Borrowed Light (7 page)

I frowned. I desperately wanted to win in this first test with the Universe. But I could only see my grandmother's face, only feel how vital it was to hear her say ‘Yes, you're right, that's my clever girl!' Why couldn't I
think
?

‘Well? Well?' Grandma Ruth tapped ash into the grass.

How can you go somewhere and stay home? Can you divide yourself in two? I thought of when I read my books—lying there on the bed I felt nothing of the blue cotton coverlet or my chilly feet. I'd be far away, in the story. Or what about Mum, lying in the dark, off in some other daylight world of her imagining.

‘You can
imagine
the moon, and live there, in your mind!'

‘Hmm yes, imagination is very important in science,'

Grandma Ruth agreed vaguely. But she snorted with impatience, blowing smoke through her nose. ‘Before you imagine anything Callisto, you need to have a framework—you need to see a bit of the world before you make up the rest.
Look at the shape of this thing—how do astronomers see the stars?'

‘With a telescope,' I said dully.

‘Yes!' crowed Ruth, and she began to peel back the velcro flaps of the canvas. I was trying not to cry. My throat ached. It was so constricted I couldn't utter a sound. The canvas fell to the ground like a magic cloak, revealing the silver and glass elegance of the telescope.

‘This will be your eye,' said Grandma Ruth in heroic tones. ‘Keep your eye on the Universe, Callisto!'

The beauty of the instrument worked its way past my tears and loosened my throat. I walked all around the telescope, as Grandma Ruth explained about the lenses and mirrors, how they were arranged to gather light. She showed me how to scrunch up one eye and look through the lens with the other. A light-gatherer, this instrument was, and I had it in my very own back garden.

A
T EIGHT O'CLOCK
, Ruth announced that it was Jupiter Night, and the family came out to investigate. They stood around in the grass, Mum holding sleepy Jeremy, Dad with his hands in his pockets.

‘Jupiter is the largest of the planets in our solar system,' Grandma told me. ‘And tonight it is in position for us to see it.' I moved toward the telescope, but she clicked her tongue. ‘Listen first, and you'll know what you're looking at.'

‘Well don't go on too long, then,' my mother said, looking at Jeremy who whimpered in his sleep.

Ruth ignored her. ‘So,' she breathed expansively, ‘did you know, Callisto, that Jupiter is a giant world, the brightest planet after Venus?'

‘What is it made of?' I asked, proud of my question.

‘Green cheese and puppy dogs' tails,' grinned Dad, and tweaked my ear. I scowled at him.

‘On the contrary, the core of Jupiter,' replied Ruth loudly, ‘is composed of melted rock, and is even hotter than Earth's core. There's a shell of ice around the core and over that an atmosphere of hydrogen that is thousands of kilometres thick.'

My father began to pull up weeds. He hummed the Star Trek theme under his breath. Soon a bundle of limp dandelions lay in his arms, so he excused himself and wandered off to Mum's compost heap.

I began to finger the telescope. It was growing harder to wait.

‘Through the telescope,' Ruth went on, ‘you may see the poison clouds around Jupiter—they look like bands of different colours. They rush around at vast speeds—and on one band there is the Great Red Spot.' Ruth brought out this last phrase with relish, like a chocolate she'd been saving for me.

‘What's that?' I asked. I imagined a giant leak of blood, unstoppable.

‘A storm that has been raging for over three hundred years,' Mum answered quickly, before Grandma could open her mouth.

‘Is that true?' I looked from my mother to my grandmother in amazement.

Caroline gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Well, I am the encyclopedia's daughter, am I not?'

Ruth smiled happily. ‘Yes, the Great Red Spot was discovered by Galileo, the first man to point his telescope in its direction. Thanks to him we've been able to see the storm raging ever since.'

I stored that piece of information away. It made me shudder, it was fascinating and horrifying, the idea of a storm continuing forever. All that lashing rage and fury,
with no horizon of forgiveness at the end. I looked at my mother, who was looking at
her
mother, and wondered why Caroline had never told me anything about this.

