My Favourite Wife
Tony Parsons
The world-wide, mega selling author of Man and Boy is back with a sizzling, Shanghai tale of sex, romance and second wivesHot shot young lawyer Bill Holden and his wife Becca move with their four year old daughter to the booming, gold-rush city of Shanghai, a place of enormous wealth and crushing poverty, where fortunes are made and foreign marriages come apart in spectacular fashion.Bill's law firm houses the Holden family in Paradise Mansions – a luxury apartment block where newly rich Chinese men install their second wives: fabulous young beauties like JinJin Li, ex-school teacher, crossword addict and the Holdens' neighbour.After Becca witnesses a tragedy that awakens her to the reality of life beyond the glitzy surface of the city, she returns temporarily to London with Holly – and Bill and JinJin are thrown together.Bill wants to be a better man than the millionaire who keeps JinJin Li as a second wife on the side. A better man than anyone who cheats. Becca is his best friend. And, in the end, adrift without his young family, can he give JinJin anything better than she had before?My Favourite Wife is a book about where sex, romance and obsession ends, and where true love begins.
My Favourite Wife
Tony Parsons
HarperCollinsPublishers
For Yuriko, MFW
You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Lolita
A man with two houses loses his mind. A man with two women loses his soul.
Chinese proverb
Table of Contents
Cover (#u1c733465-5cde-5d0a-bde2-33c0b13c7f61)
Title Page (#u8e39ccce-35bc-5796-8422-126fe090003c)
Dedication (#u62883e31-2f0f-555f-b916-7b074c6fe6d4)
Epigraph (#uf67c8e4b-fe93-5a3f-9e30-7923505bc410)
Part One: Be The Prince (#u98e31305-647c-5ce0-8ed1-ca1be0313d37)
Chapter One (#u9d8dc48e-7acb-5ff7-aadd-6bbaec802adb)
Chapter Two (#u30e37d98-e7b4-56cb-8c33-1adae5738ed4)
Chapter Three (#u7c459562-9978-56df-a19c-c24082290bf4)
Chapter Four (#ubfb324be-75fe-5b75-ae99-74f6617d8ade)
Chapter Five (#u41bc192e-e4d2-5c46-9acb-e948ab007dcd)
Chapter Six (#ubc378f67-6551-5cb8-8288-89b514e4f99d)
Chapter Seven (#u3c898d7d-1970-512a-81c0-1a612cecdd76)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: The Permanent Girlfriend (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: Home Calling (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Four: See You Around (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE: BE THE PRINCE (#ucd08e9fe-4652-501b-99e4-9cb5a9ab8cd6)
ONE (#ucd08e9fe-4652-501b-99e4-9cb5a9ab8cd6)
Bill must have fallen asleep for a moment. He was jolted awake by the limo hitting a pothole and suddenly there was Shanghai. The towers of Pudong split the night. He rubbed his eyes, and turned to look at his wife and daughter in the back seat.
Holly, their four-year-old, was sleeping with her head in her mother’s lap, blonde curls tumbling across her face, dressed like some sort of Disney princess. He wasn’t sure which one.
‘She can’t be comfortable in that,’ he said, keeping his voice down. Holly had been awake, or sleeping fitfully, for most of the flight.
Becca, his wife, carefully removed the child’s tiara. ‘She’s fine,’ she said.
‘Foreigners are very jealous they see this,’ said the driver, whose name was Tiger. He indicated the Pudong skyline. ‘Fifteen year ago – all swampland.’ Tiger was young, barely in his twenties, wearing a half-hearted sort of uniform with three gold stripes on his cuff. The young man bobbed his head with emphatic pride. ‘New, boss – all new.’
Bill nodded politely. But it wasn’t the newness of Shanghai that overwhelmed him. It was the sheer scale of the place. They were crossing a river much wider than anything he had expected and on the far side he could see the golden glow of the Bund, the colonial buildings of the pre-war city staring across at Pudong’s skyscrapers. Shanghai past facing Shanghai future.
The car came off the bridge and down a ramp, picking up speed as the traffic thinned. Three men, filthy and black, their clothes in tatters, all perched on one ancient bicycle with no lights, slowly wobbled up the ramp towards the oncoming traffic. One was squatting on the handlebars, another was leaning back in the seat and the third was standing up and pumping on the pedals. They visibly shook as the car shot past. Then they were gone.
Neither Becca nor the driver seemed to notice them and it crossed Bill’s mind that they had been a vision brought on by the exhaustion and excitement. Three men in rags on a dead bicycle, moving far too slow in the fast lane, and going in completely the wrong direction.
‘Daddy?’ His daughter was stirring from deep inside her ball gown.
Becca pulled her closer. ‘Mummy’s here,’ she said.
Holly sighed, a four-year-old whose patience was wearing thin.
She kicked the back of the passenger seat.
‘I need both of you,’ the child said.
Bill let them into the apartment and they gawped at the splendour of it all, like tourists in their own home.
He thought of their Victorian terrace in London, the dark staircase and crumbling bay window and musty basement, holding the dead air of a hundred years. There was nothing shabby and old here. He turned the key and it was like stepping into a new century.
There were gifts waiting for them. A bouquet of white lilies in cellophane. Champagne in a bucket of melted ice. The biggest basket of fruit in the world.
For Bill Holden and family – welcome to Shanghai – from all your colleagues at Butterfield, Hunt and West.
He picked up the bottle and looked at the shield-shaped label.
Dom Pérignon, he thought. Dom Pérignon in China.
Bill went to the door of the master bedroom and watched Becca gently getting the sleeping child into her pyjamas. She was quietly snoring.
‘Sleeping Beauty,’ he smiled.
‘She’s Belle,’ Becca corrected. ‘From Beauty and the Beast. You know – like us.’
‘You’re too hard on yourself, Bec.’
Becca eased Holly into her pyjamas. ‘She can come in with us tonight,’ she whispered. ‘In case she wakes up. And doesn’t know where she is.’
He nodded, and came over to the bed to kiss his daughter goodnight, feeling a surge of tenderness as his lips brushed her cheek. Then he left Becca to it, and went off to explore the apartment. He was bone tired but very happy, switching lights on and off, playing with the remote of the big plasma TV, opening and shutting cupboards, unable to believe the size of the place, feeling like a lucky man. Even full of the crates they had had shipped ahead from London, the glossy apartment was impressive. Flat 31, Block B, Paradise Mansions, Hongqiao Road, Gubei New Area, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. It was in a different league to anywhere they had ever lived back home.
If they stayed on at the end of his two-year contract then they were promised a step up the Shanghai property ladder to an ex-pat compound with its own golf course, spa and pool. But Bill liked it here. What could be better than this? He thought of his father and wondered what the old man would say about this place. The old man would go crazy.
The suitcases could wait until tomorrow to be unpacked. He carried the bottle into the kitchen and rummaged around until he found two glasses. When he came back Becca was at the window. ‘You should see this,’ she said.
Bill handed his wife a glass and looked down ten storeys to the courtyard below. Paradise Mansions was four blocks of flats surrounding a central courtyard. There was a mother-and-child fountain at its centre, lights glinting below the water.
The courtyard was clogged with brand-new cars, their engines purring. BMWs, Audis, Mercs, the odd Porsche Boxster and two 911s. At the wheel, or lounging by the open driver’s door, were sleek-looking Chinese men. They looked as if they came from a different world to the three men on the bicycle. The porter was moving between the cars, gesturing, trying to regain control. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him.
‘Because it’s Saturday night,’ Bill said, sipping his champagne.
‘That’s not it,’ Becca said. ‘Cheers.’ They clinked glasses and she nodded at the window. ‘Watch.’
So he watched, and he saw young women begin to emerge from Paradise Mansions. They were all dressed up, and like the female leads in some wildlife documentary about mating rituals, each joined one of the men waiting in the cars. They did not kiss.
One of them caught his eye. A tall girl with a flower in her hair. An orchid, he thought. Maybe an orchid.
She came out of the block opposite, and headed for one of the 911s. She raised her face to their window and Becca waved, but the young woman did not respond. She slid her long body into the passenger seat of the Porsche, struggling with her legs and her skirt. The man at the wheel turned his face and said something to her. He was older by about ten years. The girl pulled the door shut, and the Porsche moved away.
Bill and Becca looked at each other and laughed.
‘What is this place?’ she smiled, shaking her head. ‘Is this place a…what is this place?’
But he had no idea.
So they drank their champagne and watched the beautiful girls of Paradise Mansions pairing off with the men in their fancy cars, and by the time they had drained their glasses they were both dumbstruck by weariness.
So they took a shower together, soaping each other with tender familiarity and then they got in bed with Holly between them. They smiled at each other over the child’s face.
He slept until first light and then abruptly he was wide-awake.
He counted the things stopping him from going back to sleep. His body clock was pining for London time. Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. the driver – Tiger – would take him to the Pudong offices of Butterfield, Hunt and West, and he would start his new job. He was curious to know where they were, and what their new life looked like in daylight. How could he possibly sleep with his head so full? As quietly as he could, Bill got up, got dressed and slipped out of the apartment.
The courtyard where the men in cars had waited for the girls was empty apart from Tiger. He was sleeping with his bare feet on the dashboard of the limo, his legs either side of the steering wheel. He jumped to attention when Bill walked past.
‘Where to, boss?’ he said, pulling on his shoes.
‘It’s Sunday,’ Bill said. ‘Don’t they give you the day off on Sunday?’
Tiger looked blank. And then hurt. ‘Where we going, boss?’
‘I’m walking,’ Bill said. ‘And stop calling me boss.’
The Sabbath may have meant nothing to Tiger but out on the streets of Gubei New Area it felt almost like Sunday morning back home, with nobody around apart from the odd jogger and dog walker, the neighbourhood shuttered and still. It was early June, and the heat was already starting to build.
Bill walked. He was hungry to see what he thought of as the real China, the China that was nothing to do with plasma televisions and Dom Pérignon. The real China was somewhere nearby. It had to be. There were blocks of flats as far as he could see in a bewildering jumble of styles, but broken up with patches of manicured green and oversized statues. There were strips of restaurants – he could see Thai, Italian, everything but Chinese -a Carrefour supermarket, and a couple of international schools, including the one that Holly would go to in the morning. Little parks. A nice neighbourhood. Gubei was greener and cleaner than the grimy, crime-ridden patch of London they had left behind. His family could live here. His wife and daughter could be happy here. He felt a quiet satisfaction, mixed with relief.
He glanced at his watch and decided he had time to explore before Becca and Holly stirred. So he walked towards the rising sun and as he left Gubei New Area behind, the streets quickly filled. Women selling bruised fruit stared through him from shaded side streets. Someone bumped into him. Someone else spat at his feet. There were men in filthy, dirt-encrusted two-piece suits working on a building site. On a Sunday. And in the streets there were people. A tide of people. Suddenly there were people everywhere.
He stopped, trying to get his bearings. The roads were wide and traffic flew by, horns mindlessly beeping, ignoring red lights and pedestrians and the rest of the traffic. He saw a chic girl in sunglasses with her hair up behind the wheel of a silver Buick Excelle. There were flocks of VW Santana taxis. A muddy truck piled high with junk and men. And more trucks, lots of them, with their strange cargo of cardboard or orange traffic cones or pigs or yet more cars, so new they still shone with the showroom wax.
As the sun got higher, and Bill continued to walk east, the city got noisier, adding to his sense of dislocation. A woman on a scooter mounted the pavement and just missed him, beeping her horn furiously. Schools of cyclists with giant black visors over their faces swarmed past. Suddenly he was aware of the time difference, the light-headedness that follows a long-haul flight, the sweat of exhaustion. But he kept walking. He wanted to know something about this place.
He walked down alleys where thin men shaved over ancient metal bowls and fat babies were fed, and where ramshackle buildings with red-tile roofs were draped with drying laundry and satellite dishes. Then abruptly the jumbled blocks with their red-tile roofs suddenly gave way to the new shining towers and shopping malls.
Outside Prada men with their skin darkened by sun and grime tried to sell him fake Rolex watches and DVDs of the latest Tom Cruise movie. Young women hid from the sun under umbrellas. Naked Western models advertised skin-lightening products on giant billboards.
And as Bill walked on, he felt something that he had never felt in his life, and it was an awareness of the sheer mass of humanity. All those people in the world, all those lives. It was as if he truly believed in their existence for the first time. Shanghai gave him no choice.
Bill hailed one of the Santana taxis, impatient to see the Bund, but the driver didn’t understand a word he said and dropped him by the river, glad to get rid of him. He got out next to a wharf with a ferry; not a sightseeing ferry but some kind of local public transport.
Bill handed over his smallest note, received some filthy RMB in return, and joined the milling mob waiting to cross to the other side. He tried to work out where the queue began. Then he realised that it didn’t begin anywhere.
And as the ferry filled with people, and then continued to fill even more until Bill was hemmed in on every side, and fighting back the feeling that the ferry was overloaded, he saw that here, at last, was the real China.
The numbers.
It was all about the numbers.
He knew that the numbers were why he would be starting his new job in the morning, why his family’s future would be decided in this city, and why all the money problems of the past would soon be over. They filled the dreams of businessmen from Sydney to San Francisco – the one billion customers, the one billion new capitalists, the one billion market place.
He struggled to move his arms and glanced at his watch, wondering if he could make it back home to his girls before they woke up.
The ferry began to move.
That afternoon they did the tourist thing.
The three of them joined the queues and took the lift to the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower where they stared down at the boats on the Huangpu River and saw that the city seemed to be without end.
On the other side of the tower they looked down at a park that was full of brides, hundreds of them, all in white, looking like a flock of swans as they surrounded the lakes, feeding confetti-coloured fish food to koi carp.
Bill lifted his daughter so she could see.
‘New school tomorrow,’ he said.
Holly said nothing, her eyes wide at the sight of all those brides. ‘You’re going to make lots of new friends,’ Becca said, gripping one of Holly’s ankles, and shaking it with encouragement. Holly thought about it, chewing her bottom lip. ‘I’m going to be very busy,’ she said.
Although foreigners were a common sight in Shanghai now, Bill and Becca and Holly were the only non-Chinese at the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower that afternoon, and people stared at them.
The child and the woman were so blonde, their skin so pale, and their eyes so blue they looked like weather. The man holding his little girl and the child with her arms circling her father’s neck and the woman with her arm draped around her husband’s shoulders.
That’s what was noticed about them – those gestures of childlike affection, the little family holding on to each other in their new home, as if the three of them could not exist without that physical contact, or without each other.
Everybody knew that Westerners didn’t care about family in the same way that the Chinese did, especially not Westerners in Shanghai. But this man and woman and child seemed different.
TWO (#ucd08e9fe-4652-501b-99e4-9cb5a9ab8cd6)
He was gone by the time she woke up.
Letting Holly sleep on, Becca padded through the flat, edging around the stacks of crates. There was the sign of a shower, the smell of after-shave, a tie that had been considered and discarded on the back of a chair. She pictured Bill at his desk on the first day of his new job, working hard, the earnest face frowning, and felt a stab of the old feeling, the feeling you get at the start.
She picked one of the crates at random and prised it open. It was full of baby stuff. A pink high chair in three pieces. A bassinet. A cot mattress. Assorted blankets, sterilisers and stuffed rabbits. All of Holly’s old things. She had kept them, and shipped them across the world, not for sentimental reasons. Becca had kept them for the next one. Their marriage, seven years old now, was at the stage where neither of them doubted that there would be another child.
Becca went back to the bedroom and watched Holly sleeping. Then she pushed back the sheets and held her daughter’s feet until the child began to stir. Holly stretched, moaned and tried to curl up into sleep.
‘Wakey-wakey, rise and shaky,’ Becca said. She stood listening to her daughter’s laboured breathing, a wheezing more than a snoring, caused by Holly’s asthma. ‘Come on now, darling. You’ve got school.’
While Holly came round, Becca banged about in the strange new kitchen, preparing breakfast. Yawning, Holly came and sat at the table.
‘I’m a bit worried,’ she said, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth. Becca touched her daughter’s face, curled a tendril of hair behind her tiny sticky-out ears.
‘What are you worried about, darling?’ Becca said.
‘I’m a bit worried about dead people,’ Holly said solemnly, the corners of her mouth turning down.
