samanth0r:u noticed any new symptoms lately?
scar: hard to tell hey, feel ancient anyway
samanth0r: ur starting to drift more out there, u oldtimers r a nightmare.. no security
scar: shit, yeh
samanth0r: got teh usual apps n scripts running, ur still gettin away
scar: :/
samanth0r: think u can still get out here, stagger round cyberspace a little? need to round up ur clones man, u need to be with me
scar: o.0 just lemme no when, brat
samanth0r: need ur b0dy here also scar
scar: wtf?
samanth0r: hard to explain, u have to trust me yeh
scar: when, how long?
samanth0r: asap, dunno
scar: fok. ok. lemme spk to h + see what i can do, will msg u asap
samanth0r: good.1 more thing
scar: ?
samanth0r: bring blue’s local data
scar: ok, y?
samanth0r: need it, will show u here
Scar had prowled the Quarter Online perimeter often enough, bringing her data and Helen’s inside. Filtered eyefeeds and fast visits kept her intolerance of purple and (increasingly) green more or less in check, she was prone to nausea and headaches afterwards though.
Blue’s old iMac’s login screen shuddered as Scar entered passwords that didn’t work. She was on the verge of demanding software to crack it from Veto, when she idly entered “indigogirl” and the login relaxed and allowed her access. 400 gigs on to a flash and they were good to go.
That Being Something Other
A week later, a reluctant Scar took the Shuriken to Tokyo again, with Helen. By the time they’d landed and made their way to Sam and Veto’s cramped apartment, Scar had had more than enough of sophisticated cutting edge civilisation and swore she’d never travel again. Too many people, buildings that bled into the guy, too many lights, too many words, too much of everything.
The apartment didn’t look all that different from Sam’s cubicle back home; cables everywhere, terminals, boxes, peeling feminist stickers and strange little character toys in vinyl. And books everywhere – the one thing in the world that, it seemed, would never go successfully digital. It was reassuring somehow. Veto was off consulting somewhere, troubleshooting some corporation’s firewall. Sam seemed edgy, but confident; Scar guessed Africa had probably lost her to Tokyo’s cutting edge candy lifestyle.
“So, what gives?” Scar asked Sam, once they’d all settled over green tea and a restricted view of skyscrapers. Sam looked solemn and began to explain, “There’s something really weird going on man. Cyberspace … well obviously it’s getting a whole bunch fuller and stuff looks more solid too.” Scar and Helen nodded, they’d seen it, it was a logical progression. “Thing is, things are getting, like, animated or something. There’s more than drift going on out there. Everybody’s watching it, nobody knows what the hell is causing it or what to do about it. It’s like … I dunno, evolution.” “Why are you so concerned?” asked Helen and Sam said quickly, urgently, “It’s not human-coded. Some parts of cyberspace now, it’s like being in a freaking 80’s arcade game and it doesn’t feel right.” She looked at Scar, “What I said about your data, it’s happened to a few people, not many, but it’s growing. There’s animation, little … things … out there. I’m starting to see personality; you in different moods and it is fucking bizarre.” As Scar and Helen’s eyes widened further, she went on, “I can’t interact with any of them though, I think you have to be there and I think we need Helen. Veto too, she’s back tomorrow and her grandfather will come and take care of the body stuff while we’re jacked.”
Sam showed them both stills of amoeboid blue shapes against curving gridlines and gibson stacks, then she said, “It get more weird,” and showed them similar shapes in what looked like rooms without windows. Then she showed them film of one shape in a square, bouncing madly, erratically, angrily off the surfaces around it. “I couldn’t get sound,” said Sam, “but that motherfucker has your voice and it swears a lot.” Scar wasn’t sure whether to laugh or shit herself. samanth0r logged her in to insecure.org and left her to read pages and pages of discussion about the phenomenon; a thousand words into the process and it was clear that nobody knew what the hell was going on. “I’m the lab rat here,” muttered Scar, “the guinea freaking pig, the beagle of cyberspace.”
It was good to see Veto and her grandfather the following day. Sam and Veto were talking about getting married in Vegas, which fucked up Scars no travel resolution somewhat. No ways would she miss a drive-thru wedding complete with Elvis impersonators.
Tokyo tech, which seemed to evolve visibly, supplied Scar and Helen with full-face helmet style feeds – the Tokyo Two, of course, just plugged in direct. They’d have two-way comms with Grandfather Miyagi and each other when they were jacked in. The four of them ported straight in to what looked like an abandoned and half-built zone and Scar met her fragments. The circled through the zone and as they moved, amoeboid blue things moved to Scar as if she were magnetic. They shifted gently against her and Scar swore she could here a strange and low hum from them. The grumpy one Sam had talked about was quiet when it arrived, but it vibrated in a way the others didn’t.
eyefeed_log:
Samanth0r: never seen em this still
Vet0: catch with code
As Scar kept as still as possible, the others wove code around her … her whats? Aspects? Avatars? There was a problem.
