Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

Mae yearned. 'Oh, I wish I remembered all those poems!' When she saw Mrs Tung, she could visit the best of her childhood.

Mae then visited the Ozdemirs for a fitting.

The mother was called Hatijah, and her daughter was Sezen. Hatijah was a shy, slow little thing, terrified of being overcharged by Mae, and of being underserved. Hatijah's low, old stone house was tangy with the smells of burning charcoal, sweat, dung, and the constantly stewing tea. From behind the house came a continual, agonized bleating from the family goat. It needed milking. The poor animal's voice was going raw and harsh. Hatijah seemed not to hear it. Hatijah had four children, and a skinny shiftless husband who probably had worms. Half of the main room was heaped up with corncobs. The youngest of her babes wore only shirts and sat with their dirty naked bottoms on the corn.

Oh, this was a filthy house. Perhaps Hatijah was a bit simple. She offered Mae roasted corn. Not with your child's wet shit on it, thought Mae, but managed to be polite.

The daughter, Sezen, stomped in barefoot for her fitting, wearing the dress. It was a shade of lemon yellow that seared the eyes. Sezen was a tough, raunchy brute of a girl and kept rolling her eyes at everything: at her nervous mother, at Mae's efforts to make the yellow dress hang properly, at anything either one of the adults said.

'Does… will… tomorrow…' Sezen's mother tried to begin.

Yes, thought Mae with some bitterness, tomorrow Sezen will finally have to wash. Sezen's bare feet were slashed with infected cuts.

'What my mother means is,' Sezen said, 'will you make up my face?' Sezen blinked, her unkempt hair making her eyes itch.

'Yes, of course,' said Mae, curtly to a younger person who was so forward.

'What, with all those other girls on the same day? For someone as lowly as us?'

The girl's eyes were angry. Mae pulled in a breath.

'No one can make you feel inferior without you agreeing with them first,' said Mae. It was something Old Mrs Tung had once told Mae when she herself was poor and famished for magic.

'Take off the dress,' Mae said. 'I'll have to take it back for finishing.'

Sezen stepped out of it, right there, naked on the dirt floor. Hatijah did not chastise her, but offered Mae tea. Because she had refused the corn, Mae had to accept the tea. At least that would be boiled.

Hatijah scuttled off to the black kettle and her daughter leaned back in full insolence, her supposedly virgin pubes plucked as bare as the baby's bottom.

Mae fussed with the dress, folding it, so she would have somewhere else to look. The daughter just stared. Mae could take no more. 'Do you want people to see you? Go put something on!'

'I don't have anything else,' said Sezen.

Her other sisters had gone shopping in the town for graduation gifts. They would have taken all the family's good dresses.

'You mean you have nothing else you will deign to put on.' Mae glanced at Hatijah: she really should not be having to do this woman's work for her. 'You have other clothes, old clothes – put them on.'

The girl stared at her with even greater insolence.

Mae lost her temper. 'I do not work for pigs. You have paid nothing so far for this dress. If you stand there like that, I will leave, now, and the dress will not be yours. Wear what you like to the graduation. Come to it naked like a whore, for all I care.'

Sezen turned and slowly walked towards the side room.

Hatijah, the mother, still squatted over the kettle, boiling more water to dilute the stew of leaves. She lived on tea and burnt corn that was more usually fed to cattle. Her cow's-eyes were averted. Untended, the family goat still made noises like a howling baby.

Mae sat and blew out air from stress. This week! She looked at Hatijah's dress. It was a patchwork assembly of her husband's old shirts, beautifully stitched. Hatijah could sew. Mae could not. With all these changes, Mae was going to have to find something else to do besides sketch photographs of dresses. She had a sudden thought.

'Would you be interested in working for me?' Mae asked. Hatijah looked fearful and pleased and said she would have to ask her husband. In the end she agreed to do the finishing on three of the dresses.

Everything is going to have to change, thought Mae, as if to convince herself.

That night Mae worked nearly to dawn on the other three dresses.

Her noisy old sewing machine sat silent in the corner. It was fine for rough work, but not for finishing, not for graduation dresses.

The bare electric light glared down at her like a headache, as Mae's husband Joe snored. Above them in the loft, Joe's brother Siao and his father snored, too, as they had done for twenty years. In the morning they would scamper out to the water butt to wash, holding towels over their Y-fronts.

Mae looked into Joe's open mouth like a mystery. When he was sixteen, Joe had been handsome – in the context of the village – wild and clever. They'd been married a year when she first went to Yeshibozkent with him, where he worked between harvests building a house. She saw the clever city man, an acupuncturist who had money. She saw her husband bullied, made to look foolish, asked questions for which he had no answer. The acupuncturist made Joe do the work again. In Yeshibozkent, her handsome husband was a dolt.

Here they were, both of them now middle-aged. Their son Lung was a major in the army. They had sent him to Balshang. He mailed Mae parcels of orange skins for potpourri; he sent cards and matches in picture boxes. He had met some city girl. Lung would not be back. Their daughter Ying had been pulled into Lung's orbit. She had gone to stay with him, met trainee officers, and eventually married one. She lived in an army housing compound, in a bungalow with a toilet.

At this hour of the morning, Mae could hear their little river, rushing down the steep slope to the valley. Then a door slammed in the North End. Mae knew who it would be: their Muerain, Mr Shenyalar. He would be walking across the village to the mosque. A dog started to bark at him; Mrs Doh's, by the bridge.

Mae knew that Kwan would be cradled in her husband s arms, and that Kwan was beautiful because she was an Eloi tribeswoman. All the Eloi had fine features. Her husband Wing did not mind and no one now mentioned it. But Mae could see Kwan shiver now in her sleep. Kwan had dreams, visions, she had tribal blood, and it made her shift at night as if she had another, tribal life.

Mae knew that Kwan's clean and noble athlete son would be breathing like a moist baby in his bed, cradling his younger brother.

Without seeing them, Mae could imagine the moon and clouds over their village. The moon would be reflected shimmering on the water of the irrigation canals which had once borne their paper boats of wishes. There would be old candles, deep in the mud.

Then, the slow, sad voice of their Muerain began to sing. Even amplified, his voice was deep and soft, like pillows that allowed the unfaithful to sleep. In the byres, the lonely cows would be stirring. The beasts would walk themselves to the village square, for a lick of salt, and then wait to be herded down to valley pastures. In the evening, they would walk themselves home. Mae heard the first clanking of a cowbell.

At that moment something came into the room, something she did not want to see, something dark and whole like a black dog with froth around its mouth that sat in her corner and would not go away, nameless yet.

Mae started sewing faster.

The dresses were finished on time, all six, each a different colour.

Mae ran barefoot in her shift to deliver them. The mothers bowed sleepily in greeting. The daughters were hopping with anxiety like water on a skillet.