何木：A Shadow in Surfers Paradise(1-29)天堂之影

洋八路

A shadow in Surfers Paradise

By He Mu

Chapter List

Part 1

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7

Part II

Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17

Part III

Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29

The rest chapters go to separate posts.






Chapter 1



From the busy Esplanade, he strolls down to the beach, feeling himself suddenly thrown in an exotic, dreamy place.

The day has already passed its twilight, he sees no tourists but one or two white specks of seagull flitting about the water line. The low tide is lapping lazily, the sea spreading to a vague line of horizon where it was lost and merged to the one duskiness.  

In front of him, a shadow is flipping over from his feet. Like a distorted mirror might have done to him, it is stretching extensively in both length and width. Its legs are enormous like twin tree trunks, and the head at the end of it is by proportion very small and singularly idiotic. However, all parts seem to have moulded well within an intriguing delineation, conjuring up a ghostly presence of unreality.

Bing gazes at it for a long moment as if he sees his shadow first time in his life, or rather, a mere apparition wrecked and washed over by the sea.

‘Well, just a shadow!’ he murmurs in his mind, wondering how it can be cast so distinctly. He looks back over his shoulder, tracing its source to a light rigged up high in a lamp pole that, like a beacon, is beaming brightly over the beach and in its path making his shadow, as well as many dark, fist-sized eddies dappling on the sand bed.

He treads further towards the water and the shadow, dead and lifeless a moment ago, is at once animated, mimicking closely each of his motion.

It is the third time he has visited the Surfers Paradise which, located in the city of Gold Coast in Queensland, is an Australia’s iconic tourist destination. The first time was some years ago on a trip with his parents, and his then wife and his daughter; this time and the last he came here on business. The three-day conference has just finished this afternoon and tomorrow he will fly Virgin Blue back to Sydney, where he has lived almost ten years after graduating from Deakin University in Melbourne.

Actually there is someone waiting for him in Sydney, with whom he thinks he is well in love. The thought of her momentarily warms him up, and he feels both his feet and spirit are lightening.   

Intrigued by the shadow gesturing in his front, he wants to take a photo. Indeed, there is a Chinese saying, ‘Chase the wind and catch the shadow,’ suggesting the kind of vain effort in pursuing the nonexistent. But he may still give it a try.

He fumbles in his pocket for his Blackberry, an asset of the company he works for. He turned it on and the sudden brightness almost dazzles him. But as soon as he presses the camera button, it dims back to darkness. At first glimpse, there is nothing visible on the screen. So he waits a few seconds, allowing his eyes to adapt to the low level of illumination. And gradually an outline of his shadow is perceptible, and moreover, on its background, there are numerous golden bits remarkably glittering, which can’t be detected on the actual field.     

‘This is marvellous,’ he says, pressing the button, triggering a flashlight, disrupting the scene and all the more surprising him. However, after the screen has settled itself, he can’t discern anything but blankness in the taken picture. He then knows in dismay that the flash has overexposed the weak light that had produced the image. He is about to try again without it, when a beep, the sound of arriving SMS, interrupts him.  

It is from her in Sydney.

He locates the message, and opening up, it says, ‘Sorry, you are not the type of man I am looking for, everything should end from here, and good luck to you.’
 

--------- End of Chapter 1 ----

romanticlady

坐在沙发里慢慢看，恭喜楼主完成了这部长篇巨作！

romanticlady

一开篇主人公就收到一个分手短信，真是不幸。楼主的描写很细腻。

blackswan

英文小说啊，只敢围观，无法给意见了

romanticlady

还是沙发？

今天的长了些，回家慢慢看。

aladdin_lamp

膜拜一下
好奇问问，楼主多大来澳洲的

aladdin_lamp

LZ回答问题，就想知道多少年能练就您这样的英文水平呢

狗头君

说实话，文笔灰常生硬，看得出英语是第二语言

myfuturezhang

有谁总结一下，讲啥的，中文都看不下去，别说英文了

romanticlady

楼主贴得不辛苦，我看得不轻松，关键是自己的英文太差了。不过这倒是个很好的学习机会，感谢楼主。这两天手头紧张，先白条啊。

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-20 16:43
Chapter 3  -- 3/3

Chapter 4    1/2



October was the mid-spring month in Australia, which was supposed to be the best of the year. But Friday was unusually warm and sultry, the air stagnant and damp. However, it didn’t last long. Mother Nature couldn’t tolerate any extremes of such condition, which was exactly what had happened on the late afternoon, when the wind started blowing at increasing speed, followed by a sprinkling of rain. A day’s fever that had scorched the earth was therefore eased, the weather returning to its healthy balance.

During the day, knowing that Serena regarded him barely as a friend, Bing had let his pride take over his reckless preoccupation with her. His passionate scheme, intended to impress her, apparently had not worked well. So far, Serena had expressed little appreciation or opinion if any about him as a person, or about things he had done during last few days. She was tight-lipped, resisting from revealing herself even under his persistent, sinuous probing for the purpose. The only comfort for him was that the channel of communication was still open, and they seemed to be getting on well, from their QQ dialogue of last night, on the guidelines of mere friendship.

After his early supper, which comprised rice and a dish of beef mixed with cabbage he had made himself, plus a cold beer, he felt himself listlessly bored. Inside the room, the heat was still lingering; at least one more hour was needed to cool it down. So Bing decided to take a walk outside.

Baulkham Hills, in Sydney’s hills district, about 40km west to the Sydney CBD, was the suburb where he had lived in since he three years ago divorced and moved out from the house in nearby Seven Hills. Becoming a bachelor again, he rent a room in a granny flat, a two-bedroom unit renovated originally from a garage. The flat was separate from the main building, providing the privacy and independence he had so wished.

His last, actually the sixth roommate during his three years’ residence in the place, was a local Aussie called Jack, who had moved out recently. In fact Jack,  was kicked out by the landlord, David Lee, an immigrant from Hong Kong, who spoke Cantonese but little Mandarin. Jack, an alcoholic and also a possible occasional drug user as suspected by one of David’s friends, was troublesome. Although he worked for a respectful company, he seemed to be forever short of money, delaying the rent payment more often than David could tolerate. But the actual incident that triggered David’s determination to remove Jack from the flat was rather melodramatic.

One day, Jack reported to David that the flat had been robbed and that $500, his rent money for the coming month, was gone. David, shocked and alarmed, rushed to the flat, and saw the two rooms turned in a chaotic mess. The drawers of bureaus and bedside tables were all pulled out. Papers, clothes, magazines and beer bottles were littering all over the place. But strangely enough, the main door and windows were unbroken and unscathed. The burglar must have by some means got the key or used some special tools for the robbery. Jack claimed his money was hidden beneath his pillow, but now it was not there. Then he started complaining, blaming Bing for leaving and storing the key somewhere in the garden, and that he suspected the thief must have discovered it and used it for the theft.

When Bing came home, and checked for any loss, he found his $300, saved between the leaves of a book, was still there. His laptop too was intact. He argued against the idea that the robbery was due to his careless manner. True he hid the key in the garden, but it was in the backyard, and there wouldn’t be any other people knowing it, apart from Jack and himself.

A sort of argument between the tenants went on. David proposed reporting to the police, but Jack simply said no, saying police involvement would only waste time and that he would rather swallow his loss himself, so long as Bing wouldn’t leave his key in the lawn in the future.

During the night, suspicious as the case seemed to be, Bing and David were discussing this matter seriously.
       
‘Never ever has my house been robbed in my 13 years of living here,’ David told Bing, his anxiety vivid in his eyes. ‘The Hills District has always been safe and peaceful. There is no railway station in the suburb. Most of the residents are families, the law-abiding good citizens. How could this have happened?’

‘Do you believe Jack that someone took the key from under the lawn grass?’ Bing asked.

‘I don’t know. But that is very unlikely,’ David replied, frowning. ‘I didn’t even know you hid it there.’

‘Did you notice Jack behaving very strangely? I saw his eyes dilating as if intoxicated. I think he had been drinking since yesterday, so many empty bottles in his room.’

‘I hated this guy since he last time brought some friends, arguing and quarrelling after drinking, and disturbing the neighbours,’ David recalled, ‘I thought of giving him a chance. I didn’t like his long scrawny face, so evil looking.’

‘Then why did you let him take the room in the first place?’ asked Bing, who had also found Jack very disagreeable and capricious during the three months of their sharing the flat.       

‘He literally begged me to give him a chance, asking desperately for a place to tide over. And he worked for a good company. His bright uniform seemed to atone for his ugly face. The bus drivers, security guards, even those working in the bank like tellers, or stewards in planes, or simply put, the sort of people wearing uniform, would usually impress me with their reliability and honesty. I thought I ought to be fair, and not to judge a person by his facial appearance.’

‘Haha, good on you, even bank tellers,’ Bing was amused by this uniform-based judgement of a character, and distracted a moment to Serena, a bank teller, wondering if she should be safe and reliable.

‘Well, but, never easy to know a person,’ David went on, ‘I even called his company, talked to one of his colleagues, a referee he had provided. He is only twenty something, but his scraggy face, with those sunken cheeks and ridged bones, if judged by Chinese Zodiac reading, is really indicating some evil element.’

David paused to drink his tea, and Bing was surmising a possible scenario. ‘Well, from the way he behaved, as well as the weird nature of the incident, I guess it was himself making the whole scene.’

‘I suspected that too. But what was the motive?’

‘There were two possible motives, one is he was drinking and out of cash again, and tried to delay his rent; another was he might have known I had some cash in my room, the $300 for the fortnight rent, and under the influence of alcohol or even drugs, was trying to steal it. And, in order to make it look like more a conduct of the indiscriminative thieves, he messed up everything.’

‘Ehm, very interesting,’ David grinned, in spite of his concern. ‘But he was not intelligent enough to make it more credible, if that was the case.’

‘Well, he was influenced by the liquid or even drugs. I even saw the utter disappointment in his eyes when I searched out my cash,’ Bing said, ‘and he looked rather scared when you talked about reporting the matter to the police.’

The Sherlock-Holmes type of deduction went on into the night. But the more they talked about it, they more believed it was Jack fabricating the scene. Then David, a father of two, decided to take no more risks, giving both Jack and Bing two-weeks’ notice to move out. The reason given was the safety of his family, stating that he couldn’t tolerate such horrible scenes happening in his house.

Jack, very tall more than 180cm, boomed and swore furiously and extensively, protesting that how they should become the victims of a burglar’s crime, and that he had already lost $500 and a landlord had no right to drive him out because of that. However, David appeared very determined and nonnegotiable, standing firm with his short and small body against many of Jack’s F-words and threats. But since David already knew Jack had a reason to fear the police, probably with a record either for drugs or other offences, he was confident there wouldn’t be any severe consequences in the end. He further emphasized that his parents-in-law were coming to Australia in a couple of months, and so the flat wouldn’t be available anyway.

On last day of the leave notice, Bing moved out, and Jack, after finding no effect of his threatening, followed suit. Jack at first suspected that it was only him being kicked out, and frequently asked and checked with David when Bing was to move. His suspicion was not unfounded, for only two days later, Bing moved back in, his things having been temporarily stored in David’s place.

Since the incident, David was reluctant to rent the other room to other people. Safety was first, money second, he had to make sure his two kids and his wife were not within vicinity of any danger. And finding a good, trouble-free tenant was rather difficult in the suburbs where a train station was unavailable, for the potential tenants might be limited to those with work and car, excluding other needy candidates such as students.

So, the drama closed, Bing had become the only beneficiary; he was in a two-bedroom flat, but paying rent for only one.
In a pair of slippers, Bing opened the thick and heavy door, and closed it heavily after him. He said ‘Hi’ to David, who, bending his back, was digging something in the garden. His two boys were cackling and running about the yard.

On the driveway, the bordering palm trees were flourishing, their dangling foliage shuffling silently in the wind, and their fat, tapering trunks sat on the ground unbelievably like a woman’s thighs overturned. In the front yard, the giant jacaranda tree was blooming fantastically. Its purple flowers, probably blown and stripped by the strong afternoon wind, were covering a large round surface, part of the lawn, part of the walk path, like a thick velvety carpet, dazzling with its iridescent splendour. It was indeed the best time for this type of tree in the Hills. Bing, on his way to and from work, were often so fascinated by many of its violet magnificence along the street that he couldn’t help but pull off his car to take some photos. However, when it was not in such a blossom, or dormant in the season of winter, it would drop off its numerous thin leaves and branches, as well as the flat and hard winged seeds onto the ground, making a mess, causing the lawn under its wide coverage to a near barrenness. To this, David had been complaining and threatening to cut the one in his front yard, but since it had to get the approval from the council, he had never put his words into action. And Bing was pretty sure David would definitely regret and miss its purple wonder in front of his house, if he did remove it one day.

On the outside footpath, the birds, concealed in the dense leaves of many trees along the road, and the crickets imprisoned in the grass paradise, were singing, and arguing as if about the boredom of their lives in heaven.

Bing had walked innumerable times towards the little park, a so called reserve just about three hundred metres around the corner.  Most of the time he was alone on the road, but might also come across other people who took their evening leisure out of their home confinement, such as a jogging couple, a single with or without a pet, a mother with a toddler, one or two kids on bicycles. But this evening, the road was all clear. Residents were perhaps not recovered from the day’s unusual warmth, and preferred staying in their air-conditioned home. Therefore, as he sauntered on the tidy footpath, Bing felt an expansive ownership of the space, touching one or two little white flowers that peered out from the side growth. The house roofs, of red or grey tiles, were clean and sleepy in the approaching dusk. Some of them were overlaid with spreads of solar panels, smooth and shimmering. The wooden electric pole, which somehow always awed him with its diligence and endurance day and night in their quiet service, was tempting him to touch its surface. The texture, battered and worn by all seasons, looked very dry and rough in his eyes, but intimate and natural in his hands.  

Turning left, he was officially in the park. A broad greenish lawn was spreading out like an immense blanket. A circle of a children’s playground was in the middle. With its coloured plastic slides, castles, and swings, the facility appeared to be a kind of alien intrusion into the green vegetations. No kids were presently within the facility; most of the time it just stood there like a friend used and then deserted by his friends. Beside the playground, there was a big tree towering majestically, claiming a substantial space of sky. And, hanging on one of its outstretched branches, was a sizable, dry and dead twig, which must have been there for a long time, at least since he noticed it in his first visit three years ago. Every time Bing walked in the park, he would check to see if it was still there, to see if its position remained unchanged.

Yes, it was always there, and its position had never changed. He wondered when the twig had been broken and separated from its parent tree, and how, while falling to the ground, it had been rescued half way by another peer branch.

Sometimes, there was a tiny bird perching in its dangling middle. In the evening dusk, its small motionless figure looked excessively feeble, vulnerable and melancholy, and his pessimistic view of general life would suddenly chill his mood, stirring his sentimental thread that was nothing but sadness.

The twig, he believed, would stay there so long as the whole tree was still alive, and whatever time it may be it ought to be much longer than his own remaining years on the earth.

Today there was no bird resting on it.

---to next post---

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-22 14:04
Chapter 4   2/2

Chapter 5    1/2


The next morning, believing his goal a large step closer as a result of the effective communication with Serena the night before, he went to work with a jubilant heart.

As soon as he arrived in the office, he sent her a SMS, ‘I cancelled the “doctor” appointment. Don’t think it is worth the time and, you don’t want me to go.’

‘But I hope you go.’ She replied in real time.

‘What? You hope I go? But I have already cancelled it!’ His pretence was with a layer of chagrin.

No more response from her, nor did he send her any message during the day until after he came back home. After supper, he visited the Lucky Love website, and by reviewing Serena’s profile, he surmised, from the timestamp of her last logon, she must be online. So he quickly hooked up with her in QQ.

‘Are you there?’

‘Yes.’ Her response was instant.

‘I thought you were at your friend’s’

‘No, I am at home all the afternoon.’

‘But you told me yesterday you needed see a friend after work.’

‘No, I didn’t.’ Her reply was cross and rude, as if she was in a temper.  
  
‘Oh…’His spirit of the day had reached the south, and for a moment, he desired no more dialogue with her. She was either dishonest by not telling him the truth, or disrespectful by not giving him an explanation he thought he had a right to know.
   
A number of minutes had slipped by in silence, before abruptly, without a proper prelude, her message came to him, ‘Do you want to see me now?’

He was surprised  and startled with a flush, and the turn of his mood was radical. ‘I desire it very much,’ and, ‘I have been restless the whole day.’

‘Then let’s meet soon, at the service station,’ and, ‘I reckon I should be frank with you by saying things directly.’

‘What time?’

‘6:30pm,’ she answered. Bing checked the time, and replied, ‘already 6:15pm, can’t make it from Baulkham Hills to Ashfield, let’s make it 7pm.’

‘Fine, you call me when you arrive. Two minutes in advance.’

‘Fine, c u.’

Bing had to rush. He slipped off his shirt and put on a yellow-and-white striped T-shirt he thought to be the best match for his pants, went straight to the bathroom, took off his spectacles and checked his face and hair at double the usual speed. Then, grabbing his three essentials, he trod out of the door, but at the threshold, he paused and, reckoning of a need, he went back in for the toilet.

A minute later, he was on the road. Excited as he was, but it was only with the fact she had initiated a meeting. She said she should be frank with him by saying things directly, what did she really mean? What did she try to say to him? Was she about to tell him frankly and directly that she wouldn’t be able to love him? If so, why didn’t she just tell him so in QQ or SMS? Why bother having a face-to-face meeting?

He was thinking hard. Then he realized the music was too loud, noisy and distracting. He turned it off and felt he was now able to think straight. OK, she wanted to be frank, and she wanted to see me personally; she wanted to look into my eyes directly and express something to me. Yes, she was ready, but her readiness required one or two preconditions, which she was going to check with me. What could they possibly be?

What if she asked to check his ID? Some people demanded it even on the first date, which was sensible and reasonable enough. After all, who could trust the internet these days, where reality could be so well dotted and mosaicked? If he were an honest person, Bing should have told her everything at their first meeting or even before, or simply told the truth of his age, marital status and the number of children on the Lucky Love. However, he didn’t regard himself as an honest person, not in the conventional way, and he perceived an honest person as being dull, lack-lustre, and somehow without imagination. He believed he was honest with himself, honest with his own heart, not necessarily to others.

At any rate, he would tell her the truth when both of them had developed a feeling for each other and seriously began to consider a relationship, or marriage. Otherwise, why did he have to reveal all the facts about himself? Especially to someone from the internet, who would slip away quickly like a loach in the field after a few meetings? Even Serena herself didn’t reveal her true age at their first text messaging and meeting. She said her age had not been added automatically on the web site; but he was inclined to assume she had wanted to be in the age group under thirty, so that she could become a target for many Chinese male prospects who would only consider younger females. To many Chinese, thirty was a clear boundary line to distinguish a girl from a spinster. Therefore, her age registration under thirty was realistically motivated, although it mattered little to him.

During the half an hour trip, Bing was vigorously pondering, self-explaining, and justifying his disingenuous approach of hunting for a partner, or his second wife, but deriving no comfort to settle his troubled anticipation and apprehension.
‘Well, whatever!’ He said to himself, slowing to wait for a traffic light. ‘I will soon find out.’

Entering to the territory of Ashfield, he received a text line from her, ‘Drive slowly and safely, I know it’s a bit far from here.’
Oh, what a charmful, soft and feminine message! She was caring for him! Her words sounded all positive!

All at once, his spirit was turning to north, accompanied by a soft and warm flow in his chest. The uncertainty and misgivings that had bothered him along his drive had now vanished.

A light of hope was indeed glowing in his tunnel of darkness.

With no difficulty, he drove to the service station, for he remembered the place when he had dropped her off at the first meeting. He stopped the car in the customer parking area, wondering if he was allowed to stay in the place without filling gas or buying anything from the shop. But he brushed off this small concern and sent her a message to inform her of his arrival.
Turning off the engine, he turned the music back on, hoping she might like listening to it, based on her comment last time. Romanticism was always important in the courting business.

Waiting excitedly, his eyes searched about the corner from where she was supposed to emerge. And, there, in just seconds, she came out, so glamorous and marvellous looking. Dressed like a city girl cat-walking in the street towards a party, she was almost a new person to him. Her leopard-spotty pants were outlining perfectly her long legs and full thighs, affecting and stirring his very moments.

She was coming to him. She smiled. A quick flush spread over her face, radiating and emitting a charm that Bing, for the years he could remember, had not seen on any woman’s face he had ever encountered. So feminine and tantalizing, and seductive, that he must have been stupefied, at least for a time long enough for Serena to notice.       

‘Hehe, don’t stare at me, you should open the door for me, like a gentleman.’ She said, lightly, but waking him up
Awkward and a little numbed, he didn’t get out of the car, but stretched out his left hand towards the passenger door, lifted its handle, pushed the door to a little crack, and replied, ‘Not sure if I can park here or not,’ which was absolutely not to the point of her comment.

She pulled open the door, seated herself, and said, ‘Let’s go to Newtown, there is a good vegetarian restaurant.’

Bing had heard of Newtown but had no idea how to get there, for he could recall no times he had been there before. So he used GPS.

On the way, Bing was feeling dangerously short of topics for in-car conversation. But for some unclear reason, Serena was becoming very talkative. She seemed to know the roads very well, from a time to another pointing out a better route, as she believed, than that advised by the GPS. But still, Bing had missed one or two turns, because in his current state of mind, he couldn’t concentrate on either the driving, or her talking. At one traffic light, he went wrongly into the Right Turn Only lane waiting, instead of continuing straight ahead. When the light for Right Turn changed to green, he was hesitating, unmoving. A taxi behind him, after giving out a number of horn-warnings but without Bing’s any movement, had to pull around him, throwing out some words Bing didn’t dare to hear. All the while he was as diffident and unnerved as if he was doing his driving test, and Serena, who sat there like the driving instructor and paid no heed to his moment of plight, kept on telling him the right direction. When the Forward light turned green, he drove straight, and jerked straight along, uncaring for the cars on his left heading towards the same lane. Lucky, no horn was heard, no accident occurred. It was a relief.

