Ghostwritten (15 page)

Hand in hand we walk up the steps of the Big Bright Buddha, brighter and brighter, into a snowstorm of silent light.

Holy Mountain

Up, up, and up, and down, maybe.

The Holy Mountain has no other directions. Your left and right, your south, north, west, east, leave them at the Village. You won’t be needing them. You have ten thousand steps to go before you reach the summit.

There is a road, now. I saw it. Buses and trucks go up and down. Fat people from Chengdu and further drive up in their own cars. I watched them. Fumes, beeps, noise, oil. Or they drive up in taxis, sitting in the back like Lady Muck Duck. They deserve all the fleecing they get. Engine-powered pilgrimages? Even Lord Buddha doesn’t give a shovelful of chickenshit for engine-powered pilgrimages. How do I know? He told me Himself.

On the Holy Mountain, all the yesterdays and tomorrows spin around again sooner or later. The world has long forgotten, but we mountain-dwellers live on the prayer wheel of time.

I am a girl. I was hanging out the washing on a line I had suspended from the upstairs-room window-ledge and the Tree. The height of our Tea Shack above the path, it was safe from thieves, and the Tree tells the monkeys not to steal our things. I was singing to myself. It was spring and the mist was thick and warm. Upbound, a strange procession marched out of the whiteness.

The procession was ten men long. The first carried a pennant, the second, a kind of lute I’d never seen, the third, a rifle. The fourth was a footman. The fifth was dressed in silken robes the colour of sunset. The sixth was an older man in a khaki uniform. Seven to ten were baggage carriers.

I ran to get my father, who was planting sweet potatoes behind our house. The chickens fussed like my old aunts in the Village. When my father and I got around to the front, the strangers had reached our Tea Shack.

My father’s eyes popped open. He hurled himself onto the ground, and yanked me down into the dirt with him. ‘Silly little bitch,’ he hissed. ‘It’s the Warlord’s Son. Kowtow!’ We knelt, pressing our foreheads into the ground, until one of the men clapped.

We looked up. Which one was the Warlord’s Son?

The man in silk was looking at me, smiling from the corner of his mouth.

Footman spoke. ‘Sire, is it your wish to rest awhile?’

The Warlord’s Son nodded, not taking his eyes off me.

Footman barked at my father. ‘Tea! The best you have in your pit of roaches, or the crows will dine on your eyeballs tonight!’

My father leapt to his feet and pulled me with him behind the table. My father told me to polish the best tea bowls, while he loaded fresh charcoal onto the brazier. I had never seen a Warlord’s Son before. ‘But which one is he?’ I asked.

My father slapped me with the back of his hand. ‘It’s none of your concern.’ He glanced over his shoulder nervously at the men, who were laughing at me. My ear began to throb. ‘The striking gentleman, in the beautiful robes,’ muttered my father, loud enough to be overheard.

The Warlord’s Son – I guessed he was twenty – removed his hat and sleeked back his hair. Footman took one look at our best bowls and rolled his eyeballs. ‘How dare you even think it?’ A baggage carrier unpacked some silver bowls, decorated with golden dragons with emerald scales and ruby eyes. Another servant unfolded a table. A third spread a perfectly white cloth. I thought I was dreaming.

‘The girl may serve the tea,’ said the Warlord’s Son.

I felt his eyes touch my body as I poured the tea. Nobody spoke. I didn’t spill a drop.

I looked to my father for approval, or at least for reassurance. He was too busy worrying about his own skin. I didn’t understand.

The men spoke in crisp, shiny Mandarin. Their magnificent, strange words paraded past. Words about somebody called Sun Yatsen, somebody called Russia, somebody else called Europe. Firepower, taxes, appointments. What world had these men come from?

My father took my shawl off and told me to tie back my hair and wash my face. He made me serve some more tea. He was picking his teeth with a splintered chopstick, and watching the men carefully from the shadows.

Silence thickened the air. The mist had closed in. The mountainside was dark with white. The afternoon became so sluggish that it stopped altogether.

