Borrowed Light (23 page)

I knew I should have worn my other lipstick. ‘This is just my usual look,' I said. I started to babble. ‘It's called
cool
—you train your face to look immobile in the face of catastrophe and you appear years older than you are. With this black lipstick, you can achieve the vampire effect with accelerated decay. At least that's what my father says.'

‘Can you reverse the look when you're thirty?'

‘Ah, that's the question. Will we all still be alive at thirty, chatting on benches in clean air, eating food that won't give us salmonella?'

There was silence for a while, and it wasn't comfortable. It was what you might call pregnant.

‘Anyway,' I blurted into the gap, ‘what about you? What do you need to be forgiven for? You know, you said that
thing at the Observatory last night, something about the water and the quiet there, that it was forgiving.'

‘Oh, that was just something to say.'

‘Oh.'

Silence. I watched the watermelon seeds bobbing.

Romance is so much more satisfactory in your head. People say the right thing at the right time when your eyes are closed. Why is real life such an anxious sort of anticlimax?

‘Well, that's not really true,' Richard said, lurching into the quiet. ‘It was a good place to come that time.'

‘What time?'

‘Oh, years ago. The Observatory was like a sanctuary then, a place of prayer.'

‘You mean like a monastery?'

Richard smiled. ‘Not quite. I wasn't training to be a priest or anything, but I guess I did need to confess my sins.' He took a deep breath. ‘Okay, if I show you mine, will you show me yours?'

‘Maybe. I can't commit myself. I'm sure my sins are a million times worse than yours.'

‘Well, I'll risk it.'

‘That's what stars do,' I nodded at him. ‘See, I had you pegged from the start. You can't expect an old moon like me to take nuclear risks. It's just not in our nature.'

‘God, you're a smartass,' said Richard. ‘Well, when I was sixteen, I had a really shitty year. It's like everything suddenly went speeding downhill.'

‘Me too!'

‘Yeah?'

‘Yeah.'

He waited, but that was all. He looked down at a crust of avocado sandwich. ‘I spent most of that year crying,' he said.

‘Really?' I don't know if I was more surprised at his
honesty or his tears. ‘You mean at school and everything? That must have been a social nightmare for you. I mean, boys don't, do they.' God, that sounded lame.

‘I had some sort of breakdown, I suppose. In the beginning people just kept telling me not to be so heavy. “Lighten up, Richo!” they'd say—you know, I was filled with this dread about the world ending, and I'd tell people about global warming and tidal waves, or the new breed of killer mosquito. I used to search for news items that would contribute to end-of-the world evidence. I remember Kerry O'Brien on the “7.30 Report” saying after an item on lead poisoning, “Well, there's another thing to worry about.” I had such a rush of fellow feeling. I wanted to ring him up at the ABC and commiserate. As far as I could see, every day was another nail in the earth's coffin. And nobody else understood. Only Kerry and I. The world just kept denying all the evidence, and saying, “Lighten up, Richo!”'

‘That must have been awful. I wish I'd known you then.'

‘You did meet me.' Richard gave a lopsided smile. ‘Once, I came with Dad to your school. I remember because you were so pretty and I was such a mess. You took one glance and turned back to Dad. You never looked at me again. In that moment I could see those little wires in your brain making the decision. “Nerd,” they said. “Absolute dork.”

‘I didn't!' But even as I protested the blush crept over my cheeks. There was a faint image crystallising of a tall darkhaired boy all twisty with shyness. ‘You never said!'

‘Well, whatever. Mum kept telling me that I wasn't so badlooking, any girl would be pleased to go out with me. I had all this potential under my skin, etc. etc. I told her the only thing I had under my skin was pimple pus. She said, never mind, girls have always worried far more about the way they look than boys—that's what feminists are fighting, the tyranny of this perfect female body image. Blah, blah. It's hard to believe all that when girls like you swan around,
flicking back your shiny hair and showing your long legs. You look like a wet dream. You'll never know how scary you lot are.'

‘Boys still rate girls one to ten for looks,' I put in, ‘as if that's the only thing that's important.'

