Five Bells (23 page)

 

Pei Xing was contented and at peace as she moved over the water. Looking back, she could see the smiling-face façade and
Ferris wheel of the amusement park, the bridge overarching, the miniaturising North Shore. She loved these ferry rides. She was like a child with a treat. When Jimmy was little she was interested to see the emotional range of children, how profound were their pleasures, how quickly removed, how everything seemed tuned to a pitch of exaggeration. Children had a vehemence and volatility that transfigured the smallest moment. A toy removed could betoken funereal wailing; a toy recovered, a whoop of instant bliss. Now, in Australia, she allowed herself wider feelings.

She had not thought of it before: from here the Sydney Opera House looked like folded paper, like one of those shapes children produce under instruction from a teacher. Cranes. Frogs. Lotus blossoms. Airplanes. And there was a game she had seen Australian schoolchildren play: they folded paper into little peaks, inserted their thumbs and index fingers, and counted out numbers and fortunes, opening and closing the paper object like the mouth of a bird. What was it called, she wondered. The paper House sailed by. It was achieving a golden sheen in the late afternoon light, its shells polished in the setting sun, responsive to the sky.

 

Pei Xing was hungry. At the hospital Hua had eaten most of the rice; her appetite seemed huge. Pei Xing thought often of her mother's cooking. On the day of the new scarlet coat, the exemplary day, the day she returned to again and again, her mother had cooked her favourite dishes: steamed sea turtle with fried ginger and spring onions, peppery carrot broth, tofu stuffed with pork, and for dessert, balls of sticky rice shaped around sweet sesame paste. She cannot now remember why the festive meal had been prepared, but liked to think it was purely in honour of her coat. Her parents had toasted each other with Shaoxing rice wine and she questioned now, after
all these years, if it had been an anniversary of some sort. Their wedding, perhaps. She would now never know.

Gan bei!
Her father's voice was still there, his glass was still raised in a toast.

 

Less than a year before her parents were taken, Mao had famously swum in the Yangtze River. It was 1966, he was seventy-three years old, and there he was, plunged into the brown water near the Wuhan Bridge. Posters appeared everywhere: Mao chubby-cheeked and tubby-shaped, beaming robust health and totalitarian command. He was reputed to have swum thirty Li, fifteen miles, in only sixty-five minutes. Pei Xing remembers the figures exactly, because her father had scoffed, doing a quick calculation.

‘Our leader is indeed superhuman,' father announced with a wry smile.

They were happy then. The darkness had not yet fallen. They had not yet been swallowed into the belly of a giant man. In documentary footage Pei Xing saw years later, Mao was floating on his back, simply bobbing in the water, relaxed and unstrenuous. He was surrounded by five thousand young swimmers who all adored him, and who would appear lined up, in their bathing suits, in hundreds of thousands of posters. Public management jubilation. Ten thousand legs.

Why had she thought of this? Because her joy was small-scale. Because China had taught her the tyranny of scale. Because in her hunger, on the ferry, she remembered the dense and distinctive pleasure of one single day and the fact that she had never, at her peril, learned to swim.

 

There it was, Circular Quay, slowly floating closer. As the ferry moved towards its berth Pei Xing glanced across at the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, one of her favourite
places in Sydney. Marvels, full of marvels. She loved to see what visual fictions human beings might fabricate. She had spent many hours there in a trance of pure happiness, wandering the hushed high rooms, overtaken by visions. The staff there knew her, greeted her, took her coat and hung it safely in exchange for a coin-sized token, asked in a soft voice how she was going. They welcomed her rapt gazing, her lingering arty wander; they watched with casual beneficence as she circled an installation or halted forever before a particular object or painting. It was there Pei Xing first used the English word ‘
fabulous
', only one month after her arrival in Australia. She still remembered the moment: the delight of an unlikely, spontaneous exclamation. It was a difficult word to say out loud. Though she knew the English in her head, in her mouth it was a heavy and formless shape.
Fabulous.
One of the gallery attendants had heard her; it occasioned her first local exchange of English language conversation.

 

On the pier Pei Xing thought suddenly of Aristos, who would have finished his work by now and perhaps, at this very minute, was sitting on a bus, gazing out of a window. His face appeared in her mind, shifting even as it arose, sped away behind slick reflections.

