The Drink and Dream Teahouse Read online

  He walked into the bedroom and felt his hands tremble as he pulled the top sheet off the bed. It resisted for a moment, so he yanked violently. Its folds ripped out from under the mattress and it swirled in the air before falling prone across the floor, one end still clamped in Party Secretary Li’s fist. He pulled it across the floor and jammed it under the bed leg so that it was rammed down tight, then began walking backwards, step by slow step. He twisted the sheet round and round, determined hands continuing the torture till the sheet was a white cotton rope. He kept twisting till the fibres groaned in protest, then he twisted it one more turn and the end of the rope began to bend into a noose.

  When he was satisfied, Party Secretary Li climbed onto the bed and reached up to tug on the fan shaft. It felt solid enough. He tied the rope onto the fan with a knot the size of a skull, then climbed down. There were four dirty footprints embedded into the cotton quilt, that still smelt freshly washed. He imagined his wife having to re-wash the sheet, and silently rebuked himself.

  Party Secretary Li’s shaking hands patted out his last footsteps and smoothed back the hair from his head as he took a deep breath. His wife’s face haunted him for a moment‌–‌she would understand, he thought, she knew what the factory meant to him‌–‌then he took another deep breath. It didn’t calm his nerves. He looked around the room, on the desk lay his brush and the ink-smeared plate. Yes, that’s what he had to do. He took the brush and wrote huge black characters across his bedroom wall, reaching up high for the top characters and bending down low for the bottom ones. As he wrote the ink dripped one huge character into another, like they were banding together for solidarity.

  They were still dripping as Party Secretary Li washed the ink from his brush and returned it to its porcelain holder. He put the lid on the ink bottle and then turned to face the bed. He checked his cigarettes in his breast pocket, took off his shoes, neatly arranged them next to each other, then stepped up. The soft mattress swallowed his feet and he swayed like a man aboard ship, hanging on to the rope to steady himself. When he was steady he lit his cigarette and put the noose around his neck, and it lay on his shoulders like the arm of a trusted friend.

  As Party Secretary Li smoked his hands shook terribly. Half way down he threw his fag away. Closed his eyes. Took a deep breath.

  And stepped.

  Off the bed.

  The noose tightened slowly and Party Secretary Li gasped for breath, his fingers clawing at his neck. His feet kicked violently; his lips peeled back in a desperate grimace. His breathing became strangled gasps. Blood started out where his fingers had scratched. After a few minutes the violence of his kicking slowed to an erratic waltz. Urine trickled down his legs as his bowels opened. His gasps changed to gurgles. His open mouth gaped like a beached fish. His eyes bulged.

  There was a brief moment when the throttling pain lifted: the words on the wall swam together, and the last thing his straining eyes focused on was a single thread of ink, dripping down the wall.

  The ink dried to a thin crust of black on the white plaster as a crowd gathered outside the door of Party Secretary Li’s flat. Old Zhu directed them as they brought up a large hammer. Stand back, he shouted, stand back. The hammer swung and the empty rooms echoed with shouting voices and the thuds of the pounding hammer. Party Secretary Li heard nothing as he hung above the bed, his sporadic twitches stilled, his feet motionless.

  When the metal door was bent and twisted it was kicked open, and the residents of Shaoyang Number Two Space Rocket Factory rushed inside. They spread through the flat in a panicked crowd while Old Zhu walked straight to the closed bedroom door and pushed it open. Party Secretary Li’s body was suspended from the roof, feet swaying slightly in the draft from the door. Old Zhu stopped and shook his old head, felt shock clutch his throat. He gasped and shivered, felt tears build up in his stomach and start to rise.

  Madam Fan’s husband helped Old Zhu pull the body down. They both flinched as the warm head flopped unnaturally on the stretched neck, and the legs left a cold smear of sewage on the bed. Madam Fan’s husband closed the staring eyes as Old Zhu wiped his hands in disgust. Madam Fan’s husband curled his lip when he saw that shit had landed on both his shoes. Old Zhu looked up through his tears and saw the black characters across the wall, Party Secretary Li’s final message:

  Honour and wealth are gusts of wind

  That blow for a while then disappear.

