Spilled Water Read online

  Chapter Twenty-five

  All Too Much

  I tried to persuade Mr Wang to let me go back to the bear factory, pleading that the work as a runner was too tiring for me, but that I was sure I would be good at stitching bears’ noses, or sewing the pads on their paws.

  ‘I’m afraid that there are no vacancies in noses and paws, my dear,’ he said, without even stopping to consider my request, when I went for my wages two days after starting in my new position. ‘Noses and paws are very popular, so I couldn’t possibly give them to a newcomer. It would cause discontent amongst my staff, do you see, and I wouldn’t want that, would I? A fit little thing like you should have no problem keeping up as a runner. In fact, I’d say the job is tailor-made for you, tailor-made. And since there has been no training involved – anyone could do it – I can pay you the full amount for the job straightaway, lucky you. Of course, there are some small deductions to help pay for the New Year celebrations, and there’s still some to come off for the fare –’

  ‘Please, Mr Wang, please let me go back with my friends,’ I begged.

  ‘As I was saying, I think you’ll find I’ve been remarkably generous as usual. Now, off you go, dear, back to work. You can do it. I have complete faith in my choice of workers.’

  The receipt of a month’s wages all in one go, even though they had been severely trimmed, cheered me a little, for it seemed such an enormous amount of money. I counted the notes several times, struggling to take in the fact that they belonged to me. I wrapped them carefully inside my old blouse and pushed it to the back of my locker. I couldn’t wait to add to them, for suddenly the dream of going home one day became more of a reality.

  My work as a runner, though, was punishing, and was about to worsen. Two and a half weeks after I had moved jobs, a huge order came in for a range of toy farm vehicles. Suddenly, all twenty-six machines were in operation, a new group of workers was brought in, including a second runner to help me, and our hours were extended. The delicious time of solitude and relaxation I had looked forward to every evening since beginning work as a runner was snatched away from me. Our overtime was extended to midnight.

  If I had thought the pace of work was breathtaking before, now it was overwhelming. It was almost impossible to keep up with the rate at which tasks were being completed, and the supervisor shouted at us constantly. The noise from the machines was mind-numbing, the heat debilitating. There was no air-conditioning in the factory, the windows were tiny, and the temperature outside was rising steadily. The air inside was stale and cloudy with fumes, which stung my eyes and made it difficult to breathe. My legs ached and my feet, already pinched raw by my too-small sensible shoes, swelled and protested at every step I took. The runner who was recruited to help me lasted for two weeks, then disappeared and didn’t return. A young man was hired in her place. He had only been there a day when he complained to the supervisor that four people should be doing our job, not two. Nothing changed, and he left to be replaced by a man who seemed to delight in making me look slow. I asked again to be moved, but Mr Wang refused and told me I had better hand in my notice if I wasn’t happy. He didn’t want me poisoning the rest of the staff.

  I didn’t leave, but soon afterwards I developed a wheezy cough. It kept me awake at night, and during the day I felt as though I would pass out if I couldn’t take more oxygen into my lungs. Li Mei said it must be the fibres and chemicals in the air. She went to see Mr Wang on my behalf, but he turned nasty and said that if she interfered again he would dismiss both of us on the spot and we would not be paid.

  March turned to April and the outside temperature soared. Inside the factory, it was like a furnace. More orders came in. Our early finish on Sundays was taken away from us, and twice a week we had to work through until two o’clock in the morning. The atmosphere of discontent that reigned was almost as suffocating as the heat. Those workers who had some choice in the matter soon departed. Those who, like myself, had little choice, had to put up with whatever Mr Wang dictated.

  My cough grew worse. I spent my days feeling nauseous and faint. It didn’t matter how much the supervisor shouted at me now, I couldn’t have responded. I grew ever more fearful that I would be thrown out. My friends became increasingly concerned about my health.

  One day, I was simply unable to get up in the morning.

  ‘You must stay in bed today,’ Li Mei insisted. ‘They will have to manage without you.’

