Map of the Invisible World. Tash Aw

Listen, children, nice to see you, but I have stuff to do. You know. The cops have been down here already tonight touching the girls up and taking our money, so…

      Yeah sure, see you around.

      Who’s that? Farah whispered. Oh my god, Johan. Please don’t tell me you’ve been seeing prostitutes.

      In the dark he made a slight movement with his shoulders, like a shrug but not quite. As they went past the Austin a girl got out of it, smoothing her hair away from her face. The bangles she wore on her wrist filled the air with a lovely metallic symphony, but the car suddenly started up and its lights filled the road with a sharp glare and suddenly there were people running for cover, dashing across the pool of light that swept along the lane before leaving it in darkness once more.

      Shit, a baritone voice called out, I thought it was the cops again, now my hair’s all ruined.

      Hair? Call that topi keledar hair? Darling, it’s a crash helmet, just take it off next time.

      Where did you guys go? said Bob. Let’s get out of here. He was quieter now, sitting with his arms folded and his hands tucked tightly into his armpits as if it were cold. I want to go home. I’m tired.

      No, Johan said. Not yet. The Merc emerged from the alley and burst into life once more.

      Some time afterwards, when they were still driving, they reached that moment in the night when there were no more lights on the streets and the air that came in through the windows no longer felt hot and sticky, Johan said:

      Do you ever get this feeling, Farah?

      What feeling?

      That your life is not your own. That you can’t control it.

      No, what do you mean?

      I mean, do you ever feel that your real life is somewhere else, that someone has stolen it and taken it to another place far away from here?

      Farah looked at him and shook her head. No, Johan, Mummy says we’re not allowed to talk about that. Let’s go home.

      No, said Johan. Anywhere but home.

      In this fast young city he did not want to sleep, he did not want to stop. This was a place that had no past, only the present. What happened yesterday was just a dream; last week was forgotten, last month never existed at all. Every night was the same. Your life started afresh at six-thirty, repeating itself like a clock. There was no escape. It was always like that in this city.

       5

      The telephone stopped ringing just as Margaret opened her eyes. It had been ringing for a very long time. Her head hurt terribly. She squinted at the clock: nine-forty. She could not remember the last time she had woken up so late. She was turning into a grand old white housewife, she thought to herself as she padded her way slowly to the bathroom; she wished there was a bell she could ring so that some dusky, half-dressed youth would appear bearing two aspirins on a silver tray. She had fallen asleep in the rattan armchair in the sitting room and had remained there for some time before being woken by a stiff neck. She had summoned just enough energy to stumble into her bedroom and had fallen into bed without showering, and now she felt suffocated by her own cold sweat, as if someone had coated her skin with a thin layer of wet paint.

      The phone rang again as she dressed. Now that she was awake and fully conscious, the phone seemed curiously dangerous. She picked it up slowly and put it to her ear but did not say anything; she barely even breathed. There was silence, as if the person on the other end was holding their breath too, and the air in her bedroom began to feel stifling. The line clicked and went dead. ‘Probably just the exchange playing up again,’ she said aloud. The sound of her own voice reassured her, and she began humming to herself, a vacuous tune that she soon realised was the song she’d heard at the Hotel Java the night before. Somehow, she knew the phone would ring again, and this time she would not be so cowardly. Dressed now, the pain in her head dull rather than stabbing, she reached for the phone as soon as its harsh drilling started up.

      ‘Hell-o,’ she said loudly, challenging the mystery caller.

      There was a half-second’s pause. ‘Margaret?’ Din’s voice sounded timid, almost scared.

      ‘Yes, hi, Din, it’s Margaret here. Did you try calling me earlier? Just a second ago?’

      ‘Um, no,’ he said. ‘Are you OK?’

      ‘Sure,’ she said, sliding her feet into her shoes. She was sure it was he who had rung, it must have been. ‘You recovered from the horror of last night?’

      ‘It was interesting, actually, I was thinking about it on the way home. I’m glad you took me along. Maybe we’ll do it again some time.’

      ‘Sure. Maybe.’

      ‘Are you sure everything’s all right?’

      ‘Why shouldn’t it be all right?’

      ‘Well, it’s just, you’re always on time, that’s all. You’re usually here before me, so I thought I’d ring you to see if you were OK.’

      ‘What do you think might have happened? That I might have fallen prey to a wanton taxi driver? I just overslept, that’s all.’

      Din did not answer for a while. Margaret imagined his inscrutable smile. ‘OK then,’ he said calmly, ‘maybe I’ll see you later.’

      ‘Yeah, maybe.’ She let the phone fall into its cradle with a crash and walked into the sitting room. The swirling green faux-marble Formica tabletop was half-covered in bits of paper and photographs. Margaret had not bothered to put them back into the box that lay at the foot of the low cane armchair. Last night, her head heavy with drink, she had wanted to look at all those dead images. She had not seen them for a very long time, and it had taken her a while even to remember where the box was. She had recovered it in the small storeroom into which she threw everything that she did not use on a daily basis, things that collected in layers as the years went by. And so, working her way through the archaeological dig of her life, she had found it preserved like a rare fossil in the pre-adult period, buried under old college textbooks but lying (more or less) on top of a box labelled Childhood in New Guinea. Once consigned to this storeroom, things rarely resurfaced; geckos laid their eggs on the spines of books and mice crawled into boxes to die. Margaret had no idea why she had spent a good hour and a half on her hands and knees, struggling with the flashlight wedged between her chin and shoulder, to free this box from its tomb of memories. She had looked at the pictures until it was very late, until she was alone in the night, when even the scooters and dogs and radios had fallen silent. She had been surprised to see how little she had changed, and had felt an unexpected surge of happiness when she recognised herself in the pictures. She had grown older, of course, but the similarities between the fifteen-year-old Margaret and the forty-something Margaret were obvious: the slight, adolescent build, the firm unfleshy arms, the hair pulled back neatly from the face, the chin raised in a perpetual challenge, the pouting smile. It was definitely Margaret.

      She wondered if she would recognise the other people in the photos if she met them today. She certainly had not recognised her father when he lay on his deathbed. She had flown back to New York and driven upstate through an incipient snowstorm to be with him, kept warm only by the vestiges of the Jakarta heat. She had found him in a room that stank of disinfectant in a nursing home on the outskirts of Ithaca, his face pale and mottled, bleached of colour. The few wisps of hair on his head had grown too long and fell like threads of fine white silk across the scabs on his scalp. He looked like just another old man, like the ones playing cards in the hall. He was barely sixty but the cancer had taken hold.

      When he smiled she felt a terrible pain in her chest; she had never believed that sadness could be a physical sensation. During that brief weak smile, she had recognised her father, the one whose image she had always kept in her mind’s eye. And she was glad when he closed his eyes again, for he became an old man once more, someone