Daughter of Bad Times Page 2

  ‘Listen to me,’ the captain says. ‘Are you listening?’

  We’ve reached a conference room at the end of the corridor.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘You lay one hand on her, and I’ll bring you down to a fucking ant.’

  I frown at him. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The cameras are watching. I’ll be watching.’

  ‘Lay a hand on who?’ I say, but my heart is already rattling.

  ‘A fucking ant, you hear me?’ he says. ‘And you know full well who.’

  The captain pushes open the conference room door. Inside the room is a woman and she turns, startled, and puts her hand to her mouth and I realise that I do, I do know who.

  It’s Rin Braden.

  She takes three quick steps and grabs me and I’m lost in a pleasant mist of perfume. She plants her face against my chest. The bramble of sand-white hair that I remember has been carefully styled and tamed by a system of pins and clips. There are dark roots growing in. She’s holding me as hard as she can. Rin Braden is holding me and I’m wondering what fresh humiliation I might be in for now.

  ‘Ms Braden,’ the captain says but we both ignore him. He seems not to understand what’s happening and he hesitates. ‘Should I—’ he says and he clears his throat.

  ‘Get out,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  He shoots the lock into place.

  I feel her heat through my clothes. She’s holding me tightly. I want to push her away but my hands are zip-tied. We stand like this for a long time and for a long time there’s nothing else. Here’s a moment upon which time pivots. The time before, the time after. It’s the first solid point I’ve known in many months.

  When she leans back, her eyes are black and viscid like drops of oil.

  ‘You’re alive,’ she says.

  I want to tell her to go home but I lack the cruelty.

  ‘My luck held up,’ I say.

  ‘I couldn’t find you,’ she says.

  Officially, I believe, I was missing for weeks.

  ‘I gave up,’ she says and she’s losing control. Her face knots. ‘I gave up.’

  So we reach the truth of it. Rin Braden holds me and I feel her heat and I feel her shoulders jumping. There’s no doubt in my mind that she believed me dead. Certainly, I should be dead. But who chooses? Are we gathered to God as He intends? Or are we free to throw our handful of dust wherever the wind will take it? These are questions I can’t answer.

  Rin is crying into my smock. There’s a deep note to it, a lower moan. In the depths of that register I hear how much she’s suffered these last five months, searching for me, searching the lists and lists of the dead for my name, in the same way that I searched for the names of my family. One difference, of course—I could have ended her suffering with a message or a call or a photo. Instead, I hid from her.

  ‘We made it through,’ I say and it sounds unconvincing.

  Time seems to restart. She steps away and drops her bag on the conference table. She avoids my eyes. I’ve hurt her profoundly, that much is clear. Her bag is big and she sorts through it for something. A tissue. She dabs her eyes and straightens, and I find myself admiring her. She wears her black pants tight, her blazer cut close, and her white shirt open to the third button. I have never seen her dressed this way before, dressed for the company. I wonder if this isn’t the truest version of Rin Braden. Perhaps the version I’ve known—the girl on the beach—perhaps she’s only a shadow cast by this person.

  The problem with Rin Braden has always been knowing who she is.

  Otherwise, hardly a thing about her has changed. Her posture is as sure as a dancer’s. Her white hair is still mop length and mop rough. No doubt styled that way because everything about her is styled and manicured. She’s painted her lips red and her eyes black. She wears a CYC lapel pin. The summary impression is one of power, but the power of the young, the power of the vital.

  She turns to me. What she wants to ask is: ‘Why didn’t you call?’ Rin has as much pride as I do, though. Plus, she’s honest with herself. She knows why I spent months alone in Sri Lanka and now months alone in this Eaglehawk. What impresses me is that it didn’t stop her from coming.

  Instead she says, ‘You’re in here by yourself?’

  I nod. Yes.

  ‘Where’s your father?’

  I make a small motion. No.

  ‘Your mother?’

  I say nothing. What can I say?

  She’s staring into my eyes. ‘Oh Yammy. I’m so sorry.’

