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Without Peter or Lucy
In the endless twilight of a post-apocalyptic London, two children are climbing up the steep hill from the water to their house which is, like so many buildings here, half untouched, half destroyed. Viewed from the right angle, one could almost imagine that there had been no war. The large painted oak front door is in fact still locked. Around the back however, the various rooms lie exposed still filled with rubble covered furniture giving it the nostalgic almost appealing look of a doll house. Maybe Dad sits peacefully in his ratty old arm chair, pipe resting near-by. Or Mum lays draped over the ironing board in the kitchen.
Susan takes the lead using nearby blocks of concrete and piles of brick banked against the wall of the house to help her climb to the still mostly intact roof. Her younger brother Edmund joins her at the very peak of the relatively new Georgian. They peel away a piece of roof to reveal a secret compartment. Without a word, they each remove squareish black cases very much like a cosmetics case from a complete luggage set, and then begin climbing back down.
Without Peter and Lucy, they have collapsed in on one another. They sleep curled together where ever they can find shelter and hold hands much too frequently for children of their age. When Peter was leading them, always telling them that they must go on, Susan’s nagging and mothering made some sense. And when Lucy, the youngest and true of heart, would cry at this or that, Edmund’s petulant demeanor would go unnoticed. Together their personalities combined with the trauma, they are almost the neutral calm of lovers no longer in love but still together.
Susan and Edmund alive while everyone else has died. Certainly not just, if you count being alive and alone in this city that gets neither light nor dark a prize and not a punishment. That it might be a punishment, not simply bad luck, is never discussed; the thought is too unbearable.
Edmund, of course, betrayed them all for some sweets on their very first visit to Narnia. It was said that Aslan forgave him but the guilt of the event always hung around him, forever motivating him to tell the stupidest and usually most unnecessary lies. If he intended for these lies to somehow further him in someway, he must have always been disappointed.
A very reserved child under the best of circumstances, Edmund, consumed by adolescence, is covered in pimples – on his face, on his arms, on his back and even on his legs. He sits alone outside for lunch recess and secretly does small good deeds when no one is looking. Things like: returning a ribbon that had fallen out of a girl’s hair or retrieving a half eaten lunch to feed to the pigeons. Of course, he lies about these acts as well.
Susan’s betrayal is far less tangible. She had begun to grow up. When Peter and Edmund would “play Narnia” with wooden swords reenacting this battle or that, it was Susan, not Mother, who would scold them and tell them to grow up suggesting with less than subtle (or even lady-like!) language that they had never even been to Narnia. Even as a girl (she was now nearly out of her teens), she would scold her dolls, the cat, her siblings, even Mum and Dad. “Sit up straight!” “No talking with your mouth open!”
Today if they were to find food (and this is a big if) it is unlikely that she would notice such trivialities.
Scrambling down the hill back toward the water, they knew what they needed to do was to get back to Narnia. They hoped that taking the row boat down the river and out to sea that they might find the Dawn Treader exploring the edges of the world and might be welcomed back aboard. Like everything else in this world, the row boat is filthy and battered. It is not an ideal craft to be in out on the open water. But, what choice do they have? Even the water here is contaminated. It is time to leave the dead. They gently placed the cases in the boat and pushed away from shore.
Tumbling down the now very much untamed river, a man spots them from a balcony and decides to try and pursue them. His flat is immaculate, having somehow been completely untouched by the bombs. He sits on the balcony sipping bottled water feeling quite content. Why he decides to leave his oasis and go out there when he hasn’t actually gone out there for twenty years, is a mystery. Somehow he also gets a row boat and takes chase. The children have too good a lead. He never catches them.
Out on the ocean, they find the Dawn Treader with remarkable ease. But even though Repecheap the over-grown talking rat greats them with his usual effusive sword gestures (gestures that have more than once nearly caused a fight and did once caused a young princess to lose a lock of her hair) it is not a happy Narnia that they have entered. It’s not even a romantic battle that King Caspian is engaged in. There is not a single moster to chase down to slay or befriend (depending on the disposition of the monster).
Repecheap explains that they are doing battle with a mad king from an island many hundreds of miles away from Narnia. This king flies the flag of the lion and travels vast distances to harass his neighbors for reasons no one can guess.
The mad king's infrequent and largely unproductive escapades would have been simply ignored had it not been for his own people requesting King Caspian’s assistance in dethroning him. The story is that he carries about the cloth covered torso of a mannequin with him where ever he goes. It is even rumored that he has the rather embarrassing habit of kissing the dolls hard breast where the nipples should have been while in public. A few brave souls point out the obvious insanity of his actions only to be completely ignored. A few days later, the critic will simply disappear.
The children find themselves believing that this King is responsible for the vacuum of life, or of happiness in those who would not die, in their world too. It is his steadfast denial that fuels all this half darkness – present even here in this false feeling Narnia. Sadly, these are not the heroes that have come to help; it is the other two. It is the two with darkness in thier hearts that have come to battle the darkness on the sea. And this is not the King Caspian of the many grand tales, this is but an old man crippled by blindness. Even the unsinkable Repecheap is cowed by this darkness. It seems that there is no hope...
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Diagram 1, August 2006
Diagram 2, August 2006
Diagram 3, August 2006
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