Borrowed Light (6 page)

‘No, leave them,' I called out.

‘But the moonlight will keep you awake. You've got a history test tomorrow, and you need your sleep.'

That old history test. I'd had a far more significant test today. Didn't Mum ever see anything? She always read the contents of jars at the supermarket so carefully. But that was food. When it came to her family, she was quite content to just recognise the label.

She paused at the window, her hand raised uncertainly for the curtain cord. Her hair was silver with moonlight, and she was standing so intently it was as if she were awaiting a celestial blessing. Her eyes seemed fixed on something very far away. Or perhaps she was still listening to her mantra. She could have been an object in a still life, leaving the shell of her body here for appearance's sake, while her soul flew gratefully away.

She shook herself momentarily, as if awakening from a dream. Her hand dropped from the curtain cord as if she'd forgotten why it was there. She focused back on me, and smiled. ‘Don't read too long then, Cally,' she said. It was like a nursery rhyme, that phrase, repeated over and over through my childhood. When you said the same thing often, I suppose your mouth could move on automatic, while your brain was busy thinking something else for yourself. Mothers probably perfect that technique over the years.

But as I watched her walk to the door, glancing back and blowing a kiss, I wanted to shout, ‘Look! Look at me properly! Don't you see how pale my face is? How red my eyes are? Don't you want to know why I'm so quiet?' I thought of Jeremy, and how incessant were his daily cries of ‘Look at me, look at me jump! Look at me dive! See, I can do a handstand!'

‘Well, sleep well, Cally, sweet dreams,' she murmured as she stood at the door.

I looked at the dark square of carpet between us. I was standing on the bank of a river, and my mother was on the other side. The river flowed between us, familiar, chilly, always there. My mother hovered, studying the moon shadows on the water. I tried to catch her eye, but she turned just then and went through the door. As I watched her go, I saw the river slow and ice over, just a long dead gap between us.

When Mum had gone, I thought about getting up and making hot milk. But I didn't want to joggle the anxiety, set off the alarm. Moonlight drenched the bed, blanching my toes. I wriggled them. I wished I could vanish like a dust particle into nothingness. At a certain altitude I would dissolve, just like that, as easily as sugar in black tea.

O
NE THING YOU
ought to know, if you are going to understand my family, is that Grandma is passionate about cosmology. It was her profession. Mum said it was her life. Grandma Ruth thrived on the unknown, and delighted in scientific confusion. It gave her breathing space, she said, to risk and theorise. Science gave her the tools to imagine the world. Confusion gave her the chance to prove everyone else wrong.

Grandma was a hot-shot astrophysicist at the university. Professor Ruth Cook. I always listened to Grandma Ruth. I hung on her words, like Jeremy does with his glue ear. I learnt the tiniest details about her life. Sometimes I pretended I was her. As I listened to Grandma there were blazing moments of discovery, when I understood something for the first time. It was like falling in love.

It was Grandma who told me that space is not empty. At least ninety percent of the universe consists of dark matter, and no one is sure what this matter is made of. ‘Maybe WIMPS,' said Grandma. ‘That's Weakly Interacting Massive Particles!' She said these particles tended to roam about, not sticking to atoms and molecules like the more familiar stuff of the universe. I added WIMPS to my vocabulary, and found it extremely useful in describing certain people I knew.

And it was Grandma who introduced me to the language of the universe.

T
HE TRUTH—A
s Grandma tells it—was that she was born with ‘eyes for the skies'. She was labelled from the beginning, as clearly as if she'd shot from the sky, stellar wind in her hair, plasma swirling from her feet. When she was a small baby, just a few months old, the only way to quieten her was to take her out to the garden and place her
on her back in the grass. There she would lie, motionless, silent, watching the theatre of the stars.

When she began to talk, she could say ‘moon' before she said ‘Mummy', and was more interested in experiments with gravity than in hide and seek. She never did sleep very much. Later, when she could justify her behaviour, she said that sleeping was dumb, because you missed out on the sky's best performance.

