It was the same all through the summer, the woman was never in the office. Sometimes Jeanette would find evidence of her; the pattern of the room would be disturbed by her jacket flung over the chair. A rich dark plum coloured jacket that made the rest of the room seem even paler in contrast.
One night just before the equinox, when day and night were almost equally balanced, they lay parallel on the bed, tracing the edges of each other’s bodies and Jeanette dared to ask, ‘Will you email me from the South Pole?’
But the woman didn’t reply and Jeanette felt almost dizzy surrounded by the black space, her head floating near the ceiling. The woman’s hand in hers was the only thing that tethered her to the bed, to the surface of the earth.
The next day the woman said, ‘I couldn’t sleep last night,’ but Jeanette knew she had. Jeanette was trying to work, her fingers lying inert on the computer keyboard. The woman stood behind her and kissed the nape of her neck very lightly, so that all Jeanette felt was dry lips on her skin. Or perhaps the woman didn’t kiss her at all. Perhaps she only touched Jeanette with her fingertips; Jeanette wasn’t sure exactly. On the screen, the woman’s distorted image walked away.
Back in her office, she printed out the revised version of her last chapter. But when she went to the printer, something was wrong. The pages were blank. There were faint scratchy marks on a few of them, but most were pure white. No warning lights flashed on the machine, no indication of what had happened, or where her work had gone. Her supervisor refused to read the electronic version. She didn’t know what to do. She just wanted to sleep so she climbed the stairs, knowing the woman’s office would be empty, and her supervisor wouldn’t look for her there. She wandered over to the chair and sat staring at the blank screen before she reached out and jiggled the mouse, bringing the screen back to life. She looked closer, there was an email;
Darling, have missed you so much this summer.
Can’t wait to see you again.
That night, Jeanette pretended to fall asleep straight away. The woman was sprawled in the middle of the bed, snoring gently. Jeanette opened her eyes and stared into the darkness, as thick as black coffee, for the rest of the night.
A few days later, the woman gave a seminar. It was the last week of her stay in Edinburgh. Jeanette arrived late at the lecture theatre and had to squeeze into one of the few remaining seats.
The woman started talking about her last balloon experiment, two years before. Jeanette didn’t know about this previous experiment. She’d only been told about the future one. But here, in front of everyone else, the woman talked about the balloon lurching out of the sky and tumbling to the ground. She showed a photo of the balloon’s skin slumped on the ice. It reminded Jeanette of crumpled bed sheets. The data collected during the balloon’s flight was lost somewhere on the vast expanse of the Antarctic, and would never be found. The audience sighed as the woman told them that years of work had depended on this one short flight.
Jeanette’s eyes filled. She looked down and a tear splashed onto her left shoe, exploding into dark water. She waited until the spot faded away before she dared look up again.
The woman left the next day. It took some time before Jeanette started to sleep better.
Now, Jeanette knows what the link is between Paula and the ice woman. She is going to get hurt again. It’s strange how she knows this, there is no direct evidence of what Paula will do, or not do. But Jeanette can tell that it will go wrong. The only thing she can’t predict is how this will happen.
From the undergraduates’ exam paper:
1) What is the observational evidence for the expansion of the Universe?
(50 points)
2) Explain how we can see galaxies at distances of more than 20 billion lightyears, when the age of the Universe is only 14 billion years.
(50 points)
3) In 1964 Penzias and Wilson discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation; experimental proof of the Big Bang theory. They initially thought this radiation was caused by bird shit. Which one of them shot the pigeons nesting in the telescope?
(50 points)
4) Draw a Minkowski space-time diagram. Now plot on it the precise points showing when and where you first met your ex-lover, had sex with her and then cried yourself to sleep over her.
(1 point)
One night, Paula doesn’t come home at all. Jeanette knows this because she lies awake, waiting. At some point everything becomes a jumble in her mind. Paula is in the observer’s cage with her and they’re wheeling through the sky, not connected to anything.
