My Favourite Wife (38 page)

‘You can’t steal people,’ he said, unwilling to let her claim responsibility for everything. ‘People can’t be stolen.’

They talked and they cried until they were both exhausted. Then he finally got up to go, but she took his hand and placed it against her face, her neck, her thigh.

He shook his head and tried to pull away. Not that. Not now.

And that was when she placed his hand against her breast and he shook his head more violently now and tried to pull away again but she held his palm there until he felt it. It was on the right side of her breast.

A lump the size of a golf ball, a lump as hard as the real world.

The helicopter came out of the mist and suddenly there was the neon glow of Macau, with its Portuguese architecture looking like toy forts in a Victorian nursery and dominating it all, the blazing lights of the giant casinos.

Macau was the very tip of the Chinese peninsula, the end of China, or perhaps the beginning, and the neon sign that identified the Hotel Lisboa, the gaudiest casino of them all, shone like a beacon in the grey twilight, temple to a religion that meant more to the Chinese people than Communism or capitalism ever could, summoning the masses to prayer.

‘One day there will be gambling in China,’ Devlin had said. ‘Perhaps not for a long time. Perhaps not until the Party has gone. Perhaps not until after Taiwan.’

Among the senior suits of Shanghai, this was the most popular theory of how the Communist Party of China would eventually disappear – the old men in Beijing would finally wage their long-promised patriotic war on Taiwan and they would fail miserably. Their planes would be shot down, their missiles would miss or be intercepted, the PLA would never get off the beaches. Then the old men in Beijing would fall, and fall forever – taking their rotten ideology and statues of Chairman Mao with them – with the abruptness and permanence of the Berlin Wall suddenly becoming a pile of bricks.

‘The Chinese love gambling, it’s in their DNA,’ Devlin told them before they left. ‘One day there will be casinos on the mainland and they will make Las Vegas and Atlantic City look like a few slot machines stuck on the end of an English seaside pier,’ Devlin said. ‘Until then – there’s Macau.’

And Bill thought of JinJin’s father, his factory wages gone again on mah-jong, coming home to his wife and two daughters with the loser’s rage inside him, his face like thunder at the breakfast table, slowly taking off his belt.

She never had a chance, he thought.

The mamma-san brought the girls to them six at a time. Now only the five of them were left, Bill and Shane sitting on the cracked leather sofas with their clients and Chairman Sun, a fresh round
of drinks before them, looking up at the girls. Nancy had gone back to the hotel immediately after dinner. Mitch had disappeared somewhere between the restaurant and karaoke bar. The night was nearing its punchline, and for the first time Bill understood the presence of Chairman Sun. He was here to collect his bonus.

The girls were all in their late teens and early twenties, too young to hide their true feelings. They tried to mask those feelings with a practised blankness, but they couldn’t quite pull it off.

They were in turn bored, contemptuous, tired, amused, scared and sweet – though Bill knew it was the kind of sweetness that could curdle into a hard-boiled professionalism the moment a deal was struck.

He looked away from their faces to the giant plasma television. On the screen two lovers walked down a beach with ugly tower blocks in the distance as the Chinese characters of the lyrics were illuminated on the grubby sand. A sugary melody accompanied the couple. Bill didn’t know the song. He did not know any of the songs in here. He was not meant to know the song. This place wasn’t built for white boys.

‘You have to be the one who cares least,’ Shane was saying. ‘That’s the mistake I made. I always cared more than she did – I always cared more than my wife. Big mistake. Remember this always, mate – the one who cares the least has all the power.’

The karaoke bar was there to service an exclusively Chinese clientele – winning gamblers spilling out of the casino that occupied the floor below or licking their wounds on their way back to the hotel four storeys above.

The sell here was far harder than anything Bill had seen in Shanghai. The girls were more beautiful than any women he had ever seen, but the karaoke bar made him feel that sex with one of them would be like buying a slice of pizza. He murmured his feelings to Shane.

‘But what’s wrong with pizza?’ Shane said.

In the small sealed room the girls stood waiting while the men
sat watching and the giant TV screen waited with two microphones on top, ready for some more wobbly love songs, and they looked at the girls and the girls looked back at them.

