The situation wasn’t hopeful. This guy was notoriously devious, and it was quite possible he was thinking up some wicked plan. Fortunately I’d prudently kept all the relevant receipts. Even if he shrugged off the money he owed me, he couldn’t do the same with the money he owed the company.
The work situation disheartened me though. I assumed from Boss Liu’s tone there was little hope of promotion. Even if they kept deducting 5,000 yuan every month, I guessed I’d still be in debt by the time Taiwan returned to the motherland. When I discussed this with Zhou Weidong, he urged me to change jobs.
‘Your debts are a civil case at most,’ he said. ‘So you don’t have any criminal liability.’
The guy always boasted that he was a graduate of the elite China University of Political Science and Law, but the graduation certificate displayed in his office looked dodgy to me. Also, he without doubt had a vested interest in my future: it might have occurred to him that when I left it would create an opportunity for him.
Last week he’d brought me expense forms to sign and a cursory glance told there was something wrong with them. When I raised the matter, his face darkened and he said, ‘Don’t you do your expenses the same way?’
Without another word, I signed my name, thinking, Is there such a thing as an honest person anywhere?
Whatever happened, I had to stick it out until the end of the year. The year-end double salary bonus and annual commissions would be more than 20,000 yuan, which was worth having. Then in October there was our winter sales fair. As I was in charge of sales, it would be a good chance to boost my income. If I left now, it would be a waste. I’d had bad luck in everything this year, but I hoped that if I could just get through these next few months then everything would be better next year.
My mother had asked someone to tell my fortune, and was told that twenty-nine would be my glory year. I would get promoted and enjoy such success in business that money would flow to me like water: I wouldn’t even have to do much, it would just be like picking up a wallet from the ground. After hearing this, I closed my door and laughed for ages. Life; if there was no hope, where would we find the strength to carry on?
My mother was still concerned about the apartment situation. She kept telling me to get justice for myself. I didn’t know what to feel about it now. ‘Mother, give me a break, OK? Think of it as money spent because of an illness.’
She glared at me, then took out her frustration on radishes and cabbages. I thought it was a good thing I hadn’t told her about Zhao Yue’s affair or the old lady would probably have gone and killed her. My mother had kept up her kung fu all these years and was a master of many disciplines. She was accomplished at Tai Ji swordplay, and I doubted Zhao Yue would last more than a few bouts with her.
That day after I went back to the Golden Bay Hotel in the hope of finding Zhao Yu and Yang Tao, I ended up driving around the Xiyan district until I was almost out of petrol. Finally I returned to the Golden Bay and asked about them. The girl on the front desk said that she’d seen a woman and man walking out together but didn’t notice their expressions. The woman had her head down, and the man was embracing her in a sleazy way. On hearing that, I had the most peculiar feeling, as if grass was growing in my head. I stubbed out my cigarette, went back to my car and slapped myself hard and repeatedly. When all I could see was stars, I thought: Does tonight make me a winner or a loser?
Bighead Wang and Li Liang received invitations to Zhao Yue and Yang Tao’s wedding.
Bighead Wang swore loyalty to me, saying that he wouldn’t go and give them any money. ‘I’d rather wipe my ass with it.’
Li Liang said that Bighead’s suggestion would result in lead poisoning.
After consulting me, Li Liang went along as my official delegate, to congratulate the happy couple and deliver a gift of 600 yuan in a red envelope.
The wedding was a big do with lots of guests lined up to congratulate them. They’d even invited the main anchor of Chengdu TV station. Zhao Yue’s wedding dress was said by Li Liang to be ravishing, and she smiled like a flower. Apparently she refused several toasts on Yang Tao’s behalf, and someone joked that she was afraid that he’d get too drunk to perform on their wedding night.
Zhao Yue put her head on Yang’s shoulder. ‘Of course,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t watch any more after that’ Li Liang said. ‘When I left, no one noticed. To be honest, Zhao Yue is actually tougher than you.’
I was dining with a client in Neijiang that day but Li Liang called me straight after the wedding ceremony, to give me a rundown. I listened to him while my client, Wang Yu, continued to moan about the company’s rigid systems and low efficiency. When I shot him a fierce look he shut up immediately, as if I’d flicked a switch.
