Freefall

Falling ... Falling ... Falling ...

Sex with Marlene touched six point four on the Richter scale. Boots still on, her skirt up about her waste, the bed broke and keeled away to one side like a shot elephant going down. The man in the flat below banged on the ceiling but I only had that one chance and I wasn't about to quit for him.

That was it. Two minutes and forty seconds if you must know - and two hundred quid for a new bed. I never saw her again.

I cup my hands in two parentheses enclosing the world. Falling ... Falling ...

The air in the Arctic is dryer than the air in the desert; the moisture just freezes right out of it. Dead polar bears lay mummified on the ice, their faces frozen into toothsome smiles while the snow piles up around them. Somewhere down there are the remains of every explorer that ever failed to come home, Marlene included, lying snug under mattresses of snow. You are slightly heavier there, due to the lack of centripetal effect and the flattening of the earth, it is not something you would notice.

And way beneath the Antarctic, somewhere, is what remains of Grace.

Grace cooked like a TV chef, measuring all the ingredients into individual bowls before use, dressing the salad with a bottle in each hand, oil and vinegar, pouring from eye level and outstretched arms.

Two girls, one at each pole, and me above.

We all loved Grace. Love for Grace was the single thread that bound together everyone who knew her. Her sister loved her, my family loved her, our friends loved her, I loved her.

But I was the one that married her.

Love and death; it's a cheap melodrama this. The first astronauts were overcome by the sight of the globe, it seemed so bright and beautiful, and so alone. It's cheapened these days, too many photographs, too many pixel-perfect computer generated animations, it's part of the currency of everyday culture and is losing its value with inflation. I look down and I can't see meaning. I can't see a thing I want to protect.

I am geostationary, I will hang here forever, falling as fast as the earth slips away from beneath me. I will never move from this spot.

Numbers: three months and four days after Grace's funeral, where we burned an empty casket, Marlene came round to talk. She had been offered a place on an Arctic expedition to measure glacial retreat, metres per second per second versus centigrade per year. It was the opportunity of a lifetime but she did not know if she should take it after what happened to Grace. We talked for four hours and twenty three minutes, we ate one pizza divided into eight slices, distributed five to three in my favour, we drank eight three-thirty millilitre bottles of five point nought percent German beer and then we fucked. Two minutes and forty seconds later Marlene decided to go to the Arctic.

The crash of the bed caused my beer bottle to foam up and ejaculate even before I had. I didn't stop it. I let it foam out onto the carpet. At the critical moment I had said Grace's name.

Only I had not said it. I did not realise till she had gone but Marlene had said it, not me. I just thought I had.

Two months and fourteen days later Marlene slipped under the caterpillar tracks of a snow vehicle. Grace, a biologist on the Antarctic survey, had been dragged into the sea by a leopard seal. It held her ankle in its mouth and, flopping and shuffling ungainly in reverse, pulled her down the shingle beach. All they found was her camera, broken on the stones.

Two polar explorers and one astronaut. Three deaths. Two sisters, one lover in common, two ends of the earth, the once place you could view them both from, two cold deaths, one fiery hot one.

Both ice-caps flash gold.

Falling ... Falling ...

More numbers: forty-three minutes till I run out of oxygen, three and a bit hours till my suit looses power and the cooling system gives up and I cook, like a chicken breast wrapped in tin foil I shall be grilled by the unfiltered sun.

Death from oxygen starvation is supposedly a good way to go, there's no pain, you just pass out. It beats being cooked.

Marlene and I both went to our deaths trying to save the world, measuring every symptom of global temperature. Grace just wanted to photograph seals. None of it means anything in the end.

Falling ... Falling ... Falling ...