My Favourite Wife (40 page)

JinJin shook her head, quickly leafing through the stack of photos like a croupier with a new deck of cards.

‘Nobody talks about that,’ she said. ‘It’s not important any more.’ She studied the photographs thoughtfully. ‘But I think I have been a better sister to her than she has been to me.’

He reached out for her and she didn’t pull away. She didn’t flinch under his touch the way he had expected her to. That was where they were so different, that was where they were worlds apart. She could not let go as easily as he could.

‘I want one thing,’ she said. ‘I wish I could have our baby. I don’t care about you staying with your wife.’ She corrected herself. ‘I care but I say nothing.’ She paused. ‘But I want our baby.’
Bay-bee
, she said.
Bay-bee
. ‘That’s what I want.’

And a part of him wanted it too. Even now. For it would have been a beautiful baby. But it would kill him. The start of that new life would mean the end of his own. Because it would mean he finally had two homes, and two wives, and two lives, and those two lives would tear him apart. Bill liked to believe that he would do anything for JinJin. He liked to tell himself that. But in the end, he could do nothing. Because he already had a wife and a child and they filled his heart. And if his wife no longer wanted him, then they would still fill his heart. He had run out of time.

‘I have to go,’ he said, and JinJin nodded, the tears starting up, because now there was no way forward and no way back and nothing to talk about, and it wasn’t until he was at the door that her voice stopped him.

‘I saw on TV – they said that men never marry the woman they really love,’ said JinJin Li. ‘Do you think that’s true?’

Bill shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think it’s true,’ he said sadly. ‘But isn’t it lovely to think so?’

There was music on in the flat. Shane heard it before his key was out of the lock. It was not his music. It was not Eddie and the
Hot Rods. It was not Thin Lizzy. It was one of those singers his wife liked. Some singer with a shaved head, chains, tattoos. Making seduction sound like a threat of physical violence. It was not ‘96 Tears’ by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It was not ‘Do Anything You Wanna Do’. Rosalita and her special friend were not playing Shane’s song. They were playing one of the new songs. They were playing their own song.

Shane didn’t recognise the man in bed with his wife. And then he did. One of the bar owners from Mao Ming Nan Lu. From a place a few doors down from Suzy Too, one of the places with live music. That surprised Shane because he would have bet money on the bass player. He had always suspected the bass player who from the very start had looked at him with such hatred, as if Shane had come along and spoiled everything. And he was right. Everything had been spoiled, and nothing could ever be good again.

The sheets were half pulled back and the club owner was lounging on a stack of pillows with Rosalita kneeling in front of him with her head between the man’s legs.

Her skin was so brown against his pallid European flesh. What was he? French? German? The French and Germans were all over Shanghai. This wasn’t Hong Kong. The other European nations had staked their claim here. She had him in her mouth, the mouth that kissed Shane on their wedding day, the mouth that he had once believed was a perfect match for his own.

The music was loud and it had masked his entry, but then they had seen him and they were cursing, pulling apart, and the man looked so angry that Shane thought he would have to fight him, felt his fists tightening, knew he could take him, even with the man’s blood at boiling point.

But the man, this bar owner from one of the places where they had live music on Mao Ming Nan Lu, was angry with Rosalita, he was angry with Shane’s wife, not Shane, because after all she
shouldn’t have brought a man back if the dumb husband was not safely installed at the office or packed off on a business trip.

‘You stupid cow,’ the man muttered, sliding out of bed as Rosalita pointlessly covered her breasts with a fistful of crumpled sheet, and somehow the insult to his wife was the thing that moved Shane’s own blood.

More than the deceit, more than the sight of her beloved brown skin against that soft white flesh, more than what she was doing with her cheating mouth, more than coming home to someone else’s music on his sound system. The insult did it.
You stupid cow
.

He should watch his mouth, Shane thought.

Then the man and Rosalita were arguing with each other while Shane went to the living room, pulled back the
Mona Lisa
, and tapped in the code: his wife’s birthday. He came back into the bedroom with the Makarov in his hand.

