The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  ‘Well, that’s great,’ says her mother. ‘Dad and I were saying the other night, how great it was. But what will you do if they don’t make it permanent?’

  When she’s finished the wine she offers to take her mother’s case into the bedroom.

  ‘Yes,’ says her mother. ‘Thanks.’ And as Jeanette leads the way, she feels a small flourish of triumph deep within her. She is in control of this situation, she has led her mother blindfold along this path. Her mother walks in, looks around her and sees the photo. Walks over to it in silence, and picks it up, still silent. She’s turned away from Jeanette and all Jeanette can see in the stoop of her shoulders is an absolute concentration, or intenseness of purpose. Is this why her mother came here? To reclaim the photo? She’s almost afraid of her mother turning around, of having to face her.

  When her mother does turn round, her expression is unreadable. ‘Why did you take it?’ she asks.

  Because I wanted it. Because you hid it away from me. Because I hadn’t seen Kate for so many years.

  Don’t you think I have a right to see it?

  ‘I don’t know, I just did. I saw it and I took it.’ She’s trying not to sound apologetic. She doesn’t even want to explain this to her mother, to give spurious reasons for her actions. Who knows why she took it? Why anyone does anything at all?

  ‘You should have asked me,’ says her mother. Jeanette notices the absence of her father from this statement.

  ‘Why? Why should I have to ask if I can see a photo of my own sister? Why do you get to control everything?’

  ‘You took it from our room without saying anything. I would have given it to you, if you’d asked.’

  ‘You took it from me! When you hid it away. I was just — liberating it.’

  Her mother is holding the photo in both hands. Jeanette can’t see it properly now. ‘You can see it at home any time you like, Jeanette. Don’t you think this is a bit childish?’

  ‘It’s not my home!’ But she’s aware that she does sound like a child. In a minute she’ll start crying and bawling. ‘And I don’t see why never talking about things is especially grown up!’

  ‘What things.’ Her mother slips the photo into the dark pouch of her handbag and clicks the metal clasp shut.

  ‘Dad. Where he goes every day. Why he’s always late home.’ She’s finally named the unnamable, given voice to the silence. ‘The other woman.’

  Her mother’s face seems to sag and slip, as if its structure has just been removed. Jeanette catches her breath. She gazes out of the window at the garden and remembers burnt grass glistening in the moonlight. The ghost of a white bottle in the distance. The scorched smell of leaves.

  ‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ her mother suggests and Jeanette is grateful for a breather. They stand side by side in the kitchen in front of the kettle. It doesn’t click off the way it usually does, so they watch steam rising for some time.

  As Jeanette pours out the sputtering water, her mother finally speaks. ‘Some things are better off not talked about. I know about Dad, and where he goes.’

  Jeanette concentrates on stirring tea. ‘Doesn’t it make you angry? How can you stand it?’

  ‘It’s how he copes. He has another life. If it’s just the two of us, we fuel each other’s sadness. The marriage generates sadness, it’s an engine for it. I’m almost grateful to the — to her.’

  They sip their tea. Why don’t you leave, thinks Jeanette. Live another life. But perhaps the sadness is a prop. Perhaps her mother wouldn’t know what to do without it.

  ‘You can have your own copy of the photo. I’ll make one for you.’

  They go back to the living room.

  Later when her mother’s in bed and she’s picking her way to the sofa bed, she hears a noise at the front door. Paula.

  Paula’s drunk and she’s forgotten she’s not supposed to be coming back here. Just as Jeanette reaches the sofa bed the light snaps on and she’s in the doorway, grinning.

  ‘Hey,’ she says as she reaches down to remove her stilettos. ‘What are you doing in my bed, Goldilocks?’

  ‘My mother’s here, remember?’ hisses Jeanette, watching Paula slide her tights down over her smooth white legs.

  ‘Oh. Shit. I’m not supposed to be here, am I?’ and she giggles unevenly, lurching against the wall as she tries to pull her dress off.

  ‘Just try to be quiet,’ Jeanette sighs as she moves over to the edge of the bed. It isn’t really big enough for two and she’s worried it may collapse under their combined weight.

