waist. ‘No, no,’ she hisses through her teeth. ‘Let’s go back to the boat.’ She closes her eyes and rests her head on the driver’s back. ‘Did you leave Nannan alone?’ she asks Kongzi. ‘What if she’s fallen overboard?’ The motorbike drives down the broken mountain road. No matter how hard Meili is jolted, her hand remains fiercely clamped around the plastic bag on her lap.
KEYWORDS: newly hatched carp, water heaven, red dress, frozen blood, funeral song.
KONGZI STARES AT an object floating down the river, wondering whether it’s a dead fish, a piece of straw or a chopstick. He’s turned off the ignition and allowed the boat to be dragged downstream by the current. Grassy embankments and scatterings of mud houses slide swiftly by. The side winds nudging the boat off course smell of the factory effluent flowing into the river from large waste pipes.
Meili is lying on her front on the side deck, staring at the passing hills and bamboo forests, her left leg trailing in the water. The deep still river is as blue and transparent as the sky. Nannan splashes some water onto Meili’s head and cries, ‘Look, Mum! You have flowers on your hair!’ Then she ties a piece of string around her plastic doll and lets it trail in the water as well. The doll’s red dress fans out like a pool of blood. Meili closes her eyes and hears her grandmother wailing a funeral song: ‘My darling child, like a newly hatched carp that leaps from its pond for the first time only to fall into the jaws of a cat, you have entered the netherworld before your first tooth has appeared. The mother and father you’ve left behind weep in misery . . .’ Meili grew up listening to her grandmother’s grief-stricken wails. They planted inside her a seed which has grown into a tree that supports her spine, pelvis, ribs and every fibre of her flesh. She wants to sing a line from the lament, but all she can do is cry: ‘Mother, Mother, oh Mother . . .’ She puts her arms around Nannan and, unable to cry out, breaks into sobs, her back rising and falling, rising and falling, like a rag tumbling over a wave.
‘Your face has too much crying, Mummy,’ Nannan says, edging away. Against the green shorts she’s wearing, her tanned legs look as dark as soy sauce.
A long time later, Kongzi puts on his black vest, steers towards the middle of the river and drops anchor. Then he picks up the plastic bag containing Happiness’s corpse, places a brick inside and ties the top with string.
‘Wait!’ Meili says. She opens her cloth bag and takes out the little hat, vest and pair of shorts she knitted for Happiness. ‘Put these inside too,’ she says to Kongzi, handing them to him.
‘Why my brother dead, Mummy?’ Nannan asks, pressing her small hand on Meili’s sunken belly.
‘The bad people took him out before he was ready,’ Meili answers. She thinks of the anxiety and nightmares she’s endured since their flight from Kong Village, and realises that in this country there is not one roof under which she can live in safety. In the past, she ignored Kongzi whenever he described the horrors of the Tiananmen Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, the Campaign against Lin Biao and Confucius. Only now does she fully understand that, in the eyes of the Communist Party, she is but a criminal whom they can torture as they please, a woman who doesn’t even have the right to be a mother to her unborn child.
‘But I not want him dead, Mummy,’ Nannan cries, pointing to the plastic bag. ‘I want him moving. You said you give me brother.’
Against the pallor of her face, Meili’s lips are the colour of dark plums. After returning to the boat, she slept for two entire days, still leaking clots of blood. In her sleep, she could hear Nannan crying out to her and feel Kongzi place fresh wads of paper inside her knickers or pieces of banana into her mouth. When she woke, she saw blood on her dress, on the bamboo mat, and even under Nannan’s fingernails.
A swarm of flies crouch on the canopy like a squad of family planning officials.
In the twilight, a sand-dredging vessel sails past, leaving a trail of gleaming foam that makes the surrounding water appear wetter and heavier.
‘I finished,’ Nannan says, lifting her bare bottom in the air and peering down into her potty.
Mother