by Sid Smith
These pigeons were hard to train, but one hot night her brother killed them all, each fluttering wounded thing so funny that he killed another, a fist on his mouth to stop the laughter. Then he left, because he and May looked the same and there was a war about whether they’d be female or male.
‘Stop,’ said Tom. He sat up in the back of the van. ‘Enough.’
He slid out of the doss bag and climbed into the passenger seat. It was dark and felt late. Bad dreams, bad thoughts, a sickness in the stomach. He opened the door and sat sideways with his feet on the road, sucking the cold. ‘Enough of this pervy shit.’
Ten p.m.: he’d been asleep all day. He stamped along the street, the cold waking him up. He was near London Bridge Station when he stopped. He couldn’t believe it: a Chinese takeaway called The Dream House.
He stared at the name. He walked away and caught his breath and came back. He put his face to the glass and had another revelation: all takeaways are the same – a square room converted from a house, and a counter near the back wall, though here the top was the wrong colour.
There was a Honda inside. With an effort he remembered the Tans’ bike, and how he’d taken it to Bert the Breaker’s. So this definitely wasn’t the same one. It was older, now that he looked, and the food box was plastic not wood. But obviously it should be with a dog in a shed at the back.
He went inside. A Chinese calendar, Chinese posters, a TV on a stalk on the wall. No one behind the counter.
He lifted the flap and went through. For a second it was weird, but then he felt welcome and known.
The door to the kitchen had a frosted window and a clear plastic fingerplate. He pushed through and stopped. That old smell: steamed rice and sauce and chopped veg and the farty stink of cabbage. Men in aprons looked up but he ignored them. A new stove, and the dishwasher was nearer the door, but nothing too strange. The men were different, of course, but this was also good. A fresh start.
He lifted Chinese newspapers off a chair and sat down, hands on his knees, staring at everything. The men glanced at each other, but Tom looked with pleasure at the red tiles on the floor, the new white wall tiles.
He was so absorbed that the boy surprised him, saying ‘Can I help you?’ Tall, in a handsome sweater and ironed jeans.
Tom laughed. ‘I know. You’re a BBC: a British-Born Chinese. I mean, you’re not an FOB: a Fresh Off the Boat. You’re a banana: yellow on the outside, but white—’
‘We’re just closing, so . . .’
Now there was a girl. Big cheeks and glasses.
Tom looked at her with delight. Were they brother and sister? He thought, ‘When Chinese girls are plain they look like frogs— God, did I say that out loud?’
In a panic he held a hand up and said, ‘Sorry. Sorry. I mean it’s like white people. I mean they look a bit piggy sometimes, don’t you think?’
The boy said, ‘We’re closing now.’
Concentrating, he said, ‘I came in – in here – for a job. A job.’
The boy nodded. ‘Right. But actually we’re OK at the moment.’
Tom was stunned. After a moment he stood up. Head bowed, he moved towards the door.
The girl said, ‘Maybe in the future.’
‘No, no,’ said the boy. ‘Really.’
‘I used to do deliveries. In a takeaway. But then there was this thing with marijuana, so I’ve not been well. But this place is so nice. It’s like the old one. Like a mirror image or something: the same but not the same. And the name is great. It’s perfect. And you as well, all of you, the same but new, so I thought . . .’ Christ, I’m nearly crying.
‘It’s a Chinese restaurant,’ said the boy. ‘Normally we take Chinese people.’
They were at the street door. Tom murmured, ‘I love Chinese people. Anything Chinese.’
He stepped onto the wet pavement. It was like when big Chung and little Wei had edged him onto the Whitechapel Road. He said, ‘I was wondering: if there was a Chinese girl – I mean a girl who was just a baby in China, and then she came here, like you maybe, and she’s never believed in traditional stuff, Chinese beliefs and so on – and then she splits up with her boyfriend, could she send him dreams or visions or something? I mean send them to her ex-boyfriend, when he’s asleep.’
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘The dreams might be bad, you know, because she’s still angry. So she’d send him bad dreams. Or she’d take over his own dreams, and make them bad. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Really.’
