Borrowed Light

by Anna Fienberg

  ‘Not about that. Other things, they do. There’s actually a lot of science and experimentation in naturopathy. Dad’s quite interested in that. Mum is always reading articles about new treatments—a different use of a herb, maybe, for some ailment, and she’ll sit there on the sofa, reading little bits out to him. He always wants to hear more, but she gets immersed in the thing, and goes quiet. ‘Read it yourself when I’m finished,’ she says. Dad gets annoyed about that because later, when she’s folded it all up, he can never find the right bit. Like last night, she found something about giving up smoking—’

  ‘Your father smokes? I didn’t know that!’

  ‘Yeah, he hides it well. Mum’s always going on at him about it. If he smokes in the house, she walks around with a handkerchief tied over her nose like a bandit. She looks sort of dangerous, like she’s going to rob a bank or something just as soon as she’s finished cooking the steak.’

  I laughed. ‘But I bet he admires her just the same.’

  ‘I guess so—he says she’s very talented.’ Richard gave a snort then. ‘But he still complains about dinner being late, and the way she sits up reading instead of coming to bed.’

  ‘Typical moon behaviour. You whinge and salivate at the same time.’

  Richard grinned. Behind us we heard the clear high notes of Jeremy’s voice, trickling into the night air. Richard took my hand. ‘We’ll have to go soon. Can I see you again?’

  I nodded, my hands warm and folded in his.

  ‘I like the way you think,’ he whispered. ‘You bring everything to life.’

  Mr West was calling Jeremy now. Any moment they would discover us here, clasped together on the park bench. ‘But I have my own classification system, you know,’ Richard hurried on. ‘It’s a game really—hide and seek. There are those who hide and those who seek. I think you hide behind science. Do you?’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it like that,’ I echoed, gaining time. ‘Maybe it’s the only way I know to show myself.’

  There, that was a paradox worthy of Grandma.

  Richard smiled in the dark. ‘Well, that’s okay, I know my way around your universe. I’ll find you sooner or later.’

  Find me after Thursday, I pleaded under my breath. Find me then and I’ll be pure and yours and uninhabited. The undertow will be gone. No more secrets.

  We heard the flat thud behind us of boots running on grass.

  ‘Cally, I feel sick.’

  Jeremy loomed over the back of our seat.

  ‘I told him not to eat that last battalion of frogs,’ said Mr West, striding up after him. ‘But would he listen to me?’

  Jeremy came and sat on my lap.

  ‘Geez, you must be feeling bad,’ I said into his hair, giving him a cuddle. He curled up like a sleepy puppy on my knees. There was a loud burp and a sickly sweet odour wafted up to my nostrils.

  ‘I’m going to do a technicolour vomit,’ murmured Jeremy.

  ‘Right now?’

  Mr West was looking at us on the bench. ‘Well, Richo, I’ll meet you out the front. Callisto, it was great to see you here. Don’t be such a stranger now, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’ I smiled up at him.

  ‘Look out for dem frogs, boy,’ he grinned at Jeremy.

  We watched him stroll off into the dark. Jeremy leant his head back, into my neck.

  ‘You’re under May in the phone book?’ asked Richard.

  ‘Yes, D. May.’

  ‘Good.’ He began to stand up, but then, as if snagged by a thought, he sat down again. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘about the universe thing. You know, the Big Bang.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I was going to keep my lips closed this time.

  ‘Well, you reckon the Big Bang wrecks intimacy, right? But you didn’t deal with the rest of the theory. The most important part. I mean, after the explosion, all those bits flew away, sure—but don’t forget that once they were separate, atoms could form, and life could begin.’ Richard looked down at his hands. ‘That was the only way molecules and galaxies and living creatures could exist. They had to be separate to have an identity, to have a life.’

  ‘Explosion? What explosion?’ Jeremy sat bolt upright on my lap. His nose slammed into my chin. ‘Is it a meteor?’

  ‘No, Jeremy, we’re only talking. Go back to dreamland.’

  ‘I’m not tired,’ Jeremy warned. ‘I’m just thinking here.’

