by Justin Hill
Fat Pan held her eyes with his own, as his hand scuttled across the bed and onto her dress. ‘It has been a long time,’ he repeated, slower than before. His hand crawled into the hollow of her dress, found the warm softness of her thigh. ‘I’ve been very busy,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I could come and see you more often.’
His hands unbuttoned her dress, let her breasts spill out. ‘Ah,’ he smiled and she tilted her face away, eyes averted as his hands moved over her body. In her mind she tried to turn the stabbing sunlight into fingers of moonlight tracing the walls; to think of her mouth full of Winter Melon Soup; of anything but the present. She focused on the statue of Guanyin, felt herself looking down: saw Fat Pan take off his jacket and shirt; pull his belt open, lift himself up high enough to pull his trousers down, and push his y-fronts down his legs. His y-fronts caught on one of his feet, then fell to the floor in an abandoned heap of clothing: an army officer costume.
His legs were hairless, except for the shins which had thick wiry curls. Guanyin watched him smooth the embroidered silk over Liu Bei’s pale flesh, massage her thighs, push the red silk up her legs, pull her underwear off. Fat Pan positioned himself between Liu Bei’s legs and slipped a finger inside.
Liu Bei struggled to concentrate on the statue’s gaze but couldn’t keep it up. She could feel the rough stubble on his chin and his hot, smoky hot breath panting over her skin. She closed her eyes as he licked her breast, moved up her body to nibble her ear.
‘I see your temple is ready,’ he said, his voice cracking with excitement as he lay on top of her then sent his bald-headed monk in to worship.
He moved in and out, she could feel him filling her again and again. She felt no pleasure. ‘Is this how you were for him?’ Fat Pan’s voice came soft and insistent like groping hands. ‘I want to hear,’ his voice was horse, ‘that moan.’
He licked her neck and shoulder, tried to kiss her lips but she turned her face away to the side.
‘You want to turn away,’ he whispered, ‘then turn away.’ There was a moment’s silence then he pulled himself out; instructed her: ‘Fire Behind the Mountain’ and turned her over onto her side. Liu Bei tried to concentrate on the memory of a leaf on a pond: imagined it was a lone flake of sail floating away across the sea as his hands spread her buttocks and the memories faltered. She could feel his finger trying to find her anus, leading himself in. She gasped as he pushed deeper. Squeezed her eyes shut. Flinched.
Fat Pan grasped Liu Bei’s hips and thrust till she moaned. ‘Is that good?’ he asked her. ‘Is that good?’
Liu Bei bit her finger harder.
‘I’m going to fuck you so hard,’ Fat Pan was breathless. He thrust in; pulled out; thrust again. ‘Is this how you were for him?’ His rhythm speeded up. He relished each twitch she gave until he ejaculated inside, then tried to keep going.
Liu Bei felt his thrusts fade to nothing, like ripples on water, and reached behind. His penis was small and soft, like a child’s. It slipped out.
Fat Pan’s face was over hers. He kissed her neck and Liu Bei stared up at Guanyin on her high shelf, hands still raised in a gesture of peace and pink cheeks blushing with shame.
It was late afternoon when Liu Bei left the teahouse and got back to her mother’s house. An afternoon shower had settled the dust, a few errant leaves lay scattered on the dirt. Aunty Tang silently watched her approach, she didn’t need to say anything, she just licked her lips with her tongue and squinted. Liu Bei ignored her, marched inside and found Little Dragon sitting at the table, drawing with straight deliberate pencil strokes: an aeroplane.
‘Come on,’ Liu Bei snapped before he’d even noticed her, ‘it’s time to go home.’
‘Grandma’s going to cook Winter Melon Soup,’ Little Dragon protested, his pencil poised.
‘No time for soup. Mother has to go.’
‘But I want the soup,’ he said and started crying.
Liu Bei yanked him off the seat. He started crying so much his legs stopped working, so Liu Bei swept him up into her arms and carried him out of the house, past Aunty Tang and through the winding streets of the old town, where people stared and shook their heads. When they got home Little Dragon had cried himself almost to exhaustion, and he was still sniffling and glaring through his tears as his mother went outside to get the washing in.
