At night, Weeping Willow was a different world. The business, small and quaint by daylight, emerged in all its thriving, prosperous glory. The day’s heavy rain lingered into the evening, stopping for a moment and then starting up again. The lights of Weeping Willow seemed exceptionally bright in the damp air. Perhaps it was because of the bad weather, or maybe because traffic accidents had delayed the drivers, but that night Weeping Willow was very busy. Altogether, there were seventeen drivers spending the night there. The few tables in the restaurant were completely packed and the lights in the inn’s rooms were all turned on in readiness. The proprietress was radiant as she commanded her flock of girls in miniskirts, shuttling back and forth between her businesses.
Among the seventeen drivers was a young fellow by the name of Li. He drove a fuel tanker, and he knew Xue. He sat down and started glancing around, looking for Xue among the other girls, but unable to find her. He asked the proprietress where she had gone, and though he repeated his question several times, the frantic proprietress kept telling him to wait. So he waited, and didn’t drink, and didn’t talk to the other drivers, and after quite a while the proprietress finally came to him, but the news she brought was very unexpected.
‘What a shame you should come now. Xue’s had a family emergency; it just happened today. Her father was coming to get her, but he was hit by a truck on the highway!’
‘Was that the accident by Siqian?’ The young man was stunned for a moment, then he suddenly remembered something. ‘The site of the accident is still closed off. I heard it was a hit-and-run.’
‘That’s the one. Xue had only eaten half her dinner when the police came.’ The proprietress pointed at a plastic bowl and said, ‘Do you see that? She just left her dinner there.’
For a moment Li was at a loss. He opened his mouth, but didn’t know what to say. The proprietress clapped him on the shoulder and tittered, saying, ‘Don’t look so stricken. You’re not the one who hit him. Why should you be nervous?’
Li asked offhandedly, ‘Who did hit him?’ The proprietress winked and seemed to want to tell him some secret, but in the end she rejected the idea. ‘How would I know? If I did, I’d arrest the truck-driving creep myself!’ Her hands waved ambiguously in the air and then clapped the driver’s shoulders again. ‘Now don’t you pine after Xue, she was nothing special.’
As the proprietress spoke, she bent closer to Li’s ear and said in a low voice, ‘Give me a second and I’ll send Hong to serve you. She’s our best worker, and she’s beautiful, and she went to college. I guarantee you’ll be satisfied.’
On Saturdays
The man they called Papa Qi was in fact still quite young. Though Meng and his wife realized that he was younger than they were, they still affectionately called him Papa. It was a habit, and like all habits it arose from particular circumstances. It might be inaccurate, but it seemed wrong to correct it. Calling him anything else would feel unnatural by now, like the time Ningzhu had suddenly asked him, ‘Mr Qi, what time is it?’ The two men in the room had acted as if a bomb had gone off, and turned abruptly to look at her as she stood by the door. Their gazes expressed shock in different degrees, and their reaction made Ningzhu feel extremely awkward.
‘Our wall clock is broken,’ she explained haltingly. ‘Papa Qi, you have a wristwatch, don’t you?’
Papa Qi laughed silently, and glanced at his wrist. ‘Nine o’clock. I should be leaving,’ he said and stood up. He seemed a bit flustered, and ended up hitting the coffee table with his knee, then almost sweeping a cup to the floor with his arm. After this momentary confusion he gave the cup to Meng, grimaced in embarrassment at the couple, and said, ‘I should go. You’ll be wanting to get to bed soon.’
‘There’s no hurry. Why don’t you stay a while longer?’ An unmistakable look of shame appeared on Ningzhu’s face and she blocked the door as she spoke. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. The wall clock really is broken; it has been for weeks. I told Meng to have it fixed, but he doesn’t want to go to the repair shop and keeps putting it off. You know how lazy he is.’
‘I should go. It’s after nine — I really should go,’ Papa Qi said. ‘I have a lot to do tomorrow anyway. We’ve been so busy at the office recently.’
‘We just don’t have any way to tell the time at home now. I left my own watch at my aunt’s,’ Ningzhu felt compelled to keep explaining, ‘and Meng can never find his. You’d really have to look hard to find someone as forgetful as he is. We’ve bought so many watches but he just keeps losing them, one after the other!’
Papa Qi had reached the door by now. All of a sudden he turned back and told Meng, ‘Go and get your wall clock and give it to me.’
‘Sorry?’ Meng hadn’t caught on right away.
‘It’s broken, isn’t it?’ said Papa Qi. ‘My brother knows how to repair clocks. That way you won’t have to take it to the shop. Besides overcharging you for the repair, they’ll probably take out the good parts and put broken ones back. Let me handle it. That way you won’t have to pay a penny, and I guarantee it’ll run for two years without breaking.’
‘You don’t have to do that,’ Meng glanced up to where the clock hung on the wall. He said, ‘We really shouldn’t bother you with all our little problems. Maybe it’s not broken at all. Maybe I just bought a dud battery.’
‘What’s the big deal between friends?’ Papa Qi answered. ‘Go and take it down and give it to me.’
Meng looked at Ningzhu, but she avoided his eyes and sighed ambiguously. He took a chair, walked around her and climbed up to take the clock off the wall.
That was how it came about that Papa Qi left the Mengs’ that day carrying their wall clock. Outside it was already completely dark and there were no street lights. The Mengs stood outside the door to see him off, but all they could make out was the dim glow of Papa Qi’s white shirt. Apparently, he had placed the clock in his bicycle’s wire basket as they could hear it rattling. He straddled his bike and then they heard him say in the darkness, ‘Till Saturday then. On Saturday I’ll come again. I’ll bring the clock.’
On any given day, how many trains are there in the world speeding along the railway tracks? And on every train, how many people become companionable simply because they happen to be sitting next to one another in a crowded carriage? But then again, how many of these chance acquaintances end up as actual friends? Travel acquaintances are quickly made and equally swiftly forgotten; when the train enters the station there may not be time for farewells, and once you’ve been off the train for an hour you might even have forgotten what your companion looked like. Meng had never imagined that a trip lasting a mere three hours would yield an unforgettable friendship. No, you don’t expect some guy making small talk on a train to turn into a real friend.
But that was just the kind of friend Papa Qi was. Meng could no longer remember clearly what topics they had touched on while chatting on the train — the conversation had ranged from UFOs to share prices to AIDS. It had been a congenial chat precisely because it had been so wide-ranging. Both of them had wanted to kill time on the train in the most natural way, and the three hours were easily disposed of. Soon they were standing on the platform and nodding to one another as they went their separate ways.
Later, Meng could not be sure exactly why Papa Qi had checked his rapid steps — more than likely it was because of Meng’s luggage. He had three pieces with him: two travel bags and a large cardboard box. He would carry one of the travel bags on his shoulders, and the other bag and the box in his hands. For Meng a little luggage like that presented no difficulty at all. He picked up his travel bags but was beaten to the cardboard box by someone else, who lifted it up. Glancing up, Meng saw that it was his neighbour from the train, an amicable smile on his face.