Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

“ Arpeggio ,” answers the musician.

“Not enough,” the theologian snaps, preoccupied with what pressed on him in the small parlour at the manor, a word or a set of words, a circumstance on the tip of his tongue.

Jane is changing to go out for dinner, and as she pulls a thin blue angora sweater over her head, we bristle because the cloud of it begs for touching and because we don’t want her to stop what she’s doing when there are still files to go through. Thinking about the ball gave some of us a semblance of self, the tour of Inglewood House did the same for others, and we are all craving to feel that way again. But Jane has turned away from the Whitmore box. She straightens her skirt and dabs her lipstick, and the cluster that is us rises to follow her out the door.

“I’m going for a walk,” the theologian says irritably.

“Don’t,” Cat replies. “You’re the one who’s always saying ‘stay together.’ ”

“Perhaps I overestimated the company.”

“There’s no need for—” John begins, but before he can finish the theologian has slipped out the door.

There is always a sense of gloom when one of us leaves. Few who wander off come back. For this reason, for a very long time in our first years of solidarity, hardly any of us went off on our own unless absolutely necessary. We don’t know what happens to those who disappear. Maybe they get better leads and head off to follow them; maybe they learn things they want or don’t want to know and, full to bursting with the knowledge, close their eyes and Cease.

“What now?” asks Cat.

“Dinner,” says the musician, and he raises his arms to conduct us, whistling as he ghosts through the door.

The idiot once told a bedtime story to the children that began with a great black sea that doubled as an ink-dark sky. When you looked, it was filled with stars and seashells lined up together.

“Stars and seashells?” the girl had squealed.

“Absolutely,” the idiot confirmed. “Caught in the great net of time.”

“Where are we ?” she asked, hoping we were the fishermen.

“Where do you think we are?”

“On the water?”

“No.”

“In the moon?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She smacked her lips. “A spaceship!”

“No, we’re the house the sea-sky lives in. It’s in our heads twirling around; a spiral galaxy that’s shaped like a snail.”

“ Ewww. ”

“Why not?” He laughed. “Think of the breakfasts the mind can eat: Sands of time! Acres of now! Parcels of eternity! Tasty stuff.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the theologian said, calling out from the wingback chair under Jane’s sitting room window. “The sky is the sky, and the sea is the sea, end of discussion.”

But it was too late. We’d all listened to the idiot’s story and something in what he said as he carried on shaped how we started to think of ourselves, led to a sense that we were stuck together in something that could not be flattened out in ways that would otherwise be perfectly sensible. It was as if we were knots in a net that could take different shapes at different times. As if we might, one day, loop back on ourselves, come so close to the past we’d be able to taste the dust of our history in our mouths.

The pub at dinnertime is packed and smells of spilled beer and curry. Jane has avoided coming here until now because she doesn’t want to have the you’re-not-from-around-here conversation. She takes a seat at a low round table. A waitress comes over and drops a plastic menu in front of her, asks what Jane would like to drink.

“White wine, thanks.”

The girl taps the wine list and Jane scans it.

“The Chenin.”

“Small or large?”

Jane glances at the two tables nearest to her: plates of fish and chips, roast and potato, pints, a couple sharing a bottle of Malbec. “Large, thanks.”

The pub is almost exactly as she remembers from twenty years ago. The red-and-gold-medallioned carpets are the same, the leather stools and wood-backed booths, the belled lamps over the dining area tables. But there is a row of coin-operated games along the far wall now, flat-screen televisions recapping the day in rugby, a snooker table that may or may not have been there before. The customers are a mix of locals and tourists: a group of men in heavy boots and jeans at the bar, a few couples out on the smoking patio, the shop cashier from yesterday chatting up two girlfriends over by the far window and hikers tucking into dinner, their Gore-Tex jackets hanging off a nearby coat rack. At the far end of the bar there’s a cluster of twenty-year-olds standing around a high table, the kid from Inglewood House amongst them.

Jane watches him, curious in spite of herself. His back is mostly to her but sometimes he shifts around the table to talk to the girl in the miniskirt on his right or the guy in the hoodie on his left. There are at least two rounds of drink in front of them, a mix of pint and shot glasses. One of the three girls, the one with the dancer’s posture, who Jane thinks is the prettiest, is already swaying, her cheeks flushed and her gestures theatrical. The girl next to Blake, the loud one in the spangled silver top and large hoop earrings, leans sideways to say something in Blake’s ear and then turns her head, narrows her eyes at Jane. This reminds Jane of the young girl at the Chester, glaring at her from under the bones of the whale.

• • •

“Helen?”

Jane looks up from her almost empty glass of wine to see Blake holding a pint glass, a smart-ass expression on his face that she’d like to wipe off. This is what kids do, she thinks, when they get bored of their village bollocks. If, as teenagers, she and Lewis had stayed in the Lakes they’d have found whole new ways to push the envelope too. She smiles up at Blake, probably unconvincingly.

“How’s the hand?”

He pulls it out of his jeans pocket and displays the plaster. “Saved.”

Jane glances back at his table of mates, sees the girl in the silver top seething. “I think you’re wanted.”

He pulls a stool out with the toe of his boot and straddles it, places his pint on the table.

“I meant elsewhere ,” says Jane.

“They’ll live.”

Jane leans back and before she can say anything more he has leapt up to the bar and is getting her another drink. One of the workmen asks him a question and pats him on the back, and Jane hates herself for noticing how attractive he is. He’s wearing black jeans and a white long-sleeve shirt. She glances down at her own clothes — a black A-line paired with a light blue sweater. Ben used to call it her librarian-wear.

“So where are you from?” Blake swings a leg back over the stool and slides a glass of wine toward her. It is so topped up he must have told the barman he was trying to get her drunk. “London?”

Jane raises her eyebrows in a noncommittal fashion before realizing this probably looks like flirting. “Why do you want to know? So you can send birthday cards?” She can hear herself trying to sound tolerant, trying to sound like someone engaging in playful banter because it is the polite thing to do.

Blake spins the pint in his hand and looks over at his friends as if gauging whether or not he should pack it up and go back. “Listen, Helen, you have beautiful lips. I mean, the bottom one especially, there’s a kind of”—he narrows his eyes—“luscious thing happening there, and I am completely fucking horny and a little bit drunk, but I am also a nice guy and a good conversationalist. I like music, I like books, I read the paper daily , I can name, I don’t know, like fifty varieties of roses, and animals like me. My mates over there are talking about a YouTube video that shows two yobs eating their own feces—” He takes a breath. “So I’m asking you to save me.”