‘Everybody here are queers!’ growls a Chinese man in English.
Ducking my head, feeling shy, like a little boy about to start his first day at school, I tread across the lawn.
My shyness seems a bit lame, since after all this won’t be by any means the first gay club whose threshold I’ve scuffed across in my best black-and-tan Timberlands. As my shoes start to wade through the rather tufty, carelessly clipped grass it occurs to me that I seem to be growing more rather than less shy. Somehow it’s something to do with the fact that here I’m no longer the youngster. I’m old. At the dinner I could play the part of kid. Here, where so many babes are soft and smooth, suddenly I’m once more a dad. A bookish, wrinkled fogey.
I get to a paved bit, where I stop. I find myself accosted by a guy of about forty.
‘Your first time here, is it?’
Singaporean, I think. A shortish fellow. A fellow whose melon belly swells above a glossy black belt branded Yves Saint-Laurent. He says something about the club. I say something back. We swap a few more words about the city, and about our lines of work. Yes, he’s from Singapore. He tells me more than I really need to know about his import–export company.
‘You have many gay friends in this city, is it?’ he goes on. ‘Gay friends our age?’
‘Um, no — none —’
Our age. I feel foolishly flattered.
‘Myself, I know of many gay men aged thirty or forty living lives of quiet desperation in this city,’ he says. ‘Gay men who suppress their true preferences to lead less than satisfactory lives in sham marriages, just to appear respectable.’
‘Poor sods,’ I say.
‘I feel sorry for their wives,’ he says soberly.
‘Me too,’ I say in a hurry, recalling with a quick twinge my own ex.
‘I feel still sorrier for the wives of the straight men.’
Actually he doesn’t say ‘straight men’ or ‘quiet desperation’, since he’s speaking Singlish. He says stray men and choir desperation. I like Singlish. Not too sure, though, that I like to listen any longer to this particular speaker of Singlish.
‘Why?’ I say unwillingly. ‘Do the straight men lead sham lives too?’
‘On the surface, straight businessmen project an image of propriety, but beneath the surface there is wanton bonking going around. My business associates shag different girls every week even while keeping a mistress or two. Yesterday my colleagues and I attended a karaoke session with a local Communist Party secretary. You keep to yourself, okay? His idea of classy entertainment was to order lots of hard liquor and show off his harem of girls with a boast that I can have any two of them sent to my bedroom for sexual romps after the singing. As the evening proceeded he was fondling the breasts of his two teenage escorts while he sang with gusto and pomp a patriotic song called “I Love China”.’
‘Okay, well, I don’t suppose I’ll meet many Party officials. Anyway, I’ll be staying well away from karaoke on the grounds that I love music.’
‘A joke, is it? Haha.’
‘Um, kinda.’
‘Your being blond and blue-eyed will definitely arouse some of these boys to stare at you. They think your looks are exotic.’
A hand has dropped onto my right buttock.
‘I’m not exotic. I’m like most whites from my part of the world, sort of a mishmash of English and Scottish. Spuds and porridge.’
And though it’s true my eyes are blue there’s no way my hair is really blond. When I was young my hair was a nondescript brown. As the years went by it faded unevenly into grey, streaked with brown in a lacklustre sort of way, till it came to look like the pelt of some old half-albino rabbit. Or rat. For the past few years I’ve been getting my hairdresser to put in what he calls lowlights of ash blond.
‘Wah, you are handsome-handsome! A word of caution, can? Always be careful about dealing with cute young boys. Cute young boys are mostly money boys.’
The hand is patting my bum.
‘Money boys?’
‘Hookers. They are only after your money and are linked to gangs. Money boys have been known to drug you by spiking your drink and robbing you of your valuables. Notorious! Haven’t happened to me but it happened to a couple of my friends who got charmed by these boys.’
‘I’ll be okay. I’m not looking for boys — I’m looking for a man.’
‘A grown man your own age knows how to please you, is it?’ he says with an ogle.
‘Kinda — er —’
The hand on my bum is no longer patting but stroking.
