Aislinn Hunter - The World Before Us

The man’s voice was the kind that Leeson imagined men in the military would have: brusque with resolution. Instinctively, he hunkered down beside the hazel thicket the girl had dashed around, debating whether or not he should raise an arm above the foliage or shout “Here!” Instead, overwhelmed by a vision of men in red tunics brandishing rifles, he slipped back into the welt of the marsh grass and moved through the loosestrife toward the mud bank of the lake. He had heard the group early on when he’d first lost his way, and drawn by the resonant voices of the men, the bubbling-up of a woman’s laughter, he’d tried to listen to their conversation through the trees, retreating when he heard a dog bark the way dogs do to announce a visitor who is not threatening. He’d wondered if the laughter was N’s, wondered if he’d remember what hers sounded like, if he had ever, in fact, heard it before.

After the voices, and after the trampling steps of two men passed the glut of reed in which Leeson was hiding, he got up off his haunches and, stooping to keep his head below the level of the nearby bushes, moved toward the lakeside where the voices had originally come from. He calculated that if he was there and waiting, sitting calmly in the open, the conversation might be between gentlemen divested of the urge to shout.

What he would always remember was the feel of the sun on his face when he came into the clearing and saw George Farrington, how surprised he was by its warmth after hours of walking through the spun nets of the trees. A summer sun in autumn — as if brought out for the tea, arranged by the host to please his guests. Leeson, never one to shy away from a direct gaze, peered up into the orb of it to assess whether it was the same sun as always or if its commission had made it perceptibly different. Its searing whiteness was so unlike the version in the watercolour Farrington had shown him a month before in the small parlour at Inglewood — a circle so theatrically delineated it failed to resemble anything other than a button of yellow.

The shot was a colour too — a bright burst that kissed his arms and chest and passed through the left lobe of his lung. His eyes were still speckled with sun but had cleared enough that he could see the shape of a man, of men, rushing toward him, even as the ground rose up to meet his back. A commotion of voices hovered over and around him while his own throat bubbled up a confused apology. He thought briefly that it was Bedford again looming over his face intimately, but Bedford proved to be George Farrington, his scarred lip giving him away. Things could, Leeson thought, be better. Thorpe would want an explanation; Leeson could imagine him in his dark-panelled office already — jotting details into his book.

“Look at me!” George shouted, his face coming into focus, his hands on Charles, in Charles, pressing down. What to say to such an audience? That he had been wilfully detained these past months? That the stump of meat he received at lunch was often overcooked and that the kitchen staff did this to him intentionally? That sometimes the body is nothing at all and other times it is like the pulse of a frog’s throat: ghostly thin and vibrating? Ribbit , he wanted to say, or Pardon me for —but the botanist was shouting “What were you thinking?” over his shoulder at a man with long side-whiskers wearing a black hat. Bubble and spit came out of Charles’s mouth when he tried to speak of an old favourite hat of his own, a silk topper with a narrow brim that he had recently been missing because it fit him so perfectly. The botanist in a rage above him, while a cushion of some sort was placed under his head.

And then she was there, wiping the mud off his cheeks with the corner of her shawl, her fingers in his short greying hair. “Shh,” she said, and he could see that she was crying. “Shh, Charles, I’m here.” He counted the number of times her lips opened and closed, tried to work one word apart from the other. One of the men pulled her away as she said, “But I know him, please, sir—” Charles’s attention wholly on the progression of each word: odd, even, odd, even, odd, even. Then everything thickened and went silent; Charles was both in and above himself, observing his form as indifferently as his doctors had done. N beside him on her knees, her hair duller than he remembered, though otherwise she was exactly the same.

Jane stands up in the bathtub and reaches down to pull the plug. She watches the water swirl away until Sam pads into the bathroom and woofs lightly to gain her attention.

Those of us who were waiting in the main room start toward her, but the theologian interrupts us, says, “I have a confession.”

“Go on,” Cat chides.

The theologian clears his throat and announces, “I realized something yesterday at the cottages. I think I know who I was.” He pauses and turns toward us, and we can feel the full force of his attention. “I believe I was the local headmaster.”

What the theologian had remembered as he stood outside the long row of cottages by the falls was the sensation of being inside one of those rooms, of watching a grey wall of fog thickening outside his front window. He could imagine himself in a wingback chair with weak springs, the sitting room warm in the ambit of the fire. He recalled an evening that was over-quiet because the bird he’d kept had died — a linnet gifted to him by a former pupil. He’d considered, in that hour, in the form of his former body, the nature of fog — how quickly it can roll in and recede. He’d thought he ought to use the idea of fog in the lesson he’d planned for the next day’s class — a metaphor to illustrate what God does, and doesn’t, allow us to see. He was so deep in rehearsing his analogy that he didn’t hear the sound of a horse approaching until it stopped outside on the cobblestone street, and George Farrington appeared suddenly outside his window, as if he’d stepped through a curtain.

When the theologian tells us that he was the local headmaster, we move toward him to ask if he remembers any of us, if he can see us as we once were.

He says, “I think I remember the boy. He may have been a pupil. It seems to me that his brother might have worked for Farrington in the stables.”

“Do you remember the ball?” Cat asks, because she has been obsessing about that event.

“No.”

“But you remember the picnic,” the one with the soft voice says. “The day Leeson died?”

The theologian wavers and moves toward the room’s only chair. “I remember the fact of it, gossip, but I was not there.”

“And your name?” John asks.

“Bernard,” the theologian sighs. “Bernard Hibbitt.”

We have always imagined that knowing who we once were would enact some kind of completion. The theologian’s revelation dissuades us of any such conviction.

“Tweeet? ” Herschel asks.

“I don’t know,” John shrugs. “He’s still here.”

“You thought I would Cease,” the theologian says.

“Pretty much,” John replies. “I think we’ve all been expecting it. As if we only have to learn a certain amount about ourselves and then—”

“ Whoooo ,” Herschel says.

“Exactly.”

“You’re not even a minister !” Cat exclaims, and she throws her arms up in the air.

The theologian takes a deep breath. “So what then? I’m still here. As are you—” He waves his hand at us and says our names almost disdainfully: “ Eliza, Alfred, Herschel —”

“Samuel,” adds the poet, bowing. “Samuel Murray.”

“Which means …?” the musician asks.

“That we were wrong,” John surmises.

“About Ceasing?” begs the girl.

“About everything.”