A Place of Hiding

As Deborah measured out the tea, China explained her hesitation. This turned out to be the child of her superstition. “It’s like I’ll jinx things for him if I call.”


Deborah recalled her using this expression before. Think you’ll do well on a photographic assignment or perhaps an exam and you’d fail completely, having jinxed yourself in advance. Say that you expect a phone call from your boyfriend and you’d jinx the possibility of his calling. Remark upon the ease with which traffic was flowing on one of California’s massive motorways, and you were sure to hit an accident and a four-mile tailback in the next ten minutes. Deborah had named this kind of skewed thinking “The Law of Chinaland,” and she had grown quite used to being careful not to jinx a situation while she lived with China in Santa Barbara. She said, “How would it jinx things, though?”

“I don’t know for sure. It just feels like that. Like I’ll call her and tell her what’s going on, and she’ll come over, and then everything will just get worse.”

“But that seems to violate the basic law of Chinaland,” Deborah observed. “At least the way I remember it.” She set the electric kettle to boil. At Deborah’s use of the old term, China smiled, it seemed in spite of herself. “How?” she asked.

“Well, as I recall how things work in Chinaland, you aim for the direct opposite of what you truly want. You don’t let Fate know what you have in mind so that Fate can’t get in there and cock things up. You go round the back way. You sneak up on what you want.”

“Fake the bastard out,” China murmured.

“Right.” Deborah took mugs from the cupboard. “In this particular case, it seems to me that you have to ring your mum. You have no choice. If you ring her and insist that she come to Guernsey—”

“She doesn’t even have a passport, Debs.”

“Which is all the better. It will cause enormous trouble for her to get here.”

“Not to mention the expense.”

“Mmmm. Yes. That practically guarantees success.” Deborah leaned against the work top. “She must get a passport quickly. That means a trip to...where?”

“Los Angeles. Federal Building. Off the San Diego Freeway.”

“Past the airport?”

“Way past. Past Santa Monica even.”

“Wonderful. All that ghastly traffic. All that difficulty. So she must go there first and get her passport. She must make all her travel arrangements. She must fly to London and then to Guernsey. And having gone to all that trouble—herself in a state of tearing anxiety—”

“She gets here to find that it’s all been resolved.”

“Probably one hour before she arrives.” Deborah smiled. “And voilà. The Law of Chinaland in action. All that trouble and all that expense. For nothing, as things turn out.” Behind her, the kettle clicked off. She poured water into a stout green teapot, took that to the table, and gestured for China to join her there. “But if you don’t ring her...”

China left the phone and came into the kitchen. Deborah waited for her to conclude the thought. Instead of doing so, however, China sat and fingered one of the tea mugs, turning it slowly between her palms. She said, “I gave up that kind of thinking a while back. It was always only a game anyway. But it stopped working. Or maybe I stopped working. I don’t know.” She pushed the mug to one side. “It started with Matt. Did I ever tell you? When we were teenagers. I walk past his house and if I don’t look to see if he’s in the garage or mowing the lawn for his mom or something, if I don’t even think about him when I pass by, he’ll be there. But if I look or if I think about him—even think his name—then he won’t be. It always worked. So I went on with it. If I act indifferent, he’ll be interested in me. If I don’t want to date him, he’ll want to date me. If I think he’ll never even want to kiss me goodnight, he’ll do it. He’ll have to. He’ll be desperate to. At one level I always knew that wasn’t how things really work in the world—thinking and saying the exact opposite of what you truly want—but once I started seeing the world that way —playing that game— I just kept going. It ended up with: Plan out a life with Matt and it’ll never happen. Forge ahead on my own, and there he’ll be, panting to hook up permanently.”

Deborah poured the tea and gently eased a mug back over to China. She said, “I’m sorry how things turned out. I know how you felt about him. What you wanted. Hoped for. Expected. Whatever.”

“Yeah. Whatever. That’s the word, all right.” The sugar stood in a dispenser in the centre of the table. China upended this so that the white granules poured like snowfall into her cup. When it looked to Deborah as if the brew would be completely undrinkable, China finished with the dispenser.

“I wish it had worked out the way you wanted,” Deborah said. “But perhaps it still will.”

“The way your life worked out? No. I’m not like you. I don’t land on my feet. I never have. I never will.”