  I hadn’t the strength to argue. I slept all day long, right the way through till the next morning, waking only to eat a bowl of rice Li Mei had brought for me. I felt better for the rest, but my recovery was short-lived. A few days later I began to cough up blood. I was too terrified of what might happen to me to tell anyone. I worked on for another week, until, one afternoon, I collapsed on to the factory floor.

  I was carried back to the dormitory by two of the men. Li Mei was assigned to keep an eye on me, with strict instructions to return to work as soon as I revived. She sat stroking my hand and wiping my forehead with a damp towel. I remembered my mother when she had been ill, lying so still that it was as if she were dead. Mother had recovered, but her life had failed her. If that was the fate that awaited me, if I was doomed forever to a future as bleak as the past ten months, then I had no wish to recover. I couldn’t go on. I had tried, but my best had never been good enough, and the struggle was just too great. ‘You are like a fragile reed,’ Mrs Chen had said. ‘One puff of wind and you will break in two.’ I was broken now.

  I was racked by a sudden fit of coughing. As soon as Li Mei saw the blood on my pillow she ran for help. She returned with Mrs Wang, who immediately fussed around like a solicitous mother hen, while Li Mei watched her in disbelief.

  ‘The poor girl,’ she clucked. ‘I always sensed that she was a sickly child, all that fainting for no reason, but she was so desperate for a job that I ignored my better instincts.’ She stopped to pat my hand, but continued addressing Li Mei as though I were not there. ‘How cruel of her parents to send her off to work when she’s such a weak little thing. So small for her age, too. I always wondered whether she was really fifteen like she said.’ She looked at me accusingly at that point, then continued, ‘She must go to hospital, of course, and being good employers we’ll pay, but I fear she won’t be able to return here when she’s better. It’ll all be too much for her again. All too much.’

  She ran to call an ambulance, muttering ‘Poor thing, poor thing’ as she left the room. Li Mei held my hand once more. Despite feeling wretched, I began to giggle. Li Mei joined in.

  ‘That’s put the cat among the pigeons,’ she said. ‘The last thing the Wangs want is someone asking questions about their working practices and how you came to be in this state.’

  ‘I’ve always been a sickly child, didn’t you realise that?’ I said.

  Exhaustion took over again then, and I fell into a deep sleep. I scarcely stirred as they lifted me from my bed and into the ambulance, nor during the long journey to hospital. When I arrived, I was aware of a lot of activity around me: nurses taking my temperature and putting needles into my arms, doctors examining me, disturbing me, asking questions, making notes. I didn’t want to be disturbed, didn’t want to wake up. I was happy handing the burden of my life to someone else.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  A Voice So Strange

  and Quiet

  I drifted in and out of sleep for what seemed like days after that. Shadowy figures hovered on the fringes of my consciousness each time I came to, only to disappear again before I could identify them. I feared that one of them was Mrs Chen, another Yimou, another Zheng Yi. I seemed to have lost my ability to decipher what was real and what was imaginary. When Uncle appeared fleetingly from nowhere, I screamed until my cough took my breath, then I flailed my arms around to keep him away. Behind him, my mother clawed the air as though trying to pull me towards her. Even when Uncle seemed to have gone, Mother stayed there reaching out to me, but I couldn’t run to her
, couldn’t run to her. Uncle’s tight grip around my wrist was holding me back. I screamed at him to let go, kicked out at his invisible presence, and when at last he did let go, I fell back into a bottomless sleep.

  I woke at last, late one morning, to dazzling sunlight spilling across my bed from a window opposite. Through the window I could see that the sun was high in a pale blue sky feathered with clouds. I blinked in confusion, trying to remember where I was, who I was.

  Little by little, my shadow world fell away as other beds came into focus and uniformed figures bustled to and fro between them. I had no idea how long I had been there, and I was too weak to move, but I felt somehow safe and would have been happy just to lie there for ever and watch.

  A small movement to my left made me turn my head. A man was sitting by the side of the bed, head bowed, hands clasped, as though lost in contemplation. He became aware of my gaze and looked up. The minute he did, I turned away. It was Uncle Ba. I wasn’t safe. The nightmare wasn’t over.

