Shanghai Boy

by Stevan Eldred-Grigg

  Contents

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  PART TWO

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART THREE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  PART FOUR

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  About the Author

  ALSO BY STEVAN ELDRED-GRIGG

  Copyright

  ganxie wode zhiyou

  Jiang Ding

  LAST NIGHT A cab driver gave me a green fifty as part of my change. So what, right? Why am I wasting your time with this not-noteworthy scrap of non-news? Well, right now I’m standing at a shop checkout and handing the green note across to pay for some apples and almonds. The woman at the checkout screws up her face. She grabs the note at each end. She wrenches it about, listening for its sound. Squinting at it narrowly, she lifts the note to the light. Then she chucks the thing back.

  ‘No good,’ she says in Mandarin.

  ‘What?’ I say back, also in Mandarin.

  ‘No good,’ she repeats, not caring, matter of fact.

  I pay with a red hundred and then when I’m outside in the smelly street I compare the spurned fifty with another fifty and find that she’s quite right, it’s counterfeit. Dammit. The cabbie conned me, the bastard. Typical of this bloody town! Okay, crinkle up the dud note, biff it into a bin — a bin already overflowing with rubbish and crawling with flies.

  A thin drizzle is falling. Hot, muggy.

  Racket on all sides. The blat of traffic. The shriek of the crossing-woman’s whistle. The melancholy clang of the rag-and-bone man’s bell. They call this the Season of Plum Rain. Very poetic, except that not a plum tree can be seen while I wend my way, twisting my tense body, between the bodies of the smaller and slower-moving folk of One Street. Our neighbourhood streets are named after some obscure provincial city — a city which scarcely anybody here would ever expect to catch sight of or hear of in any other way between the day they’re born and the day they kick the bucket. I live in Obscure Provincial City One Street. Around the corner is Obscure Provincial City Two Street. Down the end where you can glimpse the skytrain station is Obscure Provincial City Six Street. And so on.

  Mud oozes up between loose pavers.

  A minimart invites me to buy. New, glossy with yellow paint and plastic, it’s part of a citywide chain called the Sincere Daily Stop.

  ‘How are you?’ says a woman.

  A bony, sprawling old woman, she sits knitting on a little square bamboo stool. Long grey hair has been pulled back in an untidy bun and only two teeth are left in the front of her mouth. Lack of choppers means that her words, though technically correct Mandarin, are lisped and laborious. We always greet each other in this formal yet friendly way — often four or five times a day.

  ‘How are you?’ I reply.

  Always, every day, she turns up first thing to sell a stock of faded back numbers of formerly glossy magazines. Fashion mags, beauty mags. Covers show a pouting array of smooth and lipsticked starlets. A swift grey arrow — a rat — darts past now and then on its way to the kitchen of the nearby noodle-house. The old woman, so long as the weather stays okay, sits and knits. When it rains — like today — she shakes her big bony bod into a shuffling scuttle, gathering up her stock, stowing it under a tatty tarpaulin on her trolley. Afterwards she perches, hoping to wait out the rain, on the steps of the Sincere Daily Stop.

  Now another old woman comes forward, sketches a quick kowtow and holds out a plastic begging bowl.

  ‘Charity, sir,’ she says in Shanghainese.

  Be modern — speak Mandarin says an official sign bolted to a lamppost behind the crone.

  I lob a coin into her cup.

  Shanghai!

  Oozing for aeons out of the restless mouths of the Yangtze, mud has dropped into sloppy mounds amidst lagoons and looping creeks. Once the creeks were yellow with silt. Now they’re black with shit and industrial toxins. Fat little crayfish crawl through the shitty mud feeding themselves by the thousand before finding themselves caught by boys and men and sold for a few pennies to women who chuck the catch into plastic buckets and squat themselves down on top of an upturned box or maybe a paint can and look around listlessly for a buyer. The crayfish are fat and their shells come in a kind of livery of red and black. Meanwhile, more than twenty million more of us kids and women and men are crawling all over what used to be the sloppy mounds.

