Dreams Before the Start of Time

by Anne Charnock

  Atticus wishes that Marco hadn’t arranged the droid guides for their stay in China: one for Xi’an, the second for Shanghai. He and Toni sit in their carriage at the Ürümqi terminus—they’ve waited for ten minutes already, while all the other passengers have transferred to their onward trains. It’s such an unedifying end to an awe-inspiring journey across the Eurasian steppe, across Ukraine and Kazakhstan—one that kindled in Atticus a true sense of traversing the globe. Many travellers consider the steppes a bore, but for Atticus the bore is waiting for the droid to appear. They could have transferred themselves to the Xi’an train and arranged to meet the guide at their hotel. He says, “We aren’t feeble. Marco shouldn’t interfere so much.”

  “There’s no rush, Atticus. If she doesn’t arrive in the next five minutes, we’ll go without her and tell Marco to inform the hire company. He’s only trying to help.”

  He pushes his face up against the window. “Wait, I think that’s her. Yes, she’s coming to our carriage. There’s a porter too.”

  He turns, and his irritation fades—Toni looks calm, open-faced. She’s seemed preoccupied in recent weeks, and he’s determined to find out what’s bothering her. He thought she might be slipping into a depression because of Millie’s death, delayed grieving and so on. He suggested as much to Toni. But she insisted she didn’t need any medication—said what she needed was a change of scene, that she felt jaded. And perhaps that’s all there is to it, because she seems a different person today.

  The female droid, pinch-waisted, appears at their carriage entrance. She’s dressed in the hire company’s sky-blue and yellow livery with a polka-dot neckerchief knotted jauntily off-centre. She salutes and smiles. “Welcome to Ürümqi. I’m sorry. I’m late due to circumstances beyond my control, and you will receive compensation. I will look after you for your onward train journey to Xi’an and guide you during your tour of the city. Please tell me if you’d prefer to be addressed formally or informally.”

  Atticus says, “Informally, please. Old Git One”—he points to Toni, then opens his hands—“and Old Git Two. You may abbreviate: OG One and OG Two.”

  Toni rolls her eyes. “I’ll overrule that if I may. I’m Toni, and he’s Atticus.”

  The droid dips her head. “You may call me LanBo or Blue Wave.” She stands aside, allowing the porter to shuffle in and take their baggage. “Let’s go,” she says breezily, gesturing the way with her hand. “You will adore Xi’an. Have you been there before? I can arrange the full tour of the five terracotta warrior sites and—”

  Toni says, “No, please don’t. We’d like to spend our time walking the walls of Xi’an city. We’ve seen the warriors three times over the last, let’s see . . . eighty-odd years.”

  Blue Wave brings her palms together as if in prayer. “You have made a very good choice. Xi’an’s fortifications are the best preserved in China.”

  And the walls will be an auspicious place to scatter Millie’s ashes to the wind.

  The next day, they take the hotel’s courtesy pod with Blue Wave to Xi’an’s city walls. At Yongning Gate, they take an escalator to the top. There’s something so relaxing, Toni feels, about returning to a place that you’ve already photographed and recorded. During Toni’s journo days in China, she often made mention of this city—the blossom gardens around the fortifications, the discordant views of old Xi’an inside the walls and new Xi’an outside, and the street food vendors who operate near all the major road junctions. This is one of her favourite places.

  She strides out onto the wide bricked path. She counts. It takes ten paces to reach the middle. She looks in one direction, turns and looks in the other. The path stretches into the far distance. Flags and red lanterns hang from black poles positioned every hundred metres along the wall. Younger visitors are riding bicycles; some things never change. Blue Wave is already streaming off facts and figures—the number of watchtowers, armouries—but Toni hasn’t come here to be educated. She hasn’t told Atticus, but she feels an overwhelming sense of calm here. It’s the permanence; she adores the brickmaker’s marks—carved into the original bricks, still sharp.

  Blue Wave points in the direction of the distant gatehouse. “We have a new attraction. Look. Please don’t be frightened.”

