The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  The tea kettle was whistling when the key clattered in the front door, the pressured shriek of steam, metal vibrations and rattling door coming together as one. The door slammed and a flamenco stamp of heels came across the cement floor. Lin Hong stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing large sunglasses and a cocktail dress like a throwback from her eighties hostessing days. Her perfume was so overpowering, Wang thought the only explanation for it was that it was sprayed on as a weapon, meant to asphyxiate him. She did not smile at her stepson, or remove her sunglasses. ‘You’re back then,’ she said.

  Lin Hong put a shopping bag on the table and pulled out a bottle of Great Wall red wine, paper cups and a styrofoam box of noodles.

  ‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Your father cannot come to see you today. He has important meetings all day. He sends his regards.’

  Hungry, Wang sat at the table to eat, and Lin Hong removed a corkscrew from her leather bag, uncorked the wine bottle and tipped some into a paper cup. Now that he was closer to her, Wang saw that Lin Hong had been meddling with her face, bleaching her skin and injecting collagen in her lips. She lifted her cup.

  ‘To your freedom! Ganbei!’

  Lin Hong knocked the wine back, then reached for the bottle and poured a refill. Sipping on her second cup, she watched from behind her sunglasses as her stepson opened the styrofoam container and dug into the noodles stir-fried with green pepper and pork.

  ‘Tell me about the lunatics,’ she said. ‘Do they bark like dogs? Do they think they are Mao Zedong?’

  ‘No,’ said Wang.

  Many are more sane than you, he thought. Lin Hong smiled, and asked more questions. What caused his breakdown? Academic pressures? Dumped by a lover? Or was it hereditary, from his crazy mother? Wang stuffed noodles into his mouth with his chopsticks and did not reply.

  ‘We heard from Dr Fu you had a little friend in the hospital.’ Wang looked warily up. Behind her dark glasses, Lin Hong’s eyes were glittering. ‘Now it all makes sense. You were so strange as a teenager,’ she laughed. ‘I knew something wasn’t right.’

  ‘Dr Fu doesn’t know what he is talking about,’ Wang said.

  Lin Hong smirked. ‘Frankly, I find it disgusting. Most normal people do.’

  Wang’s cheeks burned. He pushed his noodles away and mentally willed her to go. Lin Hong reached into her leather bag and pulled out some forms, stapled at the corner. She tossed them over to him.

  ‘Registration forms. Your father met with the head of your history department last week. They are going to let you repeat your final year. You can go and register in August.’

  ‘I don’t want to repeat my final year,’ Wang said. ‘I’m not going back.’

  His stepmother laughed. ‘Not going back? What will you do instead? You can’t stay here. Your father wants to give up the lease.’

  ‘I will find a job,’ Wang said.

  Lin Hong shook her head, her sleek bob shimmering. ‘Your father will be furious. He wined and dined the head of the history department for you. Not to mention the other expenses the arrangement incurred.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Wang said. ‘Going back to university is not what I want.’

  Lin Hong shrugged again. Whether or not her stepson got a degree was of no concern to her. She gathered up her bag, and said she had an appointment. ‘Do you have any money?’ she asked.

  Wang looked away and said nothing. ‘Of course not,’ she smiled, and flung some 100-RMB notes on the table.

  Not looking at the money, but at his stepmother’s dark glasses, Wang asked suddenly, ‘Why the sunglasses, Lin Hong?’

  She removed them, exposing her swollen eyelids and the postsurgery stitches on her widened epicanthus folds. She fixed him with a defiant stare. ‘Why are you so determined to be a loser, Wang Jun? You could take advantage of being your father’s son. You could be successful like him. But instead you prefer to do nothing and be nobody.’ She slid the sunglasses back over her eyes and walked out, her stilettos clattering like shots fired from a pellet gun.

  After she’d gone Wang unlatched the windows and opened them wide on hinges creaking from lack of use. The stench of her perfume had overrun the apartment like a malodorous cat scratching the furniture and pissing everywhere. It bothered him that Lin Hong had a copy of the key. It bothered him that she could come back when she pleased.

