‘The kids OK?’ Tom says, as we walk on.
‘I think so, missing me. I promised to talk to them tonight. What about you? Anyone waiting to hear from you?’
‘Nosy.’ His eyes are bright.
‘Coy,’ I return. ‘Or is it a secret? Is she married?’
‘Jo.’
‘It has been known,’ I say.
‘Single, as it happens.’
‘Moira?’ I ask.
‘What?’ he says.
‘There was a Moira,’ I say.
He laughs. ‘She’s a business partner, deals with Liverpool. Why are you so interested?’
‘Just making conversation,’ I say, sounding defensive, and I don’t know why, except I’m tired, my skin feels greasy and there’s a blister growing on the back of my heel.
‘Aphrodite,’ he says.
‘Seriously?’
‘She’s a model,’ he says.
‘Course she is,’ I say.
‘A hand model – watches, rings, nail varnish.’
‘Is she Greek?’ I say.
‘Brummie, actually. Lost the accent, thank God.’
I laugh, back on safer ground. Since he left, the longest time we’ve ever been together was the day of Lori’s graduation. We had dinner in Glasgow the night before, Lori and Tom, Nick and I, then went to the ceremony the next afternoon and out for cocktails. No wonder our interactions simmer with antagonism: we don’t know how to be with each other any more.
‘There’s a Cultural Relics bit,’ Tom says, looking at the sign near the park entrance. ‘We could take a look?’
Sightseeing? Is he mad?
‘What?’ he says. ‘It’ll only be a couple of quid.’
‘It’s not the money.’
‘What, then?’ He’s got his sunglasses on and I can’t see his eyes but he sounds annoyed.
‘Sightseeing?’ I say. It seems wrong, skewed. I’m perilously close to tears. I turn away from him, arms crossed, stare at the rows of scooters in the car park.
‘Hey,’ Tom says, ‘it’s just a break. We’re not meeting Shona until three. You go back, if you like. Sit in your room for the next couple of hours.’
I shrug. ‘I’ll come.’
Inside the park, on a small stage, a masked man is dressed in flowing coloured robes, thick with embroidery. Music plays, quick and jangly. The mask, surrounded by a headdress, is stylized, vivid swirls of solid colour, green and white and black and red. He jumps into the air, and twirls, kicks his legs, then strikes a pose. He opens a large fan and swipes it across his face. A clash of cymbals, and the mask disappears, replaced by another, red and black with jagged eyebrows, angry-looking. The man feints to the left, then the right. A scissor kick, another cymbal clash, and a new face.
We buy our tickets for the paying area. I read the leaflet. The park is dedicated to an ancient poet, Xue Tao. There are statues of her among the trees and her grave is here. I shiver in the heat. I don’t want to see any graves.
The path leads into an open area ringed with pavilions, landscaped with large stones, statuary and planting. Forest trees provide pools of shade. A standing stone we pass has characters carved into it, painted green. In the borders around the buildings, grasses and flowering shrubs are planted among bonsai pines. Pinnacles of rock remind me of the dribbled sand we would use to make sculptures at the beach.
Signs point to different attractions – the bamboo museum, the brocade-washing pavilion, the river-viewing tower. The tower itself is beautiful, a soaring four-storey pagoda, richly carved from deep red wood. The sculptures and fretwork are decorated with exquisite colours: white and red, green, yellow and blue.
While Tom goes exploring, I find a bench to sit on below a pergola, alongside the river. Across the murk of the water is the cityscape, the bristling ranks of skyscrapers.
The red stone balustrade at the edge of the water is ornately carved with flowers and repeated block patterns. Seed has been left along the tops of the walls and tiny birds with rusty red heads and fantails flit to peck at the grains, and fly away again. White butterflies dance in the grass.
I stretch and relax, wanting to let go of the tension lodged in my shoulders and guts.
Piped music starts coming through speakers hidden in the foliage and then a man’s voice reciting something. I pick out numbers yi, er, san. Perhaps he is listing the rules of the park, or the attractions to be seen, or some principles of poetry.
