by Cath Ferla
He offered a card. ‘Nah, just a PI.’
This had to be some kind of joke.
Instinct kicked in and Sophie stepped back. ‘You know who I am, then?’ The question was out of her mouth before she had time to catch herself.
‘I overheard your conversation with the cop and I saw you taking some serious notes.’
‘The girl’s only just jumped,’ said Sophie. ‘You can’t be on the case already.’
‘Nope. Just here on my lunch hour.’ He pointed to a nearby Japanese restaurant. ‘But it always pays to talk.’
Sophie stuck her hands in her pockets, gripped the top of her thighs. ‘If I was a private detective, I’d hardly want to share any information I had with a competitor,’ she said. ‘But I’m not and I don’t have any information worth talking about.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ he said with a smile.
‘I told that cop I don’t trust uniforms,’ Sophie said. ‘But I trust suits like you even less.’
She sensed a hint of defeat, despite the smile still patiently painted to the man’s face. He pushed the card towards her.
‘It’s fine,’ he said, his voice quiet. ‘But do me a favour and take this. You might decide you feel like a conversation some time.’ The blue eyes glinted. ‘Or, you know, maybe just some food.’
‘There’s a dead girl on the concrete and you’re asking me out?’
He offered the card again. ‘Just take it, please.’
They stood looking at each other. He had a freckle above his lip.
Sophie grabbed the card. ‘Fine.’
Damian rocked back on his heels, slipped his hands into his suit pockets. ‘See you,’ he said.
She watched him melt his way through the crowd, unhurried and in control. People stepped aside for him. The faintest flutter of curiosity stirred within her. But he was a private detective and God knows she’d had enough of those in her life to last the rest of it.
She flopped down on the bench and took out her phone. She scanned through the images of Wendy, noting that they matched the descriptions in her notes. Then a detail jerked her upright. Why hadn’t she noticed it earlier? Wendy’s demeanour, her sleepiness and lack of interest – it all made sense now. Possibly her suicide did too.
The skin on Wendy’s arm was pale, translucent and covered in needle tracks.
He got there as fast as he could. The news was all over the radio. The jumper had attended a language school in the city and it hadn’t taken long for him to find out which. Foreign language students were a tight bunch – they attended schools scattered throughout the CBD but they all seemed to know each other. It was a community; friendship forged by dislocation, alienation and an unfriendly city. It worked for him and his business. The students’ bonds meant they worked together to keep each other’s secrets.
And these students had many secrets. Behind the smiles, eager faces and shyness that a language barrier naturally brings, lay a range of complex, ambitious people with little to lose and everything to gain. Some of them would do almost anything if it meant getting ahead.
Including unprotected sex for money.
This reality had served him well in his brothels and clubs over the years and had made him a lot of cash. But cracks had begun to appear. If the girl on the pavement was who he thought she was, he’d have to authorise his first kill. And he didn’t like it.
He knew he’d arrived because of the crowds. A couple of police officers were doing their best to prevent a bottleneck but people still stood six deep. The general public’s thirst for horror both shocked and excited him. Perhaps his associates were right, perhaps there was a market for something harder than vanilla sex.
He swam his way through the bodies and fake Gucci shoulder bags, slipping easily to the front of the plastic barricade. He could smell cabbage and garlic on the breath of the students around him. He also detected a top note, cloying, like fresh meat.
He caught the attention of the nearest cop. The young man looked as though he wished he were somewhere else. But before he had a chance to flash his card and proffer his excuse for viewing the body, he saw the shoes. They poked out from beneath the white sheet, bright red like fresh blood. The shoes were unmistakable because he’d bought them himself. They’d been a gift from one of his associates for his favourite girl. And now she was dead. He gritted his teeth and backed away into the crowd.
The fact she was gone meant only one thing: soon there’d be a hunt on. The hunt would lead to him. He reached into his breast pocket for his phone.
It was unfortunate, but to protect the business and his freedom, a different woman would have to die.
The crowd dispersed quickly after the ambulance left. Sophie picked her way up the street to Su Yuan. The girl rested in a flat-footed crouch in front of a shop window. She held her chin in one hand, eyes wide and unblinking.
‘Are you okay?’
