Brave New Love (5 page)

Maybe, I thought, when the rightminding kicked in properly I’d be able to let go of my dream of going to sea.

Except I’d already decided that wasn’t going to be what happened. I supposed I had the rightminding, to the extent that it
was
working, to thank for the fact that I could have
a conversation with with him rationally. We were taught in school that young adults were once notorious for their emotional lability.

“Now, Billie,” he said. “You know I just want to see you contented. Not—”

“Not like Mam?” I asked.

His face paled.

Now that was cruel
, I thought. Maybe my rightminding wasn’t so good after all.

But he saw through the cruelty, I guess, to my hurt. “You’re not your mam, Bill,” he said. “I’ve never thought so. You wouldn’t run out on people who love
you.”

He said it with kindness. He reached out to touch my arm.

Shame filled me up until I wanted to vomit it out. Wasn’t that exactly what I was thinking of doing?

•  •  •

I went upstairs to bed—my half-sister Katy was just getting up, so I didn’t have to share the room with her and her fretting infant—and slept for six hours,
which still had me up by noon. When I came down again, Dad and Katy were both out. I thought Dad might be at his painting class (he’s terrible) and I seemed to remember that Katy’s son
David had an early rightminding appraisal (he’s two). I thought about using some of the water ration to shower and decided to get some work done in the back garden instead. I sat in the
parlor and ate two pieces of toast with butter while I was considering the chores and staring at the dusty guitar hung over the old fireplace.

We had a typical Irish terraced house with a typical Irish garden, which was about six meters by five and bounded by gray stone walls too high to see over. There were roses in two corners,
scarlet runner beans planted where they’d climb the through the rose branches and up the walls. We had courgettes, culinary herbs, sunflowers for the oil. Two brown hens scratched around the
margins. When I went into the garden I first took a few moments to search for their warm brown eggs.

Our house had been built before Greening, but the roof had been retrofitted with a green frame that grew herbs and sweet potatoes and tomatoes and lettuces. We had an apple tree and a solar
water reclamation system. The house was well-insulated and snug.

We had everything we needed right here. And what we didn’t have we could buy from the shops in the town. Any reasonable, rightminded person would be perfectly happy here.

Except what we didn’t have was any purpose beyond subsisting.

The stepladder was in the community shed—none of our neighbors were using it this early, and nobody was signed up to use it until five. Having decided I would work on the roof garden, I
pulled out the ladder, rolled it home on its wheeled side, braced its foot pads, and clambered up. The overlay from my Omni helped me identify and pull weeds while avoiding the seedlings of
desirable plants. The pink and white valerian would take over everything if you let it. It was pretty, but as far as I was concerned it smelled like a cat. It could stay in the chinks of the stone
walls, where it belonged.

As I worked, I tried to calm my mind—but I couldn’t help it. Over and over, I wondered again why Mam had left.

Dad’s first wife, Katy’s mother, had died of a cancer the health service hadn’t been able to do anything for. After a while, he met and married my mam but she didn’t
stick around past my fifth birthday, and she’d never told us where she was going or sent word back that she was a alive.

For a long time, nobody and no amount of rightminding could convince me it wasn’t my fault she’d gone. After a while, I’d started to accept it had been something inside her
that had driven her away. The realization had come about the same time that same something had begun to rear itself in my own head.

I patted the last marigolds in among the tomatoes—organic pest control—and made my way back down the ladder. I folded it up and took it back to the community shed.

Because I’d been thinking so much about the past, about escaping to it, I imagined what it would be like if we had our own ladder. Not to have to work around everyone else in the community
or sign up months in advance to work on the roof.

I imagined every house on my street with its own step-ladder. Its own lawnmower. Its own hedge clippers.

It was a little dizzying.
So much stuff.
Where would you
keep
it all?

Wasteful. Like the airplanes and the food from far away and the internal combustion engines that used to race around the streets. You could see it all in old movies, which people used to buy on
disks made of polymer, in boxes made of polymer, and just pile up on shelves.

It’s better to keep everything in the cloud. I know it is. It’s better to use only what you need, when you most need it, then put it back where everybody else can use it too.

But is it really better to spend your whole life in comfortable purposelessness? All those people in those old movies, zipping around in their ocean-raising cars and their storm-causing
airplanes.

They’re not like me. They all look as if they’re going somewhere.

I went inside to shower, thinking I’d earned the use of a water ration now. Besides, if it rained again this afternoon, it’d help fill the roof tank. We’d be in pretty good
shape still.

And I couldn’t stand the feeling of dirt and grease in my hair.

•  •  •

Showers are a good place for making life-changing decisions. The hot water seems to unstick the brain cells and if you cry, nobody can tell. Not even you, really. I probably
pushed my water ration a little, but I’d make up for it by not being here later.

When I was clean, I made myself a cup of tea—worth importing, even in these times—and skinned out all distractions except the obligatory emergency channel before settling down with
my interface to do some serious research.

Career inquiry
, I entered into my Omni.
How does one become a long-distance sailor?

Fifteen minutes later, I knew. There was a school for it—but at least according to the cloud, most people learned to sail by simply sailing. Finding a captain who would take them on as
unskilled labor and teach them the ropes—quite literally.

I also knew that it didn’t pay significantly better than staying on the dole. And that it was considerably more dangerous.

And that I wanted it more than anything in the world.

I closed up all the research windows floating in my peripheral vision, skinned back into reality and made myself another cup of tea—chamomile, this time, locally grown—while I
figured out the letter I was going to send to Shaun. My dad and Katy were easier: I just told them over the dinner table.

“I’ll write,” I said. “I’ll telepresence. I’ll AR you. You’ll hardly know I’m gone.”

