The Comet Seekers

by Helen Sedgwick

  2017

  Comet Giacobini

  FRANÇOIS RUNS THROUGH THE SNOW as if every muscle in his body is screaming to be set free. He doesn’t stop and he does not slow; he is at the furthest end of the world and his heart is clenched in a grip of guilt and loss and fleeting wonder. How could he do it, he asks himself, how could he leave? He should be at home, with Severine. His mama is dying. The others are watching him as if he’s on the edge – a last-minute addition to their carefully selected team who did the shorter, intensive training and is not pacing himself, who seems to need to win. But it is not winning that he needs, it is a speed that will silence the voice in his head, that will let him live with what he has left behind. The air freezes in his lungs as he gasps, as he pushes himself harder through a vast land of silver and red.

  He is sorry that they are running laps of the base, he would rather leave the red behind him and head for the endless white of the mountains in the distance, the desperate bite of the coast where the icebergs splinter in the current. But instead he goes round and round, faster and faster.

  The nights have begun in Antarctica, but they are not deep; they remain in hazy colours of wine, falling for a few minutes a day like a shadow before the sun bursts out again, forcing him to see. And he remembers Severine, eyes wide, looking into the night, at constellations and galaxies and comets searing through the solar system; dancing in the kitchen while he cooked, and laughing at jokes he could not hear and dreaming of the world.

  He feels untethered. Every year of his life has been spent orbiting Bayeux up until now. His skin is burning under his clothes; the cold is stabbing in his stomach, in his chest. His eyes sting. He runs. Others join him. They are a group now, racing around this strange caterpillar base, a woman is trying to keep up with him, but every time she pulls close he speeds up. His breath gasps in his ears.

  In a glance sideways he sees a flash of black hair and he stumbles, catches himself before he falls, runs behind her for a moment, knowing he has seen her before, in a different world – he can’t breathe – in a different life. He gets back into his rhythm, increases his pace. Some of the team, standing outside the base, are cheering now on the final lap of a marathon and he feels like his legs are going to break but he keeps going, he won’t stop pushing himself until he breaks through something, until he can stand to look at the woman from the tapestry, from the window, from the hilltop in Scotland, from his home; he stumbles again, keeps going, and Severine wanted this, he did not abandon her, he is living for her, that is what she wanted; she is here.

  At the end of the final lap he collapses onto his knees, then down to his chest. The nausea that has been with him for weeks is masked, briefly, by the freeze of snow on his hands, on his neck. He wants to cry, but does not. He rolls over, slowly, letting the snow melt into his hair, letting the glare of the sun and the endless sky burn his face, and he breathes. And he breathes.

  He is going to be OK.

  He lets himself cry out; it turns into a laugh.

  He scoops some snow up in his hands, holds it to his hot face.

  When he opens his eyes, the woman is looking down at him.

  Maybe he is seeing things too, he thinks, maybe he has started to see ghosts like his mama and her granny before her. Then the group leader walks by and nods at her. She is not a ghost, then, this woman with wild black hair and loss in her eyes.

  He must look ridiculous, he thinks, covered in snow, in sweat, lying on the ground in the midday sun on an ice shelf. In her eyes, there is something; perhaps she will smile, tell him her name. But she just keeps looking.

  You should try it, he says; meaning letting go, pushing yourself to the edge of what your body can handle and screaming into the wild emptiness of Antarctica.

  Maybe next time, Róisín says, meaning she wants to let go, she wants to learn how to push herself to the edge of what her body can handle and scream into the wild.

  He says his name is François.

  She smiles, then, in a way that makes his nausea return and his heart pound.

  Róisín stands beside him while he cooks, and helps by slicing onions and passing him tins of tomatoes. She tells him about her research, about the Earth and the sky and how she came to move from one to the other.

  It is amazing, out there, she says, looking up to the sky as if the ceiling of their base did not exist, as if she could see other planets in other galaxies. But if you look out for too long . . .

  His smile is warm but he doesn’t press her with questions – he knows there are things he can’t talk about yet. There is something about Róisín, though, that makes him believe he might be able to. Perhaps, he thinks, she is someone who knows how to listen.

  They go outside together to watch the sky, at sunset. Usually the others leave them alone, although they’ve never asked them to. They take one of the survival tents out and crawl inside, letting torchlight fill the space. They don’t always talk, although one evening she describes the village she is from. He imagines a farm with no animals or crops, a barn with a painted For Sale sign on the wall; the emptiness of a place that used to be full of life. He tells her about his mama and his grand-mère teaching him to cook; how he used to have a special stepladder in the kitchen, a pale blue plastic one for children, to climb on so he could reach ingredients before he was able to say their names.

  He pulls his bobble hat on over his windproof Antarctic one. He is not here to forget, perhaps he is here to remember who he always was. Róisín looks at it almost as if she’s seen it before, smiling as she describes the places she has been to, the people she has met, from city to city as she explored, discovered, lived, until something changed and led her to a small red survival tent in the remotest continent on Earth. He asks her if she believes in ghosts. She says she believes it is possible for people to be haunted. He tells her that his mama is dying, and describes the family she is surrounded by.

