The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We already know its redshift — so it’s not in the cluster.’ Maggie doesn’t reply, but Jeanette has to carry on. ‘It must be an interloper.’

  They’re both silent now. Neither of them needs to say the obvious; that the interloper can only appear to be connected to the other galaxy through being superimposed on it in this two dimensional image. But according to its redshift that’s impossible; the standard Big Bang model says that a galaxy’s redshift is a measure of its distance. Two objects with different redshifts are at different distances and they can’t be physically connected in the way that these galaxies appear to be.

  ‘The link looks real, though.’

  ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

  They smile at each other. They don’t know what it means, but it is unexpected, and therefore interesting. Not many unexpected events happen in their work; usually they do observations for which they have already predicted the results. This is the drawback to working in a well-established science where the main theory is sketched out and all they are doing is colouring in the details.

  Maggie pats the empty chair next to her, and Jeanette sits down.

  ‘We should repeat the observation, make sure it’s not just a cosmic ray or a random fluctuation,’ says Maggie.

  ‘Make it longer this time, we can probably go to twenty minutes before the centre gets saturated.’

  The next twenty minutes take a long time. They don’t normally repeat their observations. She thinks what a privilege it is to be able to wind back the clock and reconstruct a splinter of reality. You can’t do this in everyday life, can’t just say to a soon to be ex-lover, ‘Hold on, rewind, let’s go back to that bit where we still had hope and try again, differently this time.’

  The repeat observation is finished and they hold their breath as the image is read out onto the screen. The link between the galaxies is still there and Maggie lets out a whoosh of air. The telescope operator carries on reading his newspaper, it’s not his job to get excited about these things.

  They spend the rest of the night analysing the images in more detail, their heads bent together in front of the screen. Maggie adds the images together and cleans them of contamination, while Jeanette does a quick calculation of the size of the link. Here, on this image, it’s just thirty pixels long, but out there it’s larger than the entire Milky Way. She squints at it from the side of the screen; perhaps it holds a secret, like Holbein’s anamorphic skull. It’s really very faint.

  ‘Take a look at this,’ Maggie says, a few minutes later. She’s done something to the data so the link looks brighter, and more obvious.

  ‘You’ve smoothed it?’ asks Jeanette.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘That’s kind of cheating.’ Now the pixels have been smeared over each other so each one shows some of the light from its neighbours.

  ‘Makes it look good, though?’ Maggie is grinning.

  ‘Why don’t we write a separate paper about this?’ Jeanette asks, ‘We could probably do it really quickly.’

  ‘Does it warrant an entire paper?’

  ‘Maggie!’ Jeanette laughs incredulously. ‘This could be amazing! This could be evidence against the entire Big Bang theory!’

  Maggie sits up, ‘You’re not serious! One tenuous link between two galaxies at different redshifts? What about all the evidence in favour? We’re not dismissing that.’

  ‘I’m not saying one thing or the other. But it’s a major observation. Let’s publish it and see what happens.’

  ‘You actually think people are going to look at this and question — everything?’

  Jeanette hesitates. ‘Yeah, maybe. That’s what we do. Or what we should do. Ask questions.’

  She’s asked questions all her life, and now she’s an adult the questions get answered. Or at least listened to.

  When she leaves the observatory a few days later, travelling down the tightly curled mountain roads back to bird song and rain, the realisation of what they want to publish begins to dawn on her. Are they seriously suggesting that they have evidence that the Big Bang model is wrong? They’ll have to be cautious. As long as they stick to the actual data and avoid drawing any conclusions it should be ok.

  But it’s not until she’s on the plane going home, listening to the comforting hum of the engines, that she’s able to see the sky clearly again.

  One summer, when Jeanette is ten years old, her home explodes. An intense flash of light slams through all the rooms, sucking up the air and noise and colour, making everything brilliantly white, impeccably silent.