Aristos, whom death was stealthily following.

Pei Xing looked at the sky. It was shifting colour once again; there was a fine salmon streak to the west, and a change in the weather coming from the east. Beneath omnipresent human speech she heard the murmur of wavelets and flags and the cloth domes of umbrellas. Pei Xing crossed the concourse beyond the five jetties of Circular Quay to check on her friend Mary. There she was, sleeping, nestled in the home she had made beneath her hoarded plastic bags. She was returned, safely returned. Mary snored a little and looked
content and comfortable. She was secure in her own world, blindfolded into sleep. She bore a ravaged face, deeply creased, and her hair was grey and matted with dirt and leaves. On the surface of her tired skin lay a glaucous bloom, and there was something, some kind of note, clutched in her sleeping hand.

How the poor of any city vanish and reappear.

Respectful, quiet, Pei Xing stood for a moment, offered Mary a blessing, then rode the escalator upwards to catch the train.

 

The Bankstown Line formed a stylised map in her head, a little train track in black, and a series of perky station names: Redfern, Erskineville, St Peters, Marrickville … Lakemba, Wiley Park, Punchbowl, Bankstown. They were a chant she had learned, and a series of familiar vistas. As she rode through the damp twilight Pei Xing dozed a little. Then she roused herself at her destination and prepared for the walk home. She thought of food as she trod the lit footpaths to her apartment block.
Xiaolongbao
: steamed dumplings. Bamboo shoots. Moon-cake. Peking duck. She recalled her mother standing outside Old City God's Temple, waiting in a line for crab
xiaolongbao
, warning ‘Too much crab will make you cold inside.' Food lore: Chinese knew all the secrets of the body. Xun had brought her snake's head soup when she was breastfeeding their son; to this day she does not understand how he procured and afforded it. But she had felt instant strength and her milk flowed swiftly.

 

In her apartment Pei Xing brewed herself tea. She selected and played a favourite CD: Liu Fang's pipa solo, ‘
Fei Hua Dian Cui'
(‘Falling Snow decorates the Evergreen'). In the strings plucked forward and backward she heard the descent of the snow, there was lightness, pause, there was the floating of single flakes and their moist feathery touch; there was the sense of stilled time and Buddhic possibilities. She imagined Liu Fang's beautiful
fingers sliding the neck of the instrument, playing, her eyes closed, on a concert stage in Germany or Canada or France, spreading notes as if snow, falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling.

Pei Xing felt calmed and returned to her self-possession. Some of the pieces on the CD were hundreds of years old. This was music that had endured; this was sound ever-flowing, ripple-effecting, beyond clockface time.

 

Over a large bowl of beef and noodles, Pei Xing listened carefully to several pipa recitals and when she had finished she managed a plate of vanilla ice-cream topped with chocolate sauce. It was a satisfying meal. Not turtle, but satisfying. Instead of cleaning her dishes Pei Xing unlaced her shoes, eased them from her feet, then reclined on the sofa. She switched on the television to watch the nine o'clock news.

The story of the abducted child at Circular Quay seemed to Pei Xing unreal. The ringed heads, in which she saw herself and the woman who exchanged glances at Kurraba Point Wharf, and a young man and woman, neither of whom she could recall, was a kind of adventitious device, surely not useful in solving a crime. But calmly she rang, and calmly she received word from the policeman that a police car would come and collect her for questioning at the station. He noted her name – asked her twice to spell it – took down her address and her phone number, then thanked her for taking the trouble to call.

Pei Xing had not really noticed the man caught in the photograph with his hand on the girl's shoulder, but she remembered the child, a pretty girl with Chinese-style plaits. She had been attracted to the girl, who seemed unsure, somehow, and a stranger to the Quay, but also filled with the excitement of novelty and apparently unafraid. She had wanted
to say this to the policeman:
she seemed unafraid
; but was not given the chance. So she thought that perhaps the child was in no danger at all, there had been a domestic argument, some misunderstanding; her father – for so he seemed – had simply wanted more time alone with his estranged daughter.

In her fretful imagining Pei Xing wanted to save the child, to think up a narrative, and an ending, in which she would be vouched safe. At the police station she would say this:
she seemed unafraid.
She would dress well, and look serious. A reliable witness.
She seemed unafraid.