  That night the pale moon rose in the eastern sky, before the storm clouds rolled over it. Thick soaking clouds that dropped anchor over the factory and started to rain. The first drops rang out loudly as they dashed against the windowpane. The individual rattles increased to a thunder like the firecrackers that had celebrated Spring Festival only fifteen days before.

  As the rain fell Autumn Cloud sat alone, sniffing in the cold azure candlelight, grief turning slowly in her gut. Tears of sleet built up a thousand layers of cold, a cold so fierce it stunned the flesh. To Old Zhu the world seemed unbearably damp, and he took a candle to melt his melancholy with a cup of wine. Madam Fan struggled to sing her lines of opera, A young nun am I, sixteen years of age; My head was shaven in my young maidenhood; her voice drowned out by the noise of the falling water.

  All night the truculent heavens poured their anger down on the factory, swamping the nearby paddy fields and the streets alike. The gutters burst, the river flooded; the streets were opaque with rain.

  In the Li family flat the ceiling sprang a leak. Water seeped through the roof and slithered down the shaft of the fan. It collected on the fan’s underside, the water gathered and swelled up to a droplet, and jumped. Unseen in the empty room of Party Secretary Li’s last lines, the water dripped that long night to pieces.

  Old Zhu woke to a sky draped with black clouds and imagined he was submerged underwater. Raindrops fell unceasingly, splashing off the roofs and windows like shattering jade. The sight of Party Secretary Li hanging by a stretched neck on a rope of cotton blanket came back to him. He felt winter in his bones like never before. He climbed stiffly out of the soft mattress and saw that all the leaves had dropped during the night. Madam Fan stepped out into the morning to sing her arias. She stood on her balcony, cleared her throat and the world held its breath, but all that followed was a silence that prickled the skin.

  The stillness woke Autumn Cloud. She’d dreamt she was standing by a grey lake at dawn, watching a boat drift beyond the headland. She sat and for a moment wondered why the world felt so heavy, then remembered her husband’s death, and it crushed her again. Her solitude was intensified by the relentless babble of memories, all their old regretted quarrels restaged. Autumn Cloud sat down at the table and drank some cold green tea left over from the night before. It was bitter and thick, but she couldn’t taste it. Water dripped in the empty room; the flat was full of echoing footsteps.

  Autumn Cloud clutched her cup for comfort as the rainwater stretched the windowpanes. The picture of the boat came to her mind again, drifting out to sea. The boat faded away without leaving even a single ripple, and her heart drifted after. She battled with a wave of hatred for the husband who had abandoned her, cast adrift on the far edge of loneliness; but hatred was too exhausting to sustain, all she felt was gaping loss.

  Old Zhu went out rake in hand, but there were so many leaves he didn’t know where to start. An icy gust combed the old man’s bones and his organs shivered. The black trees rattled as he looked up and saw a light on in Party Secretary Li’s flat. In the square of the window was Autumn Cloud’s face, staring down the path for someone who would never come again. He looked at the leaves and shook his head. They fell and grew again year after year while his body only got older. There was no sense to it all. Another icy gust rattled the branches, Old Zhu let out a long sigh, and began to rake the endless wet leaves off the path.

  The rain seemed to lessen as a truck pulled up, white headlights pale in the chill mist. A man smoking the wet butt of a cigarette climbed out and walked towards Old Zhu
. ‘Is this the place of Party Secretary Li?’ the man shouted across, breath hanging in the air.

  Old Zhu wiped the damp from his face as he looked up. ‘It is.’

  The man shouted back to the truck ‘Get to work!’ and five peasants jumped down and began to unload bamboo poles that rattled on the gravel, shivered for a moment, then lay still. The men worked without the need to talk, tying poles together as the rain dripped from the trees and the last few leaves swung down to the ground. When the frame was up and steady they pulled a plastic sheet from the truck and threw it over the top. It billowed in the breeze like a bird taking flight, until they tied it down and weighed it to earth with stones and bricks. The plastic sheeting was striped red and blue and white. Red for the Communist Party; blue for the sky; white for death, winter snow and the unwritten page.