The clothes were flapping angrily on the line, it looked like it was going to rain. A pair of Little Dragon’s trousers were fully inflated by the breeze, she grabbed a kicking leg, tore off the pegs and threw them into the basket.
‘Stop crying!’ she snapped when she came inside and Little Dragon did, long enough to take a breath of air and begin again. Liu Bei ignored him as she cooked him a dinner of greens and re-boiled rice. Slowly his tears ebbed away and he got up and walked across to his mother, held on to her leg.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, lifting him up. ‘Mother is sorry.’ Outside the wind grew stronger, bringing the dust to life and sending it around the yard like a crowd of starving ghosts. On the horizon the clouds gathered in force, then rumbled in over the city. The temperature dropped, the wind stilled and they ate in silence, listening to the crunch of food between their jaws. There was an angry clap of thunder. ‘Eat up,’ she said.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Little Dragon told her. There was a flash of lightning, which seemed to back Little Dragon up so Liu Bei clicked the TV on and let him watch while she gathered up the pots and put them on the shelves. There were only adverts, adverts or another Beijing Opera. He turned on to the adverts.
Liu Bei boiled water for the thermos flasks and tried not to think of the afternoon with Fat Pan as outside stars were picked off, one by one, by the storm clouds that turned the heavens black.
There were a few more days of rain before the impatient summer settled in for good at Shaoyang. Cold weather staples of lotus root, cabbage and white radish disappeared from the market. In the fields the rice stalks grew tall and emerald green, and in the market all people could buy were piles of lettuce hearts, bamboo shoots or bulging purple egg plant. Trucks rumbled into town from the outlying towns and villages, their tip-ups full of bloated water melons that dusty men sold by the pair. Earthworms hid deep underground, and in the country whole villages slept, waiting for harvest.
In the city, people began to view summer like a visiting relative: a pleasure at first but increasingly unwelcome. It got too hot to lie-in in the mornings, too hot to stay awake in the afternoons. New high-rises blocked the cool hill breezes, lonely people wandered streets of neon signs and concrete that they no longer knew. In the Space Rocket Factory people snoozed off the hottest hours of the day and woke to find flies crawling up their noses or investigating their ears; when they lay down at night they watched the moon rise, and after hours of tossing and turning they watched it set as well. It was only by sleeping on the concrete floor that people managed to get any sleep at all; dreaming of winter as they simmered gently in sweat.
At the beginning of the sixth month the first truckloads of lychees arrived from Hainan Island, priced at nine yuan a half kilo. Old Zhu’s wife pushed through the crowd at the back of the truck, then turned the salesman down in disgust. Nine yuan–too much! It wasn’t even worth bargaining. She continued prowling around the market, hungry for the new summer foods, but bitter at the price she would have to pay.
She walked up and down, then decided she needed an umbrella to keep the sun off.
At the factory gateway a group of workmen with ladders and distinct Sichuan accents were removing the signs that had been there so long people couldn’t remember what was there before them. The wooden board which said Work to Build the Four Modernisations, lay in shreds at the side of the road. Two men were levering Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory off with crowbars and across the top half the sign had been ripped away, so it now said r In Ve t Ment.
Old Zhu’s wife squinted up into the sunlight, trying to pronounce the foreign writing, letter by letter, but couldn’t.
When she’d been at school they’d learnt Russian; everyone had learnt Russian until Khrushchev had become a revisionist, then all the Russians had left, abandoning their socialist cousins. Now the newspapers said there were Russian whores in Beijing. Spreading diseases.
Old Zhu’s wife was still squinting up at r In Ve t Ment when she felt someone grab her hand, and jumped. It was the local matchmaker, back again.
‘How’s your son?’ The matchmaker grinned, and Old Zhu’s wife couldn’t answer. She didn’t want a matchmaker getting involved. They only put a couple together, they never cared what happened in the rest of their lifetimes.
‘I have a girl who’s ideal for him,’ the matchmaker continued. ‘She’s an “elder unmarried youth”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘She’s just turned thirty-one.’
