She looked at him and smiled with a nervous sweetness.

‘Lucy, how would it be if we were to start again? If we forget all about the debt?’ He swiped the air. ‘No debt, gone! Would you like that?’

Lucy nodded warily.

‘This is my offer: I have been thinking a lot about you and Ka Lei recently. I have plans for you both. I want you to take good care of your sister. Look after her – she is special to me. You should stop working at the club. I will help you financially.’ He took out a wad of notes from his pocket and pushed them across the seat to Lucy, where they stayed untouched. ‘I would also like you to move. I have a vacant apartment.’

Lucy was lost for words. She stared at him, expecting some awful twist to this strange new turn of events.

‘From this day on, Ka Lei is mine. I own her. I will keep her. She will become my concubine. Your job will be to see that she stays safe – stays … contained. She is not to leave the house without supervision. Do you understand, Lucy?’

Lucy was afraid that she did.

‘But there is one more thing, Lucy. One more thing I demand from you before the debt is finished.’

Not even Lucy was prepared for what came next.

66

Georgina emerged wet from the shower. Her phone was ringing.

She was hoping it would be Mann. Despite what had happened, she still held out hope it would be the start of something between them. But it was Lucy. She wanted Georgina to do her a favour. Georgina was doing her best to be kind to Lucy – even after what she had done to Ka Lei, she felt sorry for her. She and Ka Lei were just waiting till Lucy felt better, then they would think about moving out.

‘Will I be able to find the shoe repairers, Lucy? I don’t want to be late for Ka Lei. I’m meeting her at Bar Paris at two, after she finishes her shift at the hospital. We’re going to spend the rest of the day together. She needs me at the moment. She’s still so upset about … everything …’

‘No problem. I tell you how to get there. It’s on the way. Got a pen? It’s no problem, right?’

‘Of course it’s no problem, Lucy. If you need it done, I will do it for you.’

* * *

It was one thirty. The sun was high in the sky. It blasted down onto the busy street and began burning the top of Georgina’s head. She scratched her head as the sweat tickled her scalp. She longed to be out of the heat.

As she stepped onto a narrow cobbled street she paused to listen to a strange noise coming from a dilapidated building above her. It was the click-clack of a mahjong game that had been going all night. By now, the players’ irritability had reached its peak. Their eyes were scratching with tiredness and their manners were raw. They shouted above the clacking pieces, slamming them onto the table.

Georgina stood in the road and listened for a while. Her eyes were searching all the time for the exact source of the noise. She had never heard the sound of a mahjong game before. She was lost in thought when an open-backed truck passed within inches of her.

The driver was Man Po. He had just taken delivery of a consignment of pig carcasses and was delivering them to a restaurant across town. Georgina smelt the truck in the same second as she saw it: salted meat and animal faeces drenched the air around it. In the back of the truck were piles of split-throated pigs. She watched them pass – their stubbly blond hairs shone in the sunshine and their sad opaque eyes stared up at the sky. Man Po turned his head back to look at her, not smiling, just staring in his lolling fashion. The pigs’ black throats gaped and their trotters bounced as the truck jolted over the cobbles. Then he turned the corner and was gone.

Georgina stumbled, reeling slightly from the near miss with Man Po’s pig lorry, and slipped on the uneven road. Looking down at the ground she saw that water filled the cracks between the cobbles under her feet. It was coming from market stalls just across the street. She crossed the road, entered the market area, and was immediately swallowed by stalls and livestock. It was a typical Chinese market, a place where all creatures alive and dead were being offered for sale (anything that lived beneath the sky certainly could and definitely would be eaten, according to Chinese belief). The smell in the air was flesh and fish, perfumed with incense.

Georgina felt lost and disorientated in the market, but she had no inclination to leave. Tiredness had stolen her ability to reason, and, anyway, there was shade from the stalls to bring relief from the hot sun, and the water from the fruit stalls was cool underfoot. She felt it through the soles of her sandals.

She stopped by a small group of people gathered in front of a fat stallholder who had a flat face and an enormous head. He stood behind a chopping board, a long knife in one hand, while the other rested on a bag on the table in front of him. The bag held his merchandise, bulging, spreading, heavy with a weight and too dark to define its contents. It twitched with an irregular pulse like some massive heart dumped there – collapsing over the wooden slab, but still beating.

The fat stallholder addressed the crowd excitedly. He beckoned to the people to come and watch this imminent spectacle. Then, after a few minutes, when sufficient people had gathered including Georgina, he held the knife aloft with the one hand and reached into the net bag with the other, pulled out a tiny pair of dark green legs, stretched them, then sliced them clean through at the thigh. He pushed the torso to the back of the board and offered the legs forward for sale.

The small group of people turned as one unit to stare at Georgina as she gasped, and the fat stallholder stopped his work. Looking up, he smiled.

‘Don lok so sat, Missy, fill no pain.’

She smiled, embarrassed, as the stallholder and onlookers stared at her. She wanted so much to walk away but she was unable to move, riveted by repulsion as more frogs were taken out, sliced at the thighs, their torsos pushed to one side of the chopping board creating a grizzly mound of wasted life, and their legs scraped shivering into a bag. Then she turned and, with great relief, saw a familiar face. Max was standing behind her.

67

In Bar Paris Edith Piaf crackled away as Ka Lei picked at the candle wax around the old wine bottles and sipped her warm Coke. She checked her messages again and again. She didn’t know where Georgina could be: Georgina was never late. In fact, she was usually early.

Every time the door at Bar Paris opened, Ka Lei searched the faces of those entering, sure that one of them would be Georgina. But, as each stranger stepped inside and closed the door behind him, a small panic surged upward in her chest and a voice in her head said:

Georgina isn’t coming … Georgina isn’t coming.

But Ka Lei couldn’t bear that thought: she needed Georgina so badly; she had waited all day to be able to see her. Georgina was the only one who could make her feel better. And now it was over an hour and a half since they were due to meet and the panic inside continued to squeeze her. Caught like a rabbit in a boa constrictor’s grip, she couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t swallow the scream that was wedged in her throat. She instinctively knew something awful had happened.

She left Bar Paris and ran all the way home. Georgina wasn’t there. Lucy was. Ka Lei ran into the flat calling: ‘Where is Georgina?’ She stared wide-eyed at the scattered belongings in Georgina’s room. ‘Why are all her things in such a mess? Where is she?’

Lucy came towards her with her arms outstretched, tears welling in her eyes. Ka Lei fended her off. ‘What’s wrong, Lucy?’ She looked past her into the bedroom. ‘Where is she?’