Fairhaven Chapter 6

Anxiety

Read chapter 5 here.

11.00 pm, Thursday, January 14, 2027
George Town, Penang – 8 Gurney Drive
Global average temperature: 1.6°C above pre-industrial levels

Once again, Grace Chan sat alone on her balcony, looking at the extraordinary view.

On paper, her life was perfect. She was doing meaningful work, well-paid. She lived in a beautiful penthouse apartment, with people whose company she enjoyed. But none of it could stop the dread. 

‘You’ll fix it,’ her young cousin Clara had told her. But in reality, nothing could be done. Fairhaven itself, the largest climate adaptation project in the world, could not stop the world from boiling as she watched. There on the 38th floor, she could enjoy a breeze at night, but thousands, millions, billions of people were once again facing violent floods and typhoons. Winter in the northern hemisphere brought wildfires to the south. 

And nobody was coming to save them. 

It was spiritual vertigo: invisible from the outside, until the moment the victim reeled from its effects. Among others, she could hold it off, but there, alone on her balcony, she too often felt the ‘call of the void’ – a wild impulse to scream at the top of her lungs, smash her fist right through the sliding glass doors, or hurl herself headlong over the edge.

It’s all pointless, she thought. 

Auntie Janis recommended she keep a diary, that she quit her job, or that she at least make herself a soft boiled egg. 

Later. She had already been keeping a diary for ages, where she wrote stories and vignettes to make herself feel better. In another hour she would wipe away the tears. But in the moment, all she could do was to sit on the plastic outdoor furniture, staring at the skyline.

She had given up the idea of asking her parents for sympathy or advice long ago. Her resources must come from within.

7.00 pm, Friday, March 19, 2027
George Town, Penang – India House

Sixteen chairs were arranged in a circle, with fourteen occupied. As Grace entered the room in the shadow of her Auntie Janis, the meeting was just getting started. Preoccupied with the thought that they might be interrupting, it took Grace several minutes to realise that the large figure in the far seat was Hans de Jong.

‘Sorry we’re late,’ trilled Janis, oblivious, wrapping herself in a voluminous shawl against the air conditioning. ‘Grace, sit, sit, sit!’ In that instant, Grace once again felt 12 years old, but managed to give a surreptitious nod to Hans, evoking a sheepish half-wave in return. She scampered over to the empty seat nearest the door. To her surprise, she recognised two other people from work. Auntie Janis, satisfied, plopped herself down next to the meeting’s leader and offered a broad smile to the room. ‘Don’t mind us!’

The leader pressed his lips together, but seemed more amused than disturbed. ‘Okay, now that we’re all here, as I was saying, I’m Wen Xin. Who’d like to go first?’

He waited a beat before nodding at a thin woman in her forties. Only then did Grace notice that the woman’s hand was half-raised.

‘Go ahead. The floor is yours.’

She stood. ‘My name is Yong. And I’m terrified that we are the last generation of people to live on this planet.’ 

Everyone in the room gave a polite smile, and clapped.

An hour and a half later, Auntie Janis left, Yong and Wen Xin drifted away somewhere, and Grace and Hans were the last to remain in the room.

‘Wanna go get curry mee?’

‘After that ordeal? Absolutely.’

Two bowls of noodles plonked down on the melamine surface of the table, followed by two bottles of Tiger beer, condensation pearling on the surface. Chilli oil floated on the surface of the noodles.

‘Careful,’ warned Grace. ‘The curry mee here is spicy.’

‘I can take it.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘So did you cry?’

Hans slurped a large spoonful of the broth. Before he could answer, tears began to stream down his face.

Grace laughed. ‘I didn’t mean that kind of crying!’

‘Very funny. Strong men don’t cry. Except when their team concedes a goal – that’s different.’

‘Zygmunt said that it’s wrong to say football is a matter of life and death – because it’s much more important.’

‘I know people in Holland who think like that. But I’m not one of them. I don’t even like football.’

‘You make a pretty good show to the contrary! I hear you and Ivan going on about it all the time. It’s the one thing he’s more interested in than wrecks.’

‘There’s nothing else men are allowed to bond over, so I make it a point to learn enough to have an intelligent discussion. But it’s not my passion.’ 

‘That’s a relief. I was bracing myself.’

Hans laughed. He took his bottle, looked in vain for an opener, shrugged, and popped off the cap with the end of a spoon. 

Grace admired the trick. ‘How did you do that?’

‘Oh, I learned it from Zygmunt.’ He showed her again.

‘That explains it. He’s always doing stuff like that; I didn’t realise when I started working at Fairhaven that our boss would be the world’s biggest life hack man.’

Hans laughed and offered his bottle, and they clinked. Grace found, once again, that something about his smile released a fragment of the constant tension that had tied ever-tighter inside her over the past years.

‘So if football isn’t your passion, what is?’

‘Flower pressing! Penang is great for flowers. And I bake a good sourdough loaf. During the pandemic I was teaching everyone else, because I’d already been doing it for years.’

‘Flower pressing? Bread? You’re not winding me up?’

‘My mother and grandmother did those things, so I took them up, too.’

