Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  They continued pushing through the crowds. Spider Girl’s legs were on fire – she hadn’t had a chance to apply any ointment since last night – but she ignored them and pushed harder at the rear of the cart. At one point she found herself actually punching it to make it move faster. And she had to listen to Tiger Eyes boasting to The Ox of how he’d killed five of The Pimp’s men. The Ox smiled patiently back at him. Spider Girl told Tiger Eyes to shut up and strip off his bloody smock because everyone was staring at it. The whores were fanned out behind them, bitterly cursing and telling anyone who’d listen of how terribly they’d been treated by these gangsters. Spider Girl couldn’t think of any way of dealing with them which would not draw even more attention to them, so she ignored them.

  Five minutes at least had passed since they’d started the cart. No sign of The Pimp. The hills were now starting to recede, which meant that the valley was getting wider and the crowds thinning out. This made them both more visible and more vulnerable, but also gave them warning of any attack. Spider Girl glanced through the canvas at their load. Lots of gourds. Lots of water. Everyone was complaining about parched throats. Give it another five minutes and if they were still safe she’d hand some out. She desperately wanted to sit down on her cart but knew she couldn’t. A true leader marches with her troops.

  Five minutes past. The crowds were still spreading out. Still no sign of attack. Spider Girl never allowed herself the luxury of optimism. But there did seem a chance that they might have escaped their pursuers. That she, a despised, crippled country girl, had actually managed, by her guile and boldness, to steal a huge amount of water and food from some city thugs with which she might help and save her family. At the moment she had no intention of seeking her family out. Were The Pimp and his killers suddenly to fall on them while they were with her family, out of vengeance they’d kill not only her but all her family. At the moment caution must prevail. But she allowed herself a sliver of hope.

  Tiger Eyes moaned that his throat was killing him. Spider Girl allowed her party to march on another quarter of an hour despite her aching legs – just to show who was boss – but then told The Ox to lift her onto the tailgate, which he did. She pulled down a gourd and poured some of its sweet waters into a bowl, which she drank down. The concrete hardness in her mouth started to moisten and soften as the precious liquid loosed and freed her mouth and throat. Then she gave a bowlful to The Ox, then sent him forwards with a bowl to refresh White Devil. She gave half a bowl to Tiger Eyes last. She ignored the lamentations of the whores.

  Spider Girl pulled herself upright to stand on the tailgate, grasping a wooden slat supporting the yellow canvas. By now the refugees were leaving the valley and spreading themselves out as once more they resumed their endless trek across the plain. She looked around and around. All the way round, twice, three times, her eyes searching for the least sign of The Pimp and his men and the blue canvas of her family’s cart. She assumed her enemy would by now have had the sense to have removed his orange jacket, but her eyes saw nothing. Perhaps the yellow canvas camouflage had worked and they’d attacked a cart with a dirty black tarpaulin like their own and received a tough response. Perhaps Tiger Eyes was telling the truth and there had been an air raid and they’d been killed. She thought that highly unlikely. Once more she swept her eyes all about, but she saw nothing.

  For a moment she allowed her mind to feast on the thought of her reunion with her family. How she would ride in her cart up to them, hail them. The joy and pride on the face of her father. The jokes and laughter of Second Son. Eldest Son’s slow and happy smile. Cherry Blossom’s likely strop when she realized she was no longer eldest daughter. The stories she’d be able to tell Baby Girl Wei about her adventures. Baby Boy Wei’s puzzled grin. She hoped and prayed that Grandfather would not be too confused to recognize her. And above all her mother. Spider Girl would have to do it with the utmost humility, showing submission throughout as she presented the water to her mother. Her mother would of course chide and denounce her but the water, the food, would be water and food, and Spider Girl knew that her mother, deep inside, would acknowledge to herself that Spider Girl did serve and love her family, even though she would never ever admit it. And that was all Spider Girl required. Because she admired and respected her truth-speaking mother. Maybe her mother, after she had been accepted into the hall of the ancestors, might even put in the word that her eldest daughter might join them? Not that the ancestors would ever accept such a crippled, ugly girl.

