Always

by Nicola Griffith

  AT THE Queen City Grill we were shown to one of the dozen or so booths running alongside the bar, a huge expanse of mahogany that looked as though it had been there a hundred years. It was enhanced by a double handful of the young urban gorgeous. One woman with long glossy hair and skin the color of toasted flax smiled and tipped her head back to laugh. Her companions laughed, too. She sipped her martini, and when she leaned forward, the cream silk of her dress pulled tight across her hips. Her lips left a red print on the rim of her glass.

  “See anything you fancy?” Dornan said, studying the menu, which was very short and specialized in steaks and seafood with an Asian tang.

  “Crab cakes look good.”

  The wine list turned out to be heavy on Washington and Oregon vineyards I’d encountered only in travel guides. I put it down. The woman at the bar laughed again, and the server appeared.

  “What do you have on draft?”

  I settled on something called Hefeweizen, Dornan ordered a kamikaze, and we asked for oysters to start. The Hefeweizen came with a wedge of lemon in it, and looked like cloudy lager. It tasted better than it looked. The oysters were cool and slippery and tasted like the beach at low tide. We focused on the food for a while.

  The woman at the bar slid from her stool and stood, gathering purse and wrap.

  “It’s good to see your appetite returning,” Dornan said. He was concentrating on squeezing the last drop from his lemon onto the oyster on his plate. I let him tip it into his mouth and swallow, then nodded at the last remaining half-shell.

  “How’s your appetite?”

  “Let me put it this way, Torvingen. For once, I think I’d be prepared to fight you for it.”

  We ordered another dozen.

  Two intense twenty-nothings took a seat at the bar and started arguing about whether cyberpunk owed its attitude more to Materialist philosophy or to a misguided interpretation of Descartes’ interpretation of Aristotle.

  “So,” he said. “How are you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. It’s been nearly a year. And then the incident with your self-defense student. And now your mother is coming. Talk to me. Tell me how you feel, what you think.”

  I thought Mr. Materialism was about to get lucky: Ms. Cartesian Dualism was leaning forward in the kind of unnatural pose that had been practiced in front of the mirror because someone once told her it made her throat look delicious, and holding her hand palm up while she talked, tilted towards him in a way that could be interpreted only as Touch me. And indeed, Mr. Materialism was beginning to stumble over the bigger words as his subconscious figured out what was going on and diverted blood from his brain to more important organs. Although Dornan’s degree from Trinity was in philosophy, I doubted that’s what he meant. I shook my head.

  He drank off his kamikaze, sighed with pleasure while he refilled his glass from the cocktail shaker, and nodded over at the debating couple. “Did you ever argue philosophy with a girl in a bar?”

  “There are easier ways.”

  He nodded. “Buying her a drink always worked for me. So have you tried any interesting approaches lately?”

  I looked at him.

  “You could at least reassure me that since, ah, well . . .” He hated to mention Julia’s death. “I just don’t think it’s natural to be so—Look, I know how you are, what you’re like. You shouldn’t deprive yourself . . .”

  “I haven’t.”

  He sat back and looked expectant.

  “Her name was Reece.”

  His expectant look didn’t waver. Ever since I had let him help with the cabin in North Carolina last year he seemed to believe he deserved a window into my life. I had not yet worked out how to shut him out, or whether I wanted to.

  “When I went back to the cabin last month Tammy had a party. She introduced me to Reece. We had a conversation that ended up in bed. She’s a very pleasant woman. It was a very pleasant evening. I doubt I’ll ever see her again.”

  I had needed the animal warmth of the sex, had welcomed the familiar building heat of skin on skin, the harsh breath, the shudder that starts in your bones. The terrible urge afterwards to weep until I howled had been new.

  “That Tammy. Isn’t she something?” It had been three months since she’d returned his ring, but his voice still throbbed with pride.

  “She is.” She was a piece of work. He was better off without her.

  SOMEONE HAD turned on the fire in the corner of my room. The dime was undisturbed. I turned off the fire, put the dime in my pocket, and opened the window.

