by Tony Parsons
Now they were waiting for final approval from the Chinese authorities before they could apply for a temporary British passport for Little Wei, and the thought that they could lose her now was too much to bear. There had simply been no room in Paulo’s head for fretting about his brother and the business. But by the time the taxi pulled up in front of Michael’s house, his heart was pounding and his head was making up for lost time.
Michael opened the door in his pants and a filthy T-shirt. He was unshaven and bleary-eyed. As the two brothers hugged each other, Paulo thought there was something metallic about his breath. He followed Michael into his home. The TV was blaring some daytime game show. The air was thick and stale.
‘Want a grappa?’ Michael said, reaching for the bottle on the coffee table.
‘Isn’t it a bit early?’
Michael shrugged, and poured one for himself. There is no word in Italian for alcoholic, their father had told them.
Paulo looked around the living room. Chloe’s playpen was still there, containing a scattering of toys. But where there was once the odd Teletubby underfoot, there were now beer cans and unwashed clothes. Paulo picked up Chloe’s penguin and pressed the button in its synthetic paw. But it no longer worked.
‘Where’s Naoko and the baby?’
Michael slumped on the sofa. ‘Osaka,’ he said, his eyes drifting to the television’s canned laughter.
Paulo picked up the remote and turned it off.
‘They went back to Japan?’
Michael looked at his brother, and nodded. Paulo sat down beside him, and took him in his arms, holding him very tight, rocking his brother as if they were still boys, and Michael had just lost his first fight.
‘I told you, Michael,’ Paulo said. ‘I told you what would happen.’
‘It’s not as though I had lots of women,’ Michael said, his voice choking. ‘I had one more than you’re allowed. One extra. One more than normal.’
Suddenly disgusted, Paulo eased his brother away, catching a blast of grappa full in the face.
‘Maybe she’ll come back.’
Michael rummaged around on the coffee table, lifted a pair of discarded combat trousers and found the papers he was looking for. He handed them to Paulo. It was a letter from a solicitor. Cold and formal words swam before Paulo’s eyes. Unreasonable behaviour. Reasonable financial provision. Application for a divorce order. The family home.
‘I am so sorry, Michael.’
This will never happen to me, Paulo thought. This only happens to men like my brother.
‘You never can tell,’ Michael said, as if reading his mind. ‘It’s never going to work for us the way it did for Dad. Staying home every night. Happy with one woman. I know you think I’m bad.’
‘I love you, you klutz.’
‘But you think I’m a bad man. But I’m not, Paulo. This could happen to anyone. It could happen to you.’
‘Michael – I’ll be back soon. I appreciate what you’ve done for me while I’ve been away. If you could just hold the fort a little longer.’
‘Thought I’d take the day off today.’ He picked up the remote control and aimed it at the TV. It erupted into brassy music and wild laughter. ‘Business is a bit on the slow side.’
‘That’s fine. Whatever you think best. Listen, Michael. My credit cards are all maxed out. We’re staying in Beijing and it’s no cheaper than London, no cheaper than Hong Kong. But another few weeks and I’ll be back with Jessica and the baby. Are you sure you’re all right until then?’
Michael refilled his glass.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘What else can happen?’
Twenty-four
A cornflake hung from Little Wei’s fringe.
Only Paulo was there to see it. Jessica was spending another day among the crowds queuing up at the British embassy in Jianguomenwai. Every day this week she had been down there, taking a ticket with her number on it, only to be told hours later that there was still no news. The passport application for Little Wei was not yet processed.
So in their modest room at the Beijing Sheraton, only Paulo saw the soggy scrap of cereal hanging from hair that had never been cut, and something about that cornflake hanging above the innocent perfection of that face tugged at his heart, and awoke feelings in him that he couldn’t even name.
It was just a tiny moment in his daughter’s life, a moment that would one day be lost for ever, but not until the day he died. He would always remember the cornflake in Little Wei’s fringe.