‘Thanks for the tips!’ I squeak. ‘Cheers!’
I dive for the door and into a writhing throng of strobe-lit boys. The music is trance. Lasers shoot their rays of crimson, magenta, turquoise, citron. Almost all the lissom twinks on the dance floor wave glow-wands. Almost all have skin the colour of coffee, or amber, or cinnamon. Almost all have black hair, shiny, spiked with gel. Squeezing through, I start to bop.
After half an hour I feel a bit of a fool.
Squeezing my way back through the grooving, lithe bods, I get myself out to the garden for a breather. Not that the night could be called cool in comparison with anything but a sauna. I finger the waxy leaves of some shrub I don’t know and ask myself whether it’s worth staying any longer. Slipping into bed seems a pretty nice option right now. Cut your losses, flag down a cab, and …
A slim, handsome man is smiling at me.
Wow.
I smile back. He comes forward. He looks great. Narrow waist, square jaw. He stops in front of me, a little nervous. Age about thirty. Too young, but —
I make the first play.
‘How are you enjoying the evening?’
‘Pretty good,’ he says, slowly but accurately.
‘It’s my first time here,’ I say, happy that he’s able to speak English.
‘I am not into clubbing normally. I prefer to stay at home instead of visiting a meat market. I was dancing for a while, but I felt the air not fresh inside. And have a guy always dance around me, and he even try to touch me sometimes. A white guy, like you.’
‘I was dancing. It wasn’t me though, haha.’
‘You are more cute than him.’
Always when someone says something like that, I feel myself flushing with disbelief, yet at the same time gag to hear more.
‘Thank you. I think you’re very cute, too.’
‘We can chatting?’
‘Sure. My name’s Manfred.’
‘My name is Jin Dui. You have boyfriend?’
‘No.’
I touch him lightly on the upper arm, hoping it doesn’t seem as though I’m just trying to get in a grope, like the bloke from Singapore.
‘Want to take a little walk, Jin Dui?’
‘Sure!’
You think I’m being conned by this cutey, don’t you? You think he’s a money boy, right? Well, as we stroll slowly along the street of dark villas he tells me that not only has he got a good job, he’s got two good jobs. On the record he’s a civil servant. Off the record he adds to his income as a bureaucrat by running his own advertising studio. Civil servants are forbidden by law from making money in private business, so the studio has been registered in his mother’s name. Jin Dui tells me how he plans to be rich one day. He tells me about the pace and haste and modernity of Shanghai.
‘Shanghai people is smart and up to date,’ he says.
I tell him I teach at a university.
‘Teach what?’ he asks.
I tell him.
Jin Dui leans across and kisses my mouth lightly.
‘The talk with you is quite nice,’ he says.
‘Thank you.’
‘I like the words you used. Quite attractive. And the style of your speaking feels good.’
An old woman shuffles up to us, holding by the hand a little boy. She wants money. The little boy holds out his open hand listlessly. No doubt the woman rents him by the hour from some boy farmer. Jin Dui walks on without
acknowledging either woman or boy. I shake my head before walking on too. The woman knows that the shaken head is a sign of weakness. She and the lad start to follow. I hear her slippers shuffle. I hear his bare feet pit-pat. Feeling bad, I turn. I shake my head once more. The little boy is looking at my glow-wand. The woman points at the wand, points at the boy. Sheepishly I thrust the wand at the lad. He takes it gratefully — too gratefully.
‘LOOK, AS FAR as I’m concerned,’ says Carmen, ‘the old coot is no better than a stringy bit of smoked and dried camel willy.’
I let out a surprised little snigger and snort.
‘Dad may be stringy but he’s not smoked and dried. He’s still got plenty of sap.’
‘Well, there’s a thought to give a girl the hots.’
