The Shanghai Wife

by Emma Harcourt

  The trapdoor released with a suck of cold, dank air and loose earth sprinkled down the stone steps that led away. A squeal echoed back to Annie as an animal scuttled into the tunnel’s safe, dark depths. It smelt of rain on rotting leaves. The trapdoor was heavy but she was afraid it would creak if she let it drop completely open. Annie listened, the women waited; it seemed like time hung in the air with the cobwebs. The silence reassured Annie they had not been overheard, at least for now. She gently rested the trapdoor on the ground then, as quickly as she could, eased Chin Feng into the hole, taking her weight firmly on her side as she half carried the girl down the uneven stone steps. At the bottom they stopped and Annie returned to shuffle the matting back as much as she could, and closed the trapdoor softly. She knew it would not stop the men from discovering their escape, but at least it would slow them down slightly.

  She turned back to Chin Feng who was leaning heavily against a wet, dripping wall of stone and earth. Furry tendrils of black-green moss sprung back when Annie moved her. Beneath their feet the stone was slippery with mould and Annie saw that the tunnel twisted away from them in a dark, low bend. She positioned Chin Feng against her side and wrapped an arm around her shoulder so that as she walked, Annie carried the girl’s weight in her hip and torso. They moved slowly down the tunnel, following its path blindly with only the echo of their shoes wet slaps against the stony path. Annie tried to hurry but Chin Feng couldn’t walk unaided and their progress was slow. She listened to their laboured breathing and wondered if they would make it out of the tunnel alive. But there was no sound of anyone pursuing them so Annie focused as much as she could on moving forward, pushing and carrying Chin Feng with her and concentrated on the next corner and finding the exit.

  Chin Feng tried to speak, coughing uncontrollably as she did. The brief stop allowed Annie to rest her aching arms. For a moment she felt relief, but then her shoulders began to burn from the effort of supporting Chin Feng, and she felt the discomfort flare through her waist, down her calves, right into the balls of her feet. She wondered if she had the strength to continue.

  They were standing in a straight length of tunnel that echoed with the drips and trickle of an underground rivulet. Annie moved her hand across the jagged stones in the wall and felt moisture. It had been many hours since she’d drunk anything. Hastily she cupped her hands beneath a rocky point and sucked up each drip that leached forth. Her back winced with pain as she leant towards the wall, but the sweetness of water in her throat was overwhelming. Chin Feng pushed her gently and Annie offered water to the girl from her cupped palms. But Chin Feng shook her head, instead bumping the low mossy base of the wall with her foot. Annie splashed the last drops of water over her neck, enjoying the cold wetness as she looked to where the girl was motioning.

  There was a door built into the stone wall. It was wooden when Annie could see it closer, but so covered in mould and moss that it was barely visible. Annie leaned against the wall a moment longer, already feeling dry and parched again. Chin Feng grabbed onto Annie’s arm encouragingly and whispered words in Chinese.

  The door stuck part way open on the uneven stone floor beyond, exposing the dark passageway in a crack of light. Annie pushed again and felt the ancient wood give way as she stumbled through. Quickly she grabbed Chin Feng and pushed her forward before heaving against the door ’til it shut. Two stone steps led up to a sparsely furnished room. Annie had to grab at her knees for support as she doubled over, light-headed with the exertion of their escape. She listened for any sound of their pursuers.

  When she was sure they had not been followed, Annie stole a look down the corridor. Very quickly she recognised where they were—the back room of the gang house on Xinzha Road. The room was in semi-darkness but Annie knew the corridor Li Qiang had been dragged along. She waited for her head to settle, unsure what to do, certain they could not have escaped unnoticed. She moved Chin Feng to a chair and listened but there were no sounds. The household was asleep. Annie sank to the ground, suddenly empty of the adrenalin that had got her this far. The secret door they had just come through was camouflaged by painted characters on the wall, but it now looked like a seal had been broken where the paint was cracked around the doorframe.

  ‘Are you all right? Can you keep moving?’

  Annie knelt down in front of Chin Feng and lifted her head gently so she could see into the girl’s eyes. She was frail and stared past Annie to a spot on the wall, her focus lost in a half-formed dream.

