‘Do you want to go in?’ Dawn says.
There are two blocks, seven storeys high, with a courtyard in between. One building is tiled in cornflower blue, with white bands every other storey and a splurge of foliage on the roof – green shrubs and some climber frothy with purple blossoms. The other block is tiled jade green, almost turquoise. The buildings are remnants from older times, gaudy and shabby now, the grout stained. Rust marks streak down from all the metal balconies. The blocks provide splashes of colour in contrast to the skyscrapers towering round, which are dun and black, grey and brown and silver, a monochrome palette for the new century.
Around the outside at ground level there are shops. Halfway along the roadside, where we are standing, there is a gateway with an automatic barrier for cars and a small security booth.
We file after Dawn through the entryway, past the security box where the guard is eating his lunch, to the blue building. He watches us pass, expressionless.
The lift is an old-fashioned design with an outer door and an inner one like a cage that concertinas. Apprehension makes my jaw and hands tense. I flex my fingers. Every day Lori would be here, in this exact space, travelling out to work, to see her friends, coming back to rest, to sleep.
‘Was it a shock, Lori breaking up with you?’ I say.
Tom raises his eyebrows at me. Maybe I am being personal but I want to know. It may have something to do with Lori’s disappearance a few days later.
‘At the time.’ Dawn plucks at her lip. ‘But things had been up and down. Maybe I should’ve seen it coming.’ She has that rising inflection on everything she says, so it all sounds like she’s questioning, like there’s some room for doubt.
‘Was there any particular reason?’ I say.
‘Lori, she likes to party, a social life. It’s hard for me, out by the third ring road. I wanted to spend more time together, just the two of us. She didn’t like coming out there. It got a bit one-sided.’
I’ve no idea how deeply Dawn felt about Lori. I don’t know whether she is heartbroken. They’d been together just a few months.
I watch the numbers change until we reach the fifth floor and Dawn says, ‘Here we go.’
Tom pulls back the lift doors in turn and we enter the hallway. It’s dim, lit by a weak light recessed in the ceiling. I can smell cigarette smoke and spicy food.
‘This way.’ Dawn takes us to a door halfway along the hallway.
I want to knock, have Lori throw the door wide, laugh that crazy laugh with surprise at our visit, pull me into a hug. I take a breath while Dawn unlocks the door. I have to be strong.
Of course no one’s there. But standing in the space, seeing Lori’s possessions in turn, each one is like a punch, thumping home the reality of the situation. In her home, her absence is magnified. I say nothing for a few moments, my eyes roving, greedy, hungry.
A kitchen opens into the living room with a balcony at the end, looking out to the high-rises and the ring road alongside. The flat is furnished with orange plastic chairs and blue translucent plastic stools that double as tables. We’ve seen the same stools outside the snack bars along the streets. Lori’s are strewn with bits of litter, paper tissues, food wrappers, empty drinks cans. An old couch has folding tray tables on thin metal legs in front of it. There are marks on the white plaster walls, where other furniture has rubbed off the surface paint, scuff marks on the door jambs, electric wiring loose in the ceiling where the lights once were. Chunks of plaster have come away in the square archway that divides the kitchen from the small living area. Mould speckles the corners. The flooring is vinyl. A Chinese knot, large and red, hangs on the longest wall. Its shape reminds me of a Celtic cross. Pinned to the wall beside it is the photo of us all she took on the weekend before she left for Thailand.
It’s stifling. I feel sweat prick my hairline, trickle down my sides. ‘Is there air-conditioning?’ I ask Dawn.
‘It doesn’t work.’
In the corner beside the fridge there is a water cooler, a red tap and a blue one, like mine at the hotel, the settings read heat and warm but the lights beside the labels are both off.
‘She turned the water off,’ I say to Dawn.
‘We do. No point in wasting the leccy.’
She blinks rapidly, perhaps worried about whether ‘leccy’ is acceptable or too frivolous in this situation. To reassure her I leap in, ‘Makes sense.’
Above the water cooler, a noticeboard is scrawled with names and addresses, phone numbers, some in Lori’s writing, the rest in Dawn’s, probably.
