Star Sailors

by James McNaughton

  She feels peeled, completely and horribly exposed in the street, the object of a long-planned ambush by hostile neighbours. Rightly hostile neighbours. The immaculate bungalows with their clipped gardens here on the Mount’s lower slopes, the homes of other lower-rung families like the Brodericks, throw out offensively bright, pristine displays of weatherboard, gate and lawn. Terrible minds made manifest. Order above everything. The absolute importance of façade. Unspoken reproaches assail her. You! The threat of somebody or something flinging out at her.

  Just a bad day, she tells herself. Just coming off. It’ll pass. Has done before.

  Each little empire passes its silent critique of her. The silence before Judgement is announced; the bend of trees just after a flash, then crushing weight.

  Voracious and insatiable ambition lurks in the dark windows and doorways. Yes, she thinks, it really is bad, the pills just stopped me feeling it. The absent owners are busy, away dragging themselves up to the next rung at any cost. Trampling their way up. Stamping on fingers and exulting in it.

  Twenty metres to the Gate now and then 100 more down Courtenay Mall. She reminds herself to disable her screen at the Gate in case Jeremiah has a track on it. She checks it. There are a couple of new messages in her inbox: an ad for antidepressants, and another ad for a UFO documentary.

  A cold gust slows then releases them.

  ‘Oh!’

  She wants a downpour. It’s been weeks. She wants rain to darken and slow the city. Rain that will mute and reduce everyone and everything to a common subdued and restricted equality. A cloak that unites everything in its darkness.

  She drops Mandela’s hand and pops the battery out of her bangle screenmaker with shaky hands.

  ‘What are you doing, Mummy?’

  ‘There’s just a problem with the battery.’

  The return of Mandela’s little hand firms the shaking; it’s slight, so the fingerprint scanner won’t be a problem. Up ahead, the Wall. The old joke—‘to keep us in’—seems truer than usual. There was no pressing security issue on Mt Victoria when the Wall was built. It was a status symbol. For the rich to become proper Inners, like those overseas, a wall was required. In New Zealand class division had to be demarcated by concrete. Proper division and enmity promptly followed—just like overseas. There’s a kind of martial enthusiasm in the air here, in the Wall’s shadow, inside Molotov cocktail range, which brings her some relief—scrutiny feels directed outside rather than on her.

  ‘Mummy, can we watch?’

  ‘For a little bit.’

  Manny likes the two large, spiked hydraulic road blocks at the Gate. He watches, fascinated, as the entrance block sinks into the ground and a truck moves forward over it. The young dreadlocked driver waves to him. Manny doesn’t notice. He’s watching the block rise behind the truck, spikes bristling.

  ‘It keeps out the bad guys, eh Mummy?’

  ‘Or keeps them in.’

  ‘Huh?’

  A barrier arm raises. The truck moves forward again. Here it will be scanned a second time. Finally, a heavy metal gate will slide back, and the truck will enter the Mount.

  ‘Come on, sweetie. We’ll be late.’

  ‘Just one minute more, Mummy?’

  ‘Okay.’ Karen waits 15 seconds and moves him on.

  There’s no one else waiting at the pedestrian exit. The pair of armed police inside the Gate, in their helmets and flak jackets, regard her impersonally as she presents her right hand for their portable scanner. The policeman with the scanner crouches for Mandela, who grins as he inserts his hand in the device.

  The policeman ruffles his hair. ‘Stay close to Mum, Mandela.’

  The comment strikes Karen as a rebuke, a judgement and an act of passive-aggression all rolled into one. Mandela’s name came up on the screen, but they aren’t supposed to use it because security information is strictly confidential. And why all the smiles for him and so cold with her? What do they know, or think they know? She hauls Mandela across Cambridge Terrace onto Courtenay Mall as fast as she can to get away from them. Mandela runs as required. Only when clear of the policemen’s eyes, concealed by the Outer brunch crowd filling the top-end cafés near the Gate, does she slow down.

  An intermittent gleam on the elbow of a slim-cut Givenchy suit catches her eye: a holosuit malfunction. Top of the range Inner wear, but for the tiny fault.

