The adults looked from Kate to Jeanette and their mother smiled at her, ‘Yes, she gets glowing reports from her teachers, she’s the brains of the family!’
‘Clever’ just became visible, then. It didn’t make a splash in the pool, or race to be first in the playground. But it belonged to Jeanette. She hugged herself and went off to lean against her mum.
Jeanette starts secondary school, pleased that she can leave behind her and Kate’s old school where people stared at her in the corridors, and where some of the teachers avoided talking to her because they didn’t know what to say. She doesn’t blame them, because she didn’t know what to say either.
So it’s easier now, in this new school. It’s like starting again. Also, there are new lessons, different things to think about. In science, she learns how to push the ticker-tape trolley down the wooden incline, making black dots appear on the paper tape spooling out behind the trolley. She measures the gaps between the black dots and works out how fast the trolley is accelerating. She drops scrunched up paper, apples and stones from the top of a ladder, and watches them all hit the ground at the same time. She loves doing things and figuring out what will happen as a result.
Whenever she gets home from school, her mother is always sitting on the sofa in a nest of newspapers, cigarette boxes, dirty mugs and ashtrays, watching television with the sound turned down.
The school is nearby, about a twenty minute walk away, and when she walks home after school, she starts off light and floaty. But as she gets nearer to home, she gets heavier. Something makes her drag her feet along the pavement. She spends time kicking the dead leaves into the air or looking for conkers, even though she’s not that interested in conkers. She arrives home later and later, but her mother doesn’t notice. Or at least she doesn’t say anything. She never says anything.
There should be two of us, Jeanette thinks. And now that there’s just one, that’s not half as good or real. It’s nothing.
She makes her route home curved rather than straight, so that it takes longer. She walks along unseen roads, past shops she never goes in and through new green spaces and strange parks.
She’s aware of the sea off to one side of the town, always visible from the top of the bus. Finally one day she walks down the long narrow hill with the sea waiting at the bottom like a promise.
The road along the coast feels lop-sided, with houses on one side and just the low level water on the other. The houses could rise up and tilt over and fall into the sea, and nothing could stop them drowning.
But she likes this road. It takes a long time to walk along it and turn back home. This becomes her routine. Each day she notices stripes of seaweed and pebbles deposited by the tide at different levels on the beach.
One day she sees a car parked on one side of the road, the side nearest the sea. It’s their car, the one her father drives to work each day. But he doesn’t work here. His office is outside town in some sort of estate, which she always thought meant parks and big old stone houses, until she visited it and saw that it was white huts huddled together in a field. She doesn’t know what happens in the huts, and when she asks him he says it’s too boring to explain. Perhaps that’s why he’s here. When she goes up to the car and peers in, all she can see is the usual stuff on the floor; crisp packets and crumpled maps.
It’s odd, seeing their car here. She looks up and down the road, but she can’t see him. As she walks home she wonders why he goes there. Does he also think it’s separate from home? Somewhere secret?
The next day the car’s parked in the same spot. She glances at the house opposite, wondering if he’s inside. Some curtains are hanging half off their rail in the downstairs window. Or perhaps he’s walking on the beach. Sure enough there are a few stick figures a long way off, two grown-ups tucked into each other. She ducks down so she can’t be seen, and watches them. Is it her dad? But the man is silhouetted against the sky and she can’t make him out.
The next day, the curtains are pulled shut against the late, low afternoon sun. She blinks as it shines in her eyes. That’s the one problem with walking home this way; she has to squint into the yellow distance for over a mile.
After a few weeks it has turned into a habit. Walk along the road, glance at their car, and keep walking. She hasn’t seen the people on the beach since the first time, and the curtains are nearly always shut. This time when she looks at the car, it has been parked really badly and one end is practically sticking out into the road. Her dad must have been in a hurry. She can imagine him swerving into the parking space and leaping out of the car. Inside the car, on the passenger seat, is a bag she’s never seen before. It looks like a lady’s handbag, but it’s not her mum’s. She gazes at it for a bit, it’s smart and black and shiny. It doesn’t seem to go with the owner of the curtains.
