Sophie managed to bluff her way through the first period, armed with a grammar game that took the best part of an hour. As she sieved her way out through the morning tea throng she fell in beside Janie, a young teacher from the Shire with a thinly disguised contempt for foreign students.

‘I’ve got her,’ Janie said, her narrow face aglow.

‘Who?’ Sophie asked.

‘Come here.’ Janie grabbed Sophie’s hand and dragged her into an empty classroom. Sophie glanced through the windows at the rapidly emptying corridor. The last thing she needed right now was to spend her break listening to Janie’s mindless prattle. She couldn’t wing another class with games and free talk.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Janie said. Sophie detected a conspiratorial tone in her voice. ‘I’m filling in for Tim, who’s on holidays somewhere hot.’ Janie paced the room as she spoke, as though she were thinking out loud or testing a theory with Sophie as her audience.

‘On the roll is a girl called Mei Li. I know her because I taught her last term.’

Sophie tuned in. She guessed she knew what Janie was going to say.

‘But this is where it gets interesting,’ said Janie, raising a bony finger in the air. ‘The girl who shows up each day isn’t Mei Li.’ She stared at Sophie, her eyes shining bright, hands clasped together, an expression of sheer pleasure illuminating her thin face.

‘You just said Mei Li was in your class,’ Sophie said.

‘That’s the thing,’ said Janie, grasping Sophie’s hands with her own. ‘She says she’s Mei Li, but it’s not her! It’s a different girl.’

‘What did you do?’

Janie smiled widely, unable to contain her self-satisfaction. ‘I marked her name on the roll and continued on as usual.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes! It’s exactly what Pete was talking about. You know, with that poor Wendy girl…’ Janie trailed off, lost in a thought. But in the next moment she snapped back, eyes again gleaming. ‘I can’t believe it, Sophie. I’ve caught my own fraudster. I can’t wait to spring her.’

Sophie knew she should stall for time. She needed to talk to this girl, and she needed to see if she could establish some connection between the missing Mei Li and the others: Su Yuan, Wendy, Han Hong.

‘Are you going to tell Pete?’

‘Of course!’ said Janie. ‘But I’m going to wait until lunch. Make sure I have enough time to sit in on any interview with the student. I wouldn’t want to miss out on that.’

Sophie smiled. ‘Good on you, Janie. You’re a right detective, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe I’m in the wrong industry,’ Janie said with a smile as she followed Sophie out to the corridor. ‘Keep it to your­self, hey?’

Sophie nodded. ‘Cross my heart.’

Sophie followed Janie into the staffroom but turned sharply to her left after passing through the door. The sounds of mid-morning chatter faded behind her as she stalked down the hallway towards the row of grey filing cabinets lining the back wall. The cabinets stored copies of student files. Sophie knew Janie took elementary English and it didn’t take her long to find Janie’s elementary class folder and Mei Li’s file within it.

Sophie glanced at the form listing Mei Li’s personal information. She was eighteen and Chinese. She planned to study at language school for one year. After that it was her intention to study at an Australian university. She wanted to study business. She flipped through the file to take a look at Mei Li’s test results. She was only one term in, but her first test results showed her to be a student with potential. She hadn’t aced it, but she’d done well enough in her reading, listening and writing sections. Her oral section, the only subjectively assessed part of the test, had let her down. Speak up! Janie had scrawled across the examination page. Don’t be shy. Enunciate! Mei Li had probably needed to use her dictionary to decipher that last word, Sophie thought, annoyed on Mei Li’s behalf. Janie was always complaining that she couldn’t understand ‘them’ properly. It was as though she expected her students to adopt a broad Australian accent when they stood up to speak.

Sophie flipped to the plastic pocket containing Mei Li’s introductory essay, the piece that had determined her class placement. The topic again was ‘My Hometown’; Mei Li had titled her piece ‘Kunming’.

Noodles like my hometown.

Su Yuan had also come from Kunming. She’d written about her hometown in her entrance paper and Sophie had looked at it only last week. Two missing girls from the same town. This had to be the connection she was looking for. There was one way to confirm it.

女孩

Tae Hun sat slumped at the back of the classroom hoping his teacher wouldn’t call on him today. His left cheek still throbbed despite days of painkillers and a bottle of soju last night. Actually, he thought, shifting in his seat, maybe the soju was the reason his head throbbed. He would lay off the booze and get to bed early tonight.

