Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  On arrival she was greeted by Donald and Hu – Spider Girl had managed to get Donald’s bow tie on him this morning and he looked resplendent – but rather than taking Spider Girl into the main operating theatre as usual instead they ushered her into a small side room. There were bits of bicycles leaning against the wall and some leather strapping. In the middle of the room stood a pair of parallel bars taken from a gym.

  Donald immediately started fiddling with the bicycle bits and leather strapping. Hu shut the windows and drew the blinds. Something was obviously about to happen.

  Hu turned to face Spider Girl.

  ‘Spider Girl,’ she said, ‘Donald and I and all the doctors here have been thinking about your condition. Your “rickets”.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We think we might have come up with a system which might help your walking.’

  Spider Girl took a step back.

  ‘It will give you strength in your legs. It will let other parts of your body support your upper legs – it will strengthen them.’

  Spider Girl swallowed.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

  ‘This is the difficult part,’ said Hu. ‘I will be here to reassure and protect you. Donald will fit this system, this harness to you, but you will have to take your clothes off so he can do it.’

  Spider Girl looked at Donald. Donald was far too deep into the process of organizing the harness, getting all its various straps and bicycle forks cohesing and conjoining, to bother about listening to what was being said.

  Spider Girl rarely found herself in a quandary, but did now. Of course she did not want a man who was not married to her seeing her without clothes and naked. But at the same time it was Donald, the very subject of various early pubescent stirrings and strange dreamings within her. His eyes would be on her most secret, her most shameful parts – close up. But on the other hand, it would just be Donald. A good and most moral man. The man who was sustaining her father in life. Besides – as she watched Donald wrestling and puzzling his way into assembling his harness – Spider Girl, with more than a touch of sadness, accepted that as he handled and felt her body he would be far more engrossed and interested in organizing his contraption than he ever would be with her and her nakedness. Or anyone’s nakedness. He was such a good man.

  Spider Girl sighed and assented.

  Donald continued to wrestle and finesse his harness as she stripped and stood there naked before him.

  Hu led her to the parallel bars and stood her in the middle, placing her two hands on the two bars.

  Suddenly it seemed as though Donald had solved his riddle. It was ready. He looked up at Spider Girl and grinned.

  ‘Ready, Spider Girl?’

  Spider Girl swallowed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Super! This is an experiment, but I’m convinced it’s going to work.’

  He advanced on her, the harness of bicycle parts and leather held out before him, then sank down out of her sight. Spider Girl heard various jangles and clanks, but resolutely did not look down. She stared hard at the blinds ahead of her.

  The harness that Donald was fitting for Spider girl consisted of four pairs of bicycle forks. Two long, two short. The two long ones, upside down, ran from her waist down to her knees along the outside of her thighs. The two shorter ones, the right way up, stretched from just below her crotch, inside her thighs, to her knees. The two longer forks were attached at their tops to a leather strap which formed a belt around her waist. The two shorter forks were attached at their tops to each other and by straps around each thigh to the longer fork on the outside of the thigh. The short forks were again joined by straps at the knees, to their respective longer fork.

  While all this was going on Spider Girl stared dead ahead of herself. Like a scared rabbit. Stared at those blinds. But as she did so she was also feeling his fumblings and expeditions all around her intimate parts. She imagined him looking there, examining and detailing and calculating her most secret places. She started to get feelings, feel heats. Suddenly a picture of his bow tie sprang vividly into her mind…

  ‘Spider Girl!’

  Spider Girl awoke. Hu was standing before her, smiling.

  ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ replied Spider Girl in a slightly strangulated fashion.

  ‘Jolly good,’ said Donald. ‘I think that’s it. I think it’s in place,’ he added with a slight note of triumph to his voice. He rose up from her nether regions and stared directly in her face. ‘I think, Spider Girl,’ he said earnestly, ‘you could try to walk forwards. Let’s see if it works. And don’t let go of the bars.’