And Paulo knew that he was becoming a different kind of man now that everything about his child – especially that scrap of cornflake in her wispy fringe – made him painfully aware of life in all its fleeting beauty. Paulo became a father and his heart was no longer his own.
She was their daughter now. They had the paperwork in two languages to prove it. What kept them hanging on in Beijing, what stopped them from returning to their lives, were the queues and the bureaucrats and the endless hours at the British embassy in Jianguomenwai. So the little family waited in limbo, tired of tramping Tiananmen Square, staying in their room, the air conditioning humming.
Little Wei began squirming in her high chair, suddenly roaring with protest. Murmuring reassurance, Paulo deftly wiped her face, removed her Hello Kitty bib and lifted her from the chair.
‘Time for your nap, gorgeous.’
With the baby in one arm, he went across to the window – thirty storeys below, the clogged ring roads of Beijing beeped and tooted in the dusty light – and drew the curtains. Little Wei’s huge brown eyes blinked at him in the darkness.
Paulo gently laid her on the changing mat and checked her nappy, sniffing the air and feeling for wetness with a tentative finger. When he was happy that she hadn’t done anything, he placed her in the cot that stood by Jessica’s side of the bed. Then he went over to the CD player that nestled under the giant flat-screen television and put on Little Wei’s only record.
They had picked it up from a shopping mall on the Street of Eternal Peace. A collection of nursery rhymes that seemed unchanged from Paulo’s own childhood. ‘Bobby Shaftoe’. ‘Incey Wincey Spider’. ‘Bow Wow Says the Dog’. ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’. They seemed to come from some other century. Even to Paulo, their references to big fat hens and tending swine, masters and dames, misty moisty mornings and froggies a-courting seemed prehistoric. He couldn’t imagine what Little Wei made of them. But as soon as she heard the opening chords of ‘Bobby Shaftoe’, she settled herself for rest.
Bobby Shaftoe’s getting a bairn
For to dangle on his arm
‘In his arms or on his knee
Bobby Shaftoe loves me.’
Paulo lay on the bed and closed his eyes. Where did these strange rhymes come from? Were they Victorian? When it was clear that Little Wei liked this CD very much, he had looked inside to find out who had written these songs, and who was singing them. But there was no information inside, and it was as if the nursery rhymes were just there, and would always be there, for generation after generation.
Paulo slipped into sleep, wondering if Little Wei’s own children would listen to the same words and tunes that soothed her in the Beijing Sheraton’s cot. Then the next thing he knew he was waking up because Jessica was bursting into the room, shouting and laughing, waving a red British passport, and inside the passport there was a mug shot of a child who looked like a rosy Buddha, chubby-cheeked and poker-faced, staring quite calmly at the world.
All the excitement woke the baby, and Jessica picked her up, smothering her with kisses, as Paulo rubbed the sleep from his eyes and tried to remember what he wanted to show his wife. Then it suddenly came back to him. But when he looked, he saw the cornflake in his daughter’s hair was gone, vanished for ever, and next to the enormity of Jessica’s news he felt silly trying to explain the feelings it had stirred in him.
So he just watched his wife holding his daughter and smiled, as Jessica laughed and showed the baby her passport, rea
ding her name again and again. Wei Jewell Baresi. A lot of adoptive parents gave their Chinese babies Western names, but Jessica had always said that wasn’t necessary. She had a beautiful name already.
All those nations and cultures and histories to make this one little girl, Paulo thought, and he felt like exploding with pride.
My daughter, the future.
It was no place to be fat.
The magazine was staffed by fiercely trendy young people, or by older people who had been trendy for twenty years or more. The youngsters were uniformly pale, as though a thousand nightclubs had bleached their skin, while the older ones were strangely discoloured, almost orange in hue – their skin colour appearing to have been artificially darkened, while their hair colour appeared to have been cosmetically lightened.
