The Incarnations (11 page)

Fireworks. The explosions began around noon. Bright flashes, showering golden sparks. Through the window recently cleaned by her father, Echo watches the day fireworks, her fingers pressed against the pane. Lightning in reverse, shooting from earth to sky. The fuses ignited by Beijingers too impatient to wait for darkness to detonate their gunpowder hoard. Echo awaits the booms and bangs with suspended breath. Evil spirits, she thinks, the fireworks are scaring the evil spirits away. She breathes on the glass and watches the flashes of creation through the steam.

Yida is cleaning. Every lunar New Year’s Eve she capitulates to superstition and sweeps and dusts the previous year’s bad luck out of Apartment 404. She borrows one of Wang’s ragged old shirts, bundles her curls into a red bandana and gathers cleaning sprays and dusters, like weapons for a battle to be fought. Rubber-gloved, she scours the kitchen, clattering pots and pans as she purges the cupboards of past-the-sell-by-date tins. She scrubs the counter as if it is a guilty conscience she is determined to purge with scalding water and bleach.

When she has finished, she strips and stands under the shower, the hot spray needling her scalp. The last of the purification rituals, the soaping of dirt from every pore.

In the evening Wang prepares drunken empress chicken, steamed sea bass with ginger and spring onions and stewed pork belly with aubergine. Fireworks blast like heavy artillery as they eat. Car alarms wail like the sirens of war. The TV is dominated by the snowstorms in central and southern China. Millions of migrant workers travelling back home for the Spring Festival, to see family not seen all year, are stranded in crowds of tens of thousands outside railway stations. Wang flips between TV channels. Wen Jiabao making a patriotic speech outside a train station in Changsha, birthplace of Chairman Mao. A montage of scenes of People’s Liberation Army troops bounding heroically through the snow. A stranded migrant worker unable to return to Hunan to see his wife and child, who says, ‘This is a natural disaster. We Chinese have more than our fair share of natural disasters, but we always rise up and overcome.’

‘One hundred million stranded,’ Yida murmurs. ‘Or was it two hundred million?’

A newscaster says the death toll so far is one hundred.

‘Not so many. . .’ Yida says. ‘
Echo
, eat your fish!’

At ten to midnight the Wangs go out into the freezing cold, to detonate their 200 RMB of fireworks. The night blazes with light, as though all of Beijing has banded together to fight an enemy in the sky. Sneezing at the gunpowder smoke and watching in excitement as the rockets whiz-bang up to the sky. Wang is in charge of lighting the fuses. Amid the carnage of exploded fireworks, charred red paper tubes, trampled and flattened underfoot, he crouches, sparks a lighter, steps back. Yida stands behind Echo, her arms protectively around her, her hands covering Echo’s small ears as she screams in delight.

The pandemonium of midnight comes and goes. Kneeling to light another fuse, Wang realizes that he is completely and utterly numb. That the empty and mechanical state of mind he lapses into behind the wheel has stayed with him hours after leaving the taxi and spending time at home with Echo and Yida.

New Year’s Day will be the same as last year. Firecrackers at dawn as the neighbours’ kids rush out to celebrate the first day of Spring Festival. The lion dance at the Dongyue Temple Fair, candyfloss and games. Then a visit to his father, punctually at four o’clock, the time they agreed. Wang Hu dribbling in his wheelchair, and Lin Hong wrinkling her powdered nose as she hands them hongbao and expensive gifts in department-store bags. Chocolates from a Belgian chocolatier. A red-and-gold stuffed toy rat for Echo. They will stay and make polite small talk for twenty minutes, then leave. Back home they will fill dumpling dough with minced pork for New Year’s jiaozi. They will watch more song-and-dance extravaganzas on TV.

When they go to bed, Wang’s ears are ringing hard, the inside of his eyelids incandescent with eruptions of light. He can feel it dragging him down again. The lethargy and apathy and ebbing of desire to be in the world that broke him down years ago.

‘Yida?’ he whispers.

Beside him, Yida mumbles but does not wake.

Sleep won’t come, so he stares into darkness as the city explodes.

‘WHAT WAS YOUR
mother like?’ Yida asked, back when they were newly-weds and her desire to know him kept her awake throughout the night. Wang pulled a photograph of his parents’ wedding day from a bundle of documents bound with an elastic band. Bride and groom and Ministry of Agriculture work-unit colleagues, sternly attired in Mao suits of utilitarian grey. A solemn gathering, as though not celebrating a marriage but mourning a death. On the wall above them is a portrait of the Great Helmsman, omnipresent throughout China back then. The Chairman overseeing the proceedings, ensuring that no one so much as smile.

