My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  When it became too cold for the baby they went back inside and ate their dumplings and wished each other happy new year. And as the last of the fireworks went off outside it really did feel like a new year to Bill, even though it was the middle of February.

  JinJin wanted to escort him back to the Trader’s Hotel but he told her to stay with her family. If she came back to the hotel with him then he would want her to stay and he knew that was impossible.

  So he said goodbye to her mother and the kid sister and little ChoCho. JinJin put on her yellow coat and walked him to the landing where he banged his knee hard against a bicycle that had been dumped at the top of the stairs. She made sure he had a card with his hotel’s name in Chinese to show the driver. He unzipped the top of her yellow ski jacket so he could slip his arms inside as he kissed her goodnight. Their bodies trembled against each other. The last of the fireworks were exploding.

  ‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘Go back inside. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  ‘Okay, William,’ she said, lifting her eyes to him.

  She kissed him for a long moment and then she let him go and he walked down to the street, trying not to fall and break his neck in the pitch-black stairwell, attempting to avoid the soiled walls and the prehistoric bicycles that were parked on every floor.

  Bill stood in the shadow of the concrete blocks, his breath billowing clouds of mist in the night, and on the wide road there were no cabs to be had. He looked up at the landing where JinJin’s coat was a smudge of bright yellow in the darkness. She waved and he waved back. He wished she would go inside. The square black blocks of flats stretched off in every direction, as far as he could see.

  He had never been around such poverty. He had never known it existed. But in every window of every flat of those ugly concrete blocks a red lantern was shining for Spring Festival, and the birth of another lunar year.

  The moon was behind the clouds as he started walking in the direction of downtown, and as he looked up at the countless flats with all those unknowable lives he could see none of the grime and the poverty and the concrete.

  All Bill could see were the pretty red lights.

  He fell asleep in his hotel bed thinking about the baby.

  There was a dark line on her hard flat belly and it ran from her navel to the sparse tuft of pubic hair. It had been another tale of mystery on her body – like the toes, like the black-rimmed eyes, like the scars on her knees from a childhood of climbing walls and falling off walls and making her own entertainment – but the dark line on her belly was the one puzzle that he did not want to solve, because he already knew what it meant.

  The line meant that she had been pregnant.

  The vertical line on her belly was not like the stunted small toes or the scars on her knees – he did not want to know where it came from; he was not interested, because whatever the answer was he knew it would hurt.

  He had thought it meant a terminated pregnancy. After tonight, it seemed he had been wrong. He had taken it for granted that the child he knew she had carried had never been born. The father would have been some boy in Changchun, or the man in Shanghai, or someone else, some unimaginable other man, and he did not want to know. It did not matter.

  This was a country where abortion was freely and casually available. What had Dr Khan said? It was easier than having a tooth out.

  How wrong he had been. The baby explained why she’d had to give up work as a teacher. She had an entire family to support- mother, sister, and child – and bills that could never be met on what they paid a teacher in Number 251 Middle School. The line on her belly said it all – why she’d left the schoolchildren she loved, and why she lived in Paradise Mansions, and why she had to be practical.

  He knew about the line. He even knew what the line was called – linea alba, white line, when you could not see it, and linea nigra, dark line, when you could.

  He had seen that line before, in another bed, in another time, on another woman.

  He had seen that dark line on the hard snow-white belly of his wife, and in close-up as he had gently brushed his lips across skin pulled as tight as a drum, his head reeling at the wonder of it all.

  JinJin met him at the hotel with a pair of cashmere long johns. Her mother was worried about how he would deal with the cold. They walked through the empty streets and just before they came to the park she stopped, and held him, and told him about the married man who had fathered her child.

  He had guessed a childhood sweetheart, a poor boyfriend her own age, and he had been wrong about that too. She told Bill how she had loved the man with all her heart, and how her mother had turned up at the bank where the man worked, screaming that he was abusing her daughter. The relationship ended, and the man never did leave his wife. But she kept the baby.

  Bay-bee, was how she pronounced it, and it held his heart. ‘I always knew I would keep my baby.’

  In the early days in Paradise Mansions, when she was still the girl who was picked up by the man in the silver Porsche, he had asked himself – is a woman like that capable of love?

  But it wasn’t what he thought, what the world thought. What the men who had beaten him and Shane would have thought. It was not sex for money, it was never sex for money.

  It was sex for survival, perhaps, and a relationship with a man because there were mouths to feed. It was practical. She came from a place with no expectations and no hope. She was practical because there was no other way.

  They had reached the park. There were food stalls just inside the gate. JinJin bought something that looked like a toffee apple on a stick.

  Inside the park there was a frozen lake where people were skidding around on wooden boxes, steering themselves with what looked like a pair of sawn-off skis. It was like the roller-skating rink in Shanghai, one of those antique entertainments that had somehow survived into the new century.

  They rented a couple of ragged old boxes and set off, and when he looked over his shoulder at JinJin, he fell in love with her, he fell in love with her at exactly that moment in Changchun. He saw her yellow coat against the frozen whiteness all around, her laughing face, her huge brown eyes shining, and he could do nothing but fall in love. He kept looking over his shoulder at her, committing it all to memory, because he had to set it down perfectly, exactly as it was, so that he could remember it in the time to come when he thought about all the things that had made his life worth living.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, William!’

