Ma Jian - Beijing Coma

I opened the book and read: ‘“. . Most eighteen-year-old girls are as pretty as flowers. At eighteen, I was enchanting. It’s no exaggeration to say that my figure was at least as beautiful as any film star you could name. I had large, glistening eyes, shiny black hair, cheeks as smooth as eggshell and eyebrows curved like fine willow leaves. My pert, ample breasts juddered gently as I walked… It was soon after my eighteenth birthday that I fell in love with my cousin. He was twenty-two, and had returned to Fuzhou for the holidays. He was tall and suave, with a dark moustache which gave him a mature and masculine air… To be honest, what really attracted me to him was the magnificent cock that bulged from between his thighs. When I think about it now, my vagina becomes so hot and itchy that it feels as though some liquid is about to spurt from it —”’

‘Stop!’ she cried, turning her red face to the wall. ‘That’s disgusting!’ Reading the passage aloud had made my heart thud with excitement.

I stopped reading and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. Once I’d assured myself that she wasn’t really angry, I pulled out my mother’s hair tongs from the pocket of my padded coat. A smell of scorched hair instantly filled the room.

‘Look, I’ve brought them,’ I said, changing the subject.

‘So that’s what they look like!’ She took them and weighed them in her hand. ‘They’re not that much lighter than my mother’s charcoal tongs.’

These tongs were made of pig iron. If you heated them in a fire, took them out just before they turned red then wrapped them around a lock of hair, they’d produce a curl that would last four or five days.

‘The Chinese actresses who play foreign women all use these to curl their hair. Look, this is how you do it.’ I took a section of her hair and curled it around the tongs.

‘Get them away from me!’ she laughed. ‘They’re frightening!’ I’d told her I’d pop round and give her the tongs when I’d bumped into her in the department store the previous day.

She took the tongs from me and turned them around, inspecting them carefully. I watched her fingers move through the beam of sunlight. Her nails turned a transparent red. The lines of dirt caught under the tips looked like tiny crescent moons. I walked over and put my hands around hers. Together we clutched the tongs, squeezing tighter and tighter. Our hands began to tremble. We moved closer until our lips were almost touching. We were both breathing very loudly. ‘I want to kiss you,’ I said.

She blushed and pulled her hands away. ‘It’s still light outside. Someone might see us.’

I wanted to hold her hands again, but she wouldn’t let me. So I sat back down on the bed. Lowering my gaze to her thighs, I said, ‘Make sure the tongs aren’t too hot. You should test them with a piece of paper first. If the paper goes yellow, let them cool down a little before you use them.’

‘We’re still only fifteen,’ she muttered, then turned her head towards me again and said, ‘What happens if the tongs scorch my hair?’

I thought of how my mother’s hair looked after she curled it. ‘I’ll do it for you. I promise I’ll be careful.’ I could feel myself blushing. ‘We’ve locked the door. What are you afraid of?’

She sat down at the end of the bed.

‘What about when I go to school? Will I be able to press the curls down?’

‘You can hide them under a hat. No one will see them. If you want to get rid of them, you only have to wash your hair.’

‘Things have become so much more open now. People don’t say “you’re nice” any more, they say “I love you”.’

‘I love you!’ I blurted. The words came out very easily, because I’d been practising saying them all morning.

She fell silent. Her face went bright red. She tried to cover a part of it with her hand.

‘If you want to love me, you must be faithful to me and never dance with other girls. Apparently a few of the older kids at school have been having dance parties at their homes when their parents are away.’

‘I know. Suyun’s been to one. She’s still going out with that boy who works in the pharmaceutical company.’

‘I forbid you to talk to her, or go to any dance party she invites you to. She’s only fifteen but she already owns a digital watch. Her morals are definitely suspect. You must promise on Chairman Mao’s life that you won’t speak to her again.’

‘I can’t dance,’ I said. ‘And anyway, her watch is a fake. It doesn’t tell the time…’

‘I don’t want big curls,’ Lulu said. ‘I want them to look natural.’ She untied her two small plaits, dipped a comb into a cup of water, then ran it through her jet-black hair, slowly straightening out the waves. ‘Does it look pretty like this? If I let it grow a little longer I’ll have proper shoulder-length hair.’

‘Only girls with loose morals have shoulder-length hair. Even adult women who go to work aren’t allowed to grow it that long.’

‘Ha! You’re too conservative. The woman who played the Party branch secretary in that revolutionary opera we saw last week wore a shoulder-length wig, so it can’t be that immoral.’

‘Still, it’s safest to keep it in a short bob.’ I could feel my heart thumping again. I moved my distracted gaze to the window. Lulu lived on the ground floor, so by three o’clock, the sunlight would already begin to leave her room. Our flat on the third floor remained sunny for at least an hour longer. A crab-claw lotus plant in a terracotta pot was sucking the condensation from her window. The flowers looked moist and red. The petals I’d knocked off as I’d climbed through the window lay limply on the sill.

‘I want to kiss you,’ I repeated, as thoughts of her smooth stomach and warm vagina filled my mind again.

‘You can’t. It’s not dark yet.’ She walked over to the mirror. ‘Your mother sings in the chorus. She must have an official licence to get a perm.’

‘Yes, I could ask her to lend it to you… You have a lovely voice. You should go to music college after you leave school.’ I touched my hair, which I’d smoothed back with some Vaseline I’d taken from a pot in my mother’s drawer.

‘I can sing Li Gu’s “Longing for Home”. Listen: “ My dreams are always of you! After this day ends, we may never meet again …”’

I watched her black shoe, which was dangling over the edge of the bed, move in time to the beat. The laces were tied in a messy knot. My face felt hot. I looked up and stared at her long, pale neck.

‘Did you like it?’ She had suddenly stopped singing.

‘Very nice. Do you like basketball?’ I thought of the cool smell of the limewashed walls that enclosed the school’s football pitch.

‘I hate it. Accompany me, will you?’ She pushed her harmonica towards me. I took it, but my jaw felt too stiff to play it. I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. We both stared at the floor.

‘I’d better go,’ I said finally.

‘All right.’ Half her breath seemed to be stuck in her throat. She released it through the corner of her mouth, blowing her fringe into the air.

I looked at her regretful eyes and smiling mouth and couldn’t make out what she was feeling.

Without another word, I walked over to the window, climbed over the lotus plant again and jumped out.

If the police hadn’t interrogated Lulu and forced her to confess to our relationship, our secret love affair might have continued for years.

It all started a couple of days before we were due to break up for the summer holidays. We’d finished our last exams. On my way to school, I noticed that the note I’d left under her flowerpot the night before, asking her out for a film, had been removed. I assumed she’d taken it away and read it.