My Favourite Wife (12 page)

‘He has to work to get money,’ Holly said, repeating the party line. She took a sip of her juice and half of it failed to go inside her mouth.

‘Early starts and late nights,’ Becca said, mopping the juice off the child’s face with a piece of kitchen towel. Then she sat back
in her chair and smiled at the unusual sight of three people sitting down for a meal. ‘This is so nice,’ she laughed.

‘Long days,’ the old man observed as Becca lavished butter on to a slice of toast, cut it into four triangles and placed them on a plate featuring the Little Mermaid.

‘Well, he’s either working late at the office or he’s out with clients,’ she said, placing the plate in front of Holly. ‘So yes – they’re very long days.’

The old man frowned with disapproval. ‘He should slow down a bit. There’s no end to that kind of life.’

Becca felt the need to gently defend her husband. ‘He just wants a good life for us,’ she said, buttering more toast for everyone. ‘That’s all. That’s why we’re here.’ She picked up a tissue and wiped a greasy smear from her daughter’s chin. ‘That’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?’

The old man chewed his toast. ‘Suppose so,’ he conceded. ‘I think Bill always thought I was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud.’ He looked almost shy. ‘That I shouldn’t have been satisfied with our little house. My little job. My little life.’

Becca placed a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sure he never thought that,’ she said.

‘Oh, he did,’ insisted the old man, warming to his theme. ‘And he still thinks it.’ He looked defiant, a slice of toast poised halfway to his mouth. ‘But that’s the difference between me and His Lordship, Bec. He wants it all. And I only wanted enough.’

‘But it was my idea,’ she said. ‘Coming out here. I pushed him. And he’ll do anything I ask him to do. Because he loves me.’ Now it was her turn to look embarrassed. She felt her face turning red. ‘Because he loves us,’ she amended. ‘And he’ll make it work,’ she said, lightening the tone. ‘He will. He’s like you – a grafter.’

‘Never got his hands dirty in his life,’ the old man said, but with a rueful grin.

And Becca could see the pride that the father felt for the son,
although she felt like she was the only person in the world who did.

At first Shane took it for a burn. But it was some sort of birthmark, a light brown stain on her darker brown skin, a birthmark the size of a hand mirror that she could never quite hide, no matter how hard she tried, or how carefully she adjusted her ponytail.

Rosalita had a waterfall of jet-black hair that she wore tied back and tossed in a thick ponytail over one shoulder. When she was on stage at Bejeebers-Bejaybers she sometimes tugged at the pony-tail, as if making sure it was still in place.

Shane had watched her sing often enough to know that she did it to hide the mark on her neck and something about that birthmark, and the way she tried in vain to hide it, undid Shane, and filled him with unbearable feelings of tenderness. There was no real pleasure in the feeling, just a kind of tormented rapture.

Rosalita and her band, the Roxas Boulevard Boys, finished their set with a spirited ‘Bad Moon Rising’ and she came off stage smiling and shining with sweat. Shane watched with hypnotised misery as the tiny Filippina joined a party of Portuguese businessmen, the small curvy figure surrounded by tall men in suits, clinking glasses and laughing. Every once in a while she looked down the bar and flashed Shane one of those merciless bone-white smiles. He turned away.

There was a woman sitting further down the bar who looked as though she had just got off the bus. She was glancing around Bejeebers-Bejaybers nervously, clutching her fake Gucci bag, as though anybody in here would bother to steal it.

There was an untouched fruit juice in front of her. Shane ran expert eyes over her. Seeking her fortune in the big bad city, Shane reflected. Ah, aren’t we all, mate? he thought, surrendering to his philosophical tendencies.

So he bought her a fruit juice. And then another fruit juice. And
although he couldn’t quite get a handle on her Fujianese dialect, they shared enough
putonghua –
literally common language, meaning Mandarin – for Shane to work out that she had not long arrived in the city from Fuzhou, her accommodation was conveniently close to BB’s, and she thought that friendly old Shane was potential boyfriend material.

That would show Rosalita, he thought. Show her bloody good, mate. But when he looked up, Rosalita was leaving the club, with the paw of a Portuguese businessman acting as a rudder on her round Filippina rear.