  Richard went on. ‘You can’t really live in a burning hot plasma state—not all the time. You can’t evolve that way. You can only really see the other person, only really appreciate them through the gaps between you. Otherwise, if you’re too close, you’re only seeing yourself.’

  Richard ran his fingers along the slats of the seat. His ears were so sleek against his head, like twin question marks, meticulously traced.

  ‘You can reach out across the gaps, you know. That’s what they’re there for.’

  Jeremy clambered off my lap. ‘Let’s go home now.’ He started walking off towards the front gate.

  ‘Jeremy, wait!’ I called.

  Richard took my hand and pulled me up. Our faces were so near, our lips brushed together. ‘See,’ whispered Richard, ‘you’re so close you’re out of focus. You’re just a blur.’

  He kissed my lips lightly. ‘But I like you blurred,’ he murmured into my neck. His lips were like feathers on my skin. I felt my nipples tingle. I wanted him to go on kissing me. An ache started in the pit of my belly, a sort of emptiness. My legs wanted to twine around his.

  ‘Cally, come here!’

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said, not moving.

  ON THE FERRY, Jeremy and I sat outside at the front. I explained that the fumes at the back would surely make him vomit. ‘The ancient Romans used to guts themselves like you,’ I told him. ‘Then they’d deliberately make themselves sick so that they could start all over again.’

  ‘That’s really naughty,’ said Jeremy. ‘I bet they got into trouble from their mums when they got home.’

  ‘Their mums probably gutsed themselves too.’

  Jeremy was quiet for a while, contemplating the enormity of those mothers.

  I leant over the rail and watched the water disappearing beneath us. As I moved my legs I felt the dampness between them. I smiled to myself—I couldn’t help it. It felt so good, sort of slippery and easy, and soft. I imagined Richard’s fingers dipping into the wetness. There’d be a sucking sound, like when you pull little sea animals squelching from the rocks. It was hard to believe. I didn’t believe myself.

  I know what you’re going to say—‘How could you feel like this, when only a week ago you were lying there on the floor with Tim? You’ve only just met this boy. And moreover, think of the state you’re in. You’re a girl with absolutely no moral values at all.’

  Well, I only know that Richard makes the pit of my stomach drop. He is made of the same molecules as me. He can talk about the necessity of gaps, but I feel like we’ve got the same skin, the same blood. I want to crawl in there with him, under our skins, where there’s atmosphere and electricity and great rushing storms of desire. I want to get buffeted around a bit in the weather, if it’s all the same to you.

  I’ve never felt like this before.

  I’VE NEVER FELT like this before, if you really want to know. It’s like a fairy tale, where the prince only has to bend down and kiss the lifeless princess, and she awakes. He has to be the right prince, of course, with the right amount of electricity. Otherwise it won’t work.

  It’s not very modern, is it, to compare life with fairy tales. ‘Life is no fairy tale,’ says Miranda Blair, with that sneer that could just about kill a Year 7.

  Well, all I can say is that some kisses are redeeming. They can save you. They save you from the vast blank lake of deadness.

  I came up to the surface, gasping for air. There was a point in breathing. I bet Sleeping Beauty felt like this. Only don’t tell Miranda Blair I said so.

  As soon as I opened my eyes on Sunday,
I thought of Richard sitting on the park bench. I went over every word he’d said, and then every word I’d said. I remembered how he’d moved his hands when he spoke, the urgency in his tone at the end, his hopeful version of the Big Bang theory. I remembered the smile in his voice.

  You could tell anything to a voice like that. Well, almost anything. When I’d first heard it, I’d thought Richard was much older. You’d have to be over twenty-five at least, I thought, to sound so assured. When we were talking later, on the park bench, his voice was like a river flowing round my words, inviting me in. That voice, with its soft vowels and welcoming smile, would never harden to build walls against me, or set like concrete.

  I got up and put on my white silk dressing gown. It was a bit crushed, because it had been lying stashed in the bottom cupboard under the winter jumpers. I never wear it usually, because I feel silly. Like some sort of pretend princess. Plus it looks better with cleavage.

  I padded out to the kitchen. Early-morning sun streamed from the kitchen window. It made little stars of light on the white kettle. My gown was so dazzling I had to squinch up my eyes to fill the kettle. I hummed along as it warmed.

