by Tony Parsons
The Irish woman looked sympathetic. ‘Have you got family there?’ she said, and he didn’t know how to answer that.
He walked down the hill and below the mudslide. The soldiers were on the road above him. He could see the stumps of trees when they had been chopped down, and the frozen brown river that had slid across the road. The hill looked as though it had collapsed. Black stars lazily drifted across the scene. But his eye was closing now and the black stars were not so bad.
The ground was slick with wet mud. As he descended the slope he fell over almost immediately, pitching forward on to his hands and knees. He got up slowly, holding on to a stunted tree for support, his palms and trousers covered in mud. He kept going down the hill, but treading more carefully, walking sideways, digging his shoes into the churned earth.
When he was beyond the mudslide he walked back up to the road and among the stalled traffic. He could hear a helicopter above him. He kept walking. He felt he knew this road but when he came to her father’s village he almost walked through it before he recognised the place.
The river was a broad brown flood. There were no tents. There were no fields. The fields and the tents were all gone. A mountain of mud had slid to the very edge of the village, burying the school, and wiping the place clean of any distinguishing features. He stared around, completely disorientated.
The small, carefully divided paddy fields that he remembered were now a glassy lake. He heard a noise and could not place it. It was like a growl coming from the centre of the earth. It was like underground thunder. He was very scared. But this was the place, even if everything had changed.
He could not find her father’s house. He looked around at the world of mud that had invaded this place. Then he saw it. Propped up with thick logs. The house next door was gone. Just gone. He heard the noise again and this time understood. The mud was rumbling in its core.
Something landed on his hand and he slapped it dead. A mosquito with black and white stripes. There were helicopters in the sky, as if watching him. He went inside her father’s house. JinJin was sitting on the side of a single bed, holding ChoCho. Her father lay on the bed, shivering uncontrollably. Bill took a few steps forward. There was a rash on his face. Bill stared at them with wonder. He would never have guessed that she would come to her father. He thought the years of violence had killed her sense of duty towards the old man. But nothing would kill it.
‘William,’ she said, as if expecting him. ‘Your face.’
There was a cracked shaving mirror on the wall. He looked into it and saw his right eye was buried under gorged black-and-purple bruising. He turned away and didn’t look at it any more. The black stars had gone for now, and he was glad of that. He saw that the rash on her father’s face was also on the baby.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ he said.
‘Sick from the mosquito,’ she said. ‘From the bad water.’
Dengue fever. The Irish woman was right. He put his arm around JinJin and outside he could hear the tons of mud growl and move. Or perhaps he imagined it. The mud was what he was frightened of. It had not scared him on the road but it did now. There it was. The noise from outside again. Louder now. It was real. They could all die today. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said, jumping up, ready to be gone. ‘We have to go, JinJin.’
‘The soldiers will come for us,’ she said, indicating the ceiling. You could still hear them up there. ‘The helicopters.’
‘Nobody’s coming,’ Bill said. He looked around the shack. Something was missing. He stared at her, trying to concentrate. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, kneeling beside her, feeling the sickness in this place. The child scared him. The child wasn’t crying. ‘Nobody’s coming,’ he said. ‘The helicopters are not coming. You know why? Because they can’t land.’ He realised that he saw it all with perfect clarity. The hovering helicopters and the ground transformed to shifting mud. They could look but they couldn’t touch. ‘They want to help us but they can’t, so we have to help ourselves.’
JinJin smiled weakly. ‘The soldiers are so great,’ she said. She was a real Chinese patriot, a true believer. Perhaps they all were.
‘The soldiers are so great but they can’t help us,’ he said, standing up. ‘The roads have gone. Everyone is stuck. We have to help ourselves. We have to go now or we will die.’ He looked around the room. ‘Where’s your friend?’
‘He went back to Guilin,’ she said, as the wind picked up outside. ‘There’s only you, William.’
