My favorite wife

'I might go back for a while,' she said.

It lay there between them until the statement – offered tentatively, as though it had just occurred to her – seemed to fill the room.

'Go back?' he said, dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what this meant. For him. For them. For their little family.

'My dad's not well,' she said quickly, playing the trump card at once. 'He's not like your dad. He's not fit. Independent. He can't make it without my mum. He's a different

sort of old man.' She patted his arm, wanting him to be all right about this. 'And I just think it might be good for me and Holly to go back for a while,' she said, happy to get it out in the open at last.

He didn't know what to say. 'How long would you go back for?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'Until I feel better about things.'

Something about her shoulders told him that she was filling up with tears. He held her fiercely, as if the strength of his feeling could change a mind that was already made up.

'I'm not asking you to leave,' she said. 'This was all my idea. Coming out here. I really think Devlin means it – you could be a partner in a few years. It could never happen that fast back home.'

'But what about us?'

'Well, there will always be us.' She patted his arm. 'Of course there will.'

'Or you could stay,' he said. He could hear the sound of splashing, and Holly laughing. 'Or you could stay and we could try for a second one.'

'What?' She genuinely seemed to not get it. How could she fail to get it? Didn't she think about this all the time? The baby who had yet to be born.

'A brother or sister for Holly,' he said. It was his own trump card, the only one he had to play.

'No,' she said wistfully. 'No, I don't think so. I think the best thing is if we go back for a while.'

'That baby will be okay,' he said, wondering if he truly believed it. 'That baby you found.'

'But it's still a cruel place. It's still a hard place. How different is it from the days when it said No Chinese, no dogs outside the parks? How different is it really?'

'God, Bee, it's really different. It's better than it's ever been. That's what you have to remember. It's better for more people

than it's ever been. And we could have a good life here. You know we could.'

'Yes, but how many things do we have to ignore for our ¦OOd life?'

Then she was silent and he didn't have the heart to argue with her. She had already decided. When she was sleeping he went back to his own room where Holly was sprawled across the single bed. The ayi had left a nightlight on, and Bill calculated where he could sleep and then turned it off .md squeezed into the small sliver of bed that was still vacant.

He carefully put an arm across his daughter, amazed at the stnallness of her, barely thirty pounds of life, a fragile and precarious presence in the world, and he held her as tightly as he dared in the darkness.

But sleep did not come here either, and sleep would not come, and so he left this second bedroom and went to the window, staring down at the empty courtyard of Paradise Mansions.

ten

The elevated freeway of Chengdu Lu runs right above St Peter's, the Catholic church in Chongqing Nanlu. As the bride and groom stepped out into the sunshine the cheers of the congregation mixed with the buzzsaw of the traffic flowing high above the church spire.

Holly was in Becca's arms, throwing confetti with her eyes screwed up, as if she was the one being bombarded. Most of it went over Bill. He looked at his wife. She looked beautiful today. And he wasn't the only one who noticed. When they had entered the church, it seemed to Bill that men on both sides of the aisle, the neat little Filippinos and the big affable Australians, all looked at his wife with a certain hunger. And now it seemed to Bill that, despite the two thousand or so nights they had spent together, he looked at her in exactly the same way.

Yet he knew that only he saw the fragility there, only he saw how the woman he loved was struggling to hold it together and put on a good front. They all look at her, he thought. But I'm the only one who really sees her.

He watched Becca smile at the sight of Shane and Rosalita, and it made him smile too. The happy couple

were a study in opposites. The groom as big and blond as his bride was tiny and dark. Shane grinning like an idiot, bashful in the glare of all this attention, Rosalita laughing and waving to her friends in the crowd, centre stage at last, happy to be top of the bill.

'He gets youth and beauty, and she gets affluence and security,' Mrs Devlin said, suddenly appearing at Bill's side. She lazily threw a fistful of confetti. 'At least that's the plan, I suppose.' She sighed wearily, as if she had seen it all many times before. 'What could possibly go wrong?'

The three Devlin boys were running wild, dodging in and out of legs, assaulting each other with confetti mixed with gravel that they had scooped up from the ground. The smallest one got caught in the eyes by one of his brothers and began crying.

Holly eyed them warily and Bill picked her up. She didn't much care for boys. She took Bill by his ears. It was her new way of getting his attention. He felt her sweet breath on his face.

'We're going back for a while,' she whispered. 'But you're staying in your home.'

He felt the panic fly up in him. 'My home is with you,' Bill whispered. 'Always. Wherever you are, that's my home. Okay?'

She thought about it, staring at her father with the solemn blue eyes of her mother.

'Okay, Daddy,' she quietly agreed, and they held each other as they stood there in their wedding clothes, and the chatter went on around them.

'We must do something with our children,' Mrs Devlin was telling Becca. Bill thought she meant some kind of military discipline, but apparently it was a play date with their daughter that she had in mind. 'Does Holly like pandas?' Tess said, baring her teeth at Holly. 'Do you like pandas, dear?'

'I like cows,' Holly said.

'We found this place near Renmin Square with a giant panda,' Mrs Devlin said, straightening up, ignoring Holly's affection for cows. 'A sort of Chinese circus. Well, their version of a circus. And the panda – he drives a car!'

Devlin grimaced. 'They do have a taste for the grotesque,' he murmured.

One of his sons crashed against his legs.

Becca smiled apologetically, and said nothing.

'They're going back for a while,' Bill said, and Mr and Mrs Devlin took it in and quickly looked away with frozen smiles, as if embarrassed to intrude upon a marriage more fragile than their own.

On the first floor of the Portman Ritz-Carlton, Becca and Holly joined the queue to congratulate the bride and groom.

Bill drifted off in search of a rest room and then he saw them coming – a group of casually dressed Chinese men and young women making their way down a spiral staircase.

The girls all had the look, that Shanghai look.

The look that summer was a tall slim girl in heels and tight white trousers. Straight shoulder-length hair, worn its natural jet black. In the chic, self-confident Shanghai of the new century there was a lot less of the highlighting and lightening than you saw among women in other parts of Asia. And the Shanghai look was no make-up, except maybe a little lipstick, and a short-sleeved or capped top to show off long, slender arms.

Everything about the look accentuated height and length and a willowy beauty that was specifically Chinese. The Shanghai look could make a young woman of quite average height appear over six feet tall.

It took him a moment to see that one of the young women with the look was Jinjin Li.

He stood transfixed as the group walked past him as if he wasn't there.

If she saw him, she gave no sign.

And he knew that she saw him.

And he wondered, how did it work? Her unknowable life. Her unimaginable nights. How was it played? Bill saw that the man was about forty, big and fit but balding, the high school jock running to seed, too old for her by far.

How did the arrangement work? Did she get a certain ¦mount of money paid directly into her bank every month? Il had to be. Was the apartment in his or her name? How many times a week did they meet? Did he fuck her every lime? Did his wife suspect a thing?

And did he love her?

Bill felt a ridiculous anger towards her, and towards the man. But what did he expect? What would he prefer? That she would stay as a teacher in Number 251 Middle School ,md meet some nice boy who would want to marry her? Yes, that was exactly what he wanted, that was exactly what he would have preferred.

There was a live band at the reception and after they had played their opening number Rosalita climbed on stage to sing 'Right Here Waiting for You', a beautiful power ballad n bout longing and loyalty that she supplemented with much slow grinding and wicked grinning.

'Ah, the unblushing bride,' Mrs Devlin said. 'In her element at last.'

Becca and Holly hit the dance floor and Bill made his way to the end of the queue for the buffet, his head swimming with the lights and the candles and the smell of orchids, and the hole in his future as he wondered what his life here would be like without them.

He steeled himself when Devlin approached him with a

sympathetic smile, but his boss said nothing, just patted him twice on the back and let his hand linger for a moment on Bill's shoulder.

Then Devlin was gone, moving off into the chatter of the guests and the muffled battery of champagne corks, and Bill stared after him with gratitude.

Bill could see what Becca would never see – the good that was in this city, and the kindness and generosity of these people.

His wife was immune to something that increasingly had Bill in its grip – the glory of this place and time, the magic of what was happening here.

Everyone's life would be better, eventually. He could be a part of that, contribute something, and make a difference.

And his life would get better too. He would not be held back the way he would be held back in London, where in the end they always wanted to know what school you went to and what your father did and what your real accent was like. All that sad old bullshit that had been going on for centuries in England. They didn't really care how well you did your job back in England.

The thing that Alice Greene complained about – the educated elite lording it over the huge pool of cheap labour, driving the economy on and on – most of the people in this room saw that as a good thing. Of course it wasn't fair. But when had China ever been fair? Tell me when, he thought.

As he moved away from the buffet table he found he had loaded his plate with jam doughnuts and foie gras. Nothing else. Just two jam doughnuts and a sliver of foie gras. A ridiculous meal, he thought, smiling with embarrassment at his choices.

He hesitated for a moment and then he thought – but why not? Really – why not?

Why shouldn't you have whatever you want?

* * *

In the master bedroom Bill read Holly a story until she slept. When she had nodded off he closed the book and just sat there for a while, smoothing back a tumble of fair hair that fell across her face. His daughter was the one who had taught him about unconditional love. There was nothing she could ever do in her life that could make him stop loving her.

Becca was packing things. She was being very selective. She was careful to make it seem as though they were not going for good. Things were being left behind.

Including me, he thought, fighting the bitterness and losing. And it wasn't my idea to come here.

'What's the book?' she said, her arms full of folded sweaters that seemed to belong to another world.

Bill looked at the book in his hands. He hadn't realised he was still holding it. "Farm Friends,' he said. 'Didn't we see the movie?'

Becca nodded seriously. 'That has to go back to the school,' she said. 'It's not one of ours.'

'Okay,' he said, opening the book. 'I'll get Tiger to run it over.'

There was a reading list at the back of the book, a little library card with DATE DUE – TITLE – DATE RETURNED at the top, followed by a list of all the books that Holly had personally chosen to take home from school. The list made him smile, and he pictured her earnest face as she made her selection.

5th June – Bunny Cakes

12th June – Do Donkeys Dance?

19th June – The Treasure Sock

26th June – Favourite Rhymes

3rd July – But No Elephants

10th July – There Was an Old Lady

17th July – Christmas Can't Wait

24th July – Imagine You're a Princess

31st July – Happy and Sad

7th August – Sssb!

14th August – Ballerina Belle

21st August – Peter Pan's Magical Christmas

28th August – Farm Friends

A Christmas book in July? And another one in August? Something about the list seemed to capture his daughter's sweet, funny essence.

He slipped the reading list into his pocket and went over to where Becca stood at the window silently watching the rain hammer down on the empty courtyard of Paradise Mansions.

'Did she go down okay?' she asked him.

'She's worn out,' he said. 'Two hours of dancing the Macarena.'

What would they talk about if they didn't have their daughter?

'Bloody weather,' he said, feeling ridiculous in the presence of English small talk. But the subject animated her.

'I think this must be the start of the Plum Rain season,' she said. 'Doesn't that sound just lovely? The Plum Rain season. I read about it before we came over. I wanted to see it. More than almost anything, really.'

They stared out at the courtyard, and he felt her take his hand. The Plum Rain season, the rains of summer, had turned Shanghai into a city of mist. They seemed to be floating in the clouds.

'How long does it last?' Bill said.

'I don't know,' Becca said. She gave him that sly, sleepy look, the one that said you know me. 'It doesn't last for ever, darling.'

He took her hand and they went to his little bedroom where he made love to his wife, her body warm and loved and familiar, that familiarity that you only get after years

logether, which is the good side of knowing another human being so well, and she slept in his arms until their daughter began to cry in the hours just before dawn.

Then Becca went back to the master bedroom and he lay I here for what was left of the night listening to his wife calm their child, smelling her perfume on his body, and thinking about the city his wife and daughter would soon be flying to, and remembering their old life in London when they were very young and very poor and very happy.

He came out of the departure gate of Pudong and looked at the mist and rain. Tiger beeped his horn from a no-parking /.one. Bill dashed through the rain to the waiting limo.

'Where to, boss?' Tiger said.

'Home,' Bill said.-'Let's just go home.'

The car headed towards the city. Bill stared straight through sights that had once filled him with bemused awe. He didn't see the blue and red flashing lights all along the highway, meant to replicate the watching eyes of the gong'an ju, the cops of the PSB. He didn't see the ancient trucks, overloaded with animals, produce, junk and men who were wet to the hone. And he didn't see the girls with the Shanghai look in their brand-new BMWs.

He wasn't interested in seeing any of that.

Instead Bill pulled his daughter's crumpled reading list from his pocket and it seemed a far greater source of wonder than any of these things. It made him smile. That girl. His girl. That little girl, sitting on her mother's lap with her books and her crayons, 35,000 feet above – oh, it had to be Inner Mongolia by now.

'Everything okay, boss?' Tiger said, slightly worried now. You never knew when these crazy da bizi would crack. The heat and the pressure and the stress. It got to all of them eventually.

'Yup,' Bill said, finishing the reading list and going right back to the start.

Outside, the Plum Rain season was at full pelt and although Tiger's windscreen wipers did their very best they could not keep pace with Bill Holden's tears.

part two: the permanent girlfriend

eleven

The Chinese did what they wanted to do. That was the strange thing. That was what caught him off guard.

Before they had ever come over, he had read all about the human rights violations, and dissidents arrested, and Falun Cong members setting fire to themselves on Tiananmen Square, but when Bill walked around the Old City on Saturday afternoon, when there was no more paperwork to keep him at the office and he didn't want to go home to an empty apartment, it felt like the Chinese were the freest people in the world. Or perhaps what they had was closer to anarchy than freedom.

Middle-aged women rode their motor scooters on the pavement. Businesses were set up in the street, and usually consisted of no more than a stool and a cardboard box and a couple of tools – the proprietors shaving old men, or helping clients to try on spectacles from a selection of hundreds, or cutting their hair. And in a pink-lit barbershop, where hairdressing was low on the agenda, two young women beckoned to him from the doorway.

Bill shook his head. One of them feigned disappointment. The other immediately turned to the next passing man. And

in his loneliness Bill was so happy about the one who was pretending to be disappointed that he kept looking at her until he banged his shin against the bumper of a car parked on the pavement.

When he looked up it was a red Mini with a Chinese flag painted on the roof.

Looking more closely, he could see that the car was about seven different shades of red. The vehicle had clearly been pulled apart, and patched back together.

Jinjin Li got out of the car. She had two ways of wearing her hair, he realised. She wore it down when she was out on the town with the man she called her husband, and pulled back in a ponytail for the rest of her life. Today she had it pulled back, the ponytail dragged through the back of a yellow baseball cap that said LA Lakers on the front, and he realised he preferred it that way because it meant you could really see her face.

She was a pretty girl with troubled skin. Later, when he saw the attention she lavished on keeping her skin under control, when he saw all the lotions and potions and pills and special soaps, he came to believe that the troubled skin was a manifestation of some inner turmoil. Later still, he didn't think about it – that was just who she was, and she was always beautiful. But that day in the Old City he thought that she was just a bit too old to have such troubled skin.

'Ah,' she said, as the central locking flashed orange behind her. 'You have come to the Old City. In the past no foreigners dared to come to Old City. Oh my gosh. They very afraid to come here.'

He watched her tugging the Lakers cap down over her eyes. What did she know about the Lakers? 'Is that right?' he said.

She nodded curtly. 'How about you? Are you afraid to come here?'

'Only if you're driving.'

She nodded. 'English joke,' she said, dead serious. 'I'm going to the market. Yu Gardens.' She smiled encouragingly. 'You want?'

'Sure,' he said, and she took his arm, and he was absurdly pleased. He felt his face reddening. He hadn't blushed for years. But he knew it didn't mean anything. He told himself that possibly she was lonely too.

The Yu Gardens market was the usual collection of everything. In ramshackle wooden buildings untouched by time and developers, Mao memorabilia was stacked up next to bootleg Disney merchandise and the latest software from Microsoft.

'For your daughter,' Jinjin smiled, holding up a strangely familiar costume inside a sealed plastic package. A yellow skirt, a blue top with red piping, puffy short sleeves. There was a picture of a girl with the face of a glacial brunette, like the young Elizabeth Taylor. And Bill thought – but where are the seven dwarves? Snow Girl, it said on the wrapping. Snow Girl? It was a counterfeit Disney princess.

He smiled, as if impressed but unwilling to commit himself – Holly would spot a bootleg princess a mile off – as the woman squatting in front of the stall spread her arms indicating that if he wasn't in the market for a genuine fake Snow Girl costume, then how about an opium pipe, or a Little Red Book, or a Deng Xiaoping watch, or a green coat from the People's Liberation Army, or a propaganda poster of heroic factory workers?

They kept moving. An old woman and her fat little Buddha of a grandson walked hand in hand, neither of them too steady on their feet, both eating courgettes as though they were ice cream cones.

'Look at those two,' Bill said, nodding at them as they paused to solemnly consider a badly scarred mechanical rabbit.

Jinjin smiled. 'Fat little boy,' she agreed. 'Very nice child.' For Jinjin Li, this was the real world. What was strange

to his eyes was normal to hers.

They emerged from the tumbledown maze of the Yu

Gardens bazaar and there before them was a teahouse on a

small lake. A wooden bridge zigzagged crazily across the

water.

'The Bridge of Nine Turnings,' she said as they stepped on to it. Below them the water bubbled and exploded with hundreds of golden carp. 'Because evil spirits can't turn corners.'

He looked at her face. She was perfectly serious. He felt her hand in his, small and cool, and she led him across the twisting bridge to the teahouse on the lake. They stepped inside a wooden room and Bill looked up at a photograph of the last American president grinning widely over a cup of green tea.

'Huxinting teahouse,' Jinjin said. 'It is very famous. Many VIPs come here.' She indicated the former president. 'And some V-VIPs. Do you know?'

Suddenly he did know it. Of course – the Huxinting teahouse was the great symbol of the city's past, a photo opportunity for every big shot that passed through Shanghai and wanted to show that they were in touch with the real China.

He had always meant to come here with Becca, but somehow they had never got around to it. Jinjin spoke to a woman in Mandarin as Bill looked up at the pictures of movie stars and presidents and royalty. But although the bazaar was teeming with people, the Huxinting was almost empty.

'We shall drink tea now,' Jinjin informed him, and they sat opposite each other at a wooden table in a narrow room.

Jinjin took off her Lakers baseball cap. Cups were placed

In lore them. A tiny pot. Three small glass jars with leaves .ind assorted plant life were filled with boiling water. He wondered how much of this was genuine historic ritual and how much of it was for the tourists. But then the thought left him because he was enjoying himself, and he liked having some company, and he was happy to make it to the Huxinting teahouse at last.

A couple of funky young Japanese men with blond hair sat at the next table. Bill and Jinjin smiled at each other, then looked away. He didn't know what to say. He felt there were huge areas of her life that he couldn't approach. She saw him staring at the long queue outside a shop on the other side of the lake.

'Nan Xiang,' Jinjin said. 'Very famous dumplings. Do you want?'

'Sounds good,' he said, and he realised that he was free, and had nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to meet. Then Jinjin was looking up at someone standing beside him.

'Bill?' Tess Devlin was touching his shoulder. 'How are you getting on without them?'

Then he was stuttering a reply with his face flushing hot – no blushing for fifteen years and then twice in the space of minutes, he thought, good going, Bill - feeling as if he had been caught out. Jinjin sipped her tea, and set down her cup. The water was still boiling hot.

He noticed a Taiwanese client and his wife gawking up at the pictures on the wall, and Devlin smiling as he stepped around his wife to introduce himself and shake hands with Jinjin Li. He does it so well, Bill thought, with a flash of admiration. He sees the situation and just takes control. Jinjin shook hands with Bill's boss as if it was a custom as alien to her as rubbing noses.

