Gravity Well

by Melanie Joosten

  Lotte remembered going to visit her father at work when she was young. A day home sick from school, perhaps? The office he shared with four others was cluttered with poster tubes and stacks of paper. There were filing cabinets with skinny drawers where a lot of the maps were kept, and whiteboards with lists of projects. Most intriguing had been her father’s desk, set at a slant and with a chair so high he’d had to lift her off the ground to put her on it. There were rulers attached to the edges of the desk; they could be moved up and down, meeting at right angles across the paper. He had showed her the project he was working on at the time, something to do with a new gold mine that was going to be tunnelled under the town. The different maps were drawn on sheets of plastic — water pipes, electricity, roads, telephone cables, gas pipes — and when they were all layered on top of each other, they looked like a pile of pick-up sticks.

  His desk now would be completely different. She doubted he even drew by hand any more; it would all be done on computers. New suburb divisions, communications cabling, stormwater drains. He probably even used Google Maps as his starting point, his job slowly devoured, like so many others, by the rise of the internet.

  Just like your mother, hey?

  Her father took a mouthful of steak, raising his eyebrows in a warning she could read clearly, despite it never having been aimed her way before. A look that she’d only ever seen him give her mother. Be nice.

  Well, I guess we’d all know, wouldn’t we? After all, we all knew Mum. Lotte took a sip of wine, relishing the antagonism even as she told herself to tone it down. And here we all are without her. Isn’t life strange?

  I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at, Lotte, said her Dad, giving Alison a reassuring smile. And it was that, more than anything, that made Lotte snap.

  She’s not even been gone four years, and here you are, ready to replace her. It’s insulting. To her, to me. And to Alison.

  The words came so easily; she slammed them down on the table.

  This isn’t about me, said Alison. She had put down her cutlery, wiped her mouth with a napkin.

  It is, though, said Lotte. She felt a reckless surge of protection toward Alison, while simultaneously wanting to hurt her.

  You’ve walked in here a stranger to all of this. It’s only fair you know how things really are. My mother is still very much a part of our lives, and you should be aware of that.

  Lotte turned to her dad.

  I mean, how is Alison supposed to feel when the house is still full of Mum’s things? Doesn’t that say something? There are things here she had before she even met you.

  Or you. His reply was sharp.

  I grew up in this house; it’s my childhood home. This house is full of my memories.

  But it’s not full of you, is it, Lotte? You’ve come back here, what, twice in four years? You couldn’t care less.

  He held her gaze, a challenge. I think you should leave.

  You’re kicking me out of my own house?

  You don’t live here.

  Lotte could see him reach out for Alison’s leg, but she was sitting too far away and he had to retreat.

  But Alison will be living here, won’t she? When you get married? You might have to get rid of some of Mum’s things then. Or will you just sell, move somewhere else? Have you even considered how I might feel about that?

  That’s none of your business.

  He stood up, the chair clattering behind him on the deck.

  I think you’ve said enough, Lotte.

  I might go home, said Alison. She stood as well, not looking at either of them, her hands smoothing her hair.

  No, you don’t have to leave.

  Even as he stretched out for her hand, Alison pulled away.

  I’d rather go.

  No, Lotte’s leaving.

  But with a little shake of her head, Alison was through the sliding door in seconds, a terrorised rabbit fleeing for safety, father and daughter watching as she scooped her handbag off the bench and disappeared down the hallway.

  Look what you’ve done.

  Lotte stared at the salad on her plate, the lettuce slick and brilliant green, a single white disc of radish like a full moon. Everything from her father’s garden; she hadn’t even known he liked gardening.

  You can do better than Alison. You deserve better. You can’t go from someone like Mum to … to someone like that.

  You barely knew your mother, he said, sitting back down. You’ve got this idea of her that’s not real. You were her child, so she treated you like a child. You don’t know what she was really like.

  We were close. Closer than …

  Than we were? Perhaps. He shrugged his shoulders. But that hardly matters now, does it?

  So that’s it. You just forget Mum and move on to an entirely new life?

  It’s not about forgetting.

  He picked up his cutlery as though the conversation was finished. But then he put down his knife and fork, his hands in his lap.

  Do you remember the way she could switch on and off? Her interest, her intensity? Don’t you remember the times she used to ignore you?

  The silences in the car after being picked up from school; her mother leaving the house, not mentioning where she was going or when she’d be back, even when Lotte was really too young to be left alone. The fact that her mother could never remember a single one of Lotte’s friends’ names, asking them to introduce themselves again and again over the years, much to Lotte’s embarrassment.

  It wasn’t personal, she said. She was scatty like that.

  She was selective.

  He began scraping the unfinished meals onto a single plate.

  She knew herself, said Lotte. She knew what she wanted.

  He laughed at this, shaking his head in open astonishment. You really didn’t know her at all. She had no idea what she wanted. No idea at all. Yet we all had to sit back and watch her figure it out.

  Lotte felt something shift inside of her at his words.

  She wanted a career, she said. You know she wanted to be a scientist, not a science teacher. Why do you think she did all of that volunteering with the astronomy club, all those nights at the observatory giving talks to tourists?