  The peasants finished their work and climbed back into the truck. Old Zhu shivered in the damp. His clothes and flesh no protection against the cold, he felt: the cold of moonlight shimmering on his gravestone. He bent to his work, raking mounds of colour up from the earth and felt a moment’s warmth in his soul. He thought of Party Secretary Li’s suicide and the factory closing, and tried to make it fit what he knew about the world.

  ‘Where’s the widow?’ the truck driver shouted across as he gave the marquee a final check.

  Old Zhu nodded up towards the window where Autumn Cloud’s pale face seemed half a ghost through the glass’s reflections.

  ‘What kind of funeral do you think she wants?’ the man asked.

  ‘The best,’ Old Zhu said.

  ‘Is she rich?’

  Old Zhu smiled. ‘No one here is rich.’

  ‘Does she work?’

  ‘She’s retired.’

  ‘What about the factory?’

  ‘It’s closed.’

  The man spat the stub of cigarette out onto the floor. ‘All the factories are closed.’

  Old Zhu didn’t answer. Closed factories were something he didn’t understand.

  ‘Everyone in this shitty town’s jobless.’ The man kicked a stone, then laughed suddenly. ‘Especially when you ask them to pay the bill!’

  Old Zhu stiffened. ‘You’ll get your money, don’t worry about that.’

  The man looked at him and his gaze hardened for a moment. Then he turned back and walked towards the truck.

  ‘Remember, we want the best!’ Old Zhu shouted after him. White hair, old skin and terrible fear of death. The man made no reaction as he climbed into the cabin and revved the engine and pulled away. Old Zhu watched the truck disappear back through the curtain of grey rain. It left nothing behind but tracks in the mud, a swirling cloud of exhaust, and the funeral marquee in the shadow of the trees.

  Party Secretary Li’s body was laid out on an old wooden table, covered with a red cloth. The body had been dressed in a blue Mao suit, buttoned close around the collar. There was a sash of scarlet and gold across the right shoulder and a grey uncomfortable expression on his lips. At the end of the table Old Zhu and the neighbours carried an old chest of drawers. The polish had been worn through by generations of hands, the brass fittings were black with age. Old Zhu dusted it down with his hand and spread a white cloth on top of it, and a photo of the dead man. No longer a chest of drawers, but a shrine.

  No one could agree on what the traditional funerary offerings should be, so objects accumulated during the morning as they occurred to people. Autumn Cloud cooked pig’s tripe and green chillies and put them on a plate on the tabletop. She lingered there looking at the soles of her husband’s shoes, that made almost a right angle, and thought how much he liked that dish. She wished she’d cooked it for him every day‌–‌breakfast, lunch and dinner. She wanted to cook all his favourite foods, and imagined the mouth-watering smells might raise him from the dead.

  Old Zhu’s wife stroked Autumn Cloud’s hair, and sat her down near the body. She went to comfort Autumn Cloud as Madam Fan rearranged the offerings and put the incense pot at the front. Madam Fan fussed over the prominence of food and photo and pot, then cleared her throat, and asked, ‘Has anyone here got any matches?’

  One of the neighbours’ husbands gave her his, and she lit the two red candles as a squad of old women came hobbling up from nowhere and sat down in the middle of the marquee. They had half a mouthful of teeth between them, and white rags wrapped around their heads

  ‘Wah! Red candles at a funeral,’ one of them hissed, ‘that’s bad luck,’ and they all tutted and shook their heads at Madam Fan, who glared back and muttered loud enough to be heard, ‘Red or white‌–‌it doesn’t matter.’

  The old crones got themselves comfortable and began to wail, encouraging each other’s efforts, then losing concentration and falling away into conversation. They loudly discussed the cost of the marquee, the extravagance of the funeral gifts, the life of the dead man and the bad luck his family would now have. Madam Fan tried as hard as she could to make them feel unwelcome but they were not to be budged. They’d come for the day.

  Autumn Cloud didn’t hear the old women’s comments. All she could see and hear was the past, locked into the present and turning over and over. People filed into the marquee to present wreaths of coloured paper, and Autumn Cloud looked up from her memories that were more real than their faces, and smiled briefly. As each person came the old women nudged each other and stopped talking to wail some more. Eventually Madam Fan tipped them five yuan, hoping they would leave, but they refused to be bought off and wailed a little louder instead. They rocked on their bony old buttocks and sucked their gums as sandalwood incense rose in the air; sobbing and falling away as black smoke swirled off from the red candles and the twilight shade deepened.

