Peter May - The Runner

As they passed the entrance of the two-storey administrative block of the First Teaching Hospital of Beijing Medical University, with its marble pillars and glass doors, a girl came down the steps towards them from where she had clearly been waiting for some time. Her gloved hands were tucked up under her arms to keep them warm, her eyes watering and her nose bright red. As she stepped in front of them to halt their progress, she stamped her feet to encourage the circulation.

Initially, Margaret had thought there was something familiar about the girl. But with the woolly hat pulled down over her forehead and the scarf around her neck there was not much of her to go on. It wasn’t until she turned to glance behind her that Margaret saw the purple birthmark on her left cheek. ‘Lili,’ she said, the name coming back to her. Behind the tears of cold she saw quite clearly that there was fear in the girl’s eyes.

‘I told you, I need to talk to you, lady.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be running today?’

‘I already run in heats. First place. I get inside lane in final tomorrow.’

‘Congratulations.’ Margaret frowned. ‘How did you know to find me here?’

Lili almost smiled and lowered her eyes towards Margaret’s bump. ‘I phone hospital to ask times of classes for antenatal.’

‘And how did you know it was this hospital?’

‘Best maternity hospital in Beijing for foreigner. I take chance. I need to talk.’

Margaret glanced at her watch, intrigued. ‘I can give you a few minutes.’

‘No.’ The girl looked around suddenly, as if she thought someone might be watching. ‘Not here. I come to your home. You give me address.’

For the first time, Margaret became wary. ‘Not if you won’t tell me what it is you want to talk to me about.’

‘Please, lady. I can’t say.’ She glanced at Wen who was looking at her wide-eyed. ‘Please, lady, please. You give me address.’

There was such pleading in her eyes that Margaret, although reluctant, could not resist. ‘Hold on,’ she said, and she fumbled in her purse for a dog-eared business card. It had her home address and number, as well as a note of a friend’s number she had scribbled on it when she could find nothing else to write on. She crossed it through. ‘Here.’ She held it out and the girl took it, holding each corner between thumb and forefinger. ‘When will you come?’

‘I don’t know. Tonight, maybe. You be in?’

‘I’m in most nights.’

Lili tucked the card carefully in her pocket and wiped her watering eyes. ‘Thank you, lady. Thank you,’ she said. And she made a tiny bow and then pushed past them, disappearing quickly into the crowd.

Wen turned excitedly to Margaret. ‘You know who that is? That Dai Lili. She verr famous Chinese runner.’

Li sat on the wall outside the subway, watching crowds of travellers streaming out on to the concourse from the arrivals gate at Beijing Railway Station. Away to his left a giant television screen ran ads for everything from chocolate bars to washing machines. The invasive voice of a female announcer barked out departure and arrival times with the soporific sensitivity of a computer voice announcing imminent nuclear holocaust. No one was listening.

Li had butterflies in his stomach and his mouth was dry. He felt like a schoolboy waiting in the office of the head teacher, summoned to receive his punishment for some perceived misdemeanour. He had not set eyes on his father for nearly five years, a state of affairs for which, he knew, his father blamed him. Not without cause. For in all the years since Li had left his home in Sichuan Province to attend the University of Public Security in Beijing, he had returned on only a handful of occasions. And although he had been too young to be an active participant in the Cultural Revolution, Li felt that his father blamed him, somehow, for the death of his mother during that time of madness. A time which had also left his father in some way diminished. A lesser man than he had been. Robbed of hope and ambition. And love.

They had not spoken once since their brief encounter at the funeral of Li’s Uncle Yifu, his father’s brother. It had been a painful, sterile affair at a city crematorium, attended mostly by fellow police officers who had served under Yifu during his years as one of Beijing’s top cops, or alongside him in the early days. Old friends had travelled all the way from Tibet, where Yifu had been sent by the Communists in the fifties when they had decided that this particular intellectual would be less of a danger to them serving as a police officer a long way from the Capital. They need not have worried, for Yifu’s only desire had been to build a better and fairer China for its people. The same people who later abused him and threw him in prison for three years during the Cultural Revolution. An experience from which he had drawn only strength, where a lesser man might have been broken. Like his brother, Li’s father.

Li saw his father emerging from the gates, dragging a small suitcase on wheels behind him. He was a sad, shuffling figure in a long, shabby duffel coat that hung open to reveal a baggy woollen jumper with a hole in it over a blue shirt, frayed at the collar. A striped cream and red scarf hung loosely around his neck, and trousers that appeared to be a couple of sizes too big for him gathered in folds around shoes that looked more like slippers. He wore a fur, fez-like hat pulled down over thinning grey hair. Li felt immediately ashamed. He looked like one of the beggars who haunted the streets around the foreign residents’ compounds in embassy-land. And yet there was no need for it. He had an adequate pension from the university where he had lectured most of his adult life. He was well cared for in a home for senior citizens, and Li sent money every month.

Li made his way through the crowds to greet him with a heart like lead. When he got close up, his father seemed very small, as if he had shrunk, and Li had a sudden impulse to hug him. But it was an impulse he restrained, holding out his hand instead. His father looked at him with small black eyes that shone behind wisps of hair like fuse wire sprouting from the edge of sloping brows, and for a moment Li thought he would not shake his hand. Then a small, claw-like hand emerged from the sleeve of the duffel, spattered with the brown spots of age, and disappeared inside Li’s. It was cold, and the skin felt like crêpe that might rip if you handled it too roughly.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Li said.

His father did not smile. ‘Well, are you going to take my case?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’ Li took the handle from him.

‘You are a big man now, Li Yan,’ his father said.

‘I don’t think I have grown since the last time you saw me.’ He steered the old man towards the taxi rank where he had parked his Jeep, a police light still flashing on the roof.

‘I mean, you are a big man in your job. Your sister told me. A Section Chief. You are young for such a position.’

‘I remember once,’ Li said, ‘you told me that I should only ever be what I can, and never try to be what I cannot.’

His father said, ‘The superior person fulfils his purpose and does not boast of his achievements.’

‘I wasn’t boasting, father,’ Li said, stung.

‘He who stands on the tips of his toes cannot be steady.’

Li sighed. There was no point in exchanging barbs of received Chinese wisdom with his father. The old man had probably forgotten more than Li ever knew. And yet the wisdom he imparted was always negative, unlike his brother, Yifu, who had only ever been positive.

Li put the case in the back of the Jeep and opened the passenger door to help his father in. But the old man pushed away his hand. ‘I don’t need your help,’ he said. ‘I have lived sixty-seven years without any help from you.’ And he hauled himself with difficulty up into the passenger seat. Li banged the door shut and took a deep breath. He had known it would be difficult, but not this hard. A depression fell over him like fog.