The date on the photograph’s reverse is 3 May 1975. An anniversary, Wang told Yida, not once acknowledged in the thirteen years of marriage to come. On the wedding day the bride was not in love with the groom. Love, she told her son years later, was not such a priority back then. In the photo they look an ill-matched couple; the bride, to put it bluntly, not pretty enough for the tall and handsome groom. Straining her eyes at Wang’s 25-year-old mother, Yida remarked, ‘She’s so innocent and wide-eyed.’ But Wang knew better than that. The bride was not as submissive as she appeared. Studying the photo two decades later, Wang could detect the shadow of a smile on her lips. ‘What was she like?’ asked Yida, elbow on pillow, tousled head propped in hand, lovely and naked under the sheets. Possessiveness over his past, as well as curiosity, glinted in her eyes. Rivalry of her predecessors in her voice. ‘Tell me about her . . . Go on . . .’

Childhood. First come the images, like the weave of smoke from one of Shuxiang’s menthol cigarettes, spiralling, amassing into the shape of the past. Apartment 404. Dishes in the sink. Curtains pulled over the rails. A message to the day:
Keep Out
. Shuxiang’s round, childish face, and her narrow range of sloe-eyed expressions. Deceptively ingénue, for an innocent his mother was not. She knew the truth about what people are like. A truth from which she did not protect her son. Kneeling by him, pouring cups of water from the basin over his head, rinsing away the suds of shampoo, she said, ‘Don’t be fooled, Little Bear, by the so-called civility out there. All our morality could blow away tomorrow like a fart in the wind. I saw it happen before.’

The boy blinked, the shampoo stinging his eyes. He believed everything his mother said, when he was only a single digit in age.

The days of Wang’s early childhood were as unstructured as a dream. Days of waking at any hour. Days of pyjamas, Shuxiang’s pale agoraphobic complexion and sweet, musky scent. Not ruled by the tyranny of clocks, they ate when hungry and slept when sleepy (her metabolism slow, Shuxiang was often sleepy). Absent-minded in her child-rearing, for her the boy was often a dazed afterthought. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked. ‘When were you last fed?’ She sniffed at him when a rankness stirred her nose. ‘Are you dirty?’ she asked. ‘Do you need a bath?’

She called him Little Bear, and said this was because Wang was born as a bear cub, and later shed his fur. Shuxiang had a wicked sense of humour. Sometimes when he tapped her shoulder to wake her from a nap, she stilled her breath, pretending to be dead beneath her shroud of hair. He shook her and wailed ‘
Mama!
’, on the brink of tears, until she smiled, her sentience betrayed by the curve of her lips. Cruel jokes are the funniest jokes, she once told him; the jokes that, before the punchline, stop the heart. She creaked her eyelid open a crack: ‘Leave me alone. I want to sleep.’

‘Mama, I’m bored . . .’

‘So?’

When Shuxiang cradled her son in her arms, he could smell the cigarettes and baijiu on her breath. Tobacco and cheap liquor were habits she’d acquired as a Sent-down Youth, seeking comfort during the frozen winters in the Great Northern Waste. Habits she hid from her husband, who though a drinker and smoker himself, considered the vices deplorable in women (‘Only prostitutes smoke,’ Wang Hu said – and he should know). Shuxiang hid her illicit substances under the mattress of Little Bear’s cot. When he asked to smoke one of her cigarettes, Shuxiang lit one for him, creasing up with laughter as her five-year-old spluttered and choked. ‘Practice,’ she said. ‘That will go away with practice, Little Bear.’

Shuxiang often disappeared into the books stacked around her bed. ‘Read to me,’ Little Jun begged. But reading was a solitary pleasure for Shuxiang. ‘These are grown-up books, not for bear cubs,’ she told him. But sometimes Shuxiang narrated her own invented tales, in which her son was the hero. A warrior during the Warring States era, or a labourer building the Great Wall. Sometimes, when she was in the mood, they played together, knotting bedsheets to climb the Tibetan Plateau, or cantering on horseback in an army of two. He adored his mother during these games. Shuxiang did not play like a bored adult indulging a small child, but acted out every role with gusto. Throughout these adventures her son was her sidekick, following the twists and turns of her imagination. They were co-conspirators. A gang of two against the world.

