Beijing Smog Read online

  While The Girl In The Corner had appeared to be down, she wasn’t out. She wasn’t through yet, and not content with criticising the Party, she took aim at her fellow students. She condemned them as a bunch of cheats.

  Her latest results had been poor, well below average. But she had a simple explanation: that she hadn’t bought the exam papers and answers in advance, and she went back into the student chat rooms and attacked the cheats, who included just about everybody who could afford to buy them.

  And she attacked the university authorities for sitting back and letting it happen, only caring about the results and not how they were achieved. She said it simply wasn’t fair.

  For Wang, fairness was relative. He saw fairness as being about maintaining a level playing field on which to cheat. Buying the answers to exams had become routine, and the accusations from The Girl In The Corner were just sour grapes.

  For a while selling exam answers had also been one of the services offered by their online shop, Liu buying the papers and answers in advance from a contact he’d made at one of the testing agencies and selling them at a small mark-up. But like most of their businesses, it hadn’t made much money. The market was too competitive. It was saturated. There were too many sources at the test agency selling too many papers.

  “She just can’t afford to buy the answers,” said Liu. “Her father must have cut her allowance because of all the shit she’s causing him.”

  Wang agreed. And Zhang said, “What’s the big deal? Everybody cheats.”

  It was soon after this that The Girl In The Corner disappeared.

  The rumours became increasingly outlandish. That she’d been pushed to her death after an argument with an official. That a security guard had tried to rape her. That other students had tried to silence her over the cheating allegations. That she’d been taken off to a secret prison and charged with subversion.

  Her parents arrived on campus, and were spotted sitting tearfully outside the administration building, asking anybody who would listen what had happened to their daughter. The university authorities refused to see them, as if it was really none of her parents’ business.

  Zhang stuck to his theory that she might still be alive. Perhaps she’d just run away. Liu said she’d definitely killed herself. Wang agreed with Liu and said that probably she was definitely dead, that it was a tragedy, but one she’d brought on herself.

  Then the university authorities intervened, clarifying everything but nothing. The Computer Science Department was among those that gathered their students and told them not to spread rumours and not to talk to anybody outside the University about “certain events”, though without ever saying what those “certain events” might be.

  Which vindicated just about everybody’s favourite rumour.

  Even when The Moment On Time was busy, nobody took the table in the corner, her table, as if ghosts inhabited it, as if by avoiding the table they could avoid the subject. All except Lily, who was the most visibly upset by the rumours, and told anybody who would listen that they were all spineless and that the missing girl was worth more than the lot of them.

  Mostly they ignored her, thinking it was just Lily being Lily, but knowing deep down that she was right. Most of her customers quickly zoned out. The coffee shop went back to its default setting, heads buried in computer screens and the barely audible tapping of keyboards.

  Liu opened an online card game. He’d promised his roommates that he’d stop looking at the trading account, or at least no more than once a day. He had no more money to invest, and just sitting there staring at the screen wasn’t going to bring the market back up again.

  Zhang went back to his dating app, where he’d now had second thoughts about using a real photo and was choosing from a bunch of Olympic athletes to use instead.

  Wang opened a game where he was breeding dragons, building a dragon city. Some were already in training for his dragon army, and he was waiting for a new batch of eggs to hatch. He’d already reached level five, but he thought it was a boring game. It took too long to get to the fighting bit.

  So he opened his Gasping Dragon social media account and shared a video he’d taken earlier that day: a young woman in high heels and fur coat walking past the campus with what looked like a new Louis Vuitton handbag, which he suspected was a fake, since it resembled one they sold in their online shop. Either way, it was fresh out of its wrapping and behind her was a big university hoarding with the words “Core Socialist Values”. Nice.

  The next thing he knew, Lily was poking him in the back and he guessed from the serious look on her face that she hadn’t come over to see the video. He told her they should be able to settle their bill by the end of the week. But she hadn’t come over because of the roommates’ lengthening tab either.

  “The girl, the one who would sit in the corner?” Lily said.

  “Which girl?” said Wang, not wanting to go there and now just wanting to hide, desperate to get back to the world beyond his screen.

  “The one who’s disappeared. Well, her parents hired a lawyer and the lawyer was threatening to sue the University, demanding to know what happened to their daughter.”

  “And?”

  “And now the lawyer’s disappeared. What do you know?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Wang said. “Why would I know anything?”

  “And you two?” she said to Liu and Zhang, who ignored her, keeping their eyes on their screens.

  “What is it with you guys?” said Lily, starting to get angry. “There’s a real world out there you know. It’s not all online. And it’s not nice.”

  But it wasn’t a world the roommates wanted any part of. Not then. As far as Wang was concerned if it didn’t happen online, it didn’t happen at all. It was safer that way.

  But Lily persisted.

  “He was supposed to be a hot-shot lawyer,” she said.

  Liu finally replied, saying, “Maybe that’s why he disappeared.”

