My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  Alice nodded with approval. ‘You’re getting very good, Bill.’ She carried on tucking into her honey-roast pork. ‘Any comment from your clients?’

  He had given her enough. ‘I haven’t had the chance to speak to our clients,’ he said. ‘I’m sure they’ll be devastated.’

  The journalist looked unconvinced. ‘Well, I don’t know if they’ll be exactly devastated, Bill. A dozen workers a day lose a limb in the factories of Shenzhen. A dozen a day! And they’re ten times more likely to die than their counterparts in Europe.’

  It’s so easy, he thought with a flash of anger. It’s so easy when you are that certain. ‘Would you like it better if they were all unemployed?’ he said.

  ‘I would prefer it if these poor bastards were treated like human beings,’ she said.

  Bill was aware of Nancy hovering awkwardly behind him. He introduced the two women and Alice smiled up at Nancy.

  ‘Will you join our Russian friends and I for dinner?’ she said, glancing over at the other occupied table. One of the Russians was entertaining his friends by pulling the waitress’s ponytail as she attempted to pour their Tsingtaos. ‘They’re enormous fun. Just before you arrived one of them hit me on the back of the head with a spring roll.’

  But Bill declined, and they left Alice and the Russians in the cavernous hotel restaurant and went out into the teeming streets of Shenzhen, a world of noise that smelled of diesel fumes and roast duck.

  He looked at Nancy.

  ‘That’s a friend of the family,’ he said apologetically. ‘My wife’s side.’

  Nancy nodded. ‘I saw your wife,’ she said as they began to move through the evening crowd. ‘I saw Mrs Holden.’

  Bill nodded. ‘That dinner on the Bund.’ He remembered holding hands with Becca out on the deck, the skyline of Pudong shining like their shared vision of the future. It seemed like a long time ago.

  ‘No, before that night,’ Nancy said. ‘She didn’t remember me, but I remembered her.’ She was speaking quickly now, relaying something that he could tell she had kept to herself for a long time. ‘Just after you came over. In the museum. The museum on Huangpi Lu in Xintiandi. You know the one?’

  Bill thought about it.

  ‘Is that where the Party first met?’ he said.

  Nancy nodded. ‘I think your wife is very kind,’ she said, and Bill was again baffled by the weight the Chinese gave to certain words. They used words like kind and love in a way that seemed to change their meaning, or drain them of meaning altogether. But Nancy Deng nodded emphatically. She knew what she meant. ‘Your wife must be very kind to be interested in that place.’

  Bill nodded, feeling stupid. ‘She’s a sweetheart, all right,’ he said. The crowds and the smell of roast meat and clogged traffic were starting to make him feel claustrophobic. They didn’t seem to trouble Nancy.

  ‘I like that place very much,’ she was saying happily. ‘Not many people are so interested. That museum always empty. But I think – very interesting place. They want justice. People forget that now. That place – my high school took us there – it is why I became a lawyer.’

  Bill thought of Mad Mitch and his belief in the essential goodness of the law.

  ‘China not such a fair place then, and not such a fair place now,’ Nancy said. ‘You saw the factory.’ She snorted with contempt, shaking her head. ‘The dogs of the rich live better than the children of the poor.’

  Bill stopped walking. ‘Then why do they come to work at the factory?’ It was a stupid question, and he already knew the answer.

  ‘Because they all want to be part of the new China,’ Nancy said. ‘They have seen it on TV.’

  He looked at her. Fifty years ago she would have joined the Party. Now she tried to make her country a better place by studying at the Tsinghua University Law School and going to work for Butterfield, Hunt and West.

  ‘Is that why you became a lawyer?’ he said. ‘To change the world?’

  ‘You are laughing at me,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘I would never laugh at you,’ Bill said. They began moving with the crowds, following the smell of roast duck.

  ‘My father thought that being a lawyer was a sacred profession,’ she said. ‘Like being a doctor. And not just – I don’t know – a businessman.’

  ‘Your father must be a good man.’

