Adam raised a hand, and his reflection raised his. The man startled; perhaps he had thought Adam was an exhibit. They stood for a moment regarding each other through the window without interacting, without letting their eyes meet properly. Adam studied the man’s nostrils. The man focused on Adam’s raised hand, but did not lift his own from the handlebars. Adam looked into the dog’s eyes, and it bared its teeth and flattened its ears at him. Then it began to bark.
Behind Adam, someone was making a speech. A couple of heads turned to look at the source of the barking, then turned back.
The man spoke to his dog, but couldn’t calm it. It was an ugly thing, with ragged teeth and a squashed expression, and its brown eyes looked straight into Adam’s. He stepped back and glimpsed a few more patrons turning their heads to look at him, as if he was the cause of the trouble. Adam tried to smile at the old man, to release him from this embarrassment, but he did not seem to see him. The man was peering into the room, muttering something. Still the dog would not stop. Adam could not turn away.
Finally the old man dismounted, breaking the spell. He spoke to the animal sternly but softly, his body language kind. He fondled its shoulders with one hand, then wheeled the bike slowly away by the handlebars. The dog watched Adam until it could no longer see him, leaning so far out of the basket that it seemed about to fall. Adam could not take his eyes off it.
Behind him, the gallery burst into applause. The artist had finished his performance. Adam moved closer in time to see him pushing the bars of his cage. They swivelled out easily. He stood and stretched, reminding Adam of an aged bodybuilder he had seen on the street in Gulou a few months before. He didn’t bow; he looked tired. Someone handed him a towel. He was young and pale and very fit, his shoulders rounded with muscle but his chest lean. When he tilted his head back, his exposed collarbones shone like porcelain.
‘Hey, man,’ Manu called in his basketball voice as he emerged from the dispersing group. He stopped a little further from Adam than Adam thought was natural. ‘You see that? Some performance, huh,’ he said, scanning the room over Adam’s shoulder.
‘Yeah,’ Adam said. It seemed safest. He calculated that the artist had been in the cage less than an hour, which wasn’t that long, really. Maybe that wasn’t the point, but it seemed like too mild a torture. A silence wormed between them. Manu’s warmth directed itself elsewhere for a moment as he greeted someone, then returned, those neat dark eyebrows meeting in concern.
‘The situation,’ Adam began, but Manu spoke over him.
‘How are you feeling?’
Adam could have sunk to his knees. ‘Still a bit fragile, actually,’ he said. ‘But getting better.’
‘Yeah, we didn’t expect to see you out,’ Manu said, and then, perhaps seeing Adam’s expression change, added: ‘It’s great you came, though.’
‘Some performance,’ said Adam.
Manu wasn’t listening. He scanned the room again, gestured to an older white guy who stood on the other side clutching a wine glass. The white guy lifted himself away from the wall.
‘We’re going for dinner, you’re welcome to join us, but if you’re still not well, don’t feel any obligation,’ Manu said.
‘Love to,’ Adam said. He was starving. His whole body sang out with a need for sustenance. It was strange how pleasant it felt to be hungry. When had he last eaten? He couldn’t remember. He put his hand in his pocket, felt the soft remains of the apple there, and was disturbed. He was not getting better at all. Something was happening to him, he felt it in his body. The dog had seen it. Something was growing inside him, like the brown bloom in the apple’s core. He removed his hand and wiped the stickiness against his jacket. He was thirsty, incredibly thirsty. He wanted to reach out and touch Manu’s fine skin where it glistened on his cheekbones, but his hands were dirty. He fought the impulse down.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ he said, swallowing.
‘Sure, man.’ Manu was already moving away.
Eliza and Manu seemed, like they often did, to know everyone there. They would be in their circle for a while. Adam looked for a bathroom on his way out, but couldn’t see one. He hurried down the dark lane to the public toilet, where he pissed hotly and noisily. He enjoyed the extravagance of it. Anyone walking past would hear him. When he stepped outside again there was no-one there. It was strange how tranquil the hutongs could be at night, even with all of Beijing draped around them. They were like something it swallowed long ago, and hadn’t been able to digest.
