Borrowed Light

by Anna Fienberg

  Nothing else seemed able to.

  ‘I’m coming over,’ said Grandma.

  ‘Okay.’

  Grandma. I suddenly felt lighter, like a weightlifter who gives up his dumbbells to the next man.

  WHEN I HEARD HER knock, I unlocked my bedroom door. Voices drifted down the hallway. Up and down the scale they went, duelling scores riding over each other.

  ‘Don’t be so pathetic, David. It’s no use trying to hide it.’ It was Mum. Her voice was so shrill. ‘This is my mother you’re talking to, not some client you’re trying to impress.’

  I winced. Mum was going to tell her. About me. It was coming any minute. I hid behind the door. Their voices were low now, rumbling, like something boiling in a pot. I could feel the tension building up. Waiting was like holding your breath under water. When I was little and we played hide and seek, I always ran out too soon. I found waiting unbearable—I’d do anything to avoid that moment of discovery, so loud in the mothball dark of the wardrobe.

  ‘Grandma!’ I called.

  ‘Callisto!’

  She was hurrying down the hall, her grey hair frizzing around her like a springy cloud. I swung the door open. She stopped short suddenly. ‘You should be in bed. Do you have much pain? What have you taken for it?’

  I would have preferred a hug. Maybe she didn’t want to touch me now. I was all ready to put my head on her chest. She was so sturdy, my Grandma, she was like a fig tree with her solid trunk and ample arms. But she kept them folded. ‘Grandma doesn’t do hugs,’ Jeremy said once, ‘she does instructions.’ Why are people so much better when you make them up?

  ‘Something with codeine phosphate would be best. I’ll see if Caroline has any in the bathroom. Now, tell me the name and address of the clinic, and then pop into your pyjamas. We’re going to take care of things here.’

  I sat down on the bed. My head felt blurry.

  I heard her charging off into the living room. The voices started again. My stomach ached. I lay down for a moment. But I thought I heard Jeremy crying in the dark.

  I crept down the hallway.

  Grandma was picking up the phone in the kitchen.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Mum said sharply.

  ‘I’m calling the police,’ Grandma replied. ‘I gather no one has done that yet?’

  ‘Oh that’s right—call in the experts,’ Mum hissed, ‘they’ll know exactly where he is. As if they haven’t got a list a mile long of missing persons. We’ll waste half the night giving information and they’ll say, “Thank you very much” and go off duty. Why don’t we just get in the car and go ourselves?’

  There was silence for a moment and then Grandma said, ‘I don’t think you are in a fit state to drive, Caroline.’

  ‘I agree,’ put in Dad.

  ‘Now, dear, what was Jeremy wearing this afternoon? Did he have his yellow raincoat on? We’ll have to explain all this to the police.’

  ‘She doesn’t know, because she wasn’t there.’ Dad gave a jeering sort of snort. Grandma was hunting for a pen. She found one of Jeremy’s Batman biros. Dad was whispering something to Mum. I leant closer to hear. I saw him gently take her chin in his hand. He was looking into her eyes. ‘I blame you,’ he said softly. ‘I blame you for Jeremy.’

  Mum sank down onto the kitchen stool. She put her head on her knees, as if she wanted to fold herself up until she disappeared.

  ‘Come on, dear, now is the time to be strong,’ Grandma said. ‘Was he wearing his school uniform?’ She had her pen poised.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child,’ whispered Mum.

  ‘Oh Caroline, we don’t know that he’s lost,’ said Grandma. ‘He might be sitting at a police station eating icecream. But that’s why we’ve got to ring them. Now let’s get organised.’

  Mum’s face was twitching. It looked so naked, with all that weather passing across it. I almost couldn’t watch. ‘You never said, you never acknowledged it,’ Mum went on. ‘You never said, “This is the worst thing to happen in a person’s life.” All you people walking around, pretending it didn’t happen. You talked about other things, like mowing the lawn or the shoe sale at David Jones. It was like not burying him. You just told me to be strong.’

  ‘What?’ cried Dad. ‘You’re living in the past. Don’t put your mother through this again, Caroline. We’re dealing with Jeremy now. Pull yourself together, for his sake!’