Becca sat back. ‘Dead people?’
The child nodded. ‘I’m afraid they’re not going to get better.’
Becca sighed, tapping the table. ‘Don’t worry about dead people,’ she said. ‘Worry about your Coco-Pops.’
After breakfast Becca set up the breathing machine. It was routine now. The thing had a mouthpiece to make it easy for Holly to inhale her medication, and her blue eyes were wide above it.
Just before nine, Becca and Holly walked hand in hand to the Gubei International School. The children seemed to be from every nation on earth. There was that awkward moment when it was time to part and Holly clung to the belt of her mother’s jeans. But then a small, plump girl of about four who looked like she was from Korea or Japan took Holly’s hand and led her into the class, where the Australian teacher was taking registration, and Becca was the one who was reluctant to leave.
Everyone else was rushing off. Some of them were dressed for the office, some of them were dressed for the gym, but all of them acted like they had somewhere very important to go. Then there was a woman by her side, smiling, wheeling a fat toddler in a pushchair. The mother of the child who had taken Holly’s hand.
‘First day,’ she said in an American accent. ‘Tough, right?’ Becca nodded. ‘You know what it’s like. The trembling chin. Fighting back the tears. Trying to be brave.’ She looked at the woman. ‘And that’s just me.’
The woman laughed. ‘Kyoko Smith,’ she said, offering her hand. Becca shook it. Kyoko said she was a lawyer from Yokohama, not practising, married to an attorney from New York. They had been in Shanghai for almost two years. Becca said she was a journalist, currently resting, and she was married to yet another lawyer, whose name was Bill. They had been in Shanghai for two days.
‘You want to get coffee sometime?’ Kyoko asked Becca. ‘Tomorrow, maybe? I’ve got to run right now.’
‘Oh, me too,’ Becca said. ‘I have to run too.’
‘Well, that’s Shanghai,’ Kyoko Smith smiled. ‘Everybody always has to run.’
As Becca walked slowly back to Paradise Mansions she called Bill on his mobile.
‘She go off okay?’ Someone was with him. Becca could tell. She could also tell he had been thinking about Holly on her first day.
‘Oh, she was fine,’ she said, far breezier than she felt.
‘She’ll be okay, Bec,’ he said, knowing how hard it was for her to leave their daughter. ‘It will be good for her to be with kids her own age. We have to let her go sooner or later, don’t we?’
The silence hummed between them and she made no attempt to fill it. She fought back the sudden tears, angry with herself for feeling like a mad housewife.
‘Try not to worry too much,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’ll see you later, okay?’
Becca still said nothing. She was thinking, wondering if the best thing for Holly wasn’t to stay with her, just keep her close, weighing it all up. Then she finally said, ‘Good luck up there, Bill,’ releasing him to get on with his job.
She couldn’t face the flat and all that unpacking. Not yet. So she caught a taxi to Xintiandi, the new area they always talked about in the guidebooks, the place she had been looking forward to seeing, where they said you could see the oldest and newest parts of the city. The flat could wait.
Suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night – the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.
Becca sipped a skinny latte on a stool by the window and read her Joseph Conrad paperback. That was what she was seeking in Xintiandi. The first sigh of the East on her face. On a side street away from the cafés and restaurants, she found the place she was seeking.
The modest little museum on Huangpi Lu was where the Chinese Communist Party had first met. She paid 3 RMB to go in, a sum so small she couldn’t calculate it in pounds. The place was deserted. The only other visitor was a serious female student in thick glasses taking notes by a tableau of dummies plotting to overthrow the foreigners and free the masses. All eyes were on the waxy features of the young Mao.
Becca drifted across to a small television displaying a propaganda film about China before the revolution. The film was grainy and ancient and only lasted a few minutes, but Becca watched it dumbfounded.
The starving faces of long-dead children stared back at her. She had never seen such poverty and misery, and as the images blurred behind a veil of tears she had to look away, telling herself, Get a bloody grip, woman, telling herself it was just the jet-lag and Holly’s first day at school.
Shanghai was Becca’s idea.
Bill would have been happy to stay in London and build a life together, and work hard, and watch their daughter grow. But life in London had disappointed her in a way that it had not disappointed him. Becca was ready for them to try something new. She saw Shanghai as a way out of their old life and their constant struggle for money. Shanghai was where they would turn it all around.
They had married young, both of them twenty-four, the first of their little group to settle down. They had never regretted it.
Becca had watched their single friends optimistically hooking up with someone they had just met in a bar, or a club, or a gym, only to grow unhappy, or bored, or trapped, or get their heart kicked around, and she was glad to say good riddance to all of that.
Marriage had seemed natural to them. They talked about it. If you find the right person, and you are both sure, then you can’t be too young, can you? And even at twenty-four both of them had felt too old for the sad dance of the gym and the bar and the club.
Some things they didn’t need to talk about. They had always taken it for granted that they would both work, and this didn’t change when Holly was born just after their third anniversary. Because it couldn’t change. Bill was a corporate lawyer at a firm in the City, Becca a financial journalist at a newspaper in Canary Wharf, and the mortgage payments on their little house in one of the leafier corners of North London demanded that they both keep earning. Every morning Bill would take Holly to nursery, and every afternoon Becca would pick her up.
And then one day everything changed.
Holly had just turned three and she had been at her nursery for a few hours when suddenly she was struggling to breathe. ‘Just a cold,’ said one of the carers, even when the child began to sob with terror and frustration. ‘Just a very bad cold.’
By the time Becca came to collect her, Holly was ready to be rushed to the nearest Accident and Emergency. By the time Bill arrived at the hospital, the doctor had diagnosed asthma. Holly never went back to the nursery and Becca never went back to her newspaper.
‘No stranger will ever look after her the way I will,’ Becca said, choking back tears of rage, and he soothed her, and he understood, and he told her that of course she was right, and nothing was more important than Holly.
Holly’s asthma was controlled with the help of a paediatrician in Great Ormond Street, who prescribed chewable tablets that she quite enjoyed and the breathing machine. She was brave and good-natured, never complaining, and Becca and Bill tried not to ask the question posed by every parent of a sick child – Why her? There were children far worse off than Holly. They saw them every time they came to Great Ormond Street.
But while Holly slept at night, sometimes making that strange sound at the back of her throat that they now recognised as a symptom of the asthma, Bill and Becca got out the calculators, applied for online overdrafts, thought about remortgaging, and wondered how long they could stay in their home.
They talked about moving to a cheaper, bleaker neighbourhood a few miles east. They talked about staying in the neighbourhood but selling their home and renting for a while. They talked about moving out to the suburbs. And everything they talked about depressed them.
Holly was well, and of course that was the main thing, but suddenly they were struggling just to get by. They loved their house. That was a problem. And they needed their house. That was another problem. Sometimes the senior partners at the firm invited them to dinner in their magnificent homes, these smooth-skinned old millionaires with their charming, hawk-eyed wives, and when you invited them back, you wanted them to come to a neighbourhood where they wouldn’t necessarily get mugged at knife-point for the bottle of Margaux they were carrying.
‘One of your senior partners had his wife’s fiftieth birthday party at the Sandy Lane,’ Becca said. ‘When they come over to our place, we can’t open a six-pack in a bedsit.’
‘We’ll never have to open a six-pack in a bedsit,’ Bill said, a note of resentment in his voice.
She put her arms around his neck. ‘You know what I mean, darling,’ she said.
He knew what she meant.
Some of the firm’s younger lawyers were already in big flats or small houses in Notting Hill and Kensington and Islington, bankrolled by indulgent parents who stayed together, or guilty parents who didn’t. Bill and Becca were doing it on their own. Nobody was giving them a thing.
Then suddenly there was a way to end all their money worries. Your life can change in a moment, Becca realised. You go through the years thinking you know what the future looks like and then one day it looks like something else.
Becca sat next to a man at the annual dinner of Bill’s firm, and nothing was ever the same again.
Every January, Hunt, Butterfield and West rented one of those big soulless hangars in a posh Park Lane hotel and personnel from the firm’s offices all over the world flew in to celebrate the anniversary of Robbie Burns’ birth. Five hundred lawyers in black tie, or kilt, and their wives – or, more rarely, their husbands.
Bill found himself sitting between the wives of two senior partners from New York, who knew each other and were happily talking across him. Becca was at the next table and she smiled as he rolled his eyes and mouthed three little words – Kill me now. Then she looked up as two men sat down either side of her. The men from Shanghai.
One of them was a big blond Australian in a kilt – Shane Gale, he said. He looked like he had been a surfer ten, fifteen years ago. Head of Litigation in Shanghai, he said. Shane was suffering from the effects of the champagne reception, but the way he avoided eye contact made Becca think that perhaps his real problem was not drunkenness but shyness.
The man on the other side was a tall, thin Englishman called Hugh Devlin, senior partner of the Shanghai office. It was funny the way their job titles tripped off their tongues as naturally as their names, she thought, fighting back the urge to say Becca Holden – housewife, homemaker and former financial hack.
While Shane silently buried his face in the Burgundy and started to get seriously rat-faced, Devlin took the table in hand.
She smiled across at Bill, her handsome young husband in his tuxedo, the American wives still talking across him, and Devlin smiled at him too. He had heard such good things about Bill, he said. Nothing but good things. A real grafter, said Devlin. Billed more hours than anyone in the London office two years in a row. Devoted to his family.
‘Yes,’ Becca said. ‘That’s my man.’
But, Devlin wanted to know, what’s your husband doing wasting his time in London? If he’s truly ambitious, then why doesn’t he come and try his luck in the fastest-growing economy on the planet? It was New York in the twentieth century and London in the nineteenth. And now it’s Shanghai, Devlin said. If you can make it there…
He saw the doubt on her face. A move to the Third World? London was rough enough for her. I mean it, he said. I’m serious. Lower taxes, higher salary. He’ll make partner out there a lot faster than he will here. And then he had her attention. A partner – it was what the young lawyers – and their wives – dreamed of. To escape the salaried life, and share the firm’s profits. When you made partner you were no longer working for the firm. You were the firm.
Devlin was talking about a life of colonial splendour that Becca had imagined went out years ago. You would have a home with a maid and a cook and a nanny and a driver – these things were cheap over there. These things were normal. And it was almost as if Devlin sensed something that she had tried to keep buried, even from Bill – that their life in London had let her down, that she was bitterly disappointed with their lot, that her little family had to struggle when they deserved so much more…
But – they couldn’t really do it, could they? Surely Shanghai was a place for a single man, Becca suggested. A man with no family ties?
No, said Devlin, not at all – Shanghai was actually a perfect posting for a man with a family. A man with stability, ambition, loved ones to work for. Shanghai had too many distractions for the single man, he said. Too many distractions. Later they would all become experts on the distractions of Shanghai.
Devlin was a family man himself – and he showed Becca a wallet photograph of a beautiful middle-aged woman and three smiling boys. Devlin said he liked his staff to have families. It meant they had a stake in the future.
Becca turned to Shane, who had been listening to some of this with a lopsided grin, and asked him how his own wife liked Shanghai. But Shane said that he wasn’t married, and they all laughed.
The pipers came into the room. They were playing ‘Flower of Scotland’. And when the dinner started to break up, and Bill came over to their table, Becca could almost hear the invitation from Devlin to have breakfast, to talk about the future, all the coy small talk of the headhunter.
But as Bill took his wife’s hand, happy and relieved to be back by her side, the man from Shanghai surprised both of them.
‘I like it that you’re married,’ he told Bill.
Becca picked up Holly from the school at twelve sharp. She could have stayed until three, but Becca was afraid that her daughter might miss her.
‘She’s been fine, didn’t miss Mummy at all,’ the Australian teacher said, giving Becca a shrewd look that said, Who’s doing the missing around here?
The pair of them held hands as they walked back through the peaceful streets of Gubei to the flat and, as Holly played with her Disney princess figures, Becca made a start on the unpacking.
‘Where did Daddy went?’ Holly asked.
‘Where did Daddy go,’ Becca said.
‘That’s just what I was wondered,’ Holly said, stunned at this amazing coincidence.
Becca pulled open a case. Suits. Dark blue suits for the hot young lawyer. ‘Your daddy’s at work, darling.’
Holly banged Prince Charming’s plastic head against the palm of her hand. ‘I need to talk to him.’
‘You can talk to him later,’ Becca said, but she wondered if Bill would get home from work before their daughter went to bed. She knew he would try his best. She also knew it was unlikely.
When Becca stopped for a cup of English breakfast tea, she went to the window but the courtyard was empty. There was no sign of the young women they had seen on Saturday night.
It was only early afternoon and the girls of Paradise Mansions were still sleeping.
THREE (#ucd08e9fe-4652-501b-99e4-9cb5a9ab8cd6)
The firm occupied three floors in a Pudong skyscraper so new that he could still smell the paint. Bill sat with his back to the window. Behind him the financial district stretched off into the summer mist.
There were spiked Tolkien towers constructed from steel and gold and black glass, one of them built to look like a hundred-storey pagoda, another with a screen covering an entire side of the building where a smiling beauty advertised a phone network. Looming above it all like the true masters of the landscape were the giant cranes.
On Bill’s desk there were neat stacks of draft contracts and a silver-framed photograph of his family – Bill and Becca and Holly standing in the surf on a beach in the Caribbean, Bill holding the then two-year-old Holly in his arms, Becca looking jaw-droppingly gorgeous in some kind of orange shift thing, the three of them wearing slightly shy grins as they gazed at the kind passing stranger who was taking the picture. It was the holiday they took before Becca gave up work and the money got tight. When his eyes drifted to the photograph in the course of his working day, Bill always found himself smiling.
He was going through the transactional documents of a new property development on the outskirts of the city. It was called Green Acres. When completed, it would be a gated community for the new rich of Shanghai. Butterfield, Hunt and West were representing the project’s German investors, DeutscherMonde. Bill had already noticed that the firm were doing a lot of work for DeutscherMonde. He looked up as Shane appeared in the doorway.
‘These Germans,’ Bill said. ‘Do they have a fixed cap?’
Shane shook his head and Bill looked suitably impressed. Clients often pressed law firms for a fixed cap on fees for any deal, knowing that if they were billed by the hour then the legal fees were potentially limitless.
‘Sky’s the limit,’ Shane said. ‘Limit’s the sky. That’s why they’re so important.’ The big Australian came into the room and leafed through some papers on Bill’s desk. ‘This place is going to be beautiful, mate. One hundred millionaires in one square mile. Gardens based on Versailles. Pools, saunas, panic rooms – all based on the actual pools, saunas and panic rooms that they had at Versailles. Twenty-four-hour armed security for the blokes who only just got used to using inside toilets. Lovely jubbly.’
Bill leaned back in his chair. He had building plans in one hand and a map of the area in the other. The development was being built in a place where right now there were only fields and a small village.
‘It looks like it’s being built on farmland,’ he said, handing Shane the map.
‘That’s right. The village is called Yangdong. They’ve been pig farmers for generations.’
Bill thumbed through the file. ‘So who owns the land?’
Shane put the map back on Bill’s desk. ‘The People,’ he said.
Bill looked at the map and up at Shane. ‘So the people of this village – the farmers – they own it?’
‘Not the farmers,’ Shane said. ‘The People. In China, all farmland is owned collectively. Each family in the village has a long-term lease on its holding. Our clients are buying the land from the local government.’
‘What happens to the farmers?’ Bill said.
‘They get a compensation package,’ Shane said, ‘and get to say so long and fare-thee-well to their pigs. Our clients build their two-million-US houses for people rich enough to afford them -and there are plenty of those. These places were all sold off the drawing board. And in a year there will be palaces where there used to be pig farms. And everybody will be happy.’
A man with fair, thinning hair appeared in the doorway. He was maybe ten years older than Bill, in his early forties. Bill had noticed him around the office because he seemed older than everyone else.
‘Shane?’ the man said. There was the north of England in his accent. ‘Mr Devlin is looking for you.’
‘Thanks, Mitch,’ Shane said. ‘I’m right there, mate.’ Shane made no attempt to introduce the man to Bill, so the pair of them smiled awkwardly at each other for a moment, and then the man was gone.
‘Who’s that?’ Bill said.
‘Pete Mitchell,’ Shane said. ‘Mad Mitch, we call him.’
