Chapter 3: Typhoon Number Fourteen

Typhoon Number Fourteen was supposed to miss Quehai Island by two hundred kilometres. It changed its mind over breakfast.

By nine the sky to the south had gone the yellow-grey of an old bruise, and the sea under it was standing up in long white ridges, and every fishing boat in the harbour was being lashed down by men in orange coats who didn't look at the cameras at all. The aunties from the market had closed their shutters. The little white temple had a red paper notice on its door that said the goddess was not receiving visitors until further notice.

Wen Shu stood in the courtyard with a bowl of rice porridge and watched the drying nets snap and belly in the wind, and thought, Good. Fine. Let it come. At least a typhoon was honest about what it was going to do.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She didn't take it out. It had been buzzing since 8:03.

@LemonDetective · 08:03
Since everyone suddenly cares about "roommates." Beijing, five years ago. A sixth-floor walk-up. A pot of mint on the landing. Two girls who weren't famous yet. You work it out.
[image]
Comments 61,402 · Reposts 133,870

She had looked at the picture exactly once. It was dark and grainy, taken from the stairs below. Two women on a landing, both turned away from the lens, one with her hand at the back of the other one's neck. You couldn't see either face. You could see the mint. The pot had a chip out of the rim shaped like a bite, and Wen Shu had made that chip herself, the day they moved in, carrying it up six flights and swearing.

She ate a spoonful of porridge. It tasted of nothing.

Her agent had called at 8:20. Deny it. Tonight, on the livestream. Make a joke. You're good at jokes. Then, at 8:31: Fan Ke's producers have seen it. They're asking questions. Shu, if this sticks to you, that part is gone. Do you understand me? Gone.

And at 8:45, in a smaller voice, as if she'd only just thought of it: What is Song Jinyi's side saying?

Nothing. Song Jinyi's side was saying nothing. Song Jinyi herself was sitting on the bench under the kitchen window, mending a torn net with a wooden needle that Zhou Mingde had shown her how to use, and she had been doing it for forty minutes with her head down and her phone face-down on the bench beside her, as though the whole internet were weather happening to someone else.

Wen Shu wanted to throw the porridge at her.

She didn't. The camera was on.

· · ·

At three in the afternoon the island lost its mobile signal, and Director Bai, who should have been frightened, was instead quietly delighted.

"Storm content," he told the cast in the kitchen, rubbing his hands together. "Real storm. Real danger. People love real danger. We're on generator for the stream until the satellite goes. Shutters, everybody! Every window. Safety first, but if you could also look a little bit scared."

The shutters on the upper floor had to be closed from outside. There was a ladder for this, an old bamboo one that lived against the courtyard wall, and Wen Shu was up it before anyone could argue, because she was the funny one and the funny one went up ladders. That was the job.

The wind hit her at the second rung from the top. It came round the corner of the house like a shoulder and she felt the whole ladder shift sideways on the wet stone, a slow terrible skid, the top end grinding along the wall.

She grabbed for the shutter. Missed.

Then there was an arm round her waist.

It came from below and behind, hard, and it pulled, and the ladder went over sideways into a stack of buckets with a crash like a car accident, and Wen Shu went backwards off the bottom rungs into Song Jinyi.

They didn't fall. Song Jinyi took the weight and stepped back once, twice, her heel skidding in the water, and stopped against the courtyard wall. Wen Shu's back was flat against her front. The arm was locked across her stomach, just under her ribs. She could feel Song Jinyi breathing, fast and hard, against her spine. She could feel her heart. It was going faster than her own.

Rain came down on both of them, so heavy it bounced.

[LIVE] Slow Tide Inn · Storm Special · 3,906,551 watching
THE ARM
THE ARM THE ARM THE ARM
camera is wet i can't SEE was that a waist grab
teacher song moved faster than the ladder fell???
roommates btw. just roommates. normal roommate behaviour

"I had it," Wen Shu said.

Her voice came out wrong. Too high. She cleared her throat.

"You didn't," said Song Jinyi into her wet hair.

The arm didn't move.

Wen Shu put her hand on it. On the forearm, on the wet sleeve, meaning to push it away. She could feel the muscle under the cloth, and the tendons, and the fine tremor running through them that Song Jinyi was very carefully not letting reach her face. Her fingers stayed there. A second. Longer.

Then she drove her elbow back, not hard, and stepped out of the circle, and turned to the camera with water running off her nose.

"Rescued by the Golden Crane! Three days running! I'm going to have to start paying her." She bowed to the lens. "Teacher Song, please send me your invoice."

Song Jinyi didn't answer. She went and picked the ladder up out of the buckets, alone, and set it back against the wall.

· · ·

At 5:12 the generator died and took the whole house with it.

The lights went first, then the fridge hum, then the small red lights on every camera in the courtyard, one after another, like eyes closing. In the sudden dark Wen Shu heard Director Bai say a word that would never make the edit.

For the first time in three days, nothing was watching.

"Fuel's in the storeroom," Zhou Mingde said, somewhere to her left. His voice was perfectly calm; he had, he'd told them that morning, been through nine typhoons and a divorce. "Behind the stairs. Red cans, and there should be candles. Shu-jie, you know where it is. Teacher Song, would you take the torch? Youyou, stay with me. Don't touch anything."

The storeroom was a narrow brick room under the stairs, the size of a lift, with metal shelves on three sides. It smelled of diesel and dried shrimp and wet rope. Rain hammered on the tin roof of the outhouse next door so loudly it was like standing inside a drum.

