The Comet Seekers

by Helen Sedgwick

  FRANÇOIS POURS HIMSELF ANOTHER GLASS of red, stolen from the base supply. He is ashamed, a bit, but not enough to stop drinking it. He is on his second bottle already when he sees Róisín in the kitchen, filling a flask and a mug with what seems to be boiling water. They haven’t spoken since her goodbye last night, and in a way he wants to leave it like that. She has chosen: not him. That’s all he needs to know, and besides, she didn’t really listen. He has listened to her; that is what he thinks as he silently lets her step out of the room. He has listened to her and she hasn’t listened to him. It seems like the story of his life.

  He doesn’t want to blame anyone, it’s not in his nature, but thoughts are crowding into his mind now he is alone, with no company and so much time to think. It is becoming too familiar, this feeling of being pushed away.

  But that is not fair. His mama didn’t choose to be ill, she never wanted this, she’s only dealing with it in the best way she knows how. Although there were times – when he was a child, when he would be woken in the night to hear her talking; when she would run through the house laughing with family but not notice him sitting there, on the top stair, sometimes, for hours. Would life have been different, he wonders, would it have been easier for her, if she had not had a son on her own? All these stories of ghosts and staying in Bayeux and longing to travel; why did she not go?

  He stands by the window in the supply room, looking out – he wishes she had seen this. Been beside him to witness the ice cloud rising from an avalanche of white on snow on white. Watched the sun rise in a sky so wide, so all-encompassing, the Earth felt as small as the tip of a needle.

  All those years ago, he thinks, lying back on his bed, had she stayed in Bayeux for him? When she was supposed to be out in the world following her dreams, was she stuck at home with a baby? She never went out dancing, staying instead in the kitchen, pretending to love dancing with him; never fell in love, never explored the worlds of ice or sand or rainforest. And then, that night, when she woke him before dawn, when she stood in the airport next to a boy not understanding why his mama had tears streaming down her face. Why didn’t she leave? He should have dragged her onto a plane, insisted that he wanted adventure not Bayeux, and certainly not ghosts.

  It wasn’t about you, François.

  François sits up, head spinning from too much drink and the room spinning with him.

  The battle was taking place inside her, Brigitte says. It doesn’t mean she loved you any less.

  François turns away, takes another gulp of wine, and lies back down.

  Brigitte sits down on the end of his bed.

  You don’t mind if I sit here a while, do you? Then she smiles to herself. Well, of course not, you have no idea that I’m here at all.

  Róisín is greeted by a blast of wind so cold it makes her eyes sting. She’s not sure what she’s doing out here, she only knows that she needs to be alone; perhaps she needs to push herself to the edge of what her body can handle and scream into the wild emptiness of Antarctica. She smiles at the memory, that first impression she had of François staring up at her, the wild wonder in his eyes, but too soon it is replaced by an image of Liam, eyes down, drawing the farm when she’d wanted him to admire the sky.

  When she was sleeping next to François, Liam had forced his way into her dreams, into her consciousness, into her room to stand by the window and pull her back to what she wanted to leave behind. And now, having calmly packed her survival bag, having let her toes cross the threshold, peering from one world into the next, as she steps out into the blistering cold and starts to walk away from the safety of the base into wild howling evening of ice and wind, where is Liam? Not here.

  Perhaps he wants her to find an isolation more complete than the one in the research base, where it will be just her and him. Perhaps that was what he always wanted.

  She’s walking fast now, away from the base, away from François and his second bottle of wine – she could see he was battling his own ghosts tonight. She was surprised to learn he had them too, but she wasn’t able to help either of them. Although, when she told him to stay asleep, perhaps she should have asked him to wake up. But it is done. He will be OK, he doesn’t know what it is like to be left behind with such spiteful finality.

  Perhaps it was not spiteful. Perhaps Liam didn’t think about her at all.

  Her steps have turned into a run inland, towards the mountains, away from the coast and the promise of a world still revolving. She has said one goodbye, now it is time for another. Sometimes you have to leave people behind.

  When François wakes from strange dreams, the room is empty, as it should be, but the feeling is so strong he can’t deny it. He was not really alone before, but he knows that he is now. He knows, somehow, that a world away from here his mother has died.

  He is surprised by the conviction of it – it is not logical, but undeniable nonetheless. He’s been waiting for news even though the news couldn’t reach him. He doesn’t know what else he can do so he drinks, and cries, and lets his heart break.

  But later that night, dizzy from the red wine, he finds a cup of cocoa on his shelf, half hidden behind his bobble hat. It has gone cold, developed a skin of milk that is marbled, patchy; less perfect than the snow. It is undrinkable.

  He holds the cup between his hands, closes his eyes. Imagines his mama’s ghost is approaching.

  Róisín’s running slows; her strength should be conserved if she’s going to make it to the mountains.

  Her backpack is heavy this time – not like when she went out with Liam, jumped the river that sloshed over rocks and old tree branches, the water soaking her feet through her trainers – and it makes her visible. It is a splash of red in the white wilderness. She is not trying to hide or to die; that is not what she wants to experience in Antarctica, miles from any other human being, on the night the comet will be at its brightest. But she needs something; wants to leave the past behind and wake up, alone, as untouched as the perfect fresh snow, and she knows that sometimes, if you hold your breath and look up at a comet for long enough, the sky can change.

  She marks her way by the stars, though they disappear behind clouds soon enough and she has to trust her senses in a world that has no direction, that has lost its sense of forwards and back.

  The cliffs help. Their shadow is still visible, and so she heads towards the mountain range with its tunnels of caves excavated by ice. She hasn’t been there before but she’s read about these mountains; she felt drawn to them, the descriptions reminding her of other caves from around the world, prehistoric homes and hidden lakes that lie undiscovered for millennia. She loves the idea of what water and ice can create when left alone, to flow, to freeze or thaw.

  She gets into a rhythm. One foot after the next is all she needs to do, and she will get there.

  There is something liberating about making a decision and walking straight towards it.

  Cave is the wrong word for what she finds; it is a scoop into the ice, a satin-smooth concave structure, like a cupped palm, near the base of the mountain. Looking up, she can see the comet, bright and determined, and the clouds moving in from the coast. She undoes her backpack and takes out a notebook, like the one she used to carry as a child. Her sketch of the night sky is amateur at best, made worse by the difficulty of drawing in padded gloves, but this is not for publication, this is for something entirely different. She marks on the constellations she can see, flattening the dome to show the swirl of the Milky Way at the horizon, and through the upturned horseshoe of stars she marks the comet, drawn like a bigger star with a triangular tail sweeping out behind. She has seen a drawing of a comet like that before, but can’t remember where. If she had colours, she would shade it in gold and red, but she only has black and white. When her eyes turn back to the sky, though, that’s how she sees it – bright gold, like a child’s drawing of a shooting star.

  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 fros
ted 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.