Zipping up he felt his stomach. There was nothing swollen, no pain. If the illness hadn’t left him, at least it was improved. He was energised by the change now, his energy somehow cleaner, humming at a higher pitch, attention feeding on each sensation. The night was cold, and the pleasure of it on his skin surprised him. He sniffed the air, and though it mostly smelled of hutong toilet, his stomach growled.
The air had got worse. In the smog, the light from the gallery formed a solid block in the centre of the hutong, framing steel cables that leaned at precarious angles, posts that dangled hazardous-looking clutches of wire at eye level, the trunk of a tree with a chain around it attached to the bent frame of a broken bicycle. He didn’t go back inside, just leaned against the tree to watch the people leaving, smiling along with them, standing in the light. He could not see Manu or Eliza now. They must have left without him.
The heavy air reinforced his sense of being inside the city’s body; Adam wondered if it would reject him eventually, push him to the surface of its skin. It was possible this was already happening.
He thought of Natasha’s house, a few blocks away down a narrow bend in the maze. The warm light inviting, pouring from the one small window that was open to the lane. These old places had no care for privacy. He had meant to knock, and wave; he had meant to wait for her invitation. He had not meant her any harm. How was he supposed to know where the lines were before he crossed them?
They appeared at his side with a group behind them, already moving through the lane.
‘Sorry, man, thought you’d left! This way,’ Manu said, waving him into the group as they passed. Adam followed in silence, too preoccupied by his hunger to speak. They took a route that felt circuitous but was probably direct, passing nothing he knew but appearing in a place he thought he recognised. It was like one of those folding paper games, the fortunes all ending up in the same place. Adam wanted to tell Manu this, but he couldn’t remember what they were called and Manu was out of earshot, striding ahead, arm in arm with Eliza. Maybe they didn’t have that game in Canada anyway.
The restaurant was a South-East Asian place. A big main room, dark, with no-one else in it but a pair of identical twin girls of about eight or nine, presumably the owners’ kids, in pale blue party dresses. They sat opposite each other, each playing on her own tablet. One of them called out without looking up, and a man appeared, wiping his hands on a tea towel. He wondered if Manu had booked the entire place but, no, there was a young couple in the dimness of a far corner, leaning in to each other so much that their foreheads were almost touching. It was late, that was all, and the air really was bad; no sensible Beijinger would be out in it.
The owner ushered them into a side room. Adam took his place between strangers. An international group, a round table. The artist was there, somehow the head of a circle; he drew the attention. Handsome, certainly. Elvish features. From Guangzhou, he thought he heard him say, but maybe he had just picked out the syllables. Adam could still see the collarbones beneath his thin white t-shirt, and worried that the young man was cold. He wrapped his own jacket close around him and waited for someone to hand him an English menu.
Manu had already ordered both red and white wine and was passing glasses around, raising a toast. He spoke in his careful, formal-sounding Chinese; people laughed as though everything he said was a joke. Maybe it was. Eliza raised a glass of water, caught Adam’s eye. Ada
m regretted coming but now that he was seated it would have been rude to leave. He smiled at her, picked up a glass that someone had filled with yellow wine. He wanted a beer. There seemed to be only the one enormous Chinese menu, leather-bound like some childhood book of spells, and it was nowhere near him. So he sat and waited, sipping from his glass.
‘Australian,’ someone said. He looked over, but they were talking about the wine, tasting it with a serious expression. Adam shook his head. The bottle was too far away to read. He was not enjoying it.
‘Are you an artist, then?’ the man beside him asked, his glass poised. It was the white man from the gallery. He must have been fifty, British, a neat anthropologist’s goatee, stained teeth.
