The Dark Road (29 page)

After flicking his stub onto the floor, the boss grabs Meili by her shirtsleeve and says, ‘Let me taste you before the clients have a go.’ Meili lashes out at him and digs her nails into his legs, but he keeps hold of her sleeve with one hand, and tugs her trousers down with the other. She bites his arm. Enraged, he jumps up, grasps her by the hair and flings her onto the bed. ‘So, you want me to play rough, huh, you filthy cunt?’ he shouts, and whips off his belt, loops it around her neck and secures it tightly to the steel bars of the headrest. Then with a pillowcase that he’s ripped off from a pillow, he ties her right hand to the bars as well. Meili kicks her legs about like a drowning dog. Her trousers and knickers have been pulled off. The belt is so tight around her neck, she can hardly breathe. Her heart races; she seizes up with terror. He leans over and strikes her across the face with a force that knocks her out. She raises her left arm and waves it feebly. He opens her legs and forces them up against her chest, then slaps again and again over her shoulders and face. Like a boat that’s struck a rock, she feels herself break into pieces and sink. He stuffs the unsheathed pillow into her mouth, spits onto her vagina then shoves his hand inside. ‘Mother, mother . . .’ her vagina screams in despair, but the noise is muffled by the man’s flesh. She’s suffocating now; her whole body is shaking. Her chest rises, straining for air. He’s jabbing against her womb. Gastric fluids surge into her throat. She wants to open her jaws and howl, ‘Mother, help me, help me . . .’ Feeling raw and scorched inside, she closes her eyes and shrinks back into herself.

‘Hah! You’re mine, now,’ the boss grunts, leering down at her with a lewd grin. He moves in and out, faster and faster, then turns her over, enters her from behind and gyrates like a wild dog, slapping her hard on one side and then the other. With one final thrust, he shouts, ‘Filthy fucking bitch!’ and spurts his sperm onto the enflamed walls of her womb. Her head is twisted to the side, pressed against the bars. Now that he’s finished with her, he shoves her back down onto the bed. She clamps her legs together as tightly as she can, then huddles into a ball, rubs her stinging neck and gasps for breath.

‘You’re nice and wet now,’ the boss says. ‘I have ten more men lined up for you tonight, including a French professor.’

Meili’s body goes into spasms of shock. She wishes she could escape to a netherworld where there are no men. She wants her defiled body to enter a furnace and emerge from the other side as ash. I’m sorry, Nannan, she says quietly. The man has beaten me. I’m too weak to take my revenge. All I can do is die, then return as a ghost and drag the bastard down to hell.

The boss switches on the lamp on the bedside table and unbuckles his belt, releasing her head. ‘Good thing you’re pretty. I can never get a hard-on with the ugly ones. You’ve got a nice round arse. Work hard here, and in a few years you’ll make enough money to set you up for life.’ He lights another cigarette and stretches himself out. Meili clambers off the bed, reaches for her trousers and pulls them on.

As she squats on the floor, she has a sense that thousands of insects are crawling beneath her skin and that rancid leftovers have been stuffed into the cavity between her legs. She tears sheets of paper from a toilet roll and tries to wipe herself clean . . . The boss is shorter and thinner than Kongzi. How did he manage to overpower me? It doesn’t matter now – I’m already dead. It’s time for me to join Happiness . . . She remembers that when her periods first started, her grandmother gave her a small soot-filled cloth bag to put inside her knickers, and said: ‘You’re a woman now. The place from which the blood flows is the source of life. You must protect it, and not let any man touch it. When you’re older you will marry, and that place will bring you new life and happiness.’ Meili looks up at the wallpaper and sees her grandmother’s face. She’s crying out, ‘Meili, help me. Fire, a blazing fire! I’m burning, burning . . .’

