Chapter 37

Early on the second of May the three girls met and went to the broadcasting centre together.

Pingchuan is the provincial capital and the broadcasting centre is in town, and it is an imposing building.

Gi Changning and Meng Lai each had a bag with their costumes in it and some biscuits to keep them going.

All three wore Fierce Flame, Blazing Sun, and at the station they found a good many other people had the same idea.

Gi Changning and Meng Lai showed their invitations. The member of staff was plainly a follower of Can't Tell N from L, took the three of them through to the studio, asked shyly for the pair's autographs, found a viewer's pass for Ji Ran from somewhere and put her in a seat with a good view. It was all arranged very neatly.

Ji Ran sat down obediently. From where she was she could see the camera operator in the middle and the width of the stage, with the lights changing constantly, evidently being set.

Gi Changning and Meng Lai had to change and have make-up done and get two rehearsals in before the afternoon recording, and began issuing instructions over the top of each other.

Meng Lai: "I'm leaving you a bottle of water, unopened. Drink it if you're thirsty."

Gi Changning: "Ring me if anything happens. The phone's in my hand except when I'm on stage."

Ji Ran said yes to all of it. "Don't worry. I'll be fine."

Only then did the two of them tear themselves away.

It was the short video platform's first competitive dance programme. Two rounds of auditions had gone out, the dance world had turned out in force, the response had been good and it had made a respectable splash. Before the competition proper began in the third episode, the platform invited well known dancers from its own pages as guests to raise the heat, including an old friend of Gi Changning and Meng Lai's. Jinghong.

Jinghong was changed and waiting for the rehearsal. She was performing Crane Pair, the piece that had got her several million likes and taken her beyond the dance world, and she had brought a classmate to partner her for it.

Backstage was chaos, performers and crew and make-up and props all mixed together, and the interesting part is that there was order inside the chaos. Through the exit you could see the floor manager with a walkie-talkie in one hand confirming the stage with the gallery and a loudhailer in the other telling the early audience to sit down and not get in the way of the rehearsal.

Jinghong had arrived early and she and her partner were already made up, so she did not have to fight for a make-up artist, and she was eating Gi Changning's finger biscuits in small bites. She was being careful not to take her lipstick off, and eating did not stop her passing on gossip she had just heard. "I'm told the station side didn't want non-professional dancers at all, and the platform thought that was a waste and insisted on three performance slots an episode. It was decided in a hurry, and since it's recorded in Pingchuan the platform took three people with over a million followers from nearby."

Gi Changning and Meng Lai were being made up. Stage make-up is a good deal heavier than everyday make-up because of the lights, and the foundation was going on thickly enough to make Gi Changning frown, and the make-up artist is a baby-faced girl who cried out at once. "NN. Don't frown. At least let me set it first."

And then joined in the gossip. "That's right, that's right. Though wasn't Jinghong from out of town?"

"My family's in the next province." Jinghong wiped her hands and lifted the skirt a little to keep people from treading on it. "But I came because of Can't Tell N from L. I'm at the Capital Dance Academy and I wasn't going home for the holiday anyway."

Meng Lai put in a word. "Thank you for getting me on television."

Jinghong was entirely sincere. "That's not it either. You two are incidental. I only wanted to meet NN's mother once."

Jinghong is not short of a performance fee. She wanted to meet people in person, and meeting NN's mother would have been better still.

Gi Changning had nothing to say.

Meng Lai had nothing to say.

At the words Capital Dance Academy Gi Changning moved, and was pushed firmly back into the chair. "I'm doing your eyeliner. Don't move."

She froze, eyes shut. "Jinghong, did you come in on the arts exams?"

"I did. You can still look my scores up in the old records." She said it casually, then worked out how old the two of them were and caught up. "Are you both doing the arts exams?"

Gi Changning's eyeliner was finally done and lipstick was going on, so Meng Lai answered. "We are. Tell us how it goes."

"Of course." She agreed happily. "After the recording. My treat, as an older student getting in first."

Her partner, in his role as scenery, agreed too. "Only right."

Gi Changning heard what was underneath it, which was Jinghong wishing them into the Capital Dance Academy. It is a very high bar and she could not stop herself being pleased. Her lipstick was done, and she looked in the mirror and produced a smile that was shy and not short of confidence. "Thank you."

