My Favourite Wife

Rosalita was doing an upbeat number now. She shook her hair, she flashed her luminous teeth, and she jiggled her tiny rump. The top of a lemon thong peeked above the waistband of her trousers, which were as tight as a wet suit. The Germans licked their lips.

‘She’s got a tattoo,’ Shane confessed, watching Bill warily to see how he would react to this news.

Bill shrugged. ‘Well, a lot of women have tattoos these days.’

‘Yeah, but her tattoo says Tom.’ Bill thought about it. ‘Who’s Tom?’

‘Some asshole,’ Shane said, and a cloud of depression seemed to pass across his face. ‘She says Tom was just some asshole.’

The Roxas Boulevard Boys brought it back to a more romantic gear – Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Penny Lover’ – and Rosalita tipped forward as if with an unendurable melancholy, her hair falling over her face. Shane sighed. And then, over the mournful minor chords, Bill heard the sound of expatriate whooping and jeering, the sound of men urging a woman on. He turned to look.

There were five of them, white boys in suits, surrounding her, the one, the tall girl he had seen with the orchid in her hair outside Paradise Mansions, although the flower was gone now, and they were all out on the tiny BB’s dance floor.

She seemed to be in a daze, dancing alone to some song in her head, her eyes closed and her arms held high above her head, and their hands were all over her. The tall girl, with a scrape high on one cheekbone, as if she had been struck.

‘Come on, darling,’ one of the men said, tugging at the button of her trousers. ‘Show us what you got.’

Another one was behind her. A young man, but already run to fat. His hands on her buttocks, her breasts, biting his bottom lip as he mimed taking her from behind, to the huge amusement of his laughing friends.

They moved in closer, getting bolder now, one of them pulling down the zip of his trousers, and then the zip of her trousers, another yanking up her cut-off top so that you saw a glimpse of a black bra. The girl didn’t notice or she was too far gone to care. Then Bill was wading among them, shoving off the fat boy behind her, and then getting between the girl and the suit who had pulled down her zip, and their expressions changed from leering delight to bewilderment, then apoplectic rage.

As Bill took the tall girl by the arm and led her from the dance floor, one of them threw a punch at the back of his head. He caught it just below the base of the skull, turned and took another one on his ear. He threw a couple of punches but they were all over him, pushing each other out of the way for the chance to lash out at him.

But then Shane was there, meaty fists flying, and then there were Wolfgang and Jurgen doing these surprisingly authentic-looking side-kicks, and then the Swedish owner and a lad from Belfast who worked behind the bar were joining in, putting themselves between Bill and the girl and the five drunken suits. A full-scale brawl broke out for about five seconds and then it was over as quickly as it had begun and the suits were running to the back of BB’s, throwing around a few bar stools as they retreated.

Bill held the tall girl’s hand as Shane got them out of the club and into the back of a Santana taxi. ‘Just go,’ he said. The cab pulled away and she still hadn’t opened her eyes. He saw that the wound on her cheekbone was livid and fresh.

‘Did they do that to you?’ he said. ‘The mark on your face. Did those bastards do that to you?’

She leaned forward, touching her face. Then she sat back up, fighting back the sickness. Bill realised he had never seen anyone so hopelessly drunk.

‘Airbag,’ she said. ‘The airbag from my Mini.’

Then they had to stop by the side of the road so that she could be sick. She bent double out of the open back door, dry heaving because there was nothing left to bring up. The driver watched Bill in his rear-view mirror with barely concealed contempt.

Fucking Westerners, his eyes seemed to say. Ruining our lovely girls.

‘Can’t stop throwing out,’ she said when they were on the road again. ‘Please excuse me. I am throwing out all the time.’

Her English was almost perfect. Too clearly learned in a classroom, perhaps. Too painfully formal. But she got almost everything right, he realised, and when she did get something wrong, he still had no trouble understanding her. Didn’t throwing out make more sense than throwing up? It was an improvement on the original.

‘You had an accident,’ Bill said. ‘What happened?’ She exhaled, shivering with grief.

‘My husband is very angry with me,’ she said. ‘Very angry with me for breaking the new car.’

