Free Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg Page A

over to dinner. Beth. They were huddled up on the sofa, deep in conversation for most of the night. Beth cried over coffee. Mum patted her hand. At around midnight I came out of my room to speak to Mum. She shooed me away, with a finger on her lips. ‘But I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘I’ve just had a terrible dream. I saw a ghost.’ I thought that would get her in. The friend began to cry again. My mother looked at me in a scathing way, and said ‘Go back to bed, Cally. I’ll come in later.’ But she never did.
    That Friday night, it was very hard saying no to Tim (borrowers
never
say no). But I just couldn’t face going out. I said I was coming down with bronchitis again. I was so anxious anyway, it was quite easy to sound breathless. He looked annoyed, and some of the light cooled in his eyes. I almost changed my mind then. It was terrible to see him look away from me, with that disapproving frown. I knew he was wondering who else he could take to the dance. His mind was flicking over girls at our school. He was standing there in front of me, but he was absent. Far away. I couldn’t bear it. I felt like I was dying. I grabbed his hand and told him I’d see him on Saturday night, and weren’t his parents going out again? I managed to smile provocatively, my lips promising a banquet of sensual delights.
    He kissed me then and I saw that his eyes were lit up and warm. I was so relieved. I felt like someone who’d had a reprieve from the gallows.
    I DIDN’T KNOW what my mother thought about sex. I didn’t know what she thought about a lot of things, I suppose. I have always collected most of my information about life from books. Like my grandma, I’ve usually borrowed twelve (the maximum amount) each fortnight from the library.I learnt about the mechanics of sex from a book when I was seven. In the photos I saw toads and birds and rabbits humping. Around that time my uncle Dan came down to visit us from up north. He told us they were having a terrible time there with tropical pests—they multiply like nobody’s business. Take the case of the cane toad, he said, spreading his hands. He gave a wicked grin and told us how every night, around eleven o’clock, he’d take his bow and arrow out into the garden to hunt cane toads. ‘Jackpot!’ he’d yell, if he got two cane toads mating. They’d be stuck together like glue, and the arrow would go straight through them. ‘Two for the price of one!’
    My mother made a ghastly face at this story and changed the subject. Mating always seemed to me such a dangerous thing to do after that. Especially if you were a cane toad.
    I didn’t know what my mother thought about sex. She wasn’t my primary source of information. When I was ten, uncle Dan’s daughters came down to stay for a week. They were a lot older than me, and at night I would listen to them talking about boys. Lisa, the blonde one, had let a boy ‘do’ it to her. She said it was ‘beautiful’, and he’d loved her so much that he’d kissed her all night. In the morning her lips were all puffed up to twice the size.
    Alone in the shadows, I shuddered. I didn’t want to have puffy lips. It seemed that this sex business always had some scary consequence. But I rather liked the thought of being held all night. Like someone’s precious jewel.
    The first time I made love with Tim was like that. He held me tightly, kissing every inch of my skin, as if he wanted to lap me up. We were slow like treacle, our tongues tasting each other, gentle as kittens. Minutes were drugged, we flowed into some other time, into each other.
    It wasn’t like that at all, actually. I make up a lot of things, lying on my bed. It was all over in about five minutes. It was a terrible disappointment, if you really wantto know. I felt empty afterwards, like I did on that Christmas Day without the