White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

2

The first area of wilderness to which I had independent access — I went there with my friends, without my parents — was Leckhampton Hill, just outside Cheltenham. A sign warning ‘Beware of Adders’ emphasised that you had left the safety of the town behind, while imparting a hint of Eden to the untamed outdoors. If you walked here you always came to the Devil’s Chimney: a vertical promontory of sandstone rock. I’m not sure whether its origins were natural (a pillar of hard rock left behind when the softer surrounding rock was eroded?) or man-made (the lone residue of what had once been a quarry?). Either way, at some point in its existence it acquired this locally mythic name.

My uncle Daryl and his brother Paul climbed the Devil’s Chimney in their teens, in 1958. There is a photograph of them both, bare-chested, perched on top of it like Hillary and Tenzing on the roof of the world. Climbing up must have been difficult, but not nearly as difficult and dangerous as clambering down.

The Devil’s Chimney: the place my uncle had climbed. It was a landmark: a place of mysterious origin where something remarkable and risky had been achieved. It is still there today but is now cordoned off to prevent anyone trying to emulate Daryl’s precocious feat.

Forbidden City

On the morning of my visit to the Forbidden City, my last day in China, I woke exhausted, as I had every day of my trip. First, in Shanghai, because of jet lag and the excitement of being in China, then — as the evenings got later, the drinks drunk more numerous, and the morning commitments earlier — from not having enough time to sleep; finally, in Beijing, from a potent combination of all of the above known as lag-induced insomnia.

There was no time for breakfast. There was never time for breakfast. Min was waiting in reception, pre-punctual as always, never tired, always smiling and happy — but with an air of harriedness beneath that smile as she asked if I’d slept well.

‘Wonderfully,’ I said. It’s the easiest thing to do when you’ve slept terribly: say whatever requires least effort or explanation. We shook hands — we had somehow got stuck at the pre-embrace stage of our relationship — and stepped outside. It was boiling already, at eight in the morning. The driver was standing by the car in a white shirt, his hair slicked back, smoking. I couldn’t remember his name. Actually, it wasn’t the name but the face that was causing me trouble: the driver’s name was Feng, I knew that, but this was not Feng, surely. So, whereas yesterday I’d said, ‘Hello, Feng,’ today I just said, ‘Hi there,’ conscious that if this was Feng then he might be offended by the downgrading to anonymity. Was that why he wasn’t smiling? No, no, it couldn’t be Feng. . That was the thing about being so tired, you forgot things you should have remembered — things like people’s faces — and then whirred away worrying about them, exhausting yourself still further.

I settled into my seat as the car began its dreadful journey to the Forbidden City. Beijing was a nightmare city, combining the intensity of New York with the vastness of L.A. Was it twenty million people who lived here? A third of the population of Britain in a city that felt about half the size of England. We were on an eight-lane freeway, barely moving. Fine by me: a chance to snatch the first of multiple naps in the course of what Min had already warned would be ‘a very tiring day.’

I was jolted awake as the car, having accelerated into an opening, braked and swerved. I’d been asleep for twenty minutes — it was so easy getting to sleep in a moving car in daylight, far easier than in a luxurious bed in a hotel at night. And these twenty-minute naps were incredibly reviving — for about twenty minutes. Min, as usual, was on one of her two phones, sorting out the day’s constantly changing schedule. She’d arranged a guide, she said, to show us round the Forbidden City. My heart sank. My heart is prone to sinking, and although few words have the capacity to make it sink as rapidly or deeply as the word ‘guide,’ plenty of others make it sink like a slow stone: words like ‘having to’ or ‘listen to,’ as in having to listen to a guide tell me stuff about the Forbidden City I could read about in a book back home, by which time any desire to do so would have sunk without trace.

We were at the entrance to the Forbidden City. I’d driven past it last night, in a different car, under the Chinese moonlight, after a dinner featuring twenty different kinds of tofu, en route to a bar with a view overlooking the moonlit roofs of the Forbidden City. The highlight of the meal had been spare ribs, made of tofu and tasting every bit as meaty as a meat-lover’s dream of ribs without the underlying horror of meat. There had even been a shiny bone sticking out of the tofu-meat, made of lotus root. I’d been dreading three things about China: the pollution, the smoking (a subset of pollution) and the food. The air had been clear, I’d encountered hardly any smoking and the food — the tofu — had been like a new frontier in simulation.

