Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

How had it started? Poppy had heard about driven parents who hired nannies to teach their children four different languages, and there had been a few students at Dalton whose mothers had glamorous international jobs that required spending their summers in Myanmar, finishing off high school in Cape Town, a sabbatical in Lesotho; children who learned the languages as a matter of necessity.

Poppy had not been one of them. She’d come of age on a council estate in Liverpool, but within those concrete walls she had heard dozens of languages. Their Polish neighbours had four blond boys they’d sometimes ask Poppy’s mother to babysit. One floor down lived Amira, the easily frightened Ethiopian woman whose clothes Poppy had offered to wash when her machine broke. In 9a lived the three-generation Pakistani family, Mr and Mrs Bhatia with their clever daughters and grandchildren.

One day, Poppy returned from school to find that her mother had disappeared. Absconded for a week to Ibiza with a boyfriend who disliked children. She’d pinned a pink fifty-pound note to the noticeboard by the front door and the phone number of her boyfriend’s sister.

Tia, the willowy Kenyan woman who lived upstairs, horrified that her neighbour had left her nine-year-old daughter alone for so long, offered to let Poppy stay for the week. Poppy slept on the sofa. But Tia’s young daughters did not like their new house guest; they called her ‘muzungu’ and picked at her hair as if it had fleas in it.

‘What does that mean?’ Poppy had asked.

Tia had shrugged. ‘It just means “white person”,’ she’d said with a dismissive wave, only the way that they said it, it sounded like an insult. So Poppy had worked hard that week to learn a few phrases in Swahili – hujambo, asante sana, lugha moja haitoshi. And the girls had accepted her words like a peace offering. Gave her others to add to her collection. Soon, the mood in the house changed, as if Poppy had crossed a threshold into their family, and by the end of the week they were singing raucously to Swahili songs, clapping their hands and braiding each other’s hair.

By the time Poppy’s mother returned, suntanned and exhausted, Poppy had realized that she had travelled somewhere too. It occurred to her, then, that there was a cure for her loneliness, that perhaps language had been the only barrier all along between herself and Amira, or the Bhatias and their blushing children. Six months later, she returned home from school and bumped into one of Tia’s daughters, who had showed her the friendship bracelet she’d woven for her out of loom bands and said, ‘Ninakupenda.’ I love you.

That was how it began for Poppy. She found that she had a knack for languages, that her tongue bent easily into unfamiliar shapes, that learning each new language felt like furnishing the mansion of her mind with new rooms through which she could wander. Soon she was asking her mother for language courses for Christmas, finding the cheapest ones she could afford, online lessons, podcasts. She requested Harry Potter in Japanese, Polish, Swahili. And the more she learned, she found, the more her mind was able to acquire, as if it was some impossible well that could never be filled. At first, Poppy used languages to help her to escape her mother’s neglect, but later, she discovered with delight that the languages could help her to escape her whole insipid life.

She had probably been given an interview at Dalton because one local newspaper had named her the city’s youngest ‘hyperpolyglot’. Poppy had always suspected that something about a mind that could grasp the counter-intuitive logic of another language appealed to the directors of the space programme. It meant that Poppy had easily picked up computer coding, learned the syntax and semantics to express the algorithms.

‘What are you reading?’ Jesse asked, breaking into her reverie as he climbed down the ladder and squinted at the title. ‘Is that Harry Potter?’

‘Yep.’ Poppy didn’t look up from the dog-eared pages.

‘In Italian?’

‘In Latin.’

‘Ha.’ Jesse smiled. ‘There’s a version in Latin?’

‘That’s right. Only the first two books though. I’ve heard there’s a version in Ancient Greek as well. It’s the longest Ancient Greek text written since AD 3.’

‘Children’s books in Ancient Greek – pretentious much?’ Harry said from across the room.

‘Says the man playing chess.’ Astrid rolled her eyes.