Ms Wan reached into a cupboard, picked out a half-finished bottle of port and filled two glasses. Jia Jia watched her carefully as she held the bottle, her wrists shaking as she poured, her big head crooking to one side.
‘The uneducated are becoming better and better off in this country,’ she said as she slowly returned to Jia Jia with a glass of wine. ‘Good movies don’t make big money any more.’
She handed the drink to Jia Jia, tottered back to the sofa, put on her glasses and went on with her reading.
*
Jia Jia stayed late that day. Ms Wan put the children to bed, called the driver, and was whisked off to her husband’s jazz lounge close to midnight. Jia Jia continued painting in silence by the light of a single lamp.
A little past two a.m., she felt tired and took a break. She had not touched the port, but now she picked up the glass and stood back from the wall. The immense project had become wondrous. The ancient Buddha Shakyamuni sat on a lotus flower in the middle, holding a beggar’s bowl in his left hand and calling the earth as witness with his right. The rest of the piece depicted the major events in the life of the Buddha. Jia Jia had painted it in sophisticated detail, mostly gold and orange tones, occasionally sprinkling splashes of emerald or cobalt for clothes or bodies of water.
As Jia Jia gazed at the painting in the dim yellow light, the rings in the blue pond rippled and the water began seeping out, covering the entire wall. The demons, gods, and eventually the ancient Buddha himself, were submerged until all that appeared in front of Jia Jia was a single fish, silver like a coin.
She had no doubt that it was the same creature she had seen before, but larger and tougher this time. It swam in circles, as if shaken by something. The body of water, as deep as ever, churned and threatened to sink everything in its path. Instinctively, Jia Jia took a step backwards, but stopped as the fish turned to face her, inviting her to step into the water.
The air had turned cold.
Jia Jia reached out cautiously and stroked the creature’s tail. Startled, it shook her hand off and continued swimming. The scales on its body were in large diamond shapes, glistening and pristine. She tried to find similarities between the fish in front of her and the fish-man Chen Hang had sketched, but there were none. The shapes were different.
Still hesitant, Jia Jia dropped her wine glass and walked forward into what used to be her wall painting and was now only water, and tried to touch the fish again. This time, it turned its head towards Jia Jia’s outstretched finger and lingered there for a moment. She dived into the water and swam towards the darkness; the fish followed her. As she went deeper, she noticed that it was glowing faintly, providing the only source of light in the abyss.
Once again, she lost sight of where she had come from. And there was no evidence that she was moving forward either; perhaps she was only treading water, kicking behind her, with the fish alongside. She turned around and tried to direct her body the other way, but she was not sure any more. The silver light from the fish dimmed and vanished, and Jia Jia was alone. Was she going to drown? Was she going to stay there and wait until she starved? What about the port? It must have stained the carpet. Was the floor carpeted? Jia Jia could not remember.
She closed her eyes and stopped moving.
Time passed and she heard a sound. She was leaning against the wall now. The solid surface felt like ice against her back. Tears began running down her face, warming her skin. The port was spilt on the marble floor.
The door lock turned, and Ms Wan and her husband entered.
Seeing Jia Jia crying that night, Ms Wan had been worried. Jia Jia assured her that she was simply moved by the story of the Buddha.
‘That, truly, is the power of religion,’ Ms Wan noted with profound compassion.
The next day, Jia Jia informed her real estate agent that she wanted to move out of the apartment as soon as possible. She felt liberated to find out that she did not need to stay there to see the fish and the water. As there had been no interested buyers since December, she said that she would not mind letting it at a lower-than-market rate if that was easier. According to the agent, it was better for Jia Jia to empty the apartment and move out before showing it to prospective tenants and buyers.
‘Many clients prefer homes that look newer and unoccupied,’ he told her.
Jia Jia’s aunt helped her pack. Now that Li Chang was not there, Jia Jia thought she could temporarily live with her grandmother and aunt. She had been so adamant about the move that her aunt had made no objections; perhaps she had also been feeling worried about leaving the old woman alone so often. By this time, her aunt had begun to avoid the subject of Li Chang entirely when she was staying with her niece. She would wait until she thought Jia Jia was asleep before whispering into the phone for hours with her friends. Jia Jia never probed; without Chen Hang’s connections, there was nothing that she could do to help. In fact, when the government’s anti-corruption efforts had begun a few years earlier, Jia Jia had been fearful for her own husband’s safety. Once, while she and Chen Hang were watching the morning news together, Jia Jia had made a casual, sympathetic comment about the corrupt businessmen and their families who had been forced to flee the country with their money.
‘No need for you to worry about such things,’ Chen Hang had told her. ‘I’m not an idiot like those people.’
She recalled, though, that Chen Hang had often come and gone with boxes of expensive wines or wild ginseng in the boot of his car. Last New Year’s, he had pulled out a thick crisp pile of one-hundred-yuan notes from an envelope and handed it to her, saying that it was red pocket money from a friend. She had bought a sculpture at auction with the money. It was a piece of dark green marble carved into a cubist-style figure of a woman; long and thin, with her hips slightly pointed towards the left side. The night after she brought it home, Chen Hang had not returned until the early hours. She had drunk three espressos and stayed awake past midnight, then applied a thin layer of foundation to her face and on her kite-shaped birthmark, and sat on the sofa in her black silk dress, next to her new art piece, waiting for her husband. By the time he came back, she had fallen asleep.
While Jia Jia was packing, she glanced at the sculpture forsaken in the corner of the room, trying to decide whether it belonged to her. She did not want to bring any of Chen Hang’s possessions with her, but she folded everything and stored it all in boxes anyway. She collected together the unfinished bottles of cognac; drank some and poured out the rest, watching the brown liquid drain down the kitchen sink. She stripped the sheets off the bed and thought that she had never seen anything so desolate as a naked mattress. She could hardly remember what it was like, sleeping next to Chen Hang in this bed. Since the second year of their marriage, she had often gone to sleep alone, her husband returning late and drunk and falling asleep on the sofa still wearing his coat. Sometimes, he did not turn up until the next morning, and would quickly shower and change before heading out to the office again. After the sculpture incident, Jia Jia had stopped staying up at all to wait for his return. She gave one last look at the piece, auctioned at a high price only to end up in an abandoned apartment, carrying no sentiment, far removed from its creator. Perhaps it deserved a better owner, she thought, before dragging the last box out into the corridor and closing the door behind her.
She took all her own art and clothes with her and called a van to her grandmother’s home. Chen Hang had been dead for six months, and her marriage was packed away in crates. From the van window, the streets appeared at once familiar and obscure. Looking up at the buildings, it seemed that the city she had known so well had been reshaped, rearranged somehow. Petrol fumes and the driver’s smoky body odour wafted back at her. For a while, Jia Jia watched the hanging charm with its piece of amber sway from the rear-view mirror in irregular rhythms, in different directions. After they had zigzagged through the city’s afternoon traffic and finally steered into the third ring road, Jia Jia took out her phone and dialled her father’s number.