Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

Her body was a black shadow squashed inside the pipe. There was nothing girlish about the silhouette.

‘Your mum is nice to you, though, isn’t she? She took you shopping last week.’

‘Did you see us?’ Her face seemed to move, but I couldn’t be sure, because it was too dark for me to see much any more.

The night was quiet and still. Inside the pipe, we could hear people cycling down a road a couple of streets away. Sometimes, when a car drove past, I’d see the shadow of a passer-by move through the light, then everything would go black again. The only constant light came from the window of a distant building, but when a curtain was drawn across it, that light disappeared as well. It was a four-storey brick building that was still under construction. A few residents had moved in ahead of time, hooked up lights to a mains electricity supply and fitted glass panes into the window frames. The half-finished building looked like a monster frozen into the night sky.

‘Do you like me?’ Her twisted face appeared to turn to me again.

‘Yes, I like you.’ My heart started thumping. I clenched my teeth together to stop my jaw trembling.

‘You gave me two of your stamps, so I know you must be fond of me.’

‘If you want, I’ll give them all to you. I also have a metal box I want to give you. It has a little lock and key.’ My voice sounded strange as it bounced across the interior walls of the concrete pipe.

‘It’s getting cold now,’ she said.

I rose into a squat and moved closer to her. Inside my head I heard a pounding, then a crack that sounded like a block of ice being plunged into hot water. I touched her hair that smelt of fried celery, then put my arms around her.

She took a sharp intake of breath, smiled and pushed me back. I pressed her hands down and moved closer to her face. I was probably trying to kiss her.

‘You can’t do that,’ she said, ‘I’m too young…’

The steam escaping from her mouth as she spoke became my goal. I moved my lips towards it. She pushed me back again and we tussled for a while until her arms grew weak. When her face looked up at me again, I floated once more towards her white breath. I stroked her hair and her nose, then pressed my mouth over her lips and pushed my tongue between them until, with a sigh, she relaxed her clenched jaw. Her tongue felt warm and soft. She moved her lips and, like a fish, sucked the saliva from my mouth.

I remember my trembling hand reaching towards her thighs and my legs shaking as I undid her belt and touched her warm stomach. When I stretched my hand inside her knickers, the lower half of my body disconnected from me and performed a dance of its own…

‘My hair’s all messy now,’ she said when it was over, clasping my hand. ‘And I forgot to bring a comb with me. What if someone sees me like this?’

‘Don’t worry.’ I let go of her hand and she sat up straight.

‘You’re such a hooligan,’ she said, doing up her belt.

‘No, I’m not. You’re the first girl I’ve ever touched.’

‘Did you notice that plastic grip Huang Lingling was wearing in her hair today? She doesn’t come from an artistic family. Who does she think she is, trying to pretty herself up like that?’ Then she moved close to me again and whispered, ‘I’m going to tell you something about my name. I want to see if you can keep a secret. My name is “Lu”, as in “road”, because I was born on the road. My mother was in the countryside on a training programme to prepare citizens for a possible American attack. Her group were made to run for hours, then throw themselves onto the ground, as though enemy planes were dropping bombs overhead. The third time my mother threw herself down, she couldn’t get up again. That’s when she gave birth to me. Because she didn’t complete the training, she was labelled a “backward element”.’

‘I promise on Chairman Mao that I won’t tell anyone.’ The sperm stuck to my trousers felt cold and sticky. I wasn’t in a mood to talk.

During that moment of bliss, you were able to forget yourself and leave your body behind. That secret pipe was your road to a new home that felt both strange and familiar.

One afternoon, I climbed into Lulu’s bedroom through the window. She had left it open for me so that I would escape the notice of her grandmother, who was in the bedroom next door removing the covers from the quilts. It was a Sunday, and her mother and stepfather were both out.

After my father’s rehabilitation was confirmed, my family was able to move from the single room in the opera company’s dormitory block to a two-bedroom flat in a large residential compound of four-storey apartment buildings. Lulu’s family was moved into an apartment in the same compound, so we were still neighbours.

She locked her door and we sat on her bed, and I listened to her play the harmonica. She’d transcribed all the melodies from The Best 200 Foreign Love Songs tape. I liked listening to the noise of the instrument and the sound of her breathing.

I pulled from my bag the copy I’d made of the banned novella A Young Girl’s Heart . I’d spent the previous three nights writing it out. She put down her harmonica and leafed through the twenty-seven pages of neat handwriting.

‘Be careful!’ I said to her. ‘The glue hasn’t dried yet.’ The previous night, I’d chewed some noodles into a paste and used it to stick the pages together.

‘Is it a dirty book?’ She put it down on her bed and made me a cup of tea with an expensive-looking tea bag.

‘I bet you could brew five cups from that bag. Apparently, in the hotels where foreigners stay, there are baskets of tea bags like that in all the rooms. You can help yourself to as many as you like.’ I glanced at the photographs under the table’s glass top and said, ‘You’ve got lots of family photos.’

On the cabinet by the wall there was a radio, a bust of Chairman Mao and an inflatable plastic swan. A calendar issued by the local family planning office was pinned to the wall above.

‘Wang Long’s mother works in a foreigners’ hotel,’ Lulu said. ‘She told me that foreigners are really wasteful. They throw away the tea bags after just one cup. And the tea isn’t good enough for them — they have to add milk before they can drink it.’ Then Lulu said that the police were knocking on people’s doors and confiscating any hand-copied novels they found, so she didn’t want to keep the book. She said that she was sure it was pornographic.

‘Lots of our classmates have read hand-copied books,’ I said. ‘This one is quite short. There’s another one called Tidal Wave , but it’s over two hundred pages long. I haven’t got round to copying it yet.’

‘Don’t you know what could happen to you? During that last mass public trial, a young man was executed for copying banned books.’

‘But he printed hundreds of copies on a mimeograph machine, and so was accused of poisoning society. I’ve only made one handwritten copy to give to you as a present. You’re the only person who will see it.’

‘Those aren’t family photographs,’ she said, looking down at the table. ‘I cut them out from a magazine.’

‘If you don’t want to read it, I’ll take it back home with me.’ I leaned back against the table, let out a long sigh and stared at the thousands of dust particles floating across a beam of sunlight.

‘If you want me to read it, I’ll read it. But don’t tell any of our classmates. Where’s the dirtiest passage?’

‘On page seven.’ After I’d copied that page out on the first night, I’d had to hide under my bedcovers and masturbate.

‘I won’t need that one then.’ She tore out the page with her delicate fingers, folded it up and handed it back to me. ‘Read me a bit, will you? If you get to a dirty passage, just skip it.’