Page 65 - Raffles09_March2022

She crossed the western border into a refugee camp. There she kept to herself and was left alone. She was hardly the only person with facial burns but she knew her scarring was uniquely disturbing: the structure of her face was preserved so it wasn’t until people came closer that they froze at the intestinal slickness of the skin, its off translucence, the way it ever so slightly distended her orifices.
Sooner or later someone would find her out. Tens of thousands of refugees here, more coming every day, everyone cramming ever closer. And they’d be right to blame her. But until she was discovered, there was a small television box set up a couple of shelters across and for hours on end she would transfix herself with the oblique slice of screen she could see. Now she understood why their leadership had bade them find and dump these boxes immediately upon taking a city: their magic was strong – the bright, loony graphics and disembodied music, the whiplashed transitions between shows and advertisements and news. The world was fragmented, was one non-sequitur after another – TV echoed that deep truth in her – you were spellbound, and nothing was at stake. Whatever the world was, TV was not it. Everything in it was recognisable and wrong. But while you watched TV, neither were you of the world, and it was this, perhaps, that she liked best.
And the faces. The faces of actresses, especially the ones on the local soap opera. Enduring every writerly indignation with healthy, flawless, fair skin. Was she really so shallow? To despise any fixation on looks while she possessed them, only to herself obsess over them once they were ruined? No matter: she went on consuming these TV faces, and hiding her own, and time passed. When an offer of American resettlement arrived, she was surprised by her sense of vestigial loyalty to A, and rejected it. As though by way of reward, an offer arrived from Australia a week later. This offer she accepted.
And instantaneously, as though to rebalance her fortune, the moment she’d been awaiting arrived. Her view of the TV was blocked by bodies; a crowd seemed to be converging at her shelter. They shaped themselves around her like poured cement, and a man detached himself from it, holding between his fists a coil of fencing wire. So this was how it would happen. One moment you were witnessing a dying matriarch confessing to her daughter, who was also her nemesis, that she was a love child from a secret affair, whom she had all her life only pretended to hate in order to safeguard her from her husband’s wrath, and the next you were facing your own apotheosis, cheap melodrama reverberating in your skull. She closed her eyes. The crowd, which had been restive, was now quiet. All the
myths agreed: it was difficult, at the last, for any mortal to kill a monster. She heard, in the dramatic silence, the man approach; and she wondered whom he had lost, and whether by her hand. Keeping her eyes closed, she lifted her face, elongated her neck. Waited. Whether it was fast or slow depended, she knew, on her. But then an intense curiosity overcame her. She opened her eyes, and looked – she wanted to see, she’d always wanted to see! – and she saw, with terrible rightness, that the man standing before her was her eldest brother. The change in her face distorted his. Shocked by strength of feeling, she flinched.
“No,” he muttered. He seemed to sag in his body for a moment. Then, swivelling to take in the crowd, he raised his voice: “This isn’t her. Look at her! This is the fearless demon?”
An unease ran through the crowd, urging it both forward and back.
“Stop!” a voice cried out. “I know this girl – she helped at my hospital!”
What looked like pity on her brother’s face reminded her of her own face, its abomination. She bowed her head. She heard the crowd disperse. Then she changed her mind and looked up, but by then it was too late, he had gone. She never saw him again.
She told this story only once, to her future husband, and he’d proclaimed how lucky she’d been that her brother had recognised her. But she knew he hadn’t. Because he’d spared her.
***
As soon as she was deposited in the outer suburb of Springvale in Melbourne, Australia, she knew she had to move. It was where all her countryfolk settled, alongside refugees from the country their country was currently at war with, who outnumbered them. She watched them all busily recreating their homelands, as though the point of migration was to replicate what had been left behind, as though the point of the present was to replicate the past – as though nothing about how they had lived might have had anything to do with why they had fled.
On the flight out, the pressure against her spine, her eardrums, the slow squeeze on her breathing, all contributed to the sense that she was phasing into a new state. The engine roar shut out thought. It was more than she deserved. When the plane juddered, others inhaled and cried out – they were all first-time flyers – but her body craved each gouge of turbulence, welcomed it. The window was a god’s portal: all that
− EMOTION −
RAFFLES MAGAZINE 63