by Sid Smith
But she wouldn’t explain the leech. Her father blamed the boy and kept his daughter at home in his castle. But in fact the culprit was May herself, who wished to resemble the boy in every particular.
‘God,’ said Tom, alert in the van. ‘More pervy stuff.’ He lay in the dark, getting angry. ‘I can change this.’
He thought: There was a river in a forest. A boy loved a girl. They were fifteen, and ready to marry. They roamed the forest, climbing for eggs and for honey from the wild bees, although the forest women told the girl, ‘Do not climb,’ because girls mustn’t go in the trees beyond a certain age. But May sat astride the high branches and laughed at the women catching frogs in the river, or digging crabs from their burrows in the river-bank. ‘Soon we’ll live high up,’ she said, ‘and make a home with the birds.’
But May’s father was a mandarin, and at last confined her in his castle. The girl pined in her rooms, and the boy pined in the forest, and when he thought of love he thought of May and held his precious part, holding it tight, because it might fall off when it was full, like May’s leech.
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Tom. ‘Start again.’
There was a boy in a forest. He wanted revenge. He would kill the mandarin and marry May. He crept silently through the trees. He crept into the wind so that the prey couldn’t scent him, and he squatted like a girl to piss, a stick at his member so that the water fell without sound.
‘But this isn’t pervy,’ thought Tom. ‘It’s very practical. A hunter’s trick.’
The mandarin was afraid of the boy, and sent two guards to kill him. But he led them to snares he’d set for pigs, then weakened them with arrows, then cut their throats, although they said, ‘Don’t kill us.’ He left their bodies for the animals, but took armour and a sword. He polished the sword and believed it could cut the river so that the water wouldn’t heal, or cut the wind, or cut today from tomorrow and make a place wide enough for a man to sit and in the morning his beard wouldn’t have grown.
‘But I didn’t go on about this bollocks. I only thought about May, and killing her dad.’
So the boy didn’t fuss with the sword. He didn’t need to, because he’d win any sword fight through superior will, a wound being the outward sign of an inner division, a feminine split which the sword had merely revealed.
‘Bollocks.’
The boy threw the sword away. Instead he polished the armour on the sandy bank of the river. He greased it with clarified fat, so that the plates were mirrors. He walked through the trees like swirling bits of forest and sky. His enemies would see his beauty, and their own image in the armour, and would fail because they were ugly.
‘No, they wouldn’t.’
The boy threw the armour in a stream. He walked through the forest, thinking only about May and her father and unarmed combat. He hung a bundle of palm leaves against a tree, punching for weeks until he punched the tree. He practised the following throws and holds: climbing rabbit bites the eagle; oil on the swan’s neck; and small fish confronts the waterfall but fails until the sixth attempt. He hid his testicles, lifting them into his belly with tight cloths. He checked often that his loins were empty.
‘Enough,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll be the mandarin.’
This mandarin came from London. He was kind. He gave food to the local people. He sheltered them when the river flooded, and they loved him, although his wife had smiled at a pretty boy so that he cast her out to be a beggar in the mountains, first cutting off her lips so that she smiled at everyone.
‘No.’
The mandarin had never married. He was in love with May, who was a poor girl from a forest village. He came from San Francisco. He’d been raised in a single Chinatown room, the children sharing a bed, brothers and sisters lying feet to faces, to prevent mischief. This might explain some later matters. He worked in a Chinese bank on Mission Street, but in the evenings he wore a white linen suit, his hair slicked back, and loitered in opium houses with other wastrels. He became an addict. In his weakness he couldn’t service his harlots and was ashamed and then angry. He saw among the opium smoke that a man’s place was that great swath of the earth from Turkey to China, where he might stand berobed with legs wide, his women crouching. One day, in a house by the docks, the opium master was himself smoking, so that his woman came from a back room. Her bound feet entered the young man’s dreams: he would fill his house with women who tottered from room to room, or rested against the furniture like swimmers, and he would be the lord. So he stole money from the bank and came to China, staring from the ship’s rail at the Canton waterfront, rapt with desire at the lovely cripples, and nothing else would do.
