The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

‘But he told me she was dead.’

  Lin Hong raises her eyebrows. ‘Why are you so upset? Your father said she was a bad, abusive mother and you were better off thinking she was dead. So what if she died later than you thought? She’s dead now, isn’t she? What difference does it make?’

  ‘I want to see the death certificate,’ Wang says. ‘Bring it to me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Bring it to me!’

  Lin Hong gets up and goes to the study. She returns and hands Wang a green booklet. Wang looks inside the government document, stamped with red stars and filled out in ballpoint pen by a small-town clerk. It’s all there. His mother’s name, age, weight, blood type. The cause of death is cited as hypothermia. Place of death, a town called Langxiang. Why Heilongjiang? he wonders. She had been a Sent-down Youth in Heilongjiang in the 1960s and had hated it. Wang’s eyes blur with tears at the thought of Shuxiang freezing to death in a small northern town. At the thought of himself at the age of twelve, under cold damp sheets in the boarding-school dormitory on the day his father told him she had died.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Lin Hong asks. ‘Wasn’t she a bad mother? Didn’t she abuse you? Your father told me he once walked in on the two of you in bed together! For a mother to do that to her son is unforgivable . . .’

  Wang puts the death certificate in his pocket and stands up. Tears are sliding down his cheeks. ‘You will never see Echo again,’ he tells Lin Hong. ‘You are dead to her now. You are dead to all of us.’

  He leaves the room before his stepmother can say another word.

  He goes into the bedroom and flips on the light. Wang Hu is awake in his bed, pillows propping up his grey, wrinkled head, the duvet up his chest. He looks nervously at his son. He has been listening.

  ‘Why did you tell me she was dead?’ Wang asks.

  Wang Hu doesn’t answer him but shrinks back against the pillows. But Wang is not fooled by the defenceless-old-man act. He knows what his father is really like.

  ‘Why did you lie about her?’ he shouts.

  He reaches for a wooden dresser near the door and pushes it over so the drawers slide out and the large oval mirror shatters as it crashes to the floor. His father’s eyes go wide with fright. He parts his dribbling lips and a low moan comes out. He tugs on the duvet with his semi-paralysed hand and pulls it over his head. Pathetic, Wang thinks. He has no pity for him. Reverse the effects of the stroke, restore his ability to walk and talk, and he’d be back to his bullying ways tomorrow. By rights, he should drag his father out of bed. He should drag him about and pull his shoulder out of joint, like his father did to him when he was twelve.

  ‘Get out! Or I will call the police!’ Lin Hong rushes past Wang, to stand between him and old man hiding under the bedcovers. She waves a cell phone at Wang. ‘I am dialling now! I will tell them you are having a psychotic episode and they will throw you back in the hospital!’

  The dial pad beeps as she presses the keys. Wang shakes his head at his stepmother, and steps back. ‘You deserve each other,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t wish any worse for you both than the lives you have now.’

  Then he turns and walks out of the apartment, slamming the door.

  Out in the street, he is shaking. They are not humans but monsters hiding behind human masks. He won’t speak to his father for as long as he lives. Or as long as his father lives. Whoever is first to die.

  26

  Train Station

  WANG HAD SHOWERED, dragged a razor over his stubble and changed before meeting Echo, hoping to counter Yida’s slander by looking the part of a respectable father. But he’s not sure this has worked. Opposite him, Echo is paler than usual, with dark circles around eyes that don’t seem to trust him. Since leaving her and Yida, he has not seen her as often as he said. Over the past fortnight he has seen her three times, and each time Echo has been more like a stranger to him. She hands the menu back, solemn in her T-shirt and dungarees.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Wang says. ‘You can order whatever you like . . .’

  But she’s not even tempted by fizzy drinks, so he orders for them both and then asks in an over-bright voice about school and her plans for the summer holidays. Echo scratches at a mosquito bite on her arm and gazes at the table of sunburnt American tourists and the laoban in polo shirts and suit trousers clinking glasses of baijiu to celebrate a business deal. When the dishes arrive Echo nibbles at a lamb kebab, while Wang eats from an earthenware pot of spicy chicken and potatoes. He swigs some beer from his glass and belches gently.

  ‘How’s your ma?’ he asks.

