by Tony Parsons
That was what scared him most. That total lack of fear, as if JinJin had no idea of how bad it could get.
EIGHTEEN
On a wooden bridge high above the river they huddled together under an umbrella bearing the hotel’s name and watched a fisherman with his cormorant.
After dark there were boats that took the tourists out to watch the men fishing with their birds. Bill and JinJin had gone out on the first night in Guilin, the searchlights from the boat illuminating the fishermen squatting at the back of their flat little punts, the cormorants facing them with a kerosene lamp between them, man and bird gathered around the lamp as though it was a camp fire.
When the birds were put to work they burst into the water and immediately exploded back out again, a miraculous fish in their beaks. The fishermen – ageless little men made of nothing but brown muscle and ropey sinew – threw most of the fish into a big wicker basket. But with every seventh catch they released the metal clasp around the bird’s neck, allowing the cormorant to swallow the fish. At night, surrounded by the dumbstruck Chinese tourists, it had seemed like a clever circus trick. But during the day, when the men fished with the cormorants and there was no audience, and you could watch them fishing from the high wooden bridge for free, you knew that this was just the way they fished, it had nothing to do with tickling the tourists. Bill thought it looked like a vision from a thousand years ago.
Guilin was the China he had seen in paintings. Beyond the town he could see the limestone mountains stretching on for ever, selfconsciously picturesque, some of them so triangular that they looked like the mountains in one of his daughter’s drawings, and all the scene swathed in mist, as if posing, as if waiting to be captured for posterity.
It felt like the edge of China, and he almost suspected that it was the end of the world, even though he knew that Vietnam was on the far side of those mountains. But although it was the most ravishing country he had seen in his life, the postcard beauty of Guilin did not grip him like the sight of the fisherman and his bird.
‘That’s China for me,’ he said. Far below them, on the glassy water of the River Li, the river that shared her name, the lone fisherman was releasing the metal clasp around his bird’s neck. The fish in its beak was gobbled down in an instant. ‘That fisherman,’ he told her, ‘that bird.’
JinJin shrugged. She smiled at Bill and squeezed his arm, but the light in her eyes hardly changed, as though the sight of the fisherman and the cormorant was nothing to make a fuss about, as though she was just humouring him. As though her country, and the world, was a far more simple place than he believed.
‘Practical,’ she said, as the bird plunged once more into the water, and came out with a fish that this time it would not be allowed to keep. ‘Just practical.’
This was the time when he couldn’t get enough of her.
In the day they walked around Guilin. In the late afternoon they put the sign on the door to make the maid and the world go away, and he moaned and loved her and slept in her arms.
It all made perfect sense, and it was also a kind of madness -because the world slipped away and being there in that room with her was all that mattered. He didn’t know how, he had no idea how, but they would work it out. He would make their days in Guilin go on, back in the real world. He would make a holiday romance last for ever. All he had to do was work out how.
At the same time the guilt was as real inside his body as the sickness had been – the crushing guilt and sense of shame, and it came to him like a baseball bat smacked against the back of the head as he lay awake and she slept. The guilt was as undeniable as the illness, and so was the terrible knowledge that if he had his chance to do it all over again, then he would do exactly the same thing, and take JinJin Li’s hand, and drive to the airport, and catch the flight to Guilin, and watch the fishermen with their birds, and step right off the cliff.
He was amazed that she wanted to see her father.
On the first morning in Guilin, inspired by the proximity of her father’s hometown, she had casually told him a string of horror stories about growing up with his violent rages, and Bill had assumed that she had severed all contact after her parents had divorced. But he was in a village in the countryside beyond Guilin, a brief taxi-ride away, reportedly in ill health, and to JinJin it was unremarkable that they should pay him a visit.
‘A father like that,’ Bill said, outraged on her behalf, ‘in the West you wouldn’t have anything to do with him.’
JinJin shrugged. ‘But we are not in the West,’ she reminded him.
So they caught a cab to his village, the limestone mountains and the glass-smooth river and the paddy fields drifting by outside the window as the horrors of her childhood at the other end of the country came back to Bill. Her father rapping JinJin and her sister across the hand with chopsticks if they annoyed him at the dinner table. Her father dragging their mother off for a beating with the words, ‘Say goodbye to the children – you will never see them again.’ And her father eventually leaving but never leaving them alone, arguing in the street with JinJin when she was fifteen and he was forty, and the passers-by mistaking them for lovers.
He was a gambler. The violence came from the gambling. He worked, he gambled, and when he had lost everything he came home to blame his wife and two daughters, and to take it out on them.
His village sat in a valley between two stubby hills. The white stumps of trees that had been cut down years ago crept up the hills like the massed tombstones of some forgotten war. The village itself was part shantytown and part campsite. Shacks of wood and corrugated metal stood alongside grubby brown tents. Barefoot children came out of the tents to gawp at the arrival of the taxi. It was hardly a village at all, Bill thought.
‘What happened in this place?’ he said.
