The Dark Road: A Novel Part 14

'No, I don't want to swim in a river. I want to go to a spa. I'll soak for hours in a warm pool of gurgling water, sipping green tea from a porcelain cup. Then I'll have a foot ma.s.sage and a back rub, I'll go to a salon for a haircut and manicure, then finish the day off with a dinner date at a nice restaurant . . .'

'How much would all that cost?' Meili asks, seeing Suya's eyes start to droop. In Changsha, she stared in wonder at Suya's long manicured fingernails, with the tiny garlands of flowers painted along the sides. But after just two hours of work on the fields, they all snapped off. Meili feels embarra.s.sed that in her entire life she has never once stepped inside a hair salon.

'Who cares how much it costs? Money exists to buy happiness and comfort, and to pay servants to look after you. What other purpose does it serve?'

Meili tries to think of the last time she felt comfortable, pampered or cared for. She often washed Kongzi's feet but he never once washed hers. She had a hot bath once, in the Golden Age Hotel when she was travelling round the county with the Nuwa International Arts Troupe. After soaking in the bath for half an hour, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and saw that she looked like a nymph from a Tang Dynasty painting, rising from a steaming pond. But she doesn't want to think about the past now. All she wants is to be free. She has eighty-six more days left to endure in the camp. Suya said that when they reach the sixtieth day, she'll buy some beer and biscuits to celebrate.

'But even when I'm released, will I ever be free, or be able to take control of my life?' Meili thinks aloud. 'The government aborted my second child, my husband has given away my third. I don't want to live in the countryside, and I'm banned from living in the cities. So where can I go now? What can I do?'

'If you want to be free, you must become resourceful, independent,' Suya replies. 'Divorce Kongzi and marry a man from the city who'll be able to give you an urban residence permit. Or set up your own business and buy the permit yourself, and an apartment too. Go to Shenzhen. It's full of businesswomen driving around in their private cars, negotiating business deals on their mobile phones. If you buy a villa in the city, you'll get three residence permits thrown in. You'll be able to live in peace for the rest of your life.'

Meili understands that the root of all her problems is poverty. If she had money, she wouldn't be afraid of falling pregnant she could simply pay the fine. One thing is certain, though: she will never divorce Kongzi. However monstrously he's behaved, she still believes that marriage is for life.

'What's happened to the pregnant woman the officers attacked yesterday?' Suya says. 'Do you think she's escaped?' The pregnant woman is a member of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. After responding gruffly to a policeman's command in the sugar-cane field yesterday, the policeman knocked her to the ground and kicked her face until it bled. Meili and Suya begged him to stop, but he said, 'Don't worry, she won't die the Falun Wheel in her abdomen will save her!'

'Yes, I wonder where she's gone. She wouldn't dare run away with a belly that size, and the guy from Jiangxi has been locked up in the prison hut, so she can't be there.' Meili thinks of the yellow shirt hanging on the washing line outside which no one has dared remove. When the wind blows it flaps like a ragged sail. A rumour has gone around that it belonged to an inmate from Shandong who hung herself in the latrines.

At the name call after supper, Suya is nowhere to be seen. Meili searches the fields, the latrines and the construction site behind, and returns to the barn in floods of tears. Last night, when Meili told her it was her birthday, Suya took off her earrings and gave them to her as a present.

Two sisters, who know how close Meili has become to Suya, walk over and sit down beside her. A man came to their village last month and persuaded them to travel with him to Changsha, promising them jobs in a Sino-foreign pharmaceutical company with monthly wages of a thousand yuan and free food and accommodation. But when they arrived they discovered that he'd sold them to work as hostesses in a nightclub. The next morning, they escaped out of the nightclub's kitchen window and went straight to the police, who put them in handcuffs and bundled them off to the Custody and Repatriation Centre.

An hour or so later, as she lies down listening to the wind rustle through the trees outside, she suddenly remembers Suya mention that prost.i.tutes are sometimes transferred from labour camps to specialist penitentiaries that examine women for s.e.xual diseases. But if she'd been transferred, surely they would have let her take her handbag? Meili quickly reaches for the handbag, pulls out the red journal and hides it under her blanket. The lights are turned off, but Meili is too upset to sleep. She stays awake all night, tossing and turning, only managing to doze off a few minutes before dawn . . .

