by Cath Ferla
For Mum and Dad
and for Eugene
The room smelled like wet onions.
This was the first thought to filter through Han Hong’s fear. She inhaled the musty, sour scent again and dissected it. She knew the smell. It reminded her of the leeks stored for too long in the damp cellar below her childhood house in her hometown. At the end of a long winter, the cellar took on an acrid smell that would linger until the last days of the following summer. Like the mildew on their perennially damp sheets or the pungent scent of shit emanating from their latrine, the cellar held a particular scent memory for Han Hong; one whiff of rotting onions and she was back there.
How she wished she were back there.
She remembered how, as a young girl, she held her nose between pinched fingers on her visits to the space below the house. She’d tried in vain to smother the scent, gulping earthy air into her lungs. Later, with hard soap, she’d scrubbed at her skin in an effort to release the stink from her pores – always unsuccessfully, she’d felt. She’d been self-conscious in her English classroom where the teacher, a perfectly groomed Western woman, smelled of fresh peaches. Han Hong had once caught the teacher wrinkling her nose as she’d bent over the desk to help her with an assignment. She’d known then that she’d never smell sweet, like peaches, until she found her way out of her hometown. That day she’d promised herself to study harder than ever before, to work hard so that she might one day escape her family home and its cellar and damp sheets and backyard toilet. She would make it out of her hometown and into the wide world, find success and money and the opportunity to make everything in her life smell sweet.
That night she’d taken to her skin with her mother’s scrubbing brush. And she’d scrubbed so hard she’d caused her arms to bleed.
Now here she was.
Han Hong inhaled deeply. The scent of her cell brought a small comfort in the memory of home. But before long, she felt the bite of hot tears in her eyes. She knew she was trapped here, but to be trapped in a place so reminiscent of everything she had left behind made her situation all the more unbearable.
Han Hong shifted, hoping to restore some feeling to her buttocks, which had numbed long ago. Some sensation remained in her legs and, through her thin stockings, she felt the damp and dimpled concrete floor scrape like sandpaper. Occasionally she heard the rattle of an animal, its claws clattering somewhere nearby. She heard voices, distant, and the occasional rush of fire mixing with the roaring in her head.
Han Hong was blind to the eye of the digital camera that watched her. It recorded every movement. Every groan. The blindfold around her eyes was secured so tightly her eyelids hurt. She couldn’t breathe deeply because of the cloth in her mouth but she forced air into her lungs through her nose, inhaling with it the damp, sour scent of her prison.
She knew life could be tough. But she never thought it would end like this.
It’s the small things that cause panic.
A dumpling dropped into a dish of soy. A bowl of tea splashed over a lap. Losing the practice tests in a classroom full of expectant students on the final teaching day before exams, ten pairs of eyes staring her down. Small things.
These thoughts occurred to Sophie Sandilands as she hunted desperately for the practice English tests that had performed a disappearing act among the papers on her desk.
The eyes regarded her silently. Those ten pairs of eyes were making her panic.
Where the bloody fuck…
Sophie dumped the pile on the floor and got down on her hands and knees. Chuck had done it to her. He’d handed her this disorganised bundle of paper, telling her he’d done her copying as a favour. She’d failed to check what lay beneath the pink cover page where he’d scrawled a long-winded note that she hadn’t had time to read.
Always do everything for yourself. She breathed the mantra quietly before inhaling deeply though her nose. She wasn’t one to easily accept favours. In Sophie’s experience, it was better to learn first how to serve yourself and forget about anybody ever serving you. If Chuck’s gesture reinforced anything, it was that she was better off getting on with things on her own.
Pushing the locks of her black hair behind her ears, Sophie rifled through the mess, ignoring the occasional titter but noticing the warm heat of embarrassment that crept up her neck and smoothed itself over her cheeks in a caress. A gift from her mother, that flush. In moments of discomfort, or at the first sip of a beer, it stained Sophie’s skin.
