The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  Mrs. Su sighs, and looks at Beibei’s shapeless features. So offensive she must be to other people’s eyes that Mrs. Su wishes she could shrink Beibei back to the size that she once carried in her arms into this room; she wishes she could sneak Beibei into the next world without attracting anybody’s attention. Beibei screams louder, white foam dripping by the corner of her mouth. Mrs. Su cleans her with a towel, and for a moment, when her hand stops over Beibei’s mouth and muffles the cry, Mrs. Su feels a desire to keep the hand there. Three minutes longer and Beibei could be spared all the struggles and humiliations death has in store for every living creature, Mrs. Su thinks, but at the first sign of blushing in Beibe’s pale face, she removes the towel. Beibei breathes heavily. It amazes and saddens Mrs. Su that Beibei’s life is so tenacious that it has outlived the love that once made it.

  With one finger, Mr. Su types in his password – a combination of Beibei’s and Jian’s birthdays – at a terminal booth. He is still clumsy in his operation of the computer, but people on the floor, aging and slow as most of them are, are patient with one another. The software dutifully produces graphs and numbers, but Mr. Su finds it hard to concentrate today. After a while, he quits to make room for a woman waiting for a booth. He goes back to the seating area and looks for a good chair to take a rest. The brokerage, in the recent years of a downward economy, has slackened in maintenance, and a lot of chairs are missing orange plastic seats. Mr. Su fmally finds a good one among homemade cotton cushions, and sits down by a group of old housewives. The women, in their late fifties or early sixties, are the happiest and chattiest people on the floor. Most of them have money locked into stocks that they have no other choice but to keep for now, and perhaps forever; the only reason for them to come every day is companionship. They talk about their children and grandchildren, unbearable in-laws, soap operas from the night before, stories from tabloids that must be discussed and analyzed at length.

  Mr. Su watches the rolling numbers on the big screen. The PA is tuned in to a financial radio station, but the host’s analysis is drowned by the women’s stories. Most of the time, Mr. Su finds them annoyingly noisy, but today he feels tenderness, almost endearment, toward the women. His wife, quiet and pensive, will never become one of these chatty old hens, but he wishes, for a moment, that one of them were his wife, cheered up by the most mundane matters, mindlessly happy.

  After taking note of the numbers concerning him, Mr. Su sighs. Despite all the research he had done, his investment does not show any sign more positive than the old women’s. Life goes wrong for the same reason that people miscalculate. Husband and wife promise each other a lifelong love that turns out shorter than a life; people buy stocks with good calculations, but they do not take into consideration life’s own preference for, despite the laws of probability, the unlikely. Mr. Su fell in love with his wife at thirteen, and she loved him back. What were the odds for first lovers to end up in a family? Against both families’ wills, they married each other, and against everybody’s warning, they decided to have a baby. Mr. Su, younger and more arrogant then, calculated and concluded that the odds for a problematic baby were very low, so low that fate was almost on their side. Almost, but not quite, and as a blunt and mean joke, Beibei was born with major problems in her brain and spinal cord. It would not be much of a misfortune except when his wife started to hide herself and the baby from the world; Beibei must have reminded his wife every day that their marriage was less legitimate. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Su thought of telling her, but he did not have the heart. It was he who suggested another baby. To give them a second chance, to save his wife from the unnecessary shame and pain that she had insisted on living with. Secretly he also wished to challenge fate again. The odds of having another calamity were low, very low, he tried to convince his wife; if only they could have a normal baby, and a normal family! The new baby’s birth proved his calculation right – Jian was born healthy, and he grew up into a very handsome and bright boy, as if his parents were awarded doubly for what had been taken away the first time – but who would’ve thought that such a success, instead of making their marriage a happier one, would turn his wife away from him? How arrogant he was to make the same mistake a second time, thinking he could outsmart life. What had survived the birth of Beibei did not survive Jian’s birth, as if his wife, against all common wisdom, could share misfortune with him but not happiness. For twenty years, they have avoided arguments carefully; they have been loving parents, dutiful spouses, but something that had made them crazy for each other as young cousins has abandoned them, leaving them in unshareable pain.

