The Ministry of Time, page 5
“Wait. Kidding?”
“No. Apparently it was very awkward when Ralph came in here for a lunchtime gallon of merlot and spotted him. He’s part of Defence’s tracking team. You know they don’t much like the fact that the Ministry is a separate institution. They thought the time-door ought to fall under their remit.”
“Forgive me my density, Simellia, but if you know this place is run by spies, why are we drinking here?”
“Because I want to see what happens.”
“Oh. Wow.”
“Now drink your beer and look suspicious.”
I laughed, and the spy carefully did not look round. “Okay,” I said, “okay, let me pop my shirt collar. How’s this? Hang on, let me hunch up a bit. How’s this?”
“Great. You look like you’re about to sell me dirty magazines from out of your raincoat, and you’re not even wearing a raincoat.”
She took a sip of her wine and adjusted my shirt collar to a more furtive angle. “You know what he’ll write about us anyway,” she said calmly, “no matter what we do or how we dress. ‘The biracial woman and the Black woman who work at the Ministry.’ ”
I straightened my shoulders hurriedly. “Ah. Well. Of course, I have the privilege of passing as white—”
I paused. I find that people usually want to tell me whether they agree with this assessment or not. Simellia, however, waited for the end of my sentence.
“So he’ll have to write about my pornographic raincoat instead,” I finished lamely. “Er. How are you finding the, er—the whole—Is he all right, your expat?”
“He used the word ‘Negro’ until I stopped him, but I don’t think he meant it with two g’s, if that’s what you’re asking me. How’s your expat managing the news of your miscegenation?”
I took a big swig of Guinness. “Well. He isn’t. I haven’t told him.”
Simellia nodded slowly, as if I’d asked her to do some long division. When she next spoke, I could hear a smooth change in register from backchat to professional counselor. “I understand why you’ve held off discussing it until now,” she said. “But I don’t advise leaving it much longer. It’s psychologically important—for both of you—that you’re able to inhabit your identity, and that he’s able to accept you gracefully and wholeheartedly. We mustn’t adjust for them. They are here to adjust to the world. A person at a time. That’s how you do it.”
“Do ‘it’?”
“Make a new world.”
She had a soft light in her eye, a sudden distance in her gaze. Gosh, I thought, she really believes it.
Personally, I believed that I had the bridge job because I was an exception and not a rule. If I’d got it by lionizing my marginalization, peeling back my layers to show the grid of my veins, I wouldn’t have put it past the Ministry to use the layout against me at a later date. Never tell a workplace or a lover anything that might cause them to terminate your relationship until you’re ready to leave. I try not to give too many context clues early on and I didn’t like to draw attention to little harms. Why would I want to point out the places where my flesh was soft, my organs vulnerable? If my white friend casually called sushi “exotic,” couldn’t I be pleased she was eating something other than unseasoned red meat? Anyway, I could be a little exotic—just enough to bring up in my annual appraisals if a raise or title change was under discussion.
The spy behind the bar, who had been conspicuously checking the till and polishing already-gleaming glasses, put some music on. Simellia brightened up.
“Hey! ‘Electric Boogie’!”
“Eh?”
She laughed. Simellia smiled all the time but she almost never laughed, so I remember this moment clearly. I suddenly saw how much of a facade was the elegant, highly efficient government professional—behind which was someone who, maybe, had too many texts from a wayward sibling that she hadn’t dealt with, someone who was giving up on dating for the fifth time in as many years, someone who had to smother her impatience when Drunk Elephant–shopping beauty evangelists tried to explain the miracle moisture properties of cocoa butter to her. Before, I hadn’t really been aware that other Simellia was there, but now, I felt her barricades.
“It’s very funny to me that anyone can get to auntie age and not know what ‘Electric Boogie’ is,” she said. “You don’t know the Electric Slide?”
“Excuse me. Auntie who? Ralph’s protégé called me ‘miss.’ ”
“Get up.”
“What?”
