She sits down heavily on the bed and waits as long as she dares, before getting up again. Even so, when she gets to the top of the stairs her mother is already hovering at the bottom, peering up.
Her father arrives just before dinner, when she’s already sitting at the table, trying not to drink the wine too quickly.
‘Hello!’ He smells cheerful and beery as he hugs her. Perhaps he went to the pub on the way home.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she grins, watching as he pours himself a glass of wine and then one for her mother.
‘So, I think we’ve got something to celebrate?’ he winks at her. ‘Has our ridiculously clever daughter found out something amazing about the Universe?’
Her mother spills casserole onto their plates and smiles.
‘Kind of. But there’s something else as well.’
‘Something else? Even better than that?’
She likes him in this mood. ‘Yep. I’ve got a job. A proper job. A lectureship.’
He punches the air, and she realises that he is a bit drunk.
‘But you had a job anyway,’ says her mother.
‘Yes, but…’ She’s half proud, half fed up, with explaining the minutiae of the University’s hierarchy and the endless gradations of jobs. ‘It’s the next level up. It’s a big jump. If everything goes ok, I’ll be permanent in a year.’
‘Do you hear that?’ Her father swivels round to face her mother. ‘Permanent!’
‘How did you get it?’ asks her mother.
‘Because she’s so blooming clever!’ says her father.
‘No, Mum’s right. It’s because I found something, at least I think that’s why I got it.’ She still isn’t sure and that’s what makes her worry that it might yet disappear in a puff of smoke.
‘Did you discover something new? A new planet?’ Her mother has finished and has cleared her plate away, even though she and her father are still eating.
‘No, I don’t do planets.’ She’s not that interested in planets. They’re little more than fluff around stars. ‘I do bigger things, galaxies, stuff in the early Universe.’
‘A new galaxy, then? Presumably that would be more important than just a planet.’
She has to admire her mother’s logic. ‘Well yes, but it’s much easier to discover galaxies than planets, because they’re much bigger and brighter. I’ve probably discovered thousands of galaxies.’ For the first time she realises how topsy-turvy her work is. What does it mean to ‘discover’ something like a distant galaxy in the early Universe, which probably doesn’t even exist now? Is it like discovering the grave of someone who’s been dead for centuries? ‘I found something odd between two galaxies, something that shouldn’t have been there. It’s caused a bit of a stir.’
‘Well, let’s drink to it,’ says her father, but her mother’s already washed and dried her own glass.
Later, when they’re watching television, her father says he has to go upstairs for a bit. She doesn’t think anything of this, until she glances at her mother and sees her expressionless face, like a mask. And she remembers all those childhood evenings with her father upstairs, whispering into the phone, and she realises that he’s still having an affair. He’s here but he’s not here.
She can hear him walking around. ‘What’s Dad up to?’ The news is on. Something to do with floods in some distant country.
Her mother shrugs, not looking away from the TV.
She wishes she could think up some other chat to distract her mother; perhaps she should tell her about her new flatmate. But she doesn’t trust herself not to betray her feelings about Paula; she’s not that good an actor. And to her parents she is always single, always neuter. She has never told them about any other women, they have never met any of her girlfriends, never heard her happiness at meeting someone new, or sadness at the end of a relationship. When she split up with the ice woman she was abrupt with them on the phone, to avoid any of the misery leaking out. This is the way it’s always been, but now she realises that she’s made a large chunk of her life invisible to them. She’s made herself invisible.
The news is showing pictures of people sitting on rooftops. Each roof has one person sitting on it and waiting for help, surrounded by dirty water which, according to the news reporter, is still rising. Each person is isolated, silent.
The next morning she lies in bed looking up at the photos. They rustle gently, and it looks like they’re breathing. She wonders where Alice is now. She never heard from her again, not after she reached out to stroke Alice’s face and Alice went away.
After she’s dressed and ready to go downstairs for breakfast she walks into her parents’ room. Their double bed is neat with the cover pulled taut. It doesn’t look like anyone ever sleeps in it. Perhaps they don’t sleep there, perhaps each night on the stroke of midnight her father goes back to his lover and her mother folds herself up like a sad lost umbrella, and waits in the corner of the room until morning.
There’s nothing else in here, no other signs of life. It’s as clean as downstairs, and as empty. Emptier, because there’s nothing on the walls. No clothes heaped on the laundry hamper, no knick-knacks gathering dust on the chest of drawers. But as she glances around the room something snags at her vision. There is something here, ruffling the smooth absence of things. A tiny bit of texture. There. She’s spotted it — she moves closer to the chest of drawers. Laid flat against the surface is a photo.
It’s a photo of Kate. Kate in school uniform and her face all smiling. Jeanette’s eyes fill. She hasn’t seen this for years. It was the very last photo to disappear, when all the other things that Kate owned, or that were associated with her, receded one by one beyond the horizon where they couldn’t be seen anymore. Why did her parents keep this to themselves? Why couldn’t they have shared it with her?
She tilts the photo, gazes at it from different angles, even holds it up to the window. But it can’t share its secrets with her.