  Sometimes, two people and a wild expanse of snow and ice and rock can be a whole world.

  It was the last thing in the world that Róisín was expecting; to find herself looking for him, wanting to be near him in the kitchen, wanting to look at the sky together. She has not wanted to spend time with anyone for so long. He is young, of course, but someone to be close to. That can be as beautiful as the stars.

  She reaches out her hand, when he talks about his mama, wanting to offer compassion but not knowing what the right thing is to say.

  I . . .

  She wonders if she should talk about Liam, but doesn’t want to change the subject to herself. So many years, she thinks, feeling her own grief haven’t helped her know what to say to others.

  Tell me something? he says. Something you wouldn’t normally talk about.

  Someone I knew. Someone I loved, he died.

  What happened?

  The wind outside is howling. It is getting late; the darkness is deeper now than it was before and nights are getting longer.

  People say we are made of stardust. Ever heard that? It’s not true though, not quite. All those stars we see, almost all, they’re dead already. They have exploded, rejected everything that they were, and the raw components, the elements they were made of, that is where life comes from.

  He likes the way she talks about the stars, sometimes, as if they are people.

  So we’re made from star ash?

  She smiles; it is good to be able to smile. His eyes make him seem older than he is.

  She begins to see him differently.

  They hear on the radio that a group of sea lions have been spotted off the coast; Zach and Róisín go to investigate, and François stays behind.

  He can’t sleep in the night – in the darkness of his room he imagines people where there are none, reaches out to hold his mama’s hand but the hospital bed cracks and breaks as if made of old parchment. On the other side he sees them, not ghosts but characters of dyed thread and stained linen, who refuse to answer his questions, whose features slip and blur into people
he loves and people he has never known.

  How can I know you? he says. How can this be true?

  He wakes, alone. Switches on a light.

  He uses the lab computer to look for pictures of the Bayeux Tapestry, of Ælfgifu and her proud stare and the cleric. He thinks he must have remembered it wrong; confused the image – what he thinks he sees, sometimes, in the dead of night, doesn’t make any sense. It cannot make any sense.

  And he is right, in the cold of the day, as the snow’s depth thickens and he shakes off the thoughts that crowd his head – Ælfgifu has a red shawl over her hair, an expression that seems familiar, but that is all. Her features are indistinct. She doesn’t look exactly like Róisín. His mind is playing tricks on him.

  He goes to the kitchen, starts preparing dinner. He thinks it is Zach coming in, but when he turns, he sees Róisín, and his heart is in his throat.

  She steps towards him and two halves of his life collide. He did recognise her, he knew it the first time he saw her, the day of the marathon – which was not the first time he saw her. He had seen her when he was a child. He moves towards her without even meaning to do it.

  His lips taste of sweet wine and the past and home and Róisín welcomes it; she needs it. It has been too long since she allowed herself to feel like this. But his kiss is different to Liam’s; she is so grateful that his kiss is different to Liam’s. She closes her eyes against the tears and puts her hand on the small of his back.

  When he pulls away she’s left spinning, but he keeps her grounded, his eyes with their wisdom beyond his years and his hair like a boy’s and his words.

  Welcome home, he says.

  And she puts her head on his shoulder, and they stand together listening to the distant chatter from the games room and the voices from their old lives.

  They sleep with layers of clothes on; it is the only way out here, where even indoors you can see the frosty stream of your own breath. But when they wake at 4 a.m. with thunder growling like a bass drum, their fingers find their way between the layers of clothes. It is childlike, it is wondrous, to peel back a jumper, a T-shirt below that, a thermal vest, to find a warm patch of skin just north of a hip, and the need to taste something so rare.

  As the nights get longer he can’t stop touching her skin, as if trying to remind himself that she is real, flesh and bone, not some distant memory of a woman he once saw as a child. She laughs when he gets to her stomach; sorry, I didn’t mean to tickle.

  No – her hands are on his head – no, don’t stop, it’s good.

  They compare cities, discover with laughter, and something more, how Róisín has lived in Bayeux, how François went to Scotland as a boy.

  And Toronto, she says, when were you in Toronto? And New York?

  He shakes his head.

  I’ve never been.

  Good, she laughs, I can show you round North America then.

  I’d prefer to go to Africa I think, he says. Not so easy, perhaps, but we can discover it together.

  It has been a long time, for Róisín, a long time since it didn’t even matter; longer still since it did. François has hands like a chef. They are not unlike the hands of a farmer. Hands that work, that burn, that create. She saw Liam deliver a calf once, and he was not gentle – that would be the wrong word – it was urgent, adept, loving. He didn’t hesitate, though he had the scars to prove it. François has a scar on his thumb, too. He says his knife slipped once; it is silver now, thin, almost elegant. Can a scar be beautiful? It can, she thinks.

  When François thinks of Hélène it feels different now. She said, once, why are you so far away? What is it you are thinking of, chéri? Róisín doesn’t use words like that, hasn’t used terms of endearment, although when she pulled off his hat he found a playfulness that was short-lived but intended only for him.