I climbed out of the car, walloped right away by the heat even though it was not yet nine. The guide was running late, Min said before hurrying off to buy tickets, so we would meet her inside.

‘Great,’ I said, hoping the guide would be unable to find us amid the crowds swarming through the gate as though this was the only day of the year entry was not forbidden. Min reappeared with the tickets and we filed into the epic courtyard — already busy, even though we had arrived only moments after tickets went on sale. It was tremendous, this initial view: red walls and golden roofs sagging and boatlike under an ocean of unpolluted sky. We walked into the next courtyard. There were a lot of people here too, but the Forbidden City was the size of Cheltenham, so there was plenty of room for everyone. Jeez, it went on forever, and every bit looked exactly the same as every other bit: courtyards the size of football pitches, cloisters, sloping roofs with rooms beneath them. Doubtless the guide would explain how all these bits were not really alike, how each part had its own particular and tedious function that distinguished it from all the others. All the more reason to enjoy it now in a state of fully achieved ignorance, without the effort of appearing to listen as the guide gnawed away at the experience with unwanted knowledge and unasked-for expertise.

Min was in increasingly frequent communication with this guide, then was suddenly waving to her. And there she was, waving back. Her hair, inky-slinky black, came down to her shoulders. Her complexion was darker than many of the visitors to the Forbidden City, who were so pale they sheltered from the scorch beneath glowing pink umbrellas. She had a big smile, was wearing a long dress, pale green, sleeveless. She walked towards Min, took off her sunglasses and embraced her. She was holding her sunglasses in one hand behind Min’s back. Her eyes were brown, round but subtly elongated. I liked her confidence (it made me feel confident, even if it also made me wish, simultaneously, that I’d not worn shorts), the way she stood, wearing sandals with a slight heel. Her toenails were painted dark blue. Her name was Li. We shook hands. A bare arm was extended, and then her eyes disappeared again behind her sunglasses. The thirty seconds since she’d waved were more than enough to reverse all previous ideas about a guide. A guide was an excellent idea. What could be better than having the history of this fascinating place explained at length, in all its intricate detail? Without the application of some kind of knowledge I would not be seeing the place at all, just drifting through it in a mist of ignorance and unachieved indifference.

The three of us stepped out of the hot shade and into the blazing sun of the courtyard or whatever it should properly be called — Li didn’t elucidate. I watched her flash into the sunlight and we continued our tour of the Forbidden City. We peered inside a couple of dusty-looking rooms, but there was nothing to see except exhausted beds and depressed chairs. Not that it mattered: the interiors were irrelevant compared with the red-and-gold exteriors, all on an unimaginable scale — the full extent of which Li seemed in no hurry to divulge. She seemed so reluctant to begin her spiel that I prompted her with a few questions, the answers to which I would normally have dreaded.

‘I’m afraid I don’t really know anything about the Forbidden City,’ she said.

‘I thought you were a guide.’

‘No, I’m just a friend of Min’s. She asked me to come.’

Mornings like this prove that you really have to be mad ever to kill yourself. Contemplate it by all means, but never commit to it. Life can improve beyond recognition in the space of a moment. On this occasion life had been pretty good anyway and then it had got better still — and got still better when Li said, ‘If you want me to be a guide, I can try.’

‘Yes, go on. Give it a shot.’

‘Well, let me see. There was a time when the emperor’s wives all lived here. They couldn’t leave. All they could do was walk around. It must have been so boring. Except everyone was always plotting. Not necessarily to get rid of the emperor or one of the other wives, partly just to kill the time. It was intriguing all the time.’

‘Your English is fantastic. Intriguing.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Where did you learn?’

‘Here in Beijing. And then in London. I lived in Camden Town. It was. . ’ In spite of her language skills she paused, searching for a less bland variant of very nice. ‘Well, it was rather horrible, if I may say.’ Ah, she’d been worried about offending me.

‘What else? Not about Camden, which is famously vile. This place — the wives, the emperor.’

‘All they wanted, the wives, was for the emperor to love them.’ She said it with such conviction it seemed as if she were not just telling their story; she was petitioning on their behalf.

