I stepped out of the dorms, my bag slung over my shoulder. When I had entered the building, I’d felt nervous in case anyone saw. Now I simply didn’t care. I walked for a while, a tightening feeling in my chest. I passed a gaggle of girls, laughing. The difficulty in catching my breath intensified. And with it came anger. I suddenly felt so fucking angry. I blinked away the film of water that had formed in my eyes. It felt white hot, like acid. I veered off the path and into a much bigger building. The door groaned when I pushed it open. It was gloomy inside. A little walkway led to a bigger space. The air was musty. In the corner there was an old grand piano.
I was fighting for breath now, but that anger was still white hot. And it wasn’t at Gen, or my mother, or anyone else, but at myself.
The words ran through my head like scampering creatures.
‘You are a mouse. That’s all you are. A pathetic little mousey-mouse!’
I dropped my bag. I struggled to unzip it. My fingers fumbled about until I found the cold steel of the knife. I took it out as I pulled up my sleeve. The steel glinted dully. The edge was not sharp, but the point was sharp enough. I thrust the tip of it against my open wrist, nipping stabs which opened up the layer of scar tissue from previous contacts, and as the pain cut and sluiced its way through me like shards of glass, the pressure on my chest simultaneously began to relieve. My arm was burning, but I could breathe again and the hot trickle of blood felt calming. My eyes fluttered and I felt dizzy, but the sudden bout of rage was … exsanguinated.
‘Greetings, Funny Bunny!’
I nearly jumped out of my skin. I spun around, the knife still in my hand. I must have looked quite maniacal, frizzy-haired with shock, the blood still dripping from the blade.
I hadn’t even heard her approach. But watching me was a girl, around my own age. Whereas I was thin and petite, she was broad-shouldered. I noticed she had small breasts. Her body looked incongruous somehow, almost like a boy’s. But her face was strikingly feline, sharp features slashed by glittering green eyes whose curiosity was not quite wholesome. There was something inquisitive but also cruel in her gaze.
My mouth must have hung open. I stepped forward, wanting to say something, forgetting that I was still holding the knife.
She raised her hands.
‘Hey, I’m all for stabbing people. I dig the direct approach. It’s just that I wouldn’t be so keen on stabbing myself!’
She smiled. Her smile was wayward yet beguiling, her eyes gleamed catlike in the gloom.
‘I … this … I didn’t even …’
My voice trailed away. I stuffed the knife back into my bag. I covered the nakedness of my wrist with my sleeve. I felt the cuts tingle. I felt the anger again. Perhaps it had never really left.
I looked her straight in the eye.
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
She raised her hands once more, that same gesture of supplication, but those eyes flashed with cruel amusement.
‘Hey I get it, Funny Bunny. You were blowing off steam. It’s just your way. Why do you think I’m here?’
‘Why are you here?’
‘Same reason. Blow off a little steam. You a newbie? I’m starting my second year in this shithole! And sometimes when I get bored of the bars, and the boys that tell their stupid jokes and the girls that laugh their stupid laughs, I come here. Like I said. To blow off a little steam.’
I must have looked baffled. She nodded at me as she strode past. She sat by the piano, lifted the lid. And, just like that, she started to play.
The notes were soft and melodious, and even on that creaky old piano they came out in an intricate cascade, melancholy and luminous. She was playing classical music. Later I would learn that it was from Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, but I didn’t know that then. I only knew that the music she created infused the gloom of that room with its beauty. So infinite, so ethereal. My first impression of her had not been a good one. There was a streak of sarcasm, of sourness, that was off-putting, but now all I could do was watch as those fingers glided across those dusty keys.
She stopped. The sound of the piano dying away was a violence in itself: beauty so suddenly vanquished. She did not meet my eye. Her gaze remained on her stilled fingers.
‘I’m sorry if you were expecting something a little more up to date.’
‘No, it’s … fine. That was … lovely!’
She did not raise her gaze.
‘Classical is all I play these days,’ she mumbled. ‘When I was younger, when I was a teenager, I was more adventurous. I would write my own songs, play my own music – I would compose the soundtrack to my own life.’
I leaned in, intrigued.
‘What happened?’