It’s still dark when she gets up and goes through to the living room where the undisturbed sofa bed mocks her. She gets into it and buries her head in the pillow, trying to convince herself she can smell Paula, before she gives up and starts to cry.
The next day she has to get up early; it’s nearly the end of term and time for the ritual of the examiners’ meeting. She teaches the undergrads a few lectures each term and then she contributes a couple of questions to their end of term test.
She has to go to the examiners’ meeting, to discuss the results of the test and resolve how to deal with borderline cases. This is the first time she’s been invited to any examiners’ meeting, and she’s quite excited. It feels like she’s crossed another invisible barrier, become adult in another way.
That morning she puts on some lipstick before she leaves the house. Increasingly the bathroom feels like a place of refuge to her, even though every surface in it is covered with containers of Paula’s make-up and perfume. But her reflection looks reassuringly solid and as she stretches her mouth before applying dark red colour to it, she feels like a proper person. Then she leaves the bathroom and has to face the empty sofa bed yet again. The absence of Paula is beginning to feel more and more like a leaden presence. The flat feels unnaturally silent without her, even though it never felt particularly quiet before she moved in.
Jeanette’s grateful to escape outside, to walk up the hill to the Observatory. It’s another windy day, making it difficult to walk quickly, and her hair blowing across her face gets caught on her lipsticked mouth, an odd sensation and one that’s she not used to. How do women like Paula cope with lipstick in Edinburgh? And she sighs as she realises something else has brought her back to Paula.
The others are already seated around the table when she arrives. It’s the same room where she was interviewed for the job and arriving like this, slightly late, makes her feel as if she is the one who will be examined here today. But she sits down and builds a professional little pile of papers in front of her, and then smiles at the Death Star. He stares back at her, motionless, impassive.
She presumes this meeting will be very boring in a nice, peaceful, monotonous way. A bit of arguing between some of the older and crustier lecturers, the ones who actually enjoy teaching. She’s hoping for just enough distraction to take her mind off Paula. She’s not expecting to have to do any work.
She devised two questions out of the twelve in the test, and her two are near the beginning. Before they get to these questions, there’s an unnecessarily lengthy discussion about a particularly inept student who’s under the impression that the cosmic microwave background can only be observed in one part of the sky.
The Death Star hands round some of the students’ scripts. ‘Turn to questions three and four.’ Her questions. He nods at them all. ‘You’ll see what I was talking about earlier.’
Earlier? Were they talking about her before she got here? What was he saying about her questions? They must have been alright because they were reviewed by the faculty panel. But perhaps none of her students could answer them, because she hasn’t taught them properly. Her stomach turns over. She flips to her questions in the script in front of her.
But there are no answers to her questions, just the words, ‘THIS THEORY HAS JUST BEEN PROVED WRONG SO WHY ARE WE BEING TESTED ON IT.’ The letters are slightly wobbly, perhaps due to nerves or excitement. She glances at her n
eighbour’s script. It says the same thing, with a similar wobble to the letters.
‘Jeanette, did you tell the students about your result?’ His voice is so quiet she can barely hear him.
‘No. No, of course not.’ Why does she feel as if she’s the one being examined here? Opened up and inspected? She sits on her hands in case their trembling betrays her.
The Death Star looks around the room. ‘Has anyone else noticed the students questioning what we’ve been teaching them?’
The professor of optics, a crumpled looking bloke in tweed at the end of the table pipes up, ‘They never question anything at all in my lectures,’ to general laughter.
‘So it’s just you then.’ The Death Star turns his death ray on her.
‘At least they’ve been paying attention to something,’ another crumpled bloke says quietly. This is Stone, emeritus professor of theoretical cosmology. He’s never really spoken directly to her at all.
‘Can hardly avoid it, can they? It’s everywhere.’ She can’t tell who said this.
