by Sid Smith
CHINA DREAMS
‘The voices and stories that trouble the hero are so far from our own that they are shown to be purely destructive. But Smith has made something fierce, alternative and horribly real from these imaginings’
Daily Telegraph
‘Smith, the author of two earlier novels about a China that, like Tom, he knows only from his imagination, has produced a weirdly compelling narrative in which the precisely and often lyrically described visions of an alternate world constantly threaten to overwhelm everyday reality’
Sunday Times
‘Plot summary cannot capture the strange beauty of this spare and intricately constructed novel. It is a beauty only gradually revealed . . . the pithy elegance and fertile imagination within [his] sentences are characteristic of Smith’s writing throughout the novel’
Guardian
‘To say that everything has become clear by the dramatic ending would be to misrepresent the layered style of the writing, the brisk prose collaged with startling imagery and the ambiguity of folktale-like narration’
Independent
‘Here is a strange and genuinely haunting piece of work’
The Times
A HOUSE BY THE RIVER
‘A considerable achievement: well plotted, vivid and original. Sid Smith’s work to date is a triumphant testimony to the power of the imagination’
The Times
‘A remarkable novel. Written in a beautifully crafted prose, its theme is the resistance of China to Christianity . . . There is nothing sentimental about Smith’s vision . . . But there’s nothing cynical about it either . . . [Smith] creates a world with the moral and intellectual complexity that a world must have. Reality has altered a little by the time you finish reading it’
Spectator
‘Never less than readable, A House by the River is a touchingly crafted fable about our hunger for the spiritual - and the more prosaic forces that thwart that hunger’
Sunday Telegraph
‘There are so many white-knuckle twists and turns and so many miraculous escapes and recaptures that it’s sometimes hard to keep up. Something Like a House is rather subtle. This book is throbbing’
Guardian
‘A perceptive, often exciting and finally sad study of idealists defeated by their ignorance of an alien world’
Sunday Times
SOMETHING LIKE A HOUSE
‘Sid Smith’s debut novel . . . is an imaginative tour de force, a descent into the darkest recesses of the human psyche which is made even more powerful by its spare, detached style’
Mail on Sunday
‘A work that is dense with politics, history and science, but which has a ring of absolute truth. It reads not so much as a novel about an experience but as one that renders the experience itself - startling, strange, unmediated’
Daily Telegraph
‘A marvellous terseness, a stark, brilliant poetry . . . a gripping literary thriller’
Independent
‘An impressively well-researched and sensitively imagined picture of an almost unknown society . . . told in haunting, piercingly spare prose which never fails to make an impact’
The Times
‘It will be compared with Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies. It is a profound and sophisticated work of fiction’
Observer
CHINA DREAMS
Sid Smith spent the first seven years of his working life in labouring jobs - including woodsman, hod-carrier, railway labourer, gravedigger, stagehand and self-employed gardener. Born in Preston, Lancashire, he now lives in London and writes extensively for newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, Something Like A House, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and forms a loose trilogy with A House by the River and China Dreams.
Also by Sid Smith
SOMETHING LIKE A HOUSE
A HOUSE BY THE RIVER
SID SMITH
CHINA DREAMS
PICADOR
First published 2007 by Picador
First published in paperback 2007 by Picador
This special electronic edition published 2008 by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-46109-2 in Adobe Reader format ISBN 978-0-330-46106-1 in Adobe Digital Editions format ISBN 978-0-330-46108-5 in Microsoft Reader format ISBN 978-0-330-46110-8 in Mobipocket format
Copyright © Sid Smith 2007, 2008
The right of Sid Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Visit www.picador.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you're always first to hear about our new releases.
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Notes
Preface
Writing a book means having your nose rubbed in your limitations – every day, every day. However, your struggle necessarily ends with publication. Or it used to.
‘A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.’ There’s some dispute over who penned this line, but it’s certain that – however much the author might have hesitated over ‘art’ versus ‘DIY’, or worried that he was sounding like a pompous ass – sooner or later the parchment was snatched from under his dithering goose feather and passed into other hands. His airy speculations became a matter of matter, of paper and stitching, and the printer’s aching back, and an inky rag in the bookbinder’s pocket, and the bookseller’s apprentice snoring under a bench in a nest of off-cuts, blotches, and misprints, his head on an unsellable collection of sermons by a fiery unfrocked monk, much concerned with righteous chastisement. Finally, his words made their dismal progress from the reader’s lap, to his elbow, and at last to a forgotten shelf.
And did that dusty book ever stir among the mouse droppings? Did it utter an insistent ‘ping’? Did an irritating light-emitting diode show that an update was available? Of course not. But eBooks are as insubstantial as minds, and as easily changed.
