by Sid Smith
‘And I soon learned the language.’
With the horn he drove rooks from their fields, and with sparks from the battery he lit their fires. At harvest-time he shone the headlights into the threshing house, so the men could work all night. They praised the skill of his hands, and it didn’t matter that the headman hated him for spoiling his daughter.
How they were in love! Tom wrote poems on fans, to praise her, and he put gauze bags of tea inside lotus flowers before they closed for the night, in the morning making tea with pure water from the well beside the village, and May smiled at that scent of lotus. At night, when his work was done, they lay on pine boughs in the firelight and stared over the treetops, smoking opium until the village lamps went out, and the dogs had ceased to bark, and a thorn bush was pulled across the pig pen to keep out wolves. May said, ‘My husband.’ And Tom replied, ‘Only a China girl will do.’
He said, ‘I have seen the Western races, where the prettiest women are only as pretty as boys. And I have seen the blacks, their men so manly that women are driven mad. But then I saw the yellow folk, in whom the yin is certainly the most strong, and therefore I travelled east.
‘First I came to Japan, where there was much variety, with dark or light skin, and large or narrow eyes, and the nose with a higher bridge, which many prefer. But the men have a yang trait, which is shown in their hairy legs and manly build, and this is also seen among the women. And likewise in Korea, although their blood is more pure.
‘Then I saw the Thais. The southern Thais are lovely, despite the blood of foreigners. But I went north and even the menfolk showed the yin. And also in Siam, where the tribes by the China border are the most beautiful.
‘So I came to China, but was confused. Some here seem Caucasian because of the Turkic strain, and some resemble the Eskimo, and there are Chinese of Malay stock who are small and dark.
‘But I recalled the Thais, and came south, where the tribes are soft and yielding, filled with the yin, driven by more virile folk to these wooded hills. And so I found you, the most female of women. And your father is as smooth as a wooden Buddha, and surely your brothers are light and slim.’
‘Ah, my family,’ said May, her eyes downcast. ‘I had a twin, but twins are unlucky so my mother died and then my brother also. And now my father has sent me from the house, because of you. But I am happy to lose him, and would stay with you always.’
‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Always.’
In the morning he smiled again, and they kissed as he left the house. But then he saw the van. It was parked by their hut under a dark pine, whose fallen needles stained its roof. The windows were edged with green, which was moss. He took the jack and worked all day to move a neighbour’s broken roof beam, and then with the tyre wrench he levered the new beam home, but the jack and the wrench were rusted. He came again to the van and someone had laid a sickle on the bonnet and scratched the paint. Chickens pecked between the soft tyres, and one stood on the driver’s seat, its lime on his coat.
He filled the windscreen washer and thought, ‘Why did I do that?’ Then May was standing beside him. She said, ‘You took me from my father, and now you are restless.’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I lost my home for you,’ she said. ‘No man will want me, being used.’
‘No, no.’ But then he thought: ‘Perhaps there are women more female, more smooth and slim, in the higher hills.’
Dozing on the Tube seat, Tom half woke. But for once the story wasn’t taking over. In fact it all made sense. If you were in China, with all those Chinese women, of course you’d look around, even if you didn’t do anything. So he watched himself in the village again.
It was morning, and he was moving the van from their hut. He parked under trees on the far side of the village, thinking, ‘In love, only selfishness is wise.’ In the afternoon May came to him. He was lying on a bed of pine boughs in the van, warmed by a little charcoal stove that he’d made from river clay, and looked up with surprise.
She laughed and said, ‘Won’t you speak? Are you shocked? Are you thinking of our time together? You were happy, I think. Would you like that time again?’
Tom shook his head.
‘Very well,’ said May. ‘Very well. But I’ve a friend who wants to be acquainted, as you and I were acquainted.’
‘I’m happy alone.’
‘But didn’t you want a lover who is slim and smooth and light? This one is all those things, and will do whatever you ask, even favours that were denied elsewhere.’ Tom was startled, recalling a small thing he had wished for, that May had refused.