In her dream, she is swimming towards her womb along a dark channel, pursued by thousands of babies. When she reaches the end, she rubs the walls but is unable to find any entrance. The babies come closer, mouths wide open. With a jolt, she wakes, rolls onto her side and notices that Suya's handbag has gone. She has a vague memory of torchlight flitting across her face a few moments ago and of the sound of receding footsteps. She closes her eyes again, but can't return to sleep. She wonders whether Instructor Zheng has dragged Suya off into the woods. As she rubs the red journal under her blanket, she remembers the day her grandmother took her to a market stall beneath a large tree in the centre of Nuwa Village. Among the earth-coloured felt and the bobbins of black thread, she spotted a white cotton scarf and white hairclip that seemed to her immaculate and other-worldly. From that moment on, white became her favourite colour. She remembers the first white van she saw enter the village, with revolutionary slogans blaring from the speakers on its roof and posters of Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng stuck to the side windows. Then she remembers, when she was about five years old, watching a man daub onto a village wall the words CARRY OUT THE FOUR MODERNISATIONS; IMPLEMENT THE ONE CHILD POLICY. As soon as he was finished, her friend pushed her against the slogan, staining her clothes with chalky-smelling whitewash. Her grandmother shouted at her and told her to go straight home.

Meili thinks of Waterborn and wonders how she's survived these past two weeks without her milk. She thinks how Nannan always kicks off her blanket in the middle of the night, and if it's not wrapped over her again, her arms and legs become stone cold. She thinks of Kongzi's obsessive desire for a son and feels angry, then consoles herself with the thought that at least he's never stolen anything or slept with a prost.i.tute. He may have watched a few p.o.r.n films and forced her into some of the lewd positions he picked up from them, but compared to the depraved men Suya described, he's pretty respectable and honourable. If only he was willing to talk to her and listen to her more, everything would be fine.

When the wind outside drops, she hears fresh cement being stirred in the construction site beyond the latrines. The male inmates are building a factory. Next year the camp will receive official permission to accommodate four hundred inmates, and to take advantage of this expansion of free labour, the Party Secretary has decided that the camp should manufacture Christmas crackers for export to Europe and America. Suya told Meili that Christmas is the foreigners' equivalent of Spring Festival and that an old man with a white beard squeezes down your chimney at night with a bag of presents and waits for you to wake up. Meili rubs Suya's red journal again and tries to think of a place where she can keep it safe.

KEYWORDS: sewage, second wife, handjob, visiting Miss Five, grey cheongsam, dead shrimp.

AS SOON AS Meili walks out of the tiny lift and is. .h.i.t by a vulgar smell of cheap perfume, she knows that she's been duped. Her legs start to shake. This morning, a genial-looking woman arrived at the camp, offering the female inmates jobs as hotel cleaners. Meili jumped at the opportunity, and boarded the minibus together with the two sisters. Although she signed a one-year contract, she made up her mind that she'd leave after a few weeks, once she'd earned enough money to buy a ticket to Guai Village.

I'm done for, this time! she says to herself as she moves down the red-carpeted corridor. Glancing over her shoulder she sees the woman's face becoming sterner with each step she takes. 'Stay inside and wait,' the woman says gruffly, ushering them into separate rooms and shutting the doors behind. Meili pities the sisters, who've escaped one brothel only to be sold to another. She decides that if she's forced to sleep with a man, she'll follow him into the room, strangle him and escape. So long as the police don't find her, she'll make her way back to the bamboo hut, even if she has to walk all the way.

The door opens and a dumpy girl in a grey cheongsam tells her it's time to eat. Meili follows her through a windowless bathroom stinking of sewage to a room where her contract has been placed on a round dining table.

'Sit down,' says a man in a sky-blue shirt sitting by the window. His hair is blow-dried and his lips have a purple tinge. 'I'm the boss of this nightclub. I won't ask where you're from or check your doc.u.ments. But I paid eight hundred yuan for you, so I must make myself clear. If you work hard and do as we ask, I'll let you go in three months I'll even pay for your bus ticket home. But if you don't cooperate, if you attempt to escape, well, you'll only have yourself to blame for what might happen. No one knows you're here, and no one will know if you disappear. Do you understand what I'm saying?'

'I signed a contract to be a cleaner. I refuse to do any other work, so you'd better let me go straight away.'