Turning my head away from him, I said softly to Li Liang, ‘Did you congratulate her for me and wish her a happy marriage?’
Li Liang was silent for a while, then said, ‘Don’t think too much about things. This is just life.’
I laughed. ‘Would it have killed you to say a few words for me?’
My hands were trembling uncontrollably. My glass dropped and smashed into pieces on the ground, splashing wine onto my shoes, which shimmered under the light.
My spirits revived, however, after polishing off two bottles of spirits. The ceiling far above me seemed to be shaking far, and the world was brilliantly colourful. Wang Yu’s mouth opened and shut and I wondered what the hell he was talking about. Suddenly I laughed and hit the table. Everyone turned around and glared at me.
‘What the fuck are you smiling about?’ Wang Yu said. ‘What’s made you so happy?’
I laughed until my tears flowed.
‘My wife is getting married today. Let’s have one more drink for her.’
He shook his head. ‘You’ve had too much, kid. You’re full of shit.’
When I stood up to toast him, I slid to the ground. My head hit the table edge and I saw stars. Wang Yu hurriedly came round to help me up.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
I lashed out a foot at him.
‘Fuck it! Fuck you! You’re all bastards.’
A few minutes later, outside the restaurant: a young smartly dressed guy sat on the ground weeping noisily. Passers-by stopped and pointed at him, laughing.
On the other side of town: a couple of newly-weds got into a wedding car and to the cheers of their friends, slowly drove away towards their happy, warm new home.
‘Why did you marry Zhao Yue?’ my sister’s husband had asked me at our wedding party.
‘I love her.’
‘What? I can’t hear. Speak up!’
I’d grabbed the microphone and shouted, ‘I love her!’
All the guests began to laugh, whistle and applaud. Zhao Yue held my hand, and blushed as she looked at me. Tears glistened in her eyes.
That was the 18th of June, my wedding day. My long-, long-ago wedding.
The third day after I returned from Neijiang, Bighead called my cellphone and asked me to hurry to his office straight away. I’d been asleep and looking at my watch I saw it was 3 a.m. Furious, I told him to fuck off. Just as I was about to hang up, he said, ‘It’s Li Liang. Quick! He’s in trouble.’
I’d asked Li Liang before where he got his gear. He always dodged this question, and if I asked again, his eyes would flare dangerously.
‘Why do you want to know? Are you going to turn me in?’
I reluctantly let it drop, denouncing Li Liang’s inability to tell when someone was doing him a favour.
Even if he didn’t tell me, I could guess: the two main centres for heroin dealing in Chengdu were Wannianchang in the east and Sima Bridge in the north. Most Chengdu powder brothers went to Sima Bridge to score. Recently the police had busted a lot of dealers there. After my brother-in-law published the news, he repeatedly asked me to urge Li Liang to be careful.
‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘He should quit.’
When I told Li Liang, he
just looked at me coldly in the way that triad gangsters look at chopper fodder.
I reached the station to find him crouched trembling in a corner. He was barefoot with his hands cuffed behind his back, and his face was blue and green with bruises. There was blood at the corners of his mouth. His shirt was ripped to shreds, his pale scrawny chest exposed When he saw me, he turned away quickly, his shoulders shaking. He seemed ashamed. I felt sad for him, and draped my jacket over his shoulders.
‘Don’t worry, Bighead and I are here,’ I said. ‘You’ll be OK.’
Bighead said that Li Liang had been unlucky because he’d just scored when the police arrived and threw him to the ground. He might have suffered a blow to the head. Struggling to free himself, he’d apparently seized hold of the arresting officer’s balls. By the time he let go, the cop’s face had turned purple. In fact he was still lying in a room next door crying. Bighead said that if he hadn’t arrived, Li Liang would have been severely beaten. I asked what we should do. Bighead shrugged.
‘What else can we do? We have to spend some money. We need to get him out of here tonight. It’ll be too difficult tomorrow.’
I asked how much and he sighed and extended four plump fingers and a thumb. I took a deep breath. ‘That much?’
