When I left the bookstore, night was falling. The afternoon blue had deepened and a great shadow had crossed the sky. Behind the shroud of dark, I caught the ghostly outline of the moon, and I watched it for a few moments before it was swallowed in darkness. I allowed the thought to come to my mind for the first time, unadorned in all its terrible simplicity: there is something very wrong with my grandmother. She is deteriorating.
And I think she might be dying.
I made my way slowly back to the apartment, the first shards of cold slipping into the evening air. By the time I got home it was almost completely dark. I could no longer see the moon, but there was now a spattering of stars against the charcoal black. Set against their distant shimmer came the sounds of human life from my building: the chattering laughter; the sound of people moving, gathering for dinner; the warm, throaty noise of a baby crying. I climbed the stairs, crossed the landing and entered my own apartment.
I felt a wave of heat from the kitchen. My family were all gathered at the table and as usual there was a lively clatter, my father the only quiet one. I sat down. My mother acknowledged me with a curt, ‘You are late,’ my brother giggled and my grandmother smiled her warm, weathered, toad’s smile before they got on with the meal. For a few moments I drank in the atmosphere. It was such a familiar scene to me, and I could almost convince myself that everything was okay. I watched my family but at the same time I felt the weight of that deeper realisation, a darkness creeping through my mind. I watched them but I felt separate from them, as though they were the participants in a drama and I merely the observer.
After dinner was finished, my grandmother went to the living room to do her needlework while my brother played a board game on the carpet beneath her feet. I went to the kitchen. Through a cloud of steam, I could see the silhouette of my mother doing the washing-up. I walked over and stood next to her. We worked in silence; she handed me one plate after the other to dry, again a routine that was well worn and familiar, and yet again it felt as though I was on the outside looking in. My voice came, hollow and unlike myself.
‘I want to talk to you about grandmother.’
‘What is there to talk about?’ my mother said curtly.
I felt my resolve falter.
‘I think she may be … ill in some way.’
‘Ill? What do you mean?’
‘Ill … in her head somehow.’
‘Ill in her head somehow?’
‘Yes, and I think you have seen it too. She forgets things.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about. All those books of yours. They make you think too much!’
‘She loses words. Sometimes she can’t finish a sentence.’
I felt my voice rise. I felt helpless, terrified even. Giving voice to these thoughts made them all the more real.
‘There have been other things too. A while ago she lost track of Qiao in the park. She let him wander off!’
My mother stopped washing up. She wouldn’t look at me. She stared at the wall.
She spoke in a low, empty voice.
‘You know nothing. It’s called getting old. That’s all it is.’
I think it was at that moment I realised she was as frightened as me.
. . .
As the nights grew longer, I spent more and more time in my room. At the small desk by my window I would work on the assignment in the meagre light from a single candle. Outside, I could see silky shreds of fine dark cloud scrolling across the pale moon. Underneath, the city formed its shapes in deep shadow, touched every now and again by the glow of forlorn light – like a great ship rolling through the darkness.
There is something about working at night. The sense that everyone else is asleep, that the building itself is groaning under the weight of all the slumbering bodies and sleepers’ snores. That you alone have entered into some kind of demi-world where human life has given way before the shadows and stars and the strange music of animals: the rustling of mice, the scraping of insects, the solitary yowling of a lonely fox. Working at that time produces a different quality of writing, in much the same way the flame of a candle looks different depending on whether you see it in the day or at night. In daylight it appears quite ordinary. But in the darkness that same candle becomes a solitary beacon whose slim silvery flame seems to resonate with sadness and melancholy, beckoning you close. So, it seemed to me, did my words attain a silvery edge, touched by the type of melancholy which is born to silence, where the only companion you have is the sound of your own breathing, the beating of your own heart.
It was on such a night that I was sitting at my desk – my thoughts roaming the darkness, time creeping into the early hours of the morning – when I heard a loud rustle and then a clatter. I sat bolt upright. For the sound hadn’t come from the outside. And it had been too loud for mice.
Someone was in the apartment.
I crept out of my door and into the corridor. The door to my parents’ room widened just a little, and in the gloom I caught the startled face of my mother peering out. She was holding a single candle.
There was another clatter.
It had come from the kitchen. We looked at one another. Warily we began to move further down the corridor, the glow from the candle casting ghostly circles of light before us. In the night-time gloom our living space was transformed into an alien terrain, the shapes of household objects assuming strange and sinister proportions, leaning into us as we crept closer.