Then Tess Devlin turned her beady all-seeing eyes on Jinjin and Bill's heart sank as they all joined them at the table.

The Taiwanese stared blankly at Bill, even though they had been introduced at the office, and then smirked as he ran his eyes over Jinjin Li. Bill tried to remember what this hideous little man was in town for. Something to do with a joint-venture dispute with a Chinese telecom operator. His small, bespectacled wife, along for the shopping, began unloading strange painted figurines on to the table. They were ornamental torture scenes depicting old men having their heads shaved, and women in glasses having their arms bent behind their backs, their tormentors angry figures in green, holding up their little red books as though they were the truth and the light.

'Look what Mr and Mrs Wang found in Dongtai Lu market,' chuckled Tess. 'Isn't that hilarious? Souvenirs of the Cultural Revolution. Why on earth do they make things like that?'

'Because they know some mad tourist will buy it,' Devlin said, smiling sweetly at the Taiwanese client's wife.

Tess was thoughtful. 'Oh, yes, money, of course,' she said. 'There's always that.'

Orders were placed for more tea. Bill thought that the logical thing would be to ask Jinjin to do it, but Tess Devlin chose to instruct the waitress herself, slowly and loudly, in broken English.

'And where are you from, dear?' Tess said, staring at Jinjin's features as if examining important forensic evidence. 'You don't look typical Shanghainese.'

'My mother is from Changchun,' Jinjin said. Bill had never heard of Changchun. She must have sensed it. She turned to him. 'Big city in the Dongbei – the north-east. Near the border with Korea.' She turned back to Mrs Devlin. 'My father is from Guilin. Down south. But I grew up in Changchun.'

Tess looked delighted. 'So you're – what do they say? A Dongbei ho …'

Jinjin smiled and nodded. 'Dongbei bo - north-east tiger . . .'

The Taiwanese gasped and jumped up, having scalded his tongue with boiling tea. His wife looked around, sighing with boredom until she saw a picture on the wall of a famous Buddhist Hollywood star sipping tea in the Huxinting. She got up to examine it, bumping the table with her behind, and making her torture sculptures rattle precariously.

'I thought so,' Tess continued. 'Your face – not really typically Chinese, even, let alone Shanghainese.' She narrowed her eyes, making her judgement. 'Hmmm – got a touch of the Manchu about you.'

Jinjin frowned, and Bill was reminded of the first time he had met her, when he had tried to tell her that she would never remove the ignition key while she had it in drive.

'Changchun,' her husband was saying. 'They've had it tough up there. Did all right during the planned economy. Bit of an industrial powerhouse. Coal. Cars. Heavy machinery. Missed out on the big payday, though. What is it up there?' This to Bill, as if he would know. 'About fifty per cent unemployment?'

Both Devlin and his wife seemed to have a genuine academic interest in Jinjin. Bill wasn't certain if he should be offended or not.

'There are many people no job,' Jinjin confirmed, rising from the table. Her English seemed to crack under stress. It became a pared down, spartan language, largely pruned of personal pronouns and the archaic idioms that he found so enchanting. He saw that it wasn't the mass unemployment in her hometown that concerned her. 'I'm not Manchu,' she informed Mrs Devlin.

The two women stared at each other.

'Of course you're not, dear,' said Tess. 'Silly of me to think so.'

'Need rest room now,' Jinjin said, her way barred by the

Taiwanese, who was still standing up, dabbing his scalded mouth. Jinjin squeezed past him. He twinkled, leered, licked his burning lips. Jinjin left without looking at Bill.

'What a lovely girl,' Tess said. 'Where on earth did you find her?'

'She's a neighbour,' Bill said. 'Just a neighbour.' Hugh Devlin looked disturbed. 'Places like Changchun -breaks your heart when you think about it.' He carefully sipped his Jasmine tea. 'China's rust belt, Bill, that's what it is. Reminds us that it's not just rural peasants that have been left behind, it's entire cities, entire regions.' He stared thoughtfully at his tea. 'Changchun is a city of twenty million people, and they are bloody desperate up there. We have to acknowledge that, and do something about it.' He rose from the table. 'Excuse us. I must give them the grand tour before they head to the airport.'

He took the Taiwanese off to see the view from the top of the teahouse, and Bill was left alone with Tess Devlin. She smiled and sighed into the silence.

'Bill, Bill, Bill,' she laughed.

He forced himself to meet her eye. 'What?'

'Oh, do be careful there, Bill.'

He shook his head and laughed. 'I told you, she's a neighbour.'

'Really? I could have sworn you were about to start holding hands. I said to Devlin – good God, Bill's about to start holding hands with that Chinese girl . .. what's her name? You do know her name, Bill? You didn't introduce us and I didn't like to ask. We've been through all this with Shane, of course. Many times.'

He took a breath. 'Her name is Jinjin Li.' Tess Devlin looked hugely amused. He couldn't tell if it was genuine or not. 'And do you know how many Jinjin Lis there are in the PRC? About, oh, one hundred million of them.'

'Really?' She was getting on his nerves. 'Who counted?'

less nodded. A serious woman now. 'I don't have to tell you to think about your wife and child, because I know you'll do that. But think about yourself. I'm very lucky with Hugh, I know – he's not into the bamboo. Never has been. One of the few good men out here that doesn't like Asian girls. Don't know why.' She nodded, as if it was all a mystery. 'Some of them are lovely when they're young.'

Bill warmed his palms on his teacup. It wasn't so hot now. He took a gulp. 'They probably say the same thing about us, Tess – Oh, those big-nose pinkies, they're lovely when they're little.'

'No doubt,' she said briskly. 'But what I never understand is how a man can get serious about a girl like that. Ask yourself – do you really want to be with a little old Chinese lady? What would you talk about? All I'm trying to do is give you some sound advice.'

'Thanks so much, Tess.'

'For your sake. For Becca's sake. For the sake of the firm – do be careful there.'

Bill sighed. 'I had the lecture when I arrived. How does it go? Hard as nails, these Chinese girls. Gold diggers, the lot of them. They don't see a man - they see a cash-point machine. But I wonder, Tess – what do we see when we look at them?'

She laughed and poured him some more tea.

'Oh dear – you sound quite keen,' she said, and he felt his face burning. He was really going to have to stop doing that. 'A mistress is a great idea in theory, Bill.'

'She's not my bloody -' He stopped, shook his head. 'I don't want a mistress, Tess,' he said, and he truly meant it. The idea sickened him. It didn't fit with his idea of himself, or what he wanted from his marriage. He loved his wife, he missed his wife, and he didn't want to be like one of those

men who drove their cars into the courtyard of Paradise Mansions. He wanted to be a better man than that. He didn't want to believe that he was just like everybody else.

'Good,' said Tess Devlin, as if they had come to some agreement. She lowered her voice a notch. 'Because you don't fall for a girl like that, Bill – you just fuck her. That's what she's for. And if you really get stuck on her – and I can see how you might, she's such a hot little Manchu slut – then you set her up in a nice little flat and then make your excuses and look for the exit sign.' She laughed. 'Don't you know anything?'

'No, I'm fresh off the banana boat, Tess.' He found he was fiddling with a yellow baseball cap advertising the LA Lakers. 'I don't know a thing.'

Her husband was coming back with the Taiwanese. It took them a while to negotiate the tight wooden stairs.

'Just don't get carried away, that's all I'm saying,' Tess concluded, lightening the tone. 'These Chinese girls, Bill -they're just so practical. They are so practical that, if you let them, they will break your heart.'

Her husband was grinning with pleasure. 'Any more of that tea?' he said.

Bill stared out at the queue for Nan Xiang's dumplings and was just in time to see Jinjin step off the far side of the zigzag bridge, designed so that no evil spirits could ever get across.

twelve

Awards, Bill thought. Lawyers love awards.

Best new this. Most promising that. Most valuable the other. Any excuse to get pissed and pat ourselves on the back.

He was in a ballroom with hundreds of lawyers in dinner jackets, the dresses of the women splashes of colour in a sea of black tie, sitting at the firm's table between Nancy Deng and Tess Devlin.

Most of the firm's table consisted of identically dressed men. On the other side of Tess Devlin was Shane. Then came Devlin. Then Mad Mitch. And finally the two Germans, Wolfgang and Jurgen, with Rosalita laughing between them.

Too many men at this table, Bill thought, missing Becca, feeling her absence. He realised that for years these events had been made bearable because, no matter how long they dragged on, he could always look up and see her face, or share a silent private joke.

But the night crawled by in a blur of bad food, harassed waiters and too much drink, the glasses topped up quickly yet sloppily, a strange combination of the servile and the slapdash. A succession of men in tuxedos, and occasionally a woman in an evening dress, went on stage to collect a glass sculpture of

a bird from a willowy Chinese woman with a professional smile that never wavered and a man in a dinner jacket who had something to do with one of the sponsors.

Then came the last award of the night, Foreign Lawyer of the Year, and when Shane's name was announced Bill was suddenly on his feet, cheering and clapping louder than anyone. 'Sit down,' someone shouted from behind him. A disappointed nominee, Bill thought, sitting down. But he got up again, clapping harder and laughing as Shane weaved his way to the stage with an embarrassed grin.

'Thank you, thank you,' the big Australian said, squinting at his award. 'I shall always treasure this, er, glass pigeon.' Laughter. 'You know, the public think that lawyers are a heartless, mercenary bunch,' he said, only slightly slurring his words. 'But of course we all know that's not true.'

Whoops of knowing, derisive laughter. Shane straightened himself up.

'I am reminded of the beautiful young woman who made an appointment to see a lawyer,' he continued, with inebriated gravitas. 'She said, "Please take my case. Unfortunately I have no money. However, I will give you the best blow-job in the world."'

More laughter, but now mixed with disapproving catcalls and the odd cry of 'Shame.' It was a conservative crowd. Bill looked at them. At the tables of rival firms, heads were being shaken, smiles fading. Shane had gone too far. These people didn't want blow-jobs with their after-dinner mints.

But Shane leaned on the podium, and it wobbled dangerously. 'The best blow-job in the world,' he repeated, with an edge of defiance, as if every word were true. He paused for effect, glaring at the crowd. 'And the lawyer said, "What's in it for me?'"

He had won them back. And as they all clapped and cheered, even the rival firms who had feigned offence, it seemed

in l'iiII that this was the very essence of his friend. Teetering ни the edge of disaster, and then somehow stumbling to glory.

Shane came back to the table amid much backslapping mil congratulations and Devlin sent the waiter off for champagne.

Kill looked at his watch. Knocking on for midnight. Back in London, Becca would have picked up Holly from nursery by now. If there was no ballet and no swimming lessons, then they would be home and he would be able to talk to both of them. He pulled his phone from his dinner jacket but saw there was no signal.

The night was breaking up. As the others got up to network and stretch their limbs, Bill was the only one who remained at the firm's table, the debris of empty wine bottles and coffee cups before him. A waiter appeared with a bucket bristling with champagne bottles and placed it on the abandoned table. Shane and Devlin looked over at Bill as he headed for the exit.

'I'll be right back,' he mouthed.

He didn't notice the four men at another table who got up and followed him out of the ballroom and into the hotel lobby. He was looking at his phone, waiting for the signal to appear, so he still didn't see them when he stepped out of the hotel and into the soft summer night. It was only when the signal appeared and he was speed-dialling Becca's number that he looked up and saw them standing there.

Four men he didn't recognise, staring at him as though he should know them.

'Hello?' Becca said, but Bill didn't hear her because he was closing his phone, and knowing all at once that he had to get away from these men.

Because now he knew them. Now he remembered them. Now he could see them out on the dance floor of Suzy Too, laughing like lottery winners, with their hands all over Jinjin Li.

Bill moved to walk past them but one of them threw his cigarette away and stepped in front of him. 'A piece of advice,' the man said.

They were like one person, Bill thought. Young but running to fat, with those closed, spiteful faces that he knew so well. His countrymen.

'Don't try to tell us what we can and can't do with some Chinese whore,' the man said, and then he punched Bill full in the face. His friends chortled their approval.

Bill had seen it coming but he was too shocked to move. He had stood there like an idiot as the blow struck the side of his mouth and the force knocked him backwards and he trod on someone in the queue for taxis and heard a girl scream. He was hit again, felt something hard and unbreakable split his lip – maybe a wedding ring, he thought – and crashed into something big and hard. He held on to it for support and saw it was one of the two Chinese lions protecting the entrance to the hotel. He had scuffed his hands on the lion but it broke his fall and kept him on his feet.

His fingers went to his mouth and came away wet and red. He felt he could smell the blood, rank and metallic. He half-turned and there were three of them in front of Bill now. Fists clenched, working themselves up, all wanting their crack at him. The lips taut on their mean, stupid faces. Oh, he knew them now. The one that had hit him seemed keen to explain something.

'Where do you think you are? The school disco? She would have been happy to fuck the lot of us for five hundred RMB,' he said. 'You ignorant fucking tourist.'

Tourist was the worst thing you could call someone in Shanghai. Tourist made motherfucker seem like quite the compliment.

Another punch, but Bill had realised that he should possibly be making some effort to duck and this one skimmed off his

Ioi chead. Then someone he didn't see kicked him in the ribs mil I he wind went whoosh out of him and he was down on ill lours, gasping with shock and fear, because the pain in Ins side was unbelievable. He wondered where this would ¦ ml, and if they were going to kill him.

Then from somewhere far away he heard Shane's voice. (billing his name, calling them bastards, telling them to leave him alone. And at first it seemed as though they were doing just that.

The blows stopped and as Bill crawled across the pavement towards the lobby of the hotel, aware of the people in the taxi queue backing away from him as though he was carrying some dreadful disease, it felt like a miracle. But they had only turned their attention on his friend.

Bill lifted his head up and saw Shane going down with all of them around him. Bill held on to the stone lion and got up. Shane was lashing out and cursing, but one of the men dropped on top of his chest, fists moving like pistons, while the others were kneeling on him, pinning him down, making him roar. There were shouts in Chinese and English. People were coming out of the hotel to watch.

Bill was back on his feet, holding his side as he staggered towards his friend. Something exploded in his ear like a red flash of light and he ducked, almost comically after the event. He saw the faces of two of the men, turning away from Shane, one of them with blood on his dress shirt. That might be mine, Bill thought.

The other two were still kicking Shane. In the head, between the legs, in the ribs. He curled up and they kept kicking him.

Bill was aware he should do something. But it was all happening too fast, and there were too many of them, and he didn't have the fury in him that he had had when he saw them with Jinjin Li and felt his blood pumping with rage at

the sight of that young, manhandled flesh. Tonight the rage was all in them.

The men who were stomping Shane were breathing heavily, sweating hard, slowing down. Their bow ties had come loose. Shane had stopped shouting. He was curled up on the pavement, not moving. Bill moved towards him but the talkative one was in Bill's face, bouncing on the balls of his feet, fists clenched by his sides. His trousers had those long satiny stripes that lawyers liked. That they were all wearing black tie somehow made the scene more grotesque, and made the men seem like a pack of psychopathic penguins.

'Protecting her honour, were you?' He had Jinjin Li on the brain, this one. 'What do you think, you stupid bastard – that she doesn't fuck men for money?'

He punched Bill in the gut and it bent him double, but then it was suddenly all over, because the hotel security were on the pavement and the men were walking off, in no hurry at all, giving each other high fives as though they had just won a basketball game, exulting and laughing and shouting obscenities over their shoulders. The hotel security stared after them, and then at Bill and Shane with equal hostility. Shane was sitting up now but bent forward and moaning with his hands cupped over his groin. He had been sick down the front of his dinner jacket.

Bill helped Shane to his feet and felt the full weight of his friend leaning on him. They staggered to the road where Tiger was scrambling out of the car and staring at them in horror. He was saying something but Bill couldn't hear him. Yes, that's exactly what I believe, Bill was thinking, as the humiliation of taking a beating kicked in. I really believe it, you pig.

I believe with all my heart that she never fucked anyone for money.

X **

When they were very young and starting out, Becca and Bill hnd talked endlessly, talked about their relationship, feelings, lilc, the world, jobs, friends, problems, fulfilment, parents ,iikl all the disappointments of the past.

And then they got married and had a baby, and after that they mostly talked about their daughter.

'She was looking for "YMCA",' Becca said on the phone. 'The CD with "YMCA" on it. By the Village People.'

'Yes,' Bill said, resisting the urge to say / know who sings 'YMCA'. He absent-mindedly felt the mess they had made of his face, and smiled at the memory of Holly out on the floor at Shane and Rosalita's wedding, facing her mother as they sang and danced along to the Village People. Her thin white arms thrown flamboyantly wide for Y, fingertips touching her head for M, leaning sideways with her arms almost forming a circle for С – that was the funniest part, for some reason – and her hands making a quick triangle above her head for the A.

'It's on Now That's What I Call Disco,' he said. His voice sounded strange to his ears. It was his fat lips, and whatever they had done to his teeth.

'But it's not,' Becca insisted. 'That's what I thought, but it's not on Now That's What I Call Disco. "In the Navy" is on there. Their other hit. The Village People, I mean.'

Bill sighed. 'Then look on Super Dance Party 1999,' he suggested. 'Might be on there.'

'Okay,' Becca said doubtfully. If Holly wanted to dance to a certain song, it never occurred to either of her parents to do anything other than search through their entire CD collection until it was found. 'Hold on, Bill. She wants a word with you.'

There was the shuffling sound as Becca gave the phone to their daughter.

'Holly?'

And then her voice in his ear. Sweet and formal, infinitely more grown up than he was expecting, than he remembered. 'Hello?'

'Holly, it's Daddy.'

'I know.' A pause. 'I have a question.' 'Go ahead, darling.' 'Did you have a scary night last night?' He stood up abruptly and recoiled as he caught sight of his face in the mirror. He was suddenly aware of what his cuts and bruises looked like, and not just what they felt like. He was a mess, and this would be an embarrassment in the office. 'A scary night, angel?' But how did she know what had happened? How could she possibly know about that? 'Why would I have a scary night?'

A long pause. Then a sigh, the kind of sigh that only an exasperated four-year-old girl can make. 'Because you were alone.'

He laughed. She made him laugh. She made him laugh more than anyone he had ever known.

'No, I'm okay,' he said, the relief filling him up. 'And you know why?'

Silence. She was probably shaking her head. 'No,' she said eventually.

He could hear her mother's voice in the background, pulling her away. She's my child too, he thought.

'Because if ever I'm down or scared, all I have to do is think of you and then I always feel better. Always. I remember that you're my little girl and that makes me feel so happy.' His blinked angrily. There was silence at the other end, not even the shuffling sound of the handset being passed like a baton in a relay.

'Holly?'

'I have to brush my teeth.' No note of apology, just a statement of fact. It was the way things were.

'Before you go -'

'Night-night,' she said briskly, and the panic flew up in him. This was no good.

'Wait, wait – before you go …' He stopped, not knowing what to say to his faraway daughter. And then he knew. 'Just remember that I'm your daddy,' he said. 'And I will never stop loving you. And whatever happens, and wherever you are, and wherever I am, no matter how far apart, I love you now and I always will and I'm so glad that I'm your daddy. And I am so proud that you're my daughter. So proud. Remember my face. Remember my voice. Okay, Holly?' Nothing. 'Hello?'

'Okay, but I really do have to go now.' Sounding like his girl again. 'Night-night, Daddy.'

'Goodnight, angel.'

thirteen

He paced the floor of his apartment with the counterfeit Lakers baseball cap in his hands, watching the light in her window.

Pathetic, he thought. Another married big nose eyeing the local talent when the wife has her back turned – what a cliche. Oh, you are such a cliche.

