– Clare Kane
May 1999
Dina runs back to the house from the paddy fields, where she has been working all morning. Her sister is leaving today, packing up her kindly smile and bony arms and taking her affection elsewhere, to a city whose name Dina can’t pronounce. Her sister stands proudly at the doorway of their low home, a bag slung carelessly over one shoulder, her hair tossed to the side, only her darting eyes betraying her nervousness.
“Don’t go!” Dina squeals, holding her sister’s waist, looking up at that familiar face.
“Oh, Dina, darling, I’ll be home soon. Don’t miss me too much.” Her sister leaves her with a sloppy kiss and a hole in her chest, a little cavity sisterly love used to fill.
Simon swings the cricket bat confidently, his chest puffing with developing manliness under the weak sun of the north. He sends the ball flying through the air; his eyes follow its beautiful arc, and he beams. He is finishing his first year of secondary school and the summer promises lush lawns and long novels and trips to his grandparents’ house, where he can lose himself in old alcoves and hide under abandoned beds, suspending that moment between childhood and the razor’s edge of adolescence.
October 2006
Dina thinks the scene feels familiar as she waves goodbye to her younger brother, promising to come back. She remembers her sister’s nonchalant stance, the pretence that she feared nothing. Dina’s heart hammers against her bones now; her hands shake with insincerity as she strokes her brother’s head and her lips pucker when she lies to her parents that she is not worried.
“I’m a big girl,” she says. She has never seen her sister again. She wonders if beyond these fields she will find her sibling behind an unknown door and slip back into her past.
“Where are you going?” her brother pipes up, trailing her as she tries to leave the house.
“Shanghai,” Dina says, tasting the unfamiliar tang on her tongue. The city’s name glitters with excitement, its vowels echo foreign and tantalising in her mouth. “In China.” Her brother wraps his fingers around her thigh until his knuckles turn white.
Simon inhales the air of learning, the promise of privilege here. His father follows him, towing two large suitcases. Simon has made it to Oxford, he has crossed the gilded gates and he is ready to make himself into something. Someone big, someone important. His college is old, the walls made of thick stone so sturdy it reassures him that nothing can go wrong. The window in his room looks onto the river, which runs fast and steady. This is not a bad place to call home for a few years.
December 2012
Dina is tired. She is not yet twenty-five, but the years have worn on her. Her last bar threw her out, saying she didn’t bring in enough customers. A new batch of girls had arrived from Vietnam and they were young and unsullied, the neon lights dazzled them, made their skin glow with life. The harsh lights in the Brooklyn bar only made Dina feel more wrinkled, more old, more unwanted. She makes her way to the newly-opened Casablanca, stepping through puddles of neon on her way, nodding to the girls she knows who stand outside the bars, red smiles and happiness painted on their faces as they hand flyers to the old men whose necks sink into their shoulders like turtles.
Simon leaves the office with two older co-workers. They ask him if he likes Shanghai, and he tells them there’s more promise here than in London. More chance for a young man to make a name for himself, to make real money. It’s only been two weeks but Simon is high on possibility, he can taste his future and it has the metallic sourness of prosperity. His colleagues take him out, tell him it’s no trouble, that they only have whingeing wives and braying children to go home to anyway. They lead him to a strip of bars and he sees that it’s true what they say about this city – everything is for sale. He drinks in the beauty of the women, lets the bad pop music flood his veins with energy, and when his colleague lays the powder out on the table he doesn’t think of saying no.
March 2013
Dina likes the Casablanca. The owners don’t cheat her out of too much money – they’re out-of-towners and not shrewd enough yet. She dances different shifts every day, but usually doesn’t work past two a.m. Most nights at least one man will buy an hour with her. The Casablanca is a more expensive bar and many of its patrons are older, or at least more sophisticated. They aren’t blinded by youth; they take experience into account too. Almost all of them are foreign and she has snatches of the languages she needs to know to get by. “You are very handsome” makes them all blush, she discovers, even the old ones, who shouldn’t believe they are handsome. Tonight is a quiet night, a Monday, and she dances, lost in the music, letting her hips guide her body, her mind filling with images. They strike her as strange, some of the thoughts she has while dancing – the purse she wants to buy, the room she shares with two other girls, her little brother’s face, where her sister might be.
