Natural History by Neil Cross Page A

look at you.’
    He nodded, too scared to speak.
    â€˜There’s a chimp sanctuary. In Devon.’
    He looked at her.
    â€˜It’s miles from anywhere. It’s on the edge of Exmoor. It’s peaceful. Next to the ocean. You could walk, dive, cycle. Burn some of it off.’
    All that pent-up energy, she meant.
    â€˜Come on,’ she said. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’

5
    Late in the evening of 24 March 1996, Jo and Patrick stood at the far end of their wild garden in North Devon, knee-deep in grass and early dandelions, and she showed him Hyakutake—the first of that year’s two great comets. By now, it was among the brightest objects in the sky.
    Emission of diatomic carbon made it shine blue-green, but Patrick’s colour vision was poor and, when he looked up—following­ her pointing finger and her instructions—he could see only another bright, white dot. But he cried out, ‘I see it!’
    Behind the comet followed a haze of tail which, she told him, stretched across thirty-five degrees of night sky.
    â€˜Thirty-five degrees,’ he said, whistling.
    There was a silence. They watched the sky.
    Then, without looking at him, Jo reached out and took Patrick’s hand. She held on for a second. Her hand was thin and long and dry. She squeezed once, hard, and let go.
    Patrick realized that soon he would lose his daughter. She would grow up and away and love someone else.
    The dark stadium of sky curved overhead. He could still feel the warmth of her hand. This was their last moment, he thought—watching the great comet in the back garden.
    He wished he could see the blue-green of it.
    As he blinked, a white line arced across his field of vision.
    He said, ‘Did you see that?’
    â€˜I saw it.’
    â€˜Shooting star,’ said Patrick and, next to him, Jo nodded.
    â€˜Shooting star,’ she said.
    The next day, she was allowed to stay late and observe the comet through Mr Nately’s telescope.
    Hyakutake would be moving very rapidly—about the diameter of a full moon every half-hour. That was fast enough for its motion to be detected by the patient but unassisted human eye.
    In the dark kitchen, woolly hat on his head, Nately said, ‘Shall we?’
    Jo pulled on her own hat, knitted wool, striped like a bee; it made her hair stick out like a clown’s. She followed Mr Nately into the garden, the universe wheeling overhead, spattered like milk. It was cold enough to see her breath.
    Mr Nately unlocked the heavy brass padlock on his shed and stepped inside. Then there was a loud noise, amplified by the silence, as he rolled back the roll-off roof. Jo thought of a cafeteria opening for business, rolling up its vandalized metal shutters.
    Inside the shed was a reflecting telescope, wide as a barrel—a Dobsonian mount that Mr Nately had made himself, right down to grinding out the primary mirror. Shoved in behind it, there was room for a single office chair, and Mr Nately let Jo take it.
    She sat and put her eye to the viewer. Mr Nately placed a pale hand between her shoulders. She could feel it there. Now and again he murmured an instruction, his voice quiet in her ear, but he allowed her to make the adjustments herself, to familiarize herself with the equipment. It took some time to locate Hyakutake, and to get it in focus, and to learn how to follow its fizzing trajectory.
    As she did this, he spoke to her: ‘Ancient people knew the heavens much better than most of us today. And something changing up there was scary. Eclipses, meteor showers, comets—they were always met with dread.’
    â€˜Well …’ Jo was squinting like Popeye ‘… they were primitive.’
    â€˜But when Halley’s Comet swung by in 1910, the press reported that Earth would actually pass through its tail. This was not long before the First World War, remember; there was a lot of anxiety about poison gas. So newspapers caught