Dreams Before the Start of Time

by Anne Charnock

  “You know what I find weird?” says Millie. “There’s Toni, two months ago, in a complete flap because she’s pregnant—I mean, almost a meltdown—and everything’s working out perfectly. Her dad seems absolutely fine about it. Her stepmother is preparing a nursery in the family home. Painting fluffy clouds and cherry blossom trees across the entire wall; Toni sent me the photos. You should see it. It’s incredible. And Atticus, bless him—he’s one in a billion—he’s all loved up over Toni and the baby. How does Toni land on her feet like that?”

  “That’s the Munroes for you. Uncritical by nature, I guess. Anyway, we’ll make a happy home for our baby.” We both laugh. We’re in the habit of saying “our baby.” I’ve even adopted the royal we when I talk about Millie. “We’ll breast-feed.” That caused hilarity in the pub last week. But Millie and I have talked everything through. We always have done. We know everything about one another, so there’s no chance we’ll ever have a serious fallout. Millie’s still hopeful of finding a partner, but next time she won’t take a chance as she did on Aiden. He said he could handle her disinterest in sex, but to my mind he realized he’d made a mistake. Millie’s main worry, and it’s understandable, is that even if I end up with a long-term partner, it won’t ever be exclusive. She’s worried about men and women breezing through the baby’s life, the child’s life, the teenager’s life. What if one of them—what did she say—was an inappropriate adult? Strewth! I couldn’t imagine that. But the more people we had in transit through our home, she said, the greater the risk we ran—it might not be fair to the child.

  So this is the deal: I won’t bring any one-night stands back to the flat. Not that I’m into that. And if I have a partner who isn’t known by anyone else in our friendship circle, then I’ve to keep them away from Millie and the child until I’ve known them for at least three months. No parties at our place unless Mum and Dad take the baby for the night. No smoking indoors. Millie alone is allowed to arrange baby-sitters. Finally, I’ll take one week’s holiday each year to give Millie the chance to get away on her own. Then, Millie says, we can say “our baby.”

  TONI CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF CHINA

  December

  “I’m going to write about Chinese egg and chips this week,” says Toni.

  “That’s a good one,” says Atticus.

  Though it’s a cold day, it’s as dusty as ever. They pick their way along broken pavements in an area beyond the commercial centre of Shanghai. They’re catching a lunch break together, heading to a small eatery that Atticus regards as a special find. He’s braver than he used to be—at one time he’d have dismissed the Xinjiang Food Heaven. It looks a dive, and most of the customers seem to be students or low-paid office workers. His colleague, Cheng, brought him to the restaurant when Atticus transferred from the London to the Shanghai office two months ago—a temporary transfer, yet the office agreed to cover Toni’s flights.

  Cheng taught Atticus the Mandarin for “not too spicy.” Since then, he has dined at the Xinjiang Food Heaven twice a week, and each time the young waiter greets him with a broad smile and the same question, “More chilli, today?” It’s a Uyghur restaurant, run by a family from the far west province of Xinjiang, on the old Spice Road to Europe. The Uyghurs are the pasta specialists of the East. As Atticus recalls his last lunch there—laghman noodles with lamb sauce and peppers—his mouth waters and, simultaneously, his stomach rumbles.

  Atticus carries Toni’s handbag because that’s the norm in China. Seeing his reflection in a shop window, he grins—it’s a lopsided grin. It’s funny how he’s melded with local customs; his shock threshold is much higher, and he reckons that’s a good thing. He and Toni pass the egg sellers who stack their stalls with hundreds, if not thousands, of eggs. They’re stacked so high that a stranger to the area might fail to notice, behind the egg sellers, two squat onion stalls positioned by the entrance to an alleyway. Atticus ventured down that alleyway with Cheng some weeks ago, discovering a food market that sweeps like a tsunami along the many dark back alleys off the main street.

