She wonders when her mother carried out this recreation of the past, and whether it worked for her, whether she is able to get any comfort from it. Does she come in here during the day when no one else is around, and pretend that she has two daughters? Is that why she always looks so unhappy when Jeanette returns from school and she has to return to reality?
But it is false.
Standing by the window, she looks down and sees something dark lodged between the wall and the radiator. One of the swimming suits. She tugs it out, and it flops onto the floor at their feet. A pelt the colour of a starless sky, it lies separate from them, a portal leading down into the world of death. Jeanette is afraid now. She has disturbed the pattern of the room. She is even more scared when Alice bends down and picks the thing off the floor, scrunching it in her hands.
Jeanette touches Alice on the arm again, this time steeling herself for the feel of soft skin against her fingertips, and they leave. As they shut the door, Jeanette realises that the room is like an event horizon showing the last remaining bit of ordinary life clinging to Kate, surrounding the black hole of Kate’s death. Like death, a black hole is unknowable, shut off and unseen from the rest of the known Universe.
Back in the present, Alice sits hunched up with her chin resting on her knees, listening to Jeanette as she talks about her father setting fire to the garden, her mother’s anger. About the emptiness, the unspoken words, the ‘Why her’ and ‘Why not you’.
Jeanette thinks she’s never talked so much in her life. She looks down at her hands as she talks and she studies their surface, noticing how the skin seems to become more detailed, until she can see every individual freckle, and even the pores seem magnified. It’s as if she’s growing larger. Perhaps her talking has expanded her, made her occupy more space.
She stops speaking and lets a silence take over, but it’s a nice silence. Nothing like the silences between her parents over dinner. Jeanette listens to Alice breathing, soft little puffs that dissipate into the air surrounding the two of them.
‘What was she like?’ Alice finally says.
It’s difficult to distil Kate down into words. She didn’t have to describe Kate when she was here, and nobody has asked her about Kate since. Kate simply was, and isn’t any more. She’s too large to be boxed into words.
Finally she says, ‘She swam fast in straight lines and was proud of it, but she never looked down on me because I couldn’t,’ and Alice nods to show that she understands.
Jeanette takes a photo of Alice. She has planned the taking of this photo for some time, rehearsed the way she’d casually touch Alice on the arm, and suggest that since she had some film left in her camera, she might as well use it up on Alice.
And Alice doesn’t appear to notice that in fact there seems to be a lot of film left in the camera, enough for at least twenty shots as she stands just outside the school gates, her hair flipped up by the breeze, her face slightly turned to one side, but her eyes still looking at the camera. At Jeanette. It takes some time for Jeanette to steady the camera, with her trembling hands.
The next day she develops the film in the darkroom, easing it out of the camera and onto the carousel, hoping it’s worked. Once the negatives are developed, she can turn on the safety light and see what she’s caught.
Alice in reverse has white eyes and white hair against ghost-grey skin. Alice is so tiny, she can shelter in one hand. She’s delicate too, and Jeanette is afraid of damaging the surface of the film. It can only be held by its edges, by her fingertips.
She lies the negatives onto the paper and makes a contact strip. Now, twenty versions of Alice flutter in the fixing tank. But she’s still too small. So Jeanette selects a photo and enlarges it as far as she can, to make Alice cover the entire base of the enlarger and spill over onto the table.
It feels luxurious to be able to stare into her eyes, touch a finger to her lips and have Alice stare back. Jeanette can look as long as she wants. She doesn’t have to worry about betraying herself. And she sees things she’s never had the opportunity to notice before. A freckle on Alice’s chin, just fractionally darker than the surrounding skin. An asymmetry to her lips, giving a slight twist to her mouth. Jeanette longs to push her own mouth against Alice’s, to smooth out its pale puckered surface.
Jeanette finds a pair of scissors and cuts the contact strip into its constituents. She really wants to take home the large photo, but it’s too large to hide anywhere. The small ones are ideal, she can carry them in her purse everywhere she goes.
Alice is always blind to Jeanette’s glances. Jeanette has to ration herself to avoid staring at her. It doesn’t matter, she’s used to reconstructing Alice from jigsaw pieces of memory; a curl of hair quivering against the base of her neck, the downwards sweep of her eyelashes.
But she’s all movement. The photos are too inert, too static. Alice never stays still. And that’s the joy of watching her, and all her fluttery trembly motion. No wonder she is so skinny. Jeanette has seen the skin pulse at the base of her throat, can imagine her heart beating away, pushing the blood around her body.
Jeanette never touches her beyond an occasional pat on the arm. She gets used to calibrating the distance between their two bodies, working out what is acceptable closeness.
Once she has the photos, she memorises them, and gets to know them so well she doesn’t need to refer to them any more. She spends more time with the two dimensional black and white image than she does with the real Alice.
Alice is getting ready to leave school. She has plans to travel for a bit before she decides what to do with her life. She isn’t sure where she’s going to go, exactly, perhaps Thailand or Australia. Perhaps she will work in a bar, hang out on a beach. These generic descriptions of her future life make Jeanette so anxious she can hardly breathe. Where will Alice be? What will she be doing? And who with?