  Eventually the file of mourners slowed for the day and the onlookers got bored and wandered back to their dinners. One of them came back with some left-over rice to sustain the sad. The old women showed determined agility as they hobbled over to be first in line. They ate hungrily, polishing their bowls clean with their chopsticks. Then they considered their job well done, got up and walked away.

  ‘What kind old women,’ Autumn Cloud said watching them go.

  ‘Bloodsuckers,’ Madam Fan thought.

  As the sun set a tangle of evening crows flew back to their roosts. Autumn Cloud shivered, not from the cold, but because she was exhausted by the voices in her head and because a night without her husband seemed unbearably long. She got up to go back to her flat but as she did so the crows flapped in the branches and croaked in disgust. Everyone looked pleadingly at the black birds, but they flapped and croaked again.

  ‘I think I ought to stay,’ Autumn Cloud said.

  ‘You’ll catch your death of cold,’ Old Zhu’s wife insisted.

  Autumn Cloud refused to move. Old Zhu’s wife fussed around her, but she wouldn’t be budged. ‘This is the last hardship we’ll share together,’ she said, so they brought quilts down from their houses, and Autumn Cloud wrapped them around her shoulders to warm her frail body. She sat and tortured herself by imagining going back to the morning of the Lantern Festival and stopping her husband taking the path that slanted off towards his death. She fantasised ten thousand possible endings, and found herself back in this one, alone.

  At around ten o’clock a group of tired musicians came stumbling out of the rain and stood in the candle flames. There were three old men carrying an amplifier and a heavy speaker. They were stooped and their heads stuck out from their shoulders like three old tortoises. Behind them stood a young girl dressed in a white T-shirt and blue jeans who was cradling a microphone in a transparent plastic bag.

  ‘Is this Party Secretary Li’s funeral?’ the girl asked the figure by the coffin.

  Autumn Cloud answered, ‘It is.’

  The girl let out a long sigh and collapsed onto the bench, and the old men began to unpack their gear. One had a pair of symbols, another a drum, while the third sat down, tuned the strings of his erhu, began to play. The girl took her microphone out of its bag
and began to sing. She sang the modern love songs she heard on the radio, full of love and loss and love again, that were amplified out into the dark rainy night. People sat in their cold flats and listened to her beautiful voice: it was young and soft and caressing, full of the hopes they had lost over the years.

  The girl sang to the spirits as the red candles burnt themselves down, and then went out. The marquee was plunged into darkness and the musicians stopped playing. All they could hear was Autumn Cloud’s gentle sobbing.

  ‘What time is it?’ the girl’s voice whispered.

  A cigarette lighter spurted flame for an instant, yellow with a nimbus of blue, then one of the men said softly, ‘Nearly midnight.’

  ‘OK, let’s go home,’ the girl said, and they left.

  The musicians came back the second night: one girl and three old men walking out of the shade. They stood in the orange glow of the lamplight, silently unpacking their instruments as the girl coughed to clear her throat, ran her hand through her damp hair and took a deep breath.

  People waited in their flats, sitting silently until the girl began to sing the latest pop songs from Taiwan and Hong Kong. They were songs with heartbroken lyrics, words that took Autumn Cloud back to a time, fifty years before, when she’d sung love songs too‌–‌before love became bourgeois. She was still lost in the past when she heard a sniff through the music. The girl was crying as she sang; diamond-black tears wearing grooves down her cheeks. It was as if she was singing of all the sadness her life would hold‌–‌either that or the death of Party Secretary Li had touched her soul.

  ‘Take her home,’ Autumn Cloud said. ‘She’s too young to sing at a wake.’

  The old men shuffled forward into the candlelight and she studied their worn tortoise faces, and bright old eyes that sparkled with miniature candle flames. ‘We need the money,’ one of them said.

  ‘Our grand-daughter …’ another began, but Autumn Cloud cut them off.