My Favourite Wife

‘None taken,’ Bill said, sipping his beer. Maybe he should be getting back. Maybe he should have gone straight home. His suit was going to reek of cigarette smoke.

‘China is an easy place to live because everything is on a clear financial basis,’ Shane said. ‘It’s only complicated if you choose to make it so.’

Then the woman with the mobile phone was back, yanking at Bill’s sleeve, giving him a gentle shove and as he turned to her he saw that peculiarly Shanghainese gesture for the very first time -the thumb and the index finger rubbed together, followed by the open palm.

Give me money, mister.

He would see that gesture a thousand times before he left this city. They might have four thousand years of civilisation behind them, but they weren’t too big on please and thank you.

In her free hand the woman was holding a photograph of a small, unsmiling boy. He was about the same age as Holly.

Bill fumbled with his wallet and gave her a 50-RMB note. She stared at it for a moment and then turned away with a disgusted snort.

‘They don’t take fifties,’ Shane laughed, putting an arm around him. ‘There’s a minimum payment of one hundred, even if you’re just being nice.’

‘How the hell can there be a minimum payment for being nice?’ Bill said.

‘Because their motto is “Haven’t you got anything bigger?”’ Shane said. He slapped Bill on the back. He was happy that Bill was here. Bill had the sense that despite living on a beauty mountain, his colleague had been lonely. ‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ Shane said. ‘And then you’ll find you’re in the closest place to heaven.’

‘Yeah,’ Bill said bleakly. ‘Poverty is a great aphrodisiac.’ He watched the woman with the son and the mobile phone being ignored by a group of young tourists.

‘That’s right,’ Shane happily agreed. ‘And don’t forget – Kai Tak rules.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Bill said, suddenly irritated by Shane’s assumptions, and by all of the big Australian’s unearned intimacy. ‘I can keep my mouth shut. But I’ve got a wife and kid at home.’

Shane frowned, genuinely perplexed. ‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’

Bill looked at the skinny dancer. She waved at him. She was too old to be in here, he thought. But then everybody in here was the wrong age. Too young, too old. He looked away. ‘So I’m not going to be playing around,’ he said, not caring what he sounded like.

But Shane just studied the golden glow of his Tsingtao and said nothing.

And then Jurgen was asking them for cab fare, because he had thrown all his cash away, the stupid bastard, and Bill was looking at his watch and Shane was shouting for just one more round, just one more, come on, Bill, you’re not like the rest of those miserable Poms, and Bill agreed, he wasn’t like the rest of them, those pampered private school wankers, and then suddenly it was three o’clock in the morning and they were having one absolutely last drink, a nightcap, you have to have a fucking nightcap, mate, in a dive Shane knew where a Filippino band did songs by Pink and Avril Lavigne, and some other girl was showing Bill a picture of her daughter and Bill was pulling out his wallet to show her a picture of Holly, and giving her a 100-RMB note, and then giving her another one, and then another, and wishing her luck and telling her that she was a wonderful mother, and Shane was singing along to ‘Complicated’ in his hearty Melbourne baritone and then huddling with Bill in a cramped red leather booth somewhere else and saying, But there are just so many of them, Bill, just so many women in the world – how can you ever choose the special one, how can you ever really know? just before the two teachers turned up, bombed out of their brains and calling loudly for more mojitos all round, and they stumbled off into what was left of the night with Shane sandwiched between them, all laughing happily, as though it was the most innocent thing in the world.

Then Bill was all alone in the tree-lined streets of the French Concession in the soft milky light that precedes dawn in Shanghai, unable to find a cab in the city where they say you can always find a cab, and one solitary street hawker was going to work, setting up his sad little display of cigarettes on the pavement, and on the far side of the street Bill saw a small hotel with a lone taxi parked outside, the driver asleep at the wheel.

Bill paused to let a tow truck rumble past, and on the back of it he saw there was a red Mini Cooper, and although the front half of it was smashed like a broken accordion, the guts of its ruined engine spilling out and the windscreen shattered, the front wheels just ragged strips of mangled metal and rubber, he could clearly make out the undamaged roof with its flag of the People’s Republic of China, the red and yellow glinting in the light of the new day.

