Dreams Before the Start of Time

by Anne Charnock

  Untitled No. 633, 2002, Dominic Munroe

  A close-up of a keyhole with a polished brass escutcheon, in a red exterior door. A sprig of rosemary protrudes from the key hole. Marco imagines an art deco stained-glass window, circular, set into the door, out of shot. The sprig of rosemary is surely a message: I called but no one was home. A signal from a family member or good friend, someone who is close to the house owner but has no key—a cousin, a nephew, an aunt. One image but several plausible stories. Is it safe to assume that no one was home? Or did the owner hide behind a curtain, having checked who’d rung the bell? Did the visitor drop by with good news, bad news, or gossip? Did the owner return home and, on seeing the sprig, feel frustrated or relieved?

  There must have been a rosemary plant in the front garden. Again, it’s out of sight. And it must be well established—you wouldn’t tear a sprig from a small specimen.

  Marco smells the rosemary.

  He admires Dominic’s brazenness; he’d spotted the keyhole, walked along the path—maybe four or five paces—through the front garden of a stranger’s home, and shot the photograph. That’s how Marco sees it. Ah, but . . . Was Dominic the visitor? Of course, he put the sprig in the lock. That must be it, mustn’t it? In which case, are these photographs a form of diary? There’s no need for words when a photograph recalls an entire episode.

  It occurs to Marco that he should take a leaf, or a sprig—he grins at his own joke—out of Dominic’s book; he should pursue a creative interest for no particular purpose. Definitely visual. He isn’t a wordsmith like his mum, definitely closer in his interests to Atticus. (Marco never did call Atticus Dad. He can’t remember a time when his parents were anything other than Mum and Atticus.) He needs a sustained spare-time activity, a hinterland. For it’s the hinterland that completes a person.

  Untitled No. 2262, 2034, Dominic Munroe

  A photograph of a kid’s drawing on a weathered brick wall. At the base of the wall, on the pavement, there’s a small pile of coloured chalks. The line drawing on the brickwork—in red, yellow, white and blue—depicts a woman in a big hat walking a dog with a big tail. Marco enlarges the photograph, looks in close-up at the woman’s cartoon lips. Stuck between her lips is a crooked cigarette butt, a real one, and there’s another cigarette butt jutting from the dog’s mouth.

  Marco barks a laugh. He imagines the scene: the child artist found the butts on the pavement, or in the gutter, and picked them up. Without any plan in mind, the kid screwed them into holes in the brickwork—bored kids do that kind of thing—and only then did the kid draw the woman and dog around the cigarette-butt interventions.

  For now, Marco won’t hatch any plans for Dominic’s photographs. He’ll simply enjoy swiping through them—after all, he’s getting a new angle on his grandfather—though Marco admits the photographs aren’t exactly avant-garde; there’s no shock of the new here. Dominic’s intention was perfectly simple. By shooting these photographs, he trained his eye; the act of observing made him ever more observant.

  Marco closes Dominic’s collection. He opens another file. It’s a video of Amelie, one he watches most evenings. It’s a ritual that stops him ruminating over his sporadic-at-best love life.

  In this clip, Amelie is seven months. She hugs herself in her artificial womb, thousands of miles away in a private clinic in Mumbai—highly rated for solo conceptions for men, and evidently operating below the radar of regulators. Marco had never warmed to the idea of using donor eggs. Going solo felt right, and no one outside his close family needed to know. He planned ahead, took a job in Mumbai, and returned to England at the end of his contract with a baby, his own baby.

  There she is with her dimples, still the same. Is she smiling? Or full of wind? There’s no knowing. Or is she dreaming? He prefers to think so. A dream before the start of time, her time here in the world.

  Amelie appears at the door, hair unkempt. “I heard you laughing.” She steps in, and the projection of her foetal self distorts across the folds of her nightdress and across her face. Marco turns off the video.

  “Oh dear. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “I wasn’t even asleep. You should let me stay up later, Dad.”

  “Come over here, then. Look at this funny photo—one of Grandad Dominic’s.”

  He pulls up the image. Amelie gazes, smiles vacantly—she’s more tired than she’ll admit. Then Marco enlarges the dog’s head. She bursts into laughter.