  He turned just in time to avoid a head-on collision with a pair of teenage boys. He swerved and skidded off the rink on to the rock-hard grass, and felt JinJin clatter into the back of him, her laugh turning to a gasp of pain as one of Bill’s sawn-off skis pierced the back of her hand.

  Mortified, he pulled off her glove and placed his mouth over the bead of red. He felt the salt taste of her blood on his lips. She was still smiling, telling him it was nothing, and he could not imagine a day when she would ever be out of his life. He loved her, you see.

  They returned to the hotel and when JinJin had gone home, Bill turned on his phone.

  You have twelve missed calls…

  He had been expecting the call – the sudden collapse of health, the rush to the hospital, the doctor’s verdict. But it was not Becca’s father who was dying.

  It was his own.

  He listened to the messages, and then he listened to them again, and it took him some long, confused minutes to accept the reality. The old man’s lungs. There was something terribly wrong with the old man’s lungs, and it looked like it had been wrong for a long time. And Becca had been calling him – while he was with JinJin. Becca had been looking after his family and trying to reach him all that time, all the time that he dared not turn on his phone because if he did he would have to lie.

  He packed his bags and called JinJin on the way to the airport, so she didn’t have the chance to accompany him back to Shanghai. He didn’t want to spoil her Spring Festival. Because he
was starting to believe that he spoiled everything for anyone who ever came anywhere near him.

  And in the cab to the airport he listened to the messages yet again. The tone of his wife’s voice made something inside him shatter. Her voice was patient, exasperated, choked up with feeling – the voice of a woman who knew him too well, and loved him far, far more than he deserved.

  Fly out of Asia into Europe and time runs backwards. You erase the present, you hurtle towards the past, and your old life rushes towards you. You just can’t stop it.

  Bill spent the night in Changchun’s freezing airport trying to get a flight, any flight, back to Shanghai, and in the morning he was on a bumpy Dragon Air ride south, the first flight out, every seat in the cabin taken, and then three more hours spent in the lounge at Pudong, waiting for his flight to Heathrow.

  In the lounge at Pudong a girl brought him a cup of English breakfast tea. Fifteen minutes later, she brought him a saucer. It was the only time he smiled in the twenty-four hours it took him to get from where he was to where he had to be.

  But no matter how many hours were squandered and wished gone, Asia was always ahead of Europe, and it would always be that way, and the long flight back to where he had begun never made up the difference.

  Becca and Holly are waiting for him at the arrivals gate and when he sees their faces and sees them both wearing their pink Juicy T-shirts under their North Face ski jackets and their green combat trousers, like two girl soldiers, a big one and a little one, he chokes up and tries to hide it and wishes with all his heart that he had died and been burned and scattered to the wind before he had ever loved anyone but them, his wife and daughter.

  Things had been simple and good and he had made them complicated and toxic and impossible, he sees all that now, understands it in a heartbeat, at long last understands the blindingly obvious. He holds Becca and Holly and longs for that old simplicity and a time when he could leave his phone turned on, and love without lying, and look at the two faces before him without feeling ashamed.

  Then, with his wife holding his hand and his daughter on his lap, the little girl laughing with delight at her father’s sudden presence, her small teeth even and white and perfect, they catch a black London cab to the hospital, and what Bill Holden can only think of as his punishment.

  PART THREE:

  HOME CALLING

  TWENTY-ONE

  Bill pulled back the curtain and there was his father in his hospital bed. He went quickly to the bedside, and kissed the old man on the cheek, trying to mask his shock.

  The old man, Bill thought, fighting back the tears, afraid he was going to disgrace himself. What had happened to the old man?

  His father looked unkempt for the first time in his life. The face was unshaven, his sparse hair too long, the eyes rheumy with drugs and bewilderment. He did not look like Picasso now. The brief peck on that patchy grey beard was like brushing his lips against sandpaper. It was like kissing death itself.

  In just a few short months something had eaten up the old man, eaten him away. He looked like a husk of his former self, the shell of the strong, proud man he had always been.

  The broad-shouldered boxer’s body looked drained of all strength and energy and purpose, and as a young Filippina nurse propped him up on pillows to receive his latest visitors, the oxygen tank standing like a black sentinel by his bedside, the old man looked like a sick child – weak, passive, heartbreakingly unable to perform this simple act by himself.

  Bill hugged him, straightened up and their eyes met. As Becca and Holly embraced the old man, something passed between the son and the father, something unspeakable and unsayable, but then it was gone, replaced by all the strained jollity of the hospital ward.

  ‘What have we here?’ Bill said, peering into the bags he carried. ‘Presents!’ Holly cried.

