The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  ‘I know, but look at it. It looks real.’ She doesn’t really have to say this. He hasn’t come up for air yet.

  ‘You’re planning to publish this?’ He finally twists round to face her and she’s surprised to see he’s smiling.

  ‘Umm, yes. Probably. I still need to run a few more tests. Double check the calibration.’ She’s got what she wanted, he’s interested, but for some reason this makes her nervous.

  ‘Of course. Nothing hasty now,’ he murmurs, and looks back at the galaxies. ‘Would you be the first author on the paper?’

  Her mind does frantic calculations. ‘I don’t know. Nothing’s been discussed.’

  ‘Could help you.’ His voice is even quieter now, and she has to lean forward to hear him as he continues. ‘Could be good for your career. Even if it’s wrong.’

  Later that night, she wonders if she heard him properly, if he did actually say that. In one way he’s right. Most scientific papers are wrong at some level. They’re superseded by more accurate papers with better quality data or more detailed models. This degree of wrongness is how the subject works, how things progress, how people learn. But what she and Maggie are considering is a spectacular amount of potential wrongness. They’re not proposing an incremental change to an accepted model. They’re proposing blowing it out of the water. And what’s more, they haven’t actually got anything else to put in its place. Could this really help her? She lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking, until morning.

  Jeanette is eating lunch with Richard and the other post-docs in a corner of the canteen but she’s not really paying attention to them arguing about football, she’s still thinking about the connected galaxies. One of them sighs; the Death Star is approaching them.

  Jeanette watches as he slowly makes his way up the centre of the room, tray clamped in his hands, his gaze sweeping over the staff and students. Finally he reaches their table. As he sits down, he accidentally knocks his bowl of soup which spills onto the table. But he doesn’t make any move to clean up the steaming mess.

  ‘Why does heat flow from a hot body to a cold one?’

  This is why they dread eating lunch with him. Yesterday he asked them what the best course of action should be if someone were trapped in a free falling lift about to hit the ground. Should one jump up in the air just before the moment of impact? If so, why.

  Today, Richard is the first to try and answer. ‘It’s the most likely thing to happen. It would be very unlikely for the hot body to get hotter and the cold body to get colder.’ Jeanette just sits and waits. She knows Richard will get into knots. He always does this, always makes an attempt to answer the Death Star, and fails. She wishes he’d learn to keep quiet, but his justification is that it’s better to have a go.

  The Death Star turns his gaze onto Richard. ‘Why.’ He can say ‘Why’ as if he’s prodding you along a tightrope, each question pushing you further and further into thin air.

  Richard retreats into analogy. ‘Well it’s like a deck of cards. It’s much more likely for the cards to be randomly shuffled, than in order. That’s equivalent to a low state of entropy.’ He bows his head at that point, as if trying to look at those imaginary cards.

  Silence. The Death Star looks round the table. ‘Jeanette? Can you help him out? Explain some basic physics to him?’

  The tiny but audible emphasis on the word ‘basic’ is another reason why they hate him. He pits them against each other, humiliates them in public. She prods the remains of her mashed potato, heaps it up into a wall on her plate, and starts to tell Richard about the second law of thermodynamics, how to calculate the likelihood of disorder. After she’s finished, Death Star clears his throat.

  ‘An illuminating explanation, Jeanette.’ As usual, it’s impossible to tell if the old codger’s being sarcastic or not. ‘And shall I put you down for a seminar in a few weeks?’

  She’s puzzled. ‘I haven’t got anything new to talk about,’ she says automatically.

  ‘Oh, come, come. No need for false modesty here. You may have something immensely exciting.’

  The others are staring at her now. Richard’s mouth is slightly open. She feels a bit sick. ‘It’s really not ready.’

  ‘What you showed me yesterday looked absolutely fascinating.’ The Death Star is very slowly collecting up all their dirty dishes onto his tray, assembling a precarious tower of greasy plates.

  ‘So you do have something.’ Richard still looks vaguely cross about the second law of thermodynamics. But it’s not her fault.

