My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  There was something – a trick, a knack, a skill – that all the working girls had in Suzy Too. They would approach a man with a look of such tenderness and generosity that he couldn’t help but feel singled out and special and chosen. As though this loud, smoky dive on Tong Ren Lu could provide him with everything that he was missing at home, as though he might find someone who really wanted him in here. If the man declined the offer of company, the Suzy Too girls would move away with a smile of regret, as if enduring a tiny death – that was the magic trick, Bill thought, their ability to stay in character even after rejection. But if the man was interested, and responded with some crucial gesture – a drink, a dance, bodily contact – then the expression changed in the woman’s eyes, and although the painted smile never faltered, the softness was replaced by a look of cold, hard professionalism that took your breath away. Bill wondered what happened to those men who mistook commerce for affection, or desire, or love. What happened to them?

  He saw that what was sold in Suzy Too was not sex but dreams, and he guessed that beyond the cold hard commerce that filled the air as much as the smoke and beer and the greatest hits of Eminem, the dream on sale was coveted by a surprising number of the men in here. The dream of the great unmet lover, the dream that you might meet someone who truly cared about you, the dream that in the morning you would wake up in the arms of someone as beautiful and untouched and unchanging as JinJin Li.

  His eyes stung from the smoke. His ears were ringing from ‘The Way I Am’ and ‘Lose Yourself’ and many songs that he didn’t know. They should have just gone back to JinJin’s apartment and closed the door – he never took her to his own apartment, and without discussing it they both knew that he never would – but Spring Festival was coming and JinJin wanted to see her friends before they all went home for the duration of China’s great holiday. It would soon be time to strike camp. Soon the entire country would be on the move.

  The conversation at their table seemed never-ending and complex. He could not even guess the subject. JinJin and Jenny One were arguing with Annie, who seemed to be tearfully protesting her innocence. Bill had never seen Annie show any emotion before, beyond her default frosty haughtiness. Jenny Two and Sugar nodded thoughtfully and held her hands, but Annie broke free of them and rolled up her sleeve, her tears streaming.

  Bill saw with a jolt that there was a fresh tattoo on her right arm, inch-high capital letters that spelled out a name in Chinese characters. Under the lights of Suzy Too the brand on her smooth pale flesh looked like fluorescent ink.

  ‘He became very angry when he saw it,’ JinJin said in English, including Bill in the story, and Bill didn’t have to ask who he might be.

  ‘And he said she must go away,’ Jenny Two said. ‘But she did this for him. Only for him!’

  ‘And he refused her,’ Jenny One said. This is what they said when someone was dumped. He refused her. Annie stared at her ruined skin, her disastrous stab at commitment to the man who had brought her to Paradise Mansions, and they all looked at Bill with pleading eyes as if he might explain the strangeness and mystery and fickle nature of a man’s heart.

  He shook his head apologetically.

  ‘We’ve got to go,’ he said.

  Back in her apartment he told her to put her feet up while he made some tea.

  As the sound of a young woman reading the news drifted out to the kitchen, Bill opened doors until he found cups and tea. He pushed the packet to one side and dug deeper inside the cupboard because, although it felt like he drank it every day of his life, he was no great fan of Chinese tea.

  Chinese tea was one of those things, like jazz or cricket, that he had tried very hard to like but could never really see the point of. He thought that Chinese tea was never much more than okay. So he was delighted when he found an unopened packet of English breakfast tea, something exotic that JinJin had picked up at the local Carrefour supermarket and then never used. Her kitchen was full of these odd souvenirs. A dusty bottle of Perrier. A jar of decaffeinated instant coffee. A forgotten packet of muesli. A six-pack of Coca-Cola. They were like messages in a bottle washed up from some foreign shore that she had only read about in magazines.

  He came into the living room carrying a tray with two steaming cups of English breakfast tea, a carton of milk and a bowl of raw cane sugar that she sometimes used for cooking. She was staring hungrily at the young female newsreader on the TV. She looked at him and recoiled.

  ‘English tea,’ he said. ‘Just for a change.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Tea with milk?’

