Beijing Coma (5 page)

‘Do you like me?’ Her twisted face appeared to turn to me again.

‘Yes, I like you.’ My heart started thumping. I clenched my teeth together to stop my jaw trembling.

‘You gave me two of your stamps, so I know you must be fond of me.’

‘If you want, I’ll give them all to you. I also have a metal box I want to give you. It has a little lock and key.’ My voice sounded strange as it bounced across the interior walls of the concrete pipe.

‘It’s getting cold now,’ she said.

I rose into a squat and moved closer to her. Inside my head I heard a pounding, then a crack that sounded like a block of ice being plunged into hot water. I touched her hair that smelt of fried celery, then put my arms around her.

She took a sharp intake of breath, smiled and pushed me back. I pressed her hands down and moved closer to her face. I was probably trying to kiss her.

‘You can’t do that,’ she said, ‘I’m too young . . .’

The steam escaping from her mouth as she spoke became my goal. I moved my lips towards it. She pushed me back again and we tussled for a while until her arms grew weak. When her face looked up at me again, I floated once more towards her white breath. I stroked her hair and her nose, then pressed my mouth over her lips and pushed my tongue between them until, with a sigh, she relaxed her clenched jaw. Her tongue felt warm and soft. She moved her lips and, like a fish, sucked the saliva from my mouth.

I remember my trembling hand reaching towards her thighs and my legs shaking as I undid her belt and touched her warm stomach. When I stretched my hand inside her knickers, the lower half of my body disconnected from me and performed a dance of its own . . .

‘My hair’s all messy now,’ she said when it was over, clasping my hand. ‘And I forgot to bring a comb with me. What if someone sees me like this?’

‘Don’t worry.’ I let go of her hand and she sat up straight.

‘You’re such a hooligan,’ she said, doing up her belt.

‘No, I’m not. You’re the first girl I’ve ever touched.’

‘Did you notice that plastic grip Huang Lingling was wearing in her hair today? She doesn’t come from an artistic family. Who does she think she is, trying to pretty herself up like that?’ Then she moved close to me again and whispered, ‘I’m going to tell you something about my name. I want to see if you can keep a secret. My name is “Lu”, as in “road”, because I was born on the road. My mother was in the countryside on a training programme to prepare citizens for a possible American attack. Her group were made to run for hours, then throw themselves onto the ground, as though enemy planes were dropping bombs overhead. The third time my mother threw herself down, she couldn’t get up again. That’s when she gave birth to me. Because she didn’t complete the training, she was labelled a “backward element”.’

‘I promise on Chairman Mao that I won’t tell anyone.’ The sperm stuck to my trousers felt cold and sticky. I wasn’t in a mood to talk.

One afternoon, I climbed into Lulu’s bedroom through the window. She had left it open for me so that I would escape the notice of her grandmother, who was in the bedroom next door removing the covers from the quilts. It was a Sunday, and her mother and stepfather were both out.

After my father’s rehabilitation was confirmed, my family was able to move from the single room in the opera company’s dormitory block to a two-bedroom flat in a large residential compound of four-storey apartment buildings. Lulu’s family was moved into an apartment in the same compound, so we were still neighbours.

She locked her door and we sat on her bed, and I listened to her play the harmonica. She’d transcribed all the melodies from
The Best
200
Foreign Love Songs
tape. I liked listening to the noise of the instrument and the sound of her breathing.

I pulled from my bag the copy I’d made of the banned novella
A Young Girl’s Heart
. I’d spent the previous three nights writing it out. She put down her harmonica and leafed through the twenty-seven pages of neat handwriting.

‘Be careful!’ I said to her. ‘The glue hasn’t dried yet.’ The previous night, I’d chewed some noodles into a paste and used it to stick the pages together.

‘Is it a dirty book?’ She put it down on her bed and made me a cup of tea with an expensive-looking tea bag.

‘I bet you could brew five cups from that bag. Apparently, in the hotels where foreigners stay, there are baskets of tea bags like that in all the rooms. You can help yourself to as many as you like.’ I glanced at the photographs under the table’s glass top and said, ‘You’ve got lots of family photos.’

