Tamaruq (2 page)

The woman sweeps up the cuttings of hair and that evening she helps them clean the apartment, awkwardly, trailing them from one side of the room to the other, copying what they do. If they think her behaviour strange they do not say so. She is grieving, they have decided, but she will not – or cannot – say what she has lost.

Later she writes:

I need to change my hair.

They look at the note, confused. Mikaela thinks of those women on the boats whose hair is always sheer and black and she worries. You want a different colour? Is that it?

Ata nods. She hesitates. They watch her pick up the pen again.

She writes:

It isn’t safe.

They look at the three words for a long time. Without having to exchange a glance they realize that they have always known this.
It isn’t safe
. They do not know who she is but it is not safe for her.

They remember the damage to her wrists when she arrived. The bruising. The skin there is still new, pink and shiny. They find they cannot bear the idea of her being harmed.

Ole and Mikaela circle her in their arms and hold her in a hug. They can feel her trembling. Mikaela says, we will look after you. We will keep you safe. She leans into them, shaking, absorbing their kind, openhearted warmth, wanting to believe that it is true. That it could even be possible.

Mikaela procures the dye for her. Something plain and brown, innocuous. If she were in the City she could get lenses to change the colour of her eyes, but she is not in the City now, and has no intention of going back. In the trash banks of the tower she finds a pair of discarded glasses and the couple help her to change the glass in the frames to something that does not blur her vision. After a while she gets used to the rub of plastic against the bridge of her nose.

On the o’dio, she is reported as missing. There are patrols out there, searching the western waterways. Then she is pronounced dead. It is a relief, to be dead.

She makes herself useful to the Larssons. She can see the pleasure in their faces with each small achievement, preparing a meal, or taking her first steps outside the apartment. She lets Ole show her how to drive their boat, a small motor with blue and white stripes, pretending she has never driven before. It gives her a reason to keep going. For them, she will do this. For them, she will clean her teeth, do the shopping run and scrub the windows, polishing in round, persistent motions until the glass sparkles like sunlight on the waves of the ocean that rush by, below, below, below.

She does not allow herself to think about him. Not even his name. His name is a whirlpool waiting to open up and engulf her. It could appear at her feet at any moment, through any matter: on the interlocking decking around a tower, or the fibreglass floor of a waterbus. Where there was ground underfoot, suddenly there is an abyss.

But sometimes it happens by accident and the pain is so acute she wants to cry out. She pushes her fist against her mouth, biting into the skin of her knuckles. Mikaela wraps tape around her fingers and tells her not to touch them. She remembers being told not to bite her nails as a child. Who told her that? Her mother, probably, but to think of
them
is another trip-up, another entry to the whirlpool below; it is because of
them
that all this has happened, that a man has died, that many more than one man have died.

The last words they exchanged were not happy ones. She was angry. She felt betrayed. He told her the truth and in that moment she hated him for it.

Had she known there was no more time, it might have been different.

There were other things she would have said. There are things she would say now, but will never have the chance.

At night she dreams of all the dead in conference and sees herself as reported on the o’dio among them, slowly decomposing beneath the surface. The dye comes off her hair, and then the skin comes off her face, and she rots. A strange relief in seeing the pieces of herself come adrift, the molecules of blood and tissue flying apart in a slow-motion explosion. What is left is a stillness of water, gently reddened, translucent. An after, as if there were never a before.

One night they sit together at the table, eating a stew she has prepared from a recipe of Ole’s, chewing slowly. The occasional nod: it’s good. If she needs to communicate something, she gestures, or writes it. At first she tried to talk, and found her throat was blocked, but now she no longer tries. Mikaela reassures her: these things take time. It will come back. She has never been in a place where there was no need for words. When she thinks of her old life – that other person, in the other city – it occurs to her that there were always words, and never silence. There were promises and lies, but there was rarely the truth.