‘And what did he want?’

‘More wives,’ she said. ‘And to get away from the wives he had.’ Was Li married? I glanced at her long, ringless fingers. Looking at her extremities, her fingers and toes, I felt less exposed than at all points in between.

Always concerned about my welfare, Min had gone to buy bottles of water, which glinted in the sun as she carried them over. We all retreated into the shade and continued our stroll, gulping water. I watched Li drink: her hand, the bottle, the water, her lips. We sat on a low wall, looking at the worn grass and cobbles of the courtyard.

‘To our left,’ said Li, ‘you will admire the Hall of Mental Cultivation.’ We were in the shade, looking at a sign in the sunlight that said ‘Hall of Mental Cultivation.’

‘You’re too modest,’ I said. ‘You actually know a great deal about this place. All sorts of arcane stuff that the foreign tourist could never work out for himself.’ I was very taken with the Hall of Mental Cultivation. It sounded so much more relaxing than sitting in the Bodleian and ordering up dreary books from the stacks, but maybe it was more demanding — and enlightening too. Perhaps, in a way that seemed vaguely Chinese, the Hall of Mental Cultivation was the sign showing the way to the Hall of Mental Cultivation. I was happy with this thought, a sign that I was already cultivating my mental faculties, which were becoming concentrated, almost entirely, on Li. Conscious of this, of how rude it might appear, I tore my gaze from her and chatted with Min until she had to take a call updating the afternoon’s schedule.

The three of us walked in the direction indicated by the sign, came to an empty room that was just an empty room like all the others, though the emptiness it contained must have been qualitatively different to that found in the uncultivated elsewhere.

We could only be out in the sun for five minutes at a time. It was roasting, the sky a burned blue. A month earlier, walking through London at ten on a cloudy evening, I’d been told that this was what Beijing looked like at midday: nearly dark with pollution. I’d had a cough at the time and that was also a foretaste of Beijing, apparently; it was impossible to go there without succumbing to a serious throat or lung infection. I told Li what I’d heard: that the pollution was so bad you could see it falling from the sky.

‘A few years ago we broke the record for air pollution. We didn’t only beat record. The machine for measuring broke also. The pollution was so bad the measure — how you say?’

‘Gauge?’

‘Yes, the gauge could not measure it.’

‘It was off the scale.’

‘It was terrible. . ’

Li took out her phone; she had an air-quality app which confirmed that the air today was, relatively speaking, mountain-clear. Expats I’d met all had these air-quality apps too, but the source for their measurements was the U.S. Embassy, whose figures were always twice that of the official Chinese figures. None of that mattered as we walked through the magically unpolluted but still-roasting air of the Forbidden City, which easily lived up to its billing as one of the wonders of the world. If it was one of the wonders of the world; I could remember only two others, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the pyramids. Did the Hanging Gardens even exist anymore? Had they ever — in the solipsistic sense of within my lifetime — or had they only been included as a mythic leftover from the vanished past? These days the whole idea of Seven stately Wonders had an elegiac feel: a standard of excellence rendered obsolete by bucket lists of a hundred things to do before you die, whether bungee-jumping over the Zambezi or losing your mind on mushrooms at a full-moon party at Ko Pha Ngan, neither of which I’d done, both of which were on my list of things to avoid before giving the bucket its final kick.

We paused in the corner of yet another square, heading to the Imperial Garden. Li was drinking water. As she raised the bottle to her lips I could see her armpit, hairless and unsweating. And a small scar at the edge of her mouth. It could only be seen when she was in sunlight, when that side of her face was turned to the sun. Min suggested she take a picture of the two of us, of Li and me together. I put my arm around Li’s shoulder but didn’t dare touch her bare skin. When I looked at it later the photo seemed marred by my hand, bunched in a fist like a potato.