  They see a shimmering. Tourists in the distance appear to move aside. As the shimmering effect dampens and seemingly solidifies, Toni and Atticus see the warriors. “There must be hundreds!” says Atticus.

  “Exactly one thousand holo-form warriors. Stay where you are. They will detect you and march around you,” says Blue Wave.

  Atticus and Toni walk forward and instinctively separate. At a distance of one hundred metres, the single-hued terracotta warriors morph into full colour—each face as real as any flesh-and-blood human. They quicken from a marching pace, unsheathe their swords in an instant and gather speed to a crouching run. Silent and ghostlike. Toni imagines a guttural roar.

  Eight abreast, the warriors charge past. Toni finds herself isolated. She can’t see Atticus. She faces wave upon wave of armour-clad warriors. She sees light ahead and realizes she’s holding her breath. Three lance bearers bring up the rear. They jog with spears held at shoulder height, seemingly relaxed. But they lengthen their strides in unison, arch backwards and hurl their spears. Toni jerks back, her forearms reaching her chest as a spear flies through her and beyond. She freezes as the spear bearers run past.

  Hearing giggles, she looks back. Two young children raise their hands to conceal their glee, but their small bodies shudder with silent laughter. They’re totally unfazed by the warriors.

  Atticus puts his arm around her shoulders. “I can think of worse ways to go—a spear through the throat. You know, I’ve often thought that I’d prefer to die in a fight—like a street fight—than die in my sleep. I can’t imagine anything worse than simply not waking up. At least in a fight, you know that death is imminent.”

  Toni takes a breath. “If you’re serious, Atticus,” she says, “I’ll make arrangements.”

  In the Long Bar of the Waldorf Astoria in Shanghai, Atticus is writing a list. It’s a list for Rudy of all the places where they sprinkled Millie’s ashes. He assumed Toni would be keeping a record—it’s a Munroe-family thing after all, making lists—but she asked him to write it all down. He hopes that after seven wonderful, carefree days together, she isn’t taking a morbid turn. It wouldn’t be surprising—carrying Millie’s ashes around all week. His mild disappointment with the holiday is that Toni has visited only her old haunts, as though she’s saying to herself, One last time. He’d prefer to see new places; there’s no need for their adventures to stop.

  Atticus cancelled the droid hire for Shanghai; he doesn’t trust them. They’re cheap for a reason. They push sponsored events, hurry you through your own schedule so they can shepherd you to an exhibition you’re not interested in, take a contorted route past specific advertising sites. They must think people are gullible.

  The waiter brings their order—two white chocolate mochas. It’s a reminiscence for Toni. She came here as a teenager with her dad, and this is the drink she ordered. Atticus is incredulous that Toni remembers such detail. It seems her memories of that visit are scribed in neon.

  Toni chortles. “I don’t think Rudy will expect grid references, Atticus.” He’s relieved; she’s okay. “Don’t forget the park opposite our hotel in Xi’an. I placed a pinch of ashes under a bonsai.”

  He adds this to the list, which already includes:

  The gardens at the base of Xi’an city walls, near the An’ding Gate.

  In the Huangpu River by the Bund, opposite the Waldorf Astoria.

  In the People’s Park in Shanghai, where Toni took her Tai Chi classes.

  In West Lake in Hangzhou—under a peach tree on Su Causeway.

  “I’ve saved a spoonful for our trip tomorrow,” says Toni.

  This is Suzhou, the Venice of the East, twenty minutes by bullet train from Shanghai. Toni and Atticus set out from their ho
tel on Shiquan Street in the old town and turn down the cobbled alleyway, which leads to the Master of the Nets Garden. The alleyway takes them through a dense, low-rise residential area and opens out into a high-walled courtyard. On the left side of this courtyard stands the imposing wooden gateway to the garden. Immense doors are pushed inwards into a dark entrance hall, and there’s a glimpse of the garden beyond. Toni has always stated, categorically, that this is her favourite place on earth. With a rush of adrenaline, and the fluidity of a woman thirty years her junior, she walks towards a fairy-tale vista—craggy limestone rockeries, blossom trees and pavilions set around the Rosy Cloud Pool.