“I’m going to teach you.”
“Simellia. In the pub? What will the boy put in his report to Defence?”
“He’ll put, ‘The biracial woman and the Black woman who work at the Ministry.’ Trust me on this.”
* * *
In the end, we decided that Captain Reginald-Smyth’s first time in a pub and first public get-together with another expat would be overwhelming enough without adding a new bridge. So on the evening Gore was out with the two of them, I sat with some friends in their gray-and-yellow kitchen with a bottle of mid-price wine. I spent the visit pretending to be normal—I was in fact contractually obliged to do this—but my entire being was wired to wonder what he was doing, what he was seeing, what he was asking. When I burned my tongue on the pizza my friend had heated in the oven, I bizarrely imagined that somewhere, he had burned his tongue in symbiotic sympathy.
The Ministry provided purportedly voluntary therapy sessions for all bridges, as our work was emotionally involved and psychologically taxing. I hadn’t signed up. I felt that human connection shouldn’t be professionally managed, or that I was somehow qualified for personal pain given a family history of pain. Fear and tragedy wallpapered my life. When I was twelve years old, I’d sat at the dining table with my mother, peeling the skins off garlic for her. She was telling me about one of her sisters, who had been beautiful and married rich. They’d killed her, of course—the cadres who sacked Phnom Penh—and she mused out loud, “I wonder if they raped her before they shot her?” Yes, thought twelve-year-old me seriously, I wonder if they did? And I would always be a twelve-year-old who had wondered that about her aunt at the dining table. An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.
When I got back to the house, I found an open packet of cigarettes at the dining table and settled in to smoke one, listening to my mind bleat. He returned about halfway through the cigarette.
“Commander Gore?”
“Good evening. After-dinner smoke?”
“Mm. My friends aren’t smokers, and they don’t know I’ve relapsed.”
“Ah. I will keep your secret.”
He spoke with grave clarity, slightly louder than usual. He was drunk, and hiding it well. If I wasn’t cohabiting with him, if my paycheck wasn’t dependent on recording his every move, I might not have noticed.
He opened the narrow drawer that contained bottles of spirits. They rattled lushly. The Ministry had resisted providing these, but as I kept pointing out, he’d been in the Royal Navy at the height of the rum-ration years; no doubt he drank.
He selected a whiskey, wandered to the freezer, then paused.
“Will you join me?”
“No, I—Actually, yes, please.”
I was also quite drunk, but he’d never offered me anything stronger than tea before.
He came to the table with two iced glasses and the entire bottle, which he set down in front of me. I slid the cigarettes across to him, and he lit one briskly.
“We must get a decanter. I feel like a lushington, pouring from a bottle. Here.”
“Thank you. Did you have a nice time?”
“Yes. I like Arthur.”
“And his bridge?”
“I like her too. She is a Negress—”
I choked. “Uh. We don’t use that word anymore. We just say ‘Black.’ As an adjective. You would say, ‘She is a Black woman.’ ”
“That sounds rather rude. Or brusque, somehow. ‘Negro’ is derogatory?”
“People will assume you’re racist.”
“ ‘Racist’?”
“Oh. Uh. That you have prejudices against people of other races.”
He frowned. “Does not every race have this?” he asked. “Having exposure, in the main, to the customs and habits of their own race, and being unfamiliar with the customs of others?”
“Well. In this era we try to look beyond a person’s race and consider them by their merits alone.”
“We?”
“The Ministry, for example. The civil service is an equal opportunities employer.”
He murmured “equal opportunities employer” back to himself, and I flushed so deeply I could feel it smearing across my sternum. He said, “She is a doctor. Of the mind. I forget the term—”
“Psychiatrist? Psychotherapist?”
“The latter, I think… But she said she was the only person of her race in the entire department. Not only the sole Black—as you say—bridge, but the only Black… mind doctor… in the… mind doctor squadron.”