‘Because if she did, then maybe it meant she still liked him.’
Tom in the black street, his shoes wet, and rain glittering under the street lights. He looked into the takeaway. ‘You’re really lucky,’ he said.
He touched the inside of the windscreen, where the mist was gritty with forming ice. He rubbed his face, then looked at his hands. Road dirt and engine oil deep in the skin. ‘It’s from tinkering with the Honda.’
Why don’t I ever mess with the van? It’s too wrecked and scary, that’s why. He sat back, refusing to think about anything except how he’d love to be a real mechanic: ‘I get too angry.’
He squirmed into the seat, hands in his armpits. His hands were black. Oil and coal dust. He worked on a riverboat in China.
Tom put his head on the door pillar. Comfortable, actually.
Steam, steel and the smell of coal. This was his life, and he didn’t have to think about his dad or Johnny or anything.
Instead he sweltered below decks. Or else he’d take the air, staring up from a hatch at the laughing China girls who leaned on the rails, round bottoms in their black trousers, staring at the river until they turned and saw him with a shock, hands to their mouths at the red-faced devil popped up from below, who looked away quickly, his hand on the deck to feel the thumping engine, staring sideways at the girls because he’d travelled to China for women in trousers.
He came from London. There’d been a scandal over lady cyclists, and he’d stopped in the Whitechapel Road to watch a woman wobble past, her trousers and the pert saddle like a hand. These visions were rare so he’d travelled north, watching from a cobbled corner as women left the mine in canvas trousers. In an alley near the station he bought photographs, and the pictures mixed in his mind with the smell of coal and oil. Then he was breathless in a library, his eyebrows up, blushing over picture books of the rice women of Italy, who bent in flooded fields, trousers under their tucked-up skirts, until he thought of millions in the East, their trousers of cotton and silk that clung in the sultry air. So he sailed down the Thames, past Tower Bridge and Gravesend, and came to China and stared across the Canton docks, rapt with desire at the trousered multitudes, and nothing else would do.
He worked on the riverboats. The city women wore a skirt over their trousers, but upriver the women were poor and had no skirts, their trousers faded and shrunk tight, their lack his vertigo. So he came to an inland town. There was a pretty girl. Her strong hill-girl’s legs. He followed her through steepening streets and she came to the foot of a great cliff, where a stream rioted down a cleft behind the town. Fearlessly she climbed, the black trousers tightening and loosening, up and up to a little house on the sheer cliff, where womanly garments dried on a tree.
The house was half on a ledge and half on beams driven into the black cliff. Around it were the lovely plants of the heights – mauve primulas, white and yellow roses – and people called it a ‘sky-farm’.
In the van Tom thought, ‘Oh, God.’ But then he saw that May was lonely, so he didn’t stop the dream. He saw how she would come to the town, sulky among the crowds, hoping that her brother had returned, but then she must climb again to the house, alone and angry. She dreamt of someone waiting on the cliff, solemn with love in a field like a bed. Or she sat astride a peg and kicked her heels on the sheer cliff, daring a lover to climb from the town, but proud that she sat on pegs too thin for men.
Now she watched the foreigner near the house. She be
nt to her crops, thinking that he would stare. When she climbed back down the stranger had left, and her trousers were gone from the tree.
Down in the town the white man saw a beautiful girl. He said, ‘It’s the girl from the cliff.’ But he was wrong: it was her brother.
‘Shit,’ thought Tom.
May’s brother had travelled far. After he left home he had wandered with the bee-keepers, who carry their hives upriver in spring, following the flowers, then to the lowlands in autumn for the blooming of the winter plum. A girl wanted him, but she made him think of falling from a cliff, so he turned to the river, sleeping in summer in a fold of the riverbank, and in winter in a fishing town, curled among sacks in an alley or on nets on the shingle. He made a musket with a pipe stolen from a round-eye riverboat, and mixed sulphur, charcoal, and bird lime into bad powder which burnt with a hiss, scattering chopped wire at the river birds. One winter he lived off bats, stretching a net over a cave mouth and coming at dusk and dawn to take their breast meat, purple and gamey, throwing the shrieking bats into the river, although he didn’t hate them like the birds. He smoked out the last bats with fires of damp straw, and they were easy targets as they circled the cave roof. He tied driftwood into a kind of bonnet, and floated among wild ducks on the river, pulling them suddenly under by the feet so that the flock didn’t scare. He sold the ducks to the riverboat crews and drank his profits because he didn’t know if he desired his twin or desired to resemble her. One night, very drunk, he lifted a tavern door from its hinges and launched it onto the river, carried downstream for a week until he reached the great road to the capital. Just outside the Forbidden City was the shack of the knifers.
