The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  Later on that summer, her mother’s doing the dishes after tea. Jeanette is still at the table, making her piece of cake last as long as possible. Her father is working in the garden.

  The radio is burbling away in the background, so there’s a reason not to speak. The radio voices make it feel almost normal. But as Jeanette picks at the final crumbs, her mother screams. The room is full of a funny flickering light and it takes a moment before she realises it is outside. Outside is on fire.

  When they rush into the garden, her mother’s rubber gloves still dripping water, they see her father. He’s not attempting to get away from the flames around him. In his hands there is a plastic bottle, and as he jerks it around his feet, the last few drops of liquid scatter from it and catch fire.

  Even as they run across the lawn to get to him, blades of grass are shrivelling and turning black. The rosebushes are turning into shivers of flame. There’s fire everywhere, fire arcing across the flowerbeds, writhing through the vegetable patch, snaking up the new apple tree, and in the middle of it all is her father, just standing there.

  Whenever she and her mother visit her father in hospital, he always seems to be asleep. Perhaps he’s pretending to sleep because he’s scared of her mother. They sit on either side of his bed, watching him as he lies there with his eyes shut. The room smells strongly of disinfectant, and underneath that there is the anger, just as strong, radiating from her mother, who sits with her lips pressed tight together, waiting. Waiting for him to wake up and explain.

  Jeanette stares at the bandages wrapped around his arms, from his wrists all the way up past his elbows. If she concentrates hard enough, she can get lost in the furled landscape of the bandages. It’s calm and pale in there. Not like their garden, which is still dark and sodden, stinking of smoke and petrol.

  Her father is in hospital for some time, so now it’s just her and her mother at home. They face each other across the table at meals, and this reminds Jeanette of all the cop shows that her mother watches. People smoking and drinking mugs of tea, and asking questions.

  She sits opposite her mother and silently interrogates her. How could Kate drown? Why won’t you tell me? Why did Dad set fire to the garden?

  She almost wishes she’d seen him do it. Pour the petrol, its haze sneaking across the innocent lawn, light the match and fling it into the night. Listen to the grass begin to crackle as it deformed in the sudden heat. Perhaps she would be able to understand, then.

  They eat their tea and listen to the radio. Then her mother lights a cigarette and pours a drink as Jeanette does the washing up. Her mother hasn’t washed up since that night. Jeanette stares into the sink even though she knows that if she looks up, all she will see is the mirror world of the kitchen reflected in the window. But she keeps her head down anyway. When this is done she can leave the room and go upstairs.

  But later that evening, when her mother is in the lounge, and the TV has replaced the radio, Jeanette surprises herself by tiptoeing downstairs, pushing back the latch on the back door and stepping over the threshold of the house into the garden.

  It’s the first time she’s been out here since that night. The air is still heavy with fumes, and when she bends down to touch the scorched leaves, they feel greasy under her fingers. The petrol has poisoned the earth. But as Jeanette straightens up, she sees a flash of green. New stalks of grass, all mixed up with the wreck of the old. It is a miracle. But if grass can do it, why can’t Kate?

  And Jeanette thinks she knows why her father started the fire, or at least why he wanted to destroy the garden. It was dead the first winter after Kate died, after they moved in, and then it came back to life. At first it seemed as if Kate was surviving in some form. But as her dad tended the garden and watched it grow, he must have realised how blind all this activity is. There’s no intent, no purpose to this new grass. It simply is. And Kate simply isn’t. And then the grass became an actual affront. It must have taunted him with its ability to survive and renew.

  When her father is allowed to come home, he finds it difficult to use a knife and fork, and so she or her mother has to cut up his food for him. Jeanette does this carefully, trying to make the lumps all the same size. But her mother just flattens everything into mush, smashing the sausages into the gravy, stirring the eggs and beans together into gloop. She doesn’t like to look at her father as he manouvres the remnants of her mother’s tiny violent actions into his mouth.

