life have been, if Dad had lived longer? Mother says he could put a smile on anyone’s face. He told long, complicated jokes, more like stories, really, and he never forgot the punchline. He was like a good long drink after a tiring day, my mother said.

  When Cally was in kindergarten, I used to wait for her in the afternoons with the other mothers under the big oak tree in the playground. I’d listen to them talk about what they put in the children’s lunches, what toys they bought them for birthdays, which friends they were having over to play. It made me so depressed. They were Professional Mothers. They knew what special packets of crisps children liked, where to get those biscuits shaped like teddies, how to pack the drink bottle in the lunch to keep it cold. They seem like small details, but there were so many of them, and I didn’t know how they learnt them all and remembered them. Cally would run out to meet me but I could barely smile at her. I used to wonder if she would rather go home with Sharon or Melanie. I wondered if she pretended that their mothers were hers.

  Sometimes I wished they were, too. Then I wouldn’t have to worry like this, all day, every day. And I’d know someone was looking after her better than I could.

  It’s hard to believe my baby Cally is almost a teenager! I never thought she’d get there, that I’d be able to do it. Every day is such a mountain to climb. In the early dawn, that wattlebird wakes me up. It has a squawk like a scream. My heart sinks. I think of all the things I have to do by eight o’clock. Lunches, clean clothes, library books, polished shoes. I remember I forgot to buy the bread. Maybe there are no sprouts for the sandwiches. I hate myself.

  Today I drove Cally to school. I normally do, unless David is around. Even if he is, he usually leaves for work at sunrise. He misses the traffic that way (and family breakfast disputes). He’s good at avoidance techniques. My husband, the empty space.

  Today we got all the green lights. It made my spirits rise. We seemed to fly through the traffic, with nothing stopping us. I thought that was a good sign for Cally’s first day. I told her that, but she just sniffed.

  Well, it was a good sign. Maybe Cally will blossom in her teens, she’ll go straight ahead like a green light. With any luck she’ll be better than me; she won’t be pulled back by every little snag in the world.

  I’m like a jinx, the way I think everything will go wrong. She’d be better off without me.

  Wednesday

  Naomi rang again tonight—still upset. Perhaps we went too far with the hypnosis. But she did want to explore the notion of double consciousness. There is the possibility of reaching a secondary personality through neuro-hypnotism. When Naomi was in the trance, she said things that were completely out of character. I made some notes about it in the red book, but must put more detail in. There was a lot of anger, and her voice changed—it was rougher, more masculine. I told her that, and she was amazed. Next time, I’ll put the tape recorder on. It’s as if these two personalities, these two halves, have no knowledge of each other. Someone said once that ‘perhaps we are also—preponderantly—what we forget.’

  I can’t forget, that’s my trouble. People so often dismiss that other personality—the one we experience in dreams—but I think it rules our lives. A nightmare will influence your decisions the next day, whether you know it or not.

  David says that’s a lot of rot. But he never remembers his dreams, anyway. The past for him is a confusing landscape he wipes clean with turps each day. He says we have to look toward the future, that every day is a new day, and why do you have to rummage around in the back streets of history when you can be making it?

  We don’t ‘make it’ much any more, anyway.

  My mother would probably agree with David. About history, I mean. She says that there is so much to see out there in the universe—‘It is continually expanding, Caroline, do you realise?—why bother staring at your puny navel all day?’ She says it with that sneer of her nostril.

  I think that is very superficial of her. Even scientific theory supports my argument. When we look up at the night sky and see all those stars and planets shining, we are looking back in time, at the past. It takes all that
time for the light to reach us. Jupiter’s light takes thirty-three minutes to arrive, Ruth, do you realise? If we had no past, we’d have no light. Every crumb of matter and energy holds traces of its history, if only we can learn to read it there.

  My mother spends all her time looking outwards. I suppose I look more inward. But it isn’t puny, the interior world. It is continually expanding, the more you look. Inside each cell there are atoms and inside the atoms are protons and neutrons and they hold traces of your father and the ape you once were, and the talent for music your great-grandfather once had. The more you travel into the past in your mind, the more there is. It’s like a treasury of Russian dolls.

  I just hope tomorrow is a better day for Cally. For me, too.

