Warmer Next Week

Lately it had been hot. Bad weather. Forty-five degrees today; next week it was going to get warmer, with a high of fifty. Jc was not a good student. High temperatures could not stop bad kids from going to the hill behind the school. High-school students did not smoke just to look cool, nor to make the white kids think better of them.

The boys were properly dressed—thanks to the school for raising such little gentlemen—in leather shoes, trousers, red ties bearing the school crest, white shirts, black belts, and grey suit jackets. Shirts had to be tucked in. Even with the temperature rising again next week, the whole suit had to be worn.

They had to cross the entire campus to smoke. The Chinese international students all loved smoking. School finished at three-thirty; Jc and the others would take the bus to a nearby shopping centre and smoke their second cigarette behind the bus stop. White kids passing by stared at them as if they were dwarfs, as if it were their hair the boys had set on fire.

A cigarette did not take long to finish. Yet they wished it would never run out. Old age and coronary heart disease were still far away; they wanted to leave everything to later. Jc thought his future was the same, like a cigarette that could never be finished.

Whenever he got tired of one, he could throw away the most expensive cigarette without caring that half remained. He could always steal more. High-school students did not know why they smoked. They only knew there were cigarettes in their hands that never ran out, and there would always be new ones in their fathers’ glass cabinets. On the hill behind the school he could smoke openly; the cigarette grew longer the more he smoked it. Jc and his friends squandered their youth as they pleased. He thought every young person was like him.

After school, everyone around him smoked with him, and the cigarettes seemed endless. Soon the bus from the neighbouring school would arrive; a crowd of white kids would get off and laugh at them. He became anxious and wanted his friends to hurry up and throw their cigarettes away, without worrying about the waste. Two last hard drags. He wanted to grow up quickly. Once he was grown, he thought, he would take his father’s place. Plenty of people would give him cigarettes. He would never have to pay.

When Jc was little, his father smoked. He was always following his father to places like Yangcheng Hotel, the Wenzhou Chamber of Commerce, and the Overseas Chinese Association. Around the table sat middle-aged men and their fibrotic lungs; Jc had delicate tonsils, and the smoke made him sick. He could make no sense of the remarks—neither good nor bad—sloshing around in the liquor, so he would ask the uncles for their flip phones and play games. The private room was huge: a big round table as you came in, sofa chairs to one side. Gifts were always arriving and being left on those chairs. Cartons and cartons of cigarettes; Chunghwa cigarettes were not considered classy enough. Jc remembered big wooden boxes, ten cigarettes to a pack.

Jc remembered the wooden boxes. He liked opening the cold glass door and stealing from the cabinet. Very few people could get hold of a whole carton. Every filter was different. Every cigarette held a secret. Sometimes Jc was proud that he smoked.

Now the only gaudy, bizarre thing left was the fifty-degree weather, and even that was nothing special. Several Chinese boys gathered by the stairs: people who lived outside the field of vision but who, sooner or later, would hold the right to speak. Their English was bad. They had not been put through pressure-cooker schooling. Wherever they went, they went unnoticed. Of course that was what they wanted—only they did not want to be stared at as if they were dwarfs. They thought many people back home were terrifying, though they did not know why. They had never met such terrifying people, yet they were always feeling righteously guilty on their behalf. It was not those people’s fault. The ones who ought to repent were the children at elite private schools: online since childhood, living with host families, home in China for two months, stealing a few cartons from their fathers before leaving—rebellious, yet unable to leave home.

A few of Jc’s friends were there. “Your dad’s here,” he said.

Jc remembered their fathers, several weightless men in suits and leather shoes drifting weightlessly over from China. The fathers of Chinese children. Talking and laughing with ease, fluent in English. Were Jc’s father’s shoes as shiny as theirs? Python skin or cordovan? There was a stolen pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He knew his friends had them too.

“Let’s go to the back hill,” K said.

“It’s fucking hot,” Jc said.

“As if you didn’t go yesterday,” K said.

They had not been smoking long and were still a little afraid, convinced the smell would settle in their hair, under their fingernails, in their clothes. They always imagined that one day they would be the people smoking in films, yet they wanted none of smoking’s consequences. Consequences belonged to the endless future. Spend long enough in bright places, wearing leather shoes and formal clothes every day, and you grow sick of anything that shines—especially the glare caught in the creases of leather shoes. The sun chased them out of the corridor. The Sydney sun kept chasing until eight o’clock, when at last it reluctantly gave up. Noon to eight in the evening seemed longer than a century. Night would never come; even when it did, almost at once it was another day.

They said it would get warmer next week: forty-eight, forty-five, maybe fifty. The owners of the cigarettes in their pockets—their fathers—had grown old. Long ago they had lost the ability to judge anything by desire, while a student’s desire alone could supply the answer. It was hot now, and still they were going to the back hill to smoke. It’s chill if it’s a little hot. The air in Jc’s hometown was damp. Sea cucumbers, tea, tossed carelessly into the garage; in the damp air back home, the exquisite wooden packaging went impotent and limp. Rehydrated sea cucumbers swelled larger and larger, larger than an adolescent cock, but the adults never glanced at them. They all said money was what they hated most.

“How much farther?”

“No idea.”

