Ink
Part One
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Part Two
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Ink
There was a woman, not so very long ago, who left her husband for another man. The husband found her, strapped her to a bed and tattooed on to her skin all the terrible things he could think to call her. With needle and ink he poured his hatred over her, for all to see, forever.
There was a man, a very long time ago, who wrote his hatred into the skin of his wife with pure magic.
In the low hills of Deyang the husband and the wife worked hard, bent double all day in the paddy fields, up to their knees in muddy water, baskets strapped to their backs. In the evenings as the mists lowered they would stagger along the narrow ridges betweens the paddies back to their small cottage, only rolling down their trouser legs once they were sat on the bed and could get their feet out of the water that flooded their home every year. Each day brought the same hardships, the same problems, the same stoop in the fields. The hard work, the monotony, blinded them both to the blue sky and the black rocks, the green rice shoots and the pink water lilies all around them.
When the husband went in the evenings with his thin pipe to squat by the bamboo groves, talking and smoking with the other men of the village, the wife would think to herself; it was not this way when we were young. When we were young, the work was not so hard, the days were not so short, the love was easier to find.
When they were young…but the wife was not old now. It was just that her happiness seemed a lifetime away.
Over the years that seemed to pass like centuries the husband became cruel and hard to the wife. In his cruelness his face became twisted, his eyes sharper, his mouth meaner. He did not care for his wife in the sense that it did not concern him whether she was too hot or too cold, or tired, or hungry, or miserable. In his disinterest his heart became hard as stone, and he looked to his wife like the ugliest man alive.
The wife met a man at the market. She was collecting water from the well and when she stumbled under her heavy load, his hand came out of the crowd to catch her elbow. A broad, strong, gentle hand. They spoke no words to each other on that first meeting, but he smiled at the wife, before drifting on with the crowd. In that kind smile he became the most handsome man the wife had ever seen.
The wife began to see his smile as she stood barefoot in the mud transplanting rice shoots, as she gathered firewood, as she pounded grain with the pestle. Each time the curve of his lips seemed to make her husband’s mean mouth all the straighter.
She began to look for him at the market; it was like looking for a flash of light in the endless dark.
She saw him, several times – he seemed to glimmer in the sunlight, to reflect the brightness all around him. Their glances grew to smiles, their smiles to words, their words to meetings. It seemed to the wife that she lived in a beautiful heaven at the foot of the hills, with secret silver mists in the evenings and thick bowers of lotuses, where lovers could meet. The hills themselves would help the wife and the handsome man find a way.
They planned to run away together, to hide in the labyrinthine caves of the mountains and live like the spirits. She could be the free wind and he could be the good, solid earth.
And one silvery shrouded night they slipped away, helped by their friends the hills and the flowers. To the wife the land around them seemed so beautiful that her heart, unused to such joy, might burst.
But unlike the spirits, the handsome man and the wife needed to eat, and so one day, one foolish day, the wife ventured back down the mountain to the market.
Without his wife to do the donkey work, the husband had been forced to collect the water and the firewood himself, and there he was, standing by the well in the crowd, and he saw his wife come down from the mountain.
In her happiness, the wife was able to look anew at her husband, and instead of his ugly, twisted mouth and dagger eyes, she saw instead a worn and wounded man, alone. Then he began to speak.
‘You,’ his voice was a guttural growl, and the wife was still some distance away, but she heard it. ‘You bitch.’ He raised an arm and pointed at his wife, who kept walking slowly towards him. ‘You lying, traitorous whore,’ his voice grew louder as she grew closer. ‘You filthy, betraying worn shoe.’
The wife felt a strange tingling on the insides of her lower arms, as if she were being stroked very lightly by someone’s hair, or a delicate paintbrush. She paused and looked down at the skin of her arms. To her astonishment she could see, faintly, the characters of the names her husband had called her appearing there; bitch on one arm, lying traitorous whore on the other. She felt a tingling on the back of her left hand and turned it over to see filthy betraying worn shoe appearing there. She stood open mouthed, her arms stretched out in front of her, unable to speak. She was close enough to her husband now for him to see the effect of his words. Emboldened by his strange new power, his voice rose still further.
‘Dirty, twofaced sow!’ It appeared on her cheek. The first names he had called her showed strongly on her arms and hands now, black ink on her pale skin.
A crowd had gathered to watch and the husband suddenly began to scream his insults, with all the rage of all the world streaming through him.
‘Slut! Witch! Disgusting diseased prostitute! You are not fit to crawl on your belly through slime! Wicked, tainted, soulless woman!’
The words came quickly, bursting out through the husband’s mouth. They hit the wife like a sharp slap, the tingling now a sting, the characters instantly black on her skin. Each new insult knocked her like a blow so that she stumbled as they hit her on the arms, legs, chest, back, face. Finally, as the torrent from the husband’s mouth began to ease, she fell to her knees in the mud. The crowd around them stepped back in one movement, as if afraid that her hate tattoos were contagious. They turned their backs and left her on the ground, marked for what she was. The husband stood a little way from her, shaking with the residue of his rage. He bent over, hands resting on his thighs and spat onto the ground, as if ridding himself of the last of the venom, before he too turned and left.
All alone, the wife knelt on the ground and read her husband’s hatred on her skin. Were the words she read true? Was she all these evil, ugly things? She knew sitting there in the mud that it did not matter – anyone who saw her would read those words, and their judgement would be made. She would be shamed. She would have to live in the mountains until she died – and alone, for how could the handsome man be expected to live with such shame, such ugliness? How could he love her now? Just as her husband’s anger and carelessness had made him impossible to love, so his rage had made her. There was nothing to be done. The wife laid down on the churned mud of the abandoned market place, and was still.
As dusk was falling and the mists were settling around the foothills, the handsome man found her. The story of her husband’s hate words had spread quickly from the crowds of the market up into the hills. As he reached the edge of the marketplace he saw only a still dark shape on the ground. Had the wife opened her eyes, she would have seen not a handsome man running towards her, but one creased and folded and pained with worry.
He reached her, fell to his knees and lifted her head in his large gentle hands. Seeing him, she put her hands to her face to hide the words that showed there, tried to cover her skin in the mud so that he would not see. ‘I am shamed,’ she whispered, ‘and I have to wear it as a coat for all to see.’ The handsome man shook his head. ‘They are his words, his hate. They tell of his unhappy mind, not of you.’
They held each other, in the dirt and the ink, and to each other they were beautiful.