Just look at you. Calculating how long you should wait before you make the next move. What are you doing} What do you think you're doing? Nothing, he told himself, the cap in his hands. I'm not doing anything. I'm just working out the best time to give back her Lakers hat. And I'm lonely. It's okay to be lonely, isn't it? Being lonely doesn't break any of the wedding vows, does it?

It's all perfectly innocent, he lied to himself. But he didn't go over there. He felt too shy, too nervous, too stupid. As far as he could remember, those kinds of feelings always put a girl off.

So on Saturday night Bill just waited, and he watched the light in her window, and then it was too late anyway because the silver Porsche arrived and after a while the light went out in her apartment. He turned away from the window and

went to look inside the refrigerator. He didn't watch her leave. He wasn't going to put himself through that.

I le threw aside the Lakers hat and lay down on his single bed, the master bedroom abandoned now, and he felt ridiculous. He had imagined that Jinjin Li was just like him, that most nights she was home alone, the table set for one and the phone not ringing. Missing someone. That's what he thought she did with her time – sat around missing someone. But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps Jinjin Li was just fine.

Perhaps it was the man's wife who was the lonely one.

The next night he went to her flat.

It still felt too soon, but when the weekend was over he would be working late or out with clients and the chance would be gone until next weekend. She would probably have a new baseball cap by next weekend. And what was the big deal anyway?

He was only returning a bloody hat.

He went over there, to the opposite block of Paradise Mansions, and caught the lift to her floor and then paused outside her door. He remembered the last time he was here – the girl drunk and sick, and him struggling to hold her up as he fumbled for her keys.

That should have been the end of it. That should have been enough.

But he rang the doorbell anyway.

Nobody came. Thank God for that. He could hear music inside, but nobody came and Bill was about to escape back to his safe lonely life when the door suddenly flew open and there she was in all her wide-eyed beauty, and he knew that it was simply not true that the Asian face is unreadable because on those high-cheekboned northern features, on that Dongbei ho face, he could see surprise, and a bit of pleasure

and a lot of wonder. Her eyes seemed to shine when she looked at him. Maybe she liked him, he thought. Or maybe that was just the way she looked at the world.

Bill had never seen a face that was so expressive, a face

where so much was happening, a face that said so much.

And it said, What is this big-nosed pinky doing at my door?

He held out his yellow-and-purple excuse. 'You forgot

your hat,' he said.

She took it from him. She had small hands. Extraordinarily small hands for such a tall woman. 'Oh,' she said. 'Tse-tse.'

'Bu ke-qi,' he said. And then the awkward silence. He defensively struggled to fill it. 'What do you know about the Lakers anyway?'

She thought about it. 'NBA. Magic Johnson. Yellow shirts,' she said. 'The Lakers are basketball. Kobe Bryant. Shaquille O'Neal.'

'That's more than me,' he said. 'I don't know anything about the Lakers.'

'LA,' she said. 'LA, California.'

He really liked her. He felt as if she had just opened up her eyes and seen the entire planet. 'You didn't have to leave, you know,' he said.

A flash of irritation in her eyes. 'That lady,' she said. 'That lady, she said I'm Manchu.'

He didn't know much about Manchuria. About as much as he knew about the LA Lakers. He knew Manchuria had been in the Dongbei, the north-eastern region she came from, and that it had been colonised by Mongols, Manchus and the Japanese. But although he didn't know much, he knew enough to know that Tess Devlin had a point.

Jinjin's face was not typically Chinese. It was easy to believe she carried the blood of some high-cheekboned invader, and easy to understand why she was so touchy about it. It was

Id | idling someone on a kibbutz that they looked like a niNsack.

I iliink she said you look a bit Manchu,' he said, playing

il down.

Now he was really getting on her nerves. 'But I'm not M.inchu.' .

11c held up his hands in surrender. This wasn't going great. Hut then she tossed her baseball cap on to the back of her head and smiled, a smile that somehow broke the enchantment cast by her looks. It was a bit of a goofy grin because her teeth stuck out slightly, and the dentists of the Dongbei had been careless with her, or maybe her parents had other things to worry about, like finding food for the table, but that smile was full of warmth and humour. And if that toothy, goofy grin took the edge off the classic beauty that resided on her face when she wasn't smiling, then it replaced it with something better – or at least something that Bill liked a lot more.

'Please come in,' she said, with the scrupulously polite formality she was capable of, stepping back to invite him into her apartment. And suddenly he felt very married. Did he really want this to happen?

He wasn't cut out for this game. That was the truth of it. All his plotting, all his calculating, all his watching from his window – when it came to the crunch, when it was time to go into her flat, he just didn't have the heart to go through with it. You see, he loved his wife.

'I've got to go.' He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. 'Early start tomorrow.'

But she had made her mind up.

'Please come in,' she insisted. 'I want you to try my dumplings.'

This was too much. Just too much.

'Oh no, I can't, I couldn't,' he said in a weak voice.

'Please,' she said, and he was struck again by her adherence to form, as though there was a strict code of etiquette here that had to be obeyed, and somehow it made her impossible to resist. In a daze, he found himself entering her apartment, and it took his brain a few moments to realise that when Jinjin Li offered you dumplings, that really was all she was offering.

The smell of dumplings filled the air and the flat was full of people. All of them young women. Apart from a child, a tiny child, a sturdy crop-haired toddler who staggered between the legs of the girls of Paradise Mansions. There was a gap at the back of his trousers where his fat little bum stuck out to make it easy for him to do his business.

They were cooking dinner, which seemed to consist exclusively of dumplings, all these small packets of dough that were being filled with pork, fish or vegetables, and then fried or steamed.

Most of the faces he recognised. These women were not strangers. The tall taxi dancer from Suzy Too was at the stove, pulling dumplings from a steamer with one hand, and fast frying a pan of dumplings with the other. She waved at him.

The woman who had tapped a number into her mobile phone and offered herself for peanuts was playing on the floor with the small boy. She pointed at the child and laughed. She seemed a lot happier than the last time he had seen her, and he realised that he hadn't seen her smile or laugh when he met her before, surrounded by all that fun.

There was another one he thought he recognised but could not place, an alarmingly thin girl in a mini-kilt who was washing up dishes in the sink. Where was she from? And then he saw the monogrammed handbag nearby and got it. It was one of the Louis Vuitton-addicted teachers, who he guessed had perhaps found a sponsor since the last time

they'd met. She glanced up at him, but gave no sign of recognition. Why would she? He had been just another guy in Suzy Too.

And there was someone else – not one of the young women he remembered from out in the night, but a face he had seen when she was putting the rubbish out, or chatting to the porter, or strolling the aisles of the local Carrefour supermarket, or when she was going off with her father. At least he had thought it was her father.

She was the plain girl in glasses that he had seen leaving with the old man in his BMW, and she had seemed to be from a different world to the rest of them. She was knitting now, and it made her look more like a fifties housewife than a kept woman. But she wasn't from a different world to the rest of them. She was from the same world.

'Neighbours,' Jinjin said, ever the perfect host. 'All the neighbours. Making xiao long bao. Shanghainese dumpling. And jiaozi dumpling from Changchun. Like ravioli. You know?'

He knew. T know.'

'Please to try.'

Jinjin found him a seat between the girl in glasses and the woman with the kid and brought him a cold Tsingtao. The child held up a scratched metal car and Bill took it. 'Ferrari,' he said, 'very nice.'

The one in glasses was called Jenny Two. Jenny Two? Yes, Jenny Two. The one with the boy was Sugar. T think we met,' he said, unsure if mentioning it was the right thing to do. He was sure Jinjin could have told him. 'How are you?' he asked Sugar, and unfortunately she told him.

'Sometimes I have to lock myself away from my family,' she said, quite matter-of-fact, watching Bill play with her child. 'My mother and father and son. I can't be with them. Because of my work.' She paused, taking a breath. This was

what they did, he thought. They bottled everything up for so long that when they finally let go, it all came pouring out. 'Last night there was a man in Suzy Too,' said Sugar. 'An Australian. And when we left he wanted to go to casino. And I said – oh no, no casino, we just go to your hotel. But he wanted casino and he lost.'

Bill nodded. He lost at the casino. What were the chances of that?

'Then this morning he gave me ten US dollar,' Sugar said, and at first Bill thought he hadn't heard her right. Ten dollars? 'And he said, "What can I do? Everything else is gone." And I was good to him.' The tears came and she blinked them back. Her child looked up at her, the little metal car in his hand. 'It's not enough, is it?' she said. 'No,' Bill said quietly. 'It's not enough.' She nodded. Her son held out his toy as if to comfort her. 'So sometimes I have to lock myself away from my family,' she said, taking the scratched toy Ferrari.

Jenny Two put a protective arm around her and Bill looked away, unwilling to intrude on this personal grief and unable to offer any words of comfort. Ten US dollars for your body. Sugar was the poor relation, he learned, bouncing between Jenny Two's spare room and her parents' apartment. The rest of them all had someone. The rest of them all had some kind of sponsor. And while the world he lived in would certainly disapprove, having some kind of sponsor was better than being paid ten US dollars for your body.

He looked over at Jinjin and she smiled and he immediately felt better – he was getting used to it now, that toothy grin that revealed her soul in a way that the cool, poker-faced beauty she wore when climbing into a Porsche never did, and never could. He was getting used to her smile but he thought that he could never get tired of it.

He had been wrong about her, he realised, pulling a book

ul crossword puzzles from beneath him. He had been wrong .1 limit all of these women, the jinseniao in the niaolong of I'.irndise Mansions. All the pretty canaries in their golden i .ige.

They might spend nights alone waiting for the call. And when they were back from the jewel-box of the Shanghai night, back from the restaurants and the cocktail bars and clubs of the Bund, back from it all and finally home alone, they might sometimes feel second best, and they might suffer all the indignities of being a married man's mistress, of going to bed with someone but usually waking up alone.

But they would never be lonely, not in the way that he was lonely. This was their city. And the girls of Paradise Mansions had each other.

It was a different kind of karaoke bar to what he was used to.

Bill had accompanied Shane and clients, all of them Asian, to glossy joints in the old French Concession, but the karaoke bar that the girls of Paradise Mansions favoured was just a warren of plain little boxes in a Gubei backstreet, and the neon sign above the door was not in English, and there were no pretty girls employed to applaud middle-aged Taiwanese businessmen for drunkenly murdering 'My Way' in Mandarin.

Bill and the girls crammed into a room the size of his wife's walk-in wardrobe and ordered fruit juice all round, and a Tsingtao for Bill.

Sugar had stayed home – she had a spare room in Jenny

Two's place that she shared with her son – but the rest of

them were there, studying the songbook menus in earnest

silence, like famished souls who had unexpectedly found

themselves in a five-star restaurant.;

He leafed through the leather-bound book on his lap

and understood none of it. There were hundreds of Mandopop and Cantopop standards, but nothing – he realised with profound relief – that would require him to sing.

Watching Jinjin seize the microphone and stare intently at a screen where an Asian man and woman were walking hand in hand down a beach with tower blocks in the background, Bill at last understood the attraction of karaoke bars to the Chinese.

The karaoke bar offered privacy in a country where privacy was scarce, and freedom of expression in a culture where expressing yourself too freely could get you a bullet in the back of the head, and the bill for the bullet sent to the folks back home.

Jinjin launched herself into a tearful Mandarin ballad, a song that he deduced could only be about undying love.

When the song was over, the taxi dancer – Jenny One -leapt up and tried to wrestle the microphone from Jinjin, who refused to let it go. They barked at each other in Shang-hainese. Jinjin won, kept the microphone and began emoting her way through another overwrought ballad, flushed with delight, watching the little ball bounce across the Chinese characters as a woman on the TV screen gazed mournfully out of a window. Jinjin's voice was not bad, but it had a tendency to crack at the big climax.

Jenny Two looked up from her knitting. 'She has a beautiful voice,' she murmured, her eyes gleaming behind her glasses. 'And a beautiful face.'

Bill nodded politely. He certainly agreed about the face. T have neither,' said Jenny Two, smiling happily. 'But my husband likes me anyway. I am very lucky. He is very old.'

Bill marvelled at his own naivety. 'North block, right?' he said, and she nodded, showing teeth that protruded beyond cute and into dental disaster.

Bill could see the 7-series black BMW parked in the courtyard of Paradise Mansions, and the well-groomed, sixty-something driver who never got out. He had seen Jenny Two running to the car, a look of innocent delight on her face, and had always assumed it was a wealthy old man taking his plain student daughter out for dinner on the Bund.

Jenny Two just didn't carry herself like the others. She didn't have the look. But Bill liked her a lot. There was a gentleness about Jenny Two, and she seemed to quite enjoy playing the ugly duckling of the group. And when she stood up to hold a formless length of blue wool against his chest, he saw that she had a hard, compact body, and that she was the only one of them with real curves. And she was nice. Bill could understand why some old taipan would take a shine to her.

'Eet eez always these way with Jinjin and the karaoke,' sighed Jenny One, flopping on to the cracked sofa.

'Where'd you learn to speak English?' he asked her, already guessing the answer. The answer to almost every question in Paradise Mansions was 'a man'. I met a man. Or more than one man.

'I took language class,' Jenny One said. 'In bed. Best place to learn language, no? I have two French boyfriends. The first – he eez young and poor and I love him very much. But he eez young and poor so I finish.' Tears sprang to her eyes, undermining the casual harshness of her words, and she dabbed at them with a little paper napkin. They were boiling with emotion, these women. It was always laughter and tears with them, Bill realised, often in the same sentence. 'The second eez rich and married and then he go back to Paris.'

Bill guessed that the Paradise Mansions flat must have been a goodbye gift from the rich and married Frenchman. That's why Jenny One could afford to live there and yet still

go home alone. She had a sponsor, even if he was long gone. 'He called for a year and then he didn't call any more.' She looked at Bill searchingly. 'Why do you think he stopped calling?'

Bill shook his head. 'I don't know.' He supposed the man's wife must have had something to do with it. Jenny One was crying openly now, and Bill saw that the girls of Paradise Mansions were regular young women. Back home they would have been accountants and teachers, girlfriends and wives. But not in Shanghai. Not in times like these. He watched Jinjin, reluctantly surrendering the microphone to the Louis Vuitton addict in the mini-kilt.

'You know that girl?' Jenny One asked him. 'She is Annie – you know?' Bill shook his head.

'She is new,' Jenny Two said, her knitting needles clacking. She nodded knowingly at Annie as though they were gossiping over a garden fence. 'Man from Taiwan!'

Annie began screeching some awful Cantopop song. 'Big apartment in west block,' Jenny Two continued, her eyes wide, and magnified further by her milk-bottle spectacles. 'Three bedroom! And the man will be in Shanghai for two years! Long contract!'

'His family are here?' Jenny One asked, and when the other Jenny nodded, she pulled a philosophical c'est-la-vie face.

Annie finished slaughtering her song and came over to join them. She imperiously sipped her fruit juice, studying Bill.

'Have you been to Hawaii?' she asked him, crossing her legs. He shook his head. She seemed amazed, as if every self-respecting foreigner knew Hawaii inside out. 'You should go,' she advised him. T was living there with my American boyfriend.' She thought for a moment. 'Four months. He sold time share.'

Jenny One looked away, as if she had heard it all before, liut Jenny Two put down her knitting. 'What happened with the American boyfriend in Hawaii?' she wanted to know. Bill noticed that they had slipped into English for his benefit, and he was touched.

'We didn't click,' Annie said, tugging at the hem of her kilt as Jenny Two looked sympathetic.

Jinjin sat down beside Bill and smiled. 'Now I find you something,' she said, ignoring his protests as she searched the songbook. He reached for his drink, flustered, wondering why only Westerners were capable of being embarrassed by karaoke. Because we think it is a performance, he thought. Because we think we are expected to be good. And karaoke has got nothing to do with being good.

Jinjin was the only one of them who did not have an adopted Western name. She was the only one who had kept the Chinese name that she had been given at birth, and as he watched her looking for his karaoke song, he wondered what that said about her. It was as if there was something about Jinjin that was unchangeable, untouchable, and out of reach. He liked it that she hadn't adopted a Western name.

Jinjin finally found him something and they all applauded as he got up and awkwardly stood there in front of the TV set, and he was surprised when she joined him, a microphone in her hand. Maybe giving him his turn was just an excuse for her to reclaim the microphone.

It was a Carpenters song she had dug up from the furthest reaches of the.songbook, 'Yesterday Once More', a chunk of unadulterated corn that had the girls of Paradise Mansions swaying from side to side with a faraway look in their moist brown eyes. Jinjin's voice swooped and soared uncertainly, disintegrating on the high notes, a made-in-China Karen Carpenter, and Bill croaked along as best he could.

When the final chords were dying and the girls were all

clapping, Bill reached across and squeezed one of Jinjin's tiny hands.

She quickly pulled it away.

She didn't mind being set up in a flat by a married man who came round when he felt like it, but she wasn't going to start holding hands in a karaoke bar with some big-nosed pinky. The girls of Paradise Mansions held on to their dignity. Then he had to do it alone. There was no escape. He resisted at first, but they wouldn't hear of it. There was no way round it. Taking your turn at karaoke in China was as inevitable as death, and far more inevitable than paying your Chinese taxes.

'I understand,' Jinjin said. 'You're too ashamed to sing.' There it was again, her arbitrary choice of word that in the end somehow seemed more fitting than the obvious choice. It was true. He wasn't embarrassed or bashful or shy. He was ashamed.

But they found him some classic Elvis and, Tsingtao in one hand and microphone in the other, he did his best to moan the lyrics as they came alight on the screen.

The girls from Paradise Mansions cheered what they thought was his shyness. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that he knew the lyrics to this old Elvis song, he knew them well from all those nights out with Shane and the Asian clients, on all those other nights when the karaoke had been compulsory.

And what were being illuminated in front of him were not quite the words, just a rough Chinese imitation, a ham-fisted facsimile of the real thing.

But still Bill sang along to 'She's Not You' with Jinjin Li smiling up at him, he sang along as best he could, he sang along although the words were all wrong.

fourteen

By the time he got in he was feeling so good that calling his wife seemed like a sound idea. Her voice echoed across six thousand miles, stone-cold sober and still in yesterday. 'Hello?'

'It's me.'

There was a pause while she weighed him up.

'Are you drunk, Bill?' she said in such a way that he couldn't tell if she was irritated or amused or a bit of both. More than anything, it was the sound of a pissed-off wife. 'I was just putting Holly to bed,' she said, and he heard the sigh in it, and was suddenly aware that she knew him so well.

That was the trouble with marriage, he thought. They got to know you so well.

'I just wanted to tell you something,' he said. It had seemed so important when the thought had occurred to him in the cab home from the karaoke bar, in the back seat between the two Jennys, with Jinjin and Annie up front next to the driver, Jinjin abruptly subdued after all those hours of singing about love that lasts for ever.

But now he felt the importance of what he had wanted

to say draining away as he sensed the reality of their lives in London. 'I'm going to get her a copy of "YMCA",' he announced. 'Online, one-click buying.' Warmed up to the idea of singing at last, and thinking that perhaps his voice wasn't as bad as he had always believed, he launched into a snatch of the old Village People song. But he stopped when he heard his wife's deafening silence.

'And that's what you called about?' He felt he could hear her shaking her head. 'What time is it over there?'

He looked around for a clock. What had he done with that clock? 'It's late,' he confessed, sheepish now. 'It's like -four, I guess.'

'Is it like four or is it four, Bill? Well, it's bedtime here. And it's really sweet that you're thinking of Holly when you're out getting drunk with Shane, but she's forgotten all about that silly song. You know what it is this week? It's "Independent Women" by Destiny's Child. Do you know that one, Bill?'

He laughed. 'Independent Women' by Destiny's Child! Something about his daughter's choices, the things that captured her attention – they amused him greatly, and delighted him, and enchanted him, and somehow seemed to measure his love for her.

