The Drink and Dream Teahouse

by Justin Hill

  Liu Bei got up early and carried a sleeping Little Dragon through the winding streets of the old town. The sun was still a pale orange, the air felt damp and cool. There was smoke coming from her mother’s chimney. The door was open and Liu Bei pushed inside, kicked the door shut behind her. Her mother was making dough for dumpling skins, her sleeves were rolled up and her hands were crusted in white flour. Liu Bei’s arms ached more now that she was finally able to put Little Dragon down.

  ‘He’s still sleepy,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll let him rest for a bit.’

  Liu Bei’s mother nodded as her daughter lay Little Dragon on the bed next to Aunty Tang. The bed was cold, seemed to get colder the nearer to the other women you went. Aunty Tang was sleeping more and more these days. It was as if she wasn’t dying so much as drifting away. About time too, Liu Bei thought as she smoothed the hair from Little Dragon’s face and folded the blanket over him, tucking it in under his chin. The sooner the better, she thought as she shook the blood back into her hands.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ Liu Bei asked her mother and her mother nodded. ‘I’ve got to go to town. I’ll probably go straight to work. I won’t be back until late.’

  Liu Bei’s mother nodded again. She had long ago stopped asking questions. Questions were useless things unless they had answers to go with them.

  The sun rose and the streets got busier and busier the nearer the centre of town Liu Bei got. She checked she had the list in her pocket, and then she checked for the letter from Shanghai in the other pocket, just in case.

  Liu Bei pushed past the confused mess of sellers and shoppers. She had to cross the road to avoid a market stall selling packaged shirts where men shouted at the crowd through megaphones. There was a new row of glitzy shops with air conditioning and loud music and the occasional groups of bewildered peasants who were trying to find their way home. Across the street a new supermarket was being opened. Shaoyang’s First Supermarket, the banner proclaimed, and their was a poster of a smiling pretty young shop assistant with the caption that read: I’m enthusiastic and fair‌–‌I hope to serve you every day.

  Liu Bei decided she would go and have a look. Outside the doorway was a line of flower bouquets, each with a red ribbon and yellow calligraphy that named the principal investors. The Fourth Army, Fifth Division, People’s Liberation Army, one of them read; Liu Bei curled her lip. Bastards, she thought.

  Inside the shop there were lots of shop assistants standing and smiling like those on the posters outside; wary shoppers investigating the long aisles. There were twenty types of washing powder; two whole sections devoted to toothpaste, and an entire aisle of foreign brands of milk powder. Liu Bei stopped to look at a rack of toothbrushes. The colours were beautiful. They had toothbrushes with smiling faces and coloured bristles, with free mini-tubes of toothpaste, brushes with stripes in red and white and blue. On an impulse she picked one out to give to Little Dragon as a present, but then she saw the price and put it back in shock. Seven yuan! Too much. Better not come at all than be made to feel like a pauper.

  It wasn’t far to the central roundabout where the statues of large-breasted Dunhuang fairies waited for the fountain to be repaired to wash the dirt from their concrete armpits. Liu Bei walked up and down the streets, looking for the right place, but it was hard to find. She thought she might be too early so she slipped into a streetside restaurant and had a bowl of wonton soup. The pork was too fatty, but the green broth was good, and there was a sauce of crushed peanuts that Liu Bei spooned in. Peanuts were good for your heart.

  Liu Bei drank the soup then stood up and paid the man three yuan. She walked round the roundabout a couple of times till she saw what she was looking for: a piece of laminated paper propped up between two stones, and leaning against a streetlight.

  Diplomas, degrees, driving licences, other miscellany: for sale, it said. The writing wasn’t very good.

  Liu Bei stood by the sign and waited. Three men who’d been posing as passers-by came rushing over‌–‌clamouring for her attention. ‘What do you want? What do you want?’ they demanded, and she told them. ‘No problem,’ they insisted and led her away by the elbow. ‘No problem, good, come with us.’