  She shrugged with embarrassment. They had stopped at a line of food stalls. Nancy ordered for both of them. Some chicken dumplings, and what looked like slices of roast duck on rice.

  ‘I have no big dreams,’ Nancy said. ‘I know I am unimportant. But I think perhaps my country’s future is still to be decided. It doesn’t matter what anyone says. Nothing is inevitable in China.’

  ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ Bill said. ‘Up in Yangdong, why don’t the local government just give those farmers the compensation they have coming to them? Why cheat them?’

  She had bought two plates of thin slices of roast duck on rice, and she handed one to Bill with a pair of plastic chopsticks.

  ‘I blame Confucius,’ Nancy smiled. ‘Confucius emphasised loyalty to family above duty to society. That’s very Chinese -perhaps hard for you to understand. Why give something to a stranger when you can keep it for your own people without fear of punishment? That’s what they think. Someone like Chairman Sun. That’s what he thinks.’ She dug a heap of meat and rice on to her chopsticks and paused with it before her mouth. ‘In China the important men hate everyone’s corruption but their own.’

  ‘I saw this couple when we were at the factory,’ Bill said. ‘A young man and woman, they looked like they had just come off work, and I wondered if their lives would have been better if they had stayed in whatever little place they come from. And I don’t know.’ He stared at her helplessly. ‘I really don’t know.’

  Nancy Deng chewed thoughtfully. ‘Then they never meet.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’ He began to eat.

  It was the best duck he had ever tasted. ‘This is good,’ he said. He watched her order a plate of glossy green choi sam, slick with oyster sauce. ‘But what’s going to happen in China?’ he said. ‘Come on – you’re a lawyer. What’s your educated guess?’

  Nancy nodded emphatically. ‘The old men will die,’ she said. ‘That’s the one certainty. The old men will die. But who knows when? Old men can live for a long time.’

  Then they did not talk for a while, because they were both shovelling the piping hot food into their mouths. He smiled gratefully as Nancy passed him a plate of lychees. He felt better than he had all day.

  Talking with Nancy Deng on that street corner in Shenzhen, hearing this young woman speak with careful optimism about her country’s future, breathing the night air full of diesel and duck, eating what the people eat – here at last was the real China.

  They walked back to their hotel and when Bill was alone in his room he took out the three photos that he carried everywhere.

  Holly looking adorably dishevelled in her nursery school uniform a year ago. Becca and Holly on that beach in the Caribbean two years back, his daughter grinning under a pink Foreign Legion hat, and his wife in big shades and that orange shift thing, her hair pulled back and tucked into a chignon, looking like a movie star from the fifties. And Holly as a stern-faced, slightly damp baby, wrapped in a white towelling robe, glaring at the camera on bath night. He looked at the photos of his family for a while and then he propped them up on his little hotel desk, like his own private barricade against the world that was out there beyond the window.

  He thought of Becca’s eyes, as blue as pieces of sky, and he knew that he would not see JinJin Li when he returned to Shanghai. Or rather, he would still see her – coming and going from Paradise Mansions, across a crowded restaurant on the Bund, walking through the ornate lobby of some new hotel – and he would be polite, but he would keep his distance. He would not see her smile, or the long lines of her body, or the way her eyes seemed to ligh
t up when she looked at him. He would harden his heart and he would not see these things and he would wait for his wife to return, and look at him once more with eyes so blue they looked like pieces of sky.

  SEVENTEEN

  The stomach cramps woke him, tight spasms of pain that dragged him from sleep and sent him staggering blindly towards the bathroom.

  Bill knelt in front of the toilet and threw up until he was empty, shivering and bewildered with the sweat pouring from him, and then he left the bathroom, came straight back and tried to throw up some more, retching on an empty stomach until he was spitting up blood.

  He shuffled back to the bedroom and flopped on to the bed. An alarm was ringing in his ears and it took him a few dazed seconds to realise that it was only the clock. Where was he? He was in Shanghai. It was Monday morning. It was time to go to work.

