My Favourite Wife

‘Personally, I think orange is even better,’ Bill said. ‘That’s just my opinion.’

‘And this is us,’ Holly said, touching a green-and-blue ball. ‘That’s earth. That’s where we are…and guess what, Daddy.’

‘What, darling?’ Did he know that much about the planets when he was four? He didn’t think so. In fact, he didn’t know that much about the planets at thirty-one.

‘The brightest stars you can see are already dead,’ she said confidently. ‘We see their image, and they look nice and lovely, but they died a long time ago.’

The brightest stars were dead already? Could this possibly be true? He didn’t know if he should correct her or not. She knew far more than he did.

‘It’s just something I learned,’ Holly said.

The ayi ushered her off to brush her teeth before going to school, and Bill heard Becca in the bedroom on the phone to her father. He glanced at his watch. Breakfast time in Shanghai meant that it was around midnight back home.

Becca called her father almost every day. Bill felt a pang of guilt, because he hadn’t phoned his own father since they’d arrived.

Perhaps he should give the old man a call, he thought, and immediately dismissed the idea. They wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Or they would get into one of their pointless rows about nothing, hang up angry, and that would be even worse.

It was different when his mother was still alive. They were a real family then. But they had stopped being a real family fifteen years ago. Bill and his father tried hard, but they both knew that it was doomed to failure. Two men couldn’t be a family. There were just not enough of them, there was no centre, no heart, and there were too many rough edges. Too much testosterone, too many rows. Everything and nothing proved reason for an argument, and then Bill was out of the house and off to university, working in the holidays and weekends because he had to, it was the only way he could afford to stick it, and because he didn’t want to go home. It made him feel desperately sad to admit it.

Get the old man out here, Bill thought as down in the courtyard the limo appeared and Tiger pulled up behind the silver Porsche. Yes, get the old man out here for a few weeks. Show him the sights. Let him spend some quality time with his granddaughter, who he loved to bits. That would work.

His feeling that family life had ended forever didn’t change until he met Becca six years later. It was Becca who made him believe that he had a chance to belong to another family. He fell in love with her the night he met her, and it was like starting all over again.

Bill turned as Holly and the ayi came back into the room. His daughter still had the home-made universe in her hands and he smiled at her and got down on his knees to better admire the intricate design.

That’s what love is, he thought, as down in the courtyard came the sound of a Porsche 911 pulling away. A chance to start again.

For five years, between the age of eleven and sixteen, Becca and Alice Greene had been best friends.

It was one of those delirious all-consuming friendships of childhood, gloriously isolationist, a time of shared secrets and energetic recklessness – one night Alice had pierced Becca’s ears with a needle that she had heated over a candle, and it was a bloodbath that they laughed about for years. But it was the kind of friendship that was always slightly out of whack.

They were both boarders at a school in Buckinghamshire, a grim Gothic building surrounded by lush wooded hills, like a setting from a fairy tale. When their friendship began they had dressed the same, and wore their hair in the same fashion, and both said they wanted to be journalists when they grew up. Naturally they loved it when their schoolmates and their teachers said that they looked like twins. Yet they were not twins.

Becca’s father made a decent living at Reuters, but the school would have been out of reach without a scholarship, while Alice’s family owned a string of restaurants on Boat Quay in Singapore, and Alice had that easy confidence that comes from growing up with money that you haven’t earned.

The largesse was one-sided – Becca enjoyed family holidays in Bali with Alice and her parents, shopping sprees in Hong Kong courtesy of Alice’s credit card, first-class flights to Singapore during the long summer break. Singy, Alice called it, and before she was twelve years old, Becca was calling it Singy too. Coming down to Singy, Bec? So when Becca learned that Alice was working as a freelance journalist in Shanghai, it felt like the best news in the world.

Alice turned up just before Holly’s bedtime and when the two women embraced, fifteen years fell away.

The pair of them bathed Holly together, the child chatting excitedly at this admiring stranger, Alice making awestruck cooing sounds at Holly’s beauty and newness, and Becca couldn’t help feeling happy that perhaps she had restored some of the balance in their friendship. Now she had a child, a husband and a home, it felt like Alice wasn’t the one who held a majority share in the good life.

When Holly was sleeping, Becca fetched a bottle of white wine from the fridge and carried it to where Alice was standing by the window.

