Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  WAITING FOR THE knock on my door, the knock of Inspector Mao. Knock knock. A strong knock, not a light knock. Day after day, while waiting for his knock, I find that my life feels more and more like death. He’ll come knocking. He’ll take me away. My guts grip tight when I think about the handcuffs, the holding cell, the cattle prod. My guts grip tighter when I think about Jay. I can’t stop thinking about Jay. How can a boy so full of life now be dead? How can I have killed anyone, anyone at all — me, the innocuous educated bland mild polite propertied hypocrite me? How can I have killed anyone, let alone my lovely Jay?

  ‘Do you prefer boys?’ he said, drawing deeply on his Double Happiness.

  The red worms have found their way back into my bathroom basin. Thin, thriving, writhing on top of the brown mottles of the clumsy cream porcelain. My first thought, upon catching sight of them — I’d just stepped out, dripping and sad, from a struggle to get hot water out of Flying Angel — the first thought prompted by the sight of the squirming vermin once more was that I was having a nightmare. Worms in my bathroom basin — no way! Flooding the basin with dishwashing detergent, I left it soaking overnight in the hope of bumping off the nasty bastards. Next morning they still squirmed. Trying another technique, I boiled water in a kettle and poured it onto those red wrigglers.

  Boiling water seems to have worked. No sign now of any creepy-crawly.

  Of course my words in reply to the cop’s smoky question about boys were truthful words. I mean those words were truthful, not all my words.

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

  Run! Get away from this city. Run away!

  Yet running away isn’t what I’m doing. I’m staying. I’m trudging on my treadmill. I wonder if it’s the same for others who kill those they love? I can’t run away because if I run away I’ll be running from the sights that allow me not only to keep thinking about, but almost seeing, Jay. One Street. Two Street.

  ‘How are you?’ says the old mag woman.

  ‘How are you?’ I say.

  Six Street. Skytrain. Campus gateway. A guard stands sweating on this hot day atop a sort of circular podium, under a floral sun umbrella. Big blotchy flowers of orange and yellow, fit for the beach, look lost above his navy blue uniform studded with brass buttons. A bus wheels in from the highway. The guard, stiffening, lifts his right arm in salute.

  Who’s he saluting? The busload of sweaty academics? The nobility of knowledge?

  The pockmarked driver?

  Sweating myself, lifting a sheaf of papers to shield myself from the sun, I cut across campus to the School of English. My office is stinking hot. Throwing open the windows, dropping myself at my desk, I start working on the notes of a new series of lectures for next semester. I toy with my red stapler, working its small sharp jaws. Snap! Opening the windows was a bit silly, really, since there’s not a breath of wind and the city stinks of soot and petrol. Snap snap! I jump up, nip outside, buy an iced tea from a stall. Coming back quickly, I carry on with my work.

  Working, writing, thinking, sweating, snapping. I want to cry.

  Jay, come back, come back to me, Jay.

  After clocking up a couple of hours I flick on my computer to go online but find that the campus net connection is on the blink. Not uncommon, I don’t know why. Okay. I pack up, leave my office, lock the door, walk out of my school. Sopping with sweat, I start to cross the campus.

  A group of short women, together with one short man, is blocking my way.

  Cops sent by Inspector Mao? No, not cops. Cleaners. A group wearing floppy white cottons and looking whacked. Two of the women have draped their heads with damp towels. All carry the tools of their trade: mops and plastic buckets. My way has been blocked by one of the women acting the goat with the man — wrestling him for his mop. Now, having got a good grip, she chucks the mop into the clipped shrubbery. They all laugh. He laughs loudest, throwing open his mouth to show gums embedded with only one tooth. A lecturer walks past unsmilingly — my age, more or less, her hair tightly coiled and skewered with a diamante pin. Nor does a group of girl students deign to show awareness of the cavortings of cleaning folk while walking past arm in arm under parasols — pretty, teetering, blooming with pink and yellow.

  I make my way into a cybercafe on Two Street. An industrial warehouse only a year ago, it’s been divided by partitions of glass and plywood into more than four hundred booths where four hundred boys, together with maybe ten girls, are busily smoking, yakking on their cellphones, cybering and drinking Coke. Windows have been blocked by panels of polystyrene. Overhead air conditioners roar ceaselessly. Boys have stripped off their shirts to sit at the screens showing beautiful smooth bodies, perky with dark little nipples.