  “I wish you’d known Dominic,” says Marco.

  “I do know him!”

  “Not really. Not for real.”

  Marco returns to Dominic’s photographs. It occurred to him, while shepherding Amelie back to bed, that he could curate a series of small selections—one for each member of the family. But the first will be for Amelie. He’ll select sixty photographs—the funnier the better—one for each year of Dominic’s photographic quest. He likes the idea that he might forge a new, deeper connection across the four generations. And the photo of the woman, dog and cigarette butts will make a fine opener for any series.

  He looks up at the skylight. It’s still black out there, but this time he notices Mars.

  THE WASHING LINE

  July

  Toni Munroe sits in the garden studio—her dad’s old studio—and dictates an address into a spreadsheet. The address is the current location of one of her dad’s major commissions, a copy of Claude Lorrain’s The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. She has confirmed the whereabouts of twenty-three of his paintings, but sixteen paintings still sit in the column titled Location Unconfirmed. Her dad kept pretty good records. Over the years, however, the paintings commissioned by private individuals have been handed down to their families, often moved to new residences or, Toni fears, chucked into storage. She wonders if some of her messages go unanswered because the owners don’t want to admit they’ve lost the paintings. They’re only copies after all. However, all his copies made for museum collections are still on display—these were among her dad’s most lucrative commissions because the museums earned troves of money from touring the originals.

  She looks across at the towels hanging, listless, from the washing line on this sunny, near-breezeless day, and smiles. She never relandscaped the back garden of her parents’ home, for one reason: she retains a fractional memory of her mum pegging wet sheets to the washing line. She knows if her parents were looking down on her, they wouldn’t mind if she made changes. However, Toni fears she might lose the memory if the garden were to take a different form.

  It’s a specific memory, not a generalized, woman-with-washing-basket-on-hip sort of thing. She sees a particular moment. A white sheet is pegged to the line; it’s snapping back and forth in a strong wind. Her mum takes the weight of a second sheet—dark blue—on her shoulder and grabs the line with her left hand. She throws the blue sheet over the line with her right hand in a clearly practiced movement, and from her pocket she takes a wooden peg; she stabs it to the sheet. That exact movement is ice-cold clear—the way her mum stabs the peg on the line. All these years later, there’s nothing so sweetly domestic to Toni’s ear as the sound of violently flapping bedsheets. She loves a good drying day.

  Toni says, “Add to my list of happy moments: Mum hanging out the laundry. And read the full list as it stands.”

  Her bracelet speaks in a voice carefully preferenced by Toni to sound like her friend Millie Dack—that is, to sound like Millie when she was a young woman.

  “Bravo! You have twenty items on the list. May I suggest a few additional special moments based on your social history as—”

  “No, no. None of that nonsense. Please, read the list.”

  “Would you like me to order the list chronologically?”

  “No. In the order I thought of them.” She leans back, folds her hands in her lap and closes her eyes.

  The bracelet says, “One. When I pimped my denim jacket with embroidered cherry blossom and a Chinese sword.

  “Two. My first story in
the school newspaper.

  “Three. Every time Atticus bakes bread.

  “Four. When Marco was born.”

  “Pause,” says Toni. She feels she ought to rank these happy moments, place Marco’s birth at the top—one of the defining moments of her eighty-three years; the single life-defining event that displaced the loss of her mother. Toni’s worldview changed on the day Atticus collected her and Marco from the hospital. As they walked out of the maternity unit, as she breathed fresh air after three days in the institutionalized, sanitized atmosphere of the postnatal ward, she grasped that everything had changed. The idea of Atticus living in a separate flat suddenly seemed preposterous.

