The Incarnations

by Susan Barker

  As the elevator pings shut on another group of guests, a woman in her late fifties or early sixties shuffles out of the door leading from the stairwell, a shabby woman, whose padded Mao jacket and worn trousers remind Lin Hong of the days when everyone owned one set of hand-sewn clothes. Lin Hong looks at the woman’s lined skin and thinning hair, brittle enough to break in the teeth of a comb. Who in their right mind would climb ten flights of stairs in the July heat? The woman, who is not breathless or perspiring from the climb, moves with a slightly arthritic gait towards the open door of Lin Hong’s home.

  ‘Excuse me. Who are you?’ Lin Hong asks, her eyes polite but her mind wanting to shoo the woman back down the stairs.

  The woman does not answer, but wanders into the apartment as though Lin Hong is someone of no importance at all. She must be one of Yida’s relations from Anhui, Lin Hong thinks, wrinkling her nose as the woman traipses her mud-caked sandals down her hall. These peasants are so rude and uncivilized. Then the taxi drivers stumble out, headed to a local Sichuan restaurant for more booze and spicy food, and the unknown guest is forgotten as Lin Hong chases after them, calling her goodbyes and inviting them to come again.

  On the sofa in her formal black dress, Echo watches the last of the guests gossiping and stuffing their mouths with the left-over snacks on the trays on the sideboard. She watches her grandfather squirming in his wheelchair as though his incontinence pad needs to be changed and she is wondering whether to raise the alarm when the downtrodden, grey-headed woman enters the room. Echo lurches with recognition and fear. What is the Watcher doing here? At her father’s wake? Echo hadn’t thought the Watcher could exist so openly out of the shadows, or the shrubbery in the park, or the shopping crowds. But here she is now. In her grandfather’s apartment, for everyone to see.

  The Watcher gazes about the living room, but her eyes don’t widen in envy and admiration like the other guests’. She heads directly to the altar, nodding curtly at Wang Hu as she passes his wheelchair. Wang Hu wheezes as though with the onset of an asthma attack then keels over, wracked by choking, hacking coughs. The guests rush over, crowding him. ‘Slap him on the back!’ they cry. ‘Bring water!’ ‘Loosen his tie!’

  The drama of the choking man does not distract the Watcher as she stands at the shrine and, like the guests before her, contemplates the young man in the photograph. But, unlike the other guests, the Watcher starts to weep. From the sofa, Echo watches, realizing that the Watcher is only the second person she has seen crying for her father. The first was her mother, who, when the police informed her of the ‘bad news’, crashed on the hospital floor and sobbed on her hands and knees, like a wounded animal. The Watcher, however, is silent in her grief, tears streaming down her cheeks. She weeps for a few moments longer then reaches into her Mao jacket for a large manila envelope. The Watcher stands with the envelope in front of the altar, as though debating whether to leave it as an offering or not. She decides against it and turns away.

  The Watcher stares at Echo with her piercing gaze, and Echo shrinks back. Caught up in the commotion of Wang Hu’s seizure of hacking coughs (‘Call an ambulance! Wang Hu is choking!’), none of the guests notice the strange latecomer approaching the daughter of the deceased, who is wide-eyed with fright. Echo has never seen the Watcher close up before. She can see the crow’s feet wreathing her eyes and the tears glistening on her cheeks. She can see the large mending stitches on her jacket and her bedraggled trouser hems. The Watcher’s accent, when she speaks, is not what Echo expected. Not that of an uneducated migrant from the countryside, but that of a well-educated person from Beijing.

  ‘I knew your father,’ the Watcher says. ‘I knew him very well. Better than anyone.’

  Echo does not believe this. If this woman knew her father better than anyone, then why did she only ever watch him from afar? Why didn’t she ever speak to him, or say hello? The Watcher is lying, but Echo holds her tongue.

  ‘I know you too, Echo,’ the Watcher says. ‘I know you better than you know yourself. Recently, I have been dreaming of you.’

  Echo is silent. She dreams of the Watcher too. She dreams of the Watcher stalking her through the streets and lurking outside the door of 404. She dreams of the Watcher standing in the corner of her bedroom at night. And now the Watcher has stepped out of her dreams and into waking life, looming over Echo, smelling of old age and homelessness. Though her eyes are shrouded in wrinkles, they are sharp as knives, dissecting Echo with their gaze.