‘Is she divorced?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’
‘Then what’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s just a little bit slow, you know how girls are now–they go to university and get ideas. Not like us.’
Old Zhu’s wife didn’t know what the matchmaker meant by ‘us’. She’d been a cadre, she was educated, well educated and married; the matchmaker was a lazy busybody!
‘Your son was born in the Year of the Rat, yes?’
‘Yes, but he’s divorced,’ Old Zhu’s wife said, trying to fend the woman off.
The matchmaker was un-perturbed. ‘Divorced is OK these days,’ she assured, ‘especially if you’re a man.’
‘He won’t marry any “elder unmarried youth”.’
‘Who then?’
‘It seems he won’t marry anyone,’ Old Zhu’s wife said and started away. She was sweating, and the sweat made her feel more uncomfortable. How should she know what her son got up to–she was only his mother.
When Old Zhu’s wife got back home she found Da Shan and Old Zhu sitting in front of the TV with a bunch of lychees, spitting the glossy brown nuts onto the floor and filling the table with cracked red shells. It was too hot to play chess these days, and anyway Da Shan had started to win: it took the fun out of playing for both of them.
‘They’re good,’ Da Shan said, wiping his chin, moving over to give her room to sit.
‘Where did you get those?’
‘In the town centre. Fresh from Hainan.’ He held a lychee up for her but she didn’t move.
‘How much did you pay?’
‘Eight and a half yuan a kilo.’
‘You were robbed,’ she told him. ‘You ought to bargain.’
Old Zhu’s wife went to the kitchen and set down her shopping. She tipped her minced pork into a wide bowl, took her cleaver and began to shred the lettuce. When she’d minced the ginger root she squeezed the juice out of the lettuce, tipped it all into the bowl.
‘Come and eat!’ she heard her husband call, and throttled the pork mixture between her fingers. Come and eat indeed, as if she had the time to come and eat when she was making dumplings. She kept squeezing as she thought about the matchmaker. The phrase ‘Elder unmarried youth’, kept coming into her head. Is that what her son had sunk to? There was a time when he had so much ahead of him: he could have been leader of the factory by now, she told herself, if that girl hadn’t got him involved. She blamed Liu Bei for everything that had gone wrong in her son’s life, whether it was her fault or not. She blamed Liu Bei for many other things as well, just to stoke her indignation. If it hadn’t been for Liu Bei her son wouldn’t have gone off to Guangdong, got married and got divorced. If it hadn’t been for Liu Bei she would have a grandson: here, in Shaoyang–and not a granddaughter she’d never met in Guangdong. She thought of her granddaughter like a Missing Person. Investing love in a Missing Person was like watering your neighbour’s field, there was no sense in it at all.
It was all Liu Bei’s fault. But what could you expect from a whore’s daughter? Things like that ran in the family–the sunflower cannot stop itself, it always turns towards the sun. That was the nature of things. Whoever heard of a pig giving birth to a goose?
‘There aren’t many left,’ Old Zhu called out from the other room but she couldn’t go and eat when she was making dumplings; and besides, lychees that cost so much would make her sick.
After her afternoon sleep, Old Zhu’s wife got up and walked, bleary-eyed, to the toilet. She squatted and wiped herself with some toilet paper, turned the tap to flush away the yellow puddle. The dry pipe croaked back at her. She hoped a spout of water might follow the noisy rush of air, but instead the sound faded away; diminishing as it disappeared down the building. She checked the taps in the kitchen: they gave dry and malevolent hisses as well.
Old Zhu’s wife looked out of the window and saw the blue sky and the sharp divide between sunlight and shadow. It was too hot to be without water, so she went into the cupboard and took the two buckets out, and set off down the stairs, the empty buckets flapping excitedly at her sides.
Outside the afternoon cicadas shrill had thickened to an incessant scream. One tree-load would fade away, then another would start up: a whole orchestra of insects playing the same interminable note. People were waiting at the stand pipe, standing in the shade with their buckets. Old Zhu’s wife joined them, and turned to find a young girl take her buckets to fill them up. Old Zhu’s wife thought the girl was trying to steal her buckets, so she shouted in alarm and tried to snatch them back.