She laughed and gave him a folded note. ‘Go to this village, to a lover who is everything you want.’ He saw that she was angry and couldn’t be trusted: he wouldn’t go to her friend’s house.
But in the evening he was restless in the van, the stove shining red on the roof, and he recalled his quest for the feminine. Perhaps May knew a woman who was slim and light and smooth beyond all others. And he might show that their love affair was finished, by preferring another.
So he opened her note, then climbed the forested hill and came to a village hidden among pines. Cautious, he walked between stone houses, lamps flickering under the trees, and found the house of May’s friend and studied its dark windows and cracked wall. Faintly in the dusk he saw carved words above the door. They were vague and wavering in the gloom, but at last he saw a verse which might be translated thus: ‘Husbands! You are slaves, / Nightly digging your own graves.’
He smiled, because the writer contradicted May, who wished to maintain their connection, against the call of freedom. He opened the door.
In his worldwide travels he had known countless lovely courtesans. And he had visited numberless houses of pleasure: all were richly furnished, but this excelled them all. He crossed a hallway carpeted with silk. Silver lamps shone from lacquered tables.
But the hall led only to marble steps, which descended into darkness. He paused, then went down the steps, where woven hangings depicted love, or yin and yang like twins in the womb, with a deep carpet underfoot, and screens that glittered with precious stones. He came to the lower floor and crept through the dark, thinking, ‘I am unarmed.’
‘Who’s that?’ he said, because his wrist was seized.
He was drawn into a room, very dark. A slight figure pressed against him, and his heart leapt. He laid the creature backwards on a bed, his blood roused by the slender limbs, so smooth and light.
How he pleasured himself! Anger made him take what had been forbidden.
‘Are you content?’ said his bedmate in the dark. ‘Are you contented now?’ The voice was cold, and he liked this coldness.
‘I’m content,’ he said, and gave his lover a silver bracelet, pretty but not expensive, that he’d bought for May, until her sorrow bored him. Now his least desire was met, so he gave the bracelet promptly, showing that theirs was a business matter.
But their fingers touched and he was inflamed, and must satisfy himself again, the limbs so light and smooth, like his dream of China.
Next day he thought of nothing but the house of pleasure, and was careless in his work. In the afternoon he climbed again to the house, but the door was locked. He returned at dusk but was disappointed. At last in the dark he could hurry again over the rich carpets and down the marble steps, though he was weak from the night before.
He was welcomed without words, and the night was yet more tiring, because he was roused so often to desire, and his bedmate always ready. ‘What do you wish, husband?’ said the voice in the dark.
Now he was caught. Daylight was an interlude between these raptures, or was a time when the poor human frame might rest, though he lay in the van and couldn’t sleep, and at night in the pleasure house he was restless with the itch of love.
Once, in that dark room, he said, ‘I must relieve myself.’
‘Do it in the corner, because my neighbours hate me.’
‘Why do they hate you?’
There was no reply except, ‘Do it in the corner.’ But instead he crept through the house and down the garden and stood among the weeds.
In the Tube, the man in a suit smelled it before he saw it – a dark patch that spread along Tom’s pants. ‘Dirty dog,’ he said, and moved down the carriage.
But Tom thought he was standing in the dark garden. He was looking into the forest, where there were lights which moved in the dark as if carried. Then the lights approached. Alarmed, he returned to the house and closed the door. But outside were men of the village, who called, ‘You will die there!’ So he used the jar in the corner.
He said, ‘How strange, how strange. When lying in the near-dark – when there is only light under a door or through a crack in the shutters – how often we see our lover’s face wavering in the gloom, sneering and snarling, or stained with decay, the eyes like the sockets of a skull. And this latter thought oppresses me.’
‘Skulls are handsome,’ his bedmate said.
One evening he lay in the van, too exhausted to sleep, impatient for the pleasure house. There was a tapping on the van doors, and May said, ‘Are you there?’ But he didn’t speak, fearing her sad demands. Yet later, after his spasms in his lover’s arms, sick from weariness, he thought of his happy time with May and said, ‘I should seek a reconciliation.’