SIX

Most days he didn’t bother with lunch.

The only excuse for lunch was entertaining clients. Otherwise there was no real need to ever leave his desk. There was an old ayi who wheeled a trolley through the office, the Shanghai equivalent of a tea lady, and she sold sandwiches and noodles, coffee and green cha. But Bill liked to get out of the building in the middle of the day, just so he could stretch limbs that had been still for too long and breathe some air that wasn’t chilled by air conditioning, even if it was just for fifteen minutes.

There was a coffee shop near their building and at noon he headed towards it, inhaling the weather, smelling the river, when suddenly a hand reached out and grabbed his tie.

‘Off to lunch?’ Becca said, pulling him into a doorway. She pressed her mouth against his face, a recklessly aimed kiss that he felt on his lips and cheek.

‘Lunch?’ he said, as if he had never heard of such a thing. She kissed him again, full on the mouth this time. ‘I thought I might get a sandwich.’

‘Oh,’ she laughed, pressing herself against him, feeling his instant response and loving it. ‘That doesn’t sound like much for a growing boy like you. Let me tell you about today’s specials.’

She pulled him deeper into the doorway, kissing him harder, fingers in his hair. It was cool and dark. He looked around and was vaguely aware that they were in the entrance to a condemned building that was being torn down to make way for more office space. Men in white shirts and dark ties passed by with their briefcases and their coffee cups, giving them the occasional glance. Bill swung her around so that she was pinned against the wall and he had his back to the street.

‘You’re nuts,’ he said, and he looked at her face, so close that he could feel her breath. ‘I missed you,’ he said, and hugged her as hard as he dared.

It had been three days since the firm’s dinner on the Bund and they hadn’t seen each other since. Too many late nights when he had arrived home after Becca and Holly had gone to bed, and too many early mornings when he had quietly let himself out of the apartment while they were still sleeping.

‘Do we know each other?’ Becca said, her hands on his arms, squeezing, her eyes half-closed, her mouth smiling. He pulled her close and kissed her, holding her as if he would never let her get away.

‘Oh,’ she said, and she could feel how much he had missed her. ‘I remember you.’

And he remembered her too.

Shane squinted at Bill through a ferocious hangover. ‘How am I looking, mate?’

They were in the show home on the Green Acres site in Yangdong, sitting by a fountain in the shape of a dragon’s head that wasn’t working yet. On the drive north Tiger had stopped the car three times so that Shane could stumble off into some scrubby bushes.

‘You look better,’ Bill said. ‘You’re getting some colour back in your face.’

Shane exhaled. ‘That’s good.’

‘But the colour is green,’ Bill said.

‘That’s not so good,’ Shane said. ‘Bad thing about a threesome is that one of them always ends up staring out the window. Puts you right off your stroke, mate.’ He brightened slightly, his beefy face turning a lighter shade of green. ‘But the good thing about a threesome is that even if one drops out, then you’re still having sex with someone.’

Bill had got back to the office to find that Devlin was sending a team to Yangdong. Chairman Sun had called a snap press conference and their clients at DeutscherMonde were nervous. Who knew what he might say if the Burgundy and Sprite started to flow? Bill looked up as Nancy Deng came through the front door with one of the Germans, the long-haired one in a leather jacket, Wolfgang, the one who looked like a mechanic who had won the Lottery.

‘Here he comes,’ Nancy said.

Shane and Bill stood up as Chairman Sun entered the show home, flanked by a delegation from the local government and a dozen members of the media.

At a discreet distance, Bill, Shane and Nancy Deng followed with their anxious German as Sun led the press pack through gleaming rooms, down sweeping staircases, under crystal chandeliers and round an Olympian swimming pool, talking in Shanghainese all the while. His bodyguard, Ho, that slab of a man, was never far from his side.

At that lunch Bill had pegged the Chairman as one of those men who rise to the top by keeping their mouths shut, but clearly when he did open up, he was a man who was accustomed to being listened to, even without the presence of a translator.

The journalists were all Chinese apart from two Shanghai-based Westerners. One of them was a razor-thin American woman in Jimmy Choos, and the other was Alice Greene. She smiled at Bill, whom she had not seen since his wedding day, and he nodded back.