  I read the faxes. Details from Laurence about how my Seattle real estate revenues had fallen against local benchmarks, the addresses of my local real estate manager and my cross-shipping warehouse, and a list of leaseholders of that property in the last eighteen months—far too many. Bette’s fax was a detailed, itemized list of OSHA and EPA complaints leveled by person or persons unknown against either me, as the property owner, or various lessees, along with pages of definitions of various regulations, and the names of relevant people at both regulatory offices to deal with the complaints.

  I turned to my laptop. The fan hummed and the hard drive chuckled as it ran its anonymizer software and automatically cleaned itself of anything but the most basic programs: no documents, no cookies, no automatic updates downloaded from the Web, no e-mails, no address book, nothing. Just an operating system unencumbered by experience or past history, lean and sure, memory constantly scoured and reset for instant, optimum efficiency. Stupid, to be jealous of a computer.

  I set every firewall I could, then hunted for and matched the hotel network. I logged in to my e-mail account. Nothing.

  I logged out, wiped all the cookies again, just in case, and checked my antivirus software. All my personal data was safe on the flash drive on my key ring.

  It was late, according to my body clock. Nearly four in the morning.

  I tapped the faxes into a neat pile and put them next to the phone on the cherry-veneered desk by the window. I’d study them carefully in the morning. On top of the pile I put my maps and two books about Seattle. Tomorrow I’d start learning this city the way I liked best, by moving through it.

  I undressed and carefully laid my clothes over the back of the desk chair, easily to hand in case of emergency.

  I stood naked by the open window. The water was black. Kuroshio, the Black Current, the vast ocean stream that poured past Japan and arced north, keeping the inlets of the Pacific Northwest from freezing. I could lower myself into the lightless water and slide beneath the surface, leave it all behind. Give it all away and never look back. I wish my father had left all his holdings to my mother instead. I wouldn’t have to be in Seattle to deal with a real estate manager stealing me blind. I wouldn’t have to meet my mother and brand-new stepfather. I wouldn’t have been at leisure to teach a self-defense class.

  The room felt as warm and moist as the womb. I got dressed.

  ON FOOT, I could head south. I walked through the night, swinging my arms, glad that there was nothing to my right but Elliott Bay. I could feel the open water, taste salt on the breeze. I walked up and down artificially graded hillocks of grass, avoided a tree. When I ran out of park I turned left, under the Alaskan Way viaduct; I saw traces of the homeless—a burnt-out trash can, a slashed sleeping bag—but the streets and train tracks were silent.

  In Atlanta at one o’clock on Thursday morning I would have had downtown to myself, but Seattle’s center flickered with flashes of restless, contradictory life. As I walked down First, south of Queen City, I could have been looking at two different boulevards. On my left, the fifty-foot-tall sculpture of The Hammering Man banged away silently in cultural ecstasy outside the Seattle Art Museum. On my right, a man and a woman stepped into the street from the Lusty Lady, whose pink neon sign flashed cheerily, its letter board declaring VENI, VIDI, VENI. Peep shows for the classically educated.

  Pioneer Square wasn’t really a
square but a triangle, partially cobbled, with a totem pole and a drinking fountain. The buildings were old brick and wrought ironwork, painted to match the blue-and-rust paintwork on the Tlingit totem. There had been more trees in the guidebook photos, plane trees. I couldn’t think of any diseases specific to plane trees, and wondered why they had been taken down. It was still a picture-perfect vision of the heart of an established city whose industrious citizens slept well—or would have been without the thump of club music, and the homeless who lay on benches or leaned against the wall in knots of two or three, not unlike the hipsters at the bar earlier. Some of them were young and some smoked, but none wore white and none of them laughed; most had more tattoos than teeth. They stopped talking as I neared. I nodded. They smelled of tobacco and old wine, like old people in hot countries, which is not how the homeless in Atlanta smell.

  Guidebooks never told you everything. Seattle was another country.

  LESSON 1

  SELF-DEFENSE IS NOT JUST A SKILL, IT’S A WORLDVIEW. LIKE THE SCIENTIFIC method—or religion, or motherhood, for that matter—once you accept its method-or religion, or motherhood, for that matter—once you accept its precepts you see things differently. I didn’t intend to tell my students this. Just as you don’t try to interest six-year-olds in natural history by discussing physiology and adaptive evolution—but take them, instead, to a pond to watch tadpoles turn into frogs—on the first day of class you don’t tell grown women to change their lives. You show them how to punch a bag.

