Bad Traffic (18 page)

Joy went back to the textbook but the words were just not adhering. She’d served a few figures, and turned a clutch of pages, when Jessica came in. She was wearing her bulky black bomber jacket with the fur-lined collar and she was backed by that lanky girl with the gappy teeth.

Joy considered stepping away and letting her father deal with them, but only for a moment. This had to be done, she supposed, and anyway there was a counter between them. She squared up. She wondered how Mark had done it, and hoped he hadn’t been brutal. Of course, there was no easy way.

Jessica was a small, pretty girl, but now she had a mean set to her jaw and red blotches high up on her cheeks.

She said, ‘I want a pickled egg.’

Joy got an egg out of the big jar and waited for the
punchline
.

‘No, I don’t want a pickled egg. A pickled egg is white on the outside but yellow on the inside. That’s the wrong way round.’

The other girl, the tall one, giggled. Joy dropped the egg back in the vinegar.

‘I want a piece of fish.’

‘You’re sure, are you?’

‘Yes, I’ll have that piece there.’

Joy took the battered cod out of the cabinet and wrapped it in unnerving silence. She was aware of the girls watching her and was careful to do it properly. They were just trying to psych her out.

Joy said, ‘That’ll be two pounds forty.’

Jessica unwrapped her parcel and considered the battered fish. She broke it open.

‘Thing about this is, it’s yellow on the outside but white on the inside, isn’t it?’

‘Like a banana,’ said the tall girl.

‘Two pounds forty,’ repeated Joy.

‘Just like a banana. Yellow on the outside, and white on the inside. So you could say it lies about what it is.’

‘Does it cheat, as well?’ said the tall girl.

‘I should think that for something like that, that lies about what it is, cheating is something that comes natural.’ Jessica lowered her voice. ‘A liar and a cheat.’

‘A liar and a cheat,’ repeated her friend.

‘Fuck off,’ said Joy, ‘you little twat. You little wee tart. And you, you stupid cow, you can fuck off and all.’

‘Bitch,’ said Jessica, and dropped the fish on the floor. ‘I don’t want that. It’s off, anyway. It smells gross. Though maybe that isn’t the fish – maybe that’s the little chinky. You’ll have to come round here now, won’t you, chinky bitch in your little apron, and clean it up.’

‘I’ll have you for that, Jessica, you cow.’

She wanted to throw something at them, and picked up the ketchup bottle, but the realisation that that was what they wanted stayed her hand, and the girls left the shop stiffly, chins in the air, and Joy was left clutching the bottle so hard that sauce oozed from the nozzle and dribbled over her fingers.

Her father got out the mop, but she told him not to bother, she’d do it. She told him it was just a stupid tiff and nothing to worry about. Kneeling to clean up the mess, she was glad he couldn’t see her, as the hand gathering fragments of fish onto a sheet of paper was shaking with fury.

‘If they come in and do that again,’ said her father, in rapid and loud Cantonese, ‘I will strike them. I cannot allow
people
to come into my shop, insult my daughter and take my fish without paying. I will strike them.’

‘You can’t hit them,’ said Joy, adding a reasonableness to her tone that she did not feel. ‘They won’t come in again. But if they do, just tell Sandy the CSO and then, if it’s really necessary, we can get an ASBO against the little bitches.’

Joy was speaking Cantonese, as she usually did with him, but she said ‘Sandy the CSO’, ‘ASBO’ and ‘little bitches’ in English. It was common for her to swap between the two languages like that – she did it without thinking.

‘I’ll hit them.’

‘Father—’

Someone tapped on the window. It was such a tentative sound she hardly heard it. She turned, expecting to see the girls again, but it was a strange slim figure swallowed up in a hooded parka, rapping with a knuckle. She only
recognised
him when he pressed his face up to the window and squinted in. That Chinese guy, the skinny one. She pointed at the door and he slipped in.

Just to look at him you could tell he was a long way from home. His desperation and foreignness made Joy uneasy. She remembered that someone had been stabbed with a
broken
bottle. With no counter for protection, she felt exposed.

She said, ‘Duck, take your hood down so we can hear you.’