When she first starts at this school, she tries to tell her parents things. One night, as they’re all sawing away at their dinner, she says, ‘I got an A in my maths test.’ Nothing. If anything the silence gets deeper. The next night she says, ‘I failed my French.’ Again, nothing. This is what it’s like if you’re an astronaut in space, she thinks, floating in the blackness beyond the curve of the Earth.
Her mother has that glassy, faraway look. Unfocused. Jeanette knows, because she can do it herself; deliberately make her eyes go out of focus, so she sees two blurred images of everything instead of one sharp one. Perhaps when her mother does it, she sees two daughters instead of one.
The next night; ‘Some chemical elements are so unstable they only last for a tiny bit of a second. You can’t detect them directly, only what they’ve left behind.’ She’s thinking of the imprint of fireworks on the night sky, the swimsuits left around the house, the pale scar of wallpaper where Kate’s photo used to be.
After that she gives up on the truth, and she just tells them anything she likes;
‘One plus one is one.’
‘The moon is a bubble.’
‘We cut up a dead elephant today.’
Even so, her voice is thin and scratchy, barely making an impression on the dull silence.
Her father starts smiling a lot. He smiles when he comes home in the evenings, but the smile isn’t directed at anyone. To Jeanette, the smile looks like the sort of after-glow you get when you glance at something bright like the lightbulb or the sun, and the image is imprinted in darkness inside your eyes. Her father’s smile is a negative smile and his eyes are looking at something that’s not in front of him, something they can’t see. Perhaps he can see Kate.
One evening, fed up with the silence, she says to her father, ‘Why do you go to the beach in the afternoons?’
It’s not anything like as interesting as all the outlandish stuff she’s told them in the past, but for some reason it works. They both look up from their plates, and straight at her.
‘The beach?’ Her father places his knife and fork quietly side by side on the plate, so that although they’re close, they’re not touching. ‘I’m at work in the afternoons, nowhere near the beach.’
‘I’ve seen our car there, it’s always there. When I walk home from school.’
‘But the beach isn’t anywhere near the way home from school. What on earth are you doing there?’
Her mother has the glassy look, but now it’s tinged with fear.
‘I walk home that way.’ She knows it’s not really about her, in spite of what he says. ‘And every day there’s our car. Once I thought I saw you, walking on the beach, but I wasn’t sure. It’s a bit difficult to see things properly when the sun’s in your eyes.’
‘It’s not our car. You must have got it wrong.’
She hasn’t got it wrong. She doesn’t get things wrong. She bends her head over her plate before making herself look up again.
Her mother says, ‘Is that why you’re always home so late?’ It isn’t clear which one of them she’s asking.
After a long pause that feels cluttered with silent words, Jeanette decides to answer
. ‘I go there after school sometimes. I like it, it’s — empty.’ Empty of all the invisible rubbish here at home.
‘You’re not supposed to go home that way…’ Her father is swerving back to where he thinks this conversation should be headed. But suddenly her mother smacks the table with her hand so that the plates jump and jitter and everything tinkles. ‘It’s not about her! It’s about you! What the hell is going on!’
So there are things they don’t tell each other, as well as not telling her. She’s relieved she doesn’t have to justify the meandering walks, the attempts to avoid coming home. Her mother looks different, she’s lost the grey veil that seemed to settle over her after Kate died.
In contrast, her father shrinks slightly into his chair. ‘Nothing, nothing… I just go there for some fresh air in the afternoon, occasionally. Not often.’
He’s lying. Why? She watches him closely, interested in what he will say or do next. He’s crying now, tears running down his cheeks. They look fresh and new, and make the rest of him look even more tired than usual.
