The Canal

Sean stared blankly at the long hair that sprouted proudly from the mole next to the officer’s mouth. As the mouth moved—lips widening to make short vowels and rounding for the long—the hair moved too, bobbing and vibrating in agreement. Sean was vaguely aware the mouth and its sidekick were addressing him rather sternly. Although he wasn’t concentrating on the words, he knew the policeman wanted to know how Christa ended up in the canal.

The day before, they had had a massive row at the “meat on a stick” place. Sean remembered thinking how he could have stabbed her then—25 skewers—two in each eye and the rest in each organ, and the heart last. She had started her usual litany of how he had ruined her life by bringing her to a hellhole of smog, lack of queueing, and rampant animal abuse.

“I piss in a door-less trough while the students watch! In class, they throw erasers at me and then post pictures of me yelling about it on facebook!”

The year before when they were planning their next contract, Sean was enamoured with the idea of being in the mouth of the Sleeping Dragon, of experiencing first-hand how the inhabitants regard that infamous former leader as “70% good, 30% bad” when the 30% led to millions starving and dying. And even though the other teachers couldn’t manage a “ni hao”, he believed that he would eventually crack the code.

Each day was an hour commute in a bus with a hole in the floor, arriving giddy with carbon monoxide poisoning to teach 60 pre-pubescent students who knew only a few words at most and wanted to learn none. When they arrived home in the evenings at the accommodation provided by the school, the building’s guards pointed and shouted what could only be a string of curses judging from the amount of spit involuntarily and voluntarily coming from their mouths. Once, they greeted them with absolute silence until Christa noticed they were all eating her Aunt Ruth’s signature peanut butter cookies and sipping Tremont Rye made near her hometown. When she called to thank her aunt, she said nothing of the theft.

The night before, she had outlined her plan to do a runner—take the laptops issued by the agency, pack their stuff, and take the next available cheap international flight. She ordered a bottle of baijiu and another round of meat.

“It’s only been six months. You just have culture shock.” He was disgusted by her weakness and said as much. “What happened to you? You used to have such a sense of adventure! Remember the shithole bungalow we lived in in Thailand with the million ants? Or what about that lech in Poland who was always grabbing your ass? And don’t get me started on Korea. Remember working 47 days straight without a break?”

Christa filled and emptied her plastic cup twice before speaking again. Her voice low, eyes unfocused.

“I’m not wasting another day of my life here. I know ultimatums are toxic to relationships but here it is: China or me.”

Sean’s sense of self-importance in the world tended to grow proportionately with the amount of alcohol he consumed. It struck him that giving in to this woman, whom he loved but not in a soul-defining way, would be a grave error. He was on a mission to know China. He too filled and emptied his glass twice before speaking again, matching her tone.

“There’s a lot more to China than to you. And China doesn’t bitch all the time.”

He didn’t bother to tell any of this to the officer in the tiny grey room. Only that they argued, she packed her bag and left.

“With body no bag. No passport. Nothing.”

“Probably stolen?”

“Maybe.” The hair twitched.

Sean closed his eyes. There was not going to be any good end to this. Nobody would believe him and fleeing would suggest guilt. Staying would lead to jail. He put his head in his hands.

She was drunk. She probably fell in. I wasn’t with her.

“But why bag and passport in rubbish?”

Worried that the man had been able to hear his thoughts, Sean removed his hands from his eyes and looked at the officer, finally seeing his face as a complete composition for the first time. The officer looked bored.

Any residual drunkenness Sean had been feeling since being roused from his bed before dawn was suddenly gone. He found he couldn’t swallow and spots were appearing on the sides of his line of vision.

They had gone home together; that he was sure of. The guards had barricaded the entrance as they always did at 11:00 pm and he distinctly remembered Christa climbing on it and shouting for the guards to “wake the fuck up”. When one of them emerged from the tiny office, vulnerable looking with his shirt untucked and rumpled hair, Christa began poking him in the chest and releasing six months’ worth of resentment.

She had trampled into the apartment, slamming doors, and throwing things into a suitcase. Sean had stayed a few feet behind her and had settled on the sofa with a beer. When the room suddenly became silent and filled with the familiar stench of tobacco, he knew she was in the kitchen drinking whisky.

Sean waited for the next moment of the narrative and realised that the smell of the smoke and the taste of the warm Tsingtao were the last things he could remember. When did she come out of the kitchen? It would have been typical for her to go down to 7-Eleven for more booze or had she taken the suitcase? And did I follow her?

“Rubbish?”

“Outside your apartment”

“Near the guard station?”

Something flickered for just a moment in the officer’s eyes, Sean’s body unclenched, and a story was born. A story that would forever remain unchanged, even in his darkest and quietest hours.