But the thought of losing him again kills me. This is, of course, a figure of speech. I will remain alive. But I will not know happiness.
As for myself, I try to eliminate all but the useful memories of what life was like before. By which I mean those that can provide clues as to what has happened, and help me map out a future worthy of the name.
Routines help. So does planning.
I order supplies by phone. Seeds and tubers to plant, an array of animal traps, a gun for shooting rabbit and deer, some sacks of seed, a good stock of tins. A man who doesn’t ask questions drops a box at the gate when I need him to. By springtime, I’ll have no further need of his services. There are three feral groups on the island, he told me. All native kids. ‘And we protect our own.’ It was meant as a warning – he’d seen the gun – but it came as a relief. From the local adults at least, Freddy will be safe.
There’s no internet any more, and little in the way of media coverage since the military took over on the mainland. Inevitably, things are far worse there. This is confirmed occasionally when there’s a phone signal, and Ashok rings. His tone is angry and unsettled. He’s frustrated that there’s no role for the man who could once shine the hot light of a business idea through any prism. The fact that capitalism has become ‘a dirty word’ enrages him. He’ll find his place, I am sure of it. But it may not lie where he hopes. He’s doing ‘a shit-load of figuring out’ what he’s got ‘to put on the table’, he reports. ‘Things suck here, you did well to get away. Just keep your head down, keep Freddy safe and wait it out. The child attacks are dying off, but the sabotages, they’re
rife
, man. And the kiddie-camps are full. Nobody asks what goes on inside them. Or what drug combination you use against so-called evil. Or what effect it has. And you don’t even want to know what’s happening in China. Anyway, take care of yourself, bud. Did you hear that Steph’s taken over Old Man Whybray’s post? Let’s stay in touch.’
The professor’s death has not sunk in. Perhaps it never will. The thought of his bloodied, open-mouthed corpse lying on the floor of the corridor at the Unit returns to me daily, sometimes hourly. And it does so in such vivid detail that I could tell you the exact shade of every element of it.
In the drawer of my desk, on top of the sheets of origami paper I have pre-creased according to Robert J. Lang’s instructions, lies the professor’s notebook. Sometimes I need to read his words over and over again. Other times, I am not in the mood to, because his reflections are as demanding and as complex as Lang’s folds. So I work with paper instead. I can get so absorbed that I don’t notice the hours pass. This is good.
Later, I’ll lie in bed trying to make sense of what he wrote, travelling miles on my restless legs.
Human history is a juggernaut. If it’s to change direction, it must first come to a stop. If our visitors believe the destruction of the world we have built is a prerequisite of humankind’s continued existence on the planet, no wonder their occupation is so brutal. It needs to be.
His handwriting is neat and precise: the handwriting of one uncorrupted by keyboard use.
People think ghosts are from the past, Sunny Chen said in his testimony to Hesketh. Quote: ‘We think they are all dead. But they are alive. And some of them are not even born yet. They are travellers . . . They go wherever they like.’
So where is it transmitting from, this occupying force? And what is its mission?
Hesketh asks what mythology the afflicted ones are replicating. But that begs the question: why should we imagine they are replicating what has gone before? And why must we assume it is ‘mythology’ at all?
There is a lot more in this vein. Much of it is highly speculative and emotional. The idea of a ‘hypothetical world’ he posited that day in Ashok’s office is taken much further. Like me, the professor was interested in the neutrino experiments – what scientist wouldn’t be – but the conclusions he drew made me wonder whether he was ill when he wrote them. I don’t like to consider the possibility that my mentor became unstable. Especially now that he is dead and I have no way of ascertaining precisely what he meant.
The idea that the children have indeed travelled – not forward in space, but backwards across time – is as heroic as it is unthinkable. But how else to explain their creeping occupation of our world?
What if they are indeed a manifestation of man’s own possible future? And that they have come not to ‘haunt’ us (as superstitious minds might insist), but instead, to simply show us – in only part of its full horror – the legacy our era will leave them, if our despoliation of Earth continues unchecked? If so, one can see their arrival as a desperate attempt to avert that future, by stopping it in its tracks.
It seems counter-intuitive to salute the children for what they have done, given the destructiveness of their methods. But instinct has its imperatives. And so does DNA. Can we blame them for craving survival, when that survival is that of our own descendants too?
When he speculated about a new paradigm that day in Ashok’s office, I dismissed it as ‘fanciful’. It never struck me that I might be wrong to. The final entry in Professor Whybray’s notebook is very short.
We are a species in crisis: a species on the brink of collapse. If this is crisis intervention, then I am glad to have seen the start of it, however appalling its immediate consequences. Yet I fear that of all the people on the planet, my beloved Hesketh will be the very last to understand: the last to make the leap of faith that’s needed. His need for proof blinds him.
This is very painful for me to read. He always praised my cast of mind. Yet here, in black and white, he condemns it. If a ‘leap of faith’ is required, how does one go about taking one? And to where must one leap? I would like to show the contents of Professor Whybray’s notebook to Einstein, or Plato, or some of the physicists from CERN or the High Energy Research Organisation in Japan, whose job is charting and assessing the unseen. But in their absence I must make do with the only expert I have access to: a boy of seven.
‘Freddy K, go and fetch some old newspaper from that pile over there.’ I point. He looks blank. I’m about to give up and try later when I see him give the little shudder I recognise: a sign that he is switching mode. ‘Freddy K. We’re going to make the world. Your world, not the old one.’
‘OK.’
‘Are there trees?’
‘Just dead ones.’
‘So get some twigs.’
