by Gavin McCrea
—Where’s Wenge? she said them, to which they responded by blushing and looking at the floor.
Coming to the final dressing room, Jiang Qing paused with her hand on the knob. She could hear crying coming from inside.
She flung the door open.
Wenge was sitting on the ground in the corner. Still in her ordinary clothes, her knees drawn into her chest and her face was in her hands.
Jiang Qing scanned the room: the girl was alone.
—What happened? Why aren’t you dressed? The performance starts in five—
Then she saw it. A slogan painted in white on the wardrobe door.
WHITE WITCH’S WHORE
As she approached the wardrobe and opened it, Jiang Qing felt no anger, for her entire will in those seconds was focussed on getting Wenge into her costume and onto the stage. Nor was there anger when she saw what had been done — all five of Wenge’s costumes slashed and spattered with paint — because she had not yet fathomed her inability to change the circumstances in which she found himself.
Anyone could have done this. A list of suspects a hundred names long could have been drawn up in a matter of minutes. In all likelihood, there were several people involved, from various levels of power. Yet the first and only person whom Jiang Qing thought to blame was her daughter. Li Na — it was obvious — had ratted her out.
There was a moment, then, when Jiang Qing saw memories of Li Na as a young baby and felt once again the obligation to be a mother to her. To stay at her side and protect her. Now, overwhelming this, came the feelings of failure and disappointment. Jiang Qing believed she had given birth to a being which would forever long for her affection, when in fact she had produced an unfeeling demon, a creature who stiffened if she caressed her.
Li Na, my child, you have been my great hope and my ultimate despair. When I batter you, crush you, flatten you, then will you think of me?
Jiang Qing turned to Wenge, who was now on her feet and holding up an arm, its elbow bent, the forearm covering her face, as if parrying invisible blows.
Going to her, Jiang Qing put an index finger on Wenge’s raised arm and applied only a tiny amount of pressure to it; all that was ever needed. Once Jiang Qing had full access to the girl’s face, she struck it: on one cheek with the open palm, on the other cheek with the back of the hand, a full swing behind it.
In the precise moment of Wenge’s falling down, there came a burst of applause from the auditorium.
Then more applause.
Then more, unceasing.
Jiang Qing delayed only to give Wenge a final kick, managing despite her haste to land it skilfully between the girl’s legs, before leaving the dressing room and running to the green room. There, amongst the crowd, she caught a glimpse of Zhu Xi in his ARMY CAPTAIN costume, chatting nonchalantly to another male dancer. When Zhu Xi noticed her, he turned towards her to reveal himself — and to flash the bandage on his broken finger — as if daring her to confront him. She ignored him. Pushed through the bodies into the wings and onto the darkened stage.
On the other side of the curtain, the applause was still going on and had not lost any of its force.
Holding her breath, she drew the edge of the curtain back and peeked out.
The entire audience was on its feet and facing towards the central door, where Mrs Marcos, expertly spotlighted from above, had entered and was now moving slowly down through the stalls towards her seat in the second row. In her limousine she had changed into a red gown, trimmed in gold thread, with a train of the same material. The audience, as they watched Mrs Marcos, knew that they were being looked at, greedily, by their colleagues in the neighbouring seats, and the public in the top galleries, and by Mrs Marcos herself, and even perhaps by Mao even though he was not there in the room. Knowing themselves to be under this scrutiny, they acted in order to be seen, with the result that their applause was rapturous but not pure. Mrs Marcos smiled and waved and soaked this poison up, as was the duty of someone who was awaited, expected, and had now come.
Do you see yourself in me?
I do, Mrs Marcos replied. Perhaps it’s because we’ve lived through the same times.
But in different places. On different sides.
From where you are, you see more than I can see. I understand myself from what I see you understand about me.
Can you see that I’m proud of you?
Yes. One must be proud of one’s enemy.
Then my success shall be your success also.
Mrs Marcos took her seat, and still the applause went on. Every actress dreamed of irrepressible ovations, of hearing her name shouted out, of being covered with rose petals raining down. But from this false and shallow crowd, the applause was divorced from its true feeling; Jiang Qing felt it to be mocking and malicious.
Finally three strikes of the gong reverberated and the applause gradually died. Behind Jiang Qing, the dancers from the first scene took their places on stage. The auditorium lights began to dim. Jiang Qing felt a hand grip her arm and pull her back from the curtain.
—Come away from there! Chao Ying rasped.
He dragged her into the wings.
Facing her now was a whole gallery of expressions in the opposite wing. A multitude of eyes. Some of them blinking, some unmoving. Which gave her the feeling of being spied upon and made her uneasy, though in fact this was only her fear of herself, for she knew it was her own soul in the wings that was spying on her, and that her role was to be its audience.
What did it feel like to be on stage? Mrs Marcos had asked her.
Nothing out of the ordinary, she had replied. I knew what to do. I had a purpose. I had faith in myself and in my right to be there.
So what has changed?
The orchestra started to play.
