Have-nots - a short story by Phil

Awaking quickly, Ana hit the alarm and caught her breath, gulping back a cough. Her daughter, Marina, just a few feet away on the tatami mat, mewed slightly but was not roused. Ana exhaled slowly and forced herself to lie still for a count of thirty seconds. If she started the day at a relaxed baseline, below her average tension, maybe it wouldn’t rise to intolerable heights by the time the day was through.

Ana stood up; there were no sheets to fold and stow at this time of year. She was a slight woman, but with woven muscles that stood out when she lifted heavy objects, like the ceramic rice pan. She looked into this pot on the one-ringed stove now for breakfast rice and put it on to reheat. Stepping out of the only door to the room, Ana went into the corridor and checked the lavatory, shared with next door. Mr Lu had beaten her to it again, huffing and grunting as he went through his morning schedule.

Back in the ‘studio’, as Ana used to optimistically refer to their tiny one-room place when her husband was listening, Marina was stirring. She coughed gently, wearily, into the handkerchief Ana always left beside her mat. The deepest, frustrated sorrow gripped Ana at that cough, sadness for Marina’s utter resignation to her own chronic chest irritation. There wasn’t any drama, no exaggerated hacking or attention-seeking, which might have been appropriate to Marina’s seven years. The coughing loosened the dark strands of hair sticking to Marina’s dewy temples. She clambered to her feet and pulled her faded red jumper over her vest, still much too big for her.

“Let’s have breakfast before we use the bathroom today,” said Ana, spooning out the rice. The pair ate opposite one another, cross-legged on the tatami. Afterwards, Ana looked out of the window. She couldn’t see the alley floor, five storeys down. Even the building across the way, only ten feet away, was hazy. The smog was a drape, a Jurassic dust cloud that concealed the sky.

They heard a door banging nearby and Ana and Marina went next door to the toilet, each holding their breath. The window in there couldn’t be opened, same as any in the block. Ultimately, this was for the best. Ana managed a smile between bulging cheeks at Marina for the farce of their daybreak routine.

Due to some local restructuring, Marina’s school was closed for the time being. Sparse council communiques promised a maximum two-month closure, yet it had been three so far. Ana had no choice but to take Marina with her to work. They donned their greying face masks and descended the stairs to street level.

Ana put her head down, grasped Marina’s hand and plunged into the morning commute. The duo weaved down the narrow alleys and joined the main streets, giant blocks all around them but barely discernible. Thousands of people flooded past them in both directions. There were workers in the green meat-growing factory uniforms, on bikes and on foot, off to culture stem cell steaks and chicken breasts. Hundreds in grey headed the same way as Ana and Marina, towards the polymer recycling complex. They turned left while Ana and her blue-clad colleagues turned right towards the shore. Two miles further along lay the desalination plant. Marina lurked behind Ana’s legs as they passed the guard post. The unwritten agreement was: the guard pretended to watch for intruding children on site and parents pretended to hide them.

The desalination plant was huge, with pumps stretching half a mile each way down the beach. The plant itself stood in the middle, a cuboid sarsen. Ana was a temperature regulator. Heated waste water from the nuclear power plant three miles up the coast was pumped to the desalination plant. Its residual heat was used to evaporate water off the briny sea, leaving dull grey salt behind. Ana had to keep the temperature just so. If it jumped or dipped, as the flow from the nuclear plant changed, productivity was compromised and her wages docked appropriately.

Marina curled up under her mother’s station and re-read her book. Ana had given her this book, her own favourite as a child. It tells a story about a seven year old girl who wants to run away from a breaking home. She gets as far as a pine-clothed hill behind her village and finds a wooden cottage on stilts up there on the slopes. Smoke comes from the chimney and rain begins to fall, so the little girl goes and knocks on the door. A wafu opens it. The little girl has never seen a wafu before, a wise hermit lady of the hills, but has heard enough about the bright red robes and bare feet to recognise one when she sees them. The wafu invites her in and gives her hot soup with fat noodles and tiny enoki mushrooms. The wafu talks to the little girl about chaos. She tells her that when many simple things are happening all at the same time, big confusing things emerge. The wafu talks about the birds that nest in the trees behind her cottage; how each one flies in a simple loop before coming in to roost, but flying all together they inscribe a pulsing vortex against the dusky sky. The little girl understands the meaning and returns to her troubled parents.

For Marina, the descriptions of the natural world, the hills and trees and bulging clouds, are the most captivating pieces of the fable. The city, the block, the factories and the foaming smog are all she has known; like any child, she’d like to know more. Ana and her husband had to bring her here when fresh into the world. The government had bought out Ana’s father’s farm to grow biofuel crops. Young, intellectual farmers like Ana’s husband, who worked with her father on the land, were forced to the cities. He couldn’t bear the crushing march of it all and wandered out without a mask, dying a few days later from a thousand cuts in his delicate lungs.

Ana had wept for a day and night, until Marina, just two, had pressed her face on her mother’s chest and told her she was hungry. And so Ana numbly went on as the world squeezed her tighter and tighter.

As Marina read, Ana clicked buttons on the monitor to alter water currents and check temperature indicators. There was a flow to her work, a sort of feel to it, which was calming, even meditative. Marina occasionally asked questions, always at the same parts in the book: what’s a pine tree look like? Did you live in a village like the little girl’s? Ana encouraged Marina to read the book in the morning then write her own stories in the afternoon. But Marina always wrote the same tale, about a little girl who was lost in the fog until her father found her.

At the end of her shift, Ana stepped with Marina out into the diffuse, brownish yellow evening light. The smog was so thick they could barely see their shoes.

Ana and Marina shuffled out past the same guard, his eyelids drooping, his pale blue uniform creased. The road was clotted with bicycles and stooped pedestrians, everyone masked. Many had their government-issue greasy goggles on today too. The traffic and smog became denser as Ana and Marina neared their block. At one point, a titanic black diplomatic car glided through. The road cleared for it and the narrow pavements became crowded, jammed with bodies and bikes. In the confusion, Ana lost her grip on Marina’s hand. She called out, the mask dampening her voice. Even as the throng dispersed, Ana cast about her, but could only see three feet through the opaque darkening air. The polluted atmosphere had sucked in Marina like a gang of children drew in their innocent peers. Perhaps she was searching for her own wafu, or her missing father, or just for her broken disappointed mother.