Jc had to cross the whole campus: uphill, past the canteen and the vending machines, drinking something, then right, then downhill. In the middle lay a broad lawn flying a foreign flag. There was no shade. The heat was unbearable.

The Pacific inside the flag rippled in the wind. The sea drew a soft veil over the sky, the kind of veil Muslim women wear. Face the sun every day and people here grow braver, and grow skin cancer. The clouds were usually thin; the sunlight came straight down. People came from the sea, then, when the bushfires began, had no choice but to turn back.

“Fuck!” Jc said.

Below the lawn was the main hall. Then another lawn, a basketball court, a handball court, a cricket pitch, and finally the largest indoor sports centre. They had to slip into the trees behind it. The woods caught fire easily, and easily set students smoking.

“Fuck.”

Someone else shouted about the heat. They walked on, howling.

He nodded and opened his phone to show them a meme. A great Arab poet once said: “go fuck yourself.”

H said he had seen it in a QQ group chat two weeks earlier. Jc was hardly cutting-edge.

In two weeks the temperature would be better. They did not know what things would be like by then. Maybe everything would stay like this forever.

Jc played a video. An old woman had gone out to buy groceries and, not paying attention, fallen into a septic tank. She summoned a reporter from a local consumer-affairs programme and raged into the camera: “For fuck’s sake!”

He laughed.

On reaching the back hill they began giving off smoke. The air was dry; ultraviolet light clung to every inch of space. The smoke they exhaled was almost invisible, sun-dried into threads.

The back hill was full of large, smooth rocks. Fallen leaves were so brittle a breath of wind shattered them. They sat on the smooth stones and at once their bodies went warm and numb. Their trouser pockets were shallow; the cigarettes stolen from their fathers kept falling out, so they set them on the broad rock behind them.

“How’s economics going?” H guessed Jc would ask. He needed someone to copy from.

Jc asked exactly that.

H said he had not done it either.

“Aaaaaah.”

“Fuck,” someone said.

How could anywhere on earth be this hot? Didn’t the same laws of physics apply here as everywhere else? Jc had not done his physics homework either. He knew it did not matter, because he was smoking, and the cigarette in his hand could burn for so long it would never be finished. Like soil being composed of minerals, organic matter, water, and other substances. That was physics. Jc’s school was composed of people superior to everyone else. Each held a cigarette that would never run out. As they smoked they talked of everything under the sun. They were best friends. They would always help one another.

They sweated as they smoked, happy, their voices hoarse. The cigarette seemed impossible to finish. For the rest of their lives, wherever they were, they could always go on smoking this same cigarette. Promises came easily: in however many years, they had to meet again; they had to smoke again on this back hill. Any place that refused to admit them would be bought. What was that to them? They were people whose cigarettes never ran out. That was human physics.

“So, did you finish your economics homework?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“I think I more or less finished it.”

“Then when can you finish it?”

They all said, “Soon.” Jc felt the sky itself was about to heat up. Next week it would get warmer, climbing past forty-five.

“Teacher’s coming,” H said suddenly, to scare them.

Everyone laughed.

Teachers terrified them, though the teachers at their school were already as good as teachers could be: students were customers, not burdens. The teacher had probably smelled smoke on them before. They could always say they had accompanied their parents to business dinners since childhood and were used to cigarette smoke. So what?

All this time they kept smoking the same cigarette, half the drags taken into the lungs, half not. They thought they were bad kids. But however bad they became, theirs was still a high-class kind of badness. They were incapable of anything else. They had never drunk alcohol, yet they discussed nightclubs.

They were too hot to speak. The plastic wrapping on the cigarette packs threw back a stabbing glare.

Even jumping into the water was torment in this weather. The Pacific Ocean was in league with the sun. They dived naked into the sea; the coarse grains of salt left on their bodies could hardly block the light. The seawater kept you cold. You flung your hair back, opened your eyes, and saw the horizon ahead, the sky two shades paler than the sea. To the left was the Sydney Harbour Bridge, linked to Darling Harbour. A few people had paid 350 dollars just to walk over its arch.

When Jc turned around, he saw something strange. By then the cigarette was nearly finished. The packs behind them had sat in the sun too long and somehow caught fire.

They had just finished the cigarettes and finished their water. None of them could speak. Their mouths tasted sour.

“Ah,” Jc said.

H pointed at the three burning packs.

Jc nodded.

H said, “Ha ha.”

Everyone said, “Fuck,” and laughed again.

In the end, watching an entire pack catch fire, watching the wind silently smoke half of it, would Jc think of the glass cabinet? When people learned that their money had been taken and turned into box after wooden box of cigarettes, which were then stolen by children studying overseas and secretly smoked on the back hill—while plenty of people out there could not even bear to buy Baisha cigarettes—how did that make them feel? Jc wished cigarettes would never run out, so he would never have to think about these questions, never have to meet those frightening people. But that was not how reality worked.

“I’m your dad,” K said.

H suggested rescuing what remained of the half-burnt cigarettes and carrying on smoking.

“I’m your dad,” Jc shot back.

Jc kicked all the cigarettes down the slope. Students should not smoke.

But Jc was used to it now. The next time he went back to China, he would steal cigarettes again.