Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  So, my students are spies. Nasty little pricks and bitches. Well, no, that’s not fair. They’ve been bailed up and made to talk by this bloke. Keep calm. Keep your cool. Your best way of getting on top of this must be to try to make yourself look like an unworldly scholar — unworldly yet quietly sure of his values. And to keep your trap shut as much as you can, cut short anything you say.

  ‘Our relationship was quite proper.’

  ‘Yet you are lonely?’

  ‘Yet I’m lonely.’

  ‘Professor Morse, you have never been seen keeping company with a lady. Do you not like to keep company with ladies?’

  ‘I’m a divorced man, Inspector Mao. I’ve had enough of keeping company with ladies.’

  The plod grins, and busies himself for a bit with his notes while taking a few deep draws on his Double Happiness. Next he looks up at me sharply.

  ‘Do you prefer boys?’

  Fuck.

  ‘I take it you’re asking whether boys are my sexual preference?’

  ‘Yes, Professor Morse.’

  ‘Only a criminal would become sexually involved with a boy, Inspector Mao.’

  He looks at me hard.

  He shrugs.

  We both look away. The Inspector finds time to light the tip of a fresh fag with the butt of the old fag — though surely he can’t have puffed his way through a whole fag so quickly? Also he scratches some characters onto that thin greyish notebook. I’m looking up towards the ceiling and noting the red nylon ribbon on the louvred vent, which as always is flickering fitfully — blackened with smuts, streaked with grease — while the air conditioner keeps up its tired throb-throb-throb. Once more I try to kid myself that I’m on a ship and that the noisy throbbing is the ship’s turbines, and that the ship’s prow is cutting through deep water, which seems soothing, as always.

  My mind goes back to the waves at Pines Beach. Waves breaking onto clean sand, tides ebbing, flowing — and a little boy who mistakes a stranger for his father.

  Sorry, mister.

  Now the cop tries another tack. He tells me, as one grown man to another, how the inquiry is coming along so far. I feel myself sweating, blushing, more on the back foot, somehow, by being treated as trustworthy. What are the new facts in the inquiry? The lungs of the body found in the water have been cut open and submitted to forensic autopsy. They show no evidence of death by drowning, so far, for the dead young man is too badly rotted. We can’t know whether he drowned or died in some other way.

  ‘In an act of violence, for example,’ says Inspector Mao, looking up at me sternly.

  A blank look back from me. I’m proud of that blank look.

  Why am I feeling proud of something so petty when what I did — what I’ve done — is kill Jay?

  Okay, look away. Quick!

  Not sure whether he saw that little shift of mood in my craven eyes. He shows nothing in his own eyes, when I sneak a look back to check him out. He takes another toke. He goes on with his story. He says that notwithstanding the lack of forensic evidence an act of violence may well have been the cause of death. A quarrel was overheard near the creek at about one in the morning after Yu Jiayu was last seen by his dormmates. A quarrel in English. Two men quarrelling. One a young man, and one not so young. Afterwards a heavy splash, and then silence.

  ‘And you really think the young man may have been Jay?’ I ask coolly. ‘Who overheard this quarrel, Inspector Mao?’

  ‘A young woman student from your university.’

  ‘One of my students?’

  ‘Not one of your students. She happened to be studying very late in her room nearby.’

  ‘Why did she pass on this information to the police?’

  ‘She’s a good citizen, so of course when she heard on campus that a student was missing —’

  I feel sicker. How can I run away?

  ‘So she speaks English? She can tell you what the quarrel was about?’

  He looks at me hard once more, while trying not to show that he’s looking at me hard.

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’

  A sense of immense relief. I try to keep speaking coolly.

  ‘What a pity.’

  ‘A pity. The young woman is a student of Japanese. The only words she recognised in the quarrel were common words recalled from her middle school English. Words such as why, you, hate. Also various obscene words.’

  ‘How does she know obscene words in English?’

  ‘Foreign films.’

  Inspector Mao looks down at his notebook. He snaps it shut. We seem to have gone over all the ground that needs to be gone over today. I find it hard to believe my good luck — if good and luck are two words fit for the way my life is now.

  ‘Please excuse me if I don’t see you to the door. My bladder is full.’