  Spider Girl did this, gingerly. Then a bit faster. It was amazing. The weight of her body, which had once ground down on her weak, twisted thighs, was now being partially carried by the exoskeleton of the bicycle forks.

  ‘It works, Donald, it works!’

  Hu chirruped with joy. Donald grinned broadly at her. Spider Girl started to walk slowly, triumphantly around the room – entirely forgetting that she was naked.

  19

  Wuhan was in its last few hours. Of survival. Of freedom. Of meaning. Already Japanese artillery was bombarding the eastern suburbs of Hankou on the north side of the river and Wuchang on its southern bank. Small arms fire could be heard crackling in the distance.

  At the apartment everyone was to depart the next morning.

  Freda had been offered a lecture tour in the States on the Japanese and Chinese economies. They all agreed it would calm her down.

  Donald was to fly to Chungking early next morning.

  Agnes had signed up with the Chinese Red Cross and was setting off on the long foot trek to the barren lands south of the Yangtze where the Communist Fourth Army guerrillas were deployed. She’d continue to contribute occasional articles to the Manchester Guardian and her book Battle Hymn of China had been safely despatched to her publishers.

  Spider Girl and Hu weren’t quite sure what they would be doing next, but that didn’t bother Spider Girl (at least openly). But they would be going out to the aerodrome to wish Donald a safe journey.

  That evening a farewell feast was held for the apartment’s members to commemorate and celebrate their time together. It was quite solemn.

  This meal over – and Spider Girl and The Drab duly congratulated and a few tears shed – Agnes suggested that to cheer everyone up they should all repair to the Last Ditch Club where a great wake was being held in memory and celebration of Wuhan’s heroic stand against fascism and barbarism. And she included Spider Girl in that invitation (but not The Drab).

  Spider Girl immediately objected on the grounds that she could not leave her father (and she didn’t want to spend an evening with a whole lot of drunken Westerners, even if it did include Donald).

  ‘No,’ said Agnes, ‘you are definitely coming. Nobody embodies the spirit of Wuhan like you.’

  Donald (who didn’t himself really want to go either, socializing wasn’t at all his thing) suggested that he could stay behind and perhaps look after Wei while Spider Girl went.

  Spider Girl glared at him.

  ‘You are definitely attending,’ commanded Agnes.

  Hu thought ‘why not?’ and ‘anything for a laugh’ and agreed.

  Freda announced she would not be coming. The Last Ditch Club would remind her too much of Vernon.

  Agnes, rather than risk a histrionic row with Freda, acceded to this and stated that Freda could look after Spider Girl’s father. Donald had after all had just dosed him with opium.

  Spider Girl did not trust Freda enough to look after her father. But before she could think up a suitably diplomatic way of frustrating this plan – and Spider Girl could do diplomatic – suddenly through the door appeared Dr Bob McClure, chief surgeon at Wuhan’s hospital. He was real sorry, he’d been bombed out of his house in East Hankou and could he please have a floor for the night? He and Donald were due to fly out on the same flight to
Chungking tomorrow, so they could travel to the aerodrome together.

  Spider Girl was neatly checkmated. Bob McClure was perfectly qualified to keep a professional eye on her father. And, as a pious Methodist and teetotaler, he was the last person to want to attend a pagan bacchanal at the Last Ditch.

  Still, she refused.

  ‘You can dance, Spider Girl,’ Hu suggested, ‘in your new harness Donald made for you.’

  Spider Girl grimaced, but then looked at Donald, who appeared worried and disorientated at the prospect of some drunken party. She knew she should support him.

  They set off.

  *

  The Last Ditch’s final party did not so much resemble the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of Waterloo as the Battle of Waterloo itself.

  It was driven by black, crushing nihilism.

  There was shouting, fighting and the ominous sound of artillery shells landing nearby. In toast after drunken toast the name of Neville Chamberlain was ritually cursed. He had betrayed his country. He had betrayed the world into darkness and perpetual war. Everyone was frighteningly drunk.

