Daughter of Bad Times

by Rohan Wilson

  ‘I intend to, Bappa.’

  Moosa Umair had lively eyes. Big, lively eyes magnified by a pair of reading glasses. That day, he’d combed his hair and combed his moustache and I could see how once, perhaps not even that long ago, he’d been a looker. He winked at me and I winked back.

  ‘Be careful with this source,’ Yamaan said. ‘One more year. Nihan would love to keep you here longer.’

  President Nihan. He ran the country like a mafia boss. ‘What’s this story you’re working on, anyway?’ I said.

  ‘There’s a rumour.’ Moosa lowered his voice. ‘Nihan has made plans. He wants to do something with the internally displaced peoples. Send them somewhere. He thinks he can stop the protests if he ships them out.’

  I felt a tingle in my chest.

  ‘Where?’ Yamaan said. ‘There are no islands left.’

  ‘Overseas,’ Moosa said.

  ‘Overseas?’

  ‘The contracts are signed. The UNHCR will re-categorise the internally displaced as environmental refugees. They’ll be sent to any countries that will take them. My source told me everything. A private company has the contract. Cabey-Yasuda Corrections.’

  Yamaan looked at me.

  Before I go any further, it would help if I explained why we visited Moosa that day. Like I told you, the Maldives was drowning. They’d done a lot, built sea walls, built pumping stations, but that was all just stalling for time. By the end of the century or maybe even sooner, some sort of threshold would be crossed. There’d be too many people, too little space, and the cost of keeping it all running would break the government. When that happened, the pumps would fail. The city would flood. Social order would disintegrate. So far, the Chinese and the Indians and the Saudis had propped up the economy through high-interest loans. How long would that house of cards keep standing? No one knew.

  I wanted Yamaan away from that. I wanted him to live with me in Yokohama. I’d been in Japan for the last year working on the deal with Hoshino. He would live with me and maybe learn the language and finish his doctorate or write a book. Whatever he felt like. We’d come to ask Moosa what he thought and whether he approved. I mean, I wasn’t a Muslim and Yamaan loved his father. He needed Moosa’s approval before he’d commit.

  ‘Cabey-Yasuda,’ Yamaan said, still looking at me.

  ‘I think they’re American,’ Moosa said. ‘They’re probably American.’ He stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I sat looking down at my hands.

  ‘They are American,’ Yamaan said.

  ‘That’s what I just told you.’

  ‘Do you know anything about them?’

  ‘A little.’

  There passed a long moment where I fiddled with the rings on my fingers and thought about speaking. I suppose Yamaan was giving me a chance to explain. When I didn’t, he cleared his throat and said, ‘You could ask Rin.’

  Moosa eyed me over his glasses. He looked like a journalist again.

  ‘She’s familiar with Cabey-Yasuda,’ Yamaan said.

  I smiled, or I tried to. It probably came out a bit thin. ‘Yeah, pretty familiar,’ I said.

  ‘Really.’

  ‘My mother is the CEO.’

  Moosa gave a dismissive cough and tossed his head.

  ‘She’s serious,’ Yamaan said.

  Moosa frowned at us. ‘The CEO?’

  ‘And the major shareholder.’

  He smoothed his moustache down. He watched me for a while. ‘The CEO?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you work there too?’

  ‘In government relations.’

  ‘So, you know about this contract.’

  What could I say? I mean, yeah, I knew about the contract. I’d always known about the contract. For godsake, we bought a house in the Maldives so that Alessandra could be on hand to negotiate the contract. In my first briefings after she made me Executive Vice President Government Relations, she showed me the terms we’d reached. Extremely generous terms. Look, I didn’t like it either and I could see the implications. The Progressive Party of the Maldives and their corrupt president had sold us the access rights to IDPs. Yeah, a lot of money probably went straight into the president’s personal bank account. No doubt. We knew the Progressives were a pack of con men, fraudsters, and criminals, like all ruling parties.

  So, I said, ‘Off the record? It exists.’

