Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Wang dislikes Yida working nights, as he knows the sort of men who go to Dragonfly Massage after dark. Men who drunkenly swagger through the heavy glass doors, eager to strip off the noose of work ties, and tobacco-and-sweat-stale shirts and be serviced by a woman’s sensual touch. Men with lewd, alcohol-loosened tongues and wayward, groping hands that Yida has to remove from her hips and thighs again and again. Even at the ‘proper’ massage establishments, the masseurs offer extras. Stuff goes on. The late-night drunks would not go there otherwise.

By the end of her shift Yida is exhausted, her lower back aching from bending over the white-sheeted massage tables and her arm muscles cramped. She leaves work as the sun rises and is back at Apartment 404 by quarter past six, to get her husband and daughter ready for work and school. Before changing out of her uniform, she goes to the kitchen, puts saucepans of eggs and rice porridge on the gas burner and washes the dishes from the night before. She makes Wang’s coffee and puts his hard-boiled eggs in a bowl. As she puts his breakfast on the table, she sees the tightening of her husband’s jaw.

‘What?’ she says.

‘Nothing.’

Yida is so exhausted she wants to lay her head down and weep. She can feel the rings darkening around her sunken eyes, and her youth draining out of her, on to the tiled floor. He behaves as though she has wronged him, through her physical proximity to other men. But she has done nothing wrong. Only the job they pay her to do.

‘The men who want that sort of thing don’t come to Dragonfly Massage,’ she says. ‘They go to the teenage whores at the place down the road.’ Then, too tired to fight, she backs down and placates: ‘I know you don’t like it. But you can’t deny we need the money.’

Wang knocks a boiled egg against the bowl, so the eggshell cracks. He can’t deny that they need the money, but he’ll never get used to how it is earned.

As Yida is working, Wang and Echo have take-out noodles from a nearby Lanzhou place for dinner, eating out of the plastic containers. Wang has bought Echo a can of lychee juice but, when he catches her stealing sips from his bottle of Yanjing, pours her a third of a glass. After dinner Echo goes to the bedroom to do her homework, and Wang goes to the kitchen. Cold yellow light spills out of the fridge as he takes out another beer. He levers the cap with a bottle-opener and gazes out the window at the buildings of Maizidian as he swigs. The mid-nineties high-rise office and apartment complexes are nowhere near as tall as the skyscrapers in Guomao, but the effect of them at night, with the dozens of floors randomly lit, is striking. Wang cracks the window open to air the stuffy kitchen but smells the greasy cooking odours from the ventilation fan below and slams the window shut again.

Heavy footsteps thud across the ceiling, and the gunfire of Call of Duty , the shoot ’em up played by the teenage boy next door, rumbles through the walls. Wang drinks half the beer in one long swallow. He is restless. His heart, lungs and legs are bursting with longing to be striding through neon-lit streets, amongst revellers, music and noise. To drink whisky in the side-alley bars and shoot the breeze with strangers. But it would be irresponsible to leave Echo. He’d never forgive himself if something happened to her.

Wang sparks a lighter and inhales the flame into a cigarette. Ten days have gone by since the barber’s and, though he hasn’t been back in person, he casts his mind back there a hundred times a day. He wants to talk to Zeng. Nothing more than that. He is not one of those men who likes other men. He is attracted to women. Zeng has never cared for women. ‘What are they for?’ he once joked.

Back when Wang drove his taxi at night, he sometimes picked up gay men from nightclubs near the Workers’ Stadium. Men in day-glo T-shirts sweaty from the dance floor. Men with abnormally dilated pupils and loopy grins, sucking on lollipops and squealing, high-pitched, in the back seat. Once, two men got in his taxi and were all over each other. Mouths slurping and hands groping at the crotch bulges in each other’s jeans, as though Wang wasn’t there. Wang had nearly pulled over and ordered them out. Why behave like animals? Why can’t they control themselves for ten minutes?

The high-rises of Maizidian sway like bamboo in the breeze and Wang realizes he is slightly drunk. He can’t call his mind to heel. Can’t stop his thoughts from returning, again and again, to Zeng. Ten years ago, in the hospital. Ten days ago, in the barber’s. To his wry smile and the dark blades of hair scything his brow. To the emerald of his dragon tattoo and the grotesque, self-inflicted scar on his forearm, as good as a warning to stay away.

When Wang looks in on Echo around nine, she is in bed in her pyjamas and reading a comic book. He leans on the door frame, his perspective of the room tilting slightly from the beer. Alcohol has turned up the thermostat of his body, flushing him red.

‘Done your homework?’ he asks.

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sure? Remember you told your mother you’d study harder and improve your grades. .’

Echo has been in Yida’s bad books since the parent — teacher meeting at Zaoying Elementary last week, where they found out that Echo ranked thirty-second in her class of thirty-five. ‘A daydreamer,’ Teacher Ling had said. ‘Echo has poor concentration and consistently low grades. She has no community spirit and does not mix well with other children. She won’t get into a good junior school at this rate.’

When they got home, Yida shouted at Echo that she was lazy and spoilt. She smacked Echo and threatened to throw her artist’s sketch pads and colouring pencils in the bin. ‘I got poor marks at school,’ she shouted. ‘I didn’t work hard enough. And look at how I ended up! You’d better study harder, Echo, or you’ll end up with a life like mine !’

Remembering the scene that Yida had made, Echo looks at her father from the bed and says quietly, ‘I finished my homework an hour ago.’

‘Okay. Good. You brushed your teeth? Washed your face?’

‘Yes.’

Wang asks Echo what comic she is reading, and she holds up the cover. The myth of the Goddess Chang-e and her palace on the moon. Wang approves, but it’s a school night, so he says, ‘Put that away now. Time for bed.’

‘One more page. .’

‘No. I’m putting the light out. No more reading.’ Wang reaches for the light switch, and Echo calls out, ‘Ba, can you leave the light on? Just for tonight?’

‘Why?’ Wang asks. ‘I’ll only be next door. .’

‘Please, Ba. .’

‘What are you scared of?’

Echo won’t say, but looks at her father with panicking eyes.

‘What is it, Echo? Tell me. What are you frightened of?’

And Echo whispers, as though fearful of being overheard, ‘The Watcher.’

‘The Watcher? What’s the Watcher?’

‘The person who is watching me.’

Wang steps nearer to the bed. ‘What person?’ he asks carefully. ‘Where does he watch you?’

‘Everywhere. In the street, and the park, and school. .’

Wang goes over and grabs Echo’s arm. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ he cries. ‘What does he look like?’

Echo stares back, trembling at her father’s bloodshot, intense eyes.

Wang squeezes her arm and shakes. ‘What does he look like? Is he skinny? Does he have strange hair? Tell me, Echo!’

‘Ba. . You are hurting me. .’

Wang loosens his grip, but his voice remains insistent, demanding. ‘Look, Echo, it’s important that you tell me right now. This man could be dangerous. You have to tell me what he looks like so we can report him to the police.’