Borrowed Light

by Anna Fienberg

  ‘Jeremy, come here now, the man has to talk to the other people in the line,’ I called.

  The guide looked at me and smiled. You should have seen that smile. My stomach lurched. It was as if we shared a secret. My heart started hammering, and the sweating began all over again. You could have just pushed me lightly, with the feathery tips of your fingers, and I’d have fallen face-forward into his orbit. My legs felt wobbly.

  ‘Hello Callisto, come for the cake, have you?’

  I swung round and saw a friendly, familiar face. ‘Oh hi, Mr West!’

  He was standing there, beaming all over his craggy old face. God, it was nice to see him. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was too surprised and I was wondering if he could see the sweat. We stood right under a lamp, sharing a pool of light like a dry patch under an umbrella. He was looking at my top lip, so I bet he noticed.

  ‘And young Jeremy!’ called Mr West, spotting him still clasped like a limpet to the guide. ‘How are you?’ He strode over and somehow drew us all together. We moved out of the pool of light, which was a good thing, into the soft webbed shadow of evening. ‘I see you’ve met my son, Richard,’ he said, clapping the guide on the shoulder.

  Jeremy nodded enthusiastically. He didn’t look at all astounded. He was used to the world bringing him magical connections. At five, I suppose every day brings a surprise.

  ‘Richard, have you met Callisto?’

  ‘No,’ said Richard, ‘but I’d like to.’ He put out his hand for me to shake. It was warm and smooth, except for a bandaid on the little finger. I wanted to hang onto it. It was very hard to let go. I felt like Jeremy with the telescope.

  I scrunched my hand up in my pocket. It was slippery with sweat. Oh God, why was I made this way? Just a few days ago, I’d thought my skin was dead.

  Jeremy was tugging at Mr West. ‘Let’s go see the moon now,’ he said. ‘I bet it’ll look like a giant banana with these monster telescopes. And the queue’s only short. Please!’

  Mr West laughed. ‘All right, Jeremy.’ He turned to me. ‘You coming Callisto?’

  Before I could answer, Richard said, ‘Callisto can stay here with me and Jupiter. She’ll help with the crowd.’ He raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Is that okay? These special nights with the lollies and all get really busy. I could do with some help. We can dispense scientific information left, right and centre!’

  Mr West shook his head at his son, and let himself be pulled away.

  ‘I don’t know enough to be a guide,’ I murmured.

  Richard looked at me. His eyes were jade green in the shadows. ‘You’ve got a telescope in your back yard, and a grandmother who’s a well-known astronomer. You’re named after a Galilean moon, for God’s sake! Although you’d rather be called something more ordinary, like Anne.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’

  ‘Ah,’ he tapped his nose slyly, ‘I haf my vays and means.’

  ‘Your father told you about me!’ I almost shouted with amazement. I’m no longer a little kid—I have my peripheral vision, and I don’t expect the world to surprise me any more. It was flabbergasting to believe that Mr West had bothered to tell his son about this rude, ungrateful girl he knew at Meadow High.

  ‘Dad used to tell great stories about you,’ Richard said in a teasing voice. ‘And about Jeremy. He always wondered what happened to your hair that afternoon, when you came back from the toilets with one side shorter than the other. I did, too. It was like losing the last chapter in a book.’

  ‘He noticed?’

  Richard laughed. ‘It would be hard not to, the way Dad described it. You were as pale as a ghost, too. And your hands were shaking.’ Richard frowned, and he leant forward. ‘There were great gaps, after that. No more chapters. Dad missed you, you know. So did I!’

  We looked at each other in the dark. I felt the cool trunk of a young fig tree under my hand. It was something solid to hang on to. People were working their way through the Jupiter line. Out of the comer of my eye I could see the woman who had glared at me at the gate. It was her turn at the telescope. She was looking our way and she cleared her throat impatiently.

  ‘It’s so strange seeing you here,’ Richard went on. ‘I mean, I’ve only ever pictured you at school—you know, in your uniform, in the daytime.’ He looked down at the brick paving.

