Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Wang baulks at her plan for Echo to live with her. But Lin Hong doesn’t notice.

‘Echo and I will decorate the room together, then I will take her to Ikea to choose new furniture. It will be so much fun! You can move in here too, Wang Jun. Once your father has moved out to the private care home, there will be plenty of room for the three of us. .’

Wang drains the last of his whisky for the courage he needs to step between Lin Hong and her delusions. ‘Yida will never agree to Echo living here,’ he says. ‘And, as for me. . well, I think my living here would be. . impractical. .’

Lin Hong sighs. ‘Yida won’t have any say in the matter,’ she says. ‘I will hire the very best lawyers to handle the divorce proceedings and guarantee you custody of Echo. And how can you say that living here will be impractical?’ Lin Hong laughs and sweeps her hands at the high ceiling and vast floor space. ‘Look how spacious it is! And we have a maid to cook and clean and do the laundry. You and Echo will be very comfortable. Much more so than in that cramped hovel in Maizidian. Ugh — so filthy! Does that woman ever clean? I’ll do a much better job of taking care of you and Echo than she ever did. .’

Wang doesn’t know what to say. He has a sudden resurgence of loyalty to Yida, who, for all her faults, at least hasn’t parted company with reality.

‘If Yida and I divorce, Yida can have custody of Echo,’ he says firmly. ‘She’s a good mother and I won’t take Echo away from her. And please understand, Lin Hong. . we won’t ever move in here. Echo won’t want to leave Yida. And I’d rather live on my own. .’

Lin Hong narrows her eyes at this, and Wang regrets not having another glass of whisky to fortify himself against what is to come.

‘Every choice you have ever made, Wang Jun — dropping out of university, becoming a taxi driver, marrying that woman, and now this — has been wrong ,’ she says. She brings her whisky to her mouth and chokes it down. Wang knows he should stand up and leave now. But part of him wants to stay and see how low-down and dirty she will fight. ‘You are very selfish to deprive Echo of the opportunity to have her own bedroom with furniture from Ikea,’ she continues. ‘She would have so much fun staying here! You should stop being so selfish and let Echo decide for herself where she lives.’

Wang smiles. ‘We’ll let Echo decide then, shall we? You know, Lin Hong, Echo doesn’t like coming here. I have to drag her here most times. You are very pushy and overbearing, Lin Hong. You are a very hard woman to be around. .’

Lin Hong looks as though she’s been slapped. Then she rears up, hissing like a cornered cat, ‘A hard woman, am I? Well, at least I don’t have a mental illness. You are not fit to be a father, Wang Jun! You should be back in a psychiatric hospital. The police should lock you up with the other madmen they are rounding up before the Olympics. I ought to report you to the Public Security Bureau as a threat to national security!’

Wang laughs at this. He laughs at her viciousness. The bloodletting is cathartic, even though the blood spraying about is his own. ‘Listen to yourself, Lin Hong! You are poisonous! I wouldn’t let Echo stay with you for even one night.’

Lin Hong leans towards him. She spills whisky on her chiffon top as she shouts, ‘You are a bad father , Wang Jun! They should never have let you have a child! They should have sterilized you in the hospital! They should have locked you up like your mother! You are just as insane as she was!’

Wang straightens up, as though a low voltage has run up his spine to his skull.

‘What do you mean, “locked up like your mother”?’

Lin Hong smiles. She had not meant to say what she said. It had slipped out. Her stepson’s expression is so gratifying, however, she is glad it did. ‘Your father put her in a hospital. The same one you were in.’

‘No,’ Wang says. ‘She died from pneumonia.’

‘She didn’t die,’ Lin Hong corrects. ‘She recovered, and then she was moved to the mental hospital. She was there for a year or two, then she ran away.’

Lin Hong’s voice is no longer shrill. Back in control, she is smooth and dulcet as a late-night-radio-show host. Wang is faint. The room spins as though he has drunk a bottle of whisky, not a glass.

‘She’s still alive?’

‘Dead,’ Lin Hong says. ‘A week after she ran away from the hospital, your father got a phone call from a town in Heilongjiang. The police had found her in the streets, frozen to death in the night. They cremated her and posted your father the death certificate.’

Wang is short of breath. His chest has narrowed and he can’t get air inside. ‘When was that?’

‘1992.’

‘But he told me she died years before then, when I was twelve. I don’t understand. .’

Lin Hong sips her whisky, relishing his confusion and anguish, taking her time.

‘Your father wanted to protect you,’ she says. ‘After you were sent to boarding school her madness got worse. She was like a wild animal. In the hospital she was howling and biting the other patients and doctors. She couldn’t speak. She didn’t know her own name. The doctors said that she would never recover. No child should ever have to see his mother in that condition.’

‘But he told me she was dead .’

Lin Hong raises her eyebrows. ‘Why are you so upset? Your father said she was a bad, abusive mother and you were better off thinking she was dead. So what if she died later than you thought? She’s dead now, isn’t she? What difference does it make?’

‘I want to see the death certificate,’ Wang says. ‘Bring it to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Bring it to me!’

Lin Hong gets up and goes to the study. She returns and hands Wang a green booklet. Wang looks inside the government document, stamped with red stars and filled out in ballpoint pen by a small-town clerk. It’s all there. His mother’s name, age, weight, blood type. The cause of death is cited as hypothermia. Place of death, a town called Langxiang. Why Heilongjiang? he wonders. She had been a Sent-down Youth in Heilongjiang in the 1960s and had hated it. Wang’s eyes blur with tears at the thought of Shuxiang freezing to death in a small northern town. At the thought of himself at the age of twelve, under cold damp sheets in the boarding-school dormitory on the day his father told him she had died.

‘Why are you crying?’ Lin Hong asks. ‘Wasn’t she a bad mother? Didn’t she abuse you? Your father told me he once walked in on the two of you in bed together! For a mother to do that to her son is unforgivable. .’

Wang puts the death certificate in his pocket and stands up. Tears are sliding down his cheeks. ‘You will never see Echo again,’ he tells Lin Hong. ‘You are dead to her now. You are dead to all of us.’

He leaves the room before his stepmother can say another word.

He goes into the bedroom and flips on the light. Wang Hu is awake in his bed, pillows propping up his grey, wrinkled head, the duvet up his chest. He looks nervously at his son. He has been listening.

‘Why did you tell me she was dead?’ Wang asks.

Wang Hu doesn’t answer him but shrinks back against the pillows. But Wang is not fooled by the defenceless-old-man act. He knows what his father is really like.

‘Why did you lie about her?’ he shouts.

He reaches for a wooden dresser near the door and pushes it over so the drawers slide out and the large oval mirror shatters as it crashes to the floor. His father’s eyes go wide with fright. He parts his dribbling lips and a low moan comes out. He tugs on the duvet with his semi-paralysed hand and pulls it over his head. Pathetic, Wang thinks. He has no pity for him. Reverse the effects of the stroke, restore his ability to walk and talk, and he’d be back to his bullying ways tomorrow. By rights, he should drag his father out of bed. He should drag him about and pull his shoulder out of joint, like his father did to him when he was twelve.