Comet Weather

by Liz Williams

  When she had finished, minus an appearance by her now ex, she went back out into the sunlight. After the hazy dimness of the club, the heat hit her like a blow. Smiling, blinking, Stella took the winding road that led past Nightside up to the little cafe at the top of the hill. It was taking her out of town, above the bay. When she reached the small patch of scrub halfway up the hill, she spun on her heel and looked back, squinting out over the gilded line of the sea. A white sail flickered across the water. The town was a distant hum. From the waste ground, a voice said, You’ll soon be home.

  It was hard to tell whether it spoke in English or Spanish, or something else. Stella turned. An olive tree stood in the middle of the patch of earth: an old tree, contorted.

  “How’d you know that?” Stella asked.

  The moon told me.

  “Moon should mind its own effing business, then.”

  The olive tree was silent.

  “Why tell me,” Stella said, “what I already know?”

  When you go home, the tree said, you should mind the man who is cold.

  Stella frowned. “Do I know him already? Or is he someone new?”

  Both. All.

  “You got a name for him?” Stella asked, but the tree was subsiding, drawing its shadow up into itself, shutting itself up into silence. “Typical,” Stella said aloud, and walked on towards the cafe.

  That night, she stood behind the mixing deck, ready to roll. She’d put a new line-up together, some tried and tested favourites, some new stuff, brought over from Manchester. A couple of new bands, Bristol-based, that she did not think the clubbers would have come across, even though the majority were Brits.

  “Are you ready, Nightside?” Stella cried. “Are you ready?”

  They were. Stella set the deck on stun, and the club roared into life.

  Two hours later, wiping sweat from her face, she ran down to the toilet. A ten minute break and Stella was in need of air. Swigging water from a plastic bottle, she inched through the door that led into the yard, into the warm darkness. The grid of lights below ended in the shadow of the sea. Stella stood for a moment in the doorway. There was a flicker of movement across the yard. Stella strained to see. A dog? But no, it was a person, getting up from their hands and knees. Christ, please don’t be bloody Liam. Stella switched on the arc light and the person, a girl, gave a little gasp.

  “Sorry,” Stella called. “Didn’t mean to make you jump. You okay?”

  “Yeah.” The girl stood, black hair fanning over her shoulders. Stella saw a thin frame, black jeans, a retro punk t-shirt with a diamante design sparkling across it. She had an indeterminate English accent; impossible, unusually, to tell origin or even class. Her face was angular and striking, cast into prominent planes by the harsh light. “I was looking for the loo and I think I dropped my lighter.”

  “Oh, bad luck. I’ll leave the light on.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The toilet’s through there. Everyone always gets the wrong door.”

  The girl nodded. “Thanks,” she said again. Stella turned, leaving her in the floodlit yard, and went back in to the melee of the club.

  Luna

  Waking into frost, Luna sighed and turned over. Sam was warm against her back, cocooned in a pod of blankets. Luna didn’t want to get up, but her bladder was insistent. She grabbed her coat, bundled it on over the clothes she was already wearing: sweater, shirt, an old vest, combats, thick woollen socks. Moth raised his long grey head as she passed, but Luna whispered reassurance and the lurcher sank back down with the sigh of the much put-upon dog.

  It shouldn’t be this cold, so early in the autumn, but Luna stepped out of the van into a white, misty world. Wisps of morning fog curled up through the spines of hawthorn and over the tips of winter wheat.

  They were somewhere in Wiltshire; white horse country, following what had once been old drove roads. His family had followed them for hundreds of years, Sam had told her, but Luna wasn’t quite sure if she believed that. Sam liked to wind her up: gorgio that she was.

  “You and your big house,” he said. “What would you know?”

  It should have sounded crueller than it did, but Sam teased, he didn’t judge. He’d been smiling when he’d said it. Then, “I’d like to see your house, mind.”

  “Maybe. One day.”

  “And your sisters.”

  She had the impression that, for Sam, her sisters had achieved a kind of mythic significance, like muses, or graces. It annoyed her. He asked a lot of questions about them: flaky Stella, superficial Serena, stick-in-the-mud Bee.

