Borrowed Light Read Online Free Page B

satellites around a new sun. Every time I told a new Tim story, the awe grew like a sudden rise in temperature. I couldn’t quite believe it. It made me glow, even if it didn’t feel real. I gave them little bits, like seeds spat out. I tried to keep all the juice to myself. I couldn’t exactly remember what Tim had said that night, but I was becoming a whiz at making it up. I remembered only looking into his eyes and seeing myself, like Venus emerging from the sea.
    I was continually nervous. It made my mouth dry, all this inventing, and I licked my lips a lot. They became chafed and an ulcer bloomed on the tip of my tongue. It’s hard kissing with an ulcer. It hurts, and you feel like a leper. But I didn’t like to say no.
    On Sundays I went to the beach with Tim and ‘the guys’. I usually wore a T-shirt over my bikini. I explained that I had a family failing. Skin cancers popped out on our backs after five minutes’ exposure to the sun.
    I sat on the beach for hours, sweltering, while the guys surfed the waves. I didn’t like to read, because I might miss one of Tim’s best ‘tubes’. He always asked me afterward if I’d been watching. When they were finished, the boys would race back over the sand, surfboards cradled under their arms like awkward pets. Tim would leap upon me, all dripping and slippery, with his cold wet lips on mine. His hips pressed into me, digging us into the sand.
    The cold of his skin was welcome, but I could hear the sniggering of his friends behind us, and I died quietly of embarrassment. Gently I’d nudge Tim off my bones, and he’d sit up and hunt around for a beer.
    José often brought his dog Tito to the beach. But he had to be careful about taking it onto the sand. There was a big sign near the toilet block with a picture of a dog and a great red slash through it. One Sunday José brought his spray can and splashed the sign with purple. When he’d finished, I told him the dog on the sign looked like an alien from Mars. ‘No Aliens on the Beach’ he wrote happily along the top. So José brought his Earth dog down to the shore.
    Tim laughed with the rest of us, but I could see that he was worried. When a lifesaver jogged up an hour later, Tim stepped in. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, ‘but my friend José here doesn’t read English. His dog came out with him from Chile.’
    â€˜Well, it’s a two-hundred-dollar fine for a dog on the beach,’ warned the lifesaver. ‘So you better tell your friend. Okay, guys,
hasta la vista
!’ He waved in a friendly way to José, and jogged back up the beach.
    â€˜
Hasta la
what?’ said José. He was angry with Tim. He’d been dying to tell the lifesaver all about alien dogs. But Tim just caught him in a headlock and they wrestled to the sand.
    Tim was different like that. He drank till he was legless, he surfed in electrical storms and acted wild at parties. But he liked things legal and tidy. His parents were quite strict. I had never met them, but he told me many stories of his mother and her Hygiene Household. It sounded as if she scrubbed and vacuumed and dusted and washed for eight hours a day. She sat down to dinner with a Wettex in her hand. She was washing up before the family had finished dessert. Visitors had to sit on special covers laid carefully over the sofa, so as not to soil the brocade.
    â€˜Does she ask guests if they’re toilet trained before they come in?’ I only wanted to make him laugh. But he didn’t. He frowned at me, and his lips clamped together.
    â€˜She’s not that bad. She’s just house-proud. My father says the best thing about the day is coming home to a tidy house. So I suppose she makes him pretty happy.’
    After that I didn’t say another word of criticism about Tim’s family, even if he was railing against them. I suppose I wouldn’t like it if Tim started going