My Favourite Wife (39 page)

He thought about calling JinJin. He thought about calling Becca. But in the end he called no one, and he stood waiting for Ling-Yuan to come, watching the late-night traffic on the road to Zhuhai, and checking his watch.

Then he thought
perhaps she will not come
. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Why should she come at all? Failing to show wasn’t going to get her the sack. Why come to his room to be shouted at by her sister’s boyfriend? He was sure she would not come.

And that’s when she knocked on his door.

She looked like someone else. The tart drag and make-up had gone. She wore a black T-shirt and trainers and jeans that, as she came into his room, he saw said Juicy on the back. Like something her big sister would wear. Perhaps even an old pair of JinJin’s jeans. No, they were nowhere near the same size. She was buying her own clothes now. No more hand-me-downs from her big sister. She had her own money. She came into the room and as she walked past him he saw there was a line of flesh and a slither of thong showing between the bottom of her T-shirt and the top of her jeans. She turned in the centre of the room to face him, and he shook his head.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘What would your mother say? What would your sister say?’

But she was prepared. Now he understood why she had to come to his room. To justify herself.

‘My sister have someone,’ she said furiously. She had that Chinese ability to suddenly flare up, to go from placid blankness to self-righteous rage in one swift move. ‘My sister
always
have someone to take care her. The man, the Shanghai man. Now you. Rich foreigner. But I have no one to take care.’

He shook his head. It wasn’t enough of a reason. Nothing could ever be enough of a reason.

‘Ling-Yuan, if you needed money, I could have given it to you. Your sister could have given it to you.’ His voice was soft. He still thought he could save her. ‘Not this way, Ling-Yuan – this is not the way to go. You must know that.’

Her small white teeth were bared in defiance.

‘That factory you take me
no good,’
she said. ‘Just enough money
to eat
. The boss a
bad man
. He do
bad things
to girl. The money
not enough
to send home. You understand? My mother
sick. Do you
understand?’

‘I know your mother’s sick.’

She held up her fingers and waggled them. ‘Karaoke money -four time, five time better than that factory.
Ten time
better. Good night.’

‘Selling yourself – is that what you want? I can’t believe that’s what you want.’

‘Factory very bad,’ she said, turning away from him and going over to the window. He watched her staring out at the rain and the lights of the distant road. The wind whipped and screamed through the palms. It was raining harder now. Something was moving down the road. At first he took it for some kind of large runaway vehicle, a truck with the brakes gone, but it was a billboard that had been ripped from its moorings. It featured the face of a smiling girl holding a pink mobile phone and she seemed to smile up at Bill as the billboard rose and twisted and disappeared into the darkness, on the road to China, its movement as graceful as a giant kite.

‘Typhoon season starting,’ Ling-Yuan said, like a lethargic weather girl. ‘Start of June. Always the same. Typhoon coming in June, July, August. This year very bad. Maybe many typhoon.’

He came and stood next to her, not knowing what to say. He felt as though the damage had been done. Even though the real damage hadn’t even started yet.

‘That’s the road to Zhuhai,’ he said quietly. ‘You can see the mainland from here.’

‘I know,’ she said, surprising him, and then shocking him, and clearly loving it. ‘I been this hotel before.’ She looked around, as if searching for something she might have left behind. ‘Maybe even this room…’ She smiled at the look on his face. ‘I been Macau one month – already know every hotel.’ Childishly counting with her fingers again. ‘Know Hotel Lisboa, Tin Tin Villa, Fortuna, Mandarin Oriental…’

The list of hotels filled him with despair. ‘Get about, don’t you?’ he said.

She nodded proudly. ‘Very popular girl. The mamma-san says, “You good girl, Cherry. You best girl in bar.”’

He held up a hand. ‘Please. Do me a favour, okay? Your name is not Cherry.’

She looked genuinely indignant. ‘It beautiful name. Cherry
American
name.’

