Lockdown didn’t arrive with drama. It crept in. Screenshots. Voice notes. Rumours in group chats. Bars shutting overnight, the people inside them shipped off to Covid camps. Schools closing while teachers and students were still in the building.

“Did you see this?”
“Is it real?”
“No one knows.”

Covid wasn’t new to us. We lived in China, the epicentre of it all. From the beginning, borders shut, doors closed. Some people left. The real ones stayed. Or at least that’s what we told ourselves. That it meant something. That staying made us stronger, braver. That loving Shanghai was enough to protect us.

For a while, it almost felt true.

Shanghai had been good to us. Better than the rest of the world, we told each other. Bars still open, streets still alive. You scanned your QR code, showed green, and life carried on. No curfews. Just tests every twenty four hours and the quiet agreement that everything was under control.

Until it wasn’t.

March came and the city sealed itself shut.

We weren’t allowed out. Not for walks. Not for air.

Food appeared at our doors like rations. Cabbage. Rice. Eggs. Sometimes meat you didn’t recognise. You waited until the footsteps disappeared before opening the door. Then you waited again, just in case.

White hazmat suits patrolled the streets. Faceless. Indistinguishable. They sprayed bleach in the air while we lined up for daily Covid tests, no difference between eight or eighty.

“Stand still.”
“Don’t move.”

The instructions came through muffled speakers, distorted, inhuman.

If you stepped out of line, they shouted. Sometimes more than shouted.

Some days we weren’t even allowed the walk to the testing booth. They came to us. Knocked once, then again, louder.

“Test.”

You opened the door and tilted your head back. No warning. The swab pushed so far it made your eyes water, sometimes bleed. You weren’t meant to react.

The neighbours changed first.

People who used to nod at you in the stairwell now watched from behind their doors. Reporting movement. Taking photos. Sending messages into group chats.

“Someone on the third floor went outside.”
“Report them.”
“Selfish.”

No one knew who was watching. That was the point.

It stopped feeling like a virus.

It started feeling like something else.

Control, maybe. Or fear dressed up as safety.

Either way, it worked.

It wasn’t just the virus people were scared of.

It was the camps.

“Did you hear about Tom?”
“They took him.”

“For how long?”

“No one knows.”

Get caught outside and you were gone. No explanation. No timeline. People disappeared into quarantine centres and came back thinner, quieter. Some didn’t come back at all.

Fear sat in the apartment with us. Even the ones pretending not to feel it spoke softer, moved slower, checked their phones more often than they needed to.

Everyone stayed inside. Everyone stayed quiet. Everyone except me.

I had a dog.

Dogs still needed to piss.

So I learned how to sneak. Shoes on quietly. Door cracked just enough. Heart racing at every corner. Head down. If a police car slowed, I rehearsed apologies in broken Mandarin, already imagining the white room. No windows. No clock. No way of knowing how long I’d been there.

Some of us still took risks.

We found a park hidden from the roads, half swallowed by trees. Bottles tucked into tote bags. Whispered laughter. Someone always watching the entrance.

“Quick, phone lights off.”
“Shh, someone’s coming.”
“Relax.”

We drank like it might be the last time. Maybe it was.

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It was Nial, Lucy, and me at first. Slipping out at dusk, circling back to the same patch of darkness at the top of Yongjia Lu. We drank wine straight from the bottle and talked about what it was doing to us, being alone for that long. Friends trapped in Jing’An with no way out. Days bleeding into each other.

Lucy was a tall Canadian with long blonde hair and strong opinions. The kind of person you went to for advice, even if you didn’t always take it. I trusted her, just not blindly. We had worked together in my first teaching job in Shanghai, and like most things in that city, our friendship had its ups and downs. Usually over her terrible taste in men.

“You just don’t get it,” she’d say, defending someone clearly not worth defending.

“No, I get it,” I’d reply. “I just don’t agree.”

She looked like the girl next door, but there was something else in her. A willingness to step into things most people would avoid. That’s why I liked her. She didn’t pretend to be careful.

Nial I’d met in my first year in Shanghai through another Scottish girl. He was gay, outrageous, and incapable of filtering a single thought.

“Absolutely not,” he’d say, before you’d even finished your sentence.

His boyfriend Paul would join us sometimes, quieter, watching everything with a kind of patience the rest of us didn’t have.

Together, we made a strange little unit. Not the kind of people who would have found each other anywhere else. But that was Shanghai. It didn’t ask if things made sense.

At first, we kept it quiet. Our secret. But secrets don’t last long in a city like that. One by one, people joined.

Four of us. Then five. Then more.

A small group of people willing to risk being taken just to sit in the dark and feel something that resembled normal.

Lucy danced when she drank, turning the park into a stage.
“Go on then,” she’d laugh, pulling us up with her.

Nial told stories that got better the more we drank. We threw him a birthday party there once, candles stuck into something that vaguely resembled a cake, all of us clapping too loudly, too aware of the silence around us.

There was a Dutch guy with a soft spot for me. He always brought rosé and ice, like we were somewhere nicer than we were. Sometimes I kissed him as a thank you. It felt easier than saying anything real.

Then Jose found us.

Older. Spanish. A restauranteur with a weakness for younger blonde girls. He said he hadn’t left his apartment in four weeks.

“I heard you from the street,” he told us, half laughing, half annoyed.
“Thought I was going mad.”

He stood there for a moment, looking at us like we were either the stupidest people in Shanghai or the smartest.

Maybe both.

It was easy to forget the city was in lockdown in that park. Easy to forget that everything outside of those trees had changed. That we had been told to stay inside, to stop, to wait.

We didn’t stop.

Jose started joining us. Bringing wine, better than anything we’d had before. He had restaurants, connections, a way of making things feel normal when nothing was.

I liked him. His conversation. The way he looked at me like none of this was strange.

We’d sneak back to his apartment sometimes. He’d cook. I’d sit there, watching him move around the kitchen like the world hadn’t been paused.

He lied, of course. About things that didn’t matter and things that probably did.

A professional. Convincing.

I didn’t ask too many questions.

It was easier that way.

***

When Shanghai loosened its grip, we left whenever we could. Sanya, Hainan. Anywhere warm enough to forget.

Christmas in Sanya felt like cheating death. The mainland was locked down, but the island was open. Sunburn instead of disinfectant. Salt instead of fear. We drank cocktails on the beach and pretended the world wasn’t ending. I told myself we deserved it.

Sanya blurred lines. It pulled new people into my life who had always been there, just orbiting at a distance. Familiar faces from the pub, from the gym, from years of passing each other in Shanghai without ever colliding. I had my world. They had theirs. I used to live at night. They lived in the day.

Lacie, who I had met during lockdown, was one of them. Another 5:20am F45 regular. I was leaning into that version of myself when we became friends. She was American, one of the good ones. Sarcastic without being sharp, funny without being cruel, and completely unaware of how beautiful she was. We shared a weakness for men who were all wrong for us.

Through Lacie, I met Issac. Later, Effie.

Issac had ocean blue eyes and a thick Irish accent, the kind that made everything sound softer than it was. He had a smile that dissolved problems and a hug that made you feel like you had always belonged somewhere, even if you hadn’t. There was something about him I couldn’t quite place. Maybe it was the calm. Maybe it was the fact that he was the first man in years I felt genuinely safe around.

I didn’t have to perform with him. No sharp edges, no hiding behind wit. Just ease.

Our friendship moved fast. Maybe too fast. In another life, it might have unfolded slower. Something else might have grown there.

But Frankie moved faster. They made sense together. I could see it immediately. I told myself I didn’t mind. I only felt a small flicker of jealousy.

Effie came with Issac. His Aussie sidekick, curly hair, big attitude. The two of them moved like a unit, and I knew there were things I could learn from them.

Wake at ten. Pub by eleven. Home in bed by nine.
Unless we got pulled in by the force that was the Grandyard.

The Grandyard was an old man’s pub that never closed, run by a Taiwanese guy called Ricky. Low lighting, always. A heavy curtain pulled over the big window to hide the beer garden and block out the morning trying to get in. A pool table in the corner, where I once snapped a cue over my leg after losing a match I was already losing. And really good beer.

A place outside of time. You’d walk in at five p.m. and suddenly it was daylight. Hours disappeared in there.

Effie drank whiskey and never asked questions.

Friendships grew without effort. Laughs, understanding. No need for heart to hearts when everyone was already living out in the open.

I’d look around and take it in. Effie, jaw set. Tret watching her like she was something to study, not realizing that everyone knew he was already in love with her. Issac chatting up another girl, hopefully not a bitch this time. Dane moving through the room like he owned it. Drinks flowing.

And somehow, still safe.

It was a different kind of chaos. Softer. More familiar. Less sharp than the years before.
These were my people now.

And that Christmas in Sanya sealed it. A short flight and suddenly we were all there, the Grandyard crew on a tropical island, moving like we had nothing to lose.

Sanya was Shanghai amplified. Heat. Alcohol. The quiet understanding that none of us were meant to be there for very long. We rode bikes to waterfalls, legs burning, lungs open, skin slick with sweat and sunscreen. Days that started with plans and ended without any memory of how we got home.

I moved between worlds in Sanya. The Grandyard crew, and the late night Century crowd, both colliding in the same place.

One night, after too many drinks and not enough food, the Century group decided to go skinny dipping. Most of us were single. The ones who weren’t didn’t seem to care. It felt harmless. Music, moonlight, that soft courage that only comes when you’ve had enough to forget consequences.

