Borrowed Light (3 page)

It was a relief, the night sky. Such a comfort, like an exotic but well-known family you can confidently return to. There was Venus, and to the left, Jupiter, both glowing with the steady shine of planets. Long ago, Grandma told me that the song ‘Twinkle twinkle little star' was surprisingly accurate. ‘Planets shine and stars twinkle,' she'd said, ‘depending on how turbulent the atmosphere is, of course.' I saw stars quivering with life and turbulence.

Someone turned up the music. I could feel the drumbeat thumping through the floor, into my feet. It pushed into my body, thrusting its heartbeat over mine. It was like a drug, that music, it could take you over, and I wished to God it would. It pulled me down from Venus and Jupiter and the quivering stars, but it did nothing to cover me. Over the music I heard someone laugh, and then someone else, and suddenly I was convinced they were laughing at me. Maybe I was ridiculous standing there in that neon dress, blaring like a Coca Cola sign.

I tried to stretch down the hem of my skirt. My cheeks were on fire. I wished I'd stayed home with Jeremy.

I wondered if he'd worn his bike helmet to bed. Surely Mum would have noticed.

The lights were dimmed, and I watched couples slow-dance into the shadows. They looked like figures in an oil
painting, the colours of their limbs fading into each other, so you couldn't see where one body began and the other finished. I would have given anything to dissolve into someone like that, but I bet all my bones would get in the way.

That was when Tim emerged, out of the shadows. I'd seen him at school—Timothy Cleary, surfing idol, skin like honey, eyes like magnets. Unattainable as planet Jupiter. But he was walking toward
me!
Maybe he'd mistaken me for someone else. I couldn't bear to see his face sag with disappointment. I nearly fell over his feet.

‘Hi, I'm Callisto May,' I said, all in a rush. I edged him over to the light where he could see me better. ‘Are you looking for someone?'

‘Someone like you,' he sang. It was an old sweet song, and he had a lovely voice. I wasn't a good judge, though, because I would have given him a Logie award even if he'd sung like a gorilla.

There is a God after all, I thought fleetingly, and made up my mind to tell Grandma. But I knew she'd say it was just the power of pheromones.

We chatted for a while, our voices straining over the beat of the music.

‘Are you a good friend of Miranda's?' I asked.

He shrugged. You could see the muscles in his shoulders gliding under his skin. He must be very strong from all that paddling in the surf, I thought. I bet he could pick me up with one hand. I felt a delicious ripple of excitement, like notes rising up the piano.

‘Yeah, I guess so, we've known each other for years. She was my girlfriend for a while.' He grinned. ‘She's a gutsy lady!' His voice was admiring.

I nodded in a nonchalant manner. But I was alarmed. That piece of information changed things for a moment. I wondered if Tim approved of blowing up garbage bins and
bullying Year 7 girls. I hoped he wasn't as dangerous as Miranda. But he smiled at me again and lifted a curl from behind my ear.

‘You have great hair, Callisto.'

I put garbage bins and bullying firmly away.

‘Do you go to Whale Beach much?' he continued.

I had a sudden vision of Tim and his friends sitting on their towels, looking at girls in bikinis as they strolled past. I'd heard that they rated the girls one to ten. Big breasts scored high. I shuddered and stepped back for a minute. The hair in his fingers pulled tight.

‘Ow!' I gasped. I said it under my breath, so I don't think he heard, because he went on holding the hair.

‘I don't think I've seen you there,' Tim went on. ‘We go most weekends—you know, the guys, José, Phil, Bob and me. There's the best waves at Whale Beach, and José brings his dog sometimes. He can have a good run around in the park there, off the leash.'

‘What kind of dog is it?'

‘An Alsatian. He looks fierce but he's as gentle as a possum. I used to have a dog, but he died last year.'

Tim's eyes were suddenly shinier, and he looked down at our feet. I took his hand and pressed it. It was very warm and I could feel the pulse in his wrist. I wondered if I should ask him what kind of dog his had been, or maybe he didn't want to talk about it. But if I didn't ask, he might think I didn't care. I couldn't decide. Also, that little beat under my finger was distracting. It made me see that Tim was vulnerable, he was a human being like me, dependent on food and drink and air to keep that beat going. We had something in common, as long as I kept holding his hand.

