Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  “But why would feminists attack an IVF clinic? Government House I can understand—”

  Daz stared at the muddy river. “If you don’t understand, I don’t think I can tell you. Anna, where you and I live, women’s rights is old news. Intelligent women want to be judged on their own merits and find the whole feminist thing embarrassing and whiney. But here, where I live… it’s a can of worms. If you start applying the concept of ‘human rights’ to women, in Asia and Africa, you uncover a holocaust. It’s getting worse, not better. You think it’s weird and backward to be asked to wear the hejab. You’re wrong, this is the future. Everywhere, women have reverted to traditional dress, adopted traditional behaviors, accepted draconian laws. It’s the only way they can hang onto their jobs, to their lives. It’s a deadly polarization: where ‘human rights’ and ‘women’s rights’ end up in one camp, and all the power is in the other. That’s the mess Ramone’s got herself into.”

  “She didn’t do anything!”

  “I’m not going to give her a chance to tell me any different,” snapped Daz, and then sighed. “Seriously, I don’t think she knew about the bombs. I don’t think she did anything bad, any more than Spence was doing anything bad. That’s not going to help.”

  “The British Consulate certainly isn’t going to help,” said Anna bitterly.

  “They never do. Let’s go, it’s time.”

  The Kota Baru prison was a collection of sour white buildings inside a big wire fence. They had to wait, first in the governor’s office and then alone in a small room with a guard. Finally Ramone was brought to them. She was wearing the same tee-shirt she’d been wearing at the Riverrun, and a grubby blue and white checkered man’s sarong. She looked dirty and thin, and cowed as a wet kitten. She sat opposite them across a little table, a woman in uniform standing on either side. When she found out she wasn’t going to be released she began to cry. She said she was eating all right. She was in a shared cell, a kind of dormitory, with other women who were all right, except that none of them spoke English. She hadn’t seen anyone from the rally since they were split up at the first police station. She said that she could often hear screaming, and she was very, very frightened. Anna looked at Daz when Ramone said this, hoping for reassurance. Daz was keeping a straight face. So were the guards.

  “I haven’t told them anything,” boasted the rabid one. “Not a word.”

  “You haven’t anything to tell,” said Daz. “You signed something when you were arrested, when you were frightened and didn’t understand what was going on. You’re going to retract that statement.”

  “I understand more than you think!” Ramone bristled, “I’m not a terrorist, but I will not condemn my sisters’ actions. The issues in Sungai are issues of sexual politics.”

  Daz clasped her hands, either praying for patience, or possibly to stop herself from thumping the prisoner. Anna was afraid to speak, fearing that anything she could say might plunge Ramone into worse idiocy.

  “At least you’re in one piece,” said Daz. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you out.”

  They were allowed to give her cigarettes, for currency, and a food parcel. The food was taken away for examination, and Daz and Anna were escorted to the prison gates.

  “This is a tough one,” said Daz.

  Anna went to see Wolfgang. He lived in a tower block overlooking the Taman Burung. It was a nice location, but the flats were small. Anna, who had been sensitive to such things since the bomb blast, started thinking at once how choking it would be in these small rooms if the air conditioning cut out. And such a long way from the ground. You wouldn’t escape easily. She was surprised at the perfunctory furnishing. His little kitchen was full of gadgets—they stood in there, while he made coffee in a fancy machine—but his living room held nothing beyond the most standard typically-tropical fittings: a cheap rattan couch, table and chairs, a pallid shag-pile rug. An empty bookcase stood against one wall, next to a mass-market Pacrim home-entertainment stack. Perhaps he did not spend much time at this

  address. He was wearing his usual bright shirt and tight jeans, but his blond hair was scraped back harshly and his face, without makeup, looked gaunt and strange.

  “Ginger syrup? Yes you do, it will perk you up. I’m sorry I have no booze in the house.”

  Anna stirred her coffee. “Wolfgang, do you remember once you offered me some ‘get-out-of-jail-free tokens’? Did you mean anything by that?”

  “Ah.”

