My Favourite Wife. Tony Parsons
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who ducked and dived beneath the women with their toddlers in their arms, the toddlers carried as if they were babies.
But Bill had not noticed the old people and the big children. He had only noticed the toddlers being carted under the arms of their mothers.
Because they all seemed to be just a little bit younger than Holly.
Shane cursed. He had not wanted to walk to the restaurant. He had advised the two Germans that it was better to take the Mercedes and a cab, but they had insisted. They wanted to stroll along on the Bund, and now look what had happened. The beggars were on them, all over them, with their toothless, ingratiating smiles, the rank smell of their clothes and their bodies, all the bewildered faces of the children carried under one arm.
Shane shoved on ahead, shouting at them in Shanghainese, while Nancy pleaded with them and Devlin gave instructions to the clearly terrified Germans. Only Bill dawdled, stunned by a world where children the same age as Holly were begging in the street.
He reached for his wallet, and immediately realised his mistake. He had planned to give some money to the women with children but there were just so many of them, too many of them, and suddenly he was overwhelmed, the coins and notes falling from his fingers and the women with toddlers being trampled by the older children. Empty palms were thrust in Bill’s face.
One of the bigger kids – a weasel-faced runt with a cropped head and the eyes of an old man – grabbed Bill’s jacket and wouldn’t let it go. The child clung on as Bill edged his way through the mob to the building where his colleagues and the Germans were waiting. A uniformed doorman prised the child from Bill’s jacket.
‘Better watch your wad around here, mate,’ Shane said. ‘They’re not all driving BMWs and shopping at Cartier. There are still millions of the little bastards wiping their arses with their hands.’
‘And nobody gets left behind in the West?’ Devlin flared. Then he smiled easily. ‘There’s more upward mobility here than anywhere on the planet.’
Bill was embarrassed, shaken. The Germans were staring at him. One of them was balding and in a business suit, and the other had the long greying hair and the leather jacket of a wild youth. But they were both all business, and they could have been brothers. They murmured to each other in their own language.
Bill wiped sweat from his face. As they went up to the restaurant in the lift, Nancy gave him a tissue for the smear of grime that the young beggar had left on his jacket. He thanked her, his face burning, and dabbed at the mark but saw that it would not budge.
The perfect black print of a child’s hand.
Bill didn’t understand.
Their clients, DeutscherMonde, were investing billions of RMB in the Yangdong project. The company had already built an identical development in the suburbs of Beijing. And yet, as the Germans sat with their expensive lawyers across the dinner table from the local government officials of Yangdong – five men with cheap suits and soft flesh and bad teeth, accompanied by their own lawyer, a bird-thin man of sixty with a shock of dyed black hair, and a slab-like stooge who looked like some kind of bodyguard – it was as if the Germans were the supplicants, the ones most desperate for the deal, the beggars at the feast.
Courses came and went. The Germans sipped their mineral water. The Chinese chain-smoked high-tar cigarettes and swilled soft drinks. The conversation ebbed and flowed from English to Shanghainese, much of it concentrating on the glory of the Green Acres development, and how it would enrich the community.
The oldest of the town’s representatives said the least. With his hooded eyes, long upper lip and frog face, Bill thought he looked like a mini Mao. They called him Chairman Sun. He smoked constantly, even when the chopsticks in his spare hand picked at a dish. Sun made no eye contact, yet still managed to convey the impression that he was mildly dissatisfied with everything, including the project, the food, the choice of restaurant, the presence of so many foreign devils, and possibly life itself.
Only Bill had turned off his phone, and tinny snatches of familiar tunes punctuated the lunch. The Mission Impossible theme, the opening chords of ‘Brown Sugar’, niggling soundbites from Beethoven and Oasis and Faye Wong. Shane pushed his plate to one side and placed his laptop on the table.
‘What do you keep on that thing?’ Bill asked him.
‘The truth, mate,’ Shane told him. ‘The brutal truth.’
Chairman Sun called for the waiter and gave him his instructions. The waiter went away and came back with the wine list. Sun chose a bottle and Shane ingratiatingly smiled and mumbled his compliments in Shanghainese at the excellence of the choice.
Everyone fell silent as they watched the ritual of the waiter returning with the bottle of Burgundy, presenting it to Chairman Sun, who – after a tense moment – nodded his faint approval.
The waiter removed the cork and delicately poured a splash of red wine into Chairman Sun’s glass. His frog face twitched with suspicion as he smelled the wine, tasted it and – after another breathless moment – nodded his approval.
The waiter half-filled Chairman Sun’s glass with Burgundy. Then the Chairman topped it up with the can of Sprite in front of him, took a long slurp and exhaled with pleasure.
Bill glanced across at Shane and Devlin and Nancy and the two Germans.
But they didn’t even blink.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon he came home to an empty apartment.
He placed the stack of files he was carrying on the table, tore off his jacket and tie, and read the note Becca had stuck to the fridge. She had taken Holly to ride the bumper cars at Fuxing Park. He had promised to go with them, if he could get away in time. But Saturday was a work day at Butterfield, Hunt and West.
Bill had spent the afternoon going through paperwork with Shane and Nancy. The contract between the Germans and the Yangdong officials was in Chinese and drawn up under Chinese law, but the deal was structured so that all the important commercial rights were offshore, governed by Hong Kong law with documents in English.
‘It makes the deal easier to enforce,’ Nancy had explained.
‘When someone steals all the money,’ Shane added.
Bill took a bottle of Evian from the fridge and crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty apart from a silver Porsche 911. It looked like a shark waiting its prey on the bottom of the ocean. A 911, Bill thought, yawning as he stretched out on the sofa. A 911 in China…
He woke up with his daughter’s face pressed close, and he could smell the sweetness of her breath as she laughed with delight. She held a brightly coloured plastic figurine in each tiny fist. A prince in one hand, and a princess in the other.
‘Be the prince,’ Holly urged. ‘Come on, come on – be the prince, Daddy.’
He closed his eyes. He had never felt so tired. When he opened them, Holly was still offering him one of the little figurines. He stretched, groaned, and closed his eyes.
‘Later, darling,’ he heard Becca say from the kitchen. ‘Your daddy’s been working very hard for us.’
Bill felt relief as he heard small footsteps walking slowly away. When he opened his eyes he saw his daughter kneeling on the far side of the room, playing quietly by herself, and he felt unkind.
‘Holly?’ He was propped up on one elbow. ‘Yes?’ she said with that shy formality that always touched his heart, and then owned it forever.
He swung his legs round, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘What do you want me to do?’
Holly looked up at him with her perfect face. ‘Go on,’ she said, advancing towards him with the figurines in her hand. She pushed a piece of plastic in his face. A little unsmiling man in a golden crown and trousers that were too tight. ‘Go on, Daddy,’ his daughter urged. ‘Go on, Daddy – be Prince Charming.’
He