  ‘Well…’ Perhaps it would be quite helpful to talk it over with the people at the Observatory, and get a sense of their reaction before launching it wider. ‘Ok.’ She’s aware she’s avoided replying to Richard. The Death Star nods at her before abandoning the dirty dishes and shuffling away.

  As she gets up to leave, she notices some of the lecturers gathered around the coffee machine looking at a piece of paper.

  ‘Good news,’ Jon shouts over at her.

  It’s an advert for a new lectureship. The university has been dithering about creating this post for some time, but now apparently it’s going ahead. She breathes out and tries not to smile with relief. She must have a good chance, surely? Then Richard appears next to her.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘I knew this was going to happen. The Death Star told me yesterday.’

  She tries not to wince. Typical of him to imply that he gets access to restricted information. Why didn’t the Death Star tell her about the lectureship too? Why didn’t he tell all of them at lunch just now?

  ‘Who do you think is going to apply for it?’ Richard asks her.

  She says she doesn’t know, but that doesn’t stop him. He talks for a long time about the other potential rivals for the job, and quantifies the possibility that each of them will get it. She shuts her eyes, trying to block out the dull sound. If she actually gets this job she will have to listen to this sort of conversation all the time. She will even have to speak like this herself.

  ‘Richard,’ she says. He stops and looks at her, so she continues, ‘What would you do if you weren’t doing this?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t bother thinking about that.’ He laughs abruptly and leaves the room.

  A week later she’s avoiding the canteen and the other post-docs, eating her chips in peace outside, when Jon appears from his lab and ambles over.

  ‘Apparently you’re a contender,’ he says to her, without any preamble.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For the lectureship. The Death Star was in the lab this morning and he said something about your fascinating data.’ He leans against the stone wall and gets out his sandwiches. He’s always organised enough to bring his own lunch, he never has to rely on the slop from the canteen. Perhaps Mrs. Jon makes his lunches, and Jeanette has a momentary vision of a woman peacefully cutting sandwiches into neat squares. But she’s never met Jon’s wife, the only evidence that she even exists is a thin gold wedding ring.

  ‘Why is he so interested in it?’

  Jon pauses between mouthfuls. ‘Because it’s controversial. High profile.’

  ‘But it’s probably wrong. It can’t really be right.’

  Jon laughs. ‘Doesn’t matter. It’ll get loads of publicity, the research council will love it.’

  Back in her office, she stares again at the apparent link between the galaxies, wanting to reach out and touch it to see if it’s real or an artefact, and knowing that there are never any easy images in astronomy. It’s always a struggle at the limit of what can be done. People initially disbelieved Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons, partly because they had no tradition of looking at the sky for external tests of ideas. And when they did look, his telescope was of such poor quality that it was difficult to distinguish the moons from the crowd of ghosts generated by the distorting glass.

  She goes back to her analysis of the data and makes a map of the image which she displays on top of it, clear black lines delineate her calculate
d shapes of the galaxies and her estimate of the umbilical link between them. Clean contours overlaid on the grey blanket of reality. She deletes the grey and sits there contemplating the map. It almost pleases her more than the real image. She turns to look outside and instead of trees, cars, people, or buildings, imagines a neat world of thin black lines.

  Paula and Becca are in the pub, sitting at the usual little round table. Everything in this image is crisp and clear; she can see the buttons on Becca’s shirt, the lipstick mark on Paula’s wine glass where her mouth has pressed against it.

  They’re talking to each other before they both slowly, simultaneously, turn to face her and they fall silent. They seem to be waiting for her to say, or do, something.

  She knows they are looking at her but she can’t see their eyes, because their faces are pixellated. No features. Just a handful of smooth blank squares. It reminds her of CCTV footage of crimes. But are they victims or perpetrators?

  The lack of information is appalling.

  The new house sits on a hill overlooking the rest of the town. One night, when Jeanette is in her room avoiding her parents, she looks out at the sky and sees the moon low down on the horizon. She has never seen it so low before, in the old house it must have been hidden by other buildings nearby.

