My Favourite Wife (42 page)

Becca looked up as he came into the master bedroom with his overnight bag. She was sitting on the bed now, the mobile phone still in her hand, but the connection broken.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

He began opening drawers and throwing things into his bag. A change of shirt, socks, pants. His shaving kit. His British passport for ID. Not much. Just enough for one night. This wouldn’t take long.

‘You have to go? Go where?’

‘Changchun. It’s up north. Near the border with North Korea.’

‘I know where bloody Changchun is,’ she said.

She stood up and folded her arms across her chest as she watched him packing. ‘You can’t get a flight,’ she said.

‘The airport’s open,’ he said, zipping the bag shut, and placing it on the bed. ‘And I’ll be flying away from the weather. Going north. The trouble is all in the south.’

‘Daddy, look,’ Holly said, padding into the room in her pyjamas, her golden hair damp and tangled. She was holding a picture of a red panda. The ayi came after her with a hair dryer in her hand.

‘That’s beautiful, darling,’ he said, scooping up his daughter, kissing her face. He turned to his wife. ‘There are no typhoons up there,’ he said. ‘Too far north. One night. That’s all I need.’

He kissed his daughter again, and she ran off holding her picture with the ayi struggling to keep up.

‘You’re not going,’ Becca said. She unzipped his bag and began pulling out his clothes.

‘One night and it’s done,’ he said. He reached for her and she pulled away. ‘Please, Becca.’

‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go to that Third World whore and talk things over or whatever bullshit you have in your head.’

She held the bag upside down and shook out what was left inside. Bill slowly began to repack.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘You’re always sorry,’ she said, and punched her fist hard against
his chest. ‘Do we have a life here or not? I want you to read Holly a story. I want you to draw with her. I want you to sleep with me tonight. I want us to be normal, Bill. Or I want us to be nothing. Do you understand all that?’

‘I have to do this one last thing.’

‘Why?’

‘So that it’s over.’

She smiled with contempt. ‘And do you honestly expect us to be here when you get back?’ she said, and she shook her head and dismissed him with a wave of her hand, as if giving up on him at last.

The plane banked for landing and he saw the mountains beneath him, conical and black, satanic remakes of the green limestone mountains of Guilin.

As the plane turned towards its destination, the mountains reared up on either side and he saw that they were not mountains at all. There were no conical mountains here. These were mountains that had been made by men. What he had seen were giant slag heaps of coal, and he saw now that there were people on them, bent double, tearing at the surface for usable chunks of fuel.

Then the black peaks were gone and the plane was coming down through fluffy white clouds, but then he saw that they were not clouds at all, but the emissions rising from the smokestacks of the remaining iron and steel mills. Then the plane was out of the man-made clouds and below them and rising up beneath him were the abandoned factories sitting in scrappy fields like wasted muscles on the arms of a dying man.

The plane hit the runway with a screech and he was back in her hometown of Changchun, the jagged metal in his pocket still pressing into his flesh, wondering how he had ever seen romance in this wretched place.

* * *

He stood outside the ugly grey apartment block looking up at the windows that had been hung with red lanterns during Spring Festival. The windows were empty now. The sky was a flat grey. He had travelled beyond the rains.

He climbed the blackened stairwell, coated with the filth of long-dead factories, preparing himself for the moment when he would see her face, and see the new man, and give her the keys.

JinJin’s mother opened the door to the little flat and she was all smiles, and as Bill stepped into the apartment, he saw that she was quite alone.

She ushered him inside, and as she made them tea she spoke rapidly in Mandarin interspersed with one-word stabs of English.

‘Father. Sick. Guangxi.’

‘Guangxi?’ But that was all the way down south. That was the other end of the country. Near Hong Kong. Even nearer to Vietnam. Guilin was in Guangxi. JinJin’s father was in Guangxi. Bill brought the teacup to his mouth and it scalded his lips. He struggled to understand, the map of China reeling in his mind. Guangxi? That was the province where the limestone mountains looked across at Vietnam, and where they had watched the fishermen with their birds from the bridge in Guilin. That was where they had seen her father, and Bill had given the man money, and JinJin had looked away.