He looked a sorry state, dishevelled and dirty with a nasty cut on his lip and bruises on his cheek. His wide eyes moved rapidly back and forth.

He said in English, ‘Please, can I use telephone?’

Joy looked at her father. In the past he had refused exactly that request – but that had been from drunk white people. He beckoned for the man to duck under the counter, and led him into the back room. The guy said ‘thank you’ about eight times.

Joy dumped the broken fish in the bin, which happened to be close to the door. She pushed it open a crack and peered in. The mainlander was sitting on the chair and her father was standing next to him holding a saucepan, so no funny business. The phone was on the counter by the
freezer
. The guy tapped a couple of numbers in, screwed up his face, tapped a few more, gazed at the ceiling with his mouth opening and closing, tapped a few more, then
concentrated
so hard that a whine escaped between gritted teeth. Joy’s father said, ‘You sure you know what number?’

‘No sure,’ said the guy, ‘no sure,’ and jabbed a last digit. He held the phone hard against his ear. His legs were crossed and his foot flexed rapidly up and down. Joy could faintly
hear a dial tone beep-beeping and held her breath waiting for a reply. The man’s nervousness was infectious – this was an important call.

The dial tone stopped and the man straightened and said, ‘Mister Kevin? Mister Kevin?’ Joy could not make out what was said at the other end, but it did not seem to be what he wanted to hear, as he repeated, ‘Mister Kevin? Are you
Mister
Kevin? Do you know Kevin? Ke-vin, yes Kevin, sorry I Chinese, English no good, Kevin, Kevin, yes, Kevin. No? No? No? Oh.’ And the poor man’s face fell, and his head drooped as he said, ‘Sorry, I got number wrong.’

He put the phone down and left his hand on it and asked, ‘Can I call China?’

‘China?’ said Joy’s father, in an exasperated tone.

‘Have to call home. Sorry.’ Asking the favour really did seem to be causing the man considerable distress – he was squirming, and his foot went even faster.

‘China’s very expensive.’

Da-ad, thought Joy, come on.

‘Very expensive.’

‘Sorry. I go another place.’

‘Go on. Be quick.’

A phone number was dialled, with confidence this time, and a connection made. The beep-beeps went on, and Joy was interested, waiting for the pick-up. But the beeps just carried on and she grew frustrated, first with the people at the other end, then with this mainlander, who wouldn’t accept that there was nobody home. Finally she was bored. The man would not give up. Perhaps he would have sat there for hours, waiting with the phone pressed to his ear, but finally her father said, ‘There’s no one home.’

The man put the phone down gently with two hands and said, ‘Thank you very much.’

Joy retreated a few paces and pretended to be interested in her textbook as they returned. The mainlander was reserved and stiff. He’d been desperate because he had hope. Now, plainly, there was no hope, but at least that meant he could act with dignity. He said that he was very sorry to have
troubled
them both.

Joy asked him what he was going to do now.

‘I will go outside,’ he said.

‘After that.’

‘I will do some thing,’ he said. She could see his only idea was to get out of the shop. The fact that he had asked a favour had lost him face, and he just wanted to get away from the scene of that humiliation.

‘Do you want some food?’ she said.

‘I no hungry, I have eat full. You potato very delicious.’ He slipped out the door so discreetly that he hardly disturbed the bell at all.

‘What do you think his problem was?’

‘He asked to use the phone and I let him. I do not want to think about it more than that.’

‘What if he’s in trouble?’

‘Of course he is in trouble. I will not have him bringing his trouble into my shop any further. I want no more to do with him.’

‘He’s Chinese.’

Joy had only said that to probe how far her father’s racial solidarity would go.

‘He is a mainlander. Mainlanders are not like us.’

That was not unexpected. He’d been brought up in Hong Kong and Hong Kongers pretty much thought of themselves as a race apart. But she did not feel that way. Having been brought up in Britain, she was simply British Chinese, or Chinese British, and set little store by her father’s regionalism.

In all her time serving chips no other Chinese person had come into the shop who wasn’t a relative. She was
irresistibly
curious.

‘I’m going to take him a can of Coke,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘He looked thirsty.’

