The long vacation begins

The last bell of the year rang on a Friday, and by the Saturday the city was already quieter than it had any right to be. The first year of high school was over. The plum rain had stopped sometime in the week and the sky had gone the colour it goes in July: a hard, pale blue, bleached at the edges, the kind of blue that means heat and nothing else. I woke on the first free morning and reached for the alarm clock out of habit, then remembered there was no alarm for two months, and lay there while the cicadas started up outside the window, one by one, the way a room fills with people.

The first week of vacation has a taste that later weeks lose. It is the taste of having nothing to do and not yet being bored by it. On the second morning I got on my bicycle before nine, when the sun was high but the asphalt still held the cool of the night, and rode the loop out to the river. Chizhou sits on the south bank of the Yangtze, and the embankment is the city’s front garden: a long concrete road closed to cars, where old men walk their birds in bamboo cages and boys fish off the stone steps. In July the river is low, not brown and rising as it was in June, but grey-green and slow, with the barges pushing upstream in a patient line. I rode to the bend where Qishan hill comes down to the water and sat on the wall for a while, watching a heron work the shallows.

There is a bookshop near the school that I never had time for in term: a narrow place on a side street, shelves floor to ceiling, a fan turning slowly above the door and the owner dozing behind the counter. On the third day of the vacation I went in and stayed an hour, coming out with a paperback I had meant to read for a year. The owner did not give me the student discount he had offered back in June; in July, he said, the pupils all come back. He was right. The shop filled slowly through the morning with people I half-recognised from other classrooms, each of us pretending to browse, each of us knowing the other had nowhere pressing to be.

Evenings are the best part. The heat of the day settles into the pavement and gives it back slowly, so that by eight o’clock the air is warm but moving, and the whole city walks out. Down on the embankment the old men set up their radios, and the evening programmes drift over the water; children run the length of the wall with sparklers that leave small trails in the dusk; the lights of the far bank come on one by one across the river. We cycle home when it is properly dark, past the Xiushan Gate and the food stalls, the air smelling of fried dough and cut watermelon and the river itself.

This is what the first days of a long vacation are for: not the plans I will make in August, but the days with no plan at all. The school year closed like a door I did not hear click, and for a while, until the routine of leisure sets in, every morning is the same open question.