In the water, it started slowly. A kiss here, then another. We looked at each other and laughed. That wordless look that says why not.

There was no romance in it. Just curiosity. The thrill of crossing a line that didn’t feel like a line anymore.

When we climbed out onto the sand, dripping and unsteady, it carried on. Lazy. Uncoordinated. Until it didn’t.

One of the boyfriends snapped.

His voice cut through everything. Loud. Sharp. Out of place. Accusations thrown like they needed to land somewhere. Calling her names. Saying things you don’t take back.

The mood collapsed. The moon dimmed.

He left for Shanghai the next day. Someone said, “He’ll cool off.” No one really believed it.

New people arrived. Spanish, Italian. More bodies, more noise. And we folded them in like it had always been that way. Kissing each other without thinking, without asking, without needing a reason. In bars. On balconies. In kitchens at three in the morning.

It became normal.

Or at least, it felt like it.

That summer wasn’t really about making out.

It was about permission. About seeing each other without filters. Letting people be exactly who they were, without asking too many questions.

I thought that was what made it real.

Then the doors shut again.

Locked down in paradise. The same fear creeping back in. The same tightness in the chest. The same quiet calculations about how to get out, if we needed to.

Only now we drank more. Moved closer. Tried to outrun it with bodies and vodka. Distraction dressed up as choice.

Once you’ve felt it, you recognise it instantly.

Shanghai had found us again.

Because no matter how far you go, you don’t really leave.

One night outside Mala Bar on Wuding Lu, I met JP. He came to me when I least expected it, which is always how these things start. I wasn’t looking, I never was when the worst men found me.

By then Irish Jessy and I had settled into something solid and strange and good. A brother–sister kind of love. Brutal honesty. Loyalty without romance. We fought, forgave, circled back. He was seeing a Chinese girl called Star or something like that. I was drifting in and out of something with Moh, the Turkish boy with dark eyes that made me feel in love even when I probably wasn’t.

Fifteen minutes, that was it. Tall. Bearded. Tattoos that looked accidental rather than curated. Not handsome, but unkempt in a way that felt deliberate. A low-level anarchy. We laughed. Talked about Freemasons. He was convinced his grandfather had been one. I surprised him by knowing more than I should. He thought I was smart ‘for a girl’. I thought he was interesting. He talked about crypto and tech and all the things that usually made my skin crawl, but that night I leaned in. New men always sound clever at first.

The girls called a cab to Parrot, or X Bar, or whatever it had rebranded itself into that month. I invited JP without thinking. He climbed into the six-seater with us and we rattled through Shanghai on a September night. Summer thinning out. Autumn creeping in. My favourite season. Autumn always feels like permission to become someone else.

JP followed us inside.

Unfortunately for him, Moh was standing at the door.

And despite liking JP in that brief, electric way, my loyalty still belonged to the Turkish boy. So I left with Moh. I thought that I’d never see the six foot crypto dude again, thought he would disappear into the Shanghai night.

He didn’t.

Men like that don’t disappear. They linger, they orbit, they make themselves useful until you forget you ever sent them away.

We started hanging out slowly, then all at once. Drinks that turned into mornings. Afternoons that dissolved into nights. He stayed over one evening not long after I’d ditched him and made me make up for it. He reminded me of that often. I thought it was charming. JP never forgot anything. I didn’t realise then that forgetting can be mercy.

The chemistry was undeniable.

It was one of the only places I felt safe with him. The only place I felt chosen without conditions. When his hands were on me, I didn’t doubt myself. I didn’t second-guess. I didn’t shrink. He undressed me like it mattered. Slowly and deliberately. Like he was unwrapping something he’d already decided was his.

The night was the only time JP made me feel loved. In those moments, it felt like I was the only woman in the room, in the city, in his life.

He was strong in a way that felt protective rather than performative. He’d lift me without effort, move me where he wanted me, press me into walls or beds like he needed to feel my weight against him. He made sure I was ready before anything else. Always. Like preparation was its own kind of devotion. He had a way of turning things that should have felt dirty into something almost reverent. Made it feel romantic rather than raw. Like desire and tenderness weren’t opposites for him, just different speeds.

And the way we looked together mattered more to me than I admitted.

He was six foot, dark hair, beard, tattoos climbing up his body and spilling onto his face like he’d never learned restraint. I was soft where he was sharp. Blonde. No ink. The contrast was electric. People noticed. I noticed.

That aesthetic, us, kept me trapped longer than I want to admit. It felt like proof. Like chemistry could substitute for safety. Like being desired that intensely meant I was loved.

For those moments, when our skin touched and everything else went quiet, I forgot the anxiety. Forgot the doubt. Forgot myself.

And that forgetting felt like freedom.

The anxiety was there from the beginning though. Not dramatic, just a hum under everything. Missed calls, unanswered texts. That hollow drop when your phone lights up with the wrong name. I’d go to the pub and see him talking to other women. He always came over to me as soon as he saw me though, that was the trick.

I needed to be picked, desperately, embarrassingly. I hated that about myself and couldn’t stop. He needed me too. Introduced me to his family like proof he was one of the ‘good guys’. His flatmate hated me. Or I hated him, probably both. I thought he was jealous. Looking back, he just knew. He saw the farce before I did.

JP got on with Jesse. That was the most dangerous part.

The first night he stayed over, Jesse called at nine in the morning after a bender and asked if I wanted to sit in the garden with a bottle of vodka and talk nonsense. I said no. JP told me to invite him anyway. Jesse came over, hungover and laughing. JP didn’t flinch. No jealousy. No tension. They got along instantly. Like it was nothing.

I thought this was it. Acceptance. Someone who didn’t need me to amputate parts of myself to be appetising. I mistook comfort for safety.

The end didn’t arrive all at once, it leaked out slowly.

Replies slowed. Affection flattened. He was still there physically, still touching me, still looping an arm around my waist like muscle memory. But something in him had gone opaque. I started needing him more as he needed me less. The imbalance grew quietly, like mould behind walls.

I hated who I was becoming: checking my phone, replaying conversations. Wondering which version of myself might keep him. I told myself it was suppose to feel like this. Tight. Earned. Conditional.

The first crack came from someone else. A half-sentence. A pause too long. A name dropped and withdrawn. I smiled through it and stored it away. My body knew before my mind caught up. I started feeling sick when his name lit up my phone. Relief tangled with dread. Yet I stayed.

That summer we went to Alter festival in Yangshuo. It was meant to be good.

He wanted to leave early, I wanted to stay with my friends. We fought. In the cab he sat in the front with the driver instead of next to me, acting like I wasn’t there or at least not worth his time. Something snapped. I jumped out on a dark forest road and hitchhiked back to the festival alone. I didn’t feel brave. I felt empty. That journey was scary, I could hear the low vibrations of the festival somewhere in the distance, but the road I was on was pitch black and trees lined both sides. I saw a man with a tuk tuk, offered him money, but he laughed at me and sent me walking down the road. I finally stopped a motorbike that was heading to the festival anyway, he took me on the back of him. I was a little scared, but I had had too many drinks to give a fuck really. It took me about an hour to get back to the festival, by which this time everyone we were with were leaving. I stayed for a bit longer, then decided it was time to go back to the villa and face him.

When I finally got home I found him crying in the villa. We talked, we admitted we made each other feel terrible. We decided to try anyway.

That was the start of the end. The moment you realise you hate each other but are too afraid to leave.

I went on a hiking trip after that. I needed space. Distance. Something solid under my feet.

When I came back, I knew I was finished.

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A few days after, I was sitting at the bad end of the bar, where the light doesn’t quite reach. Sticky wood. Rings from old glasses burned into it like fossils. The air smelled of sour beer, citrus cleaner, sweat, and a floral perfume someone had sprayed in the bathroom that didn’t belong there.

She was holding a gin and tonic. Too much ice. The glass sweating into her palm. She kept rotating it slowly, watching the lime instead of me.

There was a second before she spoke where everything paused. I felt it physically. The air thickened. She inhaled.

“Are you JP’s girlfriend?”

“Ex.” I replied bluntly, “And you are?”

“I’m the girl he was fucking whilst you were hiking around Yunnan this summer.”

My body reacted before my brain. Heat up my neck. My stomach dropping fast and clean, like an elevator snapping loose. A ridiculous thought that I might faint.

The bar noise rushed back. Laughter. Glass clinking. Music bleeding through walls. I nodded, I hated that I nodded.

Inside me, everything lined up with terrifying elegance.

The late replies. The no phone-call on my birthday that I’d put down to bad signal in the mountains.

The defensiveness.
The way he’d gone quiet when I mentioned the trip.
The constant sense of arriving too late.

What hurt most wasn’t the image of them together. It was the humiliation. Being the last to know. Walking through rooms smiling while the truth sat there fully formed, waiting for me to catch up.

And underneath it all was relief. Pure relief.

Because I wasn’t crazy. Because the dread had a name. Because I could stop negotiating with myself. I finished my drink even though it tasted like metal. I thanked her. That surprised us both. When I stood up my legs shook, but my head was clear.

After her the confessions from other women started flowing in.

This wasn’t heartbreak, it was clarity. I didn’t beg. I didn’t collapse. I didn’t even cry. What I mourned was the version of myself that had trusted him. The girl who confused being wanted with being valued.