‘My father was the director of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra of China. He had … high expectations for me. He wanted me to concentrate on Beethoven and Bach. Only I was little more than a child at that stage. And sometimes my mind wandered. He told me not to play my own stuff. But sometimes I just forgot.’
Her voice became halting, subdued.
‘So … what happened?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t really his fault. When you are that highly strung, when you are so devoted to an art, it can become all-consuming.’
Her voice faded away. She still wouldn’t look at me. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck prick. For I knew then that something awful had happened to her. Part of me didn’t want to know, but the words slipped from my mouth anyway.
‘So what happened?’
She gulped.
‘One day, when I was supposed to have been working on Rachmaninov, I’d been fooling around with my own stuff instead … he just lost it. I mean, it really wasn’t his fault. I guess he was just wired that way.’
‘Lost it?’
‘Yeah. He took a hammer to my right hand.’
She spoke in a muffled voice.
‘I guess it was for the best in the end. I kept to the greats from that time on. Nowadays, even though I can’t move my fingers quite as well, it’s nice to come here. No pressure, simply to play for the sake of playing.’
She stifled a sob.
‘Oh good grief. I’m … so sorry. I had no idea. You play so well. I think it was some of the loveliest music I have ever heard, I mean …’
She turned her gaze up to me hesitantly. Those green eyes shimmered, and her sharp, sculpted features seemed to contort. She is having a mental breakdown, I thought. My mind whirled. Should I scream for help? Should I call for an ambulance?
The contortions evened out in a slashing grin, wicked and amused. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite believe I was real.
‘I’m just fucking with you, Funny Bunny! Didn’t you get that? Daddy Dearest could no more have directed the Chinese Philharmonic Orchestra than perform brain surgery or fly into space!’
I felt the weight of my exhaustion.
‘Why would you say something so horrible? I’ve had a really, really bad day!’
For the first time her expression flickered.
‘Okay, Funny Bunny. Point taken. I wasn’t trying to upset you. I just … say stuff sometimes.’
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
I lowered my gaze and trudged past her.
‘Yeah, well, it was real nice to meet you!’ I muttered sullenly.
I felt her move after me.
‘Don’t be like that. Here, take this.’
I turned. She thrust a card into my hand. I took it on reflex and peered at it. It was the type of thing that Chinese businessmen carry to convey their position in the company. Only this one said: ‘Madam Macaw’s Marvellous Marauders’.
I looked at her.
‘Madam Macaw?’
‘At your service,’ she said in a sultry voice, giving a theatrical bow.
‘We meet every Wednesday, usually here, in order to work a little Marauder Mischief! But we go to other places too! You should come. You never know. It might even work for you!’
. . .
I didn’t see her that Wednesday. Or the Wednesday after that. I buried her card deep in my pocket, until the memory of her became something surreal, an event glimpsed through a dream. It had been, by far and away, the most intriguing encounter I’d had at university, but I was still so focused on Gen and the terrible fear of losing him. I had always known he was smarter than me, better read, more self-assured, but in the context of our high school I thought I could keep up. Now that we were in an environment of precocious and confident young adults, I felt he was sure to leave me behind. That he would find a group of friends more interesting and more worldly – and yet, like a child stamping its feet, I raged against the possibility. More and more, I devised ways of impressing him, of saying something clever, of giving him the pleasure he desired in new and varied forms. But he hadn’t asked me to his room since that first occasion.
I looked up his schedule; these were all posted publicly. I made myself available on campus, I made sure to pass him on the way to seminars. Sometimes we would have lunch together. But despite all my efforts, I could feel him retreating, day by day, hour by hour. And yet I couldn’t stay the intensity of my feelings. We shared a childhood. We had similar intellectual interests. I’d touched him down there on so many occasions. I was qualified to love him. I’d worked for it. Surely he had to love me in return.
But it became even harder. Whenever I saw him, my heart would race, only it no longer resembled joy so much as fear. As we passed on campus, I would try making my voice breezy and humorous, but my comments barely elicited even a muffled reaction. He seemed to look straight through me, his eyes glassy and distant. His voice held that lack of emotion I was familiar with, only now there was a creeping coldness, too. I’d feel a dry heat in my mouth, my heart slamming, and the words I’d try to find would get clogged in my throat. The more desperately I tried to speak, the more what I wanted to say dried up. I became gripped by this silent but inevitable sense of panic, as if invisible fingers were gradually closing around my throat.
