Something to Hide (3 page)

LORRIE WAS A
woman of generous proportions. She liked to eat, who doesn't? Nor was she alone. Most of her girlfriends were super-size, they had ballooned in girth over the years, their jaws were always working. They joked, ‘It ain't got no calories if you eat by the light of the refrigerator.' Her husband didn't mind, he said he didn't mind, he said there was more of her to love. He served in the army and their marriage was one of partings and homecomings. She ate for solace during the long months when he was a blurred face on Skype, and she cooked up a storm when he was home. Between this lay the tricky period of readjustment, this could take a week or more, when their strangeness to each other drained away and they rediscovered their old companionship. She found herself snacking heavily then, just as, long ago, during stressful times, she had smoked.

So she had put on the pounds. It was hard to believe that she had once been a skinny kid, but then there were few of them around nowadays. Children were heavier, it was a national tragedy, many of them were downright obese. Her own two kids were big for their age, it broke her heart to see them rolling from side to side as they walked, like drunken sailors. Just the other day, when she had to fetch Dean early from school, she had seen him struggle from his chair and lift the desk with him. His face, pink with shame!

Junk food was to blame. Apparently it was all to do with the presidential elections. Her neighbour's son, Tyler, was studying chemistry at college. He said the swing votes were in the corn belt, in the Mid-West, so the farmers were wooed by big subsidies, which meant over-production of corn and its by-product, high-fructose corn syrup. Imported sugar was taxed sky-high and this syrup substituted and put into practically every processed food that Americans ate. He said it had a destructive effect on the body and artificially stimulated the appetite, so people had to eat more and more. He said the United States was becoming one vast mouth and would blow itself up.

Tyler took plenty of drugs and was prone to paranoia. He'd share a spliff with her in the backyard and ramble on about alien invaders. This time, however, he seemed to make more sense than usual so she went online and discovered that it was true. When Todd, her husband, came home she told him that the government was suppressing the facts, due to pressure from the food industry, but he simply tweaked her earlobe and cracked open a beer. Wasn't America the finest country in the world? He was a patriot and prepared to die in defence of its freedoms, and that included getting fat.

This was the problem with Todd. Lorrie loved him, they had grown up dirt-poor, they were childhood sweethearts and bound together for life. But he wouldn't take her seriously. She was still his little cookie, his
big
cookie, and he wasn't having her bothering her head with things that were outside her control. His strongest instinct was to protect her. He was the man, the breadwinner; he had served two terms in Iraq and seen his friend's legs blown off and more, much more, things he would never tell her, though at night he moaned and tossed in his sleep. She had to respect this in him, his unknowable other life.

Still, it grated. He wanted his family to remain the same for him, home sweet home. It was his security. If anything upset the balance she feared he would disintegrate. His time at home was precious and Jesus he had earned it. More and more, however, Lorrie felt stifled in her little box. He didn't even want her to work. How could she, when half the time she was a single parent and childcare would cancel out any earnings? And the other half, when he was home, he wanted her there for him. This was his reasoning.

Money was short, however. They were saving up to move out of their cramped little rental and buy a place in the new subdivision on the edge of town, beyond the military base. They were beautiful homes with three bedrooms, close to Finnegan's Lake where families could boat and fish. At night Lorrie dreamed she was living there. Surely there was some job she could do part-time, and have cash of her own in her purse?

And then she saw the ad. It was soon after the conversation with Tyler. She was sitting at the kitchen table, surfing a showbiz website. Her husband was away; the kids were at school. Sunlight streamed through the window; it was mid-morning and already stifling.

Earn hundreds of dollars a month in the comfort of your own home! Become a sales rep with our fast-growing company!
It was accompanied by a group photograph of noticeably sturdy children, black, white and Hispanic.
Plus-size kids are missing out. Too often they feel ashamed when there's nothing to fit them. Our company specializes in fashion-conscious clothes for a more generous body shape.
Commission rates were twenty per cent of the retail sales price, rising with the volume of items sold.

Lorrie felt a jolt of recognition. At last, people understood her children's distress. The clothes looked great; why not give it a try? There was nothing to lose.

She felt a rush of exhilaration. Testimonials from other sales reps – moms like herself – spoke of the sums they had earned. Texas, it seemed, had one of the highest child obesity rates in the USA. It was a vast and largely untapped market.

Lorrie told nobody – certainly not her husband. He was on a training exercise up north and wouldn't be back for a week. Though she hoped that he would be supportive – after all, there was no risk involved and she would largely stay at home – she didn't mention it when they Skyped that evening. Maybe she didn't want his reaction to disappoint her. She would keep her secret to herself for a while – just for a couple of months to see how it went.

