This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  At last I could make out the gaps between the blinds, and I got up and walked to the window. A steady rain was falling; distant apartment blocks showed as blurred grey oblongs. On the street below, the cyclists wore brightly coloured plastic ponchos that covered not only their shoulders but the handlebars and saddles of their bicycles as well. I showered, then put on the clothes I had worn on the plane and took a lift up to the eleventh floor for breakfast.

  At half past nine I dialled the work number Ralph had given me. He answered after just three rings.

  ‘You’re here, then,’ he said.

  It was twenty years since we had spoken to each other. My mind folded shut, and I had no idea what to say.

  He asked whether I still felt like having lunch. If so, it might be best if I came to the bank. We could eat somewhere nearby. ‘We’ll start respectably,’ he said, ‘and go downhill from there.’ We could also meet that evening, though he couldn’t stay out late.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said.

  I hoped I hadn’t sounded too eager. Though I had told him I had always wanted to visit Shanghai, I doubted I would have come had he not been living there, and yet if he felt I’d travelled all this way just to see him, it might frighten him off. Even now, he could say that he’d had second thoughts. He could cancel, or simply not turn up.

  I left my hotel at about eleven. Outside, it was murky, but at least the rain had stopped. The air smelled of stale gingerbread, and also, faintly, of sulphur. I found myself on a busy shopping street called Huaihai Lu. From hidden speakers came the bright, breathy, tinny voice of a young woman. She might have been advertising a special one-off Christmas promotion, but the halo of reverb that shimmered around everything she said, and the Chinese itself, with its abrupt rising and dipping tones, made her sound eerie, and utterly alien. I thought of evil spells, unquiet souls. I thought of sirens. How had it felt to hear Ralph’s voice on the phone? I had known it was him, of course, but had it sounded like him? Oddly enough, when he first started talking, he had reminded me of Uncle Roland, even though I hadn’t spoken to Uncle Roland since Dad’s funeral. In the end, it wasn’t Ralph’s voice I had recognized, but something beneath his voice: a shared history, perhaps, or even a way of seeing things, a way of being. I know who you are and you know who I am. We were strangers, in other words, but only on the surface.

  I flagged down a taxi and handed the driver a piece of paper Ralph had left at my hotel. It was the address of his office, written in Chinese. Twenty minutes later, the taxi stopped outside a building in Pudong. The lobby gleamed, its corners restless with TV screens. I took a lift to the tenth floor. The bank’s glass doors were locked. I pressed the buzzer, and a young Chinese man let me in. I told him who I had come to see. He asked for my business card. ‘I’m his brother,’ I said. He laughed, then led me across an open-plan area and motioned to a door that stood ajar.

  When I stepped into Ralph’s office, which was small and unpretentious, no more than fifteen feet by eight, he was sitting sideways-on to me, in a black swivel chair. He was on the phone, speaking Italian. ‘Sempre così. Sì, sì. Lo so.’ Looking up, he smiled and waved me to the only other chair. As I took a seat, I suddenly regretted having seen Uncle Frank’s photos. Since I had known what Ralph would look like, his physical appearance hadn’t had the impact it might otherwise have done. Perhaps for that reason, I scrutinized his clothes. He was wearing a run-of-the-mill grey suit, a white shirt that didn’t seem particularly new, and a generic dark blue tie. Somehow, I had expected him to be smarter, sleeker – more corporate. I found myself staring at his hands, which were bigger than I remembered, with fingers that looked muscular. Behind him, in the window, I could see the business district, all science-fiction high-rise towers and multi-lane main roads. The air was the colour of raw onion.

  The phone call over, Ralph rose from his chair. ‘Sorry about that.’ He walked round the desk, and we gave each other a hug. I felt a brief shudder, as though we had been caught in a minor earthquake. I couldn’t tell where it had come from – him, or me, or both of us.

  ‘So this is where you work,’ I said.

  Shrugging, Ralph glanced around. He didn’t really think of himself as a banker, he said. He was more like a musician who happened to have a job in a bank. I asked about his music. He still played the trumpet, he told me – during his first year in China he had been in a band, jazz and blues mostly – and he was also learning the guitar. He often sang in karaoke places. The Chinese were mad about karaoke.

