The Falling Sky

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  Later that day, she tries to do some work. She starts to reads a scientific paper;

  In an expanding universe all galaxies are receding from each other. In addition to this universal recessional velocity, there will be local gravitational forces due to neighbouring galaxies. This will lead to additional velocity components and corresponding variations in the space density of galaxies. In those parts of the universe with lower than average galaxy space densities, there will be no counter to the recessional velocity, which will therefore increase. So, a part of the universe with fewer galaxies in it will expand at a higher rate than its surroundings, and will get even less dense. This will lead to a runaway situation in which parts of the universe will get cut off, and isolated from the rest of the universe.

  In this way it is not clear if Einstein’s theory of general relativity is fully consistent with Mach’s principle. The latter claims that our movements here on Earth only have meaning with respect to the distant stars, and thus every single object in the universe is connected.

  Connections. Does everything have to be about connections? She throws the scientific journal away from her. But then she realises. She has data on galaxies. Are her galaxies moving as they should be with the rest of the Universe, or are they in their own little void, cut off from everything?

  She sits and thinks, as the sun advances across the sky into the evening and her shadow grows larger on the wall.

  That night she decides she should tidy up Paula’s belongings. It may make her seem less physically present in the flat if Jeanette can’t see her piles of art books, or nests of underwear, or tottering towers of vintage crockery, or clotted remains of old nail varnish bottles. She feels efficient as she finds a bin bag and carefully places the objects inside. She’s not doing this to be vindictive, she’s not a clichéd ex-lover chopping the sleeves off clothes. She doesn’t want to destroy any of Paula’s belongings, she just doesn’t want to see them.

  Behind the sofa bed she finds Paula’s suitcase. Perhaps she could store her belongings in it. But it’s already full. Inside are some crumpled clothes; pastel-coloured cashmere sweaters, a polka-dotted dress from the fifties, and yet another one of Paula’s blasted kimonos. She burrows beneath them, not sure why she’s bothering to look any further. She knows all there is to know about Paula now. She’s come to the dead end.

  But there is something else underneath the clothes. Something flat and smooth lying at the bottom of the case. She dumps the clothes onto the floor to reveal a white canvas. It’s slightly smaller than the suitcase, and about the size of most of Paula’s paintings.

  She doesn’t think she’s seen anything so white for a long time. It’s remarkable in its smoothness and featurelessness. It could be a depiction of the state of nothing before the universe began. But when she gets the canvas out of the suitcase and holds it closer, she notices faint smudges hidden in the white. She takes it over to the light and scrutinises it.

  Yes, there is her own face. Her eyes, nose, and mouth are all drowning under the surface of a white sea. This is the portrait of her that Paula painted, and that she has subsequently destroyed.

  She has been whitewashed out of Paula’s history. For the second time that day she throws something across her flat.

  The balloon inside her has expanded to completely fill her. She is in a bubble of helium. She is cut off.

  She still manages to get up every day and go to work. She gives lectures, talks to colleagues, supervises students, goes to meetings. But everywhere she goes, she takes Paula with her. Paula can’t speak because she’s caught in a single moment of time, her head thrown back, her mouth open in an O of desire, her lips moist and red, her tongue catching at her teeth. Just the way that Jeanette remembers her from all their times together. At first she’s grateful for all the detail she’s able to recall, the feel and pattern of Paula’s body against her own, and then she realises she’s damned herself. She is caught in the hell of unrequited longing, which seems to be so strong it has created its own illusion. She could drink to blot it out, but when she tries that, she doesn’t even have the energy to work and has to stay at home staring at the white portrait. The death mask.

  She’s hung the canvas on the wall. She doesn’t hate it anymore, because now she thinks that Paula has been rather clever in forecasting how she looks. She doesn’t bother looking in real mirrors, she knows there won’t be anything there. She has disappeared.

