in her red journal, ‘To survive in this world, one must have an expansive state of mind.’ She will become strong, and will use the red journal as a beacon to guide her along her path . . . I will become as strong and resilient as you were, Suya, and will carry on living, on your behalf . . .
She slips a sharpened shoe knife into her handbag and prepares herself for the dangerous journey ahead. First, she crouches down beside her basin of water, carefully washes her face and neck, combs her hair into a neat bun and fixes it in place with a silver clip. Then she steps onto a broken mini freezer, looks into the mirror and puts on the same frosty-pink lipstick and blue eyeliner she’s seen models wear in magazines. She applies some mascara, but the liquid is so coagulated that her eyelashes become glued together. Realising that she forgot to put on the foundation, she quickly presses a dampened sponge onto the small patch of pale powder in the compact and dabs it over her face, taking care not to smudge the rest of her make-up. Her ears and neck now look far too dark in comparison, but there’s no more powder left to lighten them, so her face is left looking like an oval of frost on a brown cowpat. She sighs, and tries to disguise the problem by tying a red scarf around her neck. Inside her gold handbag is a collection of business cards she found on the site, including those of the director of the Provincial Bureau for Industry and Commerce, the section chief of a large tobacco company and the president of the city hospital. These cards will be her protectors. She’s memorised the details of five of them, ready to reel off if the police attempt to arrest her. She puts on the long maroon skirt Liu Di gave her, a pair of black, undamaged nylon tights, and the two left purple sandals. She notices an ink stain on her fitted white shirt and blots it out with a piece of chalk. Liu Di walks past, catches sight of her, and jumps back in astonishment. ‘My God, you look like a prostitute!’ she blurts. ‘No, sorry – I mean like a secretary of a CEO. Who would have thought that this dump could produce such a beauty! You could get on any bus you like now. No one would think of checking your documents. Ha! If you had a cigarette dangling between your fingers, you could be a guest at a foreign wedding.’
‘I’m going back to Guai Village,’ Meili says. Last night she told Liu Di the reason she ran away.
‘Good for you! As the saying goes: “However far a hen might stray, she will always return to the coop one day.”’ Last night, Liu Di revealed to Meili that her husband often beats her up, then let out a stream of curses to release her pent-up anger.
‘I’m just worried that my smell will give me away,’ Meili says. Although she’s grown so accustomed to the stench of the landfill site that she can no longer detect it on her skin, she went to Sunlight Bathhouse with Liu Di yesterday and stood under a shower for an hour. Her clothes, however, have a rotten stench that no amount of washing could remove, so all she can do is douse them with a pungent perfume, which she also plans to spray onto her neck before entering any crowded place.
The mad dog comes to sit at Meili’s feet. She wonders what she should do with him. Since he heard her wail the funeral lament on the hill last week, he’s trailed her every step, gobbling up whatever scraps she tosses onto the ground. She has already cut off his tattered waistcoat with her shoe knife, and before she leaves today, she wants to give him a good wash and see him emerge from the dirt as spotless as a lotus from a muddy pond.
KEYWORDS: state crematorium, gates of hell, charred and mangled, earthen jar, merciless beast.
MEILI SEES KONGZI’S eyes widen in disbelief, redden, then become as vacant as still water. Nannan stays sitting on the bed chewing her fingers, not daring to look up at her.
‘Come here, Nannan!’ Meili tries to shout, but the words come out as a soft whisper. She sits down beside Nannan and wraps her arms around her.