At school, Seth had no close friends. He was shorter and stockier than most, his skin a little paler than the average, though not enough to make him stand out. In the playground, he kept to himself, unless there was a game that appealed to him – a game of pirates, for instance, in which he could be relied on to repel boarders. His heavy forehead and dark eyebrows made it look as if he was thinking things through carefully, though his weak chin suggested it was unlikely he’d reach much of a conclusion. While the other kids didn’t think about such things as facial features, they did get an impression from him, and it was one they liked: solemn, but not hostile. And to get a smile out of Seth was an achievement. He was recognisable in the corridors and stuffy classrooms, with their Tupperware boxes full of marker pens and half-finished art projects pinned to the doors. The school tried not to push its pupils in the old disciplines, but encouraged them to find their own interests; some of the classes had an ‘open-door policy’, meaning any child could wander in.
Mary and Alaric were thrilled by the experience of watching their child grow: from shorts to long trousers, from words to sentences, from expressions of want to moments when he could reason and respond. When Mary gave him his favourite food, sausages, he would grace her with a smile, or at least a loosening of the jaw muscles and a light in his eyes. She fed him in much the same way as she catered for the people at her sports club: with a show of healthy stuff to start with, but then heavy on meat and potatoes. He could eat two rump steaks if he was offered, though cheese disagreed with him. Gradually, Alaric was able to interest him in trains. He bought a set in a toyshop in Regent Street. It was themed on a children’s book about dragons, but the rails didn’t fit together and the transformer kept short-circuiting. The assistant took it back without a question and added it to the pile of returns behind her counter. Online, Alaric found an old Hornby set in its original box, and, despite doubts about its age, he bought it. The track was small enough to set up in Seth’s bedroom, where they both sat on the floor. As instructed, Seth turned the knob on the transformer two notches. His eyes filled with wonder as the train began to move. It was not an interest in what trains did in real life, Alaric could see; it was joy at inexplicable motion.
Seth was in Year 6 when Miss Chapman took the children in her class to the local swimming pool. There was a classroom assistant in the shape of Weston Bernard, a hefty youth with a red polo shirt whose short sleeves rode up over biceps swollen by the gym. Miss Chapman undertook the safety lecture on the coach; Weston repeated it emphatically when they lined up outside the building. The school had booked the hour, so there were lifeguards on duty and no other swimmers in the lanes of the big pool or in the shallow water of the infant area.
The children emerged from the changing rooms into the warm, chlorinated atmosphere, some nudging and giggling, one or two running on confidently. Miss Chapman had a towel round her waist over her plum-coloured costume; she looked down at the water in the gutters and on the floor as if worried about the germs in that soupy air. She stepped into the paddling pool with the non-swimmers, discarding the towel as she went down the steps. Weston had new board shorts with an orange palm-tree design over his pale legs. He went into the shallow end of the big pool with the minority whose parents had signed a statement that they could swim. He counted them in by name and made each swim a width alone before allowing them the freedom of the depths.
At the end of the allotted half hour, Miss Chapman blew a whistle and the children left the water. They rearranged themselves according to which changing room they had used. As they hopped on the sticky floor, hunting for locker keys, sharing towels, there came a sudden shriek of panic that made them all stop, wet-haired and half-dressed. There were whistles and the sound of a klaxon from the pool area.
Miss Chapman wrapped her towel round her waist and Weston slipped into his rubber sandals. ‘Stay there,’ he shouted to the boys. The pair were in time to see one of the lifeguards, a man, dive into the deep end of the pool. A second, female, lifeguard leapt in from the other side.
Miss Chapman gripped Weston’s arm. ‘My God. What’s happened?’
Weston, who was himself not much of a swimmer, ran along the edge of the pool, sandals flapping, and jumped in.
The water under the high board was churning. Arms flailed, heads bobbed and sank. Miss Chapman stood, unable to move, her hands raised to her face, her fingers in her mouth.
Eventually the shoulders of the female lifeguard in her white T-shirt broke the surface as she began to kick hard towards the side. In her arms, as she swam on her back, was a child whom, with an athletic twist of her shoulders, she deposited on the tiles. Miss Chapman, unfreezing, ran round to where the boy lay and bent over him as the lifeguards clambered out of the water. It was Seth.
The male lifeguard pushed her away as he knelt down over the motionless child. He turned Seth on his front and pressed between his shoulders. Seth coughed and exhaled water. They sat him up and he opened his eyes. He stared about him, as if confused.
Miss Chapman wrapped her arms round him and began to sob.
The female lifeguard stood up and looked into the pool, where Weston was making slow progress in the deep end. ‘Keep an eye on him,’ she said to her colleague. ‘Don’t want two in one day.’
‘My God, my God,’ Miss Chapman kept saying.
‘Might have known it would be him,’ said Weston Bernard as he himself was given a hand out.
‘He was in your group,’ said Miss Chapman.
‘Only for changing,’ said Weston. ‘You had him for swimming.’
‘He can’t swim,’ said the male lifeguard.
‘That’s obvious,’ said Weston. ‘That’s why he was in her group.’
‘He must have got lost in the changeover,’ said Miss Chapman.
‘He’d been in the big pool before that,’ said the female lifeguard. ‘I saw him holding on to the side. We’ll have to fill in a report.’