‘If he was thirsty, he’d ask for a can for free. He asked to use the phone for free, and then he called China. He wasn’t proud.’

Joy already had the can out of the cold cabinet and was heading for the door.

She ran into the street and looked up and down, and at first she thought she was too late, he’d gone, but as she turned to go back she spotted him squatting on his heels in the doorway of the newsagents. He looked befuddled.
Presumably
he was considering what to do and coming up with no answers. She thrust the can at him.

‘I thought you looked thirsty,’ she said.

‘No no no,’ he said.

‘Take it.’

‘No.’

‘Take it.’

Bloody Chinese, thought Joy. Her relatives were the same. You couldn’t give them anything without them refusing it twice first. The mainlander stood and drank.

‘Better than Pepsi,’ he said. ‘Every person like Pepsi, but I like Coke.’

‘I’m a Fanta girl myself.’

‘What is Fanta?’

‘Orange-flavoured. Well, orangeish. What’s your name?’

‘Ding Ming.’

‘I’m Joy.’

‘Very lovely name.’

‘Thank you. What are you doing here?’

‘I need to give call Kevin, he my boss. I have to go back.’

‘Back to where?’

‘Work place.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘I don’t know. By side sea.’

‘Side sea? You mean seaside? We’re miles from the sea. Have you got any money? Anywhere to stay?’

‘No.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I do not know.’

Then, as if the weight of his troubles were a physical
burden
carried on his back, he sank until he was squatting on his heels again. She didn’t have the flexibility to squat, so she sat down cross-legged on the cold stone.

‘Where’s the other guy, the guy you were with?’

‘He got… he go away.’

A couple of lads were approaching, and Joy grew self-conscious. She knew the guys, though she couldn’t remember their names. There was a fat one and a really fat one.

‘Alright, Joy?’ Said the fat one.

‘Alright.’

‘We’ve been down the Ferryman’s. Saw that Jessica. She’s well pissed off with you. She was mouthing off. You want to watch out.’

‘I saw her.’

The fatter one ducked behind a car and a tinkle began as he pissed against the wheel. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Caught short.’

‘Any trouble,’ said the fat one, ‘and you call on us, right. We’re on your side.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who’s your friend?’

‘This is Ding Ming.’

‘Relative, is he?’

‘No.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ said the fat one, and thrust out a hand.

‘He wants to shake your hand,’ Joy whispered, and Ding Ming stood and did so, grinning nervously.

‘Where are you from, then?’

‘China.’

‘Oh aye?’

The fat one turned and considered the street, perhaps trying to look at it through alien eyes. ‘This must be a bit different for you then, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘You, er, you eat a lot of rice, do you?’

‘I like rice very much.’

‘Do you know any of that kung fu?’ He struck a fighting pose and waved his hands about in a vaguely martial way. Ding Ming looked alarmed, and stepped back, and the fat lad dropped his pose and slapped Ding Ming on the arm with drunken camaraderie.

‘It’s alright, Grasshopper. Just messing about.’

The fatter one shouted across the car, ‘He has a few and thinks he’s Chow Yun-Fat.’

Ding Ming said, ‘Chow Yun-Fat?’

‘You know him?’ said the fat one.

‘He is number one star.’

‘Yes, he bloody is,’ said the fat one, with passion. ‘I’m always telling people: you can take your Arnie, you can take your Stallone, Chow Yun-Fat would have them both. Easily. He is the man.’ He punched his own hand and repeated, with alarming vehemence, ‘He is the man,’ as if someone had cast doubt upon the assertion, or even suggested that he wasn’t the man.

‘He is number one star, you are so right, my friend. With the two-gun action.’ He made gunhands – two fingers curled back and cocked thumbs – and started shooting at Ding Ming: ‘Bang bang bang bang!’

The fatter one came round from behind the car, and he was doing it too, going ‘Boom boom boom boom!’ and the two men circled, shooting each other, and Joy, and Ding Ming, and the street.

Ding Ming made guns out of his hands and shot back – ‘Pam pam pam!’

Joy reckoned it a guy thing. She’d seen The Killer and Bullet in the Head – supposedly Chow Yun-Fat’s greatest work – and found the stylised, slow-motion violence at first alarming, then numbing. She’d called it ballet for men.

