Peter May - Snakehead

‘Oh, no…’ Margaret turned and ran up the path to the door, fishing the keys out of her pocket. Mendez got stiffly out of his Bronco and followed her. By the time he reached the door she was cursing. ‘He has!’ she said. ‘The bastard’s changed the goddamned lock.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Mendez said. ‘So I figured I’d better hang around until you got back — not least to make sure that no one stole your belongings.’ He smiled his apology. ‘Guess I wasn’t much of a guard dog, falling asleep on the job.’

Margaret stood with her hands on her hips, mind reeling, not the faintest idea what she was going to do. She could have wept. ‘I’m going to sue him,’ she said, frustration bubbling to the surface. ‘He had no right.’ And, absurdly, ‘What if it had been raining?’

‘It still might,’ Mendez said. Then quickly added, ‘Look, why don’t we get it all into the back of the Bronco, and you can stay the night at my place. In fact, you can stay as long as it takes you to get things sorted out. As long as you like.’

‘Oh, Felipe,’ she said, and she threw her arms around his neck, almost overcome by gratitude. It was one less decision she had to make. One fewer burden to carry into tomorrow. ‘What on earth would I have done if you hadn’t been here?’

‘Probably have worked your charms on the military man in the car,’ Mendez smiled. ‘In fact, you still could. He can help us load up before he goes.’

Li’s chair scraped across the floor as he stood up, the sound of it reverberating dully around the naked white walls. Xiao Ling was led in by a heavy-set Hispanic guard holding her by the arm. He let go of her and said, ‘She’s all yours.’ And he left, closing the door behind him.

Under the glare of the fluorescent light, everything about her looked burned out. She was drowned by her white prison clothes, her face pale and colourless with all its earlier make-up washed away. Her eyes were dull and lifeless. Only her hair appeared to have retained its colour and vitality. Li pulled back the hood of his Tivek suit and removed his visor, in defiance of the regulations. He knew that although she carried the virus, she was neither infected nor infectious. She was his sister, and he was not going to talk to her through a piece of plastic.

‘Why?’ he asked. A single word, a single question, conveying a whole world of misunderstanding.

She gave an almost imperceptible shrug, and without meeting his eyes said, ‘Can I have one of your cigarettes?’

He nodded and lifted the pack from the table and held it out. She took one and he lit it, watching her closely all the time. She pulled up the chair opposite him and sat down. ‘Why won’t you look at me?’ he said.

‘Why, why, why,’ she said listlessly. ‘Is that all it’s going to be? Questions? Recriminations?’ She blew a jet of smoke into the air, and then turned defiant eyes on him for the first time. ‘I don’t have any answers, except…I don’t know. I don’t know, Li Yan. I don’t know why any of it happened. It did, that’s all. And even if I could tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer.’ She took another desperate pull at her cigarette, and he saw that her hands were shaking. ‘I thought you might have asked me how I was. But maybe you don’t care.’

He stared at her, trying to sort out the cocktail of conflicting emotions in his head. ‘How are you?’ he said, finally.

‘Like shit,’ she said. ‘In my head, in my heart, in my body. Satisfied?’

He sank slowly back into his chair, placed his hands on the table in front of him and looked at them for a long time. His memory of the last time they had been together, at his apartment in Beijing, was still very clear in his head. Pregnant and with Xinxin in tow, she had arrived in the city for an ultrasound scan. If it was a boy, she had told Li, she was going to have it, in defiance of the government’s one-child policy. If it was a girl, she would abort. She had left to go for her scan, and he had never seen her again. When he arrived home that night, he found Xinxin alone in the apartment, crying hysterically; a five-year-old girl left on her own. Her mother had gone, leaving a note saying she was headed south, to the home of a friend in Annhui Province, to have her baby boy. She knew, she had written, that Li would see Xinxin was taken care of.

It had changed Li’s life. The child’s father, a farmer in Sichuan, refused to take her back, saying she was her mother’s responsibility. Li had become, in effect, a surrogate father, and for almost a year Margaret was her surrogate mother. He had never married, never felt the urge to father children, and yet here he was, the sole adult responsible for a young child. His blood. His life. And he loved her with every last part of himself.

Her mother had just abandoned her. Her own mother! In selfish pursuit of some outmoded superstitious Chinese need for a son. He felt his anger rising again as he thought about it. ‘Why?’ seemed like the most reasonable question in the world. A question he had every right to ask. And then he replayed Xiao Ling’s answer. Even if I could tell you why, you probably wouldn’t be happy with the answer . And he knew that, in truth, it wasn’t an answer he sought. It was an outlet for his anger. A focus for his rage. Two slow-burning years of it.

And then, when he had seen her in the massage parlour, painted and pouting, a common prostitute, his anger and astonishment had been quickly eclipsed by shame and humiliation. Now they all simmered together in his head and in his heart, and she sat before him defiant and, apparently, quite unrepentant.

He turned his hands palm down in an attempt to control his feelings. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Never mind the why’s. Just tell me what happened. You owe me that much.’

She flicked him a look. ‘It’s a long story. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

‘How about the night you abandoned your child.’ He had tried very hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, but it hung in the air, like the smoke from her cigarette.

If she was aware of it, she gave no indication. She sat, concentrating on her tube of tobacco, squinting her eyes against the smoke. ‘You probably think it was easy for me,’ she said, ‘leaving my little girl.’ She paused. ‘It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.’

The ‘why’ question immediately pushed its way back into Li’s mind, but he forced himself to stay silent. He lit another cigarette.

Almost as if she had read his mind, she said, ‘When I look back, I don’t really know what drove me. But that’s what I was. Driven. By hormones maybe, or by the weight of five thousand years of Chinese culture. You know that the orphanages in China are full of little girls who’ve been abandoned. I wasn’t the only one, Li Yan.’ There was almost an appeal for understanding in this. Li stayed stony-faced. She stubbed out her cigarette and helped herself to another.

‘You remember my friend from school?’ she said. ‘Chen Lan? She gave herself an English name, Christina, and made us all call her by it. She married a man from Annhui Province and went to teach there at a school in a remote hill community. I went to stay with them to have my baby. I told them my husband and my little girl were killed in a road accident in Sichuan. Everyone was very supportive. The chairman of the local committee even arranged to have a car on standby to rush me to the hospital when the time came. The nearest town was almost an hour’s drive away. My contractions started during a rainstorm, and the car skidded off the road on the way to the hospital. No one was badly hurt. But when they finally got me to the maternity unit, my baby was born dead.’