Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  ‘I notice a very bright round moon hang up the sky last night,’ he says. ‘The shining moon makes the night more bright and hopeful.’

  ‘I was born under a full moon,’ I say, a bit foolishly.

  His eyes light up.

  ‘You are son of the moon and father of Jay. I feel honoured to meet you!’

  We keep fucking for hours. By the time he heads out the door at the end of the day he’s cum seven times in less than twelve hours. After doing that sum I think fleetingly of the way teenage boys like to keep a tally. Teenage boys like Jay. He’s heading out the door because I won’t allow him to stay overnight at the Foreign Experts. Staying overnight, sleeping together in a shared bed — waking up in the morning to find each other on a shared pillow — would slide me further down the slippery slope.

  ‘Hey, we can’t meet as often as we’ve been meeting lately,’ I say. ‘We’re both getting behind with our work.’

  ‘I don’t want that you worry about work,’ he says obediently.

  ‘Also, you know, I need to spend time alone.’

  ‘Yes, I understand you need some private time every day. It is important and necessary character for a scholar. You need reading and thinking deeply.’

  Sure.

  Her hair has been dyed black once more, the way it was when I first came to Shanghai. Those days it looked glossy. Today it looks flat, lank.

  ‘Not sure I’m keen on the black,’ I say.

  ‘Raven, actually,’ she mutters.

  ‘You don’t seem too perky. Anything wrong?’

  ‘Flossy,’ she says.

  ‘Flossy? What’s wrong with the little lass?’

  Carmen and I are drinking coffee in Dante. The cat she bought the week our dad died has come with her to Shanghai. A few official palms needed to be crossed with silver before the right documents got stamped with the right rubber marks, but of course anything can be done in this city so long as you don’t take too careful note of the letter of the law — and so long as you’re willing and able to pay.

  ‘Skin infection around the neck or something. My expertise in the sickness line extends only to our species. All I know is that there’s been a bit of trauma and now there’s a lot of pus. I’ve got a pussy pussy. I’m worried. She’s in a pet hospital. By the way, I’ve begun shagging a bloke name of Gérard. He’s French. Lives in Changzhou. Does something to do with management for the Citroën works out that way.’

  ‘Cool! Farewell to the fuck-free five years. What’s he like?’

  ‘Pot belly, small brain, small willy and a bit up himself. I’d rate the fucks at four out of ten.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Well, he’s near enough when there’s nothing better.’

  ‘Will he get on well with Floss?’

  ‘I’ll shield her from all knowledge of his existence when I get her back from the quack. He doesn’t come to my place anyway. We do it at his little bijou of an apartment near Fuxing Park. He stays there weekends. He’s a prat, really. He thinks a lot about what he wears, and he’s nowhere near as cuddly as Floss.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not a good idea to keep seeing him.’

  ‘Right now any dick with a prick will do pretty damn fine, quite frankly.’

  ‘I fall in love with that book,’ he says wistfully. ‘I identify with Pip, his feelings and his struggles.’

  ‘Really?’ I say. ‘Yet you’re very different from Pip.’

  ‘I like the book for portrait of the society.’

  Jay and I are sitting with a hundred or so other well-dressed men and women on the big leather easy-chairs of the first-class waiting room at Shanghai Railway Station. Almost everybody is reading, though seldom more than newspapers, or glossy mags, or bestsellers about how to make money. One person, a plump young man, is reading a volume of poetry. I can’t make out the name of the poet, but guessing by the design on the cover of the book I think it’s classical work from the Tang Dynasty. The young man is picking a rather pimply nose. Jay, meanwhile, has been telling me the names of the novels he enjoys. He was first given Great Expectations in Chinese translation by his father when he was twelve years old. My mind’s eye has flipped in a jiffy back to my own boyhood, to my own dad.

  My own dad never handed me any book as a gift.

  We talk a little longer about Dickens. We talk about Thackeray. We talk about other writers and other books. Jay has read widely. His favourite novelists in English are Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. He adds, however, that to his mind the greatest novelists in the world are the nineteenth-century Russians.