She still didn’t move. They could hear the old man breathing, the rain beating against the corrugated roof, the moaning wind, and he could almost feel the great mass of sludge outside, waiting to bury them all.
JinJin remained where she was and Bill saw for the first time that she was paralysed with exhaustion. How many nights had she gone without sleep, caring for her father and her son? Bill took ChoCho from her arms and wrapped him in all the blankets he could find. Then he helped her father from the bed. If he could stand up then he could walk, and if he could walk then he could live. They could all live.
‘I this girl father,’ he told Bill, leaning against him, and Bill nodded, taking the man’s weight. The rash on his face was a splatter of red welts.
‘Listen to me. I can’t carry both of them. I can’t carry everybody. I can’t do it.’ Bill held out the listless child. ‘You understand?’ The old man took his grandson.
Bill got JinJin to her feet and she reached for her son. Then she was on her knees and Bill was crouching beside her, his arms around her, holding her, whispering to her until she nodded once, acknowledging that carrying her child was impossible. She looked at him and wiped her eyes with her fingers.
‘Bad mother,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said.
Bill scooped her up in his arms and carried her out of the shack. The old man trailed behind them, carrying the boy. Bill carried her through the mud with the half-buried and three-quarters-buried bodies and the wrecked homes and ruined lives, cursing the heavens and then saying, Please God, Please God, until he was too tired to do even that.
They reached the highway. The old man was dropping behind. But he was still there. ChoCho was still in his arms. Bill sat down on a tree stump, JinJin beside him, leaning against him, almost sleeping now, or something like sleep, and they let the old man catch up and rest, and they kept resting until Bill thought he heard a sound. From the hill above them, from the ground below. Mixed in with the terrible wind, the sound of something underground, about to appear and devour them. Then he stood up and they kept going. The old man was soon trailing behind. Bill shouted at him to keep going, and JinJin held him with her arms around his neck, and he felt her breath on his face, and it was as if they were still lovers.
They got to the roadblock and it was only then that his legs gave out. Bill collapsed into the arms of a PLA soldier and he could feel arms lifting JinJin from him, and someone holding him close, and not letting him go, as if the human touch would heal everything.
At the shelter they wrapped him in a blanket and gave him a bottle of water and a bowl of instant noodles.
There were no dry clothes to be had, but he felt warmer inside his blanket and gulped the noodles down, far too fast at first, making him giddy with nausea, and then more slowly, like a child learning to eat, and then he licked the plastic bowl clean when the food was gone, trying to get the last bit of goodness.
JinJin had gone to the hospital with her child and her father. Bill was still dumbfounded that he had found her here. This was the part of her that he had never imagined. Despite everything, she was still her father’s daughter and she did not hesitate to go to him in his need. He had thought that he knew her better than anyone in the world. But perhaps he knew nothing at all.
Bill realised that his hands were shaking and he stared at them with his good eye, willing them to be still. But they kept trembling with shock and cold and relief.
He looked up at the sky. There was something wrong wi
th the sky. It was different. He realised that the rain had stopped and the wind had fallen silent. And it was only then that he remembered the keys.
He felt in his pocket, then shoved in his hand. Nothing. Lost in the mud somewhere. On the hill. At the roadblock. In the back of the taxi. Left in a plastic security tray at an airport he would never see again. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. He had not really come thousands of miles to return her keys. He saw that now.
He had told himself that he was coming to return the keys, but now he understood that he was coming to tell JinJin Li that he had loved her, and to tell her that his heart did not change so easily, and to tell her goodbye.
The apartment was empty when he got home.
It was late afternoon on the next day. They should have been here. It was a school day, a Monday, and whatever they had been doing, it should have been over by now.
Bill took off his mud-caked clothes and looked at the laundry basket and then put them in a rubbish bag. Everything. It was all ruined. Then he went to the shower and stood under the hottest water he could stand until the black stars were swarming over his damaged eye and he thought he was going to faint.
