by Xiaolu Guo
all! When I saw your face the
other day, I felt I had known you
for thousands of years.
* * *
SENDER: E
+7891533432
23-07-2009 19:45
I wish i cook for you like what I am
doing now for him. Cooking spicy
tofu with spinaches, boiling rice,
bare feet.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
23-07-2009 19:48
Hmmm that image of you is
strangely exciting. Maybe I will
cook us spicy tofu while you paint
with bare feet. Also I want to learn
Japanese. I want to know everything!
* * *
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 02:28
Baby, are you awake? Are you ok?
I miss your texts. Just a small
syllable will do.
SENDER: E
+7891533432
24-07-2009 02:32
Yes, awake. We have been talking
all night. Oh god about loving two
people at the same time. It is
hard. But the conversation didnt
get far.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 02:35
Are you really talking about
loving two people at once?
SENDER: E
+7891533432
24-07-2009 02:40
I want to find out how we can be
together, without hurting each
other. Also think if i move out
from his house, i dont move into
yours. Dont want to be someone’s
woman again. I want to be a great
artist. I want to be like a monk.
To dedicate to my work.
Friday:
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 06:21
In this grey dawn I am filled with
thoughts of you – and imagine
sweet love between us. Come to
me, my darling.
SENDER: E
+7891533432
24-07-2009 07:31
Sorry I just wake up. He’s been
upset and grey all night. I cried
and cried. My eyes are sour and
hair is entangled. My foot lose
gravity. I need to be kissed and in
your arms have a deep rest.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 07:33
I’m here for you, my love.
* * *
SENDER: E
+7891533432
24-07-2009 20:40
I think i am not able to break
everything up to be with you.
Please forget about me.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 20:42
What? Baby, where are you now?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 20:44
Please speak to me.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 21:03
Can you meet me by our tree?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 21:05
Please, darling my love, please
answer me.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 21:08
Darling darling, what’s happened?
How can you make this decision
just like that? Can you see me?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 21:12
Please, my love, I cannot believe
this is happening. Can you see me now?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 22:39
A blackness is coming over me. I
am going crazy.
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 22:41
I’m walking through the park in
the rain. It’s so dark. I’m walking
past that tree, our tree. I’m
walking to your house. I have to
find you. Where are you?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 22:43
Where are you?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 22:45
Is it really over? For me it isn’t.
You are throwing something very
special away – how can you do this?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 22:47
This can’t be the end. Where are
you? Where are we? Can’t you
answer the phone at least?
SENDER: J
+7771783477
24-07-2009 22:51
My love? Answer me!
ANYWHERE I LAY MY HEAD
7.49 a.m.
THERE’S A SMALL animal, very furry and white, called a three-toed sloth, that lives in the deep forests of the South American tropics. It is the sleepiest animal in the world, sometimes sleeping for twenty hours a day. It can live for up to thirty years and spend twenty years sleeping. I think I might be a sloth too, a five-toed sloth. Sleeping is what I need and love most.
‘You sleep your life away,’ Pierre always says. Pierre is my new boyfriend. I’ve only known him for a month, but I think Pierre has already guessed that I’m a five-toed sloth from China.
I can feel Pierre looking at me right now. Like a bird, he wakes up early, bright-eyed and alert. He is probably gazing at my misty forehead, waiting for me to wake up fully. He likes the way I sleep. Pierre says he feels a strong desire to love me when I am asleep, eyes closed, eyebrows quiet. He says I am beautiful when my big Chinese cheekbones don’t move.
I know I sleep too much. Maybe it’s because I am still young, though not that much younger than Pierre. I am twenty-five and he is twenty-eight, which may explain why I need three hours more sleep every day than he does. Pierre once watched a documentary about Chinese women workers, and his conclusion was that people in China never sleep. The women in the film worked day and night in factories making plastic bags and plastic toys, and when they weren’t working they cooked huge bowls of noodles for themselves and their families, or ate them alone silently in makeshift restaurants or stared at the TV with blank tired eyes. I thought: I was studying so hard at home in China to get a scholarship for university here in the West – maybe I made myself so tired that now I need to catch up on all that sleep.
I have to wake up or I’ll be late, I tell myself. In five seconds I have to open my eyes.
Raindrops obscure the view through the windows. The sky is grey, the clouds race past in a hurry. A September morning. It has been raining for a whole week, little drops falling on my coat, soaking my boots, every day, constantly. I hate it. Grey sky, grey garden, grey street, grey cafes and grey faces. Pierre hates English rain as much as I do. He says that French rain is better, at least French rain is more decisive and more romantic.
Pierre prefers the idea of living in Paris. Three years ago, when he left his little town near Avignon, he said he was taking a train to Paris. But I guess people rarely do what they intend to do and for some reason he only stayed in Paris for three days. He said his Parisian uncle got on his nerves, and it rained so much over those three days that he started to hate Paris; but I wonder whether someone also told him great things about London. Anyway, he jumped on a train at the Gare du Nord, crossed the Channel and arrived in England. It was an impulsive decision, he said, a decision without a reason, the decision itself was the reason. I like that, or maybe I like that kind of person. Because I am the same.
