by Sid Smith
7
Tom was asleep in the van. He grunted and squirmed, watching a man in a little wooden town by a river.
It was all very clear – the man with a baby on his back, the dusty streets of the town, and the river grey and fast, with boats pulled up on the bank.
‘His wife is dead,’ thought Tom.
He watched the man walk slowly like a rustic, till he came to a low hut on the riverbank. Nearby was a pile of fish heads and fish bones which stank even in this cold air, a crow treading its summit. He waited outside the low door, looking up and down the river, until a fat little pig came trotting around the hut. It sniffed towards him, alert and interested, pulling against the rope through its earflap. At this the man ducked inside. It was very dark. After a while he saw a fire and something shiny. It was the silver tooth of an old woman, who grinned and said, ‘Your honour?’
The man had rehearsed his speech: ‘Find me a wife who’ll care for me and my house and my baby girl.’ He pushed a coin into the old woman’s hand and she smiled again: the man’s clothes were ragged and the coin was tarnished from long burial under his hearth fire. And she thought how a baby girl is a curse, because she must be fed until she’s ready to work, but then goes to her husband’s house so that her parents grow old alone. She put the money into her clothes and forgot the matter.
For months the man waited in his little house in the hills, with its one field whose best crop was stones, which rose to the surface after every rain or every ploughing. He was too ashamed to go back to the town, so at last he walked far upstream, his daughter heavier on his back, lying down for the night behind a boulder in a high pass, the child fretful. On the second day he came to a larger town and another marriage broker.
This time, though, he had dressed his daughter as a boy. ‘A plump son,’ he told the broker, ‘who’ll bring a woman and children to my house, to care for me and the fortunate wife you will find.’ But he had no money and gave the broker a poor brass necklace that his dead wife had worn. The old woman sneered as she tucked the necklace into her boot, and at once forgot the matter.
Again the man waited in the hills, gathering his daily harvest of stones. As he waited he kept the girl in boy’s clothes, although there was no one to see except the beggars that he drove from his gate and the travelling salt-vendors.
He was proud to have a son. They joked and raced and had spitting games and threw a ball of rags across his stony field, so that the child laughed and clapped her hands. She grew lean and brown like a boy, though once he found her cradling the ball of rags and crooning, so he beat her. And he beat her if she bathed or tidied the house or washed her clothes or combed her hair. Her name was May, but he only said, ‘Good boy,’ and ‘My son.’
And he banished animals from the farm, in case she saw the difference in male and female, only keeping chickens, where the male parts are hidden. And likewise they ate lizards and snakes, and collected eggs from the nests of ground-dwelling birds. A wild dog attacked the chickens and his daughter killed it and said, ‘What are these parts?’
‘A big worm and a big tick,’ he said, ‘that sucked its blood.’
Another time she said, ‘Father, why do I sit to pee but you stand up?’
‘You’ve crouched because you were young, but now you can wear a peeing part.’ And he made her an earthenware spout, and made one for himself, which he pretended to use.
And finally she said, ‘Why am I bleeding?’
‘Because now you’re a man. Your blood can mix with a woman’s blood to make babies.’ Alone, he rubbed his hands and said, ‘I’ll find her a wife.’
He went to a third marriage broker and the search was easy. He ignored the talk of beauty or wealth and chose an idiot girl, who’d been raised by aunts and toiled all day like a beast. The wedding was a hurried thing and the aunts were not invited. Afterwards he gave his daughter a carved thighbone. ‘This is called a wedding part,’ he said.
Now the farm had another worker, though he mocked the idiot wife, saying, ‘Look how she spills the water, which you carried so far.’ But his daughter was happy, and the wife smiled so that she was almost pretty.
The father was glad that his daughter wasn’t used by a man. But he was jealous of the women, who laughed as they cleared a second field, and whispered at the day’s end, perhaps thinking of the wedding part. The women kept it in their bed. It was tied with a silk ribbon and lay in a silk sleeve which the wife had made.
