Meanwhile, she worked in her room as usual, and blew her nose, as usual, under the running tap in the bathroom, making me gag a little at the sound. Other times, she was so quiet I wanted to check if she had died.
We collided from time to time in the living room and she might throw a question at me — What did I think of advertising? or, Was it true they give medicine to children, here, to calm them down? or, Was I short-sighted? Had I read Voltaire? After one particular silence she decided to show me a series of eye exercises they did in China, which meant that many people there ‘did not need glasses’ (Oh, yeah?). You had to rub your thumbs between your eyebrows and rotate your forefinger on particular points of the eyeball and around the socket, and when you were finished, stare into the distance for a while. So we sat there, in an empty block, in the middle of this deserted campus, while the rest of the Western world hung up fairy lights or wrapped their gifts, and we rubbed our eyeballs. Then we looked out the window.
Actually, I think it sort of worked.
She never knocked at my door, but I still found myself staying up all night and sleeping into the afternoon: I felt safer that way. When I staggered out on Christmas Day, she was working at the living-room table. She got up really quickly and handed me a tiny package saying, ‘Happy Christmas, Alison,’ with a shy little duck and twist of her head. Inside was a little calendar printed on a plastic card. There were two cutie-pie babies holding a ribbon with the year written on it. I said, ‘Oh, thank you, Li. Thank you,’ and she seemed horribly pleased.
Later in the afternoon, I stole some late winter roses from a college flower bed and put them on the table along with a burnt chicken and a heated-up tin of sweet-corn. My life was too short to do potatoes. My life would always be too short to do potatoes. I said this to Li who stared at her plate with a snake-like fascination. Does everyone do this? What does turkey taste like? Is it a sacrificial animal? I was worn out just listening to her. I tried to make her drink some wine and she finally took a glass, which made her giggle immediately. I drank and ranted on about advertising, which seemed to interest her, and nuclear power, ditto. She asked about Irish ‘Catholicism’ (with a funny imprecision, I realised she’d never spoken the word out loud before) and I put my head on the table, and said, ‘Oh, Li, oh, Li, oh, Li,’ which we both seemed to find quite funny.
I’m not very good at drinking, I suppose. I’d only done it three or four times and I felt quite dizzy. Before I knew it, I was tackling her about the whole homosexuality thing. She did know about it — she must know — so why did she ask me? She said no, no, they have no such thing in China, they do not even have a word for homosexual in China. There must be a word for it, I said, it’s nothing to do with culture, it’s just a natural thing, but she laughed, as though she was quite sophisticated and I was the simple one. No, she said. Really. Perhaps there was a word once, but not any more.
The phone in the hallway started to ring — my family wishing me a Happy Christmas. So, I did all that ‘Yes, you too. Yes, you too,’ through brothers and sisters and aunts, shuffled at high speed on the long-distance line. When I came back, Li had washed the dishes. She came into the living room and stood in front of me.
‘Thank you for a lovely “Christmas,” Alison,’ she said, with a little squirm. Then she walked past me, into her room.
They were sweet, nothing days. I managed to sleep through all the hours of daylight; the nights I spent reading or looking at the weather as it fell past the street lamp outside: a slight snow, or drizzle, or just the night itself in a long yellow cone. This little slice of weather made me think that the air is really busy and there is an awful lot of it, and it was good to be inside and small and barely, just barely, existing. I felt almost flayed — peeled bare and true. It was so peaceful I jumped at the smallest sound: a plastic bag subsiding in the kitchen; my own breath.
It was a kind of spell, those endless night-days of sitting and pacing and breathing. At four in the morning, I might look at the street lamp and want to cry for the melancholy beauty of the light, or the air fizzing about beneath it, or for the millions of street lamps and the millions of windows and all the drops of rain. Li was in there somewhere too, sleeping her Chinese sleep in those nylon pyjamas: not quite a Buddha but, still, my little plastic charm.
We met over her breakfast, which was my supper, and we murmured at each other like people who live together but have other business in hand. Everything was quite easy. When Karen put her key in the door, I thought we were being burgled. I realised that I had missed New Year’s Eve, somehow. And I was sad. Whatever had happened, it was all over now.
Karen was in a complete rage after the holidays. Something about her father’s girlfriend and a dog, I think, or a car. Whatever. Her father’s girlfriend was Superbitch, and so Karen snapped at us all day and cried herself to sleep at night. We could hear her through the wall. Then, suddenly, I was in love with the massively-clever-but-a-bit-dull guy from New York — completely obsessed. I talked and talked, and paced down to the lake and back again. I finally got him to call for some notes he wanted to borrow and, when he left, I shut the door behind him and slid down it on to the floor. ‘Oh, Li,’ I said, laughing. ‘Oh, Li.’
For some reason it became the roomies’ joke. ‘Oh, Li!’ we said. ‘Oh, Li.’ When anything funny or desperate happened, like a burnt saucepan, or peculiar-looking hair. It was better when she was there, but we said it sometimes when she wasn’t. As for Li, she seemed flattered by the attention: she always made that silly, laughing sound. But it confused her, too.
One evening she announced, quite carefully, that Li was what we call a surname. Her given name, which came second in Chinese, was Chiao-Ping. But mostly Ping. Then she was silent. It seemed that she didn’t want to do anything with this information, she just wanted to say it.
‘Oh, Ping,’ I said, after a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, Ping.’ And we couldn’t help it, we just dissolved, we just laughed and laughed until we were on the floor.
The next night, I found myself struggling through a horrible dream. It was one of those dreams that soak right through you, a sickener. I think the guy from New York was in it, and he was absolutely evil. I fought to wake up and the dream lurched. My mother was there, warning me, I swear it. My mother was there saying, ‘Wake up, wake up, darling,’ though ‘darling’ was never her sort of word. So I did wake up, and my body was flailing on the bed. My head was stuck and there was something wrong with the darkness. I tried to breathe but it didn’t work, somehow. I couldn’t catch my breath. My hand connected with something, a face, and I pushed into it with all my strength. I pushed my fingers into the eyes.
Ping was trying to smother me. Finally. I suppose if it hadn’t been a bunk-bed I might have died but, when I pushed, she overbalanced on the ladder and fell. I looked down and she was on the floor, scrabbling for the pillow. She grabbed it and looked up at me, then she said something in Chinese. It sounded really strange and vicious. I had never heard her speak Chinese before.
I might have left it. Isn’t that funny? Like the razors and the knickers and Karen crying all the time. I might have said nothing and just gone on, or dealt with it in some other, sidelong way. But the noise of her falling woke everyone and, the next thing, Karen was knocking on the door, ‘You OK in there?’ and when she opened it, Ping was still on the floor, and I was still looking down at her.