by Betsy Tobin
“They’re looking for you,” she says. “We’ve got to go down there!”
The Chinese man swallows, then shakes his head.
“No.” He gestures towards the ocean. “People,” he says in English. It sounds like purple.
“What do you mean? What people? Are there others?” she asks, horrified.
He nods, eyeing her.
“How many?”
The man stares at her, his chest heaving.
“How many others?”
“Tert,” he says.
“Three?”
He shakes his head, then holds up both his hands in front of him. He opens and closes them once, twice, three times, then turns his palms face up. She stares at him.
“Thirty? Thirty more besides you?” she asks, incredulous.
The man nods.
“Where?”
He shakes his head, gestures across the entire bay. They both stare at the scene below them on the beach, unable to move. After a few minutes, they hear the engine of a hovercraft out to sea. They watch as its lights criss-cross the bay, flashing eerily across the surface of the dark water. The man murmurs something quietly to himself.
“We have to go down there,” she says again. He looks out across the bay, his eyes filled with dread. Slowly he shakes his head.
“No,” he turns to her. “Puh-lees,” he says desperately.
She peers at him. Please? Or police? Is he begging, or warning her? She looks back towards the cluster of cars. Like him, she does not wish to contend with the police and their probing questions. What in God’s name would she say to them? Out for a stroll? And she would surely not pass a breathalyser.
“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Okay.”
He exhales with relief, then passes a hand across his face, while she puts the car in gear and pulls back onto the road.
September 2004
As soon as the plane touches down, Lili feels his presence acutely, like a lost limb. Her dead brother is waiting for her, just as she knew he would be. She walks, dazed with dislocation and fatigue, through a bewildering series of pale grey corridors towards immigration, where she is confronted with a battery of questions about the nature of her stay. All the while she imagines Wen at her elbow, coaxing the correct sequence of words from her that will unlock the doors to this strange country.
The immigration officer is Indian, a Sikh. He frowns at her passport, the folds of his turban ever so slightly askew. Then he looks straight at her and asks if she has relatives in Britain. For a moment she doesn’t answer. Does Wen’s spirit reside here? Or somewhere else? She looks around, her mind reaching for him. The immigration officer clears his throat, exasperated.
“Family,” he says too loudly, as if she hasn’t understood.
“No,” she replies.
Satisfied, he waves her through. A trickle of sweat rolls down her side. She walks on towards the baggage carousel, and when she reaches it, she has the sudden sense that he is near. She watches, trembling, as her pale grey suitcase trundles past her on the belt.
When she comes through the airport barrier, Jin is there, her hair and clothes completely changed since they last met. Jin wears pencil-thin black jeans and a tightly cut jacket made of shiny black fabric, and her once long hair has been cropped fashionably short, a long slant of fringe hanging over one side of her face. She is even more beautiful, thinks Lili in a flash. Jin pushes through the crowd and grabs her in an embrace.
“Lili! You took for ever! I thought they’d kept you!”
Lili smiles and shakes her head. “I made it.” She points to Jin’s hair and clothes. “But what’s happened to you? You look like a foreigner,” she jokes. Jin shrugs.
“It’s been two years. Did you expect me not to change?” Jin grabs her suitcase and propels Lili through the crowded airport terminal. “You’ve no idea what it’s like here,” she adds, pushing ahead through the crowd.
The words float back to Lili, a little ominous, and she realises with a start that Jin is right. Lili looks down at her own outfit: beige trousers, a yellow blouse, wedge sandals and a dark blue raincoat, all chosen with the utmost care at home. Now they seem drab and out of date.
On the bus ride from the airport, Lili stares out the window, feeling as if she is seeing London through the filter of Wen’s gaze. That first night she is reluctant to sleep, afraid that if she closes her eyes, even for an instant, her brother’s presence will go. Fade, or drift away, like embers on the breeze. Eventually sleep takes her. But even then she dreams of him, and of their childhood together: of endless summer days of heat and dust, of scrambling among piles of rubble outside their village, of bicycle journeys down rutted muddy paths, and watermelon seeds spat in each other’s faces. The two of them did not blend easily with other children, who regarded their twinship with suspicion and hostility. From the first they were an anomaly: a brother and sister, born into a culture of children without siblings.
As if this was not enough to mark them out, their survival was a small miracle: only hours old, they were victims of a terrible earthquake that killed their parents, and wiped out nearly half the population of the area. Across the country, newspapers covered the story of their poignant rescue: newborn twins, trapped in each other’s arms for twenty hours beneath two metres of collapsed concrete and steel, before a group of ordinary citizens clawed them out with bare hands and pickaxes. To a grief-struck nation, she and her brother became tiny symbols of hope: one small incidence of good fortune amid all the devastation. They were taken in by distant relatives, a childless couple who made nightly offerings to their ancestors for the double blessing. Was it an auspicious way to begin a life? She hardly knows.
