The Comet Seekers: A Novel (28 page)

Downstairs, his sister sits, drawing swirls of dark colour in her sketch pad, and she doesn’t look up when he calls her name – Ariane – doesn’t notice when he does star jumps in front of her, or tries to pull off her socks. As weeks go by, their mother watches as Antoine slowly accepts that his sister will not see him, and she slowly accepts that look on her daughter’s face when she hears her talking to herself.

What are you doing, Mama? she says – the first words her daughter has spoken since the accident – and when she replies that she is talking to Antoine her daughter stares at her, says simply, no you’re not.

He’s here, if you want to see him, she tries for one last time.

No Mama, she says, he is gone now. He is dead.

2016

Comet PanSTARRS

FRANÇOIS FINDS SEVERINE CROUCHED UNDER
the desk in the old study upstairs, a finger pressed to her smiling lips, as if she is playing hide-and-seek.

Mama, I brought courgettes.

Shhh! Her hands fly about her face for a moment.

Is there a mosquito?

Ha!

He knows there is no mosquito; she is seeing the ghosts. It is happening again, just like he has been dreading it would for the past five years.

What are you doing under there?

Hiding from Antoine, she giggles, he wanted to play a game. Then, more seriously: I think he gets lonely, being the youngest.

François can’t bring himself to say what needs to be said, but he thinks it – he has been thinking it since it happened before. She needs some help, and he needs help to know what kind. There is something wrong with her mind. She starts all of a sudden, noticing he is there, or re-noticing it.

You brought courgettes, she smiles, begins to stand up. He reaches forward for her arm, helps her to her feet even though she is up before he’s made a difference. She’s had her hair cut again, short like an actress from the sixties and it suits her.

It’s good to see you, François.

And you, Severine.

She stands on tiptoe to ruffle his hair.

Such a serious man, she says with a shake of her head, reaching for the courgettes. Shall we cook together tonight?

He puts his arm around her shoulders, and they head for the kitchen.

They play music while they cook, sip wine as they slice shallots and fry courgettes in olive oil. Severine sings along to the CD, and François can stop worrying for a while. It is always like this; just as he begins to think about speaking up, insisting she see a doctor, his mama switches back to herself and he lets the moment pass. He wonders if he is a coward.

You should go out, he says. What about signing up for an evening class? Or you could try that new restaurant on Rue Saint-Malô.

Promoting the competition?

They’re local.

Or maybe you’re just trying to get me away from the house.

Let the past be, he says, live your life now.

My life is more full than you know.

Her smile makes it look like she has a secret boyfriend, a secret hobby, a secret identity, but it doesn’t last. Her life is full, yes, but
not in the way she’d imagined it would be – not in the way she has ever wished for him. She has suggested, a few times, that he take a holiday, go travelling the way he always wanted, but he hasn’t gone – it’s almost as if he’s keeping an eye on her.

Outside, it has begun to snow. It pulls François to the window in amazement; snow in the middle of summer! But no, it is just petals from the apple tree in the courtyard. Most fall to the ground; one settles on the windowpane, gravity defied.

He turns away, returns to the kitchen to see his mama has started playing hide-and-seek again, trying to squeeze under the table while the courgettes are burning.

When he leaves she tells him to give Hélène her love, then realises her mistake – I am sorry, François, I forgot for a moment. I . . .

It’s OK, Severine. He reaches down to kiss her on the cheek then walks to the bus stop.

His flat, when he reaches it, is not just empty of people but somehow, oddly, empty of his past as well. He’s not heartbroken – they met when they were very young and young people change, he understands that – but he feels sad. Hélène was his friend, and he didn’t want to lose his friend. He puts on the kettle and, looking at the phone, decides that he won’t. But he does have an appointment to make in the morning, and it is not something he can put off any longer.

I’m just curious, says François, as the doctor looks at him with concern.

To generalise, early-onset dementia would be highly unlikely –
highly
unlikely – in anyone under the age of thirty. But everyone is different; every mind is different. There are tests . . .

Oh no, I don’t think . . . I don’t mean me.

The doctor holds out a hand, in mid-air, as if to soothe or create space for him to keep talking, François is not sure which. He stops talking, waits for more information to be offered.

It can affect people in their fifties, occasionally forties. The sooner it’s diagnosed, the more chance we have to help. But, it could be other things. You could talk to a psychiatrist, if you want?

He wonders how that conversation would go with Severine.

The carnival arrives in Bayeux. The ringmaster, a younger man than before, picks a plot close to the river and where they can be viewed from the bridge – he wants the town to come to him, and he gets what he wants. There are fairground rides, a hammer that can make a bell peal, a big tent where acrobats will fly and fire-eaters swallow fire.

François laughs when he hears his mama’s message, her voice so giddy, like a child: The carnival has come to town! Come this weekend, yes?

He arranges the duck à l’orange on the plate like a carnival scene, although he tells no one he has done that – they would think he was insane.

Hélène comes round to collect the rest of her stuff, some clothes she had forgotten and posters that were up on the walls. François opens a bottle of red and they talk for a while about her new place, the restaurant, their friends, then a new album that has been released by a band they both love. It’s friendly and they relax into their conversation; there are no hard feelings here. By the time the relationship had ended, they had both already left.

How’s your mama doing? she asks, and that is when François feels the difference, the regret.

She’s fine, he says, knowing that somewhere in between being together and breaking up he had kept things to himself that he should have been able to share, and that now it is too late.

