She’s not there. This is the most certain thing that Jeanette has ever known or ever will know.
Their dad is still holding her swimming bag with her towel and her snack for later.
When someone’s alive all you see of them is their body, until they die and you realise there is something else that was them and now it’s gone. Then the body becomes a travesty, a mockery of the absent person. The body is still present, you can hold it (her father did), or kiss it (her mother did), or cry over it (both her parents did). But bodies are actually quite pointless substitutes for people.
After that, the day of the funeral. Maybe someone is in charge but she’s not sure who; it isn’t her parents. They still have those strange faces and shuffle around the house as if uncertain where they are, or who they are.
Someone has given her a flower to hold so she holds it. Someone else tells her to put the flower on the coffin, and as she approaches it she sees her face yellow and distorted in the shiny metal handles.
Lots of people are standing around in huddles, but they make way for her as if they don’t want to touch her. As if something sets her apart. She is not attractive, she repels these people, she is anti-gravity. They look down at her and fall silent as she passes by them.
One of the cousins with sharp eyes comes up to her and says, ‘Kate’s in heaven now.’
‘How did she get there?’ she asks. She looks at the sky but all she can see up there are grey clouds and a tiny plane. Perhaps Kate’s beyond that. She still doesn’t know what heaven actually is and the cousin has moved off to talk to someone else.
Voids can expand faster than light. The universe itself expands faster than light. It just goes on and on, even after you get fed up with it and don’t know how to explain it any more.
Now all I can remember is the photo and not the actual face. The photo is a substitute for the real thing. The images are not the universe.
The day is bright, almond-scented by the gorse bushes on the hill. The Observatory rises up from the steep bank of grass. All this is just like a normal day. She can hear the birds above her. She can see her colleagues and students in the distance, but she doesn’t approach them. Since the conference last week, people have been problematic. Silence lays thick on her tongue. She can’t remember the last time she spoke. Today might be difficult; she is supposed to give a lecture to the third year students on the birth and death of galaxies. Not for the first time, she wonders why astronomy has to use metaphors relating to life. Aren’t there other ways of describing the beginnings and endings of inanimate objects?
She goes to her office and stares at a picture taken by the Hubble telescope of a supernova, the remains of a once-bright star shrouded in filaments of multi-coloured gas. The dead star itself is anonymous, you wouldn’t know it had caused a massive explosion unless you imaged the velocity field of the gas and saw the shock waves all emanating from the pale dot off to one side of the picture.
It is unusually silent in her office; even her computer’s hum seems dulled. All she can hear are footsteps in the distance getting louder, clumping up the spiral staircase of the tower. Then the door opens and the Death Star appears. He’s wearing one of his more flamboyant tweed jackets, with a tie that doesn’t match.
‘Aren’t you due to lecture the third years today?’ he asks.
She nods.
‘How are you going to do that if you can’t talk?’
How does he know this? Did someone tell him about the silent seminar on voids?
They look at each other. She quite likes this absence of words. It makes people look at her more carefully, as if they really have to think about what they’re seeing. They can’t just rely on the same old noise coming out of their mouths. She knows he is thinking about her, he’s puzzled, trying to put it all together so it adds up.
‘Are you alright?’ he asks finally.
She looks at the supernova again. It’s amazing how far gas can escape from the surface of a dying star. When a heavy star explodes it can be one of the brightest things in the Universe.
‘You’ve been working hard lately. Perhaps you need a break.’
A break?
‘I think you’ve been overdoing it. All these invited seminars, on top of your new lecturing duties.’
She wishes he’d stop being nice to her. If he carries on, she’ll get upset.
‘Perhaps you need a change of scenery. To recharge your batteries. You could go away somewhere?’
At least he still looks stern, he hasn’t smiled at her yet. That’s a relief. She’s not sure she could cope with anyone smiling at her.
‘Why don’t you go home? To your parents?’
‘Home?’ The word surprises them both, and she falls silent again. Her parents. Yes, perhaps. Perhaps it’s time. She’s studying voids, after all. She can go home and study them.
Back at the flat, she takes a bag and packs some things in it. A toothbrush, enough underwear for a few days, and then she unhooks the white canvas from the wall and puts that in the bag as well. It seems the right thing to do.
Outside on the street again, she pauses for a moment, before setting off. This will be an adventure. The bag’s bulky because of the canvas, so she has to clutch it to her chest. She doesn’t know what the canvas actually is, any more. It’s not a picture, not a normal one anyway. But it’s not blank because there is information on it, if you look hard enough. It’s a thing that doesn’t seem to have a name. It has a place, though. Its place is with her.
In the station, she’s doubtful for a moment or two, until she buys her ticket. She doesn’t usually like stations. People rushing around at random, as if they don’t know where they’re going. Today isn’t so bad, because of the vacuum tucked around her that makes everyone else look very far away, as if she’s looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope.
