Geoff Ryman - Air (or Have Not Have)

Something bony and hard flung itself around Mae's neck. Mae burped vile juices into her mouth and felt only elbows. Kwan, desperate, clung to her. Kwan leaned back, looked at Mae, and her lower face crumpled.

Mae felt nothing. Who was this person?

Kwan took her hand and led her to a table. Mrs Pin leapt up, and with a kind of whirligig speed, spun bowls and village bread onto the table in front of Mae.

Wing and Mr Atakoloo looked up from their food. Both bowed deeply and in silence. Mrs Pin ladled soup into Mae's bowl. Mae picked up the spoon, and found it was too heavy to lift.

She collapsed into tears and lowered the spoon and sat helplessly. Kwan crowded in next to her and Mae gave her an angry shove.

'I tried to tell you!' Mae shouted at Kwan. 'No one believed me. No one did anything!'

The kitchen fell into an embarrassed silence. From outside came the rushing sound of water.

Kwan, Wing, Sunni, Young Mrs Doh – all stared at her with those same round, helpless eyes. What were they waiting for? For her to say: I forgive you?

'That's all I have to say,' she told them abruptly. She tore at a newly moistened piece of village bread.

Mae found that the only person she cared about right now was Sezen. Not Joe, not Ken, not Ju-mei, not Kwan, none of them. It was a strange thing to discover. If she told the story of any of them, it would not move her. Only Sezen's life had a meaning. Sezen, who loved Air.

'Where is Mrs Ozdemir?' said Mae, very carefully, very angrily. 'That is what I have asked people. Sezen's mother. Or is she not important enough to be allowed into the kitchen?'

Kwan looked up, questioningly. 'In the courtyard somewhere?'

Without saying anything else, Mae stood up and walked.

'Mae?' someone called after her.

She broke into a run, fleeing from them. Leave me alone! She heard her feet on wet stone again, as if the Flood was still behind her.

The flood never goes away, it pushes – pushes, and washes all away.

Bunched up like a fist, Mae pushed her way unseen through people too concerned with their own loss. The sky was going silver. The rooster crowed on Kwan's barn roof.

Mae found Hatijah huddled in a corner of a barn in the dark. Her head was covered and she sat rocking slightly. She was singing in a wan, private voice.

'Mrs Ozdemir-ma'am? Hatijah?' Mae rubbed the woman's shoulder. The family goat was loose, rooting in hay. Edrem sat with his back towards everyone.

'Hatijah? Don't give up hope. Suppose she rescued all those people and got them up to high hills. What a heroine she will be, ah? Think how joyous we will all be when she comes back to us? Hatijah?'

The woman kept singing – a thin, wheedling, wordless lament. Hatijah stared unblinking and dry-eyed, ignoring the baby on her lap. Mae hugged the red shawl and thought of fleas and the stricken household and how Sezen had fought – fought everything. And she won. Sezen had won.

'Hatijah? Do you want to talk?'

Hatijah kept singing tunelessly, and rocking back and forth. The older daughter sat plucking her own shawl, scowling, ignored. The useless back of her useless husband was turned towards them.

'Can you talk?'

Nothing.

Edrem answered instead. 'We saved the goat.' He snarled the last word. His hands were over his eyes and he creaked like an old leather chair.

Born in poverty, die in poverty. Born in shit, die in shit, die without hope. Oh, but live in hope, oh yes, only to have those hopes broken, ground down. And for what? To want to slit the throat of a poor animal because it is alive and your daughter is not?

To break your back, weep into the earth, be beaten by the sun, and for what? For the sometime song of the nightingale? The once-a-year feast? The sometimes-full belly that is mostly empty? Love? When love is what makes it hurt when someone is destroyed?

Edrem began to sob – great, heaving, heartbroken, helpless, useless sobs. His skinny, bent body, his wide, flat shoulders swelled and shuddered. Mae hugged him too and smelled sweat, old hides, smoke, bread and yogurt. Like his wife, he was beyond being hugged.

Mae was useless too.

So Mae stood up and stepped back out into the last of the starlight, looking up at the stars, so perfect, so white, so cold. The Dragon's Breath was still blasting and hot. People still stood in silent circles, kicking the ground. The Haj was still at his post, trying to tell Dawn and her friends a story, but looking – looking as the sun rose, for anyone coming up the road.

The rooster cried, saying, Work. Work should begin.

Mae climbed up her friend's stone steps. The steps belonged to others as well, to a thousand years' worth of families. Mae's legs were made of bags of wet earth. Fire burned in her belly. Kwan sat exhausted on a chair in the diwan, hand buried in her hair. Kwan did not see her.

Mae climbed up farther.

Footsteps followed.

Mae turned and on the landing of the staircase, three men looked up at her. She pieced together who they were. Joe and Mr Ken were lined up side by side, as if for a firing squad. Behind was Siao. Siao's eyes were full, and full on Mae.

Beautiful men, so much alike really. Useless. Useless, their beautiful brown eyes, their fat male hands, their lean legs.

'Mae,' said one of them, 'Joe and I have been talking.'

'About the weather?' Mae asked with a crooked smile. 'Everyone talks about the weather.'

'We have decided not to fight,' said Joe. 'Mae. You are expecting a child?'

'It is expecting me,' she replied. She had to sit on the stairs.

Joe walked forward. Joe, she thought, you are beautiful again. Maybe you become beautiful when you are really needed. Maybe somewhere, you are always beautiful. Maybe if you had been born rich…

'I was the one who left,' said Joe. 'I will leave again.'

He leaned forward and kissed her. He took her face in his hands. 'My little Mae.'

His shoulders said: You don't need an idiot like me. I have ruined everything. I lost my father's farm. I want to wander the earth in shame.

'Don't feel useless, Joe,' Mae pleaded. 'We're all useless. We just do things and hope.'

'Lung thinks I'm a fool,' he murmured. 'I am a ghost here.'

The teenage boy had suddenly found cracks in his face. Who needs a teenage village hero in his fifties? What could he do? Nothing. Except to be someone's sharecropper.

'I could buy you some land,' Mae said.

Joe paused. 'I hate farming,' he said, smiling. 'I think I want to drive a truck.'

'So did I,' said Mr Ken, in recognition.

But you grew up, thought Mae.

So, I still love my husband. And I am going to let him go. She stood up.

Everything was very suddenly clear, as if washed clean by flood-water. She looked at her old husband, who was going away; and at faithful simple Mr Ken who had fathered her last-chance child; and at Siao, who was wise.

'I am going to live with Siao,' Mae announced. 'I'm sorry.'

Without a glance at Mr Ken, Mae climbed again. She remembered her first day at school, and seeing the older boys playing football. The captain of one of the teams stopped the game and began to fight. 'That is not fair,' he bellowed.

A little boy Mae's own age came up and stood beside her. He was the first child in the school to talk to her. 'That's my brother,' little Siao said proudly, quietly. 'Are you going to live here?' he asked.

'Until I'm grown up,' little Mae had answered.

Mae went into her old, high room, and there was the machine in front of the high window and she looked out over the courtyard. The sky over the broken roof and the bowl of the mountains was already blue-grey against silver. Somewhere farther down the valley, in the future, the sun was bright, but Kizuldah was still in shadow. The rooster was crowing over and over, having sensed at last that something was wrong.