  ‘And Cabey-Yasuda is the contracted party?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You see,’ Moosa said, pointing the arm of his glasses at Yamaan, ‘you see how grotesque the president has become? He’s become like a feeding dog. He’s even feeding off the displaced people, the people who have nothing. Not even jobs. Not even homes.’

  ‘You’re courting more trouble, Bappa.’

  ‘We have to fight such disgusting greed.’

  ‘They’ll charge you with defamation. Same as last time.’

  ‘Do you understand what’s happening? A hundred thousand people, citizens of this country, will be sent to prison camps. Don’t you even care?’

  ‘You need evidence before you run the story. That’s all I’m saying.’

  They both looked at me then.

  I pursed my lips. Honestly, I wanted to give Moosa what he needed—a copy of the contract, or some government documents, or even bank account codes and figures. All I had to do was offer my help and I might have stopped it. With a bit of sunlight, wrongful arrangements like the one between the president and Cabey-Yasuda could wither up and die. My hand went to the scar on my neck from where Michael Trevino had stuck me with a dirty shiv and even after the plastic surgery, it still hurt when I pressed down. Absolutely, I wanted to give Moosa what he needed to throw light on our deal with the Maldives. Nobody knew more about how insane CYC had become than I did.

  Yet, I kept quiet and kept my head down. Trouble was, I worried about Alessandra. She might have broken anti-corruption laws. She might have bribed people. In fact, I was pretty sure she’d broken laws and bribed people as a general course of business in Malé. It was best for everyone if we kept that under wraps. She might be dodgy, but she was still my mother.

  In order to protect her, I said, ‘Maybe the president thinks he’s doing the right thing. Maybe he wants to help.’

  ‘There’s only one person the president wants to help,’ Moosa said.

  ‘Meltwater is pouring into the oceans,’ I said, ‘and that’s not going to stop.’

  ‘Forget climate change. This is about dissent. He wants to end the protests. He wants to protect his empire.’

  ‘What if he wants to save lives? Did you think about that?’

  ‘He doesn’t care about the people.’

  ‘Maybe not. But you should. If people want to escape the water, why stop them?’

  ‘There are better ways to do it.’

  I took a breath. ‘And what if it was Yamaan?’ I said. ‘Would you force him to stay in a drowning country?’

  Moosa leaned back in his chair. From the way he looked at me, I could tell he’d reassessed my character and found me coming up short. I crossed my arms and did my best to show I meant what I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s his home. He should stay. He should fight to save it, the way I’m fighting. We need better government, not escape plans.’

  In the heavy, silent minutes that followed you could feel the future rearranging. Moosa and Yamaan spoke quietly in Dhivehi and when Yamaan’s eyes flicked to me and flicked away, I knew, I just knew, that he no longer wanted to come to Japan. I couldn’t follow all of what they were saying. It seemed intense. Moosa kept pointing at me. Later I found out he was telling Yamaan I was dangerous—dangerously rich, dangerously naïve. Well, I might have been dangerous but not for the reasons they thought.

  We rode the dhoni back to Feydhoo Finolhu in the early dusk with the gold paint of the sun afloat on the water. There was about a million things I wanted to ask him but I also didn’t want to be the girl who pressured, the girl who pushed. W
e sat in the stern holding hands (we always held hands, that was kind of our thing). By then, my desire for Yamaan had become almost pathological. I longed for him so desperately that it felt like a physical vibration. The fear that he didn’t want to live with me in Japan gave it a fiercer pitch. When I looked at my reflection in the water, the dark-eyed, white-haired ghost of my birth mother looked back at me.

  At the beach house, we somehow got kissing while vaping some hash oil on the sun deck. Kissing at first, anyway, because I could never just kiss Yamaan. You’ve got to understand the effect he had on me. He’d lick my ear or breathe onto my neck and every part of my body came to a simmer. I’d go from zero to a hundred. So, it started with kissing but it soon became the full thing, both of us naked, with him sitting on a sun lounge and me straddling. The sun had sunk and left a sky of sandy pink. I remember we fucked slowly, keeping time with the sound of the waves rolling onshore. Then the slider rolled open and Alessandra stepped onto the sun deck wearing a look of bad news.

