Chapter 12·Wen Jian · Chengdu

Wen Jian. Chengdu. Monday 15 March 2032, 06:40.

Jian folded the blanket in three and then in three again and put it on the arm of the sofa with the pillow on top, as he had on Friday and Saturday and Sunday. Then he went to the bedroom door and put his ear against it.

Nothing. Then the bed, and feet, and the lock. The door opened a hand's width. Hao's arm came out with Jian's school shirt on a hanger and Jian's bag, and put them on the floor, and went back in. The door shut. The lock went.

He dressed in the hall.

In the kitchen his mother had the rice on and the television on with the sound down, and his father stood at the window with his phone, reading, his thumb going up and up the screen. His father had read the phone at the window every morning since Thursday. He read it as he read the paper, from the top, all of it, and then started again.

"Eat," his mother said.

Jian ate. The rice was too hot and he ate it anyway, with his bag already on his back, because on Friday he had been late.

"School's open?"

"Teacher Luo messaged. Open for who comes."

His father put the phone in his pocket. His eyes went to Jian and then down the hall to the bedroom door, shut.

"He's coming out for school," Jian said.

"I know he is."

"He gives me my things."

"I know."

His father went and stood outside the bedroom door without knocking. Then he said, "Hao," in his ordinary voice. The lock went. The door opened. Hao came out dressed with his bag and went past all three of them and put his shoes on in the hall standing up, one foot and then the other, and went out, and left the door open behind him. Jian's mother went and shut it.

"Go," she said to Jian. "He'll wait at the corner. He always waits at the corner."

He did. He was at the corner by the noodle place with his hands in his jacket, watching the road. When Jian got there he started walking. Jian walked beside him. They went the eleven minutes to school without a word, which was not new. What was new was that Hao walked on the outside, on the road side, and had done since Friday, and Jian had not asked him about it.

Nine, out of thirty-four. Teacher Luo did the register anyway.

She did no lesson. She put a stack of books on the front desk and said anyone who wanted one could have one, and sat on her stool with her own book, and read, and looked up every page or so and counted them. Ling read. Jian read. Ma Yong sat with a book open in front of him and his hands in his lap under the desk and stayed on the same page for the whole hour.

At the long break there was no ring in the yard. The ring had happened on Friday, and again on Saturday morning when a few of them came in anyway. By Sunday there had been an argument about whether pinching counted. A girl from the year above had gone home crying. By Sunday the game had run out. Nine of them stood by the wall in the thin sun and tested nothing.

"My dad's gone," Ma Yong said.

He said it to the yard. Nobody had asked.

"Gone where," said Ling.

"Don't know. Friday. He took the car."

"To your grandmother's."

"He didn't say."

"Everyone's dad's gone to someone's grandmother's," Ling said. "Mine hasn't. Mine's at home reading the whole thing out loud to my mum, all of it, the big file, he's on page two hundred."

"He didn't say where he was going."

Ma Yong had his hands in his pockets. He had had them there since Friday, in the yard and in the corridor and at his desk. He took them out to eat and put them back. Jian had watched him do it. He watched him now, by the wall with his shoulders up round his ears and his hands away. Ma Yong looked smaller. Then he thought that he was not smaller, that he was the same size he had been on Thursday, so it was something else.

"Is your mum alright," Jian said.

Ma Yong turned. Nobody in the class asked Ma Yong things.

"She's alright," he said. "She's fine." He faced the wall. "She's been singing."

Ling opened her mouth and glanced at Jian and shut it.

"You've stopped," Ling said, to Ma Yong, after a while.

"Stopped what."

"Being you."

Ma Yong took his hands out of his pockets and looked at them, front and back, as he had on Friday morning when Teacher Luo told him what Thursday would be, and put them away again.

"It's not Thursday yet," he said.

"No," said Ling. "So you could."

"I know I could."

"So why don't you."

He gave no answer. The bell went. They went in, and on the way in he went through the door last, behind all of them, and held the door with his foot.