  ‘Stop here. Wait.’

  It was all Chin Feng said but it was a firm reply. Annie leant back against the wall. Her eyes ached with tiredness but she knew they had to keep moving. They were no safer here than back in the room. She looked down at her hands, which were still smudged red with Chow’s blood. It had only been that morning she found him, only a few hours of her life had passed with him dead yet she felt unable to reach the Annie Brand of then. There was no future now, no one to share it with, no reason to hope, she’d lost herself along with Chow, or Chiao Chin Pao; along with the man she loved.

  ‘We must leave now, or the Green Gang will find us.’ Annie shook Chin Feng by the shoulders but she refused to move.

  ‘I have to go, do you understand? I can’t stay here, I won’t.’ Annie spoke urgently in a low whisper. She grasped the girl’s hands in pleading and kissed them quickly, knowing it was goodbye. Then she turned and slipped silently out the front door.

  Immediately Annie was in the street she felt her legs crumple and her head swam. It was a shock to be in a public place. She stood still, rebalancing herself in the moonlight. Natalia had told her so much that was impossible to comprehend. Natalia was a Bolshevik and Chow had been deeply involved with Communists. She’d been an idiot not to see any of the connections. Annie knew she should keep moving, as she turned one way, then the other, confused and disoriented.

  She wandered aimlessly and stumbled over a tree root pushed through the footpath. A big American automobile moved past, close to the curb. Its shiny black bulk obliterated her view of the other side of the road. There was a light on in the interior of the vehicle and the Chinese chauffeur was smoking with one elbow resting on the open window. She wondered if she should motion for him to stop. Only she couldn’t get her arm to raise enough to wave at the driver and so she just stood there, dazed. A young freckled boy in pyjamas looked out from the back seat. It was late for him to be out, Annie thought. As she watched a hand reached over and patted him, soothingly. His mother, Annie surmised, trying to get the boy to sleep. A blur of blonde curls framed the child’s face as he pressed his open palms to the glass. He stuck his tongue out at Annie as he passed. The gesture was full of innocent fun and normally Annie would have laughed and waved back, but she couldn’t respond; his pink fleshy tongue was all she saw in that split-second and in her confusion, it looked horrifically, unnaturally distended from his mouth. Coming up behind the car, moving dangerously fast was another vehicle.

  The instant was shattered by screeching tyres and a second later a thunderous boom. The boy’s door crumpled like papier-mâché as it was hit. Glass smashed out in a thousand dazzling flashes. The car swerved across the road. Annie’s nose filled with the smell of hot, burning rubber. She didn’t move. Her mind and body felt catatonic; overcome by the day’s events. The driver’s head hit the wheel as he tried to control the spin. But they kept sliding. She saw the boy in the soft leather back seat. His hands splayed out, catching at the air. His eyes were open wide with shock and his mouth gaped.

  The sound of the crash buffeted around Annie, smoke rose alarmingly fast in wide swirls, but it was as though she stood inside a large, protective bubble; so much had happened that day she could not take this latest shocking sight in. She watched the car accident without flinching. It happened very fast, but she felt as though time was suspended with her in the bubble, and the accident unravelled sluggishly in thick, sticky air that slowed everything down to heartbeat after laborious heartbeat of horrifying disa
ster.

  The boy was thrown forward. Annie saw the back of his head shiver sideways with the impact. Both his arms flapped like loose wire connections. The windscreen shattered as his neck smashed through the glass. Then he hit the bonnet and Annie lost sight of him.

  Still the second car careered towards her. Annie took a step forward, looking for the boy. He lay buckled in the road, like the malformed tree root she’d stumbled across earlier. Annie saw the car swerve to avoid her, but she couldn’t move. The boy lay with one crooked leg stuck out and broken forwards at a confronting angle. She’d seen a dead body already that day, and this boy was as dead as Chow, shutoff from life with the same still, inert indifference. She was reminded too of the small baby’s body wrapped in a dirty sheet; the boy’s leg was stiff with death like the baby’s toes. But she didn’t recoil from the sight as she had done earlier in the room with Chow’s body. All she could do was stand there and be a witness.

