The Comet Seekers: A Novel (2 page)

When he looks back at his letter to Severine, the smudges of the words make it look as if he’s been crying on the page. It doesn’t matter. Of course it will not be sent, not any time soon – there is no airlifted postal service here. The next delivery is six months away. But even so, he describes the comet he has been watching, with Róisín, in the sky. I have seen its nucleus, he writes; I could make out its tail. It is a different colour to the stars, isn’t that miraculous? I feel so close to home today, and so far away.

He folds his letter, written over weeks, and seals the envelope. Presses a first-class stamp to his tongue. The taste lingers long after the letter has been safely stowed at the bottom of his case. He heads outside; he needs to sleep under the stars tonight.

RÓISÍN OPENS THE ZIP TO
François’s tent slowly, not wanting to wake him if he is asleep. She’s not sure what he’s doing out here, but she saw the red tent in the starlight and knew that she had to join him.

Are you sleeping? she whispers.

Yes, he replies.

That’s good, she smiles, though it’s so dark she knows he won’t be able to see that. I’ll just talk, and you can sleep, she says, and we’ll both feel better for it.

She talks about Liam, because she feels now that she has to speak about it, if she has any chance of letting it go.

And she suspects that François might have lost somebody too.

There is a gust of wind that makes the taut fabric of the tent resonate like a string; ripple with harmonics.

He closes his fingers around hers, but there is only a second of this closeness before she pulls away again.

I think I need to say goodbye, she says. I’m sorry.

He follows her outside as she leaves, but not back to the base – he has his own past to remember, or to forget. Instead he turns away and starts packing up the tent by the light of the morning stars, under the glow of the comet.

The next night François dreams there is a strange woman sitting on his bed, with a voice he knows but has never heard before.

So you found me, then, he says. I knew you were coming.

It’s cold, she replies. You’re on the wrong continent.

Could you take it easy on me, please? he says. I know why you’re here.

He opens his eyes to an empty, watery room. He blinks; the water in his eyes clears for a second, and then returns.

He is surprised by the conviction of it – it is not logical, but undeniable nonetheless. He’s been waiting for news even though the news couldn’t reach him. He doesn’t know what else he can do so he drinks, and cries, and lets his heart break because he knows – somehow he knows – that tonight, a world away, his mother has died.

Róisín hikes through the night, now and then stopping to take out her notebook from the side pocket of her jacket, mark with
pencil where the comet is relative to the stars. She keeps walking until the base is no longer visible – she doesn’t want any signs of humanity on the horizon. There is only one person she wants to see tonight. The wind is starting to get strong, biting at her skin even through her layers of protection – it is incredible, the way wind can do that. Soon it will be too dangerous to continue; she can see the swirls of ice ahead, where the wind is so strong it can lift the top layer of the ground.

Róisín chooses her spot carefully: a cave of sorts, an overhang of rock and ice that will provide some shelter from the wind. She looks up at the comet – still visible, still daring her on – then looks more precisely through her binoculars and marks it again on her map before starting to unpack the shelter.

Her highest marks in the Antarctic Survey were in the survival test. She has seen worse than this.

The shelter is red, bright red, the colour of something that can’t be missed, should anyone look for it. Inside, by the light of the torch, everything is rosy and golden; tent torchlight is beautiful. The storm is getting louder though. She steps outside and is almost knocked off her feet, but she struggles to stand upright, facing the wind, and watches the comet on this, its brightest night. No storm will stop her.

Some say that comets seed life on lifeless planets. She finds that hard to believe. The comet is ice, it is burning with wind; wild, inhospitable, stunning. It is not unlike where she is standing. This is, perhaps, the closest a human being can get to travelling on a comet as it approaches perihelion. Clinging on for life.

The first time she wakes, she thinks something is trying to get inside; a big shape – a bear? – is pressing against her tent. It takes her a moment to realise it is the snow piling up outside, and that there are no bears here. Perhaps there is nothing here.

The next time she is back on soft, dandelioned grass; she is wearing pyjamas and lying in the open air. Liam is beside her. No, this can’t be right. There is no grass on the comet. Wait.

She finds the torch, turns on the light. It helps. She wonders if the sun will rise soon. Perhaps François will come in the morning and unbury her from all this snow. Perhaps the snow itself will melt as they hurtle through space, towards the heat of the sun. Perhaps Liam will come home from wherever he wanted to go; he will have seen enough light, and she enough snow, and together they will lie on the farm grass and look up to the comets overhead and pretend like they don’t need to breathe; and in secret, they will breathe.

1976

Comet West

RÓISÍN KEEPS LOOKING OUT OF
the window as they eat their boiled eggs. Liam knows why; sundown is coming and she wants to be out before dark. Every night this week it has been the same; the comet was predicted, but still it hasn’t arrived. There’s only two days and a weekend left of the half-term holidays, and then she’ll have to go home.

If he knew how, Liam would stop the time from moving forwards and stay in this week – this exact one – for all his life. He looks at the clock on the kitchen wall and Róisín looks at the dusk beyond the window, out to the red tent that is pitched up in the field.

The red tent was a present from his mum the year before she died. Liam knows it was from her because his dad would never have chosen something red, although it had both of their names on the label. His mum wore red; yellow and gold and red and purple,
all the colours of the rainbow. She never seemed quite in the right place on their farm, so far from everywhere. Maybe that’s why she left it so early. Inside the red tent, the light is different to anywhere else in the world; it is like being inside a balloon that is flying up into the sun.

Can I bring Bobby with me tonight?