  ‘Just try it,’ he smiled. ‘Please.’ He carefully placed the tray on the table before her. Then he hesitated. ‘JinJin?’

  JinJin had turned her face back to the young woman reading the news. He knew what she was thinking. I could do that. ‘What is it, William?’

  ‘You’re still in the flat,’ he said, pointing out the obvious, finally broaching something that had confused him for a long time. ‘This flat, I mean. You’re still living in it.’

  She turned to look at him, the young woman with the autocue forgotten. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How come?’ Bill said, sitting down beside her. ‘I mean – it’s not your flat. You don’t own the flat.’ She stared at him, waiting. ‘He owns the flat. The man. Your old boyfriend.’ He could not bring himself to say husband. Never that. ‘I was wondering – why didn’t he throw you out when you ended it?’

  She looked shocked. ‘He’s not such a one,’ she said. ‘Perhaps he always knew that I would meet someone. That such a day would come.’ She sipped her tea, and grimaced. ‘I can’t stay here for ever. I know that. But he would never –’ she reached for Bill’s brutal phrase ‘– throw me out.’

  Bill placed his hands around his cup, and then took them away. ‘He must have loved you very much,’ he said.

  ‘He cares about me,’ JinJin said.

  She doesn’t call it love, Bill thought. What she had with him. She never calls it love.

  ‘Are you all right for money?’ he said.

  ‘I have enough,’ she said. ‘For now.’

  ‘How’s the tea?’ he said.

  She pulled a face. ‘Tea with milk. Horrible!’

  He laughed and reached for the sugar bowl. ‘Some people need a little sweetness,’ he said, heaping in a spoonful of the raw cane sugar and stirring it for her.

  JinJin sipped it carefully.

  ‘Better?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘A little sweetness,’ she said.

  Early next morning Bill came into the courtyard where Tiger was sitting at the wheel of the car, his new laptop resting on his thighs, fingers flashing across the keyboard. Tiger was so lost in the images passing before his eyes that he did not see Bill approach the car, bundled up inside his new Armani coat against the freezing January morning, and he did not see him try the handle on the passenger’s side. Tiger only saw Bill when he rapped his knuckles against the windscreen.

  ‘You can do that on your own time,’ Bill told him, sliding into the car. He nodded at the laptop that Tiger was attempting to deposit on to the back seat. ‘What’s so fascinating anyway?’

  ‘It’s nothing, boss,’ Tiger said, flushing with embarrassment. Bill shook his head, eased the laptop from Tiger’s hand and flipped open the lid. He was expecting naked girls or new cars but instead he found himself looking at a colour photograph of a chair that was the size and shape of a phone box. It was a red chair, some sort of old-fashioned Chinese chair made of lacquered hardwood with elaborate carvings down one side and calligraphy running down another. There were barefoot children standing around the chair and a caption in English. Hong Kong, 1963, it said. Young relatives try to peek at a bride as she is carried to her wedding.

  ‘What is this?’ Bill said.

  ‘This is my business, boss,’ Tiger said. He smiled uncertainly. ‘This is my website. Can I show?’

  Bill smiled encouragement and Tiger took the laptop from him. His fingers danced acro
ss the keys, and images of furniture that looked like sculpture flashed before their eyes. Black lacquer bedside cabinets. Travel trunks and hand-painted screens and hardwood coffee tables and pillow boxes and a canopy-covered bed. Red lanterns that could have been from a Gong Li movie. There was an austere beauty about it all.

  ‘This is how I will get rich,’ Tiger said, smiling shyly. ‘This is my way. I have contacts in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And there are factories down south. Many factories, boss.’

  ‘Big market for this stuff, Tiger?’

  ‘Booming market, boss. During the past bad times, lot of traditional Chinese furniture was smashed up. Now many rich people in China. Don’t want Western furniture. Not interested. Want Chinese furniture.’ Tiger looked at him with pleading eyes. ‘Bad idea, boss?’

  Bill shook his head. He was impressed, and a little sad, because sooner or later he would lose Tiger. But that was Shanghai. Everybody wanted to make their fortune.

