The Comet Seekers: A Novel (13 page)

Every few years Róisín moves, unlike her friends who are starting to settle down, from Ireland to London, London to Scotland, and now to France. She likes it here; she likes the pathways by the river, the old waterwheels that no longer spin, the spires in the distance that rise, modestly, above the homes and narrow streets. Ten years of looking away was enough, it was as if looking up for too long was starting to make her lose balance. But, as if to compensate, she has her telescope, enhanced over the years, as money allowed, shipped from city to city with her. It isn’t ideal – it is too light here, she can’t see anything too distant,
no faraway galaxies. But it is hers, and she has created it for a night like this.

It matches, she thinks, it works, for this comet was discovered by an amateur in Japan searching the sky through his binoculars. She likes how that makes it personal, how one man, standing alone, could find something so rare.

She’s left a message on the crackling answerphone at the farm, but Liam hasn’t called her back. It has become what they do to each other now. One phones, the other backs away. She wishes he had returned her call tonight, just this once, but a part of her is glad he hasn’t; perhaps it’s more honest this way. She thinks he never really cared, that much, about the comets. Not when compared to the farm.

So she tells herself, but then she reaches for the phone again, knowing it’s going to be spectacular. She doesn’t want him to miss something so beautiful, and so surprising – two comets in the sky tonight, one still distant, just approaching the inner solar system, and one so bright; the unexpected eclipsing the anticipated. There’s a certain poetry to that.

The phone rings four times then clicks over to the answerphone.

This time she doesn’t leave a message.

She puts the kettle on.

The kettle is whistling downstairs. Liam’s never wanted an electric one, until today. That whistling, calling him away when he doesn’t want to leave.

He dips the flannel in cool water again, twisting it before folding it into a neat strip. The windows are rain-dappled and dark. He draws the curtains closed, as quietly as he is able.

Behind the house where Róisín grew up, Adele, Neil and Conall wait outside in the garden. Róisín told them to look; said this time
was special. The adults have the binoculars that she gave them two Christmases ago. Conall has the pair he was given for his fifteenth birthday. He keeps turning them the wrong way round. He is cold, so he stamps his feet.

Róisín remembers a time when they lay outside on the grass, watching the sky; she remembers how much she wanted Liam to understand, to appreciate what she was showing him. It was unfair, to be so frustrated at his nature when he was so young, but it also made his indifference easy to forgive.

Not so when he told her, stroppy as a teenager, she’d best be getting back to wherever she was living these days, or when he hadn’t read her first paper, or when he said manned space flight seemed like a waste of money.

It’s harder to forgive a grown man, even when really they’ve done nothing wrong.

Clouds spill into her field of view and she tells herself that she must be patient. She knew that there would be clouds, but there is also wind. She heads downstairs to make a cup of tea, fills it with sugar. She doesn’t want to sleep tonight.

She hears something happening in the street. A group of students, perhaps, coming back from a bar or on their way to a party – she doesn’t know what. She hears voices shattering the night, a collage of tones and timbres, laughter, a shhh, the click of heels on pavement and a jangle of bracelets and then, something that sounds like a child. At first she thinks they’re just passing but she hears them again, moments later; realises they are sitting in the garden over the road. They must have climbed the gates. Róisín wonders why they’ve done that. Then she forgets about them.

Liam’s dad is sleeping now. Liam’s propped the door open so he can hear if he’s needed, and he’s sitting in the kitchen on his own,
accounts and letters covering the table. The farm is struggling. He thinks he’ll have to sell some of their land, maybe some livestock too, downsize, focus on organic produce he can take to the farmers’ market in town. His head is aching. The drone of the microwave seems like a constant in his life, even though it’s only been on for three minutes. When it pings, after four, he pours tomato soup into a bowl and the warm smell of it fills the kitchen, soothing him for a moment.

But the longer the quiet lasts the more he is unable to move; Liam is anchored to the table just like he is anchored to the farm. His soup is finished and there is a red blotch of tomato on the tabletop that he’s not ready to wipe away. He plays her message again. It is all comets and stars and galaxies; it is all Róisín. She doesn’t even ask after his dad. His bowl clatters into the sink. He deletes her. He knows that upstairs his father has stopped sleeping; he will never wake up.

Róisín scans her telescope away from the clouds. There is only so long you can stare at what is in your way. Beyond them, and to the east, she can see Beta Andromedae huddled close to NGC 404. She says their other names aloud, rolling them on her tongue: Mirach and Mirach’s Ghost. A giant star and a galaxy, so close they could almost be touching. Between them are 2.2 million light years of empty space. Her tea has gone cold; she thinks about making more while she sips it anyway.

She hears the people in the garden again, moves away from her telescope to look out of the window. They’ve put up a tent. She was right – there is a child with them, a boy, the only person she can see now. He’s pointing at the sky.

She tries to hear their voices but not much reaches her, despite the open window; only snippets of conversation, a moment of laughter, the wind catching a loose flap of the tent’s fabric.

It is red, their tent, only big enough for two. It reminds her of childhood, of something far away now and out of her reach.

She purses her lips, refocuses her telescope.

Liam climbs the stairs slowly. At the door, he waits. It is peaceful; there is that.

When he’s sitting by the bed he starts to talk. He didn’t know there were things he wanted to say, but it turns out there were, and now he’s started saying them. He talks about the time he saw his dad arguing with his mum’s ghost out by the stable after the last of the horses had been sold. He talks about why he was so upset when his dad gave his old red tent to the Kelly kids, who splashed it all over with leftover paint from the big For Sale sign on the wall of their barn. He talks about Róisín, how she’d left him behind to find a bigger world – bigger than the farm, so much bigger – and how she keeps on moving; always somewhere new. And someone new. He cannot ask her to come back. She never did what he asked her to do anyway.

