The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  I turned back to Ah Jack. The oarsmen had lowered him back on the deck, where he lay bleeding, for his heart had not yet stopped beating. Ah Jack looked up as I went over to him, heavy and slow, as though my conscience was dragging in my feet. Ah Jack saw the dagger in my hand and shook his head and mumbled, ‘No no no.’ His eyes begged me for mercy as I knelt on the blood-soaked boards besides him. But there was no mercy on the Scourge. No mercy for him, and no mercy for those who don’t obey orders.

  ‘Sorry,’ I whispered in Ghost People tongue. ‘Sorry, Ah Jack.’

  Ah Jack moaned and beat his hand against my chest, and two of the oarsmen came and held his wrists down against the deck. Ah Jack turned his head this way and that, with terror in his eyes. So I grabbed his dark curls to hold him steady, and brought the blade to his throat.

  ‘No!’ you shouted somewhere behind me. ‘No!’

  But what choice did I have?

  XIII

  We rowed you away from the Scourge of the Celestial Seas, the flag of the Red Flag Fleet wilting from the mizzenmast. Oars splashed through the waves and seabirds swooped and soared in the clouded sky above, and we rowed as though the rhythm of our strokes, our heaving chests, had sent us into a trance. My arms were loose and shaking as I pulled the oars. Though I had rinsed my hands, they still looked drenched in Ah Jack’s blood.

  Now in the robes of a galley slave, you were nothing like the scholar I had met in Fanqui Town. Bound up with rope and dumped in the bottom of the boat, you glared above your gag, your eyes deranged. Ah Jack’s head was in the burlap sack beside you, stained where the severed part had bled. The seawater that leaked into the boat, sloshing around our feet, had his blood in it too. Turtle Li sat on the bench above you, smoking his pipe, his flintlock aimed at your head. ‘Behave,’ he warned, ‘or your head’s going in that bag with your friend’s.’

  We rowed up the Pearl River Bay to Hermit Crab Cove, then pulled the boat through the shoals and up the shore. We hid the boat and untied your ropes, and lent you a broken, splintery oar for a staff. We of the Scourge were wobbly at first on dry land; we were so used to pitching our weight to counter the up and down of waves. Mud squelched and splattered our staggery legs as we trudged over the mudflats. The rickety shacks of fisherfolk and pagodas stood out on hilltops in the distance, and further inland the scenery changed to lush green paddy fields, watered by streams of the Pearl River and tended to by crouching farmers in rice-planting hats. ‘Hurry up, cripple,’ growled Turtle Li, the muzzle of his gun prodding your back as you limped. Stinky Fu and Ah Xi had our rice and water, and Ah Chen and Scabby Rui each had a flintlock to ward off other bandits. Turtle Li had ordered me to carry Ah Jack’s head in the sack and, as we trudged on, the memory of those eyes of his, begging for his life, haunted my mind.

  At dusk the sky began to spit down on our heads, and Turtle Li cursed and spat back at the sky. Though the plan had been to hike overnight, the outlaws of the Red Flag Fleet weren’t the sort for a gruelling slog through the cold and rain, and we detoured to a rocky outcrop Turtle Li knew from his time as a land bandit, where there was a cave.

  We built a fire in the cave, under a hole like a chimney, borrowing driftwood left by those who’d sheltered there before. Scabby Rui bound you up with ropes again, and dumped you in the shadows at the back of the cave, with the creatures that scuttle and bite. Though the stench of rotting meat was coming from the burlap sack, Ah Jack’s head was thrown back there too. ‘So Ah Tom won’t be lonesome,’ grinned Turtle Li. Back in the shadows you glared above the gag, looking keen to rip out his throat.

  Stinky Fu heated some rice over the fire and we dug in with grubby hands. When our supper was eaten, they passed round a flask of grog, grimacing as they swigged. The time had come for me to reveal what I’d stolen from Chief Maggot. So I brought the wooden box out of my robes and opened the lid. I spoke for the first time since the Scourge: ‘Look what I got.’

  Turtle Li’s eyes went round, and he choked on his liquor. ‘How did you come by that?’ he spluttered.

  ‘I found it on the deck.’

  ‘You don’t find foreign mud lying about,’ said Turtle Li. ‘You stole it.’

  ‘That’s Chief Yang’s,’ added Ah Chen. ‘He’ll flay you alive.’

