The Comet Seekers: A Novel (22 page)

There is no time, she is saying, or seems to be saying.

Who are you?

I am sorry.

And she looks down to the streets that are no longer empty, that are lit with torches carried by the family of a man she knows, though she wishes she didn’t remember his face. She looks over to see the flames on the roof of her mother’s house, screams out in fright, turns to run, to help, but she is too late. They are here, he is here, downstairs, and suddenly she realises: she has to protect her son.

There is not time, the woman is saying, her red dress whipping around her slight body in the breeze, and Brigitte understands, runs to the stairs, hears the creak of wood as the door is broken and the stamp of men’s feet up the stairs even as she is running, barefoot, down.

She stands in the doorway, panic gripping her throat at the sight of the man holding her son, still wrapped in her blanket, sleeping but starting to stir.

No, she says, trying to block his exit. She is taller than this man, but his boots crack on her bones and she falls to the ground. She clutches at his clothes, tries to scratch at his skin, whatever it takes, but she is outnumbered now, the flames are taking hold and the baby, her baby. She doesn’t realise that her dress is catching fire, that her skin is about to burn; all she knows is that they are taking her son.

She stands in a circle of flame that is spreading, destroying her home. Walls fall. The roof craters in. Her black hair – once falling in wild curls to her waist – burns faster than lightning. The sky is alight, too, and full of thunder without rain. Her scream catches in her throat, comes out as a growl. Words are lost in the sparks but caught again, in her eyes, in her glare that defies the burns eating away at her skin and confronts the man where he stands on the grass, in front of the house she built, that blanket held in his arms. The torch that lit the flame held high like a victory.

To the north there is a falling star, a silver light moving across the sky faster than any star she has watched before. But now her skin is black and shrivelled, curling off her bones, and this is what she sees: the man, the flames of red and gold, and her lost child – the baby she hasn’t named yet, whom she should never have left sleeping while she climbed to the roof of her home to stare at the sky.

2007

Comet McNaught

THEY TALK ABOUT NOTHING
,
WORDS
thrown across the kitchen as onions sizzle, fish glaze, courgettes roast.

What d’you do last night?

Did you hear?

Was it good?

François is happy to talk about nothing, listen to the chatter as he fries and whisks. Every movement is precise despite his speed, every word calm despite the raging heat. The excitement, the bustle of the kitchen; he loves it, just as much as he loves it when it stops. It is funny, he thinks, how he used to dream of a frozen world, and he has ended up working in this sweltering one. The speed and smell and sizzle of the night, the sense they each have of where everyone else is, what everyone is doing; plates, knives, fish, tomatoes, herbs lined up and ready to go, everything is ready, every
movement fast. Scallops perfectly golden-browned, thirty seconds in butter, salt, and parsnips – a new addition – roasted and slim, with a red-wine jus and chocolat.

The head chef returns, the conversation quietens, there is focus throughout the kitchen: there’s a clarity, too. When it goes quiet, it’s as if François doesn’t need to breathe; the world becomes the dish he’s creating and there’s beauty to that. François knows he is good at this.

The head chef nods, walks on.

People come from all over the world to work here, to learn to cook in this kitchen. François has learnt technique here, but he learnt how to cook by heart when he was still a child; that is what makes it instinct.

Getting back to his flat at 2 a.m., windows and shutters flung open; at last he has time to breathe. His shirt is thrown over the back of the chair as he welcomes in the cold night’s air. A pint of water followed by a bottle of beer, a Jacqueline Taïeb record on the turntable. A message from his mama on his answerphone: Look at the sky. And come for dinner tomorrow, yes?

He smiles, drinks more water, falls asleep in his jeans. Then wakes two hours later and walks to the window.

He is not the only one on the street. That is the first amazing thing. The next is the quiet – a buzz of silence, a ripple of something extraordinary in Paris. Then there is the comet: the brightest thing in the night sky. It is beyond visible; it is unmissable.

He doesn’t understand how he didn’t notice it before. He’d always thought of himself as somebody who noticed things.

He wants to pass it on, so he sends a text message to Hélène; she’ll be asleep, probably, she has lectures in the morning, but just in case – it is so beautiful.

Hélène is woken by her phone beeping in the night. She doesn’t mind. She smiles at the message – six months together and he can still surprise her. He was the only chef in the restaurant who didn’t ask her out while she was working there, though every time she went to the kitchen to collect the orders she was willing him to look up at her.

On her last night they went to Le Sans Soucis, and he was quiet at first; she thought he would stay for one drink and then disappear from her life. It made her braver. Enough to claim the seat next to his as soon as it became available and to finally forget to be shy in front of him. When everyone else had left, they stood outside and said their serious goodbyes like they’d never see each other again, before racing along the streets as if they were competing in the Olympics and running up the stairs to his apartment, exhausted and laughing, hand in hand.

And now he says there’s something beautiful in the sky. She thinks about getting out of bed but it’s too cold and it’s 4 a.m. so instead she huddles under the duvet and falls asleep again, waking happily in the morning to a low sun and a layer of frost that makes the grass crunch under her feet and the roads sparkle.