JinJin looked up at the hillsides. ‘Flood,’ she said. ‘In the past, many trees were cut down around here.’ She groped for the word. ‘Soil? When typhoon comes, soil comes quickly down the hill without trees there.’ She slowly raised one of her small hands, palm down. ‘Rains come, river get big – you understand?’
He nodded.
‘How long have these people been living in tents?’ he asked her. ‘When was the flood?’
She thought about it. ‘Three years ago. Come on, let’s find my father.’
JinJin’s father was at the bus depot where he worked. He had a Clark Gable moustache and he was as wide as he was tall. He was so physically different from his long lean daughter that Bill struggled to believe they shared the same blood. He grinned shyly at Bill as he chattered with JinJin, and perhaps because she was so apparently at ease with him, Bill could not find it in his heart to hate the man.
‘I this girl father!’ he announced, and Bill nodded, both of them smiling away at this shocking revelation. His two friends cackled with amusement at his mastery of a foreign language.
‘He speaks no English whatsoever,’ JinJin said dismissively.
Her father had not prospered in the years since leaving his family. The gambling and the violence had ruined two more little families, and now he lived alone in a wooden shack, troubled by his lungs and the damp, existing on a diet that JinJin said consisted of congee, roll-up cigarettes and whatever brand of tea had stained his teeth that dark brown colour.
There was a noodle shop next to the bus depot and Bill watched the pair of them as they noisily slurped their meal while he -suddenly wary of the local fare – ate nothing. Even locked out of their conversation by language, he could see that the balance of power between them had shifted. The father answered his daughter’s questions almost bashfully, unable to maintain eye contact for very long. It was the daughter who called the shots.
‘My father says the local government are very bad,’ JinJin told Bill. ‘After the flood, there was a relief fund set up for the village by the central government. But the village did not even know about it until they sent representatives to Beijing to protest.’
Her father g
rinned with embarrassment below his Clark Gable moustache.
‘My father says he would like to invite you to his home,’ JinJin said. ‘But they are very poor here, and he is ashamed to invite you to such a low place.’
Bill lifted a hand in protest. ‘Please, sir, there is no need to be ashamed, I am happy to meet you.’
They shook hands, enthusiastically, pointlessly, and before Bill knew what he was doing, he had taken out his wallet and was pushing a grubby wad of RMB into her father’s hand. He made a token protest, but then waggled his eyebrows happily, staring at the money with disbelief.
‘I this girl father!’ he proclaimed, and JinJin looked away, as if she could not stand to look at either of them.
His parents had made it look easy. You find someone and then you stick with them forsaking all others until you are parted by the grave. You kept the big promises you had made in bed and in church and on all the days you would never forget. That’s what you did, and your life was simple, and the future was clear. It did not seem impossible, unimaginable.
So why couldn’t he do it?
What was wrong with him?
They had flown back from the shockingly modern airport at Guilin and he was sick of it. Already sick of it. He didn’t want an affair, and he didn’t want to be the kind of man that kept a bit on the side. He did not want to be the Chinese man in the silver Porsche. He didn’t want arrangements made, bargains struck, secrets shared. He wanted the one who would make him forget about all the others. That was what he wanted. That was all he had ever wanted.
You find the one that obliterates all the rest and it immediately solves all problems, it resolves everything and puts an end to all the wanting, because once you start the wanting, it’s never enough until your heart stops beating, and there can be no rest and no peace and no real happiness. All you had to do was to find the one that would blind you to the rest of the world. That’s all he wanted, the same as everyone else. It didn’t seem too much to ask.
And this girl who had sat in the window seat next to him, frowning over the in-flight magazine – this fabulous girl – she filled his heart. But when he switched on his phone when he was alone in the apartment, it told him all the calls he had missed. MISSED CALL. HOME, it said. MISSED CALL. HOME.
His parents had made it look easy and perhaps in the end it was easy. As long as you kept the promises. If you broke the promises then suddenly everything else was breakable too.
He came home late from his first day back at work and saw that all the lights in her apartment were out. He knew that she wasn’t sleeping. He knew that the car had come for her.
He was angry and jealous and glad. Good, get it over with, end it now. Did he think that she was going to sit by the phone waiting for his call? Did he think that Guilin meant that there was nobody else who could make demands on her time? Did he expect her to sit at home, curl up those endless legs, and spend the evening with Crossword Work-Out? Yes, yes, yes – in his madness in their double-locked, do-not-disturb hotel room he had expected all of these things, even though he knew he could only be let down. JinJin was out for the night, the only place she could be, and he was glad about it – end the thing now – even though it was like being kicked in the stomach.
He was sitting on the stairs outside her apartment when she came home at midnight. He had thought about what might happen if the man came back with her. It would not be pleasant. But the Porsche decanted her back at her rented apartment, and then it left, and Bill was rising to his feet as she pulled out her key.
‘I’m not doing this,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it. I love my wife and our little girl. I’m not leaving them. And I don’t want a woman on the side. A permanent girlfriend. That’s not for me. I can’t take it – you out with him and me waiting for you to come back. How does that work? How does that make me feel?’ He was raising his voice now. A woman called out a protest in Chinese from behind a closed door. They both looked in the direction of the complaint, and then back at each other. ‘How could it work?’ Bill asked again. ‘Do we get you on alternate nights?’
