I felt in my coat pocket for the hongbao. Three nights had passed since we lay side by side in my too-small k’ang on New Year’s Eve and she’d given me three hundred yuan! More money than I’d held in my life. With it, I was free from the arranged marriage to Li Quifang. I had barely slept with that red envelope inside my pillowcase and Zhi’s promises in my ear.
“Hey, Zhi!” A loud whistle echoed through the crowds.
“Fatty! How you doing?”
I peered over to where a thin woman with dark skin bobbed above the crowds, lifted like a champion wrestler.
“You’re not the only one going up in the world Zhi!” She laughed throatily and disappeared into the crowd.
Zhi’s accent had changed since working in the city; her bold, thick lips refined by pearly pink lipstick, her eyebrows, now plucked thin, looked surprised to find themselves so high above her eyes. Her eye shadow shimmered in the washed-out winter light. Money had made her brand new. I wanted it to make me new too.
Up ahead, green guards infiltrated the lines and held people back. A tannoy crackled in the dome.
“Passengers waiting to validate a ticket must wait in line. Any passenger without a valid ticket must leave the foyer immediately. No passenger will be allowed to buy tickets for today’s travel.”
“Now what?”
“They do this every time,” Zhi said.
“But I’ve not got a ticket.”
A uniformed guard passed down our line. Several of the passengers fell away. We shifted closer to the barrier. I clutched the red envelope. For a moment, I wished to be home, hiding in my k’ang. I could forget about the city, the bustle and friends, the factory and wages Zhi bragged about. It wasn’t too late to beg forgiveness.
A whistle blew. The queues broke down. The foyer echoed with shouts. A swathe of guards tightened in; a man with vacuum cleaners was dragged to one side along with many others. I felt someone yank my arm.
“Quick,” said Zhi, dragging me out of the chaos. “Now’s our chance.”
We ran towards the barrier. Where Zhi darted, I followed, dodging sideways through the crowds. The air was cooler, and I felt a gust whip across my face. I heard the low thrum of the train’s engine. Zhi dropped her rucksack.
“Leave it,” she shouted, shinning her way up the barrier. “Take my hand.”
“I’m not tall enough. I don’t have the strength.”
“Yes you do, little wimp.”
A voice called out from the crowd. A young man in a suit pointed at us. “They’ve not paid! Stop them! They’re getting away!”
“Mai Ling, hurry up, I can’t hold you.”
I was almost to the top when Zhi pulled me over by the hood of my coat. I landed hard and ran, limping, onto the platform. Zhi was already on the train, beckoning me. I held out my hand and she hauled me into the cram of squashed faces and limbs.
“Mind your back,” said a young woman as the door swung shut like a coffin lid.
A whistle blew. The train spat out steam and shunted. I lurched into a stranger’s armpit. Zhi was nowhere to be seen as the train crept away from Hunan – and everything familiar.
To my left swayed a man with ratted, greasy hair and dandruff dusted across the shoulder pads of his black suit jacket. To my right, a woman sighed and ground her teeth, which set me on edge. We lurched as the train picked up speed, clattering forwards.
One-and-two-and-three-and-
I counted five minutes before shifting the weight off my sore ankle. There was no air and sweat pooled at the base of my spine. When we reached the fourth or fifth stop, the man with the dandruff got off and I left my place by the door. Half the space was taken up with piles of suitcases and bundles of washing. Eventually, I spotted Zhi in the gangway of the next carriage.
“You look pale, Cousin. Here, chew this.” Zhi unwrapped a silver stick of foil and held out something I’d never seen before. “It’s called Wrigley’s. Don’t swallow, otherwise it’ll get twisted around your heart.” Her eyes glinted.
The air was cooler in the carriage. Night had thinned into a pale band across the distant hills and a winter breeze from an open window tickled my face. I let my shoulders relax. Nearby, two studious-looking boys played rummy. The one closest was about to win. He had inquisitive, deep-set eyes that reminded me of Father’s. I wondered which village he was from.
Zhi chomped her gum. “We’ll have to buy you some new gear, Mai Mai, you can’t turn up for an interview looking like a greasy hat – even though you are.”