But the stress didn’t end here. Newtown was a very busy suburb and looked exceedingly prosperous and intoxicating. Cars were packed tight along on the kerbs of its narrow streets. The numerous small but energetic shops rugged under the old, or threadbare, or only recently refurbished low buildings, and the swaggering stocky Australian men, seemed to take entire ownership of the street and the atmosphere.

Where to park? It was a million dollar question.

Guided by Serena, the car slipped into a small side road, and started searching for a precious slot. Yet hundreds of metres had passed by, no space in the sight. Then Serena said they needed to turn back, too far away from the Newtown centre, hard to walk the way back. So he made a U-turn, and still guided by her, dived into another little lane, yet the new hope died off completely to its end. At last, he simply drove blindly to anywhere he could pause for breath. He stopped the car on the side of the road, far away from where they, or correctly she, had wished to have dinner together.

‘Looks like we have to go to another place,’ he said, disoriented.

‘Yes, where to go?’ she acknowledged the failure as a simple fact, though her face was unemotional, without betraying a trace of displeasure.  

‘City, Opera House?’ he probed, meekly. Compared to her calmness, he was excessively uneasy, with a strange malaise in his disposition, as if he had been in some way treated unfairly. Their meeting had come up solely on her impulse, and he didn’t even know what kind of meeting it was going to be. It could be just a ‘Bye, bye, good luck to you’ type of thing at the service station, or a little walk somewhere in Ashfield, or eating again in the familiar Burwood. But he swore to the sky of Sydney that he had never imagined about eating vegetables in a vegetarian restaurant in such a tight and fit Newtown.

‘OK, up to you,’ she said, as if relinquishing a precious power to him.   
  
Feeling at a loss about where about they were, he again fiddled with the GPS. The destination was easily set, but the roads seemed to be a mess, too many little turns, too much lurching and roundabouts. Oh, what a joke and awful surface in this part of Sydney! The roads seemed even more complex than his complicated palm lines that would always puzzle a voluntary palm reader who somehow had an interest in deciphering his life and his fate, especially his love affairs or the number of marriages. And, for a flashing moment, he was thinking to miss badly the broad and regular and square Melbourne streets, and yes, his ex-lover Pan over there, who had been so kind to him, so easygoing, and considerate, and caring, more than any woman who had ever treated him except his mother.  

As if lost into the black holes, and growing more and more anxious and frustrated, he was, for the first time, not quite sure the GPS was doing the right job, wondering if he could eventually get out of Newtown and reach the city.

Then she raised her eyebrows, ‘Where are we going?’

‘The Opera House?’ he was confused by her question.

‘Isn’t it too noisy over there?’

‘Hum..yeah,’ he faltered.

‘Hehe, are you nervous again…maybe we go to UNSW?’ She had another idea, which nevertheless was taken by him as a sort of last straw to unravel his predicament. He didn’t want to make a decision, the power she had handed to him had proved to be a mere source of distress.

A new destination was set. The same GPS, but this time it seemed to be working perfectly.

‘How come you know the roads so well, considering you don’t drive; or do you?’ he asked, truly amazed with her knowledge of the road.

‘I studied in UNSW, and lived in Ashfield, I’ve been around here for nearly eight years,’ she replied proudly. ‘My ex-boyfriends used to drive me often in the area.’

Oh, her ex-boyfriends, she pronounced the prefix ‘ex’, and the suffix ‘s’ distinctly, chafing his ears not a little, especially when his driving skill was at its worst in his history.
  
Before waiting for his comment, she went on, ‘What have you been doing for all these years? Where have you been going?’ Her tone was obviously critical, suggesting he should have known this place very well, if he had been actively going out.
But her logic was ill and absurd. Why did he have to visit Newtown, and UNSW? Sydney was not as narrow as her mind!

‘Well, there are hundreds of suburbs in Sydney,’ he claimed, making a controlled effort to smooth the edge of his retort. ‘I often go to the northern suburbs and beaches.’ Not really the truth, but enough to counter her mean deliberation.

‘Well, we can go to the beach as well, if you like,’ she said, as if she had to show a bit womanish obedience to him. He was about to deter such a whim of hers by saying something, but she preceded him, ‘I need to go to the toilet.’

‘Oh, really?’ he cried out, what a difficult and beastly task at this point of time!

‘Yes, let’s go to UNSW.’

Bing imagined UNSW was far away. In his mind, that was at the other end of the city, even farther than Opera House. But he didn’t say anything, for she was the actual driver, for both stomach and toilet needs. However, when Serena said they were already in the road the university was on, he was indeed very surprised. Serena later explained Newtown and UNSW were very close, that was why she chose the place.

They drove off Anzac Parade to a small lane, and soon located a parking space along the street. Getting out of the car, he noticed the parking sign leering at him ominously like a scarecrow. He went over to it, so did Serena. The plate displayed ‘1P, Mon-Fri, 6am to 8pm’. There was no ticket machine about. So it was free to park during the range of time, but only for one hour. He checked the time, 7:25pm.

‘Should we buy a ticket?’ asked Serena, her eyes narrowing with concern.   

Bing was mused for a moment, his mind ticking. Then he said, ‘No, it doesn’t say a ticket is needed. But it has a one hour limit between 6am and 8pm.’

‘But we still have half an hour to go 8pm, what can we do? Should we wait here until 8pm?’ Serena queried, her wonder spreading over her face.

‘No, no. It means before 8pm it’s free for one hour; so if we park now, we are allowed up to 8:25pm, which will be already past the time limit...’ Bing paused, feeling suddenly confused with himself. Perhaps it was after all a clear and better option if they just waited the 35 minutes until 8pm. Easy and simple as it had been a while ago, he found it very difficult to explain. It was like helping his daughter doing her maths homework.

‘Well…’ she turned and moved on, seemingly giving up altogether an issue about which she shouldn’t have to bother, and he knew it was more important for her to go to the toilet.

He followed her, towards somewhere she must have already set her mind on. Watching her behind, Bing, only now, became aware that she was wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes, which made her walking unnatural. She was really sexy in the tightness of her spotty leopard-pants; the movement of her buttocks was extravagant and desire-inspiring. But he felt she was too tall for him in her high heels, and her body was just like those of dainty passers in the street: a man could look, and imagine, but painfully he couldn’t do anything to her.

They crossed Anzac Parade to where UNSW was located. They trotted on, briskly, her heels loudly knocking on the pavement. He knew she couldn’t wait to go to the toilet.

But she suddenly turned her head and asked him, though without slowing her advance, ‘Do you feel uncomfortable walking with me? In my high heels?’

‘No, no, I am fine. I’m not worried by your height,’ he said, telling the truth a little.

‘Then your will must be strong,’ she said. ‘Some boys, of your height, are not comfortable walking along with me.’

‘Well, I don’t see why they have to be uncomfortable. It is only a person, a head, a body, and some legs.’

But apparently his little sense of humour didn’t get to her ear, for her head had then turned to the restaurant she must have frequented during her study in the university.

--- to next post --

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-24 16:00
Chapter 5    1/2

Chapter 5   2/2


She opened the door and they entered. They were greeted, and he was seated, while she directed her high-heeled strides to the little corridor leading to the bathroom.

In a minute, she returned, lofty and lightly poised. In her face, the attractive flush that had stunned him earlier in the evening was no longer there; it was replaced with an expression of sternness and sophistication, and hard pride.

They ordered Pickled-Egg-Lean-Meat-Porridge for two, and a mushroom and mixed vegetable dish, and fried fish. They sat waiting, and before long a free soup, a typical entree in a Cantonese-style restaurant, was delivered. They began to drink. Serena said she was hungry.

Like last time, she ate actively, but, unlike last time, she was the one excessively voluble.

‘You are a very different person,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘The way you pursue a girl was like a schoolboy,’ she spoke as if recalling her younger, prime days. ‘That is something a boy of eighteen is supposed to do.’

‘Well…’

‘But at your age, it is…hehe…’

Bing looked at her, imagining of her entire jaw dropping if he told her his true age.

‘Well, people have feelings, regardless of how old they are.’

‘I know, but when one gets more mature, some feelings should not be taken so seriously. You should give a girl a time to breathe, even if you have a feeling for her. You are too honest, revealing too quickly your positive feelings towards a girl. You can be easily played by some girls with plenty of experience in courting.’

‘Played?’        

‘Yes, for instance, if I want to play with you, I can just go out with you every time you ask me, spending your money, but in the end, I won’t promise to give you anything. And you will be used. Your time and money will be wasted.’

‘Why? Wasted? No, no, my time and money will not be wasted, so long as I can use them happily and willingly. And I don’t have to contrive for a particular result from you.’

‘Well, as I said, there are many cunning girls who may come to you only for convenience.’

‘Again, I don’t feel I could be used by them one way or the other. After all, you need friends and girls to talk to, to pass the dull spare time in Australia. I myself have to dine anyway, and it is not that I can’t afford it.’

‘All I can say is most men in my dating history were not like you. They usually only asked for a second date after an interval of a week. And you try to contact me and see me every day, hehehe…’

‘I don’t have to hide my feelings, I’ve hardly had such a live feeling before,’ he said to flatter her, flirting like a cock.

‘That is why I think I have to be honest with you. You are my country-fellow, I can’t play with you.’

‘What do you mean, play?’

Nibbling a piece of fish in her mouth, she didn’t fully attend to his question. Then she discovered in her mouth a tiny fish bone, fiddled for it with her fingers, and picked it and put it onto her plate. Then looking about, she said, ‘Maybe we go somewhere else after dinner?’

‘Fine,’ he answered, understanding her reluctance to discuss a probably intimate topic in a restaurant.

In half an hour, they were at Bondi Beach, a place she had suggested after dinner.  

After parking the car, they walked towards the beach.

‘Where can we find a place for coffee?’ he said.

‘I like coffee, but my doctor said I should not drink too much. It could impair my ability to absorb the calcium and iron.’

‘Well, so long as you don’t drink too much. ’

They wandered along for some distance, without a definite aim. Then, she slowed her steps, and as if she regretted coming here, asked him in her stiff, critical voice, ‘Where will we go?’

Detecting her little whimsical grudge, Bing replied, disappointedly, ‘Maybe just walk on the beach a while, then we go home?’
‘Okay, then.’

The wind was blowing more strongly than they had expected at this time of evening, but it was cool and balmy enough for their stroll. On the beach, people were gone. They must have already fallen asleep after a day’s bustling and flirting with the waves.

‘Let’s just sit on the steps,’ she said, cancelling the idea of the beach.

They sat on the top step. She was on his left, which was essential. She folded her long full legs, and set her elbows on her both thighs so that her two hands were able to cup her chin and her face . For the moment, she reminded him of an innocent, placid and dreamy girl looking into a future of mystery and uncertainty.

They didn’t talk. The sound of the sea was that of a sad, sighing man; the waves rolled and then broke with a cackle of derision, producing the pale glistening specks that trembled only a short moment before dying off.

‘Are you a romantic person?’ she broke the serenity, without turning her eyes to him

‘Maybe.’

‘Tell me the most romantic things you have ever done to a girl.’

‘I’ve never had a girl I really loved,’ he lied safely in the duskiness of night.

‘So how do you know you are romantic?’

‘The way I came to see you in the bank was romantic.’

‘Hehe.’

‘And I have lots of romantic dreams.’

‘Tell me.’ Now she tossed her head to look at him with a severe interest.

‘Hehe.’

‘What?’

Like an innocent, placid and dreamy boy, looking into a future of mystery and uncertainty, he said, ‘She and I, walking together, in a flurry of snow, leaning on each other, making two pairs of footsteps, very long and lonely.’

She didn’t interrupt him, so he went on, ‘She and I, treading barefoot on the beach, feeling the silky sand, lifting my foot to touch on hers.’

She didn’t interrupt him, so he went on, ‘She and I, gazing at each other in a restaurant, both picking a piece of food, putting it into the mouth of the other.’

She didn’t interrupt him, so he went on, ‘She and I, sitting together as we are now, peace and quiet on the surface, but vibrating in our hearts, to the beating and breaking of waves.’

He paused, musing.

‘No more?’ She asked.

‘You want more?’

‘Yes.’

‘She and I, naked and running in an ancient forest, making love, being growled at by a pack of wolves.’ His mind suddenly turned wild and flaming.

‘She and I, jumping out of a plane, in parachutes, and trying to fuse our bodies while falling.’

‘She and I, exhausted in a desert, and dying, making our last connection.’   

He paused, musing.

‘You have crazy ideas,’ she said.

‘Hehe.’

The wind was arising; without the sun, the temperature on beach had dropped considerably. He was a little chilled in his T-shirt, touching his bare arms with his hands. She seemed to feel the same, and said, ‘Are you cold? Let’s go back to the car.’
In the car, a song was playing. It was not in Chinese.

‘What language is it?’ she asked.

‘Mongolian.’

‘I thought it was Tibetan.’

‘Tibetan is more like praying.’

‘It is interesting. The lips seemed to slip over all the time.’

‘It is called Kiss, by Halin.’

‘It is nice.’

‘It is.’

He adjusted his seat, sat back, making more space to stretch his feet.

‘Wang Bing, do you know why I asked you out today?’ she asked, obviously, and finally, ready to say something to him.
‘No. It was a surprise to me.’

‘You know, I talked to my mum about you. I told her that I won’t possibly have any feeling for you, and that you seemed to be so sincerely in love with me.’

‘So?’

‘She told me, if I don’t want to continue with you, I should tell you as soon as possible, I shouldn’t drag you along and hurt you in the end.’

‘Oh.’

‘So when you said you cancelled the appointment with that doctor girl, I felt it imperative to be frank with you. I don’t want you to have illusions about me.’

‘Well, I do have a feeling for you. But please don’t imagine I’m pressuring you. I am not an easily hurt, vulnerable weakling,’ he said. ‘At least we can be friends.’

‘But I think we are so different, incompatible,’ she said. ‘You know, like a man who may only like a beautiful girl, I have a tendency to be attracted by a man much taller than I am. Height is the number one in my list of desires.’

‘Is that so much?’

‘Yes. You know, my ex-boyfriend is 190cm, he was my classmate. I felt so good walking along with him, admired by the passers-by, though I know it was only vain.’       

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes, very much.’

‘Then?’

‘He wanted to pursue his career. He was only thirty-one then, and said he wasn’t ready for marriage. So when I saw no hope of a good end, I asked for a break up.’

‘It must be very hard for you.’

‘Yes. I spent two weeks in bed, unthinking, un-eating, completely wretched and distraught. Now I really understand those people who have depression, understand what kind of hopelessness and desperation they must have gone through.’

Bing was touched. A long silence fell between them. He didn’t look at her, but he heard the tears in her breath.

‘Where is he now?’

‘He is in the US, he lives there after doing a MBA.’

‘Is he married?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Can’t you go after him, I mean to the US?’

‘No, I can’t think of leaving Sydney. And I don’t think he ever loved me all that much, otherwise he would have married me, or at least given me some hope.’

The music on play was now too soft and desperately emotional. Bing heaved a deep breath to moderate the stirrings in his chest.

‘Well, if you don’t have any feelings for me, I think I will cease bothering you,’ he said. ‘Unless you can treat me as a genuine friend. Really, I don’t want you to feel bad about our meetings.’

‘But a true friendship can hardly be sustained between a man and a woman,’ she returned. ‘I had a friend, on his wedding day, told me he still loved me, although I thought we had already become two friends ages ago.’

‘I can’t agree with you,’ he said modestly. ‘I feel all right, just like now, talking about things with you, as a friend.’

‘You know, as I told you on QQ, I am dating with a doctor at UNSW. I met him at a friend’s place a year ago, when he made a negative comment on my dress, which made me assume he didn’t like me.’

‘What did he say about your dress?’

‘He said, I shouldn’t expose too much of my bare shoulders. I was rather offended, and thought he hated my type of girl. So I decided to forget him. But strangely, he still sent me messages every now and then, especially at Christmas and New Year. I don’t particularly like him, nor dislike him.’

‘It is interesting that a man would comment on a girl’s dress at the first meeting.’ He was a little amused. Then, as if enticed by the thread of their conversation, he turned to look at her, interested in the way she today dressed herself. She turned to meet his look, but failed to do so at the time, because his eyes had slipped onto the upper line of her breasts, creamy-white, constrained only by her thin black undershirt.

‘I think he is more suitable to me,’ she said.

Ceasing his furtive glance, he asked, ‘What does he do in the university?’

‘He is a lecturer.’

‘Is he tall?’

‘184cm’

‘Much taller than me.’

‘We met a few days ago,’ she said, looking straight ahead, where, through the windshield, there was nothing but a gloomy sky. ‘since then I have been expecting his call, but no calls from him.’

‘Maybe another week?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Why don’t you contact him?’

‘What? A girl, contacting him? No, that won’t work,’ she said, making a little rustle in the seat. ‘I have actually deleted his mobile number from my phone, in case I can’t resist contacting him when I am desperately lonely.’

‘Really? Deleted his number? In case you couldn’t resist? Oh…’ He turned and observed her with a mighty awe.

‘Yes. It was very hard.’ She appeared weak and helpless like a child, but to imagine she had the courage and determination to delete a contact she desired dating!

‘If I were you, I have to contact him, even go directly after him in his university. I can’t control and freeze myself from doing nothing.’

‘No, that won’t work.’

‘How do you know it won’t work?’

‘You don’t know, but I know, it won’t work. A man doesn’t like a woman taking the initiative, especially Chinese men.’

Bing thought for a second or two; what she just stated was not entirely false. But, still, he felt it was an enormity for one to endure the type of torment of passive waiting, of craving for something yet unable to enact a move.

‘So what do you do?’

‘Just wait, and I am confident he will contact me again.’

Bing sensed a sweeping compassion and pity in his heart. There seemed an urge in him to give her some support, by some gestures, but he couldn’t, so he remained still. ‘Do you think you are in love with him?’

‘No, but I guess he is the best one I can get. I am thirty-one, heading quickly to thirty-two. I am constantly pressured from my parents, my relatives, and everything around me, moreover from my own desperation. I am not like you, pressure-free, looking for those luxurious feelings.’

‘But you are after feelings too, otherwise you could accept me,’ he corrected her.

‘True, but you see, I have a better candidate,’ she said. ‘You don’t look sad and heart-broken at my denial, do you?’

‘Hehe… may only after going back to my home,’ he said, humorously, ‘I may take more than two weeks to tide my sadness over.’

‘You know, some of the songs you listen to are so old-fashioned; they are the likes of my dad.’

Bing was taken aback, composing himself lest he betray himself with an uneasy expression. After all, she was born after 1980 and he could be her father’s younger brother. A wedge of a generation was indeed between them, between their minds, and literally, between their waists.

‘I don’t like very much those rock tunes.’ He gave a hasty explanation, feeling for the first time ashamed at pursuing a girl much younger than himself. The reflection seemed to nettle and dismay his self-esteem, daunting his minute spirit in the battle for a young love. ‘I can promise I won’t contact you in the future.’ For a moment he was resolute with the pride of a wounded man; for another, he softened his stance, ‘Or maybe just for seasonal greetings.’

‘Hehe, then I will forget you entirely,’ she said a little teasingly.

‘Okay, what is the time?’ he sought to grab some reason to shun this inflicted situation, checking his mobile. ‘Time to go home?’

On the road, sunk in the music she didn’t like, he managed to recover and heal his wounded dignity.

‘Well, I still think it is no harm we maintain a friendship. I can’t see why you have to feel bad about this.’

‘Even if we go out one hundred times, I won’t nurture any feeling for you, which is unfair to you.’

‘I don’t see it is a matter of fairness,’ he emphasized. ‘I won’t see it as wasted and useless. But you must feel okay, that is the main thing.’

She said no more, nor did he.

In another half of an hour, in the service station, she said, ‘Thank you, bye,’ and moved her legs and breasts, and then round hips away from the car. His eyes followed her, watching her heels tapping solidly on the ground. He imagined she would turn her head and at least throw him a last smile.

But she didn’t.  

Her impressive pants swung, and blurred in his eyes like an eerie set of sex organs.

He blinked them off.   


---- End of Chapter 5 ---

 

romanticlady

进来接着读小说。

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-25 12:55
Chapter 6   

Chapter 7    1/5


Saturday evening marked the passing of a full week since Serena confided her lack of feeling for him. But he still thought of her. During the week, whenever he felt restless and hopelessly alone, he would review the SMS and QQ messages, ruminating over their meetings and chatting like a cow chewing the cud. Sensibly, he knew she was a vain, love-game player, and she had demonstrated few qualities of a ‘good’ girl or a ‘nice’ wife. Of course, her pose was a charm, but her eyes were rather small, dry, and lacklustre. Compared to his exes, either his wife or lovers, with whom he had been deeply involved if not loved for the better part of his life, Serena was the least attractive in both respects of virtues and physicality.

However, he was not a sensible man, the simple fact that he had not yet taken her, who after all, was a new, different person, a girl born after 1980, was enough to stir and disquiet his libido, to provoke his desperation to claw back part of his lost youth. Moreover, in comparison to Linda, who had totally ignored his existence, she had at least communicated quite a bit with him, sharing some fair moments in a social context.  

