The Comet Seekers

by Helen Sedgwick

  Severine smiles, shakes her head. It is her granny that she misses.

  You can’t miss someone you never knew, she says.

  Her mama thinks that, actually, you can; she has watched her own mother go mad with longing to speak to members of her family that she never knew.

  Where did he go?

  Across Europe first, she says, then . . . Africa, South America.

  You didn’t think about going with him?

  Her mama smiles then, and shakes her head.

  Because you needed to be with Granny, after Antoine . . .?

  Because I had a home, and I had you, and I’d married a man who was too restless to ever stay in one place.

  What was he like?

  He was gentle, but distracted. And he was always whistling.

  Her mama’s expression changes, as if another forgotten memory has been rekindled, and it makes her face softer.

  I always thought I wanted to travel, she says, it was part of why I loved him in the first place.

  So what changed?

  Life, she says, but Severine knows from the look in her eye that she means a new life; she is talking about what happens when you have a child. And what happens when you lose one.

  It’s colder now, she says. Time to head in?

  Severine nods, allows herself to stop questioning.

  There are fewer ghosts in Severine’s room that night. The night before she was overwhelmed with how much family was around her; tonight she feels overwhelmed by the loss of them.

  Some of you have left already? she asks anxiously. You’ll come back, won’t you?

  With the next comet, says a ghost who hasn’t spoken before.

  Which one are you? asks Severine, but she regrets the question as a shiver of fear passes through her body. She knows who this must be.

  If you stay here, in Bayeux, says Brigitte, holding out her hand.

  Severine recoils. The skin on Brigitte’s arm is weeping, red raw and peeling back in places to expose shrivelled muscle and blackened bone.

  Brigitte stands where she is, stands taller, her arm still held out towards Severine, who finds her back is pressed hard against the wall. Brigitte’s burns are spreading and her hair – a minute ago wild dark curls down to her waist – has caught alight and Brigitte’s head, her face, is turning from a vicious red to the black of ash as her eyes still stare, open and pleading.

  Severine clasps her arms around her belly, turns away – she can’t help it, can’t stand to watch this horror, and she has to protect her child.

  Please, no, she says. Leave us alone . . .

  But as she rushes for the doorway she sees the tall woman in the golden dress, a red shawl wrapped around her head and neck, a gentle smile on her face.

  Hello, Severine. It’s all right now.

  Her accent is strange, foreign but not foreign; an inflection to her words that Severine has never heard before.

  I am sorry, she says. I didn’t realise what I was creating.

  Severine looks around the room, but Brigitte has gone and everything is calm again.

  I don’t understand.

  That’s why I’m here, tonight.

  Severine wishes she could kiss her cheek to welcome her, but instead she gestures towards the old chest by the window and with that Ælfgifu sits down and starts, softly, again, to tell her story.

  Severine dreams that night of hundreds, no, thousands of ghosts clamouring to be heard, breaking from their disorderly queue and talking all at once. You’re like children, she says, waving her hands around her head as she’d seen her granny do so many times, trying to swat the voices away like insects; you’re just like children.

  She wakes to silence in the night. Stands at her window for a moment, but it is not enough. She creeps down the stairs, avoiding the step that creaks, holds her breath as she passes her mother’s room and pulls a coat over her nightdress. She turns the key in the back door as quietly as she is able to; she doesn’t want anyone to follow her out here.

  In the garden, she searches the sky for the comet. She couldn’t see it out of her window, or from the back porch. Her binoculars show her layer upon layer of stars; more layers appear the longer she looks, every dark space fills with stars but Halley’s comet is nowhere to be seen. At 4.30 a.m. the sky begins to lighten and the furthest layers of stars sink into the rising blue. Standing on the grass out by Great-Grandpa Paul-François’s old shed she gives up the search; lets the binoculars fall to the ground with a quiet thud. The comet is gone, and besides, her waters have broken.

  1066

  Halley’s Comet

  They walk into the village like it’s carnival day, that’s how it feels; like it’s fun and wholesome and will never lead to arrows of fire and lungs pierced with splinters of wood. Ælfgifu stands with the others and cheers for the local boys who are going to fight, and she waves her flowers because that is what they do, at carnival time.

  That evening she goes to collect water from the stream; their well is sending up mud and they say that the flying star means bad luck, that her family shouldn’t trust anything when the stars come shooting through the clouds. What nonsense, she told Grandpa once, but still, she avoids the well and there – by the stream, she sees the boys from the procession, not off fighting yet, but playing in the water. They are like children, she thinks.

  The night is warm but fresh and their clothes are piled by the stream’s bank; one of them turns, raises a hand halfway then stops. Shaking her dark hair out over her shoulders she walks up to the stream, pretending not to watch him. He’s emerged from under the water now, the one with black hair and a wave half formed, glancing at her when he thinks she’s not looking. She kneels by the bank, and without meaning to she’s slipping her feet into the stream and he’s walking towards her. In the moonlight his skin shimmers. She slips off her dress. She invites him, and he accepts.

