Page 16 of See the Stars

Alice opened her eyes full of regrets. Why hadn’t she humoured her grandfather last night?

It wasn’t his fault he was getting confused, and she’d been so impatient.

She’d apologise today, and maybe go through his logs before she headed back to Edinburgh that afternoon.

Her brother poked his head around the door.

‘Come help,’ he said. ‘Something’s wrong with Grandpa. ’

Alice jumped out of bed and hurried after him, a sense of dread rising in her chest.

Her grandpa was taking saucepans out of the kitchen cupboard, giving each a shake, and then flinging it onto the kitchen floor. Mess was everywhere. Sheila was standing by the kitchen table, watching in horror. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘You have to stop.’

‘My logbook!’ said Grandpa. ‘Where is it?’

‘You’re always losing it, love,’ said Sheila gently. ‘It will turn up.’

‘I’ll help you look,’ said Alice. ‘It will be in the shed. That’s where we had it last night.’

‘You went to the shed with him?’ exclaimed her mother. ‘I wish you’d stop encouraging this rubbish!’ She bent down to pick up a saucepan. ‘See what happens.’

‘This isn’t Alice’s fault,’ said Eddy. He looked at his grandfather. ‘Calm down,’ he said.

‘I was one night away from getting the last readings on the comet!’ said her grandpa. ‘I will not calm down. All that work. Gone.’ He pulled out a tray of cutlery and emptied it on the floor. The clattering made them all jump, including him. He picked up a rolling pin and held it up.

‘Not this again,’ exclaimed Sheila in alarm.

‘Again?’ asked Alice.

Eddy stepped forward. ‘Come on, Grandpa,’ he said. ‘It’s not in the kitchen. I’ll help you search.’

‘It’s here somewhere.’

‘I think I saw something in your room,’ said Eddy. ‘Come on, give me that.’ He took the rolling pin and quickly handed it to Alice.

‘I’ll look in the shed,’ said Alice, passing the rolling pin to her mother like a baton. ‘Then maybe I can check the bins, in case it’s gone in there by mistake.’

‘No, you stay here with Mum,’ said Eddy, shepherding her grandpa out of the kitchen. Alice opened her mouth to object, then saw her mother’s face. ‘Maybe get her a brandy,’ added Eddy as he left the room.

Sheila sat down and put her head in her hands. ‘Sometimes he’s fine,’ she said. ‘And other days this.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice. ‘He thought he’d seen a comet, and I—’

‘Oh my God, don’t you start,’ said Sheila. She sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But in a way, I’m glad you’ve seen him like this. I can’t deal with him on my own any more. I think it’s time. He needs to be somewhere he can get proper care.’

‘A nursing home? He’ll hate it.’

‘Are you going to take him to university with you?’

‘I . . . I . . . ’

Sheila stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t fair of me. I’ll get this kitchen cleared up. We can talk about what’s next when we aren’t surrounded by saucepans.’

‘I thought I’d find you here.’ Alice came into the geology lab the next day, relieved to be back at university after the stressful Christmas break. ‘How was the takeaway for one?’

‘Sabotaged,’ replied Zelda. ‘My mum insisted I come home. She didn’t buy the boyfriend story for one minute.

Here, hold this.’ She shoved a small hammer into Alice’s hand while she brushed at a piece of what Alice now recognised as volcanic rock.

‘Apparently she couldn’t bear the thought of me being apart from family at Christmas.

Although why I can’t do what I’d prefer on what is not even the accurate birthday of someone I’ve never met who died thousands of years ago is beyond me. ’

‘Sometimes it’s nice to be home at Christmas,’ said Alice, though it hadn’t really been true for her. ‘With your family.’

‘Not with my family,’ said Zelda. ‘My mum likes the idea of a daughter, but I’m a constant source of irritation. The colour of my hair. My piercings. She wants me to fit in so much, and I just don’t.’

Alice looked at her. ‘That’s because you’re better than most people.’

Zelda smiled. ‘You think that because you’re a bit different too. Not the same kind of special as me, I can see that. But you get me in a way that most people just wouldn’t.’

Alice felt like reaching out to give her a hug. Zelda leaned back as if she could see it coming and changed the subject.

‘My fidgeting drives her crazy too, she’s obsessed with wanting me to sit still.’

‘You do tap your fingers on tables a lot,’ said Alice.

‘So what?’ said Zelda. ‘They’re my fingers. It’s not like I’m tapping them on her nose.’

Alice laughed. ‘Mothers,’ she said. She put down the hammer and fiddled with a microscope slide in front of her. ‘Mine is going to put Grandpa in a home,’ she said.

‘John?’ Zelda hadn’t met Alice’s grandpa, but she’d heard all about him. ‘He’ll hate that.’ She reached out and took the slide away from Alice, holding it carefully by the edges, and put it back in the case. ‘No fingerprints on the slide,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent ages preparing that.’