In the van, Tom watched the mandarin with suspicion. But he also thought how a bound foot would fit in your hand.
The mandarin found a castle in a forest where poor women could be bought. He clothed them in a stiff wig and a thick embroidered coat, laughing at their peasant surprise, and caused their feet to be bound. They were pleased by their new feet, thinking themselves like fine ladies, and he bowed his head over the white silk stockings and red silk slippers and the toes bent under. When he was weary of them, he thought how they couldn’t return to the forest and the fields, and he wept for them, as they also wept.
‘What’s going on?’ thought Tom.
One day a girl came to the castle with honeycomb to sell. The mandarin said, ‘I will train you in the ways of ladies.’ He gave her a heavy wig, and a heavy gown that was stiff with needlework. He smiled and said, ‘A true gentlewoman must have bound feet,’ and he showed her the silk ribbons which are tightened until the toes fold under and touch the heels. ‘I wonder what binding would suit you. Perhaps “the bow” or “the new moon”.’ Her name was May.
‘God,’ thought Tom.
The mandarin felt a stab of pity. Perhaps he should give up his dream. But then he thought of the beauty of bound feet and became full of tenderness, saying, ‘The finer the lady the more becoming are bound feet.’
May said, ‘The love of bound feet is the love of a woman humbled.’
‘It is the love of beauty,’ said the mandarin, ‘and the desire that the beloved should be perfect.’
May said, ‘Besides the pain there is an impeding of the blood, so that the toes are mortified and fall off. Degenerate men may call them “crescent moons”, “three-inch golden lotuses”, and “curved lotuses to fill a hand”, yet the feet are rotten in their red silk slippers and white silk stockings.’
‘Won’t you do this for me?’ said the mandarin. ‘Surely the greater the sacrifice the greater the love.’
‘I only want freedom.’
‘But why should you wish for freedom, when freedom means departure from one who will adore you?’
May didn’t reply. She only thought how the forest paths would be hard for her and the trees impossible, and only the castle would remain. Nevertheless she went every day to his rooms, where he knelt and snatched her feet into his lap. ‘Tighter,’ he said. ‘Bind them tighter.’
‘Bastard,’ thought Tom. But he also thought of a lover whose feet were small, like the feet of a child in the forest, or the hooves of a new creature.
Now May staggered from chair to chair. How the mandarin greeted her new feet! He knelt on the floor and drew them to him, his head in her lap, his silk cap slipping off and the oiled pigtail spilling out, and she stroked his head, so that he seemed like her own child.
‘Your feet are like the hooves of a deer,’ he said, ‘one of the tiny deer of the forest, which are as high as a man’s knee, and wait in a snare, shivering and thin, trembling when the hunter comes, who will kill it with a single blow, though first taking his pleasure, whether it be doe or buck.’
One day the mandarin was delayed and May sat in his anteroom. She would be happy among his orchids and silk, she thought, and the plates that could be laid on a book and the book still read. And she half admired him for spurning the functions of woman and man.
‘No she didn’t,’
said Tom.
May was a healthy girl. She wanted a normal life. Normal. And now she saw a shrivelled thing in a silver frame and thought, ‘His wife’s lips.’
‘God,’ thought Tom, and remembered the boy in the forest.
This boy had been faithful, despite his faults, and raged against the mandarin, who was crippling his love. And at night in the hot forest he thought of May in those private moments when we are hermaphrodite.
‘Christ.’
But there was no time to lose, so Tom put the boy at the castle gates. His precious parts were bound up, which was fair and reasonable and good tactics, but the guards searched him, their hands between his legs, and laughed with surprise, saying, ‘This is a woman.’ So the boy killed them, the bow leaping to his hand.
The stairs to the mandarin’s rooms were steep. Their treads sloped outwards and were narrow and slick with wax and designed to creak. But the boy had spent his life in the trees. He braced against the walls and climbed without touching the steps. Then he heard May shriek and knew that the story was working itself through.
She had peeked around a door and found the mandarin’s bed.
She had gone to the bed and fingered its coverlet of silk.
