My favorite wife

When he awoke in the milky Shanghai dawn he watched her sleeping, and he studied her skin, her limbs and her face until he knew them better than his own. He never went to the window.

And he got lost in her.

nineteen

'Granddad's going to die, isn't he?' Holly said.

'No, angel,' Bill said and he felt the distance between them throbbing like a fresh bruise. 'Your granddad's not going to die. He's still young. He's got some great doctors looking after him.'

'Martin said that everyone dies in the end.'

Martin was the oldest of the sister's children. Bill felt a sudden surge of hatred towards him, immediately followed by a twinge of guilt. Sara – he was trying hard to think of her as Sara, and not the sister - was going out of the way to accommodate his frequent phone calls to Holly, and always had her standing by the phone when he was scheduled to call, or not too far away.

'Listen to me, angel,' he said gently. 'Nothing lasts for ever. A flower doesn't last for ever, does it?'

Holly thought about it. He could hear her thinking. 'Penguins don't last for ever,' she said.

'That's true,' he said. 'I hadn't thought about that.'

'And dinosaurs didn't last for ever.'

'The dinosaurs. That's right.'

'There was a change in the earth's temperature that killed the dinosaurs.'

'Wow,' he said, genuinely impressed. 'Where did you learn that, Holly?'

'At school.'

'That's very good.'

'Grandparents don't last for ever,' she mused.

The philosophy was new. A year ago, at three, Holly's conversation had been an endless round of questions and orders, sentences that began either with, 'Why …' or 'You have to …' As in, 'Why does Tony the Tiger wear a bib if he's a grown-up?' and 'You have to be the prince now, Daddy.' But at four Holly was wrestling with the big issues, and he did not know what to tell her. The truth seemed too hard, and lying seemed wrong.

'We all die,' he said. 'But not for a long, long time.' A pause. 'Are you listening to me, angel?'

But her attention had been distracted. Bill could hear that the commercials had come on the TV that was playing in the background. There was a persuasive adult voice, followed by children squealing with excitement. Bill waited patiently. He could hear other noises. All the sounds of Sara's crowded, unknowable house. Children arguing. Doors slamming. Sara pleading at the dinner table, Just one more … eat one more … just a little bit ... That was what he shared with Holly, he thought. It was different when you were an only child. You were not constantly surrounded by all the clamour and clatter of siblings. You were left alone with your thoughts.

'Are you going to die, Daddy?'

He stared out of his office window at the lights of Pudong, and heard the sounds of his side of the world. Shanghai had its own distinctive noise, he had realised, especially at night, an unbroken metallic hum that seemed to be made up of traffic on the road and the river, and the lives of twenty million other people.

'I'm going to die one day,' he said. 'But not for a long

time. And you know what, angel? If it's possible for me to come, back and be around you, then that's exactly what I am going to do, and I'll be there for ever. Everywhere you go. You'll be all grown up but I'll still be there. I'll be in the sunlight on your face, and I'll be in rain on your shoes, and I'll be in the wind in your hair. I'll be there when you wake up in the morning, and I'll be there when you go to sleep at night. And I'll keep watch by your bed all night, and you will feel me smiling at you, and you'll never be alone because I will be there, always and forever.' The telephone line crackled and then was silent. 'Do you hear me, angel?'

But Holly wasn't listening to him. She was watching the commercials.

There was something strange about Jinjin's eyes. Those wide-set brown eyes – there was a mystery about them, something that he just could not work out, even though he had spent uncountable hours staring into them.

He saw now that there were no lines of black mascara drawn around her eyes. That wasn't it. He had been mistaken. She did not wear make-up, she never wore make-up, and yet somehow he felt that she was always wearing make-up. He didn't understand it. He was a married man and long accustomed to the rituals of a woman and her cosmetics and the ceremony of apply, repair and remove. He knew that his wife looked so totally different when she was or was not wearing whatever it was she put on her face. When they went out and Becca was wearing make-up, there was a polished, glossy beauty about her, and when she came home and took it off the beauty was still there but it was fresh-faced and unadorned and natural and pretty and lovely in quite another way.

It was not the same with Jinjin.

He looked at her, and he looked at her some more, and he could not work it out, he didn't understand the thick

black and totally unnecessary eyeliner that never needed replacing. The mystery was solved the moment he mentioned it.

'Permanent eyeliner,' she said, one night when they were stretched out on the sofa, facing each other, and he looked again, at those eyes that needed no help at all to look beautiful.

'Permanent?' he said, unable to fight the sinking feeling. 'What – you don't mean tattoos, do you?'

But that was exactly what she meant.

'I will change it,' she said, sensing his distaste, jumping up from the sofa to confront herself in the mirror, her long slim body pale in the moonlight. 'I get removed.' The English was deteriorating the longer she looked. 'I take away.'

And he went after her, and held her from behind, pulling her away from the mirror, telling her that he didn't want her to go through with that, everything was fine, she was gorgeous, he was just surprised. He did not mention that he had never seen it before. On a girl in the West. Tattooed eyes. But Jinjin Li wasn't a girl in the West, and he forgot that sometimes.

'I was young,' she said, and he thought that she sounded like an actress who has suddenly had a youthful photo session revealed. I was young, I needed the work. 'High school student. We didn't know about such things. And we could afford. And we want to look like the ladies in the magazines.'

'I'm sorry, it's okay,' he said, gently leading her back to the sofa, wishing he had never mentioned it, knowing that he would never mention it again for fear that he would one day find that she had had the permanent eyeliner surgically removed. The thought of it made his flesh crawl.

Still, he was sorry about the tattoos on the rims of her fabulous, wide-set eyes. She didn't need that crap, and now

it would be with her forever. Anything as permanent as that was always going to be a mistake.

'Wives are like fires,' Tess Devlin told Bill. 'They go out when unattended.'

They were watching Rosalita weave her way towards a band in a hotel bar eighty floors above the city. The band was Filippino, like most of the bands in Shanghai, but they showed scant signs of kinship as Rosalita approached them with a mojito in her hand and a wiggle in her hips.

The band's singer, a stick-thin beauty in a backless black dress, was no more than twenty. She stepped sideways as Rosalita turned abruptly to confer with the musicians, sending a splash of cocktail slopping from her glass. The boys in the band were nodding reluctantly, as if they knew this could only end in tears.

'Shane gives her plenty of attention,' Bill said. 'He doesn't neglect her. He really doesn't. He's crazy about her.'

His friend was on the other side of the table, talking to a London partner who was passing through on his way to Hong Kong, and currently blinking back the jet-lag. Shane didn't turn around even when his wife lurched into 'Right Here Waiting for You'. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for something bad to happen.

Rosalita's voice was as sweet and pure as ever, but she shuffled backwards and forwards uncertainly, her old slick professionalism impaired by the lack of space and the potency of the mojitos. When she trod on the bass player's foot, impaling his instep on a Jimmy Choo spike and making him hop around, shrieking in protest, Shane still didn't turn around. If he heard the laughter in the bar, he gave no sign.

'Whatever he gives her,' Tess Devlin told Bill, 'it's clearly not enough.'

Devlin and Nancy were at opposite ends of the table, and

they looked from Shane to his wife and then back again. Shane failed to react as Rosalita went into her second number. He was telling the London partner an interesting story about Bao Luo, the aircraft hangar of a restaurant where they had had dinner, and how it had started life as a noodle stand in a bicycle repair shop. Devlin got up and came quickly to Bill's side.

'Get him to control his wife, will you?' he muttered angrily. . Bill shrugged helplessly, but when he saw Nancy making her way to the tiny stage where Rosalita was now grinding her hips while crooning, T Will Always Love You' – the band appeared to be playing something else entirely – he got up to help her. The pair of them reached Rosalita just in time for a close-up of her falling on her bottom. Holding one arm each, they got her to her feet as sarcastic applause came from dark corners of the bar.

'Show's over, Rosalita,' Bill said lightly. 'Why don't we all get some coffee?'

'He never lets me have any fun,' Rosalita complained. They started leading her away, to the relief of the band. Unseen men were calling for an encore. Women were laughing. Rosalita's eyes were blazing with anger and self-pity. 'He is such a cheap guy,' she said. They had reached the table now and as the band struck up a polite version of 'The Girl from Ipanema' Rosalita shouted at the back of her husband's head, 'Such a cheap guy!' Shane flinched but did not turn around.

Bill and Nancy escorted Rosalita to the bar and ordered coffee. They were told there was no coffee in the bar. Only room service could get coffee. Bill impatiently threw a fistful of RMB on the counter and the bartender went off to get room service.

Rosalita laid her head on his shoulder and told Bill that he was a nice guy and that she had always liked him. Then she sang a wonky chorus of 'Yesterday Once More', wiped

away a sentimental tear, put her head on her arms and fell asleep. The woman on the next stool glanced at her and then looked away with a snort of contempt.

'The Carpenters,' said Alice Greene. 'I always hated the fucking Carpenters.'

Bill turned as Shane's bulk parked itself on the stool beside him. The big man stared down at his sleeping wife and reached out a hand. It hovered over her mass of glossy black hair, not quite daring to touch her.

'She'll be okay,' Bill told him.

'It's true what they say,' Shane said sadly. 'You can take the girl out of the bar. But you can't take the bar out of the girl.'

'That's not what you did,' Bill said. 'You didn't take her out of a bar. She's a regular girl.'

Shane wanted to believe him. 'Yeah,' he said, eyeing his wife with a mixture of fear and longing. 'A regular girl.'

He nodded and turned away, slapping Bill once on the shoulder, not looking him in the eye. Alice was still talking to him.

'So,' she said. 'How's business at Butterfield, Hunt and West?'

'Better than yours,' he said. Bill had looked for her story online, the one about the man at the Happy Trousers Factory losing an arm, but it had never appeared. As far as he could tell, nothing with Alice's by-line had appeared for months.

She laughed. 'Yeah, well,' she said, and he realised that he had never seen her looking embarrassed before. He felt a stirring of sympathy for her. 'My paper has got moral-outrage fatigue,' she said. T mean, how many stories can you do about land grabs or industrial pollution or some poor little sod in some miserable factory dropping dead from exhaustion?' She stared into her glass, as if it might contain a clue. 'Or losing a limb in machinery because nobody really, truly

cares? I mean, how many times? In the end it's like a starving child in the Third World or a bomb going off in the Middle East. Everybody's heard it all before. And everybody's bored shitless with it.' She looked at Bill over the rim of her glass. 'Remember what I said to you? When Becca found that baby?'

Bill nodded. He remembered. Irs not news.

Alice nodded too. 'Well, none of it is news. Not any more. They want journalists who are going to report the miracle. That's what these editors want. Booming China. Funky Shanghai. Tell the world that Beijing is Washington and Shanghai is New York. All that stuff. All that happy, shiny bullshit.' She raised her glass in mock salute. The bartender had returned with three cappuccinos.

'Black coffee,' Bill said. 'I ordered black coffee.'

The bartender looked sad. 'Only cappuccino,' he said. 'No more black coffee.'

On top of the foamed milk on each cup the chocolate was sprinkled into careful heart shapes.

'You won,' Alice said. 'Your lot. Cheers.'

'My lot?' Bill said, watching Nancy gently trying to wake Rosalita. He pushed his cappuccino away. 'They're not my lot.'

But Alice wasn't listening. T should have been born earlier,' she said, signalling the bartender for a refill. T should have been in Tiananmen Square.' She narrowed her eyes at Bill. 'The fourth of June 1989. That's where it started. All of this. The greed. The corruption. The poison at the core.'

Nancy stared at her but Alice didn't notice. There was a fresh drink in front of her. Rosalita was sipping the cappuccino that Nancy offered her. The heart-shaped chocolate broke and melted at the touch of her lips.

Alice jabbed a finger at Bill.

'You think it's a coincidence that the guy who sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square is the same guy behind the

economic miracle?' she said. 'You think it's a coincidence that Deng Xiaoping is responsible for all of it? It's not a coincidence. Tiananmen Square was where they sent out the message to every man, woman and child in China – Support us and we will make you rich, oppose us and we will crush you.' Alice sipped her drink and shook her head. T should have been there.'

'Stick around,' Nancy said, and they all looked at her. Alice. Bill. And even Rosalita through her bleary, mojito-fogged eyes. There was a ring of chocolate around her mouth.

'Really, you should stick around,' Nancy said. On her lips the idiom sounded like something borrowed from a Berlitz guide. Stick around. 'You may have missed the last massacre,' Nancy told Alice, smiling pleasantly, 'but you will probably be just in time for the next one.'

Instead of going home, Bill walked down the Bund, swerving between the tourists gawping at the lights and the beggars with their babies and the drunken businessmen and the off-duty bar girls and the fashionable young Chinese who were increasingly claiming the famous old street as their own. He was meeting Jinjih in the bar of the Peace Hotel. And it wasn't until he was sitting at the crowded bar sipping his Tsingtao and the band were banging their way through 'I'll Be Seeing You' that he realised it was a rotten place to meet.

What was he thinking? The bar of the Peace Hotel was a great place to go if you were a man and wife out on some special occasion. What many people didn't realise about the band in the Peace Hotel was that the old boys were very happy to play requests. So you could sit there all night listening to them play your songs. It was a fine place for all that. But it was a lousy place for a liar.

The bar was full of out-of-towners, as always, but Bill was aware that someone he knew – anyone he knew – could walk

in at any moment. Every expat with a relative in from the old country had to take a look at this bar. Every Pudong suit entertaining a client who was a Shanghai virgin had to have a drink in here. If his body clock suddenly shook him awake, it was even possible that the senior London partner himself could be brought here tonight by Devlin and Tess.

Bill watched the door, aware of his pounding heart, and drinking far too fast. He saw Jinjin enter the bar, and watched her serious face as she scanned the crowd, not seeing him. He smiled because he loved this moment – when he could watch her without her knowing he was watching. He also loved the moment when she saw him and that perfect beauty was split by the toothy grin, and became something else, something better, something that he could claim as his own. The face of his girl.

Jinjin moved through the crowd towards him.

It's not her fault, he thought with a rush of shame. She had no one to hide from. She had no reason to watch the door. He was the liar, not her.

She kissed him on the mouth and took the hand that was resting by his beer. The bartender asked her what she wanted to drink.

'We've got to go,' Bill said, still holding her small hand, and squeezing it tight, but keeping it off the bar and out of sight.

They sat at a table at the back of Suzy Too and as Jinjin urgently conferred with the two Jennys and Sugar and Annie, Bill watched the dance floor.

There was something – a trick, a knack, a skill – that all the working girls had in Suzy Too. They would approach a man with a look of such tenderness and generosity that he couldn't help but feel singled out and special and chosen. As though this loud, smoky dive on Tong Ren Lu could provide

him with everything that he was missing at home, as though he might find someone who really wanted him in here. If the man declined the offer of company, the Suzy Too girls would move away with a smile of regret, as if enduring a tiny death – that was the magic trick, Bill thought, their ability to stay in character even after rejection. But if the man was interested, and responded with some crucial gesture – a drink, a dance, bodily contact – then the expression changed in the woman's eyes, and although the painted smile never faltered, the softness was replaced by a look of cold, hard professionalism that took your breath away. Bill wondered what happened to those men who mistook commerce for affection, or desire, or love. What happened to them?

He saw that what was sold in Suzy Too was not sex but dreams, and he guessed that beyond the cold hard commerce that filled the air as much as the smoke and beer and the greatest hits of Eminem, the dream-on sale was coveted by a surprising number of the men in here. The dream of the great unmet lover, the dream that you might meet someone who truly cared about you, the dream that in the morning you would wake up in the arms of someone as beautiful and untouched and unchanging as Jinjin Li.

His eyes stung from the smoke. His ears were ringing from 'The Way I Am' and 'Lose Yourself and many songs that he didn't know. They should have just gone back to Jinjin's apartment and closed the door – he never took her to his own apartment, and without discussing it they both knew that he never would – but Spring Festival was coming and Jinjin wanted to see her friends before they all went home for the duration of China's great holiday. It would soon be time to strike camp. Soon the entire country would be on the move.

The conversation at their table seemed never-ending and complex. He could not even guess the subject. Jinjin and

Jenny One were arguing with Annie, who seemed to be tearfully protesting her innocence. Bill had never seen Annie show any emotion before, beyond her default frosty haughtiness. Jenny Two and Sugar nodded thoughtfully and held her hands, but Annie broke free of them and rolled up her sleeve, her tears streaming.

Bill saw with a jolt that there was a fresh tattoo on her right arm, inch-high capital letters that spelled out a name in Chinese characters. Under the lights of Suzy Too the brand on her smooth pale flesh looked like fluorescent ink.

'He became very angry when he saw it,' Jinjin said in English, including Bill in the story, and Bill didn't have to ask who he might be.

'And he said she must go away,' Jenny Two said. 'But she did this for him. Only for him!'

'And he refused her,' Jenny One said. This is what they said when someone was dumped. He refused her. Annie stared at her ruined skin, her disastrous stab at commitment to the man who had brought her to Paradise Mansions, and they all looked at Bill with pleading eyes as if he might explain the strangeness and mystery and fickle nature of a man's heart.

He shook his head apologetically.

'We've got to go,' he said.

Back in her apartment he told her to put her feet up while he made some tea.

As the sound of a young woman reading the news drifted out to the kitchen, Bill opened doors until he found cups and tea. He pushed the packet to one side and dug deeper inside the cupboard because, although it felt like he drank it every day of his life, he was no great fan of Chinese tea.

Chinese tea was one of those things, like jazz or cricket, that he had tried very hard to like but could never really

see the point of. He thought that Chinese tea was never much more than okay. So he was delighted when he found an unopened packet of English breakfast tea, something exotic that Jinjin had picked up at the local Carrefour supermarket and then never used. Her kitchen was full of these odd souvenirs. A dusty bottle of Perrier. A jar of decaffeinated instant coffee. A forgotten packet of muesli. A six-pack of Coca-Cola. They were like messages in a bottle washed up from some foreign shore that she had only read about in magazines.

He came into the living room carrying a tray with two steaming cups of English breakfast tea, a carton of milk and a bowl of raw cane sugar that she sometimes used for cooking. She was staring hungrily at the young female newsreader on the TV. She looked at him and recoiled.

'English tea,' he said. 'Just for a change.'

She raised her eyebrows. 'Tea with milk?'

'Just try it,' he smiled. 'Please.' He carefully placed the tray on the table before her. Then he hesitated. 'Jinjin?'

Jinjin had turned her face back to the young woman reading the news. He knew what she was thinking. I could do that. 'What is it, William?'

'You're still in the flat,' he said, pointing out the obvious, finally broaching something that had confused him for a long time. 'This flat, I mean. You're still living in it.'

She turned to look at him, the young woman with the autocue forgotten. 'Yes.'

'How come?' Bill said, sitting down beside her. 'I mean -it's not your flat. You don't own the flat.' She stared at him, waiting. 'He owns the flat. The man. Your old boyfriend.' He could not bring himself to say husband. Never that. 'I was wondering – why didn't he throw you out when you ended it?'

She looked shocked. 'He's not such a one,' she said.

'Perhaps he always knew that I would meet someone. That such a day would come.' She sipped her tea, and grimaced. 'I can't stay here for ever. I know that. But he would never -' she reached for Bill's brutal phrase '- throw me out.'

Bill placed his hands around his cup, and then took them away. 'He must have loved you very much,' he said.

'He cares about me,' Jinjin said.

She doesn't call it love, Bill thought. What she had with him. She never calls it love.

'Are you all right for money?' he said.

'I have enough,' she said. 'For now.'

'How's the tea?' he said.

She pulled a face. 'Tea with milk. Horrible!'

