My Favourite Wife (35 page)

‘Bill?’ Becca said, but he was gone, stumbling over the Simply Life bag that he had placed between his feet.

Then both the suits looked up to see Bill standing over them, leaning into the booth, his knuckles resting on their table.

‘You want to keep it down?’ he said. He was trying to stop his voice from shaking, but it was no good. His voice was shaking all over the place. ‘I’ve got a little girl here.’

The two suits looked at Bill and then at each other. They smiled uncertainly. They were accustomed to doing what they liked. Then one of them laughed.

‘It’s a free country,’ he said, and they both had a real chuckle at that, and they kept laughing until Bill picked up a large glass sugar shaker and hurled it at the wall between them. The suits sprang
to their feet, glass and sugar dusting their jackets and shirts, scrambling out of the booth.

For a long moment he thought he might have to fight them. And that was a horrible prospect, the idea of rolling around on the floor of a Coffee Planet with a couple of his fellow countrymen, but it was fine too. He would beat them or, more likely, they would beat him. He didn’t much care. All he cared about was that it ended. The talk that his daughter should not have to listen to. But they did not want to fight him and Bill turned to watch them go. He was aware that the crowded coffee shop was completely silent. His wife was holding his daughter and they were both staring at him as if they had never seen him before.

‘Jesus Christ,’ one of the suits shouted on his way to the door. ‘De-caf for Dad from now on.’

Bill sat down with Becca and Holly and tried to pick up his coffee. But his hands were trembling harder than ever. He put the cup down. He didn’t speak, and he did not touch anything. He was too shaky. So he just stared at the table, waiting for his breathing to come back. He hoped that Becca might say,
Thanks for standing up for us, Bill, thanks for being a man
. But he knew there was no real chance of that happening.

‘Do you know what you do with idiots like that, Bill?’ Becca said.

Bill looked up at her, and swallowed hard when he saw Holly burying her face into her mother’s chest, hiding behind her hair, watching him through the blonde veil. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’ he said.

‘You ignore them,’ she said. ‘Because they are
nothing
. And if you get down to their level, then you make yourself nothing too.’

He wiped his eyes. He was so tired. He wanted to curl up in the booth and sleep. Then he realised that he had kicked Becca’s shopping across the floor when he jumped out of the booth.

He reached for it, picked it up and placed it on the table like
an offering for his wife and daughter, and he watched Becca flinch as she heard the soft shifting jingle of broken glass.

He had looked for her for most of the night. He had to look for her. How could he not look for her?

He had looked for her on Mao Ming Nan Lu and on Tong Ren Lu, pushing his way through the hard-core crowds that refused to go home. He thought he saw her face across the mobbed dance floor of Real Love, silhouetted against the red neon heart that throbbed on the wall. Then he thought he saw her again in a beer-stained red leather booth at BB’s, a Chinese girl with a ponytail, her face covered by the cropped blond head of a Westerner. He pressed his face close, blood pumping, and then the kissing couple broke and as the man raised a fist, Bill realised with a gasp of relief that it wasn’t her.

And he saw her in his head, in the blackest parts of his imagination – beaten in the back of a car, raped in an alley, murdered behind locked doors. Dumped in the street. Or back in the arms of her married Chinese man, tired of the endless drama with her Englishman, happy to be back between familiar sheets, murmuring sweet nothings and second chances in her own language, and moaning with pleasure.

Oh, he saw that all right.

He had no trouble seeing that.

But he looked for her and did not find her.

He went to the police station on Renmin Square to report her missing. Nobody on the front desk spoke English. Nobody even came close to understanding him.

Men who looked like migrant workers were being dragged down to the cells. A ten-year-old beggar boy sat weeping and wiping his bloody, broken nose on his sleeve. A taxi driver and his passenger screamed at each other and had to be held apart by laughing cops. Bill went away, suddenly knowing where she would be.

At the roller-skating rink he thought he saw her face – the hair flying, the lovely face with its goofy grin of pleasure, long legs in faded denim expertly balanced on ancient skates – but it was not her, it was just someone with the look, and the city was full of them.

At the edge of the rink a girl, no more than fifteen, pulled at his sleeve. He turned to her with the hope flooding through him. Was it one of her ex-students? She had the red-cheeked face that you saw on the migrant workers.