Vet0: edge bleed. can’t get teh code round the things without coding round scar
Samanth0r: >_> we code her?
Vet0: might have to
Helen: can she get out, jack out with that stuff?
There was a very long and very pregnant pause, which ultimately gave birth to some more ideas.
Scar: can u guys get more info now? from teh blue thingies?
Samanth0r: trying
Helen: ok. screenshot it, video it, then we’re out. we gotta talk man.
Vet0: recording on all feeds now. ten and then flip.
*FLIP*
“Well,” said Vet0 once they were all out, “don’t think anyone’s seen that happen before. Surely this’ll help. I think we gotta look at it and then maybe upload it to insecure.” “Oh great,” said Scar, “my safety’s being taken care of by neurotics.” Samanth0r rolled her eyes. They watched the playbacks from all four feeds in silence. Scar watched herself being nuzzled by the blue things and felt … well, pretty calm really. it really did feel like those things were part of her somehow. The other three were looking a little distressed though. “There’s, like no edges between you right there … complete bleed,” said Veto.
“Theory,” said Sam, “they’re part of Scar and integration would fix this.” She looked at the screens again. “Theory,” she repeated, “they’re B-movie evil and would suck Scar’s brains right out.” “Oh thanks a lot,” said Scar and they all fell into silence again. “Good or bad,” said grandfather, “they are part of Scar.” Scar wondered when he was going to start calling her grasshopper.
Moodily they spent the evening slowly sucking on lager with strange names and noodles with strange shapes and they threw the theories around like a game of Pong. Scar felt like a specimen on a petri dish and didn’t like it at all. Sam uploaded the clip to insecure and then sat refreshing the board. It didn’t take long to get responses, but they weren’t remotely helpful at first. There were a lot of o.0 emoticons.
“Why’d you need Blue’s data?” asked Scar and Sam slapped her own forehead gently, “Yeah, that,” she said. “That is another thing we have to take care of, but I think we have to sort you out first. I need to get Blue locked down out there and I need the data to get the whole picture, or as whole as I can anyway. I keep finding stuff I’m not sure about. I can handle it though, but it’ll have to wait.” Scar looked at Sam, “Listen – Helen can help you with that stuff, I think she knows stuff nobody else does. You’d better talk to her Sam.” Sam agreed and turned back to the screen.
“Aha!”
The message was terse and had been posted seconds before. Sam opened another programme, inputted strings of who knew what and within seconds, was talking to the poster, a geek called aBuri. The screen scrolled interminably, loaded with pages and pages of code that made no sense to Scar at all. Sam, Veto and Helen, however, were looking startled and enlightened. “WHAT?” growled Scar the specimen, from the bleak surface of her petri dish.
“It’s your genetic code, babe,” said Helen eventually, “and it’s the same from the samples before you interacted with the blues.” “So why the hell didn’t anybody recognise it?” demanded Scar. “Encryption,” said Veto, “like, military grade encryption we don’t have the key too and aBuri shouldn’t either.”
“Biotech.” muttered Sam suddenly. “Normally, you jack in and the data you come out with, well that’s stored in your feed, right?” “Right,” said Scar, feeling hollow. “So this data’s like … lost code … fragments. Part of you. We need to get those blue things out of the cyberwaste and back into your brain yo.” Scar stared at the port bored into Sam’s skull and Sam nodded. “Yup, it’s time for you to droid up.”
Helen held Scar close while the Seroquel slowly, fluffily hit her over the head and she slipped into sleep. Clinic and institution flashbacks disturbed her all night, made her sweat and whimper. What the hell was the world coming to? It was insane.
While Sam and Veto tested code all day the next day, Helen and Scar went to a biotech lab. Anaesthetic, a drill, an insertion. Scar came round and promptly fainted. When she woke up, Helen told her 48 hours had passed. She waited for the numbness to pass, trying not to probe at the new hold in her skull with her fingers. Helen threatened to get her one of those plastic collars they use on dogs to stop them licking.
She only jacked in for a few minutes the next time. Apart from the headache, it was relatively alright, she supposed. And the nausea. And the blurring of vision. She went on to a kind of a rehab routine – gentle exercise, plain food and increasing time in cyberspace. As the periods lengthened, the blues began to find her, rest against her. Scar found that it actually made her feel better and the headaches faded with the rest of the symptoms. Sam, highly amused by then, found that when she routed R.E.M songs into Scar’s feed while she was with the blues, they seemed to sleep, their humming falling into a low and droning harmony.
