In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  Without pausing, he headed directly for a door signed ‘immigration’, beyond which was a room with clattering air-conditioning units, a few worn-looking desks and two uninterested officials talking easily to each other. Her father had some documents immediately to hand, and Miranda watched as his certainties carried the officers through the formalities at a pace that looked unfamiliar to them. Then they were passing out of the narrow confines of the immigration room, away from the harsh, cold draughts of the air-conditioning units and back into the close, tropical heat of the main hall.

  A man stepped out of the throng and came straight across to her father. “Mister Whitlam, welcome. I am Charles Lefevre. Your man, O’Donnell, has made everything ready for you. I insisted that I came to welcome you myself, though.”

  Miranda watched her father grasp the proffered hand. She watched and listened as practical issues about their baggage were dealt with, then followed after her father and Mr Lefevre, who, she noticed, had skin a shade lighter than most she had seen so far. He opened the back doors of a quite smart-looking limousine, but her father nodded that he would sit in the front next to Mr Lefevre.

  Miranda clambered into the rear alone. The car was cool inside and had tinted windows. She felt it move off and stared at the tinted world outside. The road they passed along seemed no more than a track. Rough cultivation and backyards gave way to plantations and then dense jungle. Miranda put her hand to the glass of the back-seat window just to make sure the barrier was there. Only a few cars passed them going the other way. Occasionally they had to overtake a slow-moving truck.

  Her father and Mr Lefevre talked all the way but they seemed to be merely confirming matters agreed long ago, dull, practical matters about land and money. Only when her father said, “We may be out of here sooner than I expected,” did she take notice and therefore heard, remembered, but didn’t understand when he concluded, “Knowing you, you’ll have been watching the markets closely enough, Lefevre, so you’ll see there’s a storm brewing already. That’s my doing. Soon there’ll be people arriving here cap in hand, people who’ve never had to take instructions from anyone. But they’re going to have to now. I’ll make sure you gain from this, Lefevre. I’m going to need some dependable people around me when I get moving again. How does a spell in Europe sound?” And Mr Lefevre replied that it sounded very good indeed.

  Miranda’s attention returned to the tinted glass and the jungle beyond. It was like the wildwood back home, only worse. Back home, the trees were contained within a clear perimeter and, scary though the sight was, she could at least be reassured it did not go on forever. But here, apart from a few small villages set in patches of plantation or tilled ground, the trees were everywhere. The boundaries of the little human settlements did not contain the jungle; rather they were contained within it. Miranda’s initial dislike of the island deepened.

  Her growing despondency was eventually interrupted by Mr Lefevre announcing their arrival. She looked around but could still see only jungle. Then she caught the movement of high, remote-control gates, felt the limousine turn sharply and they were sweeping up a broad drive to the front of the house.

  The building was different from home – new concrete rather than old stonework – and the feel was different. Nowhere were there any open vistas for her to look out on; no formal gardens, nor steps where she could lie down and gaze at the clouds. Instead, there was some grass, some bushes and a high wire fence, which, but for the gates onto the entrance drive, appeared to run unbroken around the house and grounds. Beyond the fence there was nothing but a wall of jungle.

  On the inside, the house looked ready for occupation but entirely unlived in, much as their home had looked when they left it. Donnell came out to greet them, pick up their bags and lead them in. He offered Miranda a choice of three rooms, one on the ground floor, two upstairs. She chose the one that was upstairs at the back. If she was going to have to look out on the wildwood again, it might as well be from a similar vantage to that offered by her room at home. She recalled Lissel saying of the wildwood view from her old room, ‘It’s a site of special scientific interest. Your father is only allowed to cut the wood under strict control.’ Miranda looked out through the metal-framed window of her new room at the tangled, unbroken mass of vegetation. This might be the wildwood, but it was clearly no site of special interest, subject to agreements and controls.

  As he put Miranda’s bags down, Donnell said to her, “Your father’s renting this place, though he’s still a guest of sorts. I believe the government uses it, mostly to put up visiting VIPs – but it looks to me like they haven’t had many of those lately. A bit down on its luck this place, I’d say. But your father’s got some ideas for it. That’s probably why they’ve let him take this house on. There’s less than a hundred thousand live on this island and most of them don’t have a job except growing whatever they can in their backyards. They’re just about ready for your father, I’d say.”

  Later, staring through her window, still trying to get the measure of the place she had been cast out into, Miranda watched the jungle grow dark. From her old room, she had at least been able to look out over the trees on moonlit nights and see the milk-white disc as if sinking into the dark sea of the wildwood canopy. Here, in this new place, the trees were higher and closer and the moon brighter. Before it sank below the tree line, this different moon cast shadows that seemed to have a deep luminosity of their own. Those shadows made Miranda shiver. She felt she might see beyond them if she kept staring, might even be tempted to step out of the window and into those shadows, into the shivery world they beckoned her to enter. That was when she set about trying to turn the scene into no more than a two-dimensional jigsaw, inwardly repeating her father’s words like a charm: ‘We may be out of here sooner than expected.’

