The plan had come to me the same moment I had seen her. It was quite simple. First I had to get everybody in the place raving about it, publically. Then I had to melt all the ice-cream in the building.
Zahra Fukasawa was in fact exactly the sort of person the management would have hoped to attract to Eis. She was here spontaneously, I was sure, because the restaurant would have been unable to remain silent about such a scoop. It also fitted what I knew about her.
She was a soundscaper. A half-Iranian, half-Japanese citizen of the world who had found some celebrity a year or so previously, her art a form of dance and musical composition that turned ambient noise into rhythmic, melodic expression. It got recorded, but the thing died in captivity as surely as orcas used to do. No, to experience it, you had to be there live, or ride someone who was there.
That’s why I had known I could create a real spike. Any other celebrity of her class would have been a success for Eis, but for me, Zahra Fukasawa was the opportunity we had been looking for.
First, of course, the waiting staff identified her. Her aura was relatively discreet – not anonymous by any means, but from where I sat she had a lot less flashing around her than, say, Niki Booker-Cosens, Thought-Patterner, hiremeforyourcognitivechange, discretiondevelopmentdirection over there in the booth by the street. But there was a collective shifting in their seats from the customers and a waiter hurried out with another table and set it near the other end of the bar, one chair for her while her minder stood.
I don’t normally open my vis to the public channels for long, but tonight I needed to know what everyone was thinking. Looking around I could see updates and pops, messages and updates and status reports being published all around the room. Zahra Fukusawa here in Islington gosh you wont believe this shes here!!! @Eis with @ZahraF This place @eis just got cooler… and so on.
I was on my twenty-eighth ice-cream. Just over halfway. This one was rare Welsh lamb, served with candyfloss, a very pleasant pink and pink with a single mint leaf. In less than the time it took me to eat the single spoonful, I had created a guest account through a dummy identity on the most popular Zahra fancom, and posted that she’d been spotted in Eis and had promised to give a performance.
By the pine-corn-old coin sorbet that followed, my message was being referenced all round the room and much further abroad as well. I shot a line to Max, typing by habit into a keyboard only I could see overlaid on the bar. Get me a Zahracrowd. Fanstorm.
In the meantime, they had sat her down and welcomed her and the big minder had already turned a couple of print-hunters away. She needed to perform, not simply sit and guzzle cold dairy products.
To my left was a woman whose aura said she was thirty-one, Viki Crane, much more besides. She looked bemused by the stirrings. But she had an air about her… The air of someone who always knows more than you. I swung my stool towards her.
“I’ve got no idea either,” I said. “Some sort of celebrity, I think.”
Her eyes twitched. “Zahra Fukasawa,” she said. “The soundscaper? You must have heard of her. She won the Lit Medal last year?” The slight hesitations told me that she was reading her facts off something virtual.
“Oh, I see,” I replied. “A musician. Funny, I thought she was someone important.”
“Deeply important,” replied Miss Crane, with a shake of the head. “She’s redefining music.”
“Music’s all the same to me,” I said with a shrug.
Her need to be right was far more powerful than her sense of bashfulness. “Oh, no. If she performs tonight you’ll know that you’ve heard something special. She can turn your own heartbeat into something wonderful.”
While I was winding this woman up I was tracking Max’s progress. Already the queue outside had doubled in length and chatter on the fan sites was peaking. The problem was that at the moment, there was no way she would give a free, impromptu performance here. It would be squandering her considerable social pull for the sake of a place she had simply popped into hoping to get a little sweet supper.
So I needed to pretend to be someone else again.
I faked up a message from an address that could be Eis’s management and sent it straight to Zahra’s sponsor, flattering her grossly, describing the wonderful serendipity of the evening, such pleasure in having her come and grace the new endeavour, proposing an alliance of convenience for a limited time. In return for an ‘impromptu’ performance in house tonight, we, the management of Eis, would arrange for twentieth grade contracts for a year with SBS, our parent consort, for Miss Fukagawa, her sponsor and thirteen other nominees.
By the second spoon of the spicy marron glace ice, I had seen Zahra whisper to the manager and then stand while her table was tidied away again. She had barely had the time to take a single lick of a beautiful vanilla cone that they had brought her.
