The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  The rehearsal proceeds in fits and starts. Lights go on and off at random, regardless of whether anyone is on the stage. People appear in the wrong places and have to disappear. The two sons have to die over and over again because neither of them can remember their lines. The Universe is supposed to go like clockwork, but this one is flawed. Eventually it reaches its conclusion, and Mother Courage shackles herself to her cart yet again, and goes off to another war.

  At the beginning, Jeanette takes loads of photos, but by the end she is simply holding the camera up, to stop people from seeing the tears running down her face. Death by water and now fire. She wonders how her parents can stand watching all those TV programmes full of dead bodies.

  ‘You’ve been working hard!’ Her teacher, Miss Nightingale, silhouetted in front of the stage.

  She nods.

  ‘Are you going to develop them now?’

  She nods again, and stumbles off.

  The school darkroom is in the basement of the science block. When she tries to open the door, it’s locked. Someone else is in there.

  When she rattles the door handle again, a voice squawks from inside, ‘Hang on!’ And the door opens slightly, just enough for a cross face to peer out, flushed red from the safety light. ‘I haven’t finished actually.’

  ‘But I booked it. This afternoon.’

  ‘Oh,’ and the face looks a bit doubtful now. Jeanette recognises it; Alice Airy from the year above. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Is there room enough for both of us?’ she asks.

  The door opens a bit wider. ‘Suppose so. Come on.’

  The most difficult part of the process is at the beginning; getting the film out of the camera and onto the developing reel. That has to be done in complete darkness without even the safety light. As Jeanette slowly and carefully guides the tip of the film into the reel, she’s aware of Alice, silent and invisible, on the other side of the room.

  ‘Won’t be long.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ says Alice. ‘I’m not in a hurry.’

  But something goes wrong, the film tightens itself into a knot and won’t wind on properly. Jeanette has to start all over again. It’s like learning to see with your fingers. Everything you do has to be guided by what you can feel.

  ‘What are your photos of?’ asks Alice, out of the darkness.

  Finally she gets the film into the developing tank and is able to turn the safety light back on. Alice is sitting on one of the benches, perilously close to the sink, swinging her legs. She has short tufty hair and large eyes, with lots of black eyeliner crayoned on, making her look younger than she is.

  ‘Why are you staring at me?’

  ‘I’m not.’ Jeanette concentrates on shaking the developing tank. It’s important to keep the liquid moving. She looks around but she can’t see what Alice is working on. ‘Where are your photos?’

  ‘They didn’t come out properly. I threw them away.’

  Jeanette waits for her film to dry and wonders why Alice is still there.

  ‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ Alice says. ‘Do you ever feel like that? Home is piss, really, since my mum had my baby brother. It’s just baby baby baby. It’s really embarrassing too. Fancy having sex at that age.’

  As she sets up the enlarger, Jeanette watches Alice out of the corner of her eye. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’ Alice is still swinging her legs.

  ‘Yes, I feel like that too.’

  She holds the negatives up to the light, and squints at them. Impossible to see, at this stage, whether they will make good photos. But she likes looking at negatives, at the world transformed into bone-white and coal-dark. She offers one of the strips of film to Alice. ‘Careful. Don’t touch the surface.’

  Then she notices that the bin is empty, ‘Thought you said you’d thrown your photos away.’

  Alice swings her legs and doesn’t reply. Jeanette lies the wet contact sheets on the counter and inspects them. This time she doesn’t get emotional. It’s more about the arrangement of the bodies in the frame of the photo. The world seems more manageable in shades of grey. She can even examine the photo of Kattrin standing on the roof of the burning building, just before the plunge to her death.

  Finally the contact sheets are done, the tanks are all cleaned and stacked against the wall, the enlarger is back in its box. Jeanette’s ready to leave.

  ‘You coming?’ she says to Alice.

  Alice slowly eases herself off the counter. ‘Suppose so.’

  When they leave the darkroom, Jeanette’s eyes are so used to the monochrome red safety light that everything seems larger, lighter. Through the windows the sky looks bluer than she ever thought possible. She laughs and so does Alice.

