All at once, he had felt terribly out of place.
Tu’s butler saw him standing around and rushed to attend to his needs. Jericho turned down hot lavender baths and Thai massages, ordered some tea and unexpectedly felt a craving for the kind of biscuits Joanna had brought him just hours before, only to scoff them all under his nose. The butler offered to make up the salon for him. For want of a better idea, Jericho nodded, paced around in a circle twice and noticed that the feeling of being out of place was accompanied by the quicksand-like sensation of helplessness.
Something had to happen.
And it did.
‘Owen? This is Diane.’
He felt a frisson of excitement, pulled out his phone and spoke into it breathlessly. ‘Yes, Diane? What is it?’
‘I’ve found something in the films that will interest you. A watermark. There’s a film within a film.’
Oh, Diane! thought Jericho. I could kiss you. If you looked only half as good as you sound I would even marry you, but you’re just a damn computer. But never mind. Make me happy!
‘Wait there,’ he called, as if there were some risk she might decide otherwise and leave the house. ‘I’m coming.’
Yoyo would have liked to convince herself she was past the worst, but she felt the worst still lay before her, and three times as intense. Hongbing had screamed and shouted. They had argued for over an hour. As a result, her eyes were sore and filled with salty tears, as if she had seen nothing but misery and hardship her whole life. She felt guilty about everything. About the massacre in the steelworks, the destruction of the apartment, her father’s despair, and finally about the fact that Hongbing didn’t love her. Almost as soon as it had appeared, this last thought entered into sinister alliances with all possible forms of self-loathing and gave birth to a new guilt, namely, having done Hongbing an injustice. Of course he had loved her, how could he not have? How low did you have to sink to assume anything else but love from your own father? But now just that thought alone made her undeserving of love, and Hongbing had taken the only logical step and stopped loving her. So what was she complaining about? She was to blame for the fact that his mask of a face had not melted, but shattered.
She had disappointed everyone.
For a while she hung around silently in Joanna’s studio, watching as Tian’s beautiful wife conjured up a feverish sparkle in the eyes of the exhausted teenagers, that last glimmer of energy moments before all systems shut down. On the monstrous two and a half by four metre canvas, she portrayed carefree natures through pigments: two ornamental fish in the shallow waters of their sensitivities, whose only worry in life was how not to die from boredom before the next party kicked off. Realising that the worst massacres in the lives of the two beauties were probably the ones they had caused in the hearts of pubescent boys, Yoyo cried a little more.
She was probably doing these girls an injustice too. Was she really any better? She had certainly been no stranger to excess in the last few years. She was more than familiar with the moment when one faded out like a dwindling, bright red dot in the blackness of a charred wick. She had sung incessantly against Hongbing’s sadness, danced against it, smoked and fucked against it, without once flagging with a soothing emptiness in her gaze like the princesses of the night on Joanna’s canvas. Each time, her last thought had been that the excesses weren’t worth dying for, that she would have much rather been sitting at home listening to what her father had to tell her about the time before she was born. But Hongbing hadn’t told her one single thing.
Joanna created eyelashes with a flourish, pressed in smatterings of mascara and distributed make-up in the corner of the eyes and onto cheekbones. Yoyo watched, overcome with melancholy. She liked Joanna’s flirtation with society, the way she wore its colourful plumage. There was no canvas big enough to depict the way China entertained itself, Joanna always said. After all, China was a big country, and so she explained to her feathered friends, whenever they came to sharpen their beaks and sip at champagne, that lack of content couldn’t be portrayed on a small scale. It was a witty and catchy comment, but really incomprehensible in an artistic sense. She pompously celebrated the beauty of emptiness and the emptiness of beauty, sold her fans something they could look at, and neglected to tell them it was actually a mirror.
‘Don’t forget,’ she always said with her most charming Joanna smile, ‘I’m in the picture too. In every single one. Including yours.’
Yoyo envied Joanna. She envied the egoism with which she sailed through life, and without picking up any bruises along the way. She envied her ability to be uninterested, and her lack of concern in showing it. Yoyo, on the other hand, was interested in everything, and compulsively so. Could that ever end well? Sure, the Guardians had accomplished quite a lot of things. Under their pressure, imprisoned journalists had been released, corrupt civil servants stripped of office and environmental scandals solved. While Joanna’s hands were being manicured, Yoyo had been busy dirtying hers by delving them into painful subjects, never tiring in demanding China’s right to its own culture of fun. This had given her the reputation of being a nationalist from time to time. Just as well. She was a hedonistic preacher, a liberal nationalist who got fired up by the injustice in the world. Wonderful! And yet there were so many other things she could do. She was sure she could find something, as long as it meant not having to be Chen Yuyun.
Joanna painted, and was simply Joanna. Self-involved, care-free and rich. Everything that repulsed Yoyo from the bottom of her heart, and yet she yearned for it too. Someone who offered security. Someone who wouldn’t step aside, because it was something they never did.
She was crying again.
After a while, Yoyo’s supply of tears was exhausted. Joanna cleaned her brushes in turpentine. Over the glass surfaces of the pagoda roof, the sky was working its way through every shade of grey in preparation for the evening.
‘So how did it go? Well?’
Yoyo sniffed and shook her head.
‘It must have gone well,’ Joanna decided. ‘You screamed at each other, and you cried. That’s good.’
‘You think?’
Joanna turned to her and smiled. ‘Well, it’s certainly better than him swallowing his own tongue and talking to the walls at night.’
‘I shouldn’t have lied to him like that,’ said Yoyo and coughed, her airways blocked from all the crying. ‘I hurt him. You should have seen him.’
‘Nonsense, sweetheart. You didn’t hurt him. You told him the truth.’
‘Yes, that’s what I mean.’
‘No, you’re getting confused. You’re acting as though speaking frankly were some huge moral issue. If you tell the truth, you’re one of the good guys. How it’s received is a different matter, but that’s what psychiatrists are for. There’s nothing more you can do to help your father bite the bullet.’
‘To be honest, I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do now.’
‘I do.’ Joanna stretched out her slim fingers, one after another. ‘Run yourself a bath, go a few rounds with the punch bag, go shopping. Spend money. Lots of money.’
Yoyo rubbed her elbows. ‘I’m not you, Joanna.’
‘No one suggested you take off and buy a Rolls-Royce. I want you to understand the principles of cause and effect. The truth is a good thing, even if it can be unpleasant at times. And if it is unpleasant, it strengthens the body’s defences.’