The lock went at ten past nine.

Jian was on the sofa with the blanket over his knees, not yet lying down, with his reading. Ba and Ma were in their room with the door shut and the television talking low behind it. He heard the lock, and the door, and Hao's feet, and then Hao stood in the hall in the light from the kitchen in his sleep shorts and a T-shirt.

"Come on."

"What."

"Come on. It's your room."

Jian got up and took the blanket and the pillow and his book and went in. Hao shut the door behind him and left it unlocked. He got into the top bunk without the ladder, as he always did, one foot on the frame and a swing, and lay down.

Jian lay down on the bottom. Four nights. The sheet was cold and smelled of the room. Above him the slats creaked as Hao turned over, and then again as he turned back.

"Turn the light off."

Jian turned it off.

In the dark the ceiling light left a green shape on the inside of his eyes, and then it went, and there was the television through the wall, and Hao breathing, and a scooter in the street.

"I'm not going to say sorry," Hao said.

"Okay."

"For the door. I'm not."

"Okay."

The slats creaked.

"You want to know why I locked it."

Jian let him wait. He had thought about this for four nights on the sofa. He had gone through it as Ling went through the twelve lines. Hao was fourteen. Hao had a phone and a group of friends Jian had never met and money sometimes that he did not explain. On Thursday night when the second line came up he had gone a colour. So Jian had put the colour together with the phone and the money and got, over four nights, a reasonable picture of a boy who had done something, not a big thing, a thing, and had counted on his fingers and got to Thursday like everybody else.

"I think so," he said.

"No you don't." Hao's voice was flat and quiet and close, as it never was. "You think I did something. You think I took something. You've been lying out there working it out. You work everything out."

Jian lay still.

"I didn't take anything. I never took anything." A breath. "I locked the door because of you."

The scooter went along the street and away.

"Because of me."

"Because you're the only one who can."

"Can what."

"Make me." The bed moved. Hao had turned onto his back. Jian could tell from where the voice was. "Ma can't. Ma shouts and I don't care. Ba doesn't, ever, he just looks. School, I don't care about school, nobody at school could make me do anything. It's you. You say a thing." He stopped. "You know what you do. Don't lie there and act like you don't. You wait, and you pick the thing, the one thing, and you say it, quiet, like it's nothing, like it's a fact, and I. Every time. Every single time. I've hit you six times in my life and every one of them was after you said the thing."

Jian's hands were on top of the blanket. He looked at where the ceiling was.

"Chinese New Year," Hao said. "In front of Auntie. You remember what you said."

He remembered.

"You didn't even look up. And I got you in the hall after and Ma went mad. And I've thought about that for four nights, Jian. Four nights. Not the door. That. Because on Thursday there's a thing in me that reads what I'm about to do, and I'll be about to do it, I know I will, I know me, and I'll be dead on the floor in the hall before my arm's even gone, and you'll be stood there, and you won't have done anything. You'll be stood there having said a fact."

The television through the wall went to a jingle and back.

"That's what I'm scared of," Hao said. "Not the thing. You."

He had told Ling on Friday, on the wall in the yard, that he had no need to test anything because he already knew what he would do. He had known it on his father's phone, upside down, in a second, without any doubt at all. He did not hit. He did not take. He did not say the thing that would land. He had been so sure of the third one that he had never counted. Now he lay in the dark and counted. The count was six. Every one of them had been in this flat. Every one of them had been Hao.

"So after Thursday," Hao said. "Don't."

"I won't."

"You will. You can't help it. You don't even know you're doing it." The slats creaked. He had turned to the wall. "Just don't."

Jian lay with his hands on the blanket. Above him Hao's breathing went slow and then slower. The scooter did not come back. The television through the wall went off. In the quiet he went back through the six, one at a time, the way Ling went through the twelve lines, what counts, what doesn't.

He got to Chinese New Year and stopped.