Hale-Bopp portends

AXIOMS – WHAT HALE-BOPP CAME TO SEEM TO PORTEND

1. The comet Hale-Bopp appears in the north west sky, its tail has an icy blue sheen, gushing against the night and the starlight. Cathy and her friends have come to view it, Cathy hasn't brought Alice this time because she feels she needs time to herself, and hasn't forgiven Alice for Christmas, and being so interesting to Betty, Betty now talks about her and asks about her every time they meet. Standing on a dark towpath by an unseen canal and sheltered from the fluourescence of the streets, Cathy feels the close pressure of herself turned in upon herself, her jealousy of Alice for finding kindness from Betty, and her jealousy of Betty for so easily gaining Alice's confiding trust. I knew Alice first, thinks Cathy, I'm the one who helped Alice and took her out, and now Betty gets the gain without taking any pains whatsoever!

2. Alice has lost her mother in that most final of ways, through what she sees as annihilation. There was neither love nor pity for Alice's mother in her illness. Death was the final humiliation of a series of humiliations, the successive stripping away of loyalty, decency, love, pity and dignity. At the end there was only a carcase in a wheelchair left. No wonder Alice is so eager to sneak under Betty's wing, thinks Cathy half angrily, then catches herself thinking it with a start.

3. Hale-Bopp is a beautiful sight but there's no pity or love in the heavens, they aren't good, as Alice once said. The comet's elliptical orbit can be described mathematically and precisely, its dirty snowball nature discovered and the boiling off of its matter to create a shining tail explained, but all this science is still based on the metaphysical assumption that the universe is explicable and will make sense. Religion may be blind without science, science would still be lame without religion! Alice, furious at her mother's death, denies goodness and love. Her metaphysical assumption is that evil triumphs every time and human life is meaningless except as a series of jeering violations. She doesn't trust her friends to deal kindly with her, they taped her mouth after all, nor does she trust those in power over her, the newspapers are filled with stories of warfare, famine, corruption and hospital closures. Death, to Alice, is the final violation where every hope of good we have in our poor little brains is stamped out and extinguished.

4. Cathy shivers and hunches herself in her coat at the real cold and the cold thought of Alice's destructive fury. Betty couldn't work all this out the way Cathy can, she thinks in self justification. Cathy looks round at the stars, thinking the light of even the nearest took three or four years to reach earth, the cold glitter overhead is a map of history. Cathy is gazing into the past. And in Alice's past, and coming to terms with it so it makes a better sense, is the key to her future. If you strip away love and goodness nothing can save you from your own materialism, there is only the material of the body left, and that must die. Cathy shivers in resentful horror to think of Alice realising her death so clearly: drama queen I have bad thoughts too thinks Cathy.

5. Can Alice live, seeing life as a rubbery warm film wrapped round a cold nothing like a dirty snowball? Can human life only be described by the laws of science, material as it is? Cathy pulls out her cigarettes, anxious for comfort during this bombardment of alienating ideas and angry feelings. Somebody points out Mars, high in the north east. Cathy turns her head and sees a red planet.

6. On the surface of red, arid, dead Mars are features resembling dried up river courses, and craters left by meteorite impact are sloping walled as if the heat of the impact had produced mud. There may be frozen water below the surface, there may once have been liquid water on the surface, it may have supported life though Cathy is sceptical about claims that micro fossils have been found in meteorites originating from Mars. She can't help thinking people have mistaken the wish for the proof, because finding life out there, finding life to be ubiquitous, is the materialists answer to the enigma of life on earth and human existence. Cathy would rather take responsibility for herself as a human soul, not claim the miracle of life is less than it is, just because, hypothetically, there's life all over the galaxy.

7. Suppose Alice takes responsibility for herself, with such a blackly lit ideology, the antithesis of comfort? Cathy throws down her cigarette in sudden anger and fear and stamps on the sparks furiously. It would be within reason for Alice to kill herself. Cathy's mind goes blank with shock but her conviction that Alice is in danger is real. She stirs, rises to her toes and back, adrenalin surges through her bloodstream, she must do something in response but the idiot others look settled for the next hour.

8. And Cathy thought, glibly, that she could be responsible! She was pettily jealous, even angry! If Alice dies it will be Cathy's fault, Cathy was too slow to realise the danger, too busy indulging her own spite, now she feels like running amok. Icy blue Hale-Bopp is still trapped by the gravity of the sun and seems motionless because of the vast scale of its distance from earth. Like a bad dream where you can't move even though your need to move is desperate. Cathy must get to a phone, she'll ring Alice quickly before Alice does something drastic, she knew she should have conquered her jealousy and brought Alice along!

9. Cathy sighs in exasperation with herself, and that awful feeling of burden at the thought of bringing Alice along tonight. She startles the others into movement, they ask if she's too cold? Someone says he is, moreover that there's a pub a bit further along the towpath. Cathy proposes and seconds they should adjourn there forthwith, and moves off all in one breath. The others laugh at her for her haste in getting to the pub for a drink, but Cathy scarcely hears, as she strides ahead in a burst of nervous energy she's already pulling coins from her pocket for the phone.