‘ What the fuck are you saying? ’ He hammered on the wardrobe door, making the walls shudder. ‘I don’t know what you think happened, but whatever it is you’re imagining it.’ He broke off, breathing hard. ‘You’re making it up. You and your dumb-ass inventions. Your weird fucking head.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my head,’ I said steadily. ‘I don’t invent things.’
‘Well, baby, you’re imagining this. I wasn’t touched, if that’s what you’re saying.’ I could see him now, in the wardrobe, crunched up against the wall. I could just make out his outline, huddled under a duvet. He seemed to be lying on his side, as if he was trying to keep warm. It was spooky, standing there in the half-light, listening to his thickened voice coming from the wardrobe. ‘I don’t want to hear you even suggesting that – WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? DON’T STAND NEAR THE WARDROBE! ’
I took a step back.
‘ Stay there. And don’t fucking look at me.’ I could hear him breathing now, a laboured sound as if something was lodged in his airway. ‘Now, listen,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to get someone to help me.’
‘I’ll take you to a doctor and-’
‘No!’ I could hear him trying to control his voice and get his thoughts in line. ‘No. Listen. There’s – there’s a number written on the wall. Next to the light switch. See it? That’s my – my mother. Call her. Go into a phone box and call collect, reverse the charges. Tell her to send someone for me. Tell her not someone from Boston, tell her it’s got to be one of the men from the house in Palm Springs. They’re nearer.’
Palm Springs? I stared at the wardrobe. Jason, part of a family where there were houses in California? Employees? I’d always imagined him as a real traveller, the sort I’d seen at the airport: a battered Lonely Planet under one arm, a toilet roll hooked on the back of a rucksack. I’d pictured him washing dishes, teaching English, sleeping on a beach with just a calor-gas stove and a patched bedroll. I’d always believed he had everything to lose – just like the rest of us.
‘What is it? What don’t you understand? Are you still there?’
An advert for Pocky chocolate wands came on the TV. I watched it for a moment or two. Then I sighed and turned for the door. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll call.’
I’d never made a collect call before, and when the automated operator asked my name I almost said, ‘Weirdo.’ In the end I said, ‘I’m calling for Jason.’ When his mother answered the phone she listened in silence. I recited everything twice: the address, how to find the place, that he needed a doctor urgently and to please – I hesitated at this bit, thinking how odd it was talking about Jason like this – to please send someone from the west coast because it would be quicker. ‘And who, may I ask, are you?’ She had an English accent, although she was in Boston. ‘Would you be polite enough to give me your name?’
‘I’m being serious,’ I said, and hung up.
It was dark now, and when I got back to the house I didn’t switch on too many lights – I couldn’t help thinking of what it would look like from outside, blazing over the darkened neighbourhood. I didn’t know a customer who could lend me money, it was too cold to sleep in the parks, and I wasn’t sure Mama Strawberry would give me a sub before payday, certainly not a big enough one to afford a hotel. I couldn’t beg from Shi Chongming. After the club I might have to come back and sleep here. The thought made me cold.
It didn’t take me long to find a selection of tools from the store rooms – there were a lot of things in that house if you’d decided you had to defend yourself: a mallet, a chisel, a heavy rice-cooker that you could probably throw if necessary. I weighed the mallet in my hand. It felt good and heavy. I took them all to my room, rested them against the skirting-board, then packed my holdall with a few things: a big sweater, all the notes and sketches of Nanking, my passport and the remainder of Irina’s money. It reminded me of the earthquake kits we were all supposed to have – the few things you’d need in an emergency. I went to the window and, holding the strap, dangled it down, gently, gently, until my arm was straight. Then I let it drop the rest of the way. It fell with a very small bump behind the air-conditioning unit. From the alley no one would know it was there.
While I was standing at the window, suddenly, out of nowhere, it began to snow. Well, I thought, looking up, Christmas isn’t far away. Soft flakes whirled against the thin slice of grey sky between the houses, obscuring Mickey Rourke’s face. If Christmas was near then it wouldn’t be long before my little girl had been dead ten years. Ten years. Amazing how time just gets packed away into nothing, like an accordion. After a long time I closed the window. I wrapped a plastic carrier-bag round my hand and went out into the snow. Using my fingernails inside the plastic I scraped up the dead kitten and took it to the garden where I buried it under a persimmon tree.
50
Nanking, 20 December 1937
I am writing this by the light of a candle. My right hand is painful, a thin burn running diagonally across the palm, and I am cramped on the bed, my feet tucked under me, the bed curtains drawn tight to make sure that there is no possibility, absolutely no possibility, of any light escaping into the alley. Shujin sits opposite me, mortally terrified by what has happened tonight, clutching the curtains closed and shooting glances over her shoulder at the candle. I know she would rather I had no light at all, but tonight of all nights I have to write. I have an overwhelming sense that any history written in these days, however small and inconsequential, will one day be important. Every voice will count because no one person will ever contain or calibrate Nanking ’s story. History will fail, and there will be no definitive Nanking invasion.
Everything I thought I believed has fled – in my heart there is a hole as naked and rotten as in the body of the child outside the factory, and all I can think about is what this occupation has really cost us. It means the end of a China that I haven’t valued for years. It is the death of all belief – the end of dialects, temples, moon cakes in the autumn and cormorant fishing at the feet of our mountains. It is the death of lovely bridges spreading over lotus ponds, the yellow stone reflected in the silent evening water. Shujin and I are the last links in the chain. We stand on the cliff-face, holding China back from a long fall into nothing and sometimes I startle, as if I’ve been awakened from a dream, thinking that I am falling and that all of China – the plains, the mountains, the deserts, the ancient tombs, the festivals of Pure Brightness and Corn Rain, the pagodas, the white dolphins in the Yangtze, and the Temple of Heaven – everything is falling with me.
Less than ten minutes after old Liu left our house, even before I’d found a way to tell Shujin we were leaving, the terrible screaming of motorcycle engines came from a street somewhere to the right of the house.
I went into the hall and grabbed the iron bar, positioning myself behind the spirit screen, my feet wide, the bar ready over my head. Shujin came from the kitchen to stand next to me, silently searching my face for answers. We stayed that way, my trembling arms raised, Shujin’s eyes locked on mine, as the dreadful thunder of engines funnelled up the alley outside. The noise grew and grew, until it was so loud that the engine seemed to be almost inside our heads. Then, just as I thought it might drive straight through the door and into the house, there came a choked rattle, and it began to diminish.
Shujin and I stared at each other. The sound headed away to the south, gradually faded into the distance, and silence fell. Now the only thing disturbing the quiet was the unearthly echo of our own breathing, hard and hollow.