The Incarnations

9. The Alley

SPRINGTIME. THE CITY is thawing. Beijingers shedding coats and scarves and other woollen armour in the battle against the cold. The scenery of winter, the roadside oil drums of foil-wrapped baked potatoes and the heavy quilts over supermarket doors retiring from view.

Gobi dust billows in the sky. The city suffocates under the haze of pollutants, the smog burning the back of Wang’s throat. He streaks the tissue he blows his nose with into black, but with a mental shrug lights another Zhongnanhai from a pack left by a fare. The shadow in his lungs will worsen anyway. What difference will one more cigarette make?

East Third ring road, the digital Olympic clock counts down the seconds until the Games. Billboards of athletes leap over hurdles and somersault through the air, China’s national heroes, muscles rippling and taut, holding up cans of Coca-Cola midjump. Throughout Beijing renovations are underway. The polluted façades of buildings are being repainted. Millions of empty flowerpots line the streets, waiting to be filled. One World, One Dream. Remaking the Environment Benefits the People. The Olympics Unites You, Me and Him. The slogans are everywhere.

Passengers come and go. The destinations are far and wide. Nanluoguxiang, the courtyards renovated into overpriced boutiques and tourist shops. Babaoshan cemetery. The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, and the undercover-police-surveillanced expanse of Tiananmen Square. The affluent gated residences of Shunyi. Desolate regions of the Great Wall. The vast sundial of the Millennium Monument, casting no shadow under the sun-bereaved sky.

A westerner slides into the back seat with a beautiful girl. Wang watches the couple in the rear-view. The man is fortyish, with toady eyes and the broken thread veins of alcoholism in his large meandering nose. The girl is in her twenties, with a sugar-frosting of make-up on her pretty face. How can she let him put his hands on her? wonders Wang. For what? Money? Status? A US fiancée visa? The man has a proprietorial hand on her knee and the smirk of one who thinks his own charisma has won him his trophy, and not the charisma of the West.

An official in an expensive tailored suit, his hair dyed an inauthentic black, flags down Wang’s cab outside a government building in Jiangguomen. As Wang drives him, the radio news talks of the Toxic Dumpling Incident. Fourteen people in Japan are sick in hospital after eating dumplings imported from China that were contaminated with pesticides.

‘Sabotage!’ says the official. ‘They are poisoning our dumplings to make China look bad.’

‘Really?’ Wang says. ‘You think the Japanese would poison their own citizens?’

‘They are an evil race.’

‘I’ve met some Japanese,’ Wang says. ‘They don’t seem so bad.’

‘Driver!’ snaps the official. ‘Didn’t you study the War of Resistance against the Japanese at school?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Well, go back to school and study it again! You obviously know nothing about our history. You wouldn’t know our history if it slapped you in the face!’

At the forceful spit of the word ‘history’, Wang stiffens, hands tightening around the steering wheel. Then he looks in the rearview at the indignant official, and the suspicion passes. He has to get a grip. He has to keep his paranoia in check.

The market. Vegetable stalls of pesticide-sprayed spinach and earth-clodden turnips. Racks of carcasses hanging from hooks, ribs and spinal cords exposed. A butcher in a bloodstained apron slams his cleaver, seasoning a joint of pork with ash spilling from his cigarette. Wang roams from stall to stall, gradually filling his bag with items on Yida’s list. Bean curd. Spring onions. Vinegar. The ground is slippery with plums fallen from a fruit stall and trampled to pulp. The children of the migrant vendors chase about, skidding through the mess as they play tag. Wang buys two jin of rice. The rice seller hands Wang his change without looking away from the old Bruce Lee movie on his laptop, perched above the till.

The dusk is balmy and suffused with spring. Wang detours down an alley behind the Golden Elephant pharmacy, passing a Uighur selling fake Rolexes and a shifty-looking man lurking by the tobacco and liquor store, on the lookout for police. Wang has seen him before and knows he is a seller of identities: student IDs, graduate diplomas and other papers. Documents, both stolen and forged, used by migrants to gain employment in the capital. Another man nearby is peddling blank receipt booklets from hotels and restaurants for officials to claim fraudulent expenses. He rustles a wad of banknotes, hinting at a profitable day’s trade.

Further down the alley, neon-lit shops cater for the darker pleasures of the flesh. An ‘Adult Health Store’ has shelves of rubber and latex sex toys and powdered ‘male power enhancers’. In a glass-fronted massage parlour, girls perch on stools, skirts ridden up to the shadowy meeting place of their thighs. The whores are heavy-lidded with boredom as they wait behind the glass. A teenager in leopard-print catches Wang’s eye with a gap-toothed smile, and he reddens and looks away.

A pole of red, white and blue stripes spins by a barber’s doorway. Inside, a man in his thirties and a teenager on a laptop slouch on leatherette chairs. The thirtyish man has his boots up on the ledge under the mirrors, stretching out his long, denim legs. He reminds Wang of someone he once knew. But older. And with shorter hair and smoker’s wrinkles around his eyes. Out in the alley Wang stares through the glass. No, he thinks. Can’t be. But on the man’s bicep is an emerald dragon. On his forearm is a knotty gnarl of scar tissue. Who else has that tattoo? Those scars?

Wang’s heart is beating hard. The wisest thing to do would be to walk on by. But he does not do the wisest thing. He opens the door and enters the barber’s.

Leaning back in his chair, Zeng Yan looks over, weary at the arrival of another customer. Then recognition widens his eyes and he swings his heels down from the ledge and stands. He is taller than Wang remembers, and thinner, his jeans sliding off his narrow hips.

