My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  Bill shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ He supposed the man’s wife must have had something to do with it. Jenny One was crying openly now, and Bill saw that the girls of Paradise Mansions were regular young women. Back home they would have been accountants and teachers, girlfriends and wives. But not in Shanghai. Not in times like these. He watched JinJin, reluctantly surrendering the microphone to the Louis Vuitton addict in the mini-kilt.

  ‘You know that girl?’ Jenny One asked him. ‘She is Annie – you know?’ Bill shook his head.

  ‘She is new,’ Jenny Two said, her knitting needles clacking. She nodded knowingly at Annie as though they were gossiping over a garden fence. ‘Man from Taiwan!’

  Annie began screeching some awful Cantopop song.

  ‘Big apartment in west block,’ Jenny Two continued, her eyes wide, and magnified further by her milk-bottle spectacles. ‘Three bedroom! And the man will be in Shanghai for two years! Long contract!’

  ‘His family are here?’ Jenny One asked, and when the other Jenny nodded, she pulled a philosophical c’est-la-vie face.

  Annie finished slaughtering her song and came over to join them. She imperiously sipped her fruit juice, studying Bill.

  ‘Have you been to Hawaii?’ she asked him, crossing her legs. He shook his head. She seemed amazed, as if every self-respecting foreigner knew Hawaii inside out. ‘You should go,’ she advised him. ‘I was living there with my American boyfriend.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Four months. He sold time share.’

  Jenny One looked away, as if she had heard it all before. But Jenny Two put down her knitting. ‘What happened with the American boyfriend in Hawaii?’ she wanted to know. Bill noticed that they had slipped into English for his benefit, and he was touched.

  ‘We didn’t click,’ Annie said, tugging at the hem of her kilt as Jenny Two looked sympathetic.

  JinJin sat down beside Bill and smiled. ‘Now I find you something,’ she said, ignoring his protests as she searched the songbook. He reached for his drink, flustered, wondering why only Westerners were capable of being embarrassed by karaoke. Because we think it is a performance, he thought. Because we think we are expected to be good. And karaoke has got nothing to do with being good.

  JinJin was the only one of them who did not have an adopted Western name. She was the only one who had kept the Chinese name that she had been given at birth, and as he watched her looking for his karaoke song, he wondered what that said about her. It was as if there was something about JinJin that was unchangeable, untouchable, and out of reach. He liked it that she hadn’t adopted a Western name.

  JinJin finally found him something and they all applauded as he got up and awkwardly stood there in front of the TV set, and he was surprised when she joined him, a microphone in her hand. Maybe giving him his turn was just an excuse for her to reclaim the microphone.

  It was a Carpenters song she had dug up from the furthest reaches of the songbook, ‘Yesterday Once More’, a chunk of unadulterated corn that had the girls of Paradise Mansions swaying from side to side with a faraway look in their moist brown eyes. JinJin’s voice swooped and soared uncertainly, disintegrating on the high notes, a made-in-China Karen Carpenter, and Bill croaked along as best he could.

  When the final chords were dying and the girls were all clapping, Bill reached across and squeezed one of JinJin’s tiny hands.

  She quickly pulled it away.

  She didn’t mind being set up in a flat by a married man who came round when he felt like it, but she wasn’t going to start holding hands in a karaoke bar with some big-nosed pinky. The girls of Paradise Mansions held on to their dignity.

  Then he had to do it alone. There was no escape. He resisted at first, but they wouldn’t hear of it. There was no way round it. Taking your turn at karaoke in China was as inevitable as death, and far more inevitable than paying your Chinese taxes.

  ‘I understand,’ JinJin said. ‘You’re too ashamed to sing.’ There it was again, her arbitrary choice of word that in the end somehow seemed more fitting than the obvious choice. It was true. He wasn’t embarrassed or bashful or shy. He was ashamed.

  But they found him some classic Elvis and, Tsingtao in one hand and microphone in the other, he did his best to moan the lyrics as they came alight on the screen.