Anthony hovers in the living room as we look round.
In the fridge I find tomatoes rotting, oozing liquid in the salad tray. Some beers. The crockery in the kitchen cupboard is all made of plastic or metal. I pick up one of the metal bowls – it’s very light, tin, perhaps. I remember breaking Lori’s mug. Isaac’s expression.
The small bathroom has no bath, just an open shower with a drain in the corner, a washbasin and a toilet. Large plastic wall tiles have cracked and are held together with lines of thick Sellotape. The sink is chipped around the rim, the chrome on the taps pitted with rust, the acrylic filler at the back of the basin black with mould. The mirror above is tarnished and peppered with white material. Flecks of Lori’s toothpaste. No toothbrush.
A double bed with a black tubular steel frame almost fills the bedroom. The duvet cover is patterned with chrysanthemums, perhaps once vibrant yellow and red but now faded to pale lemon and pink. Chrysanthemums are a lucky flower for the Chinese. There was an article in the in-flight magazine. Chrysanthemums and goldfish, the colour red, the numbers six, eight and nine, the Laughing Buddha.
Lori’s clothes are on an open rail opposite the end of the bed next to three stacking plastic boxes. Most are things she brought with her.
‘Wouldn’t she have taken more if it was a holiday?’ Tom says.
I look through the boxes: vest tops, pants, T-shirts, shorts, socks and a bra. Under the bed her purple Docs and some Converse.
‘Her backpack’s not here.’ Then I call to Dawn: ‘Did she have any other clothes that you can remember?’
Dawn comes in and looks at the rail, frowning. ‘Most of them are there. I can’t think of anything particular.’
‘Shoes?’ Tom says, pointing to them.
‘Her sandals. She wore them all the time.’
In Lori’s bedside drawer I find a small plastic envelope with a photocopy of her passport, a booklet with her vaccinations listed, and a paper with contact numbers. Nick persuaded her to sort this out before she set off.
Two washing lines, made of nylon rope, are strung across the tiny balcony. A small plastic whirligig with pegs hangs from one. On it are Lori’s blouse, the crinkly red and lilac one, two camisoles, underwear. All stiff and dusty.
‘She’d have taken that blouse,’ I say, ‘because it’s light and dries in no time, if she’d gone on—’ My throat catches. I swallow and look across to the taller blocks opposite. Three towers to the left are still concrete shells with a thousand blind eyes to be filled and brought to life, partly wrapped in green mesh and clad in scaffolding, cranes dipping and swinging above. Portakabins, where the migrant construction workers must live, are stacked two or three high around the edges of the site. Shirts and trousers are hanging out to dry. The towers straight ahead are completed, occupied, hundreds of windows, dozens of balconies festooned with laundry and vertical rows of air-conditioning units. To the right, at eye level more or less, runs the elevated ring road, part of the skeleton of the city. Someone is bouncing a ball, a basketball perhaps – it’s heavy enough for the sound to travel over the horns, engines and bird calls. I hear a baby crying, a reedy wail.
Fear twists in my veins. Tom touches my shoulder. ‘She’d have taken this,’ I say again.
Tom and I begin to search the lounge, looking for any valuables, her phone or purse. Her passport, even, in case the police weren’t thorough enough.
‘Please,’ I say to Anth
ony, ‘sit down.’
‘It’s OK.’ He smiles.
I don’t know if I should insist, if he’s being polite or if he’s averse to sitting on the grubby couch, with its threadbare red and green checked cover, mottled with stains. Everything is sanded with dust, despite the frequent rain. Along with the pollution from the traffic, there must be millions of particles of cement and earth and brick dust from all the building work.
Some notes lie on one of the low stools. I sift through them – her plans for teaching. Apple Balloon Cat Dog Elephant. How are you today? What is your name? Copies of a weekly timetable. I show it to Dawn.