“Dear diners,” began the manager, an anonymous, large woman dressed in black and possessing a particularly fat pair of lips, “We are honoured by the presence of Miss Zahra Fukasawa, who will now perform a spontaneous soundscape. Please ensure your aural implants and augmentations are channelled to our house band.”
The room, already virtually abuzz, now really began to bubble. People were telling their relatives, making distant friends jealous, publicising eyeshots, uprating the restaurant, surfing on a virtual wave of hype even while they sat in the semi-dark on their leather bankettes. I turned to the Viki lady. “So this must be a real spontaneous thing, for her.”
“Oh, I’m sure not,” she replied breezily. “Probably a well-prepared scheme.”
“I didn’t read about it with the opening,” I said.
She frowned a moment, then thought her way to the high ground again. “Maybe it wasn’t available on your level of access.” I really had to work hard to keep my grin to myself.
“Well, this is going to be the partnership the manager mentioned at the door, then,” I returned. There was no way this woman was going to admit she had heard nothing of the sort, but a startled look in her eyes told me she had taken the bait.
In a few moments I had my next ice-cream and Zahra had finished her preparations. Diners were mentioning a partnership, maybe even a sponsorship between the restaurant where they were eating right this moment and Zahra Fukagawa herself, even as they watched with open-mouths, but my mind was elsewhere. I was researching thermostat codes.
The public lay was, as I mentioned, a seamlessly well-designed interface that allowed customers to interact with a menu, log preferences, link images, read histories and discussions and much more beside. Behind it, on a visual channel unobservable to eyes without a certain ram loaded, was the business lay, giving the waiting staff information on their customers, orders, spacial patterning, calorie consumptions and, crucially for an ice-cream restaurant, temperatures. With it I could see through the bar to the kitchen and even the stockroom. I could see the till in virtual blue above the centre of the room where Zahra was now wheeling her arms in some presumably intricate and musical fashion, see the unpaid and the booked.
But back to the kitchen. It was empty now. The three kitchen staff had come out to watch and listen to the show. The barstaff were also enraptured. There wasn’t even a kitchen porter around. I identified the access interface for the freezer, hacked it with a freely-available maintenance override ram I fed into it, and reversed the temperature flow, while leaving a trace that gave the impression of factory-sourced malfunction. Thankyou online community of freezer electricians and your well-organised maintenance archive.
I returned my attention to the room around me and even tuned in to the house band. There was a relationship between her movement in her headscarf and bootleg slacks and the complex, cross-rhythmed melodies I could hear. All around the room, conoisseurs were nodding and giving themselves little smiles of satisfaction. To me it sounded like repetitive cutlery-dropping – but then maybe that was in fact where she had sourced her basic sound palette.
People were leaning in through the open doors, then, before anyone in the rapt staff could do anything about it, trickling inside in quite an English way, not wanting to take up space they hadn’t paid for but unwilling to miss the opportunity of hearing and seeing and experiencing this music-changer at work. Her minder looked panicky for a moment until he realised they were going to follow his hand signals and keep a good distance. After all, they wouldn’t want to trespass on their own heroine’s creative space.
They kept pressing in, until my eyes counted more than a hundred standing there, as well as us. With the conditioning off – I had done that as well, of course – more factory faults – the temperature in the room slowly began to rise and the little spheres of perfect chemistry began to lose their integrity and sink into puddles of expensive custard. Not that anyone was paying attention.
I was on my forty-third when she finished. My desserts had kept coming simply because of the conveyor belt in front of me, but I was fairly confident that these would be the last frozen things leaving the kitchen that night. It was a homage to the old neapolitan, but using Brie, pink caviar and rye to mess with my expectations. Too rich, really. Or perhaps that was simply the temperature.
“Incredible,” breathed my new friend to my left. “Don’t you think?”
“Hard to believe,” I agreed. “Very hard to believe.”
Forty-four was anchovy, kalamansi and basil. Very finely balanced. I concentrated on it while I listened to the increasingly frustrated customers around the room.
I sent Max a single word.
Now.
“What do you mean, I can’t have another one? You can see this one melted while we watched your performer!”
“Wait how long?”
“How can an ice-cream restaurant not have any ice-cream?”
That was the one I had been waiting for.
Then I heard Zahra. “I thought I had been given twentieth grade,” she was saying sharply. “You think I just give my performances away?”
