Part 6 (2/2)

'You say you just have one, three-year-old child, but it's clear you've given birth much more recently,' the doctor says, s.h.i.+ning a torch onto Meili's cervix. Then she turns to the nurse and says, 'Write: smooth, no cervical erosion or polyps.'

'Yes, look you can tell these red nipples have just been sucked,' the nurse says, resting her pen in her mouth and squeezing Meili's left breast.

'There's no milk in there!' Meili says. 'I have no baby, I promise, just one daughter who'll be four next month. I had an abortion last year. Why would I lie to you? I came here to have an IUD inserted because I don't want to fall pregnant again.' Meili is embarra.s.sed by the redness of her nipples. It's Kongzi's fault: he insists on sucking them every night as he drops off to sleep.

'Why didn't you have one fitted after your first child?' asks the doctor, glancing at Meili's abortion certificate. 'And what does your husband do?' She clearly a.s.sumes that Meili is a hair-salon prost.i.tute.

'He's a boatman, and grows some vegetables on the side,' Meili answers, feeling ashamed of Kongzi's diminished status. She winces with pain as the speculum continues to stretch open her cervix.

'All right, we'll give her an IUD,' the doctor says, pulling on rubber gloves. 'You're lucky the director isn't here today. If he were, we'd have to take you straight up to the third floor and get you sterilised.'

'But women are only supposed to be sterilised after their second child, and I only have one.' Meili looks at the door, unconsciously preparing for an escape.

'How do we know how many children you have? You said you were at the end of your cycle, but look how much blood there is on your sanitary towel. Are your periods usually so heavy? When did this one start?'

'Ten days ago. They're very irregular.' She wonders whether the doctor has seen traces of Kongzi's sperm inside her. A wad of surgical gauze is pushed into her v.a.g.i.n.a and twirled around. She grits her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut. Beads of sweat run down her face.

A cold pair of forceps yanks Meili's cervix forward, then a long needle is inserted into her womb, extracted and measured against a selection of IUDs.

'I suggest this oval one,' the nurse says to Meili. 'It's a domestic product, and only costs eighty yuan. The Sino-foreign joint venture ones cost two hundred. Go for the cheaper one. With the procedure fee, it will come to 180 yuan.'

'Oh no! I don't have that much money on me,' Meili says, wis.h.i.+ng she could close her legs. 'I thought the IUD would be free.'

'It's only free for local residents,' the nurse replies.

'Exactly how much money have you got?' the doctor asks brusquely.

'Check my pockets,' Meili says, pointing to her trousers.

The nurse pulls out the cash from the pockets and counts it. 'Only a hundred yuan,' she says. 'Are you sure this is all you've got on you?'

'Haven't I seen you in the market?' the doctor says. 'Do you run a stall there?'

'Yes. I sell vegetables, herbs and pickles. Look out for me next time you go. All my produce is free from pesticides.' Meili's lease on the stall will soon expire, and the market's manager has informed her that since she doesn't have an official work permit it can't be renewed.

'Well, we'll do it for a hundred yuan then. I hope you appreciate our leniency. Bring me the oval one, nurse.' The doctor picks up the IUD with long blunt tweezers, opens the speculum even wider and slides the device inside. As her warm uterine walls tighten around the cold metal object, Meili stares at the two red gulls painted on the wall above the radiator.

The nurse hands Meili an appointment form. 'You'll have a follow-up examination three months from now, to check that the IUD hasn't fallen out or been deliberately removed,' she says. 'Any woman who attempts to take out their IUD, even if it's causing them pain, will be fined five hundred yuan.'

'You may suffer cramps, nausea and light bleeding, but these side effects are usually only temporary,' the doctor says, removing her face mask and revealing her brightly painted lips.

The nurse continues to fill in the examination report. 'Did you say her v.a.g.i.n.al ridges have flattened out?' she asks, glancing up at the doctor.

Meili watches the bloodstained speculum being tossed into the bin and hears her cervix release a last thread of air before closing its entrance gate.

KEYWORDS: willow branches, dead chick, chicken wings, cotton fluffer, Three Nos, ox in a yoke.

'COME AND JOIN us, everyone. It's my daughter's birthday. Let me fill your gla.s.ses so we can drink to her health!' Kongzi is sitting on a broken, legless office chair he found on the rubbish dump and has tied to a tree trunk with rope. The battery-operated strip light he bought today is suspended from branches overhead, lighting up the plates of food set out on wooden crates.

'Thank you, Master Kong,' says Dai, a gentle man with large bulbous eyes and a deeply lined forehead. 'Me and Yiping are simple peasants. It's an honour for us to share a drink with a schoolteacher! A toast to your daughter, Master Kong!' Dai grits his teeth and forces himself to down the drink in one. He and Yiping are from Purple Mountain in Jiangsu Province. They moved to the sand island six weeks ago, and have built a shelter under the trees just behind. Meili came across them over in the town. Dai was wandering through the streets with a pole on his shoulders, a bucket of clothes and pans on one end and a cotton fluffer for quilt-making on the other. Yiping, half his height and heavily pregnant, was waddling behind him holding their two daughters by the hand. Meili approached them and advised them to move to the island to avoid being arrested by family planning officers.

A skinny, bald man called Bo lifts his gla.s.s and says, 'Drink, drink!' his scalp and bony shoulders gleaming under the strip light. His fingernails are black and broken from scavenging the rubbish dump. He and his wife have three daughters and a four-month-old son.

