The sound of the playground bell was sharp. Jen looked up to see the small yard fill with toddlers: some running, others playing on the swings in the scrub beyond. They were monitored by a girl wearing a white coat who looked little more than a teenager herself.
The railings were damp where Jen pressed her face to peer into the compound. The kids were so tightly wrapped up, like bundles of post ready to go all over the world. The girl caught sight of them and quickly gathered up the children, who threw tantrums at being led back through the darkened glass doors.
“Are you crazy? Come back to the bench,” Guan urged.
“But we’re not doing anything wrong. I’ve not taken any photographs. What, so now they think I’m some kind of paedophile?”
“Worse,” said Guan. “You’re a young woman who’s abandoned her baby and come back for it. Or, you’re a foreign reporter out to cause trouble – especially if they hear us speaking English.”
“I want to go inside. I want to see it. I have a right,” said Ricki.
Through a first floor window, Jen noticed the teenage girl pointing in their direction.
“Shit, Ricki, we’d better go.”
Ricki pulled away in the direction of the steps. “I’m staying.”
“Let her go if she needs to,” Guan said.
“I can’t let her go. She’s my twin.”
Jen chased after Ricki and knelt beside her on the institute steps.
“I wanted to leave the past where it should be, Jen. That means leaving this here.”
In her hand was the photograph of May taken at their sixteenth birthday party. Ricki tucked it inside May’s red birthday envelope and placed it on the steps, as the supervisor appeared. Guan pulled them away. They ran and didn’t look back.
As Ricki thanked Guan, a look of exhilaration and relief danced over her face.
“Listen, I hope you two are going to be okay? No more stunts like that. You need to take care. It’s not so free here. Don’t play it so risky.”
“We have to,” said Jen with urgency. “Or we’ll never find out the truth.”
“Help us,” said Ricki.
“How?”
“Your grandparents are from Hunan. Take us with you. It’s our best chance of finding May’s relatives. Our biological grandparents. Our uncle.”
Guan rubbed at his shaved head. “Remember what I said about Madam Feng’s businessman, how his mobile didn’t ring any more? Sometimes, the past just wants to stay hidden behind a wall.”
There was a sudden shift in the clouds and the sun made everything luminous.
Guan shielded his eyes. “I suppose Dad is always complaining I don’t go back home enough …”
Jen’s heart quickened. “We would need our parents’ permission.”
“You’ve no idea how far we’ve come,” said Ricki.
Guan nodded. “I’m too like my dad to say no.”
Jen and Ricki walked the backstreets to the Bluewater Hotel, avoiding the midday traffic which swelled and roared. They stopped at McDonald’s for a Coke, neither mentioning May. However, Ricki removed her hoodie to reveal the double happiness tattoo on her upper arm.
“Shit, when did you get that done?” said Jen.
“After our birthday.”
“You know they’ll kill you.”
Ricki swirled ice with her straw. “I doubt that.”
Jen wished she had her twin’s nerve. “So how do you know about double happiness?”
“I looked it up.”
“In Yifan’s book?”
“On the Net, stupid. Promise not to tell them, Jen, or they’ll never let us go to May’s village.” Ricki would tell them about the tattoo in her own time, the way she did everything. The way she accepted her past – little by little.
Jen thumbed the outline of the double happiness symbol; tried for a moment, half a moment, to work out where one character ended and the other began and realised she couldn’t.
Wisps of hair
The sound of crying babies woke me. The bed felt unfamiliar with its stiff white sheets smelling of jasmine and something else – bleach. The clock said half past two. Was it day or night? I wished the babies would shut up; where was their mother?
A face came into view. He was young and wore glasses.
“Am I dead?”
He smiled. “No, you’re not dead, Mai Ling, and neither are they.”
I followed his gaze to the reed crib, where two screaming babies lay cocooned in white woollen blankets.
He held up a bottle of formula. “Time for a feed.”
I stared, uncertain.
“Yifan?”