‘You’re not writing any more?’ Alice said, quite casually, although Becca felt the words press against some sensitive nerve.

‘No. I’m looking after Holly, mostly.’ She started telling the story of Holly’s asthma attack in London, and Alice nodded and looked concerned, but Becca cut it short and poured their wine. It sounded like an excuse, and it wasn’t. It was a reason. ‘Anyway, there’s lots to do around here,’ she said. Why the hell should she apologise for giving up work? ‘What brought you to Shanghai, Al? I thought you’d be in Hong Kong or Singy.’

Alice grimaced, and Becca smiled. She could see the ghost of the girl Alice had been at eleven, twelve, thirteen. Spoilt, generous, dead easy to love.

‘You know what it’s like for stringers,’ Alice said. They clinked glasses and grinned at each other. ‘Cheers. We have to follow the story.’ Alice sighed. ‘And the story they all want these days is the China dream. You know the thing – How China is reshaping our world. One billion new capitalists. The great China gold rush.’ Alice looked out of the window. ‘They – all the Western news outlets -want you to report the miracle.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s not all banana daiquiris at M on the Bund.’

‘How do you mean?’ Becca sipped her wine and felt a pang of foreboding. She really wanted them to have a good time tonight. Just get a bit drunk and talk for hours and feel that nothing had changed.

‘I mean the principal reason the economy keeps growing is because foreign idiots want to invest here,’ Alice said, and Becca recalled how impatient her friend could be with slowness and stupidity. There were girls at their school who were terrified of her. ‘No Western CEO wants to go down as the man who missed China,’ Alice said. ‘But how can it be an economic miracle when five hundred million Chinese are living on less than a dollar a day? By the middle of the century China will have a bigger economy than the US. And you know what? They will still have five hundred million people getting by on a dollar a day. It stinks. The whole thing.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nice wine,’ she said.

‘But a lot of them are leaving poverty behind, aren’t they?’ Becca said gently. ‘I mean, that’s what Bill’s boss always says.’

‘Some of them,’ Alice conceded. ‘A few million or so. But the Chinese deserve an affluence that’s worth having – clean water, not empty skyscrapers; rule of law, not back-handers; uncensored news, not broadband porn. They need education, democracy, a free press – not propaganda and Prada bags and traffic jams full of local-made Audis.’

‘I thought it would be more like Hong Kong,’ Becca admitted. ‘Or Hong Kong the way we knew it. You know – day trips out to the islands, weekends on somebody’s junk, Sunday lunch at Aberdeen.’

Alice laughed. ‘You make it sound idyllic.’

‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’ Becca said defiantly.

‘But it’s not Hong Kong,’ Alice said, her smile fading. ‘Shanghai has always been mainland China. You can forget all that Paris-of-the-Orient stuff. The Anglos never made Shanghai their own the way they did Hong Kong.’

‘Anyway,’ Becca said, feeling that she had been too sentimental and revealed too much, and that Alice must think she was some sad old housewife dreaming of better days. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. Another drink?’ she asked her old friend.

The two of them looked down at the courtyard. Gleaming cars were waiting with their engines running. The traffic was sparser than at the weekend, but there was a steady stream of young women getting into very new cars with older men at the wheel.

‘It’s very exciting,’ Becca said brightly, wanting to lighten the mood. She was so glad to see her friend. She wanted them to have a great time, just like the old days. ‘I think we’ve moved into some kind of knocking shop.’

‘Not a knocking shop.’ Alice smiled, and Becca saw she was happy for the chance to show off her local knowledge, eager to keep all the power for herself. ‘Becca, Paradise Mansions is a niaolong – a birdcage. There are a lot of them here in Gubei. Maybe even more of them in Hongqiao. The girls are called jinseniao – canaries.’

Becca’s blue eyes were wide. ‘So it’s true, then? These girls are all…prostitutes?’

Alice shook her head emphatically.

‘No – they only sleep with one guy. It’s all quite moral, in a twisted sort of way.’

Becca stared down at the courtyard.

‘I get it,’ she said. ‘They are all some rich man’s mistress.’

‘They’re not even really mistresses,’ Alice said. ‘It’s closer to second wives. I wrote a story about it. These women fall in love. Have children. Do a lot of laundry, if the guy is from out of town. It’s not a glamour profession, Bec. They live a normal, domestic life while waiting for the man to dump the number one wife. Which invariably he doesn’t – although I suppose it has happened. It can be quite a chaotic existence. Status can change overnight. The guy gets bored. Or his wife finds out. Or the canary gets caught enjoying her own bit on the side. Or the guy takes one too many Viagra and dies on the job.’

