Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  One moment of panic, followed quickly by recovery.

  ‘Not guilty,’ I say smilingly.

  Inspector Mao lets out a grunt, then takes a puff on his filthy fag.

  ‘We are not at present investigating a homicide, Professor,’ he says.

  Of course really it’s the interpreter who says those exact words, the young man Mr Sun. Mr Sun’s doing his doctorate on Kafka. Kafka translated into English, not in the original German. Always he has annoyed me — Mr Sun, not Kafka — because his face looks like a pudding. A malt pudding. He keeps glancing at Sissy. Maybe he fancies Sissy. Sissy, who looks down at the floorboards not at the men, and who wears her hair in a ponytail tied with a silly little frilly pink nylon ribbon.

  ‘What hours do you want to know about? I mean, what hour of the day did he disappear?’

  Why are almost all our girl students so girly?

  ‘Between ten in the evening and eight the next morning.’

  Of course I know that it’s a sexist society and the young women get a girly stereotype rammed down their throats from earliest infancy, and it’s not their fault, but the interpreter makes me feel upset, annoyed, even angry.

  ‘I was with friends at a bar downtown till about eleven —’

  A sec or two is all that’s needed for me to work out that my upset feelings are nothing to do with the interpreter, and they’re not anger. They’re grief. And it’s to do with Jay.

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘I got a cab back here. The cab took about thirty minutes because a section of the Inner Ring Road was blocked. I came inside and made myself a cup of tea. I always drink tea last thing at night. I sat down in this room with the tea and a novel for maybe twenty minutes. About midnight I went out.’

  ‘Went out?’

  ‘Went out. Not illegal, is it? I went out for a walk.’

  ‘Your leaving the building,’ says Inspector Mao, yanking a fag from his mouth and lifting a paw to smother a yawn, ‘was noted of course by the duty receptionist.’

  Fucking spies on all fucking sides in this fucking police state. Well, that’s my first thought, but of course they’re all just doing their jobs.

  ‘Okay, well, I kinda walked around aimlessly. I was out for two hours or so, more or less. I don’t wear a watch because I hate anything strapped to my body. I think it must have been about two, give or take half an hour, when I got back here. No doubt the duty receptionist will know the time.’

  ‘Six minutes past two,’ says Inspector Mao.

  ‘I made myself another cup of tea, drank it, and went to bed. End of story. So you see I don’t have an alibi. Well, not unless we can track down some of the people who saw me during my wanderings between twelve and six minutes past two. When I walk that late at night I always find a lot of people out and about.’

  ‘You mean you often walk the streets in the early morning, Professor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May one ask why, Professor?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Inspector.’

  ‘Why?’ he insists.

  ‘I suppose because I’m wretchedly unhappy.’

  Inspector Mao shrugs when this has been translated for him by Pudding. He sucks deeply on his Double Happiness. He looks down at the grey notebook.

  ‘Of course we do not suppose you played any part in the disappearance of the young man, Professor. We simply hoped that you might know more than we know. The boy was a favourite student of yours, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I try to give all my students equal time and attention.’

  ‘Of course, but your eyes would light up with delight every time he walked into the classroom,’ comments the cop calmly. ‘At least, according to one of your young women students.’

  ‘He was a very gifted young man.’

  ‘Was gifted? You don’t think the present tense appropriate?’

  This is just silly.

  ‘Inspector, I don’t know what’s happened to Yu Jiayu. I wish I could help you. I can’t help you.’

  The plod seems not to mind.

  ‘You know nothing at all?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘NOW, BY WAY of preamble I want to say that we have a long and not undemanding agenda today,’ drones Prudence West. ‘Oh, and inter alia, may I take this opportunity to prompt everybody’s memory regarding the ground rules agreed upon in the matter of mobile phones?’

  ‘Switch the buggers off, for those who don’t speak Double Dutch,’ snaps Tim Self.

