The Eternal Disappointment of the Much Anticipated Event
by Victoria Mohun.
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For months Stacey Howard had lived in anticipation of the event; the gigantic burning sphere three times the size of the sun and ten times as bright, with a tail that stretched the length of the sky, blazing its way across the heavens. Halley’s Comet; her mother had bought her magazines, she’d borrowed books from the library, she’d watched programs on TV. Her mind was full of facts; she knew that Mark Twain had been born, and had died, in years in which the comet appeared – in his own words ‘two unaccountable freaks’ pre-ordained to enter and exit this world together. She knew that some people had thought that the comet was a harbinger of the apocalypse. She knew that it had, in the past, been a small thing. This time it would be big. The comet would put things in perspective; it would wash away pain and hurt. It would light up the sky, it would make people reassess their lives and help them to find new meaning. The comet was a sort of saviour; a mark in time. It would diminish all other marks. It would be the blackest line; in comparison, everything else would fade to grey.
She bought the binoculars herself. She saved for weeks, squirreling away pocket money, until she finally had sufficient funds to purchase the damned things. When she held them up to her eyes she saw a world enlarged. What had been far away was now close. She focused her magnified gaze on ordinary household objects; the cat, Tinker, as he washed himself, the dying pot plant that sat on the coffee table in the lounge, the static of the TV screen. If only her vision could stay that way forever, everything larger than life, an eternal distortion of perspective. Everything would be easier. Everything would be full.
There had been, of late, an emptiness in the house. Overnight, her father had vanished. She woke up one morning and he was gone. Typically, when she awoke, he was in the bathroom, singing to himself as he showered, but on this particular morning, the bathroom was silent. There was no song. She washed her face at the bathroom sink, wiped the sleep from her eyes, and proceeded downstairs to the kitchen where she found her mother sitting at the table with its red and white chequered cloth, crying over a hard-boiled egg and a cup of coffee. She didn’t look up when Stacey entered, but kept her head down, as if trying to pretend that she didn’t exist or was invisible. Stacey knew better than to ask the question that was on her lips – Where’s Dad? Instead, she poured herself a glass of juice and sat down opposite her mother. The silence spoke volumes. The silence was larger than sound. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad after all. Perhaps he’d just popped out for a bit, to fetch a newspaper or some flowers for his wife, or he’d got up early and gone to work before anybody else was awake. Perhaps her mother was crying about something else. But he wasn’t there when she got home from school, and he wasn’t there the next morning or the next evening either and soon enough Stacey was forced to face the facts, icy cold and rock hard though they were. He wouldn’t be there at all, any more. He wouldn’t be there ever. Like the Cheshire Cat he had disappeared; unlike that cat he left no smile behind - just a note that she found scrunched up in one corner of her mother’s room, when she was in there looking for a lipstick to borrow (she was just beginning to experiment with make-up).
Couldn’t do it anymore.
Felt like a fraud.
Gone elsewhere.
She’d overheard her mother on the phone, though Stacey was unsure whom it was that her Mum was talking to.
He’s gone off with his secretary. Christ, did he have to turn into such a cliché? If he was going to abandon us, he could’ve at least chosen a unique way to go – run off with a lap dancer or something. It’s humiliating. Everybody giving me pitying looks and asking if I’m okay. And no, I haven’t heard from him since he left. Still gotta put a brave face on it – there’s Stacey to think of.
Her mother didn’t know she was being overheard; Stacey was sitting on the stairs, with her knees pulled up to her chest and her jersey stretched over her knees. A brave face. It was true – since the egg-sobbing incident there had been no more tears in the kitchen, just the same smile that bordered on a grimace, the same perky words, the same relentless hearty good cheer, the unfunny jokes that Stacey felt compelled to laugh at. It wasn’t her mother’s real face of course; it was a comic mask that covered the tragic one. All of this Halley’s comet would make better. All of this the comet would fix.
Three weeks after her father had made good his escape, the wild animals commenced their relentless march through the living room. Nobody but Stacey’s mother could see them, but as she herself pointed out, that didn’t mean they weren’t really there. The boars came first, shuffling by in pairs, as if they were on their way to the arc. As if a flood was on its way. They were watching Eastenders when the first of them arrived and, as the final dramatic drum roll that signified the program’s finale rattled out, Stacey’s Mum pointed at nothingness and said “Pigs! Wild pigs! Six of the buggers!” then rose to her feet and pottered off into the kitchen, wondering aloud if she’d left out something that might attract such unusual guests. In the days that followed, other creatures appeared. Camels, tigers, bears – small black bears and larger, fiercer, grizzlies with dark greedy eyes and glistening white fangs. Ferocious things that could do untold damage with a single swipe. Nobody could work it out; Stacey’s Mum couldn’t understand what it was that was attracting the animals, or where they had come from, or where they were going, and Stacey couldn’t understand why her mother was seeing things that nobody else could see.
“Maybe you just need a rest Mum,” Stacey said, but her mother shook her head.