However, he didn’t dare to contact her. He remembered telling her that he wouldn’t bother her any more except for seasonal greetings. Nonetheless, as he thought this matter over, he came to realize that, though she did express her lack of attraction towards him, she had not told him not to contact her; rather, it was himself who had made such a decision out of his hurt pride.

Therefore, as he pondered it over and again in his loneliness, he speculated that the possibility of keeping a friendly basis of contact was positive, so long as he did not do anything as frequently and stupidly as before. The best guess was that he could contact her after an interval of at least two weeks, which would agree well with his self-respect, and at the same time avoid the risk of losing her altogether.

But why not once a week? Even one week would be painfully long to him. What would be the harm of contacting her right now, instead of stretching the time for another seven days? What if she was unoccupied and rather lonely at this moment, and even expecting something from him?

Fancying and reckoning, he felt his blood beating faster in his veins. Once the impulse was unleashed, he found his resistance impossible.

He opened QQ, and double-clicked Serena’s Bow-Tie icon.

He typed, ‘There?’ and after a deciding moment of suspension in the air, dropped his finger on ‘ENTER’ key. The time was 5:05pm.

No response. A feeling of dejection washed him down.

Then ten minutes later, her reply of ‘En’ was lively on the little dialogue window, lightening him, gratifying the base of his framework.

‘Did you have to work this morning?’ he asked, remembering the day being Saturday.

‘No, rest at home.’

‘Whole day?’

‘Sleep, sleep…’

‘You couldn’t sleep this long, could you?’

But she didn’t reply to this specific question, instead she said, ‘You didn’t go out?’

‘Just came back from a little shopping.’ He lied to her, and hastened to change to a topic he thought would maintain the communication, ‘I went to see the “doctor” yesterday, are you interested in hearing about it?’

‘I am actually about to go out for shopping, but yes, I want to know.’

‘Then wait until you come back.’ He felt slightly disappointed in her passionless response.

‘Well, you can tell me first.’

‘She is a very interesting person.’ He grabbed the chance.

‘Doctors are always interesting.’

‘She has a strong egoism, utterly self-centred.’

‘Even more than yourself?’

In his hasty story-telling, he failed to grasp what her message was really about, and even mistook ‘yourself’ as ‘myself’, which caused his pointless reply, ‘No, you are not self-centred, you have a personality,’ then, he set to resume his narrative, ‘all evening she talked about her troubles at her workplace, afraid of losing her job. And in her highly absorbed mind, I was as if nonexistent.’

‘Well, it was the first time, she might not know what to say.’

‘Maybe, but she was so talkative.’

‘But you were also very talkative, weren’t you?’

This time, he did not miss the derisive edge in her tone, and as he habitually scrolled up a bit to review their former messages, he came to his realization of the explicit mockery of ‘Even more than yourself?’

Ah, what the hell! She had tried to say he was no less egoistic and self-centred than Linda. How stupid that he had not detected her contemptuous hint in the first place. What kind of woman was she? Why did she have to ridicule him in such an open, vicious way?  

Momentarily he was seized with indignation. ‘Me? Talkative?’ he sent, shedding his temper by striking hard on the keyboard.

‘So you forgot how much you had talked on the first time we met?’

‘… was I so stupid in your eyes?’

‘You really need to see more people, so as to know what a silly person really likes,’ she sent, now with more cutting sarcasm in her message. He read it twice, feeling the bitterness she had mercilessly inflicted upon him. Why didn’t she directly tell him he was just silly, a fool, an imbecile, as much as Linda? Ah, what a cunning woman!

Rather embarrassed, he stood up from his seat, paced two turns in his little den, with his heart in near fury. Then he eased a bit and got himself under control, and without resorting to any retaliating words, he sent, ‘Hehe, no more, it was just waste of time.’

‘Is there no goodness in the girl?’ her shameless interest hung on.

‘Don’t know, maybe.’

‘You won’t obtain an objective viewpoint from only one meeting,’ she sent. ‘Honestly, I think a doctor girl is more suitable to you.’

Ah, she was such an idiot!   

‘How?’ in spite of himself, he protested weakly. ‘You have such a misunderstanding about me.’

In China, a girl with a doctor’s degree was often considered as having a prim, inflexible personality, high IQ but low EQ. So her last message was deciphered as her belief that he belonged to the odd stereotype of ‘doctor.’

‘Yes, I really don’t understand you!’ She put her words emphatically, yet in no less a caustic tone.

‘I think you are the kind of person who likes jumping to conclusions.’ He fought back. ‘You are very, very clever.’ His real words in his brain were ‘mean’, ‘wicked’, ‘false’, ‘malicious’, ‘poisonous’, ‘snake’...

‘Well, one needs to make a quick judgment at dating, given the limited time,’ she went on.

‘You can’t get to know a person properly from a small number of meetings,’ he returned. ‘And under pressure, one’s true nature can be easily distorted.’

‘At this age, if distorted so easily under a bit of pressure, then it is just one of his shortcomings.’ She was doubtlessly alluding to his poor performance in her presence, especially his driving skills.

‘Nobody can be completely confident about oneself. The past experience may often lead to a presumptuous bias,’ he sent, but his fighting energy seemed dwindling.

‘I think, after a couple of meetings, one can find out something that you absolutely don’t want in a person.’

‘Well, people may have to spend an entire life to get to that point,’ he sent, obstinate in the waning heat of his debating. ‘Are you so sure and clear of your wants and needs? Dating is not just a primitive survival competition.’

‘We are not doing a choice quiz where you can compare and pick the best, instead, it is a blank field requiring a desperate fitting.’

‘Fitting?’

‘Yes, fill the loneliness and emptiness of my life.’ Upon this message, he felt his dejection was blended with a measure of pity for her. But he replied, ‘The point is that your fitting ought to be ideal to which you have a certain emotional attachment, not like a dumb piece of furniture, or a nice and cool but heartless mobile phone.’

‘Yes, I know it is very hard,’ she replied. ‘Frankly speaking, if comparing apples – the pros and cons in physical terms, you are a very good candidate for a husband,’ she was obviously referring to his website profile, ‘even if you are a very, very different person.’

‘Yes, I am sillier and more stupid than others,’ he spoke out the unsaid words for her.

‘I just think you are not a practical person, very strange,’ she sent. Then as if bored with the topic at last, she added abruptly, ‘Well, I need to go out for dinner, chat another time.’

‘All right.’

‘I’m bored, I need to go out with some female friends,’ she was lingering.

‘I may also go to the city tonight,’ he sincerely wished to end the sour conversation with her. ‘Bye.’

The time displayed in QQ was exactly 5:42pm.

Bing didn’t pay a trip to the city as he mentioned to her. Instead, he stayed in his home, having a number of drinks with David, his landlord.

David knew only a little Mandarin, so their talk was chiefly done in English, with bits and tones assisted by jumbled Chinese or Cantonese. He was a couple of years Bing’s junior, a sales manager in a company located in Bella Vista. He had two boys, one eleven years old, the other nine. His wife Jane worked in a primary school, as an office administrator. On the surface at least, it must be a happy family.

David was an amiable and smiling man. Indeed, he appeared to be so happy that Bing sometimes suspected its credibility. As more a pessimist than otherwise, Bing had never denied the existence of occasional happiness in life, but he had never believed in its stability, and durability. In his own life, poor and disorderly though it may be at present, he had enjoyed a great deal of such happiness in the past, which he believed was more intensive, more qualitative and quantitative than what David had seemed to show off from time to time.

Short, less than 165cm, and with a face round and fleshy, David should look considerably younger than his thirty-seven years of age, if one didn’t try to notice a little bald patch in the middle of his head. But, regrettably, David made it ever more noticeable by his habitual brushing the surrounding hair to cover it, attracting one’s attention more to it as well as the thinning hair that seemed rather helpless in fulfilling such a coverage, than his plump face. And oftentimes, especially in the mornings, his hair was shining, nicely combed, as seen to be necessary in his career; but that was only before he managed to ruffle or comb them by his own fingers.

‘So how is everything, good?’ David smiled, with a little humour in his tone, which was his usual way of starting a conversation.

‘Just so and so, hehe..’ Bing answered lightly, after taking a mouthful of beer from a bottle of a lager he was not particularly fond of. His favourite, more because of habit than the taste, was VB, which was the first beer he had had in Australia, when he landed in Melbourne many years ago.

‘How is your daughter? She is nine, isn’t she?’ David broached a topic, which was only too natural.

‘Yes, she’ll be ten next month. She’s fine. I took her to movie last Sunday,’ Bing replied. His daughter Adina was born on 6 Nov 2002.

Adina had visited the place only once. She had an active and outgoing personality, spent the whole day with David’s two boys, chasing and screaming and babbling within the house and without. And David’s wife, Jane, seemed particularly adoring her, pampering her all around, calling her name all the while.

‘Bring her over to play, when you get a chance,’ David said, as he had said many times. ‘She is such a lovable girl.’
‘Hehe. I will, next time,’ Bing smiled, knowing the fact his ex-wife didn’t favour the idea in the least, who had demanded him, on his visiting day in the week, to take Adina to the beach, or the cinema, or the museum. Why was she unwilling for her daughter to stay in David’s house and play with his two boys he didn’t exactly know. But since the first time Adina told her about playing with the boys, she had called him to specifically express her unexplained opposition.

‘So still good being single?’ David grinned, patronizingly, brushing his hair.

‘So far so good, I’ve seen a number of girls, but no-one in particular.’

‘Have you ever considered re-marrying your ex-wife?’ he asked a question he had asked several times.

‘Some of my other friends said so also, but I don’t think it possible.’

‘Well, I have a colleague, an Aussie, who has just re-married his ex-wife, after four years of divorce.’

‘Really? Do they have kids?’

‘Yes. They have two.’

‘That is interesting.’

‘I don’t know much about their story. But it seemed to me it is not entirely impossible to live together again.’

‘Maybe, but unlikely in my case,’ Bing said, reluctant to reveal the fact that even he had wanted to, his wife would snub the idea at its budding. David only knew he was divorced three years ago, but did not  know why.

Then Jane was coming out of her room. She nodded to Bing with a smiling ‘Nihao’ in more Cantonese than Mandarin, and went straight into the computer room, where the two kids were quietly playing the games.

‘Andrew, and Daniel, time is up. You have already been in here for more than two hours.’ Bing heard her speaking to the kids.

‘Just a minute…’ a voice protested, must be Andrew, the elder son.

‘One minute? Your one minute is infinite. Stop now,’ Jane increased her voice to a near shout.

‘Okay, okay, but I have to save it first,’ Andrew was grumbling and grudging.

At this time, Daniel, who didn’t say much, came out of the room. His face was drawn, weary, sullen, and unhappy.

‘Hehe, kids, games, an impossible thing.’ David sighed, shaking his heavy head. ‘Does your daughter play games?’

‘Only a little bit. She doesn’t show much interest in computer games. She sometimes plays a little with the mobile, but seldom with the computers.’  

‘You are lucky. Boys are invariably addicted to games. Almost every parent I know is struggling with it, and I often wonder why society doesn’t regulate the game industry as it has done with the drugs or alcohol.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course, you may not know how serious it is. Once they get stuck into it, there is no means in the world of getting them out of it. So frustrating and hopeless. So bad to their health and eyes. Frankly, I wish some game designers would be jailed for designing such drug-like stuff to ruin the vulnerable kids,’ David aired his view vehemently. ‘There are so many things for kids to do. Andrew is about to do the Selective in just four months’ time, and Daniel has to also prepare for his Opportunity Class.’

‘My daughter did the OC three months ago.’

‘Oh, yes, how did she do?’

‘Well, she was not very good at study. Just give her a chance to try. But I don’t have much expectation.’

In the state of NSW, the selective schools were the type of high schools, year 7 to year 12, which would enrol the students who had passed the designed test after primary school. And the OC was for year 5, providing a special class for presumably talented pupils. However, since both selections were largely based on the test scores, many parents, predominately of Chinese and Indian background, sent their kids to tuition after school, creating a competitive environment that overly emphasised the academic results, although not as extreme as the Chinese educational system. The tuition was very expensive, but the parents seemed to have no other choice if they wanted to better the future of their kids. And moreover, apart from the academic subjects such as English, Maths and Science, parents were also very keen for other areas, such as music, dancing, etc. His daughter Adina went to piano lessons, dancing, and drawing class, in addition to her three hours Saturday academic class. The monthly cost could amount to nearly $500 for one child, which was not a light drag on a household budget, especially for those with only one salary earner, and more so if one had a sizable mortgage to service.
With his wife also working, David shouldn’t feel much of the pressure in financial terms. Their concern seemed to be more about the kids’ obsession with games, and their delay in finishing their homework. Scolding, reproaching, threatening, defying and protesting were the chief sounds coming from the comfortable-looking house, and the issue was invariably about games and homework. David, who usually had a gentle and pacific temperament, would oftentimes lose his temper, joining his wife, becoming as fierce and frustrated in their parenting exercise and exertion.  

Bing, after giving himself another mouthful of lager, decided to ingratiate himself with David, ‘You are a happy man, having two boys.’

Though the proudness and satisfaction in his eyes were perceptible, David commented, ‘But honestly, a daughter seems better in treating the parents. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes, it may be true, and at least true in my situation. I have a sister, in Mianyang, Sichuan, who looks after my mother. But as a boy, I am here, far away, selfish, can’t even look after myself. Over the years, my mother has been worrying more about me than me her,’ Bing said regretfully and wistfully, for a moment, the faces of his mother and her sister, flashed before his eyes. ‘I can’t imagine how I could have handled it, without my sister.’

‘How is your dad?’ David asked.

‘He passed away,’ Bing replied. ‘Five years ago.’

‘Oh… sad,’ David wavered. ‘I didn’t know that.’

Bing drank his beer. Jane came out, followed by Andrew, whose face was seething with cold exasperation. Jane was a thin, kind and obliging woman, a good, dutiful and dedicated wife and mother.  As much as David, her smiles were never exhausted in public. It was only when disciplining her boys, her voice and manner and expression were rendered rough and coarse and almost hysterical.

‘Any plan to go back China soon?’ David invented a new topic.

Bing took another sip, smiled, ‘Not yet on the agenda.’

‘You? Back to Hongkong?’  

‘No, we don’t plan on taking any trips until the kids have taken their Selective and OC tests, perhaps the year after the next.’
‘I understand.’

Bing drained the last of the beer, and feeling the topic drying out between the two, he rose and said, ‘Thank you for the beer, time for bed.’

‘With pleasure, Bo Ke Qi,’ David said in half Mandarin, remained seated, and continued his drink.

Bing went back his own room, and out of habit checked QQ, unexpectedly receiving a number of Serena’s messages,
‘Are you now in the city?’ and, ‘There seemed some events going on in city,’ and, ‘But it should have already finished.’ The time stamp was 8:44pm, two hours ago.

Bing was buoyant with delight, especially now with the intoxication caused by the beer. He replied, ‘I am in a German country bar, in the Rocks, some short distance away from the Opera House.’ He was telling a story that had happened in the past. ‘Have you tried the famous Pig Knuckle?’

No reply, obviously she was not online.


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洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-26 14:14
Chapter 7    1/5

Chapter 7 2/5


Still no response after ten minutes, Bing closed the screen. He was thinking what to do.

He had an unfinished book, but he could find no peace of mind on that, especially after the beer. The TV set in living room had broken a long time ago, and he hadn’t bothered asking David to get it fixed, because he was never a TV person. But on this Saturday, it was a bit early to sleep.

Under the similar circumstances, he decided to take a walk.

It was quiet at this late hour. There was no moon in the sky, but the stars were bright. He wondered where the moon went. The stars were there, but not the moon, which puzzled him. His astronomical knowledge was limited, but wasn’t a moon always facing this side of earth at night? It was not as if it was shaded by the clouds or something, for the sky was very clear.
Without the rays of moon, the earth was dark and indistinct, with only the pale lamplight shedding its local beam. The stars, bright as they were when looked at, were too weak to help lighting the broader space. The big trees were just inky silhouettes against the stoniness of sky, and the houses crouched ominously like breathless monsters. The crickets were awakening; perhaps more of them were still asleep, unconscious of the whining utterance of their peers. But the frogs seemed all coming out, croaking and drumming, and flirting with their most vigorous sound, beefing up their sexual drive as if for their last opportunity in their lifetime.

After all, it was still in spring, or, perhaps the season didn’t matter at all to them in Australia, where the seasons were not felt as distinctly as those in China.

He went this time to the other side of the park. The path was close to a ditch, where a stream was making a noise less plaintive than the crickets’ wailing. He saw a large black bird or bat suddenly shooting out of a tree, silently gliding away into the pitch of darkness, its heavy wings flapping the air with a thumping sound like a body falling dead to the earth.  

A line of tall trees edged the sidewalk, creating a loose canopy. Gusts of wind came to rustle the leaves and treetops, producing a murmur, or whimper as if of some homeless spirits.

On reaching the wooden bridge, he paused to behold it in duskiness. In his awed eyes, the stillness of bridge seemed to bear a history of ancient struggles. In his life, he had seen and tramped many bridges; each of them earning a measure of his respect. But the number of times of his passing those bridges varied in considerable degree. The bridge in his home village was the one he must have passed the most during his childhood and teenage years; the bridge in Shanghai International Studies University, between his dormitory and the campus, ranked second in his four years of study; the third ought to be the one in Southwest Jiaotong University, which he passed whenever he had a class during his seven years as an English teacher; and this one in the park which he had been visiting nearly three or four times in a week since he moved to the current residence, was the fourth; and the list could go on and on…

But which bridge had he spent the most time with? Which one had he been lingering at the longest?

It would have to be this little one in Australia.

Some bridges were merely for bearing and carrying goods or people, some only for water, like those in rice fields for irrigation, while others, like the one in front of him, were more for musing and pondering by some solitary soul like him, or like the hermit-like her, who had always had her wide-brimmed hat on.

It was just a tiny wooden structure over the ditch, barely five steps in length, two persons’ passing capacity. Yet, it had been more like a friend, its rail a shoulder supporting his weight of agony, the water underneath soothing his mind by its soft whispers, and its floor a base for sharing his train of thoughts.

For the next half an hour, he stayed there, now and then shifting his weight to relieve a tired arm or leg.

Then he went back home, went straight to bed, without washing.

The next morning, he was awoken by the light that slipped into the bedroom through the chinks and corners of the curtain. He pulled and flung the curtain to the hook, and immediately a dawn, with a shape of triangle, was opening a window as if in his heart.   

Trees and shrubs were serene and still like a painting on canvas. The light of the babyish sun was slanting in soft silver and pink, patching here and there and drifting among the leaves, whitening, or darkening the branches and twigs. There, a pregnant palm tree was giving birth to a new cluster of seeds and flowers, which, by their ivory bony fingers, caught the prime of a day’s brilliance. Birds, one, and two, and three, flew and floated above the streaks of light, but without noise coming to him, they were no birds but shadows of paradise.

Such was an early morning in Sydney!

This was the sort of window opened every day for him; its depth of colour and its breadth of waver depended on how the Heaven had a mood playing the planet. Every morning, with the first opening of his eyelids, the window let him glimpse at the life and the breath of universe, to feel the flow of his own living moments.  

He reached the curtain, and pulled it closed. The image of the triangle was at once blotted out. He closed his eyes, pulled up the soft quilt to his cheek, snuggled into his bed for more indolent Sunday hours.

By the time he woke up again, it was after 9:30 in the morning.

Then helplessly he thought of Serena. He turned on the computer, which was on the desk beside the bed.

The messages from her said, ‘Is it in the Rocks? The German Bar? I passed there once, the waiters and waitresses are beautifully dressed, but I haven’t ever dined there.’ The time was 12:35am, so she was still on QQ after midnight.

Instantly his soul admitted a heavy touch of spirit, and he composed a long text carefully before sending it, ‘Yes, that is the one. The waiters, in breeches, are like young riders or rough farmers; and the waitress are in tight blouses. In their colourful flared skirts, they dance more than walk. The way they deliver the drinks is very special. A long stick is laden with a line of little cups in those sockets, from where customers fetch them in front of their nose,’ he sent, and added, ‘Their special pig knuckles, fried and grilled into a colour of gold, have a shape like a huge bow tie.’

He put quite a vivid description of the bar in an obvious bid to entice her interest to dine there with him. But he didn’t expect her reply anytime soon, for she was more likely still asleep, considering her late night before.

So he left the computer on, and went to the toilet. When he came back minutes later, he saw two new messages winking at him. ‘Are you free now?’ and, ‘Can I treat you to breakfast now?’

All at once he was buoyant like a balloon. And her two ‘nows’ in her messages spoke of her urgency to see him. Oh, my…! She seemed to be wanting him no less than he did her. He could feel his finger trembling when he sent, ‘Yes, I am free.’ Then, ‘You treat me breakfast? Well, let me treat you,’ then, ‘when? 10:20am?’

‘No, I haven’t yet got up yet,’ then, ‘Oh, I made a mistake, I thought you said in 20 minutes,’ then, ‘ok, let’s meet 10:20am.’ He could feel her pulse beating as fast as his.

He jumped from the seat, letting a rush of happiness go freely through him. He pulled hard to take off his pyjamas and underwear, tossed them to the ground, and stepped on them and beat them crazily, as if his excitement wouldn’t be expressed in full without a measure of ferocity.

He went for a big shower.  

Amidst the pour of water his mind began to calm down and question the cause of her sudden change of attitude. How could this happen? The only logic he could think of was the two long messages he had sent describing the restaurant. Did the messages stir her imagination and finally catch her romantic nerve? But he knew, after a few meetings with her, that she was not fond of literature. And she was far from being a sentimental creature like other women he had known.