But they all had that starved look of the terminally funky, and they stared at Cat curiously as she waddled among their desks, eight months pregnant, twenty kilos heavier than her normal weight and horribly self-conscious about her new walk – this strangely side-to-side rocking motion that made her feel like a giant bloated crab. She collapsed, gasping for breath, in the chair opposite the features editor.
All the bun-in-the-oven magazines and books made the pregnant woman’s changing body sound like some empowering earth mother experience – in titles such as You’re Pregnant! and 40 Amazing Weeks! and Congratulations! You’re Up the Duff! there were references beyond counting to ‘your new sexy curves’. But Cat didn’t feel gorgeous, or empowered, or deliciously curvy. For the first time in her life, she felt frumpy. Puffy, distended and uncomfortable. She felt as conspicuous as a whale at a Weightwatchers class.
At night her enlarged breasts made her feel like she was sharing her bed with two fat strangers who couldn’t keep still. There was only one compensation for turning into the Elephant Woman, and that was the tiny enchanted kicks inside that seemed to come whenever she lay down to rest.
‘Been looking at your clippings,’ said the features editor. A mere slip of a lad in retro Adidas, far too cool to smile.
‘I’m happy to do other stuff,’ Cat said, touching her tummy with that instinctive triple stroke. ‘It doesn’t have to be restaurant reviews. I know you’ve already got a restaurant critic.’
‘Travis, yeah? How do you like Travis?’
‘Oh he’s great, Travis. Oh, I love him. So…waspish. The way he manages to sound utterly disgusted with everything.’
‘Yeah, he’s good.’ He scratched his goatee thoughtfully. ‘I’d like to offer you something. But it’s a bit awkward at the moment.’
‘Why’s that?’
A smile at last. Like an anorexic shark.
‘How can I put it? Because I can’t commission something from someone who is going to have a baby within the next half hour. Listen – I’ve got kids myself. Two boys – three and one.’
Cat thought, well, who would have believed it? Sometimes it seems like I’m the only person in the world who’s having a baby.
‘Soon you’re going to be way too busy to knock out a thousand words on some clever little fusion joint. Don’t you know that?’
‘But I need a job. And I can’t work in restaurants because it’s all too late
She stopped herself. He was not a bad guy. She had warmed to him when she found he had children. But everything about his pained, embarrassed expression said one thing.
Not my problem, lady.
Cat felt as though the working world was suddenly passing her by. She also felt old, and although there were more ancient people than her in this office – all those forty-year-old groovers, Ibiza veterans and rave-hardened E-heads – they somehow seemed younger than Cat, with their bare midriffs and their unencumbered lives and artificially lightened hair.
Cat got up to go, touching her stomach again. Down, up, down. That almost imperceptible movement that said, don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry, baby.
Poppy sat in her high chair, eating junior yoghurt with her fingers. A small plastic plate of grapes sat waiting for her on the table, just out of reach, the treat for finishing her breakfast, or at least successfully smearing it all over her face.
The nanny, a large Jamaican called Lovely, chuckled approvingly as Poppy pushed another tiny fistful of mush in the vague direction of her mouth.
At first Lovely had seemed to be everything Megan could have hoped for in a nanny. Looking after Poppy seemed like far more than just a job to her – she seemed genuinely mad about the child. Megan had been touched to see that Lovely even had a framed photograph of Poppy in the small guest room that she stayed in during the week, before returning on Friday night to her own enormous brood in the Scotland District. Lovely was perfect. There was only one tiny, tiny problem.
Megan just wished that Lovely could remember which one of them was Poppy’s mother.
She watched Lovely popping a grape into Poppy’s mouth.
‘Lovely?’
‘Yes, ma’am?’
‘Do you remember what we agreed about grapes?’
Silence. Poppy contemplated her mother, her jaws chomping on the grape.
‘We said – grapes must be peeled.’
‘Lots of good things in the skin.’
‘Yes, but she’s too small.’
‘One year old.’
‘But she was early,’ Megan said, starting to get rattled. ‘We have been through this so many times, haven’t we? With premature babies, you don’t count from when they were born, you count from when they were due.’
