The Rest is Weight (UQP Short Fiction) (5 page)

Helen doesn’t remember how I have my tea but she remembers that I don’t like fruitcake. We study the pattern of her kitchen floor together as the kids dart in and out like fish. Colin looks in once, but my sister tells him something with her eyes and he bows out. I turn my own eyes back to the ground. We hear him rounding up the children for a game in a booming voice. I wonder what sort of man he is.

‘How?’ says Helen. Her eyes are closed. I notice the twinkle of grey lights in her hair, a twitch at the corner of her mouth that our mother affected in the months before her death.

‘How?’ she says again, this time with her eyes open, looking at me as though I have not heard her. But I have heard her. It’s just that I do not know the answer.

A toddler, her eyes wide and brown, stumbles into the kitchen and clings to Helen’s trouser leg with sticky hands. I hear Colin calling the kids together and another adult voice laughing. I look down at this child who comes to my knees, and she looks up at me with solemn grace.

‘I’ve missed so much,’ I say.

‘Come on,’ my sister says. ‘There’s still heaps of food left over.’

Demolition

There’s the orange cat, its marble eyes an inch from mine. My personal spy peering in from the roof of the apartment next door. China has made me paranoid about being watched, even by inscrutable pets. I slam the window closed. The cat doesn’t flinch, keeps staring for a moment, then slinks away. Even with the window closed the noise from the street persists, and with it the knowledge that Jeremy has gone.

Cold wind, autumn smog. The light is bad white, white that is really orange and grey. I stand and watch it pour across the floor. The caged bird in the courtyard downstairs makes a sound like an electric pencil sharpener. I overslept. You should be packing, says a voice in my head. But I don’t move.

I don’t want to move. We have lived here for two years, more or less happily until the last couple of months. We had a good relationship with the neighbours, the landlord, the people in the shops around here. With each other.

For Beijing, this is a quiet neighbourhood, which means the whirl of sound can be broken down into its component parts. Apart from the bike bells and traffic, the shouts and the marching band noise of the school, it’s mostly construction. In the daytime, it’s the jackhammering and the toy sound of ordinary hand tools. At night, I hear the tip trucks moving piles of soil and rubble, delivering materials, taking fill away. The men are pretty quiet at their work.
A serious business, rebuilding the city, and in part a stealthy one. There is sometimes a sudden eviction of whole apartment blocks by night. One day the demolition mark is painted on the wall in white: the rough strokes of the character
chai
, inside an emphatic circle. Then the walls are gone, like the cat when you turn away.
A Cheshire city. The third time you look, there’s a skyscraper.

I’m pretty sure that cat’s not working for the Party, but we are under some surveillance, or Jeremy was. He was the activist. I’m a bit more ambivalent about it all. Development isn’t something you can argue with. People deserve a better quality of life than they get in these old houses. Our place is renovated, a foreigner rental, but most of them have shitty roofs and shot plumbing. There are bad smells when it rains.
You have to use the public facilities. It’s quaint for us, so
Asian
, but who are we to decide it should all be preserved? Anyway, I didn’t want to fight him on it. The anti-demolition stuff kept him busy and out of my hair and I believed, I admit it, I believed it spent some of the energy that he used to use going nuts. So we had an understanding, which was fine. Until the fox fairies.

About three months ago, we went down the street to get breakfast, and there was the
chai
sign. The corner house was marked. The house was the last in a row of collapsing old courtyard places that leaned up against the back of the boutique shops on the main street. The cancer of demolition had come to us.

We stood outside the house looking at the mark. Mrs Hua, the old lady who lived next door to the condemned place, had come out of her house and was staring at the white character. We’d never spoken, but I sometimes nodded when I saw her sitting in the sun with her red neighbourhood vigilance armband on, watching the street. She never acknowledged me. I figured she was one of those homophobic neighbours, who preferred to pretend we didn’t exist.

She was only small; the
chai
sign circled her, a white paint halo.

‘Mrs Hua,’ Jeremy said. We walked over to her, one on either side. She didn’t react, even when I came close enough to hear her thin breaths. Her eyes were blank. Jeremy’s were bright and hard on the other side.

Jeremy called a meeting. I sat in but I couldn’t really keep up with the language like he could. The local police came, told us the house was run-down. No one lived there. I could see it was pointless. You can’t fight when things are falling apart. The journos we emailed couldn’t find room for the story. I thought that would be the end of it.