And that’s how they did it in the end. Sam mixed the R.E.M songs she found dreariest, to lull the blues while Scar and Helen jacked in with Veto. Motionless, Scar and her blues rested while the other two coded loops and circles around them. Scar felt sleepy, quiet. Time passed and she lost track of how many songs had played. She didn’t notice when Veto and Helen stopped coding, she didn’t notice the volume on the music fade and she wasn’t aware of the scrutiny was under. There was a film of blue all around her, it made her feel incredibly serene. The only thought she remembered afterwards, was her attempts to put hex codes on the blue, while the colour shifted subtly around her.
They flipped and Scar passed out yet again. By the time she came round, everybody was coding furiously, resolving amoeboid shapes all over cyberspace, trying to work out how to sort it all long term. There just didn’t seem to be many boundaries between cyberspace and meatspace anymore. The consensus was that it wasn’t safe for Scar out there anymore. She could let skin grow around the port in her cranium with a little more biotech help, her friends could clean up whatever was left of her out there, get it safely into her stack and hopefully there wouldn’t be anymore bleed, any more little lost blue things moping around the place.
There was a time when the prospect of no cyberspace would have horrified Scar, but she felt older, not necessarily wiser at all, but quite content to hang out in meatspace. She’d live on there in a way, being a test case, a case study for the whole iDisease thing. It became clearer and clearer – net access would have to alter, if there was any hope of controlling the epidemic.
There seemed to be little hope actually, the tech was just too available, too widespread. Telling people not to jack in for fear of iDisease was like telling people not to have sex because of HIV; they’d have to find another way, or watch the boundaries blur further.
Unsent Letters
Scar revived an old project and began writing letters she had no intention of sending. She wrote to her dead parents, who obviously wouldn’t get the letter even if she did send it. She wrote to Nina, her heart breaking for the past. She wrote a blanket apology to every woman she ever went out with and a heartfelt thank you elegy to Helen.
The world felt autistic; a desaturated sky, oversaturated cityscapes, a sense of not being able to communicate, not being able to keep up and never, ever fitting in.
Blue Sky Coding
In the meantime, Helen and Scar had decided not to leave Japan at least until they’d got Blue’s data secured – but who the hell was Blue? the more they probed her data, the more confusing it became. Helen, who’d known her longer than anyone, pored over the local data, with deepening frown lines. She mapped out a life in words and code and waited for shapes to appear. After a particularly long day, she threw her hands up and asked Scar to read through it all.
Scar was surprised at how much sense it made to her, until she realised that it was like reading her own life story, set in a very slightly different time. She began to wish she’d experienced as much of the twentieth century as Blue had. Blue had been a pretty clichéd dyke in a time when those clichés meant more than choice. The whole thing was kind of sad and rather beautiful.
Blue had been born well out of the urban zone, in the heart of the Karoo in a tiny and fairly forgotten town. Scar read between lines and then started typing between them; guesses at a life she imagined would be relatively accurate. She’d been born to parents who didn’t appear to understand her, or make much effort to do so. She’d gone to school locally and fallen in love with books, information and her English Literature teacher, all at once. There wasn’t a lot of money and when she got out of school, she ran the family farm while her parents aged and despaired of her ever marrying a nice farm boy and increasing the size of their land and giving them grandchildren.
Stashed on Blue’s disk had been love letters which made Helen cry when she read them. They made Scar scowl, which was really just another way of weeping. It was all so very poignant, so very doomed. Blue had fallen for a local women, only referred to as “Mich” in the data. Michelle? The stats Helen had pulled for baby names of the era suggested that was by far the likeliest possibility. Blue was desperate to move to the city, to Generika, which in those days, held all kinds of freedoms for queers that rural areas probably never ever would. Mich seemed unable to make the necessary break. A case of fear exceeding love, thought Scar and sighed.
When Mich married a local boy, Blue left for the city and as far as anybody knows, never had contact with her parents again. Or Mich. A familiar depression settled around Scar like a shroud as she read. Was humanity destined to be eternally fuckwitted? Probably.
In the city, things had improved for Blue. She’d found work, technology and lesbians. The world felt far more free. She discovered a lesbian bar, Joan Armatrading and Martina Navratilova and she felt a little less like a freak. She had a succession of relationships, but hadn’t kept any letters, if there were any. Helen had rescued chatlogs from various servers though and they painted a picture that was completely familiar to Scar. Hook-ups, break-ups, make-ups … a personal pantheon of dyke drama that made Scar roll her own eyes in sympathy and very definite empathy. Life in the crush zone …
Once the laws had changed and the queers were in their ghetto, data was tougher to source. Helen had managed to peel layers of anonymity to reveal Blue’s activism, but nothing of her personal life or loves. As far as anyone could tell, Blue had flown solo ever since.
As Helen read through Scar’s assumptions and guesses, she was able to scout further, reclaim more data. There was enough, it seemed, to put Blue to rest, there was just one gaping void that needed, perhaps, to be lit. Mich.
