‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ Xifeng said nervously. ‘There are people who can help with your problems.’
‘My only problem is not wanting to spend fourteen hours every day studying for a stupid exam,’ Ning screamed.
As Xifeng sheltered in the next room, Ning considered packing a backpack, but she had nowhere to run away to, so she just grabbed her phone, wallet and a pair of sunglasses. Heads disappeared inside rooms as Ning stepped into the corridor.
Miss Xu was back on her feet at the far end of the hallway. Rather than face her again, Ning jogged back towards the showers. She cut through steam and kicked open a blue fire door. The concrete stairs led down to a courtyard filled with children’s bicycles.
News had spread to the boys on the floor below and a few of them yelled stuff like Get ’em, psycho and Go Ning through the barred windows of their rooms. For an instant she felt like the hero in some movie and when she reached the courtyard, she spun around and gave Miss Xu’s cramming school a two-fingered salute.
‘Screw the world,’ she shouted.
Ning crashed through a metal gate and walked fifty metres up an alleyway towards a main road. It was twenty past six, but the four lanes were already busy with trucks and bicycles. She thought about going into a café for breakfast, but Miss Xu might send someone after her so she kept moving.
Without thinking, Ning had walked the short route to her school and found herself at the front gates of Dandong Lower School Number Eighteen. A caretaker and a young teacher were on stepladders raising a sign painted by little kids: LS18 Welcomes All for Joyous Parents’ Day.
The thought of parents sent a shudder down Ning’s back. Her stepfather would go bananas when he found out what she’d done.
4. STANDARD
As China woke up, the sun was going down on the opposite side of the world. Ryan studied his toes as he walked away from the ocean, his soles coated with soft white sand. He’d been living in Santa Cruz, California, three and a half weeks but his new home still made him feel like he’d moved into a TV commercial.
The eight sculpted concrete homes stood back from the sea on sandy dunes. Each had panoramic windows, giving views of the ocean, and a rooftop terrace fronted by a glass-bottomed swimming pool which allowed you to sit in your vast living room and watch swimmers overhead.
The home owners shared several acres of private beach and a harbour. An electric fence kept the rabble out and the guard on the front gate had a shotgun, just in case.
Squeals came up from the ocean, as the retired basketball star who lived in house six splashed his toddler son in the waves. Ryan was heading in the other direction, towards a couple of twelve-year-olds squatting over a timber deck.
Ryan’s target, Ethan Aramov, was a stick boy. Even on a warm autumn night, he kept covered in jeans and a baggy hoodie. He had messy shoulder-length hair and he always squinted, even though he wore contacts.
Yannis was Ethan’s best friend and constant companion. Morbidly obese, with an oily Mediterranean complexion. He got teased at school, but Ryan felt no pity because he was utterly obnoxious.
‘Hey, guys,’ Ryan said, as he strolled up, acting like bumping into them was a big surprise. ‘How’s the ’bot coming along?’
Ethan and Yannis were uber geeks. Their only school activity was chess club. They spent entire weekends playing online games, and when that wasn’t nerdy enough, they built robots. Or more accurately, Ethan, who was smart, built robots, while Yannis sat about scratching himself and eating cheese puffs.
‘Our robot is top secret,’ Yannis said.
The tone was we’re better than you, but the fact that Yannis was twelve and using a line you’d expect from a pouting six-year-old made it pathetic.
The robot was based on a radio-controlled car. Ethan had adapted it with optical sensors and a small handheld computer so that it could drive itself at high speed across the beach, tracking a course mapped out by cones, while swerving around puddles and unexpected obstacles like a kid running into its path. You could buy a four-hundred-dollar robot vacuum cleaner that did the same stuff, but it was impressive for a twelve-year-old.
Ryan sidestepped Yannis and approached Ethan, who was on one knee, cleaning the robot car’s steering with a toothbrush.
‘Must get pretty clogged up with all the sand,’ Ryan said.
‘D-uh, it’s sand, retard,’ Yannis said.
Ethan was shy. He’d usually let Yannis talk for him, but seemed keen to tell someone other than Yannis about his robot.
