Bad Traffic (27 page)

Wei Wei woke. Her blackout had been a dreamless pit, and she had not yet fully crawled out of it. Her mind was slow and memory hazy.

She lay on a mattress, facing faded wallpaper. Over the regular pattern of repeated flowers a second design of
random
blotches of mould was imposing itself, and soon the mould would win. Her attention groped outwards. The thin mattress had no sheet or pillow. It lay on a wooden floor and there was no other furniture in the drab room.

She knew she was in a lot of trouble and ought to do something about it. But mental effort was a terrible strain – she was pulling a dead weight that wanted to drag her back to the pit. First, it was necessary to be aware that she had been drugged. She knew all about strange states brought on by chemicals, the trick was to know when the drug was
talking
. Just because she did not feel alarm did not mean the situation did not merit it.

Black Fort lay behind her, spooning, and she grew aware of his murmuring voice. He seemed to be talking half to himself.

‘That – what you saw – that wasn’t anybody’s fault. These things happen. It was just bad luck. Teething trouble. Too many of them maybe… customs delays… whatever.’

His hands dabbled in her hair.

‘It’s a headache to sort out, but once the route is in place the money rolls in. There is so much money in it. More than drugs, more than girls. There’s money in it like you wouldn’t
believe. I can’t tell you how excited I am. I’m going to be
big-time
. Premier league.’

Often she had lain with him in the dark and listened to his dreams and ambitions, stated in a low and level tone, just like this. She mumbled his name. He started to kiss her neck. He always started around there or along the jaw, a
preliminary
circling before tackling the lips.

‘I wanted to tell you. I wasn’t excited just for me. For both of us. I had so many plans.’

She said, ‘Love you.’

‘I love you too. Love your skin, love the way you move, your eyes, tits, everything. So it’s such a pity I have to do this.’ He ran a hand across her breasts. ‘Tell me your Hotmail password.’

‘What?’

His fingers tapped out the syllables on her cheek as he said, ‘Tell me your password.’

She felt him slipping off her trainers and socks. The mould on the wallpaper came into focus. She had always been quick to feel disgust and it came now. Fear and despair followed. Emotions were beginning to return, she was re-inhabiting herself.

‘Why?’

‘You can’t just disappear. Not with that influential daddy. I don’t want some Chinese cop fretting, making calls, kicking off investigations. I figure on sending Daddy emails from your account. Sorry I didn’t ring, my phone is playing up, weather is this, my marks are this, the food is rubbish. I like emailing, it’s cheaper, let’s do it like this from now on. Only need a
couple
of months, I’d say – long enough to cover all traces, but you know what? I really don’t think he’ll ever notice.’

He wrapped tape around her ankles.

‘I won’t help you. You want to kill me.’

He whispered into her ear. ‘I don’t own a gambling club. It’s something else. There are girls there. These girls, they do okay, but first they need persuading. They need to be broken.’

He bit down hard on her earlobe and she cried out.

‘I know a lot of ways to persuade people. You’ll agree to whatever I want. You’ll give me your password.’

The pain blew through her befuddlement.

She said. ‘I won’t help. I won’t help. Please, just let me go. Let me go and I won’t say anything. I promise. Why? Please. Darling. Baby. No.’

He taped her wrists together behind her back and ran tape from there to her ankles. She was trussed up like a fowl. ‘You know the first thing we do when we break someone?’

He slid a gag over her mouth and fixed it carefully.

‘We give them time think about it.’ He planted a kiss on her nose and left the room.

As the drug wore off, the pain in her jaw grew bothersome. Despair stole over her but she pulled herself out of it by
trying
to think practically. There was no give in the tape, but she discovered it was possible to shift herself by small degrees if she lay on her side and wriggled. She slid off the mattress and experimented, moving around the room, and gritting her teeth when she banged her head or shoulder. The only break in the wall was a plug socket and she could not think of any way to make it serve her. There were no useful splinters
jutting
out of the floor or the skirting board.