'Becca, can you put her on for a minute?' Silence. He knew her many silences so well. 'She's already in bed, Bill. It's a school night – remember? If you had called a bit earlier . . .'

'It's all right,' he said quickly. 'Next time. Everything okay? With her breathing?'

'It's better in London,' she said.

'And how's your dad?' He should have asked her about her father sooner. He realised that now. And then came the longest silence of them all.

'It looks like he may have to have surgery,' she said, her

voice flat and expressionless. A pause. 'Thanks for asking,' she added, and he winced at the hard sarcastic edge to it.

'Surgery? That's awful. What – you mean a bypass?'

'First he's got to have something called cardiac catheteri-sation,' she said, softening now, and he could hear her holding back the tears. 'They put a tube in his heart through a vein or an artery or something and inject a dye. After that, they decide if he needs to have surgery.' He heard her swallow. 'I'm scared, Bill.'

'I'm so sorry, Bee,' he said, and they were silent but not in a bad way. Just holding on to that connection, and both finding comfort in it.

'He'll be all right, Bee,' he said softly. 'I know he will'

'Thanks, Bill.' Getting a grip on herself now, and he felt a flood of love. It couldn't be easy for her. 'Look, I've got to settle Holly down,' she said. 'I can hear her stirring.'

He could hear it too, hear his Holly's rising cry, filtered first through the child monitor and then across six thousand miles. A bad dream.

'Sure,' he said. 'I love you, Bee'

'And I love you too.'

They didn't say it very often. They were not one of those married couples that felt the need to say it every day. But it came out when they realised what they had, and they were grateful, and they were wise enough to count their blessings.

He replaced the phone, feeling flat and tired, as if all the magic of the night was just an illusion brought on by Tsingtao, old Elvis songs and the face of Jinjin Li. He went over to the last window in the master bedroom. Her light was still on. Jinjin was still awake.

He decided that in the morning he was going to go out and buy some of those crossword books. He could see how much she liked them.

And then perhaps it wouldn't matter so much when her phone didn't ring.

Shane couldn't sleep. Every time he felt himself slipping into oblivion, a current of pain pulled him back, and forced him awake.

As gently as he could he adjusted his large body, and the pain, which was located somewhere in the deepest regions of his groin, subsided to a dull ache. He remained motionless for several minutes, afraid to breathe in case he disturbed her again. But it was no good.

Rosalita exhaled wearily in the darkness. In one smooth move, she got out of bed, pulled on a thin robe and went into the living room. She left the door open and the darkness of the bedroom was broken when she switched on a light.

It had been this way ever since he had been beaten up with Bill – or, as Rosalita liked to call him, 'Your loser friend whose pretty wife left him.'

The pain sometimes went away, but it never went very far, and it never let Shane sleep the night. He rolled on his back and felt himself down there, cursing silently, and more scared than he had been in his life.

Something was wrong with him. He could sense it. Something was very wrong.

When he went into the living room Rosalita was sitting with her back to him, tapping away at the computer. He buried his face in her mass of black hair, his hand feeling her shoulders through the thin silk of the robe. He glanced at the window. It was still dark outside.

'Come back to bed,' he said, his voice rough after being pulled from sleep. 'It's too late for all that now.'

Her small brown hands flew across the keyboard. 'No sleep, no make love,' she said breezily. 'So check email.'

He looked over her shoulder at the screen, and his ixhausted eyes suddenly blinked in disbelief.

My darling, how I miss your eyes, your lips, your big fat cock -

He jumped away from her, as if from an electric shock. 'What the fuck, Rosalita?'

'Old mail, old boyfriend,' she said dismissively. 'I was just deleting him.'

Shane stared at the screen but the message was gone. His wife swivelled in her chair and stared at him with eyes like huge brown headlamps. He winced with another shiver of pain.

'You should see a doctor,' she said angrily. 'If you sick, then you should go see a doctor.'

'Who was that?' he demanded. 'Who was it? I want to know.'

But she just smiled coldly up at him and he took a step back. There was a fierceness in her that you would never suspect when she was singing all those soppy love songs. 'Please, I want to know, Rosie.' His voice softer, pleading.

'No,' she said quietly. 'You don't want to know. You really don't want to know.'

She logged off and sprang from the chair, a little brown wild cat, lithe and tiny and capable of clawing your eyes out. Towering above her, Shane meekly followed her back to the bedroom. She shrugged off her robe and he caught his breath as she slipped naked between the sheets, turning her back towards him again.

He still wanted her. At least in theory. At least in his head. But his body hadn't really felt like sex since they had got their kicking, and all the pain had begun. That confused him. Shane had believed that he would want to fuck her forever, and already

– so soon! – it had gone off the boil. Perhaps it would have been all right without the pain and the worry. Perhaps the pain and the worry were spoiling everything.

So Shane lay in the darkness, trying not to move, missing the physical life they had known before, that closeness in all its colours, but also pining for something that Shane and his wife had never really experienced, something that he saw in the marriage of his friend Bill, something that looked a lot like friendship.

In the morning Bill came to collect him.

They were going for brunch with a representative from a private health-care company from Switzerland. Rosalita slept on. Shane hoped that she would keep sleeping on. He didn't want his friend to see how bad it had got.

'This is going to be the next big growth market in China,' Bill said, watching Shane struggling to put his shoes on. 'Private health care. The new rich are going to go crazy for it.'

'Lot of money in that racket,' Shane agreed.

It was Shanghai's favourite subject – the next big new thing, the next killing to be made. The Swiss were in Shanghai to evaluate the potential of a private hospital in China, the kind of service offered to the expatriate community at the International Family Hospital where Becca had taken Holly, but serving an exclusively Chinese clientele. 'The Chinese are a nation of hypochondriacs,' Shane said. 'The Great Unwashed get an itchy arse and they think it's cancer of the colon.' He tied the laces on his Church's brogues, the pain all over his face.

'You all right?' Bill said as Shane stood up, sweat beading his forehead.

'I'm fine, mate,' Shane said. He pushed a swathe of damp blond hair away and sat down again to catch his breath. He flipped open his laptop and withdrew a disk. 'Stick that away for me, will you? In the safe.'

Hill took the disk. It said SUN on the label. 'Behind the Muna Lisa,' Shane told him.

Above the plasma TV set there was a perfect reproduc-iii hi of the Шопа Lisa. Bill carefully placed the painting on the floor and, as Shane called out the six-digit combination, itimed the dial of a small wall safe. The thick metal door came open with an electronic double beep. As Bill slipped the disk inside, he was aware of passports, jewellery boxes, and wads of foreign currency.

And then he saw it.

The gun looked like a toy. So small and simple and cheap looking. Almost harmless. Sitting there surrounded by the blue boxes from Tiffany and the wad of US bank notes and the passports of Australia and the Philippines.

Bill reached in his hand and pulled it out by the barrel, aware that his heart was pounding. It was heavy, much heavier than it looked, but quite not as heavy as a bag of sugar. It smelled of oil. Bill let it rest in the palm of his hand, and he held the gun out to Shane.

'What the fuck is this?'

'Kai Так rules,' Shane said. 'Don't forget the Kai Так rules. Don't say a word to anyone. Now put it back.'

'Kai Так rules?' Bill said. 'You're not banging some bar girl. This is not some little escapade that happened on tour. And who would I tell? What would I say? Our award-winning Head of Litigation is – what? – packing a piece? Is that the correct terminology?'

T mean it, Bill. Put it back where you found it.'

T want to know what it is, Shane.'

'All right.' Shane took it from him. He looked surprisingly expert with it. As if he knew that it wasn't going to suddenly go off, Bill thought.

'This is a PSM, often called a Makarov,' Shane said. 'It's Russian. A Russian knock-off of the Walther PP. You know

– James Bond's gun. This is the cheapo Communist version, China's full of them. From the days when Stalin wanted Mao to do his fighting for him. Fifty years back, during the Korean War. When Mao was telling Stalin that he would sacrifice a million Chinese in a war with America, but he needed the firepower to do it. Mao wanted an arms industry, but Stalin only gave him weapons. Like this one. It's small, easy to carry, dead simple to fire. Any idiot can use it.' Bill was speechless. He didn't know where to start. 'But what do you want a gun for? They'll throw you out of the country. They'll toss you in jail. They could kick out the firm.'

'Nobody's going to kick out the firm.' Bill stared at the gun, dumbfounded. 'I can't imagine how you managed to buy this thing.' He looked sharply at Shane. 'And I don't want to know.'

'You can buy anything in China,' Shane said. 'Don't you know that yet? The place is full of guns. When Mao was arming the people, waiting for some foreign invasion, what do you think happened? Do you think they just gave them all back?' 'They will come down on you like a ton of bricks,' Bill said. 'If it doesn't blow your head off the first time you pull the trigger.'

Then he waited for an explanation. But Shane couldn't explain it. He didn't even try. He carefully put the Makarov back in the wall safe and locked the door.

Bill watched him replace the Шопа Lisa, still waiting, but Shane shook his head. He couldn't find the words. It was beyond words. He knew that needing the gun had something to do with their beating, and something to do with the fear of what the pain might mean, and the overwhelming feeling that everything in his life was starting to fall apart.

But in the end Shane could not really explain to his friend why he needed a weapon in this city.

He knew it was somehow related to his jokes about the (Jreat Unwashed, and his habit of getting drunk every night, and the need to see the money piling up, and the longing for something that felt like real love.

That's why he had a fifty-year-old gun in his home.

Anything to convince himself that this place could never hurt him.

Not every client wanted to be taken to Mao Ming Nan Lu. Not every businessman who engaged the services of Butter-field, Hunt and West wanted to see the girls in Suzy Too. But they all wanted to see what they thought of as the real Shanghai.

The city, in all its frenetic modernity, encouraged the belief that you were somehow always missing the real Shanghai. The self-consciously epic skyline of Pudong, the girls dancing on tables in Bejeebers-Bejaybers with a Guinness in their fist, the cappuccinos on every corner – this could not be the real Shanghai, could it?

The girls that came out at night on Mao Ming Nan Lu, or who lived in the apartments of Paradise Mansions, were no less citizens of Shanghai than a street barber on Fuyou Lu. These days, loving Starbucks was considered authentically Shanghainese – it was said that Shanghai now had more of the coffee shops than Miami – yet at the same time the city harboured a chippy need to show the developed world that China had not only caught them up but was about to pass them by and leave them for dead in the dust.

It was all the real Shanghai, if you wanted it to be.

Bill was happy when their client from the health-care company – a sickly-looking Miles Davis fan from Geneva -announced at brunch that what he really wanted was to see the jazz music at the Peace Hotel.

Bill knew that Shane secretly sneered at the Peace Hotel

as a tourist trap, so he let his friend cry off, because he looked like hell, and anyway Bill always enjoyed sipping a Tsingtao and listening to those Glenn Miller standards being played for the millionth time. He sat there and thought of Becca and Holly, and how they must be walking home from school right now, as he watched the jazz band who had been teenagers when the Japanese marched in, now sprightly old cats in their eighties, and still banging out their spirited versions of 'In the Mood' and 'String of Pearls' and 'I Love My Wife'.

When the client had had his fill, and his jet-lag was kicking in hard, Bill got Tiger to drive his guest back to the hotel while he caught a cab home to Paradise Mansions. He let himself in, happy that he still had the Book City carrier bag with him.

He had been carrying the bag around for hours and had been afraid that he would leave it under the table in the bar of the Peace Hotel. It contained a wide selection of crossword puzzles. Every book of crossword puzzles that he could find in Book City.

His doorbell rang and he flew to it, expecting to see her face on the other side of the door. But it was Jenny One, holding a steaming takeaway container wrapped in a white linen napkin.

'Noodle soup,' she said, as if that explained everything. 'You need noodle soup.'

She came into his apartment and examined it with expert eyes. 'Company pay,' she observed, looking for somewhere ta_place the soup. 'You don't 'ave to pay.' She went into the kitchen and rattled around looking for pots and plates.

'You're very kind,' he said. 'But why do I need noodle soup?'

'Wife gone,' she said.

Did they all know? And what did they think? Did they think that Becca had gone for good?

'Only temporarily,' Bill muttered, watching the taxi dancer heating up the noodle soup.

The soup was good. Full of vegetables, thick noodles and juicy pieces of pork. She watched him wolf it down, declining his invitation to join him with a Gallic shrug.

'Good chopsteek technique,' she said, turning down the corners of her mouth with approval. The Book City bag caught her eye and she peered inside. 'Ah.' She looked at Bill with a knowing smile. 'Are these for Li Jinjin?'

He shook his head, feeling his face redden. 'No,' he said. 'They're for me. I like crossword puzzles.'

She folded her arms, unconvinced. 'Is good soup?'

'It's very good. Thank you, Jenny One.'

'I think he love her very much.' She nodded. Bill kept eating, his eyes on his noodle soup. 'I think he does. I think he leave his wife for Li Jinjin. In the end.'

He said nothing, but he saw that Jenny One wanted Jinjin to have a happy ending, the ending that had eluded the taxi dancer with the French accent.

And Bill also saw that although the girls of Paradise Mansions scandalised and appalled the expat world he moved in, they all dreamed very conventional dreams – dreams of relationships that lasted, dreams of marriage, and monogamy, and children. At best they were kept women, there was no denying it, but what they really wanted, and what not one of them had, was someone who would stay the night.

'You love 'er,' Jenny One said, and he riled at the casual Chinese use of the word. The way they tossed it around as though it meant nothing, or as though it meant you had a soft spot for someone.

'I love my wife,' Bill said, thinking of the song in the Peace Hotel, and Becca and Holly walking home from school. 'That's who I love.'

'And maybe Li Jinjin love you,' Jenny One continued,

ignoring him. She was serious now, and he saw that this was the real reason for the visit. It had nothing to do with noodle soup. She had to tell him something, something that he was just too dumb to realise. 'But she has to think about her future,' Jenny One said, and she counted off the strikes against him. 'Married . .. foreigner … no future.'

She got up to go. There was nothing else to discuss. Bill thanked her for the soup, saw her out and when Jenny One had gone he went to the last window of the master bedroom and looked down at the courtyard. The silver Porsche was parked and empty. The man had come round, but they were not going out tonight. And in his mind he saw with hideous clarity the image of the man fucking Jinjin Li and her loving it, and moaning, and begging for more.

Bill watched the lights in her apartment until they all went out and when that finally happened he stuffed the Book City bag containing all the crossword puzzles into the bottom of the rubbish bin.

And that was the real Shanghai too.

They could walk from Holly's paediatrician in Great Portland Street all the way to Becca's sister's house in Primrose Hill and their feet touched nothing but grass almost all the way.

Becca bought two ice creams by the little lake in Regent's Park, the last ice creams of summer, smelling the zoo in the distance, and London felt like a city built on a human scale, a city where a child could breathe.

They came out of Regent's Park, walked past the zoo and across Prince Albert Road on to Primrose Hill. They were some distance from the zoo when two giraffes suddenly loomed out of nowhere.

'Look, Mummy!' Holly cried. 'The secret giraffes!'

This was what they thought of as one of their family secrets. The giraffes at London Zoo were kept on the far side of the

road to the entrance, well away from the main body of the /,00, and it meant that the giraffes could suddenly appear as if by magic, their heads swaying above the trees as if they were free to roam the busy North London streets.

'We saw them with Daddy, didn't we?' Holly said excitedly. 'Remember? We saw the secret giraffes with Daddy.'

'That's right, darling,' Becca said, taking her daughter's hand as they looked up at the giraffes. 'We saw them with Daddy.'

fifteen

The next night the old man called.

The phone was ringing as Bill came through the door, worn down from twelve hours at the office and a few more taking clients down Mao Ming Nan Lu. His spirits sank when he heard the fury in his father's voice. He was too tired for an argument with the old man.

'You have to come back,' the old man told him. 'You have to be with your family.'

How long had he bottled this up? Days? Weeks? Bill could see the old man brooding as he went about his daily routine of shopping, telly and tea. The life of quiet domesticity that always had this great store of rage bubbling under the game shows and the cosy chats at the local supermarket. His father would be angry until the day he died.

'I can't come back, Dad,' Bill said. 'I have a contract. And this is my chance. My big chance to become a partner.'

'I don't understand,' the old man said, and Bill knew that was exactly the problem. The old man didn't understand and he would never understand. Because the old man had broken his back for peanuts all his life. 'Why is becoming a partner so important, Bill? What does that meanV

Bill took a breath, let it go. 'Partners don't work for the lirm, Dad,' he said. 'Partners are the firm. Partners are not salaried employees. They share in the firm's profits.'

The old man mulled this over. 'If there are profits,' he said.

'What?'

'If there are profits,' the old man repeated. 'You can only share in profits if there are profits. You can't take a share of air pie and windy pudding, can you? You can't take a percentage of bugger all, can you?'

Bill laughed with disbelief. 'Technically that's true,' he said. 'But it's not going to happen out here. Trust me, Dad. It's not going to happen in Shanghai. The economy is going through the roof over here. The firm has more work than it can handle.'

'I don't know anything about it,' the old man said, 'but I suppose a partner has to share costs as well as profits, doesn't he? I mean, you can't just share the good times, can you? But of course I don't know anything about it.'

How technical did Bill have to make it to show his father that he was a stupid old bastard? He was aware that his head was throbbing. From banging it against a brick wall, he thought. From banging it against the old man.

'You're right, Dad,' Bill said calmly, rubbing his temples. 'A partner is taking on the entire liability of the law firm. That's why there's what's known as a capital call when you become partner. You have to invest in the firm. About ?250,000. The firm helps you take out a loan.'

There was a moment of stunned disbelief at the other end. 'You have to take out a loan of a quarter of a million quid when they make you a partner?'

It was more money than the old man had ever seen. It was more money than he could imagine. He lived in a little suburban house that had taken his entire working life to buy.

You could buy four of those little houses with that kind of money.

'You invest in the firm so that you are in the same boat as the partners,' Bill said. 'For better or worse, for richer or poorer.'

'Like a marriage,' the old man said. 'Yes, Dad – just like a marriage.' More silence. And then the real reason for the call. 'Come home,' the old man told him, his voice gruff with emotion. 'Come home now.' It wasn't a suggestion. It was an order. 'Walk away from it, Bill. Your baby needs you.' 'Holly? But she's doing well. Becca told me she's -' The rage suddenly flared up in the old man, and for a moment Bill believed that his father truly hated him.

'You think you know everything, don't you?' the old man said. 'But you know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Holly's not even staying with her mother. Did you know that?' Bill felt his stomach fall away. 'What?' 'That's right, Einstein. That's right, Mr bloody know-it-all. The poor little thing has been palmed off on Becca's sister. What do you think about that?'

Becca's sister? Holly was staying with Becca's mad sister? Everything changed every few years or so with the sister. Career, hair colour, man.

Fighting the panic and the anger, Bill got the old man off the line as quickly as he could and tried to call Becca. Engaged. Probably at the hospital with her father, he thought bitterly. The excuse for everything.

He found the address book and tried calling the number he had for her sister. It was out of date. He called the old man back but he only had Becca's number and Bill hung up without bothering with goodbye.

Why didn't Bill have the sister's number? Because that was another thing that changed with dazzling frequency. Her

phone numbers. The mad sister was always changing her phone numbers to shake off her mad ex-boyfriends and sometimes their angry wives.

Bill pictured his daughter staying with her unstable Auntie Sara, and for the first time in this whole sorry mess he was angry with his wife.

What was happening in Sara's life right now? Whose marriage was she currently trying to destroy? What was she into this week – Tantric sex or an organic vegan diet or crack cocaine? It could be anything. Bill didn't care how sick Becca's father was, he didn't care how bad it was getting. There was no excuse to pack Holly off. How could she do such a thing? Somewhere on the other side of the world his daughter was being looked after by Becca's unstable, promiscuous, messed-up sister.