His expression became serious. ‘Fifty thousand may not be enough. Do you know how much stuff Li Liang had on him? One hundred grams. That’s ten years at least!’
I nearly fainted.
‘It’s so late. Where can we go to get that kind of money?’ I said.
Bighead looked around, then shut the door and said in a low voice, ‘We have a few days to get the money. I already talked this through with the chief. For the moment, we just need Li Liang to write a cheque.’
At that moment, I noticed that Bighead Wang was dressed unusually formally. The badges on his hat and shoulder were shiny, the creases of his trousers sharp. It was was different from his usual butt-cleavage image and for some reason I was suspicious. I smoked a cigarette as I studied him. My scrutiny obviously made Bighead uncomfortable and he took off his hat and slapped it on the desk.
‘If I’m getting one fucking cent from Li Liang, I’m a son of bitch,’ he swore.
I didn’t believe in vows. Bighead Wang’s words failed to satisfy me but they reminded me of an incident that had happened while we were at university.
In the second semester of our sophomore year, Big Brother and Bighead Wang fought over a 30 yuan gambling debt. Bighead brandished a mop, Big Brother wielded a chair: both were heavyweight contestants and they fought at close quarters until the dormitory was nearly destroyed. My basin, bowl, mirror and bookstand were totally wrecked in that battle. After the physical fight, there was a battle of words. Separated by a desk, the two cursed each other furiously. Bighead Wang said that someone who didn’t pay their debts should be fucked by donkeys and Big Brother almost went insane. He thrashed about, saying that he wanted to kill Bighead. Chen Chao and I had to use all our strength to restrain them and I guessed our arms were stretched several centimetres during the process. When Big Brother realised that he couldn’t escape us despite his struggles, he cursed Bighead venomously: ‘Fuck you! You would sell your own dad for one cent!’
After carrying Li Liang up to the third floor of his home, I was out of breath. I lay on his couch and couldn’t get up. I hadn’t realised it in the police station, but when I got him home I discovered he was quite badly hurt. His legs were bloody and his wrists were extremely swollen. He kept coughing.
I turned over every box and basket in the kitchen until finally I found some ointment. I rubbed it into his skin and at the same time shared my suspicions.
‘Firstly, I haven’t seen any other cops dealing with this case, and it was only Bighead who was talking about the money. Secondly, Bighead rarely wears a uniform, so how come he was dressed so formally tonight? Thirdly, he could have dealt with you himself. Why did he call me? What did he want me to witness?’
Li Liang took a deep breath and winced, as if he was in great pain. Just as I was getting really worried, he pushed me away and said to the door: ‘Come on in, Bighead. What are you standing out there for?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Bighead Wang was quite impressed with the way I laid into him that day on the banks of the Funan River. Afterwards, he called me repeatedly, but every time I hung up without listening. Once he waited for me on my way home from work; he had a fawning smile. But by now I knew that concepts like ‘friends’ and ‘brothers’ were bullshit. The truth was, my value to Bighead was that I could help him make money.
I didn’t believe that Bighead had deliberately set out to trap Li Liang, but perhaps he was taking advantage of Li Liang’s misfortune to try and make himself a little profit. Joining the cops was the perfect way to corrupt a guy. Usually it took less than two years for a cop to become a poisonous bastard who would take a bite out of even their own father.
At high school I had a friend by the name of Liu Chunpeng. He used to steal watermelons from markets, and once we punctured a teacher’s tyre together. When we both failed our university entrance exams, we stood in Hejiang Pavilion and together lamented that heaven had turned a blind eye to us. Finally we wept on each other’s shoulders. After high school graduation, he got a job as a cop on the railway station district beat; a few years later he’d become evil and mean. A friend of mine drove into some railings near the north train station; he was caught and told that his licence would be withdrawn. My friend asked me to plead for him. Liu Chunpeng said, ‘OK, OK, your problem is my problem.’
Later however, he still fined my friend and took some points from his licence, which caused me to lose face. Another time I personally witnessed the guy beating a migrant worker until he knelt bloody-faced and begged for mercy. It was all because the migrant worker had stepped on Liu Chunpeng’s foot. After the beating, he was still mad and he kicked the worker’s bag high into the air. A cup inscribed with the motto ‘Serve the people’ fell out, rolling and clattering down the street.