He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her thin shoulders. She burrowed down inside it, trying to hide from the world, and he patted her gently, the way he might try to reassure Holly if she had a bad dream. And then she fell asleep. Leaning against him. He patted her again.

He looked at her asleep in his jacket and he saw that it was the one that still bore the ghost of a handprint.

That’s never going to come out now, he thought.

It was the apartment of a single girl.

Something about it, Bill thought as he carried her inside, something about it said that here was a life lived alone. A fruit bowl containing a lonely brown banana. A magazine turned to a TV page with favourite programmes circled in red. A book of crossword puzzles, opened to one that was half-finished. She doesn’t look like the kind of girl who does crossword puzzles, he thought. And then, Well, what do you know about her?

The flat was immaculately decorated but a much smaller apartment than the one he lived in. He found the only bedroom and laid her down on top of the duvet, still wearing his jacket. In the movies, he thought, in the movies I would undress her and put her to bed and in the morning she wouldn’t remember a thing. But he couldn’t bring himself to do anything except leave her sleeping on the bed, and turn the light off on his way out. Her voice reached him as he went to close the door behind him.

‘He has nobody but his wife and me,’ she said, unmoving in the darkness. ‘I am quite sure of that.’

‘He sounds like quite a catch,’ Bill said with a contempt that surprised him, and he let himself out of the flat as quietly as he could.

Becca could tell there was something wrong. She could tell immediately. It wasn’t the kind of crying she was used to – the crying of a child having a bad dream, or who was too cold or too warm, or who needed a glass of water or a cuddle.

Holly’s crying came through the monitor as Becca was nodding off in front of BBC World, and she knew immediately that it was her breathing.

It was bad. Very bad. And Holly was frightened.

Becca remained ludicrously cheerful and upbeat as she set up the nebuliser, the breathing machine, and placed the mouthpiece over Holly’s face.

‘Deep…deep…deep,’ Becca said, miming inhalation with one hand as she desperately dialled Bill’s phone with the other. ‘Good, baby. Very good.’

No reply.

The nebuliser took the edge off the asthma attack but it wasn’t enough. Becca had never seen her as bad as this, not since that first awful day. Holly’s breathing was shallow and laboured and it scared the life out of Becca. It scared the life out of both of them. She needed a doctor. She needed a hospital. She needed it now.

No numbers, Becca thought, furious. I have no numbers. She had no idea what number to call for an ambulance. How could she be so stupid? How could she have been so certain that nothing bad would ever happen?

Becca quickly wrapped Holly in her dressing gown and grabbed her coat and her keys and dialled Bill’s number again. And again and again and again. No answer.

Then Becca was out of the flat with Holly in her arms, the child surprisingly heavy, and trying to remain as upbeat as a game show host as they went out to the night in search of a taxi.

She saw one the moment she stepped outside Paradise Mansions, a beat-up red Santana, but it didn’t stop for her and she shouted angrily at its taillights.

Holly began to cry and Becca held her tight and rocked her, while her eyes scanned the empty streets for another taxi. She tried calling Bill and there was still no signal and after that she didn’t try again. After that she knew she was going to have to do it alone.

SEVEN

There was something wrong with his home.

It should have been still and dark and both of them sleeping, with just a nightlight left on in the kitchen. But all the lights were blazing. The television was on and BBC World was playing its theme tune. The door to the master bedroom was flung open.

And they were gone.

Bed empty. Duvet on the floor. Lights on. And Becca and Holly were gone.

He flew through the apartment, throwing open doors, calling their names, and the panic was a physical sickness he could feel in his throat and in his gut.

Calling their names, even though he knew they were not there. Shouting their names over the bloody theme tune to BBC World. He didn’t understand what was happening. It made no sense at all. He wanted them back. He looked at his watch and covered it with his hand. It was so late. He wanted to throw up.

‘Becca!’

He walked to the table and picked up the mouthpiece to his daughter’s respirator.

His phone began to ring.

* * *

This was what she was good at. This was what she could do. She could look after her child. She could do that. And as long as she could do that, the rest of the world could go hang.

Holly was sitting up in bed in a private room at the International Family Hospital and Clinic on Xian Xia Lu being examined by a young doctor with an Indian face and a Liverpool accent.