He laughed and reached for the sugar bowl. 'Some people need a little sweetness,' he said, heaping in a spoonful of the raw cane sugar and stirring it for her.

Jinjin sipped it carefully.

'Better?' he asked.

She nodded. 'A little sweetness,' she said.

Early next morning Bill came into the courtyard where Tiger was sitting at the wheel of the car, his new laptop resting on his thighs, fingers flashing across the keyboard. Tiger was so lost in the images passing before his eyes that he did not see Bill approach the car, bundled up inside his new Armani coat against the freezing January morning, and he did not see him try the handle on the passenger's side. Tiger only saw Bill when he rapped his knuckles against the windscreen.

'You can do that on your own time,' Bill told him, sliding into the car. He nodded at the laptop that Tiger was attempting to deposit on to the back seat. 'What's so fascinating anyway?'

'It's nothing, boss,' Tiger said, flushing with embarrassment. Bill shook his head, eased the laptop from Tiger's hand and flipped open the lid. He was expecting naked girls

or new cars but instead he found himself looking at a colour photograph of a chair that was the size and shape of a phone box. It was a red chair, some sort of old-fashioned Chinese chair made of lacquered hardwood with elaborate carvings down one side and calligraphy running down another. There were barefoot children standing around the chair and a caption in English. Hong Kong, 1963, it said. Young relatives try to peek at a bride as she is carried to her wedding.

'What is this?' Bill said.

'This is my business, boss,' Tiger said. He smiled uncertainly. 'This is my website. Can I show?'

Bill smiled encouragement and Tiger took the laptop from him. His fingers danced across the keys, and images of furniture that looked like sculpture flashed before their eyes. Black lacquer bedside cabinets. Travel trunks and hand-painted screens and hardwood coffee tables and pillow boxes and a canopy-covered bed. Red lanterns that could have been from a Gong Li movie. There was an austere beauty about it all.

'This is how I will get rich,' Tiger said, smiling shyly. 'This is my way. I have contacts in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And there are factories down south. Many factories, boss.'

'Big market for this stuff, Tiger?'

'Booming market, boss. During the past bad times, lot of traditional Chinese furniture was smashed up. Now many rich people in China. Don't want Western furniture. Not interested. Want Chinese furniture.' Tiger looked at him with pleading eyes. 'Bad idea, boss?'

Bill shook his head. He was impressed, and a little sad, because sooner or later he would lose Tiger. But that was Shanghai. Everybody wanted to make their fortune.

'It's a good idea, Tiger,' he said. 'It's a great idea. And I wish you well. Is this stuff real or fake?'

'Do both classic and contemporary,' Tiger said, nodding

emphatically. 'Many masterpieces from the Ming and Qing dynasties. I have good people can do restoration. But also genuine replicas from factories down south.'

As always, Bill thought, the line was blurred between what was real and what was fake. It largely depended on what you wanted to believe, and how much you were prepared to pay. Things could be found, or they could be restored, or they could be copied. But as the images of hand-carved, hand-painted black and red hardwood furniture flowed in front of them, Bill saw that none of this stuff was easy to copy. It took a kind of genius to fake something so brilliantly that you never really knew when you had the real thing.

He could hear her banging about in the tiny kitchen. He had been ordered to remain on the sofa and watch BBC World while she prepared his treat. But he wasn't interested in BBC World.

'May I help?' he called.

More banging and crashing. 'Your help is not required,' she said, just before he heard something drop and shatter. 'Oh my goodness,' she muttered.

If he craned his neck, he could see what she was doing. She had boiled the water long ago, ages before she started her search for the tea bags. That had held proceedings up for a while, but now the water was being poured into his cup. She splashed in a small waterfall of milk and then heaped in three spoonfuls of raw cane sugar. Then she proudly carried the cup the few steps to the living room and placed it before him.

'English breakfast tea,' she announced. 'Like the Queen drinks.'

'You're not joining me, Jinjin?'

She shook her head and grimaced. 'I'll make some proper tea for myself.'

She watched his face as he carefully lifted the cup and sipped his tea. It was a tepid, milky concoction, so sweet that it made his eyes water.

'Mmm,' he said, and her smile came out like the sun. 'Delicious.'

twenty

The airport was clogged with people. It felt like everyone in China was returning home, as if the entire country was on the move, wrapped up against the sub-zero temperatures, carrying overstuffed suitcases. Everywhere he looked there were red lanterns celebrating Spring Festival.

The black snow of February was piled up by the side of the roads. Changchun was a hard, ugly place and the people at the airport looked different from the confident citizens of Shanghai. In Changchun they were noticeably shabbier, less worldly, part of the old China, gawping at Bill and Jinjin and revealing teeth like vandalised tombstones.

Bill had a room at the Trader's Hotel in downtown Changchun, and Jinjin came with him to check in. She would be staying with her family in their flat on the outskirts of the city. She said her mother would not approve of her staying with Bill at the hotel, and somehow this made him happy. He wanted her to be cherished. He wanted her to be protected.

She left him alone for a few hours and when she came back to collect him she was dressed in a bright red sweater, her cheeks flushed with the cold. The grey city was turning red for Spring Festival.

Downstairs there was a palpable excitement in the lobby of the hotel, and in the long queue for a cab and on the streets of the city. It felt like Christmas and New Year and the first day of the summer holidays all rolled into one. Jinjin's face shone with excitement and when the mist from their breath mingled and formed a small white cloud in the back of the cab, she ran a gloved hand through it, laughing with delight.

The taxi took them out of the centre and they passed boxes of grey flats that went on forever. It looked like a Communist city, a city that had been built without a passing thought for the individual man, woman or child, but a red lantern shone in every single window of those hideous flats, scarlet splashes of colour everywhere among the bleak state housing.

As Changchun drifted by, he held Jinjin's hand and wondered about her growing up here. He saw her as a child in the faces of the children on the street, bundled up like little Eskimos, their faces rosy with cold and celebration as they walked home with their parents. But perhaps she was nothing like those children. Perhaps it had been much harder for her. He had some idea of how poor her family had been. He had learned in those moments when he had wanted to know every inch of her and commit it all to memory. He had seen it in her toes.

The small toe on each foot was not the size it should have been. Her small toes were stunted, loomed over by their normal-sized neighbours. She was proud of her strange small toes, glad to cite this minor disfigurement, always happy to cheerfully deny his assertion that she was beautiful. She told him she had been born that way, that she came out of her mother with those runty small toes, and he knew it was not true. Being poor made her toes like that.

Her shoes had not been changed often enough when she was growing up. Outgrown, undersized footwear had blunted

the growth of her feet. They were a mark of her family's poverty. All that new money in China, Bill thought, and none of it had reached her childhood. She could not even have a new pair of shoes when she needed them.

They reached the block of flats where she had grown up. Here, as everywhere else, a cheery red lantern glowed in every window, but when they entered the flats he could see that they were little more than giant matchboxes made from tons of concrete, miserable Soviet-style houses for the unloved masses who toiled in Changchun's factories in the days when the state still had some use for the masses, in the years when Changchun still had factories working around the clock.

Inside the flats it was filthier than anywhere he had ever seen, and he tried to hide his shock. The grey walls, the stone steps, the dripping ceiling – everything was coated with a black grime from decades of industrial filth puked out by the factories. With a gentle formality that broke his heart, Jinjin took his hand and led him up to her family's home. There was no lift, and he felt ridiculous for expecting one.

Her family were waiting for him. Her mother, plump and happy, a little buck-toothed Buddha in tight leggings with a bottle of Tsingtao in her hand, all smiles. And Jinjin's younger sister, Ling-Yuan – shy and curious, angelically pretty but not long and lean like Jinjin, more short and stubby like their mother.

And as they fussed around him, bringing him tea, talking to him confidently in Mandarin – the mother – and bashfully in fragments of English – the sister – Bill sensed how hard it had been for them, for these three women. Ling-Yuan was born just after the one-child policy of 1978, making two daughters and no son and then no hope of a son. How had their father taken that?

Their father had been one of the xiagang, the country's millions of laid-off state workers. Changchun was full of

them, and when he had walked out for the last time when Jinjin was thirteen, the mother had raised her two girls alone, working at three jobs just to survive, her youngest child often left in the care of her big sister. In this clean, tiny flat the mother had slept on the sofa, and Jinjin shared a bed with Ling-Yuan. Even now, years later, Bill could almost taste the money-starved past.

The mother spoke no English. The sister spoke a little, and she falteringly explained the rituals of Spring Festival to Bill while the mother poured him a Tsingtao. They made him feel at home, and their generosity and grace touched his heart.

Did they know he was a married man? Did they know about Becca and Holly? Jinjin did not say, and he did not ask. It was enough that he was here, tonight, helping them to make jiaozi dumplings, meat and fish and vegetable, money inserted inside one dumpling for good fortune the way Bill's mother used to put a fifty-pence piece inside a Christmas pudding.

Then he heard the baby crying.

Ling-Yuan went into the bedroom and came back with a wailing child in her arms, around two years old, Bill guessed, with hair like Elvis in his prime. He was wearing a light blue Babygro covered in dark blue hearts, and that's how Bill knew that it was a boy, and the family had its son at last. Ling-Yuan rocked him and soothed him, and his tears subsided to a few sniffles. Then, wide-eyed and unsmiling, the baby considered Bill and promptly burst into tears. Everyone laughed, and Ling-Yuan handed the baby to Jinjin.

'ChoCho,' she said, bouncing him close. 'Don't cry, little ChoCho. This big-nosed pinky is a nice man. He likes babies and children very much.'

It was a good night, a wonderful night, with little ChoCho crawling between them as they made their dumplings, and everyone taking turns to hold him and play with him, even

Bill, whom he slowly warmed to, despite the strangeness of his appearance.

At midnight the fireworks suddenly erupted and they went to the soot-blackened landing to watch the lights and explosions, all wrapped up against the freezing night, the baby's head peeking out of Ling-Yuan's fake-fur coat, eyes closed and whimpering from the bitter cold. The mother was in an old green army coat that was a few sizes too big for her. Jinjin wore a quilted yellow ski jacket, the collar pulled up and the hood pulled down, with only her large brown eyes showing as she held Bill's hand.

When it became too cold for the baby they went back inside and ate their dumplings and wished each other happy new year. And as the last of the fireworks went off outside it really did feel like a new year to Bill, even though it was the middle of February.

Jinjin wanted to escort him back to the Trader's Hotel but he told her to stay with her family. If she came back to the hotel with him then he would want her to stay and he knew that was impossible.

So he said goodbye to her mother and the kid sister and little ChoCho. Jinjin put on her yellow coat and walked him to the landing where he banged his knee hard against a bicycle that had been dumped at the top of the stairs. She made sure he had a card with his hotel's name in Chinese to show the driver. He unzipped the top of her yellow ski jacket so he could slip his arms inside as he kissed her goodnight. Their bodies trembled against each other. The last of the fireworks were exploding.

'It's cold,' he said. 'Go back inside. I'll see you in the morning.'

'Okay, William,' she said, lifting her eyes to him.

She kissed him for a long moment and then she let him go and he walked down to the street, trying not to fall and

break his neck in the pitch-black stairwell, attempting to avoid the soiled walls and the prehistoric bicycles that were parked on every floor.

Bill stood in the shadow of the concrete blocks, his breath billowing clouds of mist in the night, and on the wide road there were no cabs to be had. He looked up at the landing where Jinjin's coat was a smudge of bright yellow in the darkness. She waved and he waved back. He wished she would go inside. The square black blocks of flats stretched off in every direction, as far as he could see.

He had never been around such poverty. He had never known it existed. But in every window of every flat of those ugly concrete blocks a red lantern was shining for Spring Festival, and the birth of another lunar year.

The moon was behind the clouds as he started walking in the direction of downtown, and as he looked up at the countless flats with all those unknowable lives he could see none of the grime and the poverty and the concrete.

All Bill could see were the pretty red lights.

He fell asleep in his hotel bed thinking about the baby.

There was a dark line on her hard flat belly and it ran from her navel to the sparse tuft of pubic hair. It had been another tale of mystery on her body – like the toes, like the black-rimmed eyes, like the scars on her knees from a childhood of climbing walls and falling off walls and making her own entertainment – but the dark line on her belly was the one puzzle that he did not want to solve, because he already knew what it meant.

The line meant that she had been pregnant.

The vertical line on her belly was not like the stunted small toes or the scars on her knees – he did not want to know where it came from; he was not interested, because whatever the answer was he knew it would hurt.

He had thought it meant a terminated pregnancy. After tonight, it seemed he had been wrong. He had taken it for granted that the child he knew she had carried had never been born. The father would have been some boy in Changchun, or the man in Shanghai, or someone else, some unimaginable other man, and he did not want to know. It did not matter.

This was a country where abortion was freely and casually available. What had Dr Khan said? It was easier than having a tooth out.

How wrong he had been. The baby explained why she'd had to give up work as a teacher. She had an entire family to support – mother, sister, and child – and bills that could never be met on what they paid a teacher in Number 251 Middle School. The line on her belly said it all – why she'd left the schoolchildren she loved, and why she lived in Paradise Mansions, and why she had to be practical.

He knew about the line. He even knew what the line was called – linea alba, white line, when you could not see it, and linea nigra, dark line, when you could.

He had seen that line before, in another bed, in another time, on another woman.

He had seen that dark line on the hard snow-white belly of his wife, and in close-up as he had gently brushed his lips across skin pulled as tight as a drum, his head reeling at the wonder of it all.

Jinjin met him at the hotel with a pair of cashmere long Johns. Her mother was worried about how he would deal with the cold. They walked through the empty streets and just before they came to the park she stopped, and held him, and told him about the married man who had fathered her child.

He had guessed a childhood sweetheart, a poor boyfriend

her own age, and he had been wrong about that too. She told Bill how she had loved the man with all her heart, and how her mother had turned up at the bank where the man worked, screaming that he was abusing her daughter. The relationship ended, and the man never did leave his wife. But she kept the baby.

Bay-bee, was how she pronounced it, and it held his heart. 'I always knew I would keep my baby.'

In the early days in Paradise Mansions, when she was still the girl who was picked up by the man in the silver Porsche, he had asked himself – is a woman like that capable of love?

But it wasn't what he thought, what the world thought. What the men who had beaten him and Shane would have thought. It was not sex for money, it was never sex for money.

It was sex for survival, perhaps, and a relationship with a man because there were mouths to feed. It was practical. She came from a place with no expectations and no hope. She was practical because there was no other way.

They had reached the park. There were food stalls just inside the gate. Jinjin bought something that looked like a toffee apple on a stick.

Inside the park there was a frozen lake where people were skidding around on wooden boxes, steering themselves with what looked like a pair of sawn-off skis. It was like the roller-skating rink in Shanghai, one of those antique entertainments that had somehow survived into the new century.

They rented a couple of ragged old boxes and set off, and when he looked over his shoulder at Jinjin, he fell in love with her, he fell in love with her at exactly that moment in Changchun. He saw her yellow coat against the frozen whiteness all around, her laughing face, her huge brown eyes shining, and he could do nothing but fall in love. He kept looking over his shoulder at her, committing it all to memory, because he had to set it down perfectly, exactly as it was, so that he

could remember it in the time to come when he thought about all the things that had made his life worth living.

'Watch where you're going, William!'

He turned just in time to avoid a head-on collision with a pair of teenage boys. He swerved and skidded off the rink on to the rock-hard grass, and felt Jinjin clatter into the back of him, her laugh turning to a gasp of pain as one of Bill's sawn-off skis pierced the back of her hand.

Mortified, he pulled off her glove and placed his mouth over the bead of red. He felt the salt taste of her blood on his lips. She was still smiling, telling him it was nothing, and he could not imagine a day when she would ever be out of his life. He loved her, you see.

They returned to the hotel, and when Jinjin had gone home Bill turned on his phone.

You have twelve missed calls . . .

He had been expecting the call – the sudden collapse of health, the rush to the hospital, the doctor's verdict. But it was not Becca's father who was dying.

It was his own.

He listened to the messages, and then he listened to them again, and it took him some long, confused minutes to accept the reality. The old man's lungs. There was something terribly wrong with the old man's lungs, and it looked like it had been wrong for a long time. And Becca had been calling him – while he was with Jinjin. Becca had been looking after his family and trying to reach him all that time, all the time that he dared not turn on his phone because if he did he would have to lie.

He packed his bags and called Jinjin on the way to the airport, so she didn't have the chance to accompany him back to Shanghai. He didn't want to spoil her Spring Festival. Because he was starting to believe that he spoiled everything for anyone who ever came anywhere near him.

And in the cab to the airport he listened to the messages yet again. The tone of his wife's voice made something inside him shatter. Her voice was patient, exasperated, choked up with feeling – the voice of a woman who knew him too well, and loved him far, far more than he deserved.

Fly out of Asia into Europe and time runs backwards. You erase the present, you hurtle towards the past, and your old life rushes towards you. You just can't stop it.

Bill spent the night in Changchun's freezing airport trying to get a flight, any flight, back to Shanghai, and in the morning he was on a bumpy Dragon Air ride south, the first flight out, every seat in the cabin taken, and then three more hours spent in the lounge at Pudong, waiting for his flight to Heathrow.

In the lounge at Pudong a girl brought him a cup of English breakfast tea. Fifteen minutes later, she brought him a saucer. It was the only time he smiled in the twenty-four hours it took him to get from where he was to where he had to be.

But no matter how many hours were squandered and wished gone, Asia was always ahead of Europe, and it would always be that way, and the long flight back to where he had begun never made up the difference.

Becca and Holly are waiting for him at the arrivals gate and when he sees their faces and sees them both wearing their pink Juicy T-shirts under their North Face ski jackets and their green combat trousers, like two girl soldiers, a big one and a little one, he chokes up and tries to hide it and wishes with all his heart that he had died and been burned and scattered to the wind before he had ever loved anyone but them, his wife and daughter.

Things had been simple and good and he had made them complicated and toxic and impossible, he sees all that now,

understands it in a heartbeat, at long last understands the blindingly obvious. He holds Becca and Holly and longs for that old simplicity and a time when he could leave his phone turned on, and love without lying, and look at the two faces before him without feeling ashamed.

Then, with his wife holding his hand and his daughter on his lap, the little girl laughing with delight at her father's sudden presence, her small teeth even and white and perfect, they catch a black London cab to the hospital, and what Bill Holden can only think of as his punishment.

twenty-one

Bill pulled back the curtain and there was his father in his hospital bed. He went quickly to the bedside, and kissed the old man on the cheek, trying to mask his shock.

The old man, Bill thought, fighting back the tears, afraid he was going to disgrace himself. What had happened to the old man?

His father looked unkempt for the first time in his life. The face was unshaven, his sparse hair too long, the eyes rheumy with drugs and bewilderment. He did not look like Picasso now. The brief peck on that patchy grey beard was like brushing his lips against sandpaper. It was like kissing death itself.

In just a few short months something had eaten up the old man, eaten him away. He looked like a husk of his former self, the shell of the strong, proud man he had always been.

The broad-shouldered boxer's body looked drained of all strength and energy and purpose, and as a young Filippina nurse propped him up on pillows to receive his latest visitors, the oxygen tank standing like a black sentinel by his bedside, the old man looked like a sick child – weak, passive, heartbreakingly unable to perform this simple act by himself.

Bill hugged him, straightened up and their eyes met. As Becca and Holly embraced the old man, something passed between the son and the father, something unspeakable and unsayable, but then it was gone, replaced by all the strained jollity of the hospital ward.

'What have we here?' Bill said, peering into the bags he carried.

'Presents!' Holly cried.

On the bedside table Bill placed a box of sweets with a picture of the Pudong skyline and a duty-free bag holding a portable DVD player and a stack of DVDs, and he was as creakingly jovial as a department store Santa on Christmas Eve.

