by Mark Watson
‘I’ve got no idea what time it is. I just want to smell you.’
‘We’ve been travelling for twelve hours. That’s the main thing you need to know.’
‘Does that mean I’m not allowed to want you?’
‘No. But it does mean I’m allowed to tell you to go away.’
In the morning she was businesslike.
‘I’ve got to meet someone a fair way across town. We’ll get the underground.’ For a moment I thought she meant the Tube; then I remembered where we were. I groped my way groggily around a new, formless room. Getting ready took longer than usual. The air in the bathroom was claggy and Kathleen had to help me in and out of the shower. I knelt naked on the floor and began to rummage through my case. Kathleen, sighing, got down to help me.
‘There you are. Pants. Jeans. Shirt. Let’s go.’
‘Are we going to have breakfast?’
‘Christ and his dog, come on. We’ll get some breakfast on the way or something.’
We ate gooey pastries, unevenly packed with some sort of meat, on the way down to the subway. Kathleen led me off the train, up onto the street where we were blasted with cold. She was meeting someone to talk about the way the Internet was censored here, someone who worked for an NGO. The details were too fast and numerous, the context too intricate. I waddled along beside her impatient stride, feeling like a toddler. The wind kept rearing up and dealing us slaps in the face. Or dealing them to me, at least. I didn’t feel as if we were having the same experience as one another. Kathleen pulled me into a small-feeling building and spoke to someone, and then we were in a room.
I had brought my laptop, but its battery was depleted and it felt as if asking someone about power sockets would lower my status here still further. I tapped away for a little while on the release I was writing for a credit card ‘exclusively designed’ for owners of a specific car. This has never been a car for people who play it safe. But sometimes you don’t want adventures. When you’re trying to pay for things away from home, for example. And that’s why we’ve come up with …
It was stupid: what could I say about adventures when all I wanted was to go home? I began to delete it all from the screen. Fleetingly, and without knowing why, I had an urge to begin writing to my father.
Where are you? Are you alive? Why do I not even know your name? Why did you never come back? You must have heard about me. Why don’t you want to see me?
Later on I persuaded her to take me to Tiananmen Square and we stood there in the chill. I wanted to hold her hand, but a brush-off, any little hint of impatience or cooling desire, would be too much to swallow. I remembered the two of us in Piccadilly Circus, seething with shared desire, and castigated the version of myself who had stood there and felt as if it would never fade.
‘They’re going to march in a minute,’ said Kathleen, ‘the soldiers. You can see them all gathering in their green uniforms. Sort of a dull green. Just dozens and dozens of men, all short hair. They march a couple of times a day.’
What was a dull green, what was any green? I felt physically cowed by this place, by its hordes of people and its unknowables. She described the small gangs of wandering tourists, the wintry sky, the chaotic frontispieces of the imperial buildings, the plumes of smog on the horizon. She was doing her best: it was just that for all these word-pictures, and despite the occasional strange smell and background chatter in a foreign tongue, I was still walking around in the same darkness as ever. I wanted something I could experience as a new and enriching sensation, something that would say, You are in China, you are worldly-wise. The massacre had happened here: Graham had read the report to me, and I had relayed it to Howard. I wanted to feel a clear line from that moment of my childhood to this one of maturity, but it was more as if I had simply exchanged one description of something for another.
The next day, I volunteered to stay in the hotel by myself. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to; more that I could not stomach another day as an encumbrance. Kathleen had three meetings. I would stay here and work. She’d come back and we would be like any couple – the return from the office, absence making the heart fonder. We ate a breakfast which she picked out for me, gelatinous offerings that felt wobbly in the mouth. Then she chaperoned me back to the room.
‘I’ll be absolutely fine.’
‘Just call down to reception if there’s anything. I’ve told them to have an English speaker ready in case. You just press the big button. This one.’ She took my hand and showed me. ‘All right?’
‘Yes. Go. It’s fine.’
