This Party's Got to Stop

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Did you ever take things from the house?’ I asked. ‘Dad thought you were taking things.’

  ‘I don’t remember taking anything.’ Ralph looked straight at me. ‘There wasn’t much to take, was there?’

  Our last encounter was on Friday evening. We had agreed that Ralph should meet me at my hotel at half past six. By ten to seven, though, he still hadn’t shown up. When I opened the door of my room and peered out, he was standing by the lift in his long black raincoat, a mobile pressed to his left ear. He had forgotten my room number, he said, and was just calling reception. I told him to come in, but he held up his hands, palms facing outwards.

  ‘It’s your room,’ he said. ‘Private.’

  ‘It’s a hotel room,’ I said. ‘And anyway, I’m not like you. It doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘All right.’

  Once through the door, his head twisted on his neck, his eyes darting this way and that, his nose seeming to ferret at the air. He wore the same clothes he had worn on Monday night, and when he came and stood next to me, bending over a detailed map of Shanghai so as to point out the location of the village we had visited, he gave off a musty, almost feral smell. I was struck by how perfectly it went with his behaviour.

  Ten minutes later, we were hailing a taxi outside my hotel. Ralph told the driver we were looking for a restaurant that served duck. The driver said he knew of one nearby. As we edged eastwards on Huaihai Lu, with its delicate arches of white neon and its crowds of window-shoppers, a black car drew alongside us. A well-groomed Chinese woman sat behind the wheel. When she glanced in our direction, Ralph waved at her. I expected her to ignore him, but she smiled and waved back.

  ‘You like strangers, don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘Those moments with people you don’t know,’ he said, his head against the headrest, his voice subdued, almost dreamy, ‘those chance connections, they can lift your heart a little …’

  In the Shanghai Daily News that morning, I had read an article about otaku, a Japanese term that referred to people who lived their lives at one remove, online. A junior lecturer at Shanghai University was reported as saying that the ‘smell of crowds’ gave him a headache. ‘When I see strangers,’ he went on, ‘I try to treat them as part of the neutral architecture.’ Ralph was the opposite. He wanted continual interaction, even if it was fleeting. Especially if it was fleeting. Walk down every alley, he had told me on Monday. Look in every doorway. They don’t mind.

  The restaurant our taxi driver had recommended was huge and bustling, and we were seated on a kind of dais, next to a window that ran the entire length of the room. From our table, we could look down into Huaihai Lu, the splashes of mauve and crimson neon making the street seem painted.

  ‘I’m sorry to go on about it,’ I said when our drinks had arrived, ‘but I still don’t understand what happened – why we lost touch so completely.’

  I reminded him of what he had said when we last spoke, in 1987. Don’t phone me again. If you want to contact me, do it in writing.

  ‘You took me very literally,’ Ralph said quietly.

  ‘What did you expect?’ I said.

  Ralph lit a cigarette. His face had taken on a strange, blurred expression, as if a long estrangement wasn’t something he had ever intended or envisaged, and not before time, perhaps, I saw my own part in it quite clearly. I had always assumed that it was Ralph who had severed ties with the family. Was I really all that different, though? I had felt so put upon, so commandeered, that I had needed, once I had the chance, to get away – as far away as possible. All those places I had lived in: Athens, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sydney, Amsterdam, Rome … The list went on and on. That couldn’t just be curiosity, could it? I remembered watching Ralph and his wife and daughter from Dad’s bedroom window on that perfect summer’s day in 1984 and thinking how fragile they looked – but a family could be predatory too. Families are the beginning of destruction, as the Chinese poet, Gu Cheng, put it – and then there was Sonya’s telling use of the word ‘separated’ … I was still pondering the degree to which I had cut myself off from the family when Ralph spoke again, and it was immediately apparent that he had been following a different line of thought entirely.

  ‘What’s the worst thing you ever said?’ he asked.

  I talked about having lied to Dad when I last saw him. Ralph agreed that this was pretty unforgivable, then asked if I remembered the piece of hardboard Dad used to lean on when he was writing or drawing. I said I did. Once, he had been cheeky to Dad, he said, and when Dad made as though to swipe him with the hardboard he’d told Dad not to be so pathetic.

