My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  He came and stood next to her, not knowing what to say. He felt as though the damage had been done. Even though the real damage hadn’t even started yet.

  ‘That’s the road to Zhuhai,’ he said quietly. ‘You can see the mainland from here.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, surprising him, and then shocking him, and clearly loving it. ‘I been this hotel before.’ She looked around, as if searching for something she might have left behind. ‘Maybe even this room…’ She smiled at the look on his face. ‘I been Macau one month – already know every hotel.’ Childishly counting with her fingers again. ‘Know Hotel Lisboa, Tin Tin Villa, Fortuna, Mandarin Oriental…’

  The list of hotels filled him with despair. ‘Get about, don’t you?’ he said.

  She nodded proudly. ‘Very popular girl. The mamma-san says, “You good girl, Cherry. You best girl in bar.”’

  He held up a hand. ‘Please. Do me a favour, okay? Your name is not Cherry.’

  She looked genuinely indignant. ‘It beautiful name. Cherry American name.’

  He flared up. ‘It’s a stupid name. Nobody is called Cherry in the West. Nobody is called Cherry in the real world. Mothers just don’t call their babies Cherry. It’s the name of a bar girl in Asia, it’s what some old mamma-san calls a silly little girl like you. Listen to me, will you?’ He took her hands, really wanting her to understand. But he faltered because she looked a bit like her sister. A younger, chubbier version of JinJin.

  In many ways the two sisters were physical opposites – one so long and lean and small breasted, and the other so small and round, so round that she looked like a collection of curves. One like a dancer, the other like a milkmaid, or perhaps a barmaid. But he looked at the younger sister as he took her hands and he could not deny that he saw the ghost of the girl he had loved.

  ‘Your name is Li Ling-Yuan,’ he said, reminding her, reminding all the men in all the hotel rooms, reminding himself.

  She flashed those small white teeth again. Part smile, part grimace. ‘Ah, but in that place, in this new life, my name Cherry.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,’ he said, aware of the coolness of her hands, chubby hands, different hands, and he was suddenly conscious of a tightness in his throat. She raised an over-plucked eyebrow and smiled, more widely now, as if what he said was not strictly true. He dropped her hands and stepped away from her. But they kept looking at each other, as if for the first time.

  Then she stopped smiling and they were silent and when she finally spoke her voice was barely audible above the drone of the air conditioning.

  ‘Enjoy your good time,’ she said, giving an emphatic little nod, and it was all so clear and so matter-of-fact that it was like being hit by a hammer.

  Then there was only the moment and perhaps the moment was all there had ever been and all there ever is and all his thoughts of love and forever was just some pre-packaged Western fantasy.

  There was just the moment and the girl and the shadows of the hotel room and what you wanted. He took her in his arms and felt the heat rising and she was slowly walking backwards, leading him to the bed.

  Then suddenly Bill was pushing her away and pulling her to the door by her elbow and shoving her out into the hotel corridor before he had the chance to change his mind.

  ‘Go home to your mother,’ he said angrily, and she raised her almost non-existent eyebrows and laughed at him as if he was joking, or a fool, or as if she would never go home again.

  He slammed the door on her and went over to the window and watched the storm building over the mainland as he tried to control his heart and his breathing. Electrical flashes split the night and seemed to illuminate every last drop of rain. He pushed a button on the bedside table. The curtains started to close and he was glad.

  He was sick of looking at China.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The rains came and they did not stop.

  For three weeks it was all you heard. The rivers that had broken their banks in eastern and southern China. The million people displaced from their homes in Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangxi. From south of Shanghai all the way down to the border of Vietnam, the wind and the rains came and there seemed to be no end.

  It was all you heard. The flooding and the landslides, the farmland submerged, the homes destroyed. Military helicopters dropping bottled water and instant noodles to the displaced. A case of typhoid reported in Hunan. The latest figures of the missing and the dead.

  Shane sat in the car park beneath his apartment block, an overnight bag on the seat next to him, his suit still soaked after his brief dash from short-stay parking into the airport terminal.