He came out of the shower and found a T-shirt and jeans and went to the window. The weather was finally lifting. Mountainous clouds rolled across the sky, the dying sunshine struggling behind them. The courtyard of Paradise Mansions was deserted. It was as if his wife and daughter had disappeared. He tried calling Becca’s mobile and there was only the voicemail. He said that he was back, and his cracked voice sounded weak and strange in the empty flat.
Dinnertime came and went and still there was no sign. He ate nothing, and felt as if he was floating. Even the pale sunlight from the window seemed dazzling. He sat on the sofa and massaged his temples, but the pounding would not stop. He was lost, he realised. He had never felt so lost in his life. He closed his eyes and he must have slept because he awoke with a jolt when he heard the key in the lock. Then his daughter was standing in front of him. She was holding a pink balloon with Shanghai Zoo printed on it.
‘What happened to your eye?’ she said.
He self-consciously touched his face. ‘I hurt it, angel.’
Holly pulled a face. ‘It looks really gross.’
‘It will be better tomorrow,’ he said.
She tapped the balloon against his legs.
‘We saw the red panda,’ she told him. ‘And the golden monkeys.’
He smiled. ‘You sure it wasn’t the other way round?’ he said. She looked confused. ‘What?’
‘You’re sure it wasn’t a red monkey and a golden panda?’
Holly shook her head, wise to his tricks. ‘Daddy,’ she sighed. ‘You’re going to have to stop being so dumb.’
Becca had gone into the kitchen and he did not see her face. She was at the fridge, pulling out drinks. They must have eaten out.
Holly went off to her room. He heard the sound of her playing. No, he realised. She was reading. She was already reading. He had missed so much. He stood up and it felt like every muscle in his body was aching. His legs, his arms, his back. There was an old man’s stiffness in them, and he knew that he had asked them to do too much. He walked over to his wife and watched her face in the light of the fridge.
‘I thought you were gone,’ he said, and she turned to look at him. There were three cartons in her hands. Orange juice for Holly, cranberry juice for herself and milk for his tea. A drink for each of them.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not gone,’ Becca said simply. ‘We’re not gone.’ She put down the drinks and stood in front of him. She reached out and lightly touched his broken face and he held her hand there and he would not let it go.
He remembered.
TWENTY-NINE
‘This is Suzy Too,’ Bill told the two new guys. ‘Everyone comes to Suzy Too.’
Business was good. The cake was getting bigger. The firm couldn’t cope with the work. So Devlin had flown to London and a little over a month later a pair of lawyers arrived with two-year contracts and dreams of early retirement.
On their first night in Shanghai, Devlin and Bill took them for dinner on the Bund and then Bill took them out for drinks on Mao Ming Nan Lu.
Jet-lagged and drunk and free at last from the chains of home, they stared with disbelief at their first sight of Suzy Too. The girls at the bar. The girls on the dance floor. The girls everywhere. They had never known there were so many women in the world.
Their very first night in this city, Bill thought, envying them as he signalled for Tsingtao all round. He blinked up at the strobe lights. The black stars had almost gone but the lights all had an aura, like a misty halo. He looked away, remembering his own first night in Shanghai.
Jenny One walked by, suddenly looking a lot older. She took Bill’s hand and placed a chaste kiss on one cheek and then the other. She smiled sadly and kept walking. Bill wanted to ask – But what about the Frenchman?
The new guys were covered in girls. Hanging on their arms, asking them where they came from, swaying their hips, and trying to encourage the new guys to dance, because then there would be no need to talk to them.
