Topics About Which I Know Nothing

by Patrick Ness

  She is two minutes and eleven seconds early in all of her dealings with the day due to a computer error on the ticker of the local morning news by which she sets her watch each morning. The error is not fixed for nearly a week, and Magda is not the only city-dweller who is slightly early for the next seven days.

  Today, Magda arrives at the diner 131 seconds earlier than normal. Ryan, newspaper tucked under one arm, helmet in hand, looks up at her as he opens the door to leave. He turns as she moves past him.

  ‘Magda?’ he says.

  She stops, curious, slightly annoyed that her lunch is being interrupted. She arches an eyebrow as a shield. She cocks her head.

  ‘It’s Ryan, isn’t it?’

  ‘You remembered.’

  ‘You were at that party at Adam’s.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘And you made fun of me for carrying a book.’

  Ryan glances at the book she currently has under one arm but says nothing.

  ‘I did, didn’t I? Sorry, I was kind of stupid drunk that night.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘I mean, I read, too.’

  Magda holds up the book to show him. ‘Read this?’

  ‘No, but I’ve read Giles Goat-Boy.’

  Magda is surprised. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, really.’

  Magda curls her lip in a way that strikes Ryan as attractive. He looks at his watch, but only as an affectation because he doesn’t even register the current time (1:01pm).

  ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’ve got a little bit of time left. Mind if I join you?’

  ‘Haven’t you already eaten?’

  ‘I’ll just have a coffee. We can chat.’

  Something (perhaps the handsome mess of his hair, ruffled by his helmet: perhaps the scar on his upper lip that makes his smile cutely crooked: perhaps she is just feeling lonely this afternoon) makes Magda pause and act contrary to her natural behavior.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ she says. ‘Why not?’

  Reality 2,115, 22 July, 1:00pm

  Neither Subject 1 nor Subject 2 eat at the diner that day, because:

  Reality 2,115 (continued), 2 May, 11:32pm

  ‘Do you mind if I ask why you brought a book to a party?’ His smile is a friendly one, almost familiar. She doesn’t take offense. She shows him the book (The Atrocity Exhibition).

  ‘In case I didn’t meet anyone.’

  ‘Well, you’ve met someone now.’

  Approximately two and a half months later, on 22 July, as has become their Thursday ritual, Subject 1 brings Chinese takeaway to Subject 2’s place of work (a DVD and video rental store called Ton Et Lumiere). They talk quietly and privately among themselves, laughing under an umbrella, eating their wontons as the rain sprinkles down.

  the motivations of

  Sally Rae Wentworth, Amazon

  Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones takes Julian Buxton, starts war

  The truce, which had become pretty rusty as the years ticked by anyway, was finally broken for good and all when Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones, administrative assistant to the Amazonian Vice Priestess of Reading & Bracknell (Inclusive), smote Hemel Palethorpe Gull & Gull Chartered Accountant Julian Buxton on the back of the head with a redwood birthing board at the Hemel Palethorpe Gull & Gull annual summer picnic and rounders game, knocking him unconscious and dragging him by his already thinning hair to her one-bedroom hut just off the M4 near Slough, impressing him into lifelong concubinage. Because the picnic/rounders game was being held miles away from Slough on Camberwell Green and therefore well inside the generally agreed Central London Non-Hostility Zone - having been relocated from Hampstead, where an outbreak of malaria had felled most of the Highgate Ursuline Sisters of Mercy Charity Football Summer League and where also the crocs in the men’s bathing pond had shown higher aggression of late, consuming at least three swimmers as well as a bushwalker with no doubt lecherous intent; and because such a kidnapping was a direct violation of Clause 5, Section 4, of the Non-Hostilities Pact 1985 in any event, regardless of area; and because Ponce-Jones, though not in the Amazonian governmental hierarchy herself per se, was nevertheless in line for a title and therefore directly affiliated with the Amazonian government, being, as mentioned, the administrative assistant to Vice Priestess Margaret Hassellbeck; and finally because Buxton, aside from being a fully qualified Chartered Accountant and therefore off-limits regardless, was also Deputy Treasurer for the Protectorate National Society of Chartered Accountants, Southern Division, and therefore an actual junior member of the Chartered Accountancy Government; for all reasons stated above, all-out war was more or less inevitable.