‘What’s mad about him?’ Bill said. It would be hard to imagine a more quiet, self-effacing soul.
Shane glanced at the empty doorway. ‘He’s the wrong side of forty and he never made partner. Wouldn’t you be mad?’
Bill frowned. ‘Doesn’t the firm’s up-or-out policy apply here?’
An up-or-out policy was a law firm’s way of staying lean and hungry, a money-making machine that carried no deadwood. If you lacked the stuff needed to make partner, then you were finished. The firm would not carry you to retirement. You moved up – or out.
‘Sure,’ Shane said. ‘Most – I guess, oh, eighty-five per cent – of our associate lawyers make partner. The ones that don’t are like a girl that gets left on the shelf. You know, the Bridget Jones lawyers – like an unmarried bird facing the change without her Hugh Grant.’
Bill shivered as though someone had stepped on his grave. ‘Then what’s he doing here?’ he said. ‘Mad Mitch, I mean.’
‘Mad Mitch was in the Hong Kong office but he couldn’t stand the pace after the hand-over. For years the Hong Kong boys made money hand over fist, but it got a lot tougher when the Brits shipped out. Mitch was posted out here back when Shanghai was still a soft option.’ Shane sighed. ‘Sad, innit, mate? Forty-odd years old and still a wage slave. And we can’t go on forever, can we? Not the way we work. Lawyer years are like dog years – they run that bit faster than human years.’ Shane picked up the photograph on Bill’s desk. ‘But great things are expected of you,’ he said, nodding gravely. He studied the little family for a while and then gently replaced the photograph.
‘You’re a lucky man, Bill.’
‘Yes,’ Bill said, straightening the silver frame. ‘I am.’
The Mercedes came out of the tunnel and on to the Bund.
The famous road curved off ahead of them, a great sweep of stout colonial buildings made of marble and granite, the architecture of Empire.
‘The West is finished,’ Devlin said, watching the Bund go by. ‘The future belongs to the Chinese. They own it already.’ He turned to look at Bill. ‘Do you believe that?’
Bill smiled, shrugged, not wanting to disagree with his boss, but reluctant to concede the future to anyone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Believe it,’ Devlin told him. ‘They work harder than we do. They put up with conditions that would make us call a human rights lawyer, or the cops. They make us – the West, the developed world, all the twenty-first-century people – look lazy, soft, the pampered men of yesterday. We haven’t seen anything yet, I promise you.’
There were four of them in the car, with Tiger at the wheel. He had taken off his toy soldier uniform and was wearing a business suit. Bill sat in the back seat wedged between Devlin and a lawyer called Nancy Deng, one of the firm’s Chinese nationals. She had her briefcase open on her lap, examining some files, and she hadn’t spoken since the journey began.
Shane sat up front, his wafer-thin mobile phone in his big meaty fist, talking in calm, fluent Chinese. The words didn’t have the barking sound of Cantonese, or the rural, West Country burr of Mandarin, and so Bill guessed this must be what Shanghainese sounded like.
‘What happens when the Chinese can make everything the West makes?’ Devlin said, smiling back at Bill. ‘Not just toys, clothes and dinky little Christmas decorations but computers, cars, telecommunications – when they can make all that stuff at one tenth of the cost it takes our fat lazy work force?’
‘You want to pick up our Germans or meet them at the restaurant?’ Shane said over his shoulder.
‘We’ll pick them up at their hotel,’ Devlin said. ‘I don’t want our Germans getting lost.’ He looked back at Bill. ‘The Chinese are united,’ Devlin said, his eyes shining. ‘That’s the thing that nobody gets. They’re united. They have a unity of national vision that the West has lacked since, oh, World War Two. That’s why they will win.’
Shane was telling the Germans that he would see them in the lobby in ten minutes.
‘I love the Chinese,’ Devlin said simply, leaning back. ‘I admire them. They believe that tomorrow will be a better day. And if you are going to believe in something, anything, then that’s not a bad thing to believe in.’
Bill watched the Bund go by, and silently agreed with him.
The beggars saw them coming.
At first it seemed to Bill as though every single one of them had an oversized baby in her arms, as though begging without a toddler was forbidden by some local statute, but then he realised that there were also old people shambling along at the back of the mob, filthy hands outstretched, and solitary feral children who ducked and dived beneath the women with their toddlers in their arms, the toddlers carried as if they were babies.
But Bill had not noticed the old people and the big children. He had only noticed the toddlers being carted under the arms of their mothers.
Because they all seemed to be just a little bit younger than Holly.
Shane cursed. He had not wanted to walk to the restaurant. He had advised the two Germans that it was better to take the Mercedes and a cab, but they had insisted. They wanted to stroll along on the Bund, and now look what had happened. The beggars were on them, all over them, with their toothless, ingratiating smiles, the rank smell of their clothes and their bodies, all the bewildered faces of the children carried under one arm.
Shane shoved on ahead, shouting at them in Shanghainese, while Nancy pleaded with them and Devlin gave instructions to the clearly terrified Germans. Only Bill dawdled, stunned by a world where children the same age as Holly were begging in the street.
He reached for his wallet, and immediately realised his mistake. He had planned to give some money to the women with children but there were just so many of them, too many of them, and suddenly he was overwhelmed, the coins and notes falling from his fingers and the women with toddlers being trampled by the older children. Empty palms were thrust in Bill’s face.
One of the bigger kids – a weasel-faced runt with a cropped head and the eyes of an old man – grabbed Bill’s jacket and wouldn’t let it go. The child clung on as Bill edged his way through the mob to the building where his colleagues and the Germans were waiting. A uniformed doorman prised the child from Bill’s jacket.
‘Better watch your wad around here, mate,’ Shane said. ‘They’re not all driving BMWs and shopping at Cartier. There are still millions of the little bastards wiping their arses with their hands.’
‘And nobody gets left behind in the West?’ Devlin flared. Then he smiled easily. ‘There’s more upward mobility here than anywhere on the planet.’
Bill was embarrassed, shaken. The Germans were staring at him. One of them was balding and in a business suit, and the other had the long greying hair and the leather jacket of a wild youth. But they were both all business, and they could have been brothers. They murmured to each other in their own language.
Bill wiped sweat from his face. As they went up to the restaurant in the lift, Nancy gave him a tissue for the smear of grime that the young beggar had left on his jacket. He thanked her, his face burning, and dabbed at the mark but saw that it would not budge.
The perfect black print of a child’s hand.
Bill didn’t understand.
Their clients, DeutscherMonde, were investing billions of RMB in the Yangdong project. The company had already built an identical development in the suburbs of Beijing. And yet, as the Germans sat with their expensive lawyers across the dinner table from the local government officials of Yangdong – five men with cheap suits and soft flesh and bad teeth, accompanied by their own lawyer, a bird-thin man of sixty with a shock of dyed black hair, and a slab-like stooge who looked like some kind of bodyguard – it was as if the Germans were the supplicants, the ones most desperate for the deal, the beggars at the feast.
Courses came and went. The Germans sipped their mineral water. The Chinese chain-smoked high-tar cigarettes and swilled soft drinks. The conversation ebbed and flowed from English to Shanghainese, much of it concentrating on the glory of the Green Acres development, and how it would enrich the community.
The oldest of the town’s representatives said the least. With his hooded eyes, long upper lip and frog face, Bill thought he looked like a mini Mao. They called him Chairman Sun. He smoked constantly, even when the chopsticks in his spare hand picked at a dish. Sun made no eye contact, yet still managed to convey the impression that he was mildly dissatisfied with everything, including the project, the food, the choice of restaurant, the presence of so many foreign devils, and possibly life itself.
Only Bill had turned off his phone, and tinny snatches of familiar tunes punctuated the lunch. The Mission Impossible theme, the opening chords of ‘Brown Sugar’, niggling soundbites from Beethoven and Oasis and Faye Wong. Shane pushed his plate to one side and placed his laptop on the table.
‘What do you keep on that thing?’ Bill asked him.
‘The truth, mate,’ Shane told him. ‘The brutal truth.’
Chairman Sun called for the waiter and gave him his instructions. The waiter went away and came back with the wine list. Sun chose a bottle and Shane ingratiatingly smiled and mumbled his compliments in Shanghainese at the excellence of the choice.
Everyone fell silent as they watched the ritual of the waiter returning with the bottle of Burgundy, presenting it to Chairman Sun, who – after a tense moment – nodded his faint approval.
The waiter removed the cork and delicately poured a splash of red wine into Chairman Sun’s glass. His frog face twitched with suspicion as he smelled the wine, tasted it and – after another breathless moment – nodded his approval.
The waiter half-filled Chairman Sun’s glass with Burgundy. Then the Chairman topped it up with the can of Sprite in front of him, took a long slurp and exhaled with pleasure.
Bill glanced across at Shane and Devlin and Nancy and the two Germans.
But they didn’t even blink.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon he came home to an empty apartment.
He placed the stack of files he was carrying on the table, tore off his jacket and tie, and read the note Becca had stuck to the fridge. She had taken Holly to ride the bumper cars at Fuxing Park. He had promised to go with them, if he could get away in time. But Saturday was a work day at Butterfield, Hunt and West.
Bill had spent the afternoon going through paperwork with Shane and Nancy. The contract between the Germans and the Yangdong officials was in Chinese and drawn up under Chinese law, but the deal was structured so that all the important commercial rights were offshore, governed by Hong Kong law with documents in English.
‘It makes the deal easier to enforce,’ Nancy had explained.
‘When someone steals all the money,’ Shane added.
Bill took a bottle of Evian from the fridge and crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty apart from a silver Porsche 911. It looked like a shark waiting its prey on the bottom of the ocean. A 911, Bill thought, yawning as he stretched out on the sofa. A 911 in China…
He woke up with his daughter’s face pressed close, and he could smell the sweetness of her breath as she laughed with delight. She held a brightly coloured plastic figurine in each tiny fist. A prince in one hand, and a princess in the other.
‘Be the prince,’ Holly urged. ‘Come on, come on – be the prince, Daddy.’
He closed his eyes. He had never felt so tired. When he opened them, Holly was still offering him one of the little figurines. He stretched, groaned, and closed his eyes.
‘Later, darling,’ he heard Becca say from the kitchen. ‘Your daddy’s been working very hard for us.’
Bill felt relief as he heard small footsteps walking slowly away. When he opened his eyes he saw his daughter kneeling on the far side of the room, playing quietly by herself, and he felt unkind.
‘Holly?’ He was propped up on one elbow. ‘Yes?’ she said with that shy formality that always touched his heart, and then owned it forever.
He swung his legs round, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘What do you want me to do?’
Holly looked up at him with her perfect face. ‘Go on,’ she said, advancing towards him with the figurines in her hand. She pushed a piece of plastic in his face. A little unsmiling man in a golden crown and trousers that were too tight. ‘Go on, Daddy,’ his daughter urged. ‘Go on, Daddy – be Prince Charming.’
He did his best.
FOUR (#ulink_a0cbd674-23d6-5a17-929a-d142034c3801)
He liked watching his wife get dressed. He especially liked it at times like this – when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special, and he knew that soon men and women would turn their heads to look at her in any room she entered. But now, half-dressed and getting ready for the night, the way she looked belonged only to him.
Watching her face as she put on her lipstick, a blonde tendril of hair falling across her face as she leaned towards the mirror, the familiar lines of her body, the special dress waiting on the bed. He loved it. He could watch her forever.
‘Who are you looking at?’ she said, smiling at him in the mirror.
‘I’m looking at you.’
They were in his room. He had his own room now, the second bedroom, so he could come home late from the office and leave early in the morning without disturbing Becca and Holly, who slept together in the master bedroom. The sleeping arrangements of the first night had become the sleeping arrangements of every night.
In many ways this was a drag. He missed the physical nearness of Becca, of sensing her the moment he woke up. He missed being able to reach out and touch her in the middle of the night, he missed the soft sound of her breathing when she slept, and he missed the warmth of her body beside him. And yet in many ways sleeping apart made her physical presence more of a treat, as if they were playing some kind of game, rationing intimacy, pretending to be strangers. And perhaps that was a part of the excitement he felt now. It wasn’t every day that he saw his wife getting dressed.
She stood, her make-up done, dressed in her underwear and heels. The sight of the Caesarean scar on her stomach moved him, as it always did, although he never quite knew why.
He watched her slip into her dress and the label stuck out of the back. Koh Samui, it said, and he thought of the little shop in Covent Garden, and how much she loved it, and how they would linger there on Saturday afternoons before Holly was born. He zipped her up and deftly tucked in the label with the assured touch of the married man.
‘How do I look?’ she said, and he told her she looked great, and then he tried to touch his mouth against hers, but she turned away laughing, protecting her make-up, and he laughed too. Even though it felt as if he was never allowed to kiss her when he most wanted to.
It was their first night out in Shanghai, or at least their first night out without Holly. Their first grown-up night, they called it. They had been in Paradise Mansions for three weeks now, and the jet-lag was gone and so were the packing crates, but they had never felt comfortable leaving Holly. They still didn’t, not really, but Bill could not get out of dinner invitations from Hugh Devlin forever, and Becca had to concede that the elderly Chinese ayi, Doris, who as far as Becca could tell had practically raised her own grandson, was at least as trustworthy as the string of East Europeans and Filippinas who had baby-sat for them in London.
Holly was sleeping, sprawled sideways, and Doris was sitting by the side of the bed watching her. The old ayi smiled reassuringly as Bill and Becca crept in. They stood by the bed, reluctant to leave.
Bill looked at the beauty of his daughter’s face, and it made him think of the high chair that was parked in a corner of his bedroom, and of the second child that they had talked about trying for once they were settled. They both wanted more children. But Bill loved his daughter so much that a secret part of him felt that another child would somehow be a betrayal of Holly.
He understood why people had more than one child. Most of all it was because when you had just the one, you almost loved them too much. You were sometimes paralysed with love. That wasn’t good, the constant fear. That wasn’t the way to be. But with a second child, how could you ever again spend as much time with the first? Already he felt that he wasn’t spending nearly enough time with his daughter.
If he had to find space in his life, and his heart, and his weekends, for a second child, then surely that would mean there was even less for Holly. Or didn’t it work that way? Did you love the first one in the same old way and just as much, but discover a new store of love for the second child? Did the heart just keep expanding?
Yes, that’s the way it must work, Bill thought, as they left their daughter with the ayi.
The heart just gets bigger.
You don’t love the first one any less. The heart can always find room for the ones that it loves.
A red Mini Cooper with a Chinese flag painted on the roof was blocking the exit to the courtyard.
Tiger leaned on his horn as George the porter excitedly conferred with the driver of the Mini. A number of women were gathered around the car, offering advice to the driver. George had to push his way through them. He came and stuck his head in the window.
‘Hello, lady. Hello, boss,’ he said to Becca and Bill, before releasing a stream of Shanghainese at Tiger.
‘Keys stuck,’ Tiger translated, looking at Bill in his rear-view mirror. ‘Keys stuck in car.’
Becca winced as Tiger put his hand on the horn and left it there. ‘Bill?’ she said, so Bill touched Tiger on the shoulder, requesting silence, then got out of the car and walked up to the Mini. George followed him. The women around the car watched him coming. From the window on Saturday night they had looked as similar as sisters, but up close they could not have been more different. There was a woman in her middle thirties, by far the oldest, who had the lithe body of a dancer. A much younger woman in thick glasses who could have been a librarian from central casting. There was one who was plain and slightly overweight who wore no makeup and carried a pack of disposable nappies. And there was one who clutched a Louis Vuitton bag and wore a mini-kilt that just about covered her sporran.
‘Excuse me,’ Bill said, and the little crowd parted without expression or complaint. He leaned in the window of the Mini with the Chinese flag on the roof. The tall girl with the orchid in her hair was in the driver’s seat, her long limbs everywhere as she yanked desperately at the ignition keys.
‘My goodness,’ she was saying, interspersed with torrents of Chinese. ‘Oh my goodness.’
‘Car broke,’ George said over Bill’s shoulder. ‘Brand-new car and broke.’
Bill sighed, shaking his head, glancing from the gearbox to the girl’s face. She was a good few years younger than him. Middle twenties, he guessed. But it was hard to tell out here. She could have been anything.
