by Cath Ferla
David didn’t respond. He looked miserably up at Sophie, his face now glowing a dusty red. Sophie pointed at the other children and did her best to sound encouraging. ‘Go over there,’ she said. ‘Find some young friends.’ The five-year-old studied the other children carefully, his gaze flitting from one group to the other as though trying to decide which would be his safest bet. Sophie knew he was fearful of their rowdiness, and that he felt shy and insecure. He would much prefer to play in the dirt on his own.
‘Go on,’ said Sophie. ‘I’ll wait here. Go find some friends.’ She stepped away from him, nodding encouragement as she backed into the small crowd of people gathered around the erhu. David kept his eyes on her, holding her gaze as though it were a safety rope. She gave a last impatient gesture before turning purposefully away, an act she hoped would encourage the boy to take some social steps on his own. She spent some minutes absorbed in the music. When she peeked again, she saw David taking slow steps towards the other children.
David spent too much time alone. She worried for him. No siblings, no friends, a young life already spent mostly in the company of adults. No wonder he had no interest in kites. Li Hua had nodded her head in agreement when Sophie had raised her concerns. ‘I blame myself,’ she’d said, and Sophie hadn’t understood what she meant. ‘This is no country for more children. What kind of life can he have? No brother or sister, no father and so much competition, so many people. He must work so hard just to have an ordinary life.’
Li Hua had leaned close to Sophie. ‘In truth,’ she whispered, ‘I had him only because I am so selfish.’
‘Selfish?’ asked Sophie.
Li Hua nodded and when she spoke again it was very matter-of-fact. ‘I wanted a child. I knew my husband was dying and I did not want to be alone. But if I’d been less selfish, I would have had an operation, made sure I could never have a kid. It is no good, it is no good for him.’
Sophie hadn’t known how to handle such a confession, had never encountered such brutal honesty. ‘You can’t blame yourself for wanting something so natural,’ she’d stammered.
But Li Hua hadn’t been convinced. ‘It is not natural to have a country so crowded. I am selfish and his life will be difficult. That is why I really owe him. I will dedicate myself to him.’
Li Hua already spent so much time on David. Just reading through his schedule exhausted Sophie. Piano lessons. An English tutor. Ice-skating. A swimming coach. Trips to Hainan Island. Only the best organic foods. All this at only five. Yet David had had few experiences with other kids.
Sophie watched him tentatively join the line for the monkey bars. The others laughed and chattered but David stood alone and looked miserable. A group of older boys swamped him as they shouted and ducked and fought. He’ll start school soon, Sophie thought. That will sort him out.
The erhu player began another piece. The sad tones soared and drifted, reminding Sophie of how far she’d come and how far away she now was from the hurt she’d endured. She’d run to Beijing for solace. She knew no one when she’d arrived and yet she’d somehow felt at home. She found small reminders of her mother in the gentle movements of the fan dancers and the couples waltzing to tinny music in the parks. She’d realised she fit in, could remove fish bones from her mouth with chopsticks and tolerate cubes of pig blood in her soup. She made friends, drank and danced with abandon and laughed long, hard and openly without fear.
She let go and started to figure out who she was.
Sophie returned her eyes to the playground. The monkey bars were empty. A group of children screamed in chorus from the flat surface of a roundabout as the older boys spun it from the safety of the ground. Sophie smiled. David would be terrified. Perhaps it would do him some good to experience those mixed playground emotions of pleasure and fear: that confronting rush of adrenaline and joy, the communal hysterics and comfort brought by sharing emotions and experiences with children around him. The roundabout slowed and so did the shrieking. Sophie strode towards the playground, ready to take David into her arms with a hug. But as the spinning disc slowed to a gentle twirl and the children jumped to the ground with giggles and shouts, Sophie saw that they were all girls. She glanced from the roundabout to the slide, the cubbyhouse, the se-saw and the parallel bars. There were children everywhere, but she couldn’t see David. Fear spiked through her like electricity. She broke into a run.
‘Da Wei!’ she called, willing the little boy to emerge from behind a tree, his hands and face covered with dirt. She wound her way around the playground, roughly shaking children by the shoulders, checking faces and calling David’s name.