He paid six taels and lay on the low couch, held by three men, his parts numbed with chilli sauce and removed with a single pass of the curved knife, the wound dressed with wet paper. For three days he burned with thirst and a desire to piss. The brass plug was removed and his urine flowed, which meant he would live.
He entered the Forbidden City and his looks brought him a place with the Imperial players. But he was ignorant and ill-tempered and played silent roles as a serving maid or concubine. He thought, ‘My sister is pretty and we are twins, so I’m too pretty for this.’ He was whipped for idleness and fled to a nearby town, but was followed in the street by cries of ‘crow’ because of his high voice and ‘stinking eunuch’ because of his wayward bladder. So the Eunuch Police found him and took him back to the Forbidden City and gave him twenty strokes of the bamboo.
He was still proud and lazy and received a hundred strokes. He had three days to recover, then received a whipping called ‘lifting the scabs’. He ran away again, for which the penalty was death.
He had stolen a box of gold and could buy medicines to supply the yang – the male essence. He didn’t want his parts to regrow, but he hoped that his voice might deepen and his body lose its roundness so he might escape the Eunuch Police.
The medicines didn’t work and he stayed indoors, obliged to trust his servant – a grinning villain who chewed garlic and stole his food.
Sperm is pure yang, so he sent the servant to bribe a prostitute. There was no effect and he thought, ‘Perhaps the fluid must be fresh, and without female liquids.’ He sent the servant to buy parts from the executioner. Again he was disappointed, and thought, ‘Perhaps all potency is lost at the moment of death, even though the parts are warm.’
So he clubbed his servant with a log from the fire, and used his precious parts, then killed him. There was no effect and he despaired.
He returned upriver, wanting to visit his home town before he was killed. Here he saw a Westerner, smeared with coal dust, smelling of oil. He shuddered at the hairy hands and lumpy face, but surely they showed an excess of yang, so he stole May’s clothes.
He smiled, and the white demon bought him tea. He was coy, and the monster sweated. With a show of reluctance he went to the barbarian’s room. To please the white ghost he sat with his ankle on his knee, or with a foot on the table, or he leaned on a window sill like a woman at a ship’s rail. After three days a black hair sprouted on his arm.
But then the changes stopped. He thought, ‘Perhaps the foreigner is bored, as men grow bored, no longer giving the thick fluid which comes from the spine and makes sons.’ He pleased the Westerner in strange ways and the barbarian was enslaved, so he climbed to his old home on the cliff. May greeted him with joy, but he seized her throat.
‘I’m leaving with the white monster,’ he said. ‘But first I’ll kill you and dress you as me and throw you from the cliff, so the Eunuch Police will think I’m dead. And I’ll take your clothes and be you and everyone will say, “How pretty she is.” ’
But May twisted free and ran from the house and across the little garden and down the bamboo ropes. Her brother was close behind, and caught her on a narrow ledge above the town. Here they fought until a slim figure fell to the water and floated downstream and was found a week later and claimed by the Eunuch Police.
By this time, though, the white man and his lover were far away. They sailed downstream to Canton and lived in the Western quarter, a scandal to Chinese and Westerners alike. But the white man was proud of his lovely companion, and spent his wages on trousers of canvas and cotton and silk.
9
Tom woke up fighting. Someone was crushing his face. For a while he roared and kicked, his head cruelly held. Then he stopped because he was alone.