‘Miss? You have to put it in park,’ Bill told her patiently. ‘You’ll not get the keys out until you’ve got it in park. It’s designed that way so the thing doesn’t drive off by itself and kill someone.’
She shot him a fierce look. A leg emerged from the slit in her dress, a qipao, which back then he still thought of as a cheongsam. Her skin was an almost milky white. He thought, Why are they supposed to be yellow? Where did that myth come from? She’s paler than I am. He had never seen skin so white. It was like alabaster.
‘Do you mind?’ she said, glaring at him like a rich man’s wife putting a stroppy tradesman in his place. She had the biggest eyes he had ever seen. ‘My husband will address the problem.’
Bill stared at her, momentarily stunned by the formality of her English. Then he laughed. She dressed like Suzie Wong but she talked like a member of the Women’s Institute.
‘No, I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ He turned to George. ‘She’s got the car in drive and she needs to put it in park before it will let her remove the key.’ George looked confused. ‘It’s the way they make them,’ Bill explained, not quite as patient now.
George thought about it, and understanding slowly dawned on his round face.
‘Ahhh,’ George said. ‘Very clever safety device.’
‘My husband will be here soon,’ the tall girl insisted, still struggling desperately with the key. She unleashed some Chinese and then slapped the steering wheel with her open palm. ‘Oh, my goodness!’
Bill looked at her, said nothing, and after nodding in acknowledgement at the women gathered around the car, walked back to the limo. Tiger leaned on the horn again, that promiscuous use of the horn that Bill had already realised was endemic in China. He frowned, shook his head and Tiger stopped.
Bill settled himself next to Becca. He could see the back of the girl’s head, and the white orchid she had pinned there. George was leaning into the Mini, giving her careful instructions, as though it were all very complicated. The flower moved as she shook her head.
‘What’s the problem?’ Becca said.
‘Got it in the wrong gear,’ Bill explained to his wife. ‘She’s not going anywhere like that.’
They stood holding hands on the balcony of the private members’ club and the city surrounded them in all its money, mystery and pride. It was wild. It was like nothing they had ever seen.
They looked out over the floodlit rooftops of the Bund and saw the mighty river shimmer with fragments of reflected neon, the barges invisible now but their foghorns blaring as they moved through the darkness, and all the shining peaks of Pudong beyond.
In the daylight Shanghai was hot, cruel, overcrowded, but at night Bill thought that it was always beautiful, undeniably beautiful; at night it looked as it had looked the very first time he had seen it, coming across the bridge from the airport, still punch-drunk from the flight.
He squeezed Becca’s hand and she smiled at him.
Devlin came out on to the balcony and stood beside them, drink in hand, shaking his head at the sight.
‘There was never a city like this before,’ he said quietly, and Becca thought it was as if he was talking to himself as much as them. He was like some old Empire builder, she thought, he had that mad passion about him. She could imagine him on a farm in the Ngong Hills in Africa, or suffocating in the heat of Satipur, or being carried on a sedan chair up Victoria Peak. But of course there was no Empire left.
‘Never,’ he said. ‘Not in the history of humanity.’ He looked at her and smiled, and he had enormous charm, and she could do nothing but share his wonder. He filled his lungs with the thick air of the Shanghai night. ‘To be living in this place at this time -I tell you, future generations will envy us.’
Becca smiled at him. What she liked about Devlin most of all was that he talked about the Chinese with genuine affection. She had grown up on the move, her father a reporter for Reuters, and until they finally returned to England when she was eleven her childhood had been measured out in extended postings in Johannesburg, Frankfurt and Melbourne. Becca knew that the default expat reaction to the country he or she lived in was usually a kind of amused contempt. But Devlin was not like that. He loved the Chinese, and now he stared out at the night talking about how China’s economy was already bigger than the UK’s, how it would be bigger than Germany’s by 2010, bigger than America’s by 2020, and he seemed awed, not resentful, as if it was only what the Chinese deserved. There was something wonderful about him, Becca thought, feeling that their lives would get better and keep on getting better if only they stayed close to Hugh Devlin. He made her feel that this was a good move for her family, and that the coming years would be all they dreamed.
And there was another reason for Becca to like Devlin – he didn’t patronise her, he didn’t treat her the way the firm’s senior partners in London had treated her. As a wife and nothing but a wife, she thought. As a mother and nothing before or after she was a mother. A homemaker, they would say, hardest job in the bloody world, and she knew they didn’t believe it for a second, and she saw the buried mockery.
With Devlin, she didn’t feel as though she had to establish her credentials as a former career woman, the lapsed financial journalist, and she knew that Devlin realised that rising young hotshot Bill Holden would not be here without her.
A thin, blonde woman of about forty wobbled on to the balcony with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She looked as though she should have switched to Perrier an hour ago. It was the woman that Becca had first seen in Devlin’s wallet in London. Tess Devlin held out her hand and Becca shook it.
‘I want your husband to give me a child before it’s too late,’ she told Becca.
‘That’s fine,’ Becca said. ‘Can he finish his drink first?’
‘Oh, come inside, you two lovebirds,’ Mrs Devlin said, kissing Bill on both cheeks, and taking him by the arm. She shot a look at her husband. ‘It’s so hot out here.’
Mrs Devlin allowed Bill to dawdle behind, talking to her husband, but she didn’t let go of Becca until she had steered her to the seat next to her own. It was a table for twelve, all lawyers at the firm and a smattering of the wives, although quite a few of the men seemed to be single, or at least alone.
Becca could guess the identity of some of them from the shoptalk that Bill had brought home. The Asian woman instructing the waiters in Shanghainese must be Nancy Deng. The tired-looking Englishman sitting by himself and staring sadly into the middle distance had to be Mad Mitch, who apparently was not long for this firm. She only recognised Shane, and he grinned at her and said her name, and she was touched that he remembered, as he raised a glass of Tsingtao in his meaty fist.
‘Where did they put you, dear?’ Mrs Devlin said, as an assortment of languages buzzed over the steaming bowls of shark’s fin soup.
‘Gubei New Area,’ Becca said, smiling across at Mad Mitch, who had accidentally made eye contact. He looked startled at this gesture of warmth.
‘Gubei?’ Mrs Devlin smiled her approval, and Becca saw that she had been a beauty. And she still was, if you got past the hard, glossy veneer and the professional charm and the effects of the booze. ‘Lovely, isn’t it? Good schools. We were in Gubei for the first two years when we came over.’ A drink was placed before Mrs Devlin and she turned viciously on the waitress. ‘I said Amaretto with no ice. This is Amaretto with ice. Americans and Germans may drink Amaretto with ice, but I am neither an American nor a bloody German. I am English. And we do not need to have every drink so full of ice that we can’t taste it. Take this away and bring me what I ordered.’ Mrs Devlin turned back to Becca, all smiles again. ‘So how is it? Have you settled in yet?’
Lost for words, Becca watched the young waitress walk away with the offending Amaretto. Then she looked back at Tess Devlin, and tried to put it into words. ‘It’s different. I was expecting – I don’t even know what I was expecting. Temples and teahouses, I suppose. Conrad and Kipling. I had this romantic image of Shanghai. I have it still, I guess. The taste of the East on my face…Silly, really.’
Mrs Devlin patted her hand, as if to say that it was not silly at all.
‘I lived abroad as a child,’ Becca said. ‘I love London, but England is hardly my home, not the way it is for Bill. So I can’t be one of those expats that tries to recreate the old country. You know -ordering Marmite online and buying the latest comedy DVDs and obsessing about football results.’ She picked up her big white soup spoon and contemplated it. ‘We have a beautiful apartment, a wonderful ayi, and Holly loves her school.’
Mrs Devlin pushed away her shark’s fin soup and lit a cigarette. ‘And the money’s good, isn’t it?’ she said, just the hint of a smile, the smoke streaming from her nostrils. ‘And it’s forty per cent tax for high earners in the UK, and only sixteen per cent in Hong Kong, where we cough up.’
‘The money’s very good indeed,’ Becca said, keen to show that she was sensitive to the realities of the working world. Sometimes she felt that she should keep Kipling and Conrad to herself.
Becca couldn’t tell this woman she had just met – this powerful, volatile, half-cut woman – the real problem. And the real problem was that she no longer saw her husband as much as she had in London, or as much as she would have liked, or as much as she needed. She missed him, and she couldn’t even mention it to Bill, because that would only be more pressure, and what could he possibly do about it? So Becca smiled brightly, the game younger wife. ‘I guess it just takes time to adjust,’ she said.
‘It’s not an equal opportunity city,’ Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. She sucked her cigarette, exhaled through her mouth now, her green eyes squinting in the Marlboro mist. ‘It’s very different for men and women. You’ll see that. Perhaps you’ve seen it already.’
Becca thought of the girls of Paradise Mansions coming out to meet the cars, and she wondered if Mrs Devlin had seen them too.
Tess Devlin leaned close to Becca. She smelled of Amaretto and cigarettes and Giorgio Armani. ‘I know it’s hard sometimes, but look at it this way,’ she continued. ‘A few years out here and the pair of you will be set up for life.’
A drink was placed before Mrs Devlin. Amaretto, no ice. Without acknowledging the waitress – taking what she had wanted all along as nothing more than her right, Becca thought – she cradled the glass in the palm of her hand, checking the temperature, shooting the waitress a withering look that said, Oh yes, I know that old trick, where you just fish the ice out and don’t bring me a fresh drink. Then she slowly sipped her drink, her genuinely fresh drink, giving Becca a conspiratorial look that said, They can’t fool me. The waitress vanished.
‘Oh yes, Gubei New Area is lovely,’ Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. ‘Dear old Gubei. You hardly know you’re in China at all.’
There was something wrong with the rest room. Bill felt it the moment he walked in. It appeared to be empty but – why was there a bucket and a mop in the corner? And what was that sound? What was going on in here?
He advanced with caution, his gaze shifting to the short row of cubicles. And that was strange too, because the doors were all ajar. But he could definitely hear someone. Someone who sounded as if they were trying to give birth.
Then Bill saw him. The old cleaner with his tattered trousers and filthy drawers around his ankles, sitting on the throne with the door flung open, grunting and groaning and straining, as if there wasn’t enough fibre in the world to free his strangled bowels.
He was in the furthest cubicle from the entrance, and perhaps that was his only nod towards decorum. For he considered Bill without a trace of embarrassment.
In fact Bill thought the man looked at him as though he was fresh off a British Airways flight from Heathrow, while he had been sitting there for a thousand years.
FIVE (#ulink_f45d275a-0f96-5e7a-91d5-74fec6aa6e86)
Bill stood at the window and watched the courtyard, waiting for Tiger to appear. A large black BMW with an elderly man at the wheel stood by with its engine running. A young woman in glasses came out of the opposite block and walked smiling towards the car and the man, who could only be her father. I recognise her, Bill thought. The librarian. So we are not the only ones. There are other regular people here, too.
‘Daddy? Daddy?’ His daughter’s voice, high and demanding. ‘Do you know what planet we’re on, Daddy?’
Bill had worked out that the silver Porsche came for the tall girl on Wednesday and Friday nights. It was there most Sunday afternoons. There were also sporadic visits during the week, delivering her back to Paradise Mansions early in the morning, or collecting her at strange hours. Her husband, he thought. Yeah, right.
Bill wondered what excuses the man told his wife. Maybe he didn’t tell her anything. Maybe he didn’t need to make excuses. Maybe that was the way it worked out here.
‘Daddy?’ Tugging at his sleeve now. He looked down at Holly and smiled, his fingertips touching her face. ‘Do you know what planet we’re on, Daddy?’
She was holding up a complicated contraption of string and wool and balls and cardboard for his inspection. Doris the ayi stood behind her, smiling proudly.
‘Made at school,’ the ayi said. ‘Very clever. Very genius.’
Bill looked carefully at the dangling strings and balls.
‘It’s the planets,’ Holly explained.
‘It’s really beautiful, angel,’ Bill said, studying the contraption more closely. In her matchstick fingers, his daughter held a champagne cork. Blue wool came from the cork and passed through a paper plate that had been painted black and embellished with sticky gold stars. Below the plate, which he now recognised represented the night sky, or perhaps infinite space, the wool dropped to hold a collection of different-sized painted balls revolving around a large orange cardboard sun.
One little finger pointed to a yellow ball with a wavering purple ring daubed around it. ‘That’s Saturn,’ Holly said confidently. She touched the smallest ball. ‘Pluto – furthest from the sun.’ A larger red ball. ‘Mars, of course.’ She turned her shining blue eyes up at her father. ‘I was going to use yellow cardboard for the sun but…um…I used orange instead.’
‘Personally, I think orange is even better,’ Bill said. ‘That’s just my opinion.’
‘And this is us,’ Holly said, touching a green-and-blue ball. ‘That’s earth. That’s where we are…and guess what, Daddy.’
‘What, darling?’ Did he know that much about the planets when he was four? He didn’t think so. In fact, he didn’t know that much about the planets at thirty-one.
‘The brightest stars you can see are already dead,’ she said confidently. ‘We see their image, and they look nice and lovely, but they died a long time ago.’
The brightest stars were dead already? Could this possibly be true? He didn’t know if he should correct her or not. She knew far more than he did.
‘It’s just something I learned,’ Holly said.
The ayi ushered her off to brush her teeth before going to school, and Bill heard Becca in the bedroom on the phone to her father. He glanced at his watch. Breakfast time in Shanghai meant that it was around midnight back home.
Becca called her father almost every day. Bill felt a pang of guilt, because he hadn’t phoned his own father since they’d arrived.
Perhaps he should give the old man a call, he thought, and immediately dismissed the idea. They wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Or they would get into one of their pointless rows about nothing, hang up angry, and that would be even worse.
It was different when his mother was still alive. They were a real family then. But they had stopped being a real family fifteen years ago. Bill and his father tried hard, but they both knew that it was doomed to failure. Two men couldn’t be a family. There were just not enough of them, there was no centre, no heart, and there were too many rough edges. Too much testosterone, too many rows. Everything and nothing proved reason for an argument, and then Bill was out of the house and off to university, working in the holidays and weekends because he had to, it was the only way he could afford to stick it, and because he didn’t want to go home. It made him feel desperately sad to admit it.
Get the old man out here, Bill thought as down in the courtyard the limo appeared and Tiger pulled up behind the silver Porsche. Yes, get the old man out here for a few weeks. Show him the sights. Let him spend some quality time with his granddaughter, who he loved to bits. That would work.
His feeling that family life had ended forever didn’t change until he met Becca six years later. It was Becca who made him believe that he had a chance to belong to another family. He fell in love with her the night he met her, and it was like starting all over again.
Bill turned as Holly and the ayi came back into the room. His daughter still had the home-made universe in her hands and he smiled at her and got down on his knees to better admire the intricate design.
That’s what love is, he thought, as down in the courtyard came the sound of a Porsche 911 pulling away. A chance to start again.
For five years, between the age of eleven and sixteen, Becca and Alice Greene had been best friends.
It was one of those delirious all-consuming friendships of childhood, gloriously isolationist, a time of shared secrets and energetic recklessness – one night Alice had pierced Becca’s ears with a needle that she had heated over a candle, and it was a bloodbath that they laughed about for years. But it was the kind of friendship that was always slightly out of whack.
They were both boarders at a school in Buckinghamshire, a grim Gothic building surrounded by lush wooded hills, like a setting from a fairy tale. When their friendship began they had dressed the same, and wore their hair in the same fashion, and both said they wanted to be journalists when they grew up. Naturally they loved it when their schoolmates and their teachers said that they looked like twins. Yet they were not twins.
Becca’s father made a decent living at Reuters, but the school would have been out of reach without a scholarship, while Alice’s family owned a string of restaurants on Boat Quay in Singapore, and Alice had that easy confidence that comes from growing up with money that you haven’t earned.
The largesse was one-sided – Becca enjoyed family holidays in Bali with Alice and her parents, shopping sprees in Hong Kong courtesy of Alice’s credit card, first-class flights to Singapore during the long summer break. Singy, Alice called it, and before she was twelve years old, Becca was calling it Singy too. Coming down to Singy, Bec? So when Becca learned that Alice was working as a freelance journalist in Shanghai, it felt like the best news in the world.
Alice turned up just before Holly’s bedtime and when the two women embraced, fifteen years fell away.