So then Shane got stinking, stonking drunk on Tsingtao, while his quiet, doe-eyed companion knocked back cranberry juice after cranberry juice, and when Shane was starting to sing along to songs that had ended hours ago, and all the cranberry juice in Bejeebers-Bejaybers had gone, they decided to go. Shane was so rat-faced that he almost left his laptop on the bar stool, which would have been a major disaster for all concerned, but he tucked it under his arm and they went back to her place, where she insisted that he took his shoes off at the door and kept silent until they were in her cosy little room.

Shane did as he was instructed, and when they were alone and he lay on her touching little single bed watching her get undressed, he thought – you can’t care too much about them. Care too much and they will just kick you from here to kingdom come. The trouble was, everything felt stronger when you cared too much.

In the morning, while the woman from Fuzhou slept on, heavily sedated by a couple of injections from Dr Love, Shane got out of bed buck naked and strolled into the kitchen, yawning widely and scratching his scrotum. Then he stopped dead. And so did the Chinese family eating their breakfast at the kitchen table. They froze with a sharp intake of appalled breath, brown eyes widening with horror and disbelief, spoonfuls of congee and cornflakes halfway to their mouths.

The family were all there. The middle-aged man in glasses, already dressed in a shirt and tie, ready for the office. His wife, the plump housewife with an unfortunate perm and those ridiculous mini stockings they wore in Shanghai that only covered the ankles. And their two children – a podgy crop-haired boy of about eleven and a long-haired girl in her mid-teens with her hands on her mouth and her sickened eyes on Shane.

And as Shane covered himself with a carton of orange juice and the mother covered her daughter’s eyes with a packet of Cheerios, Shane understood two things with blinding clarity.

The woman from Fuzhou was an ayi who was unclear about her terms of employment.

And it was time for him to settle down.

The old man didn’t really want to see anything. That was the truth. Bill stood at the window watching him smoking a roll-up down in the courtyard of Paradise Mansions and he knew that his father could live quite happily without ever seeing the Great Wall or the Forbidden City or the entire contents of Shanghai, just as long as he could spend some time with his granddaughter.

As the old man smoked his cigarette, Holly capered and gambolled around the mother-and-child fountain with her favourite stray cat. A car entered the courtyard, and the old man took a protective step towards Holly, gesturing with his cigarette, although the car was nowhere near her.

‘They love each other so much,’ Becca said, squeezing Bill’s arm, as though the visit was a great success.

Bill nodded, watching his father lift his daughter and hold her above his head. His hands, Bill thought. Those builder’s hands. My father’s hands.

That had been the big thing when Bill was growing up, the summit of his old man’s parental wisdom – the difference between men who worked with their hands and men who worked with their minds.

‘The hands wear out before the mind,’ he told Bill endlessly. ‘That’s why your exams are important. So you never have to work with your hands.’

How poor we were, Bill thought. His adult world had been full of old men that looked like a different species to his father. He had seen them in law firms in the City of London, he had seen them on beaches in the Caribbean, and he saw them in the restaurants of Shanghai.

Old men with open-neck blue shirts, tanned from sun and ski slopes, their women still somehow youthful. Bill’s mother had been beautiful, but he didn’t remember her ever possessing that frozen youthful quality that you saw among the people with money. And Bill’s father had never looked like the old men in open-neck blue shirts. They had that soft, spoilt look of men who had never done physically demanding work, who had never worked with their hands.

So Bill had to study hard at school. He had to sail through exams. He had to be a straight-A student – and it was a big thing, a terrible thing, if he ever slipped. All so that one day he would work with his mind and not his hands and enjoy the soft life, the easy life, the good life. The life his father had never known.

Oh, Dad
, Bill thought sadly, watching the old man roll another cigarette.
What the fuck would you know about the good life?

Not that Bill Holden would ever have said
fuck
in front of his father.

Rosalita stepped out of BB’s and its air thick with beer and sweat and smoke and she smelled the flowers immediately. The scent of roses, dozens and dozens of them, cloaking the night-time stink of the traffic.