I watch the ants running hither and thither around my feet, all the appearance of random panic, though I know they are organized, carefully following trails laid by others, working for the good of the colony. Two ants carry a burden, a grain of rice or perhaps an insect egg, wrestle it to a crack in the paving and release it there.
How much do the police know about Mr Du? Suspicious, half-formed thoughts hover at the edges of my mind, grotesque gargoyles, like the dragons that guard the gates in the park: teeth and claws, leathery scales, sulphurous breath.
Why does everything have to be filtered through Peter Dunne? Can’t they give the investigation to someone who can speak English, who can deal with us directly? I think of DI Dooley and the trip to report Lori missing, the enormity of it.
An ant runs over my foot. I dash it away, stand up and walk round the corner where there is a fountain in a circular pool.
Dawn’s words echo in my head, Weirdo . . . kept asking if she had a boyfriend. The last person to see her. Did she go back there? Was Mr Du the subject she was ‘making a start’ with?
A siren loops from across the water. Then I notice a break in the noise and wonder if the traffic lights have changed because, for two seconds, the roar of engines and the percussion of horns soaks away and birdsong, with the splash of the fountain, comes to the fore. Closing my eyes, I think of home, of clear, clean air and the peace of the garden. There is no way to concentrate with this barrage of sound. It takes so much energy just to shut it out that there’s little space left for coherent thought.
On the way back we pass a tuk-tuk parked on the pavement, with fruit piled high and a set of old-fashioned scales.
‘English?’ the vendor says, with a broad smile.
‘Yes,’ Tom says.
‘London?’
‘Manchester,’ Tom says.
‘Manchester?’
‘Yes, Manchester,’ Tom says.
‘You know Jackie?’ he says brightly.
We shake our heads.
‘Jackie in London. London, yes?’
‘No,’ I say.
‘Chengdu, like?’
I have a spare leaflet in my bag, and show him.
‘Aah,’ he says sadly.
‘Have you seen her?’ I say, struggling to remember the Chinese. ‘Nǐ kàn jiàn to le ma?’
He pulls a face, shakes his head slowly. We walk on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
A cab drops us at the university, at the West Gate. When we meet Shona, she’s wearing shorts again, royal blue, patterned with small white angelfish, along with a sleeveless denim top. And the same clashing collection of bracelets and necklaces. I ask her why it’s called Sichuan Normal University.
‘A normal university is for teacher training,’ she says. She tells us it’s coming close to the end of the academic year but most courses are still running. There are a lot of courses, like hers, for international students. In her master’s class there are people from Italy, Korea, Tibet, France, America, Mexico and Thailand. Classes are taught in Chinese so they all need at least a working knowledge of Mandarin.
‘Were you always good at languages?’ I ask.
‘Sort of. My mum was from Finland so I grew up bilingual.’
At the entrance there’s an open-air arcade, three storeys high, with shops selling groceries, DVDs, accessories, then kebab and noodle stalls, a dumpling shop and restaurants. We visit all of these and distribute copies of the fliers.
Further inside the campus, trees line the avenues and provide shade in the courtyards between
the buildings – but even here it is stifling. A patina of gritty dust is silted over everything.
We take a broad avenue downhill, lined with busts of famous people: philosophers, musicians, artists, scientists and writers. Their names are in Chinese. One or two I recognize: Charles Darwin, Marie Curie.
Passing a building with rows of large sinks inside, I see ranks of vacuum flasks piled up outside.
‘The halls don’t have hot water,’ Shona says. ‘Students fetch it from here for washing.’
The blister on my heel, tight with fluid, stings with each step. My mosquito bites from the first visit to the bar are big red lumps with crusty yellow centres. The need to scratch is intense. I’m able to resist it most of the time but at night I think I do it in my sleep.
We leave leaflets in the library, the gym, the admin offices and the student canteen. Shona takes a bundle to give to her faculty. A couple of times we stop when we run into someone she knows, but neither of them has news of Lori.
Some students are splashing about in the open-air swimming-pool at the bottom of the hill. It’s so inviting. I think of Finn, of his prowess in the water. Like a seal, sleek and smooth and fast.