  I parked outside Crystal Gaze, under the only streetlight. It was a long way from the side door. I turned off the Saab’s heater and got out. 5:56 on the second Tuesday of February. My breath hung in a cloud as I zipped my jacket. The sky was the heavy grey of unpolished pewter, shading to iron in the east. The still dark reminded me of Mørketiden, the days of Norwegian winter when you don’t see the sun.

  Crystal Gaze is Atlanta’s alternative bookshop and personal wellness center, more comfortable with chakras than choke holds. My class, the advisory board had decided, could go ahead as long as it was in the basement space. It was a very nice space, they said, even without a window: newly painted, new carpet, and a room air-conditioner; big and bare, eminently suitable for physical activity. It also had its own convenient side entrance. In other words, sweaty women reeking of the body would not trample through the main floor and disturb patrons who were browsing their way to the next level of spiritual enlightenment. They agreed I could bring in four big mats and a punch bag and leave them for the duration of the course.

  The stairwell smelled of concrete dust. My boots echoed. There were damp footprints on each tread, including one set of those pointy-toed, needle-heeled shoes that look as though they would leave the wearer utterly crippled. I peered more closely. Two sets of pointy toes. Or—no, one set whose owner had walked down, then turned and taken a couple of steps back, then decided to head back down and go through with it.

  Americans rarely have the same appreciation of punctuality as Norwegians, so when I opened the basement door at precisely six o’clock I was mildly surprised to find nine women already sitting on the corded blue carpet. Nine pairs of shoes were lined up neatly under the bench. Second from the right were the pointy-toed spike heels: brown fake-alligator ankle boots. Several of the women could have owned them—lots of lower-tier business clothes and careful makeup—though I’d bet on the white woman with the curly hair in a powder blue blouse with a wide silver stripe. At least she was wearing trousers, unlike the woman in the brilliant green skirt and matching jacket.

  “We will begin with the closed fist,” I said. “Please stand.”

  They gaped at me, then a stout woman with wiry grey hair and sensible workout clothes stirred, said, “Don’t need names for that, I guess,” and hauled herself to her feet. One woman who had been sitting in full lotus position with her palms up stood with the ease of a dancer, or perhaps a yoga practitioner, though the muscles around her eyes were tight. Another—matte black dye job, who had sat with legs spread and weight tipped back on her many-ringed hands—rose with the awkwardness of a day-old foal, just a bit too quickly to match the boredom she was trying to project. There were several obvious cases of nervous tension, including Blue Blouse; one openmouthed possible breathing difficulty, which I hoped wouldn’t develop into asthma due to poor air quality; and one set of tilted shoulders that looked to be more the result of habitual bad posture than a structural deficit. On first assessment, the only possible powder keg was a white woman who jerked to her feet and kept her chin down; who didn’t lift her eyes from the floor, even when the door banged open behind me.

  “Oh,” said the latecomer. Softball muscles played in her forearm as she shifted her gym bag from right hand to left, and through her warm-ups her quads bulged like those of a soccer player. “Sorry I’m late.”

  I wheeled the punch bag and frame away from the painted breeze-block wall and into the center of the room. The heavy bag swayed. I dropped the stabilizer on each leg and slapped it into place.

  “This bag is filled with sand. You can’t hurt it.” It couldn’t hurt them, either, because I’d had it fitted with a custom cover of latex over foam to protect their beginner’s hands. I nodded at the middle-aged woman with the wiry hair. “Come and give it a try.”

  “Me?”

  Basic rule of animal behavior: control the leader of the herd. For a group of women who had been together less than ten minutes, that meant the cheerful motherly one. “Stand here. Make a fist. No. Keep your thumb out of the way.”

  I found their ignorance difficult to believe. Dornan had tried to warn me. He had watched me thumbtack my poster to the public board in one of his cafés and shaken his head. I don’t think you know what you’re letting yourself in for. Anyone could show up. Southern women with big hair, big teeth, big nails. Women with husbands and babies.

