Twenty minutes of balance-challenging traffic later, Lady Zhao finally managed to identify a group of three near the back and prize them from their seats for a sum Ander was willing to pay. There was a drawback, however. Even she conceded they were not the first choice demographics for relocation based on economic privilege â Lady Zhao had hesitated asking them, but they were keen to accept fifty kuai per person.
The woman was both scrawny and pregnant at the same time, and looked exhausted; she had a seven-or-eight year old boy with her of whom Lady Zhao was curious to know if he was hers, and would have asked had she not been so debilitated; and there was the woman's mother, a lady in her sixties. After several others whom Lady Zhao had approached earlier for seats but got rejected from jumped up in moral outrage and proceeded to beg the trembling old woman to take their place for absolutely nothing, she put on a gallant and perhaps foolish show of strength and self-reliance by turning everyone down, all to Lady Zhao's horror.
As the old lady swayed with the bus weaving between freeway lanes, she bumped and rubbed against Lady Zhao, she coughed and spluttered so that cough-breath drifted towards Lady Zhao's facial orifices, and because the vehicle was so packed, because the air-con struggled and the bus got progressively hotter and hotter, the old woman, who probably sweated more than average anyway, every now and then sprayed small volumes of perspiration onto Lady Zhao's lap-resting hands and elsewhere.
Lady Zhao didn't flinch â she didn't look up or moan or retaliate physically with minor but deliberate counter-nudges like she would normally; she closed her eyes, tried to sleep. But sleep, although she'd had so little the night before, was hard to attain. The journey was penance; putting up with Bingbing's oblivious contented smile and irregular lip-syncing moments was also penance. What was she atoning for, she wondered?
Five hours later, the bus pulled into a small ferry terminal and disgorged nearly a hundred weary passengers, all of whom rushed to queue for tickets in a spectacle of aggregate-disadvantage, the tan of Ander's hat bobbing in rolling waves of black hair. Lady Zhao explained wearily for a second time to Bingbing while they jostled for position that Dar-For Mountain referred to the temple complexes on a mountain that was also off the mainland on an island, hence the need to get on a ship. To add to the confusion, there was not just one peak, but several, sometimes called by other names, sometimes not.
"Why don't they just call it an island?" Bingbing concluded.