She brushed her teeth with those vigorous brushstrokes, spat, pecked me on the top of the head and then – as if deciding to increase her offer slightly – came back to kiss me on the mouth. I stiffened and reached for her, but she was out of the door. There was the harsh cheep of the lift as its doors juddered aside. Within the next hour she might be anywhere in this city of fifteen million people, this city which could swallow up the Alpha, the whole of London.
The heating unit clacked away. I should have asked her to switch it off. She had laid out two cups of water for me; there were coffee granules in a mug and I could boil the kettle with a single button-press. She had set up my laptop to surf the net, and left me her own computer with a DVD ready to play. I could order room service from the Anglophone staff member. These various distractions sucked away the rest of the morning and the beginning of the afternoon. At least I thought so: in fact, when I checked the time, only two hours had gone by. I finished off the press release; I listened to a long series of BBC news clips online. The time oozed by, as sluggish as sewer water.
I didn’t want to eat anything. I had drunk both my cups of water. The hall outside was narrow and the only sound was my own footsteps. When I re-entered our room, reaching out and counting the door handles as I did to navigate at the Alpha, I was gripped by a loneliness which made me resentful and ashamed. An insect was buzzing in a corner, its steady noise woven in and out of the mechanical breaths of the heating unit. I felt the skin on my arms prickling.
Kathleen called early in the afternoon. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Completely fine. How were your meetings?’
‘It’s going really well. I might need to see a couple more people this afternoon. I’ll tell you about it later. Sure you’re all right?’
‘Of course.’
Afterwards, the sudden absence of her voice brought me to a complete standstill for a moment. My palms were damp on the desktop. Something felt alarmingly out of joint. The heater was clicking its invisible tongue. I felt hemmed in by the room, even by the air I was breathing, exhaling, rebreathing. I turned to the Internet, to my version of the world, and set the auto-read to pluck fruit at random from its billion branches.
A stampede at a temple in Mandhar Devi. 250 dead. I didn’t know anything about this place, or a single thing about any of the two hundred and fifty people who had been wiped off the human register while I was doing something else. Click here for more about Mandhar Devi. The robotic almost-voice read out some particulars. It was a twenty-four-hour-long festival. Pilgrims sacrificed animals and offered curd rice to a goddess. I typed curd rice into Google. It was a yoghurt rice commonly eaten in Kerala. I typed in Kerala. There were thirty-three million fucking people in Kerala alone. And all these people in Beijing. I had started to sweat. It pooled at the base of my spine, misted my forehead. I could hear the insect again. What sort of insect was it? I could taste the memory of the blood that filled my mouth when I was stung by a wasp at the zoo.
I was clicking on links at random, letting the impassive cyber-voice wash over me. Later-in-the-15th-century-the-lucrative-spice-trade-attracted-Portuguese-traders-to-the-region, droned the computer. I was rudderless in a sea of facts not connected to one another, or connected only in the subtle, impossible ways that all the people out of the window were connected, all the way back to Howard in the Alpha. The connections were there but I could not see them. Kerala is the state with the lowest p
opulation growth rate, the highest life expectancy. The human sex ratio is of particular interest to anthropologists because. Anthropology is the study of humankind. Margaret Mead was frequently in the mass media during the 1970s.
I closed the browser. I walked again to the end of the corridor and back, reminding myself that the crucial facts were as clear-cut as they’d always been. I was Chas York, I was going to be twenty-four this year, the year being 2005. It was January. I was in Beijing, once Peking, the capital of China. Despite the fact that my girlfriend’s precise whereabouts were unknown, she would be back before long and my skin would be against hers. Howard was only a plane ride away.
In closing the Internet down I had accidentally shut off my connection. I tried to reconnect, in vain. The shortcut keys led nowhere – my computer was beached. Kathleen’s was a little further along, but the keys felt strange; the desktop was a mystery. I called downstairs. After a considerable wait, someone spoke to me in Mandarin.