So Jeanette panics. It’s late Spring and she knows their days together are numbered, once the exam season is finished there will be nothing to stop Alice taking off and escaping. She listens to Alice talk about all the possible future beaches and bars, and she panics and reaches out. She doesn’t know why she’s doing it, doesn’t know what she expects Alice to do in response. All she knows is that the photo of Alice is no longer enough. She needs the body behind the image. So used for so long to touching Alice’s paper hair, it feels easy to simply reach forward and stroke the reality of it.
She has time to feel the strands of hair soft on her fingertips before Alice jerks her head back. ‘What are you doing?’
She could lie, pretend she’s removing some fluff, pretend her action is innocent. But she’s not capable of lying. She stares at Alice, watching her work it out.
‘I have to go now.’ Alice stands up. She doesn’t look at Jeanette as she gets ready to go, and Jeanette knows she will never look at her again. This is the first time she has ever risked anything in her life, betted on something and lost. Perhaps it’s better to remain invisible, unseen. But even that night, as she lies awake staring at the space above, she can’t stop thinking of the brief moment when she reached out, full of hope.
And then Alice leaves, properly this time, and all Jeanette has is the image.
On the day of the launch, Jon announces that there will be a party in the lab to celebrate.
When Jeanette goes along to the lab, people are gathering round a computer which is linked to the website showing the launch. They all watch the technicians at the European Space Agency launch site in French Guyana milling about, the rocket high up on its gantry a mile or so behind them.
Jon’s bouncing around the lab, looking like a wound up spring, as if he might burst with energy. She’s never seen him look like this before, but it is one of the defining moments of his life. He’s worked on this instrument for ten years.
The countdown starts. Jeanette is aware of a different sort of tension now in the lab. It feels like a thin gas permeating them all. They’re gathered around the computer which
is now focused in on the rocket.
The countdown reaches zero and the rocket starts its swoop into the sky above the crowd of spectators, blasting upwards through the air, leaving a thick grey funnel of smoke in its wake. But suddenly it flops over to the left until it’s horizontal. There’s a general murmur in the room. This is not expected. Rockets are not supposed to lean over like this, so near the beginning of their launch. Then two horns of smoke spiral across the sky, followed by a shower of sparks in all directions. The rocket has exploded. The satellite and its instruments are destroyed.
Jeanette doesn’t realise she is holding her breath until the view on the screen cuts away from the explosion to show the people at the launch site gasping and pointing at the sky. In the lab, Jon is clutching his head, pulling at his hair, as if he too is about to explode. His glasses fall off and bounce onto the floor. Everyone’s just staring at the screen, watching the heavy grey clouds. Jeanette knows that those clouds are full of smashed up bits of metal, plastic and glass all mixed together with the acid fuel, all of it tumbling to the ground.
Again the view cuts away to show the people at the site, and this time they’re running for cover, in case they get hit by the debris and fuel. Here in the lab they remain motionless. They continue watching even when there is nothing to watch, apart from the people’s stunned faces mirroring their own. They don’t know what to do now.
Finally, Jeanette goes over to Jon and puts an arm around him, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s leaning over a bench, his arms hunched protectively around his head as if to ward off the debris falling out of the sky. She can’t see his face. His glasses are still on the floor, so she picks them up. One of the lenses is cracked, a vertical fissure the length of the glass. She tries to hand them to him, but he can’t seem to grab hold of them so she just stands and waits.
The others start to wander around the lab. Some of them go to look out of the window, at a sky that doesn’t have a catastrophe happening in it, as if to remind themselves that the sky is not always a harbinger of doom. Still, nobody’s said anything yet.
One of the students is trying to open a bottle of champagne, but then realises too late that the cork will come firing out. The noise is a relief, though. It allows people to start talking. Finally Jon moves, he rubs his face with his hands and slowly blinks at Jeanette, who gives him a plastic cup of champagne. He sips it in silence.
Eventually he can speak. ‘What happened? What the hell happened?’ He starts gulping the rest of his champagne and holds out the cup to be refilled.
‘What the hell…’ he repeats, quieter this time.
‘I don’t know,’ says Jeanette. None of them know, of course. They’ll have to wait for ESA to tell them.
People are leaving the lab now. Jon grabs the half-full bottle of champagne and swigs from it, inaccurately, so that the liquid bubbles up from the narrow opening and gushes over him onto the floor. His glasses lie abandoned on the lab bench.
She watches the launch again on the news that evening, and learns that the explosion was deliberate. Due to a software error, the rocket started veering off course and had to be blown up by ESA as a safety precaution to avoid a potentially worse catastrophe. Better to have a controlled destruction, than risk the unknown. The software error was caused by an information overflow; the rocket’s acceleration was so large the onboard computer memory couldn’t store it, triggering an inaccurate change to the flight path, which meant the rocket had to be destroyed. It’s already being called one of the worst software errors in history.
There is a time-reversed film of the launch on the internet and she watches this too, sees the smoke coalesce, the bits of metal fly together, the rocket sink gracefully to earth. She can’t stop watching this reversed film over and over again, with its fake happy ending.