‘Bill – these girls?’ said one of the new guys. Somehow it was a question, although Bill did not know exactly what the man was asking. There was a tall, haughty woman behind him with her long arms around his waist, and two smaller ones by his side, one of them doll-like and pretty, the other one chubby but proudly large-breasted. Bill did not recognise them. It felt like Suzy Too was full of newcomers. The women were holding the guy’s hands and trying to encourage him to shuffle his brogues to Eminem’s ‘Shake That’. Bill guessed that Elgar was more his thing. The guy was one of those old-fashioned Englishmen – all Adam’s apple and glasses and an accent that told Bill he had been educated privately and among boys. Harry something. He looked as if he had struggled to meet girls all his life. But even Harry something wouldn’t struggle in Shanghai, Bill thought. In six months Harry something would think he was Errol Flynn. In six months he would be the cock of the Bund. But for now there was a thin film of nervous mist on his spectacles.
‘I’ll tell you about these girls,’ said the other new guy. Fresh off the flight from Heathrow, he fancied himself as something of an expert. Bill looked him up and down. Blond, cropped, fit in a Sunday-morning-football sort of way. Nigel somebody. He was not so obviously overwhelmed as Harry something. Probably been on a two-week package tour to Thailand, Bill thought. Probably had a hand-job in Patpong and thought that made him Marco Polo.
‘These girls are whores,’ Nigel said confidently. He reached out and squeezed a small breast too hard. The girl flinched, pulled away with a grimace of pain and distaste.
Bill took a breath, and held his temper.
‘Don’t call them that,’ he said. ‘Please don’t ever call them that.’
The man looked at Bill with surly belligerence, but said nothing. Bill was about to become a partner. He was billing more hours than anyone in the firm. Soon Bill would be their boss. He could make their lives very hard.
‘Then what are they?’ said Harry something. His little eyes had completely disappeared behind his steamed-up glasses. The chubby girl with large breasts had a hand in his trouser pocket and she was laughingly telling the other one that she could not find anything. This is not a deferential society, Bill thought. ‘If not whores,’ asked Harry something, ‘then what are they?’
Bill took a long pull on his Tsingtao. He was going to start cutting back on the beer. He was going to stop coming to Suzy Too. He wasn’t a tourist guide. Let them find their own fun. A shower of black stars fell across his vision and was gone.
‘They’re just practical,’ he said.
He had been told that they did not feel love in the way that he felt love, that they responded to acts of kindness and generosity with all of their body and heart, but that was not love, they told him, not in the Western sense of the one true one, the partner for life, the unmet lover found at
last. Not love like that, like love back home, the way that it was meant to be, they said. Not real love the way it was made in the West.
They were just so practical when it came to love, they told him until he believed it, until he could see what they meant, and he could see that we in the West were not practical at all – we simply fell, we just took the giddy step over the cliff and landed where our wayward hearts took us.
The East was practical. The East could not afford to love. The West was romantic. Because the West could afford to love.
But he came to believe that somehow he and JinJin Li had traded places. He came to believe that she had somehow stopped being practical and become infected with the Western concept of love -loving him even when common sense told her to bail out, loving him even when her head told her to find someone else, loving him when every instinct in her soul told her to be practical – she still loved him, she loved him through all the hurt and betrayal and sadness, and she kept on loving him even when it was not wise, and even when it brought her no happiness.
And Bill changed too. He had started out believing that he was different from the married man in the silver Porsche who had brought her to Paradise Mansions. Bill thought that he was better than that man because his heart was good, because he cared for her in a deeper, truer sense than that man, and that his love for her was real. But even back then, when he thought he loved her well and true, he could not deny that he felt that he had a claim on JinJin Li.
He had invested so much of everything he had to give, and he had risked losing all the things he loved, and he told himself that – unlike the man in the silver Porsche – he expected nothing in return. That was not true. What he expected in return was that she would love him and that she would keep on loving him as if he owned the lease on her heart. They would both be disappointed.
Was he any better than the man who had kept her in Paradise Mansions? No, Bill saw now that he was far worse, because he had dressed it all up as love. But when JinJin Li finally remembered to be practical and walk away, when the contract between them was finally broken, he’d felt totally and utterly betrayed, and responded with a bitterness that he thought might choke him.