‘------,’ said the voice.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m in Room 82. There’s someone who speaks English?’
‘-------------?’ said the voice. I heard the words helplessly as if they were objects I was being invited to look at.
‘English,’ I said, and gave Kathleen’s name.
‘--------,’ the voice replied. I could hear the insect buzzing. There was a click and I was put into a holding queue. The music was again a version of ‘Satisfaction’. It finished and got halfway through a second playing before somebody picked up.
‘Hello, sir?’
I explained the Internet problem. The man on the other end listened patiently and asked me to repeat myself. I re-explained.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the English-speaker, leaving another pause. ‘We don’t deal with Internets,’ he said in the end. ‘I give you another number. You call.’
‘I … could you do that for me, by any chance?’ I asked reluctantly. ‘I’m blind, you see, I can’t see what I’m doing, and my girlfriend … ’
There was another click, a further short burst of music, and when a voice appeared again, it was with a new spurt of Mandarin which I recognized as being the same phrase we had begun the entire interaction with.
‘------?’
I gave up and dropped the receiver. There would be no Internet till Kathleen got back, then. I began to listen to the DVD, which was ready to go. It froze after ten minutes or so. I drew back my fist to punch the machine, remembered it was Kathleen’s, and brought it down hard on my own keyboard.
Before long my field of options had narrowed to two. Both of them felt like defeats. I had been alone for five and a half hours. It was a good effort for a blind, inexperienced person. But I didn’t want to be a blind, inexperienced person. I didn’t want to interrupt Kathleen with the news I hadn’t quite made it. I pressed one on my speed-dial. The first letter of the alphabet, the first hotel in the list of London’s five-stars.
‘Hotel Alpha, good morning,’ said Graham’s voice, as crisply as if he were just behind me.
‘Is Howard there?’
‘Chas!’ said Graham. ‘How is China?’
‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘It’s been really, it’s been really … ’
That was as far as I got before my voice careered off and I was spluttering into the handset. Sarah-Jane came on; Graham must have transferred the call. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s all right. It’s all right.’
‘There’s a wasp here, I think,’ I managed to say.
Sarah-Jane talked to me for two or three minutes until my breathing had slowed down, and then Howard came to the phone.
‘Think of a number between one and a hundred,’ he commanded. I laughed out loud through a barrier of snot. The number was seventy-one. He got it right.
‘I shouldn’t stay on the phone long,’ I said, ‘it’s expensive to—’
‘We’ll pay your fucking bill, for fuck’s sake,’ said Howard. ‘You should never have to be out of your comfort zone, mate,’ he said. My comfort zone was so tiny that leaving it was unavoidable, I started to say, but Howard was off. ‘I’ve told you, you don’t have anything to prove. It’s enough that you’ve gone to China, fucking hell, without being left on your own in the room as if this is some sort of Big Brother thing where we try to torture you … ’
‘She’s only gone for the day. I said she should go on her own. I don’t want to be in the way.’
‘Mate,’ said Howard. He cleared his throat. ‘This was my whole point, this was why I wanted to go with you. I—’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I offered to come,’ said Howard. ‘I would’ve stayed in a different hotel if necessary. In fact, looking at yours online, I definitely would have. But no, she wasn’t having it.’
My mouth was dry. Howard resumed; a breath-long pause had always been enough for him. ‘That’s not the point. My point is just that I’m the person you should always turn to. Kathleen has her job to worry about.’
‘So do you.’
‘But none of it as important as you, mate. My whole mission in life is to make sure you have a decent time of it.’
‘I’m not a kid.’
‘You still need help, though, Chas.’ Howard’s tone had shed all its rhetorical bullishness, even its normal joshing quality. ‘And I’m the one who helps you. I like being the one who helps you. It’s a privilege.’