She feels better when she’s actually sitting on the train, watching the land outside slide away from her, but she should have brought her maps of voids. She takes the canvas out of the bag and looks at it for a bit. It’s smooth under her fingertips, and slightly warm. Not so different from skin. She can feel the woman next to her shift slightly in her seat, trying to create more space between them. It doesn’t matter. She lifts the canvas to her face and breathes in deeply. The woman gets up and walks down the aisle, even though the train isn’t due to stop anywhere for some time.
The thing’s a palimpsest now. It has its own history; Paula’s first portrait of her, just showing the superficial aspects, then the second portrait in pure white, a truer account of her. And now this, a cosmic void. There is nothing more she can say about herself. It’s complete.
Some hours later, the train arrives. When she gets off, she feels confused for a moment, unsure about her route. It’s been a long day, so much has happened already. She climbs the long, shallow hill that meanders away from the station and up to the house where her parents live.
She doesn’t know why she’s come here but she does know that this is the only route she could have taken, like a curving ball or a beam of light following its path through space.
Her mother opens the front door, looking puzzled.
Jeanette rests the bag against her feet. ‘Can I stay a few days?’
During dinner, she watches them as they talk in soft voices about nothing much. She doesn’t say much but they don’t seem to notice. As she sits at the old kitchen table, listening to them tell her about the neighbours and the weather and problems with the local post office, she feels drowsy in this blanket of warm sound.
After dinner they all watch television. She doesn’t remember doing this before, when she was a child she spent her evenings upstairs in her bedroom, away from them. Even now she feels an itching to go to the window, to turn her back on the room and gaze into the night.
They have a new television, an enormous screen on which the newsreaders’ faces appear larger than life and their voices boom out, deep and powerful. It’s almost too much to ta
ke in. She’s not used to so much information, she’s used to scrabbling around in the noise, trying to find out facts, trying to infer what she can about the world.
At some uncertain point in the night she wakes up. She gets out of bed, walks down the corridor and stands outside the locked door. When she finally turns the handle the door opens, as she knew it would.
She’s entered the void, the underworld. Inside Kate’s room, she sits on the edge of the bed and waits. It’s cold in here, so she gets under the covers. At first her mind is blank, and then it becomes crowded with images, photographs, snippets of film. Some of these are memories, others are things she’s never seen before. Everything’s all jumbled. Sometimes the images are speeded up, other times they slow down. To start with, she’s watching other people, and then something flexes in her and she becomes these people. She becomes:
Her mother knitting booties, the wool trailing through her hands.
Her father trimming roses, pricking his finger on a thorn.
Alice in the darkroom, her face flushed red.
Paula painting a picture of a naked man.
Kate in the pool, swimming up and down, navigating the boundary between air and water. Blue above her, she can see the sky through the glass ceiling. Blue beneath her, she’s suspended above the tiled floor. Back and forth. Touch the end of the pool with her fingertips, and flip and twist, and start again. Her movement creates waves eddying around her.
This is the shortest distance between the ends of the pool but it doesn’t seem that short. And as she swims, she has time to notice the small intrusions into this world from outside. Near one corner of the pool a pink plaster lurks and bobs, like some mutant sea life. Pain inside her, ringing like a distant bell. There has never been pain before.
She swims for ages. At one point the other kids come and join her, then they leave her again. The bell dies down, starts up again. Her coach is always there, walking up and down on the tiles, keeping pace with her like a metronome. He’s shouting at her, he’s always shouting at her, but it’s silent apart from the bell inside her.
Above her, the sky dims to grey before turning black. It’s night-time. The lights in the pool are turned off. There is no light in here, she can’t see her coach any more. Even though she couldn’t hear him, she misses him. She shouldn’t be able to see where she is going, but she can. It takes some time, a few laps, to realise that she is emitting light herself. She is the only source of light in here. The water glows around her, as if she is radioactive.
She can’t stop swimming. Swimming is what she does, she’s the swimming girl. Sleek and armoured in her swimming suit, she knows what she’s doing, as long as she keeps going.
She swims in time with the bell, feeling it knock against her ribs, toll in her head. It counts out laps, rings each time she starts a new one.
Her light fades, dies away. Now she is swimming in utter, blank darkness. The bell gets louder. The noise beats in her head, in her stomach, in her chest. She puts her hands over her ears to try and block it out.
Silence.
When Jeanette wakes up in her own bed the next morning, she feels confused. The room is the same as the one where she grew up, and also not the same. Time and entropy have done their work here. The curtains are faded from the sun, cracks run along the length of the ceiling, the wallpaper is frayed around the door.
As she struggles from the sheets, she automatically glances at the chair, half expecting to see her school uniform draped on it.
Downstairs, both her parents are waiting for her at the kitchen table, a rerun of dinner last night. There’s something in the way they’re sitting, their heads slightly inclined to each other, that makes her think of binary systems, two stars locked into a single stable orbit.
Her mother smiles at her. ‘Since you’re here, I should give you this.’ She picks up the photo of Kate and offers it to her.
‘Thank you.’ She doesn’t really want it, not now she’s realised that images don’t matter. There’s no point pinning Kate down on paper. Kate’s everywhere and nowhere. But she does have something she can offer in response to the photo. She fishes the white canvas out of the bag and hands it to her parents. ‘Here.’
