'Hello, brother. Thank you for coming to see me,' she beamed.
Thank you for coming when it will be necessary to make you lunch, thank you for coming so that it will be impossible for me to wash. Thank you for trying, as always, to assert that Joe's house is in some way yours.
'Would you like something to drink?'
'Tea would be excellent,' he nodded.
She put on the kettle and thought: no, I will not miss my bath. She snatched up fresh clothes and draped them over her arm. 'You will not mind, brother, if I wash?' she said, in a little-girl voice.
Or would you rather I stank and dripped sweat into your lunch?
Ju-mei waved his hand as if it were nothing, but he was too choked with his own unsorted emotions to speak. If the kettle boils and he wants to make his own tea, let him.
My brother. He wants this house, and cannot accept it will not be his. He is a grain merchant, he sells insurance, he wears suits, he has to cast his shadow over things.
Anger made her snap shut the curtain closing off the narrow alley between the two houses. She scowled as she peeled off the sweaty T-shirt, all pleasure in her bath gone. She needed to think. Absent-mindedly she scooped cold water over herself from the rain butt.
Ju-mei will want to chaperone me, or even have me move back into his house for propriety. Well, that won't happen. But he will also feel he has the right to drop in and out when he pleases. Joe knows what Ju-mei is up to, that is why my brother never does this when Joe is around. But, oh God, he will be here day and night, with his new baby, and his wife will want me to change its diapers. He 11 bring Mother and leave her here and say it's my turn to take care of her.
When I want to sleep in Ken Kuei's arms.
Unless I am so rude that he goes away and doesn't come back.
Necessity in life can have a wonderful, calming effect.
Unless I finally, really tell him what I think is going on. Unless I say it in the way I have always wanted to say it. She began to grin. I am just going to say what I really think. I am a peasant wife used to livestock and hard reality. His little cream suit is no defence against that.
Mae went back into the house, still smiling with anticipation. Ju-mei sat staring at the boiling kettle.
'Ha-ha. Men. You just sit there watching it boil. Can't you make the tea yourself?'
Ju-mei had no answer for that. 'I… I was offered tea.'
'Indeed,' said Mae, toweling her hair. 'There it is.' Her hand indicated the earthenware bin, in which the tea leaves kept dry. Briskly she put away the dirty clothes in the wicker basket.
'I hope, brother, you did not come with thoughts of my cooking you lunch. I have my appointments.' She smiled at him. Her teeth had never felt so big.
He was foxed. Nothing was going as he had pictured it.
'You are bold, Mae,' he said.
'Bold? To visit neighbours I have known all my life, what is bold about that? You are bold to wear so much perfume. Pooh! You smell more like a woman than my customers.'
She pulled the alcove curtain shut around her to put on her Talent clothes. 'I'll tell you what else is bold: to drop into another man's house the moment he is gone and expect to be cooked lunch. Or doesn't your wife cook for you anymore?'
'You are a woman alone.'
'No. I am not. Miss An and I always work together, so I do not need a chaperone. I certainly do not need to be chaperoned in my husband's house.' Mae was decent in the heart-patterned dress, so she pulled the curtain back. She wanted to see his face slack with surprise. She stepped into her Talent shoes. 'And there is no need to try to establish any rights to this house. If Joe dies, Siao inherits; if he dies, Old Mr Chung inherits. Either one of them could marry and then it would never fall to the family Wang.'
He shivered in his chair. 'Mae! You are impossible. This is a brotherly call!'
'I know,' replied Mae, flinging up her husband's jacket to open up its arms. She paused. 'And I know exactly what that means. Whatever I've got, Ju-mei, you want. It's been like that for as long as I can remember. You want Joe's cock, too? You want to inherit this house? Maybe you can inherit it if you let Joe fuck you.' She sniffed and made plain she was about to leave. She muttered, 'Both of you would probably enjoy it.'
All blood drained from her brother's face. Abruptly, like a cripple, he stood up, shambling, shivering, having trouble gathering up the cane.
'I don't know what's come over you! You talk like a peasant. A rough farm girl.' He was at the door.
'I am a rough farming girl.'
'I… I had come to offer to pay the debt!'
And Mae whooped in triumph. 'I know! I know! And that is how you thought you would get the farm!'
Her sneaky little brother. His face fell. Mae had to laugh. She took his arm and led him towards the door. 'Come, come, brother, it's not so bad, all our fights end this way, only this time I have decided to skip the fight.'
Mae remembered the kettle. She swooped back into the kitchen to take it off the ring, and when she came back, he had gone.
For a few weeks, Mae's days settled into a pattern.
She did her housework in the early morning and worked in her fields until noon. At lunch or during the day, she might snatch some time with Mr Ken. In the early evening Mae and An would visit neighbours with their Question Map and drink tea late into the night.
After escorting An home, Mae worked to master the television. She saw there were hundreds of things she might do with the TV. She could use the television to sell or to Market Call. She could use it like a telephone to talk live or leave voicemail. In a year she would be able to use it to make material for Aircasts.
Aircasts were like films, but they were translated into the Format. They could go then direct to people's heads. So there would be Aircast versions of movies.
And Aircast version of ads, thought Mae. And all the ads, if you looked hard enough, had something called Intimacy Shields. So, Mae began to wonder, how do you do that in Air? When it's inside your head.
She tried to buy bolts of cloth online. But she still needed something called a Believability Card and that was easiest to do when you had a Clever Card.
Kwan rubbed her shoulders. 'The world out there has grown bigger. There are two worlds. There is the one you can see, and another world people have made up, and it is bigger than the real one. They call it Info.
And Mae felt lust.
Lust to be part of that world, lust to know how it worked, lust to know how the television worked, and how the Net and how the Air would give all that wings. With a lust that bordered on despair, she wanted to be first, she wanted to know all, she wanted to be mistress of all its secrets.
I will learn, she promised herself.
Kwan would leave to go to bed. Mae would keep learning and relearning how to make the accounts system work. She asked for the wrong things, the machine got stuck on the way she said certain things, she kept forgetting what fo mu lah were, and how you entered them, but she knew that it meant the numbers would add themselves up. She thought in passing of Siao, Joe's brother, and how he should see this.
She learned that she could save pictures from the Net or from video. She learned she could change their colour. She learned she could use the tiny camera to copy things from the real world and change them.
Above all else, she learned that she would no longer need to know how to read or write.
And at three a.m., her feet crossing in front of each other as she walked, she would make her way home, as sweaty as if she had been weeding the rice by night as well.
A note on the door might say, in her mother's handwriting: Your mother called. She wonders where her daughter spends her time and asked if you would be good enough to visit her. Mae would promise herself that she would. When she had time. She would fall into her bed. Mr Ken might be there, snoring gently. She might kiss him.