  She can hear the sounds of the battle, her sisters and brothers hear it too; like a shared nightmare lingering after they’ve woken. No way to protect themselves so they sit outside on the grass and wait for whatever will follow. The screams – shapeless howls of pain that can’t be comprehended. They threw flowers, she thinks, just yesterday, daffodils of hope that were more like the petals thrown into a grave. Even the young ones understand what is happening; no words yet to speak it but she can see the fear in their eyes.

  The worst is when it gets quieter; wails of pain replaced by silence of death. From over the hill they appear, with their unfamiliar uniforms and flags; these are not their soldiers come to protect them. They are the other side, here to destroy. At the edge of the village a house is set on fire and the smell tells her it is not only wattle and daub that is burning; the animals, she thinks, and the thought turns to hope that it is only animals. The men shout in a language she doesn’t know. Children scream. She gathers her brothers and sisters, tells them to stand behind her. Overhead the comet blazes.

  She doesn’t know why they do it. The arrows pass her outstretched arms and find their target in her brother’s chest, in the face of her eldest sister who still has a flower in her hair. They set fire to their home. Her youngest sister runs to the next house, into the blade of a man who has blood streaming from his arm. He falls with her. Ælfgifu turns, looks them in the eye, holds her last sister behind her. They have killed everyone else. She’s pushed to the ground. When her sister falls beside her, blood leaks from the gash in her neck. She doesn’t know why they do it. They leave her alive.

  At the sound of his voice Ælfgifu opens her eyes.

  Please, he says, there is not much time.

  She is holding her sister in her arms, blood dried now on her face and neck, her tunic dyed brown with it. She turns away from his eyes that had smiled at her through splashing water. She wants to die here.

  He carries her to the stream, away from the village to where the smell is less thick. He follows the shooting star because there has to be some help and it is all that is left. He saw it,
the bright flying star, on the battlefield, watched it from the ground where he lay, pierced, bleeding. And now here he is. He doesn’t understand it. And there it is, the flying star, still in the sky.

  They stumble through the night, following the flight of the shooting star; when he falls she takes over, supports him in her arms so they can keep going even though she doesn’t know where they are going to. As the sun rises they see a building of stone high on the hill, an impossible shadow. They don’t know if it’s real or a death-dream but they start to climb. She trips, crawls up the steep hillside, feet bleeding against the stones. There are doors of thick wood; she beats on them with a fist and falls to her knees.

  My child.

  She looks up. A woman is standing above her; the doors are open.

  She tries to stand, collapses into the woman’s arms.

  What is your name? she asks.

  She doesn’t know if her voice will work; she thinks she is dead.

  Ælfgifu, she says, letting the shapes form on her lips and hoping the sound will follow. And—

  She turns to the soldier boy but he is gone. Something in her changes. It is a loss too far and she will spend the next thirteen years trying to bring him back; trying to protect their child. She has lost too much family and she knows she cannot stand to lose any more and now – and now she allows herself to be carried by a stranger into the safety of ancient stone and shade.

  1994

  Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9

  FRANÇOIS SQUIRMS ON HIS SEAT as he looks out of the aeroplane window, trying to turn far enough that he could press himself through the glass and into the clouds.

  Look, Mama, he gasps, Mama, do you see?

  They are over the sea; there is land rising up from the water.

  Most of the Earth is water, his mama says, and below the water is magma. The land on top, it’s just floating, like the croutons in your soup.

  François laughs at the image – Mama is so silly – but he doesn’t take his eyes from the view. As they descend through the clouds there is a moment when the world through his window is striped; golden sky, silver cloud, blue sea far below.

  Look! he cries again. Mama, look!

  And he turns, flattens his head back against his seat so she can see through the window, and she leans over him and presses her nose to the glass, and he laughs and kicks his legs against the seat in front, oblivious to the complaints of the man sitting there.

  It’s not easy, taking a child on an aeroplane. Severine is learning the hard way, just like she has with everything else. Holidays have been by car so far, sometimes by train – though when he was younger she was too exhausted to take him anywhere. But they have seen Paris and Nice and stood at the foothills of the Alps; they travelled whenever she could take the time away from the épicerie, though every time they went away she wished her granny had been there to help. It’s not enough, not for her and not for what she wants for him, but she has tried to show him some of the world, at least the country beyond Bayeux. She has tried not to mention the ghosts that she saw in the days before he was born, because she wants him to have a normal childhood. Besides, she’s not even sure they were real now, though she still dreams of their voices.

  And so now, for her first plane journey in ten years, they are going to Scotland; to feel the cold and the rain and the beauty and the music, to climb the seven hills and to start seeing the rest of the world. Perhaps she will even have a moment or two to herself; to feel like herself.

  Every time she thinks that she tries to unthink it, but cannot.

  As they land, he squeals with joy rather than pain – if his ears hurt like the other children on the plane he certainly doesn’t mention it. It’s like he was born for this, Severine thinks to herself; they are part of the larger world. And she opens her hands wide, imagines whole universes contained between her palms.