‘Guangxi!’ her mother said. ‘Guangxi!’

She had a newspaper and she showed it to him. There was a map of the country on the front page, giving the latest on the typhoons and the flooding, and although it was a Chinese newspaper and he could not read a word of it, he understood everything.

Because the page one headline was nothing but a number. 20,000,000, it said. Twenty million. The number of the displaced.

Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi. No part of southern or eastern China was untouched. It was impossible to comprehend. It was a bigger landmass than Western Europe.

Her mother tapped a stubby finger on the bottom end of the map, tittering with glee. Then he saw that her laughter was that peculiar Chinese response to disaster. She was terrified.

‘Here! Here!’

And finally Bill got it. JinJin was at the other end of the country. She was as far away as she could be, down in Guangxi with her father and the new man.

She was down among the floods.

The old woman grinned, baring her brown, tea-stained teeth. It had once maddened him, this habit of responding to disaster with delight. But now he understood. They wrapped their pain in a smile. Their laughter in the face of disaster was like a bandage on a wound. He touched the old woman’s arm, and nodded. They wrapped their pain in a smile. That was what she was doing. That’s what they all did.

He understood at last.

It took him three flights to get to Guilin.

From Changchun he flew south and west to Xi’an and then on to Chongqing. In Chongqing he waited with tourists who had been down the Yangtze River, and then the tourists left on flights to Beijing and Bill slept overnight in the terminal. In the morning he woke up and there were two old women sitting opposite him. His eyes were drawn to their abnormally small feet. He looked away, appalled, and looked again.

The old women were small but their feet belonged to dolls, to toys, to another age. He knew they had been bound even before one of them absent-mindedly tugged off her blue canvas slipper and massaged her wilfully deformed foot, the end of it flapping like a door in the wind. She pulled her slipper back on and stared straight through Bill.

Suddenly their flight was called and the old women stood up and hobbled off quickly to their gate, their boarding passes in their
hand. He watched them go. Their feet had not been bound but crushed. The process was more like having their limbs put in a vice than wrapped in a scarf. The bare foot he had seen was a memento of old China. But to the old woman it was just a foot. It had been just a foot for years, decades, for a lifetime. That was the strange thing. The normality of it all.

He had thought that he could not survive losing her, and he had been wrong. He would get over it. It would hurt and he would live, and she would live too. Bill watched the old women limp through the boarding gate.

You could get used to anything.

He was the only passenger on the flight to Guilin.

The stewardess strapped herself in beside him and clutched his hand as the pilot brought the plane down. They hit the runway, lifted off, hit the tarmac again and went into what felt like a wall of spray. Bill could feel the water on the runway dragging at the undercarriage, trying to pull the plane sideways, trying to turn them over.

But the pilot braked in a screech of rubber and the wall of spray subsided. As they taxied to the terminal, the stewardess vomited quietly into a paper bag. Bill pressed his face against the window. Outside, the rains came down as if they would never end.

There was chaos at the airport. It felt like the entire city was trying to leave. The green uniforms of the Public Security Bureau were everywhere, holding back the crowds. Bill pushed his way through the mob, moving in the opposite direction.

The car-hire desks were abandoned so he went outside to the taxi rank. It was deserted and he stood there listening to the wind, uncertain what to do next. The wind was like a warning, a lament. He had never heard wind like it. An old red Santana taxi pulled up and began to unload a family laden with suitcases. When they had paid the driver, Bill stuck his head in the window.

‘I need to get to a village,’ Bill said. ‘A village on the road to Yangshuo.’ He realised he did not even know the name of the place where her father lived. Perhaps it did not have a name. But he could remember the road. He could get them there.

‘No Yangshuo,’ said the driver. ‘Road all closed Yangshuo.’

Bill took out his wallet and pulled out all the money he had and stuffed it into the hands of the taxi driver, closing the man’s fist around the notes. The driver examined the grubby RMB notes and bared his yellow tombstone teeth. His breath was foul.

‘Road still closed,’ he said apologetically, although he made no attempt to return the money.

‘As close as you can,’ Bill said, getting into the car.