The next morning she painted her nails, the first time she had done so in years. This was stupid, considering she would be doing the job online, but she needed to give herself a boost. She felt she was emerging from a long sleep. She had worked in the past, of course – in stores, in a bar, in the payroll office of one of the big beef ranches down near San Antonio. But that was in another life, before she became a mother and unrecognizable to her former self. She had lost her nerve.

A lion's head hung in the lounge. Her husband called it Warrior. He had shot it on safari in Kenya, a boozy and extravagant R&R weekend when he was on deployment in Sudan. That evening, as Lorrie sat in front of her laptop, she was aware of its glass eyes gazing at her across the room. Later she remembered that moment. How she accessed the registration form on the Big Kids website: how she tapped in her social security number and her bank details. How the moth-eaten trophy was her only witness, its gums bared in a grin.

The next morning the phone rang.

‘Am I speaking to Mrs Russell?' asked a voice. He had a thick, foreign accent and said he was phoning from her bank. ‘I'm completing the registration details for the Big Kids Employment Agency and require your username and password to activate the account.'

She told him. He thanked her courteously and rang off.

The next day the phone rang again.

‘Is that Mrs Russell?' a man asked. He said he was phoning from her bank.

‘Is there something else I've forgotten?' she asked.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘You called yesterday …' She stopped, puzzled.

‘No, madam,' he said. ‘We haven't called you. Why I'm contacting you is that something's come to our notice and we need to check it with you.'

‘Check what?'

He cleared his throat. ‘There appears to be some unusual activity in the savings account you hold with your husband.'

The money had gone – all their life savings, every dollar. It had been withdrawn during the night.

‘
I'M COMING WITH
you,' said Li Jing. ‘This concerns both of us.'

She could tell that her husband was surprised. He said nothing, however – just a pause, as he put on his jacket. Then he turned away and picked up the cigarette that smouldered in the ashtray.

He was thinking how to respond. Jing was a simple village girl, demure and obedient. Her husband was a businessman, a powerful and successful one, and normally she wouldn't dream of involving herself in his affairs, or laying down the law. But this was something that did concern her, on the most fundamental level. After all, they both wanted a baby. They had never talked about it until recently but no doubt Lei had presumed it would eventually happen. He was standing at the window, checking messages on his mobile, but his rigidity told her that he was taken aback, and trying to work out a reply.

Then he turned around. They lived on the thirty-third floor and today the buildings opposite were invisible in the smog. ‘You'll be needing your mask,' he said, and left the room.

Jing's relief was followed by a small surge of power. For once, he had agreed to her wishes! Usually she kept them so buried that they hardly existed, even to herself. But now she'd had this small triumph she was conscious of how many more of them lurked there. She would not mention them, however. She was a good wife and knew her position.

Besides, her husband was a volatile man and she couldn't predict his reactions. Sometimes she felt that she hardly knew him at all. They had been married for five years but in reality it was much shorter; this was because he was away for weeks at a time and during his absences she reverted to her former self. Her marriage, like so many she knew, was full of departures; it never seemed to shunt forward.

If they had a child this would change; the child would be a growing thing and they would grow with it. But they didn't have a child and it was all her fault that their marriage was stuck in sterility. She had always suffered from painful and irregular periods and recently polycystic ovaries had been diagnosed. She had failed him.

And after all he had done! He had plucked her out of poverty and installed her in this vast marble apartment in CBD, the embassy district. He had given her clothes and jewellery and a credit card for when she went shopping. All this, and more, and she couldn't give him the one thing he wanted in return. And, stuck up in the sky, in a city where she had no friends, she could confide in nobody. Sometimes she was so homesick that she lay all afternoon on the bed, her face buried in the coverlet.

She never knew who suggested that her husband should have a check-up. He had mentioned it casually, as if it were a passing thought. Maybe nobody had suggested it; Lei had few intimates. Maybe he had secretly become worried and investigated on the internet.

The result, however, was that he had undergone some tests and now the two of them were sitting in the consultant's room. He was an elderly man with pebble glasses. ‘This is your sperm count, sir.' An abrupt way of putting it, she thought, considering the delicacy of the subject. He passed her husband a piece of paper.

There was a silence. The only sound was a faint bubbling from an aquarium. It was surprisingly murky for such spotless surroundings, its glass stained green with algae.

Lei read the paper briefly. Then he folded it and put it in his pocket.