‘I don't. Anyway, this is from my point of view, right, so do you want to hear it or not? Girls the same age won't look at you if there's someone there who's been through the pimple phase and come out the other side—with their P plates and the family car. You feel like a nothing compared with them, just a damp spot on a sunny day. Especially if you have this crying thing.'

‘But why were you crying?'

‘Well.' Richard's face was working. ‘Well. I suppose it was some sort of reaction.'

‘To what?'

Richard sighed. ‘I stole some money at school. Quite a lot of money.'

‘Oh.' I couldn't imagine it. Richard, with that assured voice and searching eyes. He was looking down at the table. There was a big white splotch of seagull poo near his elbow. I wondered if I should tell him. I decided not to. There'd obviously been enough shit happening to him already.

‘See, there were some soccer guys who were looking for team members. I'd been practising like crazy. I would have done anything to be friends with them. Nauseating, isn't it?' Richard glanced up at me. His eyes were a green flash. ‘They were older, you see. One of them had a motor bike. They went out drinking at night. They said I couldn't go round with them unless I had money to buy beer. They knew my dad was a teacher, and that was really uncool. Christ, they were like pirates, Cally—they got girls, they had tattoos, they didn't give a shit. I stole the money from the canteen. One of them, Wacko, was with me. He ran, but I got caught. I didn't even have a chance to buy one beer.

‘When they caught me, I blurted about Wacko. I couldn't help it—I was petrified. The soccer gang never forgot it. I got suspended from school. Mum and Dad were so miserable, it was like someone just died. After two weeks I was allowed back in, but it was even worse than at home. At school, everyone knew. Not just that I was a thief, but I was a coward. I had no friends. Before I'd been an invisible pimply nerd with no friends. Now I stuck out like dogs' balls. Everyone knew who I was, and what I was. It's terrible to lose your anonymity like that. There's nowhere to hide. No way out.'

‘You must have been so lonely.' I didn't know what to say.

‘I remember when the crying thing started. I was going for a walk, just a week after it happened. I'd been suspended, and I had all this time at home. My parents were both working, and in the living room there was a big clock. It ticked so loudly, beating out the minutes, like some sort of sentence in purgatory. The curtains were always pulled shut because we had leather sofas given to us by Grandad. Sunlight is bad for leather. It was so gloomy. There was a lone shaft of light that came in around ten. It was like God's voice or something. It made a diamond on the carpet. Everything else outside it was dead. I used to think that if I dared step inside it, I'd be forgiven. I went for a walk in the bush, but the track seemed to go branching on forever. This panic overtook me and I began to run. But the more I ran, the longer the track grew. Everything looked unfamiliar. It was like some horror cartoon, a surrealist painting. I expected to see watches melting over tree trunks. I could never get to the end.'

Richard was gazing out at the sea, but I knew he wasn't seeing the waves or the girls in bikinis, or the kids digging moats. He was blind inside his own head. I touched his arm.

‘The panic never really went away—not for months. I took some tablets, I can't remember what they were, and they
muffled the fear a bit, it was more like a sound far away. You know the whirr of a lawnmower in the next street? There was just this terrible sadness, as if I'd lost something I could never get back. I couldn't name it, so I couldn't get it back.

‘I had no control over my face. No control over the crying. It was terrible. The headmaster came into our class one day and told everyone that I was having a bad time and to be kind to me. It was so humiliating, and they still said, “Don't be heavy, Richo.” I remember having these obsessive thoughts about water. I kept trying to calculate how much water I was shedding. I was so heavy and so weak—just like H
₂
0. There was nothing solid.'

I nodded. ‘You know those rollers they use to flatten new roads? Their wheels are filled with water because that's the heaviest thing there is. Amazing, isn't it, that something so transparent can be so heavy.'

‘Yeah, amazing.'

‘The wheels press down on the tarred surface until it is smooth and flat. Did you know that a roller filled with water weighs fourteen tonnes? That's as heavy as five thousand watermelons.'

‘The wheels are called drums.'

‘I know that. So anyway, how did you get over it? Did you just dry up one day, like the Dead Sea?'