‘You look so handsome,’ said Min, glancing at the image on the back of the camera, taking another. She was always saying things like that. A surprising number of her colleagues from the publishing house said the same thing, in fact, and I was not at all displeased to hear these nice things. It might even have been true in a way. The friend who’d warned me about the pollution had also warned — in the sense of reassured — that Chinese women found white middle-aged men attractive. Was this true or was it a kind of mirror projection of the yellow fever to which Western men succumbed? Either way, the constant flow of charm from Min and her colleagues, combined with how young everyone looked, lulled me into behaving like an attractive young man. I became so at home with this new self-image that, on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, I’d glared with disdain at a middle-aged Westerner coming towards me with an expression of barely concealed contempt. The mirrored window had been polished to such a shine that the awful truth took another second to reveal itself. I had bumped, almost literally, into my own reflection: the self as pink-faced other. Right now, flattered by Min and having my picture taken with Li, that was a faded, possibly false memory. And Min’s capacity to make me feel better about myself and the world knew no bounds. It was too hot for her, she said. She had to make arrangements with the driver; she would meet us outside in half an hour.

‘Really? Are you sure?’ I said, glad that I had my sunglasses on in case any sign of excitement manifested itself in my face, my tanned and rugged face. Min was sure; she would see us in twenty minutes. She began walking back the way we had come, sticking to the borders of shade. So now it was just the two of us, just me and Li and about a million other visitors, strolling through the Forbidden City. It would have been the most natural thing in the world — and entirely impossible — to take her by the hand, to stroll hand in hand through the Forbidden City. It would have been nice to wander for the rest of the day, like Adam and Eve in some crowded paradise of the ancient East, until we came to a distant and shaded spot, to have found this place and sat down where no one could see us, away from the prying eyes of wives and visitors, far from intrigue and at its exact centre. She drank from the sun-scalded bottle until it was empty. The repeated word in all this—‘until’—bounced and echoed in my head until it was time to leave, to go and meet Min.

We walked out of the gate, found Min, the car and the driver, who was standing there in a white shirt, his hair slicked back, smoking — but smiling, pleased to see me. This was Feng, for sure.

‘Different car to this morning, same model,’ Min explained. ‘And different driver. Same driver as yesterday.’ She got in the back behind him, behind Feng. Li sat in the front, I sat in the back with Min, behind Li. We drove for ten minutes until, at some unknown place in the city, Feng pulled over so that Li could get out. I clambered out too, surrounded by the heat-roar of traffic. She had to go back to her work. It was fine to shake hands and to kiss her goodbye, on the cheek, on the side of the face with the small scar. We talked about our respective evenings. She gave me her bilingual card, holding it with both hands.

‘I’m afraid I don’t have a card,’ I said. ‘But perhaps we will be able to meet later tonight, after dinner. I hope we can.’

I’d said it casually but had never said anything more heartfelt. In my teens the prospect of going on a date with a girl I’d just met crushed my chest with excitement. Was that the physiognomic etymology of having a crush on someone?

She also hoped we could meet later, she said before turning away, leaving. I tucked her card carefully into one of the many pockets of my shorts and clambered back into the cool car. By the time I looked out of the window she had already disappeared into the crowd. The car eased back into the relentless traffic. Chatting with Min, I touched the sharp edges of the card, resisting the urge to take it out and pore over the amazing information printed on it: her phone number, her e-mail address. There was a time — it seemed to last from my mid-teens to early forties — when it was so difficult to get women’s phone numbers that a night out was considered a major success if you came home with a single number scrawled indecipherably on a piece of paper: a number you called with much trepidation, unsure if a father or, later, a boyfriend might answer. On reflection, Li had been a little reserved about handing over her phone number; in Asia it was usually the first thing anyone did.

The afternoon was, as Min had promised, exhausting: a succession of interviews which involved saying the same thing over and over, with less and less conviction, sometimes drifting off in the middle of my shtick and forgetting what I was saying, had said or was planning to say. I’d heard of soldiers being so weary they could sleep while marching, but that option was not available for the weary author being asked about his work, conscious all the time of the problem that, while he talked about his book — a history of improvisation in music, a major theme of which was the necessity of being at home in the moment — or waited for the interpreter to translate the answers, he was always either replaying sequences of Li walking through the Forbidden City, her bare shoulders, her green dress, or looking ahead to the evening, calculating the earliest possible moment they could meet again.

By the time the interviews came to an end I was in a waking coma of non-attention. Min phoned Feng from the lobby of the building. He was stuck in traffic, she said. Not far away in distance but with no chance of getting here for at least an hour. The sidewalks were jammed with people trying to hail taxis, all of which were full, none of which were moving in the dreadful traffic and the terrific heat. It would be quickest, Min said, to take the subway.

