Now its very hiddenness is for her to discover. She looks closer at tiny dark hairs lying neatly on the white skin. She wants to understand how the hairs fade away into nothing on the soft underside of Paula’s arms. She watches as her index finger traces along the length of Paula’s arm. Paula doesn’t move. Neither of them speaks. Jeanette doesn’t look up at her face, that is for later. Her arm is enough for now. She follows the pattern of veins up into the crook of the arm and beyond.
One of them sighs quietly, and Paula lets her arm flop back against the sofa, so Jeanette can reach into the loose shirtsleeve, up to the shoulder and feel the warmth of the skin around Paula’s armpit.
It’s almost clinical, this fascination with Paula’s skin, her body. She simply wants to know it. But then Paula reaches over and touches Jeanette’s exploring hand.
‘Hey,’ Paula murmurs. Only then does Jeanette look at her face, at her half-shut eyes, at the way her lips curve around her teeth.
She strokes Paula along her neck, tracing the gold chain around it, discovering the small ornament hanging from the chain between her breasts. She’s never seen this before, and the piece of metal is almost a distraction from the softness of Paula’s breasts against her fingertips, and then her lips.
There’s so much of Paula to understand that she’s almost surprised when Paula reaches forward to undo the zip on her jeans.
To start with, this was an exploration that was equivalent to Paula’s painting of her portrait. But now Paula kneels in front of her, the upside-down v of her legs silhouetted by the fire, offering herself to Jeanette at the same time as taking something from her.
She has time to notice the perfect symmetry of their bodies, the simultaneous reaching out and connecting. After that, all she’s aware of is how her body buckles in on itself, then someone cries out.
Some time later they’re still lying on the floor. Jeanette sees Paula’s hand and stretches out to it, stopping just short of touching it. Now she can enjoy the sense of Paula next to her. She’s reminded of a phenomenon in physics called the Casimir effect, in which two separated metal plates move together. This is because there is quantum energy in the gap between the plates, drawing them inexorably closer. She tries not to make an analogy with her and Paula lying there. Science can’t always provide a description of her reality.
Paula’s hand suddenly tumbles towards hers and Jeanette realises she has fallen asleep. Quietly, she gets up and goes to her own bed, where she sleeps soundly.
She’s been invited to speak at a conference. This is the first time she’s actually been invited, rather than having to apply. She hugs herself with excitement.
It’s a big conference, an international three day event on cosmology in Brighton, and when she arrives there, she finds it’s being held in an appropriately vast public hall where the ceiling is so far away it’s permanently in shadow, and she feels like they’re all at the bottom of some endless void.
She’s speaking later that afternoon, so now she hunches in her chair and waits, but it’s difficult to concentrate on the current talk. The room stretches too far back, and from where Jeanette is sitting, the speaker looks like a puppet. He’s using a microphone but this only works intermittently, so that much of what he says is inaudible.
It’s an odd experience going to conferences. People, who are only familiar to Jeanette through their names on scientific papers, suddenly come to life. They become three-dimensional, grow faces, and sprout hair. When she finally meets someone, such as Jim Wilson, who’s sitting next to her, their knees almost touching, it seems almost obscene; this intrusion of the physical into her mental construction of him. To her, ‘Wilson J.’ represents a paper on galaxy dynamics, not a short man with a bushy ginger beard and a disconcerting habit of allowing his hand to rest on his right knee too close to her.
All around her people are coming to life off the pages of the journals, acknowledging other people, holding whispered conversations in the corners of the huge towering space, going back and forth for more coffee. She keeps her head down, pretending to study the programme. The entrance door is banging, a staccato noise that bumps through her thoughts.
Now the door bangs again. She looks up, irritated, but it’s Hawking in his wheelchair being manoeuvred into the auditorium. Far above, crammed right up close against the ceiling so that it’s only just visible in the shadows, is a helium balloon. One of the earlier talks that morning was about the universal proportion of helium; one of the primordial chemical elements, created in the first moments after the Big Bang. The balloon has a cartoon face printed on it, with a manic, toothy grin that beams down on everyone below. She wonders if anyone else has noticed it.
She’s nervous. She knows that she won’t get an easy time of it here. The work is too controversial. If it’s true, then it’s fascinating, it changes everything. But she doesn’t particularly want to demolish the connection in the Big Bang theory between redshift and distance. She and Maggie never set out to do that. The theory gives a coherence to the past. It imposes epochs on the history of the universe in a way that doesn’t exist in the steady state model, which is simply an unending stew of galaxies all jumbled up together.
When it’s finally her turn to speak, the auditorium falls silent. And now the vastness of the space seems appropriate for her discoveries. As she stands in front of them all, she’s silhouetted against the image of the galaxies behind her. She may be invisible again, but she knows everyone is listening to her.
The image remains there throughout her talk. Occasionally she turns around to face it, to indicate the link between the galaxies.
From up here, she can’t tell what sort of silence she is facing, whether it’s interested, neutral or hostile. All she can do is talk, describe the sequence of steps that she and Maggie took, to test and quantify the veracity of their claim. The words form a chain that leads from one idea about the universe to another. If the audience grasps hold of it, they will end up, like her and Maggie, doubting what they have believed for the past half a century. She almost feels sorry for them.
