Bad Traffic

by Simon Lewis

  ‘Alright?’ he said.

  ‘Alright.’ The last time she’d seen him his lips had been glistening, his mouth hanging half open, tongue heavy and wet. She was glad now that she hadn’t let him touch her tits, though it had been a close thing at the time.

  Any sort of flirtation was out of the question in front of her father. She looked sidelong at him, then back at Mark to signal the danger. To her dad she was still a girl who played with plastic ponies.

  Mark put both hands on the counter and repeated, ‘You alright?’ He was looking her in the eyes, and she ordered herself not to wilt beneath that clear-eyed cheeky gaze.

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Alright.’ He looked around the shop.

  ‘What you want?’ asked Joy’s father.

  Mark looked disconcerted for a moment, thinking perhaps that the old man had sensed something he disapproved of. In fact, he always sounded abrupt when he spoke in English.

  ‘A small portion of chips please, sir,’ said Mark.

  She liked it that he called him ‘sir’. The opinion of her friends was that his manners were rough, but around her he was courteous.

  Joy’s father scooped chips. Joy put her hands in her apron pocket and wrung them. She wondered what she could do – pass Mark a note with the ketchup?

  ‘That’ll be eighty pence, please,’ she said in a voice that was sterner than usual. She didn’t call him ‘duck’, which was how she usually addressed customers.

  ‘Have you got change?’ He was holding up a five pound note. There was something suggestive, almost rude, about the way he wiggled it back and forth. She plucked it and held it to the light to see if it was fake.

  Having checked that her father was busy wrapping, she pressed coins one at a time into his cupped palm, each a stolen kiss. His hand closed and he winked at her. He took his chips and she said, in a softer voice, ‘Salt is here.’

  ‘Have you got any… mayonnaise?’

  He checked that her father wasn’t looking and blew a kiss. She snatched it and swallowed it – was that what you were supposed to do?

  ‘We do not have mayonnaise. But we do have… garlic sauce.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m a big fan of… garlic sauce.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you. Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘No problem at all.’

  The bell above the door tinkled as he exited, a fluttering tinkle like her heart. So that was it, then. It was official. They were going out.

  It was quiet – probably that on-off drizzle was keeping people at home. She had a textbook open, with a sheet of transparent paper over it to protect it from spatters, but however hard she looked at it, nothing was going in. Her euphoria began to be tinged with anxiety. Should she have been more forward? What if, in fact, he was still going out with that Jessica? He’d not said clearly that he wasn’t. Perhaps, after all, she was reading too much into things and he had only come in because he was hungry? Why had he specified a small bag of chips?

  She chided herself and wondered if it was going to be like this all the time from now on – queasiness, difficulty concentrating, fluffy dreaminess alternating with spiky paranoia. She told herself she would not be letting her college work suffer. But here was another voice, a whole unexplored aspect of herself, saying ‘Bugger work – open your mouth in the rain, watch flowers turn to the sun, laugh, sweat, snog.’

  Around ten o’clock the Community Support Officer came in, a chunky girl called Sandy. Joy knew she wasn’t proper police, she couldn’t even make an arrest. Her job was telling underage drinkers to go home and being a highly visible use of taxpayers’ money. She wore lifts in her shoes.

  She was escorting two real policemen, a man and a woman with radios attached to bulletproof vests and utility belts as big as Batman’s. They had flat hats, which perhaps meant they were a higher rank than your usual tithead.

  Sandy the CSO nodded good evening, and called them Mister and Miss Cho, showing off to the regulars how well she knew her beat. She asked how business was.

  ‘So-so,’ said Joy’s father. He was stiff and suspicious around anyone in a uniform, even parking attendants, so she wondered how he would handle this.

  The policeman took off his hat. ‘We’ve had reports of suspicious behaviour by two Asian-looking gentlemen up at the lake.’

  ‘I went to check it out,’ said Sandy the CSO, ‘and I found a broken bottle with blood on it. Someone’s been stabbed.’