I decided to live with Pierre after only knowing him for three weeks. I like it that way. I like my skin beside another’s skin. I like to feel their body temperature,
even if I don’t yet love that person.
8.49 a.m.
‘I dreamt I was in my middle-school playground, and I wanted to do a somersault, and I failed. Everyone in the playground was looking at me, and some of the kids started to laugh. I tried again but my body was so heavy, like my grandmother’s.’ These are my first words today.
Pierre only listens; he has no comments, as if I am nothing but a radio by his pillow. I dream whenever I sleep, and then I tell Pierre what I can remember, as if he were Dr Freud. Perhaps he has already heard too many of my dreams, and it must be very boring for him. Recently some of my dreams have gone like this:
A maths exam in my high school. I couldn’t divide 35 by 7, at which point my maths teacher turned into a giant King Kong and started to punish me with a whip.
An argument with an old communist about whether China is still a communist country – he cried out when he heard me saying that China is a capitalist country, and punched me hard on the nose.
A deserted high noon street with a river in the background – the river flows noiselessly like in a silent western movie.
A feast with the mayor of my home town in a very luxurious restaurant. We were served the biggest catfish I had ever seen – its whiskers were so long that we started using it as a skipping rope.
The strange thing is, though, I’ve been living in England for a few years now, but my dreams are still all set in China. In my dreams everyone is Chinese. It feels as if my life in the West amounts to nothing – there are no English faces, no Big Ben, no River Thames, no London Eye. The West is not there at all.
We kiss. Lips and eyes, eyes and lips. Then hair and ears, ears and hair. But I really need to get up – I have six hours of Chinese classes to teach. Troubled Westerners are waiting to be punished by a tough Chinese culture. I teach in a private language centre where the students are all older than me. They are bankers or businessmen wanting to open factories in China, so more Chinese peasant women can work day and night in their factories without wasting precious time sleeping.
Pierre turns on the radio. There’s jazz playing, distorted. ‘That’s Chick Corea,’ he says. Pierre is a musician, he recognises old tunes like this one. According to him, this piece is called ‘Flight from Kaloof’. I listen for a few seconds and then start to wonder where Kaloof is. Kaloof sounds like Kowloon. Kowloon is in Hong Kong so perhaps Chick Corea has been flying from Hong Kong. I’m distracted by my thoughts as Pierre slides on top of me. The duvet slips onto the floor. Sunbeams burst through the window and strike our bodies. Pierre’s lips are exploring my loins. The same familiar gentleness. But I wish there were thorns on his lips to wake me up.
My mobile phone rings. I lean across the bed to pick it up, and answer while Pierre is still kissing me.
‘Hi, it’s Laszlo.’
‘Oh, hi.’ I am a bit surprised. I shouldn’t have taken this call.
Laszlo lives in Hungary most of the time, although he has a house in Notting Hill. I haven’t heard from him for almost a year, and I don’t know why he wants to speak to me now.
‘Are you free today?’ He asks in a hasty voice.
‘No, not really.’ I turn my body towards the bed. Pierre is looking at me searchingly. ‘Why? Where are you?’ I ask him in a detached voice. I know Laszlo; he will not give up easily.
‘I arrive last night and I flying back to Budapest late late today. So I need to see you now.’ His voice gets more pressing. I hold the phone to my ear but don’t know what to say. ‘Come here now! I make us nice chicken for nice lunch.’
‘I can’t,’ I say. I’m getting a bit nervous.
‘But I already prepare chicken now, and I have nice bottle of Hungarian wine also. Just come over.’
Out of the corner of my eye I watch Pierre getting up, wrapping himself in a towel. His eyes linger on my body, then he comes to me, kisses my back. I move away from Pierre while Laszlo keeps talking.
‘OK, I’ll see you in about an hour and a half,’ I say and hang up.
Out of the window, on the street corner, I see a group of boys have just come out to play football. One of them is about ten years old and has a face like Wayne Rooney. He kicks the ball aggressively. Everyone is screaming; a Bangladeshi mother stands in front of her door shouting something to her children, her voice swept away by the noise of a rubbish collection truck. The day is starting.
In the bathroom, I hear Pierre having a shower. Downstairs, his two flatmates are wheeling out their bikes, closing the door and dashing off to work.
I sit down on the bed and dial my language school’s number. Very sorry, I can’t make it today, I say. I tell the receptionist that I have woken up with a fever and am going to try to sleep it off.
9.05 a.m.