  At her shoulder gapes the entrance to the notorious Club Spats. As a concession to the early hour, only one of the large, sleek black doors is open and one bouncer on duty. Warm stale air wafts out as if from a yawning carnivore. She glimpses descending steps.

  She feels freed from petty judgement. Cut loose. Part of it is due to the riot of retro digital advertising, for which Courtenay Mall is famous. New Zealand’s Times Square, they call it. She feels a pang of regret. New York was a distinct possibility, but in the end it was fortunate she returned home. The Big Apple is flooding and Americans are queuing up to pay millions to live here, in ‘the World’s Last Remaining Paradise’. New York was something else, but the comparison to Times Square is not ridiculous. The Mall has a real intensity about it. All shapes and sizes of OLED screens crammed into every available space on the street, including underfoot, advertise shows, bars, shops and brands continuously. It’s retro cool. Overhead screens hanging from an awning domino back before a selected consumer, flashing their name and nearby specials. A frog appears in front of Mandela, jumping from screen to screen, smiling back at him. Repeated loops, screen jumps, screen-trails—like the frog—lead and erupt into a multiscreen celebration outside a brightly coloured cafe. It’s amusing.

  For Karen, the main attraction on the flickering street is the fashion. Everyone dresses conservative—expensive on the Mount, but not here. Outers dress to be noticed in the roiling digital circus. Some don’t wear much. She respects the power of skin, but elegance is her preference: the power in restraint and suggestion.

  Outers can do wonders in a garage with a 3D printer, pirated software and a good source of illegal files. They’re way ahead of labels in following celebrity-wear. For these cottage industry designers and dressmakers, the relationship with a small clientele is very hands-on. A client will usually provide the fabric if they want cotton and, not uncommonly, a rigorous list of demands to go with it, including ridiculous deadlines. To Karen’s eye, the top-end Outer personal fitting, which is a long ongoing organic process, is subtly better than big-brand bodyscan sizing. Each fabric falls differently, and bodies have hidden quirks and strengths revealed in motion. Great work is done by these home-based independent Outers, but it is hard work, and more about pleasing individuals than being original. For this reason, she hasn’t even considered setting up independently on the Mount.

  Normally Karen would take her time and examine the cut and style of dress of those passing by, and the effect of the wearer’s carriage on the fall and shape of material and the way it might complement her figure, but she’s too anxious to celebrate a good bias cut and a straight back. It would be wrong to try. She runs her eyes along the windows instead. The bars and cafés are better here than on the Mount, more flavoured, unique and responsive. She loves the sense of hurrying past an interesting window with something original on display, as if her life were too full to stop. She makes a promise to herself to come here every day. Past experience has taught her that a new routine is essential when changing a bad habit.

  A new Malcolm-free routine, too. He’s leaving the Mount, which helps. He’d said, all silky-reasonable, ‘Perhaps you should too?’ But Mandela would be a kidnapping risk with a father inside the Wall. She immediately declined. People do it—take the chance—but it’s not for her. To leave the Mount would mean leaving without her son—an unthinkable prospect. Better to take scraps of freedom, she thinks, like this. The CCTV and security on Courtenay Mall make it safe from violent street assault, especially during the day. And any Inners she might run into will be of the more liberal sort, which means there is little to
no chance of running into an insecure lower-rung Plearn parent seeking to prove superiority, such as through a vague relationship with Klotch or just a further degree of closeness to him. She’d like to shake some Inners sometimes and tell them: It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter.

  Mandela is fascinated by the Mall’s movement and colour. She smiles. That’s my boy, she thinks.

  ‘Here we are, Manny.’

  ‘It’s Robusta.’

  ‘Good boy.’

  As they enter the café, a new little bell tinkles overhead and the security guard looks up from his holomaker. His eyes, dull with boredom, drop back down.

  Another new guy. They change so frequently.

  Oh, she thinks, how it’s fallen. Robusta was once the in-place for the Flux crowd and other fashionistas. It still looks the same: everything brown and black ‘like the spirit of magnificent coffee’, as the owners, Tem and Delilah, used to say, but the warmth has gone. The place is nearly empty.