  Lily turned, slowly shaking her head, and returned to her counter thinking these boys are beyond pathetic.

  Zhang looked at his roommates and said, “These are weird…”

  “Yeah, we get it, Zhang,” Liu said, interrupting him. “These are weird times.”

  He was about to say something to Wang, but Wang had received a call.

  He was a pale boy, and it was hard for Liu to imagine him getting any paler. But Liu was sure he could see the little colour his friend had rapidly draining from his face. It was like he’d just seen a ghost.

  “What’s up?” said Liu, after Wang hung up.

  Wang said it was a summons from the University authorities.

  It was an invitation to tea.

  – 17 –

  An Invitation to Tea

  There were two things Wang Chu found most surprising about his invitation to tea. First, they’d phoned him on his spare phone, an old and battered Nokia with a pre-paid SIM, which he used mostly for the online shop.

  He rarely gave out the number to anybody else.

  Second, the invitation was polite.

  That didn’t make it any less unnerving, but he had always thought the University authorities would make any summons as nasty and humiliating as they could. Instead the voice on the phone asked him how he was doing and when would work for him?

  The voice didn’t introduce itself, but said it was from the office of his supervisor, who wanted him to join her for tea to discuss his academic progress and other issues.

  Since the voice appeared so accommodating, Wang asked it if he could possibly have details of those other issues, to better prepare for this important meeting.

  The voice said it was so glad he could make it and hung up.

  As far as Wang could recall, his supervisor was an older woman whose name was Deng. Or maybe Jiang.
He’d have to check. She was responsible for overseeing his academic and personal development, always at hand to give guidance. At least that’s what she’d told him at their first meeting shortly after he’d started university. He’d not met her since then.

  To Wang’s mind she was part tutor, part nanny and distinctly part-time.

  Which had come as a bit of a surprise to him at first, as had the general torpor of university life after all the blood, sweat and tears to get there. The entrance exams had been brutally competitive. But he soon settled into a university routine that seemed to him to be built around an agreeable understanding that students pretended to work while teachers pretended to teach.

  Supervisors mostly avoided those they were supervising, unless they really had no choice, which was why Wang found the invitation to tea so puzzling and worrying.

  “It’s got to be the work stuff,” he said to Liu Wei, who’d offered to walk with his roommate to campus, to help calm him down, but he just seemed to be making things worse.

  “I’ve just fallen too far behind. What else could it be?” Wang said.

  “Selling fake stuff online maybe? Selling exam answers?”

  And Wang told him to stop messing around, that it had to be something serious.

  “You suppose it’s about the Professor?” Wang said, thinking again about The Girl In The Corner and the Professor who’d disappeared.

  “But you didn’t take part in the protest. We didn’t even sign the petition,” Liu said. “Perhaps you should have taken the ideology courses more seriously,” reminding his roommate that supervisors were also in charge of political and ideological education.

  “I took it as seriously as everybody else,” Wang said.

  “Which isn’t saying a lot. Remember the exam? You asked if the question about the Communist Party’s achievements was a trick question. And there was the ecological civilisation thing, when you asked what it meant and they got mad.”

  “They were jokes.”

  “Yeah, and since when has the Communist Party had a sense of humour?”

  Liu was right. The lecturer had got mad at him in the ideology exam. And his tutor had been angry over his questions about ecological civilisation. Perhaps that was why he’d been summoned. But then that made little sense either. They were just silly questions and who cared about ideology? No, it had to be his work. He’d been a little negligent, but then who hadn’t?

  Liu left Wang at the main university entrance and wished him luck.

  “Just don’t disappear until we’ve paid off the coffee shop bill.”

  Wang told him that wasn’t funny, taking a mock swing at Liu, who ducked, then waved and walked off towards their nearby room.

  His supervisor’s office was in the far corner of the campus, on the ground floor of a low-rise administration block, red brick with peeling white paint around the windows. Wang missed it, walking straight past, doubling back when he reached another exit from campus and realised his mistake.

  He was panting and five minutes late when he entered a small room to one side of the lobby, where an elderly woman wearing a big black poncho-type woollen top was watering an emaciated-looking plant, which was just about clinging to life.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs Jiang. Sorry I am a little late.”

  “She’s in there,” said the woman, without turning, just gesturing to another room with her little blue watering can.

  Wang, relieved he’d at least got the name right, removed his coat, under which he was wearing a jacket and tie, dressed to impress. It was the first time he’d done that for a while.

  He knocked and entered the other room, which seemed bigger, possibly because it was so empty – just a big desk on one side and on the other a pair of crumpled sofas around a stained coffee table.

  There was a single poster, for an academic conference, two years old, on one of the stained whitewashed walls.

  Mrs Jiang rose from behind the desk. She was a tall severe-looking woman, her hair pinned up and wearing what struck Wang as a rather dishevelled grey jacket. She wore a pair of oval, rimless glasses, and appeared younger than Wang remembered.