'Your job is to be a hostess, to look after our clients. The men who come here are rolling in money: shake them about a little, and coins will fall into your hands. If you do as you're told, you'll have hot meals and a shower every day. For a peasant like you, it's heaven! We'll teach you all you need to know.'

'I'll clean rooms, wash dishes anything. I'm not afraid of hard work. But I won't sell my body. I'm a simple woman with no education. I'm not suited to this job.'

'But peasant girls like you are very popular with our clients. They'd love your simple, honest, wholesome look, and would pay good money for you. But I warn you straight away: all tips must be handed over to us. From now on your name is Ah-Fang, and you're twenty years old.'

A girl reeking of cheap musk enters the room. She's wearing high heels and a red skintight cheongsam. She places a bowl of noodle soup in front of Meili and sits down, the long slit in her dress exposing her bare thigh.

'This is Ah-Fang,' the boss says to the girl as he gets up to leave. 'She arrived today. Show her the ropes.'

'How can you dress like that?' Meili says to her as soon as the boss has left. 'What if your parents saw you? You'd bring shame to your village.'

'Who cares now that I've left that miserable dump, I've no intention of moving back!' says the girl, a look of disdain darting across her young face. 'My name is Xu, by the way. When you've finished your meal, have a shower, then I'll give you a new dress, cut your hair and see you transform from a mother hen into a phoenix!'

'Don't boss me about, little sister I'm a mother of two,' Meili says, casting a condescending eye over Xu's skinny, adolescent frame.

'Well, I warn you, big sister: if you don't cooperate, you'll be treated worse than Communist martyrs were in Guomindang jails. The boss paid good money for you, so you'll have to repay his debt. I was a bit rebellious myself, when I first arrived. See this wound on my thigh? That's where the boss jabbed a needle into me. He never injures your face or c.u.n.t, because those are the parts that bring the money pouring in.'

'Why haven't you tried to run away?' Meili asks, staring down at the bowl of noodles.

'Run away? I'm only here because I ran away from my village. Where could I run to now? Besides, I wouldn't get very far. The boss's brother is head of the Public Security Bureau. He launched a crackdown on prost.i.tution last week. The police raided every nightclub and brothel in the city, but they didn't touch this place. If I did escape, they'd arrest me and bring me straight back.'

'But this is such grubby, shameful work. You're a pretty young girl. How can you bear to let all those filthy men touch you? Don't you care about losing face?'

'What does face matter? All I want is money. And being a nightclub hostess is less tiring than working in a salon, where you have to wash men's hair and ma.s.sage their b.l.o.o.d.y feet before you have s.e.x with them.'

'You're quite a girl! Do you have a boyfriend?' Meili stares at Xu's straightened, shoulder-length hair and remembers Suya saying that a straightening treatment in a hair salon can cost a hundred yuan.

'No, I'm single. I'm waiting for a rich guy to make me his "second wife" and buy me a car and a nice apartment. Many Korean businessmen visit this place. If you agree to be their second wives, in two years you'll have enough money to last the rest of your life. Still, I'm doing pretty well already. I make a hundred thousand yuan a year. My parents have built themselves a house with the money I sent back. You're a mother of two, so I don't need to tell you about the s.e.x side of things. All I'll say is that if you don't reach o.r.g.a.s.m, you must pant and groan as if you have. And there are some terms you must learn. "Fast food" is no foreplay, straight in and out, and costs a hundred yuan; "playing the flute" is a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b, and costs fifty; "visiting Miss Five" is a handjob, with some breast fondling thrown in-'

'Shut up! I have a husband, for G.o.d's sake.'

'You think your husband is any different from the men who come here? I've seen them all in this place from munic.i.p.al government officials to foreign CEOs. I may have a flat chest and an average face, but this month I've slept with two British engineers and three American tourists. All of them have wives and children. These days, a man who remains faithful to his wife is either an idiot or a loser.'

'Hah you and I live in very different worlds, it seems,' Meili says, remembering Suya telling her that prost.i.tutes have to think of themselves as a commodity, not a human being.

'You think so? Bring your husband here for a night and he will leave you within three days! I'll never make the mistake of getting married.'

'How do your parents imagine you make all this money? Wouldn't they be horrified if they knew?' Xu's pink lipstick and turquoise eyeshadow remind Meili of the foreign women she's seen in magazines.