The driver stared straight ahead, muttering to himself, as the wind blew the rain sideways against the windscreen. Sideways rain, Bill thought. How do you get sideways rain? A steady stream of traffic and pedestrians were coming in the opposite direction, making for the airport. Everywhere there were suitcases that had been dropped or dumped or blown off of roof racks. Everywhere there were bits of trees and billboards. The trees and billboards were the first things to go in a typhoon, he realised, and as he stared out of the window it was as if he had never been to Guilin, as if he had dreamed the time they had spent here.

The limestone peaks of the mountains were smothered in mist but it was the river that made it seem like somewhere he had never been.

The river had broken its banks and changed everything. The paddy fields were now lakes, and they looked as though they had been lakes for a thousand years. On the river where they had watched the fishermen with their cormorants, a giant barge loaded with what looked like sand seemed to be abandoned and drifting. As Bill watched, it split clean in two with a crack like lightning. He strained to see some sign of the crew fleeing for their lives. Nobody appeared and the two halves of the broken barge began
to slide beneath the water. Then they were gone, and it was as if it had never been, or he had imagined it all.

There were no PSB police this far from the airport. Here it was all PLA soldiers. He watched a group fish something from the river and lay it on a tarpaulin by the side of the road. It was the body of another soldier.

‘No road Yangshuo!’ shouted the driver, recoiling at the sight of the bloated body.

‘Just drive,’ Bill shouted back at him, and he drove, and Bill felt bad that he had raised his voice at the man, because he knew he could not get to her without him.

Bill was sure they were going to make it. But then they were at a roadblock, soldiers everywhere, their lorry parked at an angle across the road, blocking everything, and a soldier was flagging them down. He stuck his head in the window and Bill could see they were being told to turn back. Beyond the soldiers Bill could see the road ahead buried under a mudslide. It looked like a congealed brown river that had slid down the hill. The driver was moaning to himself.

‘Is there another way?’ Bill said. ‘Is there another road to Yangshuo?’

‘This
way Yangshuo,’ the driver said, banging his steering wheel as the PLA began shouting at him, gesturing more fiercely. The driver began to turn the taxi around. ‘Fuck you, man, okay?’ he told Bill in an American accent.

Bill pulled off his watch. ‘This is a good watch, okay? Worth a lot of money. A lot of money, okay? You take this watch and find another road.’

The driver showed Bill his wrist. He already had a watch. It was even a Rolex. It might not have been the real thing, but it was a Rolex of sorts and he clearly did not want another one. Bill took out his empty wallet and offered the driver his black American Express card. The driver looked away.

Bill got out of the car leaving his bag on the back seat and began walking towards the soldiers. Someone grabbed his arm. A young red-haired woman with an Irish accent. Some kind of aid worker.

‘You can’t go down there,’ she told him. ‘There’s disease in there now. Typhoid. Dengue fever. Malaria.’

He nodded politely and kept walking. The woman shouted something but the wind was too loud and he did not catch it. He had reached the soldiers now. They were very young. They had rifles slung over their shoulders. They were looking at the mudslide. He walked past them. A child’s arm was sticking out of the sludge. Bill felt his flesh crawl with horror, but he kept walking, leaning forward, pressing against the wind. The wind dropped for a second and he heard the raised voices in Chinese behind him and, further back, the Irish woman repeating that he couldn’t go down there. He kept going. Then he felt fingers digging into his arm, and he turned and placed his hands on the young soldier’s chest, and with no more force than was necessary, shoved him away. The soldier stumbled two steps backwards and then lurched forward, and in one smooth movement swung the rifle off his shoulder and rammed the butt as hard as he could into Bill’s face.

He didn’t fall over but his legs went, and he staggered around drunkenly with red and yellow flashing lights the only thing he could see. He had been struck on the right side of his face, and he could feel the blow still, it was as if he was still being hit. The feeling ran for about six inches from just above his eyebrow to just below his cheekbone. The pain filled his head, a balloon of pain that was expanding by the second, but the damage was all in his eye. His right eye. His eyebrow and cheekbone had absorbed most of the blow but he had also been hit in his right eye, and when the reds and yellows faded there were black stars floating in his foggy vision.