  The woman at the telescope coughed loudly. Richard sighed. ‘I’d better go and do my job. Coming?’

  We walked over to the telescope. Richard’s hand brushed against my arm.

  ‘Are you really busy here then?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I guess so, but most of my time is taken up with uni now—it’s hard to find time to do anything else.’

  ‘Is this your first year? Are you doing a science degree?’

  ‘Yes times two.’ Richard grinned. ‘I’m doing some psychology units and literature too. I figured I should branch out a little—“get humanised”, as my mother says.’

  ‘It must be great having your father to help with science.’

  ‘What are all those oval spots and bands around Jupiter?’ The woman with the hard face stamped her foot as she spoke. Maybe she was just squashing a cockroach (I’d seen a few on the paving), but the gesture echoed the tone of her voice. ‘How big is Jupiter? What is its distance from the sun?’

  You’d never catch this woman letting anyone into a queue.

  Richard raised his eyebrows at me.

  ‘We think the oval features are circular currents, or cyclones, trapped by the opposing winds of the cloud bands,’ I said. ‘The largest of these currents is the Great Red Spot, which is three times the size of earth. It’s actually this Spot that tells us how fast Jupiter rotates.’

  I glanced at Richard. He smiled at me as if I were a star pupil. I felt my cheeks glowing. He didn’t think I was a crazy lady. He probably kept old copies of New Scientist in a special folder. Just like me.

  ‘Well, how fast does it rotate?’ the imperious voice demanded.

  ‘At the equator, the planet’s surface whirls at a speed of about 43 000 kilometres an hour. The outward thrust due to the whirling is so great that the gases form a bulge. But they don’t fly away. Jupiter’s gravity is so powerful that it keeps them from escaping.’

  Whenever I think about that power, I get a thrill of excitement. It seems magical, the ability to keep something in thrall that way, with only an invisible force.

  I went on a bit longer, warming to the theme, telling her about the three very thin rings that were discovered by Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. I forgot about the sweat patches under my arms as I described those glittering rings, which were millions of tiny dust particles coated with ice. There is nothing as gripping as astronomy, I reckon—it kidnaps you and flings you up into a giant world, so that even if you remember to look down, you can hardly see your little old beetle-self any more. It’s a great relief, rather like drinking rum and coke without the hangover. I was getting to the moons when Richard tapped me on the shoulder. The woman was edging away, toward the cake tent.

  ‘Got more than she bargained for,’ laughed Richard. ‘You can take over my job.’

  ‘How often do you work here?’

  ‘Oh, only on a casual basis. I help out on special nights like these, when Jupiter or Saturn or whatever are in view.’

  ‘Do they pay you in lollies?’

  ‘Just about! This line is thinning out now. Do you want to go to the tent and get a coffee?’

  But just then a group of ten people streamed in, so we had a lot more information to dispense. It was good the way it worked, with Richard giving background information, preparing people for what they were about to see, while I talked to each person at the telescope. A woman of about my mother’s age was looking through the telescope for the first time. ‘Ravishing!’ she kept saying. ‘It’s just ravishing!’ She had so many questions, she could hardly get them out. We talked fervently until the man behind her grew restless.

  Inside the tent, the air was
warm with steaming urns and chattering children. I spied Jeremy near the lolly table, taking great handfuls of fluorescent snakes. He stuffed them into his pocket and went back for the frogs. Mr West pretended not to see. Honestly, Jeremy was like some starving child, storing up for the coming drought. The frogs practically lit up the plate with neon-green preservatives. I thought of Mum with her avocado sandwiches and bushes of sprouts.

  I waved to Jeremy. His hands were busy in his pockets and his mouth was full. He gave me a kind of strangled nod.

  ‘Do you have milk in your coffee?’ asked Richard. ‘I do here, it hides the taste.’

  We poured some coffee and made our way outside. I signalled our direction to Jeremy, but he’d spotted the licorice allsorts, and was busy hunting for remaining storage in his shirt pocket.

