Borrowed Light (2 page)

‘A lungfish,' said the doctor kindly, giving us both a bit of time. ‘Of the order Dipnoi. It has lungs as well as gills.'

‘I know, and in certain species it builds a mucus-lined mud covering to withstand extended droughts.'

The doctor looked annoyed. He was used to bringing out his information like a present. I was supposed to go ‘
Oh!
' Normally I would have. I'd have smiled a lot, too, and fallen about with amazement. (Because I'm a borrower, remember.
We try to fulfil people's expectations at any moment.)

Only that day I didn't feel like it. I just didn't feel like it.

I think his hand was extended to comfort me. I was too numb. The silence thing had come back. In the moments after an explosion there is no other sound. The doctor's mouth was opening and closing, and without the words he looked quite funny, like the telly when the mute button is on. Funny and vulnerable. I didn't want to worry about
him
on top of everything else, so I switched back to looking at the lungfish, of the order Dipnoi.

But I couldn't help thinking of all our fishy ancestors, crawling up from the sea, millions of years ago. Slithery slidey blotches, wriggling with pride—‘Look I've got lungs and you've only got gills, ner ner!' I remembered that a human fetus makes gills in the early weeks, only to destroy them later on.

I wondered if I had a little fish inside me.

I could feel tears welling up, warm as those primordial swamps. Suddenly the lungfish pressed against the glass. My tears spilled their banks. I wanted to let the poor thing out. The water would gush over the table, drowning the files and the neat penholder with the doctor's name inscribed in gold, and the pink plastic pelvis of a female perched in the comer. But I couldn't rescue it. Nobody could. The creature seemed frozen in time, eternally procrastinating—animal, mineral or vegetable?—while all its brothers and sisters had made up their minds a millennium ago, embracing a muddy bank, or sliding down under a wave.

‘Whatever decision you make,' the doctor said, picking up his gold pen, ‘I'd be glad to help.'

I wanted to blurt it out then, and howl. His face was all crumpled with concern. Soft, like rumpled sheets. I could have laid my head in his lap.

‘Thank you,' I said, and stood up. I waved to the lungfish. I couldn't manage anything more.

W
HEN
I
CAME
home from the doctor's, nobody seemed to notice anything different. I didn't really expect them to. Everyone in our family has eye trouble. The world goes blurry at a distance of two centimetres outside their own skins. I forgive Jeremy, of course. He is only five. And anyway, the day I got home, he was worrying about much larger things.

He was wearing his bike helmet again, inside the house. ‘Oh Jem,' I said, ‘it won't do you any good, even if a meteor does land on our house. That one in Siberia turned into a fireball and killed fifteen hundred reindeer when it fell. Where's Mum?'

I've thought for a long time now that maybe I should stop teaching Jeremy to read the sky. For me it's exciting, it's a way out of here. There are infinite possibilities. But Jeremy just seems to worry about things falling on him.

Jeremy shrugged and the helmet shifted sideways. It was too big for him anyway. ‘Mum?' He wrinkled his forehead. ‘She's in the living room, talking to those dead people.'

We both sighed. I sat down heavily on a kitchen chair, and pulled Jeremy onto my lap. The helmet hit my chin. From the living room we heard a voice. ‘Oh beloved spirits, come in peace, we are ready for you.' We held our breath in the kitchen. Jeremy snorted. I could feel his shoulders shaking. The silence was thick in that room. We'd seen it. It hung suspended, like layers of cigarette smoke.

We heard a low murmuring. There was a moaning and wailing, the sounds reeling together through the silence, and then like a solid shape spinning up from a potter's wheel, a clear cry came. It made goosebumps stand out on my skin. Jeremy pulled his helmet down.

Someone was crying. It was a hopeless kind of crying, as if it came from the bottom of a well. I could hear Mum doing her comforting routine. It was Wednesday, I realised, and I couldn't have picked a more depressing day to make my discovery.