  Which complicated my life to no end.

  You may have heard of me

  I, being your narrator, am named Sally Rae Thomasina Wentworth, Sally Rae being my two-name first name after my mother Sally RaeAnne Chenowith, of the Charleston, South Carolina Chenowiths, and Thomasina being after my father, Thomas Quiller Wentworth of the Atlanta, Georgia Wentworths. I was born forty-seven years ago in Savannah, Georgia, in the United Protestant States of America to Mr and Mrs Wentworth before they took up their permanent commission as missionaries for the American Southern Baptist Church of Christ In God to the Amazon Nation of Great Britain when I was the age of ten years. This first, and last, posting for Mr and Mrs Wentworth (young narrator in tow) was the Isle of Man.

  I am from the American South, but I am not of it, whereas I am of the Isle of Man but not from it. This is important.

  It is possible, depending upon your personal, individual attentions, that you may have heard of me or may at least have seen me on television standing next to or near or in the vicinity of Queen Joanne II on state or diplomatic occasions. I serve HRH in the capacity of Domestic Affairs Advisor, an appointed position rather than one selected from the House of Commons, as my place of birth, being no fault of my own, nevertheless prevents me from serving in HRH’s Parliament as an elected official. This is both important and not. I am a member of HRH’s cabinet but am destined to remain forever ex officio.

  This is not a complaint. I am honoured to serve HRH, long may she reign.

  War begins with an attack on the Chartered Accountancy Protectorate Luton Arms Depot, and also with paperwork

  Although the definitive action that brought on the war - Ponce-Jones’ impressment of Buxton - was taken by an Amazon, HRH, in a typical display of initiative and with the aid of advice proffered by your narrator, decided to attack the Chartered Accountancy Protectorate first, because if war was inevitable, why not ‘act boldly in the best Amazonian tradition’ (said HRH, parroting me) and just get the whole thing started off to the best advantage of our side? Makes sense.

  Two squadrons of forty soldiers attacked the CAP Arms Depot near Luton. Leaving their horses behind so as to blitz in the silence that only highly trained troops of the Amazonian army can muster, the eighty soldiers plus four sergeants plus one captain set on the surprisingly under-defended depot, taking it quickly and with minimal loss of life on our side. Fifteen CAP soldiers were killed: the remaining six were impressed. The first casualties of war. (‘Twenty-one soldiers to guard an important arms depot?’ asked HRH, quite rightly. ‘Why did we wait so long to attack them, is my question.’) Only two Amazons were killed, two more welcome guests at the Great Feast, lucky sows.

  A lot of paperwork was involved as well, and fortunately I have competent and capable assistants to handle most of it or I would be buried because war generates forms and reports like nothing else on Goddess’ Green Earth. When, for illustrative purposes, HRH launched an initiative against the French Farmer’s Republic Isle of Jersey when I was the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Domestic Affairs Advisor, under the late Dame Edith Chalwin-Prichard, it took seventeen different personnel in our office alone not excluding myself nor Dame Edith (about whom let it never be said that she was afraid of real grunt work) to type the necessary documentation. And that was for a wee little island with nothing on it but an amuse
ment park that HRH had taken a fancy to, which of course didn’t stop the FFR from causing a ridiculously overblown kerfuffle in the Assembly of Nations, as if that feeble bunch of do-nothings ever once accomplished anything useful or indeed at all.

  But from the CAP Depot, yes. Mountains of paperwork but nearly 600 spears and over 400 muskets were taken, and I ask you, if the CAP were not anticipating war, despite their repeated claims, why would they have such a fully stocked depot? I ask you.

