The Message

The Message

by Ruth Everson

(This story won the 2010 Woman and Home short story competition.)

‘Would you like to go to China?’ Anne stirred her tea with the usual amount of violence that she reserved for most tasks. ‘You can use your long leave. You’d be gone for eight weeks. My uncle needs someone to teach communications while he’s away in Lagos.’

Nothing in her forty nine years had prepared Ellen for the answer she was about to give. China was a moon journey away from the narrow, East Rand town where she had grown up believing that adventures could be dreamed but never lived. The reply was out before the fear that had made her heart retreat so many times could say no again.

There was nothing to lose and when there’s nothing to lose, courage is easier to find. Two years of bending herself into contortionist shapes to fit a dead-end relationship had left her heart heavy and her days full of uncertainty. Ellen felt like a dog, waiting eagerly for a pat on the head, a scrap of love, anything that would prove that she wasn’t as stupid as her friends kept assuring her she was. She could fly away from the stretched silences and return intriguingly triumphant as the exotic adventurer.

A single ‘Yes’ landed her in Beijing on a darkly humid August night. Home was thirteen thousand kilometers away. Ellen waited at the end of a neat queue as customs officials, determined not to smile and flanked by grey soldiers, processed the passengers. She tried to work out the time difference between Beijing and Johannesburg, it would be early morning, a new day starting just as this one was sliding towards midnight.

She switched on her phone; a message beeped its arrival. Ellen stared at the screen, ‘1 message received’. She had been missed already, she felt the invisible hand reach down to pat her on the head, she was loved, she was desired! The message opened: ‘Your area is experiencing high winds. Please ensure all windows are closed to prevent false alarms.’ She saw the suited back in front of her stiffen as she laughed out loud. She was desired by her security company. Well, whatever windows were open would have to stay that way; there would be no one home to close them for a long time.

Home for Ellen became the Hua Yue Long Mansion Hotel, No 3 Jing Yuan Road, Shi Jing. The address sounded grand, it popped like sherbet on her tongue. She had imagined herself – the exotic adventurer in a Chinese Mansion. The ‘Mansion’ was on the outskirts of Beijing in the district of Bajaio. And ‘Mansion’ she learnt, meant a place where a lot of people live. A lot of people plus one middle-aged, overweight, tired teacher.

The days soon fell into a pattern. After breakfast on the first morning and the surprise of a glass of milk that turned out to be salted, a black egg and something mysterious wrapped in a leaf, Ellen avoided the canteen. Food had always been a reliable source of comfort, something solid to fill the empty hours and uncertain minutes. Now it became an obsession, along with the cell phone that went everywhere with her, just in case the invisible hand reached out.  

It was hunger that made her push through her fear to explore the hot, Bajaio streets. Men, shirtless and slick with sweat watched as she bought sun-yellow pears, perfectly round and bigger than grapefruit. Children hid their faces in their mothers’ olive necks as they were brought to see this oddity trying to eat noodles with chop sticks, the blue-eyed, blonde ‘loawai’. She saw only one other ‘ loawai’ in Bajaio, a red haired, bearded young man, reading The China Daily. He ignored Ellen’s tentative smile, snorting at some new, outrageous propaganda in the paper, lifting it to conceal his glistening face.

She had never felt more alone. Her ears were filled with a language she couldn’t begin to understand, her eyes searched for familiar words amongst the Mandarin signs and symbols. Her sky was a continuous, low, Beijing grey, the sun a distant orange disk behind the ubiquitous smog of pollution. She longed for a tall African sky, for the riot of weavers and mossies that were her alarm clock on clear summer mornings at home.  

Mostly, she longed for the sound of an incoming message, words flying magically across the South China Sea, along the dragon’s back of the Great Wall, dodging the kites, bright red against the grey sky, to land in the waiting spaces of her uncertain heart. Ellen had learnt to deal with her hunger; yoghurt on coarse yellow bread, fruit in plastic tubs of jelly and the joy of a weekend trip on the subway to Wufujang Street and a Starbucks meal, sustained her. But her heart grew thin.

One Friday night, alone in her room, watching CCTV9 the only English channel out of fifty four choices, Ellen used her hidden poet’s heart to compose the messages on her cell phone that she longed to send. ‘I want to be held, not brief-hugged, close held like I exist.’ Delete.

She started again, concentrating on the tightness of the words so that she could fit them into one sms: ‘When my China moon rolls in2 yr sky, I’ve hidden a poem 4 u amongst the stars. It’s the shortest-longest, most simple-complex, most said-left unsaid, happiest-saddest poem ever written: I love u.’ Her thumb hovered over the send button. She heard the man in the room below her cough and spit. Ellen pressed the button: ‘Saved to draft’. At least she hadn’t deleted this one. She would send it tomorrow. She settled on the ironing board bed and holding the phone in her hand, curled around it into another night.

