My Favourite Wife (23 page)

The accident must have happened just a few minutes ago, because there was no sign of the Public Security Bureau. Some of the crowd stirred into motion. While the men stood and watched, the women began stepping into the road and gathering up the fruit, working quickly, anxious to do their looting before the cops came. But there was such an abundance of fruit that for all they gathered up, they crushed even more underfoot.

Bill was sitting in the passenger seat, with Nancy Deng and Mad Mitch in the back. He turned to the driver impatiently. The man was staring blankly at the scene of fruity destruction. Bill missed Tiger.

‘Is there another road, another way?’ he said, and Nancy leaned forward, translating into Cantonese.

Mad Mitch placed a reassuring hand on Bill’s shoulder. ‘Slow
down, Bill,’ the firm’s oldest associate lawyer advised him. ‘We’ll get there soon enough.’

Bill narrowed his eyes. Mitch shouldn’t even be here. Shane should be fronting this trip. But Shane, still in a lot of pain, would not be flying to Shenzhen for a trip to the Happy Trousers Trading Company. So Mitch was here in his place, although Bill had seniority.

‘Can’t slow down, Mitch,’ Bill said lightly. I might end up like you, he thought. I might end up like my father.

Then the PSB were suddenly on the scene, shooing the looters away and clearing a path for all the cars containing important foreigners on their way to do business in the free-trade zone.

Bill stared out at the blank faces of the looters, and at the fruit that still covered the road but was now reduced to a vivid pulp of red and gold, the colours of China.

The car began to move.

An ethical audit. That’s what they called it. That’s what they were there for.

One of the firm’s clients had asked for an ethical audit of the Happy Trousers Trading Company, a moral accounting to weigh up the pros and cons of making cheap clothes for the West using factory workers wearing rags.

‘It’s an industrial revolution,’ Devlin had told them, looking pained. ‘And unfortunately you don’t get too many paid vacations and tea breaks during an industrial revolution.’

So Nancy took notes as a podgy manager with a white nylon shirt and a paralysed grin gave them a guided tour of the factory.

They peered into a dead-aired dormitory where workers were sleeping twelve wooden boxes to a room, piled high in four triple-tier bunks. The sudden light produced snake-like stirring of lethargic flesh, and it made Bill shiver. He thought of slave ships, he thought of concentration camps. He looked at Nancy’s
face. It revealed nothing. They closed the door and moved on.

It’s like something from another century, Bill thought, and tried to steel himself. He supposed he was going to have to get used to this kind of thing. Foreign companies who were under pressure from consumers in their own country to ensure that their factories were not breaching Chinese law, International Labour Organisation rules, and human decency were often requesting ethical audits now.

They saw the cold-water taps where the workers washed, displayed with grotesque pride by the grinning factory manager. They saw the gruel that the workers queued for in a stinking canteen. They saw the dull-eyed stare of men and women who had just pulled two shifts back-to-back. And Bill saw with a sinking feeling that the glittering malls of the Bund and the shining towers of Pudong and the whole PRC gold rush were built on these things.

But Bill also saw the girls in the canteen sharing a joke. He saw small pictures of well-scrubbed children pinned to the walls of the fetid, overcrowded dorms. And as the afternoon shift poured through the gates, he watched a boy and girl worker pair off and stand together by the factory wall, their hands entwined. And he thought that perhaps Devlin was right.

Although the factory conditions were like something from the nineteenth century he wondered if these workers would really have been better off staying in the villages. He just didn’t know. He had no certainty left in him. And he could almost hear Devlin telling him that fifty years ago millions of them were starving thanks to the Great Leap Forward, and that now they were happy to have a full belly and a job to go to.

Bill wanted to believe him.

The manager grinned confidently at the lawyers from Shanghai. The man had done many ethical audits before, and in broken English he demonstrated that he knew his lines perfectly. He knew how to salve their troubled minds, Bill thought, he knew how to
settle their weak Western stomachs. Bill suspected that these visits changed nothing much apart from the factory manager’s ability to more fluently mouth any assurances the big-nosed pinkies wanted to hear. But without these visits it could have been even worse. Who knew?

