Song Read online

  At the hatch Hai swung around. ‘Good luck, Song,’ he shouted in English. ‘Don’t forget who taught you how to talk like a real Englishman.’

  ‘You get that office job, Hai,’ Song yelled back. ‘Then you come on to Guiana, like we said.’

  Hai waved back. And he was gone.

  Song stood blinking back the tears.

  ‘Forget him,’ Li Bai called out from his hammock. ‘He’ll forget you as soon as his feet have landed on solid ground.’

  ‘He said he might come to Guiana after he’s made some money here.’

  Li Bai’s voice softened. ‘Get on with your own life now. You gotta be tough too. Like Hai was tough.’

  ‘He just came across tough.’

  ‘That’s all you need to do. I don’t want to see you let anyone else go taking half your food. You got to start thinking harder about surviving.’

  Anyone who was able left the boat in Madras. With fewer in their quarters the air felt less stifling, even fresh. Yet within several hours, dozens of new passengers boarded. This time many came on board as families: women wearing bright colours of lime and cerise with jewels in their noses and ears; men carrying bales of cloth and packets of powdered spices which smelled good and rich; and so many children, even babies strapped to their mothers’ back. Song noticed how the newcomers’ skin shone, how their white teeth glinted even in the darkness. Then he looked down at his own body: his wracked thinness, the oozing pustules. He was painfully aware of his aching joints and sore gums. He didn’t want to consider how much longer he could go on this way.

  The new passengers looked so well, so healthy. They seemed so happy. He studied the way the families stuck together, the way they looked out for each other and chatted in a language he didn’t understand, yet he was still able to detect the familiarity between them as they spoke. He watched them tease each other, sometimes laugh together. Song felt pangs in his stomach, like hunger but different, and closed his eyes to see in his mind his sisters and brothers playing in the rice fields, his mother by his side, caressing his head, reaching out a hand just to make sure he was there.

  Among the families, Song noticed one other boy alone, like himself. He heard his name, Jinda. He was bony but pigeon-chested and with raised shoulders, which gave the impression he was bulkier than he was. He wheezed when he talked and whistled as he slept. Song was curious, but he kept to himself. He was focusing only on surviving till the end of the journey.

  As the boat left the harbour Song thought of Hai exploring the streets of Madras. He wished they were together, out there in the city or on the boat. He missed his friend’s big mouth and his bigger dreams. Song imagined him settled in a new job, dressed in a white shirt and surrounded by books. He pictured an Englishman boss, pleasantly surprised at Hai’s brilliant English, and who paid him a good wage and gave him a breezy room in his large house on a hill overlooking the sea. He imagined Hai in that room now, looking out of the window and watching the Dartmouth sail out to sea. He wondered if Hai was thinking of him, as he thought of Hai.

  The voyage dragged on and Song fell into a lonely routine. Without Hai, he now had a full bowl of rice each day; he ate every grain deliberately, sipping his fresh water slowly. From time to time he was able to climb up the ladder with Li Bai, but otherwise he lay on his back in the dark, waiting. He had more time to think now. And he started to reflect more deeply on what the haircutter had told him, and what Hai had said: that Guiana was too far away to make it there alive.

  The journey was taking too long. His body was getting weaker. He found himself crying in his sleep, but too quietly for anyone to notice. Memories of home flitted in and out of his head: Xiao Bo bleating for food; his sisters chanting little ditties; his mother calling out his name; his father’s silhouette as he left through the doorway for the last time. Sometimes he woke himself up by shouting out loud in his dreams. He smeared away his tears and tried to force himself back to sleep. He didn’t want anyone to notice, but he felt painfully alone in the cramped, crowded space.

  Since Madras the sailing had been steady. There had also been no further outbreaks of fever. Many of the passengers from Madras had brought fresh chillies with them and they remained markedly healthier than the rest. It was those who had been on board the longest who looked the sickest. Their skin was increasingly pallid and breaking out in sores; some, like Song, had open ulcers around their mouths.