As most break-ups go, we kept finding each other again in the dark, sneaking around like we were teenagers with something to lose, telling ourselves stories about why it was okay, why this time didn’t count. I heard he was seeing someone else, a South African with a strong accent and a penchant for prescription drugs. I told myself I wasn’t jealous. That I wasn’t as bad as all the women who knew about me and did it anyway. I was protecting my pride, that silence was strength, that maybe he was doing the same for me. That we were somehow being careful with each other. Looking back, that kind of thinking feels almost sweet in its stupidity.

Then I had the accident.

It was an ordinary night, which is the cruel part. Riding home from the the pub with the city still humming softly around me, a couple of drinks in my system but nowhere near drunk, nowhere near reckless by the standards I’d lived by for years in Shanghai. I’d ridden that motorbike in worse states, on darker nights, with less awareness. Yongjia Lu was familiar, muscle memory, the kind of street you stop paying attention to because you think it owes you safety.

A six seater van pulled out suddenly with no lights on. I saw it too late. I turned instinctively, the body moving before the mind could catch up, but the back of my bike clipped the side of the van and the world folded in on itself. Thirty kilometres an hour straight into a tree. My face split open. My nose destroyed. The bike flipped and came down on top of me, crushing my chest, eight ribs cracking like kindling.

And then nothing.

I was in a coma for ten days.

It was Covid, so no one could come. No visitors. No familiar faces hovering at the edge of the bed. In China your passport is tethered to your visa and your work, so eventually the system did what it does best and informed my job, and my job told my friends, and my friends told my parents. The Shanghai family gathered the only way it could, through messages, voice notes, long threads of love and panic and relief sent into the void while I lay unconscious and swollen and suspended somewhere else.

When I woke up I was barely myself. Drugged, stitched together, ribs screaming every time I tried to breathe too deeply. I scrolled through my phone slowly, clumsily, ten days worth of messages stacked like sediment. I wasn’t really reading them. I was scanning, hunting.

I was only looking for one name.

John Paul.

There was nothing.

I knew he knew, his parents had messaged me, gentle and concerned, saying he’d told them, asking if I was okay. But from him there was silence. No message. No call. Not even the decency of avoidance dressed up as concern. Just absence.

I don’t know why I expected anything different.

I’d already been trying to walk away from him emotionally after the end, dragging myself forward one day at a time, telling myself I was stronger than the pull. But lying there alone in a hospital bed during a pandemic, body broken and stripped down to survival, I understood that this wasn’t something I could half do anymore. I couldn’t just leave him in my head. I had to pull my body away too, every last part of it, even the parts that still wanted him.

Twenty one days later, when I was finally released from the hospital, I saw him.

He looked at me and said, almost offhand, like he was sharing a fun fact:

“Well now we’re the same Charlie, I had a head injury and a coma when I was seventeen.”

I remember staring at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence that never came. Waiting for care, or guilt, or empathy. Something human.

That was it.

The veil lifted then, quietly but completely. How easily he made everything about himself. How long I had been bending myself into shapes that made this feel normal. Covid had a way of stripping everything back to the bone. Bodies. Truth. Who shows up. Who doesn’t.

And in that moment I knew, without drama or debate, that this was the real end of it. Not because I hated him, but because I finally understood that staying would cost me more than leaving ever could.

I didn’t hate JP.

He brought out the worst in me. I needed him for all the wrong reasons. And when it ended, what I felt was not grief, it was peace. I started a new job and started my masters. Something respectable to hold onto while everything else still felt loose. I wasn’t sober from alcohol, but I started therapy and was managing my drinking. Leaned into the gym. From the outside it looked like healing. Inside I was just redirecting the obsession, same hunger just disguised. I thought the worst was over…

Then came the Shanghai Lockdown…

I was at work, my boss knocked on the door, urgent and pale. Two officers at reception asking for me. My heart fell through my rib cage. I didn’t fight it. I knew I couldn’t. I walked down to reception, got cuffed and thrown into a police car.

There was an hour between my work and the police station. An hour in the back of that car, the siren screaming so loud it swallowed the city whole. An hour to sit there and wonder how the hell I’d ended up here. I hadn’t touched anything since the whispers of the crackdown started a year earlier. Not in Sri Lanka. Not in Amsterdam. Not anywhere. Not worth the risk, I told Frankie and Ella. But Shanghai doesn’t care about risk. It doesn’t weigh good against bad, doesn’t sort the careful from the careless. When Shanghai decides it’s your turn, you feel her wrath all the same.

They shaved my head before they asked me anything.

Not fully shaved, just enough to humiliate me. The clippers buzzed unevenly, like they were bored. Hair fell into my lap and stuck to the sweat on my thighs. I watched it drop. I didn’t cry. I remember thinking, this is already happening, so I might as well stay inside my body while it does.

They led me into a room with no windows and sat me in an iron chair bolted to the floor. The kind you see in bad films and assume is exaggeration. It wasn’t exaggerated. It was cold through my clothes. A metal ring welded to the armrest, unnecessary but intentional. There was a desk. Two men. A third who didn’t speak at all. No clock. No water. White walls that made time stretch in strange ways.

At first I waited to be scared.

It didn’t come.

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Instead there was irritation and a low buzzing anger. I was thirsty and my back hurt and I hated being locked into that chair. I hated the way they spoke English like it was a favour. I hated the way they smiled before asking questions, like politeness was a weapon.

“How long in China.”

I told them.

“What job.”

I told them.

They nodded and wrote nothing down. Asked again, slightly differently. Same questions looping. I realised this wasn’t about information. It was about wearing me down. About seeing how long it would take before I slipped.

Time moved badly in that room. Sometimes it rushed. Sometimes it stalled completely. I tried to count minutes by my breathing but lost track. My mouth went dry. I swallowed nothing over and over. At one point I asked for water. One of them looked at the other and laughed. Cruel. Casual.

Then they took my phone.

They didn’t snatch it. They unplugged it from my hands like it belonged to them already. Walked it over to a computer. Plugged it in and I watched my life appear on a screen I couldn’t see properly. WeChat loading. Conversations unfolding. Old ones. Deleted ones. Things I’d forgotten existed. The beginning of time, dragged forward into fluorescent lighting.

My heart kicked then. Just once.

I thought of the transfers: Small amounts, dinners, taxis, booze. Not labelled. Not obvious. I remembered paying everyone back and everyone paying me back. I remembered thinking at the time that it was normal. That it was fine, so I watched their faces carefully. Waiting for a flicker. A pause. Anything.

Nothing.

One of them asked, “You sell drugs.”

I laughed. A sharp sound that surprised even me. “No.”

They asked again.

“No.”

“Never.”

“Never.”

It wasn’t a lie.

I said it until the word lost meaning. Until they were just sound. The police didn’t raise their voices. They didn’t threaten me. They just waited. Silence pressed down like weight. I could feel my bladder starting to ache. I shifted in the chair and the metal scraped loud against the floor.

At some point one of them left. Came back with a cigarette.

He held it out to me like an offering. I took it too fast. My hands were shaking then. I noticed that. The first crack. Then, he lit it for me. Watched me lean over to my hand that was locked inside the chair’s steel ring. Watched me inhale like he was counting seconds. Smoke filled my chest and grounded me back into myself.

I thought, I am not scared. I am furious.

Furious that they could do this and call it procedure. Furious that my phone knew more about me than I did. Furious that I was here at all. I sat up straighter. Let the anger settle, it helped me focus. It helped me remember to breathe slowly. To answer only what was asked. Nothing extra. Never extra.

Fortyeight long hours passed.

When they finally stood up, there was no announcement, no warning. One of them nodded toward the door.

That was it, I was let go. They had nothing, because there was nothing. They threw the negative drug test at me, and told me to get out.

Outside, the street was loud. Too loud. Cars. People. A woman shouting into her phone. Normal life carrying on like I hadn’t just been peeled open and examined. The light hurt my eyes, I stood there for a moment not knowing what to do with my hands.

I walked slowly, then faster. Then stopped again, my legs felt unreal, like they didn’t belong to me. I wanted to scream at strangers. I wanted to hug someone. I wanted a drink. I wanted a shower. I wanted to never speak again.

When I saw Maddie later I didn’t explain it properly. I couldn’t. I just said, “I’m out.”

That night I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the chair. The screen lighting up. My own words coming back to haunt me in neat green bubbles. I realised then that something had shifted. Not broken. Shifted.

I wasn’t afraid of the city anymore.

But I wasn’t innocent in it either.

After that, I laid low.

Weeks passed. Then one night, I told Maddie the truth. Or a version of it.

I knew it was Brooke before the police had said her name.

That’s the thing about snakes, you don’t need proof. You feel it in your gut long before the evidence arrives. A tightening. A low hum of recognition. Her smile had always lingered half a second too long. Her questions had always come dressed as concern.

Maddie made the call.

She was better at sounding calm, better at sounding stupid on purpose. She put the phone on speaker and leaned back against the kitchen counter like this was just another evening, like we weren’t about to detonate something.

“Hey babe,” Maddie said, bright, careless. “Random question. Did you ever talk to the police about anyone we know.”

There was a pause. Just long enough.

“No,” Brooke said. Too fast.

Maddie smiled at me and kept going. “Because someone told Charlie that a girl from our circle said she sold drugs. Like properly told them. Gave her name and where she worked.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

“That’s crazy,” Brooke laughed. “People say all sorts of shit.”