  ‘War and piss,’ he says.

  A couple of secs before I get it.

  ‘Okay,’ I say mildly. ‘I’ve never really liked Tolstoy.’

  We fall silent for a bit, while holding hands under cover of his jacket. We’re waiting for the same train, but I’ll stay on board only some of the way before leaving him to go on alone. Suzhou is where I’m headed. I’m on my way to visit some old Ming gardens in that historic city. Dr Sun will meet me there, with other colleagues. Jay’s setting off for his parents’ wedding anniversary in Nanjing. Aunts, uncles and cousins will also be joining in the family weekend. Jay last saw everybody one month ago, at Spring Festival.

  ‘My father and mother must be miss me,’ he says.

  Father manages an advertising company. Mother is a doctor. A woman servant comes in during the day to do the dirty work. Jay has told me the whole story. He’s an only child, of course, thanks to state policy. As a lad he played a lot with his younger cousin, evidently another bright and good-looking boy, who’s still at middle school in Nanjing.

  ‘Will your visit to the family be from a sense of duty, or is it something you really want to do?’

  He looks slightly upset.

  ‘No, not a sense of duty. My mother and my father are getting older and older. I will cherish the time with them, every second.’

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘My mother fifty-seven, my father fifty-eight.’

  A chill goes down my spine. Old and older. Jay, not noticing, leans towards me and whispers in my ear.

  ‘Are you mine, Daddy?’

  He keeps calling me by this name when we talk, no matter where we are or what we’re up to, and now I’ve given away trying to get him to stop. To tell the truth I’ve not only got used to the word but now have even started to find it makes me feel good — especially when he’s fucking me, when his cock is buried up to the balls inside me, it’s strangely exciting to hear him say, I am fucking my daddy, the dad is being fucked by his son. Sick, really. Me with my own dad barely dead. Why would anyone want to writhe and sweat in the sack with his own son?

  ‘I like you a lot, Jay.’

  He grips my hand very tight under the jacket.

  Jay talks now about how his family wants him to do well at university. Not just his mother and father but his two grandmothers and two grandfathers are all waiting for great things from their boy.

  ‘My family wish me to enter a famous school and treat me so well that I feel lots of pressure on my thin shoulders.’

  ‘Your shoulders aren’t thin, they’re broad,’ I say with a laugh. ‘Don’t do things to make your family happy, though — that’s always a mistake.’

  ‘I want to make my family happy. I am Chinese.’

  ‘Also you’re yourself, not just Chinese.’

  ‘I am a lucky guy. My parents and grandparents love me. The only sadness in my life is love life.’

  He means his failed affair with another boy. The two guys shared a dorm at middle school, became fast friends, and after a bit started to jack each other off. They got fond of the habit and did it a lot. Boys being boys, they began working out how to suck and fuck. Graduation from middle school was followed by goodbyes, for the other boy was sent away by his family to study engineering at a university in Beijing, while Jay came down here to Shanghai. They still swap an odd email. The other boy talks about himself as straight and has a girlfriend now.
Jay, one day last week, brought from his dorm to my apartment a small cardboard box with the word Memory written on the top in English. Slowly he unpacked from the box a few keepsakes filched from the other guy. A red cotton handkerchief, folded neatly. A pocket calculator which no longer works — simply a flat slip of black plastic, scribbled with tiny white ciphers. A yellow pencil whose end was chewed by the other guy absentmindedly, then thrown away.

  So he’s had his heart broken, my boy.

  ‘Jay, you’ve got to go out and fuck other guys, okay?’ I say roughly. ‘The way you feel about me isn’t healthy.’

  ‘I love you, that is healthy.’

  ‘How do you know you love me? You’re just a kid with no experience of the world. You’ve gotta get out, meet other guys, fuck around, before you can understand anything about love.’

  ‘I don’t want other guy. I want you only. All that is totally out of my expectation before I go to university, to fall in love with my professor.’

  ‘You were just as much in love with that boy at middle school, right?’

  ‘It’s totally different from. That one is childish.’