  A finger taps Mr. Su’s shoulder. He opens his eyes and realizes that he has fallen asleep. “I’m sorry,” he says to the woman.

  “You were snoring,” she says with a reproachful smile.

  Mr. Su apologizes again. The woman nods and returns to the conversation with her companions. Mr. Su looks at the clock on the screen, too early for lunch still, but he brings out a bag of instant noodles and a mug from his bag anyway, soaking the noodles with boiling water from the drinking stand. The noodles soften and swell. Mr. Su takes a sip of soup and shakes his head. He thinks of going home and talking to his wife, asking her a few questions he has never gathered enough courage to ask, but then decides that things unsaid had better remain so. Life is not much different from the stock market – you invest in a stock and you stick, and are stuck, to the choice, despite all the possibilities of other mistakes.

  At noon, the restaurant commissioned by the stockbrokerage delivers the lunch boxes to the VIP lounges, and the traders on the floor heat lunches in the microwave or make instant noodles. Mr. Su, who is always cheered up by the mixed smells of leftovers from other dinner tables, goes into a terminal booth in a hopeful mood. Someday, he thinks, when his wife is freed from taking care of Beibei, he’ll ask her to accompany him to the stockbrokerage. He wants her to see other people’s lives, full of meaningless but happy trivialities.

  Mr. Su leaves the brokerage promptly at five o’clock. Outside the building, he sees Mr. Fong, sitting on the curb and looking up at him like a sad, deserted child.

  “Mr. Fong,” Mr. Su says. “Are you all right? Why didn’t you come in and find me?”

  Mr. Fong suggests they go for a drink, and then holds out a hand and lets Mr. Su pull him to his feet. They find a small roadside diner, and Mr. Fong orders a few cold plates and a bottle of strong yam wine. “Don’t you sometimes wish a marriage doesn’t go as long as our lives last?” Mr. Fong says over the drink.

  “Is there anything wrong?” Mr. Su asks.

  “Nothing’s right with the wife after she’s released,” Mr. Fong says.

  “Are you going to divorce her?”

  Mr. Fong downs a cup of wine. “I wish I could,” he says and starts to sob. “I wish I didn’t love her at all so I could just pack up and leave.”

  By late afternoon Mrs. Su is convinced that Beibei is having problems. Her eyes, usually clear and empty, glisten with a strange light, as if she is conscious of her pain. Mrs. Su tries in vain to calm her down, and when all the other ways have failed, she takes out a bottle of sleeping pills. She puts two pills into a small porcelain mortar, and then, after a moment of hesitation, adds two more. Over the years she has fed the syrup with the pill powder to Beibei so that the family can have nights for undisturbed sleep.

  Calmed by the syrup, Beibei stops screaming for a short moment, and then starts again. Mrs. Su strokes Beibei’s forehead and waits for the medicine to take over her limited consciousness. When the telephone rings, Mrs. Su does not move. Later, when it rings for the fifth time, she checks Beibei’s eyes, half closed in drowsiness, and then closes the bedroom door before picking up the receiver.

  “Why didn’t you answer the phone? Are you tired of me, too?” Mrs. Fong says.

  Mrs. Su tries to find excuses, but Mrs. Fong, uninterested in any of them, cuts her off. “I know who the woman is now.”

  “How much did it
cost you to find out?”

  “Zero. Listen, the husband – shameless old man – he confessed himself.”

  Mrs. Su feels relieved. “So the worst is over, Mrs. Fong.”

  “Over? Not at all. Guess what he said to me this afternoon? He asked me if we could all three of us live together in peace. He said it as if he was thinking on my behalf. ‘We have plenty of rooms. It doesn’t hurt to give her a room and a bed. She is a good woman, she’ll take good care of us both.’ Taking care of his thing, for sure.”

