In short, he had every mod con.
But he looked at his mother, who’d been married to his father for all those years, and all he saw in her eyes was a curly-haired eighteen-year-old called Albert, which wasn’t his father’s name, and who’d once, when she was sixteen and on holiday in the Isle of Man, whistled a tune every time he passed underneath her chalet window all that summer fortnight to let her know he was there and he was waiting for her.
He looked at his father, and all he saw in his eyes was a double image of a dark and deep and still pool in the river near where his father had grown up; it was back before the rivers were ruined, and in both those pools and both those eyes there was a silver fish the length of his father’s arm, and his father, aged twelve, who’d sat night after night waiting to catch that fish, was, God damn it, still sitting in the long grass at the side of that non-existent river right now in the far future.
He tried the eyes of some people he knew less well. He looked at their next-door neighbour. She had been hit by a bicycle when she was a young woman back in the ancient 1970s and her leg had been shattered, and even though she had a perfectly good new leg now all there was in her eyes was the fast flash of an afternoon of dancing at the wedding of her sister, when she’d been so fast and light on her originals, the feet she’d been born with, that it was as if they were winged.
He looked in the eyes of the neighbour who lived on the other side. This man’s eyes were terrifying because there was nothing in them but swastikas, and the images at the back of his eyes were, the boy decided, a place he himself would never choose to look again.
He couldn’t look in his grandmother’s eyes, because she had died and been buried without the necessary inbuilt computing system they’d launched in the year 1990 so that you could access the inner photo albums of the departed and leaf through them — just like, in the past, you’d have done if you’d gone to their house and a relative had handed you the album.
No one had yet solved the way of communicating with the dead. But when they did solve it, the boy thought, what would be the point anyway? All the dead would ever probably say, no matter what you asked them, would be, “Ah! once!”
The boy had known a girl who had died. She had been in the same year as him in the Young School. They’d sat together at the same Project Table; he had done Extinct Mammals (tigers and otters) and she had done The Old English Sycamore (the name, once, for a tree). Last year the girl had gone to bed one night and the next morning nobody had been able to wake her up.
It was a total mystery.
There weren’t many mysteries left.
Most of all the boy wanted to look into that girl Jennifer’s live eyes and see what was in them. There was no other girl’s eyes he wanted to look in, which was annoying and irrational. There would have been no point, obviously, in looking in her dead eyes, even if he could. They would just say, “ah, once,” etcetera.
But before she had died she had been young, like him, and not yet been onced by life.
Today the boy was taking his grandfather, who was a morose old man and didn’t get out much, up in a Pensionglide. They went up the public launcher on the side of the hill. Pensioners’ free airspace was from 10am till 12 noon, when less traffic used the skyway. There was a pretty good tailwind, and the Pensionglide went like a dream. His grandfather was in the back seat and the boy was in front, staring out at the blue of the sky and the stream of other pensioners going back and fore on the horizons of the turn of the century.
“Grandad,” the boy said, looking ahead into the eyes of the sky itself. “You are meant to be old and wise, and I need badly to talk to someone older and wiser than me, but I’m afraid to look into your eyes in case I see the same old story I keep seeing in everybody’s eyes.”
Then he realized the old man behind him was laughing. The old man was laughing so hard in the back of the Pensionglide that the little plane began to rock dangerously from side to side.
But he wasn’t laughing at what the boy had said, because he couldn’t hear what the boy had said; the boy’s words had been blown away in the wind (and anyway the old man wasn’t connected to his HearHelp).
“They forgot to give me my Senior Calmit, boy!” he shouted. “I never took my Senior Calmit! They forgot to give it me! I feel FANTASTIC. I haven’t felt this good in YEARS. Look!”
His grandfather pointed down at his own lap in the cockpit. He looked back at his grandson with his face full of delight.
“Christ! I wish your grandmother were alive today. I wish she were here right here and right now, son! I’d hold her on my knee and I’d sing her such a fine old love song!”
When they landed, and after his grandfather had badly but very energetically demonstrated a dance by the early film star Fred Astaire, flinging his walking stick from hand to hand and up into the air in front of a crowd of cheering pensioners on the runway, the boy returned his grandfather to the Old School gate to sign him back in. As they drew near, his grandfather grew morose again and began to shake.
“Please don’t grass on me,” his grandfather said. “They’ll double-dose me if they find out.”
Grass on me was old-speak for tell tales or betray.
“Grandad, they probably already know,” the boy said. “If they haven’t seen it on their monitors they’ll have tracked it via their Spirit Levels.”
But if they knew they gave no sign of it, and the boy said nothing, and when the grandfather saw that the boy wasn’t going to say, and that he’d got through the gates without being admonished or injected, he thanked the boy with his eyes.
The boy looked into the old man’s eyes and saw something amazing all right. He didn’t yet know it but he would spend the rest of his life looking back and looking forward in search of it, the still-unpolluted source that feeds into every ruined river.
This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.
BUT
would a man in shutting himself in / be asking things to stop or to begin?
Mark’s mother, Faye, had been dead for forty-seven years. Her most recent attention-getting device was rhyme.
Mark walked through the park. He had forgotten how charming it was here. Would he be testing whether he’d be missed / would such inversion mean he’d not exist? this was interesting, because usually she was much ruder and cruder than she was being this morning. Also, it was quite unusual for her to ask questions. Questions demanded an answer, didn’t they? They asked for a response. Unless they were rhetorical questions; true, she often used those (“a rhetorical question is one which does not expect an answer or one whose answer is implied”: The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith’s for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar). Mark went the long way, round and up through the woody place, to get to the Observatory, thinking it might be less steep. No, it was still notably pretty steep. He waited to get his breath back sitting on a bench opposite the place where one of the Astronomers Royal, or was it Astronomer Royals, had dug a well a very long way into the ground. According to the notice, the Astronomer Royal had sat down there under the surface, literally inside the hill, it looked like, watching the sky through a telescope. The well was fearfully deep.