Crimson China (8 page)

Lili and Jin do not speak of Wen, but he hovers like an unseen presence between them. Lili cannot banish the photos from her mind, nor the idea that Jin may have travelled to Morecambe Bay to see him in the weeks before he died. The thought preys on her, and she secretly resolves to find her own way there. Her knowledge of British geography is hazy, so she buys a road atlas from a newsagent in Sheep Pen. She knows the country is an island, but sees at once that its shape is amorphous, like a giant squid, with London rooted firmly in the bulging south, and other cities flung like ink spots around the periphery. Scotland perches precariously atop England, a huge expanse of land with relatively few interruptions. Wen once told her that he longed to see Scotland: Western men with bushy beards, he had joked, wearing women’s skirts and playing pipes upon the hillsides. But as far as she knows, he never travelled north of Morecambe Bay.

With some difficulty, she locates it on the atlas, two-thirds of the way up the western seaboard, not far from Liverpool. The bay is vast, stretching far out into the Irish Sea. She had not realised how close Ireland was – had never thought that Wen’s body might have drifted to another country altogether. She continues leafing through the pages of the atlas until she finds the nucleus that is London. She sees that the city is surrounded by a fat blue circle of
roads, with a web of motorways extending north and west, one of which eventually leads straight past Morecambe Bay.

It couldn’t be easier, she thinks, tracing the long blue line that curls upwards from Birmingham towards Lancaster with her finger. She will have to find a way.

On her day off, she spends the morning doing laundry and revising her English. Apart from the old woman who works there, she is the only one in the laundromat. She notices that people do not remain there while their clothes are washing: instead, they come and go at intervals, some not even bothering to fold their newly cleaned clothes, but quickly stuffing them in sacks and carting them away, as if they cannot bear to linger, even for a minute. The people who come are a jumbled mix of colours and ages, but they all seem slightly put upon by the drudgery of the task, rather than resigned to it. Perhaps if they scrubbed at life hard enough, she thinks, they would not be saddled with its more menial jobs. After an hour, Lili tires of the place and decamps to a café across the road. But she finds the atmosphere inside little better: the slightly rancid smell of bacon grease and stale cigarette smoke oppresses her, as do the leering glances of a knot of workmen at a nearby table.

That afternoon, she takes a bus to Hammersmith, for she has quietly formed a plan, and that plan involves Johnny. But when she arrives, she finds that the area is not as she remembered. The bus lets her off at an unfamiliar crossroad, and she immediately walks in the wrong direction. In the end it takes her more than an hour to find the takeaway where Johnny works. When she finally sees
Taste of Spring
she feels a surge of relief, as if the next hurdle in her journey to Wen has been overcome.

She walks tentatively up to the plate glass window and peers inside: Johnny is behind the counter, serving a dark-skinned teenage boy wearing a hooded sweatshirt and baggy jeans.

When she pushes open the door, Johnny doesn’t notice her at
first. She watches as he hands the boy a white plastic bag containing a small polystyrene container.

“Hey,” says the boy. “You got any chopsticks?”

“Sure,” says Johnny. He hands a pair of disposable wooden chopsticks over the counter.

“Can I get some more?” asks the boy.

Johnny fixes him with a look.“How many?”

“Like, six or seven?”

“For one dish of fried rice?” In that instant Johnny sees her, and a slow smile spreads across his face. He nods to her over the boy’s head.

“Yeah,” says the boy.

Johnny shakes his head. “Help yourself,” he says with a shrug, grabbing a huge fistful of chopsticks and handing them across the counter.

“Hey thanks,” says the youth appreciatively.

“No worries,” says Johnny. Lili steps to one side as the hooded teenager brushes past her, then walks up to the counter.

“So Hebei,” says Johnny in English. “What’s wrong? You tired of hotpot?”

Lili laughs.

“I thought you forgot me,” he continues in Mandarin.

“Impossible,” says Lili.

“Excellent,” says Johnny. “You’re just in time. I’m off in ten minutes.”

He takes her to a nearby Starbucks, and though Lili blanches at the price of coffee, she doesn’t let it show. They sit in leather armchairs by the window. Johnny tells her that his family is from Shanghai, and that he has been in London studying for almost three years.

“No wonder,” she says. “You seem so accustomed to it all.”

He laughs. “Only in comparison to you,” he replies. “Believe me, I’m still just as much an outsider. I don’t even need to open my
mouth. They can tell just by looking.” He glances surreptitiously around at the other customers, as if they are adversaries.

“But now I do it too,” he adds with a shrug. “I’ve got so I can tell who was born here and who wasn’t.”

Lili looks at the people sitting around her: two young Muslim women with headscarves huddled over hot chocolates, a blonde woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a business suit working on a laptop, and two middle-aged men in anoraks who are deep in conversation in a language she doesn’t recognise. These people could be from anywhere, she thinks. She turns back to him.

“How?”

“The people from here look like they
deserve
to be here,” Johnny says easily. “Like it’s their entitlement. The rest of us look as if we are scrambling to find a way in.”

He takes a sip of cappuccino, and a small fleck of foam remains on his upper lip. Lili’s eyes are drawn to his mouth: his lips are beautiful, full and perfectly formed. She considers reaching out and dabbing at the fleck of white with her napkin. She forces her gaze away.

“You don’t look like you are scrambling,” she remarks, stirring her coffee with a wooden stick.

“Well, I am,” he says. “We all are. The good news is,” he adds, “there are so many foreigners here, we almost outnumber them.” He flashes her a grin.

