The flames lower to glowing embers and ash. Zeng leaves the doorway and goes to him.
‘Wang Jun,’ he says, ‘why don’t you come inside? Come and drink a beer with me, and we can talk about what’s wrong.’
But Wang shakes his head. He kicks at the charred ashes. ‘I warned you not to send any more letters.’
‘I didn’t,’ Zeng says.
‘One more letter, Zeng,’ Wang warns, ‘and I will come back and burn down your shop. One more letter and I will burn down your life.’
Then Wang steps back. The boy has barged out of the barber’s and is waving the long cut-throat razor about. He pushes in front of Zeng, his neck tendons standing out as he slashes the blade. The weapon is no less threatening for the shaving foam stuck to it.
‘Get out of here! Get out of here, psycho, and don’t come back!’
‘Wu Fei!’ yells Zeng, grabbing the boy’s shoulders. ‘Get back inside!’
Everyone in the alley is staring at Wang and, if he leaves now, it will look as though Wu Fei has scared him off. But the boy’s fury is like the heat of a raging fire, forcing him to retreat. The boy wouldn’t hesitate to stab him. He wouldn’t hesitate to go to jail to ‘defend’ Zeng Yan. So Wang backs off.
‘Remember what I said,’ he says. Then turns and leaves.
20. Yida
CHAUFFEUR’S HAT ON head, white-gloved hands on the steering wheel, Driver Mao was proud to serve the Communist Party cadres. He was proud to lend a hand in the cadres’ messy domestic affairs and drive their clinically depressed wives to the psychiatrist’s, their homesick six-year-olds to boarding school and pregnant mistresses to the abortion clinic. One of these mistresses, escorted against her will, was Lin Hong. She had told her stepson about it, the summer they were friends. Lin Hong had wept and spat at Driver Mao, and told him his conscience had been eaten by wolves. And Driver Mao had wiped her saliva from his cheek with a white-gloved hand and calmly said, ‘I have orders to stay with you until the general anaesthetic. It’s my duty.’ This is how Driver Mao serves the nation and protects the image of the Party. He had no moral calling higher than that.
On the day Wang left the hospital, the same Driver Mao was waiting outside. He drove him to the building in Maizidian where he had grown up and handed him a set of keys. ‘Do you need assistance with your luggage?’ he asked. Wang, who had nothing but a rucksack, said he could manage.
Wang let himself in and saw that Apartment 404 was its same dark self: the furniture arranged as it was nearly a decade ago, the curtains drawn. He dropped his backpack with a thud, and breathed the stagnant air. He sensed the atmosphere shifting around him, to accommodate his human form. Uninhabited for ten years, stillness had reigned over his childhood home.
The bedroom was not the same, though, for every trace of Li Shuxiang had been removed. The hangers in her wardrobe were empty and her hundreds of novels and books of poetry missing from the shelves. Wang’s father must have arranged for a recycling collector to clear out her things. He would never dirty his own hands with the task.
In the kitchen, Wang held the tea kettle under the tap and the pipes shuddered as water came through. He put the kettle on the stove, next to the battered wok, and sparked the gas ring. Then he stared out of the window, watching the grannies and retired Ministry of Agriculture cadres in the yard as the water came to the boil. He recognized some faces from ten years ago, and the familiarity both comforted Wang and filled him with despair.
The tea kettle was whistling when the key clattered in the front door, the pressured shriek of steam, metal vibrations and rattling door coming together as one. The door slammed and a flamenco stamp of heels came across the cement floor. Lin Hong stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing large sunglasses and a cocktail dress like a throwback from her eighties hostessing days. Her perfume was so overpowering, Wang thought the only explanation for it was that it was sprayed on as a weapon, meant to asphyxiate him. She did not smile at her stepson, or remove her sunglasses. ‘You’re back then,’ she said.
Lin Hong put a shopping bag on the table and pulled out a bottle of Great Wall red wine, paper cups and a styrofoam box of noodles.
‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Your father cannot come to see you today. He has important meetings all day. He sends his regards.’
Hungry, Wang sat at the table to eat, and Lin Hong removed a corkscrew from her leather bag, uncorked the wine bottle and tipped some into a paper cup. Now that he was closer to her, Wang saw that Lin Hong had been meddling with her face, bleaching her skin and injecting collagen in her lips. She lifted her cup.
‘To your freedom! Ganbei!’
Lin Hong knocked the wine back, then reached for the bottle and poured a refill. Sipping on her second cup, she watched from behind her sunglasses as her stepson opened the styrofoam container and dug into the noodles stir-fried with green pepper and pork.
‘Tell me about the lunatics,’ she said. ‘Do they bark like dogs? Do they think they are Mao Zedong?’
‘No,’ said Wang.
Many are more sane than you, he thought. Lin Hong smiled, and asked more questions. What caused his breakdown? Academic pressures? Dumped by a lover? Or was it hereditary, from his crazy mother? Wang stuffed noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks and did not reply.
‘We heard from Dr Fu you had a little friend in the hospital.’ Wang looked warily up. Behind her dark glasses, Lin Hong’s eyes were glittering. ‘Now it all makes sense. You were so strange as a teenager,’ she laughed. ‘I knew something wasn’t right.’
‘Dr Fu doesn’t know what he is talking about,’ Wang said.
Lin Hong smirked. ‘Frankly, I find it disgusting. Most normal people do.’
Wang’s cheeks burned. He pushed his noodles away and mentally willed her to go. Lin Hong reached into her leather bag and pulled out some forms, stapled at the corner. She tossed them over to him.
‘Registration forms. Your father met with the head of your history department last week. They are going to let you repeat your final year. You can go and register in August.’
‘I don’t want to repeat my final year,’ Wang said. ‘I’m not going back.’
His stepmother laughed. ‘Not going back? What will you do instead? You can’t stay here. Your father wants to give up the lease.’
‘I will find a job,’ Wang said.
Lin Hong shook her head, her sleek bob shimmering. ‘Your father will be furious. He wined and dined the head of the history department for you. Not to mention the other expenses the arrangement incurred.’
‘I don’t care,’ Wang said. ‘Going back to university is not what I want.’
Lin Hong shrugged again. Whether or not her stepson got a degree was of no concern to her. She gathered up her bag, and said she had an appointment. ‘Do you have any money?’ she asked.
Wang looked away and said nothing. ‘Of course not,’ she smiled, and flung some 100-RMB notes on the table.
Not looking at the money, but at his stepmother’s dark glasses, Wang asked suddenly, ‘Why the sunglasses, Lin Hong?’
She removed them, exposing her swollen eyelids and the postsurgery stitches on her widened epicanthus folds. She fixed him with a defiant stare. ‘Why are you so determined to be a loser, Wang Jun? You could take advantage of being your father’s son. You could be successful like him. But instead you prefer to do nothing and be nobody.’ She slid the sunglasses back over her eyes and walked out, her stilettos clattering like shots fired from a pellet gun.
After she’d gone Wang unlatched the windows and opened them wide on hinges creaking from lack of use. The stench of her perfume had overrun the apartment like a malodorous cat scratching the furniture and pissing everywhere. It bothered him that Lin Hong had a copy of the key. It bothered him that she could come back when she pleased.