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I watched the wall while they spoke. I couldn’t look at Maddie. Couldn’t look at the phone. My body was buzzing again, the same way it had in the interrogation room. I recognised the feeling now. This was the moment where you don’t interrupt. You let people hang themselves.

Maddie softened her voice. “I mean, I get it if you were scared. The cops can be intense.”

Silence.

Then Brooke sighed. A performance sigh. “I didn’t have a choice.”

That was it.

The room went very still. Maddie didn’t react. Didn’t pounce. She just said, “What do you mean?”

“They threatened me,” Brooke said. “They said they’d deport me. I gave them Charlie’s name because I knew she would be clean… I thought they’d let her go straight away.”

My head started ringing. I thought of the chair. The cigarette. The way they scrolled through my phone like it was theirs. I thought of Brooke’s face when she’d hugged me goodbye weeks earlier. I wondered if her arms had shaken then too.

“What exactly did you tell them,” Maddie asked.

Another sigh. “That I got my drugs from her… I couldn’t tell them my actual dealer… they would hunt me down and do a lot worse to me than the police would do to Charlie!”

I stepped forward then. Maddie hadn’t invited me in. I didn’t wait.

“You lying little bitch,” I said. “I was clean. I hadn’t touched anything! You didn’t just talk. You invented a fucking story.”

Brooke gasped. “Charlie I didn’t think they’d take it seriously.”

I laughed. A short sound. Empty. “You thought the Chinese police wouldn’t take it seriously.”

“I was scared,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

Something snapped cleanly inside me.

“I do know,” I said. “I sat in a room for two days because of you. They shaved my head. They took my phone. They strapped me to a chair. That was what it was like.”

She started crying then. Real crying or not, I didn’t care. The sound irritated me.

“I didn’t mean for it to go that far,” she said.

“That’s the thing,” I said. “You never do.”

Maddie took the phone gently from my hand and ended the call without ceremony. No goodbye. No drama. Just click.

We stood there for a moment. The fridge hummed. Someone laughed outside. Life continuing like nothing had happened.

I was shaking, and that surprised me. I felt hollowed out, cleaned. Like something rotten had finally been cut away.

Later when I was alone, the anger came. Not explosive, but focused and cold. I replayed every interaction: every smile, every drink bought and shared. I saw the pattern clearly now. Brooke hadn’t betrayed me in a moment of fear. She’d done it because she could. Because I was louder. Braver. Because she wanted to feel taller by pushing me down.

I didn’t cry for her, I cried for myself. For how easily I’d trusted her. For how much damage one small, bitter person could do with a sentence and a name. I’d let her into my life, invited her to mine and Maddie’s home. Had her over for dinner a few nights before she spun the fantasy to the police.

That was the day I stopped confusing proximity with loyalty. And I never spoke to her again.

After Brooke, nothing snapped back into place. It just… didn’t.

The city looked the same: same bars, same street corners, same plastic stools and warm beer and men shouting across tables like nothing had shifted. But something had, I could feel it every time I walked into a room. A tightening behind my ribs. A constant scan.

Paranoia doesn’t arrive screaming. It settles in like fog in winter.

At first it was small things, conversations stopping when I walked over. Someone lowering their voice instinctively. A glance exchanged between two people that I couldn’t quite read. I started replaying moments like evidence footage. Had she asked too many questions. Had he been too interested. Had I said too much.

Everyone felt dangerous now. Or fragile. Or both.

I stopped talking freely that was the biggest change. I, who had always spilled everything, suddenly kept my stories folded tight inside my mouth. I edited myself mid-sentence. I laughed and then watched the laughter land, measured how it was received.

Friendships didn’t end. That would have been cleaner. They thinned.

People cancelled plans and didn’t reschedule. Drinks became one drink instead of many. Group chats went quiet, then polite, then dormant. No one accused anyone of anything. No one needed to. The suspicion floated between us like smoke.

Irish Jesse stayed. That mattered. He didn’t ask questions I couldn’t answer. He didn’t probe. He just sat with me in the garden sometimes, legs stretched out, cigarette burning down between his fingers.

“You alright,” he’d say.

“Yeah,” I’d lie.

He never pushed.

Others weren’t so simple. Some friends treated me like I was radioactive. Like proximity itself carried risk. Others overcompensated, too kind, too careful, like they were trying to convince themselves of my innocence more than anyone else.

The worst were the maybes.

The people I couldn’t place. The ones who smiled but didn’t quite meet my eyes. The ones who’d been there before and now hovered at the edges. Every interaction became a test I didn’t remember agreeing to take.

I hated myself for it. For the suspicion, for the bitterness, for the way I started categorising people instead of loving them. Safe. Unsafe. Unknown.

But I couldn’t stop.

At night I lay awake replaying the interrogation even when I wasn’t thinking about it. My body remembered before my mind did. The light. The chair. The cigarette. I’d flinch when my phone buzzed. My heart would kick when I heard sirens, even distant ones.

Trust felt naïve now. Like something I’d grown out of the hard way.

I drank more again. Wildly. Not like before. Enough to quiet the constant internal surveillance. Booze blurred the lines between fear and forgetfulness. Sex helped too, briefly. Bodies were easier than conversations. No loyalty required. No long memory. But even intimacy fractured.

I’d lie next to people and feel elsewhere. I’d pull away without meaning to. I started leaving first. Leaving before anyone else could decide something about me.

What hurt most was the grief I didn’t get to name.

The city moved on quickly. It always did. There was always another party, another drama, another person burning brighter than you. Survival in Shanghai meant speed.

So I learned to move faster too. I learned to keep my head down. I learned that love could turn into evidence, that friendship could become leverage, that being known was a liability.

The fractures weren’t loud. They were the empty chair at the table. The unread message.

The way I stopped telling stories because I didn’t know who might repeat them.

That was the real aftermath. Not the police. Not Brooke.

But the slow, quiet understanding that whatever innocence I’d had about people had been permanently, irreversibly stripped.

And Shanghai, which had once felt like a place that held me, started to feel like a room full of doors I didn’t know how to open anymore.

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It was Spring when I met Gabbie. Sara introduced us. Sara was wild, big laughs, soft hair, zero filter, and Gabbie had the same sharp wit, same stormy heart. Turns out I’d already dated her ex, Jack. Big Jewish guy, bear-like, big belly and a soft dick. Gabbie didn’t mind. We became fast friends over cheap wine and deep conversations. Talked books and beat poets, Kerouac and Bukowski and whoever else we were pretending to be. We had things to hide, both of us. Hers wrapped in prose and insight, mine under my skin and sex and too many missed calls to my dad.

We were similar. Hiding ourselves behind intellect and talk so people would feel close, but never really get in. The difference was, Gabbie was closer to healing than I was. She knew what pain was, and she knew how to walk away from it. I was still licking my wounds and picking the scabs.

In the beginning, Gabbie and I were inseparable. Bonded by drink and heartache and the kind of intimacy that forms when you are both trying not to feel too much. By then, the heartbreak from Scotland and the ex had technically faded. Three years had passed. Enough time that I could say it out loud without my voice shaking.

But something in me was still wrong.

I wasn’t heartbroken anymore, not exactly. I was just tired of myself. My head was still my worst enemy. A quiet, constant presence that followed me everywhere. It didn’t shout all the time. It waited, whispered and suggested things. Told me to jump out of windows. Told me how easy it would be to stop. Sometimes I could silence it. Booze helped. Oxys and Valium helped. Noise helped. Sex helped. Anything loud enough to drown it out, but every so often it slipped through anyway, filling my chest, pressing down on my lungs until there was nothing left to do but listen.

One of those nights was supposed to be a good one.

Gabbie and I were meeting at an Angus and Julia Stone concert in Pudong. One of my favourite bands. Something gentle, something safe. It was winter in Shanghai. One of those stretches where the sun disappears for weeks and the city turns grey and heavy. That was always when the depression hit hardest.

I was in a taxi for about forty minutes, crossing the river, watching the city blur past the window. Somewhere halfway there the voices started getting louder.

You’re useless. You don’t deserve to be here. You are wasting everyone’s time.

Not tonight, I thought. Please not tonight.

But the voices were convincing. They always were, they didn’t just live in my head they moved through my body. Turned into sensations, urges and obsessions. I started thinking about opening the taxi-car door. About throwing myself out into traffic. Over and over again. Worse than that, my mind started enjoying it. Replaying the image: My skull. The tires. The impact. There was a sick, magnetic pull to it that scared me more than the thoughts themselves.

That was the first night I ever admitted it to myself. That this wasn’t just dark humour or passing sadness. That something was wrong in a way I couldn’t outrun. I told the voices to shut the fuck up. I put my seatbelt on tight, like that might anchor me. I stared straight ahead and prayed we would arrive soon.

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When I finally got out of the taxi and found Gabbie, she knew immediately. Something about my face gave me away. She asked what was wrong, gently, casually, like she wasn’t trying to pry. Normally I would have said it, my usual line: All good, let’s get a drink. I’d been practising that sentence for years. But instead, I told her. I told her everything. I told her I was scared of my own thoughts. That I was worried I might act on them. That I didn’t trust myself in moving vehicles or high places some days.

She didn’t panic. She didn’t rush to fix me. She didn’t wrap me up in platitudes. She just nodded.