‘I’m glad you don’t look like me,’ her mother had confided once, long ago. ‘But that pink in your skin comes from my blood. Avoid wine and rose petal tea if you do not want to blush.’
She’d avoided neither for a long time and had embraced the pink. Disorganisation, on the other hand…
Disorganisation suggested a lack of control, showed weakness and allowed emotions to be laid bare. Seamus taught her that, way back when she’d been small enough to perch on his knee. Flustered people, her father had said, find it harder to hide their true self from others. Panic opens up a person’s body and allows it to speak through involuntary language: a nervous flick of the hair; a rap of knuckles against a desk; the grinding of teeth. In panic, a person’s weaknesses are on display for observers to read. Only organisation, regimen and control can allow a person to hide in plain sight.
Sophie forced a smile onto her class. ‘I’ll be there in a sec,’ she murmured.
The students stared back, dissatisfaction on their faces. She had to take control of the situation immediately or they would begin to complain. And a collective of complaining language students was not something Sophie needed right now.
She glanced across at Wendy, a lanky Chinese woman with bobbed hair. She’d assumed her usual position, slumped over her desk, no doubt attempting to sleep off the rice wine she’d consumed the night before. Party girl. Unlike her classmates, Wendy approached study with minimal effort. More often than not these days she seemed only to want to sleep.
Outside, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the Sydney winter presented its ugly face. A thick mist hung over the rooftops, obscuring the narrow slash of sky visible between the skyscrapers on a clear day. In the foreground, a mess of construction scaffolding and yellow cranes explained the tinny clank of metal on metal that played the soundtrack to most of Sophie’s days.
‘Gotcha.’ The pile of practice exams appeared from inside the sleeve of a manila folder. Chuck had practised organisation after all. He’d slipped the folder containing the tests under a pile of recycled copier paper. Now that Sophie read the cover note, she saw he’d intended for the students to use it ‘as scrap’.
Su Yuan leaned forward in her chair.
‘Hey Sophie,’ she said, her eyes sparkling.
Sophie straightened herself out, dusted her corduroys and began distributing the tests to the students. She ignored the groan from Enrico, the Brazilian sandal merchant, who had clearly been hoping for a bludge.
‘It doesn’t matter if you lose things, as long as you find them again.’ Su Yuan stretched out a slender arm for her paper, her smile widening as Sophie handed her the sheet.
‘My thoughts exactly,’ Sophie said as she prodded Wendy awake and slipped the practice test onto her desk. ‘Although I’m not sure you’d be reassuring me if I’d eaten ten minutes into your real exam.’
She returned to the front of the room.
Wendy yawned, stretched and began drawing circles on the corner of her test sheet.
‘Sophie?’ Su Yuan again, her clear voice cutting the silence.
‘What’s up?’
‘Just one question.’
Sophie flicked open the spare practice test on her desk. ‘Yes?’
‘How can you eat an exam?’
If I’d eaten
ten minutes into your real exam. The turn of phrase. At best you created confusion and at worst you created a group of people who went out into the streets of Sydney complaining about their ‘blue mood’ or interrupting conversations with a ‘burning question’. But when Sophie looked up at Su Yuan, the young woman’s smile was broad: a joke.
‘I dunno, Su Yuan,’ she said, as the tension between her shoulders began to fade. ‘I guess it’d taste okay if you added a lot of salt.’
鬼
At lunchtime, Sophie joined the crowd in a staffroom that smelled suspiciously like a fridge. The room, small and windowless, had space to seat only ten – inadequate when the school employed a staff of forty. Most people skipped downstairs to the sushi bars or the food court for lunch, cramming into the elevators alongside hordes of rowdy students. Not an option for Sophie. Standard food court food was the pits. If she allowed herself one indulgence in her life, one safe thing to remember her childhood by, it was interesting, eclectic food: the kind that didn’t involve sweet and sour sauce.
She squeezed past the line for the microwave and took a seat at the laminex table next to Chuck, her fifty-something Kentucky-born colleague, who was as camp as he was heavy, the proud king of the photocopier and the owner of one mother of a smelly lunch.