JinJin let herself into the flat, not looking at him. He followed her inside, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her round.
‘Or are you going to see both of us the same night?’ he said. He had never seen her look so sad. ‘You know what that would make you, don’t you?’
‘I end it,’ she said. She always slipped into the present tense when she was tired, or stressed, or hurt. ‘I end it with that man.’
Bill stared at her. He didn’t know what to say. He felt like he was always rushing to judge her, and always getting it wrong.
‘Tonight I tell him,’ she was saying, ‘We can’t go on.’ Now she looked at Bill. ‘Because I don’t want to go that way.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t want to go that way. And because I love you all the time.’
Then she was in his arms and his mouth was on her face, kissing away her tears, refusing to allow them, no more tears, and he was mad for her, starved for her, moaning his love and apologies, sorry again, endlessly sorry for everything, and endlessly grateful, and all his wise decisions obliterated by the touch of her mouth on his mouth, and everything tasting of salt.
I don’t want to go that way.
I love you all the time.
He loved her all the time too.
Outside her window they could hear the unbroken buzz of the city going about its everyday business, but in JinJin’s room he felt that the world had entered a different time.
Everything about her was a source of wonder. He cupped her knees and ran his hands along the endless flanks of her legs and it seemed to take for ever. He wanted it to take forever.
‘Measuring me again,’ she laughed. There was a lot of laughter. The long afternoon felt light-hearted and deadly serious all at once. They were giddy with joy, punchdrunk with happiness. She pressed her mouth against his, her brown eyes alight, and then those eyes closing, and he could tell she felt it too. This hunger that was more than a hunger, this craving that could not be satisfied if they stayed in this room for the rest of their lives.
She rose naked from the floor where they had been lying and looked at herself in the mirror, her arms and legs long and gawky as she examined herself, her small hands cupped across even smaller breasts.
‘Too small,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Ugly me.’
‘Yeah,’ he smiled. ‘Ugly old you.’
‘Not even A cup,’ she said, and when she arched her back he saw the ridges in her ribcage, and they made him ache with tenderness. It was just a ribcage – he knew that. But the ridges of her ribs against her skin tormented him, and he wanted to touch them, and no other man to ever touch them.
‘Double A!’ she cried, eyes wide, as if she had just discovered her bee-sting breasts. ‘Yes, you are right – ugly old me.’
‘Well, everyone has body issues,’ he said, propping himself up on one elbow. He reached out a hand and idly stroked her foot, looking up at her. She stared down at him seriously, her hands falling away. It was true. Her breasts were very small. Even in this room, even now, he could see that she was not perfect – her bum was too flat, her breasts were too small, her skin was too troubled for perfection to be considered.
But she was perfect for him.
He didn’t want to change a thing about her. He loved the imperfections as much as he loved her greatest hits – those eyes, those legs and – why not? – those double-A cup breasts. That was her. That was who she was, and he revelled in it all.
‘Take me, for example,’ he said, sitting cross-legged and casting down his eyes. He hesitated. ‘I don’t know if I want to talk about it.’ She knelt beside him, a consoling arm draped across his shoulder, encouraging him to go on. ‘I – I worry that I’m just too big,’ he said, looking up at her concerned brown eyes. ‘You know. Down there. Too big for any woman…’
She stood up and slapped his shoulder. ‘Hah,’ she said. ‘English joke!’
He rol
led on his back, chuckling to himself. ‘You wouldn’t look right with large breasts, JinJin. Your legs are too long. You’d look top heavy – like Jessica Rabbit.’
She laughed shortly. ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘Beatrix Potter.’
When he looked up at her she was smiling. That toothy, goofy grin that he could never get enough of. He nodded. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘Chinese joke.’
When the night came they did not leave the room but lay entwined and wrapped up in each other, as if they were closer than any couple in the world, and closer than anyone had ever been, as if they were one flesh now. He looked at her looking at him and he knew that nobody else in his life had ever looked at him in quite that way.
As if he was special.
As if he was – and he had to smile at this – exotic.
But it was true. He was a different kind of man and she was a different kind of woman. He explored her long, almost hairless body and it was like discovering another planet. She ran her fingers through the light covering of blond hair on his arms as if he was some strange new species.
‘Very hairy,’ she said. ‘My goodness. Like a monkey. Help, help – there’s a monkey in my room.’
‘This isn’t considered hairy where I come from,’ he said, but he knew that she didn’t really know anything about where he came from. She knew how to conjugate verbs and she knew about writers and she could use all the antique idioms, but that was all she knew. His eyes were an unremarkable shade of green and yet she looked into them as if they were Solomon’s treasure.
And he knew that Becca did not and could not ever look at him with eyes like that. His wife loved him – he was sure of that – but she looked at him the way a sister would look at a brother, with a kind of amused familiarity, an affection that was unclouded by mystery.