‘Have you heard of a man called Beethoven?’ Dr Khan asked Holly, his fingers lightly feeling her ribs.

‘No,’ said Holly warily.

‘Beethoven had asthma,’ the doctor smiled.

Becca laughed, the tears springing. Devlin was standing by her side and he placed a hand on her shoulder. She touched his hand, sick with relief. Holly was going to be all right.

‘How about Charles Dickens, Augustus Caesar and John F. Kennedy?’ Dr Khan asked Holly. ‘Have you heard of any of them?’

‘I haven’t heard of nobody,’ Holly said, wide-eyed and looking at her mother for prompting. Becca was smiling at her now. ‘Why are you crying, Mummy?’

‘Because I’m happy, sweetheart. You make me happy. That’s all.’

‘That’s a funny old reason to cry. Grown-ups don’t cry.’

‘Well,’ Dr Khan said. ‘Those people all had asthma.’ He pulled down her top. ‘All the best people have had asthma.’ He turned to Becca and nodded. ‘She’s going to be fine.’

Becca nodded, overcome with gratitude. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

‘Are you a doctor?’ Holly asked him.

‘I’m what they call a Senior Medical Registrar,’ he said. ‘It’s a fancy name for a doctor.’ He sat on the bed, holding Holly’s hand as he spoke to Becca. ‘She’s had a trigger reaction that could have been caused by almost anything. If she’s not around tobacco smoke, then air pollution is most likely. Shanghai is better than Beijing, but it’s still a Chinese city. We have some of the worst car pollution in the country. Then there are all the factories and power plants in the northern suburbs, up in Baoshan.’

‘Thank goodness they’re starting to control that,’ Devlin said. ‘Ten years ago you often couldn’t see Pudong from Puxi.’

‘Asthma is not a disease that we cure,’ the doctor said. ‘But it’s a condition we can control.’ He stood up. ‘But of course you know that already.’

Becca loved this hospital. Outside its glass doors the Changning District was as grubby and down-at-heel as anywhere in Shanghai, but the International Family Hospital and Clinic looked newer, cleaner and more modern than anything she had ever seen back home.

‘All my boys have been in here at some stage,’ Devlin said, as if reading her thoughts and trying to keep the mood merry. ‘The youngest two were born here. And I think we have had – what? -two broken arms, one undescended testicle and a hyper-active thyroid gland.’ He beamed at Dr Khan but Becca knew the words were meant to reassure her. And they did.

It was reassuring to know that this oasis of Western-trained, English-speaking doctors in their clean blue uniforms was available twenty-four hours a day.

Unlike her husband.

Devlin and Dr Khan were gone by the time Bill arrived. Holly was sleeping. Becca was almost asleep herself. Bill stood sweating and panting in the doorway.

‘What happened? What happened?’ he said, coming into the room. ‘Is she okay?’

Becca stirred in her chair. ‘She woke up struggling to breathe,’ she said, her voice sounding mechanical and drained. She wanted to tell him, she really did, but it all seemed a long time ago, and it was all right now, and she really did feel tired. But he wanted more. He wanted to know everything.

‘I tried calling you,’ she said. She looked from her daughter to her husband, and couldn’t keep the resentment out of her eyes. ‘Lots of times. No answer. I couldn’t even get your voice-mail.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, sinking to his knees next to her. He kissed her hands, kissed her face, put his arms around her. It was like holding a statue.

‘I didn’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have the numbers. You know – emergency numbers. It’s not 999, is it?’

‘We’ll get all the numbers,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ll get all the numbers for us.’

‘I couldn’t even get a taxi. So I called Tess Devlin. She was fantastic. Then things started to happen. Then I had help. Devlin came with Tiger and they brought us here. Holly and me. And Dr Khan – he’s been…’

Bill was on his feet, looking at Holly’s face, and for a second Becca wondered if he was even listening to her.

‘Where were you?’ she said, very calm.

‘I went for a drink with Shane,’ he said, and it wasn’t a good moment. He knew how it sounded. ‘The Germans were flipping out. There have been some incidents. At the Green Acres site in Yangdong.’ He shook his head. ‘The security is out of control. They were hitting this little kid. I had to stop them, Bec.’