Róisín rolls her eyes.

Liam’s not really this young – he’ll be seven later this year – and most nights he forgets about Bobby altogether, but if he’s going to try to stay in this week forever, without time moving forwards, he’d quite like to keep Bobby with him.

Pandas don’t live in tents.

Bobby does. He likes the red. Anyway, pandas don’t live in Ireland either.

Róisín made Bobby stay in the house last night because of the risk of rain, although it didn’t rain in the end and there was no comet either, so it was a bit of a waste. Liam thinks that maybe Bobby will be a good omen for them tonight.

If you like you can bring an omen too, he says.

I don’t need one – Róisín zips up his coat by the back door and puts Bobby in his big coat pocket – I’ve got you.

While Liam arranges everything in the tent in the field, Róisín starts work on her maps. She’s been drawing them every night. Maps of the night-time sky, so that she can see how each thing moves, how near and far from each other they get. It was one of the first things she learnt to draw when she was little, and she still think it’s the best. Why draw a square house with a triangular roof when you can draw the patterns in the stars? Liam thinks her maps look a bit like join-the-dots – that if he just knew how to read them properly something extraordinary would appear. Maybe the
comet will help, like the code key he has in his colouring books. Yesterday he did a tractor.

Liam!

He puts Bobby in his sleeping bag and unzips the tent. The dark comes quickly; he’s noticed that this past week.

I think it’s come.

The comet?

Of course!

That’s grand.

Róisín doesn’t look at him the whole time; her eyes are fixed on the sky.

The comet is more like a blur really. Like someone has dropped a silver pen on a page of black paper and then smudged it with their thumb.

Is that it? Liam says. Why’s it so small?

Because it’s far away. But what you mean is why is it so faint. And that’s because it’s far away too, but it’s moving towards us so it’s going to get brighter.

When?

Maybe later tonight.

Are you sure?

Maybe tomorrow.

So what are we going to do tonight?

He’s getting cold already, out here in the dark, what with it not even being spring yet, not for a few weeks anyway.

Tonight we’re going to watch it move, Róisín says, as she pulls her sleeping bag from inside the tent. If we lie here, we’ll be able to see the sky all night long.

Liam crawls inside the tent. He’s cold. He thinks that Róisín will follow him in, but he knows that’s a stupid thing to think – she’s never followed him anywhere. It’s always the other way round.

He takes Bobby out of the sleeping bag, brushes away at the bits of grass on the floor of the tent and sits him up in the corner instead.

But it’s not fun being in the tent on his own, even with Bobby, so he forces himself to count to one hundred and then he unzips the door again and looks out. Róisín is lying on her back in the sleeping bag.

He drags his sleeping bag out of the tent, lays it along the grass next to Róisín and wriggles inside.

I’m back, he says, although she doesn’t reply and even if she did all she’d say is that he is stating the obvious. He always seems to be doing that.

Hold your breath and count, she says. If you count long enough, and hold your breath long enough, you’ll be able to see it move. Because it’s flying.

No it’s not.

Yes it is. It’s flying so fast and so far away it can change the whole sky in the time you can hold your breath for. It’s the fastest thing in the solar system. You just have to hold on, and then you’ll see.

Liam lies as still as he’s ever been and watches, and waits, and holds on. The grass bristles against his skin, the night breeze blows his hair into his eyes but he doesn’t move to brush it away. His face gets hotter the longer he goes without breathing; his lips purse into a tight wiggly line, eyes wide and gleaming, his hand grasping onto his cousin’s.

Can you see it? she asks.

You breathed!

Liam lets out his breath, gasps in more night-time air – it’s the kind of air that smells of ice and fresh grass and pyjamas.

Róisín’s hand is clutching his, and they look at each other and breathe in unison, a big open-mouthed breath to sustain them for
another thirty seconds, or sixty, as they turn their eyes back to the sky.

Nothing moves.

They both know what they want to be when they grow up. Liam is going to be a farmer like his dad and Róisín is going to move far away and become an astrophysicist. She knows the names of all the constellations, and the different shapes of the moon, and the order of the planets, and she knows when the comets are going to be in the sky. That’s why she persuaded Liam to camp out in the field with her tonight, the night when it will be at its brightest. She stares up at the sky and then, still lying on the grass, holds the notebook high over her face and starts drawing.

What are you doing? He wants to understand.

Astronomy, she says. I’m mapping the sky. I have to mark where the comet is now in relation to the stars. So that we can see how far it moves. Otherwise we might forget.

It’s
not
moving.

But it will. Have patience.

Liam rolls his eyes. This astronomy takes too long.

Look. She shows him her map. See those stars? I’ve marked them here. And the comet is in between those two right now. See?

He nods, reluctantly.

You can go inside if you really want.

I don’t want.

She tears off a blank sheet of paper and gives it to him, along with one of the spare pencils from her pencil case. She takes it with her everywhere, so she can always map the sky.

What should I draw?

Whatever you want to draw.

She always talks to him like this, as if she’s the grown-up, even though she’s only two years older than he is.

He frowns in concentration; he’s not going to ask her any more questions tonight. His pencil hovers over the page.

Liam falls asleep while the comet is still between the two stars overhead, buried deep into his sleeping bag with the zip done up to way over his head.

On the dew-damp grass in the early hours of the morning his drawing blends into indecipherable marks. The farm, the field, his house, the cows and sheep, his dad, the lack of his mum, and Róisín staring up at the sky: dots and lines that have been smudged out of context by a careless thumb until their meaning is lost.