Ren was responsible for finding them a place to sleep at night. They saw some small golden lights swinging wearily on a wire up ahead. It was getting quite dark and it usually took half an hour of inquiries to find lodging. On this occasion, they met a young woman in the middle of the three house village who said she had a place for them to stay. The place on offer was a low-roofed barn outbuilding with a thick layer of straw on the floor and a little green wooden framed window at the far end. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it looked like somewhere a bitch would retreat to whelp her puppies. It actually was.
The scruffy white terrier attended to her litter of five pinkish offspring each vying for her attention. A quiet cacophony of guttural sounds filled the soundless night. Little Wu slumped down in a corner with a piece of cold potato, washed it down with a little water and rested her head against a cool stone wall. She was almost too tired to notice the litter but had closely watched Ren’s sheepish departure soon after their arrival with the young homesteader and her kerosene lamp. From the window, Little Wu observed that they had gone not into the main house but an old open garage with rooms above where lights were briefly turned on, and then off. A lampshade light went on. Then a few female giggles sounded at intervals of a minute or so across the barnyard, the sort that communists could not prevent.
Little Wu watched and listened attentively despite feeling tired. Perhaps the girl was fetching change for the rooming fee. Or preparing a vacuum flask of hot water to counter the chill of the night. Half an hour elapsed. Then all the lights went off. Little Wu turned from the window. Another ten minutes passed and Ren sauntered back to the low barn. He tried to open the door but Little Wu had bolted it from the inside and pretended to fall asleep.
Let him spend the night with Little Miss Red Pioneer!
Ren peered through the green window. Little Wu had positioned herself to be partially visible slumped on the hay. He tapped at the window for a few moments but did not want to make a scene so he made himself fairly comfortable in a nearby milking shed where found a faded velvet lounge, a tallow lamp and a valve radio playing traditional music. He had brought a quart of rice wine across from the garage. He poured it into an enamel cup he had found. He sipped at the homemade spirit. His gums buzzed in his mouth and he lay back, tucking his shirt back into the front of his pants, before going adrift. Things could be a lot worse.
Li Na had a body honed by pitchforking hay into a wagon. Her ribs showed a little and her breasts rose pert and coral-tipped in the soft light produced by tallow. She took Ren's hand and used her eyes to persuade him to run his hand over her hips. Ren sensed an unspoken reason for this. A fight with the boyfriend, the dare of a girlfriend, or the censure of parents perhaps? He found himself caring for the reasons but, like most men, not particularly compelled to ask for them.
She wriggled from her smock dress. He saw red marks on her hips where she pulled the hay wagon by its handle to and from the barn below.
As she slid down tightly on him, she did not seem elsewhere or playing a role out a habit, definitely not. But has her gyrations flinched from low to high, and she moved him, wettening, to where she wanted him to be most, it occurred to Ren that had they enjoyed a preface, some sort of slow unwrapping, their desire would have to contemplate a future. And, in giving themselves something to do next time, her demands could be partial, spaced out, call to him by name in the black of the night, intimate and knowing by indulging and waiting to be indulged, slow but steadily rising. And as she put her full weight on his shoulders, tuning him directly to her frequency of flushes and rushing, their faces were keen and hot with delight, the urgency her movements suggested taking something while the offer stood, rather than counting on something uncertain.
Li Na took deep breaths, inhaling sharply through little white teeth, and looking down on Ren through a messy fringe of black shiny hair, and leaning back on a bed rail, called him to nuzzle her outer-most folds. He obliged, staying there for a full ten minutes, following her winding seams as far as his tongue would take him before his nose rubbed at her joy at the same time and the mute chime of a wooden clock sounded her buttery splashing end with an almost inaudible whisper of thanks, and he did not mind, pleased to bring her to her point and push her over with a touch. Li Na flipped over and, securing herself fragile on a window ledge and but high and open and close to the light, brought Ren by the fingertips to face the small of her back and to busy himself, blindly, at first playing about at her tiny apertures. With his preference going unjudged, he found himself wanting more and more to slide tighter and tighter, letting her resolve the bend in his hopeful nudges until he was easily close but free of any thought of friction. He had tried this before and it had seemed to him like slipping into nice knitwear on a chilly day but not much more. Her pushing back on him very slightly made this quite special, and he waited back and let her direct it all and his body swamped by a heavy cloak of warmth until they were both filled and the night air became noticeable on their bodies.