Nothing changed for a couple of weeks. Every day we walked past the circled character, like a big scratch of a moon in the concrete, expecting the place to be gone. Mrs Hua kept standing out in the street and looking at it. But she didn’t talk to us. She didn’t come to any meetings. She just scuttled back into her place and shut the door. I figured it was over. It was a dump. The roof was a wreck with a tree shooting through it, the tiles off, replaced with a plastic sheet held down by rocks. The house was going to fall down either way.

But Jeremy wouldn’t stop talking about it. Every time we met friends he’d be going on about it. He’d stay out late to keep talking. Some nights he wouldn’t come home.

‘Fox fairies!’ His voice shook into me, a train through a tunnel. ‘Raj, they can’t do it. It’s full of fox fairies!’

‘I am asleep,’ I said, crawling out of a dream.

‘I’ve figured it out,’ he said. ‘I’ve figured it out!’ He drummed his hands on the desk. A plastic drink bottle rattled and toppled, rolled under the bed.

‘Hang on. Start again.’ I looked at the clock. It was two in the morning.

‘The corner house. It’s got fox fairies.’

‘Have I missed a gay subculture?’

His grin was orange in the dark. ‘That’s the defence, you get it? Traditional culture. This whole neighbourhood is full of it. Fox fairies. She really has one. Mrs Hua. She said she’s been looking after one for years. They are guarding this hutong. They’re guarding it.’

‘Mrs Hua talked to you?’

He nodded. His forehead was shiny with sweat. I wanted to reach out and wipe it with my hand but I couldn’t be sure how he would react.

‘Are you sure this actually happened?’

‘Oh fuck off, Raj. As soon as I get excited about something you start thinking I’m losing it. It always has to be the fucking disorder,’ he said. ‘Well it’s not. I wish you’d just fucking listen.’

‘I’m sorry, baby. I don’t mean to pathologise.’ I sat up in the bed and watched him pace. His arms were stringy and pale.

‘Tell me again.’

When his pacing brought him close I reached out for the backs of his knees and pulled him towards me. His breath was hard and heavy. I could feel his heartbeat like standing over the subway grate and I was afraid.

‘I’m listening,’ I said.

‘So really old foxes, they become immortals, like people.
You know, they get spiritual. Magical powers and so on.’
Holding him was like holding a cat that didn’t want to be there. I felt my fingers slipping.

‘Right.’

‘Well maybe it’s not just a myth. She said she was looking after one. She said we have to leave it alone or there will be trouble.’

‘Uh-huh.’ I stroked the back of his neck. I could see a fast pulse in his jugular. I couldn’t remember if I had saved the number for the hospital in my phone.

‘Well maybe there’s really something in it. A spirit of the house kind of thing.’

‘She lives alone,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’s a little bit gone in the head.’ I felt him flinch.

‘You never want to get involved,’ he said, twisting around. ‘You’re so fucking absent. Sometimes it’s like you don’t really live here.’

‘I live here. I’m just not Chinese. And neither are you. How can you believe in some old folktale which not even Beijingers believe in any more? That’s not just superstition, it’s cultural appropriation.’

That was a cheap shot. I try not to pull race rank on my boyfriend, but fuck, being brown is so rarely an advantage that I feel almost obliged to use it.

‘I’m just trying to look after these people’s interests,’ he said. His voice was small. I could feel the tug in his muscles ease. The hush of night was interrupted by the sigh of a braking truck. I waited for it to pass.

‘Jem, baby, let’s go to New York.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Just for a week or two. We need a holiday. It’s more than a year since we left Beijing. We’re losing our perspective.’

‘You think I’m crazy,’ he said.

‘No, I don’t. I think we both need a break.’ I held him closer, rubbed his lower back. The muscles were hard and there was a fog of sweat under his shirt. The conversation moved into our bodies. We had sex, made up, and fell asleep.

For a few days after that he was calmer, though he only slept four or five hours a night. Then he started to get worked up again, staying out late, talking and arguing about what he called the campaign. I stopped going with him. There was no more talk of home.

I woke up at about three. There was an electric orange glow in the sky and a cold place beside me. I called his name softly but there was no answer; Jeremy was still out.

I got out of bed, pulled on my tracksuit pants and a t-shirt, and stepped into the courtyard in my rubber slippers. In a gap between roofs I could see the slender curve of a waning moon, dimmed by the smog to a dusty light bulb. Beneath it was the new apartment building that was going up two blocks south, topped by the pointed finger of a crane. Those cranes turn and turn and never make a sound. The night was dim with smog. In the alley I could hear the whining of a small dog, someone’s pet locked out for the night.