Becca nearly choked on her Chablis.

‘Don’t laugh, you heartless cow, it happens!’ Alice said. ‘These women are the modern concubines. The man is often from out of town – Hong Kong, Singy, Taiwan. A lot of overseas Chinese. They set the woman up in a flat, stay there when they’re in Shanghai. A lot of Taiwanese. Taibazi, the girls call them – which sort of means Taiwanese hicks from the Taiwanese sticks. They badmouth the Taiwanese, but most of the girls prefer the out-of-towners.’

Becca cradled her drink. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because they stay the night,’ Alice said, looking down at the courtyard. ‘Makes them feel more like a real wife, I guess.’ She smiled at her old friend. ‘You tell me, Bec. What does a real wife feel like?’

Becca just smiled.

Alice gestured at the courtyard with her glass. ‘Most of these guys all look like locals. Nobody in Taiwan or Hong Kong dresses as badly as that. But think about it. The man is spared the agony of looking for company in the bars, and the woman – who invariably grew up in unimaginable poverty – gets security. For herself and her family. At least for as long as it lasts, which can be years.’

‘A marriage of convenience,’ Becca said.

‘More like a meaningful relationship between sex and economics,’ Alice said.

‘I guess it goes on everywhere,’ Becca said, trying to sound worldly, trying not to look alarmed. Somehow prostitution would have been easier to understand.

‘These women can make a few thousand RMB a month in a normal job, if they’re lucky,’ Alice said. ‘Or they can live next door to you and Bill. Using what they’ve got to get what they want. Very pragmatic. Very Chinese. And this city is full of them.’

Buzzing between the larger cars was the red Mini Cooper. Of course, Becca thought. The tall girl stuck in the wrong gear.

‘There’s money here, all right,’ Alice said. ‘But Shanghai is a distorting mirror. Go to the countryside. Half of the kids there have never seen the inside of a school.’

Out of the child monitor came the sound of crying, and Becca left Alice brooding at the window. Perhaps she was trying much too hard to recapture their old friendship. Perhaps she should enjoy her own company a bit more, Becca thought as she took the half-sleeping Holly in her arms. And the company of her child in the hours between school and bed, and the company of her husband on Sunday and sometimes part of Saturday. Married people shouldn’t have this desperate need for friends, Becca thought.

But when Holly had settled Becca went back to the living room and found Alice smiling as if something had just come back to her.

‘Hey Bec,’ she said. ‘Remember when I pierced your ears?’

They couldn’t practise law in China.

That was the joke played on the Western lawyer in Shanghai, and Shane liked to mention it whenever the clock was creeping close to midnight and the lights were going out all over Pudong and they were sipping their cold coffee at desks still crowded with paperwork.

It said Foreign Lawyer on their business cards, because it was different for foreigners. If you were a foreign lawyer working for a foreign firm in Shanghai, the People’s Republic of China restricted you to the role of legal representative and kept you in your place. Even a Chinese lawyer like Nancy Deng could not practise PRC law at a foreign firm and was designated PRC lawyer, non-practising. Butterfield, Hunt and West had to get all their Chinese contracts rubber-stamped by some tame local lawyer.

But despite not being real lawyers in the eyes of the PRC, most nights the endless bureaucracy of doing business in China kept Bill in the office until he was too tired to see straight, and too full of caffeine to contemplate sleep.

‘For blokes who can’t practise law here,’ Shane said, ‘we sure are busy little buggers.’ He yawned and stretched, and sat on Bill’s desk, squashing a stack of files marked Department of Land and Resources. ‘Enough for one night, mate. More than enough. Let’s get a beer.’

A beer sounded good. Bill knew that Becca and Holly would have gone to bed hours ago. Now that he was sleeping in the second bedroom so as not to disturb them when he came back late, and when he left for work early, it didn’t really matter when he got home. A little unwinding sounded like just what he needed.

‘I’m going to tell you how it works out here,’ Shane shouted, raising his voice above a song that Bill couldn’t quite place. Something about making things more complicated. ‘I’m going to tell you what we call the Kai Tak rules, okay?’