Jiang Qing closed her eyes and began to follow with a finger the lines on her palms. She wanted to avenge herself on all men and make them suffer. But it occurred to her that maybe that performance had already happened. Maybe what had been was not the rehearsal but the event, playing itself out. All things reverse and return: the curtain was rising, revealing a theatre after a performance had concluded and everything had been put away. So what was this? Present time. Herself, in the dark, still acting.
Iris
1968
xvii.
The door opened and Keith peeped in:
—They’re ready for you.
Sitting at her dressing table, she looked at him through the mirror in front.
—I’ll be right there.
—You okay?
—Just getting my head together.
—Anything I can help with?
She smiled:
—Take your face out of here. I won’t be a minute.
He left, and she returned to the tarot cards laid out on the table. The question she had asked them was a simple one, Should I go through with this? but their answer was not clear. Crossed at the centre of the reading, the Tower and the Page of Cups seemed a warning (her past would return to destroy her plans and would in turn be destroyed by them), yet surrounding those cards were a number of minor figures from the sword suit which appeared a call to proceed (the discord with her mother was blocking her creative and emotional energy, the only solution was open and aggressive confrontation).
Unable to decide between these equal truths, and knowing it was disrespectful to repeat the experiment — the master spoke but once — she swiped the cards off the table. After she had done this, she examined herself in the mirror and saw, to her alarm, that she looked as alarmed as she felt. She turned off the sitar music on the stereo and, staring into her own eyes, took a few breaths in silence. Divination was meditation. It required a clear and tranquil mind. The cosmic influences did not penetrate every wall; one had to be receptive to them. Her mistake had been to approach the cards in a preoccupied state.
Escaping her reflection, she unlocked her chest of drawers and retrieved a box that she kept there. A gift from Max, bought on his trip to China with Doris, it was finished with black lacquer and decorated with a painted scene of a boy pulling a rickshaw. Returning to the table, walking over the tarot cards on the floor without noticing, she unlocked the box and emptied its contents: an old leather-bound edition of the I Ching and a felt pouch containing the special coins used to consult it. Slowly and deliberately she untied the pouch cord and poured the three bronze coins into her left palm. Closing her right palm over the left to form a sealed vessel, she shook the coins, once to her left, once to her right, then back to the centre, trying to empty her consciousness of everything that interfered with her inquiry.
She threw down the coins together and noted their values on a scrap of paper. She repeated this six times. Summing up the values of each throw, she looked up the corresponding diagram in the book. She read the accompanying prophecy once to herself, then recited it a few times aloud:
Work on what has been spoiled,
This will bring you success.
It furthers you to cross the great water.
Before the starting point, three days.
After the starting point, three days.
Which settled it. She would go by what she had understood.
Leaving the book open on the table, with the coins resting on the verso side in order to keep the pages from turning over, she fetched the bottle of LSD from its hiding place behind the broken radiator. She shook it and raised it to the lamp to check the liquid level. Satisfied that this had not moved — she would not use product that had been tampered with — she measured thirty doses into a bottle of Babycham (for the adults) and half that amount into a bottle of fizzy lemonade (for the children). She then crushed some Thorazine and some vitamin B12 tablets and funnelled the resulting powder into the bottles using a folded bit of paper (this would help protect their minds against bad trips). She used one of her ornamental chopsticks as a spoon to stir the solutions. Then she screwed the lids back on and went to the wardrobe to change her clothes.
Off came her jeans and her kaftan and her beads and her bangles, and in their place her Wherehouse boiler suit, which had been dyed black but come out grey-brown. She swapped her sandals for black boots. Pulled back her hair and clipped it up. Took out her earrings and her nose stud. Creamed off the caste mark on her forehead and the varnish on her nails. The only concession she made to her own style was to put on her diamond-shaped glasses (one lens red, the other black). At the door, bottles in hand, she turned back into the room, as if to say goodbye to it, but in fact not really seeing it. Her mind was busy with the ethics of spiking other people’s drinks. A question on which she stood squarely on the side of: acid-in-the-reservoir. She wished someone had done this to her a long time ago.
The collective had gathered in the auditorium. The Maoists were dressed in their usual army fatigues, Mao’s Sayings in their chest pockets and Mao badges on their lapels. The rest of the adults were in the newly dyed boiler suits. The children were in navy scout uniforms stripped of their distinguishing patches and epaulettes. Everyone’s face had been painted black. Tied around their heads were white headbands like those the Vietnamese wore when in mourning for their dead. Several members carried toy pistols in their belts. Others had rifles slung over their shoulders. Chosen for their realism, the weight and finish of the metal, these weapons glinted in the light provided by the lanterns which were spread across the worktables and the stage floor. Cubes, pyramids, lozenges, globes, cylinders, stars, fish, animals, fruit, flowers, the smallest about a palm width in size, the largest reaching up to the men’s waists: together the lanterns emitted an ancient sort of brightness which cheated Iris’s mind like a dream. Gazing about, it seemed as though she had never really seen what these walls were like, or these ceilings, or this floor. Now that she was going to lose it all, she surveyed it avidly, and felt love for it.