  Wondering whether I’m not so much going to pee as spew, I take to my heels, scamper down my corridor and burst into the bathroom. A bathroom fitted not only with the dim mirror and dodgy shower you know about already but also a handbasin, a flush toilet and a bathtub. All three cons, definitely not mod, have been moulded from yellowish ceramic but each has its own playfully unique pattern of mottles or streaks. The streaks in the toilet bowl are orange. The mottles in the bathtub are grey. The mottles in the handbasin are brown. I stoop over the handbasin, wishing to splash my face with cold water.

  I see, writhing in that shallow pit of porcelain, red worms.

  Thin worms, thin as human hair.

  A first shrinking back is followed by the quick thought that they’re not worms at all and that somehow some of the yarns from the red ribbons on the vents of the air conditioner have dropped into the handbasin, where they’ve got wet, and where they’re now waving around in their wetness like worms, when really they’re nothing more loathsome than threads, grubby yet harmlessly synthetic, nothing worse than nylon. A thought followed in turn by the thought that the thought is nonsense. The truth of the matter is that living vermin have somehow crawled up the drainpipe of my bathroom basin and are now starting a colony, a colony like the colony founded by my forebears when they crawled down the camiknickers of Queen Victoria — which for some weird sexist reason is how my brain right now personifies the process by which creaking wooden ships carried great-grannies and great-granddads across deep oceans — a colony which would become, after a century or so, my homeland, my country.

  Worms! Okay, swallow hard. You’re not in a nightmare, right? You’re in your bathroom. Tiny invertebrates have taken a wrong turning and all you need do is turn on the taps.

  What if they haven’t crawled up the drainpipe but have come through the tap water?

  Gross!

  I lurch into the kitchen, grab a plastic bottle of dishwashing detergent, burst back into the bathroom and flood the basin with the green viscous crap. Crap which must be toxic enough to kill the worms, surely. Surely if I leave this detergent soaking in the sink for a few hours there won’t be any worms tomorrow. Certainly this isn’t a nightmare —

  Yet it is, it is a nightmare.

  Jay!

  The cops will work it out. They’ll come back. Not that their coming back is the worst of it. The worst of it is what I did to Jay.

  ‘I’M PISSED OFF with bloody Lenore,’ says Carmen. ‘She still hasn’t phoned me after our row, which you’ll know — if like me you’re keeping tabs on your calendar so you can work up a good grudge — now took place a full sodding fortnight ago.’

  ‘Why do you want her to phone you? Don’t you find it quite restful not to be phoned?’

  Lenore is our sister, by the way. Younger than me, older than Carmen, she lives with her husband in Melbourne. The husband is a financial planner and consequently likes to talk about making money. Spending gets looked after by Lenore. She’s not our only sibling, as you know. Godfrey, one year older than me and a computer geek, lives in Singapore.

  ‘Well, true, it’s like a holiday not having to pick up the phone and listen to that ignorant cow moo on a
bout nothing. Married in Melbourne. What a fate! But that’s not the point. She should be phoning and begging me to forgive her. She won’t, though. Sow.’

  ‘Make up your mind, does she moo or does she oink?’

  ‘Oh, ha bloody ha.’

  Carmen chucks a featherweight biscuit at me — a slimming biscuit, air inside an envelope of rye, because she’s on a dieting gig right now. My sis has been a big lass ever since her teen years. We’re seated inside the red and orange lounge of her apartment, thirty storeys above Nanjing Xi Lu. Three months and more have gone by since I first landed in the city. I’m drinking beer and she’s downing gin. She’s in yellow shorts and her hair this week is also a sort of yellow. Maybe you could say straw.

  ‘True, she’s not begging you to forgive her. But she’s thinking about it all the time, you can bet.’

  ‘Thinking? What you mean is that a few loose phrases will dribble haphazardly through that morass of a brain. Aw, must call Carmen at some stage and clear the air. She won’t be highlighting it at the top of her priority list. Not that the concept of the sow drawing up a priority list isn’t anything but risible. Was that the right number of negatives making a positive? She’ll just be slothfully supposing that one day when she’s brave enough she’ll get off her bum and pick up the phone. Thinking that I, like her, don’t have a life and therefore will always be waiting.’

  The row broke out during a phone conference between the four of us to talk about Dad. We were trying to work out the best way to fly him around the planet to visit us all.