  He didn’t answer for a moment, stacking the plates.

  Is that where you think she was?

  Of course that’s where she was. What would you know? You’d just be in your study every night, doing whatever it was you do with your time. Drawing your stupid maps. She wanted a career, a proper one. She wanted to be an astronomer. But you went and got her pregnant, and that’s what held her back.

  And now you’re living out her dreams, is that it?

  He stood up, picking up the dishes.

  There’s nothing wrong with wanting more. You always wanted to punish her for that. Why couldn’t you support her instead of holding her back?

  Well, I guess it’s too late for that, he said, and went inside.

  She needed him to be contrite, defeated. But all she could see was how alive he was, how real. The muscles flexing across his calves, the weight of his step sounding out on the floorboards. It wasn’t fair, that he was the one to survive.

  She dreamt she was on a space shuttle, cramped and folded into the tiny space of a hull. The shuttle seemed to stretch to accommodate her each time she moved, then contracted slowly, forcing her to tuck her arms tightly beneath her until her hands went numb and she woke feeling she was tethered to the bed, heavier than a body had any right to be. On Jupiter, her body would weigh two and a half times its usual weight — her muscles wouldn’t know how to move her limbs, her heart would quickly tire. Not for the first time, she noted that a hangover is simply the assertion of gravity. The blood draining from your brain, because your heart finds it too difficult to pump. Your vision narrowing; your ribcage too hard to lift.
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  The sun was blocked by the blinds, but still light squeezed in around the edges and flaunted itself about the room. She felt her stomach rise up to meet her rib cage and swallowed rapidly. She didn’t want to face her father, not just yet. Memories of last night circled her consciousness, and she batted them away. She needed a glass of water.

  The benches of the kitchen were clean; the outdoor table had been completely cleared. A pineapple sat near the stove. It hadn’t been there yesterday. She took a knife from the second drawer, a chopping board from behind the stove top, instinctively knowing her way around the kitchen. Saliva pooled in her mouth as she cut the base off the pineapple, the sweet smell of it making her gag, so that she had to grab for a glass, drink down a mouthful of water. She sliced a round, cutting off its skin and notching out the eyes. He must have bought the pineapple this morning. For her? Or had he simply forgotten to put it in the fridge? Vin said it was a tradition, to have a pineapple in the house if you were expecting guests. He’d bought one the time her parents had stayed with them in Canberra, planting it in the middle of the table like a portly overseer and slicing it up at dinner, not caring that it didn’t go with the chocolate mousse.

  Her father and Alison had gone to the beach. That’s what the note said. Port Fairy, a long way down the coast, and they’d be there the rest of the week until New Year’s Day. You’re welcome to stay at the house, or to join us, but I didn’t want to wake you. It was polite necessity that had him including the invitation, she was sure: she wasn’t going to turn up on his holiday, nor would he want her there. Lotte even felt a rush of relief to see Alison’s name there, to know that she hadn’t been run off completely.

  She thought about going back to bed. She’d slept in her old bedroom, but it could have been anyone’s, her teenage belongings long gone. There was an exercise bike in the corner, and a vacuum cleaner. An old couch was pushed up against the wardrobe, piled with boxes. Lotte lifted the flap of one and skeins of wool sprang free. Purple and white, the strands twisted like wildberry ice-cream. She recognised the jumper her mother had been knitting back then, and idly thought about finishing it off before realising that she couldn’t. She had no idea how to read a pattern, and she dropped so many stitches that her mum had always fixed the holey mess for her when she reached the end of a row.

  Sipping her coffee, she wandered through the house. All the decorations — the wall hangings, the vases, the bookends — were her mother’s. Four years on, and you still couldn’t tell he lived there, or anything about him except that he was tidy. She realised then that there were no photographs in the house. It was this, not the tidiness of the house, that really marked its difference. Her mother had been a great one for memories: the fridge covered with photographs, more of them framed and crowded onto dressers and bookshelves. Lotte walked through each room of the house, looking. Not a single photograph anywhere. Of anyone. He must have put them all away.

  She hesitated before entering her father’s bedroom. The wardrobe was empty on what had been her mother’s side, the white shelves bare. Lotte was just about to let the wardrobe door close when she saw, on her father’s side, a huddle of perfume bottles on one of the shelves, behind his folded jumpers. She picked one up, sniffed, and was immediately taken back to her mother’s embrace. It was a childhood smell, triggering the recollection of one moment when Lotte had so completely captured her mother’s attention that she was almost breathless with the anticipated disappointment of losing it. She could understand why he kept these.

  It had been the school holidays: grey rain drizzling, the whole sky made of cloud, and no shadow to tell the time of day. Lotte had created a cubby house beneath the dining table — blankets for walls; chairs and the clotheshorse put into service as awnings. At nine years old she was too old for this kind of play, she knew, and she had left her dolls on the shelf of her room (though she was still worried they might resent her for it). She had a set of cards, each one decorated with a different type of dog and their defining characteristics and personality traits, and she was categorising them in an attempt to find the one she wanted most, and then make a case for her parents to buy it for her. Her mother had delivered Lotte’s lunchtime sandwiches to her, sliding them in under one of the blankets without comment. Thank you, Mum, Lotte had written on the note she delivered back, and beneath it a grid listing her five favourite types of dogs, with ticks that showed they met all the necessary requirements. Friendly; quiet; short hair; can be trained; cute. Something in this note must have amused her mother, because her face appeared, light flooding the hideaway.

