Peter May - Snakehead

She saw the doctor, through the glass, waving her to the door. She disconnected from the yellow cable and waddled over to where she could open the hatch of the ultraviolet chamber to retrieve the photograph, cassettes, and handful of books she had bought at the airport. Then she turned back toward Steve’s room. The nursing staff had spotted her by now, and one of them pointed to a yellow cable hanging free from the window wall on the far side of the bed. She hurried across the anteroom and into the special care room, rounding the bed and connecting to the cable before she turned to look at Steve where he lay in the bed. The air rushed back into her suit and blew down over her head.

Steve’s face was a strange putty colour, with incongruously red patches high on his cheeks and forehead. His mouth was open and his breathing shallow, eyes shut, sweat beading across his brow. One of the nurses laid a cool wet towel across his forehead, and his eyes flickered open. He inclined his head a little to his right and the dull glaze left his eyes, a lustre returning to them as he recognised Margaret behind the visor. He smiled, and reached out a hand to take hers, wires trailing in its wake.

‘Welcome back to Wally World,’ he said. ‘It’s a fun place to spend forty-eight hours.’ Phlegm caught in the back of his throat, throwing him into a convulsion of coughing that turned him scarlet and left him gasping for breath. When he had control again, he said, ‘I knew I should have paid those goddamned parking fines.’

Margaret squeezed his hand tightly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it yesterday.’

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s twenty-four hours between friends? I knew if you couldn’t make it there’d be a good reason.’ He paused. ‘So what the hell was it?’ And then he broke into a grin. ‘Only kidding.’ He nodded toward the bag. ‘What have you got for me?’

She held it open for him to see. ‘Some books. Your personal stereo. And I didn’t know which tapes you’d want, so I just brought them all.’

He flicked his head toward a blue and silver portable stereo on a shelf on the opposite wall. ‘One of the nurses loaned me her ghetto-blaster. Jesus, she only had tapes of rap music. You know, that’s rap with a silent C. Go figure.’ He stopped to catch his breath. ‘Put Clapton on for me.’

Margaret glanced up at the nearest nurse who gave an imperceptible nod of her head. ‘Sure,’ she said, and rummaged through the cassettes until she found the Pilgrim tape. She crossed to the stereo, slipped in the tape and pushed the play button. The creamy sound of the Clapton guitar swooped and slid around the room, rising and falling in skin-tingling crescendos. And then his soft, tremulous voice praying for a healing rain to restore his soul again.

The tears ran hot and salty down Margaret’s cheeks as she turned to see that Steve had closed his eyes, dried lips moving, almost as if he were miming the words. She moved back to his bedside and took out the little pewter frame. ‘I brought Danni,’ she said.

His eyes opened again and she saw that they, too, were filled with tears. He looked at the photograph in her hand and reached out to take it from her. For a long time he looked at the little girl smiling at him. Then he looked at Margaret. ‘I wish I could have known her,’ he said.

‘You will,’ Margaret said softly, urgently, and with more conviction than she felt. ‘Be strong, Steve. You can make it through this.’

Steve clutched her hand again. ‘I want to see her,’ he said. ‘Even through the glass. They’ve got the address and phone number out there. Martha’s still down as my next of kin.’ And he was racked by another fit of coughing. And when he caught his breath again, he said, ‘Call her, Margaret. Please.’

Li watched the traffic out on Connecticut Avenue drift past in the colourless sodium light and felt the deep rumble of the Washington metro through the floor of Charlie Chiang’s restaurant as a train pulled into the Van Ness metro station somewhere deep below them in the bowels of the city. His normal appetite for Charlie’s excellent cuisine was on hold, and he picked at the shredded beef and noodles in the rice bowl before him. Sitting opposite, in some deep, dark world of her own, Xiao Ling ate in small, almost frenetic, bursts. Plain boiled rice. She seemed to have only the most tenuous grasp of why her diet was being restricted, but did not seem to mind that she faced a lifetime of dull and simple food. It had never been a priority.

Li had asked her several times about the ma zhai , and in small, teasing fragments, she had confirmed what Margaret had told him. Yes, she thought she recognised them. No, she didn’t know their names. She was not sure if they worked at the Golden Mountain Club or not. Perhaps she had seen them at the massage parlour. She couldn’t remember. Li was certain that her memory lapses were selective and inspired by fear. Whatever else they had done, the ma zhai had been successful in scaring her into silence.

Finally, he reached across the table, removing her chopsticks from between her fingers and taking one of her hands in both of his. ‘Xiao Ling, we are in Washington now,’ he said with as much reassurance as he could muster. ‘You are safe here. Tell me about the Golden Mountain Club.’

She pulled her hand away and shook her head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She took a long draught of Coke, one of a handful of soft drinks that had been identified as ‘safe’. She met his eye. ‘And if I told you, you wouldn’t want to hear it. Believe me.’

He knew that her recent past was like an open wound. It would take time to heal, time before he could touch her again and she could revisit that place without pain. He did not want to force the issue, particularly since she was going to have to face yet more trauma in the next hour. He had not yet had the courage to tell her. Some instinct told him that if she knew, nothing would persuade her to come home with him. To come face to face with the daughter she had abandoned.

He felt sick. It was not only Xiao Ling who faced the trauma of reunion. He had no idea how little Xinxin would react to seeing her mother again after two years. At first he had told her that her mother was ill. That she had been taken off to a hospital for treatment and then to a rest home in the country to recuperate. Initially, she had asked daily when her mother would be coming home. When would she be well again? Why couldn’t she go and see her? It had broken Li’s heart to lie to the child. It was such a breach of trust, and trust between child and adult was almost as important as love. Margaret’s presence had been an invaluable diversion, a substitute mother-figure, a loving presence to fill the black hole left by the disappearance of her real mother.

Gradually, Xinxin had asked after her less and less, and in time not at all. There was a knowingness about her whenever the subject came up, as if somehow she had guessed. And she had become adept at side-stepping the issue when she was asked by children at school or by their parents or her teachers. She had never once asked after her father, and Li had been taken aback once, when collecting her from kindergarten, to discover that she had told her teachers that she lived with her uncle and that both her parents were dead.

Li paid the check and told Xiao Ling it was time to go. He asked Charlie to call them a cab, and the driver took them south on Connecticut, crossing Rock Creek at the Taft Bridge, guarded on either side by impressive carved stone lions couchant, and then turning right past the seven-storey hotel that was now home to the Chinese Embassy. From their cab, the only identifiably Chinese feature was the red and gold emblem of the People’s Republic above blanked-out glass doors. Xiao Ling did not even notice it. Li craned to see if there was anyone he knew coming or going. But the tree-lined street was empty, dark and deserted in the quiet mid-evening of a Washington fall.