Shane spoke to the mamma-san in Cantonese and she conferred with him through a rictus grin of yellow, tea-stained teeth. She must have been a beauty once, but her face was marked with old chickenpox scars, and Bill thought that she had the eyes of a corpse. For all the practised good manners of the seasoned mamma-san, she was not comfortable with the presence of so many Westerners.

Only Shane’s fluent Chinese, and the fact that he had been here before and spent big, plus the Chairman’s lordly demeanour, made their presence tolerable. But she was getting impatient.

The way the karaoke bar worked was that five girls were wheeled in, one for each customer, and they stayed for a drink and a bit of a sing-song, and then the mamma-san came back and took the girls out of the room. Next the mamma-san faced the men alone, as she did now, grinning in hideous conspiracy, waiting for them to decide which girls could come back and which girls must be replaced, and which of the girls they wanted sent up to their hotel rooms.

On a busy night – and with the Chinese suddenly transformed into the world’s greatest travellers, they were all busy nights now – the supply of girls was not endless. The karaoke bar was a labyrinth of small airless rooms, and they all needed a steady supply of young female flesh. Beyond the frozen smile, Bill could see that the mamma-san was becoming increasingly frustrated. When were they going to decide which girls they would take home for the night?

‘You going to stick with the one you’ve got?’ Shane asked Bill, and he nodded.

Bill had spent the last hour sitting with a young woman from Zhuhai, just across the border. Most of the girls in here spoke no English at all, in this karaoke bar with only two neon Chinese characters above the door and no corny English name for them to sneer at, but Shane and the mamma-san had managed to find
Bill one who was new, and nice, and quietly terrified, and who had even taken a few English classes.

Bill had showed her the pictures of Holly that he carried in his wallet, and the girl made impressed noises as she sipped her orange juice. He would never know her name, although he tried to say it a few times, but it was just too difficult for him to get, and although she said her bar name was Lovely, he could not bring himself to call her that.

They gave them such ridiculous names.

She generously tried to find him a song he knew in the thick menu – ‘Elvis,’ Bill told her, ‘try to find something by Elvis’ – but she had never heard of Elvis and besides, there were no songs for his kind in this place. They were being tolerated. But they were not needed. It felt like someone else’s century now. The big-nosed pinkies, deferred to for so long, were no longer needed.

The girl had enough English words for Bill to understand that she was studying to be a beautician and that her younger brother was shelling out good money to become an actor. Before she had left the room he discreetly slipped her a wad of Hong Kong dollars. He felt sorry for the kid.

‘You want to pay her bar fine?’ Shane asked, already knowing the answer but urged on by the leering mamma-san. Her eyes glittered at Bill as he turned away, shaking his head. Sex with a stranger. Just what he needed. Along with a hole in the head.

The evening was winding down. Bill could smell the cigarette smoke of a dozen casinos on his suit, and he could feel the effects of too much Tsingtao. The drinks were insultingly expensive, but the mamma-san did not want them sitting here all night. She wanted them to buy a few rounds, bar fine the girls and get an early night.

Shane conferred with the mamma-san. One of the Germans, Jurgen, the one who looked as though he spent his weekends practising his golf swing, had made his selection. The other one, Wolfgang, the forty-year-old in a leather jacket, said he would have one more
drink but he was going back to the hotel alone, as he always did. Like Mad Mitch a few hours earlier, Wolfgang had that slight air of sheepishness that the virtuous always displayed in these places.

Shane was with a girl he knew from a previous trip, and he was going to have her sent over to the hotel, although the thought seemed to give him no pleasure.

Chairman Sun had been entertaining the same girl all night, impressing her with sugary Mandarin power ballads sung with the voice of a dead bullfrog, but she had poured him a glass of red wine without leaving room for the Sprite, and now in a fit of pique he suddenly wanted to exchange her. He was very drunk.

Holding his hands out in front of his chest, his nicotine fingers spread wide to signify giant breasts, he described the qualities he was looking for to the mamma-san, like a wine connoisseur consulting the sommelier.

‘One more round then,’ Shane said, and the mamma-san went out and came back with all the girls they had been sitting with minus the Chairman’s companion. Bill stared at her replacement. He could not stop staring at her. And after a stunned moment he felt the sickening shock of recognition.