  She looked puffed up with self-importance, or maybe she’d put bigger lifts in. Real trouble would look great on her CV – she probably dreamed about it at night. She looked at the proper policeman keenly, like a faithful dog. She either fancied him or, more likely, his uniform. He was quite good-looking, this policeman, but he had a moustache.

  The real policewoman glared at Sandy, obviously for saying too much.

  ‘A broken bottle?’ said Joy. ‘That sounds terrible.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the policeman. ‘Our witnesses said that that the suspicious characters were… Chinese in appearance.’

  So of course you came here, thought Joy, though she didn’t say anything.

  ‘We were wondering if you had seen any… people of Chinese appearance tonight.’

  Again the pause. The policeman seemed aware that ‘people of Chinese appearance’ was a clunky term. Perhaps he was wondering if it might even cause offence.

  Joy recalled the mainlanders who had come in earlier, a big old one and a skinny young one. They had looked furtive, but they hadn’t looked like criminals. She composed her features into what she hoped would be read as blank indifference.

  ‘You mean, apart from each other?’ she said.

  Joy’s father said, ‘No.’

  Joy said, ‘No.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, how many people are in your family?’

  ‘Dozens,’ said Joy.

  ‘Living here.’

  ‘Only us.’

  ‘How many members of your family live in the area?’

  ‘None, nobody,’ said her father. ‘We no got anybody since my wife pass away. Not another Chinese family near.’

  ‘Have you seen anything out of the ordinary today?’

  ‘No.’ Joy was nodding, pouting a little, trying to look as if she would love dearly to be able to help. ‘What happened exactly?’

  ‘We’re not sure.’

  ‘So we’re talking to everyone,’ said the policeman.

  ‘Should we be worried?’ said Joy.

  ‘Be alert and aware,’ said the policewoman, ‘but don’t get anxious.’ She had a surprisingly high-pitched voice. ‘Please give us a call if you see anything odd – anything at all out of the ordinary, however small.’ She opened the door.

  ‘And don’t go down to the lake,’ said Sandy.

  ‘We certainly won’t,’ said Joy. She thought that was it, but the policeman looked determined to prolong the encounter.

  ‘Those chips look tasty,’ he said. Joy offered him some and he refused. The women left, but he took his time. He suspected something, she could tell, and she had to suppress gestures of nervousness and impatience as he looked round, stepped towards the door, looked round again, put on and adjusted his hat.

  When he reached the door she expected him to do a Columbo, come back with a finger raised saying, ‘Just one more thing…’, but he didn’t. The bell tinkled, they were gone, and she puffed out her cheeks.

  Joy’s father said, in Cantonese, ‘I think it’s slow tonight because of the weather.’

  ‘Yes.’ Joy waited but there was nothing more. She wasn’t going to bring it up if he didn’t. The matter, then, was closed. They were co-conspirators now. She reflected that if she had been with any of her friends, and they had lied to the police, they would afterwards acknowledge and discuss the transgression. But to her father, who after all had come from a very different world, it was just a simple fact, not even worthy of note, that you did not talk
to cops.

  (49

  Joy went back to the textbook but the words were just not adhering. She’d served a few figures, and turned a clutch of pages, when Jessica came in. She was wearing her bulky black bomber jacket with the fur-lined collar and she was backed by that lanky girl with the gappy teeth.

  Joy considered stepping away and letting her father deal with them, but only for a moment. This had to be done, she supposed, and anyway there was a counter between them. She squared up. She wondered how Mark had done it, and hoped he hadn’t been brutal. Of course, there was no easy way.

  Jessica was a small, pretty girl, but now she had a mean set to her jaw and red blotches high up on her cheeks.

  She said, ‘I want a pickled egg.’

  Joy got an egg out of the big jar and waited for the punchline.

  ‘No, I don’t want a pickled egg. A pickled egg is white on the outside but yellow on the inside. That’s the wrong way round.’

  The other girl, the tall one, giggled. Joy dropped the egg back in the vinegar.

  ‘I want a piece of fish.’