  When the light dies down, the house is empty. Oh sure, all the furniture’s in the same place; the sofa where her mother sits in the afternoons, staring at air. The dining table and chairs where Jeanette and her parents eat without speaking, trying not to look at the empty fourth chair.

  She wants to make it sound like it used to. When she gets home from school, she bangs the garden gate, flings open the front door, shouts, ‘Hello,’ and stamps down the hallway into the living room.

  ‘Keep the noise down,’ her mother whispers from a huddle on the sofa.

  Kate used to get up early each morning and go to the pool for swimming practice. When she was very young she learnt how to tuck all her hair into her tight blue swimming cap, so that not a single wisp blurred her outline as she swam in perfect straight lines up and down the length of the pool. Occasionally Jeanette came and watched her. She liked the way Kate could push the water aside so efficiently. She always swam as though she was going somewhere, and needed to get there fast.

  The other kids made a mess of the water, they splashed too much and churned it up, and the coach shouted at them. He didn’t often shout at Kate, but walked along the side of the pool as she swam, keeping pace with her.

  Sitting there watching Kate felt like sitting in a clean, hard box. All the kids had neat, tidy bodies. The coach was small and compact, with a bullet head and legs tightly corded with veins. Jeanette felt out of place as she lolled against the seat, surreptitiously sucking sweets and picking scabs on her knees, trying to remember when Kate had started swimming. There had always been swimming. Kate had swum for ever.

  One night Jeanette hides in her bedroom to get away from her parents. She opens the window to get a better view of the dark-covered land outside. The sky’s clear and she sees the stars; they feel like some sort of blessing. She tilts her face up to them for so long that she notices they’re moving. They’re not keeping pace with the moon, which is arcing high overhead; they have their own smaller motion. As they swing around she wants to grab onto a chain of them and be carried away from here. Fascinated, she watches a single faint star in the apple tree, its light just visible as it moves through the tips of the branches.

  That night, she learns that it takes a star an hour to travel the width of the tree. An hour of not having to sit with her parents downstairs. An hour of feeling the air brush her face and cool the hot, sad, congested mess inside her.

  At first, just after the explosion, everything seems shocking and clear, as if the world has been replaced by another one overnight. One that superficially looks the same, but which is a copy of the real one, like some sort of TV programme where actors try to be proper people, but you can tell they’re faking it. When Kate returns, the world will be real again. But Kate doesn’t return. Not after her funeral when Jeanette goes back to school and her parents to work, and they all have to pretend everything is normal. Kate could return now, Jeanette thinks, and it wouldn’t be too difficult. She might be cross about the funeral, or maybe she would find it funny. Jeanette doesn’t know.

  Then more time goes by, and the actors get better at acting, or perhaps Jeanette forgets what’s real and what’s fake. But every now and then, she realises that the world isn’t just pretend, it’s wrong. And still she doesn’t know why it happened. Kate’s gone but she doesn’t know why. Nobody will talk about it. There is just this heavy silence everywhere.
r />   One evening as they’re eating dinner she asks her parents, ‘Why did it happen?’

  They don’t say anything, but her mother gives a sort of shiver as if she’s cold, although it’s quite warm in the house.

  So she tries again. ‘What happened to Kate?’

  Finally her father speaks. ‘She drowned.’

  Drowned? But she was swimming. She was the best swimmer. The best one in the team, in the whole county. There was talk of Olympic trials. How can you drown if you know how to swim?

  ‘But how could she drown? She didn’t just suddenly stop swimming, did she?’ She fiddles with her fork while she waits for them to answer, before she realises that they’re not going to.

  ‘How did it happen?’ She taps the fork on her plate to break the silence. It doesn’t make sense. Why won’t they tell her what really happened?

  ‘Jeanette.’ They refuse to tell her any more so she gives up and lets the silence take over. That night she leaves them in the living room with the television blaring, and she goes upstairs to her room and leans against the window staring at the sky.