  “They’re just… you know.” She’d shrugged, sullenly.

  “They sound okay to me. Stella’s following her heart, so you said. Her music. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Serena makes clothes, doesn’t she, now? And you said she’s not all that into being the big fashion designer, just likes making pretty stuff. That’s cool. And Bee grows things and makes cider and looks after books. Nothing wrong with getting your hands in the earth if you’ve got a bit of land.” Sam in candlelight, round faced and reflective. “Don’t be so hard on them, Lune. They sound okay. And they’re your family.”

  “I suppose.” Too hard to say: but I don’t know what to be. I don’t know where I fit in. Did she fit out here, on the road? Not really here, either.

  Sam told her, when they first met, that his family were not gypsies. “Romany, you mean?” she’d said, anxious to get the word right, to not offend.

  “No, not Romany. Not travellers, either, although we do travel, obviously. Older than both. So I sometimes say gypsies because everyone knows what it means but it doesn’t tie us into the New Age lot or the Rom.”

  “How old are your people, then?” Luna had asked, intrigued.

  “I dunno really,” he’d said, with what she now recognised to be a deliberate vagueness. “Well old, anyway.”

  Luna had not met many of Sam’s family yet. That was to come. For the last year, ever since she’d got together with him at a festival – a small, local thing, a few tents, a roundhouse, on a farm on Dartmoor – they had been travelling. Not in a painted vardo, or a modern streamlined trailer, but a high-sided thing that looked as though it was made of wood, but was not. It was drawn by two hairy piebalds: saved on road tax, Sam said, not to mention the petrol.

  Now, the piebalds grazed peacefully on the starry, frosted verge. Luna pissed in the hedge, unravelling from layers of clothing, and stumbled across the clotted field back to the van. Once inside, the windows misting, she put the kettle on the little gas stove and lit it. Sam was still a huddle under blankets; he rarely woke much before ten if he wasn’t working. Moth, too, remained still, a curled grey shape in his own blanket. Luna didn’t bother to glance at the clock: a year out of normal time and she’d learned to know what stage of the sun it might be. Now, it was around eight. The sun was coming up over a ridge of ash trees in a bright smoky blur. Luna sipped strong tea and waited.

  She had not lost hope that she’d meet her mother on the road. It wasn’t likely, but it wasn’t as unlikely as her sisters pretended. Luna knew that they remembered Alys as she had been: long legs curled up under velvet skirts or in faded jeans, nestled in an old paisley beanbag, book in one hand, tea in the other, or her silver-fair, blue-eyed head bent over embroidery. Alys in the heart of Mooncote, as she had always been.

  But Luna knew that this was not true. Because when her mother had been a girl – some time between the months of modelling for Zandra Rhodes, some time between the later seventies glam rock Vogue shoots and the girl-about-town London snaps, some time even between the hippy trips to India (Alys with grinning tribesmen on some high Afghan pass) and Marrakesh – Alys had done another kind of journey.

  “The Gipsy Switch,” she’d told Luna. “That’s what it was called.”

  They had been in the long panelled attic at Mooncote, surrounded by painted roses and the high-beamed ceiling, getting Alys’ old clothes out of the trunk. Flared velvet trouser suits
and Persian cotton kurtas, still smelling of joss sticks. Long flounced skirts, lacy blouses with high Victorian necks. A crocheted sleeveless tunic which looked like a bedspread, at which both Alys and Luna had grimaced. “So arky,” Alys said, her word for out-of-date. Luna never knew whether it meant archaic, or from-the-ark. But a lot of the clothes had become magical again, the seventies back in fashion, and they were looking through the trunks partly for Serena in London, for ideas, and partly for Luna to wear, even though she was so much shorter than her mother, and not as slim either. Good thing some of the clothes were wide, Luna thought.

  “The Gipsy Switch?”

  “The route of the horse fairs.” Alys had smiled. “Land’s End to John O’Groats, round the top and down again. It took a whole summer. We slept in hedges.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “Oh,” Alys said, far-away-eyed, “A man. There was usually a man.”