Wednesday was seance day. Every Wednesday, for as long as I can remember, I've come home to a darkened living room, moist with sad ladies. Curtains are drawn, the air is trapped and still, the dining table pushed into the middle of the room. Sitting around it are eight or nine women, usually my mother's age or older. They all have one finger on a glass that is moving jerkily around a ouija board, telling stories of misfortune. My mother says they are trying to contact the spirit of a loved one, who was too rapidly snatched from this world. When I come in from school, she glances up at me with irritation and purses her mouth into
Ssh!
position. It makes her mouth look like a dried plum. ‘There's fruit in the bowl,' she whispers. ‘Can't talk now.'

She may as well swat me. Jeremy often sings in the bath, ‘Shoo fly, don't bother me, I do not want your company'. Sometimes I worry that he feels like I do.

Once I tried to talk to Mum about the ladies. ‘You're too young to understand,' she said. But she let me join a meditation class she runs on Thursdays. That was a disaster (of the temporary kind). We all lay on the floor with our shoes off, me and ten women, while my mother took us down some stairs and into a cellar—imaginatively speaking, that is. It was quite pleasant on the second stair, where she said some wild lavender was growing. Could we smell it? So restful it was, wriggling our toes in the carpet, hearing gentle sighs all around.

But when we got to the fourth and fifth stair, we were going below ground, and Mum's voice became softer. It was musty in this place, where no lavender grew, and I could hardly hear her. I was dying to open my eyes. The silence was suffocating. You could even hear people swallow. ‘Be aware,' my mother whispered to us, ‘don't fall asleep. Look around. Remember.'

Suddenly there was a loud fart, like a car backfiring. I jumped. It was the lady with the floral dress. She was fast asleep.

Everyone pretended they hadn't heard. I started to laugh. I couldn't help it. I might as well have tried to stop breathing. I kept my mouth locked for a while, but I kept hearing that fart in all the silence and soon the laughs were ripping my throat open, huge tugging lions of laughs and in the end I just gave in and lay there on the carpet, shrieking. It was the best laugh I've ever had.

Afterwards my mother wouldn't speak to me.

I tried to tell her that it was only because I was so relaxed by her meditation, and I'd loved the lavender bit. And that later, in my room, the laughs had turned to sobs, because I'd felt so lonely laughing on my own. But she wouldn't listen. She's only interested in her ladies' sorrows. I realise now you can only join her secret circle of sorrow if you are forty and over. If you're exactly like her. Otherwise she doesn't want to know.

My mother has some secret mission to mop up the sorrows of all the women in the world. She hasn't bothered with training from health courses or naturopathy or Gestalt therapy or religion—nothing with a certificate and a bit of respectability. Not my mother. She trusts nothing. Only her own ‘instincts'. And the muttering of the dead. She writes pages and pages in her diary about her discoveries—perhaps she's inventing her own therapy. She spends a lot of time staring into space, looking for signs from the natural world. Putting it down like this, she sounds quite creepy. But I suppose I'm used to it. Jeremy's the one I worry about.

It's not that she doesn't do things that mothers are supposed to do. She makes our lunches and cooks our dinner, and asks us about our day. She doesn't look like the mother in the Addams Family. Although, come to think of it, she is rather willowy and dark and intense-looking. And sometimes, I have to admit, she forgets to comb her hair. She wears it long, like mine, but she has quite dazzling streaks of grey in it now. When she remembers to brush it,
her hair flows down her back like wine. I tell her to heighten the colour in it, that a deep burgundy would look great, but she says she couldn't be bothered, that I shouldn't care so much about appearances—then I get a lecture on spirituality etc., and the inner world, so I drop it. Dad just raises his eyebrows, and shakes his head in that ‘Oh, she's hopeless' way. He tries to share a conspiratorial grin, but that irritates me too. I'm not going to be on
his
side, old fussyboots.

No, the thing is, she might ask questions but she doesn't listen to the answers. When Jeremy or I start on a story—what someone said at school, what happened at swimming lessons, her eyes glaze over, settling into a vacant stare.

I call it her dead bird gaze.

I'd never tell her about me. About
my
misfortune. I don't know her well enough.

