My Favourite Wife (30 page)

They reached the block of flats where she had grown up. Here, as everywhere else, a cheery red lantern glowed in every window, but when they entered the flats he could see that they were little more than giant matchboxes made from tons of concrete, miserable Soviet-style houses for the unloved masses who toiled in Changchun’s factories in the days when the state still had some use for the masses, in the years when Changchun still had factories working around the clock.

Inside the flats it was filthier than anywhere he had ever seen, and he tried to hide his shock. The grey walls, the stone steps, the dripping ceiling – everything was coated with a black grime from decades of industrial filth puked out by the factories. With a gentle formality that broke his heart, JinJin took his hand and led him up to her family’s home. There was no lift, and he felt ridiculous for expecting one.

Her family were waiting for him. Her mother, plump and happy, a little buck-toothed Buddha in tight leggings with a bottle of Tsingtao in her hand, all smiles. And JinJin’s younger sister, Ling-Yuan – shy and curious, angelically pretty but not long and lean like JinJin, more short and stubby like their mother.

And as they fussed around him, bringing him tea, talking to him confidently in Mandarin – the mother – and bashfully in fragments of English – the sister – Bill sensed how hard it had been for them, for these three women. Ling-Yuan was born just after the one-child policy of 1978, making two daughters and no son and then no hope of a son. How had their father taken that?

Their father had been one of the
xiagang
, the country’s millions of laid-off state workers. Changchun was full of them, and when he had walked out for the last time when JinJin was thirteen, the mother had raised her two girls alone, working at three jobs just to survive, her youngest child often left in the care of her big sister.

In this clean, tiny flat the mother had slept on the sofa, and JinJin shared a bed with Ling-Yuan. Even now, years later, Bill could almost taste the money-starved past.

The mother spoke no English. The sister spoke a little, and she falteringly explained the rituals of Spring Festival to Bill while the mother poured him a Tsingtao. They made him feel at home, and their generosity and grace touched his heart.

Did they know he was a married man? Did they know about Becca and Holly? JinJin did not say, and he did not ask. It was enough that he was here, tonight, helping them to make
jiaozi
dumplings, meat and fish and vegetable, money inserted inside one dumpling for good fortune the way Bill’s mother used to put a fifty-pence piece inside a Christmas pudding.

Then he heard the baby crying.

Ling-Yuan went into the bedroom and came back with a wailing child in her arms, around two years old, Bill guessed, with hair like Elvis in his prime. He was wearing a light blue Babygro covered in dark blue hearts, and that’s how Bill knew that it was a boy, and the family had its son at last. Ling-Yuan rocked him and soothed him, and his tears subsided to a few sniffles. Then, wide-eyed and unsmiling, the baby considered Bill and promptly burst into tears. Everyone laughed, and Ling-Yuan handed the baby to JinJin.

‘ChoCho,’ she said, bouncing him close. ‘Don’t cry, little ChoCho. This big-nosed pinky is a nice man. He likes babies and children very much.’

It was a good night, a wonderful night, with little ChoCho crawling between them as they made their dumplings, and everyone taking turns to hold him and play with him, even Bill, whom he slowly warmed to, despite the strangeness of his appearance.

At midnight the fireworks suddenly erupted and they went to the soot-blackened landing to watch the lights and explosions, all wrapped up against the freezing night, the baby’s head peeking
out of Ling-Yuan’s fake-fur coat, eyes closed and whimpering from the bitter cold. The mother was in an old green army coat that was a few sizes too big for her. JinJin wore a quilted yellow ski jacket, the collar pulled up and the hood pulled down, with only her large brown eyes showing as she held Bill’s hand.

When it became too cold for the baby they went back inside and ate their dumplings and wished each other happy new year. And as the last of the fireworks went off outside it really did feel like a new year to Bill, even though it was the middle of February.

JinJin wanted to escort him back to the Trader’s Hotel but he told her to stay with her family. If she came back to the hotel with him then he would want her to stay and he knew that was impossible.

