‘Tell me again.’
When his pacing brought him close I reached out for the backs of his knees and pulled him towards me. His breath was hard and heavy. I could feel his heartbeat like standing over the subway grate and I was afraid.
‘I’m listening,’ I said.
‘So really old foxes, they become immortals, like people. You know, they get spiritual. Magical powers and so on.’ Holding him was like holding a cat that didn’t want to be there. I felt my fingers slipping.
‘Right.’
‘Well maybe it’s not just a myth. She said she was looking after one. She said we have to leave it alone or there will be trouble.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I stroked the back of his neck. I could see a fast pulse in his jugular. I couldn’t remember if I had saved the number for the hospital in my phone.
‘Well maybe there’s really something in it. A spirit of the house kind of thing.’
‘She lives alone,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’s a little bit gone in the head.’ I felt him flinch.
‘You never want to get involved,’ he said, twisting around. ‘You’re so fucking absent. Sometimes it’s like you don’t really live here.’
‘I live here. I’m just not Chinese. And neither are you. How can you believe in some old folktale which not even Beijingers believe in any more? That’s not just superstition, it’s cultural appropriation.’
That was a cheap shot. I try not to pull race rank on my boyfriend, but fuck, being brown is so rarely an advantage that I feel almost obliged to use it.
‘I’m just trying to look after these people’s interests,’ he said. His voice was small. I could feel the tug in his muscles ease. The hush of night was interrupted by the sigh of a braking truck. I waited for it to pass.
‘Jem, baby, let’s go to New York.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Just for a week or two. We need a holiday. It’s more than a year since we left Beijing. We’re losing our perspective.’
‘You think I’m crazy,’ he said.
‘No, I don’t. I think we both need a break.’ I held him closer, rubbed his lower back. The muscles were hard and there was a fog of sweat under his shirt. The conversation moved into our bodies. We had sex, made up, and fell asleep.
For a few days after that he was calmer, though he only slept four or five hours a night. Then he started to get worked up again, staying out late, talking and arguing about what he called the campaign. I stopped going with him. There was no more talk of home.
I woke up at about three. There was an electric orange glow in the sky and a cold place beside me. I called his name softly but there was no answer; Jeremy was still out.
I got out of bed, pulled on my tracksuit pants and a t-shirt, and stepped into the courtyard in my rubber slippers. In a gap between roofs I could see the slender curve of a waning moon, dimmed by the smog to a dusty light bulb. Beneath it was the new apartment building that was going up two blocks south, topped by the pointed finger of a crane. Those cranes turn and turn and never make a sound. The night was dim with smog. In the alley I could hear the whining of a small dog, someone’s pet locked out for the night.
Beijing is surprisingly quiet at night. Riding our bikes home from the club sometimes we’ll be the only people around, except for the dump trucks, or the road crews resurfacing the streets. It’s not just our neighbourhood. The whole city is constantly under construction. I’m almost used to it. A part of me enjoys the impermanence, the shift, like living in a breakbeat remix. Jeremy takes it personally. He was here before the Olympics, and maybe there was a time when it was different, more predictable. But I doubt it. This city’s too much like a force of nature.
No one was around in the street, though I could hear the sounds of trucks slipping past on the main road a block away. I stepped into the corner toilet, pushing aside the heavy winter doors, which held in the stink. After I pissed I felt awake, alive. I almost went right back to bed. A part of me was thinking Jeremy would be back soon; he’d probably just gone to dance away his mania at Destination.
That high dog howl came crawling through the hutong. The acoustics are strange from all the little houses crammed in together, but it seemed to be coming from the end of the lane. I turned to the shadowed place where the doomed house sat and something orange darted in front of my eyes. Pointed ears and a bushy tail. Fast and silent. Bigger than a cat. I found myself standing in the sharp air of its wake. I was right in front of the house.
The white circle on the wall seemed to glow, the character in thick rough brushstrokes, higher than my head. I lifted a finger and traced the lines. There was a muffled coughing sound, almost a growl. It came from inside.