  Cheng was a patient guide. He pointed out the specialities as well as everyday foodstuffs and fast foods: potsticker dumplings fried in large pans of oil; xiao long bao—a chicken-stock soup with dumplings filled with pork; black sesame bao and red bean bao—breakfast snacks, so sweet and sticky they made Atticus gag; stall after stall of fresh noodles; a stall juicing pomegranates; yet more displays of eggs—the smallest being pigeon eggs; and a wet fish market with long lines of blue plastic baskets filled with crab and eel. Atticus committed Cheng’s commentary to memory, regurgitating all the facts and anecdotes to Toni later that same day. He felt he’d discovered his nose for news because Toni immediately followed up with her own visit to the market and found a bunch of story leads. Already she’s written a short feature about the strange juxtaposition of the xiao long bao chef and his market neighbour, a chiropodist, whose pitch is just large enough for two wooden stools—one for herself and one for her customer.

  Thanks to that feature, Toni now has her own weekly column in The London Sentinel. Atticus feels the title, China Tales, is a tad uninspiring, but Toni had long dreamed of securing a regular column, and she dismissed his quibble about the title: “It’s a huge step forward for me. If the content is good, the sharing could be stratospheric.” Toni can’t get enough of China.

  They reach Xinjiang Food Heaven with its cracked plastic signage and steamed-up windows. It’s hemmed in by a cycle repair shop and a cigarette kiosk. As they step inside, they’re engulfed by the smell of cumin. They’re early enough to nab their favourite of the six tables—the one closest to the small galley kitchen. Toni takes a seat facing the galley’s open doorway. Atticus knows she’ll take mental notes. He twists around and sees the same three family members standing at their usual stations—mother and father and the father’s brother, crammed elbow to elbow in front of three steaming vats on a blackened gas stove. He turns back and watches Toni’s eyes as she inspects the kitchen interior, and wonders if he’ll be reading about the restaurant in her next column for the Sentinel. He hopes so because he’s curious to see which details Toni picks up on; he’s invariably surprised. Yet he attempts to match her; it’s a game he plays on the sly. He notices that the benches and stools are mismatched—battered but more or less clean. And the restaurant feels crowded with only four other diners, each sitting alone.

  Toni refocuses on Atticus. “My next column is sorted out. The egg-and-chips photos are absolutely brilliant. They’re perfect for China Tales. And it’s a double whammy—there’s a high hit-rate when travel combines with food.”

  She took the photos at the Wangfujing night market on the first evening of their recent trip to Beijing. At the time, Atticus had had one thought: how to fill his stomach as quickly as possible after their train journey from Shanghai. But Toni? Well, without fail, she has her antennae up for a story.

  “That street market was the best part of the whole weekend,” he says.

  “I can’t wait to go back.”

  He says, eyebrows raised, “If we’re going back to Beijing, we shouldn’t delay the trip too long. You’re pretty big already.”

  “I’m bigger than Millie at twenty-four weeks.” She places her palms on either side of her baby bump, takes a deep breath and puffs out her cheeks. Atticus laughs.

  “Hey, the photo you’ve chosen for the article—the egg-and-chips piece—you don’t mean the photo of me trying to eat the fried egg?”

  “Tempting, but no. It’s the one showing the bundles of long chips—like bundles of twigs—with a fried egg slapped on top of each bundle. The way they’re all carefully stacked, raking back . . . it looks gorgeous. Totally improbable, but gorgeous. It’s such a crazy riff on the British greasy-spoon café.”

  “I tell you what. I’m going to Shenzhen in two weeks’ time. I can take a trip out to that artists’ village, Dafen. If you give me the best photo, I’ll ask one of the painters to make two copies.”

&nbs
p; Toni crinkles her nose. “Sounds a bit naff.”

  “No, listen. I’m serious. The artist could send the finished canvases to us by post, and I’ll get them stretched and framed here in Shanghai. We can have a painting each, copied from the same photo. Or I can give the artist two slightly different photos, different angles.”

  “Atticus! People think we’re weird already, living in separate flats in the same block. There’s no way we’re having identical fucking décor.”

  “Don’t swear, Toni.” He mock frowns. “Baby might hear. And, by the way, I think I’ve decided on a boy’s name. On . . .” He pauses. Toni is wide-eyed. “Marco. So, Connie for a girl, naturally. And I’d like Marco for a boy—goes well with Atticus.”