  ‘I’m so looking forward to seeing the dear old chap again,’ Lenore had cooed into her mouthpiece.

  ‘You’ve got a quaint way of phrasing irksome fucked prick,’ snarled Carmen.

  ‘Carmen, you’re so — so —’ floundered Lenore.

  ‘Accurate?’

  Carmen had then gone on to say that while she was willing to have the old man in the same city as herself for a week she wouldn’t be letting him set foot in her apartment. Lenore had started to go on about callousness, and cruelty, and what was owing from a daughter. Carmen had cut in with a comment about the word daughter being a synonym in some cases for sap.

  And so on, with me sniggering on the side, and no sound from Godfrey.

  ‘Lenore can go onto a back burner for now though, right?’ I try. ‘We’ve got to make up our minds what hotel we’re sticking him in when he gets here, and what we’re going to do to keep him busy.’

  ‘He can look after himself during the day,’ says my sis.

  ‘Hmm, don’t you think maybe —’

  Carmen thrusts a big open palm, driven by her powerful arm, to wave my weak words away.

  ‘Life’s too short to waste on losers,’ she announces, and then starts chomping discontentedly through one of the slimming biscuits, in a fine dust of rye. ‘I’m getting fatter and fatter — not wise, given that guys these days are so lard-averse when it comes to looking for a screw.’

  ‘Well, the guys are getting more solid too, aren’t they?’

  ‘They sure are! Those beer bellies are blooming.’

  ‘So, since such a lot of men your age are getting on the heavy side there’ll be a queue of them, right, more than happy to go with a solid woman?’

  ‘No matter how many tonnes the guys weigh, they still want Barbie.’

  ‘Or Ken, lucky for me.’

  The phone rings.

  ‘Wonder if that’s the sow,’ says Carmen. ‘Very bloody likely!’

  I run across the room. And as it happens, it is Lenore.

  ‘I’ve just got home from the hospital,’ she says. ‘I’m ringing you and Carmen because the doctors say he’ll definitely only last a few more months, so the two of you will need to make the most of the short time he’ll have with you in Shanghai.’

  My mind leaps back to the day, ten years ago, when we were all together at the hospital first hearing a doctor talk about the need for surgery. Standing on the beige carpet of a white room, the five of us were there. Dad, Godfrey, Lenore, Carmen, myself. The surgeon explained how the cancer would be handled. He kept glancing at Carmen, since she was a colleague, while spelling out the need to open the jaw. Seemingly by opening the jaw he’d be able to get to the seat of the cancer, deep inside the throat. How was the doctor to open our dad’s jaw? He’d slice through the wrinkled old skin of the chin, and he’d saw apart the brittle old jawbone, and he’d fold out the lower half of dad’s head like folding out the wings of a butterfly.

  ‘Like the wings of a butterfly,’ he said twice, since it was a nice clear simile and would help us lay folk to grasp his meaning.

  Dad looked wordlessly at the white walls.

  The jaw, once opened, would be held down by steel clamps. The surgeon would gouge out cancerous tissue. He would slice and peel strips of skin from my old man’s shoulders, graft the strips onto the shambles left at the throat, then stitch it all back up again.

  Lenore, turning red, burst into tears.

  ‘The bit about the butterfly wasn’t too apt,’ Carmen said to me a bit later. ‘We’re not talking about gossamer here, we’re talking about hacking a way through tendon and cartilage and bone — he won’t look like a butterfly, he’ll look like a stringray run over by a bus.’

  Walking into the lobby of the Hotel Equatorial, and finding myself stumped by bulky blandness, I look around at a lot of white men in black suits before catching sight of an old coot under a red baseball cap. A scrawny old coot seated inside a suite of slippery black leather. Catching sight of me, he waves jerkily.

  Waving back, I wade towards him across the carpet.

  ‘How are you, Dad?’

  Dad looks old and sick, which is what he is, as you know. He looks to be at home, though, despite having never before been to Shanghai. Carmen and I two nights ago trailed out in a taxi to the international airport to pick up the old guy. This afternoon, having a few hours free from classes, I’ve made myself come to the hotel to do a stint more dad duty.