She’s done the difficult bit about the testing of the data to make sure the link wasn’t an artefact of the telescope or the night sky and she’s almost finished when, unthinkingly, she starts to talk about the verification of the result from the consortium’s data. From up here, Richard’s outburst seems small, even faintly ridiculous. She and Maggie didn’t publish the consortium’s data in their paper. And plenty of scientific papers refer to ‘private communications’ between people; conversations that aren’t documented, or informal sharing of data. There’s really nothing unusual in what she did. Apart from Richard’s reaction to it.
So she’s not prepared for what happens. As she mentions the consortium, she’s aware of a man sitting near the front, staring at her. He’s wearing glasses and all she can see of him are two oval lenses mirroring light at her.
Then he jumps up and points at her. ‘How did you get access to that data?’ he shouts. People turn to look at him.
Jeanette says quickly, ‘Private communication.’
‘But who exactly showed it to you?’ He’s still pointing at her, his finger seems to be accusing her.
She doesn’t want to mention Richard by name in public. She owes him, she’s aware of that. So she remains silent, until the man sits down, slowly, and clearly reluctantly. She sees him whispering something to his neighbour who also stares at her.
Somehow she manages to finish the talk. The questions are almost a relief after the interruption. Many of the questions are technical; people are puzzled, they are trying to work out what could have caused this result. There is less scepticism than she anticipated. A lot of people want to discuss the Orion instrument and its ability to decide whether or not the link exists.
An older man stands up, leaning on a stick. By now she knows it’s always the older ones who ask the awkward questions. They’ve got nothing left to prove and they don’t give a damn.
‘Do you b
elieve it?’
Ah, that word again. It sounds odd in this space. They are all used to statistical odds, experiment, proof, even uncertainty, but they rarely talk about belief. It sounds too human. And they like to pretend that what they do is beyond human.
She looks at this man, whom she doesn’t know, and wonders what he thinks. She pauses before she speaks, because she knows this is important. It’s one thing to present an odd result, a peculiar image. It’s another thing entirely to have to explain your worldview. And she wants to get this right.
‘I think we are too used to the current model. Things are too comfortable now. In the 1920s, when Einstein was working on models of the Universe, nobody even knew then whether there were other galaxies outside the Milky Way. They didn’t know that the Universe was expanding until Hubble’s observations. Einstein thought it was static. And then, only twenty or thirty years after that, we had the great debate between Hoyle and Ryle over the steady state theory versus the Big Bang.’
The man looks at her, questioningly. She hasn’t answered him yet. But she will do. She carries on, ‘So there was a lot of uncertainty around. Even relatively recently we didn’t know what the Hubble constant was, or Omega. All we had were toy models. It never felt very… concrete.
‘But recently, we’ve all become rather used to result after amazing result from telescopes, from satellites. Better maps of the microwave background. Pinpointing the Hubble constant. A precise determination of the age of the Universe.
‘Perhaps we’re too used to it. It’s a wonderful thing that cosmology has finally become a science, but perhaps we’ve become rather complacent. Perhaps we don’t properly question things anymore. We accept too much. It’s easy to mock the steady state theory, but philosophically it makes sense. A world without end. Or beginning.’
He looks at her for a moment, and she can’t tell at all what he’s thinking, what he makes of her speech, until he speaks. ‘We don’t do philosophy. We do science.’ And then he sits down heavily, and the man next to him pats him on the arm, as if to say well done.
She’s brought up short. That ‘We’ seems designed to exclude her.
That evening when she goes for a drink, in a corner of the conference centre that is dolled up as a traditional pub, the man from the consortium is already there, propped up against the bar and sipping a glass of wine. She doesn’t want to confront him, she couldn’t stand another row about their wretched proprietary data, so she sits down at a table some distance away, trying to act as if she is waiting for someone to join her. She watches him out of the corner of her eye; she knows he can see her too.
She feels a bit daft sitting here in the bar without a drink but she can’t go near the bar. And now because she can’t get one, she really wants a drink, a lovely cold glass of white wine. Perhaps he’s standing there deliberately to prevent her getting what she wants. His wine is finished, and he doesn’t look like he’s leaving.
Jim Wilson comes into the bar. Jeanette smiles at him brightly so he wanders over to where she’s sitting, looking a little uncertain.
‘Hi, Jim!’
‘Um, hi.’ He blinks at her then looks away.
‘Jim, could you do me a favour? Could you buy me a drink? A large glass of white wine?’
‘Um, sure.’ The blink rate increases. ‘You deserve it after your talk.’
‘No! Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.’ But it’s too late, he’s already on his way across the Tudor rose patterned carpet to the bar — much too close now to the consortium man for her to go running after and explain. Shit. Now she’ll have to buy him a drink and he’ll talk to her about galaxy dynamics for the entire evening.
He returns, carrying her wine and a pint of something dark, and sits down on the stool next to her, far too close, so that their knees are touching.
The man from the consortium walks towards them. ‘Enjoy the rest of your evening,’ he whispers to Jeanette as he leaves the bar.
