We Are Watching Greenlawlavinia

We are WatchingSomething Terrible

Happening

Lavinia Greenlaw

THE SUMMER THAT Mars stood close to the Earth,I went down to the sea each evening. It wasshockingly visible and looked like a storybookversion of itself – a red swirl, volatile and ancient.Night after night I lay on the sand like a truebeliever waiting for something to happen and,while nothing changed or moved, the scale ofthings was different. Space opened up. I felt smalland was glad to.

I’d been on the island for several weeks before myhusband was able to visit. I relished the quiet andthe simplicity as well as the good fortune of beingunder clear skies at such a time. I thought I hadn’tmissed him. The night he arrived, I led him to thebeach and hurried ahead calling ‘Look! Look!There it is!’ I realised then that I’d missed him

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greatly.

He took my arm as we skittered down the dunesand allowed me to feel as if I’d arranged the wholething – the warm night, the soft sea, the redplanet. We lay on the sand as couples do who’vespent hundreds of nights together – close butunentwined. I made myself say nothing aboutwhat we were looking at. I let him decide.

‘It looks beautiful,’ he said, ‘and it looks like awarning.’

We’d been married for two years. Theacceleration towards a life together and the settlingdown were over. What next? We went home anda month later I started my new job at the museum.It bothered him that my days were not easy toexplain. In the evenings he always had somethingto say about the closing of loopholes, the trackingof payments, the new ways drug money was beingmoved around. His work was of such immediateand obvious importance compared to mine. Evenso, I had thought that he was proud of me.

‘I deal with this world,’ he liked to tell people,‘and my wife deals with the others.’

Then one day he said this instead: ‘She could beout there discovering new stars and mapping theuniverse but she spends her time in a basement

34 BBC National Short Story Award

35We are Watching Something Terrible Happening

with a cupboardful of rocks. I just don’t get it, doyou?’

When he asked me what I did all day that mademe so silent when I came home, this is what I toldhim. The boxes that come to me contain parts ofother worlds. I hold a meteorite in my hands andhave the same feeling I had lying on the beach andmeasuring everything I felt against the distancebetween two planets. It makes me think aboutwhat really matters.

‘What do you mean, what really matters?’‘What matters is what lies beyond us.’ I knew

how hollow it sounded and chose not tounderstand the way he smiled.

I had to go to France to collect some samples froma recently discovered crater in the Egyptian desert.It had been spotted by someone scanning satelliteimages for evidence of ancient settlements. Whathe found was a 5,000-year-old crater that wascompletely undisturbed. Because of the dry desertair, it was pristine. You could trace the directionfrom which the meteorite fell in the fanning of thesand.

The scientists got there first. They wrote theirnames on a piece of paper, put it in a bottle andleft. When they came back the bottle was gone.

‘So?’ my husband said. ‘They left their names. Itdoesn’t mean they own what’s there.’

The acquisition of meteorite samples is notstraightforward. As soon as the scene of an impacthas been located, the debris is being collected. Thelocals arrive first, then the dealers and thescientists, all as businesslike and intent as thosewho work their way through a battlefield takingboots and wedding rings. Most of the rocksdisappear into private collections.

Samples from the Egyptian strike had found theirway onto the market and some were beingadvertised for sale at the annual collector’s fair inFrance. We had no other way of acquiring themand had been in touch with the dealers.

‘How much will this cost?’ My husband was notinterested, he was disapproving.

‘We’re not buying anything, we’re beinggiven it.’

‘Why would a dealer give you such valuablespecimens?’

‘We help them.’‘How?’‘We analyse their samples, provide the

verification they need in order to get a good price.In return they give us some.’

I knew he’d had to make such compromises, he’d



told me enough stories, but he wasn’t going to sayso now. I lay beside his silence feeling just asuncertain of myself as he intended.

I woke him up later to say that the knowledge wemight gain from these samples would bescientifically priceless. I lay there with my eyesclosed and listened to him leave the room. Hedidn’t come back. I thought about the crater inthe desert and what it would be like to be in aplace so remote and still that, even whensomething fell out of the sky, nothing changed.The rock exploded, cooled and remained. Thesand recorded it.