I miss my boys.
‘We’re in The Big Issue.’ That’s the first thing Nick says when I call. Half nine in the evening my time but it’s only half two in the afternoon there. ‘I’ll scan a copy and email it. Two-page spread. And the Guardian have published a small piece, a couple of inches. The Manchester Evening News are doing a full page tomorrow. We’ve a TV crew coming anytime now, BBC, for the local news.’
‘I wish there was some sort of coverage here,’ I say. ‘There’s still not been anything.’ A press conference seems to be the only way to grab the headlines and we haven’t a date for that yet. ‘Listen, Nick, we talked to Oliver today. That last lesson Lori did, on the Sunday night, the student was one of the people she was going to use for her photo project. And, according to Dawn, he was a bit odd.’
‘Odd in what way?’ Nick says.
I tell him.
‘Shit.’
‘I know. We’ve told Peter Dunne and insisted that we want the police to look again at this bloke.’
‘Yes, they must,’ Nick says.
‘They have interviewed him,’ I’m not sure whether I’m reassuring Nick or myself, ‘so he must have checked out all right. There’s a neighbour too, whom we haven’t seen yet. She was another hobby subject. Look, do you want me to talk to Edward about any of this?’
‘No,’ Nick says. ‘I will.’
‘Have there been any calls to the hotline?’
‘I don’t know. Edward says they check things out first, just to make sure, and pass on anything they judge to be significant.’
I hear our house phone ring.
‘I’d better get that,’ Nick says.
‘I’ll Skype the boys later.’
‘Great. Bye.’
And he’s gone.
When I Skype the boys, I feel as though someone has cut me off at the knees, thinking back to Christmas when they squabbled and Lori, slightly merry with drink, grinned and blew kisses.
Isaac stares at me reproachfully. ‘When are you coming back?’ he says.
‘Soon.’ I am deliberately vague. ‘How was the museum?’
His thundercloud lifts for a few moments, light in his eyes, as he gives me an energetic account.
‘Brilliant,’ I say.
He nods.
‘Finn’s turn,’ Nick says.
Finn is delighted to see me. ‘Mummy!’
‘Hello.’
He peers closer into the webcam. ‘Have you found Lori?’
‘I’m still looking for her.’
‘Oh. Benji ate my rocket.’
‘Ate what?’ I say.
‘From the museum.’
‘His spaceship – he chewed the nose off,’ Nick interprets.
‘Oh. Naughty dog.’
‘It might come out in his poo,’ Isaac, off screen, chips in.
Finn laughs. A rich chuckle. They all have different laughs: Finn this throaty chortle, Isaac quieter, almost a titter, breathy. And Lori: Lori’s laugh is sudden, abrupt, like a bark, but hilarious and infectious.
‘We were on telly,’ Finn says.
‘Did you see yourselves?’ I say.
‘Yes, but we were fuzzy,’ he says.
‘Daddy talked,’ Isaac says, ‘he talked about Lori—’
‘Isaac made too much noise,’ Finn says.
‘I did not.’
‘Did.’
‘OK, lads,’ Nick interrupts. ‘Let me talk to Mum now.’
‘What does he mean “fuzzy”?’ I say.
‘They blurred the boys’ faces – privacy rules apparently.’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Was it OK – the filming?’
‘Bit crazy,’ he says, ‘but they must be used to all sorts, the team that do it.’
‘I’ll try to call again tomorrow,’ I say.
They all crowd in to wave goodbye and then the screen goes black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I’m at breakfast when Tom seeks me out. ‘Any word from Peter Dunne?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, ‘but it’s only nine o’clock.’
‘He had all day yesterday to talk to Superintendent Yin.’ Tom looks tired, in spite of the fact that he’s acquired a tan since we got here. His eyes are dull, weary.
‘Ring after this, then?’ I say. ‘Are you not eating?’
‘I already did. Give me a knock when you’re ready.’
