by Andy Oakes
The taxi pulled away. She settled into the plastic covered seat for the journey into the city’s heart. Fifteen kilometres. The banner over the driver’s head proclaiming the name of the company whose taxi it was that she was driving in … the ‘FRIENDSHIP TAXI SERVICE.’ It didn’t feel very friendly. The driver’s stare into the rear-view mirror not leaving her for the whole of the fifteen kilometres.
*
The main entrance of the Jing Jiang Hotel sits opposite a row of shops, the most exclusive in China. Amongst these is a supermarket that sells some rare treats … chocolate, cheeses, biscuits. Day and night there is a permanent queue at the checkout … such is the hunger.
*
It took all of her strength not to go over the same territory again. Not to grab the demure white bloused receptionist and haul her over the desk …
Where’s my goddamn son, you bitch. What have you done to him?
And if an answer had not been forthcoming, which it would not have been, to do the same to the deputy manager. Then the general manager. And then the fucking shit of an owner, if she had thought that it would have done any good. But that had already been done verbally from many thousands of miles away; and on several occasions since the night when Bobby’s name had javelined into the depths of her sleep … splitting her life away from all that it had previously been anchored to. She and Carmichael, bombarding the hotel with calls. Prodding. Probing. Slicing away at every polite response to their questions. Digging for an inaccuracy. Words … pinned. Sentences … dissected. Silences … analysed. Pressure, and a contact of Carmichael’s at the China International Travel Service, resulting in the faxing of the Jing Jiang’s guest registration book. Pages. Pages. Fifteen months of recordings. Room 201 had been busy, it was located in the prestigious north block, the preferred area of the hotel by those in the know; often frequented by dignitaries. Nixon in February of ‘72. Reagan, some twelve years later. But no Bobby Hayes. His name not appearing on the registration pages for room 201. His name not appearing next to any room number in the hotel. He had never stayed at the Jing Jiang, but Barbara could recall almost every telephone call that she had made to Bobby at that very same hotel. 53–42–42. Knowing the number by heart.
Approaching the desk, hand deep inside her raincoat pocket, fingers drumming against the thick wad of letters, postcards. Some written on headed hotel notepaper. Some bearing the hotel’s name, its logo, stamped, black inked across dismal postage stamps. Words. Sentences. Descriptions of the Jing Jiang. His room. His view from the room. Flows of frantic scrawl. And still they said that Bobby had not stayed at the hotel whose lobby she was now standing in.
*
“Welcome to the Shanghai Jing Jiang Hotel, madam. How may I help you?”
Her English too perfect, as it had been over the telephone. Clipped. Polished. Cold. Perfect words, leaving her mouth as ice cubes.
“A reservation was made for me under the name of Hayes.”
“Yes, madam, I will call a porter to carry your cases.”
Punctuating her sentence with the placing of a room key next to the registration book. Its fob, heavy, large, unattractive. Their logic in reducing the risk of it being stolen as a memento of a pleasant stay in Shanghai.
“Your room, 210, is on the tenth floor of the hotel.”
“201. I reserved room 201.”
The girl’s eyes fled fleetingly to the green scroll of the computer terminal as the porter approached with a trolley. She exchanged the key with another from the huge numbered board behind her and handed it to him. His uniform, pristine. But shoes scuffed, unpolished. Under his fingernails, black crescent moons of old engine oil. Hints of another life.
“Your room, 201, is also on the tenth floor of the hotel.”
Barbara filled in the registration book, finding herself thinking, not in a flow, but in separate stills … and all of the time praying that they wouldn’t zoom in on Bobby. Stills of his hand touching the same registration book. The same key fob. The same reception desk. And at the same time not wanting to push these feelings away either. Fighting, tooth and nail, against denying him. Needing so much to do nothing else but fill her every vacant second with his face.
The porter hauled her cases onto the trolley and moved toward the elevator. She hurriedly completed the registration details.
“Have a pleasant stay at the Jing Jiang Hotel, Madam Hayes.”