  She’s on the verge of elevating Marco’s birth to the top of her list, but she falters. The towels hang limp on the washing line; the breeze has died. It’s uncanny; within that happiest moment—giving birth to Marco—a seed germinated for one of the deepest sadnesses of Toni’s life. Marco never knew her mum. He grew up knowing Anna as his granny; children don’t say step-granny, or do they? Marco should have called her Anna—Toni could have encouraged that. She should have reserved the granny title for her mum. Toni had hoped that as Marco grew up, he’d piece together bits of information, anecdotes about her mum, to create a picture of her, however distorted that picture was bound to be. But hard as Toni tried, dropping her mum’s name into conversation whenever possible, she reckons Marco only truly clicked one afternoon in his twenties when the two of them were clearing up the kitchen. He’d made a roast dinner during a visit home; cooking was his hobby, how he relaxed. Toni told him that her mum, Connie—she always tried to imprint the name Connie on Marco’s memory—had taken classes in French cookery in her spare time, that she’d considered going further. Toni had recounted this story before, but this was the first time he’d really listened. Marco asked, “Why didn’t she go further?”

  Of course, it was ancient history, but Toni did remember her mum saying, “I couldn’t work all day in a hot kitchen.”

  It was Marco’s reply that stays with Toni: “So it’s your mum I take after, as much as anyone.” In fact, hearing that simple statement is one of her happiest memories, but she won’t add it to the list.

  “Carry on,” she says to her bracelet.

  “Five. When I felt Millie’s baby kick.

  “Six. When Marco told me I’d be a grandmother, and when he brought little Amelie home.

  “Toni, if I may interject—strictly speaking that’s two separate items, but I’ll continue.

  “Seven. When Dad painted the bamboo graffiti.

  “Eight. When Amelie was a toddler and started calling me Nan Toni.”

  She shudders with a silent laugh. Nan Toni and Gr’Atticus.

  “Nine. When I moved into my first flat.

  “Ten. When Dad took me to Shanghai Fabric Market.

  “Eleven. When we moved back into Dad’s house after he died.

  “Twelve. Walking the walls of Xi’an city.”

  “Stop there,” says Toni, for it strikes her as odd that three of these memories happened in the year after her mum’s death. Toni realizes that if she and her dad hadn’t travelled to China, she’d now see that entire year as a gaping black hole, a nothing time. To lose your mum at twelve years old was tragic by any standard, but to lose a loved one in the days before holographic reconstructions . . . Well, no one ever mentions that to Toni; it’s too damned sad.

  It isn’t as easy as she’d thought to pinpoint the happiest moments in her life. Not because her memory is failing—it certainly isn’t—but it requires chance connections to bring those happy moments to the forefront of her thoughts. She could make a list of her unhappiest moments in a trice. Why is that? Pain scrapes a deeper groove?

  Amelie had prompted Toni’s list-making—when she came over for Sunday lunch with Marco two weekends ago. Over puddings, they launched into their usual recounting of family tales. Toni told Amelie about that first visit to China, when she visited Suzhou—how she visited local gardens with exquisitely named pavilions—Putting a Question to the Spring Pavilion, the Pavilion of Dark Blue Waves. Amelie giggled when her Great-Grandad Dominic, sitting at the dining table in holo-mode, said, “Don’t forget the Waterside Pavilion of Washing Hat Ribbons.” He flickered. Anna, beside him, flickered too, as though a gust had blown across them both.

  Amelie then asked Toni, “Was that the best time ever, Nan Toni? You know, the happiest? When you went to China with your dad?”

  Toni, caught off-guard, found herself flustered. She summoned an unconvincing white lie, about all her life being happy. Amelie insisted, saying, “I’m serious, Nan Toni. I want to know your best day ever.”

  Funny little girl. Amelie Constance Munroe. Constance, after Toni’s mum. She loves the old stories.

  The end wall of the studio is hung with the abstracts Toni’s dad painted during his retirement. Toni arranged the paintings this way after his death. They’re still saleable, but Toni maintains they aren’t hers to sell. They will belong to Amelie one day. And after Amelie, they will pass down hopefully along the bloodline, so that Dominic Munroe becomes the best-remembered ancestor in the family because there is substance to back up the family lore. She has already given Marco the digital files for her dad’s street photography. She discovered these photographs after his death; it seems he’d worked on this unremunerated, personal project since his student days.

  “Add another item to my list: When I discovered Dad’s street photos.”