Adam shook his head. ‘I just look,’ he said, but before he could explain, the noise of conversation rose; the man had already turned to the young Chinese woman on his other side and begun to explain something to her. Adam listened as he announced that in the old days all the British expats in China were homosexuals. He actually said homosexuals. ‘They could practise, you know, their lifestyle choices,’ he projected, and conversation hesitated further around the table. ‘They were sent here or to India to get them out of the way.’ He laughed, though the woman did not seem interested in the slightest.
Adam turned at a memory. Eliza’s perfume must have drifted to him across the table, or there were flowers in the restaurant that were past their freshness. But the only plants he could see were plastic. Something twisted in his gut.
‘I would love to have been here in the thirties, when it was all falling apart,’ the British man said into his ear. His breath was hot and moist. Adam pretended not to hear him.
When the food arrived it was light, delicate, fragrant with lemongrass and coriander. The centrepiece, a sculpted fish, arrived to much exclamation. He could not stomach the smell, though it wasn’t the food. He tried to order a beer, but his back was to the door, and the waiter never there when he looked. His head was spinning, the sounds in the room – the acoustics were terrible – becoming harder to distinguish as language. Outside in the hutong someone was calling his name. Adam managed to secure a spoonful of rice, some broccoli in a thin coconut sauce, but he could not eat much. He needed to get some air. He got up and excused himself, backed out of the room. Sweat at his temples. Manu didn’t see him go, was busy with his warm arm around the artist’s shoulder, his bow lips almost to the young man’s ear. Eliza gave him a quick look of concern, but said nothing.
In the street outside Adam tried to catch his breath. There was no-one there, of course; his mind had just been reaching for a pattern in the noise. He looked down the lane for another toilet, but couldn’t see a thing. It was too dark, and the smog was thicker than before. He could still smell the resurfacing, but he couldn’t hear or see the machines from here; the odour might just be the air, thick with mysterious hydrocarbons. The sky was a grim orange above the grey tiled roofs, and his breath tasted like iron. It moved into his spine. He saw the young man in his cage, the pink flesh of the fish on the table. The fish in front of Natasha’s father, and his wine-stained lips. Carving knives. A steel table. Dark brick walls. Adam felt in his jacket pocket for his phone, and took his hand out quickly; something soft and rotten lurked there.
He steadied himself, reached in again, took out the apple and dropped it on the road. He could have sworn he had got rid of it already. In the pocket beneath it, there was a plastic bag, a soft lump of packaging, its barcode intact. He gazed without recognition. Chatterboxes, that’s what they were called. It was just a game. There were four options and you chose a square. The other person counted out the question. Then you chose your corner and they showed you the answer. His sister had opened it to show him YOU DIE and he had cried for what seemed like days.
Cried inconsolably, head buried in his mother’s chest. Cried because he kept getting the same terrible answer. You’re not a child, his mother had said, but he was. He was thirteen, and his father was gone, and Lisa had tricked him, had written the same thing in all eight places. She had opened it to show him, trying to calm him down. Now that he thought about it, the fortune had been accurate, maybe the only accurate fortune there was. He wondered if Lisa remembered any of this. She would think it was funny, if he reminded her. Or maybe not. She was a mother now, she would consider everything in a different light.
He’d left something behind, he thought, in the restaurant, or at his mother’s house. Something important. He could not think what it was.
A figure was approaching. Familiar, but he couldn’t place them. His mind was still in Australia. The air was thick as soup, and they were charging through it, their footfalls dull. He stood straighter, anticipating their arrival. They would speak first, or he would raise a hand and smile. He even stepped into the lane to intercept them. But then he saw, too late, that it was no-one he knew, just some androgynous kid in K-Pop finery and a black face mask, hands in the pockets of a panelled garment, walking with an urgent stride. The figure was about to sweep past, so close that they would have to brush against him. Adam anticipated the swish of fabric against his skin and leaned towards it. At the last moment, without in any other way acknowledging he was there, the person stepped sideways to dodge him. Adam heard the music in their headphones clearly: not K-Pop at all, something much more familiar. They disappeared around the next corner and the melody played on in his head for a moment before the words came to him: I want to hold your hand.
