and waits for the storm to reach its peak. As lightning flashes through the black sky and thunder shakes the ground, Kongzi rolls on top of her again. ‘Be kind . . . to me . . . Kongzi,’ she mumbles. ‘I don’t want to . . . fall pregnant . . .’ Her hands linked behind his neck, she holds onto him, tighter and tighter, until her body is so compressed and her lungs so empty, she feels she is drowning. She opens her mouth and gasps for air. The alcohol on Kongzi’s breath makes her stomach turn, but she can’t escape it. She senses herself sinking into the ground as his jolting body weighs down on her. ‘It’s pouring outside. I must . . . bring in those pickles . . . I left to dry on the hutch.’ Desperately she tries to push him off.
To avoid having intercourse with him every night, Meili often goes to sleep on the boat with Nannan. She’s terrified of falling pregnant, of the government cutting out from her a piece of flesh as warm as her own, of having to conceal inside her body a contraband object which would grower larger and more visible by the day. She left Kong Village to find freedom, but if she falls pregnant again she knows she will become a hunted animal once more.
After the rooster in the bamboo cage greets the dawn, smaller birds begin to sing in the willows and insects fly out from the reeds. Meili feels a stream of sperm leak out from between her thighs. Am I already done for? she wonders to herself. Her period is three weeks late, and she suspects that her IUD might have fallen out.
She sits up and looks at the imprint of the bamboo mat on Kongzi’s forehead. He’s grown so familiar to her, he almost looks like a stranger. She wants to shout, ‘I’m pregnant! Are you happy now?’ but stops herself just in time. If she is pregnant, she wonders whether she could induce a miscarriage by lifting heavy objects or encouraging Kongzi to make love to her more aggressively than usual. She crawls outside and puts on a T-shirt. Her breasts feel heavy and tender and she can detect a sour taste in her mouth. Yes, I have all the symptoms. As her bare feet press into the sand, images from the past flit through her mind. She sees the winter morning she first set eyes on Kongzi, walking up to her wearing a yellow down jacket like a promise of a golden future. The first time he asked to meet her in the woods, her legs trembled with fear. She and Kongzi crouched in the dark shade of a tree beside a group of gravestones. He gave her some peanuts and said he’d invite her to a film in the county town and take her out for a meal. He told her a friend of his had opened a Sichuan restaurant on the ground floor of the County Cultural Centre which served beef poached in hot chilli oil and Chongqing hotpot. She remembers the photograph of Kongzi as a child, standing next to Teacher Zhou with a big smile on his face. She knows that Kongzi was Teacher Zhou’s favourite pupil, and that in 1989, when he went to stay with him in Beijing, they joined the democracy protests and, on 4 June, stood at a street corner arm in arm and watched the army tanks enter the capital. Now she is Kongzi’s wife. For his sake, she left the village designated on her residence permit and the comfort of their tiled-roofed house. She’d dreamed that if she worked hard, she could open a shop one day and buy a modern apartment in a county town with a flushing toilet and hot shower, like the one owned by Cao Niuniu, the son of Kongzi’s artist friend, Old Cao. She still believes that as long as she avoids another pregnancy, she’ll be able to live a good life one day, and stroll along supermarket aisles wearing nylon tights and high-heeled shoes.
She peeps back into the shelter. Nannan sits up and says, ‘I want to cuddle Daddy.’
‘No, you’ll wake him up,’ Meili replies.
‘I want to tell him I not going wake him up, then!’ Nannan says, leaning over to hug Kongzi’s head. Meili puts a second jumper on Nannan, then shuts the door and goes down to the beach. Hugging herself against