  Mum leapt up. ‘You,’ she spat, ‘when have you ever been here for anybody’s sake? Gany died, your wife lost six kilos in a week and you got on a plane and flew away. Well, I blame you, David May. I blame you.’

  ‘Gany?’

  They all turned around as I came into the kitchen. ‘Who was Gany?’

  ‘He was your brother. He died when he was three months old. He was my first child.’

  ‘Caroline—shut up!’

  ‘Why did he die?’

  ‘No one knows. The so-called experts couldn’t make a diagnosis. “It happens sometimes,” they said. “We’re sorry for your loss.” But I always knew he wasn’t happy. He didn’t ever really bloom—’

  ‘Oh nonsense, Caroline,’ said Dad. ‘He was a perfectly normal baby. There was nothing anyone could do. Callisto, go back to your room now please. Now!’

  ‘You said I shouldn’t tell the children. You said they’d grow up with a handicap if I did. But how could I forget? How could I forget?’

  Mum looked so small on the kitchen stool. All the parts of her body were touching each other. Her face was in her hands, her elbows digging into her knees. She looked shrunken. Sorrow like that would make anyone shrink.

  It’d make you want to die. Take me, Mum must have said, take me first. But they didn’t.

  I took a step toward her. Look at her poor broken face.

  ‘Callisto!’ said Dad. ‘Go back to your room now!’

  Grandma came over and took my hand. ‘The panadeine is in the bathroom. Let’s get a capsule on the way.’

  Look at her tears dripping through her fingers. I didn’t know what to do. How would I know what to do?

  I shook off Grandma’s hand. ‘I’ll get it myself.’

  FROM MY ROOM I heard Grandma talking on the phone to the police. ‘Dark brown eyes, dark hair, he was wearing a Batman outfit.’

  ‘No, that was underneath,’ I called out. ‘He had Robin on top. Robin’s red.’

  ‘And he had a little wart on his thumb,’ she added.

  I heard her voice break. I didn’t know she’d seen that. Jeremy said Poison Ivy had kissed him there.

  Grandma was silent for ages. I bet they asked her to hold on. They probably put that muzak stuff on for her to listen to. There’s nothing more irrelevant in life than muzak, is there? It’s just a waste of sound waves. Especially in a crisis.

  I thought of the stolen children cutting Mum had put up on the fridge. I’d read it, but it didn’t touch me. I hadn’t let it. ‘Most parents know what it’s like to lose a child for five minutes—last seen at the school gate,’ the journalist had written. ‘Where is she? they ask themselves. Who has her? What is he doing to her? … Imagine that feeling protracted—over a week, then a year, then a decade …’

  I got up and went into Jeremy’s room. I prowled around.

  I picked through his toy crate. Old Jem, he was such a hoarder. There were his old rattles and chewing ring. Where could he have gone? I punched his teddy in the arm. I wished teddies could speak. This one must know all Jeremy’s secrets. He told it everything. As I walked out I picked up an old gym shoe lying in the doorway. The black paint had flaked off everywhere and made a little pile of dark crusts on the carpet, like the remains of something burnt. Jeremy had wanted black shoes, to be like Sam Underwood.

  I leant against the wall for a moment. Sam Underwear. I closed my eyes. I hadn’t bought the cake as I’d promised. I hadn’t bought juice. Sam didn’t come and admire Jeremy’s bunker.

  I threw down the shoe. Little bits of black paint flew off. And
dirt.

  It was the dirt that gave me the idea. My head practically lit up, like those characters in comic books with light bulbs in their brains. I found Jeremy’s Playschool torch and ran through the hallway, toward the front door. No one saw me. They were huddled down there in the lounge room like enemies at a conference.

  The lawn was slushy with rain. I crouched down as I passed the living-room windows. Mum was sitting by herself on the couch. I ran along the side of the house. The cold seeped into my socks. When I got to the steps leading down to the back, I slowed down. The steps had always been cracked and broken, and I’d slipped more than once. But when I shone the torch I saw the old stones had been replaced with bricks. The first step was perfect. The others needed finishing. I smiled. Someone must have been working on it.

  Scattered around the brick pylons under the house were old cardboard boxes and pipes and scores of sweet wrappers. The wrappers glowed brightly likes jewels in the dirt. So much dirt. Loose earth was sprayed all around, covering the carpet of leaves. I spotted a small mountain of mud further up—directly under the kitchen.