His phone rang.

The other students groaned, several twisting in their seats to shoot accusing glares his way. Tae Hun scowled back at them as he fumbled with the zipper on the pocket of his army pants. His teacher, a weedy, balding guy named Jake, stared at Tae Hun, crossed his arms and tapped a foot impatiently against the floor. Tae Hun’s fingers grasped the thick wedge of the handset and he tapped madly at its keypad, hoping to turn the damn thing off. He succeeded, and the synthetic pop cut out as suddenly as it had begun. The room was silent but for the sound of Jake’s sneakered foot beating against the floor.

‘Are we done?’ Jake peered over the top of conservative spectacles that were at odds with his T-shirt and jeans. This school was much less classy than United. The teachers here were less organised. Half of them were washed-up surfers making a little money to fund their next surfing binge. Tae Hun thought Jake was a strange-looking surfer – he had neither the build nor the bleached blond curls of the surfers he saw down at Bronte where he sometimes hung out. ‘Surfers come in all shapes and sizes,’ Jake had said when Tae Hun questioned him on this. ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ And Tae Hun hadn’t quite understood what that meant.

Tae Hun placed the silenced phone on his desk but Jake wasn’t yet done with him. ‘See that sign?’ Jake pointed to a grubby piece of laminated paper tacked to the wall. Turn phone’s off, it said, and Tae Hun couldn’t help wondering why the administrators at an English school couldn’t ask someone to help them with their punctuation.

Jake was waiting for Tae Hun to speak, his arms still crossed and his eyebrows raised expectantly.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled and Jake’s face softened.

‘I’m not asking you to apologise, mate, just turn it off in future, okay?’

Tae Hun nodded, feeling foolish.

‘Go take the call if you need to,’ Jake continued. ‘It’s not like you’re doing much here except distracting everyone with that banged-up face of yours.’

He was joking, or trying to make a joke, but Tae Hun felt the throbbing in his head intensify with rage. He pulled himself out of his seat and strode through the desks to the door. What did teacher Jake know about anything? What did he know about what went on out in the streets and backyards of the real world? They were so fucking self-righteous, these language teachers, particularly here in Australia. It was as though they thought their students were stupid or juvenile or both. It was as though they mistook language difficulty for intellectual incapacity. They’d use patronisingly slow speech patterns and speak loudly, almost to the point of shouting, as though addressing a room of stupid deaf people. The stupid ones were these teachers, Tae Hun thought. Here in their homeland, teaching their native language – anyone could do that. These teachers seemed to think they were doing something special.

Tae Hun looked down at his phone. The screen flashed green to signal the missed call. He checked the name of the caller and, with a sinking heart, saw the call had come from Sophie. And then the phone began to ring again. As Tae Hun watched Sophie’s name flash on the screen he contemplated switching the phone off. But the memory of how Sophie had tenderly cared for him, bathing and disinfecting his cuts and giving him a place to stay, was still fresh. There was no point blaming her for what had happened out at the house.

‘It’s not one o’clock yet, I know that,’ Sophie’s voice at the end of the phone sounded desperate. ‘I really need to talk to you.’

‘Now?’ Tae Hun knew he’d already said and done too much. If he’d only kept his mouth shut, none of this would have happened and he would be living his regular life, worrying about the rent and school fees and work and learning English. He wouldn’t be worrying about the possibility that some crazy S&M club owner would hunt him down and kill him.

‘I need to know where Han Hong came from,’ Sophie said.

Tae Hun leaned against the wall. That was easy enough. He could give her that.

‘China,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders instinctively. He would have thought that was obvious, but perhaps Asians all looked the same to the Aussies. A lot of Aussies looked the same to him.

‘Where in China, do you know?’

Tae Hun thought. He did know, they had talked about their hometowns one day early in the term. He couldn’t remember the name of Han Hong’s town, but she had said something about the name of her province that had struck him as beautiful. He tried to remember the English.

‘South of the Clouds,’ he said finally.

‘Pardon?’

‘She lives South of the Clouds. It’s the name of her province, not her town. In English.’