  There seem to be many textures of silence. A few are simply the companions of eating, the easy, sloppy sounds of chewing and swallowing. But most are harder and more jagged; little mountains that have to be climbed at each meal.

  She tries talking about school. She launches words into the thin air, but they fall down again, they can’t get a grip on this ice. Her parents don’t reply. Her mother wields a fork and spears a piece of meat. Her father shuffles some lettuce around the plate.

  Nothing is done about the garden. When it rains, lines of sooty black water run across the patio. The petrol container is still lying on the ground at the back of the lawn, ghost-white.

  One morning Paula appears at the front door of the flat, surrounded by boxes, even though they haven’t actually agreed when she is supposed to be moving in.

  ‘Couldn’t wait any more,’ she explains. ‘The landlord turned up again and asked for extra payment.’ She shudders at the thought of this, and Jeanette winces in sympathy.

  Although she hasn’t been expecting her, or at least not so soon, it is surprisingly easy to adjust to Paula living in the flat. Sure, some spaces have to be recalibrated. The living room is now a thin corridor of carpet around the permanently extended sofa bed. Distances have to be altered; it takes longer to negotiate the length of the kitchen, once Paula has stacked her boxes of cocktail glasses and vintage teacups on the floor. Things appear out of thin air. A painted wooden monkey takes up residence on the television, and kimonos are draped over chairs. An old Bakelite telephone stands on the floor by the sofa bed.

  It’s not until Paula’s belongings are splashed around the flat that Jeanette realises she has been used to living in a pale world of cream walls, white bedlinen and beige rugs. Paula pins a poster onto the living room wall, and the giant face of Hedy Lamarr pouting at Jeanette whenever she goes into the room takes her by surprise.

  Paula herself is not there that much. She has to spend a lot of time at the art college, she says, getting ready for the next show. She’s usually still asleep when Jeanette eats her breakfast in the morning, stretched out in the sofa bed only a metre or so from where Jeanette is munching her cereal. There is hardly room to eat in the flat. There never was much room, but now they seem to eat most of their meals standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

  Even when Paula is not there, there’s evidence of her. A talcum powder footstep on the bath mat, which fits Jeanette’s own foot. The air smells of Paula’s perfume; something with geraniums in it. Not a sweet smell, but sharp, reminding Jeanette of crushed flowers.

  Things move from one place to another as if a poltergeist has taken up residence. A bottle of sloe gin appears from the back of the drinks cupboard, where it has lived undisturbed for several years, and sits on the floor of the living room within reach of the sofa bed. Each morning Jeanette notes that the level of liquid in it has decreased; it is being drunk at the rate of about two centimetres a day. It lasts for a week before she finds the bottle, now empty, abandoned near the back door. She realises she’s never actually tasted sloe gin, so she takes the lid off the bottle and licks the rim. It’s like kissing lip-gloss; sweet and sticky. She glances through the doorway but Paula is still asleep, hair swept out across the pillow as if she is running somewhere.

  Even after Jeanette brushes her teeth, she can still taste the gin.

  One evening, Becca comes over for dinner. The sofa bed is folded away and the flat suddenly seems much larger. When Becca arrives, Paula and Jeanette are in the kitchen, making prawn paella.r />
  ‘Very domestic,’ Becca says.

  ‘Well, we have been flatmates before. For some reason Jeanette feels defensive. Becca stands on the edge of the room watching the two of them, making no move to take her coat off. Why doesn’t she want to join in, Jeanette wonders? It’s cosy in the kitchen, the paella’s bubbling away, they’re both sipping gin martinis, and there’s some forties-style jazz playing on the radio. But Becca looks from one to the other and Jeanette realises she’s being scrutinised, measured. She doesn’t know why.

  Later on, it gets better. They’re all sitting on the floor, amongst the dirty plates and wine glasses, laughing at Paula’s impersonations of Jeanette’s colleagues.

  More time passes. They’re lying on the floor, singing and holding hands. They’re swigging from a bottle of some anonymous liquor, passing it around like a communion cup. They’re all smoking, sharing one cigarette between them, smudging out the ash spilt onto the rug.

