‘You’re nice and wet now,’ the boss says. ‘I have ten more men lined up for you tonight, including a French professor.’
Meili’s body goes into spasms of shock. She wishes she could escape to a netherworld where there are no men. She wants her defiled body to enter a furnace and emerge from the other side as ash. I’m sorry, Nannan, she says quietly. The man has beaten me. I’m too weak to take my revenge. All I can do is die, then return as a ghost and drag the bastard down to hell.
The boss switches on the lamp on the bedside table and unbuckles his belt, releasing her head. ‘Good thing you’re pretty. I can never get a hard-on with the ugly ones. You’ve got a nice round arse. Work hard here, and in a few years you’ll make enough money to set you up for life.’ He lights another cigarette and stretches himself out. Meili clambers off the bed, reaches for her trousers and pulls them on.
As she squats on the floor, she has a sense that thousands of insects are crawling beneath her skin and that rancid leftovers have been stuffed into the cavity between her legs. She tears sheets of paper from a toilet roll and tries to wipe herself clean . . . The boss is shorter and thinner than Kongzi. How did he manage to overpower me? It doesn’t matter now – I’m already dead. It’s time for me to join Happiness . . . She remembers that when her periods first started, her grandmother gave her a small soot-filled cloth bag to put inside her knickers, and said: ‘You’re a woman now. The place from which the blood flows is the source of life. You must protect it, and not let any man touch it. When you’re older you will marry, and that place will bring you new life and happiness.’ Meili looks up at the wallpaper and sees her grandmother’s face. She’s crying out, ‘Meili, help me. Fire, a blazing fire! I’m burning, burning . . .’
Mother sees that the man has fallen asleep. She puts on her shoes and pulls out her bag from under the bed. Her eyes glazed and empty, she takes a cigarette lighter from the bedside table and sets light to the bed sheet. Then she picks up a half-finished bottle of liquor and smashes it over the man’s head. Within seconds, flames engulf his body. He sits up for a moment and waves his arms about, then flops back down with a thud. Mother retreats into the corridor and watches the bed burst into a ball of fire and the flames leap along the carpet and up the papered walls. Black smoke billows into the corridor. Coughing and spluttering, Mother returns at last to her senses, falls to her knees and crawls to the steel door. Someone opens it from the outside, peers round then runs away in fright. Mother swings the door open, bolts down the stairwell and runs out onto the road. Flames are pouring out from the third-floor window now, and licking the heaven on earth nightclub neon sign. Panicked, half-dressed men and women stagger out of the building, knocking into each other like insects fleeing a fire pit. Everyone is screaming and darting about. Mother detaches herself from the crowd, walks to the billboard on the other side of the road and disappears into the darkness.
KEYWORDS: convent, white chrysanthemums, purple sandals, red journal, nylon tights, mad dog.
MOTHER RUNS AS fast as she can across the city, her intense pains deadened by fear. She races past the flower market, the Chairman Mao statue in front of the government office building, the musical fountain in the main square, she sprints along broad avenues of office towers and roads lined with gated compounds of identical apartment blocks, and finally reaches an empty asphalt road that winds along the banks of a dark river. She keeps going, running, walking, then running again. When she hears a car approach, she crouches behind a tree and waits for it to pass. As the sky begins to lighten, she stops and looks up at some houses on a hill in front of her with lights already shining at the windows . . . Although she has left the city, Meili still feels nervous. She climbs over a low wall into a deserted demolition site. Alone and hidden from view at last, she falls to