  The real Paula has also disappeared. Jeanette hasn’t seen her since the night in the club, and guesses that she’s staying at friends. She won’t still be with Richard. Jeanette sees Richard at work, watches him sit in front of his computer churning out his numbers and feels sorry for him because she knows they’re meaningless. But they’re all he has.

  The first day at work after the night at the pub, Richard came up to her and said, ‘How did you get home?’

  And she was able to reply that she’d walked home.

  ‘We…’ he looked at her all the time he was speaking, hardly blinking, ‘We went on to Sneaky Pete’s.’

  ‘Did you.’

  ‘And then we drank tequila and Paula lost her phone.’

  He seemed stuck in the minutiae of that night. Perhaps she should help him out. ‘And then the sun rose and it was a new day.’

  He looked at her oddly. ‘Yes, that’s right. We had breakfast in that caff on Forrest Road.’ Was he giving her an alibi? Perhaps he hadn’t slept with Paula after all. But nothing else could explain Paula’s utter absence. And there were the signs between them in the pub, like semaphore. Their red flags of desire.

  It seemed to have cancelled out her refusal to consider him for her grant, because he said to her quite cheerily, ‘Loads more job applications to do!’ Or perhaps it was simply his revenge. She wasn’t able to assess the mixture of the different motivations for what happened, so she walked away. And that has set the pattern for all their subsequent encounters, which is fine by her.

  When she does see the real Paula, and not the phantasm created by the engine of her desire, spacetime buckles and warps. She gets home from work one day, about a week after the night in the pub, and finds Paula waiting in the flat.

  Jeanette sits down opposite her on a chair that is hardly ever used. She is close enough to reach out and touch Paula, but the space between them has stretched to infinity. Conversely, time has collapsed so that all the layers of their history are present in the room. Jeanette can’t look at her without seeing the past and present; Paula lying naked on the sofa, and Paula sitting there in her old paint-stained overalls. Paula with her eyes shut, eyelashes fluttering on her cheeks, and Paula inspecting a patch of paint on her hand, as if she is trying to avoid looking at Jeanette.

  She waits for Paula to stop scraping the colour from her skin, and speak.

  Paula nods at the white canvas. ‘What’s that doing there?’

  ‘I found it in your suitcase, when I was tidying up.’

  Paula nods again, but then she says, ‘I need that canvas. That’s why I painted over it. I’m going to reuse it.’

  ‘I’d like to keep it.’ Jeanette stares at it while she speaks and after she looks away she can see its negative, a dark square, superimposed on the rest of the room.

  ‘But it’s blank!’ Paula sounds exasperated.

  ‘I know.’ Words weigh heavy like stones in her mouth. Perhaps they will drown her.

  ‘It was a trial run,’ Paula says. She looks like she wants to say something else, perhaps elaborate on what she means by ‘it’.

  ‘I know.’ Jeanette can’t say out loud that right now the blank canvas seems more truthful than any other, more obvious, depiction. ‘But I’d like to keep it, as a memento of — your work.’

  ‘Oh…’ There is a slight softness in the air now. She has appealed to Paula’s vanity, her sense of importance. ‘Perhaps I don’t need it, for the time being. You might as well keep it.’ She stands up. ‘My show starts in two weeks. You can come to the opening, if you
want to.’

  Jeanette realises that she’s not actually being invited to the opening, she’s being given permission to come to it. She remembers the last show, the elegiac picture of Becca, and finally understands. ‘Are you staying with Becca?’

  Paula doesn’t even look surprised. ‘No.’ She pauses as if trying to decide how much to tell Jeanette before continuing, ‘No, I’ve met someone else.’

  This, then, is the end. If she thought they’d got to the end before, she was wrong, because now they have reached the nub of it, and time stops here. She looks at Paula and sees something else in her face, a desire to tell her all about her new relationship mixed with her innate preference for keeping things secret.

  ‘Will you be moving your stuff out?’ It’s an effort getting the words out, being practical.

  Paula looks slightly taken aback. ‘Well, I don’t actually have anywhere to put them right now. Could I pick them up in a few days?’