  Prudence shoots him a dirty look. Tim offers her a little twitch of his upper lip. All the rest of us fidget, or sigh, or yawn, or frown. None of us likes sitting at a meeting table alongside Tim. We know how badly he gets along with others. We also know that Pru, by stupefying everybody with boredom, will make us want so badly to bolt out the door that she’ll find herself able to get her own way and will keep climbing, step by step, the career ladder she hopes will end with some lurk more lucrative than the interdepartmental chair.

  ‘Without any further ado,’ she moos in her monotone, ‘shall we proceed to the first item on the agenda?’

  ‘Perish the thought that we could skip straight to the last,’ yaps Tim.

  ‘Apologies?’ croons Pru. ‘May I hear apologies?’

  Where are we? We’re inside a brightly lit meeting room on the campus of my old university back in my home country, that’s where. When? Not long after the start of the first semester early last year. An interdepartmental meeting gets summoned once a month so we can feign to talk about — but really rubberstamp — laws for our school. Pru West is our head of school: the School of Culture Studies. The university has a lot of schools. Schools are grouped into faculties — ours is the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

  ‘Chair moves that the minutes of the last meeting be taken as read,’ says Pru. ‘Any seconder?’

  Of course she has several lackeys to hand, happy to second.

  My head aches. Monday, merely, yet already this seems to have turned into Manfred’s Week of Definitive Pratfalls. Seated, comatose, at the big dull table I note that not only my head but also my stomach feels crap. Blame the boozy staff bonding barbecue on Sunday. We all stumbled around a swimming pool while supposedly developing a sense of warm-and-fuzzy group solidarity for the semester. Of course the last thing anyone would want to do with a weekend would be to go to a staff barbecue. You wouldn’t, would you? You wouldn’t want to watch hunks of dead cow singed over steel grills, slapped bleeding onto buns, chewed by my colleagues? You wouldn’t want to glug down the cheap plonk they lay on for academic cannon-fodder like us?

  ‘Now, matters arising from the minutes of the last meeting —’

  My day so far has chalked up one squabble with our departmental secretary, one putdown over morning tea by an ambitious younger colleague, and one suddenly chipped tooth. The tooth chipped itself thanks to my biting too hard into a gritty scone straight after the putdown and finding inside the dough a stone. Making myself come to this table has been the work of half an afternoon. A slow, stumped afternoon spent seated blankly in my office, idling with my red steel stapler, snapping its little jaws up and down, up and down. I don’t know why.

  Snap, snap, snap!

  The campus is killing me. The rooms like toilets along long straight smothering axes. Corridors, cells, enclosure, airlessness. Bland colours, lack of colour, lack of vitality, movement, accident, irregularity, the organic, the fluid, the flexible, the pliable, the friable.

  Who else has made their unwilling way to the interdepartmental meeting?

  Dr Batty from Romance Languages. Two plush chairs caress his plump arse. A skinny arse, by contrast, jiggles on the neighbouring plush: Dr Downer’s. She, yawning her way through the meeting, shows no trace in her tired little eyes of knowing that she’ll be dead by the end of the year when her lightweight car will be totalled in a head-on. Dr Blight has turned up too, of course — moaning as always about how he gets dumped upon with all the dross jobs in Romance.

/>   ‘A propos, may I depart from the strict limits of the agenda for a moment or two and say that in my view —’

  Who’s come along from Comparative Cultural Studies? Let me see — their senior representative, Professor Perfect, always to be found lobbying and jockeying and assassinating character wherever any sort of politics can be found going on around the campus. Last year she threw the contents of a cup of tea — tepid, luckily — at the swollen pink kisser of Professor Swinyard. Swinyard snorted for months afterwards about having Perfect up before the staff disciplinary body on a charge of assault. Who else from Comparative Cultural Studies? Dr Rough, as always. Dr Gunn, sacked later in the year for downloading child porn from the internet. Dr Inkster, seated on my left, hunkered down inside his old tweed jacket with worn leather patches on its elbows. Inkster seems to have something naughty hidden beneath his briefing notes for our meeting. A quick glance or two to check it out. Yep, he’s smuggled into the room a fistful of footnotes to be appended to one of his latest academic articles — a dense thicket of script which he keeps peeking at by lifting a corner of the briefing notes.