I wish Nick were here. There’s a gulf between Tom and me that can’t be bridged. The rift when he left me and Lori was so deep, so ragged, that it never really healed. Or not on my side. I’ve no idea what Tom’s perspective is on it. We’ve never spoken about it in any meaningful way. He was quite ruthless at first, unapologetic almost. I’d be weeping down the phone and he would hang up. As things settled, as it became apparent that the separation was going to be permanent, that I couldn’t win him back, I hardened my heart against him. I let all the fire of my love, jealousy and anger crystallize and chill into cold, unyielding stone. He would never hurt me again. In my own mind I belittled him, a man who couldn’t commit, a playboy, a narcissist, his only concern feeding his ego. I bit my tongue in front of Lori as Tom cherry-picked his time with her. I became an expert at tact and diplomacy.
If Nick were here I could share my thoughts and feelings about our search, perhaps even voice the fears I’m working so hard to deny, to ignore. Although Nick and I weren’t exactly communicating well before I left.
Across the room, a guest drops a glass of juice, making me jump. In the hubbub that follows I leave the table and walk to the lift. I rub at my arms to ease the gooseflesh and the shiver that runs through me.
Tom’s window looks down onto a side road and across to the buildings opposite. I think they must be offices – there are no balconies, no ever-present laundry on show.
He’s been smoking: the air stinks of tobacco. His bed is a tangled mess, strewn with clothes. Leaflets and notes cover the desk.
‘Put it on speaker,’ I tell him, as he calls the consulate.
A secretary answers and asks Tom to wait while she checks if Mr Dunne is available.
Tom leans against the edge of the desk, a pen in his hand, notepad at the ready.
I look out to where a bus, with a wooden frame like those old half-timbered Morris Minor Travellers, stops and a queue scrambles to board.
‘Mr Maddox?’ says Peter Dunne. ‘I was about to call you. I managed to speak to Superintendent Yin late yesterday afternoon and relayed the information from your email.’
‘And what did he say?’ Tom asks.
The slightest hiatus, then Peter Dunne says, ‘He is not at liberty to disclose details about the ongoing inquiry but the information you provided will be scrutinized.’
Tom grits his teeth.
‘They will talk to this student, Mr Du, again, won’t they?
’ I say.
‘I’m sure that they will do everything necessary,’ Peter Dunne says.
Which is an evasion, not an answer.
‘But I was anxious to speak to you both,’ he goes on, ‘about the press conference. I have good news. We’ve agreed to a venue in Chengdu, the Rose Hibiscus Hotel for Thursday at ten thirty a.m.’ The day after tomorrow. ‘That means it should be carried on the news throughout the rest of the day. You’re both still willing to be present?’
‘Yes,’ we answer in unison.
‘And be available for follow-up interviews should requests be made?’
‘Yes,’ Tom says. I echo him.
‘Superintendent Yin will give an initial address, outlining the police search and inviting public co-operation. We’ll then have one of you making a direct appeal in English. We’ll need to approve the wording in advance, so if you could consider that and send me something through? Nothing too long,’ he adds.
‘Missing Overseas have guidelines,’ I say. ‘We can talk to them.’
‘Excellent. Have you had any response to the leafleting?’
‘Not yet,’ I say.
‘Well, hopefully the press conference will take things to the next level and we’ll reach a significant audience.’
‘Thank God for that,’ I say to Tom, when Peter Dunne has gone. ‘I was beginning to think they might be stalling.’
Tom doesn’t speak. He takes a cigarette and lights it. ‘But they expect us to sit tight, doing fuck-all, while Superintendent Yin decides if talking to the weirdo is worth a punt.’
‘What else can we do?’
‘Go and see him,’ Tom says.
‘I don’t—’
‘Why wait?’
‘Maybe we should see what Superintendent Yin—’
‘Jo, we waited fuck knows how long to find out about the text to Shona. Now this guy and his—’
Tom’s phone rings. Anthony is downstairs. We’re leafleting outside Lori’s again.
‘Change of plan,’ Tom tells Anthony. ‘We’ll be down in a minute.’
I stare at him, wondering whether this is wise.
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