  I see you’ve been busy. Can I come in?

  Yes.

  But even as she wriggled over into a corner, making space for her mother, Lotte had been unsure how to proceed. Delighted by Helen’s unexpected presence, she was already dreading the moment she would leave.

  So you’ve been doing your research on dogs?

  I want to make sure I pick the best one.

  And then what?

  And then we can get one. Maybe.

  Maybe we can, her mother said. What else do you do in here? It’s pretty dark.

  I have a torch. Lotte handed it over to her mother, who flipped it on, holding it beneath her own face.

  Do I look scary? Do you tell ghost stories?

  Sometimes.

  Her mother lay down on her back, and Lotte did the same. She could smell her mum’s perfume, and thought it strange. It was her going-out smell; she rarely wore it around the house. The torchlight danced across the underside of the dining table.

  If this was the sun, it would rise over here and set over there, her mum said.

  The light obediently traversed the wood.

  Then where does it go?

  Around the other side of the world, so they can have day time. And we have night time.

  So it keeps going round and round every day?

  No, the Earth goes round the Sun.

  Lotte kept quiet, not wanting to get it wrong.

  Remember I taught you the planets? They all go around the Sun. It stays still.

  Why don’t they crash?

  They have orbits. Like a track to follow. They can’t move off the track; they can only go forwards. Hold this. Her mother handed Lotte the torch. Point it up, she said.

  Lotte shone it at the underside of the table and watched as her mother took a yellow crayon and drew a circle, scribbling to fill it in with colour.

  Using a different colour each time, she drew in all of the planets — purple Venus, red Mars, blue Saturn with orange rings.

  Each one goes around the Sun, all in the same direction but at different speeds. Mercury’s really fast, and it’s closest to the Sun, so it has the quickest years. Jupiter is really big and it moves slowly, but spins super fast. So fast that it bulges in the middle. A year there takes twelve of our years, but a day is only ten hours long.

  She drew the planets’ orbits in white, looping in egg shapes about the sun. It reminded Lotte of the relay teams on sports days.

  Do they pass each other?

  Well, yes. But they’re too far apart. It would take maybe twenty years for us to fly to Pluto. That’s why we don’t really know what it’s like yet.

  Do they line up?

  They must, her mum said. Though I don’t know how often.

  She thought for a while. Maybe every thousand years?

  For the first time, Lotte had suspected that there were things in the universe that even her mother didn’t know.

  All these years later, Lotte knew the answer herself. Putting the perfume bottle back in the wardrobe, she went into the living room. She pulled out one of the dining chairs from the table, and then another. It was probably no longer there; it looked like the table had been varnished since then. But she crouched, knees cracking with the effort and tried to see. There was colour, smudges of it at least, and she lay he
rself down on the floor, shuffled in beneath the table like a mechanic under a car, the blood rushing at her temples and momentarily blacking out her vision. There they were — the crayon planets as vivid as the day her mother had drawn them. And then she laughed out loud: she had forgotten her own contribution to the diagram, added only when her mother had tired of instruction and left Lotte once again to her own devices. In the centre of the drawing, the sun was sporting black sunglasses and a devilish grin, and the entire universe had been hemmed in by a border of pink and orange petalled flowers, every one of them wearing sunnies.

  It wasn’t every thousand years, she wanted to tell her mum now. There was less chance than one in a billion of the planets lining up. The inner six planets align in the same quadrant once or twice a century, but, because of each planet’s differing right ascension, they will never be all in a row like a school project diorama. It was near impossible, but nothing was ever completely impossible. One chance in a trillion billion million, perhaps?

  6

  EVE

  AUGUST 2015

  Unzipping the door of her tent, Eve’s eyes seek out the feathered treetops reaching for the lightening sky. The moon has long since dipped below the horizon, while Venus has stepped into her role as morning star. The rain has stopped hours before; by now, Len is no doubt snoring in his bed, his concern for her safety forgotten. In the pre-dawn everything holds still, letting the water sink and settle. Time to look for fairies.

  Eve walks through the campsite and crosses the highway. The dunes are banked high, waves calmly sloshing forth and retreating as she slides and slips her way past where the sand has been pockmarked by rain. The sea has followed the moon, pulling back from its morning high — a house-proud matron sweeping the sand clean in her wake. No street lamps or houselights are visible from here. It is only a small beach, a cove really, where summer holidaymakers are discouraged from swimming by the absence of a surf club or even a patrolled stretch of sand: families trudge around the headland for that, or drive back into Lorne. Back when Eve was still part of a family, that’s what they had done. Tom watching from the beach as Eve floated beyond the breakers, her pregnancy seemingly put on hold as the weight of Mina was dismissed by the gentle swell of the sea. It was Tom who’d first brought her here to this beach. The summer before Mina was born: a year after Lotte had left.