Persephone

It all started with Carl. There had been so much to take in - it wasn’t until the next day that I noticed.

I‘d spotted the playground from the big window in the new flat in the morning. I was forbidden to go alone as it was made inaccessible by skinny, disappearing pavements and fast, twisting roads. My sister Esther and brother Jude were persuaded to take me there after lunch while Mum unpacked in peace. The merry-go-round, the climbing frame were more gaudy and plasticised than the ones at home, but my siblings flattened my initial excitement with their cool lassitude. I soon felt the influence of their torpor, added to jetlag, humidity and heat and begged to go back to the flat. That was when I noticed the thing about Carl that I hadn’t when we first arrived, half-asleep, the previous evening.

I gave myself a proper tour of the flat when we got back from the playground, which was why I noticed. My big sister’s rosebud-papered room was off to the left, then it opened out into a large multipurpose room. It had a living area to the left, with the big window revealing hills dropping down to the sea, and the playground. To the right was a study area for Dad screened off by rattan bookcases - he’d arrived a month earlier so it was already dressed with maps of the Far East on the wall dotted with pins and cut-out headlines; there were newspapers on the desk with sections of text boxed or looped in assertive red chinagraph. Also to the right was a dining area, which signified meals, my least favourite part of every day, and then curling further to the right was a door to a grim little kitchen, with a door out to the grey yard.

I stared at it: there was chicken wire around the noisy, dripping air-conditioning units that protruded from the wall of the flat, there was an eggy stench, the sound of Cantonese voices from several radios by open windows, and a high wall at the back, blocking out most of the light. My father, getting a beer from the kitchen, forbade me from entering this yard on pain of death - he warned that it was a local custom to chuck your rubbish out of the window, which isn’t funny when there are 27 storeys above you. Especially unfunny when their rubbish is old air-conditioning units and TV sets.