Borrowed Light (14 page)

I rang back. I said into the phone, ‘Have mercy, I don't know why the world is ending. I know I should be grateful. I don't know why I feel so bad, I don't know.'

He said we'd talk about it when he got home. I was asleep by then. I have to sleep whenever I can. It builds up my milk.

22 May

STERILISE BOTTLES AND UTENSILS—use Milton

Instructions on fridge. Mother says cold sterilisation is best. She said I'd be sure to knock over the saucepan and bum someone if I used the boiling method. I didn't say anything. Maybe she's right She went out and bought the Milton sterilising unit Showed me how to do it. She bought the milk formula too. Said the baby was starving.

Maybe she's right about that too. But he still doesn't sleep. He still cries and fusses. I know he's not happy. Even with cold sterilisation and fake milk. The doctors say there's nothing wrong with him.

When you measure the dried milk formula out, you have to get it exactly right. Mother said to use a knife to scrape the level flat on the spoon.

I wish I could just lie in bed with the baby sleeping on my
chest. I wouldn't ever get up, only to wee and get glasses of milk. We'd lie together and make a tent with the sheets. But when I do that, just for a while, and take the phone off the hook, I can't help seeing the little spirals of dust whirl up as a breeze blows in, and the egg I didn't have for breakfast cementing on the plate. I worry that the utensils won't be sterilised in time, and the formula won't be made up. If I don't look after things, who will?

Tuesday

Fed 6 a.m.—160 ml

Baby doesn't ever drink enough. I have to walk around jiggling him in my arms, showing him the fans, switching the lights on and off while I put the teat in his mouth. This morning I couldn't stand the cold empty house, so I took him to a cafe. It was only 6.30 a.m! ‘Andiamo', the cafe's called. David and I used to go there before we were married. We used to order cappucinos and read the Saturday papers. Sometimes we'd just talk.

‘Andiamo, bambino!' I said in a cheerful way. I do quite a good Italian accent. The baby looked at me as if I were mad, and he laughed. God it was good to see him laugh. I chattered away to him in big loud voice, doing my brilliant Italian accent, and he soaked up my silliness like a little sponge.

Outside, it was so early that the street lights were still on. The café was full of cigar smoke. Only taxi drivers and truckles were there, munching rolls and sipping scalding coffee. It was freezing. The air was blue in the café and I knew this wasn't the healthiest place for a baby. But it was so good to see smiling faces—come in, get out of the cold, what a cute little baby, how old is he, look at him smile—and I ordered a cappucino and then I thought I'd lash out (didn't I deserve it?) and have raisin toast as well.

I jiggled the baby on my knee as I drank my coffee. I thought of Mother saying I'd knock over the scalding water, and I held
the cup far from me. A truckie with a thick blue jumper came over and tickled the baby under the chin. He said, ‘Can I hold him a minute?' My heart leapt in alarm, but his face was so friendly, with these two big lines around his mouth like commas when he smiled, so I said yes. He held the baby tenderly and talked to him as if he'd known him all his life and threw him up in the air a couple of times just as if he were a sturdy soccer ball. Then he gave him back to me and winked. ‘He's still in one piece,' he said. ‘I've got two of them at home—twins. Haven't had a decent meal since they were born.'

I felt sad when he paid his bill and walked out of the café. He knew about things. He seemed to miss his babies. I supposed he worked long hours. He probably drove his truck at night, as well as the day. It made me think about David. I wondered if he missed his baby too, when he went on his trips. I wondered if he missed me.

O
N
T
UESDAY MORNING I
dreamt about the herb cure. In my dream the leaves of the herb were huge, shooting out from the trunk like a giant's fingers. I didn't know how I was going to swallow them. I woke up with a bitter taste in my mouth.

I didn't really understand how the plant cure worked. None of Mum's books referred to it. Tim said this Jim Shepherd was at ‘the cutting edge'. Of what? I hoped that didn't mean I was going to be his guinea pig. Or frog. In Year 7 we'd cut one open in science.

I had a shower and put on my uniform. Mum called me for breakfast. Home-made muesli. As Jeremy said, you took about five hundred hours to chew your way through it. We had this kind of breakfast more often when Dad was away. He called it ‘birdseed'.