Wen had lived in London for a time; he’d said as much in his letter. But the city was expensive in ways she could not possibly imagine. Even a cup of tea was an extravagance, let alone a bed, or a bus ride, or a meal. He’d come to London a month after his arrival in Britain. Those first few weeks he’d spent working in an electronics factory up north, where for twelve hours at a stretch he glued labels onto microwave machines. The work was soul-destroying. After his shift, he would stumble back to a dorm room lined with narrow metal bunk beds and collapse onto a still-warm mattress. Even the bed was not my own, he had written. One day, the man on the production line beside him fainted from exhaustion, his face grey, his eyelids swollen with fatigue. He was carried out and within an hour a new man took his place, anxious and bewildered. I looked at him and saw myself, Wen wrote.
He had quit the next day and got a bus to London, where he’d slept rough in parks, dodging police and living on air. A loaf of bread could last three days, he’d said. Though the bread was terrible: spongy and flavourless, like eating white moss. With no English, he’d found it impossible to get work. Until one day, a Chinese man approached him on the street. The man offered him a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant: he could share a flat with other immigrants like himself, the man explained, and he could eat for free. Wen was uncertain at first. He didn’t like the man’s clothing: a cheap but flashy imitation black leather jacket, designer jeans with brass studs. Nor his manner, which was crudely arrogant. But options were scarce.
That was the beginning. One badly paid job had led to another, according to the letter. He’d moved about the country wherever the work led him, sleeping six or seven to a room in bare mattresses laid out like coffins on the floor. The jobs varied: he’d picked apples in Norfolk, packaged chicken in King’s Lynn, bussed tables in a restaurant in Hull, though he preferred outdoor work when he could get it. Until one day in early February, he found himself combing the sand for cockles on Morecambe Bay. The work was hard but the money better than he’d made in previous jobs. He was good at it, faster than the others, and more adept at reading the sands. But it was not for the faint-hearted: the winds off the ocean were bitter and the work back-breaking. The massive wooden boards used to tamp the sands and draw the cockles to the surface were awkward and heavy. Wen carried them slung behi
nd his neck like an ox, and by the end of a shift, his shoulders were hunched like those of an old man.
On his first day out, a young woman in his group had broken down and wept. They helped her back to the van, where she sat and cried until the rest of them had finished. A day’s grief with nothing to show for it, he had written. He felt sorry for the woman, had offered her his last hand-rolled cigarette on the way home. She looked at him, then tore the cigarette neatly in two, handing one half back to him. She did not smoke it but placed it carefully in her pocket. Later, he saw her trade it for a few squares of chocolate with one of the others. This is what we are reduced to here.
The letter had been dated the day before he died. He must have posted it himself, within hours of perishing alongside twenty-two others in the freezing rip tides of Morecambe Bay. Oddly, the faint postmark was dated five days after the incident. When she mentioned this to Jin, her friend only shrugged in response. The letter must have languished somewhere during those five days, Jin had said. Mislaid in a sorting office, or perhaps forgotten at the bottom of a pile. Each time Lili rereads the letter, she feels a tight clench of pain in her gut, as if she is there with Wen inside the story: sleeping rough in a suburban London park, eating stale bread on the street, or freezing on the sands of Morecambe Bay.
And from the moment she arrives, she feels guilty that her own experience in England will be less fraught with hardship. That is the thing about her and Wen, she thinks. We shared everything and nothing. Growing up in their small village, Lili had been all Wen wasn’t: a star pupil at school, a devoted daughter to their ageing stepparents, a loyal member of the youth brigade, and the winner of a much-coveted place to study English at a local teacher’s college. Throughout their childhood and adolescence, Lili strived for and achieved all that was set out for her, while Wen did the opposite, barely managing to finish middle school before dropping out altogether.
In spite of this, it was Lili who had been plagued by uncertainty and self-doubt, like a spider clinging to the slender thread of her success. As a child, she’d suffered sudden bouts of panic, moments of inexplicable terror, when she would retreat to her bed and hide beneath the quilt. Wen would comfort her during these times, burrowing down beside her and waiting patiently for her fears to subside. Later, she grew out of these attacks, but experienced odd moments of paralysis, when the world around her seemed to tilt uneasily, causing her to question everything she held true. At such times, Lili felt her own history bearing down on her, feared she might be crushed beneath its terrible weight.
Her stepmother attributed these attacks to the traumatic events that followed her birth, a year so calamitous it later came to be known as the Year of Curse. They consulted a doctor who prescribed bitter herbal remedies designed to calm the spirit and bolster the heart’s yin. But the only remedy for what Lili’s stepmother termed her “distracted spirit” was Wen. It was Wen who understood that Lili suffered not just the tragedy of her own history, but that of her people. He and Lili had grown up in the distended aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the chaos and violence of which cast a long shadow over their childhood. And while the nation prided itself on its ability to move forward, the evidence of what transpired lay all around them, from the bludgeoned statues in the local temple, to the disfigured old woman who lived beneath them, who was forced to drag herself about on crude wooden wheels, her legs mangled from beatings suffered at the hands of Red Guards. Each time Lili faltered, it was Wen who would draw her back, clasping both her hands in his and whispering reassurances in her ear. We are survivors, he told her repeatedly. And eventually, she came to believe him. In this way, Wen anchored Lili – indeed, he was the only aspect of her life that never wavered.