  ‘Matters arising is our business at present, please note. Which means, I’m sorry, that I must ask you to postpone that matter until the appropriate…’

  Sociology has given us bleary, wrinkled, white-bearded old Professor Stiff and cute perky little Dr Mein, who started her career as a B student before she attracted the friendly attentions of Stiff. Dr Thrasher, also from Sociology. Dr Woolly, who for some reason will go blind early in the New Year.

  My mind wafts back to my rendezvous with the red stapler earlier in the afternoon.

  Snap, snap!

  A weary old woman called Con Craven sits to my right, come to the meeting in her capacity as monitor for the faculty. Con’s long mournful face with its blue skin and yellow teeth has been seen around the tables of academic committees in one or another capacity for so many years that she’s become known as the Zombie. Nobody knows where she goes when day ends at the university. One theory is that she sleeps in the broom cupboard behind the audiovisual laboratory.

  ‘Now, moving on to the next item on the agenda,’ moos Pru.

  One hour has passed, with painful slowness. We start into the second hour.

  Snap!

  ‘Disagreeably, we find ourselves forced to consider the possibility,’ she lows well into the second hour, ‘of a policy for a glass ceiling on career advancement in two of our schools, namely —’

  I start to weep. Tears seep from my eyes, slowly.

  ‘Well, speaking frankly,’ snaps Professor Perfect, ‘I’m damned if I’m accepting a glass ceiling for my school!’

  ‘May we please speak in an appropriately measured way during our proceedings?’ asks Pru. ‘Given that we’re dealing with matters of no small substance?’

  ‘I’m damned if I’ll measure my words if measuring means —’

  Only after a few more slangings have shot back and forth between those two does the table run out of words. Pru gulps. Perfect gapes. All have started to stare at me aghast, for now I’m no longer seeping tears. I’ve begun to sob — hoarsely, snottily.

  Why am I crying? I don’t know. I only know that I’m thinking about my dad. I’m thinking about my dad not as he is now, but as he was long ago, more than forty years ago, when he was a young man and I was a boy. Pines Beach. I’m thinking of a day at Pines Beach. Kids playing. Broom pods popping in the sun. Salty sand. Sweet, sticky orangeade. One of those long, slow summer holidays when we came from town with our togs and our beach towels and our cricket bats, and rented a cottage, and lay about for week after week, taking it easy. When I say we I mean my brother and my two sisters and me, and Mum.

  Dad was less lucky. Dad kept working.

  A tinny little alarm would wake him. He’d drag on his duds, take a pee, cough up a lot of phlegm — as a kid I’d flinch when I heard him in the toilet, hacking away, a smoker’s cough. He’d pack himself a lunchbox. He’d head off towards the bus stop. He’d take a bus down the highway. He’d ride all the way to the city. He’d clock in. He’d work his eight hours and then do overtime for the extra money — which always came in more than handy, given the kids he was trying to keep fed. Why, though, did he have so many kids? Why didn’t he and my mum reach for the condoms, since every other grown-up in our suburb seemed to grab hold of the things whenever they wanted? Anyway, he’d work a long day. He’d clock out. He’d get the bus back to the beach.

  What were his thoughts while he worked, while he smoked, while the bus brought him home to us? Did he think about us?

  Did he think about me?

  Not likely.

  One day when I was seven or so the thought came into my head that I could meet him when the bus brought him back from the city. I’d been at the general store. I’d bought myself a war comic. Mum always gave each of us a shilling from Dad’s weekly pay packet and my shilling — my bob, as everyone called that coin — got itself spent on a war comic. War comics were tatty little booklets, printed in smudgy black and white, telling the story of how we won the Second World War. Story after story about doltish Krauts getting the crap kicked out of them by plucky Poms. You know the kind of thing. Having handed across my bob and got my comic — rolled into a tube, cinched tightly by a rubber band — I stood outside the general store. The bus stop was right in front of the general store.

