By Tracy Farr
I text Mattie before I realise it’d be about midnight back home, to say I’m standing with one leg in today and one leg in tomorrow, and he texts right back to say there’s this band on tonight and I should come down and meet him. And I text back and say nah, ya dick, I’m in England, I am like literally standing on the zero meridian. And he texts back and says oh yeah, he forgot I was half a world away, he thought I was talking about the power bill or something. Except he says it shorter than that because it’s in a text. And I think he was joking about forgetting I’m on my OE, but it’s hard to tell, sometimes, with Mattie.
Greenwich is like a kind of quiet amusement park for geeks. I’ve always wanted to come here, I’ve always been interested in space and stuff, I get that from Mum. Space and time. Mum’s got photos of her standing outside the Royal Observatory, from when she did her OE. She travelled on her own, like I am. Her photos are actual photos, of course, stuck into albums. She even has some slides, a couple of rolls of them she says even though they’re in plastic frames, not rolls. We don’t have a projector to look at them properly, but Mum showed me how you can hold them up to the light, or just to a window, and look through them, so that the dark rectangle of film in the middle of the plastic frame becomes bright, illuminated, and the image reveals itself. The colours are beautiful, really vibrant; you can see right into them, as if everything’s three dimensional. There are some scenes from mountains, with snow and lakes, and sky that is so blue, so blue, it makes your eyes hurt.
You have to hold the slides carefully, by the frame, so you don’t get fingerprints on them. Mum says they were expensive, so you were careful about what you took photos of, then. I tell her I could scan them for her, her slides and photos, upload them on the net, put them on Flickr or FaceBook. But she says they’re from another time, they don’t need sharing, not like that. She keeps the slides in a shoe box. There are plastic boxes that the slides just sit neatly inside, they’ve got orange bases and pearly white tops, and those sit within the shoe box, so that the slides are like jpegs and the boxes are like folders within a shoebox folder on the computer. I can make sense of it like that, it’s just like on a computer.
I caught the District Line to Mansion House – not too early, trying to miss the commuters on the Tube – and walked across the Millennium Bridge to South Bank, to get the ferry to Greenwich this morning. There were quite a few tourists around already, and a bunch of us got off the ferry and walked around past the Old Naval College buildings and on, across the road and up to the observatory buildings on the top of the hill. You can walk up a great sweep of grass, that starts flat then rises gently then more steeply up in a wedge to the buildings, or you can stick to the path that winds up at the side, under trees that shade you from the sun. I started off on the path, but the cold soon got to me, and when I hit an open patch and felt the sun pull on my arms like some strange gravity I veered off to the left and onto the grass. There were Canadian boys with a hackysack – there are always Canadian boys with a hackysack – tossing it back and forth as they meandered up the hill in front of me, kicking it, heading it, larking around. One of them kicked out high, so high with his foot to try to connect with the little beanbag, that he overbalanced and fell on his back. The hackysack rolled down the hill towards me, so I stopped it with my foot, bent down and picked it up, then threw it back to him. One of the others dived in front of him and caught it a solid whack with his knee, and they continued their game, up the hill, progressing a little but falling behind as I overtook them.
At the top, I fell into line with all the other tourists, and looked around for a bit to get my bearings as I passed through the entrance. You can go either way, from the entrance, to the astronomy side or the meridian side. I stood there for a moment – in between space and time – before I decided to start on the astronomy side. It was brilliant; really dark, but with lots of lights coming out of screens and stuff. It was good to get there early, before it got too busy. I’m not a big fan of busy. I spent ages sitting in front of the screens and the lights, sliding the perspex controller over the stars in the console to make new words and images show on the screen in front of me. Everything around me was dark, and I could feel the blue and green lights shining up onto my face, under my chin, illuminating me. I glanced across at the two guys at the console next to me, and I could see that strange unearthly lighting on them, too. I guess it’s kind of on purpose, to make you think about worlds other than ours.