He flared up. ‘It’s a stupid name. Nobody is called Cherry in the West. Nobody is called Cherry in the real world. Mothers just don’t call their babies
Cherry
. It’s the name of a bar girl in Asia, it’s what some old mamma-san calls a silly little girl like you. Listen to me, will you?’ He took her hands, really wanting her to understand. But he faltered because she looked a bit like her sister. A younger, chubbier version of JinJin.

In many ways the two sisters were physical opposites – one so long and lean and small breasted, and the other so small and round, so round that she looked like a collection of curves. One like a dancer, the other like a milkmaid, or perhaps a barmaid. But he looked at the younger sister as he took her hands and he could not deny that he saw the ghost of the girl he had loved.

‘Your name is Li Ling-Yuan,’ he said, reminding her, reminding all the men in all the hotel rooms, reminding himself.

She flashed those small white teeth again. Part smile, part grimace. ‘Ah, but in that place, in this new life, my name
Cherry.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with
you,’ he said, aware of the coolness of her hands, chubby hands, different hands, and he was suddenly conscious of a tightness in his throat. She raised an over-plucked eyebrow and smiled, more widely now, as if what he said was not strictly true. He dropped her hands and stepped away from her. But they kept looking at each other, as if for the first time.

Then she stopped smiling and they were silent and when she finally spoke her voice was barely audible above the drone of the air conditioning.

‘Enjoy your good time,’ she said, giving an emphatic little nod, and it was all so clear and so matter-of-fact that it was like being hit by a hammer.

Then there was only the moment and perhaps the moment was all there had ever been and all there ever is and all his thoughts of love and forever was just some pre-packaged Western fantasy.

There was just the moment and the girl and the shadows of the hotel room and what you wanted. He took her in his arms and felt the heat rising and she was slowly walking backwards, leading him to the bed.

Then suddenly Bill was pushing her away and pulling her to the door by her elbow and shoving her out into the hotel corridor before he had the chance to change his mind.

‘Go home to your mother,’ he said angrily, and she raised her almost non-existent eyebrows and laughed at him as if he was joking, or a fool, or as if she would never go home again.

He slammed the door on her and went over to the window and watched the storm building over the mainland as he tried to control his heart and his breathing. Electrical flashes split the night and seemed to illuminate every last drop of rain. He pushed a button on the bedside table. The curtains started to close and he was glad.

He was sick of looking at China.

The rains came and they did not stop.

For three weeks it was all you heard. The rivers that had broken their banks in eastern and southern China. The million people displaced from their homes in Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangxi. From south of Shanghai all the way down to the border of Vietnam, the wind and the rains came and there seemed to be no end.

It was all you heard. The flooding and the landslides, the farmland submerged, the homes destroyed. Military helicopters dropping bottled water and instant noodles to the displaced. A case of typhoid reported in Hunan. The latest figures of the missing and the dead.

Shane sat in the car park beneath his apartment block, an overnight bag on the seat next to him, his suit still soaked after his brief dash from short-stay parking into the airport terminal.

He was meant to be flying down to Hong Kong again with the Germans but there was nothing in or out of Pudong. Come back tomorrow, said the girl on the desk at Dragon Air. It might be better tomorrow.

So he sat in his car in his ruined suit, putting off the moment when he would have to go up to the apartment, afraid that his wife might be there, and afraid that she might be somewhere else.

* * *

Bill pressed his face against the glass of the maternity ward.

The babies came in many colours at the International Family Hospital and Clinic but they were all swaddled tightly in the Chinese style, wrapped up like little white packages, tiny arms pinned to their sides. Yet his eyes kept returning to one baby.

A girl. He was certain it was a girl, even though he could not possibly know for sure. Half Chinese, half European. Neither asleep nor really awake, its little bud-like mouth moving with some unnameable complaint. The sleeping infant made him smile. There was something about mixed blood that made for strikingly beautiful babies, he thought. He could see all the beauty of the world in that sleeping baby girl.

Glancing at his watch, he turned away from the glass wall of the maternity ward just as Sarfraz Khan was emerging from the lift. Khan walked past Bill with his head down, studying some papers, making it easy for both of them.