Mother sees that the man has fallen asleep. She puts on her shoes and pulls out her bag from under the bed. Her eyes glazed and empty, she takes a cigarette lighter from the bedside table and sets light to the bed sheet. Then she picks up a half-finished bottle of liquor and smashes it over the man’s head. Within seconds, flames engulf his body. He sits up for a moment and waves his arms about, then flops back down with a thud. Mother retreats into the corridor and watches the bed burst into a ball of fire and the flames leap along the carpet and up the papered walls. Black smoke billows into the corridor. Coughing and spluttering, Mother returns at last to her senses, falls to her knees and crawls to the steel door. Someone opens it from the outside, peers round then runs away in fright. Mother swings the door open, bolts down the stairwell and runs out onto the road. Flames are pouring out from the third-floor window now, and licking the
heaven on earth nightclub
neon sign. Panicked, half-dressed men and women stagger out of the building, knocking into each other like insects fleeing a fire pit. Everyone is screaming and darting about. Mother detaches herself from the crowd, walks to the billboard on the other side of the road and disappears into the darkness.

KEYWORDS:
convent, white chrysanthemums, purple sandals, red journal, nylon tights, mad dog.

MOTHER RUNS AS
fast as she can across the city, her intense pains deadened by fear. She races past the flower market, the Chairman Mao statue in front of the government office building, the musical fountain in the main square, she sprints along broad avenues of office towers and roads lined with gated compounds of identical apartment blocks, and finally reaches an empty asphalt road that winds along the banks of a dark river. She keeps going, running, walking, then running again. When she hears a car approach, she crouches behind a tree and waits for it to pass. As the sky begins to lighten, she stops and looks up at some houses on a hill in front of her with lights already shining at the windows . . .
Although she has left the city, Meili still feels nervous. She climbs over a low wall into a deserted demolition site. Alone and hidden from view at last, she falls to her knees and breaks into sobs, her whole body convulsed. She wants to go back to the bamboo hut. It may be a tiny and ramshackle hovel, but it’s her home, the place where she is both a mother and a wife. The thought of suicide frightens her, and she knows she will need to build up her courage before she can carry out the act. In the meantime, she will try to get a lift to Dexian and make her way back to Guai Village. She hears a truck rumble in the distance, and walks towards the noise, picking her way over the broken ground. Below her feet, maize leaves and burst balloons lie caught between shattered bricks. She can smell a stale, masculine scent in the dawn mist, and after scaling another low wall, she finds herself on the edge of a large landfill site. A light is twinkling in the distance. She starts to walk towards it across the refuse. The truck she heard a few moments ago has dumped a load of garbage from the city onto the ground. Workers are circling it, prodding it with spades, turning it over. Foul vapours fill the air. Meili dodges around heaps of plastic bags the workers have emptied and discarded. A woman spots her and shouts, ‘No scavenging! We’re in charge of this patch!’

‘I’m just looking for a lift,’ Meili says. Drawing closer, she sees the woman impale a plastic bag with a hooked pole, shake out the orange peel, sanitary towels and food scraps, then stuff it into a large plastic bucket.

Meili approaches the truck. Another woman notices her and says, ‘Are you looking for a scavenging job?’

‘What’s the daily wage?’ Meili asks, trying to sound casual.

‘Fifteen yuan, with free lodging and lunch. If you’re interested, go up there and speak to Mr Deng.’ The woman points to a hill behind them that has flimsy shacks crammed onto the lower slopes and black crows hovering above the peak. The prospect of free food and shelter appeals to Meili. She decides to stay for a few days until she’s earned enough money to pay for her journey back to Guai Village.

The workers have built the shacks with wooden boards and plastic sheeting below a village that was torn down to make way for the landfill site. The families live and work inside them, dismantling rubbish they retrieve from the site and sorting it into piles of glass, paper, plastic and metal, which are then taken to be weighed at the warehouse. Battered cassette recorders, motorbikes, sofa cushions and other objects the warehouse rejected lie stacked outside each doorway. Shelters occupied by families with young children are surrounded by broken prams and dirty plastic toys. Washing lines have been strung between the roofs of the shacks. The grey bras and tights flapping from them look pure white compared to the filth below. Along the path, pigs nozzle heaps of refuse, searching for scraps to eat, while ducks wade through waste-water streams, ruffling their wet and grimy feathers. On this hillside, the decaying and the living emit the same morbid stench.