The band had gone on ahead of her while she had engaged in some playful goodnight arse-slapping with the owner, just a bit of fun, she was good at that sort of thing, and now the musicians
stood in front of the van, its back door open and ready, their instruments cased and in their hands as they all grinned back at her.

And as the band grinned at Rosalita, she slowly looked down at her feet where her size-four spike heels rested on…roses, the start of a trail of roses, a hand-made road of roses that led from the door of the club and away from the band’s van to a stretch limo – an unnecessarily, ridiculously stretched limo – with its back door open, where Shane sat on the nearside, an iced bucket of champagne resting precariously between his beefy legs.

Without warning a man began to sing loudly in the shadows. Rosalita jumped back in alarm.

‘O Sole Mio’ it was, delivered pitch-perfect by a fat young Italian engineer who Shane had discovered singing Elvis ballads at the Funky Fox karaoke bar on Tong Ren Lu. The young engineer sang with a hand on his heart, as if pleading the sincerity of the man who had hired him for an hour.

The Roxas Boulevard Boys grinned and chortled at the sheer brazen corniness of the scene, and Rosalita laughed too, although there was a hint of flattered delight in her amusement. Shane smiled bashfully, and glanced quickly from the tiny singer to the boys in the band.

The drummer angrily jabbered something in Tagalog, and Rosalita angrily jabbered something back at him, and for a moment it could have gone either way.

The choice was hers – get in the van or go with the man.

And then Rosalita walked on the flowers of romance, as if the decision had never been in any doubt, her high heels clicking on the crushed petals underfoot, and her grin bone-white in the moonlight.

‘Let me help you with that,’ Bill said.

He knelt before his daughter and tightened the silver buckle on
her roller skates. Holly held her foot out for him like a princess trying on a glass slipper, lifting her face to the deafening sound of the skating rink. Bill’s father grinned down at her, holding on to the rail for balance, a pair of prehistoric roller skates already strapped to his feet.

‘We have lift-off,’ the old man said, and launched himself into the flow of skating Chinese teenagers. Arms flapping, he struggled for his balance, controlled it, and then skated off with surprising poise, waving back at his son and granddaughter.

Roller skates in China, Bill thought, as the metallic pounding of wheels on wood roared behind him. Who would have thought the city would have a place for such ancient pleasures? But that was Shanghai, where old-fashioned and even extinct entertainments still lurked in hidden corners of the ferociously modern city. ‘Let me do the other one,’ Bill said, and Holly offered him her skateless foot.

‘Actually, it’s a bit difficult for a small person like myself,’ she said.

He smiled at her serious face as she frowned at her foot and then back at the rink, anxious to be out there with her grandfather and all the big children, and Bill felt an overwhelming surge of love.

Sometimes he felt that Holly was more Becca’s child than his own. He fought the feeling, but he couldn’t help it. When they spent time together alone he always felt as if he was staking his claim on her.
She’s my child too
.

‘There’s our friend,’ Holly said.

He looked up and saw JinJin Li laughing at the head of a pack of children. She was good on roller skates, her thin arms held out like a tightrope walker, as delicate as wings. Sometimes it seemed as though she had never really got used to the length of her limbs, but not when she was skating. There must have been about a dozen children following her, boys and girls, all around twelve years of
age, and they were playing some kind of game where they held on to the person in front of them. JinJin was leading them. She had her hair pulled back. He had never seen her laughing like that before. Incredible, he thought. Not only can she smile, but she can laugh too. Whatever next? You could see her face better when she wore her hair like that, he thought. And that was a good thing.

Holly waved and JinJin saw them, her eyes widened with surprise, and she swung towards them, breaking away from the child behind her. Bill felt himself lurch backwards on his skates, and quickly righted himself. Suddenly JinJin was there, holding on to the rail and panting for breath. She seemed to shine with life.

‘You like skating, Holly,’ JinJin said. A few of the children followed her, their laughter subsiding, suddenly shy in the presence of big-nosed pinkies.

‘It’s my first go,’ Holly said.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Bill said, looking up as the old man expertly skated to a halt. Bill tried to place her in his world. ‘Dad, this is JinJin. Our neighbour.’