  I must try to act positive, be encouraging. She must never know how it really is for me.

  I FOUND A HIDDEN stash of these diaries in my mother’s room. They were in a row of shoe boxes she keeps at the bottom of her wardrobe. I felt like telling her she’d be a lot better off if she kept shoes down there, like any other normal person, instead of private weird notes that her daughter can find. But I couldn’t say anything, because I wasn’t supposed to see them.

  Funny, isn’t it, because I remember my first day of high school, too, and I thought we caught every red light. We were late, as usual. Mum had to drive like a madwoman with wings just to get there on time.

  That first year of high school I was put into the top class. I was sure there was some mistake. I sat at my new desk, and studied the letters chiselled into the wood. Whoever made those deep gouges must have used something very sharp, like a penknife, or maybe a dagger. It made me tremble. Even the graffiti was difficult to understand.

  Melanie, Sharon and Morgan weren’t in this class. We’d known each other ever since we were five. In high school they were put into a lower class. They’d be sitting together now, all cosy and giggling at someone else. They’d be well camouflaged. Company gives you that. When I dared to raise my head up from the desk, my heart pounded even faster.

  The kids around me looked sharp as foxes. They were A-class people, with pointy chins and high foreheads. They were buzzing with talk, and they threw insults at each other, back and forth, like bombs. Even their insults were complicated and sharp with geometry. They had algebra stuffed up their sleeves, arithmetic multiplying in their jumpers. I dreaded arithmetic and geometry and algebra. Kids who could do that seemed like another species. They worked in gangs, firing answers to maths puzzles like pistol shots.

  It was terrifying.

  It was like entering a war zone, with no soldiers on your side. And no ammunition.

  The ‘A’ people were carnivores, with their sharp brains and dagger teeth. Melanie, Sharon, Morgan and I had always been herbivores. All through primary school we grazed gently in the valleys of non-competition. We learnt to share, and we let each other win. We said things like ‘It’s only fair’. We knew about the cut-throat world of carnivores. We watched it at a safe distance, shuddering at all that tooth and claw. It was like being cosy and safe in the movies, holding hands in the dark while people did brave, scary things on the screen.

  In Year 7, they threw me into the lion pit. I was so scared, I couldn’t think. In Science, I was frozen. In English, I stuttered. People sniggered. A group of male carnivores made spitballs and chucked them at me. A missile got me in the eye one day, and it scraped my cornea.

  ‘How did that happen?’ my mother asked me.

  ‘Glen Gill threw his biro at me.’

  ‘Did you tell the teacher?’

  I rolled my eyes. It hurt. ‘If you dob, you get into even worse trouble. Leave it alone.’ Mum sat there frowning. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping. She didn’t know what to do. She’s not very good in social situations.

  I sat there squinting. My eye felt as if it had grit in it, a crumb of sand.

  ‘Well,’ Mum said finally, ‘let’s bathe it and apply some drops of comfrey. That’s a herb for quick healing.’

  I jumped up. This was an event I could do something about. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not having comfrey or hocus-pocus or anything else. I’m not going to lose the sight of one eye, just because of some old carnivore called Glen Gill. I’m going to the eye doctor. A proper one with letters after his name.’

  Mum just said ‘Oh all right’. She looked depressed, slumped there on the sofa. I felt sorry for her, as if she was the one with the sore eye going into battle each day. Obviously her daughter wasn’t going ahead in life like a green light. ‘You don’t have to come with me, if you don’t want to,’ I told her. She cheered up for a second, at that.

  While I put on my shoes she dithered about, wringing her hands. She disappeared into her room and returned with her bag, saying she was coming. I know she hates doctors’ waiting rooms. They give her the creeps. She never even reads those interesting pamphlets, for heaven’s sake. So I said, ‘Thanks, Mum,’ and gave her a hug.

  By the time we came home from the doctor’s, I wished I’d taken the comfrey drops instead. He’d put a black patch on me, and said I had to wear it to school tomorrow.

  You can imagine the carnivore reaction to that. There was feasting for days.

  HAVE YOU EVER noticed the wall between adults and kids? It just seems to grow higher when there’s a problem. ‘Don’t worry, it will be all right,’ adults say, when there’s absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever.