鬼

After Sophie disconnected the call she closed her eyes and leaned against the filing cabinet. South of the Clouds was the English translation for Yunnan province in China’s south-west. And the capital of Yunnan was Kunming.

A commotion in the hallway stole Sophie’s attention and she glanced up to see Janie hauling a female student down the corridor. Sophie slipped the class file back into its drawer and hurried to catch up.

‘Janie, a moment please.’

Janie stopped and threw an exasperated hand in the air. ‘I know I was going to wait,’ she said. ‘But then I thought she might do a runner. I figured this was my only proper chance to catch her.’

The girl squirming under Janie’s fierce grip was a frail-looking thing with greasy hair and pimples on her chin. A long fringe fell down over her eyes but Sophie could see the curl of her lip as it formed a snarl.

‘Can I speak to Mei Li in private, Janie?’ Sophie asked.

Janie shot her an incredulous look. ‘Did you not listen to me before, Sophie? This isn’t Mei Li. That’s the whole point.’

‘Sure, Janie, but can I have a word with her before you speak to Pete?’

‘Why?’ Janie’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re not trying to steal my thunder, are you?’ She stepped closer and lowered her voice. ‘I worked this out and I want Pete to know that.’

Sophie did her best to sound sympathetic. ‘I know, Janie, and you did a great job.’

‘You can speak to her after we’ve talked to Pete,’ Janie said.

On hearing his name, Pete poked his head out of his office. ‘What’s all this then?’ he asked, his eyes darting from Janie to Sophie.

‘Pete,’ said Janie, stepping forward.

In a flash, the girl had twisted and slipped past Janie and back out into the corridor. As she did, Sophie stuck out a hand and grabbed the girl’s fleeing elbow. The girl snapped her head back, agitated.

‘Let go,’ she snarled.

‘What’s going on?’ Pete shot a glare Sophie’s way.

‘I’ve got her, Pete, no worries,’ said Sophie.

Janie pulled Pete into his office. Sophie ducked her head and whispered into the student’s ear, ‘I need to find Mei Li. Tell me where she is.’

But the girl just stared back, confused. ‘I am Mei Li,’ she said, the words stumbling out of her mouth in a whimper.

Sophie shook the girl’s arm. ‘No, you’re not. You know that and I know that. I need to find the real Mei Li, where is she?’

The girl searched Sophie’s face, bewildered. Sophie noticed her pupils were the size of pins.

‘Let me see your arm,’ she said, but before she could reach for the sleeve to push it up, the girl opened her mouth and drenched the carpet in vomit.

‘That’s just great.’ Pete leaned on the open door to his office, rubbed a hand through his hair. ‘Get her to the bathroom, Sophie.’

‘I’ll take her,’ Janie lurched forward but Pete held up a hand.

‘No, let Sophie do it,’ he said. ‘Thanks for alerting me to your concerns, Janie. I’ll check the paperwork while you get someone to clean this up.’

Janie scowled, shot Sophie a glare. Sophie positioned her body close to the student’s and started to half walk, half drag the girl down the corridor to the bathroom. Six blue-doored cubicles stood opposite a narrow wall-length sink. Grey signs against the grey walls reminded students not to stand on the toilet seats. Automatic deodorisers pumped sweet, artificial smells into the air throughout the day but the tangy scent of urine remained an ever-present bottom note. Two young girls at the end of the communal sink giggled at their foamy-mouthed reflections in the mirror. Why anyone would brush their teeth in this space is beyond me, Sophie thought, as she helped the student to the basin.

The girl leaned against the mirror and fumbled with the tap. As the water gushed out, she studied it for several seconds before uncurling a clenched palm and cupping the running water in her hand. Sophie grabbed a roll of toilet paper and unravelled several sheets.

‘Here, let me help you,’ she said, as the girl gulped down fist after fist of water. The girl gripped the edges of the basin and slowly lifted her head. She allowed Sophie to wipe her face and the front of her shirt, but she kept her eyes down, refusing to meet Sophie’s.

The skin on the girl’s forehead and chin was blistered with sores. Sophie brushed them gently with the paper and they wept. Beads of perspiration bubbled around her hairline and on her upper lip, and her skin, sallow and yellow, smelled faintly of cleaning chemicals.

‘What have they given you?’ Sophie said so quietly it was almost a whisper.

