admire him. Some day he would have a beautiful house and a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a life as dead dead dead as that empty crab husk lying claws-up on the gravel beach.
Gaby flicked the dead crab into the fire. Its chitinous shell squeaked and hissed, its legs curled up and withered in flame.
Marky imagined that thrice-weekly fumbles with her bra strap and a condom dropped out of the car window could hold her back from London and Network Journalism. He was a fool. It never had been a man that would keep her here. She had made him an excuse. It was this place, this Point she had known all her life, in all its seasons and climates. It was the thick walls of the Watchhouse on its promontory, watching over land and sea and the lives those walls contained. It was the golden light of rare autumn days; it was the silver frost on the dead brown bracken on January mornings; it was the shudder of the little headland beneath the storm waves when the wind seemed to push at the house like a pair of huge hands and got inside through crannies and vents to blow the carpet up like a heavy green sea. It was the little beaches on the seaward sides of the low islets known only to those who have paddled through the shallow tidal lagoons. It was being rooted in the land. It was the fear that her strength came from the physical presence of place and house and people and separated from them she would become pale and transparent. An un-person.
‘There are two, and only two, ultimate fears,’ her father had told her one September storm-night with the wind bowing in the window glass. ‘The annihilation of solitude or the annihilation of the crowd. We lose our identities if we are alone with no one to reflect us back on ourselves and tell us we exist, we are worth something, or we lose our identities if we are in a mass of others; anonymous, corporate, overwhelmed by the babble.’
Gaby was old enough to understand that hers was the fear of the annihilation of the crowd. In solitude, in this place among the elements, she existed. To go would be to join the mass. That was the nature of her dilemma.
‘Give me a sign,’ she said. Insects whirred. She flicked them away from her face and long, straight mahogany hair. So many stars. The dark-adapted eye can see four thousand stars on a clear night. A constellation crossed heaven: an aircraft, following the line of the coast in to the City Airport.
It was not a sign.
A cluster of lights moved against the far side of the lough. A night-ferry, decks aglow.
It was not a sign either.
Saturn and its moons were still under the horizon, beyond the hills of Scotland. That was the thing that most exemplified Marky. Mysteries that would inspire anyone with a functioning sense of wonder were happening out there. To Marky they were too far away, too small to be seen with the naked eye: irrelevant. How many times had she told him he had no soul? The biggest question occupying him was whether Gaby would let him get his hand down the front of her jeans. She felt pity for people who were never touched by things greater than themselves.
‘Come on, dogs.’ They appeared out of the darkness, eager for something to be happening at last. ‘We’re going back.’
She poured yellow sand over the embers of her fire and walked back to the house beneath the brilliant stars. The dogs went streaking out before her, catching the scent of home.
In the living room that looked out over the harbour, Reb was curled comfortably on the sofa, half-watching the Sunday night sports results on the television while she stitched at her tapestry. It was a monumental work: a map of the zodiac eight feet long. Cats purred, nested in the blue and gold folds of Capricorn and Aries. She had been at it six months, it would take another six to complete at her rate of a sign per month. Gaby admired her youngest sister’s dedication to long, exacting tasks. In many ways, Rebecca was the best of them.
‘Two nil,’ Reb said without looking up from the needlepoint. ‘They lost.’
‘Shit,’ said Gaby McAslan.
‘Marky left a message on the machine.’
‘Double shit. I’m making coffee. You want?’
‘Hannah’s in the kitchen tacklin’ with one of her wee Christian boyfriends.’
‘Thrice shit. Dad?’
‘Upstairs, trying to get a look at what’s going on out at Saturn.’
‘Anything about it?’
‘Some boffins on the news just now with some new theory or something. I’d be more bothered about two nil.’
‘Season’s young yet.’
‘Gab.’
She stopped, hand on the door-frame where all their heights had been scratched indelibly with a steel ruler and pair of dividers.
‘You should have better than Marky. Dump him before he dumps you.’
Strange, wise child. Four years separated them, but Gaby was more kin to Reb than Hannah, the middle sister who had spent most of her life on a long and solitary search for belonging. Playgroup, Gym Club, Brownies, Guides, school choirs, sports teams, and now a multitude of little Christian groups that kept her running from meeting to meeting. Sound theology, Gaby thought. If they stay too long in one place they might start having ideas about sex.
What would the small-group leaders have to say about the mystery out at Iapetus? Something to do with the end of the world, probably.
The Watchhouse was the best kind of house in which to grow up. It had enough windings and twinings and crannyings for privacy and enough openings to the seascapes outside to draw you out when you felt you were curling in on yourself. These qualities met in the Weather Room. Tradition in the village was that each generation of occupants add something permanent to the Watchhouse. The previous resident had built the new dining room that smelled of beeswaxed wood panelling and had views on its three sides of harbour, headland and open sea. The current resident had put his contribution directly on top of it. It was a kind of conservatory-cum-observatory- cum-study-cum-wizard’s den. Glass walls gave unparalleled panoramas of the coastline on both sides of the lough. You felt like you were standing on the bridge of a stone ship with waves breaking on your rocky bows. In autumn the storm spray would drench the windows and the wind would howl under the eaves and wrench at the chimney pots and satellite dish and then you were Vanderdecken flying forever with his crew of the damned into the eye of the eternal hurricane.
‘Two nil, Gab.’
‘I know. Reb told me.’
Her father sucked his teeth in mock regret, shook his head. At least tonight he was not playing those terrible punk records of his from the 1970s. ‘Golden years,’ he would insist. Every generation reckons the music of the time when it gains social mobility to be the golden years.
‘Give me a hand with this.’
They dragged the telescope on its stand to the open window. It was a good telescope; the best you could buy for the money. That had always been her father’s way, to buy good, to buy expensive, but never to buy indiscriminately. It was one piece of parental wisdom his daughters had learned. A still-unsolved domestic mystery was how he always had vastly more money than his many little occupations – a spot of wardenship, a bit of writing, a little boat chartering – could account for.
‘Marky left a message.’
Gaby hoped he could see her grimace in the dark room. The only light was from the monitors.
‘How did he look?’
‘Rudolph Valentino plays Jilted Nobility. Here, click on this, would you?’
The lower screen displayed co-ordinates for the seventeenth moon of Saturn. The upper showed a videostill of what remained of Iapetus’s brightside.
‘Is that from Hubble?’
Her father nodded.
‘Those must be costing you a penny or two.’
‘They’re handing them out free. Loss-leader to get new subscribers to the Astronomy Net. It’s not every day a moon goes black.’
Gaby moved the mouse. The screen flashed at her. The telescope moved on its computer-controlled
