Slow River

by Nicola Griffith

  I opened the door. Magyar was there, trying to look bored, succeeding only in looking fierce and alien in her green skinny with its red and black strapping. I stood aside, gestured from one to the other. “Magyar, this is my father, Oster. Dad, this is Cherry Magyar.” I put my arm around her waist briefly, so he would understand, and said to her, “My father and I are going for a walk. I’ll be back. After the shift, outside.”

  I hadn’t meant it to be a question, but of course it was. My father was here in the flesh. Everything was real. This was her chance to back away from Lore van de Oest. All she said was, “Don’t be late,” and gave my father a piercing look.

  It was wet and cold and windy. The towpath was surprisingly light: the water reflected the city’s glow. We walked in silence for a while.

  “Did you fly straight from Ratnapida?”

  “Yes. Private plane from Auckland to Bangkok, then on to Rotterdam. Then here.”

  “I imagine you feel cold.” It was summer in Ratnapida. Mid-eighties on a cool day.

  “The carp are bigger,” he said. “Even in just three years.”

  More silence.

  “Lore, will you come home?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “She’s gone,” he said softly. “Your mother.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was terrible.”

  I took his arm as we walked, and he told me: Tok arriving in the middle of the night, shouting, “-making all these accusations. He was wild. Shouting, almost screaming.” He wouldn’t wait until morning. He had waited too long already, he said. Stella was dead, Greta was a twisted shadow of what she should be, because ever since they were very small Katerine had been going into their rooms and… using them

  “Did you believe him?”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “But you did, didn’t you?” Accusatory. “Because you already knew.”

  The arm in mine tensed. I thought he would pull away, but then he sagged. “I didn’t know. I mean, I was never sure. But I think I’ve suspected… That night when you screamed and wouldn’t be left alone without a lock… But she was my wife! Your mother. Mothers don’t… they don’t do that sort of thing.”

  “Stella is dead. I nearly died. Tok ran away.” I had a sudden vision of myself as a mechanical bird, parroting: Stella is dead, I nearly died, Tok ran away. Stella is dead, I nearly died, Tok…

  “It’s so easy, Lore, to ignore things. To pretend that what’s there is your imagination.”

  “Do you know, do you have any idea, what your… your pretense cost me? Do you?”

  “Tok said…” His voice was low and brown with grief.

  Maybe I should have felt sorry for him, and I did, in a way, but I was too angry. “Stella died. I didn’t even get to go to her funeral. I don’t even know where you had the funeral. Katerine was there, and not me. Katerine and Greta. And why? Because you didn’t pay my ransom! Because-”

  “What do you mean, we didn’t pay your ransom? Of course we did. Greta handled it. She told me so personally.”

  “Greta,” I said. “Greta. Good old gray Greta. Greta will get the job done. Give it to Greta.” I hardly recognized my own voice, it was so twisted up. Oster looked sick. “Don’t you like who I’ve become, Papa? I’ve been through some hard times, staying alive. But I’m not a bad person. I don’t hide from the truth.” You’re doing it again, hiding from things, Magyar had said. Well, not anymore. “Let me tell you some things about Greta, Papa. Are you listening? Because I will follow you and speak until you do hear. Gray Greta, efficient Greta, is running a group like Jerome’s Boys.”

  “But-”

  I was implacable. “One of them, who goes by the name of Nathan Meisener, was almost responsible for the deaths of thousands and thousands of people. I could have been one of them. And she’s risking the deaths of thousands every day. She had me kidnapped. Yes, my own sister. She probably kidnapped Lucas Chen.”

  Oster looked bewildered.

  “You’re not asking why, Papa, but I’ll tell you. She took me because I was an easy target. And she saw me as being the favorite, of you and Katerine. Maybe you would both pay the ransom. And she needed the money, because she needs to control things, have secrets, secret power. Only she didn’t know what to do when Tok started making the accusations.

  Everything got confused. Maybe she thought Tok knew about her. Maybe she panicked and tried to get rid of me: I stopped being a person and became a liability. People aren’t real to her. Why? Because my mother made her crazy.” I was trembling with rage, only now it was not only at Oster but at Katerine. Katerine, who had ruined the lives of untold people. Who had nearly ruined mine. Katerine.

  “Where is she?”

  “What?”

  “Katerine. Where is she” Where did you send her? She’s not in jail. It would have been on the net.”