  Floating just above the land, like a balloon, the moon is huge and it glows fiery orange. But as it rises in the sky, it becomes paler and smaller. She watches it for over an hour, witnessing its transformation into the ordinary moon.

  It’s winter. At night, Orion is in the sky. He’s always low down on the horizon, because he’s hunting, hiding from the animals in case they see him and run away. Sometimes when she should be asleep, Jeanette watches him, as he creeps across the sky from East to West.

  If she looks at the sky for long enough, she can find the pole star. At first it’s anonymous; but if you watch and wait, you can find it. It’s the one star that doesn’t curl around the sky as the Earth rotates through the night. It looks quite ordinary, but it is the steadiest thing.

  On some nights a fox sits in the garden, and stares back at her.

  In the new house there is a room that was meant for Kate, but now it has no purpose. On the first day, she glances at this empty room from the doorway, but doesn’t go inside. What’s the point? When she gets up the next morning and negotiates her way past towers of cardboard boxes in the hallway, the door to the room is shut.

  The hallway is decorated, the woodwork around the door to the room painted white. But the door itself is left alone.

  A few months after they move, Jeanette realises that she’s never been in this room. She stands outside and stares at the door. What’s behind it? It seems impossible that there is just a room similar to her own. Something has happened to the room in her head, it has expanded and also shrunk. It can’t contain her. She walks away.

  Her mother spends weeks unpacking the boxes and arranging their belongings. But a lot of things seem to have disappeared. The new house has smooth, bare walls with no pictures or photos. None of the drawings brought home from school by Jeanette and Kate that used to cover the old kitchen walls are on display any more. Jeanette isn’t even allowed to spread her school books all over the dining table, but has to take them upstairs to her bedroom.

  ‘Your own desk! How nice!’ exclaim her parents. She doesn’t mind. She’d rather be up here than downstairs with them. But it is odd living in this sort of house. Even things like the towels that Kate used for swimming, that smelt like comforting old dogs, have gone. The rug with little smiling suns woven into it has gone. The shower curtain with goldfishes printed on it has gone. Her parents buy lots of new towels and rugs and sheets and curtains, but all these things seem to have the colour left out of them. Her mother calls them ‘neutral’.

  These new things match her parents. Her mother wears beige clothes and doesn’t bother with lipstick anymore. She still has a few of her old lipsticks, these haven’t been thrown away in the move, but they rattle around in the bathroom cabinet like forgotten dolls.

  One day Jeanette takes out one of these lipsticks and, feeling sorry for it, opens it and dabs it on her mouth. The colour is startling, like creamy blood. She scrubs her lips with toilet paper and flushes the colour down the loo.

  A few weeks later, she’s hiding upstairs in her bedroom after school when someone knocks at the front door. This is odd, hardly anyone comes here. She shuts the book and listens to her mother pad to the door. Voices. She leaves her room and goes to the top of the stairs; from here she can see the hallway. Her mother is standing in the open doorway with a man. Kate’s old swimming coach. She hasn’t seen him since the funeral.

  ‘…pure coincidence!’ The coach’s voice is as loud as ever. Perhaps he hasn’t yet realised he doesn’t need to shout in ordinary houses.

  ‘How did you find us?’ In contrast, her mother sounds very quiet.

  ‘One of your neighbours has a son who I used to coach. I popped in to say hello to them just now and they just happened to mention that you’ve moved here!’

  The two of them continue to stand in the hallway next to the open door, as if unable to decide what to do. Jeanette wonders why her parents haven’t told the coach that they moved. Have they told anyone? Is that why nobody ever visits?

  Suddenly his voice drops quiet. ‘How are you all doing?’

  Her mother is silent for a moment before she replies, ‘Oh fine, fine. We’re — I’m — starting a new business. Tidying up people’s houses. Decluttering. It’s good for the soul to get rid the stuff you don’t need.’ She still hasn’t invited him inside.