  The stainless steel bench gleamed beneath, wiped clean of yesterday’s traces.

  When the kettle had boiled, I took my tea to the kitchen table. I ran my fingers over the wood. It glowed in the melt of marmalade sunshine. Under my hand, the wood was so warm I could almost imagine a pulse throbbing there.

  I sipped my tea. I felt it trickle all the way down, along my tongue, into my throat, warming my stomach. In that moment I could have drawn a circle around myself, and never stepped outside. I was happy there, bewitched by sunlight, hot tea, and the warmth of wood.

  AN INDIAN MYNAH bird streaked past the sun, across the kitchen window. I watched feather shadows sweep the table.

  I sat with this sense of hope—nothing solid or definite, mind you, like a plan for the day or a list of things to do. It was just a feeling of possibility, like a heat mirage shimmering in the desert.

  Jeremy woke up and I poured him an orange juice.

  ‘What’ll we do today?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said breezily. ‘Anything could happen.’

  I put milk and cornflakes out on the table. Jeremy fetched the bowls. They were a rich cream colour, with a thin blue line like a vein traced around the top. Dad had brought a set of six back from Africa.

  ‘Don’t they look beautiful on the dark wood?’ I said, tapping my bowl where it sparkled.

  Jeremy peered at me suspiciously from under his hair. ‘You’re up early,’ he said.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’

  Jeremy nodded. ‘I had terrible dreams. I didn’t sleep for about sixteen hundred hours.’

  ‘Must have been all those “conservatives” in the frogs,’ I smiled at him. ‘Did you see them in your dreams, little green creatures marching around in suits?’

  Jeremy was scraping the sugar off his cornflakes. It was a laborious task. ‘I didn’t want any more sugar, Cally. My stomach still feels kind of funny. Why did you put sugar on them?’

  His voice was whingey. He pushed away his bowl and put his head on the table. He slumped there like a jellyfish, his eyes closed.

  I got up quietly and rinsed the bowls in the sink. I glanced at the telephone. No one in the civilised world would ring yet, I supposed, unless they were under the age of eight. Even so, when I’d wiped my hands I picked up the receiver, just to check the dial tone. Sometimes Jeremy left the phone off the hook in the other room.

  I stared at the telephone. It was white, with greasy finger prints on the dial panel. But it suddenly had such a weighty significance. In comic books, phones appear with frantic lines waving around them. Their ringing is deafening on the page. Often there is a girl waiting beside it, with long blonde hair and ten-out-of-ten bosoms.

  I put the receiver back and wiped down the sink.

  I noticed I was holding my breath. This phone thing—the possibility that it might ring—gave everything another dimension, like slipping on those special glasses in a 3D cinema. It’s as if we were all waiting—me, sleepy Jeremy, the particles of air, the dust motes suspended in that shaft of sunshine. We were all charged, transformed, holding our breaths. There was someone behind the curtain, watching us, maybe waiting too, fiddling around until nine o’clock when he’d suddenly dial our number and blare onto the stage, making the entrance of a main character.

  Jeremy dragged himself up from the table. ‘I might ring Sam,’ he said tentatively. ‘We could get on with the digging.’

  I found the number for him, and helped him dial. ‘Don’t be too long,’ I said.

  I went into the bedroom to get dressed.

  All morning, Richard bobbed around in my mind. I carried him carefully, like a valuable package. I saw his quick pointed face, turning toward me on the seat. There was the neatness of his hairline against the pale forehead, as if someone had painted it on. The mystery of the shadows under his eyes. The nape of his neck. I dusted the bookshelves in my room. I picked up pairs of dirty underpants and twice-worn T-shirts and threw them in the washing machine. I vacuumed under my bed. Everything I did had a bounce to it, a breathy hum, as if each action were a star note in a new song.

  I ran the duster over Ganesha. He gleamed and grinned at me. Maybe he had brought me Richard. Or maybe the planets had all lined up in the right order. Or maybe Mum threw salt in the direction of love last night. I don’t know. But certainly the thought of Richard was enough to dull the other thoughts. The nasty ones.