It occurred to her that there was a great deal she needed to think about, primarily what she could say to make him change his mind. But these musings led to others, distressing or
irrelevant
, such as how this could happen, what could have made him like this, how ridiculous she was. The situation could not be as simple as it looked. It was impossible to accept, for so many reasons. How could she fall for such a man? How could her instinct be so wrong? How could a man who had loved her do this? So in her mind it grew many complications. He had gone temporarily mad, was being manipulated or
blackmailed
, had been replaced by an evil twin or doppelganger. Perhaps this was some kind of test.

As the hours stretched on, her mind ran over and over the same territory, and she grew irritated with herself. She was tired and thirsty. Her mental and physical labours began to look pointless. There was only waiting and discomfort. Subtle signs convinced her that a rat was in the room, and she
began to listen out for it. She drifted into troubled sleep. When she woke the gag was like gravel in her dry mouth and the pain in her jaw insistent.

A moth settled low on the wall and it was interesting to watch. There was something like a silver dust on its wings, she had not noticed that about moths before. She passed into a light-headed state of acceptance and clarity. He was a cold-hearted killer and she a silly little girl. She’d lived under a set of foolish illusions and was now paying a price. What shit she talked, believed, did. It was a shame that she was not to be given a chance to redeem herself. She had made a mess of a great many things.

She believed she heard voices and engines outside. She seemed to hear a man call, ‘Chinky dinkies! Let’s be
having
you.’ It was incredible that there were real people, just out there beyond the window. She must be clever and find some way to use this. She forced her way towards the
window
and made as much noise as she could by banging her head and knees against the wall. But the vehicles departed, and she was left alone to her well of fear and pain, tired and defeated.

Her thoughts grew impossible to control. Sometimes she wanted to giggle. The fact that the password he was after was his own name, for example, could be seen as drily amusing. She thought about her mother and her father and listed in her head all the things that she wanted to do. It struck her that many interesting thoughts had occurred to her and maybe this was just one of them. There were more rats now, though they were cunning enough to stay out of view.

Aches and pains and the rage in her throat made it
impossible
to complete a thought, though many were begun. Each minute was tediously the same, a cycle of pain, despair, hope, worry, thirst, exhausting and unstoppable. She wet
herself, and was annoyed that she had not done so away from the mattress. She began to black out, for a few
minutes
at a stretch. Waking, and realising where she was, was awful, each time worse than the last. Once she thrashed furiously, and banged her head on the wall, first by
accident
, then deliberately.

She watched the wallpaper darken. Another night was coming, perhaps her third. She slipped from nightmare to reality and back again. The floor was thronged with rats, a great sea of them writhed, if she slept they would gnaw her. Her stupefied gaze took in a slither of moon, mocking
shadows
, a phone smeared with blood, a curlicue of hanging wallpaper, a pair of basketball shoes. Her eyes closed and coloured shapes ebbed and flowed. Her eyes opened, and the shoes were still there. Black Fort helped her up, slipped down her gag and poured water between her flaking lips.

Wei Wei leaned against the wall with her mouth open, and water splashed over her chin. When she began to choke, instinct brought forth effort, and she coughed and
swallowed
. Her stomach tightened as the water hit it, and it was a surprise to her that her body still had the strength to manage that response.

He held her head steady as she drank. That soothing trickle was like a thread sewing her back together again. As her senses gathered, she grew aware of moonlight filtering through the window, and saw in its pale glow a
dragon-shaped
pendant of green jade. She knew it well, had often rubbed it. His face above held no expression, and she observed the familiar line of the jaw and the birthmark. Her eyes were always drawn to that mark – it made his face more interesting. She had tried to make him see and he never understood. His skin was soft and clear. She wondered at her own mind, that it could bring up these irrelevancies, and reminded herself that he was not her lover but her torturer.

Hot fluid touched her lips and a metal spoon tinked against her teeth. Perhaps he was trying to poison her. She clamped her mouth shut and wrenched her head away and the liquid dribbled down her neck.

‘It’s soup,’ he said, and showed her the polystyrene cup. She licked her lips and tasted tomato. Patiently he tried again and this time she let the spoon enter and tip. Creamy smoothness filled her mouth.

‘Okay, here it comes again. Open. Careful. Slowly. There we go.’