  Toni reaches across, takes hold of his hand. “Good choice. I can live with Marco.”

  The proprietor’s son, a teenager wearing shorts and a T-shirt, sidles up, “More chilli?” He laughs. Atticus shakes his head, points at the photos in the plasticized menu, ordering black tea and cardamom to start them off, then for himself, the Uyghur dish of polu—rice pilau with lamb and lamb fat, carrots and dried fruit. Toni points at spiced soup with tiny meatballs, and a small naan with chopped chives. The boy whirls around, shouts the order across the kitchen.

  Toni says, “Anyway, what about your morning? Finished that proposal yet?”

  He shakes his head. “So frustrating. I’m waiting for data from one of the directors—keeps promising. Then the London and Hong Kong offices are keeping me waiting for updated bios. And I don’t like the proposal’s introduction.”

  “I thought you used software for writing abstracts.”

  “Only when I’m desperate. The results are always turgid.”

  The face she pulls says, you poor thing. “It should be easy enough, really. It’s an interesting project—Asia’s biggest clean-up.”

  “Nothing sounds sexy with soil remediation in the title. I’ve rewritten the opening paragraph about six times this morning.”

  “Cut to the chase, Atticus. Skim through the document and look for a phrase or a sentence that snags your interest. Pretend you’re writing for a general reader. Everyone loves an anecdote. Or find a great statistic.”

  He dips his head and looks up at her as if to say, It’s easy for you. “Anyway, I’ve a dozen other problems to sort out, and the deadline’s pressing—”

  “Relax, will you?” She splays out her hands on the table. Atticus can see there’s a pep talk coming. “When I write a travel feature, I always start in the middle of the action. At the moment of highest drama.” She pauses, then repeats, “Highest drama.”

  “I’m not sure that’s applicable.”

  The teenager brings out their orders—the plates and bowls are as mismatched as the restaurant’s furniture—and sets them down with the calculated delicacy you’d expect in a five-star restaurant. The boy’s dedication stabs Atticus in the heart.

  “Atticus, just chill out. In my work, you see, I’m a flâneur. I try to take in the big picture by absorbing all the small details. Basically, I try to capture the essential, um, unfamiliarity of any given situation.” Atticus isn’t convinced this is going to help. “Or, lift a great quote from someone in the industry.”

  He knows it’s good advice. Anything presentational is her forte—he saw it in the way she handled the news of her pregnancy. She slipped into crisis management mode. Not that public relations is her thing, exactly, but she studied the theory during her journalism studies. In a crisis, she told him, the correct way to handle bad news was as follows: total honesty, with information released in bite-sized chunks, in as short a time frame as possible. Ideally, the worst news should be released first, but sometimes you have to hold back. She said, “When the time comes to tell your parents, don’t simply blurt out that I’m pregnant. I don’t think they’ll cope with a blunt statement.”

  Atticus doesn’t like such window dressing. Makes him feel dishonest. His parents, he decided, could take it all in at once. They’d rarely been critical, and they were grateful to him for renovating the house. As it turned out, he’d expected too much, and now there’s an edge to all his conversations with his parents. They’ve lost their easiness with one another, and he hopes the baby’s arrival will patch things up.

  “Look, I’ll give you a hand with the intro this evening,” she says. “This is the big one, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. We’re saying the project will take three years, not two and a half. You still feel okay about that?”

  “Are you kidding? China’s a gold mine for me. I only need to walk outside; there’s a story on every block. Have you noticed the elderly woman with her sewing machine? She sits by the roundabout at the end of our street? She has an old wooden chair, and her machine sits on a folding metal table. You must have seen her; she’s there every day, wearing a thick coat with a high collar.” He looks blank and shakes his head. “Anyway, I spoke with her this morning. Well, I didn’t speak. I explained in international sign language.” She laughs. “I showed her my bump and explained I needed some clothes let out. It won’t cost much, hardly anything, and I’ll get another month’s wear out of everything. It’s a great piece for the column: there’s me with my best work clothes, purchased from a chichi boutique in London—well, I can exaggerate a little—handing them over to an old woman sat on a pavement in Shanghai. And no receipt.”