  ‘The dreams show me who you were in the past,’ the Watcher says. ‘Once, you were a sorceress, and then a Mongol warrior with a battleaxe-scarred face. Once, you were Emperor and ruler of all under heaven, and then a Red Guard called Long March.’

  Echo shudders. The Watcher is mentally ill, she realizes. Though her eyes are shrewd and intelligent, her mind is deranged.

  ‘And now in this life,’ the Watcher says, ‘you are my grandchild.’

  Though the madwoman is lying, Echo recoils at the thought of being her granddaughter.

  ‘Here,’ the Watcher says, handing her two brown envelopes. ‘One letter I wrote to your father, before he died. The other I wrote for you. It’s the story of your first incarnation. And there will be more, Echo . . . For it’s my duty to enlighten you about your past.’

  Echo accepts the envelopes with both hands.

  ‘Now you are only eight years old, and too young to understand my letters. But, one day, when you are older, you will read them, and you will know about the bond that has entwined us for over a thousand years. You are very clever, Echo. It won’t be long.’

  The Watcher turns and leaves, and Granny Ping (her Olympic Security Volunteer armband strapped over her sleeve) looks up from Wang Hu’s wheelchair and gasps, ‘Even the dead have come to pay their respects . . .’ The Watcher walks out of the living room as Lin Hong walks back in. The women brush shoulders in the doorway.

  ‘Lin Hong! Your husband won’t stop coughing!’ wails a guest. ‘What shall we do?’

  Lin Hong ignores Wang Hu. She marches over to Echo. ‘Who was that woman? What did she give you? Let me see!’

  Echo leaps up from the sofa, hugging the envelopes tightly to her chest. ‘No!’ she shouts, with such force that Lin Hong steps back.

  As Echo runs to the spare room, Lin Hong decides there are too many guests about to make a scene. She will discipline Echo later. The patriarchs of the Wang family are either crippled or dead, and she is in charge now. And as much as she adores Echo, it is important that she keep the child in line. No doubt Yida’s breast milk poisoned Echo as a baby, contaminating her with her backwards Anhui ways.

  ‘Lin Hong! Your husband!’

  Lin Hong smiles pleasantly and turns to the crowd panicking over the choking man. ‘Slap him on the back a few times. The harder the better. That will shut him up.’

  Echo goes into the guest room, where her mother is unconscious, sprawled with her face in the pillow under lank and unwashed curls. Yida’s dress is hitched up over her buttocks and, though there’s no one about to see, Echo tugs the dress down over her knickers. Seeing her mother like this, drunk and insensible, is worrying to her. How will she stand up to Lin Hong when she is so weak?

  Echo kneels and reaches under the bed for a large metal security box. She turns the combination lock, clicks open the lid and deposits the brown envelopes inside with the others. Her mother gave her the letters. She said it was her inheritance from her father. ‘Your only inheritance,’ she had laughed. ‘Your father wrote them. Once, when I was angry, I threw them out of the kitchen window. I thought they were lost, but a security guard saw me from below. He gathered them up and gave them back. Anyway . . . I thought maybe one day you will want to read them. You will want to know who your father was.’

  Echo crawls on to the bed next to her passed-out mother and wraps her arm around her. She touches her forehead to her mother’s shoulder and is reassured by the life and blood she detects thrumming there. She lifts her mother�
�s curls from her cheek, and leans in to kiss her. Her mother is different when she is sleeping. She is like a child.

  Echo slides off the bed. She puts the security box in her backpack, zips it up and feeds her arms through the straps. Then, her heart racing, she waits with her ear against the guest-room door until there’s no sound in the hall, and sneaks out. She slips on her flip-flops and runs out to the stairwell. As she flies down the ten flights of concrete steps, Echo thinks of the guests at the wake, feasting their mouths on the trays of snacks, and their eyes on her mother’s burnt-out grief. She thinks of overbearing Lin Hong, with her over-plucked eyebrows and stretched-too-tight face. She hopes Yida will move them out of her grandfather’s home soon. Otherwise, Echo will run away.

  Echo runs through the marble-floored foyer, past the doormen and out of the revolving glass doors. Out in the street, her flipflops slap the pavement as she runs, and her backpack thuds on her back. She can’t believe that her father is not out there still, cursing the traffic and tapping cigarette ash out of the window. She can’t shake the feeling that at any moment his taxi will pull up. That he will beep the horn and call, ‘Echo! Jump in! I’ll drive you the rest of the way . . .’

