My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  ‘You know who’s going to get rich here?’ Alice said. ‘The Chinese. A few of them, anyway. Chairman Sun, for example. And some of his pals. You comfortable with that, Bill?’

  He looked at her and said nothing. She was still holding her notepad in her hands. She may have been at his wedding, and she may have been his wife’s best friend when they were growing up, but she still looked like trouble. He began walking towards the gates. Alice followed him.

  ‘You’re an intelligent man,’ she said. ‘And I’m just curious to know what you think is happening here. Off the record.’

  ‘And what do you think is happening?’ he said, not breaking his stride. ‘On the record.’

  Alice shrugged. ‘Looks like a standard land-grab to me. The new rich get their mansions. The local politicians get their cut. And the farmers get shafted.’

  He stopped and stared at her. ‘You think these people are going to be robbed?’ he said, genuinely outraged. ‘Is that what you think is going to happen? I’ve seen the details of their compensation package.’

  She laughed at him.

  ‘Just think about it,’ Alice said. They had all arrived at the gates at the same time. Ho and the guards were handing over the old man and the boy to the PSB. The old man looked resigned to his fate but the child looked terrified. ‘Until the mid-nineties all the land in China was owned by the People,’ Alice said. ‘And then suddenly it wasn’t. One day you woke up and the land your family had farmed for generations was owned by someone you had never met. And he wanted you out.’

  ‘These people are going to receive generous compensation packages,’ Bill said, watching one of the security guards shove the old man. That wasn’t right. They shouldn’t do that.

  ‘Don’t buy that, Bill. We both know that the money goes to the local government. Your friend Chairman Sun – is he going to see the farmers right, Bill?’

  He ignored her. The security guards were conferring with the PSB cops as they gripped the arms of the old man and the boy. They were working out what to do with them. Bill hesitated, unsure if he should stick his nose in here.

  ‘Every foreigner who works in China has to learn the ostrich trick,’ Alice said. ‘You know what the ostrich trick is, Bill? It’s when you ignore what’s going on right in front of you.’

  Ho suddenly got tired of all the chit-chat and punched the boy full in the face. The child went flying backwards and Bill watched him sprawl in the mud. For a moment Bill could not believe what he had seen. Then he was on Ho, pushing the larger man as hard as he could and not budging him, screaming in his face, telling him to leave the boy alone, let the police deal with it.

  Bill helped the boy to his feet, trembling with shock and rage, and discovered that he had to keep holding him because the punch had knocked him senseless. There was blood on the boy’s lips and chin from a broken nose. Bill searched in his pockets for something to wipe it with and found nothing. Two of the PSB officers took the boy’s arms and eased him from Bill’s grip.

  ‘This is intolerable,’ Bill said, even though he knew they didn’t understand a word. His voice was shaking with emotion. ‘My company will not be a party to this, do you hear me?’

  The PSB led the boy and the old man away. Ho chuckled and gestured at Bill with real amusement. The guards gawped at him with their infinite blankness. Bill looked up and saw Alice Greene offering him a Kleenex.

  For the blood on his hands.

  On the road back to Shanghai, Tiger had to swerve to miss a blue Ferrari coming in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road. As Tiger wrestled the limo across pockmarked gravel, Bill caught a glimpse of a boy and girl laughing behind their sunglasses.

  ‘Look at that,’ Shane said, placing a grateful hand on Tiger’s shoulder as the Ferrari weaved off in a cloud of dust. ‘There’s about fifty million of them driving around who were on bicycles last year.’

  Tiger revved the engine, trying to ease the car out of a pothole. A family of peasant farmers, their skin black from the sun, sullenly watched them.

  ‘Very low,’ Tiger said. ‘Very low people.’

  Nancy looked up. ‘I am from Yangdong,’ she said in English, but Tiger was fiddling with his climate control, and gave no sign that he had heard her.

  Bill looked at Nancy and tried to remember her file. She had gone to two of the top colleges in the country – Tsinghua University Law School, then the University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. To get that kind of education, to become a lawyer after growing up in this dreary landscape – it told him that Alice Greene was wrong, and that Chinese ingenuity and hard work and intelligence would ultimately triumph over Chinese cruelty and corruption and stupidity.