  “Tok said we should get the police. But I couldn’t. She’s your mother.”

  She’s a monster. “She should be in jail.”

  “I couldn’t…” He seemed unwilling to continue. I just waited. I was scared, I realized. What if she was somewhere nearby?

  “Don’t you see? Not having control, not knowing what was going on hurt her.” Not enough. Not nearly enough to make up for Stella, and Tok, and me, and Lucas Chen. “I made her leave. Divorced her. Divested her of her holdings.” It all sounded impossibly military, like a court-martial. “She’s watched. We get reports…”

  He trailed off. I had a sudden, sickening feeling in my stomach. “Who sees to the reports?”

  “Greta.”

  Greta. She was everywhere.

  Oster was still talking to me. “… don’t understand why she would want to hurt you. She’s your sister. Are you… are you sure?”

  He was hunched up, like a dog expecting a kick, I felt sorry for him. “I’m sure. And I don’t think she does want to hurt people. She doesn’t think about that. What she’s thinking about is the family. The business. Control. The patents, the intellectual property, the profits. It’s her life. The way she’s found to not think about being small and held down by her sweating, crying mother…” I was the one who was crying. Greta, who had got me a lock. My mother, lost…

  He stared at me. His eyes were bright with city lights. “How do you know all this?”

  “Oh, Papa, you are the one who should have known!”

  He reached out and touched my tears, found a handkerchief. “We can’t be everywhere, and know everything at once,” he said sadly.

  But you didn’t even try! He had removed himself from the responsibilities of ownership, He had been happy to leave it all to his wife and her family. He had delegated himself right out of the command chain, and gone off in his boat to count endangered fish.

  “The business carries your name. You’re responsible.”

  I didn’t know how to make him understand. I met a man called Paolo, I wanted to say, whose life is ruined because you didn’t care enough to oversee the business. The money comes in, and you take it, you don’t care how it’s made, you don’t care that we still rake in tithes on every patent use, that we preside over a monopoly that we don’t need anymore. We already have so much money we don’t know what to do with it.

  But even when I was seven years old I had known he preferred to leave the real work to others. He wasn’t a termite on the forest floor, organizing the building; he was a brightly colored bird soaring up, up above the canopy, unconcerned with what went on below, as long as the sun still shone and there was nectar in the orchids.

  There was too much for me to explain, and I didn’t have time.

  “I have something to do tonight,” I said. “Something that won’t wait. I’ve made a tape. I’ll give it to you. You must make Greta give back Lucas Chen.” I hesitated, then decided not to threaten him with taking it to the police, making the whole sordid business public. “And I want your help. I want you to speed up the formal reclaiming of my identity. I want a copy of m
y PIDA.”

  He knew there were things I wasn’t saying, but he merely nodded. “I have it.” They had probably sent it to the family as proof that they had me. “I’ll get it messengered over first thing tomorrow. Will I see you then?”

  He looked old and frail. “Oh, Papa, yes.”

  We walked farther. We had been walking awhile.

  “I have to go.”

  We held each other again. Longer this time, and harder. I had my father back. “Tomorrow,” he whispered. I hurried down the towpath.

  Spanner was in the Polar Rear, drinking alone. She saw me in the mirror and watched me thread my way to the bar, the way a well-fed snake will watch a young pig: trying to decide whether it should kill now, or wait for its prey to grow a little and make the attraction, the mesmerizing gaze, the final strike worthwhile.

  I didn’t bother to sit down. “Why did you do it?”

  She shrugged, looking down at her drink. “Why not? You always said I would do anything for money.”

  “And will a quarter of a million make you feel good about yourself?”

  “Money always helps.”

  “That’s what you’ve been waiting for all along, isn’t it? A reward. For your prey to finally get big enough, worth the risk. Worth lunging for, pumping full of poison.”

  Her eyes seemed dry and blank. No reflections there. No clues about how she felt, or if she did feel anything anymore. I doubted she understood a word I was saying.

  “Did you hate me right from the beginning?” She said nothing. “Why did you hate me? Because I had what you didn’t, self-respect?”

  She stirred. “You didn’t have any self-respect when I found you naked and bleeding and nameless. No, what I hated was that you had choices. You chose to not go back to your family. I had no choices. I’ve never had choices.”

  “That’s not true. There is always a choice.”

  “Easy to say when you’re a van de Oest.”