“Yes,” he picked up the baby and snuggled it into the folds of his doctor’s coat.
Two babies …? I edged up the bed; a shooting pain gripped my lower abdomen. A tube inserted into the back of my hand connected me to a bag of clear liquid by the side of my bed.
“Don’t be scared, that will make you strong again.”
Yifan reached into the crib and passed the second baby from his arms to mine. “Here, be gentle with her, she’s still very weak.”
I directed the bottle to her lips and she sucked greedily. Her eyes rolled in contentment. White spots freckled her nose and cheeks.
“I can’t remember … what happened …”
“These are your children, Mai Ling. Your baby girls. You’re all going to be fine now; you’ve been getting stronger every day.”
I stared at him. He had loved me – hadn’t he? And loved me now in spite of my babies? Or maybe I never told him? There were vague shards of memory – a yīshēng, the bucket, running barefoot in the rain to survive.
“Mai Ling, I’m so sorry, but we had to operate.” Yifan paused; his shoes tapped against the side of the bed. “The operation was to remove zi gong.” He explained this was my infant’s palace. He said I nearly bled to death in the doorway of a block of flats.
The baby in my arms stared at me, her eyes mesmerising, pulling me into her. Just looking at her made my breasts ache.
“But I’m afraid there is something else, a more pressing problem,” he said, “that is, the matter of where you will live. This is a missionary hospital, Mai Ling. We’ve subsidised your operation, but we can’t keep you here once you’ve recuperated sufficiently to return home.”
“Home? But I don’t have a home.”
Yifan peered at his shoes.
“How soon?” I asked.
“Tomorrow morning.”
I gazed at the drowsy infant, swathed in blankets. What next Mama? She seemed to ask before her eyes pursed in sleep.
I don’t know baby.
Under sleep’s anaesthetic, I returned to the dingy clinic where Doctor Quo slavered to chop my flesh into pieces with a meat cleaver and boil it into soup. When he turned round, I realised it was Kwo, the factory cook. He ladled the blood out of a deep vat. Peering inside, I saw two babies bob to the surface, their webbed hands splayed. Don’t let us become broth, they begged.
The dream felt so real, I hurried to check the twins were safely asleep. My pillow was damp with sweat; the bed seemed to be shrinking. My stomach ached from the bottom of my pelvis up to my ribs and for hours I lay awake listening to the sound of other babies crying, mothers’ snoring, footsteps squeaking down the corridor. In the half-light I watched the slow drip-drip of liquid as it plinked through the tube into the back of my hand.
I lumbered back onto the bed. There had to be someone in this big city who could help us? I thought of Cousin Zhi, Fatty, Ren, Fei Fei, Madam Feng … And my family? I could never shame them with these children. Yifan was my only remaining friend; I would swallow my pride and plead with him for help.
An hour or so later, an insistent hand tapped me on the shoulder.
“Wake up, your babies are hungry. Time to get up.”
I rolled over to see a different doctor peering down his nose at me.
“Where’s Yifan?” I asked.
“Doctor Meng has been
called out on an emergency; it’s unlikely that he’ll be in for the rest of today.”
“But I need to see him.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“I’m sorry lady, there’s nothing I can do,” he left me with two bottles of formula. “Perhaps one of the nurses on reception can see to whatever it is you want; but don’t take long with that feed – we have an amputee in the corridor waiting for your bed.”
The patient in the bed next to mine pulled back the edge of her blanket, enough to see out.
“Tsst. You got somewhere to go?”
I shook my head.
She had a weather-beaten face that looked distrustful of the world. I wondered why she was in hospital, there was nothing obviously the matter with her. No broken arm, no bleeding, no babies.
“Think you’ll keep ‘em?” She gestured to my arms, where one child guzzled formula and the other grasped impatiently at the air.
Instinctively, I said yes. “We’ve survived this far together.”