On the cabinet by the wall there was a radio, a bust of Chairman Mao and an inflatable plastic swan. A calendar issued by the local family planning office was pinned to the wall above.

‘Wang Long’s mother works in a foreigners’ hotel,’ Lulu said. ‘She told me that foreigners are really wasteful. They throw away the tea bags after just one cup. And the tea isn’t good enough for them – they have to add milk before they can drink it.’ Then Lulu said that the police were knocking on people’s doors and confiscating any hand-copied novels they found, so she didn’t want to keep the book. She said that she was sure it was pornographic.

‘Lots of our classmates have read hand-copied books,’ I said. ‘This one is quite short. There’s another one called
Tidal Wave
, but it’s over two hundred pages long. I haven’t got round to copying it yet.’

‘Don’t you know what could happen to you? During that last mass public trial, a young man was executed for copying banned books.’

‘But
he
printed hundreds of copies on a mimeograph machine, and so was accused of poisoning society. I’ve only made one handwritten copy to give to you as a present. You’re the only person who will see it.’

‘Those aren’t family photographs,’ she said, looking down at the table. ‘I cut them out from a magazine.’

‘If you don’t want to read it, I’ll take it back home with me.’ I leaned back against the table, let out a long sigh and stared at the thousands of dust particles floating across a beam of sunlight.

‘If you want me to read it, I’ll read it. But don’t tell any of our classmates. Where’s the dirtiest passage?’

‘On page seven.’ After I’d copied that page out on the first night, I’d had to hide under my bedcovers and masturbate.

‘I won’t need that one then.’ She tore out the page with her delicate fingers, folded it up and handed it back to me. ‘Read me a bit, will you? If you get to a dirty passage, just skip it.’

I opened the book and read: ‘“. . . Most eighteen-year-old girls are as pretty as flowers. At eighteen, I was enchanting. It’s no exaggeration to say that my figure was at least as beautiful as any film star you could name. I had large, glistening eyes, shiny black hair, cheeks as smooth as eggshell and eyebrows curved like fine willow leaves. My pert, ample breasts juddered gently as I walked . . . It was soon after my eighteenth birthday that I fell in love with my cousin. He was twenty-two, and had returned to Fuzhou for the holidays. He was tall and suave, with a dark moustache which gave him a mature and masculine air . . . To be honest, what really attracted me to him was the magnificent cock that bulged from between his thighs. When I think about it now, my vagina becomes so hot and itchy that it feels as though some liquid is about to spurt from it –”’

‘Stop!’ she cried, turning her red face to the wall. ‘That’s disgusting!’ Reading the passage aloud had made my heart thud with excitement.

I stopped reading and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. Once I’d assured myself that she wasn’t really angry, I pulled out my mother’s hair tongs from the pocket of my padded coat. A smell of scorched hair instantly filled the room.

‘Look, I’ve brought them,’ I said, changing the subject.

‘So that’s what they look like!’ She took them and weighed them in her hand. ‘They’re not that much lighter than my mother’s charcoal tongs.’

These tongs were made of pig iron. If you heated them in a fire, took them out just before they turned red then wrapped them around a lock of hair, they’d produce a curl that would last four or five days.

‘The Chinese actresses who play foreign women all use these to curl their hair. Look, this is how you do it.’ I took a section of her hair and curled it around the tongs.

‘Get them away from me!’ she laughed. ‘They’re frightening!’ I’d told her I’d pop round and give her the tongs when I’d bumped into her in the department store the previous day.

She took the tongs from me and turned them around, inspecting them carefully. I watched her fingers move through the beam of sunlight. Her nails turned a transparent red. The lines of dirt caught under the tips looked like tiny crescent moons. I walked over and put my hands around hers. Together we clutched the tongs, squeezing tighter and tighter. Our hands began to tremble. We moved closer until our lips were almost touching. We were both breathing very loudly. ‘I want to kiss you,’ I said.

She blushed and pulled her hands away. ‘It’s still light outside. Someone might see us.’

