by Rohan Wilson
‘What did you remember?’
Her face fell. ‘Being with my mother.’
‘Alessandra?’
‘No. My real mother. My birth mother. She died when I was a kid. I remembered something that I hadn’t thought about in years.’
I folded the cloth in half and then quarters. A twinge of disquiet passed through my chest. Perhaps I’d opened a door that ought to stay closed.
‘Like, she was laid out on the tatami in our house in Japan,’ Rin said. ‘In the sun. I don’t know. Sleeping. Playing. I tried to wake her. That’s what I remembered. That she was there and I tried to wake her.’
I wiped the knife and wiped the counter.
‘The sun, the tatami, me trying to wake her. That’s what I remembered.’
‘And she wouldn’t wake.’
‘No. I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t remember.’
I kept my eyes down, hoping this was all she would say. To my everlasting shame, I had begun to fear for my job. Involving myself in a struggle between Rin and Alessandra? Not clever.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and it was, like, pretty interesting and all, that I remembered that. But the thing that struck me, the thing I can’t quit thinking about, is the colour of her hair. Her hair was white. Like, white white.’
I wiped the chopping board back and forth. Swept the chilli seeds, the onion skins into a heap. I did this methodically slow.
‘It’s strange, right? That I changed my hair.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not strange.’
She adjusted the strap of her swimsuit. ‘Alessandra thought it was strange. She told me it was unhealthy.’
‘Alessandra wants to control you.’
She stared at me for a long time. ‘Her hair was so beautiful, you know.’ She turned her face to the windows that gave a view over the lagoon laying blue upon the shallow sand. Coconut palms stirring in the shoreward breeze.
I waited for Rin to change the subject.
‘There’s a dream I have some nights now. Fuck, it sounds so stupid.’ She briefly covered her face with her hands. She sat up straight. ‘It comes back sometimes. My mother’s there. I talk to her. She doesn’t talk to me but I talk anyway and I tell her I remember. I ask what her name is.’
‘Does she answer?’
‘No.’ There was tension around her mouth where she held back some feeling. ‘She just sits there. I can’t see her face. Her hair sort of hangs across it.’
‘You’re not strange,’ I said.
‘It’s Alessandra you need to convince.’
‘No. It’s you I need to convince.’
Her eyes narrowed, as if she found me suspicious.
‘If you want to change your hair, then you should change it.’
‘Fucking Houston,’ she said. ‘If you’d been through what I went through in Houston, you’d want to change too.’
‘Houston?’
‘It’s a Cabey-Yasuda thing. They sent me to Houston for training. I’m supposed to know how the whole company works. Yeah, well. Now I know.’ She rubbed a small red scar on her neck that I had not seen before. ‘This is what I learned in Houston.’
‘What did they do to you?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
I threw some salt crystals into the mortar and ground away at the paste. There was a long interval full of the scrape of the pestle. After a while she said, ‘Can I tell you the truth?’
I looked into those dark eyes, as dark as the bottom of a well. I thought of my bappa in prison and my mamma at work in the market and the government apartment that we could barely afford.
She said, ‘I want my mother back.’
A current ran right across my skin.
‘I want her back.’
‘Rin,’ I said. ‘Listen to me. That’s not strange.’
‘I miss her so much.’
‘Isolation,’ I said. ‘That’s what you feel. Isolation and loneliness. Perhaps you’re lonely. I’m lonely too. Alessandra is lonely. To exist is to be lonely. It’s not strange. You have to stop thinking like there’s something wrong with you.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re lonely,’ I said. ‘But you’re loved. Believe that.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Alessandra loves you.’
She blew the bangs from her forehead.
In the space of a heartbeat I saw I had to take a chance. ‘I love you,’ I said.
‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘I know you don’t.’
‘Rin. I love you. I’m saying I love you.’
‘I’m good for a fuck. That’s what you’re saying.’
I came around the counter to stand by her side.
‘No, I’m—’
She levelled her eyes on me.
