The Secret Mother (33 page)

“Wake up, your babies are hungry. Time to get up.”

I rolled over to see a different doctor peering down his nose at me.

“Where’s Yifan?” I asked.

“Doctor Meng has been called out on an emergency; it’s unlikely that he’ll be in for the rest of today.”

“But I need to see him.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“It’s an emergency.”

“I’m sorry lady, there’s nothing I can do,” he left me with two bottles of formula. “Perhaps one of the nurses on reception can see to whatever it is you want; but don’t take long with that feed – we have an amputee in the corridor waiting for your bed.”

The patient in the bed next to mine pulled back the edge of her blanket, enough to see out.

“
Tsst.
You got somewhere to go?”

I shook my head.

She had a weather-beaten face that looked distrustful of the world. I wondered why she was in hospital, there was nothing obviously the matter with her. No broken arm, no bleeding, no babies.

“Think you’ll keep ‘em?” She gestured to my arms, where one child guzzled formula and the other grasped impatiently at the air.

Instinctively, I said yes. “We’ve survived this far together.”

She lowered her voice. “There’s always the welfare institute …”

I frowned, recalling the white-washed monolithic building on Hong Cheng Road and the warning Ren had issued the night of the ferris wheel, “Don’t get in deeper with the manager, Sky Eyes.” I was already much too in love with Manager He to heed her warning. My ‘sky eyes,’ as she called them, were watching clouds, daydreaming of a different life to this shabby one.

“Rumour is, welfare sell babies to rich foreigners,” I said. “The managers own fancy apartments downtown.”

“Ha! You shouldn’t believe everything you hear, girl. Besides, the westerners can offer them a better life.” She shook her head and reached into the bedside cabinet, producing a dog-eared sheet of photographs. They were black and white passport photos of her and a baby. On two of the pictures, the woman’s eyes were closed and she looked gormless. They stirred me nonetheless.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Here, take it. Take a good look.”

“It’s a baby girl.”

“Taken the day we said goodbye. You see, girl, sometimes it’s for the best.”

“Perhaps.”

“No perhaps about it, we don’t have choices.”

“There’s always a choice,” I said, too quickly. I didn’t like the way she said “we,” putting us in the same category.

The woman grabbed the photograph, offended, and slipped it into the cabinet. “Well,
hao yun,
girl,” she sighed. “I hope a gold pin falls in your well. You’re going to need it to look after them two littlies.”

The sun shone shiftily between the blocks of high-rise flats opposite
God’s Help Hospital.
Between the breaths of traffic that log-jammed Jenmen Road, a police siren screamed, distant. The rain stopped. The water level receded below the kerb. Lines of buses sloughed past, spraying me as I stared into the petrol rainbows, wishing hard for Yifan to pull up, beep his horn and say, “Hurry up! Get in, we’re going home!” For fifteen stupid minutes I waited, counting the seconds, believing he might come.

For hours, I wandered the nearby streets, scuffing through the crowds, going nowhere in particular.
God’s Help
had sent me on my way with a pair of navy court shoes, two sizes too small, donated by their latest amputee. I felt a century old, with my feet bound into the tight leather. It didn’t take long for me to develop the strange shuffle of my ancestors – women who knew the suffering road.

By midday my babies were blue from screaming to be fed. I sat on a bench beneath a date palm tree whose fronds hung spindly in the November gloom. I put my little finger in one mouth then the other. They cried harder when they realised nothing was coming out. I would have given them my breasts, but they were empty. My wells had run dry of milk.

Stealing the formula was a risk. The owner’s eyes were onto me the moment I entered her low-beam corner shop. Perhaps it was the ghostly pallor of my skin or the dark circles around my eyes, or maybe she could smell it on me: the intention to rob her blind. I mooched up and down the aisles, sniffed a garland of red chillies, delved my hand into a crate of ripe pears at the back of the shop – squeezing, testing, admiring. I knelt by a sack of green tea and rubbed the leaves between my fingers.

My opportunity came when the owner fetched her husband some tea while he mended shoes on the street. I hurried over to the aisle with powdered formula and stuffed a jar into my coat, tucking it inside the blankets where the twins’ heads nestled, bawling. I hoped it was enough to last a couple of days.