Like this wasn’t the first time she’d heard something like this. Like she understood without needing details. She told me she was there if I wanted to talk. Properly there. No pressure.

Then we got a drink and watched the show.

And that was the thing I kept learning in Shanghai. You could be surrounded by music and friends and plans and still be quietly unraveling. Running away doesn’t cure you. It just gives the voices new scenery.

Gabbie knowing didn’t make the thoughts disappear. But it made them less lonely. And for a long time, that was enough to keep me here.

One wine-heavy night, Gabbie and I ended up at Century. That’s where I met Irish Jesse. Jesse looked like my ex. That was the first hook. Same jacket slung carelessly over his shoulders, same messy hair that never quite behaved, same distant eyes that looked past you and into something else. Familiar before he even opened his mouth. I met him on the dance floor in the dead of winter. Bodies packed tight and sweat running down the back of my neck, pooling between my shoulder blades. The music was loud enough to erase thought. He danced like he didn’t care who was watching, like his body was already somewhere ahead of him. When he smiled at me it felt accidental, like he hadn’t planned on liking anyone that night.

We didn’t talk much, we didn’t need to. We stumbled back to mine, coats half on, half off, kissing in the garden, fumbling with keys like it mattered we got inside fast. As soon as the door closed we were on each other. Shoes abandoned, clothes peeled away without ceremony. No tenderness, no preamble. Just urgency. The kind that feels like falling.

We kissed and rolled about all night, lost track of hours. The room smelled like sweat and my Estee Lauder perfume. At some point the sky lightened and neither of us acknowledged it. When we finally stopped we lay there breathing hard, bodies sticky, limbs tangled like we might drift apart if we moved.

In the morning we ordered pizza. Ate it naked in bed, grease on our fingers, laughing at nothing. By noon we were drinking beer, sunlight cutting across the sheets, and then somehow we were back at it again. Another long stretch of skin and mouths and heat. A twelve-hour session that felt like dropping through a trapdoor into someone else’s life. Like I’d slipped into an alternate version of myself where nothing existed outside the room.

He told me about Lizzie in pieces. The ex still living in his flat. The unfinished ending. The way some things don’t leave when they’re supposed to. I listened with my head on his chest, tracing circles I wouldn’t remember later. We didn’t analyse. We didn’t plan. We just kept touching like that was the only language available.

He stayed with me for a few days after that. We barely talked. We kissed like we were trying to communicate something we didn’t yet have words for. Like if we stopped, reality would come back too quickly and ruin it.

Jesse was a music teacher in his late thirties, red nose, permanently rumpled, with a glass eye for life. Too drunk to lie. Too honest to pretend. He believed in open relationships like they were a philosophy, not a warning sign. I asked for one. He agreed. Said we needed rules. I thought rules meant care. Thought this was something that evolved. Something freer. Something that wouldn’t hurt the way other things had.

Our relationship was highly sexual. From the beginning it was a body-first connection, curiosity leading the way. We experimented. We tried things without naming them. There was a sense that anything could be suggested, that nothing had to be defended or explained. Sex wasn’t just release with Jesse, it was exploration. A way of stepping outside ourselves for a while.

One night in winter we came back to my place drunk and flushed from the cold. Shanghai winters get inside you. The kind of cold that doesn’t just sit on the skin but seeps into your bones. We turned the aircon on full heat, the room filling with that dry artificial warmth that smells faintly of dust and electricity.

Jesse was still in his jeans. He had on a big brown belt with a heavy gold buckle, the kind that felt old-fashioned and masculine, solid. I’d been drinking too much to keep warm and it had tipped me into that reckless, fearless place. Everything felt amplified. My skin alive. My thoughts loose.

I took the belt off him slowly, deliberately. Let the weight of it land in my hand. I didn’t say much. I just told him what I wanted.

There is something about pain and pleasure together that quiets my mind. Another dimension where the voices don’t exist. A place where sensation overrides thought. Where everything arrives at once. And in that space I don’t have to fight anything. I don’t have to be vigilant or clever or in control.

Submission, for me, has always been liberation.

For those moments I was fully present and fully his. Not disappearing, not shrinking. Just existing inside sensation. Inside trust.

Afterwards we lay there quietly, the room humming, my body still buzzing like it hadn’t quite landed back in itself. In the morning the spell broke. Jesse was pale, shaken. He asked me, almost pleaded, that I never ask him to do that again. The roles reversed suddenly. He vulnerable. Me steady.

I agreed.

That was the unspoken truth between us. We could go far, but not forever. We could touch edges without living there. Sex was our language, but it wasn’t our future. Of course it ended badly. But we didn’t disappear from each other’s lives. We shifted. Became something else. A strange, solid bond. Siblings, almost. Brutally honest. Loyal in a way sex never managed to be.

I stopped sleeping with him, but I never stopped loving who he was.

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He introduced me to Alex. A philosopher, a poet. Been doing his PhD for over a decade and never could quite finish it. Alex was a mess of ideas and wine bottles, but he got it. Understood me. We’d sit in the garden of my new place on Yongjia Lu, drinking and rambling, speaking in tongues or poetry, who could tell. It was peace, that place. My oasis.

For the next year I drank with Jesse, Alex, Gabbie, and Frankie in my garden on Yongjia Lu. We drank philosophy in bottles of wine and cheap beer, trying to prove something.

Jesse said, “We’re just a joke the universe is telling us.”

Gabbie argued, “No. Consciousness matters. We matter.”

Alex shook his head, “We’re smarter than the universe? That’s arrogant.”

I raised a wine glass. “Maybe we’re both arrogant and beautiful. That’s the point.”

We laughed so loud it sounded like church bells.

Gabbie started fucking Alex. Jesse and I knew it wouldn’t end well. And it didn’t. But maybe it pushed Gabbie into sobriety. Maybe it saved her.

And then came the crackdown.

It started slow. Whispers. Rumours. Then people started disappearing. Police were rounding up all the foreigners. One by one. Drug tests. Interrogations. Everything dry. No noise.

Then it was me…

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“You alright?” he asked in that thick Northern Italian accent, voice like gravel soaked in espresso.

“I just woke up,” I said. “I can’t be arsed.”

He laughed and lit a cigarette. “That’s good. Most people pretend to care.”

We sat there for hours. Everyone else was buzzing, talking about nothing. But we just sat on that second-hand sofa talking nonsense like it meant something. He told me Sara had mentioned me once, said I was mad in the best way. Maybe that was why he stayed. Or maybe he just liked tired girls with messy hair and no filter.

There were ten people in that room. Nine of them I wanted to disappear. Gino was the one that made sense. Nine years later, we’re still talking nonsense.

Then came Niko. Another Northern Italian. Quieter than Gino, but sharp. Alert. Eyes that watched everything and missed nothing. Most of the crowd had left Dean’s place by then. Just the essentials left: Niko, Gino, Sara, Dean, and a Colombian called Leon. I’d had a couple shots by then, and was fully awake and alert.

We took the elevator to the top floor. Climbed the stairs past the eleventh story and broke through the rooftop door like teenagers breaking curfew. The city lit up around us, Shanghai stretching wide and humming with secrets.

And that’s what we did up there. We told secrets. Proper ones. Not stories or gossip. Not self-help slogans or humblebrags. Secrets. Real ones. I hadn’t done that since I was thirteen. I didn’t even know I had any left. But then I watched these boys open their hearts like they were reading poems and it cracked something in me.

Gino talked about his dad. Niko talked about someone he couldn’t forget. Leon talked about dying and the love he had for his ex. I said something, I can’t remember what. But it was true.

That’s when Niko and I became friends. Proper ones. The kind who know the map of each other’s minds after just an hour. The kind you trust instantly and introduce to your other friends like, here, take him too, he’s good, he gets it.

A couple years later Niko invited me to his birthday. A table full of Italians speaking a hundred words a minute and I was the only non-Italian there, but he made me feel welcome at every step. Passed me wine like I belonged.

“Charlie, you are family now,” he said, and he meant it.

Then, I moved in with Maddie.

Poor Maddie didn’t know what she was signing up for. Two Scottish girls in a boxy flat above a corner beer shop on Wuyuan Lu. Twenty kuai bottles and all the mess that came with me. Maddie was a couple years older, but I’d lived a few more lives. She was the kind of girl who would walk barefoot through snow for someone she loved. And people, including me, took advantage of that.

She made me laugh, even when I was in the pit. Took my pain like a priest in confession, never once flinched. Never complained when I came home drunk at 3am, slamming doors and waking her up. Not even when I brought home strange men, or when I screamed about meat in the frying pan and chucked it across the kitchen.

“I told you,” I said, standing over the pan, furious. “I don’t fucking eat meat. I’m a fucking vegetarian.”

“You don’t have to throw shit,” she said, calmly ducking behind the counter.

I stared at her like she was some pure relic from another world. She wasn’t cut out for Shanghai. She was meant for someone who loved her back. Someone who didn’t lose their mind over pork in a pan.

Still, she stayed. We did face masks and made shadow puppets on the wall, sometimes with fingers, sometimes with other body parts. Our casual jaunt was Fumin Lu, Funkadeli, espresso martinis and Aperols, sitting in the humid dusk like life was okay. I should’ve been better to her.

But her tolerance for me hit its peak the night she had to pee in a pot.

Our landlady had told us not to put toilet paper down the loo. Shanghai plumbing, old pipes, the usual warnings. Recklessly, I did anyway. It flushed fine, or so I thought.

