Meatloaf in Manhattan Read Online Free PDF Page A

slamming my mug on the table, looking at me as if he has a cleaver in mind.
    It’s twenty past two in the morning. Charlene flips the sign on the door to ‘closed’ and turns out the lights. The neon sign outside shudders and crackles, then gives up the ghost. She steps out into the street and shuts the door behind her. The snow is falling heavily and there’s no one around. She shivers, remembering the broken heater in her small room down by the Battery and wishes she’d got it fixed last weekend like she meant to. She breathes in the sharp cold air as she turns the key to lock the door. From way up above large snowflakes fall on her hair as she stands and watches them float and dance in the light of the street lamp.

SHE CALLS HER BOY AMAZING
    He will come to this world in darkness and in water.
    Chi, his mother-to-be, is but a child herself, lost in the war, standing at the end of the jetty in Danang, on the coast of Vietnam. Buildings smoulder, bodies lie in the streets for the pigs and the crows. The old man with the three white hairs hanging from his chin taps her on the shoulder. He moves his fingers to his mouth. Yes, she nods, she wants to eat. He hands her a small brown banana and she gulps it down like a pelican might, skin and all. Rice, he says, pointing to the small rowing boat tied to the steps. The hairs on his chin quiver in the breeze, but no necromancer is he.
    Sitting in the bow of the boat she eats with her fingers the sticky rice from a jagged tin. The old man begins to row towards a rusty hulk of a ship that rises up out of the waves. It has a strange flag flapping in the wind and the circling air is cold to her eye. The wall of steel looms larger as they approach. It makes creaking and sighing sounds that, if she were older, might warn of the danger ahead. They float alongside and the old man gestures for her to climb up the rope that hangs over the side of the ship.
    On the deck, Chi is met by the eyes of the crew. Half-starved themselves, bedraggled and filthy, sea-madness in their faces, deep scars on their souls. The boatman whispers to the tallest of the men who hands him some banknotes, then pushes him away. The old man spits on the deck, then clambers back over the side to his boat below. She thinks she hears his oars dipping in the water.
    As night sets in man after man does to her things that only men can do. In the years to come, in their older age, they will blame the insanity of the sea or else bury the memory under the thick black sand of the ocean floor. When the moon settles in for the night, and they are all finished and done, they drink rice wine to stave off the hunger and to forget who they’ve become. Then three of the worst of them take her by her arms and legs and toss her overboard, a filleted fish, debris for the seabirds.
    For a second underwater she has the urge to surrender, to give herself over to the salty swell. But deep inside she feels a life in the bud, a purpose, a struggle to be had. So she kicks her feet and swims upwards towards the moon, breaking the surface of the water with a mighty gulp of air. There in the distance is the shoreline, the early morning fishermen tending their nets and a sleeping port that will become her home.
    The following spring her son is born. She calls him Ny, which means ‘amazing’.
    They live by the train station, first alongside the railway tracks, barely staying alive, foraging for food in the bushes, picking up scraps discarded by passengers from passing trains. Then she fashions together a small hut from broken bits of this and that. At night she straps the baby to her back, and, under the cover of darkness, steals rice and vegetables from the fields that skirt the railway. In the morning she cooks the rice and moulds it into small bundles, then wraps them in banana leaves. Swooping up Ny, she heads off to the station to wait for the trains and to jostle amidst the hordes of hawkers. Unbeknownst to her,