  That’s what it told him.

  But he didn’t quite believe it.

  Back at the firm, Devlin came into his office. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Bill.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Bill said.

  ‘I heard what happened. The boy and the old man.’ He shook his head. ‘Ugly business.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But we can’t get squeamish here,’ Devlin said. Bill looked up at him and Devlin touched his arm. ‘I mean it. It’s better now than it’s ever been. You know that, don’t you? And it will get better. Change will come. Because of people like us.’

  They stared out at the view. There were red lights on the peaks of the skyscrapers, and they seemed to wink in secret fraternity at the red lights of the discreet CCTV cameras in Bill’s office.

  ‘Do you know what I liked about you?’ Devlin said. ‘When we first met.’

  ‘My wife,’ Bill said, and Devlin laughed. ‘That’s what everyone likes best about me.’

  ‘What I liked about you was that you’re a lawyer, not a technician,’ Devlin said. ‘Lawyers solve problems. Lawyers can reason. Technicians – their mummy and daddy wanted them to be lawyers, so that’s what they do for forty years. Technicians know a snapshot of the law, from when they qualified. But they don’t feel it in their bones. They’re not real lawyers. They’re technicians. But you’re a lawyer. You see the law as social lubricant and not as a club. But you’re coming from a land where the law is used to protect rights, and you are living in a place where essentially the people have no rights. We’ve done nothing wrong here, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘But those villagers,’ Bill said. ‘That boy…’

  ‘His family will be taken care of,’ Devlin insisted. ‘Look, Bill, you have to choose what you see here. You know what the China price is?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The China price was the key to everything, even more important than the numbers. When foreign manufacturers had looked at every price offered by their suppliers, they demanded the China price – which was always the lowest price of all.

  ‘It means you can move any kind of operation to China, and get it all done cheaper.’

  Devlin shook his head.

  ‘The real China price,’ Devlin said. ‘The real China price is the compromises we have to make to work here. Forget all that stuff about ancient civilisations. Forget all that propaganda about four thousand years of history. This country is still growing up. And some diseases it’s best to get when you are young.’

  They stood together at the window and watched the sun set quickly. In the gathering darkness it suddenly seemed as if all of Pudong lit up at once, and the two men stared silently at the lights shining before them like the conqueror’s reward.

  He was ready for home.

  The trip to Yangdong had left him with dirt on his shoes and stains on his suit and the urgent need to crawl into bed next to Becca and just hold her for a while. Or perhaps she could come to his bed and then they would not have to worry about waking Holly and they could do more than just cuddle.

  But Jurgen and Wolfgang were in Shane’s office when Bill was leaving, clearly agitated, expressing some concern in streams of German to each other, and broken English to their lawyer. Shane came out of his office and took Bill to one s
ide.

  ‘They’re getting their lederhosen in a twist,’ Shane sighed. ‘Worried about what the hacks might write after today. Let’s buy them a couple of drinks and calm their nerves, mate. Tell them we’re all going to live happily ever after.’

  ‘I’ve really got to get home,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t see my wife. I don’t see my kid.’

  ‘One drink,’ Shane said. ‘They’re your Germans too, mate.’

  ‘All right,’ Bill said. ‘But just the one.’

  There was an Irish bar on Tongren Lu called BB’s – Bejeebers-Bejaybers – run by a large Swede with absolutely no Irish blood whatsoever.

  BB’s was always mobbed because you could get English football with Cantonese commentators from Star TV, Guinness on tap and live music by a band from Manila.

  ‘You see them all over Asia,’ Shane said, recovered from his hangover and ready for the night. ‘These Filippino bands with singers who can really sing and musicians who can really play. Maybe in the West they would have a record deal, or at least appear on some television talent show. Out here they play dives for the likes of us.’ He chugged down his Guinness and called for another. ‘You see it all the time.’

