Bad Traffic

by Simon Lewis

  ‘Take it.’

  Bloody Chinese, thought Joy. Her relatives were the same. You couldn’t give them anything without them refusing it twice first. The mainlander stood and drank.

  ‘Better than Pepsi,’ he said. ‘Every person like Pepsi, but I like Coke.’

  ‘I’m a Fanta girl myself.’

  ‘What is Fanta?’

  ‘Orange-flavoured. Well, orangeish. What’s your name?’

  ‘Ding Ming.’

  ‘I’m Joy.’

  ‘Very lovely name.’

  ‘Thank you. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I need to give call Kevin, he my boss. I have to go back.’

  ‘Back to where?’

  ‘Work place.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know. By side sea.’

  ‘Side sea? You mean seaside? We’re miles from the sea. Have you got any money? Anywhere to stay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  Then, as if the weight of his troubles were a physical burden carried on his back, he sank until he was squatting on his heels again. She didn’t have the flexibility to squat, so she sat down cross-legged on the cold stone.

  ‘Where’s the other guy, the guy you were with?’

  ‘He got… he go away.’

  A couple of lads were approaching, and Joy grew self-conscious. She knew the guys, though she couldn’t remember their names. There was a fat one and a really fat one.

  ‘Alright, Joy?’ Said the fat one.

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘We’ve been down the Ferryman’s. Saw that Jessica. She’s well pissed off with you. She was mouthing off. You want to watch out.’

  ‘I saw her.’

  The fatter one ducked behind a car and a tinkle began as he pissed against the wheel. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Caught short.’

  ‘Any trouble,’ said the fat one, ‘and you call on us, right. We’re on your side.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who’s your friend?’

  ‘This is Ding Ming.’

  ‘Relative, is he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said the fat one, and thrust out a hand.

  ‘He wants to shake your hand,’ Joy whispered, and Ding Ming stood and did so, grinning nervously.

  ‘Where are you from, then?’

  ‘China.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  The fat one turned and considered the street, perhaps trying to look at it through alien eyes. ‘This must be a bit different for you then, eh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You, er, you eat a lot of rice, do you?’

  ‘I like rice very much.’

  ‘Do you know any of that kung fu?’ He struck a fighting pose and waved his hands about in a vaguely martial way. Ding Ming looked alarmed, and stepped back, and the fat lad dropped his pose and slapped Ding Ming on the arm with drunken camaraderie.

  ‘It’s alright, Grasshopper. Just messing about.’

  The fatter one shouted across the car, ‘He has a few and thinks he’s Chow Yun-Fat.’

  Ding Ming said, ‘Chow Yun-Fat?’

  ‘You know him?’ said the fat one.

  ‘He is number one star.’

  ‘Yes, he bloody is,’ said the fat one, with passion. ‘I’m always telling people: you can take your Arnie, you can take your Stallone, Chow Yun-Fat would have them both. Easily. He is the man.’ He punched his own hand and repeated, with alarming vehemence, ‘He is the man,’ as if someone had cast doubt upon the assertion, or even suggested that he wasn’t the man.

  ‘He is number one star, you are so right, my friend. With the two-gun action.’ He made gunhands – two fingers curled back and cocked thumbs – and started shooting at Ding Ming: ‘Bang bang bang bang!’

  The fatter one came round from behind the car, and he was doing it too, going ‘Boom boom boom boom!’ and the two men circled, shooting each other, and Joy, and Ding Ming, and the street.

  Ding Ming made guns out of his hands and shot back – ‘Pam pam pam!’

  Joy reckoned it a guy thing. She’d seen The Killer and Bullet in the Head – supposedly Chow Yun-Fat’s greatest work – and found the stylised, slow-motion violence at first alarming, then numbing. She’d called it ballet for men.

  The fat lads mimed getting shot in the chest, throwing their arms in the air and their heads back, then flapping their hands to simulate blood spurting from ruptured bodies, and letting their tongues hang out and wobble. They laughed and slapped Ding Ming on the back and repeated what a man the incomparable Chow Yun-Fat was.