'My parents are village cadres who have to sc.r.a.pe by on sixty yuan a month. I told them I'm a shop manager. When I went home last Spring Festival and handed them a fat envelope of cash, they beamed with pride.'

'I must leave this place!' Meili looks out of the window and sees on a large billboard across the road, a little girl in a pink dress and leather shoes smiling up at her. Diesel fumes from the cars streaming past far below slide into the room through the metal bars of the open window.

'You want to escape? The boss will hunt you down, drag you back and beat you to death. You won't be able to say I didn't warn you.'

Meili lowers her eyes again, picks up her chopsticks and gulps down the noodle soup.

'You'll see, it's not so bad here,' Xu says with a smile. 'I'll give you a health certificate in case the hygiene inspectors turn up. I promise you, in three months' time, you'll like it here so much, you won't want to leave. The boss is putting you in room 303 tonight. There's no need to be nervous. After your shower, rub some lubricating oil between your legs. When the client walks in, turn off the lights, help him off with his clothes, then slip a condom onto him straight away, before his erection wilts. Most of the men will be drunk, so don't waste time making conversation. If they turn violent, kick the door . . .'

'Shut up, shut up . . .' Meili hisses, staring down at the tiny dead shrimp floating on the dregs of her noodle soup.

KEYWORDS: heaven on earth, cloud of smoke, source of life, unsheathed pillow, blazing fire.

MEILI CREEPS DOWN the dark corridor and locks herself in the toilet. All she can see are a bucket, a mop, a mirror, a rusty nail jutting out from the brick wall nothing that she could use as a weapon. The window is open, but it also has metal bars, so there's no escape. The steel security door is the only way out of this place, but it's double-locked. She has no choice but to return to her room. When she enters, she sees the boss lying on the single bed, a bottle of liquor in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He puffs a cloud of smoke into the air and tells her to shut the door.

'No, it's too hot in here, I'll leave it open,' she says, her voice faltering. She decides that if he touches her, she'll fight him off with all her strength. During the shower she took after lunch, she scrubbed off all the mud and grime from the camp, soaked her lice-infested hair in conditioner and combed out every insect. Then she sat on the bed, pulled Suya's journal out of her bag and read the third page: '. . . He pushed my thighs up and stuck his head between my legs. I told him he wasn't allowed to do that, and tried to wriggle free, but he said: "What's your problem? I'm paying you enough money, aren't I?" I pulled his hair and tried to yank him off, but then he pinned me down and rammed himself inside me without a condom, and pounded and pounded, first one hole and then the other . . .' Meili couldn't bear to read any further. Her skin, which had relaxed in the warmth of the shower, became cold and tense.

After flicking his stub onto the floor, the boss grabs Meili by her shirtsleeve and says, 'Let me taste you before the clients have a go.' Meili lashes out at him and digs her nails into his legs, but he keeps hold of her sleeve with one hand, and tugs her trousers down with the other. She bites his arm. Enraged, he jumps up, grasps her by the hair and flings her onto the bed. 'So, you want me to play rough, huh, you filthy c.u.n.t?' he shouts, and whips off his belt, loops it around her neck and secures it tightly to the steel bars of the headrest. Then with a pillowcase that he's ripped off from a pillow, he ties her right hand to the bars as well. Meili kicks her legs about like a drowning dog. Her trousers and knickers have been pulled off. The belt is so tight around her neck, she can hardly breathe. Her heart races; she seizes up with terror. He leans over and strikes her across the face with a force that knocks her out. She raises her left arm and waves it feebly. He opens her legs and forces them up against her chest, then slaps again and again over her shoulders and face. Like a boat that's struck a rock, she feels herself break into pieces and sink. He stuffs the unsheathed pillow into her mouth, spits onto her v.a.g.i.n.a then shoves his hand inside. 'Mother, mother . . .' her v.a.g.i.n.a screams in despair, but the noise is m.u.f.fled by the man's flesh. She's suffocating now; her whole body is shaking. Her chest rises, straining for air. He's jabbing against her womb. Gastric fluids surge into her throat. She wants to open her jaws and howl, 'Mother, help me, help me . . .' Feeling raw and scorched inside, she closes her eyes and shrinks back into herself.