Hence this edited version of China Dreams. The book is supposed to celebrate plot – the hardest bit of fiction writing, and the bit that most fiction therefore leaves out. How good, though, if you could think up a top plot like Dracula, or Jekyll and Hyde, or ‘Little Red Riding Hood’: China Dreams makes dozens of attempts. For its paper publication, though, I left a few radical bits out: the book already seemed too near the raggedy edge. But nobody’s complained, so this eBook version has added oddities �
�� including more about Jack the Ripper.
The only advantage of paper books is portability, but that won’t last. EBook readers will soon weigh nothing and cost nothing and be a camera, phone, music centre and (as part of their Internet function) a gateway to all the world’s knowledge, and they’ll fold up and fit in your pocket and be forgotten until you need them.
As for the pious types who declare that nothing will replace ink on paper: well, millions of us stare at computer screens all day; millions of us read nothing that’s not on screen. The argument that screens hurt the eyes is equally unconvincing: if, like mine, your eyes have been ruined by unhealthy amounts of reading, you’re delighted at words that are backlit and as big as you like. And if we’re daft enough to want the grey-on-beige of paper and not the crisp black-and-white of a computer display, then the technology will be happy to oblige. Besides, we’re living through the most important development in learning since Gutenberg – and the Internet happens on screen.
The best attitude for writing a book is to feel that you’re capable of good work but you’re not sure if you’ve managed it yet. And surely eBooks are the best of all worlds for pursuing that ever-postponed perfection: the work is being sold, reviewed, read, yet can still be tinkered with.
But how to crack on with the next piece when the old one can still be fiddled with? Will authors spend a lifetime on the same work? Will it become an obsession with the ideal, in the same way that people get addicted to plastic surgery? Will our eBook publisher eventually ban us from any more alterations? (Obviously they’ll never give us the passwords.)
Writing is depressing (see ‘nose’, above) and publication used to be a blessed release. You may be mauled by the critics – they are horribly accurate, invariably picking on the bits that you also doubted – but you couldn’t do much about their comments. No longer.
We still can’t tinker indefinitely. In time we may run out of inclination or talent. In time we’ll run out of time. But, thanks to eBooks, a work of art need never be abandoned.
Oh god.
www.sidsmith.co.uk
1
He kept dreaming about China.
At first they were only daydreams: he pictured himself in a rice field, or he was leading his buffalo home under the stars, singing although he was tired, or he was fishing from a boat on a river, the fish very strange and Chinese. But then they were real sleeping dreams, and he’d snort and twitch and think that he’d never get home. And finally Tom saw that the dreams had a meaning, although to find the meaning always seemed to need another dream.
It started with May Tan, their room over her dad’s takeaway, and his job on the little red delivery bike, wobbling down the Whitechapel Road with fried rice and crackers. Because of May he saw himself in China, happy with her in the jungle lowlands, or the wooded hills, or in the mountains near Tibet. But then she dumped him, and Tom thought the China dreams were over.
Instead he was back at the squat. He’d lived there the summer before, when he’d just left school and everyone was brown and the apple tree in fruit in the back garden. It was hot in his top-floor room so he’d sat under the tree, smoking dope and eating apples with students and hippies, signing for his dole with hands oily from fixing cars in the gutter. But now it was winter, and he had the clammy basement room, and the squat was full of ex-cons who didn’t flush the toilet.
But the China thing went on. If he stepped outside, there were always Orientals who might or might not be Chinese, and if he stayed indoors, sitting in the sleeping bag with his back against the concrete basement wall, he thought about May, her brother and dad, and the two cooks who couldn’t describe China, or what it was like to be Chinese in London, and had edged him out of the takeaway on that last day, saying, ‘You go,’ and ‘No trouble,’ Tom dizzy with bad dope, and May wouldn’t see him.
So he pictured her in China. She was on a buffalo. She was riding by a river, coming to their wedding. She wore a tall hat and a skirt of many layers. She was riding side-saddle on the way to the wedding, but afterwards she’d be astride. The ceremony was strange, but May’s dad was helping. Tom and May walked into the river. They were married when they held hands under the water.
2
Tom’s eyebrows were very black. They were always raised, even when he was alone. They made pointed arches over his eyes, and said that life was surprising and needed careful thought. In the street, people noticed these eyebrows and his wayward gaze, looking at cars or pigeons or women. His wiry black hair stood up in clumps.
All this was funny and endearing, as was his company. He spoke softly and quickly in his country accent, but preferred to listen, his mouth a little open, his eyebrows high, because people were mysteries he might puzzle out. He hated his tobacco teeth, so his smile was tight-lipped and shy, with the glance downwards.
Then May dumped him and he changed. His eyebrows were still high and surprised, but now they also showed hurt and sometimes anger. He watched people with suspicion, because they might betray him. And when he was alone he pined for May and their room under the eaves.