‘Jeremy?’
There was no entrance from the lane but I knew there was one along the side of Mrs Hua’s place. I pushed at the red door to her courtyard. It wasn’t locked. There were piles of broken crockery and old bricks. Weeds sprawling out of burst plastic pots. I’d never been inside her place before and I stepped as quietly as I could, hoping not to wake her, because I didn’t want to have to explain what I was doing. I was in my pyjamas; I figured I could just pretend to be sleepwalking.
The door to the empty place was rotting wood, held closed by a couple of grey bricks at the base. I peered through the crack in the door. The other side of the house was bricked up against the back of a shop, and light came through from the street. I saw bright pinpricks, glimpses of the other side. A few weeks ago I’d wandered into a temple hidden in the back lanes near our place. One wall was entirely lined with shelves, which were built to hold scriptures, ancient Buddhist scriptures. But half had been destroyed and the other half taken away by European museums. Through the cracks between the shelves you could see the sunlight shining through. Like after hundreds of years of raids and purges, sunlight was the only scripture available.
I shifted the bricks with a tiny scraping sound and pushed open the door. My eyes had adjusted, but the light was poor. The room seemed cold. Actually, more than that. It seemed to be shivering.
‘Jeremy,’ I whispered. I don’t think I imagined the worst, but I knew on some level I’d been preparing for it, because I felt relief when I heard the breathing. It flooded through me like a small, furtive orgasm. He was here. But then I listened hard and heard the breaths were laboured, uneven. There was someone here, right up the back in the dark. But it wasn’t Jeremy.
The room smelled of milk and dust. Here and there long rags hung from the beams, makeshift curtains instead of walls. I pushed further inside and stepped on something crunchy. Leaning down, I saw a tiny pile of bones. I picked one up and snapped it in my hands. Chicken bones, I hoped. Then I looked up. The breathing in the room grew louder.
Two cold eyes. Animal eyes. I jumped back a step, stumbled on a plank, knocked over something that cracked, and then felt something hit me over the head: not hard but heavy. There was a struggle and a blur of limbs. I scratched out and my hands hit fur, then soft, fat, hairless flesh. Human skin. A woman yelled at my back. An answering shriek from the creature in the corner. Something leaped into the rafters, fell as dust.
The night outside was bright. My eyes smarted from the particles.
‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ Then remembered and apologised in Chinese. Mrs Hua stared at me, pulled me out through the door and moved the brick back, muttering. She escorted me out of the courtyard and down the lane. She hardly reached my shoulder but her hand on my elbow was strong. It crossed my mind that to get to her age she must have survived a hell of a lot. She knew how to march someone down a road.
‘What was that?’ I said, in my softest voice.
She looked me steely in the eye. ‘Daughter,’ she said.
I went back to bed and lay there. After a couple of hours, Jeremy came home, stinking of cigarettes and other boys’ aftershave. He made feeble attempts t
o be quiet.
‘I’m awake,’ I said.
‘I had to work off some steam,’ he said. ‘You weren’t worried?’
‘I only just woke up. How was the club?’
‘Same as ever.’ He threw his t-shirt into the corner and got into bed, his back bent to me.
I stuck my forehead into the hard corner of muscle under his shoulder blade, my hand cupping his chest. I knew I should say something. You can’t keep a person locked up like that. But I let the moment pass.
‘I’m glad you came home,’ I said.
He was already asleep.
Through the glass, I can hear Beijing. Bicycle bells, traffic and shouting. The grind and hiss of machinery. The crunch of a bobcat at the end of my street, chewing through old stone. The downstairs bird makes its pencil-sharpening sound, and all around the city appears and disappears, a force of nature, of chaos and confusion.
I pull my suitcase out from under the bed, stir up two years of dust that rises into the narrow light. And as I fill it, the orange cat returns to my window to watch me, cleaning carefully behind its ears.