I thought about Gen all the time, and I dreamt about him too. Sometimes we were children again, and I was with Jian, Wang Fan and the others, who were just as they had always been. And when I saw Gen, he too was as he had been: a subdued, thoughtful boy with just a hint of cruelty, a boy whose strange mannerisms resembled those of someone older. A boy who never quite fitted in and yet it never seemed to bother him. But when I came to look on him in my dream, his features were obscured by shadow. I knew it was him, for his bearing and voice were familiar, only the more I tried to see his face, the more the darkness there terrified me.
Things eventually came to a head one evening. He was spending more and more time with his two friends, whose names I had learned were Aiguo and Sile. I had hung around campus all day, hoping to run into him and yet dreading it. I had to be careful with money, and while the other students spent a lot of time in the bars and cafeterias, I walked the campus in the sunshine, enjoying the grass and the feeling of warmth on my face. By that point, however, it had started to drizzle, and the day was already starting to fade into the evening’s murky grey.
I made my way to the East Slope bar. I passed through the hard doors and into an atmosphere of cigarette smoke and pounding bass from the music of a band of sweaty and entangled figures performing under the bright light at the front. I saw him straight away, lounging with the other two at the back, a cigarette drooping from his mouth. I hadn’t seen him smoke before. As I approached him, I felt the nervous anticipation one feels when approaching a stranger. When I reached him he nodded at me in greeting and smiled but the smile never reached his eyes.
His two friends nodded politely as well. For a while we just stood there watching the band. I noted that Gen was bobbing his head to the rhythm of the music while he smoked. It seemed to me that he was almost a different person, someone I would have to adapt myself to. But that was what I had always done. With Gen. With my mother. With my schoolteachers. The only person I had really felt I could be myself with was the one person who was no longer here.
I looked at Gen and cracked my coolest, most casual smile. I started to move in time with the music too. But the music seemed harsh and loud, the electric guitars scraping their way across my head. When my voice came, it was reedy and weak, a flailing shrillness, trying to make itself heard above the harsh metallic sounds crashing across the room and roaring in my ears.
‘Hey, this is pretty rad. I really … I really dig this scene!’
Rad. Dig? Had I ever used those words before that night?
He moved his head a fraction of an inch. He didn’t respond.
I tried to speak again. His smile thinned. He tapped his ears. He was indicating that he couldn’t hear me, but I knew he could. I knew it and he knew I knew. It was in his expression, eyes lit with a hint of cruelty. I stood there gaping at him. One of the other boys cleared his throat. I turned on him in fury. I had expected that Aiguo and Sile would be smiling, that all three of them would be laughing at my wretchedness – the hysterical female to be ridiculed; a means to facilitate their male bonding.
But when I looked at the other two boys, what I saw in their eyes was pity.
I looked at Gen one last time, studied his face to see if there was any recognition of how I was being made to feel. I wanted to scream. I wanted to stay silent. I headed out of the bar and into the night. I walked for a while, hearing the music fade into an intermittent haze of sound until it was gone altogether. My legs were tired but I trudged on, making my way round the perimeter of the campus at night, a series of never-ending circles traipsed in the rain. Inside the campus buildings I could see groups of people, talking and laughing – a whole world playing out behind the doors of the residences, one which excluded me by virtue of some invisible barrier.
I thought of my grandmother. In my family, she had been the one who most supported my going to university, who was most vocal about it, even though she had never valued books or libraries or study. She had seen it as a means by which I might better myself, and she also believed it was my destiny to do great things, to go to places she and my parents had never seen. She believed in me. I wondered what she would think of me now, lingering in the shadows, the rain dripping from my lank hair, a morose combination of wetness and self-pity. She would have some choice words, of that I was sure.
I reached into my pocket simply to keep my hands warm. But my fingers found a weathered card: ‘Madam Macaw’s Marvellous Marauders’.