  ‘All emotion has the same source, neither childish nor grown up.’

  ‘My emotion with you is like I am hit inside and out. Did you ever have this feeling before with someone right away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see.’

  A sound system tells us our train is ready. The well-dressed men and women hurtle from their easy chairs as though the city were about to be bombed. They elbow their way onto the rubbered and rumbling metal steps of an escalator. Jay and I join the throng. He holds my hand while the wheels of the steel stairway roll us a little closer to the sky. An hour later he looks like he wants to cry when we say goodbye on the platform at Suzhou.

  ‘Manfred, I do not hope we will apart! It is a torment for me!’

  ‘We’ll see each other in a few days, Jay.’

  Pecking his cheek quickly, I glance briefly into his moist brown eyes. I turn on my heel. I start running across a long broad wilderness of fake granite in search of the bobbing nodding little head and body of Dr Sun.

  All through the weekend he keeps sending me text messages from Nanjing. My cellphone bleeps every hour of the day and half the night with his quickly keyed words, some obscene, some sentimental.

  ‘Fuck u hard and cum a lot when I back to Shanghai. I want u, Daddy!’

  ‘I feel lonely in the night. I miss u so much.’

  ‘Miss ur hot ass!’

  ‘I don’t like the circumstances without a definition,’ he announces sternly the very first day we’re back together in Shanghai. ‘I have strong interest on making plans for our future together.’

  ‘Our future will be short. That’s the truth, okay?’

  ‘Not the truth, and not okay.’

  ‘Well, it’s all I can say.’

  ‘Manfred, please, I want to come live with you in this apartment. I want to have a home here with you. Many romantic stories will happen in the apartment at the end of every day when we finish the school and come back to our home. We together can spend every night in our warm bed. We together can appreciate the four seasons change. I will do what I can to make your life rich. I love you very much and want you happy!’

  His eyes are gleaming hopefully, hotly — almost angrily.

  ‘Jay, you’re wonderful. I’m very moved by what you say.’

  ‘Daddy! Your answer is yes?’

  ‘My lovely guy — I don’t know. Let’s keep talking about it, and thinking about it, and — and — I don’t know.’

  A quick scornful look is his only answer before, stark naked, he bounds out of bed and darts towards the bathroom. We’ve been doing the deed. He’s fucked me witless. Now, catching sight of a pair of his white underpants lying on the floor, he hooks them with his toes. Jumping, he flicks them into the air. He lands back on the balls of his feet. Whistling, he runs on his limber brown legs to the bathroom. Fuck! I’m so lucky. I think of Dad. I don’t know why. I think about Dad as he was at the age of fifty. I try to think about that dad with a young lover, a Chinese boy of eighteen, my dad with such a boy, kissing — and of course I can’t, I can’t think of it, it’s unthinkable, the poor sod was stuck with his kids, and his mortgage, and Mum.

  After dressing we make up our minds to go to the movies, since neither of us needs go back to the campus. We grab our backpacks. We walk quickly. Twilight has started sliding icily across the city.

  ‘I like how you put your hands on my shoulders in the public,’ says Jay.

  ‘I like the way you tell me what you like.’

  I wasn’t even aware that I was doing it, to speak the truth. My hands simply find their way onto his body, nowadays, as though the surface of his skin is where they belong.

  We come to a bus stop. We wait. A workman about sixty years old stands here too, with a fag and a smoker’s cough, his big hairless head looking like the wrinkled breast of an old woman. A boy with long hair and a baby face — a boy about the same age as my boy — leans back on a wall with his hands in his pockets while chewing gum and blowing it out to make pop sounds. A workman of about thirty, tired and thin but cheerful, stands by the boy. He has big buck teeth. Two worn women sit on stools with a jam jar of green tea between them, playing cards on a dirty little green folding table.

  ‘If you have a dream you should do all your best to realise the dream,’ Jay says suddenly.

  ‘What? You mean me, or anybody?’

  ‘You! Anybody! Don’t be fearful and do have courage. If you are easily stumbled by some difficulties, you’ll never realise your dream. Once you start, you must keep on. Stopping in the halfway is the most shameful thing.’