  Naturalization

  As you will have gathered from the brief history above (of which more in a moment) I am a naturalized Amazon, having completed citizenship proceedings at the age of twenty-one with six hundred and eleven other hopefuls in a very moving ceremony hosted by HRH herself. We held our hands across our chests, bodies sheathed in formal leather singlets, a ceremonial bow or spear or flail as per personal preference in our free hand, and renounced all ties to inferior pasts, becoming by proclamation Amazons, despite a noticeable lack of height in comparison to the sternly helpful Immigration Officers present and the sternly kind personage of HRH, looming down at us with the one and only real Sceptre of War in one hand and the actual immensely impressive Mace of Might in the other, thereby underlining for all six hundred and twelve freshly minted Amazons the real and true sombreness and seriousness and underlying importance of the ceremony we had just gone through.

  For me, for one, it was the least they could do.

  The motivations of Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones

  Why, in a question that gets lost in the mists of time - or the rasping, raking, grabbing claws of time or the general vague yet unshakeable depressing fog of time, your choice - did Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones so boldly break a years and years-old truce for the sake of the individual man Julian Buxton? Or more succinctly, why do wars begin?

  I have talked myself into a corner there, do you see? I know the answer to the first question, but I do not, in fact, know any such answer to the second. Why do wars begin? Any wars at all. You may be surprised to hear this from me yet nevertheless I am here to tell you that nothing good ever comes from any war. Ever. Of any kind. Only scarred and scared generations of young dying on front lines, puffing up only those old and powerful and arrogant and, most importantly, distant enough to imagine themselves as the hand of destiny, the God or Goddess of War (for the Amazons to whom I have allieged are far from guiltless), directing the fates of worlds when it’s really only the fates of the twenty-somethings and, heaven save us from our sins, teenagers who we send to die and die and die. Notice how it’s always called the ‘spoils’ of war. Medals of coagulated blood, celebration pyres for the dead, telegrams and letters and emails now of grief in terse sentences. At least Amazons are guaranteed seats at the Great Feast if they die in battle.

  If you believe that. Which sometimes, if I’m honest with you, I wonder, especially now that ‘battle’ has expanded the definition of itself to include such things as death by natural causes after retirement from being a shopping-centre security guard or death by car crash if the dogcatcher wagon overturns, watering down I think the Great Feast table into just another boring convention of uniformed women. I wonder.

  But, yes, again the motivations of Lucia ‘Tippi’ Ponce-Jones. It was love clearly or at least what the young so often mistake for love and, frankly, who are we in middle age to say that it isn’t love, that rush of adrenalin and hormones that feels hot and cool at the same time like a frozen creamy cocktail. Why is that not love but yes this companionable settling that we do as life goes on is? Maybe love really is only for the young and the old co-opt it as we do everything and call our watered-down if quite comfortable version the only ‘real’ love. Tippi was in love with Julian Buxton. I could see it with my own two eyes. Simple. Plain as the nose on your face. Because if the fizz in her voice and behind her smile and in the flush of her skin wasn’t love, then why bother with love at all and not just take whatever it is she has? If Tippi wasn’t in love, then love’s been scooped by something that looks far better or at least more fun, is my opinion.

  The missionary work of the ASBCofCinG on the Isle of Man

  My parents Mr and Mrs Wentworth were young, too, when they arrived on the Isle of Man with ten-year-old me along as something they could cling to. They were both twenty-six years old. Twenty-six. Can you imagine a twenty-six-year-old these days moving across the ocean with spouse and child in tow for no salary, only living expenses, suffering deprivations including no running water for the first year, all to preach an evangelist gospel of mostly American nonsense but with a few good ideas interspersed including pacifism which was like kerosene on a campfire as far as the Amazons were concerned? Nor can I, though I suppose they must exist because as far as I know the ASBCofCinG Missionary Service is still around, sending off dazed smiling youths (maybe) filled with the fire of God or at least a challenge or at the very least ham-fisted good intentions, off to parts unknown, unexplored, unChristianised certainly, sending them to serious hardship, certain struggle, potential doom. I wonder what those missionaries look like now, though I wouldn’t want to meet one to find out, I don’t think.

  My parents were true believers which 37 years ago was less of a thing. Earnest and fresh-faced and eager to proselytise, they moved into a tiny central terraced house in Jurby East. Why not Douglas? Why not Castletown or even Peel? I do not know. Jurby East was where the church sent them and Jurby East is where they went. Isolated amongst Amazons, miles from the nearest town, they set to work. They started operating a little church in our sitting-room, and for a very long time, my mother and father took turns making up half of the congregation of two while the other preached to me and whoever’s turn it was.