I had thought about her a few times since that surreal encounter, but with everything that had been happening with Gen, I had put her to the back of my mind. Now she emerged again, those feline eyes, that smile edged with cruelty. I had been feeling lonely and sorry for myself as the rain beaded my hair and dripped from my nose. Now, however, I realised that I hadn’t been completely excluded from life on campus. She had invited me to whatever it was she did. She had asked me to come on Wednesday evening. And it was Wednesday evening now. Perhaps she had meant to mock me. She was difficult to read. But she had invited me to join her and the ‘marauders’ nevertheless. And, however strange or uncomfortable that might be, it wouldn’t be worse than how I was feeling now.
I made my way back to the same building. I pushed through the heavy doors.
The great room had been dim and shadowy before; now it was bright and resplendent. There were nine or ten people in the room, but the centre stage was occupied by two young men. One of them was wielding what looked like a club, the other was looking back at him with a ferocious stare.
‘Don’t you dare!’ said the smaller individual in a high-pitched voice.
From behind them Madam Macaw screamed emphatically:
‘Hit the bastard. It’s fucking Shakespeare!’
I wasn’t sure what was going on. At first glance, it appeared that the smaller individual – a rather well-groomed and effete young man – had, for some bizarre reason, been named Shakespeare. That Madam Macaw had developed an insane dislike of him and somehow arranged for him to be subjected to a ritual beating in front of me. And then I saw the props, the arrangements and the position of the others in the background. I realised I was watching a play. And yet there was a real intensity to what was taking place.
Madam Macaw shrieked again.
‘Chiron wants to kill Bassianus. Because he wants to fuck Lavinia. Don’t you want to fuck Lavinia, Chiron?’
The larger of the two individuals – a tubby-faced young man with a strangely placid demeanour – looked at Madam Macaw sheepishly.
‘Yes?’ he mumbled.
The smaller and tidier one went to say something, to point something out, but the other brought the club down and thwacked him over the head.
The club was a rubber one, of course, and yet the larger actor had brought it down hard; it wasn’t as if he had put any menace into the gesture, but, given the sheer size of him, the impact had a certain effect.
The smaller man shrieked at his larger comrade. Then he turned and shrieked at Madam Macaw. The sound was impossibly high-pitched and indignant.
‘Ow! That hurt.’
‘This is theatre, darling,’ Madam Macaw drawled. ‘It’s about revealing one’s inner pain. It’s meant to hurt!’
The smaller young man peered at her dubiously, looking to see if she was laughing at him. But Madam Macaw’s features were unreadable. In the end he turned away from her stare.
The bigger guy tentatively reached out his arm, and then the two actors embraced. It was an awkward motion that at once became smooth; the smaller student seemed to relax in the bigger student’s arms. And then the smaller guy kissed the bigger guy on the lips.
I’d never seen anything like it.
It wasn’t the kind of kiss I might have given to my brother. It was instantaneous, it was over in a second, but there was in it the type of intensity with which I might once have kissed Gen.
It was romantic.
My mouth hung open.
At the same moment, Madam Macaw turned round. She saw me.
‘Funny Bunny!’ she exclaimed with delight. ‘I didn’t know if you would come or not. But I’m glad you are here!’
I realised it was the first time anyone in this entire place had seemed pleased to see me.
‘Come hither, come hither, sweet, strange damsel!’
‘What?’ I blinked.
‘I’m speaking Shakespearean. Get your butt over here!’
She snapped the words out but her eyes were smiling. I walked over.
‘So this is Lan and this is Min.’
She gestured towards them.
Lan shuffled uncomfortably. He was big and sweating heavily, perhaps because of the lights and the heavy jumper he was wearing. He nodded at me, painfully almost, and then his soft, awkward eyes slid away.
Min, on the other hand, had lively eyes; dots of black darting everywhere. He leaned forward and kissed me on both cheeks.
‘So lovely to meet you, darling. So sorry you have been co-opted into this satanic organisation. There is, of course, no escape now!’
He looked at Madam Macaw defiantly.
‘Oh, aren’t you a cad?’ she said. ‘Let’s call it a wrap! See you at Bar Wujiaoxing.’
‘You and I are about to get drunk,’ she said to me, taking my arm.
And when you are swept up in that kind of strange, magnetic energy, it is hard to resist.