  Nobody knows how many millions more than twenty, given that lots of us are illegals or semi-legals. Men and women who lack the right papers flock here from faraway provinces willing to take any kind of foul work that can be found. No shortage of foul work here in the big smoke. Drains have got to be cut. Pavements have got to be laid on top of the old ooze. Techno-skyscrapers have got to be heaped up downtown to a height of eighty or more storeys into the grim, polluted sky.

  I sidestep the beggar woman.

  Downtown techno-skyscrapers are far away from folk here in my district, a district which is humdrum, ordinary, workaday. Solid, gritty apartment blocks crammed between gritty streets filled with petrol and diesel fumes — the pavements slippery with gobs of spit — stump their way north and south, east and west, towards an invisible horizon. Almost all of these grey, smutted blocks of apartments were built in the eighties of last century.

  As for me, right now the most real thing in my life seems to be a feeling of sickness in my stomach.

  He’s due to turn up today. What am I going to do?

  Why has my life gone so wrong?

  A fat bored guard nods at me from behind his pane of glass at the gates to the Foreign Experts Hotel. He has almost nothing to do, almost all day long, except lurk behind that glass and be bored. Right now he’s got hold of a banknote which he’s rolled into a tight little tube and is using to clean his ear. He digs deeply, thoroughly. Afterwards he looks at the digging end of the tube to check the colour and texture of the wax he’s dug out.

  Note to self: avoid waxy banknotes.

  I nod back.

  The Foreign Experts is a block of four storeys in its gated compound off One Street. A thin, bored receptionist nods at me from behind the counter with its long slab of marble. Seated on an upended clothes drawer, she hunches her narrow shoulders towards an electric fan. The fan spins frantically in a futile fight to get free from its wire cage. Our building is a blend of the grandiose and the shabby. The lobby smells of piss and fish. I climb wide, shallow flights of polished granite stairs until I come to the third floor, where I turn and find a door. My door. A door opening into a set of rooms which are high, white and rather empty. Floors are hardwood, polished. Bookshelves, desk, tables, chairs, beds, a few other odds and ends are also polished wood. Well, on first glance they’re wood, but really they’re veneer over some sort of customwood.

  I dump the plastic bag of groceries lumped in from the street and drop myself into one of the armchairs. Two armchairs have been provided with the flat. Austere armchairs — they seem to have been designed not for loosely limbed living humans but for dead mandarins mummified and bent at the waist and knee in neat ninety-degree angles.

  Check the clock. One, in a tick or two.

  He’s due to turn up today.

  Somehow it seems as though I’ve spent my whole life waiting for him to turn up, if by him we mean a man, a man who — or a boy, a boy who —? Not that I feel too sure I know where a boy ends and a man begins, really.

  Well, back to here and now — let’s see, it’s the end of
the second semester. I’m waiting to talk about the final essay with one of my students. Jay. Jay has booked himself the one o’clock slot in my appointments diary. Classes are over for the year. My students, stressed and freaking, stuck at their desks, are spending days and nights cramming. Poor sods. Exams are what make or break a student in this country. Jay scribbled his name in the diary almost a month ago. A very clever kid, he scribbled quickly and nearly illegibly. Of course I shouldn’t think of these students as kids — they’re young men and women of eighteen, nineteen, sometimes twenty. Like I said, though, I don’t feel too sure that I know where a boy stops being a boy and becomes a man.

  What am I going to do?

  Why the fuck has my life gone so wrong?

  I look at a red ribbon which flickers faintly on the louvred vent of the air conditioner, while listening to the background racket. One of the things that hit me most when I first came to live in this place a year ago was the racket. What can I hear right now? A gang of workmen drilling a pavement, the thud of their pneumatic drills reverberating through my floor and walls. Also a sort of oceanic roar from traffic as it streams ceaselessly across an elevated motorway. Also high-pitched hums, followed by whooshes, of skytrains shooting from their glazed station. Also the throb-throb-throb of the tired old air conditioner. The air conditioner makes so much noise at night that sometimes the only way I can get to sleep is by kidding myself that I’m on a ship and that the throbbing is the ship’s turbines, and that the ship’s prow is cutting through deep water, which seems soothing somehow.