A boy in a red beanie approached her.
‘Excuse me, I have a little boy, Da Wei, you were with him over there.’ She pointed to the monkey bars. ‘Have you seen him?’ The panic made her words spurt out in short gasps.
‘Who are you, the maid?’ he asked, suspicion in his voice.
Sophie bit down on the inside of her cheek. ‘I’m his friend,’ she said. ‘Have you seen him?’
‘Da Wei…’ The boy raised a bony fist to his mouth and called through it like a conch. ‘Lu Cong!’ Another boy ran over, skidding through the sand like a skater. The red beanie turned to him. ‘You see a boy named Da Wei?’
Lu Cong grinned a toothy smile. ‘I dunno.’
The red beanie turned back to Sophie. ‘We don’t know.’
Tears threatened. She raised a hand to her chest to quiet its heaving.
‘Sorry, Ayi,’ the red beanie said. ‘How old is the kid?’
Sophie held out her fingers in the hand signal for five. ‘He’s five. He’s this tall.’ She stretched her hand out level with her thigh.
‘I think maybe I saw him,’ the second boy said.
A flicker of hope.
‘His coat, what colour is it?’
That was easy, she had bought it for him herself. ‘It’s red.’
‘Then everything’s okay,’ Lu Cong said, his words bringing Sophie sweet relief. ‘He was picked up five minutes ago. He went away with his dad.’
Sophie tasted bile. ‘Da Wei doesn’t have a dad.’
She pushed past the boys, rushing to the edge of the playground, scouring the trees for a glimpse of David. She spun on her heels to find the boys fast behind her, sensing danger or buzzed on her fear or high on a mixture of both.
‘Where did they go? Which way?’
‘That way.’ Lu Cong pointed to a path cutting through the trees to the side gate.
Sophie rushed to it. Outside the serenity of the park, Beijing pushed by with a roar. Fumes mixed with the scent of duck fat and spice. The traffic bellowed, sent plumes of black into a quickly darkening sky. Sophie looked up and down the street, her eyes searching for a glimpse of red. But the footpaths to her left and right were empty. If David had been here, he was now gone.
And then she saw it. Something green in the gutter. In three quick strides she was there. With a sinking heart, she bent down and picked up David’s winter hat, that perfect green cap, round as a gumnut. Tears streamed out of her eyes as she held it to her face.
女孩
Sophie crept back to the computer, picture frame in her hand. She stood it on the desk next to her MacBook, shook the screen awake. The folder marked 二 appeared before her. She placed the cursor over it and clicked it open.
The files were photos and images and newspaper articles relating to David’s disappearance. Sophie recognised many of the articles: she’d looked them up at the library herself. But the collator had included many references she had not come across: articles from Chinese-language newspapers and clips from the Mandarin-language news. She scanned through the documents, blinking rapidly to keep tears at bay.
Whoever had compiled this had gone to considerable time and effort. The missing people in her life compartmentalised neatly before her as a series of newspaper articles.
And now it’s happening again. I have missing people all around me.
Might the third fol
der contain the answer to Han Hong’s disappearance?
Sophie took a deep breath as she allowed the cursor to come to rest upon the third file. With a double-click, she opened it. In the next moment she felt her hand hit her mouth. Sophie stared at images of herself, scarf taut around her neck, face turned to the lens. It felt like looking in a mirror. The photographs had been snapped outside United English and the street shone with rain.
She already knew Zhou was watching her. But even if he’d taken the photos, how had he known where she lived?
She considered the three files again, a new thought dawning. Clearly, the sender was taunting her, reminding her that no matter how far she ran, she could never escape her past. Mysteries and missing people scattered the framework of her life.
But the more she considered the order of the pictures, the more she felt drawn to something darker. The owner of the bullet had sent her a clear message.
Sophie bolted from her chair and grabbed her parka, finally certain of one thing.
If she didn’t solve this quickly, the next person to go missing would be her.