  A bus, backfiring with black smoke, blunders up.

  We climb on board.

  A cinema soon gleams at the two of us, and at a few score other men and women who make up a sparse but prosperous audience in a deeply carpeted, plumply seated, warmly heated auditorium. Tickets are costly. Jay and I hold hands while lights dim and credits roll and a shining dreamscape opens out on the screen — the neverland of a costume drama set during the Song Dynasty. Handsome heroes strut. Pretty princesses pout. Once or twice during the early scenes, and then more and more often as scenes keep unspooling, the soundtrack comes accompanied by electronic warbles from the cellphones of spectators. A woman, answering one warble, yammers away bossily. She stops. A man answers another warble and begins to drone. He drones monotonously yet loudly. I can hardly hear the soundtrack now. One or two people turn to glare at the offending guy, but nothing more — nobody tells him to shut his trap. All just wriggle and squirm. Afterwards I ask Jay why everyone kept quiet instead of taking the offenders to task about their bad manners.

  ‘Chinese way is to avoid the conflict in the public place.’

  ‘Well it’s a bad way.’

  ‘It is our way.’

  ‘Those rude bastards are rich bastards, right? Or else they’re Party officials. That’s why nobody dared to speak out.’

  Jay says nothing but looks vexed. We step out of the cinema. We walk to a nearby noodle-house. We order. We drink tea. We chew, not very chattily. We walk a couple of blocks and step into the metro, which will carry us the first few kilometres back to our neighbourhood. The metro whips through a twisted subterranean tunnel. Our car is hot but at least for once it’s not too crowded. Jay, seated opposite me, throws off his padded jacket to show a yellow T slashed across the chest with a ragged red X.

  ‘Jay, I’ve made up my mind about the apartment. I’ve thought about it, and made up my mind.’

  He looks at me eagerly.

  ‘You want me to come live in your apartment?’

  ‘I want you not to come and live in my apartment. I’m sorry.’

  He bursts into stormy tears. All the other folk in our car turn to take a good look. Why is the bony-cheeked foreigner making the student cry? The foreigner must be a professor. Outlandish, his hair of white and
yellow. Has the student failed an exam? What were those words they spoke? German? An old woman clicks her tongue. Jay pays no heed. He weeps. He opens his mouth, takes a deep breath, and shouts.

  ‘I begin to doubt the whole thing and my position in your mind! I am not gonna be a dummy giving my heart out and receiving hurt back. I need secure emotionally.’

  ‘Please, think it through — it’s best for you.’

  ‘If you have brave or truth in yourself, you are willing to try share life with a guy who love you, regardless of old or young. But you cannot find brave or truth. That will be your fate for the rest of your life. You cannot change. You cannot be brave for yourself.’

  We’re still whipping through the subterranean tunnel. Now, however, the eyes of everybody move away from the sight of the noisily disrespectful student — clearly the foreign professor must be in the right and the student in the wrong, and the professor has behaved with admirable calm and propriety in spite of the impertinence of the student — to take note of two newcomers into our car. Taking note, then hastily looking away. Looking shamefacedly at the floor, the walls, the windows. Looking at anything but the newcomers. Who are the newcomers? A ragged boy of about seven years. A ragged woman of about fifty. The woman guides the little lad past each passenger. Her palm is planted firmly on his lower back. The boy, holding out his cupped hands for alms, lets out a sort of bestial grunt.

  A burns victim I say to myself, trying to make it easier to swallow by wheeling out a quasi-medical phrase.

  I feel sick for the boy. The front of his head has been flattened somehow, smeared downwards, melted as though when he was a baby somebody pressed his face against the top of a hot stove. I hope it wasn’t done to cripple him for the begging trade. The woman poses as his grandmother. Clearly she’s his boss, his owner. Where’s his father?

  How does it feel, being that boy?

  Jay reaches out to me, once the little boy has gone by. My own boy, handsome as a god, touching my hand with his fingertips, and speaking to me quietly.