Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

She felt silly, frightened, but she couldn't help it. She remembered the listening lights of the night before.

'It will be no trouble. Just talk to Joe.' She felt like weeping in panic.

'When. How?' he demanded.

'I will leave my house tonight,' she whispered. 'We can go out into the fields, into the reeds. Three a.m.?'

That firm, old light was in his eyes again. He kept shifting in her vision between man and boy. Now he seemed older. He nodded once: Good.

'This will end well,' he promised her.

She shook her head with misgiving, and left him.

And so she was reduced to being a young girl, addled by love instead of money. Love catches up with you if you ignore it, she thought. She wanted to be with him, now. She wanted to suckle on his nipples as though they were breasts. All these things shocked her, overturned her. She was upended like a boat.

'I am bereft,' Mae said. She said it to Old Mrs Tung.

She answered. When I was in trouble, I started a school.

Mae walked on, towards the television set.

And there were the men of the village, at this hour of the morning, watching kung fu.

There was Joe.

'I knew!' she exclaimed. 'I knew I would find you here! Shiftless, feckless man!'

Joe shifted his feet staring at them, wincing with hangover and embarrassment.

'You comic character,' she told him, more in frustration, sadness, and affection than anything else. Young Mr Doh, Old Mr Doh, Mr Ali – they all chuckled, too.

'Your wife is well again, I see, Joe,' said Young Mr Doh.

'And a good hand with knives I hear, too,' said Old Mr Doh. And they all laughed. Which meant that yes, they all knew she had chased Mr Haseem out of her house. Did Joe? He kept grinning, looking baffled.

Mae needed the men to be away. She needed the television. 'What are we to do with you small boys?' Mae said, shaking her head. 'Ah? You have families, you have fields, you have duties, what are you doing here?'

'Watching the movie?' shrugged Joe. More laughter.

'Joe, you dolt,' she said, simply, quickly. That made the men laugh again.

'Wifely humours,' Young Mr Doh said. It was a way of saying a woman was right. He leaned forward and pushed some buttons. 'Okay, I've saved the movie. What time?'

The men frowned and wobbled their heads. They murmured times, but Old Mr Doh was something of a leader. 'Eight o'clock,' he said.

With a flourish, his son moved the hands of the clock to eight.

Mae felt a stab of something icy in her chest. They can do that? Go back to a movie? The movie folded up like a picture and was dropped into a pink piggy bank. Mae thought, Mr Doh knows how to do that? And I don't? The men stood up with a murmuring and an exchange of cigarettes. They nodded goodbye to Mae.

She was left standing alone in the courtyard.

The screen showed nothing but a door.

Mae sat in front of the screen. She touched the door. It creaked, it opened.

There were pictures with words underneath. Mae couldn't read. On the screen was a picture of an hourglass with running sand, like her life draining away, and there were rows of pictures: books and magnifying glasses and things that had no meaning for Mae at all. Mae saw a drawing of a newsreader. News would be good. She touched the newsreader and up came a screen of words.

Too many words, too complicated. It assumed so much, this machine – that you understood what the signs meant, that you could read, that you could guess what lay behind each door or each word. Her heart was sinking.

Then she saw a picture of an ear.

'Touch the ear,' said a woman's voice: Kwan, behind her.

Kwan was wearing a folded headdress, the peasant dress of her ethnic minority. She had never done that before. She stood over Mae.

'Go on,' she said.

Mae did.

The TV replied, 'You have chosen the talking option.' Mae felt both relief and shame. Kwan knew the fashion expert found it difficult to read.

'It is good you are learning,' said Kwan, suddenly relaxing. 'It is good you are not afraid of it.'

Afraid? Well, yes, this was new stuff.

The TV kept talking. 'The list of available topics is very long. It is probably easier if you tell me what you want to know.' It was as if the television were inhabited by a ghost. Like Old Mrs Tung.

'Fashion,' said Mae.

And for some reason, as if on impulse or from affection, Kwan had taken hold of the muscles between Mae's neck and shoulder and given them a squeeze.

'So you are going to fight,' said Kwan.

Mae paused. 'You know,' she sighed.

'In this village? There is nothing to do but talk.'

Mae was ashamed, fearful, and angry. 'There is everything to do!'

Mae amazed herself again with the passion, almost the frenzy, that welled up inside her. 'The village is like a goose without a head when the legs keep twitching. The whole world has died, and we have a year to learn how to live all over again!'

She spun around to look at Kwan. Kwan was blinking in surprise.

The television said in a honeyed voice, 'You have a choice of looking at the Paris spring collections, the Beijing Festival of Culture, or the Vogue channel.'

'I do not need to be beholden to that dog of a man now! I need to be doing this!'

'Pause,' Kwan said once, to the machine. It whirred in place. 'Mae, we could loan you the money to pay him back. What is the interest?'

'Joe was so drunk, he did not even ask!' Mae swayed under the weight of it all.

'We would not charge interest,' murmured Kwan.

Mae felt many things, all at once – gratitude, relief, and wariness. She feared that they would end up replacing one loan with another. You and Wing make yourselves rich the same way Haseem does, she thought, only, you are more polite. Though she loved Kwan, Mae did not entirely trust her.

'We would stand in an echoing corridor of loans,' Mae said quietly.

'That is true,' said Kwan, calmly. 'But the offer will stay open, if you need it.'

'Thank you, Wing's-wife, ma'am.'

'Don't be silly,' said Kwan, for Mae had addressed her as an employer.

Mae sighed. 'Until we have money, I am everyone's servant,' she said. 'The offer is kind and will be remembered. Paris,' she told the television. 'Show me Paris.'

'I will leave you to it, then,' said Kwan. She turned and walked away.

She has changed, too, thought Mae. We will all change.

So Mae looked at the ghosts of Paris, and they were no help. These were clothes that no human being could wear, let alone farming women in the Happy Province. The television talked and talked. It explained why it was such a revolution that long flaps of cloth hung uselessly down to the knees from the shoulders, or that someone called Giannini had gone for splashes of colour.

Mae already knew. It is just a special way of talking. It sounds grand, but it offers nothing to actually do.

What… she asked herself, what actually am I trying to do?

I am trying to find something that will make me money. I think if I spend more time at this machine, then I can stay ahead of my clients, find something to sell them. But they are ahead of me…

Paris fashion kept parading, as if to say, look, peasant, look what you cannot afford to even look at. Look at what your world could never have in it. Learn the lesson of your poverty and your distance and your unimportance.

She looked around. Two little village girls stood in Kwan's courtyard, twisting in place with coy naughtiness.

'Who told you you could come to Mrs Wing's house? Go on, go away.'

'We want to watch the television,' one of them said – determined to stay, hopeful of being allowed to.

'You should be in school,' Mae said.

They said nothing, but their eyes and smiles grew brighter. A little boy ran up to them and stopped, dead, to see an adult by the television. The girls burst into fits of naughty giggles.