She lowered her voice. “There’s always the welfare institute …”
I frowned, recalling the white-washed monolithic building on Hong Cheng Road and the warning Ren had issued the night of the ferris wheel, “Don’t get in deeper with the manager, Sky Eyes.” I was already much too in love with Manager He to heed her warning. My ‘sky eyes,’ as she called them, were watching clouds, daydreaming of a different life to this shabby one.
“Rumour is, welfare sell babies to rich foreigners,” I said. “The managers own fancy apartments downtown.”
“Ha! You shouldn’t believe everything you hear, girl. Besides, the westerners can offer them a better life.” She shook her head and reached into the bedside cabinet, producing a dog-eared sheet of photographs. They were black and white passport photos of her and a baby. On two of the pictures, the woman’s eyes were closed and she looked gormless. They stirred me nonetheless.
She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Here, take it. Take a good look.”
“It’s a baby girl.”
“Taken the day we said goodbye. You see, girl, sometimes it’s for the best.”
“Perhaps.”
“No perhaps about it, we don’t have choices.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said, too quickly. I didn’t like the way she said “we,” putting us in the same category.
The woman grabbed the photograph, offended, and slipped it into the cabinet. “Well, hao yun, girl,” she sighed. “I hope a gold pin falls in your well. You’re going to need it to look after them two littlies.”
The sun shone shiftily between the blocks of high-rise flats opposite God’s Help Hospital. Between the breaths of traffic that log-jammed Jenmen Road, a police siren screamed, distant. The rain stopped. The water level receded below the kerb. Lines of buses sloughed past, spraying me as I stared into the petrol rainbows, wishing hard for Yifan to pull up, beep his horn and say, “Hurry up! Get in, we’re going home!” For fifteen stupid minutes I waited, counting the seconds, believing he might come.
For hours, I wandered the nearby streets, scuffing through the crowds, going nowhere in particular. God’s Help had sent me on my way with a pair of navy court shoes, two sizes too small, donated by their latest amputee. I felt a century old, with my feet bound into the tight leather. It didn’t take long for me to develop the strange shuffle of my ancestors – women who knew the suffering road.
By midday my babies were blue from screaming to be fed. I sat on a bench beneath a date palm tree whose fronds hung spindly in the November gloom. I put my little finger in one mouth then the other. They cried harder when they realised nothing was coming out. I would have given them my breasts, but they were empty. My wells had run dry of milk.
Stealing the formula was a risk. The owner’s eyes were onto me the moment I entered her low-beam corner shop. Perhaps it was the ghostly pallor of my skin or the dark circles around my eyes, or maybe she could smell it on me: the intention to rob her blind. I mooched up and down the aisles, sniffed a garland of red chillies, delved my hand into a crate of ripe pears at the back of the shop – squeezing, testing, admiring. I knelt by a sack of green tea and rubbed the leaves between my fingers.
My opportunity came when the owner fetched her husband some tea while he mended shoes on the street. I hurried over to the aisle with powdered formula and stuffed a jar into my coat, tucking it inside the blankets where the twins’ heads nestled, bawling. I hoped it was enough to last a couple of days.
The owner wrestled me on the doorstep, demanding to see inside my coat.
“You migrant mothers, stealing our stuff! Wait until I get my husband onto you.” She called for him.
I unzipped my coat a slither, enough to show them the bulge inside was human.
“Let her go. I don’t want any trouble, Xingyan, not this time,” he ranted.
I hurried away, the babies bobbing in the swag of my jacket.
There were worse crimes. That night I crouched in an alleyway and raked together a makeshift shelter out of cardboard boxes. Two adolescents carrying knives held a woman against a nearby skip and assaulted her. I sobbed the whole way through as they whooped and grunted. They both took a turn and eventually the woman’s cries died down, she stopped fighting, her body limp. I dared not move from my shelter for fear they might do the same to me. Let the police catch the rapists, let the mother live, I whispered, curling myself into a tight ball amidst the junk. When I was sure they’d gone, I covered her sobbing body with my coat.