I got the clear from Max, then pushed myself off my stool and headed out to the street, typing on my thighs as I went, grinning like the shark leaving the empty lagoon. The review was out in eight minutes. Two minutes before Zahra Fukagawa’s sponsors filed a lawsuit against Eis and eighteen minutes before the value of SBS contracts plummeted to the lowest they had been that year.
Of course, our contract holdings were all in Cornucopia now.
The Cutting
‘You’ll have to clear the brook again,’ he said from his chair. ‘Always grappling with those willows, I was. You’ll never get the hay barge up there if you don’t cut them back.’
‘I hear you father. That’s a long week’s work, and I can’t spare the time.’
The old man snorted. ‘Won’t, you mean. Won’t! Sheer idleness is all. A son of mine to shirk so shamelessly, on his own land. Send Buck and Milton, if you won’t do it.’
‘There’s time yet before hay-making. Buck won’t do it this week, and I won’t let Milton down by those trees. He’s no respect for them.’
‘And what about you? You talk as if you weren’t a working man yourself. I never hired a man to do what I wouldn’t.’
‘I’ll stay by the calving, as well you know, this week and as long as those cross-breeds are birthing. Not one of them has borne a live calf yet, and we’ll not suffer another year’s losses for a little patience.’
‘You talk as if you blame me, son. You’ve already made me admit a fault, but you can’t leave it. You may not have bought them, but there’s no sense in disowning an inheritance like I’ve given you. But I tell you, if you don’t clear the brook this week you’ll be ruing your sloth come haytide. The weather’ll break, and you know that I know it.’
‘And shall I leave my crippled father to calve those cows, then?’ Young Foxton had been needled enough. Much as he hated to strike at his father’s weakness, the man seemed to refuse to accept his own circumstances. Old Foxton, who had been the bluff, hearty owner of Foxton Farm for the last thirty years, was now confined to the chair by the hearth when he wasn’t being carried to and fro by sons or daughters’ husbands. He had made over the deeds to his eldest, a man too like himself for comfort, but seemed to have forgotten it.
‘If you’ll hear me and choose not to listen,’ said Old Foxton, ‘Then you’re more of a fool than I gave you credit, and that’s all I say.’
The next morning Young Foxton took Milton and the axes down to the low pasture. His wife was with the cows. It had been his hope to overcome the old man’s curse and see those cross-breeds bear something living. He had been born himself with a living touch – animals were all ready to have him close by. As a boy foxes had come out of coverts, ravens down from roosts and milk-cows seemed to have saved their best milkings for his soft hands. But there was something about that his father had suspected – something less than manly, this gentleness and this easiness to feel and stroke. But even he had admitted that there were cows on the pasture who would have been wasted away in the cold winter but for the nearness of those warm, living hands.
The first day was an undifferentiated continuity, slashing at the tangling weed, bramble that stretched from bank to bank, rosebay, sycamore and aspen shoots all twisted and unlikely attempts at trees. They laboured on under summer sun until the dusk came at last, leaving the hay-barge only yards upstream from where the little brook joined the river. Unless they could clear a fair route to the long pasture then all the year’s growth of tall grass would be wasted, and the fields might as well have been stocked for the months they had been held back. Such waste couldn’t be contemplated. Neither father nor son would have any waste on their farm, or ever had. It was the only sin worse than deceit in their stern religion.
By the end of the second day a route had been hacked as far as the row of willows that Old Foxton had staked into the damp soil some fifteen years before. They were all alike, with the same twist to the North about ten feet up, and none keeping an unsplit trunk fifteen feet above the ground, unpollarded though they were. But they were all cuttings from another tree, some hundred yards up the brook. Old Foxton had planted them for the leaf, which made a passable fodder, but also in some trial to placate the original tree, or so he said.
‘Come to the willow row already, Father. A week, you said.’ Young Foxton couldn’t help but crow. ‘We’ll have the brook clear before Sunday.’
Old Foxton shook his head. ‘And you’ll be the one to praise patience! Those willows shouldn’t be misjudged. Roots like cable running into the water. I cut that old willow down over and over, and he wouldn’t be stopped until I cut out the very lowest limb. Rotted then. More alive than you or I, those trees.’