  On the bedside table Bill placed a box of sweets with a picture of the Pudong skyline and a duty-free bag holding a portable DVD player and a stack of DVDs, and he was as creakingly jovial as a department store Santa on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Your favourites, Dad,’ Bill said. ‘Liquorice Allsorts and cowboy films.’ For want of anything better to do, Bill began pulling DVDs out of the duty-free bag. ‘Let’s see – you’ve got The Wild Bunch…Shane…The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance…True Grit…High Noon…’

  The old man examined his box of sweets.

  ‘Gary Cooper and Bertie Bassett,’ he said wryly, his voice a rasping wheeze, like something with a puncture. ‘Who could ask for anything more?’ His old voice had gone. He had a new voice now. He turned to the nurse. ‘This is my son,’ he said. ‘He’s a bigshot lawyer.’

  The nurse gave Bill a big white grin. ‘He gets more visitors than anyone,’ she said, and then, to the old man, raising her voice as though he were deaf or simple or both, ‘He’s very popular.’

  ‘They don’t know me, darling,’ the old man said.

  The nurse was a good woman, Bill could see that, but there was something about her tone, combining condescension and kindness in equal measure, that Bill resented, because it made him realise that the old man’s illness had set him apart from the rest of the world.

  Becca and Holly sat on the bed, Holly enthusiastically relaying the latest gossip from her ballet class, the old man and Becca smiling at her as she prattled away. Bill tried to busy himself by unloading his presents, and throwing out old flowers, and going to fetch tea.

  When he came back two elderly neighbours had arrived, bringing petrol station flowers and banter about the old man being looked after by all these attractive young nurses. And when the old man suddenly found it impossible to take another breath, they all watched in silence as he placed an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and struggled to fill his exhausted lungs with just one more mouthful of air.

  Becca took Holly off to the toilet. When the old man was finished he flopped back, the mask in one hand, shaking his head. Then Becca came back with Holly and the grey, stubbled face was all smiles.

  The nurse was right. There were many visitors. They kept coming, bringing grapes to the cancer ward, and soon the little curtained-off space was crowded. Bill thought how foolish he had been to think that his father might die alone. There was no chance of that. Too many people loved the old man to let him die alone.

  It had been a small family for such a long time, just Bill and his old man, such a small family that Bill grew up and went away and started his own family wondering if they had ever really qualified as a family at all. No mother, no wife, no woman. Just a father and his son.

  But the old man had his own family behind him, the brothers who were still alive, and the widows of the ones who were not, and Bill saw that there were many people who loved the old man because of who he was, and without the obligation of blood. They all came, and there was a sad grandeur to these final days in the hospital, as if all the friends and neighbours and work mates of a lifetime had to be gathered here, in this special place, to show they cared and to say goodbye.

  And Bill thought, Who will be there to mourn me? Perhaps that was what had troubled his sleep on the long flight back – not the thought that his father might slip away with nobody by his bedside, but Bill’s fear that when it was his own turn, he surely would.

  When it was time for Becca and Holly to leave they kissed his father goodbye and Bill walked them to the lobby. Just beyond the glass doors an old man in stripy pyjamas and carpet slippers was smoking a cigarette. Becca picked up Holly and Bill wrapped his arms around them.

  ‘You’re out on your feet,’ Becca said. ‘Come home, Bill.’

  But their old home was being rented out to the family of a lawyer from New York to pay the mortgage, and Becca was staying at her sister’s place with Holly now that her father was feeling stronger. And Bill wanted to stay.

  ‘I can’t leave him, Bec,’ he said, and she didn’t argue with him.

  He kissed them and let them go. Then he went back to the crowds around his father’s bed. The
little curtained-off space had taken on a festive air. There were people he had not seen in years, people he had never met. Introductions were made, hands shaken, cheeks kissed.

  But in the end everybody left the old man except Bill, for it was getting late, and you can’t stand by a hospital bed forever. There is no timetable for these things, Bill realised. He attempted to make the mental leap to the brutal fact that this was it, there was only one ending, and although the doctor said weeks rather than months they did not really know. Bill could not truly believe it, he could totally not comprehend that the world could keep turning without his old man.

  It was late now and he watched the nurse, a different one, a tall young Czech, hold the oxygen mask over his father’s mouth. He and his father held each other’s stare for a moment and the old man closed his eyes. He was scared, Bill saw, and somehow that surprised him, although he thought – who wouldn’t be?

  ‘My son,’ the old man said when the nurse took the oxygen away. ‘A handsome devil, isn’t he?’

  He had never heard his father boast about him before and it seemed ludicrous, fake, completely out of character.

  The nurse tucked in the blankets. There was a rubber sheet under the old man’s bed, like the kind Holly had had when she was very small. ‘I come back later for to give wash,’ the nurse said.

  ‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do,’ the old man said, fighting for breath again, shaking with the effort, and for a moment Bill wondered if the oxygen tank was empty.

  The nurse left them alone. The lights went out. They could hear the sound of a hospital ward at night. That echoing sound that never quite managed silence. Distant voices, restless sleep.

  The two men smiled at each other and Bill took the old man’s hand and it seemed completely natural although he hadn’t held his father’s hand since he was five years old.

  Those old builder’s hands. The hands of a tough man, a man who worked with his body not his head, a physically capable man.