  ‘I called him pathetic,’ Ralph said.

  I winced. ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He didn’t do anything. He just sort of stared off into the top corner of the room.’

  ‘I know that look.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said it. It was cruel.’ Ralph dragged on his cigarette, then looked down into the street.

  ‘I think he did his best,’ I said. ‘I know he loved us. It can’t have been easy.’

  I told Ralph something Beth had told me when I saw her last. On the day of our mother’s funeral, Beth had come across Dad and Ralph in what was then the dining-room. Ralph was standing on a chair, and Dad was beside him with his arm round Ralph’s shoulders, and the two of them were staring at the wreaths laid out on the drive.

  ‘It was still gravel then, wasn’t it?’ Ralph said.

  I nodded, watching him.

  He put out his cigarette. ‘If I could bring one person back, it would be her.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  Later, as we crossed Suzhou Creek, our taxi heading for a run-down area near the north end of the Yangpu bridge, I decided not to ask any more questions. From now on, we were just two brothers, out for the night.

  We pulled up outside the Live Bar, which was where Ralph had played trumpet when he first moved to Shanghai, and which was hosting what it called a ‘winter punkers’ Assembly!’. Once a warehouse, the club had a stark industrial atmosphere, with a concrete floor and plenty of metallic surfaces. It was so cold that I kept my coat on. We watched as four girls in stylish black outfits took the stage and made as much noise as they could. When I turned and grinned at Ralph, he mouthed the words, Aren’t they sweet? We drank two beers, then went to a karaoke bar further down the street. ‘It looks like there’s nothing here, doesn’t it?’ he said as I followed him up a steep flight of wooden stairs between two buildings. He led me into a brown room. Green plastic foliage coiled on the ceiling. There was a small TV on the bar, and a larger one fixed high up in the corner. It was even colder than the last place. We were the only foreigners.

  ‘They want me to sing,’ Ralph said when he returned with our drinks.

  The woman who ran the bar handed him a cordless mike. He moved towards the smaller of the two TVs and began to sing in Chinese. His voice was young and clear, and so unforced that it sounded almost casual. Since he was facing away from me, I could only see his long black coat, the back of his head, and the lit cigarette in his left hand, but once, halfway through the first song, he turned and gestured in my direction, and even though I couldn’t understand the words, I felt nothing but good coming from him.

  If he could bring one person back, he had said, it would be our mother. And I had agreed. Because that, I realized, was what I had been trying to do. I had been visiting people who used to know her. Asking questions. Filling in the empty spaces. And I had glimpses of her now, the woman who danced around the room with no clothes on when my father asked her to marry him, the woman who hugged me tight against her in the cold, the woman who was so enthusiastic, and so cheerful, and so afraid of growing old. My darling. All my life I had been haunted by her absence. Haunted by her failure to return. Her shadow lay across me like a fall of snow. But now I had learned enough, perhaps, to free myself from that exquisite, paralysing chill, that weight. Now, at last, I could bury her.

  When Ralph had
sung two numbers, he gave the microphone back and sat down. The bar filled with loud applause.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘That was brilliant. Were you reading the Chinese?’

  ‘Only for the second song.’ The first – ‘Moonlight Represents My Heart’ – was a song that everybody in China knew, he said, and one that he’d been taught when he arrived.

  A group of Chinese men strolled in and rearranged tables and chairs in such a way that they occupied the centre of the room. The ringleader had a face that shone, as if it had been greased, and his neck was thick, like a wrestler’s. He wore an iridescent emerald-green shell-suit top with the word brazil emblazoned across the shoulder blades in yellow.

  I leaned close to Ralph. ‘I don’t like the look of them.’

  ‘They’re probably gangsters,’ he said.

  The man in the green top raised his glass to us, then drained it. Ralph did the same.

  ‘You’d better drink as well,’ he muttered. ‘You have to empty your glass, or it’s an insult.’

  I finished my beer.

  Later, a thin, stooping gangster picked up the mike and began to sing. His suit was the drab grey of the fluff that collects in tumble dryers.

  ‘He’s dreadful,’ I whispered.