There were words projected on the walls, all around the room, quotes from scientists mainly, like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and others from people I’ve never heard of. There was this one that really struck me, it’s by Arthur C. Clarke, and I know he’s a writer because Mum really likes science fiction and she’s got a whole wall of books of it at home. Two possibilities exist, it said, either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. And then there was the bit I liked the best. Both are equally terrifying. I got my phone out of my bag and took a photo of the words on the wall. I was checking it to make sure it came out, and this security guard came up to me and said No photographs. Read the signs, he said. Oh, sorry, I said, and I was, I felt really shamed, he said it really shortly, you know, really harsh. I hate it when I do something wrong, especially when I don’t mean to.
So I stood and fiddled with the magnetic catch on my bag, pretending I just had my phone in my hand anyway, kind of pretending the security guard hadn’t told me off. One of the guys at the console was looking at me, then he looked away. I felt like the guard had kind of spoilt it for me. I hope he’s alone in the Universe. Creep.
I put my phone back in my bag and walked out of the dark room and back the way I’d come, so I was kind of going against the tide of people. I went back to the entrance building and through into the meridian side. There were clocks and things, all these navigational instruments, but the best things were the first really precise clocks, the ones that let the sailors know where they were in the world. You always think of them in ancient times using the stars, but they needed the clocks too, to be able to put themselves on maps, once the maps got accurate I guess. They called it The Longitude Problem. It sounds like a TV show. Or a science fiction book.
It’s funny to think about time, how it’s a different time on the other side of the world, back home. I mean, I know it is, and everything, but I just can’t get used to it being night-time back home, and the middle of the day for me. We’re antipodal – opposite points – like opposite ends of the earth, I suppose. Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit on my own, I want to burrow through the earth, a straight line home to just talk to Mum, or even Mattie, just to look them in the face and have a conversation about something, about anything – about the silliest thing, or the most important. The day before yesterday was the longest day of the year here – midsummer – and that means it was the shortest day back home. I was sitting on the grass in the sunshine, wearing a t-shirt, while they were in the middle of their midwinter night, probably with a hottie and an extra duvet on the bed. Antipodal kind of sucks. It feels so far away.
I went up through the Astronomer Royal’s Apartments, these beautiful old rooms but filled with modern people walking through, so it was a bit hard to get a sense of what they were like in the days before. I’d come out into a courtyard garden, and it was sunny, and my bag was getting heavy, so I thought I’d sit for a while, just watch the people go by. I like doing that rather than being caught up in the crowd. So I sat down on the side of the garden, on a low brick wall; there was a fig tree in the garden across from me, I noticed, and that seemed strange, I didn’t think that fig trees would grow in London, didn’t think it was warm enough. I had a water bottle in my bag, and I took a drink from it. It tasted of metal. I’d filled it from the tap in the bathroom in the backpackers before I left this morning. I imagined lead, little dark particles floating in the cosmos of the water pipes, anti-stars, dark stars.
People were streaming past, hundreds of them, in pairs and families and groups. I watched them walk up the steps from the other side of the building and sort of appear in the courtyard, head first, as if they were coming up an escalator from underground, from hell. There weren’t many people on their own, like me. I like being on my own, mostly, especially in a crowd. Sometimes it’s when you’re in a crowd, surrounded by people, that you feel the most alone.
I took my phone out of my bag, held it up and took a photo of myself, then checked it. My eyes were squinting against the sun, one of them closed, the other half open; I looked really stupid, so I deleted it, took another one. Better. Mum told me that on her OE she took a whole roll of film – started it before she left Wellington and finished it in her first week in London – and at the end, the numbers on the top of her camera kept going, past 36, 37, 38, and she thought that was strange, because she said there was this increase in tension you’d get at the end of a film, and she didn’t feel that, so she knew something was wrong. It turned out she hadn’t wound the film into the camera properly, or it had slipped out or something, and so she’d taken what she thought was a whole roll of photos but they didn’t exist. Not at all. Photography was a matter of faith in those days – you pointed the camera and clicked, and then you waited days or weeks or months before you saw the photo. Or you didn’t.
