Read Online The Fahrenheit Twins by Michel Faber - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michel Faber
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approaches the appointed hour. Very likely the Magdalaya’s clocks are wrong, compared to the wristwatches of the men, which are precision instruments guaranteed not to lose a second in ten million years. However, that’s irrelevant here. Here, nothing can be hurried, and none of the men – even those who might ordinarily need to humiliate several inferiors per hour – has uttered a word of complaint all day.
At last, when the Magdalaya’s foggy clock says the time has come, Miss Soedhono appears from a curtained anteroom like a carved effigy on a revolving clocktower display. The wait is over.
Miss Soedhono is tall for an Indonesian woman, but no taller than an average Western adolescent. Her outfit is demure by the standards of an English or American boardroom: her legs are shrouded in a long, sarong-like skirt, and her high-collared jacket is buttoned up to the throat. The colours – emerald green, with bright gold brocade – are more sensuous than the greys and blacks these men are accustomed to seeing on their female colleagues back home, but on the other hand, there’s something affectedly formal, even antiseptic, about Miss Soedhono’s clothing, redolent of the livery of flight attendants. Her hair is pinned back severely, and her lips are painted pale orange, with a gloss as thick as wax. Her teeth are white, faintly delineated with pale brown, as though she was once a smoker and has spent many years trying to polish the damage away. Yet if she is a person of any vulnerability, this is not betrayed by her expression. She’s as calm as a bronze sculpture, her eyes so dark that pupil and iris are indistinguishable, even up close. No one gets close.
Miss Soedhono lifts her hands into the air, allowing them to hover near her brocaded bosom, displaying the flawless shape and yet mature flesh of her fingers, the whitish pink of her palms contrasted with the dark honey of her knuckles, the orange fingernails in all their pellucid lustre. Her hands cradle air as though it were a dossier of papers, a dossier she holds for the sake of protocol but which she has no need to consult. Already the men are attentive: affecting to shuffle in their seats in casual preparation, they are staring at Miss Soedhono’s hands, at those sculpted orange nails hovering in front of them, almost eerie in the jaundiced light.
Miss Soedhono opens her mouth to speak. A hundred male mouths open too, their lips parting in anticipation.
‘You will forgive me,’ she says, ‘if some of what I say is already well known to you.’ Her accent is thick, though the words are all her own, not recited from a script or reconstituted from a phrasebook. She’s fluent in five Asian languages, but English is the lingua franca to which she condescends as a special favour to this crowd of perspiring, pink-faced non-Indonesians.
‘There is always a possibility,’ she continues, ‘that there will be someone here for whom the subject is … virgin territory.’
A subtle thrill goes through the audience, as though the air temperature had momentarily dropped ten degrees. The combination of the word ‘virgin’ and the way Miss Soedhono pouted her glossy orange lips to speak the word is what caused that thrill to pass among the men. The presentation has begun; nothing can stop it now.
‘We are here,’ says Miss Soedhono, ‘to examine the physiology of the coconut, particularly in areas of exudation – that is, bleeding – of spadix sap, analysis of the sieve tube sap in all its components, translocation of ferro-cyanide in the sieve tube, and the factors which influence the nut’s copra content.’
‘Oh God,’ whispers one of the men, scarcely able to believe that only yesterday morning he was exchanging meaningless pleasantries with his wife at the breakfast table, and now here he is, in the same room as Miss Soedhono, breathing the same air she exhales from her glossy mouth, from her honeyed throat.
‘We have been busy here,’ says
At last, when the Magdalaya’s foggy clock says the time has come, Miss Soedhono appears from a curtained anteroom like a carved effigy on a revolving clocktower display. The wait is over.
Miss Soedhono is tall for an Indonesian woman, but no taller than an average Western adolescent. Her outfit is demure by the standards of an English or American boardroom: her legs are shrouded in a long, sarong-like skirt, and her high-collared jacket is buttoned up to the throat. The colours – emerald green, with bright gold brocade – are more sensuous than the greys and blacks these men are accustomed to seeing on their female colleagues back home, but on the other hand, there’s something affectedly formal, even antiseptic, about Miss Soedhono’s clothing, redolent of the livery of flight attendants. Her hair is pinned back severely, and her lips are painted pale orange, with a gloss as thick as wax. Her teeth are white, faintly delineated with pale brown, as though she was once a smoker and has spent many years trying to polish the damage away. Yet if she is a person of any vulnerability, this is not betrayed by her expression. She’s as calm as a bronze sculpture, her eyes so dark that pupil and iris are indistinguishable, even up close. No one gets close.
Miss Soedhono lifts her hands into the air, allowing them to hover near her brocaded bosom, displaying the flawless shape and yet mature flesh of her fingers, the whitish pink of her palms contrasted with the dark honey of her knuckles, the orange fingernails in all their pellucid lustre. Her hands cradle air as though it were a dossier of papers, a dossier she holds for the sake of protocol but which she has no need to consult. Already the men are attentive: affecting to shuffle in their seats in casual preparation, they are staring at Miss Soedhono’s hands, at those sculpted orange nails hovering in front of them, almost eerie in the jaundiced light.
Miss Soedhono opens her mouth to speak. A hundred male mouths open too, their lips parting in anticipation.
‘You will forgive me,’ she says, ‘if some of what I say is already well known to you.’ Her accent is thick, though the words are all her own, not recited from a script or reconstituted from a phrasebook. She’s fluent in five Asian languages, but English is the lingua franca to which she condescends as a special favour to this crowd of perspiring, pink-faced non-Indonesians.
‘There is always a possibility,’ she continues, ‘that there will be someone here for whom the subject is … virgin territory.’
A subtle thrill goes through the audience, as though the air temperature had momentarily dropped ten degrees. The combination of the word ‘virgin’ and the way Miss Soedhono pouted her glossy orange lips to speak the word is what caused that thrill to pass among the men. The presentation has begun; nothing can stop it now.
‘We are here,’ says Miss Soedhono, ‘to examine the physiology of the coconut, particularly in areas of exudation – that is, bleeding – of spadix sap, analysis of the sieve tube sap in all its components, translocation of ferro-cyanide in the sieve tube, and the factors which influence the nut’s copra content.’
‘Oh God,’ whispers one of the men, scarcely able to believe that only yesterday morning he was exchanging meaningless pleasantries with his wife at the breakfast table, and now here he is, in the same room as Miss Soedhono, breathing the same air she exhales from her glossy mouth, from her honeyed throat.
‘We have been busy here,’ says
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