‘Her students,’ she says. ‘She keeps a record of what they covered. Well, that was the plan.’ Dawn’s voice goes squeaky and she tugs at her hair with one hand. I have a glimpse into the life the two of them shared, Lori letting her paperwork slide. Did Dawn chide her? Dawn seems more settled, conscientious. I look at the paper: there are names and addresses blocked in with space below each entry to make notes. I work out Lori’s routine. ‘So, she’d be off Mondays and Tuesdays?’
‘That’s right.’
I put a copy of the schedule into our file.
A little bamboo bowl holds hair slides and elastic bands, scissors and pens, a friendship bracelet. ‘Phone charger,’ I say, holding up the cable, ‘but no phone.’
I look at the photo on the wall. We’re all smiling, even Isaac. ‘What about her camera?’ I ask Dawn. ‘Where does she keep it?’
‘There.’ Dawn points to the tray table. ‘She always has it handy.’
‘And her laptop?’
‘Usually around here somewhere.’
‘The police didn’t say they’d taken anything,’ Tom says, ‘so she must have.’
Clearing my throat, I keep on looking.
Tom is going through all the stuff in the box by the couch. He sits back on his heels, pushing the hair out of his eyes. ‘No phone, no passport.’
‘Why leave her charger if she was going away?’ I say. ‘And she’s hardly taken any clothes. Left stuff in the fridge to go bad.’
Tom tilts his head, raises an eyebrow.
‘OK, maybe that’s not so unusual, the food, but the rest . . .’
‘She could have forgotten the charger,’ Tom says.
I can hear Dawn on her phone, talking to someone about the meeting tonight.
Stepping back out onto the narrow balcony, I put my hands on the railing, look across to the ring road and gaze at the traffic, silvered in the dull white glare of the day. My fingers are grimy, everything rimed in the fine, gritty dust. What if she walks in now? Comes in breathless from her travels and finds us here, poring over her things, trying to work out where she’s gone. Her dad and me, Dawn and Anthony.
‘OK, so suppose she forgot the charger,’ I say, as I go inside. ‘Look what’s not here: phone, backpack, laptop, camera, passport – all those things she’d pack for a trip away.’ I know the whole holiday explanation, nearly four weeks later, looks a little thin. After so long she should be back in touch with someone, if not here in person. But what else am I to think? Tom looks at me, then leans back, his hair falling away from his face.
Before we leave, I empty the fridge of the perished food and Dawn takes it out with the other rubbish to bins on the landing. Under the sink I see cockroach powder. Two tubs of it and a pack of pink foam sponges. I’ve chucked the cloth from the sink so I break open the sponges and use one to wash out the fridge.
‘We might as well turn it off,’ Tom says.
I check the freezer section – if it’s choked up it may flood, but there isn’t much build-up of ice.
‘I’ll give you these.’ Dawn passes me the key on a fob, a metal goldfish, the body segmented so it appears to wriggle if you shake it.
There is some debate about whether Anthony should accompany us to meet Lori’s friends that evening.
‘We won’t really need a translator,’ Dawn says. ‘Everyone speaks English.’
‘That’s good,’ I say, ‘but I’m not sure we can find our way.’
Dawn says she’ll meet us at the hotel and we can get a taxi or even a bus if we walk along to the ring road.
Anthony looks a little disappointed. He offers his services once more and I decline politely. ‘Tomorrow, though, we should have the leaflets and posters. We’d like you to help us then, when we hand them out.’
I’m suddenly ravenous as we travel back to the hotel and ask Anthony to drop us at the mini-market nearby. I scour the place for something sweet and starchy, peer at the labels, searching for script I can read, try to decipher photographs. Tom exudes impatience from the doorway. I grab a packet of ‘pineapple sandwich cookies’.
Back in my room, the cookies turn out to be like fig rolls with pineapple in the middle, the coating soft, sweet and floury, like undercooked shortbread, cloying. I eat four of them with an instant coffee and feel satisfied for a while. Then queasy again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
When Dawn arrives, I show her the map Peter Dunne gave us and ask her where the bar is. She studies the map for a moment, then points. ‘Near here. This road is where we get off the bus so we walk this way.’ She traces the route. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick. ‘Or we can get a taxi,’ she says.
‘We’ll get the bus,’ Tom says, ‘be good to orient ourselves.’