‘Jesus,’ Becca said, turning her face away. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, Bill.’ Looking back at him now. ‘Your daughter is being rushed to hospital and you’re in some bar?’

Bill stared at her helplessly, feeling useless. He wanted so many things from this world. There was quite a list. But more than anything he wanted his wife and daughter to be happy, safe and proud of him. And he had let them down because he went for a drink with clients and got into a fight over a girl he didn’t know. When it was his family who needed him, when it was his family he should have been with all along.

Maybe he could have explained it better. He had wanted to come home. He really did. But it was work. He wanted her to understand.

He wanted her to get it. Surely she knew that there was nothing more important to him than her and Holly? He wanted to tell her everything.

But he couldn’t tell her about the girl.

Devlin had told Tiger to wait for them. As they drove back to Gubei, Becca held Holly on her lap and the child slept in her arms. Bill touched his daughter’s hair.

‘She’s okay,’ he said. ‘She’s doing really well –’

Becca’s anger exploded. ‘What do you know about it, Bill? You’re never around. How dare you? And she’s not okay. She’s not okay at school because she started in the middle of a term and the other kids already have their friends so she plays alone in the playground.’ It was all pouring out now, even things she had decided not to share with him because she didn’t want to worry him, because there was enough pressure already, he had enough on his plate at work. ‘Did you know that? Of course you didn’t. And her breathing’s not okay because the air here is filthy. All right? So don’t ever tell me she’s okay, because you know absolutely nothing about it.’

They stared out at the elevated Ya’an Freeway. The lights of the city seemed to be glowing somewhere far below them.

‘I’m sorry, Bec,’ he said. ‘It will get better. I’ll make it better.’

Tears sprang to her eyes. This was a good thing about him. He would always reach out a hand to her. It had always been that way when they argued. He wouldn’t allow them to go to sleep angry and hurt. He always tried to make it better. And he didn’t say what he could have said, what most men would have said – Coming here was your idea. But this life wasn’t what she had expected.

‘I wanted us to see the jazz band at the Peace Hotel,’ she said, almost laughing, it sounded so absurd. ‘And I wanted us to buy propaganda posters and Mao badges in the Dongtai Lu antique market. All these places that I read about, all the great places they say you should go.’

He put his arm around her.

‘And I wanted us,’ she said, snuggling down, adjusting Holly on her lap. ‘I wanted us to drink cocktails in hotels where in the thirties you could get opium on room service. I want to support you, Bill. And I want to be a good sport. And I want to muck in and I don’t want to whine. But why isn’t it like that?’

‘We’ll do all those things,’ he said, and he touched her face, that face he loved so much, and determined to see her happy again.

‘But when?’

‘Starting tomorrow, Bec.’ He nodded, and she smiled, because she knew that he meant it.

Her unhappiness, and her loneliness, and all the panic of tonight were things he would address with the dogged determination that he brought to everything. My husband, she thought. The professional problem-solver.

He could never understand why people felt sentimental about when they were young. Being young meant being poor. Being young was a long, hard grind. Being young meant doing jobs that sucked the life out of you.

Being young was overrated. Or maybe it was just him. For in his teens and twenties Bill had endured eight years of feeling like he was the only young person in the world who wasn’t really young at all.

At weekends and holidays, he had worked his way through two years of A-levels, four years at UCL, six months of his Law Society final exams and his two years’ traineeship with Butterfield, Hunt and West.

Over eight years of stacking shelves, carrying hods, pulling pints and ferrying around everything from takeaway pizzas (on a scooter) to Saturday-night drunks (in a mini cab) and cases of wine (in a Majestic Wine Warehouse white van).

The worst job was in a Fulham Road pub called the Rat and Trumpet. It wasn’t as back-breaking as lugging bricks on a building site, and it wasn’t as dangerous as delivering pizza to a sink estate after midnight, and it didn’t numb your brain quite like filling shelves under the midnight sun of the supermarket strip lighting.

But the Rat and Trumpet was the worst job of the lot because that was where all the people his own age didn’t even notice that privilege had been given to them on a plate. They had a sense of entitlement that Bill Holden would never have, the boys with their ripped jeans and pastel-coloured jumpers and their Hugh Grant fringes, the girls all coltish limbs and blonde tresses and laughter full of daddy’s money.