Stopping would make it worse, she said. Like a bicycle, forward motion was all that kept her upright. She worked as a lone parent advisor at Reed, helping solo Mums and Dads to get back to work. She liked to help. It made her feel useful, made her feel that her life wasn’t a complete and utter waste of time and that she herself wasn’t a complete and utter waste of space. But every night she cried, useless, endless tears that served no purpose. Tears that took her nowhere. She didn’t sob in front of her daughter; she went to her room to do it. Stacey heard her through the wall – the wailing wall, as she’d come to think of it. And still the beasts from the other place, marching through the living room, some of them (said Stacey’s mother) performing little dance steps, waltzes and foxtrots and whatnot. As if they were hoping to keep an audience entertained.
There was no-one to discuss these problems with. Brothers or sisters would have made it better. Siblings would have made it okay – they could’ve laughed at their mother behind her back, poked fun, lain in opposite beds at night and whispered reassuring words to each other. Reached out, maybe, and held hands, depending on how great the distance between the two beds was. Instead of somebody to hold hands with, there was the comet. It was inescapable, like fate. It was evidence that something or somebody higher was in control. It was proof that all was unfolding according to some plan, and part of that plan quite obviously included the animals that her mother was now seeing and the bottomless grief that she was suffering, so viewed that way, pictured in that light, there was nothing to worry about. At school, the previous term, they’d studied Troilus and Cressida.
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form
Office and custom, all in line of order
The comet fitted right in with all of that. It was part of the natural order of things. Who in their right mind would argue with events that were divinely decreed?
And it all might have continued in this fashion; the animals, the sobbing, the stiff upper lip that Stacey kept, along with her resignation, if it had not been for the phone call from her father that came six weeks after his departure and that threatened to shatter, like a brick hurled through a windowpane, the routine that her life had fallen into. It was Stacey who answered the phone. Her father’s voice sounded forced, as if somebody was holding a gun to his head and telling him what to say.
“I was hoping to take you out this Sunday,” he said. “I thought we could go to the lake.”
The lake had been their special place. It was more of a pond, really, located bang smack in the centre of their local common, but Stacey liked to think of it as a lake, as to do so made her feel closer to nature, connected to the earth, more than just an alienated little unit plodding her way through an indifferent world. In the winter the lake froze over and you could hire skates from a man and strap them to your feet and go spinning out across the slippery, treacherous surface. In the summer there was abundant birdlife – ducks, geese, the odd swan. It was winter now; everything would be frozen. Everything would be cold white ice. She considered turning him down, to teach him a lesson for abandoning her and her mother, but how could she say no to her own father? He was her Dad, the only one she had.
“Sure,” she said. “The lake sounds cool.”
“Don’t tell your mother. She might start hounding me for, you know, stuff. She might start asking me to return.”
“To be honest, Dad, I think she’s beyond caring. I don’t think she’s terribly well.”
“What do you mean not well?”
“I’ll tell you all about it on Sunday.”
“Meet me at the lake at about nine. Then we can spend most of the day together. Maybe go to the zoo after, if you fancy.”
Animals, more animals.
“K see ya then.”
She put down the phone without waiting for him to say goodbye.
There had been another lake also, one in the process of being made – it would become a dam that would supply the power station the government was planning. She’d stayed nearby as a kid. They’d cleared out an entire town to make way for it; moved all the inhabitants elsewhere. They were planning to drown the town. She and her parents had stayed in a hotel with a sign outside that read ‘Soon to be on the banks of beautiful Lake Milton’. Trees were planted on either side of the sign. The hotel’s owner seemed to feel that her secured location was something of a coup – she’d got the land cheap, nobody else had the foresight to realise that it would be worth a fortune one day. But the project never went ahead. Something happened – bad planning, financial or otherwise and so the woman had been left there, with a piece of what should have been prime real estate but which turned out to be a slice of land nobody else wanted or would ever want. One more loser in life’s vicious lottery. It was an image that Stacey had been unable to forget, it had stuck in her mind as if burnt there with a branding iron; the woman waiting and waiting for the water to rise. The water never rising.
Sunday arrived. It was the day that the comet was scheduled to appear. Scheduled – it was the right word; the comet had been slotted into the calendar of heavenly events, and now, like a girl pulling back the window of an advent calendar she would bear witness to it, in all its fabulous greatness. It would be present during the day, but only visible by night. On the morning that it was due, she awoke feeling like she’d felt as a kid, on Christmas Day. Snow had fallen overnight. When she pulled back the curtains she saw a thick blanket of it, broken by the footprints of animals; black marks on a blank page. Foxes, probably. Crows. Her mother was still in bed; that was becoming a habit, an unsavoury one, wallowing under the duvet for most of the morning when the weekend rolled around, as if she had nothing to get out of bed for. Which maybe she thought she hadn’t.
Stacey made herself a cup of coffee and poured it, still steaming, into a plastic cup so she could take it with her, then dressed in her warmest woollen trousers, a jersey, a long overcoat, a hat and mittens, a stripy scarf that had been a present from her Dad for her last birthday (a way of pleasing him, of showing him that she still wanted to maintain some connection). The streets were almost completely deserted; there was nobody around. It was too early for most people. The steam from the coffee mingled with the steam coming out of her mouth. She shuffled her feet as she walked, so that when she turned to look back over her shoulder it seemed that the thing that had made its way down this pavement was more like something robotic than something human. The gates to the park were locked; she found a place where the spikes had fallen from the top of the fence, sculled the remainder of her coffee, which scalded her oesophagus as it went down, and then climbed over, catching her coat as she leapt down to the other side. Pulling herself free, she continued on her way, heading for the centre of the park, for the place where she would sit and wait.