  ‘Don’t want your mum knowing what we do, do we?’ Paula giggles again.

  Jeanette doesn’t reply. There is a world of unspoken actions here, going all the way back to Alice Airy. Her parents don’t know about her. Or at least they don’t talk about it, and for the first time she wonders how much they do know about her and don’t mention. Is she jammed into the same Pandora’s box as her father’s affair?

  Paula’s in the bed now. ‘Jesus, you smell of smoke,’ Jeanette mutters as the bedsprings twang under them. But Paula doesn’t have anything on apart from knickers and Jeanette can’t stop herself from running her hands over Paula’s skin, burying her face in her neck.

  The bed rattles uneasily beneath them as they tremble and sigh against each other’s bodies. Afterwards she says, ‘You’ll have to leave first thing, before my mum gets up.’

  ‘Why? We’re flatmates. Nothing wrong with that.’

  Jeanette is silent. There’s nothing wrong with any of it, she wants to say. But she’s said enough to her mother this weekend. She can’t cope with any more secrets being exposed. So, at seven o’clock in the morning, when it’s still dark outside, she makes Paula get up and get dressed.

  ‘When can I come back, then?’ Paula’s astonishingly obedient as she tries to put on her thin tights, in some inept time reversal of last night. But perhaps she’s used to being bundled out of people’s beds, being a secret in their lives.

  ‘This evening. She’s getting the four o’clock train.’

  ‘Toodle pip, then.’ Paula smiles but her eyes are half shut and she still smells of smoke.

  Later, before her mother appears, she gets up and tries to tidy the room. She doesn’t think there’s any visual evidence of Paula having been there during the night. But she worries about the noise. What could her mother have heard?

  Over coffee her mother says, ‘I slept well.’

  ‘Good.’ She tries not to smile.

  ‘It’s very quiet here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She moves to shut the window which has been open all morning to let out the smell of Paula.

  ‘Were you talking to someone on the phone last night? I thought I heard voices at about midnight.’

  She looks down at her hands, trying not to think about her childhood, her father coming home late each evening, before the silent family dinners. Why should she be the same as her father?

  ‘Dad…’ she starts.

  ‘Yes?’ Her mother looks surprised, wary. ‘What about him?’

  He was always with someone else, another woman. Invisible, unseen sex. She feels sick. Why can’t she be different?

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘my flatmate came back last night. Unexpectedly.’ Because everything Paula does is unexpected, her tongue flicking softly between Jeanette’s legs. Her desire for Jeanette is unexpected.

  ‘Your flatmate,’ says her mother, staring into her coffee. ‘So why isn’t she here now? Did she have to go to work or something?’

  ‘We didn’t want to disturb you.’ All she can hear is we - disturb. Paula disturbs her, to her core. But it’s not the same as her dad. It’s only them for a start. Nobody else is involved. ‘She’s gone…’ But she doesn’t even know where Paula’s actually gone so she stops abruptly.

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s alright, you know. She can come back, I promise I won’t bite.’ But her mother shifts slightly on the sofa, now neatly folded back into place with all the night time activity tuck
ed away. She looks around her. ‘It’s a bit small for two people.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I suppose it’s only temporary? She can’t sleep on a sofa bed for ever.’

  But Jeanette doesn’t want to think about Paula moving out. She cleans up the empty coffee cups in silence.

  Jeanette’s in the darkroom, teaching Alice how to print photos. They slip the pieces of paper into the tray of developer and watch as the hidden images emerge.

  But the last piece of paper already has a picture on it before it is placed in the tray. Jeanette sees her own face fade under the liquid. Her eyes and lips are washed away and the paper turns white.

  Alice takes the empty photo out of the bath and pins it to the wall. ‘See?’ she says, ‘that’s you. Don’t you look lovely?’

  Paula hasn’t been in the flat for some time. She seems to be out working, or just out. Jeanette isn’t sure where.