  Solitude. Long, hot showers. The spaciousness of the double bed. Wang did not take for granted the simple things denied to him in hospital. He chopped vegetables and listened to the local radio station, slow-cooking soups on the hob. He swept and mopped the dust of inhabitation from the floor. The apartment had remained undecorated since the block went up in the seventies, and the walls were drab and needed a coat of paint, so he bought tins of white and painted compulsively for nine hours straight. When he finished he stood back, woozy with fumes, his joints and muscles sore, and admired the whitewashed walls. Wang had the sense that his past was contained within those walls. That his former life with Shuxiang had been absorbed by the concrete, and was interred there still, under the coats of white.

  On the nights Wang couldn’t sleep, he thought of Zeng and masturbated. When he came, his remorse was immediate, and his longing to be normal again intense. But he was not normal. He couldn’t stop fantasizing about living with Zeng and sharing a bed and the rituals of everyday life. During the day the idea of him and Zeng living together was absurd. But in the hours of darkness it seemed like a chance of happiness he was foolish not to pursue.

  To end the sleepless nights Wang set his alarm for six every morning, and dragged himself up when it rang. Groggy, he spread a folding map of Beijing out on the table and circled his forefinger above the districts of the city. Then Wang would bring the finger down on a random place, and that would be his destination for the day. He washed, shaved and dressed and then set out, the map folded in the back pocket of his jeans.

  Tens of kilometres per day. Hundreds of kilometres per week. As he roamed across the city thousands of sensory impressions passed through him: the din of traffic, the put-put of motorized rickshaws, and strange-tasting chemicals in the air. Perceptions that entered his senses fleetingly resided in him, then vanished without a trace. At the end of each day he went home and showered, rinsing the sweat and grime away. He would cook and eat a simple meal, then tumble into bed and fall asleep without a single thought in his head.

  It was on the walks across Beijing that he decided to become a taxi driver. To drive to every part of the city and meet people from every walk of life. Wang got a driver’s licence and, with his father’s string-pulling, signed up with a taxi company (vowing he’d never again ask for his help). By the end of the summer he was co-renting a Xiali sedan with another driver and supporting himself with his earnings. The next phase of his life was underway.

  The day he met her, the clouds had been congregating since dawn, oppressive and tenebrous and gathering negative charge. Though it was late September, Wang had the windows rolled down, and was perspiring as he drove about the city, thirsting for a cold beer. When the city darkened as though in premature dusk, and lightning forked the sky, Wang was relieved. The tension in the atmosphere dissipated as the storm broke loose.

  The girl stood near Dongzhimen subway, conspicuously still as those around her ran for shelter as though bombs were falling out of the sky. The downpour had soaked her to the skin, but she didn’t appear to care about catching a cold. Though she hadn’t flagged him down, Wang swerved over to her, his windscreen wipers slashing full speed. She pulled the latch of the passenger door and climbed in the front seat, as though his taxi was exactly what she’d been waiting for. The girl was twentyish, the same age as Wang. Her T-shirt and skirt were wringing, but she was unapologetic as her damp shadow seeped across the upholstery. She moved her feet and her canvas shoes squelched.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked.

  She looked at him dismissively and named a street in the south. Her voice was husky and low, her accent that of someone
who’d grown up far from Beijing. Wang pulled away from the kerb.

  The wind shook the trees on Dongzhimen Avenue, stripping the branches of leaves. Lightning splintered the sky and water crashed on the windscreen faster than the wipers could clear it away. Wang stole glances at the girl, illuminated by the halogen arcs of street lights slanting into the car. She was wringing out her hair, both hands squeezing it into a rope that dripped on to her denim-skirted lap. Then she stared straight ahead, biting her lower lip, raindrops studding her nose, her eyelashes in wet spikes. Wang shifted awkwardly in the driver’s seat. He had been a driver for three weeks and hoped the girl wouldn’t notice his inexperience. He hoped he wouldn’t lose his way and have to consult a map.

  The girl shivered beside him. A sneeze threw her towards the dashboard, and Wang turned the heater on full. Nervous of her prettiness, he asked her where she was from.

  ‘Anhui,’ she said. How long had she been in Beijing? ‘Two years.’

  ‘Why were you standing in the rain without an umbrella?’ he asked.

  ‘Just because.’

  Her reticence had nothing to do with shyness, and they lapsed into a silence during which Wang imagined tugging her clinging T-shirt over her head and stroking and fondling her damp breasts.