'Your favourites, Dad,' Bill said. 'Liquorice Allsorts and cowboy films.' For want of anything better to do, Bill began pulling DVDs out of the duty-free bag. 'Let's see – you've got The Wild Bunch … Shane … The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance … True Grit… High Noon ...'

The old man examined his box of sweets.

'Gary Cooper and Bertie Bassett,' he said wryly, his voice a rasping wheeze, like something with a puncture. 'Who could ask for anything more?' His old voice had gone. He had a new voice now. He turned to the nurse. 'This is my son,' he said. 'He's a big-shot lawyer.'

The nurse gave Bill a big white grin. 'He gets more visitors than anyone,' she said, and then, to the old man, raising her voice as though he were deaf or simple or both, 'He's very popular.'

'They don't know me, darling,' the old man said.

The nurse was a good woman, Bill could see that, but there was something about her tone, combining condescension and kindness in equal measure, that Bill resented, because it made him realise that the old man's illness had set him apart from the rest of the world.

Becca and Holly sat on the bed, Holly enthusiastically relaying the latest gossip from her ballet class, the old man and Becca smiling at her as she prattled away. Bill tried to busy himself by unloading his presents, and throwing out old flowers, and going to fetch tea.

When he came back two elderly neighbours had arrived, bringing petrol station flowers and banter about the old man being looked after by all these attractive young nurses. And when the old man suddenly found it impossible to take another breath, they all watched in silence as he placed an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and struggled to fill his exhausted lungs with just one more mouthful of air.

Becca took Holly off to the toilet. When the old man was finished he flopped back, the mask in one hand, shaking his head. Then Becca came back with Holly and the grey, stub-bled face was all smiles.

The nurse was right. There were many visitors. They kept coming, bringing grapes to the cancer ward, and soon the little curtained-off space was crowded. Bill thought how foolish he had been to think that his father might die alone. There was no chance of that. Too many people loved the old man to let him die alone.

It had been a small family for such a long time, just Bill and his old man, such a small family that Bill grew up and went away and started his own family wondering if they had ever really qualified as a family at all. No mother, no wife, no woman. Just a father and his son.

But the old man had his own family behind him, the brothers who were still alive, and the widows of the ones who were not, and Bill saw that there were many people who loved the old man because of who he was, and without the obligation of blood. They all came, and there was a sad grandeur to these final days in the hospital, as if all the friends

and neighbours and work mates of a lifetime had to be gathered here, in this special place, to show they cared and to say goodbye.

And Bill thought, Who will be there to mourn me? Perhaps that was what had troubled his sleep on the long flight back – not the thought that his father might slip away with nobody by his bedside, but Bill's fear that when it was his own turn, he surely would.

When it was time for Becca and Holly to leave they kissed his father goodbye and Bill walked them to the lobby. Just beyond the glass doors an old man in stripy pyjamas and carpet slippers was smoking a cigarette. Becca picked up Holly and Bill wrapped his arms around them.

'You're out on your feet,' Becca said. 'Come home, Bill.'

But their old home was being rented out to the family of a lawyer from New York to pay the mortgage, and Becca was staying at her sister's place with Holly now that her father was feeling stronger. And Bill wanted to stay.

'I can't leave him, Bee,' he said, and she didn't argue with him.

He kissed them and let them go. Then he went back to the crowds around his father's bed. The little curtained-off space had taken on a festive air. There were people he had not seen in years, people he had never met. Introductions were made, hands shaken, cheeks kissed.

But in the end everybody left the old man except Bill, for it was getting late, and you can't stand by a hospital bed forever. There is no timetable for these things, Bill realised. He attempted to make the mental leap to the brutal fact that this was it, there was only one ending, and although the doctor said weeks rather than months they did not really know. Bill could not truly believe it, he could totally not comprehend that the world could keep turning without his old man.

It was late now and he watched the nurse, a different one, a tall young Czech, hold the oxygen mask over his father's mouth. He and his father held each other's stare for a moment and the old man closed his eyes. He was scared, Bill saw, and somehow that surprised him, although he thought – who wouldn't be?

'My son,' the old man said when the nurse took the oxygen away. 'A handsome devil, isn't he?'

He had never heard his father boast about him before and it seemed ludicrous, fake, completely out of character.

The nurse tucked in the blankets. There was a rubber sheet under the old man's bed, like the kind Holly had had when she was very small. T come back later for to give wash,' the nurse said.

'We've got a lot of catching up to do,' the old man said, fighting for breath again, shaking with the effort, and for a moment Bill wondered if the oxygen tank was empty.

The nurse left them alone. The lights went out. They could hear the sound of a hospital ward at night. That echoing sound that never quite managed silence. Distant voices, restless sleep.

The two men smiled at each other and Bill took the old man's hand and it seemed completely natural although he hadn't held his father's hand since he was five years old.

Those old builder's hands. The hands of a tough man, a man who worked with his body not his head, a physically capable man.

'Don't die, Dad,' Bill said, and the tears came with the words, burning his eyes. 'Please don't die.'

They had a lot of catching up to do.

The old man woke up in the night, writhing in his bed, and Bill was suddenly awake, rising out of the chair and hitting the button that called for help. There was too much

pain, he couldn't stand it. Bill stood by the bed as a black nurse he had not seen before came and calmly gave the old man a little white pill in a plastic container. The nurse tucked in his sheets, gave Bill a weary smile and then left them. In the next bed a man cried out a woman's name in his sleep. Bill stroked his father's hand as the old man lay back, eyes closed, mouth open, and every breath another battle.

'I wish it had been better between us,' Bill said after a while, very quietly, almost to himself, and the feelings he had held back for so long came tumbling out. 'You were always my hero. I always admired you. I always thought you were the most decent man I ever knew.' He patted his father's hand, so lightly that it seemed as if he hardly touched it. 'I always wanted whatever it was that you and Mum had.' Bill was silent for a bit. The ward was very still now, but he could sense all those bodies in the darkness beyond the curtain. He took a breath. 'And I always loved you, Dad,' he said. 'It might not have seemed that way, but I never stopped loving you.'

His father was sleeping.

A few hours later the ward was stirring. There were voices, the smell of food, gathering light. A breakfast tray lay untouched in front of the old man.

'How long have you known?' Bill asked him.

'A while,' the old man said. 'Didn't want to worry you.' He pushed the breakfast tray a bit further away. 'Got enough on your plate.' Bill could hear the breath in the ravaged lungs. 'Tell me about your life,' the old man said, closing his eyes. 'I want to hear about it. Tell me how it's going out there.'

'Sure.' Bill pulled his chair closer to the bed. 'It's going well, Dad. When you feel better, you'll come out again. When

Becca and Holly are back. I'll fly you out. I will. First class this time, Dad.'

He thought of all the times his father had bored him or made him impatient and ashamed and he wanted to make up for all that, he wanted to take it all back, and now it was too late, now it would always be too late.

'We'll meet you at the airport and it will be great. You'll stay with us, Dad,' Bill said, and the tears came again, because he knew he might as well be promising a round trip to the moon. 'You'll stay with me, Dad, you'll stay with us, and it will all be good.'

And the old man gently touched Bill's hand, as though his young son was the one in need of comforting.

During the day they could not talk, not with all the visitors around, not with all the chitchat and sympathy. At night, if the old man was not too distracted by the pain and not too numbed by the drugs they gave him to obliterate the pain, then they could do their catching up.

'And are you all right? You and Becca?'

Bill wished he had the stomach to lie. But he was sick of it. That's why he would never make a truly accomplished liar. Because it ate him up. It took something from him that he would never get back.

'I don't know,' he said.

The old man looked at him with hooded eyes, and Bill felt some of the old scared feeling that he always felt when he had displeased his father.

'Got somebody else, have you?' the old man said, guessing it all, and Bill wondered how this one-woman man knew so much about the frailty of modern relationships.

Bill thought about lying, his last chance to lie, and then nodded. He waited for more questions, but the old man said nothing.

Bill looked up at him. 'You and Mum stayed together. If she hadn't died then you'd be together now. How do you do that? How do you stay with someone for a lifetime?'

The old man winced with pain. He exhaled once, and seemed to writhe against the pillows. Bill jumped up but his father motioned for him to sit down.

'We weren't perfect,' he said. 'Children always think their parents are made of different stuff to them. But we were no different. We had our moments.'

Bill tried to place his mum and dad in their moments, and in the modern world, he tried to put them into somewhere like Paradise Mansions, into the mess he had made of his own life. But it was beyond his imagination.

'But you stayed together,' he said. 'Whatever happened, you stayed together.'

The pain was strong now. You could see it written all over the old man's face. Bill was standing again. The old man held the metal box with the red button, but he didn't press it, as if unsure if he should call the nurse now or try to wait a while.

'Because you don't leave your child for a woman,' the old man told him, and he gave Bill a look as though he knew nothing. 'Nobody's that good in bed.'

The old man liked bragging to the nurses. It was as if he had to impress the last young women he would ever know. Anything would do.

'Look at this,' he said, fondling his portable DVD player as the Czech nurse looked at his chart. 'One of the latest gadgets. My dad bought me this.'

Bill laughed with disbelief. His dad bought him that? He couldn't let the old man get away with that. It meant he was slipping off the edge of sanity. And it frightened Bill. He touched his father's arm, covered in black-and-yellow

bruises from all the needles for the blood tests and the IV drip and the injections for the pain.

'It was me,' Bill said, with a smile to ease the way. 'Remember? I got it for you.'

Unexpected tears sprang into the old man's eyes, confused and humiliated at this casual contradiction.

'But my dad was here,' he said with real anger. 'I saw him.'

The Czech nurse glanced at Bill and on her impassive face he saw the message loud and clear. Their minds go, you know. All the chemicals. By this stage they're in their own little dream world.

'You want shave?' said the nurse, raising her voice. 'You want nice? I give little shave?'

'I'll do it,' Bill said.

On the seventh day Bill could no longer keep his eyes open. He slumped forward in the chair by the bed, his head lolling, unable to believe that he could be so tired.

'Go home,' the old man wheezed. 'Go home and get a good night's kip.'

Bill was used to his father's new voice by now. He had almost forgotten what the old voice sounded like. This was normal – the croaking voice, the lungs with no air, the unbearable pain of inhaling and exhaling. All normal now. Bill could hear every pitiful breath, every one of them as undeniable as a scar. But although Bill was fighting to keep his eyes open, his father seemed more awake than he had been for a long time. The pain had retreated for now, and with it the doses of morphine. The old man almost seemed restored to his former self. Giving his son orders, knowing what was best for him, and not willing to discuss it.

'I mean it,' the old man commanded. 'Go get some kip.'

Bill stood up, stretched his back. 'I might do that,' he said. T might get some kip, Dad. Come back in the morning.'

'Good idea.' His father was sitting up in bed. But then he was always sitting up, even when he was sleeping. The old man nodded encouragement, not so stern now. Just wanting what was best for his son.

'Just for a few hours,' Bill said, and he looked at his father's freshly shaven face, smooth as a baby, and he suddenly remembered what he had to tell him. 'Dad?'

The old man had sunk back into his pillow. There was no sign of the pain that seemed to suddenly paralyse every muscle in his face. He seemed peaceful. As though he were about to close his eyes and get some kip too. 'What?'

It was so simple. And so obvious. And so necessary. 'I love you, Dad,' Bill said. And then he laughed with embarrassment.

The old man opened his eyes and smiled. 'Yeah. I know you do. And I love you too. You know I do.'

Bill hung his head. 'I'm so sorry, Dad.'

'What for?'

'That I never told you before.'

The old man smiled at his grown-up son.

'Once is plenty.'

They called him in the morning to tell him that his father had died.

He knew what it was before he answered his mobile in the spare room of Sara's house. He already knew.

A world without his father in it.

It was a one-minute phone call from someone he had never met and whom he would never meet. They were as sympathetic as they could possibly be, under the circumstances. Bill sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his phone. It was the most natural thing in the world, and the

most momentous. The end of the old man's life. It felt both ordinary and epic.

Bill went to the room's small window, stared out at the suburban street and tried to feel something. But nothing came. He couldn't even cry. All he could feel was a bleak relief that all that pain was over, and a nagging guilt that he had not been there at the end, and a gratitude that the old man had been his father.

He went downstairs to where he could hear voices. He didn't feel like company but Sara was there with Becca in the kitchen. Becca looked at Bill and stood up and she knew, just got it straight away, and he went to her arms and let her hold him before breaking away with an apologetic smile. Sara touched his arm and slipped out of the room.

Becca pulled him close and he leaned against her, her blonde hair in his face, his mouth against her skin, and he revelled in his wife, he inhaled her, he wanted to get lost in her.

'He was a lovely man,' she said. 'I'm so sorry, Bill.' She looked at his face. 'You should sleep on for a bit.'

'But there's so much to do, Bee' Feeling giddy with the thought of it.

He had to collect his father's things from the hospital. He had to arrange a funeral. He had to tell everyone who knew and loved the old man that he was gone. He had to register the death. All the banal admin of death. He had to do all of that. And he had no idea how to do any of these things.

'It can all wait a while,' Becca told him, and she stroked his back as he held her. T know,' she said. T know, Bill. But you've still got us.'

He nodded, turning away from her, hiding his face. In the hallway he bumped into Sara, rounding up her children. To get them out of the house, Bill thought. To give us space. They were girls of six and eight and a boy of ten. And then

he was in Sara's arms and he was touched by her tears, the tears that he couldn't cry himself.

Sara was an older, sportier version of Becca, wearing a T-shirt advertising her Pilates class, and her cropped, dyed red hair was the only sign of any other life beyond the one she had now.

Becca had been right about Sara and Bill had been wrong. Sara had been through her adventures, and her changes, and come out the other side as a real sister to Becca, and a loving aunt to Holly, and a friend to Bill's family, even though he had not known it until now.

Sara's partner came down the stairs. He shook Bill's hand, offered his condolences and told Sara's children they were going to the park. He was a tall, quiet man in a track suit, some sort of personal trainer. Bill had been wrong about him too.

Here was the little family that had looked after Holly when Becca was nursing her own father, and they were clearly all such decent people, and so smitten with Holly, and so sorry to hear of the death of Bill's dad, that Bill felt a flush of shame. Not only for what he had thought of them, but what he had thought of his wife. How could he have believed that Becca would ever leave Holly somewhere she wasn't safe and loved? How could he have imagined that? What was wrong with him?

'Thank you,' Bill said to them. 'For everything. I'll go to see Holly.'

She was watching a Wonder Pets DVD in the living room. He picked her up but she squirmed out of his arms, her eyes not leaving the TV screen.

'I want to watch this,' she said.

The room was cool and dark and the only light came from the screen where the Wonder Pets were rescuing some sort of egg.

'But when are they going to have the happy ending?' Holly asked him.

He smiled. 'I'm sure they'll get there in the end,' he said, standing up and lifting his daughter with him. Heavy, he thought. Heavier all the time. But always his baby girl. She peeped at the DVD over his shoulder. He wanted to get it out of the way. He wanted to be beyond this moment.

'Darling, your granddad's in heaven now.' He didn't know what to say to her. He didn't know how to explain death to a four-year-old. He didn't know where to begin. 'He loved you so much. Just so much. And he will always be looking down on you, and he will never stop loving you.'

'I know,' she said, turning her blue eyes from the television to her father. 'Granddad was here.'

'Yes, Granddad Joe is always here for you, and he loves you too,' Bill said. 'I'm not talking about Mummy's daddy. I'm not talking about Granddad Joe.'

Holly shook her head impatiently. 'Me neither. Not Granddad Joe. My other Granddad. The one that died.' She looked at him now and did not turn away her clear, unwavering gaze. 'Your daddy. He was here. And he smiled at me.' Holly nodded once, as if it was all settled. 'It's true, you know.'

He looked at her for a moment and then he held her tighter than he had ever held her before. Winter sunshine was pouring into the room, the windows of the suburban London house turning to blocks of blazing gold, and Bill had to close his eyes against it.

'I know it's true,' he whispered to his daughter, and his heart was full of love and grief and an edge of fear that he could not deny.

The key turned in the lock and Bill had to press hard against the door to move all the junk mail.

Becca followed him into the darkness and stale air of his father's house, watching his face as he paused and looked around, as if seeing the place where he had grown up for the first time.

She found a switch and turned on some lights.

'You okay?' she said, touching his arm.

He nodded. 'You can't breathe in here,' he said.

'I'll open some windows,' she said.

She looked around for a key to the back door and found it under the mat that said Our Home in florid, faded letters. She threw open the back door and looked out at the scrubby patch of neglected garden, filling her lungs with air that didn't taste of tobacco and illness.

Bill was in the living room, peering at the bookcase. Under one arm he carried a stack of flat-packed cardboard boxes and in the other hand he had a thick black roll of rubbish bags. That was their job today. To decide what went to Oxfam and what was thrown away.

'Remember this?' he said, and she was glad to see him smile.

He was looking at a photograph of Holly. She was three years old, holding a thick pink crayon like a miniature javelin and grinning at the tiny black girl standing next to her.

'First day of nursery,' Becca said. Their eyes scanned the bookcase. It was a bookcase that contained no books, just a few ragged copies of Reader's Digest and National Geographic, some souvenirs of foreign holidays – Spanish castanets, a Chinese doll – and shelf after shelf of family photographs.

Bill's parents on their wedding day. Bill as a baby in the arms of his mother. Bill as a crop-haired toddler with his father down on one knee beside him, the boy standing on his father's thigh. Bill and Becca on their wedding day. And Holly everywhere, from birth to now. If Becca looked quickly

along the shelves, it was like watching her daughter grow up before her eyes.

'He was lonely,' Bill said.

'He had a lot of people who loved him,' she said. 'You saw that at the funeral.'

Bill picked up a TV Guide on the coffee table, still open at the day his father had been rushed to hospital. His finger traced the favourite programmes ringed in red ink. Cop shows, hospital dramas, sport.

'Shall we make a start?' Becca said. 'Or do you want to do it some other time?'

He shook his head.

After she had filled a few rubbish sacks with the contents of the kitchen cupboards, much of it with a use-by date from the last century, Becca went upstairs. Bill was in the bedroom, sitting on the bed with a green box file on his lap. She sat down next to him. He was holding a photograph clipped from a magazine, a picture of Bill in black tie with Becca in an evening gown by his side. They held champagne flutes and each other, smiling uncertainly.

'Our first Burns night at the firm. We look so young.'

He nodded but said nothing, and she saw that the box on his lap was full of cuttings from trade papers. Bill made no move to touch them so, very carefully, Becca began to leaf through them, as if afraid they might disintegrate in her hands.

'Look,' she said, showing Bill a torn and sellotaped certificate with his name on it that said, LEGAL WEEK AWARDS – SECOND RUNNER UP – HIGHLY COMMENDED.

'All the crap he kept,' Bill said. He shook his head and covered his face with his hands. 'I just wanted to make him proud of me.'

Becca put her arm around his shoulders. 'Look around,' she said. 'You did.'

He kept his hands over his face. 'Don't give up on me, Bee,' he said.

She laughed at the thought. 'Why would I do that?' she said.

The three of them stood at the foot of the hill, waiting. The only sounds were the distant buzz of the late-afternoon traffic, the voices of small children playing in the park, and the wind whipping through the bare branches of the trees up on Primrose Hill.

Holly yawned. Bill looked at Becca.

'It's not going to happen,' he said. 'Let's go.'

Becca shook her head.

'Wait. Let's wait just a little bit longer.'

Holly sighed elaborately. 'Oh, come on, Mummy,' she said, her shoulders slumping theatrically to convey her exhaustion. 'Please.'

