Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  “That’s me. Frances Lorien van de Oest. The real me. Or it was.” I didn’t know who I was now. I had an eerie sense of multiplicity, of staring down at my reflection in the water and seeing three faces instead of one.

  Magyar was very still, and her eyes looked odd. Slitty. Sunk back into their epicanthic folds. I knew I should be wary of her strange expression, but I felt oddly dispassionate. Unreal. The pictures on the screen kept moving, mute. The three reflections in my head rippled. Who am I? Magyar still didn’t say anything. She was clenching and unclenching her plasthene-gloved fists. Her mouth was a straight line.

  “You aren’t supposed to be angry,” I said calmly, from a great distance.

  “No? Tell me, Bird, how am I supposed to react?”

  Like everyone else reacted to the van de Oest name: shock, awe, then a closing off as the person they were dealing with changed from human to van de Oest.

  “I don’t understand. Why are you angry?”

  “Because I feel like a fool.” Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. “We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.”

  Just like that. Dismissed. “But…”

  “But what?” Hand on hip.

  But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She couldn’t just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else… But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it—to be treated as a real person?

  “We’re not done with this, Bird. Not nearly done. We’ll talk after the shift. After you’ve made up your time.”

  She waited. I waited back, then realized she had the upper hand: I was the worker, she the supervisor. The fact that I had told her who I really was didn’t change that. I left the break-room. As though my movement had disturbed the surface of a river, the three faces shivered and blurred together, indistinct.

  I don’t remember walking to the troughs, but found myself there, trembling, looking at my face in the slick black water.

  Who am I? What would I say if I opened my mouth?

  * * *

  We ordered loc, the hot chocolate liqueur. Magyar took a big gulp of steaming liquid and burned herself. She swore, called to the man behind the counter for some ice, then scowled at him when he shoved an ice bucket her way. Her eyebrows were very dark against her pale skin.

  She put a cube in her mouth, crunched, sucked.

  I said nothing, I did not even want to breathe too hard, in case the single blurred reflection in my head separated out again.

  “So. We’re here to talk about the way you lied to me.”

  I spoke carefully, uncertain of my voice. Of my accent. Of the language. Of my own tongue. “It’s hard.”

  “Do it anyway.” Utterly unsympathetic.

  “Tell me about your family.”

  “Why? We’re here to talk about you, not me.”

  “Do you have brothers? Or sisters?”

  “Both.” She swallowed her ice and took another experimental sip of loc.

  “I have—had—two sisters and a brother. But one is a half sister, Greta, my mother’s daughter, and she’s so much older than me she’s more like an aunt-”

  “Is this relevant?”

  “-and the other brother and sister are twins. Were twins. Stella killed herself.” Now she was listening. “In some ways I was like an only child. And my parents should have divorced fifteen years ago. I am used to hiding things that matter to me, keeping them close. It’s what I do. Who I am.”

  “Tell me why the fuck I should care about that! You think that just because you can buy me and Hedon Road, probably the whole city, a hundred times over I’ll nod and say, Fine? Just like that? Without even an explanation of why you’ve been hiding, lying to me? Lying to everyone.”

  There was no way to deal with her anger. I ignored it. “This job, Hedon Road isn’t a game to me. I need it. I have less money than you do.” Not true, not true. What about the thirty thousand? The faces shimmered, each with their own secrets.

  The muscles in her jaw had relaxed a little, and her pupils were returning to normal.

  “I was kidnapped. You know that. When they, when I escaped, I couldn’t go back.” The rest stuck in my throat like small polished pebbles.

  “Why? And why did you lie?”

  I sat there, mute.

  “I feel like such a fool. Do you have any idea how used I feel? All that time I was ordering you around, telling you to bring me this readout or that, treating you like an apprentice. Making you work like that. All that time, you knew, you knew…” She swirled the remains of her loc around the glass. “You know something? You’ve made me feel ashamed of myself. Of how I bullied you. I don’t like that.”

  “You didn’t bully me.”

  She wasn’t listening. “But why? That’s what I don’t understand. You say you need the money, but why? Why aren’t you back with Mummy and Daddy-”

  “Don’t.” Sharper than I intended. “Please, don’t call them that.”

  “Fine. Your family, then. Why aren’t you with them, in your fancy house, or estate, or whatever?”

  “Ratnapida.”

  “What?”

  “The house. It’s called Ratnapida.” Stella in the fountain. Oster. Then, later, Oster and Tok, standing side by side. Tok looking beaten.

  “Whatever. You could be in the sunshine, doing nothing. So why are you hiding? And what happened to the real Sal Bird?”

  I think I killed someone, I had told her. “I never met her. She died in an accident.” I waited for her to decide whether or not to believe me. I knew I looked calmer than I felt. Years of training at the dinner table.

  She absorbed that, nodding. Still expressionless. “Go on.”

  “The man I killed…” I swallowed. The man I killed. “It was one of the men who kidnapped me.” I told her about the tent, the drugs. About Crablegs and the camera. About finding the nail.