My mother touched her hand to the door of the kitchen and pressed it open gingerly. We moved inside.
In the darkness, the candlelight revealed a single shape, a shimmer of white. The phantom seemed to rotate on its axis, turning its withered face towards us before floating its form in our direction, its eyes skeletal pools of black, its mouth a puckered dark clasp. My mother let out a violent wheeze, staggering backwards, but I remained fixed to the spot. I blinked and the image clarified. I saw my grandmother dressed in the shimmering white lattice of her ancient nightgown, her eyes impossibly wide. Cereal had spilled all over the floor, along with a smashed plate.
My mother blinked at her.
‘What in the name of god are you doing, old woman?’
My heart was no longer pounding, but now there was a new fear – deeper, sadder. There was something trance-like about my grandmother’s demeanour, as though she were sleepwalking. She looked at my mother and said in an impossibly small voice:
‘I was looking for cookies.’
My mother looked at her, astonished.
‘At this time of night!’
My grandmother said in the softest of tones:
‘Please don’t send me away, Chou Chou!’
My mother’s face drained of all colour.
My grandmother looked at me, and the biggest smile came over her face; she suddenly seemed so happy.
‘Little One!’ she whispered.
I looked at her, the thinness of the gown through which I could glimpse her withering flesh, her eyes wide and childlike, and finally the trails of blood which glistened along the floor, from where the skin of her twisted, leathery, broken feet had met with the fragments of smashed china. I blinked away my tears. I moved towards her gently, and made my voice as small and kind as I could.
‘It’s okay, Po Po. I’m here. It’s okay.’
She let me gently lead her back to her room. As I held her hand, it struck me just how cold it was. The thought came to my mind.
This is how a dead body might feel.
I fetched some antiseptic, tweezers and cotton wool. I remember how she lay on the bed, watching me with those large eyes that seemed to catch the last lonely slivers of light in the gloom. She didn’t flinch when I pulled the shards of glass from her feet. I don’t think she even felt it really. She watched me for a while. I remember feeling as though I were the adult and she the child. And then, just like that, I heard the low rumble of her snores. I finished removing the last splinters of glass from her feet as gently as I could, but my grandmother was a deep sleeper and, once asleep, difficult to rouse. I think people of that generation often were.
I crept back to the kitchen. My mother had cleaned up the mess but hadn’t returned to her room. Instead she was just standing there, her face a severe outline in the shadow, her expression immobile and cold. She moved slightly when I re-entered the room, the only acknowledgement she made of my presence. My voice arrived, tremulous and shaky.
‘Why did she call you Chou Chou?’
There was silence. I thought at first my mother wasn’t going to respond. But eventually she did.
‘Chou Chou was what she used to call her own mother. My grandmother.’
I wanted to add something. To confirm that we needed to act somehow. But in the event, I didn’t have to say a word. My mother spoke in that same dull voice.
‘The doctor. Tomorrow I’ll call the doctor.’
Nothing more was said. I returned to my room. I couldn’t sleep. I went back to my desk. Pored over what I had written. I had managed some three thousand words, but all of it seemed worthless and trite. I thought about what the old man in the bookshop had said. To be human means to want to be remembered. But it is also about remembering. I thought about my grandmother. But what happens when you lose your memories? When you confuse them? When you forget?
And just like that I had my first couple of sentences.
Being human is about remembering. We are the sum of all our memories. And yet, everyone forgets. And anyone can become confused. But when we lose track of our memories, that is when we are at our most human. Because that is when we are at our most vulnerable …
. . .
Some days later I was walking in a woodland area towards the outskirts of the city with Gen and my little brother. Qiao was walking up ahead. The slope we were climbing led to a parting of trees, revealing a clearing of dowdy brown grass and a single hut decorated in the classical Chinese fashion, with reds and greens and a curling tile roof. It was a peaceful place where the hazy ochre and green of autumn’s last leaves flitted in a subdued breeze.
‘Hey, Qiao!’ Gen called out.
My brother, some way ahead, turned and frowned. He wandered back towards us.
‘Hey pal,’ Gen said with a smile. ‘Don’t get too close to the hut.’
‘Why?’ my brother asked credulously.
Gen frowned.
‘Well, I didn’t want to have to go into this. But that place there, it used to be a place of worship for an evil cult long before the teachings of Buddha arrived on our land. They say the followers of that cult had the ability to coax wraiths from the darkness and shadows from the trees. They even had the ability to make the dead move again!’