They stared at him. And they stared at the cheap Russian gun. Shane sighed. Silence at last. Apart from the sound of someone else’s song.

This music is so hateful, Shane thought. So full of real hatred. He felt very calm, although he was aware that he did not seem to be breathing.

Then the bar owner laughed at Shane. He had been here before.

‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ he said confidently, pulling on his trousers and zipping up. ‘Rosalita’s your friend and she’s my friend too, so you’re not going to shoot me,’ he said.

And that’s when Shane shot him in the stomach, shot him with one tiny flex of his right index finger, which produced the sudden crack of sound and the spectacle of the man knocked backwards with his hands clutching with wonder at a gut wound that would kill him, but not immediately, not that Shane had planned it that way, and the man cursed once and loudly in disbelief, clawing at himself as he sank forward on his knees, his
head bowed as if in shame, shame at last, the blood spreading on the white sheets.

But Shane didn’t see any of that because he was watching his wife, who was screaming for help,
Someone, help, he’s going to kill me
, in that curious Spanish accent that Tagalog speakers bring to the English language, as she crawled across the bed and then on to the floor, and he felt his finger on the trigger again, flesh and bone squeezing on a sliver of cheap black metal. And then he felt it pause.

Her hair was down, not tied and tossed across one shoulder as usual, but hanging loose, as it only did when she was in bed, or she was sleeping, or when she was making love. And with her hair hanging down like that he could see it clearly, he could see the ink stain on her neck.

There it was, for the very last time, the birthmark that Rosalita tried to hide for almost every waking moment of her life. Shane knew then that he loved her and that he was glad he had married her, he would do it all again in an instant.

Shane saw Rosalita’s birthmark and knew that the sun rose and set with her. So he lowered the gun, then lifted it and pressed the barrel against his own pulsing temple and finally squeezed the trigger.

And in the moment before oblivion he thought of how she had looked the first time he saw her, so full of life, you never saw anyone so full of life, and he was grateful for it, all of it, and he remembered further back, one long-forgotten dawn in his youth in Australia, the sun coming up as he waded out to sea, the board in his fists, the water so cool from the waist down that it made him gasp even as he felt the sun on his face and his shoulders, and he remembered one of his first nights in Asia, in Hong Kong it must have been, Kowloon side, he didn’t even know enough to be on Hong Kong island, but it was great, with the first Peking duck and hoysin sauce he had ever tasted and also the first Tsingtao,
and who had ever tasted duck like that or drunk beer like that, or even knew they existed, the plum sauce on his disbelieving tongue, the skyline across the harbour shining like the stars, and he was grateful for it all, and then he was paddling further out to sea and up on the board and the water on his skin was already drying and the sun was coming up, almost blinding him now.

It was only the last micro moment of his life, but he was aware of all the good things he had known, and how fleeting it had all been, and how could he feel anything but the stab of sadness you get when you know that something so sweet and strange and wonderful will never come again.

They had told him it was a village, but it was not quite that – just a jumbled collection of shacks surrounded by rain-lashed paddy fields on one side and a broad, rising river on the other. There was a thick red slime on the banks of the river. That was the reason Nancy Deng was here.

The car bumped down a dirt-track road and the firm’s new driver, the driver who wasn’t Tiger, an older man who was less likely to rush off to join the gold rush, clung to the wheel and tried to avoid an old woman wheeling her bicycle, her bare feet sloshing through the mud. There were no other cars here.

‘I can see her,’ Bill said. ‘Pull over.’

He could see Nancy out in the fields. She was surrounded by a group of villagers, small figures in transparent plastic macs, looking like ghosts against the lush green landscape. Bill got out of the car and took one of the paths that weaved through the paddy fields, his umbrella buckling in the wind. There were streams running through the fields. They were the colour of rust. He said her name and she looked up.

‘I’m so sorry about…Shane,’ she said, saying his first name for the first time.

