Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  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!”

  “My son!” wailed Desy, staggering upright. “My son! He’s a clerk in the Ministry!”

  The Parentis building was made of stronger stuff than most of the downtown towers. The windows didn’t blow out. People were shocked and shaken and there were breakages, that was all; but the fire alarm was clamoring in amber tone. Anna went into her drill in a state of dizzy detachment. So Sungai had blown up. It wasn’t unexpected. Spence was safe and Transferred Y was safe, she had a copy at home. Daz and Ramone were at the rally, but there was nothing Anna could do about that. She cleared the clinical suites of personnel, locked them, checked that the cold rooms were off main power and onto emergency. She was heading for admin by the stairs before she recalled that Spence was not safe, he was in town. Electrified by this shock, she met a rush of people coming up the stairs and couldn’t understand why. Then came the second explosion; it threw her across a hallway. The air was full of smoke, the alarm segued into its GET OUT NOW howl. There were hundreds of people, they were shouting Penangalang! Penangalang! What did it mean, some kind of political slogan? She heard a woman’s voice, shouting about babies without souls. The building was on fire, the labs were under attack, she had to get to the admin floor. A young man had something like a fire axe or a big machete, he was trying to chop down the door to Suri’s antechamber: well, he wouldn’t get through that!

  She had to get to her office, though she couldn’t remember why. When she managed to reach that room (still free from smoke up here), she saw the intercom on her desk: of course! Communication! She fell on it, opening a channel to the security chief.

  “Philip? Is it Philip? How are you, how are we doing?”

  “I’m very well, Mrs Anna,” came the guard’s voice, incongruously cheerful. “Bad news, the fire and emergency services cannot reach the building; the crowds are holding them off. The good news is that every badge is out but you. Can you get to the emergency stairs?”

  “Thank God for that… Yes I can, I’ll be fine.”

  She was looking round the office, thinking what the devil do I need from here. She heard a voice faintly calling her name. “Who’s that?”

  Philip had said that every electronically tagged member of Parentis personnel was out of the building, but Philip was obviously wrong. Who was calling?

  “Anna is that you?”

  She tried every door before she traced the voice to Aslan Gaegler’s office. Aslan was in there, sitting behind his desk, grey in the face, holding his family photographs.

  “Oh, there you are,” he said faintly. “What’s going on, Anna?”

  “The building’s on fire. I think someone must have lobbed an incendiary device into the downstairs lobby, must have been something biggish—”

  “I’m sorry. I kind of froze. Got an attack of angina.”

  “Well, okay, but you have to unfreeze now. We have to get to the emergency stairs.”

  She had remembered what it was
she should have taken from her desk. But it was too late, because Aslan was not able to help himself. No point in asking him why he wasn’t wearing his badge, not for her to say anyway. She fed him his pills, stripped out the roller towel from his toilet and soaked it, thank god for old fashioned luxury, thank god the water was still running, and walked with him slowly step by step. They were not in danger, as long as he didn’t collapse. When they reached the clinical floor the smoke was worse. They sat and shuffled from step to step, passing the wet towel between them.

  “My God, Anna. How do you keep so calm?”

  “I don’t know; maybe because I’m British.”

  Before he got out of the Straits Times building, where Dream On’s editorial staff was housed, Spence had heard the news people yelling that there was a mob attack on the IVF clinic. His grasp of the language was good enough for that. In the glaring heat—they were still in the monsoon but it was eleven o’clock, not raining yet—he was quickly soaked with sweat. He got turned back by an adamant police cordon and ran around and around the Parentis block, trapped by panic, unable to think what to do. He reached an intersection where a car had been overturned and pieces of concrete lay about. The air was choking with partly dissipated tear gas. There were a few people passing, young men carrying loot: a box of electronic hardware, an armful of bright-colored clothes. He thought he was at The Plaza, but he couldn’t recognize anything in the smoke. The yell of sirens was everywhere, and a roar that must be power hoses. He saw someone lying on the pavement, covered in grey dust. Her face was upwards. It was Unusual Girl from the group in the old schoolhouse.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded, dropping to his knees.

  “I don’t…know. I was going home. I’ve hurt my leg.”

  He couldn’t remember her name, what the fuck was her name? Sunita. There was blood all over, under the grime of the blast. He took one good look at the leg and knew he wasn’t going any further. Had to stay here, until someone qualified arrived. Oh, Anna—

  “Sunita, what happened?”

  “They blew up the rally. They blew up the baby-making clinic. I don’t know what else.”

  “What the fuck for? What’s Parentis got to do with democracy?”

  “Sungai people are very superstitious, they think the AI was stealing their babies. The Penangalang. She steals the souls of poor people’s babies and gives them to artificial children. That’s what people think. Am I going to be all right?”

  “I think so, soon as we can get you to the hospital.”

  “I’m sorry Spence, it’s where your wife works isn’t it.”

  “Yah. But I’m sure she’s okay.”

  “It wasn’t us, Spence. It wasn’t anyone we know. It was the crazy people.”

  Sunita went on talking. Spence went on answering, only letting go of her hand to release the pressure occasionally on his amateur tourniquet. (Amateurs should never do a tourniquet, but in this case…) He was amazed at the way she kept talking. He stopped being able to follow her, in English or Malay: he kept saying Yes, okay, I know, don’t worry, in an agony of frustration and terror. He might have been kneeling by her for half an hour before he noticed that the thing beside them on the pavement, which he’d taken for a jagged chunk of concrete, was a naked, scorched, human arm and shoulder, minus the hand, lying there by itself. He was glad he had something definite to do. He’d have been lost otherwise.