  At a bridge over Liangma River, Echo stops and leans over the railing, peering down at the shallow water below. She thinks of taking out the metal box and emptying the letters into the stagnant ditch, drowning the letters so the ink dissolves into illegibility. But she tightens the backpack straps and runs over the bridge instead.

  Echo runs all the way to Xiu Xing’s run-down apartment block and sinks down on a concrete step in the entryway, panting and sweating in the July heat. When she recovers her breath she will knock on Xiu Xing’s door and he will pause his video game and let her in. Xiu Xing will hide the letters for her in his bedroom, where Lin Hong won’t be able to find them. He is her closest friend, and can be trusted to keep her father’s letters safe.

  Echo unzips the backpack, takes out the metal box and puts it on her lap. As she turns the combination lock, set to the date of her father’s birthday, she remembers how the Watcher had said, ‘Now you are only eight years old, and too young to understand . . .’ Who says I am too young to understand? Echo thinks. And, burning with curiosity and defiance, she unfolds one of the Watcher’s letters.

  ‘“Sorceress Wu, Sui Dynasty, AD 606,”’ Echo reads out loud. Straining her eyes through the shadows, she reads on.

  Read on for an extract from Sayonara Bar

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  1

  MARY

  Shinsaibashi wakes for business, metal shutters clattering upwards, broom bristles scratching concrete. Dribs and drabs wander round, salarymen reading menus in restaurant windows, high-school drop-outs killing time till dusk. Edged by the aerials and billboards is a sunset the shade of blood oranges.

  The building where I work is in the grimy end of the entertainment district. The chef from the grilled-eel restaurant on the floor below us slouches in the doorway, easing dirt from beneath his thumbnail with a toothpick. We nod hello as the sign for the Big Echo karaoke blinks on, and its fluorescent palm trees hum.

  The Sayonara Bar is empty; only the spectral drone of Spandau Ballet drifts over the empty stage and dance floor. Every table sits in a pool of jaundiced light, the tasselled lampshades hanging low, making the place look ready for a séance or psychic convention.

  In the changing room, shoes, magazines and crumpled balls of lipstick-stained tissue litter the floor. Blouses with deodorant-stained underarms hang from the sagging curtain rail. In the midst of it all stands Elena, peering into the slanting mirror, dotting concealer under her eyes. We bounce smiles and greetings off the glass. My back to her, I start to undress, flinging my T-shirt and jeans onto the mound of clothes in the corner. I zip myself into the gold-sequinned top that Katya lent me and a black knee-length skirt.

  Elena budges sideways to give me room at the mirror. ‘Nice sequins,’ she says.

  ‘I know. Couldn’t get away with it anywhere but here. Did you have a good day?’

  ‘Same as usual: up at seven to get Eiji and Tomo ready, then I had to clean up after the pair of them …’

  Elena is petite, jaded and prone to world-weary sighs. She came to Japan with a TEFL qualification and a four-month English-teaching contract. Six years on, she has a Japanese husband, a five-year-old son and a vast catalogue of cross-cultural grievances. She makes me feel young, lightweight as flotsam. I watch her pull an eyelid taut and drag a sharpened kohl pencil along her lashes.

  ‘Did you hear about the trouble I had last night?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah. I hate that creep. He should be made to wear a muzzle or something.’

  Last night this salaryman laddered Elena’s tights, then stuffed a thousand-yen note down the front of her dress, telling her to buy herself a new pair. Elena told him her tights cost more than a thousand yen. So he ripped the other leg and tried to stuff another thousand yen into her dress.

  ‘When I complained to Mama-san she told me to get a sense of humour.’

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘I know. I am leaving at the end of the month.’

  ‘You should.’

  I really wish she would, but she has worked here for two years already and I bet she will be here long after I’m gone.

  Her hand shakes, jolting her eyeliner upwards. ‘Shit. Can you pass me a tissue? … First I quit this place, then I divorce Tomo.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I murmur, not really in the mood to listen to her marriage problems.

  We stare ahead at our reflections. I smudge on some MAC Purple Haze eye shadow. Elena traces her lip line in berry red.

  ‘Did you get up to anything today?’ she asks.