  Someone laughs loudly. No, the few solitary patrons are engrossed in their holomakers and don’t look even faintly amused. I’m hearing things, Karen thinks. Introverts, most of them, judging by the privacy blocks. Expressionless, they peer through narrow viewing portals in a desert storm, concrete sphere, patch of jungle, or whatever personal privacy block has materialised on the table in front of them.

  Robusta was a lifeline when they first moved to the Mount, when she was progressing through the first stages of culture shock, alone, while Jeremiah worked 80-hour weeks. Robusta was a lifeline after her two failed Inner ‘careers’—the part-time jobs in real estate and then interior design, among those deemed appropriate for a dedicated parent, meaning mother, in a Resilient Family. She took neither job very seriously; they were to tide her over until she found a way around the ‘vulnerable’ security status which still prevents her working legally outside the Wall. (It appears that every dedicated mother who applies for work outside the Wall is branded ‘vulnerable’.) She was immediately accused of being a homewrecker by mothers engaged in part-time office work at both Inner jobs, even though she had resolutely fended off the testosterone-charged living fossils hitting on her. Everyone at Robusta had found it hilarious, and Karen appreciated their perspective, but she needed something to do other than provide comic material for her ex-colleagues. Online courses were awful. She felt she knew as much as the tutors, and her designs would become property of the institution. Even courses that didn’t claim intellectual property, she was told, took it unofficially. She didn’t trust many people at Flux for the same reason. To show them her best work after she’d officially left felt like a mistake. Somewhere up the line it would be taken from her. The ‘frustration stage’ was to come after the ‘honeymoon stage’, as the orientation materials given out on the Mount advised. What ‘honeymoon stage’?

  The armed robbery at Robusta was a shock for everyone. Shots were fired, a man killed in the street, and the traumatised owners sold up and opened a new café in Dannevirke, taking the baristas with them. Everyone kept coming for a while but the salaried workers tried hard too hard, or didn’t care, or something. They weren’t hosts like Tem and Delilah were and it just wasn’t the same. A new café in Miramar became the place to be for night-owl Outers with no security issues. All the Flux workplaces and meeting spots are security risks for Karen now, along with her friends’ private residences. The connections were cut too easily.

  She wonders what’s happened. She’s dogged by the feeling of not being good enough to reconnect with Flux over the divide of the Wall. Of not being bright enough, beautiful enough, or good enough to make that happen.

  ‘Adjustment’ did not follow the ‘frustration stage’ on the Mount. Frustration, boredom, resentment and suffocation continue. Inners don’t see her; she can’t talk to them. To them she’s just a spouse. There’s no one to confide in. The problem with the Mount is that it’s crazily conservative and she never knows where to turn, what the next step is.

  She takes her usual table near the window. Manny goes for the large box of retro toys he likes. No one comes for her order. She realises there are no waitrons. The café has been automated since her last visit. The barista is a robot, one of the cheaper type that remains behind the espresso machine, common in the ’burbs but unheard of in the Mall. Surely a candidate for a cricket bat attack by the neo-Luddites. The robarista wipes the bench in a deliberate wrist-revolving way as she approaches. Its male voice is deliberately robotic; the head a benign curve of white plastic.

  ‘Hi, what can I get you?’

  ‘A flat white.’

  A smooth, silky and efficient arm immediately lifts a portafilter. ‘How do you like it?’

  ‘Strong, bitter, thick and not too milky.’

  It fills the portafilter with coffee, tamps it and fits it. The other hand simultaneously pours, heats and froths the milk. ‘Can I put a name to the face?’

  ‘Dusty.’

  The robarista places the coffee in front of her and nods deeply. ‘This one’s on me, Dusty. Let me know how to improve it for next time.’

  There won’t be a next time, she thinks. ‘Right.’ She takes the coffee back to her table. Annoyingly, the coffee is exactly how she likes it. Perfect.