  Mrs. Su blushes. “Does she want to live with you?”

  “Guess what? She’s been laid off. Ha ha, not a surprise, right? I’m sure she wants to move in. Free meals. Free bed. Free man. What comes better? Maybe she’s even set her eyes on our inheritance. Imagine what the husband suggested? He said I should think of her as a daughter. He said she lost her father at five and did not have a man good to her until she met him. So I said, Is she looking for a husband, or a stepfather? She’s honey-mouthing him, you see? But the blind-man! He even begged me to feel for her pain. Why didn’t he ask her to feel for me?”

  Something hits the door with a heavy thump, and then the door swings open. Mrs. Su turns and sees an old man leaning on the door, supported by her husband. “Mr. Fong’s drunk,” her husband whispers to her.

  “Are you there?” Mrs. Fong says.

  “Ah, yes, Mrs. Fong, something’s come up and I have to go.”

  “Not yet. I haven’t finished the story.”

  Mrs. Su watches the two men stumble into the bathroom. After a moment, she hears the sounds of vomiting and the running of tap water, her husband’s low comforting words, Mr. Fong’s weeping.

  “So I said, Over my dead body, and he cried and begged and said all these ridiculous things about opening one’s mind. Many households have two women and one man living in peace now, he said. It’s the marriage revolution, he said. Revolution? I said. It’s retrogression. You think yourself a good Marxist, I said, but Marx didn’t teach you bigamy. Chairman Mao didn’t tell you to have a concubine.”

  Mr. Su helps Mr. Fong lie down on the couch and he closes his eyes. Mrs. Su watches the old man’s tear-smeared face twitch in pain. Soon Mrs. Fong’s angry words blend with Mr. Fong’s snoring.

  With Mr. Fong fast asleep, Mr. Su stands up and walks into Beibei’s room. One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs. Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs. Fong’s blabbering and walks to Beibei’s bedroom. There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white, with a bluish hue. Mrs. Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei’s hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, gray and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents’ garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy.

  Sorry?

  Helen Simpson

  Helen Simpson (b. 1959) is a British novelist and short story writer. She worked at Vogue for five years before becoming a writer full-time. Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and her second, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, won the Hawthornden Prize. In 1993 she was selected as one of Granta’s top twenty novelists under the age of forty.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Patrick. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘Soup of the day is wild mushroom,’ bellowed the waiter.

  ‘No need to shout,’ said Patrick, putting his hand to his troublesome ear.

  The new gadget shrieked in protest.

  ‘They take a bit of getting used to,’ grimaced Matthew Herring, the deaf chap he’d been fixed up with for a morale-boosting lunch.

  ‘You don’t say,’ he replied.

  Some weeks ago Patrick had woken up to find he had gone deaf in his right ear – not just a bit deaf but profoundly deaf. There was nothing to be done, it seemed. It had probably been caused by a tiny flake of matter dislodged by wear-and-tear change in the vertebrae, the doctor had said, shrugging. He had turned his head on his pillow, in all likelihood, sometimes that was all it took. This neck movement would have shifted a minuscule scrap of detritus into the river of blood running towards the brain, a fragment that must have finished by blocking the very narrowest bit of the entire arterial system, the ultra-fine pipe leading to the inner ear. Bad luck.

  ‘I don’t hear perfectly,’ said Matthew Herring now. ‘It’s not magic, a digital hearing aid, it doesn’t turn your hearing into perfect hearing.’

  ‘Mine’s not working properly yet,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve got an appointment after lunch to get it seen to.’

  ‘Mind you, it’s better than the old one,’ continued Matthew comfortably. ‘You used to be able to hear me wherever I went with the analogue one, it used to go before me, screeching like a steam train.’

  He chuckled at the memory.