  ‘Of course.’ They might be discussing a business arrangement, which could be all this ever was for Paula. A place to stay and regular sex. But she doesn’t want to know. She could spend the rest of her life trying to guess what Paula’s motivations and feelings were, and never know, because it’s unknowable. There is no objective truth to this, there’s just her feelings and Paula’s feelings. And their feelings are different.

  Paula stands up, ‘I’ll phone you. About the opening, and about picking up my stuff.’

  She’s almost out of the door when Jeanette allows herself to say, quietly, ‘It was a good portrait. You shouldn’t have painted over it.’

  Paula pauses and speaks without facing her. ‘It wasn’t good enough.’ And then she’s gone.

  When the door has slammed shut behind Paula, the balloon inside Jeanette bursts and she explodes into a million pieces. She flies up to the living room ceiling, crawls through the bedroom carpet, slip-slides down the kitchen tiles, comes to rest panting over the toilet bowl, where she is sick, before she takes flight again. She spends the rest of the night circling the bathroom, while her body slumps on the floor. She’d escape if she could, but she’s not sure how. What would happen to her in the night air? Would she simply dissipate, her atoms floating away in the sky?

  In the morning, she looks in the mirror and isn’t surprised to see that she doesn’t exist any more. The face looking back at her is Kate. This is what it means to have the past and present concertinaed together. Everything that has happened to her in the past is happening to her right now. Time has shut down. In a way, she’s not surprised. As she stands there, brushing her teeth, she remembers what Einstein said; ‘Time only exists to stop everything happening at once.’

  She spits out her toothpaste and looks at Kate in the mirror again, seeing her freckled nose, her dark brown eyes. Kate looks back, impassive and still. When she was alive, she never stopped moving. She darted around their house, their school, the whole town. Jeanette was the quiet one, the steady one.

  Jeanette sticks out her tongue but Kate doesn’t react. She seems to be studying Jeanette, as if trying to decide something.

  ‘Why?’ Jeanette asks her. ‘Why are you here, now? Why didn’t you come back years ago?’ When we needed you, she thinks.

  Kate doesn’t move, doesn’t speak. Jeanette realises she can’t stay in the flat with her dead sister so, even though it’s Sunday, she goes to work.

  Once she’s there, she decides to go to the plate library. This is a little-used room where thousands of glass photographic plates are stored. Until the development of digital cameras, these plates were the only way of imaging large areas of the sky. Now they’ve been superseded by newer technology and the room has an abandoned, mournful feel to it.

  Dust covers everything, blurring the edges of the shelves where the plates are stored. She’s probably the only person in the department who comes in here anymore, and she wonders how long the plates can last before being thrown out.

  She turns on the light table, but its yellow glow seems rather sickly, a poor copy of the daylight outside.

  What she is doing here is archaic; she wants to look at photographic plates showing the portion of sky she plans to study. She could probably get better information from more recent electronic images, but she likes the way that the plates have captured light from these objects and preserved it like insects in the amber of the photographic emulsion. The tiny pieces of the objects right in front of her seem more substantial than images on a screen. Back in the days when all astronomy was carried out with glass plates, there must have been a weight, a heft, to people’s studies of the sky.

  She peers through the eyepiece at the plate, at the tiny images of stars and galaxies. Her fingers trace the unique patterns in the emulsion, as intently studied as the skin of any lover.

  She used to find it odd looking at celestial objects no bigger than pin-heads. But now she’s comfortable with her whole universe being inverted; unimaginably enormous and faraway galaxies have been shrunk to millimetre-sized dots on a glass plate in a lab. It’s how she knows things. There are further inversions of reality in this material; the photograph is a negative; black sky is chalk white, and stars and galaxies are dark freckles. The plate is even back to front so that east is to the left and west to the right, a mirror image of real life.

  Does time run backwards up there too? If something out there is observing her, would it see her leave this room, go to her flat, talk to her dead sister in the bathroom mirror?

  She sits studying the plate through the eyeglass for some time, only pausing when the muscles in her shoulders seize from hunching over the table.