  ‘I don’t think I would have lasted if you hadn’t started taking me with you up there,’ Song said to Li Bai.

  ‘You would,’ Li Bai said.

  Song shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know any different. I sometimes think it’s harder for the two of us. We get to see daylight, we get to breathe, and then we have to come back down here again.’

  ‘At least we see it,’ Song said quietly.

  ‘At least we do.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d . . .’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about it,’ Li Bai interrupted. ‘You need to stop talking this way. You can be collapsing inside but you gotta stand tall.’

  There had been fewer trips up the ladder to clear the dead but Song had overheard enough to know that Guiana was the next and final destination.

  ‘This better be the last,’ Song heard one of the men say, as Li Bai heaved another limp body over the side of the ship. ‘We’ve got to keep everyone alive from now on. No more ports to restock and it won’t do us any good arriving with an empty ship.’

  Song was surprised to hear that their survival was important to these men too. But he was glad of it. Daily rations of rice and water increased. Pails of salt water were even sent down to regularly wash out the hold. Hope started to creep back into Song’s mind. Not since before Madras, when he had been trying to persuade Hai to stay on, had he thought about his dream of sugar and gold and diamonds. Now he again allowed himself to believe.

  Then the weather changed.

  The wind had dropped and the ship was becalmed. Not even a wave lapped against the outside of the hull. The temperature rose inside the hold. There was a far-off rumbling of thunder but no sound of rain.

  The humidity made everyone drowsy. Song’s head was pounding in the stagnant air. He found himself slipping between light uneasy sleep and strong preternatural dreams, and then a sudden terror of not knowing where he was. He thought he had drifted into another muddled nightmare. There was a man shouting. A young girl screamed. Swirling water. The noise grew louder. Women ululating like at a funeral. There was a crack of thunder. The floor beneath Song shook. He jolted awake but still the noises persisted. A pulse of blue light streaked into the hold. The ship smashed against the water as if it was going to burst open.

  ‘What is it ?’ Song shouted at Li Bai.

  ‘The ship’s breaking apart.’ Li Bai was crouching on his haunches and retching between his legs.

  In another burst of light the hold brightened for a second: a flash of flailing limbs, mouths open in fear, families cowering. Men and women bellowed like cows able to smell their own impending slaughter. The boat thrashed out of time with the rising sea and the shuddering wood vibrated through Song’s body like a fever. It was then, amid this noise and terror, that Song realised how hard it would be to turn around and ever make the long journey back home.

  Seemingly impossibly, the violence of the storm only increased. Song tried to flatten himself against the floor to stop himself from smashing into anyone else, or slamming against the walls of the hold. There were objects tossed in the air: buckets, utensils, boxes. Song took a hit just above his eyebrow. He reached up his hand and felt the hot blood trickling down his face, and then blacked out.

  Nobody knew how long the storm lasted. Days, they said. Song could not be sure what he had dreamed and what he had lived. When the ship was finally stilled he wondered if they had sunk to the bottom of the sea.

  Nobody moved much. There was a low groaning, and some sobbing. When Song got up, he noticed Li Bai s
prawled unnaturally at the bottom of the ladder, as if he had deliberately put his body there, ready to be carried up to deck and cleared. Song went to him, already feeling the anguish of losing a friend. Song saw Li Bai’s swollen misshapen head and a pool of dark blood around him. He crouched down and put out his hand to touch the soft tissue. It was still wet and sticky. The man’s eyes were open but unmoving. Song brushed his hand down Li Bai’s face, forcing his eyelids to close. He couldn’t look at him this way.

  ‘I won’t go back,’ Song said to himself. ‘I will never go back.’

  Song longed for an end to the voyage. Any end. Guiana or not. He wanted solid earth beneath his feet, like the raised pathways latticing the rice fields. He wanted to feel the mud between his toes and the sureness of ground underfoot.