He had come across the type at university, but they had not been the dominant group, not at UCL, where the braying voices were drowned out by other accents from other towns and other types of lives. But this was their world, and Bill just served drinks in it.

Kids whose mothers and fathers had never got sick, or broke up, or divorced, or died. At least that’s the way he thought of them. They all looked as though nothing bad had ever happened to them, or ever would.

They stared straight through him, or bellowed their orders from the far end of the bar, and he had no trouble at all in hating every one of the fucking bastards.

The Rat and Trumpet had no bouncer, and sometimes Bill had to throw one of them out. The landlord slipped him an extra fiver at the end of the night for every chinless troublemaker Bill had to escort to the Fulham Road – they called it the Half-Cut Hooray allowance.

The extra money was greatly appreciated. But Bill – twenty-two years old and furious with the Fates – would cheerfully have done it for nothing. Hilarious, they always said. Like the woman from Shanghai Chic. Everything was hilarious. It was all so fucking hilarious that it made you puke.

One night some idiot was practising his fast bowling with the Scotch eggs and splattering yolk and breadcrumbs all over the customers in the snug. Howzat? Hilarious, darling. The Scotch-egg bowler was a strapping lad in a pink cashmere sweater and carefully distressed Levi’s. They could be big lads, these Hoorays. They weren’t selling off the playing fields at the kind of school his mummy and daddy sent him to.

There was a girl with him – one of those girls, Bill thought, one of those Fulham Broadway blondes – who was trying to get him to stop. She seemed halfway to being a human being. Bill gave her credit for looking upset. For not finding it absolutely hilarious. That was the first time he saw Becca.

Bill politely asked the Scotch-egg bowler to leave. He told Bill to fuck off and get him a pint of Fosters. So Bill asked him less politely. Same response. Fuck off and a pint of Fosters. So Bill got him in an arm lock before his brain had registered what was happening and marched him to the door. It toughed you up on those building sites. It didn’t matter how much sport they played at their private schools, it just wasn’t the same as manual labour.

A meaty lad but soft inside, Bill thought. He gave him a push at the door – slightly harder than was strictly necessary – in fact a lot harder than was strictly necessary – and the fast Scotch-egg bowler skidded and fell into the gutter.

At the outside tables, people laughed.

‘One day you’ll bring drinks to my children,’ he told Bill, getting up, his face red for all sorts of reasons.

‘Can’t wait,’ Bill said. They must have been about the same age, he thought. Bill bet his mum wasn’t gone.

‘And you’ll be a toothless old git with snot on his chin and your rotten life will be gone and you will still be waiting on the likes of me.’

Bill laughed and looked at the blonde girl. ‘I hope your kids look like their mother,’ he said, turning away, and never expecting to see her again.

But Becca came back inside to apologise on behalf of her boyfriend and offer to pay for the Scotch eggs and all the mess, and she was just in time to see the landlord fire Bill, who didn’t like it that Bill had used more force than necessary to throw out the fast Scotch-egg bowler; he wasn’t here to rough up the paying customers, he was here to stop trouble, not to start it, and Bill was saying that he couldn’t possibly be fired, because he was fucking well quitting, okay?

Becca followed him outside and said, ‘Don’t go.’

And Bill said, ‘Three quid an hour to be insulted by dickheads? Why not?’

But that wasn’t what she meant.

She apologised again and said that he was a nice guy really, Guy was, and Bill got a bit confused there, because the boyfriend’s name was Guy, and they had a little laugh about that, and that was good, because she had such a beautiful face when she laughed, and then she said that Bill shouldn’t think they were all idiots and Bill said ah, don’t worry about it, he had no objection to spoilt rich kids with no manners, they had to drink somewhere, and she said that was not her, and he didn’t know her at all, getting angry now, and he said, Well, prove it – let me have your phone number and I might give you a call sometime, because he really didn’t give a fuck any more and he was sick of not having a girlfriend who looked like her and sick of being lonely and sick of feeling that he had never had the chance to suck all the juice out of being young.