Shuxiang didn’t like to go outdoors, which often led to encounters with other people and the narrowness of their minds. But they had to go out sometimes, to shop for weekly rations of vegetables, meat and cigarettes. Passers-by greeted her. They commented on the paleness of her little boy. ‘He is white as a glass of cow’s milk,’ they’d say, mentally tutting and thinking, He needs more sun. Shuxiang was not deaf to the mental cluck of tongues. ‘Cow’s milk?’ she said to Little Bear. ‘Well, who’d know better than one of the lowing herd?’ They lived in a housing compound where all employees of the Ministry of Agriculture were housed. The wives of her husband’s co-workers did not like Li Shuxiang. They did not invite her to be part of their gossipy clique, with a hierarchy based upon their husbands’ positions and salaries. They shunned her and, offended by her indifference, condemned her as mentally deficient and strange.

Yida’s eyes widened in fascination, pupils swallowing the dark.

‘What about your father? Tell me about him.’

She shifted slightly on her side. He stroked a hand along the curved length of her body, from shoulder to hip, under the sheets.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Anything. Go on.’

Throughout Wang’s childhood, his father was promoted through the ranks of the Ministry of Agriculture, his status rising annually. Socializing was part of his job. Banquets, baijiu and beer. He was home in the evenings only once or twice a week. Bleary-eyed from overwork, alcohol and forty cigarettes a day, rubbing broodingly at the stubble the razor never completely banished from his jaw. His wife and son were not used to him. Both preferred it when he was not there. Wang Hu was critical of them, his lip curling at his wife as he chastened her, ‘You are lazy as a goat, Shuxiang. Look at this fucking mess. What do you
do
all day?’

Little Jun was nervous of him. Though his father hung up his suit jacket and loosened his tie, he never stopped being a stranger. Sometimes he rumpled his son’s head and smiled with tobacco-tawny teeth. But mostly he was polite and distant, as though the boy was someone else’s child. He scowled at Shuxiang’s meals. Accustomed to banquets hosted by contract-seeking agribusinesses, he grumbled about Shuxiang’s cooking. ‘This is prison slop,’ he told her. ‘Worse than what they serve in Labour Reform camps.’

‘Don’t eat here then,’ she replied.

Wang Hu complained that his son was not like other boys his age. Not boisterous and rowdy enough. Not enough rough and tumble in him.
A Mama’s boy
. ‘Send him to play outdoors more,’ he ordered Shuxiang. ‘The kid needs to get into some scrapes.’ The closeness of mother and son bothered him. ‘You spoil the boy,’ he said. ‘Eight years old and his breath still smells of mother’s milk.’

Little Jun’s bed was in the corner of his parents’ bedroom. Mama went to bed the same time as him, but Baba came home much later. Sometimes he slipped in quietly. Sometimes he slammed doors, cursed and spat. Unzipped his fly and pissed around the rim of the squat toilet. He broke things accidentally. He broke things on purpose. He knocked an ashtray on to the floor. Shattered the teapot in the sink. Mama and Little Jun did not investigate these destructive fits of rage. They stayed in bed, wakeful and tense, until Baba staggered in and was snoring drunkenly. Some nights when Baba came to bed, he turned into a beast that devoured Shuxiang. Wide-eyed in the dark, Little Jun watched from the other side of the bedroom as the hump-backed ogre reared up. Panting, out of breath and shuddering the bed frame, until he grunted and collapsed. (‘A bad dream,’ Mama said when Little Jun asked about Baba the morning after. ‘You were having a bad dream.’) Little Jun sometimes woke from nightmares. Mama stroked his brow, brought him to her bed and cuddled him back to sleep. One night she dozed off before carrying him back, and Baba pulled back the bedcovers to find mother and child in a sleeping embrace. He dragged his son out of bed, nearly pulling his shoulder out of its socket as he threw him across the room. ‘It’s time he crawled out of your womb,’ he shouted at his wife. ‘Or he’ll be stuck up there for the rest of his life.’

Wang Hu was gone when they woke in the morning. Washed, shaved and out the door. His career was founded upon his ability to be drunken and sociable at night, then resurrect himself from the ruins of a hangover and be first in the office the next day. Once he was gone, mother and son trod carefully about the apartment. They cleaned up. Soaked up the puddles of urine with old newspapers. Swept up the shards of glass. ‘Love for a man must extend to the crows on his roof,’ Shuxiang intoned flatly. But neither of them loved him to start with, thought her son. Never mind with crows.

‘I am Lin Hong.’

The girl blocked their path in the street. Mean-looking in stilettos and a little black dress. Rouged lips. Fight-picking eyes rimmed in electric blue. Mother and son were walking home from the supermarket. They stared at the girl, standing with a hand on her hip, proud of her beauty and height. She smiled at Shuxiang.