 

After Mao died in 1976, China began rapidly to change. By the time her husband had died, in 1982, Shanghai was well into its transformation. There were gangs, she heard, who kidnapped children for ransom. They had a test. They let the child grow hungry, then offered them fish. If the child plucked the eyeball with his chopsticks and tried that first, he was a rich child and it was worthwhile pursuing a ransom. However, if the child reached for the body of the fish and a mouthful of flesh, he was more likely to be from a poor family and hardly worth keeping. It may have been urban myth, but stories sprang up of precious offspring of the one-child policy being stolen away and huge sums demanded for their safe return. Sometimes the stolen child was never seen again. Pei Xing had warned little Jimmy – or Lun, as he then was – to stay close by when they went to market, and if offered fish by a stranger to eat as if he were starving. This way, she reasoned, he might be let go. It made her afraid, the idea of stolen children. And she had made her son afraid too. Even now he ate greedily, as if vigorous consumption was a test of his permanence.

 

When Xun died Pei Xing was working as an English teacher. Those skills once despised as corruptive were now regarded as
essential. She gave classes at a middle school, and taught private students in the evenings. It was hard to make ends meet. Xun's father had also died and there was no provision made for the grandson, or for her, nor did she have any remaining family in Shanghai to support her. She waited, just waited, to see if her parents would be rehabilitated, to find a way to join her half-forgotten brother, now living in Australia.

For years after his death crowds visited the embalmed Mao Tse Tung in his crystal coffin. They lined up for hours around Tiananmen Square, just to file past and pay their respects. Mao persisted undead, his bubble face waxy, glimpsed through the casket manufactured by Beijing General Glass Factory, Number 608. He hadn't disappeared; he was just more object than ever. He was the emblem of the Chinese capacity for glorification, the great face-object of a monstrous fame.

Pei Xing believed that history was still uncertain and China might, without warning, again turn violent. She returned to habits of quiet and careful circumspection. She would lie low and hide out and disappear if necessary. She would guard her child. She would practise discipline and survive. No degree of caution seemed too large. But Pei Xing enjoyed being a teacher, being out and about in the city. And when she looked over the black-haired heads of her students, all of them reading silently, all of them inward and quiet, she felt that they existed within the compass of her care, and that she might love, if permitted, each and every one of them.

 

The telephone rang and Pei Xing leapt up, startled. It was a nurse from the hospital saying she had left her plastic rice container behind, and would she like them to hold it for a week or post it in the mail? Pei Xing was touched that so trivial an object had prompted a call, that someone had bothered whether or not she might be concerned at what she'd left
behind. She suggested they hold it, thanked the nurse sincerely, and replaced the receiver.

When the policeman knocked on the door Pei Xing was ready. There was a man and a woman, both very young, and she was touched to see that the man had the marks of adolescent acne still apparent. Just a boy, as Jimmy was. A blemished, particular boy. He had the slightly abashed manner of adolescents, not sure exactly where to put his hands, looking away to remember what came next. Pei Xing was not afraid as she allowed herself to be guided into the police car, and was pleased that the officers were unenthusiastic and wished for no small talk. They were no doubt bored with this errand – treated like taxi drivers, taking an unimportant Chinese woman all the way to the central police station. For Pei Xing it did not feel compulsory; she felt she was doing the police a favour.

 

Predictably, they took the M5 route into the city. Pei Xing rarely had a chance to fly like this along the freeway, since she owned no car and went everywhere by public transport. But it was almost exhilarating, the speed at which they moved, the dark night flashing by in a neon rush of even-spaced lights, the glassy effect of staring through the window, alone with her thoughts. There were long and sinuous tunnels, foggy with chemicals, like something she had seen in a car chase in a Bruce Willis movie – all that thunderous truck-tonnage ready to detonate in a fireball, or replayed again and again as Princess Diana's final moments – the artificial quality of the light, a pinkish gel, the way the fast-shifting walls swung distorted and dangerously close. Pei Xing was relieved when the car shot out of the tunnel, back onto the open road. When they passed the airport, and entered the short tunnel beneath the runway, there was the thrill of proximity to aircraft landing and taking
off. All that activity in the sky, all that national and transnational coming and going. The paranormal roar of the planes set off a tremble in her body; the boom of machinery lifting into the air, the improbability of it all.