  ‘Paula’s a great artist,’ Jeanette informs Becca at one point.

  ‘I know,’ Becca smiles.

  ‘Of course! You were her model. A great model. Great legs. Great…’ She runs out of words. She smiles back at Becca.

  ‘Shall I make some coffee?’ Becca offers.

  But Jeanette has to go to the loo. In the bathroom, she presses her fingers against her face; tries to be reassured by the feeling of her skin, flesh, and skull. She shouldn’t drink so much; reality seems to race away from her when she does. Sound comes at her like bursts from a radio.

  It’s nice here in the dark. She rests her forehead against the mirror and breathes slowly, appreciating the cold glass against her skin. Eventually her feet become re-attached to her legs and they are capable of carrying her back into the living room.

  But everything seems to have become very quiet in here.

  ‘Becca’s got to go now,’ Paula announces. They’re still sitting on the carpet, opposite each other. Becca’s staring at Paula as she says this.

  ‘I do,’ she murmurs, but this sounds more like a question.

  ‘Why? You could stay,’ offers Jeanette. ‘Crash with me or Paula. There’s plenty of space.’

  Becca looks at her, and she’s astonished to see the sadness in her eyes. ‘I can’t do that.’ And she picks up her coat and walks out of the flat. Paula’s still sitting on the floor, her legs sticking straight out in front of her, like doll’s legs.

  ‘What’s that all about?’ Jeanette asks, but Paula doesn’t answer.

  A few weeks later Paula suggests they have a party. There were lots of parties when they were students but Jeanette’s memories of them are blurred; puffs of cigarette smoke, and nebulous faces. She hasn’t had a party since then and she wonders if the experience will be the same.

  She invites the people from the Observatory and Paula invites the art students. Predictably, they don’t mix. The astronomers stick to the kitchen and stand around in the glare of the fluorescent light, drinking various obscure types of beer and talking about bumps in the microwave background. The artists stay in the living room, dancing around in the shadowy dark lit up only by a string of fairy lights, and making fluttery movements with their hands. Jeanette stands at the edge of the room, watching them. The kitchen is too much like work.

  ‘Boo.’ Richard suddenly appears next to her. He squints into the living room. ‘Is that your new flatmate?’ Paula is rattling a cocktail shaker over people’s heads, pouring gin martini into their upturned mouths, like a debauched mother bird feeding her babies. She’s not wearing much, just one of her kimonos over a lace slip.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘She’s got them all in a tizz in there.’ He jerks a thumb towards the kitchen. ‘Long time since that lot have seen any female flesh.’

  ‘Don’t I count?’ she says, laughing.

  But he doesn’t answer her question. ‘Does she usually walk around in her scanties?’ His voice is thick, his body threatening to topple over onto hers, before he smiles suddenly, as if he’s discovered a secret. ‘I bet she does all the time when you’re around.’

  The spectre of her sexuality is made visible in front of them both. Richard knows about her and the ice woman, he was nice about it. He took her out and got her drunk, tried to make her laugh with exaggerated stories about his own failed relationships. But now there is something new, and not so friendly, in his voice. There is something he wants here.

  She looks at him more closely; his face seems blurred, and out of focus. But she’s still quite comfortable standing there until he murmurs, ‘Ever fancy a threesome? Think your flatmate would be up for it?’

  She walks off. She gets fed up with being reminded about Paula’s effect on people. On men. And she certainly doesn’t want to be dragged into it herself, into Richard’s sordid little fantasies. How ridiculous and unprofessional to suggest something like that to a colleague. And then she remembers the ice woman again, and blushes.

  Some time later she’s done a circuit of the flat, filled people’s glasses, introduced people, and tried to chase her colleagues out of the kitchen. She feels too efficient. She should be lurching around the living room, swigging from a bottle. But this party hasn’t really worked for her, she’s been outside it all evening, stuck on the other side of the glass watching everyone else. At least Richard seems to have disappeared, presumably gone home. And she’s back on the edge of the living room again.