  He gives me a thumbs up. We’re always awkward when together. Now, rather than meeting his eye I look at a point a little to my left of his right ear, and dart quick glances at his face to put together a picture of his appearance the way a satellite spinning through space takes multiple quick still shots of the surface of an unknown moon. Computers working their socks off back at base will meld the many short shots into a visual whole, maybe, though don’t count on it in this case. A scrawny sack of ribs is the upper part of his body. As for his head — well, his head looks like a skull. A skull which somebody with a macabre sense of humour has sprayed all over with a thin — very thin — layer of reddish latex. The same humorist, thrusting a fist inside the skull, has squeezed into its sockets a couple of beady brown eyes, presumably made of plastic or fibreglass, and then gone on and wired those eyes, together with the bones and the latex, to some complicated little electronic gizmo that makes the skull look almost as though it were alive.

  Clicking his jaw, making a raspy noise, he waves me onto a black sofa.

  He’s knackered, yet somehow he seems happy.

  He looks birdlike, chirpy, perky.

  Dad. Who the hell is Dad?

  A shadow, always he’s seemed a shadow. Not a dark shadow. A grey shadow. No, not grey, something still weaker —

  Seating myself, glancing at a few white threads that poke out from beneath that red baseball cap, I think back to when he was a young dad and I was a little boy. His head in those days thrived with thick, always closely clipped, gleaming black hair. I think back to the day he stepped off the bus at Pines Beach. The day I mistook another man for my dad. Next I think back further, back to when I was a toddler.

  Cock horse.

  Two words, which come quickly, twinned, together with a feeling of rocking, swaying — with feeling thrilled and worried and a bit sick. A pic comes quickly too. A pic from somewhere inside myself. A pic of a young man. A young man who looks — no, who feels, because I’m a wee boy — vigorous and
wiry. A young man who wears browns, or greys. A young man seated with his knees crossed, one lower leg swinging free, weighted with — with me!

  Ride a cock horse

  To Banbury Cross

  To see a fine lady

  Upon a white horse.

  A young man in those browns, or greys, or greys-and-browns, his face ruddy, his dark hair shaved to the skull at sides and back but gleaming and glossy on top. Swinging his free leg, swinging me, while I’m squealing excitedly.

  Ride a cock horse

  To Banbury Cross …

  A weird feeling, because of course there’s that word cock. Somehow it’s as though this young vigorous dad in his brown-grey, his wholesome nothingness, was swinging you on his thing, the thing that was anything but nothing, that big soft heavy sack he kept slung between his legs, big and squirming and sliding, that thing tucked away, stowed away, well hidden beneath those thick flapping folds of tweed or twill or drill but glimpsed sometimes when we were in changing sheds at the public pool, or the beach — a thing which when glimpsed made you open your eyes wide in amazement.

  Dismayed by the memory, I turn my eyes down from the red cap to look him full in the face.

  His skin is awful. On closer inspection it’s not so much like latex as a sort of frayed fake leatherette developed last century in some interwar lab, a leatherette meant for covering wireless cases but thrown out as faulty and left lying on a scrapheap ever since to be cooked by the sun and cracked by the frosts and turned into something scaly, scabbed, patched, frayed, fraught —

  Actually, to tell the truth, I’m still not looking him in the eye. We never have looked each other in the eye; we’re too shy.

  ‘What’re you up to, Dad?’

  Dad nods zestfully, gives me another thumbs up, grabs a little portable whiteboard, writes a few words.

  Family photos, putting in order, to give copies to you and Carmen.

  Okay, what next to say? What next to say to someone who may be dead a month or two from now? I look at a sort of glossy loose fan formed by hundreds of photographs strewn across the grainy wood of the tabletop. Dad sorts steadily. He seems to have some system as he slides the snaps into the plastic envelopes of an album bound in red vinyl. Myself, fingering the fan without any thought — lifting one photograph after another, looking at likenesses of dead and living kinfolk — I feel a lot of fleeting things, things felt only brokenly. All these photographs are well known to me already. I’ve got copies of my own. A likeness in sepia of a young woman wearing a jazzy frock seated in the spring sunshine of 1922 and holding on her lap a baby boy. Dad. Two young soldiers standing in front of a camera, loose limbed and grinning, sometime about 1940. Dad with his brother who was killed in the war. A family shot from about 1950 showing in sober black-and-white a row of men and women dressed to the nines on a mown lawn. Dad, marrying Mum.