  Ten minutes past one. Why do I love it so much, I wonder — water, I mean — why is it so wonderful?

  Ebb and flow, tides, waves —

  The faint flickers of the ribbon are meant to prove to disgruntled guests of the Foreign Experts that the air conditioners really are working. Needless to say, the thin nylon red has become soiled by the greasy air of the city as it seeps through the louvres.

  Twenty past one.

  Not that anyone would raise an eyebrow, since students are seldom on time for any appointment. As for Jay, well, of course the brightest kids — oops, students — are often the slackest in their ways. The boy failed to turn up at all for the last class of the semester, almost a fortnight ago.

  Knock knock.

  A lurch in my stomach. A knock — my door?

  The Foreign Experts is not what you’d call high tech. We don’t have laser wands or security buzzers, or even homely little electric chimes, to let us know when someone has come to our door. All anyone can do to that door is knock, with their knuckles.

  Or kick, maybe, with their boot.

  Knock knock.

  Yes, my door. A light knock. Not a strong knock. Yet a knock that makes not only my stomach lurch but my heart bump — makes that tough old ticker bump hard. A bumping so hard that I wonder whether I’ll be able to stand safely, whether my legs will have the knack of carrying me, whether I’ll quite have it in my power to make it to my door without keeling over onto that slippery, slightly treacherous floor of polished hardwood.

  Dad? Is it my dad at the door?

  Well, that’s a whimsical thought for you. Dad’s not here, he’s on the other side of the world. Nor is he fit to knock on my door. He’s not fit to knock, or knock about, anywhere any more. Okay, up I jump. Trot across to the door. Twist the doorknob. The door swings open to — not my dad, not a wrinkled old red-faced coot of eighty-plus years, but a soft-spoken smooth-cheeked local lass wearing spectacles.

  ‘Dr Manfred, I worried about Jay,’ she says in English.

  ‘Why, Sissy? Have you got a reason?’

  ‘Too many!’ she wails.

  Sissy spells them out. She and Jay are classmates, and she’s the monitor, yet she hasn’t seen the boy for thirteen days. She hasn’t had an email, a text message, a phone call from him during the whole of those thirteen days. He was last seen by the boys in his dorm late one night — a very hot night, the night before our concluding class. He’d been sitting over his books in the study room when he leapt off a chair, plucked up his cellphone and headed out the door. Sissy has come here this afternoon, knowing that Jay was booked for an appointment, thinking that surely nobody would skip something as important as a date with a professor. Now, getting a bit bewildered by her verb tenses, she stops talking. Also she looks tearful.

  ‘Was he unhappy,’ I ask quietly, ‘when he was last seen by you or the other boys?’

  ‘No, he is always happy.’

  ‘Nobody’s always happy, you know.’

  ‘I have bad feeling, Dr Manfred. Very have bad feeling.’

  ‘You may as well wait here, Sissy. He’ll be here soon, I suppose — he’s usually late.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Manfred.’

  Sissy sits awkwardly. At first I try to set her at ease but since I don’t feel at ease myself it falls flat. After a bit I leave her with some books and a drink of peach juice while sloping off myself into the next room to feint doing some paperwork. Shuffle the papers. Shuffle, shuffle. Quickly the papers get turfed aside. Why not try typing? Okay. Flick my fingertips for a while across the clickety little plastic keys of the computer. Crap! Can’t be bothered trying to type. I switch off the computer. I look out the window and see nothing but the smutted sides of mildewed apartment blocks against a muggy grey sky. Spinning my body back towards my desk, I start to toy idly with a red steel stapler. The stapler came with me from my homeland. Snapping its small sharp jaws onto a folded sheet of white paper, snapping it again and again, I think once more of Dad. Snap, snap, snap! One whole hour passes slowly. I feel sick. I want to cry.