Only Jeremy would laugh. He liked the way Dad flapped his wings.

Mum had the radio on. I opened my mouth to say
something and she put her fingers to her lips. ‘Listen,' she mouthed. They were doing a story on the Aboriginal stolen children. Mum turned up the volume in the kitchen. She brought her coffee over to the table. They were playing a tape of a grandmother meeting her grown daughter for the first time.

You should have heard their voices. The daughter said when she was little she was taken to a Girls' Home. It was hundreds of miles away. She was two years old. Girls were groomed there to start work as domestic servants at fifteen. In the beginning, she kept climbing over the fence to look for her mother. After a while she didn't look any more. The silence between the women made you wait, holding your breath. The loss lay between them, a drowning substance. ‘We are strangers with the same blood,' the grandmother said. She was weeping.

A government minister came on next. ‘They're a lot of wimps,' he declared. ‘All those people saying sorry, falling about crying. They're in the crying game. We weren't responsible for those policies. We must put the past behind us.' His voice was as bland as a yellow plastic toy in the sun.

‘Did he mean Weakly Interacting Massive Particles?' I asked Mum. ‘Was he using the acronym?'

She just said ‘ssh!'. She looked annoyed. Well, if anyone was interacting weakly, I reckoned it was him.

The reporter said there was going to be a national Sorry Day. You could write ‘sorry' in a book, and give it to the Aborigines.

‘It's about understanding,' an Aboriginal man said. ‘For our people, saying sorry is simply a way of recognising another person's feelings.'

‘Sports News' came on then. There was hardly time to hear the ‘s' in feelings.

I heard Mum telling Jeremy about the stolen children when he was going to clean his teeth. She was following him
down the hallway. He said, ‘Well, I'm not saying sorry because I didn't do it.' Mum told him he sounded just like the government. Only Jeremy is five. When you're five you don't know about history, and how pain is handed down. You don't know about facing stuff before you go on to the next thing. Jeremy thinks you can just live in brackets, and events that happened in the past are all closed off, like air in a balloon when you tie the knot.

Mum came back to the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. Our fingertips met as she handed me the mug. We were both tearful. For a moment we were cocooned together in the same feeling. She stroked my hair. When the program finished, it was like coming back to earth. It had been so riveting, I'd forgotten everything else. The thought of the present, of this day, was like an alarm switching on. Tim was to pick me up at five o'clock. We were going to buy the herb cure.

It was hard to find other things to think about for ten hours.

But I managed. So did Tim. On the way, in his father's Ford Laser, I tried to tell him about the stolen children report.

‘It's a damn shame,' he said, shaking his head. But his fingers started to drum impatiently on the steering wheel. I told him about the silence—how terrible those pauses were on the radio. ‘You know, radio is noise and entertainment,' I said, ‘with no gaps for reflection. The silence was dreadful, almost shameful, like wearing only your knickers to a black-tie function. I mean, you're not performing like you're supposed to. You're being yourself instead of someone else. It was all so naked somehow. All that inexpressible feeling. I think sometimes it's the nakedness of things that people can't deal with. Why do we have to spend so much time painting over things, pretending?'

‘Never mind, you've got enough to worry about right now,' Tim said kindly, patting my knee.

So we talked about swimming training instead. Tim stopped drumming and his face lit up. The other guys who trained with him were awesome, he said.

‘Bob and José shave their legs. They're that serious, Cal. Even that tiny friction of hairs in the water can slow you down. Do you think I should?'

I nodded. ‘Maybe you could shave your head, too.'

He practically ran us off the road. ‘Are you crazy?' He says that often. He shook his long golden mane, tucking a piece behind his ear protectively. ‘I wear a cap,' he explained. That keeps it out of my eyes, and stops the friction. That's what the coach says.'

He looked so worried, I squeezed his arm. ‘You've got to keep these things in perspective,' I said.

But I knew what he meant. I worried like that about my estrogen deficiency.

The subject of hair kept us involved for the next twenty minutes. We arrived at the office in Kings Cross ten minutes early, but we went in anyway.