“If we leave this to Sam,” said Helen, “go home and go after Mich, then the story’s done.” Scar nodded. “See you in Vegas next year?” asked sam as she hugged Scar goodbye at Narita. “You can bet your skinny arse,” said Scar, fighting tears. No cyberspace meant no Sam and she’d miss her, to put it mildly. And off they went, back to Africa, back to Generika, back home.
Exactly how many stories would never be told, because people had to hide?
Wide Blue Yonder
In the Karoo, everything felt far away and the sky was still blue, unlike Generika’s grey dome. The farm where Blue had grown up was haunted only by a few cranes now. Flat, dry and stretching out to a lone koppie with a few aloes, Helen and Scar stood quietly on the dirt road by rusted gate posts. It was hard to imagine Blue there; her hard, rugged edges would have fit in, but not her hairstyle – not combined with her gender anyway.
The school was long gone, just more flatness, some bleached shells of buildings and only the soccer field still in use. There weren’t any photographs of Blue as a kid at all, so Scar pictured herself there, boyish, ill-fitting, lost. There were few locals around and those they found had no recollection of Blue’s family, they were all too new or too lost themselves, in that despairing poverty, alcoholism, isolation. How do people still live out here, they wondered. Such a brutal existence.
They photographed everything, filed it, made notes nonetheless. This part of her world may have forgotten Blue, so they’d just build the connections back themselves. Every broken windmill and rusted barbed wire fence, the rocks, the sky, the brittle, yellow grass – it was all a part of her.
In the middle of this startling backdrop, Sam mailed a file. She’d looped the humming of Scar’s blue things, the audible swearing of the angry blue thing and a backtrack of Scar’s breathing while the coding was done. It was the most bizarre thing to listen to while the sun crashed into the earth the way it does in Africa and the stars came out, closer than anywhere else against a soft navy sky.
Eating fragrant Karoo lamb that night, wild with the stunted plants of the semi desert, Scar thought a person could be happy out there if they didn’t have to integrate too much. Maybe there weren’t even enough people left to have to integrate these days; the Karoo was becoming renowned for being where the freaks washed up, the ones too freaky even to make it in the cities. There were rumours of towns far out, full of queers and artists. Funny how those two species seemed to overlap and hang together. Like canaries down mine shafts, the freaks would creep quietly into barren lands and live well until the rest of society noticed and took over.
Where was Mich though? There just weren’t enough physical traces of a human past here to trace her. The Karoo had eroded the details right off everything, leaving only the husks of the old town.
Hunting a Haunting
Train home, to the edge of the city, then a shuttle or three back to the dock. Helen surfed government records from the area, property deeds, birth certificates, marriages, deaths. Farming boomtime back then, there was a shitload of data to wade through and filter, but it didn’t take Helen very long to generate a handful of matches; a handful of Michelles and Micheles and a Michaela.
She tossed their identities out into the net and then filtered even more results. Two dead Michelles, one in the city, a Michele in Canada and no Michaela whatsoever. Two people to investigate and one to find. Helen emailed the canadian Michelle, asking her if she’d known a tomboyish girl back in the Karoo, called Hester. Hester – a name that didn’t fit Blue any more than her town had, it was almost unbelievable. Scar thought about her own name and sympathised again. Michele was about the right age, they waited and held thumbs, hoping.
Scar took a trip into the business hub to scope out the city Michelle, who owned a company there. She was tall, efficient looking and didn’t seem impressed to be accosted by Scar as she exited the building, talking furiously into her wristfeed. She stopped though, as soon as Scar mentioned her corner of the Karoo. “Hester Pretorius,” she said, “yes I went to school with her and yes, everybody was called Michelle that year, almost!” Over coffee in a café nearby, Scar learned a little more. “Ja no, that was a scandal back then, old Hester, shame,” as she talked about the past, her accent grew warmer and harder. “Times were changing then, but never quick enough for her, never. It wasn’t enough she turned into a man right in front of us, but then that trouble with the …” her voice trailed off and Scar raised her brows questioningly. “Almost said the wrong word,” she said, “how our history scars us. Listen, it’s ancient history. You say Hester’s dead now; her parents died long ago. It’s a damn sad story, you should leave it alone.” And with that, she activated her wristfeed again and strode off, heels clipping the sidewalk in a way the sidewalk would certainly know who was boss.
She replayed the conversation for Helen from her own wristfeed later and Helen showed her the email from Canada. “What would the wrong word be for someone like that, from that place?” muttered Helen, while Scar read.
Dear Helen,
What a blast from the past, I hardly ever even think of the old place these days, life is so different here, so much better. I knew your friend; everyone knew everyone back there, it was that kind of little place.