Beijing is surprisingly quiet at night. Riding our bikes home from the club sometimes we’ll be the only people around, except for the dump trucks, or the road crews resurfacing the streets. It’s not just our neighbourhood. The whole city is constantly under construction. I’m almost used to it. A part of me enjoys the impermanence, the shift, like living in a breakbeat remix. Jeremy takes it personally. He was here before the Olympics, and maybe there was a time when it was different, more predictable. But I doubt it. This city’s too much like a force of nature.

No one was around in the street, though I could hear the sounds of trucks slipping past on the main road a block away. I stepped into the corner toilet, pushing aside the heavy winter doors, which held in the stink. After I pissed I felt awake, alive. I almost went right back to bed. A part of me was thinking Jeremy would be back soon; he’d probably just gone to dance away his mania at Destination.

That high dog howl came crawling through the hutong. The acoustics are strange from all the little houses crammed in together, but it seemed to be coming from the end of the lane. I turned to the shadowed place where the doomed house sat and something orange darted in front of my eyes. Pointed ears and a bushy tail. Fast and silent. Bigger than a cat. I found myself standing in the sharp air of its wake. I was right in front of the house.

The white circle on the wall seemed to glow, the character in thick rough brushstrokes, higher than my head. I lifted a finger and traced the lines. There was a muffled coughing sound, almost a growl. It came from inside.

‘Jeremy?’

There was no entrance from the lane but I knew there was one along the side of Mrs Hua’s place. I pushed at the red door to her courtyard. It wasn’t locked. There were piles of broken crockery and old bricks. Weeds sprawling out of burst plastic pots. I’d never been inside her place before and I stepped as quietly as I could, hoping not to wake her, because I didn’t want to have to explain what I was doing. I was in my pyjamas; I figured I could just pretend to be sleepwalking.

The door to the empty place was rotting wood, held closed by a couple of grey bricks at the base. I peered through the crack in the door. The other side of the house was bricked up against the back of a shop, and light came through from the street. I saw bright pinpricks, glimpses of the other side. A few weeks ago I’d wandered into a temple hidden in the back lanes near our place. One wall was entirely lined with shelves, which were built to hold scriptures, ancient Buddhist scriptures. But half had been destroyed and the other half taken away by European museums. Through the cracks between the shelves you could see the sunlight shining through. Like after hundreds of years of raids and purges, sunlight was the only scripture available.

I shifted the bricks with a tiny scraping sound and pushed open the door. My eyes had adjusted, but the light was poor. The room seemed cold. Actually, more than that. It seemed to be shivering.

‘Jeremy,’ I whispered. I don’t think I imagined the worst, but I knew on some level I’d been preparing for it, because I felt relief when I heard the breathing. It flooded through me like a small, furtive orgasm. He was here. But then I listened hard and heard the breaths were laboured, uneven. There was someone here, right up the back in the dark. But it wasn’t Jeremy.

The room smelled of milk and dust. Here and there long rags hung from the beams, makeshift curtains instead of walls. I pushed further inside and stepped on something crunchy. Leaning down, I saw a tiny pile of bones. I picked one up and snapped it in my hands. Chicken bones, I hoped. Then I looked up. The breathing in the room grew louder.

Two cold eyes. Animal eyes. I jumped back a step, stumbled
on a plank, knocked over something that cracked, and then felt something hit me over the head: not hard but heavy. There was a struggle and a blur of limbs. I scratched out and my hands hit fur, then soft, fat, hairless flesh. Human skin. A woman yelled at my back. An answering shriek from the
creature in the corner. Something leaped into the rafters, fell
as dust.

The night outside was bright. My eyes smarted from the particles.

‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
Then remembered and apologised in Chinese. Mrs Hua stared at me, pulled me out through the door and moved the brick back, muttering. She escorted me out of the courtyard and down the lane. She hardly reached my shoulder but her hand on my elbow was strong. It crossed my mind that to get to her age she must have survived a hell of a lot. She knew how to march someone down a road.

‘What was that?’ I said, in my softest voice.

She looked me steely in the eye. ‘Daughter,’ she said.

I went back to bed and lay there. After a couple of hours,
Jeremy came home, stinking of cigarettes and other boys’
aftershave. He made feeble attempts to be quiet.

‘I’m awake,’ I said.