Her mother’s eyes snap open, they’re brighter and rounder than they have been for months. ‘What’s going on?’ she shouts. There is a horrible moment when she stares at Jeanette and Jeanette knows that she isn’t really seeing her at all, before she bolts from the table, fiddles with the back door and runs into the garden.
It’s the first time she’s been in the garden since the fire. Or maybe she goes there all the time, Jeanette thinks, the way her father goes to the beach, secretly when she thinks nobody can see her. But he goes there because it’s different, and not like home. The garden is like the inside of their house except it is even worse, it’s like the inside of their minds, all burnt out with nothing there.
Their phone is on the landing and some evenings, when Jeanette goes upstairs after tea, she can hear him whispering into it;
‘When?’
‘Please…’
She tries not to imagine that it’s Kate he’s talking to, asking her to come back. If her mother comes out onto the landing when he’s on the phone he puts the receiver down, very quietly so it doesn’t make that clicking sound, and turns round to face her with the smile. It doesn’t work though. Her mother usually starts crying. As Jeanette recedes up the stairs she can hear her voice, sliding around even more than usual;
‘Why her?’
‘Why not me?’
But she can’t hear her father’s reply.
It’s what Jeanette sometimes imagine her parents saying to her; ‘Why Kate?’ or ‘Why not you?’
If she had died instead of Kate, she can’t see how they would have noticed. After all, they don’t seem to notice her now, when she is alive and here. So they probably won’t notice if she isn’t here. It was always Kate, not her, at the centre. She was on the edge. Watching. But now there’s nothing for any of them to watch.
Her mother stops eating dinner with her and her father. She takes a tray into the living room and sits with it on her lap as she watches TV. When she eats, her eyes stay focused on the television screen. If you look closely, you can see reflections glowing tiny and blue in each of her eyes, like two radioactive daughters.
Sometimes when Jeanette comes home from school and stands between the sofa and the TV, she wonders what her mother actually sees. A girl slouched, her school bag at her feet. Waiting. She’s aware that sometimes her mother can hardly stand to look at her, that she prefers to look at her made-up world beyond the glass. That world doesn’t have the power to hurt her.
At night, after Jeanette finishes her homework, she watches the sky. She realises that the stars rise in the east and set in the west, and that different stars can be seen at different times of the year. The planets are more complicated. Venus is erratic, sometimes visible just after sunset, sometimes not. Mars can move around the sky, and then stop, before changing direction.
She steals her father’s binoculars from the sideboard in the dining room and learns how to adjust and focus them, to make objects contract from fuzz to sharpness, and reveal the true nature of themselves. Things in the sky have a clarity that is lacking down here. Jupiter has small moons surrounding it, Venus changes shape from a crescent to a full disk and back again. The Milky Way roars across the centre of the sky. The Andromeda galaxy is just a pale thumbprint off to one side.
Stars and planets are solid. They make her feel solid too. They don’t look through her as if she’s transparent.
The next morning Jeanette leaves the conference building in search of daylight. The wind is a slap in the face, but it wakes her up as she mooches along the seafront. She’s debating whether to go back inside when she sees a group of people from Edinburgh. They’re silhouetted against the sky, so she can’t pick out their faces until they stop right in front of her. Mark is there and she smiles at him but she can’t see if he’s smiling back. There’s silence and she wonders why they’ve all stopped like this, as though they’ve been choreographed. Mark steps out so he’s in front of the rest of them, only a foot away from Jeanette. He clears his throat. Ridiculously, she feels nervous. Is there going to be a showdown?
‘Mark?’
‘Why did you publish it?’ he asks her, straight out. It makes her want to laugh. Have they followed her from the conference building in order to meet her out here, and challenge her?
‘Why shouldn’t I have?’