Adam inhaled deeply, tasting the air in his throat. He longed for sleep. He could hear the laughter travelling out through the window of the restaurant. He knew that he should go back inside, but he was so exhausted he could have stretched out in the street and closed his eyes. Let the city take him in, let it reseal itself above him. The song played out in his head, stopped, and began again from the beginning.
It was the thought of Manu finding him like that, of his hands reaching down to the cold earth in pity, that got Adam moving. He walked quickly to the end of the hutong, where he hoped that it joined a road he knew. A taxi hovered there with its lights on, its nose pointed north. The driver peered out, his eyes in shadow. Two punk girls breezed past, laughing. Adam climbed in the back, gave the name of the subway station nearest his apartment – he had never managed to get a Beijing taxi driver to recognise his actual address. He hoped that he had some cash in his wallet. It was still in the back pocket of his jeans when he checked. The driver tossed his cigarette out the window and turned the car around without speaking. Adam thought that he must have mispronounced his destination; this was not the right direction. He spoke the name again, but the driver ignored him.
It took several blocks for Adam to see that the driver was going the right way after all; he must have become disoriented. He sank in his seat. His eyes were heavy, kept threatening to close. Of the rest of the ride back to his apartment he registered only one scene: a construction site beneath a bridge, the workers shirtless, their spines glistening in the light of their site lamps. The white air gathering in the light around their bodies made it look like they were evaporating.
ROSES
They scent him, close here. In the contained air, thick with transmission, they shutter from body to body, feeding on attention, on distraction, seeking him out. Most people don’t feel the impression, but some seem to accept it. This one, smell of oranges, looks at her reflection in the window, evades the eyes, picks at the teeth. The mouth floods with flavours. She touches her belly, stretched and pregnant, and the lips sink into a grimace. They feel her interior fascination, her estrangement from herself, the life that feeds on her life. Bladder, calves, the press of weight, the swollen ankles. The swish of her skirt against the legs when the train lurches gives her pleasure; she lurches with it. She looks behind her, where nobody gives up their seat. At the next stop, someone pushes past her, and they feel a hand pressed lightly against her lower back; they feel her whole body tense and hold itself from fightin
g. The fury in her, everywhere at once. They press themselves beside it, shift with her protection.
He’s tight as a rubber-band ball. The seam of rage under the surface. He gets off the train, avoiding contact. Nothing in his pockets when he taps at them. They don’t want him to go up the stairs, and he stays to watch the last carriage trundle away. A shimmer, a spark in the eye, enjoying this odd imprisonment.
He walks to the edge of the platform, peers back into the tunnel for the lights of the next train. Nothing comes out of the dark. They coil in him, wanting to build to a release like lightning. Uncertain if this pressure is their own, or if it belongs to the body. If there’s a membrane between what they are and him, it’s porous; they leak through.
Something in him that they recognise. Pain, demanding and dispersed. Some kind of homesickness. The platform is crowded but the crowd stands at a distance. He hears the train approaching with his whole body. His mouth fixes its tight line and his hands look for his pockets. Too close to the edge. Heart like a panic drum and no they are all at once no
‘No,’ she says and they are in her arm, wrinkled with the scars there, fired and clasping him by the shirt as the train rushes in. The wind catches at her lungs and she takes his shoulder in her other hand. She scrapes him away, burning the wrist with her nails. They feel the quick of her assessment. ‘Are you all right?’
He looks away. ‘I lost my balance,’ he says, frowning. Looks back. Black eyes don’t see them.
‘No, you, I. We can talk,’ she says, stuttering through the pronouns. So much meat in her throat the tongue doesn’t seem to fit there. ‘Listen, I can help,’ she says. She yanks her hair away from her face, loose, grey, untreated. The hand is shaking; she hides it behind her hip. A narrow ache in the ribs that comes from nowhere.
The Airways Page 15