The mamma-san grinned and held out her hands, like a magician’s assistant at the conclusion of a trick. The girl was short and rather stubby but she had a pretty face and, requested as specifically as a vegetarian meal, large breasts.

The Chairman’s eyes narrowed knowingly, an indication of pleasure, and Bill was still looking at the girl, who was wearing the same artfully torn tutu that they all wore, tottering uncertainly on her ill-fitting high heels, like ballerinas in a knocking shop, and he kept staring, and then he was out of his squashy sofa and pulling her to the door.

Because she was Li Ling-Yuan.

Because the new girl was JinJin’s sister.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said, and even as he was asking
his stupid question, he was aware of the mamma-san’s angry protest, and the Chairman roaring with displeasure behind him.

Ling-Yuan looked at him and she finally saw it was Bill and her surprise turned to sullenness in a second and his presence didn’t seem to scare her as much as he felt it should. In fact it didn’t seem to scare her at all. This wasn’t his place.

‘What are you doing?’ He angrily shook her. ‘Answer me, Ling-Yuan.’

Then Shane had a hand on his shoulder and was saying his name over and over, trying to get him to calm down, but he still had hold of Ling-Yuan, and wouldn’t let her go. She was trying to pull away from him but he had her by the wrist now, and he was turning to them, trying to explain, aware he had to clear something up. ‘I know this girl,’ he said, as if that said it all. ‘I know this girl.’

‘She name Cherry,’ the mamma-san said. ‘She good girl.’

‘Her name’s not fucking Cherry,’ Bill said angrily. ‘I know this girl.’

The Chairman snapped his fingers twice and Ling-Yuan made a move towards him. Bill held up his arm, stopping her. The Chairman was shouting at Shane in Mandarin, the mamma-san was barking in Cantonese, and Ling-Yuan joined the chorus, her voice the self-pitying whine of a spoilt teenager who has been unfairly grounded.

‘We’re leaving,’ Bill said to Ling-Yuan, and he turned to Shane. ‘I’m not arguing about it. This is JinJin’s sister. He’s not fucking her, okay?’ He looked at the mamma-san. ‘Nobody is fucking this girl tonight. She quits.’ He raised his voice at the Chairman. ‘Find somebody else.’

‘But she can’t just quit,’ Shane said quietly, looking pained. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘Then pay her bar fine,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t care. But she’s leaving with me now. I mean it, Shane. She’s going to get changed and we are walking out of here right now.’

Two bouncers were standing in the doorway. Shane was talking to the Chairman, placating him, and haggling with the mamma-san. Neither seemed impressed. The Chairman shook his head furiously, his eyes never leaving Ling-Yuan’s breasts. The mamma-san took a step back and stood between the two bouncers. The tea-stained rictus grin had gone.

‘What are you doing here?’ Bill said to Ling-Yuan, as if it was just the two of them.

‘Working,’ she said, rolling her eyes at the dumbness of his interrogation. He expected her to say,
And what are
you
doing here?
But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything else. As if it was all too obvious to need saying.

Shane consulted the mamma-san and an agreement was reached. ‘You can pay her bar fine,’ he told Bill. ‘But it’s the same deal as for the rest of the girls.’ He held up a hand as Bill started to protest. ‘Sorry, mate. We give the mamma-san the money. We also give her the name of our hotel, a room number and a time. Then she knocks on your door.’

‘But this is –’

Shane shook his head, finally losing patience with him. ‘You pay her bar fine and agree to see her later or you let her go back to work,’ he said. ‘Your choice.’ Then he softened, and smiled, as Bill let go of Ling-Yuan’s wrist. She stared at him like a defiant child. Shane wrapped his arms around his friend, and looked at him with infinite sadness.

‘You see, it’s different now,’ Shane said gently. ‘We play by their rules. Or we don’t play at all.’

He could see China from his hotel window.

It wasn’t much of a view. Just the coastal road to the nearest mainland city, Zhuhai, with its scattering of whitewashed villas, most of them dark and abandoned, and the wild palms swaying under a string of yellow lights as the winds built in fury. Every
once in a while lightning cracked across the sky and illuminated the scene. Rain began to fall.