‘Good evening, won't you sit down?'

I was relieved to see a plump, clean-looking man of around thirty. He wore a white coat and a courteous smile. The people in the main drag of the Cross hadn't looked nearly so polite. I wondered why we had to go to a red-light district to do this thing. All the way along the street there'd been men in bow-ties and greased-down hair standing in the doorways of strip joints. They'd glared at us, flicking their cigarette butts onto the pavement like hand grenades, demanding we come in and ‘see the cutest pussies in the Southern Hemisphere'.

‘The rent is cheap,' shrugged the clean-looking man, seeing our faces. He was as bald as an egg. Tim flicked back his hair and we shared a quick smile. ‘Jim Shepherd,' the
man said, extending his hand energetically. I saw that he'd shaved his head. There was a blueish-grey shadow around his crown. I wondered if he swam. He had a small silver stud in one ear.

‘Callisto May,' I whispered.

Mr Shepherd walked over to the desk. He eased himself up onto it, and sat there cheerfully, swinging his legs. I hoped he wouldn't swing them too high and break all those little glass jars of herb cures beside him.

‘I'll just be outside, will I?' Tim said in a rush. He didn't wait for an answer. He closed the door behind him. I began to sweat all over my top lip.

‘Well, Callisto, what a far-out name you have! Where's it from? Mongolia, Poland, Tibet?'

‘Galileo,' I murmured. ‘I'm named after one of his moons.' I had a weird sinking feeling in my stomach. I wanted to go to the toilet.

‘Cool,' he nodded, looking puzzled. ‘So, how pregnant are you?'

‘Not very,' I said hopefully. I told him the date of my last period, and how sick I'd been and my obsession with parsley. I suppose I talked a lot; I do that when I'm nervous. As I talked, I looked all around the room for a plaque. There should have been some sort of certificate with Mr Shepherd's name on it, followed by some important-looking capitals. A Diploma of Something. There was only a Japanese print and a primitive wood carving of a man with huge dilated nostrils and impossible genitals. I hurriedly looked away.

Mr Shepherd sprang up off the desk, clutching one of the glass bottles in his hand. ‘So, Callisto, I don't know what Tim's told you, but I've been working with herbs for years, well, many months anyway, and I've had some remarkable successes. You can feel safe with me. Arthritis, schizophrenia, back pain—you name it, I've dealt with it. I've been all around the world. Next year I'm going to the
States to continue my research.' He held up the glass triumphantly. ‘This particular mixture stimulates female hormones, and brings on a period. I can't guarantee it will stop the pregnancy, but you never know.'

‘I'm willing to try anything,' I said eagerly. I smiled at him nicely, to show I wasn't disappointed.

He poured the herbs into a small bowl, and began grinding them up with a pestle. He put a lot of muscle into it, humming as he pounded. He obviously loved his work. I closed my eyes, picturing my mother making her mixtures in the kitchen. I wondered why I'd come all the way to the Cross to see a deluded stranger without a diploma, when I had one at home.

When he'd finished grinding, he poured some of the fine powder into a glass and filled it with water from the sink. ‘Drink that now,' he advised, ‘and I'll give you a packet for tomorrow. It's best to take it less than twelve hours after the first dose.'

I took a sip. The grains stuck to the roof of my mouth. It was like eating sand. They hadn't dissolved at all. I started to gag.

‘Drink it all in one gulp,' Mr Shepherd said. ‘It's easier that way.'

I smiled at him, to show that I was grateful, even if my body was heaving.

‘Do you have any orange juice, or Pepsi?' I ventured.

He frowned.

‘Oh, it doesn't matter,' I said quickly, ‘it was just to disguise the taste, I'll swallow it now, it'll be fine.' I opened my throat and poured the revolting stuff down.

‘Thank you,' I said, and smiled again. I could feel the olive green sand gritting between my teeth. But I didn't like to ask for more water. In fact, I didn't want to open my mouth again, in case I was sick all over his diploma-less office.

‘Good luck!' he called as I went out.

I made an enthusiastic noise, and waggled my eyebrows at him to show goodwill.