He is too handsome, she thinks suddenly. And too confident. Not like Wen, who had a quiet self-assurance. She cannot help but compare them. Her brother’s looks were unremarkable, but he had something that drew women to him like swallows to a nest. She was fourteen when she first noticed, barely into puberty. One day, two girls followed her and Wen out of school, nudging each other, their eyebrows arched knowingly. They looked straight past her, as if she wasn’t there, and boldly asked Wen if he would help them with their homework. Lili often did Wen’s homework for him,
so she was surprised when he readily agreed. After that she grew used to approaches from other girls, could discern at once the predatory look in their eyes. And though it grated on her each time, she eventually learned to steel herself against them. It helped that Wen did not attach himself to any one of them. He ranged freely across them, always coming back to her in the end.

“Hey Hebei,” says Johnny in English. “What’s up?”

She looks at him, startled.

“I lost you for a moment,” he says in Mandarin.

“I’m sorry,” she says, blushing. “Everything is so new,” she adds a bit feebly.

“No worries,” he says in English.

She wishes this were true. For she does have worries.

“Do you have a car?” she asks suddenly. Johnny raises an eyebrow.

“My uncle does,” he says. “Where do you want to go?”

“To the seaside,” she replies.

Later, they go for dinner in a crowded pizza house, where Johnny orders a large pitcher of beer to wash down their meal. Afterwards, he takes her hand and walks her to a small park. When they reach an empty bench, he pulls her down beside him and into an embrace. His kiss is tentative at first, but quickly takes on urgency when she responds. She feels his hands searching out her softer places, and feels herself stirring, a little reluctantly, somewhere deep inside. But almost at once, a part of her seems to detach and float away, as if this second self is above her looking down. A sudden thought alarms her: perhaps Wen is watching too? Instantly, she pulls back from him. Johnny struggles for breath, as if she has winded him.

“Hey,” he murmurs, leaning forward to nuzzle her ear. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she says quietly. “We should go.” He draws back and looks at her a long moment.

“No worries,” he says then.

It is only the second time she has kissed a man. Unlike most of her classmates, she managed to avoid any romantic entanglements at university. The first time was only four weeks after Wen’s death, when she went out to a bar with friends and drank too much in a bid to forget. That man was another young teacher she had known vaguely for a few years. Towards the end of the evening, he had taken her outside and led her down a dark alley, where he had pressed her ardently up against a wall. His movements were clumsy and unpractised, and she was unwisely tempted to laugh. That night she had allowed herself some drunken licence: she was twenty-eight years old, had lost her only blood relation and had never been with a man. But she had stopped short of having sex. Even so, the next morning she woke with a creeping sense of self-hatred. The teacher rang and she refused to see him. In the weeks that followed, he plagued her, calling constantly and waiting outside her building after work. In the end he wrote a letter asking her to marry him, which she sent back along with her refusal. It was about this time that she admitted to herself a truth that she had known all along: men made her uneasy. And the only one who didn’t was dead.

A few days later, Johnny rings to say his uncle has agreed to let him borrow the car the following day. But when he hears where she wants to go, his tone alters.

“Hebei,” he says, uncertainly. “I was thinking maybe Brighton.”

“Lancaster is only three hundred kilometres,” she says. “If we start early, we can be there by lunchtime.” In truth she has only guessed at the distance. But Jin has told her that the highways in the UK are as smooth as glass, and that cars can travel at alarmingly fast speeds compared to home. Since buying the atlas, the desire to get to Morecambe Bay has threatened to devour her. She
wants to run her fingers through the water of Wen’s grave and feel its bitter chill. She will walk there if she has to.

“Please,” she says to Johnny, a note of desperation creeping into her voice.

“Okay,” he says after a moment.

After she hangs up the phone, Lili wonders what she will have to offer in return.

The next day he collects her from Hounslow Station at eight in the morning. Inevitably, they lose their way getting out of London, and in the end the journey takes more than five hours. After three hours, they stop for petrol at a service station just past Birmingham. By then Johnny’s good humour is wearing thin, and Lili wonders whether she has overstepped his kindness. When she sees the price of fuel she is horrified; the bill comes to nearly forty pounds.

“So much money,” she says, her eyes widening. “I didn’t know.” She reaches in her purse, wondering whether she has even brought that much.

“It’s okay,” says Johnny, waving her away. “My treat,” he adds in English.

She watches a little uneasily as he pays at the counter.

He suggests they go for coffee, so they drive to another part of the service area. It is built like a shopping mall, filled with shops and restaurants of all kinds, as if it is a destination in its own right. Outside the car park is nearly full, and inside there are throngs of people milling about. It had not occurred to her that petrol stations could be so elaborate, nor provide so many services; at home they usually consisted of a single pumping station. She insists on paying for the coffee, and when they are finally seated opposite each other, Johnny crosses his arms and fixes her with a look.

“Okay,” he says. “Now is the time.”

“The time for what?” She smiles nervously.

“The time for you to tell me your story,” he replies. “The one
you’ve not been telling me.”

Lili hesitates; her eyes drift around the café. Across the aisle, an enormous woman wearing pale blue stretch trousers wedges her massive frame into a booth. Her short dark hair looks artificially curled and her face is bright red with exertion. Lili frowns at the women’s bulging thighs. She has seen more obese people these past two weeks than in her entire lifetime. She turns back to Johnny.

“I had a brother,” she says finally. “He died in Morecambe Bay.”

Johnny frowns.

“You mean this year? In February?”

She nods. He leans back, clearly surprised, and draws a breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says then. “I didn’t know.”

Lili shrugs. A lump rises in her throat. Beside her, the woman in pale blue trousers bites into an enormous cheeseburger. A large dollop of ketchup squeezes out and falls onto the table, but the woman does not notice.

“I should have told you earlier. I just wanted to go there, and see.”