  ‘You’re sure, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll have that piece there.’

  Joy took the battered cod out of the cabinet and wrapped it in unnerving silence. She was aware of the girls watching her and was careful to do it properly. They were just trying to psych her out.

  Joy said, ‘That’ll be two pounds forty.’

  Jessica unwrapped her parcel and considered the battered fish. She broke it open.

  ‘Thing about this is, it’s yellow on the outside but white on the inside, isn’t it?’

  ‘Like a banana,’ said the tall girl.

  ‘Two pounds forty,’ repeated Joy.

  ‘Just like a banana. Yellow on the outside, and white on the inside. So you could say it lies about what it is.’

  ‘Does it cheat, as well?’ said the tall girl.

  ‘I should think that for something like that, that lies about what it is, cheating is something that comes natural.’ Jessica lowered her voice. ‘A liar and a cheat.’

  ‘A liar and a cheat,’ repeated her friend.

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Joy, ‘you little twat. You little wee tart. And you, you stupid cow, you can fuck off and all.’

  ‘Bitch,’ said Jessica, and dropped the fish on the floor. ‘I don’t want that. It’s off, anyway. It smells gross. Though maybe that isn’t the fish – maybe that’s the little chinky. You’ll have to come round here now, won’t you, chinky bitch in your little apron, and clean it up.’

  ‘I’ll have you for that, Jessica, you cow.’

  She wanted to throw something at them, and picked up the ketchup bottle, but the realisation that that was what they wanted stayed her hand, and the girls left the shop stiffly, chins in the air, and Joy was left clutching the bottle so hard that sauce oozed from the nozzle and dribbled over her fingers.

  Her father got out the mop, but she told him not to bother, she’d do it. She told him it was just a stupid tiff and nothing to worry about. Kneeling to clean up the mess, she was glad he couldn’t see her, as the hand gathering fragments of fish onto a sheet of paper was shaking with fury.

  ‘If they come in and do that again,’ said her father, in rapid and loud Cantonese, ‘I will strike them. I cannot allow people to come into my shop, insult my daughter and take my fish without paying. I will strike them.’

  ‘You can’t hit them,’ said Joy, adding a reasonableness to her tone that she did not feel. ‘They won’t come in again. But if they do, just tell Sandy the CSO and then, if it’s really necessary, we can get an ASBO against the little bitches.’

  Joy was speaking Cantonese, as she usually did with him, but she said ‘Sandy the CSO’, ‘ASBO’ and ‘little bitches’ in English. It was common for her to swap between the two languages like that – she did it without thinking.

  ‘I’ll hit them.’

  ‘Father—’

  Someone tapped on the window. It was such a tentative sound she hardly heard it. She turned, expecting to see the girls again, but it was a strange slim figure swallowed up in a hooded parka, rapping with a knuckle. She only recognised him when he pressed his face up to the window and squinted in. That Chinese guy, the skinny one. She pointed at the door and he slipped in.

  (50

  Just to look at him you could tell he was a long way from home. His desperation and foreignness made Joy uneasy. She remembered that someone had been stabbed with a broken bottle. With no counter for protection, she felt exposed.

  She said, ‘Duck, take your hood down so we can hear you.’

  He looked a sorry state, dishevelled and dirty with a nasty cut on his lip and bruises on his cheek. His wide eyes moved rapidly back and forth.

  He said in English, ‘Please, can I use telephone?’

  Joy looked at her father. In the past he had refused exactly that request – but that had been from drunk white people. He beckoned for the man to duck under the counter, and led him into the back room. The guy said ‘thank you’ about eight times.

  Joy dumped the broken fish in the bin, which happened to be close to the door. She pushed it open a crack and peered in. The mainlander was sitting on the chair and her father was standing next to him holding a saucepan, so no funny business. The phone was on the counter by the freezer. The guy tapped a couple of numbers in, screwed up his face, tapped a few more, gazed at the ceiling with his mouth opening and closing, tapped a few more, then concentrated so hard that a whine escaped between gritted teeth. Joy’s father said, ‘You sure you know what number?’