  Echo looks guiltily at the half-eaten kebab on her plate. She says in a small voice, ‘She says I’m not to talk to you about her.’

  ‘Really?’ Echo reaches for a napkin and Wang frowns at her nails, bitten to the quick, the cuticles ragged and raw. ‘What’s she been saying about me?’ he asks. ‘Don’t worry. You can tell me. She won’t find out . . .’

  Echo doesn’t look up as she folds the napkin into origami.

  ‘I can’t say.’

  Wang smiles tightly. He should shut up. He shouldn’t drag Echo into this. But when it comes to Yida he has no restraint, he can’t do what’s right.

  ‘Bad-mouthing me every chance she gets, eh?’ Wang says. ‘Is she still saying that I am ill?’ Echo puts her origami crane on the table, looking miserable. ‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with me,’ Wang says. ‘Your mother is making it up. You don’t think I am ill, do you?’

  Echo looks up at her father. ‘No,’ she says quietly.

  Wang is stung by her lack of conviction. ‘Listen, Echo, there are two sides to every story. There are lots of bad things I could tell you about your mother. But I won’t, because I don’t want to upset you.’ Wang drinks the last of his beer, choking back the urge to rant on. Then he pushes back his chair and leaves the table.

  In the bathroom he splashes water on his face over the sink. He hasn’t slept properly in days and is in a dark, irritable mood. How much had his mother suffered during the last two years of her life? Why was she homeless on the streets of a town in Heilongjiang? These questions go around his mind at night, sabotaging sleep. He wipes his face with a scratchy paper towel from the dispenser. After leaving his father’s, he called Yida to warn her to keep Echo away from them, and explained why. Yida needed no persuading. That his father and Lin Hong were despicable was one thing on which they agreed.

  When Wang returns to the table, Echo is looking through one of her own comics, illustrated in black and white.

  ‘Can I see?’ Wang asks.

  Echo hands over the stapled sheets, and Wang flips through them. The Watcher is the title of the comic, and it is about a girl called Moon-bird who is stalked by a dark shadow only she can see. The shadow, cross-hatched in ink and swarming with strange, demoniac eyes, lurks in the corner of each panel, watching Moonbird in the classroom, on the way home from school, and in her bedroom at night. No one – not her parents, teachers or classmates – sees the shadow except Moonbird, whose isolation worsens her fear. Eventually Moonbird confronts the shadow. ‘Who are you?’ she asks. ‘What do you want?’ The second-to-last panel shows Moonbird disappearing into the shadow. Whether the shadow is devouring her or she is entering of her own volition, Wang can’t tell. The last panel shows Moonbird’s mother and father calling for their missing child. The End. Wang hands the comic back, unsettled.

  ‘What a sad story,’ he says. ‘You’re only eight. Why don’t you write a story with a happy ending?’

  ‘It’s just a story,’ Echo says.

  She stuffs The Watcher back in her shoulder bag. Seeing he has hurt her, Wang says, ‘The illustrations are really good. I don’t know where you get your artistic talent from. Not from me or your ma . . .’ Echo shrugs and pushes her half-eaten kebab away. ‘Look, Echo . . . I know we are going through a rough time right now,’ Wang says, ‘but don’t worry too much about it. Things will get better soon. Don’t upset yo
urself.’

  Echo winces and puts her hand on her stomach. ‘My belly hurts,’ she tells her father. ‘Can we go?’

  Not sure how to put things right, Wang calls the waitress for the bill.

  Morning. Wang is woken by the slammed door and beer bottles clinking in a bag. ‘Off!’ orders Baldy Zhang, kicking the mattress. Wang drags himself up and rummages through his bin liner of clothes for a crumpled shirt. He is so exhausted after his night of sleeplessness, that if he had a gun he’d put himself out of his misery. He’s so exhausted, even Baldy Zhang notices.

  ‘Sleepless night, eh, Wang Jun?’ he says, grinning with sulphur-coloured teeth. ‘Still angsting about your wife and kid, eh? Forget ’em, I say. You’re better off without them!’

  Wang goes into the bathroom, throws water on his face, and drags a toothbrush about in his mouth. He knows he should take the day off work, but can’t think of where to go. At least driving the taxi will be a distraction from his wretched state of mind.