And whoever was living with her.

Bill flung the phone across the room and it Came apart with a crash against a copy of Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.

In the morning he saw that someone had slipped a note under his door. A sheet of 'Hello Kitty' paper folded in half. Please call me, it said, and then Jinjin's name in both English and Chinese characters and a mobile phone number.

He looked at it for a moment and then screwed it up and tossed it in the bin that still contained the crossword puzzles. This was all bullshit. He was tired of adolescent games, tired of being fed things he never asked for, tired of watching the light in her window.

He started getting ready for work. He couldn't call London yet. Too early here, too late there. Whatever way you looked at it, the timing was all wrong.

Then, late on Sunday afternoon, when he had nothing to do but wait for the working week to start, Jinjin knocked on his door.

'You know how to work?'

She had a Sony Handycam, still boxed up. It was the latest version of the camera that he had used to record his daughter growing up.

'Any idiot can use one,' he told her. She nodded happily, holding out the Handycam. He was the idiot she had chosen.

They went back to her apartment and while Bill charged up the Handycam, she disappeared into the bedroom and eventually came out wearing an immaculate red qipao and far too much make-up – some hideous skin-whitening stuff that made her look like a ghost of herself, apple-red blusher, and some sort of sticky goo that made her mouth look all wet. He shook his head, hardly recognising her as the same young woman who never used cosmetics beyond the permanent lines of black mascara around her eyes.

'What do you think?' she said, her natural beauty buried under a thick layer of powder and paint. 'Very nice,' he lied.

Jinjin Li had not built all her dreams around the man in the silver Porsche. More than anything, she dreamed of reading the evening news on China Central Television. That would solve all her problems. To sit solemnly behind that desk with a picture of the Shanghai night skyline behind her, reading an autocue that brought glad tidings of China's latest triumph -she seemed to want this even more than a happy home.

She fussed around the flat until she found a spot for him to film her. They were both nervous. Jinjin because she seemed to believe that this was her big chance to break into show business, and Bill because he couldn't work out how to turn on the Handycam. It had been a while since he had filmed his daughter.

When the little red light finally came on he gave Jinjin the nod and she delivered a piece to camera about herself in formal Mandarin, while he attempted to keep the Sony

I l.mdycam steady. CCTV, the state TV channel, was looking lor trainee presenters, and Jinjin was looking for a change of career, another life, a way out of Paradise Mansions.

It was a touching and pathetic dream, Bill thought. It i(-minded him of seeing her refusing to let go of the microphone in the karaoke bar. It seemed a strangely juvenile fantasy, as though there was a neglected part of her that (raved attention, that made her want the world to notice her.

But who was he to sneer at anyone's dreams? He felt a surge of unearned pride in her – why shouldn't she be reading the evening news on CCTV? She was more beautiful than the girls they had on CCTV. Or perhaps she just had more life in her.

He lifted the camera and her funny Valentine face filled the frame. Her mouth was too small. Her chin was a little weak. Her black-brown eyes were big and seemed even bigger in the small head that rested on the long lines of her body. Even without the teeth-filled smile she was not quite a classic beauty. Would someone hire her as a TV presenter? He did not know. But as he lowered the camera and kept looking at her, he could see very easily why someone would love her.

'Is there something wrong?' she said.

He shook his head. 'There's nothing wrong, Jinjin.'

Her fingertips flew to her face. 'Is it my skin?'

'Your skin is fine,' he said. In truth her troubled skin was invisible to the naked eye under all that make-up.

'Do I look ugly?'

'No,' he said, and laughed shortly at the absurdity of the question. 'You could never look ugly.'

'I have very sensitive skin,' she said, staring at the fingers that had touched her face. 'You're lucky. You don't have sensitive skin.'

'That's true,' he said. 'I have very insensitive skin.' He lifted the camera and then brought it down again. 'But a sensitive heart.'

'Hah,' she said, and her buck-toothed smile came out like the sun. 'English joke.'

'You're lovely, Jinjin,' he said. 'Don't you know that? Haven't a thousand guys told you that?'

'Ah,' she said, and he saw the uncertainty in her. 'Being told is not the same as knowing.'

'Is that a wise Chinese saying? Or did you just make it up?'

She grinned. 'It's a wise Chinese saying that I just made up.'

'Okay, take it from the top,' he laughed, framing her face once more. 'But try breathing this time. You're allowed to breathe.'

'Pardon?' She said pardon when she wanted something repeated. He didn't know anyone who said Pardon? 'Let's just do it again,' he said.

And they did, and his heart sank because he saw that perhaps she wouldn't be reading the evening news on CCTV. Because all her quirky grace and charm and humour and warmth and loveliness seemed to evaporate the moment the red light came on. And because she was too nervous, and the nerves did not diminish as they did take after take. And because her skin, like her ambitions of TV glory, was strangely adolescent – it was young, troubled skin that was prone to sudden rashes and eruptions.

Her nerves made him nervous too. When he gave her the nod, her smile – that lovely, natural toothy-goofy smile -became frozen in a cold rictus grin, and she stumbled over her words and couldn't keep the tremor of fear from her voice. She wasn't good enough. That was the truth. But maybe she could improve, break through the fear barrier, do something about her difficult skin. For some reason he wanted to have faith in her.

When they had finished filming, she sat him at the table

in the imy kitchen and brought two steaming bowls of congee, sin told him that congee, rice porridge, was all she ever ate

hi n she was home alone.

'I go to many restaurants,' she said. 'But when I am in my home, I like simple food.'

'I know what you mean,' he said, watching her pour two i ups of green tea. 'I go out to a lot of restaurants.'

'With your wife?' she said, not looking at him.

'Sometimes,' he said. He reached for the cup but it was too hot to hold and he quickly pulled his hand away. 'But mostly with clients.'

'It doesn't need to be rich all the time,' she said.

Then he heard the key in the door and the man came in. 1 le was suddenly there with them. The unknown man in the silver Porsche.

He gawped dumbly at Jinjin and Bill as if equally surprised to find them here. Bill stared back at him, wondering why he was shocked to discover the man had a key. Of course he had a key. This was his place and he owned it all, including fixtures and fittings.

Jinjin flew to the man's side, and although she did not kiss him, she laughed and took his arm in a proprietorial way that somehow seemed more intimate than a kiss would have been, and far worse.

She babbled a happy explanation about what they had been doing, then showed the man an ad in a Chinese newspaper as if to prove she wasn't lying.

Bill watched Jinjin fussing around the man – getting him settled on the sofa, giving him the Handycam so that he might examine it and give his approval, then going off to prepare fresh tea, all the while chatting away – and Bill fought back emotions he had no wish to feel.

He was disappointed in her. After those long moments watching the man make himself at home, he was bitterly

disappointed in her. He did not want to feel this way, but he couldn't help it.

She gave up teaching for this guy? She left those children who adored her for him? She played the golden canary for somebody as ordinary as this? This was the guy she gave her body to?

The two men nodded at each other, and Bill fought back the bile, his face seized with a disgusted grin of embarrassment and loathing. The man was around forty. No spring chicken, Bill thought. Prematurely grey-haired, but without the physical puffiness that a lot of successful Chinese businessmen toted around. He was a big man – Bill wasn't sure why that surprised him. Bill also wondered if he had disguised the fact that he despised the man on sight.

The man was dressed in the smart-casual style of the affluent Asian male. Polo shirt, grey flannel trousers, shoes so polished you could see your face in them – the off-duty-Japanese-salaryman look that all the new Chinese big shots were adopting as their own. He didn't speak English, and made no attempt to shake Bill's hand, but there was no hostility there. The man simply did not care. Bill Holden was nothing to him. Just a dumb big-nosed pinky neighbour who had been roped in to do a domestic chore. No threat, no rival, no problem.

Without even being asked, Jinjin had clearly offered the man an explanation of what they were doing and the man accepted it. It wasn't a big deal to him. Bill's meaningless presence in Jinjin's flat had no impact whatsoever on his life, or his plans for the evening.

And Bill wondered what Becca would have thought if she had walked in on him pointing a brand-new Sony Handycam at the face of Jinjin Li.

His wife would have seen right through him.

1* «¦ *

This is what he wondered. He wondered if every marriage in the world became less and less about the man and the woman and more and more about their child, or if that was Iusi his marriage.

In the afternoon Becca called him at work.

Right in the middle of a crisis meeting, a meeting called because back in the UK the press had picked up on the soaring number of industrial accidents in the factories of China, all those men and women who were losing eyes, limbs and lives in the workshop of the world so that the West could have their cheap gadgets and trainers and rock-bottom underpants. Foreign investors in China were suddenly being made aware of the phrase ethical shopping, and up at the firm they knew that this could only be bad for business. Something had to be done.

But when Bill saw Becca's number on his phone, he stood up at the conference table with all of them there, Devlin and Shane and Nancy and Mad Mitch, and he did not care what it looked like. No meeting was more important than his daughter.

'Sorry, I have to take this,' he said, and stepped outside the conference room, and then kept walking, just to be moving, and to stop them from hearing.

'Bill?'

She sounded down, way down, and he unexpectedly felt a flood of the old love, the original love, the feeling that was there from the start. Just one word and he could read her mood. She said his name and he felt it, knew it with total certainty – it was her father.

'Your dad,' he said. 'What's happened, Bee?'

But it wasn't her father. He was wrong.

'My dad's actually doing okay,' Becca said, so breezy that Bill felt like a fool. 'He went to the hospital for his test, but they let him come back home until his cardiologist has looked at the results.'

Then there's no excuse, Bill thought. There is just no excuse.

'So what's happening with Holly?'

Becca laughed, and it infuriated him. 'She's fine. She's so grown up. She misses you, Bill. She misses her daddy. She misses it when you throw her around. I can't do that with her. Not the way you can.'

He had forgotten about the throwing around. How could he have forgotten that? His daughter would wrap her arms around his neck and he would let her go, and she would scream and squeal as her fingers slipped away and she started to fall, and then – just at the moment she let go – he would catch her and swing her up over his shoulder, and upside down, and into his arms, her eyes inches from his own.

'I talked to my old man,' he said, suddenly hoping that it wasn't true and that perhaps the old man had got his ancient wires crossed, the silly old bastard, perhaps Holly had just been shunted off to the mad sister for one night, while Becca's father had his tests. 'My old man said that Holly was staying with your sister.' It always seemed unnatural to call her by her name, as though nothing could fit her better than mad sister. 'With Sara,' he said.

'She is,' Becca said, brightening, as if this were nothing but good news. 'And Sara's with this new guy, and he's just great with Sara's kids and with Holly.'

Some guy? Some fucking guy}

It got worse.

It got far worse than Bill had ever imagined. It got so bad that he could hardly contain his feelings.

'I'm coming back,' Bill said. 'Next flight. Give me Sara's address.'

'Why?'

'Because if you can't take care of her, then I will.'

'You're not coming back,' she said. 'You don't need to

i time back. Look, I know how you feel about Sara. And it's I rue she has had problems in the past. But she's calmed down so much over the last few years. Since she stopped drinking .iihI the other stuff, she's so much nicer, so much more herself. Therapy has done wonders for her. And Holly is totally safe .md happy, and I was going to tell you – really – but I knew you'd fret.'

Then he lost it. 'You knew I'd fret? I'm doing more than fret, Becca. When were you going to tell me? And let me know when I'm fretting too much for you.'

'But it's only until my dad is well enough to take care of himself.' Bill was genuinely astounded that he should feel this way. It drove him crazy. 'And they're all really great with Holly. They love her so much. Sara. Her kids. All of them. Especially Sara's partner.'

Sara's partner.

Sara's fucking partner.

'It's temporary, Bill,' Becca said, very calm, and wanting him to be calm too. 'Until my dad is a little better. And Holly's very happy. Please believe me.'

'I don't like it.'

And then her sighing. Her sighing was driving him nuts. It would be wonderful if he never heard her sigh again.

'What don't you like?'

'I don't like Holly being with strangers.'

'My sister is not a stranger.'

'No, she's a flake. She's a lunatic. Always has been. One minute she's married, the next she's a lesbian -'

'Oh, that was just a phase after her first marriage broke up. She's settled down a lot, Bill. Do you think I'd put Holly somewhere there was any sort of danger? Sara's been a great help to me. You have to trust me on this.'

But he didn't trust her on this.

'I don't like it,' he said. 'She should be with you.'

'But I've been with my dad.' 'I still don't like it.'

Then her patience was gone, and she was sick and tired of him, and there was the coldness that was always waiting there to greet him when he stepped too far out of line.

'But you're not here, are you?' she said. 'So I'm the one who has to deal with it.'

'If anything happens to Holly,' he said quietly, 'I'll never forgive you.'

'Oh fuck you, Bill. How dare you suggest I would put my daughter in any kind of danger? If you want to know the truth, she's having a lovely time. More fun than she ever has with us. Sara's family eat their meals together, they spend time together -'

'And we don't? Why's that, Becca? Because I'm working twelve hours a day to give you a lifestyle of the rich and famous.'

'You think that because you make the money you're excused all other duties.'

'You're always telling me what I think.' 'Does that annoy you?'

'No, I love it. Really. Truly. I fucking love it.' He looked up and saw Shane waiting at the other end of the corridor. Beyond him the others were waiting for him in the conference room. 'You should put Holly first,' Bill said, turning his back on Shane. 'You should put her before everything.' 'I do, Bill, and one day you'll realise that,' she said. 'What about you? What's your number one priority? Sara and I were discussing this last night. Some men clock off with their family as soon as they clock in at the office.'

'Don't you ever discuss me or my business with that crazy bitch,' he shouted, and heard the line go dead. A hand lightly touched his shoulder. He turned to look at Shane's face.

'Family all right, mate?' his friend said. 'Never been better, mate,' said Bill.

Kecca watched Sarfraz Khan walking towards them down the corridor of the paediatric clinic with a big smile and for a long moment she thought she was seeing things.

'What are you doing here?' she said, thinking how rude that sounded.

'Seeing some friends,' he said. He crouched down to say hello to Holly. He was good at that, Becca thought. He always arranged himself so that he was on the same level as the child. 'I'm getting the train up to Liverpool tomorrow morning.' Something passed briefly across his face. 'My mother hasn't been well.'

He stood up and looked away, running a hand through his glossy black hair, and she recognised that feeling. The guilt of the absent adult child.

Becca was aware of her sister staring at her, and at Sarfraz Khan, and she hastily made the introductions. The doctor shook Sara's hand, his eyes flicking almost imperceptibly over her cropped orange hair.

'Everything all right?' he asked Becca, and she knew he was talking about Holly.

'Good,' Becca said. 'Very good. No more attacks. She likes being back in London. Misses her father, of course.'

'Of course,' he said, and he dropped into his professional squat again, smiling at Holly. 'How was that long plane journey?'

'I saw the cockpit,' she said.

'Did you?' he said.

'It's where the pilot goes,' she nodded. 'They invited me.'

'Wow,' he said, standing up and smiling at Becca. 'I wish I got invitations like that.' He hesitated for a moment, as if summoning up his courage. 'You're not free for a quick

coffee, are you? It turns out my old friends here have other plans.' He tried to make a joke of it. 'How quickly they forget.' He looked at Holly and Sara. 'I mean – all of us. If you're free.'

Becca shook her head. 'Sorry, I can't.'

'Oh go on,' Sara said, nudging her, and Becca caught a glimpse of the old recklessness. 'I'll take Holly home and you have coffee with your friend.' She turned to Khan. 'She's hardly been out of the house since she came back, unless it's to see some kind of doctor.'

'Well, he's a doctor too, of course,' Becca said, but somehow it was settled. Becca and Sarfraz watched Sara and Holly walking up Great Portland Street until they disappeared into Regent's Park. Then he turned to her and clapped his hands. She didn't think she had ever seen an Indian blush before.

'Starbucks?' he said. 'There's one right across the street from my hotel.'

Becca grimaced. 'Don't we see enough of Starbucks in Shanghai?' she said.

'Then the cafe at my place,' he said, and she found herself accompanying him to his hotel. Should have gone to Starbucks, she thought.

He had a room at the Langham on Portland Place. There was a cafe in the lobby, full of tourists buttering scones and enjoying high tea. They ordered their coffee and she started to relax. Khan was so clearly a decent man, and he was so open about his guilt about his mother – struggling with the early stages of MS while her only son was on the other side of the world – that she found herself opening up and telling him how torn she also felt. Torn between their family life in Shanghai and her responsibility in London, between the roles of mother and daughter and wife.

'Sometimes I just don't know what to do,' Becca said.

'No, that's not true – I never really know what to do.' She stared at her coffee cup. 'Because the most important things in my life – my father, my husband, my daughter – are all pulling me in different directions.'

Khan stared at her thoughtfully, and she thought that mentioning Bill had subdued him somewhat. And she was glad about that because she did not want him to confuse a coffee break with a date. But then she realised that he was just trying to remember something.

'This is what you shall do,' he said.

'Excuse me?'

'This is what you shall do,' he said again. 'Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labour to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning god, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.'

'Well, thanks for the advice,' Becca said. 'I'll certainly keep all that in mind.'

He was crestfallen. 'Don't you like it?' he said.

'I think it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life,' she said. 'What is it? A poem?'

He nodded. 'Walt Whitman. Did you know he was a doctor of sorts? Cared for the injured and the dying during the Civil War. It was the defining experience of his life.'

He called for the bill and tried to put it on his room but Becca insisted on paying it. She was glad he didn't offer much of a fight. When they were in the lobby she said she hoped that things worked out with his mother and his trip up to Liverpool.

'Take good care of your mum,' she said.

'Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,' he said, stepping sideways to avoid a bellhop wheeling a stack

of suitcases, 'and with the young and with mothers of families.'

And Becca thought – a doctor who quotes poetry.

'Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,' he said, as if she was no longer there, 'reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem …'

She wasn't sure how it happened.

She told him that she was going to the little bookshop in Primrose Hill first thing in the morning to buy everything she could find by Walt Whitman. And Khan said he had a copy of the collected works in his hotel room and he wanted Becca to have it.

She said oh really that's okay no thanks but he insisted, and she didn't want to make a big deal out of it. That would have been even worse. So they walked through the gilded old lobby of the Langham because somehow it would have seemed inappropriate to wait in the lobby while he went off to fetch Walt Whitman and then they got into the mirrored lift and said nothing as the floor lights ascended and they went up to his room.

Khan let himself into the hotel room. Becca followed him. It was a suite, far larger than she had been expecting.

'They upgraded me,' he said, picking up the chocolate truffle that had been placed on his pillow. 'I always stay here when I get back from Shanghai on my way up to Liverpool. It's too far all in one day.' He was talking too much. He turned to face Becca and they stared at each other for a moment and then he popped the chocolate in his mouth. 'I'll get you that book,' he said through a mouthful of chocolate, and went into the other room.

She went to the window and stared out at the lights of Broadcasting House, the flags flying outside the embassies,

i he long sweep of Portland Place leading all the way to Regent's Park, Primrose Hill and the secret giraffes.

And when Khan came back with the book in his hands, Itecca was gone.

¦

sixteen

The lift doors opened and suddenly she was standing there.

Jinjin looked from Bill's face to the suitcase in his hand, her all-conquering smile not wavering. She made no attempt to leave the lift. The doors began to close. Bill stuck out a foot and the doors clunked open again. Jinjin stepped out, the doors closing behind her.

'I was bringing this for you,' she said, offering him a small square of plastic. There was a tiny DVD inside. 'The film we made,' she explained. 'It's very good, William.'

Bill smiled politely. 'I'll watch it when I get back,' he said, taking it with his free hand.

Jinjin looked again at his suitcase. 'Holiday?' she asked him. 'Holiday in London?'

He slipped the DVD inside his jacket. 'Business trip,' he said. 'Excuse me.'