The fat lads mimed getting shot in the chest, throwing their arms in the air and their heads back, then flapping their hands to simulate blood spurting from ruptured
bodies
, and letting their tongues hang out and wobble. They laughed and slapped Ding Ming on the back and repeated what a man the incomparable Chow Yun-Fat was.

The fatter one muttered to his friend, ‘Let’s leave the
lovebirds
to it, heh?’

‘Lovebirds?’ said the fat one, and looked at Ding Ming in a new light. It was explained to him in a whisper that carried clearly to Joy’s ears – ‘Arranged marriage, isn’t it.’

Joy was too shocked to say anything for a moment, then realised that outraged protest might offend Ding Ming, and by the time she had formulated a sensible response the lads had taken their leave.

Joy said, ‘Never mind them – they’re just pissed.’ Ding Ming’s burst of gaiety had faded, but it seemed to have improved his mood a little.

‘Internet,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I can send email my cousin, he go see my mother, get Kevin telephone number. MSN Messenger.’

‘What?’

Joy understood what he had said, it just seemed such an unexpected thing for the man to know about.

‘MSN Messenger. Have this place got computer bar?’

‘No. Ding Ming, I want to ask you a question. Please tell me the truth. Have you attacked anyone tonight? Have you stabbed someone?’

‘Stab?’

‘Like this.’

‘No. No.’

She looked him in the eyes as he said it, and believed he was telling the truth.

‘I’ve got internet. On my laptop.’ She looked back at the chippy, the street’s only lighted shopfront.

‘My father wouldn’t like me taking you up. Tell you what: we’ll close up soon and then he goes to bed. Wait here for an hour or so, then I’ll come and get you. OK? You
understand
?’ She remembered the policeman. ‘And don’t let
anyone
see you.’

She led him to a dark alleyway and made doubly sure he understood her plan. He put his can at his side, saying he preferred his cola flat, and squatted between bins with his arms folded across his knees and his head dropped, resigned to the wait.

She returned to the shop and told her father the guy had taken off. This was the second time she’d lied for the
mainlander
– he’d better be on the level.

It didn’t look like there would be any more trade, so they closed up and in silence wiped surfaces and cleaned machines. She was free to think about Mark – she’d earned this right, surely? – but as she tried to whip up a soft-focus reverie of gentle hands, wet lips, adoring eyes and so on, she kept being disturbed by the thought of the
man squatting between the smelly bins, in the cold, in his oversized coat.

They went to the flat above the shop and her father cooked fried rice.

Joy said, ‘Father, I’d like to go to the ancestral village. I think it would be interesting.’

Joy had been to Hong Kong a few times, but never to the village in Guangdong Province that the Chos traced
themselves
back to.

‘One day,’ he said, ‘but we will be expected to take a lot of presents. No one is more popular than a rich man going home.’

‘We’re not rich.’

‘You’ll be surprised the number of relatives a rich man can have. I’ll take you when you have finished your education. But it would be better for you to spend time in Hong Kong. You can meet a good man there. You won’t meet one on the mainland.’

‘I could meet a good man here.’

He chewed slowly, and changed TV channels with the remote. As always after work, he was sat with dinner on a tray in his lap and an apple pie, a mug of green tea and a packet of Royals waiting on the armrest. He found football and grunted with satisfaction.

Finally he said, ‘You can meet a good man in Hong Kong.’

Joy was not going to push it. She went to bed and lay fully clothed and wide awake in the dark with her door ajar,
waiting
for her father to finish up. It took him ages. The LED on her alarm said 12:43 when finally he shuffled to his room and the door clicked shut. She gave it another forty minutes, then slipped out.

She’d snuck out on other occasions, to go to parties or meet lads, and knew where all the creaky floorboards were. Still it
was a risk. The tricky bit was getting down the stairs. She
carried
her trainers and put them on when she got outside.