Reason
One-two one-two: an owl cried out from the hidden branches of a ghost gum. One of the women jumped up, strode towards the tree and started to shout. The other women sitting in the dust in a cluster rose more cautiously, but they raised both the volume and pitch of their chatter. I didn’t know their language, but I understood by the woman’s tone that the owl was being warned.
I checked my phone for the time. We should have left hours ago. I looked over my shoulder, peered into the grubby window, but I couldn’t make out the Minister inside.
The women all went quiet, their upturned faces fixed on the branches. As I watched, a young woman turned and met my eye. She had a naked baby immobilised against her shirt. She walked towards my chair and I stood.
‘That bird,’ she said, ‘he won’t leave us alone. That bird, kuur-kuur, he’s the man who comes through our fence in the night.’
‘What man?’ I said, looking around. There was no fence in sight. The woman smiled at me with pity, and I realised she was just a girl, still in her teens.
‘You can’t see him, kungka,’ she said. ‘Spirit man.’ She tilted her head at me, eyes wide.
I nodded, losing interest. I moved back to my chair but she grabbed my wrist. Her skin was rough, her grip like a vine.
‘Kangaroo bone,’ she said, and turned to expose her throat. Her eyes were black with a glint of cunning, though it could have been reflected light. She let go of my hand and put her own to her mouth to stifle a sound that might have been laughter.
I smiled faintly and stepped back towards the chair. My phone rested on top of it, a folder of paperwork leaned against its unsteady legs. The evening had cooled without warning, despite the stifling day, and I wished I had brought a coat.
It had been a productive day, I reminded myself. A good meeting. I kept the Minister informed, handed him the appropriate paperwork. I didn’t participate in the discussion but it was my job that would go if this fell through. While I waited outside with the women, the Minister was in the house of an elder, promising royalties. Even out here the real deals were made after the official meetings.
The young woman was still watching me. She hoisted her baby in one slender arm. ‘Don’t worry. He’s gone,’ she said.
It was true. The one-two seemed to have stopped. I nodded and smiled, trying not to show my disapproval. It was all superstition, the same superstition that was holding these people back.
She shifted the motionless baby again and drifted back into her group. I heard them laughing as I sat down. Telling ghost stories, I thought, with their babies asleep in their laps. I went through my papers, hearing a few English words stand out among the patter of a language I couldn’t understand.
I read over the draft agreements in my folder and checked my phone. Still no signal.
The Minister stepped out of the house and loosened his tie. He smiled, the smile that was always the same, whether the cameras were on or not. I nodded tersely. I wanted to get out of there. It had been a long day and I craved the simple calm of the hotel. It was the next best thing to the comforting wax-coloured walls of my office, its ordered piles of paper, its calm wooden furniture. I even missed the heavy portraits in the halls.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
I obeyed. I had no choice but to spend the next two years obeying orders. It was a probationary sentence, I thought, then remembered where I found the phrase: the man who left the community today in the back of the police vehicle, a battered four-wheel drive that looked as worn as any of the upturned vehicles we saw on the way there.
I got in the car and waited for the Minister to fasten his seatbelt before I started the engine. As we pulled out, the women watched us. Some laughed, a few waved, and the rest stood silent. The teenager with the baby stared beyond us into the trees, waiting for her moment. I thought of her after we left, turning to the group and telling the story of the white lady she spooked.
Only a hundred or so kilometres of the road out was dirt, then it should have been an easy run to town, if we managed to avoid the roos. The car was hired, a white monster. I missed my silver sedan with the little flag on the bonnet.
‘Did you reach an agreement?’ I asked the Minister.
‘They’ll be reasonable,’ he said. ‘We’ve done what we came to do – present them with their options.’ He snorted. ‘Didn’t have to stand over them. They know we could cut them off in a second. Besides, those kids need shoes.’
I wasn’t sure this last was true, but I nodded. ‘I’ll start on the report tonight.’