Grandma Ruth joined the library when she was very young, and was allowed to take twelve books out at a time. Soon she knew about electromagnetic forces and elliptical galaxies, she could describe the impact of meteorites and theorise about why the dinosaurs died out. She was breathless with information, and dying to use it. She couldn't wait to add herself to the map of the universe, like a new star.

At university, Ruth was not popular with other students. She wore the wrong clothes and argued with everybody. But Ruth says she didn't care. She was far more interested in the colour of Mars than the colour of lipstick. Once, when she'd been reading through breakfast and was late for uni, she raced out in her pyjama top, and when she realised, she wasn't even embarrassed. Can you imagine?

At university, Grandma Ruth irritated people terribly. She admits it with a laugh. She developed a particular sneer—the left comer of her lip rising almost to her nostril—when any of her colleagues held forth about the absolute truth of some new theory. She often quoted the astronomer, Fritz Zwicky, on the subject—he was a prickly individual, just like her. ‘Absolute beliefs are nearly always absolutely
wrong
!' she'd declare with that lift of her lip. She prided herself on her scientific flexibility.

At lunch, she usually ate her sandwich alone. But this didn't worry her, as she always had a book in her bag. Her constellation of friends sat in her heart, continually talking,
exploding, transforming hydrogen into helium and lighting up her dark.

Grandma told me once that she found the cosmos far less complicated than the human mind.

Grandma Ruth met Grandad at university. He was studying Humanities. He probably had no absolute beliefs, so he was safe. Humanities people, Grandma said, were like washing in the wind. They went wherever it blew them. She admitted to me that secretly she rather admired this flexibility. But she sneered at the way ‘they' weren't interested in facts, only feelings. Grandad said imagination was greater than knowledge. ‘Only a scientist could think of that,' Grandma retorted. She was right—the quote was from Einstein—so she had the last word.

Strangely enough, when
she
holds forth, she always expects other people to listen and believe. This is one of the things that Mum seems to find most enraging about her.

I just sit back and soak her in.

I
T WAS THE
Christmas when I was twelve years old that Grandma said the thing about space. I'd just finished unwrapping my mother's present and it had been a long process because it had been clumsily done, with too much stickytape, to make up for lack of ribbon. Under the wrapping I found a small square cardboard box. I took the lid off. It was empty.

I peered into the box. I dug my finger into the four comers, tracing the smooth flat base. A false bottom, like a drug-runner's suitcase? No, just empty space, framed.

That was when my grandmother leaned toward me and we looked together into the box.

‘That box is full, not empty,' said Grandma Ruth. ‘It's brimming with a rich, gaseous mixture of oxygen—21 per
cent,
vital
for life on Earth, my dear—and other amounts of nitrogen, argon and carbon. Without the contents of that box, we would not be here having Christmas!, She gave a great crow of triumph and took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Remember, space is mostly matter and matter is mostly space!'

It wasn't until months later that I began to understand about matter—that the atoms inside it were like galaxies, holding huge valleys of space. It was a great discovery, and I looked at ordinary old tabletops and rocks with wonder for weeks afterward.

But in that moment, at Christmas, it was hard to concentrate. There was the dreadful disappointment about the present. And yet through the fog, something penetrated. The sounds of Grandma's words were sharp and delicious—like new tangy fruits you'd love to put in your mouth. The possibilities of meaning I folded carefully away into a pleat in my mind.

There was a shift in the way I saw the world. It was as if I'd walked through a wall and come out on the other side. I was standing close to my grandmother in this new place, so near I could smell the layers of her. There were the fumes of Christmas sherry, thick as petrol, the peppermint of toothpaste, and underneath, the eternal menthol cigarettes. I saw my grandmother's quick black eyes darting like fish, and the iron-grey hair whirling out of their pins like roving electrons. In this new world my mother was very far away, a diminishing speck, almost imagined.

I was learning a new language, and I was going to make it my own.

T
HAT CHRISTMAS, GRANDMOTHER
Ruth's words gave me something else to think about, right when I needed it.