  He thought of Li Bai often. How he had asked Song to be tough, to focus on surviving. Song did. He ate, he drank, he washed the cut above his eye with his rationed water. He no longer went up the ladder to clear the dead but discovered something of the outside down in their bleak quarters. At the back of the ship, on the starboard side, there were some loose boards, and from time to time he went there to see the spears of light splitting open the darkness. He let his fingers play in and out of the sun and shadow, believing he could almost grab hold of the light, as if it was the gold he was trying to reach.

  Then one day, Song heard the grating of the anchor unravelling. There was a great splash into the sea. It must be Guiana. He sniffed the air. There seemed to be the smell of land: something earthy and sweet, rather than the stench of their quarters or the salt of the sea. Like broken leaves and burned sugar.

  From inside the hold Song could hear boats put upon the sea, but there was still no sign of the hatch opening. A day and night passed. There was a ragged edge to the long hours, an increasing desperation and the smell of festering wounds. But nobody was giving up now, not after all they had been through. There was less talking, less mixing, as if they were saving any shred of life to get them through these last days. Song stopped listening in on stories and observing those around him.

  After another full day passed, people became restless. The following night a fight broke out. Everybody knew the signs. It started over a game of cards. Song heard the shouting. He sat up and peered into the gloom at the two men wrestling on the ground. He saw Wei Ling take up his knife and thrust it twice into Dai Jie’s chest before someone pulled them apart.

  Song knew the sound of dying. The shallow breathing. High wheezing. The choking gasp. Nobody touched the dead man. Wei Ling sat in a corner cursing his victim and the night. Song thought about how far they had come. Like him, both men had boarded in Guangzhou. To die now. After all these months, to die now. Song gritted his teeth and curled his hands up into small fists, as if his fight was just getting underway.

  On the third day the hatch opened. There were orders shouted from above, and down in the hold there was a burst of activity. After all the months of waiting to arrive, suddenly nobody was ready to leave. Song looked around at the men and women hurriedly untying hammocks, clattering bowls, roughly folding clothing. He threw his shirt over his shoulder, and waited his turn. After this journey, a journey so many had told him was too long, he had made it to Guiana. He allowed himself a small smile, but at the same time closed his eyes, wary to witness this beat of hope that could be snatched from him.

  From the deck of the ship there was little to see. But it was surely land. A green band of vegetation. Above it a stretch of haze wobbled in the air. A small group of figures was standing on the mud flats. Song hardly dared breathe. This was the Guiana he had been dreaming of. The beginning of his new life.

  Song climbed over the railing of the ship, down the rope ladder and into a boat. The sea was creamy brown, more like the colour of river. He lowered his hand over the side to feel the cool water and brought his fingers up to his mouth. Salt. He wiped his face and then slipped his hand back into the sea, letting the water eddy about his fingers.

  Before the small boat had slid to a halt on the shore Song was on the beach. He felt dizzy and stumbled. It was the same for those around him. They swayed like drunks on the solid ground.

  Song sat where he had fallen and sensed the ground moving beneath him. Beneath his palms he speared his fingers down into the wet sand in the same way he used to plant rice seedlings. Rough granules rubbed against his skin. His first touch of Guiana.

  The crowd on the shore swelled. They clung to their natural groups: families, brothers, friends. But there was the same unease in the air that there had been on the dock at Guangzhou. Song looked around him and realised how few had come all the way from there. Those with any choice had elected to leave earlier, such as Hai. Many more had been thrown into the sea. There was a handful of them, no more. He felt closer to those few, not that he showed it, and they didn’t give any sign of feeling the same. He was still as alone as he had been on the day he boarded the cart to leave home.

  Song looked back out at the ship and thought how small it looked now, and how still. It was sitting high in the water as if it was holding its breath. ‘I won’t go back,’ he said to himself, shaking his head. He had shocked himself when he had first whispered those words after the storm. He repeated them again now. ‘I will never go back.’

