Gwyneth Jones - Life(2005)

by Anonymous Author

  gimme one of those hearts that can't be broken,

  gimme one of those lies that can't ever be found out,

  gimme one of those

  gimme one of those,

  gimme one of those,

  are you one of those—

  Spence let himself drift. Ramone was right, it was getting obscene to stay here, earning money, making love, having drug experiences, when life for the real people dancing down there was a total road accident. We don't belong, why do we stay, where am I going to. . . ? At dinner he'd asked Daz—you revert to the past when you meet old friends—what did she ever see in that Tex character? "I don't know," she'd said, taking the question as seriously as if the affair was fresh in her mind, "He was a talented wanker, among a lot of untalented utter wankers, and he was sexy, to me then, though it was hard to believe afterwards. And I was unsure of myself, as usual. I was trying to be the kind of woman I felt I ought to be—" Spence could relate to that. Fractional recursion. The handful of things you know and feelings you feel keep on returning, you never get beyond them. You leave home first chance you get: I don't belong here, this isn't my kind of shit, sure you will find a world where you belong, some shit you will be proud to call your own. But like the first line of a novel, encapsulating the whole story, it keeps happening over and over. You can't escape the spiral, you can only be in the same place further along the timeline, in Spence's case always the place where I don't belong, just don't fit.

  He sighed, and shook himself. It must be getting on for midnight.

  "Come on, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Let's dance."

  When he looked around, she was gone. So was Ramone. There was only Wolfgang, rolling another spliff, and a fresh pair of flower vases that appeared to be filled with milky coffee. He gave Spence a roguish smile, nodding at the two empty seats.

  "Sparks flying there— "

  Daz and her pals were gone too, the loft was nearly empty. "Where's Anna?"

  "She left with her friend, of course, to follow those sparks. Don't worry, have a drink."

  "What is this stuff?"

  "Brandy Alexanders."

  "Arrgh."

  "I've been buying your beer all night. I like cocktails. Don't be coy: I know you ex-pats, there is nothing you will not drink. Share this nightcap with me, and then we'll go on somewhere." Wolfie's eyes had a chilly brightness, a strange expression that made him look like a different person. "Be nice to me, or I won't help you to find the lady."

  * * *

  Ramone told the bicycle taxi driver to take them to medan meriam, reading the name carefully from a scrap of paper. Anna leaned back under the tattered hood and closed her eyes. After the chill of the Riverrun the air outdoors felt like a bath of warm, black milk. They were going on somewhere. It was all right, everything under control, she had her bag on her back, wallet in her pocket (touch it), headscarf tied. The medan meriam, sometimes known as the Parade Ground, was a broad, flat, open space to the east of the city center, where there had been a fortress or something in colonial days. There was a permanent children's fun fair there and a market called the bird market where you could buy house plants, cage birds, pond fish. . . Suddenly she started up in alarm.

  "Ramone! Have you put your headscarf on?"

  "Yes I have. Feel it if you don't believe me."

  The streetlights were few, the city night very dark. Ramone took her hand and guided it so she could feel the fabric; then, unexpectedly, came the soft touch of lips on Anna's fingers.

  "Why did you do that?"

  "Felt like it. How's your migraine."

  "Not so bad."

  All my problems, thought Ramone, come with the label, don't start from here. Here she was, a fucking professional feminist, basically a sex-worker, a pornographer, making her living out of being female. She had achieved nothing.

  "D'you remember when we lived on campus?"

  "Yes."

  "All those famous people in Lawy's salon. We should have been taking notes."

  "I don't remember. I only remember you and me and Lawy talking." Anna paid off the taxi.

  "Why'd you give him such a massive tip?" Ramone, still fascinated by Anna's spending habits, had watched the transaction carefully. "Taxi fares are supposed to be controlled."

  "Yeah, but the price of rice isn't. Only stingy tourists pay the government fares."