  ‘It’s a good idea, Tiger,’ he said. ‘It’s a great idea. And I wish you well. Is this stuff real or fake?’

  ‘Do both classic and contemporary,’ Tiger said, nodding emphatically. ‘Many masterpieces from the Ming and Qing dynasties. I have good people can do restoration. But also genuine replicas from factories down south.’

  As always, Bill thought, the line was blurred between what was real and what was fake. It largely depended on what you wanted to believe, and how much you were prepared to pay. Things could be found, or they could be restored, or they could be copied. But as the images of hand-carved, hand-painted black and red hardwood furniture flowed in front of them, Bill saw that none of this stuff was easy to copy. It took a kind of genius to fake something so brilliantly that you never really knew when you had the real thing.

  He could hear her banging about in the tiny kitchen. He had been ordered to remain on the sofa and watch BBC World while she prepared his treat. But he wasn’t interested in BBC World.

  ‘May I help?’ he called.

  More banging and crashing. ‘Your help is not required,’ she said, just before he heard something drop and shatter. ‘Oh my goodness,’ she muttered.

  If he craned his neck, he could see what she was doing. She had boiled the water long ago, ages before she started her search for the tea bags. That had held proceedings up for a while, but now the water was being poured into his cup. She splashed in a small waterfall of milk and then heaped in three spoonfuls of raw cane sugar. Then she proudly carried the cup the few steps to the living room and placed it before him.

  ‘English breakfast tea,’ she announced. ‘Like the Queen drinks.’

  ‘You’re not joining me, JinJin?’

  She shook her head and grimaced. ‘I’ll make some proper tea for myself.’

  She watched his face as he carefully lifted the cup and sipped his tea. It was a tepid, milky concoction, so sweet that it made his eyes water.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said, and her smile came out like the sun. ‘Delicious.’

  TWENTY

  The airport was clogged with people. It felt like everyone in China was returning home, as if the entire country was on the move, wrapped up against the sub-zero temperatures, carrying overstuffed suitcases. Everywhere he looked there were red lanterns celebrating Spring Festival.

  The black snow of February was piled up by the side of the roads. Changchun was a hard, ugly place and the people at the airport looked different from the confident citizens of Shanghai. In Changchun they were noticeably shabbier, less worldly, part of the old China, gawping at Bill and JinJin and revealing teeth like vandalised tombstones.

  Bill had a room at the Trader’s Hotel in downtown Changchun, and JinJin came with him to check in. She would be staying with her family in their flat on the outskirts of the city. She said her mother would not approve of her staying with Bill at the hotel, and somehow this made him happy. He wanted her to be cherished. He wanted her to be protected.

  She left him alone for a few hours and when she came back to collect him she was dressed in a bright red sweater, her cheeks flushed with the cold. The grey city was turning red for Spring Festival.

  Downstairs there was a palpable excitement in the lobby of the hotel, and in the long queue for a cab and on the streets of the city. It felt like Christmas and New Year and the first day of the summer holidays all rolled into one. JinJin’s face shone with excitement and when the mist from their breath mingled and formed a small white cloud in the back of the cab, she ran a gloved hand through it, laughing with delight.

  The taxi took them out of the centre and they passed boxes of grey flats that went on forever. It looked like a Communist city, a city that had been built without a passing thought for the individual man, woman or child, but a red lantern shone in every single window of those hideous flats, scarlet splashes of colour everywhere among the bleak state housing.

  As Changchun drifted by, he held JinJin’s hand and wondered about her growing up here. He saw her as a child in the faces of the children on the street, bundled up like little Eskimos, their faces rosy with cold and celebration as they walked home with their parents. But perhaps she was nothing like those children. Perhaps it had been much harder for her. He had some idea of how poor her family had been. He had learned in those moments when he had wanted to know every inch of her and commit it all to memory. He had seen it in her toes.

  The small toe on each foot was not the size it should have been. Her small toes were stunted, loomed over by their normal-sized neighbours. She was proud of her strange small toes, glad to cite this minor disfigurement, always happy to cheerfully deny his assertion that she was beautiful. She told him she had been born that way, that she came out of her mother with those runty small toes, and he knew it was not true. Being poor made her toes like that.