On a bright morning three days later, Meili puts on her canvas gloves, sits down on a tyre and stares at the mass of tattered shoes spread before her. With her experience of gutting fish for a living, she managed to secure the job of dismantling shoes, which allows her to sit while she works. To dismantle boots, she has to slide her knife up the leg, rip it off, pull out the inner sole, extract each nail, smash off the heel, remove the rubber outsole and place the leather or synthetic upper into the correct pile. All leather, whether from shoes, gloves or sofas, is shredded and boiled to produce the protein which is added to counterfeit milk formula. Sports shoes are simpler to take apart, as the soles can be removed with one slit of the knife. When Meili finds a shoe she considers too pretty to destroy, she puts it aside in the hope that its pair might turn up. Yesterday, she thought the miracle had happened when she spotted a purple mid-heel T-strap sandal, identical to the one in her hand, lying on top of the heap. If only it was a right shoe, and not another left, it would be a perfect match.

Liu Di, the woman in the shack next to hers, is in charge of sorting through glass bottles. She gave Meili the plasters that now criss-cross her hands. Liu Di has four out-of-quota children. Right now, the three eldest are jumping about on a pile of plastic bags and the six-month-old baby is sleeping in a fly-encrusted crate, wedged between empty Coca-Cola bottles and ceramic wine flasks.

‘Get down, you brats!’ Liu Di shouts. She smashes another bottle onto the ground and shards of broken glass fly into the sunlight.

‘Be careful, children, he might bite you – agh, I’ve always been afraid of dogs!’ Meili says, pointing to the mangy grey dog that roams the landfill site like a piece of walking rubbish. Three metal springs are hooked to his frayed waistcoat. Since his owner disappeared last year, he’s become melancholy and unhinged, and no one dares go near him.

‘How come she has yellow hair?’ Meili asks, glancing at the baby’s blonde head nestled in the crate. She remembers the force with which Waterborn sucked her nipples and feels sick with longing. The baby’s head is huge, and her cheeks are so swollen that her features have become squashed together. Her hands and feet look tiny in comparison. The day she was born, her father found a watch on the landfill site and so named her ‘Little Watch’.

‘Her hair was jet black when she came out of me,’ Liu Di laughs. ‘But after my milk ran dry, I put her on Three Deers infant formula, and her hair turned yellow overnight.’ Liu Di is wearing three pairs of nylon tights to keep her legs warm. She’s leaning against the pink vinyl armchair in which she eats her meals and takes afternoon naps.

The pile of leather scraps beside Meili is now high enough to block the wind, but not the stench that wafts up from the landfill site. When her shelter’s walls flap, she can glimpse the cold light bouncing from a pile of sky-blue plastic canisters further up the path.

A week passes. The purple bruising around her neck has slowly faded, and she has tried to push memories of the rape out of her mind. But this morning, she was shaken out of her numbed state when she saw, lying on a heap of rubbish, the corpse of a tiny baby. She recoiled in horror, and went to sit under a tree far away. Her longing for Waterborn, and rage against Kongzi for getting rid of her, surged to the surface. She made up her mind to work here for another week then go back to Guai Village, making sure not to be caught on the way. Liu Di’s husband told her that the only way to avoid arrest is to dress like a city resident. Meili feels relatively safe on the landfill site. Although all the workers are illegal migrant peasants, no government official would be willing to brave the stench to come and check their documents. Meili can work in peace, and in her free moments, flick through magazines she finds on the site to study how women in the cities dress. Yesterday, she found a designer raincoat with a missing pocket which she’s swapped with a fellow worker for an imitation jade bracelet and a compact with a patch of foundation powder remaining and a mirror on the inside lid. She’s also come across handbags that were probably binned by thieves after they’d extracted the wallets. Many of them are brand new, and contain keys, combs, condoms, pills, packets of tissues and leather address books.

‘It can’t be easy bringing up four children, Liu Di,’ Meili says, wiping the flies from her mouth. She put on some lipstick this morning which she found in a handbag, and flies have been swarming around her mouth ever since. Liu Di told her that the lipstick is probably flavoured with honey.

‘It’s just a few more mouths to feed, that’s all,’ Liu Di replies. ‘That beef and bitter gourd they gave us yesterday was delicious, wasn’t it?’ When the boxed lunches are handed out at noon, Liu Di usually gives hers to her children, but yesterday she couldn’t resist gobbling it all up herself. She could never afford to eat meat back in her village, but becoming a family planning fugitive has widened her horizons. She has tasted hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Whenever she finds a bottle of Coke that is not quite empty, she sniffs it, and if it doesn’t smell too sour, keeps it aside for her children to drink later.