Tae Hun removed the last soju bottle from the corner booth and used his cloth to wipe up some spilled kimchi. The group in the corner had arrived early, left late and created a great mess in the hours between. A bunch of Chinese students, trying out Korean food. They’d complained that it was too spicy and too sour and they’d lifted their silver rice bowls to their mouths like pigs. Tae Hun wiped the table clean and hummed his favourite pop song. He consoled himself with the thought of a cigarette and a glass of Johnny Walker. These small pleasures would be his in an hour, amid the darkness of a nightclub, in a corner booth, with some friends for company, some good music and a girl or two. He’d look out for a pretty one tonight and he’d ask her to sit on his lap.
Australian girls were so stuck up. In Australia, the girls spent their whole evening sneering. If you tried to talk to one of them, she’d brush you off before you got a chance to ask her name. No wonder the women here were all single and haggard.
In Korea, it was different. In Korea, women actually dressed to impress. A man could invite a lady to come and sit with him. Back home in the clubs, Tae Hun liked to order Johnny Walker, champagne, plates of food and sweets, expensive cigarettes. Then he’d scan the crowd for the best-looking woman and ask a friend to invite her over. The girl would take a look and, if she liked what she saw, she’d comply. In Korea, men were men and women were women. Life was not so complicated.
Tae Hun bit his lip as he felt the first stabbing pain of homesickness hit hard in his gut. He still had five months of study to complete, but he would be home by Christmas and away from all this. He now dearly regretted his conversation with the English teacher. He’d opened a box that perhaps couldn’t be closed and he had a sneaking suspicion that this would have negative consequences. He wanted to forget about Wendy and Han Hong and the rest. Now he wanted only to finish his time here, and go home to Seoul.
He loaded the last of the dirty dishes into a plastic tub and hoisted the tub to his shoulder. But as he turned towards the kitchen, he became aware of a woman calling his name. He felt his stomach muscles tense as he recognised the voice.
鬼
Sophie winked at Tae Hun as he followed her approach with his eyes. He had the flushed look of someone very tired or very emotional and his eyes were encircled with dark. Sophie felt bad about what she was going to ask him to do – the boy looked in need of his bed.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked, peeling gloves from her fingers.
Tae Hun pointed to the tub full of dirty dishes, annoyance clear on his face. ‘I’m kind of busy, Sophie. You? You want something to eat?’
Sophie shook her head. ‘I need you to help me, Tae Hun. I need you to take me to that club.’
The boy’s skin turned pale. The capillaries in his cheeks became visible under the fluorescent light.
‘Which club?’
‘The one you told me about. The place where you saw Han Hong.’
He picked up the tub. ‘I can’t, Sophie,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry. I have to work.’ He began to move away, his eyes fixed to the floor.
Sophie moved quickly around the table and placed herself in his path. ‘Please, Tae Hun. You asked me to help you and I’m trying to. But I need to see that club for myself.’
Tae Hun looked up, shaking his head. ‘Don’t ask me to, Sophie, the club is illegal.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
He tried to step around her. Then he lowered the tub. ‘It might not be there any more,’ he said. ‘The illegal clubs, they move location.’
Sophie studied him. She guessed from the fear on his face, and his refusal to meet her eye, that the boy was lying. The deception made her more determined.
‘I need to see it, Tae Hun.’ The emotion welled in her throat. She noted that Tae Hun had flinched when he heard her voice break.
‘I’m not sure if I remember how to get there,’ he whispered.
Sophie pulled out her phone and retrieved the photo of Han Hong. She held the image out. ‘She was your classmate and now you think something may have happened to her. You didn’t want to go to the police so you came to me. I’m asking you to help me find her.’
Tae Hun stared at the photo of Han Hong and didn’t speak.
Sophie shoved the phone back into her pocket. She’d go by herself. ‘Just drop me there in a cab. You don’t have to come in.’
He managed a defeated smile. ‘I can’t let you go there alone, either.’ He pointed to a nearby table. ‘Sit down, have a drink. I finish at midnight, we can go then.’