‘If it's any comfort,' said the consultant, ‘this is not unusual. Sperm counts have fallen dramatically during the past ten years. It's now been proven that this is directly related to our industrial growth. Fertility in Hebei province is down eighty per cent, and Beijing is not far behind. Pollution is to blame, sir, rather than any shortcomings in yourself.' He gave a wintry smile. ‘It seems that nature is finishing what our leaders started. The one-child policy is fast becoming a no-child policy.'

Nobody smiled. This was unsurprising. Jing, avoiding her husband's eye, gazed at the submerged castle, dimly visible in the aquarium. Her first thought was for Lei. How she wished she hadn't accompanied him, to witness his shame!

Lei got up, shook the consultant's hand and left the room without a word. Jing followed him. As they descended in the elevator she glimpsed him in the mirror. His face was smooth and expressionless. The reality hit her and her guts tightened. They were doomed to be childless, for ever. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away, inspecting the emergency telephone. Now hope was removed, she realized how much she had been presuming that it would happen one day, sooner or later. One day she would hold a baby in her arms. She would love and be loved. She would love it until she died.

Lei strode ahead of her down the street. People passed them, masked and scarved. The neon sign of McDonald's loomed up, then a noodle bar. As she followed her husband, Jing felt the phantom child dissolve into the smog. So this was it.

A bus passed, belching fumes. Lei opened the car door and she climbed in. Even in her despair, however, Jing felt a small tweak of relief – so it wasn't her fault, not entirely. She had felt such shame and guilt, that she had failed as a wife. Now her husband was her new companion in barrenness. Nothing felt companionable just now, however, as he abruptly pulled out into the street. Horns honked.

‘I'm so sorry,' she said.

‘Mother fucker!' he shouted at a van.

She could hardly guess at the depths of his shame. Everyone knew it was different for a man. Pride drove them; it was both their fear and their fuel. Wang Lei was a tough, strutting, aggressive man; status was important to him – no, more than that. It was his core. This was often the case with small men. The shopkeeper back in her village, a stocky little pug-dog, was always getting into brawls.

Her husband's battles took place in the boardroom, or wherever it was that he did business. Jing had no idea of the exact nature of his work. He never spoke about it and she had no intention of asking him. Africa, the source of his wheeler-dealing, lay like a great dark unknowable secret. She knew only the private man, a man addicted to malt whisky and gambling. The most private thing of all, which so often ended in failure, was something she would keep to herself till she died.
It's all right
, she used to whisper, touching him as he lay hunched, his back to her. He had never responded so she had learned to keep silent. And sometimes it did happen – enough times for them to have conceived a child, if either of them had been able to do so.

He was driving past the smudgy bulk of the Hyatt Park Hotel, near where they lived, but he didn't take the turning.

‘Aren't we going home?' she asked.

Lei shook his head. ‘I've got something to show you.'

He said nothing else, and now they had joined the stream of traffic on the Second Ring Road. Headlights swept past in the opposite direction; it was only two-thirty but dusk had lasted all day. Sitting in their beautiful, silent car she thought: pollution doesn't distinguish between rich and poor. And then, with a lurch of homesickness, she pictured the blue sky of her family village. She pictured the clear streams, the egrets stepping fastidiously, hesitantly, through the shallows. She pictured the washing swaying in the breeze and her grandmother tock-tocking at the hens as she fed them. If only she could sit with her family now in the fresh air, drinking tea and laughing! But yet another gulf had opened up between them. Never, ever, could she tell them what had happened in the doctor's room. One gulf after another, all of them unbridgeable – this one above all. And she the envy of her schoolfriends!

They drove past a row of electronics shops, their lights glowing, then over a flyover. Through the dimness she could see cranes and half-built apartment blocks. Beijing was one vast building site, spreading ever wider. It was disorientating how landmarks upon which she used to rely disappeared, seemingly overnight, and skyscrapers grew up in their place. And
she
had only lived there for five years.

The sky had cleared; they were out in the countryside now. What was Lei's surprise? Were they going to drive into a village and snatch a baby? Did he have a joint suicide in mind, a hand-in-hand jump from a bridge? Jing had no idea and she didn't care; she was sunk into apathy. This was strangely liberating. Her inner censor had loosened and, as they sped along the motorway, words swam dreamily into her head, words she had never admitted. What would it be like to make love to another man? She was a virgin when she married. Why did Lei show no interest in her life? Why, to be fair, did she show no interest in his? Was every wife as lonely as she was? Would a baby really have bound them together? Did Lei have sex with black women in Africa? Did she even like him?

Despair had made Jing blazingly honest; she flushed at her boldness. When she was little she had gone to a ventriloquist show; now, as she sat beside her husband, she felt as if a dummy had popped up to ask those forbidden questions. They came so thick and fast it seemed impossible that Lei didn't sense them as he sat at the wheel, wreathed in cigarette smoke.

