Bad Traffic (2 page)

Standing outside the university, Jian looked gloomily at a billboard across the street. The giant image of a pretty Asian girl flanked by a black man and a white man seemed to be taunting him. It was impossible to tell what it was advertising.

The student had called a taxi for him. When it came he showed the driver a print-out teacher Delaware had made, lines of squiggles which apparently showed the address his daughter had given when she enrolled.

In the back seat, Jian took from his briefcase a slim
hardback
book. Wei Wei had sent a portrait photo to a magazine and been invited to Beijing to take part in a ‘prestigious modelling competition’. He’d forbidden it: he knew what those competitions involved. She’d thrown a sulk, and to mollify her he’d paid for this portfolio of fashion images to be made.

Before leaving home he’d scoured the house for recent pictures, and because he couldn’t find any better
alternatives
he’d bought a copy of the dumb book along. He flicked through it. In one image she posed in a tight military
uniform
, cradling a gun, legs wide apart, lipstick as red as the star on her beret. In another she was in a red qipao slit right up the thigh, and here she was in a little black dress cocking a champagne glass and a cigarette holder. The photos had captions – guff like ‘woman is beauty’ and ‘true love is
forever
’ in Chinese, and other stuff in English, the language of fashion and modernity.

He thought what a good actress she was – just from the pictures you could tell she was inhabiting each role. She’d had to do a lot of acting on the phone for all those months. But he hadn’t made it difficult for her. Their Friday night exchanges had been ritualised, absent of true
communication
. Are you well? How is college? How are your marks? How is the food? Yes, great, okay, rubbish. Only on food had they gone into any detail. She’d tell him about the strange things she was eating and the tastes she missed. He’d emphasise the importance of a good education and they’d say brisk goodbyes. Every remembered word bought a wince – what a tower of deceit.

The cab passed houses with slanting slate roofs, given a look of ruddy health by their red brick walls and wide windows. The front doors looked flimsy and none of the windows had bars, even on the ground floor. It was remarkable how much care had been lavished on the little gardens. No one seemed to be growing vegetables and no dogs were chained up. There was no litter, the trees were bushy, the pavements flat and smooth. Everything spoke of contented prosperity. But, with no streetlife – no food stalls or vendors, and not even many pedestrians – it was all rather dreary.

The cab pulled up and the driver tapped a meter. It said seventeen. Jian gave him two of the orangey-brown notes and received three chunky gold coins in return. He tried to
calculate
how much that had been in yuan. A not unreasonable thirty. No – an outrageous three hundred. Standing on the pavement, he watched the taxi pull away. Had he just been conned?

He was standing outside a row of three-storey houses. He checked the printout. Among the squiggles were digits – thirty-four, the same number displayed on a wooden panel
on the house before him. The path to the door passed a brick mounting that held rubbish bins. Odd place to put them, in the way of visitors.

He rang the bell and planned what to say to his
daughter
. He’d play it cool and ask her how she was eating. She’d apologise for stressing him out like that. She’d be impressed that he had come all this way out of paternal concern and would apologise for her unfilial behaviour. He’d be
magnanimous
. He would not get angry, not yet. The door was opened.

An unfamiliar Asian girl held the door on a chain.

Jian said, ‘
Ni hui shuo zhong wen ma?…
Do you speak Chinese?’

‘
Hui
.’ A mainlander – that was lucky.

He held the vanity book open at an image of Wei Wei
looking
dreamy with a fake butterfly in her hair.

‘
Zheige nu’hai zhu zai zher ma?
… Does this girl live here?’

‘No.’

‘Did she live here?’

‘Yes. A long time ago.’

‘I’m trying to trace her. She’s missing.’

He flashed his PSB namecard. The logo of Tian’anmen Gate was in red above embossed black characters. He’d had them specially made, in thicker card than the government issued.

‘Come in.’

He had said it out loud, just like that, without thinking. Missing. Now the heavy word clattered round inside his head.

