wipes Nannan’s bottom and hugs her tightly. ‘Your brother had a sad fate, Nannan. He must go to heaven now. Say goodbye to him.’ Her eyes are two narrow slits between lids red and swollen from crying.
‘But heaven in the sky. Why you put brother in water heaven? He can swim? He going swim to Sea Dragon’s palace?’
‘No, your brother just wants to have a long sleep,’ Mother says. ‘Kongzi, put Happiness into the river.’
Mother flops onto her stomach again and lies on the deck with her long hair over her eyes, her swollen left arm outstretched towards the bow. Two ducks stick their heads out of the bamboo cage below and stare at the darkening water and sky. ‘Wait,’ Mother calls out. ‘Drive back to the bank and pick some osmanthus.’
The infant spirit can hear the sounds from that evening, but can’t see the images clearly as the sky is not yet pitch black. The river is calm. All that can be heard is the dull thud of the propeller churning through the water. After a short absence, Father returns to the boat holding three branches of osmanthus. He drives the boat back to the middle of the river, threads the branches through the string knot of the plastic bag then gently lowers the bag into the water. The infant spirit plummets to the riverbed and watches the bag descend.
‘Look at that leaf, Mummy,’ Nannan says. ‘It swimming.’
Once the water burial is finished, Kongzi sails back to the bank and drops anchor. ‘Let’s spend the night here,’ he says, crouching down and staring out at the smooth surface of the river.
The night thickens and the river turns black. Happiness and the osmanthus flowers have vanished. The flies have gone. In the candlelight, Meili sees Nannan’s doll floating in the river, one arm outstretched. After soaking in the water all day, its red dress has turned the colour of frozen blood, and its eyes a more intense blue. Its yellow hair streams and scatters around the shiny plastic face.
Meili feels milk begin to leak from her breasts. She leans over the side of the boat and squeezes it out. Drip, drip, drip . . . The river opens its mouth and swallows.
KEYWORDS: sand island, National Day, forced abortion, blood clot, potassium permanganate.
BEFORE NIGHTFALL, KONGZI anchors the boat near a jetty that juts out over the river beneath a municipal rubbish dump. Other ramshackle boats and barges are tethered nearby, each one crammed with scavenged plastic crates, sofa cushions and lampshades. Chickens, ducks and children are scampering over the muddy shore while above them foragers pick their way over the dump’s broken bricks and tiles. The buildings on the hill behind are festooned with National Day celebration banners and flags. It looks like a sizeable county town.
Meili sees a woman in the next boat washing spinach, and reminds Kongzi that they’ve run out of rice.
‘I’ll go up to the town and buy some,’ he says. ‘And I’ll buy some soap as well, so you can wash in the river this evening.’ Kongzi hasn’t earned any money since he paid the abortion fee, and only has fifty yuan left.
‘No, I don’t want to wash.’ Meili still can’t bring herself to touch the river in which Happiness is buried. Her body is filthy and covered in insect bites, but at least the swelling on her left arm has subsided, and she can now bend it again.
‘I want play with them, Daddy,’ Nannan says, pointing to some children in a cabbage field who are poking a flock of chickens with bamboo sticks. The ducks in the cage on the side of the boat ruffle their wings, desperate to be let out onto the river.
Kongzi ties the boat to a broken slab of concrete, picks Nannan up into his arms and crosses the dump, heading for the town.
Meili turns round and sees a long sand island in the middle of the river. A jumble of houseboats, as dilapidated as theirs, lie anchored by the shore. Children are playing hide-and-seek among the bushes and babies are lying asleep on car tyres. Colourful laundry hangs from cables strung between trees, giving the place a homely air. She can tell at a glance that the islanders are fellow family planning fugitives and, suspecting that they club together to bribe local officials into leaving them alone, thinks it might be safer if they joined them. She wouldn’t want to stay long, though. Once they’ve crossed Guangxi Province, they’ll reach