  Agnes sat down at the ancient and discordant piano and started belting out ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ with Jack Belden standing beside her roaring out the verses and everyone joining in the chorus – followed by ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’ in all its cartographic glory and ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ in all its gynaecological glory. Agnes shared Jack’s bottles of bourbon.

  Hu, being a Methodist and so teetotal, set about enjoying herself.

  Rewi Alley, standing on top of the piano, gave a long encomium in praise of honourable, decent blokes everywhere and how they were shortly to be exterminated off the face of the earth. He then fell off the piano and ended up under a table.

  Spider Girl knew immediately she should not have come.

  Donald likewise stared aghast. For several days now he had been feeling emotional. Of course he hadn’t realized he was feeling emotional. He didn’t know what emotions were. For him life revolved entirely around surgery, random photo snappings, and bicycles. That was pretty much it. He’d been so happy just being in Wuhan. Doing his surgery. Doing it and doing it and doing it. All the time thinking, working up new surgical skills, shortcuts, refinements – helping people. He had not been so happy since he was a boy on Salisbury Plain galloping across the green, green grass with raised head staring into the blue, blue heavens.

  But in these last hours, as the time for their departure grew ever closer, all these strange, slightly ugly things started moving around inside his body. What were they? He was distinctly nervous. And so it was tonight that his ‘emotions’ finally burst from out of him.

  A tray of drinks was passing by. He grabbed a large glass of scotch and swallowed it. He grabbed another large glass and swallowed it. Then another.

  Spider Girl stared.

  Izzy Epstein was in high spirits. Having attended the performance of Defend Wuhan! he’d actually seen Madame Chiang Kai-shek in the flesh and been able, with his own two eyes, to ascertain, irrefutably, that her polka dot sweater was in fact purple with pink dots. This would finally shut up his irascible editor in New York so that he could now write meaningful stories about the terrible sufferings of the heroic Chinese people.

  James Bertram was somewhere on hands and knees.

  George Wang punched his opposite number at AFP.

  George Hogg had more important matters on his hands.

  Peter Fleming was not present.

  Agnes, having gone through ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘Land of My Fathers’ (for some reason or other), belted out ‘The Internationale’.

  By popular request ‘Roses of Picardy’ was sung by Ralph Shaw who possessed a particularly fine baritone.

  Everyone wept.

  Ralph then followed it with a long and maudlin anamnesis of all the many women he had slept with. Big Wanda, his White Russian squeeze, stared at him icily.

  It was at this point that Donald suddenly remembered he could play the piano.

  To Spider Girl’s horror he was already three quarters of a bottle of scotch to the worse (he never drank), and his bow tie lay torn and bedraggled across his breast.

  Donald approached the piano. Agnes saw he was going to play and made way for him. He bowed to her, nearly fell over, then unsteadily took his seat. He straightened his back, adjusted his cuffs, breathed in and then with hammer blows and shrieking chords set about Chopin’s ‘Heroic’ Polonaise celebrating the Parisian proletariat’s valiant 1848 uprising against the brutal bourgeoisie. Occasionally he hit the right note.

  The piano stood up to this assault for a commendable while but then started disintegrating under his hammer blows.

  Spider Girl was aghast. She had never heard such ugly discordant sounds. It sounded like a hundred sawmills. Everything appeared black to her. She panicked and fled the club.

  Donald was finally dragged from the by now largely demolished piano and was violently sick all over the floor.

  There was a darkness, a desperation to the whole frenzied night. Wuhan was falling. They were all stumbling out into a deep dark world which could only get darker every day. Mr Chamberlain had won. Fascism had won.20

  *

  George Hogg made a decision. The authorities would not take responsibility for the orphans he had been working with. They were too traumatized, smashed about by life. With their violence and psychotic behaviour they were simply too dangerous to move. Leave them to the Japanese.