  The girls from Paradise Mansions cheered what they thought was his shyness. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he knew the lyrics to this old Elvis song, he knew them well from all those nights out with Shane and the Asian clients, on all those other nights when the karaoke had been compulsory.

  And what were being illuminated in front of him were not quite the words, just a rough Chinese imitation, a ham-fisted facsimile of the real thing.

  But still Bill sang along to ‘She’s Not You’ with JinJin Li smiling up at him, he sang along as best he could, he sang along although the words were all wrong.

  FOURTEEN

  By the time he got in he was feeling so good that calling his wife seemed like a sound idea. Her voice echoed across six thousand miles, stone-cold sober and still in yesterday. ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  There was a pause while she weighed him up.

  ‘Are you drunk, Bill?’ she said in such a way that he couldn’t tell if she was irritated or amused or a bit of both. More than anything, it was the sound of a pissed-off wife. ‘I was just putting Holly to bed,’ she said, and he heard the sigh in it, and was suddenly aware that she knew him so well.

  That was the trouble with marriage, he thought. They got to know you so well.

  ‘I just wanted to tell you something,’ he said. It had seemed so important when the thought had occurred to him in the cab home from the karaoke bar, in the back seat between the two Jennys, with JinJin and Annie up front next to the driver, JinJin abruptly subdued after all those hours of singing about love that lasts for ever.

  But now he felt the importance of what he had wanted to say draining away as he sensed the reality of their lives in London. ‘I’m going to get her a copy of “YMCA”,’ he announced. ‘Online, one-click buying.’ Warmed up to the idea of singing at last, and thinking that perhaps his voice wasn’t as bad as he had always believed, he launched into a snatch of the old Village People song. But he stopped when he heard his wife’s deafening silence.

  ‘And that’s what you called about?’ He felt he could hear her shaking her head. ‘What time is it over there?’

  He looked around for a clock. What had he done with that clock? ‘It’s late,’ he confessed, sheepish now. ‘It’s like – four, I guess.’

  ‘Is it like four or is it four, Bill? Well, it’s bedtime here. And it’s really sweet that you’re thinking of Holly when you’re out getting drunk with Shane, but she’s forgotten all about that silly song. You know what it is this week? It’s “Independent Women” by Destiny’s Child. Do you know that one, Bill?’

  He laughed. ‘Independent Women’ by Destiny’s Child! Something about his daughter’s choices, the things that captured her attention – they amused him greatly, and delighted him, and enchanted him, and somehow seemed to measure his love for her.

  ‘Becca, can you put her on for a minute?’

  Silence. He knew her many silences so well. ‘She’s already in bed, Bill. It’s a school night – remember? If you had called a bit earlier…’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said quickly. ‘Next time. Everything okay? With her breathing?’

  ‘It’s better in London,’ she said.

  ‘And how’s your dad?’ He should have asked her about her father sooner. He realised that now. And then came the longest silence of them all.

  ‘It looks like he may have to have surgery,’ she said, her voice flat and expressionless. A pause. ‘Thanks for asking,’ she added, and he winced at the hard sarcastic edge to it.

  ‘Surgery? That’s awful. What – you mean a bypass?’

  ‘First he’s got to have something called cardiac catheterisation,’ she said
, softening now, and he could hear her holding back the tears. ‘They put a tube in his heart through a vein or an artery or something and inject a dye. After that, they decide if he needs to have surgery.’ He heard her swallow. ‘I’m scared, Bill.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Bec,’ he said, and they were silent but not in a bad way. Just holding on to that connection, and both finding comfort in it.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Bec,’ he said softly. ‘I know he will.’

  ‘Thanks, Bill.’ Getting a grip on herself now, and he felt a flood of love. It couldn’t be easy for her. ‘Look, I’ve got to settle Holly down,’ she said. ‘I can hear her stirring.’

  He could hear it too, hear his Holly’s rising cry, filtered first through the child monitor and then across six thousand miles. A bad dream.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I love you, Bec.’

  ‘And I love you too.’

  They didn’t say it very often. They were not one of those married couples that felt the need to say it every day. But it came out when they realised what they had, and they were grateful, and they were wise enough to count their blessings.