  I passed Ralph photographs of Kate and Evie, and as he looked at them I suddenly saw them as proof of something, like a reference or an affidavit, like a badge. It seemed important that he should look at them and know who I had become. He needed to understand that I had done as he had done. We both had people we lived for, people whose lives we would defend with our own. I told him I had spoken to Sonya recently, for the first time in years, and that it had shocked her to learn that I had a wife and daughter. She had assumed I would always be alone, describing me as ‘a little bit separated’. Ralph chose not to comment. Instead, he opened a file in his computer and showed me some pictures of his own family. There was a photo of his sons, both adults now. They looked rugged, confident, reminding me of the kind of French actors who played gangsters in the fifties and sixties.

  On our way to lunch, Ralph kept snatching glances at me, and I thought I saw amusement on his face, and disbelief, that I had flown to China, as I had said I would, that we were together after all these years, that this was actually happening, and once, as we crossed a featureless piazza, he reached out quickly and skimmed a hand over the top of my head. ‘Look at that lovely hair,’ he said.

  We took an escalator to the first floor of a neighbouring high-rise. The restaurant Ralph had chosen, Wang Chao, was enormous and grandiose, with black-and-gilt urns on pedestals and paté-coloured marble walls. Since the menus were in Chinese, I left the ordering to Ralph. Large bottles of beer appeared. The skin above and below my eyes felt stiff, and my thoughts wobbled and lurched like one of Dad’s Super 8 home movies. For me, it was five o’clock in the morning.

  I told Ralph about my missing suitcase. The same thing had happened to him, he said, when he first arrived. Three days later, the luggage was delivered to his house. He told me not to worry. I felt he thought I was being unnecessarily fretful. I also sensed that material possessions meant little or nothing to him. He didn’t care what kind of suit he wore, or how his office looked. Luggage? That didn’t matter. This mattered. Being out. Talking. He was flipping through the menu – forwards, backwards, forwards again. Even sitting down, he exuded energy and self-assurance. He had an exchange with the waiter, who backed away with an uncertain smile.

  ‘They don’t like it if you make jokes in restaurants,’ Ralph told me. ‘They get confused.’ He shook his head. ‘Sometimes I really hate the Chinese – all one point seven billion of them.’ Grinning, he reached for his beer.

  We drank fast and chain-smoked cigarettes called Shanghai Gold. Our conversation jumped from subject to subject, often halfway through a sentence. I had so many questions for Ralph, but at the same time I was content simply to be with him, having lunch. In retrospect, I was glad he had asked me not to record him. Truman Capote once said that a tape recorder destroys any naturalness that might exist between what he referred to as ‘the nervous humming-bird and its would-be captor’, and this naturalness, I felt, was the very state that we were trying to recapture or achieve.

  The food began to arrive – a tureen of sour hot soup, and crab-meat tofu in a terracotta bowl. I asked Ralph about the eggs, which were a peculiar bruised blue-green.

  ‘Pidan doufu,’ he said. ‘Hundred-year-old eggs. They’re not a hundred years old, of course.’ He selected one with his chopsticks and ate it, then made a face. ‘Horrible.’

  Now I was grinning. ‘Good colour, though.’

  ‘I only got them for the colour. You don’t have to eat them.’

  Somet
hing hallucinogenic was happening: whenever I took my eyes off Ralph, I found that I couldn’t remember what he looked like, and even if I stared at him, his face would alter, reverting to how it had been when he was nine or ten, a time when I had known him well, or else, and more disturbingly, transforming itself into the face of a friend of mine from New Zealand whom Ralph now happened to resemble. I tried to home in on certain specific features – the creases on his forehead, the deep-set eyes, the humorous mouth – but my brain seemed reluctant to retain or even to process the updated image.

  He gave me another of his rapid sidelong glances. ‘This is all right. This is fine.’ He nodded. ‘Well done.’

  I smiled. He was using one of Dad’s catchphrases.