  CHAPTER 3

  The crowd started to grow agitated. Song felt someone shove him from behind. There was pushing and shouting as they were hustled towards the carts. A family was being split. An elder brother was yelling. The Englishman was telling him to shut up but the brother was panicking. He didn’t understand. Song understood. He wanted to come to the brother’s help, to tell him to be quiet, that he would translate for him, but before he’d had a chance the brother had pushed the Englishman away from his family. Three Englishmen moved in and one hit him on the head with the butt of his shotgun. The brother slumped to the ground. The rest of his family fell to their knees around him, wailing, but the Englishmen pulled them away, and everyone else fell silent, climbing quickly on to the carts. Song felt he had seen this all before: the rough treatment, the shouting, the impatience. He looked at the brother’s unmoving body on the ground. To die now. After all this, to die now. He cursed himself for not speaking up earlier, but knew that he might have taken the hit instead.

  ‘Name ?’ A man’s voice interrupted his thoughts. He was taking note of each passenger. He looked down at Song. ‘Name ?’

  ‘Song.’

  ‘Forty-three,’ the man said.

  Song understood the number but didn’t know what it meant. He wondered who forty-two and forty-four were, and where they were all going.

  Song used the spokes of the wheel like rungs to climb into the back of the cart. They pulled away. The bumping of the wheels on the uneven road felt good after the swaying motion of the sea. Song hung on to the side, studying the tall trees and spotting bright squawking birds flying in pairs. He sniffed the dusty heat of the earth and the freshness of leaves. A man rode by in the other direction on a bicycle with a basket of okra and squash. There were odd ramshackle houses and children playing out front. Some pointed at the cart. Song and the others stared back unsmiling. But nothing could lessen the lightness Song felt, as Guiana unfolded, beating with life, so full of colour, so different to everything he knew.

  The roads widened and there were trees planted neatly on both sides of the street. The grand whitewashed homes resembled those Song had seen in Guangzhou, with their large windows and wraparound porches. One house they passed had rattan lounge-chairs and knotted hammocks on either side of the front door with gardens of rolling green lawns and beds of red and pink flowers. There was a young man in sky-blue clothes trimming a bush with clippers and Song thought how he would like such work, at least for a time, until he could go looking for gold. The cart rolled on by.

  On the pavements women dressed in soft colours carrying parasols walked with men in pale suits wearing hats who looked like the sailors on the ship, but cleaned up and dressed well. Th
ey turned their faces away as the cart passed; Song didn’t understand why.

  The tree-lined streets narrowed again and the houses bordering the road became more modest. Paint was peeling off the walls. The front yards were filled with junk. Men slept in hammocks in the shade. An old woman rocked in a chair.

  As the cart continued the sugar plantations came into view, just like Song had imagined. The fields spread out as far as he could see, rising and dipping, revealing huge stretches of cultivated land beyond. The crop was tall and green and dense. It whispered with the same sound Zhu Wei had described. It was as beautiful as Song had hoped.

  They stopped at a clearing beside the road where there were several wooden buildings. Song was taken to the one furthest away.

  There was a row of bedrolls running along each wall, each painted with a number on the floor. At one end was a table with a stack of metal bowls. Nothing more. Song looked for his number, 43, and laid his jacket down on the bedroll.

  The other boys in the room also seemed to be the young ones from the ship. He recognised Jinda, the boy who had boarded in Madras but who he hadn’t spoken to.

  ‘I’m Song,’ he said in English.

  ‘I’m Jinda,’ he panted. ‘I saw you. On the boat.’ He could only say a few words before running out of breath. ‘I thought you were sick,’ Jinda continued. ‘You never said much.’

  ‘Just sick of the boat,’ Song said.

  Jinda laughed and that made him cough. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Did you come on your own ?’ Song asked.

  ‘I ran away. My father beat me. So after my mother died I left. One morning she stopped cooking. She sat down. Rested her head on the table. That was it. I watched her. So peaceful.’ Jinda seemed to be in his old life for a moment. His breathing had become deeper, calmer. Song watched him visibly shake himself back to the present. ‘That’s when I left. My father came after me. But he couldn’t find me. And you ?’