She watches as her hand sneaks out, picks up the photo and slips it into her pocket. The photo’s snug against the curve of her body now, not left out in the cold of her parents’ bedroom.
She walks downstairs for breakfast and doesn’t tell her parents about her secret stowaway.
Jeanette finds it difficult to remember the first time with Paula. There are gaps in the timeline, things her brain has not registered. So the second time is slower, more deliberate; she wants to record this physical phenomenon in her memory.
Paula is lying naked on the bedroom carpet, with Jeanette kneeling between her legs. She wonders what she looks like from this angle and for a moment it saddens her that she will never know, never be able to see and truly understand herself. She only knows her own body from studying other women, and their bodies can only be an imperfect mirror of her own. It occurs to her, as Paula trembles slightly against her fingers, that she spends her life looking at images of reality without ever being able to reach reality itself.
Even as Paula shudders, Jeanette has to observe her, noticing the way her face flushes pink, her hips arch up away from the floor. Information to be stored for analysis later.
Afterwards, when they’re both lying on the carpet, Jeanette thinks about her first girl and remembers that brief moment when she thought she understood it all.
The first girl was a girl in a blue shirt. Jeanette was a student, going to a club off Grassmarket each week, hanging round the dark, damp space, trying to notice other girls and get noticed.
The girl came over to talk, but it was too loud so they just smiled at each other. Jeanette couldn’t stop looking at the girl’s shirt, where the soft fabric met her skin.
They walked home together and stopped at the edge of the Meadows. The girl turned to Jeanette. She still didn’t know her name, but now she could see that her eyes matched her shirt.
‘Please touch me,’ the girl whispered as she clung to Jeanette. They were still upright but the girl had backed Jeanette against the wall. She said it again; ‘Touch me.’ M
ore insistent this time, less pleading.
Touch me. As if that was what she was. She was her body. And when Jeanette reached out the girl had already unzipped her jeans, so there was smooth skin, then coarse hair, then she was at the limit of the girl’s body and the edge of her cunt, before she found what she’d been looking for all these years. Similar to herself, and yet so different.
This is what women did, then. To each other.
The girl had her own hand in Jeanette’s jeans now. ‘I want to touch you,’ she sighed in Jeanette’s ear.
You. You are this. All this is you.
Jeanette was still vaguely worried about being seen by passers-by. They were only a few metres from the nearest streetlight and the people in the tenements opposite could have just looked out of the windows and seen the two of them doing this to each other.
She was too wound up and tense to come herself, even though the girl was pushing inside her, stretching her wider. But as her finger slid and bumped around on the girl’s clit, she could feel the girl gasp and clutch at her, not able to do anything but ride her orgasm until it broke and they were both stranded, slumped against the wall.
The girl took a step back, and they looked at each other. The girl’s skin was moon-pale in the streetlight. Jeanette’s cunt ached and there was a thump in her belly because she wanted more, but at least she had the smooth slick of the girl on her fingers.
The girl slowly ran a glistening finger around Jeanette’s mouth. ‘Thanks for that. You’re lovely,’ she said.
She had never been lovely to anyone before, she was made lovely for the first time that night. She kissed the girl again, wanting to feel the stickiness between their mouths. But the girl pulled away. ‘I’d better go,’ she said. She lived with someone, that was why they were out here in the cold, trying to hide from other people. And Jeanette couldn’t imagine bringing a woman back to the flat. To her male flatmates she was the sensible one, the one who didn’t shag random people or have dating disasters. They asked her for advice about women, probably not realising what she thought about these women.
‘See you at the club again, maybe?’ Jeanette offered.
‘Yeah. Maybe.’ The girl walked off down the street, waving goodbye behind her, past the row of shiny-eyed windows. Jeanette was still leaning against the high stone wall, her own jeans wide open, not wanting to move away from that moment. She no longer cared if anyone had seen them together.
Now, on the carpet with Paula, Jeanette thinks she’s fallen asleep so she glances at her. But Paula’s eyes are wide open and she’s staring at the ceiling.
Jeanette’s see-through. She’s swimming, slipping through the water as easily and quickly as Kate used to. She’s gliding up and down the pool, effortlessly. But she’s translucent, a jellyfish girl. As she pauses and then falters, alone in the water, she looks down at her body, fascinated by the structure of her bones and veins. Just like the branches of a naked tree in winter. Even her swimming suit is pale. Only her heart is the wrong colour. It’s dark red. It looks bruised, vulnerable.
Other astronomers are repeating the experiment. They’re taking more images of the galaxies to see if they too can spot the link. Almost an entire volume of one of the leading academic journals is taken up with these repeat observations. The good news is that everyone can see this link, although nobody can see it very clearly. The bad news is that no other galaxies show anything similar. There appears to be only one pair of linked galaxies at different redshifts in the observed Universe. People trawl through old datasets, rummage around in their office through forgotten computer tapes, get their students to re-check their results. Nothing.
The consortium publishes a paper in Nature showing an analysis of all their thousands of galaxies. They are scathing about Jeanette’s and Maggie’s work, and claim that their own image of these galaxies shows a very low statistical significance and should not be used in support. But Jon writes a letter to Nature the following week, reminding people about Orion and encouraging them to keep an open mind, at least until then.