  This is the point where I should tell her to leave. These are rough waters that we ought not to cross. I mean, look at her. Look at who she is. You’d need to be crazy to believe it possible. I’m not crazy. There may be a kinder, saner world where a refugee and an heiress make a cheery couple but that is not our world. In our world, a man like me holds no value. Monetary value, I mean. Earning potential. Assets and holdings. It’s humiliating for Rin to be seen with me—the man with nothing. Our world is neither kind nor sane. I’m honest about this, but Rin isn’t.

  Still, she kisses me. She’s kissing me, and for a second I can forget that I’m nothing. Colours explode in my brain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she breathes onto my lips. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I blink and blink. It’s a pinwheel of colour, the colour of us.

  She has a lighter from her bag. She melts the zip-tie and I find myself looking into her eyes.

  ‘Rin,’ I say. ‘This is no good.’

  ‘Don’t leave me again,’ she says.

  ‘This is impossible. Go home. Please.’

  ‘I’d rather die,’ she says. ‘Do you understand?’

  I look up at the ceiling. This is what I’ve done with my pain and my doubt.

  ‘Stay with me,’ she says.

  ‘You need to go home.’

  She’s warm in my arms. She might be good and kind but I remind myself that she’s also a coward.

  ‘I read the lists every day,’ she says. ‘Every day. Looking for your name.’

  ‘The lists. Yes. I was reading the lists too.’

  ‘For your father?’

  ‘For my father. For my mother.’

  ‘They all thought I was sick,’ she says. ‘Alessandra, all my friends. They wanted to put me in hospital. They didn’t know I was mourning for you.’

  Listening to this, I feel the old tremor of anger. Yes, I’ve hidden myself from her. Yes, I’ve wounded her. Now do you see why? She can’t be honest with her mother or her friends about who I am. She can’t tell the truth. We pass some moments simply standing and holding one another. The thudding of her heart plain enough through the thin silk of her shirt. Thudding against my belly. The smell of her hair, peach, vanilla, right below my nose. All the same, I know it’s a false feeling. We once shared a deep pact but that trust drowned in the water like everything else.

  ‘Go home,’ I say. ‘Please. Leave me be.’

  ‘Not without you.’

  I close my eyes in frustration.

  ‘Do you want to come with me?’ she says softly and from her expression I can see it is a bigger question she’s asking. What she means is, why are you resisting? Do you care for me? Do you want to share a life? This is her way of apologising, her way of winning back my trust. But I’ve learned from Rin Braden the hardest lesson of life. I’ve learned that to love someone is to be shown the facts of your own predicament. That you’re nothing and no one, just a fool with a swollen heart. So I follow the old rule of my father’s: be as hard as bone or beasts will chew you.

  ‘Leave me in peace,’ I say without humour. ‘Let me have a life. Or what’s left of it anyway.’

  ‘I’m not leaving you in here. Forget it. No way.’

  ‘Does your mother know you came?’

  Her mouth tugs sideways like it’s pulled by string. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘My mother?’

  We spend a hard second staring at each othe
r.

  ‘Yammy, she doesn’t control me. She doesn’t make decisions for me. Forget my mother. She’s got nothing to do with this.’

  This is such a dismal, wounding lie that I have to move around the room to hide my face from her. Her mother is why I’m in this Eaglehawk. Her mother, who fired me from my job. Her mother, who couldn’t tolerate me. Control? She has total dominion over Rin’s life and the result is this bitter space between us.

  ‘Rin, I say this before God. There’s no hope for us.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘That’s the child in you speaking,’ I say. ‘You need to grow up.’

  ‘Six months ago, maybe. Six months ago, I might have agreed with you. In the last six months I lost every bit of my childishness by searching through photographs of dead people looking for you. That wakes you up to life, let me tell you. It makes you grow up real fast.’

  ‘Rin,’ I say and it’s all I can manage.

