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‘This way,’ she said.
She swept me down the corridor and more or less shoved me through the doors of a ladies’ toilet. I
burst into a cubicle and hunched over the bowl, throwing up the liquids I’d had that morning and then
nothing but bile.
The retching was painful, convulsive and it took long minutes to subside.
‘Are you OK?’ It was Nicky. She crouched behind me, and I felt her hand on my back, rubbing
between my shoulders. I couldn’t reply. The smell of my vomit was sharp and unpleasant. It made me
feel ashamed. I leaned against the cubicle partition.
Nicky extracted a clean tissue from her bag, which she passed to me. She said, ‘Oh Rachel.’
‘I’ve been so stupid.’
I dabbed the tissue at the edges of my mouth. She handed me another and I spat on it and tried to rub
the blood from my fingers.
‘You should have stuck to the script.’
She reached over me and flushed the toilet.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked Zhang, who was watching us.
‘We wait, somewhere more comfortable. When you’re ready.’
‘Wait for what?’ I asked.
‘Honestly,’ Zhang replied, ‘at this point, I have no idea.’