‘Before the telescope was invented, no one knew that Jupiter was the mightiest of the planets,' Grandma Ruth went on. ‘But it is named after the most powerful of the Roman gods. And you know, Jupiter's gravity is so strong,' here Ruth lowered her voice to a whisper, so that I had to stop fingering the telescope and lean closer, ‘it keeps other members of the solar system
captive
!'

‘Oh Mother, for heaven's sake!' cried Caroline. ‘Why do you have to put it that way?'

‘Who's captured?' I asked.

‘Asteroids, dark matter, moons—your namesake, of course!'

‘What?'

Ruth looked at Caroline, her eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘There are sixteen known moons that spin around Jupiter.' Ruth turned to me. ‘Four of these you'll be able to see with the telescope and one of them is called—
Callisto
!' Ruth stood back to gaze at me, like a painter who stands back to see the effect of his last brushstroke.

‘You knew that, silly,' said Mum, shifting Jeremy to the other shoulder. ‘I told you about it years ago, but you were never very interested.'

I blushed red. I didn't want Grandma Ruth to think I was so out of tune with the universe, such a dull stone. Once I'd seen my name in a science book at school, but it had seemed like a coincidence, nothing to do with me. When I'd asked Mum about it, I remembered her saying dismissively, ‘I don't know, I heard the name from your grandma, and I thought it sounded musical, like calypso, or castanets—something with a Spanish flavour, exotic.' And she'd gone on preparing the table for her ladies' meeting.

I looked at Mum. She was staring fixedly at an insect
crawling on her shoe. It was my mother who wasn't interested, I thought, not me, and I kicked at a paving stone with venom.

‘The Jovian moons are ice palaces,' Grandma Ruth said into the silence. ‘Callisto has a twin, called Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system. You'll see it up there—it is even bigger than the planets Mercury and Pluto.'

I heard a sharp intake of breath. My mother was standing rigid, like a tree struck by lightning. She moaned, and the movement of her mouth was terrible against the stillness of her body. The sound woke Jeremy, and as if in sympathy, he began to wail. She clutched him tightly and stumbled away, moving over the dark grass like someone who couldn't see the path.

Grandma Ruth shook her head. She turned, as if to go after her, but then stopped.

‘What,
what
?' I cried. ‘What's up with Mum?'

Ruth looked at me. Then she looked back at the telescope. She took another cigarette out of the pack. ‘So, do you want to have a look at the universe? Come on,' she said briskly, ‘stand here and close that eye, that's right. No, don't hold on there, it's fragile.'

I hesitated. My pulse was still hammering with the sight of Mum, her face all broken up like a shipwreck. I kept remembering her mouth. I had never seen her like that. She was like a stranger. But Grandma Ruth was
tsking
impatiently, and the lure of the universe was strong.

At first I could see nothing, just a black surface, opaque, like canvas. I felt a leap of alarm—
Oh, I can't even see through a telescope, I'll have to make it up for Grandma!
But then Ruth twisted the lens position slightly. Suddenly a round silver ball came into view. It had four smaller beads strung around it like a perfect necklace. I felt shock spread like a current through my body.

I was seeing it, another world spinning in the universe.
I could hardly breathe. I turned for a second to gasp at Grandma. She laughed, and gave me a thumbs-up sign. I swung back again. The telescope was a living nerve attached to my eye, and I was travelling along it, into space. Those shining spheres, fixed in motion, were like balls thrown up by a juggler. They were so near, I could almost catch them.

To see pictures of something in a book, and then see the real thing in the world is heart-stopping. It's like your favourite wish jumping out in front of you. I shifted my weight onto the other leg. I had a cramp. It didn't matter.

To think that this other world had always been there, orbiting, storming, fighting with meteors while I went to school and played with Jeremy and ate my sandwiches. All those huge transforming things were going on and I never knew. The sky was suddenly different, inhabited by ice palaces and beads of silver.

As I gazed, I was aware of the blades of grass on my anklebones, and the smell of Grandma Ruth's cigarette on the breeze. But these things were muffled, more like memories of things familiar.

‘Can you see the four moons?' Grandma's voice was eager. ‘The Galilean moons? Now you can imagine how Galileo felt when he discovered them!'