In his experience journalists were rarely good news for lawyers.

They were going outside. Chairman Sun led the way out of the show home and Bill thought it was like stepping out of a Las Vegas hotel on to the surface of the moon.

As far as the eye could see, the bleak landscape was mud, churned by construction work and the summer rain. The farms had long been bulldozed and the barren fields where the new houses would stand were already partitioned, ropes staking out the plots of land, parcelling out the future. There was a cop on the door of the show home, a young Public Security Bureau policewoman with a fading love bite on her neck. As they filed outside Bill saw that there was security everywhere, although it was not easy to tell where the private guards ended and the PSB state police began.

There was something curiously martial about the site. Inside the wire that staked out the development there was a long, orderly line of snout-nosed trucks with red flags fluttering on their bonnets. Men in bright yellow hard hats swarmed between orange diggers adding to the piles of earth, their lights flashing in the mist. Everywhere there were patches of water with an oily, rainbow-coloured sheen, and on the far side of the wire, like a defeated army corralled into a POW camp, the farmers and their families stood watching.

The lawn had yet to be laid outside the show home and the woman in Jimmy Choos began to topple backwards as her heels sank into the mud. Bill caught her and she flashed him a professional smile.

‘I’m from Shanghai Chic,’ she said, holding on to him for support. ‘Where are you from? Isn’t this hilarious? We’re doing a big piece.’

On the far side of the wire, a few bored-looking security men were attempting to move the villagers on. But they didn’t want to move and began to argue with the guards. Then the dispute suddenly erupted into fury, the kind of hysterical, almost tearful scene that Bill had seen break out without warning on the streets of Shanghai. Press the wrong nerve, he thought, and all at once these people go ballistic.

He watched as a grubby-faced boy of about twelve drew back from the wire, and picked up something from the ground. He hefted it in his hand – a broken brick, discarded by the builders – and then threw it high and hard in the direction of the palace that had appeared on their land. The brick fell short, but they all turned to look as it clattered against the show home’s cast-iron gates.

Orders were barked and the villagers took off across the field with the security guards on their tail. Bill saw that Ho had disconnected himself from Chairman Sun’s side and was with them.

‘Hilarious,’ said the woman from Shanghai Chic. ‘Isn’t this hilarious?’

The boy who had thrown the brick paused by a neat stack of fresh bricks and began hurling them at the chasing pack. An old man joined him, one of those wiry old Chinese men without a gram of fat on his body, and Ho and the security guards hid behind a bulldozer as the bricks rained down. Then they started throwing the bricks back.

Bill shook his head. ‘It’s like a medieval battle,’ he said.

‘China is a medieval country,’ Shane said. ‘A medieval country with broadband.’ He looked across at the press delegation. ‘We should put a stop to this, mate,’ he said. ‘It’s not good in front of journalists. Even tame journalists.’

‘I’ll deal with it,’ Bill said. ‘You get Tiger.’ He began walking towards the press pack. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, if you would care to step back inside, Chairman Sun will take questions.’

But nobody was listening. They were watching the guards chasing the old man and the boy across the open mud flats. The old man was too slow, and when he fell the guards were immediately on him, lifting him by his arms. The boy had stopped, uncertain if he should run or fight, and then they had him too. As Ho barked instructions, the guards began hauling them back to the show home.

‘Hello, Bill,’ Alice smiled. ‘Going to get rich in China?’

Bill smiled along with her. ‘That’s the plan,’ he said, watching the security guards. They were taking the old man and the boy to the PSB. That’s what they were going to do, he saw. Turn them over to the law. The cops had gone to the gates to meet them.

‘You know who’s going to get rich here?’ Alice said. ‘The Chinese. A few of them, anyway. Chairman Sun, for example. And some of his pals. You comfortable with that, Bill?’

He looked at her and said nothing. She was still holding her notepad in her hands. She may have been at his wedding, and she may have been his wife’s best friend when they were growing up, but she still looked like trouble. He began walking towards the gates. Alice followed him.

‘You’re an intelligent man,’ she said. ‘And I’m just curious to know what you think is happening here. Off the record.’

‘And what do you think is happening?’ he said, not breaking his stride. ‘On the record.’