  He was meant to be flying down to Hong Kong again with the Germans but there was nothing in or out of Pudong. Come back tomorrow, said the girl on the desk at Dragon Air. It might be better tomorrow.

  So he sat in his car in his ruined suit, putting off the moment when he would have to go up to the apartment, afraid that his wife might be there, and afraid that she might be somewhere else.

  * * *

  Bill pressed his face against the glass of the maternity ward.

  The babies came in many colours at the International Family Hospital and Clinic but they were all swaddled tightly in the Chinese style, wrapped up like little white packages, tiny arms pinned to their sides. Yet his eyes kept returning to one baby.

  A girl. He was certain it was a girl, even though he could not possibly know for sure. Half Chinese, half European. Neither asleep nor really awake, its little bud-like mouth moving with some unnameable complaint. The sleeping infant made him smile. There was something about mixed blood that made for strikingly beautiful babies, he thought. He could see all the beauty of the world in that sleeping baby girl.

  Glancing at his watch, he turned away from the glass wall of the maternity ward just as Sarfraz Khan was emerging from the lift. Khan walked past Bill with his head down, studying some papers, making it easy for both of them.

  JinJin was in her room, sitting on the bed, her bags packed, almost ready to go home. Her face was still pale from the general anaesthetic. He kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Just waiting for my prescription,’ she told him. ‘They’re giving me antibiotics and painkillers and then I’ll be discharged.’

  He sat on the bed holding her hand. It was a whole new vocabulary, he thought. The lexicon of ill health. The realisation that one day your body would betray you.

  At the Chinese hospital she had first gone to, they told her that the lump was benign and that she should just learn to live with it. That was old China. Putting up with things that you did not have to put up with. Bill persuaded her to go to the International Family Hospital and Clinic where she had a minor operation to remove the lump, and told her that the scar would be so small that she would hardly know it was there. But the need for surgery had been a shock to both of them. It felt as if the real world was coming to claim them.

  Now Bill put his arms around her, very gently, because he knew she was still in a lot of pain, and she was still nauseous from the general anaesthetic. Not the embrace of a lover, he thought. No, not like a lover at all. They had gone beyond all of that.

  He kissed her cheek again, and he thought that it was not really the kiss of a lover. It was more like the kiss of a best friend, more like the kiss of a man and woman who had stuck together in sickness and in health, a couple who were married, and who had been married for a very long time.

  They saw the neighbour on the stairs. The guy from the flat above. Brad.

  ‘You all right, JinJin?’ he said, all concerned, as if you could just walk into someone’s life and pretend that you cared. As if the bonds could be there in an instant, Bill thought, as if they didn’t take time. Brad had the nerve to take her hands. ‘Did it go okay?’ he said.

  So she had told him. They were close enough for that. Now he stood on the stairs, on his way out, and acted like he gave a damn, pressing his back against t
he wall as JinJin smiled and nodded and took her hands away. Bill squeezed past him with a bag in each hand.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Bill said, not breaking his stride.

  Then they were in the flat and as she showered he stood in the doorway watching her trying to avoid the dressing on her left breast, a black dot of congealed blood showing through the gauze, and when it was done they got into bed and lay side by side.

  He couldn’t stay. Not even tonight, when she was just home from the hospital. That was the unvoiced sadness between them. They both understood that there would come the moment round midnight when he got up and left her and went back home. He wanted to show her that he would do anything for her. He wanted to not just say it, but to prove it with his deeds. But in the end he couldn’t even stay the night, and what he wanted meant nothing. He lay there by her side and listened to her voice, her lovely voice soft in the night, as if she was thinking aloud.

