Jia Jia woke with a fear of ageing that left her unable to breathe. She leaned over the basin and stretched the skin of her cheeks with her fingers. Her reflection exposed a few spots that were darkening. She smiled and examined the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and thought for a moment that she saw them stretching away, like grapevines. She stormed out to a nearby mall and spent over one thousand yuan on anti-ageing cream, anti-ageing serum and anti-ageing face mask. She also wanted to buy an eye mask, but finally decided against it.
She returned to the apartment and charged past the living room where her grandmother was feeding the surgeonfish and clownfish in the aquarium. The tank was much taller than the old woman, who stood on a small plastic stool to reach her arm above the rim. Jia Jia thought about helping her. But instead she went into the bathroom, washed her face, spread half a bottle of face mask over her skin like butter, sat on the toilet seat and waited.
For the entire night following her catastrophic meeting with her father, she had kept her phone next to her pillow, the volume turned up, and waited for him to call and take back what he had told her, as if there could have been a chance that he had lied about his new marriage. But he never did. How typical of him not to think of her, Jia Jia thought. The card that Qing had given her, from the gallery, was still untouched on her bedside table, next to the fish-man sketch. None of that – the gallery, selling paintings, her art – seemed important, and she had failed her friend, who must have tried so hard to find her a gallery that was willing to meet her. But Jia Jia felt so tired. Everything she touched seemed to bounce away from her with stronger force.
She washed off the mask after exactly fifteen minutes and went back to her room.
‘The biggest mistake people make is keeping it on for too long,’ the salesperson had warned her. ‘It’ll actually extract moisture from your skin.’
She applied the rest of the skin products to her face and felt a little more at ease. Then she directed her attention to her fish-man paintings, taking them out one by one from the cardboard box and studying them. These paintings could hardly be considered art, she decided, and took them downstairs and stuffed them into the rubbish bin outside. There was just one that she wanted to keep. It was, objectively, the worst painting in the box, but there was an honesty and plainness about it that she wanted to preserve. Perhaps it resembled Chen Hang’s sketch the most. It did not look like an oil painting – it had no background and no layering, just the body of a fish in the middle of the canvas, painted in greyish strokes that looked like diluted ink. Even the outline of the body was not precisely contoured, as if the fish was somehow emerging and disintegrating at once.
She set the painting on an easel and sat on her bed, trying to visualise its face. She could not go forward any more, not like this. She was going nowhere like this. It was as if she had begun a story with the fish-man long ago, before she could remember, something that had pushed her off her axis, something that demanded an ending now. She had to see the fish-man for herself, to be able to fill out that empty oval on the canvas. For a moment she thought she saw the oval expanding, like a hole that, if left untouched, would ultimately eat up the entire work. The more she stared at it, the more certain she was that she had to finish the painting. But the news of her father’s marriage occupied her mind, and she could not concentrate. She had to leave this stifling, yellowing room. She thought about how Chen Hang would take himself away when he needed to. She wondered if she too might go to Tibet.
That afternoon, Jia Jia picked up her phone, scrolled through her contacts list to find Chen Hang’s travel agent, and was relieved that she had not deleted her number. The idea of getting away for a few days had given her some energy.
‘I want the same itinerary,’ she told the woman on the phone. ‘I would like to stay as close as possible to the hotels where he stayed, but cheaper ones.’
‘I will certainly check and see if we can arrange that,’ the woman said. Her tone reminded Jia Jia of the announcer on the subway. Jia Jia held the phone between her ear and shoulder as she scribbled with a sketching pencil into an old beauty magazine.
| Day 1: | Arrive in Lhasa |
| Day 2: | Potala Palace. Johang Jokhang Monastery (walk around three times) |
| Days 3–5: | Nyingchi |
| Days 6–7: | Guide’s home. DREAM HERE. |
| Day 7 and after: | TBD. Depends on fish-man. |
‘I also want the same guide,’ Jia Jia said. ‘I don’t know his name though.’
‘I will check to see if he is available. Would you not like to see Namtso Lake?’ the woman said. ‘At this time of the year, it should be—’
‘No, thank you. That’s it for now.’
To accommodate the guide’s schedule, Jia Jia’s arrangements would not be finalised until two weeks later.
Now that she had a plan, she felt up to going through her unread messages from the night before. Maybe her apartment had been sold at a decent, fair price. Maybe there was somebody who did not know about Chen Hang dying in that bath, or somebody who did not care.
Most of the messages were adverts, but there was indeed a message from her agent, who urged her to ring him immediately. Ms Wan had also sent a text expressing her and her husband’s concern for Jia Jia’s health.
‘Whatever the illness is,’ Ms Wan wrote, ‘it will all be all right in the end. You have good karma.’