We’re at her local cafe, Dante, where we’ve seated ourselves in two armchairs at a small round table in one of the windows. Carmen chose the windows. Obviously, for they allow optimal scoping of the well-heeled shoppers who stalk restlessly up and down the pavements of Nanjing Xi Lu. My sister is forty years old and a pathologist. Fond of a drink, fonder of food, she sips a red wine and chows down on a triple-chocolate megamuffin. Her hair, dyed a strong glossy black, has been bobbed friskily. As she sips and chows she laughs a lot — loudly — and at the same time twists in her seat to keep casting an eye over the doings, while cocking an ear for the words, of the other clientele of the cafe.
‘I don’t mean that,’ I say, letting out another sniggery snort. ‘I mean blood coursing through his veins.’
‘I think you mean lymph oozing.’
‘He’ll see ninety yet.’
At the next table sits a family group made up of a young woman with two folk in tow — her boyfriend and her mother. The young woman wears a little black number low on her shoulders. A thin silver chain drapes itself around her white neck. Her hair is tastefully auburn, artfully streaked to look real, tied back in a ponytail with a silk kerchief. She drinks coffee. The boyfriend wears a white polo shirt and in his ear a tiny diamond stud. On his wrist he sports a Rolex. He drinks coffee too. The mother, bored and jaded and about my age, drinks green tea. On her head bobs a black beret, while turquoise mascara burrows into the lids of two squinty eyes. Her neck hurts her, I think. When not talking she reaches back awkwardly with her right hand and presses the palm against the nape of the neck.
‘Yeah, well, you may be right,’ concedes Carmen. ‘Given that he’s already spent ten years tottering along wordless and bloody useless since the first surgery.’
‘He’s extraordinary, isn’t he?’
‘Dad is the least extraordinary man I know. Not that I think I know him anyway.’
‘Yes, well, point taken. I was meaning his will to stay alive.’
‘It’s not will to stay alive, it’s fear of death.’
‘Can’t be! He enjoys everything so much. He enjoys everything with gusto. Kinda lovely when you think how in his earlier days, when we were kids, he seemed to be living from a sense of duty. Now it’s clear that he lives from a sense of — of feeling that he’s happy just living one day, and then after that another day.’
‘Happy? The old goat can’t be feeling happy.’
‘Hey, maybe we shouldn’t use words like goat and camel’s willy. I worry that if I let myself use words like that, then —’
My sis stares at me boldly.
‘Then?’ she prompts.
‘Well, you know, there’s something to be said for not letting yourself speak out. The words that pop into my brain whenever I think about him aren’t nice words.’
‘You mean they’re true words.’
‘I mean they’re bad words. They’re bloody crude words.’
‘Civilised society needs people willing to speak crudely,’ proclaims Carmen. ‘It needs loose cannons.’
‘I can’t help feeling that if I let myself speak crude words then the next thing to follow will be crude deeds.’
Carmen loses interest in anything I might have to say right now, because two young women come and grab a table nearby. One wears a pink tanktop. The other has silver piercings. Apart from us they’re the only white punters in the place. My sis eavesdrops on their nattering.
‘Oh no, she’s coming to the party?’ says Tanktop. ‘Random!’
‘Oh groan,’ says Piercings. ‘How fun will that be? None!’
‘I hate to do the back in my day thing,’ says Carmen to me in a stage whisper. ‘But back in my day a girl knew that if she had a bust the size of a bus it wasn’t wise to wear a tanktop.’
‘I was thinking of taking a quick flight back home for a few days. You know, before teaching begins.’
‘What? Why?’
‘To check up on Dad.’
‘Waste of time, waste of money, waste of love. Don’t do it.’
‘Well, no doubt I won’t. I don’t exactly fancy seeing him again so soon after getting away.’
‘What will I wear to the party?’ wonders Tanktop. ‘Can’t make up my mind whether to wear my new skirt or my new bootcuts.’
‘Wear your bootcuts, they’ll look wicked,’ cries Piercings.
Tanktop orders a chai latte.
‘How was your hot date with Thingy?’ she asks Piercings.
Piercings orders a mochaccino.