The owner wrestled me on the doorstep, demanding to see inside my coat.

“You migrant mothers, stealing our stuff! Wait until I get my husband onto you.” She called for him.

I unzipped my coat a slither, enough to show them the bulge inside was human.

“Let her go. I don’t want any trouble, Xingyan, not this time,” he ranted.

I hurried away, the babies bobbing in the swag of my jacket.

There were worse crimes. That night I crouched in an alleyway and raked together a makeshift shelter out of cardboard boxes. Two adolescents carrying knives held a woman against a nearby skip and assaulted her. I sobbed the whole way through as they whooped and grunted. They both took a turn and eventually the woman’s cries died down, she stopped fighting, her body limp. I dared not move from my shelter for fear they might do the same to me. Let the police catch the rapists, let the mother live, I whispered, curling myself into a tight ball amidst the junk. When I was sure they’d gone, I covered her sobbing body with my coat.

I fell to sleep on my haunches, rocked by the muted patter of rain. The babies woke every couple of hours in need of formula, which I mixed in a bottle salvaged from the skip. I had to step over the woman to get to it.

The next morning a refuse collector came peddling his cart. He picked over the rubbish, scratched at the pavement with his bamboo broom.

“What the …”

I poked my head out of the shelter.

“Move it, woman, you can’t sleep here. I thought you were a stiff. Watch yourself.”

I crawled from beneath the cardboard, the babies cowled in my jumper, and ran. Above was leaden sky. Cold air. A slack rain in the wind. I coughed up phlegm like a woman who’d smoked opium all her life. My clothes lingered with the smell of the street and of food waste. I was scavenging some rice from my coat when a couple of westerners bumped into me.

“Watch it,” I said.

“Oh …
bàoqiàn
.” The man fumbled for an apology. No doubt he was an American.

Immediately, his wife honed in on my babies. Her clothes were pristine: grey fur coat, black patent leather shoes. The hems of her tweed trousers brushed at her heels. She had blonde hair curled in waves, crowned with a beret. This one had money alright. She smelt of money. She oozed money. Money, money, money. Good enough to eat.

She reached out to touch my babies. Sensing the opportunity to earn a few yuan, I let her stroke my baby’s cheek. For a moment my youngest stopped crying and I felt a pang inside like someone had plucked a zither whose strings were attached to my heart. How could she calm them like that?

The husband reached into his back pocket and pulled out a wallet fat with yuan. Mao’s blue washed-out face gawped up at me. Ha! They were giving me cash and all I’d done was flash them a glimpse of my babies. My stomach leapt at the promise of food.

“Xièxiè,” I said.

He thanked me back in hesitant Chinese and turned to leave. His wife stood transfixed. He had to link his arm through hers and pull gently before she would move. I watched them disappear inside the restaurant’s plush interior then shoved the money quickly inside my vest. It felt crisp against my laddered ribs.

Six days and six nights passed. The rain drained away, leaving a damp film over the streets. My shoes began to stretch. When I took them off at night I noticed the leather had taken the shape of my feet, bulging at the front where my potato toes were rooted in an uneven row.

I used some of the Americans’ money to buy clean
kaidangku.
The ones from
God’s Help
were too soiled for my babies to wear and the stench was unbearable where their shit had seeped out. I worried constantly about disease. I’d seen first-hand the girls at Forwood falling too ill to work after eating stale food.

The best places to wash were in public toilets and department stores, although I was usually eyed with too much suspicion to get past the doors. More than once, security guards threw me out of the Pacific Department Store, calling me “dirty
mingong
” or “lazy daughter.” It was easy for them to rough me up a bit, even as I cradled my babies. I had no rights on the street, the police would have laughed in my face and locked me up if I turned to them for help.

It was on the seventh morning, as the sun shone feebly though the bare trees on Bayi Avenue, that the hopelessness of my situation hit me. I was feeding my babies cold formula on a bench. I had spent my last fen on a bottle of purified water.

How can we go on like this?

