Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind Read Free Page B

she’s facing south, towards . . . where? Hong Kong? But apparently she is not.
    This is stupid. Halfway around the planet, and she’s hanging around her hotel room. She grabs her denim jacket, her bespoke denim jacket, embellished with her own handiwork—flowers embroidered in the armpits and red-headed woodpeckers along the sleeves—perfect for the Bund not simply because it’s chilly in the late afternoon in spring but because fashion is a big thing in China. Her dad says people have their clothes made to measure in the market so everyone’s more individual .
    Toni thinks this is amazingly cool—everyone wants to be a bit different in the most populated country on earth. She walks along the darkened corridor towards the elevators and stops to snap a photo of these really weird glass boxes set into the wall along the corridor, like fish tanks without the water. Inside each glass box, there’s a rock. Just a lump of grey rock. Small lights are inset into the tanks, and they shine downwards so that the cragginess of each rock is obvious. Is it art? She has no idea. She must ask her dad.
    He said he wouldn’t be gone for long. He’s in a pre-meeting at his client’s office before they visit the client’s home town, Suzhou. That’s when they’ll get down to the details of exactly which painting he wants her dad to copy, at what size. Her dad refuses to paint actual size; that way, he avoids any dodgy business. He’s a professional copyist painter, with the emphasis on professional ; that’s what he always tells people.
    The hotel reception is on the second floor, and as Toni wanders past, all three reception staff look up and smile. She takes the elevator down to the ground floor, to a windowless mini-reception where another receptionist stands in semi-darkness at a high counter. He’s stationed there so that when people walk in off the street, he can say, “Please take the elevator to reception.” Toni reckons he has the most boring job on the planet. Does he think it’s a good job? She has no idea. He says, “Have a good afternoon. Do you need a taxi?” She shakes her head. “No, thanks.”
    Toni texts her dad: Gone out. On the bund. He replies: On way back, meet you opp hotel. Don’t wander off. She replies: As if!
    She knows he’ll be in a panic now. Out on the Bund, on her own; anything could happen. That’s the problem now; he thinks anything can happen, as though once one bad thing happens to you, it’s easier for another bad thing to smack you. As if when you’re vulnerable, God decides to kick you while you’re still down. But she doesn’t believe in God, not since she woke up on her last birthday, her first day as a teenager. That’s when she decided.
    Anyway, she doesn’t mind her dad’s fussing, because she’s just the same—only she doesn’t say anything. It’s like she expects a disaster with every ping. During the past two hours, she has imagined her dad falling down the stairs at the metro station and being trampled by the crowds. She has imagined him walking from the metro and glancing instead of looking at a busy junction and getting flattened by a motorcycle rickshaw driving on the wrong side of the road. It wouldn’t actually kill him, but he’d definitely end up in hospital. And now he’s rushing back. The roads are so dangerous here.
    Toni comes to a conclusion as she waits patiently at the road junction outside the hotel. She should worry about bigger things instead of stressing about traffic accidents. She should upscale to the apocalypse.
    So she crosses to the promenade, leans over the railing and imagines in the distance a tsunami sweeping up the Huangpu. Would it come from her left or her right? She can only imagine it coming from the left. But that’s correct. It would come from the sea, from the left. In front of her, there’s a procession of three open barges laden with pyramids of coal. Boxy Chinese characters are spray-painted in yellow across the coal.