Severine waits for him out in the street, the door closed and locked. She’s excited and she wants to get to the carnival before dark; she’s wearing her pleated skirt and lipstick. She feels young today.

François buys her a toffee apple, and one for himself, only getting halfway through before it has become too sweet and he has to drop it in the bin they pass on the way to the big top.

He watches his mama’s face as she lights up, covers her eyes, laughs at the magician and the acrobats, at the old man in the top hat and tails who looks like a relic from a lost time, a less cynical generation. François can see how most of the tricks are performed, but he keeps that to himself; besides, it is beautiful to watch, the bright colours of the performers, the bold red of the ringmaster’s cummerbund, the glow of the candles at the front of the stage. Severine is enjoying herself, and he hasn’t seen her laugh like this for years. Then she turns away from him, seems to forget that he is there at all, and starts talking to the empty seat beside her. People turn. They stare. They avoid her as they leave the big top at the end of the show. He gives her shoulders a squeeze.

It is not to be cruel that he says it; it is because he loves her, and because he is scared of what might happen if he doesn’t act now.

I made an appointment for you, for Tuesday, he says, his arm still around her shoulders. I’ll come with you, and we’ll see what the doctor thinks about the ghosts. OK?

Severine slumps under his arm, but she doesn’t pull away and, as if realising that she has spent the last half-hour speaking to a hallucination, she silently nods her consent.

The ghosts come at a price, Severine has known that for a long time.

She has always tried to tell him her truth, she thinks, but he doubts her anyway; he is a different person to her. That is OK. Perhaps it means that he will lead a different sort of life. The thought makes her happy again, optimistic about the future. She stops, suddenly, at an old-fashioned ride, a small train for children that takes you through ghost villages in the Wild West and jungles of tigers and bears.

Shall we go on an adventure, François? she says.

He smiles, a little sadly, and buys them both a ticket.

THERE IS A LINE IN
the introduction to the handbook of the British Antarctic Survey: unlocking the past, understanding the present. It goes on after that, something to do with the future and exploration, but it’s not the future that Róisín’s really concerned about. She’s not sure which part of the sweeping statement she is drawn to but when she reads it she thinks she is doing the right thing. This is what she needs. Somewhere wild and inhospitable and brutal where she can try to understand what has happened, and what is happening, and what it is she has been searching for since she was too young to know she was searching for anything.

There will be tests, they tell her. Physical, psychological, survival. There is something appealing in that. She would like to be told that she can survive.

Róisín tries to be logical, when she thinks about her life. There are some things that she knows, and she is glad that she knows them – the orbit of Halley’s comet around the sun, the tilt in the angle of the Earth’s axis, the way to move from place to place, orbiting home, never resting long enough to burn. She wants to tell herself that she doesn’t know why Liam chose to climb to the roof of his family’s farm at dawn. The days spent trawling through
that farmhouse – once where she lived, too, but not for long enough to start using the word home, for her it had remained the farm – they hadn’t helped. For days she searched through drawers and cupboards, room to room, the dusty attic space empty but for a disused water tank that made her ache with its futility. There were drawings, childish drawings, of the farm, like he had drawn when he was a little boy: stick men and cartoonish animals. There were bills too, and a second mortgage she had been unaware of, followed by an hour or so of anger that he hadn’t told her, that he had chosen to hide so much of himself and pretend that her arrival had made everything all right. And she does wonder – of course she does – if it would have been the same had she stayed.

But under all that, there is perhaps a part of her that knows we are too small to matter. Nothing happened, that’s the thing. The universe carried on, the comets kept coming – it made no difference. A life and a death made no difference. Perhaps that is why she’s frozen.

Planets are not born. What a clear-cut word that is – to imagine something is not and then, a moment later, it is. No, that is not how planets come about.

It starts with a death. A violent supernova somewhere as a star collapses under its own weight, becoming denser until it can no longer support its existence. The burst of radiation it emits can eclipse an entire galaxy, that’s how loud it screams. And as it does, all those elements of iron and silicon and oxygen and carbon, the building blocks of planets and life, are thrown out into the universe to drift and search and become molecular clouds where new stars begin to burn.

But that is not the formation of a planet, that’s just how to create the components that make planets possible. Now fast-forward.

Out of that debris, eventually, a star begins to burn, and under its gravity collects the leftover debris of the supernova; that which
was expelled, that has been floating, meaningless, through a universe composed almost entirely of empty space. And the debris comes together, forming rocks and swirling angry gas, distant ice planets and, occasionally, an ideally placed one that is not too light and not too dark. But at the heart of it, she knows, there can be a stellar black hole where once there was a star, a nothingness from which no light can escape; the remnants of a scream at the instant of death from a star that had taken in too much, and had to let it all go.

At the doctor’s she watches, passive, as the red of her blood travels, unexpectedly slowly, down the thin tube connected to a vial that will be sent away for tests. She doesn’t cringe as the needle slips into her arm, as injection after injection immunise her against diphtheria, meningitis, yellow fever, tuberculosis, hepatitis A and B. So many ways to be saved against what might hurt you, but no way to be saved from what has already happened.

The conference is held at a large red sandstone country house, arched windows and a pillared courtyard and landscaped gardens – it feels as far from Antarctica as the human race gets. It is beautiful though, the sunlight striking off the tones of rose and maroon in the bricks, the windows glinting like rock pools.