‘Sorry,’ said Alice. She sat down on one of the stools. ‘The worst thing is he seemed so OK at first. Happy, thinking he’d found a comet.’

‘Had he?’

‘No,’ said Alice. She couldn’t bring herself to tell even Zelda that it had been an aeroplane. She was embarrassed for him.

‘If he was fine, why does your mum want rid of him?’

‘Well, I thought he was fine,’ said Alice. ‘Until he lost his logbook . . . ’ She thought of the kitchen, pots and pans everywhere. ‘There was no way Mum could look after him like that.’

‘Remember when I lost that rare specimen of wiluite rock from the Vilyui basin in the second week of term?’

Alice smiled. ‘I couldn’t forget.’

‘It makes people act illogically, losing things,’ said Zelda. ‘Because it is illogical. You had something, then all of a sudden you don’t. What about the laws of conservation of energy?’

‘But still . . . ’ said Alice. ‘It was bad. He was bad.’

‘Then maybe a retirement home is the best place for him,’ said Zelda. ‘You can still visit, take him out to see the stars.’

‘I suppose,’ said Alice. Her grandfather had been too confused for her to apologise.

And he was always bad on the phone, when he couldn’t see her.

Maybe she could go and visit him when he was settled.

Not next weekend, she had to study. And the following one was the freshers’ ball. Maybe next month . . .

‘I’ll need that hammer now, please,’ said Zelda. She took it and began chipping away at the rock.

Alice brushed some dust off the table.

‘I needed that dust,’ said Zelda. ‘That was actually what I was going to study.’

‘Shit, sorry,’ said Alice, trying to get the debris from her hands back onto the table. ‘I can’t get used to you geologists and your dust.’

‘It’s the key to the universe,’ said Zelda. She paused. ‘While we’re discussing feelings and things,’ she added, ‘my cat died.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Alice, watching Zelda bring the hammer down onto the rock. She knew better than to try to hug her friend, so she waited for her to be ready to say more instead.

‘That cat hated me,’ said Zelda. ‘It scratched me all the time. But I loved it.’

‘Is that where the scars are from?’ asked Alice.

‘What?’

‘There.’ She pointed to a series of small scratch marks poking out from the top of Zelda’s bracelets.

‘Oh,’ said Zelda, pulling at the bracelets. ‘Yes,’ she added. ‘Of course.’ She went back to hammering.

‘Of course,’ repeated Alice. But her eyes were on Zelda’s wrist.

‘Let’s sit there.’ Alice pointed to two free seats in the departmental seminar. As undergraduates, they didn’t have to attend, but both girls were fascinated by the subject.

‘I’d rather be at the front,’ said Zelda. ‘I can hear better.’

Alice smiled. ‘You said you could hear better at the back yesterday,’ she said. ‘When Dr Simpson was presenting.’

‘Dr Simpson is better at projecting her voice,’ said Zelda, though Alice could see the colour rising in her cheeks. ‘Professor Boxley is more softly spoken.’

‘This isn’t even one of your electives.’

‘I’m interested, OK?’ said Zelda. ‘It’s about exoplanets. You know what exoplanets are made from? Rocks.’

Alice smiled. ‘Or gas. But far be it from me to question your motives,’ she said, settling back into her chair as Boxley entered the room and began the seminar.

Alice concentrated on the numbers on the board that Boxley was scribbling up.

She looked at the formulae, visualising the orbital paths they represented.

She liked to do this, closing her eyes and imagining how the planets would circulate, drawn by gravity into a circular path around their host star.

She stopped herself. One of the orbits didn’t work. The path made no sense.

A mistake in the formula. It had to be.

She nudged Zelda, who was assiduously taking notes. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stack up. You couldn’t have a planet with that path.’

Zelda looked up and frowned at the board. ‘Surely not,’ she said.

‘A reading like that would be much more likely to be from stellar activity,’ said Alice.

‘Actually, I see what you mean,’ said Zelda, her voice a little too loud. ‘If you—’

‘I hope this is something you’d like to share with the entire lecture hall?’ interrupted Boxley, addressing Zelda as if she were a schoolchild. ‘Not some gossip about who kissed who at the union last night?’ There was a murmur of embarrassed laughter.

‘Alice found a mistake in your calculations,’ said Zelda.

‘What?’ said Boxley.

‘What?’ hissed Alice. ‘Don’t point it out in front of everyone!’

‘You did,’ said Zelda. She looked back to Boxley. ‘Alice is a genius,’ she announced to the room.

‘Oh God,’ said Alice, sinking lower in her chair.

‘And I do think it would be something that everyone would like to hear,’ Zelda added for good measure.