  I said nothing and shrank back, leaving the opium out for the taking. They were opium-fiends, every last one, and the opium was here and Yang and his jackals were not. There’s no harm in smoking a pinch, they all soon agreed. Turtle Li stabbed his stubby finger at my chest.

  ‘Anyone gets done for this, it’s you, Tanka boy. Got that?’ Then he pounced on the opium and stuffed some in his pipe.

  And so they smoked and spent an hour or so bragging about the merchant ships they’d sailed on, and the faraway lands they’d been to, and guffawing about the sinner’s boils they’d caught off the whores they’d poked. Smoke fogged the cave as they puffed on pipe after pipe and I had to crawl to the opening to clear my head.

  The opium stole away their brains, or what they had of them, right before my eyes. They smoked themselves into a stupor, then stared into the fire, hypnotized by the leap of flames. When they spoke it was the same foolishness Three Pipes Qin used to come out with after a pipe or two:

  ‘I remember this cave from before I was born,’ said Ah Xi. ‘This cave’s where all humans come from before they are born . . .’

  ‘When we’re back on the Scourge, I’ll challenge Chief Yang to a duel and win,’ boasted Turtle Li. ‘Then I’ll be head of the Red Flag Fleet. ’Tis the prophecy of the seagull with the ruby eyes!’

  What a relief it was when one by one they lay down their opiummuddled heads and slept. Turtle Li was the last to go.

  ‘Anyone’s getting done for this,’ he slurred as he stabbed his finger at me, ‘it’s you, Tanka boy . . .’

  Then he was out cold, gone from the here and now.

  In the gloom at the back of the cave, your eyes blinked in the dark.

  XIV

  I watched them by the light of the dying fire. Though they were strewn lifeless as bodies from a shipwreck, I watched to make sure they were properly out. Then, shuddering at the risk I was taking, I tugged Turtle Li’s dagger out of the scabbard on his belt. At the back of the cave, you were wriggling on your side. Nervous you would wake the bandits, I crawled over and hacked through your bindings with Turtle Li’s cutlass, breathing deeply to steady my shaking hands. You ripped off your gag and gasped. Then you grabbed Ah Jack’s head in the sack and hobbled over to the sleeping bandits. You reached for Ah Chen’s flintlock and limped out of the cave.

  Silently we hobbled through the mud up the Pearl River Bay. You were using the broken, splintery oar as a staff and had thrown the flintlock in with Ah Jack’s head and slung the sack over your shoulder. Under the cloudy and drizzly night sky we went as fast as our legs could go, Tanka fisherboy and Red-haired Devil, knowing the more distance between us and the cave of sea bandits the better.

  Grieving over Ah Jack, you didn’t say a word as I led the way over the mudflats to the other British devils in Wangpo. But fleeing from the Scourge had lifted my spirits, and my heart had quickened with the eagerness to go back to Ma Qin’s wash boat and show them I was alive. First and Second Sisters would shed some tears to see me again, and Ma Qin would tell me off for getting captured by sea bandits. ‘How was I cursed with such a fool for a son!’ she’d scold. ‘No more seafaring for you, Ah Qin!’ Then I would work as a porter in Canton harbour and forget the Scourge and lose my sea-ruffian ways. I’d do my duty as first-born son and look after Ma Qin and my sisters, and never leave the Pearl River again. I’d had enough of the sea for this life, no matter what the Sea Goddess had foreseen.

  We hiked through the mud of the Pearl River Bay until sunrise, when we stopped to catch our breath. We could see Wangpo in the distance and, though you were soon to be with your British-devil kin again, you looked miserably at the sun rising over the sea and shimmering on the waves. ‘Are you thirsty, Ah
Tom?’ I asked, wondering where we might find some drinking water. You did not respond but dropped the sack you’d been carrying on the muddy ground, reached in and pulled out the flintlock. Then you spun around, and pain cracked in my skull as you hit me with the butt. You cocked the gun and upped the barrel level with my chest.

  ‘Get back,’ you hissed. Your eyes were possessed by fury, your finger on the trigger. Clutching my head, nearly blinded with pain, I stumbled back a step.

  ‘What is it, Ah Tom?’ I asked. ‘What have I done?’

  You glared and nodded at Ah Jack’s head in the burlap sack. ‘Jack was a good man. Now I have to tell his wife and children that he is dead. That his head was cut off on a pirate ship and his remains are in the South China Sea.’

  ‘Chief Yang ordered me to,’ I cried. ‘I didn’t want to. I had no choice.’

