Louis Hannibal NezPearl
Young Pearl Johnson, thrilled, has just made a discovery whose significance even she cannot begin to grasp.
She hears her mother on the other side of the door and switches off the lamp. Light from the street falls on the uniform draped over her chair. One sleeve stirs in the breeze from the window. Pearl stays seated, her pencil between her teeth, until the footsteps slowly recede down the hall. Then she returns to the telescope. The three stars are still there, forming a hook above the rooftops of the small town of Keswick, England. Below them, a yellow point shines.
Pearl adjusts the focus. The yellow point acquires a trembling blue rim, then returns to its original colour. She waits for her eyes to stop watering before looking again. She switches on the lamp, shielding it with a notebook. She finds the sheet dated the fourteenth of May, two thousand and seventy-two, a few nights ago. She lays that night’s drawing over the one she has just made and holds them against the bulb. The hook-shaped constellation lines up. The other point sits below it.
Pearl puts the sheets on the desk. She lifts them again, concentrating on what she sees. Just then, the phone vibrates beneath her thigh. One of her closest friends, Alice, has sent a photograph from the pub. Her other friend holds a glass in front of her face, hiding just as someone takes the picture. Below it is a message: ‘You can still come.’ Pearl smiles, then writes that she is in bed. She sends it and brings the sheets back up to the light.
The bedroom is full of those marks: on the desk, stuck to the wardrobe, across the bedspread where there is no longer room to sit. In February she marked the point for the first time. In March she sent a report. The European Space Agency’s reply arrived four days later: she needed to check the instrument’s settings. She checked them, and a few days later wrote again.
Now she also has the observations made at Alice’s house, with another telescope, from another garden. Pearl opens that notebook and runs her finger along the dates. The last measurement does not fit the others. She rubs it out. She makes it again in the same place. This time her mother opens the door.
“I can see the light under the door, Pearl.”
The girl stops rubbing the paper.
“I was just checking something.”
The woman picks up the uniform from the chair and holds it against her body. There is a damp sheen on the collar: she is still finishing the ironing. She looks at Pearl’s clock.
“And what are you going to find tonight that you can’t find tomorrow?”
Pearl searches for a sheet without quite picking it up.
“It won’t be there tomorrow.”
Her mother looks towards the window.
“Is it going away?”
“It moves.”
The woman puts the uniform on the bed. Pearl steps away from the telescope, but her mother does not approach the eyepiece. She looks at the sheets her daughter is holding.
“Show me here.”
Pearl lays them over one another again. She points to the hook and then to the little line the other points make. As her mother holds the paper, her thumb covers one of the marks.
“Not there.”
The woman moves her finger.
“Sorry.”
Pearl lowers the sheets.
“Look, these three don’t change position relative to each other. This one does.”
Her mother leans towards the bulb. She narrows her eyes. Pearl waits.
“And is that good?”
Pearl laughs. It comes out louder than she expects, and she covers her mouth. Her mother smiles too, though she keeps looking at the same spot.
“I don’t know. I still don’t know what it is,” her daughter admits.
The woman hands the papers back.
“Then don’t write that you do.”
Pearl looks at the computer screen. On the first line of the new report she has written: ‘The object is not a star.’
Her mother picks up the uniform.
“I’ll leave your milk in the kitchen. And tomorrow you get yourself up. I’m not calling you six times.”
As she leaves, she pulls the door almost shut. Pearl deletes the first line.
At four in the morning, the computer asks Pearl whether she wants to attach another file.
Fighting sleep, Pearl has her cheek resting on her arm. The open window has left her feet cold. She lifts her head and reads what she has written, following each line with the cursor so she does not skip any. She has added dates, times, the models of both telescopes. Also the changes from yellow to orange and from orange to blue. Beside the last record she notes that it was damp. The word ‘star’ still appears twice. She replaces it with ‘object’.
When she reaches the file name, she stops. She types ‘Nut’. The sky goddess was in one of the books she has read; she still remembers her blue body arching over the tiny figures on the earth. She goes to the shelf, finds the illustration and leaves the book open beside the keyboard. For a few seconds she compares that blue with the light she has just seen. Then she adds the date to the file name.
She still needs to photograph a table of figures. She finds it under her dinner plate, with a tea stain on one corner. She smooths it on the bed and frames it with her phone. Part of her pyjamas appears in the photograph too. She crops it too tightly: a column of times disappears. She takes it again. The file is added to the message. Pearl checks the address one last time and presses send. She switches off the computer. The window is beginning to grow light. Through the wall she hears her mother stir in bed.
Pearl opens her phone and writes to Alice: ‘I think I’ve found something.’ Her friend’s reply comes when her eyes are already closed. ‘I thought you were asleep.’
The next morning, after very little sleep, Pearl burns her tongue on her tea and finds the ESA’s strikingly quick reply while she waits for it to stop hurting. A woman named Mary asks for the original notebooks. The loose sheets too. At the end there is an address in London and a proposed date. Pearl stands so quickly that the chair hits the floor.
“Mum.”
Her mother comes back from the hall with her coat half on. Pearl holds out the phone. She withdraws it before her mother can take it and reads the message aloud. She mispronounces Mary’s surname. She starts again. Her mother puts her bag on the floor.
“Slowly.”
Pearl reaches the invitation and bursts out laughing. The woman gently takes the phone from her, reads to the end and smiles. Then she looks at the calendar stuck to the fridge.
“I can’t go with you on Monday. If they’ll change my Thursday shift…”
Pearl stops laughing.
Her mother keeps looking for the date. Her fingernail traces the days on the calendar.
“I can go on my own,” Pearl says.
The fingernail stops.