  She hasn’t seen the ghosts for eight years – and for eight years now she has been the parent, the one in charge. It seems like a lifetime since she felt looked after; since she was allowed to be the child.

  François is older now though, she thinks, more able to take care of himself. Besides, he is not afraid of travel – he seems to love it.

  Maybe they can go and see all that world, after all.

  He’s never asked about his papa, and that’s OK by her; she’s had enough questions from her mother to last her a lifetime.

  Actually, he’s a nice enough man. He says he likes receiving the photos she sends, says to let him know if there’s ever anything they need.

  He works on a boat that travels the Atlantic.

  They could have been good friends (the love thing was never going to work out; they soon realised it wasn’t love that drew them together) and a part of her wanted to go with him, but another part of her chose to stay and now she doesn’t really know why. Sometimes, though, she imagines a vast ocean, the brightness of so much water, the wide-open expanse of it.

  Can I run on this bit?

  François jumps with impatience; there is a moving strip of floor and he wants to fly along it, to race faster than he can on grass.

  His mama checks behind her – they were the last to get off the plane; they are the last on the people carrier that will take them to the terminal.

  OK, she says, run like the wind.

  She is supposed to say be careful but that’s not the kind of mother she wants to be.

  His arms fly out as he runs. When he gets to the end he waits for his mama to do the same, come on! he shouts, but she doesn’t run – she stands tall and waves at him as the flat escalator carries her forwards and something in him is disappointed.

  On their first night, François wakes with a nightmare. He was on a dark beach, there were waves crashing against the rocks; there was cold and there was fear. The salt water filled his mouth when he tried to shout out, he gasped and choked, he had to save his mama . . . He opens his eyes; pulls the covers over his head and grips his toy tiger as if someone were trying to steal it from him.

  In the bed next to his, Severine is awake too. This always happens when she leaves home: a knot in her belly, something between guilt and loneliness that haunts her in the night. She wishes the ghosts would appear now; even after all these years she misses her granny. She never really said goodbye. One day she thought she was surrounded by so much family, and then they were all gone, leaving just her and her child, a baby then, to wonder how the house could feel so empty when there was so much noise. She too pulls the covers over her head and tries not to wake her son, tells herself this is crazy, that it probably never happened at all, that she spent two days hallucinating after her granny died.

  And then, of course, she knows that they have arrived.

  Granny?

  She pulls the covers away from her face to see the shadow of a woman standing by the door. This is not like it was the last time. Where is the rush of voices, the laughter, the playful bickering of people who have loved one another for decades, for centuries?

  This is silence.

  Severine tries to beckon Brigitte closer, but she won’t come.

  She thinks about getting out of bed herself, but something makes her stay.

  They look at one another across the room, neither making a move.

  There is a sound though.

  What are you trying to say?

  Please . . .

  Severine stares. In the shadows Brigitte’s face is obscured, her clothes are long and loose; her skin looks dark, but that might just be the lack of light. Severine looks down at her own skin, at her arms. She is visible in the moonlight coming in through the curtains. Brigitte must be hidden by more than shadow – she is fading into the air.

  Come forward, she wants to say; are you here alone?

  But François is sleeping and Severine does not say the words out loud and the ghost remains where she is, barely visible. Watching.

  Severine rolls onto her side; from here she can see François’s bed and she tells herself
that he is what’s real – the world is Severine and François and their holiday in Scotland, with wide oceans still to explore. It is her choice to make. She closes her eyes.

  When she opens her eyes again Brigitte is gone, and she tries to deny the disappointment she feels.

  François wakes early; he is in a new country that he has never seen before and he wants to go and explore.

  Scottish breakfast? his mama asks with a smile.

  He wrinkles up his nose to say no, pulls the curtains wide to look out at Edinburgh, where there are castles and bagpipes and looming hills of rock.

  Half an hour later they are on the Royal Mile, standing before a stall of fresh fruit and flowers. François chooses the clementines for breakfast, holding each in his hand before making his selection, testing for their ripeness the way he’s seen his mama do it, looking up to her with a grin. She buys herself a single tulip and threads it through the buttonhole of her coat; rests her hand on his head but he pulls away, already eager to see more.

  Severine’s not sure why she turned her back on Brigitte in the middle of the night. She never wanted to ignore the ghosts before – she spent most of her life willing them to appear. But before they had wanted to speak; they had been happy to see her. Now, their appearance seemed to say something else.

  No, not their appearance. Brigitte’s appearance.

  Where is her granny?

  As they walk up the cobbled streets, listen to the commentary about the castle – with François asking so many questions – take photos from between the cannons and eat ice cream despite the chill in the air, she catches herself glancing over her shoulder, looking into the darkened alleyways, behind closed blinds and along the shadows of the old town, wondering if Brigitte will appear again.

  What are you looking for?

  François pulls his mama away from a dark alleyway of steps that smells like a toilet.