The China Coin

by Allan Baillie

Joan put the coin on the table and leaned back. ‘Now we talk.’

  Leah locked her eyes on the coin and fished for her old anger.

  ‘I didn’t know how you felt about China. I thought the trip and the coin were as important to you as they were to me. Maybe more …’

  ‘You were so fast – the day after the funeral you were talking about studying for China. Getting ready for the trip. The day after!’

  ‘Don’t you see? No, you don’t see. You haven’t had the night of the mob. You must try to understand.’

  Joan turned the coin with a finger. ‘I was eight years old when they came. A terrible yammering in the air, I’ll never forget the sound. Father looked down the street and there was a tide of men with machetes, clubs and torches. Mother rushed me off the street and Father started to close the shutters. Then he changed his mind and got us out of the shop, running very hard down the street.

  ‘The mob were breaking windows, tearing the shutters from the shop of a neighbour, Ah Fang, throwing torches inside. Ah Fang hobbled to the door and tried to run away but the men with the machetes … Mother covered my eyes, but I know what happened.’

  For an instant Leah saw that night through the eyes of a very little girl. Terrible! So terrible the little girl could never forget it, seeing it on a TV screen in Guangzhou, in a train, in a lane in Shanghai.

  But what did that have to do with Dad? ‘Why were the men angry?’ Leah asked the question quickly, to give herself time to think.

  Joan made a sound almost like laughter. ‘They were a mob. A mob does not need a reason. Like the Japanese in Janjing, like the soldiers in Shanghai. In Penang they were Malays, we were Chinese. That was reason enough.

  ‘So the fire spread from Ah Fang’s shop to ours, and that was the end. We left for Singapore three days later. You understand?’

  Leah looked blankly at Joan.

  ‘No you don’t. The night of the mob taught me something important. When everything’s gone, when there’s nothing more you can do, it is best to turn away. Change things, go somewhere else. When Father phoned me in Sydney to tell me Mother had died I took a bus to northern Queensland. Father stayed home in Singapore but he painted the family flat. We knew what to do.’

  ‘So we came to China to forget about Dad,’ Leah said bluntly. ‘I don’t want to forget him. Ever.’

  ‘You aren’t understanding.’ Joan rose unsteadily to her feet and touched Leah’s hand. ‘We’re tired. Look after the coin.’

  They returned to the hotel, their steps echoing in the empty street.

  10 Gorges

  The second riverboat was much the same as the first boat, single funnel with red star, a lounge for the second class passengers, two restaurants, airy comfort near the bridge, packed bodies and air reeking with tobacco smoke everywhere else. They were allotted an inside cabin but they would spend nearly all their time on deck. A few steps away there were showers, but one shower seemed to be on all the time.

  The boat yawed into the river current, dodged a hooting cross-river ferry, passed under a massive bridge and left Wuhan behind. No more freighters now, but smaller, flatter barges sitting on flat lazy water, and fishing boats drifting with the current. Lone hills occasionally broke the monotony of the flat plain.

  Joan left Leah alone on deck and read a book. Leah rubbed the coin with her thumb as she leant on the rail.

  We are still chasing the coin, Dad, but it is getting so complicated. Oh, I’m not complicated. I’m still after what you wanted, the mystery of the coin, but who knows what Joan wants? When you were here, she wanted to follow her father’s last request – to take the coin to his ancestral village, right? But when you were gone she wanted to find the only family she had in the world, fast, and to forget about you. Then in Good Field it was her father’s request, again, and now it’s all about forgetting you – again.

  Leah held the coin over the brown river.

  The coin was the end of the fun days. Wish it had never come. Oh, there were good times afterward, even after the Cough began, but there was always a little bit of cloud hanging about. The arrival of the coin was the first time – and just about the last time – she had seen Joan crying.

  A sudden string of explosions jerked Leah’s head up as the side of a hill slid down into a rising fog of brown dust.

  Startled, she clutched the coin, pulled it back from the river. She opened her hand slowly and stroked the black metal. She was frowning, as if it had somehow changed.