  Okay, don’t look at the boys. You’re a boykiller. Buy yourself a card to go online at one of the monitors.

  A niche above the reception counter houses a gilded statue of the God of Money. Two apples have been placed on pewter plates in front of his plump belly. Opposite sits Pooh Bear. The bear with very little brain wears a red nylon sweater and holds a card saying Hello in English.

  Buying my card, going to a booth, I try to go into a gay website where guys can chat. A site where I’ve met lots of guys before today.

  The site won’t load, for some reason.

  Dammit.

  I try another similar site. It won’t load either. Nor will a third. What’s going down? A creepy feeling comes over me as I check out the authorised online newspapers. China Daily. Shanghai Daily. Hmmm, scroll through this tendentiously censored story, and that censored tendentious story, and that bit of biased pontification, and — here we are, here’s the news.

  PEOPLE’S WAR AGAINST PORN WEBSITES

  It turns out that the Party has made up its mind that cyberdating websites are pornographic — are severely damaging social style, polluting the social environment and harming the physical and psychological health of young people. Hence the crackdown. Good work. We don’t want lonely guys finding a way to meet other lonely guys, do we? The city government has come scuttling up behind the state with a scheme to back the war against net depravity by ordering video surveillance cameras and high-tech spyware to be fitted into every one of the thousand and more cybercafes of Shanghai.

  How good to know that the authorities are tackling the country’s really serious problems.

  A beggar holds out her hand as I step back onto Two Street. A kid with one eye catches my eye as I hail a cab. I look away. Acid rain falls scrappily, a short shower that turns straight to steam while the cab drives me through dirty streets, past an overflowing sewer, onto a showy boulevard. An old woman with rickets tries to hobble across the boulevard but none of the cars will slow down or give way. A lot of the drivers in town haven’t ever passed a driving test. Licences are easily bought with bribes. My cab brings me quickly to a hot little park, sooty and dusty, at a spot where a creek flows into the Huangpu.

  Why have I come here? I’ve come here because this is where, three weeks ago, my boy was found floating, rotten and bloated.

  I stand on the riverbank for a bit, weeping furtively.

  ‘What time do you finish work?’ asks a blubbery bloke in a terylene suit, speaking Mandarin into his cellphone while shuffling along the embankment. ‘I won’t finish till ten tonight, but I’m tired and already hungry.’

  My own gut feels empty when I get back to the Foreign Experts. I check out fried chicken in a hole-in-the-wall eatery. My eye lights on a plastic bucket set down on the pavement in front of the eatery. The plastic is a fresh green colour. Swimming in red blood inside the bucket are white dismembered chunks. Wings. Legs. Breasts. Skin is pricked all over with gooseflesh, as though the dead are feeling a chill while those of us who’re living sweat in the sticky heat of the street — and while fat black flies, riding waves of warm air that stink with death, find their way to the tempting treats inside the plastic bucket.

  A schoolgirl with shiny specs and
a greasy chin stands next to the bucket, gnawing happily on a grilled drumstick.

  Okay, let’s go for something from a can.

  My kitchen looks naked but clean under the light of its single bare bulb. I bite chunks out of a green apple. I bolt down some wholemeal bread. Afterwards, thinking it wise to swallow protein, I open a tin of Canadian salmon. Turning the fish out onto a plate, and blending it with some Italian balsamic vinegar, I fork up a few mouthfuls and chew. That’s enough, don’t want any more. Always these days I have to make myself eat when what I want is to starve. Jay. Flipping open a plastic container, I stow away the rest of the fish. The container is white and, to make it look pretty, a little pink posy of flowers has been painted above the product name. Cook Joy.