  “When I came here with Dad, I imagined a zombie horde trying to scale the walls. I imagined that this walled garden was the last safe place in Suzhou, and the Master of the Nets was the sole survivor of a zombie apocalypse. And you know the three bamboo paintings? I took the original photos here—Dad made the painted copies back in London.” Atticus knows the story of the bamboo paintings, but the zombie horde is an embellishment he hasn’t heard before. Toni can still surprise him.

  They cross a zigzag stone bridge towards the Waterside Pavilion of Washing Hat Ribbons. They sit together by a limestone outcrop and hold hands. The tops of the tallest cherry trees are tousled by a stiff breeze, but the air is barely disturbed within the garden.

  “You know, Atticus, I told Millie about the gardens in Suzhou—this one, the Humble Administrator’s Garden and the gardens at Tiger Hill. I nearly persuaded her to come here after Julia was born. She was so unhappy for a while back then.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You were away from home around that time. I think you had a new love interest.” She looks at him and smiles as she pats his hand. “Or maybe Millie asked me not to tell you. I can’t remember now. She’d had a fallout with Rudy. Well, you know how it is after a birth—everyone’s emotional and exhausted. Things were said that couldn’t be unsaid, if you see what I mean. Took her a long time to recover.”

  “She should have come here. She’d have loved it. I never understood why she was so timid.”

  “Yes, timid about travel. Personally, I blame her parents; they were so overbearing. Millie said the strangest thing to me one time. She said she used to fantasize as a child about being brought up by another family. She’d look at other families in the street and say to herself, They’d be better than my parents.” They fall silent for a while. “But she loved her sister. So that’s something.”

  Toni opens her sling bag and removes the metal canister. “Let’s follow the path, find somewhere quieter.” The path is inlaid with pebble mosaics of fish and chrysanthemums. They pass through a circular opening into the simplest of gardens—a singular smooth boulder set below a purple magnolia tree. And onwards, they find the Meditation Study with its fretted exterior panels and a small courtyard planted with bamboo. A woman is sweeping the entrance, and she wanders away as Toni and Atticus approach.

  “Let’s do it now. Stand over there, Atticus, and tell me if anyone’s coming.” With difficulty, even with her exo-skel, Toni crouches down by the bamboo. She opens the capsule, pours the remaining few ashes onto the freshly turned soil, and draws the miniature trowel from her bag. She works the soil and ashes together.

  Toni suggests, as they board the Silk Route train heading westwards, that they book an early lunch in the dining car. “The view will be better than in our suite,” she says.

  “Good idea. You make the booking, and I’ll send a message to Marco—tell him we’re on board.”

  She suddenly feels the urge to disembark. Over the course of the past week, she’s felt herself becoming more like Millie: reticent. Yesterday, she demurred when Atticus suggested a day trip outside Shanghai to Pingshan, a village with classic Huizhou architecture—a place they’ve never been before. Having visited all her favourite places, she didn’t want to risk ending their trip on a potentially disappointing note. But Atticus was right to make the suggestion, and she felt bad he wouldn’t go there without her.

  They savour their light lunch of jianbing, a spiced Chinese version of crêpes, with spring onion, coriander and egg. Toni asked for a jianbing without mustard tubers, and Atticus warned, “Go easy on the chilli.”

  “I’ll miss the food,” says Toni. “I hope we’ll be back sometime soon.”

  The waiter brings their coffee. He asks, “Have you enjoyed your stay in China?” They say they have. Toni asks where he’s from, and he says he lives in a village called Turpan, south of Ürümqi on the old Silk Road. Toni knows that the word village doesn’t translate; the waiter is referring to a town, of probably half a million souls. The waiter says that people call Turpan “a place as hot as fire”; it is famous for its hot sand baths and its mountains, which appear to be aflame. He says Turpan is the most beautiful place in the whole world, and they should visit now because it’s the very best time—not too hot and not too cold.

  When the waiter moves on to the next table, Atticus says, “Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” He pushes. “Don’t you think?” And pushes again. “We never did visit Ürümqi or explore Xinjiang Province. It didn’t reach the top of the list, did it?”