  You shook your head in disgust, and I saw no trace of the kind and decent Ah Tom I’d met seven years ago in Fanqui Town. Not much difference between a civilized man and a savage. A few days at sea and a skirmish with bandits can turn the former into the latter. Even the likes of you.

  ‘Get back,’ you sneered. ‘You Chinamen are all the same.’ Then you pulled the trigger of the gun.

  24

  Bruises

  THE RUSH-HOUR CROWDS disappear into the subway; the masses, shrieking into cell phones, treading on heels and fighting their way through the scrum. Stalled in traffic, Wang watches them, his head throbbing with the engine. There’s no harmonious society, he thinks, only the chaos of people with crooked teeth and no manners, trampling on each other.

  Deciding to call it a day, Wang turns off the for-hire sign and moves with the traffic down Workers Stadium Road. Near the exhaust-blackened iron and concrete of Long Rainbow Bridge, Wang hears screeching brakes, the crunch of metal and a woman’s scream. One by one the cars ahead of him stagger to a halt, and the drivers slam out and hurry over to the intersection. Wang stays behind the wheel, not wanting to run and stare. But it isn’t long before the strange anxiety of missing out has him abandoning his car like everybody else.

  A crowd of fifty or so has gathered beside a 707 bus, people at the back standing on toes and straining for a better view. Wang can’t see much, but a report of the accident makes its way through the crowd. The 707 knocked into a cyclist and sent him soaring through the air, to land metres away from the crumpled metal of his bike. The boy’s head has cracked against the asphalt, and those who can see him are certain he is dead. Wang can’t see the cyclist, only the driver of the now-empty 707, a fiftyish man with a deathly pale face, his thin wail of protest rising above the crowd. He flew into me! He wasn’t looking where he was going! The driver pleads his innocence as though the bystanders are the jury at his trial, and he must prove he is not culpable there and then. But the jury are not convinced. ‘He was driving like a maniac,’ an old man near Wang remarks. ‘He should be locked up.’ Others grumble in agreement.

  The epidemic of staring infects more people on their way home from work. Some turn their heads as they walk by, looking casually at the blood-splattered scene without breaking their stride. Others push to the front of the crowd, one man holding up his cell phone to photograph the dead cyclist and his mangled bike. ‘Seventy per cent of people in China are immoral,’ Baldy Zhang had once joked to Wang. ‘The other thirty per cent are screwed over. That’s a fact from the National Bureau of Statistics.’ Watching the jostling crowd, Wang almost believes Baldy Zhang’s statistics, and he goes back to his taxi, wondering if he is part of the seventy per cent too.

  When he’s back behind the wheel, the driver of the BMW on his right slams on his horn without letting up. Hooonnnnkk. The honking gets on Wang’s nerves, and he leans out of the passenger-side window and yells, ‘Hey! Cut that out!’ The driver, a teenager in a baseball cap, glances at him, glances away. He blasts the horn again. Hoooonnnnnkk. Leaving the keys in the ignition, Wang gets out. The driver looks up nonchalantly at Wang’s approach. His window is open and, through the heat and traffic fumes, Wang smells new leather upholstery and the perfume of the girl in the passenger seat, who is batting her mascara-clogged lashes at him. Wang sees the contempt in the BMW driver’s eyes. That the scruffy, middle-aged taxi driver isn’t worthy of his respect.

  ‘What’s your problem?’ the teenager asks.

  ‘You,’ says Wang. ‘Stop honking on your horn.’

  ‘Why?’ the boy pretends confusion. ‘There’s no law against it, is there? It’s not illegal.’

  Wang points to the intersection. An ambulance has now pulled up, paramedics bringing out a stretcher as several policemen herd the crowd away.

  ‘Someone has been knocked down and killed,’ Wang says. ‘Show some respect, will you?’

  The boy shrugs, his conscience unmoved. The death of a man twenty metres down the road is of no consequence to him, beyond the inconvenience of a traffic jam.

  ‘Too bad for him. He should’ve looked where he was going.’ Then, ignoring Wang and staring through the windscreen, he slams down on the horn again. Hooonnnnkk. The girlfriend swats his arm and giggles at him to stop. Wang is sick of these Little Emperors, with their bulging wallets and expensive cars Daddy bought them.

  ‘You’re a piece of shit,’ he says, when the honking stops. ‘You know you’re a shit, deep down. That’s why you act the way you do.’

  The teenager laughs.

  ‘You know nothing about me,’ he says, pressing a button so his window rolls up.