But his bedmate said, ‘Why should you trust a woman?’ and sang a jolly tavern song, beating time with a slim wrist, the silver bracelet jingling, and the chorus of the song was: ‘My woman’s love / Changed its palate every month.’
He returned to the village, where men said, ‘You were gone for three days, and the village is dark.’ But he was too tired to work, and lay all day in the van, and dreamt of the pelvic socket where a thighbone fits, or of the socket of a guttered candle, or of a man digging his own grave, weakening as he digs.
He thought, ‘I must rest or die.’
But the hours dragged in the cold, until it seemed foolish to bear this discontent, fretting the feeble body. Slowly he climbed the hill, up through the sodden forest, resting against trees, aching for his lover as a bone aches for flesh, till he came to the stone village, where many lamps flickered, and there was a murmuring and a hidden busyness that was new. But he hurried to the pleasure house, where his strength was praised, and he caressed that side, so smooth and cool, and the limbs so light.
When he next saw the village a week had passed, though it seemed he had spent only a night in that dark room. He bent above the engine, making many mistakes, his former friends spitting on the ground, until night fell and he turned again to the hill.
But he was followed by jeering villagers, and boys threw stones. ‘Fool,’ they shouted as he hurried through the forest, his coat over his head, and they were close behind when he crossed the stone village, where there was a muttering like anger, as though hidden folk were roused. He came to the pleasure house and slammed the door and rushed through the corridors, which now were bare stone, their furnishings gone, and into the dark room where his bedmate lay and didn’t rise to greet him. The villagers struck the door, but his lover answered with another jeering song: ‘Do you see death coming / With slim arms like a woman, / His lap / Empty with a woman’s lack?’
When he next left the house, his van was daubed with chicken blood. The windows were broken, and someone had smashed his charcoal stove and scattered the bed. May watched from her father’s door, but he turned away and waited in the damp woods until he could climb again to the pleasure house.
He wasn’t seen in the village for two weeks, though in that dark room it seemed that only a long night had passed. The villagers shouted as he crept to the van, which was a burnt shell, sunk on melted tyres. He sat on the bare wires of the driver’s seat in a smell of wet ash, until he heard a battering on the van. He leapt out and found the villagers with sticks, and the headman angry and grinning, so he fled to the forest and hungered all day for the room where all he saw was his lover’s smile and the bracelet gleaming.
Yet he was so weak that his bedmate must bend to his lips when he said, ‘I begin to guess your secret, but you see that I do not care.’
‘I’m glad that I please you.’
It was a month before he left the room, where he never hungered and where a month was like a winter’s night. The van was gone from the village, and he followed its tracks to a cliff above the river, which swirled around a glint of metal. He sat on a stump in the forest but couldn’t rest, the day cold, mist filtering downwards through the trees, and then it rained, so that he came again to the village where a woman shouted, ‘The foreigner!’
Her cries brought the villagers. Over their heads he saw May, who called, ‘Don’t go again to that house.’
But he didn’t answer and was swallowed into the mob, which dragged him to the headman’s hut. Here men had gathered to speak of crops trampled at night, and a beating on their doors by bony knuckles, and in the morning the tracks of bony feet. And the pig pen was robbed, though its bars were so close that only a child could enter, but no child could have killed the pig. Also: the sucking out of the eyes of sheep, the chewing of babies’ toes, and the biting off of the precious parts of the watchdogs of the headman, though his gold was untouched.
The men shouted when they saw the foreigner, and May’s father bent his great arms, saying, ‘Our troubles come from where you go nightly.’
Then the villagers surged forward and the headman’s guards were overwhelmed. The crowd hurried the white man from the village, and a madman gripped his arm, saying, ‘We know who steals male essence.’ So Tom was carried up through the forest, the mist very thick, and a roaring from the hidden folk of the stone village, and so to the pleasure house.
Here he wiped his eyes, because the house was now a tomb in a graveyard. Weeds grew on its roof and the door was broken and its bones scattered by the mob.