She stepped aside and he hit the down button. She looked disappointed but she was holding on to the smile. 'You are a good film maker,' she said.

T look forward to seeing it,' he said, glancing at his watch. Tiger should be waiting for him downstairs. The lift came and they stepped inside together. 'When I've watched

it I'll drop it in your mailbox,' he said as the lift began to descend.

'You can bring it to me,' she said. There was still some of the smile left. 'Bring it to me anytime you are free.' Her face brightened. 'We could watch it together!'

Bill nodded. 'I might just drop it in the mailbox,' he said.

They reached the ground floor. The lift doors opened and he saw that Tiger was there, the engine running and ready to drive him to the airport.

'As you wish,' said Jinjin.

They stood there in awkward silence, the lift behind them and the glass doors to the courtyard in front of them. When they went through those doors they would go their separate ways.

'Where are you off to?' she said, and something about her choice of phrase made his heart feel like it was being squeezed. It sounded like something his mother would have said.

What a shame, he thought. What a shame we can only ever be friends.

'The Pearl River Delta,' he said. 'Shenzhen.'

She pulled a face and it was full of the northerner's instinctive distrust of southerners. 'Be careful,' she said. 'Many bad people down there.'

He laughed. 'I'll be all right,' he said. 'You be careful.' He found himself fumbling for the words. 'Drive safely and everything.'

He saw the sudden sting of tears in her eyes, like a child just told that their best friend is moving to a new school.

'Why are you crying?' he said.

She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. 'I'm not,' she insisted.

He looked out at Tiger. T have to go,' he said, reaching out to touch one of those long slim arms.

T know you do,' she said, abruptly pulling away, and she

stepped through the automatic glass doors with a swish of air.

He watched her walking across the courtyard of Paradise Mansions with that strange, awkward gait of hers, like a colt that was still getting used to the length of its legs, and she had one hand lifted to shield her face against the merciless morning sun, as though that was another one of the things that she had never really got used to.

Their car came to a halt, and beyond the stalled traffic ahead Bill could see the lorry on its side, its nearside wheels in a ditch.

The driver stood next to it, staring at his vehicle in bewilderment, as if he could not quite believe this betrayal. He was still holding the portable DVD player that he had been watching at the wheel when he went off the road.

It was a fruit lorry, and it blocked the road from Shenzhen to the factory of the Happy Trousers Trading Company. A garish avalanche was spread across the road, a vivid mass of apples, bananas, melons, plums, oranges, mangoes and lychees that had tipped out of their cardboard boxes but remained in their individual wrappers of cellophane and paper, as if tempting the palates of the bystanders who had gathered to gawp by the side of the road.

The accident must have happened just a few minutes ago, because there was no sign of the Public Security Bureau. Some of the crowd stirred into motion. While the men stood and watched, the women began stepping into the road and gathering up the fruit, working quickly, anxious to do their looting before the cops came. But there was such an abundance of fruit that for all they gathered up they crushed even more underfoot.

Bill was sitting in the passenger seat, with Nancy Deng and Mad Mitch in the back. He turned to the driver

impatiently. The man was staring blankly at the scene of Iruity destruction. Bill missed Tiger.

'Is there another road, another way?' he said, and Nancy leaned forward, translating into Cantonese.

Mad Mitch placed a reassuring hand on Bill's shoulder. 'Slow down, Bill,' the firm's oldest associate lawyer advised him. 'We'll get there soon enough.'

Bill narrowed his eyes. Mitch shouldn't even be here. Shane should be fronting this trip. But Shane, still in a lot of pain, would not be flying to Shenzhen for a trip to the Happy Trousers Trading Company. So Mitch was here in his place, although Bill had seniority.

'Can't slow down, Mitch,' Bill said lightly. I might end up like you, he thought. I might end up like my father.

Then the PSB were suddenly on the scene, shooing the looters away and clearing a path for all the cars containing important foreigners on their way to do business in the free-trade zone.

Bill stared out at the blank faces of the looters, and at the fruit that still covered the road but was now reduced to a vivid pulp of red and gold, the colours of China.

The car began to move.

An ethical audit. That's what they called it. That's what they were there for.

One of the firm's clients had asked for an ethical audit of the Happy Trousers Trading Company, a moral accounting to weigh up the pros and cons of making cheap clothes for the West using factory workers wearing rags.

'It's an industrial revolution,' Devlin had told them, looking pained. 'And unfortunately you don't get too many paid vacations and tea breaks during an industrial revolution.'

So Nancy took notes as a podgy manager with a white nylon shirt and a paralysed grin gave them a guided tour of the factory.

They peered into a dead-aired dormitory where workers were sleeping twelve wooden boxes to a room, piled high in four triple-tier bunks. The sudden light produced snakelike stirring of lethargic flesh, and it made Bill shiver. He thought of slave ships, he thought of concentration camps. He looked at Nancy's face. It revealed nothing. They closed the door and moved on.

It's like something from another century, Bill thought, and tried to steel himself. He supposed he was going to have to get used to this kind of thing. Foreign companies who were under pressure from consumers in their own country to ensure that their factories were not breaching Chinese law, International Labour Organisation rules and human decency were often requesting ethical audits now. They saw the cold-water taps where the workers washed, displayed with grotesque pride by the grinning factory manager. They saw the gruel that the workers queued for in a stinking canteen. They saw the dull-eyed stare of men and women who had just pulled two shifts back-to-back. And Bill saw with a sinking feeling that the glittering malls of the Bund and the shining towers of Pudong and the whole PRC gold rush were built on these things.

But Bill also saw the girls in the canteen sharing a joke. He saw small pictures of well-scrubbed children pinned to the walls of the fetid, overcrowded dorms. And as the afternoon shift poured through the gates, he watched a boy and girl worker pair off and stand together by the factory wall, their hands entwined. And he thought that perhaps Devlin was right.

Although the factory conditions were like something from the nineteenth century he wondered if these workers would really have been better off staying in the villages. He just didn't know. He had no certainty left in him. And he could almost hear Devlin telling him that fifty years ago millions

nl ilium were starving thanks to the Great Leap Forward, .nid that now they were happy to have a full belly and a job in go to.

Bill wanted to believe him.

The manager grinned confidently at the lawyers from Shanghai. The man had done many ethical audits before, and in broken English he demonstrated that he knew his lines perfectly. He knew how to salve their troubled minds, Bill thought, he knew how to settle their weak Western stomachs. Bill suspected that these visits changed nothing much apart from the factory manager's ability to more fluently mouth any assurances the big-nosed pinkies wanted to hear. But without these visits it could have been even worse. Who knew?

They entered a room where hundreds of young women sat hunched behind weaving machines, their ponytailed heads half-hidden behind enormous reels of yellow cotton. The women looked grubby, badly fed, used up. Their hair, their teeth, their skin – it all looked worn out, although most of them were not out of their teens.

They were not like Jinjin Li. They did not have the look. Not the look of the girls in Paradise Mansions, the look of the women in Shanghai. They had the other kind of look, the look that Chinese women more frequently had – the look of women who had grown old before they were ever really young. The look, Bill thought, of a piece of fruit with all the juice sucked out. The din their machines made was deafening, like being inside a giant dustbin that had been thrown from a cliff. Mad Mitch said something and Bill shook his head. Conversation was impossible. Even stringing two thoughts together was difficult in the midst of that noise.

Then they were in a room full of young men. Everybody was so young. Bill wondered – where were all the old people? Where were the towns and the villages and the farms that

these young men had left behind? And what did they look like with all the young people gone?

The noise was even louder in here, if that was possible. Gigantic presses slammed down on pieces of moulded rubber as they made their steady journey down the assembly line.

Young men sorted and shifted trainers as they passed by, their eyes cast down, fussing over the world-famous brand name, lavishing them with their unbroken attention. There was a smell of burning rubber in the air. There was no talking or eye contact. There was just the endless rumble of the assembly line, and the slamming of the presses, which came down with a whoosh of compressed air, like some giant door being slammed shut in hell.

And then, piercing all the industrial clamour, there was the scream.

At first it did not seem human. At first it sounded as though it was a piece of malfunctioning machinery. High-pitched, whining, like metal grinding against metal. But then the assembly line ground to a halt, and all eyes were looking to the far side of the room where a young man was clutching his arm just above the elbow, his face deathly white and eyes wide with disbelief and dread.

He was being supported by two of his friends. They were both babbling – offering explanations, calling for help, Bill couldn't tell. One of them was crying. He looked up and saw that Nancy was already on her phone, calling an ambulance.

The injured man was eased to the floor and laid on his side. He was still clutching his arm. Below the elbow it was a mangled pulp of flesh and bone. The factory manager knelt by the man's side and a thick scrum of workers gathered around to offer advice and opinions but mostly just to watch. Then the paramedics were there and the man was taken away on a gurney. There was nothing else to see. Orders were given, and the

assembly line jolted back to life. Bill saw that a woman was cleaning the press where the man had worked.

The factory manager escorted them to their car. His smile didn't falter as he assured them that working practices were even now being reviewed to ensure that such an accident could never happen again. And Bill just wanted to be gone.

This was a cruel, hard, grubby place and he could not stand the thought that he was a part of it. They were driven back to the hotel and Bill stood under the lukewarm shower for a long while. By the time Mad Mitch met him in the bar a few hours later he was halfway to drunk.

'He lost his arm,' Bill said. 'That boy in the factory. Nancy called the hospital. They had to amputate his arm.'

Mitch nodded. 'She told me.' There was a small forest of green Tsingtao bottles in front of Bill. Mitch sat on the stool next to him and signalled for two more.

'All for a pair of trainers,' Bill said. 'All for some cheap clobber to flog to the West.'

Mitch shook his head. 'There's no such thing as cheap clothes,' he said. 'The real price isn't paid by the people who buy the stuff, it's paid by the people who make it.' He took a sip of his beer. 'But we're not here for them, are we? We're here for our clients.'

Bill looked at him with despair. 'Then what do we tell the client?'

'Tell them what we saw,' Mad Mitch said. 'Tell them exactly what we saw. Tell them the Happy Trousers Factory resembles a nineteenth-century workhouse. Tell them that you would need to be Charles Dickens to do the place justice.'

'And what will that change?'

'Bugger all,' said Mad Mitch. 'The client likes the profit margins he gets out here. And his customers like rock-bottom prices. The West wants it both ways. Dirt-cheap products and a clean conscience. Nobody is going to stop doing business

here. Why should they? We are not going to stop doing business here, are we?'

'But I don't see why that means the locals have to be on two dollars a day,' Bill said. 'I don't see why that means some kid has to lose an arm.' He drained his beer. 'Can't we do something?'

'Like what?' Mitch said. He hadn't touched his drink.

'You saw them in there,' Bill said. 'Peasants straight off the farm working fourteen hours a day. Doing double and triple shifts till they drop. Getting ?50 a month with one day off. And that factory manager only gives a toss when he wants to keep our clients off his back. What can we do? Do him for a start.'

'Perhaps the West can't have it both ways,' Mad Mitch said. 'Perhaps you can't have dirt-cheap trainers and Chinese factories where the workers get treated like human beings. And perhaps our client only cares when he wants to keep the press off his back. Look – if the client gets too much bad publicity here, what do you think is going to happen? They'll just ship the factory to Vietnam. Or India.'

'But there are rules about working practices,' Bill said. 'There are regulations about safety. Every day of the year that place breaches International Labour Organisation rules, not to mention Chinese law. The boy who lost an arm should sue.' Bill nearly fell off his stool and steadied himself with a smile. 'Know any good lawyers, Mitch?'

The older man sipped his Tsingtao carefully.

'We're lawyers in a country with no rule of law,' Mad Mitch said. 'Where we come from, the courts are independent and have authority over all. Judges protect the freedoms of individuals against the state. Here it's just not like that. The PRC operates a Communist legal system. Nobody with any kind of power – financial, political or military – considers themselves bound by any court rulings they don't like. Where

the rule of law doesn't apply, legal solutions are always going to be imperfect. That boy who lost an arm wouldn't stand a chance.'

Bill shook his head. 'Can I ask you something, Mitch?' he said.

'Go ahead.'

'Why did you never make partner? What happened there?' Bill laughed, trying to keep it light. 'You slow down once too often?'

Mitch laughed along with him. 'Up at the firm they say that I lacked the stamina for Hong Kong and the stomach for Shanghai. And I think that's probably a fair and reasonable assessment. But also, practising law is a service industry and I never really understood that. I thought it was about truth, justice, decency and all that old-fashioned stuff.' He raised his glass in a toast. 'And I was wrong.'

Nancy arrived in the bar and Bill carefully climbed off his bar stool. He knew it was going to take a supreme effort to avoid falling on his face.

'You coming in to dinner?' he asked Mitch.

Mitch shook his head, grimacing, and looked at the younger man with wonder.

'You can still eat?' Mitch said. 'After what we saw today?'

Bill nodded, surprised, and Mad Mitch gently patted his arm.

'Don't worry, Bill,' he said. 'There's no doubt about you making partner.'

The hotel's restaurant was empty apart from a group of drunken Russians eating their sweet-and-sour pork with knives and forks. Bill and Nancy turned around and were about to leave when he noticed the only other diner was Alice Greene. Bill went over to her table and she raised her chopsticks in salute.

'Butterfield, Hunt and West doing business in Shenzhen, the sweatshop of the world,' she said. 'Who would have thought it?'

Bill laughed. 'A hack chasing an ambulance,' he said. 'What are the odds of that? And isn't it the workshop of the world? What did you do? Fly down from Pudong this morning? I didn't see you on the flight.'

'I got the train from Hong Kong,' Alice said. 'I've been touching base with my paper. They sent me over when we heard about the accident. Any comment on the man who lost his arm?'

'It's obviously a tragic accident,' Bill said, aware that anything he said could be used against him. He thought of the deep-frozen grin on the manager's face, and how it had never faltered. 'The factory have already launched an investigation.'

Alice nodded with approval. 'You're getting very good, Bill.' She carried on tucking into her honey-roast pork. 'Any comment from your clients?'

He had given her enough. 'I haven't had the chance to speak to our clients,' he said. 'I'm sure they'll be devastated.'

The journalist looked unconvinced. 'Well, I don't know if they'll be exactly devastated, Bill. A dozen workers a day lose a limb in the factories of Shenzhen. A dozen a day! And they're ten times more likely to die than their counterparts in Europe.'

It's so easy, he thought with a flash of anger. It's so easy when you are that certain. 'Would you like it better if they were all unemployed?' he said.

T would prefer it if these poor bastards were treated like human beings,' she said.

Bill was aware of Nancy hovering awkwardly behind him. He introduced the two women and Alice smiled up at Nancy.

'Will you join our Russian friends and me for dinner?' she

i said, glancing over at the other occupied table. One of the Russians was entertaining his friends by pulling the waitress's ponytail as she attempted to pour their Tsingtaos. 'They're enormous fun. Just before you arrived one of them hit me on the back of the head with a spring roll.'

But Bill declined, and they left Alice and the Russians in the cavernous hotel restaurant and went out into the teeming streets of Shenzhen, a world of noise that smelled of diesel fumes and roast duck.

He looked at Nancy.

'That's a friend of the family,' he said apologetically. 'My wife's side.'

Nancy nodded. 'I saw your wife,' she said as they began to move through the evening crowd. 'I saw Mrs Holden.'

Bill nodded. 'That dinner on the Bund.' He remembered holding hands with Becca out on the deck, the skyline of Pudong shining like their shared vision of the future. It seemed like a long time ago.

'No, before that night,' Nancy said. 'She didn't remember me, but I remembered her.' She was speaking quickly now, relaying something that he could tell she had kept to herself for a long time. 'Just after you came over. In the museum. The museum on Huangpi Lu in Xintiandi. You know the one?'

Bill thought about it.

'Is that where the Party first met?' he said.

Nancy nodded. T think your wife is very kind,' she said, and Bill was again baffled by the weight the Chinese gave to certain words. They used words like kind and love in a way that seemed to change their meaning, or drain them of meaning altogether. But Nancy Deng nodded emphatically. She knew what she meant. 'Your wife must be very kind to be interested in that place.'

Bill nodded, feeling stupid. 'She's a sweetheart, all right,' he said. The crowds and the smell of roast meat and clogged

traffic were starting to make him feel claustrophobic. They didn't seem to trouble Nancy.

'I like that place very much,' she was saying happily. 'Not many people are so interested. That museum always empty. But I think – very interesting place. They want justice. People forget that now. That place – my high school took us there – it is why I became a lawyer.'

Bill thought of Mad Mitch and his belief in the essential goodness of the law.

'China not such a fair place then, and not such a fair place now,' Nancy said. 'You saw the factory.' She snorted with contempt, shaking her head. 'The dogs of the rich live better than the children of the poor.'

Bill stopped walking. 'Then why do they come to work at the factory?' It was a stupid question, and he already knew the answer.

'Because they all want to be part of the new China,' Nancy said. 'They have seen it on TV.'

He looked at her. Fifty years ago she would have joined the Party. Now she tried to make her country a better place by studying at the Tsinghua University Law School and going to work for Butterfield, Hunt and West.

'Is that why you became a lawyer?' he said. 'To change the world?'

'You are laughing at me,' she said.

He shook his head. T would never laugh at you,' Bill said.

They began moving with the crowds, following the smell of roast duck.

'My father thought that being a lawyer was a sacred profession,' she said. 'Like being a doctor. And not just – I don't know – a businessman.'

'Your father must be a good man.'

She shrugged with embarrassment. They had stopped at a line of food stalls. Nancy ordered for both of them. Some

chicken dumplings, and what looked like slices of roast duck on rice.

'I have no big dreams,' Nancy said. 'I know I am unimportant. But I think perhaps my country's future is still to be decided. It doesn't matter what anyone says. Nothing is inevitable in China.'

'One thing I don't understand,' Bill said. 'Up in Yangdong, why don't the local government just give those farmers the compensation they have coming to them? Why cheat them?'

She had bought two plates of thin slices of roast duck on rice, and she handed one to Bill with a pair of plastic chopsticks.

'I blame Confucius,' Nancy smiled. 'Confucius emphasised loyalty to family above duty to society. That's very Chinese – perhaps hard for you to understand. Why give something to a stranger when you can keep it for your own people without fear of punishment? That's what they think. Someone like Chairman Sun. That's what he thinks.' She dug a heap of meat and rice on to her chopsticks and paused with it before her mouth. 'In China the important men hate everyone's corruption but their own.'

T saw this couple when we were at the factory,' Bill said. 'A young man and woman, they looked like they had just come off work, and I wondered if their lives would have been better if they had stayed in whatever little place they come from. And I don't know.' He stared at her helplessly. 'I really don't know.'

Nancy Deng chewed thoughtfully. 'Then they never meet.'

He laughed. 'That's one way of looking at it.' He began to eat. It was the best duck he had ever tasted. 'This is good,' he said. He watched her order a plate of glossy green choi sam, slick with oyster sauce. 'But what's going to happen in China?' he said. 'Come on – you're a lawyer. What's your educated guess?'

Nancy nodded emphatically. 'The old men will die,' she said. 'That's the one certainty. The old men will die. But who knows when? Old men can live for a long time.'

Then they did not talk for a while, because they were both shovelling the piping hot food into their mouths. He smiled gratefully as Nancy passed him a plate of lychees. He felt better than he had all day.

Talking with Nancy Deng on that street corner in Shenzhen, hearing this young woman speak with careful optimism about her country's future, breathing the night air full of diesel and duck, eating what the people eat – here at last was the real China.

They walked back to their hotel and when Bill was alone in his room he took out the three photos that he carried everywhere.