  He replaced the phone, feeling flat and tired, as if all the magic of the night was just an illusion brought on by Tsingtao, old Elvis songs and the face of JinJin Li. He went over to the last window in the master bedroom. Her light was still on. JinJin was still awake.

  He decided that in the morning he was going to go out and buy some of those crossword books. He could see how much she liked them.

  And then perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much when her phone didn’t ring.

  Shane couldn’t sleep. Every time he felt himself slipping into oblivion, a current of pain pulled him back, and forced him awake.

  As gently as he could he adjusted his large body, and the pain, which was located somewhere in the deepest regions of his groin, subsided to a dull ache. He remained motionless for several minutes, afraid to breathe in case he disturbed her again. But it was no good.

  Rosalita exhaled wearily in the darkness. In one smooth move, she got out of bed, pulled on a thin robe and went into the living room. She left the door open and the darkness of the bedroom was broken when she switched on a light.

  It had been this way ever since he had been beaten up with Bill – or, as Rosalita liked to call him, ‘Your loser friend whose pretty wife left him.’

  The pain sometimes went away, but it never went very far, and it never let Shane sleep the night. He rolled on his back and felt himself down there, cursing silently, and more scared than he had been in his life.

  Something was wrong with him. He could sense it. Something was very wrong.

  When he went into the living room Rosalita was sitting with her back to him, tapping away at the computer. He buried his face in her mass of black hair, his hand feeling her shoulders through the thin silk of the robe. He glanced at the window. It was still dark outside.

  ‘Come back to bed,’ he said, his voice rough after being pulled from sleep. ‘It’s too late for all that now.’

  Her small brown hands flew across the keyboard. ‘No sleep, no make love,’ she said breezily. ‘So check email.’

  He looked over her shoulder at the screen, and his exhausted eyes suddenly blinked in disbelief.

  My darling, how I miss your eyes, your lips, your big fat cock -

  He jumped away from her, as if from an electric shock. ‘What the fuck, Rosalita?’

  ‘Old mail, old boyfriend,’ she said dismissively. ‘I was just deleting him.’

  Shane stared at the screen but the message was gone. His wife swivelled in her chair and stared at him with eyes like huge brown headlamps. He winced with another shiver of pain.

  ‘You should see a doctor,’ she said angrily. ‘If you sick, then you should go see a doctor.’

  ‘Who was that?’ he demanded. ‘Who was it? I want to know.’

  But she just smiled coldly up at him and he took a step back. There was a fierceness in her that you would never suspect when she was singing all those soppy love songs. ‘Please, I want to know, Rosie.’ His voice softer, pleading.

  ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘You don’t want to know. You really don’t want to know.’

  She logged off and sprang from the chair, a little brown wild cat, lithe and tiny and capable of clawing your eyes out. Towering above her, Shane meekly followed her back to the bedroom. She shrugged off her robe and he caught his breath as she slipped naked between the sheets, turning her back towards him again.

  He still wanted her. At least in theory. At least in his head. But his body hadn’t really felt like sex since they had got their kicking, and all the pain had begun. That confused him. Shane had believed that he would want to fuck her forever, and already – so soon! -it had gone off the boil. Perhaps it would have been all right without the pain and the worry. Perhaps the pain and the worry were spoiling everything.

  So Shane lay in the darkness, trying not to move, missing the physical life they had known before, that closeness in all its colours, but also pining for something that Shane and his wife had never really experienced, something that he saw in the marriage of his friend Bill, something that looked a lot like friendship.

  * * *

  In the morning Bill came to collect him.

  They were going for brunch with a representative from a private health-care company from Switzerland. Rosalita slept on. Shane hoped that she would keep sleeping on. He didn’t want his friend to see how bad it had got.

  ‘This is going to be the next big growth market in China,’ Bill said, watching Shane struggling to put his shoes on. ‘Private health care. The new rich are going to go crazy for it.’

  ‘Lot of money in that racket,’ Shane agreed.