  Wang stoops and stares through the rising barrier of glass. When the window is nearly sealed, he hears the teenager mutter, ‘Loser.’ Blood rushes in Wang’s ears, and he slams his fist into the tinted, shuddering glass. ‘Oh my God!’ squeals the girl, jolting in her seat. The boy sparks the ignition and the BMW lurches forwards a metre or so. The roaring in Wang’s head subsides and he stands there, his knuckles throbbing.

  Workers Stadium Road is moving again, and the police are directing traffic around the cordoned-off area. The white van behind Wang’s taxi is beeping and shouting at him to move, and Wang goes back to his car, confused by the driver’s anger. He had confronted the teenager on behalf of everyone there. Why is the van driver acting like he’s in the wrong?

  Baldy Zhang hunches over noodles in broth with chopped-up sheep’s intestines, feeding before the long and solitary night shift ahead. Besides the bowl of noodles are Baldy Zhang’s garlic cloves and a half-smoked pack of Dongfanghong, the favourite brand of his hero, Mao Zedong (‘I know millions died because of Mao and his policies. But he’s still the greatest leader China’s ever had!’). The night is sibilant with whirring insect wings. The bug-zapper crackles, electrocuting those lured by its fluorescence to charred carcasses.

  ‘Your mood’s as foul as a woman with the curse,’ Baldy Zhang remarks through a mouthful of offal. ‘What’s up?’

  A Sichuan kitchen girl, hugely pregnant, waddles over with a plate of scallion pancakes. She dumps the plate in front of Wang then arches her lower back, pushing her bump out and sighing before waddling away. Baldy Zhang takes one of Wang’s pancakes with his chopsticks. Tears into it with his teeth and chews.

  ‘I need somewhere to stay,’ Wang says.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Yida has kicked me out.’

  Baldy Zhang guffaws, spraying the table. ‘What’ve you done? You been screwing around?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She cheated on you?’

  Has she? Wang is not sure. Baldy Zhang sighs and shakes his head.

  ‘Here’s my advice, Wang Jun. Knock her about, then shaft her till she’s bleeding and senseless. She’ll respect you for it. Society had it right back in the days of foot-binding and concubines. I don’t know why they had to go changing the laws. Back then, women behaved . . .’

  ‘You ever been married?’ Wang asks.

  ‘Never,’ Baldy Zhang says. ‘“Marriage is the grave of love,” as they say. Mind you, I’ve never been in love either. Women are more trou
ble than they’re worth. A bachelor’s life is the life for me . . .’

  Baldy Zhang furrows his heavy ledge of brow and slaps at a mosquito biting his scalp. ‘Bastard,’ he spits at the smear of blood and dead insect in his palm. Wang nods politely, thinking ‘bachelor’s life’ captures none of the bleakness of Baldy Zhang’s existence.

  ‘Can I stay at your place for a night or two?’ he asks.

  ‘Well . . .’ Baldy Zhang digs his little finger into his ear, wiggles it about. ‘. . . You can’t stay for free. There’s the cost of overheads . . . Electricity for the light and fan. Water for the shower. Gas for the stove. It adds up . . . ’ He pulls out the long fingernail and inspects the contents. ‘Twenty kuai per night sound reasonable to you? I’m giving you a discount, by the way, on account of the rough time your wife is giving you.’

  ‘That sounds very reasonable,’ says Wang, pulling two ten-RMB notes out of his wallet.

  ‘There’s three bottles of Red Star erguotuo in the kitchen,’ says Baldy Zhang, pocketing the notes. ‘I’ll know if one goes missing.’

  ‘I won’t go near them,’ promises Wang.

  Old men stroll about the Maizidian compound, vests rolled up over Buddha bellies they slap proudly in the summer heat. The security guard naps in his booth, his cap on the desk beside his drowsing head. Air-conditioning units weep down the side of Building 16, dripping on Wang’s shoulder as he goes inside.

  In the stairwell, Wang sees the stuffed rubbish bags dumped outside Apartment 404. He can imagine Yida storming about the bedroom, emptying drawers of socks and underwear into the black bin liners, breaking into a sweat in her determination to be rid of him. Wang can imagine her grim satisfaction as she knotted the bags and slung them out like trash.

  Audience laughter roars behind the door. Yida wants him to stay out. She wants him to take the bags and slink away like a dog with its tail between its legs. Well, too bad. He wants to say goodbye to Echo. But, as he slides the key in the lock, Wang can’t shake off the feeling he is trespassing.