The receptionist’s words, snipped with steel shears. Barbara didn’t look back. The elevator doors were already closing as she entered it.
*
201. The room, just as Bobby had described it. The porter leaving her sitting on the edge of the bed. Raincoat slipped off. The wad of letters, cards, spreading across the bedcover. A scrambled mosaic of whites and creams. Gaudy, retouched picture postcards and eagerly ripped open envelopes. Walking to the window, reading from a page of one of his letters. Gripping the window ledge until it hurt. Letting the page drift from her fingers, onto the floor. Looking out across the city. His words in her head, her ears, her eyes.
… I’m not much good at descriptions … all those technical archaeological reports that I have to write, I guess. But I’m looking out of the window of the hotel right now and wanted to tell you about it. It seems a long way from D.C or Boston. I can see the river beyond the elegant buildings that line the ‘Bund’. String after string of junks tied up along its edges. Almost below me, next to the Sun Yaysen Museum (which is currently closed to those who do not have the right connections – but open to me, as I do) is Fuxing Park. I jog there every morning before breakfast. And by the way … they do a great western breakfast in the eighth floor restaurant of the hotel. Almost as good as ‘Ed’s’, back home. You’d like the park, everybody does. It’s a huge canopy of vegetation, a real oasis from the frantic city … especially on a hot day in the summer. It’s big, nearly twenty-one acres … but there’s no risk of getting lost. The old folks really seem to love this place … there’s a group of them at least every fifty metres and always only too eager to help a lost looking American boy. Remind me to take you there if you ever have the time to come over …
The green pool table foliage of Fuxing Park sat below her. She could not make out the tired knots of old folks gathered beneath it, but knew that they would be there. Perhaps some of them would have seen Bobby, spoken to him? Perhaps one or two of them had even wondered where the blond American boy, who always jogged in the park before breakfast, had gone?
She walked into the bathroom reading a postcard that he had sent on the 22nd; just two weeks ago. Creased … a view of the Huangpu labouring under a sluggish, scaly skin of junks and barges. Catching a glimpse of herself in the large mirror. The tussle of blonde hair, fall upon fall of slow twisting loose cascading waves. And the eyes … two dark blue sapphires that surprised even her. An old college boyfriend had once penned in a poem about her, that she ‘looked like an angel who was waiting impatiently in line for her wings to be repaired.’
It had been the only poem that he had ever written about her, out of many, that had managed to catch at least the shadow of a truth.
She filled the hand basin with water, bitter cold. Digging deeply into it. Splashing it onto her face, her neck. And then it was upon her, as if she had opened a trap door to it … loss, as deep as a well. Thumping at the sides of the hand basin. Ripples worrying across its surface.
Jesus, Bobby. Jesus. Did you do this too … run the water down your face? This room. This basin. This water.
On her knees. His letters. His cards. Falling around her. A snow storm of buff and scribbled ink. Inching her way across the deep piled carpet of the room. Blind with tears.
Damn. Damn. There must be something left of you Bobby. There must be something?
Searching for a hair. Long, wavy, blond. Just a hair. Tears falling onto her arms, her hands. Nose running. Breaths … laboured, tortured. Racked by frantic spasms of sobbing.
Bobby … he had such lovely hair. The first time that
he got it cut I cried. Watching it as his shorn locks being swept off of that dime barber’s floor with that dirty broom.
“Jesus, Bobby. Jesus.”
*
It was only when she was in the soft lobby of sleep’s motel that she realised that the carpet that she had searched on her hands and knees, was new. Very new. Probably never been walked upon until she had entered room 201. Bobby’s room.
The bastards have thought of everything, Bobby. Everything.
She fell asleep. His letters, his cards … her mattress, her dreams. She fell asleep, aware of only four words constantly repeating themselves through the sparsely strung necklace of night hours. Repeating themselves …
Is this my fault …? Is this my fault …? Is this my fault …?