  The swimming suits are still all around the house, like the discarded skins of dead animals. They lie curled over the radiators, and crumpled in the corners of the kitchen. Jeanette finds one of them in her own laundry basket, but she’s afraid to touch it. When she does finally pick it up, it seems too light, as if it could float up into the sky. She’s not sure what to do with it, so she scrunches it up and stuffs it under her mattress. She doesn’t want to throw it away; Kate may need it. The swimming suits have a sour smell which Jeanette never really noticed before, but now it seems ominous, like a siren going off in her head.

  Kate died.

  She died because she drowned.

  No, she didn’t die. She swam down a river until she found a hill with a cave hidden in it. In the cave there’s a bed draped in satin and she’s asleep on this bed, with a knight standing guard over her.

  Perhaps she likes being asleep. But Jeanette doubts that. Kate was good at getting up early for swimming practice. So perhaps she’s lying on the bed just pretending to be asleep, but really she has one eye open and she’s staring at the knight, wondering why he’s wearing armour and why she’s lying on satin sheets.

  Perhaps she got ill and died in the swimming pool. But she hadn’t been ill that morning. Jeanette can’t remember the last morning, which means that it must have been a normal one; Kate crashing down the stairs at six o’clock, her father waiting by the front door, eyes half shut with tiredness.

  Satin sheets would be very slippery. You’d slither off the bed. Velvet is better, Kate used to have a dark blue velvet hair ribbon. It’s probably still in her room. Jeanette thinks about going to get the hair ribbon but stays where she is, gazing up at the sky and wondering what her parents know, and what they won’t tell her, about Kate’s death.

  Jeanette’s father spends a lot of time gardening. He used to give Jeanette and Kate things he found out there, handing them over as if they were priceless gifts. Rosehips or daisies, or, once, a tiny pale blue eggshell. One side of it was shattered, but if you turned it over you could pretend it was still whole. They argued over who could keep it and Kate won. It’s still in her room.

  There are lots of other things in her room, but Jeanette doesn’t want them anymore. She wanted them when Kate was still here, but now that Kate has gone, something’s happened to the things. It makes her feel heavy inside, just thinking about the bird’s egg, or the oyster shells, or the swan feather. It makes her feel tired.

  There’s other stuff too, to do with Kate’s swimming. All the medals and cups and certificates and curled up yellowy newspaper clippings used to be crowded together on the sideboard in the dining room. There wasn’t enough space for all of it, not after Kate started winning really big cups with wide handles.

  One morning Jeanette’s the first to get up. This happens quite a lot, now that her father doesn’t have to take Kate to her training session. There’s no shape, no centre to their days without Kate’s swimming to keep them in order.

  But if nobody else is around, it’s easier to pretend that things are normal, and that her mum is asleep and Kate and her dad are at the pool. This is what she’s used to. On mornings like this, the lump inside her melts, just a bit, and she can breathe easier. But when she takes her breakfast into the dining room, all the stuff has gone, and the surface of the sideboard is flat and bare. There are faint rings in the dust, like ripples on a swimming pool. Jeanette blows on the dust, making it rise into the air. The rings are even fainter now.

  Just one photo of Kate is left. A school photo; Kate in her uniform grinning at the camera. Jeanette can’t work out how far away it is, even though she knows it’s on the sideboard. Space seems to have buckled so that it’s simultaneously in the middle of the room, hovering under the lightbulb, and also at the edge, near the garden. She can’t look at it any more, the lack of perspective makes her feel dizzy.

  Jeanette eats her breakfast in the kitchen to avoid the photo. In the evening, when they’re in the dining room, she’s aware of the photo lying in the dust. The three of them eating in silence and a photo of the fourth. Is this what happens when you die? Do you turn into an image?

  One day, even the photo is gone and the sideboard is polished clean. The photo is never seen again, but that doesn’t help the silent words.

