My Favourite Wife

The Sabbath may have meant nothing to Tiger but out on the streets of Gubei New Area it felt almost like Sunday morning back home, with nobody around apart from the odd jogger and dog walker, the neighbourhood shuttered and still. It was early June, and the heat was already starting to build.

Bill walked. He was hungry to see what he thought of as the real China, the China that was nothing to do with plasma televisions and Dom Pérignon. The real China was somewhere nearby. It had to be. There were blocks of flats as far as he could see in a bewildering jumble of styles, but broken up with patches of manicured green and oversized statues. There were strips of restaurants – he could see Thai, Italian, everything but Chinese -a Carrefour supermarket, and a couple of international schools, including the one that Holly would go to in the morning. Little parks. A nice neighbourhood. Gubei was greener and cleaner than the grimy, crime-ridden patch of London they had left behind. His family could live here. His wife and daughter could be happy here. He felt a quiet satisfaction, mixed with relief.

He glanced at his watch and decided he had time to explore before Becca and Holly stirred. So he walked towards the rising sun and as he left Gubei New Area behind, the streets quickly filled. Women selling bruised fruit stared through him from shaded side streets. Someone bumped into him. Someone else spat at his feet. There were men in filthy, dirt-encrusted two-piece suits working on a building site. On a Sunday. And in the streets there were people. A tide of people. Suddenly there were people everywhere.

He stopped, trying to get his bearings. The roads were wide and traffic flew by, horns mindlessly beeping, ignoring red lights and pedestrians and the rest of the traffic. He saw a chic girl in sunglasses with her hair up behind the wheel of a silver Buick Excelle. There were flocks of VW Santana taxis. A muddy truck piled high with junk and men. And more trucks, lots of them, with their strange cargo of cardboard or orange traffic cones or pigs or yet more cars, so new they still shone with the showroom wax.

As the sun got higher, and Bill continued to walk east, the city got noisier, adding to his sense of dislocation. A woman on a scooter mounted the pavement and just missed him, beeping her horn furiously. Schools of cyclists with giant black visors over their faces swarmed past. Suddenly he was aware of the time difference, the light-headedness that follows a long-haul flight, the sweat of exhaustion. But he kept walking. He wanted to know something about this place.

He walked down alleys where thin men shaved over ancient metal bowls and fat babies were fed, and where ramshackle buildings with red-tile roofs were draped with drying laundry and satellite dishes. Then abruptly the jumbled blocks with their red-tile roofs suddenly gave way to the new shining towers and shopping malls.

Outside Prada men with their skin darkened by sun and grime tried to sell him fake Rolex watches and DVDs of the latest Tom Cruise movie. Young women hid from the sun under umbrellas. Naked Western models advertised skin-lightening products on giant billboards.

And as Bill walked on, he felt something that he had never felt in his life, and it was an awareness of the sheer mass of humanity. All those people in the world, all those lives. It was as if he truly believed in their existence for the first time. Shanghai gave him no choice.

Bill hailed one of the Santana taxis, impatient to see the Bund, but the driver didn’t understand a word he said and dropped him by the river, glad to get rid of him. He got out next to a wharf with a ferry; not a sightseeing ferry but some kind of local public transport.

Bill handed over his smallest note, received some filthy RMB in return, and joined the milling mob waiting to cross to the other side. He tried to work out where the queue began. Then he realised that it didn’t begin anywhere.

And as the ferry filled with people, and then continued to fill even more until Bill was hemmed in on every side, and fighting back the feeling that the ferry was overloaded, he saw that here, at last, was the real China.

The numbers.

It was all about the numbers.

He knew that the numbers were why he would be starting his new job in the morning, why his family’s future would be decided in this city, and why all the money problems of the past would soon be over. They filled the dreams of businessmen from Sydney to San Francisco – the one billion customers, the one billion new capitalists, the one billion market place.

He struggled to move his arms and glanced at his watch, wondering if he could make it back home to his girls before they woke up.

The ferry began to move.

That afternoon they did the tourist thing.

The three of them joined the queues and took the lift to the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower where they stared down at the boats on the Huangpu River and saw that the city seemed to be without end.

On the other side of the tower they looked down at a park that was full of brides, hundreds of them, all in white, looking like a flock of swans as they surrounded the lakes, feeding confetti-coloured fish food to koi carp.

Bill lifted his daughter so she could see.

‘New school tomorrow,’ he said.

Holly said nothing, her eyes wide at the sight of all those brides. ‘You’re going to make lots of new friends,’ Becca said, gripping one of Holly’s ankles, and shaking it with encouragement. Holly thought about it, chewing her bottom lip. ‘I’m going to be very busy,’ she said.