Qiao looked at Gen with the exasperation of one who has seen much of the world and whose patience has long since worn thin.
‘Gen, I am ten years old. I know there are no ghosts in that hut. I know that you are making it up because you are trying to scare me!’
Gen held up his hands and smiled in defeat.
‘Well, I was just trying to warn you, that’s all. But if you really don’t believe me, why don’t you go up to that hut yourself? Check it out?’
For the first time I saw a flicker of doubt cross my brother’s expression. But then his voice hardened in certainty.
‘Okay then, I will!’
I found myself smiling. I loved it when Gen was like this, when he was relaxed and playful, especially with Qiao. We followed my brother up the little hill. We watched as his small figure paused tentatively before the old hut, gathering courage before he darted inside. Some moments later he came rushing out with a big grin on his face.
‘There was nothing there, there was nothing there!’ he said laughing.
But Gen’s face was stone-cold sober.
‘Well of course there wasn’t. You didn’t think that was the way the ghosts get you, did you?’
My brother blinked.
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘Well, that’s not how it works.’
‘How does it work?’ my brother asked sceptically, but I could tell he was fascinated.
‘Well, the closer you get to the hut, the more the spirits crowd around you. But they are invisible. Until suddenly one of them slips into someone you know. And then that person becomes possessed, that person starts to …’
Suddenly Gen crouched down, clutching at his face, shielding himself from view. Then slowly he began to rise and his voice came in a dull but eerie dirge.
‘And then … that person starts to … have a hungering for human flesh whereby he …’
Gen took his hands away, his eyes wild, and promptly lunged at my brother with a zombie-like groan.
Qiao let out a little yelp before staggering back. He looked at Gen with a scandalised grin.
‘I knew you were going to do that, I knew you were!’ he chanted.
Still pulsing with excitement, Qiao ran back into the old hut. I took Gen’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
‘You are so good with him, you know? He is usually a little shy but you really bring him out of himself!’
Gen smiled.
‘And I think he needs it now.’
Gen glanced at me quizzically.
‘Recently, grandmother has been getting so much worse. I think Qiao has noticed too. He hasn’t said anything. But I am pretty sure he sees it. It’s so much more obvious now. Sometimes she forgets what day it is, sometimes she forgets the time of day as well.’
I had noted my brother’s feelings, and was genuinely worried for him. But once I had started speaking, I realised how much I needed to talk to someone about what was happening to my grandmother. I couldn’t talk to my mother or father.
But a brief shadow passed across Gen’s face.
I felt that speaking about my grandmother was difficult for him. So I tried to make what I was saying a little more light-hearted.
‘I mean it’s really weird and everything. Sometimes she thinks we are about to have breakfast when we are settling down for dinner. And sometimes she forgets which toothbrush is hers and she takes my mother’s, which causes an awful brouhaha!’
I snuck glances at him from the corner of my eye. His expression had returned to its typical equilibrium, a mild thoughtfulness.
‘Families, eh? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. I do love this place though. So peaceful.’
I realised that the conversation about my grandmother was at its end. Only then did he turn to look at me, his lips curled in the beginnings of a smile, his expression intimate and inviting.
‘I hope you won’t mind me confiding something to you too.’
‘No, of course not. Anything you want!’
‘I wonder if next time we meet you might not bring your brother along.’
That same lurching, shuddering feeling in my belly. The feeling of being winded.
He touched the side of my cheek, and I turned into his touch, closing my eyes, willing away the tears which were forming.
His expression became ardent. He spoke softly.
‘Please don’t think for a moment that I am not happy to spend time with your brother. He is so much fun, so much larger than life. But … perhaps …’
He glanced into the middle distance.
‘I was just hoping. Given that we spend so little time together. And given that we are, I think, quite serious about one another …’
His voice faded. His eyes returned to me before moving away once more.
‘… given that we are serious about one another, I was hoping our time together could just be you and me.’
I gripped his hand, squeezing it. I was grateful he wanted to spend time with me. But at the same time his comments about my brother had taken me aback. And I couldn’t shake that sense of disturbance. Nevertheless, I arranged my features in a smile and said as brightly as I could:
‘Of course. I had to bring him today but that was only because everyone was out and he had no one to look after him. I promise in the future it will only be us.’
From within the old hut my brother suddenly released a delighted whoop. He’d somehow managed to clamber to the top, and from his position as conqueror, he waved furiously out at us, elated by his achievement.
I waved back.