  He puts his hand to his mouth and gasps. “Chilli!” At the sight of Atticus, the teenage waiter doubles over with laughter, and his mother comes out of the kitchen to steal a glance. While Atticus blows in and out, Toni’s phone vibrates. She picks it up.

  “Message from Millie!” she says, evidently surprised. Millie doesn’t have time for idle messaging; the baby is only two weeks old.

  Atticus takes a slug of water. “Anything wrong?”

  “Says: ‘All’s well. Rudy’s thriving. I’m knackered. Just to let you know, in case you want to send a message, that Aiden’s mother—Betty, you remember?—she died at the weekend. In her sleep. I won’t get to the funeral. Don’t think I could handle it. Love Millie, kiss kiss kiss.’”

  “Couldn’t handle it? You mean, with a newborn baby?” says Atticus.

  Toni pushes her shoulders back, trying to stretch. “No, it’s not only that. She won’t want to see Aiden—he’ll have to fly back from wherever the hell he is now.”

  “She’s still mad at him? Because he wouldn’t father the baby?” Atticus attempts to cool down his mouth, taking sips of water and fanning his mouth with his hand.

  “There’s more to it than that.” Toni’s eyes are watering. Atticus wonders if he’s missed the point.

  She looks aside, lost in thought. He follows her gaze and guesses she’s staring at the bowl of steaming hot soup, which the young waiter sets down heavily in front of an elderly diner. A dirty crack runs down the side of the bowl from a large chip on the rim. Crikey, if the bowl breaks right now—

  Toni stares back at Atticus. She says, “It’s like this: Millie knew how much Betty wanted a grandchild. So Millie must be thinking, you know, what if. Imagine, Atticus. If Aiden had agreed to father the baby, then Betty would have seen her grandchild before she died.”

  Atticus hands Toni his thin paper napkin. She dabs her eyes, blows her nose. “It’s harsh, I know”—her voice cracks—“but I hope Aiden feels a total shit.”

  PART TWO

  2084–2085

  THE ADOPTION

  March

  Don’t say bottle babies, Rudy Dack tells himself, though he fears the slang is already imprinted.

  His wife, Simone, sits in the control seat as always. The car veers into the grounds of the clinic and scrunches along the gravel drive, making Rudy feel anxious on Simone’s account. They sweep through a forested perimeter and emerge to see a glass block of a building.

  Simone turns to him and beams. “It’s modern.”

  “That’s a good start, isn’t it?”

  “The gravel drive . . . I was worried.”<
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  Rudy knows the gravel drive conjures images of old buildings for Simone. She dislikes old brickwork and iron railings. Smooth red bricks in particular drag her down. It’s not that her childhood was dire; her parents were not deliberately neglectful. Yet when she’d left home for her university studies, she couldn’t bring herself to return, not even for a brief visit. She left it all behind—her family and their suburban home with its smooth red bricks and black gloss railings. Rudy is the only person who knows about Simone’s architectural distastes. He admires her love of all things new. She always faces forward.

  “We’re due to birth a baby in an hour,” says Dr. Kristina Christophe. “So I’ll need to break off shortly to meet the parents. Let’s take a tour of the wards now. I’ve booked a table for you in our guest restaurant; you can enjoy a leisurely lunch, on my account, while I’m overseeing the birth.”

  They follow Dr. Christophe across the atrium in the direction of the gestation wards.

  “There’s no point going to the first ward. There isn’t much to see there. The foetus you’re looking at today is in the third-trimester ward.”

  Rudy cringes. He loathes the word foetus—the cold heartlessness of the word—with its intimation that an ungendered it hasn’t as yet earned its passage.

  “Can we see the second-trimester ward too?” asks Simone.

  “Okay. And I’ll also show you the control room. Then, after lunch, when you’ve had time to take it all in, we’ll talk through the family details and your obligations should you decide to go ahead. How does that sound?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Perfect,” says Rudy. He squeezes Simone’s hand as they walk with Dr. Christophe along an evenly lit, glass-walled corridor. The large glass panels are coloured in five shades of creamy yellow. Rudy feels he’s walking through a dream.