  Bill stared at him. Because what you didn’t see all the time was Shane looking at a woman the way he was looking at the tiny Filippina singer who was leaning against her keyboard player’s back and giving a pitch-perfect rendition of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ by the Carpenters. She tossed back her waist-length hair, jet black but shot through with blonde highlights, and when she smiled it seemed to light up every dark corner of Bejeebers-Bejaybers. A little further down the bar, Wolfgang and Jurgen sipped their Guinnesses and stared up at her, the press forgotten.

  ‘Who is she?’ Bill said.

  ‘Rosalita,’ Shane said with real tenderness. ‘Rosalita and the Roxas Boulevard Boys.’

  ‘You know her?’ Bill asked. Shane looked as though he had thought about her a lot.

  Shane looked at him. ‘I see you with your wife,’ he said, taking Bill by surprise. ‘I see you with Becca. Saw you together at that dinner. And I envy you, Bill.’ He turned his gaze back to the stage. ‘It can’t go on forever, can it? This life.’

  Rosalita was doing an upbeat number now. She shook her hair, she flashed her luminous teeth, and she jiggled her tiny rump. The top of a lemon thong peeked above the waistband of her trousers, which were as tight as a wet suit. The Germans licked their lips.

  ‘She’s got a tattoo,’ Shane confessed, watching Bill warily to see how he would react to this news.

  Bill shrugged. ‘Well, a lot of women have tattoos these days.’

  ‘Yeah, but her tattoo says Tom.’ Bill thought about it. ‘Who’s Tom?’

  ‘Some asshole,’ Shane said, and a cloud of depression seemed to pass across his face. ‘She says Tom was just some asshole.’

  The Roxas Boulevard Boys brought it back to a more romantic gear – Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Penny Lover’ – and Rosalita tipped forward as if with an unendurable melancholy, her hair falling over her face. Shane sighed. And then, over the mournful minor chords, Bill heard the sound of expatriate whooping and jeering, the sound of men urging a woman on. He turned to look.

  There were five of them, white boys in suits, surrounding her, the one, the tall girl he had seen with the orchid in her hair outside Paradise Mansions, although the flower was gone now, and they were all out on the tiny BB’s dance floor.

  She seemed to be in a daze, dancing alone to some song in her head, her eyes closed and her arms held high above her head, and their hands were all over her. The tall girl, with a scrape high on one cheekbone, as if she had been struck.

  ‘Come on, darling,’ one of the men said, tugging at the button of her trousers. ‘Show us what you got.’

  Another one was behind her. A young man, but already run to fat. His hands on her buttocks, her breasts, biting his bottom lip as he mimed taking her from behind, to the huge amusement of his laughing friends.

  They moved in closer, getting bolder now, one of them pulling down the zip of his trousers, and then the zip of her trousers, another yanking up her cut-off top so that you saw a glimpse of a black bra. The girl didn’t notice or she was too far gone to care. Then Bill was wading among them, shoving off the fat boy behind her, and then getting between the girl and the suit who had pulled down her zip, and their expressions changed from leering delight to bewilderment, then apoplectic rage.

  As Bill took the tall girl by the arm and led her from the dance floor, one of them threw a punch at the back of his head. He caught it just below the base of the skull, turned and took another one on his ear. He threw a couple of punches but they were all over him, pushing each other out of the way for the chance to lash out at him.

  But then Shane was there, meaty fists flying, and then there were Wolfgang and Jurgen doing these surprisingly authentic-looking side-kicks, and then the Swedish owner and a lad from Belfast who worked behind the bar were joining in, putting themselves between Bill and the girl and the five drunken suits. A full-scale brawl broke out for about five seconds and then it was over as quickly as it had begun and the suits were running to the back of BB’s, throwing around a few bar stools as they retreated.

  Bill held the tall girl’s hand as Shane got them out of the club and into the back of a Santana taxi. ‘Just go,’ he said. The cab pulled away and she still hadn’t opened her eyes. He saw that the wound on her cheekbone was livid and fresh.

  ‘Did they do that to you?’ he said. ‘The mark on your face. Did those bastards do that to you?’