Well, the main thing was she wanted a date with him, the reason for which was no longer important.

Sharp, clean, and at his best as he perceived himself in the mirror, he was soon on the road, driving, or flying like a bird to the service station. It was drizzling and drifting; the strokes of the windshield wipers were mirroring his heart’s palpitating; and the rain beads on the shield, blown by the headwind, shooting upwards like countless sperm heads.

He pulled up in the same place at the service station. He got out and walked in the rain to the shop. He thought he needed to buy at least something, such as a couple of bottles of water, so to be a genuine customer authorised to use the parking space. And today could be a long day; after breakfast, they might go anywhere. He truly believed this time their story wouldn’t be finished by the end of breakfast, therefore the water would be needed for rest of their meeting.

When the guy behind the desk asked for $7, he was not a little surprised. Instead of the five dollar note ready in his hand, he had to find a fifty dollar note from his wallet. He was never a person who minded much the price tag when shopping, but three and half dollars a bottle for water was enough to scrape his price-sensitivity.  Maybe it was just the premium of convenience in the service station he had to pay for; maybe the price was actually similar to other supermarkets where he had scarcely bothered to check. He remembered seeing a headline in a newspaper saying Sydney was the third most expensive city to live in the world.
Well, he knew that house prices were certainly expensive, but other living expenses? He wouldn’t have a clue. In the years of his marriage, it was mainly his ex-wife who took care of domestic matters. For the last three years as a single, he was invariably blind to any items on the shopping receipt. He would use his Master Card, or preferably the American Express if it was acceptable, because of its higher reward points, and grandly signed off the slip at the counter.

Carried two of the cold water bottles, he walked back to the car. He didn’t quicken his steps to avoid the rain. He liked rain as much as the rays of sun. In this aspect, he was similar to those local Aussies, especially the uniformed high school students on the road, who would not be scared by a storm, who would just walk, walk, walk, and never bother shaking their head or ruffling their hair. They were not like frightened hens, who had to seek an immediate shelter on any emotional outbreak of nature.

However, in the car, he did snatch a couple of tissues to dry his hair and face. Then, he called Serena.  

She said, ‘My landlady wants to go Ashfield. Can she go together with us in your car? It is raining.’

‘No problem.’  

Ashfield was less than one hundred meters away. So her landlady needing a lift for such a short distance made him think of other possible ulterior motives Serena might have in mind. It was very likely she wanted her landlady to see and check on him, then to give her some opinion in her husband-decision-making process, now that she was readily taking him on.
Then in few more minutes, under a small umbrella, Serena turned up, but alone. With short whitish pants that ended at her knees, and a pinkish blouse that set off her relatively dusky skin, as well as a pair of sandals that exposed her insteps and toes, she appeared rather casual, real and relaxed, although far less striking than last time when her tight spotty leopard-pants had impressed him.

‘Where is your landlady?’ Bing raised the question through the open window.       

‘She changed her mind, and decided to go over there herself,’ she said, walking around to the passenger door.

Bing felt vaguely disappointed. Then he heard Serena speak again, ‘Can you save a bird?’

‘Bird?’
‘There is a little bird on the road, looks like it’s dying, can you save it?’

‘Of course, where is it?’

He stepped out, and followed her back to the corner. A bird, common in Sydney, lay prostrate on the wet road, cheeping weakly. Bing didn’t know its name, but it was definitely not as tiny as a sparrow, though it did have similar grey feathers.
‘A young bird, it must have fallen out of its nest and wounded itself,’ he said, as he approached the little creature.

He picked it up with his hand. The bird struggled feebly in his palm, and Bing noticed its head tilted unnaturally to one side.
‘I guess it’s hurt its neck,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to survive. If it is only in its legs, then there might be some hope.’
‘So it can’t be saved,’ she said sadly.

‘Anyway, let me put it in the car, at least it won’t be drenched in the rain. He may survive, we can’t tell.’

He walked to the car, and opened the boot. There happened to be a sheaf of Chinese newspapers inside, which he unfolded and laid the bird onto it. The bird didn’t even move.

While closing the boot, Serena caught sight of a pink-coloured raincoat, and she said, ‘What is that?’ then before he could reply, she rushed out, ‘is it your daughter’s?’

Her tone sounded not at all serious, but Bing was absolutely stunned. ‘What? My daughter’s? Are you kidding.’ His quick denial rushed out to stifle his troubled expression, and, consciously to distract and divert her attention, he pushed down the boot with more force than necessary. ‘It must have been left over by one of my neighbours.’ He searched for a quick excuse, hoping her curiosity would soon die off.

Honestly, he didn’t know how the raincoat had got there. It must have been a long time ago when he took his daughter to the beach. He never imagined that the item, a common thing in his eyes, would one day attract the interest of someone like Serena.

He walked around to get into the car, his mind refusing to cling to the incident. Actually, it was not the first time Bing had been struck by the sharpness of a woman’s intuition. His ex-wife had demonstrated quite an astonishing if not horrible sixth-sense in his thirteen years of marriage to her. He himself was largely a careless man, easily and characteristically forgetful and ignorant of earthly things  outside his area of concern. If Serena’s notice and interest of a raincoat in his car was understandable,  her instant conjecture of its association with his daughter was utterly incredible. How could she possibly have any knowledge of his daughter? She didn’t even know he’d been married! Or did she? Had she managed to find something out? Oh, how ridiculous and absurd, and horrible!

‘Where do I put my umbrella?’ Serena asked. He turned to her, and found her holding the dripping umbrella, hesitating at the opened door.

‘Just get in,’ he said, ‘I will put it in the back seat.’

She stepped in. Bing took the umbrella from her, but before he was about to throw it, he thought better of it. ‘Better put it in boot.’ He got out of the car.

Inside the boot, he found the bird stiff on the paper, already dead. A sudden thought came to him that its struggle in his palm a while ago might have exhausted all its little remaining energy, therefore, what he had done was actually quickening its death. Feeling bad, he thought of putting it in a garbage bin, but looking around, he couldn’t see any bins available for the funeral. ‘I’ll have to take it along,’ he said to himself, while getting another sheet of paper for the umbrella.

When he got back in the car, he didn’t mention the bird to her, nor did she seem to remember any such merciful deed ever happened on the gloomy day.

‘Where to for breakfast?’ Serena probed.

Again, a chronic what-to-eat and where-to-eat question was plaguing the minds of a spinster, and a reclaimed middle-aged bachelor. Bing advised they could just have MacDonald’s on the way to somewhere yet to be decided. But Serena expressed a low opinion of a Big Mac as being the first meal she intended to treat him.

‘Then Ashfield?’ he asked. ‘Many good restaurants here could serve well our breakfast, couldn’t they?’

‘No, too many people may recognise me,’ she answered simply.

Although slightly confused as to why she was afraid of people recognising her, he didn’t have the mood to reason with her. In the end, Burwood again became the only destination they could agree upon.

During the trip, Bing was ill at ease, influenced by the dismal occurrences that had severely tarnished his earlier jubilation, and a long, poignant silence was smothering the souls of two passengers. It was as if an idea or two were working and turning actively in their respective minds, banishing any threads of possible speech, and the atmosphere in the car was eerie, unnatural, and unhealthy. The only distraction was the music, which seemed to help a bit diluting the heavy sombreness that had built up and saturated the air of the chamber.

Suddenly, Serena asked, ‘How old are you? You are thirty-six, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he was taken back, but didn’t turn his head to her. ‘Why?’

‘Well, it’s just that I think you look older than that,’ she said lightly, yet seriously. ‘I have known a number of men about your age, but they don’t look like you.’

‘Hehe, maybe I often go outdoors, quite weather-worn,’ he made his explanation as lightly as he possibly could.

‘Show me your ID, hehe,’ her crude request came as abruptly as her first question, but her eyes at which he turned quickly to look or stare, in his highly disturbed state, were twinkling like a mischievous child.

‘Well, you guess it first,’ he answered steadily, after a moment of difficult composure. Part of the reason for his ability to remain relatively calm, at least on surface, was due to his understanding that, sooner or later, he had to expose his true identity to her, if any serious relationship was about to commence. Serena’s suspicion, though so ghastly and unpleasant, only brought forward the time of its eventuality.

‘38?’ she said, looking curiously into to his left side.

‘No,’ he shook his head, not as weakly as he could have imagined.

‘40?’

To this, Bing didn’t give an immediate reply. He formed his lips into a twisted smile, and said diplomatically, ‘Keep as a secret for the moment.’

Serena didn’t chase it further; she was cunning, but in no way stupid. She was shrewd enough to lend him a crack of room to breathe, and so, his last remark seemed, tentatively, to have put an end to this ugly and tormenting guesswork. With a sophisticated woman’s tactic, she handled this situation remarkably well, letting her probe or provocation up to no further than the last skin-layer of his self-respect. In her numerous dating experiences, she must have encountered the same false and deceptive internet-men like him before. He wondered.

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洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-26 14:21
Chapter 7 2/5

Chapter 7 3/5


They parked the car in the same place in Burwood. He opened the boot, took out the umbrella and gave it to her. There was only one umbrella, and Bing, consciously, was unsure how they were going to share it, or not share it. It was only drizzling; Bing had no concern about walking in the rain. In fact, for this moment, he was inclined to run away from her, at least for some time, for him to settle down, to muse over his plight.

However, for some reasons, Serena was behaving considerately and intimately, as much as a friend, or more than a friend. She leant into him, and she was on his right, straining her left hand to hold the umbrella over his head. Bing was debating within himself whether he should take the umbrella and do the job as a man. But he didn’t; he simply drifted along, like a grass surviving only by clinging to a bough in a flood. He was a victim, turned into a frail, miserable sheep by himself, or by her. He was a thief caught off guard by a policeman, or by her, this very woman beside him. And worse, the fact that she was walking on his right against his preference made the air under the umbrella ever more awkward and unbearable. It was like a male and a female animal, without love or chemical, being forced to build an intimacy in a zoo condition, in order to breed their offspring, to save a species that was on the brink of extinction.   

If only she could just carry him onto a bed, or elsewhere, to rape him, to crush him and beat him, he didn’t think he had an ounce of energy to fight her back.

There, they were moving, he under her sister-like protection. Now and then, they would mutter one or two dull comments about the weather, about many a Chinese shop. When entering the open area of the street, such as crossing a traffic light, he would stray a little from her coverage, as if escaping from her feminine power, as if trying to free himself from a shame that had made his conscience smart so much and so unprepared. But she didn’t let him loose; she deftly reached him and covered his head again. And, the fleshy softness his right elbow occasionally caught from her left flank was ridiculously comfortable, so sexually stirring, though he was too much an unnerved creature to enjoy fully such moments of ecstasy.
They, or just she, decided on the restaurant for their breakfast. It was a Chinese noodle shop. It was old-fashioned; Bing couldn’t remember he’d dined there before. He liked something new, a new concept expressed by the restaurant proprietors of this generation, either by the cloth lanterns painted with red flowers and birds, or by some artistic strokes or frames on the wall, like the Old Shanghai Shop in Ashfield.

But today, the furnishings mattered little to him. It was Serena’s hospitality and treat; she had the choice. And he was in no mood, with no room for art or sentiment.

Serena, upon entering the restaurant, halted her steps, turned to him and said, ‘I need to go the shopping centre to get some cash. Will you wait here for me?’

‘Yes, no problem.’ Truly and absolutely, it was not a problem, rather a solution, for it would offer a great timeslot for him to soothe his perturbation, to become himself again, to transform a chicken-hearted creature to another who had a stronger will and resolve. The result wouldn’t be a tiger though, definitely not, because he had never conceived of himself as someone with a ruthless mind and a dogged head, who could do nothing but attack and conquer in the fierce battle of human society. At best, Bing could only be a goat, braver than average, or maybe more a sneaky snake. After all, he came from a country where the famous The Art of War of Sunzi was developed thousands years ago; a tiny snake could still take over the world, if it was acting smartly.

‘Well, what am I going to do now?’ he asked himself, seeing her walk off. ‘How long can I conceal my true background from her, now that she has become aware of my fabrication on the internet?’ Of course, it was not a crime, but it had the same shame and distaste of a crime. And if he told her about his age, then naturally his marital status would be her next questioning. And he had a child, a daughter nearly ten years old. All the rest of the information, such as his work, and his approximate income, was right. His chief motive was to conceal his age for a period of time, because it was so sweet to fancy he were still young and with enough charm to attract the young.  

It didn’t take long for him to make a final decision. He would tell her everything during breakfast, for it would be unthinkable if he later had to reveal more untruthfulness to her, which would then be really unacceptable, and deadly criminal, and would absolutely become an issue of his character, violating his snaky integrity.

With that, he felt very much lightened. Some of the lost energy and pride started creeping back to him. At the same time, the shame and the ugliness and indecency of his concealment that had tormented him heavily for all the while, seemed in the process of detaching itself from his conscience. And he began to excuse himself: well, a lot of people hid their true identity on the internet, it was just a consideration of privacy. If anything, it was just hovering on the verge of morality. It was about when to tell, rather than not to tell; and, see, he was going to tell the truth.  

He checked the direction of the Shopping Centre. She was still not in sight. She seemed to have taken too long for an ATM transaction. And the fact was, instead of wishing her away, he was now anxious for her to come back, so that he could tell her the truth, so that everything would be black and white, so that no longer he would be so painfully crooked.

Yet five minutes more elapsed, and she was still nowhere to see. Then he started wondering. What happened? One would never take such a lengthy period to carry out a transaction with an ATM; after all it was not a teller.

Then a thought crossed his mind. Was it possible that she, knowing he had been hiding himself and faking his story, had just escaped from him? And her ATM business was no more than an excuse? And that she would just send an SMS later to inform him she was not coming to breakfast? Or simply leave him standing there forever as a type of punishment?

Well, the scenario would be too much of a melodrama, but it was not entirely impossible. She seemed to be, always if he had been able to estimate her correctly, an impulsive and capricious woman.

Or, it was also possible, she was thinking alone inside the shopping centre, and teetering on the next movement she was to take.  

Then he caught her figure, coming out of the sliding door of the shopping centre, and waiting placidly at the traffic-lights for a little while, before crossing the road and walking towards him as gracefully as before.

Reaching where he was standing, she gave some reason for taking so long, but Bing didn’t grasp her words, for his mind was tight with his matters.

Entering the restaurant, she closed her umbrella and thrust it into the basket at the entrance. Seated, they ordered some food, and then waited.

‘Actually, you should have come in and ordered the food, then we wouldn’t have had to wait,’ she said, in her usual critical way.

So, his speculation of her sudden leaving him without courtesy was unfounded. He said, simply, ‘But I didn’t know what you wanted to eat.’ He told the truth.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, just breakfast.’

Yet, in Bing’s mind, the matter did matter to her, and, to a lesser extent, to him. Otherwise, why did they spend so much time ordering? People, so fussy and spoiled by their own relentless inventions, have too many choices nowadays to confuse them in every single situation.

They did not have to wait as long as expected. The porridge, the dumplings, and the Fried Dough Sticks (You Tiao) were soon on their table. Serena seemed to like the fried dough-sticks very much; but to Bing, this was the best representation of unhealthy foods, even worse than the chips in MacDonald’s or KFC’s. But he knew it was very popular for Chinese breakfast, especially when eaten together with porridge or soybean milk. It was rather soft, and with a great aroma typically from pig-oil, eating them was really enjoyable. And, loose and hollow and insubstantial though its inside was, it had a stiff shape of a sausage, which, for a peculiar and perverse impression, tended to remind him, as wicked as he had known himself to be, of the shaft of a man’s penis.

Serena asked the waitress to cut the dough sticks into shorter stumps so as to fill easier in her porridge bowl.

The breakfast went on smoothly, with Serena again being the main eater.

Meanwhile, Bing picked the moment to make his scheduled confession.

‘I was born in 1970,’ without much preface, he dived into the sensitive waters. ‘So I am even older than your guess.’

’41 or 42?’ She obviously needed a bit of mental arithmetic to work this out.

‘Precisely, by this 20 July, I will be 42,’ he said, proudly as if he was saying a proud thing.

‘Oh, no wonder,’ she smiled a little, ‘I just thought you were about 38.’

‘So I look younger, do I?’

‘But not as young as 36 though.’

‘Frankly, you are the first one in my dating history, who’s voiced such a suspicion,’ he said. ‘The others seemed to be indifferent, or just ignorant.’

‘Maybe they don’t care much about a man’s appearance, or maybe they are just desperate for a man to fulfil their destiny of marriage.’

‘So you are different,’ he commented, and then as flippant as now of his manner, he released the last stain of his shame, ‘and I was divorced, and have a daughter.’

‘Really? How old is your daughter?’

‘Nine.’

‘Living with her mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long have you been divorced?’

‘Three years.’

By this time, Being’s appetite was all gone. Serena asked him to eat more, for there was plenty left on the table. He persuaded himself to take one of the sticks, which he did, together with some porridge.

As soon as they came out of the restaurant, after his taking the umbrella from the basket, Serena said to him, ‘Why did you have to conceal your age and marital status? I know quite a lot of girls who’d be interested in a mature man like you.’

‘Well, I just don’t want to confine myself to certain age groups. After all, most of the meetings would go nowhere. One doesn’t have to reveal everything on the first date. It is the face-to-face meeting that should be taken as a real starting point, well, in my opinion.’ He found it very hard to say things straight.  

‘Well, where to go?’ Serena asked, diverting the difficult topic for him.

‘Can we go to the beach? Dee Why?’ he proposed, now he was feeling like a different man, a true man, his tone was somehow more confident. He knew it was raining, not a good time to stroll on the beach. But he pictured them dining in one of the beach restaurants. The fact that she was still willing to go with him after his revelation was a sweet encouragement. Even talking to her in the car could be quite relaxed and unreserved, to an honest man he had just now become.

‘Okay,’ she agreed, with the charm of womanly obedience unseen on their previous negotiations.

He was again the driver now. Without having to pretend to be a young naïve newbie in the field of human relationship, he was assuming a new role of potency and maturity.  After all, he had seen and experienced a lot more than she; there was no reason he should feel timid and humble before a person much his junior. Presently he was feeling now as a winner, and she a loser, for all of her previous claims about him had been mistaken, and had derived hastily and shallowly from her shallow mind.

And he knew very well how to get to their destination; no need to rely on the GPS that would make him look green and inexperienced. It was raining, so the feeling inside the car was cosy and safe, and comfortable, and romantic. To extend the time for such a nice closeness between them, he deliberately chose a longer road, through Lane Cove, and then the winding sinuous Mona Vale Road, to the far north of Sydney, from where he could drive down to Dee Why.

‘Do you see your daughter?’ she asked, meaning how often he saw his child.

‘Yes, once or twice a week, not fixed though.’

‘May I ask how you came to divorce?’

It was definitely not a good time for answering this type of question, yet he had no other choice but to pacify some of her curiosity. ‘Well, I would say it was my fault. It was me whose mind wandered too far in the midst of a so called middle-aged crisis,’ he paused to make up a safe story. ‘It was as if, coming towards my forties, I was able to see at the end of my life for the first time, and I could no longer bear the monotonous and uninspiring progression towards the end. I felt something was missing from my life. It was one of those wonderings and whims, a type of dissatisfaction with what you are, and what you have, you know.’ He took a break, then decided not to go further on the uneasy topic, although he knew he had simply evaded her query. The real cause of his divorce was simple, base and common. He had betrayed his wife; he had been unfaithful. For now, holding the truth back from Serena was not an issue of honesty, but again, something to do with precious privacy. After all, she was not yet his girlfriend, not even a friend in the common sense. Even if she were already his wife, he would still have a right to keep it from her.

Nevertheless, Serena didn’t seem to be so much interested in his past as her question might have implied. Her question was more like picking a topic for the sake of a topic, for, while his mind was still with her first inquiry, she jumped to another branch, utterly irrelevant, ‘Do you know why I asked you for breakfast today?’

‘No, I don’t know,’ he said, glad of the change in her direction of chatting, increasing his sense of humour. ‘You haven’t fallen in love with me, have you?’

‘Haha…’ her little laugh brushed off gleefully his little humour. ‘You know, since I met you the first time, I have thought of you in the light of a husband. I am not stupid, no longer a young, vain, silly girl who was only guided by the appearance and look of a man, although I am still naturally and more readily attracted to those qualities. I am mature enough to know the unstable and short-lived nature of a feeling. Last time I told you I didn’t have a feeling for you, which was true, but I didn’t intend to give you up completely. You are still a good candidate, an acceptable height, and work and salary. You did seem a bit odd and strange to me, not seemingly belonging to my generation. The music you listened to, the way you behaved were a contrast to other men I had met before.’

She paused to touch one of the water bottles Bing had placed in the cradle between the seats, and asked, ‘Can I have one of these?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, picked up the bottle, and handed it to her.

She took it from his free hand, screwed off the cap, and began to drink, softly.  

The car was moving, shrouded in the sentimental rain. The wipers worked diligently as good servants, and his hands on the steering wheel were truly of an expert driver’s.

After taking a mouthful of water, she replaced the bottle, and went on, ‘Now would you tell me your real background so that I can start to piece together a complete picture of you.’

Bing was ready to tell her about everything about himself, and paused a while to think where to start. Then, Serena, as often happened before, changed the conversational direction dramatically again, ‘You know, yesterday I had a date with the doctor from UNSW, the one I told you about before. It was an utter disappointment. I had my high-heels on, and you know what his comment was?’

‘No?’ His tone was encouraging.  