I fell to sleep on my haunches, rocked by the muted patter of rain. The babies woke every couple of hours in need of formula, which I mixed in a bottle salvaged from the skip. I had to step over the woman to get to it.
The next morning a refuse collector came peddling his cart. He picked over the rubbish, scratched at the pavement with his bamboo broom.
“What the …”
I poked my head out of the shelter.
“Move it, woman, you can’t sleep here. I thought you were a stiff. Watch yourself.”
I crawled from beneath the cardboard, the babies cowled in my jumper, and ran. Above was leaden sky. Cold air. A slack rain in the wind. I coughed up phlegm like a woman who’d smoked opium all her life. My clothes lingered with the smell of the street and of food waste. I was scavenging some rice from my coat when a couple of westerners bumped into me.
“Watch it,” I said.
“Oh … bàoqiàn.” The man fumbled for an apology. No doubt he was an American.
Immediately, his wife honed in on my babies. Her clothes were pristine: grey fur coat, black patent leather shoes. The hems of her tweed trousers brushed at her heels. She had blonde hair curled in waves, crowned with a beret. This one had money alright. She smelt of money. She oozed money. Money, money, money. Good enough to eat.
She reached out to touch my babies. Sensing the opportunity to earn a few yuan, I let her stroke my baby’s cheek. For a moment my youngest stopped crying and I felt a pang inside like someone had plucked a zither whose strings were attached to my heart. How could she calm them like that?
The husband reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet fat with yuan. Mao’s blue washed-out face gawped up at me. Ha! They were giving me cash and all I’d done was flash them a glimpse of my babies. My stomach leapt at the promise of food.
“Xièxiè,” I said.
He thanked me back in hesitant Chinese and turned to leave. His wife stood transfixed. He had to link his arm through hers and pull gently before she would move. I watched them disappear inside the restaurant’s plush interior then shoved the money quickly inside my vest. It felt crisp against my laddered ribs.
Six days and six nights passed. The rain drained away, leaving a damp film over the streets. My shoes began to stretch. When I took them off at night I noticed the leather had taken the shape of my feet, bulging at the front where my potato toes were rooted in an uneven row.
; I used some of the Americans’ money to buy clean kaidangku. The ones from God’s Help were too soiled for my babies to wear and the stench was unbearable where their shit had seeped out. I worried constantly about disease. I’d seen first-hand the girls at Forwood falling too ill to work after eating stale food.
The best places to wash were in public toilets and department stores, although I was usually eyed with too much suspicion to get past the doors. More than once, security guards threw me out of the Pacific Department Store, calling me “dirty mingong” or “lazy daughter.” It was easy for them to rough me up a bit, even as I cradled my babies. I had no rights on the street, the police would have laughed in my face and locked me up if I turned to them for help.
It was on the seventh morning, as the sun shone feebly though the bare trees on Bayi Avenue, that the hopelessness of my situation hit me. I was feeding my babies cold formula on a bench. I had spent my last fen on a bottle of purified water.
How can we go on like this?
The answer was glaring – we couldn’t. I had no hukou for a home, no food, no clean clothes, nothing to keep us warm, no protection and no money. I didn’t even have the will to lift my head and beg for help any more.
I thought about the peasant in God’s Help hospital who abandoned her daughter. I kissed my babies, put my nose to their faces and let them gnaw my finger, wanting to feel pain and be reminded that we were still alive, because at that point I felt dead; at least, dead inside. Whatever it was that had kept me going - hope, fear, love, stubbornness – had finally petered out.
I got up and started walking. One foot, then the other, then another. I counted the steps and avoided the cracks in the pavement. I became annoyed with strangers who got in my way, or made me lose count. Didn’t they know where I was going?
When I turned the corner onto Hong Cheng Road, the first thing I noticed was the colour of the welfare institute walls – grey, not white as I remembered them to be. More drab and hollow because of what I was about to …
The Secret Mother Page 26