  Perhaps she was right. I would never know. I was not her, and I was glad. “What do you want me to say? That I hate you? I don’t.” And I didn’t. I didn’t feel much of anything except sorrow that she could not and would not see the chances and choices and possibilities of change I felt everywhere about me. And it wasn’t just because I was a van de Oest. Stella had been a van de Oest, and she had killed herself. Greta had been brought up as one, and she had twisted and stayed twisted. You had to allow change, you had to want it. You had to believe you deserved it. Spanner did not hate me; she hated herself.

  I left her sitting there alone, looking at her reflection in her beer. I wondered what she saw.

  The medic had a clinic in the center of town. I had to offer him a triple fee to open up for me for a nonemergency.

  There was no nurse. He cleaned my left hand himself, worked on it quickly and efficiently, and closed up the incision with a plastic staple. He sprayed it with plaskin. Put a small sticking plaster on the top. “That’s to remind you it’s stapled. Otherwise, you might forget and try to use it.”

  I wondered how many times he had saved people’s lives, or how many times he had tried and failed, without notifying the authorities. His eyes were very tired, down-drooping, like a bloodhound’s. He was exhausted. What would happen if there was a gunshot wound, or a serious stabbing to attend to, and he was too tired?

  “Doctor,” I said on impulse as he collected his instruments in a tray, “if I made a donation, would you give me some information about one of your past clients?”

  “No”.

  “For thirty thousand?” He hesitated. “For thirty thousand now, and a yearly stipend—enough to hire an assistant for the night shift? I’ll put it in writing if you like.”

  He put the tray down and looked at me steadily, his eyes more like a dog’s than ever. “What’s the question?”

  “Did you treat a man, just over three years ago, with a wound to his neck? A man about six feet tall. The wound would have been about here.” I pointed to the left side of my neck, at the carotid.

  “What kind of wound?”

  “Puncture. Tear. Made with a long, rusty nail. And if you did treat him, did he die?”

  He said nothing for a long time. “Let me ask you a question instead. You know I need the money—the clinic needs it. If I refuse to give you confidential information, would you withhold it?”

  The man had saved my life. He knew it, I knew it. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.” That wasn’t enough. The thirty thousand was stolen, anyway. “You can have the thirty thousand. No strings attached.”

  He went to his terminal and for a moment I thought he was going to pull the information I needed, all the case notes, because I had made the selfless choice—like the child in a fairy tale being rewarded by the old witch in disguise. But life isn’t a fairy tale. He was making up my bill.

  He held it out.

  “Thank you,” I managed, and headed for the door.

  At the wharf, the lights were still out from my last visit. The surface of the river was choppy in the wind. I watched it awhile. The riverbank is the one place in the jungle where an animal is visible from the air and the ground.

  The grate in the pavement was hard to lift one-handed, and I got a bruise on my wrist when it fell the first time I tried. It seemed appropriate. This should not be too easy and painless.

  Turning on the lights was like stepping out into the open. “My name,” I said to the wind, to the river rolling to the sea, “is Frances Lorien van de Oest. I live here.”

  I would spend the rest of my life by the river, being visible.

  I got to the plant just as the shift was leaving. Magyar was the last out. Maybe she had been waiting as long as she could, giving me extra time, or putting off the possibility that I might not be there. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind, her face pinched and worried. Her head turned this way and that, searching.

  I stepped into the light. “Magyar.”

  When she saw me she smiled. It was like opening the door of a furnace: a blast of light, fire, warmth. For me. This woman’s eyes were bright and lively, full of herself and her vision of me. I could see myself there, if I looked.

  I held out my hands. She took them, then lifted my left hand to the light. “What happened?”

  “I had the false PIDA removed.” For a while, I would be nobody but the Lore I had made. We stood in the street, wind howling around us, Magyar’s hair streaming behind her. I imagined her in my kitchen in the morning, skin warm and smelling of sleep, that beautiful hair tucked behind her ears, making coffee, talking of this and that. “Come home with me.”

  “Yes.”

  We walked hand in hand down the street. When I met my family again, I would introduce them to both of us.

  Author’s Note

  There is a disturbing tendency among readers—particularly critics—to assume that any woman who writes about abuse, no matter how peripherally, must be speaking from her own experience. This is, in Joanna Russ’s terms, a denial of the writer’s imagination. Should anyone be tempted to assume otherwise, let me be explicit: Slow River is fiction, not autobiography. I made it up.

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