  Patrick did not smile at this cosy reference to engine whistles. He had been astonished at the storm of head noise that had arrived with deafness, the whistles and screeches over a powerful cloud of hissing just like the noise from Elizabeth’s old pressure cooker. His brain was generating sound to compensate for the loss of hearing, he had been told. Apparently that was part and parcel of the deafness, as well as dizzy episodes. Ha! Thanks to the vertigo which had sent him arse over tip several times since the start of all this, he was having to stay with his daughter Rachel for a while.

  ‘Two girls,’ he said tersely in answer to a question from his tedious lunch companion. He and Elizabeth had wished for boys, but there you were. Rachel was the only one so far to have provided him with grandchildren. The other daughter, Ruth, had decamped to Australia some time ago. Who knew what she was up to, but she was still out there so presumably she had managed to make a go of it, something that she had signally failed to do in England.

  ‘I used to love music,’ Matthew Herring was saying, nothing daunted. ‘But it’s not the same now I’m so deaf. Now it tires me out; in fact, I don’t listen any more. I deliberately avoid it. The loss of it is a grief, I must admit.’

  ‘Oh well, music means nothing to me,’ said Patrick. ‘Never has. So I shan’t miss that.’

  He wasn’t about to confide in Matthew Herring, but of all his symptoms it had been the auditory hallucinations produced by the hearing aid which had been the most disturbing for him. The low violent stream of nonsense issuing from the general direction of his firstborn had become insupportable in the last week, and he had had to turn the damned thing off.

  At his after-lunch appointment with the audiologist, he found himself curiously unable to describe the hallucinatory problem.

  ‘I seem to be picking up extra noise,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s difficult to describe.’

  ‘Sounds go into your hearing aid where they are processed electronically,’ she intoned, ‘then played back to you over a tiny loudspeaker.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ he snapped. ‘I am aware of that, thank you. What I’m asking is, might one of the various settings you programmed be capable of, er, amplifying sounds that would normally remain unheard?’

  ‘Let’s see, shall we,’ she said, still talking to him as though he were a child or a halfwit. ‘I wonder whether you’ve been picking up extra stuff on the Loop.’

  ‘The Loop?’

  ‘It works a bit like Wi-Fi,’ she said. ‘Electromagnetic fields. If you’re in an area that’s on the Loop, you can pick up on it with your hearing aid when you turn on the T-setting.’

  ‘The T-setting?’

  ‘That little extra bit of kit there,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘I didn’t mention it before, I didn’t want to confuse you while you were getting used to the basics. You must have turned it on by mistake from what you’re saying.’

  ‘But what sort of extra sounds does it pick up?’ he persisted.

  Rach
el’s lips had not been moving during that initial weird diatribe a week ago, he was sure of it, nor during the battery of bitter little remarks he’d had to endure since then.

  ‘Well, it can be quite embarrassing,’ she said, laughing merrily. ‘Walls don’t block the magnetic waves from a Loop signal, so you might well be able to listen in to confidential conversations if neighbouring rooms are also on it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that quite explains this particular problem. But I suppose it might have something to do with it.’

  ‘Look, I’ve turned off the T-setting,’ she said. ‘If you want to test what it does, simply turn it on again and see what happens.’

  ‘Or hear,’ he said. ‘Hear what happens.’

  ‘You’re right!’ she declared, with more merry laughter.

  He really couldn’t see what was so amusing, and said so.

  Back at Rachel’s, he made his way to the armchair in the little bay window and whiled away the minutes until six o’clock by rereading the Telegraph. The trouble with this house was that it had been knocked through, so you were all in it hugger-mugger together. He could not himself see the advantage of being forced to witness every domestic detail. Frankly, it was bedlam, with the spin cycle going and Rachel’s twins squawking and Rachel washing her hands at the kitchen sink yet again like Lady Macbeth. Now she was doing that thing she did with the brown paper bag, blowing into it and goggling her eyes, which seemed to amuse the twins at least.