The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  ‘Are you a ghost, Ma?’ Wang asks.

  Shuxiang pretends not to hear, and Wang remembers her habit of ‘not hearing’ questions she didn’t want to answer from his childhood. She gazes at the beer bottles, pellets of cockroach poison and the stuffed bin liners ‘packed’ by Yida before her eyes come to rest on her son. Wang shifts awkwardly in his T-shirt and boxers.

  ‘I don’t live here. I am staying here for a week or two while I work out some problems with my wife . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  How much does Shuxiang see of his life from beyond the grave? Wang wonders, with a creeping sense of shame. But Shuxiang knows the truth about what people are like. She has seen humans at their worst, and nothing much shocks her. Wang thinks of where they put her before she died.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened to you, Ma,’ he says. ‘Father lied to me. He told me you were dead. I only found out the truth last week . . .’

  Wang thinks of Shuxiang, drugged and incarcerated in the hospital. He thinks of his twelve-year-old self, grieving on cold, damp dormitory sheets, and tears flow down his cheeks. Irritation stirs the blankness of Shuxiang’s face. Even when Wang was a child, she had no patience with tears.

  ‘Why get upset over that now?’ Shuxiang says. ‘Even had you known the truth, what could you have done? You were twelve. That’s in the past, anyway. That’s not why I came to see you. I am here because of a danger in the present.’

  ‘Danger?’

  Wang notices for the first time the strange humming in the air, as though the atmosphere is agitated by Shuxiang’s presence, the molecules vibrating, tense and volatile.

  ‘That man,’ Shuxiang says, ‘is worse than you thought.’

  ‘Who?’ Wang asks. ‘Father?’

  ‘Not him. Your friend. You must go and check on Yida and Echo. They are in trouble.’

  There’s a sickening thud in Wang’s chest. Zeng Yan. She must mean Zeng Yan.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Go to them,’ Shuxiang urges. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  Wang curses, pulls his trousers from a bin liner, staggers into them and zips up the fly. He grabs his keys and wallet and runs out of the door.

  ‘Hurry,’ Shuxiang calls after him as he runs on panicking legs down the hall. ‘Hurry, Xiao Jun . . .’

  The phone is ringing, shrill and electrifying as it jolts him awake. Wang sits up in the dark. ‘Ma?’ he says. The chair is empty, Shuxiang no longer there. Disappeared upon waking from the strange dream. Wang gropes for the ringing phone. It’s Yida, and she is hysterical. Wang can’t make sense of her breathless torrent of words. He hasn’t heard her so distraught since that harrowing night nine years ago, when they woke to blood-soaked sheets and the miscarriage of their first child.

  ‘Slow down, Yida. What did you say?’

  She repeats herself. Wang can’t believe what he is hearing. If he didn’t know Yida better, he’d think it was a sick practical joke.

  ‘I am coming now,’ he tells her. He hangs up and heads out into the night.

  Echo is in a private room at the hospital, on a white-sheeted bed. A high-flow oxygen mask is strapped over her nose and mouth and connected to a ventilation machine by a long corrugated plastic tube. Wang touches his hand to her clammy forehead, and her eyelids, pale and faintly blue-veined, remain shut. Her hair is spread across the pillow, and the pallor of her face, partially obscured by the transparent muzzle of the oxygen mask, is as though her blood drained in fright and has yet to return. The odour of fire clings to her. Smoke and the chemical fumes of burnt plastics: toxic and harmful to the lungs of little girls.

  The last time he’d seen Echo in hospital was the day of her birth. Wang had watched the midwife pull her out and hold her up in her latex-gloved hands under the fluorescent strip light. Echo had wailed, and Wang had sympathized with her protest at being wrenched out of the womb. He understood the terror of her ears, hearing for the first time the stainless-steel clatter of the delivery room. He understood the terror of her lungs, breathing the chill, disinfectant-scented air. Echo had wailed and kicked her tiny feet and Wang had vowed then to protect his newborn daughter. A vow that, standing over Echo’s hospital bed eight years later, he knows he has not honoured.

  Dr Shu waits quietly, allowing the father time with his child, before explaining, ‘The smoke inhalation is unlikely to cause any lasting damage. We will prescribe your daughter some antiinflammatory drugs, and the irritation in her lungs and respiratory tract should be gone in a week or two. Echo is a very lucky girl. Her mother was very brave and quick-thinking to get her out of there as fast as she did.’