She’d been more than two hours, but not only was the mainlander still in the alley, he was still in the same
position
. He looked up sleepily at her approach. That was a
clever
trick, to be able not only to squat on your heels for hours, but actually to doze in the position.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘We go into a hallway, then up a flight of stairs and we get to a corridor. My room is at the end of that corridor, but we have to pass my father’s room. Any noise will wake him up and then I will be in such deep shit. Take your shoes off.’

Ding Ming seemed to take this all very seriously, and she was relieved to see that he was light on his feet. He didn’t even need to be told to step at the edges of the stairs not the middle, and when they were in the hallway he followed in her footsteps as she crept along the wall.

She heard the rhythmic breathing of her sleeping father and for a moment it did not reassure her but made her worry, for he was not conscious to offer his protection. It occurred to her that this particular adventure was really daft.
Inviting
a possible murderer into your room in the middle of the night did not now seem like the action of a smart person who considered things carefully. Anyway, she got him in without incident and closed the door.

The room was barely big enough for two people. A smart person would also have already got the computer started and the broadband connected, but she had to do it while he stood looking round. She was embarrassed by her
muscleguy
screensaver, her girly trinkets and all the clothes heaped on the floor, especially the pants.

But he was not looking at her pants, he was looking at her shelves.

‘So many books,’ he whispered with reverence. ‘Very good.’

He unzipped his parka, revealing a bare, bruised chest. Why there was not an ounce of fat on him and you could see all the ribs, like on a greyhound. She tutted at the state of him and gave him an old T-shirt. She motioned for him to sit at the desk and he typed ‘www.sohu.com’ into the address bar and some Chinese homepage opened. He closed pop-ups.

To her, China was important, but an abstraction. It was part of her experience but not her life, a background image like a distant unclimbed mountain. Now, here was an envoy come down from the mountain, earthy and real. His skin was darker than hers. There was something different about his body language – it was less demonstrative, almost demure. He even smelled different, completely unlike anyone she knew. How could that be? Was it simply diet? Or was he in some essential way Chinese?

One-fingered, Ding Ming typed an address and password, and an email account opened. But it was garbled. The icons all worked, but the text was a jumble of symbols. He tried refreshing and the same page popped up. He opened an email and the text there was all rubbish, too.

Ding Ming chewed a lip. ‘What China language your
computer
got?’

Joy could not read Chinese. She had picked up
Cantonese
from her parents but had never formally studied, she could read only a handful of characters. So she didn’t have any Chinese language software on her computer. Because she didn’t have Chinese language software this guy couldn’t send an email from her computer to back home in China. She should, she felt, have anticipated this problem. She should, she felt, have learned how to read and write what was after all her own fucking language.

She was ashamed and upset.

‘I don’t have Chinese language software,’ she admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

The man, it seemed, was inured to disappointments. ‘Thank you for help me,’ he said carefully. ‘I will try to call my mother on the telephone again in some time.’

But the phone was in the hall and the shop was closed. She couldn’t let him do it here. And she was tired now.

‘Why don’t you sleep in the shed behind the shop? Then try again tomorrow? How about that? Come into the shop in the morning and I’ll convince my father to let you have another go at calling your mum. Okay?’

‘Thank you. You are very kind. You are the most kind
person
ever in the world.’

She took blankets and a sleeping bag and led him out of the flat and down the alley. A door here led to the yard behind the shop, where the shed stood. When they’d moved a broken bike, he assured her that it was quite spacious enough.

For the second time she snuck back upstairs. Only this time she pushed open her door to find her father standing in her room with his arms crossed. He’d put trousers on over his pyjamas, but he was barefoot.

‘I will not have you sneaking around at night. You think I am stupid. I’m not stupid. Do not test me in this manner. You are seeing boys, aren’t you?’

He moved into English, which he only did with her when he was upset.

‘Are you bad girl?’

‘Don’t say that,’ shouted Joy, speaking English now too, a easier language for her to argue in. ‘It’s not like you think. Why do you think the worst all the time? I helped that—’

Her explanation was cut short by a scream. They both fell silent. It came from downstairs, either the alley or the yard. The only window that looked over the yard was in the
bathroom
, and that was frosted. She would have to go and look for herself. Was it that Ding Ming? No, it had sounded too girlish. But what would a girl be doing there? She ran downstairs.