Susan Barker - The Incarnations

‘And now in this life,’ the Watcher says, ‘you are my grandchild.’

Though the madwoman is lying, Echo recoils at the thought of being her granddaughter.

‘Here,’ the Watcher says, handing her two brown envelopes. ‘One letter I wrote to your father, before he died. The other I wrote for you. It’s the story of your first incarnation. And there will be more, Echo. . For it’s my duty to enlighten you about your past.’

Echo accepts the envelopes with both hands.

‘Now you are only eight years old, and too young to understand my letters. But, one day, when you are older, you will read them, and you will know about the bond that has entwined us for over a thousand years. You are very clever, Echo. It won’t be long.’

The Watcher turns and leaves, and Granny Ping (her Olympic Security Volunteer armband strapped over her sleeve) looks up from Wang Hu’s wheelchair and gasps, ‘Even the dead have come to pay their respects. .’ The Watcher walks out of the living room as Lin Hong walks back in. The women brush shoulders in the doorway.

‘Lin Hong! Your husband won’t stop coughing!’ wails a guest. ‘What shall we do?’

Lin Hong ignores Wang Hu. She marches over to Echo. ‘Who was that woman? What did she give you? Let me see!’

Echo leaps up from the sofa, hugging the envelopes tightly to her chest. ‘No!’ she shouts, with such force that Lin Hong steps back.

As Echo runs to the spare room, Lin Hong decides there are too many guests about to make a scene. She will discipline Echo later. The patriarchs of the Wang family are either crippled or dead, and she is in charge now. And as much as she adores Echo, it is important that she keep the child in line. No doubt Yida’s breast milk poisoned Echo as a baby, contaminating her with her backwards Anhui ways.

‘ Lin Hong! Your husband! ’

Lin Hong smiles pleasantly and turns to the crowd panicking over the choking man. ‘Slap him on the back a few times. The harder the better. That will shut him up.’

Echo goes into the guest room, where her mother is unconscious, sprawled with her face in the pillow under lank and unwashed curls. Yida’s dress is hitched up over her buttocks and, though there’s no one about to see, Echo tugs the dress down over her knickers. Seeing her mother like this, drunk and insensible, is worrying to her. How will she stand up to Lin Hong when she is so weak?

Echo kneels and reaches under the bed for a large metal security box. She turns the combination lock, clicks open the lid and deposits the brown envelopes inside with the others. Her mother gave her the letters. She said it was her inheritance from her father. ‘Your only inheritance,’ she had laughed. ‘Your father wrote them. Once, when I was angry, I threw them out of the kitchen window. I thought they were lost, but a security guard saw me from below. He gathered them up and gave them back. Anyway. . I thought maybe one day you will want to read them. You will want to know who your father was.’

Echo crawls on to the bed next to her passed-out mother and wraps her arm around her. She touches her forehead to her mother’s shoulder and is reassured by the life and blood she detects thrumming there. She lifts her mother’s curls from her cheek, and leans in to kiss her. Her mother is different when she is sleeping. She is like a child.

Echo slides off the bed. She puts the security box in her backpack, zips it up and feeds her arms through the straps. Then, her heart racing, she waits with her ear against the guest-room door until there’s no sound in the hall, and sneaks out. She slips on her flip-flops and runs out to the stairwell. As she flies down the ten flights of concrete steps, Echo thinks of the guests at the wake, feasting their mouths on the trays of snacks, and their eyes on her mother’s burnt-out grief. She thinks of overbearing Lin Hong, with her over-plucked eyebrows and stretched-too-tight face. She hopes Yida will move them out of her grandfather’s home soon. Otherwise, Echo will run away.

Echo runs through the marble-floored foyer, past the doormen and out of the revolving glass doors. Out in the street, her flipflops slap the pavement as she runs, and her backpack thuds on her back. She can’t believe that her father is not out there still, cursing the traffic and tapping cigarette ash out of the window. She can’t shake the feeling that at any moment his taxi will pull up. That he will beep the horn and call, ‘Echo! Jump in! I’ll drive you the rest of the way. .’

At a bridge over Liangma River, Echo stops and leans over the railing, peering down at the shallow water below. She thinks of taking out the metal box and emptying the letters into the stagnant ditch, drowning the letters so the ink dissolves into illegibility. But she tightens the backpack straps and runs over the bridge instead.

Echo runs all the way to Xiu Xing’s run-down apartment block and sinks down on a concrete step in the entryway, panting and sweating in the July heat. When she recovers her breath she will knock on Xiu Xing’s door and he will pause his video game and let her in. Xiu Xing will hide the letters for her in his bedroom, where Lin Hong won’t be able to find them. He is her closest friend, and can be trusted to keep her father’s letters safe.

Echo unzips the backpack, takes out the metal box and puts it on her lap. As she turns the combination lock, set to the date of her father’s birthday, she remembers how the Watcher had said, ‘Now you are only eight years old, and too young to understand. .’ Who says I am too young to understand? Echo thinks. And, burning with curiosity and defiance, she unfolds one of the Watcher’s letters.

‘“Sorceress Wu, Sui Dynasty, AD 606,”’ Echo reads out loud. Straining her eyes through the shadows, she reads on.

Thank you to Jane Lawson for her support and encouragement over the years I was writing The Incarnations . Many thanks to Andrew Kidd and Marianne Velmans.

Thank you to Hubert Ho, Jennifer Yeo, Richard Dudas, Sal Attanasio, Liang Junhong, Julia Wang, Glen Brown, Emily Midorikawa and Zakia Uddin.

I am very grateful to the Royal Literary Fund for the fellowship that enabled me to keep writing this book, and to Tim Leadbeater and the wonderful staff at Leeds Trinity University. Thank you also to the Arts Council England and the Society of Authors for the grants I was awarded.

In 2010 I taught English as a volunteer to patients at the Beijing Chaoyang Mental Health Service Centre, and to civil servants at the Ministry of Health in Beijing. I would like to thank all those I taught, for their friendship and the insight I gained into China and their lives.

Many thanks to my fellow writers at the Beijing Writers’ Group for reading the early chapters.

Thank you to the Corporation of Yaddo, the Red Gate Gallery in Beijing, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat, and all the inspiring writers and artists I met on these residencies.

Thank you, as always, to my father, mother and sister.

Thank you most of all to Robert Powers, who supported me throughout the writing of this book, and to whom The Incarnations is dedicated.

Susan Barkergrew up in east London. While writing The Incarnations she spent several years living in Beijing, researching ancient and modern China. She is currently based in Shenzhen, China.

Follow her on Twitter @SusanKBarker