  She hears rain on the studio roof, but it’s a passing shower; it lasts a couple of minutes. Perhaps her dad looked up from his work when it rained—checked if any sheets were on the washing line. Toni imagines him dashing out to the rescue, her mum rushing out from the house at the same time, and they’re laughing as they throw pegs to the ground. They run, draped in sheets, back to the house.

  Hardly anyone uses a washing line these days. Toni does so because she loves to repeat her mother’s pegging action. And there’s another reason. She loves the fact that even as an octogenarian she has the physical strength to lift the wet sheets. Thanks to her exo-skel. She and Atticus are early adopters in all things techy; she buys all the upgrades.

  Her bracelet says, “Toni, you’re scheduled for Nicol’s skating class this afternoon, with Millie. Battersea Park. Do you need a nap before lunch?”

  “Good idea. And remind Atticus that tonight’s our date night.”

  She stands up from the desk and walks across the studio. She steps out of her exo-skel, then lies down on the narrow day bed. The bed is her addition to the studio, and she loves to wake up from a nap to the smell of pine cladding. “Wake me in forty-five minutes, will you?”

  Toni relaxes in the luscious anticipation of an evening with Atticus. It’s part of their understanding that they arrange a weekly date night whenever either of them has another love interest. He’s been staying over with Candice for the past two months, but Toni reckons he’ll return to her soon. No complaints though. She’s been busy with her dad’s archive, so, had Atticus been here, he might have felt neglected. And Atticus hasn’t had a lover for at least five years, whereas Toni had a reunion last year with her old flame Freddie—returned home to England for his retirement. Freddie, thank God, has mellowed over the years. He’s excellent company now; he’s fun. And she still teases him about the theatre programmes; he’d always been pestering to complete his collection. She sent them eventually.

  Freddie never had a family. In Toni’s opinion, he was too self-absorbed in his youth, and quite frankly, too damned selfish. But she’s let go of old aggravations, chats with Freddie most days, often before retiring for the evening. When Atticus is around, he joins in.

  She hopes Atticus will tell her tonight that he’s moving back. She misses the smell of his home-baked bread.

  Toni’s one-seater pod delivers her to the centre of Battersea Park, an expansive space, the poorer cousin to public parks north of the river. It’s a Londoners’ park, south Londoners,
that is. On a grey day, it feels desolate and uninviting, but on a bright day such as today, Battersea Park attracts as many runners, walkers, skaters, boarders, pram joggers and cyclists as any outdoor space in the capital.

  As usual, Toni is the first club member to turn up; Millie is invariably the last. The group meets at two park benches opposite the Pump House Gallery. The tutor, Nicol, is setting out the games’ paraphernalia. Toni’s pod door slides open, and she steps out carrying her tote bag and skates.

  “Look at you, all ready for action,” says Nicol.

  “We are skating today, aren’t we?”

  “Sure. Warm-ups, then twenty minutes skating around the park, and then a few games.”

  Toni drops her skates to the ground and reduces her exo-skel to medium assist. After all, zero effort means zero warm-up. This new suit is smarter than her last, so there’s less chance she’ll strain herself as she did last year. She missed all the summer sessions, even after two months of intense physio.

  She starts her stretching routine, one that she’s used ever since she lived in China. The People’s Park in Shanghai had a mobile crèche, and twice a week she left Marco there while she joined a Tai Chi class of mainly elderly Shanghainese. She’s pleased, even proud, that she also learned Mandarin, which she has kept up even though wearable translation is so much easier now.

  She tips her head back, reaches her fingertips to the sky. Two birds are harrying a magpie—protecting their nest, no doubt. She stretches out to her left at shoulder height, holds it, then stretches to her right. In the distance, she sees three pods heading in her direction. One veers off towards the café pavilion. She continues her warm-up, stepping forward to stretch each calf in turn. Increasing the exo-skel assist, for it’s too difficult otherwise, she takes her weight on her right foot, bends her left knee backwards and grabs her ankle with her hand. She stretches her thigh, counts to twenty before releasing, then does a right-thigh stretch. She bends from the waist, touches her toes. And, standing upright, she takes a long step forward and lunges, her back straight as a plank, then repeats. She feels energized.