The pair of them bathed Holly together, the child chatting excitedly at this admiring stranger, Alice making awestruck cooing sounds at Holly’s beauty and newness, and Becca couldn’t help feeling happy that perhaps she had restored some of the balance in their friendship. Now she had a child, a husband and a home, it felt like Alice wasn’t the one who held a majority share in the good life.
When Holly was sleeping, Becca fetched a bottle of white wine from the fridge and carried it to where Alice was standing by the window.
‘You’re not writing any more?’ Alice said, quite casually, although Becca felt the words press against some sensitive nerve.
‘No. I’m looking after Holly, mostly.’ She started telling the story of Holly’s asthma attack in London, and Alice nodded and looked concerned, but Becca cut it short and poured their wine. It sounded like an excuse, and it wasn’t. It was a reason. ‘Anyway, there’s lots to do around here,’ she said. Why the hell should she apologise for giving up work? ‘What brought you to Shanghai, Al? I thought you’d be in Hong Kong or Singy.’
Alice grimaced, and Becca smiled. She could see the ghost of the girl Alice had been at eleven, twelve, thirteen. Spoilt, generous, dead easy to love.
‘You know what it’s like for stringers,’ Alice said. They clinked glasses and grinned at each other. ‘Cheers. We have to follow the story.’ Alice sighed. ‘And the story they all want these days is the China dream. You know the thing – How China is reshaping our world. One billion new capitalists. The great China gold rush.’ Alice looked out of the window. ‘They – all the Western news outlets -want you to report the miracle.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s not all banana daiquiris at M on the Bund.’
‘How do you mean?’ Becca sipped her wine and felt a pang of foreboding. She really wanted them to have a good time tonight. Just get a bit drunk and talk for hours and feel that nothing had changed.
‘I mean the principal reason the economy keeps growing is because foreign idiots want to invest here,’ Alice said, and Becca recalled how impatient her friend could be with slowness and stupidity. There were girls at their school who were terrified of her. ‘No Western CEO wants to go down as the man who missed China,’ Alice said. ‘But how can it be an economic miracle when five hundred million Chinese are living on less than a dollar a day? By the middle of the century China will have a bigger economy than the US. And you know what? They will still have five hundred million people getting by on a dollar a day. It stinks. The whole thing.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nice wine,’ she said.
‘But a lot of them are leaving poverty behind, aren’t they?’ Becca said gently. ‘I mean, that’s what Bill’s boss always says.’
‘Some of them,’ Alice conceded. ‘A few million or so. But the Chinese deserve an affluence that’s worth having – clean water, not empty skyscrapers; rule of law, not back-handers; uncensored news, not broadband porn. They need education, democracy, a free press – not propaganda and Prada bags and traffic jams full of local-made Audis.’
‘I thought it would be more like Hong Kong,’ Becca admitted. ‘Or Hong Kong the way we knew it. You know – day trips out to the islands, weekends on somebody’s junk, Sunday lunch at Aberdeen.’
Alice laughed. ‘You make it sound idyllic.’
‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’ Becca said defiantly.
‘But it’s not Hong Kong,’ Alice said, her smile fading. ‘Shanghai has always been mainland China. You can forget all that Paris-of-the-Orient stuff. The Anglos never made Shanghai their own the way they did Hong Kong.’
‘Anyway,’ Becca said, feeling that she had been too sentimental and revealed too much, and that Alice must think she was some sad old housewife dreaming of better days. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. Another drink?’ she asked her old friend.
The two of them looked down at the courtyard. Gleaming cars were waiting with their engines running. The traffic was sparser than at the weekend, but there was a steady stream of young women getting into very new cars with older men at the wheel.
‘It’s very exciting,’ Becca said brightly, wanting to lighten the mood. She was so glad to see her friend. She wanted them to have a great time, just like the old days. ‘I think we’ve moved into some kind of knocking shop.’
‘Not a knocking shop.’ Alice smiled, and Becca saw she was happy for the chance to show off her local knowledge, eager to keep all the power for herself. ‘Becca, Paradise Mansions is a niaolong – a birdcage. There are a lot of them here in Gubei. Maybe even more of them in Hongqiao. The girls are called jinseniao – canaries.’
Becca’s blue eyes were wide. ‘So it’s true, then? These girls are all…prostitutes?’
Alice shook her head emphatically.
‘No – they only sleep with one guy. It’s all quite moral, in a twisted sort of way.’
Becca stared down at the courtyard.
‘I get it,’ she said. ‘They are all some rich man’s mistress.’
‘They’re not even really mistresses,’ Alice said. ‘It’s closer to second wives. I wrote a story about it. These women fall in love. Have children. Do a lot of laundry, if the guy is from out of town. It’s not a glamour profession, Bec. They live a normal, domestic life while waiting for the man to dump the number one wife. Which invariably he doesn’t – although I suppose it has happened. It can be quite a chaotic existence. Status can change overnight. The guy gets bored. Or his wife finds out. Or the canary gets caught enjoying her own bit on the side. Or the guy takes one too many Viagra and dies on the job.’
Becca nearly choked on her Chablis.
‘Don’t laugh, you heartless cow, it happens!’ Alice said. ‘These women are the modern concubines. The man is often from out of town – Hong Kong, Singy, Taiwan. A lot of overseas Chinese. They set the woman up in a flat, stay there when they’re in Shanghai. A lot of Taiwanese. Taibazi, the girls call them – which sort of means Taiwanese hicks from the Taiwanese sticks. They badmouth the Taiwanese, but most of the girls prefer the out-of-towners.’
Becca cradled her drink. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Because they stay the night,’ Alice said, looking down at the courtyard. ‘Makes them feel more like a real wife, I guess.’ She smiled at her old friend. ‘You tell me, Bec. What does a real wife feel like?’
Becca just smiled.
Alice gestured at the courtyard with her glass. ‘Most of these guys all look like locals. Nobody in Taiwan or Hong Kong dresses as badly as that. But think about it. The man is spared the agony of looking for company in the bars, and the woman – who invariably grew up in unimaginable poverty – gets security. For herself and her family. At least for as long as it lasts, which can be years.’
‘A marriage of convenience,’ Becca said.
‘More like a meaningful relationship between sex and economics,’ Alice said.
‘I guess it goes on everywhere,’ Becca said, trying to sound worldly, trying not to look alarmed. Somehow prostitution would have been easier to understand.
‘These women can make a few thousand RMB a month in a normal job, if they’re lucky,’ Alice said. ‘Or they can live next door to you and Bill. Using what they’ve got to get what they want. Very pragmatic. Very Chinese. And this city is full of them.’
Buzzing between the larger cars was the red Mini Cooper. Of course, Becca thought. The tall girl stuck in the wrong gear.
‘There’s money here, all right,’ Alice said. ‘But Shanghai is a distorting mirror. Go to the countryside. Half of the kids there have never seen the inside of a school.’
Out of the child monitor came the sound of crying, and Becca left Alice brooding at the window. Perhaps she was trying much too hard to recapture their old friendship. Perhaps she should enjoy her own company a bit more, Becca thought as she took the half-sleeping Holly in her arms. And the company of her child in the hours between school and bed, and the company of her husband on Sunday and sometimes part of Saturday. Married people shouldn’t have this desperate need for friends, Becca thought.
But when Holly had settled Becca went back to the living room and found Alice smiling as if something had just come back to her.
‘Hey Bec,’ she said. ‘Remember when I pierced your ears?’
They couldn’t practise law in China.
That was the joke played on the Western lawyer in Shanghai, and Shane liked to mention it whenever the clock was creeping close to midnight and the lights were going out all over Pudong and they were sipping their cold coffee at desks still crowded with paperwork.
It said Foreign Lawyer on their business cards, because it was different for foreigners. If you were a foreign lawyer working for a foreign firm in Shanghai, the People’s Republic of China restricted you to the role of legal representative and kept you in your place. Even a Chinese lawyer like Nancy Deng could not practise PRC law at a foreign firm and was designated PRC lawyer, non-practising. Butterfield, Hunt and West had to get all their Chinese contracts rubber-stamped by some tame local lawyer.
But despite not being real lawyers in the eyes of the PRC, most nights the endless bureaucracy of doing business in China kept Bill in the office until he was too tired to see straight, and too full of caffeine to contemplate sleep.
‘For blokes who can’t practise law here,’ Shane said, ‘we sure are busy little buggers.’ He yawned and stretched, and sat on Bill’s desk, squashing a stack of files marked Department of Land and Resources. ‘Enough for one night, mate. More than enough. Let’s get a beer.’
A beer sounded good. Bill knew that Becca and Holly would have gone to bed hours ago. Now that he was sleeping in the second bedroom so as not to disturb them when he came back late, and when he left for work early, it didn’t really matter when he got home. A little unwinding sounded like just what he needed.
‘I’m going to tell you how it works out here,’ Shane shouted, raising his voice above a song that Bill couldn’t quite place. Something about making things more complicated. ‘I’m going to tell you what we call the Kai Tak rules, okay?’
‘The what?’
‘The Kai Tak rules. Pay attention. The Kai Tak rules are very important.’
They were in a place called Suzy Too. ‘Everybody comes to Suzy Too,’ Shane said. It was loud, smoky, crowded beyond belief. There was a dance floor in one corner, although people were dancing all over the place, including on the bars.
There were young Chinese men with dyed blond hair and Western women in jeans and T-shirts and Western men in stained polo shirts or business suits with their ties hanging off and Chinese women in short skirts or qipao or jeans that said Juicy on the back. Lots of them.
A woman pulled at Bill’s sleeve. She looked hungry. She tapped in some numbers on her mobile phone and showed it to him. It said 1000.
‘One thousand RMB,’ Shane said, taking Bill’s other sleeve. ‘That’s about £70.’
‘But eight hundred is okay,’ the woman said. She blinked, dazed by the smoke and exhaustion.
Bill stared at the handset, trying to understand.
‘Are you looking for a permanent girlfriend?’ she asked him.
Bill had pushed his face close to her, just to hear what she was saying. Now he reared back. ‘I’m married.’
The woman took this in her stride. ‘Yes, but are you looking for a permanent girlfriend?’
‘No thank you,’ Bill said, aware that he sounded as though he was declining a second cucumber sandwich at the vicar’s tea party.
Shane put a cold bottle of Tsingtao in his hand.
‘You know Kai Tak?’ the Australian said. ‘No? Kai Tak was the old airport in Hong Kong. Kowloon side. Your missus said she visited the Big Noodle as a kid. She would remember it. Before your time, mate.’ Shane’s free hand, the one that wasn’t holding a Tsingtao, impersonated a plane making an erratic landing. ‘Where you came in through the blocks of flats hanging their laundry on the balconies and you would often land with someone’s pants wrapped around your neck. Sometimes your own.’ He winked, clinking bottles with Bill. ‘And that’s the point.’
The woman with the mobile phone said something in Chinese as she draped an arm around Bill’s shoulders, an act more of weariness than desire.
‘You’re beautiful,’ Shane told Bill.
‘Who says that?’ Bill asked. ‘You or her?’
‘Her,’ Shane said. ‘To me, you’re just about cute.’
The woman turned to Bill and said something, her eyes half-closed.
‘She loves you,’ Shane said.
Bill stared at her. ‘But we just met,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ the woman said in English, leaning against him. ‘I have financial issues.’
Shane laughed, said something in Shanghainese and she turned away with a shrug. Then he looked quickly at Bill. ‘You didn’t want her, did you?’
Bill just stared at him. He managed to shake his head. Shane leaned in. This was important. This was crucial.
‘Kai Tak rules means that we never talk about what happens when we are on an adventure, okay?’ he continued. ‘Kai Tak rules mean omerta. It means loose lips sink ships.’ Shane gently prodded a thick finger against Bill’s heart. ‘Kai Tak rules means keep your cakehole shut, mate. You do not talk about it with your wife, your girlfriend, or the married stiff in the office. Whatever we get up to, you do not confess to Devlin, you do not boast to Mad Mitch. It’s the first rule of Fight Club. You do not talk about Fight Club – right? What happens on tour stays on tour.’
‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ Bill said. But he sort of knew. Already there was the first glimmer of understanding.
It was different out here.
There was an eruption on the dance floor. Notes had started to fall from the sky. They looked up and saw one of their German clients – not the old rock and roller but the other one, Jurgen, the conservative-looking one – grinning foolishly from the DJ box. He was throwing his cash away with both hands, making a Papal gesture every time he released a fistful of RMB, as though he was blessing the crowd.
‘This will all end in tears,’ Shane predicted, as the dancers fought each other to get at the cash, which drifted slowly to the dance floor before it was seized upon by leggy Chinese girls in qipao and sweating Western businessmen.
Two women wrapped their arms around Bill’s waist, laughing and sighing and smiling as if they had mistaken him for Brad Pitt on an off night. Shane made a slight motion with his head and they went and did exactly the same thing to a small bald Frenchman who was slumped at the bar. He was about sixty-five and they acted like they had mistaken him for George Clooney. Bill stared at Suzy Too with appalled wonder.
‘Does this go on every night?’
Shane nodded. ‘And some say that Shanghai’s commitment to late nights shows just how few people in this city really have serious business in the morning,’ he said. He swigged Tsingtao. ‘They may well be right.’
A woman with wild eyes and a Louis Vuitton handbag was dancing on a table, slowly moving her narrow hips, looking at the mirror on the wall, lost in herself. Another woman, all sinewy length and hardened flesh, no waste, was out on the floor, laughing as she eased herself into a scrum of businessmen clumping their feet to some thirty-year-old rock song.
Bill was certain that he had seen both of them at Paradise Mansions in the scrum of women who had gathered around the stalled red Mini. And, now he came to think of it, the one with the mobile phone looked familiar too. But it was not easy to tell who was touting for trade and who was just out on the town.
‘Are these women all prostitutes?’ Bill said.
Shane thought about it. ‘It’s prostitution with Chinese characteristics,’ he said, looking up at Jurgen the German in the DJ box. The money was all gone but Jurgen was still standing up there with that foolish grin, as if he had made some kind of point. ‘There goes Jurgen’s profit margin for the last fiscal quarter,’ Shane said. ‘Prat.’ He nodded at the laughing girls at the bar. They were stroking the Frenchman’s head and cackling. ‘I know those two. They’re teachers. Mathematics and Chinese. They’re just making a little money on the side for their designer handbags and glad-rags. Prostitutes? That seems a little harsh, mate. That seems a little brutal. Some of them are just here to dance the night away. They’re as innocent as you and me. Well – you. The Paradise Mansions girls are saving themselves for the right man – even if he is married to someone else. That’s the theory – at Paradise Mansions they are all good little second wives – although of course they do have a lot of lonely nights. The others, they just want their small taste of the economic miracle that they’ve seen on TV, and they can’t get that on what a bloody teacher earns, which is, oh, a few peanuts above nothing.’ He thoughtfully chugged down his Tsingtao.
‘And the authorities just condone all this, do they?’ said Bill. He knew he sounded like a prude. He knew the tone was all wrong. He liked Shane. He wanted to understand. But the world was turned upside down. Commercial sex was not morally reprehensible out here. It was a career option, or a part-time job, or something a teacher did when she should have been marking homework.
‘Not at all,’ Shane said. ‘When they hear about it the authorities are shocked – shocked! Let’s see – year before last we were all in Julu Lu. Last year we were all in Maoming Nan Lu. Now we’re in – where are we now? Oh yeah – Tong Ren Lu. Next year we’ll be somewhere else. Every now and again, the authorities get tough and move us a block down the road. That’s China.’
A skinny woman in her middle thirties danced herself between Bill and Shane, her arms above her head, a smile splitting her face. She was ten years older than most of the women in here, but in better shape. It was the one who looked like a dancer. She was a beauty, Bill could see that, but the beauty had been worn down by time and disappointment. You would not mind growing old with a woman who looked like that, just as long as you met her early enough. For he could not help believing that some man or some men long gone had had the best of her, and he thought that was a terrible thing to believe about anyone. But he could not help it. She was smiling in his face.
‘This one won’t dance,’ Shane told her. ‘Please don’t ask as refusal can cause offence.’