I wanted to hold her hands again, but she wouldn’t let me. So I sat back down on the bed. Lowering my gaze to her thighs, I said, ‘Make sure the tongs aren’t too hot. You should test them with a piece of paper first. If the paper goes yellow, let them cool down a little before you use them.’

‘We’re still only fifteen,’ she muttered, then turned her head towards me again and said, ‘What happens if the tongs scorch my hair?’

I thought of how my mother’s hair looked after she curled it. ‘I’ll do it for you. I promise I’ll be careful.’ I could feel myself blushing. ‘We’ve locked the door. What are you afraid of?’

She sat down at the end of the bed.

‘What about when I go to school? Will I be able to press the curls down?’

‘You can hide them under a hat. No one will see them. If you want to get rid of them, you only have to wash your hair.’

‘Things have become so much more open now. People don’t say “you’re nice” any more, they say “I love you”.’

‘I love you!’ I blurted. The words came out very easily, because I’d been practising saying them all morning.

She fell silent. Her face went bright red. She tried to cover a part of it with her hand.

‘If you want to love me, you must be faithful to me and never dance with other girls. Apparently a few of the older kids at school have been having dance parties at their homes when their parents are away.’

‘I know. Suyun’s been to one. She’s still going out with that boy who works in the pharmaceutical company.’

‘I forbid you to talk to her, or go to any dance party she invites you to. She’s only fifteen but she already owns a digital watch. Her morals are definitely suspect. You must promise on Chairman Mao’s life that you won’t speak to her again.’

‘I can’t dance,’ I said. ‘And anyway, her watch is a fake. It doesn’t tell the time . . .’

‘I don’t want big curls,’ Lulu said. ‘I want them to look natural.’ She untied her two small plaits, dipped a comb into a cup of water, then ran it through her jet-black hair, slowly straightening out the waves. ‘Does it look pretty like this? If I let it grow a little longer I’ll have proper shoulder-length hair.’

‘Only girls with loose morals have shoulder-length hair. Even adult women who go to work aren’t allowed to grow it that long.’

‘Ha! You’re too conservative. The woman who played the Party branch secretary in that revolutionary opera we saw last week wore a shoulder-length wig, so it can’t be that immoral.’

‘Still, it’s safest to keep it in a short bob.’ I could feel my heart thumping again. I moved my distracted gaze to the window. Lulu lived on the ground floor, so by three o’clock, the sunlight would already begin to leave her room. Our flat on the third floor remained sunny for at least an hour longer. A crab-claw lotus plant in a terracotta pot was sucking the condensation from her window. The flowers looked moist and red. The petals I’d knocked off as I’d climbed through the window lay limply on the sill.

‘I want to kiss you,’ I repeated, as thoughts of her smooth stomach and warm vagina filled my mind again.

‘You can’t. It’s not dark yet.’ She walked over to the mirror. ‘Your mother sings in the chorus. She must have an official licence to get a perm.’

‘Yes, I could ask her to lend it to you . . . You have a lovely voice. You should go to music college after you leave school.’ I touched my hair, which I’d smoothed back with some Vaseline I’d taken from a pot in my mother’s drawer.

‘I can sing Li Gu’s “Longing for Home”. Listen: “
My dreams are always of you! After this day ends, we may never meet again
 . . .”’

I watched her black shoe, which was dangling over the edge of the bed, move in time to the beat. The laces were tied in a messy knot. My face felt hot. I looked up and stared at her long, pale neck.

‘Did you like it?’ She had suddenly stopped singing.

‘Very nice. Do you like basketball?’ I thought of the cool smell of the limewashed walls that enclosed the school’s football pitch.

‘I hate it. Accompany me, will you?’ She pushed her harmonica towards me. I took it, but my jaw felt too stiff to play it. I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. We both stared at the floor.

‘I’d better go,’ I said finally.

‘All right.’ Half her breath seemed to be stuck in her throat. She released it through the corner of her mouth, blowing her fringe into the air.

I looked at her regretful eyes and smiling mouth and couldn’t make out what she was feeling.

Without another word, I walked over to the window, climbed over the lotus plant again and jumped out.

If the police hadn’t interrogated Lulu and forced her to confess to our relationship, our secret love affair might have continued for years.