Nicola Griffith - Slow River

The picture on the screen changed from the boy to me, sitting on the same chair. My body felt confused, in three places at once: sitting in a tent, in bright light, weeping and slurring; naked and bleeding on the cobbles, bathing in the light of images of myself tied to a chair; standing clothed—uniformed, anyway—in a hot breakroom.

The bell signaling the end of the break rang, but I just stood there, stupid and still and alone, while the pictures of me played. Eventually, the screen cut to the male anchor speaking soundlessly, and then back to the sixteen-year-old boy. Then a man, old enough to be the boy’s father, hurrying down some steps on a narrow street, the kind found in the centers of some Asian cities, shielding his face from the sun and bright camera lights.

I could move again. I turned up the sound. “—tape was given to the net an hour ago. Although the family refused to comment, a spokeswoman for the Singapore police department tells us she suspects the Chen family have known about the kidnap of Lucas Chen for over a week.”

Cut to female anchor, “And this isn’t the only similarity to the van de Oest abduction over three years ago.” Another picture, this time of a young Frances Lorien. Solemn-faced, arrogant. I wondered when it had been taken. I didn’t remember it.

I turned the sound off; and sat down. I stood up again, quickly. Sitting made me feel vulnerable, made me remember the light, the camera.

Not again. Not all those pictures running, over and over.

I looked at the screen again. The boy wasn’t me, but the chair was the same, and the tent, the light. Everything.

Probably the same kidnappers. Kidnapper, I told myself. Fishface was probably three years dead.

“Bird!” Magyar. Hard-eyed and cross. “Break finished more than—”

“I know. Five minutes ago.” I felt unreal. Suspended somewhere between then and now Between Frances Lorien and Bird. “I’m Lore,” I whispered to myself. “I’m Lore.”

Magyar stepped closer. “What are you mumbling about?”

“You want to know who I am? Take a look. Up there. May as well look now as later. They’ll be playing it for days.” Poor Magyar, she didn’t understand. “What do you think—is it me?”

“What?”

I nodded at the screen. She glanced at it, then back at me, then, almost unwillingly, back at the screen. Her face began to change, muscles moving as her brain processed the information. I suppose it was a shock. She jerked her arm up and out to the volume switch.

“—with Oster van de Oest, live from Auckland.” The fountain was buttery with summer sunshine. Oster, used to cameras, had made sure the sun was behind him so he wouldn’t squint.

“We empathize with the family of Lucas Chen. We know how we felt uhen Frances Lorien was taken. We know that somewhere, someone knows where she is. Even after three years. We’re prepared to offer two hundred and fifty thousand for information leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of our daughter.”

He looked different. Older. And so formal. He thought I was dead.

I turned the sound off. “It’s not Auckland, you know.”

Magyar looked at me blankly. “The house, Ratnapida. The family has an agreement with the news services not to reveal where we live.” They were showing more pictures of me. Magyar was looking back and forth from me to the screen. “Not that easy to see at first, is it? But you’d have spotted it eventually. It’s there, if you think to look.”

She was turned away from me now, studying the bright pictures, but she watched me from the corner of her eye.

“That’s me. Frances Lorien van de Oest. The real me. Or it was.” I didn’t know who I was now. I had an eerie sense of multiplicity, of staring down at my reflection in the water and seeing three faces instead of one.

Magyar was very still, and her eyes looked odd. Slitty. Sunk back into their epicanthic folds. I knew I should be wary of her strange expression, but I felt oddly dispassionate. Unreal. The pictures on the screen kept moving, mute. The three reflections in my head rippled. Who am I? Magyar still didn’t say anything. She was clenching and unclenching her plasthene-gloved fists. Her mouth was a straight line.

“You aren’t supposed to be angry,” I said calmly, from a great distance.

“No? Tell me, Bird, how am I supposed to react?”

Like everyone else reacted to the van de Oest name: shock, awe, then a closing off as the person they were dealing with changed from human to van de Oest.

“I don’t understand. Why are you angry?”

“Because I feel like a fool.” Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. “We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.”

Just like that. Dismissed. “But…”

“But what?” Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She couldn’t just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else… But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it—to be treated as a real person?

“We’re not done with this, Bird. Not nearly done. We’ll talk after the shift. After you’ve made up your time.”

She waited. I waited back, then realized she had the upper hand: I was the worker, she the supervisor. The fact that I had told her who I really was didn’t change that. I left the break-room. As though my movement had disturbed the surface of a river, the three faces shivered and blurred together, indistinct.

I don’t remember walking to the troughs, but found myself there, trembling, looking at my face in the slick black water.

Who am I? What would I say if I opened my mouth?

We ordered loc, the hot chocolate liqueur. Magyar took a big gulp of steaming liquid and burned herself. She swore, called to the man behind the counter for some ice, then scowled at him when he shoved an ice bucket her way. Her eyebrows were very dark against her pale skin.

She put a cube in her mouth, crunched, sucked.

I said nothing, I did not even want to breathe too hard, in case the single blurred reflection in my head separated out again.

“So. We’re here to talk about the way you lied to me.”

I spoke carefully, uncertain of my voice. Of my accent. Of the language. Of my own tongue. “It’s hard.”

“Do it anyway.” Utterly unsympathetic.

“Tell me about your family.”

“Why? We’re here to talk about you, not me.”

“Do you have brothers? Or sisters?”

“Both.” She swallowed her ice and took another experimental sip of loc.

“I have—had—two sisters and a brother. But one is a half sister, Greta, my mother’s daughter, and she’s so much older than me she’s more like an aunt—”

“Is this relevant?”

“—and the other brother and sister are twins. Were twins. Stella killed herself.” Now she was listening. “In some ways I was like an only child. And my parents should have divorced fifteen years ago. I am used to hiding things that matter to me, keeping them close. It’s what I do. Who I am.”

“Tell me why the fuck I should care about that! You think that just because you can buy me and Hedon Road, probably the whole city, a hundred times over I’ll nod and say, Fine? Just like that? Without even an explanation of why you’ve been hiding, lying to me? Lying to everyone.”

There was no way to deal with her anger. I ignored it. “This job, Hedon Road isn’t a game to me. I need it. I have less money than you do.” Not true, not true. What about the thirty thousand? The faces shimmered, each with their own secrets.