The Visitors Read Online Free PDF

globe. We talk about countries, about our little England and the provinces beyond it, all encompassed in a sphere. She is astounded at how quickly my fingers move across it and how my mind knows it so completely so soon. By touch, I have a special knowledge of it which perhaps a sighted child would not gain from a flat map. In a morning I learn the continents and the oceans and some of the countries. Europe gives me trouble, so many little nations on one slab of land.
    ‘Do they not argue in Europe,’ I ask Lottie, ‘living so stuffily?’
    I like mountains, as they ridge pleasantly beneath my fingernails. The first I learn are the Alps. They do not feel so very far away from England. I ask Lottie if we can visit the Alps tomorrow. She explains the globe is a scale replica, that I have to multiply the distances I feel by hundreds and thousands of times. That the miles from here to Australia are almost beyond imagining. My mind aches at this. But one day, I will be able to comprehend it. For now, the globe gives me a shape for our existence.
    But what is beyond the globe? The sky. And beyond that? The stars. And beyond them?
    Lottie says, ‘Your father wants to talk with you about that.’
    ‘Why not you?’
    ‘Your father does not want me to discuss such matters with you.’
    ‘About the sky?’
    ‘No, about God.’
    ‘What is God?’
    ‘Ask your father.’
    So I ask him, ‘What is God?’
    Father tells me God created the world and the universe and everything in it. He is all-powerful and all-knowing. God wants me to be a good girl, kind to others and always mind my parents and my teacher. God knows when I have been bad. He sees me always and knows my every thought.
    ‘Does he live in my house?’
    ‘No, our Lord resides in heaven.’
    ‘Is it by the sea?’
    ‘No, it is above the earth, way up above the sky itself.’
    ‘When you look up, can you see heaven with your eyes, Father?’
    ‘No. It is not in our sphere.’
    ‘How can God see me then?’
    ‘He has the all-seeing eye.’
    ‘How can he hear my thoughts?’
    ‘He can do anything He pleases. He can enter your mind and eavesdrop on you.’
    ‘Like the Visitors?’
    ‘Who?’
    I stop there. I am not ready to tell Father about the Visitors. I do not want him to think I am a lunatic.
    Now I know about the world and about God, and I can speak about them. I believe I know everything, that my education is complete. What else is there to learn?

4
    Lottie brings me something new. Slips of paper with bumps on them. She lets me feel the bumps; they are made of lines and curves, like the carvings on my headboard. She puts a pot of glue beside me. She gives me a cup. She helps me to paste the paper to the cup. Then she spells C-U-P in my hand and directs me to feel the bumps on the paper. Now my mind is at work, it does not take me long to realise that the bumps are letters. Put them together and you can make words. Not in the hand, but on paper, where you can pass the paper to someone else and they can hear it by touching, even take away the paper to somewhere else and give it to another person, who can hear the word too, without even being in the room with you. I understand it is a kind of portable finger spelling. Lottie explains further that others can recognise these letter shapes with their eyes, while I use touch. Later I know this to be called reading and writing.
    We paste many labels on to objects and I start to learn the sequences of shapes, relating them to my finger alphabet. Pointing to the tip of my thumb corresponds to the shape A on the paper, and so on. Then I am given the separate letters of the alphabet on paper and I organise them myself into words, arranging them side by side to spell cup, key, apple. I put the words together to make sentences: water in cup, apple on table, key in door. I use the letters to make more words, the ones that are not objects you can hold or actions you can show, the useful words that hold language together: