Chapter 2: Nine Calls

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Director Bai had not, in the end, cut the livestream. He had done something much worse. He had come into the kitchen at the end of the night, beaming, sweating through his fishing vest, and announced to the camera that since Teacher Song and Shu-jie were old roommates, the production would of course be happy to put them in the attic room together. For old times' sake.

Two million people had watched Wen Shu try to say no.

She had opened her mouth. She'd had a whole sentence ready. Then she'd looked at the lens, and at Lin Youyou's hopeful face, and at Zhou Mingde already clapping, and she had heard how it would sound — no thank you, I'd rather sleep in the fish shed than share a room with my dear stranger — and what had come out instead was, "Great! Love that! Bunk beds?"

They were not bunk beds. They were two narrow single beds under a sloping ceiling, a metre apart, with a round window at the end like a porthole. Wen Shu had lain in the one on the right and listened to the sea for five hours.

And to the other thing. The small, even sound from the bed on the left.

Song Jinyi still slept on her left side. Wen Shu had not looked. She had known from the breathing.

At 4:45 an alarm went off, two soft notes, and was silenced before the third. Wen Shu kept her eyes shut and listened to the other bed creak, and bare feet on the floorboards, and the zip of a bag. When she finally opened her eyes, Song Jinyi was sitting on the edge of her mattress in the grey light, lacing her shoes, already dressed.

The silence went on. It went on long enough that the window turned from grey to a weak, milky blue.

Wen Shu broke first. She always did.

"You can't just say things like that."

Song Jinyi pulled a lace tight. "It was true."

"It was five years ago."

"Then it was true five years ago."

"That's not—" Wen Shu sat up. Her hair was flat on one side; she could feel it. "Do you know what's on the hot-search list right now? Do you know what my agent sent me at one in the morning? Eleven voice messages. Eleven. The last one was just breathing."

"Then your agent should see a doctor."

"My agent has a me problem. Because of you."

Song Jinyi finished the second shoe. She stood up, and for a moment she was very close in the small room, the slope of the ceiling making her bend her head, and Wen Shu smelled soap and something faintly like cedar, and was furious at herself for noticing.

"We're on fish-market duty," Song Jinyi said. "Five-thirty. Get dressed, Wen Shu."

Not Ms Wen. Wen Shu heard the change and hated that she heard it.

· · ·

The fish market on Quehai was a concrete shed by the harbour with the front wall missing, so the wind came straight off the water and through your clothes. Crates of ice. Yellow croaker laid out in rows like gold bars. Crabs tied up with grass string, still blowing bubbles. A dozen aunties in rubber boots and sleeve protectors shouting prices at each other in a dialect so thick Wen Shu caught one word in five.

She loved it immediately.

Within ten minutes she'd learned three of the aunties' names, been fed a raw mantis shrimp, and haggled a crate of croaker down by eight yuan through a combination of flattery and a fake heart attack. The cameraman, Xiao Hu, was crying with laughter behind the lens.

[LIVE CLIP] Slow Tide Inn · Morning Market · 412,077 watching
SHE GOT THE AUNTIE TO GIVE HER A FREE CRAB
wen shu is a menace to society and i love her
teacher song just standing there holding the bag like a bodyguard
why is teacher song watching her like that
like WHAT

Song Jinyi did not haggle. She stood at Wen Shu's shoulder holding the woven shopping bag, and whenever an auntie asked her something she said a single word, yes or no or thank you, and the aunties looked at her with deep suspicion, as if she were a tax inspector who'd wandered in by mistake.

"You could help," Wen Shu muttered sideways.

"You're doing fine."

"I'm doing everything."

"Yes," said Song Jinyi. "You always did."

Wen Shu reached into the oyster tray without looking.

The shell was open on one side and sharp as glass. She felt it go into the pad of her index finger, a clean bright sting, and then the blood came up fast and thin and ran into the ice.

"Oh, come on—"

Before she'd finished swearing, a hand had closed around her wrist.

Song Jinyi didn't say anything. She took Wen Shu by the wrist, the way you'd take hold of something you'd been handed and weren't allowed to drop, and walked her six steps to the tap at the end of the shed. She turned it on and put Wen Shu's hand under the water. The water was so cold it ached. Pink went swirling down the drain between them.

Xiao Hu was thirty metres off, swearing at a battery pack.

"It's fine," Wen Shu said. "It's a scratch. I do this all the time."

"I know."

Song Jinyi let go of her wrist long enough to unzip the small bag at her hip. She took out a plaster. Not a sad crumpled one from the bottom of a bag. A clean one from a little tin box, the kind people buy when they're expecting to need them.

Wen Shu stared at the tin.

Five years ago, she thought, you didn't own a single plaster. I carried them. For you. For your stupid thumbs.

She didn't say it. She watched Song Jinyi peel the backing off and wrap the plaster round her finger, firm and neat, pressing the ends down with her own thumb, her head bent so close that Wen Shu could see a pale scar under her jaw she didn't recognise. New, then. From some time when Wen Shu hadn't been there.

"There's a scale," Song Jinyi said.

"What?"

Song Jinyi lifted her hand and touched Wen Shu's face.

It was nothing. It was the side of a thumb, cold from the tap, laid against her cheekbone just under her eye, where a single silver fish scale had stuck and dried. The thumb moved once, slow, and the scale came away.

Wen Shu did not breathe.

Song Jinyi didn't take her hand back. It stayed there, the thumb resting where the scale had been, and her face was doing nothing at all. Except her eyes. Her eyes had gone very dark and very still, the way they'd used to go five years ago in the second before she said something true, and Wen Shu felt her own pulse go off like a fire alarm, loud and stupid and impossible to switch off.