Later, she sits in front of her laptop. She needs to say something to Maggie. Finally, she sends just one line;
What are we going to do now?
She can’t think of anything more to say. They were waiting for Orion to get more, better quality data, to provide the definitive answer on whether or not the galaxies were really connected. And now they won’t get that. There’s only the grey fog of uncertainty. The apparent link between the galaxies will probably just remain as an anomalous, peculiar result. Something unexplained and unexplainable in a world where everything has to have an explanation. It’s not a comfortable place to be.
Now she wonders what she’s done to the universe, to the beautifully written story of its creation. She’s taken a pencil rubber and erased an essential part of it, without replacing it. And what does that do to the story of her own life? Now, as she imagines Kate lying dead on the side of the swimming pool, Kate seems to be fading away before her eyes. The square patterns of the tiles are clearly visible through her body. Only her swimming suit is a solid dependable block of colour.
She has clear memories of Kate, ones she relies on like milestones. She and Kate are standing right against the kitchen door frame and their father rests a pencil against the top of each of their heads. When they wriggle away he shows them how much they’ve grown. There is a succession of wobbly pencil marks with ‘J’ and ‘K’ and the dates by their sides all the way up the paintwork, and for each date, ‘J’ is always slightly lower than ‘K’. Like two planets with nicely predictable orbits.
She remembers saying to Kate, ‘I’ll catch up with you one day,’ and Kate just rolling her eyes. Of course, she did catch up with Kate, although she doesn’t remember any more pencil marks being made after Kate died.
Now, just as clear as any of the actual memories of these measurements, she sees Kate shrinking down to the kitchen floor until she’s no bigger than the pencil itself, before disappearing completely, lost in the dust and dirt on the ground.
She remembers Kate in the pool, swimming up and down as she always did. But now she sees multiple Kates, so many of them that they’re getting in the way of each other, and they’re accidentally kicking each other. They’re still trying to swim up and down, but they’re not getting anywhere. All they can do is zigzag randomly around the pool, bumping into each other. Soon, one after the other sinks beneath the water, until there’s only a single Kate left. But there’s no way of telling if this is the original Kate, or just a copy.
That night in bed she watches car headlights scribble unreadable messages in light across her bedroom walls. I never set out to do this, she thinks. I didn’t mean to fall in love with Paula. I didn’t mean to disrupt the laws of physics. Things just seem to happen in this Universe. But the car headlights generate light, which travels in predictable lines from the filaments to her bedroom. She must have wondered about Paula years ago, must have fantasised about kissing her. Kissing your straight best friend is the most predictable gay fantasy. And she thinks of Alice.
The name of the rocket which exploded today is called Ariane, the French word for Ariadne; the ancient Greek heroine who gave Theseus a thread to lead him out of the minotaur’s maze. She realises now how appropriate this was — right up until the rocket exploded she had hoped it would lead them all out of this mess. Now she’s afraid they’ll have to remain in the maze.
The next morning she’s slogging up the hill to work when she sees Richard ahead of her, stationary at the bend in the road, silhouetted against the sky. If she had a gun she could pick him off quite cleanly. Perhaps he has seen her too, and is waiting for her so they can have yet another argument. She slows down, hoping he’ll get bored and give up. But he just stands there, watching her as she struggles up the steep slope. Why does this hill never get any easier? No matter how many times she walks up it, it’s still an effort. An awful, accurate metaphor for life.
‘Sorry about your satellite,’ he drawls as she approaches. She grunts in reply, and they continue walking, almost side by side up the remaining road.
‘I’m sorry about the consortium,’ she says, finally. She hasn’t said this before, not properly. ‘About referencing your
work in our paper.’ Now she’s started she has to carry on, ‘without asking your permission. I know I should have got permission. I’m sorry.’
The good thing about walking alongside someone else is that you can’t see their face. They’ve almost reached the gate of the Observatory before he replies, ‘I suppose we all make mistakes.’
She nods in agreement, and she’s just about to open the door to the east tower and head inside to her office when he carries on, ‘Some of us are going out for a drink tonight. Do you want to come along?’
Why not? She supposes it might help her forget about things. There seem to be quite a lot of things she wants to forget right now. ‘Thanks. See you later.’
When she logs on to her computer, the chatter on the internet is all about the exploding rocket. There’s only a bit about Orion and even less about the planned observations of the link between the galaxies. She rummages through various websites, skims through the usual blogs that comment on astronomy. But they’re all focused on the software error that brought down the rocket. There is not yet much discussion of what this means for astronomy itself. For her result. She supposes she should be grateful, that she should just sit quietly and wait to see what happens. But she’s been invited to speak at another conference soon. The expectation is that she would have the results from Orion, that they would all have some answers to the questions. Without Orion, what on earth is she going to talk about?
No answer from Maggie, even though she’s read Jeanette’s email. Maggie always replies promptly and the lack of response from her is unsettling.
She remains in her room all morning, until it’s time for the weekly staff meeting. She doesn’t really want to go and face other people, and speculate with them about what will happen now, and when she finally gets there she’s late. Everyone else is already waiting, apart from Jon.
The Falling Sky Page 19