  The moon was gleaming from the hilltop when Liu Bei got back from The Drink and Dream Teahouse. In her mother’s house Little Dragon was just as she’d left him, except that he was dressed in his panda pyjamas, and his hair had been messed up by the pillow.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ her mother called from the toilet, and Liu Bei sat down at the table and waited for her to come out. Aunty Tang sat in the corner on a footstool, smoking a roll-up. The butt of the fag was wet with saliva, stained brown by the nicotine. The tobacco had a bitter smell, like it was mixed with twigs. The old woman was silent as she sucked the smoke in, breathed it out again like a toothless old dragon.

  ‘I wanted to ask you,’ Liu Bei said when her mother had washed her hands and come and sat down with her, ‘if I could borrow some money.’

  ‘Where do you think I could get money from?’ Liu Bei’s mother asked.

  Liu Bei nodded. Her mother was always like this about money. ‘I just thought you might have some. Don’t we have any relatives we can ask?’

  ‘Relatives?’ her mother snorted. ‘You don’t expect me to go and beg at their door do you?’

  Liu Bei stopped. Maybe this was the wrong time. They sat in silence. The light bulb swung above their heads and made the shadows sway from side to side in a slow and predictable dance. Liu Bei thought of another way to bring up the subject, but couldn’t. She had no idea what she needed would be so expensive, but everyone she’d asked had quoted the same prices. They were in league, she was sure. The whole world seemed to be in league against her sometimes.

  Liu Bei was working late the next few days, and Little Dragon stayed over at his grandmother’s. On her next full day off she went over to see him. She was excited at the prospect but when Little Dragon saw his mother he looked away and carried on playing with his friends.

  ‘Little Dragon!’ Liu Bei called, but he ignored her. She waited but he kept on playing so she pretended it didn’t matter and went inside, sat down at the table. The event made up her mind for her: a whore couldn’t bring a son up. It would be better for Little Dragon and better for her. And maybe she could come back and collect him when she had some money.

  Aunty Tang refused to get up for lunch and Little Dragon cried because he wanted to keep on playing. Liu Bei’s mother picked him up and he cuddled into her breasts, and sucked his thumb. Liu Bei watched and ate in silence. The old crone lay on the bed and stared at them through her blurry old eyes, started singing an old song to herself. Her voice was old and crackly, so tuneless it was hard to tell she was singing at all.

  The noise started to grate on Liu Bei’s nerves. She clenched her jaw shut, wanted to scream. Aunty Tang carried on regardless and Liu Bei began to feel the song was directed at her; as if the old woman was enjoying some obscure private joke. Liu Bei thought about how she would have escaped all this if she and Da Shan had settled down quietly together‌–‌but they would have had to have been different people to do that, and she didn’t want to be anyone but herself. No, that wasn’t really true: they would have settled down if he’d kept his promise. She could have settled down with someone else if she hadn’t waited for him; or if she hadn’t had Little Dragon. Maybe she’d passed lots of other Da Shans in the streets or in the market: passed her ideal lover in the street, and never known. The thought made her feel cold and hopeless. Aunty Tang continued singing.

  Liu Bei stood up and started to clear the table, carried dishes to the side ready to wash. She filled a kettle, lit the stove with a match, and set the water to boil. Little Dragon sat on his grandmother’s lap and wanted to play peek-a-boo.

  ‘Peek-a-boo!’ Liu Bei’s mother was saying, ‘peek‌–‌a‌–‌boo!’ and Little Dragon burst out into laughter.

  ‘Can you write your name yet?’ Liu Bei called across with a smile,
but Little Dragon took no notice.

  ‘Peek-a-boo!’ Liu Bei’s mother said, and Little Dragon burst out laughing again. He was still laughing when she gave him a pencil and a piece of paper and said, ‘Come on‌–‌write your name for your mother.’

  Little Dragon held the pencil in his fist and carved the words onto the paper. He was pressing so hard the paper tore and he had to begin again, in the corner. Liu Bei’s mother went to the bed and pulled up the mattress, took an old leather envelope and carried it into the light. She opened it up and took the money out, put it on the table. Little Dragon’s eyes peered at it as he carried on writing the strokes of ‘Dragon’ like his grandmother had taught him. ‘Little’ was easy, it only had three strokes, but ‘Dragon’ was difficult. He finished carving it into the paper, and counted how many strokes it had: ‘little’ had three and ‘dragon’ had one, two, three, four, five‌–‌six strokes! He checked his strokes, tried to make them look more like they should do, then held it up.