  The car clipped Annie as it careered past her into the wall. The bolt of power from the impact pushed all her bones from their locked places. Her stomach jerked as the breath barrelled out of her. She grabbed at herself as her legs slid out. The sound of her own body hitting the ground filled her head a moment before the pain did. Then there was no feeling at all as a dull cloud enveloped her. The chaos in the road disappeared. The panic throbbing in her ears receded. Quickly, silently, everything went black.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A wild current swirled and pounded in her head, crashing and churning. There was a searing pain in Annie’s arm. Her back was numb. If she moved, even a little, it roared in her head again. When she closed her eyes the current was still there, dragging her under. She gasped.

  ‘Missy, Missy?’

  She tried to concentrate on the voice. It was agitated but not angry, a woman. Annie dragged herself up out of the heaviness with another gasp.

  ‘Is okay, you okay? You very lucky.’

  From where she lay, head flat against the footpath, Annie could see individual specks of glass glinting like stars. They spanned out from right beside her cheek. She tried to look around but it hurt too much. Ahead, one of the cars had stopped in the road. Fluid leaked from somewhere beneath the bonnet, running to the drain in a watery kaleidoscope of metallic sheens. But right there, where the cool stone of the footpath soothed her cheek, was restful.

  A crowd huddled around something. There was noise; shouting and crying. Close to Annie the woman looked at her with concern. She was a young stranger, trying to help.

  ‘Yes, okay,’ Annie whispered.

  The noise of a siren made her wince. Her head ached. She pushed herself up to sit propped against a building. One arm hurt terribly. Her back had begun to thaw, and with it another torrent of pain washed through her.

  It took a moment to remember where she was. Then the local police arrived, setting up barriers, pushing the crowd back from the scene, using their whistles constantly. The noise was unbearable. Annie remembered how she’d ended up there. She had to leave, the police had too many connections, too many spies, she’d be discovered and the news would quickly get back to Natalia and her men.

  As she struggled to move, a hand rested on her shoulder. The fingers were fine and long. She looked up at the face of the woman, a stranger and her protector now, who patted Annie and motioned for her to stay still, like Annie was a dog. But she hurt too much to care. She closed her eyes to it all and gave in to overwhelming exhaustion. She couldn’t move, let alone run away. It was a relief to close her eyes and subside into oblivion.

  The light flared and disappeared, flared and disappeared. Annie blinked awake. A minute, an hour, she had no idea how long she’d been there. Her arm throbbed horribly. But at least the pain pulled her out of the blur.

  She saw the sock first. It was blue wool, with a white rabbit embroidered on the side of the ankle; a child’s sock. It stuck out awkwardly. There was no shoe. The sock had been darned; neat stitches looped across the big toe area, back and forth to build up a replacement layer of wool. His mother probably mended his socks.

  Then she saw the woman kneeling down beside the boy. His head fell limply forward into her chest as his mother hugged him. Her face hung in his hair. Her body shook uncontrollably. From somewhere deep within, the moan of an injured animal erupted in pitiful cries as her hands scrambled across his back, across his legs, pulling at the limbs to tuck them into her embrace.

  Someone stepped in front of Annie and hands reached down to help her up. She looked around, confused, trying to see the blue sock. But she was being led towards an ambulance, led away from the small body wrapped in his mother’s desolation, away from the sock so lovingly darned to keep that little foot safe as it skipped through a boy’s day.

  The rough hospital sheets didn’t move as Annie rolled over. Her head hurt. Her wrist was wrapped in a cotton bandage. A second bandage covered the cut on the back of her head where she’d hit the pavement. She laid still, legs straight, arms resting on her thighs.