  “This is hard. I haven’t thought about it. It was… So when they took me outside, after they’d told me my family hadn’t paid… I thought… it just…” Another swallow. I looked down at my hand on the bar. This was not something I wanted to think about. I stared at my fingertips, the way the skin curled pinkly around the nails. She put her hands on mine, warm and dry. I still couldn’t look up. Try, that hand said. “I had the nail hidden in my fist. When we got outside I hit him in the neck.”

  She lifted her hand from mine and picked up her drink. “Was he dead?”

  “The other one, Crablegs, he said I’d killed him. “But…” But of course Crablegs would want me to think that. Keep me confused, docile. “I don’t know. I just assumed.”

  “Then that’s the first thing we do tomorrow.”

  “We?”

  She just looked at me, indecipherable.

  I felt strange. “I need another drink.”

  We were quiet while the drinks arrived.

  “When did it happen, the kidnap?”

  “September. Three years ago.” Crisp clean air like the scent of apples. The cobbles, blood. Only he might not be dead after all. And Magyar had said we.

  “September. Right. So we’ll look at all the murder reports from three-”

  But I wasn’t listening. I might not have killed him after all. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?” I said suddenly.

  Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  I put my hand on hers, the one still wrapped around her glass. Neither of us said anything. We both pretended our hands weren’t warm and soft together, palm to back, finger on finger, the hair of her forearm touching the underside of my wrist.

  “I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spanner. Do you know what I’m entrusting to you? I think she did. “
My father loved me. That’s what I thought. But then I found out my sister Stella had been…” I couldn’t say it. It was as though there were a clothespin crimping that part of my mind together. I had to talk about it. “I had bad dreams about a monster. My older sister, Greta—she was already grown by the time my mother married my… Anyway, she understood what was really happening. She gave me a lock for my door, so…” the monster “my…” the monster “so Oster couldn’t come into my bedroom when I was alone. Stella went into therapy. Tok said she was getting better, but then she killed herself. And I hadn’t known anything. All that time, he was doing that to her. Had been. And then when she got older, when she wasn’t a helpless child anymore, he tried it on me. But Greta knew.” Greta, always gray and stooped, hesitant as though something was about to come around the corner and get her. “I think it had happened to her, too. What I can’t understand…” The air in the bar seemed too thick all of a sudden, the oxygen all used up. I wanted to go belly to the ground, where it was safer, where it was easier to breathe. “What I can’t understand is why no one told me. Tok knew. Stella knew. Greta knew. I didn’t. I should have guessed. There were all these clues. He even… He even took me for a walk and asked me what I knew, what I had been told.”

  What did Stella say? he had asked.

  No one tells me anything, I replied.

  But Greta had tried. Or at least she had got me the lock.

  Magyar was frowning. “I’m trying to understand something. You said you thought Oster turned to you when Stella was too old…”

  “Yes.”

  “But you think Greta was abused, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Lore.” Her eyes were soft, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. She sighed. “Tell me about the time… Tell me about the night the monster came to you.”

  “I dreamt. At least that’s what Katerine said when I woke up with her hand on my shoulder.”

  “Katerine was there when you woke up?”

  “Yes.” I was puzzled.

  “Lore.” She took both my hands in hers. “Just think a minute. You dreamed about the monster, and when you woke it was Katerine who was there.” I looked at her blankly. “You say Greta had been abused, too. But she was an adult by the time your mother and father married.”

  “Yes…” I said slowly.

  “Then if the abuser likes them young, it couldn’t have been Oster.”

  Absurdly it was Tok who came to mind, his laugh of disbelief when I shouted at him about being mean to Katerine, demanded to know if he realized what he was doing to her: What I have done to her?

  “It’s too hot in here. I have to go outside.” The air was so thick I felt as though I was swimming toward the door, fighting for breath. I leaned against the wall outside, gasping. I had forgotten to bring my coat. Through my thin shirt the bricks were hard against my shoulder blades.

  Katerine on the bed, fully dressed. “It’s a dream,” she said to Oster. Oster, who was just stumbling into the room.

  Magyar came out, our coats draped over her arm. She held mine out silently.

  “But she’s my mother,” I said finally.

  “Yes.”

  My mother, the monster. Which meant Oster wasn’t a monster after all. This time I had to bend forward, head nearly to my knees, before I could get air into my lungs.

  My mother, the monster. And Oster—he could be my father again. The one I thought I’d lost.

  I started pulling on my coat. “I have to go.”

  “Go where? Are you all right.”

  “I don’t know. But I need to think.”

  The air above the wharf was heavy with damp, the scent of timbers softened and swollen with rain and river water. I slipped down the right alleyway, found the panel set in the pavement, and levered it open. I laid my fingers lightly on the switches, then Hipped them. The lights went out.

  There was no moon and the stars hid behind soft black clouds; nothing to reflect from the water. Just me. I sat down on the wharf, careless of the cold. I could feel the river rather than see it: distended by the rains of the last two days to a thick, dark tongue feeling its way blindly to the sea. Somewhere downriver a barge bumped hollowly against its moorings. Water lapped softly at the timbers.