The rest of them are silent, looking at her and Mark. The sun goes behind a cloud, and now she can see all their faces in the dull grey light. They’re so young. She feels ancient in comparison. They’ve never known anything else. Neither has she, but at least she knows that she will die, and at some point become uncoupled from this smooth trajectory that has carried her through school and university to this. They don’t know that yet. They’re still on the upper part of the trajectory. They haven’t figured out that they have to land somewhere, that they might yet fail.
Someone else chips in, ‘The press are beginning to say that the whole Big Bang model is wrong. The research councils might think that too. It might affect our grants.’
‘I don’t think my work’s that important!’ she laughs, but they do not. ‘Seriously,’ she continues, ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t have published this?’
‘No one believes it,’ says Mark. ‘No one but the nutters.’
‘So what’s the big deal?’
‘Because it helps them. There’ll be stuff in the media giving credibility to all sorts of nutty theories.’
Someone’s phone starts ringing, and the noise is a tinny simulation of some famous bit of classical music, but she can’t put a name to it.
‘It can cope, you know,’ she carries on. ‘It won’t all crumble and fade away just because of a couple of peculiar galaxies. What about the microwave background? Nothing else can explain that, apart from the Big Bang.’
But they don’t say anything, and as she turns her back on them and walks back to the conference, she can hear them shuffling behind her, mumbling to each other. Her shadows.
Later that week, when she gets back to the Observatory, she finds out that an application for grant money has been successful. Because she is now a permanent lecturer, she is able to apply for money from the research council to support more junior researchers, and she has been awarded enough money to support someone for three years. This is part of what she is now expected to do, build up her own team of people. She already has some ideas about who she wants, who would be suitable for her work. She sits at her desk and drafts an advert to be placed on the astronomical job website. Just to make sure the right people know that she has them in mind, she emails it to them as well. Now all she has to do is wait.
She makes a visit to her parents to tell them about the new job. From the window of the train the landscape looks brilliant, sparkling blue and green. The morning is cold, and her breath is visible.
She takes the short cut from the station to the house, to avoid the long and tedious hill. But when she arrives, her father
isn’t home, so she and her mother have to sit and wait. She wasn’t expecting this, but she should have remembered that her father works late most evenings. Or at least he doesn’t come home until late.
She searches round for something to talk about. It’s as quiet and empty as ever in here.
‘How’s work?’ she asks her mother.
‘Busy.’
But she can’t imagine her mother being busy. ‘What do you do? I mean, how do you encourage people to throw their stuff away?’
‘Oh, they’re always pleased, even if they think they can’t bear to get rid of their things. They’re always grateful afterwards.’
Jeanette can’t stop thinking of all the things taken away, like some sort of surgical procedure performed by her mother. People amputated from their favourite belongings.
‘Are you sure it’s good for them?’
‘They write to me afterwards and tell me that they can breathe better. They feel freer.’
Jeanette gazes round at the living room with its sofa, TV, armchair and dresser. On the dresser is a mathematical formation of crystal glasses. There is one picture on the wall, a photo of a wooden jetty leading out into a vast expanse of water surrounded by mountains. There are no people in the photo.
The clock ticks on. Her father seems to be even later than usual, or perhaps time has slowed down. She resists the urge to keep looking at her watch.
‘Perhaps I should take my things to my room,’ she suggests, after about ten silent minutes, and gets up before her mother can reply.
Upstairs she walks quickly past the locked door. She hasn’t been in that room since she went in there as a teenager, with Alice. It’s a stage set, a faked history. Her own bedroom is a relief, as it always was when she lived there. Somehow it’s survived her mother’s relentless decluttering and its walls are so covered in her photos that they’re a patchwork of black and white images. A small one of Alice, near her pillow. Larger ones of planets, a smudged Jupiter with its rings all out of focus, one of the Moon looking like a still from an old movie. She doesn’t think her mother ever comes in here. But she’s not sure. Perhaps her mother comes in here and lies down on the bed and cries into the pillow. Crying for lost girls. Surreptitiously she feels the pillow, but it’s not damp.
The Falling Sky Page 11