The next night he was out almost till morning. Iassumed it was to do with work but he didn’t say.When he lay down beside me, I put my head onhis chest and listened to his racing heart.Something had frightened him but whether it waswhat he had been doing in the night or what hadpassed between us, I had no idea.

On the plane back from France, I rehearsed mydefence. I thought he was bound to quiz me againbut all he managed was the basic reflex of hello,how are you, how was your trip. He wasn’tlistening. He seemed so distracted that if I utteredmore than two sentences at a time, I felt as if Iwere interrupting something.

The next night we had sex and I asked him whyhe’d closed his eyes and turned his head away. Itwasn’t the first time he’d done this and Iunderstood why he might. I knew what it was tofeel that sudden tug into the self. I trusted whathappened between us in bed and I’d never beforeinsisted, as I did that night, on holding his gaze. Imean really insisted. I got quite upset.

I tried to explain that something was slipping outof place. ‘Is that right,’ he said. He wasn’t avoidingthe matter. He didn’t care. This coldness was sonew that I actually found it interesting.

‘Where have you gone?’ He was brave enough not to pretend that I

meant this literally.‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I’m here now.’‘Then where have you been?’‘I can’t remember.’

I watched over months as he slipped in and out ofsight. I saw how he used one part of himself toconceal another and how he arranged himself inthis way whenever I came into a room. He couldtake my hand or stroke my cheek and I could tellthat nothing of his true quick self was in thatgesture or even in the room. In the end I wentlooking and while I still wasn’t sure, I foundenough. We talked it over, shouted, wept andfought. Eventually we agreed to go on.



It became apparent that I could accept nothing,not even the minor contradictions anddishonesties that we generally set aside as human.‘You’re relentless,’ he said. He was right. What Ihad glimpsed in him had become a definingdarkness. His goodness – and he was good –seemed artificially lit from then on.

There were days when he decided to recover us.He would be too animated, too affectionate andattentive, making me elaborate cups of coffee,asking rows of questions and giving me lots ofpunchy kisses. He would propel me out of thehouse, grab my hand and look for something todelight in so that we could delight in it togetherand remember this as a lovely time we hadtogether. I tried hard to feel what he wanted meto but in the end I would have to say somethingto make clear that I was resisting his spell. Helooked truly hurt. The rest of the time he was –what? Polite. That seems the best word for it.

*

If I shut all the doors in the house, I can forget he’snot here. I come home from work, turn on thetelevision and watch a country at war with itself. Ithink, if I were there, I’d have got out, only ofcourse I wouldn’t. From this distance we can foolourselves that we’d see the situation clearly but if

that were my home wouldn’t I wait just as blankly,unable to believe the red on the walls, the red onmy hands, the red in the air, the red on red onred…

Things fall out of the sky all the time but we don’tlive according to the possibility. How can we? Firein the sky leads to fire on Earth, rockets to burningroofs. Two hundred rockets in three hours – lifesuddenly missing. Details float through my head allday: eleven members of a single family, six fromanother, four from another. In their homes. Thechildren, with knives. A boy whose head isentirely wrapped in bandages. He cannot see andyet looks upwards. Does he hope that what iscoming might save him? Or is he praying that itmight end him?

I watch it all and then I listen to more of it insteadof sleeping. I remind myself that although myhusband has gone, how small are our lives andhow small the questions I want to ask him.

Last night I woke up crying and phoned hismobile before I knew what I’d done. He askedwhat was wrong.

I told him that people were setting fire to theirown roofs so the soldiers would think their homeshad already been hit and would move on. I didn’tknow what else to say.



‘You couldn’t point to that place on a map,’ hesaid.

Thousands of chunks of rock fall from space everyyear, some tiny, most small, and now and thensomething huge. They can land anywhere. Youmight pick one up on a walk, put it in your pocketand never know that it didn’t make its way therethrough the slow shift of mud and water, thegradual pressure of stone. It fell.

A bombed-out block of offices or apartments sonear to collapse that it seems to hang in the air.Whatever was left inside has been abandoned.Men stand around chatting in the warm twilight.Children watch the slow stream of passing cars.

The further we are from something, the morecomplete the view, the more simple. From space,the cool blue and green of Earth looks impossibleto disturb. If we were beings from another planetlooking up at it and naming it for one of our gods,it would be a god of calm or peace. Only Earth’sno different to any other planet, a chanceconstruction caught up in the push and pull.