  Luna knew better to ask: was he my dad? It would have been too long ago; Luna was only twenty-five now. But she wondered anyway. Alys had never told them who their fathers were, but occasionally a little sidelong hint slid out. Stella’s father: a visiting musician. Bee’s dad: someone local, apparently, and they’d spent a few months listing possible suspects. It was, of course, easy to make some genetically-educated guesses about eye colour and perhaps hair. Luna had wondered for a while if she and Bee had shared a father: shorter and stockier than the other two girls, brown-haired and amber eyed, but then Alys had said something about dates which seemed to rule that out. But Stella’s blue eyes were Alys’ own and Serena’s fine fair hair was identical to Alys’ blonde.

  “The Fallows,” Alys had said once, “never stay with a man for long.”

  “What about Grandpa, though? He was born and died here.”

  “That was a bit different. He married a woman who liked to stay put. Like Bee. And anyway, Grandpa was a man. Maybe it’s different for male Fallows.”

  But the Gipsy Switch… Luna thought of it now, in her own van, with her own man asleep under the blankets. Alys’ loss was a sharp ache in her heart, sometimes pinprick, sometimes rapier. It would be a good thing to do, retrace the Switch, follow in her mother’s footsteps. And maybe, just maybe, she’d find her, where her sisters and the police and the newspapers had failed.

  Bee

  With Sarah, one of the girls from the village, Bee cleaned Mooncote from top to bottom on the day that Nell was due in from the States. It wasn’t as though the house ever got really filthy, but Bee was determined for Nell to see it at its best: her cousin had not visited the place since her teens, and now Nell was forty. But Bee knew what the house had meant to her, for it had appeared in Nell’s novels over and again, in different guises. In the latest book, the one that had won that big literary award, it had been the homestead of the three silent brothers and their overbearing mother, a tragedy played out in shades of monochrome, delicately portrayed. Bee had read it with interest, recognising rooms and views from windows, although the house in the book had been situated in the Hudson Valley, where Nell now lived. She barely remembered the brothers’ names, but she remembered the house, and now, before Nell was due to visit, Bee sat down with the book on her knee while Sarah did some last minute dusting, and undertook a quick scan of first and last chapters so that she would have something intelligent to say about the novel. In her experience, Nell rarely talked about her work and certainly wouldn’t have expected her relatives to have read it, but that wasn’t the point. It was polite, and that meant much to Bee.

  When Sarah had gone, and her own little bit of homework had been done, she wandered through the house. Plenty of time. She was going over to Amberley for a few hours this afternoon, then on to the airport for six. Hopefully Nell’s flight would land on time, wouldn’t end up in Cardiff because of fog, or somesuch. Stop finding things to worry about, Bee told herself firmly. The staircase swept down in an arc, banisters gleaming, to the acorn-shaped newel post. Bee did not have an inner small boy, but if she had possessed one, she thought, she would have wanted to slide down those banisters. The hall smelled of polish and woodsmoke, and the chrysanthemums that fireworked from the big blue and white Chinese vase. From here, Bee could see the stone flags of the kitchen and the worn Persian rugs that covered the living room floor. But she went upstairs, onto the quiet landing. There was a sudden flurry of disappearing cat, which meant Fly, who was prone to panic at noises.

  “Oh, come on, you silly thing,” Bee said aloud. “It’s only me.”

  Fly did not reappear. Bee walked on, checking that the Welsh quilt on Nell’s bed was straight and untroubled by further cats, and that the chrysanthemums in her room had enough water. Outside, through the leaded windows, she could see into the orchard, and this made her think of Dark, and the previous night. Dark had a secret, which he was not divulging. She could always tell, and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of asking him.

  She paused before the door to Alys’ room. It dismayed her too much to think of pushing open the door, to find her mother sitting on the bed, brushing her hair into a silver shine, looking up into the mirror. “Oh, Bee. It’s you, darling.”

  She opened the door anyway. The room was empty, just as Alys had left it, although Bee had put away the clothes that had been left on the floor in the haste of Alys’ packing. It had been most unlike her mother, Bee thought, frowning, to want to go on a sudden hiking trip and the police, certainly, had seen it as suspicious. They thought, Bee knew, that Alys had staged her own disappearance, but Alys would have never done that to her daughters, although she might have done it to a man.