  ‘Wow,’ says Alice, ‘It’s like technicolour. Like a cartoon.’

  It’s late now and all the other kids went home ages ago. As they walk down the long corridor, Jeanette says to her, ‘You never developed any photos, did you?’

  And Alice shakes her head, not looking at Jeanette. ‘It’s nice and quiet. No one would look for me there.’

  Jeanette feels a small splutter of annoyance. ‘If you’re going to hide in a darkroom, you might as well learn how to use it.’

  Alice grins. ‘Are you going to teach me, then?’

  Jeanette brings Alice home for tea.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Alice asks as they go past the locked door on their way to Jeanette’s room.

  ‘Nothing.’

  At teatime, the two of them sit waiting at the dining table. It’s sausages, they could smell them upstairs before tea. But when her mother brings them in, on the old tin baking tray that’s always used for this meal, Alice says, ‘Oh.’ A small sad sound.

  ‘Oh?’ her mother echoes.

  ‘I don’t eat meat. I’m really sorry.’ She looks it too. Her eyeliner is smudged, as usual. It makes her look like she’s been crying, even though she hasn’t.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Jeanette’s mother turns to her, exasperated.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  Her mother sighs. ‘How about an omelette, then?’

  ‘That would be lovely. I’m so sorry! Thank you!’ Alice smiles, hugely, brilliantly.

  Her mother smiles back. ‘More sausages for Jeanette, then. Lucky her.’

  But Jeanette remembers that Alice ate a chicken sandwich for lunch. ‘You do eat meat,’ she hisses, when her mother is back in the kitchen.

  ‘Not sausages,’ says Alice. ‘Not processed meat.’ She looks sad again.

  Her father arrives home halfway through their meal. ‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ says Alice. She’s only been picking at her omelette and Jeanette’s mother is looking exasperated again. ‘I’m Alice.’

  ‘Very nice to meet you, Alice. I’m Derek.’ And he leans forward to shake her hand. Jeanette stares at her father. He doesn’t usually talk like that.

  He’s wearing a short sleeved shirt and Jeanette can see the old burn scars on his arms, where the skin is gouged and contoured. She wonders how visible the scars are to other people; if you didn’t know about them, would you be able to see them? She wishes she could undo the knowledge of them.

  ‘Sausages!’ he says, and smiles at Alice. Jeanette watches Alice smile back.

  ‘I once knew a dog who could say ‘sausages’. ’Alice says. ‘It was a poodle.’ Jeanette’s father laughs.

  When Jeanette returns to the table, after helping her mother clear away the first course, she realises there are four of them. Two to the power of two. The family has been lopsided for so long, like a broken chair, that she’s forgotten what it looked like when it was whole.

  She pauses at the doorway to look. If she squints her eyes — but Alice doesn’t look anything like Kate. Kate had been solid, she’d shovelled in food efficiently and cleanly as if she were stoking a fire inside. Alice is too fragile, all eyes and skinny legs and leftover food. Even though she’s three years older than Kate ever was, she
’s probably still smaller.

  Her mother passes round the dessert bowls and her father starts telling a story. It’s long and rambling, and Jeanette can’t really get the gist of it, but she isn’t used to her father talking this much.

  Every now and then he pauses, and Alice laughs politely. Jeanette eats her pudding in silence. When she finishes eating, she gets up immediately, as she always does, but her mother frowns. She sits down again, not used to not having a reason to be there, the usual alibi of food. Her father is still talking, and Alice has hardly started her ice cream.

  Later, Alice says, ‘Your dad’s childhood sounds amazing.’

  Childhood? Was that what he was talking about?

  ‘In the country, with all those brothers and sisters.’

  They’re walking upstairs now, past the room she never goes into, to her own bedroom. Something has happened to the room behind the door, nobody has seen it for so long. There could be anything behind it. A whole new world. A vast dark space. A narrow bed where no one ever sleeps.

  Downstairs, the TV is switched on, the TV voices knit together, and life goes back to normal.