  Her daydreams returned to real life with a jolt. Suddenly she was surrounded by a cloud of whores, angry as wasps, demanding water. She said they had no water or food to spare. The tumult increased. ‘That’s our water you’ve stolen!’ She snapped back that just like everyone else on this march they’d have to fend for themselves. They were whores. Why not go off and fuck in exchange for water? The girls angrily responded that sex was the last thing anyone wanted on a death march. This didn’t seem to work. They tried a new course. Didn’t she understand what it was like to be a whore? You never leave the brothel. You are warm and secure and fed within it. You are likely born in it and brought up in it being taught from childhood all the techniques and tricks of pleasing a man so that you know no other world but the brothel. It was their home! Their pimp, just to lure them out of it, had had to furnish their cart with silks and cushions and all sorts of luxuries – the finest incenses and perfumes – and they were just about surviving when this monstrous waddling woman had turned up and tried to shoot their pimp and turfed them all out. They were made to walk! They’d hardly ever walked in their lives. They’d mostly just lain on beds and got fucked. And now they’d suddenly been thrown out of their familiar world of tiny little rooms and beds into this huge confusing terrifying world. No curtains and walls, but horizons which just went on and on forever, and this huge sky above them with this evil yellow sun burning their skin and bodies. All these scary swearing crowds all around them.

  Spider Girl was not someone much moved by fellow-feeling or pity (unless it was within her family), but she was pragmatic. These girls were not going to go away. She could shoot them, but she didn’t want to waste bullets, and besides, she was not the sort of person who shot defenceless people. So an understanding had to be reached. There was ample water in the cart – at least until they joined up with her family – so for the time being she’d allow them a tiny ration of water on condition they walked twenty yards behind the cart and remained totally silent. She reserved the right to cancel the understanding. That did nothing to solve the problem or hush the barrage of outrage. (Spider Girl was starting to realize the job of being a pimp was not an as easy as it might appear.) Two of them could not even walk because of their bound feet. The rest had to carry them because they were family, but they could not carry them any further. They should ride in the cart. No chance, stated Spider Girl. They were very light, the whores argued, holding them up. On their pig’s trotter feet they could only hobble a few yards, and having spent almost their entire lives on beds getting fucked their leg and body muscles had never developed. They were like consumptive children. They would hardly weigh down the cart at all. Each side stared at the other.

  As a partly crippled person herself Spider Girl had a slight sympathy for these two girls. But she had used her brains to overcome her physical difficulties. These girls hadn’t. But then her family had not used their brains – at least enough – to understand and overcome their own difficulties. But these girls were not her family. What would her father have done in this situation? He would have taken them and helped them. But then her family was in this situation at least in part because her father was too kind-hearted. But then she saw that The Ox – without whose help she would by now probably be dead – was looking with great concern and sympathy at the two girls. They were indeed remarkably light.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but mutter even one word you’ll be off the cart and walking.’

  The girls were lifted onto the ca
rt, the rest of the whores fell back twenty paces. There was peace.

  After an hour, with the crowds widely dispersed across the plain, Spider Girl, standing on the back of the cart, took one last, careful look all around her, studying minutely all the groups and individuals she could see, and came to the conclusion that they were not being pursued by The Pimp or his men. Who knows – perhaps what Tiger Eyes had seen of them being killed by a bomb was true – though as he was now boasting he by himself had killed at least nine of them, she doubted him. Perhaps they’d just been fooled by the yellow canvas and gone off and attacked another cart that looked like theirs. She must continue to keep a vigilant watch for them, but it seemed they might just be safe.

  She now felt secure enough to start searching for her family. Her heart lightened. Since she’d travelled fast in her cart to escape from her enemies, she calculated she was now ahead of her parents. Her parents had been travelling on the western side of the march and Spider Girl had deliberately gone to the east to avoid her family becoming entangled in any violence. Now, if she travelled diagonally towards the west, there was a fair chance their paths would cross.

