Candy Stripe Bags

by Greg Baines

They are in lines stretching back north into the old station area.  The first level still goes by its old name, Shanghai South Station.  I’m on level three, Sky South, in charge of people coming in via airship.  The lines are swelling, almost overwhelming.  Comrade Zhen is jittery.  He’s fought his way through walls of flesh to call more people into work.

I have processed hundreds of people over the last few days.  I have seen some people with their whole lives on their backs, dangled precariously under their arms, lives downloaded onto memory chips.  I see some whose faces are stained with tears, others who look relieved to be here.

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Very Small Rooms

by Greg Baines

My first glimpse of Yu Ting, actually, was on a grainy web cam that was pointed at her as she squashed into the wall dressed in some black lacey fuck-me lingerie. She paned around the room she lived in and I saw her mum crumpled and asleep next to her.

Her house was forty one square metres in total and mine was about eighty but I did share with a French girl who didn’t believe in sex before marriage. But when she moved in I wasn’t in love with Yu Ting.

Yu Ting now ‘feels-close-enough-to-get closer-and-show-more-commitment’ (go to bed), but the French girl and her unemployed mother have forced us into public parks at odd hours hiding from people doing Taichi to grope and get our hands tangled in each other’s clothes and to avoid guys with uniforms and whistles roaming around killing pleasure.

Half of her thinks that I am, of course, some no-good-dirty-foreigner-who-will-fuck-anything-that-moves and say any ‘sweet-words’ to any girl to fuck her so when I told her I’d never heard of  “couples cafés” she slapped me and told me I was a rotten egg and I’d probably fucked many girls in them. Continue reading…

People’s Eye

by Greg Baines

1

I couldn’t see very clearly. He looked scared to me. But the light was poor, image grainy. Beads of sweat could be lost in fuzzy electronic noise, twitches of facial muscles impossible to tease out.

My wife came in after tucking the kids in and saw me squinting at the screen, cup of hot chocolate in her hand. She smiled when she saw me and said, “You look like an old curtain twitcher”. I laughed.

2

We were in down town weren’t we? Watching on the sky screens above the tube. I couldn’t believe it, the force of it. I remember you fell against me, really you actually stumbled… you don’t remember? Well I remember, it made me sick to my stomach. Fire and screaming and silence as someone pulled the images and the screens flashed to some stupid bloody cooking program. We all had the chills then. You wanted us to get home, you were afraid of the open streets after that. On the tube I couldn’t get the fire out of mind, and seeing… human… on the street. In our time.

He deserves it. If you ask us, I know I shouldn’t speak on behalf of you love but I saw your face. You had nightmares all week. He deserves whatever he gets, anyone who does that. Anyone.

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