Holly looking adorably dishevelled in her nursery school uniform a year ago. Becca and Holly on that beach in the Caribbean two years back, his daughter grinning under a pink Foreign Legion hat, and his wife in big shades and that orange shift thing, her hair pulled back and tucked into a chignon, looking like a movie star from the fifties. And Holly as a stern-faced, slightly damp baby, wrapped in a white towelling robe, glaring at the camera on bath night. He looked at the photos of his family for a while and then he propped them up on his little hotel desk, like his own private barricade against the world that was out there beyond the window.

He thought of Becca's eyes, as blue as pieces of sky, and he knew that he would not see Jinjin Li when he returned to Shanghai. Or rather, he would still see her – coming and going from Paradise Mansions, across a crowded restaurant on the Bund, walking through the ornate lobby of some new hotel – and he would be polite, but he would keep his distance. He would not see her smile, or the long lines of her body, or the way her eyes seemed to light up when she looked at

him. He would harden his heart and he would not see these things and he would wait for his wife to return, and look at him once more with eyes so blue they looked like pieces of sky.

seventeen

The stomach cramps woke him, tight spasms of pain that dragged him from sleep and sent him staggering blindly towards the bathroom.

Bill knelt in front of the toilet and threw up until he was empty, shivering and bewildered with the sweat pouring from him, and then he left the bathroom, came straight back and tried to throw up some more, retching on an empty stomach until he was spitting up blood.

He shuffled back to the bedroom and flopped on to the bed. An alarm was ringing in his ears and it took him a few dazed seconds to realise that it was only the clock. Where was he? He was in Shanghai. It was Monday morning. It was time to go to work.

He went back to the bathroom and made an effort to shower and shave. He must have cut his face because when he was forced to sink back to his knees, his drained stomach straining to be free of him, a few beads of blood ran down his chin and stained the tiled floor.

He dressed with shaking hands and lay back on the bed, worn out and sweaty. The spare room revolved around him. He stood up and it stopped. Muttering encouragement, Bill

let himself out of the apartment, light-headed and stomach aching.

In the lift he realised that his legs were not all they should be and propped himself up against the door until it opened on the ground floor. The day seemed over-lit and harsh. He stepped into the courtyard and took a few steps before he realised that he wasn't going to work.

He leaned against a new BMW that had been parked there overnight and tried to catch his breath. Annie came out of the opposite block, dressed for the gym, and regarded him warily with her hard little face. Bill raised his hand, a listless plea for help, but she was soon gone, moving quickly on her trainers, shooting him a disapproving look over her shoulder. He had not known that Louis Vuitton made trainers.

Time seemed to stop as he slumped against the car. He looked for the porter but there was no sign of him. He would call the office, that's what he would do. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his phone, but he had left it in the flat.

Bill looked up at clouds scudding quickly across the sky, his mind grasping for a plan. He would go back to the flat, that's what he would have to do. He cursed, launched himself from the car, but before he could make it to the lift he felt himself pitch forward.

Someone did their best to catch him. He felt hands on his arms that almost broke his fall, and then the hands were dragging at the lapels of his suit jacket, hauling him off his knees, and there was another pair of hands helping him to his feet.

He opened his eyes to see Jenny One and Jenny Two on either side of him, conferring in Shanghainese as they guided him to the lift. They were both dressed in black. All black. But somehow he did not register that they were going to a funeral.

The two Jennys fumbled in his pockets and found the key to his apartment. They tried to lead him into the master bedroom but he pulled away and had soon resumed his prayer position in front of the toilet, with Jenny Two patting and stroking his back as he strained and groaned and sweated, with nothing left to come out.

Back in the master bedroom Jenny One had pulled the curtains. He was too tired to explain to them that this wasn't his room, that his room was the other one, the guest room, that the master bedroom was where his wife and daughter slept, or used to, but it was all too complicated and too much of an effort and so he said nothing and just did his best to help them as they undressed him down to his Calvins and eased him between the sheets. The sheets were cool and fresh. This was a great bed.

Then he must have slept for a while because Jinjin was suddenly there, and then there was some conversation that he couldn't understand, and the door was closing as the Jennys went away. The bedroom tried to spin round but her face remained before him, the still centre of his universe.

'Sleep now,' she said.

'You deserve,' he said, reaching for her hand, trying to sit up. It was so small. How could anyone have such small hands? She pulled it away with an impatient scowl. He wanted to talk, there were things he had to say, but there was something wrong with his breathing, he was all clogged up, and it distracted him, and the thought of exactly what she deserved escaped him.

'Too much talk,' she said,^ shaking her head. She pulled him up, plumped his pillows meaninglessly, and then eased him back on the bed. He closed his eyes, which were stinging from the sweat, his guts felt empty and painful, and he was more tired than he'd known it was possible to feel.

He reached for her again and this time when he took her

hand she didn't pull it away. A phone was ringing somewhere. They ignored it.

She stayed with him through the endless day, half-carrying him to the toilet when he needed to get on his knees and pray, and he later realised that she had seen him at a lower physical ebb than anyone had ever seen him in his life. She slept beside him, fully clothed on top of the sheets, a slender arm draped across his chest.

And in the morning, when a full twenty-four hours had gone by and he was still shivering and sweating as he slept in that wonderful bed with nothing but the stomach cramps inside him, she searched through his pockets for his wallet, trying to find someone to call.

'We talk about heart failure but the phrase is misleading,' said the cardiologist. 'In a medical sense, heart failure is a relative term. Failure implies that the heart is no longer pumping blood into the arteries and the patient is dead.' His thin lips moved to somewhere between a smile and a grimace. 'And this can of course happen.'

Becca, her father and Sara were in his office. Becca thought that the office was surprisingly small for such a coveted, expensive specialist. He was a ski-tanned fifty-five-year-old, looking forward to retirement, looking forward to dinner at the Ivy. Her father was his two o'clock appointment, but he was running late. They should have learned that by now, Becca thought. Get the early appointments and then there was less chance of sitting in the waiting room flicking through worn-out glossy magazines, wondering if the end result would be life or death. They should call it the wondering room, she thought.

The cardiologist's assistant, a fat nurse in a blue coat, was placing black medical plates on a light screen. It didn't look like her father. It didn't look like a heart.

Becca sat there between her father and her sister and wondered, How many does be see every day? There was a practised compassion about the cardiologist. He has seen it all before, Becca thought. The terror in the face of the patient, the weepy disbelief in the loved ones, the desperate hunger for a scrap of good news. How many death sentences, how many reprieves? Too many to count, she thought. And we are only his two o'clock.

'Think of an unhealthy heart like an inefficient worker,' said the cardiologist. 'The inefficient worker works twice as hard as the efficient worker, but he doesn't get half as much done. The healthy heart -'

Becca's telephone began to ring inside her bag. The fat nurse looked at Becca as if she wanted to kill her. Becca released the hands of her father and sister and quickly pulled out her phone. She saw that the screen said UNKNOWN CALLER just as she switched it off.

'Sorry,' she said to everyone, but mostly to the fat nurse who wanted to kill her.

Then Becca felt the hands of her father and sister reclaim her own hands, their fingers digging into her palms, holding her for comfort and reassurance and as if to stop her getting away.

'You can pull your pants and trousers up,' Dr Khan told Shane. While Shane was getting dressed, Khan went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He looked exhausted. He was only hours off the flight from Heathrow and in the grip of the dazed, spaced-out dislocation of full-blown jet-lag. When he went back to his office, they were waiting for him.

Shane's wife sat beside him, but Shane felt completely alone. Somehow Rosalita's presence in the doctor's surgery made him feel more isolated than if he had been there without her.

They were here because the pain had not stopped. The pain down there in his trusty old meat and two veg, his faithful servants for so long and on so many adventures. They had betrayed him at last, for the pain down there had sometimes gone away but it had never gone very far. For a while now he had believed that there was something very wrong with him. Today he would find out.

It was a time when he wanted a friend, an ally, and a wife. Someone to tell him that it would be all right – whatever happened, he would get through it. They would get through it together. But instead he felt like the loneliest man in the world.

'It's not cancer and it's not a scrotal hernia,' Dr Khan said, but something about his tone prevented Shane from releasing a sigh of relief.

At least the examination had been mercifully swift. Shane on the couch, his pants and trousers pulled down but not pulled off. The fingers in the plastic gloves had located the source of the pain, dug expertly into him, and now Dr Khan was confidently announcing that it was not the thing that Shane had feared most. It was not cancer. The plastic gloves had moved away from the testicles, heading north, pressing against the top of the groin, and his abdomen, and then back down south of the border to the source of the pain. But it wasn't a hernia either. And the way that Dr Khan pronounced on these things, Shane knew that he had no doubt.

But there was something else.

'Unfortunately it could be torsion,' Dr Khan said, and Shane thought – torsion? It was a word, a fate, that he had never encountered, never dreamed of. Shane had spent weeks with medical encyclopaedias running through the things that could be wrong with him if it wasn't just the after-effects of a kick in the balls.

Cancer? Maybe. A scrotal hernia? Possibly, and although

it would be nasty it would be infinitely preferable to the Big C. But torsion? He had never heard of torsion. Was torsion even listed in the Concise Medical Dictionary} Oh, definitely. But he had not looked it up. This is what will kill you, Shane thought.

Something you can't even name.

'Torsion is an abnormal twisting of a testicle,' Khan said. 'Imagine a ball being spun round.' Shane crossed his legs and then uncrossed them, opening them wider apart, imagining only too well.

Shane tried a brave smile, but there was too much that he didn't know, and too much he was scared of.

'Worse-case scenario?' he said, as lightly as he could. Dr Khan stared at them. 'Well, if it's torsion, and if you've lost viability in that testicle – if there's no blood getting to it, if it is essentially dead – then it will have to be surgically removed as soon as possible.'

Then Shane was too numb to be afraid. He was conscious of his breathing, and his heart in his chest, and he could see his life veering off in an insane, unexpected direction. Torsion! Now I've heard of it! Then his wife spoke, her voice cold and flat and hard.

'Will he still be able to have children?' she said, as though she had just suffered a gross personal insult. Dr Khan chose to swerve around the question. 'We need to get you a scan immediately,' he said. 'There's a consultant radiologist who is the best in the city and I want you to go and sit outside his office until he can fit you in. I'm going to call him now, but as you don't have an appointment I'm afraid you will have to sit there until he can see you.'

Shane nodded, still in shock. Where else did he have to be? What else was there outside of this room? His wife was silent by his side. She didn't touch him, and he almost forgot that she was there.

The phone on Dr Khan's desk rang and he angrily snatched it up. 'No calls when I'm with a patient, you know that.'

His secretary was apologetic. 'It's emergency, Dr Khan,' she said, her English faltering under pressure. 'About Mr William Holden from Jinjin Li. She say you know.'

Khan almost had to laugh. God, he was tired. 'Jinjin Li?' he said. 'That narrows it down. There must be fifty million Jinjin Lis in China.'

But he took the call, making an apologetic face at Shane and Rosalita. There was a click and then her voice came on the line.

'Dr Khan?' she said. 'You don't know me.'

In the big strange bed Bill drifted in and out of dreams. He shook and shivered under the sweat-stained sheets, listening to her moving around the flat, his exhausted mind racing.

What if the problem was not trying to meet someone great but that you would meet a lot of great people? What if the problem was not finding someone worthy of love, but meeting an endless number of people who were worthy of love? What then? Was that a blueprint for a happy life? Or a recipe for disaster?

'You're a very lucky man,' said Dr Khan, leaning over Bill's bed.

He was in the International Family Hospital and Clinic with an IV drip inserted into his arm. It flowed through his veins like molten ice and he flinched with the pain. Jinjin stood awkwardly in a corner of the hospital room, uncertain if she should stay or go.

'I don't know what you've been eating,' said Khan. 'But this is some kind of viral infection of the stomach and intestines. Looks like amoebic dysentery. We're going to keep you

in for tests. And of course you are seriously dehydrated. That's what could have killed you.'

'Did someone call my wife?' Bill croaked.

'Someone from your office came by while you were sleeping. Miss Deng, is it?' Against the wall Jinjin nodded but Khan did not see her. Bill realised the doctor was doing his best to not even acknowledge her presence. 'Your office is aware of the situation,' he said. 'Miss Deng said she would personally call Becca. Call your wife. You can call her yourself when you're up to it.'

'I'll do that,' Bill said, and Dr Khan nodded shortly, and looked away. When he had gone, nodding curtly at Jinjin, she pulled a chair to the side of Bill's bed, watching his face. She placed the back of a hand on his forehead as if taking his temperature then gently pulled it across his temple, and down one cheek, and across his lips, and up the other cheek, removing a thin film of sweat.

'Thanks for saving my life,' Bill said, and she smiled her priceless smile, and it is possible that she may have replied, but by then he was sleeping.

He awoke not knowing where he was, disorientated by the dream-like sounds of a hospital at night.

Someone crying out in their sleep. Wheels rolling by his room. Nurses conferring in the corridor. A telephone ringing, and left unanswered.

The IV drip was by his side, but the little bag had been sucked half-dry, and he groaned as he felt that icy pain crawling up his arm.

Now he remembered.

Khan was gone. Jinjin was gone. But in the shaft of light that seeped through the top of the door he could see Shane's familiar bulk sitting in the chair by the bed.

'You all right, mate?'

Bill closed his eyes and nodded and smiled, comforted by the rough Aussie burr.

'Touch of the running squirts, eh?' Shane said. 'Happens to the best of us.'

'I don't know what I ate,' Bill groaned. The last meal he remembered was some late-night Dan Dan noodles with Shane and the Germans on the Bund. But Shane had clearly survived the noodles. Bill closed his eyes. He had never felt so tired.

'Amoebic dysentery,' Shane shrugged. 'It's just as likely to be in the water as in the food. You probably got a bad ice cube. Stay away from the water, mate. Don't you Poms know anything?' He patted Bill's arm. 'Anyway – everyone sends their love. Take as long as you like, Devlin says.' Shane shifted awkwardly. 'Had a bit of a bastard day myself. Had warm jelly rubbed all over my crown jewels.' Bill opened his eyes and stared at his friend. Shane sighed at the memory, and couldn't quite manage a smile. 'Lot of people would pay good money for that, mate. When the doc said a scan, I thought that he meant one of those scans where they stick you inside that big machine – you know, the big machine like a coffin. What do you call that machine, mate?'

'MRI scan,' Bill said. 'It's called an MRI scan.'

'Yeah, MRI scan. But this scan was the kind that a woman has when she's got a bun in the oven. Where they rub jelly on her belly so you can see the little nipper inside her.'

Bill thought of the long-ago scans holding Becca's hand as they stared with wonder at their unborn daughter. That was the best time. No, when their daughter was born was the best time. No, when she was bigger, and she was walking and you could see the little girl she would be, that was the best time. No, he thought, maybe later, when we could talk to each other. That was the best time.

Shane was still talking about scans. 'The kind of scan when

the woman's up the duff and there are lots of oohs and aahs,' he said. He moved uncomfortably in his seat. 'Well, there were plenty of oohs and aahs when they started rubbing this jelly on my Elgin marbles.'

Bill closed his eyes and laughed. He didn't want to laugh because it hurt too much, but he couldn't stop himself. The ice crawled up his veins and made him gasp with pain. 'Are you all right, Shane?'

The big Australian shifted in the darkness. He had not talked about any of this. He had kept it all locked up. 'The doc thought I might have to have a bollock lopped off. From our big night out in Pudong, remember?'

Bill looked at him, not laughing now. 'Jesus, Shane.' The secrets that we keep, he thought. 'I'm so sorry.' And he did feel sorry, and he felt responsible, and he knew that if he had never gone near Jinjin Li then his friend would not have had to live through today.

'It was okay,' Shane said lightly. 'The radiologist said there was no torsion. Great guy. Lovely man. Just the effects of getting a good kicking, he reckoned. But your mind plays tricks, doesn't it? Your mind plays all sorts of tricks.'

'Then that's good, Shane,' Bill said, his voice a croak. Their voices were soft in the hospital night, as though there was some third party asleep in the room who they were trying not to disturb. 'Then that's great.'

'I remember when my grandmother died of breast cancer,' Shane said. 'Great old girl. And she did the most generous and bravest thing that I ever saw anyone do in my life. She took my mother's hand and made her feel the lump – made her know the thing that was killing her. And my grandmother said, "That's what you are always looking for, love, that is what you must guard against, sweetheart, and if you find it, you beat it. You spot it early and you get it cut out of you and you live." And when I thought it might be

testicular cancer, I thought – fuck me, as much as I love him, there's no way I'm letting Bill Holden stick his hand down my trousers.'

Bill laughed again, harder now, as though some weight had been lifted from both of them, and he didn't care about the way that any kind of movement made the ice ache in his arm. 'It turned out all right,' he smiled. 'It turned out all right in the end.'

Shane nodded. 'But something like this – it shines a light on your life.' He rubbed his fingers across his eyes. 'It shines a light on your marriage. It really does. When something like this happens – when it looks like they are going to start cutting bits off you – well, you find out what you've got, and what you haven't got.' He turned his face away, although Bill couldn't see it in the darkness. 'She had her bags packed, Bill. I saw it. Not literally, but I would have been in this thing alone. If it had been anything bad, Rosalita would have been off.'

Bill thought of his friend looking at the woman who became his wife before she was even his girlfriend. He thought of how quickly it could all come apart. 'You don't know that,' Bill said, reaching for some reassuring cliche, and unable to believe in any of them. 'It might have brought out the best in her. It might have brought you closer.'

Shane snorted.

'Radical way to patch up your marriage, mate. Have a bit of surgery on the family heirlooms.' He shook his head. 'Sad fact is, she's not there for me the way a wife should be there. She's not my best friend.'

Bill closed his eyes. He wanted to help his friend. He wanted to comfort him. But he was so tired now. The only thing keeping him awake was the ice that crept through his blood, and made him wince from the pain.

'It's not like you and Becca,' Shane said. 'Me and Rosalita

– it's just not like that. We're not partners. We're – I don't know what we are. Fuck buddies with wedding rings. That's all. And lately, since that night in Pudong, not even that.' Shane covered his, face with his hands, and Bill could hear his friend breathing in the darkness. 'You've got the kind of marriage that every man dreams about,' Shane said, and Bill knew it was true.

But your mind plays tricks, he thought.

Your mind plays all sorts of tricks.

'I feel terrible,' Becca said. 'I feel awful. Really rotten.'

On the other side of the world, Bill laughed weakly. 'Snap,' he said, and in one word she could tell how bad it had been. Her husband sounded as though he had had the stuffing knocked out of him.

'I'm so sorry, baby,' she said.

'What are you sorry about?'

'Sorry that we had to come home. Sorry you had to get through this alone. I should have been there.'

'You can't help your dad getting sick.'

'I know, but – I just want us to have a happy life. Really. That's all I want. I just want us to be together again.'

'Me too,' he said.

It was such a simple and obvious thing to wish for, and she couldn't quite remember why they had ever wished for anything more.

'How's he doing? Your dad?'

'No change,' she said. 'The tests were not conclusive. He has an irregular heartbeat but they don't seem to know what's wrong. I don't know. He suddenly seems like an old man, Bill.'

'And Holly,' he said, and she remembered their screaming row, and she wanted to avoid another one.

'She's well, Bill,' she said quickly. 'She's fine with Sara and

her kids.' A beat. 'Please believe me, baby.' She deliberately did not mention the partner. She knew how the unknown partner touched a raw nerve. 'And I promise you it's just for a little while, until my dad can really take care of himself.'

'That's good,' he said, keeping it as neutral as possible.

'How are you? When are you going to be back at work?'

'I'm better. Really. Don't worry. Devlin's told me to stay away for a while. That's okay. There's plenty of stuff I can do from home.'

'Still, maybe I should come over,' she said. 'I'll talk to Dr Khan.'

'No,' Bill said. 'Please don't do that.'