Grace shook her head in disbelief. ‘You need to bake your bread for the rest of us. I buy the square, white stuff from the supermarket, but it’s pretty bad.’ 

‘I’ve already established a starter culture for the sourdough. It’s on the kitchen counter behind the knife block.’

‘Is that what that is! I was wondering. Did you have one of those big bread ovens when you were growing up?’

‘Yes, when I was small. We lived on a farm on Vlieland. That’s a Frisian island outside the main dykes. The 2017 flood here wasn’t the first one I’d seen. A big one hit when I was eight – Cyclone Anatol. We all got out, but we had to go live in Rotterdam after that. You could say we were climate refugees, of sorts. They raised and reinforced the dykes, but we never went back.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘We used to keep a big, yellow axe in the attic on the farm. Maybe you’ve heard about that practice among the Dutch; my grandmother was strict about it – like she was about a lot of things. Her parents chopped their way out through the roof during the great flood of 1953. And she was prepared for it to happen again.’

‘Wow. How old is she?’ Grace asked.

‘She’s 88. I’d love to introduce you to her some day. You know, she used to read to me all the time. She’s the real reason I was able to get an education. I didn’t like school much, but she made it interesting for me.’

‘I’d love to meet her.’

Hans took a smaller slurp of his noodles, his eyes crinkling. ‘My family’s very close. I miss them.’

‘But you did a good job of ignoring my question,’ Grace pressed.

‘You noticed.’

‘And?’

‘The answer is no, I didn’t cry. At least, I didn’t let anyone see it.’

‘Have you been going to these meetings for a long time?’ she asked.

‘This was my second one. Are you going to come back?’

Grace, her mouth too full of curry mee to speak, her eyes watering from the chillies, nodded her head in confirmation. When she swallowed, she continued, ‘So what did your grandmother read with you?’

‘All sorts of stuff. Lots of it was ancient. Jack London, HG Wells, Asimov, Tolkien, Wyndham. Thea Beckman.’

‘I loved all of those, too. I was a real bookworm. But I had to read it to myself. My parents were never around.’

‘It’s what I do instead of crying,’ Hans explained. ‘I disappear into a good book, or into a film. That’s not to say I don’t sometimes cry as well. Sometimes there’s nothing else you can do.’

‘It’s worse now than it’s ever been.’ 

Hans nodded as he took another swig from the bottle of Tiger. 

Grace continued, ‘You know, I’ve always known it was coming. In primary school, we learned about it just as a normal part of science class. But it was this huge, distant thing, like that massive cliff in Yosemite Valley. In my mind’s eye, that’s what it was like: big, but far away. Now, thinking about it at work every day has brought me to the foot of the cliff. It fills my whole view. There is nothing else.

‘And now we’re on the cliff, a hundred metres up. My nose is pressed against the rock and my knees are trembling. Meanwhile, you and the rest of the team always look so confident; I always thought I was alone.’

‘Obviously not, given the company tonight.’

‘But I’m still terrified. For all of us. I’m convinced we won’t make it. We’ll fail in a valiant effort and all get picked off one by one. We can’t fix it.’

‘By the way, you’re pretty good with extended metaphors. Have you ever tried writing it down?’

‘I do. My auntie gave me a journal.’

‘I’m not much of a writer,’ Hans mused. ‘Typical engineer. Good with a calculator, bad with a pen.’

‘I don’t just stick to diary-writing. In fact,’ she confessed, after a long pull from the bottle, ‘I’ve been writing short stories. Alternative histories of the past and of the future. Something that can give me hope, where problems are solved, and we can look forward to what’s ahead. What I really want is to get these stories in front of people, so they can see how disasters can be averted, or at least made less devastating.’

‘It’s possible. If you do it right.’

‘In the stories I can say what I want. But in real life I can be impatient, and blunt.’

‘Too blunt – are you sure you’re not Dutch?’

Grace laughed and shook her head. ‘Given my family background, it’s possible! We’re just about everything you can think of – Chinese, Malay, Indian, Portuguese, and who knows what else. Maybe Dutch. One of my other aunties tried to assemble the family tree a couple of years ago and had to give up.’

‘So are you going to come back to the next Climate Anxiety session?’ Hans asked.

‘I have to. Auntie Janis made me go because she found me crying after family dinner last week.’ Grace didn’t add that part of the reason for her tears was the harangue from her Auntie Annie, who told her that at 28, she was risking being ‘left on the shelf’, that she herself was already married with three children by that age, and that Grace was getting old and ugly. She was once again grateful that she could go home to the casual, anonymous commune of 8 Gurney Drive. 

‘Maybe you should bring along something you’ve written.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Do. I want to read it.’

‘It’s personal. But I might make an exception for you.’

Hans had finished his noodles but remained still in his seat. ‘Grace, speaking of personal things … do you want to … come over to my place tonight?’

She laughed and took his hand. ‘I live there, after all. But yes. I would very much like that. I’ve been waiting for an invitation. Later, I can show you some of the stuff I’ve been writing. I’ve been working on a piece about the Titanic.’

Read the next chapter, “Defying Futility”, here