The answer was glaring – we couldn’t. I had no
hukou
for a home, no food, no clean clothes, nothing to keep us warm, no protection and no money. I didn’t even have the will to lift my head and beg for help any more.

I thought about the peasant in God’s Help hospital who abandoned her daughter. I kissed my babies, put my nose to their faces and let them gnaw my finger, wanting to feel pain and be reminded that we were still alive, because at that point I felt dead; at least, dead inside. Whatever it was that had kept me going - hope, fear, love, stubbornness – had finally petered out.

I got up and started walking. One foot, then the other, then another. I counted the steps and avoided the cracks in the pavement. I became annoyed with strangers who got in my way, or made me lose count. Didn’t they know where I was going?

When I turned the corner onto Hong Cheng Road, the first thing I noticed was the colour of the welfare institute walls – grey, not white as I remembered them to be. More drab and hollow because of what I was about to …

A flight of eighteen steps led to a first-floor entrance. There was also a ground floor entrance. A large porch was supported by six columns, three on either side. The triangular roof of the porch and its columns were painted red. It was a four-storey building, fifteen windows to every floor. Four bands of colour were painted on the central windows marking out each floor; the colours were: white, pink, pale blue and red in ascending order. Unusually, there were also six circular windows on the front of the building. I guessed they were pure decoration, some architectural ornament intended to demonstrate to foreigners that the Chinese had taste and style, as well as babies. I stared long and hard until I could remember every detail with my eyes closed. I knew that I would never forget that building. The least I could do – the only thing – was to remember it properly and precisely.

I couldn’t do the same for my babies. A child is not a building. A voice is not a brick. A baby that moves, cries, shivers, gargles, wrinkles, breathes, frowns isn’t anything that will be remembered in detail. My babies were too fluid. Their skin, yes, maybe their skin would be remembered. Their skin was a naked grain of rice slipping through my fingers. Their skin was my empty hand, grasping for their memory before I had even let go.

Never let you go.

I pressed my face to theirs and kissed. Then I took the rusty pen knife the rapists had discarded in the alley, held my wrist steady and cut away some wisps of their hair. In a short while, it would be all I had left. Afterwards, I squatted in the restless dark, folded my hands into a fist against my forehead, closed my eyes and waited.

I waited for the staff to cease their bedtime duties. Waited until the lights had been turned off in all fifteen windows. Only the circular windows remained illuminated, these must have been the stairwells. The children would like having a light at the end of the corridor, it would be a comfort, a reassurance they weren’t abandoned.

Never let you go.

When everything was still and all the babies in the building were surely asleep, I waited some more. Hours. I waited for the right moment: the lull in traffic, the calming of the breeze and for their crying to subside. I waited for my babies’ eyes to close so that they wouldn’t see me leave. Soon the morning staff would arrive and discover my girls. They would be brought in from the cold, I hoped.

My daughters were ten days old. Would they one day wake up in a cold sweat, unable to shake the memory of being abandoned on the steps of Nanchang’s Welfare Institute? Would my eldest be making love for the first time and burst into tears, haunted by the sound of footsteps fading?

The right moment never came. There can never be a right moment for a mother to say goodbye, to let go, to walk away from the things she loves the most in the entire world. My precious babies, my sweet loves, my flesh … my flesh was not for cutting, was not for giving, was not for leaving behind on those frost-laced steps. Sweet babies, I wrapped you in a blanket and covered you with my hair and wiped your tears one last time, even though I knew those tears would keep on falling, would sting your cheeks in the bitter cold. I did not go quickly, or bravely, feeling that my leaving was for the best. I burned. I burned like a flame engorged with air. I burned in my breasts because to leave you was the scorch of death.

Two, maybe three days later, I passed a stall selling plastic cartons of fresh watermelon at the entrance to the People’s Park. My mouth filled with the taste of their sweet, pink flesh, reminiscent of my childhood. I stole a carton and headed over to a bench. It was the first thing I’d eaten since that night.

An early-morning haze hung over the park and the elderly residents who were practising Tai Chi looked other-worldly. Their limbs branched outwards and upwards. Their movements were smooth, gentle, like the reeling in of silk. I sucked hard on a slice of melon; the knot in my abdomen pulled tighter.