‘And we’re going the other direction from Lori’s flat?’ I check.
‘That’s right. You’re in between here. It’s two stops either way.’
She guides us along the side streets past the park and to the junction where the ring road is. Tom asks about her job. She’s teaching at an English training school. ‘It’s for kids,’ she says, ‘they come after ordinary school or at the weekends. I asked for the day off today.’
‘What age are they?’ I say.
‘Four to twelve.’
‘Did you know that Lori’s visa was dodgy?’ Tom says.
Dawn stops walking. Her face flames and her fingers pinch her lower lip. ‘Kind of,’ she says. ‘She really wanted to stay and it was the only way she could do it.’
‘And the people who arranged it, did she have anything to do with them afterwards?’ Tom says.
‘No. That was it.’ Dawn signals to warn us about a scooter mounting the pavement and we hang back as the man, with a child on his lap, steers past us and parks outside a milk bar. Along this street, tree trunks, the pillars of a building and telegraph poles are all wrapped in a stretchy shiny gold material.
‘How did she find people to teach?’ I say.
‘They found her,’ Dawn says. ‘Everyone wants to speak English. We get asked all the time.’
‘And her other friends, the people we’re going to meet, are they all teachers?’ I say.
‘About half and half. Shona’s studying at the university, doing a master’s, Bradley does translation for a software company, Rosemary is a teaching assistant at a school like mine, and Oliver teaches at the petroleum university. Rosemary and Oliver are both Chinese.’
‘The petroleum university?’ I say.
‘There are loads of universities in Chengdu,’ Dawn says, ‘and some of them specialize in certain areas, like science or technology or finance.’
We wait at the lights to cross the road. There’s a marquee going up outside the shopping mall. The frame is built and the roof canopy on. I watch a man on top of a stepladder: he has a foot on either side, and he swings the ladders along underneath the tent, like a stilt walker.
Once we’ve reached the other side, there are steps up to the middle of the ring-road carriageway, where the bus runs. A woman is sweeping the bridge and a guard in a blue uniform, with a baton hanging from his belt, sits near to the ticket booth.
We offer to pay but Dawn has already slid money under the glass screen and the clerk gives her three counters in return. ‘It’s two yuan anywhere,’ Dawn says.
Twenty pence.
‘They can give change here but if you get
a bus on the street you have to give the exact money – or pay more,’ she adds.
We copy Dawn, swiping the counter on the toll gate at the bottom of the escalator to release the barrier. At the top the platform is enclosed in a transparent shelter with a curved roof. An electronic display shows when the next bus is due. I look at the route map to the side: the names are in Chinese and English. I try to memorize our stop, repeat each syllable silently. Look around for landmarks. There is the mall, and to the side of it two mirrored towers that cast shadows onto each other creating a trompe l’oeil: it appears as though there is a third ghostly black building between them.
The bus pulls in and the automatic gate opens so we can board. We make our way to the back where there are free seats. A television plays adverts for some sort of takeaway food outlet, then toothpaste.
From this viewpoint I can see the scale of construction work along the route. The base of a huge crater, the size of a city block, has been levelled, its sides banked up, a swathe of red earth. Hoardings at the far side advertise what will come, Forest Heaven Park, illustrated with an image of glitzy towers.
I think of that poster, the construction workers in New York, having lunch on a girder halfway to heaven. No safety net, no harnesses or hard hats.
Every so often a ringtone goes off and each passenger answers exactly the same way, shouting, ‘Wei?’ into their phone.
A recorded voice comes over the speakers, ‘The next stop will be . . .’ I can’t discern the destination, a string of syllables going up and down, abstract as musical notes.
I’m apprehensive about the meeting to come, these strangers who befriended my daughter, who were part of her new life. It may not be fair but I keep thinking they failed her. Failed to realize she was missing, failed to raise the alarm. The negligence or self-absorption of youth, perhaps. Or did they simply not care for her enough to worry?
The bus pulls in and I can see down a broad road below, lined with skyscrapers, gleaming in the light, choked by traffic. The horizon melts into the haze.
Half the World Away Page 12