  The fatter one muttered to his friend, ‘Let’s leave the lovebirds to it, heh?’

  ‘Lovebirds?’ said the fat one, and looked at Ding Ming in a new light. It was explained to him in a whisper that carried clearly to Joy’s ears – ‘Arranged marriage, isn’t it.’

  Joy was too shocked to say anything for a moment, then realised that outraged protest might offend Ding Ming, and by the time she had formulated a sensible response the lads had taken their leave.

  Joy said, ‘Never mind them – they’re just pissed.’ Ding Ming’s burst of gaiety had faded, but it seemed to have improved his mood a little.

  ‘Internet,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can send email my cousin, he go see my mother, get Kevin telephone number. MSN Messenger.’

  ‘What?’

  Joy understood what he had said, it just seemed such an unexpected thing for the man to know about.

  ‘MSN Messenger. Have this place got computer bar?’

  ‘No. Ding Ming, I want to ask you a question. Please tell me the truth. Have you attacked anyone tonight? Have you stabbed someone?’

  ‘Stab?’

  ‘Like this.’

  ‘No. No.’

  She looked him in the eyes as he said it, and believed he was telling the truth.

  ‘I’ve got internet. On my laptop.’ She looked back at the chippy, the street’s only lighted shopfront.

  ‘My father wouldn’t like me taking you up. Tell you what: we’ll close up soon and then he goes to bed. Wait here for an hour or so, then I’ll come and get you. OK? You understand?’ She remembered the policeman. ‘And don’t let anyone see you.’

  She led him to a dark alleyway and made doubly sure he understood her plan. He put his can at his side, saying he preferred his cola flat, and squatted between bins with his arms folded across his knees and his head dropped, resigned to the wait.

  She returned to the shop and told her father the guy had taken off. This was the second time she’d lied for the mainlander – he’d better be on the level.

  It didn’t look like there would be any more trade, so they closed up and in silence wiped surfaces and cleaned machines. She was free to think about Mark – she’d earned this right, surely? – but as she tried to whip up a soft-focus reverie of gentle hands, wet lips, adoring eyes and so on, she kept being disturbed by the thought of the man squatting between the smelly bins, in the cold, in his oversized coat.

  They went to the flat above the shop and her father cooked fried rice.

  Joy said, ‘Father, I’d like to go to the ancestral village. I think it would be interesting.’

  Joy had been to Hong Kong a few times, but never to the village in Guangdong Province that the Chos traced themselves back to.

  ‘One day,’ he said, ‘but we will be expected to take a lot of presents. No one is more popular than a rich man going home.’

  ‘We’re not rich.’

  ‘You’ll be surprised the number of relatives a rich man can have. I’ll take you when you have finished your education. But it would be better for you to spend time in Hong Kong. You can meet a good man there. You won’t meet one on the mainland.’

  ‘I could meet a good man here.’

  He chewed slowly, and changed TV channels with the remote. As always after work, he was sat with di
nner on a tray in his lap and an apple pie, a mug of green tea and a packet of Royals waiting on the armrest. He found football and grunted with satisfaction.

  Finally he said, ‘You can meet a good man in Hong Kong.’

  Joy was not going to push it. She went to bed and lay fully clothed and wide awake in the dark with her door ajar, waiting for her father to finish up. It took him ages. The LED on her alarm said 12:43 when finally he shuffled to his room and the door clicked shut. She gave it another forty minutes, then slipped out.

  She’d snuck out on other occasions, to go to parties or meet lads, and knew where all the creaky floorboards were. Still it was a risk. The tricky bit was getting down the stairs. She carried her trainers and put them on when she got outside.

  She’d been more than two hours, but not only was the mainlander still in the alley, he was still in the same position. He looked up sleepily at her approach. That was a clever trick, to be able not only to squat on your heels for hours, but actually to doze in the position.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We go into a hallway, then up a flight of stairs and we get to a corridor. My room is at the end of that corridor, but we have to pass my father’s room. Any noise will wake him up and then I will be in such deep shit. Take your shoes off.’