  ‘Look!’ he shouted but no one looked. His mother and grandmother were talking.

  ‘Look!’ he said again, and carried the paper over to them. ‘I wrote my name.’

  ‘Very good,’ Liu Bei’s mother said, ‘now why don’t you go and sit down and write your mother’s name.’

  Liu Bei’s mother counted out the money Da Shan had given her in front of her daughter. There was more than seven thousand yuan. ‘Don’t ask me where it came from, but I’ve saved it for you and Little Dragon,’ she said. ‘For emergencies.’

  Liu Bei stared at the money. With this much she wouldn’t have to go marry the man in the advert. She could do something: set up a business or something. Her mind raced as she reached and took the money. This was her second chance. She could put this with the money she’d saved and‌–‌Liu Bei felt a sudden terror. What if she did go to Shanghai and start a business, what then?

  The summer had been so hot it dried great cracks into the yellow earth. Autumn Cloud noticed one had cut across the path as she walked up the hill to the Temple of Harmonious Virtue. There were good views out into the countryside, and there was usually a breeze up at the temple, even when the rest of the world was still. She climbed up one day each week, paid a monk to chant his rosary. While he chanted she would light three sticks of incense and stick them into the copper bowl at the feet of Guanyin. Let them carry her blessings to her husband.

  Today she lit the incense as normal and puffed out the yellow flames. The tips glowed red then retreated slowly under long hats of ash. Autumn Cloud whispered her prayers and the monk started to cough. Guanyin’s half-moon eyes looked on, unmoved, but Autumn Cloud turned in alarm. The monk wheezed a little more and then held his hand up to her not to worry, took a sip of tea from his jam jar, blinked his eyes. ‘It’s OK,’ he said recovering his composure, using the disturbance to skip a couple of beads.

  Outside the spring sun was scattering pale shadows across the floor and a light breeze was dancing with the sunlight. It ruffled Autumn Cloud’s hair and sent grey wisps flickering across her forehead. She put her hand to her head, stroked a long strand, pulled it down and let it fly back again. From here she could see all across Shaoyang, she could even hear the clatter of machines on the building sites.

  It had looked much more beautiful when she’d first come here in 1959. There had been so many villages and bamboo forests dotted through the fields. Now they were all buried under concrete and tarmac. Autumn Cloud thought back to the time she’d been released from the re-education camp, and shivered. How long ago was that? she thought. Ten, fifteen‌–‌no it must be over twenty years ago now. She must have been released in 1973, she thought, and her husband in 1975.

  Autumn Cloud let out a long sigh. What terrible days.

  She and Party Secretary Li had worked hard to build China. Even though they were newly weds they hardly saw each other for days or sometimes weeks. He’d been in charge of the Prostitute Re-education Centre, and she’d been working in the Political Press Office. Dreams of modernising the country had driven them on. It was like they’d been married to the country.

  Autumn Cloud shivered again, and tried to wipe the tangled threads of hair from her face as the wind wrapped itself around her. She remembered reading about widows in Old China, maybe in the time of the Qing Dynasty. She’d always thought that she had nothing in common with people so far away, but now she wasn’t so sure. Look at the worker who got killed last week: he was as dead as her husband. What did time matter: it was all in the mind. We all got washed away in the end and the muddy stream soon ran clear again.

  It took a half an hour for Autumn Cloud to get back into town. She usually went to the man in the factory compound, the one by the office block, but there would be so much fuss‌–‌and anyway‌–‌it didn’t matter where she went.

  The first hairdressers she found was a concrete box with a metal garage door open to the street. A teenage girl in a miniskirt was sitting in the doorway filing the nails of her right hand down to neatly curved blades. Her slim legs were folded over each other, her feet slipped carelessly into a pair of fluffy slippers that were made in the shape of dogs’ faces with two flappy ears on either side. Autumn Cloud stood waiting, but the girl kept working on her nails. On the walls were pages neatly torn from magazines and stuck onto the wall with drawing pins. Autumn Cloud peered into the beautiful faces with white smiles and gorgeous hair. She studied them for a moment and turned to look at the girl, who was still grinding her nails, then she cleared her throat and said, ‘Hello?’