‘The what?’

‘The Kai Tak rules. Pay attention. The Kai Tak rules are very important.’

They were in a place called Suzy Too. ‘Everybody comes to Suzy Too,’ Shane said. It was loud, smoky, crowded beyond belief. There was a dance floor in one corner, although people were dancing all over the place, including on the bars.

There were young Chinese men with dyed blond hair and Western women in jeans and T-shirts and Western men in stained polo shirts or business suits with their ties hanging off and Chinese women in short skirts or qipao or jeans that said Juicy on the back. Lots of them.

A woman pulled at Bill’s sleeve. She looked hungry. She tapped in some numbers on her mobile phone and showed it to him. It said 1000.

‘One thousand RMB,’ Shane said, taking Bill’s other sleeve. ‘That’s about £70.’

‘But eight hundred is okay,’ the woman said. She blinked, dazed by the smoke and exhaustion.

Bill stared at the handset, trying to understand.

‘Are you looking for a permanent girlfriend?’ she asked him.

Bill had pushed his face close to her, just to hear what she was saying. Now he reared back. ‘I’m married.’

The woman took this in her stride. ‘Yes, but are you looking for a permanent girlfriend?’

‘No thank you,’ Bill said, aware that he sounded as though he was declining a second cucumber sandwich at the vicar’s tea party.

Shane put a cold bottle of Tsingtao in his hand.

‘You know Kai Tak?’ the Australian said. ‘No? Kai Tak was the old airport in Hong Kong. Kowloon side. Your missus said she visited the Big Noodle as a kid. She would remember it. Before your time, mate.’ Shane’s free hand, the one that wasn’t holding a Tsingtao, impersonated a plane making an erratic landing. ‘Where you came in through the blocks of flats hanging their laundry on the balconies and you would often land with someone’s pants wrapped around your neck. Sometimes your own.’ He winked, clinking bottles with Bill. ‘And that’s the point.’

The woman with the mobile phone said something in Chinese as she draped an arm around Bill’s shoulders, an act more of weariness than desire.

‘You’re beautiful,’ Shane told Bill.

‘Who says that?’ Bill asked. ‘You or her?’

‘Her,’ Shane said. ‘To me, you’re just about cute.’

The woman turned to Bill and said something, her eyes half-closed.

‘She loves you,’ Shane said.

Bill stared at her. ‘But we just met,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the woman said in English, leaning against him. ‘I have financial issues.’

Shane laughed, said something in Shanghainese and she turned away with a shrug. Then he looked quickly at Bill. ‘You didn’t want her, did you?’

Bill just stared at him. He managed to shake his head. Shane leaned in. This was important. This was crucial.

‘Kai Tak rules means that we never talk about what happens when we are on an adventure, okay?’ he continued. ‘Kai Tak rules mean omerta. It means loose lips sink ships.’ Shane gently prodded a thick finger against Bill’s heart. ‘Kai Tak rules means keep your cakehole shut, mate. You do not talk about it with your wife, your girlfriend, or the married stiff in the office. Whatever we get up to, you do not confess to Devlin, you do not boast to Mad Mitch. It’s the first rule of Fight Club. You do not talk about Fight Club – right? What happens on tour stays on tour.’

‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,’ Bill said. But he sort of knew. Already there was the first glimmer of understanding.

It was different out here.

There was an eruption on the dance floor. Notes had started to fall from the sky. They looked up and saw one of their German clients – not the old rock and roller but the other one, Jurgen, the conservative-looking one – grinning foolishly from the DJ box. He was throwing his cash away with both hands, making a Papal gesture every time he released a fistful of RMB, as though he was blessing the crowd.

‘This will all end in tears,’ Shane predicted, as the dancers fought each other to get at the cash, which drifted slowly to the dance floor before it was seized upon by leggy Chinese girls in qipao and sweating Western businessmen.

Two women wrapped their arms around Bill’s waist, laughing and sighing and smiling as if they had mistaken him for Brad Pitt on an off night. Shane made a slight motion with his head and they went and did exactly the same thing to a small bald Frenchman who was slumped at the bar. He was about sixty-five and they acted like they had mistaken him for George Clooney. Bill stared at Suzy Too with appalled wonder.

‘Does this go on every night?’