  I crawled along on my knees. In the torchlight, near the pile of mud, there was a shovel. It was near an old door lying flat in the dirt. I recognised the door—it was the one from my room. The only thing Dad had changed when we’d moved into the house. The wood was all splintered. It was a flimsy thing. I remember, because Dad had to go away a few days after that and he’d left me with no door. I couldn’t play my radio loud or read in torchlight or anything without someone coming to yell at me.

  I threw the shovel away near some boxes. Then I tried to lift the door. It slid a few inches across the dirt. My stomach clenched. In the gap, I saw the ground slope away sharply. I dragged at the door and it came away from the hole.

  In the circle of torchlight, curled up in his bunker, lay Jeremy. It was Jeremy, my Jeremy. His cheeks were smudged with dirt. Spidery tracks of tears made webs in the black. He was shivering as he slept. He looked like one of Mum’s pictures on the fridge. He sucked the thumb that Poison Ivy had kissed.

  I LAY ON THE ground next to him. I put my head into his tummy. He slept on. I tried to cry softly. I wanted to laugh too and celebrate and do a sailor’s hornpipe but only the tears would come. I smelled the wet fishy smell of his nylon. My forehead moved in and out with his breath. I could feel blood leaking out onto my pyjama leg. It made a rust stain on Jeremy’s knee. I breathed through my mouth into Jeremy’s stomach, sucking in tears. Words and pictures and thoughts and dreams, everything swam into everything else as I cried for my little fish and the fish I once was. I cried for my dead baby brother who was called Gany and I cried for Jeremy who had been digging his own grave.

  DAD CARRIED JEREMY inside. All the way, as he stumbled over the half-finished steps, swearing at the stones, he prodded him for details. Jeremy was hardly awake. How did he pay for a taxi and why did he stay outside worrying us all to death and if no one was home why didn’t he go to a neighbour’s?

  I told Dad that he should have fixed those steps years ago and then he wouldn’t be stubbing his toe on them in those silly airline slippers. He told me to shut up and that I sounded just like my mother. ‘And anyway, you should be in your room.’

  ‘You’ve been telling me that since I was three,’ I mumbled. ‘Why don’t you try something else?’ But he wasn’t listening.

  ‘Jeremy!’ cried Mum as we came into the house. She pulled at his shoulders. She grabbed him under the arms. Dad didn’t want to let him go. They carried him together over to the sofa. He lay with his head on Mum’s lap, his feet on Dad’s knees.

  ‘I gave Grandma’s lira to the taxi man,’ Jeremy murmured into Mum’s skirt. ‘He seemed pleased.’

  Grandma choked. ‘I bet he was. He could have made fifty trips with that money.’ But her eyes were sparkling with tears. She bent over him, stroking his forehead. I was looking at everyone in amazement. I had never seen so much feeling in this house. It was like high tide sloshing against the walls. Everyone looked different.

  Mum wiped the dirt off Jeremy’s cheeks.

  ‘I’m cold,’ said Jeremy. ‘It was so dark.’

  Mum wrapped the TV rug around him. She held his head close to her chest. He snuggled in, put his thumb in his mouth and went back to sleep.

  Grandma came over to me and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Shouldn’t you be sitting down?’

  Mum looked up at me then. ‘I don’t know how you could do a thing like that, Cally,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just don’t know how you could do it.’

  My legs began to tremble. I felt my head go light with rage. It was as light as a cloud, it was going to float off my shoulders.

  ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, Mum.’

  I was staring at her as if I could kill her.

  She held out her hand. ‘No, I mean, why didn’t you tell me? Let me help you? How could you do this thing all alone?’

  ‘Why didn’t you ever tell me about you?’

  Dad got up, sliding Jeremy’s feet onto the sofa. ‘Callisto, you should be in bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. I’m only going to say now that I am very disappointed in you. More than words can say.’ He sounded like he was delivering a sentence.

  I felt the tears starting again. He looked away from me as if I were something disgusting that would contaminate him. I wished I had a coat to put over my head.

  He turned to Mum. ‘I’m just going to change out of these wet clothes.’

  ‘Oh no you’re not,’ said Mum. ‘Don’t you go sneaking out now like you always do.’