  Richard found a seat in the garden. From there you could see all the way down to the water, spread out like a cloak at the bottom of the hill. You could just hear it whispering against the sea wall, rustling into little folds and wavelets.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Richard said quietly as he sat down. ‘I come here sometimes just to sit and think. The world seems much bigger and more forgiving somehow, in this place.’

  We were silent for a while. It wasn’t the school memorial kind of silence. It wasn’t awkward, either. But I couldn’t help wondering what Richard felt he needed to be forgiven for. Me, I could name one huge thing. I wished for the hundredth time that the undertow wasn’t there. That it wasn’t stuck like an ocean between us. My secret. It was so loud in that quiet place.

  ‘So how long have you had the telescope in your garden?’ Richard asked.

  I jumped.

  ‘You were far away.’

  ‘This is a dreamy place. I was twelve when Grandma gave us the telescope. We had a Jupiter night back then, too.

  I can still remember how electrifying it was, to see Jupiter for the first time.’

  I was looking at Richard, but suddenly Mum’s face floated into my mind. I remembered her mouth that night. It went all sharp and jagged when Grandma named the moons out loud—Callisto, Ganymede, Io, Europa. I could still hear her chanting, like some celestial nursery rhyme. Mum had run away then. The porch door had slammed. Gany.

  ‘What is it, Callisto?’

  ‘Oh nothing, I was just thinking.’ I smiled, but it was a rotten smile. It was one of those you put on when a photographer asks you nicely.

  Gany. I didn’t want to think about that now. It was like being at the edge of a dream, in that intertidal zone.

  Richard looked at me, waiting. The secret was there between us, it was so noisy, nagging away, and Richard was so close to me on that seat. It was amazing that he couldn’t hear it—Look at me, see what I’ve done, I’m a bad girl, you wouldn’t like me if you knew. I thought of that couple I’d seen at the restaurant with Tim. Their noses had touched while they talked. You could practically see their thoughts flowing into each other, like fluids in osmosis. I felt such an urge to tell Richard the secret—it was like a wave building up in my chest. I realised then that I’d had no practice in telling the truth. I had never really said what I meant.

  ‘It’s hard to tell your thoughts,’ I said, in a stumbling sort of way. ‘There’s a distance between your head and your mouth, filled with all these little wires and networks, and in the unravelling along the way something gets lost. I mean, the more you talk, the further away from the original thought you get.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Richard, considering, ‘especially when you’re concentrating on how the other person will react as you’re saying it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I agreed. The dreaded blush crept up my cheeks. It was true—how did he know that? And why did I want to tell him, someone I’d met only an hour ago, when I couldn’t tell my own mother?

  I wanted to close the gap between us. I wanted to get close. I could hardly breathe with this need to show him myself.

  ‘There are such big gaps between people,’ I said. ‘The more they try to close them, the bigger the gaps get.’ I paused, and we watched a boat drifting across the water. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  He nodded, but didn’t say anything. He just kept looking at me with that green, steady gaze. In the shadows of his eyes there was no light reflected. I was on my own.

  ‘Well, it’s strange isn’t it, incredible really. It’s like the expanding universe.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘These gaps. You know the theory. Once upon a time all the ingredients of the universe were so close. Every bit of matter was tightly packed against every other bit—it was so compressed it was red-hot. There were no gaps, like lovers melting into each other, and then BANG—’

  ‘The Big Bang theory!’

  ‘Yes. And all those close, intimate bits of matter exploded and flew away from each other as fast as they could. They’ve been running ever since.’

  ‘Into the expanding universe! Hey, that’s neat. And all the bits grew cooler as they ran—’

  ‘That’s right—the gaps made them cooler. So, what I’m saying is, the universe began in this burning hot state, it began in singularity—all places that exist today used to be the same place, right? Things used to be so cosy, without gaps.’

  Richard pushed back his hair. He cracked his knuckles. ‘So you’re saying that people get close, they heat up, and then explode? Like, what’s the use?’

  ‘Well that’s a very bald way to put it.’ The words hung there in the night, stark as bones. I wished I didn’t talk so much. Gaps—it’s better if you leave some so the other person can fill you in. I bet silent types have more fun, like blondes.