  As she promised, Jeanette teaches Alice how to use a darkroom. She gets Alice to practice winding film onto the spool with the safety light on. Even in the light, Alice keeps dropping things. ‘Sorry,’ she says as the spool hits the floor yet again.

  ‘What’s wrong with having a baby brother, anyway?’ Jeanette’s been to Alice’s house and seen the baby, who sat in a mound of cushions on the floor, grabbing at people passing by. When Jeanette picked him up for a cuddle, he gurgled and smiled at her. They had chips for tea and the whole of the small house was filled with noise. It seemed pretty good to her.

  As if Alice could read her mind, she says, ‘We have chips all the time. Mum never has time to cook anything else. And she shouts. I wish she’d stop shouting at me.’

  ‘At least she notices you.’

  Alice has finally wound the film onto the spool.

  ‘Now you have to do it again, this time with the light off.’

  ‘You are bossy,’ Alice murmurs, as Jeanette snaps the switch off. She’s used to the way darkness makes the room feel larger, makes you forget the edges of your own body so that you seem to swell into the surrounding air. There is the regular creak of the spool as Alice winds the film onto it. It sounds as though she’s got the hang of it now.

  ‘Ready!’ she sings out, so Jeanette turns on the light again. But something has happened to the geometry of the room; Alice is much closer than she thought, close enough for Jeanette to reach out and touch her.

  ‘What’s the next step?’

  ‘Sorry,’ and Jeanette blinks.

  In bed that night, she imagines reaching out in the dark and stroking Alice’s cheek, just making contact with the skin, and something takes up residence in her mind. Something whispers, you want this.

  She invites Alice back to her house again. This time Alice eats all her omelette, and Jeanette stays in her place after the end of the meal, listening to her father. She isn’t used to so much talk. She’s never heard him say all this stuff before. He’s talking to Alice about gardening, and Alice smiles and nods and only occasionally glances at Jeanette. Her mother seems to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, perhaps more time than is necessary.

  Afterwards, when they go upstairs to Jeanette’s room, Alice pauses outside the shut door again.

  ‘What’s in there?’ she asks, the same question she asked the first time.

  ‘Nothing,’ Jeanette answers. She finds it impossible to imagine anything in that room, for that room to exist at all as a collection of walls and carpet and windows. There can’t be anything behind the door but blackness, space, vacuum. If it was meant for Kate and Kate doesn’t exist, then what is the point of it?

  It becomes a habit for Alice to come back for tea at Jeanette’s at least once a week.

  ‘Poor thing,’ says Jeanette’s mother. ‘Not a scrap on her. You do wonder what goes on in other people’s houses.’

  ‘It’s alright. They eat plenty,’ says Jeanette, but her mother just shakes her head. ‘At least she gets a decent meal here.’

  One evening she says to her mother, ‘Alice is coming over next Friday.’

  ‘Next Friday?’ repeats her mother, and Jeanette notices something in her eyes, the translucent grey veil settling between her mother and the rest of the world. And then Jeanette remembers. Next Friday is Kate’s birthday. One of the days of the year that dumps them back in the past. No matter how many times the Earth orbits the Sun it has to go through this same bit of bruised space, exposing them to the same pain. But it also reminds them how much has changed. The only thing worse than the sharp pain of grief is its numbing with time, because that dullness reminds you that the death, and the life it owned, is being swept away into the past, and you yourself are being swept into the future.

  That Friday evening, as they all sit round the table, the air is thick with sadness. Jeanette has not warned Alice in advance, has not been able to think of how to explain to her the significance of this date. Jeanette knows that Alice thinks of her as a lucky only child, in a blessedly quiet house with no noise or mess. This house is Alice’s haven.

  When Jeanette first started secondary school, she learnt to answer the standard question, ‘Have you got any brothers or sisters?’ with a quick shake of her head. No words were needed. No explanations were given. It was true, after all. Some other kids knew about her sister, most didn’t. Because Alice is in the year above Jeanette and didn’t know her at primary school, she doesn’t know. It’s better that way, Jeanette thinks, and it’s beyond explaining now.

