The Comet Seekers: A Novel (35 page)

She shakes her head, irritated at her own sentimentality – shooting stars are not flying through the solar system, they are lumps of rock burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Perhaps that’s how this comet will end up.

Turning her back on the sky, she faces the ice and pulls her survival tent out of her backpack. The floor of the hollow she will use as her base camp is slippery, so she roughens it up first, gouging out chunks of the ice to create a surface that the tent can remain on. And then she crawls inside, drinks some water, turns on her torch then turns it off again, closes her eyes and begins to count. When she opens them again, the comet will have moved position, will have flown beyond the stars of the horseshoe in front of a new constellation.

When she opens her eyes again, she is not alone.

Liam is standing at the foot of her sleeping bag, a threadbare panda clasped in his right hand and a bobble hat pulled down over his ears, her own scarf draped loosely around his neck.

Why are you in the tent? he says. You need to follow me.

It’s too cold, she says, we’ll freeze.

He turns and pulls back the door of the tent, walks out to the soft dandelioned grass.

Róisín is met by the smell of hay and fresh morning dew.

But it’s beautiful, she says, as he disappears from view beyond the edge of the tent’s door, and she knows she has to be out there with him, with her hair scooped up in a ponytail and that spring breeze tickling the back of her neck.

She finds him out in the field, lying on the crisp grass and holding her old notepad high over his face, sketching something in pencil on the page.

What are you drawing?

She sits down beside him, doesn’t see her snow boots but instead imagines her toes wriggling in the grass.

I’m not drawing, he says, I’m mapping the sky.

Why did you never want to do that before? she asks.

She looks up to the expanse of blue fluffy clouds so perfect they seem like a cartoon of the way a sky should be. But it hurts her neck, to keep staring up like this, so she lies down beside him, lets her whole view of the world become that sky.

You can’t draw the stars though. There are no stars in the daytime.

He holds up his pencil, as if using it to measure the distance between one invisible object and the next.

Sure there are.

And he is right. When she turns her eyes back to the sky she can see them – all the stars of the universe are filling the blue sky, glittering in the sun.

Look, she gasps, as she sees the comet, brighter than any she has seen before, brighter than the sun and the moon and all the stars of the Milky Way. But when she looks back to the ground, the boy is standing up, folding his map in half and in half again and again, until it is a tiny square of paper that he lets drop from his left hand to flutter to the ground. He holds his arms out – the world is big, I think – palms outstretched as if the only way to grasp the Earth
is to allow it to be infinite, a line from palm to palm that flows over oceans and continents and spans the globe. Then he turns and starts walking away.

Wait, she says, where are you going?

If you follow me you’ll find out, he says, reaching out a hand towards her.

She scrambles to her feet, unable to understand why the grass has become as slippery as ice.

I can’t, she says. I came to say goodbye.

He turns and starts to run away.

Wait . . .

Her feet seem to be sinking into the ground and her legs won’t move properly, the shivering in her body won’t stop.

Wait! – she is screaming now – Wait, you have to say something; you have to tell me it’s OK. But her voice is drowned out by a growling, violent roar of the Earth like the ground is about to split open, like a volcano is starting to erupt and the farm is being broken in two. Her legs collapse underneath her and she falls back into the snow. She tries to cry out but her voice freezes in her throat as the avalanche of snow and rock cascades down from the mountain. The speed of it, like a waterfall as deep as the ocean, filled with shards of glass, and she rolls over, manages to crawl some distance despite her numb hands, her wrists sinking into the snow. She has never heard anything so loud; the mountain is howling, the continent breaking – it must be – nothing could survive this violence, but she forces herself to get up, to run the few metres that feel like miles separating her from the ice cave, from the survival tent, from the glow of a torch and a flask of hot water that François saw her fill; she has to do this. The last of her strength gets her back into the tent, where she collapses like the mountain around her, as the sky comes crashing to the ground.

While François sleeps, Brigitte talks about Severine when she was a little girl, how she would run through the house searching for the ghosts, demanding her granny repeat their conversations word for word. How once they found her, curled up under Great-Grandpa Paul-François’s old desk like a tabby cat, unaware that her family was watching over her, whispering so as not to wake her even though she couldn’t yet hear them. And she tells stories about how she jealously watched them make pastries, mother and son together, baking pain au raisin and brioche when he was a little boy, flour and eggshells patterning their kitchen, their hands, sugar glinting in their hair as they laughed through the mess.

And, she said goodbye, Brigitte says eventually.

She knows her time is almost up. She didn’t get to say goodbye to her own child, but she is glad she can say goodbye on Severine’s behalf, at least. There’s no one left to see her and she is so far from home; all the others have gone and she should be with them. But she still has a moment; she still has hope.

François, Severine is proud of you, she says. She will be out there, you know, seeing the universe. I think she’ll enjoy it.

He opens his eyes and he knows that it’s true.

I’m glad you had your ghosts, Mama, he says to the empty room. He wishes he had said it to her before, but then he never felt so strongly that she was listening before. I’m glad you had so much family, he says, and I’m glad that I am your son. And it’s OK, Mama, I promise; everything is OK.

Róisín wakes to find the avalanche has stopped, and she is not buried underneath it, although there is a metre of snow piled up outside her tent. She unzips the door and pushes the fabric down to make a steep red carpet out into the white. She has to pull
herself up but there is room to crawl out, like a child leaving a toy tent that has grown too small, knowing she has to face the world.

