Borrowed Light (11 page)

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.

H
AVE 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 the 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.

At recess I realised that it was all too late. Melanie, Sharon and Morgan had made other friends. They sat with Sally and Jo on the benches, and shared their biscuits. They made a couple of remarks about the ‘brainy bunch' in the top class; the ‘snobs'. They inched away from me. I looked at them closely. Hadn't their teeth grown a little? Didn't their nails look sharper? Perhaps they'd changed into
omnivores.
This thought was confusing, and threatened to break down my whole classification system.

My temporary move to the higher realms had created another invisible wall. When they looked at me, I could tell the image was blurred, as if they were looking through tracing paper.

I ate my sandwiches alone in the shade. My uniform was still too long, but it didn't matter any more. Other girls had pert little skirts. They sat in the sun and rolled their socks down so their legs would get tanned. They ate Vegemite or ham sandwiches, or sausage rolls. I had tofu and sprouts
and avocado on lumpy bread bursting with seeds. I felt like a budgerigar. But I grew a lot that year, and I began to tower over my mother. I hated being so visible. I hunched my shoulders and drooped my neck forward. My bones seemed too big. I felt more and more awkward with all those bones—huge and angular like a giant cassowary. Head down, I went blundering through the bushes.

(I once saw a documentary about cassowaries, actually. I was surprised to hear that they can be very aggressive. Even if you try not to look at them, they charge ahead and attack you. In the documentary we saw a man with twenty stitches just under his rib cage from a cassowary kick.)

That summer, when the school year was over and I had turned twelve, Grandma Ruth gave me the telescope.

It was like a ripe fruit dropping to the ground. I caught it just in time.

My herbivore/carnivore classification was in tatters. There was no viable escape from Earth—until Grandma led me out into the garden and read the skies. Then I flew up into a world so powerful that Glen Gill and his biros looked about as big as bullants.

Over the next year I used the telescope constantly. During the day at school I'd be like a nocturnal animal, only barely awake. I was waiting for the night. I began to visit the observatory that sat on a big hill right in the middle of the city. I saw Saturn there for the first time. It was thrilling. Those rings around the planet are the most beautiful things I've ever seen. The guide told us that the rings are made up of millions of tiny particles circling the planet. The light they give off comes from the sun, but it's reflected like sunlight off particles of ice. So astronomers think Saturn's rings may be made of little pieces of ice.

I came home from the observatory that night, bursting with Saturn. Mum was still up, and I told her about the ice and the rings. She was very tired. She smiled at me and said
that when you looked at the sky you were looking at the past. I was quite intrigued by that idea, and asked her to go on. But Jeremy started crying then, and she had to haul herself up to go to him.

Sometimes I think Mum really does belong to the past. Maybe she's the reincarnation of some nineteenth century medium. When I was in Year 8, soaking up the heavens, Mum was absorbing the Victorians. She read about the spiritualists and their meditative trances, and researched their ideas on amnesia and hysteria. She believed the ghosts of the past flowed about our world—they were as common as clouds. You just had to be in the right ‘state' to see them.

A sprinkling of women started coming to our house, and they did experiments together, mostly in the dark. They set up a ouija table. It has a smooth surface strewn with letters and digits cut out of cardboard, set all around in a circle. In amongst them are
YES
and
NO
and certain other symbols. A glass is placed in the middle, and everyone puts a finger on it. When I've peeped through the crack in the sliding door, I've seen the glass move wildly between the letters, spelling out names and messages. It is truly creepy. The living room seems to be inhabited by invisible guests, all rushing around like the wind. My science teacher, Mr West, said that the involuntary spasms of the muscles in the finger are responsible for the glass's movement. But he hadn't seen the speed of that glass, or the shock in those women's faces.

Mr West was the one person that I looked forward to seeing at school. Sometimes, after a science lesson, I'd stop and tell him about my visit to the Observatory, and what I'd seen. He was always interested. He'd put down his chalk and draw up a stool, encouraging me to go on. Then he'd tell me things that I could talk about with Grandma when we stood with our bare feet tucked into the earth, reading the night sky.

W
HEN
I
WAS
fourteen, Jeremy went to preschool. The kindy was practically next door to my school, so sometimes I picked him up in the afternoons. I liked doing that. He would run to me with a whoop, his arms full of the paintings and craft he'd done. ‘Look at this, it's a submarine!' he'd yell, and hold up a tissue box plastered with bits of material and a toilet roll for a funnel and cotton wool for smoke. Then the other kids would run up too. They'd climb all over me as if I were a sofa and show me their boats and aeroplanes or how fast they could run. It lifted me up, all that joy and welcome. They were so twanging with life, those little ones, and they wouldn't notice if your skin was black or white or your hem was down to your feet.

One afternoon I had a surprise for Jeremy. We'd been talking about chemicals, and how they react to one another. For his birthday, I'd given him a science kit. It included a good instruction booklet that told you how to make a volcano. All you needed was a little flour to make the mountain, and something acid to react with something alkaline to sprinkle on top. The fizzing result flowed down the mountain like boiling lava. Just add a drop of red food dye for drama.