‘We must improvise!’ she said. ‘Though it will be very crowded.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Any half-decent city has crowded subways.’

But none had subways as crowded as Beijing’s. Every part of the process — buying tickets, going through barriers and along walkways (the longest, surely, of any subway anywhere in the world) — was exhausting, and every part of the subway system was packed to bursting. Any corridor we had to go down was a solid mass of citizens, from beginning to end. For each of the two changes, we had to queue to get on a train when it came, not with any hope of getting on but with the hope of securing a better position when the train after next pulled in. There was no queue-barging and no pushing and shoving; everyone had adapted to living in crowds and went politely about their tightly packed business.

I was shattered by the time I got back to the hotel, to the room where I’d woken up feeling shattered ten hours earlier, but there was no time to unshatter myself by taking a nap, as I’d banked on doing in the car that was supposed to have met us, before the truly shattering experience of taking the subway back to the hotel. There was time only to shower, change into fresh underwear, a clean blue shirt — the last clean one, kept in reserve — and jeans before meeting Min in reception. We were going to a restaurant to eat Peking duck. This, Min explained, would mark the symbolic end of my visit: the eating of Peking duck in a restaurant in Peking famed for its Peking duck.

It was only a five-minute walk away. The pictures in the elevator showed dozens of the world’s leaders and celebrities eating Peking duck, though the restaurant in the pictures didn’t necessarily look like the one we stepped into when the elevator doors opened.

There were six of us for dinner, in a private dining room. Qiang, the head of the publishing house, was there, and Wei, whom I hadn’t seen for a couple of days. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with something written on it in Chinese characters, and carrying, as always, a pink rucksack made out of some soft and fluffy material. When we’d first met I’d guessed that she was Qiang’s daughter, accompanying him during the school holidays. In the rucksack, I assumed, were a few toys or computer games to stop her getting bored — until I passed it to her and found that it weighed a ton. It was crammed with books, a laptop and various electronic accessories. She was twenty-four, the marketing manager. The reason I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days was that she’d been taking care of another visiting writer, Jun, from Hong Kong. She introduced us; we shook hands. Jun was exactly my age but, unusually in a part of the world where everyone seemed a decade younger than they were, looked five years older.

Like the Forbidden City, the Peking duck lived up to its considerable reputation, but all the time I was folding slices of duck into the pancakes, adding scallions and other bits and pieces, constantly commenting on its deliciousness, I was conscious of trying to speed things along so that I could meet Li again, even though there was no point in hurrying because she was busy eating dinner herself, not gobbling her food, not fretting and worrying about when we might meet.

I soon had something else to fret about. I’d left my phone at the hotel, in my shorts, and so Min — obliging as ever — called Li and fixed up a rendezvous. It was at a bar, only twenty minutes away, and Jun, Min and Wei were all coming too. Not quite how I had envisaged the rest of the evening panning out, obviously, but perhaps it wasn’t a bad idea to dilute my eagerness, to prevent it acquiring a touch of desperation. We found a taxi immediately; the roads were almost empty. For ten minutes we sped along, then were obliged to slow to a crawl before crawling to a halt as the traffic congealed around us. We were still in the car an hour later, had waited twenty minutes to make a left turn — the lights turned to green for less than thirty seconds — onto the road the bar was on. If we’d known this we could have jumped ship, walked to the bar in five minutes and saved fifteen — a quarter of an hour. Except, even when we did get out, on the street itself, the bar was nowhere to be seen. It was a street full of bars — horrible places, some with pole dancing, all crowded with young youth, the youthful young — like a shinier, slightly less ghastly incarnation of Camden Town. Surely she wouldn’t have chosen one of these bars. And if she had, then where the fuck was it? Where was she? More time ticked pointlessly away. A minute was like five minutes. Ten hours from now I’d be on a flight to London. Then I saw her, waving as she had that same morning in the Forbidden City, minus the shades. She was wearing a blue dress, shorter than the one she’d worn earlier. Darker too, knee-length, but also sleeveless, revealing the same shoulders and arms. No wonder we hadn’t been able to find the place: she was outside a nail bar. I looked down at her feet, her sandals, her toes, her blue nails. Min introduced Jun and Wei to Li and we followed her along a passageway to the side of the nail bar. We came to a dented grey elevator, large enough to accommodate a patient on a gurney in an under-funded hospital, with weary staff and several anxious family members. The doors squeezed shut; the elevator shuddered upwards until the doors opened again to reveal a dim landing lacking all distinguishing features except some partially erased graffiti. It was an evening when one kind of disappointment followed swiftly on the heels of another, interrupted by surges of hope and renewed expectation. I followed Li up a flight of concrete stairs, the muscles in her calves flexing as she took the steps. But where was she taking us? To a crack den?