I
T WAS HARD
to finish dinner, that Wednesday night. Now I had a proper diagnosis, I surrendered to the nausea that had been bubbling away. I excused myself and ran to the bathroom. I flushed the toilet to disguise the noise and was sick into the tumbling blue water. After that, I could face the avocado salad. Mum says avocado possesses every vitamin known to man, so we eat it a lot. I was voraciously hungry and on the verge of throwing up at the same time. It's a dreadful combination of sensations, if you really want to know.

We had dinner early, because Dad was going away at the crack of dawn the next day. He likes to have plenty of time to pack and fuss and check he has all his socks. ‘Be Prepared!' is his motto. He must say it at least fifty times a day. He doesn't object to avocado salad because it's an efficient fruit. You can economise with avocado, he says.
I bet he'd eat space rations if he could. He prides himself on his big O—Organisation, that is. Mostly he makes jokes about Mum's cooking. Not the funny ha-ha jokes, more the sneery, condescending snipes that leave an uncomfortable silence, while you decide whose side you should be on. I feel sorry for Mum then. She looks down at her plate, but when she looks up again she's wearing her dead bird gaze.

It didn't matter to me that my father was going away the next day because I wasn't going to tell him my terrible news, anyway. I couldn't imagine such a thing. He'd be outraged at my lack of Organisation. Where was my preparation? My pre-planning? My feasibility study? Distant stars like him have absolutely no empathy for moon behaviour. They don't understand that we are helpless against the stark gravitational pull of other bodies, and are doomed to follow.

That evening I went into my room and lay on my bed. I was panicking. Often I do my worrying here, but that's pale pink compared with the scarlet of panic. It makes you feel like you are dying and need an ambulance. That your heart's going to explode out of your chest. Red everywhere. It's like listening to a siren that won't stop. I just wanted it to stop.

‘You're pregnant,' the doctor had said. His voice rang in my head. The lungfish gasped at me from the glass. Two words that were going to change the rest of my life. Two words, but they made a sentence.

I would have to make a decision. I would have to decide. But there was nobody to ask.

I
MET
T
IM AT
a party. I'd been nervous for two weeks, ever since I got the invitation. The girl who invited me was two years older, and she drank green ginger wine like milk. She
had five earrings in one ear and seven in the other. She looked like a warrior, and she said ‘Well, fuck
me
!' whenever she was surprised. She was surprised quite often, and her exclamation always sounded more like a threat than an invitation.

Anyway, I still don't know why she thought of me.

Perhaps she did that quick glance thing, (being way over the age of eight) and thought I looked passable—a decorative asset for her party, like streamers to hang over the windows, and balloons at the gate. Or maybe she just needed more girls.

A week before the party I decided to buy a new dress. After all, it's not every day you go to the house of Miranda Blair, urban warrior extraordinaire. I thought of getting an orange streak in my hair, too, and maybe some black lipstick (like Miranda) but I knew, deep inside, that a moon like me couldn't carry it off.

Still, I must have been feeling daring, just a little bit nuclear, because I bought a bright red dress. It was really short, too, and its silky skirt shone and rippled round my hips like petrol on fire.

‘You'd have to be mighty sure of yourself, to wear a dress like that,' a customer said as I left the shop. I cringed, right down to my bones. You could accuse me of anything, but not
that
, I swear.

I wore it, just the same. But it was hell, if you really want to know. As I walked into Miranda's hallway, I could hear the music blaring from the rooms up ahead. I was alone. There was a full-length mirror on the wall, and I glanced to see if I had any parsley between my teeth. God, I looked like a lonely flamingo, picking its way through a forest of bottles. Those absurd long legs were as skinny as stilts. I hung onto the wall for a moment, wishing like mad I'd worn the old black dress that covered my ankles.

The house opened up into a huge room, crammed with
people. I quickly searched the faces for someone I knew. No one looked back at me, or smiled, or even lifted an eyebrow. Maybe there was a policy not to talk to flamingos.

I wandered over to the sliding glass doors, and peered out at the night. There was a chance I could look cool and a bit mysterious, standing on my own, contemplating the sky.

Actually, there was a luscious full moon that night. It shone steadily down on the lawn, picking flowers out of the dark. I haven't always been so derogatory about the moon, you know. I admire its generous nature, offering a torch to the night, sharing its light around—even if it is borrowed.