'Hah! You're mine, now,' the boss grunts, leering down at her with a lewd grin. He moves in and out, faster and faster, then turns her over, enters her from behind and gyrates like a wild dog, slapping her hard on one side and then the other. With one final thrust, he shouts, 'Filthy f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!' and spurts his sperm onto the enflamed walls of her womb. Her head is twisted to the side, pressed against the bars. Now that he's finished with her, he shoves her back down onto the bed. She clamps her legs together as tightly as she can, then huddles into a ball, rubs her stinging neck and gasps for breath.

'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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d down to h.e.l.l.

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 a.r.s.e. 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 pa.s.s. 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 her knees and breaks into sobs, her whole body convulsed. She wants to go back to the bamboo hut. It may be a tiny and ramshackle hovel, but it's her home, the place where she is both a mother and a wife. The thought of suicide frightens her, and she knows she will need to build up her courage before she can carry out the act. In the meantime, she will try to get a lift to Dexian and make her way back to Guai Village. She hears a truck rumble in the distance, and walks towards the noise, picking her way over the broken ground. Below her feet, maize leaves and burst balloons lie caught between shattered bricks. She can smell a stale, masculine scent in the dawn mist, and after scaling another low wall, she finds herself on the edge of a large landfill site. A light is twinkling in the distance. She starts to walk towards it across the refuse. The truck she heard a few moments ago has dumped a load of garbage from the city onto the ground. Workers are circling it, prodding it with spades, turning it over. Foul vapours fill the air. Meili dodges around heaps of plastic bags the workers have emptied and discarded. A woman spots her and shouts, 'No scavenging! We're in charge of this patch!'

'I'm just looking for a lift,' Meili says. Drawing closer, she sees the woman impale a plastic bag with a hooked pole, shake out the orange peel, sanitary towels and food sc.r.a.ps, then stuff it into a large plastic bucket.

Meili approaches the truck. Another woman notices her and says, 'Are you looking for a scavenging job?'

'What's the daily wage?' Meili asks, trying to sound casual.

'Fifteen yuan, with free lodging and lunch. If you're interested, go up there and speak to Mr Deng.' The woman points to a hill behind them that has flimsy shacks crammed onto the lower slopes and black crows hovering above the peak. The prospect of free food and shelter appeals to Meili. She decides to stay for a few days until she's earned enough money to pay for her journey back to Guai Village.

The workers have built the shacks with wooden boards and plastic sheeting below a village that was torn down to make way for the landfill site. The families live and work inside them, dismantling rubbish they retrieve from the site and sorting it into piles of gla.s.s, paper, plastic and metal, which are then taken to be weighed at the warehouse. Battered ca.s.sette recorders, motorbikes, sofa cushions and other objects the warehouse rejected lie stacked outside each doorway. Shelters occupied by families with young children are surrounded by broken prams and dirty plastic toys. Washing lines have been strung between the roofs of the shacks. The grey bras and tights flapping from them look pure white compared to the filth below. Along the path, pigs nozzle heaps of refuse, searching for sc.r.a.ps to eat, while ducks wade through waste-water streams, ruffling their wet and grimy feathers. On this hillside, the decaying and the living emit the same morbid stench.

On a bright morning three days later, Meili puts on her canvas gloves, sits down on a tyre and stares at the ma.s.s of tattered shoes spread before her. With her experience of gutting fish for a living, she managed to secure the job of dismantling shoes, which allows her to sit while she works. To dismantle boots, she has to slide her knife up the leg, rip it off, pull out the inner sole, extract each nail, smash off the heel, remove the rubber outsole and place the leather or synthetic upper into the correct pile. All leather, whether from shoes, gloves or sofas, is shredded and boiled to produce the protein which is added to counterfeit milk formula. Sports shoes are simpler to take apart, as the soles can be removed with one slit of the knife. When Meili finds a shoe she considers too pretty to destroy, she puts it aside in the hope that its pair might turn up. Yesterday, she thought the miracle had happened when she spotted a purple mid-heel T-strap sandal, identical to the one in her hand, lying on top of the heap. If only it was a right shoe, and not another left, it would be a perfect match.

Liu Di, the woman in the shack next to hers, is in charge of sorting through gla.s.s bottles. She gave Meili the plasters that now criss-cross her hands. Liu Di has four out-of-quota children. Right now, the three eldest are jumping about on a pile of plastic bags and the six-month-old baby is sleeping in a fly-encrusted crate, wedged between empty Coca-Cola bottles and ceramic wine flasks.