Her spirits stirred. He spoonfed her so tenderly that the intoxicating thought grew that things were back to how they were – perhaps, after all, he was the man she knew. It was such a delicious hypothesis that she did not dare test it until the cup was finished.

‘Let me go.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Please.’

‘I told you, I can’t. Do you want a cigarette? Last meal and a last smoke. I figure it’s the least I can offer.’

‘Last? Oh, please.’ She coughed. It was not easy to talk, her words seemed to take her breath away with them. Hot tears welled. It was better when she was numb.

‘I guess not. Then we’ll get on.’

He laid the spoon down between a candle and a little plastic bottle shaped like a lemon. Next went a
hypodermic
needle in a transparent plastic cover, a blue packet of cotton balls and a baggie of beige powder. He laid it all out neatly, in two rows, like instruments in a hospital.

He held an oblong of white card up to her face. The strain of her eyes refocusing hurt. She made out her own surname, Ma, under the PSB logo of Tian’anmen Gate. It was her father’s namecard.

‘He’s dead.’

He struck a match and lit the card and held it by the corner. She watched Tian’anmen blacken and curl, then the name.

‘He got here very quickly. I guess you managed to call him after all. Bad luck for him.’

With the flaming card he lit the candle. He shook the card and the flame went out and black flakes swirled. He
dribbled
wax onto the windowsill and stood the candle in it.

‘He drowned in a lake.’

He squirted drops of liquid from the lemon-shaped bottle into the spoon, then added powder from the baggie. His movements were precise and patient, as ever.

‘So no need to get your password out of you. It doesn’t matter any more.’

He moved the bottom of the spoon over the candle flame and the metal glinted, and shadows on the walls loomed and receded.

‘When things are messy, I feel itchy. You know that
feeling
? Maybe you don’t.’ His voice was as steady as his hand. ‘Very uncomfortable.’ He pinched cotton off a cotton-wool ball, rolled it between his fingers, and dropped it in the spoon. ‘Itchy,’ he repeated.

Focusing her energies, she stumbled through a prepared statement – ‘I beg you, think about what you’re doing and remember all the good times we had and trust me as I’ve… trust me as I trust you.’

‘Huh?’

She realised she had addressed him in Mandarin and began to repeat herself in English. He hit her with an open palm. ‘You don’t say anything. Every word I hit you again.’ Finally his voice had an edge to it. ‘You fucked this all up, not me. All I’m doing is cleaning up.’

She lay and sobbed and watched him put the needle of the hypodermic against the cotton. He pulled the plunger, held the syringe upright and tapped it.

‘A hot shot. Smack and strychnine. You’ll just float away.’

He freed her ankles and pulled her legs straight and she gasped as pins and needles prickled in her hips and thighs. Her feet were very pale and the paint on the toenails was chipped. There was so little feeling in them, it was quite possible they were someone else’s. She mustered all her
strength and kicked out at him, but he batted her legs aside with ease.

‘No. No.’

He pulled one leg of her jeans up and tied a belt around her calf. She could see her flesh constricting but hardly felt the squeeze. She drew the other leg back, lashed out and caught him across the face. He reeled and dropped the syringe. She pulled her other leg out from under him and rolled off the mattress onto her stomach. She groped for the syringe with a foot. She had the idea that she could grab it between her feet and stab him with it.

He straddled her, grabbed a hank of hair and yanked her head back.

‘Move again and I smack your face into the floor.’

She felt him lean back. He was retrieving the syringe. She tried to wriggle, but he held her fast between his thighs.

Waiting for the prick of the needle, her senses seemed to sharpen, and she considered the immense rich detail of the scene – the grain of the wood on the floor, the wallpaper design, the splotches of mould. An oblong of yellow light flitted across the wall, as someone outside swept a torch across the face of the house. She heard running feet, then the sound of glass smashing, then the rumble of an
explosion
, just beneath her. Still the jab did not come.

Black Fort clambered off her and went to the window. She rolled over and laid her cheek against cold wood. What a stupid little girl she was. She realised she was going to die miserable and desperate, and this seemed a shame. A
second
explosion thundered, this one closer. Black Fort cursed and sprinted out. She raised her head.