She had pulled back the coverlet, and stopped in surprise. Along the pillow was a row of wigs, like her own wig.
She had pulled back the sheet. Below each wig was a coat, like her own embroidered coat.
There was a gap amid the coats. It was just big enough for the mandarin to lie in.
She drew down the sheet. Below each coat was a pair of legs. They were severed at the knee. A leg fell to the floor, pretty in its white stocking and red slipper, and seemed to kick her.
Now the mandarin rushed in, his little sword a blur, and Tom said, ‘God,’ the story unstoppable.
But the boy was also there. He burst into the bedroom, his bow humming. The mandarin fell with arrows in his face.
But where was May? Now Tom saw her. She stumbled towards him, her face blank. Why was she on her knees? She laid her hand on the table, looking at him with a dumb appeal, and the story had won.
The boy gathered her up. He carried her away and never left her till her wounds were dry. She lived with him in the deepest part of the forest, and bore her affliction bravely, but often looked at the sunlit paths among the trees, which she had loved so well.
15
Tom was walking fast, clearing his head. A stupid sick dream, the worst yet. He strode around the block and back to the van, then around the block again, kicking walls because the dream had beaten him.
Bollocks to the dreams. But how else could he be with May? He got into the driver’s seat, the doss bag spread on his lap. Three a.m. The world is speaking Chinese.
And here was another thing: with every dream the river got bigger. At first it had been a torrent among mountains, and the girl saying, ‘I’m young and lovely, as you see.’ Then it was broad and fast below the black cliff, and now it was slow and wide among forests, as if the stories were heading downstream, getting closer.
He sat very still in the cold van, his muscles tense instead of shivering. ‘It’s because there’s no draughts in a car, except if you make your own.’ Tense and cold, he wouldn’t turn his head, so the night gathered round him. The Whitechapel Road was quiet under the street lights, asleep but its eyes open, and he thought about the age of China and its millions of dead: scalded and strangled and shot, or stoned to death or fallen off cliffs, or choked on noodles or tripping over a dog, but above all death by knife and fire.
He remembered when he last saw Johnny.
He’d been pubbing in Brixton. He’d walked very carefully from the Whitechapel Tube, a secretive grin, past the hospital, round behind the takeaway, through bin bags and empty cardboard boxes into the kitchen, and had sat at the steel table, drunk and stoned, watching Johnny make toast, pleasantly bemused at his weird haste as he stacked the slices. Now Tom suddenly understood: ‘It’s because toast is an insulator.’
Medicine was disgusting, said Johnny, so maybe he’d write about the Chinese abroad. You could do the history of a house, maybe this house, and the people who’d lived here, going back through the generations to China.
‘Not that rap crap?’ said Tom.
‘Well, you know. Maybe someone could do the music.’
And he was still damn fast with the toast, leaning from the hips, his long narrow back, swiftly spreading marge, then the knife deep in the jam so that it covered the toast in one quick sweep and a couple of fiddles at the corners. Tom nodded at the windscreen: margarine and jam are also insulators.
Johnny turned off the grill and relaxed a bit. The lid of the margarine tub was upside down on the table. He lifted the tub at one end, slackly between finger and thumb so that it turned upside down, and pressed it into the lid. He let it spin upright and put it in the fridge, swiftly so the cold couldn’t get out. Fag fussing.
‘My dad’s trying something new on the menu. It’s rack of lamb.’
‘Don’t.’
‘He was going to do ram instead of lamb. But there’s a lack of ram.’
His hair was greased straight back. A thin black tie over a silk shirt, the sleeves rolled up, slim slick arms like a shop dummy. His pants were baggy linen: his linen jacket on a chair back. Now Tom recognized the look: a Shanghai gangster, circa 1920. Fag vanity.
Johnny put the lid on the jam jar and turned it the wrong way. When the ends of the threads clicked he turned it the right way: this prevents cross-threading. He held the sugar bowl over the cups, moving it aside to empty the spoon. He poured the kettle, following the tea bags for maximum infusion. He added milk while the water still swirled, and stirred vertically so the sugar didn’t just circle the bottom. White scalp through his hair, which was countable like a wig: they have hairs not hair.