  It was Shanghai’s favourite subject – the next big new thing, the next killing to be made. The Swiss were in Shanghai to evaluate the potential of a private hospital in China, the kind of service offered to the expatriate community at the International Family Hospital where Becca had taken Holly, but serving an exclusively Chinese clientele. ‘The Chinese are a nation of hypochondriacs,’ Shane said. ‘The Great Unwashed get an itchy arse and they think it’s cancer of the colon.’ He tied the laces on his Church’s brogues, the pain all over his face.

  ‘You all right?’ Bill said as Shane stood up, sweat beading his forehead.

  ‘I’m fine, mate,’ Shane said. He pushed a swathe of damp blond hair away and sat down again to catch his breath. He flipped open his laptop and withdrew a disk. ‘Stick that away for me, will you? In the safe.’

  Bill took the disk. It said SUN on the label. ‘Behind the Mona Lisa,’ Shane told him.

  Above the plasma TV set there was a perfect reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Bill carefully placed the painting on the floor and, as Shane called out the six-digit combination, turned the dial of a small wall safe. The thick metal door came open with an electronic double beep. As Bill slipped the disk inside, he was aware of passports, jewellery boxes, and wads of foreign currency.

  And then he saw it.

  The gun looked like a toy. So small and simple and cheap looking. Almost harmless. Sitting there surrounded by the blue boxes from Tiffany and the wad of US bank notes and the passports of Australia and the Philippines.

  Bill reached in his hand and pulled it out by the barrel, aware that his heart was pounding. It was heavy, much heavier than it looked, but quite not as heavy as a bag of sugar. It smelled of oil. Bill let it rest in the palm of his hand, and he held the gun out to Shane.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’

  ‘Kai Tak rules,’ Shane said. ‘Don’t forget the Kai Tak rules. Don’t say a word to anyone. Now put it back.’

  ‘Kai Tak rules?’ Bill said. ‘You’re not banging some bar girl. This is not some little escapade that happened on tour. And who would I tell? What would I say? Our award-winning Head of Litigation is – what? – packing a piece? Is that the correct terminology?’

  ‘I mean it, Bill. Put it back where you fou
nd it.’

  ‘I want to know what it is, Shane.’

  ‘All right.’ Shane took it from him. He looked surprisingly expert with it. As if he knew that it wasn’t going to suddenly go off, Bill thought.

  ‘This is a PSM, often called a Makarov,’ Shane said. ‘It’s Russian. A Russian knock-off of the Walther PP. You know – James Bond’s gun. This is the cheapo Communist version. China’s full of them. From the days when Stalin wanted Mao to do his fighting for him. Fifty years back, during the Korean War. When Mao was telling Stalin that he would sacrifice a million Chinese in a war with America, but he needed the firepower to do it. Mao wanted an arms industry, but Stalin only gave him weapons. Like this one. It’s small, easy to carry, dead simple to fire. Any idiot can use it.’

  Bill was speechless. He didn’t know where to start.

  ‘But what do you want a gun for? They’ll throw you out of the country. They’ll toss you in jail. They could kick out the firm.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to kick out the firm.’

  Bill stared at the gun, dumbfounded. ‘I can’t imagine how you managed to buy this thing.’ He looked sharply at Shane. ‘And I don’t want to know.’

  ‘You can buy anything in China,’ Shane said. ‘Don’t you know that yet? The place is full of guns. When Mao was arming the people, waiting for some foreign invasion, what do you think happened? Do you think they just gave them all back?’

  ‘They will come down on you like a ton of bricks,’ Bill said. ‘If it doesn’t blow your head off the first time you pull the trigger.’

  Then he waited for an explanation. But Shane couldn’t explain it. He didn’t even try. He carefully put the Makarov back in the wall safe and locked the door.

  Bill watched him replace the Mona Lisa, still waiting, but Shane shook his head. He couldn’t find the words. It was beyond words. He knew that needing the gun had something to do with their beating, and something to do with the fear of what the pain might mean, and the overwhelming feeling that everything in his life was starting to fall apart.