  A nurse gave Annie something for the pain. She felt herself sliding out of her body, not into unconsciousness but no longer part of the pain. At last, the men had given her the opiate. She thought she was slipping through oblivion with a deathly overdose, laid on a rough bed still covered in Chow’s blood. The image was thin and papery; she could walk through it like walking through the washing blowing dry in the garden at home. Then she was swimming in the river, struggling to breathe, fighting against the current. It was no good, death always won, she had no choice. No choice who to love; her sister, her father, someone else? The other man, Chiao Chin Pao; his name felt wispy, like the sheet in the breeze again, only this time it was a note, folded into a soft square, telling him things she shouldn’t say, helping him to die. The boy lay in the road like a tree root. His mother knew it was death she clung to; that her boy was already gone, into the ground with the seeds for next year’s crop. Where was the ground? Annie hovered in her mind above her bed. Where was the girl who left the valley for adventure? Where did she go?

  A doctor approached. She latched on to his arm.

  ‘Help me,’ Annie whispered and she heard Chin Feng talking in her ear. ‘Help me.’

  Annie woke feeling groggy and sore. But her head was clear, and as the evening lights turned on, she looked around the ward. Rows of thin metal beds were packed tightly like finger biscuits in a tin. Beside her a small stove was alight on the floor. Two women prepared food for the patient next to Annie. Chopsticks flashed through green stalks in the wok. They stared up at the misplaced foreign woman. She lay back against the pillow and took a deep breath, wincing with pain, but she took another, and another, expanding her chest so that heat scorched across her back, willing to endure the pain because at least it was a feeling, she was still breathing, still alive and still able to hurt.

  A doctor approached, and walking beside him, Annie saw Ilma. Her eyes stung with tears at the unexpected sight of her friend. She hurried towards her with such a familiar, gambolling style it made Annie catch her breath with relief. She closed her eyes.

  The doctor talked in hushed, respectful tones, not wanting to wake Annie.

  ‘Please excuse my English. We do not often get foreigners in this hospital. This lady is very fortunate; no broken bones, some bruising, very deep, and cuts. She must leave bandages on for next week. But there is something else that concerns me. May I speak frankly?’

  Annie heard Ilma cough.

  ‘Are you aware your friend is with child?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Annie heard the shock in Ilma’s voice. Her fingers dug into the pillow as she listened, every fibre in her body tensed with disbelief.

  ‘Yes, and I would like your permission to assess her to confirm that the baby was not harmed.’

  ‘Of course, do what you must.’

  Annie heard the doctor move forward, pulling a screen to the end of the bed to shield them from view. She felt his cold hands against her belly and couldn
’t help a shiver as he pressed gently. She went over the dates in her head to work out how long since she was last on the rag; more than two months without a doubt, maybe even three. She felt her stomach start to roll and churn.

  ‘Pregnant?’

  She whispered the word and listened to it hanging in the air.

  ‘Annie, you’re awake.’

  She hadn’t realised she’d said the word out loud as Ilma snuck in behind the screen. The doctor stopped his examination and smiled at Annie. His eyes were sunken with puffy mounds of tiredness suspended beneath each one. Annie concentrated on the doctor’s face and the professional concern she saw in his eyes but she couldn’t stop the tears that fell unhindered.

  Ilma was looking at her intently.

  ‘Did you hear what the doctor said, Annie? It’s good news, no time for tears. You are going to have a baby—a baby, Annie. You’ve been in a terrible accident but there are no broken bones, and the baby is healthy, the doctor has checked. It’s all going to be better now; I’m here and I will do everything to make you comfortable.’

  Ilma bundled her into an embrace and Annie breathed in the familiar scent of Yardley’s lavender soap, where her cheek pressed against the smooth cotton of Ilma’s blouse.

  ‘There you go, my dear, it’s shock, that’s all, let’s go home. Some tea will help and then you might feel up to celebrating.’ Her voice hovered in the room, soft and reassuring.

  ‘The future will be here sooner than you think, Annie, and it’s going to be grand.’

  Annie rested in bed. She rolled over and faced the window where the underside of a leaf pushed against the glass, its veins pressed flat like the lifelines on her palm. Her silent tears fell onto the pillow. She closed her eyes, wishing for the blankness of sleep. Ilma appeared at her door, smiling broadly before shuffling in to smooth the blankets, leaning over Annie heavily a moment as she reached across to the far side.