‘Let me help you,’ the girl said, but Old Zhu’s wife didn’t listen. The girl fought back, so they struggled for a few seconds before Old Zhu’s wife realised what was happening and gave in. She stood, feeling foolish, watching the girl put the bucket on the floor and turn the tap on full, checking she got it right. The water gushed noisily into the buckets, spraying up at first then charging round and round in a foaming whirlpool. The girl left the tap on as she switched buckets, splashing water everywhere and making Old Zhu’s wife’s feet squeak in her plastic slippers.
When the buckets were full the girl tried to carry the buckets but Old Zhu’s wife would have none of it. ‘I’ll take them,’ she said, ‘don’t be so polite.’
Half way home Old Zhu’s wife wished she hadn’t said that, or that the girl hadn’t filled her buckets so full. She wasn’t as young as she used to be, and water was heavy. Old Zhu’s wife set them down and changed hands, although it didn’t make much difference as she tottered along. The buckets bumped against her legs. She’d spilt half the water but now they felt heavier than before. She rested under a shrilling cicada tree, saw a swallow swoop down in front of her and pluck a hovering dragonfly from the air.
A flash of turquoise, gone to bird food.
The water-cut struck all of Shaoyang. There was no news as to why it had happened, and no one cared, they just picked up their buckets and tramped to the nearest stand-pipe. Stand-pipes never ran out, they were something you could rely on, like the coolness of autumn. Liu Bei was filling up her buckets when the old man in front of her said, ‘This always happens when the weather is at it’s hottest, never when it’s cold.’
Liu Bei was thinking of something else. She half listened, half nodded.
‘Never when it’s cold,’ the old man repeated, ‘nor when it’s dry. But only in the summer, when it’s at its hottest.’
‘Yes, it’s true,’ Liu Bei said just to shut him up.
She watched the water splashing into the buckets and thought it was the same with the Teahouse. Men never came to drink when it was at it’s hottest, they only needed warmth when it was cold. It was at this time that she began to feel lonely. As she shuffled closer to the stand-pipe the idea made her smile to herself: a lonely whore!
The drought lasted for two whole days; gurgling pipes gasping for water. When the water did come back Old Zhu’s wife was out buying beansprouts. Old Zhu heard the sound of splashing water, ran to the kitchen, and saw rust-coloured liquid and lumps of dirt drip-dribbling out of the tap. He turned it on full, even turned the tap on in the
toilet and let the filthy water wash out. It took over an hour.
When the water was clear Old Zhu filled all the buckets, just in case, then put a kettle on to boil. It took more than an hour to cool in the heat, then he tasted it, still warm. It tasted salty, he decided, and turned the taps on again. They were still on when his wife came back from Autumn Cloud’s house. She put a bag of beansprouts down on the side and then went into the bedroom for a lie down. Old Zhu watched her come into the kitchen and then go out again, and decided to water his chrysanthemum. It needed daily water now it was hot. He usually watered it in the evenings, but his wife had been watching him the last two days.
‘Don’t think I carry water in buckets for you to water your flower!’ she’d told him.
Old Zhu didn’t know what to say then, he watered it with the water he carried. Not hers.
Old Zhu’s wife lay thinking of her unmarried son and tried to think who she could turn to for help. Autumn Cloud came to mind, but Old Zhu’s wife dismissed her. She was too old to know girls for Da Shan, and what did old people know of affairs of the heart?
She thought about Mrs Cao? Even worse. May as well put it on the national radio news.
At last Old Zhu’s wife decided on Madam Fan. Her daughter, Peach, must have some friends who could be suitable for Da Shan. Not too pretty, nor too clever–it didn’t make for a happy marriage, but not an idiot either. And not ‘elder unmarried youth’.
When Madam Fan listened to the old woman’s problem and was so excited she wanted to clap her hands together. ‘Your son needs a girl,’ she laughed, ‘and my girl needs a son!’
‘I didn’t mean your daughter,’ Old Zhu’s wife began, but Madam Fan cut her off.
‘I was joking,’ she said, ‘but why not? Let’s invite you all for a meal, then they can meet each other. They’re both adults, they can decide.’
