By the time the interviews came to an end I was in a waking coma of non-attention. Min phoned Feng from the lobby of the building. He was stuck in traffic, she said. Not far away in distance but with no chance of getting here for at least an hour. The sidewalks were jammed with people trying to hail taxis, all of which were full, none of which were moving in the dreadful traffic and the terrific heat. It would be quickest, Min said, to take the subway.
‘We must improvise!’ she said. ‘Though it will be very crowded.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Any half-decent city has crowded subways.’
But none had subways as crowded as Beijing’s. Every part of the process — buying tickets, going through barriers and along walkways (the longest, surely, of any subway anywhere in the world) — was exhausting, and every part of the subway system was packed to bursting. Any corridor we had to go down was a solid mass of citizens, from beginning to end. For each of the two changes, we had to queue to get on a train when it came, not with any hope of getting on but with the hope of securing a better position when the train after next pulled in. There was no queue-barging and no pushing and shoving; everyone had adapted to living in crowds and went politely about their tightly packed business.
I was shattered by the time I got back to the hotel, to the room where I’d woken up feeling shattered ten hours earlier, but there was no time to unshatter myself by taking a nap, as I’d banked on doing in the car that was supposed to have met us, before the truly shattering experience of taking the subway back to the hotel. There was time only to shower, change into fresh underwear, a clean blue shirt — the last clean one, kept in reserve — and jeans before meeting Min in reception. We were going to a restaurant to eat Peking duck. This, Min explained, would mark the symbolic end of my visit: the eating of Peking duck in a restaurant in Peking famed for its Peking duck.
It was only a five-minute walk away. The pictures in the elevator showed dozens of the world’s leaders and celebrities eating Peking duck, though the restaurant in the pictures didn’t necessarily look like the one we stepped into when the elevator doors opened.
There were six of us for dinner, in a private dining room. Qiang, the head of the publishing house, was there, and Wei, whom I hadn’t seen for a couple of days. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with something written on it in Chinese characters, and carrying, as always, a pink rucksack made out of some soft and fluffy material. When we’d first met I’d guessed that she was Qiang’s daughter, accompanying him during the school holidays. In the rucksack, I assumed, were a few toys or computer games to stop her getting bored — until I passed it to her and found that it weighed a ton. It was crammed with books, a laptop and various electronic accessories. She was twenty-four, the marketing manager. The reason I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days was that she’d been taking care of another visiting writer, Jun, from Hong Kong. She introduced us; we shook hands. Jun was exactly my age but, unusually in a part of the world where everyone seemed a decade younger than they were, looked five years older.
Like the Forbidden City, the Peking duck lived up to its considerable reputation, but all the time I was folding slices of duck into the pancakes, adding scallions and other bits and pieces, constantly commenting on its deliciousness, I was conscious of trying to speed things along so that I could meet Li again, even though there was no point in hurrying because she was busy eating dinner herself, not gobbling her food, not fretting and worrying about when we might meet.
I soon had something else to fret about. I’d left my phone at the hotel, in my shorts, and so Min — obliging as ever — called Li and fixed up a rendezvous. It was at a bar, only twenty minutes away, and Jun, Min and Wei were all coming too. Not quite how I had envisaged the rest of the evening panning out, obviously, but perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea to dilute my eagerness, to prevent it acquiring a touch of desperation. We found a taxi immediately; the roads were almost empty. For ten minutes we sped along, then were obliged to slow to a crawl before crawling to a halt as the traffic congealed around us. We were still in the car an hour later, had waited twenty minutes to make a left turn — the lights turned to green for less than thirty seconds — onto the road the bar was on. If we’d known this we could have jumped ship, walked to the bar in five minutes and saved fifteen — a quarter of an hour. Except, even when we did get out, on the street itself, the bar was nowhere to be seen. It was a street full of bars — horrible places, some with pole dancing, all crowded with young youth, the youthful young — like a shinier, slightly less ghastly incarnation of Camden Town. Surely she wouldn’t have chosen one of these bars. And if she had, then where the fuck was it? Where was she? More time ticked pointlessly away. A minute was like five minutes. Ten hours from now I’d be on a flight to London. Then I saw her, waving as she had that same morning in the Forbidden City, minus the shades. She was wearing a blue dress, shorter than the one she’d worn earlier. Darker too, knee-length, but also sleeveless, revealing the same shoulders and arms. No wonder we hadn’t been able to find the place: she was outside a nail bar. I looked down at her feet, her sandals, her toes, her blue nails. Min introduced Jun and Wei to Li and we followed her along a passageway to the side of the nail bar. We came to a dented grey elevator, large enough to accommodate a patient on a gurney in an under-funded hospital, with weary staff and several anxious family members. The doors squeezed shut; the elevator shuddered upwards until the doors opened again to reveal a dim landing lacking all distinguishing features except some partially erased graffiti. It was an evening when one kind of disappointment followed swiftly on the heels of another, interrupted by surges of hope and renewed expectation. I followed Li up a flight of concrete stairs, the muscles in her calves flexing as she took the steps. But where was she taking us? To a crack den?
No! To a rooftop bar. When we emerged into the hot night, it was like a dream of Ibiza, one of the wonders of the nocturnal world.
‘What’s it called, this place?’ I asked.
‘It is the Bar of Mental Cultivation,’ she said. ‘Did you not see the sign?’
‘I’m pretty sure there was no sign. But maybe I was looking for the wrong sort of sign. Like the Dog and Duck.’ It was a pub joke, wasted on Li.
The bar was surrounded on three sides by high-rise office buildings, gleaming and new — some so new they were not even finished. On the fourth side the city stretched away forever: neon-topped skyscrapers, the blinking lights of planes. The music was not loud. She had chosen the perfect place, but it was not quite perfect: there was nowhere to sit. Li introduced two friends, both women, who had been here a while, trying without success to secure a table. The best option was for us all to crowd into the psychedelic pod in the middle of the roof, on cushions, but that would have been like sitting inside, not out in the night with the stars overhead. These stars were nowhere to be seen, there was too much light pollution for that — come to think of it, where had last night’s moon got to? — but the light was not pollution at all, it was its own kind of magic. We milled around in a way that was like a standing version of being back in the car, close to where we wanted to be, but stuck at a frustrating remove from it. There were a few empty chairs scattered around, not enough to combine and seat a party of seven. Then a large group, all male, Chinese and Western, got up to leave, vacating a large sofa and some chairs. Li pounced. Once Jun had grabbed two extra chairs we were in place, all of us together around a low table — with me seated next to Li on the sofa, without seeming to have done so deliberately.