I reached into my coat for the red envelope, excited about the shops and the idea of my own salary. My plan was to send enough of my wages back to Mother and Father to buy their forgiveness and lift them from shame.
“What’s the matter?” asked Zhi.
“It’s the envelope, Cousin. I had it in my hand a minute ago … I …”
“Mai Ling?”
My ankles gave way, my knees buckled and the train became blackness.
When I came round, an old man was staring down his nose at me. I’d fainted on his copy of the Sanxiang City Daily.
Zhi knelt by my side. “Give her room to breathe.”
“This girl isn’t fit to travel,” grimaced the man.
“Don’t be so hard, this is her first time by train,” said Zhi.
He shook out his paper and shuffled up.
I held onto the bench and pulled myself in beside him, apologising.
“How many fingers?” Zhi waved three in front of my nose. “Now watch this.” She moved her index finger in a pendulum. “Tsk! Your temperature’s not good. You need to drink more.”
The studious boy coughed. “Excuse me. I have a flask of green tea, if your friend would like some?”
“Really? Give it here will you?” said Zhi.
He produced a cup from his knapsack and began to pour some of the steaming tea. The movement of the train unsteadied his hand and the liquid spilled onto his shirt sleeve. He fumbled for a handkerchief and hurriedly dabbed it away without a fuss.
“Here, this should help re-hydrate her,” he said.
Our hands touched momentarily. He was quite handsome; his nose stately; his eyes gentle. His presence was like a shady tree on a hot day and I sipped the tea, feeling shy.
“Give her some more,” said Zhi.
“Are you sure you’re alright?” he asked. “You still seem disorientated.”
“I’m not sure, it must be the heat.”
“One minute we were talking about shopping, then all of a sudden - zoumph! You went out cold,” said Zhi. “You’d better not go fainting on me at work; I don’t want you mucking up the orders.”
I smiled at the kind boy, feeling inadequate at the sight of so many textbooks bulging from his knapsack.
“Do you like reading?” he asked.
“Very much,” I lied, ashamed to have left school at twelve.
“I’m studying medicine. Do you work in the city?”
“She’s an engineer,” interrupted Zhi.
The old man next to me tapped his cap. “She ought to take better care of her brains then.”
“She’s a rising star of the Forwood Motor Corporation in Nanchang. She’s working on their new 4x4.”
“You don’t look …”
“Appearances are deceptive, my friend,” said Zhi and fluttered her heavy eyelashes like a songbird fluttering its feathers.
I pinched her leg – an engineer! I struggled to work the plough. I didn’t like the way she flirted with him either.
“I’m also heading for Nanchang. My name’s Yifan. Perhaps our paths will cross there?”
Another crowd of passengers poured into the carriage and we moved on, for fear of the ticket inspector. I lost sight of Yifan behind a couple of young businessmen, who joked loudly about getting drunk over Spring Festival. We squeezed past the two suits and a woman carrying a television on her hip. Zhi stumbled over a pair of shoes, where a man lay asleep beneath the seats. “Move it!” she said and bu
nched him.
I spent the rest of the six hour journey squeezed into a space of about twelve inches, surrounded on all sides by bags, boxes and steaming passengers. My body soon ached with a pain I’d not thought possible. Unable to get to the toilet, I soiled myself.
Wedged beside me, Cousin fell in and out of sleep. She muttered the word Manager as her head rolled against my shoulder, buffeted by the rattle of the train. I pictured my family at home in the kitchen: Mother furious at the stove, Father staring at his boots wondering how he lost his obedient daughter. By now, Little Brother would be eating breakfast – his lip trembling because there was no Big Sister to play figurines in the yard. I swallowed hard at my guilt. Could I run away from them? Did I have the guts to see it through and make a new life in the city?
“You’ll easily find a job,” Zhi had said. “You don’t have to live like our grandmother and her mother’s grandmother.” She made it sound so easy. She promised my family would forgive me. “As soon as your wages brush their palms, you’ll be their daughter again. They’ll love you even more because they don’t have to bow and scrape to the Quifangs. You can earn four times as much as they do in a year.” We had been curled beneath my blanket on New Year’s Eve, firecrackers shattering the night sky. She had watched my eyes light up the dark at the sight of so much money inside the red envelope – money that could free me from my fate.