  ‘I’ve never thought of it all like that,’ Richard said. His voice had the smile in it. It was admiring, and he was looking at me intently, as if I were some new species he hadn’t seen before. He seemed to be peering inside, as if he wanted to know where the words came from.

  He cleared his throat. ‘Maybe we were all close once, like the original universe.’ He was frowning, bringing his words out with care. ‘Think about children, for instance. I have these two nephews—they’re only little, one’s just started pre-school. It’s incredible how they’ll play with anyone new, without introductions, they’ll chatter away about their families and their pets, tell family secrets to strangers so that their parents cringe. It’s as if they think everyone is an extension of them—the grocer, the butcher, the woman next door—that we’re all under the same skin, like some enormous human umbrella.’

  I nodded. Jeremy used to be like that. I remembered the time he told the special delivery man that Mum couldn’t come to the door because she was doing poo and she’d only just started. ‘She takes about fourteen hundred hours,’ he’d said. ‘But you can wait with Cally and me if you like.’

  ‘I wonder what happens to us,’ I said. ‘Later on, I mean.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just growing up.’

  ‘Growing away.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Richard leant toward me and put his hand on my cheek. He brought my face round to his. There was a sudden charge in the air. It almost crackled between us, electric. I held my breath. ‘I’d like to get close to you,’ he murmured.

  I pulled away involuntarily. ‘Hah, the Big Bang eh?’ I heard myself snigger like Miranda Blair.

  Richard kept his hand on my cheek. He shook his head. ‘No, I’d rather go slow with you, I don’t want to spoil it.’

  Such a tingle shot up my spine when he said that, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I’d been holding my breath, it was like sitting on a bubble, and the slightest movement would cause it to burst. I wanted to burst, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I began to burble.

  ‘According to my classification, you, Richard West, are definitely a star. I can’t imagine what you’re doing with me, just a little old itty-bitty moon!’

  Richard laughed, and asked me what was I talking about, and I told him about my classification system and that my mother was a moon, and my father was a degenerating star, maybe a white dwa
rf who’d been a giant in his day. I was burbling on because I was so nervous. Or maybe I was just terribly excited. I don’t know. I wasn’t used to being happy-excited, so it was hard to recognise. This feeling had always come under the Nervous category, with those familiar symptoms of talking too much and thumping heart. Maybe I’d have to invent a whole new section, if ‘happiness’ were to be included.

  Anyway, I’d never said any of this out loud before. It was intoxicating. (But I didn’t mention the borrower bit. Borrowers can make you sick.)

  ‘And Jeremy?’

  ‘Yes, Jeremy. I think he’s a young star.’

  Richard was tapping out some rhythm on the bench. He was thinking, savouring the idea. He wanted to play this game, and I couldn’t believe how easy it was with him. It was like talking to Jeremy, someone with the same blood, the same language, plus there were the pheromones as well!

  ‘My mother is the star in our family,’ Richard concluded after a while.

  ‘What about Mr West?’ I protested. For me he was a kindly, warming star of the nicest kind. I felt offended for him.

  ‘Oh no, he’s definitely in Mum’s orbit.’

  ‘Is she a strong woman—is she astonishingly attractive?’ I felt a prickle of anxiety for a moment.

  Richard laughed. ‘I suppose she’s attractive. I’d call her determined.’

  ‘Does she work? What does she do?’

  ‘She’s a naturopath.’

  ‘No, really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  ‘Does she have real, live qualifications? You know, with letters after her name and all?’

  Richard grinned. ‘Yes, she’s quite successful actually, her practice is really busy. She often gives lectures. You should come some time. She helps a lot of people, I think.’

  ‘She doesn’t read tea leaves or throw salt over her shoulder?’

  ‘No,’ laughed Richard. ‘Does anyone?’

  ‘No one I know,’ I said quickly. I went red. ‘Does your father follow her diagnoses? Or is he in the grip of science—I mean, Western medicine? Do they argue about it?’