Dad stood up to take my plate. “Who’ll do the washing up, then?” he asked, but I knew that was his way of saying he would miss me.

“I’ll do it,” Katy said. “At least there’ll be one less plate.”

The sun didn’t set that night until almost ten.

•  •  •

I used the daylight packing. Summers were better than winters—in summer, you never got enough sleep, but in winter it was always going to bed early so you didn’t
outrun your electricity allotment. Katy was downstairs with David, letting him nap in the shady part of the garden. I imagined they were both skinning out my sounds, not wanting to be reminded.

While I was staring at jumpers spread out on my bed, I heard Dad’s step upon the stair.

He paused in the open door to my room. I didn’t turn at first, but caught his eyes in the mirror, looking at me. I had his coloring, the same red hair and freckles, though his had gone
sandy with the years, but my cheekbones and pointed chin were all Mam’s.

He didn’t say anything, just stared at me with love and sorrow. I held his gaze in the mirror until I couldn’t stand to anymore, and looked down.

I wondered if he also saw Mam in my face just now, or now more than ever.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said.

He had two glasses of wine that had come by tallship from France. He saved it for special occasions. He handed me one, then went to the bed and pushed one of the jumpers aside to make an edge to
sit on. He looked up at me and pursed his lips, and the seriousness and hush in his voice made me strain to hear.

“Don’t ever tell Katy this,” he said. “But when I was your age, I wanted to go to Dublin and be a musician.”

I thought of the dusty guitar in the living room. I knew he could play it, so I must have seen him play, but I couldn’t summon up a memory of him with the thing in his hands. Certainly,
I’d always wondered why we had one when nobody in the house used it much—a wasted resource, just warehoused like that.

Now I knew.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” he said. “I made another choice, and I got you and Katy and David.”

I nodded, too tight up for words. Was this what grown-up choices were like, then? This hollow feeling that nothing I could do would be right?

He’d never gotten the regret rightminded away. The brain bleachers could have fixed it for him, made it not hurt anymore. The way they had my mam leaving, for me, when I asked.

“Call every day,” he said. “Or if you don’t have the bandwidth, send email.” He stood, and got that particularly Irish rising stress in his voice as he said,
“And don’t you be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Anywhere in the world, we’ll get you home.”

“I love you, Dad.” It was all I could say.

He stood up. He kissed my hair on the way out of the room.

I didn’t email Shaun the letter until morning, when I was packed and ready to leave for the station. I didn’t take much—some trousers, some shirts, a tube of
sunblock. My Omni. I was wearing the jumper Dad had pushed out of the way.

I walked up Bridge Street to the train station via the footpath with the River Bracken on my right, locked away down in its stone channel with the valerian and ferns and ivy growing from the
gaps in the rock all around. The path leads up a little rise behind the seawall, overhung with flowers and with a wooden rail on the right. I was passing through the narrow stone doorway, the train
station on the right, when I heard running feet behind me and a breathless voice call, “Billie Rhodes, you stop right this instant!”

I stopped, because I couldn’t do otherwise. Clutching the strap of my backpack with my right hand, I said, “Shaun, you shouldn’t have come.”

I didn’t turn back to look at her. I couldn’t. Not until she came pelting up the path toward me, put her hand on my shoulder, and spun me around. Her cheeks were bright with running.
She was wearing jeans and a pajama top, and her feet were bare. She minced a little, as if she had bruised the right one on a stone.

“Aw, Shaun,” said I.

She put her fists on her hips, the wind raveling her tangled hair across her face. She stood framed in the gray stone door and spat, “What on
earth
were you thinking?”

“Shaun—” There was nothing I could say, really. Nothing that would make it better at all. The air was full of the rank, stuffy smell of valerian and the tang of the sea. It had
stopped raining for once, though her hair was damp, and the broken clouds piled up and tossed behind her.

I sighed and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry. That’s all you’ve got?”

I shrugged. I hated myself for shrugging. I did it anyway.

She tilted her head. She wasn’t crying, but that was only because she was too angry. Unshed tears glistened in the corners of her eyes. “Will you at least tell me why?”

What’s out there that’s more important than me?

“I want to do something that matters,” I said.

Something in her face changed. Softened, as if she couldn’t hold on to her anger. She started to say,
And you can’t do that here?—I
could see her start to say it. And
then she paused, swallowed it, and said instead, “I don’t matter?”

“You matter most of all. But you’re not something I
do
, love. You’re your own thing. Your own person. What am I supposed to do about what I need?”

“Get it rightminded out,” she said, so fast I knew she’d been thinking about it.

“But it’s
me.
”

“But it hurts you. It hurts me.” She shook her head, not understanding. “If it hurts you—”

“You could come with me,” I replied.

She stepped back.

I nodded. “Exactly. You don’t want to. But you could get that changed, too.”

She looked down.
Stalemate.
“So you’re leaving me.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m leaving Ireland. I’ll only leave you if you don’t want me anymore. We’ll have the cloud, we’ll have mail. I’ll
come home. Maybe while I’m gone you’ll find something to be as well.”

The light was climbing up the wall behind me. In the distance, I heard the whistle of the solar train. Once they had run every few minutes—but now, if I missed this one, the next
wasn’t until the afternoon—and the tickets were expensive. It didn’t matter. I stepped closer to her and pulled her into my arms. “We’ve always been trapped
together,” I said. “We could rely on that. Don’t you want to see if we can still rely on each other if we’re not trapped?”

She leaned her head on my shoulder. Her back and arms stayed stiff and her weight wasn’t behind the caress. “We’d have to . . .
choose
each other.”