  ‘Really,’ Ralph said. ‘I’m glad you came. I’m glad you got in touch. I’m not sure I ever would have.’

  We raised our glasses and drank. He would take me for a stroll that evening, he said, signalling for more beer. In a recent e-mail, I had mentioned a liking for dilapidation, and he had discovered an area he thought might interest me.

  ‘I have some questions about 1984,’ I said. ‘Quite a lot of questions, actually. I don’t want to start just yet, though. Maybe tonight.’

  ‘You can ask me anything you like,’ he said, ‘but I warn you: I’ll be brutally frank.’

  ‘Good. There’s no point otherwise.’

  He told me he had put some thoughts down on paper only weeks after leaving the house, when everything was still fresh in his memory. He said that what he’d written was really vicious. I nodded. The past was so long ago that we seemed to be talking about entirely different people, and I thought this sense of disconnection would make it difficult for either of us to take offence at anything that might be said.

  At six o’clock that evening I found myself in another taxi, racing up a slip road on to the elevated highway that roller-coastered across the city, east to west. The concrete walls enclosing us glowed with a supernatural lime-green light. As we joined the flow of traffic, tall buildings massed on either side, one topped with steel horns, another with a crown, a third with what looked like a monumental steering wheel. They, too, were doused in exotic shades of neon – acid yellow, turquoise, damson – and many of the façades doubled as screens that showed commercials. The excitement I felt reminded me of trips to New York when I was in my early twenties, my eyes pinned wide, my heart fizzing, threatening to vaporize.

  When I arrived in Ralph’s office for the second time that day, he had already changed into what he called ‘plain clothes’ – a dark, chunky roll-neck sweater, black trousers, and black shoes. He muttered to himself as he lunged and darted round the office. ‘What do I need? Keys, money, lighter … Cigarettes! Where are my cigarettes?’ As at lunchtime, I was struck by his unusual vitality: it was almost visible, like shock waves, or an aura. I watched him pull on a long black raincoat that was cut like an Australian duster, then we left the bank by a side door and took the lift down to street level.

  Our taxi driver, who was young, with wispy hair and nicotine-stained teeth, kept looking round at us as he drove. He and Ralph were having a detailed discussion about the route.

  At last, Ralph leaned back. ‘They find it difficult if you don’t give them a proper destination,’ he said. ‘Where we’re going, it’s just a certain point on a road – there’s no address – and he can’t get his head around it.’

  We were in the shadow of a flyover whose stanchions were so tall that the road above us seemed to totter, like somebody on stilts. If I looked behind me, Ralph said, I would see the Yangpu bridge – ‘the big bridge’, as the Chinese called it – but when I turned in the seat the window was steamed up.

  ‘It smells in here,’ I said. ‘Of feet.’

  Ralph nodded. ‘Taxi drivers often sleep in their cars.’

  To our right, and ghostly in the gloom, were dozens of blocks of flats, none less than twenty storeys high. They looked anonymous, forbidding, and fertile, somehow, as if they might be capable of self-replicating.

  Ralph gestured at our driver. ‘Do you want to ask him something?’

  ‘Has he got a girlfriend?’

  Ralph put the question for me, and the driver replied.

  ‘He’s got a wife,’ Ralph said.

  ‘Is she beautiful?’ I asked.

  The answer came back.

  ‘She’s average,’ Ralph said.

  We both laughed.

  ‘You see, I like that,’ Ralph said. ‘The Chinese are so matter-of-fact. They see things exactly as they are.’

  The taxi stopped, and I got out. The road, which was wide and straight, seemed to disappear into nothingness. Out there somewhere was Changxing Island and the East China Sea. A dense mist closed around the street lamps, stifling the light they gave off. There were no houses, and no cars. Very seldom in my life had I felt so far away from everything.

  We crossed a rough grass verge, then climbed through a gap in a low wall. I found myself standing on a muddy, unpaved track. The rain was holding off; the damp air swirled. Up ahead, I could make out the dim outlines of buildings. Were they still under construction, or already derelict? I couldn’t tell. Shadowy figures moved through unfurnished rooms, a woman’s lowered forehead coaxed into existence by a kerosene lamp, a man’s hand floating in a pool of light. Windows with no glass in them. Doorways, but no doors. Off to the right, a Buddhist temple stood on its own in the shattered landscape, surprisingly whole and perfect, like the sole survivor of a heavy bombing-raid. I felt we had wandered into a war zone.