  Anna was puzzled that there was no amplified music at this outdoor rave, but soon she relaxed. The medan meriam was like a coral reef in darkness, teeming with life, sparkling with pockets and currents of quivering light. They explored the funfair, stopping to peer into hucksters' booths and to watch the fairground rides. There were impromptu bars, food stalls, people everywhere. Faces glinted out of the gloom, smiling, solemn, or preoccupied. "You're right about HAR," confessed Anna suddenly. "I know you're right. I hate the business. I still try to do my job well; it's irrational but that's the way I am. But I don't want to be part of the rape of the planet, directly or indirectly. It just—"

  "I know," said Ramone. "Life gets in the way. I don't want to be a feminist, either. But I'm doomed." She took Anna's hand and squeezed it. They wandered hand in hand, which was strange but pleasant. Anna was taller, it made her feel protective. An old man beckoned to them, they followed him into an open-sided hut where tanks of water stood on long wooden tables. He shone a torch into one of the tanks. They saw two beautiful slender creatures, twisting around each other, with silvery butterfly wings sprouting from their golden and dark barred bodies.

  "What are they? Are they flying fish?" whispered Ramone.

  "No. They're sea moths. People use them in TCM, that's traditional Chinese medicine."

  "Are they rare?"

  "Not yet, they've only been a traditional medicine for a while. They soon will be."

  The old man wanted to show them some other tanks, but they left, disheartened.

  "I thought traditional medicine was supposed to be ancient. Making up new ones is cheating. That means. . . nothing would be safe."

  Anna shrugged. "Tradition is what I point to when I say it. That's always been the way, everywhere. It's our tradition to eat hamburgers and drive cars."

  "Tradition means pillage, basically. I fucking hate it. Every bit of it."

  For a while they sat and watched a shadow puppet show, drinking tots of arak bought from a woman who was working the crowd with a yoke of cool boxes across her shoulders, which she would lay down and arrange into a counter in front of her customers: patiently, smilingly repeating the process every time she was beckoned over. The spirit was much better value than her Thai and Singaporean bottled beer, so they had several tots. Anna recalled that there was a spliff of Toba grass hidden in the lining of her bag. They shared it and talked fast: about the spirituality of the passing moment, fetishes, Balinese funeral rites, Japanese animism, the artificial consciousness debate, the way any mortal thing can be living and aware because we say so. Anna described working with SURISWATI. Well, how do I know you are conscious, Ramone, she demanded warmly. How will you prove to me that you're not a complex biological automaton, saying and doing what I expect from another person, but for purely mechanical reasons? It's not my field, but I don't think there's ever going to be a day when self-aware AI is announced. It'll creep up on people, like abolishing slavery. Like women's rights, come to think of it."

  "I'm not interested in rights for women," gabbled Ramone. "Not 'women are people too,' pretty please, that's no good. I'm looking for a new concept of humanity. Resurrecting forgotten heroines is dumb. It's playing into the hands of the enemy to say, see, we were up to your standards all along. That's crap. We need a whole different paradigm."

  "Isn't the kind of change you want already happening?"

  "It's because it's happening that I can write about it!"

  "You can suppress the truth as often as you like," said Anna, thinking of Galileo's telescope. "If that's all it is, abstract truth, because who cares? Nobody cares. You can't suppress the facts bec
ause—well, there they are, all over the place—"

  The night fell into confusion. They moved on, and joined another audience. Here there were shadow dancers, not puppets, performing behind what looked like a large white bed sheet, lit by coppery flares and stretched between bamboo poles. A beautiful young man, in a white sarong, flying thongs of black hair to his waist, leapt out to take his bow. Anna noticed as the applause began that she and Ramone were surrounded by a group of Sungainese Chinese, young women with round, rosy faces, and Ramone appeared to know these people. She was talking to them, in English, but Anna couldn't follow the discussion. Then Daz appeared, coming into the open-sided canvas theatre with the friends she'd met in the Riverrun loft. She saw Ramone and Anna. She came over to them; but she was soon walking away again, after some kind of altercation with Ramone, picking out a path between the shadowy ranks of Sungainese, who were sitting on the ground like flare lit carved lumps of stone. . .

