The funeral took place in early summer. The sky was light blue, a breeze tickled the trees, and the afternoon sun was pricked by just a hint of cold. I remember I was wearing a blue dress that day. My grandmother was buried next to my grandfather. At the cemetery, we burned a selection of objects – flowers, bread and money – all of which had been fabricated from Joss paper. The tradition was that these things could be used in the afterlife. I think my grandmother would have been sceptical, however. Even though she was perhaps the most superstitious person I’ve ever known, for her the spirits resided alongside the living – in this world. What was the use of heaven if you couldn’t tease your loved ones? And the thought of giving a little grief to her family in the here-and-now, reminding us that she was still around, would have tickled her. It would have brought one last smile to that old turtle face.
Of course, she hadn’t been that same person, my real grandmother, for a while. The dementia had taken one layer of her after another, sucking them into its void, until there was next to nothing left. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t cry on the day of her funeral. I had cried before. I had been grieving her for a while. What I felt instead was numbness. Many years later, I was out with a couple of girlfriends. One had recently lost her beloved mother. The other laid her hand on the knee of our grief-stricken friend and said something I will never forget. She told her to ‘enjoy’ the funeral. Because it would be the one day in all her life when she could share stories about her departed mother with abandon – could talk to everyone and anyone about her without inhibition or worry. That it was important to take advantage of this, for she would feel the need to talk about her mother every day after. For as long as such days were given to her.
I wasn’t able to take advantage of my grandmother’s funeral in that way, despite how much I had loved her. Because something of me wasn’t there at all. I just lingered in the background, at the corners of the room, that numbness filling every part of me. And yet the number of people who came to the gathering after the funeral was incredible. Hundreds filled our corridor, generations of women laughing and shedding tears, talking about my grandmother: her sharp-tongued humour, her cantankerousness, her fearlessness and the vein of kindness that had run through her like silver ore through hard, black rock. I didn’t shed any tears of my own; I couldn’t cry, so instead I watched, until it seemed as though I was little more than a faint presence at the periphery of my life.
I watched those large, rotund women giggle and commiserate, laugh and cry, and I watched their grandchildren wriggle impatiently around their legs, squalling, hot tears of tiredness and boredom filling their eyes. I watched my brother retreat into his own imaginary world while men ruffled his hair and women tenderly pinched his cheek. I hung back in the kitchen and watched my own mother as she played hostess, clasping hands and laughing and handing out small parcels of food. She was in her element, I thought. All the attention of the community was on her, and to my sense of numbness was added a sudden shock of hate.
She picked up on it, my mother. She came into the kitchen, closing the door against the warm heat produced by all those people and the chatter bodying out across the air. She caught my look, sullen and frowning, before I had the chance to look away. Her smile – still fixed – died on her face. She moved close to me, one arm arching on her hip. Her gaze was even but hard.
‘You disapprove?’
I rubbed my mouth, mumbled something into the sleeve of my pretty blue dress.
Her gaze never left me, never lost its clarity, but her lips thinned. Her voice came in a hiss.
‘You miss your grandmother! Always the two of you against the world, thick as thieves. You think you knew her so well, right? But did she ever tell you about the time she left me in the back garden for the night in the cold and the rain because I spoiled a chicken she wanted me to prepare? I was no more than eleven years old. She ever tell you about the time she threw a kitchen knife at me because I talked back to her? She ever tell you about that, your perfect, wonderful grandmother?’
My mother’s voice became ragged. Tears welled in her eyes. She blinked them away.
‘Oh, what the hell does it matter? What use is it anyway?’
She straightened herself up. She fixed that smile to her face once again. And then strode out of the room to cater to the guests.
A tightening against my chest. A feeling of not being able to breathe. Light shimmering across my field of vision. A faintness. Something I hadn’t felt for some time.
I stumbled out of the apartment and through the corridor, which was thick with people. I heard some of them say my name, felt friendly hands on my shoulder, but I had to keep moving. I exited the building and I kept on moving.
By the time I arrived at Gen’s house the weather had grown colder. Or perhaps that was just how I remember it. I remember that blue dress still clinging to me. I knocked on his door. His dad was away, his mother was shopping, I think. He took one look at me, and took me into his arms.
‘You’re shivering,’ he said.
He made me some hot tea. We lay on his bed and he held me.
‘Drink a little more, you’re still cold!’
We stayed like that for a while. I was so relieved to be away. He touched my hair. But his voice, when it arrived, was awkward and pained – a whisper almost.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t come … today. I wanted to. But I thought it was … more a family occasion.’
‘It’s okay,’ I murmured. My voice sounded soft and strange. That same numbness creeping in. ‘Everything is fine.’