The girl didn’t respond. The two girls brushing their teeth had started shooting nervous glances their way.

‘Can you tell me about Mei Li?’

A small moan slipped out of the student’s mouth. Was that the sound of defiance or defeat? Sophie decided to prod some more.

‘I’m really worried about Mei Li. Please tell me what you know about her.’

‘I am Mei Li.’ The girl’s voice, little more than a childish whine, rang loud and craggy in the confines of the bathroom. ‘I am Mei Li.’ She bucked her head as she heaved out the words, grasping the rim of the sink with two palms and rocking her body in a slow rhythmic dance. Sophie glanced at the girls with the toothpaste. They shoved their belongings away, their cheeks glowing an embarrassed red. They shot shy smiles and lowered their heads as they pushed past and out the door.

‘I am Mei Li,’ the girl moaned again and it seemed to Sophie as though she were writhing with the pain of this lie. Her instinct was to take the girl into her arms but she feared frightening her further. Instead she reached out a tentative arm and placed a hand on the girl’s back, spreading her fingers like wings, pleading for calm through her touch.

‘Stop,’ she whispered. ‘Please stop this.’

It had an effect. The girl leaned back into Sophie’s touch and as she did Sophie brought her body behind the girl’s and slipped her arms down and under her armpits, pulling her back, carrying her weight, cradling her in an awkward embrace. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’

‘I am Mei Li,’ the girl whispered, exhausted.

Sophie lowered the girl gently to the floor and she crumpled there, folded into the space between Sophie’s thighs. ‘It’s okay. You are Mei Li,’ said Sophie, glancing at the bathroom door. ‘Stay there a moment.’

Sophie pulled herself up and pushed open a cubicle door. She grasped the sanitary towel disposal unit and lifted it out, surprised at its weight. With some force, she wedged it under the handle of the bathroom door, jamming it closed. They needed privacy now.

When she again sat close to the girl and placed an arm on her shoulder, there came a low guttural murmur.

‘It’s my job to say that.’

Bingo.

Sophie took a bony hand in her own. ‘Who tells you to say that?’

‘Every morning and every night they make me say it,’ the girl mumbled, her nose running with snot.

‘Who tells you?’

‘My boss men.’

‘You’re working for someone?’

The girl nodded her head.

‘They pay you?’

‘At first they paid me. Then they give me drug. At first I say, no, I don’t want to take it. I don’t do this kind of thing. But they give to me anyway. Now I need it. I take payment in drugs.’

Sophie suppressed her rising indignation. ‘Who are these men?’

The girl wiped her nose with her hand. ‘My boss. They are my boss.’

‘They drug you?’

‘Yes. At first I don’t want. But now I need. I come here only to study English. I thought the opportunity was a good one. To make money for my family. But these people are not good people. They ruin my life.’

‘Did you tell the police?’

The girl recoiled in fright and anger. ‘No. You don’t tell police. I don’t tell you to tell police. The police get involved, my family is hurt.’

‘Your family here?’

‘In China. My family.’

Sophie feigned retreat. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But these men are doing the wrong thing by you. And by your family too. They threaten you.’

The girl shook her head. ‘It’s not so bad for me. Only this game.’

‘Do they hurt you?’

‘No, no. Only the drug and the game. Other girls, they do worse. They strip, they do S&M, they make videos…’

‘Videos?’

The girl nodded. ‘For sale in Chinatown. I’ve seen the shop. Upstairs there are rooms with beds. Downstairs there are yellow movies. They wanted me to work there but I said no.’

‘What is your real name?’

The girl looked up, a crooked smile on her lips. ‘I have no name. No passport. I belong to them. I am only Mei Li.’

‘But where is the real Mei Li?’

‘She’s working. Maybe at the video shop. I don’t know. She’s making money, right now. The drugs come later. Please, let me go. If I make mistake and the school catch me, then my boss will hurt my family.’

‘We need to stop them.’

‘I must protect my family. I nearly paid back my debt. Then I can go home. Dizzy said so.’

‘Dizzy?’

‘My English teacher. In Kunming. He helped me here.’

Dizzy. She fished her wallet out of the back pocket of her jeans and started flipping through the cards. Among the copier and restaurant cards she found her business card stash. She flicked through it.

Sophie settled on something green – the card belonging to Michael Disney.