We let the music into our conversation then. It filled the sea of dark between us with just the right words. I stopped agonising about the dog.

Later, Tim went to get a drink and I wondered if he'd ever
come back. I needed to go to the toilet, but what if I missed him when he returned? I stood there squeezing my thighs together.

And there he was, blue eyes from a postcard sky, threading his way carefully through the room, bringing two glasses of green ginger wine.

I wish I could say we talked all night, but what with the music and the phenomenon of irresistible attraction between two bodies, we began kissing quite soon.

That was something to remember, that first kiss. Tim put his arms around me—honey-coloured, with little golden fireflies of hair—and drew me toward him. He looked at me, carefully, for thirty whole seconds. That's a long time—you try it. While he was looking, I counted silently. It was less excruciating that way. No one had ever looked at me for that long. Except Jeremy, perhaps. But that's because he was dying for me to tell him what happened when a planet collided with a meteor swarm.

Once, a reporter came to our school and interviewed lots of students. ‘Pretty Callisto May,' wrote the reporter a week later in the newspaper. Can you believe it? Everyone else just had their name in the paper, without the adjective. I read that phrase over and over again. There it was, in black and white, a judgement made by the world. Well, I couldn't agree. What about my spiky hips, my disappointing breasts? I wanted to run after the reporter, ask him if he'd noticed the hairiness of my arms, my scrawny legs, with the knobble-bone on the ankle that could cut paper. Where were the womanly curves? Couldn't he see the shadow of a moustache? Did he usually wear glasses? No, if he'd taken more than a glance out of the comer of his eye, he never would have written, ‘Pretty Callisto May'. That was for sure.

But at Miranda Blair's party, on the 3rd of March, Tim Cleary looked at me for thirty seconds. When he was
finished, he still wanted to kiss me. I smiled so much my face ached. I was caught in his gaze, trapped in sunlight. Every cell of me was in focus, every movement seemed larger than life. I was exquisitely aware of my breathing, my treble clef nostrils, the itch under my tongue, the twitch beginning in my mouth. I felt beautiful for the first time. Tim Cleary picked me out with his eyes, he selected me,
me!
and suddenly I was alive.

His mouth was hard and soft at the same time. I was amazed that a boy's lips could be so silky, like the most secret parts of a girl. And behind the lips were the teeth and jaw, pushing and determined, carnivorous. I was excited, scared, breathless, thrilled. He didn't close his eyes while he kissed me. Neither did I. I wasn't going to miss anything. His eyes stared into mine. I didn't know what would happen next. But I would do whatever he wanted. He'd given me the best gift in the world. I leapt for it eagerly, borrowing his warmth and making it my own, the way the moon borrows light.

S
CHOOL WAS VERY
different after the 3rd of March. Miranda Blair, urban warrior, let me join her tribe. I ate my avocado sandwiches with her on the wooden seats under the oak tree. I stood on guard at the toilet door while she had a smoke. I bought some black nail polish. And I got my ears pierced.

Grandma said that if I was so determined to do my ears she'd take me to the hospital herself—she has a friend who is a matron there. I bled profusely as if I were in a major car accident. As I said to my mother when I got home, I don't know why I can't just do things normally, and go to a chemist like everyone else. It's over in two minutes, isn't it?, with that little gun the chemist uses, and you haven't got white-coated doctors rushing around talking about
transfusions. My mother just shrugged and muttered something about Grandma's absurd faith in doctors and then she did her dead bird gaze. Still, it gave me another bloodthirsty tale to tell the warriors. I was becoming an expert in tall tales.

Miranda had wanted to know all the details about my night with Tim. I'm sure she still fancied him herself. ‘What did he say? Did he lick your earlobes? Did he put his tongue down your throat?' Miranda and her friends orbited about me, like satellites around a new sun. Every time I told a new Tim story, the awe grew like a sudden rise in temperature. I couldn't quite believe it. It made me glow, even if it didn't feel real. I gave them little bits, like seeds spat out. I tried to keep all the juice to myself. I couldn't exactly remember what Tim had said that night, but I was becoming a whiz at making it up. I remembered only looking into his eyes and seeing myself, like Venus emerging from the sea.