'One more minute,' Becca said, not budging. She felt her husband and her daughter exchange exasperated looks, and ignored them. She had faith.

Then she saw it. While Bill and Holly were still fidgeting with irritation and looking elsewhere, Becca saw the giraffe suddenly sway into view above the tree line, looking at the three of them out of the corner of its eye, ruminatively chewing a mouthful of leaves, and before she could cry out there was another, and then another, all of them gazing down on the little family with quizzical disdain.

'Look, look, look!' Becca was crying, afraid that her grumpy companions would miss them, but by then Bill and Holly were laughing too, squinting up into the pale winter sunshine and applauding wildly at the sight of the secret giraffes.

Bill wanted them to check into a hotel, but Sara would not hear of it.

Holly was in with the two girls and Becca and Bill were in the guest room. Becca knew it was not what he wanted. Bill was anxious to be alone with his family again, and to close the door on the rest of the world. On his last night, he watched her as she came towards the bed in just her panties and a T-shirt, and she knew that look. She stood by the side of the bed, smiling at him.

'Bill, I'll be back in Shanghai next week,' she said. 'And these walls are really, really thin.'

He shrugged. 'We could just have a cuddle.'

'Yeah, right. I know your cuddles.' She slid into bed beside him and he wrapped his arms around her as if he had been waiting for a long time. He whispered her name, and then said it again.

'We would have to be really, really quiet,' she said, stifling a laugh. 'I mean it, Bill.'

He nodded, ready to promise anything, pushing up her T-shirt. 'I'll put on my silencer,' he said, and she felt his mouth on her lips, and on her face, and on her ribs, and she could feel how much he wanted her, and it felt familiar and new all at once.

Later he lay on his back and she lay on her side in his arms, the pair of them drifting away to sleep, the way they always used to.

Becca wondered – when had they stopped sleeping like this? After they were married? After Holly was born? When had sleeping in his arms become something that she no longer did?

'Come back with me,' he whispered. 'In the morning. The pair of you. I can get you on my flight. It's not too late, Bee'

'Soon,' she said, patting his chest. 'Very soon.'

He seemed desperate.

'Why not now?'

'Holly's school. My dad. Our house. These people we've been renting to have made a bloody mess of it, Bill. I have a million things to do. Just give me a few days. Next week, okay?'

In the morning he flew back alone.

twenty-two

From the back seat of the car Ling-Yuan watched the factory workers stream out of the gates, her pretty face trying to hide the fear as her big sister sat in the driver's seat talking to her quietly in Mandarin. Encouraging her, Bill thought. Taking care of her even as she prepares to let her go.

A bell was ringing to signal the end of the shift. The workers were mostly young and female and many of them were still in the light blue coats that they wore at their workstations. Some of them were eating as they walked, their chopsticks shovelling noodles from plastic bowls held just a few inches from the mouth. They looked worn out, ravenous, like refugees in their own land.

'What do they make?' Jinjin said, turning to him.

'They make Christmas decorations,' Bill said. The sisters looked at him blankly.- 'Santas and reindeers. Angels and silver bells. You know – the stuff they hang on a Christmas tree.'

They didn't know. Not really. All the Christmas trees they had ever seen were in shopping malls – giant merry monsters strung with strobe lights, although both of them had vague memories of seeing the more domestic Yuletide tree in half-watched Hollywood movies. But they got the point. 'Like a

toy factory,' Jinjin concluded. It didn't really matter what they made here. The factories were all the same in the end.

Ling-Yuan said something and her big sister barked back at her. Bill looked at Jinjin.

'She's talking about modelling again,' she told him, then directed a stream of angry advice at Ling-Yuan. 'I tell her -forget about modelling for now.'

Ling-Yuan wanted to be a model. One of those new Chinese dreams, Bill thought. And she was young enough and pretty enough. But even Bill could see that she was too short and too heavy to do much more than hand over the money that Jinjin had given her for a one-month modelling course in Shenyang. The course had been completed, a certificate awarded, but no modelling offers had materialised. So now they sat outside the factory gates as the workers flowed around them and Jinjin said something to her sister, more softly now, and Ling-Yuan leaned towards him, her face pale with worry.

'Thank you, William,' she said.

He shook his head. He wished he could have done more, he wished he could have found her a better job. But there were no economic miracles for an untrained young woman. 'Shall I come in with you?' he said.

Jinjin shook her head. 'I have the name,' she said, studying a scrap of paper. They got out of the car and started walking towards the factory gates, one sister so tall and lean, the other so small and round. Ling-Yuan was carrying a small Hello Kitty bag. In the West she would be going to the gym, Bill thought. Here she's going off to a new life. No wonder she's terrified.

He wished he could speak to the little sister in her own language and tell her that he knew what it was like to be that scared, to be that petrified of change. But she's a kid, he thought. Just a kid. She's too young to feel like that.

The sisters disappeared inside the factory gates, and Bill sat

watching the shattered faces of the workers until Jinjin came back out alone.

They made love in the new apartment, the one she had rented with the money he had transferred to her account, and he needed her and he loved her and he was so ashamed of her, so ashamed that she had quit her old life as a school teacher for the other man, the man before him, the man who had paid for the flat in Gubei and everything in it, including her, and Bill was so ashamed of himself, and even as they lost themselves in the big new bed in the beautiful unfurnished apartment, he knew that they would never have a happy ending, not in a million years, no matter how much they loved each other, because the shame would see to that.

'This is our flat,' she said firmly, and her innocent optimism broke his heart. It was not their flat. The lease was in her name. It was the least he could do, and the most he could do. Because he already had a home.

They were happy. That was the funny thing. That was the madness. They laughed at nothing, they laughed at everything. They were always happy when they were together. But then came the moment when he had to get out of bed and get dressed and go home. She buried her face in the pillow, the black hair tumbling over her eyes, and she never confronted him, she never issued ultimatums, and that made it worse.

'I can't stay,' he said, preparing to go back to the real world. 'You know that.'

She knew that. She was ready to sleep. Like a normal person. And he was tired too. But it was time to get dressed and step out into the night. It had been a long day – the drive out of the city to the factory in the northern suburbs, saying goodbye to the sister, coming back to Shanghai, making love, holding each other, the clock running.

Any normal person would be ready for sleep.

And as Bill looked in on his daughter tucked up in dreams in his old room, and then went into the master bedroom and slid into bed next to his sleeping wife, he knew that he would never feel like a normal person again.

She had knocked on his door.

After Holly and Becca had come back, and she had known they were there, Jinjin had done the unthinkable and crossed the courtyard and knocked on his door with a smile on her face. That was the thing that shook him when he opened the door and saw her standing there – she was smiling.

'Denial,' Shane said later. 'That's what they call big-time denial, mate.'

Bill did not know if it was denial. How does anyone deny a wife and a child? But he could not believe it was an act of malice. Despite all she had seen of the world, there was an innocence about Jinjin. She probably just wanted to see him. It was as simple as that. She followed her heart. And she just wasn't being practical.

'But Jinjin,' he said, genuinely not understanding what she was doing there, wondering what would have happened if Becca had opened the door, what would have happened if his wife and daughter had not been sleeping off their jet-lag, 'you can't come in here.'

And she didn't. She went away. Then she cried for a few days. It was all crazy. What did she expect? And when he finally went to her new flat he had to hold her and tell her as gently as he could what he had told her long ago and what she could not have forgotten – I'm not free -and just hold her some more and let her break her heart in his arms until she was ready to let him lead her to the bed.

'Who was that at the door?' Becca had said.

'Nobody,' he had said.

His friend was right. They call it denial.

Then he did not see her for a month.

His family were back and he was sick of secrets and in the remnants of the week when he was not at work he was with Becca and Holly, watching the dolphins in Aquaria 21 at Changfeng Park on Saturday afternoons, and on Sunday mornings going on the slides and rides at Fun Dazzle in Zhongshan Park, and then eating brunch together at the Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carlton or M on the Bund. One time he thought he saw her. But there were a million girls who looked like her. And none of them were her.

In the end he found himself back in the rented apartment, hating himself for leaving her alone for so many nights, flinching at the sight of her crossword puzzles, knowing that on any of those nights he could have gone from the office to her flat before going home, and as they ate the noodles she had prepared, he plotted how to steal a tiny piece of time.

The city was suddenly different. There were places that were safe and there were places that were not safe and there were places where you took your chances but you just didn't know.

New Gubei was off limits. The Bund was out of bounds. Hongqiao, where they had rented her apartment, was reassuringly foreign ground, but he soon tired of the local restaurants because they were full of wealthy men who had installed their sleek mistresses in the lush anonymity of the Hongqiao apartment blocks. It wasn't the girls who appalled him. It was the men. Bill couldn't stand being around those men. He could not stand the thought that he was one of them.

Trips were best. There was much less chance of being seen together on a trip. When they started to feel the pressure of being confined to her bland new neighbourhood, Jinjin suggested a short boat trip down the Chang Jiang, the Long

River, the Chinese term for what Westerners knew as the Yangtze.

It was believable, both at home and in the office, that he could have pressing business in Chongqing, the big ugly capital of southwest China, and their departure point for a trip down the Yangtze. After they flew to the filthy old port, Bill even had a brief meeting with Chinese clients at a freight company while Jinjin bought their boat tickets for their trip down the Yangtze.

The best lies were the ones that stayed closest to the truth, Bill realised, the lies that you could almost believe yourself.

Or were they the worst lies?

Outside their cabin window the rain lashed down on the green limestone cliffs.

There were white man-made markings high up on the cliffs, even higher than the wispy clouds of mist that clung to the rock face, and these white markings indicated where the water would rise to when the Three Gorges dam was completed. Bill found it hard to believe, but in a few years all this impossible beauty would be gone forever, and it would be as if it had never existed. It was like concreting over the Grand Canyon to turn it into the world's biggest parking lot. Yet somehow the Chinese expected you to be impressed. The boat's PA system was a constant tinny blare boasting in Mandarin about the march of progress. And it wasn't just the land they were destroying. Two million people were being moved from their homes. Entire communities would be under water. It made him feel physically sick, it made him feel a long way from home.

Their Yangtze trip was wrong from the start.

'I don't know why you can't go back to teaching,' he said, pacing the tiny cabin. 'You were good at it. Your students loved you.'

Jinjin was sitting on one of the cabin's single beds studying the smiling face of a CCTV presenter. 'A good horse eats going forward,' she said, not looking up.

'I don't know what that means,' he said, though he knew exactly what it meant. It meant you can't go back. 'What's that? Another wise old Chinese saying?'

'Yes,' she said, in that clear, quiet voice she used when they were about to argue. 'Another wise old Chinese saying. It is true there are so many.'

He turned and looked at the sheer green tower outside his window. All this useless beauty, he thought. What good does it do anyone? They will only kill it, cover it with concrete and tons of water and the dumb bastards will still want to take their photographs.

The boat was horrible. Like a floating block of council flats, Bill thought. Ms Kongling is a deluxe cruise ship of the most up to date facilities, perfect functions and a great variety of amusements of almost all kinds, said the leaflet that Jinjin had proudly presented to him as they waited to board. The Three Gorges are celebrated for their majestic steep crags, secluded beauty, dangerous shoals and magnificent stones and sceneries. When the Three Gorges Project completed, these treasures will be covered by water, so please to be welcome to the unspoiled pristine Three Gorges, a natural landscape gallery of unique beauty, peril and serenity, where you will escape from the worldliness and remain fresh and healthy in Nature and Beauty.

But they were rarely fresh and healthy in Nature and Beauty on that floating eyesore full of tourists, and in the dining room at every meal they had to share their table with two silent Taiwanese men who shovelled in food held an inch from their faces while staring at Bill and Jinjin as though they had never seen such a sight.

There were a few game old American tourists in baseball

caps and khaki shorts, and on the first night one of them borrowed Jinjin's camera to take a picture of Bill and Jinjin dancing. A patch of deck in the restaurant had been designated a dance floor and as Faye Wong sang a love song Bill held Jinjin in what he imagined was the old-fashioned style, the way his father would have held his mother. As the kind old American took their picture, they could not stop smiling. That was the best time.

Apart from Bill and the elderly Americans, everyone else on board was Chinese, and he knew that this was the real problem with the good ship Ms Kongling. This was a luxury ship only if you were Chinese. If you were not Chinese, then it was like a prison, but with poorer food and more rules and regulations.

A bell rang signalling lunch and above their heads they could hear the tourists scrambling to be fed. Bill's heart sank at the thought of the Taiwanese eating with their mouths open. Jinjin tossed her TV magazine to one side and crossed her legs. She was wearing a white mini-skirt, boots and a black roll-neck sweater. Her hair was pulled back in a pony-tail, and he liked it that way, because it meant you could see her face. No matter how simply she dressed, she always looked great. They looked at each other and she smiled at him and they both knew they would not be going up for lunch.

The boat drifted by the Three Gorges in the rain and he knew that this was the biggest problem of all. His head said forget it, but his heart said that he could never forget it.

Not when the Three Gorges was as lost as Atlantis, not when the waters rose and the mountains fell, not in a thousand years.

There was one Chinese character that had lodged in his mind and that he always recognised and it was the character for

her family name. He could read Li when he saw it written in Chinese. So when they came through domestic arrivals at Pudong airport and he saw one of the hordes of drivers holding a sign with her name on it he pulled her arm and nodded at the sign and they both laughed with pleasure.

Then he saw Tiger.

He was idling at the end of the line, watching the other exit door, and while Jinjin laughed as a middle-aged businessman approached the driver holding up her name – 'Look, William, it's Mr Li!' – Bill searched the crowd, wondering who Tiger was waiting for.

And then he saw them.

The boys came out first, those three wild blond monkeys, the small one fiddling with his iPod while the two big ones bickered and slapped each other, and then their parents -Devlin pushing the trolley loaded with luggage, raising a hand to Tiger, and Tess beside him, giving instructions to the boys, and carrying a carrier bag that said Chek Lap Kok Airport.

Back from a long weekend in Hong Kong, Bill registered, just as Mrs Devlin turned her head and stared straight at him.

Then Bill was gone – quickly but far too slow to avoid being seen.

He turned away and headed in the other direction and got lost in the crowd, with Jinjin still holding on to him but struggling to keep up, aware that something was very wrong, and he hated the wild panic inside him, it made him burn with shame, but he still didn't stop or slow down until they were out of the airport and at the end of a mercifully short taxi queue.

'What's wrong?' she said, not getting it, and really wanting to know. 'Tell me.'

'Nothing,' he said, not looking at her, not daring to look at.anything, wishing the queue away, wanting to be safely hidden in the back of a cab, and all the while waiting for

the moment when he would hear an English voice right behind him say his name.

But the queue moved, and they got into the back of an old Santana taxi, and Jinjin let him be. She knew him well enough for that. And she was smart enough to guess.

'William, why don't you tell me what's wrong? Perhaps I can help.'

Jinjin was sitting up in bed in a T-shirt and panties, thumbing through a book of crossword puzzles. This was the exotic for them, he realised, this was a special treat. Hanging around the apartment like a normal couple, as though they had all the normal time in the normal world. As though Bill was a good man with no other place to be.

'I told you,' he said, his voice thin and tight. He didn't want to take it out on her, not her, she did not deserve it, but he could not stop himself. 'Nothing's wrong, okay?'

'Was it the woman at the airport? The one who was looking at us? It was the woman from the teahouse, wasn't it?'

Jesus Christ, he thought. What happens now?

He was standing at the window looking down at the traffic on Zhongshan Xilu and the lights of the Shanghai stadium, and not seeing any of it.

He shouldn't be here. He should have gone home. Change the cover story. Change his life. Because his daughter was waiting for him. Because Tess Devlin had seen him. And now everyone would know. Now his dirty little secret would be released into the world.

The things that had once made him glad to be alive now made him wish he were dead. It wasn't worth it. To feel this way – it just wasn't worth it. He felt like he was being torn in two.

'William?' He heard her setting down the crossword puzzle book.

He didn't move from the window. 'What is it?'

'Are you cross with me?' she said.

He turned to look at her. 'Am I cross with you? You do realise – or perhaps you don't – that nobody talks like that in England? Outside of – I don't know – Enid Blyton novels. Nobody says – are you cross with me?' He turned back to the window, hating himself. 'Your text books were fifty years out of date.'

'Please don't be cross with me,' she said, and he covered his eyes with one hand. He shook his head, almost laughing. Her voice was soft and understanding. She would forgive him anything. She loved him and he knew it. 'Why don't you just come to bed?' she said.

He met her eyes. 'And why don't you get out of my fucking life?'

He went into the bathroom, for want of anywhere better to go, slamming the door behind him. He stared at his face in the mirror and he was ashamed of taking it out on her when she had done nothing wrong. He cursed, threw cold water on his face. It was him. It was all him. He was the one who had done everything wrong. He went back into the bedroom so that he could hold her and tell her that he was sorry and let her see that he meant it.

But by then Jinjin Li had got up, got dressed and got out of his life.

twenty-three

'You should see this,' Becca said.

She was standing at the window, looking down at the courtyard of Paradise Mansions. Bill went across to her, remembering when she had said the same thing on that first night. Looking down at the girls getting into the cars. That first night, when he saw Jinjin for the first time, all dolled up for Saturday night and the man in the silver Porsche. There was the same note of amused disbelief in his wife's voice now. You should see this. Then she turned to look at him and he saw the concern on her face.

'You all right?' she said, her fingertips on his day-old stubble. 'God, Bill – you look beat.'

'I'm all right.'

Bill joined Becca at the window and his wife slipped her arm around his waist. There were raised voices in the courtyard. A Chinese woman in her fifties was screaming abuse as she threw things from a window in the opposite block. Dresses, underwear, bed sheets were tossed out and fell and floated to the ground. Annie was down in the courtyard, desperately gathering up her belongings, weeping bitterly.

'The wife found out,' Becca said, indicating the woman at the window. 'That's what happened. She just found out.'

'Well, maybe,' Bill said, turning away from the window. He couldn't stand watching all that raw grief. 'Or maybe she knew all along but the time came for a crackdown.'

Becca's smile grew wider. 'Listen to you. You sound like an expert.'

He grimaced. T don't know anything about it,' he said.

There were loud thuds in the courtyard. Annie's wailing went up a pitch, registering fear as well as misery. The wife had found a store of Louis Vuitton bags. They hit the courtyard like small rocks and as each one fell it brought cries of real anguish from Annie.

Bill remembered the tattoo on Annie's arm, the beginning of the end. He wondered if the man had confessed to his wife, shopped Annie and himself, and let the wife do the dirty work of evicting her, or if she had found out some other way. He hated this man he had never met.

T wonder why they do it,' Becca said, turning away from the window. 'These girls, I mean.'

Bill stayed at the window, wanting to help Annie and knowing he could do nothing. 'They just want to better themselves,' he said. 'That's what we all want, isn't it?'

Becca shook her head, sinking into the sofa. She picked up a glossy catalogue.

'A woman has to have something missing to get involved with a married man,' Becca said. 'It takes a lack of imagination, or a lack of heart, or – I don't know – some kind of mad optimism.'

She flicked past images of chairs, tables and wine glasses embossed with Chinese symbols. Down in the courtyard Annie gathered up her beloved bags. A light wind had lifted one of the sheets and wrapped it around her legs. The woman in the window was pointing down and laughing. Faces were

appearing at other windows, and calling to their spouses to come and see.

'It's just so bloody cruel,' Becca said.

'Well,' Bill said. 'I guess she's really angry. It can't be easy. Finding out something like that.'

Becca looked at him strangely.

'I'm not talking about the wife, Bill,' she said. 'I'm talking about the silly bitch who has been running around with a married man. Can't you see? She's the cruel one.'