  He went back to the bathroom and made an effort to shower and shave. He must have cut his face because when he was forced to sink back to his knees, his drained stomach straining to be free of him, a few beads of blood ran down his chin and stained the tiled floor.

  He dressed with shaking hands and lay back on the bed, worn out and sweaty. The spare room revolved around him. He stood up and it stopped. Muttering encouragement, Bill let himself out of the apartment, light-headed and stomach aching.

  In the lift he realised that his legs were not all they should be and propped himself up against the door until it opened on the ground floor. The day seemed over-lit and harsh. He stepped into the courtyard and took a few steps before he realised that he wasn’t going to work.

  He leaned against a new BMW that had been parked there overnight and tried to catch his breath. Annie came out of the opposite block, dressed for the gym, and regarded him warily with her hard little face. Bill raised his hand, a listless plea for help, but she was soon gone, moving quickly on her trainers, shooting him a disapproving look over her shoulder. He had not known that Louis Vuitton made trainers.

  Time seemed to stop as he slumped against the car. He looked for the porter but there was no sign of him. He would call the office, that’s what he would do. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his phone, but he had left it in the flat.

  Bill looked up at clouds scudding quickly across the sky, his mind grasping for a plan. He would go back to the flat, that’s what he would have to do. He cursed, launched himself from the car, but before he could make it to the lift he felt himself pitch forward.

  Someone did their best to catch him. He felt hands on his arms that almost broke his fall, and then the hands were dragging at the lapels of his suit jacket, hauling him off his knees, and there was another pair of hands helping him to his feet.

  He opened his eyes to see Jenny One and Jenny Two on either side of him, conferring in Shanghainese as they guided him to the lift. They were both dressed in black. All black. But somehow he did not register that they were going to a funeral.

  The two Jennys fumbled in his pockets and found the key to his apartment. They tried to lead him into the master bedroom but he pulled away and had soon resumed his prayer position in front of the toilet, with Jenny Two patting and stroking his back as he strained and groaned and sweated, with nothing left to come out.

  Back in the master bedroom Jenny One had pulled the curtains. He was too tired to explain to them that this wasn’t his room, that his room was the other one, the guest room, that the master bedroom was where his wife and daughter slept, or used to, but it was all too complicated and too much of an effort and so he said nothing and just did his best to help them as they undressed him down to his Calvins and eased him between the sheets. The sheets were cool and fresh. This was a great bed.

  Then he must have slept for a while because JinJin was suddenly there, and then there was some conversation that he couldn’t understand, and the door was closing as the Jennys went away. The bedroom tried to spin round but her face remained before him, the still centre of his universe.

  ‘Sleep now,’ she said.

  ‘You deserve,’ he said, reaching for her hand, trying to sit up. It was so small. How could anyone have such small hands? She pulled it away with an impatient scowl. He wanted to talk, there were things he had to say, but there was something wrong with his breathing, he was all clogged up, and it distracted him, and the thought of exactly what she deserved escaped him.

  ‘Too much talk,’ she said, shaking her head. She pulled him up, plumped his pillows meaninglessly, and then eased him back on the bed. He closed his eyes, which were stinging from the sweat, his guts felt empty and painful, and he was more tired than he’d known it was possible to feel.

  He reached for her again and this time when he took her hand she didn’t pull it away. A phone was ringing somewhere. They ignored it.

  She stayed with him through the endless day, half-carrying him to the toilet when he needed to get on his knees and pray, and he later realised that she had seen him at a lower physical ebb than anyone had ever seen him in his life. She slept beside him, fully clothed on top of the sheets, a slender arm draped across his chest.

  And in the morning, when a full twenty-four hours had gone by and he was still shivering and sweating as he slept in that wonderful bed with nothing but the stomach cramps inside him, she searched through his pockets for his wallet, trying to find someone to call.

  ‘We talk about heart failure but the phrase is misleading,’ said the cardiologist. ‘In a medical sense, heart failure is a relative term. Failure implies that the heart is no longer pumping blood into the arteries and the patient is dead.’ His thin lips moved to somewhere between a smile and a grimace. ‘And this can of course happen.’