‘I teach,’ she said. ‘I give lessons.’ She had an improbable French accent. Teech, she said. I geeff. She actually spoke English with a French accent. How did that happen? Shane said something in Chinese and she shrugged and danced away, giving Bill a little wave. He watched her go, with a pang of regret. Shane laughed.
‘Forget about that one if you’re looking to get your end away,’ he said. ‘You get all sorts in here, mate. That one’s a taxi dancer who’ll boogie all night but that’s it. She dances with men for money and then goes home alone to Paradise Mansions. A taxi dancer in the twenty-first century! Strange but true. Then there are the pro-ams.’ He gestured his empty beer bottle towards the teachers. ‘Shanghai is completely unregulated. It’s not like other parts of Asia. Not like Manila. Not like Bangkok. Not like Tokyo. The women in here don’t work for the bar. They’re punters, like you and me. They work for themselves. Like the great Deng Xiaoping said, “To get rich is glorious.” But don’t think they’re promiscuous. It’s not that. They’re just practical, it’s just too hard a place to not be practical. Hard for them, that is – not hard for the likes of us. China’s not a hardship posting for you and me, mate. Don’t listen to what those whining expats tell you – mostly Poms, mate. No offence intended.’
‘None taken,’ Bill said, sipping his beer. Maybe he should be getting back. Maybe he should have gone straight home. His suit was going to reek of cigarette smoke.
‘China is an easy place to live because everything is on a clear financial basis,’ Shane said. ‘It’s only complicated if you choose to make it so.’
Then the woman with the mobile phone was back, yanking at Bill’s sleeve, giving him a gentle shove and as he turned to her he saw that peculiarly Shanghainese gesture for the very first time -the thumb and the index finger rubbed together, followed by the open palm.
Give me money, mister.
He would see that gesture a thousand times before he left this city. They might have four thousand years of civilisation behind them, but they weren’t too big on please and thank you.
In her free hand the woman was holding a photograph of a small, unsmiling boy. He was about the same age as Holly.
Bill fumbled with his wallet and gave her a 50-RMB note. She stared at it for a moment and then turned away with a disgusted snort.
‘They don’t take fifties,’ Shane laughed, putting an arm around him. ‘There’s a minimum payment of one hundred, even if you’re just being nice.’
‘How the hell can there be a minimum payment for being nice?’ Bill said.
‘Because their motto is “Haven’t you got anything bigger?”’ Shane said. He slapped Bill on the back. He was happy that Bill was here. Bill had the sense that despite living on a beauty mountain, his colleague had been lonely. ‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ Shane said. ‘And then you’ll find you’re in the closest place to heaven.’
‘Yeah,’ Bill said bleakly. ‘Poverty is a great aphrodisiac.’ He watched the woman with the son and the mobile phone being ignored by a group of young tourists.
‘That’s right,’ Shane happily agreed. ‘And don’t forget – Kai Tak rules.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Bill said, suddenly irritated by Shane’s assumptions, and by all of the big Australian’s unearned intimacy. ‘I can keep my mouth shut. But I’ve got a wife and kid at home.’
Shane frowned, genuinely perplexed. ‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’
Bill looked at the skinny dancer. She waved at him. She was too old to be in here, he thought. But then everybody in here was the wrong age. Too young, too old. He looked away. ‘So I’m not going to be playing around,’ he said, not caring what he sounded like.
But Shane just studied the golden glow of his Tsingtao and said nothing.
And then Jurgen was asking them for cab fare, because he had thrown all his cash away, the stupid bastard, and Bill was looking at his watch and Shane was shouting for just one more round, just one more, come on, Bill, you’re not like the rest of those miserable Poms, and Bill agreed, he wasn’t like the rest of them, those pampered private school wankers, and then suddenly it was three o’clock in the morning and they were having one absolutely last drink, a nightcap, you have to have a fucking nightcap, mate, in a dive Shane knew where a Filippino band did songs by Pink and Avril Lavigne, and some other girl was showing Bill a picture of her daughter and Bill was pulling out his wallet to show her a picture of Holly, and giving her a 100-RMB note, and then giving her another one, and then another, and wishing her luck and telling her that she was a wonderful mother, and Shane was singing along to ‘Complicated’ in his hearty Melbourne baritone and then huddling with Bill in a cramped red leather booth somewhere else and saying, But there are just so many of them, Bill, just so many women in the world – how can you ever choose the special one, how can you ever really know? just before the two teachers turned up, bombed out of their brains and calling loudly for more mojitos all round, and they stumbled off into what was left of the night with Shane sandwiched between them, all laughing happily, as though it was the most innocent thing in the world.
Then Bill was all alone in the tree-lined streets of the French Concession in the soft milky light that precedes dawn in Shanghai, unable to find a cab in the city where they say you can always find a cab, and one solitary street hawker was going to work, setting up his sad little display of cigarettes on the pavement, and on the far side of the street Bill saw a small hotel with a lone taxi parked outside, the driver asleep at the wheel.
Bill paused to let a tow truck rumble past, and on the back of it he saw there was a red Mini Cooper, and although the front half of it was smashed like a broken accordion, the guts of its ruined engine spilling out and the windscreen shattered, the front wheels just ragged strips of mangled metal and rubber, he could clearly make out the undamaged roof with its flag of the People’s Republic of China, the red and yellow glinting in the light of the new day.
SIX (#ulink_07170b7b-b258-5769-a683-77d2f97fe34c)
Most days he didn’t bother with lunch.
The only excuse for lunch was entertaining clients. Otherwise there was no real need to ever leave his desk. There was an old ayi who wheeled a trolley through the office, the Shanghai equivalent of a tea lady, and she sold sandwiches and noodles, coffee and green cha. But Bill liked to get out of the building in the middle of the day, just so he could stretch limbs that had been still for too long and breathe some air that wasn’t chilled by air conditioning, even if it was just for fifteen minutes.
There was a coffee shop near their building and at noon he headed towards it, inhaling the weather, smelling the river, when suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed his tie.
‘Off to lunch?’ Becca said, pulling him into a doorway. She pressed her mouth against his face, a recklessly aimed kiss that he felt on his lips and cheek.
‘Lunch?’ he said, as if he had never heard of such a thing. She kissed him again, full on the mouth this time. ‘I thought I might get a sandwich.’
‘Oh,’ she laughed, pressing herself against him, feeling his instant response and loving it. ‘That doesn’t sound like much for a growing boy like you. Let me tell you about today’s specials.’
She pulled him deeper into the doorway, kissing him harder, fingers in his hair. It was cool and dark. He looked around and was vaguely aware that they were in the entrance to a condemned building that was being torn down to make way for more office space. Men in white shirts and dark ties passed by with their briefcases and their coffee cups, giving them the occasional glance. Bill swung her around so that she was pinned against the wall and he had his back to the street.
‘You’re nuts,’ he said, and he looked at her face, so close that he could feel her breath. ‘I missed you,’ he said, and hugged her as hard as he dared.
It had been three days since the firm’s dinner on the Bund and they hadn’t seen each other since. Too many late nights when he had arrived home after Becca and Holly had gone to bed, and too many early mornings when he had quietly let himself out of the apartment while they were still sleeping.
‘Do we know each other?’ Becca said, her hands on his arms, squeezing, her eyes half-closed, her mouth smiling. He pulled her close and kissed her, holding her as if he would never let her get away.
‘Oh,’ she said, and she could feel how much he had missed her. ‘I remember you.’
And he remembered her too.
Shane squinted at Bill through a ferocious hangover. ‘How am I looking, mate?’
They were in the show home on the Green Acres site in Yangdong, sitting by a fountain in the shape of a dragon’s head that wasn’t working yet. On the drive north Tiger had stopped the car three times so that Shane could stumble off into some scrubby bushes.
‘You look better,’ Bill said. ‘You’re getting some colour back in your face.’
Shane exhaled. ‘That’s good.’
‘But the colour is green,’ Bill said.
‘That’s not so good,’ Shane said. ‘Bad thing about a threesome is that one of them always ends up staring out the window. Puts you right off your stroke, mate.’ He brightened slightly, his beefy face turning a lighter shade of green. ‘But the good thing about a threesome is that even if one drops out, then you’re still having sex with someone.’
Bill had got back to the office to find that Devlin was sending a team to Yangdong. Chairman Sun had called a snap press conference and their clients at DeutscherMonde were nervous. Who knew what he might say if the Burgundy and Sprite started to flow? Bill looked up as Nancy Deng came through the front door with one of the Germans, the long-haired one in a leather jacket, Wolfgang, the one who looked like a mechanic who had won the Lottery.
‘Here he comes,’ Nancy said.
Shane and Bill stood up as Chairman Sun entered the show home, flanked by a delegation from the local government and a dozen members of the media.
At a discreet distance, Bill, Shane and Nancy Deng followed with their anxious German as Sun led the press pack through gleaming rooms, down sweeping staircases, under crystal chandeliers and round an Olympian swimming pool, talking in Shanghainese all the while. His bodyguard, Ho, that slab of a man, was never far from his side.
At that lunch Bill had pegged the Chairman as one of those men who rise to the top by keeping their mouths shut, but clearly when he did open up, he was a man who was accustomed to being listened to, even without the presence of a translator.
The journalists were all Chinese apart from two Shanghai-based Westerners. One of them was a razor-thin American woman in Jimmy Choos, and the other was Alice Greene. She smiled at Bill, whom she had not seen since his wedding day, and he nodded back.
In his experience journalists were rarely good news for lawyers.
They were going outside. Chairman Sun led the way out of the show home and Bill thought it was like stepping out of a Las Vegas hotel on to the surface of the moon.
As far as the eye could see, the bleak landscape was mud, churned by construction work and the summer rain. The farms had long been bulldozed and the barren fields where the new houses would stand were already partitioned, ropes staking out the plots of land, parcelling out the future. There was a cop on the door of the show home, a young Public Security Bureau policewoman with a fading love bite on her neck. As they filed outside Bill saw that there was security everywhere, although it was not easy to tell where the private guards ended and the PSB state police began.
There was something curiously martial about the site. Inside the wire that staked out the development there was a long, orderly line of snout-nosed trucks with red flags fluttering on their bonnets. Men in bright yellow hard hats swarmed between orange diggers adding to the piles of earth, their lights flashing in the mist. Everywhere there were patches of water with an oily, rainbow-coloured sheen, and on the far side of the wire, like a defeated army corralled into a POW camp, the farmers and their families stood watching.
The lawn had yet to be laid outside the show home and the woman in Jimmy Choos began to topple backwards as her heels sank into the mud. Bill caught her and she flashed him a professional smile.
‘I’m from Shanghai Chic,’ she said, holding on to him for support. ‘Where are you from? Isn’t this hilarious? We’re doing a big piece.’
On the far side of the wire, a few bored-looking security men were attempting to move the villagers on. But they didn’t want to move and began to argue with the guards. Then the dispute suddenly erupted into fury, the kind of hysterical, almost tearful scene that Bill had seen break out without warning on the streets of Shanghai. Press the wrong nerve, he thought, and all at once these people go ballistic.
He watched as a grubby-faced boy of about twelve drew back from the wire, and picked up something from the ground. He hefted it in his hand – a broken brick, discarded by the builders – and then threw it high and hard in the direction of the palace that had appeared on their land. The brick fell short, but they all turned to look as it clattered against the show home’s cast-iron gates.
Orders were barked and the villagers took off across the field with the security guards on their tail. Bill saw that Ho had disconnected himself from Chairman Sun’s side and was with them.
‘Hilarious,’ said the woman from Shanghai Chic. ‘Isn’t this hilarious?’
The boy who had thrown the brick paused by a neat stack of fresh bricks and began hurling them at the chasing pack. An old man joined him, one of those wiry old Chinese men without a gram of fat on his body, and Ho and the security guards hid behind a bulldozer as the bricks rained down. Then they started throwing the bricks back.
Bill shook his head. ‘It’s like a medieval battle,’ he said.
‘China is a medieval country,’ Shane said. ‘A medieval country with broadband.’ He looked across at the press delegation. ‘We should put a stop to this, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s not good in front of journalists. Even tame journalists.’
‘I’ll deal with it,’ Bill said. ‘You get Tiger.’ He began walking towards the press pack. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you would care to step back inside, Chairman Sun will take questions.’
But nobody was listening. They were watching the guards chasing the old man and the boy across the open mud flats. The old man was too slow, and when he fell the guards were immediately on him, lifting him by his arms. The boy had stopped, uncertain if he should run or fight, and then they had him too. As Ho barked instructions, the guards began hauling them back to the show home.
‘Hello, Bill,’ Alice smiled. ‘Going to get rich in China?’
Bill smiled along with her. ‘That’s the plan,’ he said, watching the security guards. They were taking the old man and the boy to the PSB. That’s what they were going to do, he saw. Turn them over to the law. The cops had gone to the gates to meet them.
‘You know who’s going to get rich here?’ Alice said. ‘The Chinese. A few of them, anyway. Chairman Sun, for example. And some of his pals. You comfortable with that, Bill?’
He looked at her and said nothing. She was still holding her notepad in her hands. She may have been at his wedding, and she may have been his wife’s best friend when they were growing up, but she still looked like trouble. He began walking towards the gates. Alice followed him.
‘You’re an intelligent man,’ she said. ‘And I’m just curious to know what you think is happening here. Off the record.’
‘And what do you think is happening?’ he said, not breaking his stride. ‘On the record.’
Alice shrugged. ‘Looks like a standard land-grab to me. The new rich get their mansions. The local politicians get their cut. And the farmers get shafted.’
He stopped and stared at her. ‘You think these people are going to be robbed?’ he said, genuinely outraged. ‘Is that what you think is going to happen? I’ve seen the details of their compensation package.’
She laughed at him.
‘Just think about it,’ Alice said. They had all arrived at the gates at the same time. Ho and the guards were handing over the old man and the boy to the PSB. The old man looked resigned to his fate but the child looked terrified. ‘Until the mid-nineties all the land in China was owned by the People,’ Alice said. ‘And then suddenly it wasn’t. One day you woke up and the land your family had farmed for generations was owned by someone you had never met. And he wanted you out.’
‘These people are going to receive generous compensation packages,’ Bill said, watching one of the security guards shove the old man. That wasn’t right. They shouldn’t do that.
‘Don’t buy that, Bill. We both know that the money goes to the local government. Your friend Chairman Sun – is he going to see the farmers right, Bill?’
He ignored her. The security guards were conferring with the PSB cops as they gripped the arms of the old man and the boy. They were working out what to do with them. Bill hesitated, unsure if he should stick his nose in here.
‘Every foreigner who works in China has to learn the ostrich trick,’ Alice said. ‘You know what the ostrich trick is, Bill? It’s when you ignore what’s going on right in front of you.’
Ho suddenly got tired of all the chit-chat and punched the boy full in the face. The child went flying backwards and Bill watched him sprawl in the mud. For a moment Bill could not believe what he had seen. Then he was on Ho, pushing the larger man as hard as he could and not budging him, screaming in his face, telling him to leave the boy alone, let the police deal with it.
Bill helped the boy to his feet, trembling with shock and rage, and discovered that he had to keep holding him because the punch had knocked him senseless. There was blood on the boy’s lips and chin from a broken nose. Bill searched in his pockets for something to wipe it with and found nothing. Two of the PSB officers took the boy’s arms and eased him from Bill’s grip.
‘This is intolerable,’ Bill said, even though he knew they didn’t understand a word. His voice was shaking with emotion. ‘My company will not be a party to this, do you hear me?’
The PSB led the boy and the old man away. Ho chuckled and gestured at Bill with real amusement. The guards gawped at him with their infinite blankness. Bill looked up and saw Alice Greene offering him a Kleenex.
For the blood on his hands.
On the road back to Shanghai, Tiger had to swerve to miss a blue Ferrari coming in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road. As Tiger wrestled the limo across pockmarked gravel, Bill caught a glimpse of a boy and girl laughing behind their sunglasses.
‘Look at that,’ Shane said, placing a grateful hand on Tiger’s shoulder as the Ferrari weaved off in a cloud of dust. ‘There’s about fifty million of them driving around who were on bicycles last year.’
Tiger revved the engine, trying to ease the car out of a pothole. A family of peasant farmers, their skin black from the sun, sullenly watched them.
‘Very low,’ Tiger said. ‘Very low people.’