In the morning she woke with a sense that something was different. The stiffness of her hips after twenty eight nights on the hard bed was familiar, so was the clatter of the air conditioner that was never switched off, but the morning light was a different colour. Ellen pushed back the curtains to find the gift of a clear blue sky. A typhoon off the coast had blown far enough inland overnight to heave the pollution away from the city. The kites were already up, dipping and bowing, pulling at the hands that controlled their sky dance. As Ellen watched the dance, she felt an unexpected wind push against the low grey clouds that circled her heart. Today, she would do it.

In her first week in Beijing, two of Ellen’s students, Xin-Xin and Fang Wei, had taken her into the centre of Beijing, down the broad road that runs between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City with its enormous picture of Chairman Mao looking across the Square to where his body lies in embalmed reverence. The multi-lane road, too dangerous to cross except via the subways that run beneath it, had frightened her. Busses, taxis and cars demanded space on the inner lanes while on two outer lanes motorbikes, donkey carts and more than Katie Melua’s nine million bicycles rushed around them. Their destination though was beyond the city. They wanted Ellen to see the Great Wall - and climb it.

The Wall – the largest man-made structure on earth and built along the tops of the mountains – she couldn’t do it. She imagined her flat feet slipping on the steep paths she would have to climb to get to the base of the Wall. She could feel the fire in her chest. Ellen had struggled up impossible mountain paths before, with well-intentioned fit people far ahead on the path, calling back encouragement as she had plodded, head down, seeing nothing but her out-turned duck feet and wishing for death. She was nearly fifty and there were better ways to induce a heart attack than on a rough green mountain in China. So she had declined. The exotic adventurer had gone back to her crowded Mansion determined not to acquire an “I climbed the Great Wall’ T-shirt.

But today she would do it. Ellen struggled with the window and managed to slide it back far enough to let the storm-washed air into her room. On the tiny table that served as her desk lay a book of Chinese stories that she was using with her students. The last story they had discussed was The Serpent Sacrifice by Gan Bao. She opened the book to the line that she had highlighted:”Because you were timid, the serpent ate you.” Ellen felt the tight windows of her heart slide a centimeter. It was enough. She was tired of being timid; she was tired of being eaten by the serpent of uncertainty. It was time to climb through her fears towards clear skies.

Xin-Xin was delighted to be part of the adventure. Ellen packed her rucksack with what she thought she would need for the expedition: water, a cap, sunscreen, her camera and plasters for her feet. She looked at the cell phone next to her bed, then turned her back on it. As she closed the door she felt the invisible hand pulling her back. She snapped the door shut on its fingers.

Ellen’s great adventure was an anti-climax. There was no mountain to climb. As the cable car lifted her effortlessly towards the Wall, she looked at the ticket in her hand:”Ticket for the scene spot of Badaling sencyion of the Great Wall of China.” She didn’t even have the heart to smile at the mangled spelling. She had wanted to do something brave.

The challenge, when it came, was unexpected. Ellen stepped out of the cable car at the top of the crowded Badaling section of the Wall. The view was breathtaking. She felt as if she was standing on the back of a roller-coaster. The Wall was an endless mix of smooth, slippery stone and steps so high she had to haul herself up them using a worn metal handrail than burnt her hands as the sun beat down from the cloudless sky.

Ellen had not packed enough water, the cap offered little protection and the plasters for her feet were too small for the blisters inflicted by the Wall. Six hours later, red-faced and with legs that felt like noodles, she pushed her way through the crowds at the kiosk at the foot of the cable car and pointed to what she knew without a doubt that she had earned. It was a grey T-shirt with a picture of the Wall and the words that Xin-Xin translated for her: “You are not a true man of China until you have climbed the Great Wall.” Perhaps she wasn’t a man of China but she had damn well climbed the Wall.

When the exotic adventurer returned to her Mansion the phone was where she had left it. She didn’t pick it up to check for a message. She lay on the bed, her muscles aching and smiled. She had climbed the Wall body and soul. Her body had protested but had not let her down, her soul had climbed its own Great Wall. Her eye caught the card that Fang Wei had given her. The message on the front, he had told her, was an important Chinese philosophy. Ellen picked up her phone and typed the simple message. It didn’t matter if no one else understood it, she did. Without hesitation, she pressed the send button, lay down in her new grey T-shirt and went to sleep.

In Johannesburg, the message beeped. A hand reached for the phone:”What is the way? Leave.”