Air (or Have Not Have)

If Mae had had a voice, she would have shouted. 'I've got no time, this is an emergency!'

'For an emergency configuration, simply repeat your own name several times.'

Mae said her own name over and over.

Mae! Mrs Tung seemed to cry out.

'Mae, Mae, Mae…'

Mae!

Something seemed to go click. It felt like a small electric shock. Something was connected.

Immediately, Mae was seized, hugged, held in terror as if she were a strong tree in a flood.

Can you feel it? It's pulling us back, Mae!

The voice of Air slowed to a crawl. 'Your… mailbox … is configured…' Time was stopping.

Old Mrs Tung said one small, forlorn, unexpected word, full of dread.

Water.

Time reversed. Everything, the Format, the voices, the whitewashed stone walls, the people in them were sucked back in, down. It all collapsed, and everything was gone.

The past is so very different, we know it at once.

Mae knew she was in the past because of the smells. The wood beams stank of creosote; the house had a stewed odour of bodies and tea and fermenting beanshoots.

She was in a house at night, with no lights on; the walls were in unexpected places. A stairwell opened up underneath her feet. A woman stumbled, rolled down the steps and landed up to her knees in water.

My books, someone thought, all my beautiful books!

The woman stumbled to her feet, tried to find a candle. A candle, fool, in this?! She waded across the floor of her main room, water lapping around her shins. How much water is there? Where can it come from? She reached out and touched a leather binding on the shelf and in that moment knew the books were lost.

She heard a laugh behind her and turned. A woman's voice said, 'What is it worth now, all the money you married?' The voice was rough and silky at the same time; an old woman's voice.

'Is it still coming in?' Mrs Tung screamed, twisting around. Mrs Tung was young, supple, and strong.

'It is roaring down every slope.' Hearing that voice, Mrs Tung's heart sank with a sense of oppression, overruling, and contempt.

Mrs Tung waded her way through the flood. 'Are the children upstairs?' she demanded.

'Oh,' said the dark voice, 'so now you remember you have children?' The voice was bitter, triumphant, and full of hatred.

Mrs Tung pushed past her, feeling her old, quilted overcoat. The old woman laughed again, a familiar hooting, a slightly hollow laugh.

Then, from outside the house, from the slopes above, there came a spreading hiss and clatter like applause, as if all the stones of the valley were rising in tribute.

'Lily! Ahmet!' Mrs Tung called, in the dark, to her children. A thousand rolling pebbles clattered against the house like rain. There was a boom! and the house shuddered.

'Mrs Tung,' Mae tried to say. The words went somewhere else.

'Lily!' Mrs Tung shouted again, her voice breaking. The house groaned, and something made a snapping sound.

Mrs Tung bashed her head on a doorway, heard a wailing in a corner. She scooped up a child in thick pyjamas. Mae could feel the button-up suit made of flannel, smelling of damp dust.

'Where is your brother?'

The child could only wail.

'Lily! Where is Ahmet?'

The child buried her head and screamed.

Mae thought: Lily? Ahmet? Mrs Tung had another family? Another family before the Kens? Who?

Mrs Tung turned and begged the quilted coat, 'Mrs Yuksel, please! Have you seen Ahmet? Has he gone down the stairs?'

'Yes,' said the calm dark voice. 'He went out the front door.'

And the certain, terrible knowledge: Ahmet's grandmother did not want a half-Chinese grandson.

'You let him out!'

The laugh.

'You let him out to die!'

Carrying Lily, Mrs Tung thrust herself past her mother-in-law.

'Ahmet! Ahmet!' Mrs Tung wailed a whole broken heart. She plunged down into her front room and into mud up to her waist. The front room was choked with it. The child in her arms kicked and screamed.

It was all Mrs Tung could do to shrug herself around, turn, and wrestle her way back towards the stairs. As her foot struck the lowest step, still under mud, she felt a scurrying sensation round her knees. Water was flowing in over the top of the mud. The water was still coming for them, inexhaustible. Bearing Lily, she hauled herself up.

'Mrs Tung! Mrs Tung!' A voice was pleading.

Her own voice. If this voice was her voice then who was she?

'Mrs Tung, this is just a memory. Mrs Tung…'

What? What?

'This is all Air, Mrs Tung!'

'Water!' she shouted back, and rose out of the mud. Hatred swelled out of her heart. She felt the wall of the staircase. On the wall was a family sword.

'So you will not inherit my beautiful room,' said the laugh.

Mrs Tung swung the sword. The laugh was cut off. Mrs Tung turned and ran into the upstairs corridor. The wooden timbers creaked, like a ship. The entire house shuddered, heaved, and moved forward from its foundations. It twisted and began to break apart; she ran towards its end room, the one with the beautiful window, the one that looked back towards home, to Kizuldah.

She heard a great collapsing behind her, felt timbers separate, fall, rumble like barrels. Somehow she kicked glass from the window. Lily screamed. Reflected in the roaring water was fire, leaping along rooftops. Mrs Tung jumped, falling many feet, out over the downside of the slope, awash in a wake of water. She fell through warm air down into a snow-cold, icy torrent.

Everything pulled. Lily was pulled from her. She slipped away like a scarf into the current.

'Mrs Tung!'

The water was blue.

'Mrs Tung, this is just a memory, this is not really happening!'

Then why is the air warm? Why is the water cold? Can you feel water in memory?

Mae held and pulled, resisted the Flood and the backwards pull.

Somewhere dimly there was singing. Turandot was being performed. Three old men sung about their lost homes. 'Kiu. .. Tsiang… Honan.'

'There, Mrs Tung! We need to get back there!'

From somewhere, Old Mrs Tung said: It was real. It was as real as now and as important. My Lily was real.

Mae said, 'We need to get home!'

That was home! That is real! It all gets washed away. I can die, that means nothing, but a whole universe dies every day, slowly, slowly, it deserves remembrance, here, see it was beautiful, beautiful!

'Dear Mrs Tung. Sssh. See? See?'

Life like a mountain, huge, cold, fearsome, ice with water wreathed in cloud and air and sunset, too big, too strange.