女孩
They were out west, somewhere near Ashfield. Sophie had watched suburban Sydney turn to Asia through the windows of the cab. Chinese characters advertising everything from dumplings to electronics to traditional medicine flashed by in hues of yellow and red. But, unlike Asia, the streets were empty. Sophie squinted at her watch. It was close to one.
They pulled up in a quiet suburban street. Sophie had imagined a club somewhere in the bowels of Chinatown or above a sex shop in the Cross. Not this. Not the suburbs where kids rode bikes over uneven concrete footpaths and mothers rolled prams to parks. It somehow made the idea seedier. What type of people would come looking for sex here?
Tae Hun mooched down the darkened street, pulling his tracksuit top to his chest to block out the cold. Then they were turning into the driveway of a darkened weatherboard home. It was a large block and the house, to the left of the driveway, was set back from the road. A high wooden fence protected the property from nosy neighbours and street-side eyes. Ugly metal bars protected the property’s windows at the front and side. Sophie couldn’t see any light coming from the home, and the darkness combined with the night’s chill and silence gave her the creeps.
‘Is this the right spot?’ she whispered, pressing into Tae Hun’s back.
He grabbed her hand. ‘Come with me.’
They slid through an unlocked iron gate and walked hand in hand around to the back. There, the bright welcome of a sensor light announced their presence. The backyard spewed overgrown grass and several large mounds of dirt. To the left of the yard sat a windowless concrete garage. It stretched long and narrow, the length of the yard, its flat roof home to the shadowy outline of an old lounge set. Sophie followed Tae Hun but stopped in her tracks when the door opened and a man with some serious metal in his face stepped out.
The smash of house music escaped from the shed and into the night. Then quiet again, as the man closed the door behind him. He leaned against it to light a cigarette.
Tae Hun extended his hand. The man stuck his cigarette between two rubbery lips and reached out for Tae Hun’s wrist. In a single manoeuvre he whipped Tae Hun’s arm around behind his head and twisted his torso to place him in an uncompromising headlock. Tae Hun gave a startled whimper and Sophie felt her own hand slam against her mouth. Through the shock, Sophie registered irritation. This was how people felt when
they realised too late that they’d placed themselves in the shit.
The man in the baseball shirt let out a laugh and released Tae Hun from his grip. Relief replaced tension. Tae Hun’s giggle, high-pitched, rang out next to the deep guffaw of his captor. Sophie watched, sensing the screw in her belly loosen its grip. But something in Tae Hun’s expression suggested a quiet unease. Sophie guessed that perhaps he knew there was an equally serious side to the joke.
‘This is Cho,’ Tae Hun said. ‘I told him you were curious.’
Cho smiled at Sophie. Even in the dull light provided by the sensor, Sophie could see the nicotine stains on his teeth.
‘Hi,’ she said.
Cho responded by sending his gaze down Sophie’s body and back again, coming to rest at her chest. She pulled the zipper on her parka straight up to her throat, dragging with it Cho’s greasy-eyed stare and his smirk. They eyeballed each other. Cho maintained eye contact as he leaned across to Tae Hun and spoke a few words that Sophie could not understand.
She looked over her shoulder at the house. It lay in darkness, blocking access to the relative safety of the road. The only way back to the street was through the gate at the head of the driveway. Sophie wondered whether it would be locked when she next tried to pass through.
And then Tae Hun addressed her: ‘C’mon, Sophie, let’s go.’
Cho opened the door to the shed and pulsing electronica exploded into the early morning quiet. Sophie followed Tae Hun inside, jumping away from the touch of Cho’s hand on her back. The door closed swiftly behind her. Sophie leaned against it, felt a gentle resistance. Insulation.
She breathed shallowly through her nostrils, willing herself to tolerate the scents of tobacco smoke and cheap, sweet deodoriser. Dim lighting and a smoky haze made it difficult to see. The room was carpeted and contained a mix of odd furniture. A DJ in a basketball cap mixed beats in one corner. Along the opposite wall, a trestle table housed a multitude of different bottles and plastic cups. The patrons numbered about twenty: a couple of younger guys mixed in with men of middle age, nursing drinks and smoking heavily. They sprawled across the couches and chairs, some in groups and others quite obviously alone.