The Incarnations (21 page)

‘One bastard made me take pills, to get me high. Then back at his place a gang of his friends were waiting . . . Bastards. They threw me out on to the street afterwards. Crippled and bleeding . . .’ Zeng shook his head, wincing at the memory. ‘Some won’t pay afterwards. Complain the service was poor after shooting a wad in your mouth. That’s why I have this story about my mother having breast cancer, and needing money for hospital fees. Cheat or be cheated. That’s how it goes.’

Zeng wanted to know about Wang too. He asked about his past lovers, and Wang reeled them out. There was the girl he dated in his first year, who wrote bad poetry and had long centre-parted hair. A sly exhibitionist, the girl had liked to serenade the drunken dregs of parties with folk songs strummed on her guitar. She liked to gush about her emotional depth, and Wang’s reticence frustrated her. ‘The more time I spend with you, the less I know you,’ she complained, then dumped him for a bassist in a rock band. The girlfriend in Wang’s second year had wanted Communist Party membership and a stable ‘iron rice bowl’ job. She had said so on their first date. She had pressured Wang into arranging work experience for her in his father’s department and he had broken up with her in disgust. Wang rarely thought of these girls any more, or the awkward dorm-room fumblings with bra clasps and condoms, the rushed and unsatisfactory sex. Shuxiang is the woman who dominates his past.

‘What was she like?’ Zeng asked.

‘Strange. One in a billion.’

‘Tell me about her,’ Zeng said. ‘Go on.’

Wang remembers how her eyes shone black and how cigarette smoke seeped from her mouth. Shuxiang had a round and motherly face, but she was not like other mothers.

‘Ignore what the teachers say,’ she said, when she picked her son up from school. ‘Forget what they teach you in those lessons. They teach nothing but nationalist lies. They are training you to be sheep.’ Looking around the playground at the other children, she said under her breath, ‘Little emperors, constantly demanding sweets and toys. As bad as babies, screaming at you to wipe their faeces and feed them milk, night and day.’ Then she glanced at her solemn young son, and had to concede, ‘But you are better than most, Little Jun. You are one of the very best six-year-olds there are . . .’

Sometimes they went to the market, riding there on the bus. Little Jun would run amongst the stalls, sniffing at the fish guts and spilt chicken’s blood and dough sticks frying in oil. ‘Don’t touch,’ Shuxiang warned. But he touched everything. At the rice seller’s he slipped his six-year-old hands into the barrels, sifting the grains through his fingers. At the stall where spices were weighed out on old-fashioned scales, he dipped a finger in the chilli powder and licked, tearing up as his sinuses burned.

‘Like fire ants, eh?’ laughed the spice seller. ‘Fire ants up your nose.’

One day at the market he decided to run away and become one of the street kids who begged for a living. He wouldn’t have to go back to school and not fit in. He wouldn’t have to go back to the shadowy apartment and the strange, bitter things his mother said. They had been about to leave the market, and Shuxiang was paying for a jin of tofu when Little Jun crawled under the noodle stall. The noodle-maker was kneading and slamming dough and the table wobbled. He did not have to wait long before he heard his mother say, ‘You seen my son?’

Under the table, Wang saw her feet, strapped in her sandals. His heart skipped with the thrill of concealment.

‘No, not today,’ the noodle-maker said.

His mother walked her feet away. Wang peeped out. She was asking the butcher, his cleaver suspended over bloody cuts of meat, if he had seen her boy. The butcher said no. Shuxiang turned away and Little Jun saw the furrow of worry on her brow. In his hiding place, Wang was pleased by her pain. Proof she must love him as much as he loves her.

Round and round the market she went, calling for him and accidentally bumping into other market-goers. ‘Seen my son?’ she asked the shoe-mender. ‘Seen my son?’ A lump grew and stopped up Little Jun’s throat. The filth under the stall, the vegetable rot and flies, was nauseating. The time to come out had long passed, but now he was too scared.

Then she saw him, under the table. They locked eyes, mother and son, the boy’s eyes trembling, the mother’s turning to stone.

‘Still looking for your little boy?’ the tofu seller asked.

‘No,’ said Shuxiang.

Then she turned and walked out of the market.

It was dark when a neighbour brought him back to Maizidian. She was a Ministry of Agriculture wife and, out of loyalty to his mother, Wang had refused to take her hand. The neighbour was Shuxiang’s age and had recognized Little Jun because she was the kind of woman who took notice of small children. She had fumed out loud, ‘Fate is unkind to give a child to a woman like Li Shuxiang, and to me none.’