Further down the list, amongst all the junk, she was surprised to see Leo’s name. It was a short message.
‘Come when you can,’ his message said. ‘I have a new wine for you.’
Jia Jia called her estate agent first.
‘Ms Wu,’ he began, without giving Jia Jia a chance to speak. ‘You need to understand, I’m trying to do my job but you’re not cooperating. I was just being honest with you about your apartment’s situation, you see? Ms Wu, I’m just hoping to do the best I can for my clients.’
‘Are you finished?’ Jia Jia asked coldly. ‘I have a beautiful apartment in a beautiful area. And you’re telling me that nobody wants to live there? I don’t believe you. Call me when you have something new to say.’ She hung up.
Jia Jia looked at Leo’s text again and checked the time. It was almost noon. Outside the window, willow catkins raided the air, each seed in search of some piece of soil that it could claim as its own.
She and Leo had not spoken since the night of firework skies, in February, when it was still cold. She remembered the fireworks. How beautiful they were. She remembered how she had looked that day, in the orange dress. Immediately she felt nervous. How could she have aged so much in so little time? If she stood naked in front of Leo, would he still want to touch her? She took off her clothes and looked in the mirror. She had lost weight, making the skin on the undersides of her arms look flaccid. She ran her fingers down her neck and tried to focus her attention entirely on what her fingertips were feeling. She wanted her hands to feel in the way that someone else’s might. The skin on her shoulders was dry, her breasts were still small, her waist was thinner and her hips were less shapely than she had remembered. She pulled up a chair in front of the mirror and sat with her legs open. She traced her index finger softly from her birthmark to her pubic hair to her clitoris, and found reassurance in the softness and warmth of what she felt. She decided that her body was still desirable.
She picked out some evening clothes and waited for the western sun.
Leo was showing a couple to their table when Jia Jia pushed open the door. She was wearing a grey dress with a leather jacket in the same colour. She had lost weight, Leo thought. He had not known that she was coming; had not realised how much he had hoped to see her until he sent that message and began to wait for a response. Now that she was sitting on her usual stool in front of him, he seemed to miss her even more. Her hair hung loose and swayed against her back when she moved, like a calligraphy brush.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t responded to your message,’ she told him.
Leo mixed and served the drinks for his other customers and stopped at the cellar on his way back to the bar. He took out the bottle of white wine that he had intended for Jia Jia, a gift from an old friend who had visited from Tokyo.
‘I’ve saved this wine for you,’ he said. ‘Japanese wine. You can’t find this in Beijing.’
‘That’s very kind, really,’ she said. ‘That you’ve kept me in your thoughts. I said terrible things.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘To you. I said terrible things to you.’
‘I should be the one apologising. But never mind now, I’m glad you’ve come.’ It was true, he was delighted, and he was also truly sorry for what had happened that night.
‘I’ve moved out, to my grandmother’s place.’ She took a sip of the wine and Leo waited for her reaction. She seemed to have expected it to taste differently but she did not appear displeased.
‘What did you do with that horse painting? The one above your sofa,’ Leo said.
‘I took it with me. It’s taking up a lot of space. Will you forgive me for the terrible things I said?’
‘Perhaps I should have thought it all through before doing something so rash.’
‘I was happy to have met your parents.’
The image of Jia Jia sharing those stories of her mother came to Leo’s mind – her dark eyes glowing like pebbles in a clear stream.
‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
Jia Jia gave the question a moment of thought. Looking away, she answered in a low voice, ‘A better place, maybe.’
Then she seemed to remember something and reached into a paper bag that she had brought with her.
‘Have you been to Chongqing? My mum bought this from Chongqing, years ago.’ She lifted a small lantern out of the bag. ‘I thought it would look nice in your bar.’
The oval lantern must have been bright orange when it was new, but the paper had turned a little browner now, lending it a more muted charm.
‘I can’t take it,’ Leo said.
‘Oh … will you not accept it then? I just can’t bear to see it hanging in my old room, so lifeless and sad,’ she said.
A man caught Leo’s attention as he walked up to the counter. He finished his drink and put his empty glass down.
‘Ms Wu, good to see you here,’ the man said.
His appearance startled Jia Jia.
‘I apologise for my tone during our call, Ms Wu, I may have been a bit pessimistic,’ the man continued. ‘I have managed to find a tenant for you this afternoon. The rent they’ve offered is not as high as other apartments in your compound, but it’s not too bad either. I think you’d be happy.’
‘This is my estate agent,’ Jia Jia said to Leo.
‘Nice to meet you.’ The man held out his hand. Leo shook it firmly and told Jia Jia that he would keep the lantern for now, then excused himself from the conversation. He stepped outside the bar for a moment and looked up at Jia Jia’s building across the road. He counted the floors and found her bedroom window. He remembered the last time the light had been on, just over a week ago; he had wondered where she had been.