—A toast, she said, holding the bottles up for everyone to see. To mark the end of our preparations and the beginning of our performance.
She handed the lemonade to one of the older girls. The other children, fearful of being passed over, crowded round the girl and demanded to know how the lemonade was to be divided out. A rationing system was quickly established by measuring how many fingers of liquid the bottle contained. As each child took their swig, they were closely monitored by the others — their hands hovering around the bottle, their eyes keenly gauging the motion of the liquid inside — to ensure they were taking no more than their share.
Álvaro accepted the Babycham from Iris with a bemused smirk: fucking hippies and their rituals. He knocked a mouthful back and passed the bottle on. The bottle made its way around and everyone took a gulp, except for two: Doris refused by saying she had given up alcohol years ago, while Keith had been warned by Iris in advance about ingesting anything that day; before drinking, he caught her eye, and she gave him a subtle signal — a narrowing of her lids, a shivering — which told him not to go on.
—What’s this about, Eva said when her turn came.
Iris offered to take the bottle back.
—It’s just a gesture. If you don’t want to participp—
Eva, distracted by an argument that had flared up amongst the children, took a healthy draught and returned the bottle to Iris, before going off to intervene.
For show, now, Iris took her own serving. She put the bottle to her mouth as if to drink from it, but kept her lips shut against the liquid that washed against them. Taking the bottle away, she wiped her lips roughly with her sleeve and looked around. No one was paying any attention to her.
That morning, a rare occurrence, Simon had come alone to her room. He had walked straight in without knocking, and put the LSD down on her table, and said:
—This is for you. If you dose it out properly and don’t squander it, it’ll earn you enough to live for at least a couple of months.
The dressing gown that he lived in was gone. He had a clean shirt on, and a suit jacket, and a functioning pair of leather shoes, and a cap to cover his scabby head: outside clothes, none of which she had seen him in before.
—So I was right, she said.
—Does that make you happy? You’ll be fine without me. Better off.
His prosthesis was stuffed into the pocket of his trousers, his look for the exterior world, designed to attract fewer stares on the streets.
—You’ll have to take care of yourself from now on, he said.
—Like, find a job? Get a trade?
—Is there something wrong with that?
—Is that what you’re going to do, Si? No, wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.
With his good hand, he pulled up his belt on one side so that it sat higher on his belly:
—Did you see the Indians in the basement have scarpered? I saw them with their suitcases this morning.
—Scumsuckers. They owe us two weeks.
—You can say goodbye to that.
—I wonder where they’ll go.
—That’s a question you should be asking yourself, Iris. It wouldn’t be sensible to move in with your father. You can’t look to him for support.
—Don’t worry about me.
—I don’t. I know you’ll be okay.
By shrugging, and sniffling, and throwing her eyes around, she tried to avoid the pain that came with hearing these words.
—You know, Si, she said then, the world has changed since you were last in it. The sixties are ravenous. You’re going to get eaten up.
—I survived a war.
—Child’s play, compared.
He went out to the corridor and put his rucksack on his back. Turned to look back through the open door.
—Tell me one thing before I go, he said. Are you going to go through with it?
—The happe
ning? Don’t see why not. What have I got to lose?
—Just remember your mother isn’t the enemy. Go easy on her. You won’t have to use force, she’ll submit to you, if you approach her properly.
—We’ll see about that.
—War is the father of all things. Have you heard that said? Your mother can’t help what she is. Any more than you can. Everyone has the same fate. You hit her, someone else hits you.
—Spare me the soldier’s wisdom, Simon. Right now you’re nothing but a deserter. If you’re going, go.
And he did.
She went to check his room and found it empty. The cupboards bare. His money tins gone. Absences that she had imagined would one day be. Which just went to show. Nobody knew the beginning of anything, but the end was never so hard to see.
Now she poured the last of the Babycham onto the floor and threw the bottle away. Went over to Doris to have her make-up done.
—How you feeling? Doris said, rubbing the shoe polish onto her forehead and cheeks.
—Determined, said Iris.
Doris tied the white band around Iris’s head:
—Too tight?
—That’s fine.
Doris offered her a red armband:
—You going to wear one of these as well?
Over Doris’s shoulder, Iris checked who else in the group was wearing one. Almost everyone.
—Are you? said Iris.
—Why not? Doris said.
—Fuck it. Put it on.
Now that Iris was in costume, they were ready to go. Eva lined up the children at the auditorium door and assigned a lantern to each of them. To the younger children she gave the smaller lanterns to hold directly in their hands; to the older ones she gave the larger, heavier lanterns, some of which hung from poles. The children, though wound up, bursting with excess energy, had assumed a bearing of absolute seriousness. None of them boasted if they received their favourite lantern, nor complained if they did not; rather they took immediate ownership of the one assigned them, inspecting it, turning it round, testing for the best way to display it.