‘I based it on a cheap fifty-dollar RC car,’ Ethan said ruefully. ‘Should have got a proper Taimya kit, with a waterproofed shell.’
Ryan had now spent three weeks trying to become Ethan’s friend and this was the longest conversation they’d had.
‘Would it be a lot of work to switch to a different car now?’ Ryan asked.
Yannis hauled his fat arse up and wedged himself in front of Ryan before Ethan could answer.
‘Let’s carry the stuff inside,’ Yannis said, with his flabby back in Ryan’s face. ‘It’s getting dark. You can see better inside.’
Ryan sidestepped Yannis. ‘This robotics stuff looks cool. Is there a club or something you go to?’
Ethan was about to reply, but Yannis blared over him. ‘We learned ourselves from books and online. It’s taken years to learn all that we know. We’re not interested in working with a rookie.’
Ryan was easy-going, but he’d done a lot of combat training since he’d joined CHERUB and at that moment he’d have happily used his Karate black belt and kickboxing skills to beat Yannis to a pulp.
‘Nighty-night, Ryan,’ Yannis said, waving his porky hand as he followed Ethan up the beach towards house number five.
Ryan turned to face the sea and swore under his breath. On the way back to his house he encountered the little boy sitting proudly on the shoulders of his enormously tall father.
‘How’s it hanging, bro?’ the retired basketball star asked.
‘Been worse,’ Ryan said, but his smile was fake and he was scowling by the time he reached house eight. He was living there with pretend half-sister Amy and FBI agent Ted Brasker, who was their pretend father.
Ryan pushed a sliding door and stepped inside on to the metal-grilled floor of a beach shower. After hosing the sand off his feet he padded into a huge basement room, kitted out like a proper health-club gym.
CHERUB agents are expected to maintain high levels of fitness when they’re undercover. Ryan thought about the treadmill or the weight bench, but the heavy bag hanging from the ceiling seemed the best outlet for frustration.
After some warm-up stretches and toe touches, Ryan exploded upwards, pirouetting on the ball of his foot and smashing the bag with a powerful roundhouse kick. As the bag swung back towards him, he dodged it, then launched a stream of heavy left and right hooks, accompanied by grunts.
After five minutes Ryan’s knuckles hurt, the tops of his feet were bright red, his torso glistened and the bag had a huge dent from the pounding.
‘Give the poor bag a break,’ Amy shouted, as she came down the stairs.
Ryan backed up and tried to catch his breath. Amy was the kind of girl who’d look hot if you put a tent over her head, but fresh from the pool in a lime green swimsuit she was off the Richter scale.
‘Sorry, I was pushing the envelope, you know?’ Ryan said.
He was trying to sound macho, but Amy sensed his frustration.
‘I was floating,’ Amy replied. ‘I could hear your grunting two floors up.’
She inspected the dent in the heavy bag, before launching a heavy kick, spraying Ryan with chlorinated drips.
‘You’re not bad,’ Ryan said, as he matched Amy’s move.
Amy didn’t appreciate having her combat skills referred to as not bad. She threw a kick so hard that it pushed the bag violently upwards. As it crashed down, the chain holding it up made a clank followed by a hollow boom as the entire ceiling flexed.
Ryan gawped upwards, half expecting to see cracks in the plaster. He’d seen a heavy bag lifted up before, but only by a training instructor with thighs broader than Amy’s waist.
‘God help any guy who messes with you,’ Ryan laughed.
‘So why the naked aggression?’ Amy asked.
‘Nothing in particular,’ Ryan said.
Amy didn’t buy that. ‘I saw you with Ethan and Yannis while I was swimming. Can I assume it wasn’t the breakthrough you’ve been waiting for?’
Ryan looked depressed as he sat down on a weight bench.
‘I’ve got to pull this off, but I’m screwing up,’ he admitted. ‘A good agent should make friends with their target within a day or two – a week at most. I’ve done hours of role play, I know all the psychological tricks for making someone like me. But we’ve been out here almost four weeks. I’m getting nowhere with Ethan, at home or school.’
‘Is Yannis still the problem?’ Amy asked.