When he returned, the agent had rejoined his date, leaving Jia Jia observing the lip prints on her wine glass.
‘Tell me, since when did we become such strangers?’ she said to Leo, still keeping her eyes on the glass.
‘We never became strangers. We always were.’ He sighed softly – a resolute, solid sigh.
‘I see that you’re still upset with me,’ she said.
He imagined her in a village above the clouds, overlooking the world that he lived in. Her eyes saw everything yet focused on nothing in particular.
‘Do you ever feel that sometimes, when something happens to you,’ she said, her index finger tapping on the wine glass, ‘something deep inside you changes? You can’t undo it, and you wonder whether this is the person you want to be. So you just stay, contemplating whether you like your new self until something else happens to you and you start the process all over again. Ever feel that way? If I had met you before I married Chen Hang—’
Leo dropped the dirty glasses he was holding into the sink, making a loud clank and interrupting Jia Jia. ‘Don’t you think that sometimes we just need to love in the simplest way possible?’ he said.
Jia Jia focused her attention fully on him for the first time that night. He saw a sudden influx of emotion in her gaze. Her eyes were black, so black, and Leo thought that he had never seen such wonderful, sorrowful eyes.
‘You know what I decided today?’ Jia Jia said, her tone determined. ‘I’m going to Tibet.’
‘You’ve come to say goodbye,’ said Leo. He stopped himself from asking her why she was going to Tibet – she had her own reasons, reasons that had nothing to do with him.
She looked away towards the corner of the room.
‘And I am to wait for you?’ Leo asked.
‘I don’t think you should have your life all tangled with mine any longer. I don’t want you to.’ She finished the rest of her wine in one gulp and started filling both of their glasses. While she did that, he just looked at her hands. ‘Drink with me tonight.’ She clinked her glass against his, on the counter. ‘Let’s remember this night as a happy one.’
It was a Sunday and the bar was quiet. Jia Jia’s agent paid his bill and left, telling Jia Jia that he would send her a lease agreement later on in the week. Leo closed for the evening. He removed his bow tie and stuffed it into his bag without folding it like he usually did.
They drank more and spoke less throughout the night. During the few conversations they did have, Jia Jia laughed in the most honest way Leo had ever seen her laugh. She went behind the bar and started rummaging through his whiskeys; she delved into his bag, pulled out his bow tie, tied it around her own neck and took a picture with his phone. She felt more familiar to him than ever. He became regretful for the life he had never had with her, for the nights they had never spent together behind the lit-up window of their own apartment.
They played disco music from their phones and danced. At some point, Jia Jia made fun of Leo for only owning jazz records. ‘How can you dance to these songs?’ she said while flipping through his collection.
When the sun peeped through the window, he walked her out the door and told her he loved her.
‘How much do you love me?’ she answered.
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Very well.’
She re-tied her hair and headed towards the subway station.
Back in his bar, Leo washed and wiped all the glasses except the one that Jia Jia had used. He sat at the counter for a long while, in the seat at the end, holding her glass. When he finally felt drowsiness creeping over him, he washed the glass thoroughly and hung it above the bar counter with all the others. He arranged Jia Jia’s lantern on a small table at the corner of the bar and headed home for a deep, long sleep.
*
When Jia Jia got back to her grandmother’s apartment, the aquarium was on fire. There was a single flame the height of a child, thrusting up on one side of the tank from the base towards the ceiling. The corals swayed like metronomes and the fish continued their sluggish, aimless wander, oblivious.
Jia Jia rushed through to the kitchen in search of a container of some sort. Her grandmother was washing rice, and like the fish, she did not have a clue about what was going on. Jia Jia dragged out a bucket from under the sink, knocking over a bottle of cleaning fluid, filled the bucket with water and hauled it back to the living room. She launched it at the tank, spilling half of it on herself. The water seemed to calm the flame somewhat and she began the process again. By this time, her grandmother had emerged from the kitchen and was yelling things.
‘Quick, quick, quick,’ she kept repeating as she shuffled her feet as fast as she could.
Jia Jia’s aunt appeared from her room, saw the flaming tank, and immediately turned to the bathroom to fetch another bucket, all the while shouting at Jia Jia’s grandmother to stand out of her way. Jia Jia was not sure how many buckets of water she hurled at the fish tank. She was running out of breath, and her arms refused to lift themselves any more. With one last effort, it was her aunt who managed to put the flame out.
Jia Jia unplugged the aquarium and the blue fluorescent light went off, leaving the fish and coral dull and dusky. The three women stood around the tank, none of them saying anything.