‘You shouldn’t be a mother,’ Wang said. ‘I should never have been born.’
This remark had some effect on Shuxiang, and she looked at her son.
‘Yes, it would be better if you had never been born,’ she agreed. ‘Being born into this world is hell. You will be crushed with countless millions all your life long.’
Shuxiang went to the bed, pulled back the covers and got in. Then she held up the bedspread with her arm, making enough room for her son to crawl in beside her. ‘Come to bed,’ she said. Wang stared at her body in the shadows. No way, he thought. But they had shared a bed when he was a child. Back when Shuxiang used to look after him, and not the other way around. And Wang was tired. He was tired of worrying. Tired of the anxiety of what she might do next. So he went to the bed, slipped under the bedcovers and rested his head on the pillow beside hers. He had on a jumper and old school trousers. The fact he had clothes on, he decided, compensated for the fact that she did not. At first he was tense with the strangeness of it. But Shuxiang was not tense. Shuxiang was sleeping. The rhythm of her breath lapped at him like waves against a shore. Lulling him to calmness, lulling him to sleep. Wang lapsed in and out of consciousness, waking to the darkening sky and lengthening shadows as the earth spun away from the sun. Waking to the nearness of Shuxiang and her mouth slackened by gravity. Waking to sulphurous breath, rising from her stomach’s gastric pit. Shuxiang’s hands were in prayer, her body in a loose foetal curl. They were not touching at first, but her body moved to his, seeking him out. She gathered him in her arms with a protectiveness she lacked in waking life, and slept on. Wang drowsed, the sounds of children playing in the yard drifting in and out of his hearing. But he did not hear the key in the lock. He did not hear the front door clicking open.
They were not woken when the quilt was tugged off them. They were not woken by the bloodshot, caffeine-sharpened eyes staring down at them. They were cleaved to each other, mother clasping son in a tight embrace. On the pillow their parted mouths nearly touched. The blood-capillaried eyes bore into them, until Wang’s father could not stand what he saw a moment longer. His thick knuckled hand reached down and dragged his twelve-year-old son up by a fistful of hair. Wang screamed as his scalp lifted and short dark hair ripped out from the roots. Shuxiang leapt up, her bare chest heaving as she slapped at her husband, shrieking at him to stop. Wang Hu hurled the boy from bed to floor, then fell on him. Blow upon blow upon blow. When he was done, and the boy near unconscious, he turned on Shuxiang, who had been hitting him throughout. ‘Shut up,’ he said, and hit her so hard her screaming stopped. Then he threw her on the bed and unbuckled his belt.
Wang was sent to a boarding school, north of Beijing. After eight weeks at the school his father came to visit and told him his mother had died from the pneumonia she caught after swimming in the Liangma River on a freezing January night. Father and son were in an empty classroom, loaned to them by the headteacher, to allow Wang Hu some privacy to break the tragic news.
‘The funeral was three days ago,’ Wang’s father said. ‘We didn’t want to interrupt your schooling. It was very depressing. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted you there anyway.’
It irritated Wang Hu to see that his son’s dislocated shoulder still hadn’t healed and remained in a sling. He should have recovered weeks ago, he thought. The boy’s stubborn as a crooked nail that won’t hammer flat. For appearances’ sake, Wang Hu sat with his son for another twenty minutes, before getting back in his BMW and heading back to Beijing. It was the last time Wang would see his father for several years.
9. The Alley
SPRINGTIME. THE CITY is thawing. Beijingers shedding coats and scarves and other woollen armour in the battle against the cold. The scenery of winter, the roadside oil drums of foil-wrapped baked potatoes and the heavy quilts over supermarket doors retiring from view.
Gobi dust billows in the sky. The city suffocates under the haze of pollutants, the smog burning the back of Wang’s throat. He streaks the tissue he blows his nose with into black, but with a mental shrug lights another Zhongnanhai from a pack left by a fare. The shadow in his lungs will worsen anyway. What difference will one more cigarette make?
East Third ring road, the digital Olympic clock counts down the seconds until the Games. Billboards of athletes leap over hurdles and somersault through the air, China’s national heroes, muscles rippling and taut, holding up cans of Coca-Cola midjump. Throughout Beijing renovations are underway. The polluted façades of buildings are being repainted. Millions of empty flowerpots line the streets, waiting to be filled. One World, One Dream. Remaking the Environment Benefits the People. The Olympics Unites You, Me and Him. The slogans are everywhere.
Passengers come and go. The destinations are far and wide. Nanluoguxiang, the courtyards renovated into overpriced boutiques and tourist shops. Babaoshan cemetery. The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, and the undercover-police-surveillanced expanse of Tiananmen Square. The affluent gated residences of Shunyi. Desolate regions of the Great Wall. The vast sundial of the Millennium Monument, casting no shadow under the sun-bereaved sky.
A westerner slides into the back seat with a beautiful girl. Wang watches the couple in the rear-view. The man is fortyish, with toady eyes and the broken thread veins of alcoholism in his large meandering nose. The girl is in her twenties, with a sugar-frosting of make-up on her pretty face. How can she let him put his hands on her? wonders Wang. For what? Money? Status? A US fiancée visa? The man has a proprietorial hand on her knee and the smirk of one who thinks his own charisma has won him his trophy, and not the charisma of the West.
An official in an expensive tailored suit, his hair dyed an inauthentic black, flags down Wang’s cab outside a government building in Jiangguomen. As Wang drives him, the radio news talks of the Toxic Dumpling Incident. Fourteen people in Japan are sick in hospital after eating dumplings imported from China that were contaminated with pesticides.
‘Sabotage!’ says the official. ‘They are poisoning our dumplings to make China look bad.’
‘Really?’ Wang says. ‘You think the Japanese would poison their own citizens?’
‘They are an evil race.’
‘I’ve met some Japanese,’ Wang says. ‘They don’t seem so bad.’
‘Driver!’ snaps the official. ‘Didn’t you study the War of Resistance against the Japanese at school?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘Well, go back to school and study it again! You obviously know nothing about our history. You wouldn’t know our history if it slapped you in the face!’
At the forceful spit of the word ‘history’, Wang stiffens, hands tightening around the steering wheel. Then he looks in the rearview at the indignant official, and the suspicion passes. He has to get a grip. He has to keep his paranoia in check.
The market. Vegetable stalls of pesticide-sprayed spinach and earth-clodden turnips. Racks of carcasses hanging from hooks, ribs and spinal cords exposed. A butcher in a bloodstained apron slams his cleaver, seasoning a joint of pork with ash spilling from his cigarette. Wang roams from stall to stall, gradually filling his bag with items on Yida’s list. Bean curd. Spring onions. Vinegar. The ground is slippery with plums fallen from a fruit stall and trampled to pulp. The children of the migrant vendors chase about, skidding through the mess as they play tag. Wang buys two jin of rice. The rice seller hands Wang his change without looking away from the old Bruce Lee movie on his laptop, perched above the till.
The dusk is balmy and suffused with spring. Wang detours down an alley behind the Golden Elephant pharmacy, passing a Uighur selling fake Rolexes and a shifty-looking man lurking by the tobacco and liquor store, on the lookout for police. Wang has seen him before and knows he is a seller of identities: student IDs, graduate diplomas and other papers. Documents, both stolen and forged, used by migrants to gain employment in the capital. Another man nearby is peddling blank receipt booklets from hotels and restaurants for officials to claim fraudulent expenses. He rustles a wad of banknotes, hinting at a profitable day’s trade.