They entered a room where hundreds of young women sat hunched behind weaving machines, their ponytailed heads half-hidden behind enormous reels of yellow cotton. The women looked grubby, badly fed, used up. Their hair, their teeth, their skin – it all looked worn out, although most of them were not out of their teens.

They were not like JinJin Li. They did not have the look. Not the look of the girls in Paradise Mansions, the look of the women in Shanghai. They had the other kind of look, the look that Chinese women more frequently had – the look of women who had grown old before they were ever really young. The look, Bill thought, of a piece of fruit with all the juice sucked out. The din their machines made was deafening, like being inside a giant dustbin that had been thrown from a cliff. Mad Mitch said something and Bill shook his head. Conversation was impossible. Even stringing two thoughts together was difficult in the midst of that noise.

Then they were in a room full of young men. Everybody was so young. Bill wondered – where were all the old people? Where were the towns and the villages and the farms that these young men had left behind? And what did they look like with all the young people gone?

The noise was even louder in here, if that was possible. Gigantic presses slammed down on pieces of moulded rubber as they made their steady journey down the assembly line.

Young men sorted and shifted trainers as they passed by, their eyes cast down, fussing over the world-famous brand name, lavishing them with their unbroken attention. There was a smell of burning rubber in the air. There was no talking or eye contact. There was just the endless rumble of the assembly line, and the
slamming of the presses, which came down with a whoosh of compressed air, like some giant door being slammed shut in hell.

And then, piercing all the industrial clamour, there was the scream.

At first it did not seem human. At first it sounded as though it was a piece of malfunctioning machinery. High-pitched, whining, like metal grinding against metal. But then the assembly line ground to a halt, and all eyes were looking to the far side of the room where a young man was clutching his arm just above the elbow, his face deathly white and eyes wide with disbelief and dread.

He was being supported by two of his friends. They were both babbling – offering explanations, calling for help, Bill couldn’t tell. One of them was crying. He looked up and saw that Nancy was already on her phone, calling an ambulance.

The injured man was eased to the floor and laid on his side. He was still clutching his arm. Below the elbow it was a mangled pulp of flesh and bone. The factory manager knelt by the man’s side and a thick scrum of workers gathered around to offer advice and opinions but mostly just to watch. Then the paramedics were there and the man was taken away on a gurney. There was nothing else to see. Orders were given, and the assembly line jolted back to life. Bill saw that a woman was cleaning the press where the man had worked.

The factory manager escorted them to their car. His smile didn’t falter as he assured them that working practices were even now being reviewed to ensure that such an accident could never happen again. And Bill just wanted to be gone.

This was a cruel, hard, grubby place and he could not stand the thought that he was a part of it. They were driven back to the hotel and Bill stood under the lukewarm shower for a long while. By the time Mad Mitch met him in the bar a few hours later he was halfway to drunk.

‘He lost his arm,’ Bill said. ‘That boy in the factory. Nancy called the hospital. They had to amputate his arm.’

Mitch nodded. ‘She told me.’ There was a small forest of green Tsingtao bottles in front of Bill. Mitch sat on the stool next to him and signalled for two more.

‘All for a pair of trainers,’ Bill said. ‘All for some cheap clobber to flog to the West.’

Mitch shook his head. ‘There’s no such thing as cheap clothes,’ he said. ‘The real price isn’t paid by the people who buy the stuff, it’s paid by the people who make it.’ He took a sip of his beer. ‘But we’re not here for them, are we? We’re here for our clients.’

Bill looked at him with despair. ‘Then what do we tell the client?’

‘Tell them what we saw,’ Mad Mitch said. ‘Tell them exactly what we saw. Tell them the Happy Trousers Factory resembles a nineteenth-century workhouse. Tell them that you would need to be Charles Dickens to do the place justice.’

‘And what will that change?’

‘Bugger all,’ said Mad Mitch. ‘The client likes the profit margins he gets out here. And his customers like rock-bottom prices. The West wants it both ways. Dirt-cheap products and a clean conscience. Nobody is going to stop doing business here. Why should they? We are not going to stop doing business here, are we?’

‘But I don’t see why that means the locals have to be on two dollars a day,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t see why that means some kid has to lose an arm.’ He drained his beer. ‘Can’t we do something?’