Bill nodded. The villagers began to drift away, their heads bowed in the rain. They moved in single file down the path between the
paddy fields towards their homes, and he thought it looked like a funeral procession. He stared down at the orange-coloured water beneath their feet.

‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘From the factories.’

Nancy pointed down river. ‘I have a scientist who helps me. Pro bono.’ She took off her glasses and wiped them with her fingers. ‘He has found traces of heavy metals in the water from the factories.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘They dump their waste in the river and nobody can stop them.’

The rusty water was soaking through his shoes. ‘What do they make?’

‘Pesticides. Insecticides. Fluorides. Plastics. The villagers rely on the river for their rice crop, for their drinking water. The rice crops have failed because of the poisoned water. Babies are being born with birth defects. This place has a population of a few thousand, and hundreds of them have died.’

Bill looked at the pitiful little shacks. A cancer village. That’s what they called it. ‘But what can you do, Nancy?’ he said.

‘Stop them,’ she said. ‘Establish the link between the factories and the sickness. Force the government to apply its own laws. Prove that the factories upstream have poisoned these people. Protect the living. Compensate the bereaved. Care for the sick. There are children here with no parents. There are mothers and fathers who are dying. Everybody has let them down. They have nobody. Not the party. Not the government. Nobody to fight for them.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘They do now.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m nothing. I know that. But there are others like me. At legal aid centres. Running hotlines. Working within universities. All over the country.’

He had always felt hope for the future when he looked at Nancy. He knew that there were countless villages like this one, but he also knew there were young Chinese lawyers like her, offering their
services for nothing, or a pittance, sometimes holding down jobs in commercial law firms to fund their pro bono work, or until they could afford to quit and do work that meant something beyond a fat salary and a glittering future. And Bill guessed that’s exactly what Nancy had been doing in all her years at Butterfield, Hunt and West. Saving up for the day when she knew she would have to work for nothing.

‘What I want,’ she told him, ‘what I want is for the poorest people in the land to have access to the law of the land.’ She looked down at the rust-coloured water on her boots. ‘You will miss him so much,’ she said. ‘Your good friend.’

Bill looked away. ‘I miss him, we all miss him.’ He looked back at her. ‘That’s why I’m here. Devlin sent me. We’ve got more work than we can handle. There are new guys coming in from London, but it’s not going to be enough. The firm wants you to come back. We need you.’

She shook her head, and indicated the plastic-coated ghosts disappearing into their modest homes. ‘They need me more,’ she said.

He did not push it. He had known that she would never come back. He had told Devlin that she would never come back. And in his heart he did not want her to come back. He wanted her to stay here and fight for these people. He did not want her to be like him.

‘You need to be careful, Nancy,’ he said. He had heard what could happen to idealistic young lawyers who did pro bono work for the poor. ‘You’re dealing with people who get away with murder.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ she said, sounding as if she believed nothing could touch her, and he knew she was wrong. ‘It doesn’t matter how rich we get. China will always be a Third World country until the courts are willing to protect the little man. Until we have the rule of law, we will be a nation of peasants.’

‘You sound like Mad Mitch,’ he said.

‘He was the one who talked to me about the rule of law. Did you notice? He talked about it all the time.
The rule of law means that the law applies to everyone in equal measure. Where the rule of law does not apply, legal solutions are imperfect. The rule of law is the root and branch of democracy
. Mitch believes that what we do is a sacred profession. Like a doctor, you know? He’s a good lawyer.’

‘But all wrong for this place,’ Bill said. ‘There’s not a lot of the sacred in the PRC.’

‘And how are you?’ Nancy asked him.

He seemed almost embarrassed. ‘They’re making me a partner.’

She congratulated him, smiling for the first time, really pleased for him, because she knew it was what he wanted, and why he was here, and everything he had worked for.

Bill thanked her, and they stood under his umbrella watching the rain on the paddy fields and the red-etched river beyond, and he knew that he would be long gone from this place before it ever broke its banks, but that she would still be here.