  The rain came down harder. It crashed down on the windscreen as though they were passing under a waterfall. The wiper blades slashed uselessly. Visibility was down to a few metres and Wang could barely see the tail lights of the car in front. He held the steering wheel steady and slowed his speed.

  ‘Fuck!’ cursed the girl. ‘Drive carefully. Don’t crash the fucking car!’

  ‘You can get out here if you want,’ Wang said.

  They were driving through a desolate region of the city, a wasteland of construction sites with industrial cranes and crater lakes of rain and sand. The girl scowled and said nothing else.

  Minutes later, Wang pulled up at the street of run-down buildings that was her destination. ‘Thirty kuai,’ he said, reading the meter. Then he waited for her to pay the fare and disappear back into the city of twelve million strangers. Good, he thought. He couldn’t wait for her to go. Outside, the storm raged on, battering the streets. The girl stared into her lap.

  ‘I don’t have any money,’ she said eventually.

  Wang turned to look at her. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You can pay me another time.’

  His kindness was too much for her, and the girl shuddered with a deep sob. She pressed her hands to her mouth and shook. Wang watched her awkwardly.

  ‘Something bad happen to you today?’ he asked.

  ‘They fired me from my job.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’ll find another job. There are lots of jobs in Beijing.’

  ‘I hated it anyway. I worked in the toilets in Dongzhimen subway station. Worst job I’ve done in my life.’

  Wang laughed, and the girl looked at him properly for the first time.

  ‘You’re young to be a taxi driver,’ she sniffed, wiping her eyes.

  Wang shook his head. ‘I’m old. I’m twenty-two. I have wrinkles around my eyes.’

  The girl squinted at his face. ‘So you do,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll call you lao shifu then.’

  Then she smiled, but as though her heart was breaking, and Wang knew that she needed saving from more than the rain.

  Her name was Ma Yida. ‘Yida,’ Wang whispered in his head, liking the sound of it. She slapped the table, leaning towards him in a conspiratorial manner.

  ‘Let’s get drunk,’ she suggested. ‘Let’s get so drunk we pass out in the gutter.’

  The waitress, pen hovering over order pad, narrowed her eyes. Yida’s smile was beatific and wide: ‘Bring us four bottles of Tsingdao!’

  Other refugees crowded the restaurant, fleeing the storm to order pots of tea and watch the red lanterns swinging wildly from the awning in the wind. In the kitchen, visible through a hatch in the wall, the chef pulled noodles from strands of dough and dumplings steamed in baskets of woven bamboo. Yida’s clothes were drenched. When Wang suggested she dry them, she shrugged. ‘They’ll dry eventually.’ So Wang offered her his jacket and was relieved when she accepted, covering her see-through wet T-shirt, clinging to her bra-cupped breasts. When the beer came she poured it out carelessly, frothing the glasses up with spilling foam.

  ‘Ganbei! To the Beijing Subway Authority!’ she cried, holding up her glass.

  She knocked it back, then poured another. She wrinkled her nose at Wang’s offer of a cigarette, denouncing the brand as ‘filthy-tasting’, then lit one, and over the course of the evening chainsmoked most of the pack. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she insisted as Wang ordered. ‘All I want is to drink enough to fall down drunk.’ But when the dishes arrived Yida stuffed herself like a starving peasant. Wang ate a bowl of noodles then lit a cigarette, leaning back in his chair to watch her eating dumplings. The stark fluorescent lighting stripped away the shadowy mystery she’d had in his taxi, exposing the odd pimple, chapped, flaking lips and other imperfections that in no way diminished her looks. She had arresting eyes, mostly brown, but with splinters of jade glinting in her irises. Spirals of curls sprung up about her head as her hair became drier, and Wang wanted to reach out and touch them. When she went for napkins, heads turned in appreciation of her pretty face and bare legs in a short skirt. And though he’d known her for less than two hours, Wang felt a mixture of possessiveness and pride.

  When the dishes were empty, Yida put a hand on her stomach and groaned, ‘I’m stuffed!’ Then she lit a cigarette and began to talk. Wang liked the low, husky pitch of her voice. He liked her strong Anhui accent and flawed command of Mandarin. There was a hint of performance in her outpourings, the theatricality of a lonely girl keen to keep her audience captive, now someone cared enough to listen.