  Foolishly, then, I start to well up. I wipe my eyes with the hurt of it all. My father, my mother. This precious girl who came to find me. It hurts in a way that seems to come from my bones and I hold my breath to stop myself and swallow past the block in my neck. Rin takes hold of my hand, lifts it and kisses the curves of my fingers.

  ‘You know something,’ she says. ‘I’m not quitting until I get you out of here. No way. So you can insult me all you like. Tell me to leave. Whatever. It makes no difference.’

  She looks at me. She kisses my fingers.

  ‘I’m getting you out,’ she says.

  She plucks a pair of glasses from inside her blazer and puts them on. I’ve seen her wearing glasses many times, whenever she was working, or communicating, or watching streams, but still I’m startled by how they frame the feline shape of her eyes. Feline, in the upward curve, in the long lashes. Somehow, glasses give these feline eyes even more appeal. She hands me a second pair.

  ‘Take these,’ she says.

  Unlawful Non-Citizens aren’t permitted to use connected devices. She must know that. ‘They’re watching us in here,’ I say.

  ‘The cameras are disabled. I did it myself. Out there is where you need to be careful.’

  Careful. Yes. If the cameras notice theft or violence, a guard is alerted.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘Take them.’

  I turn them over and turn them back. They weigh almost nothing, slim wire frames and a heavy bridge where the sensors are inset. It’s hard to say what brand, certainly something expensive. When I put them on, I see that Rin has some files floating in front of her.

  ‘They’ve assessed your processing fees, transport, and medical insurance at $48,136,’ she says and flips a few pages.

  She hands me a glowing file. Itemised accounts. My water usage. Weekly rent for my bunk. Food. Everything. I’ve missed my quota of TabaPets for today so a fine will be added to that total. Every time I eat, every time I use the toothpaste, every time I take a shower, wipe my bottom, blow my nose, or whatever, the debt swells. It’s a strange thing, this debt. Like a spirit, it occupies another plane of existence where I can’t see it or touch it. Also like a spirit, it’s no less dangerous for being invisible.

  ‘I’ll pay,’ she says. ‘That’s the only way to get you out of here.’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘Quiet. I’m paying it.’

  ‘I’m not taking your money. It’s my debt. I can pay it.’

  ‘Forty-eight thousand is bullshit. It’s a number. Listen to me. Let me pay. I’ve found you and that’s all that matters.’

  I lower my eyes.

  ‘You can’t stop me,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘This is crazy. Listen to yourself.’

  ‘Once I pay it, they’ll put you into the community on a refugee visa.’

  I study the posters on the walls. They show my future through pictures of smiling brown-skinned citizens overlaid with slogans. Productivity is the Australian Way. Association is Unionism. Another features an African man hard at work in the Australian sunshine. New Life, New Labours, it says. I have doubts this is a community I want to live in. Yet where else can I go?

  ‘If you want to humiliate me,’ I say, ‘this is certainly the way to do it.’

  ‘I don’t care. You can feel however you want. As long as I get you out of here and away from this fucking company forever it’s a victory.’

  For all my hiding, I’m useless after all. In the end I’m trapped and made to accept her help. The poor man taking from the rich girl. That’s the poison of money, you see? The more you want to pretend it doesn’t matter, the more you’re forced to see that it does, of course, matter. Who knows that better than me?

  I look down at my plastic sandals and when I look up I’m intending to tell her that this is the last time we’ll ever see each other. Yet I can’t even say a word. It’s the sidewards tug of her lips, their delicate watermelon colour. Her front teeth have a fullness, a prominence, ever so slight, that is utterly charming. I can’t help it. My body betrays me. My mouth opens and closes and nothing comes out. It would be miserably sad to never see her again and I’ve had enough with sadness after all.

  ‘Keep them,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The glasses. Keep them. Wipe the memory if they catch you.’

  When I pull them off the files vanish. The room seems suddenly bare.

  ‘You just tell it. Tell it to wipe.’

  I clear my throat. ‘Hey, glasses,’ I say.

  The frame trembles in my hand and gives a confirmation chirp.