  Ralph thought it might be best to go. If they asked us to join them, we wouldn’t be able to say no, and then we’d never get away. As we left the bar we shook hands with the man in the green jacket, and he gave us a broad smile whose meaning I couldn’t gauge.

  Out on the pavement again, Ralph suggested a foot massage. We walked back along the street and pushed through a plate-glass door. Inside, two women were watching car crashes on TV. Betty was tall and mannish, with long black hair and tight-fitting dark blue jeans. Janet had a dumpier physique. She wore a denim miniskirt and a pale blue synthetic top with a scoop neck, and her hair, which was short and frizzy, was dyed a strange brown colour, like burnt sugar. Against the left-hand wall stood a row of lumpy armchairs, each one covered with a large bright orange towel. In front of the chairs were buckets lined with blue plastic bags.

  Ralph studied the price list on the wall. ‘There’s a whole range of services on offer.’

  ‘You said feet.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s twenty yuan.’

  I sat down next to Ralph, and Janet settled on a low stool in front of me. She took off my shoes and socks, then rolled up my trouser-legs and lifted both my feet into the plastic bucket, which she had filled with warm water. When she had washed and dried my feet, she rested them on her knees and began to massage them, starting with the toes. Her fingers were strong, seeming to reach between the bones.

  After a while, she said something that made Ralph laugh.

  ‘She doesn’t believe we’re brothers,’ he told me.

  I asked why not.

  ‘Because my legs are white and yours are yellow.’

  Janet leaned forwards, her breasts touching my shins. She looked into my face, then spoke to Ralph. ‘She says you have beautiful eyes,’ he said, translating. ‘They’re blue.’

  ‘They’re not blue,’ I said. ‘They’re more sort of grey-green – like that cushion over there.’

  Now I leaned forwards, which made Janet giggle. ‘She has beautiful eyes as well,’ I said. ‘They’re brown.’

  Ralph translated.

  ‘She says they’re black,’ he said.

  Janet spoke again.

  ‘She wants to shag you.’ Ralph tilted his head in the rough direction of a flimsy chipboard partition. ‘There’s probably a little room in the back.’ He was grinning again. ‘She says it wouldn’t take long.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ I said.

  Ralph explained to Janet that I was expected somewhere else. As she listened to him, she pushed her hands up past my knees, her fingers gripping the muscles in my lower thighs.

  On TV the car crashes had become more extreme. Now they were showing footage of a pile-up on a motorway.

  ‘Not very relaxing,’ Ralph said.

  When Janet spoke again, she kept her eyes on me, their corners narrowing with mischief.

  I turned to Ralph. ‘What’s she saying now?’

  ‘She’s wondering which hotel you’re staying at.’ His massage over, Ralph started pulling on his socks. ‘She doesn’t want you to go. She loves you.’

  ‘You could be making this up for all I know.’

  Still bending down, doing up a shoe, Ralph smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true.’

  When I got to my feet, Janet wrapped her arms around my waist and laid her head sideways against my chest. She suddenly seemed much younger, like an affectionate but slightly wilful child.

  By the time we left the massage parlour, it was half past eleven, and the bands in the Live Bar had finished playing. We set off down a narrow, poorly lit street called Tongbei Lu, in search of a pool table.

  ‘My feet feel better than they did before,’ I told Ralph. ‘More alive, somehow.’

  As I spoke, a pretty girl with an oddly disjointed walk fell into step with us. She asked what we were looking for, then offered to take us to a place she knew. I thought she was trying to be helpful, but Ralph wasn’t convinced. There was usually some kind of scam going on, he said. Probably she had an arrangement with a local bar, and would be paid ten yuan for every Westerner she brought in. He felt we would be wasting our time if we went with her – unless, of course, I wanted to. I shook my head. When Ralph told her we had decided to take a taxi to Pudong, she seemed surprised, though not particularly disappointed. As she moved awkwardly away through the dim ochre light, I had the impression that her body was only being held together by her clothes. She was like a packet of biscuits that had been dropped: it looks whole while the wrapper’s on, but when you open it everything’s in pieces.