‘How’s my sister? I never see her nowadays. Or you – though I hear you, of course.’ A squirm and a kind of frowning smirk: ‘Not what I expected when I offered you the job.’
‘Blimey, Johnny. I mean.’
‘I came to the squat, at great personal inconvenience.’
He halved the toast into faggot triangles and brought it all to the table. Straight-backed he prodded the toast with his face turned away, lifted it with his fingertips, bit, his lips held clear, then looked at the bite. Tom saw May in him, but soured with loneliness, fussy where she’s quick.
‘We might be going to China,’ said Tom. ‘Me and May. Tracing her roots. Up that river, you know.’
‘Maybe I’ll come. They’re my roots too.’
‘I thought you didn’t fancy the place,’ said Tom. ‘Third World toilets and all that.’ Deliberately he said, ‘Anyway, it’d be me and May – a boyfriend–girlfriend thing, you know.’
‘China,’ said Johnny, stiff-backed. ‘Yes, you’re welcome.’ But he was very hurt. He slid the cup towards him, then off the table edge, then lifted it, thus needing the minimum of tricky balancing. ‘I could do so much,’ he said, ‘given time.’
Tom was crouched behind a parked car. He was watching Mr Tan on the tall stool behind the counter, staring up stupefied at the TV on the wall. At eleven o’clock Tan came through the counter flap and turned the sign to Closed.
Tom waited, then went round the back. He took a deep breath and opened the kitchen door. ‘My god,’ said Wei.
They were at the steel table, Wei astonished, Mr Tan in his chef’s whites, sleeves pushed to the elbows, his thick smooth arms on a played-out game of Patience. He saw Tom and went grey.
‘Mr Tan. I very sorry. Sorry about Johnny.’
Tan glanced down at the cards. He looked up and said, ‘Go, please.’
‘Yes. Definitely. I just want to say I very, very sorry.’
‘Go.’ Tan’s fists were bunched on the table, muscles moving in his slick arms.
‘Yes. Definitely. But, one thing. I just, I mean I dream about China.’ A nervous laugh. ‘Maybe you have medicine. Tiger bits or bear’s feet. Yo
u know.’
‘Not understand. Waste of time,’ said Tan, lifting his barmaid arms and dropping them back, Tom watching the buttery lumps of muscles so that he lost the thread.
‘I mean. Mr Tan. I very ill. I not sleep.’
‘Talk English!’
‘Yes. Sorry. I mean I’m dreaming about a river. Does that make sense?’
Mr Tan stared, his bull-dyke forearms still at last: ‘Johnny is dead.’
Tom bowed his head. ‘I very sorry. Really. Is unbelievable.’
‘English!’
‘Yes. I wish I spoke Cantonese, Mr Tan.’
‘You not Cantonese. Not Chinese. Not a man!’
‘What? What you mean?’
‘English! You English, you talk English.’
‘Yes. OK. No problem.’
Tan’s fingers curled, holding some outrage. ‘Dirty. A dog.’
‘No. Wait. Just a minute.’
‘Go. Where my bike?’
‘It stolen. It is stolen. It was stolen. It has been stolen.’
‘You are really very useless.’
‘Yes. But that other thing. I mean it was nothing. It didn’t matter. Anyway it was somebody else. This other friend, who . . .’
‘Go now.’ Tan’s hand, smooth as a glove, over his eyes.
‘What about May?’
‘What?’
‘I dream about her, so I want to talk to her and still see her.’
‘Bastard! Talk to May, you finished.’
‘Look,’ said Tom, pointing. ‘About May. You split us up. I don’t want any more of that crap.’
Tan got up, his arms curved. Tom said, ‘Look, you fat fool. Johnny is dead because of you. It’s your fault, OK? And I’m going to marry May.’
Afterwards he thought, ‘When they say that a man is strong, that’s what it means.’ His fingers crushed together behind his back, Tan’s other hand on his neck, he was pitched into the alley as Wei held the door and bowed him out with a grin.