May was by his side. She led him among the graves, where he stumbled and saw the loneliness of death. She pointed to weeds, where a skeleton lay white and new, still with its burial clothes. ‘That was my brother,’ she said.
On its wrist, though, was the silver bracelet, and in this way Tom was broken, as every bachelor is broken at last.
He crept into the forest and lay on the wet ground. When May came he turned away, recalling his lover in the pleasure house, and nothing else would do. He ate grass and bark, and drank water from the stump of a tree. Then May found a husband, a trader from the town, so he went to the river. At night he slept under bushes among fish bones and rats, and in the day he sat in the sun in an old rotten fishing boat on a mudbank in the shallows.
Stale water lay in the bottom of the boat. It was fringed with green, kissed by mosquitoes, and often he leaned forward and stared down and saw his outline black against the sky. Then he would think, ‘Everything all along was all my fault.’
By midnight Tom was back on the streets. As he left the cop shop, the custody sergeant gave him directions to Waterloo.
‘Sorry,’ said Tom. ‘Sorry for all that.’
‘Next time, if we find you we keep you.’
It was raining. He smelled of piss. As he walked he remembered lying on the Tube floor at the terminal, still locked in the dream, groaning and twitching because he was held by his lover in the dark room. Then the cops had hauled him away, and he’d fought them because they were also the crowd hauling him up the hill to the graveyard. And finally he’d sat in the rotten boat and stared into the stagnant water, but actually he was sitting on the bunk in a police cell, until the cops decided that he’d stopped being mad.
Waterloo. He turned into a side road, nervous about the van, but there it was, faithful under a street light. As he climbed into the driver’s seat he thought, ‘I’ll go home.’ The roads were empty: he’d be there in an hour, the house dark and locked up, but the catch on the pantry window was loose. He could take a bath. Sleep in a bed. In the morning he’d visit Gilly. Maybe look for a job. It’d be better without his dad. H
e could make friends. You make friends if you’ve got a job.
He started the van, thinking about the route out of London. But only fourth gear worked. He slipped the clutch, the engine toiling as he pulled away, Tom blushing in the dark because his life was crap.
He was turning into Kennington Lane when the clutch burned out. Shouting, revving the engine, he beat the steering wheel as the van rolled gently to the kerb. He put his arms on the wheel and his head on his arms and said, ‘The end.’
He’d been wrong about everything. Wrong and wrong, ever since Wei and Chung had pushed him out of the takeaway. But the young monk had put him straight: ‘Maybe Tan Yiu angry.’
Very depressed, he climbed out into the rain and went round the back. But he got a shock when he opened the doors: his doss bag was crooked in the dark, like someone was lying inside.
He got in and closed the doors and sat with his back against the cold side of the van, eyeing the bag. The street light here was faulty. Its yellow light flickered through the windscreen and past the edge of the curtain and lay in a ribbon across the doss bag, which was all bright ridges and black valleys, with Tom watching angry and afraid.
But he was cold and wet. The bag was empty or full or lumpy with bones, but at last he had to slip inside.
He lay there for days. Mostly he dozed, but sometimes he woke to the slap of parking tickets. Then he’d roll asleep again, deep in his last dreams, which were all about Johnny.
21
Johnny was in a mountain pass. He lay on a stony slope, facing a stony slope, mist streaming between. Tall birds were crossing below him. One by one they ran across the pass, hopping from rock to rock on their long legs, hurrying because they were afraid. Sometimes one stood on a boulder to rest, upright like a man. Then it would see him and scurry on, though it was tired, stretching its long neck, rolling its eyes, long wings trailing, till it vanished in the mist. At last Johnny understood: the birds were too heavy for this thin air. He stood up and followed them. His breath steamed, as did the wound in his belly. Soon he was going downhill. He slithered on loose stones, following a stream. Ahead, a bird stood on a rock. It turned its long neck towards him, then cried out and spread its wings. It leaned out over the slope and launched into the mist, and through its wake he saw a green valley. The stream had become a river. Next to the river was a village with a red tent and a girl who said, ‘I’m young and lovely, as you see.’