‘You looking for girl, boss?’

‘Yes,’ Bill nodded. ‘Li JinJin – do you know her? She was a teacher –’

The girl was nodding emphatically. ‘You take me with you, boss. I’m a nice girl.’

Then there was another one, talking to him in Mandarin, and another one with just a few jagged shards of English, and another one that could only say,
Nice girl, boss
, as though she had learned it in night class. Prostitution for Beginners, Module One, he thought, as grubby hands slipped into his pockets to explore whatever was in there, until he pushed his way through them, feeling as if he was suffocating.

Outside there was a sign in English plastered across the side of the ugly concrete building that housed the roller-skating rink. ACQUIRED FOR DEVELOPMENT, it said. LUXURY SPACE TO RENT.

And then he realised that there were signs all along the ramshackle buildings of the little backstreet. CONDEMNED, they said, as he slowly walked past them down the unlit street. CONDEMNED. CONDEMNED. CONDEMNED.

Some nights he would go to the flat in Hongqiao and let himself in with the spare set of keys and then he would wait for her, he would wait for her until around midnight and when she still had not come he would go back to Paradise Mansions at the time he would be expected home, even though he knew they would be sleeping.

On the first night he wandered the apartment, tormented by the signs and souvenirs of who she was – the Sony Handycam bought to launch her TV career, the stacks of crossword puzzles, the selections that had been made from the piles of CDs and DVDs – a live Faye Wong CD, an obscure Zhang Ziyi film – and the photographs on her bedside table.

The framed picture of the pair of them in the rain on the bridge in Guilin, another picture of him at his desk in the London office, white shirt sleeves and a tie and so much younger, something he had given her when they started, and a third picture of JinJin on graduation day flanked by her mother and her sister, that family of women.

But after the first time he no longer saw these things, the puzzles and the pictures, and they no longer hurt him. By the second time he had stopped calling her mobile, which was always off, and stopped leaving messages. And on the third time he was standing by one of her overflowing wardrobes, holding a green
qipao
in his
hands, burying his face in it, feeling ridiculous but doing it anyway, trying to drown in the memory of her in that dress, when he suddenly looked up, hearing the key in the lock.

She came into the apartment with little ChoCho in her arms. They both seemed surprised to see him. He went to her and wrapped his arms around the pair of them.

She smiled, nodded, and jiggled little ChoCho on her hip. ‘I had to go back home,’ she explained. ‘My sister is working. My mother is sick. In the hospital.’

‘What’s wrong with your mum?’

She clenched her fist. ‘Stiff,’ she said. ‘All stiff. Pain.’

‘Arthritis?’ he said. ‘Rheumatoid arthritis?’

JinJin grimaced. ‘Getting old,’ she said. ‘Getting old lady.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry I said those things.’

He squeezed her tight. She laughed and kissed him. ChoCho slowly stared from one to the other with his huge solemn eyes. Then a young man walked into the apartment carrying a folded stroller and a battered suitcase.

‘Ah, thank you, Brad,’ she said, all polite formality and gratitude.

Brad? Who the fuck was Brad?

Bill watched him carry her things inside. He was not the typical Shanghai suit. He was in T-shirt and Levi’s, pumped up and wearing glasses. He had that Liam Neeson speccy-hunk thing going on. The glasses made him look vaguely sensitive, but the muscles stopped him looking like a nerd. Maybe one of those wasters who teach English as a foreign language instead of working for a living, Bill thought, narrowing his eyes at Brad – fucking Brad – and then JinJin.

‘Brad – this is my boyfriend Bill,’ JinJin said, smiling from one to the other. The two men shook hands and Bill’s features froze into civil indifference.
I don’t care
, his face tried to say.
You mean nothing to me
.

‘I live upstairs,’ Brad said. Australian accent. No, a bit more clipped than the Aussies. A kiwi, Bill guessed. ‘I was coming back from the gym when I saw the pair of them getting out of the cab.’ He had the nerve to stroke ChoCho’s cheek with a hairy finger. ‘Well, I’ll let you crack on,’ he said, beaming at JinJin. Bill knew what he wanted to do to her, and it wasn’t just carry her luggage. Fucking Brad…

When he had gone, Bill took ChoCho and watched JinJin busying herself in the flat. Relief had been replaced by suspicion. As she crashed about in the kitchen, he rocked the child and went over the encounter in minute detail. The way that Brad had smiled at JinJin as he kindly carried her things into the flat. The way she had touched his arm when introducing him to Bill. The way she had called Bill
my boyfriend –
what was that? Goading the nice man upstairs? Letting him know that she was in demand? Letting him know that the good ones are always,
always
taken.