  A man, one of the art students, taps her on the shoulder and asks, ‘Do you know where Paula is?’ so she points across the room.

  ‘Ah,’ he says, sounding like he’s found something he needs. He moves away from her, into the darkness and towards Paula.

  She decides that the party is over. The best place to be is the garden. She stands in the middle of the lawn, a breeze soft on her cheeks, tilting her head up at the sky to get away from all this. When she looks back at the flat, and into the kitchen, it’s empty. Her colleagues have all gone home. Then Paula comes in, and she watches her flinging open cupboards, before she pauses in the centre of the room, her lipstick blurred slightly by some flaw in the glass, so that it looks like blood smeared on her mouth.

  To Jeanette’s surprise, Richard appears in the kitchen and Paula turns to face him. They stand some distance away from each other, and she can see their mouths move as they talk. The only way back in is through the kitchen, and she doesn’t want to interrupt them, doesn’t want to know what they’re saying to each other. So she has to stay out here and watch them. She’s out there for some time.

  Each week, on Wednesday afternoon, one of the staff gives a seminar on an aspect of their research. Today, as agreed with the Death Star, it’s Jeanette’s turn. As she stands at the front preparing to begin, she has a shivery nervous feeling in her stomach; she is going to tell them something different, something unexpected, and she is not sure how they will react. There is a silence in the room as they wait for her to start. She must remember that she is in control here. All she has to do is tell them what she knows. She’s going to start with the easy stuff first.

  Richard’s sitting near the front, pretending to take notes. But she knows, from sitting next to him at previous seminars, that these ‘notes’ are in fact obscene doodles about the imagined sex lives of the older lecturers. She hasn’t seen much of him since the party. She can’t work out if he’s been keeping out of her way, but now he grins at her as she glances at him. No obvious embarrassment. Perhaps he can’t remember what he said. She wishes she could wipe it from her mind.

  Most of the other post-docs are sitting clustered around the Death Star, like orbiting satellites. Jeanette knows that they’re only listening to her in order to think up difficult questions. It’s one way of proving yourself; spot an error in the speaker’s logic, and trap them in the question and answer session afterwards.

  She still finds it amazing that she can talk about galaxies, that she knows things about them; their distances, their brightnesses, their compositions. Nothing in this boring lecture room su
ggests that there’s knowledge here. There’s not much to look at; a bunch of star charts lying in a dusty pile on the shelf, a faded portrait of Hubble in which he has the appearance of a disappointed schoolteacher sucking on his pipe. The real knowledge is hidden away in the data stored on the computers, in symbols, in their heads.

  Sometimes when she gives seminars, she knows she captures her audience and takes them with her. Today’s one of those occasions; when she projects an image of the connected galaxies onto the giant screen behind her, and starts to explain about the link between them, the room falls completely silent.

  The professor of theoretical cosmology sits up. ‘How different are the redshifts?’

  ‘They’re 0.4 and 0.8’ she replies, knowing exactly what he will say next. And he doesn’t disappoint.

  ‘So the distance between them is of the order of megaparsecs,’ he barks. ‘How can they be linked at that distance? A physical link would be orders of magnitude larger than any other known structure.’

  She doesn’t bother speaking, but just points again at the handful of pixels between the galaxies.

  ‘Something wrong with your data calibration,’ suggests one of the engineers. ‘Has anyone else been able to verify this?’

  ‘No, we haven’t asked anyone else. You’re the first to see this.’ She means this to imply a sort of privilege, but a lot of them are still glaring at her. She glances at the Death Star. He has a sharp nose, she notices for the first time, and he is looking at her the way a dog points at its quarry.

  And so her seminar continues. People don’t like it but nobody can find anything wrong with it. People start shifting around in their seats, whispering to each other, and some of them actually get up to scrutinise the image of the galaxies on the screen.

  One of the emeritus professors bellows, ‘Are you trying to say that you’ve turned into one of those flat-earthers who worship Fred Hoyle?’ and people laugh. She smiles tightly but doesn’t reply.