It wasn't true that there was nothing she could have done about it, Becca thought as she hung up. She could have stayed with him. But there was no point in thinking about it now. The worst of it was over, she thought, as she went into the kitchen and made some pasta and salad for herself and her father. Her dad was dozing in front of the evening news and Becca woke him when the meal was ready. He made lots of delighted and appreciative noises, but he hardly touched a thing.

After dinner Becca called Sara's number to say goodnight to Holly. Then she watched a few hours' television with her father, changing channels to follow the news. Or rather Becca watched television while her father slipped back into his snoring slumber.

It was strange. He could not sleep during the night, and she would often hear him bumping around, but he had no trouble at all sleeping on the sofa, when it wasn't time to sleep.

Near midnight she woke him again and waited until she had heard him successfully negotiate the stairs, the bathroom and lights out before she turned in herself.

And Becca smiled wistfully to herself and thought how

strange it was that now it was her turn to go to a spare room, and climb into a single bed, and go to sleep alone.

Tea was good for his recovery, Jinjin said. And fresh air. And walking.

So when he had been home for a few days, and during one of those mornings when there was no ayi and no Tiger bringing him groceries and no Shane dropping in to see him or maybe just to delay going home from work, Jinjin rang his bell and announced that she was taking him out. She recommended the Old City and Yu Gardens and the teahouse on the lake.

They drove there in her red Mini and he could not decide if she was the worst driver in the world or just a typical Shanghai racer. But they arrived in one piece and she took his arm as they walked through the Old City until they came to the zigzag bridge leading to the teahouse. He felt her long body pressing against him and stopped to look at her. Her eyes drifted to the waters bubbling with golden fish beneath them, and then back to his face.

'Good father, good husband, good man,' she said, then nodded once, as if making an important decision. They looked at each other for a very long moment. 'Yes, I think so.'

When he kissed her it was a good fit. In fact their mouths fit together perfectly. There was usually something wrong with the way mouths fit together, he thought. Tongues too active or passive, lips too hard or wet, teeth that got in the way. Noses all over the place. But not with her.

'It's not going to happen,' he said, stepping back, feeling himself responding instantly to her, wanting to hold her and stepping away so that he could not. 'It's not going to happen because if it happens then I'm none of those things, am I? Good father, good husband, good man – it's all out the window, Jinjin. I'm none of those things if we start.'

She nodded thoughtfully, as if agreeing with him. 'We can't go anywhere,' she said.

He didn't know if she meant that the relationship could go nowhere, or if she meant they could not go out for fear of being seen – the teahouse by the lake was a lot emptier during the week, there was not much chance of seeing someone from the firm today, but it was still a possibility -or if she meant that it was unthinkable, conducting an affair at either of their apartments.

Maybe she meant all those things.

'No, no, no,' he said, desperate now, backing away from the edge of a cliff. 'Nothing could ever happen. I can't take you to the place where my wife sleeps and my daughter plays. And we can't go to your place – your friend might walk in.' There was no keeping the jealous bile out of his voice. 'He has keys, doesn't he?'

Jinjin confirmed this in her devastatingly matter-of-fact tone. 'He has keys, yes,' she said. 'He owns the apartment.' They began slowly walking towards the teahouse. She smiled as if at some good clean joke. 'No making love in William's apartment. No making love in Jinjin's apartment.'

He could not smile back at her. This had gone too far already. The kiss had been a mistake. But she had been so kind, and she looked so good, and he had been so lonely for so long.

'How can we?' he said. 'I think you're terrific – you know I do – but how can we?'

Then they said nothing at all until the woman had brought them their tea and poured two cups. And while they were waiting for the boiling water to cool, Jinjin opened her bag and silently gave him an envelope that contained two Dragon Air tickets with their names on. He looked more closely. Shanghai to Guilin. Leaving tomorrow morning. Impossible, he thought. No chance.

'No,' he said. 'I'm not going to – where is it? – Guilin. I'm going back to work.' He stared at the tickets, shaking his head. 'I've never even heard of Guilin.' He held out the tickets. She made no move to take them. She blew on her tea. He leaned forward. 'Listen to me. Look at me. I'm not free, Jinjin. Three little words before it begins. I'm not free.''

'You'll like Guilin,' she said, giving him three little words of her own, and she lifted her cup, although gingerly, because it was almost too hot to hold.

Then they didn't talk until the red Mini with the Chinese flag on the roof was bombing east, back to New Gubei, and she was turning to chat to him in the fast lane of the freeway, telling him how her father came from Guilin, so she had a mother from the far north in Changchun and a father from the distant south, next door to Vietnam, and she was leaning on the horn just to announce her presence in this world, overtaking on the inside, tailgating, flashing her lights, showing absolutely no fear.

That was what scared him most. That total lack of fear, as if Jinjin had no idea of how bad it could get.

eighteen

On a wooden bridge high above the river they huddled together under an umbrella bearing the hotel's name and watched a fisherman with his cormorant.

After dark there were boats that took the tourists out to watch the men fishing with their birds. Bill and Jinjin had gone out on the first night in Guilin, the searchlights from the boat illuminating the fishermen squatting at the back of their flat little punts, the cormorants facing them with a kerosene lamp between them, man and bird gathered around the lamp as though it was a camp fire.

When the birds were put to work they burst into the water and immediately exploded back out again, a miraculous fish in their beaks. The fishermen – ageless little men made of nothing but brown muscle and ropey sinew – threw most of the fish into a big wicker basket. But with every seventh catch they released the metal clasp around the bird's neck, allowing the cormorant to swallow the fish. At night, surrounded by the dumbstruck Chinese tourists, it had seemed like a clever circus trick. But during the day, when the men fished with the cormorants and there was no audience, and you could watch them fishing from the high wooden bridge for free, you knew

that this was just the way they fished, it had nothing to do with tickling the tourists. Bill thought it looked like a vision from a thousand years ago.

Guilin was the China he had seen in paintings. Beyond the town he could see the limestone mountains stretching on for ever, self-consciously picturesque, some of them so triangular that they looked like the mountains in one of his daughter's drawings, and all the scene swathed in mist, as if posing, as if waiting to be captured for posterity.

It felt like the edge of China, and he almost suspected that it was the end of the world, even though he knew that Vietnam was on the far side of those mountains. But although it was the most ravishing country he had seen in his life, the postcard beauty of Guilin did not grip him like the sight of the fisherman and his bird.

'That's China for me,' he said. Far below them, on the glassy water of the River Li, the river that shared her name, the lone fisherman was releasing the metal clasp around his bird's neck. The fish in its beak was gobbled down in an instant. 'That fisherman,' he told her, 'that bird.'

Jinjin shrugged. She smiled at Bill and squeezed his arm, but the light in her eyes hardly changed, as though the sight of the fisherman and the cormorant was nothing to make a fuss about, as though she was just humouring him. As though her country, and the world, was a far more simple place than he believed.

'Practical,' she said, as the bird plunged once more into the water, and came out with a fish that this time it would not be allowed to keep. 'Just practical.'

This was the time when he couldn't get enough of her.

In the day they walked around Guilin. In the late afternoon they put the sign on the door to make the maid and the world go away, and he moaned and loved her and slept in her arms.

It all made perfect sense, and it was also a kind of madness – because the world slipped away and being there in that room with her was all that mattered. He didn't know how, he had no idea how, but they would work it out. He would make their days in Guilin go on, back in the real world. He would make a holiday romance last for ever. All he had to do was work out how.

At the same time the guilt was as real inside his body as the sickness had been – the crashing guilt and sense of shame, and it came to him like a baseball bat smacked against the back of the head as he lay awake and she slept. The guilt was as undeniable as the illness, and so was the terrible knowledge that if he had his chance to do it all over again, then he would do exactly the same thing, and take Jinjin Li's hand, and drive to the airport, and catch the flight to Guilin, and watch the fishermen with their birds, and step right off the cliff.

He was amazed that she wanted to see her father.

On the first morning in Guilin, inspired by the proximity of her father's hometown, she had casually told him a string of horror stories about growing up with his violent rages, and Bill had assumed that she had severed all contact after her parents had divorced. But he was in a village in the countryside beyond Guilin, a brief taxi-ride away, reportedly in ill health, and to Jinjin it was unremarkable that they should pay him a visit.

'A father like that,' Bill said, outraged on her behalf, 'in the West you wouldn't have anything to do with him.'

Jinjin shrugged. 'But we are not in the West,' she reminded him.

So they caught a cab to his village, the limestone mountains and the glass-smooth river and the paddy fields drifting by outside the window as the horrors of her childhood at

the other end of the country came back to Bill. Her father rapping Jinjin and her sister across the hand with chopsticks if they annoyed him at the dinner table. Her father dragging their mother off for a beating with the words, 'Say goodbye to the children – you will never see them again.' And her father eventually leaving but never leaving them alone, arguing in the street with Jinjin when she was fifteen and he was forty, and the passers-by mistaking them for lovers.

He was a gambler. The violence came from the gambling. He worked, he gambled, and when he had lost everything he came home to blame his wife and two daughters, and to take it out on them.

His village sat in a valley between two stubby hills. The white stumps of trees that had been cut down years ago crept up the hills like the massed tombstones of some forgotten war. The village itself was part shantytown and part campsite. Shacks of wood and corrugated metal stood alongside grubby brown tents. Barefoot children came out of the tents to gawp at the arrival of the taxi. It was hardly a village at all, Bill thought.

'What happened in this place?' he said.

Jinjin looked up at the hillsides. 'Flood,' she said. 'In the past, many trees were cut down around here.' She groped for the word. 'Soil? When typhoon comes, soil comes quickly down the hill without trees there.' She slowly raised one of her small hands, palm down. 'Rains come, river get big -you understand?'

He nodded.

'How long have these people been living in tents?' he asked her. 'When was the flood?'

She thought about it. 'Three years ago. Come on, let's find my father.'

Jinjin's father was at the bus depot where he worked. He

had a Clark Gable moustache and he was as wide as he was tall. He was so physically different from his long lean daughter that Bill struggled to believe they shared the same blood. He grinned shyly at Bill as he chattered with Jinjin, and perhaps because she was so apparently at ease with him, Bill could not find it in his heart to hate the man.

'I this girl father!' he announced, and Bill nodded, both of them smiling away at this shocking revelation. His two friends cackled with amusement at his mastery of a foreign language.

'He speaks no English whatsoever,' Jinjin said dismissively.

Her father had not prospered in the years since leaving his family. The gambling and the violence had ruined two more little families, and now he lived alone in a wooden shack, troubled by his lungs and the damp, existing on a diet that Jinjin said consisted of congee, roll-up cigarettes and whatever brand of tea had stained his teeth that dark brown colour.

There was a noodle shop next to the bus depot and Bill watched the pair of them as they noisily slurped their meal while he – suddenly wary of the local fare – ate nothing. Even locked out of their conversation by language, he could see that the balance of power between them had shifted. The father answered his daughter's questions almost bashfully, unable to maintain eye contact for very long. It was the daughter who called the shots.

'My father says the local government are very bad,' Jinjin told Bill. 'After the flood, there was a relief fund set up for the village by the central government. But the village did not even know about it until they sent representatives to Beijing to protest.'

Her father grinned with embarrassment below his Clark Gable moustache.

'My father says he would like to invite you to his home,'

Jinjin said. 'But they are very poor here, and he is ashamed to invite you to such a low place.'

Bill lifted a hand in protest. 'Please, sir, there is no need to be ashamed, I am happy to meet you.'

They shook hands, enthusiastically, pointlessly, and before Bill knew what he was doing, he had taken out his wallet and was pushing a grubby wad of RMB into her father's hand. He made a token protest, but then waggled his eyebrows happily, staring at the money with disbelief.

'I this girl father!' he proclaimed, and Jinjin looked away, as if she could not stand to look at either of them.

His parents had made it look easy. You find someone and then you stick with them forsaking all others until you are parted by the grave. You kept the big promises you had made in bed and in church and on all the days you would never forget. That's what you did, and your life was simple, and the future was clear. It did not seem impossible, unimaginable.

So why couldn't he do it?

What was wrong with him?

They had flown back from the shockingly modern airport at Guilin and he was sick of it. Already sick of it. He didn't want an affair, and he didn't want to be the kind of man that kept a bit on the side. He did not want to be the Chinese man in the silver Porsche. He didn't want arrangements made, bargains struck, secrets shared. He wanted the one who would make him forget about all the others. That was what he wanted. That was all he had ever wanted.

You find the one that obliterates all the rest and it immediately solves all problems, it resolves everything and puts an end to all the wanting, because once you start the wanting, it's never enough until your heart stops beating, and there can be no rest and no peace and no real happiness. All you

had to do was to find the one that would blind you to the rest of the world. That's all he wanted, the same as everyone else. It didn't seem too much to ask.

And this girl who had sat in the window seat next to him, frowning over the in-flight magazine – this fabulous girl -she filled his heart. But when he switched on his phone when he was alone in the apartment, it told him all the calls he had missed. MISSED CALL. HOME, it said. MISSED CALL. HOME.

His parents had made it look easy and perhaps in the end it was easy. As long as you kept the promises. If you broke the promises then suddenly everything else was breakable too.

He came home late from his first day back at work and saw that all the lights in her apartment were out. He knew that she wasn't sleeping. He knew that the car had come for her.

He was angry and jealous and glad. Good, get it over with, end it now. Did he think that she was going to sit by the phone waiting for his call? Did he think that Guilin meant that there was nobody else who could make demands on her time? Did he expect her to sit at home, curl up those endless legs, and spend the evening with Crossword Work-Out} Yes, yes, yes – in his madness in their double-locked, do-not-disturb hotel room he had expected all of these things, even though he knew he could only be let down. Jinjin was out for the night, the only place she could be, and he was glad about it – end the thing now – even though it was like being kicked in the stomach.

He was sitting on the stairs outside her apartment when she came home at midnight. He had thought about what might happen if the man came back with her. It would not be pleasant. But the Porsche decanted her back at her rented

apartment, and then it left, and Bill was rising to his feet as she pulled out her key.

'I'm not doing this,' he said. 'I can't do it. I love my wife and our little girl. I'm not leaving them. And I don't want a woman on the side. A permanent girlfriend. That's not for me. I can't take it – you out with him and me waiting for you to come back. How does that work? How does that make me feel?' He was raising his voice now. A woman called out a protest in Chinese from behind a closed door. They both looked in the direction of the complaint, and then back at each other. 'How could it work?' Bill asked again. 'Do we get you on alternate nights?'

Jinjin let herself into the flat, not looking at him. He followed her inside, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her round.

'Or are you going to see both of us the same night?' he said. He had never seen her look so sad. 'You know what that would make you, don't you?'

'I end it,' she said. She always slipped into the present tense when she was tired, or stressed, or hurt. 'I end it with that man.'

Bill stared at her. He didn't know what to say. He felt like he was always rushing to judge her, and always getting it wrong.

'Tonight I tell him,' she was saying, 'We can't go on.' Now she looked at Bill. 'Because I don't want to go that way.' She shook her head. 'I don't want to go that way. And because I love you all the time.'

Then she was in his arms and his mouth was on her face, kissing away her tears,.refusing to allow them, no more tears, and he was mad for her, starved for her, moaning his love and apologies, sorry again, endlessly sorry for everything, and endlessly grateful, and all his wise decisions obliterated

by the touch of her mouth on his mouth, and everything tasting of salt.

/ don't want to go that way.

I love you all the time.

He loved her all the time too.

Outside her window they could hear the unbroken buzz of the city going about its everyday business, but in Jinjin's room he felt that the world had entered a different time.

Everything about her was a source of wonder. He cupped her knees and ran his hands along the endless flanks of her legs and it seemed to take for ever. He wanted it to take forever.

'Measuring me again,' she laughed. There was a lot of laughter. The long afternoon felt light-hearted and deadly serious all at once. They were giddy with joy, punch-drunk with happiness. She pressed her mouth against his, her brown eyes alight, and then those eyes closing, and he could tell she felt it too. This hunger that was more than a hunger, this craving that could not be satisfied if they stayed in this room for the rest of their lives.

She rose naked from the floor where they had been lying and looked at herself in the mirror, her arms and legs long and gawky as she examined herself, her small hands cupped across even smaller breasts.

'Too small,' she said, pulling a face. 'Ugly me.'

'Yeah,' he smiled. 'Ugly old you.'

'Not even A cup,' she said, and when she arched her back he saw the ridges in her ribcage, and they made him ache with tenderness. It was just a ribcage – he knew that. But the ridges of her ribs against her skin tormented him, and he wanted to touch them, and no other man to ever touch them.

'Double A!' she cried, eyes wide, as if she had just discovered her bee-sting breasts. 'Yes, you are right – ugly old me.'

'Well, everyone has body issues,' he said, propping himself up on one elbow. He reached out a hand and idly stroked her foot, looking up at her. She stared down at him seriously, her hands falling away. It was true. Her breasts were very small. Even in this room, even now, he could see that she was not perfect – her bum was too flat, her breasts were too small, her skin was too troubled for perfection to be considered.

But she was perfect for him.

He didn't want to change a thing about her. He loved the imperfections as much as he loved her greatest hits – those eyes, those legs and – why not? – those double-A cup breasts. That was her. That was who she was, and he revelled in it all.

'Take me, for example,' he said, sitting cross-legged and casting down his eyes. He hesitated. 'I don't know if I want to talk about it.' She knelt beside him, a consoling arm draped across his shoulder, encouraging him to go on. 'I – I worry that I'm just too big,' he said, looking up at her concerned brown eyes. 'You know. Down there. Too big for any woman

She stood up and slapped his shoulder. 'Hah,' she said. 'English joke!'

He rolled on his back, chuckling to himself. 'You wouldn't look right with large breasts, Jinjin. Your legs are too long. You'd look top heavy – like Jessica Rabbit.'

She laughed shortly. 'Ah yes,' she said. 'Beatrix Potter.'

When he looked up at her she was smiling. That toothy, goofy grin that he could never get enough of. He nodded. 'Very good,' he said. 'Chinese joke.'

When the night came they did not leave the room but lay entwined and wrapped up in each other, as if they were closer than any couple in the world, and closer than anyone had ever been, as if they were one flesh now. He looked at her

looking at him and he knew that nobody else in his life had ever looked at him in quite that way.

As if he was special.

As if he was – and he had to smile at this – exotic.

But it was true. He was a different kind of man and she was a different kind of woman. He explored her long, almost hairless body and it was like discovering another planet. She ran her fingers through the light covering of blond hair on his arms as if he was some strange new species.

'Very hairy,' she said. 'My goodness. Like a monkey. Help, help – there's a monkey in my room.'

'This isn't considered hairy where I come from,' he said, but he knew that she didn't really know anything about where he came from. She knew how to conjugate verbs and she knew about writers and she could use all the antique idioms, but that was all she knew. His eyes were an unremarkable shade of green and yet she looked into them as if they were Solomon's treasure.

And he knew that Becca did not and could not ever look at him with eyes like that. His wife loved him – he was sure of that – but she looked at him the way a sister would look at a brother, with a kind of amused familiarity, an affection that was unclouded by mystery.

But Jinjin Li looked at him with new eyes, eyes so brown that they were almost black, eyes so large that they shone from her face, and he loved being looked at like that.

His first Asian woman. Her first Western man. And as the night moved on and the city slept, neither of them doubted that they would also be their last. What more could you want beyond this room?

She slept and he placed his hand on her stomach and it was as flat and hard as a table. He smiled to himself. You could bounce ping-pong balls off that belly, he thought to himself. Instead he placed his lips softly against it, and

kissed her as lightly as he could before putting his arms around her and snuggling up against her long, beloved body, and soon he was also in the bottomless sleep of happiness and exhaustion.

If he had gone to the window of Jinjin's room then he would have been able to see across the courtyard of Paradise Mansions to his own apartment, and the windows of his other life. But he never did.