They went shopping. Suddenly Holly's expanding social schedule allowed these pockets of time for just the two of them. Perhaps it would carry on like this all through her childhood, Bill thought, and in the end they would not be needed at all.

'What about these?' Becca said, picking up a wine glass with a tastefully embossed Chinese symbol. 'Do you like this, Bill?'

He nodded. 'Very nice,' he said. 'You know, Bee, Devlin said we should take Holly to the Natural Wild Insect Kingdom on Fenghe Lu,' he said. 'It's aimed at kids. They can hold big hairy spiders. The boys love it, apparently.'

'I bet they do,' she said, holding the glass up to the light. 'Those little horrors. But I'm not sure it's really Holly's thing. She'd run a mile if she was presented with a tarantula.' She touched his arm. 'You know, we don't always have to do something.'

He looked bewildered.

'I know you've been trying really hard since we came back,' she said. 'Dolphins, bumper cars, creepy crawlies…' She smiled. 'But sometimes we can just take her out on her bike to the park. Try and get her off the stabilisers. Or we can stay home. She loves drawing and crayoning and all that stuff.' She touched her husband's face. 'Sometimes we can just be together.' Becca

put down the wine glass and glanced at her watch. 'We're going to have to pick her up from ballet soon,' she said.

'I'll get her,' he said.

'You don't mind?' Becca said, running her hand over the lacquered wood of a red Chinese lamp. 'I could spend all day in here.' She picked up the wine glass again and slowly twirled it. The Chinese symbol looked like it had been drawn in frost. 'Do you have any idea what this means?' she asked.

'Double Fortune,' Bill said. 'It means a happy ending for both of you.'

'Full moon,' said the ballet teacher, and the class raised both their hands above their heads. Bill watched Holly, her pale face frowning with concentration, and imagined her on stage for the Royal Ballet, hugging a bouquet to her chest as she took a standing ovation, her proud father wiping a tear from his eye in the stalls.

'Half-moon,' said the teacher, and all the little girls in their pink tutus – and one weird curly-haired boy in white shorts and vest – dropped their right hands to their side, apart from Holly, who dropped her left hand.

Bill smiled as she did a double take at her friends, and corrected herself.

'No moon,' said the teacher, and the class dropped the other hand to their sides, and Bill was amazed how the frail little girl Holly had been a year ago was turning into a bundle of endless energy.

She was still thin and pale and slighter than her contemporaries, but the asthma attacks were further apart, and less severe, and she no longer looked as though a strong wind would carry her away.

As the class began running around in circles, their faces beaming with delight, flapping their hands close to their

sides – 'Small wings,' the teacher had commanded – Bill thought she was growing into the person she was meant to be. She was becoming herself.

After the class he helped her out of her pink leotard, pink tutu and pink slippers and into combat trousers, T-shirt and trainers.

'I can do it by myself, Daddy,' she said impatiently, as if he was the biggest idiot in the world. He watched her as she attempted to force her left foot into her right shoe.

They were meeting Becca in a coffee shop across the street from the Gubei International School.

'I need my pens, Daddy,' Holly said as he scanned the place for a table.

'I've got your pens and some paper, angel,' he said, and he held her hand as they moved quickly to the one spare table. The tabletop was covered in the crumbs of half-eaten muffins and the sticky circles of stained empty cups. Bill cleaned the table, then got out the crayons and sketchbook from her rucksack.

'Okay?' he said.

'Okay,' she said, not looking at him, yanking the top off a felt-tip and already immersed in the act of creation.

He went to get their drinks. When he came back she said, 'Look at this, Daddy,' and held up a picture of a stick creature with a lopsided smile, wild yellow hair and a pink dress. Her drawing was getting better. She still drew straight lines to represent arms and legs, but her faces were getting more expressive, the eyes and mouths of the round blob heads conveying real emotion. Perhaps she would be a painter. Perhaps she would be another Matisse. Perhaps his daughter would be the greatest painter who ever lived.

'It's brilliant, angel,' he said, unwrapping a straw and placing it in her orange juice. 'But what is it?'

Holly looked outraged. 'It's me,' she said, amazed that he

was so stupid that he hadn't got it immediately. 'Can't you see?'

'Now you point it out,' he said.

They were sitting at the end of a line of booths. In the one closest to them, two white boys in suits were arguing.

'But you can't compare Bangkok and Manila,' one of them said. 'It's like comparing a team of battle-hardened professionals with a bunch of happy amateurs.'

'Well, that's my point exactly, dickweed,' said the other suit. Bill realised they were both Brits, although he couldn't quite place the accents. They were not quite Londoners.

'The thing about Manila,' one of them said, 'is that they will fuck you blind for nothing. Whereas in Bangkok you have to give them a credit-card number before they even look at your knob.'

'Look at this, Daddy,' Holly smiled, holding up her drawing. There was a large stick man with a foolish grin in the corner. 'That's you,' said Holly. 'You're waiting for me.'

Becca walked into the Coffee Planet and came over to them, all smiles, kissing them both and saying, 'So how was it?' as she pulled up a chair. And then, to Bill, looking at his clenched face, 'What's wrong?'

'But Bangkok and Manila can't compare to Hong Kong in the old days,' said one of the suits in the adjacent booth. They were loud enough to hear every word. Holly kept drawing. Becca looked at Bill and Bill stared off at nothing. 'My granddad, right, my granddad Pete, he was in Hong Kong at the end of the war and he got a blow-job through the wire.'

The suits laughed. 'What?' said the other suit, not quite believing. 'He actually had his knob -'

'I'm telling you – my granddad Pete was on the Hong Kong side, patrolling the border, keeping out the mainland wetbacks, and he had his knob through the wire and was sucked off through the wire. Cost him a shilling.'

'A shilling?' said the other suit. 'What's a shilling?'

'Bill?' Becca said, but he was gone, stumbling over the Simply Life bag that he had placed between his feet.

Then both the suits looked up to see Bill standing over them, leaning into the booth, his knuckles resting on their table.

'You want to keep it down?' he said. He was trying to stop his voice from shaking, but it was no good. His voice was shaking all over the place. 'I've got a little girl here.'

The two suits looked at Bill and then at each other. They smiled uncertainly. They were accustomed to doing what they liked. Then one of them laughed.

'It's a free country,' he said, and they both had a real chuckle at that, and they kept laughing until Bill picked up a large glass sugar shaker and hurled it at the wall between them. The suits sprang to their feet, glass and sugar dusting their jackets and shirts, scrambling out of the booth.

For a long moment he thought he might have to fight them. And that was a horrible prospect, the idea of rolling around on the floor of a Coffee Planet with a couple of his fellow countrymen, but it was fine too. He would beat them or, more likely, they would beat him. He didn't much care. All he cared about was that it ended. The talk that his daughter should not have to listen to. But they did not want to fight him and Bill turned to watch them go. He was aware that the crowded coffee shop was completely silent. His wife was holding his daughter and they were both staring at him as if they had never seen him before.

'Jesus Christ,' one of the suits shouted on his way to the door. 'De-caf for Dad from now on.'

Bill sat down with Becca and Holly and tried to pick up his coffee. But his hands were trembling harder than ever. He put the cup down. He didn't speak, and he did not touch anything. He was too shaky. So he just stared at the table,

waiting for his breathing to come back. He hoped that Becca might say, Thanks for standing up for us, Bill, thanks for being a man. But he knew there was no real chance of that happening.

'Do you know what you do with idiots like that, Bill?' Becca said.

Bill looked up at her, and swallowed hard when he saw Holly burying her face into her mother's chest, hiding behind her hair, watching him through the blonde veil. 'Why don't you tell me?' he said.

'You ignore them,' she said. 'Because they are nothing. And if you get down to their level, then you make yourself nothing too.'

He wiped his eyes. He was so tired. He wanted to curl up in the booth and sleep. Then he realised that he had kicked Becca's shopping across the floor when he jumped out of the booth.

He reached for it, picked it up and placed it on the table like an offering for his wife and daughter, and he watched Becca flinch as she heard the soft shifting jingle of broken glass.

He had looked for her for most of the night. He had to look for her. How could he not look for her?

He had looked for her on Mao Ming Nan Lu and on Tong Ren Lu, pushing his way through the hard-core crowds that refused to go home. He thought he saw her face across the mobbed dance floor of Real Love, silhouetted against the red neon heart that throbbed on the wall. Then he thought he saw her again in a beer-stained red leather booth at BB's, a Chinese girl with a ponytail, her face covered by the cropped blond head of a Westerner. He pressed his face close, blood pumping, and then the kissing couple broke, and as the man raised a fist Bill realised with a gasp of relief that it wasn't her.

And he saw her in his head, in the blackest parts of his imagination – beaten in the back of a car, raped in an alley, murdered behind locked doors. Dumped in the street. Or back in the arms of her married Chinese man, tired of the endless drama with her Englishman, happy to be back between familiar sheets, murmuring sweet nothings and second chances in her own language, and moaning with pleasure.

Oh, he saw that all right.

He had no trouble seeing that.

But he looked for her and did not find her.

He went to the police station on Renmin Square to report her missing. Nobody on the front desk spoke English. Nobody even came close to understanding him.

Men who looked like migrant workers were being dragged down to the cells. A ten-year-old beggar boy sat weeping and wiping his bloody, broken nose on his sleeve. A taxi driver and his passenger screamed at each other and had to be held apart by laughing cops. Bill went away, suddenly knowing where she would be.

At the roller-skating rink he thought he saw her face -the hair flying, the lovely face with its goofy grin of pleasure, long legs in faded denim expertly balanced on ancient skates – but it was not her, it was just someone with the look, and the city was full of them.

At the edge of the rink a girl, no more than fifteen, pulled at his sleeve. He turned to her with the hope flooding through him. Was it one of her ex-students? She had the red-cheeked face that you saw on the migrant workers.

'You looking for girl, boss?'

'Yes,' Bill nodded. 'Li Jinjin – do you know her? She was a teacher -'

The girl was nodding emphatically. 'You take me with you, boss. I'm a nice girl.'

Then there was another one, talking to him in Mandarin,

and another one with just a few jagged shards of English, and another one that could only say, Nice girl, boss, as though she had learned it in night class. Prostitution for Beginners, Module One, he thought, as grubby hands slipped into his pockets to explore whatever was in there, until he pushed his way through them, feeling as if he was suffocating.

Outside there was a sign in English plastered across the side of the ugly concrete building that housed the roller-skating rink. ACQUIRED FOR DEVELOPMENT, it said. LUXURY SPACE TO RENT

And then he realised that there were signs all along the ramshackle buildings of the little backstreet. CONDEMNED, they said, as he slowly walked past them down the unlit street. CONDEMNED. CONDEMNED. CONDEMNED.

twenty-four

Some nights he would go to the flat in Hongqiao and let himself in with the spare set of keys and then he would wait for her, he would wait for her until around midnight and when she still had not come he would go back to Paradise Mansions at the time he would be expected home, even though he knew they would be sleeping.

On the first night he wandered the apartment, tormented by the signs and souvenirs of who she was – the Sony Handycam bought to launch her TV career, the stacks of crossword puzzles, the selections that had been made from the piles of CDs and DVDs – a live Faye Wong CD, an obscure Zhang Ziyi film – and the photographs on her bedside table.

The framed picture of the pair of them in the rain on the bridge in Guilin, another picture of him at his desk in the London office, white shirt sleeves and a tie and so much younger, something he had given her when they started, and a third picture of Jinjin on graduation day flanked by her mother and her sister, that family of women.

But after the first time he no longer saw these things, the puzzles and the pictures, and they no longer hurt him. By

the second time he had stopped calling her mobile, which was always off, and stopped leaving messages. And on the third time he was standing by one of her overflowing wardrobes, holding a green qipao in his hands, burying his face in it, feeling ridiculous but doing it anyway, trying to drown in the memory of her in that dress, when he suddenly looked up, hearing the key in the lock.

She came into the apartment with little ChoCho in her arms. They both seemed surprised to see him. He went to her and wrapped his arms around the pair of them.

She smiled, nodded, and jiggled little ChoCho on her hip. T had to go back home,' she explained. 'My sister is working. My mother is sick. In the hospital.' 'What's wrong with your mum?' She clenched her fist. 'Stiff,' she said. 'All stiff. Pain.' 'Arthritis?' he said. 'Rheumatoid arthritis?' Jinjin grimaced. 'Getting old,' she said. 'Getting old lady.' 'Sorry,' he said. 'I'm so sorry I said those things.' He squeezed her tight. She laughed and kissed him. ChoCho slowly stared from one to the other with his huge solemn eyes. Then a young man walked into the apartment carrying a folded stroller and a battered suitcase.

'Ah, thank you, Brad,' she said, all polite formality and gratitude.

Brad? Who the fuck was Brad?

Bill watched him carry her things inside. He was not the typical Shanghai suit. He was in T-shirt and Levi's, pumped up and wearing glasses. He had that Liam Neeson speccy-hunk thing going on. The glasses made him look vaguely sensitive, but the muscles stopped him looking like a nerd. Maybe one of those wasters who teach English as a foreign language instead of working for a living, Bill thought, narrowing his eyes at Brad – fucking Brad – and then Jinjin.

'Brad – this is my boyfriend Bill,' Jinjin said, smiling from one to the other. The two men shook hands and Bill's features froze into civil indifference. / don't care, his face tried to say. You mean nothing to me.

'I live upstairs,' Brad said. Australian accent. No, a bit more clipped than the Aussies. A kiwi, Bill guessed. 'I was coming back from the gym when I saw the pair of them getting out of the cab.' He had the nerve to stroke ChoCho's cheek with a hairy finger. 'Well, I'll let you crack on,' he said, beaming at Jinjin. Bill knew what he wanted to do to her, and it wasn't just carry her luggage. Fucking Brad …

When he had gone, Bill took ChoCho and watched Jinjin busying herself in the flat. Relief had been replaced by suspicion. As she crashed about in the kitchen, he rocked the child and went over the encounter in minute detail. The way that Brad had smiled at Jinjin as he kindly carried her things into the flat. The way she had touched his arm when introducing him to Bill. The way she had called Bill my boyfriend - what was that? Goading the nice man upstairs? Letting him know that she was in demand? Letting him know that the good ones are always, always taken.

Jinjin smiled at the sight of him holding her son and he smiled back, knowing that there would be plenty of opportunities for the nice New Zealander upstairs to knock on her door when the boyfriend was not around, and knowing that he could not trust her, this man who knew that he could not be trusted, this man who knew he would betray her in the end.

For there was a part of Bill that could not help believing that Jinjin Li was just like him.

'We were up at Yangdong and it's going to be so beautiful,' Tess Devlin said, lifting her voice above the restaurant din. 'It's incredible what they've done up there – these magnificent

houses rising out of goat farms, or whatever they were She glanced at her husband. 'And we're thinking of buying one, aren't we? If next year's bonus is as big as we all hope.' She lifted her glass to Shane and Bill. 'Got to work hard, boys.'

Bill and Shane laughed dutifully. 'We're doing our best,' Shane said.

'Is the air better up there?' Becca said. 'The air must be better.'

'And it's so good to get out of the city for the weekend,' Tess nodded, signalling for the waiter to bring another bottle of champagne. 'Give the boys somewhere to ran wild.'

'Indeed,' Devlin said, stiff with dignity. He was drunk. They were all drunk. The dinner was to celebrate the return of one wife, and to begin the search for a new one, but it had gone on for a few bottles too long, as dinner on the Bund always did. 'Let the little buggers wear themselves out,' Devlin chuckled.

There were six of them. Bill and Becca. Tess and Devlin. And Shane placed next to a blonde South African woman, somebody Tess Devlin had found in her Pilates class, one of the new fashion people that had suddenly washed up in Shanghai – a stylist, she told them, as if any of them had any idea what that meant. Well, maybe Becca and Tess did. But Shane and the South African had not hit it off – he was too much the straight macho suit for her tastes, and Shane was still in mourning for his wild young bride. He looked sullen, shy, closed up in the presence of all this domestic chitchat. But by the time the table was littered with bottles, the stylist was starting to look better.

'Any chance of a shag tonight?' Shane asked.

'Every chance of a shag,' said the South African, staring straight ahead. 'But not with you.'

'Saw some of the locals,' Tess was saying to Becca. 'Talk

about the great unwashed. The children look like little chimney sweeps. Like urchins out of Dickens, you know? The Artful bloody Dodger or something. And they just gawp at you with their little black faces. They just stand there and gawp. Gawping – it's the only word for it.'

The South African turned to Tess. 'I've seen some of those migrant workers selling fake watches outside Plaza 66,' she said, suddenly animated. 'They're filthy. I nearly puked.'

Bill smiled, shook his head. 'But, Tess,' he said gently, 'those kids – half of them never see the inside of a school. That's why they're so dirty – they're in the fields all day. You know what the schools out there spend half their budgets on? Wining and dining school inspectors. They can't tell those important men there's nothing for dinner …'

'Oh, Bill,' Tess laughed, shaking her head, as if he were pulling her leg.

'It's true!' he insisted, wanting her to believe him. But he had drunk too much. He knew that. He shouldn't have started with this. But he thought of the boy he had seen being beaten at Yangdong, and he could not keep his mouth shut. 'The kids of those farmers up at Yangdong have been left behind, and they'll always be left behind. There's no difference between them and some laid-off state factory worker in the Dongbei. China doesn't need them.'

Becca got up to go to the rest room. Bill noticed her catch his eye and tap her watch with her index finger. They had to get back to Holly and relieve the ayi.

'It's true there are certain inequalities that have to be addressed,' Devlin said. He lifted his glass to his lips but it was empty. He did a double take. What had happened to his drink?

'I agree,' the South African stylist said, not quite grasping Devlin's point. 'Those migrant workers for a start – the police should do something about them.'

Bill felt his wife's hand lightly touch the back of his head as she drifted away from the table.

'Certain inequalities?' he said to Devlin, ignoring the fashion airhead.

'Have another drink, mate,' Shane said, holding out a fresh bottle, attempting to fill his glass, trying to distract his friend.

Bill ignored him. 'But the whole thing is built on inequality,' he said. 'By the middle of the century China will have a bigger economy than America. And they'll still have five hundred million people living on two dollars a day. They're meant to be Communists, for fuck's sake.'

'They haven't been Communists for a long time,' Devlin said with irritation. 'You know that.'

'And anyway – whose side are you on, Bill?' Tess laughed.

'But you would expect at least a token nod towards equality, wouldn't you?' Bill said, really wanting Devlin to understand. He drained his glass. 'Even if it was just going through the motions, a nod towards fighting injustice, or giving a damn about the poor. Like those kids from the farms in Yangdong. But they don't want equality here. Equality wouldn't work here.'

Devlin looked pained. Shane looked for a waiter and waved for another bottle.

'Without the millions of poor buggers who will work for a bowl of noodles,' Bill said, 'and can be cheated out of even that, this place loses its attraction. China gets rich as long as most of its people stay poor.' He looked up at Shane impatiently. 'Where's that drink?'

'Oh, Bill,' Tess laughed. 'Bill, Bill, Bill …'

Shane refilled their glasses. Bill sipped his champagne. He was tired of champagne. Something about the enforced jollity of the drink was wearing him down. 'Oh what, Tess?' he said. 'What, what, what?'

She leaned across the table, as if it was just the two of them now. 'Without all that horrible inequality, Bill,' she said, in not much more than a whisper, 'you would lose everything.'

He leaned towards her with a faint smile. 'How's that, Tess?'

She shook her head, suddenly disgusted. 'Spare me your tears for the great unwashed, Bill. Everything we have is built on things being exactly the way they are – everything you have right now, everything you will have when you make partner – and everything you've had."