Although foreigners were a common sight in Shanghai now, Bill and Becca and Holly were the only non-Chinese at the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower that afternoon, and people stared at them.

The child and the woman were so blonde, their skin so pale, and their eyes so blue they looked like weather. The man holding his little girl and the child with her arms circling her father’s neck and the woman with her arm draped around her husband’s shoulders.

That’s what was noticed about them – those gestures of childlike affection, the little family holding on to each other in their new home, as if the three of them could not exist without that physical contact, or without each other.

Everybody knew that Westerners didn’t care about family in the same way that the Chinese did, especially not Westerners in Shanghai. But this man and woman and child seemed different.

TWO (#ucd08e9fe-4652-501b-99e4-9cb5a9ab8cd6)

He was gone by the time she woke up.

Letting Holly sleep on, Becca padded through the flat, edging around the stacks of crates. There was the sign of a shower, the smell of after-shave, a tie that had been considered and discarded on the back of a chair. She pictured Bill at his desk on the first day of his new job, working hard, the earnest face frowning, and felt a stab of the old feeling, the feeling you get at the start.

She picked one of the crates at random and prised it open. It was full of baby stuff. A pink high chair in three pieces. A bassinet. A cot mattress. Assorted blankets, sterilisers and stuffed rabbits. All of Holly’s old things. She had kept them, and shipped them across the world, not for sentimental reasons. Becca had kept them for the next one. Their marriage, seven years old now, was at the stage where neither of them doubted that there would be another child.

Becca went back to the bedroom and watched Holly sleeping. Then she pushed back the sheets and held her daughter’s feet until the child began to stir. Holly stretched, moaned and tried to curl up into sleep.

‘Wakey-wakey, rise and shaky,’ Becca said. She stood listening to her daughter’s laboured breathing, a wheezing more than a snoring, caused by Holly’s asthma. ‘Come on now, darling. You’ve got school.’

While Holly came round, Becca banged about in the strange new kitchen, preparing breakfast. Yawning, Holly came and sat at the table.

‘I’m a bit worried,’ she said, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth. Becca touched her daughter’s face, curled a tendril of hair behind her tiny sticky-out ears.

‘What are you worried about, darling?’ Becca said.

‘I’m a bit worried about dead people,’ Holly said solemnly, the corners of her mouth turning down.

Becca sat back. ‘Dead people?’

The child nodded. ‘I’m afraid they’re not going to get better.’

Becca sighed, tapping the table. ‘Don’t worry about dead people,’ she said. ‘Worry about your Coco-Pops.’

After breakfast Becca set up the breathing machine. It was routine now. The thing had a mouthpiece to make it easy for Holly to inhale her medication, and her blue eyes were wide above it.

Just before nine, Becca and Holly walked hand in hand to the Gubei International School. The children seemed to be from every nation on earth. There was that awkward moment when it was time to part and Holly clung to the belt of her mother’s jeans. But then a small, plump girl of about four who looked like she was from Korea or Japan took Holly’s hand and led her into the class, where the Australian teacher was taking registration, and Becca was the one who was reluctant to leave.

Everyone else was rushing off. Some of them were dressed for the office, some of them were dressed for the gym, but all of them acted like they had somewhere very important to go. Then there was a woman by her side, smiling, wheeling a fat toddler in a pushchair. The mother of the child who had taken Holly’s hand.

‘First day,’ she said in an American accent. ‘Tough, right?’ Becca nodded. ‘You know what it’s like. The trembling chin. Fighting back the tears. Trying to be brave.’ She looked at the woman. ‘And that’s just me.’

The woman laughed. ‘Kyoko Smith,’ she said, offering her hand. Becca shook it. Kyoko said she was a lawyer from Yokohama, not practising, married to an attorney from New York. They had been in Shanghai for almost two years. Becca said she was a journalist, currently resting, and she was married to yet another lawyer, whose name was Bill. They had been in Shanghai for two days.

‘You want to get coffee sometime?’ Kyoko asked Becca. ‘Tomorrow, maybe? I’ve got to run right now.’

‘Oh, me too,’ Becca said. ‘I have to run too.’

‘Well, that’s Shanghai,’ Kyoko Smith smiled. ‘Everybody always has to run.’

As Becca walked slowly back to Paradise Mansions she called Bill on his mobile.

‘She go off okay?’ Someone was with him. Becca could tell. She could also tell he had been thinking about Holly on her first day.

‘Oh, she was fine,’ she said, far breezier than she felt.