The taxi driver turned towards the passenger in the back seat. His voice was low, the words muffled through the plastic partition.
“Ni kendingle ma?” he asked. Are you sure?
“Mei banfa. Guangmenr le,” the woman replied. No choice. It’s closed.
A second-hand Beijing burr hid her American East Coast accent.
The driver returned his eyes to the road. The headlights threw a silver glow into Shanghai’s late winter drizzle.
The passenger pulled off her shoes, opened her handbag and removed a tired pair of fake Nikes. She pushed her pumps into the bag, replaced them with the worn sneakers, and waited for the taxi to come to a stop under the dripping branches of a plane tree. Steam rose from the hood and the windshield wipers scraped against the glass.
She paid the driver in cash, stepped into the cold air and waited for the taxi to pull out onto the empty road before swinging her bag and tossing it over the fence. With her left hand she gripped the top of a railing then jumped to grab a low-hanging branch with her right. A push with one foot against the iron post and she was crouching on top of the fence as she’d been shown to do a week after arriving at Fudan University and had returned from an evening in the city to find the gates shut and the campus locked down. Now she was an expert at avoiding the guards, their knowing nods as they let her in and the possibility that someone might keep note of the time she returned. Carefully, she lifted the back of her coat over the sharp tip of the fencepost and dropped to the ground, falling to her knees in the wet grass.
She was glad then she’d only drunk two cups of rice wine at the banquet that night. For the remainder of the toasts she’d raised a cup filled, when no one was looking, with water. At just five-foot-one it didn’t take much alcohol to send her head in circles and her mouth out of control, and she liked to think before she spoke, constructing arguments that were clear and persuasive. That was never easy to do. It was harder to do it in Mandarin, even Mandarin as good as hers, and it was almost impossible to do in Mandarin with a belly full of fermented grain. Even those two cups were now making her head spin a little.
She forced a shoe that had escaped onto the grass back into her bag and made her way to the path that led eventually to the foreign student dorms. There was no wind that night but the rain was growing heavy and she pulled her coat tightly around her. The campus was large. It would be at least ten minutes before she was back in her room. If she was lucky, Claire would be staying at her boyfriend’s again and she wouldn’t have to undress in the dark to avoid waking her, or worse, answer Claire’s difficult questions about where she’d been and what she’d been doing. She was a terrible liar, though practice was improving her skills.
She walked quickly, her footsteps disappearing into the rain. Soon she’d be back in her room. Soon she’d be dry and warm. Whether she’d be asleep soon was a different question. Already, as she thought about what she’d heard that evening, excitement quickened her pace.
A soft noise from between the trees on her right—a mixture of trodden leaves and wet earth—made her turn. Beyond the lights she could see only the dark shapes of branches, the distant outline of the railings and the long blocks of the new dorm buildings. A cat, she figured, or a rat more likely. Or nothing. But she walked a little faster to where the path turned towards the foreign student area tucked away in the corner of the university campus.
The noise came again, closer this time, a soft squelch just beyond the glow of the lights on the path. It was heavier now. Deliberate. A firework exploded silently somewhere over the city, an early sign of the New Year celebrations. The sparkles flashed and died. A shape moved in the shadow of a dormitory building then disappeared.
She’d never felt concerned walking through the campus at night. The place might have been dark, badly-lit and easy to penetrate, as she well knew, but it was also full of students, young and familiar, and she trusted them. Now she hesitated.
She was being silly, she thought. She was in Shanghai, not on the dark streets of Chicago or New York. She was safe here and would soon be in her room, showering off the day and trying to dampen her excitement so that she could sleep at last.
She stepped briskly out of the light and onto the narrower path that led to the place that, for eighteen months, she’d been happy to call home. Her building was dead ahead, the last before the campus ended. Twenty-plus floors of students from Japan and Korea, America, Africa and Europe. Some of the lights still shone behind the curtained windows despite the late hour. Students studying. Or talking. Or crashed half-stoned on Xinjiang Black.