I stand under the shower washing my hair. The water is suddenly very cold. I’m freezing. That dumb boiler has run out of hot water again. And in this flat even the cold water is lousy. It’s like living in the Third World. Then I can’t find any soap. So I use shampoo to wash myself. I’m still new to Pierre’s place; one week is not enough to get to know a house. And one month of being with Pierre is also not enough to know him. From that very first moment when I spotted him playing in a concert at the Barbican until now, I know no more about him except his brown guitar and silver recording machine by his bed.
Pierre doesn’t really care how the flat looks – all of his stuff is in the wrong place. His shoes and CDs share the same shelf, and his violin is hanging in the wardrobe alongside his jeans. He also has a flute, which he told me he bought in Istanbul some years ago. He says he really worships it, but then I saw his flute leaning in a dusty corner of the room, with the broom and dustbin beside it. Before I met Pierre, I thought that composers were very clean and tidy people, except for the punk ones. Pierre is certainly not a punk, but he isn’t tidy at all. I wonder whether I should help him – buy some new shelves for him, and clear out his collection of three hundred used plastic razors.
9.35 a.m.
Pierre has made coffee, and bread is in the toaster. He has also bought some goat’s cheese from a nearby French deli. Pierre always complains he can’t find good cheese in London, and when he occasionally does it costs the price of a cinema ticket. I don’t care about cheese – I think it’s a bit crazy to talk about cheese all the time, it’s like talking about cow’s tits. I don’t really care about bread either. Brown or white, what’s the difference? It’s all made from the same crops. I’m Chinese. We eat better stuff than that.
I drink my cup of black coffee and bite into the goat’s cheese. The coffee is so strong that immediately my intestines start to tremble. After the fifth sip, I have to run to the toilet. Pierre puts more coffee and water in the espresso machine, and turns on the gas again.
When I come back he’s making an omelette. He always makes a big fuss about breakfast. If he makes an omelette, it won’t be just a simple one, he will add courgette mash, or feta cheese. His omelettes taste very juicy, I have to admit. Pierre is very serious about food. He pays as much attention to each meal as he does to his music.
9.49 a.m.
While we eat, we listen to September Songs by Kurt Weill. Before I lived with Pierre, the only Western musician I knew was Elvis Presley. I rarely listened to any European music, and I’d certainly never wanted to hear German noise first thing in the morning. But for the last week I have been listening to Kurt Weill’s songs every day. I am really drawn to the piece called ‘September Song’. It makes my mind drift in a smoky shape – I can see an autumn forest spreading out in front of our misted kitchen window.
‘Why do you like this one so much?’ Pierre asks.
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s something to do with the East,’ I say. I don’t really know what I mean.
‘To do with the East?’ Pierre looks at me. ‘How?’
I gulp down another mouthful of coffee. My intestines are still struggling in a dark world. He finishes his omelette. Now a German woman with a shrill voice starts to sing.
‘Who is that? Sounds terrible.’ I stop eating.
‘It’s Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s wife,’ says Pierre.
‘Why does his wife also have to sing a song?’ I can feel myself getting annoyed.
Pierre laughs. ‘No, she is a very good singer. This is called ‘Pirate Jenny’, it’s about a working-class woman who dreams of becoming the wife of a great pirate.’
I try to like the song, but it’s too dramatic for me. And outside the window the autumn forest disappears, washed away by a piercing female voice.
‘I like Lotte Lenya,’ Pierre says.
I say nothing. I can’t be bothered. I put the last bit of omelette in my mouth; it suddenly tastes very salty. I spit it out. Perhaps Pierre was distracted by the German song while he was cooking. Now he digs out a new CD – another Lotte Lenya album. He plays me a song called ‘Matrosen-Tango’.
‘This is about a group of bourgeois men and women on a sinking boat before they reach Burma.’
The music is like a tropical typhoon, or a speeded up Italian opera. I try to draw a map of Asia in my brain to picture Burma’s location; I can see big tigers living in a wild Burmese jungle, walking slowly and heavily.
Pierre pours me some more coffee. I am getting really restless.
‘Stop! That’s enough!’ I scream.
Pierre stops pouring and looks at me, surprised.
‘Too much stuff going on in the morning,’ I complain. ‘No more coffee and sugar, please, and no more omelettes either.’ I look inside my chest. I see a greasy heart smothered by fat and protein, unable to beat freely. Perhaps I need to pump my chest to force my heart to beat continously. Pierre bursts out laughing. He stands up and pours the rest of the coffee into the sink. I hug him from behind. Pierre turns towards me and we kiss again.
‘We didn’t make love this morning,’ he says.
‘I know, but I am late.’
‘So I officially invite you to make love when you come back tonight.’
‘OK,’ I say. I put on a pearl necklace.
Pierre looks at me. ‘You said you didn’t like that necklace.’
‘Well, sometimes I like it.’ I find a comb and put it into my bag.
It is not usual for me to use a comb. I don’t comb my hair. I have very straight hair. But today, I need it.
11.20 a.m.
The Underground isn’t as crowded as usual – I am late today and the morning rush hour is over.