  They get ready to move house. This was planned when Kate was still here. In fact the reason for moving house was to live nearer to the big Olympic-sized swimming pool, so Kate didn’t have to spend so much time travelling to her training sessions. Now, there is no point in moving house, but it happens anyway.

  Before they move they have to pack up everything in the old house. It’s like the end of an elaborate game, where all the pieces are scattered all over the board and they have to be put back into the box. Except that this game seems to consist of the pieces getting thrown away.

  Jeanette’s mother kneels on the kitchen floor and crams a crumpled cushion cover into an already overflowing cardboard box marked ‘RUBBISH’ in neat black pen on each side. Around her are heaped piles of stained tea towels, a crooked tower of saucepans missing their lids, a stack of postcards so faded that it’s impossible to tell where they come from, a wind chime with its strings tangled together, and a dog collar.

  ‘Whose is this?’ Jeanette picks up the dog collar. It’s old and worn, almost disintegrated in places.

  ‘When I was a kid, we had a dog. A lassie dog.’

  ‘And you’ve kept its collar all this time?’

  ‘It’s going now.’ And the collar gets squashed into the box.

  The door to Kate’s room stays shut during all the packing activity and Jeanette is afraid to open it. She doesn’t know what she’s more afraid of, seeing a bare room, or seeing all her sister’s belongings still endlessly waiting for her sister. The patience of things, the way they will just sit and wait like dumb animals, makes her want to cry.

  Finally, the day before they move, she plucks up the courage to creak open the door. The room is empty. In fact, there’s an astonishing absence of things. In every other part of the house, the packing cases are piled up in the middle of rooms and surrounded by abandoned tat and rubbish, like a beach at low tide covered in strands of seaweed and chunks of old plastic. Here, there is nothing. Not even any boxes. Just indentations on the carpet showing where the furniture was. Jeanette goes over to where the bed should have been and lies down on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. Perhaps there are clues up there. But the ceiling is bland white. She doesn’t remember ever looking at it before. All she can do is take great bites of the air, gulping it down inside her. There’s nothing else of Kate that she can take with her.

  She’s in her sister’s bedroom, trying to tidy up. But something’s wrong. The schoolbooks piled on the desk aren’t covered in dust, the way they should be by now after all these years. The handwriting on the sheets of paper is still crisp and black, not
faded.

  She picks up the waste paper basket and tries to shake the contents into a bin bag, but the pieces of crumpled paper, old tissues and pencil shavings refuse to move. They disobey the force of gravity and stay poised in mid air, the way her sister used to hover above the diving board before plunging into the pool.

  The swimming suit on the radiator is still wet, but the water isn’t running down the grooves of the radiator and soaking into the carpet the way it used to.

  Her sister’s bedroom is the only place in the universe which defies entropy and time. Which stays locked in the past.

  When Jeanette arrives home the observing trip, like every other observing trip she has been on, seems slightly unreal. Those journeys up mountains into air stretched out thin feel as if they take place in another life. Perhaps they’re the scientific equivalent of going to a monastery. Perhaps the only way of understanding the universe is to retreat from normal life.

  The first day back at work is always an ordeal. Her sleep patterns are disturbed from the combination of jet-lag and the topsy-turvidom of working at night. But she hasn’t forgotten how much she longed for the grit of Edinburgh, the kindness of its dirt and noise, the whole multiplicity of life here, as opposed to the tedious singularity of purpose at the observatory in Chile.

  Fortunately, there is one aspect of this trip that is different to the others. When she returns, the tapes of data collected during the trip are piled on her desk waiting to be analysed. Sometimes they wait for a long time, because it’s never as much fun looking at data afterwards as it was at the telescope. The crucial sense of discovery has dissipated on the journey home. But this trip has been different. They actually have something interesting to look at.

  She puts the tape in the computer and locates the image of the connected galaxies. The link between them is very small and much fainter than she remembers. Her heart sinks, but she carries on.