Read Online Natural History by Neil Cross - Free Book Online Page B

found another comet, a few weeks back. A much smaller one.’
    â€˜The same patch of sky?’
    â€˜The same patch of sky.’
    â€˜But a different comet?’
    â€˜But a different comet.’
    â€˜What are the chances of that?’
    â€˜Astronomical.’
    Flattered by the joke, Jo asked him, ‘What magnitude?’
    â€˜Eleven. It’s going to come close.’
    â€˜How close?’
    â€˜Nought point one.’
    Patrick leaned in and asked, ‘Nought point one what?’
    â€˜Astronomical units,’ said Jo.
    â€˜That’s a measurement of distance,’ said Nately. ‘The average distance between the earth and the sun—’
    â€˜â€”a hundred and fifty million kilometres.’
    â€˜Which is pretty close, actually.’
    â€˜Pretty close,’ said Patrick.
    Jane nudged him with her elbow. He stepped back, towards the corner, and clasped his hands behind him, like Dixon of Dock Green.
    â€˜And it’s going to be night-visible,’ Nately said. ‘It’s a serious comet.’
    Patrick coughed. Jo and Jane both looked his way, now—identically irritated.
    Patrick said, ‘So, this isn’t the comet Jo’s been going on about? The big one, coming in?’
    â€˜No,’ said Jo, meaning obviously.
    Nately said, ‘I expect you mean Hale Bopp. That’s coming later. So we’re getting two great comets in one year. That’s actually pretty unusual.’ Then he turned to Jo and said, ‘Do you know when the last great comet arrived, Jo?’
    Jo thought about it. And, all at once, she noticed how the stranger Mr Nately had been, a few moments ago, had been replaced, like a genie leaping through the hatch in a stage floor, by a teacher.
    â€˜Comet West,’ she said. ‘Nineteen seventy-six.’
    Mr Nately nodded, and glanced at Patrick and Jane.
    Behind her, Jo felt her parents relax.
    Mr Nately held lessons in the back room, which overlooked the garden with its vegetable patch and curiously modern shed. The garden bordered an orchard—always moving in the corner of Jo’s eye.
    The room was equipped like a proper classroom, with a grey desk and school chair, and a wooden desk for Mr Nately. There were posters on the wall—the Periodic Table, Gandhi, the Moon, a mass of white birds taking off from the surface of some lake, a computer on a stand. Instead of a blackboard, Mr Nately had a whiteboard. He wiped it clean with an old Pink Floyd T-shirt. Jo did not comment on this. She pretended to think it was a proper whiteboard-erasing cloth; for some reason, the scrunched up Pink Floyd T-shirt made her hurt on Mr Nately’s behalf.
    Once in a while, Mr Nately walked or cycled to the village, where he did most of his shopping. He had his milk, his bread, and The Times delivered. He grew his own vegetables and some of his own fruit. He made jam and apple sauce and cider. He hung his laundry on a creaky old rotary line that stood in an overgrown and sunless corner of the back garden. And in the evening, he took it inside again, still damp and smelling of laundry powder.
    Make yourself at home, he said every morning, as she lolloped her stuff to the classroom.
    And she did—although there was nowhere less homely than Mr Nately’s house, with its mixture of old people’s things, chairs and cookers and kettles, and antimacassars and china animals.
    That and the back room with its Apple Macintosh and its school chairs and its TV and VCR, and the creepy orchard that bordered the garden, making a sound like the sea.
    MONKEY BUSINESS!
    US BRITS ARE ANIMAL CRACKERS,
BUT HAS TV’S JANE JONES FINALLY GONE APE?
    Jane Jones—the animal-loving babe dubbed THE PHWOAR OF THE JUNGLE by cheeky fans of her trademark khaki shorts—is worried she’s bitten off more than she can chew … by taking on an ailing chimpanzee sanctuary in the wilds of Devon!
    â€˜Monkeyland is the biggest