The three men were struggling with the willows from then on. Even though the trees were young, as Old Foxton had said, they had the roots of much larger trees, and a saw had to be brought to rasp away at them underwater. The billhook would strip the lithe branches but only succeed in releasing an inner, vicious springiness. Each of the men were covered in scratches and cuts when they returned to the farm up the hill. The best axe was brought back blunt from those indomitable skins.
Young Foxton blamed his parent. ‘Well, did you anger that tree, Father? I’ll swear those cuttings bear a grudge against me.’
‘Willow is tough, boy. The moving water only toughens it. They gather all the strength of the water and the wind into their knots and hearts. What did you expect? Nothing wants to be cut back.’
One of the cuttings had a limb right across the stream. Alone among its siblings it had seemed to have scorned the sky and preferred sheer contrariness. Even after a few years’ growth the branch was thick and twisted.
Young Foxton was sure that if they could take it off, the hay barge would go clear up to the long pasture uninhibited. He worked hard the fifth day, and kept Buck and Milton with him until the evening star was brighter than the sun.
‘Hand up the saw, Buck,’ he said. ‘And we’ll tell the old man that his job’s done, even before those cows have calved.’
It took the saw to bite into the bark, but the teeth squealed when they started into the living wood. Then the axe, chipping, chipping, pale shreds of wood floating slowly downstream beside the barge. The saw again, and sweat rose on the farmer’s face.
It was hard to see what had been done and what was left to do in the early night, beneath the shadow of those long leaves. He put his weight against the bough to test it, and before he knew his feet had slipped off the mud-layered root beneath him, falling backwards. With a crack the branch sheared off, not where it had been cut and hacked, but right at the trunk and the two fell together into the stream. His head bounced on the hardness of the root and eyes closed as the water covered over him.
Try as they might, the two men floundering in the dark shadows could not lift the branch off from him. Somehow it had caught in the tangle underwater and he was held down. By the time they had cut and wrenched it out, he was a heavy, sodden mass like a still-born calf, and that was how he was taken back up to his father by the hearth.
I wrote this in 2011. I wanted something a bit spooky – and maybe it’s in imitation of Lawrence, too – but I always intended it to fill the third space in my Ghost Story Trio.
The Cooking Stove
“Ai, Sarah! Come and fetch wood.”
“Wait just there, Mama. My son Benjamin is writing in his schoolbook. I want to see him writing.”
“Sarah, Sarah. It is a long walk, we will not wait until he is done.”
“Ooh, Mama, I am coming. Every day! Every day we must go to fetch more wood, go to fetch water, go to the goats, go to the market. My life is a chain.”
Sarah got up from beside her house and picked up the strap from the raw wood hook in the fence. She did not run – you would never see her run, or any of the women there – she took her long strides and caught up with the other women, chattering on the path. It was morning and not yet hot.
“Your husband is away long, Cindy. He will have to give you such a present when he gets back.”
“Aha! I know what I would like from my husband, oh yes. I have been waiting for him!”
The path was dusty, lined and cracked liked Mama’s forehead. She was the eldest of the women there, gaunt and straight like a Sudanese, but copper-coloured like the dirt. She strode along, her head covered with a bright scarf that flashed, her dark eyes watching the women, and flashing.
“Ai, Cindy. You do not want too big a present from that man. He has given you too many babies already.” Mama clicked between her teeth.
“I know how to have my man,” Cindy giggled, “And no more babies. I am not a girl anymore.”
They carried on, teasing, smiling, and then came to the scrubby trees. There was still a lot of wood on the ground. They fanned out, still calling out, stacking the bleached wood, knocking off remnants of bark, making their own piles. From above it might have looked like the uncurling of fingers on a hand, even, balanced.
Sarah leant over and grasped a forked limb. A lizard dashed out from beneath it, over her foot, away. “I am just like that lizard,” she said. “There is no time.”
“Why do you say there is no time?” said Mama, who was collecting small pieces beneath an acacia. “There is just enough time for all of us.”
“If I was not collecting wood I would be helping my son with his writing. I would be answering his questions. I would be taking the melons to the shop. We have all those melons and they will not stay fresh. It would be better to sell them to Mr Funassu, and then I could buy another book for my Benjamin.”
“But you have to collect wood,” said Mama, “Or you cannot cook food for him.”
