The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Read Online Free PDF

I’ll call you. Or you could call me.’
    ‘Yes.’
    Joyce started feeling around in her pockets for something to write with. ‘Er. Let me get a pen or something and I’ll give you my mobile.’
    But all the pens had been packed. ‘I don’t have a…do you have a…’ Marker tapped his pockets and found nothing. Then he discovered half a pencil behind his left ear. He gave a short embarrassed snort of laughter when they both notice that there was a ring of teeth marks around the top.
    Another crash shook the building, but the two young people didn’t notice. There were far larger explosions—we’re talking 100-megaton nukes—happening in their glands.
    ‘Now let me find a piece of paper,’ said Joyce. Problem: all the pieces of paper had been packed.
    Marker handed her a bent, slightly damp business card from his pocket. ‘You call me. I write my mobile phone number on the back of my card. We go for coffee. Or something. Sometime.’
    ‘Yeah. Great. Ha ha,’ she said. ‘Cool. Okay. Well, bye. See you on, on, er, sometime.’
    As he backed away, she held his gaze for one point nine seconds longer than was absolutely necessary and her heart did a set of triple backflips as a trillion new delightful possibilities added themselves to the google which were already there. Life was rich. Then he was gone.
    Seconds later, she and Wong were running down the stairs as the building crumbled around them.

2

    Heading into work when everyone else is heading home should be depressing, but sometimes it isn’t. At certain times in our lives, we discover that there’s something oddly energising about swimming against the current.
    These days, Lu Linyao felt like that all the time, which was a bit worrying. She felt she was literally charging against the flow of a major river as a Yangtze of people poured out of an office block on the built-up side of Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, the road that skirted The Bund, and she had to shoulder her way through the bodies like a 58-kilo salmon powering upstream. Being the sort of person she was, Linyao only half stepped out of the way, leaving the person coming towards her to contribute the other half of the manoeuvre.
    A number of men—through carelessness, sleep deprivation, world weariness or for other reasons—preferred to brush heavily against her instead. This was bad news for them, as she was deliberately carrying a hardcover book under her right arm, its sharpest pair of edges scratching painful tramlines on anyone who made the mistake of encountering her right breast. When she saw a trio or longer string of people heading directly for her, she lowered her head, bullet-like, and careered through them, forcing them to break formation and regather behind her, their heads turning. What’s the matter with her? As the pavement obstacle course grew more dense (for that’s how she saw most people: as obstacles), she did not slow down, but marched faster, punishing people for being in her path.
    Yet once she was through the crush of people on the main road and had turned into a quieter side street, she found her footsteps slowing down. Was she going the right way? Was she doing the right thing? Perhaps I should just leave it to the others . After all, they were young people with time on their hands; she was a 31-year-old woman with a professional job, a mortgage and a child. These were big responsibilities, adult ones that had to be taken seriously.
    Her steps slowed even more. Should she be doing this sort of thing at all? She never had enough time for herself and her offspring. Yet here she was, heading for her second job, the voluntary running of the Shanghai Vegetarian Café Society. The group she chaired ran a small canteen and catering operation on Hankou Lu, a road just off one of the main arteries that carries traffic towards The Bund.
    Lu Linyao was divorced and had an eight-year-old daughter whom she adored, and who hated her, or acted as if she did. This was no surprise to