There was a bench beside the lake; it was covered in leaves and snow. She scraped away the snow with a mittened fist and plonked herself down. It was five to ten. She was right on time; the old boy would be here soon, and then they would be able to discuss things – his departure, her mother’s crumbling mental state, school. Then it was ten o’clock, and then ten past. The hands of her wristwatch continued their relentless march. She tried not to look; it seemed so cruel, the way that time just kept on, the way the wheels, the cogs, kept turning, even when you wanted them to stop. By half past ten she’d resigned herself to the fact that her father would not be appearing, that he’d done a no show, set her up just to knock her down, done it on purpose, to give himself some weird kind of kick, to gain some control over her, to play her like a piano maestro sat at the keyboard of her emotions. She would not give him the power, she would take it back. She wouldn’t let him near her – she would build a wall, she would invent a persona, an interface and that would be as close as he ever got. Next time he called she would hang up. All the same, despite the feigned indifference, the internal shrug that nobody was witnessing, she felt the letdown as something almost physical – a slump, a weight falling on her slender shoulders. She walked around the lake a couple of times and then headed back home.
Her mother was in the living room watching Songs of Praise. The songs sounded strange as if they were coming up from underwater, as if the people singing them were mer-people - part-fish. A choir with scales and tails.
“Christ, Stace,” said her mother, looking over. “Why the long face? What’s happened?”
“Nothing.”
“You know what night it is tonight, don’t you? Comet night. So, cheer up. Isn’t this what you’ve been looking forward to for so long?”
“Yes and no.”
“What do you mean love? What do you mean yes and no?”
“I dunno, it just doesn’t seem…”
“Seem what?”
“Worthwhile anymore. ”
What could you say to that? What could you say to a daughter who’d suddenly decided that the thing she’d most anticipated was no longer worth witnessing? Nothing. And nothing was what her mother said, just settled back down on the sofa, her eyes once more on the TV, as riveted as if Songs of Praise was a celestial, rather than a terrestrial, broadcast.
Later on that day her father called.
“Hello love, shame we missed each other this morning.”
She tried to hang up, but couldn’t quite bring herself to put down the receiver. He had his excuse to hand.
“I couldn’t get into the park,” he said. “The gates were locked. I tried to call your mobile but it just rang and rang. Didn’t you take it with you?”
“No, I forgot it.”
“So let’s meet next Sunday then.”
“No,” she said. “No I don’t think so Dad, sorry. I’m meeting someone.”
“Meeting someone? Who?”
“Just a friend. No-one you know Dad – a new friend from school. We’ve already agreed to do something together on that day.”
“Oh right. The week after then?”
“No sorry. Busy then too.”
“Stace! Stop being so unreasonable.”
“I’m not being unreasonable! It’s just, y’know…I waited there for you today and you didn’t show up.”
“I told you, the gates were locked. You know that yourself.”
“Whatever. I’ll see ya round.”
He was telling the truth. Her mobile lay on the bed. She had several missed calls.
Oh well, she thought, fuck it. If he’d wanted to see me that badly he would’ve climbed the fence like I did. It was just an excuse, saying that the gates were locked. If I agree again to meet up with him, he’s only going to let me down. I can’t be his puppet. I won’t let him pull the strings.
Night fell. Her mother was still on the sofa; she’d been there all day, she hadn’t even moved to fix herself a cup of tea, or a bowl of soup for her lunch, or any of the other basic, fundamental things that she typically did on a Sunday such as mop the kitchen floor or clean the bathroom. No doubt she was too engrossed with the creatures that she was seeing; as if the illusions that she conjured were more real to her than this world. Stacey walked out into the back garden and held the binoculars up to her eyes. It was better outside; outside was always preferable to in. It was a bright, clear night; crystalline. The stars hung in the sky like cold white diamonds. There it was, high in the heavens. Not even the size of a marble; more like the head of a pin, but too small, even, for angels to dance on. A feeble thing, pale, barely glowing. Where was its blazing tail? It was barely on fire. It was the very definition of disappointment. It looked nothing like the pictures in the books, nothing like the object that she had imagined. It was as if the comet, the actual comet, had decided to pull a sickie and sent along its understudy to take its place. Even the stars, the everyday stars, upstaged it.
Back inside the house, she hung up her binoculars; looped their thin leather strap over the hat rack in the hall.
“They’ve stopped,” said her mother. “They just suddenly ceased to arrive.”
“Oh dear, that’s a shame.”
She was tired of it now, the madness that didn’t quite ring true, but struck instead, a hollow chord. She traipsed up the stairs to her room. This is what there was; this was all there was. Objects that should appear but don’t; things that are smaller, fainter, paler, feebler than you imagine them to be; tasks that are begun but never finished. Events that are never on time.
©2006 By Victoria Mohun