be so terrifying. Last night I dreamed that the baby had become frozen solid. I put it under a light bulb to warm it up, then I was afraid someone might see it, so I wrapped it in toilet paper and hid it in a drawer. I walked away and forgot all about it, and when I next opened the drawer I discovered it had suffocated to death.’ Meili’s eyes fill with tears.
‘Don’t cry, my dear wife. Everything will be all right. I give you my word: if this one’s a boy, we won’t try for a third. Let me feel your belly. My goodness. It’s so large now. So hard.’
‘I’m sure the baby is bigger than Nannan was at this stage. Stronger, too. Look at all the purple lines around my tummy button. Let’s not have a third, even if Happiness is a girl. We need to get on with our lives.’ Kongzi slides his hand down between her legs and she slaps it hard with the tip of her fan. ‘Don’t touch me! I’m boiling.’
When Kongzi came back late last night he confessed that he’d been to see a porn movie in the video parlour boat docked near the wharf. He said he couldn’t help himself because she hadn’t let him touch her for weeks. Meili knows that those films feature men and women making love in the nude. She’d always considered Kongzi to be a respectable man, and the knowledge that he’d watched porn movies in a grubby video parlour lowered him in her estimation.
‘All right, my turn to sing a song, then,’ Kongzi says, sitting up and tossing the fly-encrusted remains of the watermelon into the river. ‘In the village, is a girl called Xiao Fang. She’s pretty and kind, has big dark eyes and wears her hair in bunches—’
‘Agh! So out of tune . . .’ Meili groans. Sensing he wants to make love to her, she pulls the peony-printed sheet over her thighs and tries to change the mood. ‘You must phone home tomorrow, Kongzi. Find out what the situation is.’
‘I told you, my father asked me not to get in touch until the baby’s born. All right, I’ll phone them, if you insist, but if the line is tapped and the police track us down, don’t blame me.’ He pinches her arm playfully.
Meili hunches her shoulders and crosses her legs. ‘Just make sure you don’t tell them we’re in Sanxia,’ she says. In the breeze blowing across her face she can smell the scent of the osmanthus branches she put on the canopy. The smell always transports her back to her parents’ house and her grandmother, who planted an osmanthus tree in the garden the day Meili was born. She remembers how her grandmother always likes to rub the blossom between her fingers and dab the scent behind her ears.
‘So black and smooth,’ Kongzi says, stroking Meili’s hair that glistens like the skin of an eel.
‘At least it’s easy for me to wash my hair on this boat,’ she says, tucking a stray lock behind her ear. Every morning, she leans overboard and dunks her head in the river.
‘And such slender legs,’ Kongzi continues, running his hand up to her thighs.
‘Careful of the money!’ Meili gasps, and quickly presses the sachet of cash she sewed into the lining of her knickers to check that it’s still there. As he strokes her thigh she feels her face begin to flush. ‘If I weren’t pregnant, I’d have a slender waist as well,’ she whispers, nuzzling her head into the nape of his neck.
‘You’re beautiful from top to toe, but your best part is . . . here.’ He leans down and pulls her knickers off.
‘Can’t you even say “I love you” first? Since you watched that porn movie, you think you can just ram yourself inside me and tell me to moan.’ She cranes her neck round to check that Nannan is still asleep in the cabin, then closes her eyes and waits for Kongzi to repeat what he did last night.
‘No, my darling wife, all I want is to make you happy,’ he whispers into her ear. ‘That’s why I work so hard every day. I want to give our family a better life.’ Then he mounts her belly and pushes himself inside her.
‘No!’ Meili cries, knocking him off. ‘You know I black out when you go on top.’ She rolls onto her side, letting her belly rest on the deck, then reaches for