  ‘I can’t talk to you when you’re in this state.’

  ‘No, you might have an emotion, it’s a frightening thought. You always go and make tea in the love scenes on TV, don’t you?’

  Grandma stood up. ‘Caroline, you’re tired. Overwrought. It might be best to talk about all this in the morning.’

  ‘Or maybe never at all. Let’s shove it under the carpet, shall we, like we do everything else.’

  I stood up. Dad glanced at me and his eyes quickly moved away. ‘Your pyjamas are filthy, Callisto,’ he said. Tow at least had better go and change.’

  There was an awful silence while everyone turned to stare at me. I saw their eyes travel down my pyjamas, to where the blood was spreading into a map of Europe. I wished I could fall into one of Jeremy’s craters. I wished a meteor would fall on us right now in this living room and no one would ever say another word.

  But I couldn’t bear the silence.

  ‘I’m disgusting, aren’t I?’ I burst out. ‘Well, don’t look at me, then. Pretend you only have a son. Pretend I never existed. I wish I bloody didn’t, I wish all my blood would leak away until I was dead!’

  Dad said nothing. His left eye was twitching.

  ‘Oh Cally,’ said Mum. She held out her hands to me. She had that look—the deep frown, the head to one side, the lips slightly parted. I didn’t trust her.

  ‘You’re looking at me like I’m a sad lady,’ I said. I was crying again. I didn’t know any more when the tears stopped or started. My head was like a tap with a faulty washer. The tears kept leaking out from some ocean inside.

  ‘You are a sad lady tonight,’ said Mum softly.

  ‘What, now you’re going to let me join your club? Why do I have to be sad for you to look at me? I don’t want to be like you!’

  Mum shook her head. ‘I don’t know, just give me a hug. Please!’

  ‘You haven’t looked at me for years.’

  ‘Come here.’

  I saw the softness in her face, the shine of her hair, Jeremy’s head pressed against the pillow of her breast. She was my mother. I didn’t know her. I hadn’t known the first thing about her.

  ‘Why didn’t you help me?’ I felt like slapping those open hands. I wanted to rake my fingernails down those smooth arms. I wanted to be enfolded in them too, like a hand in a glove. My head was floating again. ‘You didn�
�t look after me. Rosa said, “Why isn’t your mother here to help?” I had to make excuses, I had to freak out about Jeremy, there was no one to look after Jeremy, I had no one to sit with me, to take me home, to tell me it was going to be all right. I don’t know why you had children!’

  ‘Callisto!’

  I swung round to Dad. He was holding his eye to stop it twitching. I was so light with anger I felt like a hot air balloon. I could have floated around the room, torching them all. ‘All you can say is my name. What else do you know about me? Nothing! What do you know about Jeremy? Did you know he was building a bunker? Digging his own grave? What a happy little nuclear family!’

  I stood on tiptoes, ready to run. I expected Dad to hit me. And I wasn’t going to change my pyjamas, either. I was going to bleed all over the carpet if I had to, let all my disgusting blood drown that house and its sorrows.

  ‘Come here,’ Mum said again.

  ‘No, you’ll get dirt all over you.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Dad just sat and held his eye.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Jeremy and me about our brother? Why did you make it a guilty secret?’

  Mum sighed. ‘David said it would hurt you.’

  ‘That’s right, blame me,’ blurted Dad. ‘You were the one who was going mad with it all. You wouldn’t sleep, you wouldn’t eat, you kept seeing him, hearing him, it was all you would talk about.’

  ‘I needed to.’

  ‘You needed to forget, that’s what. You had to go on and live your life. I had to get on with mine. You didn’t look at me any more. You didn’t care how I was, what I was doing. That time I got mugged in Johannesburg, and had stitches in my head, you barely asked me about it. You said, “Is that all?” It was as if I was just some irrelevant noise in your life—’

  Like muzak, I thought. I had never heard my father put so many words together at the same time. Words about feelings, that is. He could talk on about picture frames and gold leaf and gallery prices for hours. But this was like some sort of magic spell. I didn’t want to break it.

  Dad was frowning, looking down at his fingers splayed on his knees. I could see red creeping up his neck. It was amazing. I couldn’t stop looking at his neck. I even felt sorry for it.