'What do you mean?'

The table was silent now.

He knew exactly what she meant.

'Without the great unwashed – that big supply of desperate humanity who are anxious to work, anxious to spread their legs, anxious to clean our toilets, anxious to eat – we would not have our nice lifestyles, our second homes, our bonus,' she said, and then she seemed to hesitate, then decide something, and plough on. 'AH of the things we currently enjoy. And you would have missed out on your great little adventure.'

He waited.

Daring her to spell it out.

They stared at each other for a long moment.

'Is that the time?' Shane said. He barked at the nearest waiter in Mandarin. Devlin laid a hand on his wife's arm. She didn't seem to notice.

'I don't know what you're talking about, Tess,' Bill said, but beyond the comfortably numb feeling of the booze, he felt the panic rise.

'Can't you see, Bill?' Tess said. 'Don't cry for the great unwashed, because it's all fake. Everything they sell.'

'Those watches are definitely fake,' said the South African.

'I was going to get one for my brother in Durban but I said to him, I said, Peter, they look so cheap.'

Tess Devlin let the contempt show. 'Fake DVDs and fake software and fake watches. Fake orgasms, no doubt. Fake love? Certainly.' She drained her glass, banged it down empty on the table and held his stare. 'Love with Chinese characteristics.'

'You don't know what you're talking about,' Bill said. 'You haven't got a clue. I doubt if you ever really knew one Chinese.'

'In the Biblical sense, you mean?' Tess said.

'Oh, go home,' Bill said.

'Steady on, Holden,' Devlin said. 'That's my wife you're talking to.'

Shane was on his feet, clapping his hands. 'Come on, mate, let's get you home,' he said to Bill. 'Tiger's waiting.'

'Can someone call me a cab?' said the South African stylist. 'The Bund is crawling with beggars.'

Bill stayed where he was and Tess Devlin jabbed a finger at him across the table. 'I warned you when you started,' she said. 'I warned you when you started with your little Manchu slut and you would not listen, Bill. I told you that it ends one of two ways – you either leave your wife or you don't. I told you – / fucking told you, Bill, and you would not listen – it ends one of two ways and it always ends badly.'

Then she looked up and so did Bill and they saw Becca standing at the end of the table, the blood draining from her face, finally understanding everything.

Somewhere a champagne glass broke and there was laughter and Shane was shouting in Chinese.

'Qing bang wo jiezhang, bao ma?' he said, snapping his thumb and index finger together.

Time for the bill.

» л *

Tiger had seen it all before.

He drove them back to Gubei, glancing at them in the rear-view mirror, and wondered why he'd ever thought that these two would be different. But few marriages were ever improved by Shanghai.

What was different about the boss and the lady was that they said nothing. There were none of the flashes of pain and rage, no words spat out as if they tasted bad.

The boss and the lady sat in complete silence all the way home, as if the words they had to say to each other were too terrible to speak, and too terrible to be heard.

Like a normal married couple they let themselves into the apartment and they were both friendly and polite to the ayi, and she told them that Holly hadn't been sleeping very well, and when the ayi had gone Becca went to the second bedroom and from the master bedroom Bill could hear his wife soothing their daughter.

'It's all right, darling, it's all right, darling, I'm here now, it's all right, darling.'

Bill was sitting on the bed when Becca appeared in the doorway.

He looked up at her and he couldn't bear it.

'Who is she?' Becca said, all business-like, stepping into the room and pushing the hair off her face. 'Is she one of the whores who live here or is she one of the whores at Suzy Too?' She smiled bitterly at the look on his face. 'Oh yes – I know all about that place. You think the wives don't know all about that place? So what is she? One of the whores from there or one of the whores from here?'

He muttered something and she took a step closer to the bed. 'What?' She had a hand cupped to her ear. 'Can't hear you.'

He raised his eyes. 'I said,' he said quietly, 'she's not a whore, Becca.'

She hit his face with a flurry of furious blows. 'Stupid … stupid … stupid

Left right, left right, hitting his mouth his eyes his nose. He lowered his head but did not try to cover up. He felt her ring finger catch the side of his nose and bring tears to his eyes.

'Oh fuck you and fuck her too,' Becca said, dismissing it all. 'You're welcome to each other. You deserve each other. What did you tell her?' Slipping into a mocking sing-song voice, a grotesque parody of romantic sweet nothings. 'My wife doesn't understand me .. .we haven't got along in years … it will not always be this way, baby … trust me, baby, we can work it out… you're the best thing that ever happened to me …"

And perhaps that's what it was, he thought, and what it would always be. A grotesque parody of the real thing. She sat next to him on the bed and covered her face with her hands.

'You broke my heart,' she said, her voice choked. 'You broke my bloody heart, Bill.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, putting one hand on her shoulder. 'I'm so sorry.' He said her name. He said it again, and he made her name sound like a question. 'Please don't stop loving me,' he said.

'Don't touch me,' she said, and he took his hand away. She took a deep breath, stopped crying, wiped her nose, suddenly all icy calm. 'Don't touch me when you've been touching her,' she said. It was like a new rule for their new life. 'And don't kiss Holly with a mouth that's been on that dirty Third World whore.'

'Don't kiss my daughter?'

Becca nodded. 'You stay right away from her.' She

narrowed her eyes to thin slits of loathing. 'You stay right away from my daughter, you fucking bastard.'

He stared at his hands, and weakly muttered something that she didn't get, although it made her look up at him with eyes blazing, snot and tears on her face. 'What?'

'I said – she's my daughter too.'

She bared her teeth at that. 'Well, maybe you should have thought more about that before you started. How does it work, Bill? Do you have exclusive fucking rights? Or have you got her on a time share?' Becca shook her head. 'Are you going now or in the morning?'

He hung his head. 'Never.'

'What?' She was up now, pacing around the master bedroom, her arms folded across her chest.

'I'm not going.' There was no blood in his voice. All the blood had gone. He said the words but he didn't sound convinced. It was as if his wife had all the power now. 'I'm never going.'

Her voice was perfectly reasonable, but a little impatient, as if she was explaining something obvious to the village idiot.

'But, Bill – we don't want you here.'

'You mean you don't want me here.'

'That's right. I don't want you here.'

'But I don't want to go.'

'Why not, Bill?'

'Because I love you.'

'That's a fucking laugh.'

'And I love my daughter.'

He thought that it was the one thing she could never deny or refute. But she did. Even that. She stood in front of him, happy to explain why he had to leave.

'You love your daughter but you would break up her home – and break her heart – and give her a wound to carry for a

lifetime for some dirty Third World whore. You don't know, Bill. Your parents didn't divorce. Your mother died. It's easy when one of them dies. All you feel is sad. When someone dies, you feel sad. But when one of them goes – when one of them walks out – then you feel so worthless. You just feel so worthless, and I don't think you ever get over it. I think a part of you always feels worthless, as if you deserved it, as if you made it happen, as if it happened because you were bad.'

'Then let me stay. Let me stay for Holly, if not for you.'

'But you've made staying impossible. Can't you see that?' She dissolved before him. Something seemed to crumple inside her. 'How could you be so cruel? To us, Bill. How could you be so cruel to the two people who loved you more than -oh fuck,' she said, and she sat on the bed, racked with grief, and he didn't dare touch her again. She pulled herself together, wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. 'Let me ask you a question, Bill.'

'What is it?' he said, and swallowed, afraid of what she would say, afraid of what was ahead.

'Was it worth it?' Becca said.

He knew she hated him now. He knew that he had ruined it with Becca and he knew that it was likely that his daughter's life would be changed forever by what he had done. And he knew that no matter how many times he talked about how much he loved them, and begged to stay, their little family could never be the same again.

'Nothing is worth this,' he said, and he believed it with all his heart. She looked into his face, trying to understand him, not getting him, completely mystified by the man she had married.

'Did we mean so little, Bill? I mean you and me. Our marriage. Don't you get it? Marriage is time. Marriage is trust. Marriage – I don't know what it is, but I know you

don't get it from somebody you pick up in a bar. You think you're smart. Sneaking around behind my back, keeping it hidden. You think you're so smart.'

He shook his head. 'No, I don't think I'm smart.'

'But you're stupid,' she continued, not hearing him, her voice breaking. She breathed hard, struggling to hold herself in one piece. She had things to tell him before she came apart. 'Oh you're so stupid, Bill, oh you're such a fucking cliche. Now Holly is going to grow up with one parent, she's going to be one of those poor little kids that only has one parent because the other one was fucking around and it will scar her and it will hurt her forever and she will never get over it.' He thought she was going to hit him again but she shook her head, sadder than he would have believed possible, and that was so much worse. 'And it will all be your fault,' she said, and he knew she was right. 'And you betrayed me. I loved you and I trusted you and you chucked it all away. You treated it like it was nothing. All our time together -nothing. All the things we went through – nothing. You've spoilt everything that was good in my life.'

She hung her head.

'Bee?' he said. 'Oh, Bee, don't cry.'

But she cried and cried. He tried to hold her but she lifted her hands, forbidding it. 'She's not the love of your life, Bill. Is that what you think? She's just your dirty little secret. And it's not passion – you think it's passion? It's the opposite. All the lies, all the planning – it takes a very cold heart to do all that. You must be a very cold-hearted bastard, Bill.' She covered her face again, but she had stopped crying. 'Oh fuck. Why did I choose you? Why did I choose a cold-hearted bastard like you? When I think of all the places I could have been.'

'I'll make it up to you, Becca, I swear.' His voice was desperate now. 'I'll make it up to you.'

She frowned, shook her head. 'But you could never make it up to me,' she said. She stood up and walked wearily, to the door. 'I'll sleep with Holly. I can't stand to be around you. I loved you so much and now I can't stand to be around you. How did you manage that, Bill?'

'Bring Holly in here with you,' he said. 'I'll go in the other room.'

But she had had enough.

'Oh just get out of my life,' she said quietly. Dead on her feet, as if the strongest feeling of all was exhaustion. 'Just pack your bags and go. I'm sick of looking at you.'

He stood up, but made no move towards her. 'I'm so sorry, Becca.'

She exhaled wearily. 'How many times are you going to say that?'

'Until you believe me.'

Then she seemed so sad and exhausted, leaning in the doorway of their bedroom, as if she was already in mourning for the marriage, as if it had been a beloved living thing that had died.

'Oh, it's too late to be sorry,' she said.

Then she left him and he heard her getting into bed with Holly and after a while he took off his clothes and got into bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to them stir in the other room from time to time. It was Holly that always started it – he could hear the distressed waking from dreams, and then Becca's soft, reassuring words, followed by the long silence of sleep, or at least the attempt to find sleep.

Bill did not sleep, but he must have been close to it because at some point in the night he realised that she was suddenly standing over his bed.

She had been awake too, and she had been thinking, and she wanted some answers.

'Who is it?' she said, her voice hoarse from the crying. 'Is it one of the girls here?'

He nodded. 'But she's gone. She doesn't live here any more.'

He had visions of Becca at the window of Jinjin's flat, tipping her possessions into the street, although he knew that would never happen in a million years. She had too much pride, too much class. Becca would just cut him out of her life and would never treat Jinjin as a rival. Nobody had stolen her husband. He had given himself away.

'What one?' Becca said. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffed up with all the hurt and anger of the night, but her voice was controlled now. She just wanted to know. 'Don't tell me,' she said, as if it was some sort of game. 'I can guess. The one with the red Mini and the legs. Is that the one?' She looked at his face and she nodded, not even needing a reply. 'Oh, Bill – she's nothing special. She's not a world-beater. There are younger and better out there.' She saw the look on his face. Of course there were younger and better out there. That was the world. There was always younger and better out there. But that didn't mean you wanted them.

'I don't care what you do, but keep her away from Holly, keep your whore away from my daughter,' Becca said, her question answered, the fury coming on like a fever, the anger tightening her throat, her face. 'You think you're a good parent, don't you, Bill?'

He shook his head. 'I wouldn't claim that for myself.'

'But you will never be a good parent until you put your child before and above everything, Bill,' she said, as if he had not spoken. 'Including the woman you want to spend your life with. Including the woman you want to fuck. You know – your Chinese whore.'

She walked to the door, pulling at her wedding ring,

struggling to get it over the big first knuckle, and she threw it at him from the doorway. It clattered against the wall and he could hear it spinning on the floor.

He had thought on their wedding day that the rings they exchanged would last them a lifetime. Now he saw that wedding rings get lost, they get stolen, they get thrown in anger. Now he saw that you might get through any number of wedding rings in a marriage. Now he found it difficult to believe that he had ever been as young as he was on their wedding day, young enough to believe that you only need one wedding ring.

She came to him in the morning, wrapped up in a robe and shivering as though she was freezing, and she watched him packing a suitcase.

'I love you so much,' he said, not looking at her, not looking up from what he was doing. 'You're the best friend I ever had. You don't deserve this.' He was crying now, but a restrained sort of crying, the sort of crying where you clench your teeth and tighten your jaw because you fear that if you let it all out you will just unravel. 'I'm sorry I hurt you. I know you're sick of hearing it, but I am.'

She sat down on the bed, next to his suitcase. Her eyes were almost closed now from all the crying. She placed one of her bare feet on the edge of his suitcase. 'How do I forgive you, Bill?'

He shrugged, shook his head. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't see how you can.'

'Truth is, I can't.' Her face was lovely, even streaked with tears and puffed up with grief, and he thought of all the men that had been after her, and he wondered it too – Why choose me?

'And I can't trust you,' she said. 'Even if we – how can I ever trust you? But this marriage is not just about us

any more, is it? It's about that child asleep in the next room.'

He looked at her, and he realised what she was saying. What she was offering. She raised a hand, telling him not to get carried away. 'You've ruined it, Bill. You've ruined it forever.' Her mouth twisted with resentment at his stupidity, and at all he had inflicted upon her, all that real, unendurable physical pain. 'Because you fucked around^ she said, and wiped her eyes. 'I can find a better husband than you.' She nodded. It wasn't open to debate. She knew this to be true. 'A better man than you. I know I can get a better man than you. You think you're anything special? But …' She laughed, shook her head and dragged her hands across her face. 'But I don't know that I can find someone who is a better father than you. I don't know if I can get a better dad for my daughter. Someone who loves her as much as you do. I don't know if I can find a man who will love Holly as much as you do, Bill. And a man who my daughter will love as much as she loves you. I don't think so. I don't think I can.' She shook her head. 'Which is a bloody shame, isn't it? For all of us.'

'Don't stop loving me,' he begged her. 'Please don't stop loving me.'

'Maybe it just wears out,' she said. 'You and me. Everybody. Maybe you just use it up, wear it out. I didn't feel that we were worn out. You and me, Bill. I loved you. You were the man I wanted to spend my life with. That's corny, isn't it? That's stupid.'

He shook his head.

'But maybe it just changes so much that we all end up married to strangers,' she said. 'Total strangers. And if you're lucky, you like them. Even love them. But you can't pretend that it's the same person you married.'

He touched her arm and said her name but she gave no sign of noticing. He felt like he had killed her.

'Marriage starts off as a love match and ends up as – I don't know what it is – an economic partnership,' she said. 'A home. A place to raise children. It starts as a love affair and ends up as a family.' She looked at him quickly, as if she was afraid he would miss the point. 'That doesn't mean I stopped loving you. But I love our daughter in a different way, in a bigger way, and I am letting you stay because of her. I loved her from her first breath and I will love her to her last breath. And I let you stay because of her. Am I being rational? Am I being mature? Am I thinking about my daughter? Well, fuck you. I feel like teaching you what it feels like. Shall I do that, Bill? Shall I find someone and teach you how it feels?' She looked at him as if something had suddenly occurred to her. 'Why did you stop loving me?'

'I never stopped loving you.'

'What's really funny about you, about all you men, is that you think you're the only one,' she said. 'The only one with choices.'

What was she talking about? Who was she talking about? But Becca didn't say and he didn't ask. He was too afraid of what the answer might be. She was letting him stay. That was enough, and all that mattered.

He lowered his head and she took him in her arms, but she did not hold him tightly, and her body was tense and trembling, as fragile as a Double Fortune wine glass. They lay down on the bed, and they cried together at how the familiar body beside them had suddenly been changed for all time.

He knew that this was not the end. He knew that this night would always be with them, although he had no idea how bad the scar would be, or if they would be able to live with it. One day soon there would be questions – terrible questions, heartbreaking questions, all the questions you

ask of a divided heart. But right now, as Becca got up to leave and the new day streamed in and they heard their child stirring in the next room, she had only one question. 'Is it over?' his wife said.

twenty-five

The helicopter flew straight up and they were suddenly amid the skyline of Hong Kong, not looking at it but hanging in it, hovering like some giant insect by the steel-and-glass cliff face of the Bank of China, with the serried ranks of tower blocks marching up mid-levels to Victoria Peak, a green summit jabbing out of a drifting necklace of pearly mist, the eagles circling above.

There was nothing corny about the Hong Kong skyline. It was not like Shanghai where you always knew that the grand old buildings on the Bund were really just the beautiful leftovers of a colonial dream. This was a place that had been untouched by any ideology, a city that had never worshipped any god but money. Even now, reclaimed by the motherland, Hong Kong was all that the great cities of the mainland aspired to be.

There were seven of them bound for Macau. Bill and Shane together in the back seat of the helicopter with Mitch and Nancy in front of them, leaning into a laptop. Then Wolfgang and Jurgen from DeutscherMonde, looking more alike these days as the old rocker and the weekend golfer both acquired that ripe, over-watered look of the suit who

has seen too many Asian nights. And then Chairman Sun, sitting up front next to the Australian pilot, and staring down at Hong Kong with a proprietorial air from behind his mirrored shades. The pilot said something on the radio and it crackled in Bill's ear, completely indecipherable, and the helicopter dipped its nose, pointed west and buzzed out across the harbour, a frenetic patch of water crowded with tiny wooden junks and a giant cruise ship and the green-and-white Star Ferries that shuttled between Kowloon and Hong Kong island.

Soon they were skimming low over the South China Sea, the water rushing beneath them, and ancient fishing boats suddenly coming out of the fog like ghost ships and then abruptly disappearing.

The waxy yellow earplugs did little to keep out the drone of the engine, and the noise hammered them into silence, and left Bill alone with his thoughts. These days he really only had one thought – the thought that woke him in the middle of the night, his wife asleep beside him, the same thought that kept him from sleeping in the lazy, dreamy hour after making love when Jinjin lay in his arms until it was time for him to go.

Was it over?

It was over because he saw now that he could never leave his wife and child. Becca could throw him out, that was always a possibility, but he could never just walk away from his wife and child. Was it over?

He thought that it would not be over until he stopped caring about the red lights of that Spring Festival and her face on the ice rink and how she looked in her yellow coat. It would not be over while he remembered these things, and he was sure that these were among the things that he would remember on the day that he died.

Was it over? He could never see her again in his life and it

would not be over. Was it over? She could marry someone else and have his child and then another child and it would not be over. Was it over?

Not until he could harden his heart and stop seeing her, not until she stopped loving him as if there was something special about him, not until she stopped loving him as if he was a good man.

Not until she stopped loving him all the time. Not until he knew that she would be just fine without him. Not until he could think about what was going to happen to her without being worried sick.

It would never be over until then.

Last night Bill had come home from the office past midnight and found Becca awake and waiting for him, curled up on the sofa with a book, dressed in a robe and slippers. Her face was pale and drawn and when she looked up at him as he came into the apartment, she seemed to shudder. She clutched at the neck of her robe and the gesture made him think of sickness and hospitals.

He wanted to hold her and he knew he did not dare.

'You didn't have to wait up for me,' he said, hating the strained formality that was suddenly between them.