  “It was horribly polluted when we lived here. We couldn’t have taken Marco.”

  “I’ve always fancied getting off the train at Ürümqi. You know, I first heard about Ürümqi in school in geography lessons. It’s near one of the poles of inaccessibility.”

  Toni grimaces. “What?”

  “Ürümqi is close to the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility—the farthest point on the Eurasian land mass from a coastline. Just as . . . the town of Allen in North Dakota is North America’s pole of inaccessibility.” He laughs, “See, occasionally I know stuff you don’t.”

  “I didn’t realize geographers could be so poetic. It’s lovely: a pole of inaccessibility. Maybe I should write an article . . .”

  “Why not?”

  A second waiter passes through the carriage, offering a choice of liqueurs. Toni and Atticus decline the spirits, but after conferring—they agree they can nap after lunch—they ask for two small glasses of tawny port. As the waiter pours, Toni says to Atticus, “Millie developed a taste for port. I’d pick up a bottle, something unusual, when I was travelling.”

  In her mind’s eye, Toni sees Millie in her armchair, a generous measure of port in hand, invariably in the same etched glass. She sees Millie studying her projected maps, timetables for shipping routes and train journeys, timelines of political alliances and trading agreements. “Millie called it a marriage made in heaven, you know—England and Portugal, their wine and cork traded for our cod. She had a brilliant talent for summary. Part of a civil servant’s job, I suppose.” She smiles, and her eyes mist. “Here we are on the Silk Route, and Millie probably knew all the history of trade in this part of the world. It’s a crying shame she never made this journey.”

  But Toni wonders if Atticus is listening at all, if his thoughts are still at the poles. Indeed, he continues: “Let’s see. In South America, the pole of inaccessibility is near Arenápolis in Brazil—never been there. In Australia, it’s near Papunya in the Northern Territory—haven’t been there either. And in Africa, the pole is somewhere near the borders of . . . I can’t remember, but it’s close to a town called Obo. I remember that much. And I always thought, as a kid, I’d travel to all the poles in my lifetime.”

  Toni falls quiet, gazes out at a stony desert that stretches north to the Gobi and Mongolia. “You know, Atticus,” she says without looking at him, “there must be thousands of people our age in Turpan who haven’t ventured outside their province, or even outside their own valley. And look at how many places we’ve seen and explored.” She isn’t sure Atticus heard this either. He’s looking out of the window too. He’s probably disappointed in her. But she has been intrepid for most of her life; she set the pace for so many years. Imagine if he’d married Millie—talk about total opposites. They’d have split years ago. Toni grins.
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  “What’s tickling you?” Atticus asks.

  “Oh, I was just thinking about Millie.”

  She wonders what her old friend might say if she were still alive. If she could whisper in Toni’s ear, right now . . . She smiles, for she hears Millie’s voice: Get off the train, will you? Go and explore. Come home and tell me everything.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Dreams Before the Start of Time started out, three years ago, as a short, novella-length manuscript. My editor at 47North, Jason Kirk, encouraged me to revisit and expand that work. Thank you, Jason, for your excellent advice—from that initial prompt through to the novel’s completion.

  My thanks also to Garry, Rob and Adam, always my first readers. And thanks are also due to Alex Jungwirth for her advice when I visited China.

  As ever, many thanks to the delightful and diligent team at 47North.

  It’s my pleasure to thank Dr. Aarathi Prasad for our conversation about human reproductive technologies. Aarathi’s astonishing book Like A Virgin: How Science Is Redesigning the Rules of Sex formed the starting point for my research. I may have occasionally misinterpreted my research sources, or added embellishments for fictional purposes. For the former, I apologize.

  I refer to a number of paintings in this novel:

  A Goodnight Hug, 1880, Mary Cassatt, pastel on paper.

  The Boating Party, 1893–1894, Mary Cassatt, oil on canvas.

  Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648, Claude (also known as Claude Lorrain), oil on canvas.

  Madonna of the Meadow, 1505–1506, Raphael, oil on board.