  It took me a second to notice. Yamaan was squeezing my breast and making me pant pretty loud but when I noticed Alessandra the pant changed into a choking squeal. With a gasp, I stepped back. I was torn between the shock that she’d come home so early, the mortal embarrassment at our nudity, and the fear at what she’d do next. It’s not a complementary mixture of feelings. My soul shrank like a piece of plastic near a fire.

  ‘While the cat’s away,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Can’t you give us some privacy?’ I said.

  Yamaan stood from the sun lounge also fully naked and if it wasn’t what it looked like, it must have been wickedly close.

  ‘You.’ She pointed at Yamaan. ‘You’re done. Get the hell out.’

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Wait a second.’

  ‘You think you’re going to touch my daughter? In my house? The hell you are. Get out.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong idea,’ I said to her. ‘This isn’t what you think.’

  ‘Not even wearing a condom,’ she said. ‘You greedy bastard. I see what this is. You won’t find a payday in here, boy. Out.’

  ‘God, would you calm down?’

  Alessandra paused and something in her bearing changed. She stiffened. Her eyes snapped back and forth. ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘He doesn’t need a condom. I have an IUD.’

  ‘How long?’ she said to Yamaan.

  ‘Four years,’ he said.

  ‘Four fucking years? Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s just sex,’ I said. ‘We’re having some fun, that’s all. Like you’ve never had fun with men before.’

  ‘Four years. How could you be so stupid?’

  ‘It’s sex. That’s all.’

  Our clothes lay dispersed from where we’d undressed each other in the temperature of the moment, a polo shirt here, a sports bra there, and Yamaan went to scoop up his pants but Alessandra grabbed them first. I thought she might hand them over, or tell him to cover up, I don’t know, like what a regular person might do. Alessandra isn’t what you’d call a regular person though. Instead she threw his pants into the lagoon. Then she found his company polo shirt and shorts and threw them over the edge as well. Yamaan stood there with his head bowed. She told him he was a disgrace to his family. She told him that a man with any self-respect would know better than to treat a young woman this way. She told him he was fired and to get out of the house immediately. She told him that if she saw him on Feydhoo Finolhu again, she’d call the police. Like I said, she’s not really a regular person.

  With some distance, with some clarity, I realise how everything turned one way when I might have turned it another. For whatever reason, I was pissed about the fact she’d thrown his clothes into the lagoon and so I hung off the ladder hooking them in with my toe and tossing them onto the deck. This was dumb, I’ve since come to realise. What I should have done was stand up for him, protect him, but I was pretty addled from the hash and the shouting and the shock of it all. Back up the ladder I went, still naked, but when I climbed the deck Yamaan was gone. Probably gone to find some clothes, I figured. After the browbeating Alessandra gave him, he’d looked sick with dismay. So, I chucked on my t-shirt and stormed inside in a fashion that should have made my temper clear.

  Alessandra was pouring herself some wine. ‘That’s a weasel deal you got yourself into.’

  Yamaan wasn’t anywhere. He wasn’t in his room. He wasn’t on the roof.

  ‘Where did he go?’ I said.

  ‘Are you kidding me? He’s gone. He’s fired.’

  Outside in the dark, still summer night I started calling his name. I took the path over the dunes to the pier. No one there. The last dhoni of the day had sailed and the moonlit wake it left cut the bay like a trench. Was he on that boat? I called his name. Nothing. The white noise of the waves, the clicking of insects. I went home.

  For the rest of the week, I tried reaching him. He’d left everything behind—his glasses, his knives and his clothes. When I called the agency that sent him out, they couldn’t tell me anything. They’d had no contact from him. In Malé, I traced my way to his apartment building using an address the agency gave me but standing outside the building, I couldn’t be sure it was the same place. His building had been pink, right? I buzzed up and a young woman answered in Dhivehi. No, Yamaan Umair didn’t live here. No, she’d never heard of him. Dead end.

