Prologue

She'd been dreaming of my death ever since I'd announced I was leaving. She'd awaken in a panic from visions of a plummeting plane, engines ablaze, dropping like a pebble into a cold foreign sea, engulfed by black smoke on arctic tundra, or turning to dust amongst the unforgiving dunes of the Gobi.

I was nine years older than her and people had said it wouldn't work. But we'd made it work, for over two years, up until I left my job as a kids' football coach in Scotland to follow her to Warwickshire, middle England, where she was to study Human and Equine Sports Science. Half horse, half human. With her long legs, glowing brown eyes and her propensity to see in tunnel vision, a blinkered skittishness, it suited her. But god, how I loved her.

Enough to give up everything.

We lasted a year down there, a year that like pot of tea started sweet and ended bitter. I couldn't get a job at any of the good sports centres as I couldn't swim. Every time I spoke to one of the managers of these places, outlined my qualifications in football, badminton and athletics, they'd get interested then ask:

'Great, and have you got your Bronze Medallion?'

'Uh, no, I haven't.'

'That's okay, we'll put you through the course, no problem.'

Of course, as soon as they found out I couldn't swim I was sunk.

To pay my share of the rent on our pretty two-bedroom apartment I took the first job I could find.

'Where's ya bin?'

Roger would ask me this every time I climbed the fire-escape stairs with the slops. He thought it was really funny, creasing up in girlish giggles as I sweated and humped out the stinking buckets.

'Where's ya bin?'

He was a violent schizophrenic with the biggest penis I have ever seen, outside of dirty magazines and porno movies. He was fond of getting it out and waving it about before the nearest nurse could stop him. He had a slatternly girlfriend from another home with dyed-blonde hair who came to visit him at the weekends for a shag. He was just one of the forty-odd residents suffering not in silence but in gibbers, wails and screams, in their own private hell (if they were unlucky enough to realise their condition) or consigned to oblivion (if they weren't), living in a dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of 'Historic Warwick'. Assistant Head Chef, me. Stuck in a steamy basement bereft of any natural light along with a seventeen-year old ferret-fancier who had pre-empted his teachers by giving up on school before it gave up on him, a shy portly gay man with receding red hair and gingivitis and the piglet-faced, scheming Head Chef, who enjoyed assassinating whoever had just left the room, laying bare every one of their bad points mercilessly like a butcher with a sharp knife, until they were nothing but a set of separated organs, stinking offal on the table before us. 'Bag o' shite,' she'd proclaim.

The only time I felt comfortable in that place was on the 6 am breakfast shift. I'd cycle along the dark canal, walk through the fusty halls of the quiet home down to the kitchen, where I'd crank up all the ovens, light every gas ring, and fry up enough bacon, toast enough toast, stir to the boil enough porridge, to feed a barmy army. Then I'd sit outside on the fire-escape steps, wolf down a bowl of porridge with sultanas, almonds and honey, drink coffee, smoke, and watch the sun fizzle and fry against the morning mist, a handful of heaven snatched from that hellish bedlam.

I tholed this as well as I could, trying to stay positive. We did have each other, didn't we?

She went back home for New Year and I spent the worst and loneliest Hogmanay of my life with a bunch of strangers, a half bottle of Bell's blend my only friend. I was on breakfast shift the next day, the first day of the new year of 2001, the head chef of course having first dibs on the day off. Bag o' shite. When she came back for the new term, I told her I couldn't go through that again. She promised to stay down south for the summer and we'd spend some quality time together; it would be a second summer of love, but we seemed to have misplaced the first somewhere, and it was no real surprise when the second didn't materialise. Summer 2001 was for her, up north, a round of parties, drinking and dancing while, for me, down south, it was scrubbing ovens, sweating into my whites, and humping out the slops.

'Where's ya bin?'

The newspaper ad' read something like this:


Do you want to teach in China?

If you have a degree, and a thirst for adventure, call...


A Coventry number. I felt compelled to answer it. As soon as she saw me doing this, she said:

'You'll get it.'

And she was right.

So I sent myself to Coventry, to a portakabin in the suburbs of that shabby shoebox city. The interview process was a joke. 'Have you got a degree?' 'Uh, aye, in English Lit, from Edinburgh Uni.' 'Okay, you're in.' We, the other already-accepted candidates and I, listened to selected 'experts' in the field: a guy in his late thirties who’d been a TEFL teacher overseas for some years, and an old man who'd lived over there and had got married to a local girl (he lent me the China episode of Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days, as if that was some kind of preparation). We were asked to download lesson plans from the Internet. And that, basically, was that. I left that evening none the wiser as to what I was getting myself into. All I knew was that I was being sent to a city called Harbin, which was very cold. I should buy some warm clothes before I left, but not to worry, whatever else I needed I could buy over there, as it was cheap. I had visions of myself trudging through snowdrifts in a blizzard to a rickety wooden hut. The two other candidates there, who were to become my companions in travel, culture shock and teaching, seemed to have no more idea than me.

Danuka

Tall, angular, awkward, beautiful, with a face that seemed to have been hewn from white granite with a chisel. Bulgarian linguist and mistress of seven languages. I thought her at once sexy and diffident, alluring and unreachable. She was wearing a green shirt and flared jeans and her dark hair cascaded down her back like a waterfall in a photographic negative. With the sudden action of a camera shutter, her nature would change from open to closed and back again in a blink. Tough, cool, chatty, moody, she was a mystery to me right from the start.

Gina

Power-dressed with the veneer of professional respectability you'd associate with a practising (or, now, non-practising) lawyer. Bobbed, curly, blonde hair, ice-blue eyes, a tittering giggle that skittered across her face, whose features rose and fell in waves of childlike moods, as if everything should be black and white in the world and the grey constantly upset her. At times she'd take control with a firm 'Right!' and then at other times seem to have no idea what was going on. I couldn't imagine why on earth she was on her way to China. But then again, why were any of us?