  ‘Don’t crash the car today,’ Baldy Zhang calls from the mattress, as Wang picks up his keys and walks out the door. ‘You’re paying for the damage if you do!’

  Behind the wheel, buzzing with nicotine and caffeinated energy drinks, Wang barely feels the steering wheel in his hands or the pedals under his feet. His driving is shaky at first, but autopilot soon takes over, controlling his steering and braking. Wang works on automaton too, picking up fares and driving them to their destinations, as though in a surreal dream of a working day.

  By late afternoon, he can’t remember one thing about the ten hours he has worked. He can’t remember where in Beijing he has driven to, or any of the passengers he has had. So when he sees Zeng through the windscreen, in the crowds outside Beijing West station, he thinks he must be hallucinating. He swerves over to the kerb anyway, and slams on the brakes, sending the man in the passenger seat lurching to the dashboard. Wang then snatches up the keys and bounds out the door. ‘Where are you going?’ his passenger calls, aggrieved. Wang ignores him. He runs past construction workers digging up the roadside and fights his way through the station crowds, determined not to lose him. ‘Zeng Yan! Stop!’

  Zeng Yan, backpack on his back, turns around, and Wang is shocked for a moment that he is not a trick of the light or the mind, but flesh and blood and real. He stares at Zeng and his stomach turns over with the sense that this is no coincidence. But how did Zeng know where he would be driving his taxi that day? How had Zeng timed his movements so he would be in Wang’s line of sight at that moment in time? Who is Zeng exactly? Smoker’s wrinkles deepen around Zeng’s eyes, dazzled by the sun. Then he shades his shrinking pupils with his hand.

  ‘Wang Jun? Is that you?’ Zeng breaks into a wide smile. ‘I just got off the train from Guangzhou. Forty-eight hours in a hard seat. What are you doing here?’

  Wang doesn’t smile back. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  Travellers leaving Beijing West station push past them, fatigued from long journeys on trains with strangers and now stumbling out on cramped legs into the traffic-honking chaos of Beijing. They have reached the point of exhaustion where other people are no longer people. They bump against Wang and Zeng. ‘Stop blocking the way,’ says an old man, hunched under heavy bags. Zeng looks strung out too, and gaunter than the last time Wang saw him. He nods, Wang’s hostility chasing away his smile.

  ‘Feifei said you were looking for me at the salon. I was back in my hometown for a few weeks. Wang Jun, my mother died. She had ovarian cancer . . .’

  My mother has cancer . . . Zeng had used this story on the CEOs when he was a nightclub host, to con them out of money for ‘hospital fees’. Wang doesn’t waste time on his deceit.

  ‘Why did you send the photos to my wife’s phone?’

  Zeng looks confused. ‘Huh?’

  A man pushing a cart of wholesale clothes cuts between them. Zeng backs out of his way, only to be shunted by someone rushing for a train. He holds on to his backpack straps, swaying on his feet.

  ‘The photos you took with the hidden camera in the back room. The photos you sent to her phone.’

  Zeng looks at him blankly. ‘What are you talking about? What photos?’

  ‘You know what photos,’ Wang says. ‘The ones you sent to my wife’s phone!’

  Zeng stares at Wang as though he is speaking another language. He rakes a hand through his jagged hair. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about. I never sent any photos to your wife’s phone. I don’t know her phone number. I don’t even know her name.’

  Horns beep and a pneumatic drill starts up in the road, shattering concrete. As Wang stares back at Zeng, he feels a pulsing in his temple and tension mounting behind the eyes. Somebody treads on his heel, and he glares over his shoulder. But the offender has merged back into the masses streaming around them; chattering, smoking cigarettes, squinting up at the train timetable or down at their phones. He turns back to Zeng.

  ‘Because of your photos, my wife and I have separated. She threw me out.’

  Zeng frowns as though concerned. He reaches out the arm he scarred by punching out a window many years ago, to comfort Wang, his hand hovering near his shoulder.

  ‘Do you need somewhere to stay?’ he asks. ‘You can come and stay with me. You can stay as long as you like . . .’

  Wang sees the longing in Zeng’s eyes and his heart quickens in spite of himself. He resents Zeng then, for the complicated feelings he wrings out of him. The jackhammer continues to break up the road, and the tension behind Wang’s eyes sharpens into pain. ‘Are you crazy?’ he says. ‘Do you really think I want to stay with you at the barber’s? After you broke up my marriage?’