We talked for a few minutes more. I could hear the sound of Sarah-Jane singing, pots and pans being thrown about. I could construct, as a reflex of the senses, the atrium’s web of voices, the whirring of the lift, the touch of Room 25’s slightly misshapen door. There was a stab of pain like a stitch in my lower abdomen.
‘Are you all right?’ Howard asked, picking up on some change in my breath in the way he alone could.
‘I just … I’ve got this stupid idea that I should never have left. That the hotel will never quite be the same when I go back.’
Howard laughed softly. ‘Well, you’ve got that right. It is a stupid idea. This place never changes, mate. It’ll all be waiting for you.’
His words made me feel as if I were an explorer pined for by those left at home, rather than a man who had left just over seventy-two hours ago. A strange pride took hold of my heart. By the time Howard said goodbye, the room was just a room. My being there was a neutral thing, a matter of indifference. When at last Kathleen’s footsteps rang outside and the door let her in, I was in a state of quiescence like someone recovering from a violent vomiting fit. Everything was pleasantly out of focus.
There was the clanging of loose change onto the desk, and she filled my horizon, suddenly, kissing me on the forehead. ‘Hello.’
‘How was your day?’
She slipped away as I grasped for another kiss, and I heard her flinging herself onto the flimsy bed. ‘Amazing. The woman I met just then basically all-but-said the correspondent job is mine. If I want it. Jesus juice,’ she added, ‘it’s warm as hell in here, have you had the heating on all day?’
‘So, obviously you do want it …’
‘It’s kind of too good to turn down,’ Kathleen said.
There was a pause in which I might have said congratulations, or she might have reassured me that the relationship could survive across continents, or either of us could have said something optimistic about my chances of relocating to China. None of these things happened. The heating unit came sighing to a silence of relief as she yanked the cord.
‘Have you been OK?’
‘I’ve been great.’
‘But really?’
She took off her coat and slung it somewhere, and I caught the scent of her, the real flesh and blood of her as she moved closer again. ‘Really, no. I panicked a bit. There was … I had trouble with the Internet and there was an insect. It was fine.’
Kathleen’s hand toyed with the sleeve of my jumper. ‘You could have called me.’
‘I called Howard.’
We stumbled over his name, as we always s
eemed to now. She drew back her arm.
‘He told me he was going to come, but you didn’t want him to.’
‘Fucking hell,’ said Kathleen. ‘He’s bloody good at telling you things when it suits him, isn’t he!’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’
We were slipping into a pattern which I thought I recognized, as if we’d spoken these exact words before. I realized with sorrow that it wasn’t about the words but the rhythm. I’d heard many strangers’ iterations of this dance: the quickstep through grievance, anger, resignation, the rise and fall of voices, the sudden lurches of volume. Early in our romance we would laugh at them, warring couples in the bar. And now here it was, here we were.
‘What do you mean, nothing? What were you going to say?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Obviously it matters, because now you’re being defensive.’
‘I’m always going to be defensive,’ said Kathleen, ‘if you go running to Howard at every sign of a—’
‘I didn’t go running to him. I’m on the other side of the fucking world from him.’
‘All right,’ she said, ‘great, but I wanted this trip to be about you and me. If Howard is here, the trip ends up being about him. Everything is always about him.’
‘I don’t know why you have to be so antagonistic towards him the whole time. Literally the whole time.’
‘There are a lot of things you don’t know,’ she spat back.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
The silence was so biting, I almost wished for the insect-buzz or the heater noise again. Kathleen sighed. ‘Listen. I wanted you to feel independent. Feel like you can get away from that place, from the hotel.’
‘It’s my home. I’ve never known anywhere else.’
‘Precisely,’ she said, ‘and that’s the problem.’
‘Just be upfront with me. What have you got against him? Against the Alpha?’
Kathleen hesitated. ‘Against the Alpha, nothing.’
‘Against Howard?’
She let a moment go by. ‘I think he dominates you, and you’re a bit too dependent on him, that’s all.’