Ryan nodded. ‘I hate that fat dick, but they suit each other. Like, Ethan’s really clever, but he’s weedy and shy. It suits Ethan to have Yannis around. Yannis mostly does what Ethan tells him to, and the way Yannis brushes people off means Ethan doesn’t have to deal with his shyness. It’s like an impenetrable geek force field.’
Amy straddled at an overhead press machine and paused to think.
‘What about physically?’ Amy asked.
‘Physically what?’
‘Yannis gives Ethan what he wants, by fending off questions. But would Yannis be able to protect Ethan in a physical confrontation?’
‘A bit. I mean, Yannis is such a lard arse that most average kids wouldn’t start because he’d just end up sitting on them.’
‘But the tough guys, the jocks, football players or whatever you have at your school?’
Ryan laughed. ‘No way Yannis could fight them. You should see him in Phys Ed. He runs like a jelly having a seizure and sweats like a fountain.’
‘Well that’s it then,’ Amy said brightly. ‘Problem solved.’
‘What, you’re saying that I should beat Yannis up and then somehow take his place as Ethan’s protector?’
‘No,’ Amy said, showing off sparkling teeth as she laughed. ‘If you beat up Ethan’s only mate, he’ll hate you for it. You need a situation where Ethan is threatened but Yannis can’t help him. It won’t guarantee that you’ll become best buds, but it will make Ethan feel that he owes you something.’
‘So Ethan-the-wimp is about to get his arse kicked and Ryan-the-good-looking-hero steps in to save him,’ Ryan said, half smiling.
‘We tried something similar on a CHERUB mission when I was about your age,’ Amy explained. ‘An agent was trying to befriend the son of some mad Saudi terrorist but they didn’t hit it off.’
‘Couldn’t you have mentioned this a week ago?’ Ryan asked.
‘I said we tried something similar,’ Amy said. ‘But it didn’t exactly work.’
‘What do you mean, didn’t exactly work?’
‘Well, the whole mission went down the pan and my fellow agent spent three weeks in hospital recovering from a head wound. But on the up side I have a pretty good idea where we went wrong.’
5. NOODLE
It was a quarter to eight, but the day felt old already. Ning sat in the remotest corner of a food court, less than a kilometre from her school. The place ached with pastel shades and newness, but had never caught on. Seven of the ten food stands had gone bust and the only regular customers were high school kids, who liked the deserted space because they could hang out for hours without getting moved on.
The high-schoolers put huge effort into looking cool. They had dyed hair, carried fake designer bags and wore leather jackets over their school sweatshirts. Ning watched one lad showing off a new mobile, before it got snatched and thrown about.
But the conversations Ning caught were hardly different to her eleven-year-old classmates’: exams, teachers, TV. They made Ning feel that the future held nothing but more of the same. Depressed, she sat with her head on a plastic tray, while her deep-fried shrimp bun congealed.
She tried keeping her mind blank, but that’s tough when you’re troubled and getting in deeper. Miss Xu’s rooms were privately owned and had no connection to Ning’s state-run school. But while she faced no consequences at school, she’d suffer a huge loss of face arriving in class less than an hour after storming off so dramatically. Also, Ning didn’t have her books or uniform and to make matters worse it was parents’ day, which she’d been dreading for weeks.
Parents’ day was a huge deal. Mums, dads and grandparents toured the school in the morning, looking at displays of work and listening to class presentations. In the afternoon, parents gathered in the assembly hall to hear lengthy speeches by the headmistress and school’s communist party representative, followed by a stage show with a small role for every child in the school.
For Ning, the best thing about parents’ day was that hers never turned up. Her stepfather Chaoxiang ran a large business and was always too busy to attend, while her stepmother Ingrid was an Englishwoman who preferred to stay home with vodka and badly dubbed American cop shows.
But the fact Ning’s step-parents weren’t attending didn’t excuse her from having to dress up in tights and ballet pumps and clomp her way through a twelve-minute routine, lined up with girls who were mostly half her size.
Her dad would yell at her for what she’d already done, so how much worse would it get if she skipped a day’s school as well?
