Leave Me Alone (12 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

If cities were people, Chengdu would be a happy drifter with a fatal lack of ambition. Chengdu’s soft dialect melts your ear: it’s said that it can make a person’s anger dissolve instantly. Chengdu people are famous idlers. Feet stretched out in a rattan chair with a glass of tea, or at the mahjong table, their lives are like a fleeting dusk. When you visit the city’s famous historical spots such as Qing Yang Palace, Wu Hou Temple or Du Fu’s cottage, you get the sense that throughout history there have been too many people happy to spend 5 yuan to sit around all day with a glass of tea; their lives were as weak and flavourless as tea leaves that have been reused several times.

That weekend, our gang gathered at Du Fu’s cottage to play mahjong — Bighead Wang, Li Liang and the rest. Li Liang and Ye Mei fought over some tiles. Ye Mei’s pale face
went red, Li Liang’s goblin face was white: both were puffed up with rage.

Bighead and I tried to smooth things over.

‘You are still on your honeymoon,’ I said. ‘Is there anything that can’t be solved by talking about it?’

Bighead Wang said solemnly, ‘If you like, we’ll get out of the way so you two can make love to release some heat.’

I exploded with laughter and Zhao Yue snorted.

Ye Mei glowered at Bighead and said, ‘You are so petty. What kind of man are you?’

Li Liang’s eyes bulged as if he had been possessed by a toad spirit. I restrained him and told Ye Mei to wrap it up. Ye Mei gave me a hostile look but kept silent.

After that we abandoned mahjong and quietly drank tea. Secretly I was thinking it was bad luck that the game had been called off just when Li Liang owed me 200 yuan. We stuck it out until dinner time, and then Li Liang drove us to the China Hotel where the boss presented us with a wreath of smiles.

‘Master Li, we haven’t seen you for a long time,’ he said. ‘The five-grain wine you saved here last time will soon be going bad.’

Bighead said, ‘Rich people really are different. They wear expensive clothes, and everywhere they go people kiss their arses.’

The boss clapped his hands.

During the meal, Bighead told a few dirty stories. These restored my appetite and, lowering my head, I launched an assault on the salmon. Bighead was talking up a storm but
then suddenly I realised he’d stopped. Reluctantly lifting my head, I saw that Li Liang and Ye Mei were once again eyeballing each other like two cocks in a fight. If they weren’t sitting on opposite sides of the table they’d already have started snapping at each other. I theatrically held my hand in front of Li Liang’s eyes to block their glares and sighed inwardly, ‘Aiya, the saying is true: all lovers are enemies from a past life’.

After eating we all went our separate ways. Bighead and his wife said they had to look at a house; this corrupt couple now found their own place too small. Li Liang took Ye Mei home, where I presumed their war was about to resume. I had no idea who would come off worst. Zhao Yue hinted that she wanted me to go shopping with her, but I refused, telling her I had to go the office to write a report.

There were days when we didn’t argue, but even then it felt as if we’d become like strangers. To judge by appearances though, we were more in love than ever. When we left home, we looked at each other and smiled. Returning at night, we smiled and looked at each other. Whenever we were going to be late home for some reason or other, we’d call the other to check that was OK.

Zhou Weidong found this strange behaviour. ‘Brother Chen, when did you become a new man?’ he asked me.

I smiled mirthlessly. I’d never mentioned to Zhao Yue about the call to her phone that night at the disco. When we got home, I’d gone into the bathroom to cool down and then heard her speaking softly outside. I pressed my ear against the door and listened for ages but was unable to hear exactly what she was saying. When I came out, Zhao Yue beamed
a fake smile. From that point on, I started to take note of her whereabouts. Secretly I went through her handbag, even sniffed her discarded panties. I didn’t know what I thought I’d find, or what I’d do if I did find anything. Because of that I hated myself a little; I wasn’t a real man.

I didn’t know if it was because of my bad detective work or because Zhao Yue was good at deception, but I didn’t discover anything suspicious. Of course, just because I didn’t find anything didn’t mean that nothing had happened. I detected a significance in the look of slight resistance on Zhao Yue’s face as we made love, and her lost expression afterwards. Three months before, when Zhao Yue had told me she had a lover, I’d been sure that she was lying. Since she was now denying everything, that told me she’d gone over to the dark side. Li Liang said I was addicted to perverse logic, but perverse logic was really my weapon, I thought with a cold smile.

My report quickly reached seven or eight thousand words. First I told the story of how a rank-and-file salesman became a sales manager. This was taking a leaf out of Bighead Wang’s book. Last year at the security bureau’s public speaking competition he’d won first prize with his address, ‘From plain cop to station chief’. After his win he’d been unbearably smug, boasting incessantly to me and Li Liang. Only after we taunted him by changing ‘plain cop’ to ‘plain cock’ did he desist.

