In World City (9 page)

Miranda went away from the session disappointed. Yes, something might have changed in the world after she'd moved those lines on the screen, but really no more so than if she had picked up a telephone. The programme merely meant she was better able to run things from behind the razor wire she was surrounded by. The world beyond the wire was still there, mostly entirely beyond her reach. Something terrible could still happen out there. What Miranda had wanted from those lines was the power to change the world directly according to her will, but what she had got was a tool for issuing instructions. She felt the lifeline she had made of those glittering threads begin to unravel.

Home was supposed to be where his parents lived, but Dion was sick to the heart with memories of his island. His father put him in a mixed-language school with small classes where he could learn to understand the local people while keeping up his education at the same time. Dion was interested in learning to understand the local people, but otherwise did badly in his first term. He would find himself losing the teacher in mid-sentence, his gaze drifting towards the window and the indeterminate grey of the sky beyond. Then a flood of memories would wash over him, leaving him aching with longing and entirely deaf to all that was being told him.

His classmates were mostly obedient sons and daughters of the professional couples who inhabited the district. The children received and regurgitated information during classes then, during break, demanded of Dion, in carping, self-satisfied tones, whether he or his parents owned certain things that were being considered essential to have that week.

He tried to play the game at first. He said, ‘Sure, we've got one of those on order,' or, ‘Nah, it's the next update I'm waiting for.' Later, sitting in the apartment kitchen, watching his mother chop vegetables in her fussy, chaotic way, his frustration and discomfort finally broke through his vow of silence. He asked, “Mum, when can I have a VR game deck? All the kids at school have got one. I'm the only one who hasn't.”

“That's wasted money,” his mother retorted impatiently, as if Dion had been talking this way ever since they arrived. “Your father hasn't come all the way here just to waste the money he makes on games for you. School work is what you need to be spending your time on. That's what your father did when he was your age. He didn't waste his time playing games or spending his parents' money. He worked hard and it's because of that that we're here now.”

This did not encourage Dion, either to work hard or to fit in. His lies about what he owned became increasingly half-hearted and he concentrated instead on finding ways of getting out of school without being noticed. Since almost all the other children were white this was difficult, so he tried cultivating a low profile, burying himself in a book most breaks. This singled him out even further and he began to experience a developing hostility. The asides and occasional direct attacks were unpleasantly verbal. Anything physical he could have dealt with, but the words hurt more, being mostly about what a loser he was and how he didn't have anything worth talking about. At the point when he was about to beat hell out of someone – anyone – he remembered a lesson his grandmother had taught him, seemingly odd at the time, but now presenting itself as a possibly valuable skill.

She had said, “What most peoples want, young Dion, is to be big and important. Bet you want to be big and important, yes? Basketball player on the cable, so all your friends shout, ‘Hey look, there's that Dion,' when they turn on. You like the thought of that? Hmm? Thought so. Now, listen to me. The ones that get onto that screen – they're just the ones that didn't get eaten on the way. That's what happens to most. And the ones you see on the screen, they're only at the top of the pole while they stay strong enough not to slip down. All slip down in the end, Dion. All get old and weak – all get eaten. But there's another way you can do it. You do it like this.”

She took him on one of their longest walks together. When they set off, she had walked as any normal person might: heavily, purposefully, looking around herself, curious, slightly challenging, then apparently losing herself in some thought and blundering slightly in her steps. Only then had Dion realised his grandmother had never walked like that before – his father, yes, and his mother and teachers and, when he came to think about it, all the grown-ups around him, and most of the children. But his grandmother had never walked like that, not until now. He didn't like his grandmother walking like that. It was unpleasant, out of character. But he stuck by her side, saying nothing.

As they continued together, his grandmother's way of walking gradually became more like her own: quieter, more graceful, more inwardly-directed. Dion found himself falling into step. He wanted to find out what it felt like to walk like that. They continued together for some time, giving Dion a chance to get the feel of it. He began to sense a lightness about himself, a transparency, as if he might be blown away by the sunlight. His sense of himself as someone with things to do and places to go began to soften and blur. Thoughts stilled, to be replaced by an awareness that was increasingly drawn in on his surroundings. As each moment passed into the next, that awareness seemed to deepen and expand. It was unfamiliar but he felt okay, albeit peculiarly neutral, as if he could have gone on like that forever, as if nothing would ever again be able to intrude and deflect him onto a new course. But there seemed to be more in his surroundings than he had taken in before: scents, patterns of light, differently-shaped leaves, air breaths. He felt like he might as well take it all in. He concentrated on taking it all in and it was, therefore, some time before he realised his grandmother had disappeared completely. The shock of finding her suddenly absent brought him instantly back to his familiar self. Where was she? Why had she disappeared? Would he be able to find his way back?

“Boo,” said his grandmother, still walking close beside him. “You were almost gone. You done well there.”

She called it ‘vanishing', and Dion had got to practice it several times with her before he was taken from the island. He practiced a lot more though after he found himself alone in the school playground with nothing but the memory of her lesson to hold on to. He practiced hard and soon he was able to be in or out of the place without anyone noticing the difference.

He used his freedom to take long walks along the tree-lined streets, past the neon-lit cubes he had seen on the evening of their arrival. They looked like places where people worked, not many people and all of them well-dressed. Dion noted down the names the neon signs spelled out and went to a community information centre close by. He asked the assistant how he could find out about the names he had noted. The assistant showed him how to operate the menus on one of several screens available for people to use freely. The commercial directory listed each of the names and gave brief details of their interests. Dion read about advertising agencies, graphic-design studios, specialist electronics and law partnerships. Many of the words were unfamiliar to him so he asked the assistant for a translator's dictionary. Still, some of the words meant nothing, even when translated, so he asked the assistant about them. The information centre was very quiet and she willingly told him everything he wanted to know. When she asked him why he wasn't in school he said his father was on a short-term contract and he was having private tuition.