‘My thoughts never leave you,’ I said. ‘I wake and I picture your face. I sleep and I dream of your perfume.’
The hint of a smirk passed her features.
‘You’re the limbs of my soul,’ I said.
I took her hand and pulled her off the stool.
‘Am I?’
‘You’re my love’s fire.’
When she stood the towel fell from her waist. Her shoulders were broad with braids of muscle, the sort of muscle she’d earned on machines. It was not proper to say any more and I simply stood there. With my hand holding hers, I leaned down to kiss her lips.
It was a moment of shining truth. I held the back of her neck. I pulled her towards me. There’s pain and loneliness and there’s also togetherness. She unbuttoned my shorts. Our only hope is that togetherness defeats the worst of it and makes our lives bearable. I peeled off her swimsuit. In truth, we live alone and we die alone and nothing prevents that, not God, not anything. I lifted her off the ground and she wrapped her legs around me. The abyss between us cannot be crossed. I held her there, rocking my hips, kissing her throat and her cheeks and her mouth. We dream and we delude ourselves that we can join souls with another person, if we care for them deeply and truly, and that’s the lie that makes life possible. I hugged Rin Braden to my chest, longing to make her a part of me.
We passed the afternoon like that. We hadn’t been together since the previous July and our bottled-up hunger took a good while to satisfy. In particular, I found her breasts to be a constant source of arousal. They were fuller than you’d expect for a woman of her size and finely shaped like teardrops. She’d sit up in bed or raise her arms and the way they shifted was enough to cause a wild craving in me. My appetite for her came from a subterranean place. It was an endless pit I could never fill. She loved to push me down on the bed and take the high position with her athlete’s strength and the white twines of her hair would fall in my mouth and over my eyes. The contentment I felt in those hours seemed to me like the highest and best good a man might ever want—to want more than this was sheer greed. Later, as I was falling asleep, she took my face in her hands and whispered her secret list of reasons for loving me, banal habits I’d barely noticed, such as the way I ran my thumb along her jaw or the way I’d towel her down after swimming, and others more conscious, such as the way I’d pick bougainvillea flowers to leave on her pillow. I fell asleep as she was speaking, full of warmth and love and contentment. That afternoon, I believe we crossed some new threshold. The mist of our souls began to mix.
In the kitchen, in the last light of day, we made mango lassis the way my mother had always made them, gassed up with a dose of lime juice and a little cardamom, and we kissed as we poured the drinks and kissed again as we sipped. There was no barrier between us now, nothing at all. I might touch her as much as I pleased. Her hands passed over my chest in soft patterns that returned me to a lustful state. The heat colour in her cheek made such a charming sight that I would cup it and kiss it and be lost again for long seconds in the faultless pleasure of her skin. She looked squarely into my eyes.
‘Say it again.’
‘I love you.’
‘Again.’
‘It’s true. I mean it.
’
‘Do you?’ she said.
‘More than you know.’
I had one hand under her t-shirt. The t-shirt was all she had on.
‘The first time I saw you,’ she said. ‘Within a second. I felt it.’
‘Like in the movies? Be serious with me.’
‘No, I’m telling you. I felt it right here.’
She shifted my hand to her left breast where her lively heart was ticking.
‘The first time. Within a second. Every part of me knew it.’
I ran my thumb over her nipple. Her eyes closed and then shot open.
‘Come to Yokohama,’ she said. ‘In August. Come and live with me.’
‘What?’
‘There’s so many things you could do there. Write a book if you wanted to. Finish your study. You could do anything.’
I removed my hand.
‘I’m not kidding. Come with me. The Maldives, you know, the water—it’s drowning the country. You need to get out of here.’
On the roofs of other houses along the beach, I saw people pointing at the ocean. The sunset on still nights would make a golden road along the surface. It brought people out.
‘Once my father is out of prison,’ I said. ‘Once he’s out, I could come.’
‘Do you want to come?’
‘Of course. But as a whole man. Not with your charity.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not right. I should be taking care of you.’
‘You do.’
