if she was stuck with Halley because other people were already stuck on it, then her best recourse was creative recasting. To take her name out of the hat once again and re-configure it in a narrative of her choice. Inventively feathered or flashed, the wide brim dashingly turned, but with some plausible elements in order to persuade people of its truth.
So using the base facts of Mills, and Bill, and having looked for possible links under H in the compact encyclopaedia, she came up with the skelly story that her great-great-great she wasn’t sure how many generations but far back, way on her mother’s side, she was related to the world-famous astronomer Edmond Halley.
Ye-es! she nodded as she told, great news, wasn’t it, emphasising that the appropriate response would be awe. And when people looked at her blankly – her own father only snorted Edmond! – she prodded them further, bright, tenacious girl that she was.
The comet, you know?
Until it dawned on them, Oh. Yes. Halley’s Comet. Fancy that!
And she studied their faces, not convinced they looked suitably impressed. Whenever she could, though, she put it about that she was indirectly named after an incredible heavenly body. An exceptional phenomenon.
Listen, she said, Hal, emphasising the peculiar sound of her name, not Hay, like straw. It’s got a double ll, see.
Which to her meant like the comet, with a distinctive, remarkable streak.
And it did come to be a distinction, of a sort, even if the elliptical comet were to be visible but once in her lifetime, and then rather indistinctly, and though the times seemed barely to register, never mind take notice, when to the watchers there appeared a mackle of blurred printing across the southern skies.
No fabulous spectacle or great shakes. People had been warned to anticipate nothing much. But there it was regardless, Halley’s Comet.
And Halley Murphy found something comforting in the brief collective ken of faces turned skywards. She was happy to catch even the faintest glimpse, ever hoping, from the uncertainty of earth, to see as it is in heaven.
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