The Comet Seekers: A Novel (9 page)

And so now, for her first plane journey in ten years, they are going to Scotland; to feel the cold and the rain and the beauty and the music, to climb the seven hills and to start seeing the rest of the world. Perhaps she will even have a moment or two to herself; to feel like herself.

Every time she thinks that she tries to unthink it, but cannot.

As they land, he squeals with joy rather than pain – if his ears hurt like the other children on the plane he certainly doesn’t mention it. It’s like he was born for this, Severine thinks to herself; they are part of the larger world. And she opens her hands wide, imagines whole universes contained between her palms.

She hasn’t seen the ghosts for eight years – and for eight years now she has been the parent, the one in charge. It seems like a
lifetime since she felt looked after; since she was allowed to be the child.

François is older now though, she thinks, more able to take care of himself. Besides, he is not afraid of travel – he seems to love it.

Maybe they can go and see all that world, after all.

He’s never asked about his papa, and that’s OK by her; she’s had enough questions from her mother to last her a lifetime.

Actually, he’s a nice enough man. He says he likes receiving the photos she sends, says to let him know if there’s ever anything they need.

He works on a boat that travels the Atlantic.

They could have been good friends (the love thing was never going to work out; they soon realised it wasn’t love that drew them together) and a part of her wanted to go with him, but another part of her chose to stay and now she doesn’t really know why. Sometimes, though, she imagines a vast ocean, the brightness of so much water, the wide-open expanse of it.

Can I run on this bit?

François jumps with impatience; there is a moving strip of floor and he wants to fly along it, to race faster than he can on grass.

His mama checks behind her – they were the last to get off the plane; they are the last on the people carrier that will take them to the terminal.

OK, she says, run like the wind.

She is supposed to say be careful but that’s not the kind of mother she wants to be.

His arms fly out as he runs. When he gets to the end he waits for his mama to do the same, come on! he shouts, but she doesn’t run – she stands tall and waves at him as the flat escalator carries her forwards and something in him is disappointed.

On their first night, François wakes with a nightmare. He was on a dark beach, there were waves crashing against the rocks; there was cold and there was fear. The salt water filled his mouth when he tried to shout out, he gasped and choked, he had to save his mama . . . He opens his eyes; pulls the covers over his head and grips his toy tiger as if someone were trying to steal it from him.

In the bed next to his, Severine is awake too. This always happens when she leaves home: a knot in her belly, something between guilt and loneliness that haunts her in the night. She wishes the ghosts would appear now; even after all these years she misses her granny. She never really said goodbye. One day she thought she was surrounded by so much family, and then they were all gone, leaving just her and her child, a baby then, to wonder how the house could feel so empty when there was so much noise. She too pulls the covers over her head and tries not to wake her son, tells herself this is crazy, that it probably never happened at all, that she spent two days hallucinating after her granny died.

And then, of course, she knows that they have arrived.

Granny?

She pulls the covers away from her face to see the shadow of a woman standing by the door. This is not like it was the last time. Where is the rush of voices, the laughter, the playful bickering of people who have loved one another for decades, for centuries?

This is silence.

Severine tries to beckon Brigitte closer, but she won’t come.

She thinks about getting out of bed herself, but something makes her stay.

They look at one another across the room, neither making a move.

There is a sound though.

What are you trying to say?

Please . . .

Severine stares. In the shadows Brigitte’s face is obscured, her clothes are long and loose; her skin looks dark, but that might just be the lack of light. Severine looks down at her own skin, at her arms. She is visible in the moonlight coming in through the curtains. Brigitte must be hidden by more than shadow – she is fading into the air.

Come forward, she wants to say; are you here alone?

But François is sleeping and Severine does not say the words out loud and the ghost remains where she is, barely visible. Watching.

Severine rolls onto her side; from here she can see François’s bed and she tells herself that he is what’s real – the world is Severine and François and their holiday in Scotland, with wide oceans still to explore. It is her choice to make. She closes her eyes.

When she opens her eyes again Brigitte is gone, and she tries to deny the disappointment she feels.

François wakes early; he is in a new country that he has never seen before and he wants to go and explore.

Scottish breakfast? his mama asks with a smile.

He wrinkles up his nose to say no, pulls the curtains wide to look out at Edinburgh, where there are castles and bagpipes and looming hills of rock.

Half an hour later they are on the Royal Mile, standing before a stall of fresh fruit and flowers. François chooses the clementines for breakfast, holding each in his hand before making his selection, testing for their ripeness the way he’s seen his mama do it, looking up to her with a grin. She buys herself a single tulip and threads it through the buttonhole of her coat; rests her hand on his head but he pulls away, already eager to see more.

Severine’s not sure why she turned her back on Brigitte in the middle of the night. She never wanted to ignore the ghosts before – she spent most of her life willing them to appear. But before they
had wanted to speak; they had been happy to see her. Now, their appearance seemed to say something else.

No, not their appearance. Brigitte’s appearance.

Where is her granny?

As they walk up the cobbled streets, listen to the commentary about the castle – with François asking so many questions – take photos from between the cannons and eat ice cream despite the chill in the air, she catches herself glancing over her shoulder, looking into the darkened alleyways, behind closed blinds and along the shadows of the old town, wondering if Brigitte will appear again.

What are you looking for?

François pulls his mama away from a dark alleyway of steps that smells like a toilet.