‘It’s onion salad and it’s good for me,’ he said to Sophie when he caught her eyeing his plate. ‘I’m trying to lose pounds for Pattaya. Two weeks and I’m in party town.’
‘Hope your onion breath’s cleared up by then.’
Chuck smiled and pulled a pack of chewing gum from the pocket of his polo shirt. ‘Juicy Fruit,’ he said. ‘Besides, the Thais eat so much chilli they’ve destroyed their scent receptors.’
‘Don’t you mean their taste buds?’
‘Those too.’ He sneaked a peek into Sophie’s brown paper bag. ‘What you got there?’
Sophie’s lunch was a large steamed bun she’d picked up from a tiny Chinese breakfast cafe opposite Central Station. She’d stopped in on her walk to work for a bowl of hot soy milk with sugar and an oily fried dough stick on the side. She’d seen the buns, lined up in rows in giant bamboo steamers, and that had been it.
She bit into the steamed bun, cold now, but still delicious. Fluffy white bread encased a filling of mushroom, tofu and bamboo shoots. She dunked it into the container of chilli dipping sauce and offered it to Chuck.
He held up a hand and shook his head. ‘No thanks, sweetheart. I’m off carbs.’
Sophie shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ she said, biting off another chunk. ‘All the more for me.’
‘Don’t talk with your mouth full.’
Sophie flipped a finger. Chuck feigned shock. They laughed.
A sudden collective shriek from outside the room jerked their attention to the door. They heard the thump of footsteps in the corridor.
Sophie’s colleague Tim filled the doorway, his great frame heaving with effort.
‘It’s one of the students,’ he said. ‘Wendy Chan. For fuck’s sake, she’s just bloody well jumped!’
It was true, then – people really could turn to stone. Life could jam like a disc with a scratch. The moment probably only stretched three seconds, but it felt as though the room hung suspended – fingers raised to mouths, forks resting against salad leaves, hands clasping spectacles, knives sunk into butter – as people digested Tim’s news. Then, with the beep of the microwave, life returned. Chuck was out first, his chair thrown back, slipping past Tim through the door and down the corridor. The others followed, leaving spilled drinks and remnants of lunches and the sour stink of onions.
女孩
Outside, a crowd had gathered. Sophie pushed through the thick fog of faces to where Wendy lay. She looked strangely intact, not at all like she’d just fallen from a city skyscraper. There was her head, yes, a bloody, spongy mess, but the rest of her lay neatly against the footpath, whole. Sophie opened her notepad. A young police officer had his eyes on her and the expression on his face conveyed a mixture of anxiety and distaste, like a new teacher on his first day of class.
Get the details. Always get the details.
Seamus had taught her that. It’s amazing how quickly the mind forgets, he’d said. Self-preservation. The mind knows that remembering horror can drive it insane.
For years Sophie had concentrated on writing down the details: an encounter with a traffic inspector; harsh words exchanged with a lover; vehicle descriptions of the cars driven by her dad’s clients. She’d thought the practice would come in handy one day when she followed in Seamus’s footsteps and started her own private investigation business.
But then it had all unravelled.
Her mother disappeared in the night. Her father removed his mask.
Sophie ran.
She’d gone to Beijing to forget the details, forget her past and discover something different. And the more she distanced herself from the details, the more she started to feel renewed.
You like it here in Beijing?
More than what I left behind.
We’re all running away from something. Can I buy you a beer?
Only if you want to see me blush.
You’re a one-pint screamer?
It’s my Chinese blood.
You don’t look fucking Chinese.
You don’t look like an arsehole.
You’re funny.
I’m not even drunk.
Can I kiss you?
Please.
And then it happened. A crime on her watch. And because Sophie had failed to write down the details, she’d been unable to provide any more information than the bits she could sieve from her confused brain. She’d muddled her memory with nightclubs and booze; she’d lapsed in her judgement and let go of Seamus’s rules. And because of those things she’d been unable to help solve a terrible crime for which she felt responsible.