Simon comes to the Casablanca alone. He has been here a few times now, and he likes its low-key vibe. The other bars can get a bit too crazy, the girls are annoying, pushing unwanted drinks on him and slinking off huffily if they don’t get their time bought out immediately. He likes the places with poser DJs and thumping music on big nights, evenings when he wants to just spend and forget. But it is Monday and even the young men set to inherit the new world need a quiet night. He nurses a Japanese whisky alone, and watches the dancers. He sees one he hasn’t noticed before and his eyes fix on her. She swings softly, moving from her waist, her features serene as though she were watching the sun go down rather than dancing on a bartop. He watches her through the mist of alcohol and he surges with a desire to possess her. Not to possess her the way he has Caroline, with her blonde pony club hair and tinkling laugh, a hand to hold when mingling at expatriate parties. No, he wants to own this beauty, to dominate it, to have it to himself. This girl might be the most beautiful he’s ever seen, her eyes milky and unfocused, the blackening bruise on her thigh her sole imperfection, serving only to underscore the unblemished promise of everything else.
July 2013
Dina sees Simon come into the bar. She looks the other way, pretends she hasn’t noticed his confident walk, his dominant strides towards her. She knows how to play coy, how to summon her inner coquette. She raises her hands above her head, twists her fingers, looking down only when he grabs her ankle. She almost stumbles in her heels.
“I’ve paid for the whole night,” he says.
She is surprised, but pleasantly so. They have slept together a few times now, going to a nearby hotel. Simon is young, he is almost handsome, and he seems kind. He always pays the rate and then some, letting Dina pocket some extra money. The cash she will get for the whole night is a welcome bonus – her rent is due next week.
Simon takes her to his apartment, serves her a whisky on the rocks. He watches her carefully, noticing how she looks from corner to corner, trying to conceal her delight at his wealth. He smiles triumphantly, a lord in a land of cream stereos and flat-screen televisions. He looks at her sipping, taking tiny mouse nibbles at the drink the way they are all trained to in the club.
“You can drink properly here,” he says. “You’re not going anywhere tonight.”
He watches her relax, and he is happy. He finally possesses her.
Dina knew Simon was rich and his apartment confirms it. She aches to live like this, to luxuriate on a leather sofa, to flick through 600 channels on a television, to have a cabinet full of alcohol rather than bare cupboards with only withered ramen noodles and dried-out cockroaches. She wonders how much Simon likes her, if an allowance might be on the cards, if he wants a real “girlfriend” experience. Dina knows her game will be up in the bars soon, that she will be relegated to a dark club for flabby older women with no hope and little sex appeal. Simon sits on the sofa next to her and kisses her neck gently. She closes her eyes, feels her body give in to the moment. The amber whisky warms her throat, lulls her into a half-sleep in his arms.
“Angela, I’m so glad you stayed here tonight,” Simon says.
He doesn’t know her real name – she chose Angela because she thought it sounded exotic and beautiful. She smiles at him, indulgent. She feels something sharp against her leg. His fingernail, she thinks, but then she notices a trail of blood running down her thigh like a single tear. She gasps and pulls away. She sees the knife in his hand. She screams.
He curses her shouts. He had not factored in the noise she would make. This is the first time he has done this and his rage at the world seeps out of him into his actions, his desire to be someone, to own the world, flows into the knife he holds. He cannot stop.
Dina is not screaming when the police arrive. She is almost dead, but her eyes are locked into those of her killer, the man who has taken her life without even knowing her name. She sees the police officers, they are young and robust and professional. They wrestle Simon to the floor. She tries to talk but her body is giving up, closing down.
Their names, foreign and distinct, appear side-by-side in newsprint, on screens, on the lips of the city. Dina is remembered for at least a few months, the latest tragedy, a reason to lament humanity’s decline, to question the brutality of man. Simon is remembered for longer, for his rambling during the trial, for his collection of books on serial killers, for all his money and his little happiness. When similar killings happen, their names are pulled back from the place they disappeared to, and Dina’s sister sees familiar eyes staring back at her from the television screen. Eyes she must forget are watching when she goes to work in the bars.
Clare Kane
Clare Kane works in advertising in London and her creative writing has appeared in various outlets including the Daily Telegraph, Man Repeller, 1000 Words and Toasted Cheese.