Daughter of Bad Times

by Rohan Wilson

  SENIOR CONSTABLE MARTIN: Shadi Thoriq.

  INSPECTOR LEE: Shadi Thoriq. You ran all the way. Through that scrub and whatever. The gum trees. You ran to Port Arthur just to hide from your cousin.

  YAU: Yes, sir. I did.

  INSPECTOR LEE: That make any sense to you, Davey?

  SENIOR CONSTABLE MARTIN: Not a fucking jot.

  INSPECTOR LEE: I agree.

  YAU: You have my cousin’s file. You know he was placed in solitary confinement because of the threat to my life. Is it so strange that I might be afraid of him?

  INSPECTOR LEE: Let me tell you what I reckon happened, Mr Umair. I reckon you left the facility with Rin Braden.

  YAU: That’s not true.

  INSPECTOR LEE: I reckon you left with Rin Braden. You went to Port Arthur together. She left you there and caught the ferry back to Hobart alone.

  YAU: I never saw her at Port Arthur.

  INSPECTOR LEE: When did you see her last?

  YAU: I told you. About the time the fence was breached I saw her running into the trees. Many people ran into the trees and she was among them.

  INSPECTOR LEE: Davey?

  SENIOR CONSTABLE MARTIN: Bullshit.

  INSPECTOR LEE: Senior Constable Martin doesn’t believe it.

  YAU: I have told you all I can tell.

  INSPECTOR LEE: There’s one more thing I need you to do, Mr Umair. I need you to unlock your glasses.

  YAU: I am an Unlawful Non-Citizen. Unlawful Non-Citizens do not have glasses.

  INSPECTOR LEE: Don’t come that crap with us. They were found on your person. We know they belong to you.

  YAU: Let me see them please.

 

  YAU: Glasses, wipe.

  INSPECTOR LEE: Get them off him. Get them off him.

  SENIOR CONSTABLE MARTIN: (inaudible)

 

  Yamaan

  On the last day of history, and with an unfelt rumble somewhere below the Indian ocean, I sat waiting outside the Braden house on Feydhoo Finolhu in a state of high anxiety. The maakashikeyo trees along the beach dropped leaves in the winds of afternoon and I remember these leaves, in their long sword shapes, falling and rattling on the sand. On some islands, they wove those leaves into prayer mats. I’d once been responsible for sieving maakashikeyo leaves from the jacuzzi on the rooftop of the house. Not anymore. I’d been fired. This was the first time I’d returned in over a month.

  I called it a house. Alessandra called it a bungalow. It was two lozenges of plastic and glass, stacked one atop the other, both sleek and white and with the upper somewhat offset from the lower. On the last day of history, I was sitting outside this house on a sand bank searching for the courage to call Rin, still in dreamy ignorance about the depraved things God had mapped for us after that distant earthquake.

  ‘Yamaan?’ she said in surprise. ‘Hold on. Give me a second.’

  She had on a slim silver dress, a metallic material, that shimmered in the lights of the nightclub. She was somewhere in Ginza. The bass beat of the music deadened as she entered a bathroom stall and latched the door.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ she said.

  Twenty-eight calls, in fact. None of which I’d answered.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘About the whole thing. Alessandra can overreact sometimes. I’m sorry if—’

  ‘Don’t apologise. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What?’ She was reapplying her lipstick with a compact mirror as she talked.

  ‘You have some on your teeth.’

  She plucked a tissue from somewhere off camera. ‘Damn it.’

  I kicked leaves into the lagoon. Courage was needed.

  ‘I sent you some messages. Did you get them?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got them. Thank you.’

  ‘I miss you. I love you. Please don’t be angry.’

  ‘Are you with Hoshino?’

  ‘He’s here someplace. Dancing with Clover. Honestly, if that son of a bitch touches my ass one more time, I will bite his ear off.’

  ‘There’s a favour I have to ask,’ I said. ‘I need you to open the door to the house.’

  I shook the heavy glass slider so she could see what I was talking about. It was August. The place was dark and empty. The Bradens, as was their habit, had flown out at the end of July.

  ‘The door?’