‘Don’t worry. We can put our heads together,’ said the male lifeguard. ‘It was an accident. The important thing is—’
‘That he’s all right,’ said Miss Chapman.
‘Just swallowed a lot of water.’
‘Had a fright,’ said Weston. ‘Perhaps he’ll learn.’
‘Are you all right, darling?’ said Miss Chapman, hugging Seth to her.
Seth belched out more water and said something that sounded to his teacher like ‘S fell.’
The school played down the incident when reporting it to the parents. Alaric was known to be easy-going, but as a teacher himself was sure to be a regular participant in checks and safety tests. He might be critical. Mary was liked by the staff, including Miss Chapman, but was not someone you would risk antagonising.
Fortunately, Seth himself seemed relaxed about almost drowning. Miss Chapman sat him down and explained how he must think ahead, not just pull himself along the pool by hanging on to the side, but try to think what the dangers might be: he, a non-swimmer well out of his depth … Imagine.
‘I won’t swim again,’ he said.
‘That’s not what I’m saying, Seth. I’m saying you need to work out what the risks are. Think ahead. And listen to the teachers.’
He nodded, as if humouring her. ‘Yes, miss.’
When they had been briefed about the incident by the school, Alaric was inclined to put it behind them. ‘It’s very unfortunate,’ he said, ‘but at least the safety procedures worked.’
Mary was not so sure. ‘It’s not that I want to blame Miss Chapman or the local authority. As you say, it worked. Up to a point. I’m more worried about Seth. The way he just put himself in that situation, knowing he couldn’t swim.’
‘He’s a daring lad.’
‘It’s a failure of imagination.’
They had a short discussion about whether courage and a lack of foresight were the same thing.
‘The important thing is that we keep an eye on him,’ said Alaric. ‘Especially now he’s growing bigger.’
‘He seems to be on the verge of puberty already,’ said Mary. ‘Is that normal?’
‘I think it gets earlier all the time,’ said Alaric. ‘Something to do with nutrition. To judge from my generation and the boys I teach, the mean age has come down by a year in the last twenty-odd years.’
‘But Seth’s only eleven.’
‘I know. But there was a boy at my school who at that age was equipped like a man. And not just any man, but—’
‘I get the picture. But eleven … I don’t want him to be a man already. I feel he’s hardly had a boyhood.’
Alaric laughed. ‘He’s never been exactly childish. Dear boy.’
‘Which reminds me,’ said Mary. ‘Next year he can meet Talissa.’
‘Have you been in touch?’
‘No. But I do think about her.’
‘Do you think she’ll want to come and visit? Or has she forgotten all about us?’
‘Both,’ said Mary. ‘If you see what I mean.’
Alaric went back to the spare room, where he worked on his book, History Awake: The Challenge of the New Century. He had dropped the idea that the world had gone to sleep for about fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The facts didn’t support the thesis. The Cold War had ended, true enough, but Russia then evolved, via Wild West gangsterism, into Stalinism Mk II. In 2001, Islamists attacked America, who invaded Iraq in 2003 and plunged the Middle East into war without end. Banks and hedge funds bankrupted the world but had their losing bets paid out from ordinary people’s taxes. A scientific consensus agreed that the planet would shortly burn itself out unless humans changed the way they lived. You couldn’t really characterise all this as ‘nothing happening’.
His new idea was that most of the changes the world had undergone in the last fifty years, while often eye-catching, were superficial, and that the underlying concerns of humanity had remained the same.
‘What’s really altered in our lifetime?’ he asked Mary. ‘In the way we live from day to day?’
‘Well,’ said Mary, ‘when you and I were children, say in 2000, the internet suddenly began to work properly. Then everyone had smartphones. How about that?’
‘It was just one gadget. For the rest, it was still Russia, terrorism, Christmas cards, terrible game shows on television … It was still the world of my infancy. But now with mobiles.’
‘OK, so then, in the second part our lives,’ said Mary, ‘climate and energy crises. Potentially world-ending.’
‘But we never see this great Dogger power station,’ said Alaric. ‘All those turbines in the sea. Or the nuclear fusion labs. I’m not even sure where they are. People still eat baked beans and worry about their pensions and the Man U–Tottenham result. The only visible difference is the number of private cars. Quieter roads.’
‘I think you’re forgetting ADEPT,’ said Mary.
The provisions of the Anti-Discrimination and Equality of Populations Treaty, passed by the United Nations in July 2040, had been adopted by member countries to varying degrees. The Unites States passed a Thirty-Fifth Amendment; the European Union issued binding directives. The British Parliament, with no constitution to amend and with its application to rejoin the EU having been rejected, continued to dispute the merits of the treaty with itself.
‘I’m not sure about that,’ said Alaric, ‘how much it’s really—’
‘Come on, don’t you think ADEPT has finally moved the world into a post-identity phase? And surely that’s a change. For the better, too.’
‘I hope so. But some people say it’s just another attempt to get those with real grievances to give up their struggle. It’s worked in some countries more than others. At different rates, in different ways.’
‘But that’s history, isn’t it?’ said Mary. ‘Hard to pin down. It runs through your fingers. You know that.’
‘I suppose I do. Never the terminus, always the way station.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Perhaps we really are Selhurst Park,’ said Alaric. ‘But you have to keep going.’