  Zeng shakes his head at this. He opens his mouth and hesitates for a second. Then he takes a breath and says, ‘Your marriage was broken long before your wife saw any photos. Your marriage was broken from day one. I see men like you all the time, Wang Jun. Men who are living a lie. Men who think they can get away with hiding who they are. But we are born this way, and to deny it is to betray yourself.’

  Though Wang can feel his own pounding heart and panting breath, there is something disembodying about his rage, knocking him out of himself. Though he can feel the thud of Zeng’s flesh and bones beneath his knuckles, he hovers above them, watching one man striking another, throwing punch after punch, as his victim fends off his blows. When it is over, Wang stumbles back from Zeng dizzy and out of breath, shaking out his numb and tingling hand. Zeng is bending over with both hands on the bright mess of red streaming out of his nose, splashing down his chin and vest. Though it had lasted only a few seconds, Wang’s fit of rage had attracted a crowd like a magnet pulling iron filings. Those standing around them stare at Wang in shock and fear.

  ‘Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?’ a boy in a KFC uniform asks Zeng.

  Zeng shakes his head.

  ‘Someone should call the police,’ says a girl with a fake Louis Vuitton bag over her arm, looking nervously at Wang.

  ‘No no no,’ Zeng says. ‘Don’t call the police. He’s my friend. He didn’t mean it.’

  Wang nearly laughs. ‘We’re not friends. And here’s some advice for chasing men in the future. Don’t write them letters. Don’t stalk them, and don’t break up their marriages. It’s the wrong way to go about things.’

  Zeng says nothing in his defence. Blood seeps through the fingers clamped to his nose, and there’s hurt and confusion in his eyes.

  ‘Now get out of my sight,’ Wang says.

  But it’s Wang who turns to walk away, pushing back through the crowds, bumping into a woman carrying a toddler in split pants and mumbling an apology. When he gets back to his taxi, the passenger-side door is wide open, and the passenger gone, leaving 20 RMB on the meter, unpaid. Wang gets back in the driver’s seat and lights a cigarette with shaking hands, his knuckles grazed and smeared with his own blood and Zeng Yan’s. He inhales long and deep, but the lungfuls of smoke don’t calm him. The confrontation has
changed nothing, of that he is sure. Nothing short of death or a jail sentence will keep Zeng away.

  27

  The Fire

  NIGHT. OUT IN the street, traffic murmurs. Halogen lamps glow through the curtains, and the bantering of drunks rises up from below. The July night is hot, and Wang can’t sleep. He smokes a cigarette on the mattress and watches the spirals of smoke rising up, then diffusing to the corners of the room.

  Knock. Knock. Knock . . . Someone has the wrong door, Wang thinks. No one ever visits Baldy Zhang. Wang ignores the knocking and wills the caller to go away. But the striking of the knuckles becomes louder, more demanding. Knock. Knock. Knock . . . Knock. Knock. Knock . . . Wang stubs out his cigarette and drags himself to the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ he calls, pulling down the latch.

  The woman standing in the hall is in her forties, shabby as a poor migrant worker, with threads of grey in her hair, face as round and pale and impassive as the moon. Wang knows at once there’s something not right about her. Though the night is sweltering, over 30 degrees, she wears a padded Mao jacket and looks cold to the touch. Her piercing eyes settle on Wang, waiting for him to recognize her. When recognition comes, Wang is light-headed, and he holds the door frame to steady himself.

  ‘Ma?’ he says.

  Shuxiang nods. Wang speechlessly pulls the door wider and she walks in. Under the 30-watt bulb she looks younger than Wang remembers, and he understands that while he has aged twenty years, Shuxiang has stayed the same. He is catching her up. Wang drags a chair over for her. Though old and creaky, the chair makes no sound as Shuxiang lowers her substanceless body on to the seat.

  ‘Can I have some water?’ she asks. ‘I have walked very far today, and I am thirsty.’

  Wang’s throat constricts at the sound of his deceased mother’s voice, and his hands are shaking as he pours a cup of boiled water from the thermos by the mattress. He passes the cup to her, careful not to brush her hands, which look icy and repellent to the touch. He watches his mother take cautious sips, as though the water is not room temperature but scalding.