Fuyuki had been moved to a far corner of the courtyard and the Nurse was with him, bent over, busily tucking a fur throw over his legs. She was dressed in a very tight skirt, a high-collared jacket and her usual high heels. Her hair was tucked behind her ears, revealing her white, oddly pitted cheek. She’d painted her lips in a deep red – on her tight mouth it looked almost bluish. The men nearby sat with their backs turned pointedly to her, concentrating on their conversations, pretending not to be aware of her presence.
She didn’t look up at me. She had probably intended to lock those doors anyway, I thought. There was no reason to think she’d known I was there. Fuyuki muttered something to her, his frail hand groping for her sleeve. She lowered her head to his mouth, and I held my breath, staring at her nails, each oval painted a careful matt red. The nail on her smallest finger had been grown long and curved, the way Chinese merchants traditionally grew them to show they didn’t do manual labour. I wondered if Fuyuki was telling her about my insistence that he show me the apartment, but after a few moments she straightened and, instead of looking at me, slipped silently away past the pool, through the opposite doors.
I sat forward, tense, my hands grasping the chair, my attention going with her, following her every inch of the way along the corridors, maybe down the stairs. I knew what she was going to do. I knew it instinctively. The noise of the party faded into the background and all I could hear was the pulse of the night, the lapping of water against the pool filter. My ears expanded with my heart, until all the small sounds seemed amplified a thousand times and I thought I could hear the apartment shifting and murmuring around me. I could hear someone washing dishes in the kitchen. I could hear the Nurse’s soft footfalls moving down the stairs. I was sure I could hear padlocks rattling, iron doors creaking open. She was going to get Fuyuki’s medicine.
And then something happened. In the pool, at a depth of about eight feet, there were two underwater windows covered by slatted blinds. I hadn’t noticed them before because they had been in darkness. But a light had just come on in the room, sending vertical yellow stripes into the water. Quickly I fished inside my handbag, lit a cigarette and got up, moving past the crowd and going casually to the pool edge. I stood, one hand in the small of my back, taking a few draws on the cigarette to calm myself. Then, when I was sure no one was watching me, I peered down into the water. A guest nearby began to sing a loud enka song, and one of the hostesses was giggling loudly, but I was barely aware of it. I closed off my mind until all there was in the world were me and those stripes of light in the water.
I was sure, without knowing how, that just beyond those blinds was the room where Fuyuki’s medicine was kept. The slats were open far enough to show part of the floor and I could see the Nurse’s shadow moving around in there. From time to time she came sufficiently close to the window for me to see her feet in their hard, shiny stilettos. My attention narrowed. There was something else in the room with the Nurse. Something made of glass. Something square, like a case or a-
‘What are you doing?’
I jumped. Jason was standing next to me, holding his drink and looking down into the water. Suddenly all the noise started again and the colour came back into the world. The singing guest was grinding out the last few bars of his song, and the waiters were opening bottles of brandy, distributing glasses among the guests.
‘What’re you staring at?’
‘Nothing.’ I shot a look back down into the pool. The light had gone out. The pool was dark again. ‘I mean, I was looking at the water. It’s so – so clear.’
‘Be careful,’ Jason murmured. ‘Be very careful.’
‘Yes,’ I said, stepping away from the pool. ‘Of course.’
‘You’re here for something, aren’t you?’
I met his eyes. ‘What?’
‘You’re looking for something.’
‘No. I mean – no, of course I’m… What a funny thing to say.’
He gave a short, dry laugh. ‘You forget, I can tell when you’re lying.’ He looked at my face, then at my hair and my neck, as if they had just asked him a complex question. He touched my shoulder lightly and a bolt of static made my hair leap up at him, wrapping itself round his fingers. He looked down at it with a long, slow smile. ‘I’m going to get all the way inside you,’ he said quietly. ‘All the way. But don’t be scared, I’m going to do it very, very slowly.’
29
Nanking, 18 December 1937, eight o’clock (the sixteenth day of the eleventh month)
At last I can write. At last I have some peace. I have been gone from home for more than a day. When, in the late afternoon, I made up my mind to leave the house, nothing could have stopped me. I pinned my refugee certificate to my jacket and slipped out into the alleyway, dragged onwards by the smell. It was the first time I had been outside in daylight since the thirteenth. The air seemed heavy and cold, the snow stale. I went quietly, using alleys and climbing over gates to get to Liu’s house. His front door was open and he was sitting just inside, almost as if he hadn’t moved since I left him. He was smoking a pipe, a desultory look on his face.
‘Liu Runde,’ I said, stepping into the receiving room, ‘can you smell it? Can you smell the meat cooking?’
He bent forward and put his nose out into the cold air, tilting his head and looking up thoughtfully at the sky.
‘It could be the food they stole from us,’ I said. ‘Maybe they’ve got the gall to cook it.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’m going to search. Out on the streets. Shujin needs food.’
‘Are you sure? What about the Japanese?’
I didn’t answer. I was recalling with some embarrassment his insistence that we would be safe, I thought of the example we were to be setting. After a long silence I gathered myself and patted my refugee certificate. ‘Haven’t you – haven’t you got one of these, old man?’
He shrugged and got to his feet, putting down the pipe. ‘Wait there,’ he said. ‘I’m going to get it.’
He had a hurried, whispered conversation with his wife. I could see them in the dimly lit room at the back of the house, facing each other, just her faded blue silk sleeve visible in the doorway, moving every now and then as she raised her hand to make an earnest point. Shortly he came outside to meet me, closing the door carefully behind him and glancing up and down the alley. He had his certificate pinned to his jacket and an anxious, drawn look on his face. ‘I never expected it would come to this,’ he whispered, turning up his collar against the cold. ‘I never would have imagined. Sometimes I wonder who is the foolish one in my marriage…’
We crept to the head of the alley and peered along the deserted street. There wasn’t a sound or a movement anywhere. Not even a dog. Only rows and rows of shuttered houses, blackened with soot, an abandoned handcart up-ended against the front of a house. Small fires burned on the roadside, and in the direction of the river the sky was red with flames. I sniffed the air. That incredible tantalizing smell seemed stronger. Almost as if we could expect at any moment to hear the sizzle and pop of frying coming from one of the houses.
We crept up the road like a pair of starving cats, hovering in the shadows, scurrying from doorway to doorway, all the time working towards the Zhongyang gate in the north, the direction the thieves had run. From time to time we happened on bundles of possessions, the owner nowhere to be seen, and we would drag them into the nearest doorway, rummaging desperately through them, hoping for food. Every rickety house we saw we pushed our noses against the doors, whispering through the knotholes, ‘Who’s cooking? Who’s cooking?’ A fist of hunger was working its way through my body, so intense I found it difficult to stand up straight. I could see from the look on Liu’s face that he felt the same. ‘Come out,’ we hissed into the houses. ‘Show us – show us what you are cooking.’