*
In the fifty thousand characters of the Chinese language there is no word for privacy. There is no need for such a word, the Chinese, quite simply, do not recognise privacy. Neither is there a word for intimacy in the language.
In the People’s Republic expect hotel staff to enter your room without knocking. In the People’s Republic expect a doctor to examine you and offer you his diagnosis in front of six other patients sitting in that same room. In the People’s Republic expect people to bump into you in the street and not offer an apology. In the People’s Republic expect to bump into others in the street and for them not to expect an apology. In the People’s Republic expect to see a three wheeled pedicab run over a young child and not stop.
Only renao is given credence and worth in China … a word, a value, that is the very flip-side of privacy, of intimacy. A word whose meaning cannot be found in the English language or in any other European language. Renao. ‘Hot and spicy’. The pleasure of living life amongst a large group of friends and relatives. Renao. Chopsticks clicking. Loud voices jarring against each other. Plates of food being thrown unceremoniously onto the table. Mah-jongg tiles snapping to attention with the sound of stern, unforgiving applause. Renao. A life spent hot and noisy in a clamorous China where privacy is impossible except by the hazard of chance … except when thrust unwillingly upon you.
*
At exactly 7.00 am Barbara Hayes was awakened by a room boy in a crisp white uniform placing a bright red thermos flask of hot tea onto her bedside table. Rubbing the vestiges of sour dreams from her eyes, her mouth tasting of broken sleep and long-haul aircraft food. Holding the sheet up to her chin. She said nothing; he said nothing. He left the room. Settling back into the pillows, hoping that sleep would reclaim her and her it … only to hear footsteps outside, the door opening once more. The room boy, this time carrying a thermos of cold water.
“You could at least knock. It’s 7.00am for Christ sake. Can you leave so that I can get some sleep?”
The room boy smiled, bemused.
“I come. I go. It is not important. You sleep. Sleep.”
He left the room. She closed her eyes. Five minutes later he returned, a change of fresh towels draped over his arm. Barbara pulled a sheet around herself and entered the bathroom shaking her head; avoiding the mirror but catching an unwelcome reflection of herself in the glass shower cubicle.
At the urgent rush of the shower cascading into life the room boy smiled once more. He knew that there was no hot water.
*
The young man, blond, long wavy hair. Eyes, sky-blue and intense beyond his years … stared out from the photograph. Barbara couldn’t recall when it had been taken. Who had taken it. What the smile hinted at. What the eyes spoke of. But she knew what they now said …
Find me, I am your child. Take me home.
Showing the photograph to the elderly Chinese in Fuxing Park. At first with confidence and hope. Expecting a nod of recognition followed by a few mangled words of English. How the Chinese love to speak English …
The American boy. Yes. Yes. He walk here many times. Very many times. He gone now. Gone to big hotel on other side of city. Other side. You find there. He there.
It would all be so simple. Easy answers. But as the eyebrows raised, the gazes turned away, the words failing to be born … showing Bobby’s picture became a slow torture of erosion. The washing away of her confidence by the drop-drop rains of silence. She left Fuxing, her steps becoming more and more hurried, until she was running from the grasp of the foliage, the prune faces, the rotten teeth in their mouths of ginger and garlic. Back toward the hotel. Room 201. His room. At the back of her eyes, tears intensely hot; not daring to give them up, not until they blistered her with their intensity. Wanting to feel that pain, begging to physically hurt.
Running … not one Chinese seeming to stare at her.
Of the thirty-six ways of handling a situation … running away is best, goes the adage.
Making it to the room door. Slamming it shut. Fumbling with the heavy brass lock. Slipping it and muttering to every room boy in China …
“Try and get through that you bastards!”
The mahogany of the door cold against her back, unyielding as she slipped down it. Tears, in torrents, untethered. Down her cheeks. Her chin. As warm as babies’ fingers.
It was some time before she could move, stand, walk. Rehearsing in detail every action before it was made. She opened the attaché case, hand still wet. Moving to the thin black diary. Page upon page of names and numbers. With each one, a story. With each one … a debt – a deal – or a favour. Remembering, at all times, the cardinal rule of amassing and retaining power, as her index finger travelled the black lines of digits. Never ask for a favour … only grant them or take them.
