Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

Teacher Shen came, looking solemn. He brought his beautiful wife Suloi, in case anyone misunderstood his friendship with Mae.

'Teacher Shen,' Mae said, pleased to see him. Suloi had Kwan's face, the face of their minority, the Eloi. Mrs Shen was just as beautiful as Kwan. Even now, here, she was merry.

Mrs Shen asked, 'How is our fashion expert?'

'Very confused,' Mae replied. 'I am more a history expert now.'

She looked up at Teacher Shen's face and, lo, remembered him as a skinny, put-upon little boy. Old Mrs Tung had worried so about him. She had wished she had more books to give this solemn child.

'You should have gone for that exam,' Mae said sleepily, 'to be a civil servant.'

Teacher Shen blinked, his face darted up towards Kwan, who nodded once downwards.

'I could not afford the time or the books,' he said quietly. 'So I took the teaching course.'

'Remember the tiny white book? About the rabbits?' Mae murmured. Old Mrs Tung had found it for him, a book of his very own.

His face was a wan smile, his eyes unblinking. He produced from his pack. 'This one,' he said.

It was a tiny battered book, stained by childhood, and it said in the language of their people The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

The Teacher turned to others in the room about him, and his staring eyes were filling. 'It's true,' he whispered to the room. 'It's true.'

Shen's Eloi wife edged closer to Mae, on her knees, smiling. She took Mae's other hand.

'You have become a prophet,' she said, in a very quiet voice.

'Of the past,' said Mae. What would it be like, just once, to have a moment to herself?

Standing among her friends were Sunni and her husband Mr Haseem. He wanted this house.

The next day was Mrs Tung's funeral.

Mae watched impassively as the cardboard coffin was lowered into the rocky ground. The mosque looked small, high on the hill, its whitewash peeling. The whole hillside looked peeling.

It was somewhat strange to see your own body buried, to see people you did not really know daub their faces. To know that you had lived so long that there was no one left to mourn you. Mrs Tung's grandsons were grown men, sad, yes, discomfited in suits. One was a mechanic in Yeshibozkent, another drove buses. They would be back to business by the afternoon.

Mae was not in mourning; for her, Mrs Tung was not dead. A body was only earth. Mrs Tung was with her in Air.

Sunni Haseem came to her and took Mae's hand. 'I am so sorry,' said Sunni, conventionally.

'Why?' Mae asked.

'She led a full life,' Sunni agreed.

And Mae remembered Mrs Tung making love in the middle of battle, in the marsh.

She remembered the tops of the reeds being cut down by bullets as Mrs Tung embraced. Mrs Tung's young man leaned back and smiled, and Mae remembered that smile. It was careless, as if to say, Life is not worth having if it's not worth losing. And Mae knew: The boy was killed.

'She died at an honourable age,' said Sunni.

Oh, fashion wife with your little kitchen and lack of love, what do you know about it? What have you ever given for anything?

'Honourable?' Mae repeated. As if all Mrs Tung had done was darn tea towels. 'She was a guerrilla; she hid soldiers in the school.'

Kwan and Joe came forward, and took her arm. 'Let's get you back home,' Kwan said.

Mae stood her ground. 'Why do people treat the past as if it had lost a battle that the present won?' she demanded, fists clenched. 'Why do they treat it as if it faded because it was weak?'

Joe looked baffled and distressed.

'I don't know,' said Kwan.

'The past is real,' said Mae. 'It's still here.'

'Then maybe so is the future,' said Kwan.

Through those weeks, into June, Mae slept late and long.

She grew plump through inactivity, dreaming of ninety years' worth of human voices: children, adults, the barking of favourite dogs long since dead, the sloshing of water on burnt-out canoes long since rotted away.

Gradually she found she could make meals again, do some tidying-up, or sweep. She managed to banish her sister-in-law from her kitchen. Her husband Joe began to look relieved. His work clothes were ready again for him in the mornings, and his breakfast of steamed noodles.

But Mae would stand near her tiny kitchen window, to catch a glimpse of Mr Ken. Her heart would go out to him, with two young daughters late in life, leaving for his fields in the earliest dawn, long before her Joe. Her heart would go out to him, for the infant and small boy he had been, and for his plump face, thin waist, and the quick, nimble way he did things.

She kept thinking of Old Mrs Tung in the reeds. How the dress had come up, the trousers down, and how Mrs Tung had opened up to her lover, fully, completely, loose and abandoned like a sail in the wind, wanting him to fill her with babies, nothing held back.

Old Mrs Tung had known that, prim and delicate as she may have looked.

The fashion expert had not, for all her talk of beauty.

The lipsticks, the oil in the hair, the flower hairgrips – they were all signals; signals that said, Love me, I have not been loved. That was why they had power over her, why she was drawn to them, why she needed them. She had wanted to festoon herself with flags, saying, Come to me, I cannot come to you.

Now she simply wanted Mr Ken.

It was night and Mae was half asleep in bed when she heard Joe come home.

Back from the Teahouse, Joe hissed and giggled at his brother Siao. Someone else was with them. 'So where is the wife?' a man asked. Mae recognized the voice: Sunni's husband had come back with them.

Joe murmured something polite and indistinct.

'Back at work? In the fashion business?'

Joe chuckled something; Sunni's husband chuckled back.

'Good to be the man of the house again, ah? Ha-ha!'

Joe told his brother Siao to fetch the whisky. Siao grumbled, fed up with Joe playing the older brother.

'Oh! No – the good stuff for Mr Haseem!' Joe exclaimed in frustration. A clink of glasses. Joe would be pink-faced in the evening and red-eyed in the morning. Joe was worst when drunk; he simply became a sheepish goon. Why couldn't Sunni's husband just come bearing good wishes and go?

Because, thought Mae, Sunni's husband does not bear good wishes. Mae lay still and focused with her ears.

'I can help,' said Sunni's husband. Mae could almost hear the wallet unflap, unfold. She kicked her way free from the sheets, and threw on a robe. Then she thought: No. That is not enough. She needed to look like a fashion expert.

Everything worked against her: the dark and the slovenly disorder the alcove had become. She tried to move quietly; she wanted to appear suddenly, in order, pristine, to say, We do not need your help Sunni's-man, sir.

'How much?' Joe exclaimed in wonder.

Mae fumbled for her best dress in the dark. Her hand struck a hanger, and she felt the dress. The curtain-folds of the collar seemed to be right. She hauled it on over her head and ran her fingers through the bird's-nest tangle of her hair. She patted the windowsill and found a hairgrip. Hands shaking with urgency, she pulled her hair back as tightly as she could bear it and slipped on the grip.

Everything felt lopsided – her face, the grip, the dress hanging off one shoulder but straining around her belly. Shoes. Where were her shoes?

Mr Haseem's voice drawled as if over a woman. 'Enough to clean up the old barn, set up a byre, buy a few goats. Ah? Ha-ha.'

Don't, Joe, fool, that's how he does it, he loans too much money and then takes the farm in payment. Sandals. Inappropriate with a best dress, but anything, now. I feel like a haystack, thought Mae. And pulled back her curtain with gracious slowness.