He held me to him, held me close, and for a moment I thought that numbness which had spread through me might abate. Then I felt his hand, tentative and gentle, finding my hand, guiding it down to his groin. It seemed so automatic I didn’t even think about it. I just started to move my fingers up and down, gripping him. And I heard him emit that soft, guttural moan. I felt the splash of warm liquid against my skin.
And at some point I felt myself get up.
‘I’d better get going.’
‘You don’t need to. You don’t have to. You can stay longer if you want.’
‘I should get going.’
As I left the house, his mother was coming up the garden path, carrying several bags of shopping. Even though she was much younger than Gen’s father, and very pretty, to me she had always seemed pathetic somehow, forever projecting the kind of shrill, artificial brightness that edged towards hysteria. But when she raised her head and smiled, I caught in her soft dark eyes a look of genuine concern. She reached out as she said hello, but didn’t quite touch my cheek with her hand. And then I realised it was she who pitied me.
I walked through the streets. I walked for a while longer. My body was numb. My mind was dull, like a thick murky soup, but one thought eventually came bubbling up. The thought of a book I had read all those years ago: Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. I recalled the triumph the old man had felt when he had hooked his great fish, but what my mind focused on was what happened next. The way the old fisherman had watched helplessly as the sharks circled his boat and feasted on his catch. The way the great marlin he had caught had been reduced to nothing by the gnawing of the sharks’ teeth, the way his hope had been eroded in the process until there was nothing left of that either.
All that was left was the return to shore. The feeling of exhaustion. The cold. The numbness.
I got back to the apartment late. Everyone else had gone to bed. I moved through the living room in the gloom; it was littered with paper plates and other paraphernalia. I went into the kitchen, turned on the light, and its blue-white fluorescence hummed. Plates were piled high in the sink like towers. I thought about my grandmother. I felt numb.
Something caught my eye. The glint of the blade of a bread knife. I thought about my grandmother again, and I thought about what my mother had said about her, and I thought about Gen and his low guttural groan and the feeling of his emanation against my skin. I thought about these things, and they seemed to blur in the numbness, and the only thing that was real was the stark, sharp clarity of the blade.
I gripped the handle. The movement came naturally. That same sense of inevitability.
I pressed the cold steel against the soft flesh of my upturned arm. And suddenly everything that had happened forced itself against me with a sudden sharpening violence, and I took the blade and I jabbed myself with its point – not as hard as I might have, but hard enough to break the skin and draw blood. The sudden stab of pain was in some way relieving, for that carapace which had grown across me – that skein of numbness – was for the first time broken, and the feeling of my blood dribbling out of my body caused me to take in breath, violently. My heart was pounding.
And the rage – those feelings of loathing and disgust I had towards myself – had diminished now, as the warmth of that blood trickled and flowed. My breathing began to quiet too. The blood was soaked up by the thin, fine fabric of my pretty blue dress. And although, in the time to come, I would cut my arms on many more occasions, I would never wear that dress again.
. . .
Since my grandmother had passed away, my brother was quieter, less boisterous. It was to be expected, I suppose. I’d watch him sometimes when he was absorbed in some game. And sometimes I’d feel a sense of pity because even though he was on the cusp of adolescence, he still seemed so indelibly a child. He’d watch his cartoons with rapt attention. And sometimes I envied him his escape.
My mother did not mention my grandmother after the funeral. Instead, she stripped the sheets from her bed and gave away her clothes. But my grandmother’s chair remained. It had, of course, belonged to my grandfather, all those years ago. When he’d died, my grandmother had commandeered it. Now it sat empty as the room itself gathered dust. I’d glimpse its outline through the gap of the door late at night as I went to get a drink of water from the kitchen. Sometimes I’d step into the room in the early morning, when the motes of dust flickered across sleek beams of sunlight, and I’d remember how she would sit there and sew. I’d remember the smell of her, and the huskiness of her voice, and those thickly veined hands and nimble fingers. I’d remember the full, unapologetic solidity of her – the strength of her broad back, but also the softness of the flesh around her belly. And I’d remember the rich darkness of her eyes, always somewhere between amused and defiant.
And that’s when I’d feel the grief, hot and palpable against the edges of my skin, the back of my eyes. I’d look at the chair in that room, and the object itself seemed bereft, as though a great loneliness had settled on it during the night – and its old threadbare arms and the jutting outline of its legs would soften and blur through my tears. I had turned eighteen that summer but I’d never felt more like a child.
Fortunately I kept busy. I had started working. Both Gen and I had been accepted at Peking University. His family was wealthy, but mine was less well-to-do, and the government had abolished the old tax-funded system of education that had existed under Mao. Fortunately, as a result of scoring highly in the essay competition, I had obtained a scholarship, but that wouldn’t cover the cost of books or rent. While Gen would stay on campus in the student dorms, I would remain living at home with my family, and that summer, before my first academic year, I worked in Mrs Yang’s corner shop, selling tobacco and lottery cards.