Nancy looked up. ‘I am from Yangdong,’ she said in English, but Tiger was fiddling with his climate control, and gave no sign that he had heard her.
Bill looked at Nancy and tried to remember her file. She had gone to two of the top colleges in the country – Tsinghua University Law School, then the University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. To get that kind of education, to become a lawyer after growing up in this dreary landscape – it told him that Alice Greene was wrong, and that Chinese ingenuity and hard work and intelligence would ultimately triumph over Chinese cruelty and corruption and stupidity.
That’s what it told him.
But he didn’t quite believe it.
Back at the firm, Devlin came into his office. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Bill.
‘I’m fine,’ Bill said.
‘I heard what happened. The boy and the old man.’ He shook his head. ‘Ugly business.’
‘Yes.’
‘But we can’t get squeamish here,’ Devlin said. Bill looked up at him and Devlin touched his arm. ‘I mean it. It’s better now than it’s ever been. You know that, don’t you? And it will get better. Change will come. Because of people like us.’
They stared out at the view. There were red lights on the peaks of the skyscrapers, and they seemed to wink in secret fraternity at the red lights of the discreet CCTV cameras in Bill’s office.
‘Do you know what I liked about you?’ Devlin said. ‘When we first met.’
‘My wife,’ Bill said, and Devlin laughed. ‘That’s what everyone likes best about me.’
‘What I liked about you was that you’re a lawyer, not a technician,’ Devlin said. ‘Lawyers solve problems. Lawyers can reason. Technicians – their mummy and daddy wanted them to be lawyers, so that’s what they do for forty years. Technicians know a snapshot of the law, from when they qualified. But they don’t feel it in their bones. They’re not real lawyers. They’re technicians. But you’re a lawyer. You see the law as social lubricant and not as a club. But you’re coming from a land where the law is used to protect rights, and you are living in a place where essentially the people have no rights. We’ve done nothing wrong here, you know that, don’t you?’
‘But those villagers,’ Bill said. ‘That boy…’
‘His family will be taken care of,’ Devlin insisted. ‘Look, Bill, you have to choose what you see here. You know what the China price is?’
‘Sure.’
The China price was the key to everything, even more important than the numbers. When foreign manufacturers had looked at every price offered by their suppliers, they demanded the China price – which was always the lowest price of all.
‘It means you can move any kind of operation to China, and get it all done cheaper.’
Devlin shook his head.
‘The real China price,’ Devlin said. ‘The real China price is the compromises we have to make to work here. Forget all that stuff about ancient civilisations. Forget all that propaganda about four thousand years of history. This country is still growing up. And some diseases it’s best to get when you are young.’
They stood together at the window and watched the sun set quickly. In the gathering darkness it suddenly seemed as if all of Pudong lit up at once, and the two men stared silently at the lights shining before them like the conqueror’s reward.
He was ready for home.
The trip to Yangdong had left him with dirt on his shoes and stains on his suit and the urgent need to crawl into bed next to Becca and just hold her for a while. Or perhaps she could come to his bed and then they would not have to worry about waking Holly and they could do more than just cuddle.
But Jurgen and Wolfgang were in Shane’s office when Bill was leaving, clearly agitated, expressing some concern in streams of German to each other, and broken English to their lawyer. Shane came out of his office and took Bill to one side.
‘They’re getting their lederhosen in a twist,’ Shane sighed. ‘Worried about what the hacks might write after today. Let’s buy them a couple of drinks and calm their nerves, mate. Tell them we’re all going to live happily ever after.’
‘I’ve really got to get home,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t see my wife. I don’t see my kid.’
‘One drink,’ Shane said. ‘They’re your Germans too, mate.’
‘All right,’ Bill said. ‘But just the one.’
There was an Irish bar on Tongren Lu called BB’s – Bejeebers-Bejaybers – run by a large Swede with absolutely no Irish blood whatsoever.
BB’s was always mobbed because you could get English football with Cantonese commentators from Star TV, Guinness on tap and live music by a band from Manila.
‘You see them all over Asia,’ Shane said, recovered from his hangover and ready for the night. ‘These Filippino bands with singers who can really sing and musicians who can really play. Maybe in the West they would have a record deal, or at least appear on some television talent show. Out here they play dives for the likes of us.’ He chugged down his Guinness and called for another. ‘You see it all the time.’
Bill stared at him. Because what you didn’t see all the time was Shane looking at a woman the way he was looking at the tiny Filippina singer who was leaning against her keyboard player’s back and giving a pitch-perfect rendition of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ by the Carpenters. She tossed back her waist-length hair, jet black but shot through with blonde highlights, and when she smiled it seemed to light up every dark corner of Bejeebers-Bejaybers. A little further down the bar, Wolfgang and Jurgen sipped their Guinnesses and stared up at her, the press forgotten.
‘Who is she?’ Bill said.
‘Rosalita,’ Shane said with real tenderness. ‘Rosalita and the Roxas Boulevard Boys.’
‘You know her?’ Bill asked. Shane looked as though he had thought about her a lot.
Shane looked at him. ‘I see you with your wife,’ he said, taking Bill by surprise. ‘I see you with Becca. Saw you together at that dinner. And I envy you, Bill.’ He turned his gaze back to the stage. ‘It can’t go on forever, can it? This life.’
Rosalita was doing an upbeat number now. She shook her hair, she flashed her luminous teeth, and she jiggled her tiny rump. The top of a lemon thong peeked above the waistband of her trousers, which were as tight as a wet suit. The Germans licked their lips.
‘She’s got a tattoo,’ Shane confessed, watching Bill warily to see how he would react to this news.
Bill shrugged. ‘Well, a lot of women have tattoos these days.’
‘Yeah, but her tattoo says Tom.’ Bill thought about it. ‘Who’s Tom?’
‘Some asshole,’ Shane said, and a cloud of depression seemed to pass across his face. ‘She says Tom was just some asshole.’
The Roxas Boulevard Boys brought it back to a more romantic gear – Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Penny Lover’ – and Rosalita tipped forward as if with an unendurable melancholy, her hair falling over her face. Shane sighed. And then, over the mournful minor chords, Bill heard the sound of expatriate whooping and jeering, the sound of men urging a woman on. He turned to look.
There were five of them, white boys in suits, surrounding her, the one, the tall girl he had seen with the orchid in her hair outside Paradise Mansions, although the flower was gone now, and they were all out on the tiny BB’s dance floor.
She seemed to be in a daze, dancing alone to some song in her head, her eyes closed and her arms held high above her head, and their hands were all over her. The tall girl, with a scrape high on one cheekbone, as if she had been struck.
‘Come on, darling,’ one of the men said, tugging at the button of her trousers. ‘Show us what you got.’
Another one was behind her. A young man, but already run to fat. His hands on her buttocks, her breasts, biting his bottom lip as he mimed taking her from behind, to the huge amusement of his laughing friends.
They moved in closer, getting bolder now, one of them pulling down the zip of his trousers, and then the zip of her trousers, another yanking up her cut-off top so that you saw a glimpse of a black bra. The girl didn’t notice or she was too far gone to care. Then Bill was wading among them, shoving off the fat boy behind her, and then getting between the girl and the suit who had pulled down her zip, and their expressions changed from leering delight to bewilderment, then apoplectic rage.
As Bill took the tall girl by the arm and led her from the dance floor, one of them threw a punch at the back of his head. He caught it just below the base of the skull, turned and took another one on his ear. He threw a couple of punches but they were all over him, pushing each other out of the way for the chance to lash out at him.
But then Shane was there, meaty fists flying, and then there were Wolfgang and Jurgen doing these surprisingly authentic-looking side-kicks, and then the Swedish owner and a lad from Belfast who worked behind the bar were joining in, putting themselves between Bill and the girl and the five drunken suits. A full-scale brawl broke out for about five seconds and then it was over as quickly as it had begun and the suits were running to the back of BB’s, throwing around a few bar stools as they retreated.
Bill held the tall girl’s hand as Shane got them out of the club and into the back of a Santana taxi. ‘Just go,’ he said. The cab pulled away and she still hadn’t opened her eyes. He saw that the wound on her cheekbone was livid and fresh.
‘Did they do that to you?’ he said. ‘The mark on your face. Did those bastards do that to you?’
She leaned forward, touching her face. Then she sat back up, fighting back the sickness. Bill realised he had never seen anyone so hopelessly drunk.
‘Airbag,’ she said. ‘The airbag from my Mini.’
Then they had to stop by the side of the road so that she could be sick. She bent double out of the open back door, dry heaving because there was nothing left to bring up. The driver watched Bill in his rear-view mirror with barely concealed contempt.
Fucking Westerners, his eyes seemed to say. Ruining our lovely girls.
‘Can’t stop throwing out,’ she said when they were on the road again. ‘Please excuse me. I am throwing out all the time.’
Her English was almost perfect. Too clearly learned in a classroom, perhaps. Too painfully formal. But she got almost everything right, he realised, and when she did get something wrong, he still had no trouble understanding her. Didn’t throwing out make more sense than throwing up? It was an improvement on the original.
‘You had an accident,’ Bill said. ‘What happened?’ She exhaled, shivering with grief.
‘My husband is very angry with me,’ she said. ‘Very angry with me for breaking the new car.’
He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her thin shoulders. She burrowed down inside it, trying to hide from the world, and he patted her gently, the way he might try to reassure Holly if she had a bad dream. And then she fell asleep. Leaning against him. He patted her again.
He looked at her asleep in his jacket and he saw that it was the one that still bore the ghost of a handprint.
That’s never going to come out now, he thought.
It was the apartment of a single girl.
Something about it, Bill thought as he carried her inside, something about it said that here was a life lived alone. A fruit bowl containing a lonely brown banana. A magazine turned to a TV page with favourite programmes circled in red. A book of crossword puzzles, opened to one that was half-finished. She doesn’t look like the kind of girl who does crossword puzzles, he thought. And then, Well, what do you know about her?
The flat was immaculately decorated but a much smaller apartment than the one he lived in. He found the only bedroom and laid her down on top of the duvet, still wearing his jacket. In the movies, he thought, in the movies I would undress her and put her to bed and in the morning she wouldn’t remember a thing. But he couldn’t bring himself to do anything except leave her sleeping on the bed, and turn the light off on his way out. Her voice reached him as he went to close the door behind him.
‘He has nobody but his wife and me,’ she said, unmoving in the darkness. ‘I am quite sure of that.’
‘He sounds like quite a catch,’ Bill said with a contempt that surprised him, and he let himself out of the flat as quietly as he could.
Becca could tell there was something wrong. She could tell immediately. It wasn’t the kind of crying she was used to – the crying of a child having a bad dream, or who was too cold or too warm, or who needed a glass of water or a cuddle.
Holly’s crying came through the monitor as Becca was nodding off in front of BBC World, and she knew immediately that it was her breathing.
It was bad. Very bad. And Holly was frightened.
Becca remained ludicrously cheerful and upbeat as she set up the nebuliser, the breathing machine, and placed the mouthpiece over Holly’s face.
‘Deep…deep…deep,’ Becca said, miming inhalation with one hand as she desperately dialled Bill’s phone with the other. ‘Good, baby. Very good.’
No reply.
The nebuliser took the edge off the asthma attack but it wasn’t enough. Becca had never seen her as bad as this, not since that first awful day. Holly’s breathing was shallow and laboured and it scared the life out of Becca. It scared the life out of both of them. She needed a doctor. She needed a hospital. She needed it now.
No numbers, Becca thought, furious. I have no numbers. She had no idea what number to call for an ambulance. How could she be so stupid? How could she have been so certain that nothing bad would ever happen?
Becca quickly wrapped Holly in her dressing gown and grabbed her coat and her keys and dialled Bill’s number again. And again and again and again. No answer.
Then Becca was out of the flat with Holly in her arms, the child surprisingly heavy, and trying to remain as upbeat as a game show host as they went out to the night in search of a taxi.
She saw one the moment she stepped outside Paradise Mansions, a beat-up red Santana, but it didn’t stop for her and she shouted angrily at its taillights.
Holly began to cry and Becca held her tight and rocked her, while her eyes scanned the empty streets for another taxi. She tried calling Bill and there was still no signal and after that she didn’t try again. After that she knew she was going to have to do it alone.
SEVEN (#ulink_76c09cbf-06ef-52d4-aff5-97aa8fbb8994)
There was something wrong with his home.
It should have been still and dark and both of them sleeping, with just a nightlight left on in the kitchen. But all the lights were blazing. The television was on and BBC World was playing its theme tune. The door to the master bedroom was flung open.
And they were gone.
Bed empty. Duvet on the floor. Lights on. And Becca and Holly were gone.
He flew through the apartment, throwing open doors, calling their names, and the panic was a physical sickness he could feel in his throat and in his gut.
Calling their names, even though he knew they were not there. Shouting their names over the bloody theme tune to BBC World. He didn’t understand what was happening. It made no sense at all. He wanted them back. He looked at his watch and covered it with his hand. It was so late. He wanted to throw up.
‘Becca!’
He walked to the table and picked up the mouthpiece to his daughter’s respirator.
His phone began to ring.
* * *
This was what she was good at. This was what she could do. She could look after her child. She could do that. And as long as she could do that, the rest of the world could go hang.
Holly was sitting up in bed in a private room at the International Family Hospital and Clinic on Xian Xia Lu being examined by a young doctor with an Indian face and a Liverpool accent.
‘Have you heard of a man called Beethoven?’ Dr Khan asked Holly, his fingers lightly feeling her ribs.
‘No,’ said Holly warily.
‘Beethoven had asthma,’ the doctor smiled.
Becca laughed, the tears springing. Devlin was standing by her side and he placed a hand on her shoulder. She touched his hand, sick with relief. Holly was going to be all right.
‘How about Charles Dickens, Augustus Caesar and John F. Kennedy?’ Dr Khan asked Holly. ‘Have you heard of any of them?’
‘I haven’t heard of nobody,’ Holly said, wide-eyed and looking at her mother for prompting. Becca was smiling at her now. ‘Why are you crying, Mummy?’
‘Because I’m happy, sweetheart. You make me happy. That’s all.’
‘That’s a funny old reason to cry. Grown-ups don’t cry.’
‘Well,’ Dr Khan said. ‘Those people all had asthma.’ He pulled down her top. ‘All the best people have had asthma.’ He turned to Becca and nodded. ‘She’s going to be fine.’
Becca nodded, overcome with gratitude. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’
‘Are you a doctor?’ Holly asked him.
‘I’m what they call a Senior Medical Registrar,’ he said. ‘It’s a fancy name for a doctor.’ He sat on the bed, holding Holly’s hand as he spoke to Becca. ‘She’s had a trigger reaction that could have been caused by almost anything. If she’s not around tobacco smoke, then air pollution is most likely. Shanghai is better than Beijing, but it’s still a Chinese city. We have some of the worst car pollution in the country. Then there are all the factories and power plants in the northern suburbs, up in Baoshan.’
‘Thank goodness they’re starting to control that,’ Devlin said. ‘Ten years ago you often couldn’t see Pudong from Puxi.’
‘Asthma is not a disease that we cure,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’s a condition we can control.’ He stood up. ‘But of course you know that already.’
Becca loved this hospital. Outside its glass doors the Changning District was as grubby and down-at-heel as anywhere in Shanghai, but the International Family Hospital and Clinic looked newer, cleaner and more modern than anything she had ever seen back home.
‘All my boys have been in here at some stage,’ Devlin said, as if reading her thoughts and trying to keep the mood merry. ‘The youngest two were born here. And I think we have had – what? -two broken arms, one undescended testicle and a hyper-active thyroid gland.’ He beamed at Dr Khan but Becca knew the words were meant to reassure her. And they did.
It was reassuring to know that this oasis of Western-trained, English-speaking doctors in their clean blue uniforms was available twenty-four hours a day.
Unlike her husband.
Devlin and Dr Khan were gone by the time Bill arrived. Holly was sleeping. Becca was almost asleep herself. Bill stood sweating and panting in the doorway.
‘What happened? What happened?’ he said, coming into the room. ‘Is she okay?’
Becca stirred in her chair. ‘She woke up struggling to breathe,’ she said, her voice sounding mechanical and drained. She wanted to tell him, she really did, but it all seemed a long time ago, and it was all right now, and she really did feel tired. But he wanted more. He wanted to know everything.