  But on this Friday, Jeanette is worried. Silent words buzz around between her and her parents, words that have never been spoken. Words such as ‘Why did she have to die?’, ‘Why her?’, and sometimes Jeanette thinks she can even hear ‘Why not you?’

  The words manage to attract energy to themselves as they fly through the air. Some of them are bound to crash into Alice, as she sits in the fourth chair, chattering about her baby brother learning to talk. The three of them seem to be staring at Alice, as if astonished that she can be so ordinary on a day like today.

  They finish their main course, and Jeanette’s mother clears the plates. Jeanette, Alice and Jeanette’s dad wait. Sometimes this day is a relief, Jeanette has found over the years, the days and weeks beforehand getting more and more strung out, taut as a wire before the final release of energy on the day itself. This year it isn’t like that, the tension hasn’t dissipated. Something else has to happen but she can’t imagine what, so she has to wait.

  Ice cream appears. When Jeanette glances at Alice, she sees her running her left hand along the arm of her chair. Kate used to do something similar, and Jeanette blinks.

  ‘Who used to sit here?’ Alice mumbles through a mouthful of ice cream.

  The three of them look at Alice and the silent words crash to the floor. Now they have to deal with reality.

  Alice continues, ‘It’s all worn away here.’ And she touches the patch of fabric made smooth by Kate’s fingers.

  Someone has to say it. ‘Kate,’ mutters Jeanette. Her parents just sit there.

  ‘Who’s Kate?’ says Alice. But Jeanette has run out of words. She stares down into her bowl, not wanting to look at Alice’s bright innocent face. Suddenly, Jeanette hates her. How dare she ask questions like that? How dare she use the present tense? Doesn’t she realise you can’t just say things in this house? How dare she not know?

  Jeanette gets up, still not looking at Alice, and slams her chair into the table. Her parents seemed to have turned into ice. Perhaps they always were. ‘I’ve finished,’ she says much too loudly and walks out of the room not bothering to wait for anyone’s response.

  As she bangs upstairs, she hears Alice behind her, ‘Wait for me,’ and there’s a sudden scraping noise as Alice falls over. ‘Ow!’ Good. Pain is good, especially physical pain, but Jeanette would r
ather feel it herself. There’s no point in Alice getting hurt. So she stops to wait for her.

  Upstairs, safely away from her parents, Jeanette tries to breathe deeply. Grief is the same as gravity, the same word, and the same heaviness. Grief crouches on her chest and stops her breathing properly. She pauses in the hallway; Alice is right behind her, so they bump into each other.

  ‘Sorry,’ says Jeanette.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Alice whispers. She seems to have realised that today is not normal. Their house is not normal.

  They are standing outside the room, and it’s finally possible to open the door. Alice waits, not moving, until Jeanette tugs her arm and pulls her across the threshold.

  Inside. Superficially the room looks like Kate’s old room, in their old house. There is her bed, covered with her favourite duvet cover, the one with wavy blue and green stripes. Her swimming medals are hanging in a shiny jangle off her bookshelves. Swimming certificates are pinned to the wall, and Jeanette knows without looking inside, that the cupboard will be full of her clothes. She has an urge to open the cupboard door and rub her face in them, to smell the last of Kate.

  Schoolbooks are piled on the desk by the window. Jeanette can remember her clear, round handwriting. The books will be full of it, but she isn’t sure she wants to see it. She’s beginning to feel sick now. People aren’t like houses, or cities. They’re not just collections of their own belongings. She could stroke the strands of hair in Kate’s hairbrush, sitting on Kate’s dressing table, and it would be no nearer to Kate than peeling a dead animal off the road.

  It is utterly silent. Alice’s eyes are even wider than usual as she watches Jeanette walk over to the window. The view here is slightly different to the view from Jeanette’s bedroom, although you can only tell the difference over short distances. And Kate never saw this view at all. Jeanette thinks of her lying in bed, waiting for the morning when she would get up, and go to the pool for her daily practice, and die.