‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ she wailed, shaking her head.
‘How did you think it would be?’
‘I’m not having any!’ she yelled back.
She knocked the spoon out of my hand, spattering monkey brains on the floor. It was like soft tofu.
‘Do you think this is cheap?’ I don’t know why I brought up money, it wasn’t as if we were short of it. ‘Eat! Go on — eat!’
I gouged out some more brains and tried to prise open her mouth, but she kept it clamped shut. The monkey brains quivering on the spoon were smeared with her lipstick, a fake, lurid red. There was monkey brains smeared on her lips and cheek as well. She was all spotty. She disgusted me. I mean, it was just eating, wasn’t it? Don’t you eat every day? Three times a day … Eating live fish and shrimp and all that doesn’t bother you, does it? And this is dead monkey, just a corpse, you’re just eating a corpse! A corpse!
Suddenly my wife threw up. I was furious.
‘Now look at you!’ I shouted.
4
Normally, my wife looked impeccable. She was still one of the best-looking women on our block. But at that moment she wasn’t looking pretty at all. She looked as rough as a salted ribbon fish.
Loads of men used to be after her. I was always afraid, when we were going out, that one of them would snatch her away from me. Right up until we married, she was getting phone calls from other men, but in the end she chose me. She was a sensible woman, and if she couldn’t do something properly, she didn’t do it at all. Perfect wife material.
After we married, everything about her, like her pretty face, solidified. I earned the money and she managed it — our life was like a train chugging along the same old track, day after day. I started slumping down on the sofa or snuggling up in the duvet and watching TV, wearing out the remote, even though I never wanted to watch anything. I put on weight. Sometimes I even hoped that some rival would appear, to rekindle the frantic desire I used to feel when I feared someone might steal her away from me.
As soon as I had graduated, reality hit. I needed to earn proper money if I was going to get a wife. I used to go around with my briefcase, begging favours, making what I could from buying and selling chemicals. I told my wife that a stash of money I happened to come by was actually a regular monthly salary. I don’t know what I would have said to her if I hadn’t finally started selling tonics and supplements. I yearned to possess her body, come what may.
Now that body belonged wholly to me, lay in bed next to me, but it didn’t make my heart skip a beat. Now she could change her clothes in front of me, wash the bra and panties she had stripped off and hang them out to dry on the balcony — and I was unmoved.
We had become lazy about our love life. I would invariably be on top, and everything — the speed of my thrusts, how long I kept going — was always just the same. We just couldn’t be bothered with each other. We’d look at the grandfather clock which stood at the end of the bed and the minute hand would leap forward — it always leaped forward, whenever you looked at it. Then we’d turn to each other in surprise and start yawning.
‘Is it really so late?’
‘Time to go to sleep.’
‘Yup.’
And we’d switch off the light.
We knew what the other was thinking. We were both terrified that some day one of us would see through the pretence. The clock was only in the bedroom — standing there like a coffin — to give us an excuse as soon as we got into bed. That tick-tock, it was hypnotic. It put you to sleep, lulled you into carrying on living just as you always had.
One look, one leap of the minute hand.
But you don’t want to do it too often. A couple of times a week is all right. Monday, Wednesday and Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, like my parents’ political study classes in the Cultural Revolution. Or maybe only twice a week — you have to look after your body. Early to bed, early to rise and early morning exercise … it’s important to have good habits. But it’s the bad habits that keep you going: staying up late, sleeping in, smoking, drinking, fighting with the wife, playing mah-jong, flirting and having affairs …
We only ever talked about stupid, insignificant things. Today I saw so and so. What’s more nutritious: eggs that are cooked through or only half-cooked? Who’s won top prize in the lottery. Wasn’t that university student who poured acid over a bear just appalling? China’s won the bid for the Olympics. Let’s buy a villa …
We all make up hot topics, we invent illusions. We kid our daughter that she can get into a top university and go abroad to study, we kid girls and boys that they can look like glamorous stars, we kid lovers that sentimental tosh is real love, we kid grown ups that they can succeed in business and lead a life of luxury, we kid women that they can stay eternally young and beautiful, we kid old folks they can enjoy long, healthy lives, we kid the frail that they can be strong. Even the modernisation of China is just a myth. It’s not just the biggest myth of all, it’s a factory for churning out myths: science and technology are progressing by leaps and bounds, life is getting better and better, we’re doing really well, and, hey, we’re going to need the strongest anti-theft locks … But when one of us comes back home, the other doesn’t even bother to turn around, they just wait for the key to turn in the lock. Who else could it be anyway? Even the door swings open lazily.
But one day the door opened and a strange woman was standing there. No shit. This woman — this intruder — had long, straight hair. She wafted into the room, bold as brass, and I leaped up from the sofa.
‘You know what this is?’ asks my wife. She always had curly hair, ever since I first knew her. It was her crowning glory.
‘No,’ I said.
‘It’s a straight perm. Guess how much it cost. 800 yuan.’
‘Wow, big spender.’
It was very odd. There was a strange woman in my kitchen, using my wok and my ladle, wringing out my dishcloths, opening my fridge, gliding to and fro. When she brought food to the table, all I could see was a curtain of straight hair. Her face was hidden, her body enveloped in a faint, medicinal smell. I couldn’t stop watching her as she darted into the sitting room and straightened the cushions on the sofa, as she got some women’s underwear out of the bedroom closet and floated into the bathroom. I pretended I needed a piss and went in too. But as I was unzipping my trousers I stopped — I didn’t dare to in front of this strange woman. I went back into the sitting room, leaving the bathroom door ajar, and listened uneasily to the sound of the shower. I crept back to the bathroom and pushed the door a little further open. Her body was naked beneath the dark waterfall of her hair. She stepped into the bath. My bath. I looked round at the bathroom with new eyes. That bath towel had only just been wrapped around her body. That shower gel was just about to be smeared all over it. I hardly dared look. I couldn’t leave. I slowly crept forwards. She was facing the other way. For the first time in a long while my head swam and my heart pounded. I shut my eyes and pounced. The water poured over my face as we leaned forwards. I held her in a wet embrace. She struggled a bit but soon submitted and allowed me to knead her all over. She started to moan. An unusual sound. An unusual position. A mane of hair, like a horse.
‘Hang on a minute,’ she said. ‘Wait for me in bed.’
Maybe we’d wanted a child so we didn’t have to confront all this. Maybe this was the reason we’d had a daughter as well. I remember reading in a book that when a woman has to orgasm to produce the alkalinity which lets her conceive a son. What about me? Orgasms, maybe, but not much excitement.
We stopped being lovers as soon as our daughter was born. We were just Mum and Dad loving our child together. Life was terrifyingly full of her crying, fussing, milk, porridge, tins of this and that, peeing, pooing and nappies. I earned the money for the child, my wife fed her. I drove the car for the child, she changed her nappy. I was the one who tucked in the right-hand side of the child’s quilt, she tucked in the left-hand side.