The next step was to renew my passport, which was almost out of date. I phoned the passport office and asked them if they could rush it through in two weeks. An irrepressible Irishman with a sense of humour really not suited to his occupation told me there would be no problem.

'Where ye headed, then?'

'China.'

'China! Fir fuck's sakes. Now what would ye want to go and do that for?'

'Umm, well, I'm going to teach English.'

'Ah, that'll be it then… Here, how tall are ye?'

'Dunno, maybe about five-foot seven.'

'Jesus, ye'll be a giant over there, ye know.'

'Aye, I hadn't really thought about it.'

'Well it's the truth. Chinamen are short little fuckers. They're so sma', and there's so many o' them, they have to sleep in drawers.'

He told me to enjoy my drawer, and I hung up wondering how he'd managed to get through the job interview.

I still have the photo-booth photos of her, of us, together, which we took at the same time as my passport ones. She looks improbably pale, face and collar-bone ivory, deep brown eyes wide open, a sad but assured smile, as if she knows what's going to happen but doesn't want anyone to know her thoughts on it. I'm behind her, my chin resting on her right shoulder, face craggy and unshaven, eyes and mouth creased in forced smile like tears in crepe paper. Looking at that photo now I hardly recognise myself. It's like looking at another person.

We'd decided I'd spend a year in Harbin, which I'd now found out was in the north east of China, had a population of more than four million, and was famous for it's ice festival.

'Where's ya bin?'

The last time Stuart said this I replied:

'It's where I'm going, Stuart. Where I'm going.'

I quit my job and waited for the visa to come through. This meant a lot of daytime TV shows and, one day, watching some trashy Australian soap, the programme was interrupted to show images of a plane colliding with a tall New York building and bursting horrifically into flames. I watched gob-smacked as it happened again. That afternoon I couldn't tear myself away from the terrible carnage of 9-11. The whole world seemed to go into a kind of collective shock. Of less importance, our visas were delayed. And every night she would wake up in a panic and when I asked her what she'd dreamt about, she wouldn't say.

A few weeks later, at a motorway service station somewhere south of Oxford, she's crying hysterically. The drive down had been fraught for us both, so much we wanted to say to each other but couldn't put into words. In the back of our minds we were wondering if we were ever going to see each other again, but we hid these thoughts behind the clichés and platitudes of the everyday, as if we'd see each other tomorrow. Time now seemed so short, and yet the car seemed to be moving in slow motion. A long goodbye is never a good one, and this was excruciating, like having your teeth pulled slowly out of your mouth one-by-one without anaesthetic. And yet I felt that I was trying to be strong for the both of us. She was a real mess. She wouldn’t let me drive (her car, mine already sold), but I was afraid she was going to crash. Suddenly she's shouting at me incoherently, in this busy service station car park, yanking at the steering wheel violently, hardly looking where she's going. She pulls out into the exit lane and nearly blind-sides a yellow van, slamming the car into a juddering emergency stop just in time.

'What's wrong with you?' I shout at her, as if she were over the other side of a frozen river, rather than right next to me in the driver's seat.

'What's wrong with you?'

And eventually she composed herself enough to tell me about her dreams.

Heathrow airport international departures terminal is an incredible, horrible, nasty, fascinating place, a melting pot of people inasmuch as it's hot, bubbling and constantly minutes away from brewing to boiling point. We finally all managed to meet up, me with my distressed girlfriend, Danuka, alone, Gina, sobbing parents in tow, and a lady name of Liu, representative and visa procurer for Rising Moon English Language College, who were to be our new employers in little more than a day's time. This seemed somehow wrong and totally unreal, in the way that change can grip and unseat you like a classroom bully yanking your chair away.

Liu was flashing a photocopied passport with a picture of a young, grinning guy, asking us if we'd seen him. It seemed there had been an addition to our party. Right on cue this stocky, friendly Englishman in a leather jacket and jeans saunters up to our group, more sobbing parents in tow.

'Alright, I'm Tam.'

Now we were four.

After half an hour of pushing, shoving, bickering and pleading, our heavyweight luggage was checked in, amazingly with no extra charge, the others left for TGI Fridays, and I walked her back to the car.

Under the dim lights of the cavernous concrete car park we cried and held each other for what could have been seconds or hours then suddenly she was opening the car door, getting in, starting the engine and pulling away out of my life. I stood there for some time, dazed, with this crazy notion that she'd come zooming back out of the dark bowels of the car park, screech to a halt, get out of the car and declare that she couldn't live without me and that I should get in and come home with her and forget about ever going to China. And at that moment I would have done it; my suitcase would have been heading to Beijing, but I would have been heading home with her, to our house, our bed, her arms.

I eventually wandered back into the airport, which was throbbing with life, people dragging huge trolleys of suitcases, chatting, eating, shopping, sleeping, colourful, sweaty, smelly, angry, happy people everywhere, and I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing. All could think about was her. I was convinced this was a mistake. I just wanted to go home.

'Oi, Ross man! Over 'ere!'

It took me a while to realise someone was calling me. It came to me as if from down a deep well. It came to me almost as if from within myself.

'Over 'ere, you wally!'

Focus returned and I could see Tam waving, laughing, at a table with Danuka and Gina at TGI's. I joined them and ordered a steak sandwich with fries. When the food came I must have eyed it with such pleasure, perhaps wondering when I would next be able to eat a steak sandwich, if they even had such a thing in China, Matt laughed and said:

'I like you, Ross. It doesn't take much to cheer you up. Your girlfriend's gone, but you got a steak sarnie and chips. Things could be worse.'

And, with that, I suddenly began to look forward to our big adventure.