  An old river made old sounds. The water at Ratnapida had never sounded or smelled like this. There, it fountained in the sunshine, tinkled on stone, plopped when a fish surfaced for a fly. Even the rain sparkled—fast showers, followed by rainbows and glistening grass. Young water, and lighthearted. Maybe that was why Stella had chosen the fountain as her backdrop…

  It all seemed so different now: Stella desperate and pleading, begging for Oster to notice, to do something. Giving him, and me, clues that we couldn’t see.

  Katerine had watched the whole scene so calmly. Too calmly, I saw now: What mother should be able to watch her daughter like that, half naked, drunk, obviously in some pain? Why hadn’t I thought about that before? Because that’s just how Katerine was: closed up like a lacquered fan.

  But not always, Something, some feeling I had never seen, never even caught a glimpse of, had prompted her to steal into her children’s room at night—Greta, Stella, me—and… and… I felt again the heat of the monster’s breath on the back of my neck and the fear, the creeping flesh feeling that something was terribly awry in my seven-year-old world.

  How many times had Stella had to lie quietly through that? A mother was a foundation, a cornerstone, a touchstone, not a monster. Not the reason to kill oneself.

  All the time my mother had been doing that to my sister I had wanted her to love me, had ached for her approval, had wanted her to believe I was like her.

  I had to lean forward with my weight on my palms, I was so dizzy. Did the fact that I knew, now, what she had done make her a different person? Was I a bad person because I still wanted to be like her? And I still did. On some level I always would. It was what I had grown up with, that image of the calm, competent woman.

  I didn’t want to think about it. I stared down at my hands, at the drying cobbles, the miniature riverbeds that formed between them. Here and there were discarded remnants of the tourist trade: beverage cans, a torn disk wrapper. It would all be cleaned up by midmorning.

  Katerine had always liked things clean and orderly. Efficient. That monster, Tok had called her. That monster can’t be allowed to get away with it.

  Tok and Oster talking to the camera. Tok looking—not beaten, I realized, but exhausted. What had they done to her? Where was she? Why hadn’t they said something, anything on the net?

  My mother. I imagined her carefully: tidy hair, concise conversation, economical gestures. She had never gestured much, come to think of it. And her hair was always cut the same way, though she did occasionally tint it varying shades of blond, as a concession to fashion. Her eyes… I had never known the color of her eyes. Did she hide them in a subconscious attempt to hide her soul?

  My mother, who was all too human. She had got away with hurting her children because she was so… acceptable. But someone must have known. Tok had. And he had tried to tell me. Why had he taken so long to speak out?

  My father should have known! But so should I. No: I was a child. Not really.

  Had Oster known? I tried to remember how he had behaved that afternoon with Stella in the fountain. He had known something was wrong. He had even asked me what I knew…

  He should have known. I couldn’t get away from that. He was my father—Stella’s father—and he should have taken some responsibility, some interest in us apart from that absurd competition with his wife to make us love him more.

  He should have known. But he wasn’t a monster. And I missed him. I wanted to have him back. I’d spent the last three years believing him to be something he was not, and I wanted to touch him, maybe have him ruffle my hair, anything, just to make contact again with the father I had thought I had known.

  A barge hooted from downriver, a burly morning noise. Almos
t dawn.

  I stretched and stood, feeling strange: wobbly and light-boned. So much had changed. I had my father back, and had lost my mother. And Magyar knew who I was. She could see through the obscuring reflections. To her I wasn’t van de Oest, I wasn’t Criminal, I wasn’t Bird. I was just me, Lore.

  * * *

  Lore’s birthday came and went. Twenty. She went out in the blustery September wind with the cat’s daily ration of leftovers. As usual she knelt to push the plate under the bushes without really looking, but this time the plate bumped into something soft. She peered into the tangle of dry wood and old, dead leaves.

  It was a kitten. Dead. Probably about two weeks old.

  Skinny. Fur the color of sand.

  She looked at it a long time, then went inside to get her work gloves and spade. It weighed nothing.

  Kittens should be round, she thought. It struck her as terribly wrong for something so young to look so used-up. It should have had warm milk, and spring, and a skyful of butterflies to chase. Not a short, hard life and an end on the cold ground.

  It was wrong. All wrong.

  Spanner was reading. “I don’t really see what the difference is, whether you enjoy it or not.” She barely looked up from the gray book screen in her lap.

  “Because it’s a lie.” Because kittens should be round.

  Spanner switched to the next page. “It’s flickering again.”

  “What?” Lore was confused for a moment; then she realized Spanner was fiddling with the screen contrast. “Turn that book off and listen to me.”

  Spanner turned it off, put it down on the cushion next to her. “I was listening. You were saying that if you enjoy yourself it must not be real.”

  “You’re being obtuse.”

  “No. It’s a job, just like any other. You don’t begrudge Jamaican cane cutters a smoke to make their work less monotonous, do you? Or Chileans a good chew of coca leaf to get them up the next mountain trail where the air’s too thin for anything except their goats. So why deny yourself?”

  “Because I hate what we do.”

  “You just said you enjoyed it.”

  “I do, at the time.”