  There was nothing to watch in the port of Yichan except for the captain’s docking procedure. So Leah stood with Joan in the long light of the setting sun and supervised. The riverboat had slowed fifty metres out from a small stretch of vacant dock and was moving up against the heavy current.

  ‘Lovely to see a man doing what he knows,’ Joan said. ‘Even out here. Especially out here.’

  The bow anchor was let go with a running rattle and the engine slowed down.

  Leah looked at Joan. Was she thinking of her father?

  ‘Watch him. He’s going to make the river work for him.’

  Once Joan would talk about her old man, a mechanic with magic fingers. Motorbikes, diesel tractors, sewing machines, anything he touched he fixed. He was learning computers near the end. She could talk about him making a windmill drive a motor carcase as a pump, and she even sounded as if she understood it all.

  The boat was drifting slowly backwards and sideways.

  But she never talked about him now.

  The anchor chain was clanking off the boat, link by link.

  But everything happened so fast. She’d be talking about him, then the letter and the coin arrived, then the house went empty and quiet, then Dad started pushing toward China, then the Cough.

  ‘He hardly needs the engines now …’

  The riverboat’s bow cleared the stern of the ferry on the dock.

  Then the verdict and Joan wasn’t crying this time.

  A line thrown casually from the bow to two men wearing gloves on the dock. The line caught and pulled, dragging the heavy cable from the boat.

  All this in a month! Four lousy weeks.

  The cable was over the bollard and the boat’s winch tightened the cable, pulling the bow toward the wharf. The stern swung in to the wharf, the stern cable was secured and the stern winch began to grind.

  ‘Oh, he’s good. I want to clap,’ Joan said.

  The boat snuggled between the other boats, nudged the wharf and stopped. There was no room left even for a rowboat.

  Leah followed Joan inside, dead faced, to be stopped by a small pandemonium. The ever-running shower had burst and was gushing water out of its cubicle. Two drenched youths wrestled with the shower, armed with a very large monkey-wrench, while two girls desperately mopped the sodden carpet.

  ‘See,’ beamed Joan. ‘It’s the same the world over. We old coots can do it, you kids haven’t a clue.’

  Next morning the riverboat pulled itself out to the anchor and shouldered into the Yangtze. A little later the riverboat reached a high concrete wall stretching across the Yangtze, pouring brown water from multiple turrets to feed the river.

  ‘Gezhouba Dam,’ Joan said, and she sounded impressed. ‘We’re catching a lift.’

  ‘It’s huge,’ said Leah. She watched two massive metal doors slowly open ahead. Another riverboat and a barge scuttled out like cockroaches.

  The boat nudged forward through the scarred doors, with Leah leaning back, looking up at the top of the lock. A mouse in a dungeon. Hydraulic rams, thick as funnels, began to close the doors very slowly.

  Leah felt a sudden impact, solid as a blow.

  It had been like this!

  After Dad’s news, nothing ended. Not at first. Dad went out and sold cars, Mum tended plants at the nursery, and she went to school. Everything was the same, like the broad brown river at the stern of the boat, but there was a great dark door slowly closing.

  Mum pushed her out with Dad, so they could go bushwalking, do
wn the ancient Aboriginal path to the shining water of their secret cove. Watch gulls wheel over Lion Island, a schooner set rust-red sails for the Marquesas Islands. But then it became too far to walk. They drove to the Ku-ring-gai headland, the three of them, and picnicked with the crowd. ‘What fun!’ said Mum, and it was for a bit. Then Dad stopped selling cars and stayed home and read.

  Leah stared intensely at the steadily reducing slit between the two doors, seeing only the last of the sunlit river.

  Bald now, and walking on a stick – but he often reversed it and putted pebbles out of the way. He took the family to the movies, until he had to stay in the toilet for half an hour with the Cough.

  The doors hissed together, leaving the riverboat in hazy shadows. Water began to thunder into the bottom of the lock.

  In hospital, out of hospital. Shrinking. But always trying to laugh. Home in bed with so many pills and medicines, out of bed in a wheel chair. Playing chess in the sun, with frangipani blossoms falling on the board. Daughter winning, should not be winning.

  The riverboat began to rise.