  Wang nods and, without pulling his gaze away from Echo’s sleeping face, says, ‘The police suspect an electrical fault?’

  ‘That’s what I heard,’ the doctor says. ‘Your wife is talking to them now. She will have a clearer idea of what is going on . . .’

  Wang can’t hear the rest. Who once bragged in a letter about going to Apartment 404? Who was once convicted of arson for setting fire to a shed he thought his ex-lover was inside? Who is deranged enough to attempt to burn a woman and child to death in their beds? When he sees Zeng, Wang doesn’t know what he will do.

  The door to the private room opens and Yida enters, her eyes dazed under the craziness of her hair. The smoke of the fire clings to her as it does to Echo, ashes smudging her cheeks. She wears the floral polyester nightdress Wang bought her for her birthday, and must have fled without shoes, as she has disposable hospital slippers on her feet. Yida stiffens when she sees Wang, who walks to her, reaching out his arms.

  ‘Yida . . . what’s wrong?’

  She glares at him, her smoke-inflamed eyes shot through with red. ‘I don’t want to speak to you.’

  ‘Yida? You don’t blame me for the fire, do you? That makes no sense. I wasn’t even at home!’

  Dr Shu clears his throat, excuses himself and slips out the door. Yida strides past her husband to Echo’s bedside. Her chest heaving under her nightdress, she turns and points a shaking finger at him.

  ‘I warned you the wiring in the bathroom was dangerous. I warned you we had to get it fixed. But you were too lazy. We accidently left the water heater on tonight, and look what happened!’

  ‘So it’s my fault then? That’s what you’re saying? If you were concerned about the wiring, Yida, why didn’t you report it to the landlord yourself?’

  Though Wang thinks he’s made a valid point, Yida reacts as though he has said something offensive. She stabs a finger at the door. ‘Get out! Now! I can’t stand the sight of you.’

  Wang takes a deep breath. He reminds himself of what Yida has been through. How she woke in the night to suffocating heat and smoke and had to escape with Echo on to the neighbour’s balcony. Apartment 404 has been gutted by fire, and everything they own destroyed. She has nowhere to live, and her only child is in a hospital bed, hooked up to a machine. Yida is too shaken up to think straight, and Wang aches for his wife. She should be turning to him for support, not turning against him.

  ‘I’m sorry that I wasn’t there, Yida,’ he says. ‘I thank God that you and Echo got out of there safely. I owe you for rescuing Echo. You were very brave.’

  Wang’s words, the tremor in his voice, break down her animosity. She lowers her shaking hand. ‘I thank God I woke up,’ she says. ‘It frightens me to think what would have happened if I hadn’t woken . . .’

  A sob catches in Yida’s throat and she throws a hand over her mouth. Wang goes to her, and she doesn’t resist as he takes her in his arms, embracing her for the first time in weeks. He strokes the back of his wife’s messy head as she quietly weeps on his shoulder. The fire has destroyed everything they have, but at least it has brought them back together, Wang thinks, as a family once more.

  ‘We shouldn’t blame each other,’ he says soberly. ‘The fire had nothing to do with the wiring.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Yida pulls back to look at her husband at arm’s len
gth. There is a wary look in her bloodshot eyes. ‘That it was arson?’

  Wang nods. ‘I know who did it.’

  Yida laughs, shoves his chest with both hands and steps backwards out of his arms. ‘Let me guess,’ she says. ‘Your friend? The man who wrote the letters?’

  ‘The police couldn’t do anything about him before,’ Wang says, ‘but now he has harmed us they can arrest him.’

  Yida laughs again, harsh and cynical. She goes back to their daughter’s bedside. Leaning over Echo, she strokes the hair at her temples, as though to close ranks against him.

  ‘You think it’s all in my head, don’t you, Yida?’ Wang says.

  ‘Yes,’ Yida says. ‘The fire started in the bathroom. The firemen said it was the wiring. I can’t take any more of your madness, Wang Jun. I’m sick to death of it. The police are waiting to speak to you in the hall. Go and tell them your arson theory! Go!’

  Echo is waking. She coughs faintly into the breathing apparatus over her mouth, the sound muffled by the plastic. Her eyes flutter open up at her mother, standing over the bed, and she attempts to raise her head from the pillow. ‘Ma?’ she croaks up at Yida. Wang’s heart contracts and he wants to stay with his daughter, to reassure her that she is safe. But the last thing Echo needs right now is to see her parents fighting. So he leaves to speak to the police. Yida will come round.