I managed to nod, and keep my eye glued to the lens at the same time. Grandma's voice was like background music for the theatre I was watching.

‘Galileo, you know, made his own telescope. At that time everyone believed the earth stood still while all the stars and planets travelled around it. Galileo expected to prove everyone wrong.' Grandma chuckled. She obviously liked that bit. ‘Just think, Cally—until then everyone believed that our moon was the only one. But when Galileo focused on Jupiter, what did he see? Three strange dots of light in line with it!'

Galileo, I thought, couldn't have been more excited than me. Even though four centuries separated us, I felt intimately close to him, as if our souls lay side by side, somewhere up there between the moons.

‘Well, soon he had proof that the dots were moving around Jupiter. He could prove that some objects in the sky don't circle the earth. Would the telescope lie?'

‘No!' I cried.

‘No!' echoed Grandma Ruth.

‘So what happened to Galileo then?'

‘He was put in jail like a common criminal.' Grandma spat out the words angrily. She began to pace around the garden, as if she were still trying to work off the rage caused by the infamy of human beings four hundred years ago.

‘But no one could destroy the moons of Jupiter,' she concluded when she came back.

‘Tell me about them,' I said. ‘Tell me about
mine
.'

Grandma Ruth smiled. ‘Callisto—it comes from the Greek, Kallisto, or
kallistos
, meaning the most beautiful.'

I made a face, but I looked at Callisto again.

‘Gosh, I'm everywhere!' I said. I hugged the knowledge to myself. Somehow, having my name up in the sky, in that precious place, strengthened my claim there, making it more complete. My name was like the flag that mountaineers put up on the summit after a long climb. It made the language of the universe seem peculiarly my own.

Then another thought fell like a shadow. ‘Did Mum know all this?'

At that moment, the porch door slammed like a pistol shot, and Caroline came out of the house. We heard only her footsteps in the darkness, and then she emerged so suddenly, her face swimming up to us out of the deep, that we both jumped back, startled.

‘Jeremy's asleep,' she said. Her mouth was calm now, and composed. ‘You'd better be getting to bed, Cally.'

Grandma Ruth looked at her watch. ‘Heavens, it's ten o'clock. I didn't know it was so late.' She ruffled my hair. ‘You're all right then, Caroline?' Ruth's voice was soft and she reached out to touch my mother's hand.

Caroline folded her arms. ‘Fine,' she said.

I heard the full stop that came after it. Mum still hovered there, tense, like a rubber band stretched tight. The night was silent, out in the clipped, smooth garden, but I could feel the swarm of words buzzing in my mother's head. She seemed electric with feelings. She was staring at Grandma Ruth, but she said to me, ‘So, did you thank Grandma for her present, Cally? Do you think you will enjoy exploring the skies?'

‘Yes, Mum. Thank you, Grandma, it was lovely, it was all … great.'

‘Good,' Caroline said briskly. ‘Your grandmother always spent more time looking at the sky than she did at me. It's a very nice telescope, Cally, top of the range, so make sure you look after it.' And she nodded at her mother as impersonally as if she were saluting the postman, and went back inside.

I
STARED AT
the swinging porch door.

‘She's just tired,' said Ruth, peering through the mulberry leaves at the moon. ‘You get very emotional when you're sleep-deprived, you know. Jeremy wakes her up all through the night. Caroline will have to stop breast-feeding soon.'

‘Why?'

‘He's not getting enough milk, in my opinion. And if he's hungry, he won't sleep well. The bottle would make things more regular. This family needs a bit more order in it.' She sighed, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘But try telling any of that to Caroline …'

I glanced back at the wire door. It had stopped swinging,
but I could feel a presence, ‘a spirit', as Caroline would say, that was as strong as my mother's real flesh. Clinging in the gaps of the wire was another Caroline, almost speechless, hardly there. I could just catch her outline if I joined the dots of her words, rough in the soft night air.

Ruth and I looked back at the moon. It was round and full tonight, a circle of silver. Grandma breathed out with pleasure, and smiled. ‘The Greek philosopher Plato said that the sphere is the most perfect geometric shape because it contains the largest possible volume within a given surface area.'