A stupid question. Had Su Yuan known Wendy? Had the two women been friends? They were both Chinese, but aside from that, they appeared to share little in common. Bright, bubbly Su Yuan breathed light into Sophie’s classroom. Wendy had sometimes snored.
Su Yuan stared up at Sophie. ‘I don’t think I am okay,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I’ve never seen a suicide before.’
Sophie squatted beside her and stared out at the passing foot traffic. She twisted the ring on her finger. ‘Me neither,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody awful.’
Su Yuan slumped against the window. ‘Poor Wendy,’ she said. ‘I’ll always wonder why she did it.’
Heroin. ‘I don’t know if it makes you feel better,’ said Sophie, ‘but you’re not alone.’
Su Yuan grunted a disagreement. ‘That’s what you think.’
‘We can talk about it if you want,’ Sophie said. ‘There won’t be any classes this afternoon, we could get something to eat…’ She sounded like the PI.
Su Yuan shot her an irritated look. ‘The last thing I can think about now is food!’
Sophie cringed. She should remove herself and her runaway mouth from Su Yuan’s pain. ‘I’ll go,’ she said. She pushed up from her squat and her hand brushed Su Yuan’s knee. The girl shot her hand out and clutched Sophie’s fingers, pulling her close.
‘We’re all connected,’ she said.
The words hit Sophie like bullets. ‘What?’
Su Yuan gave a small smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just upset about Wendy.’ She squeezed Sophie’s hand. ‘Some noodles would probably do me good.’
The Happy Chef restaurant at the top of the Sussex Centre was Sophie’s happy place. It was more a series of authentic hawker stalls than a typical shopping-centre eating spot, and the air smelled of ginger and pork broth and dried shrimp. Clutching her receipt in one clammy hand, Sophie watched a shop assistant ladle spoonfuls of wonton laksa and seafood noodle soup. The surfaces of the bowls shimmered with oil. Finally, it was her turn. Sophie willed her hands not to shake as she collected her tray and its boiling resident: five-spice beef noodles with extra chilli.
The first spoonful burned her mouth. Then the chilli hit the back of her throat. She coughed loudly. Diners at other tables stifled grins against chopsticks. But the carbohydrate did the trick and Sophie felt her body coming back to her. The pounding in her head and her heart began to recede. She relaxed.
Around her, the food court heaved and pushed. Fluorescents lit up the stalls but the tables themselves sat in shadow. Patrons, a mix of casually dressed business people, sharply dressed shoppers and gaggles of students, queued six deep at the more popular outlets. Others watched midday television, without sound, from the flat screens screwed into the roof. She listened to the buzz of chatting patrons punctuated by the ringing of service bells and the occasional sneeze. Smells of beef broth and fried garlic, shrimp paste and chilli laksa, seeded themselves into her nostrils, pores and clothes.
Su Yuan placed her tray on the table and slipped into the chair opposite. Her bowl br
immed with an elegant clear broth. A few prawns, curled neatly into orange crescents, floated alongside the white flesh of scallops without roe. A pile of gleaming choy sum stems, cut on the diagonal, glistened like precious jade.
‘These are the best,’ Su Yuan said, pulling wooden chopsticks from a packet and snapping them apart with a quick flick of her wrists. ‘Noodles like my hometown.’ She rubbed the sticks together to shave off stray splinters.
‘You eat seafood noodles in Kunming?’ Sophie asked. The city was many miles inland.
‘For sure. With frozen fish, not fresh. Here it’s the same.’ She took a mouthful of soup and closed her eyes. A faint smile curled the edges of her lips. ‘Hen hao chi,’ she said; delicious. Her eyes drifted open and settled on Sophie’s. They were deep brown and wide, a gaze you could drown in.
‘I think maybe this place reminds you of home, too,’ Su Yuan said.
Sophie considered the girl sitting across the table. Her heart beat a faster rhythm at her breast. A memory scorched through her.
Her mother’s kitchen, the air thick with steam. Bone broth rolling in a pot, garlic dry-frying in a wok. Sophie at the sink, her shirt sleeves protected by floral-patterned sheaths. A leek, pale and creamy on the outside, is slit to reveal inner rings blackened with dirt. Her mother shows her how to wash it. Sophie’s fingers are in the water, in her mother’s hair, at her mother’s neck. Wet. A gentle admonishment. A laugh and a kiss. The soup is ready. Five-spice beef with noodles.