  The policeman is sleeping in the chair outside Echo’s room, called off duty by his three-in-the-morning fatigue. Wang looks up and down the otherwise empty hallway. He hears the policeman’s colleague in the examination room. ‘This one’s a bullet wound. I was chasing a gangster,’ he boasts. The nurse giggles. ‘What bullet wound needs . . . ten stitches?’ Wang stares at the policeman sleeping in the chair. What if he tells the police he suspects arson and they suspect him? What if they look up his records, see that he was once a psychiatric patient and arrest him? He has heard how the police solve their cases. They will take him to the station and throw him about an interrogation room until he confesses. The investigation will begin and end with him.

  Wang walks back to reception, where a mother hugs her asthmatic, wheezing toddler, and a drunk smiles, bleeding from a head wound but too numbed by baijiu to feel the pain. The sliding glass doors part for him as he leaves, and out in the hospital car park Wang starts to run, past the ambulances and parked cars. At the hospital gate, he looks back at the emergency-room entrance. No one is coming for him but, not wanting to take any chances, he keeps on running down the street.

  Morning. The sky, cleared of pollution by pre-Olympic closures of coal-burning factories outside Beijing, is blue and streaked with cirrus clouds. The alley, however, is its same sordid self, smelling of beer, gutter urine and the sweet rot of cabbage in bins. The barber’s is closed, the red, white and blue pole not spinning, the cord unplugged. Wang turns off the taxi engine and calls Zeng. The phone rings and rings. Wang is on the verge of hanging up when Zeng picks up.

  ‘Wei?’

  Zeng is sleepy, his tongue groggy on the bed of his mouth. Ten past seven and he probably hasn’t been in bed for long.

  ‘I need to speak to you,’ Wang says. ‘Come outside.’ He hangs up.

  As he waits, Wang smokes a Red Pagoda Mountain, tugging nicotine and tar, the only stuff his body won’t reject with nausea, deep into his lungs. He has smoked it down to the butt by the time Zeng appears. Yawning. Bare-chested in boxers. The bruises on his nose and cheeks darkened to purplish black, making him look like a featherweight boxer staggering out of the ring. Zeng walks to the taxi, the emerald scales of his dragon tattoo glinting in the sun. The waistband of his boxers hangs from his narrow hips, and his lean and sinewy body looks vulnerable and undefended.

  Wang leans out of the driver’s-side window. ‘Get in.’

  ‘What is it? Why have you come to see me?’ Zeng asks. He touches his hand to the bruises that Wang beat into him the day before.

  Wang chokes back his anger, struggling to bring his voice under control. His heart is beating hard and sweat dampening his brow. He looks straight ahead through the windscreen.

  ‘You know why. Get in.’

  Zeng goes to the passenger-side door, unconcerned that he is barefoot and in his underwear. He slides into the passenger seat, slams the door and turns to Wang. ‘I don’t understand you, Wang Jun,’ he says. ‘The way you . . . attacked me yesterday. I thought you never wanted to see me again . . .’

  Wang shuts his eyes and grips the steering wheel with all his strength. He thinks of Echo in the hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask so she can breathe. The nearness of Zeng in the taxi is unbearable. Wang can’t release the steering wheel from his white-knuckle grip, out of fear of what his hands would otherwise do.

  ‘Did you get another letter? Is this what this is about? I swear, it wasn’t me . . .’

  Wang opens his eyes. Zeng is stroking his scarred forearm as he looks at him, as though his fingers are unconsciously drawn to his past self-destruction and pain. Wang is sure Zeng knows why he has come for him. Where is his sense of self-preservation? His sense of threat?

  ‘I worry about you, Wang Jun,’ Zeng says. ‘I know you are under a lot of stress. If you want to talk, I am here for you . . .’

  Wu Fei comes flying out of the barber’s. Barefoot. Naked from the waist up. His underdeveloped chest and pale adolescent nipples make him appear younger than Wang had first thought. Seventeen, or even sixteen.

  ‘Yanyan! Stop!’

  Wang hits central locking. The boy won’t let Zeng go without a fight.

  ‘Roll up your window,’ he tells Zeng.

  Wu Fei dashes in front of the taxi, to the passenger side. He pulls uselessly on the door latch then thrusts his fingers through the narrow gap above Zeng’s window, tugging on the glass.