Spoons scrape against bowls. She notices details like this, the small functional sounds, a swallow or a cough. They eat all of the stew. Mikaela switches on the o’dio. The apartment is full of the smell of cooking, briny and fresh. The woman looks at the empty dish and she is surprised by the peace that settles over her in that moment. She offers a smile to her rescuers and receives two smiles in return. Their lips curve in the same way. She is not sure if it was always like this or if they have become more like one another over time, their gestures merging into one entity, as happens sometimes with those who share lives.

She writes one word on the piece of paper and pushes it towards them. A question. Mikaela Larsson looks at her.

‘Because you need us, Ata.’

Weeks pass and they are beginning to depend on her too. Returning from the market with the day’s fresh kelp, she feels lighter than usual. She’s got a large bag of it, and she’s pleased, because she has learned to haggle without words. There are plenty of ways to communicate without speech: the slight contraction of the eyebrows, in surprise at the price, the shrug that denotes indifference. Take my money, don’t take it, I don’t care. She worried at first that her silence might mark her out, but the truth of it is, everyone has their peculiarities on this side of the border.

When she reaches the door to the apartment she hears voices. Not the o’dio but real voices in real time. Mikaela, and another, male, youngish, and with an insistent whine. She stops at once and listens.

The man says, ‘I think you should come.’

‘Well…’

‘No, I think you should.’

‘We’ll see. We’ll see.’

‘I helped organize it. Don’t you want to know more? Aren’t you interested?’

‘Of course I am, you know I am. Go on. You tell me.’

‘It’s a demonstration. Something big, exciting. There’ll be a lot of people there.’

‘You know we don’t go in for that sort of thing.’

‘It’s important. You should be there. It’s about integration. You can’t not be there.’

Mikaela makes a non-committal noise and the man repeats himself. ‘You can’t not be there.’

‘Really, I don’t think—’

‘You don’t think? You’re right, you don’t think.’ The man’s voice grows louder. ‘You don’t think about anything other than yourselves. Call yourselves westerners? You know what, you deserve to stay here when the border opens.’

She feels a rush of anger towards this person, whoever he is. How dare he speak to Mikaela in that way?

‘We don’t call ourselves anything,’ says Mikaela. She does not rise to the other’s anger and her voice remains gentle. ‘We just want to get on with our lives. Be careful, Oskar. You know we worry about you with those people.’

Then she hears the sound of something being hit. The table, she thinks. The table she polished this morning. She imagines the strange man’s palm smacking it, his sweat now smearing the clean surface,
polluting it
, and her anger grows.

She hears him say, ‘This is a joke.’

Footsteps, hurried, across the apartment. She backs away, alarmed, but it is too late. The door slams open. The young man is in the doorway, his coat buttoned to the throat implying he never intended to stay for long. He stares at her, his face flushed with anger.

‘Who the hell are you?’

She backs away, panicked. She can’t think. She can’t think! She hears Mikaela coming to the door, wants to say
no, don’t acknowledge me, don’t say a word
, but her throat is stoppered.

‘Ata?’ says Mikaela Larsson.

The man is still staring at her.

‘
Ata
?’ he repeats.

Danger, she thinks.
Danger
. Run. Get out. Get out now.

But she can’t move. She’s transfixed in his glare. The handle of the bag is slippery in her sweating palm. She can feel the damp weight of the kelp.

‘This is Ata,’ says Mikaela. ‘She’s been staying with us.’

No. No—

‘Since when?’

‘Since the night the tower collapsed.’

Please stop – you don’t realize—

‘The tower—’

‘We found her, Oskar. In the water. She was in trauma. Don’t raise your voice, it upsets her—’

She sees the change in the young man’s face. The hint of recognition, the confusion as he struggles to place her.

‘Ata,’ says the man again, a disbelieving note in his voice. ‘Take those glasses off a minute?’

He reaches out a hand. She doesn’t know what his intent is but the movement is enough, it’s the impetus her body needs. She turns and runs. Behind her she hears his shout, Hey! and Mikaela Larsson calling after her, but she’s already in the stairwell. Her chest is tight. It’s hard to breathe. She races down the stairs, blundering into people, ricocheting against the walls, unaware of any pain as she connects with concrete. She can hear the man, Oskar’s, voice.