  The thought of Richard brought the world back into focus. It’s as if it had been waiting outside all this time, leaning on the door, and now it was tumbling in, with all its colours and smells and textures.

  I looked at the row of perfumes on my dressing table. Dad often brought back a duty-free bottle from his flights. Mum gave me hers. The bottles were coated with dust. I picked up ‘Donna’ and dabbed it under my ears. I closed my eyes. I smelled expensive women with pearly teeth and plunging necklines. Sleeping Beauty would smell like that when the prince bent to kiss her.

  You can’t help thinking about fairy tales or gods or magic, when you’ve been kissed like that. Even if you want to be scientific like Grandma, and explain it with pheromones or the mating instincts of baboons or something, nothing accounts for the bolt of electricity in your belly and the branch of lightning that shoots up your veins. You suddenly know what you’re for. And the lightning only happens with that person, doesn’t it, in that time and place. (I knew that forever after, amen, Observatories around the world would make me pant.) Imagine if I’d never gone to that place, if it had rained that night or Jeremy had lost interest or there’d been an earthquake. I never would have met him. It is luck, isn’t it? Think of all the words there are for the miracle of that meeting—destiny, fate, magic, enchantment. It has the timing of fairy tales. The inexplicable feelings that change endings and cancel out evil.

  I only wished I could have moved the whole thing backwards, or forwards. I wished I had met Richard months ago, or months in the future. Not smack bang in the middle of the greatest disaster of my life.

  When the phone rang, I was on the toilet. Can you believe it? Jeremy answered it, and I heard him say, ‘I’m not doing anything today, I don’t know about Cally. No, she can’t come to the phone—’

  ‘Jeremy!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.’

  ‘Okay. Richard? Cally said she’ll be there in a minute. She must only be doing wee. What are you doing today?’

  When I got to the phone I snatched the receiver and gave Jeremy a good pinch on the arm.

  ‘Oww!’ he yelled. ‘Oww oww, Cally pinched me! That hurts, you scumbuggit. I’ll get you for this, you stink-butt wee-head! I hate you!’

  He was wailing and shouting so loudly that I couldn’t hear anything, even though the receiver was pressed tightly to my ear. The noise must have woken
Mum, because she came rushing out into the kitchen in her chilly nightie. She was still removing slices of cucumber from her lids. Cucumber is good for cleansing tired skin. You put it on just before bed.

  ‘I’m going to pick up the phone in my room, Mum—will you put this one down?’

  She nodded over Jeremy’s head. He pressed his nose into her tummy, flinging his arms around her bottom like a drowning man. He was such a drama queen. He had cucumber in his hair.

  I dashed out of the kitchen.

  HOPE IS BUBBLY and oxygenated and energising. It’s like carbonated water in sunshine. It sparkles in a glass on a table that overlooks a valley of blue water, dotted with boats. You can hear the masts tinkling together in the wind.

  That’s where I wanted to go on Sunday.

  But harbourside cafes are expensive. Neither of us had much money. And anyway, I only wanted the sparkling water as a backdrop for our celebration.

  ‘Why don’t we go to the beach?’ Richard’s voice on the phone was a little deeper. ‘It’s a beautiful day.’

  Collapsed bikini tops loomed. I feel so much more comfortable with my clothes on—I wish I didn’t, but there it is. There’s a lot to be said for preserving illusions.

  ‘It might be a bit cold to swim now,’ I said cautiously.

  ‘Yes, you might be right. But we can go for a walk round the rocks, and up onto the cliff.’

  We arranged to meet at eleven.

  I had a shower and worried about what to wear. In my room I decided on jeans and a nice silky blue shirt I’d had for years. I’d put my costume and towel in my bag and hope I wouldn’t need it.

  Mum and Jeremy were still in the kitchen. Mum was making coffee and Jeremy was doing something with his magnet set on the floor.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he scowled, seeing my bag.

  ‘To the beach, with Richard.’

  ‘Oh, can I come?’

  ‘Who’s Richard?’

  ‘He’s a boy I met at the Observatory. It’s all right, Mum, he’s not a bank robber or anything, I know his father. He’s a teacher at my school. Mr West.’