So he said goodbye to her mother and the kid sister and little ChoCho. JinJin put on her yellow coat and walked him to the landing where he banged his knee hard against a bicycle that had been dumped at the top of the stairs. She made sure he had a card with his hotel’s name in Chinese to show the driver. He unzipped the top of her yellow ski jacket so he could slip his arms inside as he kissed her goodnight. Their bodies trembled against each other. The last of the fireworks were exploding.

‘It’s cold,’ he said. ‘Go back inside. I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Okay, William,’ she said, lifting her eyes to him.

She kissed him for a long moment and then she let him go and he walked down to the street, trying not to fall and break his neck in the pitch-black stairwell, attempting to avoid the soiled walls and the prehistoric bicycles that were parked on every floor.

Bill stood in the shadow of the concrete blocks, his breath billowing clouds of mist in the night, and on the wide road there were no cabs to be had. He looked up at the landing where JinJin’s coat was a smudge of bright yellow in the darkness. She waved and he waved back. He wished she would go inside. The square black blocks of flats stretched off in every direction, as far as he could see.

He had never been around such poverty. He had never known it existed. But in every window of every flat of those ugly concrete blocks a red lantern was shining for Spring Festival, and the birth of another lunar year.

The moon was behind the clouds as he started walking in the direction of downtown, and as he looked up at the countless flats with all those unknowable lives he could see none of the grime and the poverty and the concrete.

All Bill could see were the pretty red lights.

He fell asleep in his hotel bed thinking about the baby.

There was a dark line on her hard flat belly and it ran from her navel to the sparse tuft of pubic hair. It had been another tale of mystery on her body – like the toes, like the black-rimmed eyes, like the scars on her knees from a childhood of climbing walls and falling off walls and making her own entertainment – but the dark line on her belly was the one puzzle that he did not want to solve, because he already knew what it meant.

The line meant that she had been pregnant.

The vertical line on her belly was not like the stunted small toes or the scars on her knees – he did not want to know where it came from; he was not interested, because whatever the answer was he knew it would hurt.

He had thought it meant a terminated pregnancy. After tonight, it seemed he had been wrong. He had taken it for granted that the child he knew she had carried had never been born. The father would have been some boy in Changchun, or the man in Shanghai, or someone else, some unimaginable other man, and he did not want to know. It did not matter.

This was a country where abortion was freely and casually available. What had Dr Khan said? It was easier than having a tooth out.

How wrong he had been. The baby explained why she’d had to give up work as a teacher. She had an entire family to support- mother,
sister, and child – and bills that could never be met on what they paid a teacher in Number 251 Middle School. The line on her belly said it all – why she’d left the schoolchildren she loved, and why she lived in Paradise Mansions, and why she had to be practical.

He knew about the line. He even knew what the line was called – linea alba, white line, when you could not see it, and linea nigra, dark line, when you could.

He had seen that line before, in another bed, in another time, on another woman.

He had seen that dark line on the hard snow-white belly of his wife, and in close-up as he had gently brushed his lips across skin pulled as tight as a drum, his head reeling at the wonder of it all.

JinJin met him at the hotel with a pair of cashmere long johns. Her mother was worried about how he would deal with the cold. They walked through the empty streets and just before they came to the park she stopped, and held him, and told him about the married man who had fathered her child.

He had guessed a childhood sweetheart, a poor boyfriend her own age, and he had been wrong about that too. She told Bill how she had loved the man with all her heart, and how her mother had turned up at the bank where the man worked, screaming that he was abusing her daughter. The relationship ended, and the man never did leave his wife. But she kept the baby.

Bay-bee
, was how she pronounced it, and it held his heart. ‘I always knew I would keep my baby.’

In the early days in Paradise Mansions, when she was still the girl who was picked up by the man in the silver Porsche, he had asked himself – is a woman like that capable of love?

But it wasn’t what he thought, what the world thought. What the men who had beaten him and Shane would have thought. It was not sex for money, it was never sex for money.