Some days later, he went up to one of the neon-lit cubes, the one that did specialist electronics, and asked the man on the reception desk if they had any work at the weekend he might do – he wouldn't want much money and he was willing to try anything. It took courage to do this, because the man behind the reception desk looked like Miranda Whitlam's man, the one that had called him a filthy little nigger boy. The man behind the desk said he was sorry but they had nothing. He was polite and took Dion's request seriously. Dion was relieved but still left feeling let down.

Apart from the information centre and the walk past the concrete cubes, Dion's other main focus of attention was a small sandwich bar in among some shops. The sandwich bar had two games machines. On one, you could drive around the world at high speed dodging other cars and obstacles thrown in your path. On the other, you could journey out into space to try and find the lost world of Zarcon. Dion liked the lost world game best because not only did you have to fight your way past any number of aliens on the way, you also had to solve puzzles that would tell you which direction to take. If you finally made it to Zarcon, there was a whole new game to be played in a landscape full of dinosaurs, vast seas and ancient cities. A great and evil queen ruled the planet from the most spectacular of these cities and she was responsible for all the adversities he'd had to overcome to get there. When, after several months of playing, Dion finally reached the end of the game, he discovered that the great and evil queen was actually under the spell of a powerful sorcerer. When he had defeated the sorcerer, the queen was transformed into a beautiful, young princess who promised to be his forever for having released her from the spell. Dion's mother gave him a little money each day to buy lunch with at the school. If he went without lunch for two days, he could save enough for a game, a coffee and a sandwich.

He still thought of Miranda Whitlam and still didn't hate her. He tried imagining her as the great and evil queen of the planet Zarcon, with that man who had beaten him up as the powerful sorcerer. Perhaps if he had fought and defeated the man, Miranda Whitlam would have been released and would have pledged herself to him for all eternity. Dion spun the fantasy around for a while. It developed to the point at which he decided it would make more sense if it was Mr Whitlam who was the powerful sorcerer. The man who had beaten him up was merely a minion – a demon guard. Mr Whitlam was the one who owned the demon guard, the one who had destroyed his home and had sent Dion and his family to this terrible place. He was the real power. Perhaps if Miranda Whitlam had not denied him, Dion would have been in greater danger still. If she had acknowledged that she might have become his friend, her sorcerer father would have seen him as too great a threat to his plans and would have had him killed. Perhaps, by making people believe he had been no more than a chance stranger, caught looking, Miranda Whitlam had saved his life. As time passed, Dion's hurt smouldered less strongly, but the image of Miranda Whitlam's face looking up at him still burned.

*

Dion gradually began to establish a life for himself entirely separate from the world he found himself in, a life of memories or fantasy, or both. He walked as far as he could, kicking at fallen leaves, sliding on iced-over puddles, holding his jacket tight around himself against the wind. But no matter how far he walked, Dion could find nothing that could reconnect him with his island. Nothing seemed to have a life of its own. He recalled his grandmother's words, ‘... they work for appearances is all and appearances is what they make.' Not knowing what it was to be without the rich underpinning of feeling and intuition that was the life of the appearances he had been familiar with, those words had meant little to Dion at the time; he hadn't even known what appearances were. Now he knew. That underpinning of feeling and intuition had been pulled forcibly from him and he was left floating in a place that was nowhere.

After school, he wandered past the shops, bathed in the cold radiance of the window displays, his breath misting the glass when he looked more closely. For all he knew, this was all there was in this promised land of his father: tree-lined streets, neon-lit cubes and cold shop windows that gave a view onto inaccessible treasures. He imagined the same combination of elements endlessly repeating itself, with people performing actions that endlessly repeated themselves, people who were entirely uninterested in anything beyond the endless repetitions they were immersed in. He remembered the moon rising over Morne Diablotin, the dogs in the streets and the boys doing acrobatics down on the beach by the packing station. He remembered the heat of midday and the sea wind at night, the clamour in the school playground, and his grandmother leading him along a barely visible path through a filigree of tree ferns. Dion broke his vow of silence and asked his father how long it would be before they went back home.

“Home? This is home. You're not thinking of that squalid little street we used to live on, are you? – That squalid little street on that squalid little island? That hut we lived in has been pulled down now and turned into something useful. You're stupid, boy. I wouldn't go back there if you paid me twice what I'm getting now. People live there all their lives and they go nowhere. I've been fighting my way out of there ever since I could walk. I don't want another word about it from you. I'm intending to forget I ever had anything to do with that place, and you do the same. Have you got that? And talking of going nowhere, I've been getting reports from your school. As far as I can see, I'm wasting my money. You need to start making progress there, or else.”

Dion was interested in what the ‘or else' might be, but guessed it could only be more of the same that he was working to avoid at school. He became even bolder in his excursions during class hours, walking further, staying away longer. The simple act of walking had always gone some way towards stemming the tide of unreality that had swept over him on their arrival in Europe. Now it became a vital necessity. So he walked more. And as he walked, he imagined running away from home, hitching lifts to the coast and stowing away on a ship bound for the other side of the sea. He spent a lot of time staring in travel agents' windows and looking at the atlas screens in the information centre. He went into one of the travel agents and asked if they had any old posters he might have. They had one of a jungle-clad island, which Dion took home and hid under his bed, only taking it out to look at when he was sure he would be undisturbed.

Eventually Dion's truancy was detected and its regularity confirmed. His father said, “I'm going to make an account of all the money you've wasted. I want you to pay it back. I don't need the money, but you need to learn its value. I've tried to give you a decent education, but you clearly aren't capable of using it. You might as well go to the local state place.”

Dion felt an unaccountable surge of hope at this.