Chapter Fifteen

Such was the success of Orion, whose seashell skeleton dominated the cabin, that by the following May another part of the wall was studded with winkles. Zoë became familiar with the Plough, fingering the polished surfaces of the seven big shells which Harry had arranged there. He’d included Alcor, to make the double with Mizar in the centre of the Plough’s handle, a double known as the Horse and Rider.

‘He must have fallen off,’ she said, more to herself than to him, as she felt the two components of the double, two winkles separated by inches of empty wall.

She frowned as she worked her imagination around the idea of the Bear, flashing her father a smile as though she had a better suggestion for a name. At least the Lion made sense; she understood the Sickle that comprised its head and front quarters with the big star, Regulus, and could appreciate the shape of its haunches to its tail, Denebola. It started as a joke between the man and the child, her questioning of the constellations, that such a scattering of stars, or indeed seashells, could have come to represent the creatures and objects and people they did.

With the Plough, the Lion and the Crab, together they swivelled to the Crow and the Water Snake, and that section of the wall was as thoroughly explored as the earlier map he’d made. Zoë’s scep­ticism was a customary ingredient of their evenings with the stars.

‘I know they don’t really look like or feel like the things they’re named after,’ he told her, pretending to be cross, scuffling with her in mock exasperation. ‘They’re ancient names. They’re characters from legends, old stories that people used to tell one another hundreds of years ago. We’ve got to call them something, Zoë, so that we can learn to recognise them. So yes, a bear! Yes, a lion! Try again, and let your imagination go free! After all, you found Orion’s willy pretty quickly, didn’t you? But you can’t go renaming the whole sky – not with that sort of name, anyway.’

‘Can’t I?’ she said, with an expression of such wisdom on her face that he could only shrug and look away.

Another wall was completed in August. She ridiculed Hercules, who seemed to be flailing with panic at the proximity of the Serpent. ‘Not much of a hero!’ she sniffed, feeling the shells, her eyes tight shut. ‘He’s terrified!’

‘And down a bit, Zoë, down to the Crown,’ Harry whispered. ‘How lovely that is!’

They came to Boötes, supposedly the Bear Driver. ‘Well, I can just about make you out,’ she muttered to the wall. ‘But I’m afraid your bear’s gone missing. I couldn’t find it anywhere when me and Daddy were looking for it on the other wall. Just a few bones, that’s all. . . .’

As she knelt on the floor, she could feel the head of the Scorpion emerging; and she humoured her father by fleeing in a pretence of terror, cuddling to him on the easy chair, where he reassured her that the sting in the tail was safely out of sight below the horizon, buried by the distant dunes.

Through November, the final map was built: the flattened W of Cassiopeia, in which the demon Algol lurked, and close by, the spiral nebula of Andromeda. To Zoë, this extragalactic system, more than two million light years from the Ozymandias, was a dusting of the tiniest periwinkles, as fine as sand on her fingertips. She could touch it. The Swan beat across the heavens, its long neck outstretched, exciting her to an agitation of hopping and clapping which wasn’t entirely devoid of sarcasm: for this was a creature on her shell maps that she could truly identify.

‘Just like the swans on the estuary, Daddy!’ she cried, imitating their flight by thrusting forward her head and holding out her arms. ‘Great big wings making that whistling noise with every flap, and then landing on the water with a whoosh! That’s a good one, Daddy! No need to think of another name for that one!’

Saying this, she fell suddenly quiet, dropping her vigorous and noisy beating, and she returned to the wall.

‘Go on, Daddy,’ she said. She knew that her father was watching her instead of looking through the telescope. ‘Where shall we go next?’ she asked him. ‘This way?’ She fingered the Eagle and flashed him a broad smile. ‘I suppose it’s a bit like an eagle,’ she conceded, ‘if it’s gliding with its wings wide open. Yes, Daddy, let’s call this one the Eagle, shall we?’

Harry blinked at her magnanimity, her empty, invincible stare. ‘Yes, let’s,’ he said.

And back into Taurus, towards the Pleiades, which signified that the year had changed, that the sky had rolled around them and was once more stretched vast and silent above the Ozymandias, just as it had been when the first shell map was fixed into place. . . .

The whole cabin was painted blue-black, from floor to ceiling, and was studded with seashells. That year of star-gazing had quickly passed. There’d been no visitors; no Frank, no Dewi, no Helen. Zoë and Tycho presided. The night skies were captured, brought inside, painted and glued on the walls. The room was dark, the shadows relieved only by an encrusting of shells: winkles of different colours and sizes and shapes, more lustrous as the days and nights slipped past because of the polishing of Zoë’s fingertips and the heat of her breath on them. She’d said that the Ozymandias was a spaceship. Harry watched her as she read and reread the maps, over and over again.

Past her eighth birthday, the little girl, blind and brilliant, moved silently around the cabin, her lips working soundlessly as she continued her exploration. Sometimes, when she paused and she could tell that he was watching, she would turn to her father with that smile, with her fingers to the wall, holding her breath, whispering to herself. And he wondered what she was saying, what words she was mouthing. . . . She held a secret of her own, which she wasn’t prepared to divulge. He didn’t ask, lest she refuse to answer.

Instead, afraid, he turned his face from hers and from the beady glare of the crow. What was her secret? What did the constellations mean to her, that she should retrace them so many times and smile like that?