‘He said I shouldn’t bother wearing high heels if I didn’t feel comfortable. It seemed to me, after two years, he was still only conscious of how I dressed, as if he didn’t have anything else to say about me. And he said he could accompany me shopping if I wished. But I never like the idea of a man, like a puppet, escorting a woman around the shopping counter. Oh, such a person! And to think I had to strain and make my feet ache by trying to appear more attractive to him.’ She stretched out both feet, taking off her shoes, revealing the scraped reddish skin around her ankles.

Conscious of her quite waiting for some sympathy from him, he looked at her feet for a while, feeling the pain, and he said, ‘Oh, so red…’ Honestly, he wanted to touch them, but couldn’t, so he asked, ‘How old is he?’

‘Thirty five,’ she said.

Bing gave an opinion, ‘I am not sure of what type of person he is. But at the age of thirty five and single, he must have picked up and dropped, picked up and dropped his Ms Right during his entire ten suitable years, which was exactly what some of my never-married single friends had been doing. I don’t know why a man should have so much concern with a woman’s dress, and even if he must, he should consider keeping his mouth shut to show some respect to a woman, shouldn’t he?’
Still bent to nurse her red skin, she didn’t answer him. Then she asked, in her usual, off-the-course manner during a dialogue, ‘How old were you when you married?’

‘Twenty six.’

‘Well, you got divorced,’ she said, with obvious disdain and mockery in her tone, hinting strongly that it was much worse getting married then divorced than not marrying at all, and that her ‘spinster’ status was after all not as bad and miserable as she and others might have thought herself to be.

‘Yes, but one can’t predict the future,’ he returned, philosophically. ‘Life is a process, I do not anticipate an ideal end result. Above all, there is only one end in all lives, nothing but death.’

For the next minute or two, they were silent, as if the word ‘death’ in his remark had choked off their thoughts.

The car had now entered a narrow road, winding through the forest, sandwiched by the thick trees and undergrowth. The quietness was suggesting they were now in a place far away from the noisy human-inhabited suburbs. For a long while, the feeling of remoteness, and the misty semi-transparent sky, and the steady brushing sound of the wiper, and the hesitating and merging raindrops on the window glasses, seemed to dominate the two souls of Chinese origin. It was a little sad, a little romantic, a little longing, but peaceful in each heart.

‘I like this road. It is sort of adventure in the bush,’ he said to her, as she sat back and began to finger her earrings.  

‘I like it too,’ she agreed, which for her was a rarity of showing direct agreement on a subject with him, and which encouraged him to chat further in the same direction, ‘you know, sometimes, on a fine day, the rays of sunshine were pouring down from the treetops, like a curtain. It is a fantastic experience when you’re driving through the trees.’

No comment from her. It seemed every time he tried to extend a topic hopeful of building a deeper rapport between them, she would cruelly curtail it, disappointing and dejecting him. For so many times, he had been trying to stimulate her aesthetic or romantic sense, but she was rather unresponsive; either she lacked it, or deliberately shunned his efforts, he was let down just the same.

--- to next post ---

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-26 14:36
Chapter 7 4/5

Chapter 7   5/5


The moment he was inside the car, she commented, ‘It is warmer here.’ Then she pulled one or two tissues to wipe her feet, which were now free of constraint from her sandals. The vivid red scars, half across the arch and ankle of her foot, looked very sensitive, and pitiful.

‘Sore?’

‘Throbbing.’

‘I can go out and get a bandage for you.’

‘No, don’t bother. It is all right.’

‘Do you want music?’

‘No, I said your music is from my dad’s generation,’ she teased.

He was not affected unpleasantly as before. ‘Well, there are a great many of songs on the disk, many of them English, and of your generation as well.’

‘Better just chatting.’

‘Okay.’

She took more tissues to dry her hair. ‘Can I leave the used tissues here? I will dispose of them later,’ she said, whilst employing both hands brushing and loosening her hair.

‘Don’t bother,’ he said lightly.

For a long moment, neither spoke. Bing watched the raindrops making runnels on the windshield, which, unlike the ones falling on the ground, didn’t explode or splash but produced many small eddies, rippling and waving like oil.  

‘Are the earrings nice?’ Serena broke the silence, surprising him. He turned and saw her hands holding a pair of tiny golden earrings, diamond-shaped.

‘Yes, where did you get them?’ Bing commented easily.

‘From the shopping centre in Ashfield. There was a discount sale yesterday,’ she said, her fingers caressing the metal.
‘Good,’ he said, showing no enthusiasm for this topic. ‘But, really, I think all of those trinkets are good and beautiful.’

‘Hehe.’ At his lack of interest, she turned her attention back to the earrings in her hands; whilst he took a moment to wonder why she had to show him this kind of thing at this particular time. Did she just want to find something to say, or was she hinting at something?

Then he felt the air in the car becoming stuffy. He pressed the button to lower the windows on both sides. The rain started slanting a bit in.

‘You don’t mind the rain wetting the leathers inside?’ she asked.

‘Well, why, only a little bit.’

‘Some people are more serious about that.’

He imagined her ‘some people’ referring to her ex-boyfriends. ‘It is just a car, even a human doesn’t mind a few drops of rain.’

But noticing the rain dampening her legs below her shorts, he closed the window on her side, and adjusted his to a narrow crack for fresh air.

‘Do you still love him?’ he asked, casually yet abruptly.

‘Who?’

‘The one of 190cm.’

‘Don’t know, it has all passed. I did love him, but I don’t know if I love him now.’

‘A woman can only love a person at a time. Is that a true statement?’ Bing pursued, philosophically.

‘I tend to disbelieve it.’

‘But, frankly, I don’t think you can love any more. Every time you catch a man, you compare him with another. And the feeling you had had with him was actually not dead, only dormant, and it would awaken any time you try to do another comparison.’
‘Well,’ she was faltering.

‘It sounds like what you are trying to do is to find a man to fill your room, a physical, brick and mortar room comprising a bed, a number of pillows, and closets, but not a room of love, feelings and emotions. So I tend to think you won’t be able to love a man any more.’

‘But I did have another relationship with another man, after my boyfriend left me for the US.’

‘Well?’ He turned to her, his eyes widening.

‘Soon after I thought I had recovered from the loss of leaving him.’

‘…’

‘It was a deed of shame, I admitted. The man was married, and he was actually a good friend of his. I fell for him helplessly when he said he loved me.’

‘I guess it was more to fill the hole left by your boyfriend, kind of opportunistic.’ He commented, after a little shocked by her revelation.

‘I don’t know. But my feelings were very strong, in many ways more intense than my ex.’

‘Do you think it was love?’

‘That is the thing I am not sure about.’

‘Then what?’ He was encouraging.

‘His wife discovered the affair, and I knew I must end it. So I went back to China and stayed for two months to pacify myself. I hurt his wife, an innocent woman. And then I got a chance to learn a bit about Buddhism, and repent for what I had done to her. Now I would never get involved again with a married man, even if in despair. ’

‘Was that when you were studying?’

‘Yes.’

The air in the car seemed becoming heavier with the new threads of her confession. He pushed open the shade of the sunroof. The light from the sky, by the crystal rains, brightened the space. The raindrops were mildly bubbling on the glass roof.

She bent her body forward, to nurse her scar on her foot again. ‘That bloody man at UNSW. How stupid was I to have punished my feet for his sake! It was so much pain, for someone who didn’t even appreciate a woman’s effort,’ she said, with a vigorous bitterness in her tone.

Bing didn’t make any comment, and she continued to spell out her thoughts, ‘It is just unfair that a woman has no say in the matter of marriage.’

‘What do you mean? Of course you will have your say when marrying someone.’

‘But a woman can’t make the final decision, can she? She can’t say like a man that “I want to marry you.” That sort of decision seemed always to be in the hands of the man, whereas a woman can only passively wait for something like fate, so painfully hopeless.’

‘Well..’ He was about to say, when a woman refused a proposal, or expressed an ambiguous, uncertain response, the pain a man was to feel was by no measure any less. But he thought it too heavy and complicated, and said no more. Serena didn’t pursue it either.

In the silence that ensued, Bing watched her caring delicately for her hurt foot. Her toenails were actually manicured blue, but only mildly. It was possible her nails were not quite even and regular to provide a good platform for polishing. Then he wondered about her fingernails, and noticed for the first time that they were also manicured, subtle and pale, inconspicuous. She had long legs, spotless shins and calves and knees, nice-looking, though not white enough if he allowed his desire for perfect beauty to go skywards.

Her posture for a moment reminded him of a swan, in her stooping to tend her solitary pain and vanity. Her slender neck, and her hair that splashed over her shoulder, even if common for most girls he had ever known, were remarkable, and tantalising.

Then, as if enough care had been taken of her body, she straightened and leant back on the seat. She turned and looked at him and said, ‘You faked your profile, what would happen if a girl was in already love with you, before you tell her the truth?’
‘Well, if she is in love, what else does she need? She has got love, that is what she wants, and I get what I want. Will my background matter any more once we are in love? Love, in my understanding, should be unconditional.’

‘You would put a girl into jeopardy if she has to cut her love after realizing your deception.’

‘If she decides to leave me, it only means she is not really in love with me, and I don’t think she would possibly feel real pain, because she cares more about other things than me as a person.’

‘Well, the sort of ideal love, or whatever name you might like to call it, may be unconditional as you’ve explained; but what about just some simple likes or a bit of admiration?’

‘Then the pain will be even less. Please remember it is my least intention to hurt anyone. All I need is to give myself, and her as well, a fair and equal chance to get to know each other, to realize, to discover the love, a true and pure love, which may otherwise be missing from us,’ he said, then as if by accident, he added, ‘Do you like me?’

He gazed into her eyes steadfastly, longer than he, or she might have anticipated.

Holding his look also, she didn’t answer him; but a change, a colour, or just a softening, started to affect her features. And in her eyes, a measure of tenderness together with a helpless defiance was glowing.

Then she moved her eyes away and lowered her head. On her cheek, screened by the strands of her loose hair, he saw the same charm and luminous vivacity that had struck him previously when she was in the spotty leopard-pants.   

‘Serena?’

She was without answer, and she retained her position.

He reached out and put his hand on her head, gently fondled her silky hair down towards the nape of her neck. Then he stretched himself over, and with two hands, he moved her head so that she faced him fully. He searched her eyes, which were for the moment closed with the eyelids quivering.

He kissed her eyes, feeling the flutter beneath his lips; he kissed her lips, feeling their warmth and softness. Then she was responding, wrapping her hands around his neck, at first lightly, then increasing her force as if to drag him down to her.
They clutched each other in such a strained, angular manner for a long time, until he felt the soreness around his waist. ‘To the back seat,’ he whispered to her. Then he released her and extricated himself.

Opening his door, he got out and walked around to her side, and opening her door, he pulled her out and picked her up like a child. A faint resistance was felt at first, but as if yielding to a force beyond her control, she slid out, barefooted on the wet ground. She mumbled about her shoes, but the other door was already open, and it was raining heavier than before. Bing pushed her into the back seat, and pushed her deeper inside so that he was get himself in.

He was in seconds embracing her body.

‘I am wet again,’ she complained weakly.

He answered her with his kisses, kissing dry all the raindrops on her face. She was heaving passionately in the middle of her struggle. Soon she lay to occupy the entire length of the seat, and he on top of her. Her hands were tremulous, gripping his shoulders to pull him to her. They were kissed absorbedly. And in his palm, a fire seemed burning, so he closed both over her breasts. Her tiny nipples, now fully exposed, were stiff and purplish, and he treated them like drinking the spring-water when he was a child in the valley of his village hills.

She was panting, her bosom thickly heaving.

He was hard. His pants were straining it. Freeing up one hand, he arched and moved to loosen his belt and unzip his fly. It sprang out, throbbing and staring, like a dragon.

‘Hold it,’ he begged, but she didn’t, so he grabbed her hand, and forced it onto it.

The urge was on. He moved his hand to her belly, then down to her mound, in a blind effort to remove her short pants. Then he felt her hand stopping his attempt.

‘No, not today.’

‘Why…’

‘No, not safe.’

‘But I can be careful.’

‘No.’ Her tone was firm.

He withdrew his hand, and occupied himself again with kissing, now reaching her belly and the button. Her legs and thighs were cool and moist with rain, to be warmed gently by his heated palms. Then, their first wave of energy half exhausted, the movements were going slower, less frantic.

Without fully pushing off her pants, she let his hand slide into her triangle. The hair was rough and smooth, dry and damp, and her wet lips seemed crying tears for him. He couldn’t control himself, he moved into position, with her hand following.
Then her hand was off him. She whispered, ‘Don’t enter.’

‘En.’ He promised, and started to rub and thrust, using all his middle-aged wisdom not to enter her mystery, the only hole that could possibly put out the fire of a man, the only abyss that could absorb a man’s soulfulness and madness.
And amazingly, she trusted him. How could she have the faith in the discretion of fully aroused masculinity? But he kept his promise, and in the end he burst out all in his reserve into her crotch.

He dropped his cheek against hers; his fingers caressing her features. They kissed more, slowly and more lovingly, the swell and flood and blood rhythmically subsiding.  

Sitting up, they adjusted their clothing into a decency and sobriety more acceptable to society. He had been sweating; with his hand, he was mopping his forehead. From the front seat, he brought over the tissue box. Carefully, Serena cleaned herself, declining his proffered assistance. She then collected all the used papers, and threw them onto the front seat, to join the ones she had used for her feet.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked.

Checking his mobile, he said, ‘Nearly 4.’

‘We’d better go. I have a party tonight. My colleagues drag me along, and this time I can’t escape.’

‘All the staff in your bank?’

‘It’s being organized by one individual. It happens quite often, I rarely go, but this time, they insist my attendance. Not much fun, they just drink, and I don’t.’

‘So what do you do at the party if you don’t drink?’

‘Just drink water. I like coffee, but my doctor advised not to take too much caffeine, it will hinder my absorption of calcium and minerals,’ she explained once more.

He was curious, so he asked, ‘Why? You are still young, not as if you have to seek this type of advice?’

‘Well, I am thinking of having a baby,’ she answered, flippantly.

‘What? Have a baby? You don’t have a husband yet.’

‘But I have to prepare for it. I am not as young as I would have wished.’

‘Do you really want a baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘Labour is such a pain, let alone rearing a child.’

‘But a woman can’t be regarded as complete if she hasn’t been a mother.’

‘You know, when I watched my ex-wife in labour in the hospital, I fainted at the sight when the doctor put the needle into her spine with some pain-killers. And it was me who needed a bit of care from the midwife. They gave me some sugar to recover.’
‘So you still left her after seeing her pain?’ Serena asked, critical, which made Bing exceedingly uneasy.

‘Well…people tend to forget pain. Like a woman who might have sworn never wanting to have another baby would do again after one or two years.’ He circumvented her question.

‘Maybe you really didn’t love her,’ she said, in a bid to smooth the edge of blame of her words.

A period of silence fell in the car, rendering the air peculiarly stagnant. Feeling the clumsiness and disconcertion affecting him again, he started the car.

‘What time is the party?’

‘They will pick me up 5:30pm at the service station.’

‘Hehe, the service station, it has become your bus stop.’

‘Yes, it is. I always ask people, my friends to pick me there.’

‘There must have been a lot of boys over there, waiting and lingering and worrying for you.’

‘Yes, quite a few, over the years, just think I have lived in that place for almost 10 years, and it’s not as if I’m unattractive, is it?’

‘Of course not. I just imagine the staff in the service station will one day ask you for a fee for the convenience for your frequent dating.’

‘Hahaha..’

Bing started the car moving, and due to the time, he had to travel by a quicker route back to Ashfield than the Mona Vale.
In the car, they shared more of their past encounters and romances. He had never felt he was so much himself. They talked freely, and Bing was restful and jubilant. Serena mentioned Nan Tian Temple, the majestic, and the most prominent Buddhist temple in Australia, located half way between Sydney and Canberra. He said he was willing to drive her there one day.
Only when approaching Ashfield, Serena picked the unfinished bottle of mineral water, and said, ‘I should take this with me as a memento.’ Bing detected something unusual in her tone, but he only said, lightly, ‘Why a memento, we have plenty of time,’ to which she smiled at him inscrutably and slyly.

At the service station, he got out first, went and opened the boot, caught a glimpse of the dead bird, took out the umbrella, and closed the boot. He opened the umbrella for her. She put all the tissues into her handbag, got out of the car. He didn’t understand why she cared so much about the used tissues.  

While handing the umbrella to her, he took the opportunity to pull her body over to him, and after placing a heavy kiss on her lips, he said, ‘Bye, see you later.’

She replied, in a weak voice, ‘Bye.’

When Bing arrived home, he wrapped the dead bird in the newspaper, and disposed of it into the red-lidded rubbish bin.

In the evening at his dinner, thinking the next day was Australia Day, a public holiday, he sent an SMS to her, ‘If you want to go Nan Tian Temple tomorrow, just let me know.’  He got her message late midnight, ‘Thank you. No.’

Then, two days later he got her message again, ‘Let’s marry soon, I am very tired.’

Confused, and surprised, and no less excited, he started imagining he could hold a body that was eleven years younger than him, and make love to her every night.

He replied, ‘Okay, in three days, after I come back from the trip.’


--- End of Chapter 7 --- End of Part I ---

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-26 14:38
Chapter 5   5/5

Part II

Chapter 8  1/2


The air in Surfers Paradise is darkening; he checks his mobile, it is 8:03pm. He is the only person on the gloomy beach.

Serena is such a capricious person, changing a paramount life decision in a matter of days. Probably she still rejects him because of his age, or his marital status, or anything else. Shall he reply to her with an acknowledgement or some comments either good or bad, angry or careless? What should he say to her?

He continues treading on the sand; the shadow, like a puppet, is catching up. He steps down to the lower column where he finds a sloping dry area and sits down, crossing his legs like a Guan-Yin Buddha.

He is now a sitting audience in a theatre. Before him, the tide is flirting with the beach. They hold and kiss each other for a long second before the tide decides to leave, slowly but surely, ebbing away. However, the beach is not disappointed, because the tide will soon come back again, to continue the next cycle of their loving affair.

Without changing his position, he ponders quietly upon the sea, and the tide, and the sky, until he feels the strain in his legs. Then he lies down, let his head rest on his crossed hands.

His front is vulnerable.

No moon is in the sky. The few visible stars are sparsely scattered. They seem too weak to sustain their existence in the firmament. He has the impression they will be drowned and disappear from him at any moment.

They are barely existent and can be neglected by the world.

‘So am I,’ he mused, blinking to the stars; and the stars, as distant and far back as his childhood, blink back.



When he was eight years old, he once asked his father, ‘Dad, what is the meaning of my name? Our Chinese teacher told us to ask parents for that.’ His father, who had just come back from the town, where he worked as an electrician in the broadcasting station, thought a while, and answered him, ‘Bing means polite, respectful, good-natured, good-mannered, intellectual, reading a lot of books.’

‘And Wang?’

‘Wang is our family name. It has passed from generation to generation since many, many years ago.’

‘Why do all my classmates have the same name Wang?’

‘Because, many, many years ago, there was only one family. The family bore many offspring, like a big tree with many branches and leaves, therefore they all inherit the same name.’

‘Does that mean we are all sisters and brothers in our class?’

‘Yeah, we are all brothers and sisters, live in the same village, descended from the same parent.’

‘Oh,’ Bing nodded, his eyes widening in awe.

Through his primary years, Bing had maintained steadily a position within the top three students. Whether or not it was because of his ‘intellectual’ name he didn’t know. But it was a truth that his father, who had himself successfully completed eight years of primary and secondary school and was considered well-educated compared to many villagers with little chance of doing any form of schooling, had always placed Bing’s study as the first priority. Any household chore or farm work would have to be set aside for his homework. His mother was illiterate, but she was nonetheless of the same opinion as his father.

In the class he was the youngest, because he went to kindergarten at six, one year earlier than the normal entry age. But on the other hand, he was also a well-known silly boy in the village.

One evening, when he came back from school, he noticed his mother was very upset. She questioned him, ‘Bing, the two Yuan I put in the drawer is not there any more. Do you know where …’

‘I don’t know,’ he cut in to deny, hastily, and with his head sagging, twisting his fingers against his schoolbag.

‘Now, Bing, I need the money to buy pork. Your dad has friends visiting us this weekend.’ She squatted down, holding his arms. ‘If you know, tell me, okay? Otherwise we won’t have anything for our guests, and Dad will be angry.’

‘I… ’ he stammered. He didn’t fear his mother, but his father, well, he couldn’t imagine.

‘Did you take it? Where have you put it?’

‘I gave it to Wang San, to buy a stone with it.’

‘What? Stone? What stone?’ his mother was in confusion.

Bing fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a little stone, bluish, its surface very smooth and shining. “This,’ he gave it to her.
‘Oh, just this?! You can easily find these stones in the stream.’ She lost her temper, throwing the stone away. ‘How can you take the money from home? Eh? Now go and ask him to return the money.’ She was shaking his arms.

Bing cried, turned and ran to Wang San’s home. But he failed in his effort, because San refused to give the money back. In the end, his mum had to talk to San’s mother. After a lot of blaming, jeering and arguing between the two mothers, the money was finally returned, at the price of Bing’s silly reputation spreading through the village. Even a long time after this incident, Bing’s mother would, whenever she got a chance, tell others that such a little boy had already learnt how to cheat for money; and San’s mother would, whenever she got a chance, fight back, saying who was to blame if a boy was so stupid? Even before the incident, the two families had not been getting along very well. So the dispute had worsened the already poor relationship, manifesting the typical neighbourhood strife in the tight confinement of the village community.

Among all the childhood memories, Bing had retained chiefly the good parts of it. His kindergarten was nicely sheltered in a low soil-stacked flat, which was fully funded by the government.