I am not Mich. I’m not even sure I should be telling you this, I don’t like thinking about it all again. I think the heartbreak killed Mr and Mrs Pretorius, they just faded away somehow, after it all.
Michaela Malgas is Mich.
I’m sorry, I’m not prepared to discuss this any further.
M
“Malgas,” said Scar, “names were racially divided back then, that’d explain the ‘wrong word’ thing.” Helen frowned, “Racist, homophobic fuckers,” she said, in uncharacteristic irritation.
First port of call – Google:
“Michaela Malgas”
*SEARCH*
0 Results for “Michaela Malgas” – did you mean Michael Malgas?
“No, you gender-impaired monolith,” cursed Helen, “she could have got married, changed her name … she did get married dammit, to a farmer … but who and how the hell are we going to find out?” Scar was pensive, “Isn’t Michael Malgas that old artist dude?” she asked, “The guy who made his name painting the outside of the Brown Ghetto walls … blue?!” It’s not often you can hear an exclamation mark and a question mark, but they were audible then. Helen clicked on the link and got a quarter of a million results. Filtering it using “blue” hardly reduced the number, but “Karoo” and “Hester” paid off well.
The biographical stuff told a harsh tale, of an impoverished childhood, an unspecified scandal, an abusive marriage and an escape into the city, into art, into blue, away from Blue and into a whole new gender. Michaela had become Michael as soon as he fled his marriage and went to the city. It happened surgically a few years after that, in Japan, where he was already a star. There was only one overt reference to Hester/Blue and it was, unexpectedly, a poem.
hester
beautiful boy, desert star, i
got lost in your constellation
painted myself blue, away from you,
desaturated, digitised, carved my skin
became more you than you
could ever be
betrayed me
lost you
*mm*
“Wrong race,” said Helen, frowning mightily, “wrong time, then wrong gender. Jesus.” “Terrible poem,” remarked Scar, “must have been a lesbian when he wrote it.” Helen frowned again, “Could you just once,” she muttered, “for once in your life, try a little sensitivity.” Scar shrugged apologetically, “Those poor bastards nutshelled a lot of their century eh?”
That was when Helen really started putting the thumbscrews on to me about writing shit down. I shrugged her off habitually and compulsively; there were more than enough damn words in the world, right? When it came to Blue’s story though, my resistance melted away like … like stuff that melts. Ice in a heatwave. Whatever. Blue’s story deserves its own novel, screenplay, film, everything. It’s huge. It feels too big to write properly sometimes.
That *mm* at the end of the poem was the first record they found of what turned into Michael Malgas’ logo, adorning his gallery in the city, his website and all of his work from then on. From enfant terrible to wise old man of the art scene, his latest work was “Mickey Malgas,” a distorted rendition of the Disney icon, referencing Andy Warhol in the quad prints in each luminous eyeball and set against a background of high-gloss, hi-res blue M&M’s. Witty as ever, thought Scar, but perhaps a tad over-synthesised. Clicking back through his body of work (a phrase that never failed to make Scar feel as if she were at a catholic mass), there was a clear progression from an artist completely shunned by society, to one who was in the throes of hauling out as many of its icons as possible and jamming them almost beyond recognition. Blue featured, always, but from the matt tones of his street start, it had morphed into a violent shade, oozing acid and dislocation.
He’d gone global long ago and lived in New York these days. Helen’s attempts at subtle emails were ignored. A bolder email mentioning Hester by her full name got no response either. “He’s probably got minions,” said Scar, “hell, that dude’s so huge, his minions probably have minions.” Helen gave up emailing, kept Michael Malgas firmly on her radar and got on with life.
And she nagged me about writing. A lot. I made a few desultory attempts back then and kept giving up. I’ve always been lazy. If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned reader comments and stuff in a while, it’s because this last piece of writing happened all in one go. Still well behind target and panicking gently, it’s lunch time, for those that do lunch and I have done over 5 000 words. Because that’s how I roll. Also, Helen’s standing behind me with a sjambok. OK I’m kidding, but only about the actual sjambok, she might as well be. Thank God. If it wasn’t for her … anyway.
We Gots Our Freak On
Blue’s story inspired both Helen and Scar to start tracking their own histories. Scar didn’t get any further than dead parents and the estranged Nina. Helen fared slightly better and started gentle communication with her mother on the web. They talked of meeting, perhaps, one day. Helen’s mother wrote that she loved her and something hard inside her seemed to soften, some old wound healed a little.
Encouraged, Sam contacted her parents too, but was told she was no longer a part of the family and would she please disappear. Her brother contacted her independently, demanding a wedding invitation. You win some, you lose some. Veto’s family were pretty amazing, maybe because Japan was so much more advanced, who knew. They’d pretty much adopted Sam from the word go and were taking an extreme interest in the wedding arrangements. Seemed like it was going to be the party of the year if they had anything to do with it.