‘Like what?’ Mitch said. He hadn’t touched his drink.

‘You saw them in there,’ Bill said. ‘Peasants straight off the farm working fourteen hours a day. Doing double and triple shifts till they drop. Getting £50 a month with one day off. And that factory manager only gives a toss when he wants to keep our clients off his back. What can we do? Do him for a start.’

‘Perhaps the West can’t have it both ways,’ Mad Mitch said. ‘Perhaps you can’t have dirt-cheap trainers and Chinese factories where the workers get treated like human beings. And perhaps our client only cares when he wants to keep the press off his back.

Look – if the client gets too much bad publicity here, what do you think is going to happen? They’ll just ship the factory to Vietnam. Or India.’

‘But there are rules about working practices,’ Bill said. ‘There are regulations about safety. Every day of the year that place breaches International Labour Organisation rules, not to mention Chinese law. The boy who lost an arm should sue.’ Bill nearly fell off his stool and steadied himself with a smile. ‘Know any good lawyers, Mitch?’

The older man sipped his Tsingtao carefully.

‘We’re lawyers in a country with no rule of law,’ Mad Mitch said. ‘Where we come from, the courts are independent and have authority over all. Judges protect the freedoms of individuals against the state. Here it’s just not like that. The PRC operates a Communist legal system. Nobody with any kind of power – financial, political or military – considers themselves bound by any court rulings they don’t like. Where the rule of law doesn’t apply, legal solutions are always going to be imperfect. That boy who lost an arm wouldn’t stand a chance.’

Bill shook his head. ‘Can I ask you something, Mitch?’ he said.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Why did you never make partner? What happened there?’ Bill laughed, trying to keep it light. ‘You slow down once too often?’

Mitch laughed along with him. ‘Up at the firm they say that I lacked the stamina for Hong Kong and the stomach for Shanghai. And I think that’s probably a fair and reasonable assessment. But also, practising law is a service industry and I never really understood that. I thought it was about truth, justice, decency and all that old-fashioned stuff.’ He raised his glass in a toast. ‘And I was wrong.’

Nancy arrived in the bar and Bill carefully climbed off his bar stool. He knew it was going to take a supreme effort to avoid falling on his face.

‘You coming in to dinner?’ he asked Mitch.

Mitch shook his head, grimacing, and looked at the younger man with wonder.

‘You can still eat?’ Mitch said. ‘After what we saw today?’

Bill nodded, surprised, and Mad Mitch gently patted his arm.

‘Don’t worry, Bill,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt about you making partner.’

The hotel’s restaurant was empty apart from a group of drunken Russians eating their sweet-and-sour pork with knives and forks. Bill and Nancy turned around and were about to leave when he noticed the only other diner was Alice Greene. Bill went over to her table and she raised her chopsticks in salute.

‘Butterfield, Hunt and West doing business in Shenzhen, the sweatshop of the world,’ she said. ‘Who would have thought it?’

Bill laughed. ‘A hack chasing an ambulance,’ he said. ‘What are the odds of that? And isn’t it the
workshop
of the world? What did you do? Fly down from Pudong this morning? I didn’t see you on the flight.’

‘I got the train from Hong Kong,’ Alice said. ‘I’ve been touching base with my paper. They sent me over when we heard about the accident. Any comment on the man who lost his arm?’

‘It’s obviously a tragic accident,’ Bill said, aware that anything he said could be used against him. He thought of the deep-frozen grin on the manager’s face, and how it had never faltered. ‘The factory have already launched an investigation.’

Alice nodded with approval. ‘You’re getting very good, Bill.’ She carried on tucking into her honey-roast pork. ‘Any comment from your clients?’

He had given her enough. ‘I haven’t had the chance to speak to our clients,’ he said. ‘I’m sure they’ll be devastated.’

The journalist looked unconvinced. ‘Well, I don’t know if they’ll be exactly
devastated
, Bill. A dozen workers a day lose a limb in
the factories of Shenzhen. A dozen a day! And they’re ten times more likely to die than their counterparts in Europe.’

It’s so easy, he thought with a flash of anger. It’s so easy when you are that certain. ‘Would you like it better if they were all unemployed?’ he said.