Li handed her a scotch. It was her third. On an empty stomach. And they were large ones. They were all feeling the effects of fatigue and stress, emotionally drained, physically tired. And the alcohol was providing relief and the promise of oblivion. Except for Li. He felt the whisky burning his stomach, but his head remained painfully clear. It was nearly midnight. An hour ago he could barely keep his eyes open. Now he was beyond tired. He knew he would not sleep tonight.
Margaret was curled up in one of the armchairs. She and Lyang had hugged and cried, and now she, too, was drained. Completely exhausted. Looking back, the events of the day seemed to her like a nightmare. Usually you woke up from a nightmare. Margaret knew that only sleep would provide an escape from this one. Alcohol offered her a route to that escape, and she was only too happy to take it. Xinxin was sharing a bed with Ling, and Li Jon was in Ling’s old cot. They had agreed that Margaret would sleep with Lyang, and Li would take the settee. They had talked and talked, at first about Bill and the case, and then about nothing of any consequence at all. Margaret raised her glass. ‘I’m for bed when I’ve finished this.’ And she drained it in a single pull. ‘Which is now.’
‘Me, too,’ Lyang said, and she also drained her glass.
Margaret eased herself out of the armchair and waited as Lyang got unsteadily to her feet. They knew she had been drinking before they got there, and although she seemed quite lucid, its physical effects on her were obvious now. She half staggered across the room, and Margaret put an arm around her to guide her toward the stairs. Margaret glanced back at Li. ‘Will you be okay?’
He nodded and took a sip at his whisky and listened to their uncertain progress up the stairs. He heard them in the hallway overhead, and then their voices distantly in the master bedroom. After a few minutes there was only silence. Li got up and turned off the lights and stood gazing out over the city. There was a time, not so long ago, when the power supply had been erratic, unpredictable. Demand greater than production. Now there seemed a limitless supply of power to burn. To waste. When he had first arrived here from Sichuan nearly twenty years ago, Beijing had shut down at night. Early. There had been very little to entertain a young man beyond his studies. Now the city never slept, and tonight Li knew he would keep it company.
He took another sip of his whisky and looked around the room in the city’s reflected light at all the things Bill Hart and Lyang had chosen to turn an empty apartment into a home. Every picture, every rug, every item of furniture, a decision they had made. With most people there was a story behind nearly everything you found in their home. A personal story, a history of a life together, memories shared. But what did any of it mean when you were gone? When you took those memories with you, and all that was left were their material remains, meaning nothing, except perhaps to the partner with whom the memories were shared and for whom they now brought only pain.
Li was almost overcome by a sense of melancholy. He felt an intense sadness for Bill and Lyang. For himself, and a life in tatters. For Margaret, and all the unfulfilled dreams that had led her finally to a one-bedroom police apartment in Beijing, a partner who was never there, a baby who depended upon her and had stolen her independence. A life that was no longer her own.
And he thought of his sister lying awake on a hard bunk in a cell somewhere in the north of the city, shut away from her life, removed from her daughter. And Xinxin, stifling her tears to look after baby Ling and her tiny cousin, taking on a mantle of responsibility she had yet to grow into. Like life itself, there was no way to take back a lost childhood.
He wondered, too, if his father was asleep. In a strange house, with a man who didn’t like him much, his dead brother’s best friend. And he remembered that unexpected moment between them when they had hugged, Li scared to squeeze too hard in case he crushed him like a bird.
All these things somehow had Li at their centre. Like satellites orbiting a planet, held there by the force of its gravity, dependent upon it for their very existence. It felt like an enormous burden of responsibility. And he was tired and beaten down, and did not know if he could bear it much longer. He took a long, final drink of whisky from his glass and felt the heat of it snaking its way down inside him. He saw Lyang’s cigarettes lying on the table and took one out of the packet. He lit it with her lighter and this time resisted the urge to choke on his first drag. By the time he finished it, it was as if he had never given up. He stubbed it out viciously in the ashtray, angry at himself for his weakness, and lay back on the settee, staring up at the shadows lying across the ceiling above him. They were static, unchanging, but even as he watched they seemed to take shape and form. The shadow of a man, the head of an elephant, a face. He closed his eyes to shut them out and saw the tall, stooped computer image of Commissioner Zhu crossing the hall of the EMS post office. An outline image passing through three hundred and sixty degrees, showing everything but the face. How could he ever prove it? How could he put a face to that faceless figure? How would he ever know what lie he’d been caught in?
Li sat up with a start. He had been so certain he would not sleep, he was shocked to realise he had been dreaming. A strange dream full of frantic running down endless corridors, a ferry boat slipping from its berth, gangplank falling away as Li leapt across the gap only to miss the rail and fall. And fall. And wake, heart pounding, a cold sweat beading across his forehead. The fear of the fall, that endless tumbling sensation, is what had woken him. But there was something else, something hidden in an obscure, cobwebbed corner of his mind. Had he dreamed it? He couldn’t remember. Like the dream itself, the memory of it was fading even as he tried to recall it. Perhaps because he was trying to recall it. He swung his legs on to the floor and rubbed his face in his hands, trying instead to empty his mind, to free it from the constraints of imperfect memory. The Tao says be full by being empty, he heard Dai say. And suddenly the memory of what his subconscious had been trying to tell him, pierced his consciousness like a spear.
‘Shit!’ he heard himself say, and he was on his feet immediately. He found a light switch at the foot of the stairs and climbed them two at a time, his slippered feet sliding on the polished surface. He padded along to the end of the hall, hesitated a moment, then knocked softly on the door of the master bedroom. He opened it as Margaret sat upright in the bed. Lyang lay face down beside her, dead to the world. ‘What is it?’ Margaret whispered, alarmed. She had been as certain she would sleep as Li had been that he would not. She glanced at the digital bedside clock. 3.15 a.m. And she had not slept a wink.
‘I need to talk to Lyang,’ Li said, and he moved into the bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed beside the sleeping widow. He looked down at her face in profile, all muscles relaxed, her mouth slightly open, and heard her deep, slow breathing. And for a moment he almost decided it could wait until morning. But it couldn’t, and he shook her gently by the shoulder. It was fully half a minute before he could rouse her.
‘What’s so urgent that you have to wake her up in the middle of the night, for God’s sake?’ Margaret whispered.
‘Trust me,’ Li said. ‘It’s important.’
Lyang raised herself on to one elbow, blinking away the sleep in her eyes. Li could almost see the recollection of the previous day’s events returning to her, grief welling up inside, the pain of a hangover already tightening its grip around her head. ‘What…?’ But she was still barely conscious.