  But there had not been a man, not for some time.

  Bee went over to the rocking horse that stood by the window: Alys’ old toy, from childhood. She touched the white mane and the horse creaked forward, then back. The patterns on his back were a grey-dappled map of the moon: Grandpa’s little astronomical joke. A moonhorse, to ride all the way up to the sky.

  A flicker of motion in the mirror made Bee jump. She looked up, heart suddenly in mouth. “Mum?”

  There was a figure in the mirror, a reflection of someone who was not in the room. Her long full dress was a dull gold; her hair was red and laced with pearls. She carried a lump of polished jasper in one hand, a sprig of plantain in the other. “Arcturus,” Bee whispered. She knew her Behenian stars. The spirit in the mirror regarded her gravely for a moment from yellow cat-eyes, then flicked out of sight. Bee sighed, and went to open the window to let in apple-scented air.

  In the afternoon, she drove over to Amberley in a sudden rush of rain. It was a bigger house than Mooncote, and not quite as old. Bee had always liked it, regarding it, like her sisters, as a second home. Whereas Mooncote was late summer coloured, honey-stone, Amberley was wintery: a grey stoned, slate roofed house of elegant proportions, warmed with yellow lichen. Mooncote was more homely; of the two, Amberley was the debutante. A magnolia, beautiful in spring but now dropping its hard leaves, stood before the tall, square windows of the lower floor and Caro’s roses, neatly tied, decorated the borders.

  By the time Bee had come into the drive, the rain had swept down the valley towards the coast, leaving a wan light in its wake. Caro Amberley came out to meet her, a tall woman, chestnut hair turning to grey, and brown eyed.

  “Bee! I thought you were coming tomorrow.”

  “No. Today. It’s in the diary.”

  “Honestly.” Caro rolled her eyes. “Sorry, I’m sure you’re right. It’s just – I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, this week. I keep getting muddled up.”

  “That’s not like you.” Normally, Bee knew, Caro was one of those women of whom other women said, I don’t know how she manages, when you think of everything she does, she’s a miracle, she really is… Not like Alys, Caro’s best friend, dreaming vague through life.

  Caro spread her hands. “I know. I’ve been running about like a headless chicken for the last month – I’ll be glad when all this is over.” All this was showju
mping, gymkhanas, fetes: the usual manic round of summer in a horsy family. Bee gave her a sympathetic smile. “I know. Well, you can calm down for a bit. Before the jumps season starts, anyway.”

  “God! Richard’s dealing with most of that, anyway. Although some of his clients at the moment –” She pulled a face. Training horses was high pressure, Bee knew. She’d rather stick to books. “And then there’s Apple Day.”

  “Well, that’s why I’m here.”

  They had been planning it since the spring. An Apple Day, at Mooncote. It had been Caro’s idea and Bee had thought it a good one.

  “Part of this Celebrate Somerset campaign they’re doing. Jamie’s been involved in it – raising the profile of the county.”

  “A lot of people are running Wassailing events now – look how popular those are, and that’s in the middle of January. We went to an Apple Day last year over near Somerton. It was fun. Lots of cider.”

  “Anyway,” Caro said now. “Come on in.”

  They went straight up to the turret room, a creaking oak spiral leading into the tall pale interior, with its leaded windows looking out across the vale. Bee had always envied the Amberleys this room, a Victorian folly, but now it was, for the time being, her office and she was grateful for that. It was not, however, tidy. Boxes of books littered the floor, stacked on top of one another. Caro repeated her earlier grimace.

  “They seem to have bred,” Bee said, looking at the boxes.

  “They have bred. Julian brought more over this morning in the back of his car and he couldn’t see out of the back window.”

  Bee eyed her askance. “I hardly dare ask. Are there more to come?”

  Caro nodded. “’Fraid so. He says they’ve cleared out about three quarters of it.”

  “So does Ward want any of this?”

  “I don’t know. He’s still in New York and when I emailed him I got a reply that said, basically, don’t bother me now.”