Standing at last, she thinks she will sink but she doesn’t – her feet stand firm on the fresh snow. The sky has cleared to a frightening blue, a blue that has no end, no place in her world of white, but there it is, refusing to dim. The moon is still out, in a different quadrant to the sun, and below it, to the right, is a comet bright enough to be seen in the morning sky. What a beautiful thing, she thinks, this sky, this universe; she can feel herself flying with it. She can see the continent of ice and snow, so pristine with its fresh avalanche dusting of white, a perfect expanse of nothing stretching from coast to coast, untouched by humanity.

But that is not true. Over there, on the ice shelf, a splash of red that doesn’t belong in the natural world of ice and snow; one that is made by human hands. And inside, François will soon be cooking, slicing mushrooms and frying onions in oil that crackles in the heat, such contrast to the frozen world outside. François, whose mother is dying – has died, she knows now, though she’s not sure how. François, who thinks the sky is beautiful, who listened and did not talk. She wants him to talk now. She wants to be the one to listen.

Róisín looks down to realise that her feet have sunk into the snow. It is time to move forwards. She is ready.

She packs up the tent and collects her backpack and begins the long walk back to Halley VI, over the ice and through the snow and back to the human world.

When the sun is high over the Halley VI research base, François is woken up by steps outside his bedroom door. He knows her footsteps, understands that it’s Róisín before the door opens and she steps inside, her hair wet and still frosted with snow, her skin
raw, almost transparent from the ice. For a second he thinks she almost looks like a ghost. But there’s no such things as ghosts. Róisín – she is real.

He stands up.

Róisín hadn’t realised that François had a mirror in his room, but he must have, because out of the corner of her eye she sees her own reflection as she steps inside; her dark hair looks wild, her eyes full of loss and hope and her snowsuit, once a bright red, is darker from the ice, almost clinging to her skin like a dress blowing against her body in the breeze.

You’re back, he says quietly, almost a whisper, almost a question, and she walks towards him and they meet in the middle of the room, neither of them sure what words to use. Perhaps she could say hello, she thinks. I missed you. I have come home. But she doesn’t speak.

Brigitte looks at this woman who looks just like her, and she knows her family. She reaches out but stops herself – this is enough. She doesn’t need to be seen, she only needs to know that through generations and centuries her family has survived. Goodbye, she says, unheard, before slipping away from the Earth at last.

You’re back, he says again, his voice finding its strength now that Róisín is here, his palms touching the melted snow on her clothes.

Yes.

I was hopeful.

Her smile turns into a laugh, and his does too, a laugh of finally understanding one another and knowing there is no need to ask for explanations.

She pulls her hood back from her head; she breathes, forgetting how there had been no hood in her reflection, just long, dark hair.

Is it still snowing outside? François asks.

Róisín doesn’t know, but she takes his hand and they move to the window together to watch the outside.

It is snowing, lightly, but well enough to cover her footprints leading from the wilderness back to the base. It is as if no one has ever walked there before.

It’s beautiful, he says.

Yes.

And peaceful.

She smiles; I think it is miraculous.

They stand together in the kitchen, taking turns to make the food that reminds them of the people in their lives. François makes pain au chocolat; Róisín makes boiled eggs and soldiers; together they make a tagine, cracking cinnamon sticks before throwing them into the pot, filling the base with the spiced sweet smell of lamb and apricots – food to share. And then they start to invent; new dishes made of ingredients they take turns to pick from the cupboards, combinations they would never have thought of on their own but, in this kitchen, as the snow falls, everything seems possible.

And then in the night, they are woken by silence. The snowstorm has passed and the world is quiet.

Wrap up warm, he says, looping a scarf around her shoulders, we could freeze to death out there.

We won’t freeze, she says, pulling his bobble hat down over his ears. The comet will protect us.

And she is right, in a way; they don’t feel the cold as they step outside and gasp at the sky, filled with hundreds of shooting stars, golden in the moonlight.

What’s happening? he asks.

Her hands are held out as if she is trying to catch the stars, as if they will fall to the ground like dancing confetti to rest on her palms and in her hair, and he understands that the comet has
broken under the pull of gravity, after all the distance it has travelled, it has burst apart to shower the world in light and settle in the winter’s ice.

I thought it would go on forever, she says, orbiting the sun, glancing at the Earth, never getting to rest.

There are plenty of other comets to do that, François says, because he thinks that she will miss the endlessness of a comet’s journey. He looks over to her, to see if he’s said the right thing, but Róisín just smiles, because the sky is filled with sparkling pieces of light and she knows that now, given some time, they will find a way home.

Acknowledgements

A HUGE AND HEARTFELT
thank you goes to: Terry Karten, Gregg Kulick, Christina Polizoto, Jillian Verrillo, Katie O’Callaghan, Allyssa Kasoff, the sales reps and everyone at Harper; Alison Hennessey, Kathy Fry, Sarah-Jane Forder and everyone at Harvill Secker; Cathryn Summerhayes, Siobhan O’Neill and the team at WME; Caitrin Armstrong, Claire Marchant-Collier and Scottish Book Trust; all the people who offered feedback and encouragement while I wrote this book, including Margaret Callaghan, Kirsty Logan, Nick Brooks, Katy McAulay, Jane Alexander, Viccy Adams, Maria Di Mario, Gill Tasker and Anna Power; my family, Mum, Dad, Ally, Steve and Granny, for their unconditional support; the ghosts, of course; and finally, to Michael, with love.

About the Author

HELEN SEDGWICK
is a writer, editor, and former research physicist. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, and her writing has been published internationally and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and Glasgow’s Aye Write. She grew up in London and now lives in the Scottish highlands with her partner, photographer Michael Gallacher.