He’d tumbled into the footwell of the van. He was blind and suffocated, stuck between the seat and the gear stick, his feet tangled in the pedals. He lay for a while, smelling old mud on the carpet, his neck crooked, remembering how the dream had made him twist and groan.
Six a.m. Cold and still dark. He hauled himself free, his back sore, and started driving while he was half asleep, the Whitechapel Road as empty as a river when he parked across from the hospital, desperate to see May but instead watching a woman shivering on a street corner. A Whitechapel trollop, just like the Ripper killed. And probably the local Chinkies were suspects, pitiless insect faces, they chop suey then they chop us.
He frowned because the dreams weren’t just about May and bad dads and an outsider who might be him: there was also this stuff about pervy brothers.
He jumped out and rubbed the windows with his sleeve. Christ, get me out of London. He nodded because it was obvious. Bastard place. But drive for long enough and it ends, just like anywhere else.
Back shivering in the van, thinking about the black beyond the last lights, and how he’d wake up shivering but at least it’s the country. He could get a job. He’d be brown and fit. Hedging and ditching, then evenings in the pub with a dog on his feet. Shit, he could steal the Tans’ dog. Poor bugger, it would love to run. He saw it muddy and laughing, still mad and crapping everywhere but getting better, galloping round the garden where he’s digging veg for May. He straightens, stretching his stiff back, then rinses muddy carrots in a bucket by the door, grabbing herbs from a window box, and into their little thatched house, the roof over its eyes like a slipped wig, where they’re happy and alone.
He’d talk to her. Somehow get her out of London. And steal the dog.
He was falling asleep when the Aussie doc walked past.
Tom watched him, amazed. He crawled from the van, stiff with cold, and stared after the bouncy gangling figure under the street lights. ‘Well, I suppose the dick has to go home sometime.’ He got the washing line off the back doors, cold clumsy hands, and ran after him. He remembered an alley up ahead and made a noose in the line, laughing as he ran. Cleaners and labourers at the bus stops and a few cars going past in the dark. Easy to pick the moment.
He dropped the noose over the doctor’s head. He turned and put the line over his shoulder and hauled Frank up the alley, enjoying the gurgles and gasps, the Aussie bastard dragging on his back, holding the noose, kicking himself along. Tom hooked the line through railings, and pulled until Frank hit them with a thump.
He looped the line
around the bugger’s ankles, the doc trying to kick but too busy pawing at his neck. Laughing, skipping around, Tom dropped the line around a spike at the top of the railings and hauled him upside down. Now Frank was gripping the rails, so it was easy to fasten his bony brown wrists. The doctor’s tie flopped down over his face: Tom pushed it into his mouth for a gag.
He strolled back to the van, rubbing his hands. He would leave Frank for a while in the cold, because he had reason to hate him. On his first night with May they’d kissed on the bed and she was rolling around on top of him and then his pants were sticky. He went to the bathroom and he was plastered in blood. He thought it must be her period, but then he took his pants down. He ran back to her in a panic, saying, ‘My cock has burst.’ They climbed on the bike and she took him to A&E and laughed with Doctor Frank who called it ‘a nosebleed in your dick’. They waited a week, and then another week because she was on nights, and then she had incense in her room and a red cloth over the bedside light and new panties. He didn’t say that it was his first time.
He also didn’t mention his foreskin. It had always been tight, a twoskin maybe, and he’d never understood its workings till they did it in biology. For years he tried forcing it back, but this left white stretch marks, which were scar tissue and made it tighter. He entered her and yelped.
He pulled back and lay bewildered, May saying, ‘OK?’ He went to the bathroom and his foreskin was stuck back. She watched as he got dressed, but he only said, ‘I have to go.’ Eventually she was quiet. Maybe it was her first time as well. Again he climbed carefully onto the bike and buzzed through dark streets to A&E, but this time he sat for hours. He could feel his knob end. It chafed against his clothes, raw as an eyeball, but its messages came from somewhere unplaceable. Occasionally he checked in the toilet, his foreskin still stuck, a bit of blood, and his plum going black. Then Doctor Frank again, who was impressed: ‘Hey, it’s strangulated.’ By morning Tom was circumcised.