  ‘You tell yourself you are going with an unmarried man,’ she said. ‘But then you see he keeps looking at his watch. Then you see he always checks the mirror to worry about if there is any lipstick showing. And you realise that he can’t take your birthday and Christmas gifts home, or that he must hide them if he does. And you wonder how many gifts he has thrown away, gifts that you spent a long time choosing because they said how much you love him. And when you are together, and it is good, it feels so…beautiful. Really. That’s the word. Beautiful. I know sometimes I get the wrong word. But that’s the right word. It just feels beautiful and right. And then when you sit there by yourself – after he has gone, and on all the nights you are alone – it all looks so ugly. And that is the right word too.’ She turned her face towards him. ‘What am I going to do now, Bill? What’s going to happen to me?’

  He turned on his side, and put an arm across her belly, and he held her, and he could say nothing. There was a limit to the lies he could tell. He saw that now.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said, sliding out of bed.

  ‘But before you go,’ she said, and he knew that she had planned this all along, ‘I want to show you some pictures.’

  They were photographs of her sister with her new boyfriend. A large grinning German with his arm around a smiling Ling-Yuan, who since he had last seen her in Macau had piled on the pounds and an engagement ring.

  ‘He’s very handsome,’ JinJin said of this spectacularly ordinary man. ‘Don’t you think he’s very handsome?’

  ‘He’s bloody gorgeous,’ Bill said, and then he hesitated. ‘But what about when she was away?’ They looked at each other. ‘What about that time?’ he said.

  JinJin shook her head, quickly leafing through the stack of photos like a croupier with a new deck of cards.

  ‘Nobody talks about that,’ she said. ‘It’s not important any more.’ She studied the photographs thoughtfully. ‘But I think I have been a better sister to her than she has been to me.’

  He reached out for her and she didn’t pull away. She didn’t flinch under his touch the way he had expected her to. That was where they were so different, that was where they were worlds apart. She could not let go as easily as he could.

  ‘I want one thing,’ she said. ‘I wish I could have our baby. I don’t care about you staying with your wife.’ She corrected herself. ‘I care but I say nothing.’ She paused. ‘But I want our baby.’ Bay-bee, she said. Bay-bee. ‘That’s what I want.’

  And a part of him wanted it too. Even now. For it would have been a beautiful baby. But it would kill him. The start of that new life would mean the end of his own. Because it would mean he finally had two homes, and two wives, and two lives, and those two lives would tear him apart. Bill liked to believe that he would do anything for JinJin. He liked to tell himself that. But in the end, he could do nothing. Because he already had a wife and a child and they filled his heart. And if his wife no longer wanted him, then they would still fill his heart. He had run out of time.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said, and JinJin nodded, the tears starting up, because now there was no way forward and no way back and nothing to talk about, and it wasn’t until he was at the door that her voice stopped him.

  ‘I saw on TV – they said that men never marry the woman they really love,’ said JinJin Li. ‘Do you think that’s true?’

  Bill shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think it’s true,’ he said sadly. ‘But isn’t it lovely to think so?’

  There was music on in the flat. Shane heard it before his key was out of the lock. It was not his music. It was not Eddie and the Hot Rods. It was not Thin Lizzy. It was one of those singers his wife liked. Some singer with a shaved head, chains, tattoos. Making seduction sound like a threat of physical violence. It was not ‘96 Tears’ by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It was not ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. Rosalita and her special friend were not playing Shane’s song. They were playing one of the new songs. They were playing their own song.

  Shane didn’t recognise the man in bed with his wife. And then he did. One of the bar owners from Mao Ming Nan Lu. From a place a few doors down from Suzy Too, one of the places with live music. That surprised Shane because he would have bet money on the bass player. He had always suspected the bass player who from the very start had looked at him with such hatred, as if Shane had come along and spoiled everything. And he was right. Everything had been spoiled, and nothing could ever be good again.

  The sheets were half pulled back and the club owner was lounging on a stack of pillows with Rosalita kneeling in front of him with her head between the man’s legs.

  Her skin was so brown against his pallid European flesh. What was he? French? German? The French and Germans were all over Shanghai. This wasn’t Hong Kong. The other European nations had staked their claim here. She had him in her mouth, the mouth that kissed Shane on their wedding day, the mouth that he had once believed was a perfect match for his own.