  A nearby patron, her back turned to Karen, has dropped the privacy shield on her holomaker. A 30 centimetre tall super-elderly woman stands on the holomaker stage, fake-tanned and happy in the type of elaborate short red dress worn at horse races. The old woman’s head is selected. It swells and swells until it hangs in the dim café like the patron’s companion. From under a metallic fascinator peer one blue eye and one entirely white but for the pupil’s black prick. The smiling old woman is oblivious of her missing coloured contact lens. Karen shudders. No best-dressed prize for you, she thinks. Loss of colour in the iris is a side-effect of long-term NST. (White eyes are a minor side-effect, according to the scientists, because the eye still functions normally and creepiness is hard to quantify.) The next projection is a short video. It’s a tennis match. Close-up, between points, an old man removes his dark glasses and towels his face. He hands the towel to the ball-boy. His eyes are as white as his tennis outfit. The patron repeats the short clip. Selects a static image and revolves the blind-looking head.

  Karen looks away. The wind is powering up; it’s getting gloomier. Robusta is a cold and melancholy place now, but also still a reminder that things were much better only recently. Things can be better again. Yes. Rain would help. Getting off the happy pills is essential, of course. Shame will drive that. Shame and fear will drive that home. To not notice that Manny had appendicitis, that he’d been quietly and staunchly going downhill with a serious medical condition for a week or more, which she’d put down to shared soul-weariness, some kind of familial spiritual malaise… Four years old, she thinks. In my care. Her bangle won’t activate. It’s disabled.

  The coffee really is excellent. Even the depleted husk of Robusta is better than any franchised café on the Mount. She is notorious, she knows, to many Inners for her failed ‘careers’ on the Mount, due, so her second boss told her, to ‘repeated gross impropriety’. She had to confirm by dictionary the meaning of that on the way home. Marti had said, ‘Hell hath no fury like an elderly CEO with a testosterone implant scorned.’ The stay-at-home wives are also awful. Karen wondered if they were hard of hearing at first. In fact, she was being ignored. Because Jeremiah was new on the Mount, she was at the bottom of the ladder. They mirror the male pecking order at Venture Group. It’s all about who your husband is. A woman’s volubility is dependent on her husband’s seniority. A bottom-rung spouse like Karen is allowed a brief question or two to the group per coffee, at most. What bullshit! She refused the next invitation she was supposed to feel so grateful for. No more came. Now she has the sense of being ‘sighted’ in cafés on Mt Victoria; seen like an exotic man-eating spider in women’s eyes, like a piece of chocolate cake in men’s. And always the sense that the banal discussions she finds herself in are recorded and her
clothes itemised to provide subject matter for later conversations over hot and cold beverages in homes with views.

  She’s not ‘sighted’ in Robusta. And the coffee is strong, bitter and thick. Confidence-boosting. The caffeine hit teases loose a positive association, dislodges a pulse of the confidence and ambition she recently felt right here at this table not so long ago. The sweet moment passes, shredded by the usual stream of self-consciousness and doubt.

  What is left here of us, she wonders, everyone who spent so much time here? All our life and energy disappeared into nothing, vanished into the air like smoke and sound. Robusta’s dead now, reborn as a fifteen-minute flophouse for furtive screen-watchers. What happened here? She curbs an impulse to check her disabled screen. Like Robusta, it’s flat, run down. Once the energy is spent, it’s lost. My last visit here, she confirms to herself. Even the echoes of echoes are gone.

  A woman comes down the street in a brimmed black hat set at a jaunty angle, rammed down against the wind, in fact, but with verve. She has a black halter-neck top under a short black, red-collared jacket and black Arabian pants. Karen half-stands to check out her shoes as she passes: heels. How inappropriate at 11 am in winter—and how regal of her! Nothing has been lost after all; it’s been made material. The energy that burned here has been transformed, is being transformed.

  Mandela has removed his coat and stands over the wooden toy box. ‘Three, two, one—lift-off!’ His T-shirt untucks as he lifts a tin plane and flies it at arm’s length over his head. ‘Crgghghghghgh!’ He’s strong again. Already! He turns and smiles. It’s not that he’s forgiven her—he never even blamed her. ‘Mum, look, a suborbital plane!’

  Karen will remember this moment. When elderly, the living memory will hit her with the force of a freight train, and she’ll return to the present every time to find her face wet with grateful tears.