'Get down, you brats!' Liu Di shouts. She smashes another bottle onto the ground and shards of broken gla.s.s fly into the sunlight.

'Be careful, children, he might bite you agh, I've always been afraid of dogs!' Meili says, pointing to the mangy grey dog that roams the landfill site like a piece of walking rubbish. Three metal springs are hooked to his frayed waistcoat. Since his owner disappeared last year, he's become melancholy and unhinged, and no one dares go near him.

'How come she has yellow hair?' Meili asks, glancing at the baby's blonde head nestled in the crate. She remembers the force with which Waterborn sucked her nipples and feels sick with longing. The baby's head is huge, and her cheeks are so swollen that her features have become squashed together. Her hands and feet look tiny in comparison. The day she was born, her father found a watch on the landfill site and so named her 'Little Watch'.

'Her hair was jet black when she came out of me,' Liu Di laughs. 'But after my milk ran dry, I put her on Three Deers infant formula, and her hair turned yellow overnight.' Liu Di is wearing three pairs of nylon tights to keep her legs warm. She's leaning against the pink vinyl armchair in which she eats her meals and takes afternoon naps.

The pile of leather sc.r.a.ps beside Meili is now high enough to block the wind, but not the stench that wafts up from the landfill site. When her shelter's walls flap, she can glimpse the cold light bouncing from a pile of sky-blue plastic canisters further up the path.

A week pa.s.ses. The purple bruising around her neck has slowly faded, and she has tried to push memories of the rape out of her mind. But this morning, she was shaken out of her numbed state when she saw, lying on a heap of rubbish, the corpse of a tiny baby. She recoiled in horror, and went to sit under a tree far away. Her longing for Waterborn, and rage against Kongzi for getting rid of her, surged to the surface. She made up her mind to work here for another week then go back to Guai Village, making sure not to be caught on the way. Liu Di's husband told her that the only way to avoid arrest is to dress like a city resident. Meili feels relatively safe on the landfill site. Although all the workers are illegal migrant peasants, no government official would be willing to brave the stench to come and check their doc.u.ments. Meili can work in peace, and in her free moments, flick through magazines she finds on the site to study how women in the cities dress. Yesterday, she found a designer raincoat with a missing pocket which she's swapped with a fellow worker for an imitation jade bracelet and a compact with a patch of foundation powder remaining and a mirror on the inside lid. She's also come across handbags that were probably binned by thieves after they'd extracted the wallets. Many of them are brand new, and contain keys, combs, condoms, pills, packets of tissues and leather address books.

'It can't be easy bringing up four children, Liu Di,' Meili says, wiping the flies from her mouth. She put on some lipstick this morning which she found in a handbag, and flies have been swarming around her mouth ever since. Liu Di told her that the lipstick is probably flavoured with honey.

'It's just a few more mouths to feed, that's all,' Liu Di replies. 'That beef and bitter gourd they gave us yesterday was delicious, wasn't it?' When the boxed lunches are handed out at noon, Liu Di usually gives hers to her children, but yesterday she couldn't resist gobbling it all up herself. She could never afford to eat meat back in her village, but becoming a family planning fugitive has widened her horizons. She has tasted hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Whenever she finds a bottle of c.o.ke that is not quite empty, she sniffs it, and if it doesn't smell too sour, keeps it aside for her children to drink later.

'I wish I could have a shower and wash this stench from my skin,' Meili sighs. She jabs her knife into the seam of a leather brogue, drags it around the base, pulls off the leather upper and tears out the insole which still bears the imprint of a man's five toes.

'Why didn't you go with us to Sunlight Bathhouse the other day, then? It's only two kilometres away.'

'I didn't want to walk that far I was afraid police might catch me.' Inside the bag by Meili's feet are four pairs of shoes which she hopes will fit Kongzi and Nannan.

'If you spray some cologne into a bowl of water and wash yourself with it, you'll smell as though you've used soap. But I warn you, the nicer you smell, the more flies you'll attract.' Liu Di always laughs when she finishes speaking. The only time she didn't was when she told Meili that her third baby was killed by family planning officers a few seconds after it was born.

