CHERUB: People's Republic (5 page)

5. NOODLE

It was a quarter to eight, but the day felt old already. Ning sat in the remotest corner of a food court, less than a kilometre from her school. The place ached with pastel shades and newness, but had never caught on. Seven of the ten food stands had gone bust and the only regular customers were high school kids, who liked the deserted space because they could hang out for hours without getting moved on.

The high-schoolers put huge effort into looking cool. They had dyed hair, carried fake designer bags and wore leather jackets over their school sweatshirts. Ning watched one lad showing off a new mobile, before it got snatched and thrown about.

But the conversations Ning caught were hardly different to her eleven-year-old classmates’: exams, teachers, TV. They made Ning feel that the future held nothing but more of the same. Depressed, she sat with her head on a plastic tray, while her deep-fried shrimp bun congealed.

She tried keeping her mind blank, but that’s tough when you’re troubled and getting in deeper. Miss Xu’s rooms were privately owned and had no connection to Ning’s state-run school. But while she faced no consequences at school, she’d suffer a huge loss of face arriving in class less than an hour after storming off so dramatically. Also, Ning didn’t have her books or uniform and to make matters worse it was parents’ day, which she’d been dreading for weeks.

Parents’ day was a huge deal. Mums, dads and grandparents toured the school in the morning, looking at displays of work and listening to class presentations. In the afternoon, parents gathered in the assembly hall to hear lengthy speeches by the headmistress and school’s communist party representative, followed by a stage show with a small role for every child in the school.

For Ning, the best thing about parents’ day was that hers never turned up. Her stepfather Chaoxiang ran a large business and was always too busy to attend, while her stepmother Ingrid was an Englishwoman who preferred to stay home with vodka and badly dubbed American cop shows.

But the fact Ning’s step-parents weren’t attending didn’t excuse her from having to dress up in tights and ballet pumps and clomp her way through a twelve-minute routine, lined up with girls who were mostly half her size.

Her dad would yell at her for what she’d already done, so how much worse would it get if she skipped a day’s school as well?

Ning’s eyes glazed as the high school kids started moving off for the beginning of school. She began to daydream, imagining some high school punk starting to flirt with her and taking her on his moped. Or hanging out in his room, listening to really loud music. Maybe they’d smoke some weed.

She liked the thought of causing a huge scandal, with everyone in her class hearing that she’d been busted by cops, with a cute, stoned, sixteen-year-old riding a stolen moped.

By God, that would freak everyone out!

But it wouldn’t happen. Cute guys always went for skinny rakes like Xifeng, for starters. Ning sat up, feeling ugly and wondering how to pass the hours. She’d have to stay off the main streets because the cops would pick her up. But she needed to buy a book or sneak into a cinema, otherwise she’d die of boredom. Or maybe the best thing would be to call her dad and get it over with. He might not be so mad if she got her side of the story in first.

Ning slid a little Samsung out of her coat pocket. She’d switched it to silent in case her school rang. She half expected to find missed calls, but there was just a single text message from a boy in her class called Qiang:
Ms Xu has packed all your things and put them in the lobby. At least if your dad beats your face you can’t get any uglier!

Qiang was a troublemaker. He could be hilarious but he was cruel to the weaker boys. Ning didn’t exactly like him, but at least he wasn’t a zombie like most of the others in her class.

Ning had her father programmed in as hotkey three. She paused for a moment to get her story straight. If Ning caught her father in a good mood and played things right, she could get away with a lot.

She’d decided to make out that it wasn’t a big deal. She’d say she’d been in a fight.
Miss Xu has packed my things and says it’s best if I leave. Could you send one of our drivers to pick me up?
Then if Miss Xu told a different story later on, she could say that the crazy old biddy was angry because she’d lost a paying customer.

Ning took a deep breath before holding down the number three. She almost chickened out and cancelled the call, but nobody answered anyway.

‘
Welcome to China Mobile voice messaging. Please leave a message after the tone
.’

Ning didn’t know what to say and hung up. As she dropped the phone inside her jacket she saw a music teacher from her school walk up to one of the counters. Mr Shen was slender and still in his twenties. He wore jeans, with a white shirt and a thin tie with piano keys down it.

Ning looked about, wondering whether to hide, but Mr Shen only seemed interested in buying noodles, so she stayed in her seat but turned slightly towards the wall.

Unfortunately, as Mr Shen turned to leave the man on the noodle counter pointed Ning out and spoke loudly. ‘Is she one of yours?’

Mr Shen had never taught Ning. He shook his head and told the noodle man that he taught at a lower school, for which Ning was too big. Ning was relieved, but the teacher’s brain made a connection a quarter-second before he committed to the escalator. After a wobbly spin on food-court tiles, Mr Shen moved towards Ning with his scrawny neck stooped like some curious bird.

‘Fu Ning?’ he said, uncertainly. ‘Why aren’t you in class?’

Ning considered running away. Mr Shen looked neither tough nor fast, especially with a steaming tub of noodles in one hand. Maybe she could dodge between tables and jump down the escalator. Or even charge Mr Shen down and surprise him with her strength. But then what? What would she do all day? Where would she go?

Ning was eleven years old and knew she could only push things so far. Getting kicked out by Miss Xu would make her dad angry. But assaulting a teacher would mean serious trouble with the school authority and this was beyond the limit of Ning’s courage.

She stared at Mr Shen and shrugged. ‘I just didn’t feel like going today.’

‘Me neither,’ Mr Shen said, as he invited himself to join Ning at the table.

Ning watched the steam rise from the noodle pot, as Mr Shen scooped a hot mouthful with his chopsticks. Most teachers at Ning’s school had a strict
do as I say
attitude. Sitting down to talk was radical.

‘Don’t you have to be in school?’ Ning asked.

