their shelters. At Spring Festival, Kongzi wrote rhyming couplets for every family to hang outside their doors. Bo and Juru didn’t have a door, so they hung their couplet – IN THIS GOLDEN AGE, EVERY FAMILY WILL PROSPER / IN THIS NEW YEAR, EVERY HOUSEHOLD WILL REJOICE – from the branches of a nearby tree.
Kongzi has released the ducks back onto the island. He lets them forage under the trees for water weeds, fish and slugs left behind by the flood, so only has to give them a full meal – usually a cabbage and cornmeal gruel – after he returns them to their pen at dusk. The pale brown hens scuttling about in the sunlight are squealing like children running home from school. Meili’s favourite bird is the large white drake that is double the size of the female ducks. Since she was forbidden to renew her lease on the market stall, she has spent most of her time on the island, looking after the birds. Every morning, she collects five or six luminous eggs from the cardboard boxes in which the egg-laying ducks roost.
Kongzi bought a hundred little ducklings yesterday for just two hundred yuan. Meili suspects that at such a cheap price they must be an inferior breed. She tears a cardboard box into pieces, scatters them over the beach and ladles boiled rice onto each one.
‘Get up now, it’s lunchtime!’ she calls out to Kongzi, watching the yellow ducklings wander off towards a bush littered with plastic bags. It’s noon already, but Kongzi is still fast asleep, his legs draped over his blanket and peony-printed sheet. The new shelter he built from scavenged tarpaulin, wooden planks, tiles and old doors is finally, after many repairs, waterproof. It’s taller than their last one, and wider than the cabin of their boat, so the three of them are able to sleep quite comfortably. On the inside of the door Meili has nailed a coat rail, and on the outside a kitchen rack in which she keeps ladles, spatulas, chopsticks, spoons, and bottles of soy sauce and vinegar. Next to the pile of shoes beside the entrance is a coil of rubber hose which Kongzi found on the rubbish dump. He was going to take it to Time Square to water his plants, but last week the police discovered his vegetable patches and destroyed them, so it’s useless to him now.
‘Help me up, Meili!’ Kongzi shouts.
Meili peeps inside the shelter and sees Kongzi’s penis sticking up under the sheet.
‘No, my hands are dirty,’ Meili says.
Kongzi reaches up, pulls Meili down and presses her hands onto his penis. Reluctantly, she begins to rub it, peering out through a crack in the door at a duck stretching its neck in the sunlight. She glances down at the erection in her hands and feels a warm jolt between her legs. Kongzi squeezes her nipple. Her face flushes. ‘You lecherous pest,’ she says. ‘Can’t you wait until tonight?’
‘Don’t stop,’ Kongzi moans, trying to tug her trousers off. ‘Sit on me, will you?’
The zip of her trousers breaks. She pushes him away and says, ‘Let me go for a pee, then we can do it in the cabin.’
Once she’s lying flat on the heart-shaped sheet inside the cabin of their boat, Kongzi thrusts his penis into her, swivels it about for a while like an oar in a fulcrum, and ejaculates. Meili’s stomach cramps. His sperm is inside me now, she says to herself. Never mind. The IUD will kill them. She breathes a sigh of relief and crosses her legs.
‘This time, I’m sure I’ve planted a son inside you,’ Kongzi says. He ejaculates almost every day now, hoping desperately that one of his seeds will sprout.
‘The ducks have finished their lunch,’ Meili says, pulling her trousers back on. ‘I must spray some water on them.’
‘With what?’ he asks, scratching the mosquito bites on his arms.
‘My mouth. I heard the other day that if you spray them after a feed, it encourages them to preen their feathers. They need to rub themselves every day. It makes them feel good.’
Kongzi sniggers quietly.
‘Oh, don’t be so vulgar! What’s happened to you? I preferred you when you were a schoolteacher and wore a clean suit and a shirt buttoned to the top.’
‘One must adapt to changing circumstances. I’m not a teacher any more, I’m a family planning fugitive.’
‘Well, I won’t let my standards drop. From now on, we must brush our teeth every day. Just look at