There was lavender in the garden behind me, I could smell it, and when I turned around I saw its flowers, just like in Mum’s garden. I took a photo, close-up. The focus was good, you could see the little petals on top of one of the flower heads. I put my phone in my pocket, and picked the lavender flower. I crushed it in my hand, put my hand up to my nose, smelled the dusty sweet smell of it.
That was when I came through to this other courtyard, full of people, all lined up to stand at the zero meridian – the prime meridian – and have their photo taken. The line stretched way back, but people looked happy, standing in the sunshine. I joined the queue, and we snaked slowly closer to the building, where the meridian line was marked and you could take your photo. I could still smell the lavender on my hand, but other smells too; perfume and stuff from people in the line, coffee, maybe product in their hair. It didn’t take too long to get to the photo op after all – there was a security person moving people along – and finally there I was, standing there, just like I put in the text to Mattie, with one leg in tomorrow and one leg in today. Except I’m texting him from off to the side, because the guard moved me on pretty quickly, as soon as I’d had my photo taken. The person behind me in the line took it for me, and I checked it to make sure it was OK and it was, so I’ve moved off to the side and I text Mattie, and he texts back, then I text him, and I’m standing with my phone in my hand leaning against the building in the shade so its easier to see the screen on my phone, waiting to see if he texts me back.
While I’m waiting, I look up from the screen, and I realise that everyone in the courtyard is facing in the same direction now, but away from the meridian line. Their faces are all looking up – not up at the sky, not quite, but more at some in-between point, in-between the earth and the sky. Some of them point cameras, or video recorders or phones. There’s a man kneeling on the ground on one knee, kneeling by the side of a small child. He’s pointing, the man, with his arm held at a steady angle. The child shades her eyes with her hand, even though the sun is behind her; looks in the direction the man is pointing. Everyone – all these people – pointing and watching and waiting; it’s as if the world is about to end, except you can’t tell by their faces whether it’s something catastrophic or something wonderful that’s going to happen.
So I turn and look in the same direction. There is a red ball, smooth, large, the size of a basketball – no, bigger than that. Except it’s not quite smooth; the sun shines off it, shows that its surface is dimpled, like the moon, like a planet, maybe the red planet, that’s what they call Mars, isn’t it? The ball is on a thick black pole mounted on a tower on the top of the Astronomer Royal’s building. There are compass points above the ball, and on a thin pole above the compass points, an arrow is mounted. Its flights are painted gold, like the compass points, and it points between north and west.
I’d read about it, inside. I’d seen a sign nearly at the top of the stairs to the bright room at the top of the building, the Octagon Room where astronomers watched the heavens: It is controlled by a mechanism behind this door. That’s the kind of sign that makes you want to break a lock, open a door. The Time Ball, it said, allowed anyone in sight of the Royal Observatory to obtain Greenwich Time. Greenwich Mean Time, that’s what I remember from school, remember wondering how time could be mean.
My phone beeps, there’s a text, and I look down at the screen – just briefly – but then I look up again, look up with everyone else, at the Time Ball. It drops slowly, not fast – as if being lowered gently, by angels. There is an intake of breath, as if collectively from the crowd, and an exhaled “ohh!”. It drops in one slow movement, then hangs there, bobbing slightly, before it slowly drops lower still, then comes to rest. A child’s voice, high pitched, says something, a word I can’t understand, perhaps in a foreign language. Then someone, somewhere, claps, applauding the ball, and a few people respond, clapping too, then they think about it and they stop. There’s a moment of silence, communal.
And then everyone turns away, spell broken. Push chairs roll again through the crowd, bumping ankles, trailing dropped hats and stuffed toys; the hackysack boys pass me in a gaggle, limbs jiggling, in search of open ground; a man passes a tiny video camera to the woman at his side, and she places it reverently in a case strapped over her shoulder, zipping the case closed, patting it with her hand, keeping it safe.