Soon he’s at work on a hawthorn branch. While he’s busy, I fold half a dozen origami men, on the same model as the one I made for Sunny Chen. I remember there’s a sack of sand among the rusted farm machinery. I haul it to the porch and spread it out by the doorstep, and sprinkle some coarse dishwasher salt on top.
There. A sparkling white desert that looks like Heaven. Freddy is immediately excited. He doesn’t say anything, but he rushes to gather up the origami figures and the makeshift trees.
‘So what next?’ I ask.
He plants the twigs first, in clusters. ‘Scissors,’ he says.
When I hand them over he calmly begins snipping my origami figures into pieces.
‘What are you doing?’
He digs a shallow hole and throws them in. ‘They die.’
‘Who?’
‘People. They get sick. From poison and the sun. Their eyes pop. Then they die and we bury them in salt. And when they’re ready we dig them up. For eating.’ He throws a handful of sand and salt over the chopped pieces.
‘That’s a sad story, Freddy.’
‘It’s not a story.’
‘But if it was, how would it go after that?’ His face changes again. As if sleepwalking, he gets down from the table and opens the front door. ‘Freddy K?’ A blast of freezing air rushes in as he steps outside, still barefoot. He never wears shoes any more and I have stopped trying to make him. ‘Freddy!’ We were getting somewhere: I can’t let him go now. ‘So what happens next, Freddy?’ He doesn’t respond. ‘How does the story go?’
It seems like an innocent question, but I have said the wrong thing, because he whips round and shouts: ‘I told you, it’s not a story! You’re not listening! It happens!’
He runs around the back of the house, picks up a rock and smashes the ice on the bath tub, then starts hauling out the huge shards. They clatter to the ground, falling next to his red bare feet. I take a deep breath and shout back.
‘
What
happens, Freddy. Tell me!’
Frenzied, he grabs the chain and pulls out the bath plug: instantly, the freezing liquid glugs down the plughole and waterfalls down on to the icy mud, leaving the goldfish flipping about on the white enamel base in a swirl of mud. Then, too fast for me to react, Freddy has reached in, grabbed the creature, stuffed it into his mouth and run off.
Indoors, freezing, I strip off and dry myself. Then I go upstairs and sit on my bed and rock.
It’s not a story, Freddy said. It happens.
But when, and where, and why?
The soil is rock hard, but I dig it anyway because the fight of it soothes me. Darkness is closing in. You can see the dance of will-o’-the-wisp as the bog exhales its methane into the air, mixing with the distant froth of the shore. I stare at the silhouettes of clouds drifting across the horizon. I try to see the story Freddy is telling: the one he insists is not a story, but reality.
Once upon a time the Earth we know went amok: hurricanes crossing vast oceans; coasts drowned; lowlands steeped in salt; landscapes baked to desert; aquifers welling up and crystallising.
Salt is born of the purest parents.
Too much sun, too much sea. White Death. The Swiss demographer’s conference:
The Perfect Storm: Climate, Hunger and Population.
A species in crisis. The exponential growth phase giving way to the stationary and death phases. The curve’s end: the collapse of humankind that Professor Whybray wrote of in his notebook. And the aftermath?
A place my boy knows well. A place he feels at home. A land of insects and dried seaweed, of stockpiled tins from a bygone era which this version of himself never even knew. Poison and sun-blindness. Mass death, mass graves of salted meat. And when the last food is gone, only one way to assuage the hunger.
Majd. Ikenie.
The eating of each other. And then fewer of them still.
Until – the opposite of a Creation myth: just one is left. And then none.
The children’s story is the story of man’s end on Earth.
An hour later he’s standing next to me, peeling the bark off a stick. Barefoot, as usual, despite the cold.
‘Freddy. The hand-print you make. What does it mean?’
‘Stop. It means we want you to stop.’
‘Stop what?’
He shrugs and throws down his stick. ‘Everything grown-ups do. Everything you did, when you were alive. Everything you did before you died.’
‘We’re dead?’
‘You’re from the Old World. Same thing.’
‘You say we want you to stop. Who’s we?’
He shrugs. ‘Me and the other kids. We have the same blood.’
‘So where do you come from?’
‘The place you are before you’re born. And after you’re dead.’
‘But you’re alive Freddy. You’re here with me. We’re both alive.’
He shakes his head. ‘No. You’re dead. This feels like now, for you. But it’s a zillion years ago.’
. . . beloved Hesketh . . . the very last to understand: the last to make the leap of faith . . . His need for proof blinds . . .
The Venns erupt in my head. Circles within circles. Fairy rings. Neutrinos. I lean harder on my spade and start to rock. The CERN experiment represented a seismic breakthrough in our grasp of the universe. Can undreamed-of dimensions be fused, in times of crisis, to the dimensions we know? Can a child be in two realms of time at once? Quantum physics would say yes. When the professor spoke of an ‘occupation’ he was being serious. But I dismissed it.
We belong to the Old World,
said Naomi.
Time doesn’t work the way you think. They’ve come back to stop us.
I remember a day in London, Ashok silhouetted against the sky, ranting.
Look what’s happening to growth! How can anything be rebuilt or even survive, when industry’s being sabotaged on this kind of scale?
Growth. Progress. More. Newer.
The Holy Grail.
Look behind and you shall be turned into a pillar of salt.
Beloved Hesketh
, he called me. But it took Freddy to show me the thing I couldn’t see. It is not a hypothetical world to them. It is as real as ours.
The question is not how they came. Let string theory work that out. The question is, how could they not?
After Freddy wanders off, I stay in the darkness for a long time, leaning on my spade.
A few days later we go for the walk I will come to think of as our last. There’s a light rain.