Alice shrugged. ‘Looks like a standard land-grab to me. The new rich get their mansions. The local politicians get their cut. And the farmers get shafted.’

He stopped and stared at her. ‘You think these people are going to be robbed?’ he said, genuinely outraged. ‘Is that what you think is going to happen? I’ve seen the details of their compensation package.’

She laughed at him.

‘Just think about it,’ Alice said. They had all arrived at the gates at the same time. Ho and the guards were handing over the old man and the boy to the PSB. The old man looked resigned to his fate but the child looked terrified. ‘Until the mid-nineties all the land in China was owned by the People,’ Alice said. ‘And then suddenly it wasn’t. One day you woke up and the land your family had farmed for generations was owned by someone you had never met. And he wanted you out.’

‘These people are going to receive generous compensation packages,’ Bill said, watching one of the security guards shove the old man. That wasn’t right. They shouldn’t do that.

‘Don’t buy that, Bill. We both know that the money goes to the local government. Your friend Chairman Sun – is he going to see the farmers right, Bill?’

He ignored her. The security guards were conferring with the PSB cops as they gripped the arms of the old man and the boy. They were working out what to do with them. Bill hesitated, unsure if he should stick his nose in here.

‘Every foreigner who works in China has to learn the ostrich trick,’ Alice said. ‘You know what the ostrich trick is, Bill? It’s when you ignore what’s going on right in front of you.’

Ho suddenly got tired of all the chit-chat and punched the boy full in the face. The child went flying backwards and Bill watched him sprawl in the mud. For a moment Bill could not believe what he had seen. Then he was on Ho, pushing the larger man as hard as he could and not budging him, screaming in his face, telling him to leave the boy alone, let the police deal with it.

Bill helped the boy to his feet, trembling with shock and rage, and discovered that he had to keep holding him because the punch had knocked him senseless. There was blood on the boy’s lips and chin from a broken nose. Bill searched in his pockets for something to wipe it with and found nothing. Two of the PSB officers took the boy’s arms and eased him from Bill’s grip.

‘This is intolerable,’ Bill said, even though he knew they didn’t understand a word. His voice was shaking with emotion. ‘My company will not be a party to this, do you hear me?’

The PSB led the boy and the old man away. Ho chuckled and gestured at Bill with real amusement. The guards gawped at him with their infinite blankness. Bill looked up and saw Alice Greene offering him a Kleenex.

For the blood on his hands.

On the road back to Shanghai, Tiger had to swerve to miss a blue Ferrari coming in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road. As Tiger wrestled the limo across pockmarked gravel, Bill caught a glimpse of a boy and girl laughing behind their sunglasses.

‘Look at that,’ Shane said, placing a grateful hand on Tiger’s shoulder as the Ferrari weaved off in a cloud of dust. ‘There’s about fifty million of them driving around who were on bicycles last year.’

Tiger revved the engine, trying to ease the car out of a pothole. A family of peasant farmers, their skin black from the sun, sullenly watched them.

‘Very low,’ Tiger said. ‘Very low people.’

Nancy looked up. ‘I am from Yangdong,’ she said in English, but Tiger was fiddling with his climate control, and gave no sign that he had heard her.

Bill looked at Nancy and tried to remember her file. She had gone to two of the top colleges in the country – Tsinghua University Law School, then the University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. To get that kind of education, to become a lawyer after growing up in this dreary landscape – it told him that Alice Greene was wrong, and that Chinese ingenuity and hard work and intelligence would ultimately triumph over Chinese cruelty and corruption and stupidity.

That’s what it told him.

But he didn’t quite believe it.

Back at the firm, Devlin came into his office. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Bill.

‘I’m fine,’ Bill said.

‘I heard what happened. The boy and the old man.’ He shook his head. ‘Ugly business.’

‘Yes.’

‘But we can’t get squeamish here,’ Devlin said. Bill looked up at him and Devlin touched his arm. ‘I mean it. It’s better now than it’s ever been. You know that, don’t you? And it will get better. Change will come. Because of people like us.’

They stared out at the view. There were red lights on the peaks of the skyscrapers, and they seemed to wink in secret fraternity at the red lights of the discreet CCTV cameras in Bill’s office.