Ning’s eyes glazed as the high school kids started moving off for the beginning of school. She began to daydream, imagining some high school punk starting to flirt with her and taking her on his moped. Or hanging out in his room, listening to really loud music. Maybe they’d smoke some weed.
She liked the thought of causing a huge scandal, with everyone in her class hearing that she’d been busted by cops, with a cute, stoned, sixteen-year-old riding a stolen moped.
By God, that would freak everyone out!
But it wouldn’t happen. Cute guys always went for skinny rakes like Xifeng, for starters. Ning sat up, feeling ugly and wondering how to pass the hours. She’d have to stay off the main streets because the cops would pick her up. But she needed to buy a book or sneak into a cinema, otherwise she’d die of boredom. Or maybe the best thing would be to call her dad and get it over with. He might not be so mad if she got her side of the story in first.
Ning slid a little Samsung out of her coat pocket. She’d switched it to silent in case her school rang. She half expected to find missed calls, but there was just a single text message from a boy in her class called Qiang: Ms Xu has packed all your things and put them in the lobby. At least if your dad beats your face you can’t get any uglier!
Qiang was a troublemaker. He could be hilarious but he was cruel to the weaker boys. Ning didn’t exactly like him, but at least he wasn’t a zombie like most of the others in her class.
Ning had her father programmed in as hotkey three. She paused for a moment to get her story straight. If Ning caught her father in a good mood and played things right, she could get away with a lot.
She’d decided to make out that it wasn’t a big deal. She’d say she’d been in a fight. Miss Xu has packed my things and says it’s best if I leave. Could you send one of our drivers to pick me up? Then if Miss Xu told a different story later on, she could say that the crazy old biddy was angry because she’d lost a paying customer.
Ning took a deep breath before holding down the number three. She almost chickened out and cancelled the call, but nobody answered anyway.
‘Welcome to China Mobile voice messaging. Please leave a message after the tone.’
Ning didn’t know what to say and hung up. As she dropped the phone inside her jacket she saw a music teacher from her school walk up to one of the counters. Mr Shen was slender and still in his twenties. He wore jeans, with a white shirt and a thin tie with piano keys down it.
Ning looked about, wondering whether to hide, but Mr Shen only seemed interested in buying noodles, so she stayed in her seat but turned slightly towards the wall.
Unfortunately, as Mr Shen turned to leave the man on the noodle counter pointed Ning out and spoke loudly. ‘Is she one of yours?’
Mr Shen had never taught Ning. He shook his head and told the noodle man that he taught at a lower school, for which Ning was too big. Ning was relieved, but the teacher’s brain made a connection a quarter-second before he committed to the escalator. After a wobbly spin on food-court tiles, Mr Shen moved towards Ning with his scrawny neck stooped like some curious bird.
‘Fu Ning?’ he said, uncertainly. ‘Why aren’t you in class?’
Ning considered running away. Mr Shen looked neither tough nor fast, especially with a steaming tub of noodles in one hand. Maybe she could dodge between tables and jump down the escalator. Or even charge Mr Shen down and surprise him with her strength. But then what? What would she do all day? Where would she go?
Ning was eleven years old and knew she could only push things so far. Getting kicked out by Miss Xu would make her dad angry. But assaulting a teacher would mean serious trouble with the school authority and this was beyond the limit of Ning’s courage.
She stared at Mr Shen and shrugged. ‘I just didn’t feel like going today.’
‘Me neither,’ Mr Shen said, as he invited himself to join Ning at the table.
Ning watched the steam rise from the noodle pot, as Mr Shen scooped a hot mouthful with his chopsticks. Most teachers at Ning’s school had a strict do as I say attitude. Sitting down to talk was radical.
‘Don’t you have to be in school?’ Ning asked.
Mr Shen laughed. ‘I think I should be questioning. But since you ask, I teach music so I start later and do individual lessons until nine p.m. I’m early today, because I must set up the main hall and prepare the band for the afternoon show.’
Ning had hardly touched her bun and the smell of noodles made her feel hungry.
‘Why couldn’t you face school?’