‘Because you took something that didn’t belong to you,’ the policeman said.
‘So that’s stealing then. Theft.’
‘No!’ the sergeant shouted. ‘It’s just a few bones no one wanted. They’re worth nothing.’
‘What we did was worth nothing?’ she yelled back. ‘Everything we’ve done has been worth nothing? We’ve been through so much, suffered so much, been treated unfairly all our lives. And it’s not worth a cent? We suffered it all for nothing? Just you listen … ’ And she started on her usual litany of complaints, counting them off on her fingers:
When they were born, the country was in chaos.
They grew up during the Three Years of ‘Natural Disasters’.
The Cultural Revolution wrecked their school years, branding them rebels and banishing them to remote villages.
When they married, they were too poor to afford even a quilt.
The children were born and grew up.
They were lucky enough to get to university, where they had to study like crazy because of the Four Modernisations.
But when they tried to get a job, people with degrees were earning less than manual workers.
So they had to work abroad until they made some money.
Life was hard in the old days. This was how people had suffered. People who only ever wanted a better life.
‘That’s enough, Mum,’ I said.
‘Don’t interrupt,’ she said. ‘If we hadn’t suffered so much, would you be here today? If we hadn’t got those gourd bones, would you be alive now?’
I’d never seen a gourd bone, never even heard of one. But this humble bone had fortified the miraculous broth which had made me big and strong.
Back at the market where my parents had committed their crime, I found one on a butcher’s stall, sticking up just like a gourd. A pig scapula. There are all sorts of peculiar bones in every animal, high or low. They never notice them when they are young and healthy, but as they grow old they begin to ache and creak. I had to buy one.
Are you sure about this?
You can shut the book now.
Do you choose to read on?
I Love My Mum
1. THE CRIME
I didn’t realise how many people I’d piss off when I started as head of the vice squad. It was my job to keep the streets clean, of course, but when we rounded up a bunch of hostesses from a nightclub, all hell was let loose. Without the sex industry, entertainment businesses took a hit and that was bad for hotels. With the hotels half empty, nobody went out at nights, so taxi drivers started cruising the city like vengeful ghosts, hitting their steering wheels and cursing the authorities. The traffic police were down on fines, the commerce department was down on admin charges, finance was down on taxes. Everyone was out of pocket, and my boss was pissed off too.
‘The sex industry is a pillar of our city’s economy,’ he fumed. ‘Don’t you want the city to get rich? If we want the economy to develop, we have to make the best use of whatever we have to hand. And what we have to hand is prostitutes. You’ve got to let them go.’
Those girls knew the score. They took their sweet time getting their things together, fixing their makeup, doing their hair. I told them they had to find a different way of making a living. The looks they gave me spoke volumes.
‘I can’t believe you’re only interested in selling your bodies,’ I pursued.
‘Our bodies are a gift from our parents,’ one put in. ‘Just like yours made you one metre eighty tall, so you can arrest bad girls like us.’
‘I don’t arrest bad girls because I’m tall.’ I looked stern. ‘I arrest people for a reason.’
Of course, in this job my size and strength are — quite literally — big assets. When I arrest someone they look guilty even if they’re innocent. On my beat, if grown-ups want to scare their kids they say ‘I’ll get One Eighty to lock you up.’
My nickname was a wedding present. My wife’s family was well off and there were plenty of other men who fancied her, but she only wanted me. At the wedding, people asked her why she had chosen me. She smiled but said nothing. A colleague cleared his throat and ventured, ‘Is it because he’s one metre eighty tall?’ From that time on, I was known as One Eighty.
My parents gave me a fine physique and a bright future. When I sat the exams for the police academy, they went easy on me at the interview. At athletics meetings, I always carried the flag. In college shows, I always played the hero. Women look at me with frank admiration. The imposing stature my parents gave me is a gift I can never repay.
But I couldn’t get my head around this new murder case. The victim was a woman in her fifties. The main suspect was none other than her son.
He was a cripple.
He sat there on the bed, his body twisted from the polio he had as a kid. I told one of my officers to help him up, but as soon as the suspect was upright, he keeled over. His legs were useless.
‘You’ll have to carry him out,’ said a neighbour.
So I picked him up and put him in the car. How could he be the killer?
‘His mother carried him everywhere on her back,’ said another. ‘He couldn’t even stand with a stick.’
Why had his mother let him beat her to death? If she had just moved a bit, he wouldn’t even have got near her. Her body was covered with lash marks from a leather whip we found with a soft sheath around the handle, made from rags. The stitching was so fine I couldn’t even feel the seams. But he went everywhere on his mother’s back. How could he have got hold of it?
The neighbours said they’d only heard one cry, like someone letting air out of a balloon. The door stayed closed. The grocer next door had pressed his ear to the wall and thought he heard a whip. But no groans. Surely you would make a noise if someone was beating you to death?
‘Round here it’s all shacks,’ the grocer added, ‘the walls are so thin you can sometimes see shadows through them. But not this one. They had wallpaper.’
They had kept themselves to themselves. The head of the residents’ committee was the last person to go and see them. The mother stood in the doorway, a rancid smell flooding from the room behind her.
‘If anything’s up, just call us,’ the woman said.
‘Call you for what?’ asked the mother.
So no one called again. The committee was too busy with family planning, rubbish collection, the neighbourhood song and dance troupe. They always put on a good show when there was a festival or some campaign. But the cripple and his mother never got involved.
Her husband had died long ago, when she was only thirty, but she never married again, because of her son. He got polio when he was two. The experts said there was no cure, but his mother tied his legs to wooden boards to try and help him walk, or strapped him to the bedpost to exercise his back. She used to make him do it for hours every day, until he was in pain, exhausted, beads of sweat trickling down his face.
‘If he doesn’t do this now, what kind of life will he have?’ she used to say.
Her neighbours tried to persuade her to ease off.
‘It’s not doing any good,’ they said.
‘We can’t give up,’ she insisted. ‘We’ve got to keep trying.’
But it was no use. She had to carry him everywhere — on her back, in her arms, any way she could — even when he was grown up. Sometimes he hung round her neck, or clung to her back, or even hung on to her breasts.
She used to work in a factory, but it closed down. She put her severance pay in a savings account so it didn’t get frittered away and carried on working. She’d do some cleaning in the mornings and then rush home to make lunch for her son. She was only fifty, but it was hard work and she began to worry what would happen to her son when she was too old to carry on. She decided that she had to find him a wife.