  She leaned forward, touching her face. Then she sat back up, fighting back the sickness. Bill realised he had never seen anyone so hopelessly drunk.

  ‘Airbag,’ she said. ‘The airbag from my Mini.’

  Then they had to stop by the side of the road so that she could be sick. She bent double out of the open back door, dry heaving because there was nothing left to bring up. The driver watched Bill in his rear-view mirror with barely concealed contempt.

  Fucking Westerners, his eyes seemed to say. Ruining our lovely girls.

  ‘Can’t stop throwing out,’ she said when they were on the road again. ‘Please excuse me. I am throwing out all the time.’

  Her English was almost perfect. Too clearly learned in a classroom, perhaps. Too painfully formal. But she got almost everything right, he realised, and when she did get something wrong, he still had no trouble understanding her. Didn’t throwing out make more sense than throwing up? It was an improvement on the original.

  ‘You had an accident,’ Bill said. ‘What happened?’ She exhaled, shivering with grief.

  ‘My husband is very angry with me,’ she said. ‘Very angry with me for breaking the new car.’

  He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her thin shoulders. She burrowed down inside it, trying to hide from the world, and he patted her gently, the way he might try to reassure Holly if she had a bad dream. And then she fell asleep. Leaning against him. He patted her again.

  He looked at her asleep in his jacket and he saw that it was the one that still bore the ghost of a handprint.

  That’s never going to come out now, he thought.

  It was the apartment of a single girl.

  Something about it, Bill thought as he carried her inside, something about it said that here was a life lived alone. A fruit bowl containing a lonely brown banana. A magazine turned to a TV page with favourite programmes circled in red. A book of crossword puzzles, opened to one that was half-finished. She doesn’t look like the kind of girl who does crossword puzzles, he thought. And then, Well, what do you know about her?

  The flat was immaculately decorated but a much smaller apartment than the one he lived in. He found the only bedroom and laid her down on top of the duvet, still wearing his jacket. In the movies, he thought, in the movies I would undress her and put her to bed and in the morning she wouldn’t remember a thing. But he couldn’t bring himself to do anything except leav
e her sleeping on the bed, and turn the light off on his way out. Her voice reached him as he went to close the door behind him.

  ‘He has nobody but his wife and me,’ she said, unmoving in the darkness. ‘I am quite sure of that.’

  ‘He sounds like quite a catch,’ Bill said with a contempt that surprised him, and he let himself out of the flat as quietly as he could.

  Becca could tell there was something wrong. She could tell immediately. It wasn’t the kind of crying she was used to – the crying of a child having a bad dream, or who was too cold or too warm, or who needed a glass of water or a cuddle.

  Holly’s crying came through the monitor as Becca was nodding off in front of BBC World, and she knew immediately that it was her breathing.

  It was bad. Very bad. And Holly was frightened.

  Becca remained ludicrously cheerful and upbeat as she set up the nebuliser, the breathing machine, and placed the mouthpiece over Holly’s face.

  ‘Deep…deep…deep,’ Becca said, miming inhalation with one hand as she desperately dialled Bill’s phone with the other. ‘Good, baby. Very good.’

  No reply.

  The nebuliser took the edge off the asthma attack but it wasn’t enough. Becca had never seen her as bad as this, not since that first awful day. Holly’s breathing was shallow and laboured and it scared the life out of Becca. It scared the life out of both of them. She needed a doctor. She needed a hospital. She needed it now.

  No numbers, Becca thought, furious. I have no numbers. She had no idea what number to call for an ambulance. How could she be so stupid? How could she have been so certain that nothing bad would ever happen?

  Becca quickly wrapped Holly in her dressing gown and grabbed her coat and her keys and dialled Bill’s number again. And again and again and again. No answer.

  Then Becca was out of the flat with Holly in her arms, the child surprisingly heavy, and trying to remain as upbeat as a game show host as they went out to the night in search of a taxi.

  She saw one the moment she stepped outside Paradise Mansions, a beat-up red Santana, but it didn’t stop for her and she shouted angrily at its taillights.