  Somebody knocks on the door. Knock knock. A strong knock, not a light knock.

  A hard knock.

  ‘Jay!’ says Sissy.

  ‘No. It’s not his knock.’

  Somebody knocks again masterfully.

  ‘We keep hearing hype about the Chinese century and the way China’s going to be the biggest economy on the planet, but to my mind they’re still unbelievably backward, and a mystery. You never really know what thoughts and feelings are weaving their way through their brains.’

  ‘Exactly! And as for the everyday aspects of lecturing in a university over there —’

  ‘Apparently they ask you to take on a dreadful teaching load.’

  ‘You won’t get anything like the working conditions we take for granted here, and the pay’s appalling.’

  ‘Survival wages. You’ll not save a penny, you know.’

  ‘And just think about the things they eat!’

  ‘Cat, dog — I hear that Shanghai businessmen have taken to eating human embryos bought by restaurants from nearby abortion clinics. They serve them as embryo soup!’

  ‘I don’t allow any of your arguments,’ was my statesmanlike reply. ‘We’re so insular about China. What’s the stereotype that keeps getting cranked out in western mass media? By mass media I don’t just mean tele and Time. The stereotype you find on all but the most high-brow media? Crazy old Orient, that’s what. World of the weird and wacky.’

  ‘Professor Morse?’ asks Detective Inspector Mao.

  ‘What? Oh, yes,’ I say. ‘Yes?’

  The inspector is a small bloke, a bloke of about fifty, stocky and square. He makes himself comfortable and starts stinking out my apartment with the fumes from his Double Happiness. A red packet, printed with a pattern of golden lanterns and gold script in Chinese and in English.

  DOUBLE HAPPINESS Super Lights.

  ‘Manfred Gilbert Morse?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  As he works through what I suppose is called a police inquiry — the very first that’s come my way in my own fifty years — the inspector doggedly smokes one after another of the little white-sheathed, amber-wadded tubes of poison which he fishes out of the packet. The tip of each fresh fag he lights with the butt of the old fag. He offers me one of the nasty nuisances. I turn down the offer politely. Me, I’ve got no vices. Boring, right? Inspector Mao, brooding i
n the heavy smoke from those nonstop fags, holds a ballpoint in one fist and scratches onto a piece of thin, greyish paper.

  ‘Of course you can account for your movements, Professor, on the night during which the young man disappeared?’

  Words which fit my idea of what a detective should say. Actually his words come to me only in translation because he hisses them out in Shanghainese, to be subsequently hoovered up and airbrushed into smooth Received Pronunciation English by an interpreter — a student on loan from the university, a Mr Sun.

  ‘Of course.’

  Inspector Mao has prepared the way for this question by making use of various conventional phrases to say he is very sorry to disturb my privacy, and that he’s sure that he need not detain me for long, but that Jay was reported missing by the university authorities two days ago. A body has been found. A young man. A naked young man, heavily decayed — decay consistent, apparently, with about two weeks in the water at this time of the year. He was found this morning lodged against the pier of a bridge where the neighbourhood creek flows into the Huangpu. Clues to his identity have been hard to find because of that advanced state of decay. The height and weight of the young man, however, are the same as the height and weight of Yu Jiayu.

  Jay.

  ‘Professor, we hope you may be able to cast some light on the disappearance of Yu Jiayu.’

  ‘When you say disappearance, you mean death?’

  Inspector Mao looks at me sharply.

  ‘Do you know he is dead?’

  One moment of panic, in which I see myself inside a police interrogation cell somewhere downtown. The cops of this town are not known for kid gloves, though they are known for cattle prods. And electric shocks to the nipples or the cock. And handcuffing of suspects in agonising postures. Maybe a man will find himself suspended from the ceiling on the tips of his toes for hours, or maybe cuffed with his arms bent diagonally behind his back in a way that stops the blood flow and makes bones break after half a day.