Tom liked the night, so he’d liked the takeaway. At first he’d worked the counter, but he bungled the orders and fumbled the change, so they sent him to the kitchen, where he broke plates, spilled sauce, and lost spoons in the noodles.
Then they put him on deliveries and forgave him everything because he’d go to the worst council blocks, not leaving the motorbike to be stolen or wrecked but riding up the stairwells over silver paper and used needles, and if a gang was waiting he wanted them to start something, staring them down until the ambush calls stopped.
On his days off he imagined being Chinese: in shops he’d point and nod, not speaking; he was careful on buses, like the Chinese cooks going home in their cheap clothes, London strange to him; and he’d sit in Chinatown cafes over green tea and bean-curd cakes, watching kids flirt and laugh, although their race is beyond age. When he was working he kept the bike helmet on, so that people might think he was Chinese.
After closing time he’d wheel the bike into the shed, where the watchdog shivered among turds and dried-up leftovers and pushed its nose in his hands to be stroked. He helped with the washing up, then ate leftovers at the steel-topped table with May’s dad and the two cooks: Mr Tan dealing games of Patience with his creepy thick hairless arms, Chung big and absent-minded, little Wei sucking chicken bones, and Tom understanding nothing, watching their lips and eyes, hearing his name like a dog does, his arms on the cold table, his chin near his arms, smoking Marlboros from the big semi-legal packs in the cupboard under the sink and staring at the three Chinese, while newly washed pans dripped from a rack above the table. Big Chung was irritated to be watched, Wei amused, and Mr Tan thought that Tom was a fool.
Sometimes Johnny was home from college, May’s nearly twin, nervous and snooty, propped against the cupboards. But most of all there was May, thin like Johnny, a girl by omission, arms folded over her trainee-nurse’s blouse, joking with the cooks, her big black shoes at ten-to-two, giggling when Tom’s eyebrows turned her way.
One night he was climbing on the bike when she said, ‘Looks like fun.’ He tapped the seat and she pulled up her nurse’s skirt and jumped on, and this was his dream so he was drunk with lust before they’d left the yard, her skinny bum squeezed between his back and the plywood box for the food, and she was bouncing on the seat shouting, ‘Faster, faster.’
For weeks they went all over London on the little red Honda, weaving up hills at walking speed, down alleys and pavements, through shopping precincts, warm in the late-summer nights, and then she’d use Johnny’s line about getting from A to Beer, so he’d park outside pubs, proud of his China girl, and she was instantly drunk, red-faced and loving, laughing at her country boy, her hand light on his leg, her clever quick London voice. She’d doze on his shoulder all the way home, sleepy in the kitchen with the tired cooks, the plots and plans, eating leftovers under the strip lights, daring her dad to object, her dad sayi
ng, ‘You poyfriend? Poyfriend?’ then up the stairs for a snog in her room under the roof, decorated like the takeaway – red walls, tassels on the lampshade, Chinese travel posters, a velvet throw on the bed that maybe didn’t squeak – until finally she let him stay.
On their last night together she was very drunk. He wheeled the bike into the shed and couldn’t resist a quick oil check and brake-cable adjustment and a stroke of the dog, then up the stairs but her room was empty because she was snoring at the kitchen table between the two cooks that snobby Johnny called Eeny-Meeny and Miney-Mo. Or Fee-Fo and Fi-Fum. Or Who-How and Why-Where. Then he heard people on the stairs, but it was May stumbling and muttering. She fell into her room and undressed in a three-legged race with her jeans and fell on the bed, saying, ‘Just wait till the Chinks take over.’
‘That’s why I’m reading this stuff.’ Shelves of picture books about China, muddy colours on cheap paper, bought by her dad for a dozen birthdays but ignored.
She said, ‘We’ll call it the Yellowchapel Road. And we’ll repaint the White House.’
‘Um.’
‘And Whitehall.’
‘Yes.’ Her jokes made him nervous, but she fell asleep, so he looked at pictures of a grinning ploughman, the Great Wall, cormorant fishermen with their lamps, and then imagined himself in China. May tended their little field, and he worked a claypit in a bend in the river. All day he drove a buffalo round and round to tread the clay. He hated the buffalo because it stepped in its old foot-holes.
The two cooks woke him. They tapped on May’s door and took him to the all-night pool hall at King’s Cross, where he picked up their splayed-finger cue action and gangster smoking style – the bared teeth, stiff fingers, shrewd frown, and wide enveloping swoop for the ashtray – then slept on the first Tube back to Brixton. He grabbed his dole, scored, had a day-long pub crawl, did deliveries all night, stoned stupid, and by ten was back at the takeaway.