  It was three weeks since Equality and Democracy day. Some activists had been arrested, others had gone to ground. The blast area was still cordoned off, but so far there had been no more trouble. Wolfgang placed his cup and saucer carefully on a paper coaster, on the glass-topped coffee table. He stood and went to look out of the window over the park, arms folded. “This is for your friend, isn’t it. The little friend with whom you went missing from the Riverrun.”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s been a bad, stupid girl I hear. And the more stupid she is, the better you like her. I am right?”

  Anna thought of the wet kitten, and without warning tears came brimming. She nodded.

  He walked up and down by his window, looking different, looking like someone older, harder, that she didn’t know—until he turned, tossing his head, with a roguish, twinkling smile. “Oh Anna, you know what fairies are like. I’m afraid you may have said the magic word, that makes me give my last boon and disappear.”

  “I don’t want you to get into trouble.”

  “But we don’t want your little friend to ‘disappear’ in the technical sense?”

  “She isn’t going to disappear. They’re going to hang her. Daz says they’ll do it.”

  “Well, that is also something to avoid. Don’t worry, it’s no sacrifice. My credit was running low. I may as well spend it all at once, and then I simply take a plane and find a new banker.”

  There were wild rumors, fostered by Wolfgang of course, but no one knew for sure what lay behind the jealously preserved mystery of his private life. At the end of this short interview, Anna still wasn’t sure that he could or would do anything for Ramone. Wolfgang liked to be valued. He made you pay for his office efficiency with lots of strokes and coaxing and cajoling. Maybe he just enjoyed the game of being asked for cloak-and-dagger help. It was a part for Dietrich: the femme fatale with a heart of gold.

  She never did find out for sure. But a few days later Ramone Holyrod was on a plane home, and Wolfgang had vanished. Anna never saw him again.

  The day the police declared the building safe, Anna went in to start closing the clinic down. Parentis, while denying rumors that they were pulling out, wanted the withdrawal implemented at speed. Contract workers would finish their time elsewhere.

  It was not her job to assess the damage to SURISWATI, but she couldn’t resist the tug of the secret room. If human genetics expert systems were going to be terrorist targets, the hardware would have to have better protection. The mob had smashed its way in without much difficulty in the end. She stood looking round, touching nothing, wondering in her ignorance where in these broken fragments Suri herself had lived. She had been haunted, since the blast, by the terrible conviction that Suri had been real… A child had been killed here: a lively, adventurous, brilliant little girl, who had spent her short life in a cage, and died alone in terror. An unexpected sound made her jump. Aslan was standing in the doorway, holding a big bouquet of white specimen chrysanthemums.

  ‘This wasn’t necessary,” he said, in distaste. “A few passes with a strong magnet would have sufficed.”

  “I suppose. Aren’t modern machines shielded? I don’t know enough about it. What are those for? A funeral wreath?”

  He held out the bouquet, embarrassed. “They’re for you. I asked your husband which were your favorite. It’s inadequate, I know. You saved my life.”

  “De nada.” She wondered how long he’d been suffering angina, that ominous and painful symptom, and telling no one at the office. So
now she had another good friend, like KM Nirmal. It was like being a battered wife. They do you harm, then they’re your humble servants; they can’t do enough to make up: until next time. But she knew it was irrational to blame him. The mob had gone through the three floors of Parentis like a grass fire. Anna could have done nothing, even if she hadn’t been helping Aslan.

  She had found the TY disks, undamaged: not that they meant very much, without SURISWATI to back them up. Not that they meant much anyway. Those findings were unpublishable.

  “What does Penangalang mean?” he asked. “I’ve heard it in the coverage, but I seem to have missed the point. They thought our AI was some kind of vampire?”

  The word was spray-paint scrawled over every wall. “Sort of a vampire. A woman, possibly dead after a miscarriage or stillbirth or possibly still alive, I’m not sure. Her spirit goes about at night sucking blood from newborn infants and women in labor.”

  “For the blood is the life,” said Aslan solemnly. “I think I get it.” He looked at Anna with concern. “Hey, don’t be upset. A software entity like Suri can’t die, you know that. It looks bad, but we’ll have our goddess up and running again: soon as we replace the hardware and get another copy from the makers.”