One day the man lifted a stone and hurt his back. It wasn’t a big stone, and he lay in the house drinking barley beer and thinking that now he was old. He remembered the games with his daughter and thought how he’d never have a grandson. That night he woke up choking because he smelled the women or because their breath had drained the air.
Next day he lay drunk in bed while the idiot wife bustled about the house and his daughter trimmed maize in the yard. He said, ‘Where is the wedding part?’
The wife stared at him.
‘Where is the wedding part that I made?’
She looked towards the window.
‘Did you think that your husband made it?’ said the father, laughing. ‘No, it was me. And now I’ll burn it.’
‘No,’ said the idiot wife.
‘I’ll burn it because I have a special wedding part. Do you want to see it?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a special wedding part that makes babies. Do you want babies?’
The idiot wife thought about this.
‘You want babies, of course. Come here. Look at my special wedding part.’
When the wife came he pulled her onto the bed. His back hurt, and he was surprised at her strength, or perhaps at his own weakness. But he pressed on, the wife shouting under him until his daughter came running with the shears.
She chopped off his special wedding part and he bled to death.
As he died he told them how to fix the roof, about men and women, and where to buy goats, which would prosper on these stony hills. The women were puzzled. That winter, though, the wife had his child.
It was a boy, so now the women understood. They were happy together and their son grew fat. In time he married and had many sons, who played in the stony fields, and ran with the goats, and cared for the two grandmammas when they were old.
Tom woke in the dark. He was shivering in the driver’s seat, thinking that maybe dicks are full of gristle and hard to cut, especially with farm shears. And wouldn’t your dick shrink if someone came at you with shears? Or you’d fight them off, surely, even if you were drunk. And would you really bleed to death? So maybe the dream couldn’t be true.
‘Forget the dream.’ But unknowingly he touched his pants because they might be bloody.
He fired up the van and set off anywhere. ‘I’m in China more than I’m here.’ A new thumping from the van, the gear stick shuddering so that it blurred.
Then he thought, ‘Saturday night,’ and went round the Elephant and Castle double-yolker roundabouts and turned north. On King’s Cross Road he parked up and crossed to the pool hall. He straightened for the door-cam and flashed his membership card. An inordinate pause until the lock buzzed.
He bounded up the stairs feeling glad, and here’s that wonder – an all-night bar. ‘Good evening, gents,’ he said, bowing through the gloom to the slackers on the red plush benches. ‘What a place, eh?’
An old barman, shaky and slow, and Tom said, ‘Lager, please, pal,’ and checked his pockets. ‘Shit. Just a half, actually,’ the alky barman confused, then careful with the glasses like he’s on a boat.
Embarrassed, Tom drifted to the big windows on to the snooker room. ‘I should pick up my dole.’ He put his nose to the thick glass. Rows of tables dwindling into the gloom, a library hush, and men bent to play or leaning like sentries with spears. He turned to the nearest drinkers and lifted his childish glass: ‘Gentlemen, the great London secret. And it took a bunch of Chinese to show me.’
But then he said, ‘Damn,�
�� because he saw the black Doc Martens shoes, black official polyester trousers. ‘Coppers, eh?’
‘Never,’ said one. ‘In an after-hours bar?’ Neat hair, well-filled sleeves.
‘Well, right. And tragic if it got shut down.’
‘You on something?’ said a cop, young and therefore dangerous. ‘You on the naughty substances?’
‘Just a natural high.’ Tom said, ‘Could I? Do you mind if . . . ?’ and he’s wiggling a cigarette out of a pack on the table.
The young cop nodded: ‘Natural.’
‘Certainly. Just happy to see you gents enjoy yourself. Yes. Among the common folk. And I wish you well. Really I do. Slumming.’ A stillness settled through the cops at this, watching more than listening, so that Tom said quickly, ‘Well, must be going. Enjoy. Enjoy yourselves. Really. I really really mean that.’ Jesus, shut up.
Sweating, he aimed for the basement because the Chinese prefer pool. Metal-edged stairs that make your bones ache, then out into the strip-lit pool room. ‘Dead Chinamen,’ he thought, because big Chung loomed among the Chinatown cooks, and all of them yellow-brown under the lights. They love strip lights. Drives away demons maybe or something. Like in the Tan kitchen after hours, the leftovers shiny in a surgical glare.