One source of fun during those years was ‘hide and seek’. Once found, the person was treated as an imaginary enemy, whose arms would be grabbed and twisted behind back by the winners, as they marched to an imaginary execution field. It was typical of scenes in many of the revolutionary films and posters where the winner was supposed to punish by gunning down the loser. Oftentimes, the loser was a girl, and Bing, as a winner, would grasp one of her arms, another winner the other. The soft and boneless feeling of a girlish arm seemed so different from that of boys, which must have been the first time he had a vague comprehension of sexuality.  

A couple of years on, the boys in the village started to avoid girls’ company. The boys’ fun after school went for field-battling, and fishing, and loach-catching. In his village Guzhai, which means Ancient Village, there was a low, marsh-like field just in front of a row of houses. In winter, it turned dry, when the kids, usually four, would group into two fighting teams. Each team stacked up a pillbox made from the ploughed soil, about twenty metres apart. When the battle started, they used lumps of soil, imitating gun-shooting to attack each other. They opened a spy-hole in the middle of the pillbox to detect their enemies’ attempts. Serious injuries rarely occurred, for the soil lumps, even hitting one’s face, caused  no more harm than a loud boyish wailing. However, in all scenarios, the battle would in the end turn each of them into a soil-boy, with dust and dirt in their hair and faces, with their clothes wretched and filthy.

Bing was once injured in another type of field battle. Instead of making a pillbox, they made the wooden-grenade. It was cut from a bough, thinning one end to shape up a handle. Two groups of people would stand about fifty meters apart, throwing the grenade at each other. Most of the time, if a fighter paid enough attention, he was able to see the grenade flying through the air and avoid it. But Bing, nine years old, at the particular time stood there motionless, unaware of the flying object falling towards him. It landed  between his eyes, at the point where the bridge of his nose started.

He was bleeding all over his face, but he was not entirely unconscious, for he heard his mother running to him, shrieking, frantically, like a hen whose chick has just been taken by an eagle.

He didn’t die, nor was he blind. Both eyes were found to be unscathed after the blood was stopped and cleaned off.

He was extremely lucky. The tiniest shift in any direction would have caused damage that would ruin his life. The boy who hit him, a few years older than himself, was as much frightened as everyone else. He must have been sure Bing was already dead, for he ran from scene, and dared not come back home for two days.

Since this incident, Bing’s mother never forgot to pray with burning incense at every chance she could possibly find, in the temples, or at home where she set up a little altar for the purpose. She thanked the greatest Buddha for saving his boy, by a range of tributes such as orange, banana, home-made rice wine, or whatever good-foods she could prepare. She truly believed it was not a mere accident or pure luck but the hand of Buddha that, at the last fraction of second, had moved the ‘grenade’ away from his eyes, from his nose, from whatever spots on his head that were weak enough to be fatal, or disabling.

The wooden-grenade game was then forbidden in the village. Bing had become a source of behavioural education and teaching among parents. ‘Don’t play that, remember Bing…’ was often heard in the soil-stacked houses as Bing passed by.
In 1980, when Bing was ten years old, China had just come out of the chaotic ten years of the Cultural Revolution, which had officially ended only four years before by Deng Xiao Ping, who had resumed power and steered the country on the course of economic reform. But the country was still half starving, at least in his village which must have been one of the poorest in Sichuan Province.

Some of the good-food Bing had a chance to taste in those years were birds and field-mice. Although the crops were not plentiful, the field mice seemed to be sufficiently fed.  And the birds in the hills and mountains had no trouble thriving on the wild fruits and seeds.

His uncle had a rifle he used to shoot birds, and boars, and other scarcer animals such as deer. In addition, he possessed a great number of mouse snares made of bamboo and strong strings. One at a time, he would place up to thirty of them in the fields near the burrows and tracks frequented by the rodents. Using grain as the bait, the snares were laid in the evening, to be collected next morning. One day, Bing, on his way to school, saw him coming back with the dangling corpses in the snares.

‘Whoa… Uncle,’ he ran to him excitedly. ‘How many have you got?’

‘Don’t know, you count yourself,’ his uncle was grinning, showing his tobacco-stained teeth.

Bing fiddled among the snares; the numbering skills he had freshly learnt from school were put into practical use. At last, he declared, ‘Fourteen, three more than last time.’

‘Quite a few escaped from the snares, I need to fix and tighten the springs,’ his uncle said. ‘Your aunt will cook it tonight, you come over.’ His uncle lived in the same mud-house, but in adjoining rooms with a separate kitchen.

‘I will,’ he said, feeling hungry in anticipation. ‘Uncle, when do you go hunting for boar?’

‘Have to wait for a few days. Jilin told me he saw the footmarks of boar somewhere on White Water Hill. But Kan hasn’t come back home yet.’ Both Jilin and Kan were local farmers, who would go together with his uncle when hunting for the bigger animals.

‘Can’t you just go with Jilin?’  

‘No, we need at least three people. Boars are crazy and dangerous. And if we catch one, with three it is also easier to carry it home.’   

Seeing Bing still lingering about him, his uncle waved him away, ‘Go to school, you will be late.’

Bing left reluctantly, frequently looking over his shoulder at those little dangling creatures. His uncle was tall and skinny. The snares on his shoulder were rocking with a rattling sound of bamboo.  

Coming back home at about four in the afternoon, Bing went, first thing, straight to the ledge of the fence of the house. The mice, already detached from the snares, lay on top of a bundle of fire-twigs. His uncle was not in; his aunt was busy in the kitchen.

‘Aunt, when are you going to cook the mice?’

‘Ah… we need to remove the fur first.’ His aunt peered at him from the low seat beside the stove. ‘You want to do it?’

‘Yes,’ Bing answered gladly. He had done it a few times before.

‘You go bring the basin, and fetch the ashes from here.’

Bing went for a big tin-basin, and came back to her. Poking the spade inside the stove, his aunt brought out the ashes which she emptied form the spade into the basin. She did this a number of times until the basin was half filled.

Then, fetching a couple of mice into the basin, he began to apply the ashes to the skin, forcefully rubbing it. In the meanwhile, his cousin Wang Dan appeared from the doorstep, coming back from kindergarten.

‘Ah, mice,’ Dan was instantly excited. ‘How many has my dad caught this time?’

‘Fourteen.’  

Dan sat down on the ground, and joined in the skinning work.

An hour later, even with all their enthusiasm, they had only done three mice, and even those three were poorly done, with fur still stuck about the surface. Bing was always amazed at the efficiency of his aunt in doing the job. Her big, rough hand grabbed a pile of ashes with which she stroked harshly upon the little body, put it aside, and then took another, repeating the same application. She would then let them stay for some minutes, before proceeding to the next and final step. In her hands, the fur seemed to easily drop off, and in less than half an hour, all fourteen mice became furless and clean. The result looked much like a pile of small skinned rabbits.

‘Aunt, why don’t we use hot water to remove the fur from the mouse?’ Bing asked curiously. He knew his mother used boiling water to do the job with rabbit, which seemed to be a better and cleaner method.

‘No, a mice is too small and not as fatty as a rabbit, and boiling water can even harden its fur roots.’

‘Oh…’ Bing frowned, not understanding how smallness and fat should make such a difference.

His aunt went on washing the mice, and went ahead preparing them in the same way one usually did with fish.

-- to next post --

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-28 16:31
Part II

Chapter 8  1/2

Chapter 8   2/2


It was a big meat-feast for two families. Bing’s dad and grandpa were not at home. Bing, and his sister Ming, two years his junior, and his mother and his grandma enjoyed the meat, together with his uncle’s three-member family. His aunt fried them with ginger and spring onion, the same method she used with birds and rabbits. His uncle, who would always drink rice-wine on such occasions, spent hours at the dinner table in the dim light of the oil-lamp, reading a small book which seemed to Bing always the same, and chewing one piece of meat or bone so long that it must have become a pulp before he finally let it go down his throat. Knowing his habit, Aunt had allocated five of them in his bowl, and with also a plate of peanuts, he stayed there ruminating until very late in the night.

Bing’s grandpa had two wives, but only living with his first wife since the 1949 Chinese Revolution and the renunciation of concubinage. Bing’s father and uncle were the children of his second wife, or concubine so to speak, who lived alternatively with her two sons. His first wife also gave birth to two children, but one of them died during labour, the other died from hunger in the 1960s. Childless since she had been, she didn’t seem to be fond of children, also seldom meddling in the affairs of the other two family units in the same mud-house. Now and then Bing’s uncle would approach her and offer her some meat he had available, but she would most times simply decline.

The mud-house, which was a soil-stacked two-storey building, had six bedrooms upstairs. Its ground floor were used as the living area. In the middle of it was a big, shared living room, the rest divided into three units for cooking and dining for the three separate households.

His grandpa was a peddler, a businessman, often going far away, sometimes absent from home for up to a month. When he came back from his travels, he would always bring many little exotic delights for the whole village, such as candies, fireworks, new clothes and toys. However, Bing didn’t seem to develop much affection towards his grandpa in his childhood, probably due to his long absence, or more to his bad temper.

At school, Bing was a good student. Teachers liked him, especially his Chinese teacher. This had unfortunately caused some jealousy among some of the other students. Bing was slim and pale, giving an impression of cleverness and shyness. He didn’t have the build and the bodily strength that could lend him an advantage in any possible physical friction with other stronger boys.

One day, his sister went together with him to his class. During the class break, he was sitting with her on the stool, reading a book. The teacher was away in his room. Two boys in the class decided to bully him. One of them covered Bing’s eyes with his hands, the other knocked Bing’s head with his knuckles. Bing was weak, he cried, and so did his sister.

When the teacher came back, and heard about the incident, he punished the two culprits by making them stand for the entire one-hour session on the teaching platform, before the class of more than forty students. Since then, two boy’s resentment towards Bing grew even worse, and as far as he could remember hardly faded for the rest of their school days.  
While boys were tricky and tended to be more mischievous than girls, the girl with whom he shared his desk was an exception, as in one morning class she had demonstrated to him, and to the whole class.

As soon as the teacher stepped into the classroom, the class monitor of the day ordered the class to ‘Stand up!’. So all students rose to their feet and immediately shouted their respect to the teacher, ‘Teacher good!’, then in a little while ‘Sit down!’. Just a moment after Bing had begun lowering himself, the girl, Chun,  moved his end of the stool away. Although he instantly detected her trick, there was not enough time to prevent him from falling to the ground. With a sensational thumping, followed immediately by an explosion of laughter from every little soul in the class, he didn’t feel any pain but the hottest shame on his face. Even the teacher couldn’t suppress his amusement from the corner of his mouth, though he did promise to punish anyone who dared to do this again.

As a shy person, he couldn’t possibly do anything to her on the spot. She was a girl, and worse, she was the one he seemed mostly attracted to in the school. On two or three occasions he tried to avenge his suffer by doing the same to her, but she was too smart, and never lost her utmost vigilance in her defence. The timing was calculated, the stool being moved at right moment, but she didn’t sit and fall, but pulled back the stool and threw a vicious and foxy smile at him.

Well, it was not as if he had to hate her. Instead, a strange friendship seemed to exist between them. Tricky as she had often been, she would hand over her rubber, without his asking, when she noticed he didn’t have one. Sometimes she would write him a maths question on a slip of paper, and quietly he would work it out and push his answer slip over to her. And, at every new term when the seats were to be changed, he hoped he would be assigned to sit together with her again, and would feel very downcast if failing to do so. At the times of school assembly or the radio-guided exercise that occurred twice a day during the class break, his wandering eyes would always centre about where she was located.  

He didn’t assume she was aware of his boyish infatuation at all. Apart from some sweet wordless communication between them along their desk, Bing had never detected any of her glances dwelling on him. However, he was hardly disappointed by her ignoring him, for it was more like a curious, wondering state of mind, expecting something sweet, yet not bearing much of a shadowy sensation if nothing came out. And, sometimes he chose to go to the places where she had been previously seen staying, hoping to see her there again, but only watching her at a safe distance if she did turn up, teetering on the boundary of hiding or showing himself.

After their last time sharing the desk in Year Four, he had never been close to her again, but his covert friendship with her lasted unbelievably long, in fact becoming one of his unforgettable childhood memories.

Between ten and twelve, like his fellow students in the village, Bing was obliged to do a range of work at weekends, especially during the school holidays. He had participated to varying degrees in numerous laborious tasks involved in the cycle of rice growing, such as sowing, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, threshing, rice toting and drying. He was not strong, but he helped his mother in every possibly way. With his father employed in the town, his mother was the only adult working full time in the field, which made his little contribution very helpful. The acres of rice field was allocated by the government based on the head count of the family, according to the newly adopted Land Contract Policy in China following the end of the People’s Commune style of collective production.

To him, farming was on most occasions fun. The only thing that he dreaded  was when he had to thrust his bare foot into the muddy field. To his young imagination, inside the mud was always a piece of harsh clay or stone, or a sharp glass, or even a snake or a lump of manure, ready to cut or bite or scrape his foot. He was even told some appalling stories about leeches that had penetrated the legs of a farmer, who had not even noticed their intrusion until the length of leech had completely submerged into the flesh, which had to be urged out by some strong smoke.

Frightful as it was sounding, the leech horror had never happened to him. And after hundreds of times of planting his feet unthinkingly into the mud, he seemed to have adequately overcome his fear with the like boldness and spirit equipped in a young adventurer.

Once, he was in the water field, with his mother who was then smoothing the soil, readying it as the last step before planting. A cow-driven cart with revolving vanes was used for the task. His mother, in a majestic posture, was standing on its two small ledges, one hand gripping the rein, the other a whip made from a bamboo stick.

‘Hemn, hemn, hemn…’she yelled, spurring on the animal, assisted with occasional use of the whip. The cow was hauling the heavy weigh, lurching forward, rapidly, or slowly depending on its mood which was largely dictated by the food level in its stomach. With the vanes of the cart rotating, the soil mass in the water was pressed to be smoothed.

At the time, Bing was at the other end of the field, checking the water inlet to increase the inflow, as his mother had said more water was needed.  He squatted down, pushing to enlarge the inlet of the upper field, hearing the yelling and whipping and the water splashing from his mother’s direction.  

Then, suddenly, she gave a sharp cry. Bing instantly lifted his head, and saw his mother falling, and plunging down heavily, a flourish of muddy water pushing at her sides.

‘Mum!’ he sprang to his feet, stamping and skipping across the field.

He tried to pull her up, but finding it difficult. Then he realized one of her feet was stuck between the vanes. So with his hands, he tried to untangle her foot, while at the same time, his mother was scrambling by her own effort to turn her face out of the water. With one hand propping herself up, she was choking, gasping for breath, her face all smothered with the slush that she was desperate to clear with only one free hand.

As soon as she was able to speak, she muttered, ‘Wait, wait… don’t pull …’  

He halted his effort. Slowly, his mother moved her body in the water to a position where she could free her foot from the vanes. Then with a gentle twist, her foot was disengaged from the columns, finally. Bing grabbed her arm, helping her to stand.

‘Did it hurt much?’ Bing asked anxiously.

‘Some, but I don’t feel I’ve sprained it,’ his bedraggle mother replied, continuing to slosh the water to clean her face. Then looking at the cow, she smiled a bit, ‘Lucky though, the cow stopped immediately when my foot slipped into the vanes. Otherwise I might have been dragged along, and my foot will be done for.’

The cow was bulky. Its eyes, bleary, bulging, and unfathomable, were assuming an air of stern indifference to what was being said about it. Its four feet, each as big as a sizable trunk, were rooted motionless in the field; its dark head was swinging, its long and thick tail flinging in its futile effort to drive away the swarming flies.

How did it possess the intelligence to feel the incident at its back and stop at once to protect its human master? This was one of the many mysteries of nature that often puzzled Bing’s little mind.

He and his mother went to the little ditch. There was a livid red streak around her ankle, but it was not bleeding. She cupped many handfuls of clean water, and thoroughly washed her face. She was soon showing her florid face again. Slim, and only a little taller than him, she was to him firm like a safe pillar.   

They went home. His sister Ming was sitting on the front yard, among a group of chicks which, with their beaks and eyes desiring, were approaching her for the crumps of a sweet potato she was eating. His grandma was on a stool, peeling the taro with a sickle. His mum passed her and told her briefly what had happened.

His grandma raised her eyes and said, ‘Aiya-hah… hurt anywhere? Always need more careful!’ Her concerning eyes were following her daughter-in-law’s drenched body into the house, but she didn’t stop the work at hand. The way she peeled the taro was intricate, and fascinating. The sickle stood with its wooden end on the ground and was steadied by her left foot. The small and round and hairy taro in her left hand, was scraped quickly clean by the swift movement of the sickle’s blade under the precise control of her nimble fingers. One must be careful not to get the juice of taro into the eyes, or the skin, or the clothes, because the substance was irritable and scratchy, its stain hard to remove. Bing had once got some in his eyes, suffering terribly, and the pain could only be relieved by a great deal of water. Nonetheless, the taros, especially the young and slimy ones, were his favourite food, for the white and soft and sticky pulp felt and tasted so good in his mouth. It was indeed the best and most plentiful food he had eaten during his childhood, serving well his growing appetite.

After washing herself and changing into a new set of clothes, his mother and Bing went down to the field again. In the village, it was usually the men doing the task in which a cow was involved. But because his dad did not normally work in the field, his mother did it herself in order to save the cost and trouble by hiring other men to do it. His uncle was often out hunting, and hired others to work his own field. Otherwise he could offer the hand to help.   

At dusk, on their way home, Bing saw his uncle coming from the other end of the road. He was carrying a long rusty rifle on his shoulder, a number of birds tied with a wire dangling from the barrel. Excited, Bing slowed down to let his mum go ahead first, waiting for him.

‘Uncle, how many?’ he asked.

‘Eight,’ his uncle was grinning, his teeth all black.

‘Sparrows,’ Bing said, looking at the little lifeless bodies with a little sympathy. ‘Uncle, can you take me with you next time when you hunt for the birds, please?’

‘You got to do your study,’ he evaded the request, adopting the exact tone of his dad. ‘Don’t run after Dan, you must study hard and one day go to high school and then university.’

However, Bing knew for a fact that his uncle was willing to take him, so long as his dad didn’t know and the consent from his mother could be obtained. Compared to his father, his mother was not entirely unnegotiable in the matter, while seeking such permission from his dad was absolutely out of the question. His father was obstinate about his not mixing with other village children, let alone hunting for wild birds in the hills. His cousin Dan rarely did any homework. It was a simple fact that the majority of the kids didn’t do well with their study. Too much fun and field work and lack of parental supervision were the main reasons the village kids couldn’t pursue the study any closer. Many of them would quit school after Year Five, and begin to help their family with whatever labour they were capable of doing.

But Bing was different. His father was a high school graduate, and worked as an electrician instead of a farmer like the majority of his fellow students’ parents. He was expected to study hard, and to escape a lifetime toiling fate that had been with all the generations who had shared the Wang surname in the Ancient Village.     


---End of Chapter 8 ----

小信

狗头君 发表于 2014-3-20 15:06
说实话，文笔灰常生硬，看得出英语是第二语言

狗头君怎么看出来生硬呢？请指教一二，好吗？

我觉得还行啊。

狗头君

小信 发表于 2014-3-28 17:53
狗头君怎么看出来生硬呢？请指教一二，好吗？

我觉得还行啊。

我说错了，看不出是英文是第二语言，我是我先入为主的偏见，但看得出不是写作老手

笔法累赘，比如说下面那段去掉红字比较简洁：
The first time was some years ago on a trip with his parents, and his then wife and his daughter; this time and the last he came here for the purpose of work.

还有就是白描太多，看得很累，场景之类的一笔带过比较好，都是我个人看法啊，你让我写我绝对写不出来

小信

狗头君 发表于 2014-3-28 17:53
我说错了，看不出是英文是第二语言，我是我先入为主的偏见，但看得出不是写作老手

笔法累赘，比如说下面 ...

明白了，谢谢。

我也觉得描画的非常细致，语言很精细，但是读完就完了，平平淡淡的叙述文的感觉。

我觉得楼主语言上的技巧应该够了，就是需要一些立意和一个强大的故事。

洋八路

狗头君 发表于 2014-3-28 17:53
我说错了，看不出是英文是第二语言，我是我先入为主的偏见，但看得出不是写作老手

笔法累赘，比如说下面 ...

狗头君，你好。

去掉那个purpose of 确实简练一些。 那个his本来我也想去掉，可是去掉会不会感觉，那个 then也在修饰daughter呢？会感觉女儿也是前女儿？

and his then wife and daughter; this time and the last he came here for work.

还有，因为不是英文专业的，语法不好。。尤其是，a, the, in, on, at, with, by, 这些词搞糊涂，好像都觉得对，非常头疼。。

出版社编辑也觉得有些细节多了点，目前也想着尽量修改得简练一些。。

谢谢。。

狗头君

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-28 22:01
狗头君，你好。

去掉那个purpose of 确实简练一些。 那个his本来我也想去掉，可是去掉会不会感觉，那个  ...

then daughter肯定不行，不可能离婚就不是daughter了，不用then wife就用former wife？

看你小说的感觉笔法像新闻报道或者论文，不容易投入进去

洋八路

狗头君 发表于 2014-3-28 21:08
then daughter肯定不行，不可能离婚就不是daughter了，不用then wife就用former wife？

看你小说的感觉 ...