  “Yeah,” said Anna. “You can clone her. But it won’t be the same person.”

  The living room in the flat was full of boxes; they were getting ready to leave. Anna came home from another day of picking-up-the-pieces admin and showered, luxuriating in the hot needle power, the glistening tiles, the shining taps and pipes. After China and Africa, it was eerie to have come so close to disaster while living in a place like this. It was as if they were on a space station and had been reminded by some minor emergency of how insanely fragile it all was…all this. On the wall beside her wardrobe mirror a transparent lizard skated on clinging toes. She twisted a gauzy purple and green sarong around her waist, fastened the scalloped margins of her white kebaya jacket with a silver pin, and cupped, for a moment, the warm weight of her own breasts in her hands. The infertility expert who is childless, the money-motivated foot-slogger who longs to be a reputable scientist, the straight-as-a-die monogamist who is drawn to her best, female friend. Was it time to look these contradictions in the face?

  We won’t do this again. Goodbye to the foreign legion. And what comes next?

  In the living room Spence lay on the couch trying to watch abysmal terrestrial channel tv. The ceiling fan hummed; rain fell in sheets across the swimming pool, the squash courts, the container port, the wide darkness of the South China Sea. Anna picked up the postcard that had arrived that morning, announcing that Ramone was safely back in England. Suffer, Birdone… The picture on the front was Bournemouth seafront.

  “Spence, how would you feel if I were to…well, fuck with Ramone, sometime?”

  “I would be rightly pissed off,” he answered, sitting up sharply. “I don’t know how you can consider the idea. After the trouble she caused…! I’m not saying you have to be exclusive, doing it with someone else is okay. But please, NOT Ramone!”

  Ramone as a sexual partner would be the same as Ramone for a friend: capricious, aggressive, hating you for having witnessed her moments of weakness, the very weaknesses that made you love her in spite of everything. Certain things about the sex itself would make a lovely change, but it wasn’t worth the price. She was amused to note, from the vehemence of his response, that Spence had been more attentive than she’d thought to aspects of Ramone’s visit. She’d have teased him, but the look on his face warned her otherwise—

  “Calm down. It was a weird, passing idea.”

  vi

  While Ramone was in Sungai, Lavinia’s brother Roland had come up to London to check on her and carried her off home with him. He claimed she wasn’t looking after herself. Six months later, while Ramone was away for a few days promoting the Parable paperback, he did it again. Ramone rushed down to Dorset, to that smug middle-class house in the country, to reclaim her. But this time Lavvy didn’t want to come home.

  Ramone stuck it out for two days. Roland’s wife (Ramone had expunged the woman’s name from her mind) managed total denial of the fact that Ramone was a best-selling author and treated her like dirt. Like, can lower-class persons of your type actually read? Do you know how to eat with a knife and fork? Roland said that Lavinia was staying there: Ramone was selfish and irresponsible and unfit to look after anyone. The grown-up children (who still lived at home, the slobs) were on Ramone’s side, but no one was asking them. She gave up the fight on the third day, sickened and disgusted: couldn’t make it past breakfast. She drove to Bournemouth, and there she had to stop. Had to get out of the car and walk around, beating her pointless grief into submission.

  Those few days in Kota Baru jail had done wonders for the sales of Parable and for Ramone’s engagement diary. She was supposed to be starting a job in a few months’ time, something flashy at one of the old universities: she didn’t know if she even needed it. But could she stand this? Could Ramone hack fame and fortune, without Lavvy?