‘Hey,
Ata
! Where are you going?’

He’s following. Did he recognize her? Could he?

There’s a bridge ten floors down. She ducks into a corridor and heads for it. He won’t know which way she’s gone. He’ll have to guess.

She steps out of the tower onto the narrow catwalk that constitutes a bridge this side of the border, clutching at the rusting handrails for balance. The tail of a winter wind hits her face, whipping through the inadequate western clothing and chilling her at once. The sea churns coldly in the waterway below. Ahead of her on the bridge is a young child. She watches where the child steps and places her feet in the exact same spaces. They are agile as birds, the kids here, and it is this that will give her away, any hint of hesitation, the suggestion that she has not spent her entire life balancing on rickety bridges constructed from salvage that might at any moment give way beneath her feet.

Fifty metres to the next tower. She crosses the bridge. She does not look back. She ducks into the tower. The lift is a trap; she takes the stairs to the surface. A waterbus is pulling in and she elbows her way onto it, using the few peng left over from the kelp to pay for her ticket. She goes below, and sits, head down, heart racing. Black spots dance in front of her eyes. The motor starts up, sending shudders through the boat.

Yes, leave. Leave now. Please. Please.

The boat pulls away. She doesn’t know where it is going and doesn’t care. The place that was safe is no longer safe.

She should never have gone outside. She thought the disguise was enough, but it only takes one person who follows the newsreels, and it’s over.

The waterbus reaches a terminus somewhere near the south-western edge of the city. Here there are wide interstices of daylight between the conical towers and through them the sea stretches away into the distance, its grip unbroken except for the occasional fishing or military boat.

Adelaide disembarks with the rest of the passengers. It is only then she realizes the waterbus has remained busy to the end of the route. She looks up at their destination. The terminus appears like any other tower in the west, its drab grey slopes pocked with indents from unidentified sources, graffitied landscapes layered over grime, with no obvious signs to indicate what or who might be found inside.

On the decking westerners mill about, some pushing into the queue for the returning waterbuses, others smoking thinly rolled cigarettes, watching the buses, idly exchanging conversation. She finds it hard to guess the ages of westerners, who often look older than their years, but there is a full spectrum here, from young children clinging to the legs of their minders to old faces furrowed with lines and tempered by the harsh climate. Something jumps into her mind, something Vikram said once, about the average life expectancy this side of the city, and she has to close off the thought quickly, to prevent the whirlpool. She enters the tower with a stream of other passengers.

Inside is a heaving marketplace; a tower full of winding corridors opening abruptly into dimly lit hallways, where walls and ceilings have been knocked through, and partitions lean at dubious angles. She is swept into the flow of prospectors. Vendors grin up at her from the tightly jammed, competing stalls. Their grins seem identical, mass-produced – the grins of toothed fish. At every pace merchandise is dangled under her nose. Salt boxes and other amulets she does not recognize, pieces of mirror, jars of undefined substances, recalibrated scarabs and tobacco pouches with barely concealed slips of milaine inserted inside. She jerks back as something wet and wriggling is thrust in front of her face. It’s an octopus, still alive, on a platter. To her right, from the same stall, she sees a bucket full of creatures clambering over one another, their claws gaining the lip of the bucket but never quite managing to escape. The reek is abominable, the smell of rotting seafood and bodies in too-close proximity, a whiff of manta fumes drifting through, everything overlaid with a mask of cheap incense which fills the halls with bluish, hazy smoke.

A woman in white Teller garb and cheap plastic clogs totters down an aisle, grabbing at the clothes of the market-goers and imparting nuggets of wisdom into their ears. Adelaide swerves away as the Teller approaches, but she is not quick enough: the Teller has caught her eye and veers purposefully, inevitably, towards her. She will make herself more visible if she tries to evade the woman. The Teller grabs her shoulder and brings her mouth close to Adelaide’s ear. She can smell the alcohol on the Teller’s breath.