  The music was loud and it had masked his entry, but then they had seen him and they were cursing, pulling apart, and the man looked so angry that Shane thought he would have to fight him, felt his fists tightening, knew he could take him, even with the man’s blood at boiling point.

  But the man, this bar owner from one of the places where they had live music on Mao Ming Nan Lu, was angry with Rosalita, he was angry with Shane’s wife, not Shane, because after all she shouldn’t have brought a man back if the dumb husband was not safely installed at the office or packed off on a business trip.

  ‘You stupid cow,’ the man muttered, sliding out of bed as Rosalita pointlessly covered her breasts with a fistful of crumpled sheet, and somehow the insult to his wife was the thing that moved Shane’s own blood.

  More than the deceit, more than the sight of her beloved brown skin against that soft white flesh, more than what she was doing with her cheating mouth, more than coming home to someone else’s music on his sound system. The insult did it. You stupid cow.

  He should watch his mouth, Shane thought.

  Then the man and Rosalita were arguing with each other while Shane went to the living room, pulled back the Mona Lisa, and tapped in the code: his wife’s birthday. He came back into the bedroom with the Makarov in his hand.

  They stared at him. And they stared at the cheap Russian gun. Shane sighed. Silence at last. Apart from the sound of someone else’s song.

  This music is so hateful, Shane thought. So full of real hatred. He felt very calm, although he was aware that he did not seem to be breathing.

  Then the bar owner laughed at Shane. He had been here before.

  ‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ he said confidently, pulling on his trousers and zipping up. ‘Rosalita’s your friend and she’s my friend too, so you’re not going to shoot me,’ he said.

  And that’s when Shane shot him in the stomach, shot him with one tiny flex of his right index finger, which produced the sudden crack of sound and the spectacle of the man knocked backwards with his hands clutching with wonder at a gut wound that would kill him, but not immediately,
not that Shane had planned it that way, and the man cursed once and loudly in disbelief, clawing at himself as he sank forward on his knees, his head bowed as if in shame, shame at last, the blood spreading on the white sheets.

  But Shane didn’t see any of that because he was watching his wife, who was screaming for help, Someone, help, he’s going to kill me, in that curious Spanish accent that Tagalog speakers bring to the English language, as she crawled across the bed and then on to the floor, and he felt his finger on the trigger again, flesh and bone squeezing on a sliver of cheap black metal. And then he felt it pause.

  Her hair was down, not tied and tossed across one shoulder as usual, but hanging loose, as it only did when she was in bed, or she was sleeping, or when she was making love. And with her hair hanging down like that he could see it clearly, he could see the ink stain on her neck.

  There it was, for the very last time, the birthmark that Rosalita tried to hide for almost every waking moment of her life. Shane knew then that he loved her and that he was glad he had married her, he would do it all again in an instant.

  Shane saw Rosalita’s birthmark and knew that the sun rose and set with her. So he lowered the gun, then lifted it and pressed the barrel against his own pulsing temple and finally squeezed the trigger.

  And in the moment before oblivion he thought of how she had looked the first time he saw her, so full of life, you never saw anyone so full of life, and he was grateful for it, all of it, and he remembered further back, one long-forgotten dawn in his youth in Australia, the sun coming up as he waded out to sea, the board in his fists, the water so cool from the waist down that it made him gasp even as he felt the sun on his face and his shoulders, and he remembered one of his first nights in Asia, in Hong Kong it must have been, Kowloon side, he didn’t even know enough to be on Hong Kong island, but it was great, with the first Peking duck and hoysin sauce he had ever tasted and also the first Tsingtao, and who had ever tasted duck like that or drunk beer like that, or even knew they existed, the plum sauce on his disbelieving tongue, the skyline across the harbour shining like the stars, and he was grateful for it all, and then he was paddling further out to sea and up on the board and the water on his skin was already drying and the sun was coming up, almost blinding him now.