The white paint almost glows, a vacuum humming with particles and unsaid words, unvoiced thoughts.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a portrait of me.’
‘But…’ They look at it, puzzled.
‘You never put up any pictures of me, when I lived here. When I was a kid. So I thought you might like one, now. It matches the rest of the house, doesn’t it? All the nothingness, the blanks.’
She’s crying now, so she stops to wipe her cheeks. Then she realises her parents are crying too. Tears are running down her father’s face, her mother is rummaging around for a hankie.
‘Why didn’t you talk to me? We didn’t both die. I don’t even know how she died. You never told me anything!’ She rips the photo of Kate into two pieces. Then she remembers doing this to the star certificate that her mother gave her, all those years ago. She stands there, clutching half of Kate in each hand, her anger subsiding. Perhaps, then and now, her mother was trying to reach out, to make a connection.
‘Jeanette,’ her father sighs, ‘you are the only thing that kept us going. Without you we really would be nothing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘Don’t be,’ her mother grabs hold of her hand, ‘The truth is we don’t know how she died. We don’t really know anything about it at all.’ She squeezes her hand before continuing, ‘How could we talk about it when we didn’t know what to say? You were so young, even younger than Kate.’ Her mother nudges her father, ‘You should tell her what you do know. About the death. What happened that morning.’
Her father sighs, and passes a hand over his face. ‘All of it?’
‘All of it.’ Her mother sounds definite. They glance at each other before her father starts to talk.
‘I haven’t ever talked about this since the inquest. Never.’ And now his voice does sound a bit creaky, as though it hasn’t been used very often. He sits up a bit straighter.
‘When Kate first started training in the mornings, before school, and I’d take her to the pool, I’d stay and watch. I liked to watch her swim; it was so exact. She turned it into a science. And she was so unselfconscious about it. She never cared if anyone watched her or not. She just got on with it.
‘But it was always the same routine, every morning. Or at least if it was different, I couldn’t spot the differences; they were too subtle for me. So, quite often I’d go out to get a coffee. That morning, I went outside into the carpark. It was a clear bright day, pale morning sky. It was always quieter out there. The swimming pool was incredibly noisy, it all just bounced around between the walls and ceiling. I liked going outside where sounds could fly away and leave me in silence.
‘The carpark faced the pool, and one side of the pool was glass so you could see in. But it was sunny that morning and the glass just reflected back the sky. I couldn’t see what was going on inside. Usually I drank my coffee quickly and went back inside. But that morning there was a woman in the carpark. She asked me to help. She’d lost something, I can’t remember what.’
He pauses and wipes his eyes, ‘She wore dark glasses and she wanted to borrow some money to make a phone call, so I rummaged through my pockets looking for change. I couldn’t see her eyes because of the glasses.
‘And then someone came running outside. One of the other girls. She was barefoot and still in her swimsuit. She could hardly speak, she was huddled, dripping wet, cold and goosepimpled. But she managed to say that something had gone wrong with Kate. Those were the words she used. Gone wrong. As if the machinery of Kate’s perfect swimming had broken down.
‘She and I ran back inside. The woman didn’t move, she just stayed there, immobile. I have always tried to remember what I was thinking at that point, but I don’t remember anything. ‘After the event I can
reconstruct the fear, that I must have felt somewhere in my body, that my daughter was injured. That something had happened to her. But I think my mind was blank. Perhaps I was still thinking about the woman, or even just the coffee which I’d hardly begun to drink. Perhaps I was just intent on not spilling my coffee.
‘Kate was…’ he wipes his eyes again, ‘lying on the side of the pool. One arm was trailing in the pool and it was still moving. When I saw this, I thought she was ok. But she wasn’t. She’d already gone by this point but we didn’t know that then. Her arm was moving because the water was pushing it around.
‘The coach was doing CPR. Blowing into her mouth and pressing down on her chest. I asked the girl what had happened but she didn’t know. She didn’t see anything until the coach jumped into the water because Kate was on the bottom of the pool. Sunk. We found out afterwards that there was water in her lungs so she’d already drowned before the coach could get to her.
‘Nobody saw anything. That’s the point. It was all invisible. If I’d been there I might have seen her get into trouble. Or I might not. I don’t know.
‘I wonder what the woman did after I left her in the carpark. I can’t remember what the problem was. I felt I should go back and ask, or tell her why I’d run away. But of course I never did, I never did.
‘It makes no sense, no matter how many times I tell it. One minute she’s alive, the next she isn’t. The post-mortem couldn’t answer any questions. And at the inquest nobody could work out what had happened. Why she slipped under the surface of the water, into darkness. There weren’t any marks on her body. No bruises. She didn’t die because she hit her head on the edge of the pool. She just died and nobody saw her do it. They say nothing happens unless you observe it, don’t they?’ He looks at Jeanette, who nods slowly, doubtfully.
‘But nobody saw her. So how can she have died?’
Her mother says, ‘You should have stayed, you shouldn’t have gone out for the coffee,’ and he says, ‘What difference would it have made.’
‘At least you would have been there.’
The Falling Sky Page 24