The Warlord’s Son stretched his legs and arched his back. He picked at his teeth with a bejewelled toothpick. ‘After drinking tea as bitter as that, I want sherbet. You, rat-in-the-shadows, you may serve me a bowl of lemon sherbet.’

My father fell to his knees and spoke to the dirt. ‘We have no such sherbet, Lord.’

He looked round at his men. ‘How tiresome! Then tangerine sherbet will have to suffice.’

‘We have no sherbet at all, Lord. I’m very sorry.’

‘Sorry? I can’t eat your “sorry”. You wreck my palate with your brew of nettles and foxshit: What kind of stomach do you think I have? A cow’s?’

His look told his entourage to laugh, which they did.

‘Oh well. There’s nothing for it. I’ll have to eat your daughter for dessert.’

A poison thorn slid in, bent, and snapped.

My father looked up. The Khaki Man coughed.

‘What’s that cough supposed to mean? My father told me to come on this accursed pilgrimage. He didn’t say I couldn’t have any fun.’

Footman inspected my father like shit on his boot. ‘Get your upstairs room as ready as you can for His Lordship’

My father made a gurgling noise. ‘Sir . . . Lord. I – I mean—’

The Warlord’s Son imitated the buzzing of a horsefly. ‘These wormholes! Can you believe it? Give him one of the bowls. They were a wedding present from my ogre-in-law, I never liked them. As a dowry. More than a fair exchange for sluicing out a peasant girl’s cunt. They’re from Siam. She’d better be a virgin for workmanship like that!’

‘She is, Lord. Untouched. I promise it. But I’ve had some genuine marriage proposals, from suitors in high places . . .’

Footman unsheathed his sword, and looked at his master. The Warlord’s Son thought for a while. ‘Suitors in high places? Carpenters’ cocks. Very well, give him two bowls. But no more haggling, Mr Wormhole. You’ve tried your luck enough for one morning.’

‘My Lord’s reputation for generosity is just! No wonder all who hear of My Lord’s grace weep with love at the very mention—’

‘Oh, shut up.’

My father looked round at me. ‘You heard His Lordship, girl! Ready yourself!’

I could smell their sweat. Something unspeakable was going to happen. I knew where babies came from. My aunts down in the Village had told me about why my bad blood leaked out every month. But . . .

Lord Buddha was watching me from his shrine beside the Tree. I asked him for it not to hurt as much as I feared.

‘Up.’ Footman jabbed towards the stairs with his sword. ‘Up!’

The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He’d dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn’t made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?

I could feel him shrinking inside me, at last. He finally stirred to pick his nose. He pulled himself out of me, and a few seconds later something slid out of me and down my thighs. I looked. Gummy blood and something white was staining our only sheet. He wiped himself on my dress, and looked down at me critically. ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘we’re no Goddess of Beauty, are we?’

He got dressed. He dug his big toe into my navel, and looked down at me from the dimness. A spoonful of saliva splashed onto the bridge of my nose. ‘Skinned little bunny.’

A spider spun the dimness between the rafters.

‘Mr Wormhole,’ I heard him say as he descended the creaking stairs. ‘You should be paying me. For breaking in your foal.’

A flutter of laughter.

If I were a man, I would have flown down the stairs and shoved a dagger into his back. That afternoon, without a word to me, my father went to sell the bowls.

In the misty dusk an old woman came. She laboured slowly up the stairs to where I lay, wondering how I could defend myself if the Warlord’s Son called again on his way down. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The Tree will protect you. The Tree will tell you when to run, and when to hide.’ I knew she was a spirit because I only heard her words after her lips had finished moving, because the lamplight shone through her, and because she had no feet. I knew she was a good spirit because she sat on the chest at the end of the bed and sang a lullaby about a coracle, a cat, and the river running round.

Ten or twenty days later, my father returned, penniless. I asked him about the money, and he threatened to whip me. When we wintered with my cousins I was told the whole story: he’d gone to Leshan and spent half my dowry on opium and brothels. The other half he had spent on a scabby horse that died before he got back to the Village.