The hallway was carpeted. He bent to take his shoes off but she told him not to bother and led him past bicycles into a cramped kitchen. On a plate sat some half-eaten bread and paste dish.

‘I interrupted your dinner.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘What is that?’

‘Pizza.’

‘Is it tasty?’

‘It’s simple to cook.’

‘You eat with a knife and fork. That’s clever.’

‘It’s easy.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Song.’

The only time Wei Wei had ever talked about her flatmates was to call a certain Song ‘a top-class bitch’. The girl wore glasses and had bad skin but there was a good figure beneath the jeans and jumper. Her accent was Beijing, a croaky ‘r’ inflection at the end of words. She seemed okay to him.

‘When did Wei Wei live here?’

‘She moved in in September of last year, and she moved out again after three months.’

‘Did she say where she was going?’

‘No. She moved out in secret, when we were all at college.’

‘She didn’t leave a note?’

‘No. She ran away owing a lot of rent. Three hundred and sixty pounds.’

‘Did she leave anything?’

‘We put it in a box. I’ll get it.’

Song left the dingy kitchen. Jian opened drawers. He found food in the cupboards, bottles under the sink. A cork noticeboard held postcards, bills, restaurant flyers,
timetables
, phone numbers and the like. A magazine on the table had glossy images of good-looking people on the cover, and inside were bad photos of these people doing ordinary things, shopping or just walking in the street. Good-quality paper, though. So much of detective work was about
spotting
things that didn’t quite fit – but he couldn’t do that here, where everything was strange to him. The girl returned with a cardboard box.

‘This is the stuff she left. You’re lucky we haven’t thrown it away.’

Books, pens, folders – she’d left behind everything
associated
with her course. Even though she was writing in
English
, he still recognised her slapdash hand. In notebook margins she had doodled elaborate question marks, turning them into spirals and swirls. Across the cover of a textbook she had scrawled ‘dull dull dull’, and that symbol he hoped she’d grown out of, a flower with a happy face. He put the relics carefully into his suitcase.

‘Is this an official investigation? You’re going to struggle without a translator.’

He said, ‘You didn’t like her.’

‘She never talked to us, she was hardly even civil. Except when my boyfriend came round. An English boy. Then she’d put make-up on and walk round in a nightdress. She was flower crazy.’ A flirt. ‘She liked to show that her English was better than mine, so she used long words to him. I think she looked them up in the dictionary before coming in.’

She slopped the remains of the pizza into a bin and dropped the plate into the sink with an irritable clatter. There was a catch in her voice as she said, ‘He kissed her.’

‘I see. And?’

‘And that was the kind of person she was. She was trouble.’

‘I need to see her old room.’

‘We got someone in as soon as we realised she wasn’t
coming
back. Mili is in there now.’

‘I have to have a look around.’

‘Mili doesn’t like anyone going in there.’

‘If you fail to co-operate with the investigation, that will be noted in my report.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘Be quick.’

She led him up two sets of stairs. It didn’t feel right to be walking on carpet in shoes. The walls were wallpapered and the lights had tasselled shades. It was civilised and girly and he felt like a trespasser. Song knocked on a door and, when there was no reply, opened it.

Plastic figurines were displayed on shelves and posters of Japanese cartoon characters covered the walls. He’d
imagined
there would be something of his daughter left, some lingering presence, but of course there was nothing. He’d fooled himself. He’d intended to treat the place as a crime scene but what had really motivated him was a pilgrim’s crude need to see.

But now he was here, he had to try. The main light was dim, so he replaced it with the much brighter bulb from the hallway. He got down on all fours and examined the carpet.

‘Please be quick. Mili might come home any minute.’

The bed was on a baseboard on castors. He tried to peer under it but the bottom was only a few centimetres off the floor. He shifted a bedside table and a robot-shaped alarm clock fell off. Song watched him from the doorway as he dragged the bed away.

‘You’re a northeasterner, aren’t you, like her? Which city?’