  Today I woke at Yuji’s place around two-ish. We tried to get up but were sunk in his bed like quicksand. So that was where we stayed, in a tangle of mouths and limbs. A whole afternoon with the curtains drawn, rutting from one end of the bed to the other, the television chattering in the background. I am sure there were things that mattered before I met him, but Yuji has this way of making me forget what they are.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I say.

  In the mirror Elena clips on a gold earring and smiles.

  The other hostesses arrive while I am setting up the bar. Yukiko negotiates a shift swap with me so she can see her boyfriend’s band play at the Metro next Friday. Mandy shows off the henna tattoo she had done on her navel in Bangkok. Katya walks in late, clutching a take-away bag and pushing a french fry between her lips. Her hair is swept back into a silk headscarf, and a faux fur coat flaps at her too skinny calves. When she sees me she heads over. She smiles and grazes my temple with a greasy, menthol-cigarette-scented kiss. ‘Wow,’ she says, ‘that top is hideous. Glad I gave it away.’

  ‘Thanks, Katya. Appreciate your honesty.’

  ‘Where are you tonight?’

  ‘Bar duty. You?’

  ‘Karaoke booth. Mr Shaky-hands has booked it for his ninety-seventh birthday. Do you want to swap?’

  I reject the offer with a rueful smile. Mr Shaky-hands has Parkinson’s – Katya can be quite cruel sometimes. She narrows her eyes and stalks away to the changing room, sinking her teeth into another french fry. We fight tooth and nail for bar duty here because you spend the whole evening airlifting drinks to the lounge and small talk is limited to short, near-painless bursts.

  Waiting for things to get busy, I slice up a lemon and watch Supermodel TV. Mama-san put it on the wide screen because our Wednesday night keyboard player called in with stomach flu. Supermodel TV is this satellite channel that broadcasts nothing but fashion models charging up and down catwalks all day long. All these ethereal beings with jutting hips and swan-like necks. Not sure of Mama-san’s strategy here. Perhaps she hopes we will absorb their glamour by osmosis – I do develop this ‘sashay’ in my walk whenever it’s on. But there is something too innate about our imperfections; our bedraggled, lipstick-on-teeth, taut-seams-at-the-hips slovenliness. S
omething no amount of exposure to beauty will fix.

  One of the first customers is Mr Mitsui, the head of some corporation in the Umeda Sky building. He and his companions take up a table by the cigarette machine and I watch him twist his neck about in search of me. Mr Mitsui bought me a Gucci handbag once; burgundy leather, it was, with a golden clasp that fastened with a sophisticated click. But Yuji hates it when I accept gifts from clients, so I gave it to Katya. The handbag was a reward for participating in his ongoing English-speaking scam. Mr Mitsui knows a smattering of English and he likes to use it to impress his business associates. He’ll call me over, introduce me to his friends and then we begin to chat.

  ‘Mary, in your country do you have sushi?’

  ‘Yes. In Japanese restaurants and sometimes in supermarkets too.’

  ‘Ah! And your country. Winter. Colder or warmer?’

  ‘About the same, I think.’

  And so on. The whole time his friends make admiring noises in their throats and exclaim things like: ‘Isn’t Mitsui-san’s English skilful?’ He always has different associates in tow, so they have no idea that we run through the same dialogue every time. Tonight I carry over some Martinis and we do the routine for the benefit of two starry-eyed assistants. We have it down pat, word for word, except when Mr Mitsui throws me by substituting ‘sushi’ with ‘escalators’ in a rare spurt of improvisation. Afterwards he chomps on the olive from his Martini and looks proud of himself. He slips me a thousand-yen note and whispers I am not to share it with the other hostesses.

  When I told a friend back in London what I was doing out here she was shocked. She thought hostess was a polite synonym for prostitute or something. I had to explain to her that it’s nothing like that. Salarymen don’t go to a hostess bar to purchase sex; it’s sexual charisma they’re after, a different thing entirely. Most of our clients are the older, mid-life-crisis types. Men loaded with prestige and greatness within the corporation, but invisible to young women they pass by on the street. Our job is to sit with them, act interested in them, laugh at their jokes. Create a make-believe world where they are attractive again. And the more exalted a customer’s ego, the more generous the tip. Mama-san likes to recite this old proverb at the end of our more lucrative evenings: ‘With flattery even a pig can be made to climb a tree.’