This must be what it’s like when you’re ill and facing a roomful of doctors, she thinks. There is no privacy and they all talk about you as if you aren’t there. Perhaps she isn’t there. Perhaps she’s still in the bathroom piling on the lipstick, or better, in bed with Paula. Perhaps right now Paula is whispering in her ear, trying to wake her up, so they can make love again. She sighs without thinking, and realises Death Star is staring at her.
‘It’s probably just an excuse,’ Stone says. ‘Perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered to do the work. It’s only an end of term test after all, it doesn’t count towards their formal marks.’
She glances at Jon, but he’s staring at the wall in front of him. Is he trying to avoid her?
‘I’ve a good mind to fail the bloody lot of them,’ says the Death Star.
‘How many are we actually talking about?’ asks Stone. She wonders why he’s helping her.
‘Four. I wonder who the ringleader is? There must be a ringleader.’
Four? Is that all? There are twenty in that class. She sits back in her chair and relaxes slightly. What a hoo-hah over nothing. But the Death Star is pointing his pen at her. ‘You need to do all you can to correct this misunderstanding.’
‘I haven’t done anything to cause this misunderstanding.’ Paula has evaporated now. She’s no longer in bed waiting for Paula to appear. She’s in this room glaring at the Death Star. ‘I taught them the standard stuff! A bit of general rel, Hubble’s observations, the Friedman-Lemaitre equations, radio source counts, abundances of primordial elements, the microwave background…’
He cuts her off with a swipe of his pen through the air, like a conductor controlling an orchestra, ‘Yes, yes, alright. That’s enough.’
Stone starts tapping the table with one finger. ‘Actually it could be quite helpful, in some ways.’ Jeanette notices Jon looking at Stone, the first time he’s shown any signs of engagement.
‘How?’ The Death Star’s voice is acerbic.
‘If nothing else, it teaches them about uncertainty. They learn all this stuff like it’s the catechism. Perhaps they need to think a bit more about the limitations.’
‘We do that in the second year.’ The Death Star still won’t give any ground. ‘The flatness problem, the horizon problem and so on.’
‘Exactly. All the dogma. And by then it’s no good, it’s too late. All these first years are straight out of school, they need to be shown how to think differently. Not to regurgitate the same old stuff.’ Stone glances at Jeanette. ‘No offence.’
She wants to smile at him but can’t quite summon the energy. ‘Perhaps everything will become a bit clearer once we get the results from Orion.’
‘Orion?’
‘Jon’s satellite instrument. It’s going to provide a proper test.’
He looks tired for some reason. ‘A proper test indeed. In the meantime we’re all being shaken up.’
They are being shaken up. There’s no avoiding it now. Not since her appearance on the news. Googling the phrase ‘Downfall of Big Bang theory’ brings up more than half a million hits, #bigbangwrong is one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter. It feels like almost every time she turns on the radio someone’s commenting on what the discovery means for cosmology, for astronomy, for science, for humanity. The last time she heard it being talked about on the radio they’d dredged up one of Hoyle’s old students to reminisce about the good old days. When there were fights outside Cambridge pubs between different factions of astronomers, over the merits of the Big Bang theory versus the steady state. Hoyle had a mean left hook, apparently, but Ryle could topple him with a swift kick to the shins. She wishes this could be settled as easily as a pub fight.
That afternoon she goes to visit Jon in his lab. Orion has been completed and shipped to the European rocket launch site in French Guyana. The lab feels a lot larger and emptier without the instrument, a bit like the way Jeanette’s flat feels when Paula isn’t there.
Jon is still rather quiet. He’s tidying up some drawers full of different types and thicknesses of wire. They look a bit like frozen pieces of sewing thread. She likes watching him methodically extract each loop of wire and wind it round a pencil before returning to its home. Clara is sitting nearby, doodling on a pad of paper. Everyone here seems to have more time and less purpose, now that the instrument’s gone.
