‘Like fire ants, eh?’ laughed the spice seller. ‘Fire ants up your nose.’
One day at the market he decided to run away and become one of the street kids who begged for a living. He wouldn’t have to go back to school and not fit in. He wouldn’t have to go back to the shadowy apartment and the strange, bitter things his mother said. They had been about to leave the market, and Shuxiang was paying for a jin of tofu when Little Jun crawled under the noodle stall. The noodle-maker was kneading and slamming dough and the table wobbled. He did not have to wait long before he heard his mother say, ‘You seen my son?’
Under the table, Wang saw her feet, strapped in her sandals. His heart skipped with the thrill of concealment.
‘No, not today,’ the noodle-maker said.
His mother walked her feet away. Wang peeped out. She was asking the butcher, his cleaver suspended over bloody cuts of meat, if he had seen her boy. The butcher said no. Shuxiang turned away and Little Jun saw the furrow of worry on her brow. In his hiding place, Wang was pleased by her pain. Proof she must love him as much as he loves her.
Round and round the market she went, calling for him and accidentally bumping into other market-goers. ‘Seen my son?’ she asked the shoe-mender. ‘Seen my son?’ A lump grew and stopped up Little Jun’s throat. The filth under the stall, the vegetable rot and flies, was nauseating. The time to come out had long passed, but now he was too scared.
Then she saw him, under the table. They locked eyes, mother and son, the boy’s eyes trembling, the mother’s turning to stone.
‘Still looking for your little boy?’ the tofu seller asked.
‘No,’ said Shuxiang.
Then she turned and walked out of the market.
It was dark when a neighbour brought him back to Maizidian. She was a Ministry of Agriculture wife and, out of loyalty to his mother, Wang had refused to take her hand. The neighbour was Shuxiang’s age and had recognized Little Jun because she was the kind of woman who took notice of small children. She had fumed out loud, ‘Fate is unkind to give a child to a woman like Li Shuxiang, and to me none.’
She knocked three times, loud and angry, at the door of Apartment 404. Shuxiang opened it, and the boy darted in like a cat streaking out of the rain. The woman opened her mouth to tell Shuxiang off, but Shuxiang, without thanking her, let the door slam shut.
‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said, turning to her son. ‘I won’t smack you.’
A bowl of soup and a steamed bun were put on the table in front of him. She told him to eat, and she sat at the table too. Hungry, he chewed mouthfuls of bread and slurped out of the bowl. Mentholated smoke leaked from the edges of Shuxiang’s mouth and the cigarette in her hand.
‘Have you learnt your lesson?’ she asked.
Wang Jun nodded.
‘I was rude to that woman, wasn’t I?’ she said. ‘Her name is Rongrong and, during the Cultural Revolution, I saw her stab a girl in the head with scissors. That woman has blood on her hands. That’s why I was rude.’
Little Jun shuddered. The woman had offered him one of her bloodstained hands, and he was glad he’d refused it.
‘She has no right to look down on me,’ Shuxiang said, ‘but she probably doesn’t see it that way. Everyone has amnesia about that time. But not me.’
Wang nodded solemnly at his mother. He was on her side against that woman. He sided with her against every one of her enemies. Shuxiang exhaled through her nostrils, bluish snakes of smoke winding into her eyes, which softened as she looked at her son and said, ‘Leaving you there was as hard for me as it was for you. But I have to prepare you for the world out there. You have to be ready for what it’ll be like after I am gone.’
Bells were ringing. Time to go to the canteen and queue for dinner. Across the hospital patients rose up from napping, staring at the TV and other forms of inactivity. Except for Wang and Zeng. They lay on the shower-room floor. Neither of them was hungry. Neither of them stirred a limb.
‘How old were you when she died?’
‘Twelve.’
‘You must have missed her.’
‘She was all I had.’
‘But things are different now,’ said Zeng. ‘Now you have me.’
Wang said nothing to this, and the words hung in the dusk, waiting for his response. When none came, Zeng reached for Wang’s wrist and cuffed it with his hand. It felt strange to have his wrist seized in this way. But the strength of Zeng’s grip, and the heat and pulse of his blood, was comforting too.
‘Do you think we’d be friends, if we hadn’t met in hospital?’ Zeng asked. ‘Would someone like you, who goes to Beijing University, be friends with someone like me?’
‘What does it matter?’ Wang said. ‘I met you here.’
‘After the hospital, do you think we’ll stay friends?’
‘Sure.’
But he wasn’t sure. For the first time, it occurred to him that staying friends with unstable Zeng, who sold his body in karaoke bars and burnt down a shed to kill an ex-boyfriend, was a bad idea. Zeng smiled.
‘Then I have a business proposition for you, for after we get out of here. Why don’t we open a bar together?’
‘A bar?’
‘We could rent a place in Sanlitun. A place with a dance floor. We’ll have a DJ booth and a cocktail menu. Lots of cool people will come. Artists and musicians and foreigners. .’
He could imagine the nightclub Zeng had in mind, with a flashing strobe-lit dance floor heaving with sweaty dancers. Wang’s head ached just to think of it.
‘Where would we get the money from?’ he asked.
‘Isn’t your father stinking rich?’
Wang laughed. ‘He won’t lend us a fen.’
‘I’ll find an investor then,’ Zeng decided. ‘I’m well connected. I know the richest men in Beijing.’
Zeng shone with enthusiasm and, knowing there was no steering him back to reality, Wang said nothing. Zeng’s attention would soon flit to something else.
‘We could move in together too,’ Zeng went on. ‘It’ll be fun. We could cook meals together, and watch TV and play mah-jong. We could be together every day. .’
Wang’s heart beat strangely at this. The thought of being ‘together every day’ with Zeng both excited and disquieted him. Zeng’s hand now felt like a handcuff around his wrist, shackling him to a future he wasn’t sure about. He tore his wrist from Zeng’s grasp and sat up.
‘We can’t live together.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because two men can’t live together. It’s not normal.’
Zeng sat up and stared at Wang in confusion. ‘You shouldn’t care what people think,’ he said. ‘Being happy should be the most important thing. .’
‘What makes you think living with you will make me happy?’ Wang said. ‘I’m not like you. I don’t want to live with a man.’
But Zeng was not deterred. He leant in closer and stroked the line of Wang’s jaw. He gazed into his eyes as though reaching into their depths, and said, ‘Why aren’t you honest with yourself?’
Wang glared at him. ‘Don’t!’ he warned.
But Zeng grabbed the back of Wang’s head and banged his mouth against Wang’s with such force his lip split against his teeth. Then his tongue was inside, probing about, and Wang was paralysed for a moment, before he shoved him back roughly.
He was breathing hard, and his heart was beating against his sternum. His mouth tasted of Zeng’s saliva and blood.