Susan Barker - The Incarnations

‘He was a good father,’ I whisper. I squeeze my eyes shut, but tears squeak out. You hear my sniffles.

‘Don’t cry, Moon.’ You put your arms around me, holding me closer to the heat and pulse of your body. ‘Don’t cry. Your father will be reformed and released soon.’

You kiss my eyelids with light butterfly kisses that flutter down into the pit of my belly. It’s so unexpected, I stop crying immediately. The last person who kissed me like this was my mother, and not since I was a little girl. You stop kissing me, but don’t move away. Your breath is humid on my face.

‘What about your father?’ I whisper. ‘What’s he like?’

You laugh and say, ‘One-eyed Zhang gave me a good Communist upbringing. He was reading passages of The Communist Manifesto to me when I was still in the womb. When I was old enough to read he made me memorize People’s Daily editorials and recite them back to him. If I made too many mistakes, that one-eyed bastard would beat me.’ You laugh again. Bitter and without mirth.

‘I should be grateful to Comrade Zhang, I suppose,’ you say. ‘Thanks to his strict ideological training, political speeches are effortless for me. . My father wanted to call me Soviet Zhang —’ you pause ‘— but my mother insisted on the name of Liya. She was much gentler than him. Not a day goes by when I don’t miss her. .’

You stroke my hair, your fingers tickling my scalp. It’s past midnight, much later than I am used to. My eyelids are drooping, the tempo of my blood slowing down.

‘You were looking at me in the bathtub,’ you say.

Your words shake me back to wakefulness.

‘What?’

‘My breasts,’ you say. ‘You were looking.’

I laugh in surprise. ‘You were naked. How could I not look?’

I hear the muscles in your throat contract. ‘You can touch them if you like.’

I laugh again, embarrassed, not sure whether you are joking. I don’t move, so you grab my limp hand and place it on your pyjama top, over your left breast. I rest my hand there awkwardly for a moment, then I squeeze. ‘Much bigger than mine,’ I comment.

‘You’ll catch up, in a year or two,’ you say kindly.

I remove my hand, and it feels different somehow, as though the fullness of your breast has left an impression in my palm.

‘Have you started yet?’ you ask.

‘Last year,’ I say, ‘but they aren’t regular. Every three months or so.’

‘Mine came when I was twelve,’ you say. ‘I thought I was dying. I ran to the school nurse in tears, and she gave me some rags and explained what it was.’

‘I can’t believe. .’ I nearly say, your mother didn’t tell you , then I remember your mother is dead, ‘. . you didn’t know.’ There’s a tickling in my throat so I turn my head and lightly cough. Then I ask the question I wanted to ask when you put my hand on your breast: ‘Do you ever touch yourself?’

‘Touch myself?’

‘You don’t ever touch yourself. .? Down there?’

‘ No .’

You sound appalled, and I regret mentioning it. But then you ask, ‘What’s it like?’

I hesitate, then say, ‘It starts when I think of a man, like Teacher Wu, kissing me, and down there feels good. So I rub and rub and the feeling grows stronger, until this spasm comes. . I sleep in the same bed as my mother, so I usually wait until she is snoring. . Sometimes I stop halfway through, scared I have woken her. .’

You don’t say anything. What are you thinking? That I am a pervert? A sexual degenerate?

‘I. . I feel bad afterwards,’ I stammer. ‘So I will stop this bad habit. I will keep my thoughts Socialist and pure, and loyal to the motherland.’

You remain silent and I start to panic. What was I thinking? You are Zhang Liya, leader of our school’s detachment of the Communist Youth League. You will report me on Monday, and I will be ordered to write a confession of my bourgeois self-pleasuring and read it in assembly. Teacher Wu will be disgusted. I will be expelled and perhaps even sent to a prison for juvenile sex offenders. My mother will hang herself in shame.

‘What do you rub?’ you whisper. ‘What is this spasm ?’ You reach for my hand, resting on the pillow, and tug it down under the bedcovers. ‘Show me how.’

At the Beijing No. 104 Middle School for Girls, you behave like a stranger to me. But though you shun me in the classrooms and halls, I know that I am your closest friend. Though you and Long March walk arm in arm in the yard, I know she is your rival and wants your position as leader of the Youth League. (‘Long March would push me off a cliff if she had the chance.’) Though you and Resist America share a bowl of noodles in the dining hall, you have never bathed with Resist America, or washed her hair with your stepmother’s expensive shampoo. Though you and Patriotic Hua plan the agenda for Youth League meetings together, you have never shown Patriotic Hua the black and white photograph of your mother, or turned the white bust of Chairman Mao to the wall before dancing cheek to cheek with her to ballads from Hong Kong. Though you praise Soviet Chen’s singing of the latest revolutionary opera, you have never hooked your leg over Soviet Chen’s under the bedcovers and whispered, ‘We are like a pair of chopsticks. We belong together.’

Though you ignore me, I know I am your most intimate friend. Though at school I am as ostracized as ever, the spring of 1966 is the happiest of my life.

We spend every Saturday night together until May, when I don’t see you for three weekends in a row. There are rumours that the Party has handed down directives to the student leaders to be more revolutionary. There are rumours of a coming political storm. And I know these Party commands are keeping you away.

The first Saturday in June you knock for me, exhausted after a ten-hour Youth League meeting. The evening is hot, and we go to Ironmongers Lane and soak in a tub of tepid water. When I ask you about the rumours, you say, ‘There’s going to be a reform of the education system. I am prohibited from saying any more than that. But don’t worry, Moon. I will keep you safe.’

After dinner, we lie on your bed and go to sleep. Hours later I am woken by the floorboards creaking as you pace up and down, lost in thought. The moon-cast shadows of the tree outside the window reach across your body, the branches stroking your breasts and hips and reaching as though to strangle your neck. I drift off again, and wake before daybreak to see you kneeling by the loose floorboard and staring at the black and white photo of your dead mother. Are you too excited to sleep? Or too scared?

I am scared. In every political campaign, it’s the rightists who suffer most.

II

On Monday when I arrive at school the playground is crowded with girls gazing up at large sheets of paper dripping with black ink pasted to the gate and the school walls.

Long Live the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution.

Time for a Revolution in Education.

The Rightist Intellectual Headteacher Yang Must No Longer Dominate Our School with Her Capitalist Agenda.

We stare at the posters, confused. Who vandalized the playground? Where are the teachers? Why hasn’t the bell rung for lessons? Only the Youth League members look as though they know what is going on. You and Long March, Red Star and Patriotic Hua stand with authority, watching your classmates’ reactions to the slogans in black ink.

‘Why hasn’t the bell rung?’ someone asks.

‘Lessons are cancelled,’ Long March says.

‘But the high school entrance exams are next month,’ complains Ying Le, who wants to go to medical school and train to be a doctor. ‘How are we supposed to study for them?’