  Then, as she straightens up, she sees someone else in the lab. Paula. Paula is sitting on the other side of the room, watching her. When Jeanette turns to look at her properly, she fades away, yet she can see her out of the corner of her eye. Paula is by the window, not speaking, just staring at her. Her outline is indistinct, as though the sunlight is wearing it away, but Jeanette can see that she’s wearing the same paint-stained clothes as she wore the night before. Paula smiles at her.

  She feels cold, angry. This is her space; Paula has no right to be there. ‘What do you want?’

  Paula remains silent. Jeanette realises she can see through her to the window, and the city beyond. She’s more shadowy and less substantial than she was in the flat.

  What will it take to get rid of her? She throws the eyeglass at her but Paula dodges it easily, and so she has to cross over to her side of the room to retrieve it.

  ‘Happy now?’ Jeanette asks her.

  She doesn’t look particularly happy. Her face is rather smudged, and her mouth seems almost wiped away. Her eyes are just dark hollows. As Jeanette looks at her, she seems to fade even more until parts of her are almost invisible.

  Then Paula fractures into multiple images, and starts dancing around the room. Someone else appears, even darker and more vague, holding Paula’s hands. It is herself. She watches the two of them silently dancing together, twisted like rope. The images are shadowy and monochrome as though caught on old photographs. Now, the dancing seems to be slowing down, and then Paula starts pulling at the other woman’s hands. She seems to be resisting, she’s trying to pull away but Paula’s too strong, and the two of them recede to the far end of the lab, behind the tall shelves of books, out of sight.

  What does Paula want with her? Why can’t she leave her in peace? Jeanette approaches the back of the lab, creeping across the dusty linoleum so she can see what’s going on. Her shoes squeak on the floor and so she gets down on her hands and knees and crawls through the dust. At the back of the room, behind the shelves, she can see the two figures huddled up against the wall. Still no sound from them. It’s as if they are surrounded by a vacuum.

  The figures are intertwined, their heads bent together, their hands stroking each other. She howls at them, and runs back to the light table, picks up the glass plate and hurls it at the shelves.

  As it splinters, shards of the white sky sh
ine in the air and tinkle onto the floor, disturbing the dust. When she dares to look again behind the shelves, Paula’s gone. It seems that violence is the best way to deal with her.

  She has to leave this place now, it’s not safe anymore; but as she turns to go she realises that her hand has been cut by the broken glass. There’s a scattering of blood on the floor, complementing the dark spots of stars. Blood is still dripping from the gash on her thumb, and there’s a trail of drops leading from the shelves to where she’s standing by the light table. The colour is beautiful, like the velvet dark roses her father used to grow for his lover.

  Outside the sky is blue, the grass is green. She glances around her, at the east tower where Paula sketched her. As she looks at it, it bursts into flames. There is no noise, just a silent curtain of fire. She sees Richard strolling along, hair caught in the wind. Jon is just behind him, deep in discussion with another lecturer. Other people amble through the blaze, and only she can see the shower of black smuts raining down on them.

  Her father appears, holding a can of petrol. His arms are wrapped in bandages, but these are unfurling, trailing along the ground. Her mother walks out of the east tower and steps onto one of the bandages, preventing her father from moving. They stay still and silent, only connected by the pale bandage.

  Above her the sky darkens to night. She can see the usual constellations for this time of year; Cassiopeia, Orion. And there is something else moving across the sky, rippling through it, making waves of particles shimmer in its wake. A girl swimming. Even as Jeanette watches, the girl fades away into dullness, the fire shrinks down, her parents dissolve. The unfurled bandage becomes a discarded hankie.

  Her mother sits by the fire, knitting. The yarn is pink, always pink. Baby booties spill from the knitting needles into her lap, all connected to each other by a single thread of yarn. Her mother makes no attempt to cut this umbilical cord, she just carries on knitting. Outside the moon shines brightly, but her mother can only see by the electric blue of the television.