Until he died. The news of the accident had felled her. That previous summer, she’d begged him not to go: the journey was dangerous and living illegally had its own perils, she had argued. The idea of going abroad terrified her. Though their life was not perfect, she told him, it was known. Who could say what he might encounter on the far side of the world, surrounded by a people not his own? But Wen had taken her hand and said: Fang xin. Relax. If I stay here, I will suffocate. But you could go to Beijing, or Shanghai, she protested. He smiled ruefully and shook his head. It’s not a place I am looking for, he told her. This journey has been coiled up inside me all my life.
She didn’t see, but in retrospect perhaps she hadn’t wanted to. She’d wanted their lives to run in tandem, like the double yellow lines painted down the centre of the highway. But she and Wen were not the same; she knew that now. The rules and doctrines they lived under, the ones that guided and reassured her, were precisely what had stifled him. I’m like the swallow that flies over the mountains, he explained. I need to escape.
He had phoned her three times since his departure in July. Once from Paris, where he claimed to be standing beneath the Eiffel Tower, and twice from different locations in the UK shortly after he’d arrived. Each time the conversation was brief: he gave few details but assured her he was fine. After the last call, there was a long silence lasting several months, followed by a visit from the local party secretary notifying her of his death. He had drowned, they told her, along with many others. There would be no compensation from either government, the official said, though the men in charge on the night of the incident were likely to be prosecuted.
Two weeks later, the letter arrived without warning. The moment she saw Wen’s handwriting on the envelope, Lili felt ill. The sight of it unnerved her. It wasn’t just the unhappy timing: the letter seemed to her oddly out of character. It was long and rambling, and filled with tiny details about his life, the sort of things he’d never bothered to disclose in the past. She wondered what had precipitated it. A sudden bout of homesickness, perhaps. Though Wen was not the sort of person to succumb to such emotions. The tone of the letter was reflective, almost sentimental. And in the final lines he had apologised for his departure. It was painful to leave you, he had written, more bitter than you know. He promised they would meet again soon. Even now, she wonders at his choice of words: as if he’d known that he would soon be proved wrong.
Perhaps it was those last few lines that had incited her to follow him. He had been so certain they would meet again, that she could not deny him this last wish. So within a few weeks of receiving his letter, she had swallowed her fears and resolved to go abroad. She made enquiries, obtained letters of support from prominent local officials and filed a visa application. Most importantly, she tracked down Jin, a former classmate who had gone to England two years before and was now teaching in a language school in London. She’d been reluctant to approach Jin at first. Though they had been room-mates at university, they had not been great friends. Jin had been one of the boldest girls in her year, and one of the most daring in her lifestyle. She wore make-up, permed her hair, shortened her skirts and dated older men at a time when most girls had only recently shed the dark trousers and shapeless jackets that constituted the party’s uniform. She and Lili shared a dorm room with four others, and somehow it was always Lili who was forced to cover when Jin flouted the curfew rules.
She was surprised when Jin responded warmly to her email, promising at once to help her find work. With her fluency in English and teaching qualification, Lili was sure to land a job quickly, Jin had said. Mandarin schools were popping up like mushrooms all over the country. China was the new America, she had written. Everyone wanted a piece of it. But the wheels moved slowly. It was five months before Lili received the visa, and another two months before she had saved enough money to cover her travel expenses. So it was that eight months after Wen’s death, she finally fulfilled his promise of a reunion.
That first night, Jin takes her back to her room in a boarding house in Hounslow. When Jin opens the door and turns on the light, Lili is silenced. The room is sparse and depressing: a single bare light bulb hangs from a cracked ceiling, and the walls are covered in badly peeling pale coffee-coloured paper. Jin calls it a studio, but
Lili thinks this is far too glamorous a term. There is a double bed, a tiny round table made of white metal, a chipped wooden wardrobe and a small kitchen unit with a sink and a two-ring cooker. The correct word in English is bedsit, she remembers. Because the only place to sit is on the bed. But she does not say this aloud. Jin explains that they share a bathroom with five or six others down the hall, which means they must fight their way to the shower each morning. The landlord has installed a timer on the wall, and during peak times, each person is allowed only five minutes. When Jin tells her the weekly rent on the room, Lili gasps, for it is more than two months’ teaching wages at home. Jin laughs. Forget about ren min bi, she says. We work in pounds now. The pound is our ticket to prosperity.
But I didn’t come here to find prosperity, Lili thinks. I came here to find Wen.
February 2004
Wen shakes uncontrollably during the drive back to the English woman’s house. He has no sense of time passing nor of the direction they are heading, but is relieved when they eventually abandon the coast road. The English woman does not speak; indeed, she almost seems to forget his presence, so preoccupied is she with her own thoughts. She drives recklessly, he notices, too fast for a dark, stormy night. But he is hardly in a position to criticise.
His hands and feet are numb with cold. And each time he draws a breath, pain punches through his chest. But he is alive. He scarcely dares consider the fate of the others. Every time he remembers their stricken faces, he feels his insides lurch. Where are they now? He buries his head in his hands, clinging feebly to the hope that they have somehow been rescued, like him.
