right time, the right place. Hope is in sight. Tonight, I will cook dinner.’ Kongzi grabs the scan results and wraps his arms around Meili. The chemicals in Heaven’s rivers have corroded their boat so badly that he’s had to abandon his water-delivery business and join Meili dismantling machines, so now, like her, his sweat smells of burnt plastic.
‘Well, I won’t be doing any more housework from now on,’ says Meili, lying down on the bed and stretching out her legs. Feeling the baby’s weight press on her main artery, she rolls onto her side, then kicks off her tight sandals and watches Kongzi slice some beef into chunks. ‘I’m not hungry, Kongzi. Besides, I shouldn’t eat beef. The preservatives and tenderisers aren’t good for the baby.’
‘This is a country where everyone is poisoning each other. It’s a game: whoever dies first, loses. Still, this beef cost me a fortune, so you’d better at least try some.’ He pushes his glasses onto his head, drops the chopped beef into a bowl and douses it with soy sauce.
‘There are specific foods women should eat each month of their pregnancy. If you cared a little more, you’d find out what they are and give them to me. You were much more thoughtful before we married.’ Meili is thinking of the time Kongzi bought her her first packet of sanitary towels. Until then, she’d made do with attaching wads of folded toilet paper to a sanitary belt that used to belong to her mother.
‘Daddy, why have you made Mummy’s tummy grow bigger again?’ Nannan asks. ‘Rongrong said it’s because you piss into Mummy’s bottom every night.’
‘What a brat! Don’t listen to her. Hurry up and write your diary. If you want to live in a house that has carpets when you grow up and not a dirt floor like this, you must study hard.’
‘Mummy, can you give Daddy a baby boy and me a baby girl?’
‘Whether it’s a boy or a girl, you’ll be its big sister – that’s all that matters,’ Meili says. The loving embrace Kongzi gave her a few moments ago has left her with a bitter-sweet feeling. ‘I should be drinking prenatal herbal tonics for my sore back and swollen ankles,’ she says in a supplicating tone she hasn’t used since she returned from her one-month absence. ‘I don’t think I’ll go to work tomorrow. Buy me some pork kidneys in the morning. I need to build up my strength.’
‘Whatever you say, my beautiful wife. I’ll look after you. I’ll work my back off to make sure you and little Heaven have everything you need.’
Meili senses that the baby has given their family a new future. What miseries we’ve endured in our quest to find happiness, she thinks to herself. She feels an urge to put her arms around Kongzi and burst into tears. Instead, she stares up at the magazine photograph she stuck to the wall showing a slender woman with glossy blonde hair, a white leather bag slung over her shoulder and large gold earrings sparkling in the shadow of her long neck. Then she looks at the photograph next to it of herself, Kongzi and Nannan standing in front of the Ming Dynasty theatre with Womb Lake in the background. In the room’s dim light, her wide grin shines out like a strip of cloud torn from the sky. Through the open front door she can glimpse a small section of the lake, which conjures up memories of their years on the river. Their corroded boat now lies abandoned on a muddy riverbank. She remembers how frightened and sick she felt the first few days they spent aboard, and how, after just one month, she was able to jump into the water with confidence, and even swim around a little. During those years, the boat rocked her from side to side, and Kongzi rocked her back and forth, until her body flowed like the river. If she hadn’t been constantly afraid of falling pregnant, she would have been able to relax more and enjoy the pleasures of the floating days and undulating nights, the dizzying, watery limbo between sky and land. She thinks of Weiwei and his hand moving over her body. To help erase him from her mind after he left, she made Kongzi make love to her so often that, for a few days, it was painful for her to walk. But since she escaped from the violent assault and arrived in Heaven, she