“Oh, yeah, Kooks and Killers is super white. Obviously, at intake, there are fewer Black candidates, you know, structural reasons, uh, it starts at school, even, there are barriers in their way from the start, and then by the time they’re school graduates, university graduates, uh… It’s an ongoing process. We’ve had only about fifty years of thinking about it seriously, and every generation sees that the last one wasn’t doing enough. They’ll probably find us criminal in a century or so.”
I stammered this out hurriedly. Simellia felt so present that she might as well have been there, invigilating our conversation. Gore was pondering his whiskey, and nothing I’d said would have made sense to him, but I wanted to get a good mark from Simellia for my anti-racism (totally normal to want, totally possible to achieve).
Gore stared into his glass, turning his wrist to give the ice cube a tour of the perimeter.
“ ‘Kooks and Killers’?” he said at last.
My shoulders unknotted.
“Ha. Ministry nickname for the Behavioral Science department.”
He raised his eyebrows at the ice in his glass, tipped it back and forth. I pulled a second cigarette, and he lit it for me with automatic politeness.
At length, he said, “When I was a younger man, I spent some time on the Preventative Squadron. It was set up to suppress the West African slave trade.”
He threw back half his whiskey, set it down. “I was thinking about the Rosa. That was captured when I was… five-and-twenty. On Christmas Day, I remember that distinctly. It was flying under Spanish colors, with some three hundred—mm—Africans aboard. I was on the Despatch, under Commander Daniell. We brought them to the port at Barbados. At that time, I was quite thick with the assistant surgeon, John Lancaster. We were of an age, and he was excellent company. He spoke Spanish, which none of the other officers did. He was determined to make me eat a coconut. Have you ever eaten a coconut?”
“I have.”
“I’d never experienced a fruit that fought back so hard against being eaten. Where was I? Yes. Commander Daniell and the chief surgeon went ashore in February, and left me as acting lieutenant, just as the Rosa’s case was being tried. John and I had to go aboard and count the Negr—captives. They’d been provided with such provisions as they needed, and confined to the ship, along with the Rosa’s crew, for the duration of their detention. But they couldn’t leave the ship, you see, and…”
He stopped, drank the other half of his whiskey, then reached for the bottle.
“I was, I think, a little giddy with my own power. I had never been handed the command of a ship, regardless that it was docked, regardless that its captain would return soon enough. Riding beside that giddiness was the dread weight of responsibility. When I saw the captives, I recognized that their berthing was—inadequate. That they had undoubtedly suffered greatly and were exhausted and sick. Two had died since we captured the Rosa. But my chief thought was, I had better get this head count right. Or perhaps I might have thought, briefly, Poor wretches. But there was more obligation than Christian compassion in my heart. Whether I saw men, or women, or children…”
He trailed off.
“You’re thinking about Simellia.”
“I’ve had Black seamen under my command. That’s a different thing. Those unfortunates in the hold… I don’t know… Would she have behaved so pleasantly towards me had she known that I’d looked at them and seen a tally?”
“She’s familiar with the era.”
He nodded, rather gloomily, and lifted his glass to his mouth again. This time, he didn’t drink but regarded me over the lip.
“I hope you do not mind me making this observation,” he said. “But I think I am right in saying you are not, yourself, wholly an Englishwoman.”
“Well done,” I said, as neutrally as I could. “What gave it away? Shape of my eyes?”
“The color of your mouth.”
The ice hit the bottom of my glass with a frigid knock. I’d never heard that one before.
* * *
He didn’t like twenty-first-century language. “Victorian” was his greatest descriptive enemy, and to be fair, I’d heard people apply the word miscellaneously to any period 1710–1916. But much of what I thought of as quintessentially “Victorian” was in his future and, to him, gargantuan, disproportionate, ungentlemanly, unpious. He didn’t understand my use of the term “classical music,” which meant something to do with formal classicism to him and meant, to me, that it had violins. He hated “text” as a verb, “sex” as an act, “tomato” as a salad product. One afternoon he came in from a walk and asked me, very thoughtfully, “Some charming young women—out on the heath—addressed me quite boisterously—what is a ‘DILF’?”