‘Wang Jun!’ he laughs. ‘Is that really you?’

Wang nods and sways slightly. He feels as though reality is disjointed, as though he’s knocked back several glasses of baijiu in a row.

‘Long time no see,’ he says.

‘How long has it been?’ Zeng smiles. He pauses to cough. ‘Nine years? Ten?’

‘Ten,’ Wang says.

They look each other up and down, taking in a decade of change. Wang has become softer and rounder, the hair sparser on his head and the stubble coarser on his jaw. Zeng is gaunter, more angular, but his hair wavy and thick. Zeng Yan has lost the handsome looks he was so proud of at twenty — a loss Wang knows must have been painful for him.

‘You look well, Wang Jun.’

‘Liar,’ Wang laughs. ‘I’m balding. I’ve gained weight.’

‘Bullshit! You’re handsome as ever.’

‘You look much better than I do.’

Zeng coughs at this, his congested lungs protesting Wang’s lie. Looking at how haggard Zeng has become, Wang suspects something worse than heavy smoking and late nights. Some chronic illness lurking within.

The teenager on the laptop has stopped chatting on qq and stares at Wang with a hostility that makes him shift awkwardly. He looks around the run-down barber’s. The linoleum floor is peeling at the edges, scattered with tufts of hair. Duct tape mends the rips in the fake leather chairs. The cords of the hairdryers are frayed electrocutions waiting to happen.

‘How long have you been working here?’ he asks Zeng.

‘Two years.’

‘I live in Maizidian. Just round the corner. How come we haven’t seen each other in the street?’

‘I’ve seen you,’ Zeng says, ‘with your little girl.’

‘And you didn’t say hello?’

‘You’re a family man now. I thought it better to leave you be.’

Zeng lowers his eyes in shame. Still in the same line of work he was in as a teenager, but now on the lowest rung. Wang can tell he doesn’t have wealthy men throwing money at him any more. Now Zeng has to haggle over his fee with working-class men or migrants from outside Beijing.

‘Would you like a haircut?’ Zeng asks.

Wang went to the barber’s three weeks ago, but he nods. ‘Sure.’

‘Go clean up the back room, Wu Fei,’ Zeng orders the teenager. The boy shunts his chair back and exits through the beaded curtain, the strands swinging aggressively in his wake. Zeng shakes out a hairdressing cape and holds it up so Wang can thread his arms through. Wang then sits in one of the ripped leatherette chairs, and Zeng squirts shampoo and water from a plastic bottle on to his scalp and lathers it up. ‘How long you been married?’

‘Nine years.’

‘Long time,’ says Zeng. ‘What’s your wife’s name? What does she do?’

‘Ma Yida. She’s a masseur at Dragonfly Massage.’ Wang then asks, ‘How about you? Married?’

Zeng’s laughter lapses into a coughing fit. His chest revs like a car that won’t start.

‘I’m still a bachelor,’ he laughs, thumping his sternum. ‘I’m not the marrying kind.’

Wang leans back into the washbasin, and Zeng cradles his head, kneading his temples and digging his thumbs behind his ears. Wang shuts his eyes as Zeng’s strong fingers go to work on his scalp. The massage is part of the seduction routine. Many men wander into the barber’s on a whim. Only a haircut, they tell themselves. But Zeng’s fingers persuade them to stay for more. ‘Look what we do to your scalp,’ they say. ‘Think of what else we can do.’

‘How long have you been driving a taxi?’ Zeng asks.

Wang opens his eyes. He stares at Zeng’s upside-down face. ‘How do you know I’m a taxi driver?’

‘I’ve seen you in your cab.’

‘Really? When?’

‘Sometime last year, near Liangmaqiao.’

Water sprays from the nozzle, rinsing the lather out.

‘How many times have you seen me?’ Wang asks, his heart quickening. ‘Do you know where I live?’

Zeng starts at Wang’s tone. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I only saw you twice.’ He continues rinsing in silence, and Wang’s suspicion recedes.

Zeng rubs Wang’s head dry with a towel, then combs his sparse, damp hair. Wang watches, reversed in the mirror, as Zeng starts to cut. He stares at the deep scar, from elbow to wrist, on the inside of Zeng’s forearm. They’d been rallying a ping-pong ball in the hospital yard, when Zeng had told him how he punched out a window when his boyfriend, Dragon, dumped him. Some nerve endings were severed, and Zeng couldn’t make a proper fist. He had put down the ping-pong paddle to show Wang the looseness of his grip.

‘Should have punched with my left hand. Certain things I could take care of on my own, I can’t any more.’

Zeng had grinned, then admitted, ‘Some people are as good for you as a bullet in the head, but you want them anyway. Know what I mean?’

And Wang had nodded. He was beginning to understand.

Zeng Yan is blasting the blow-dryer when Wang’s phone buzzes with a message. Yida, waiting at home. Wang signals for Zeng to turn off the dryer.

‘I have to go,’ he says. ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Nothing.’

Zeng removes the cape and brushes off the collar of Wang’s polo shirt. ‘Come back whenever you like. I will always cut your hair for free.’

‘Thanks,’ Wang says. Though he doesn’t feel gratitude. Only an addict’s fear of relapse.

‘Well,’ says Zeng. ‘See you around.’

But Wang isn’t fooled by his casual, offhand tone. Zeng looks as though he can’t bear to see him leave.

‘Sure,’ he says.

Wang picks up his shopping and walks out of the barber’s and into the alley. He doesn’t say when he will be back, but they both know that he will.