  ‘My knives, you see, they’re in the kitchen.’

  ‘Wait, you’re calling me about the door?’

  ‘If you could just unlock it for me, I’ll grab my knives and go.’

  ‘Unfuckingbelievable. You’re calling me about the door?’

  ‘Rin, I have to find a job. My mother can’t work. There’s the matter of paying our rent. I need my knives so I can—’

  ‘No, no, I get it. You want your knives. After a month of silence this is what you call me about. Not to see how I’m doing or anything. Just to ask a favour.’

  As Rin left the stall, I could see other women in the bathroom turning her way, raising their eyes away from phones or purses, wondering, I suppose, what she was yelling about.

  ‘Be straight with me, Yammy. Did you mean any of the stuff you said? Any of it? About you and me?’

  It felt like we were actors in one of the serials Rin liked to stream. Her mannerisms, her vocabulary, her injured pride—it was lifted wholesale from Hollywood. She lived her life at the emotional heights of soap opera. Right then, at that moment, I saw how my time in the house with Rin and Alessandra had fit the conventions of drama. The steady courtship, the slowly growing lust, then the fiery crash? That was a learned performance. We acted in the narrative patterns of pulp romance. This realisation made me angry. How arrogant I’d been to think her feelings were genuine when we’d simply played out the cultural display of passion. It was the sentiment of every restless holiday love story ever told. Really, it wasn’t me she loved but loneliness she hated.

  The thing about the holiday love story: it ends in separation.

  ‘Unlock the door,’ I said. ‘Please. I have a water taxi waiting for me.’

  ‘Did you mean it?’ she said. ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Rin—the lock.’

  ‘You said those things to me. I have your messages here. Your poems. I’m carried on the crests of your sea—that’s what you said. You’re the limbs of my soul. Remember that? I do. I remember. Because I repeat those lines to myself every day. I say those things over and over to myself because they’re beautiful and they’re true.’

  I have to admit, this tested my resolve. I crouched on the step and looked along the blue glass lagoon. The crests of your sea carry me, to shining bays, and shores of white heat, and I am home. That was the poem I’d written in the style of old Rumi. And she was right, it was the truth. The strange quality, though, the really strange trait of the truth is how its strings to the world can break. Truth, it turns out, can float off like a child’s balloon. Rin had cut those strings when she let Alessandra turn me out of the house a month ago after … well, after the incident. And what was the incident, really? Nothing—nothing that matters. It was nothing more than a moment in which I saw the whole story: that Rin Braden, my sea, my home, my love, felt it shameful to think of me similarly. Better to live without my knives than waste breath explaining this.

  So, I tapped the arm of my glasses and ended the call.

  The sun came down from high overhead. I crouched a while on the beach by inch-high waves. It would soon be time for afternoon prayers. I had much to say to God. Much that made me bitter. What I wanted to ask Him, chiefly, was this: why am I so afraid of Rin Braden? Of course, I didn’t need God to tell me why I was afraid and I took His silence on the matter as a gentle chiding.

  Rin called back twice, three times. Each time I cancelled the call. At length the lock in the door chugged and the light snapped over to green and I felt immense relief. Rin has her faults, but she is fundamentally good of heart.

&n
bsp; Still, I fear in her world that may also count as a fault.

  In the kitchen, I laid all my knives in the travel case I kept for them. One or two had some rust spots that required oiling and polishing and I brought each blade to a new edge on the stone before latching the case shut and slinging it over my shoulder. While engaged in this task, I avoided glancing around the living area or the sun deck or the spiral stairwell—the places where Rin and I had made love. Best to put that out of my mind. As alarmingly real and as tangibly meaningful as it felt, it was best to put her out of my mind. So, crossing the living area, I kept my eyes down on the floor to keep these memory-ghosts from chasing me and it was probably this act, this silliness, that saved my life. You see, some of the panels in the floor were tempered glass that allowed a view through to the water that washed under the house.

  Except the water was gone.