  “The thumb always goes on the outside of the fingers,” I said, and raised my hand to show them. They all nodded and flexed experimental fists. I got behind the bag and steadied it against my body. “Now hit it.”

  The stout older woman glanced around, but didn’t seem to find any hints, so she stepped up to the bag, and gave it a tentative tap. Self-consciousness, the curse of Western womanhood.

  “Again, only this time, say ‘Blam!’ ”

  “Blam?”

  “Like a cartoon. Pretend you’re in a Saturday-morning animation: Blam! Pow! Zap! You’re an invincible superhero. It’s not really you hitting this bag, it’s the character you’re playing.”

  She pulled a face at her audience, moved half a pace closer to the bag, said “Blam!” like a ten-year-old boy waving a homemade lightsaber, and thumped it. The difference was audible. “Cool!”

  Everyone grinned. I nodded at her to go again.

  “Whap!” she said. “Zammo! Bam bam bam!” Her face got red and her hair stuck out.

  “Okay. Good. Next!”

  They lined up. The newcomer assaulted the bag with a flurry of ferocious punches, added a couple of elbow smashes, and finished with a “Whomp, whomp, you asshole!”

  “Next.”

  The yoga woman, light but competent, followed by Dye Job who shrieked “Fuck!” when her fingers got mashed between bag and ring metal, a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Blue Blouse and Green Skirt surreptiously removed rings and pocketed them. Blue Blouse was clearly embarrassed but hit the bag anyway, after a fashion. Then, because it was her turn and it was expected of her, Carpet Starer came to the bag, managed “Bang, bang,” in a tight whisper, and poked it with her knuckles. I nodded and called “Next!” because I had seen so many women like her—in shelters, in hospital emergency rooms, bleeding bravely in their homes—and it was important not to let her know I was paying attention. Next was Green Skirt, who unselfconsciously hitched up her skirt, brushed back her bangs, and flipped her hair over her shoulders before beginning. Then Sloping Shoulders, then Breathing Difficulty.

  Now that everyone had had
a go, I made the line hustle.

  “Run!” I said. “Faster. Hit it three times. And again. Experiment: stand closer, try the other hand, point the other leg forward. Shout when you hit it. Hit it five times. Don’t think. Do. And run. And again.” The air began to hum, and muscles plump, and just before the room kindled I clapped my hands and said, “Enough. Please sit.” They did, in an obliging circle, some smiling, and Blue Blouse scooted to her left with an ingratiating bob of her head—teacher’s pet—to make a space. I took it.

  “I am Aud Torvingen. Aud, rhymes with crowd.” They waited for more, but I wasn’t interested in proving I was qualified to teach them, and the name of the class, Introduction to Women’s Self-Defense, was self-explanatory. I nodded to Blue Blouse that it was her turn. She told us she was Jennifer, and we went round the circle briskly: Pauletta, with the green skirt and a gold cross. Suze, the latecomer. Katherine, the bad posture. Sandra, the carpet starer. Kim, with long red nails. Therese, the yoga woman. Christie, the dye job. Tonya, the breathing difficulty with carefully straightened hair. Janine, the middle-aged woman, “Or Nina, I don’t mind which.”

  “Pick one,” I said.

  “Nina, then.”

  “Fine.” I waited a moment. “Self-defense has only one goal: to survive.”

  “And kick butt!” said Nina.

  “No.” They blinked. “One goal, to survive.”

  “Wait a second,” Suze said, “just hold on.” She leaned forward. “You’re saying we can’t fight?”

  “I’m saying that from a self-defense perspective, the only goal is to survive. Fighting is neither here nor there.” Wrinkled brows. The flick-flick-flick of Kim’s long red nails, one by one, against her thumb. “Of course, once you’ve ensured your survival, kicking someone to death is an option.”

  Therese lifted her shoulders, momentarily losing that Zen poise as nasty reality intruded on her nice, clean middle-class understanding.

  Suze was still frowning. “So are you saying we should or shouldn’t fight?”

  “You’re grown-ups. Make your own choices. My job is to show you the basic tools and techniques of self-defense: how to stay out of trouble, how to recognize it if it finds you anyway, how to deal with it using what’s available—whether that means words, or body weapons like elbows and teeth, or found objects.”