  ‘No sure,’ said the guy, ‘no sure,’ and jabbed a last digit. He held the phone hard against his ear. His legs were crossed and his foot flexed rapidly up and down. Joy could faintly hear a dial tone beep-beeping and held her breath waiting for a reply. The man’s nervousness was infectious – this was an important call.

  The dial tone stopped and the man straightened and said, ‘Mister Kevin? Mister Kevin?’ Joy could not make out what was said at the other end, but it did not seem to be what he wanted to hear, as he repeated, ‘Mister Kevin? Are you Mister Kevin? Do you know Kevin? Ke-vin, yes Kevin, sorry I Chinese, English no good, Kevin, Kevin, yes, Kevin. No? No? No? Oh.’ And the poor man’s face fell, and his head drooped as he said, ‘Sorry, I got number wrong.’

  He put the phone down and left his hand on it and asked, ‘Can I call China?’

  ‘China?’ said Joy’s father, in an exasperated tone.

  ‘Have to call home. Sorry.’ Asking the favour really did seem to be causing the man considerable distress – he was squirming, and his foot went even faster.

  ‘China’s very expensive.’

  Da-ad, thought Joy, come on.

  ‘Very expensive.’

  ‘Sorry. I go another place.’

  ‘Go on. Be quick.’

  A phone number was dialled, with confidence this time, and a connection made. The beep-beeps went on, and Joy was interested, waiting for the pick-up. But the beeps just carried on and she grew frustrated, first with the people at the other end, then with this mainlander, who wouldn’t accept that there was nobody home. Finally she was bored. The man would not give up. Perhaps he would have sat there for hours, waiting with the phone pressed to his ear, but finally her father said, ‘There’s no one home.’

  The man put the phone down gently with two hands and said, ‘Thank you very much.’

  Joy retreated a few paces and pretended to be interested in her textbook as they returned. The mainlander was reserved and stiff. He’d been desperate because he had hope. Now, plainly, there was no hope, but at least that meant he could act with dignity. He said that he was very sorry to have troubled them both.

  Joy asked him what he was going to do now.

  ‘I will go outside,’ he said.

  ‘After that.’

  ‘I will do some thing,’ he said. She could see his only idea was to get out of the shop. The fact that he had asked a favour had lost him face, and
he just wanted to get away from the scene of that humiliation.

  ‘Do you want some food?’ she said.

  ‘I no hungry, I have eat full. You potato very delicious.’ He slipped out the door so discreetly that he hardly disturbed the bell at all.

  ‘What do you think his problem was?’

  ‘He asked to use the phone and I let him. I do not want to think about it more than that.’

  ‘What if he’s in trouble?’

  ‘Of course he is in trouble. I will not have him bringing his trouble into my shop any further. I want no more to do with him.’

  ‘He’s Chinese.’

  Joy had only said that to probe how far her father’s racial solidarity would go.

  ‘He is a mainlander. Mainlanders are not like us.’

  That was not unexpected. He’d been brought up in Hong Kong and Hong Kongers pretty much thought of themselves as a race apart. But she did not feel that way. Having been brought up in Britain, she was simply British Chinese, or Chinese British, and set little store by her father’s regionalism.

  In all her time serving chips no other Chinese person had come into the shop who wasn’t a relative. She was irresistibly curious.

  ‘I’m going to take him a can of Coke,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He looked thirsty.’

  ‘If he was thirsty, he’d ask for a can for free. He asked to use the phone for free, and then he called China. He wasn’t proud.’

  Joy already had the can out of the cold cabinet and was heading for the door.

  (51

  She ran into the street and looked up and down, and at first she thought she was too late, he’d gone, but as she turned to go back she spotted him squatting on his heels in the doorway of the newsagents. He looked befuddled. Presumably he was considering what to do and coming up with no answers. She thrust the can at him.

  ‘I thought you looked thirsty,’ she said.

  ‘No no no,’ he said.

  ‘Take it.’

  ‘No.’