Kirk came into the kitchen, shouldering a large kitbag full of diving equipment. He kissed his daughter on the head.
‘We’ve got a night dive at the Sandy Crack,’ he said. ‘Don’t wait up. Bye, Lovely.’
‘Bye, Mr Kirk.’
Megan strode over to the table and snatched up a carton of fruit juice.
‘And what’s this?’
‘Apple juice,’ Lovely said, sulky and resentful. She tenderly wiped Poppy’s face clean, and gently lifted her from the high chair.
‘Lovely,’ Megan said, ‘this juice has got sugar in it. Sugar. Poppy has the sugar-free apple juice. I thought we agreed
They were watching her. Her daughter and her nanny. Holding on to each other, and staring at Megan with exactly the same look in their eyes.
Their look said, yes, that’s all very well, complaining about sugar-free juice and peeled grapes and all the rest of it. But you’re not here all day.
Are you, Mummy?
‘Lower your pants,’ Megan said, pulling on a pair of plastic gloves.
The woman gingerly lowered the bottom half of her bikini. One buttock resembled an albino porcupine – pink, round and covered with countless black spikes.
‘It looks like you sat on a sea urchin,’ Megan said. ‘You can pull up your pants. I’ll write you a prescription for the pain.’
Megan began gathering up her things, glancing out of the window at the bright sails of the windsurfers. A dive boat was heading towards the hotel, its red flag with the white diagonal stripe fluttering in the breeze. She wondered if Kirk was on board.
‘That’s it?’ the woman said.
She was in her mid-thirties, tanned and toned, expensive highlights in her hair, no doubt some kind of mover and shaker back in London. Accustomed to getting what she wanted. Megan saw a lot of her kind in Barbados.
‘Painkillers are the best thing for you,’ Megan said. ‘With these sea urchin spikes, it’s much better if you just let them dissolve. Trying to pull them out will do you more harm than good.’
The woman straightened herself up. No doubt she was quite formidable in an important conference. She didn’t look quite as impressive with a bunch of sea urchin spikes in her bum.
‘Please don’t be offended, but are you a proper doctor?’ she asked. ‘Or are you just some kind of – I don’t know – hotel nurse?’
Megan smiled. ‘I’m a proper doctor. But if you’re unhappy with my diagnosis, by all means get a cab to take you
to the A & E at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in Bridgetown.’
The woman looked appalled. ‘A local hospital?’
‘They’re very good at the Queen Elizabeth. Get them to take a look at you. Get your bottom a second opinion.’
Out of the window she could see that the dive boat had stopped near the shore. Figures in wet suits climbed or jumped into the shallow water. Kirk was among them. Good. They could have lunch together. Megan smiled pleasantly at the woman. ‘Enjoy the rest of your holiday. I hope you feel better soon.’
The dive centre was on the far side of the hotel’s beach. Megan walked through the palatial lobby, returning the greetings of the hotel staff, and down to the sand. She felt the sea winds on her face, and took a deep breath. This was a better life.
But when she approached the dive centre she saw that Kirk was sitting on the sand with a girl in a wet suit.
She looked like one of those Swedish girls that came to the island – sporty, independent, and younger than Megan could ever remember being. Kirk reached out and pushed a tangled strand of wet blonde hair from the girl’s face, and it made Megan catch her breath. Before they could see her, Megan turned on her heels and walked back up the beach.
Then she drove clear across the island to the east coast, parked her little Vitara on a hill above Bathsheba and spent the next few hours watching the Atlantic smashing itself against the rock formations.
She couldn’t go home just yet.
It wasn’t time to take over from the nanny.
The flight from Beijing to London takes ten hours.
The British Airways girl at the check-in desk must have taken a shine to Little Wei, who was effortlessly making the transformation from cute baby to radiant toddler, because the three of them found they had been upgraded to the business-class cabin.
Jessica had visions of cuddling the child and sipping champagne all the way home. But it was like travelling with a wild monkey.