I was continually nervous. It made my mouth dry, all this inventing, and I licked my lips a lot. They became chafed and an ulcer bloomed on the tip of my tongue. It's hard kissing with an ulcer. It hurts, and you feel like a leper. But I didn't like to say no.

On Sundays I went to the beach with Tim and ‘the guys'. I usually wore a T-shirt over my bikini. I explained that I had a family failing. Skin cancers popped out on our backs after five minutes' exposure to the sun.

I sat on the beach for hours, sweltering, while the guys surfed the waves. I didn't like to read, because I might miss one of Tim's best ‘tubes'. He always asked me afterward if I'd been watching. When they were finished, the boys would race back over the sand, surfboards cradled under their arms like awkward pets. Tim would leap upon me, all dripping and slippery, with his cold wet lips on mine. His hips pressed into me, digging us into the sand.

The cold of his skin was welcome, but I could hear the sniggering of his friends behind us, and I died quietly of embarrassment. Gently I'd nudge Tim off my bones, and he'd sit up and hunt around for a beer.

José often brought his dog Tito to the beach. But he had to be careful about taking it onto the sand. There was a big sign near the toilet block with a picture of a dog and a great red slash through it. One Sunday José brought his spray can and splashed the sign with purple. When he'd finished, I told him the dog on the sign looked like an alien from Mars. ‘No Aliens on the Beach' he wrote happily along the top. So José brought his Earth dog down to the shore.

Tim laughed with the rest of us, but I could see that he was worried. When a lifesaver jogged up an hour later, Tim stepped in. ‘Sorry, mate,' he said, ‘but my friend José here doesn't read English. His dog came out with him from Chile.'

‘Well, it's a two-hundred-dollar fine for a dog on the beach,' warned the lifesaver. ‘So you better tell your friend. Okay, guys,
hasta la vista
!' He waved in a friendly way to José, and jogged back up the beach.

‘
Hasta la
what?' said José. He was angry with Tim. He'd been dying to tell the lifesaver all about alien dogs. But Tim just caught him in a headlock and they wrestled to the sand.

Tim was different like that. He drank till he was legless, he surfed in electrical storms and acted wild at parties. But he liked things legal and tidy. His parents were quite strict. I had never met them, but he told me many stories of his mother and her Hygiene Household. It sounded as if she scrubbed and vacuumed and dusted and washed for eight hours a day. She sat down to dinner with a Wettex in her hand. She was washing up before the family had finished dessert. Visitors had to sit on special covers laid carefully over the sofa, so as not to soil the brocade.

‘Does she ask guests if they're toilet trained before they come in?' I only wanted to make him laugh. But he didn't. He frowned at me, and his lips clamped together.

‘She's not that bad. She's just house-proud. My father says the best thing about the day is coming home to a tidy house. So I suppose she makes him pretty happy.'

After that I didn't say another word of criticism about Tim's family, even if he was railing against them. I suppose I wouldn't like it if Tim started going on about my mother. And he had enough material, all right. When he came to pick me up for our first date, Mum answered the door with beetroot juice all over her nose. He didn't say anything, but she must have seen him looking. ‘It's a cure for sun cancers,' she explained, ‘it works wonders.'

Later, when we were driving away—we were going to José's house to watch a video—Tim didn't mention my mother. I thought that was very decent of him. He never made beetroot jokes or anything. She must have looked so weird, standing there like the victim of a dog bite. It's strange how you can go about detesting your own family, but if anyone else criticises them, it's like a knife in your heart. I learnt a lot of things from Tim.

But I was always nervous. I don't know why. The trouble with my breathing started then. I was constantly breathless. I developed bronchitis, which wasn't very attractive because it made me bark like a dog. Often I'd come down with it the night before a big party. With my hollow chest and barking cough, I could have been someone in an opera dying of consumption.

Since real disaster has hit, these anxieties look tiny, like ants at a distance. You'd think I'd have enjoyed being popular for once. But I felt like someone in a bad disguise. Any minute I would be discovered.

I suppose I am superstitious, like my mother. Deep down I think something terrible will happen if you go against the
divine order of things. Moons shouldn't dress up as stars, even if it is only pretending.