  How long had he been there? How had he found me? What did he want?

  I heard him stand up and clear his throat. I waited for the usual words of criticism, words of scorn, knowing that after what I had been through they would have no power to touch me.

  ‘How are you feeling, Si-yan?’ Uncle said at last, in a voice so strange and quiet that I almost thought it had come from someone else. The question hung tantalisingly in the air. How did he expect me to feel? I lay there motionless, the fraught silence begging me to have my say, but no words found their way out. I sensed Uncle shifting uneasily. Let him suffer.

  ‘I have come to take you home, Si-yan.’

  My heart skipped. More silence.

  ‘I have been trying to find you these last four months. There was a letter from Mrs Chen’s mother-in-law to your mother saying that you were on your way home. But you never arrived. And then, when I tried to retrace your steps, it was as though you had disappeared.’

  I might as well have done, Uncle Ba, for all you cared.

  ‘I have travelled a thousand miles to find you, Si-yan. I had all but given up when the hospital made contact.’

  Why so much effort, Uncle Ba? I turned towards him. He looked shrunken somehow, and haggard. He avoided my gaze and sat back down in the chair. Then he leant forward and tried to take my hand. I pulled it away sharply. How dared he?

  ‘Si-yan,’ he said. ‘There is something I have to tell you.’ His voice quavered in its reluctance to speak. ‘Si-yan –’ he said, and paused again.

  I stared at him and despised his sudden weakness.

  ‘It’s your mother, Si-yan.’

  The air grew taut.

  ‘What about my mother?’ My own voice frightened me. ‘Where is my mother?’ I tried to sit up, wanting to challenge the man I hated to say anything against her.

  ‘Your mother is dead.’

  The words struck me like daggers, though they were spoken in the smallest whisper. I screamed then, over and over again, ripping the air into shreds. Uncle tried to calm me, but I hit him with all my might.

  ‘She’s not dead, she’s not dead! How can she be? Why are you saying such things? I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’ I screamed.

  Nurses came running, I heard Li Mei’s voice. Nothing could stop me, though. My pain was devouring every ounce of my body and threatening everyone else around me. I fought against the comforting words and restraining hands, fought against the efforts to make things better. They couldn’t be made better. It was Mother’s job to make things better, and she had gone.

  I screamed until my cough robbed me of my breath and I succumbed to a drug-induced sleep.

  Li Mei was sitting by my bed when I woke again. The news of my mother assaulted me afresh and I began to sob.

  ‘Tell me it’s not true, please tell me it’s not true.’

  Li Mei held me tight, quietly stroked my hair, and her silence told me again what I didn’t want to believe.

  ‘Where’s Uncle?’ I asked at last.

  ‘He’s asleep on a bench outside.’

  ‘It’s his fault, Li Mei, I know it’s his fault.’

  ‘He says it was pneumonia, that your mother was too weak to fight it,’ Li Mei said gently.

  ‘Too weak because of him,’ I countered.

  ‘He blames himself terribly, Si-yan.’

  ‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for him?’ I howled. ‘He sold me, Li Mei, sold me like a bucket of pakchoi, just because we owed him money. All he ever thinks about is money. And now he’s killed my mother because of his meanness.’

  Li Mei held my hand. ‘He wants to make amends, Lu Si-yan. The way he treated you can never be excused, but there are things he has told me that you may not know.’

  I looked at her angrily. ‘What sort of things? He’s just trying to get you on his side, Li Mei. You don’t know him like I do. He’s always been mean, always selfish, always finding fault when we were doing our best. Father loved him, but all Uncle could do was criticise him. And he’s always hated me. Always, always, always.’