Mr Shen laughed. ‘I think
I
should be questioning. But since you ask, I teach music so I start later and do individual lessons until nine p.m. I’m early today, because I must set up the main hall and prepare the band for the afternoon show.’

Ning had hardly touched her bun and the smell of noodles made her feel hungry.

‘Why couldn’t you face school?’

Ning shrugged. ‘I hate all this memorising for exams. And for parents’ day I’ve got to dress up like a cat and do a stupid dance, and I’m
so
much bigger than the other girls.’

Mr Shen stifled a smile, but then spoke more firmly. ‘What will you become if you can’t pass exams?’

‘Rock star,’ Ning said.

‘I didn’t know you played an instrument.’

Ning felt like she’d been caught out. ‘I don’t … I mean, I’ll be a singer or something.’

Mr Shen had briefly seemed, if not exactly cool, then at least more relaxed than most older teachers. But he now gave Ning a stern look.

‘You must be careful,’ Mr Shen began. ‘I can see from how you dress that you take in many western influences, from television and music. But in the West there is lax discipline. If you try and play the rebel here, the school board will classify you as mentally defective. You will be sent to reform school and your parents get no say in the matter.

‘I worked in one of those places when I was a student teacher, and believe me they’re tough. I saw boys arrive, swaggering like gods. But their heads were shaved, they were given no heat or blankets in winter and their diet was reduced to cold broth. Their spirits were broken most effectively.’

Ning had heard fifty versions of this lecture. She’d spent her early childhood in an orphanage and four years at an elite sporting academy. Monotonous days at Lower School Eighteen drained her sprit, but it was far from the worst place she’d been.

‘I know what I
don’t
want to do with my life, but I don’t really know what I do want,’ Ning said thoughtfully.

She looked at Mr Shen, hoping for wisdom, but he felt he’d absolved all responsibility with his lecture, and now his mind was focused on scoffing noodles and the afternoon concert.

6. FACE

Ning sat on a stool behind a privacy curtain. She was dressed in a cat costume: black leotard and leggings, with a pointy-eared hat on the floor between her unshod feet. Her boots and regular clothes were in a mound on the floor, and there were identically dressed but smaller girls on all sides, shrill with pre-show nerves.

Ning grabbed her boot and tipped out the mobile she’d dropped inside for safe keeping. It was against the rules to call during school time, but she was desperate to get in touch with her stepfather.

It wasn’t unusual that he hadn’t replied. He’d often fly out of the province on business, or spend a day at one of his discount stores in the countryside, where mobile reception could be poor. But she’d also left messages with her father’s secretary, who’d never previously failed to return a call.

Dandong was a rapidly growing city. Services sometimes crashed under the strain, and Ning suspected a fault with the telephone network. But she was getting anxious because she’d been kicked out of the dormitory and had nowhere to go when the parents’ day show ended.

Ning’s step-parents lived twenty kilometres out of the city. No buses went out that far. She barely had enough money for a taxi and drivers were always reluctant to drive so far out. And even if she did make it home, she didn’t have a house key. Her stepfather would still be at work, the housekeeper would have finished for the day and the chances of her stepmother being awake were no better than fifty-fifty.

Daiyu straddled piles of clothes, heading towards Ning. ‘They’ll take your phone if they see you,’ she warned.

‘Am I speaking to you?’ Ning snapped.

Daiyu seemed thrilled to be a cat. Her slim body suited a leotard, she kept swinging the stuffed tail sewn to her bum, while her face was thick with eyeliner, lipgloss, glitter spray and nylon whiskers.

‘I don’t care if you’re speaking to me or not,’ Daiyu said, tilting her head and cracking a sarcastic smile. ‘But
everyone
else has had their make-up done. Mrs Feng is waiting for you. So you can either go and have make-up like a normal person, or you can make one of your big scenes. I don’t care either way.’

Ning dropped her phone back into her boot and almost tripped on her swinging tail as she stood. Her own costume was back at the dormitory and rather than letting Ning out to retrieve it, her teacher made her wear a spare cat suit that was far too small. The leg and ankle cuffs stopped at least ten centimetres off the mark. Ning was getting pinched under the armpits and had a horrible feeling that the arse wouldn’t withstand too much prancing about on stage.

The classroom had been divided with a curtain so that the girls could change in privacy, but getting made up involved a trip to the other side. As Ning pushed through the drapes the boys in her class erupted with laughter.

‘It’s Catzilla!’ one shouted.

‘Freak of nature,’ said another, while Qiang made
boom-boom
noises as if Ning was shaking the floor.

The most annoying part was that while the girls had to dress up like idiots, the boys were doing a basketball display in the tracksuits that they wore for PE.

‘Go home and screw your mothers,’ Ning said, as she booted the classroom door. ‘I wouldn’t mind but I’m
better
at basketball than any of you.’

‘Meow!’ one wag said.

Mrs Feng was a professional make-up artist, and the mother of a girl in another class. She’d set up at a folding table, parked beside the rows of lockers in the broad hallway that ran through the centre of the school. The space was deserted, but the sound of little kids singing wafted from the parents’ day show taking place in the main hall.

‘I don’t want too much gunk,’ Ning said, as she sat on a stool. ‘That stuff makes me itchy.’

‘You
must
be Ning,’ Mrs Feng said.

Ning liked the way that Mrs Feng pronounced her name like some strange and terrible disease, but joy was short-lived because Mrs Feng switched on a powerful make-up lamp and began applying foundation with a cotton wool pad.

‘What’s that?’ Ning asked, as her torturer homed in on her nose with a brush and a small metal tube.

‘Look up! Up at the ceiling,’ Mrs Feng ordered. ‘It’s glue for your whiskers. Don’t tug them or they’ll fall off.’