Next morning I walk into the living room and find Maddie curled up, pale, eyes wide like she’d witnessed death. She just shook her head and whispered, “You fucking blocked it.”

She’d woken up desperate for a piss in the middle of the night, opened the lid, and found a clogged nightmare staring back at her. No flush. No plunge. Nothing. So she did what only someone with a cracked sense of humour and a strong constitution would do… she grabbed a kitchen pot, squatted, and pissed in it. Then walked it down four flights of stairs like a guilty Santa Claus and poured it in the outdoor communal bin before sunrise.

She laughed and cried telling me, sitting on the couch with her hands in her hair. “I can’t believe I did that for you,” she said, half proud, half traumatised. And I knew, I knew right then, her tolerance for me was unmatched. No one else on Earth would’ve handled that without moving out immediately and calling their mum for an exorcism.

Maddie was my touch of home, she didn’t just put up with me, she loved me in spite of me. We’d laugh about boys and heartbreak and the absurdity of everything. She was funny, messy, chaotic, soft. She reminded me of who I was without all the madness. She left after a year, met a nice boy, had a baby. Built a life back in Scotland with people who didn’t make her feel like an emotional punchbag.

It was on one of those Funkadeli nights, with Maddie, I met Stephen.

Stephen was ten years older, sharp eyes and sharper talk. Sold rum to the rich and lied about everything. Said he was a plumber growing up but forgot to mention it was with daddy’s money. A modern-day con man with a soft voice and a cocaine problem.

We’d talk all night, drinking rum and spinning stories. He saw through me in a way that scared me. Knew it was my ex that haunted every word. After about eight dates and ten grams, we finally fucked. And then he ghosted me. I’d never been ghosted before. The taste of my own medicine turned toxic in my mouth. I spiraled. Pride smashed. Ego shattered. I texted him eight times in a row. Two weeks later, he texted back.

He came to my apartment. We didn’t fuck. I cried about my ex again. He sat still, eyes blinking slow.

That night, I woke up in panic, soaked in sweat and tears. I’d had a nightmare about my friends dying in a carbon monoxide leak in a house in Glasgow. I was sobbing, pacing.

“Are you okay?” he asked, half asleep, unsure of what he was witnessing.

I nodded. “I just… I thought they were dead. All of them.”

He left in the morning. I didn’t see him for months. Then, one day, he turned up with a bottle of Irn-Bru and a carbon monoxide monitor.

Take that as you will. You bet I did.

The first night I met Stephen, I also met Emily.

Emily was Dutch, older than me, sharp as glass and already fraying at the edges. She would later become one of my closest friends in Shanghai. That night, she was still a stranger behind a bar, mascara perfect, hands trembling just enough to notice if you were paying attention.

Emily lived with anxiety the way some people live with chronic pain. The real kind, OCD so loud it hijacked her body. Skin clawed raw hair pulled until her hands hurt. The kind of suffering that sounds exaggerated until you see it unfold in front of you. That night she was holding it together. Barely.

She was working at Atticus’ on Julu Lu, a new cocktail bar dressed up as art and discretion. Swanky. Expensive. Curated. The kind of place where the lighting is intentional and the silence costs money. Atticus’ wasn’t for rich people who wanted to be seen. It was for the kind of rich who already owned everything and were bored of being admired.

This was the dangerous rich. The ones who had exhausted drugs and girls and parties and were now chasing edges and pushing limits. Testing how far things could go before they broke. Morality included.

I didn’t know that yet. Not fully. I just knew the room felt wrong in a way that made my spine go tight.

I ended up there with Stephen and one of his friends. Emily recognised us and smiled, that tight professional smile that meant she was already managing something inside herself. She led us past the bar and through a side door, into a back room hidden behind thick black curtains.

As soon as the fabric fell closed behind us, the air changed. It was quieter, heavier. The kind of quiet that doesn’t calm you, it sharpens you. I remember thinking, very clearly, that this was not a place you wandered into by accident. This was where things happened that didn’t leave receipts. Stephen belonged there in a way I didn’t yet understand. He was comfortable and relaxed. Like someone who knew the rules and the exits. I clocked it and ignored it. I was still learning how easy it is to mistake proximity to power for safety.

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Emily hovered at the edge of the room, pretending to check something on her phone, eyes flicking between us. I didn’t know then that she was already counting breaths, already planning how to get through the night intact.

That was my first glimpse of that world. The money. The menace. How close pleasure and danger sat to each other when you could afford to blur them.

And through all of it, through every door and every crowd and every bad decision dressed up as excitement, Century remained the constant. The place I returned to. The place that still felt honest. Century was where it all erupted. Where I danced and dissolved and didn’t give a fuck.

Oscar owned it. The Russian club guy. Older, receding, needing Viagra but still coming the second I sat on him. He liked them young and damaged. I liked the attention. He kissed me in the camera room, whispered stories about the woman who almost bankrupted him, his half-Serbian kid abandoned in a Belgrade flat.

“I should’ve known better,” I said to Sara once.

“You did,” she said. “You just didn’t care.”

I didn’t, she was right. I played with people like chess pieces. Broke hearts and threw glasses at walls, harassed his friends and blocked and unblocked him like it was my favorite game. It was all distraction. Obsession in disguise. Because when you’re avoiding your own heartache, you start collecting other people’s.

Once, at Century, a girl tried forcing shots down my throat. I told her no, once, twice, three times. She laughed. Kept pushing. I snapped. Punched her straight in the jaw.

Frankie was there. She looked at me different after that. I know I scared her.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why would you hit someone over a drink?”

“It’s not about the drink,” I said. “It’s about being pushed.”

That was the truth. I wasn’t just reacting. I was combusting.

I didn’t want to scare Frankie, I just needed her to see it. Who I was underneath all of it. I felt bad. I felt worthless. I was on a path of self-destruction and I wanted someone to know it. To witness it. To say I was still human. This was the part of my life where I confirmed what I always feared people thought of me anyway. That I was scum. A scumbag who looked good and liked to fuck. So that’s what I did. Fucked a lot. Drank a lot. Danced until I forgot.

This was the era of Century. Of Maddie. Of fights and frying pans. Of dreams about death and bottles of Irn-Bru. This was the winter where I screamed until people flinched and danced until my heels bled. I didn’t know it yet, but the healing hadn’t even started.

Century. Our club. Sweat soaked walls. Red light bulbs that turned skin into something that felt feral. Ceiling fans chopping the air without cooling anything. The bass was physical, it didn’t just hit your ears, it pushed into your ribs, your throat, your teeth. Techno so loud it shut your thoughts down and left only movement behind. Your jaw clenched. Your knees loosened. Your body understood before your mind caught up. Century was our church. Our sanctuary. A place to lay things down without ever naming them. It didn’t matter how you arrived: heartbroken, wired, angry and already unraveling. The music took you as you were. You always came out lighter. Looser. Better, I thought then. Back when I still believed escape could be clean.

I found Century by instinct. I had moved to China from Glasgow, a city raised on electronic music, on dark rooms and collective release. What I missed wasn’t just sound. It was the subculture. The unspoken agreement that once the beat drops, everything else stops mattering. No one cared about passports, politics, gender or class. All of it dissolved into sweat and two-steps. Electronic music has always been a place where I felt safe, anonymous and free. Where I could exist without explaining myself. So when I found Century, and the people who orbited it, something in me settled.

You entered through a narrow staircase, pitch black, one hand on the wall, the other on a stranger’s shoulder. Bodies brushing past. Heat rising. At the bottom, a padded wall. You pushed through it and stepped into an underworld that pulsed and breathed. The sound was relentless. Low and dirty. It crawled up your legs, wrapped around your spine, shook loose whatever you’d been holding onto. Sweat dripped down backs. Shirts stuck to skin. The floor vibrated under our feet like it was alive.

Men kissing men, tasting salt and chemicals. Girls laughing too loud at the bar, deals happening without words. The VIP tables glowed at the edges, faces half lit, half watching. On the dance floor we were packed tight, rolling hard, pupils blown, mouths open, talking nonsense into each other’s ears, swearing we’d never felt anything like this before. Everyone was there. The gays. The girls. The gang. Expats and locals and people who refused to be either. All of us moving together, forgetting time, forgetting responsibility, forgetting the world above the stairs. Century didn’t ask questions. It welcomed surrender. It let you disappear inside sound and bodies and called it belonging.

At that point, it only gave. And I took everything.

That was around the time of Ben.

Ben was brief. Which is maybe why he mattered.

The Christmas boy with good intentions and big dreams. Soft lips and even softer morals. We met in Shanghai when I was already cracked open from Scotland, still bleeding but pretending I wasn’t. He felt like a pause, a clean inhale. Someone gentle enough to hold what I couldn’t yet look at.

The first time we slept together was in his apartment near M50, the art district, all concrete and half-finished ideas. It was raining, the Shanghai rain that soaks through everything, even confidence. We’d been drinking Bloody Marys all afternoon, hunting for the best one in the city. That was our thing: tomato juice, vodka, celery salt, heat. Something bracing enough to pretend we weren’t avoiding anything.