It was good to get out of the house. My relationship with my mother had devolved into a series of hostile silences. My father was as much of a recluse as ever. My little brother occupied the happy colours of his cartoon world. And even though I was not superstitious like my grandmother, her presence pervaded every inch of that apartment. Sometimes I could almost hear her clacking her false teeth in the mornings, or swearing colourfully as she pushed up from the toilet seat in the night-time cold, her arthritic legs creaking.
These thoughts I kept to myself. Around other people, I spoke less and less. I saw Gen often that summer. Other than the old men who came in to buy their lottery tickets – their strange chatter, their rosy breath, their smoky clothes – Gen was my one real contact with the outside world. Sometimes we went to the cinema, though I don’t recall the films we saw. Sometimes we would spend time in his room, being intimate – always the same procedure, my hand on him. He was concerned for me in his way. Sometimes he would be holding forth on the latest existential writer who had tickled his fancy, or his father’s callous behaviour of late, and his voice would trail away when he realised my attention had slackened.
He wasn’t nasty about it. I’d apologise profusely. I explained to him that it wasn’t him. Only I didn’t really know what it was. So I’d apologise some more. He’d smile in amusement. In a small voice I’d ask him to continue. Even if my mind had wandered. Even if I wasn’t quite sure what he had been talking about. For it felt like Gen was my one remaining tether to the world. That without him, I would float away.
We were lying on his bed. Gen was talking excitedly – he would be studying politics and I literature and some of the modules we were offered by the university might overlap. He had already chosen the ones we should take outside the core curriculum and he was justifying his choices. Some part of me relaxed when he was like this, because he knew more about these things than me. But more importantly, when he was telling me about the book I should read or the course I needed to take, I felt he was concerned about me and invested in our future together.
‘Hey, you know what we could do?’ I asked quietly.
‘What’s that?’
‘We could go to the bookseller not so far from my building. Do you remember I took you there once? That quiet old place. It always makes me feel so peaceful. And since I know the owner so well, I bet we could get some of our books for university from there a little cheaper!’
Gen didn’t speak at once.
‘Yes, that’s a possibility,’ he eventually said.
His tone had changed. And he said nothing after. Living with my mother and my grandmother, I was used to people thundering out their emotions in torrents. But Gen could go silent just like that, and his silence weighed on me until it became unbearable. Until I asked in a small voice:
‘You think it’s a bad idea? You don’t want to go there?’
He turned my face towards his. Gently. Looked into my eyes.
‘I didn’t want to talk about this, especially not now,’ he said softly, and it was as though he was a man burdened by great sadness.
‘Talk about what?’ I asked, feeling a sense of panic rise and clarify like fingers of ice.
‘You know how intelligent I think you are, right? How sensitive. How kind. But I think, because of that fundamental kindness, you don’t always see the world as it is. Rather you see it as you want it to be.’
‘What do you mean?’ I whispered.
‘A man that age. Giving a young girl books for free. Almost as tokens, as presents. Having her over for cups of tea. The more cynical among us might imagine …’
His voice trailed away in the gravity of the silence that followed.
I burst out laughing.
I hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t even funny. It was a kind of hysteria provoked by the sheer absurdity of the suggestion.
‘You can’t mean … that’s ridiculous. I’ve been going there for years, and he’s never so much as looked at me in that way!’
He turned away and spoke in a clipped whisper.
‘I’m sorry my concern for you is so amusing!’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I really didn’t. I just wanted to, I mean I just think …’
Again my words fell into the void of silence his seriousness had conjured up.
Neither of us said anything.
‘I mean, I really appreciate it. I guess … I don’t really have to go there, if you don’t want me to. If that’s what you want.’
He looked at me ardently.
‘It’s not about what I want. It’s about what’s best for you. I …’
His gaze flickered downwards.
He seemed vulnerable then. I touched my hand to his thick shaggy hair. Even if everything in my apartment had collapsed, if it was hard to breathe at home through the fug of our grief – here at least, I had these moments with him. Where we were both in some way naked, vulnerable, but together.
‘Okay. I can tell him. I’ll go one more time, and … tell him I won’t be coming to visit him any more.’
‘Okay.’
I had been sincere in what I had said to Gen, about telling the old bookseller that I wouldn’t be coming around any more. And yet the promise had been abstract. I hadn’t firmed up a particular day, and part of me hoped to put it off as long as possible. But Gen was quietly persistent, he kept reminding me, and encouraging me, and eventually, he even offered to come with me. I knew he wasn’t going to forget. And besides, I felt tired. I just wanted to get it over with.