Just wondering where we should go next, she says.

He doesn’t believe her. She was hardly listening to the man talking about the castle and when he got ice cream on his face she didn’t even notice. He had to wipe it off on his sleeve, and he doesn’t like doing that.

Let’s sit down in the gardens, she says; the gardens used to be a loch in the middle of the city. That used to be where they dunked witches, she says, and then she stops talking suddenly.

Is that a story you’re not supposed to tell a child? he says, and his mama looks surprised and maybe a little bit like she’s going to laugh.

I’m going to tell you a secret now, she says.

His eyes widen.

OK.

My granny told me when I was little, she says. And now I’m going to tell you.

François doesn’t believe in Father Christmas any more. He doesn’t believe in magic either; he is eight years old! So he scrunches up his nose at his mama’s story of ghosts, and waits for her to tell him the real truth.

Well, you were named after your great-great-grandpa Paul-François, she says, do you believe that much?

Of course, he says, I’ve seen a photo of him, so I know that he was real. He’s just dead now.

And of course that’s when Great-Grandpa Paul-François decides to appear.

We need to talk, he says, fading in and out of vision.

Severine shakes her head.

I know, not now. Later. In the night. We can’t stay long here. It’s too far . . .

He’s gone again.

Severine frowns.

The bagpipe player starts up again, and François clasps his hands over his ears and squeals. Shouting over the noise, he says, you know, Mama, there’s no such thing as witches, and there’s no such thing as ghosts.

IN THE FIRST SECONDS AFTER
Róisín wakes she doesn’t know where she is, and she loves it. She looks over to the curtains – red and gold, thinner than expected – up to the ceiling with its ornate plasterwork and old-fashioned charm. Voices, traffic, laughter, unexpected sunshine. Her flatmate is making coffee. She knocks; passes it in.

Skies look clear, she says. You’re going up to the observatory tonight?

Tammy sits cross-legged on the floor as they chat. She is studying French and Spanish; says it means she can live in pretty much any continent of the world.

But after she’s left the flat and Róisín is on her own again Liam appears in her mind; every morning there is this moment, the flash of a different life, his face the last time she saw him, the shadow beneath his eyes, before he is brushed away. The sea is keeping them apart, the distance. It’s for the best. She did the right thing; she’s out in the world.

She rolls onto her side, decides not to get up just yet.

She doesn’t have to work today. The party is planned for this evening.

The predictions are for the comet to explode in the atmosphere of Jupiter, in the early hours of the morning. A comet this size, colliding with a planet; it’s the stuff of Armageddon.

That is what she wants to see, in her life. The power of something extraordinary.

Eventually she pulls on leggings and a jumper; changes the jumper for a T-shirt when she looks out of the window.

Below her flat there are people on the street, some waiting at the bus stop, others walking past the grocer’s on the corner. A mother and son, hand in hand, are standing by the flowers and vegetables on display outside. She pushes open the window and French voices reach her on the air; she almost calls out to them before she catches herself – people in Edinburgh don’t wave to strangers the way people in the country do. Still, the sun in Scotland can make people do unexpected things.

She checks the news on her computer for any preliminary observations. Nothing from NASA so far, just promises that the best is yet to come.

She closes the window; the people below have moved away. It makes her feel strangely alone.

Róisín decides to climb the hill a bit later than the others; she knows they’re all going to be there together, at the observatory,
and she feels like making her own separate entrance. She takes her time with the day, letting the anticipation build as she does some washing, as she listens to a radio play, as she thinks about phoning her mum but doesn’t lift the receiver to make the call. Simple everyday things on a day that is not everyday, on a day that is once in a lifetime.

Patience.

Another hour slips by; the comet will know it cannot escape now, will be feeling the rush of the outer atmosphere as it edges closer to its fate.

She paces her flat, pulls on her shoes.

It is nearly time for sunset.

In orbit, telescopes orient themselves towards the stormy gas giant; in deserts, on mountains, terrestrial observatories prepare to record the collision in all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. There have been great comets before, but this is something special. Earth knows it, for once; the planet is at a safe distance, but it knows where to look, and it’s learning how to wait.

Róisín is learning to wait, too; she’s trying to stop cheating, to stop expecting something new to feel as powerful as something old. Things with Liam, they couldn’t be the same; that couldn’t continue, not as adults, not when they had lives to lead. A secret like that would fester.

And so she’s gone home, twice a year, like she promised; has visited on Boxing Day and called in to the farm each summer, and they have gone back to being cousins, if not best friends – they are a long way from that. But cousins is something. Cousins is what it should be.

She shakes her head. Pulls on her coat, grabs a hat from by the door. It could be chilly, on the hill.

Tonight, Róisín will wait all night if she has to, for that perfect moment of destruction when the comet will split and burst, crash through the atmosphere and turn from ice to fire.

Some people say that comets seed life on lifeless planets. That will not happen today; nothing can survive on Jupiter, not even ice and dust and rock.

When she arrives, Sam is already there; he glances at her as she walks from the stairs to join the group, his eyes lingering a second longer than if there was nothing to say.

How’s it looking? she asks.

Clear night, he says.

There are several other postdocs there, PhD students and one of the junior lecturers leaning over the computer’s keyboard. We should get some good measurements from here, he says without looking up.

Róisín thinks about saying she is more interested in the view, then realises how unscientific she sounds.