The Ghost Marriage

Chapter Five

Lianxiang hutong was yet another ancient alley scheduled for demolition. Little by little the authorities were effacing the city’s history, the labyrinth of hutongs and siheyuan that denoted a way of life dating back to the Mongols. Already most of it was gone, replaced by luxury apartments and shopping malls. A new generation of wealthy Chinese was replacing the old Beijingers, and the floating population from all around China which had descended on the city looking for work was being swept away. Where, Li wondered, would they all go? Where would they live? After all, not everyone could be rich — even if Deng Xiaoping had declared it glorious to be so.

He pushed his bicycle along the narrow alley, between high stone walls, until he found the gate to the condemned siheyuan occupied by the Sheng family. In the dark alley leading to the courtyard beyond, he leaned his bicycle against the wall and squeezed past the detritus of disposable lives. The tree shading the courtyard was decorated with bamboo bird cages, and in the confined space the sound of birdsong was almost deafening. The singing was accompanied by the discordant sounds of a piece from the Peking Opera playing on a radio somewhere in the dark beyond open windows and doors. Heat fibrillated in the thick summer air. A very old lady, dressed entirely in black, sat sleeping in the shade.

‘Hello!’ Li called out. And after a short time a middle-aged woman in a blue blouse and red cardigan emerged from the south-facing door. She looked at him curiously for a moment, before curiosity gave way to fear as realization dawned.

‘Can I help you?’ But she knew what he wanted.

‘Yes,’ Li said. ‘You can tell me where you got the body of the girl you married to your dead son.’

Sheng Nuwa and her husband Dai sat side by side in the semi-dark and comparative cool of an inner room, its window shutters closed, the only light spilling in through an open door. Both faces were ghostly pale as they surrendered to Li’s hard gaze. Li wondered if this was, in fact, the room where the minghun had been played out. Feng Qi’s description of the odour had stayed with him, and he wrinkled his nose at the thought of it.

Sheng Nuwa said, ‘We had no idea until we saw the Missing posters. She was only delivered to us on the day of the wedding. We thought she had come from the crematorium. That’s what the man who brought her said.’

‘I’ll need his name.’

‘We don’t know it.’ It was the husband who spoke this time, and when Li blew his disbelief through pursed lips, he added quickly, ‘They told us they weren’t able to get us a body, so we had resigned ourselves to proceeding with just the paper dummy. Then this guy arrives at the last minute.’

‘Who did you go to originally to ask for a body?’

Sheng Dai glanced darkly at his wife. Their reluctance to speak was clear.

But Li was losing patience. ‘Come on! Spit it out! You’re in trouble enough as it is. Don’t make it worse.’

The dead boy’s mother said, ‘We were given a name. A certain Gan Bo. He could find wives, we were told, for the living. It’s hard these days for a single man to find himself a woman.’

It was, Li knew, a demographic time bomb for the future of his country. A legacy of the one-child policy, and the traditional preference for boys over girls. With only 100 women for every 130 men, there was a growing demand for mail-order brides. And a criminal element had appeared to satisfy that demand, trading women for money.

Sheng Nuwa brushed a stray strand of hair from her eyes. ‘But we were told that sometimes Gan Bo could supply dead ones, too.’

Li could barely conceal his disgust. ‘So you put in an order for one.’

Her eyes dropped away from his. ‘We were only trying to do the best for our son.’

‘And what did Gan Bo say?’

Sheng Dai said, ‘He told us he would see what he could do. But he came back a couple of days later and said he couldn’t get one in time. And with the summer heat, we couldn’t wait.’

‘So then some guy just appeared from nowhere?’

‘Yes. On the morning of the minghun. He brought the girl in the back of a van. Said that Gan Bo had been able to find a body for us after all. We’d already acquired a second coffin.’

‘And you paid him.’

‘Yes.’

‘How much?’

‘He wanted dollars.’

‘How much?’

‘Twelve hundred.’

Li clenched his jaw involuntarily. So that was what a young girl’s life was worth these days. Twelve hundred dollars. The price of a plasma TV. ‘Tell me what the man who brought the body looked like.’

But the dead boy’s father just shrugged. ‘I didn’t pay him much attention. I was kind of in shock. He was just some guy. Forty, maybe. A little older. He didn’t stay long.’

Li found himself strangely disappointed that this description, however brief, in no way resembled the tall, skinny boy who had been Meilin’s lover. ‘And the bodies? I suppose you had them cremated.’ All evidence destroyed in the furnace.

‘That was the original plan,’ Sheng Nuwa said. ‘But then a cousin with a little land out near Donghulinmen offered to let us bury them there, and we jumped at the chance.’