  Her shoes had not been changed often enough when she was growing up. Outgrown, undersized footwear had blunted the growth of her feet. They were a mark of her family’s poverty. All that new money in China, Bill thought, and none of it had reached her childhood. She could not even have a new pair of shoes when she needed them.

  They reached the block of flats where she had grown up. Here, as everywhere else, a cheery red lantern glowed in every window, but when they entered the flats he could see that they were little more than giant matchboxes made from tons of concrete, miserable Soviet-style houses for the unloved masses who toiled in Changchun’s factories in the days when the state still had some use for the masses, in the years when Changchun still had factories working around the clock.

  Inside the flats it was filthier than anywhere he had ever seen, and he tried to hide his shock. The grey walls, the stone steps, the dripping ceiling – everything was coated with a black grime from decades of industrial filth puked out by the factories. With a gentle formality that broke his heart, JinJin took his hand and led him up to her family’s home. There was no lift, and he felt ridiculous for expecting one.

  Her family were waiting for him. Her mother, plump and happy, a little buck-toothed Buddha in tight leggings with a bottle of Tsingtao in her hand, all smiles. And JinJin’s younger sister, Ling-Yuan – shy and curious, angelically pretty but not long and lean like JinJin, more short and stubby like their mother.

  And as they fussed around him, bringing him tea, talking to him confidently in Mandarin – the mother – and bashfully in fragments of English – the sister – Bill sensed how hard it had been for them, for these three women. Ling-Yuan was born just after the one-child policy of 1978, making two daughters and no son and then no hope of a son. How had their father taken that?

  Their father had been one of the xiagang, the country’s millions of laid-off state workers. Changchun was full of them, and when he had walked out for the last time when JinJin was thirteen, the mother had raised her two girls alone, working at three jobs just to survive, her youngest child often left in the care of her big sister.

  In this clean, tiny flat the mother had slept on the sofa, and JinJin shared a bed with Ling-Yuan
. Even now, years later, Bill could almost taste the money-starved past.

  The mother spoke no English. The sister spoke a little, and she falteringly explained the rituals of Spring Festival to Bill while the mother poured him a Tsingtao. They made him feel at home, and their generosity and grace touched his heart.

  Did they know he was a married man? Did they know about Becca and Holly? JinJin did not say, and he did not ask. It was enough that he was here, tonight, helping them to make jiaozi dumplings, meat and fish and vegetable, money inserted inside one dumpling for good fortune the way Bill’s mother used to put a fifty-pence piece inside a Christmas pudding.

  Then he heard the baby crying.

  Ling-Yuan went into the bedroom and came back with a wailing child in her arms, around two years old, Bill guessed, with hair like Elvis in his prime. He was wearing a light blue Babygro covered in dark blue hearts, and that’s how Bill knew that it was a boy, and the family had its son at last. Ling-Yuan rocked him and soothed him, and his tears subsided to a few sniffles. Then, wide-eyed and unsmiling, the baby considered Bill and promptly burst into tears. Everyone laughed, and Ling-Yuan handed the baby to JinJin.

  ‘ChoCho,’ she said, bouncing him close. ‘Don’t cry, little ChoCho. This big-nosed pinky is a nice man. He likes babies and children very much.’

  It was a good night, a wonderful night, with little ChoCho crawling between them as they made their dumplings, and everyone taking turns to hold him and play with him, even Bill, whom he slowly warmed to, despite the strangeness of his appearance.

  At midnight the fireworks suddenly erupted and they went to the soot-blackened landing to watch the lights and explosions, all wrapped up against the freezing night, the baby’s head peeking out of Ling-Yuan’s fake-fur coat, eyes closed and whimpering from the bitter cold. The mother was in an old green army coat that was a few sizes too big for her. JinJin wore a quilted yellow ski jacket, the collar pulled up and the hood pulled down, with only her large brown eyes showing as she held Bill’s hand.