I was airing my bedding from the upstairs room’s window-ledge when I heard their voices. A boy and a girl had arrived without me noticing – my hearing is drawing in. Through a spyhole in the planking I watch them for some moments. Her face is made-up like the daughter of a merchant, or else a whore. Her breasts are budding, and the boy has that look men get when they want something. And not a chaperon in sight! She was leaning against her hands, against the skin of my Tree on the hidden side, where a hollow will cup a young girl’s body perfectly. Above it, a bunch of violets grow every spring, but she cannot see it.

The boy swallows hard. ‘I swear I will love you for ever. Truly.’

He rests his hands on her hips, but she swats them away. ‘Did you bring your radio to give me?’ The girl has a voice used to getting its way.

‘I brought you my life to give you.’

‘Did you bring your radio? The little silver one that can pick up Hong Kong?’

I hobbled downstairs, the stairs and my ankles creaking. So intent are they on getting what they both want, they didn’t notice me until I was at the chicken coop. ‘Tea?’

They spring apart. Big Ears blushes like a tomato. Does she thank me for guarding her honour? No. She looks at me, arms folded, quite unabashed, though her legs are as wide apart as a man’s. ‘Yes. Tea.’

They come around to the entrance to the Tea Shack. She sits down, crosses her legs, and pulls lipstick and a mirror from her shoulder bag. He sits opposite her, and just stares, like a dog at the moon. ‘Radio,’ she orders. He gets a shiny little box out of his bag, and slides out a long wire. She takes it, touches the side, and suddenly a woman’s voice is on the path, singing about love, the southern breeze, and pussy willows.

‘Where’s she coming from?’

The girl deigns to notice me. ‘It’s the latest hit from Macau.’ She looks at the boy. ‘Haven’t you heard it?’

‘’Course I have,’ he says, gruffly.

There are things I will never understand.

My father shrieked at me and the chickens squawked. ‘You little slut! You little fool! After everything I’ve done for you, after the sacrifices I’ve made, this is how you thank me! If it had been a boy, the Warlord’s Son would have showered us with gifts! Showered us! We could have lived in his castle! I would have been appointed a dignitary with servants! Fruits from the islands! But why would anyone want to acknowledge that!’

He jabbed his fingernail into my baby’s loins. My baby howled. Only five minutes old, and already learning. ‘You’ve sold your chances of a decent marriage for a nightpot of watery shit!’

One of my aunts led him out.

The Tree was looking in, and smiling. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ I asked.

The shadows and light on my baby’s face were leafy and green.

A few days later, it was agreed that my daughter would be raised with relatives living three days’ ride downstream. A large landowning household, one more daughter could be slipped in without much fuss. An uncle told me that the distance would conceal the shame I’d inflicted on our family’s honour. My chastity was gone for ever, of course. Perhaps in a few years some widower pig farmer might be persuaded to take me in as a mistress and nurse for his old age. If I was lucky.

I resolved then and there not to be lucky.

These same uncles all agreed that the Japanese would never get this far down the Yangtze, nor this far into the mountains. And supposing they did? Everyone knows how Japanese soldiers need more oxygen than humans, so they could never get up the Holy Mountain. The war had nothing to do with us. Many of the village sons were conscripted by the Warlord, and sent to fight on the side of some kind of alliance, but that was beyond the Valley, where the world is less real. Places called Manchuria, Mongolia, and further.

My uncles never knew truth from chickenshit. I dreamed of a clay jar of rice in the cave. When I asked a monk what it meant, he told me it was a suggestion from Lord Buddha.

When the Holy Mountain is windy, sounds from afar are blown near, and nearby sounds are blown away. The Tea Shack creaks – my lazy father never lifted a hammer in his life – and the Tree creaks. That’s why we didn’t hear them until they had kicked the windows in.

My father was climbing into the cupboard. I listened, nervous, but already resigned to whatever fate Lord Buddha had laid out for me. I wrapped my shawl around me. They didn’t speak valley language. They didn’t even speak Cantonese, or Mandarin. They made animal noises. I spied through the cracks in the planking. It was difficult to see in the lamp light, but they looked almost human. My village cousins had told me that foreigners had elephant noses and hair like dying monkeys, but these ones looked a lot like us. On their uniforms was sewn insignia that looked like a headache – a red dot with red stripes of pain flashing out.