  Why didn’t I do what I always did after buying a comic? I don’t know. Normally I’d scamper back to our cottage, hurl myself onto my bed, peel off the rubber band and start to read. Today, I stayed. I stood by the bus stop with my little paper tube of story. A low light raked across the tops of the pines and the cypress. Magpies gargled. Painted steel pipes sprang from the sandy yellow grass of the playground to prop up swings and slides and seesaws. Crimson pipes. Orange pipes. Sky blue pipes.

  Cars came past with crumpling sounds, sounds caused by their thick black tyres on loose shingle.

  After a bit the bus came up and puttered to a stop. Out stepped the dads. A whole row of dads. My dad wasn’t the only dad who stuck to his last — who kept working in town while his family came here to the seaside. All of those dads stepping down from the bus looked to me, to me the little kid, like the typical dads of my part of the world in the middle of the twentieth century. Youngish blokes whose hair had been shaved to the skull at sides and back, leaving only a little cap on top, clipped hair the colour of brown or straw — a cap maybe like the reverse of a monk’s tonsure. They really were a sort of monk. Almost all those dads had taken vows of service and duty to their wife and their kids. They dressed with the drabness of monks, too. Stepping down onto the shingle outside the general store, the dads loped in a tired but easy sort of way towards the various little lolly-coloured cottages nested amidst sighing pines dive-bombed by those gargling maggies.

  My own dad ducked his head at me, a short nod.

  ‘Hello, Dad,’ I chirped, looking away.

  We didn’t touch, of course. Not so much as a thought even crossed the mind of son or father that either might perhaps have allowed himself to touch, let alone kiss. My dad swapped a word or two with some other blokes while I looked for a bit into the store window. While looking I was aware of his lean height behind my back. Afterwards we seemed simply to fall into step. Side by side, we set off. Quiet, but companionable — that was what it felt like, walking alongside that lanky chap. He seemed a calm man who needed not to talk in order to be good company.

  My own tongue got busy.

  ‘We’ve had a neat day here, Dad. We played wars down the beach. I was a German. And we beat the British. And we went for four swims. And a man gave us rides in his speedboat across the lagoon. And it was neat. And I saw seven types of bird in the lagoon —’

  He said nothing, but I felt good as we pressed on towards our cottage.

  Hang on, though — we weren’t headed towards our cottage. We’d gone the wrong way!

  Looking up, worried, I wondered why my dad ha
d gone the wrong way. Dad always went the right way. He was that sort of man. Somehow, it occurs to me now, it seems not so much a strength as a weakness, that he should always have gone the right way. Does it mean he didn’t even wonder whether there was a wrong way? Anyway, I’m looking up at my dad — and with a shock I see that the lanky bloke loping next to me isn’t my dad at all. He’s some other boy’s dad. Bewildered, turning my head sideways, I see my own dad heading off the right way.

  I feel shame. I feel my face flushing hotly.

  Looking back up at the unknown bloke, I see that he’s smiling down at me in a daddish sort of way. Absent, vaguely friendly. Maybe he’s thinking about how he’s weary at the end of his day and how good it’ll be to get back to the cottage and kick off his town shoes and put his feet up and sing out to his wife to open a bottle of beer.

  ‘Sorry, mister,’ I whisper, and scoot away.

  Pines Beach was where I found myself a few months after the interdepartmental meeting, seated on a dune looking out to sea while making up my mind whether or not to run away to Shanghai. I was at the beach because I own a cottage there, and have done since my divorce. I was on a dune on a working day because I’d been given stress leave by my university. Stress leave is what they call it when we get sent home with nervous disorders. We keep collecting our pay. I wasn’t at all keen about ever going back to my job, so I was asking myself whether or not I should try throwing the whole show over and scarpering to Shanghai.

  Carmen had already been working there for more than a year, so the nuts and bolts of it would be easy. After my phone call, begging her for help, she’d done some quick asking around, calling in the odd favour, and landed me a job — not as a historian, the only trade I’m qualified for, but as a teacher of English.

  ‘It’d be a doddle,’ she said. ‘What they want’s mostly language and just a few rats and mice of literature, so you wouldn’t need to write lectures about Congreve or Orwell.’

  ‘You need special skills for language teaching, though.’