But did she really know our family? Or care about the old ways? Listening to Zhi talk, there was no past, no sense of ‘our work’, ‘our history’, ‘our family,’ it was only ‘me, me, me’ – and always in the future. All she knew about was the city and even that could be one of her tall tales. Maybe Nanchang only existed in the sky? I had the sudden urge to fling myself from the train.
Tucked inside the sleeve of my jumper, were two of the four figurines I had carved over Spring Festival. I had taken the parents and left Little Brother with the children. They were my confidants, my reminder of home and would be called Nie, secret. I wriggled Mr and Mrs Nie free. Their faces looked disgruntled. Their quiet smiles had vanished in the train’s dim light. Were they upset to be escaping so fast and so far from Hunan? Should I turn back and go home, to my family – Li Quifang’s family, the funeral parlour?
Stop now. Go back. Stop now. Go back.
I strained to hear their warning. Through the window, I could just make out the slow ache of a new day cutting through the city haze.
It was the silence of the place that got to her, made her wonder if she was the last one alive on earth and where she existed in the cosmos – how she, Nancy Milne, aged sixty, fitted into it all – and what separated her from the other side? If May, or any of the silent bodies in Hope Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, could deteriorate so easily, fall from consciousness in an instant, might she be next? And then who would look after her girls? Her girls, her precious twins, by law and by right – not the birth mother’s - not May’s. She’d given up her rights the day she abandoned them on the steps of Nanchang’s Welfare Institute.
Nancy perched on the edge of a plastic chair and waited to be called from the numb safety of the ICU reception. Her eyes returned frequently to a pile of leaflets on bereavement counselling left discreetly on a table. The silence stretched unbroken, except for the coaxing voice of a nurse breezing in her ear.
“Mr and Mrs Milne, it’s this way when you’re ready.”
Her hand reached for Iain’s and they followed the nurse down the corridor. A familiar knot tightened in the back of her neck. Nancy pushed away the memory of the hospital where her mom died.
The nurse paused in front of a hand-gel dispenser. “Before you go in, I should say May is hooked up to monitors, and a ventilator. It might look like a lot of wires. Her head is also misshaped after surgery …”
Her voice faded into the background as Nancy remembered the stolen photos stashed in May’s closet.
The nurse’s bleeper vibrated and she excused herself.
“Nancy, are you sure you want to do this?”
No.
“I’d like to be alone with her, just for a while.”
Iain squeezed her hand. “If you’re sure … she’s your friend. I’ll wait outside. But Nancy – I want you to come away if this is too much.”
She gave a vague nod and passed into the dim, medicalised abyss.
May’s bed was at the far end. When she pulled back the curtain, a pale Chinese face came into view: eyes closed, chest ticker taped with monitor pads, a ventilator tube bulged at her mouth. Her head was bandaged, her hair shaved. Some of the iodine from her operation streaked her scalp. Beneath the bandage another tube led to a monitor. She looked like she was on a charger. Nancy was thankful May’s comatose body looked nothing like her mom’s, bloated with seawater.
Nancy’s hands felt suddenly empty and she wished she’d brought something: flowers, grapes, anything to hold onto in the strange, scientific place where lives hung on threads pinned to beds. She dragged a chair forward. It felt important to be close to May in case she showed any signs: a twitch, a frown. A white tag on the edge of the linen sheet said ‘Property of Hope Hospital’. She wasn’t sure if that meant May or the bed linen.
May’s toes formed meringue-peaks in the sheet two thirds of the way down. Clearly, it wasn’t designed for a woman like her. Like most hospital equipment – wheelchairs, stretchers, bedpans, Gideon Bibles, flight socks and the red emergency pull cord for when the soul gets itchy feet – the bed was standardised, built for functionality, an average Caucasian male. The incongruity of May’s petite Chinese body in that huge bed made Nancy want to scream: she could have been looking at the body of a child, and had never noticed, until that moment, the similarity between May and her daughters. Her mouth was exactly like Ricki’s, even the same dimples.
“I …”
She waited between bleeps, unsure what to say, like a long lost relative who slowly gets to know the face behind the face in front of her.