She laughed and shook her head. 'Oh, but I did, Bill,' she said. 'Oh, but I did because I don't know where you are, do I? And I don't know who you're with, do I?'

There was no real accusation in the words. It was a statement of brutal fact, quietly spoken. But he could feel the rawness of her feelings, and he could understand why it made sleep impossible. She did not trust him and perhaps she would never trust him again and he didn't see how they could live like this.

'It's all this Yangdong stuff,' he said, taking cover in the mundane chores of work. 'There's so much to do before

they open.' He looked her in the eyes and shrugged helplessly. 'I was at the office, Bee'

She laughed and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. 'I know,' she said. 'I know it, but I don't really believe it.'

He sat down on the sofa and she stood up, her book in one hand and the other at the neck of her robe.

'I'm so sorry,' he said, ready to say it a million times, to say it until she believed it.

She nodded and sighed. 'But sorry's not enough.'

Before she turned away he saw the book in her hand and realised that he recognised the thin green paperback. It was something he remembered from school. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

He never knew his wife liked poetry.

He had gone to Jinjin and told her that it was over and they held each other and he could feel the tears on their faces and he knew that they belonged to both of them.

'Don't you see?' he said. 'This could go on for another five years, another ten years, and then where would we be? You want to grow old waiting for something that's never going to happen? Is that what you want?'

And she thought about it. She wiped her eyes and thought about it. For the first time, he believed. She saw herself as someone's forty-year-old mistress. Childless, sleeping alone, and a few years beyond any chance of a happy ending.

'I don't want to hurt your family,' she said. She pulled off a piece of kitchen towel and dried her face. 'Your little girl. Your wife. She has never done anything bad to me. I don't want to steal you.'

'You can't steal people,' he said, unwilling to let her claim responsibility for everything. 'People can't be stolen.'

They talked and they cried until they were both exhausted.

Then he finally got up to go, but she took his hand and placed it against her face, her neck, her thigh.

He shook his head and tried to pull away. Not that. Not now.

And that was when she placed his hand against her breast and he shook his head more violently now and tried to pull away again but she held his palm there until he felt it. It was on the right side of her breast.

A lump the size of a golf ball, a lump as hard as the real world.

The helicopter came out of the mist and suddenly there was the neon glow of Macau, with its Portuguese architecture looking like toy forts in a Victorian nursery and dominating it all, the blazing lights of the giant casinos.

Macau was the very tip of the Chinese peninsula, the end of China, or perhaps the beginning, and the neon sign that identified the Hotel Lisboa, the gaudiest casino of them all, shone like a beacon in the grey twilight, temple to a religion that meant more to the Chinese people than Communism or capitalism ever could, summoning the masses to prayer.

'One day there will be gambling in China,' Devlin had said. 'Perhaps not for a long time. Perhaps not until the Party has gone. Perhaps not until after Taiwan.'

Among the senior suits of Shanghai, this was the most popular theory of how the Communist Party of China would eventually disappear – the old men in Beijing would finally wage their long-promised patriotic war on Taiwan and they would fail miserably. Their planes would be shot down, their missiles would miss or be intercepted, the PLA would never get off the beaches. Then the old men in Beijing would fall, and fall forever – taking their rotten ideology and statues of Chairman Mao with them – with the abruptness and

permanence of the Berlin Wall suddenly becoming a pile of bricks.

'The Chinese love gambling, it's in their DNA,' Devlin told them before they left. 'One day there will be casinos on the mainland and they will make Las Vegas and Atlantic City look like a few slot machines stuck on the end of an English seaside pier,' Devlin said. 'Until then – there's Macau.'

And Bill thought of Jinjin's father, his factory wages gone again on mah-jong, coming home to his wife and two daughters with the loser's rage inside him, his face like thunder at the breakfast table, slowly taking off his belt.

She never had a chance, he thought.

The mamma-san brought the girls to them six at a time. Now only the five of them were left, Bill and Shane sitting on the cracked leather sofas with their clients and Chairman Sun, a fresh round of drinks before them, looking up at the girls. Nancy had gone back to the hotel immediately after dinner. Mitch had disappeared somewhere between the restaurant and karaoke bar. The night was nearing its punchline, and for the first time Bill understood the presence of Chairman Sun. He was here to collect his bonus.

The girls were all in their late teens and early twenties, too young to hide their true feelings. They tried to mask those feelings with a practised blankness, but they couldn't quite pull it off.

They were in turn bored, contemptuous, tired, amused, scared and sweet – though Bill knew it was the kind of sweetness that could curdle into a hard-boiled professionalism the moment a deal was struck.

He looked away from their faces to the giant plasma television. On the screen two lovers walked down a beach with ugly tower blocks in the distance as the Chinese characters

of the lyrics were illuminated on the grubby sand. A sugary melody accompanied the couple. Bill didn't know the song. He did not know any of the songs in here. He was not meant to know the song. This place wasn't built for white boys.

'You have to be the one who cares least,' Shane was saying. 'That's the mistake I made. I always cared more than she did -1 always cared more than my wife. Big mistake. Remember this always, mate – the one who cares the least has all the power.'

The karaoke bar was there to service an exclusively Chinese clientele – winning gamblers spilling out of the casino that occupied the floor below or licking their wounds on their way back to the hotel four storeys above.

The sell here was far harder than anything Bill had seen in Shanghai. The girls were more beautiful than any women he had ever seen, but the karaoke bar made him feel that sex with one of them would be like buying a slice of pizza. He murmured his feelings to Shane.

'But what's wrong with pizza?' Shane said.

In the small sealed room the girls stood waiting while the men sat watching and the giant TV screen waited with two microphones on top, ready for some more wobbly love songs, and they looked at the girls and the girls looked back at them.

Shane spoke to the mamma-san in Cantonese and she conferred with him through a rictus grin of yellow, tea-stained teeth. She must have been a beauty once, but her face was marked with old chickenpox scars, and Bill thought that she had the eyes of a corpse. For all the practised good manners of the seasoned mamma-san, she was not comfortable with the presence of so many Westerners.

Only Shane's fluent Chinese, and the fact that he had been here before and spent big, plus the Chairman's lordly

demeanour, made their presence tolerable. But she was getting impatient.

The way the karaoke bar worked was that five girls were wheeled in, one for each customer, and they stayed for a drink and a bit of a sing-song, and then the mamma-san came back and took the girls out of the room. Next the mamma-san faced the men alone, as she did now, grinning in hideous conspiracy, waiting for them to decide which girls could come back and which girls must be replaced, and which of the girls they wanted sent up to their hotel rooms.

On a busy night – and with the Chinese suddenly transformed into the world's greatest travellers, they were all busy nights now – the supply of girls was not endless. The karaoke bar was a labyrinth of small airless rooms, and they all needed a steady supply of young female flesh. Beyond the frozen smile, Bill could see that the mamma-san was becoming increasingly frustrated. When were they going to decide which girls they would take home for the night?

'You going to stick with the one you've got?' Shane asked Bill, and he nodded.

Bill had spent the last hour sitting with a young woman from Zhuhai, just across the border. Most of the girls in here spoke no English at all, in this karaoke bar with only two neon Chinese characters above the door and no corny English name for them to sneer at, but Shane and the mamma-san had managed to find Bill one who was new, and nice, and quietly terrified, and who had even taken a few English classes.

Bill had shown her the pictures of Holly that he carried in his wallet, and the girl made impressed noises as she sipped her orange juice. He would never know her name, although he tried to say it a few times, but it was just too difficult for him to get, and although she said her bar name was Lovely, he could not bring himself to call her that.

They gave them such ridiculous names.

She generously tried to find him a song he knew in the thick menu – 'Elvis,' Bill told her, 'try to find something by Elvis' – but she had never heard of Elvis and besides, there were no songs for his kind in this place. They were being tolerated. But they were not needed. It felt like someone else's century now. The big-nosed pinkies, deferred to for so long, were no longer needed.

The girl had enough English words for Bill to understand that she was studying to be a beautician and that her younger brother was shelling out good money to become an actor. Before she had left the room he discreetly slipped her a wad of Hong Kong dollars. He felt sorry for the kid.

'You want to pay her bar fine?' Shane asked, already knowing the answer but urged on by the leering mamma-san. Her eyes glittered at Bill as he turned away, shaking his head. Sex with a stranger. Just what he needed. Along with a hole in the head.

The evening was winding down. Bill could smell the cigarette smoke of a dozen casinos on his suit, and he could feel the effects of too much Tsingtao. The drinks were insultingly expensive, but the-mamma-san did not want them sitting here all night. She wanted them to buy a few rounds, bar fine the girls and get an early night.

Shane conferred with the mamma-san. One of the Germans, Jurgen, the one who looked as though he spent his weekends practising his golf swing, had made his selection. The other one, Wolfgang, the forty-year-old in a leather jacket, said he would have one more drink but he was going back to the hotel alone, as he always did. Like Mad Mitch a few hours earlier, Wolfgang had that slight air of sheepishness that the virtuous always displayed in these places.

Shane was with a girl he knew from a previous trip, and

he was going to have her sent over to the hotel, although the thought seemed to give him no pleasure.

Chairman Sun had been entertaining the same girl all night, impressing her with sugary Mandarin power ballads sung with the voice of a dead bullfrog, but she had poured him a glass of red wine without leaving room for the Sprite, and now in a fit of pique he suddenly wanted to exchange her. He was very drunk.

Holding his hands out in front of his chest, his nicotine fingers spread wide to signify giant breasts, he described the qualities he was looking for to the mamma-san, like a wine connoisseur consulting the sommelier.

'One more round then,' Shane said, and the mamma-san went out and came back with all the girls they had been sitting with minus the Chairman's companion. Bill stared at her replacement. He could not stop staring at her. And after a stunned moment he felt the sickening shock of recognition.

The mamma-san grinned and held out her hands, like a magician's assistant at the conclusion of a trick. The girl was short and rather stubby but she had a pretty face and, requested as specifically as a vegetarian meal, large breasts.

The Chairman's eyes narrowed knowingly, an indication of pleasure, and Bill was still looking at the girl, who was wearing the same artfully torn tutu that they all wore, tottering uncertainly on her ill-fitting high heels, like ballerinas in a knocking shop, and he kept staring, and then he was out of his squashy sofa and pulling her to the door.

Because she was Li Ling-Yuan.

Because the new girl was Jinjin's sister.

'What are you doing here?' he said, and even as he was asking his stupid question, he was aware of the mamma-san's angry protest, and the Chairman roaring with displeasure behind him.

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Ling-Yuan looked at him and she finally saw it was Bill and her surprise turned to sullenness in a second and his presence didn't seem to scare her as much as he felt it should. In fact it didn't seem to scare her at all. This wasn't his place.

'What are you doing?' He angrily shook her. 'Answer me, Ling-Yuan.'

Then Shane had a hand on his shoulder and was saying his name over and over, trying to get him to calm down, but he still had hold of Ling-Yuan, and wouldn't let her go. She was trying to pull away from him but he had her by the wrist now, and he was turning to them, trying to explain, aware he had to clear something up. 'I know this girl,' he said, as if that said it all. 'I know this girl.'

'She name Cherry,' the mamma-san said. 'She good girl.'

'Her name's not fucking Cherry,' Bill said angrily. 'I know this girl.'

The Chairman snapped his fingers twice and Ling-Yuan made a move towards him. Bill held up his arm, stopping her. The Chairman was shouting at Shane in Mandarin, the mamma-san was barking in Cantonese, and Ling-Yuan joined the chorus, her voice the self-pitying whine of a spoilt teenager who has been unfairly grounded.

'We're leaving,' Bill said to Ling-Yuan, and he turned to Shane. 'I'm not arguing about it. This is Jinjin's sister. He's not fucking her, okay?' He looked at the mamma-san. 'Nobody is fucking this girl tonight. She quits.' He raised his voice at the Chairman. 'Find somebody else.'

'But she can't just quit,' Shane said quietly, looking pained. 'It doesn't work like that.'

'Then pay her bar fine,' Bill said. 'I don't care. But she's leaving with me now. I mean it, Shane. She's going to get changed and we are walking out of here right now.'

Two bouncers were standing in the doorway. Shane was

talking to the Chairman, placating him, and haggling with the mamma-san. Neither seemed impressed. The Chairman shook his head furiously, his eyes never leaving Ling-Yuan's breasts. The mamma-san took a step back and stood between the two bouncers. The tea-stained rictus grin had gone.

'What are you doing here?' Bill said to Ling-Yuan, as if it was just the two of them.

'Working,' she said, rolling her eyes at the dumbness of his interrogation. He expected her to say, And what are you doing here? But she didn't. She didn't say anything else. As if it was all too obvious to need saying.

Shane consulted the mamma-san and an agreement was reached. 'You can pay her bar fine,' he told Bill. 'But it's the same deal as for the rest of the girls.' He held up a hand as Bill started to protest. 'Sorry, mate. We give the mamma-san the money. We also give her the name of our hotel, a room number and a time. Then she knocks on your door.'

'But this is -'

Shane shook his head, finally losing patience with him. 'You pay her bar fine and agree to see her later or you let her go back to work,' he said. 'Your choice.' Then he softened, and smiled, as Bill let go of Ling-Yuan's wrist. She stared at him like a defiant child. Shane wrapped his arms around his friend, and looked at him with infinite sadness.

'You see, it's different now,' Shane said gently. 'We play by their rules. Or we don't play at all.'

He could see China from his hotel window.

It wasn't much of a view. Just the coastal road to the nearest mainland city, Zhuhai, with its scattering of whitewashed villas, most of them dark and abandoned, and the wild palms swaying under a string of yellow lights as the winds built in fury. Every once in a while lightning cracked

across the sky and illuminated the scene. Rain began to fall.

He thought about calling Jinjin. He thought about calling Becca. But in the end he called no one, and he stood waiting for Ling-Yuan to come, watching the late-night traffic on the road to Zhuhai, and checking his watch.

Then he thought perhaps she will not come. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Why should she come at all? Failing to show wasn't going to get her the sack. Why come to his room to be shouted at by her sister's boyfriend? He was sure she would not come.

And that's when she knocked on his door.

She looked like someone else. The tart drag and make-up had gone. She wore a black T-shirt and trainers and jeans that, as she came into his room, he saw said Juicy on the back. Like something her big sister would wear. Perhaps even an old pair of Jinjin's jeans. No, they were nowhere near the same size. She was buying her own clothes now. No more hand-me-downs from her big sister. She had her own money. She came into the room and as she walked past him he saw there was a line of flesh and a slither of thong showing between the bottom of her T-shirt and the top of her jeans. She turned in the centre of the room to face him, and he shook his head.

T don't believe you,' he said. 'What would your mother say? What would your sister say?'

But she was prepared. Now he understood why she had to come to his room. To justify herself.

'My sister have someone,' she said furiously. She had that Chinese ability to suddenly flare up, to go from placid blankness to self-righteous rage in one swift move. 'My sister always have someone to take care her. The man, the Shanghai man. Now you. Rich foreigner. But I have no one i о take care.'

He shook his head. It wasn't enough of a reason. Nothing could ever be enough of a reason.

'Ling-Yuan, if you needed money, I could have given it to you. Your sister could have given it to you.' His voice was soft. He still thought he could save her. 'Not this way, Ling-Yuan – this is not the way to go. You must know that.'

Her small white teeth were bared in defiance.

'That factory you take me no good,' she said. 'Just enough money to eat. The boss a bad man. He do bad things to girl. The money not enough to send home. You understand? My mother sick. Do you understand?'

'I know your mother's sick.'

She held up her fingers and waggled them. 'Karaoke money – four time, five time better than that factory. Ten time better. Good night.'

'Selling yourself – is that what you want? I can't believe that's what you want.'

'Factory very bad,' she said, turning away from him and going over to the window. He watched her staring out at the rain and the lights of the distant road. The wind whipped and screamed through the palms. It was raining harder now. Something was moving down the road. At first he took it for some kind of large runaway vehicle, a truck with the brakes gone, but it was a billboard that had been ripped from its moorings. It featured the face of a smiling girl holding a pink mobile phone and she seemed to smile up at Bill as the billboard rose and twisted and disappeared into the darkness, on the road to China, its movement as graceful as a giant kite.

'Typhoon season starting,' Ling-Yuan said, like a lethargic weather girl. 'Start of June. Always the same. Typhoon coming in June, July, August. This year very bad. Maybe many typhoon.'

He came and stood next to her, not knowing what to say.

He felt as though the damage had been done. Even though the real damage hadn't even started yet.

'That's the road to Zhuhai,' he said quietly. 'You can see the mainland from here.'

'I know,' she said, surprising him, and then shocking him, and clearly loving it. 'I been this hotel before.' She looked around, as if searching for something she might have left behind. 'Maybe even this room …' She smiled at the look on his face. 'I been Macau one month – already know every hotel.' Childishly counting with her fingers again. 'Know Hotel Lisboa, Tin Tin Villa, Fortuna, Mandarin Oriental …'

The list of hotels filled him with despair. 'Get about, don't you?' he said.

She nodded proudly. 'Very popular girl. The mamma-san says, "You good girl, Cherry. You best girl in bar."'

He held up a hand. 'Please. Do me a favour, okay? Your name is not Cherry.'

She looked genuinely indignant. 'It beautiful name. Cherry American name.'

He flared up. 'It's a stupid name. Nobody is called Cherry in the West. Nobody is called Cherry in the real world. Mothers just don't call their babies Cherry. It's the name of a bar girl in Asia, it's what some old mamma-san calls a silly little girl like you. Listen to me, will you?' He took her hands, really wanting her to understand. But he faltered because she looked a bit like her sister. A younger, chubbier version of Jinjin.

In many ways the two sisters were physical opposites -one so long and lean and small breasted, and the other so small and round, so round that she looked like a collection of curves. One like a dancer, the other like a milkmaid, or perhaps a barmaid. But he looked at the younger sister as he took her hands and he could not deny that he saw the ghost of the girl he had loved.

'Your name is Li Ling-Yuan,' he said, reminding her, reminding all the men in all the hotel rooms, reminding himself.

She flashed those small white teeth again. Part smile, part grimace. 'Ah, but in that place, in this new life, my name Cherry.'

He shook his head. 'I don't know what I'm going to do with you,' he said, aware of the coolness of her hands, chubby hands, different hands, and he was suddenly conscious of a tightness in his throat. She raised an over-plucked eyebrow and smiled, more widely now, as if what he said was not strictly true. He dropped her hands and stepped away from her. But they kept looking at each other, as if for the first time.

Then she stopped smiling and they were silent and when she finally spoke her voice was barely audible above the drone of the air conditioning.

'Enjoy your good time,' she said, giving an emphatic little nod, and it was all so clear and so matter-of-fact that it was like being hit by a hammer.

Then there was only the moment and perhaps the moment was all there had ever been and all there ever is and all his thoughts of love and forever was just some pre-packaged Western fantasy.

There was just the moment and the girl and the shadows of the hotel room and what you wanted. He took her in his arms and felt the heat rising and she was slowly walking backwards, leading him to the bed.

Then suddenly Bill was pushing her away and pulling her to the door by her elbow and shoving her out into the hotel corridor before he had the chance to change his mind.

'Go home to your mother,' he said angrily, and she raised her almost non-existent eyebrows and laughed at him as if he was joking, or a fool, or as if she would never go home again.

He slammed the door on her and went over to the window and watched the storm building over the mainland as he tried to control his heart and his breathing. Electrical flashes split the night and seemed to illuminate every last drop of rain. He pushed a button on the bedside table. The curtains started to close and he was glad.

He was sick of looking at China.

twenty-six

The rains came and they did not stop.