‘Oh damn it!' my mother cried when she registered the empty box. ‘Where is the ring? I put a mood ring in there for you, Cally, you know, it changes colours according to how you feel.' She'd grabbed the box from me and tipped it upside down. ‘It's a beautiful ring, it reveals your innermost feelings. Even if you have developed a hard shell—' and she stopped staring at the box and stared at my father instead, ‘it can show you and others the true state of your heart.
Damn
, it must have dropped out when I was wrapping it. It'll be here somewhere.'

I said nothing. I was thinking about my grandmother's words. The thing about space. ‘It's a paradox,' she'd said. ‘You'll find a lot of those in astronomy!' It was as if she had given me a present instead. She'd filled the box with an idea so rich it was impossible to put the lid back on.

My father sighed heavily.

The family had then gone on a search for the ring, led by my frantic mother. We picked up rugs and pushed back sofas. Beds were flung apart and cabinets as heavy as elephants were inched out from the walls. Dust fluttered up in clouds. Grandmother Ruth sneezed and her eyes streamed.

Mum, I saw, had begun to enjoy it. She had closed her eyes, and was using her mental energy to tap the secrets of the house. Her face was feverish with excitement. ‘Come on everybody! Let's look on this as a symbolic journey!' she cried, clowning, one foot balanced precariously on the windowsill and the other on the kitchen table. (As if it could possibly be there.) ‘We are looking for a ring, a mood diviner—buried under all the weight of material possessions!'

I stared at my mother. It's strange how people like her seem to feel every quiver of their own hearts as if they were earthquakes, but are deaf to anyone else's. (Unless you are a sad lady of forty and over, of course.)

‘This is ridiculous,' my father said. He detached himself from the search party, and began to wipe a thin grey coverlet of dust from the leather sofa. He sank down heavily with his paper like a ship throwing down anchor.

Just then Jeremy, who was only a few months old, slid off the cushion where someone had put him, and onto the floor. He wasn't hurt, but like a cricket on its back, he couldn't turn over. His howls were like sirens.

Dad sighed loudly. ‘Who's going to get him?' he asked, just as if the baby were a kettle screaming. ‘Go on, Cally, there's a good girl. I've just got comfortable.'

You should have seen him, sitting on that sofa. He was like a well-manicured mountain, immovable and unruffled. A baby's cries were supposed to make the milk start in a mother's breast. What should it do to fathers? I walked stonily toward Jeremy, wondering why some people
had
children.

I scooped the baby up and cuddled him into me. His cries stopped as suddenly as if a cork had been popped in his mouth. He smiled at me and dribbled enthusiastically onto my new Christmas dress. I smiled back. I breathed in the warm earthy smell of his head and promised him then, as I looked at the back of my father's newspaper, that I would teach him the Language too. He would grow up with the Universe, and the names of the planets would be as familiar to him as apples and oranges. Maybe he could become a star, one of the lucky ones who make their own light. And Grandma Ruth could help.

I looked around the room, at the wrapping paper washing up at my feet like debris at the beach, my grandmother sticking strands of steel-wool hair back into their pins, the shape of my mother's legs as she bent to look under the piano. I felt piercingly empty and full at the same time. Just like the cardboard box I still held in my hand.

A
FTER CHRISTMAS LUNCH
, when Dad and Jeremy were asleep and Mum was clearing up, Grandma Ruth led me outside into the garden. The sun was sinking behind the rooftops and power lines, and rising up in front, like an actor coming onto the stage too soon, was the moon.

‘Why does the moon shine while the sun is still in the sky?' I asked. I sat down in the grass and crossed my legs. I looked at my grandmother expectantly, hoping to hear more of the Universe. But suddenly I saw the long thin shape wrapped in black canvas, tucked behind the clothesline. It was standing on a tripod that looked to me like the claws of a giant prehistoric bird. I jumped up.

‘What is it? A rocket?' I tugged at the canvas, believing in the magic of my grandmother.

Grandma Ruth smiled. ‘Well, it's nearly as good as a rocket.' She took my hand away from the canvas. ‘Guess! Come on, Cal. How can you go to the moon and stay on the earth at the same time?'