  She ordered White Devil to change course.

  *

  They travelled on for an hour, reaching the area where Spider Girl had calculated her family would be. No blue canvas roof. Nothing. For an hour she stopped – they might have fallen back, been delayed. Nothing. No blue canvas roof. She speeded up. Tiger Eyes started to complain but she gave him a look. At the end of two hours she’d seen nothing. Then, suddenly, she spotted a blue canvas roof. She ordered Tiger Eyes – she’d replaced White Devil with Tiger Eyes to keep him away from the girls – to hurry the ox on. They started to catch up with the cart. It was being pulled by a donkey. There was a family travelling in it. It could be hers. No sign of Cherry Blossom’s parasol, but that gaunt woman climbing out of the back looked distinctly like her mother. Spider Girl was almost about to shout when around the side of the cart rolled a short, fat man, obviously the woman’s husband, followed by a short fat son. Spider Girl’s heart sank. She ordered Tiger Eyes to stop. She stared after the receding family. Where should she look now?

  A thought which she’d been deliberately suppressing, which she’d been forbidding herself to even think about, now forced its way before her. What if, in all the pushing and rushing and turmoil in the valley, the cart itself had been damaged? At long last the rotten spokes had given way? It would mean her family would now be on foot, clinging on to their last supplies of water and foot, traipsing like so many others across this parched, unending plain. They’d now be well behind her and difficult to spot. And what, worst of all, if there had been an air raid, as Tiger Eyes was constantly going on about, and they had been caught in it? But she had to know.

  She got off the cart and walked forwards to Tiger Eyes.

  ‘That air raid you claim took place?’

  ‘It did take place.’

  ‘Describe it to me again. Exactly. And this time no bullshit about all the men you claim to have killed. What did that bomb do?’

  ‘It hit the cart.’

  ‘But I heard no explosion.’

  ‘As I said, it came speeding through the grass, hitting people. It didn’t explode.’

  ‘How many people did it hit before it hit the cart?’

  He paused. ‘Five or six that I saw.’

  ‘And did you see it hit any other cart before it hit The Pimp’s cart?’

  ‘No. Just people.’

  ‘Could it have hit a cart before it hit these people?’

  ‘Don’t think so. It’d have stopped in it, like it stuck in my cart.’

  ‘You’re certain about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but he wavered. Spider Girl correctly saw that his hesitation was not because he was lying, but because, as someone who always told people what he thought they wanted to hear, he was worried he was not telling her what she wanted to hear. So he was telling the truth. He had not seen the bomb hit any other cart. It might have hit a cart before he saw it, she decided, but the chances of it hitting her single family amid the tens of thousands of other refugees crowding into that valley were virtually nil. They were far more likely to be somewhere out here – with or without their cart.

  She stood and thought. Something must have happened in that valley, some current in the crowds could have swept them onto a different course so that they had emerged on the eastern side of the multitude rather than the western. She was going to have to sweep slowly across from west to east and back again, making allowances that they might be either swifter with the cart or slower on foot. She knew that they must already be almost out of water, so they would be slowing down, but simultaneously – and she had to fight with herself to even think of this – she knew that her mother, in order to preserve Eldest Son, would be cutting down on the number of lips drinking the family water. She would do the same if she were in her mother’s awful position. So she must show all haste in finding them, in giving the whole family her precious water.

  She ordered Tiger Eyes to start leading the cart again.

  ‘But you promised me this whore.’

  ‘I said in two days. Not ten hours have yet passed.’

  She drew her knife, held out her other hand as though she was fondling his balls, then slashed her knife brutally above it.