‘Qitaihe.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘It’s a pearl.’

Qitaihe might be home but Jian had no illusions. It was a town of dour apartments built around state-owned
factories
and surrounded by freezing wilderness. Time was you could at least make an honest living, but now the hurricane of capitalism was sweeping the country, the inefficient factories were closing, and workers who’d been
promised
an iron rice bowl – a job for life – were getting thrown onto the street. The biggest industry was the prison, whose
inmates made counterfeit watches for the entrepreneurs of the People’s Liberation Army. It was a mean town and getting meaner.

The carpet below the bed was dusty and pale. What filthy things they were, just a dirt trap, and what a strange idea to fill your house with them, then not even take your shoes off. The thing must be full of evidence, dust and hair, and who knew what else. Something gleamed by the skirting board. He slipped it in his pocket while the girl talked on.

‘Have you heard of Scotland?’

‘It’s in England.’

‘It’s the name for the northern area. It’s cold and wild, like the northeast. Scottish people are fierce and direct, they make good friends and terrible enemies, and they like drinking and they’re not so good at business. Just like
northeasterners
in China.’

‘People from cold places are all the same.’

He found a black hair and pulled it straight. It ran from his fingers to his elbow, and it was half bleached. Wei Wei had thick, strong hair. He wrapped it round his finger and pulled it tight so that it caused pain and redness, and it didn’t break. It was his daughter’s, he was sure of it. When he unwound the hair it left a white striation with a blush either side. He laid it between pages in her vanity book.

‘What kind of trouble is she in?’

‘I cannot divulge that information.’

‘How come you’re on your own?’

‘My colleagues are following other lines of inquiry.’

He put the bed and table back and changed the bulbs and closed the door on the room and the girl was visibly relieved.

‘I really think you’re going to need a translator.’

‘Where’s your toilet?’

The bathroom was cluttered, with pebbles, candles and shells among all the bottles and vials. The showerhead was above the bath, like in a hotel. He sat on the lowered toilet seat and pulled out his find.

A pewter jewellery box, oval, big enough for a few rings. An image of a phoenix was etched on the lid. It was a fake antique, made in a factory on the outskirts of Shenzhen, and aged by being left in strong tea. He knew because the
stallholder
had told him all about it when he’d tried to buy it. The stallholder had insisted that the public security man take this thing of little value for free, as he himself could not in all honesty receive money for such a trifle from an esteemed official. Jian had given it to his daughter before she left for England. She’d said it would prove very useful, that she’d keep her best earrings in it.

The phoenix was depicted at the moment of rebirth. The flames were crudely sketched, but the bird was well done, all its feathers delineated, its neck craning away from the fire, wings spreading. So what it was a fake? Someone had taken a lot of care to scratch the picture into the metal. Or maybe they did it with lasers, the way they carved signature chops.

The lid fitted too tight. It would take nimble fingernails to prise off, his own were too thick. He found nail clippers and used the nail-file attachment as a lever.

Inside the box were two pink pills, a half-smoked
handmade
cigarette and a package of glossy paper, a couple of centimetres long. He unfolded the package into a flat square. Half a gram or so of white powder gathered in the creases. Drugs. It wasn’t even a surprise.

Jian had suspected Wei Wei was doing drugs back home. She’d go to that sleazy YES! disco dressed up like a tramp, and get up to who knew what with the disreputable elements that hung round there. He’d tried to get the place shut down on grounds of moral pollution, but no chance of that – the proprietor also owned a sauna where you could get a massage and something else, and city bureaucrats got their
something
else for free. He’d personally overseen the beating-up of the club’s drug dealers – and she’d got mad because they were friends.

He’d hoped a stint at a foreign college would knock some sense into her. And look what she’d done. She’d dropped out of her course, taken drugs, argued with that sensible girl and run away from this comfy house. She’d lied to him for months on end, and now who knew where she had gone and what trouble she’d got herself into. He wanted to punch something in his frustration. Damn her that she caused him such hurt.