  "We ought to have asked her where Wolfie and Spence have got to."

  "She doesn't know," said Ramone. "She's pissed off with me, because I'm right."

  Ramone began to talk fast again, explaining that she was here as Lavinia Kent's emissary, that she'd been working, at long distance, with a Sungai feminist group, and that she understood the situation far better than Daz did. . . They moved again, the whole group together. Now they were among huge-leaved plants, forest smells of humus and water. Anna thought she had been carried far distances by magic, to some forest retreat of the revolution. The young Chinese women were kissing and hugging and singing happy songs. Anna and Ramone had their arms round each other too. They vowed eternal friendship; it seemed natural to kiss. Natural to handle the soft weight of Ramone's breasts, to cuddle close and imagine, with a spinning head, what it would be like to share sexual passion with an equal, someone your own size, someone who would be your sister through the hormone-driven storm. . .

  * * *

  Wolfgang and Spence found her at four am, wandering on the margin of the medan meriam Special Night Market, this impromptu event with which the police had wisely decided not to interfere: bag on her back, wallet in her pocket, watch on her wrist, all intact except for the power of self-conscious thought, gone temporarily AWOL. (Ramone, meanwhile, turned out to be back at her hotel, with little idea of how she'd got there.) Anna wondered, as she nursed her hangover, what might have happened that she didn't remember. She decided that she wouldn't try to find out. She didn't regret those kisses or the vows of eternal friendship. The night had been a fine adventure: she was glad, very glad, that she and Ramone had got back together. But, taken all in all, she was even gladder that she had woken up safe at home in her own bed.

  v

  Spence visited the editor of a magazine, Sungai's best selling as-pirational women's glossy, called Dream On. There was no irony intended; the zine was simply about dreaming for things and getting them: but there you go. You can't copyright an idiom. The offices were open plan and nicely climate controlled, with a great view of the West Quay. Spence had sold Dream On a couple of lifestyle articles, and they were discussing a column. The editor, in chocolate stockings and a candy pink boucle suit, was keen; this was her own idea. But she expected Spence to sell himself, and he felt an intense reluctance.

  She was uneasy about his online career. Media people have rewritable minds. Maisie Loh honestly believed that working for the web had always been intrinsically suspect and awful. The fact that this state of mind had been imposed on her by an illegal government in the recent past entirely escaped her.

  "I was a programmer," he admitted. "Started out in college vacations, did a couple of years with an information warehouse service. It was clerical work. Writing's what I want to do."

  What would he cover in this column? Cultural topics? What did he think of the home media service in Sungai? It was very good, wasn't it? Spence and Anna did not possess access to this splendid resource. All they had was a plain little color tv, which they mainly used for watching (over and over again) the classic movies they'd brought out with them. He prevaricated, staggered that this woman could believe that monopoly-controlled pap-feed connectivity was the hot, radical future of entertainment. She was probably right.

  But it would be good to have a milieu outside the home. He made up his mind. He would turn on the charm and get the job. It would be a trip.

  BOOM!

  All the glass in the windows flew. Spence dived to the floor. Then he was on his feet again, the staff of Dream On rushing around him, someone streaming blood, the air full of sudden warmth, fire alarms hammering. Maisie Loh shot by, leaping on her skinny heels, chocolate stockings in ribbons, two cut knees, lugging a First Aid chest. His ears were ringing.

  Someone was shouting, "It was Government House!"

  Government House, Victorian pile dwarfed by the downtown towers, was two blocks from Parentis. Spence ran out of the office, heading for the fire stairs with everyone else.

  * * *

  That morning, the morning of the Rally, Wolfgang hadn't turned up for work. Anna wasn't surprised. She supposed plenty of people must be regarding this event as an excuse to take the day off. She was on the clinical floor, in the lab manager's office, haggling. There was really no chance that Anna would change her mind about anything, but they went through the must-have list item by item, for the sake of decency.