“I’m …”
A nurse, who was writing notes about the elderly woman in the bed next to May’s said, “It would be good for you to speak to her. She’d find that reassuring. I speak to Sybil all the time.”
Nancy glanced at Sybil: the oxygen mask, the wire spewing from her wrist, her chalky, capsized face and thought: why? Sybil only needed drugs, maybe May did too.
When Nancy’s mom chose to die – her one decisive act in an otherwise unmoved existence – Nancy had kicked and screamed and cried and dug an imaginary hole to bury her mother as she raged with a kind of blame that felt like heaps of earth, piled up and final. How could she leave her? A child of eleven! Didn’t she care about her Math test on Monday? About their summer vacation? Didn’t she know her dad couldn’t look after her and Lizzy?
She placed her fingertips on the linen sheet, careful not to get tangled up in May’s wires. Her skin was the texture of a faded petal, except that it felt cold – so unmistakably, life ebbing cold. Nancy pulled back; she hadn’t meant to kiss May’s forehead, only to feel cool, detached rage for the woman – this stranger, this psychopath – who’d come to take her babies.
“You lied to us,” she whispered, “you made us believe you were our friend … we had no idea …”
She waited and watched May’s lips to see if they might speak her side of the story, but the inert body was no more likely to confess its secrets than the wide awake May.
“How could you do that to us, May? How the hell did you do it? It’s not like the embassy gave you our details, hell, they barely told us anything and we were paying them three thousand bucks.”
Nancy stooped her head, exasperated. The smell of May trapped between worlds, took her right back to Sunnyside and the sewing room where her mom’s body had been laid out for three days. Afterwards, the smell of her permeated the house: the carpets and the kitchen linoleum, the buttercup wallpaper of Nancy’s childhood bedroom, even the banisters thrummed with the physicality of death.
“What am I supposed to tell J
en? And Ricki? All those photographs you stole … it’s sick. SICK. I can’t tell them. I can’t put them through that, they’ve already lost their mother – and now I can’t tell them it’s you! Because it is you, isn’t it? You in there.” She prodded her arm, more forcefully than she ought to have done.
May’s hand gave an involuntary twitch.
Shit. Nancy recoiled. She checked May’s face. Of course she was still comatose; stupid, how stupid of her. Comatose like Sybil in the next bed, and the old guy in the bed next to that and the young guy over the way whose face was bandaged up. Get a hold of yourself, woman, this isn’t ER. People don’t just wake up! She might never get the answers.
There were callouses down the sweep of May’s thumb and forefinger. It struck her now as being a working hand, not a teacher’s. She tried to recall her daughters’ hands – were they the same? Were their fingernails square, like May’s, did each phalange correspond to hers in length, were their thumbs inflated at the joint? She couldn’t remember … she couldn’t remember. But she should be able to remember.
When the twins had arrived, Iain took so many photographs; they’d spent hours gazing at the girls, taking in their solidity, their dimensions; each micro gesture drawing them in. But now, sixteen years on, the details were vague; her memories slippery as soft-boiled eggs.
She pictured a younger version of May stroking Ricki’s cheek, her hand cradling Jen’s baby-soft head. Her ownership of them, her motherhood, made hot tears swell in Nancy’s eyes. She and Iain had waited years for their babies.
“Why abandon them?” She pinched May’s hand, where the blood had retreated from the surface of her skin, leaving it oddly mottled.
“How fucking selfish of you to come here, to our home, to ruin their lives all over again.”
She wrung her knees. Nancy needed a clue, something – anything – that would join the dots to those vast empty years between what she knew and what she didn’t know about May. Six years they’d been ‘friends’, six years to the month since she’d turned up at Iain’s photography studio in tears, asking for a portrait to send home to her fiancé … Was Yifan a lie as well? Or was he the twins’ father? Six years and never a word about the flesh and blood that belonged to May, the twins she’d made and left in China. What kind of a mother would abandon her kids to then hunt them down? What kind of a mother would let a stranger into her home without ever apprehending the truth? Nancy found herself pinching May’s thumb as if to extract a stubborn thorn.
The Secret Mother Page 3