  He hastily picked up the lead, she indicated they should go eastwards, and the cart and its attendant group set slowly off. Spider Girl, standing on the cart, continuously scanning the horizon, looking not only for carts but groups on foot, even individuals. Nothing. After an hour or so they reached the western side of the march where refugees started to become bandits – though that line of distinction was fast blurring. But the figure of The Ox always deterred any would-be attackers. She turned back again on the eastward diagonal of her sweep. Again nothing. They completed two or three more sweeps – nothing – before night drew on. What to do? Stop for the night, or continue their sweeps? There was a moon. She was undecided until she noticed, at their water break, Tiger Eyes starting to flirt with the whores. There were whispers back and forth. Giggles. He started to strike poses. Was there anyone ever more beef-brained than Tiger Eyes? He knew that she not only had the power to destroy him through her magic – he was stupid enough to actually believe that – but that she had no compunction about shooting people dead. And still his boasting about those he’d killed – now up to twelve – and his hackneyed flirtings with the whores, one in particular, continued.

  She ordered him up front to lead the ox. Their slow sweep resumed.

  In the blackness of the night, with the moon setting, she steered her course by the Plough, keeping it roughly to her right and then her left. Through the night she called out her family name – ‘Wei, Wei’ – then sometimes individual family names. They disappeared into the darkness and there was no response.

  During this night Spider Girl passed close by a dying Baby Girl Wei. Baby Girl’s throat was so dried out that all her voice could do was croak. She heard Spider Girl’s voice and tried to respond but, so tight was her throat, she could make no sound and her tiny mind, already filled with terror and bewilderment, spiralled into blackness.

  Spider Girl, unaware of anything, carried on her weary quest.

  The search continued through the night and for much of the following day., Spider Girl never ceased standing in the cart, her eyes searching incessantly left and right and all around her. Nothing. The others were given water, food (Spider Girl even allowed the whores to have some), and slept by turns on the cart next to the two whores with bound feet, but Spider Girl, steadfast, never stepped down nor rested.

  But as the second evening drew on she knew they were going to have to rest during the night. Even The Ox was starting to flag, and he was too heavy to sleep in the cart. The whores who were walking could go no further. Spider Girl reasoned that her family too – by now very low on water – would be slowing and probably sleeping through the night. They ha
lted. Spider Girl passed out the food and a meagre ration of water. Spider Girl and The Ox would take it in turns to keep watch. But there was a problem. The flirting between Tiger Eyes and the whores was starting to get out of hand. Tiger Eyes especially was flashing his eyes at her while he was doing it, showing her he wasn’t scared of her, that he would have his revenge. What a moron! And White Devil was starting to regain his courage and side with his old friend. Even the whores had forgotten their vow of silence and were happily responding. Flirting, foreplay, however crude, was entirely novel and exciting for them. All they’d ever known was fat old men falling on top of them. Spider Girl could see it was getting out of hand. It could lead to feuds, fighting, confrontations – the last thing she needed at this moment. Did they require the two young bandits any longer? She calculated that with The Ox still there, he would give them all the strength and security they needed. Tiger Eyes and White Devil were a threat and a drain on their resources. Superfluous. She waddled up to them – Tiger Eyes mocked her walk – pulled out her pistol and shot them between their eyes. Swiftly and humanely, as her father killed livestock on the farm.

  The whores were horror-struck. She was not going to have any more problem with their boring chatter. The Ox was unconcerned. He knew that Spider Girl trusted him and needed him. He carried the bodies a short way and dumped them. They settled down for the night. It was a very quiet one. Spider Girl hardly slept a wink, worrying about her family. Then she took over the watch from The Ox, who slept like a baby. Tomorrow she must find them. They would have run out of water. Unless she found them they would all be dead.

  Before they had travelled much further in the morning they reached one of those stream beds, rank and stinking with mud and faeces. They picked their way across it, The Ox pulling on the cart to help the cart cross the stream, the whores following miserably behind. A few hundred yards further on Spider Girl saw a grave. It was not so much the grave which caught her attention as what was lying beside it. She called for the convoy to stop, for everyone to keep well clear of the grave. She walked carefully towards it. It was just an ordinary grave. They had passed enough of them earlier in their march, but by now they were becoming a rarity as people no longer had the strength or the tools to give their dear ones a proper and pious burial. They just left their bodies as they died upon the plain, left their dear bodies to the buzzards.