‘Maybe Alessandra will give me a raise,’ I said.
‘Not if you break another one of her plants, she won’t.’
The previous week I had cracked the pot of a bonsai tree. She deducted the amount from my wages. Here was Rin, so generous, so loving, and her mother the coldest of fish. What a funny world we live in. We said nothing else about Yokohama that night but in every look we shared and every touch of our hands there was a new certainty—this affinity, or whatever it was, this bond had a future. There was now the promise of Yokohama giving us something solid to think about. For the first time since I’d known Rin Braden, I began to believe it was possible. She and I. The two of us. We. I began to see the possibility and it made me drunk with joy.
We are four: Rasheed, Abdullah, Hassan and I. In the last two days, we haven’t eaten. Our water is running out. We’re pissing in empty bottles. The door is barricaded by a pile of chairs and mattresses and we can’t get out.
This is the good news.
The bad news? The bad news multiplies.
In the yard below, hundreds of men stand or sit or lay in the shade. Like us, they have not eaten. They’re losing the will to fight. These men don’t scare us. No, the ones that scare us are the men in hoods and masks and baseball caps. They carry bits of prison jumble. One man with a plastic club shaped from the leg of a chair. Another with an electric cable meant as a lash. Another with a sharpened broom handle. We’ve gathered at the window like schoolboys to watch them at work.
‘What do you think they want?’ Hassan says.
‘The same thing we all want,’ Abdullah says. ‘Freedom.’
‘I have a knife,’ Hassan says. ‘If they come in here.’
‘It’s not a knife,’ Rasheed says. ‘It’s a stick.’
‘It’s a very sharp stick.’
The men in masks walk below our window and we lean close to see where they go.
‘The gate,’ Abdullah says. ‘They want the gate.’
These men gather in a shabby bunch before Red Gate. Some take watch while others begin the work of breaking it down. They’re using a large rock or a brick to crack the electric locks on the gate, perhaps thinking that they can reach the manufactory and, eventually, a way out.
‘A rock won’t do anything,’ Rasheed says.
‘And what would you use?’
‘I wouldn’t waste energy on a steel gate in the first place.’
‘I’d use a crowbar,’ Hassan says.
Abdullah huffs. ‘They ought to just climb it.’
‘You can’t climb through razor wire.’
‘Throw a blanket over it. What’s so hard about that?’
‘There aren’t any,’ Rasheed says.
It’s true. On the first night of the protest we dragged the chairs and boxes and blankets, and anything that might burn, from the housing pods and built huge fires in the yard. These fires burn even now, shedding thickets of black smoke. We painted our bedsheets with slogans that say Visa or Freedom or We Are Not Criminals. I’m watching all this so closely, the masked men, the fires in the yard, that when the pounding starts I think it’s Hassan throwing the tennis ball again. When everyone turns to look at the door I realise what’s causing the noise: someone is trying to get in. The vinyl mattresses are piled five deep against the door but there’s a slot in the door, a rectangle slot, cut in the upper part to allow the firing in of gas canisters. We can see a pair of eyes in this slot.
‘Oi,’ someone yells. ‘Yammy. Mate. Open the fucking door.’
No one speaks. They all look at me.
‘Howland,’ I say.
‘Don’t let him in,’ Hassan says.
‘Mate. Come on.’
‘What do you want?’ I call.
‘To come in, for fuck’s sake. I want to show you something.’
The thunderous pounding begins again. The matresses piled at the door shake. Hassan yanks something from his back pocket and calls out, ‘We have weapons. We have knives.’
The pounding stops. The eyes appear in the slot. ‘That’s a stick.’
‘It’s very sharp.’
‘You could pick your teeth with it.’
‘I am prepared to stab you,’ Hassan says.
‘Mate, if you stab me with that and I find out about it, I’ll come back here and kick your arse.’
We share the decision around us in an exchange of glances.
‘Look, I’m not going to bloody hurt you. Open it.’
‘Are you alone?’ I call.