‘Do you know what I liked about you?’ Devlin said. ‘When we first met.’

‘My wife,’ Bill said, and Devlin laughed. ‘That’s what everyone likes best about me.’

‘What I liked about you was that you’re a lawyer, not a technician,’ Devlin said. ‘Lawyers solve problems. Lawyers can reason. Technicians – their mummy and daddy wanted them to be lawyers, so that’s what they do for forty years. Technicians know a snapshot of the law, from when they qualified. But they don’t feel it in their bones. They’re not real lawyers. They’re technicians. But you’re a lawyer. You see the law as social lubricant and not as a club. But you’re coming from a land where the law is used to protect rights, and you are living in a place where essentially the people have no rights. We’ve done nothing wrong here, you know that, don’t you?’

‘But those villagers,’ Bill said. ‘That boy…’

‘His family will be taken care of,’ Devlin insisted. ‘Look, Bill, you have to choose what you see here. You know what the China price is?’

‘Sure.’

The China price was the key to everything, even more important than the numbers. When foreign manufacturers had looked at every price offered by their suppliers, they demanded the China price – which was always the lowest price of all.

‘It means you can move any kind of operation to China, and get it all done cheaper.’

Devlin shook his head.

‘The real China price,’ Devlin said. ‘The real China price is the compromises we have to make to work here. Forget all that stuff about ancient civilisations. Forget all that propaganda about four thousand years of history. This country is still growing up. And some diseases it’s best to get when you are young.’

They stood together at the window and watched the sun set quickly. In the gathering darkness it suddenly seemed as if all of Pudong lit up at once, and the two men stared silently at the lights shining before them like the conqueror’s reward.

He was ready for home.

The trip to Yangdong had left him with dirt on his shoes and stains on his suit and the urgent need to crawl into bed next to Becca and just hold her for a while. Or perhaps she could come to his bed and then they would not have to worry about waking Holly and they could do more than just cuddle.

But Jurgen and Wolfgang were in Shane’s office when Bill was leaving, clearly agitated, expressing some concern in streams of German to each other, and broken English to their lawyer. Shane came out of his office and took Bill to one side.

‘They’re getting their lederhosen in a twist,’ Shane sighed. ‘Worried about what the hacks might write after today. Let’s buy them a couple of drinks and calm their nerves, mate. Tell them we’re all going to live happily ever after.’

‘I’ve really got to get home,’ Bill said. ‘I don’t see my wife. I don’t see my kid.’

‘One drink,’ Shane said. ‘They’re your Germans too, mate.’

‘All right,’ Bill said. ‘But just the one.’

There was an Irish bar on Tongren Lu called BB’s – Bejeebers-Bejaybers – run by a large Swede with absolutely no Irish blood whatsoever.

BB’s was always mobbed because you could get English football with Cantonese commentators from Star TV, Guinness on tap and live music by a band from Manila.

‘You see them all over Asia,’ Shane said, recovered from his hangover and ready for the night. ‘These Filippino bands with singers who can really sing and musicians who can really play. Maybe in the West they would have a record deal, or at least appear on some television talent show. Out here they play dives for the likes of us.’ He chugged down his Guinness and called for another. ‘You see it all the time.’

Bill stared at him. Because what you didn’t see all the time was Shane looking at a woman the way he was looking at the tiny Filippina singer who was leaning against her keyboard player’s back and giving a pitch-perfect rendition of ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’ by the Carpenters. She tossed back her waist-length hair, jet black but shot through with blonde highlights, and when she smiled it seemed to light up every dark corner of Bejeebers-Bejaybers. A little further down the bar, Wolfgang and Jurgen sipped their Guinnesses and stared up at her, the press forgotten.

‘Who is she?’ Bill said.

‘Rosalita,’ Shane said with real tenderness. ‘Rosalita and the Roxas Boulevard Boys.’

‘You know her?’ Bill asked. Shane looked as though he had thought about her a lot.

Shane looked at him. ‘I see you with your wife,’ he said, taking Bill by surprise. ‘I see you with Becca. Saw you together at that dinner. And I envy you, Bill.’ He turned his gaze back to the stage. ‘It can’t go on forever, can it? This life.’