The handmade cigarette was four centimetres long with a blackened end. He split it, revealing crispy shreds of
tobacco
and green fragments of plant matter. It was too old to smell, but presumably it was dope. Rolled-up paper had been inserted to act as a filter. He slid it out with the nail file and uncurled it.

The paper was glossy and white. It had two straight edges and two rough, showing it had been ripped from the
corner
of something, perhaps a magazine or book cover. It
was unmarked except for a curling red line, part of a larger design, possibly a letter.

Jian put the paper in his namecard holder and dropped the rest of the cigarette and the pills and the powder into the toilet and flushed it. The sound awakened a response, and he remembered he needed a shit. He normally took a dump every morning, and his regularity was reassuring to him, but of course now, with the time difference, and staying up for hours, his system was out of whack.

The porcelain was unpleasantly cold. He hadn’t used Western toilets much. More and more, he saw them around, but he stuck with what he knew, the squat variety. He
realised
that other bare arses had sat here recently, including that of the fetching Song. A strange intimacy to share.

So his daughter had moved here in September of last year. She’d attended her course for three weeks and she’d lived in this house for three months. In December she’d run away to save herself from paying rent. It was March now. So what was she doing between dropping out and leaving here? And why did she drop out so quickly? And what had she been doing for the many months that she’d lied to him? And what had happened to her now? That was a lot of questions, but of course only one mattered.

There was no toilet paper bin by the loo, so he wrapped the used sheets in clean sheets and put them in the only bin he could see, under the sink. His turd was not the usual
colour
and it took two flushes to get it away.

Back in the kitchen, Song was tackling the washing-up. He guessed his presence had made her self-conscious about it. He didn’t want to leave. Where would he go? Who else could he to talk to?

Did Wei Wei use a knife and fork?

‘I guess.’

He’d never seen that, didn’t know she was capable of it.

‘What did your boyfriend tell you she said to him?’

‘Ex-boyfriend. We split up. What are you studying, oh that is so interesting, tell me more. The importance of – what was her catchphrase? Grace. How she wanted to live like an
artist
. She got it all out of magazines. She was a silly country girl desperate to look sophisticated. Now I’ve got all upset again.’ The washing-up gloves made decisive slaps as she took them off. She wiped a tear away. ‘I wish she’d stayed at home.’

‘What else do you remember? What else?’

‘She once said how sick she was of oily Cantonese muck and how she wanted proper Chinese food.’

That seemed odd. He did not remember her saying the same to him.

‘Where would she get Cantonese food?’

‘She usually had takeout.’

‘Usually?’ She had told him she was cooking for herself. Even about the food, then, she had been lying. ‘So who eats takeout and complains about it?’

Jian’s eyes were drawn to the restaurant flyers on the
corkboard
. A couple were for pizza places, with shocking
pictures
of the lurid things. He answered his own question. ‘Waitresses. She worked in a restaurant.’

‘That would make sense.’

He could see it. The course had bored her stupid, so she’d stopped attending. Fearing that he’d stop her allowance, she hadn’t told him. Needing to do something, she’d got a job in a restaurant. It was a good supposition. He was excited, the detective in him exalted at leads, and while there were leads there was hope.

‘There can’t be many Chinese restaurants.’

‘No, they’re everywhere. English people like Chinese food.’

Jian took the flyers down and picked out the ones with Chinese characters on. The flyer for the Wild Crane was flimsy and yellow with a green bamboo design on the cover. He put it aside. The second was glossier, with thicker paper. On the cover a stylised image of a pink lotus flower hung over the name, The Floating Lotus, written in fluid running script. Inside was a long list of dishes, and on the back an address. Jian took out the slip of roach paper from the drugs cigarette and placed it against the bottom right-hand corner of the back page. It was a match, with the red line the
bottom
curl of the number nine, the last digit of the restaurant telephone number.

‘I’m taking this,’ he said. ‘Thank you for your co-operation.’