  Róisín feels like she is moving through the world in reverse; rewinding time to when she was young and hopeful and desperate to grow up. She tastes his skin, wondering if he’ll notice, perhaps hoping he won’t, as she lets her tongue-tip touch the curve where his neck meets his shoulder.

  As François falls asleep, he hears voices, or thinks he does; it could be the chatter of birds or a party in the snow or a clamouring of ghosts who are lost and trying to find their way home.

  Severine, he thinks, picturing his mama not as she was when he left, but when he was still a child; imagining his mama before she was a mother.

  Are these the voices you heard, Severine?

  Are these the whispers you chose to live with?

  But even in his sleep he knows that all you can hear out here is the silence of snow and ice dust and rock.

  Then, in the night, Róisín wakes with a start and she sees him, Liam, and she rises and begins to talk. You were the one who left, she says, so why are you here?

  I didn’t leave you, he says. You are being naive.

  No, you are.

  Perhaps we should argue.

  Good, she says; for a long time I’ve needed to shout.

  But his arm is already around her waist and she can smell the farm on him, spring grass and the musty hay from the barn, and outside there is a comet that looks like a shooting star, even though she knows it’s not.

  She will not ask why.

  Don’t fucking kiss me, she says, don’t you dare.

  And he smiles and says, there appears to be a man in your bed.

  She turns, sees François asleep, the blond mess of his hair on her pillow.

  I suppose you think this is funny, she says, but there is no one there to hear her.

  She gets up before he wakes, not wanting a morning scene in bed to be the way she tells him that she’s not ready for this yet. She came here looking for isolation in the Antarctic winter – for the sky, not the people.

  When she returns to her room, half an hour later, the bed is made and the room is empty. She sits down on the duvet and looks at the door.

  SEVERINE IS GLAD SHE IS home. They don’t leave her alone for a minute, not now, and she wouldn’t want them to; they keep her company always, chatter and laugh just as she imagined they would when she was a little girl and she couldn’t hear them.

  I’m ready, she tells her granny.

  It’s not time yet.

  Who decides when it is time?

  You always were quarrelsome.

  Severine smiles; I was delightful.

  That too.

  They are all young now, all her family – young and full of life. They don’t need to tell their stories any more; they are like giddy teenagers, wanting to play, wanting to gently tease.

  Setting the table, why did you keep doing that? Brigitte asks, her gown a rich emerald now and her hair scooped up into a ponytail that makes her look like a modern girl in fancy dress.

  I just wanted you to know that you were welcome.

  Brigitte reaches for an apple and throws it up in the air, smiles as it floats there.

  Severine watches it, not held but not falling either, hovering between two worlds and spinning, slowly, like a globe caught in the breeze. Then Brigitte shimmers away and the apple falls to the ground. Severine isn’t sure why Brigitte doesn’t stay for more than a minute at a time, though Brigitte knows what she’s doing – she has a plan.

  She hasn’t told the others, but she’s saving what little energy she has left to go and see François at the end. She knows it will be hard, and that she won’t have long, that far from Bayeux, but their time is coming to an end anyway. And she knows she can’t make him see her but that doesn’t mean she can’t hope. He is the last member of this branch of the family but there might be others, her descendants, that he could find one day, if she could persuade him to look; living their lives without ghosts, perhaps, or with them, somewhere, across the sea.

  What’s it like? Severine asks.

  Being dead? Like running and spinning and flying as fast as the wind can carry you, laughs Antoine, holding her mother’s hands and spinning her round until he
r feet fly off the ground.

  I played that game at school.

  So did we, cries her mama, mid-flight. This and handstands and stuck-in-the-mud.

  So you were never here to see me? Severine asks Antoine, though she’s not waiting for an answer and he’s not listening. Obviously it was her mother that he was waiting for. He wanted his sister back.

  I stayed here for you, says her granny. And, my darling, you are wonderful.

  Even Great-Great-Grandma Bélanger is younger now, though she’s shaking her head at the nonsense of the other ghosts; Henri and the sisters in lace dresses are waving to her, and her sons too, in their uniform – listen to this, Mama! They grin as they tell her jokes from centuries ago.

  Ælfgifu stands in the corner, less giddy than the rest, with her daughter on one side and her soldier boy on the other; the love that started it all. Severine doesn’t think she’s ever felt that type of love, but it’s OK – she is full to bursting with other kinds.

  You can decide when it is time, she says quietly to Severine, and the others all keep playing and pretend not to hear her.

  FRANÇOIS FEELS THE LOSS OF Róisín, though he tries not to show it, and in quiet moments he accepts that she has her own ghosts to contend with. He tries to be friendly. He makes her hot cocoa sometimes, when she is out in the snow, leaves cups cooling by her bed so she’ll know that she doesn’t have to be out there alone. But he is a little angry, too. Her grief makes her selfish.

  Every day he tries to call Severine, via satellite, but she does not answer. He tries to get in touch with the hospital too, but they say she is home – that she is being checked on. She is comfortable. His Antarctic layers prickle with static and itch at his skin. So instead he writes to her, as he promised. He writes to her about the snow and mountains, about the furious noise of the coastline, the peace of the night; he writes to her about the centuries that have been captured within the ice.