  ‘Wipe.’

  It trembles again, an unhappy tremble, as if it has understood.

  ‘No, not now,’ I say.

  It chirps twice and cancels the action.

  She kisses me by reaching up on her toes and grabbing my chin. I can taste the sweet wax of her lipstick. She steps away and smooths down her blazer and when she takes up her bag she seems the very image of a hardened corporate woman. This must be the woman that her colleagues see, so unlike the girl on the beach at Feydhoo Finolhu, the girl who would emerge from the lagoon and towel herself while never taking her eyes off me, the girl who lazed in my bed through the long heat of afternoon. That girl has gone forever. She scans her face to unlock the door. Then quietly she says, ‘You could have called me. I would have come, you know. To Sri Lanka.’

  Sri Lanka. With its red mud and rows of tents. It might have done her good to see Sri Lanka. What better antidote to wealth?

  ‘I would have come,’ she says.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘I wish you’d called me,’ she says.

  ‘Rin, go home. Let me be.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘All right.’

  ‘Please don’t visit anymore.’

  ‘We’ll see. We’ll just have to see.’

  For a second she looks at me, her fingers drumming on the handle.

  ‘Take care of yourself, Yammy.’

  As soon as she leaves, I sit in the steel chair and for a time I simply stare at the wall. Not for many months have I known such complicated sensations. Here in this Eaglehawk, everything is simple. You work and you eat and you sleep. Even on the days when I’m allowed access to a media headset, I have no one to send messages to, I have no living relatives outside the facility, no living friends. What could be less complicated? Now Rin has placed a layer of bewilderment on top of everything.

  I lean back and breathe and the room is full of her peach and vanilla. If only she wasn’t a coward. If only she’d fought for me. I sit for long seconds staring at the clustered lights in the ceiling. Cracks in the cheap foam tiles. Streaks of dust. Quiet room. Thundering pulse. The calling of my blood for her.

  No, I won’t make that mistake again.

  Any Maldivian will tell you the story of the handi—a demon in the body of a beautiful woman. In some stories, men fall in love with her. How could they not? Them, poor fishermen. She, kind and gentle. They’d marry and live a p
erfect life until one day, quite by accident, the fisherman learned her secret. He’d catch a glimpse of her true form or see her scaly feet. With her secret broken, the handi would no longer feel safe in the village and she would leave. That was the fear—not that you lived with a demon who might eat you, but that the demon would leave you forever. Being alone, that’s the truest horror.

  ‘Talons and claws,’ my father had said. ‘The handi will have one of these. If you see such a thing, for your own good, escape that house.’

  He was sitting at the plastic table in the visitor’s room of Maafushi prison. He waved his pencil at me as he spoke.

  ‘The heel,’ he said. ‘Look to the heel. You see the talon and then you know. She’s a handi.’

  He said this only half as a joke.

  A secret exchange had happened between Rin and I. It weighed little, had no form, and yet it shifted everything. He knew I was in trouble—he knew. I didn’t need to say it. He waved his pencil at me dismissively. You’re lost. You’re finished. No one can save you now. No, and I didn’t want to be saved. In my role as housekeeper, I would stand cooking roshi in the Braden kitchen and watching Rin on the sun deck. Muslim women didn’t dress in thin athletic wear and practise yoga on the sun deck the way she did. Indeed, the mutaween had banned yoga years ago. Still, Rin Braden was no Muslim. I glanced now and then at the poses she made. Stretching overhead. Bending at the waist. The lean, the twist. The muscle of her back had a geographic quality—hills, tracts, valleys. No, I didn’t want to be saved.

  I see now that my father was right.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  Captain Rahmatullah has appeared in the conference room.

  ‘We’re old friends,’ I say.

  ‘I’ve half a mind to make you eat concrete for touching her like that.’

  He hustles me against the wall and zip-ties my hands.

  ‘She broke a man’s arm,’ he says. ‘Did you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘In Houston,’ he says. ‘Broke in two places.’