No! To a rooftop bar. When we emerged into the hot night, it was like a dream of Ibiza, one of the wonders of the nocturnal world.

‘What’s it called, this place?’ I asked.

‘It is the Bar of Mental Cultivation,’ she said. ‘Did you not see the sign?’

‘I’m pretty sure there was no sign. But maybe I was looking for the wrong sort of sign. Like the Dog and Duck.’ It was a pub joke, wasted on Li.

The bar was surrounded on three sides by high-rise office buildings, gleaming and new — some so new they were not even finished. On the fourth side the city stretched away forever: neon-topped skyscrapers, the blinking lights of planes. The music was not loud. She had chosen the perfect place, but it was not quite perfect: there was nowhere to sit. Li introduced two friends, both women, who had been here a while, trying without success to secure a table. The best option was for us all to crowd into the psychedelic pod in the middle of the roof, on cushions, but that would have been like sitting inside, not out in the night with the stars overhead. These stars were nowhere to be seen, there was too much light pollution for that — come to think of it, where had last night’s moon got to? — but the light was not pollution at all, it was its own kind of magic. We milled around in a way that was like a standing version of being back in the car, close to where we wanted to be, but stuck at a frustrating remove from it. There were a few empty chairs scattered around, not enough to combine and seat a party of seven. Then a large group, all male, Chinese and Western, got up to leave, vacating a large sofa and some chairs. Li pounced. Once Jun had grabbed two extra chairs we were in place, all of us together around a low table — with me seated next to Li on the sofa, without seeming to have done so deliberately.

A waiter took the complicated drinks order: beer, cocktails, gin, wine. Now that we were settled, with drinks on the way, everyone was re-introduced. One of Li’s friends turned out to be her sister.

‘You don’t look at all alike,’ I said. Her face was angular, sharp, almost hard.

‘She is not real sister,’ said Li. ‘She is cousin-sister.’ The cousin-sister was a dancer, though she looked too tall to be a dancer. And she’d just had a baby. The waiter came back with a tray loaded with glasses, bottles, ice, drinks. Li had ordered a Singapore Sling (‘whatever that is’); I was drinking beer. Min proposed a toast to me and Jun. As soon as we had all clinked glasses I offered one back—‘To the Chinese century!’—and we all clinked again. The beer was only Tsingtao but it was cold, wonderful, tasted OK. For the first time since leaving the Forbidden City, I was able to give myself entirely to the moment. But if a moment is this perfect there is a need to preserve it, to photograph it. When people are having a good time they take pictures to show and prove they’re having a good time. Everyone was taking pictures, not just the people in our group, but all around. What’s the point? These pictures never capture the magic of magical evenings, they just show people getting red-eyed drunk and taking pictures of each other, but the act of taking the pictures is part and proof of the moment. It was something I associated with the young, but Jun was at it too. The difference was that he was using a proper camera, not just a phone, and taking considerable care, altering the focus and aperture. At one point he changed the lens in an unobtrusive, unfussy way, still holding his beer, not talking. Then he got up and left the table and walked away, continued photographing at a distance. When he sat back down he passed around the camera so that everyone could see the results.

They were fantastic. I had never been in a situation where something I was experiencing had been caught so perfectly on film. These were pictures of the inside of my head. The photographs were beautiful but, everyone agreed, the best ones were of Li’s cousin-sister. The colours were slurred, gorgeous, drenched. In one picture there was a yellow smear of light and, to the right, a string of blurred blue dots stranding her in shadowed clarity. Had Jun known what the result would be? If so, how had he done it?

