Episode 1
Once upon a time in the middle of the jungle lived a tiny creature called Rona who loved kissing people. Well, there weren’t actually any people around so instead she kissed the non-human creatures that were around, which where she lived was mostly bats. The bats hung upside down from the trees and Rona hung upside down with them and kissed them, and when she did that they tended to cough and sneeze a bit and the other bats asked if they were all right and they shrugged their shoulders and said ‘yeah, okay, could
be worse thanks,’ and carried on hanging there and after a while they felt better.
Rona was tiny and as round as a rubber ball and she wore a smart blue coat like Paddington Bear who at the time lived in another part of the jungle, but Rona’s coat had lots of blue bobbles on it which made it special. She felt quite at home with her bat friends but from time to time wondered if there might be more to life than hanging upside down and kissing bats.
Then one day, when Rona was 19, a man came into the jungle, cutting his way through the undergrowth with a long knife, and he threw a large sack over Rona and the bats and carried them all away from their home.
Rona thought her life was over and hid her head deep in her blue coat and closed her eyes and waited for things to be normal again, but they never were. Instead one day after travelling in a jeep, a lorry, a big ship and another lorry, she arrived in a very noisy place full of the sounds of thousands of people and animals all shouting and screaming and roaring and squeaking at once, and she and the bats were all shaken out of the sack and made to hang upside down on a market stall in a town called Wuhan. When she
had grown accustomed to the noise, Rona timidly opened her eyes and found herself staring into the face of a man with an irresistible smile.
“Hello,” said Rona. The man didn’t reply but just kept on smiling – Rona was so tiny that he couldn’t see her or hear her tiny voice. But his smile was so lovely and so different from the sort of rather limited facial expressions of her bat friends that without more ado she took a deep breath and leapt onto his face and started kissing him for all she was worth. Then she dropped down to the man’s shoulder and looked around in amazement as he sold bats and snakes and lizards to his customers then ate lunch in a café using chopsticks.
Over the following days Rona clung to the man (his names was Wang, she discovered) as he went about his business: talking, laughing, waving his arms around and shouting, counting money, jumping on and off buses, playing football in the park, cooking in his
kitchen, lying down in his bed, getting up the next morning. It was all so varied, so unpredictable, so interesting – how had she managed to stand living for a full nineteen years with a colony of bats who did nothing all day but hang around and squeak?
Every day with Mr Wang held a new surprise. Today, for instance, in the middle of a conversation with a customer, he was suddenly overcome by an attack of coughing. He threw all his bats and snakes into a sack and set off for home.
He waited at the bus stop, still coughing, then climbed on the bus and joined the crowd of passengers hanging from straps. But then he did the strangest thing Rona had yet seen: he let out a gasp, then a strangled cry, swayed backwards and forwards, and
crashed to the floor.
Continued in Episode 2