  ‘Girls don’t matter as much as boys,’ she told him. ‘That’s why my parents didn’t care that I went so far away. They have my younger brother. Married couples in our village are allowed two, if the first-born is a girl.’

  She had failed the high school entrance exams – not that her parents could afford to send her anyway.

  ‘They are saving all their money for his education,’ Yida said. ‘I bought a fake high school certificate once, but never used it. Who needs qualifications anyway? Eating bitter, that’s the only qualification I need in life.’

  Ma Yida’s first job was in a factory when she was fifteen, attaching plastic blond hair to pink dolls. She moved to Beijing at seventeen. ‘I sent money home for a year or two, and I used to call them too. But now my family and I are out of touch.’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll go back there one day. Not now, though. Unfilial, aren’t I?’

  Yida had worked two years of jobs that native Beijingers don’t want to do. She’d been lied to, tricked and exploited, cheated out of her wages and abused. She’d left her job as a lift attendant after spending a night trapped in a lift which had ground to a mechanical halt (the caretaker, to save on the night call-out fee, had waited until the morning to call a repair man). She’d left her job as a waitress when the boss groped her in the storeroom, amongst the rice sacks and aluminium drums of oil.

  ‘I kicked him in the balls,’ Yida said, stabbing the air with her lit cigarette. ‘He never fucked with any waitresses ever again.’

  Wang nodded, not sure whether to believe her. Yida slept on a mattress in a room shared by six migrant workers, all of them from Anhui province, all of them dirt poor. When it came to workers’ rights, they had none at all.

  Yida had been a toilet attendant in Dongzhimen subway station for six weeks. The toilets were on the underground platform, between the tracks and the trains rumbling north and south. Yida’s supervisor was an overweight, overbearing man in his fifties. ‘All men are equal, everyone has to take a shit’ was his motto. It was supposed to make them feel better about the job.

  ‘He hated me on sight. Accused me of having a bad attitude. Tell me, Driver Wang, what kind of attitude would you have be
ing around all that pissing and shitting, day in, day out? Every night I go home and stand under the shower for half an hour, but I can’t rinse off the filth. That’s why I was standing in the rain: to get clean.’

  Working in the subway, Yida got to know the beggars who worked the circular line tunnelling clockwise and anticlockwise beneath Beijing, shaking their money-collecting tins as they limped through the carriages, frightening commuters with their deformities.

  ‘The cripples. The burnt ones. The blind ones. Some are so disgusting they made me want to puke. But when you get to know them, they are just like us. Some are mean bastards, of course, but some I get on really well with. Some of them are really funny. You need a sense of humour when your legs are amputated and you are dragging yourself about by your hands.’

  Her supervisor had seen the beggars hanging about by the hand-washing sinks, chatting with Yida as she mopped the floor. ‘They smell bad,’ he told Yida. ‘They scare the commuters.’ He warned her that if he saw the beggars loitering by the toilets again he’d fire her, and Yida hadn’t had the heart to tell them to go away.

  It was close to midnight when they left the restaurant, the waitresses stacking chairs and sweeping around them. The streets were still after the storm, with only the odd drip of rainwater falling from the branches of trees. They swayed with drunkenness, laughing and splashing each other in puddles. Then they got into Wang’s taxi and drove to his apartment in Maizidian, where Yida finally removed her damp clothes and Wang got to run his fingers through her long and tangled curls. The next morning they drove to Yida’s place for her things. It took her ten minutes to pack everything she owned into two woven-plastic bags and bring them down to his cab.

  Back then, she was a miracle. She moved into his lonely bachelor apartment and her laughter chased out the bad memories and ghosts. She sang along to Faye Wong cassettes, smoked cigarettes and painted her toenails on the bed. She strolled out of the shower wearing nothing but glistening beads of water running down her skin, and it stopped his heart. Yida was not a housewife. She let the dishes pile up in the sink and burnt the pan when cooking rice, covering the stove top with starchy, boiled-over scum. But under her spell of chemicals and lust, Wang couldn’t care less. Every night he held her lithe and slender body in his arms, and never once thought of Zeng Yan.