  I stood for a long time staring. Crabs picked over wet sand ripples and knots of weed lay exposed. I looked at my watch. It should have been high tide. Not ten minutes ago the water had been breaking around the highest part of the beach. I went to the sun deck and spread the heavy glass sliders. Most mornings, I’d taken my prayers on this deck. Rin would unroll her yoga mat here for exercise. You could dive off the front straight into the lagoon. From this deck, what I should have seen was a vast pool of seawater as blue as a neon sign. Instead, I saw a plain of glistening white sand. Unnaturally silent without the lapping of the waves.

  It seems foolish now when I think back that I didn’t recognise what was going on. I suppose I should have. Perhaps I could have saved someone’s life. My bappa? My mamma? I often wonder. What if I’d made a call right then, at that second? Could I have saved them? That’s a sharp and needling pain to live with, let me tell you.

  As I looked over the empty lagoon I thought of the stories Bappa told, about how the colour of the sea showed its moods, about how the kandufureta came ashore only from the darkest depths to kill humans, about how you should never cut driftwood because it might bleed. He’d offered no stories of the sea receding this way. I had no name for it.

  Before sea-level rise had flooded the outermost buildings, the island of Feydhoo Finolhu had formerly been a prison and, after that, a police training camp. Chinese developers had cleared the buildings, rehabilitated the site, and portioned it up for lease. Along the lagoon sat beach homes on raiseable stilts. I entered the house and climbed the stairs to the roof and saw people now appearing on balconies or rooftops, just as I was, their hands shading their eyes as they stared across the wet sand flat. We were all staring far out to sea.

  A wave appeared in the distance.

  To be honest, I felt relief. It was an ugly wave, bubbling like spilled lemonade, but the sight of it relieved me. Oh, how moronic that seems now. It was like having the pieces of a puzzle in front of me. I had the pieces, yes, and still I couldn’t see the entire picture. The water covered the beach and washed over the low sea walls left from the prison days. When it began washing up over the sun deck of the Braden house every one of my nerve ends fired at once. I felt the house sway. Water burst through the hollow courtyard and rose and rose until it flooded the lower level. I fell as the building lurched rightward, pushed by the weight of water.

  At this point, I saw the entire picture.

  What’s it like knowing you’re about to die? You hear people say that a life story runs before your eyes or you grow inhuman strength to free yourself and save others. No. None of this happened. Being on top of a moving house was an event outside the bounds of imagination. I had no pattern, no template, to work from. I felt mindless because my thoughts simply couldn’t keep up. As the house tore free of its pylons, I was a crash test dummy. The water spilled from the jacuzzi and broke over the top of me and I hung on to the rail with every piece of my strength. I held the rail and swung to and fro, probably with a look of dumb serenity on my face.

  In that instant, it seemed the house would roll and crush me. The whole building tilted over. My feet hit the water, which was full of leaves and sticks and plastic. I remember thinking, there goes my sandals! As if that was the worst thing that might happen today. The house gave a final epileptic shudder, a groan, and ceased moving and I was left dangling, the waves sloshing around my bare feet, my eyes closed.

  The sun poured down. I ran with sweat. I shook so hard my teeth chattered. I remember then speaking the 113th surah that asked for refuge from the evil of the blower of knots and the evil of the envier when he envies. Perhaps I’d regained some sense of danger. With effort, I heaved myself into the empty jacuzzi that now occupied a side of the house like a cave in the face of a cliff. From there I climbed higher, stretching from rail to post to umbrella fixture until I had reached the summit, what was formerly the north wall and had become the roof.

  For many minutes, I couldn’t accept what I saw. I walked up and down with my mouth ajar. It was like I’d been plucked and placed on a distant world. Yet this was Feydhoo Finolhu. Or it had been a few minutes ago. I stood and turned a full circle, surveying the island. There was no island. I was standing in the middle of an ocean. Debris drifted about. Only the heads of the coconut palms emerged from the water. Looking north, where other houses ought to have sat, there was only a soup of timber, sand and plant material. I put my hands on my cheeks.