Song Jinyi held the torch. Wen Shu went along the shelves feeling for cans.

"Here. No. That's paint. Who keeps paint next to—" Her hand closed on something with a handle. "Here."

She turned round with the can, and Song Jinyi was right there.

The torch had slipped down in her hand and was pointing at the floor, so all the light in the room was coming up from their feet, and her face above it was all shadows and edges. Wet hair. A drop of water on her jaw, on the pale new scar. Her shirt soaked through at the shoulders. She was standing so close that the can was the only thing between them.

Wen Shu's hair was stuck to her own neck in a cold wet rope. She hadn't noticed until Song Jinyi reached up and moved it.

Two fingers. They slid under the hair at the side of her throat and lifted it away and laid it back over her shoulder, and then they didn't leave. They rested there, just under her ear, on the place where her pulse was going like a startled bird, and they must have felt every beat of it, and Wen Shu couldn't do anything about that at all.

Song Jinyi spoke first.

"Ah-Shu."

Nobody had called her that in five years. Nobody had ever called her that but one person. It went through her like the cold from the market tap, all the way to the bone, and for a second she couldn't see anything, not the shelves or the torch or the can in her hands.

"Don't," she said.

"Ah-Shu—"

"No. You don't get to." Her voice was shaking now; she let it. There were no cameras. There was only the drum of the rain. "You don't get to say that like nothing happened. Five years, Song Jinyi. Five years, and you never once, not one time, did you even—"

"I never once?"

It was a question. Song Jinyi didn't ask questions. Wen Shu heard the edge on it, sharp and raw, and looked up, and the face above her wasn't still any more. Something had cracked across it, right across the middle, the way ice cracks when you step on it in the wrong place.

"You never—" Song Jinyi said, and stopped, as though the rest of it had caught in her throat and wouldn't come.

Her hand had moved. It was at the back of Wen Shu's neck now, warm, her thumb resting just behind the ear. Wen Shu didn't know when that had happened. She didn't know when she'd stepped forward, either, but there was no can between them any more, it was down by their feet somewhere, and she could feel Song Jinyi's breath on her mouth, uneven, and she could feel her own answering it.

An inch. Less.

The generator coughed, caught, and roared.

The bare bulb over their heads blazed white. Wen Shu flinched as if she'd been slapped. Through the wall she heard Zhou Mingde shout something triumphant, and Director Bai cheering, and then the storeroom door banged open and a lantern swung in.

"Teacher Song? Shu-jie?" Lin Youyou, in an enormous yellow raincoat, beaming. "Brother Zhou fixed it! He hit it with a shoe! Did you find the—"

She stopped.

She looked at them. Her eyes went from Song Jinyi's hand, still lifted in the air where Wen Shu's neck had been a second ago, to Wen Shu's face, to the fuel can lying on its side on the floor between their feet.

"Spider," Wen Shu said.

Lin Youyou blinked.

"Massive spider. Teacher Song was being incredibly brave about it. She's very good with spiders." Wen Shu bent and snatched up the can and pushed past both of them into the hall, into the light and the noise. "Here! Fuel! Hero of the day! Brother Zhou, I want to see this shoe."

Behind her, in the storeroom, nobody said anything for a long time.

· · ·

The signal came back at twenty to eight, and a minute later every phone in the house went off at once.

Wen Shu was on the stairs. She took hers out. Lin Youyou, in the kitchen doorway below her, had already gasped.

@SongJinyiStudio · 19:41
Ms Song will speak for herself, live, during tomorrow morning's broadcast of Slow Tide Inn at 10:00. She will answer every question. She asks that no one speak on her behalf before then.

Wen Shu read it twice.

No one speak on her behalf. As if there were some long line of people waiting to. As if she'd ever let anyone.

Her phone rang immediately. Her agent. She let it ring out. It rang again. She switched it to silent, and the screen kept lighting up in her hand, over and over, a small white pulse in the dim stairwell like something with a heartbeat.

She went up to the attic.

Song Jinyi was sitting on her bed with her back against the sloping wall and her knees up, looking out of the round window at the dark. The storm had dropped to a heavy, steady rain. She had changed into dry clothes. Her phone lay beside her, face down again.

Wen Shu stood in the doorway. Neither of them spoke. The rain filled the space where talking should have been.

She broke first. Of course she did.

"What are you going to say?"

Song Jinyi didn't turn from the window. "Tomorrow."

"Are you going to deny it?" Her throat was tight. Better for both of us. She could see the words, the exact grey font. "Because if you are, you could just tell me now. You could save me the trouble of watching. I've already seen that episode."

Now Song Jinyi turned.

She looked at Wen Shu for a long time. Her eyes were dark and steady, and whatever had cracked in them in the storeroom was gone, or hidden, or pressed down somewhere very deep.

"Do you want me to?"

Wen Shu opened her mouth.

Nothing came out. Not a joke. Not a bit. Not one single word, and she had never in her life run out of words, she was famous for it, people stopped her in airports for it.

Song Jinyi held her eyes a moment longer. Then she reached over and switched off the lamp.

Wen Shu stood in the dark until her legs ached. Then she lay down on her bed, on top of the blanket, fully dressed, with her phone on her chest. When she finally turned it over, the show's app had already put up a page. A photograph of the inn in the rain. Song Jinyi's name in gold.

SLOW TIDE INN · LIVE MORNING SPECIAL
Song Jinyi: "I will answer everything."
Starts in 14:00:02

She lay there and watched the fourteen turn into a thirteen.