  They shook hands and she gestured towards the sofas, where they sat, one sofa each. She was carrying a file, which she placed in her lap.

  “You are looking well,” Mrs Jiang said. “How are you finding the landscape architecture course?”

  Wang said he was fine thank you, and that he was studying computer science.

  Mrs Jiang looked at the file, then back up at Wang and rebooted.

  “You are looking well. How are you finding the computer science course?”

  “It’s challenging at times, and I have been a little slow with some recent assignments, but generally I am coping well, and really enjoying it thank you, Mrs Jiang.”

  He was about to blame the missed deadlines on a sickness in the family, possibly his own sickness or even a computer virus. Perhaps all three. But somebody interrupted him, clearing his throat, a long piercing retch.

  Wang looked round to see a man sitting in a chair at the back of the room, near the door, which was now closed. The man lit a cigarette and sniffed. Wang turned back to Mrs Jiang, who ignored the man, making no attempt to introduce him.

  “How are your parents?” Mrs Jiang said.

  “They’re fine, thank you. Still finding the winters a little cold in Harbin, but doing very well.”

  “Your sister?”

  “I don’t have a sister.”

  Mrs Jiang looked back at the file, then across at the man, then at Wang again.

  “Your parents must be very proud of you, Wang. As is the University. You are a good student and you have a great future ahead of you. You have a lot of responsibility, to them and to us.”

  Wang thanked her again and said he appreciated the opportunity he’d been given, as he began to wonder where all this was going. Her appraisal of him and his future seemed, well, a little generous, and he began to wonder if she was reading from the correct file.

  Mrs Jiang glanced at the man, who cleared his throat again, though this time more of a gurgle than a retch.

  “Such a promising future,” Mrs Jiang repeated. “We would not want you to do anything to jeopardise that. Neither would your family.”

  Wang heard movement behind him, and then saw that the man, who was heavily set and wearing a black ski jacket, had moved to one side of the room, closer to the sofas, from where he was taking photographs of Wang with his smartphone.

  Mrs Jiang continued as if he wasn’t there.

  “You are at a crucial time in your course, Wang. You should never forget your responsibilities.”

  Then they sat in silence. The ski jacket retreated to the back of the room, wheezing and sniffing. Mrs Jiang continued to ignore the man and was again leafing through papers in her file.

  “If it’s about the exam, I can explain,” Wang said.

  The ski jacket stopped wheezing and Mrs Jiang looked up from the file.

  “The exam?” she said.

  “Yes, the ideology exam, the bit on the achievements of the Communist Party. When I asked the lecturer whether it was a trick question, it wasn’t out of disrespect, but because I genuinely thought it was.”

  “A trick question?”

  “Yes. Because you see it was multiple choice and all the answers seemed to be right because as you know the Party has so many achievements. That’s why I asked if it was a trick question.”

  At mention of the Party, Mrs Jiang looked over Wang’s shoulder towards the ski jacket, who was wheezing again. She looked longer this time, as if she was expecting the man to say something, which he didn’t.

  “If it’s about Professor Huang, I accept that it was wrong to question the judgement of the University authorities or the Party. Though I didn’
t take part in the protest or sign the petition.”

  “The petition, Wang? The protest?”

  “Yes, in support of the Professor who disappeared and is under investigation for violating Party discipline,” said Wang, aware that he was rambling and regretting ever having mentioned it.

  “Wang, this is China. People don’t just disappear. At least not without very good reason,” Mrs Jiang said, looking again at the ski jacket. “You know the Party always acts in the best interests of the people and corruption is a cancer that needs to be cut out wherever it occurs.”

  Wang said that was the point, that many people felt Professor Huang was a decent and honest man, but immediately regretted having said it.

  “I really can’t recall a Professor Huang having ever worked at the University,” Mrs Jiang replied. “If he did exist, he doesn’t anymore, and issues like that, real or imagined, are best put behind us. You have a promising future to look forward to. That is the most important thing, Wang.”

  “If it’s about the ecological civilisation thing, I really was just curious.”

  “The ecological civilisation thing, Wang?”

  “Yes, I asked my tutor what it was.”

  “Well, isn’t that obvious?”

  This time the silence was longer and Wang began to wonder whether the invitation to tea included any tea. He was about to ask, when there was a screeching and a clanking as the ski jacket, still seated, pulled his chair over to the coffee table, where he sat looking at Wang before lighting another cigarette.

  “Do you believe in aliens?” the man said in a rasping voice that Wang at first struggled to understand.

  “Aliens, Wang, do you believe in them?”

  “Aliens?”

  “That’s right. Aliens. Little stick men with pear-shaped heads and big eyes.”

  Wang said you couldn’t completely discount the possibility of some form of life out there in a distant world, thinking that perhaps this was a sort of test. He said they’d even found signs of water on Mars, which could support a living organism.