---

Around ten the rehearsals began one after another.

Ji Ran does not watch much television and had no idea how any of it worked. She could hear a man calling himself the floor manager shouting himself hoarse into a walkie-talkie, after which people would come on and rearrange the set, and then, when a judge had walked a few steps, he would make a mild and friendly suggestion and have them walk it again along his line.

It is hard work for everybody.

The first rehearsal was a rush for everyone, and the music played for a few seconds only, apparently to fix positions and order.

With no break, the second began.

The host came on, then the judges, then the guest performers' opening pieces. Gi Changning and Meng Lai's slot was good and not good. They were last of the three guest acts, which is the closing spot, and also the point at which an audience is starting to flag.

The day before, before they gathered at Jinhua Gardens to do homework, they had given the programme their music and gone through the lighting and the stage effects in detail. What they were performing was the mirror dance, Monster.

Ji Ran got her phone out and rested both arms on her legs to make a stand of them. Gi Changning had asked her to record the rehearsal so they could see their state and their positions.

The stage went black. Gi Changning and Meng Lai stood back to back with their heads down, with a single spotlight on them.

Nothing like the casual version in the studio. They were in costume now, Gi Changning in black and Meng Lai in red, both made by Gi Changning's mother from her own design and her own cutting. To suit the piece they were plain colours throughout, with a small cape worked into the shoulder and loose trousers to leave the movement free.

And the cut of the two costumes mirrored each other, as the dance does.

The instant the music began, the spotlight split into two beams following each of them, and when they both turned at once the whole rig came up with a bang.

Ji Ran heard a few gasps from an audience that was barely there.

Down at the front, the host and the judges, who had been drifting a little, did not take their eyes off two girls spending everything they had on that stage, and the odd word they exchanged did nothing to hide what was on their faces.

It was extraordinary. That is all it was.

Afterwards the two of them did not go back. They came straight to the audience seats and leaned in on either side of Ji Ran, lit up, and asked in the short break, "Are we better?"

Ji Ran put her thumb up and handed over the phone.

They took an earbud each and put their heads together and talked quietly about which movements were not clean and where the positions came apart.

At lunch they found a corner and got themselves ready for the recording.

In the afternoon the audience came in and recording began.

No phones during the recording, so Ji Ran sat quietly in her seat, and the feeling was a strange one. In that enormous studio there were small scratchy voices near her and the host and the judges larking about on stage, and all those machines large and small cutting two worlds apart, with the people facing the machines performing every feeling there is and the people with their backs to them passing judgement freely. And what she felt was quiet.

She thought of the first ballet she ever saw, a very well known international company on a world tour, one stop of it at the Pingchuan theatre, performing Swan Lake.

Honestly, Ji Ran does not know how to appreciate ballet, and she was taken into the story on that stage all the same, carried up and down by the music and the plot. It was not that she had suddenly acquired a great deal of taste. Outside the story, what moved her was the dancers, because they believed in it, and put into it a feeling so pure that nobody outside could understand it, which is why the people watching felt it with them.

She remembered that in the third act the black swan has to do thirty-two whipping turns on the spot without stopping, and something came to her out of nowhere, and she tipped her head and looked at Gi Changning beside her.

How is she supposed to describe what was in Gi Changning's eyes?

Ji Ran did not think she could.

Gi Changning was leaning forward with her eyes fixed on the black swan, and what was in them was heat and truth and longing, and a madness like betting everything on one card.

Ji Ran had watched foreign films in her spare time to work on her English, among them Black Swan, and the last scenes of it came back to her, the lead killing off the weak white swan and taking the final curtain as the proud black one.

Which is, oddly enough, the same idea at the heart of Monster.

In the studio the lights went out, and one spotlight came down with a bang on two girls standing back to back.

Monster is about two separate people inside one body fighting over who owns it.

It opens with the two of them feeling each other out, face to face, making exactly the same movements with exactly the same expressions, surprise or fear, and even the arc their hair made when they threw their heads was barely different.

Then the red one, Meng Lai, works something out and attacks. The drums come in heavier and clearer, and her face gets bigger and bigger, until the harmonics at the peak of it break out.

A run of harmonics across two octaves, and the sound in that studio is very good. Both dancers shook the muscle through it, and their control was frightening. Every shake sat perfectly on the music, and the movement grew with it, larger and plainer, exactly like something fighting as it dies, and wilder than it had been in the studio or in the rehearsal, and with nothing in it to fault.