JinJin was in her room, sitting on the bed, her bags packed, almost ready to go home. Her face was still pale from the general anaesthetic. He kissed her on the cheek.

‘Just waiting for my prescription,’ she told him. ‘They’re giving me antibiotics and painkillers and then I’ll be discharged.’

He sat on the bed holding her hand. It was a whole new vocabulary, he thought. The lexicon of ill health. The realisation that one day your body would betray you.

At the Chinese hospital she had first gone to, they told her that the lump was benign and that she should just learn to live with it. That was old China. Putting up with things that you did not have to put up with. Bill persuaded her to go to the International Family Hospital and Clinic where she had a minor operation to remove the lump, and told her that the scar would be so small that she would hardly know it was there. But the need for surgery had been a shock to both of them. It felt as if the real world was coming to claim them.

Now Bill put his arms around her, very gently, because he knew she was still in a lot of pain, and she was still nauseous from the general anaesthetic. Not the embrace of a lover, he thought. No, not like a lover at all. They had gone beyond all of that.

He kissed her cheek again, and he thought that it was not really the kiss of a lover. It was more like the kiss of a best friend, more like the kiss of a man and woman who had stuck together in sickness and in health, a couple who were married, and who had been married for a very long time.

They saw the neighbour on the stairs. The guy from the flat above. Brad.

‘You all right, JinJin?’ he said, all concerned, as if you could just walk into someone’s life and pretend that you cared. As if the bonds could be there in an instant, Bill thought, as if they didn’t take time. Brad had the nerve to take her hands. ‘Did it go okay?’ he said.

So she had told him. They were close enough for that. Now he stood on the stairs, on his way out, and acted like he gave a damn, pressing his back against the wall as JinJin smiled and nodded and took her hands away. Bill squeezed past him with a bag in each hand.

‘She’s fine,’ Bill said, not breaking his stride.

Then they were in the flat and as she showered he stood in the doorway watching her trying to avoid the dressing on her left breast, a black dot of congealed blood showing through the gauze, and when it was done they got into bed and lay side by side.

He couldn’t stay. Not even tonight, when she was just home from the hospital. That was the unvoiced sadness between them. They both understood that there would come the moment round midnight when he got up and left her and went back home. He wanted to show her that he would do anything for her. He wanted to not just say it, but to prove it with his deeds. But in the end he
couldn’t even stay the night, and what he wanted meant nothing. He lay there by her side and listened to her voice, her lovely voice soft in the night, as if she was thinking aloud.

‘You tell yourself you are going with an unmarried man,’ she said. ‘But then you see he keeps looking at his watch. Then you see he always checks the mirror to worry about if there is any lipstick showing. And you realise that he can’t take your birthday and Christmas gifts home, or that he must hide them if he does. And you wonder how many gifts he has thrown away, gifts that you spent a long time choosing because they said how much you love him. And when you are together, and it is good, it feels so…beautiful. Really. That’s the word. Beautiful. I know sometimes I get the wrong word. But that’s the right word. It just feels beautiful and right. And then when you sit there by yourself – after he has gone, and on all the nights you are alone – it all looks so ugly. And that is the right word too.’ She turned her face towards him. ‘What am I going to do now, Bill? What’s going to happen to me?’

He turned on his side, and put an arm across her belly, and he held her, and he could say nothing. There was a limit to the lies he could tell. He saw that now.

‘I have to go,’ he said, sliding out of bed.

‘But before you go,’ she said, and he knew that she had planned this all along, ‘I want to show you some pictures.’

They were photographs of her sister with her new boyfriend. A large grinning German with his arm around a smiling Ling-Yuan, who since he had last seen her in Macau had piled on the pounds and an engagement ring.

‘He’s very handsome,’ JinJin said of this spectacularly ordinary man. ‘Don’t you think he’s very handsome?’

‘He’s bloody gorgeous,’ Bill said, and then he hesitated. ‘But what about when she was away?’ They looked at each other. ‘What about that time?’ he said.