She knocked three times, loud and angry, at the door of Apartment 404. Shuxiang opened it, and the boy darted in like a cat streaking out of the rain. The woman opened her mouth to tell Shuxiang off, but Shuxiang, without thanking her, let the door slam shut.

‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said, turning to her son. ‘I won’t smack you.’

A bowl of soup and a steamed bun were put on the table in front of him. She told him to eat, and she sat at the table too. Hungry, he chewed mouthfuls of bread and slurped out of the bowl. Mentholated smoke leaked from the edges of Shuxiang’s mouth and the cigarette in her hand.

‘Have you learnt your lesson?’ she asked.

Wang Jun nodded.

‘I was rude to that woman, wasn’t I?’ she said. ‘Her name is Rongrong and, during the Cultural Revolution, I saw her stab a girl in the head with scissors. That woman has blood on her hands. That’s why I was rude.’

Little Jun shuddered. The woman had offered him one of her bloodstained hands, and he was glad he’d refused it.

‘She has no right to look down on me,’ Shuxiang said, ‘but she probably doesn’t see it that way. Everyone has amnesia about that time. But not me.’

Wang nodded solemnly at his mother. He was on her side against that woman. He sided with her against every one of her enemies. Shuxiang exhaled through her nostrils, bluish snakes of smoke winding into her eyes, which softened as she looked at her son and said, ‘Leaving you there was as hard for me as it was for you. But I have to prepare you for the world out there. You have to be ready for what it’ll be like after I am gone.’

Bells were ringing. Time to go to the canteen and queue for dinner. Across the hospital patients rose up from napping, staring at the TV and other forms of inactivity. Except for Wang and Zeng. They lay on the shower-room floor. Neither of them was hungry. Neither of them stirred a limb.

‘How old were you when she died?’

‘Twelve.’

‘You must have missed her.’

‘She was all I had.’

‘But things are different now,’ said Zeng. ‘Now you have me.’

Wang said nothing to this, and the words hung in the dusk, waiting for his response. When none came, Zeng reached for Wang’s wrist and cuffed it with his hand. It felt strange to have his wrist seized in this way. But the strength of Zeng’s grip, and the heat and pulse of his blood, was comforting too.

‘Do you think we’d be friends, if we hadn’t met in hospital?’ Zeng asked. ‘Would someone like you, who goes to Beijing University, be friends with someone like me?’

‘What does it matter?’ Wang said. ‘I met you here.’

‘After the hospital, do you think we’ll stay friends?’

‘Sure.’

But he wasn’t sure. For the first time, it occurred to him that staying friends with unstable Zeng, who sold his body in karaoke bars and burnt down a shed to kill an ex-boyfriend, was a bad idea. Zeng smiled.

‘Then I have a business proposition for you, for after we get out of here. Why don’t we open a bar together?’

‘A bar?’

‘We could rent a place in Sanlitun. A place with a dance floor. We’ll have a DJ booth and a cocktail menu. Lots of cool people will come. Artists and musicians and foreigners . . .’

He could imagine the nightclub Zeng had in mind, with a flashing strobe-lit dance floor heaving with sweaty dancers. Wang’s head ached just to think of it.

‘Where would we get the money from?’ he asked.

‘Isn’t your father stinking rich?’

Wang laughed. ‘He won’t lend us a fen.’

‘I’ll find an investor then,’ Zeng decided. ‘I’m well connected. I know the richest men in Beijing.’

Zeng shone with enthusiasm and, knowing there was no steering him back to reality, Wang said nothing. Zeng’s attention would soon flit to something else.

‘We could move in together too,’ Zeng went on. ‘It’ll be fun. We could cook meals together, and watch TV and play mah-jong. We could be together every day . . .’

Wang’s heart beat strangely at this. The thought of being ‘together every day’ with Zeng both excited and disquieted him. Zeng’s hand now felt like a handcuff around his wrist, shackling him to a future he wasn’t sure about. He tore his wrist from Zeng’s grasp and sat up.

‘We can’t live together.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because two men can’t live together. It’s not normal.’

Zeng sat up and stared at Wang in confusion. ‘You shouldn’t care what people think,’ he said. ‘Being happy should be the most important thing . . .’

‘What makes you think living with you will make me happy?’ Wang said. ‘I’m not like you. I don’t want to live with a man.’

But Zeng was not deterred. He leant in closer and stroked the line of Wang’s jaw. He gazed into his eyes as though reaching into their depths, and said, ‘Why aren’t you honest with yourself?’

Wang glared at him. ‘
Don’t!
’ he warned.