  The girl looked up and sniffed.

  ‘I want a hair cut,’ Autumn Cloud said.

  The girl turned back to her nails.

  ‘I want a hair cut,’ Autumn Cloud repeated.

  The girl let out a long bored sigh and stood up. Her doggy slippers dragged lazily along the floor as she walked to the back of a battered metal chair. She pulled the chair out and the metal legs scraped noisily across the bare concrete, then pulled a dirty towel off a peg and flapped it in the air‌–‌creating a dust cloud of black hairs that fell towards the floor.

  Autumn Cloud shuffled her bottom to get comfortable, and looked up into the mirror and her reflection gazed back.

  ‘How do you want it?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Shaving.’

  ‘Shaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Completely shaving?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The girl raised an eyebrow and reached forward to pick up the electric shaver, turned it on. The blades rattled together with excitement. Autumn Cloud felt the cool metal touch the nape of her neck, and the tone of the metal changed as they began to cut, and then strands of grey hair fell to the floor; one by one.

  Autumn Cloud walked back to the factory and walked through the gate and up the stairs to her block of flats. No one recognised her at all; it was as if she wasn’t there any more. Not even her neighbour’s child, who was playing with a toy aeroplane and who just looked straight through her.

  Autumn Cloud made herself a cup of tea and then sat down at the table and put her plastic bag down in front of her. It rustled as she un-knotted the top and pulled it open, and looked down at the tangled strands of grey hair. She put her hand in and felt them, expecting it to feel reassuringly familiar, but it felt cold instead‌–‌cold and lifeless.

  Autumn Cloud took a deep breath and unlocked the bedroom door, pushed it open. She didn’t like to go back in there, it made her apprehensive. She quickly went over to the bed and smoothed the sheets down, and then knelt down and pulled the box out from under the bed. The ashes moved inside the box as she picked it up and carried it out into the living room. She shut the door behind her, and lifted the box onto the table. As she did so the box rattled again and Autumn Cloud shuddered. Her left hand began to shake and she bit her lip but it wouldn’t stop. She put the box on the table and clenched both fists, forced herself not to cry and took a deep breath. She was all right so far.

  Autumn Cloud opene
d the flaps of the box. She didn’t want to look inside, but couldn’t help smelling damp ashes and seeing the irregular pattern of grey-black remains. She stared for a long moment at the jumble of ash and charred fragments of bone, and a wave of cold drenched her insides. The entirety of her husband’s life reduced to a box full of ashes.

  Tears blurred the world as she fumbled for the bag of hair and tipped the mess of hairs into the box. She found the box flaps and pushed them down again, and carried the box back into the bedroom. She left the box on the bed, and closed the door behind her, and locked it.

  Old Zhu’s wife was bargaining over the price of egg plant when she overheard someone say something about Party Secretary Li’s widow. She piled up more than a kilo, bargained the price down to a pittance, then marched under the factory gate and up towards Party Secretary Li’s flat. Her feet tramped loudly on the stairs; she was breathless when she got to the top and knocked loudly on the door. There was no answer. She listened and thought she could hear the voices inside. She knocked again, louder this time. Still nothing.

  Old Zhu’s wife took in a deep and angry breath. She tried the door and pushed it open, and saw a figure sitting at the table: a shaven-headed Autumn Cloud.

  ‘Oh heavens! Look at you!’ Old Zhu’s wife shouted. ‘What have you done?’

  It took a while for Autumn Cloud to stop crying, and Old Zhu’s wife felt guilty for being so forthright, but then her hand brushed against the bristles on Autumn Cloud’s head and she started. A shaven head looked so unnatural: especially awoman’s.

  ‘Wah! You look like a nun!’ she chided and Autumn Cloud smiled weakly. ‘There, there, that’s better!’ Old Zhu’s wife said, then gave the woman a severe look. ‘Imagine how I felt this morning when a peasant told me you’d become a nun! I started telling them off for spreading tales and then I come here and find it’s true. How do you think I feel‌–‌people will laugh at me.’