He sat on a crooked chair against the wall, hidden behind the fag machine, watching Chung practise alone. Where was that little rat Wei? But maybe I can get more sense out of Chung, who’s big and calm or big and stupid. He slid the unlit cigarette into a pocket and strode out under the merciless light.
‘Hello, Chung.’
‘Yes.’ Glancing round, baffled.
‘How are you?’
‘Yes.’
Tom patting his jacket. ‘Look, you got a smoke?’ Chung sighed, taking his time to haul out the Marlboros, Tom twitching. ‘Chung, I want to ask you something. About Johnny.’
‘Johnny suicide.’
‘Yes, yes. We know this.’
‘Johnny suicide because you.’
‘What? That’s crap.’ Chung frowning, beer glass in his huge hand. Why does he hate me? Tom sucked down the smoke. ‘God, that’s good. Jesus. Anyway. I wondered, Chung. Leaving aside your usual shite. I mean, OK I was stoned that night. But this is not very bad. So then what? I lose job because Johnny dead? Why? Why, please?’
‘Johnny dead because you. And because you friend from hospital.’
‘Hospital?’
‘Old people hospital. You and friends and Johnny.’
Dread in his belly, and Chung’s angry face, big as a bum.
Tom said, ‘God, this place. Bad lights, bad chairs. Why upstairs so nice? Because upstairs bloody white people maybe.’
‘Forget,’ said Chung. He was giving Tom the straight look, looming over him, Tom looking up at the blackheads in Chung’s flat nose in his flat face, his fingers spread on Tom’s chest, pressing a warning. ‘Forget May. Forget takeaway. Don’t come. Never.’
‘I can’t forget. Damn dreams.’
Chung tramped off for a closer look at a clutch of balls, Tom looking round the room, alone and stupid. He swallowed. Johnny and the old folks’ home, and now the sick dread.
Abruptly he ran up the stairs, and there were the cops again.
‘Hi. Hello, lads.’ Their blank stare, and Tom breathless. ‘I wondered maybe if you could help. It’s a friend of mine. He’s dead. A couple of weeks back. Very unexpected. So I wondered, when’s the inquest, do you reckon?’
An old copper said, ‘Depends. But probably it’s been and gone.’
‘Well, I want to object. I’ve got evidence. They’re saying suicide, but he was murdered. As good as.’
‘Best tell the police, then.’
‘Well, for fuck’s sake I’m telling you.’
‘Yes, but we’re not here.’
‘Bollocks,’ said Tom, flustered. ‘Smart crap.’
The cop decided to be kind. ‘Listen, son. A word of advice.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Tom, and at last had the sense to leave.
8
Towards dawn he was sleepy in the van near Blackfriars Bridge, blinking across the river at birds like flags over the office blocks. But he hated daylight so he climbed over the seats and under the curtain, his eyes mostly closed, finding the doss bag by touch, then curling up tight so that he didn’t think about the coppers and big Chung and ‘you friend from hospital’.
‘I’ll think about the river.’
It was grey and fast. It ran by Chelsea and the Isle of Dogs. But first it flowed under houses on stilts, and past a dirty fishing town, and swiftly below a black cliff, sheer as a building.
‘Bastards. All of them.’
He stared hard at the cliff. There was a tiny house. It clung to the cliff face. It was called a ‘sky farm’, because its fields were scraps of land on ledges and crannies in the terrible rock.
He saw the farmer. On ropes of woven bamboo, and on bamboo pegs wedged in the black rock, he climbed to fields as small as rugs, which he covered with flat stones to keep the soil moist and save it from the fretting cliff-top winds.
‘Beautiful,’ said Tom. ‘Oh, beautiful.’
The house was half on a ledge and half on beams driven into the cliff. Below, the rock fell sheer to the river. Above, it rose to a meadow on the cliff top, where wiry grass was nibbled by goats. The goatherds dropped stones on the little family, to keep them in their station, and the goats climbed down and ate their crops.