  *

  Lissel had left Miranda with a regime of screen-learning to follow and this was reinforced by her father shortly after their arrival. He described to her the terminals present throughout the house they now occupied.

  “It doesn’t matter where you are, Miranda,” he said. “These screens can get you anywhere you want in the world. You can use them to learn about anything you want, in the same way as I can use them to work on anything I want. You remember me changing the lines on the screen back home?”

  As if she didn’t. So powerful had the act seemed that, beyond playing make-believe games with her bricks, Miranda had found herself wondering whether anyone had died after he adjusted the glittering web he contemplated so many hours each day. She had wondered whether anyone had been saved. Nothing had prevented the death of her mother, but that had been before the screen with the glittering lines had appeared on her father’s desk.

  Of course, in reminding her about the lines on the screen, he was only trying to gain her cooperation in his own plans for keeping up her education. But Miranda was willing to play along. Staring into the screens, she imagined herself back in the Land of the Princess, with the images dancing attendance on her every wish. Clothed in their variety and richness, the screen images could crowd around her and keep the world outside safely at bay.

  So it was to the screens that Miranda increasingly turned when she couldn’t sleep or woke early, when all she could see from her window was the harsh moonlight that fell into the open area of the compound and washed over the jungle wildwood, casting amongst the trees shadows she feared she might fall into. And so it was to a screen she turned, waking early one morning with an unpleasant sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that grew as she stared out through her metal-framed window into the darkness beyond.

  She decided to give a program called Wheel of Fortune a turn.

  Wheel of Fortune was popular with parents who wanted to give their children an impression of the awesome fund of information available to them. Selecting at random, it could access any one of several thousand sites set up to be especially interesting and attractive to a curious child or teenager. Miranda watched as the usu
al entry images came up: a wheel of fortune, then waves of pictures morphing in and out of each other to present an eyeblink overview of the world of knowledge that might be explored by the program.

  Then something odd happened.

  Usually, at this point, you were asked to click the ‘spin’ button to get the wheel turning, but instead a crude fuzz took over the screen. The fuzz resolved itself into a grainy video-picture of a city. Miranda looked carefully, intrigued by the departure from the usual sequence. The picture panned from a dense conglomeration of skyscrapers, intersected by broad streets teeming with traffic, to a distant view of soiled tower blocks against a backdrop of green, densely-forested hillside. Then the picture zoomed in close to the city’s edge. Miranda noted broken cloud in the sky and a patchwork of light and shade falling on the crumbling margins of the city. It looked hot and humid, morning approaching midday. Then there was a cut to a street scene in which the cracked, rust-stained concrete facades looked like the bases of the tower blocks previously seen from a distance. Battered transits, open lorries and poster-strewn vans bumped slowly over potholes.

  The camera picked up a dirty, undistinguished car and followed the vehicle into the kerbside, where it pulled up next to a group of five raggedly-clothed children. The picture zoomed in to show their faces, tired, dirty and suspicious. The bulk of the car obscured the details of the transaction but it appeared as if one boy in the group, maybe eight or nine years old, had been singled out and offered something, which he stuffed into an inside pocket of the ill-fitting jacket he wore. The boy gave his companions a noncommittal nod and climbed into the front of the car. The camera was then inside the car, turned towards the front seats, taking in the boy, who was wedged between the driver and another man on his right. They were talking in a language Miranda could not understand. The driver joked with the boy and the other man offered him a cigarette. Miranda could see the boy relaxing. Only fragments of the track the car took were seen through the windscreen but it appeared to be circling the periphery of the city, the driver picking a track through an interminable waste of broken concrete and strewn rubbish. The only changes were the increasing desolation and the diminishing number of people.

  Finally the car drew to a halt in front of a derelict warehouse. The camera followed the two men and the boy towards a dark opening with a door hanging off. The boy showed some hesitation, but the two men on each side of him gripped his upper arms and pushed him on into the darkness. Inside, three men were waiting. Their faces were masked by stockings pulled over their heads. Cut-out eye and mouth holes rendered them identical and expressionless. The boy began to struggle but was held fast. The biggest of the masked men stepped forward, taking hold of the boy. One of the boy’s captors was thus allowed the freedom to receive a wad of currency notes, which he counted carefully. Another masked man took the boy’s other arm and the camera followed the two who had been in the car as their silhouettes were swallowed back into the brightness that shone through the door they had entered by.

  The camera pulled back to encompass the three masked men and the boy. Then it moved in closer to fill the frame with the boy’s face. His eyes were wide and he was shouting in high, querulous, staccato outbursts. The camera pulled back again to show the group heading for a steel-plated door. The one who had earlier handed over the money now keyed open the door, standing aside to allow the boy to be forced in. The camera cut to the inside to take in the door being slammed shut. Then it panned round the chamber they had entered. The only light was daylight filtering in through a grill in the roof, casting a harsh net of shadow over the space below. The camera moved down and circled the chamber. A heap of old tyres was tumbled into one corner. Otherwise there was nothing but filthy plaster walls and an uneven dirt floor. The three men left the boy to beat against the steel door while they took their clothes off. After that, the camera mostly focused on the boy’s terror and pain. The other shots were anatomical with occasional pull-backs to take in the hysterically energised bodies of the three men as they repeatedly battered and penetrated the boy. His screams of terror were gradually drowned out by the screams of excitement coming from the men.