The music eased, as if giving two animals a moment to rest and watch.

And then Gi Changning attacked.

The black one begins holding everything in. She is not thrown out the way the red one is, and there is a smile at the corner of her mouth the whole time that says she has already won. Every step forward changed her by a degree, and her face stayed the same and her eyes sharpened, and she was the ruler of that stage, holding her own feeling and the audience's together, and under that advance everybody could only drop their weapons and wait for the end.

The red one included.

A gunshot. Gi Changning raised a hand and blew the smoke off the barrel. Meng Lai struggled twice and dropped.

That settled it.

The black one looked at a red one lying silent on the floor, and her chin came slowly up, and her red mouth curved, and her head whipped round to face the camera, which happened to have its back to the audience, so that every person there saw the winner wearing exactly the same wide grin the red one had worn.

Who killed whom?

Who became the monster?

For one second Ji Ran was back at the ballet, looking at something she had seen before. Love, with the madness of a bet laid on one card.

A last beat of the drum, and every light went out at once, and there was nothing on that stage but dark.

---

It was nine in the evening when the recording finished.

Gi Changning had thought she and Meng Lai would dance and be done, then go and eat with Jinghong and pick her brains about the arts exams and go home with Ranran. Instead, once they were off stage, the three acts the platform had sent were all put in seats beside the judges to watch the competitors and offer the odd comment.

Though nobody who gets to a million followers is a fool, and everybody fudged what could be fudged and praised what could be praised, and where praise was impossible they raised the mistake delicately. It was far more tiring than dancing.

It was too late to eat, so that was put off a day, and the holiday ran to three days and there was time tomorrow.

Meng Lai lives near. She had not taken her make-up off or changed and she was drooping like something with a flat battery, and on the bus people kept looking over, and she would gladly have lain down and had no energy to care.

At the stop, Ji Ran looked at Meng Lai, who seemed drunk and about to put her head on the ground and sleep rough on the spot, and suggested, "Let's take her to her door."

Gi Changning had borrowed Jinghong's remover after the recording and had a clean face and was in reasonable shape. The three of them got off together and took Meng Lai to the gates of her estate.

Possibly the air inside an estate is different, or possibly the square dancing was loud enough to do it, but Meng Lai woke up as she went in, and waved them off. "I'll get myself home. Don't worry."

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

She was not entirely reassured.

She sighed. "Will you put a message in the group when you're in?"

Meng Lai pointed at the sky and held up three fingers. "OK. OK."

Once Meng Lai was out of sight they turned back towards the bus stop.

Ji Ran got her phone out. Six minutes to the next one. She looked up, and there went Gi Changning like a small bird, slipping silently into the back row of the square dancing.

The music was Lady Shexiang.

Ji Ran had nothing to say.

That one was clearly drunk as well.

The dancing had been going a while and the song was into its second half.

Ji Ran watched her. She had plainly never done it before and could only wave her arms about behind the aunties and pick it up, and her gift is frankly alarming and she had the few repeating sections inside a minute, and was doing them more accurately and with more feeling than the aunties were.

With a school bag on, and still that loose in the body. How anybody manages it is a mystery.

The song finished and an auntie in the back row took hold of her happily, and the next one started, an electronic version of Above the Moon.

Extremely wild.

Ji Ran went and collected her. "Ningning?"

Gi Changning was hot from it and fanned herself with a hand, and tipped her head to look at the side of Ji Ran's face. "Mm?"

Ji Ran looked back at her. "Do you love it that much?"

"I do." She opened both arms and her eyes were full of stars. "And it isn't only dancing. I love making the dances. I love showing what I've made to everybody. But the most finished thing I've made is me."

Talk like that always makes Ji Ran think of Fang Xiaomu.

Gi Changning shot round in front of her and walked backwards. "Ranran. Why did you want to do medicine?"

Why medicine.

Ji Ran steadied her, and they waited at the stop. "I couldn't help Dad. But I'd like to help other people who've been burned."

So that they can at least face the world like anybody else.

"And now?"

"Now." Ji Ran smiled, and it was something like Gi Changning's own smile, stubborn and honest and facing straight forward. She smiled and stepped off. "Come on. The bus is here."