‘What’s the chance of it blowing up?’ she says suddenly. Her words take her by surprise, she didn’t know that’s what she was thinking. But Jon nods as if he were expecting it.
‘Blowing up?’ Clara’s voice rises incredulously. But Jeanette knows it’s not that unlikely. About one in a hundred, maybe?
‘Well?’ Perhaps she’s angry with him for not speaking up on her behalf this morning. Is that why she’s trying to force a response out of him?
But Jon doesn’t reply.
When she gets back to her office, she has an email from Maggie, containing an image of the cover of a book just published by some religious college in America. The cover shows a picture of their galaxies, but the book isn’t about astronomy, it’s about intelligent design. Their galaxies are being used as the scientific equivalent of Michelangelo’s God and Man connecting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. According to the book, the image of the linked galaxies is so unlikely it proves God must have had a hand in it, somehow. Maggie hasn’t provided any comment, and Jeanette just stares in silence at the book cover.
That evening, Paula’s in the flat when Jeanette arrives home. Jeanette doesn’t ask her where she was last night. She’s chopping onions in the kitchen and the radio is on. Things may be normal.
They eat dinner and Jeanette talks about the examiners’ meeting. Paula sips her wine and nods at regular intervals, she’s obviously making an effort. Jeanette tries not to look at her too much, tries not to notice how tired her eyes are, tries not to wonder how little she slept the night before.
‘Becca says hello,’ Paula announces in a gap between Jeanette’s words.
Becca? ‘When did you see —?’
‘Last night.’
Silence. Jeanette doesn’t know what this means.
Paula holds out the bottle of wine. ‘A refill?’
Jeanette studies the way her fingers curve around the bottle. Since they became lovers, Paula exists in several dimensions, in a way that no one else does. Other people are just collections of clothes and faces and hands. They might be interesting to look at, but they don’t overwhelm her with information and memories in the way that Paula does. She can’t look at Paula’s arms without being reminded of the first time she stroked them, and felt the texture of the skin. Only Paula fully inhabits space and time.
‘Do you want a refill or not?’ Her impatience is only just audible.
‘Sorry. No.’
More silence. Perhaps they can go back, rewind to earlier times.
‘You should be called Urania.’ This occurred to her weeks ago but now, spok
en out loud into the heavy silence, it sounds absurd.
‘Urania?’ Understandably, Paula looks baffled. She stares at Jeanette for the first time that evening, and Jeanette knows that she doesn’t hear the echo of that earlier night under the stars, of starry girl.
‘Yes.’ She feels obliged to explain, even though she knows that it won’t help. You can’t induce feelings in other people at will. ‘She was one of the nine muses in classical times. The astronomical muse.’
To her credit, Paula is still making an effort to understand. ‘You mean I’m your muse?’
Jeanette doesn’t know how to reply. When she first thought of saying this to Paula, the imagined conversation ended with Paula’s burbling laughter, with them kissing. Not with this dull, inert air blocking up the space between them.
Paula clatters the plates together and disappears into the kitchen. Then Jeanette hears the back door slam and knows that Paula has gone into the garden to have a cigarette. To get away from her.
Maggie comes to Edinburgh on a short visit. She’s moving from Heidelberg to a new post in California and she’s stopping off to see Jeanette on the way. When she gets a cab to the Observatory from Waverley, Jeanette runs out to meet her.
‘Is this all your worldly belongings?’
Maggie’s standing on the lawn by the east tower, gazing around her. She’s wearing one of her jackets covered in functional zips. It’s the colour of dirt, presumably to hide any actual dirt. A large rucksack and a small suitcase are parked at her feet.
‘Mostly. My books have been shipped separately. Wow. I’d forgotten how amazing this view is.’
No wonder she’s able to move around so easily. Jeanette suddenly feels very heavy, weighed down by her emotions.
‘Oh, the view… you get used to that.’ She grabs hold of the small suitcase. ‘Come on, I want to show you some new images. Simulated images of the link.’
The Falling Sky Page 16