They had been driving for an hour, through heavy traffic. Lei, sounding his horn, overtook a fleet of coaches. Mountains rose up on either side. She had travelled this road before, when Lei had taken her to the Great Wall. He had taken her parents too – five-star hotel, lavish meals; she must remember that he was a generous man. And she must remember how he was suffering. The humiliation, the sense of male inadequacy, the loss of hope.

He seemed remarkably cheerful, however, as he indicated left. He even started whistling.

‘Where are we going?' she asked.

He smiled at her. ‘Wait and see,
bao bei
.'

The endearment gave her a jolt of pleasure. The sun had come out, though the tops of the mountains were wreathed in mist. Somewhere up there the Great Wall ran up and down the spine, as rhythmic as music. A group of tourists in fluorescent jackets cycled along the road. It led along a valley, past orchards of apricot trees and farmhouses. A row of elderly villagers were pumping away at exercise machines.

And now their car was climbing up a winding road, in a queue of vehicles. Arrows pointed to hotels; a placard said P
ICK
U
P
Y
OUR
L
ITTER
. By now Jing had guessed that her husband was taking her to the Wall. Yet he was wearing a business suit and hardly dressed for it. Maybe it was an impulsive decision, to cheer her up. He had realized the news had been as upsetting for her as it had been for him.

He parked in the village of Beigou, where coaches were disgorging sightseers. They got out. Jing had a strong desire to take his hand in gratitude, but he disliked public shows of affection. And now he was beckoning to her to follow him up a path. A sign said R
ESIDENTS
O
NLY
.

Jing followed him, her feet slipping in their city sandals. They left behind the village and the tourists. The path was thickly bordered with bushes; she glimpsed a surveillance camera. After ten minutes Lei paused. He looked at her, his eyes glittering with excitement, and took something out of his pocket.

She followed him round a corner and stopped dead. In front of them stood a house. It was brand new, with a gabled pagoda roof and vast windows surrounded by fancy woodwork.

For a moment she thought they were visiting one of his business cronies – a government official, perhaps. Lei had connections in the highest places and only they could afford such a property. ‘Whose house is this?' she asked.

Lei opened his hand. A key lay in his palm. ‘It's ours,' he said.

He unlocked the door, walked in and ambled around the lobby. He ran his finger down the wood as casually as a farmer stroking the flank of a cow. ‘It's our beautiful holiday home, an escape from the suffocating city. Our beloved country is choking itself to death. That's progress, my dear wife, that's our great miracle. Here, however, we can relax in the fresh air.' He pointed to the floor. ‘These bricks were used for the restoration of the Great Wall, bought from the factory that made them. The architect is world-class. He is Italian.'

She was still suffering from shock. She thought: why has he done all this and told me nothing? What other secrets does he have? ‘Holiday home?' she asked. She had never heard of such a thing. If people were rich they went to Europe or the USA. If they were poor they went back to their villages.

He was irritated. She couldn't blame him. ‘It's what's happening,' he snapped. ‘Do you know nothing?'

‘No,' she said and stepped towards him. ‘I'm sorry. It's beautiful.'

‘Shall we look around?'

As she followed him up the stairs she thought how mysterious he was to her. She knew he had other properties. He had bought apartments in London, investments in places called Kensington and Battersea. He spent hours on the phone. In fact, now she thought of it, her abiding image of him was muttering into his mobile as he pushed the door shut with his foot.

They stood in the master bedroom. Its entire wall was glass, with a view that stretched to the end of the world. Lei said: ‘There were plenty of buyers but I moved fast. You know I always get what I want.' He moved close and touched the hollow of her throat. ‘When I saw you I knew I had to have you.'

His finger lifted the gold chain around her neck. Jing felt a sexual jolt – such an unusual sensation it took her by surprise.

To be truthful, she didn't remember that moment at all. She was checking out a customer at the Shanghai Sheraton, where she worked at the reception desk, and Wang Lei was checking in. Her colleague must have dealt with him. Needless to say, she had never admitted this.

If he had been tall and handsome she might have noticed him. Lei, however, was a plain man. His attraction lay in his energy; there was something of the boxer about his short, squat body. During those first weeks she had succumbed to the sheer force of him as he wined and dined her and made it clear that he would keep her safe for the rest of her life – indeed, keep her in the sort of luxury she had only glimpsed in the dreamworld of magazines. He wooed her parents too – as if they needed it – taking them shopping in New York and gambling in Atlantic City, a trip so unreal that by the time they had offered up thanks in their temple, back in their village, they couldn't believe it had happened at all.