Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

“No.”

“Car?”

“Yes.”

She hands Jane a parking disk and her room key, and then slips Jane’s form into the ledger and puts it back under the counter. “The car park is at the side of the building. Breakfast is seven till eight through those doors — if you’d leave the dog in the room. Public lounge is just through there, though it’s usually quiet. Shower’s tricky — you need to give the tap a good heave to get it open. I’m Maureen, my husband’s Andy. Just ring the buzzer by the front door if you need one of us. And help yourself to a cereal bowl in the breakfast room if you want to leave water out for the dog.” She tugs her cardigan closed and then rubs the corner of her eye with a knuckle. “You all right, Helen?”

“Yes, fine.” Jane perks up. “Just tired from the drive.”

Jane pulls her bag and the box of files about the Whitmore out of the car. Her room on the second floor is larger than she expects, with modern wallpaper in green and tan stripes, and a view of the river that cuts through the centre of the village and the grey stone houses on its far side. There’s a trestle desk in the corner and a small stand on which sit a kettle and packets of ginger biscuits. On the bed there’s a plush robe folded into a neat square and tied with a thick yellow ribbon.

Sam noses the empty rubbish bin, the bathroom tile, the area under the window, drinks loudly from the water bowl and then settles down on the mat just inside the door to scratch his ear with his hind leg.

“I know you’re hungry, pal, but let me just get two hours of sleep, okay?” Jane sets the alarm beside the bed, changes out of her damp clothes and slips under the thick white duvet, the Whitmore box next to the desk in her direct line of sight. Sam takes up watch from his mat on the floor.

Because it is day and because we do not trust ourselves to rest, we gather around and watch as Jane settles into sleep. That we once took sleep for granted! That we dropped onto our own beds or cots or idled langorously on our sofas and didn’t savour the escape! How the body unflexes itself into a state of compliance, frees the mind to travel.

“I miss beds,” Cat says. “I think I had a white ceiling. I can almost picture waking up and looking at it; it had decorated squares—”

“Coffers,” the idiot offers.

“Decorated squares with an oval in the room’s centre and a hanging gas lamp—”

“That’s the Whitmore,” John says. “The ceiling in the men’s ward looked the same.”

“Hark the soft pillow of her hallowed mount,” the poet says. “There is no greater pleasure than falling asleep on top of a woman.”

“There are children present,” the one with the soft voice says, and the one who rarely speaks snickers. We turn our attention back to Jane.

Under the plush duvet of the inn Jane is dreaming nonsense. So we sift through the flickering residue of her day: Sam running out of sight, the hours of driving, the mobile on her kitchen table blinking Gareth’s name. After an hour or so she works her way back to the knot that is William. She sees him and Mina at the hummingbird cabinet, their faces reflected in the glass. But then the dream shifts and the birds twitch to life. Some flit up off their mounts, some get caught in their wiring. After a minute all two hundred and four of them are flapping wildly, trapped in the case like a swarm.

“Do something,” the girl says, turning from the dream and imploring us.

“We can’t,” the theologian replies.

“Why not?” John asks.

Those of us who were drifting off into our corners come forward, ready to take sides if we have to.

The birds knock against the glass.

“Help,” the girl says again. “I mean it.”

“Let’s try,” the one with the soft voice says. “It’s only a dream. They hardly ever make sense anyway.”

In the dream the hummingbirds are dying; they crest and fall with broken necks, the flurry of one colliding with the arc of another. Jane does not know how to break the case, she cannot move to save her soul, and William and Mina are oblivious, the little girl saying, “I like this one” and tracking a hummingbird as it flits into the glass. In the end it is N who hands Jane the key, who loops it off the ring in her pocket and presses it into her palm. Jane standing back as the birds pour out of the opened panel in a fluster of sound.

“Thank you,” the girl says quietly, and someone claps from the far side of the room.

“Who’s that?” the theologian snaps, not recognizing the figure.

Some of us leave the dream then, and some of us stay, watch Jane touch the bodies of the birds that litter the case, her fingers stroking their ruffed feathers, righting their bent wings.

Once, when we were at a play with Jane and Ben, we debated the validity of Ceasing. The theologian liked to tell us that death was the end for everyone and that all of our flapping about wouldn’t change the fact that we would eventually stop Being.

The argument started at the end of the fourth act when the actress playing the mad woman climbed a stepladder in a gauzy white dress and hanged herself by the neck. Blue floodlights made fake river water below her and all of us turned to Jane, who had clenched her eyes shut. The rope went taut as the lights dropped to black, then blazed back on to reveal an empty stage.

“Where did she go?” the boy asked.

“Trap door,” the idiot answered.

“She was pretty,” said the girl. “I liked her hair. What’s a trap door?”

“It’s a hole that opens in the floor,” the one with the soft voice said.

“Is she stuck?” asked the girl.

“Nope,” we said.

“Actually it depends,” said the idiot. “It is, conceptually speaking, possible for matter to pass through matter, and therefore possible for matter to become stuck, one thing inside the other, the woman and the floor, for example, the surface of things being—”

“Stop—” the theologian hissed.

“—the surface of things being an illusion and the particulate nature of the universe such that gaps and fissures exist between all things. If we take molecular models—”

The theologian cleared his throat.

“—and apply probability, which granted precludes—”

“Shut it,” said Cat, “or else.”

The audience shuffled toward the bar.

“Shall we?” the musician asked, and he stepped forward to conduct us up the aisle.

At the bar the girl wanted to know, “If the white-dressed woman—”

“Ophelia,” we said.

“If O-felya isn’t trapped then is she Ceased?”

“Define your terms,” said the idiot.

“No one is talking to you,” Cat snapped.

We turned our attention to the same place we always did.

“Yes, she is Ceased ”—the theologian flourished a wavery hand in the air—“for all intents and purposes.”

“Excuse me,” someone said — a woman in a black turtleneck and tiger-print scarf — speaking to the queue of people in front of us at the bar. Because it was a weekday matinee the theatre had only opened one of its three lounges and it was packed. We always felt pinched in these situations so we moved out onto the balcony to stand beside the crowd of men in suit jackets and women in blousy dresses holding a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Through the glass doors we could see Jane and Ben still arguing about whether or not the performance was any good, Ben’s eyes flitting over Jane’s shoulder to the women walking in and out of the loo.

“So is she stuck or is she Ceased?” the girl asked again, eyeing the cup of ice cream an elderly woman was handing to her husband, the side of it lightly shimmered with ice.