Dear World,
This is the world the queers inherited …
We’re inconvenient and most of you won’t let us in unless we have money or a really great closet. Our families reject us, frequently, and if anybody at all tolerates us, we’re supposed to be grateful. We have to miss important stuff if society doesn’t want us there. We’re bullied at school and in South African townships, raped to cute us or just murdered to remove us. You keep changing laws about us, we’re always in a stream separate to human rights. It’s unjust, but as much as it changes with time, it never changes at heart. We’re firmly on the fringes, why won’t you just let us in?
Yours,
(in rage and pain)
Scar
Veto’s family would be there at the wedding, bearing gifts and smiles. Sam’s brother would be there and everybody would be very aware of the absence of her parents. All the queers would be so used to the scenario, they’d overcompensate, embracing Sam like the most cloyingly loving family on earth and it still wouldn’t alleviate the greater rejection completely.
In the time it took to plan their wedding and get married, fifteen American states would have altered their laws and opinions on queer marriage. They’d be doing the legal ceremony in Japan first, to avoid their American marriage being invalid within weeks. It happened.
You could fake it and fit in, or you could celebrate your freakiness, but there seemed to be no escaping it. Freaks were freaks and the world kept on filing them away.
Moodily, Scar began another installation. Homage to Seti, in a way – two genderno figures, winged and embracing in a kiss so that you could hardly see where on figure left off and the other started, surrounded by an angry and faceless mob with pitchforks and fire. She called in the Marriage of Figurative and made it roughly, angrily, noisily. Everybody loathed it on sight, which pleased Scar. She did too. She wondered when the city would get as far as ordering her stuff cleared from the dock spaces, or just bulldozing it themselves.
She thought back to getting busted for being queer when she was, what, seventeen? “Gender Non-Conforming!” said a doctor in a very white quote, making angry notes. It went downhill from there. She was lucky she’d arrived there once they got bored with Electro-Convulsive Therapy. She knew a lot of people who’d been forced down that road and none of them had emerged unscathed. The pills were no fun either and Scar often wondered whether the pills had in fact overtaken and overwhelmed her personality years before. It was a tough life, it made you bitter, even while you never had to look far to see other people far worse off. Perspective could be a bastard too.
“Fly,” she said to the winged genderno people and she torched their wings and watched them melt back into shapeless lumps of unhappy metal.
Enter the Dyke Hag
“Jesus fuck you’re so emo!” said a voice behind her and Scar turned to find Ginger (remember her of dyke-hag chatlog fame?) standing behind her. She grinned, “What’s up, het?” she said and over McJunk burgers, caught up with each other.
I’d better explain here that Ginger’s possibly the weirdest hetero hero you’ll ever find in a queer “novel.” She doesn’t even have ginger hair either, she got the nickname from her addiction to ginger haired men and a promise to give up any children she ever bore who weren’t ginger haired. She’d been away at university for what seemed like a million years and in the way of university students, had always been liberal, friendly to the cause, a quiet defender of queer rights in her own way.
“Stop making morbid art,” she grouched, “and stop bloody well listening to Beck and Death Cab for Cutie and fucking well write the shit down!” Scar stared; when had this damn kid grown up to be quite so forceful? Ginger, a film student, wanted Blue’s story as a project, Scar was stoked. The kid had talent, even if she didn’t have any damn manners.
Scar started writing.
Ginger hung out with them a lot, gently rebuffing the advances of babydykes and bemoaning the lack of fine red haired men in the area. Helen suggested that perhaps the Queer Quarter wasn’t the best place to go fishing. Ginger muttered something about Prince Harry not answering her calls and hung around some more.
She started interviewing people for her film, reading through Helen’s data and Scar’s arthritic attempt and a novel. She explored the older areas of the ghetto, getting footage for the project. She asked Scar questions and then left her alone to write down the answers. She never learned any manners.
Dressed to the nines, she went off to a Michael Malgas’ gallery opening in the city one night. She got back with a slightly distended liver and Mr Malgas’ phone number. They sat around staring at it for the longest while before Helen picked up the phone.
Helen’s side of the conversation, transcribed from Ginger’s feed:
Mr Malgas?
No, you don’t know me, my name is … PLEASE don’t hang up, Dr Helen Cherry and we’ve been trying to get hold of you for ages.
From the gallery opening, a friend who is working on a film which involves you …
Yes, from Generika U … postgraduate, doctoral, yes …
No, not an art documentary, I know you’re in hundreds, it’s … well …
… Hester Pretorius. Blue.
Mr Malgas?
Are you there?
Sir?
Oh, good.
Sorry?
OK.
Click.
“He’ll see us,” she said, with a mixture of excitement and fear whirling across her face.
