Deer Luhan, With Love

40

THIS HAS BEEN A SEXTUPLE UPDATE (as in, six chapters in one go).  GO BACK TO CHAPTER 35.

Chapter 40 – In Which I Am Apparently A Teenage Spy

Deer Luhan,

Not totally sure how they actually bought that bullsh*t.  Then again, there’s this jokey saying in the UK that a humanities or arts degree is a degree in the art of bullsh*tting, which probably explains a lot.

Leigh

Beijing West to Baoding East by rail?  Longest forty-eight minutes of my life.  I was lucky to have got to the Beijing West station in time to catch a high-speed bullet train, or it would have been the best part of two hours.  During the journey, I tried ringing Luhan again a couple of times, but I got no response.  The phone was still on, though, and I found myself checking the find my phone app every couple of seconds as the darkened countryside and lights from towns flashed by.

Kris rang just as the train was pulling into the terminus.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in angry English.  “Tao said you went haring out of the dorm an hour and a half ago!  Where are you?”

“I forgot about a house visit Luhan asked me to do,” I lied.  “Don’t worry – I’ll be back probably just after midnight.  I’m not in Beijing, so chances are I won’t bump into anybody unpleasant.”

There was a pause.

“Are you sure?”  He sounded worried, bless him.  It kind of made me feel bad: I had absolutely no idea what I was walking into here: I just knew that Luhan wasn’t acting normally and that he hadn’t moved from a particular spot over in the north-east of Baoding for nearly two hours now.  At least, I hope that was it and he was still with the phone, because otherwise I had a Houston-sized problem on my hands.

“I’m sure.”  I stepped out onto the platform.

Almost immediately, I gagged as tepid air hit the back of my throat.  It felt like I was breathing in a bunch of chemicals rather than oxygen and nitrogen.  Coughing, I put a hand in front of my nose and, when it didn’t do much, pulled up the material of my polarneck until it was almost in my eyes.  And I thought the pollution levels in London could be bad.

“How come Luhan couldn’t do this visit himself, though?” Kris pressed.

“I don’t know.  Probably because he’s negotiating a ransom drop to get his aunt back?  Look, Kris, I really need to go – I’m going to be late.”

“Okay.”  He hung up, albeit somewhat reluctantly.  I tried to breathe a sigh of relief and just started gagging again.  The sooner I was out of the open air, the better.

Before too long, I found myself a taxi rank (still with my top pulled up over my nose) and managed to communicate to the taxi driver that I wanted to go to an address fairly close to the outskirts of the city.  His accent was a tiny bit awkward for me to understand at first, and I reminded myself that China was a huge country and that meant that the variation on accents was going to be even greater than it was in the UK.

If I’d been jittery on the train, it was nothing compared to how I felt crawling through the traffic across the city in that cab.  Part of me was tempted to have him set me down wherever we were so I could run, but for once the sensible part of my brain put its foot down and reasoned that I’d still get there much faster by taxi.  And at least the air in the taxi was vaguely tolerable, too.