  George examined his Quaker conscience. He understood he, and he alone, was now responsible for them. He was not going to be a banker. He was not going to be a journalist. He was certainly not going to be a spy. He was going to have to look after them.

  He went to his bank and took out all his meagre savings.

  At three in the morning he and his young wards sat crammed into their tiny hut. George addressed them.

  ‘You have got me. I have got you. We are all we have in this world.’

  He looked around at them – Liang, Hua, Chin, Heng, Bojing, Cong, Xingfu, Wen, the rest.

  By now they understood that the Japanese were coming. Immediately. Each one of them was terrified – including George.

  ‘We have to be together, as one. If we are not together, as one, we die. The Japanese are nearly upon us.’

  He looked at them. They stared back at him like rabbits.

  ‘You all fight each other. Your…’ George remembered his own striking of Peter Fleming, corrected himself, ‘…our only chance of surviving, escaping the Japanese, is by working for each other, helping each other, protecting each other. Heng, if you bully Chin – the Japanese will kill us. Bojing, if you whine about Hua – the Japanese will kill us. If I lose my temper and shout at one of you – the Japanese will kill us. Everyone here must help each other, protect each other. Otherwise we will all die, be shot by the Japanese. Do you understand me?’

  They all nodded.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Liang.

  ‘West,’ replied George, ‘where the Japanese are not.’

  ‘How are we going to get there?’ asked the smallest, Chin.

  ‘We will walk. A long, long walk. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month. And all that time we will help each other, protect each other, brothers, and when we get there, I promise you, when we finally get there you will have a proper life. You will have a garden. A very large garden. Where you can all grow our food – as you once grew your food on the farms you came from. We will be able to play games. And we will have a school room where we can all learn things and sleep at night.

  ‘We will get there because we will not hit each other, all the time we will help each other, all the time. Otherwise we will all die.’

  He looked around him at their dirty faces.

  ‘Do we agree?’

  A pause.

  ‘Yes,’ they all said solemnly, ‘we agree.’

  So they set off through the dark city.
As each one left the hut George handed them a raw potato from a sack he’d bought on the Bund. They rubbed the dirt off on their clothes and started chewing the potatoes. He slung the rest of the sack over his shoulder and they walked westward, towards the ferry which would take them across the Han River to Hanyang, and then to the world beyond.21

  *

  Spider Girl walked alone through the dark cold streets of Wuhan. They were deserted. Shadows and figures flitted from door to door or into dark alleys. She ignored them.

  She felt very emotional. In fact she was at the mercy of a whole conflict of emotions.

  The two central conflicts were between Donald and her father. She did not want to lose either of them. But her father was dying and Donald was flying off to Chungking. Which was good. Donald was a good man and he was going to do good things. But…

  By now Spider Girl realized she was in love with Donald. This feeling – entirely novel to her – was both enchanting and terrifying. She kept having these dreams. The two of them with no clothes on – she not even wearing the exoskeleton he had made for her. Of him sitting on a chair and she sitting astraddle him, facing him, as she had once seen her parents doing. But she didn’t have the least idea what happened next except that Donald’s bow tie – his only garment – glowed resplendently.

  And besides all this strange stuff with Donald there was her father. The Japanese were arriving, in hours. Donald said it would be safe to move her father. Spider Girl certainly wasn’t going to abandon him to the Japanese. But she needed a cart on which to lay her father, and everyone was buying carts, so the prices of both carts and the horses and donkeys to draw them had shot up, beyond what Spider Girl could possibly afford. And Hu had had complicated everything by refusing to leave for Chungking with Donald but instead insisting she stay with Spider Girl and her father and help them. Hu was a moral person; Spider Girl was not a moral person. Hu was likely to vigorously oppose certain steps Spider Girl might take in order to ensure they all survived. And then there was The Drab. Spider Girl would not abandon her – poor bewildered creature – to the Japanese.