But Zeng grabbed the back of Wang’s head and banged his mouth against Wang’s with such force his lip split against his teeth. Then his tongue was inside, probing about, and Wang was paralysed for a moment, before he shoved him back roughly.

He was breathing hard, and his heart was beating against his sternum. His mouth tasted of Zeng’s saliva and blood.

‘What are you doing!’

Zeng said nothing, but stared back at Wang with a certainty that scythed through him. Then, with the same quiet confidence, he got up and walked into one of the toilet stalls. Wang sat and stared at the stall’s open door for a while, with Zeng waiting inside. Then, awkward, messed up and sick with desire, he followed him in.

Three times they were nearly caught. Twice by other patients, stumbling in on night visits to the toilets. They froze in the stall, breathing suspended for as long as it took for the intruder to empty his bladder and leave. Once Nightwarden Guo came in and knocked on the door. ‘Who’s in there?’ Wang’s mind had gone blank with fear, but Zeng, no stranger to these predicaments, flattened himself against the back wall and gestured that Wang go out alone. Wang squeaked open the door, slipped out. ‘What were you doing?’ the nightwarden asked. ‘Using the toilet,’ said Wang. His heart was beating so wildly he thought he would throw it up. ‘Liar,’ said Nightwarden Guo, ‘you were beating the aeroplane. I heard you.’ A head-shake of disgust. ‘Go back to bed, pervert. They should lock you in your room.’

‘This can’t go on much longer. When I leave here, I want to be normal. I don’t want this.’

He swept out his hand, to stand in for what he could not say.

‘I understand,’ said Zeng. ‘Tell me when you want to stop, and we’ll stop.’

‘I’m not like you.’

‘I know.’

‘This hospital has messed me up. When I get out of here I want to get better.’

‘I understand.’

But Wang looked at Zeng and saw he didn’t understand. That he thought it was only a matter of time.

‘Pass the remote,
faggot
.’

Wang was slouched in a chair in the common room, watching the news. Heat flushed his cheeks, and his ears and scalp tingled. ‘What did you call me?’

‘You heard,’ said Liu Xiaoliang. ‘Everyone knows what you are up to with Zeng Yan.’

The other TV watchers smirked and looked at Wang. Zeng Yan, who was playing poker with Old Chen, said nothing. Wang snapped, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Everyone’s seen you both sneaking about in the night,’ said Liu Xiaoliang. ‘It’s no secret.’

‘What do you know about anything?’ said Wang. ‘You think you fought the Japanese.’

Liu Xiaoliang, who suffered recurring flashbacks of the Japanese occupation (though he was born in 1970, and his traumatic ‘memories’ came from dramas on TV), took offence.

‘
Faggot
,’ he said.

Wei Hong pointed at Wang and said, ‘Homosexuality is a crime against the people and homosexual diseases are highly contagious. I want him out of our room. I don’t want to catch anything.’

Old Chen looked up from his playing cards, and said, ‘You can’t catch AIDs from sharing a room, Wei Hong. You only get it from blood transfusions and sex.’

‘I’m with Wei Hong,’ said Gao Ling, perched on his chair on his toes. ‘Wang Jun can’t sleep in our room. We’ve got to ask the doctors to remove him.’

No one was watching TV any more. They were staring at Wang and Zeng, who was studying his fanned-out playing cards.

‘Go fuck yourselves. I’ll sleep where I like.’

Wang glowered at them. What did it matter what these mental patients, cast out from society, thought of him? They hadn’t half a functioning brain between them. Wang got up and walked out of the common room. When he heard footsteps chasing him down the hall, he knew they were Zeng’s, but didn’t stop.

‘Wait!’ called Zeng. ‘Why are you letting them get to you?’

‘Leave me alone,’ Wang said, without looking over his shoulder.

Zeng didn’t catch him up.

It had to stop. So Wang cut Zeng dead, shunning him with his eyes when they passed in the hall, swept the yard or queued for medication. In the canteen, when Zeng sat near him, Wang moved with his rice bowl and chopsticks to another table. The message was clear.

Evading Zeng in the hospital could be done with coldness and determination, but Wang couldn’t evade Zeng in his dreams, where he reappeared night after night. Wang woke in arousal and tenderness from dreams of Zeng in the darkness of the stall; the smoothness of his skin and scent of hormones and sweat. He woke from dreams of the time Zeng clasped his wrist as they lay together on the floor, the heat and pulse of his grip reminding him of the muscle of Zeng’s heart, banging away in his chest. Wang woke from these dreams aching with a loss he hadn’t known since Shuxiang died, and he’d lain grieving every night on cold, damp dormitory sheets.