  We turned left into a paved alley. It was suppertime, and most people were busy cooking. Noodles whirled in dented vats. Clouds of steam poured from under slack tarpaulins. All the smells were water-related: boiled vegetables, damp washing, mould. Ralph said the inhabitants were from the Anhui province, which was north-west of Shanghai, in central China. They had come to the city to work on the building sites.

  Further up the alley, we bought bottles of beer and played pool beneath a slanting sheet of corrugated plastic. Hurricane lamps hung from rusty hooks above our heads, and fifteen or twenty scruffy-looking men watched intently from the shadows, their arms folded. The surface of the table was so warped that if you hit a ball too softly it would curve away from the pocket. Everything was moist; my cue kept sticking to the web of skin between my thumb and my forefinger. Sometimes we had to straddle puddles to play our shots. There was a strong smell of urine. In China, Ralph told me, you could piss anywhere you liked.

  ‘I’m playing pool outside,’ I said, ‘in December –’

  ‘In Shanghai,’ Ralph said.

  But I had been about to say, With you.

  After he had beaten me two games to one, we moved on up the street, taking our beers with us.

  Ten minutes later, we came out on to a main road. Broken kerbstones, a shop selling exhaust pipes and electric fans. Street lights like a row of dirty yellow peonies.

  ‘Ask me a question,’ Ralph said.

  ‘All right. It’s big, though.’

  He nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘What was I like?’

  ‘What were you like?’ He stared straight ahead, into the mist. ‘That’s a good one.’

  We took a right turn along a desolate canal.

  ‘You were wearing black probably,’ he said, ‘when you arrived. In those days you always wore black.’ He paused. ‘You were very close to Robin. You seemed obsessed with him.’

  ‘Obsessed?’

  ‘There was this whole thing of sleeping together – in Goat’s bed.’

  I couldn’t help grinning. I had forgotten that we used to call Dad ‘Goat’. Obviously Ralph and Vivian still did.

  ‘I don’t know who slept in that room first,’ Ralph went on.

  ‘Robin did.’

  ‘But you chose to sleep in the same bed …’

  ‘I suppose it was the only bed that was made up when I arrived.’

  Ralph gave me a look I couldn’t interpret.

&n
bsp; ‘How long did I sleep in Dad’s room anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘About a month.’

  ‘I thought it was only until after the funeral.’

  Ralph shrugged. ‘That’s what I remember.’

  The canal lay to my left, smooth and grey as sheet metal, the far bank fringed with coarse pale yellow grasses. To our right stood a row of concrete houses. Fluorescent strip lights filled each interior with a bleak white glare. In rooms that looked over-exposed, people were preparing food, mending clothes. Playing mah-jongg.

  ‘We thought you were having a sexual relationship,’ Ralph said.

  I stared at him.

  ‘We didn’t judge,’ he said. ‘You know, we thought, Well, if that’s what’s going on, that’s cool.’

  ‘You thought we were having sex?’

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at me. ‘Weren’t you?’

  ‘No.’ My voice bounced off the flat surface of the canal. I had spoken more loudly than I’d meant to.

  ‘You were always together,’ Ralph went on. ‘Robin was the more dominant one – no, that’s putting it too strongly …’

  ‘So was I – I don’t know – submissive?’

  ‘Not exactly. You just wanted to be with him all the time.’ Ralph stared at the ground. ‘You were infatuated.’

  We had reached a junction. On the roof of a nearby lean-to was a crooked stovepipe, and orange sparks seemed flung, crackling, into the misty air. Two women stood in a doorway below, their backs to us, tending to a wood fire. Like everybody else, they were hard at work on their evening meal.

  Startled by Ralph’s answer to my first question, and unsure where to go with it, I jumped straight to the next one. What had been the cause of our original estrangement in 1980? Had I said or done something, or was it Tina?