Chapter one
It was late. Viv had just reread Chapter 2 of Andy Newsam’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Universe. The first time had been astonishing. The second time, unbearable. The weight of all that solar knowledge made her head ring. The Sun, the star that burned closest to her skin and yet still housed mysteries beyond man. Stupid men, she thought, pulling the crisp linen sheet over her exposed leg. The luxury hotel’s air conditioning was working too well.
Why was the corona of the Sun hotter than the surface? She turned the page again but felt her thoughts flare, her mind glowing with questions too loud for the sleeping man next to her. Eventually, she let herself exhale, slipped out of bed, and went to boil the kettle.
The kettle was tucked inside a lacquered cupboard, next to two tiny porcelain teacups, four weighty sachets, and a note wishing her a tranquil stay. This one had a bespoke tray. Everything portioned, arranged, hidden in velvet drawers. She flicked the switch, a soft chime rang out as if alerting the hotel gods she wanted heat.
She quietly slid the thick glass doors open and stepped out onto the balcony. The humid air greeted her, the cicadas paused, waiting for her answer, then resumed their opera. The ocean swelled invisibly below. The balcony of the suite she was staying in was perched just outside of Hong Kong, the silhouette of the jungle-covered mountains dripping their way into the sea. She felt proud. Not boastful, but cautious. Careful not to take too much credit for herself.
She let the gratitude rise with the night air and whispered, How did I get here? Existentially, she knew: freak life, collapsing probabilities, oxygen. But specifically, this hotel? This moment? Watching the sky above a national park while her Chinese boyfriend snored into a pillow embroidered with the hotel’s logo?
She took stock of how intimately she now knew the minutiae of luxury hotels. How someone like her, with her beginnings, had become someone who could easily take for granted a toothbrush delivered by robot.
She used to mock men like this. The ones who paid. She sat there staring through the soundproofed glass of the hotel room, looking at a man’s body shrunk against the stretch of a super king size bed. She couldn’t remember what they talked about that night just how he looked at her. It had taken her years to realise that being beautiful wasn’t about being seen. It was about the space she made silent. The men who stopped talking.
The moon rose, blood orange and bold, and for a moment she thought it was the sun. That the universe had broken its own laws just for her. She sipped the tea, jasmine and over-steeped, and looked at the moon again.
Then it hit her in a hot gust of memory. That uncanny sense that she was on the brink of something, and the only witness was the sky. The magnetic poles switched, and somehow she was back to 2007. She was twenty on another balcony.
Liverpool, she recalled, on the precipice of her first trip to China, sipping tea after anonymous sex.
She liked to imagine balconies as pressure valves for her soul, a place she could pour something out into the sky. But this one was like a genie trapped in the spout of its own lamp. All the moments jammed inside her. Guilt, lust, shame, ambition, euphoria, now set free. Her potential had been her own gravity, now she was floating through Jasmine scented vaporised memories.
The memory of that summer did not arrive gently, it was a solar storm of visceral emotion she was now feeling again.
The hotel was engineered for surrender. The blackout blinds, the welcome page that appeared on the television when her keycard activated the electricity. The wardrobe lights that flicked on before her hand even touched fabric. The slippers set precisely beside the bed. The turndown service she never asked for, but that always came.
She was alive trying to play it cool but too giddy with the potential of her own brain to remember feelings from nearly twenty years ago. She longed to stay in this moment of the past. Vivian surrendered, closed her eyes, the world spun and it was the summer of 2007 again.
It always happened on a balcony.
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