  He went with her to the hospital. The ambulance team seemed to expect it, taking him for a brother or a boyfriend maybe. Spence realized that his best chance was to get to somewhere that had news feed. The hospital turned out not to be such a good bet. The casualty department was full of staggering bloody walking-wounded from the Government House car bomb. He was told first that there were no survivors from the Parentis explosion, and then that there had been no serious injuries there, but the patients had been diverted to St Joseph’s, another hospital on the north side of town. No one could tell him how to get to the north side at present, in fact it could not be done. He was being severely warned, by an understandably ratty policewoman, to go home and stay indoors! when his wife appeared. She was wearing that brick-colored dress with the yellow splashes and the sexy little Audrey Hepburn belt. It was filthy and her feet were bare, her arms were black with smoke or bruises. She came up to him and leaned her forehead against his shoulder.

  “Hi Spence. How did you know I’d be here?”

  They sat on a bench in the casualty waiting area, sharing a cup of lukewarm coffee from the machine. “It was Aslan,” explained Anna. “He had an angina attack, he was stuck in his office. Thank God I heard him calling, the stupid bugger wasn’t wearing his tag for some unknown reason, and Philip had counted him out. I walked him down the back stairs. I’d have been in shit if he’d collapsed. He’s not fat exactly but he’s a big lad. But he kept trucking, so we were okay. I came to the hospital with him, but I’m all right. Spence, Suri’s dead.”

  Spence put aside the plastic cup and held her. So far, the massive car bomb that had exploded at Government House had a toll of thirty-seven dead and twenty-three seriously hurt, plus uncounted numbers of relatively non-serious flying glass injuries. The bomb at Parentis had killed no one, but the mob had wrecked the building. No wonder Anna was in shock.

  “They got Suri? That’s okay babe, she isn’t dead. You have her offsite backing.”

  “No… It was in Government House. Don’t you remember? Parentis had to agree to that, it was the only way they’d let us have her running. It’s gone.”

  “You’ll have a snapshot, they can’t have trashed her so completely—”

  “They did. They trashed her, she is gone. I was going to grab my disc copy of her TY extrapolation from my desk, but then I heard Aslan calling. It doesn’t matter.”

  The double doors at the end of the hall opened for a further influx. A nurse zoomed across, probably to tell them they should go to St Joseph’s, because these casualties looked in reasonable shape. She bounced back, and the group resolved itself into two parties, the second of which was newshounds, pointing cameras and sound booms. The political ritual of visiting the victims had begun. Senior hospital staff appeared, to meet and greet. Anna and Spence watched the circus go by, but one of the women detached herself and came over to them. It was Daz.

  “Hi.” She sat down on the bench. “I’m glad you’re safe Anna.”

  “Don’t let us keep you,” said Spence, with totally unjustified hostility.

  Daz shook her head. “They won’t miss me.”

  “So, what happened to the peaceful Equality and Democracy rally?”

  “It was side-tracked. Look, has either of you seen Ramone?”

  “No—”

  “Shit. We have to find her. Someone saw her being put into a police van, possibly. Anna, do you know anyone who might help us?”

  “No,” said Anna, bewildered by the idea. “I don’t know anyone.”

  Anna and Spence were at first mystified that Daz was taking the absence of the rabid one so seriously. When Ramone failed to turn up the next day, they started to be afraid that she might have been killed. Sungai was full of rumors that the true body count would never be known… But no, Daz was right. Ramone had been arrested. She was being held in Kota Baru women’s prison, down on the estuary, and likely to be charged with serious offences.

  Spence was disgusted. Sunita’s shattered leg had been amputated above the knee. He’d visited her in hospital. She was heartbreakingly cheerful—sure this episode would be over soon and she could get back to her normal life. If Ramone thought it was cool to fool around pretending to be involved with terrorists (she’d made a highly damaging statement at the time of her arrest), then let her pay the price.

  He knew, all the same, that she couldn’t be abandoned.

  It took Daz ten days to track Ramone down, it took another week to get permission to visit the prisoner. She and Anna drove together to Kota Baru. There were roadblocks all the way. It reminded Anna of
Nigeria, but African for-profit roadblocks had been like a good-humored institution, except for the guns. You hardly felt that you were in danger. On this journey Anna was terrified. Several times they were pulled over and questioned. Once they were made to get out of the car and their passports and papers were taken away while it was searched. Daz had to answer a lot of questions. Her status with the EU Mission should have been a safeguard, but you couldn’t rely on that. At Kota Baru they were back in the old Third World. Smokestack chemical plants muddied the air, the market square was beaten earth awash after the rains. The main street ran between broad margins of mud and rotting garbage.

  They were an hour early for their appointment. “Let’s go for a walk,” said Daz.

  They walked between the estuary and Kota Baru’s bus station, on a concrete promenade. “Spence was letting your email address be used as an anonymous mail drop.”

  Anna swallowed hard. “What makes you think that?”

  “The fact that I was there when he told me. Please, Anna, don’t be dumber than you can help. This is difficult enough. He’s afraid he might have got the two of you into bad trouble, because apparently Ramone knows. Now I’m going to repeat to you a list of names, and you have to tell me if you recognize any of them. I’ve tried this on Spence, but you speak better Malaysian than he does, and you spent more time with Ramone.”

  None of the names, most of which sounded Chinese, meant a thing to Anna. She shook her head, hands clenched in the pockets of her modest calf-length skirt to hide their trembling. She couldn’t believe that she and Spence were in trouble. But they could not get out of Sungai in a hurry now, leaving Ramone in jail. No use wondering how long it would take to pack… They stood and looked over the parapet. A ribbon of bright green weed drifted by, heading out to sea on the falling tide. Across the wide water, palm oil plantations gave the horizon a uniform spiky fringe.

  “I don’t know if you realize this, Anna, but it was no accident that the mob attacked Parentis. That was Ramone’s friends, and it was deliberate.”