He says he wishes he were a different kind of man, that he found it easier to speak, though now it’s too late the words won’t seem to stop coming. He talks about how the farm is his now, only his, and it is empty; how he knows it has become irrelevant to the world but at the same time knows it is all that is left of his home.

He wonders if this means he is being set free. Perhaps Róisín would see it that way. But freedom was never what he needed and besides he can feel the weight of his heart, just like his father’s, that is tying him to a place and a past that was happy, once; that will not let him leave.

Do you want to see, Conall?

He is stamping his feet.

Here, I’ll help you, if you want? Conall?

Adele holds the binoculars close to his face without touching, and he starts to shout. His arms knock into his sides, the flask of tea topples over. Neil bends to pick it up – no harm done. Everything’s grand, you don’t have to look.

The binoculars are removed. The shouts quieten down.

Conall stamps his feet.

Adele smiles. Not everyone has to watch the comet, she says. There’s more to life, so there is.

Conall stops stamping his feet. He’s seen a fox, at the end of the garden.

A moment later, it is gone.

Inside, the phone starts ringing.

Liam doesn’t know who else to call.

SEVERINE TAKES OUT THE BINOCULARS
and tries them out herself first, locating the comet, its tail and its nucleus, so she can help him find it; help him see.

You need to adjust them for your own eyes, she says, and he bends the eyepieces closer together, immediately getting the hang of it.

She watches his expression as he moves the binoculars to point all around the sky. He looks at the moon, at Orion, straight overhead like he’s trying to see the top, the very top of the universe, until he loses balance, almost toppling backwards before catching his fall and letting the binoculars swing around his neck.

And that’s what the strap is for, she says. Already he’s holding them up to his eyes again.

To François, it is like looking at a new world, more foreign and magical than anything he has seen so far in his atlas. The moon has craters and mountain ranges, dry lakes that spread between
skyscrapers of rock. And there are patterns in the stars, pictures that he can see how to make, like in the join-the-dots drawing book he had when he was still a little boy. He spins around, not afraid of falling again – why should he be afraid of falling on grass? – and then he sees the tops of buildings, magnified into the homes of giants, and then a window. And a woman.

Mama, look.

He points up to the open window.

What’s she doing?

Looks like someone’s got a telescope, Severine says, gently pulling the binoculars from his eyes. They’ll get a beautiful view of the comet from there.

Can we get a telescope too?

Severine smiles, passes him a clementine.

You and I don’t need one, she says. We’ve got special powers.

When his mama’s not looking, François points the binoculars to the window with the telescope again. The woman is standing next to it, adjusting something, perhaps, and looking at the sky but never down to the park. He thinks at first that she’s wearing a red dress just like his mama’s, but then he sees that it’s a scarf, wrapped around her shoulders. Her dress is black, like her hair that is tied back in a ponytail with wisps left loose and free around her face.

Guess what, his mama interrupts. He’s not sure if it’s because she thinks it’s wrong of him to be spying on the lady with the telescope, but he puts the binoculars down just in case.

What is it, Mama?

She pauses – she hadn’t meant to do this – but she feels a need to share their family, wants him to understand, now that she knows there’s no risk of him being haunted by them. She never was much good at keeping secrets.

Your great-great-grandpa Paul-François is here, she says. Your namesake.

François looks around the empty park and forces a smile.

François isn’t quite old enough to know that he thinks his mama is a bit embarrassing, but he will be soon. He has been resisting her stories of magic and ghosts for years, and now she is trying to pretend they are actually here.

He stares at the stars. He can’t see anything very much without the binoculars; the sky has become smaller, somehow. There is no comet, and he can barely even make out Jupiter – it’s just a star no brighter than some of the others. If he squints he can almost believe it’s red, but even then, not really.

There’s no one here, Mama, he says.

Oh, Severine, says Great-Grandpa Paul-François, he looks just like me – don’t you think he looks just like me?

Your great-granny is here too, Severine says.

Where?

She’s wearing a black dress, sitting next to Great-Grandpa Paul-François. She’s very beautiful, with her dark hair, don’t you think?

That’s not Granny, that’s the woman in the window.

What?

For a moment Severine is shaken, her faith questioned by a child.

She takes the binoculars and looks up to the window; there is a telescope but no woman, no one watching the stars.

There’s no woman in the window, she says to François harshly, but then smiles at him because it is not his fault she is suddenly terrified that he might see things, but different things to her.

Well, maybe not now, he says, stubborn and sure of what he saw. But she’ll come back. She’s real, I saw her. Wait and see.

But soon he’s forgotten about the woman in the window because the evening is getting cold and he wants to go into the tent; it was his birthday present and he wants to feel like he’s really camping.

In the tent he says, you do know they’re not real, don’t you, Mama?

And it hurts, to see that look in his eye.

You’re right, she says, I’m sorry. I was only playing.

Were you trying to be funny?

She smiles. It wasn’t funny, was it?

He shakes his head.

There are no ghosts, she says. There’s no such thing as ghosts.

She tucks him in and leaves the flask of hot lemon beside him, and goes outside to sit in front of the tent and watch the comet and talk to her ghosts knowing that he’s safe, and asleep, and that nothing will scare him tonight.

We met on a night like this, says Great-Grandpa Paul-François.