Richard's gaze flew back to the table, and me. He focused again, and gave a half-smile. ‘No, there were no sudden miracles—I just had to get through the week.' His eyes narrowed, and I looked away. My heart started to thump. When he finished his story, he'd expect me to tell mine. I was dying to, and dying not to.

Richard rubbed his hand over his face. ‘There were small things. Dad stopped being angry and started to listen. I told him about the water and the sadness. He sent me to a counsellor and she suggested I go to another school. Life
gradually improved. But I still don't know if it was
all
because of the money thing. That kind of sadness hardly ever has just one cause, do you think? I mean, we're not all identical little robots wired up the same way, getting sad or happy if you press button B.'

‘Or a bunch of chemicals, fulfilling our end of an equation. E=mc
²
.'

‘That's right. I mean, another kid might just have said, ‘Hey, sorry,' and got on with his life. He might even have used that kind of notoriety to become a hero—you know, a wicked guy with a past.'

‘A pirate.'

‘A blackguard with a heart of gold.'

‘A free radical!'

‘He could have gone on, deeper and deeper into a life of crime. Just think, he could have blown up school garbage bins, snatched little kids' lunches—'

‘That's hardly heroic.'

‘No.'

I threw a crust onto the ground for the seagulls. ‘It's all in the way you see things, isn't it. Some people act tough like that to be cool—you know, defiant. I remember Jeremy asked me once, “Do you see out of your eyes like I see out of mine?”

‘Good question. I often wondered that as a kid. I wondered if my father saw the same shade of red that I did. I had a thing about red. I wanted him to love it as much as I did. Fire engines and sunsets and red T-shirts and Jonathan apples. I suppose no one sees anything exactly the same.'

‘No, it's a scary thought. You sort of want to be like other people, don't you. You don't want to be an island, floating out there on your own.'

‘Mm.'

We watched a seagull pecking at a crust, its black eyes darting nervously.

Richard laughed suddenly. ‘I remember, I spent the whole of Year Five trying to talk with an Irish accent.'

‘Why?'

‘Well, there was this new boy, Liam, who'd come from Ireland, and he picked me to be his friend. He sort of claimed me, like a brother. It was exciting to have such an exotic best friend, and I didn't want to disappoint him for a minute. We'd sit together at lunch, and Liam used to eat really quickly, so I did too. I had constant stomach aches. I was always hungry, but I didn't want him to find any other friends while I finished my sandwich. He was often homesick, and he used to talk about his friends back home. He'd do their voices, and in this game we had—throwing spit balls at an enemy gang—he wanted me to be Patrick, his friend in Dublin. I had to yell out Irish curses as we threw them. Patrick was very fiery, Liam said. I used to practise the accent every night in front of the mirror, and soon I had it just right. I talked like that at breakfast, and at the shops, and when people asked me my name, I said “Patrick”. People in the street used to think Liam and I were brothers fresh off the boat from Ireland.'

‘You wanted to be just like him.'

‘Yeah, I would have shaved my head too, if he had.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘Oh, he went back to Dublin.'

‘That must have been terrible.'

‘Yes, it was. My father threatened to send me after him. But in a strange way, I felt more relaxed after he'd gone. I actually slept better. I wasn't up for hours learning Irish poems. It really had been such a strain trying to be someone else.'

Richard leaned against me. His mouth was only an inch
away from my hair. ‘What I didn't know was, you don't have to be the same as someone else, to be close.'

‘There's your gap thing again. Reaching out across the abyss!'

‘It's
your
gap thing, Ms May. I'm only picking up your theme. Why do you hold yourself so far away?'

His eyes were darker at this angle, forest green. I noticed for the first time that they turned up at the comers, foxlike. Perhaps he would pounce. He looked ferocious, fervent. There was this sort of hum between us, like a live telegraph line. The anticipation was delicious, excruciating. I couldn't stand it. I sort of groaned and he pulled my head toward him and our lips crushed together. He opened my mouth and his warm breath spilled into me and I could taste him on my tongue. I wanted to open further, I wanted to slide open like a cave in a rock, a mossy, moist cave, filled with him.