Life (36 page)

“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 Lavvy’s salon. We should have been taking notes.”

“I don’t remember. I only remember you and me and Lavvy, 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 because—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 aspirational 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!”