Slowly she dialled the number.
*
Debts – deals – favours … in that order. That is the oil of politics and diplomacy. The lubricant that ensures that its engine runs free and easy with no risks of seizing up.
Debts – deals – favours.
In the People’s Republic, this lubricant it is known as ‘guan-xi’ . The invisible but powerful threads that bind people. Moves situations along. That opens up back doors. It works well in China; it has to. It constantly oils a system that coheres a nation of one billion people. From the top to the bottom, it works. It can conjure up a dish of Sichuan fried chilli bean curd when every other restaurant diner has been assured that they had sold out of it. It can cut out waiting through three torturous hospital queues to see a frantic doctor … zhouhou-men, ‘taking the back door’ to his home, after hours, to where the best and more leisurely medical care is given. It will give you access to the ‘Friendship Store’ … the department and grocery store reserved for foreigners and top graded cadre only, where goods not available to the ordinary Chinese abound.
Guan-xi. It has no rank. It does not know its place. It is there in the peasantry. It is there in the Politburo. It seeps, unimpeded, through the labyrinthine system of grades and ranks … the Chinese puzzle of twenty-four steps of government. The flex of its fingers takes all within its span. There is a joke in China that doctors, drivers and shop clerks are the ‘Fat Jobs’ … the professions that can make the most of guan-xi because of the access that they have to services or commodities that can be traded through the back door. They call these fat jobs the ‘Three Treasures’.
Washington D.C. also has its three treasures … debts – deals – favours … in that order.
*
It was a private number that she dialled. A number that by-passed the bureaucratic regiments of the embassy … the hurdles that were set in place to upend or discourage all but the most persistent; or those with the necessary contacts. It was a private number that was relayed through its own telephone exchange and switching station. It was not foolproof, they were, after all, in China. But it was the best that they could do.
The name at the end of the line would volunteer his help to her because they were old friends. She had known him from a time when life was a lot less complicated … or so it seemed. A time coloured only by Leonard Cohen and Moroccan Gold. He would also help her because she had great legs.
&
nbsp; With every digit dialled, a memory. Every memory tethered to his room at Harvard. Both students. Both learner lovers for two hours, never to repeat the clumsy episode over the next twenty-years as their lives frequently overlapped. If she closed her eyes tight, very tight ‘like raisins’, as Bobby had described them as a child. … she could still taste the cheap red wine. She could even feel his large hands upon her. The wrestling match with her bra. Her pantyhose. Her knickers. Pulling her reluctant fingers down towards his urgent, impatient crotch.
The telephone was answered. A measured and sort of sit on the sofa kind of a voice that you would imagine coming from the kind of man who only ever rose at the ‘crack of lunch’. An American voice. Barbara could almost smell the blueberry pie. Could almost hear Cagney singing a chorus of … ‘I’m a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy.’ There was a pause before she spoke. That instant before a leap into space is made, is risked.
“Hi Edward, it’s Barbara. How are you, Mr Ambassador?”
Chapter 6
A Hong-Qi, a Red Flag, is a car … but not just a ‘car’, you can’t describe a dream of stretched black and chrome as just a car. In a country where the purchase of a bicycle can eat up two and a half years of savings and the flash of the silver from its forks or shopping basket exude status, germinate envy; the Red Flag is a hand-tooled wonder. A jewel in the crown of the elite; a social marker. A marker to be pointed at, one of the few that says. …
Yes, we have abolished class in China – but not rank, never rank.
The Red Flag is the transport of those drenched in rank. The high cadre … Generals, members of the Communist Party Central Committee, Bureau Chiefs, Governors of the Provinces, Cabinet Ministers, their wives and inner circle of hangers-on. Remember the proverb, old and Chinese, the ownership of a Red Flag breathing life into. …
If a man becomes an official, even his chickens and dogs will ascend to heaven.