  In bed all the time. Mum at home, playing cards with Dad when he was awake, cleaning things when he wasn’t. She moved into your bedroom and set up a bunk, because she was afraid of hurting him. Became ‘Joan’.

  Leah was caught by the sunlight slanting over the metal wall and closed her eyes.

  Just a shadow now, melting away. Wouldn’t see anyone. Eyes staring from a waiting skull.

  The thundering water slowed, and stopped.

  Joan picked you up from school half way through the morning. She said, ‘He’s gone.’

  The doors off the boat’s bow – just booms lying on the river now – began to open.

  Then the funeral and you couldn’t stop thinking, ‘It’s over. Thank God it’s over.’ No matter how hard you tried.

  And you were angry with Joan!

  As the riverboat moved into the upper Yangtze Joan clicked her tongue. ‘Well, how did you like that ride?’

  ‘It’s over.’ Leah took Joan’s hand and squeezed. ‘We’ve been through a lot, eh?’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Joan looked at her with a slight touch of puzzlement.

  The gorges started almost immediately. Hills became mountains and slid together, squeezing the broad, slow Yangtze into a narrow surge.

  We’ve left the flat land, Leah thought. Down there is Good Field and Swallow and Grandfather. Up here are the mountains, Turtle Land and the secret of the coin. Let’s get on with it!

  Tiny villages clung to high ridges with terraces etched desperately far above them. The sun swam feebly in a pass thick with mist. The beat of the boat was echoed in the constant crash of toppling waterfalls. A mountain ahead had been cleft cleanly to let the river twist through. Tiny boats rode the river downstream as if they were surfing, as tiny boats fought the river upstream in exhausted gasps along the rock walls, eddy by eddy. Five men hurled a rowboat against the current, flailing the water furiously with their oars.

  The riverboat cut across a calm stretch, nearing a small valley of moss-streaked boulders and sheltered pines. And a pure blue river. The blue of the mountain water met the brown of the Yangtze, pushed it back, flowed with it for a few metres, cutting a clean line between the blue and the brown. Then the Yangtze humped over a rock and there was no more blue.

  Joan hunched over the rail, looking back. ‘He should have seen that.’

  Leah blinked at Joan, and nodded. ‘Yeah.’ She was smiling.

  A little later the gorge opened up and a coal town squatted among the green banks and the grey mountains. A battery of chimneys pumped smoke across the river, ramshackle buildings seemed to be slowly collapsing. Trucks tipped coal down the river bank adding to the spreading fans of fine black. Long chains of men and women carried baskets of coal on their shoulders from the piles to a waiting fleet of barges, and trudged back for more.

  The riverboat twisted round a bend and the stepped forests and waterfalls of the gorges returned. But that little town was a taste of the giant at the end of the run.

  11 Fortress

  All morning the boat had wound through black hills under a sky heavy with smoke. A fuming factory sat on every ridge. Every metre of muddy slope was covered with a shell of rickety grey shacks. If there had ever been a splash of colour on those slopes, the smoke and the rain had long since washed it away. There were no trees, no bushes living in the acid-tasting air.

  ‘Chongqing,’ said Joan. ‘The last bastion.’

  Leah shivered. She knew Chiang Kai-shek’s troops had retreated before the Japanese armies from Shanghai, from Nanjing, from Wuhan, to here. Here they stayed. Nearly every night Japanese bombers followed the gleam of the Yangtze to unload on yesterday’s fires. The last bomb had fallen forty-five years ago, but Leah could not shake the feeling that the war had not stopped. Chongqing was still an embattled fortress.

  The boat nudged a floating wharf at the foot of a long, long climb of greasy steps and stopped.

  ‘Here we go, stick with me.’ Joan swung her suitcase out of the cabin.

  A man helped Joan with her suitcase past the beginning of the steps and left her near an inclining cable car before she could thank him. They slid past the staggering steps and the blackened buildings to a high road, where they caught a taxi.

  It’s getting better, Leah thought. A bit.

  ‘Renmin Hotel,’ Joan ordered. She smiled at Leah. ‘A people’s palace, built in the 1950s. We deserve that for a day.’