Not much further now. Two hundred yards and she’d be out of the rain, out of the dark and climbing through the stairwell window to avoid the guard stationed permanently in the hallway. She’d be able to consider the events of the evening as she prepared for bed and she’d have the darkness in which to absorb and understand all she’d seen and heard that night.
And as she thought again about that banquet, replaying the conversations, questioning whether everything that had been spoken and decided really was as important as she felt—and surely it was—she didn’t hear the footsteps in the grass next to her.
It wasn’t until the man was standing right behind her, as he was raising his arm, as he took the breath that would power the blow, that she heard his coat rustle and turned to see a long, heavy club dropping towards her head. The weapon stood out against the streetlight even as it fell, aiming for a point at the top of her skull.
She didn’t scream. There was no time, no chance even to raise an arm or try to run. She could only gasp sharply and duck. The weapon struck hard across her shoulders, sending a sudden thick pain down her side. She staggered sideways.
A hand grabbed her collar and pulled. She struggled but the man dragged her off the path, onto the lawn between the student buildings. He was strong and tall, although most people were taller than her. He shoved her towards the trees and she fell face down in the wet grass, landing with a hard thump that knocked the breath out of her lungs. She rolled onto her back and another burst of pain shot down her right hand. Her fingers burned. She shuddered.
His silhouette towered over her. Her throat tightened.
“Ni… ni yao shenme? Ni yao shenme?” She begged for a reason believing, still, that she could talk her way out of this.
The man said nothing. Holding his club in both hands, he raised his arms, ready for his next and final blow.
She kicked, aiming for where she thought his knee would be. Her heel hit him just inside his thigh but he stumbled back, and immediately she was up and running, a staggered, limping jog that brought her bag banging against her hip.
The man was three yards behind her. His footsteps were heavier and quicker than hers. Her chest ached. Her arm throbbed. But she ran.
The gate, with its guard, was too far away. A dorm building was off to her left. Lights shone in some of the windows but she was running straight, away from him and away from the building, in the only direction her legs wanted to take her.
She shouted.
“Qiu! Qiu ming!” Help! Help me!
Her voice died between the walls.
A hard push in the middle of her back sent her flying past a tree, and she sprawled across the lawn. Again the weapon came down, powered now by a rage triggered by her kick. It smashed across her ribs. She groaned and pulled herself to her knees. She couldn’t see her attacker now but she knew he was there. When the next blow fell, she threw herself forward. The club sank into the ground.
The fence was ahead of her and she remembered the taxi driver. Maybe he’d still be in the area, and if not him then perhaps another. She tried to run but each step brought a sharp ache in her side. Gasping, she slowed then stopped and let the bag that still hung from her shoulder slip into her hand.
One chance. That was all she’d have.
She turned and swung blindly, putting all the strength her fear could produce into her attack. The bag, heavy with her shoes, struck the side of her attacker’s head with a satisfying smack. He lurched sideways into a tree, releasing a quiet grunt that landed heavily in the silence of the campus.
Now she had an opening. She dropped the bag and broke into a lop-sided sprint. The fence was just twenty yards ahead of her, fifteen now. She risked a glance behind her. Her attacker was already stumbling to his feet. He cursed and groped in the grass for his weapon but the fence was straight ahead and beyond it were lights on the road. She ran on, ignoring the pain in her chest and the ache in her shoulder. With just one working arm if she didn’t hit the fence at full speed she wouldn’t have the momentum to pull herself over.
She was five yards away, three, two... she jumped.
Her fingers curled around the top of the railing and she pulled her body halfway over. The street was below her. The tips of the railings dug into her stomach like spears. The fall would be immensely painful but if she could just make it to the end of the road, surely there’d be people who could help her.
One more push.
The weapon smashed against her shoulders.
Her hand gave way and she fell.
The club rose then dropped. Blood splashed between the railings to land in the puddles on the road.
Again the man swung and again, until his work tool had dug a hole in the soft earth.