‘Well, I am totally not man-bashing here,’ she says, ‘but —’
‘Dad is a sad old fart whose life is empty of everything but habit,’ cuts in Carmen. ‘Trust me on this, big brother. As far as I can work out his life has always been empty of everything but habit. We’re duping ourselves if we think there’s anything there for us. Anything like fondness, kindness, warmth or any other noun you might care to choose to denote qualities that could be thought fatherly. Not only does he not need us, we don’t need him. We never, in point of fact, ever had him. I won’t be visiting him any more. Not unless I turn up there one night with an axe.’
‘An axe — what?’
‘I wonder how far you have to go before you’re driven to murder somebody. I quite fancy myself as an axe murderer, chopping my way through his scrawny useless neck.’
I’ve got a lump in my throat. I can see my sis wants to cry.
‘Hey, he’s done his best, Carmen. He tried. He —’
A tall white guy lopes into the cafe. German, I’d say. He wears flared jeans, a flared leather jacket with wasp waist, lots of pockets, seventies retro style. The main mark of his pleasant but otherwise not notable face is the way he’s meticulously clipped two sideburns on each side of his jaw. Sassy sideburns, raking across his pale white skin.
‘Mm, a blond,’ says Carmen.
‘Peroxide, I think. He’s young enough to be your son.’
‘Who cares? Arse and facewise he’s not my type, but mmmm — a blond. Drool. Blond is always good.’
One evening, a fortnight later, Jin Dui and I are seated on the balcony of a costly apartment drinking beer. The apartment belongs to Jin Dui. We came back here together that first night after picking each other up at the club. We shagged, then slept together. We’ve slept together a couple more times since. Now we’re looking out at the dark sky. Jin Dui has slid a CD into his sound system. New Age. The night is humid, hot. A full moon has come swimming over a cluster of vast glassy tower blocks. One of the towers is shooting rays of light up into the darkness — a little like the strobes of the gay disco — above floodlit domes. The rays are violet, then indigo. The domes make me think about Constantinople seen from the Bosphorus in the fifth or sixth century, except that they swell not from the calm waters of an inland sea but from the slick tops of techno towers.
‘Kind of tired today,’ says Jin Dui.
‘Poor guy,’ I say.
‘So maybe we just take it easy. Go to bed early for sleep.’
‘Okay, that’s cool,’ I murmur, having already come to understand the guy well enough to know that go to bed early for sleep means just what it says. ‘I had an email about my father’s operation today.’
�
�Successful?’
‘Successful.’
The entrance to this apartment tower is guarded by an immense Roman gateway. Corinthian pillars climb to a height of three storeys, in curved colonnades. A roaring stone lion crouches, ready to pounce, at the end of each colonnade. The apartment behind our balcony measures 188 square metres, counted painstakingly. The number 8 brings good luck. When you speak it out loud it’s a homonym for the word meaning wealth. A lot of numbers can bring good or bad luck in this city. The number 66 is good because it means all goes smoothly. A very bad number is 514 because it means I want you to die.
‘I so happy,’ says Jin Dui. ‘I happy your father don’t suffer.’
‘Dad’s a man who’s — he’s very —’
I falter because the words I want to use are words like stoical, uncomplaining, which won’t be easy for Jin Dui to grasp. So I’m fishing for other words, and as I start fishing it occurs to me that I don’t know whether my dad really is stoical and uncomplaining. I know only that those are the signs he chooses to show the world. What feelings secretly pulse inside his chest? What thoughts really race through his skull?
‘I do not like my father,’ says Jin Dui.
‘Oh, sorry to hear that,’ I say, feeling a quick friendly warmth.
‘Very unlikeable man. He drinks. He bets. He has many girlfriends, and he spend too much money on gifts for them, make my mother unhappy. A bad father. He almost never talk to me. Every year, only a few words.’
Only a few words from my dad, too, for years and years. Nowadays, of course, no words — or only words written in wipeaway ink on a whiteboard.
‘Does he know you’re gay?’
‘I think he knows but not knows. Never say a word. Chinese think the gay things are ridiculous, or childish. My father wants the grandson. Marriage is such a necessity.’
Shanghai Boy Page 4