Sophie pulled away from Su Yuan’s stare, busying herself with her soup. She scooped noodles with chopsticks. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
For a while they ate in silence, but for the sounds of their slurping.
‘The true thing is, I’m not surprised she did it,’ Su Yuan said finally, resting her chopsticks against the rim of her bowl.
‘You’re not surprised Wendy killed herself?’
Su Yuan’s eyes fixed on Sophie. ‘It’s not easy here,’ she said. ‘This country is not so friendly if you are a foreigner. It’s easy to feel alone in the crowd.’
‘But Wendy wasn’t alone,’ said Sophie, scanning her memory for everything she knew about Wendy Chan. ‘She had her classmates and a boyfriend. I even went out with them once. She probably partied too hard, but she didn’t seem unhappy.’
‘She was alone,’ Su Yuan said.
Sophie twisted her chopstick wrapper between her fingers. ‘It doesn’t seem a strong enough reason for Wendy to kill herself.’
‘Loneliness is a real reason.’
So is heroin.
‘Wendy could have gone home,’ said Sophie. ‘She could have returned to her family. She didn’t have to jump.’
Su Yuan shook her head. ‘If she’d done any of those things, she’d have failed. Her parents probably paid all they had to send her here. Or maybe she won a scholarship that would have gone to waste. If she went home early, people would know she’d failed.’
‘So you think she killed herself to save face?’
‘Chinese people care a lot about other people’s opinions,’ said Su Yuan. ‘It’s not a simple thing to save your family embarrassment. But it is important.’ She bit her bottom lip. ‘I’m sure you know something about this, Sophie. You may not have a Chinese name, but I know you are one of us.’
Sophie screwed the wrapper into a ball. She curled it into her palm and squeezed. Her nails dug into her skin. She wrestled with the feeling she’d been slit open like a fruit.
‘My mother came from Hong Kong,’ she said finally. ‘But people don’t usually guess.’
‘That’s because most people here don’t know how to use chopsticks properly,’ said Su Yuan. ‘But I can tell that you’ve used them your whole life.’
Sophie debated whether to tell Su Yuan about the track marks she’d seen on Wendy’s arms. But for what? The information would only highlight even further Wendy’s obvious fall from grace. She flicked the ball of paper across the table.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Do you care about what other people think?’
The girl opposite shrugged. ‘No,’ she said. ‘And I don’t care about the difficulties in this country. I’m not here to make friends.’ There was hostility in Su Yuan’s voice. In her eyes, though – sadness.
‘Why are you here, then?’
Su Yuan pushed her bowl to the side and folded her fingers together in a white-knuckled grip. ‘To find my sister.’
Sophie’s stomach lurched. ‘Your sister’s lost?’ she asked, hoping the emotion didn’t show on her face.
‘Yes,’ Su Yuan said. ‘But I will find her. I can’t say any more about it now.’
‘Is your sister in trouble?’
Su Yuan shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. I will find her.’ She plucked her bag from the floor and pushed back her chair. ‘Thanks for showing me this place,’ she said with a grin. ‘Next time I feel sad, I know where to come for noodles that remind me of home.’
‘Where are you going?’
Su Yuan shrugged. ‘My room,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at school.’
She watched as Su Yuan disappeared down the escalator. Tomorrow afternoon, the students would sit their tests at an external exam hall and most wouldn’t show for revision in the morning. The new teaching term would begin next Wednesday, following a break. Sophie hoped she’d find Su Yuan’s name on her list.
鬼
Sophie closed the door of her rented Paddington terrace and slumped against it with relief. Her shoulder hurt. Afternoon classes had been cancelled for counselling and an emergency staff meeting. Then Sophie had walked across Hyde Park, down Liverpool Street, and through the Five Ways junction. She’d carried a bag of books and now her body screamed for a wheat bag and a cup of tea.