谢谢。。现在书稿基本已经定了，写作的风格是无法再改了，当然可以去掉一些冗长，无关紧要的细节。。

目前主要是预防一些明显的语法和常识错误。。避免笑话。 这也是我最希望足迹同学们帮忙指出的。。

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-28 16:34
Chapter 8   2/2

Chapter 9        1/3



It was school holiday. One evening at dinner table he was begging and nagging his mum to grant him a chance to go shooting with his uncle, making a lot of promises in regard to his study as a bargain. It was a kind of fun he had been wishing for and vividly imagining, but it had never become a real experience. Therefore, when his mum had finally yielded to his imploring, he was thrilled to the very roots, running immediately next door to pass the news, while his mother calling after him, ‘keep quiet, keep quiet, don’t let your dad know.’  

On the eve of his adventure, Bing went to sleep much earlier than usual. He would have to get up as early as 4:30am in the morning and go to a hill some miles away.

Next morning, he was nudged awake by his mother, and for a moment thought that she had come to say ‘good night’ instead of ‘good morning’, because it was like he had not slept at all.

It was very quiet, except for the frog croaking in the fields. The oil-lamp was on, its light wavering. His mum was preparing him a few more clothes, muttering that the morning dew might catch him a cold. He got out of the bed and without his usual grudge in wearing more clothes, let his mother dress him as much as she wished. Then they went down carefully by the wooden fenceless staircase to the living room, where, lit by his mum, another oil-lamp was already on the dinner table, as well as a bowl of sweet potatoes. She asked him to eat all the potatoes, but this time he was too excited to fully corporate with her, and after finishing one and taking another in his hand, was impatient to go to his uncle’s. Their household dog, obviously having heard the stirrings inside the room, was creeping through the dog-hole around the wall corner, and pulling itself up, coming over to greet him, its tongue licking, its tail wagging. Bing split a little piece of potato and sent it to its mouth. The dog was exceedingly happy, its lean jaw extensively jerking as if it had caught a feast. It was a yellowish dog, very humble, overly kind, not even showing teeth to strangers or other wandering dogs. Bing patted its head and, followed by his mother, went ahead to the thick and heavy wooden door. The latch was thick and heavy too, and made a deep sound as Bing clumsily lifted it up and pulled it aside. But the jarring noise that came later with the door opening had almost frightened him in such a quietness before dawn.

They slipped outside. His mother was closing the door, as gently as she could so as to lower the squealing noise. Then Bing saw a swallow squeezing through the narrowing crack, and coming out, shooting and swirling into the dusky air.  

‘Why? The swallow going out so early?’ he was puzzled. Inside the room, there was a family of swallows, two adults and two eggs, living in a nest right under the wooden ceiling. His father had only to fix a loose structure made of iron wire onto the crossbeam and the swallows, so intelligent as they seemed to be, would detect it and enter the house to make nest over it, using all types of building materials, such as straws, little twigs, leaves, feathers, cigarette or paper scraps. And most of the time the swallows tended to keep their nest and the house clean and tidy, like a good guest is expected to behave. However, when they were having babies, the droppings on the floor and around the nest could be very ugly, and one must try to stay away from under the nest in case the baby swallow’s dirt hit his head. How many times had he been bullied in such a manner by those babies? Well, he couldn’t remember, but he did remember a couple of times after he had been hit, instead of running away, he stayed and raised his eyes to scowl at them, only seeing and receiving more of the babies’ weapons.      

‘They are always early, when they detect the door opening,’ his mother commented, in a low voice. And perhaps considering the swallow might return to its home, she left the door open with a small crack.

They went to the next door, his uncle’s. He saw through chink of the door the light inside the room, and knew his uncle was already up, and would come out at any minute. He knocked at the door, twice, to send him a signal. That done, they stood under the eave, waiting.

His mother brushed a bit his clothes, muttering her reminders, ‘The road to the hill is wet and slippery, don’t rush, walk carefully, it is still dark.’

The night was deep; the sky was in semi-darkness, wherein the scattered stars were twinkling, with a light even weaker than the oil-lamp set at its lowest. The distant hills and mountains were like a pool of ink poured across the lower sky, mysterious and a little scary. In the garden bed along the fence, the plants were just like a group of black unmoving shapes.

If not for the sound of the door opening, Bing would have soon got himself into a dream. His uncle came out, hitching the long rifle along his side. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

Bing followed him towards the main entrance of the house. ‘Don’t rush, follow closely uncle,’ said his mother after him.

With another creaking sound, they were then on the dusty path of the village. And immediately the dog next door started barking, and then more dogs in the village began to bark, though their voices didn’t sound angry at all. Perhaps they were just barking from habit, like birds twittering some innocent songs. For a moment, it came to him so distant and unreal that it was more like something he had often heard in his sleep.

He and his uncle thudded their steps on the narrow path fenced by the walls of houses. As his eyes became more used to the dim light, the road and things were clearer. The fewer than fifty houses in the entire Guzhai village were actually built upon a hill, their foundation level almost varying from one to another. Therefore, the only stone-paved path that wound through it was steep and zigzagging. More than twice Bing had nearly tripped over the steps. His uncle, walking briskly in the front, kept saying to him, ‘Careful, careful.’

In about ten minutes, they were out of the village, onto a track snaking uphill. A big bird was suddenly breaking out of a tree, scaring him like a ghost. The bird didn’t cry out but flapped its heavy wings, heading unhurriedly to another tree. Slightly shocked, Bing paused a second or two, but his uncle, not affected at all, didn’t slacken his steps in the least, like nothing had ever happened.   

As they went up the steep hill, the path was narrower. The leaves and twigs were protruding in their way, the dew wetting his face and clothes. He felt a little cold, his mum was right, he would definitely catch cold if he had not put on extra clothes.

Along the track, he often heard some noise from the undergrowth, like the chickens scratching their claws on the soil searching for worms, but, strange enough, as they approached, it would stop at once and start at once again some distance away. It seemed to him the noise producer, whatever it might be, was able to jump from one place to another in no time.

Once, there was a loud plunging just in the front of his uncle, Bing saw only the shaking thicket but spotted neither birds nor animals that had caused the brisk rustle.

‘What is it?’ he asked frightfully.

‘A snake,’ his uncle answered.

‘Is it big?’

‘Yes,’ his uncle replied.   

By the time they arrived in a thick wood, the sky was near dawn. The dull paleness began to touch the treetops, its share coming down to the undergrowth. Dots and patches of light were quivering on the dewy leaves and trunks. Birds began to sing. At first, only with one or two sleepy chirpings, then as if they were awakened by a common call, their voices more like a chorus, echoing very far and deep.

His uncle paused at a small branch of the road, and said, ‘Walk slowly, we are close to our target.’

They gingerly trod upwards by the track as narrow as his foot, moving towards a tree as high as a two-storey house.

‘That is the tree,’ his uncle pointed. ‘We need to find a hiding place, some distance away.’

‘But are there any birds there?’ Bing wondered. ‘There is no chirping out of the tree.’

‘They are still asleep.’

They stooped and sneaked towards a young pine tree about a man’s height, within half of a stone’s throw to the target. His uncle pressed the low ferns and grass, then took out the plastic sheet from his bag, unfolded it and spread it over.

Sitting down, his uncle perched the rifle onto a fork of the tree, his eyes measuring the direction to the target.

They waited. Minutes had drifted by before Bing began to see its leaves stirring, hearing a few peeps like that of little chicks. It then took less than a minute for the whole tree to turn alive, with the vibrant clamour and rustle. Oh, to imagine only a little time earlier it had been so hushed and quiet!

‘Ready to shoot?’ Bing said in an excited but very low voice, turning to his uncle.

His uncle shook his head. Cool and imperturbable, he was making his cigarette. On his palm was a small square piece of paper like the one Bing used for an exercise book. He took a small amount of tobacco from his bag, laid it onto its middle, folded a couple of times to make it fit, added two more pinches, folded again, wrapped it over, licked on the paper’s edge, pressed the tobacco tight at the larger end of the piece, and, as a final touch, thrust out his tongue again to lick the full length of the seam. The whole piece looked like a small version of the funnel his mother used to pass the rice-wine.

Then, putting the thin end of the funnel between his lips, he fired up the lighter. There was no breeze, but he still used his left hand to protect the flame. For next minute or two, he was enjoying his cigarette, while Bing sat there wondering when the real thing could begin.

The cigarette burned half way down, his uncle opened his bag and fished out a firework, a ‘double-bunger’ firecracker.

‘Fireworks! Why?’ Bing had to suppress the surprise in his voice.

‘Now, you have a job to do.’ His uncle didn’t give him a reason. ‘When I give you the signal, you light the cracker.’ He put the firework in Bing’s hand. ‘You know how to do this, don’t you?’

Of course he knew. This was his favourite fun, although it was usually during Spring Festival. ‘Do I need to point it to the tree?’

‘No. Just make sure not at yourself, we only need its sound to scare off the birds.’

‘Oh…’ Bing was still puzzled, but in another second he understood the trick. ‘Hehe, I understand.’

His uncle gave the burning cigarette to him, ‘Fire it when I give you the signal.’ Then he moved to a prostrate position, crouching like a cat. His feet, in a pair of wretched Liberation Shoes, stretched beyond their plastic mat out to the wet grass.

Bing felt his blood beating in his temples. He set up the firework in the grass with its curled wick pointing outwards, holding his breath. His fingers clutched the wet end of the cigarette, waiting for his uncle’s signal.

Finally, his uncle winked at him, ‘Yes.’ At once Bing put the red ember against the wick, but it failed to ignite; he did once more and failed once more. Then he thought of something, and sucked the cigarette until the coal was almost burning his fingers before trying the third time.

The sparks began creeping down the short lead of the cracker.

The explosion, of just a firework, produced a massive bang in the heart of the forest. A cloud of birds, in his unblinking eyes, were swelling up in all directions out of the tree. Then, an immediate explosion, many times louder than the one a second before, joined to break the air, ear-piercing, rocking everything in the space.  

There was a sudden change in the birds’ flying pattern, as if they were numbed for a moment by failing of their wings. Many of them had recovered quickly and flown away, but some, after jerking a little in the air, were fluttering to the ground.

‘Not too bad, at least ten,’ his uncle declared, withdrawing the gun, which was still clouded in thin smoke.

Bing rose to his feet, running towards to where he had just noticed a falling bird. It was a sparrow. As he picked it up, its tiny feet were still quavering, though only for a brief moment. In its body there was no gunshot to be seen. ‘He must have been scared to death,’ he thought.

Rummaging through the thick undergrowth, they had searched and gathered a total of seventeen sparrows, a lot more than Bing had seen falling.

Most of them didn’t have any obvious wound on their body.

‘Why is there no wound?’ Bing asked.

‘Well, it is small, you can’t see it. The gun is a blaster, it sends out a wide shower of tiny beads.’

‘So the bead is inside the flesh. But won’t it hurt my teeth when I eat it?’

‘No, you will notice it on the surface of skin when you take the feathers off.’

The hunt was a victory. They collected the mat and the bag, tying all the birds by their feet with a long string. At first, Bing wanted to carry it himself, but his uncle said it was better hanging them on the barrel of the rifle.

Along the way back home, the birds’ chorus in the wood was sounding more feverish, as if the deadly shooting had not occurred. The daylight was now brighter, the water in the fields shining like mirrors. The swallows, with their nimbleness and agility, were sweeping low over the fields, darting and skimming upon the water. Now and again, as if called up by some spirit in the sky, they would suddenly dash skywards, catching the insects such as dragonflies and beetles. Bing knew some of them would immediately go home with their catch to feed their wailing babies, to hush those dirty and naughty, red-skinned, long-necked, and big-mouthed baby swallows.

Then he had a question, ‘Uncle, how do you light the cracker when you hunt for birds yourself?’ But he thought he had already known the answer even before he finished his asking.

‘Well, I have two hands, haven’t I?’ his uncle smiled proudly, showing his bad teeth.

‘Hehe.’

When they arrived at home, his sister was still in bed. His grandma was sitting on a stool in the front yard, peeling the taros. She said: ‘Aiya-hah, how could you go hunting…Aiya-hah, you will be in trouble if your dad knows,’ then seeing the birds in his hands, ‘Aiya-hah, so many,’ then noticing Bing’s damp clothes, she halted her work, stood up and brushed repeatedly his sleeves as if to make them dry, ‘Aiya-hah, soggy, let’s go and change your clothes.’ Grabbing his arm, she was leading him inside the room.

‘No, no, grandma,’ Bing broke away from her, ‘it will dry itself.’ He then placed the sparrows onto the fire-twigs on the ledge, and began counting again.

Of her three grandchildren, his grandma loved him the best, because he was the oldest. He had always been the first in line whenever she got some sweets or other little things for them. Oftentimes she would go to his school and wait outside his classroom for him to come out during the class break, and then watch him eat until finish the meat balls or the steamed buns she had bought from the market. On these occasions, his classmates would always gather around them with their staring jealousy. In his village, buns were regarded as a better and rarer food than rice, and could only be bought from the market.

Bing brought all the strung seventeen birds closer to his grandma, who had now sat back peeling the taros. ‘See, grandma, seventeen, that’s a lot, isn’t it, grandma.’

She reached out her old slender hand, patted his pants and shoes, repeating, ‘Aiya-hah, all dirty and wet, go and change, aiya-hah, don’t catch a cold.’


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洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-29 17:36
Chapter 9        1/3

Chapter 9   2/3


Putting the birds back onto the ledge, he went into the living room. The clock which had always been sitting importantly in the middle of a cabinet struck six times with its round, flinging pendulum. It sounded very deep and vibrating, so intimate and familiar to his ears. His dad had a watch, but his uncle didn’t have any. Bing wondered how his uncle could manage the time when hunting. Then, like many questions he had asked and immediately afterwards answered by himself, he knew his uncle was able to guess the time probably by the position of the sun or the moon. After all, he was a good hunter in the village. But he was not a full-time hunter, for he still needed to work in the fields. Oftentimes, he would exchange his hunted birds, or mice, or boar’s meat for field labour from other villagers.

Having seen the birds as they came back, a villager, Gua, came to the house, and offered to buy some for his guests.

‘How many do you want?’ his uncle asked.

‘Ten?’

‘All right.’ He then went to get the birds, and gave them to his customer.

‘How much?’ Gua asked.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘No, no, I won’t take them if you won’t take the money.’

‘Then five Jiao.’ Five Jiao equalled half a Yuan.

Gua produced the notes from his pocket, and handed them to his uncle, who at once thrust them into Bing’s breast pocket, ‘It is your reward, buy some pens and books.’  

Bing hesitated as to whether he should accept his uncle’s offer, but his uncle by the time had already slipped inside the room. Then, in a while he came out again, pointing to the rest of the birds. ‘Ask your mum to cook them.’

‘Okay, we will eat them together,’ Bing replied.

‘No, there’s only seven left. Next time,’ he said, going out of the house.

His mother was at the time watering the vegetables at the foot of the hill. Her figure rose and fell with the long scooper in her hands. Bing couldn’t wait to tell his mum of his first fruitful hunting adventure.

The birds were cooked together with rice porridge, and the soup was delicious, and Bing didn’t think he had left any bird bones un-chewed.

However, after this time, his dad by one way or another discovered his hunting secret, and got very angry. In his dad’s eyes, his uncle was a person without a proper occupation, and hunting was not only dangerous but would also distract Bing’s study more than anything else. So his uncle didn’t dare to take him hunting any more.

But there was so much fun in the village that Bing could always find his way to circumvent his dad’s supervision, especially during holidays. One morning, Bing got up, and felt very bored at home. He had already done the homework assigned for the holidays, and finished reading the books his father had brought home.

Then his cousin Dan came in, and tempted him, ‘Want to go fishing?’

‘But my dad will come home today,’ he said, sadly. ‘I have to stay at home.’

‘When will he come home?’

‘Don’t know. Probably this afternoon, my mum said he was coming back with some guests, for dinner.’

‘Then we try to be back before he gets home.’

‘But…’ Bing was wavering.

‘And today is good for fishing, because of yesterday’s rain. The water in the brook is rising.’

Bing didn’t need more enticement. ‘Okay, okay, but I lost my fishing hook last time, I need to fix it first.’

Last time, the hook was entangled in weeds, and he had to force it off, and lost it.

The fishing rod was actually a long, thin bamboo stick. When unused, the fishing line tied at the thinner end of the stick, was wrapped along the rod, with the hook tugged safely at the other end of stick.

Bing got a new hook from a little box he saved for the purpose, and began to attach it to the line. His grandpa sold the hooks and fishing lines and a lot of other little things. All he and Dan had to do was to steal some when their grandpa was dozing.
  
He said to Dan, with a tone of big-brother command, ‘You go and dig for the worms, and I will be ready when you come back.’  

Dan took a used, rusty cup and a hoe with him, going out. After the rain, there were plenty of worms in the soil, especially among the grass or shrubs by the rich well-fertilized plots. Actually it was rumoured that the worms were very nutritious and edible, and some people had even taken them for food. Ah, what a disgusting idea! He never liked the squirming, spineless things, let along eating them. Even a snake was better than the worms, because the snakes did have some spine-like bones. He remembered some years ago eating a snake when his grandpa bought a very big one from the market. The snake had to be prepared and cooked outside the house, and the skin and other unused parts had to be burned in a fire some distance away from where they lived, otherwise, as the villagers truly believed, the snakes in the field would be attracted by the smell of their like, and swarm into the houses.

Dan came back with the cup half full of worms. Bing was still struggling to tighten the knot. He did it up a number of times, but every time he pulled to test the tightness of the knot, it came undone. Dan came to help, and did it very efficiently. It seemed kids who didn’t study well at school were invariably better at other fun activities.

Bing found some of the ghastly worms climbing over the rim of cup. One of them dropped to the ground, jumping with energy like a little fish, before settling a bit, and escaping quietly to safety. Dan came to it, snatched it and tossed it back inside the cup.

Bing reminded him, ‘You need a cover, or all of them will climb out.’ But Dan couldn’t find anything good enough for the purpose; so in the end, he simply got some old paper and stuffed it inside.

In a while, they were ready to go.

His sister, Ming, who had been playing with her spinning-top made from a type of round and tipped and hard-shelled seed, came out of the house.

‘Ge Ge (brother), I want to go as well,’ she begged.

‘No, no, you are not allowed to, wait for grandma and mum to come back home,’ he said, as he had said to her many times on similar occasions, and he knew she would invariably listen to him, and be agreeable. In his mind, she was not really interested in fishing, or anything boys had been enjoying. However, today she seemed rather unhappy, grimacing as if about to cry. She came to him, and held his sleeve and shook his arm.

‘It’s so boring at home, let me go with you please…’ she was appealing. For a moment, his resolve was inclined to weaken. But a greater dread of the imagined fury of his father, on discovering they had both gone out, firmed his will. He didn’t forget the horrendous accident last time, when his sister hurt her middle finger in the rice-threshing machine. On that afternoon, they had gone to play in a field. The machine was then idle, not being used by the adults. He stepped on the pedal and made the cylinder with those pointed teeth rotate, but Ming moved her hand too close to the gear, which caught her middle finger and almost cut off half of the tip in one turn. It was indeed a disaster even more horrible than his grenade-incident. Her screaming was still lingering, even today, in his ears. Two years had gone by, her finger had recovered, but it was, noticeably disfigured around the tip.

‘No, no, please, Ming, you stay at home. Dad will be back soon,’ he said, glancing at the injured finger, but gave up the idea to warn her by recalling that horrific accident. He knew the mere mention of their dad was sufficient to daunt her courage, because since she injured her finger, she had been ordered again and again by their father that she should not go out with boys to play in the field, anytime, anywhere.

With a sulky face like the sky going to rain, she had to give in, mumbling, ‘It is unfair, I never go out.’

Bing fondled her head, and soothed her little temper by saying, ‘You don’t have to go out, you stay home, and you eat the big fishes I bring home, hehe.’

So Bing and Dan set off on their way, with two long fishing sticks swinging in their hands. Then his grandma, who had been digging soil in one of the ridges between the fields, saw them and called out, ‘Aiya-hah, go fishing again, don’t go, don’t go, Bing, your dad will be back home, he will be angry.’

‘Grandma, we will be back before he comes back, don’t worry.’ He waved to her.

They soon got to their favourite section of the creek. The water was brimming with the flow rushing from the hills. They laid down the gear on the ground and began to bait their hooks.

Every time Bing caught a slimy, writhing worm, he had a very uncomfortable feeling, a kind of vomiting, but he had to touch it for the sake of fishing, as much in the same way he didn’t like thrusting his foot into the dreadful mud yet still doing it. The sensation seemed to be telling him a life lesson that good feelings don’t come by themselves, but accompanied by the unpleasantness for one to endure.

He pinched one worm, finding its head or tail he didn’t know, and pierced it through the curve of the hook, until the hook was fully disguised and covered by the struggling life. Then he nipped off the extra length. The job was one requiring a sort of profound but repulsive delicacy, but Bing couldn’t wish to finish it faster.

Dan flung his bait into a farther, deep pool. The floater, made of a dry rice-stalk, was bobbing on the surface. He then inserted the end of stick into the soil to hold the rod. Bing went upstream, to where the water was shallow and sparkling. There would be only the minnows there he knew, but his experience told him it was always quicker to catch something in the rushing riffle. He threw the bait to the uppermost part of the stream, his hand far stretched, following the torrent down towards the deeper swell. He repeated the process twice, and in his third time the line started to tremble. It passed all the way from the tiny jittering tip, through the rod, then to his hand, then to his heart. He felt his body was all dissolving in that moment. It all happened during a very short time. He pulled the rod up, and there it was, a little fish, silvery, shining, and spinning. He caught it in his hand; it quivered and wiggled in his fingers. The little thing just had so much energy.

Dan came up to him, in his usual slow and unhurried manner. ‘Oh, a little minnow,’ he remarked lightly, reached up his hand to touch it once, as if it was not a victory anyone should be proud of.