‘He must be in love with her!’ I said, answering my own question. This romantic and technologically ignorant reaction was also a vicarious declaration and attempted deflection of what might have been obvious to everyone. If you were to fall in love with someone, on a rooftop bar in Beijing, this was what it would look like. Or was it just the camera that was in love with the cousin-sister? I’d read that Muhammad Ali, along with his other attributes, had the perfect face for a boxer, with rounded features that made him less susceptible to cuts. Li’s cousin-sister had the opposite kind of face: angular, sharp-featured. The camera didn’t glide or slip from her face in the way that punches slid off Ali’s. It clung to her as you hang on someone’s every word when you are falling in love with them. The shutter speed, presumably, was however-many-hundredths of a second, but something about her face meant that the camera held it fractionally longer and, in the process, softened it. Her face allowed, even encouraged the camera to do this, to bring her inner life to the surface. She was removed, not quite there. Maybe she was thinking of the child at home? She looked — and again the softened sharpness of her features played a part—abstracted. Maybe this was what Jun had noticed, that her face had that special quality or capacity.

I was glad to be able to concentrate on the pictures, to avoid directing my attention completely on Li — especially since, as we had bent forward together to study the camera, our shoulders had touched. They were still touching — my shirt against her bare skin — as we clicked though the images and came to one taken five minutes earlier, showing the two of us sitting where we were now, surrounded by a blue like the blue of oceans seen from space, with the moon above my head. (I glanced around — yes, there it was, peeking out from behind a building.) At first the picture was a little confusing: Li was twisted round, her head was hidden behind me so that only her left shoulder could be seen. I had leaned forward while she reached behind me to retrieve her bag from the end of the sofa, so it looked like she was jokily hiding from the prying camera. There was a subtle intimacy about the interplay of bodies and limbs, what was revealed and hidden. Again, was this an accident— something the camera had accidentally caught — or was it something Jun had noticed and quickly captured? Everything was blurred and coloured by the fairy lights: slow yellows, stretched reds. The softness of the night was implied, its heat and promise, and the uncertainty as to whether I was responding to something that existed in a haze of intangible and unspoken signs. That was also there in the photograph as we looked at it, forearms damply touching, certainly.

Li pointed at my face on the screen, clicked to enlarge it.

‘Ah, you a-rook rike George Crooney!’ she said, eyes wide. She had never ‘r’-ed her ‘l’s like this before. By breaking the spell, she cast me into it more deeply. And she had out-pubbed me too.

Li handed back the camera to Min — having first taken care, I noticed, to click back to an unincriminating wide shot that showed the whole group together. Min passed it to Jun. The waiter came back with another trayful of drinks. More people were arriving, some of whom knew Li’s friends. The bar filled up; the music grew louder but not loud enough to cover up the way that time, which had already ticked away pointlessly in the car, was continuing to tick away, more loudly and pointedly by the minute.

Then, everyone agreed, it was time to go. It was two in the morning. My flight was eight hours from now. The bill was paid — by the Chinese; my money was stuffed back into my hand, as it had been every time I’d tried to pay for anything. We stood up and left the roof. The dismal elevator returned us to the still-busy street with its crude lights and lusts. There was much milling around, waiting for taxis, as everyone in the now-expanded group worked out who was going in which direction. Li was by my side. With a little contrivance I could whisper to her, ‘Can I come home with you?’ or ‘Will you come back to my hotel?’ It was premature to propose such a thing and, at the same time, almost too late. And even if she said yes, how to navigate the complications of taxi taking, how to avoid the assumed arrangement of sharing a taxi with Min, Jun and Wei? There was, in addition, the gulf between the polite reasonableness of the question—‘Can I come home with you?’—and everything the answer to it might allow, all that could become unforbidden. Why was it — what law of the barely possible decreed — that these situations only cropped up on one’s last night, so that instead of falling asleep and waking up with her, instead of eating breakfast and spending the day getting to know her, I would get on a plane a few hours later and leave with an even greater sense of regret because, instead of having missed out on all of this totally, we would have experienced just enough to make us realize how much more we had missed out on by not missing out on it entirely? Li was still by my side. I turned towards her, spoke in her ear. Two taxis pulled up, one behind the other. Hours and minutes had ticked by. Doors were opening, goodbyes being said. There were not even minutes left, only seconds before she would turn towards me so that I could kiss her goodbye — or turn towards me and not say goodbye, not turn away.