‘I tried calling you,’ she said. She looked from her daughter to her husband, and couldn’t keep the resentment out of her eyes. ‘Lots of times. No answer. I couldn’t even get your voice-mail.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sinking to his knees next to her. He kissed her hands, kissed her face, put his arms around her. It was like holding a statue.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have the numbers. You know – emergency numbers. It’s not 999, is it?’
‘We’ll get all the numbers,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ll get all the numbers for us.’
‘I couldn’t even get a taxi. So I called Tess Devlin. She was fantastic. Then things started to happen. Then I had help. Devlin came with Tiger and they brought us here. Holly and me. And Dr Khan – he’s been…’
Bill was on his feet, looking at Holly’s face, and for a second Becca wondered if he was even listening to her.
‘Where were you?’ she said, very calm.
‘I went for a drink with Shane,’ he said, and it wasn’t a good moment. He knew how it sounded. ‘The Germans were flipping out. There have been some incidents. At the Green Acres site in Yangdong.’ He shook his head. ‘The security is out of control. They were hitting this little kid. I had to stop them, Bec.’
‘Jesus,’ Becca said, turning her face away. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Bill.’ Looking back at him now. ‘Your daughter is being rushed to hospital and you’re in some bar?’
Bill stared at her helplessly, feeling useless. He wanted so many things from this world. There was quite a list. But more than anything he wanted his wife and daughter to be happy, safe and proud of him. And he had let them down because he went for a drink with clients and got into a fight over a girl he didn’t know. When it was his family who needed him, when it was his family he should have been with all along.
Maybe he could have explained it better. He had wanted to come home. He really did. But it was work. He wanted her to understand.
He wanted her to get it. Surely she knew that there was nothing more important to him than her and Holly? He wanted to tell her everything.
But he couldn’t tell her about the girl.
Devlin had told Tiger to wait for them. As they drove back to Gubei, Becca held Holly on her lap and the child slept in her arms. Bill touched his daughter’s hair.
‘She’s okay,’ he said. ‘She’s doing really well –’
Becca’s anger exploded. ‘What do you know about it, Bill? You’re never around. How dare you? And she’s not okay. She’s not okay at school because she started in the middle of a term and the other kids already have their friends so she plays alone in the playground.’ It was all pouring out now, even things she had decided not to share with him because she didn’t want to worry him, because there was enough pressure already, he had enough on his plate at work. ‘Did you know that? Of course you didn’t. And her breathing’s not okay because the air here is filthy. All right? So don’t ever tell me she’s okay, because you know absolutely nothing about it.’
They stared out at the elevated Ya’an Freeway. The lights of the city seemed to be glowing somewhere far below them.
‘I’m sorry, Bec,’ he said. ‘It will get better. I’ll make it better.’
Tears sprang to her eyes. This was a good thing about him. He would always reach out a hand to her. It had always been that way when they argued. He wouldn’t allow them to go to sleep angry and hurt. He always tried to make it better. And he didn’t say what he could have said, what most men would have said – Coming here was your idea. But this life wasn’t what she had expected.
‘I wanted us to see the jazz band at the Peace Hotel,’ she said, almost laughing, it sounded so absurd. ‘And I wanted us to buy propaganda posters and Mao badges in the Dongtai Lu antique market. All these places that I read about, all the great places they say you should go.’
He put his arm around her.
‘And I wanted us,’ she said, snuggling down, adjusting Holly on her lap. ‘I wanted us to drink cocktails in hotels where in the thirties you could get opium on room service. I want to support you, Bill. And I want to be a good sport. And I want to muck in and I don’t want to whine. But why isn’t it like that?’
‘We’ll do all those things,’ he said, and he touched her face, that face he loved so much, and determined to see her happy again.
‘But when?’
‘Starting tomorrow, Bec.’ He nodded, and she smiled, because she knew that he meant it.
Her unhappiness, and her loneliness, and all the panic of tonight were things he would address with the dogged determination that he brought to everything. My husband, she thought. The professional problem-solver.
He could never understand why people felt sentimental about when they were young. Being young meant being poor. Being young was a long, hard grind. Being young meant doing jobs that sucked the life out of you.
Being young was overrated. Or maybe it was just him. For in his teens and twenties Bill had endured eight years of feeling like he was the only young person in the world who wasn’t really young at all.
At weekends and holidays, he had worked his way through two years of A-levels, four years at UCL, six months of his Law Society final exams and his two years’ traineeship with Butterfield, Hunt and West.
Over eight years of stacking shelves, carrying hods, pulling pints and ferrying around everything from takeaway pizzas (on a scooter) to Saturday-night drunks (in a mini cab) and cases of wine (in a Majestic Wine Warehouse white van).
The worst job was in a Fulham Road pub called the Rat and Trumpet. It wasn’t as back-breaking as lugging bricks on a building site, and it wasn’t as dangerous as delivering pizza to a sink estate after midnight, and it didn’t numb your brain quite like filling shelves under the midnight sun of the supermarket strip lighting.
But the Rat and Trumpet was the worst job of the lot because that was where all the people his own age didn’t even notice that privilege had been given to them on a plate. They had a sense of entitlement that Bill Holden would never have, the boys with their ripped jeans and pastel-coloured jumpers and their Hugh Grant fringes, the girls all coltish limbs and blonde tresses and laughter full of daddy’s money.
He had come across the type at university, but they had not been the dominant group, not at UCL, where the braying voices were drowned out by other accents from other towns and other types of lives. But this was their world, and Bill just served drinks in it.
Kids whose mothers and fathers had never got sick, or broke up, or divorced, or died. At least that’s the way he thought of them. They all looked as though nothing bad had ever happened to them, or ever would.
They stared straight through him, or bellowed their orders from the far end of the bar, and he had no trouble at all in hating every one of the fucking bastards.
The Rat and Trumpet had no bouncer, and sometimes Bill had to throw one of them out. The landlord slipped him an extra fiver at the end of the night for every chinless troublemaker Bill had to escort to the Fulham Road – they called it the Half-Cut Hooray allowance.
The extra money was greatly appreciated. But Bill – twenty-two years old and furious with the Fates – would cheerfully have done it for nothing. Hilarious, they always said. Like the woman from Shanghai Chic. Everything was hilarious. It was all so fucking hilarious that it made you puke.
One night some idiot was practising his fast bowling with the Scotch eggs and splattering yolk and breadcrumbs all over the customers in the snug. Howzat? Hilarious, darling. The Scotch-egg bowler was a strapping lad in a pink cashmere sweater and carefully distressed Levi’s. They could be big lads, these Hoorays. They weren’t selling off the playing fields at the kind of school his mummy and daddy sent him to.
There was a girl with him – one of those girls, Bill thought, one of those Fulham Broadway blondes – who was trying to get him to stop. She seemed halfway to being a human being. Bill gave her credit for looking upset. For not finding it absolutely hilarious. That was the first time he saw Becca.
Bill politely asked the Scotch-egg bowler to leave. He told Bill to fuck off and get him a pint of Fosters. So Bill asked him less politely. Same response. Fuck off and a pint of Fosters. So Bill got him in an arm lock before his brain had registered what was happening and marched him to the door. It toughed you up on those building sites. It didn’t matter how much sport they played at their private schools, it just wasn’t the same as manual labour.
A meaty lad but soft inside, Bill thought. He gave him a push at the door – slightly harder than was strictly necessary – in fact a lot harder than was strictly necessary – and the fast Scotch-egg bowler skidded and fell into the gutter.
At the outside tables, people laughed.
‘One day you’ll bring drinks to my children,’ he told Bill, getting up, his face red for all sorts of reasons.
‘Can’t wait,’ Bill said. They must have been about the same age, he thought. Bill bet his mum wasn’t gone.
‘And you’ll be a toothless old git with snot on his chin and your rotten life will be gone and you will still be waiting on the likes of me.’
Bill laughed and looked at the blonde girl. ‘I hope your kids look like their mother,’ he said, turning away, and never expecting to see her again.
But Becca came back inside to apologise on behalf of her boyfriend and offer to pay for the Scotch eggs and all the mess, and she was just in time to see the landlord fire Bill, who didn’t like it that Bill had used more force than necessary to throw out the fast Scotch-egg bowler; he wasn’t here to rough up the paying customers, he was here to stop trouble, not to start it, and Bill was saying that he couldn’t possibly be fired, because he was fucking well quitting, okay?
Becca followed him outside and said, ‘Don’t go.’
And Bill said, ‘Three quid an hour to be insulted by dickheads? Why not?’
But that wasn’t what she meant.
She apologised again and said that he was a nice guy really, Guy was, and Bill got a bit confused there, because the boyfriend’s name was Guy, and they had a little laugh about that, and that was good, because she had such a beautiful face when she laughed, and then she said that Bill shouldn’t think they were all idiots and Bill said ah, don’t worry about it, he had no objection to spoilt rich kids with no manners, they had to drink somewhere, and she said that was not her, and he didn’t know her at all, getting angry now, and he said, Well, prove it – let me have your phone number and I might give you a call sometime, because he really didn’t give a fuck any more and he was sick of not having a girlfriend who looked like her and sick of being lonely and sick of feeling that he had never had the chance to suck all the juice out of being young.
So she wrote her number on the palm of his hand and by the time he got back to his rented room on the other side of town his heart fell to his boots because the eight digits had almost worn off.
But he still had the number. Just.
And that was how he met Becca. She was the first one in that place, the very first, who didn’t look straight through him, or look at him as if he was dirt, and he would always love her for that.
And he got scared sometimes. Because his life was unthinkable without her. Because he wondered what would have happened to him if he had not met Becca. He thought – what then?
Who would have loved me?
The three of them walked hand in hand through a warehouse full of old masters.
There was Picasso’s Weeping Woman, Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. There were Degas dancers, Monet waterlilies and haystacks, Cézanne apples and mountains. There were Lichtenstein’s comic-book lovers, Jasper Johns’ flags and Warhol’s Marilyn and Elvis and soup cans. There were canvases stacked everywhere, and on many of them the paint was still wet.
‘Do one-two-three,’ Holly commanded, happy to have a parent on each hand, so Bill and Becca went, ‘One-two-three!’ and swung their daughter up between them, her thin legs flying as they walked past Gauguin native girls, a pile of Last Suppers and Mona Lisas by the score.
‘One-two-three!’ they chanted, and Holly laughed wildly as they walked past Hockney swimming pools, Jackson Pollock splatter paintings and sailboats by Matisse.
They stopped at the end of an aisle where a girl in her late teens was painting half a dozen Sunflowers all at once. She worked quickly, occasionally glancing at a dog-eared History of Modern Art.
‘It looks absolutely like the picture in the book,’ Holly said.
‘It looks exactly like the picture in the book,’ Becca said.
‘Is it really real, Daddy?’ Holly said.
The girl artist smiled. ‘Everything is fake except your mother,’ she said. ‘Old Shanghai saying.’
Becca ordered four Sunflowers to go with the Starry Night and The Sower that she had already bought. She laughed happily, in a way that she hadn’t laughed for a long time. Vincent Van Gogh was going to fill the walls of their new home.
They caught a cab to the Bund, which by now Bill had learned to called the Waitan, ‘above the sea’, and finally they saw the jazz band in the bar of the Peace Hotel.
The six musicians were in their eighties now, the very same bunch of swing-obsessed Chinese boys who had been playing when the Japanese army marched into Shanghai a lifetime ago, and as the waitress fussed over Holly’s hair and Bill and Becca sipped their Tsingtaos while the band swaggered through Glenn Miller’s ‘String of Pearls’, for a few sweet dreaming minutes Becca thought it truly seemed as though the old world had never been pulled apart.
The next day Bill came back from work early and joined his daughter at the window. Devlin had packed him off home. He wanted Bill’s family to be happy. He wanted them to stay.
‘That’s my favourite one,’ Holly said, indicating a half-starved ginger kitten that was patrolling the perimeter of the fountain. ‘That’s the best one.’
There were no pets allowed in Paradise Mansions but from their window Holly would watch the stray cats who haunted the courtyard – emaciated creatures that preened themselves in the shade of the straggly flower beds, or lapped delicately from the pools of water created by the mother-and-child fountain, or gnawed at bones they had foraged from the rows of huge black rubbish bins in an alleyway behind the main building.
Bill laughed. ‘So why do you like her best?’
Holly thought about it. ‘She’s the smallest.’
‘Shall we feed her, angel?’
Holly’s eyes lit up. ‘Shall we feed her? Shall we, Daddy?’ Holly hopped around with excitement while Bill got a carton of milk from the fridge and a saucer from the cupboard. Becca, in the bedroom getting ready to go out, frowned doubtfully, called something about fleas, but Bill and Holly were out of the apartment before she really had time to object.
Down in the courtyard, they watched from a respectful distance while the ginger waif lapped up its saucer of semi-skimmed and then took itself off to a flower bed where it collapsed with contentment in the dirt. Bill and Holly approached tentatively. The ginger kitten permitted Holly to stroke its back. Then Bill was suddenly aware that they were not alone.
The tall girl was standing there watching them with the cat. She was wearing a green qipao that made her long, slim body look even longer and her hair was hanging down. She was dressed to go out.
‘Hello there,’ she said, smiling at Holly, and Bill saw that she was holding his jacket. She had had it dry cleaned, and it was still in a cellophane wrapper that said Da Zhong American Laundry. He could see that they had not managed to remove the handprint.
‘Tse-tse,’ she said, holding out his jacket. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Bu ke-qi,’ he said.
‘That means “you are welcome”,’ Holly told her, and they both laughed and the tall girl touched Holly’s hair. ‘So fair,’ she said, ‘I adore her,’ and that was the first time he really heard her English, and the strange weight that she put on certain words, and the unfathomable choices she made with the language. I adore her. It somehow clanged. And yet it wasn’t wrong. He could not say that it was wrong.
He held out his hand and she shook it lightly and awkwardly and quickly, as though she had never shaken hands with anyone in her life. Her hand was small and cool.
‘Bill Holden,’ he said, and he touched his daughter’s head. ‘And this one is Holly.’
‘Li JinJin,’ she said, and he knew that she was putting her family name first, in the Chinese fashion, the family coming before everything, the family name forever inseparable from the first name.
‘Hello, Holly,’ she said. Holding the slit of her qipao together with a modest gesture, she crouched down so that their eyes were on the same level. ‘What are you up to with your daddy?’
Holly squinted at her. ‘We’re look aftering this cat,’ she said, and the woman and the child silently contemplated the mangy ginger cat as it lolled in the flower bed. Bill sensed that JinJin didn’t know quite what to say about the stray moggy. The Chinese were not sentimental about animals.
Bill looked at JinJin when she stood up. The mark on her face looked better in the daylight. Not so raw. Or maybe he was just prepared for it now. And now he could see that it was from an airbag. He could tell that a human hand hadn’t made it. But even with that mark on her face, there was still something about her, Bill thought. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman he had seen in Shanghai. She wasn’t even the most beautiful woman he had seen in Paradise Mansions – that would have to be his wife. But when JinJin Li smiled, she seemed to have this inner light. He had never seen her smile before.
‘Have a good day in Shanghai,’ she said, and now it was his turn to be lost for words as he struggled for something to say about the other night, to put it in its rightful place, but nothing came, and it did not matter because at that moment the silver Porsche pulled into the courtyard and she gave him one last smile before she started off to where the car was waiting for her, its powerful engine still running, ready to take Li JinJin off to her life.
Becca’s night on the town had been fun, although she enjoyed it more in retrospect than she did at the time.
Alice had taken her to a bar on the Bund, plied her with ludicrously potent mojitos, and Becca had spent the evening with her mobile phone in her hand, just in case there was some problem with Holly. But Bill never called and they were both sleeping when she got home. Becca moved quietly through the apartment, checking on her family, and free at last to savour the evening, now that she knew everything was fine.
Holly was in the middle of the king-size bed, looking tiny. Breathing normally. And Bill in the spare room. His feet sticking out the bottom of the single bed. Looking comically big for it. Becca took off her clothes. He gasped and tried to sit up as she slid in beside him. She placed a soothing hand on his chest and kissed his face.
‘She okay?’ Becca said.
‘Fine,’ Bill said sleepily. ‘She’s been fine. What time is it?’
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