  Nobody understood Parable. Not her dear friends and others who’d trashed it unread, or the critics who groveled before it now. A profoundly divided woman, someone had said, descends into the world of myth, in the hope of finding a meaning for her life. Fucking cheek. It’s the world that’s divided, not my heroine… Ramone had written a fairy tale. A young woman, named only L’Inconnue (when she’s fallen from grace, it becomes a name, “Nou-nou”) learns that she can secure a large inheritance from her father’s estate if she can discover the laws that govern worldly fame. She sets out on this quest, interrogating celebrity figures from the past, the present, and the future—some of them human; some of them technologies, texts, discoveries; all of them persons (of course, autotheology). Reproached by nameless, superior beings who prove to her that public success is destructive of all virtue and value, L’Inconnue protests that she has never doubted this. As soon as she has won her rightful inheritance she plans to return to the ranks of the unsung, the truly good and truly beautiful whose names are effaced from history…(Women are always there. Look in the contemporary records of any movement, any crisis, any endeavor: and you find them. Their names just magically never make it into long term memory.) What Nou-nou wants isn’t possible. She cannot have justice, unless she gives up her innocence.

  Of course it was about Anna Senoz.

  The publishers wanted her to write something quick and dirty on women’s rights terrorism in the Developing World, on the tail of the Kota Baru thing. She hated the idea. Maybe she’d better do it, because if you don’t capitalize on something that’s made you saleable, the chance will not come back. This is what it must feel like to be a man, she thought, wandering through the streets. Yes, I’ve become a man. You obey orders, you count your hierarchy points. My editor is a bigger cheese than your editor! My penis—oh, sorry, did I say penis? I meant my advance—is bigger than your advance.

  She went to visit Mary Shelley’s grave, but hadn’t the heart to stay there long. The graceful, solid Victorian facades mocked her. By the time the moment for hyenas in petticoats came round again, Ramone wouldn’t be here to enjoy it. She stared through the window of a tasteful little clothes shop. A woman on the other side, browsing a rack of skirts, started back in alarm… Ramone grinned like a gargoyle, rolled her eyes, and passed on. Better to be funny-looking than look like nothing at all. And the more successful you are, the more beautiful you get. The latest pub-shot almost made her look strange, rather than comical. By the time she was world famous, she’d be irresistibly attractive.

  That was something to look forward to.

  Finally, she took refuge in the Russell Cotes Gallery and bought some coffee and sticky cake in the cafe, the first food that hadn’t choked her in several days. She began to write a letter. In fountain pen, on lined paper, on the same kind of blue covered A4 pads she’d used since her first year at university. Feint and margin, Suffer, Birdone.

  Behold me
eating cake in Bournemouth, in the museum. (I visited Mary S. on your behalf, do you remember?) As you know, I am fond of museums. I can’t understand why I should reverence all those stupid cases full of china or pebbles; or the headless, armless, handless, marble things with the daft descriptions like “headless young boy.” They’d look better left to rot gently in situ, in which case they’d never bother me, because I don’t like abroad, except for Paris and New York. What I like is the waste of space, the only true conspicuous consumption. It was in the British Museum basement that I found the portrait of Nou-nou which adorns the cover of the new Parable paperback, which I’m sending to you with this. She’s called Figurine of an Effeminate Eros, in an attitude of flight, from Boeotia. She has black patches because she was in a funeral pyre. She looks a lot like you, with your hair pulled up on top of your head; a form-fitting feathered kilt around her long thighs; and lovely pointed feet, like a ballet dancer’s. In the same case there is another Eros, not so effeminate, nonchalantly burning a butterfly, signifying the human soul, which he’s dangling by the legs over the flame of a lamp. It’s a splendidly cruel, off-hand, sophisticated piece. Probably turned out by thousands. The first century Rome-world terracotta workers really did do butterfly wings on their Psyches: which looks weirdly modern and tasteless…

  Anna and Spence were coming back to England, Ramone planned not to meet them. She had decided to abandon the fight that she could not win. Anna had made her choice. She preferred sex with a man, a creature fundamentally different, someone who could never, no matter what he did with his baby-maker, invade those final privacies. So be it. Ramone felt the same way, that was why she avoided lesbian relationships herself: too much like surrender. But she enjoyed writing these letters—not least because she knew Spence was bound to read them, and feel suspicious, and hopefully suffer a little, hahaha. Anna always answered. In her latest nice polite little letter she had revealed that Spence was now going to be a writer, news that made Ramone’s blood boil. Fucking typical New Man: first he wants me to call him a radical feminist because he sponges off my friend; now he wants to be a lady novelist; I expect he’ll make his fortune, rot him.