‘Really?’ Boxley looked at Alice, then did a mock bow. ‘Please, young lady, be my guest. Perhaps you’d like to take my place on the stage?’

‘No thanks,’ said Alice. She bit her lip and stayed in her seat. ‘I’m probably wrong, but I just thought I saw an error in the formula. Sir.’

‘The reviewers of my paper in Nature magazine had no issue with it,’ he said. ‘But of course, I’m open-minded,’ he added, clearly not meaning it. ‘If a first-year student wishes to make corrections.’ He held out the pen. ‘Come on. Up you get.’

Alice didn’t want to go on stage. But she couldn’t see a way to avoid it.

Getting to her feet, she awkwardly went to stand next to Boxley. A sea of faces was looking at her. Some people looked amused and a few of the more empathetic students seemed embarrassed for her.

‘It’s just that this path doesn’t quite work,’ she began, her voice sounding odd in her head as she tried not to look at all the people listening.

‘I can see why the data makes it seem as though it would, but it’s much more likely to be stellar activity or a debris disc.

Look at this number here . . . ’ She made some adjustments, then, unwilling to linger on stage, handed the pen to Boxley and hurried back to her seat.

‘Wouldn’t that mean that the numbers in your book are off too, sir?’ asked Callum.

‘I must have written them up incorrectly,’ said Boxley quickly. ‘The ones in my book are certainly correct.’ He looked back at Alice. ‘Thank you for your keen eye,’ he said, giving her a grudging nod. ‘Your name is . . . ’

‘Alice,’ she replied. ‘Alice Thorington.’

‘Well, Miss Thorington, thank you.’ He looked her up and down, causing Alice to squirm in her chair. ‘It’s good for me to be kept on my toes. And I do like a challenge.’

‘I don’t know what you’re worried about,’ said Zelda, a little out of breath as they climbed Arthur’s Seat, the ancient volcanic hill just outside Edinburgh. ‘Professor Boxley said thank you.’

‘It was the way he said it,’ said Alice. ‘And what did he mean about liking a challenge?’

‘Just that you challenged him, and he liked it,’ said Zelda. ‘That’s academic rigour.’

‘I’m not sure that’s what he meant,’ said Alice. ‘He was looking at me weirdly.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Zelda.

‘Though I suppose I’m not the best judge of these things.

’ She stopped and bent down. ‘Look at that glorious igneous rock,’ she said with a grin.

‘Now here is something I’m a good judge of.

’ She held up a lump of dark grey stone.

‘Did you know it was on Arthur’s Seat that the theories of rock formation were turned on their head in the eighteenth century? ’

‘You might have mentioned it once or twice,’ said Alice, her mind still on Boxley.

‘I looked up the calculations in his book,’ she said.

‘He did make the same mistake there. I think it could have implications for whether the orbital planets he theorised even exist. This could undermine his most well-known research.’

‘You should tell him,’ said Zelda. ‘I’m sure he’ll want to make a correction.’ She held up the rock to the light as they walked. ‘Don’t you just love volcanoes?’

‘Mountains that also spew out poisonous gas, ash and molten lava?’ laughed Alice. ‘Not particularly.’

‘I love them,’ said Zelda. ‘All that energy from under the earth, finally coming out in a glorious release, changing the shape of the land. They don’t have to bottle things up.

They explode whenever they want, let it all go.

’ She looked at the rock again. ‘And what they leave behind is magnificent.’

‘Isn’t what they leave death and devastation?’

‘I suppose you could see it that way,’ said Zelda. ‘But volcanoes have changed the face of the planet. Just look at this.’ She passed the rock to Alice.

‘It’s just a jagged grey stone,’ said Alice, turning it over in her hands. ‘It doesn’t look very special to me.’

‘Not special?’ exclaimed Zelda. ‘It’s made of basalt.’

‘So?’

‘Basalt accounts for ninety per cent of all the earth’s volcanic rock. And it’s been found in the moon’s craters. It makes up the Sea of Tranquillity. It probably lines the surface of much of Venus and Mars. It’s flung all over our solar systems and likely beyond. There is nothing more special.’

‘If you say so,’ said Alice, her mind elsewhere as she looked at the view. Gorse bushes punctuating the long grass just beneath them, then Edinburgh, the sandstone city sprawled out, the castle perched on another volcano in the distance. ‘I want to carry on studying here,’ she said. ‘I love it.’

‘We both do,’ said Zelda.

‘And I want to study under Boxley. His research fields are so fascinating.’

‘Fine.’

‘I don’t want to antagonise him,’ said Alice. ‘So I’m going to keep my mouth shut about that mistake.’

‘That seems unnecessary,’ said Zelda. ‘I’m sure that—’

‘And so are you.’ Alice cut her off. ‘Promise?’

‘I think you’re being ridiculous,’ said Zelda. ‘But yes. I promise.’