I hit a sandy patch and kept both hands on the wheel. To my right the moon had risen over the rocks, yellow and weak as though its batteries were running low. I concentrated on the road.
‘You’ll probably be tired from driving,’ he said. ‘Still, no harm making a start I suppose.’
I smiled inwardly at the method of his pressure. Corrugations in the track kept us silent for a while.
I arrived here by following a trail of work I found myself good at. It was always obvious to me that I would get an internship and go on to Canberra. I had no real sense of lust, either for good deeds or power. I was simply moving ahead in the most logical way. My father was a military bureaucrat, my mother his wife. I know there are paths carved out for us if we can hold to reason.
An erratic bat dashed in front of the windscreen and vanished. Instinctively I pressed on the brakes, then remembered my defensive driving course. The last thing we needed was to be bogged out here, or worse, become one of the upturned shells of cars that littered the road. I shifted in the seat.
‘You have the stats I emailed you for tomorrow?’ I asked, so that the Minister would not offer to drive, not that he ever has.
‘What? Oh, yes,’ he said. His tone was distracted. When I looked at him he turned away from me and faced straight ahead as if he had been caught lying.
‘I can resend them if you need me to.’
He yawned. ‘Shame that airline went bankrupt. We could have chartered a flight.’
I didn’t remind him it was his idea to drive, to ‘get to know the land’, as he put it. I was too busy concentrating on the road. The dirt was turning half to gravel, we were almost at the tarmac. I slowed for a wallaby that shot in front of us and away into the darkness, safe.
When we reached the paved road, I was so relieved that I let my foot relax on the accelerator. I opened the window to let in some real air. The air conditioning made my throat dry, but the dust was no less irritating. I closed the window and stared into the dark beyond the headlights.
I saw something. I had to squint to focus, it was dark, but there was something there. A vague shape on the road ahead. As we approached, it grew into a man. He was not waving, simply
standing in the dirt, one hand covering his chest. Must have been an accident, I thought, a breakdown. I scanned the ditches either side for overturned cars. Nothing. When I looked ahead again he seemed to be the same distance away, just on the edge of visibility. I slowed down.
‘What is it?’ the Minister said. He leaned forward in his seat.
‘There’s a man up ahead,’ I said. ‘I hope he’s not in trouble.’
‘Where?’
‘Right there,’ I said, as patiently as I could.
‘I can’t see a thing.’ He rubbed his eyes.
I refrained from mentioning his missed optometrist’s appointments, because I was his assistant, not his wife. Instead I raised a finger, but was forced to withdraw it. The road ahead was empty.
‘He’s gone,’ I said. ‘Must have walked off into the bush.’
The Minister stared at me. ‘There’s nothing out here.’
‘Must be an outstation or something,’ I reassured him. ‘The asphalt.’
Then again, maybe asphalt did not mean houses here.
‘I’ll call the office first thing in case any of those figures have changed,’ I said. ‘We don’t want to get caught out by some small inaccuracy.’ I was speaking automatically, not really concentrating, because I was wondering how anyone could have gone so far ahead of us on foot.
Spirit man, the woman said. Just a teenager giving herself nightmares for kicks. But the imaginary bone in the fist at her throat. The pity in her voice: You can’t see him. Their laughter rang in my head, sneaking in under the whine and rattle of the engine.
As I came to a rare corner, the moon appeared to grow brighter and dim again, a trick of the changing light. Alice Springs appeared as an orange glow between the sudden hills. Canberra glows like that when you drive towards it in the night, and it means you’re under half an hour away. This town is so small, I knew we must be close.
‘Is it eighty here?’ the Minister said. I looked down. I was driving too slowly, holding the wheel too tight.
‘I was looking at the ranges,’ I said. But they looked dull and featureless to me, just dark lumps like the piles left by an earthmover on a kerb. I wondered what would possess someone to want to live out here. I watched the speedo rise.
The Rest is Weight Page 6