It was sex for survival, perhaps, and a relationship with a man because there were mouths to feed. It was practical. She came from a place with no expectations and no hope. She was practical because there was no other way.

They had reached the park. There were food stalls just inside the gate. JinJin bought something that looked like a toffee apple on a stick.

Inside the park there was a frozen lake where people were skidding around on wooden boxes, steering themselves with what looked like a pair of sawn-off skis. It was like the roller-skating rink in Shanghai, one of those antique entertainments that had somehow survived into the new century.

They rented a couple of ragged old boxes and set off, and when he looked over his shoulder at JinJin, he fell in love with her, he fell in love with her at exactly that moment in Changchun. He saw her yellow coat against the frozen whiteness all around, her laughing face, her huge brown eyes shining, and he could do nothing but fall in love. He kept looking over his shoulder at her, committing it all to memory, because he had to set it down perfectly, exactly as it was, so that he could remember it in the time to come when he thought about all the things that had made his life worth living.

‘Watch where you’re going, William!’

He turned just in time to avoid a head-on collision with a pair of teenage boys. He swerved and skidded off the rink on to the rock-hard grass, and felt JinJin clatter into the back of him, her laugh turning to a gasp of pain as one of Bill’s sawn-off skis pierced the back of her hand.

Mortified, he pulled off her glove and placed his mouth over the bead of red. He felt the salt taste of her blood on his lips. She was still smiling, telling him it was nothing, and he could not imagine a day when she would ever be out of his life. He loved her, you see.

They returned to the hotel and when JinJin had gone home, Bill turned on his phone.

You have twelve missed calls
…

He had been expecting the call – the sudden collapse of health, the rush to the hospital, the doctor’s verdict. But it was not Becca’s father who was dying.

It was his own.

He listened to the messages, and then he listened to them again, and it took him some long, confused minutes to accept the reality. The old man’s lungs. There was something terribly wrong with the old man’s lungs, and it looked like it had been wrong for a long time. And Becca had been calling him – while he was with JinJin. Becca had been looking after his family and trying to reach him all that time, all the time that he dared not turn on his phone because if he did he would have to lie.

He packed his bags and called JinJin on the way to the airport, so she didn’t have the chance to accompany him back to Shanghai. He didn’t want to spoil her Spring Festival. Because he was starting to believe that he spoiled everything for anyone who ever came anywhere near him.

And in the cab to the airport he listened to the messages yet again. The tone of his wife’s voice made something inside him shatter. Her voice was patient, exasperated, choked up with feeling – the voice of a woman who knew him too well, and loved him far, far more than he deserved.

Fly out of Asia into Europe and time runs backwards. You erase the present, you hurtle towards the past, and your old life rushes towards you. You just can’t stop it.

Bill spent the night in Changchun’s freezing airport trying to get a flight, any flight, back to Shanghai, and in the morning he was on a bumpy Dragon Air ride south, the first flight out, every seat in the cabin taken, and then three more hours spent in the lounge at Pudong, waiting for his flight to Heathrow.

In the lounge at Pudong a girl brought him a cup of English
breakfast tea. Fifteen minutes later, she brought him a saucer. It was the only time he smiled in the twenty-four hours it took him to get from where he was to where he had to be.

But no matter how many hours were squandered and wished gone, Asia was always ahead of Europe, and it would always be that way, and the long flight back to where he had begun never made up the difference.

Becca and Holly are waiting for him at the arrivals gate and when he sees their faces and sees them both wearing their pink Juicy T-shirts under their North Face ski jackets and their green combat trousers, like two girl soldiers, a big one and a little one, he chokes up and tries to hide it and wishes with all his heart that he had died and been burned and scattered to the wind before he had ever loved anyone but them, his wife and daughter.

Things had been simple and good and he had made them complicated and toxic and impossible, he sees all that now, understands it in a heartbeat, at long last understands the blindingly obvious. He holds Becca and Holly and longs for that old simplicity and a time when he could leave his phone turned on, and love without lying, and look at the two faces before him without feeling ashamed.