It goes without saying that he called me half-caste. Perhaps it goes without saying that it took a while for me to correct him. I’d used it myself, before I learned not to. People forget how recent an invention “mixed-race” is, and by the time I was at the Ministry, we weren’t even supposed to write that. We were supposed to write “people with a mixed ethnic background.”
I’d taken my time correcting him because I wasn’t sure what I meant to myself. “Mixed-race” people don’t technically belong to either of their heritage spaces, but they don’t necessarily belong in a “mixed-race” space either—there’s too much flex in the term. I used to think every mixed-race person was an island, composed of a population of one. Maybe that’s because the Cambodian diaspora is so small here, or maybe it’s because I wanted, willfully, to be an exception.
Graham used other words too, not wrong, exactly, but not right, like “your people,” or “your culture.” When I said, in a wincingly tight voice, that we had the same people and culture, he replied, mildly, “But I don’t think that we do.” Then came the image searches about Cambodia, on food and dress and customs. I had to do those for him, in the early days, because he still didn’t know how, and the English-language internet was not on my side. Exotic, friendly, conservative, resilient. The way he couched his questions, too, was imperfect. I had to correct “ancestor” for “grandparent,” “sacred” for “polite,” “tribal leaders” for “farmers.”
Eventually he asked if he would meet my family, eyes full of hopeful curiosity. This was forbidden, but I reluctantly showed him a picture of my parents and sister on my personal phone, the screen supernovaed with cracks. He pointed at my sister, beaming. “Oh! There’s two of you!” he said in a voice so full of naked delight that I hurriedly put the phone away.
One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language informed experience—that we did not simply describe but create our world through language, like Adam in the Garden of Eden calling a spade a spade or whatever happens in Genesis. At its heart, the theory promised that the raw stuff of the universe could be carved into a clausal household, populated by an extended family of concepts. In retrospect, we might have devoted more time to explaining to the expats why they couldn’t use what were now considered slurs. Some of them never really got the hang of this.
The expats, loose as dust in narrative time, were schooled mercilessly in description. According to the hypothesis, the more accurate their vocabulary, the more likely they would temporally adjust. “Assimilate” is actually the word we used—they would assimilate if they said “phone” instead of “unholy device” or “car” instead of “horseless carriage”—but we meant survive. The bridges were expected to be day-by-day dictionaries. For the expats, Simellia and I were contextually so unusual that we were asked more questions (“Will your women’s brains not overheat?” from Sixteen-forty-five; “When did you throw off your chains for these—how do you call them—‘pantsuits’?” from Seventeen-ninety-three). I was discomfited by this stilted forbearance of our sex and our skin. It’s not that I wanted to be someone like Ralph, any more than I wanted to develop a crust, but I’d fondly imagined authority as an equalizer.
Twice a week, we would sit the expats in a room with a comfortable chair, a desk, a screen, and a pot of tea. The tea was not essential to the experiment, but they were more inclined to cooperate if they were given nice tea with a china cup and saucer—even Sixteen-forty-five and Sixteen-sixty-five, who didn’t have the manufactured appetite for it. Embarrassing stuff, something for a Punch cartoon about Englishness, but it worked.
The bridge would sit behind a two-way mirror, with the members of the Wellness team running the experiment. We’d stand and watch as images from twenty-first-century life appeared on the screen in front of the expat, who would then describe aloud what they could see. Anachronisms, malapropisms, and total ignorance would be noted but not pointed out; it was up to the bridge to actively correct them in future daily routines.
To begin with, the language experiment had a chilly, near-sensual thrill. There’s something vengeful about agreeing on an interpretation. Set your narrative as canon and in a tiny way you have pried your death out of time, as long as the narrative is recalled by someone else. I certainly understood better why people became writers, and why jealous lovers force so many false confessions, and why the British history curriculum looks the way that it does.