‘You may trust Bighead, but you shouldn’t trust any cop,’ I told Li Liang.
‘I already handed over the money,’ Li Liang replied, ‘so what’s the point of talking about this?’
I continued to slander the cops, calling them beasts with badges. Li Liang listened for a while, then said, ‘You know what your problem is? You don’t take seriously the things you’re supposed to take seriously, and you’re way too serious about the things you should be relaxed about.’
Bighead’s expression that day at Li Liang’s place was ugly. He puffed out his cheeks and glared at me and so I was sure he’d heard what I’d said. I was uncomfortable; in fact, it was highly embarrassing. Just as I was about to explain though, Li Liang went berserk. He dived into the bedroom and started to turn everything upside down, making a terrible noise. Bighead and I hurried after him and saw chests and drawers already ransacked. He was out of breath and a strange sound came from his mouth.
‘What are you looking for?’ Bighead said. ‘Don’t worry, Chen Zhong and I will help you.’
Without looking at us, Li Liang said, ‘There’s one more packet! I still have one more. One more!’ His voice was hoarse and grating, like a wolf howling in the wasteland.
Perhaps Li Liang had remembered wrong. We turned the house upside down but didn’t find the packet. By then his fits were getting more and more frightening. At one point he grabbed an empty needle and tried to stab it in his arm. Bighead and I threw ourselves on him and wrested back the needle, both of us sweating with the effort. Li Liang rolled and crawled on the floor, twisting his body in strange contortions like a worm. This was the first time I’d witnessed such a scene. I was shocked and uneasy, afraid that he’d have a heart attack and die.
Bighead fought with him for a while, then wheezed out an order.
‘Go and get a rope to tie him up!’
As I went to leave, Li Liang clung pathetically to my leg.
‘Chen Zhon
g, I’m begging you! Go out and score for me!’
With a great effort I shook him off. He hit the ground, his face covered with snot and tears, his lips blue and green. His pupils were dilated, like a corpse with open eyes.
We had to carry him downstairs on our shoulders. The sky was still dark and the whole city was deserted, except for a few people who had stayed up all night and floated past with ghostly expressions. When we stuffed Li Liang into the car, he shrieked loudly. The sound was as sharp as a knife, piercing my soul, making my guts shudder.
After a fifteen-day compulsory detox treatment, Li Liang had put on weight. The day he came out of the clinic his manner was a bit weird. His strange smile suggested that he was happy and disappointed at the same time. His facial muscles were twitching, so I guessed that maybe he was having withdrawal symptoms.
On the way home we stopped for a meal at Liangjia Alley. Li Liang ate like a robot, chewing his rice expressionlessly and not saying a word.
I couldn’t bear it any more and begged him, ‘Bro, say something, OK? You’re really scary like this.’
He prodded the slices of boiled pork in the bowl with his chopsticks, then said thoughtfully, ‘Fuck, the restaurants outside the college gates had better food than this.’
Two days after, he disappeared, I dialled his cellphone repeatedly but he didn’t answer. I went round to his place and almost hammered his door down, but there was no response. I felt an unnamable fear. After hesitating a while, I summoned the courage to call Ye Mei. She asked me what I wanted.
‘Go to your home and take a look,’ I said. ‘Li Liang might have killed himself.’
Li Liang’s idol had always been Hai Zi, the poet. In 1989 Hai Zi committed suicide by lying on the railway tracks near Shanhaiguan. Li Liang claimed to have read all of his poetry. He’d come to the conclusion that Hai Zi’s death made him a hero, and that those who clung to life should feel shamed by his example. Later, this became one of Li Liang’s articles of faith. The second semester of our senior year, the literature society held a creative writing seminar where we pretentiously contemplated the future direction of Chinese literature. A group of pretentious young prats got so excited they had nosebleeds. When the meeting was about to end, Li Liang asked me, ‘Chen Zhong, what do we live for?’
Leave Me Alone Page 17