And we’re just the same. We think it’s all aboutintimacy, about getting inside one another andidentifying all the parts but it’s not, is it? You needto go on seeing one another from a distance too –

as a complete and simple presence you believe in.

A child stands in a sea of rubble clutching a toy carin her hand. Like others in such pictures she’slooking into the distance. She’s not averting hergaze. It’s as if she’s looking for a place beyond thisplace but cannot see where this place ends. There’sno flat surface in sight, no pavement or road, justrubble. But she’s not going to play with the car,she’s holding onto it. It’s not as if she knows whatshe has in her hand. She just doesn’t want to letgo.

There are all kinds of locked boxes in lockedcupboards in locked rooms. They might containpaper or gold, plutonium or guns, diamonds orashes – the stuff that fixes our making andunmaking. The box I will open this morningcontains part of another world. Of the tens ofthousands of meteorites that have landed on Earth,only sixty or so have been from Mars and only fiveof those have been witnessed. This is a piece ofone of them. It came from Morocco via NewYork. I cannot say what negotiations took place. Itwas picked up within weeks of impact and so isalmost uncontaminated. Planetary matter, awitnessed fall, it’s priceless.

The meteorite was seen by nomads in theMoroccan desert. They described a fireball, at firstyellow and then green. There were two great



booms and the ball appeared to break in half. Wehave a record of their statements. Oneremembered saying ‘It is a miracle.’ Another that‘We are watching something terrible happening.’

One thing smashes into another smashes intoanother. Whatever collided with Mars sent chunksof rock hurtling into space. Think of a godthrowing a stone in the air and that stone risingand falling over hundreds of millions of miles, andits journey taking sixty million years. In thevacuum of space it would neither rise nor fall butwould keep travelling until it collided withsomething else or got caught up, as this one did, inthe gravitational pull of another planet. Its charredsurface records how it burst into flame whenfalling at a speed at such odds with the thickness ofour atmosphere that it scraped against the air andignited like a struck match. The nomads werewatching the end of something that started tohappen millions of years ago, hundreds of millionsof miles away. Yes, it was terrible.

The sample we have acquired weighs as much as acouple of bags of sugar. It contains an unusualamount of glass, probably formed in the explosionthat propelled it into space. This glass may containpockets which may contain compounds that areevidence of life. If life is found, it’ll be life that islong gone, of a kind I cannot envisage and whichoccurred in a place I’ll never go to. Does this seem

pointless? Desperate? It may establish a fact butdoing so will raise many more questions.

The image that sticks in my mind is not the girlwith the toy or the bandaged child but a manstanding up to his waist in ruptured concrete. He’sbetween two white slabs that have cracked andtilted. They’re ragged-edged and look a bit likejaws. At first I thought he was being rescued buthe’s not looking up, he’s looking down, back intothe hole in which he’s standing. He’s not trapped.The men who surround him are not trying to helphim. One’s peering into the hole as well but he’sstanding back. There’s little sense of emergency,only the man looking as if he’s about to go downinside that tilting concrete, into what he can’t see.His right hand is raised, fingers spread as if he’sfound something to grasp in order to steadyhimself. There’s nothing there but he’s graspinganyway. He doesn’t look brave or determined.This is just something he has found himself doing.He’s hesitating for a moment and trying to find ahold.

I ring my husband again and ask if his lovers hadbeen strangers.

‘No one you know.’‘What were their names?’‘I don’t know,’ he says and then, ‘I can’t

remember.’



I hold the rock in my hands.

Who’s to say which of us is entitled to possess suchstrange and precious matter? Strangeness is whatwe’re all after. Is it not simply human to graspwhat we can and to enter the unknown in thehope of meeting something of ourselves within it?

That night on the beach my husband had tried toreach me.

‘I’m here,’ he said. ‘Here on Earth.’I did not respond.

This is life. Here and now on the turning Earth.Here where fire rains down and we still walk outunder the sky as if one thing will not lead toanother, as if we are not here at all but out therewatching it happening from an untouchabledistance. As if we will not be drawn in.

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We Are Watching Greenlawlavinia