Now, a teenager tried to break around the privacy barrier, his mobile phone poised to shoot.
The cop saw him and moved quickly, catching the kid by the elbow.
‘Buddy, I said move off.’ He gave the kid a gentle shove. ‘The woman’s dead. Show some respect.’
The kid shook his arm free and muttered something under his breath before scuffing across the street. Sophie watched him pass Chuck and some other teachers. They were hugging each other and crying. She scanned the remainder of the crowd and recognised several students as hers. She should probably offer comfort, but her feet felt fused to the earth.
Maybe she was in shock.
That was Wendy on the concrete, the girl who’d sat a practice test in her classroom not an hour before. Had she given any indication that she planned to take her own life? Sophie scanned her memory for details. Wendy had been sleepy and uninterested, but Sophie had never known her any different. She’d completed the test in a barely legible cursive and smiled politely at Sophie when she finished. On the hour, she’d untangled her limbs from her desk and bee-lined for the door. She’d sauntered away wordlessly, books clutched to her chest.
The police officer turned to address Sophie. ‘Which paper are you from?’
Sophie slipped the notepad into her back pocket. ‘I’m not.’
He frowned. ‘You’re not officially reporting on this?’
She shrugged. ‘More taking notes for the record.’
The cop cleared his throat and glanced away. When he looked back his eyes were cold. ‘Well, that’s a bit sick, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Are you some sort of private investigator or are you just taking notes and photos for kicks?’
Private investigator. In another life, maybe.
‘She was my student and she’s dead,’ Sophie said. ‘Her parents might want to know the details and I want to be able to tell them.’
The cop raised an eyebrow. ‘You can probably leave that to the police.’
Sophie smiled. ‘Yeah, right,’ she said. ‘I have this thing about uniforms.’
The cop leaned in,
like she’d asked him out on a date. ‘Oh, yeah?’
Sophie let her eyes lock with his. What was that she saw in his irises? Hope?
‘Can’t be trusted,’ she said.
She felt the cop’s gaze follow her as she moved to a nearby bench and sat down. Depending on the size of his ego, he might try to write her up. Let him. She didn’t give a shit.
People around her were crying now. Sophie spied Su Yuan and Enrico. The tall girl embraced the rough, muscular Brazilian. Tears cascaded down Enrico’s face and tangled in his beard.
Sophie retrieved her notebook and wrote down the time. She flicked back through the pages and tried to decipher her scrawl. What had she seen? Wendy’s face, a slick of colours and textures: the magenta sheen of her blood and black matte of her hair; a white gleam of bone splintered through flesh; her pale pink brain oozing onto the concrete.
She’d noted Wendy’s fingernails, painted orange and still intact.
She’d described a shopfront sign, now dented and damaged from the force of Wendy’s fall.
She’d sketched the angle of Wendy’s forearm, crooked and dislocated from the elbow socket.
Sophie closed her eyes, contemplating what she’d seen and what it meant.
‘You’ve done a lot of work there.’
She whipped her head up. A man leaned on the bench behind her, his arms folded neatly across its curved back. He wore a grey suit, white shirt and black tie. His sandy hair was cut short, parted neatly and combed. Sharp. He examined Sophie with clear blue eyes and the slightest smile on his lips.
Sophie flipped the notebook shut. ‘Do I know you?’
The man shook his head, drawing Sophie’s eyes to his strong jaw, a hint of stubble just visible on sun-loved skin.
‘I overheard you saying you have trust issues,’ he said. It sounded more like a question than a statement.
Sophie stood up.
‘Hey, it’s all right, I’m not into uniforms either.’ He smiled and extended a hand. ‘I’m Damian Sommers.’
Sophie eyeballed him. ‘You’re a plain-clothes’.’
Damian reached into the breast pocket of his jacket. Sophie’s body tensed as though he were going for a gun.