Borrowed Light by Anna Fienberg Page A

felt for days. I noticed that if I was really firm with it, the nausea seemed to fade now, too. Perhaps the whole thing was in my mind.
    I snapped the light on with new energy. Lying on the bedside table was Grandma’s letter from Venice. I hadn’t even opened it. I shook my head at myself, and smiled indulgently. All this worry over something that was only in my mind.
    I plumped up the pillows, settling back for a good read.
    I loved getting Grandma’s letters. The stamp showed one of those delicate Renaissance men with the long nose and chiselled jaw. The wavy black postal lines ran through the stamp, smudging it slightly. Pity, I’d have liked it perfect.
    â€˜Venice is
magnifico
, as always,’ Grandma Ruth wrote. ‘But I don’t have much time to wander the streets. There’s so much going on at the conference, and so many hotheads! The Moscow gang are still arguing that the neutrino has mass, and the Swiss deny it. Look up Enrico Fermi, Callisto, and we’ll talk about it when I get back. Oh, the Italians—they know their stars, and their coffee! Every time there’s an interval, you can’t resist one of those short blacks—tepid, so’s you can taste it, bitter and sweet at the same time. I sip litres of the stuff, watching the gondolasdrift along the canals, then race back for the next lecture. Heaven on earth, Cal!’
    God, it would have been great to be there with Grandma. I could listen to her argue, watch the caffeine and excitement shine in her face. It would be like visiting another planet.
    She was in Italy for two months, to attend
La Conferenza di Galileo
. Every five years astronomers met in Venice, the city where Galileo worked for most of his life. They discussed the latest discoveries in cosmology, and this year the theme was Dark Matter in the Universe, the name coined by the scientist, Zwicky, back in the 1930s.
    Grandma went to all the conferences, even though she was retired from the university now. She said that just because the skies no longer kept her in menthols, it didn’t mean she’d stop looking up. My grandmother arrived at the peak of her career only a few years ago. She’d been one of the astronomers who discovered thousands of previously unknown galaxies in the cloud-veiled skies of the Milky Way.
    I had already written to Ruth in Venice. My letter was probably waiting for her when she first set foot in her hotel.
    I liked writing out the address, using Galileo’s name—it was as if some of the light anointing the heads of those conference stars might rub off on me, just on contact.
    With my letter I’d included an essay I’d written in English at school. I thought she might appreciate it. We’d been asked to examine the use of the moon as a symbol in literature. I’d spent hours over it, studying the celestial facts, quotes from poetry, my own private feelings. Even though I had learned everything from my science manuals, I still preferred to see the moon as a perfect place, invulnerable and remote (like me). ‘The moon is an island of perfection,’ I wrote, ‘a silver jewel on a black sea. Nothing touches it, but the moon touches everything, here on Earth.’
    I’d been quite proud of this essay, and I’d pinned a photo of myself at the telescope to it, as well.
    I scanned Grandma’s letter. I swallowed in anticipation.
    I had to read all about the coffee and the gondolas and the Dark Matter before I saw any mention of my essay.
    â€˜Fiddle!’ wrote Grandma. ‘How can you write all this drivel about the moon, as if you’d never heard anything I said! “So remote, so self-sufficient, floating up there alone on stellar winds …” Well, that’s just romantic nonsense. The moon is not self-sufficient, nothing in our universe is. Haven’t you heard of gravity—the phenomenon of attraction between bodies? Why didn’t you put that in?