Meeting Michael Malgas
He had a day left before his return to New York and we went to the revolving Hotel to see him. Not so long before, that hotel was a downtown crackhouse, well past its heyday, but the gentrification of the area had turned it into a star again, in that timeless kitsch way so beloved of architects and designers. Late twentieth century minimale was the order of the day, even the curves seemed to have corners.
“Call me Michael,” he said quietly and so we did. He leaned forward and listened intently without a word, while Helen told him what we knew of Blue’s story and how it had ended. Ginger was recording and he didn’t stop her. We seemed to have tacit approval from then actually. With Ginger’s looks, approval wasn’t rare around her, it was extremely useful.
“You are exactly right,” he said to Helen, at the end, “the times were against us, my skin colour and hers and ultimately, my gender. It was doomed. It’s a trite story, no?” “No!” said Ginger, firmly and we all gazed at her. “Just because the theme’s as old as time doesn’t mean the story is,” she said, “in fact, the story’s not only of it’s time, your generation, but this one too. History’s just … spiralling!” Michael nodded.
“if you tell this story,” he warned, “it might paint an unhappy picture of mainstream society, but it paints an unhappy one of queers and transgenders too. I broke Blue’s heart, you know. We didn’t recover from each other, but we couldn’t be together either. Your world wants gender not to matter at all, but it mattered to both of us, it matters to me.”
“Isn’t that just the way it goes?” Helen chimed in, “I mean, some people do overcome gender totally, some don’t. Isn’t the ultimate message simply that all choices are valid that everyone’s entitled to be themselves, that …” she trailed off again.
“How do you put any kind of message out there without pissing off part of the LGBTQI community anyway? Just do it anyway and hope that more people will too and that more and more views will emerge. Sometimes you can’t speak for your whole tribe, just yourself, your friends.” That was Scar’s contribution and it made Michael pause and think.
“OK,” he said eventually. “You have my permission and within reason, my participation, although I must warn you I am a busy man.” He gave Ginger a frank look and said, “You keep the focus on Blue, not me, right?” and Ginger agreed. He looked at Scar then, “And you … you write with your heart, yes?” “Yes,” said Scar. Was there another way to write?
Ginger’s lack of manners turned into a blessing, as she pestered the world till she got its co-operation. Scar and Helen only ever saw her through the wrong end of cameras in those days, for interviews and whatever footage of them Ginger had decided was necessary to make what she thought would be the most mindblowing documentary ever. She spliced meatspace film and screenfeed from cyberspace, she fucked around with sound and vision like it had probably never been fucked with before. She was like John Cage on seriously good drugs.
She didn’t sleep much, her hair looked like hell and Helen nagged her about food daily while she was at the dockside. She frequently wasn’t though and she got damn thin, chasing memories in the Karoo and interviews in Tokyo and New York.
Scar tried not to get distracted by the detrimental effects of Evanescence on Seether HOW many years ago and buried herself in words every day, committed to doing the 50 000 words in 30 days NaNoWriMo thing. Curse it. She fought off doom, gloom and her own inattentive goldfish brain and the novel ate her head gradually. She wondered if she’d ever be the same again.
Blue’s Story
Hester Pretorius was born, roughly halfway into or out of the twentieth century, under a very pondering, ponderous sky indeed. The Karoo, South Africa’s unforgiving heart, has a reputation for a sky that is far more wide open than most of the minds burning in the fierce heat under it. Pioneers had no time for gentleness, no scope for it and the very thing that made one generation adventurous turned the next into heartless seeming survivors, who knew no other way. Hester’s town was no exception and so she was born, alien corn amongst the tough aloe. Her parents, Frederik and Elana, were kindly enough souls, but they didn’t understand this girl child who looked like a boy, who wasn’t interested in dolls, who fidgeting in church and seemed to be outcast at school. Hester couldn’t understand why she felt so different either.
It was a little school – a few whitewashed buildings cowering from that enormous sky, a little haven of old fashioned values, apartheid and Christian National Education. The pupils were as white as the walls, kids who weren’t white learned to read on the farms where their parents worked, if the farmer’s wife was that way inclined. Hester’s mother was indeed that way inclined and it was she who taught young Michaela Malgas to read while her parents kept the house clean and the sheep safe from black-backed jackal out in the veld. She didn’t have to stay on the farm, said Elana Pretorius to Michaela, if she learned English and sums and reading, maybe she could work in a shop one day.
Hester went to school, came home, did her chores and mostly ignored her homework, unless it was English Lit. Miss Neville, their English teacher, was really English, all the way from Durban and Hester never figured out how she landed up in the Karoo, but was grateful for it and would have done anything for her. After a few years in the wilderness, Miss Neville vanished coastwards and Hester’s world bleached a little more under the sun. Ostracised by her class full of Michelles, Hester felt stunted by loneliness. She’d try to fit in and keep failing and it bruised her a little bit harder each time.