  What is happening between her and Paula doesn’t seem connected to their past. It makes her nervous that she can’t determine the cause of it. If it’s bubbled up out of nothing perhaps it could just as easily disappear again, leaving no trace. But she knows that this is wrong; that what is happening will leave some physical evidence on her. Her skin feels marked, and she can remember the precise detail of what Paula has done to her, where she has touched her. When she’s dead and her bones are being examined by archaeologists, they will see the effects of Paula.

  Jeanette sits in the living room waiting for her, but then she gives up and goes to bed, lying in the dark. Some time later the door opens and Paula slips in. Jeanette watches her as she peels off her clothes, her breasts visible in the lighthouse beams from the cars outside. She gets into the bed, and for a moment they just lie there side by side, not touching. Then there is a soft sigh as Paula turns to her.

  Afterwards Paula slips away again. Nothing has been said by either of them. Jeanette surprises herself by falling asleep easily and waking up, feeling refreshed. But when she wanders into the living room Paula is gone, the sofa bed tidied away. The only external evidence of her recent presence there is her wet toothbrush in the bathroom.

  One evening, they’re both at home. Jeanette is making notes for her next lecture on special relativity for the undergraduates, and Paula is studying for an essay. The phone rings.

  ‘I’ll get it.’ Paula lunges for the phone. Jeanette carries on writing, but can’t help listening.

  ‘Where do you work?’ Paula writes something down. ‘Oh yes, that’s good, that’s interesting.’

  A pause. Jeanette watches her twist her hair around her fingers. She does this when she’s in the pub, talking to someone new.

  ‘Can I meet you there tomorrow, at five, say?’

  Who is she meeting? Jeanette stares at her, but even after the conversation is finished, she doesn’t offer any explanation.

  ‘Who are you meeting?’ Too abrupt. Paula looks at her, startled, before Jeanette sees her narrow her eyes slightly, as if focusing on something a long way away.

  ‘I mean…’ Jeanette flounders, ‘Was that a friend from college?’

  ‘No.’ Paula picks up her pen and carries on writing, the pen scarcely leaving the page as words flow smoothly from it. In contrast, Jeanette’s breathing feels jagged. She tries to write an explanation of the equivalence between different frames of reference. On a train, it is impossible to tell if you are actually moving at constant speed, or stationary. You may end up in different places, but the experiences are physically equivalent.

  ‘It’s another sitter,’ Paula says out of nowhere, just when Jeanette has finally managed to think her way back into her lecture. ‘I put up an advert. After I painted that portrait of you, I realised I wanted to do some more, of real people doing real jobs. Not just students.’

  Jealousy shoots its barbs into Jeanette. Paula’s painting someone else? ‘What does this — person — do?’

  ‘He’s a butcher, which is going to be fantastic. Great bloody sides of cow and entrails. But I can’t decide whether to keep him in his white coat, which would be a brilliant contrast with the meat, or have him naked. Life flesh and dead flesh, next to each other.’

  Naked. Jeanette squeezes her hands together, until the blood disappears from her fingers and they turn blue-white.

  ‘Oh, come here.’ There is a note of exasperated affection in Paula’s voice. Obediently, Jeanette gets up and stands in front of her. Paula runs her hand up Jeanette’s leg as far as her hip. A precise, minimal movement. ‘You’re not jealous?’

  ‘No,’ Jeanette lies. She puts her hand on top of Paula’s and stays there standing, motionless for a moment before Paula pulls her down.

  Afterwards they carry on working.

  So the relationship becomes more efficient, stripped away to its essentials. They don’t waste time sitting on the sofa, or lying in the garden. They don’t talk so much. There doesn’t seem to be time for Jeanette’s stories. Jeanette tells herself it’s because Paula is busy. She has to prepare for a new show, she’s at the art school most evenings. This is the way it’s got to be. Paula’s absences make Jeanette feel guilty, she should also be working hard, but she’s been neglectful lately.

  Paula appears in Jeanette’s room about one night each week, but Jeanette never knows in advance when it’s going to happen. She learns that to stop herself thinking about it at work, she has to maroon it in her mind, cut it off from the rest of her. Paula’s only visible at night, her head on the pillow next to Jeanette. She doesn’t exist in the daytime; she’s swamped by all the other information that Jeanette has to process. She’s too faint and delicate to compete with the demands of work.