  ‘Hidden away here, aren’t you?’ he laughs. Jeanette’s mother doesn’t laugh.

  ‘I expect you’re busy,’ she says and she makes a move towards the door. ‘I know I am.’

  Jeanette knows her mother will just go back to the sofa. Her decluttering business hasn’t really taken off yet, she only spends about one day every fortnight at someone else’s house persuading them to throw out all their belongings. The rest of the time she is at home.

  ‘Well, no,’ says the coach, ‘I’m not that busy. Not at all. Not coaching so much nowadays.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ says Jeanette’s mother, but she doesn’t sound very sorry. She sounds rather triumphant.

  ‘Not since…’ and he stops. He can’t refer to Kate either, thinks Jeanette. ‘It’s kind of done for my coaching activities. That’s why I popped round to see your neighbour, to try and convince him to let his son carry on swimming with me.’

  ‘Well.’ And her mother breathes out a long sigh, like air escaping from a tyre. ‘I’m not surprised, I’m afraid. If a child dies on your watch, then what do you expect? You were lucky at the inquest.’

  The inquest? Jeanette knows there was one, but she doesn’t know what happened at it. Now it occurs to her that there might be something written down as a result. Something that her parents might have, that would help her understand what happened to Kate.

  From up here she can see her mother pointing at the coach, jabbing a finger at him. ‘Lucky you didn’t get more of the blame.’

  ‘And how do you know what happened! You weren’t even there —’ There is an odd emphasis to this final ‘you’. But Jeanette’s mother hardly ever went to the pool. Who blamed her for what happened? Jeanette edges closer to the top of the stairs, hoping for more. But they must have heard her because they both look up and the coach falls silent. She stands on the top step, unsure whether to join them.

  ‘Look.’ Her mother beckons to her. ‘There’s no point talking about it. It doesn’t help anyone, does it?’

  When she reaches them, her mother puts an arm round her and pulls her close.

  ‘Hello, Jeanette,’ says the coach.

  She’s not often this close to her mother and it feels weird. She can feel her mother quivering slightly. ‘Hello.’

  He still smells of chlorine, even if he isn’t doing much coaching any more. She wants to
ask him what happened to Kate but the quivering is putting her off. The coach pats her on the head before he turns and walks away, and her mother releases her.

  It’s difficult to get the opportunity to look for any papers about Kate because her mother is nearly always at home. Finally, one day she gets a decluttering job on the other side of town and when Jeanette gets home from school there are instructions written on a piece of paper about boiling potatoes for dinner.

  It’s good being by herself in the house. Without the constant whine of the TV the house feels more peaceful.

  Ignoring the potatoes, she goes upstairs to her parents’ bedroom. She knows where important papers are kept, in a metal box inside the wardrobe. She’s worried it might be locked. But it opens easily.

  She rifles through the papers, not really sure what she’s looking for. She finds a photo of her parents’ wedding. Her parents standing on some grass, smiling and squinting at the camera. Her father in a dark suit and her mother in a veil which has flown up and over her head, like a white flag of surrender. Both their faces are rather bleached by sunlight.

  She puts the photo to one side and carries on. She finds her birth certificate, creased into three parts. But although she reaches the bottom of the box, she can’t find anything to do with Kate. It’s as if Kate never existed, not officially. The metal box is cold against her fingers. The air in the bedroom feels cold, colder than the rest of the house. Perhaps they don’t ever have the heating on in here. She gives up and goes to do the potatoes.

  Her father spends even more time in the new garden than he did in their old one. But now, when he comes back into the house, he doesn’t have anything for Jeanette.

  So she has to go out and look for things herself; she finds delicate brown leaves that crumble in her hands, sturdy seed pods, the wisps of an abandoned birds nest.

  And when she’s out there she can see things change. First, crocuses spike through the lawn, then blossoms appear on the tree. The roses bloom, their ice-cream coloured petals scatter on her shoes when she goes outside to tell him tea’s ready. Like a magic trick, the dead flowerbeds come back to life.