Shane nodded. ‘And some say that Shanghai’s commitment to late nights shows just how few people in this city really have serious business in the morning,’ he said. He swigged Tsingtao. ‘They may well be right.’

A woman with wild eyes and a Louis Vuitton handbag was dancing on a table, slowly moving her narrow hips, looking at the mirror on the wall, lost in herself. Another woman, all sinewy length and hardened flesh, no waste, was out on the floor, laughing as she eased herself into a scrum of businessmen clumping their feet to some thirty-year-old rock song.

Bill was certain that he had seen both of them at Paradise Mansions in the scrum of women who had gathered around the stalled red Mini. And, now he came to think of it, the one with the mobile phone looked familiar too. But it was not easy to tell who was touting for trade and who was just out on the town.

‘Are these women all prostitutes?’ Bill said.

Shane thought about it. ‘It’s prostitution with Chinese characteristics,’ he said, looking up at Jurgen the German in the DJ box. The money was all gone but Jurgen was still standing up there with that foolish grin, as if he had made some kind of point. ‘There goes Jurgen’s profit margin for the last fiscal quarter,’ Shane said. ‘Prat.’ He nodded at the laughing girls at the bar. They were stroking the Frenchman’s head and cackling. ‘I know those two. They’re teachers. Mathematics and Chinese. They’re just making a little money on the side for their designer handbags and glad-rags. Prostitutes? That seems a little harsh, mate. That seems a little brutal. Some of them are just here to dance the night away. They’re as innocent as you and me. Well – you. The Paradise Mansions girls are saving themselves for the right man – even if he is married to someone else. That’s the theory – at Paradise Mansions they are all good little second wives – although of course they do have a lot of lonely nights. The others, they just want their small taste of the economic miracle that they’ve seen on TV, and they can’t get that on what a bloody teacher earns, which is, oh, a few peanuts above nothing.’ He thoughtfully chugged down his Tsingtao.

‘And the authorities just condone all this, do they?’ said Bill. He knew he sounded like a prude. He knew the tone was all wrong. He liked Shane. He wanted to understand. But the world was turned upside down. Commercial sex was not morally reprehensible out here. It was a career option, or a part-time job, or something a teacher did when she should have been marking homework.

‘Not at all,’ Shane said. ‘When they hear about it the authorities are shocked – shocked! Let’s see – year before last we were all in Julu Lu. Last year we were all in Maoming Nan Lu. Now we’re in – where are we now? Oh yeah – Tong Ren Lu. Next year we’ll be somewhere else. Every now and again, the authorities get tough and move us a block down the road. That’s China.’

A skinny woman in her middle thirties danced herself between Bill and Shane, her arms above her head, a smile splitting her face. She was ten years older than most of the women in here, but in better shape. It was the one who looked like a dancer. She was a beauty, Bill could see that, but the beauty had been worn down by time and disappointment. You would not mind growing old with a woman who looked like that, just as long as you met her early enough. For he could not help believing that some man or some men long gone had had the best of her, and he thought that was a terrible thing to believe about anyone. But he could not help it. She was smiling in his face.

‘This one won’t dance,’ Shane told her. ‘Please don’t ask as refusal can cause offence.’

‘I teach,’ she said. ‘I give lessons.’ She had an improbable French accent. Teech, she said. I geeff. She actually spoke English with a French accent. How did that happen? Shane said something in Chinese and she shrugged and danced away, giving Bill a little wave. He watched her go, with a pang of regret. Shane laughed.

‘Forget about that one if you’re looking to get your end away,’ he said. ‘You get all sorts in here, mate. That one’s a taxi dancer who’ll boogie all night but that’s it. She dances with men for money and then goes home alone to Paradise Mansions. A taxi dancer in the twenty-first century! Strange but true. Then there are the pro-ams.’ He gestured his empty beer bottle towards the teachers. ‘Shanghai is completely unregulated. It’s not like other parts of Asia. Not like Manila. Not like Bangkok. Not like Tokyo. The women in here don’t work for the bar. They’re punters, like you and me. They work for themselves. Like the great Deng Xiaoping said, “To get rich is glorious.” But don’t think they’re promiscuous. It’s not that. They’re just practical, it’s just too hard a place to not be practical. Hard for them, that is – not hard for the likes of us. China’s not a hardship posting for you and me, mate. Don’t listen to what those whining expats tell you – mostly Poms, mate. No offence intended.’