Sophie moved through the small lounge room crammed with potted plants and bookshelves and into the dining space. She dumped her book bag on the dining table, ignoring the mess that spilled out of it onto the floor. In the kitchen she disturbed three baby cockroaches: Sydney friends. They scattered across the green bench top as she reached for one of the many canisters lining the wall. Tea. She needed it like a drug. Thank fuck for Jin Tao.
Her housemate claimed the title of household tea king. Whatever the variety – Darjeeling, lapsang souchong, Indian chai, pu-erh, oolong – Jin Tao kept the house in plentiful supply. Sophie reached for the longjing – dragon well – a strong Chinese green that tasted a little bit like rice.
Three years ago, after attempts at juggling the expectations of housemates – for cooking sessions, Scrabble nights, Tuesday trivia, and girls’ nights in – with her own needs, Sophie had resolved to move to the suburbs and live alone. Then she’d seen Jin Tao’s newspaper ad and had decided to give the inner-city house share one more go. So far, so good. Jin Tao was a shift worker who shared Sophie’s taste for Chinese food and for balancing personal time with the schedule of a busy life. He left her alone but shared his tea and his balcony when she needed to chat.
Sophie chucked her wheat bag into the microwave and watched it rotate. At the sound of the bell she took the bag and her cup of tea into the lounge room and collapsed onto the couch. Outside the wind had picked up. The newspaper stuffed up the chimney rustled and scratched. A dreary winter Wednesday. And Wendy was dead.
The needle tracks on her arm.
When had she first met Wendy? Sometime earlier in the year. Sophie had been assigned a new class. Although none of the students had known each other, many had studied at the school in the previous level, and understood the structures and the routine. Part of the routine was an English-language name: some students chose to use one, to save the repeated agony of listening to their teacher mangle the tonal sounds of their birth name. Often these were literal translations. Hence, Sophie had taught a Stone, a Tiger, a Golden and a Field. Wendy was from China, and it was in China that He Wen Yi had first selected the English name, Wendy. She’d told Sophie dryly that she’d decided to reject her language teacher’s init
ial suggestion of ‘Winnie’. She hadn’t wanted to be named after the noise made by a horse.
Wendy had been funny. But most of the time she’d been quiet, sleepy. More than once, Sophie had had to prod Wendy with the whiteboard marker, gently reminding her to lift her drooping eyes. Could Wendy have been on the nod all those times? Was there a drug problem that she just hadn’t noticed?
Dad would be so proud. Not. She’d been brought up to look for the cracks in stories and appearances, to seek out anomalies in the otherwise mundane. Yet she’d missed this. And now Wendy was dead.
Just as little David Qin was still missing.
Thorny pain tore through Sophie, engulfing her as it so often did in the moments when she let her guard down and allowed herself to think of David. She would never forgive herself. Sophie had resigned herself to that fact. She would do anything to bring David back. But at the same time, she could do nothing. He was gone and his beautiful mother, Li Hua, had forgiven her. Li Hua had set Sophie free to move on with her sterile, Western life, away from the pain and the constant searching and the false hopes. And Sophie had seized the opportunity, had run from Li Hua and Beijing; fled back to Australia, to Sydney, where she was unknown. In Sydney, neither Seamus’s mistakes nor David’s disappearance could haunt her. Sophie’s past could remain buried.
And now this.
Sophie sipped her tea, blinked away tears, allowing the leaves to work their soothing wonder. Wendy was dead: a limp body on the concrete, face mashed to a paste. Who would grieve for that girl? Would Wendy’s mother double over and howl in pain, the way Li Hua had? Would she accept the fact that her daughter had travelled all the way to Australia only to throw herself from her language school window?
Loneliness is a real reason.
Sophie scanned her memories. She pulled up a rainy night in June. A Sichuan restaurant. Sophie and Jin Tao on one side of a corner table, Wendy and her boyfriend on the other. White tablecloths and peach napkins. A feast of a meal: shiny jellyfish salad, hot boiled beef, whole barramundi fried in chilli bean sauce, pickled snake beans and fire-exploded lamb kidney. The fierce afterglow of the Sichuan peppers danced on their palates. She remembered Wendy, happy, drinking Tsingtao and placing soft kisses on her boyfriend’s neck. She remembered Jin Tao, unruly.