  By the time he called me in that Ginza nightclub asking for his knives a month had passed. Me? I’d passed through everything as well—wild anger, idiot denial, darkest grief—I’d passed through it and settled into a sickly, weepy loneliness. I’d wrecked it. The connection between us, the poems, the promises, the declarations—trashed, all of it, because in the one moment when it counted I’d see-sawed on the place Yamaan held in my life. The worst part? I didn’t even know why. I couldn’t figure it out. There was some nuggety, pulsing, blackish organ inside me that seemed set on eternal solitude. He’d trusted me and I’d turned state’s evidence. The call didn’t go well. I lost my cool. That old organ again, back to make sure I lived forever alone.

  An hour later an earthquake south of Sri Lanka and west of the Maldives sent multiple tsunami waves spreading across the ocean. Big waves, made killers by the fact the country sat below sea level. They struck at noon prayer time. The house on Feydhoo Finolhu, everything on Feydhoo Finolhu, disappeared into the sea. No one survived. For months I believed Yamaan lost too. I watched video of Malé burning, video of apartment blocks toppling like dominoes, video of survivors being dredged from the water. Night after night, I watched the same videos. Night after night, I searched the same lists of confirmed survivors, the same lists of the missing. He was gone.

  Here’s what cycled around in my thoughts for weeks after-wards: if you’d stood up for Yamaan that night on the sun deck, he’d still be alive. He’s dead because you’re a coward. You abandoned him and you killed him. Not the water, not the earthquake, not God. You. You did it. You. You. You. On and on, day and night, cycling around. You can imagine the effect it had.

  After some weeks of this, one evening in my apartment in Battery Park I stood looking at the bathtub full of water and looking at the hair dryer charging on the vanity and wondering how I could kill myself. I stepped into the tub. All my clothes still on, the same clothes I’d worn and slept in for days. I knocked away the hair dryer and took up its charging dock. The cord reached about as far as the rim. I stared at the blinking power light and the nail-polish stains on the buttons. The water around my knees was cold. But even if I stretched it, the cord wouldn’t reach, and it took me a second to realise what I was doing. Relief was all I wanted. Not this. I started shivering, like, really shivering. I dropped the dock on the vanity.

  Anyway. I made it through. Not wholly intact, not as the same person, but somehow, I’m still here. I thought it would end that day when I found him in Eaglehawk MTC. The sense of elation. He was alive, sure, but I was the one being raised from the
dead. That wasn’t the end though. That was the start. There would be worse to come.

  There are two kinds of days, days you win and days you lose, and I don’t need to tell you what kind of day I’m having. Outside in the dry Tasmanian heat, I stand gazing around in a stupor. I had to get out of there, since the smell in the Behavioural Adjustment Unit was making me sick. A fence separates us from the recreation yard and I lean on it while I wait for the nausea to pass. The yard resembles the laid waste of a tornado. A wreckage of chairs and sheets and boxes covers the ground by the dorm pods. Fires burn, fed with plastic mattresses that make a smoke as thickly black as oil. We need to cross that if I’m ever going to make it out … well, at least if I’m going to make it out with a pulse. It’s too late to think about making it out of here with anything better than a pulse—you know, like my freedom or Yamaan’s freedom. Those hopes are long gone. Staying alive—that’s all I can hope for. The weight of that thought causes me to feel sick all over again.

  Meanwhile, my message feed is bubbling away with non-stop pings from Alessandra.

  have they hurt you? what do they want?

  I won’t answer her calls so she sends these panicked, teary requests for information. what do they want? we’ll give them anything they ask. She panics because she sees what she’s done, how she set Rahmatullah on me, how she locked me in a conference room, and abandoned me inside the facility. rin, talk to me. tell me you’re okay. we’re sending an extraction team for you. hold on. please talk to me. My blood drums louder and louder with every message I read. That drumming, the sound of my anger.

  A shadow falls across me. It’s Yamaan.

  ‘He can’t walk very well.’

  The cousin, he means the cousin. But there’s other things on my mind.

  ‘Why did you leave me?’ I say. ‘That night at the beach? Why?’

  Yamaan looks at the sky. He looks at his feet.

  ‘Why?’ I say.

  ‘Don’t ask me that question. It’s a childish question.’