JinJin smiled at the sight of him holding her son and he smiled back, knowing that there would be plenty of opportunities for the nice New Zealander upstairs to knock on her door when the boyfriend was not around, and knowing that he could not trust her, this man who knew that he could not be trusted, this man who knew he would betray her in the end.

For there was a part of Bill that could not help believing that JinJin Li was just like him.

‘We were up at Yangdong and it’s going to be so beautiful,’ Tess Devlin said, lifting her voice above the restaurant din. ‘It’s incredible what they’ve done up there – these magnificent houses rising out of goat farms, or whatever they were…’ She glanced at her husband. ‘And we’re thinking of buying one, aren’t we? If next year’s bonus is as big as we all hope.’ She lifted her glass to Shane and Bill. ‘Got to work hard, boys.’

Bill and Shane laughed dutifully. ‘We’re doing our best,’ Shane said.

‘Is the air better up there?’ Becca said. ‘The air must be better.’

‘And it’s so good to get out of the city for the weekend,’ Tess nodded, signalling for the waiter to bring another bottle of champagne. ‘Give the boys somewhere to run wild.’

‘Indeed,’ Devlin said, stiff with dignity. He was drunk. They were all drunk. The dinner was to celebrate the return of one wife, and to begin the search for a new one, but it had gone on for a few bottles too long, as dinner on the Bund always did. ‘Let the little buggers wear themselves out,’ Devlin chuckled.

There were six of them. Bill and Becca. Tess and Devlin. And Shane placed next to a blonde South African woman, somebody Tess Devlin had found in her Pilates class, one of the new fashion people that had suddenly washed up in Shanghai – a stylist, she told them, as if any of them had any idea what that meant. Well, maybe Becca and Tess did. But Shane and the South African had not hit it off – he was too much the straight macho suit for her tastes, and Shane was still in mourning for his wild young bride. He looked sullen, shy, closed up in the presence of all this domestic chitchat. But by the time the table was littered with bottles, the stylist was starting to look better.

‘Any chance of a shag tonight?’ Shane asked.

‘Every chance of a shag,’ said the South African, staring straight ahead. ‘But not with you.’

‘Saw some of the locals,’ Tess was saying to Becca. ‘Talk about the great unwashed. The children look like little chimney sweeps. Like urchins out of Dickens, you know? The Artful bloody Dodger or something. And they just gawp at you with their little black faces. They just stand there and
gawp
. Gawping – it’s the only word for it.’

The South African turned to Tess. ‘I’ve seen some of those migrant workers selling fake watches outside Plaza 66,’ she said, suddenly animated. ‘They’re filthy. I nearly puked.’

Bill smiled, shook his head. ‘But, Tess,’ he said gently, ‘those kids – half of them never see the inside of a school. That’s why they’re so dirty – they’re in the fields all day. You know what the schools out there spend half their budgets on? Wining and dining school inspectors. They can’t tell those important men there’s nothing for dinner…’

‘Oh Bill,’ Tess laughed, shaking her head, as if he were pulling her leg.

‘It’s true!’ he insisted, wanting her to believe him. But he had drunk too much. He knew that. He shouldn’t have started with this. But he thought of the boy he had seen being beaten at Yangdong, and he could not keep his mouth shut. ‘The kids of those farmers up at Yangdong have been left behind, and they’ll always be left behind. There’s no difference between them and some laid-off state factory worker in the Dongbei. China doesn’t need them.’

Becca got up to go to the rest room. Bill noticed her catch his eye and tap her watch with her index finger. They had to get back to Holly and relieve the ayi.

‘It’s true there are certain inequalities that have to be addressed,’ Devlin said. He lifted his glass to his lips but it was empty. He did a double take. What had happened to his drink?

‘I agree,’ the South African stylist said, not quite grasping Devlin’s point. ‘Those migrant workers for a start – the police should do something about them.’