Her mother’s innocent suggestion that Michaela help Hester study Shakespeare for school may have sealed both their fates. Elegantly, symbolically, fatefully, Hester’s class were reading Romeo and Juliet that year and, as Hester’s father said, understanding it fokol, man. Hester, always the outsider, feel in love with the poetry of it all and imagined herself as Romeo – lyrical, handsome and doomed. Michaela had her eye on the same role, however, and several inches taller than Hester by then, she won. She was Romeo to Hester’s Juliet all of the July school holidays. Hester hated being shorter and she hated being blerrie Juliet also, but she did enjoy Mich’s in character embraces very much indeed. A spark had been ignited and the two misfit fourteen year olds were pretty helpless in the face of it.
It seem unthinkable in the days of media-saturated acceleration, but those two stole kisses, wrote letters and hung out together for the next four years without their families ever becoming suspicious. Hester had always been strange and Mich, well, she wasn’t the right colour and so people took very little notice of Mich at all back then.
(Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?)
At eighteen, Hester dug her comfortable heels in, left school and refused to go to teacher training college or to go out with any of the local boys her mother pushed her towards. She stayed home and farmed, while Frederik slowly and inexorably got lost in a cloud of emphysema.
Innocently, unbelievably, Hester and Mich had never gone further than kisses at all and they were kissing when Elana found them. There was a silence heavier than mercury and then Elana said, “Get.In.Side.Now.” to Hester and to Mich, “Go.To.Your.Mother.” They did so and with alacrity, faster than laxatives. Elana pretorius wasn’t the kind of woman who told you to do anything more than once.
Michaela’s father beat her into submission, pure and simple, and having submitted, she found herself married to a local boy of her class and caste, not a farmer as Scar had supposed later, but a farm labourer. He was too old, too male and far too drunk to ever make Mich happy and he very quickly set about the business of ensuring the reverse. It was the stuff of early Irish novels, he fucked her, thrashed her and then demanded his dinner. And so life slouched on to bedlam.
With a train ticket north, to the teacher training college, Hester bade her family farewell for the last time ever, looked down at the battered suitcase in her hand – and boarded the southbound train instead, to Generika, which her parents had always referred to as Gomorrah, the syllables lurching from their tongues like the start of an avalanche.
Hester would probably have ended up doing construction work in a country without apartheid, but her white skin pushed her into clerical work and despite her manly appearance, Hester Pretorius soon became a secretary. She hated it with a passion, but was later grateful, because it did at least get her into computing early. By the time she became a mainframe programmer, she was known as Blue, a nickname given to her by her first real girlfriend. She hadn’t even realised she always dressed in blue until the girlfriend laughingly mentioned it. And so she became Blue, by name and nature as she’d say, for the rest of her life.
Back in the Karoo, Mich blurrily waited to be beaten to death, but fate intervened in a positive way she was completely unaccustomed too, and her cursed spouse drank himself to death. “Should have murdered you myself, fucker!” spat Mich and she left the Karoo. While Hester was finding herself and losing herself in Generika, getting high, sleeping with women, getting low again and moving between jobs and homes and women far too often, Mich was intensely involved in the revolution of her own tribe, the one she shared her skin colour with. There wasn’t time to be gay or be straight while that shit was going down and she had a history she preferred to forget anyway.
By the time the laws had all changed and then changed again, Mich had escaped to America, land of the free, as long as you had money and by then, Mich had been living as a man for years, conquering the art scene with a swagger – the new Warhol, they all said. Blue was living in the ghetto then, trying to programme the latest revolution.
And if she was no longer visibly on Mich’s radar, he was clearly on hers. They met again only once before Blue didn’t make it back out of cyberspace that day.
The conversation was recounted by a tearful Michael Malgas, on film.
Blue: I loved your poem, I keep it close. Your letters too.
Mich: The letters! I no longer have them, those days were bleak hey?
Blue: Fokken bleak ja.
Mich: Blue … even if we had stayed together or found each other again sooner, you know it wouldn’t change who I am …
Blue: I know Mich, I know.
At that point apparently, there was an incredibly long silence. You’ll see it in the film and the music will rip your heart right out with its bare hands at the same time. Ginger is as cruel as an artist needs to be to get it right.
Mich: There’s never been anyone but you.
Blue: And you ja, it’s just … the way it is.
Mich: It’s just the way it is.
Strange way to say I love you, perhaps, but that is what they were saying, without a hint of a speculation of a shadow of a doubt.
Redemption is expressed so neatly in Ginger’s notes, in Blue’s heroic acts, in Michael’s brave life and successes. The technology that had given Blue freedom, money and then a second freedom, killed her in the end. Michael lost the love that had ultimately made him free to work out who the hell he was.
If you’d known Blue, you wouldn’t have thought she died unhappy, hopefully she didn’t.
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