  Jeanette hasn’t felt this seriously about anyone since the ice woman. She’s managed to stop thinking about her recently, but now she finds herself remembering more and more of that summer.

  The first time they met, she appeared without warning in the Observatory canteen and sat down next to Jeanette. She didn’t slouch down in the low slung chairs like everyone else; she sat upright with her back straight, her hair so glossy in the sunlight that Jeanette couldn’t see what colour it was.

  The woman explained to Jeanette that she’d come to work at the Observatory for a few months, to finish writing a book on the cosmic microwave background. Jeanette always pictured this remnant of the Big Bang hanging through the whole universe like smoke from a fired gun.

  The woman told Jeanette about her plans to release a detector on a balloon high into the thin air above the South Pole. The balloon would fly for three weeks, pointing at the sky and collecting information before sinking back down to earth.

  As they drank coffee out of the Observatory’s chipped mugs, the woman talked about life in the Antarctic, and the thousand variations of white in the snow. ‘The only colours you see are artificial. Human life is artificial there. It’s like living in outer space.’

  ‘How long have you spent there?’ asked Jeanette.

  ‘Six months.’

  It was summer now in Edinburgh. The woman would be going back to the Antarctic in the autumn to fly her balloon.

  ‘Where do people here go in the evening?’ The woman wore an ivory-coloured scarf tied around her neck, and Jeanette watched her skin pulse as she spoke.

  ‘There’s a pub nearby, at the bottom of the hill.’ Jeanette felt shy, as if this might be inadequate. The pub was a grotty students’ drinking den with bad beer. But Jeanette didn’t think the woman drank beer.

  ‘Good. I’ll see you there at seven?’

  Jeanette nodded, and the woman turned around to talk to someone else. Jeanette’s supervisor waved at her from across the room; he had some feedback on her thesis. He also wanted her to proofread the exam paper for the undergraduates. When she went back to her office, she realised she didn’t know the woman’s name.

  Jeanette sat waiting in the pub, her whisky and water reduced to a slick on the bottom of the glass. Finally, the woman arrived and bought a glass of red wine.

>   ‘Cheers,’ Jeanette said, but the woman didn’t reply.

  Silence. Jeanette wiped her sweaty hands on her jeans and imagined herself somewhere dry, still, safe; on the moon.

  The woman inspected her wine. ‘So,’ she said, finally looking at Jeanette, ‘You want to fuck?’

  The sex wasn’t particularly interesting that first time. The woman’s body was oddly anonymous; her skin seemed exactly the same colour and texture all over. She behaved as if she were used to being naked with strangers, as if they were doing this in public.

  It was very dark in the woman’s hotel room; the curtains were pulled tight shut against the rest of the city. The woman said she couldn’t sleep when it was light. In the Antarctic summer, days crashed up against each other with no gaps in between. She said there was nothing to do but work. Everyone worked night and day.

  At coffee time the next day Jeanette saw the woman on the other side of the canteen. She felt the woman glance at her, once or twice, before she left. She had a lot of work to do on her thesis.

  Later, the woman appeared in her office. ‘So this is where you’re hidden away,’ she smiled. ‘I’ll see you this evening?’

  Jeanette nodded and continued reading her supervisor’s feedback. He had found gaps in her analysis; she had made too many assumptions. The last chapter was going to have to be completely reworked.

  This time Jeanette found a cluster of freckles at the base of the woman’s spine, only fractionally darker than the rest of her skin. This time the neatness of her body was admirable.

  ‘You are so fair,’ the woman kept saying as she stroked Jeanette’s breasts. ‘Like ice, like snow.’

  It was nearly Midsummer’s Eve, and sunlight managed to slide its way into the room in spite of the curtains. Throughout the night, the woman kicked at the sheets and sighed, as Jeanette tried to sleep.

  The next day she found it difficult to concentrate, so she went to find the woman. But her office, a clean, bare box of a room with whitewashed walls, high up in one of the Observatory’s towers, was empty. Just an abandoned academic paper idly flapping in a draft near the window.