Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

John leans toward the boy. “You’re not hungry. At least, not in the way that you think you are.”

“The cottages have changed,” the theologian states, tired of the tenor of the conversation. “There used to be wood-beam ceilings here.”

We bend forward to look at the ceiling, even though we are tired of indulging the theologian. He’s been making emphatic statements since we arrived at Inglewood: These houses are new; the old stables are gone; the pub has a different sign . His proclamations were exciting at first, but now, as there’s little to set them against — no facts, no dissenting opinions — they’ve become tedious.

Even in the dim light from the kitchen we can see that the ceiling is plaster. We can also see the reflective sheen of a flat-screen television, the blinking dots of DVD and CD players, a stereo with large speakers — various signs of modernity. On the mantel there’s a digital photo frame sliding a series of bright images across its screen, like a magician shuffling a deck of cards.

“There was ivy here,” the theologian continues, “all over the front of the house.” And maybe because we want to believe him, or maybe because there once was, some of us picture rustling vines covering the cottage, imagine this whole row of houses hunkered alongside the falls in shaggy green coats.

“I remember ivy,” the boy says.

“Hedera helix,” the idiot chimes. “ Helix from the Ancient Greek—” and he stops because he expects to be interrupted, even though no one opens their mouth to silence him.

Inside the kitchen the teenager stands up. She places her empty bowl in the sink and switches off the light. A second light goes on in another, more distant room before a door shuts and drops us back into near-darkness.

“Where’d she go?” the girl asks.

“To sleep,” the poet says.

“I want to sleep,” the girl says. “I’m sleepy too.” She fake-yawns.

“You are sleeping,” the theologian replies.

The girl shakes her head; she doesn’t like to be told this. She moves up to the window and taps it lightly with her fingers.

“Don’t—” the theologian commands, more sharply than he should.

Over on the mantel the photo frame is still lit up and the girl watches the years slip across it: the teenager we just watched morphing into a chubby eight-year-old holding the handlebars of a bicycle with pink streamers. Then she is ten, and standing on a bristly field in a football shirt; then thirteen or fourteen in a peach-coloured dress, under a cluster of green balloons; then a young girl again: she and her mum holding up cake beaters covered in batter in a floral-papered kitchen.

“I want to go home ,” the girl says, and she turns and waits for one of us to do something.

But none of us steps forward because, like her, we have no sense of how to get there.

We like to believe in the resilience of children, and sometimes, watching them — our own two, or the boys down the hall in Jane’s building, or Lewis’s daughters — we marvel at the vibrancy of their imaginations, their ability to cordon off one version of reality from a preferred alternative. In the real world children grow. They learn to toggle between the actual and the imagined in new ways, eventually settling in a domain that allows them to walk to the corner shop on their own, master multiplication tables and graphs, write letters and essays, make their own decisions. We are less sure about how knowledge is gained here, in the half-light of our existence, or how such knowledge will serve the boy and the girl, though we agreed long ago it would be wrong to lie to them. Even at the gravestones that bear the moss-clad names of the Farrington pets—“Beck,” “Duke,” “Cato,” “Cicero,” “Tip”—Cat had asked the children if they knew what the markers were for, if they understood what buried meant. The girl said yes, but the boy wasn’t listening; he was tracing the weathered letters, trying to find a familiar name.

We plod back toward the inn caught up in our own concerns. Jane and Blake had gone ahead while we dallied at the cottages and we let them go — the boy distracted by the falls and the rest of us not wanting to leave him. Now, as we walk, the girl is worrying her way around the contradiction we’ve set up: the idea that she is both awake and sleeping. The poet tries to make it clear to her, explaining that just as her hunger is not real hunger, she is not sleeping in the way she used to sleep; this is a different kind of dream. She shakes her head at this and he tries again, saying sadly that the girl with the cereal bowl is alive , “whereas you, little flower, are dead.”

In the early days of our interrogations the question we were most afraid to ask each other was “How did you die?” It held in its husk the possibility that some strain of suffering might be remembered. It was more pleasing to ask what kind of music one preferred, what kind of food one favoured, if a spouse or children came to mind when we said the word family . It was easier to tug out of the mind memories like “terrier” or “clockworks” or “a wall of drawers in a long narrow shop” than the last thing the body remembered.

One of our final interrogations took place at the museum. Jane was collating the Lyell glassware archives for auction and we’d wandered upstairs. The one who never spoke was in the alcove in the science gallery by a tall window, and having just asked the poet a set of questions and getting no response but metered verse, we turned to the figure in the nook.

“What clothes can you see yourself wearing?” we asked. “Where is your house?” “Are you old or young?” A dozen more questions followed: “What colours do you like?” “Are you of faith?” “Have you seen the sea?” But the figure stayed mute.

The theologian grew impatient and snapped, “How did you die?”—as if this were an equally weighted question. To which the figure by the window cawk ed and then released a long slow whistle, as if falling from a great height.

The idiot once told us that learning is not the same as knowing. “ Integer non scientes, ” he’d groaned when the rest of us exclaimed aha at a trivial detail that Jane was reading in her office. We made no distinction back then between those bits of information that drifted through us and the larger ideas we could retain, the kind of knowledge we could build on. We always asked, “When will we know ourselves?” never “When will we know ourselves enough ?”

When the poet told the girl that she was dead, the boy overheard. Now the girl is walking dolefully beside Cat and the boy is scuffing his feet, though he keeps turning to look back at the field. We have dispelled their happiness before, but it never gets any easier. Once, in Jane’s flat, the girl shrieked loudly during a game she and the boy were playing, and Jane turned her head to where the girl was standing. It was a game the children liked: they chose a letter, and whenever the radio announcer said a word that started with that letter, the girl or the boy won a point; the first to reach a score of fifteen won the game. That day, the girl picked P and the boy M . It was a frosty winter weekend and Jane was gathering her things to go Christmas shopping. The broadcaster was interviewing an astronomer called Peter. At one point a whole sentence of P s—“extrasolar planet,” “parsecs,” “Outer Earth Project”—erupted and the girl shrieked in delight. Jane stopped, keys in hand, on her way to turn off the radio, and glanced to where the girl was standing beside the kitchen counter.

“She heard that,” the boy said. “Do it again!”