We arrived back to his apartment, his flat mate was home, somewhere behind a thin wall, so everything had to be quiet. That made it feel secret and charged. Like we were teenagers again, bodies too aware of themselves, laughing and shushing each other, falling onto the bed fully dressed. We lay there for a moment, catching our breath, rain tapping against the window. My t-shirt was damp from outside, clinging to me. He watched me like he was taking something in properly. His blue eyes held mine longer than necessary. That look did things to me. Made me feel chosen, not just wanted.

He slid my t-shirt up slowly, deliberately, like there was nowhere else he needed to be. His hands were warm. Confident without being hurried. When he kissed me it was unpracticed in a way that felt sincere. Less performance, more curiosity.

I remember the quiet more than anything. The awareness of the door. The careful movements. The way my body seemed to lean toward his without instruction. My skin lit up. My thoughts went pleasantly blank.

Time blurred.

Clothes ended up on the floor. The bed creaked once and we froze, laughing silently into each other’s shoulders. He kissed down on me like it mattered where he went next, like he wasn’t rushing toward anything. And that was where Ben shone, where he paid attention and where I disappeared.

I remember gripping the sheets, staring at the wall, letting myself sink into the feeling of being wanted without complication. For that moment everything felt right, not perfect. Just quiet. Like this might be what love was meant to feel like. Not fireworks. Not drama. Just being fully there in someone else’s hands.

I forgot my ex. Forgot the ache I’d been dragging behind me. Forgot myself entirely.

I was just Ben’s.

That was the danger.

A few months later he moved to Bangkok where his family still lived. Said we’d make it work, try the long distance thing. Promises said softly, like they might survive that way. So I flew out month after month, played girlfriend in a city of glass and money and air-conditioned malls. His family liked me. I smiled for them, wore the Christmas jumper, held my wine properly and learned how to behave.

But something in me already knew. Ben was a season, not a future. A place to rest, not to stay. There were signs. There always are.

Like Lucy.

A few months before Ben took off for Bangkok, she knocked on his door at two in the morning once, drunk and desperate, eyes glassy with entitlement. She stared at me like I had stolen something that belonged to her. I had seen her before, lurking around bars, watching us too closely, snarling when Ben touched me. I didn’t care. An average looking American with a bad attitude didn’t threaten me or my relationship. I had no interest in making her my enemy.

Until she touched me.

It was in Century. Of course it was. She shoved into me on the dance floor, her and her whole little pack circling like they thought numbers meant power. The second her shoulder hit mine, something ancient switched on. My spine arched. My jaw locked. I snapped.

“The fuck do you want?” I said, already stepping forward. “If you can push me in here you can push me outside… all three of you.”

I meant it. All of them. Right there.

They froze, backed down and looked at each other like the spell had broken. And in that moment I understood something about myself that I never forgot. If I can’t punch you, I will dismantle you another way. Slowly. Thoughtfully. With witnesses.

I could see it all over Lucy’s face: the self-loathing, the bitterness and the hunger to be chosen. She had her friends to prop her up, to echo her cruelty, to make her feel less alone. So I decided then and there I would take them. Every last one. I would make them mine and leave her standing by herself wondering where everyone went.

By the end of the night her friends were laughing with me. Dancing with me. Asking for my number. Lucy watched from the edge of the room, silent, shrinking.

That’s was the thing about me back then, I was vengeful and petty. I told myself I was supposed to be different now. That moving countries meant I’d left the aggressive, volatile version of myself behind in Scotland. That Shanghai was a fresh start. A softer version. But that’s the lie people tell themselves when they move abroad. You adapt, sure. You learn new streets, new manners, new rules. But changing your country doesn’t change you.

Back then my head was in chaos. Anything could set me off. A look. A word. A shove in a club. And the old me would come flooding back without warning. No pause. No guilt. Just instinct. And Century had a way of pulling instinct to the surface. But Ben, God love him, he held me in public and kept his gaze fixed even when I spiraled.

One night a few months later I went to visit him in Bangkok. We took a trip to Phuket with all his posh boy friends, linen shirts and inherited confidence, the kind of men who have never once questioned whether they belong in a room. The day started well enough, beers in the sun, salt in our hair, everyone performing ease. But I was out of place and we all knew it. The girl from a council estate in Scotland does not suddenly become one of them just because she is holding a glass of champagne on a yacht.

I felt it in the way they looked at me. In the jokes that hovered half a second too long. In the polite smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes.

It came out on the ferry back from Phuket. I was drunk, sunburnt, already simmering. I could feel the judgment pressing in on me, quiet and well-mannered but there all the same. And instead of swallowing it, instead of letting it pass, I chose violence.

“No wonder I date other men,” I screamed.

Ben’s face changed instantly. Something open closed.

The silence after was the sound of glass cracking.

I suppose letting him know I was dating other men made me feel somewhat superior in my discomfort over our clear economic imbalance. Like I’d levelled the playing field of money and manners and family names. But really it was just insecurity dressed up as dominance. I wanted to wound him before they could wound me.

It wasn’t the right thing to do. Not the dating other men. Not the public humiliation. But at that point I was still confusing self-protection with self-destruction.

He forgave me, of course. That kind of forgiveness you give when you’d rather paint a prettier picture than face the truth. Ben the wannabe pilot, dreaming big and speaking slow, a little posh and too clean. I was too rough, too dirty. I didn’t want to teach him how the world worked. So I fucked off back to Shanghai and stopped replying. Thought the message was clear after three months of silence, but he called me anyway, called me his girlfriend, like nothing had happened.

“Ben,” I said, flat. “We haven’t spoken in months.”

“But…”

“I’ve been sleeping with other people,” I told him. “I thought after that ferry argument, we were done.”

That was it. I was guilt-free and he was gaslit. I ghosted him and moved on with my life, forgetting that Shanghai always kept receipts…

I stepped off the train from Beijing into Shanghai and straight into a thick wall of smog and déjà vu. Beijing has the kind of industrial sky that clings to your skin and makes you think about all the wrong decisions that led you to this exact point, and somehow Shanghai carried it too. I was tired, heartbroken, and high on possibility. China didn’t feel like a new country. It felt like a test of character, strength, and resilience.

The first days were a blur of visas and government offices and people barking instructions I only half understood. I looked at apartments that didn’t feel real. Bathrooms outside. Kitchens on landings. Pots and pans left out, thick with old oil and roaches. It was shocking, but I was ready for change in a way that made me reckless. I threw myself into it. I was Type B then. The things that bothered other people didn’t bother me. What got to me came later, slowly, in small relentless ways. Spitting in the street. Chewing with mouths open. People screaming into phones at five in the morning. The smell of unbrushed teeth pressed into your face on the MRT. None of it was dramatic on its own. Together it wore you down until one day you snapped.

The house I finally settled on was out in the sticks, Qingpu, a suburb of Shanghai that felt like the middle of nowhere. I shared an apartment with two girls I’d met during the training course in Beijing. We’d only known each other a few weeks but already knew too much. It had a strange sleepaway camp energy. Sweaty sheets. Thin walls. Other people’s noises bleeding into your sleep. Forced closeness dressed up as friendship.

My first bus ride into the city took over an hour. A sticky, swaying tin can packed with bodies and breath. I sat there gripping my bag, heart racing, feeling like I was being smuggled into something. I probably was. The bus rattled forward and my mind wandered backward. Guilt. Shame. Old mistakes resurfacing without warning. Things I thought I’d buried coming up for air. Somewhere between Qingpu and Jing’An I found myself forgiving them. Not dramatically. Not out loud. It just happened.

There’s something about being alone on a bus in a foreign country. No one knows you. No one is watching. The mind goes where it wants, even if it’s dangerous. I watched the city slowly come into focus through a dirty window and thought about acceptance and humanity and God, all tangled together. I arrived in Jing’An changed in a way no one could see. Those were the moments that mattered. Not the scraps in bars or the places where you were expected to perform. The real shifts happened quietly, on sweaty buses, moving toward a life I didn’t yet understand.

The girls I shared the apartment with in Qing Pu were Ashley and Jane, blurry in the memory but soft, like starter friends. Then I met Vicky and Ellie, Ellie was a friend of convenience, something you learn fast when you move abroad. You make fast bonds to stay afloat until the right people show up. She wasn’t a bad person, but we were different types of girls. She called herself an ‘ethical slut’. I was an unethical one. One trip to Southeast Asia sealed the end of us. She banged a Spanish guy one night, and I fired into him the next. C’est la vie.

Ellie with her baggy T-Shirts and a university degree she was too proud of, looked at me with detest.

“You’re a bad feminist and an even worse friend.” She snarled.

I blinked.

“I think friend is a bit of a stretch Ellie.” I nonchalantly replied, not an ounce of guilt.

The friendship dissolved without a bang, just a quiet untagging of stories. Some people are just pit stops.

Vicky, though, we had a proper fallout once, a square go, shouting and tears and then forgiveness.

“Fuck you and your morals and ethics!” I yelled at her on a beach somewhere, hot sand in my shoes and fire in my throat.

She didn’t flinch. Just stared through me like an oracle. Said, “Don’t push me. I’ve lived many lives. I was you, once. Angry. Bitter. Burning bridges just to feel the heat.”

That kind of thing leaves a mark. We’re still friends, there’s something solid about someone who’s seen you at your worst and sticks around anyway.

That Southeast Asia trip changed more than just friendships. Travel does that. It strips you back and hands you situations you didn’t know you needed. You lose people because you are learning yourself. You are allowed to take risks and see who you are in different rooms, different countries, different beds. I had travelled when I was eighteen, but this was different. At twenty two I was learning myself slowly. Allowing myself to be who I wanted to be without the judgment of people who needed me to stay smaller. At the same time, I carried a lot of self hatred. I was either working through it or living inside it. Escapism worked because everyone in China was running from something. We were all hiding in plain sight.