  A BLEAK MORNING on a cold campus. The students call these opening days of the new semester the first three dark weeks because they get dumped with such a taxing workload. I’m staring out of my office window at bands of dim wintry colour stretched across an achingly low sky above the dead dark rooftops of the city. My office is cold. I’m rugged up in woollens as well as wearing a padded jacket and gloves. Shanghai looks like shit. A canal, sluggish and grey, crawls in front of my eyes. A group of workmen toil across a tract of mud on the other side of the canal, a tract lately bared by the building of a towering new apartment block and now strewn with shiny scraps of metal, whitish chunks of polystyrene, greyish shreds of plastic. Also lying about are broken bits of brick — baked long ago and handled and weathered and then broken or knocked down or thrown away and buried, buried under other things knocked down or thrown away. A bit creepy, really. All those weathered bits of broken baked clay, sunk and forgotten yet now, thanks to the tools of the workmen, climbing up through the mud, climbing from damp darkness into the cold, dry light of day. Climbing towards the lonely sky like the dead white shells on the beaches of my homeland.

  A cold wind whistles against my window.

  A wind all the way from Siberia.

  The workmen have now squatted on their heels in the lee of a mound of mud. The mound is low. Any shelter from the wind must be more in the mind than the body. One bloke, who wears muddied gloves, holds his hands in front of him as though in prayer. All the guys are puffing on fags. Grey ash from those fags won’t be dropping onto their thick dark baggy trousers but will be caught by the wind and whipped away.

  The door of my office bursts open. A boy, bounding forward, throws himself at me and covers me with kisses.

  ‘Yesterday I sense you don’t like me as much as before, because you are too polite, not natural,’ he says, after stopping to catch his breath, stroking my cheek with smooth warm fingertips, staring into my eyes, looking, looking for the truth. ‘So today when you say you don’t wanna meet me, I think you don’t like me any more.’

  ‘Jay, look, I’ve got so much work to do today. We can spend time together tomorrow.’

  ‘But I am feeling insecure. You know what I am so scared mostly?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What if you find me not attractive? I can’t imagine what will happen.’

  ‘Well, I can’t imagine ever finding you unattractive.’

  ‘Politician!’

  Quickly shifting my eyes, I look once more out the window. A new motorway is being built far off to the north, a new skytrain has come strutting from the west on white concrete pylons, while to the east can be seen the blunt black shapes of enormous pile-drivers pounding into the black earth ready for a still newer skytrain to link with the other at an interchange soon to be blinked into existence.

  So much money — so much work —

  So much scouring, scraping, sealing, welding, raising, lifting. You can feel the tension mounting, the blood pressure rising, the pace of the rat race quickening as technology streaks out of the city and sends lances of glass and metal and fibreoptic cable flying faster and faster —

  One hour later we’re lying in bed together at the Foreign Experts. His body is smooth and slim and firm. His skin glows against the crisp white cotton. We kiss a lot. His lips are warm and rather full. He kisses gently. Suddenly he swings a leg over me, slides his hips up my chest, and starts to fuck my mouth. Quietly, he fucks. Slowly. Silken skin lifts and sinks softly above my nose. I run my open hands across his chest, his tits. Next, sweeping around his shoulders, I run my fingertips down to the rhythmically moving, almost rubbery young buttocks. Gripping those buttocks tight while they begin fucking faster, then still faster, I gulp greedily as he shoots into the back of my throat a load of cum. I gulp it all down, every last drop. I keep my grip tight, holding his cock inside my mouth, while he lies panting on top of me, tickling my lips with his thatch of glossy black, winking at me with his navel. After a while — after a very short while! — his cock can be felt starting to thicken and harden once more. He moves his hips. He rocks back and forth, driving down my throat the swollen head of the cock. Wordlessly, he rolls away. Grabbing hold of me, flipping me over, he kisses the nape of my neck, my shoulders, the small of my back, the cheeks of my arse. Grunting, he slides his cock into my arse. Groaning, crooning, he fucks my arse steadily. The thrusts of his cock inside my body — and the young weight of him on my back — and the quick kisses he keeps darting down onto the nape of my neck — the whole firm remorseless feel of my lovely boy helping himself to me — I find overwhelming. I crane my head back so we can kiss. I cum. Jay, flipping me over once more, licks up all my cum. He jacks himself while licking. He guides my head down to his cock and I open my mouth wide for him to spurt another hot load down my throat.

  We lie on our sides, face to face, arms around each other, saying nothing while waiting for our breath to slow.