But François stays outside, staring up, long after the crowds have dispersed. For some people there is only so long you can admire the sky before your neck starts to ache. Not for him; he feels like he could search the skies all night for patterns in the stars, for mountains on the moon, for a comet that moves – yes, he thinks it has moved – between the constellations while he holds his breath and refuses to blink.

When he gets home, he writes a recipe for his mama. He wants to thank her for something, though he is not sure exactly what.

He doesn’t hear back from Hélène. She must be sleeping.

A few hours later he goes for a run, despite having been up all night. He has the feeling that something is happening; that something is about to change.

RÓISÍN ARRIVES IN HAWAII
,
NATURALLY
taking to the routine of staying awake all night and sleeping as the sun blazes down. She names the galaxies she sees, though they have catalogue numbers already; she names them after people she has known in research groups across the world. The group in Hawaii laugh over midnight breakfast, trying to guess which colleagues she liked and which dwarf galaxies she’s named after professors who had become too fond of their own voices. Her results are good; she’ll get another paper from this trip. She has moved across the world, sending postcards of new cities to her mum and sticky chocolate to Conall.

Guess where I am? she texts Keira one night from the observation room, the sky too beautiful to keep to herself. On a mountain top, looking through a telescope at a supermassive black hole in the centre of the Andromeda galaxy. We’ve discovered they might help galaxies form – isn’t that amazing?

Well, I invented a new kind of pistachio cheesecake today, texts back Keira. Beat that!

She laughs – it is true; even though Róisín has invented a new program to analyse the radiation detected from some of the most distant galaxies in the universe, she has never quite mastered the art of baking.

She is exhausted after her shift but she still finds it hard to sleep; she closes her eyes and sees the stars, wants her day to begin all over again. She walks through the mid-morning sun to the canteen, where some of the others are already drinking.

A nightcap? Gerhardt suggests, pouring her a glass of ouzo – none of them know why there is ouzo in the Mauna Kea observatories, but it comes in handy – and they slip easily into talking about their observations, their spectra, the questions they each have about the universe that drives them to search the skies.

Róisín tells them half of her story; the half that involved watching comets race through the clouds as a child, the half that loves to feel free in a universe that is so big, the half that feels the beauty of the sky like an ache in her chest.

The other half of her story she doesn’t share. Liam is still there, a part of who she is, and that is as it should be – everyone has a first love, she thinks, and it is personal, and it is precious, and it is in the past.

The storm lasted for two days, and it seemed endless. Even now the rain has stopped, the sky is so dark and low it feels like an effort to walk through the fields, as if the clouds are resisting the movement below.

Liam trudges through the mud of the field, but just as he gets to where he was going the skies open again and a shatter of lightning tells him it is futile. It is only lightning, he tells himself, but he also knows it is the last time – in this moment, he gives up on trying to fix the fence that he has mended every year, after every storm, since his father first built it.

As a young man, his father believed that hammering wood into ground would make a strong enough root to last. It was an act of faith.

As a young man, he wanted to be just like his father.

It is heartbreaking, he thinks, the things people believe they want when they are young.

In Toronto, Róisín starts a relationship with one of the engineers she’s been working with. Jie is part of the team designing a component
of the
Rosetta
spacecraft that will be woken up from three years of deep sleep to land on Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

We are looking for prebiotic molecules, he says, in his unfamiliar Canadian twang.

You mean you’re searching for life? she asks.

The precursors to life. And other things.

She smiles; she loves that idea.

To the
Philae
lander, she says, holding up her orange juice in a salute. Long may she travel with the comets.

He has fine black hair that tickles her chin, and trendy glasses that she likes to push to the top of his head, despite his protests. He is very easy to be around, perhaps because he is a happy man, by nature; when he wakes up in the morning something in the world always makes him smile.

Where were you before Toronto? she wants to know.

I spent three years at the Université de Montréal.

And before that?

PhD at McGill.

She nods, makes sense; perhaps he doesn’t like to be too far from home.

I had a year in Antarctica though, Jie says, as if he can read her mind and doesn’t want to be seen as homely. That’s impressive, hey?

Her eyes widen.

Tell me more.

He laughs, undoes the top button of her shirt. They are together for three and a half months before parting amicably, and she enjoys every day of it.

But she thinks of Liam. Remembers that intensity in his eyes and feels the weight of it. Her mum says he goes for Sunday lunch sometimes, and she is glad of that. She hopes that he has learnt
to see the fun in life, the beauty; hopes it is not cruel of her to think that.

Liam arrives at Adele and Neil’s house at midday on Sunday; he is invited every week, and about once a month he makes the effort to go. He finds their kindness strangely hard to take, finds he returns to his home feeling more alone than if he had never left it.

Over lunch Adele mentions Róisín again – she is proud, of course, and he understands that. But he struggles for words to reply, even now, even after ten years, can’t quite bring himself to ask questions about her life.

She has been to Hawaii.

She has made new friends in Canada.

She is improving her French.

There has been no one else, for Liam. He doesn’t want the dishonesty of pretending he can love someone else, or the superficiality of pretending he doesn’t need to.

But the next week, when the phone rings on Saturday to invite him for Sunday lunch, he doesn’t answer it. He will not be spending Sunday lunch with her family again.