  Ralph knew of three bars, which were all on the same stretch of road. In the first, he bought two Coronas. While we were waiting to play pool, a girl in a red satin blouse walked over. She was called Swallow. She told us foreigners were always laughing at her name. We said it was a lovely name. Poetic. I told her about Rome in the autumn, and how, at dusk, the air was full of swallows, and how agile they seemed, and how decisive. But if she didn’t like the foreigners laughing, she might consider changing her name to Raven, I said, on account of her black hair, or even Wren, since she was so petite. On the pool table, a Chinese man in his early twenties was winning game after game. His hair hung in glamorous spikes over his eyes. Ralph had seen him play before and didn’t think we had much chance of beating him.

  After we had both lost, we said goodbye to Swallow and moved on to the next bar. It was closed. The third bar was further down, the scarlet of its neon fuzzy and soft-focus in the fog. We pushed through the door. Low lighting, smoky air. Girls’ faces floating up out of the gloom. I met Pamela, who had wide, almost Mongolian cheekbones and chaotically backcombed hair. She wore a shiny black plastic jacket with pointy lapels and black-and-white hooped leg warmers. Pamela introduced us to Fei Xu, whose hair was long and straight with tawny highlights. She was dressed more conventionally, in a pale-pink T-shirt and jeans.

  Ralph ordered a round of drinks – Corona for us, Malibu for them. I went to the bathroom. Above the urinal, three small muddy paintings hung in an uneven row. Back in the bar, Ralph was talking to a brawny American called Kurt or Dwayne. There’s art in the toilet, I said. What’s it like? Ralph said. Brown, I said. He laughed. No, really, I said. Pamela had rested her head sideways on the bar, her face turned towards us. She said she was sleepy. She needed another Malibu. You haven’t finished the last one yet, Ralph said. He told me that she would probably have been in the bar since about midday.

  We bought more drinks and then played pool, Ralph and Pamela against me and Fei Xu. I lost all sense of time, but it didn’t bother me how late it got. I was with my brother; there was nowhere I would rather be.

  Every once in a while, between rounds, we would order shots of vodka. The girl
s wanted vodka too. We tried to persuade Pamela to have tonic with it – we didn’t want her to get too drunk – but she howled in protest, sounding, for a moment, exactly like a cat.

  At six in the morning, we asked if we could settle up. Our tab came to 615 yuan, or more than £40, and we barely had enough money between us. I hugged Pamela goodbye. She was so tiny that she nearly got lost in the folds of my coat.

  Out on the street, in the cold, Ralph and I stood facing in different directions. His bar was great, I said. It had made me feel like Alice in Wonderland. He grinned. As he began to tell me that he should be going home, his mobile rang. He put it to his ear.

  ‘What are you doing awake?’ he said.

  I knew then that Vivian was on the other end.

  ‘No, it’s been fine,’ he said. ‘It’s been lovely.’

  I had come to China to see Ralph. All the same, it felt strange to have Vivian’s voice so close, and to know that she would have nothing to do with me. Was what had happened in 1984 so terrible that not even twenty-three years were enough to wipe it out? A wave of regret swept through me, and I walked a few paces up the street.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I heard Ralph say. ‘I just need to get some money.’

  Cars surged, one by one, through air that was dense and sluggish. Soon it would be light.

  Turning, I saw Ralph slide his mobile into his pocket.

  ‘Vivian,’ he said.

  We caught a taxi to the nearest ATM machine, and I watched as Ralph ran across an intersection, then hunched over the metal key-pad, punching buttons. These were our last seconds. He climbed back into the taxi and handed me two red 100-yuan notes. ‘You paid for almost everything back there.’ We hugged briefly, then he got out and shut the door. As the taxi pulled away, I turned and peered through the back window. Ralph was walking at the edge of the wide road in his black coat, his face already indistinct, almost featureless, and because the taxi was moving faster than he was, because he was diminishing so rapidly, he appeared to be travelling in the opposite direction, away from me. The feeling that went through me in that moment was so fierce and unalloyed that it took me back to adolescence. Though we had only just parted, I already longed to see him again. Would he be feeling something similar? I doubted it. Probably he would be thinking of getting home – his wife still awake, his daughter stirring …