Once I’d set the scene, I went on to list all my hard work that year. The report was a thorough blend of direct
description and subtlety: it had a summary, it had action points, it had emotion. It even had lyrical passages. Reading it over, I felt sure it would hit the spot for that stolid bunch at Head Office. After faxing it through, I leaned back in my chair and fantasised about Chengdu branch General Manager Chen Zhong: driving a Honda with a babe at my side, wallet stuffed full of notes.

Thinking about girls, I suddenly remembered one I’d met once when I was drinking tea in Yulin South Road internet café. She was called Niu something or other and she was tall and slender with substantial firm breasts, a round face and an attractive smile. That day she’d acted hot for me, giving me plenty of flirtatious glances. Finally she’d left me her telephone number, saying, ‘If you have time, let’s do something.’

After searching my desk drawers for ages, I actually found her number. For a moment my heart was savage with joy. I dialled and through a racket on the other end of the line heard some man asking me who I was looking for. I said I wanted to find little Niu. He said I’d got a wrong number.

I refused to abandon hope and simply dialled the number again. This time as soon as the guy heard my voice he started to curse. ‘Screw you, didn’t I say you’ve dialled the wrong number!’ He slammed down the receiver.

My fury knew no bounds. I dialled the number once again, and as soon as the other person picked up I unleashed a volley of curses. ‘Screw your mother, screw your sister. Screw your wife!’

I left the building still glaring at people in the street as though they owed me money. I went into the car park and
looked all around but couldn’t find the Santana. Of course it had to be that idiot Liu Three who’d taken it. I dialled his cell phone. This was the first time we’d had any kind of private contact in more than a month.

‘What’s up?’ Liu Three answered.

‘I need the car. Please return it immediately.’

He said that his sister was moving house and they were using the car to transport a few things.

‘There’s nothing I can do about that,’ I said. ‘I need to take a client to the repair centre.’

Very resentfully, Liu Three returned the car. I just stood there impassively as he shut the car door, then he turned and left without a word. I glared at his back, thinking, You cheeky sod. How dare you show your bad temper in front of your superior?

Liu Three’s salary was hardly any less than mine; each month he got more than 4,000 basic and then commissions on top. In a good month it could exceed 10,000. But the guy was incredibly tight. Whenever we went out to eat, he never offered to pay. Zhou Weidong called him ‘iron wallet’. Those two had a relationship which was reminiscent of mine and Fatty Dong’s in the early days. They were secretly at war, and whenever they had an opportunity they attacked each other. I often had to calm them down, blaming both sides equally so they didn’t dare to take their quarrel too far. Zhou Weidong’s temperament was rather like mine: he was always spending money and couldn’t resist a pretty girl. If it wasn’t for his unfortunate compulsion to dwell on my flaws, he’d probably have risen faster than Liu Three.

A couple of days before, I’d successfully annoyed Liu Three by finding a pretext to deduct 600 yuan from his salary. Fatty Dong had tried to intervene to no avail. From what I’d heard, Liu Three was beside himself.

As I thought about company matters, I found myself missing Zhou Yan a little. After the May holidays she’d asked for a few days’ sick leave and not long after that, she’d resigned. I spent ages trying to persuade her that she would have a bright future with the company, constructing an argument that roamed from China’s opening up, to the WTO, to the Iraq War — a panoramic sweep of national and international affairs. Although I tried my best, I still couldn’t get her to stay but she sat in my office for a while, her big eyes red. By the look of things she felt sad about leaving. As for me, my heart was pounding as we chatted about a lot of things. She explained about her and Donkey’s relationship, leading me to understand that they’d slept together many times. I burned with jealousy. Finally Zhou Yan warned me that I should beware.

‘I can’t say that you’re a good person but you’re not a completely terrible person either,’ she said. ‘You’ve still got a bit of confused goodness in you, and I’m afraid that you’ll be the one to suffer in the end.’

I drove along the road by the university. A few smoking kebab stands were pitched either side, and groups of grungy students with clean, fresh faces wandered up and down. Today’s university students were more modern than my generation:
it was said that computer illiterates and virgins were both endangered species. After midnight, porn films were shown in a screening room outside the campus gates and this immature but formidable generation of young people watched and aspired to emulate. When Bighead was transferred to that beat, he’d once made a surprise inspection of the screening room and caught a couple ‘on the job’. When he shone his torch on them, the guy blasted him: ‘What’s your problem? I’ve got a ticket!’

Today I was in the mood for love. After all, at that moment I couldn’t say whose arms Zhao Yue was lying in. Boss Sun had a saying: ‘Human life is all about two things, food and sex.’ This, at least, he had seen clearly. I lit up a cigarette and thought that you shouldn’t torture yourself by trying to go against life’s grain. The dissolute will take advantage of the young. If you could be happy for a while, then settle for that.

There was a female student just ahead of me: average height with a slender waist and full buttocks. From behind she was really something, and so I drove slowly past, stuck my head out and asked, ‘Beauty, do you want to come to a bar?’

Her look was contemptful. ‘Dickhead!’