‘But he told me she was dead.’
Lin Hong raises her eyebrows. ‘Why are you so upset? Your father said she was a bad, abusive mother and you were better off thinking she was dead. So what if she died later than you thought? She’s dead now, isn’t she? What difference does it make?’
‘I want to see the death certificate,’ Wang says. ‘Bring it to me.’
‘Why?’
‘Bring it to me!’
Lin Hong gets up and goes to the study. She returns and hands Wang a green booklet. Wang looks inside the government document, stamped with red stars and filled out in ballpoint pen by a small-town clerk. It’s all there. His mother’s name, age, weight, blood type. The cause of death is cited as hypothermia. Place of death, a town called Langxiang. Why Heilongjiang? he wonders. She had been a Sent-down Youth in Heilongjiang in the 1960s and had hated it. Wang’s eyes blur with tears at the thought of Shuxiang freezing to death in a small northern town. At the thought of himself at the age of twelve, under cold damp sheets in the boarding-school dormitory on the day his father told him she had died.
‘Why are you crying?’ Lin Hong asks. ‘Wasn’t she a bad mother? Didn’t she abuse you? Your father told me he once walked in on the two of you in bed together! For a mother to do that to her son is unforgivable. .’
Wang puts the death certificate in his pocket and stands up. Tears are sliding down his cheeks. ‘You will never see Echo again,’ he tells Lin Hong. ‘You are dead to her now. You are dead to all of us.’
He leaves the room before his stepmother can say another word.
He goes into the bedroom and flips on the light. Wang Hu is awake in his bed, pillows propping up his grey, wrinkled head, the duvet up his chest. He looks nervously at his son. He has been listening.
‘Why did you tell me she was dead?’ Wang asks.
Wang Hu doesn’t answer him but shrinks back against the pillows. But Wang is not fooled by the defenceless-old-man act. He knows what his father is really like.
‘Why did you lie about her?’ he shouts.
He reaches for a wooden dresser near the door and pushes it over so the drawers slide out and the large oval mirror shatters as it crashes to the floor. His father’s eyes go wide with fright. He parts his dribbling lips and a low moan comes out. He tugs on the duvet with his semi-paralysed hand and pulls it over his head. Pathetic, Wang thinks. He has no pity for him. Reverse the effects of the stroke, restore his ability to walk and talk, and he’d be back to his bullying ways tomorrow. By rights, he should drag his father out of bed. He should drag him about and pull his shoulder out of joint, like his father did to him when he was twelve.
‘Get out! Or I will call the police!’ Lin Hong rushes past Wang, to stand between him and old man hiding under the bedcovers. She waves a cell phone at Wang. ‘I am dialling now! I will tell them you are having a psychotic episode and they will throw you back in the hospital!’
The dial pad beeps as she presses the keys. Wang shakes his head at his stepmother, and steps back. ‘You deserve each other,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t wish any worse for you both than the lives you have now.’
Then he turns and walks out of the apartment, slamming the door.
Out in the street, he is shaking. They are not humans but monsters hiding behind human masks. He won’t speak to his father for as long as he lives. Or as long as his father lives. Whoever is first to die.
26. Train Station
WANG HAD SHOWERED, dragged a razor over his stubble and changed before meeting Echo, hoping to counter Yida’s slander by looking the part of a respectable father. But he’s not sure this has worked. Opposite him, Echo is paler than usual, with dark circles around eyes that don’t seem to trust him. Since leaving her and Yida, he has not seen her as often as he said. Over the past fortnight he has seen her three times, and each time Echo has been more like a stranger to him. She hands the menu back, solemn in her T-shirt and dungarees.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Are you sure?’ Wang says. ‘You can order whatever you like. .’
But she’s not even tempted by fizzy drinks, so he orders for them both and then asks in an over-bright voice about school and her plans for the summer holidays. Echo scratches at a mosquito bite on her arm and gazes at the table of sunburnt American tourists and the laoban in polo shirts and suit trousers clinking glasses of baijiu to celebrate a business deal. When the dishes arrive Echo nibbles at a lamb kebab, while Wang eats from an earthenware pot of spicy chicken and potatoes. He swigs some beer from his glass and belches gently.
‘How’s your ma?’ he asks.
Echo looks guiltily at the half-eaten kebab on her plate. She says in a small voice, ‘She says I’m not to talk to you about her.’
‘Really?’ Echo reaches for a napkin and Wang frowns at her nails, bitten to the quick, the cuticles ragged and raw. ‘What’s she been saying about me?’ he asks. ‘Don’t worry. You can tell me. She won’t find out. .’
Echo doesn’t look up as she folds the napkin into origami.
‘I can’t say.’
Wang smiles tightly. He should shut up. He shouldn’t drag Echo into this. But when it comes to Yida he has no restraint, he can’t do what’s right.
‘Bad-mouthing me every chance she gets, eh?’ Wang says. ‘Is she still saying that I am ill?’ Echo puts her origami crane on the table, looking miserable. ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with me,’ Wang says. ‘Your mother is making it up. You don’t think I am ill, do you?’
Echo looks up at her father. ‘No,’ she says quietly.
Wang is stung by her lack of conviction. ‘Listen, Echo, there are two sides to every story. There are lots of bad things I could tell you about your mother. But I won’t, because I don’t want to upset you.’ Wang drinks the last of his beer, choking back the urge to rant on. Then he pushes back his chair and leaves the table.
In the bathroom he splashes water on his face over the sink. He hasn’t slept properly in days and is in a dark, irritable mood. How much had his mother suffered during the last two years of her life? Why was she homeless on the streets of a town in Heilongjiang? These questions go around his mind at night, sabotaging sleep. He wipes his face with a scratchy paper towel from the dispenser. After leaving his father’s, he called Yida to warn her to keep Echo away from them, and explained why. Yida needed no persuading. That his father and Lin Hong were despicable was one thing on which they agreed.
When Wang returns to the table, Echo is looking through one of her own comics, illustrated in black and white.
‘Can I see?’ Wang asks.
Echo hands over the stapled sheets, and Wang flips through them. The Watcher is the title of the comic, and it is about a girl called Moon-bird who is stalked by a dark shadow only she can see. The shadow, cross-hatched in ink and swarming with strange, demoniac eyes, lurks in the corner of each panel, watching Moonbird in the classroom, on the way home from school, and in her bedroom at night. No one — not her parents, teachers or classmates — sees the shadow except Moonbird, whose isolation worsens her fear. Eventually Moonbird confronts the shadow. ‘Who are you?’ she asks. ‘What do you want?’ The second-to-last panel shows Moonbird disappearing into the shadow. Whether the shadow is devouring her or she is entering of her own volition, Wang can’t tell. The last panel shows Moonbird’s mother and father calling for their missing child. The End. Wang hands the comic back, unsettled.