  ‘Don’t go with him, Yanyan!’ he yells at Zeng. ‘He’s dangerous! He will beat you again. He only wants to hurt you.’

  ‘Feifei,’ Zeng says firmly, ‘we are just going for a drive. There’s something Wang and I have to talk about.’

  Clinging with his fingers, the boy shouts into the gap above the window glass. ‘Please, Xiao Yan. Please get out of the taxi. Don’t go with him. Get out of the taxi now!’

  Zeng Yan sighs. ‘Feifei, go back to bed. I’ll be back soon and we’ll get breakfast together.’

  ‘No.’ Wu Fei shakes his head. ‘Let me come with you. I will sit in the back seat and be quiet. You won’t know I’m there, I promise. I just want to make sure you are okay.’

  ‘Feifei, stop acting like a child!’

  But he is a child, Wang sees that now. He is a boy in a dark adult world, and Zeng is his protector; the one person he has. Wu Fei clings to him with a child’s fear of abandonment.

  ‘Please, Yanyan, don’t go! He’s crazy and wants to hurt you! Why can’t you see that?’

  Zeng turns to Wang, embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry about this.’

  He turns back to Wu Fei, and Wang waits as they quarrel. The boy presses his forehead to the passenger-side window, desperately pleading with Zeng through the glass. Frustrated tears well in the boy’s eyes and Wang feels sorry for him then. It must hurt to love someone so much. Wu Fei shouts over the passenger seat at Wang, ‘Let me in, or I’ll send more photos to your wife! I’ll send the worst ones I have!’

  Wang turns the key in the ignition. At the sound of the engine starting up, the boy dashes to the front of the car and leans over the bonnet. For a moment Wang is afraid he will climb on the taxi and cling on to the windscreen. But Wu Fei stares him down instead. He spits on the windscreen, vicious and hard. Saliva slithers down the glass and Wang fights the urge to turn the windscreen wipers on.

  ‘I know your taxi company!’ the boy shouts. ‘I know your licence-plate number! If Zeng Yan doesn’t come back soon, I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them you’ve kidnapped him, and they’ll go after you!’

  He thumps the bonnet, the vibrations passing through the chassis to the driver’s seat. Wu Fei glowers at W
ang. But he is conceding defeat. Backing off.

  ‘If you hurt him, I will kill you,’ he shouts. ‘I’ll kill you, Driver Wang!’

  Wang doesn’t doubt it. He lowers his foot to the accelerator and the car lurches forwards. The boy moves aside, and as they drive away Wang watches him recede out of sight in the rear-view. Wu Fei stands in the alley, watching them, desolate and grief-stricken as Wang drives his lover to an unknown fate. You are still young, Wang thinks. You’ll get over him.

  ‘He has problems with his temper,’ Zeng says. ‘His father used to beat him a lot . . .’

  Wang shakes his head and mutters, ‘I should’ve run him over for sending those photos to my wife.’

  28

  The Anti-Capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls

  People’s Republic of China, 1966

  I

  THE PEASANT IS old and shrunken, his clothes sewn out of Plentiful Harvest rice sacks. He hawks and spits on the classroom floor, and rows of fifteen-year-old girls in padded-cotton jackets and trousers wrinkle their noses at their desks. Most of my classmates are from good Beijing families, and some are daughters of the Communist elite. Their fathers use spittoons.

  The peasant shuffles up on to the teaching platform, and Teacher Zhao introduces him as Comrade Po.

  ‘Comrade Po is from a village outside Beijing,’ Teacher Zhao says, ‘and in today’s lesson, “Recalling with Bitterness the Exploitation of the Peasant Classes by Evil Landlords”, Comrade Po will tell us about his suffering during the Nationalist era.’

  Comrade Po grins with overcrowded, never-been-brushed-looking teeth, and starts lecturing us in his guttural, rural dialect. A quarter of an hour goes by before Teacher Zhao realizes we can’t understand and translates:

  ‘One year the sorghum harvest was so bad, Comrade Po couldn’t pay the rent. He begged the landlord not to evict him, as he and his wife and children would freeze to death. The landlord told Comrade Po that he could stay if he gave him his eldest daughter. Well, what choice did Comrade Po have? To save his wife and eight other children, he gave his eldest daughter away. The landlord raped her, and Comrade Po’s daughter was so ashamed she drank insecticide and died. She was eleven years old.’