Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Solitude. Long, hot showers. The spaciousness of the double bed. Wang did not take for granted the simple things denied to him in hospital. He chopped vegetables and listened to the local radio station, slow-cooking soups on the hob. He swept and mopped the dust of inhabitation from the floor. The apartment had remained undecorated since the block went up in the seventies, and the walls were drab and needed a coat of paint, so he bought tins of white and painted compulsively for nine hours straight. When he finished he stood back, woozy with fumes, his joints and muscles sore, and admired the whitewashed walls. Wang had the sense that his past was contained within those walls. That his former life with Shuxiang had been absorbed by the concrete, and was interred there still, under the coats of white.

On the nights Wang couldn’t sleep, he thought of Zeng and masturbated. When he came, his remorse was immediate, and his longing to be normal again intense. But he was not normal. He couldn’t stop fantasizing about living with Zeng and sharing a bed and the rituals of everyday life. During the day the idea of him and Zeng living together was absurd. But in the hours of darkness it seemed like a chance of happiness he was foolish not to pursue.

To end the sleepless nights Wang set his alarm for six every morning, and dragged himself up when it rang. Groggy, he spread a folding map of Beijing out on the table and circled his forefinger above the districts of the city. Then Wang would bring the finger down on a random place, and that would be his destination for the day. He washed, shaved and dressed and then set out, the map folded in the back pocket of his jeans.

Tens of kilometres per day. Hundreds of kilometres per week. As he roamed across the city thousands of sensory impressions passed through him: the din of traffic, the put-put of motorized rickshaws, and strange-tasting chemicals in the air. Perceptions that entered his senses fleetingly resided in him, then vanished without a trace. At the end of each day he went home and showered, rinsing the sweat and grime away. He would cook and eat a simple meal, then tumble into bed and fall asleep without a single thought in his head.

It was on the walks across Beijing that he decided to become a taxi driver. To drive to every part of the city and meet people from every walk of life. Wang got a driver’s licence and, with his father’s string-pulling, signed up with a taxi company (vowing he’d never again ask for his help). By the end of the summer he was co-renting a Xiali sedan with another driver and supporting himself with his earnings. The next phase of his life was underway.

The day he met her, the clouds had been congregating since dawn, oppressive and tenebrous and gathering negative charge. Though it was late September, Wang had the windows rolled down, and was perspiring as he drove about the city, thirsting for a cold beer. When the city darkened as though in premature dusk, and lightning forked the sky, Wang was relieved. The tension in the atmosphere dissipated as the storm broke loose.

The girl stood near Dongzhimen subway, conspicuously still as those around her ran for shelter as though bombs were falling out of the sky. The downpour had soaked her to the skin, but she didn’t appear to care about catching a cold. Though she hadn’t flagged him down, Wang swerved over to her, his windscreen wipers slashing full speed. She pulled the latch of the passenger door and climbed in the front seat, as though his taxi was exactly what she’d been waiting for. The girl was twentyish, the same age as Wang. Her T-shirt and skirt were wringing, but she was unapologetic as her damp shadow seeped across the upholstery. She moved her feet and her canvas shoes squelched.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

She looked at him dismissively and named a street in the south. Her voice was husky and low, her accent that of someone who’d grown up far from Beijing. Wang pulled away from the kerb.

The wind shook the trees on Dongzhimen Avenue, stripping the branches of leaves. Lightning splintered the sky and water crashed on the windscreen faster than the wipers could clear it away. Wang stole glances at the girl, illuminated by the halogen arcs of street lights slanting into the car. She was wringing out her hair, both hands squeezing it into a rope that dripped on to her denim-skirted lap. Then she stared straight ahead, biting her lower lip, raindrops studding her nose, her eyelashes in wet spikes. Wang shifted awkwardly in the driver’s seat. He had been a driver for three weeks and hoped the girl wouldn’t notice his inexperience. He hoped he wouldn’t lose his way and have to consult a map.

The girl shivered beside him. A sneeze threw her towards the dashboard, and Wang turned the heater on full. Nervous of her prettiness, he asked her where she was from.

‘Anhui,’ she said. How long had she been in Beijing? ‘Two years.’

‘Why were you standing in the rain without an umbrella?’ he asked.

‘Just because.’

Her reticence had nothing to do with shyness, and they lapsed into a silence during which Wang imagined tugging her clinging T-shirt over her head and stroking and fondling her damp breasts.

The rain came down harder. It crashed down on the windscreen as though they were passing under a waterfall. The wiper blades slashed uselessly. Visibility was down to a few metres and Wang could barely see the tail lights of the car in front. He held the steering wheel steady and slowed his speed.

‘ Fuck! ’ cursed the girl. ‘Drive carefully. Don’t crash the fucking car!’

‘You can get out here if you want,’ Wang said.

They were driving through a desolate region of the city, a wasteland of construction sites with industrial cranes and crater lakes of rain and sand. The girl scowled and said nothing else.

Minutes later, Wang pulled up at the street of run-down buildings that was her destination. ‘Thirty kuai,’ he said, reading the meter. Then he waited for her to pay the fare and disappear back into the city of twelve million strangers. Good, he thought. He couldn’t wait for her to go. Outside, the storm raged on, battering the streets. The girl stared into her lap.

‘I don’t have any money,’ she said eventually.

Wang turned to look at her. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You can pay me another time.’

His kindness was too much for her, and the girl shuddered with a deep sob. She pressed her hands to her mouth and shook. Wang watched her awkwardly.

‘Something bad happen to you today?’ he asked.

‘They fired me from my job.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ll find another job. There are lots of jobs in Beijing.’

‘I hated it anyway. I worked in the toilets in Dongzhimen subway station. Worst job I’ve done in my life.’

Wang laughed, and the girl looked at him properly for the first time.

‘You’re young to be a taxi driver,’ she sniffed, wiping her eyes.

Wang shook his head. ‘I’m old. I’m twenty-two. I have wrinkles around my eyes.’

The girl squinted at his face. ‘So you do,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll call you lao shifu then.’

Then she smiled, but as though her heart was breaking, and Wang knew that she needed saving from more than the rain.

Her name was Ma Yida. ‘ Yida ,’ Wang whispered in his head, liking the sound of it. She slapped the table, leaning towards him in a conspiratorial manner.

‘Let’s get drunk,’ she suggested. ‘Let’s get so drunk we pass out in the gutter.’

The waitress, pen hovering over order pad, narrowed her eyes. Yida’s smile was beatific and wide: ‘Bring us four bottles of Tsingdao!’

Other refugees crowded the restaurant, fleeing the storm to order pots of tea and watch the red lanterns swinging wildly from the awning in the wind. In the kitchen, visible through a hatch in the wall, the chef pulled noodles from strands of dough and dumplings steamed in baskets of woven bamboo. Yida’s clothes were drenched. When Wang suggested she dry them, she shrugged. ‘They’ll dry eventually.’ So Wang offered her his jacket and was relieved when she accepted, covering her see-through wet T-shirt, clinging to her bra-cupped breasts. When the beer came she poured it out carelessly, frothing the glasses up with spilling foam.