  My parents, in a ludicrous oversight all too common amongst purveyors of do-goodery, had not been taught to speak Amazonian. They were expected to pick up the language from the Manx Amazons. Being a child language-sponge, this meant practically that I at ten years of age was expected to learn the language and translate for them. As I was not, however, allowed by Amazonian law to attend an Amazonian school, this was problematic. Nor were we permitted to shop in any Amazonian store save a piss-poor designated one six miles away, nor could we attend Amazonian movies, nor own a car to drive on Amazonian roads, nor bank in any Amazonian savings institution, and on and on. To say that missionaries were barely tolerated by the Amazonian government is to risk over-generosity. They didn’t want my parents there but had reluctantly acquiesced to international law to allow them in.

  Despite all the difficulties, and there were nothing but, my parents after a year and a half managed a convert. One. The bus driver who drove the route to the grocery store six miles away and who had seen my mother dragging me onto her bus every Monday for eighteen months. Hostility turned to grudging turned to gruffness turned to conversation turned to conversion at a painstaking rate, but the first one is always the difficult one. KeithAnne was her name, all seven feet of her, friendly in a frowning sort of way, appalling table manners, but there she was. In the flesh. On a Sunday morning, too big for our inherited American Civil War-era blue Wodehouse tea cups, her fur skirt leaving an uneasy oil across the divan, and a quiver of arrows that I couldn’t keep my now-eleven-year-old eyes off of. Nonetheless, a convert.

  Consequences were quick to follow.

  Why I love who I am

  Here, let me give you a list:

  The Amazon laugh. I have worked hard to learn this laugh, and I am getting there. The Amazon laugh is like no other. Rich, deep, uninhibited, superior but happily so. An Amazon will not cover her mouth with her hand when she laughs. She will not form her lips to make vowel sounds of laughter, no ‘hoo hoo’ or ‘hee hee,’ only a loud, clanging cataclysm of air, an avalanche of plosives. Her laugh, like so much else Amazonian, is out-and-out warfare. It conquers. It does not comfort. An Amazon laughs like she just created a planet.

  This is all the more impressive because Amazons as a rule have no sense of humour.

  Physical Educati
on Class, Year 11. When the time came to select volleyball teams, the two tallest, most athletic girls in the class, Margo Newman and Sophie Macquarrie-Adler, were chosen by PE Mistress Nobbier as captains. Out of a class of 22, despite being the shortest by over a foot and thumpingly average at volleyball, Margo Newman chose me sixth for her team - the eleventh choice overall, out of 22 remember - because she thought my ‘enthusiasm deserved a chance.’ If you need this explained to you, then perhaps you would never understand anyway and should move on to point 3.

  The Amazonian Religion. True, the Amazonian religion, which has no name (another reason to like it), is a bit of an exclusive club. The Goddess, who has no name other than Goddess, demands the supplication of all non-Amazons, and this had led to all sorts of warfare, as you may have noticed. However, if you are an Amazon, and I am, don’t forget, all that the Goddess wants for you is your happiness. The Goddess never berates, never punishes. The Goddess is for you and against your enemies. Granted, the being-an-Amazon part is a pretty severe caveat, but if you’re in, you’re way, way in. As an Amazon, I am not allowed to say more.

  HRH, on my fortieth birthday. Aside from the gifts she gave as Head of State (the silver service, the huge wax seal that I have used ever since for official correspondence), HRH gave me, on the side, in secret, away from official eyes, a butterfly from her gardens. It was an anomaly, she said, a blue Monarch which had slipped in unnoticed in its cocoon on a sequoia she had imported from the UPSA. It was the only blue Monarch in the entire Amazon, HRH told me, holding it lightly between her fingertips. ‘Know that it’s yours,’ she said, and we watched as she let it fly away free into the flowers of her garden. As a queen, HRH is incapable of friendships. She necessarily has only allies or foes. But, sometimes, she does try.