  ‘I love you, Daddy,’ he says at last, looking at me wonderingly.

  ‘What? Daddy! I’m not your father, Jay!’

  ‘Okay, I understand, Daddy.’

  He’s grinning at me now.

  ‘Let’s hit the shower.’

  ‘Sure, Dad.’

  Flying Angel burps and squirts with tepid water, and we do our best to sluice our bodies. Afterwards, wrapped in white towels, we drop onto my new red sofa. Jay twines his legs into mine. I bought the sofa after coming back — after coming back from failing to say goodbye to Dad — bought it on a whim when my back and bum found themselves unwilling to park any longer on either of the two armchairs for mummified mandarins. Jay, lolling his head against my chest, starts singing. Bright red, the upholstery of the new sofa. Sharp red. Not at all a dull red. Not by any means a grim greasy red like the red of the ribbon lying limp right now on the louvred vent of the air conditioner.

  ‘Jay, last night I got a phone call from Julia. She’s thinking of coming to visit Shanghai.’

  ‘Wow! I hope to make friends with your both daughters.’

  ‘They’re good girls.’

  ‘They have themselves life and career. I think it is very happy thing for you, as a father.’

  We start flicking through some pics of my girls when they were young, followed by some pics of myself when I was young. He’s taken by a shot of my childhood home in a sunny suburb. A red-brick bungalow, a green roof, a green lawn, snapped on a summer day.

  ‘No doubt that I like the house very much,’ says Jay. ‘I think it is beautiful and clean house.’

  Catching sight of myself in a mirror hanging on a wall nearby, I see that I’m smiling grimly.

  ‘You reckon?’ I say.

  ‘My daddy had his boy time in this house — so interesting!’

  ‘Okay, that’s one point of view. Why are you calling me your daddy? It’s a bit weird.’

  Jay shoots me another grin, after which his mood shifts and he picks up the remote and snaps on the tele. Jay likes blobbing out in front of the screen only as half of a twosome. He’ll blob if I blob. We watch a bit of basketball. Jay loves basketball. He plays with other boys, sometimes twice a day, and talks to me happily about the way he played during his years at high school.

  ‘All the boys in school
like Michael Jordan. My dream when I am in school is to dunk like Michael Jordan.’

  ‘Dunk?’

  He spells it out. A Japanese cartoon, widely loved by schoolboys a few years ago, was called Slam Dunk. We talk scrappily about Japan. We talk scrappily about Japanese pop music. Jay flicks channels in quest of pop. Click! Digital Korea, a show beamed out of Seoul and fronted by well-groomed, smiling, baby-faced cuties of indeterminate gender, comes onto the screen and we watch for a bit while the cuties rave about advances in cyberscience.

  Jay’s mood shifts once more.

  ‘I love you, Daddy. Do you love your Jay?’

  ‘Look, we’ve gotta cool down. We’ve gotta — Jay, you can’t keep talking this way!’

  ‘Why not keep talking this way?’

  ‘One year from now you’ll be making love to a boy. A boy your own age.’

  Jay looks hard into my eyes.

  ‘You should trust me and I will trust you. No matter what happen, I will still with you.’

  Jay’s always this way, always so outspoken. I find it bewildering. Men have never behaved to me this way. I know it’s untrustworthy. Also it makes me go weak at the knees. We start to kiss. Soon, after some grappling and wrestling, I’m sitting on the rigid rod of his cock. He’s cupping my arse cheeks in the palm of his hands. I feel frightened by the warmth to be seen in his eyes. Climbing down, I kneel on the floor. He fucks me some more. After an hour or so of orgy I find myself lying on my back on top of a wooden bureau, with my feet locked behind his neck, while he’s between my legs, fucking me wholeheartedly. How can I be so lucky? How can this be right? I can’t believe the glint in his eyes, the deep dark flush all over his face. My fingers once more are gripping the muscles of his buttocks, gripping the taut tightness as he pumps in and out. My eyes fix greedily on the sight of his face contorting and darkening into a still deeper flush, about to let loose a load. He groans and gasps —

  Afterwards, staggering into the next room, we drop onto the bed and lie sweatily together.