  Becca, her father and Sara were in his office. Becca thought that the office was surprisingly small for such a coveted, expensive specialist. He was a ski-tanned fifty-five-year-old, looking forward to retirement, looking forward to dinner at the Ivy. Her father was his two o’clock appointment, but he was running late. They should have learned that by now, Becca thought. Get the early appointments and then there was less chance of sitting in the waiting room flicking through worn-out glossy magazines, wondering if the end result would be life or death. They should call it the wondering room, she thought.

  The cardiologist’s assistant, a fat nurse in a blue coat, was placing black medical plates on a light screen. It didn’t look like her father. It didn’t look like a heart.

  Becca sat there between her father and her sister and wondered, How many does he see every day? There was a practised compassion about the cardiologist. He has seen it all before, Becca thought. The terror in the face of the patient, the weepy disbelief in the loved ones, the desperate hunger for a scrap of good news. How many death sentences, how many reprieves? Too many to count, she thought. And we are only his two o’clock.

  ‘Think of an unhealthy heart like an inefficient worker,’ said the cardiologist. ‘The inefficient worker works twice as hard as the efficient worker, but he doesn’t get half as much done. The healthy heart –’

  Becca’s telephone began to ring inside her bag. The fat nurse looked at Becca as if she wanted to kill her. Becca released the hands of her father and sister and quickly pulled out her phone. She saw that the screen said UNKNOWN CALLER just as she switched it off.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said to everyone, but mostly to the fat nurse who wanted to kill her.

  Then Becca felt the hands of her father and sister reclaim her own hands, their fingers digging into her palms, holding her for comfort and reassurance and as if to stop her getting away.

  ‘You can pull your pants and trousers up,’ Dr Khan told Shane. While Shane was getting dressed, Khan went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He looked exhausted. He was only hours off the flight from Heathrow and in the grip of the dazed, spaced-out dislocation of full-blown jet-lag. When he went back to his office, they were waiting for him.

  Shane’s wife sat beside him, but Shane felt completely alone. Somehow Rosalita’s presence in the doctor’s surger
y made him feel more isolated than if he had been there without her.

  They were here because the pain had not stopped. The pain down there in his trusty old meat and two veg, his faithful servants for so long and on so many adventures. They had betrayed him at last, for the pain down there had sometimes gone away but it had never gone very far. For a while now he had believed that there was something very wrong with him. Today he would find out.

  It was a time when he wanted a friend, an ally, and a wife. Someone to tell him that it would be all right – whatever happened, he would get through it. They would get through it together. But instead he felt like the loneliest man in the world.

  ‘It’s not cancer and it’s not a scrotal hernia,’ Dr Khan said, but something about his tone prevented Shane from releasing a sigh of relief.

  At least the examination had been mercifully swift. Shane on the couch, his pants and trousers pulled down but not pulled off. The fingers in the plastic gloves had located the source of the pain, dug expertly into him, and now Dr Khan was confidently announcing that it was not the thing that Shane had feared most. It was not cancer. The plastic gloves had moved away from the testicles, heading north, pressing against the top of the groin, and his abdomen, and then back down south of the border to the source of the pain. But it wasn’t a hernia either. And the way that Dr Khan pronounced on these things, Shane knew that he had no doubt.

  But there was something else.

  ‘Unfortunately it could be torsion,’ Dr Khan said, and Shane thought – torsion? It was a word, a fate, that he had never encountered, never dreamed of. Shane had spent weeks with medical encyclopaedias running through the things that could be wrong with him if it wasn’t just the after-effects of a kick in the balls.

  Cancer? Maybe. A scrotal hernia? Possibly, and although it would be nasty it would be infinitely preferable to the Big C. But torsion? He had never heard of torsion. Was torsion even listed in the Concise Medical Dictionary? Oh, definitely. But he had not looked it up. This is what will kill you, Shane thought.