  "How you get to be so young and so hard-hearted?" grumbled Desy Periah, lab manager.

  Someone out in the lab was watching the rally on an illicit pocket tv. Anna could hear, over a background of decorous crowd noise, a reporter saying the occasion was calm. Anna's mind was half on Desy's troubles (which were grave, but only too familiar) and half on Ramone. That midnight ramble had woken an unsuspected hunger for the fast-talking, challenging, noncomplementary intimacy they had shared. And for the kid herself: her silly face, her bright-eyed cartoon face. Could Anna fit another important relationship into her life? She wondered what Spence would think.

  BOOM!

  Desy's chair shot backwards. Anna grabbed the desk to save herself. One of the clinicians burst in. "It's Government House. They've blown it up!"

  "My son!" wailed Desy, staggering upright. "My son! He's a clerk in the Ministry!"

  * * *

  The Parentis building was made of stronger stuff than most of the downtown towers. The windows didn't blow out. People were shocked and shaken and there were breakages, that was all; but the fire alarm was clamoring in amber tone. Anna went into her drill in a state of dizzy detachment. So Sungai had blown up. It wasn't unexpected. Spence was safe and Transferred Y was safe, she had a copy at home. Daz and Ramone were at the rally, but there was nothing Anna could do about that. She cleared the clinical suites of personnel, locked them, checked that the cold rooms were off main power and onto emergency. She was heading for admin by the stairs before she recalled that Spence was not safe, he was in town. Electrified by this shock, she met a rush of people coming up the stairs and couldn't understand why. Then came the second explosion; it threw her across a hallway. The air was full of smoke, the alarm segued into its GET OUT NOW howl. There were hundreds of people, they were shouting Penangalang! Penangalang! What did it mean, some kind of political slogan? She heard a woman's voice, shouting about babies without souls. The building was on fire, the labs were under attack, she had to get to the admin floor. A young man had something like a fire axe or a big machete, he was trying to chop down the door to Suri's antechamber: well, he wouldn't get through that!

  She had to get to her office, though she couldn't remember why. When she managed to reach that room (still free from smoke up here), she saw the intercom on her desk: of course! Communication! She fell on it, opening a channel to the security chief.

  "Philip? Is it Philip? How are you, how are we doing?"

  "I'm very well, Mrs Anna," came the guard's voice, incongruously cheerful. "Bad news, the fire and emergency services cannot reach the building; the crowds are holding them off. The good new
s is that every badge is out but you. Can you get to the emergency stairs?"

  "Thank God for that... Yes I can, I'll be fine."

  She was looking round the office, thinking what the devil do I need from here. She heard a voice faintly calling her name. "Who's that?"

  Philip had said that every electronically tagged member of Parentis personnel was out of the building, but Philip was obviously wrong. Who was calling?

  "Anna is that you?"

  She tried every door before she traced the voice to Asian Gaegler's office. Asian was in there, sitting behind his desk, grey in the face, holding his family photographs.

  "Oh, there you are," he said faintly. "What's going on, Anna?"

  "The building's on fire. I think someone must have lobbed an incendiary device into the downstairs lobby, must have been something biggish—"

  "I'm sorry. I kind of froze. Got an attack of angina."

  "Well, okay, but you have to unfreeze now. We have to get to the emergency stairs."

  She had remembered what it was she should have taken from her desk. But it was too late, because Asian was not able to help himself. No point in asking him why he wasn't wearing his badge, not for her to say anyway. She fed him his pills, stripped out the roller towel from his toilet and soaked it, thank god for old fashioned luxury, thank god the water was still running, and walked with him slowly step by step. They were not in danger, as long as he didn't collapse. When they reached the clinical floor the smoke was worse. They sat and shuffled from step to step, passing the wet towel between them.