3
When Jia Jia woke, it was still dark. She sat up and swept for her slippers with her feet. They were not there. She reached a bit further but found nothing. Looking down at the floor, she discovered that it did not exist any more, and what replaced it was the surface of a deep sea, as if she was sitting on the edge of a ship watching the reflection of the starless sky in the water. The darkness rippled like silk. She lifted herself from the bed and stepped onto what used to be the floor, falling into a sudden wet chill that was surely cold water. She immediately turned to grab for the bed, but it was no longer above her. Submerged in water, she searched for anything to hold on to. She held her breath and swam, deep, deeper.
Time became indistinct and irrelevant. Jia Jia did not know in what direction she was swimming. She could not see her body. If she was travelling down, once she reached the bottom of her building, would she find the ground again? It was worth a try, she thought. After what felt like a long time, a white ray of light penetrated the water. The sun! It must be the sun rising in the distance. Refracted, the light seemed alien, as though it belonged in a different dimension, but Jia Jia swam towards it anyway, pulling at and ripping off her pyjamas, crying for help, her voice muffled.
As she was nearing the light, she spotted a small silver creature beneath her, swimming around in circles. She thought she could make out a tiny fish with a sharp tail, shining like glitter. It swam wildly – a fry just learning how to flap its fins.
Jia Jia shifted her focus back to the light and pushed towards it, leaving the silver fish behind. The light grew brighter. She rose out of the water, finding herself sitting on the floor of her apartment, naked, pyjamas in a heap, frozen to the core. The morning sun pierced the blind, the sky was a pale blue now, and a group of middle-aged women were already gathered outside in the park dancing to disco tunes.
Jia Jia’s eyes gradually adjusted to the light. She was shaking. With an automatic gesture she reached for the drawing on the bedside table. Relieved to find it still dry, she leaned her head against the bed and studied the fish-man. She saw lifelessness in its eyes, like prey that was being hunted and had already given up.
Jia Jia folded the drawing, though she was unable to erase the image from her mind. The water, what was it? She could not remember what it looked like any more, only the stinging cold that it had left on her skin. The heater must have broken during the night. A bitter chill remained. The apartment was too big. She had to move out, she decided, as soon as she could. She could not bear being alone in this place.
Jia Jia could not remember the last time she had admitted, even to herself, that she was truly afraid of something. It was not because she never experienced fear, because of course she did, but she had learned very young that her vulnerabilities would only lead to more trouble for her family: more worry for her grandmother, more tears for her aunt, more concerned late-night whispers between the two of them.
The day that her mother died, Jia Jia had just started middle school.
That evening, peeping through the door to the bedroom where her grandmother wept into her pillow in silence, her legs hanging from the edge of the bed, Jia Jia had learned to do the same.
Now she tried to get up but found herself unable to summon the energy to rise. She wrapped the duvet around her body and sat for hours on the wooden floor, wishing that the day would stop for a moment and wait for her. She closed her eyes and searched for memories of her mother. She had not done this for a long time. The memories were fragmented and faint, just as they always were. Jia Jia was sure that these memories had felt like reality once, that at a distinct moment in the past there had been an intensity and lucidity to them. But when? She could not say any more. She could not remember the details, only the existence of details.
In the afternoon, Jia Jia decided to go to her grandmother’s. She wanted a distraction, something to occupy her mind and lift her up from the floor. She got dressed and boarded the 139 bus towards Jianguomen. It would take longer than the subway, but she felt better able to breathe above ground. Jia Jia managed to find a seat towards the back, next to a mother and a girl. The mother held the girl’s schoolbag on her lap and had a few plastic bags of groceries near her feet. The two did not speak much during the journey, only once when the mother unscrewed the top off an insulated bottle, poured some warm water into it, and held it up to her daughter’s lips.
‘You need to drink more water,’ she said.
The girl, keeping her eyes fixed on a picture book in her lap, opened her mouth for her mother to feed her. When Jia Jia got off the bus, the mother and daughter rode on.
Jia Jia had grown up in a compact three-bedroom apartment with her grandmother and her aunt. It was in an old brick building, on the second floor, overlooking a courtyard. Her grandparents’ apartment had been consigned to them by their employer, and when her grandfather passed away, her aunt had moved in to take care of her grandmother. Then, when her aunt married Li Chang, he joined them too. Through the years, the courtyard had become crowded with parked cars and there were fewer bikes lying around than there had been in Jia Jia’s childhood. A group of women walked out of the front gate just as Jia Jia entered. She did not recognise them. When she was young, she thought that the families who lived in this building would never leave; they had seemed so rooted to this piece of land, as if they had sprouted from it, like trees.
Jia Jia pushed open the metal door, stamped hard on the floor to switch on the lights, and climbed up the stairs. There were more advertisements on the stairway walls, posters layering over the old ones. Someone had written ‘car rental’ followed by a phone number directly onto the wall.
She knocked on the door and her aunt greeted her.
‘Look at my new aquarium!’ her aunt said. She slanted her body so that Jia Jia could squeeze past the shoe cabinet and into the room.
There was a large aquarium in the living room, standing more than a head taller than Jia Jia. Different species of fish swam inside, eyes big and round, lost and disconcerted. But even with so many fish, the tank looked oddly vacant.
‘Did you get any coral?’ Jia Jia asked, putting down her bag on the sofa.
‘It’s coming tomorrow,’ her aunt said, proudly looking at the tank as if it was her child.
Jia Jia’s grandmother was shaking her head as she walked, with tiny steps, out of her room.
‘We’re just a normal family living in a normal apartment,’ her grandmother said, her voice raspy with mucus, and her face scrunched into a displeased expression. ‘Jia Jia, your aunt has a new idea every day, always trying to go with the trend. Look at how much space this thing is taking up!’
‘Li Chang’s at a meeting right now,’ her aunt said to Jia Jia, ignoring the old woman. ‘He and I have been working on a film project. Once I get my share of the money, I’ll try to get you a nice little apartment, and an aquarium just like this. It should be a big sum this time.’
Jia Jia’s aunt sat down and began rinsing and sterilising teacups with boiling water.
‘The apartment you’re in now is too big for you. You should sell it and invest in our project,’ she continued. She picked three cups out with a pair of wooden tongs. ‘Last night your uncle and I stayed at the Four Seasons to celebrate this film deal. More than one thousand yuan a night! Li Chang and I thought the lobby was so beautiful. Too bad it’s winter, otherwise we would’ve had a drink on the terrace.’