  When you’re a little kid and have a nightmare, they tell you that monsters with ten arms and slimy heads don’t exist—it’s okay, go back to sleep. But the picture is still real in your head. You can see its slavering tongue, the bloodshot eyes, the claws red with blood. You look at the adults sitting calmly on your bed, their feet in slippers, their faces sleepy, and you realise that they live in another world from yours. They don’t see the things you see, they don’t have the feelings you have. So how can you trust them? The wall between you both is thin but strong, like a spider web.

  I wanted to go and sleep in their bed. But there was the wall.

  I felt terribly alone the year I turned twelve. My father was very angry when he heard about the biro incident. That was rather nice. He said some rude things about the biro shooter and he stroked my eye patch. He said I made a very handsome pirate. I soaked it up. I wished he were home more often. But when he said he’d go and see Glen Gill’s father, I lost it.

  ‘No, no, no!’ I screeched. ‘That will just make it worse. Don’t you see? He’ll tell everyone that I dobbed. Everyone will know I’m spineless as a slug. They’ll just gobble me up and spit nothing out!’

  ‘Oh Callisto, you’re gabbling!’ my father yelled back. ‘Take a deep breath and count to ten.’

  ‘I hate arithmetic!’ I screamed hysterically.

  ‘This place is a madhouse!’ my father concluded, and looked sharply at my mother.

  ‘What’s that look for?’ she retorted, instantly flaring up. ‘My fault, is it? My fault Cally got shot in the eye and is upset? What should we all be, robots like you?’

  Mum and Dad got into combat zone then, so I retreated. Funny how often that happens.

  Looking back, I don’t know what Mum or Dad could have done, really. On account of the wall. Dad suggested I get a maths coach. It would make me feel more secure. So a teenage girl came to our house every Thursday afternoon. Her name was Valerie. She was kind and explained everything in a soft white voice like feathers. She politely ignored the sighing and murmuring of the meditation class in the next room. But I couldn’t hear anything over the roaring of my heart.

  My heart told me to go to the Principal and ask to be put back into the lower class. I made an appointment for after school. I packed sunglasses and a long coat in my bag so I could go in disguise. But in the end I came up with the cunning idea of saying I was in trouble. ‘They caught me putting firecrackers in the garbage bins,’ I told the others. ‘So I’ve got detention with the head. Maybe I’ll be suspended.’ That earned me some points with th
e carnivores and got me there safely as well.

  The Principal was a short man with bandy legs. You couldn’t really tell about the legs while he was in long pants—there was just the suspicion, until the swimming carnival. He turned up in a safari suit, with shorts. When he stood up straight, cheering on the team, the space between his hairy legs made a kind of elongated ‘0’. You could see the grassy bank through the space. The bandy legs made me feel closer to him, as if he were really a little child who hadn’t grown up. He pretended all day that he was a big man doing a big job, but you only had to glance down at his legs and you could see how he’d waddled along when he was two.

  I deliberately thought about his legs when he showed me into his office and gestured grandly to the leather chair. He sat behind his desk and shuffled some papers into a pile. ‘Well, well,’ he said, clearing his throat. He had to look down at his papers to check the name. ‘Callisto. What can I do for you?’

  I told him I had a hole in my heart. My medical condition gave me palpitations and arrhythmia. I was known to pass out if I became stressed. ‘I happen to be very stressed at the moment because I’m in the wrong class,’ I said. ‘There was some kind of administrative mix-up.’ (I didn’t tell him that all the animals in my class eat meat, and you can’t put a sheep in with the wolves. I just kept to the medical facts.)

  He fiddled with his tie and shuffled some more papers. He raised an eyebrow. I just kept on talking. I was very nervous. But I was fighting for my life. It was almost exhilarating, being in the battle. I told him I could give him a medical certificate if he needed it. I’d forge it, if necessary, I thought desperately.

  When I got up to leave, he still hadn’t said if he’d put me back in the right class. ‘Just one class lower, if you don’t mind,’ I repeated. ‘Where the stress isn’t so great.’ He cleared his throat and shook his head and nodded. What can you make of that?

  But the next day I was put into the lower class. It was official. I breathed a sigh of relief, and my palpitations stopped. At least, for half an hour.