The problem is, thinks Jeanette as she reads Jon’s letter, that we’re stuck on Earth with only one point of view. Never has she felt so frustrated by the essential passivity of the way that they work. If only she could reach into the sky and grab hold of the galaxies, turn them around in her hands, examine them from every direction.
It’s Becca’s birthday and there is a cake with candles, because Becca always does things properly. She would have been the sort of little girl to have birthday parties with other little girls in nice dresses, and fairy cakes, and sandwiches cut into triangles. After Kate died, Jeanette’s mother stopped doing those sorts of parties. Watching the candles on Becca’s cake makes Jeanette’s eyes fill.
‘Are you ok?’ Paula whispers. She nods. They’re in a restaurant in town, surrounded by Becca’s friends from work, who are all as well dressed as Becca. Jeanette has made an effort with her smartest jeans, but still feels like a slob. She surreptitiously tries to tidy up her nails by pushing back her cuticles, and draws blood.
She’s sitting next to Paula but they don’t touch, and they don’t even talk much to each other. But she’s so aware of Paula; it’s as if her body has turned into some sort of precision instrument whose sole purpose is to detect Paula’s. The hairs on her arms have turned to needles on the scale of the instrument and they’re trembling. All the information she’s received is overwhelming her; the way the shoulder straps on Paula’s dress keep slipping down on her arms so that she has to pull them up again. Each time she does this, Jeanette gets a glimpse of the paler skin at the top of her breasts. Her hands resting so close to Jeanette’s on the table keep reminding her of the way those hands touched her just before they left for the restaurant. She can’t concentrate on anything else, not on making polite conversation to Becca’s boring boss, not even on talking to Becca herself.
Becca doesn’t know. Jeanette wants to tell her, but Paula is more cautious.
‘She doesn’t have to be “told”, does she? We don’t have to “come out” to her, do we?’
‘She’ll be upset if she finds out from someone else.’
‘But nobody else knows either.’
‘They may guess.’ To Jeanette it is inconceivable that people won’t guess when they see her and Paula together. Surely it’s obvious. ‘She’ll guess. She knows both of us so well. She’s bound to notice something’s changed.’
Becca is sitting further down the table, cutting the cake. Wedges of it are passed around the table, tiny cliffs of chocolate earth. Jeanette has to stop herself from staring at Paula’s mouth as she licks her lips to get the last of the icing.
‘Hey, Paula,’ Becca calls down the table, ‘You still with that bloke you met at your party?’
‘Of course not,’ Paula calls back, easy.
‘Of course not,’ Becca echoes her, knowingly, and laughs.
‘What bloke?’ she mutters at Paula.
‘Just a bloke.’ Paula gives her a small sideways smile, ‘Don’t worry. It was quick and painless. He didn’t suffer much.’
She remembers seeing Paula talk to Richard, and there was another man asking for her. She can remember too much, and it’s all the more painful because it meant nothing then. Why didn’t she anticipate the future, then? Why didn’t she notice more?
‘Who?’ she has to ask again.
Becca looks down the table at them. ‘I suppose your style is a bit cramped in Jeanette’s flat.’ It sounds to Jeanette as if this is a question. She wants to answer it, wants to share her knowledge of Paula’s style, but she stays silent. Paula stays silent too.
She likes explaining things to Paula, likes talking about her work. Perhaps she’s worried that without it she’s not so interesting. What is it that differentiates her from any other smallish not-so-youngish mousey-hairedish woman in Edinburgh? So, like Scheherazade, she spins out the story of the Universe to keep Paula intrigued. Fortunately, in many versions of this story there is no
end. But she doesn’t know what will happen as the Universe continues to expand, and everything travels further away and all the stars die out one by one. Will Paula still be interested then?
Paula seems to like the mistakes best, so today Jeanette is telling her about galaxies. The great astronomer Hubble thought he’d solved the problem of why there are different types of galaxies. Some are featureless elliptical blobs, and others are spirals; great Catherine wheels of stars that it’s easy to imagine spinning across the sky.
Hubble set out images of different types of galaxies in a diagram that resembles a tuning fork, and convinced other astronomers that elliptical and spiral galaxies both evolved from a more primeval form and that at a certain point, the evolution bifurcated to give the two different shapes.
It was simple, clever — and wrong. The idea fell apart in the sixties when astronomers started getting better, more detailed data on the different types of stars in the galaxies. But Jeanette still likes the idea because it articulates the desire of transforming yourself into something else. Even if it does take billions of years.
‘How extraordinary,’ murmurs Paula. ‘What happens here?’ She gently touches the point where the long legs sprout from the body on the tuning fork diagram.
She and Paula are lying in the garden, grass bunched beneath them, waiting for a predicted meteorite shower.
They are quiet together. She likes this new aspect of Paula. She never imagined it would be peaceful, being with her. She can’t remember Paula being quiet, staring at the night sky, when they last lived together.
Tonight, the sky is obligingly clear and dark, and there is no moon to get in their way. They wait. At the peak of this meteorite shower, there should be one meteor every minute, but they haven’t noticed any yet.
The Falling Sky Page 12