Kongzi has fried some chicken wings and Meili has made a salad of wild wood ear fungus. Smells of garlic and sesame oil drift from the men's faces as they tuck into the food. A gaggle of children run up, grab some chicken wings, then go to chase each other along the river's edge. Chen arrives in his boat, tethers it to a rock and climbs the sandy beach. 'So you still manage to remember birthdays on this island!' he says to Kongzi, clapping his hands. 'Ha! We haven't remembered our kids' birthdays for years.' He puts a bag of deep-fried meatb.a.l.l.s onto the wooden crate. When he laughs, exposing his black and yellow teeth, he looks like a monkey.

'My daughter and I both have birthdays in November, so I never forget hers, and we always end up celebrating them together,' Kongzi replies.

Meili and the women are sitting beside them on cardboard boxes, eating rice and braised tofu. The smell of the duck stew simmering on the gas stove outside the shelter makes the breeze feel a little less cold.

'Have some more, Xixi,' Meili says, tapping the bowl of tofu with her chopsticks. 'You're eating for two, now. And try some of this liver. It's full of vitamins.'

'Thank you, thank you,' Xixi says, b.u.t.toning up her angora jerkin and rubbing her small b.u.mp. She turns to Yiping and asks, 'So, when's your one plopping out?'

'Not for another four months. But look, my belly's already so big I can't see my legs any more. Dai said our padded quilts are too hot for this town. He wants us to go into the mountains and see if we can sell them there.' Yiping is sitting cross-legged on a mat. With her large belly bulging from her tiny frame, she looks like a sweet potato freshly pulled from the ground.

'Wait until your baby's born before you leave,' says Bo's wife, a scruffy woman called Juru. 'You can give birth in the backstreet clinic behind the Family Planning Centre. The midwife only charges three hundred yuan.' Juru pulls out her breast from under her s.h.i.+rt and stuffs it into her baby's mouth. When Meili visited her shelter she was shocked by the sodden, mouldy straw on the ground, and advised Juru, for the sake of her baby's health, to replace it more frequently.

'Yes, if you set off now, the authorities might arrest you and give you a forced abortion,' Meili says. 'Dai should forget about selling quilts and try to find work on the rubbish dump. I'm thinking of buying a hundred more ducks and building a large pen on the beach. I reckon I could make ten thousand yuan a year from a flock that size.' Meili feels that now that she no longer has to worry about falling pregnant, she can concentrate on building a comfortable life for themselves here.

'Admit it you've had an IUD fitted, haven't you?' Yiping says in the thick mountain accent Meili finds hard to understand.

'No, no,' Meili replies, glancing nervously at Kongzi. 'I considered it, but then realised that if I wanted another child I'd have to bribe a nurse a hundred yuan to remove it.'

'I'm so stupid,' Yiping laughs. 'All I'm good for is making babies. First time I saw a condom, I didn't know what it was. I thought it might be a piece of tripe, so I plopped it into a soup and ate it!'

'I wouldn't dare let anyone put an IUD inside me,' says Xixi. 'A neighbour back in our village tried to remove one from his wife. He stuck his hand inside her and groped around for hours, but couldn't find it. In the end, he got so frustrated he exploded her womb.' Xixi cringes at the memory, then spits a shard of chicken bone onto the ground.

'Exploded it?' Meili says, her mind returning to the dead face of Happiness.

'Yes, he bunged a firecracker up her v.a.g.i.n.a and set light to it,' Xixi says, crossing her legs and wriggling her toes.

'Men get so obsessed with carrying on the family line, they lose all reason!' Meili says, glancing at Kongzi again. He's banging his fist angrily now, shouting: 'Those f.u.c.king officials, turning up here and bombarding us with b.l.o.o.d.y condoms.' Two days ago, officers from the County Family Planning Commission came to the island to hand out floating population fertility registration forms and bags of condoms printed with photographs of movie stars.

'Hope you didn't swear at them like that when they came,' Chen says, then licks his teeth. 'When my brother was locked up in a detention centre last year for entering a city without permission, he swore at an official, and they cut half his tongue off.'

'I've been detained for vagrancy as well,' Bo says, scratching his bald scalp. 'If you have money and connections, they let you out after twenty-four hours. But I had nothing. They forced me to labour in the fields for two months, and beat me viciously every day. By the time I was let out, I was skin and bone.'

'So, what doc.u.ments do you need to avoid arrest?' Dai asks, brus.h.i.+ng some white cotton fluff from his jumper.

'Ident.i.ty card, health certificate, temporary urban residence permit, temporary work permit, birth permit, marriage licence . . .' Kongzi says, rattling off the list. 'But even if you have them all, if you are in a big town or city and you look like a peasant, they'll still arrest you. And once you're in handcuffs, they'll squeeze as much money from you as they can.'

'They call us the ”Three Nos”: no doc.u.ments, no homes, no income,' says Bo. 'When our son's a bit older, I'll go and work on a building site. Start living a normal life.' Bo is in his late forties. A rumour has circulated the island that he spent time in jail for abducting his neighbour's wife and selling her to a widower in the countryside.

'No, what they really call us is ”blind vagrants”, aimless drifters,' says Chen, a foolish smile spreading across his face. The Western suit he's wearing is thin and torn. He's making good money now, hauling cargos of oranges up the river several times a week.

'To think that it's now a crime for us to live in our own country!' Kongzi cries out, his face red from alcohol. 'Where do they expect us to go?'

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