  Ding Ming seemed to take this all very seriously, and she was relieved to see that he was light on his feet. He didn’t even need to be told to step at the edges of the stairs not the middle, and when they were in the hallway he followed in her footsteps as she crept along the wall.

  She heard the rhythmic breathing of her sleeping father and for a moment it did not reassure her but made her worry, for he was not conscious to offer his protection. It occurred to her that this particular adventure was really daft. Inviting a possible murderer into your room in the middle of the night did not now seem like the action of a smart person who considered things carefully. Anyway, she got him in without incident and closed the door.

  The room was barely big enough for two people. A smart person would also have already got the computer started and the broadband connected, but she had to do it while he stood looking round. She was embarrassed by her muscleguy screensaver, her girly trinkets and all the clothes heaped on the floor, especially the pants.

  But he was not looking at her pants, he was looking at her shelves.

  ‘So many books,’ he whispered with reverence. ‘Very good.’

  He unzipped his parka, revealing a bare, bruised chest. Why there was not an ounce of fat on him and you could see all the ribs, like on a greyhound. She tutted at the state of him and gave him an old T-shirt. She motioned for him to sit at the desk and he typed ‘www.sohu.com’ into the address bar and some Chinese homepage opened. He closed pop-ups.

  To her, China was important, but an abstraction. It was part of her experience but not her life, a background image like a distant unclimbed mountain. Now, here was an envoy come down from the mountain, earthy and real. His skin was darker than hers. There was something different about his body language – it was less demonstrative, almost demure. He even smelled different, completely unlike anyone she knew. How could that be? Was it simply diet? Or was he in some essential way Chinese?

  One-fingered, Ding Ming typed an address and password, and an email account opened. But it was garbled. The icons all worked, but the text was a jumble of symbols. He tried refreshing and the same page popped up. He opened an email and the text there was all rubbish, too.

  Ding Ming chewed a lip. ‘What China language your computer got?’

  Joy could not read Chinese. She had picked up Cantonese from her parents but had never formally studied, she could read only a handful of characters. So she didn’t have any Chinese language software on her computer. Because she didn’t have Chinese language software this guy couldn’t send an email from her computer to back home in China. She should, she felt, have anticipated this problem. She should, she felt, have learned how to read and write what was after all her own fucking language.

  She was ashamed and upset.

  ‘I don’t have Chinese language software,’ she admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

  The man, it seemed, was inured to disappointments. ‘Thank you for help me,’ he said carefully. ‘I will try to call my mother on the telephone again in some time.’

  But the phone was in the hall and the shop was closed. She couldn’t let him do it here. And she was tired now.

  ‘Why don’t you sleep in the shed behind the shop? Then try again tomorrow? How about that? Come into the shop in the morning and I’ll convince my father to let you have another go at calling your mum. Okay?’

  ‘Thank you. You are very kind. You are the most kind person ever in the world.’

  She took blankets and a sleeping bag and led him out of the flat and down the alley. A door here led to the yard behind the shop, where the shed stood. When they’d moved a broken bike, he assured her that it was quite spacious enough.

  For the second time she snuck back upstairs. Only this time she pushed open her door to find her father standing in her room with his arms crossed. He’d put trousers on over his pyjamas, but he was barefoot.

  ‘I will not have you sneaking around at night. You think I am stupid. I’m not stupid. Do not test me in this manner. You are seeing boys, aren’t you?’

  He moved into English, which he only did with her when he was upset.

  ‘Are you bad girl?’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ shouted Joy, speaking English now too, a easier language for her to argue in. ‘It’s not like you think. Why do you think the worst all the time? I helped that—’

  Her explanation was cut short by a scream. They both fell silent. It came from downstairs, either the alley or the yard. The only window that looked over the yard was in the bathroom, and that was frosted. She would have to go and look for herself. Was it that Ding Ming? No, it had sounded too girlish. But what would a girl be doing there? She ran downstairs.