A year younger than Bing, Dan was, to all those in the village, a boy of a quiet temperament. Bing was tall and slim, Dan short and stout. When Dan was walking, or better, straggling, he tended to part his steps outwards to the side, in a typical fork-step, or in Chinese, the Ba Zi step. His brow was prominent, hooding over his eyes. He didn’t resemble the look or temperament of his father, who was rather quick and lithe in both mind and body. To think of Dan going hunting like his dad was rather ironical, hardly imaginable. Dan seemed to have inherited and even manifested more from his mother, who had a pacific and complacent disposition, and who had also the uncommon, outstanding eyebrows.

In all the fun that went on in the village, Dan had always been Bing’s companion. He smiled a lot, but rarely laughed from his belly. He seemed to possess a cold, and humorous or sarcastic quality that belied his age. He never liked books or school. Bing even doubted he could write his own name properly, for Bing had hardly ever seen him writing anything at all.

Bing unhooked the fish, five centimetres long, even smaller than a medium-sized loach common in the rice fields. Dan dawdled back to his own position, watching the float on the water. Bing placed the fish, still alive with its tail flicking, into the basket. Then he thought to let the fish swim in the water, but in their haste they hadn’t brought any bottle or bucket with them for the purpose. He looked around, and knowing Dan wouldn’t bother with such a thing, went to the lower side of the stream, and dug a small hole, where the water was able to form a puddle. He then put the fish into it. The fish appeared very delighted with the water and its freedom, but still frightened enough to escape. Its little head banged against the wall a number of times, then thrust it in and hid its head and eyes in the soil, while leaving its body swaying in the water. There, feeling safe, it was in peace at last.

With the first victory, Bing continued to make best of the fun in the riffles. He caught three more minnows, which evidently disrupted the coolness of his cousin. Dan finally pulled himself up, lifted his line out of the water, and looked around for a more rewarding position. Bing, as he always did whenever a line was lifted out of the water, gave a curious glance to Dan’s hook, and burst into quick laughter on seeing the worm was already gone from it.

‘It must have been a smart fish nibbling at it,’ Bing was chuckling.

‘No, more like the worm slipped off in the water,’ Dan corrected, without a smile, nor with a dismal expression in his face. He went to the cup, and fixed another worm on his hook, before joining Bing to catch the little ones.  


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洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-29 17:42
Chapter 9   2/3

Chapter 9    3/3


A few more minnows were caught. Then as if the fishes had grown wary of today’s worms, or all stupid fishes in the rivulet had already been taken, their harvest dried up.

‘Let’s try another place,’ Bing said.

‘Yes,’ Dan agreed. ‘Let’s go much farther upstream, to White Water Valley.’

They picked up the fishes from the puddle, most of which already dead, and went upstream to the new destination. On their way they threw their lines into the water here and there, but without any success. White Water Valley was the farthest fishing spot for the kids in the village. Most parents would not permit their children to go that far. It was said  boars and some deadly snakes had been seen around the place. But today, enraptured by the little minnows he had caught, Bing seemed to have forgotten all the fears and warnings.

Some time later, they arrived at the spot, and made themselves ready on two big boulders along the brook. The water was rushing and laughing. And their boldness was fairly rewarded, for the minnows they caught here were much fatter and bigger, almost three times the size of their first ones, and their skin was gleaming with lustrous sheen. For a long time, the two boys, highly delighted and excited, were engrossed in the frequent vibration of their sticks and catches.

Then the minnows lost their attraction. They decided to do some more patient fishing for bigger ones, such as catfish and carp which were only available in deeper pond.

Fortune was indeed with Bing today. He didn’t have to wait long before his float started to dip, a sure sign a fish was upon the bait.

Unlike the minnows in the shallow water, a longer acting time was needed for bigger fish. He waited, and waited, his nerves jumping with the thrilling movement, until the float was submerged under the water. Feeling as if his hair was standing on end, and with a force that must be great enough to lift his own body, he pulled back the bamboo stick.

It was a carp, the biggest in his memory. Such a live thing, with a dignity and nobility incomparable to the minnows. He grabbed it hard lest it struggle off the hook and drop back into the water. Should he lose it, just as he had experienced a few times before, the loss would be so big that for many days on he would be buried with the uttermost misery and regret.

Therefore, he was only relieved when he had climbed onto the solid land, where his catch could be kept safe from the river. Dan jumped off his stone, full of admiration, and touched it and weighed it even longer than Bing himself. Unlike Bing, who would be happy at catching a fish big or small, Dan tended to discriminate his joy by its size.

This time, Dan helped him dig a bigger puddle in the field, stacking up a higher soil-fence to host the carp. As safe as it should be, in his next fishing hour, Bing came back a couple of times to check his triumphant catch as if it might just vanish from there.

They continued to fish on the same spots, nurturing patiently any new surprise. But luck refused to touch them any longer. A lot of time had passed, but they had caught no more than a number of minnows.

Disappointment as well as a little anxiety began to show in their faces.

Then, suddenly a snake slipped out of the nook around the rocks, and caught in its mouth was a green frog, whining, its legs kicking.

‘Look, snake,’ Bing shouted, but didn’t move, half expecting the snake would soon go away, half stunned by its lithe, golden, fantastic body, until only a second later he realized the snake was actually swimming swiftly across the water, towards where he was sitting, and it looked like about to wind along his fishing stick.

At a sudden loss, he at once threw his stick away, and jumped into the side water to avoid its direct approaching. The water was rushing though only up to his knees. He waded in the torrent as quickly as he could, then a slippery stone in the water caused him to tumble, falling into the stream, his chin hitting an emerged boulder. He scrambled to his feet, steadying himself among the slippery pebbles.

Then he felt his chin was tickling, he rubbed it to find the blood in his hand. Strange, he didn’t feel any pain.

By then, Dan had come to the platform where Bing had sit, looking at his drenched cousin in the water, highly amused, lofty and smirky. ‘Well, you shouldn’t have run away from a water snake like that. It is not venomous. I was bitten a number of times by it, and it was nothing.’

Bing was only conscious of the tickling on his chin, he rubbed it, and then washed his hand in the water, and then rubbed again, and then washed again, as if this way he could wash away the blood from his chin and stop its bleeding. But it didn’t stop; it kept coming. And worse, he began to feel the pain, the throbbing pain, more severe with every ticking second.

‘Don’t rub it, just hold your hand there to block the flow,’ Dan said, standing there in the same majestic way, without coming down to offer any help.

Nevertheless, Bing did as he said, holding his chin, and manoeuvred his way toward the land.  

He sat on the grass, his hand holding tight his chin. In a few minutes, Dan advised him to remove his hand. Bing hesitated for a moment or two before taking his hand away. The pain was as sharp as anything he had ever remembered.

‘It’s stopped,’ Dan observed, without a trace of sympathy in his words. ‘It is just skin opening, no major wound.’

Bing looked at him, in vexation, as if his cousin was the real cause of his injury. ‘But now my dad will know that. I can’t hide from him.’

Without Dan’s presence, Bing would have surely begun to cry. A new and bigger problem was now in his hand.

‘Let’s go home,’ Dan said, only now he looked worried. Like Bing, Dan was also very afraid of Bing’s dad, far more than of his own father. Bing’s father was not a standard farmer, which must be the reason to recognise certain authority, the very reason his uncle, and his mum and other people in the village seemed to show him a great deal of respect.

On their way home, they remained speechless, like two soldiers who had just lost a battle. Only when they counted the fish, which was a distraction they had done for a number of times, were they able to draw some consolation. They had fished a total of thirteen minnows and a carp of considerable size.

Approaching their house, Bing asked Dan go home first, taking all the gear and fishes with him, and to check for his dad’s presence.  

While staying away, Bing was more anxious with his wound, his hand constantly nursing his chin as if to cure it fast or to suppress his anxiety. The blood was congealed like half-dried porridge, and the pain was pulsing like his heart beat, which was still tolerable if without the dread of being reproached by his father.

Dan came back with the good news. His dad was not yet home, reporting that only their grandma was questioning where himself had been.

Bing dashed home, welcomed promptly by his grandma, who had just come out to look for him.

‘Aiya-hah, look, look at you, what happened?! Fell over, aiya-hah, how careless...’ her words came to him like bullets, her hands turned his head, her eyes examined his chin so close as if to kiss it. ‘So long a cut, quick, quick, go inside, aiya-hah, you need a wrap.’

She led him to the room, and fetched quickly a tiny bottle, a basin of water, a bundle of white gauze and the tape. She first washed around his chin with something like alcohol, and he was feeling only fresh and cool, but when she brushed it closer the wound, he shuddered, the pain was so acute and real. In spite of himself, his tears began. Then his sister, who had been worrying all the while since she noticed his injury, was in tears ever more.

‘Hurt? Hang on a moment… ’ his grandma consoled him, in her full concentration upon her task. Then he saw her taking out some cotton to absorb the liquid from the bottle and brush it over the surface. The odour was pungent, assaulting his nostrils to make his nose and brows severely wrinkled. Finally, she covered his chin with the gauze, fixed by two strips of tape.   

But Bing protested, ‘Dad will see it! He will scold me, can you take that off?’

She said, ‘Aiya-hah, it is such a big cut, if taking it off, you will lose your chin, ugly, and unable to find a wife, now you know the trouble, I told you not to go, but you not listen, aiya-hah, now come to change clothes, your dad is soon coming back.’

She then led him upstairs. Following her, he begged, ‘Grandma, can you just tell dad that I fell over somewhere, not from fishing?’

‘Aiya-hah, I don’t know, not good, telling lie, now, quick, come …your dad is coming back.’

After changing into a new set of dry clothes, he checked himself in the mirror in his parents’ bedroom, and found his face awful, like that of a wounded soldier he had seen in a movie.

His sister was with him all the time, anxious as much as himself, with her frequent, annoying questions, ‘Ge Ge, painful, painful?’

But his mind was entirely possessed with the coming dread of confronting his father.

He dared not come down, when his father eventually got home, with two other guests.

Staying upstairs, he strained his ears to hear what was being spoken between his dad and grandma.

‘Mum, can you go boil some water, I have to kill a duck,’ his dad said to his grandmother.

‘Aiya-hah, ... do you need Tian home to help?’ she asked.

‘No, I can handle it,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’

‘She is in the field, weeding.’

‘Where is Bing, and Ming? Where have they run to?’

‘Upstairs, doing homework.’

His father said no more. In a while, he heard the quaking of a duck. His dad was a good cook, and often took the opportunity to cook when they had guests. The duck, fried with ginger and spring onion, never failed to make Bing’s mouth water.

Then he heard his grandma’s voice, ‘Dan caught some fish today, may make a nice little dish,’ following which came his dad’s, ‘Did he? Then wash and clean them for me.’

So far, so good, half the weight on Bing’s heart seemed to have dropped. His grandma was doing very well to cover him. Now, the last thing was about the ugly wound on his chin. But he was confident his grandma would make up a fine story.

Before long, his mum returned home from the field. A few amiable greetings were exchanged downstairs between her and the two guests.

At dinner time, his grandma went upstairs to call Bing and Ming. Bing was nervous, but she whispered to persuade him, ‘Come down, now, a good time to face him, he is busy with cooking, can’t spare a moment.’

But his face was still of great concern, ‘What would you tell him? Don’t tell him I went fishing.’

She pulled his arm, ‘Aiya-hah, just come.’

So, grandma headed the team of three, descending the stairs, and directly to the kitchen. His dad and his mum noticed it immediately.

‘What happened to your chin?’ his dad asked, in a horrible voice, yet without stopping his work over the big wok. His mother instantly rose from the low bench in front of the stove, and came up to him, and checked him, ‘Did you fall over?’

‘He fell over to the ground,’ interposed his grandma timely. ‘Scratching a little.’

‘Were you running wild again?’ his dad frowned suspiciously.

‘No, just skipped over something,’ Bing muttered, aching to run away.

‘So careless,’ his mother said, touching about his chin to inspect it a while longer, ‘careful not to contact water.’ She then resumed her own task, grabbing the firewood and grass-tinder from the piles in the storage, poking them into the square door of the stove.

The alarm was off.  Bing and Ming and his grandma walked in measured steps towards the door, going out of the kitchen like a family of sheep, with three lightening hearts. The moment was indeed hilarious. It was a kind of freedom from oppression, a successful escape from a fearful punishment.

Dan came out from his room, stood against the wall poised with only one leg on the floor. His eyes, twinkling, looked at him, and made a grimace of amusement, and gloating.

At dinner, even if the two guests, or uncles as Bing was asked to title them, repeatedly called the whole family to come and dine together with them, his mother just smiled and declined, saying they had enough food in the kitchen, where they would have their dinner. This was another great relief to Bing, because he could avoid being questioned again at the dinner table by his father and his guests. For, in his memory, the dinner table was the very place for his father doing his preaching and reprimanding. It was also the place for every thread of topic or argument or gossip that might come to the minds of his parents. Many a time, the conversation would turn sour, the dispute between his father and mother could break out without any warning, and on such occasions his mother would walk away, sometimes in tears.

So Bing, Ming, his mother and grandma, had their dinner separately in the kitchen. They had also called Dan to join them, but he declined, as he often did whenever there were other guests in Bing’s house.

The duck and the tiny fishes had never been so tasty. Bing picked the bits of fishes he had himself caught, put them into the bowls of the other three, who must have been rather confused with his unusual gesture. It was indeed the first time he had picked food for others during dinner.

But really, under the circumstances, he was on the top of world.  


---- End of Chapter 9 ---

洋八路

洋八路 发表于 2014-3-29 17:49
Chapter 9    3/3

Chapter 10   1/2



At the end of Year Five, Bing and two other boys in the village were selected as ‘talented students’ for the  Year Six special class in the Town’s middle school. It was a boarding school, two miles from the market centre, twelve miles away from his home. The class’s fifty-one students were all selected from primary schools in many villages in the township.   

Every Friday, after the class, Bing and the other two would go home by foot, spending the weekend, and go back school in Sunday afternoon. The road between his home and the town centre was just a line of ridges between the fields. Only section from the town to the school had a road wide enough for a tractor to drive on.

Bing was more or less isolated from the other two who for some reason didn’t like him. But he didn’t want to travel alone because he still needed some company on the two-hour journey, even if it was one without friendliness. The other two would walk ahead, chattering loudly, and proudly showing their friendship to each other, while Bing was quietly trailing behind at a distance.

Once, the two played a trick. They picked up some dust from the road, throwing it in the air. The wind at the time brought the dust towards Bing. Angry as he was, he had to silently endure their insult, because he couldn’t possibly deal with two of them at once. He waited until one of them had left the road, leaving the other as alone as himself, and picked up a stone from the ground, and threw it at the enemy’s back. With the hit, the boy only grumbled a bit, lacking the courage to look around or charge back. It could be because Bing happened to be taller than him, though thinner, or maybe the boy was guilty for having first bullied his attacker. In any case, something had weakened the boy’s resolve to take it on.

The boarding school was, at first year of his middle school, located inside a paper-pulp factory. All the boys were supposed to lodge in one large room. The bunk beds leaned tightly against each other, allowing only one long narrow aisle for every two rows of adjoined bunks. The meagre belongings of the students were placed either on the bed or underneath, for there was no space for storage, nor were there any desks or stools they could use for study. Most of the students had a thermos flask for hot water from the boiler. The iron wires running across the sides of bed were hung full of hand towels.

At the time, there were not enough beds for all of them. Bing was persuaded to ‘temporarily’ share his single bed with another student, Kai, who came from a much more remote village. A couple of months later, their teacher Mr. Xiao offered his own room to address the shortage. So Bing and Kai, another boy Xing moved into their teacher’s room. Mr. Xiao himself went home to his family every day after school.

In their new room, there was a big four-post bed, the equivalent of four bunk beds. A wooden pole at each bed corner was used to hold up the mosquito net. Bing and Kai took one side, Xing the other. Since they all had their own quilts, the night could pass easier without one’s foul feet intruding another’s nose.

One ritual of every night, of every season, prior to their lying down to sleep, was to seek between the creases and chinks of the net for the mosquitoes to kill. It was not an easy task though, for the mosquitoes, learnt from their constant, life-and-death battle with humans, seemed to have become smarter, more ready to flee. Every morning when Bing got up, he would inevitably find bloodstains, fresh or dry, on the net and his hands.

However, even though the school was shabby and in poor condition, Bing and his new friends were not entirely deprived of fun. There was a small river not far away, and Bing and his classmates often went there swimming during lunch break.
One day, they set off as soon as they had finished their meal.

Taking with them only their threadbare towels, they wound their way through the fields towards the river that ran through the Town’s centre. Minutes later, they were on the banks of the stream. They looked around, and, after seeing no other soul near the place, slipped off their clothes, and placed them on top of a little thicket on the bank. Such naked, they trod down the little track to the water.

Kai and Xing entered first, Bing last. The soft, slippery and rotten slush his foot stepped in made him shudder. It was not until he moved further to the middle of the river, where a more solid base was found, that his native aversion to the mud was adequately relieved.

The sun was big, the sky blue, the water was sparkling with micro-rainbows. And their laughter seemed to attract, as Bing noticed for the moment, a flock of butterflies and a coupe of swallows to fly low with them.

He was so happy and free.  

They swam in a dog-paddle; their heads remained cocking up above the water so that they could breathe easily. Their hands and legs were pulling and kicking like a frog, or unlike a frog, for they had to stay more on the surface than below to generate as many bubbles they could, which were all necessary to their swimming joy. The water soon became murky as the mud was being stirred up from bottom, but the flying and singing water was never so white and glittering in the sun. Bing was not a good swimmer; the longest distance he could go without stopping was less than three meters.

Of the three of them, Xing was the slimmest, yet the boldest. He swam to the other side of the stream, and climbed onto the low hanging trunk of a tree, and there, like a good image of a monkey perching high with his little thing between his legs, he asked the other two to join him. Kai was hesitating, Bing was determined not to follow, for the dead leaves and twigs and obscure water over there were enough to discourage him.   

‘Look, snake,’ Xing suddenly cried.

Startled, the other two at once stopped paddling, and straightening, they darted their eyes to where Xing’s finger was pointing.

There was a curvy, swaying thing upstream, coming down slowly to them. But no sooner had Bing triggered a panic flight towards to the shore than Xing declared it was a mere snakeskin, a slough, although the swaying shape had all the animation of a live snake.

An alarm was thus cleared, but in another second, Xing announced another, ‘Someone is coming.’

‘Who? Girls?’ Bing and Kai asked simultaneously, their wet faces full of worry.

‘Don’t bother, no girls, a lad.’

‘A student?’ Bing’s concern was readily gone.

‘Don’t know, maybe not, he looks older than us, could be a few years older.’

‘Well, no worry, so long as no girls,’ Kai sounded very relieved.

So they resumed their water-kicking. Xing stayed on the tree, his feet dangling, imperious like a monkey king watching over his little ones having their fun.

Suddenly, Bing heard him shouting fervently, ‘He took my clothes!’ and again, ‘he took my clothes! Hurry up, hurry, we’ve got to stop him.’

Xing’s cry was urgent. Bing and Kai immediately stopped splashing; Xing leaped into the water, and waded frantically through the heavy water to the shore.

When Bing got onto the land, he saw the youth already escaping the scene, jumping along the field ridges, laughing and cackling like a lunatic, his hand brandishing Xing’s pants.

‘Stop, stop, you son of dog!’ Bing shouted, together with Kai, and then Xing, chasing him. But they had to lose the race because they were soon conscious of their nakedness in the open. The scoundrel ran away, disappeared into blocks of mud-houses, his cackling echoing widely over the field.

They came back. It was a little comfort that only Xing’s pants were taken. Lucky they acted quickly enough; should Xing not have sat in the tree and spotted the danger early, all of their clothes must have gone, which would prove to be a real disaster, because they would have to wait for dusk to sneak back to school, and the afternoon class would have to be skipped. There was no way someone could come to help, and no way they had the courage to walk naked in the daylight.
Their swimming fun was thus ended prematurely, and miserably, especially for Xing. None of them had any underpants, therefore without his pants, there was no other workable alternative to hide his ‘little-chick-chick.’ Of course, one of them could go back school and fetch some clothes for Xing, but that was not an option either, because almost all students in the school, as far as he knew, had only one set of clothes during the whole week. They didn’t change during the week, nor did they bathe often because there was no bathroom at the school. The best thing they could do in summer, was to fetch cold water from a very ancient-looking well, and to shower their head directly from the water in a basin. A slice of soap, the same as that used at home for washing clothes, helped clean their body. It was a simple open round well, stone-walled, with green grass thriving in all cracks, where some frogs found their residence. But the water looked very clean, and tasted sweet like spring water; in summer, or after sweating at sports, students drank it directly from the bucket in a manner like a thirsty cow. The bucket was made of wood, with its handle tied with a long and thick rope used for tugging.

At last, they came up with a partial solution to deal with their embarrassment. Bing lent his shirt, the longest among the three, to Xing, who could then at least pull and stretch to cover half his privacy, assisted a little by the towel. They also thought of giving him another shirt to be tied around his waist, but then one of them would have to bare his upper body, attracting more unwanted attention on their way back, for at this time of the day, many girls and boys were loitering about on the school campus.  

So, sandwiching Xing in the middle, the threesome carefully traced the way back to their dormitory. Fortunately their trip was not observed, saving for some distressed moments when, approaching their destination, a group of female students came their way. Yet the girls seemed to giggle only among themselves, whether or not they had noticed something, they really couldn’t tell, because they had to lower their heads and eyes, behaving like naughty boys who had been punished by their parents.   


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