And that’s why I found myself standing outside the bookshop one August evening. I had been going there for so many years; it was a sanctum of solace and learning, a place more than any other that embodied the magic of books for me. But Gen was watching me with a gentle gaze, reminding me of why we had come. The following week I would start university and my life would change. So perhaps it was necessary and inevitable that I break with the past. At least, that’s what I told myself.
Gen waited outside. I walked through the doors one final time. With everything that had happened in the last few months, with my grandmother’s deterioration, I hadn’t been in for a while. As I entered the store, I felt the warmth and scent of musty books envelop me. The old man was sitting at the desk where he always was. This man had only ever shown me great kindness, but this felt like something I had to do.
He looked up at me, his eyes the colour of the sea on a warm afternoon, soft and blue, infinite in their gentle haze. I felt my heart trip against my chest. I felt something inside me break, perhaps because I knew I wouldn’t see him again. Perhaps it was about my grandmother too, the feeling that everything was being left behind. A door to an old tattered bookshop that I would never step through again.
He looked up at me. All at once the tears were streaming down my cheeks.
He raised himself up, that thin arthritic body, and in that moment a man who had only ever seemed old to me seemed older still, and yet he was reaching out to me, trying to provide me with support, and I could see the concern etched into his halting, painful movements. My tears flowed all the more. I hadn’t cried on the day of my grandmother’s funeral, and now it seemed as though I couldn’t stop.
‘Cup of tea?’ he murmured, with a gentle, sad smile.
I shook my head. I couldn’t get the words out.
He watched me for a few moments longer. He was distressed and baffled and he clearly didn’t know what to say; how to calm this teenager who had appeared so suddenly distraught. He faltered, then managed:
‘Would you care to take a book? You can take any one of them. Not just to borrow. But to keep. Free. No charge.’
Even at my young age, I realised this was his way of showing concern. He could no more ask me to explain why I was sad than I could ask him about the family he might once have had, or how he had ended up alone. I thought about that – he had never told me anything about his family, the people he had once known. I wondered about them. How many people does a person lose in the course of a life? How long is it before you lose yourself? I thought about my grandmother. I thought about her empty chair.
And then the words arrived, in a desperate, halting whisper.
‘Do you have a book … to tell you what to do when someone is gone? Someone you’ve known … for as long as you remember. A book to stop it from … hurting so badly. Could you give me that one?’
He raised his eyes to me, and in his expression I thought I caught a hint of desperation. But his voice arrived as precise and soft as ever.
‘I am afraid we don’t have anything like that in stock. At least … not currently.’
The last part – that ‘at least … not currently’ – caused me a small involuntary smile.
I felt the tears drying on my cheeks.
I had the urge to reach out to him, to touch the thin white hair which remained, to stroke his face, to let him know how incredibly grateful I was for the kindness he had shown me all those years. For the love of books he had helped inspire in me, and which had so benefited the course of my life.
For a few moments, all those feelings whirled inside me, struggling for expression, and it occurred to me that in all our time together I hadn’t ever asked his name. But Gen was waiting for me outside, and I knew it was time to go; that I had to go, and I could not return. I felt the tears burn my eyes once more.
So I did all that was remaining to me in that moment and mouthed the words:
Thank you.
Did he hear what I wanted to say without speaking? Was it ever important that he did?
Looking back on it, he may have shown the same kindness to many other waifs and strays. I am certain it was in his nature. He had played a massively important role in my life, which made it easy for me to assume I had played some kind of role in his. But was that true?
I don’t know. I just hope he had some inkling of what he had meant to me.
I walked away and didn’t look back. I heard the soft tinkle of the door as I exited the shop for the last time.
Gen was waiting for me outside. He kissed my mouth, a chaste but loving gesture.
‘I know that wasn’t easy for you. But I am very proud.’
I felt something in me light up. As he linked my arm in his, Gen had a spring in his step, and feeling his positive energy, I knew we were moving towards the future. He had been right, it was important to move on. He was proud of me. Whatever else, we had each other.
And that is how I was able to put the old bookseller to the back of my mind. Because it was necessary. Because I had to move on.
And when I got home later that evening, it was quiet in the apartment. Still. I could be alone in the kitchen. I could take the long clean blade of my favourite knife. And I could run it up and down the inseam of my arm. And when the image of the old man came to me again, along with my shame, I could stab the point of the knife into the skin. Over and over. Eventually I felt dizzy. I wrapped my arm in tissue paper and watched with a certain relish as the paper blushed red and my heart began to slow.
I got into bed. The gentle throbbing was the last thing I remember before I slipped into a peaceful sleep.