  ‘What is going on? What is going on?’

  He paused in the hallway to put shoes on, and she rushed out alone.

  Someone hurtled past, an elbow caught her in the stomach, and she was knocked against the wall. It was a small figure with a hoodie pulled up, and over it a bomber jacket. It was clutching a spray can. It sped around the corner. That bloody Jessica.

  In the yard, Ding Ming stood contemplating the wet letters sprayed in blue paint along the wall by the back door, the word ‘Chin’.

  He said, ‘I hear noise, come out, person paint on wall, I grab him, he run away. Run away very fast.’

  Joy wondered what Jessica had intended to write. ‘Chinky bitch’, perhaps, or something similarly uninspired. She touched the paint and her fingertip came away blue. Perhaps it would be easier to clean up while it was still wet, but she couldn’t be bothered. Leave it till the morning.

  Her father arrived and inspected the damage. He ignored Ding Ming completely, you’d think he hadn’t noticed the man at all, but on his way out he said, in English, ‘I want him go out first thing in the morning.’

  Ding Ming said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I saw her and I know who it is, so we can go the police,’ said Joy. They were on their way upstairs.

  ‘No police,’ said her father.

  ‘We slap the bitch with an ASBO, she gets arrested if she comes near the place.’

  ‘If you want to let people stay in my yard, you ask me first.’

  ‘We could go and tell her parents. We should take a picture before we clean it up.’

  ‘I don’t understand young people today,’ said her father, and Joy wondered if he was talking about Jessica or her, and got no chance to ask for clarification as he went back into his room and shut the door.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, to the door, in English. ‘Why don’t we ever have a proper talk? We talk for, like, minus a second a day. Oh well, whatever.’

  Finally, she got to go to bed, but jumbled memories from the day were bright in her head – Mark’s
smile, a hand-drawn map to a service station, broken fish, the word ‘Chin’ in blue paint, Jessica’s vicious eyes.

  The notion took her to learn how to squat the way the mainlander did. She didn’t much feel like sleeping, so she got out of bed and gave it a go. She managed for about ten seconds, then the strain was too much and she collapsed on her bottom. It made her laugh. ‘How daft are you,’ she said out loud. ‘Look at yourself.’ Someone knocked on the front door.

  She slipped bare feet into trainers and put a coat over her nightdress and buttoned it as she clumped downstairs. It was either that Jessica or that mainlander and they were both trouble. If it was that Jessica she would punch her in the gob, definitely. She wound herself up to do it as she unlocked the door. It was on a chain and she saw a radio on a dark uniform and a moustache on a serious face. The police. That one from earlier, and behind him his wingpig, the woman who looked round a lot.

  ‘May we come in?’

  ‘It’s a bit late.’

  ‘Yo

  ur lights were on.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She took off the chain and opened the door and said, ‘How can I help you, officer?’

  ‘We are investigating reports of a serious assault. Do you have a young Chinese man staying at this address?’

  ‘What do you mean, assault?’

  ‘An attempted rape has been reported.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. It was that Jessica, wasn’t it? It wasn’t an assault. She was spraying graffiti and he chased her off. I don’t think he even touched her. She’s a vandal – go and arrest her.’

  ‘Nonetheless the allegation has to be investigated. It’s the second incident involving a Chinese gentleman tonight, and we need to talk to him urgently.’

  Her father joined her at the bottom of the stairs, with his gravest face on.

  ‘Your co-operation is advisable. We can drag you in for questioning and get warrants if we believe it’s necessary.’

  The girl cop said, ‘If an offence has been committed and you do not co-operate, you could be in a lot of trouble. Where is this man?’

  ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ said Joy’s father. His jaw was set, his eyes fixed at a point above her head. ‘He in the yard. He stay in the shed.’

  The policeman said, ‘Take us there, please.’