“Yes,” said Sarah. “I have to collect wood.” She picked up her bundle by the strap, and raised it against her back. “I have to.”
Sarah came walking back from Mr Funassu’s shop. It was an hour there, an hour back. She did not have a clock that told her this. She knew it from the number of steps she had walked. She was taut inside, guilty for the time she had spent, anxious. And carrying a bundle that was not shaped like a book. She hurried into her house and sat down by her fireplace.
Cindy appeared at the open door. “What have you bought from Mr Funassu, Sarah? What have you found?”
Sarah looked around. “It is a cooking stove. Mr Funassu showed it to me. It does not smoke like this fire. It will not sting my eyes with the smoke. Mrs Funassu has one, and she cooks on it every day.”
The cooking stove was a round drum, about eighteen inches high, somewhat battered and plainly well-used. It had an opening in the side, an open top and a folding frame.
“How can you cook with that? It is too small for the fire!”
Sarah shook her head. “No, it is not too small. It keeps the fire close together.”
“You spent money on it, but you did not need to spend any money on having a fire. Your fireplace is already there.”
“Wait and see.”
Mama came to see later that evening. Sarah was sitting by her stove, stirring the porridge in the pan. She lifted the cup through the grain, through the water, slap, slap. The flames climbed around the sides of the pan.
“Ai, it is dark in here! You have hidden your fire in a can!”
Sarah didn’t answer. She put down the enamel cup and experimentally pushed the pieces of wood deeper into the opening. They didn’t move far. The porridge was cooking quickly. The fire normally needed feeding more than she or her son.
“How can the fire breathe in that stove?” asked Mama scornfully. “He is trapped in there.”
Sarah smiled. “The fire must do as I say now. He must not make all this smoke in my house. It makes me cough. It hurts all our eyes. He is my fire, so he will stay in the stove if I tell him to.”
Mama snorted and left.
She heard the noise as Birthday came back with the goats. They pattered and butted their way through the gate and into the yard around the little round house. She heard his familiar whistle and smiled, knowing she would see his lopsided smile very soon… in a moment!
He came through the door, his bright eyes shining. His mouth seemed to laugh whenever it opened. His missing teeth might have been knocked out by the force of so much good humour. Sarah knew she was a lucky woman with a man who smiled and meant his smile.
“Ohoho! What is this? What has my Sarah bought here? A cooking stove, they told me. Ohoho. My wise wife is thinking of her house.”
When Birthday was there, Sarah did not need to worry what the other women thought. She did not feel bad for thinking differently, or having wishes, or wanting to play with her boy.
The others could still look at her with their scornful eyes, but she had Birthday’s bright eyes and his lopsided, gappy smile.
“Here, my Birthday. Eat and be warm in your belly.” She passed him a tin plate of porridge. He ate it slowly today. Normally he ate quickly. He scooped it up and seemd to be thinking.
“I think right now Benjamin is walking along the path from school,” he said. “I think he is playing with the other boys and he is happy to be coming home.”
“He is a good son,” she said.
“Yeass. Maybe he will do well at school. Then he will be a teacher or a lawyer and tell people what is right to do and make judgements in the city. He cannot spend all his time looking after goats, like me.”
“We have to do our best.”
“Oh yeass. But you are working harder than all the other women, Sarah. You are cleaning and milking and growing and fetching water and wood.”
“Benjamin is big enough to fetch the water now.”
“So he must do his part. But our lives are full of things to do and we cannot just help him to grow up his own way. I want him to have something better, you know?”
She smiled and drew close to him. This was why they had come together. They had more in common than need and desire. They had some living spark of hope. They knew other people had things better.
“Ai, Sarah! Come and fetch wood.”
Sarah looked up from the patch she was weaving for her dress. Mama and the women were waiting on the path. But then she looked at her stack of wood. She had not used half of it. She did not need to fetch wood.
“I am not coming, Mama. You can all go.”
“You are not coming? Does your fire in a can not need wood?”
“I have enough wood.”
Mama called again. “Then I suppose you can just stay and rest, can’t you?”
“Rest? Ai, no! There is so much I want to do!” She leapt up. Now she had time…
I wrote this as an exercise after watching a TED talk about providing simple cooking stoves for rural households in Africa. Or maybe it was a National Geographic article? I don’t remember – there’s quite a lot on the internet about these initiatives.