For some reason, as he lay there alone on the dusty lounge looking up at the fibro roof, he was reminded of a time as a child when he had broken a vase. Confession to his mother was tempting but not quite necessary until she noticed the vase was absent. The childish thought that maybe she would never notice could not quite drown out a sense that time was ticking down against him. Even a child understands that an early plea makes no difference. Maternal rage is a wild river needing to be crossed.
Little Wu lay awake in the barn. In each hand, she held a cooked potato and conducted a muted argument between them. The Ren potato said something weak and unconvincing and The Little Wu potato scoffed at it and scorned the Ren potato before fatally squashing him with a running kung-fu kick delivered with an assassin’s high shriek. Placing the broken potatoes back in their wax paper wrapper, she took another drink of water and wriggled down to sleep. Her displeasure could wait for the morning when she figured out exactly what annoyed her so much. When she did, she figured that she could keep the feeling running slightly beneath a bad mood for a whole day.
‘Little Sister! You cannot do this’ said Ren, feeling her tongue warm and close on his brow at dawn. ‘Maybe just a little more then. You are too young for me. How did you learn to do this? Just don't get caught. Naughty, naughty...’
Ren awoke with a fright to find a cow licking his ear steadily.
Little Wu sat on a milking stool heaving for breath between convulsions of laughter.
His head pounded. The daylight broiled his failing mind. Little Wu’s laughter only aided the insinuation of the rice wine. He had a feeling that both were only getting started. He tried to find a dark quiet place by burying his head in the upholstery of the old lounge.
‘The Oedipal urge!’ said Little Wu. 'Look at you!'
She could only wonder when Ren would run out of gifts for her. Ren shoved the cow so he did not smell its grassy breath. Initially, it did not budge. He sat up and shooed it away with claps of his hand that sounded in his ears like the thunder of the damned.
‘Come on' said Little Wu. 'You are not going to win the country for communism by sitting there’.
'Where are we going?' asked Ren not really wanting an answer.
‘Our host left a flask of hot tea at the barn door. Your Little Sister is nowhere to be seen now’.
The night before they were set to argue. Ren would be the older man who was handy enough for a younger woman. He could act like Little Wu would need to get a ticket. Little Wu would be feeling everything fully as usual. Her role would be Ren’s scorned wife who was not yet his girlfriend. Ren could have played for hours, a day perhaps, with what Little Wu was not and it would have destroyed them both. Or he could have offered an early and unconditional surrender. Then he would have ended up with experiences of two young women inside the same week, and had he returned to Hong Kong, that would have kept him going throughout his old age. But Ren was unusual among men. He did not keep trophies, or bank them for a rainy day. He tended to let them fall from his fingers. He figured he was haunted enough.
Had the night not gone as it did, Little Wu could have remained stalled in her own unforgiveness. She had released too much of herself to Sir Seth. Her haunting by it might have continued indefinitely. Her emotional presumption toward Ren had been safely contained behind all their lively talk. The incident with the farm girl would have flushed Little Wu out into the open. Ren would have seen her anger, raw and hot, and streaming like ants from a nest. It would have been fatal to Ren to tell her to walk before she ran because she had no idea how to stop running. Ren, by not having any real idea of what Little Wu had lost, or the knowledge she had gained from the Niall house, would have allowed him to conclude quite fairly that Little Wu was plain crazy.
The situation had changed overnight.
Laughing at Ren had not reduced him in Little Wu’s eyes. But she was in no hurry to reassure him of that. Ren was capable of holding on to silly hopes for a closed connection, yet this was not what liberated Little Wu. Nor had his ridiculous moment given her a way to talk about her foolish days. No-one wants confessions in the early days of a love. But she could bookmark her past for him now. She could expect him to notice. She could say, here is the place where I was hurt, and here and here, and here as well. By seeing that, and planting her bookmarks, Little Wu could begin to slow down. She could walk again. Walk out of the little village. Walk along the road, and although Ren did not know it yet, walk to the aviary and every other place where their fates would be decided.
Ren just felt like a wreck. He whistled a little phrase from a folk song his mother had taught him.
‘Why are you going so easy on me?’ he asked after a while.
‘Who says I am?’ she replied with the hint of a smile.