At dusk, when the golden sky fills with fluttering crows and sparrows, the workers finish for the day and climb up the path for some fresh air. At the top of the hill, beyond the demolished village, stand the ruins of an ancient convent that was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. The villagers built pig pens within the crumbling walls, using its tombstones and broken rafters. From up there, the landfill site resembles a dry lake nestled in a green forest. In a few years' time, when the natural dip in the land has been filled, the local government is planning to cover the site with concrete and build a large sports centre to commemorate the forthcoming Beijing Olympics. On the other side of the ruined convent is a field of white chrysanthemums the site manager is growing for his own profit. As the workers return to their huts, Meili keeps climbing the path that's still covered with old mattresses and tabletops laid down during downpours to prevent it turning into mud. She's wearing the two left purple sandals that she's been practising walking in for three days. Red, orange, yellow, green and blue clothes swing from washing lines tied between floor lamps and exercise machines flanking the path.

At the top of the hill, she sits down on an ancient flagstone of the ruined convent and thinks of Suya, who treated her like an older sister. She has read her journal from beginning to end, skipping the words she didn't understand. There are no addresses inside, so she won't be able to find Suya, or give the journal to her boyfriend as she promised. Even if Suya is still alive now, she's unlikely ever to see her again. But she knows that if she hadn't met Suya, she herself would probably be dead now . . . When I thought about killing myself after the rape, Suya, I knew how angry you would have been. You were raped every day for a year, sometimes twenty times in one night. What were you hoping to gain from that life? Independence? Revenge? I can feel you looking down on me now. The pink clouds above are filled with your eyes. Even without looking up, I can see you . . .

As the autumn wind begins to whistle, Meili opens her throat and sings, 'My dearest sister! Alone you cross the Bridge of Helplessness and step onto the Home-Viewing Pavilion from which the dead may throw a last glance at their families in the living world. Before you drink Old Lady Meng's five-flavoured Broth of Amnesia, turn back and look at me one last time . . .' Feathers of gold light flutter through the rosy clouds like strips of satin, then, seconds later the sky becomes as murky and grey as the field of waste below. In the darkness at the bottom of the hill, the mad dog struggles out of a pool of mud and starts trudging up the path, the bra and plastic net hooked to the springs on his waistcoat trailing behind him. A glimmer of hope sparkles in his eyes. High above in the ruined convent, Mother's lament pounds against the broken tombstones and crumbles into the sweet, fetid air.

At dawn a week later, Meili senses that she has finally emerged from her state of shock. Although her body still aches, her mind has cleared. She knows now that she won't kill herself. She will keep the rape a secret from Kongzi, and will struggle on until she finds happiness. As Suya wrote 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 G.o.d, you look like a prost.i.tute!' 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 doc.u.ments. 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 h.e.l.l, 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.

'You died, Mum,' Nannan says, tears welling in her eyes.

'No, I didn't die.' Meili missed the long-distance bus yesterday, so she had to spend the night in Dexian station, huddled up on a metal bench.

'You're dirty, and you stink,' Nannan says, sniffing Meili's neck. Before she left the landfill site, she took the mad dog to a petrol station and scrubbed him with soap and water. By the time she'd finished, the dog was as white as snow but she was splattered with mud. The dog waited with her by the roadside for hours. After a truck finally pulled up and gave her a lift, he chased after it for as long as he could, then gave up and shrank into a tiny white speck.

Unable to control his anger any longer, Kongzi jumps to his feet, slaps Meili across the ear and shouts, 'So, where the h.e.l.l have you been these last four weeks? We've all been worried sick. When your grandmother heard you'd gone missing, she had a heart attack and died.'

Meili slumps onto the floor, buries her head in her hands and weeps. 'I was arrested,' she cries out. 'Taken to a Custody and Repatriation Centre. It's a miracle I've made it back.'

'And what are you doing dressing like a prost.i.tute?' Kongzi barks, veins bulging from his neck.

'You merciless beast! I've suffered ten thousand hardships to get here, and this is how you welcome me . . .' The only sparks of light on Meili's drawn face are the tears in her blue-black eye sockets.

'I sent people to check every custody centre in the county, but you weren't there. Your brother's been with us for two weeks, and has gone searching for you every day.' He sits back down on the crate of beer, his temper subsiding a little.

'When did my grandmother die?' Meili asks, wiping snot and lipstick on the bed sheet.

'October the 9th your birthday,' Kongzi replies, taking out a cigarette.