The sawn-off shot gun and birdshot were buried exactly where the Old Man had told Ren. It was a brutish weapon. To Ren, sitting there with Little Wu in the potting shed next to the old house, and listening to the steady plod of the rain, keeping the gun from view, and out of his preoccupations, were just more things to worry about. He had found it in the hidey hole at the driveway entrance and tucked it away in a rubber gun sack behind the aviary on the pretext of going to reconnoitre the house and its occupants. He had not spoken to Little Wu about what he was going to do. She had not asked him because she knew while she was there, standing between Ren and the parrots, it was undecided. The rain was a godsend to them both but Ren was irritated by it.
The monsoon rain had swirled around for days. The communist family stayed in their house. Ren and Little Wu sat with a few army blankets on the polished concrete floor of the ivy strewn potting shed. They took shelter behind a great wall of potted tomato seedlings. Whenever the rain stopped for an hour or so, the lady of the house visited her tomatoes to fuss over them. The potting shed boasted enormous glass ceilings allowing the gardener the reassurance of the sky above and the shelter of a world within. Pruning out the yellow leaves, and taking out the top stems to channel growth into the flowering ones, the old dame looked like she knew what she was doing. She worked on lettuce seedlings as Ren and Little Wu peered up through leafage in studied silence.
The old woman was a salad gardener. Someone who wanted a sudden abundance out of season. A trader. A communist and a trader. Cherry tomatoes. Romas. Rouge de Marmande. A tomato for every class in the People’s Republic. Everyone wanted eggs and tomatoes in those days. No-one quite knew where they came from. No-one wanted to admit to them or share them. The communists presided over a secret food economy. There was not much a local party Chair would not do for a ripe tomato or a nice duck egg.
Spades, shovels, pruners and secateurs of all varieties were neatly arranged on pegs along the wall behind the potting bench. Ren peered admiringly at them. These communists looked after the old place like it was theirs. Her work done for the time being, the lady left the potting shed under the cover of an ancient oilcloth umbrella that Ren recognised from the old days. She closed the door stiffly behind her and made a run for it.
‘Do you hear a rush of water?’ asked Ren.
‘It is raining, and it has all day’ Little Wu said.
‘No, it’s louder. Like a river nearby’, said Ren. ‘Must be the drainpipe out the back.’
The night began to fall. The rain drove on. Ren went to a window every now and again to see if all the lights had gone off in the house. Finally, they did. He was ready to make a move. Three days of travel through open country with Little Wu, thinking about it. The moment had come. There was an open sense about her. She longed for the moment too.
‘Do you expect me to show you how?’ Little Wu asked.
‘Must I undress in front of you?’ he asked.
‘Yes. You go first’. She was enjoying this.
‘No. You go, Little Wu.’
‘Ren!’ she exclaimed testily. ‘I asked first.’
Ren sheepishly dragged his shirt up. His pants slid to the floor revealing everything. There stood a forty years old man. Ribs. Strong chin. Lots of cheer and a touch of longing in his otherwise tired eyes. It has all come to this. Little Wu stood, sensing it too.
He turned his heels and skipped for the door. He darted to the back of the potting shed over a mossy path through the moonlit rain. He found there the drain pipe buckled by the downpour and a shower of water belting out of the gutter outlet.
‘A shower at last!’ he rejoiced under his breath.
He had barely washed his shoulders when Little Wu bumped into him, seeking a bedtime slosh with eyes like lamps drawing his attention from everything else.
‘Move over!’ she demanded with a whisper, her skin catching the moonlight like a mirror on cloudy day.
‘How good is this?’ asked Ren, them standing back to back and water crashing onto their shoulders and heads.
Little Wu said nothing. She bent forward slightly to catch the water in her hands as it gunnelled through her prayer and splashed over her thighs. After a time, they returned clean to the potting shed and swaddled each other in old sheets ready to be torn up by the old lady gardener to secure the tomatoes outside on sunny days.
‘I love tomatoes’ said Little Wu. ‘The way you can smell their sweetness’.
‘Waste of effort moving them outside’ noticed Ren. ‘It’s warmth not light that ripens tomatoes’.
‘The way they draw you in and finish a little sour’ she noted dreamily. ‘Once you eat a tomato, you know the deal’.
‘You discover the acidity’ agreed Ren.
They coupled easily. Every second of their intimacy whether touching or not was a diary left unguarded. It was a forgiveness asked for by pleading and accepted by trying to hold down selfish desire. Frenetic when a good thing had been found, darkly wilful when a better thing still was yet sought, their closeness began as careful admissions about what was thought ‘that time when you said’. Little Wu quickly brought Ren to the edge. Together no longer feeling that the honesty of one showed in the judgment of the other, skin touched skin in a spirit of play. First, a brush of wrists. Then lightly holding hands, Ren caressed low and Little Wu simmered in dream and evaporated. Transfusing and gushing they followed each other across and through their bodies free in a near constellation. A gentle friction of endless waiting and a resisted dream allowed her to drench herself from an unguarded squirt.
Ren felt Little Wu’s translucence as a warm release. He put his hand on it gently. Finding that it slipped and sprang back to his touch, the compulsion made by a blush rising was no easy thing to forget but rare to him all the same. Nothing came close to her little opaque folds of skin. The warmth of afternoon river stones. The easy collapse of proving bread. The rush of crushed mint. Lots of things played a note. But here was the song. Lifting up for a clear view of a warm tributary below. Everything expressed in a tremble, steady and destined, open to sense, and rebounding, an immersion for him. He was here to stay. Let free of a shrouded heart. Beyond all risk of shame and pursuing her as hard as his heart could take. A quivering believed to be eternal in its moments was stilled by a law of nature. It brought gravity crashing and gasping, and their shuddering into remains told them they were no longer beginning.
A limit was found, as it always is. The rain seemed to be hammering down now.
Little Wu ended up finishing Ren off with a few weak movements. Not that she worried she could get more pregnant. In her own glowering decline, she had earned her placidity, and when Ren came it was a failing focus given over to a tidal shove and recoil. An absent minded reverie persisted for as long as no-one spoke. She watched the rain clear and the moths returning to brush around under the house’s porch light. The song’s final strains were tonal. But there was a tang in there too that she enjoyed. She was surprised to find she was not experienced enough to expect it but open enough to see its value.
Ren handed her a nice red grosse lisse.
He had been going hard at the cherry tomatoes for some minutes.
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