After Ellie left, space opened up. That’s when Sara arrived, small and wild, a blonde Austrian with eyes full of static and a grin that promised trouble. I met her on a rooftop in the French Concession, Shanghai beneath us glowing like a fake city, like a movie set. And there she was, drinking red wine, talking like she knew me already. I knew right then we were going to be sisters. Her hunger matched mine, hunger for life, wine, boys, madness. She made me feel alive in a way I hadn’t felt in years, maybe ever.

Sara was around my age, an oligarch of such. Not by wealth but by spirit. Her parents had money, and shipped her off to boarding school in America where she learned how to argue and pronounce her vowels with a sneer. University in New York followed, something political or vaguely academic, but she didn’t care much for lectures. She was Austrian with a little twist of American, not by blood of course, but by cultural osmosis. A hybrid stitched from luxury and leftover party bruises.

Sara didn’t talk so much as perform. She spoke in colour, full-body monologue, telling six different stories at the same time, each as passionate and pressing as the last. Sometimes they crossed paths, like drunk lovers. Sometimes they didn’t. I’d sit there watching her twist through tales like a street performer on Red Bull, not knowing whether I was bored or bewitched. Probably both.

One afternoon we sat in some overpriced café pretending to be hungover but really just wanting to gossip.

“I need an American boyfriend,” she said, swirling her iced Americano with an acrylic nail.

I raised an eyebrow. “For what, taxes?”

“For passport. Obviously.”

“You can just apply, you know. Legally.”

She ignored me.

“I don’t have time for the system,” she said. “I need to do it quick. Like this.” She clicked her fingers. “I find a man. I make him fall in love. Then I get pregnant. Then boom. Done.”

“You’re unhinged.”

She would talk like that all day, about nothing much at all. Rants about capitalism, horoscopes, love, venereal diseases, Chanel lipsticks, all wrapped up in dramatic hand gestures and whatever shade of lipstick she was testing that week. She was ridiculous. And magnetic. You could hate her if you wanted, but you wouldn’t last long. You’d get pulled in.

I’d take the hour-long bus into town just to be near her, to soak in that buzz she carried. It was worth every second. We’d walk around Wuding Lu like we owned it, like it was ours. We drank wine on the balcony of Dean’s apartment. His aunt had bought the place back in the nineties before the market exploded, and it became our oasis in the middle of the city. Dean was tall, half Native American, a DJ with sleepy eyes and a steady energy that kept us all just this side of unhinged.

It was in that apartment, after a 24-hour bender, that I met Frankie.

I woke up in Sara’s bed, still drunk, five a.m. maybe, sun bleeding through the curtains like a warning. I heard voices on the balcony and wandered out. Dean was there, post-gig, glowing with sweat, and next to him was Frankie. She was smoke and moonlight, all angles and sharp thoughts. There were two full drinks on the table. We talked about the moon and how it controls us. I drank one, then another, and slept like I hadn’t in weeks.

I woke up a few hours later wondering if she’d been real or just a dream manufactured by the hangover. Turns out she was real, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I pestered Dean to set us up again. There was something about her, raw, almost aggressive in her vulnerability. She told me she didn’t have female friends, and didn’t trust women. Challenge accepted. If someone intrigues me, I need to know everything. Eventually Frankie folded into the Sara and Charlie madness. The three of us were a kind of beautiful chaos. Vicky drifted in and out. She had her own rhythm. But Sara and I, we dove deep. Deep into Shanghai, deep into each other, deep into that frantic need to feel something all the time.

And then there was Century. The club. The church. The underground fever dream. Techno shaking your bones until you forgot your name. This was Shanghai’s heartbeat, pulsing with ketamine, sweat, and questionably sourced coke. Sara and I found ourselves there most nights, not looking for trouble exactly, just open to it. Curious. Untethered.

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We met a gang of Gamblers one night, all charm and a glistening eyes. Beautiful smiles. Expensive shoes. We pretended to be friends. They pretended too. Everyone pretending, but wanting something real out of it anyway.

We ended up at their apartment. Dark alleyways and warped music. Furniture pushed back like the room had already seen worse. We brought Lenny, who was mid breakdown or maybe always mid breakdown. We drank away our doubts and ignored the red flags because at that age red flags just looked like decoration.

One night one of the guys dared me to drink a pint in under ten seconds. If I won, I got eight hundred RMB. If I lost, I paid for the pint and then some. I did it in seven seconds. He said I cheated. Sara, eyes lit up and feral, told him she would stab him.
“Where I am from, a bet is a bet,” she said.

I shrugged and said I didn’t care. I was happy with the free drink.

Sonic stepped in. The ringleader. The one who liked us. He laughed and waved it off.
“They’re just two skinny white girls,” he said. “Let it go.”

He meant harmless. He was wrong.

Later, Sonic took me to meet his uncle. He said it casually, like we were popping out for cigarettes. My uncle’s in town, he’s a top dog, a business man. Casino owner, he confirmed. He’s staying somewhere nice, we need to quickly pass by for a moment to see him.

The hotel smelled like money and silence, I remember the thick carpet, low lights and no laughter. The kind of place where doors close softly and things disappear. We rode the elevator to the penthouse. My stomach tightened somewhere around the fifteenth floor. I remember thinking that I should have stayed downstairs. Or gone home. Or said no. But I didn’t, I followed him, like I always did then, mistaking danger for momentum.

The door opened and his uncle filled the frame. He was huge. Wrapped in a red robe like a king or a threat. He didn’t smile, he just looked straight at me…Too long, not curious, assessing.

“This is her,” Sonic said.

The uncle nodded slowly, eyes still on me.

“So,” he said, eventually. “You are the Scottish one.”

I tried to laugh. “I suppose I am.”

We sat. Or rather, I perched on the farthest chair I could find. The room felt staged, like something was already in motion and I’d walked in halfway through.

Almost immediately Sonic stood up.
“I need to go to the bank,” he said. “Just quickly.”

I looked at him. “Now?”

“Yes. She can wait,” his uncle said, waving a hand at me like I was furniture.

Every alarm in my body went off at once. I wanted to say no, I wanted to stand up and leave. Instead I nodded and held my breath as Sonic disappeared out the door and the lock clicked behind him.

Silence.

The uncle leaned back and crossed his legs. His eyes never left my face.
“You are very charming,” he said.

“Am I?” I said, forcing brightness into my voice. Scottish humour, weaponised friendliness and pure survival mode.

I talked and joked whilst moving further away without making it obvious. I kept him laughing, kept him occupied, kept space between his body and mine. There was no fucking way I was letting him near me. When Sonic finally returned, the uncle stood and reached into a drawer. He pulled out a thick wad of cash and handed it to Sonic without looking at him. Something went sideways in my brain. I stood up.

“What is that?”

No one answered.

I felt heat rush to my face. My skin crawled.
“Oh no,” I said. “No. Absolutely fucking not.”

I snatched the money from Sonic’s hands and threw it at his chest.
“What the fuck is this?” I said. “You think I’m for sale?”

The uncle laughed.
“I like her,” he said. “She has spirit.”

That was it.

I ran out of the suite, down the hall, into the lift. I don’t remember screaming but I remember people staring. Chaos snapping shut around me.

Back at our friend’s place, I tried to explain what had happened. It came out wrong and fragmented, like a fever dream. Frankie listened quietly, then said, very calmly,
“Oh. Yeah. I did that last night.”

I stared at her.

“He gave me eight thousand RMB,” she said. “For drinks. For talking.”

I didn’t feel jealous, I felt sick. Even the idea that I might have been traded, even just looked at for money made my stomach turn. That was the tax. The cost of chasing madness. Of following dangerous men through unfamiliar cities and calling it courage instead of recklessness.

And the city, this life, it kept whispering more.

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I smiled through it, dated a funny boy at uni, booked holidays I couldn’t afford, laughed at myself in group chats. But I was masking something much deeper. Something sad and slippery and sharp around the edges. Depression, low self-worth, the usual heartbreak cocktail, and no one to really speak it to. Or maybe just no courage to say it. I thought people expected me to be strong, so I performed strength like it was theatre. I have this tragic habit of assuming I know what people want from me. Then I become that, even if it’s fiction. Even if it’s killing me. So I shut up about the pain. I got on with it. Like the strong girl I thought I was supposed to be. Unsurprisingly, I started to fall apart. Turns out not trusting your closest friends with something as small as an emotion can have catastrophic consequences. Who knew?

So I applied for a job in China. Just like that. And before I could back out, my bags were packed and I was boarding a Virgin Airways flight from Heathrow, heart bruised and spirit restless, off to Shanghai with no idea what the fuck I was doing.

This Substack will be a series of essays about the people I met on the streets of Shanghai. On musky nights and long, sweaty summer days. The ones who loved me, inspired me, betrayed me, followed me. And the ones I loved, inspired, betrayed, and followed back. There will be laughs and tears, punch-ups and parties, drug-fuelled nights and weeks-long benders. And yeah… there’ll be smut. Plenty of it. This Substack will be a series of essays about how I tried to survive my twenties in the world’s wildest city. With the best, baddest, maddest people by my side.

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