  The taxi climbed above the slate grey slums and to a broad gate at the top of a hill. Behind the gate was an expanse of lawn and a great curved red and gold building, an emperor’s dream. But the steps were blocked by banners and a swelling crowd, and the gate was sealed by a body of white-capped police. The taxi driver was waved away.

  ‘Bloody students!’ Joan muttered. ‘They’ve taken over the hotel.’

  The taxi driver drove on, looking for another hotel.

  Joan frowned. ‘I don’t understand. The police still aren’t doing anything.’

  They found a hotel in the heart of town, bought train tickets for Chengdu for tomorrow and Joan decided that she needed a good bath followed by a long nap.

  ‘And you? Going to read a book, or something?’

  Leah shuffled about a bit. ‘Ah, d’you mind if I walk around?’

  ‘Here? In this place?’ Joan’s face tightened.

  Leah looked away. They were both remembering Shanghai. ‘I won’t go far. I won’t get lost.’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like out there – the students – it may be danger – ’ Joan stopped and closed her eyes. ‘Doing it again, aren’t I? Seeing the mob everywhere we go. Must stop that. All right, go – but be careful.’

  Leah strode out of the hotel, but she took with her the glimpse of Joan’s face, eyes heavy with anxiety. She almost went back. She had only been testing the water, seeing if Joan had changed since Shanghai, but Joan was now letting her go, completely. She did not know if she wanted all that freedom.

  Oh, come on, you can’t stop now.

  Leah turned a corner and walked into a march of protesting students. She raised her camera, but a spectator shook his head and waved her down.

  You’re in the heart of China. Things are happening. Just look.

  She left the students and wandered along sooty streets, snapping as she went. She saw there were very few bicycles on the streets and was able to work out the reason: hills made for goats. She wandered through a covered food market, hanging meat, black bananas, small oranges, blotched cabbage. Bad fruit and vegetables because the soil was being poisoned by Chongqing’s factories. She skirted a few police with walkie-talkies.

  She stopped to watch a pavement ‘doctor’ treat a woman by attaching minerals to her ear, and a crowd gathered to watch her. She was moving on when the doctor saw her.

  ‘The ear is the key to the body. You know that?’ He spoke in heavily accented putonghua, and Leah battled to understand.
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  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Anything, arthritis, constipation, lung infection, they can be treated through the ear. You have something wrong?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘You are from America. You see the students?’

  ‘Australia. Yes, before.’

  ‘They are foolish. They cannot remember the bad years.’

  ‘The Decade of Chaos? The Red Guards?’

  ‘And before. When Chiang Kai-shek was here. When the bombs were falling. Chiang’s secret police were throwing students into prison. Chiang, Red Guards, it does not matter. Now is a dangerous time.’

  Leah said goodbye to the ear doctor and walked downhill. She saw a crowd around an intersection and stopped to adjust her camera.

  A youth suddenly pointed at her camera and called to her and she looked up in alarm.

  But the youth only wanted her to go up a pedestrian overpass. She did what she was told and joined a small crowd looking down on an empty road. A young woman with a camera made room for Leah and hers. There were police on the overpass and along the road.

  ‘What is happening?’ Leah said.

  The young woman frowned as she battled through Leah’s putonghua. ‘Ah, yes, Beijing,’ she said in English. ‘Look.’

  Leah could see the swirl and billow of red flags and banners above the slope of grey slums. She could even hear the rapid beat of a single drum.

  ‘The government has still not promised to change things …’

  Hundreds of spectators pressed against the traffic barriers and a roar swept the road like surf. People were clapping around the police, some younger men making slow fists as the march reached them. The woman leaned over the rail and worked her camera under the impassive gaze of a policeman five metres away. The drum passed below Leah, beaten with style and a little pomp by a girl with four straining men taking the weight. Leah smiled nervously at the policeman, but she took photos. The drum team grinned up at her and held up quick Victory signs. The road was filled with marchers and banners as far as Leah could see.

  The woman with the camera yelled over the noise at Leah. ‘In Beijing, in Tiananmen Square, one thousand students have gone on a hunger strike. Until the government moves.’