  The last shot was of the boy’s broken, blood-smeared body and sightless, staring eyes. Then the screen cut to some crude text that read, ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of knowledge. Spin the Wheel of Fortune again and you might get to see some political prisoners being electrocuted, or some child labourers being crushed to death, or some offcast women being gang raped. But if you’re really lucky you might just find out what dinosaurs were doing a hundred million years ago.’

  That was all – no signature, no provenance. The text vanished to leave a blank screen which Miranda continued to stare fixedly at until the one maid they kept full-time, came up to find out why her charge was late for her breakfast.

  *

  Shortly after, concerned by her sudden withdrawal from all activity or conversation, her father had someone that Miranda dubbed ‘Sweetie’ flown in. Sweetie stayed a week, during the first part of which she kept trying to make Miranda play games with some dolls. Miranda rapidly realised the only way to clear the space she so desperately needed was to tell Sweetie precisely what she had seen. She was impressed by the look of sudden revelation that came over the woman’s face. After that, Sweetie only appeared a few more times and then only to make sure Miranda had not been having any bad dreams, which she hadn’t.

  Miranda’s father told her the children’s educational net had been hit on the morning of her experience by a concerted attack from an anarchist organisation, which had yet to be traced. He said it was an extremely sophisticated attack designed to undermine the security children like her drew from what he called their materially privileged circumstances. He said there had been some children severely and perhaps permanently traumatised by the images they had been exposed to and showed Miranda a recording of a news programme in which the attack was discussed in detail. He told Miranda he was proud of her for having coped so well.

  *

  But Miranda wasn’t sure she had coped, at least not yet. She would cope, she told herself. She was determined to, and it was this determination that was keeping her from the tears, the screams, the nightmares and the bedwetting that had been the fate of so many others. Miranda was acutely aware it could still go that way for her, acutely aware that in her withdrawal and fixity of thought she was holding herself back from an edge. Over that edge was the void of nothingness that had been revealed in the boy’s sightless, staring eyes. From the moment she had been exposed to the image, she had been determined not to go over the edge those eyes had brought her to.

  Accordingly, it had been an extreme of concentration not horror in which the maid had found Miranda locked that morning. Having taken in to the full the void in the boy’s eyes, Miranda had fixed her entire attention on the one thing she knew would keep her from going over the edge. She had conjured up the counter-image of her father reaching out to his screen to change the world. That boy in the filthy concrete chamber had been linked to no screen. There had been nothing to prevent his life concluding in the nothingness of his staring eyes. Miranda would never submit to such nothingness. She would reach out into the screens that surrounded her and make some fine but powerful and far-reaching adjustment so no such thing would ever happen to her.

  *

  Her determination held Miranda intact just long enough for her to recognise that not only were the screens beyond her power to influence, but it was also from the screens the attack had come. The screens were a power that was still beyond her and they were dangerous. She had to find some other way of sustaining herself. So, instead of turning away from the moonlit jungle night to seek the compromised assurances of her screens, Miranda began to make a point of turning, at every opportunity, to confront the darkness outside. By concentrating on the scene as abstract, moonlit shapes, she could will them to dematerialise, to become no more than symbols like the lines on her father’s screen; tractable, pretty,
ready to move at her bidding. And though she did not succeed in actually reaching out with her mind to rearrange the jigsaw-puzzle pieces before her, the intensity of her effort and her fixity of purpose did ensure Miranda remained isolated from the full impact of what she had seen. Her father commented again, several times, on how well she had coped and Miranda began to believe him. She had stayed in control and that was what mattered.

  Her memories scabbed over.

  5

  Dion’s father said, “Part of the deal is that I get work in Europe and full moving expenses for the family.”

  Dion’s grandmother said, “For the family, eh? That include me?”

  Dion stopped outside the window he had been passing by and continued to listen.

  “You don’t want to come with us,” his father said.

  “Like fockin’ hell I don’t. I go with you, son, and I dead the day I leave. You know that. That what you want?”

  “I can set you up here with a house and enough to keep you going, if that’s what you want.”

  “What’s what I want got to do with anything? You want to make yourself some money, and you don’t want me costing you nothin’.”

  “Listen, I don’t mind you costing me something. God knows, you’ve never cost me much.”

  “Cost you much? Ha – cost you your fockin’ dignity is what you tell those money boys you keep company with down in Roseau. I know what they say. They say why don’t you turn her out, that nasty old witch of a mother of yours? And you say it because your daddy’s will got you tied up looking after me. You say you got to do what it tell you if you goin’ to keep control of the land around here. And I say the old white shit should have left it all to me. So why can’t I stay here? Your father bought this place for you and me to stay in. You want to go? Okay, and I want to stay, and I want to stay here in my house.”