Tom saw the farmer’s wife. She was calling and calling from the house door. The farmer didn’t answer. She looked across the cliff face and put her hand to her mouth. There were two broken pegs – one which had snapped beneath him, and one he had broken as he fell to the river.
‘God,’ thought Tom.
So now the woman worked alone. She crept in terror to the scraps of land, her son and daughter playing by the house, ropes around their waist to keep them from the edge where the tiny garden stepped into air. They were twins, and wore their mother’s cast-off clothes, so that even she was confused.
The little boy hated to climb, but his twin, free of male entanglements, was soon busy on the cliff, her fingers sure as roots in the cracks of the handholds. Their mother watched from the garden, holding the little boy, who shouted, ‘May!’
Around their house were the lovely plants of the heights – azaleas, mauve primulas, maidenhair fern, palm trees, golden and green bamboo, clematis, white and yellow roses – springing from cracks which the father hadn’t reached. But May crept to the plants, cutting them for kindling and pushing the seedling of an orange or pomelo into the cupful of earth, looking straight down between her feet to the tiny boats on the river, and the riverside town, its folk too small to see.
Asleep, Tom held his breath. He was watching May, beautiful and brave on the cliff face.
Her mother ceased to work. Angry in her fear, she said, ‘May is the farmer and I am a useless extra mouth.’ She went to the riverside town and came home smelling of drink and the hands of river coolies. One day her son watched amazed as she folded her clothes at the edge of the garden and stood naked, then followed her husband into the river.
So May kept the house. She found new fields, little as pillows on the black cliff, and knelt on the spongy new earth, looming like a moon over the wiry grass and the flowers like trees in this small world, and perhaps a household of ants and a spider brought by the wind. She tore off the turf like a scab and turned it over and weighted it with stones and planted her crops, so that there was food to sell, and salt twice a week.
Now certain stirrings began. On hot nights she stood at the cliff edge, the night wind strong up her shift then weak where it tickled her breasts, and thought how the townsfolk might see up her shift, though they were too far down. And in the daytime she watched the town from a scrap of tilted earth, until perhaps a river bird rose with stiff wings up the cliff, and saw her with a squawk, and drifted out over the river, lost in day’s high house. She had no mirror, and remembered her mot
her, who perhaps had wondered if she was pretty enough to fly.
Like his sister, the boy heard the rustle of wings. But it seemed like the rustle of a woman’s clothes as she shed them at the cliff edge. So he climbed to the cliff-top meadows, and spread a net over short grass, and scattered grain, and ate the birds whose feet were entangled. He pushed thorn twigs into the earth around grain, and rock doves stuck their heads into the circle and were caught. He smeared twigs with the sticky sap of the fig tree, and caught the tiny rice bird, which he cleaned by pushing a straw down its throat and blowing.
He ate the birds at once, or only broke their wings so they were still fresh when he sold them in the town. He killed falcons and sold them as scarecrows to the riverside rice farmers, who hung them by the feet so that their wings spread. He trapped a crane and sewed its eyes shut, tethering it on the riverbank where it called down other cranes, which he killed. And he hatched duck eggs by the fire in the house, a blue thread hung above the eggs so that the ducklings followed the thread, tied to a cane, when he led them to eat snails in the rice fields by the river, then to the town to be killed, where he suffered much chaffing about lonely duckmen and their ducks.
May’s birds didn’t die. She caught eagles with a rabbit in a tethered basket: the eagle seized the rabbit but couldn’t draw it through the basket and wouldn’t let go, though May was coming with her net. She fed the eagle with meat tied to string, pulling the meat from its stomach until its spirit broke, and sold it to traders in the town. She took goshawks from the nest and trained them to hunt pheasants, then sold them to hunters; after two years they were released to breed. She found magpie nests, which are made with nothing from the ground, and sold them to a healer who burnt the nests to bake the eggs, which cured ailments caused by the earth element. And her pigeons flew to fields on the riverbank and returned at night to a coop above the house, their crops full of rice. She gave them water laced with alum so that they retched up the grain.