  She told me, then, what she had learned from Uncle while I was asleep. I knew already that Uncle had helped to bring up my father after the death of their parents. I didn’t know quite how bitter that had made him at the loss of his own childhood. I didn’t know that even when Uncle was a simple farmer, he had helped Father to establish his own farm. I didn’t know, and neither did my mother, that when I was born, by which time Uncle was working in a factory, he had made payments to my father whenever times were hard. When Li-hu was born, Uncle had at last seen a time in the future when he would no longer have any responsibility for us. Li-hu and Father would share that responsibility. Then Father had died, and suddenly he was more responsible than ever.

  ‘When your father died,’ Li Mei continued, ‘your uncle supported your mother more and more, but he became increasingly embittered. You bore the brunt of his bitterness because, like many men of his generation, he considered you good for marriage and little else.’

  ‘But I tried so hard,’ I protested.

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered how hard you tried. It wouldn’t have made any difference once he had made up his mind to reduce his burden by settling your future elsewhere.’

  ‘By selling me, you mean.’

  ‘He says he chose your future in-laws very carefully.’

  ‘Not carefully enough,’ I snapped. ‘I’m sure he just sold me to the highest bidder. Nothing matters to Uncle except money.’

  ‘He is paying a terrible price now for his actions. He has seen what harm it caused to your mother and to you. He has to live with the knowledge that he allowed his own bitterness to split his family apart.’

  ‘Let him pay the price then, why should I care?’ I sobbed. ‘He took my mother from me, and I’ll never forgive him.’

  ‘He needs you, Si-yan, and so does your brother.’

  ‘I am just a girl-child,’ I said bitterly. ‘How can he possibly need me, except to cook his meals and run errands for him? Don’t you see, Li Mei? We’re more of a burden than ever now.’

  ‘You and your brother are all the family your uncle has left. Go home and give him a chance, Si-yan.’

  The emptiness I felt inside was worse than the pain I had endured before. I had nothing to look forward to any more. My survival over the past few months had been built upon the belief that, one day, I would go home and be with my mother. What was there now? I wandered back through the paths of my childhood, tried to grasp hold of the happy times and not let them go. There was Father singing in his rickshaw, bumping his way to market; Mother sitting on the river bank laughing with the other village women; Li-hu chasing hens and yelling with delight every time he found an egg. Little Li-hu, my apple-cheeked baby brother. Nearly a year had gone by since I had left him behind in my mother’s arms. He would have grown. I might not even recognise him. Would he know me? How was he coping without Mother?

  Suddenly, more than anything in the world, I wanted to be with h
im, wanted to hold him, wanted to make things better for him, wanted to take away his pain, wanted to tell him that I loved him. ‘When he is old enough, my handsome tiger will protect and treasure my beautiful silk swallow,’ my father had said. But he wasn’t old enough. He was only six. ‘Perhaps your silk swallow will protect and treasure your handsome tiger,’ I had laughingly replied. Well, I would protect him. I would be mother and father and sister to him. And I wouldn’t resent it. Not for one moment.

  ‘I want to be with my brother,’ I said.

  Li Mei squeezed my hand and left the room. She returned with Uncle, who hovered by the door, all his self-assurance gone. I noticed the dark circles under his eyes before I turned my head away, unable to cope with his uneasiness on top of my grief. He stepped forward and spoke.

  ‘I am not asking you to forgive me, Si-yan, just for a chance to repair some of the damage I have done. My selfishness has nearly destroyed this family, I see that now. I want to give you and your brother a home. I don’t want you to be a mother to Li-hu, it is too much to ask of any child. I want you to go back to school, Si-yan, to make something of yourself. Li-hu too.’

  I looked at him. Did he really mean it? Had he changed so much? I had changed, I knew that.

  ‘I am not the child you sent away ten months ago, Uncle. I will come home with you for the sake of my brother, and for the sake of my mother and father. But I cannot forgive you, and I will not be your servant.’

  Uncle nodded. ‘You have come a long way,’ he said, ‘and so have I.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Let it Be Somewhere

  Better

  It was another week before I was strong enough to leave hospital. Uncle came to see me every day. We were so awkward together at first that I almost dreaded his visits. He tried hard to make things right between us. They couldn’t be, though, not just like that, not for a very long time.