‘No, I’m not. Your mum’s out here giving me a blowie.’
I walk to the door and look through the slot. Howland is leaning by the wall and I can see that his t-shirt is smeared with dirt and charcoal and his beard is pale with dust. Where did he sleep? Slowly, he straightens from the wall and holds up a can of cola. ‘Hurry or I’ll fucking drink it,’ he says.
‘He has soft drink,’ I say.
‘The mattresses,’ Abdullah says. ‘Help me.’
We tug them back two at a time. We unlatch the door. Howland clambers over the rampart of bedding and boxes and stands looking down on us from a height. He throws a can to Rasheed and another to Abdullah. Big cans. I’ve never seen cans this big in the facility. The hiss as they open fills my mouth with water. We share them around.
Hassan won’t drink. He waits, arms crossed, staring at the Tasmanian.
‘Now, I know I’m not that pretty,’ Howland says to him.
‘What do you want?’ Hassan says.
‘Can’t a bloke visit his mates?’
Hassan looks around at us. ‘The drinks are stolen. He steals them.’
‘Oh woah woah,’ Abdullah says. ‘What is this? What is this?’
He’s tapping on the plexiglass. We lean across to see.
‘That’s what I came to show you,’ Howland says. ‘It’s started.’
In the recreation yard, a formation of officers in shiny black armour has appeared from the admin block. It’s the Centre Emergency Response Team. They have shields and batons and they walk close together like one long creature. They follow the walkway that runs along the far side of the yard. Suddenly the men down there find some energy. For two days, they’ve waited for a confrontation and for two days nothing has happened. Now there’s a roar. They begin to hurl missiles. The CERTs raise their shields.
‘I’m actually happy to see Van Hooj,’ Abdullah says.
‘Finally,’ Rasheed says. ‘I am hungry enough to eat my sandals.’
/> ‘Don’t start counting your chickens,’ Howland says.
‘Record, record,’ Hassan says.
I put on the glasses and start to stream.
Since yesterday, I’ve been streaming the scenes inside the facility. In the first hours of the first morning we Maldivians spoke with a common voice: free us, free us, free us. Yet as time wore on, as night fell and our hunger grew, our comradeship began to fray. Fights broke out. Old hatreds emerged. As is the way of such things, the group began to fracture along fault lines of creed and class. Some turned violent. The rest of us found places to hide. We fear what might come next. Our only defence is to show the world what’s happening, so we show the world and we pray they send us help. I open a stream and start to broadcast.
Hassan lifts his hand. ‘Look, look.’
We watch as the line of DEOs veers off towards Red Gate.
‘Where are they going?’
‘Where do you reckon,’ Howland says. ‘The manufactory. They’re protecting their investment.’
Rasheed kicks the wall. ‘What about us?’
‘People are hurt,’ Hassan says. ‘People are hungry. And they worry about TabaPets?’
‘No dinner tonight.’ Rasheed slumps down.
From the window we watch the men in masks throw everything they have. The officers hold a line around the entryway. They seem calm. They lock their tall clear shields together and fire cans of gas that spin through the air like flicked cigarettes leaving a contrail of white. Through the scratched plexiglass the whole scene warps and deforms. Then the DEOs make a move. They lift their plasers and fire and some of the men fall. They drag these men by the ankles and zip-tie their hands. They look like livestock, like animals in a market. They lay face down with their hands knotted behind their backs. The DEOs wallop them with batons, one after another.
‘They’re killing them,’ Hassan says.
‘What should they expect?’ Abdullah says. ‘They tried to open the gate.’
Hassan pulls me towards the window. ‘Please stream this. The record. We need the record.’
You have to remember Hassan lives with heavy memories of the struggle. He’d been an anti-government protestor in Malé before the cataclysm, when thousands of the displaced amassed in the streets near the People’s Majlis to call for an end to corruption and help for the poor and needy. They waved banners scrawled with my father’s words. One afternoon the police fired on them. Hassan’s wife was killed by a bean bag round that pushed splintered rib into her heart.
