Susan Barker - The Incarnations

Wang’s words, the tremor in his voice, break down her animosity. She lowers her shaking hand. ‘I thank God I woke up,’ she says. ‘It frightens me to think what would have happened if I hadn’t woken. .’

A sob catches in Yida’s throat and she throws a hand over her mouth. Wang goes to her, and she doesn’t resist as he takes her in his arms, embracing her for the first time in weeks. He strokes the back of his wife’s messy head as she quietly weeps on his shoulder. The fire has destroyed everything they have, but at least it has brought them back together, Wang thinks, as a family once more.

‘We shouldn’t blame each other,’ he says soberly. ‘The fire had nothing to do with the wiring.’

‘What are you saying?’ Yida pulls back to look at her husband at arm’s length. There is a wary look in her bloodshot eyes. ‘That it was arson?’

Wang nods. ‘I know who did it.’

Yida laughs, shoves his chest with both hands and steps backwards out of his arms. ‘Let me guess,’ she says. ‘Your friend? The man who wrote the letters?’

‘The police couldn’t do anything about him before,’ Wang says, ‘but now he has harmed us they can arrest him.’

Yida laughs again, harsh and cynical. She goes back to their daughter’s bedside. Leaning over Echo, she strokes the hair at her temples, as though to close ranks against him.

‘You think it’s all in my head, don’t you, Yida?’ Wang says.

‘Yes,’ Yida says. ‘The fire started in the bathroom. The firemen said it was the wiring. I can’t take any more of your madness, Wang Jun. I’m sick to death of it. The police are waiting to speak to you in the hall. Go and tell them your arson theory! Go!’

Echo is waking. She coughs faintly into the breathing apparatus over her mouth, the sound muffled by the plastic. Her eyes flutter open up at her mother, standing over the bed, and she attempts to raise her head from the pillow. ‘ Ma? ’ she croaks up at Yida. Wang’s heart contracts and he wants to stay with his daughter, to reassure her that she is safe. But the last thing Echo needs right now is to see her parents fighting. So he leaves to speak to the police. Yida will come round.

The policeman is sleeping in the chair outside Echo’s room, called off duty by his three-in-the-morning fatigue. Wang looks up and down the otherwise empty hallway. He hears the policeman’s colleague in the examination room. ‘This one’s a bullet wound. I was chasing a gangster,’ he boasts. The nurse giggles. ‘What bullet wound needs. . ten stitches?’ Wang stares at the policeman sleeping in the chair. What if he tells the police he suspects arson and they suspect him? What if they look up his records, see that he was once a psychiatric patient and arrest him? He has heard how the police solve their cases. They will take him to the station and throw him about an interrogation room until he confesses. The investigation will begin and end with him.

Wang walks back to reception, where a mother hugs her asthmatic, wheezing toddler, and a drunk smiles, bleeding from a head wound but too numbed by baijiu to feel the pain. The sliding glass doors part for him as he leaves, and out in the hospital car park Wang starts to run, past the ambulances and parked cars. At the hospital gate, he looks back at the emergency-room entrance. No one is coming for him but, not wanting to take any chances, he keeps on running down the street.

Morning. The sky, cleared of pollution by pre-Olympic closures of coal-burning factories outside Beijing, is blue and streaked with cirrus clouds. The alley, however, is its same sordid self, smelling of beer, gutter urine and the sweet rot of cabbage in bins. The barber’s is closed, the red, white and blue pole not spinning, the cord unplugged. Wang turns off the taxi engine and calls Zeng. The phone rings and rings. Wang is on the verge of hanging up when Zeng picks up.

‘Wei?’

Zeng is sleepy, his tongue groggy on the bed of his mouth. Ten past seven and he probably hasn’t been in bed for long.

‘I need to speak to you,’ Wang says. ‘Come outside.’ He hangs up.

As he waits, Wang smokes a Red Pagoda Mountain, tugging nicotine and tar, the only stuff his body won’t reject with nausea, deep into his lungs. He has smoked it down to the butt by the time Zeng appears. Yawning. Bare-chested in boxers. The bruises on his nose and cheeks darkened to purplish black, making him look like a featherweight boxer staggering out of the ring. Zeng walks to the taxi, the emerald scales of his dragon tattoo glinting in the sun. The waistband of his boxers hangs from his narrow hips, and his lean and sinewy body looks vulnerable and undefended.

Wang leans out of the driver’s-side window. ‘Get in.’

‘What is it? Why have you come to see me?’ Zeng asks. He touches his hand to the bruises that Wang beat into him the day before.

Wang chokes back his anger, struggling to bring his voice under control. His heart is beating hard and sweat dampening his brow. He looks straight ahead through the windscreen.

‘You know why. Get in.’

Zeng goes to the passenger-side door, unconcerned that he is barefoot and in his underwear. He slides into the passenger seat, slams the door and turns to Wang. ‘I don’t understand you, Wang Jun,’ he says. ‘The way you. . attacked me yesterday. I thought you never wanted to see me again. .’

Wang shuts his eyes and grips the steering wheel with all his strength. He thinks of Echo in the hospital bed, wearing an oxygen mask so she can breathe. The nearness of Zeng in the taxi is unbearable. Wang can’t release the steering wheel from his white-knuckle grip, out of fear of what his hands would otherwise do.

‘Did you get another letter? Is this what this is about? I swear, it wasn’t me. .’

Wang opens his eyes. Zeng is stroking his scarred forearm as he looks at him, as though his fingers are unconsciously drawn to his past self-destruction and pain. Wang is sure Zeng knows why he has come for him. Where is his sense of self-preservation? His sense of threat?

‘I worry about you, Wang Jun,’ Zeng says. ‘I know you are under a lot of stress. If you want to talk, I am here for you. .’

Wu Fei comes flying out of the barber’s. Barefoot. Naked from the waist up. His underdeveloped chest and pale adolescent nipples make him appear younger than Wang had first thought. Seventeen, or even sixteen.

‘Yanyan! Stop!’

Wang hits central locking. The boy won’t let Zeng go without a fight.

‘Roll up your window,’ he tells Zeng.

Wu Fei dashes in front of the taxi, to the passenger side. He pulls uselessly on the door latch then thrusts his fingers through the narrow gap above Zeng’s window, tugging on the glass.

‘Don’t go with him, Yanyan!’ he yells at Zeng. ‘He’s dangerous! He will beat you again. He only wants to hurt you.’

‘Feifei,’ Zeng says firmly, ‘we are just going for a drive. There’s something Wang and I have to talk about.’

Clinging with his fingers, the boy shouts into the gap above the window glass. ‘Please, Xiao Yan. Please get out of the taxi. Don’t go with him. Get out of the taxi now!’

Zeng Yan sighs. ‘Feifei, go back to bed. I’ll be back soon and we’ll get breakfast together.’

‘No.’ Wu Fei shakes his head. ‘Let me come with you. I will sit in the back seat and be quiet. You won’t know I’m there, I promise. I just want to make sure you are okay.’

‘Feifei, stop acting like a child!’

But he is a child, Wang sees that now. He is a boy in a dark adult world, and Zeng is his protector; the one person he has. Wu Fei clings to him with a child’s fear of abandonment.

‘Please, Yanyan, don’t go! He’s crazy and wants to hurt you! Why can’t you see that?’