For three weeks it was all you heard. The rivers that had broken their banks in eastern and southern China. The million people displaced from their homes in Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan and Guangxi. From south of Shanghai all the way down to the border of Vietnam, the wind and the rains came and there seemed to be no end.

It was all you heard. The flooding and the landslides, the farmland submerged, the homes destroyed. Military helicopters dropping bottled water and instant noodles to the displaced. A case of typhoid reported in Hunan. The latest figures of the missing and the dead.

Shane sat in the car park beneath his apartment block, an overnight bag on the seat next to him, his suit still soaked after his brief dash from short-stay parking into the airport terminal.

He was meant to be flying down to Hong Kong again with the Germans but there was nothing in or out of Pudong. Come back tomorrow, said the girl on the desk at Dragon Air. It might be better tomorrow.

So he sat in his car in his ruined suit, putting off the

moment when he would have to go up to the apartment, afraid that his wife might be there, and afraid that she might be somewhere else.

Bill pressed his face against the glass of the maternity ward.

The babies came in many colours at the International Family Hospital and Clinic but they were all swaddled tightly in the Chinese style, wrapped up like little white packages, tiny arms pinned to their sides. Yet his eyes kept returning to one baby.

A girl. He was certain it was a girl, even though he could not possibly know for sure. Half Chinese, half European. Neither asleep nor really awake, its little bud-like mouth moving with some unnameable complaint. The sleeping infant made him smile. There was something about mixed blood that made for strikingly beautiful babies, he thought. He could see all the beauty of the world in that sleeping baby

girl-Glancing at his watch, he turned away from the glass wall of the maternity ward just as Sarfraz Khan was emerging from the lift. Khan walked past Bill with his head down, studying some papers, making it easy for both of them.

Jinjin was in her room, sitting on the bed, her bags packed, almost ready to go home. Her face was still pale from the general anaesthetic. He kissed her on the cheek.

'Just waiting for my prescription,' she told him. 'They're giving me antibiotics and painkillers and then I'll be discharged.'

He sat on the bed holding her hand. It was a whole new vocabulary, he thought. The lexicon of ill health. The realisation that one day your body would betray you.

At the Chinese hospital she had first gone to, they told her that the lump was benign and that she should just learn to live with it. That was old China. Putting up with things

that you did not have to put up with. Bill persuaded her to go to the International Family Hospital and Clinic where she had a minor operation to remove the lump, and told her that the scar would be so small that she would hardly know it was there. But the need for surgery had been a shock to both of them. It felt as if the real world was coming to claim them.

Now Bill put his arms around her, very gently, because he knew she was still in a lot of pain, and she was still nauseous from the general anaesthetic. Not the embrace of a lover, he thought. No, not like a lover at all. They had gone beyond all of that.

He kissed her cheek again, and he thought that it was not really the kiss of a lover. It was more like the kiss of a best friend, more like the kiss of a man and woman who had stuck together in sickness and in health, a couple who were married, and who had been married for a very long time.

They saw the neighbour on the stairs. The guy from the flat above. Brad.

'You all right, Jinjin?' he said, all concerned, as if you could just walk into someone's life and pretend that you cared. As if the bonds could be there in an instant, Bill thought, as if they didn't take time. Brad had the nerve to take her hands. 'Did it go okay?' he said.

So she had told him. They were close enough for that. Now he stood on the stairs, on his way out, and acted like he gave a damn, pressing his back against the wall as Jinjin smiled and nodded and took her hands away. Bill squeezed past him with a bag in each hand.

'She's fine,' Bill said, not breaking his stride.

Then they were in the flat and as she showered he stood in the doorway watching her trying to avoid the dressing on her left breast, a black dot of congealed blood showing

through the gauze, and when it was done they got into bed and lay side by side.

He couldn't stay. Not even tonight, when she was just home from the hospital. That was the unvoiced sadness between them. They both understood that there would come the moment round midnight when he got up and left her and went back home. He wanted to show her that he would do anything for her. He wanted to not just say it, but to prove it with his deeds. But in the end he couldn't even stay the night, and what he wanted meant nothing. He lay there by her side and listened to her voice, her lovely voice soft in the night, as if she was thinking aloud.

'You tell yourself you are going with an unmarried man,' she said. 'But then you see he keeps looking at his watch. Then you see he always checks the mirror to worry about if there is any lipstick showing. And you realise that he can't take your birthday and Christmas gifts home, or that he must hide them if he does. And you wonder how many gifts he has thrown away, gifts that you spent a long time choosing because they said how much you love him. And when you are together, and it is good, it feels so . . . beautiful. Really. That's the word. Beautiful. I know sometimes I get the wrong word. But that's the right word. It just feels beautiful and right. And then when you sit there by yourself – after he has gone, and on all the nights you are alone – it all looks so ugly. And that is the right word too.' She turned her face towards him. 'What am I going to do now, Bill? What's going to happen to me?'

He turned on his side, and put an arm across her belly, and he held her, and he could say nothing. There was a limit to the lies he could tell. He saw that now.

T have to go,' he said, sliding out of bed.

'But before you go,' she said, and he knew that she had planned this all along, 'I want to show you some pictures.'

They were photographs of her sister with her new boyfriend. A large grinning German with his arm around a smiling Ling-Yuan, who since he had last seen her in Macau had piled on the pounds and an engagement ring.

'He's very handsome,' Jinjin said of this spectacularly ordinary man. 'Don't you think he's very handsome?'

'He's bloody gorgeous,' Bill said, and then he hesitated. 'But what about when she was away?' They looked at each other. 'What about that time?' he said.

Jinjin shook her head, quickly leafing through the stack of photos like a croupier with a new deck of cards.

'Nobody talks about that,' she said. 'It's not important any more.' She studied the photographs thoughtfully. 'But I think I have been a better sister to her than she has been to me.'

He reached out for her and she didn't pull away. She didn't flinch under his touch the way he had expected her to. That was where they were so different, that was where they were worlds apart. She could not let go as easily as he could.

T want one thing,' she said. 'I wish I could have our baby. I don't care about you staying with your wife.' She corrected herself. 'I care but I say nothing.' She paused. 'But I want our baby.' Bay-bee, she said. Bay-bee. 'That's what I want.'

And a part of him wanted it too. Even now. For it would have been a beautiful baby. But it would kill him. The start of that new life would mean the end of his own. Because it would mean he finally had two homes, and two wives, and two lives, and those two lives would tear him apart. Bill liked to believe that he would do anything for Jinjin. He liked to tell himself that. But in the end, he could do nothing. Because he already had a wife and a child and they filled his heart. And if his wife no longer wanted him, then they would still fill his heart. He had run out of time.

'I have to go,' he said, and Jinjin nodded, the tears starting

up, because now there was no way forward and no way back and nothing to talk about, and it wasn't until he was at the door that her voice stopped him.

T saw on TV – they said that men never marry the woman they really love,' said Jinjin Li. 'Do you think that's true?'

Bill shook his head. 'No, I don't think it's true,' he said sadly. 'But isn't it lovely to think so?'

There was music on in the flat. Shane heard it before his key was out of the lock. It was not his music. It was not Eddie and the Hot Rods. It was not Thin Lizzy. It was one of those singers his wife liked. Some singer with a shaved head, chains, tattoos. Making seduction sound like a threat of physical violence. It was not '96 Tears' by Eddie and the Hot Rods. It was not 'Do Anything You Wanna Do'. Rosalita and her special friend were not playing Shane's song. They were playing one of the new songs. They were playing their own song.

Shane didn't recognise the man in bed with his wife. And then he did. One of the bar owners from Mao Ming Nan Lu. From a place a few doors down from Suzy Too, one of the places with live music. That surprised Shane because he would have bet money on the bass player. He had always suspected the bass player who from the very start had looked at him with such hatred, as if Shane had come along and spoiled everything. And he was right. Everything had been spoiled, and nothing could ever be good again.

The sheets were half pulled back and the club owner was lounging on a stack of pillows with Rosalita kneeling in front of him with her head between the man's legs.

Her skin was so brown against his pallid European flesh. What was he? French? German? The French and Germans were all over Shanghai. This wasn't Hong Kong. The other European nations had staked their claim here. She had him

in her mouth, the mouth that kissed Shane on their wedding day, the mouth that he had once believed was a perfect match for his own.

The music was loud and it had masked his entry, but then they had seen him and they were cursing, pulling apart, and the man looked so angry that Shane thought he would have to fight him, felt his fists tightening, knew he could take him, even with the man's blood at boiling point.

But the man, this bar owner from one of the places where they had live music on Mao Ming Nan Lu, was angry with Rosalita, he was angry with Shane's wife, not Shane, because after all she shouldn't have brought a man back if the dumb husband was not safely installed at the office or packed off on a business trip.

'You stupid cow,' the man muttered, sliding out of bed as Rosalita pointlessly covered her breasts with a fistful of crumpled sheet, and somehow the insult to his wife was the thing that moved Shane's own blood.

More than the deceit, more than the sight of her beloved brown skin against that soft white flesh, more than what she was doing with her cheating mouth, more than coming home to someone else's music on his sound system. The insult did it. You stupid cow.

He should watch his mouth, Shane thought.

Then the man and Rosalita were arguing with each other while Shane went to the living room, pulled back the Mona Lisa, and tapped in the code: his wife's birthday. He came back into the bedroom with the Makarov in his hand.

They stared at him. And they stared at the cheap Russian gun. Shane sighed. Silence at last. Apart from the sound of someone else's song.

This music is so hateful, Shane thought. So full of real hatred. He felt very calm, although he was aware that he did not seem to be breathing.

Then the bar owner laughed at Shane. He had been here before.

'You're not going to shoot me,' he said confidently, pulling on his trousers and zipping up. 'Rosalita's your friend and she's my friend too, so you're not going to shoot me,' he said.

And that's when Shane shot him in the stomach, shot him with one tiny flex of his right index finger, which produced the sudden crack of sound and the spectacle of the man knocked backwards with his hands clutching with wonder at a gut wound that would kill him, but not immediately, not that Shane had planned it that way, and the man cursed once and loudly in disbelief, clawing at himself as he sank forward on his knees, his head bowed as if in shame, shame at last, the blood spreading on the white sheets.

But Shane didn't see any of that because he was watching his wife, who was screaming for help, Someone, help, he's going to kill me, in that curious Spanish accent that Tagalog speakers bring to the English language, as she crawled across the bed and then on to the floor, and he felt his finger on the trigger again, flesh and bone squeezing on a sliver of cheap black metal. And then he felt it pause.

Her hair was down, not tied and tossed across one shoulder as usual, but hanging loose, as it only did when she was in bed, or she was sleeping, or when she was making love. And with her hair hanging down like that he could see it clearly, he could see the ink stain on her neck.

There it was, for the very last time, the birthmark that Rosalita tried to hide for almost every waking moment of her life. Shane knew then that he loved her and that he was glad he had married her, he would do it all again in an instant.

Shane saw Rosalita's birthmark and knew that the sun

rose and set with her. So he lowered the gun, then lifted it and pressed the barrel against his own pulsing temple and finally squeezed the trigger.

And in the moment before oblivion he thought of how she had looked the first time he saw her, so full of life, you never saw anyone so full of life, and he was grateful for it, all of it, and he remembered further back, one long-forgotten dawn in his youth in Australia, the sun coming up as he waded out to sea, the board in his fists, the water so cool from the waist down that it made him gasp even as he felt the sun on his face and his shoulders, and he remembered one of his first nights in Asia, in Hong Kong it must have been, Kowloon side, he didn't even know enough to be on Hong Kong island, but it was great, with the first Peking duck and hoysin sauce he had ever tasted and also the first Tsingtao, and who had ever tasted duck like that or drunk beer like that, or even knew they existed, the plum sauce on his disbelieving tongue, the skyline across the harbour shining like the stars, and he was grateful for it all, and then he was paddling further out to sea and up on the board and the water on his skin was already drying and the sun was coming up, almost blinding him now.

It was only the last micro moment of his life, but he was aware of all the good things he had known, and how fleeting it had all been, and how could he feel anything but the stab of sadness you get when you know that something so sweet and strange and wonderful will never come again.

part four: see you around

twenty-seven

They had told him it was a village, but it was not quite that – just a jumbled collection of shacks surrounded by rain-lashed paddy fields on one side and a broad, rising river on the other. There was a thick red slime on the banks of the river. That was the reason Nancy Deng was here.

The car bumped down a dirt-track road and the firm's new driver, the driver who wasn't Tiger, an older man who was less likely to rush off to join the gold rush, clung to the wheel and tried to avoid an old woman wheeling her bicycle, her bare feet sloshing through the mud. There were no other cars here.

T can see her,' Bill said. 'Pull over.'

He could see Nancy out in the fields. She was surrounded by a group of villagers, small figures in transparent plastic macs, looking like ghosts against the lush green landscape. Bill got out of the car and took one of the paths that weaved through the paddy fields, his umbrella buckling in the wind. There were streams running through the fields. They were the colour of rust. He said her name and she looked up.

'I'm so sorry about … Shane,' she said, saying his first name for the first time.

Bill nodded. The villagers began to drift away, their heads bowed in the rain. They moved in single file down the path between the paddy fields towards their homes, and he thought it looked like a funeral procession. He stared down at the orange-coloured water beneath their feet.

'That's it, isn't it?' he said. 'From the factories.'

Nancy pointed down river. 'I have a scientist who helps me. Pro bono.' She took off her glasses and wiped them with her fingers. 'He has found traces of heavy metals in the water from the factories.' She put her glasses back on. 'They dump their waste in the river and nobody can stop them.'

The rusty water was soaking through his shoes. 'What do they make?'

'Pesticides. Insecticides. Fluorides. Plastics. The villagers rely on the river for their rice crop, for their drinking water. The rice crops have failed because of the poisoned water. Babies are being born with birth defects. This place has a population of a few thousand, and hundreds of them have died.'

Bill looked at the pitiful little shacks. A cancer village. That's what they called it. 'But what can you do, Nancy?' he said.

'Stop them,' she said. 'Establish the link between the factories and the sickness. Force the government to apply its own laws. Prove that the factories upstream have poisoned these people. Protect the living. Compensate the bereaved. Care for the sick. There are children here with no parents. There are mothers and fathers who are dying. Everybody has let them down. They have nobody. Not the party. Not the government. Nobody to fight for them.'

'Well,' he said. 'They do now.'

She shook her head. 'I'm nothing. I know that. But there are others like me. At legal aid centres. Running hotlines. Working within universities. All over the country.'

He had always felt hope for the future when he looked at Nancy. He knew that there were countless villages like this one, but he also knew there were young Chinese lawyers like her, offering their services for nothing, or a pittance, sometimes holding down jobs in commercial law firms to fund their pro bono work, or until they could afford to quit and do work that meant something beyond a fat salary and a glittering future. And Bill guessed that's exactly what Nancy had been doing in all her years at Butterfield, Hunt and West. Saving up for the day when she knew she would have to work for nothing.

'What I want,' she told him, 'what I want is for the poorest people in the land to have access to the law of the land.' She looked down at the rust-coloured water on her boots. 'You will miss him so much,' she said. 'Your good friend.'

Bill looked away. 'I miss him, we all miss him.' He looked back at her. 'That's why I'm here. Devlin sent me. We've got more work than we can handle. There are new guys coming in from London, but it's not going to be enough. The firm wants you to come back. We need you.'

She shook her head, and indicated the plastic-coated ghosts disappearing into their modest homes. 'They need me more,' she said.

He did not push it. He had known that she would never come back. He had told Devlin that she would never come back. And in his heart he did not want her to come back. He wanted her to stay here and fight for these people. He did not want her to be like him.

'You need to be careful, Nancy,' he said. He had heard what could happen to idealistic young lawyers who did pro bono work for the poor. 'You're dealing with people who get away with murder.'

'I'll be all right,' she said, sounding as if she believed nothing could touch her, and he knew she was wrong. 'It

doesn't matter how rich we get. China will always be a Third World country until the courts are willing to protect the little man. Until we have the rule of law, we will be a nation of peasants.'

'You sound like Mad Mitch,' he said.

'He was the one who talked to me about the rale of law. Did you notice? He talked about it all the time. The rule of law means that the law applies to everyone in equal measure. Where the rule of law does not apply, legal solutions are imperfect. The rule of law is the root and branch of democracy. Mitch believes that what we do is a sacred profession. Like a doctor, you know? He's a good lawyer.'

'But all wrong for this place,' Bill said. 'There's not a lot of the sacred in the PRC

'And how are you?' Nancy asked him.

He seemed almost embarrassed. 'They're making me a partner.'

She congratulated him, smiling for the first time, really pleased for him, because she knew it was what he wanted, and why he was here, and everything he had worked for.

Bill thanked her, and they stood under his umbrella watching the rain on the paddy fields and the red-etched river beyond, and he knew that he would be long gone from this place before it ever broke its banks, but that she would still be here.

Shane's parents were old and bewildered and dumbstruck with grief.

Bill accompanied them to the Australian consulate on the twenty-second floor of CITIC Square and gently steered them through the paperwork required by two nations for the release and transportation of their son's body.

They were staying almost next door to their consulate, at the Portman Ritz-Carlton in the Shanghai Centre, but Bill

had decided that in this rain it would be best to make the short trip by car. This was a mistake. The traffic was not moving on Nanjing Xilu and while Shane's parents sat in stunned, red-eyed silence in the back of the firm's car, Bill sat up front and stared out at the crowds. And that was when he saw them. His wife and the man. They were at a window seat in the Long Bar.

Becca and Dr Sarfraz Khan.

Bill's first thought was Holly. They were talking about Holly and her asthma. But it might not have been asthma. Or it might have been Holly and other things. He did not know. They were sitting on opposite sides of the table, leaning across, Khan talking urgently and Becca listening, his wife just listening.

And he knew that she was right – there are always options, there are always options for all of us. And for the first time Bill saw that it wasn't the seeking and straying and coming apart that was touched by magic, but the staying together.

They stood on the tarmac at Pudong and watched the men loading the coffin on to the plane.

Shane's parents huddled together under an umbrella bearing the name of their hotel. You should not have to do this, Bill thought. You should not have to bury your child. Nobody should have to do what you are doing. He could not imagine life beyond losing your child. What life could there be after that?

Bill stood on one side of Shane's parents and on the other was a man from the Australian consulate. He must have been one of the junior staff, still in his twenties, but his presence gave the act a ceremonial feel.

As the coffin was loaded into the plane, on the same slow-motion conveyor belt they used for the luggage, the young man stood very erect, stiff with decency and respect. Bill was

glad he was here, although as the coffin slid into the hold he could almost hear Shane's mocking laughter. Any chance of an upgrade, mate? They've got me in with the bloody suitcases.

The mother, a large grey-haired old lady, seemed to shudder as her son's coffin disappeared into the plane, and Bill felt like hugging her. The father – shorter and smaller than his wife, and determined to keep a grip on his feelings – was harder to warm to. But then in Bill's experience fathers always were.

The coffin disappeared into the plane. They watched the hold close. It was the last act before flying. The young man from the consulate glanced at his watch. Shane's mother turned to Bill and put her arms around him, clinging to him as if he was holding her up. Then she abruptly pulled away.

'You come and see us,' she said. 'In Melbourne. With your wife and little girl.'

'I'll do that.' Bill nodded, knowing it was unlikely that they would ever meet again. There was a battered leather holdall at her feet. Shane's overnight bag. He had seen it a hundred times. Tossed into the boot of Tiger's car. In the back of the helicopter to Macau. Sitting on Shane's desk in the office, about to accompany its owner on a trip around the country or the continent. The mother picked up the bag and held it out to Bill.

'They found this in the car,' she said. 'Mostly work things.'

'We don't want it,' the father said.