  About that time, I heard my name being called. Yes, floating on the torn-away roof of a house, I saw Muslima, the housemaid for the Dutch couple who lived next door. She waved and I waved back. The roof floated on a debris patch made from splintered timber and leaves and furniture. She waved and called my name and I called her name. It might have been any other afternoon where we passed each other on the beach, walking the path to the water taxi berth. The roof turned in the churning water, it juddered, it creaked. Muslima held the satellite dish as her footing became unstable. I called that she ought to swim to me, swim through the churn, maybe using some timber for buoyancy, and that I would pull her onto my roof but we both looked at the white water running there, full of eddies and currents, and we knew it would be impossible. No one could swim it.

  She called my name and waved and now there was a note of panic to it. Her roof began to sink. First, by corner and edge and shortly by tipping upright. Muslima climbed and held tight. As the roof fell below the churn, she found other timbers to hold. For a while, I could see her hijab darkly outlined against sand and water. She turned in a current and drifted. For a while, I could see her as the flotsam pressed about but then she was gone and then I didn’t see her again. It happened so quietly, so efficiently, that I found I couldn’t feel anything other than a sort of confusion.

  And yet, this was not the worst of it. To the south was Malé, the capital, the island city, where my mother lived beside the Friday Mosque. Where I lived, where I’d always lived. In clear weather, you could make out each apartment tower. Today it was all dust. The water seemed to smoke. The long, lank shapes of buildings like spectres in the haze. As I watched, freight ships carried on the wave ploughed sidewards through the towers on Havaree Hingun and toppled them. Huge buildings, as huge as mountains. Those buildings that housed tens of thousands of people simply toppled and fell.

  I put my hands on my head. After a while I dropped to my knees and stared. Here had come the end of all things.

  The morning bell shocks me awake from dreams of drowning, dreams of fire. The bell. It rings and we lurch to the next meal, the next workday. I hate the bell. I hate its icy pitch and I hate its cruel duration. When I picture a happier, saner world, it’s a world without a bell.

  To escape it, and in order to feel human, we need to do regular human things. Cleaning, for instance. Bathing. I fetch down a face washer that cost eighty dollars from the commissary, a safety razor that cost thirty-eight dollars, a bar of soap that cost twenty-nine. I haven’t bought shaving cream in months. Shaving cream? Who can afford shaving cream? You see, there’s a trade-off here. The more we buy, the longer it takes to pay down the debt we owe to CYC.
Shaving cream is a luxury. We men of Eaglehawk shave with soap or, for the more devout, we let our beards flourish.

  I drop the face washer, razor, and soap into a bucket and drape a towel over my shoulder and I’m turning for the door when I catch sight of the glasses Rin had given to me. They’re peeking from the split seam of my mattress. The notification light on the arm is winking. I look around. Men are rolling out of the rows of plastic moulded bunks along the walls and palming their eyes. I look around once more to be sure no one’s watching. Discreetly, holding the towel over my head, I slip on the glasses. There’s a message. The message is from Rin. I press play.

  In the video she’s half naked, aiming the camera at herself and holding her breasts with her other arm. Small pink nipples. Pale skin. Skin I’d kissed. She looks profoundly unhappy. She says, ‘I love you so much I want to die’ and then it ends. There’s a hot-water rush down my spine. I touch the air from where she stares back at me and I touch the pixels of her face but there is nothing to touch. It’s a projection. A ghost.

  I stand thinking about her for a long time.

  She has never said it that way before, never with such desperation. When we were together we would share things with each other every day. To her, I sent classic poetry, books of philosophy, biography, and history. To me, she sent Japanese movies, American music, and often packages of sweets or chocolate. We were thousands of miles apart but we shared everything. We often shared our bodies over camera which, of course, being pornography, was a crime in the Maldives. Never in all that time, never did she declare her feelings so desperately. That she does so now, I read as an accusation and a warning. An accusation, because I had left her to suffer alone. A warning, because she cannot stand to suffer like that again.

  All in all, this has a strange effect on me. The heat of my reaction maybe thaws some frozen organs and for the first time in months, I experience sympathy for Rin Braden. The desire to touch her is powerful enough to make me wince. This is certainly not what I want, at least not rationally, and I rub my face to rid myself of these sensations and I repeat again the lines that get me through: she’s a coward, she won’t fight for you, and the walls of her wealth are too high. I repeat it again and again.