‘Now,’ says Jim, ‘Could you explain to me exactly how you took that image of the connected galaxies?’
It starts slowly. A hairline crack appears in the sky. A splinter of light where there should be darkness. Jeanette fails to notice, she’s too busy gazing at her galaxies.
Distant stars flicker like failed lightbulbs. Subatomic particles zooming straight along world-lines get lost, spiral into side streets, dawdle down disused train tracks. Jeanette stares at the sky, wonders why the world is winding down.
The link between the connected galaxies blinks and stutters, even as she continues to write about it. Her universe is no longer explainable; she’s destroyed its story. She doesn’t know what Kate is dreaming any more.
Kate reading comics in the tent, covered in orange light, as if she were on fire. Kate breaking her tooth on an apple, like something out of a fairy story. Kate dancing round the kitchen after she got her first medal, and the rest of them following her, trying to keep up. Kate flashes into her mind, one memory followed by another, fast and weightless.
They were all in the car driving to yet another of Kate’s competitions in some distant grey town. This happened nearly every weekend. But this weekend they were lost.
The heat made the car seat stick to her thighs, and sweat trickle down her neck. Kate was looking out of the window. They were on a narrow road, surrounded by high hedges on either side.
The car had stopped moving. Her parents were silent, still. They all waited in the car. She didn’t know why they were just waiting, why her parents weren’t doing anything. Kate played with her shoelaces, and then her hair. Although she didn’t speak either, she was impatient. She never was any good at waiting.
On the floor at Jeanette’s feet was a piece of paper. She picked it up. It was a map of a foreign country. She couldn’t understand the way the letters were arranged, but she could follow the pale roads with her fingers, and work out routes between places, imagining herself driving between the straight black lines on the map. Even the green patches on the map were uniform and flat, unlike the ragged branches and hidden depths of the hedges outside the car. The map must be a guide to a toy country where plastic people lived. She let it drop back to the floor, and kicked it under the front seat.
Resting her head against the window, she noticed that even the apparently smooth glass had a tiny city of scratches etched into it. On the other side, a butterfly landed, inches from her nose, and folded itself up into a vertical line.
Still no movement in the car. Her parents remained motionless, speechless. But, finally, the silence was broken by a thin hum that gradually got louder. Another car was driving towards them. And as it got nearer, Kate took charge. She got out and waited, resting against the hot bonnet. The other car stopped and she went over to the driver’s window.
Jeanette watched Kate talk to the shadowy head of the other driver, before she came back. As she hopped in, she said, ‘I know where we are now.’
Another memory. They were at a family party in some cousin’s house. Jeanette and Kate were supposed to be playing with the other children, but they’d given up and wandered back into the living room where all the adults are. Everyone seemed to be clutching a glass. Some of the glasses had slops of wine making red-purple stains in the bottom, like liquid bruises.
The adults were all laughing, throwing their heads back. Jeanette couldn’t figure out what was so funny, as one person stopped and another started. Their mother was tipping her glass to one side as she leant back and her throat was stretched out, flat and white. She was all angles in different directions, and she was wearing a dress that Jeanette hadn’t seen before, something shiny and dark, a bit like Kate’s swimsuits. It slithered around her as she laughed. You couldn’t imagine it would be much good in a swimming pool though. It would cling, black fabric seaweed pulling you under the water.
Jeanette and Kate found themselves surrounded by the adults.
‘Darlings,’ their mother said, for some reason. Jeanette couldn’t think what to say and she wa
sn’t even sure why they’d come in here, but it seemed better than staying with the children and their needle-sharp eyes. She stood a bit behind Kate, because it was usually Kate they were interested in.
‘How’s your swimming coming along? Still the county champion?’ said a cousin. He was staring down at them, moving his head back and forward like the crumpled old tortoise they saw at the zoo.
Kate stared back. Jeanette looked around. People were perched everywhere. On the sofas, on the edge of the dining table, on the window sills. They were all focused on Kate, waiting for her to answer. Jeanette could have slipped away unnoticed, as usual, but she decided to stay. Kate didn’t seem to care that they were all waiting for her. In any case, she was used to being around lots of adults; swimming coaches and all the hundred and one officials at the championships.
The cousin continued, ‘Leaving all the others behind in your wake?’ and his eyes flickered at Jeanette as he spoke. Just a flicker but she saw it. She knew Kate did too.
When Kate finally spoke it was in response to this silent gesture, this dismissal of Jeanette’s apparent slowness, her inability to be noticed. ‘Jeanette’s the clever one.’
Clever? At school, she could do the sums without thinking, her reading age was years older than her actual age, she already knew all the things the teacher told them. In fact she was fed up with being taught things she remembered; she wanted the new stuff. She wondered when she would be surprised.
But nobody had ever commented on this before. Was this what it meant to be clever? To know that the moon goes round the earth and they both go round the sun and to be able to see them in her mind, making a corkscrew dance in the sky?
‘Clever’ sounded like the silence in the classroom as she waited for the others to catch up. But the other kids were still better than her at the important things; the random jokes, thinking up nicknames for their teachers, making each other laugh. She stuck to silence.
The Falling Sky Page 10