Somewhere behind them Xiao Hu's camera beeped back to life.

"Teacher Song!" Wen Shu stepped back so fast she nearly sat in a crate of crabs. She held up her bandaged finger to the lens. Her voice came out bright and enormous. "Look at this professional first aid! Do you charge extra for the face? Because I can't afford the Golden Crane rate. I'm on a variety budget. I get paid in free crab."

Song Jinyi lowered her hand.

She put it in her pocket. The same way as yesterday, on the steps. As if something were in her palm.

"No charge," she said, and turned and picked up the shopping bag.

· · ·

Wen Shu's phone buzzed on the walk back. Just Qiqi, sending a row of screaming faces. But it was the old two-tone buzz, the default one, and something in her stomach turned over before her head caught up.

It had buzzed like that at 9:47 p.m., five years ago.

She had been sitting on the floor of their flat in Beijing, a sixth-floor walk-up with a broken lift and a pot of mint on the landing, eating sunflower seeds and watching the wrap-party photos come in online. Song Jinyi's first lead. The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter. Everyone already said it would make her.

She remembered that she'd been smiling when she picked the phone up.

Song Jinyi · 21:47
Don't wait for me tonight. Take your things before I come back. Don't call. This is better for both of us.

She had called anyway. Nine times. She knew it was nine because afterwards the list sat there in red, nine times Jinyi, nine times unanswered, and she'd stared at it until the screen went dark by itself. She'd sent fourteen messages. The first one said what happened. The last one, sent at one in the morning, said ok.

Then she'd packed. It didn't take long. Most of the flat had been Song Jinyi's anyway.

She'd left the key under the pot of mint, and gone down six flights with her bag on her back, and somewhere around the third floor she'd started laughing, because what else were you supposed to do. In the taxi she'd taken out her SIM card and thrown it out of the window into the dark.

A week later, a producer she'd never heard of called her new number and offered her a guest slot on a show called Run Laugh Run. She was sleeping on a friend's sofa. She had four hundred yuan. She said yes before he'd finished the sentence.

She fell in a lake on the first episode, and people loved it, and that was her whole career.

Better for both of us.

Wen Shu put the phone back in her pocket and climbed the hundred and forty-seven steps behind Song Jinyi, and didn't look at her once.

· · ·

Song Jinyi carried the crate of croaker up the steps herself. It was heavy and wet and the ice was leaking through the slats onto her shoes, and she was glad of it. It gave her hands something to hold.

She didn't look back. She didn't need to. She could hear Wen Shu behind her, and she could hear that Wen Shu had stopped talking, which she had found out a long time ago was the only sound in the world she couldn't stand.

The wrap party had ended at eight.

She'd been in the car, already halfway home, when Qiu Lan called her back to the agency. A conference room on the nineteenth floor. Two lawyers, a man from publicity, and a brown envelope on the table. Inside the envelope were six photographs of a stairwell landing with a pot of mint on it. In four of them, Wen Shu was kissing her cheek.

"Give me your phone," Qiu Lan had said. Her manager then, for three years. A small, neat woman who wore pearls to everything and had never once, that Song Jinyi knew of, been wrong. "You'll call her. You'll say something you can't take back. Give it to me, and let's sort this out like adults."

It had been 8:31. She remembered the clock on the wall, because she'd looked at it instead of at the photographs. She remembered the click of the clasp as Qiu Lan put the phone in her handbag.

She had told them she would not deny it. She'd said it once, and then again, and then many times, in that room, through the whole night, while the lawyers talked about buying the pictures and the man from publicity talked about a male co-star and a staged dinner. She had not moved. At ten past four Qiu Lan had sighed, and taken the phone out of the handbag, and given it back.

There had been nothing on it.

Not a call. Not a message. The whole night, the night when the photographs were sitting on a table and her life was being argued over by strangers, and there had not been one single word from Wen Shu.

She had told herself the battery must have died. It hadn't. It was at sixty per cent.

The flat had been empty at 4:40. The key was under the mint. Wen Shu's number rang out, and by the next afternoon it was no longer in service.

A week after that, Qiu Lan had laid a printed page on her desk. A guest contract. Run Laugh Run, which the agency co-produced. Wen Shu's signature at the bottom, round and careless, the Shu trailing off the line the way it always did.

"She called our office the morning after," Qiu Lan had said, gently. "She asked what we could do for her. This is what she asked for. I'm sorry, Jinyi. I really am. Some people know what they want."

Song Jinyi had watched the first episode alone in a hotel room in Hengdian. Wen Shu fell in a lake. She came up out of the water laughing, with weed in her hair, and the studio audience roared, and she looked happy. She looked completely, effortlessly happy.

Song Jinyi reached the top step. She set the crate down inside the gate, and wiped her wet hands on her trousers, and only then turned around.

Wen Shu was on step one hundred and forty, laughing at something Xiao Hu had said, holding up her bandaged finger for the camera. The same laugh. Lake water and weed.

She never called, Song Jinyi thought. Not once. Not all night.

· · ·

On step one hundred and forty, Wen Shu laughed until the camera turned away, and then she stopped, as if someone had pulled a plug.

She never picked up, she thought. Nine times. Not once.

Above her, in the gate, Song Jinyi stood with her hand in her pocket and watched her come up the last seven steps. Neither of them said anything.

Five years ago, at 9:47 p.m., Song Jinyi's phone had been lying at the bottom of Qiu Lan's handbag, under a packet of tissues and a lipstick, in a locked conference room on the nineteenth floor.